Between the local and the universal: academic worlds and the long history of the university

Since the 1990s, the scale of transnational academic mobility has measurably increased.Between 2000 and 2012 the global number of enrolled foreign tertiary students more than doubled (OECD 2014a, p. 343; OECD 2014b, p. 344).Academics are more difficult to track, but between 1994 and 2005, the number of international academics moving into the US increased by 49 per cent (Vincent-Lancrin 2006, p. 186).In 2010 more than 56 per cent of academic staff in Europe were classed as internationally mobile (IDEA Consult 2010, p. 8).Yet academic mobility is a phenomenon that is far from even.In 2014 Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States together received more than half of all foreign students globally (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2014a, p. 343; OECD 2014b, p. 344).And many countries continue to experience marked outflows of academics from their universities to the US and Europe (United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture [2009], p. 15).In the realm of science, virtually no foreign researchers were to be found in India in 2012 (Franzoni et al. 2012, p. 5).As students and academics move along the international routes of scholarship, they do so under particular political conditions, travelling identifiable routes, to select institutions and for specific purposes.Despite rhetoric about global mobility, it is clear that the routes of scholarly travel at the start of the twenty-first century trace particular paths and are shaped by a variety of forces and actors creating geographies of connection that may be transnational, but are far from global.It is perhaps more useful to think of these geographies as academic "worlds": limited transnational communities that are mapped by practices and engagements that, though expansive, are none-the-less bounded.Universities and the individuals who work in them are both local and global actors.They are rooted in specific social, political and economic communities, yet their authority comes from their claim to be representatives of a culture and learning that is apparently "universal" in that it is recognisable and even tradable beyond the boundaries of particular localities.To maintain their status and power, universities need to maintain their relevance on both fronts: they need to meet the political and social needs of particular regional and national contexts, and they need to sustain their connection to changing culture and knowledge.Clark Kerr, the reforming President of the University of California from 1958 until 1967 put it another way:Universities are, by nature of their commitment to advancing universal knowledge, essentially international institutions, but they have been living in a world of nation states that have designs upon them.My basic question is: where does this dual identification position these institutions between a mythical academic Heaven and a sometimes actual earthly hell, and in what ways does it affect how they may act? Which to serve: the universal truth or the particularised power?(Kerr 1990, pp. 1 & 5-6) This 'dual identification' has meant many different things in different contexts, not least because what counts as 'universal truth' has a history, and its relationship to 'particularised power' has not always been as separate as Kerr made out.Academic travel sits at the heart of this tension between the local and the "universal": students and scholars move between various centres, seeking the particular status and expertise of institutions and individuals renowned for their development of knowledge.But they do so constrained by history, conditioned by capacity, shaped by regulation, lured by money, and compelled by circumstances beyond their control.Understanding the respects in which scholarship has been territorialised or deterritorialised -by states, universities, and international relations among other forces -is a way of tracing the long history of the transnational politics of higher education (Swyngedouw 2010).This chapter argues that, if we are to understand the geographies of higher education today, it is necessary to look to the past and its legacies.It traces the long history of the university, from its European origins in the Middle Ages through to the present, in order to show how its adaptation (or failure to adapt) to the changing politics of the local and the "universal" has created various transnational geographies of connection that continue to shape the international "worlds" of higher education in the 21 st century.

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