If you're looking for some summer reading on higher education (and, really, who isn't?), I'd like to recommend to everyone a recently-published book entitled The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World, by the Kauffman Foundation's Ben Wildavsky. It's a good, breezy introduction to the kinds of issues that senior administrators are pondering with respect to internationalization and what has come to be known as the "world-class university movement."

The book tackles a number of inter-related themes about the "global university."  The vast expansion of educational opportunity in the developing world, and the rapid modernization of China and India have broadened both the supply of and the demand for highly-qualified personnel and educational services. Universities, which for the past two centuries have regarded their role as being handmaidens to state power, have, in response, suddenly started to revert to their medieval role as ecumenically transnational centres of learning.  The shift has been jarring and sudden, and it's still not clear where the transition is leading.

Wildavsky brings a refreshingly jargon-free approach to his examination of this shift.  He is not a theorist; if you're looking for some more overarching understandings of globalization and knowledge, go read Manuel Castells instead. This is much more a magazine-style of writing (as befits his background as a former editor at U.S. News & World Report); six 30-page chapters, each focused to a large degree around a couple of people or institutions doing something that he believes is a harbinger of a larger coming trend. 

This approach of focusing on "the next big thing" means that Wildavsky spends most of his time looking at outlier institutions rather than the ones most professors and students inhabit.  For instance, New York University's attempt to turn itself into a global entity with a number of co-equal campuses around the world - which takes up most of the first chapter - doesn't herald the arrival of chain universities with globalized brands.  But if NYU succeeds - which is far from a sure thing, given the risks and money involved - it would change the face of international higher education and there will certainly be imitators.  It would also permanently alter the way the world sees NYU; from a slightly parvenu second-tier Ivy League school to a visionary institution with a first-mover advantage in a whole new category of world super-institution. 

Fundamentally, this book is about how students and professors have become more mobile, how institutions have come to see themselves as being in competition for these students, and how they are altering their behaviour in order to improve their chances of winning these competitions.  But, despite Wildavsky's repeated use of the market language of "competition," it's worth remembering that universities do not really compete with one another the way companies do.  When companies compete, they are doing battle for market share and, ultimately, profits.  This is not even vaguely true of universities; in countries like Canada, few genuinely wish to increase their enrolment and none are legally entitled to show a profit or distribute earnings to shareholders (of which they have none, in any case). 

Rather, the competition is simply for prestige.  This is a very important concept within universities; prestige being in fact the main currency of academia, both at the level of the individual academic and the institution as a whole.  But it's an odd currency, in that it is difficult to count and measure at the level of the institution.  Global rankings, in this sense (the subject of another chapter), serve a useful purpose within academia by bringing a certain transparency to the measurement of prestige, thus allowing people to see who is "winning" (the charge that rankings "created" competition for prestige between institutions is, in North America at least, nonsense - it's always been there, but wasn't acknowledged openly). 

But what does an institution do with prestige once it has it?  It hoards it, basically, like Smaug sitting on his treasure pile.  What many people fear is that prestige is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands; this, in part, is what has led governments around the world to start creating multi-million-dollar "excellence" programs designed to concentrate talent at a few domestic universities so that they can "compete" on this world stage.  As we saw here in Canada during the G5 (or "Big Five") debacle of last summer, there's a genuine debate to be had about whether or not this is a good thing (for what it's worth, I think there are merits both to the concentration and dispersion of talent, but there's very little evidence to suggest one is much better than the other), but Wildavsky, unfortunately, declines to enter into this larger debate.

This is a symptom of what, unfortunately, is this book's greatest deficiency.   While it's a great gee-whiz tour of the leading edges of neat stuff going on in academia on four continents (neither Africa nor Oceania get much of a look-in), it lacks a "so what" element.  So what if a few institutions have gone global?  So what if there are some institutions that are world-class and others not?  Does it matter either for institutional or public policy that this stuff is going on?  After all, most of the challenges this book outlines are very far removed from the lives of most professors and students.   Most universities are not really in a global competition for talent, either at the student or faculty level.  Even among those that are, the concrete nature of the challenges of such "competition" actually affect very few people beyond the vice-President, some deans and a few student affairs types.  At a day-to-day level, few, if any, students and professors will perceive themselves to be participants in any kind of global competition.  So why should any of this stuff matter to them?  Wildavsky doesn't really take the time to say.

The real answer, I think, is that, as long as prestige matters, then university presidents' central mission is always going to be to obtain as much prestige as possible for their institutions.  What Wildavsky is really documenting is that the rules for obtaining prestige have changed - essentially, if you're not internationalized, you're dead.  And it is this change in the rules of prestige that are driving such profound shifts in institutional behaviour.

The final element of the book that I think is really worth highlighting here is its chapter on for-profit higher education and how a few (primarily American) companies are making millions of dollars through the provision of education in Latin America and Asia.  It's easy, of course, to pooh-pooh for-profit education; usually, if the choice is between for-profit and free public education, the nod should go to the latter.  But while Wildavsky doesn't pull punches on issues of quality control, he also gives the sector its due - in much of the world, the choice isn't between private and public, it's between private and nothing.  In the way this chapter gets down to the hard brass tacks of the economics of delivering education in distant places, it's perhaps the book's most intriguing passage. 

This book won't be for everyone; the lack of a strong integrative synthesis will grate for some, as will a lack of reflection on the downside of the war for prestige for those institutions left behind.  But as a peek into fast-evolving trends in global or transnational education that are increasingly consuming the minds of university presidents, it's extremely good, and its educated-but-breezy Atlantic style of writing, so rare in higher education books, make it a pleasure to read. 

(Editor's note:  you may also be interested in a transcript of a speech Wildavsky gave at the Carnegie Council, as well as a review of Wildavsky's book by The Times Higher Education.)