Realizing the World-Class University: An Ecological Approach

Abstract

AbstractThe ‘world-class university’ has become a trope of two rivalrous perspectives. On the one hand, it is used by cross-national and national organizations and institutions (and their leaders) to promote global positioning and achievement. On the other hand, it is deployed as a target of critique by scholars, it being observed that the term – ‘world-class university’ – presses interests, of cognitive capitalism, institutional entrepreneurialism and hierarchy amongst universities. Much less evident in these rivalrous discourses is an attempt to derive a way of holding onto the term – ‘world-class university’ – that retains links with core values of the university itself, such as those of reason, inquiry, understanding, and learning. I wish to use my chapter to mount such an inquiry and to do so by deploying an ecological approach. The university is interconnected with the world in manifold ways, through multiple ecosystems, but those ecosystems –such as those of knowledge, learning, social institutions, persons, the economy, culture and the natural environment – are impaired. Accordingly, could it not be suggested that a ‘world-class university’ would be one that draws on its resources in advancing the wellbeing of the major ecosystems of the world? Such a university would be a university in a class-of-and-for-the-world.