CGHE Webinar 95

What do political developments in China mean for university autonomy and academic freedom? A panel discussion

Date: Thursday, 15 November 2018 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Location: Seminar Room A, Department of Education, University of Oxford

Speaker(s):

At the core of the Humboldtian notion of the university are the freedoms to learn, teach, inquire and research. The European and American university are nested in a tradition of institutional autonomy that is always partial, always contesting with the state, but never wholly disappears, or not for long.

Academic freedom is qualified by training regimes and performance management but for much of the time (more for some than others) there is space for self-determined creativity. The modern university in China is immensely productive in teaching and research, especially in the hard sciences.

Universities in China now produce more research papers in English than universities in America. No scholars anywhere like being directed from above and the Chinese university could not be a leader in scientific innovation if simple authoritarianism was the only force in play.

But China does have a political tradition different to the West, in which the state has a comprehensive rather than limited role and universities are always at the core of nation-building.

The last is sometimes but not always true in the European tradition. Are institutional autonomy and academic freedom the same concepts, the same practices, in China as they are at Oxford, Leiden, the University of California or Bath Spa University?

What are the implications for autonomy and academic freedom of the Xi Jinping era in China, with its increased emphasis in universities on national objectives, Chinese characteristics and the thought of the leader? What does this mean for Chinese universities’ internationalisation strategies?

Correspondingly, how robust are liberal autonomy and freedom in Western universities – and (the crunch question) to what extent can we treat these as universal principles that we expect in higher education everywhere?

Panel and short presentation titles

Professor Simon Marginson – University autonomy and academic freedom: Universal concepts or culturally diverse practices?
Lili Yang – Chinese traditional interpretations of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and implications in contemporary higher education
Xin Xu – Internationalising Chinese humanities and social sciences: Influences on institutional autonomy and academic freedom

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.

Lili Yang

Lili Yang is an assistant professor at Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she was a PhD researcher and then a postdoctoral researcher at CGHE. Her research interests include higher education, cross-cultural comparison of higher education, and higher education policy. Her forthcoming book is titled ‘Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches’ (Bloomsbury).

Xin Xu

Xin Xu is a DPhil student and a Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her doctoral research investigates the impacts of incentivising international publications on Chinese humanities and social sciences academics’ research and career.