Higher education cooperation in ASEAN: building towards integration or manufacturing consent?

Abstract

The triad of cooperation, international exchange, and integration among institutions of higher education has become the new norm in the global experience of learning and academic training. The goal of improving and standardising the academic experience across countries is now typically also associated with fostering cultural and political ties and complementing processes of cultural integration and economic growth. Behind the rhetoric of many new initiatives, however, is a competition of geopolitical proportions, in which various national or regional systems of higher education try to shore up their positions or conquer new territory. In this paper we assess these discursive and material battles over institutional hegemony in Southeast Asian higher education by drawing on the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. We critically address the competitive negotiation over higher education taking place between international and Southeast Asian educational players, asking whether these contribute more to integration than reinforcing dominant higher education domains.

Acknowledgements

Our gratitude goes to fellow research colleague Prof. Conrad Schetter for help with work preceding this and to Dr Eric Beerkens for comments on a draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The authors thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation [grant number 30700037] for their generous support to this research project, and recognise no outstanding conflicts of interest in the publication of these findings.

Notes on contributors

Hart N. Feuer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), Cambodia, and an Associated Researcher at the Center for Development Studies (ZEF), University of Bonn. His work focuses on higher education reform and internationalisation, as well as on the sociology of food, with a focus on food education and ecological agriculture.

Anna-Katharina Hornidge is a Professor of social sciences at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology (ZMT) and the University of Bremen, Germany. Before that, she was the Director and Professor of the Department of Social and Cultural Change, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Germany.

Notes

1. An alternative term, which is perhaps less useful for describing decentralised regional higher education systems such as the USA, is ‘polity’ (see the example of Europe in Beerkens 2014, 5).

2. AUN: ASEAN University Network. AQAN: ASEAN Quality Assurance Network. SEAMEO-RIHED: Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization – Regional Institute of Higher Education and Development.

3. AUNP: ASEAN – EU University Network Programme. ACCESS: Academic Cooperation Europe- Southeast Asia Project.

4. APRU: Association of Pacific Rim Universities; ACODE: Australasian Council on Open, Distance and e-Learning; UMAP: University Mobility in Asia and the Pacific.

5. A less direct, but more polite form refers to the GMS (Greater Mekong Subregion) countries.

6. They outline the following world hierarchy of higher education actors: (1) The Major Players: the USA, the UK, and Australia; (2) The Middle Powers: Germany and France; (3) The Evolving Destinations: Japan, Canada, and New Zealand; and (4) The Emerging Contenders: Malaysia, Singapore, and China.

7. Based on statistics from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics: http://www.uis.unesco.org/

8. Under this programme, Singapore opens all domestic scholarships to the outside (open eligibility), charges tuition for non-residents of only 10% above local, and offers favourable interest rates for student loans.

9. Based on the authors’ tabulation of available records from AUN, AQAN, and SEAMEO-RIHED.

10. In 2005, Johnson Paul was the Deputy Director of Research Services and Publications of the Singapore National Library Board. By 2014, he was the Senior Associate Director at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.

11. Specifically, the ASEAN Plus Three Senior Officials Meeting on Education (SOM-ED+3) and the ASEAN Plus Three Education Ministers Meeting (ASED+3).

12. INQAAHE: International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education.