DeAngelis systematizes some of the important factors or variables that distinguish national systems, regions, and individual institutions from each other in terms of their response to globalization. He argues that local traditions; bureaucratic and policy networks; shared knowledge; interest group mobilization; public policy priorities; and policy creativity or ineptitude play into the response to globalizing forces. Not only do such factors shape the particular forms that globalization takes, but they also provide the basis for resistance and countervailing tendencies. He illustrates his argument through a comparison of France and Australia, and shows how they exemplify diversity and resistance to global uniformity and the elimination of the local.

Mok discusses issues related to structural adjustment and educational restructuring in China, paying particular reference to university merging and changes in higher education governance models. While largely focused on historical and documentary analysis of policy change in Chinese higher education, Mok also focuses on restructuring strategies that the Chinese government has adopted to make its university systems more competitive and efficient in the global market context. University mergers in China should not be simply understood as a pure higher education reform, but rather as a fundamental change in higher education governance model from an ‘interventionist state model’ to an ‘accelerationist state model.’ Rather than globalization bringing about the decline of the nation state, this article shows transformations taking place in Chinese universities may not necessarily diminish the capacity of the state but instead make the Chinese government a more activist state in certain aspects.

 

van Vught discusses the present condition of European universities in the context of the European ambition to be a world-class knowledge economy. He explores this political ambition and the realities of the European knowledge economy. He continues on to compare these European realities with the performance on the U.S. knowledge economy and provides an analysis of the ‘knowledge gap’ between Europe and the U.S.

 

Schneiderman discusses Monsanto Company ‘discovery research’ partnerships with universities (in contrast to drug development research). He believes that university-business partnerships are essential to retain U.S. economic competitiveness. Rather than limiting the access of foreign companies to American research universities, Schneiderman advocates for equal access of American scientists, engineers and companies to foreign research and engineering centers. 

This book is a collection of writings produced while Brodhead was Dean of Yale College. The first section focuses how undergraduates can get the most from their undergraduate education. Later sections focus on familiar challenges of the modern university – ranging from free speech to diversity issues to questions of constructing a coherent curriculum.

Das emphasizes the provisional nature of the collective intervention put forward by the seminar on Responsibility in Crisis. While she agrees that the university’s location within the state and market needs constant address, she wonders whether the significance of 9/11 proposed in the introductory paper is overstated and whether “sacred space” is the right way to defend it. Das was surprised by the “sporadic dissent” of the major American research universities to the federal administrative directives affecting jurisdiction of students and believes that this dissent “perhaps represented that universities were so dependent on funding from federal grants and their prestige as research universities was so tied up with funding that opposition was not a simple matter of withdrawing consent”.

Kennedy suggests that the university’s sacred space is about cultivating competencies in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary engagements in addition to providing a place to identify injustice and mourn losses, and explore the unsettled nature of identity and challenge of recognition in the world. This conception of ‘sacred space’ depends on having an environment where heresies can be considered, transformative dialogues nurtured, and their implications considered and refined. How can the university develop its potential, he asks, to experiment with new modes of communication that reach across working divisions of culture, language, religion, and discipline?

Gebert focuses on the site of evil’s production, and asks readers to consider “radical evil” as something defined by “an intentional group attack on a collectivity of individuals, selected necessarily to be defenseless, but possibly also on the basis of other characteristics, with the aim of exterminating them.” Gebert raises the challenge to consider how the victim responds to evil. Gebert believes it is the mission of the U.S. university to identify the individuality of radical evil, by helping communities associated with that exercise to dissociate from its practice, and put responsibility on those individuals who commit it.

Cohen argues that no simple location or heritage explains the problem of Africa’s awkward location in the world. Cohen identifies problems not only with race, but also with other metanarratives used to construct useful knowledge about Africa. Through the telling of the story of the murder of Robert Ouko in Kenya, Cohen argues for an elevated status of uncertainty within the scientific protocol of the social sciences. Yet, as Cohen writes, “all narratives are ultimately contingent upon and conditioned by the workings of uncertainty as these narratives are constructed…in the same vein, justice is itself contingent on the recognition of the powers of uncertainty, or alternative possibilities, of the values of hesitancy in seeking closure”.

Some analysts have argued that globalization, the Internet and the scientific community will level the playing field in the new age of knowledge interdependence. Others claim that globalization means both worldwide inequality and the McDonaldisation of the university. It is argued that all of the contemporary pressures on higher education, from the pressures of massification to the growth of the private sector, are the results of globalization. There is a grain of truth in all of these hypotheses - and a good deal of misinterpretation as well. The purpose of this essay is to "unpack" the realities of globalization and internationalization in higher education and to highlight some of the ways in which globalization affects the university.

Most African Universities were established to produce personnel to man mainly government ministries, prior to independence or soon thereafter. Initially European models transplanted to Africa and  thus alien to the social structure, African Universities have nevertheless accomplished a lot in achieving their initial objectives and overcoming some of the problems associated with colonialisation. However, this article argues that, as the end of the twentieth century approaches, these Universities must undergo a process of adaptation from their European heritage and reform themselves.

Weber critically reviews global discourses in the academic writing on comparative education dealing with the crises in African higher education. The most common methodologies used to analyze comparative higher education employs the nation state as the main analytic unit. Weber argues that we might learn about how government policies influence reform at tertiary institutions, or how the university structure of one country compares with another; but little about the problematic impact of globalization on the patterns observed at the national levels. Informed by writing on postcolonialism, the article proposes alternatives to the current literature; it advocates the development of critical knowledge systems and independent institutions, rooted in local societies and social struggles.

The relationship between government and the institutions of higher learning in any society reflects the variety of historical, political, and cultural factors that have formed the character of that society.  A careful study of government-university relations therefore requires some appreciation of a society's history.  Sawyerr analyzes this relationship within the Ghanaian context throughout its history.  Inheriting an English model of higher education, Ghana's university became a vital part of the national project of self-development and, in turn, constitute a major source of ideas on all matters of national concern.  Difficulties have arisen in the attempt to keep the universities autonomous from the government.