Higher education in a globalising world: Community engagement and lifelong learning

By Peter Mayo

This book focuses on current policy discourse in Higher Education, with special reference to Europe. It discusses globalisation, Lifelong Learning, the EU’s Higher Education discourse, this discourse’s regional ramifications and alternative practices in Higher Education from both the minority and majority worlds with their different learning traditions and epistemologies. It argues that these alternative practices could well provide the germs for the shape of a public good oriented Higher Education for the future. It theoretically expounds on important elements to consider when engaging Higher Education and communities, discussing the nature of the term ‘community’ itself. Special reference is accorded to the difference that lies at the core of these ever-changing communities. It then provides an analysis of an ‘on the ground project’ in University community engagement, before suggesting signposts for further action at the level of policy and provision.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526140944

Book preview

UNIVERSITIES AND LIFELONG LEARNING

Higher education in a globalising world

UNIVERSITIES AND LIFELONG LEARNING

Series editor:

Professor Michael Osborne (University of Glasgow)

Universities and lifelong learning analyses the external engagement activities of universities and third-level institutions and is concerned with the range of activity that lies beyond the traditional mission of teaching and research. This is an area that until now has seldom been explored in depth and has rarely if ever been treated in a holistic manner.

Lifelong learning, the arts and community cultural engagement in the contemporary university: International perspectives Edited by Darlene Clover and Kathy Sanford

Knowledge, democracy and action: Community-university research partnerships in global perspectives Edited by Budd Hall, Edward Jackson, Rajesh Tandon, Jean-Marc Fontan and Nirmala Lall

University engagement and environmental sustainability Edited by Patricia Inman and Diana L. Robinson

A new imperative: Regions and higher education in difficult times Michael Osborne, Chris Duke and Bruce Wilson

Higher education in a globalising world

Community engagement and lifelong learning

Peter Mayo

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Peter Mayo 2019

The right of Peter Mayo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4092 0 hardback

First published 2019

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Praise for Higher Education in a Globalising World:

Neoliberalism presents the university with a dilemma: either the university adjusts to the demands of neoliberalism, and is thus disfigured beyond recognition, or it offers resistance and carries out its democratic and community-oriented mission as a counter-current. Mayo shows courage in providing a well-argued book that constitutes a powerful appeal for the university to pursue the second route. The book provides concrete ‘on the ground’ examples of how this can be done.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, University of Coimbra, author of, among others, Decolonizing the University, the Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice, (2017)

Mayo’s book sheds a light on the curious paradox of higher education: its inability to grapple deeply with the issues of lifelong learning and adult education. From their privileged positions as bastions of learning and knowledge, higher education institutions need to do much more with responding to adult learner needs not only in the classroom, but in marginalised communities and local settings. Mayo reminds us that, rather than subscribing solely to the neoliberal agenda of training workers for the state and industry, higher education would do well to educate citizens for the full and abundant life.

Leona M. English, Professor of Adult Education, St Francis Xavier University, Canada

It is impossible to discuss higher education outside the context of globalisation. Peter Mayo’s Higher Education in a Globalising World may be the best book we have on the subject. Not only does Mayo offer a stunning detailed analysis of the globalising forces shaping higher education within a dialectic of oppression and resistance, but he does so with a style that is as rigorous as it is accessible and poetic. This book is a must read for any one concerned with how the political landscape of higher education has changed under the impending and powerful forces of globalisation. This book is at once a theoretical and political tool box for rethinking the relationship between power and politics, on the one hand, and higher education and the complex forces of globalisation on the other. If you want to understand how power and resistance mutually engage each other in the 21st century in the struggle over higher education, read this book and then give to your friends.

Henry Giroux, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest; The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy; Author of, among others, The University in Chains. Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014), co-author of Take Back Higher Education. Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2004)

This lucid and expansive book calls for critical university engagement with local communities to support a ‘globalisation from below’. Mayo deftly presents a portrait of lifelong learning that weaves together tropes from social justice movements, feminism, gender studies, climate change, Catholic ritual, class struggles, and intergenerational learning. The examples span the globe, but a prominent place is given to traditions of lifelong learning in Europe and Mediterranean societies, including Southern, Eastern and Arab Mediterranean with their rich social and institutional histories. Drawing on the critical lexicon of the likes of Paulo Freire, Lorenzo Milani, Ivan Illich and Antonio Gramsci, Mayo calls on educators to practice an ethical, engaged pedagogy that ignites ‘the popular creative spirit’. This book should be a staple in the critical studies of higher education and lifelong learning.

Linda Herrera, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Peter Mayo presents a comprehensive examination of University Lifelong Learning in the EU, Euro-Mediterranean zones, and the Global South. He aptly presents a critical reflection on the development of University Lifelong Learning and the role it has played in the evolution of higher education. Most importantly, in that the book focuses on all Higher Educational institutions, including universities, academies, and vocational colleges that award degrees, diplomas, and provide certification of professional attainment, Peter Mayo makes a compelling and inspiring case for the re-conceptualisation of the university as an alternative to the existing hegemonic one. The equal inclusion of all tertiary institutions is a hallmark of this book.

Rosalind Latiner Raby, Director, California Colleges for International Education, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International and Comparative Higher Education

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Preface by Budd L. Hall

1 Introduction: globalisation and the HE market

2 Changing conceptions of lifelong education/learning

3 The EU’s HE discourse and the challenges of globalisation

4 Extending the EU’s higher education discourse to the rest of the Mediterranean

5 Mainstream and alternative HE discourses in LLL

6 University/HE LLL and the community

7 University community engagement project: engaging the popular imagination and the ‘Holy Week’ culture

8 Whither European universities and other HE institutions and LLL?

Postscript by Rosemary Deem

References

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support of a number of friends and colleagues with regard to the development of this book. My deepest gratitude goes to my wife Josephine and daughters Annemarie and Cecilia for their constant support.

My colleague and friend Mary Darmanin deserves great thanks for having persuaded me to embark on research on higher education in Europe for a joint presentation with her at a 2008 International Sociology of Education conference in London. This led me to write a paper around the topic for the journal connected with this conference. Michael Grech, Budd L. Hall, Carlos Alberto Torres and Eugenio-Enrique Cortés-Ramírez provided me with feedback and insights for specific chapters. Great thanks go to them. I am also indebted in various ways (sharing ideas, relevant collaboration, provision of relevant travel opportunities, sharing of material, providing inspiration) to the following: Hasan Aksoy, Paula Allman (late), Pep Aparicio Guadas, Godfrey Baldacchino, Federico Batini, Susan Belcher El-Nahhas (late), Carmel Borg, Joseph A. Buttigieg, Donna Chovanec (late), Paul Clough, Josann Cutajar, Antonia Darder, Leona English, Andy Green, Marvin Formosa, Henry J. Frendo, Henry Giroux, Gordon L. Hay (late), Linda Herrera, Paul Heywood, Anne Hickling-Hudson, Kemal Inal, Antonia Kupfer, D.W. Livingstone, Emilio Lucio-Villegas, Nur Masalha, Andre Elias Mazawi, Maria Mendel, Francois Mifsud, Mike Neary, Maria Nikolakaki, Mike Osborne, Maria Pisani, Milosh Raykov, Najwa Silwadi, Bonnie Slade, Ronald G. Sultana, Alessio Surian, Tomasz Szkudlarek, Paul Spiteri (late), Nicos Trimikliniotis, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Kenneth Wain. The usual disclaimers apply.

Abbreviations

Preface

Budd L. Hall

We welcome Peter Mayo’s contributions to the growing literature of both critical university studies and community university engagement. His towering contributions to adult and lifelong education founded on his seminal work on Freire and Gramsci (Mayo, 1999) have been added to year after year by major contributions to critical pedagogy, socialist thought, anti-racist and anti-oppressive studies and Mediterranean Studies. In this book, Mayo draws together many of his discursive powers to cast a light on higher education in Europe and beyond within the context of globalisation. His focus is mostly on universities within the legislative and policy framework of Europe of the past decades. Importantly this work interrogates higher education from two linked streams of globalisation, what he refers to as ‘hegemonic’ globalisation, the triumph of the neoliberal regime, and ‘globalisation from below’, the growing movement of decolonisation, resistance and resilience. A very important contribution of this book, which other recent books on higher education and globalisation do not make, is the author’s attention to lifelong learning and adult education within European higher education. The role of continuing education and online distance learning are explored both as handmaidens to the neoliberal agenda and as spaces for alternative imaginings. Mayo’s book might well be seen as a European analysis that complements and extends another recent critical higher education study, that by Spooner and McNinch, Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education (2018).

I very much appreciate Mayo’s drawing our attention to the links between adult education, lifelong learning and contemporary issues in European higher education. He reminds us of the nineteenth-century movement of ‘extending’ the university to the community as illustrated by the creation of the Extension Office of Cambridge University. The university extension model that began in England found counterparts in other parts of Europe. It was ‘modernised’ in the 1960s and 1970s in most places as Continuing Studies, a more American term, and an emphasis gradually shifted from provision to those left out of formal studies to provision of professional qualifications. But the principles of adult education of respect for the lived experience of adults and the democratic right to learn are very similar to those being either espoused or sought after by the contemporary engagement discourses. It is, however, striking that, with the exception of Mayo in this book, most contemporary discourses on higher education, social responsibility, engagement and innovation ignore both the history of lifelong learning and education and the potential that those principles and institutional innovations might contribute. If we are to see moves towards Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy, as Levin and Greenwood (2016) suggest, Mayo’s book is an essential contribution.

Higher education studies have grown and expanded remarkably over recent years. This interest has been fed on the global side by the explosion of new universities created in both the poorer countries of the Global South and the middle-income countries such as Brazil, India and China (Kumar, 2017). While in the majority of the countries of Europe and other more well-to-do nations, universities are being challenged to demonstrate or renegotiate their relationship with society. Within all of our universities questions about knowledge abound. Some authors speak about a transition beyond the both the concepts of knowledge economy and knowledge society to knowledge democracy (Hall, 2011; Hall and Tandon, 2014). Within the broader concept of knowledge democracy, there are calls for decolonising higher education, decolonising the curriculum and decolonising knowledge itself (Battiste, 2018; Tuck, 2018; Hall, 2018).

The work that Rajesh Tandon and I have been engaged in, under the aegis of our UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, in collaboration with the Global University Network for Innovation and others, has focused on building capacity in the theory and practice of community-based participatory research (www.unescochair-cbrsr.org). Our work is part of the contemporary interrogation of knowledge and epistemology informed by scholars such as de Sousa Santos, to whom Mayo refers in this volume, Visvanathan (2017) and others. Our work would be a contribution to what Mayo refers to as ‘globalisation from below’ and is based on the critical respect of knowledge created in social movements and community action settings, the value of academics and community intellectuals co-creating knowledge and on the social responsibility of higher education institutions to those communities where they are located (Hall and Tandon, 2017).

In summing Mayo’s contribution to finding a way forward for a progressive social-justice oriented higher education, let me draw attention to two of his calls to action. First he says that ‘universities can engage in a meaningful process… by re-conceiving of their role as not simply being there to boost the economy,… but also to contribute to a regeneration of democracy and the public sphere’. Second, he tells us that an agenda for the future, ‘would therefore be decolonizing and hence a genuinely democratic process. It is… where different voices reflecting and expressing different cultures and knowledge traditions make their presence felt.’

Mayo’s book is an invitation to all of us to enter into a crucial discussion of what globalisation means for higher education and how we can take action to keep a focus on the issues of justice, sustainability and peace.

Budd L. Hall, PhD

Professor of Community Development and

UNESCO Co-Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education

University of Victoria

Canada

References

Battiste, M. (2018). Reconciling indigenous knowledge in education: promises, possibilities and imperatives. In Spooner, M., and McNinch, J. (eds.), Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Hall, B. L. (2011). Towards a knowledge democracy movement: contemporary trends in community-university research partnerships. Rhizome Freirean 9. www.rizoma-freireano.org/index.

Hall, B. L. (2018). Beyond epistemicide: knowledge, democracy and higher education. In Spooner, M., and McNinch, J. (eds.), Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Hall, B. L., and Tandon, R. (2014). 5th World Report on Higher Education: Knowledge, Engagement and Higher Education Contributing to Social Change. Barcelona GUNI and London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, B. L., and Tandon, R. (2017). Participatory research: ‘where have we been, where are we going?’ A dialogue. Research for All 1(2), pp. 365–374.

Kumar, R. C. (ed.) (2017). The Future of Indian Universities: Comparative and International Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levin, M., and Greenwood, D. (2016). Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London and New York: Zed Books.

Spooner, M., and McNinch, J. (eds.) (2018). Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Tuck, E. (2018). Biting the university that feeds us. In Spooner, M., and McNinch, J. (eds.), Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Visvanathan, S. (2017). An introduction to a thought experiment: quality, diversity and the epistemics of university. In Kumar, R. C. (ed.), The Future of Indian Universities: Comparative and International Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1

Introduction: globalisation and the HE market

Higher education (HE) is believed to play a pivotal part in the process of globalisation and, as a consequence, it is being transformed, mainly within the context of a supranational union (the European Union, henceforth EU), which set itself the ambitious and unlikely target of becoming the most powerful and competitive ‘knowledge economy’ in the world by the year 2010 (EC, 2000). By higher education I mean all those institutions and organised forms of learning that occur at tertiary level, that is to say those institutions whose provision extends beyond secondary education and high school. These include universities, academies and vocational colleges that award degrees, diplomas and provide certification of professional attainment. Globalisation is conceived of as an all-embracing concept, incorporating both its economic and cultural dimensions which are often inextricably intertwined, since, as Manuel Castells states:

We live in a global economy… in which all processes work as a unit on real time throughout the planet; that is, an economy in which capital flows, labor markets, markets, the production process, management, information and technology operate simultaneously at the world level. (Castells, 1999, p. 54)

Nevertheless, as indicated in a study, published by the OECD Directorate for Education:

Globalisation is not a single or universal phenomenon. It is nuanced according to locality (local area, nation, world region), language(s) of use, and academic cultures; and it plays out very differently according to the type of institution. (Marginson and van der Wende, 2007, p. 5)

Furthermore as Roger Dale (1999) indicates, while ‘globalisation does represent a new set of rules, there is no reason to expect all countries to interpret those rules in identical ways, or expect them all to play to the rules in identical ways’ (p. 65).

Hegemonic globalisation

There are different kinds of globalisation. According to Carlos Alberto Torres (2005; Rhoads and Torres, 2005a, pp. 8–9) there are: (1) hegemonic globalisation; (2) globalisation from below; (3) globalisation of exchange of people and ideas, and influence on culture;¹ (4) globalisation of the war on terror;² and (5) globalisation of human rights.³ The most relevant forms of globalisation for discussions around HE are the first two and I will give them ample treatment in this volume. I would argue that the other three forms of globalisation are also relevant. The globalisation of exchange of people and ideas is obviously connected with HE, in terms of change in demographics and ethnic composition of staff and students and also international student mobility. This will hopefully have an effect on the nature of knowledge and learning taking place over a period of time. In my view, Torres’ fourth type of globalisation, globalisation of the war on terror, is also relevant, especially if, following Giroux (2007), we need to take into consideration the existence, in a number of powerful countries, such as the USA, of the academic-industrial-military complex. The word ‘academic’ is said to have been included in Dwight Eisenhower’s draft before his enunciation of the industrial-military complex.⁴ Then there is the globalisation of human rights that becomes relevant for HE in the sense that students and other people have been gathering on streets and in squares over the years, demanding that access to HE be recognised as a human right. They have been arguing that HE should not be governed by the ideology of the market. We have seen this in recent years in Chile and Greece, in particular, and it has also featured in the student protests in England, especially London, with regard to the hikes in university fees, and in Quebec (Giroux, 2014b).

While stressing links between the last three types of globalisation and HE, as mentioned by Rhoads and Torres (2005a), I will explain in greater detail the two major forms of globalisation that will be at the heart of my discussion in the book. I shall start with hegemonic globalisation predicated, for the most part, on the ideology of neoliberalism.

The well-known Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, when interviewed by Roger Dale and Susan Robertson, discussed hegemonic globalisation stating that: ‘Neoliberalism is the political form of globalization resulting from a US type of capitalism, a type that bases competitiveness on technological innovation