In recent times, there has been a great flattener in the world of international higher education. In one of my previous entries, I talked about how Friedman's the World is Flat assertion has become a catch-phrase in major board rooms of the corporate world. However, the flattening of the world has been going on for quite some time. A good example of this is in the arena of higher education.
It is suffice to say that the idea and concept of the University was born prior to modern times. The Italians, British, French and the Egyptians all claim to be the originator of the University. Going by strict definition, the Indians are probably the the first to have the first tell-tale signs of organised knowldge dissemination (what a univerity is really all about) through the concept of ashram.
Nevertheless for the purpose of this particular discussion, I am going to refer to 'University' as to mean the modern University as per what we are all accustomed to now which is a model created and popularised by the Anglo-Saxons. Enter the world of Cambdrige, Oxford and Havard!
In the beginning (as any Cambridge historian will tell you), there was no University of Cambridge. There was however, a group of colleges that later became known collectively as the Univerity of Cambridge. The same applies to Oxford. While these and many more Universities have been in existence for almost a thousand years, the explosion of Universities around the world took place only after World War 2. In the United States itself, the mushrooming of unversities and adult education coincided with th return of US servicemen from the trenches of Europe. At the same time, many nations gained their independence from their colonial masters. This happened right from 1940s and all the way to 1970s. Countries in Africa, Asia and other parts of the world all scrambled to assert thier nationhood by establishing their national universities. Ironically, this assertion of new found nationhood was modelled after what was existent in the land of the colonial master themselves. Hence, one will hear nationalistic statements of educational freedom vis a vis national freedom and such from an Asian or African university BUT their entire academic and administrative structure will be a carbon copy from the Oxfords and Cambridges of the Anglo-Saxon world. Soon, this model became the only model for what a University should be. In porpular parlance, it was known as the brick & mortar university
The brick & motar Universities held sway throughtout the world and like many things in human history, anything that is often repeated becomes the truth; sometimes the only truth.
Then, the Internet age arrived in the 1980s. Since then, the concept of University has gone through more changes than what it has been accustomed to in the previous 1000 years. As the Internet prompted people to ask questions about their traditional way of doing business, it also encouraged people from the academia to question the traditional way of disseminating knowledge. For the first time, the possibility of providing University education without the need for physical brick & mortar campuses was explored. Hence, the birth of distance education which later morphed into on-line universities.
Since the 1990s, the concept and practice of University went through another dramatic change through the establishment of Transnational Universities which have incorporated the best methods and processes of traditional and non-traditional universities. The distinguishing characteristics of a Transnational University are : 1) Provides its services/products in 3 or more national territories, 2) Multi-ethnic faculty, 3) Distributed decision making, 4) Centalised quality control, 5) 3 or more international affiliations, 6) One Vision and Mission, 7) Non-governmental and/or political.
Like any change, the tansformation of the University and what it should mean to the 21st century knowledge seeker has received much resistence from those affected by the change in the status-quo.
I anticipate more exciting things to come from these Transnational Universities.
