Globalization and higher education in Southern California: views from the professoriate

Abstract

In this study, faculty at institutions of higher education in Southern California were surveyed to determine the ways they interpret the effects of globalization dynamics upon their various teaching and research activities. Faculty in the state’s three higher education tiers spoke positively about the intellectual benefits to be gained by exposure to different worldviews made possible by an increasingly diverse faculty and student body. Divisions were noted among the different tiers, however, with respect to their disparate levels of engagement with the private sector. The private sector was seen as having a negative impact upon the public sector’s research agenda while simultaneously being embraced by faculty at the community colleges. Faculty at the research institutions were typically critical of the overarching neoliberal paradigm and spoke in political terms about the ways this largely economic‐efficiency model was reorienting their teaching and research roles.

Keywords:

• globalization
• higher education
• USA
• information technologies
• autonomy
• funding

Notes

1. This article benefits from previous work by Jevdet Rexhepi, ‘Exploring globalization on the margins: A study of the impacts on higher education in Albania’ (in progress).

2. For further reading, see: Allen, Bonous‐Hammarth, and Teranishi (2006); Altbach, Berdahl, and Gumport (2005); King (2004); Levin (2001); Rhoads and Torres (2006); and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004).

3. This study was carried out as part of a graduate course at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. The course was taught by Carlos A. Torres, Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

4. See Torres (2009b, 30–1, Note 11).

5. Michael Apple (2001) cites how the success of the ‘conservative right’ has much to do with its ability to manipulate and transpose a concise and perhaps irresistible notion of common sense.

6. For Appadurai, worlds should be assessed in terms of their overlapping and disjunctive landscapes (1996, 32), creating an awareness of complexity (perhaps, by way of an a priori globalness of human existence?).

7. For further analysis of the role of globalization upon technology, see Misiaszek et al. (forthcoming).