Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval: On Common Goods, Geopolitics and Decolonisation

This open access book collects papers on the major trends in international higher education from leading scholar Simon Marginson, who led the UK's Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE) from 2015-2024.

In the last decade higher education and research has grown rapidly, becoming more international and embroiled in politics and economics of an increasingly conflicted world. Surveying these developments, Marginson judiciously identifies and discusses the major trends, events, issues and dilemmas that have shaped and are still shaping global higher education. With exemplary worldwide reach, these papers, sole or lead authored by Marginson, consider the relation between public good and private good in higher education; the changing geo-politics of higher education; the growing role of the higher education sector and its increasing destabilisation; the impact of Brexit in the UK; how nativist politics and U.S./China tensions are disrupting cooperation in research and the free movement of ideas and people across national borders; the undue dominance of Western institutions and knowledge in global higher education in what is now a multi-polar world and the need to open global science to diverse languages and insights; the unresolved dilemmas and challenges for higher education resulting from its failure to conclusively progress on either social equality at home or global justice abroad; and the growing demands for greater focus on graduate employability and national not global mission.

Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval maps global higher education with strong and accessible data, while also exploring and developing key concepts for understanding worldwide trends and developments in higher education and science, and analysing these in terms of relations of power. It will provide critical new insights in how to improve the delivery and impact of higher education globally.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.