Volume 9, Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Reimagining Transnationalism in the Global Academy, Guest edited by Jennifer A. Reimer and Michael Subialka

Scholars who study higher education describe globalization as an inevitable force in postsecondary systems and institutions worldwide. Resulting trends include massification, privatization, reduced public funding, competition, and unprecedented student and faculty mobility. In the last two decades, another small but important trend has developed: the emergence of liberal education (often called “liberal arts and science” or “general education”) in cultures where it has rarely existed before. Discourse about this phenomenon is overwhelmingly positive. Using critical theory to analyze this evolving global trend, however, provides a much-needed alternative perspective for policy and practice. In this article, I define liberal education and provide an overview of the current trend based on a 2013 empirical study. In reaction to a dominant economic framework that rationalizes the development of liberal education programs, I present several counter narratives related to history, students and faculty, learning and teaching, access and elitism, and cultural hegemony. This article emphasizes the importance of critically analyzing new international higher education developments to increase the propensity for creating socially just policies and programs. Finally, I illustrate the implications for the global emergence of liberal education by suggesting that liberal education as a higher education philosophy could both reinforce and resist neoliberal practices.

In this article, we seek to establish what liberal education means in the Asia of today by examining different institutions in India, Japan, South Korea, and China. In particular, we have analyzed fourteen such programs and identified certain commonalities, as well as important differences, particularly involving governance structure. We then offer some insights gleaned from the first three years of one of the largest such undertakings, Yale-NUS College in Singapore. We conclude that partnerships with U.S. institutions offer expertise and prestige, but the spread of liberal education in Asia will also depend on change within the relatively rigid but prestigious public systems that dominate most education in the region. The curriculum should embrace the local culture but put it in conversation with broader trends both in Asia and the West. In order for these institutions to thrive, faculty and students must be free to teach, study, and conduct research on controversial subjects without political interference.

New York University Abu Dhabi was inaugurated in 2010 with the express aim of producing global citizens, adept at crossing ethnic, national, and religious borders and exemplifying a certain kind of cosmopolitan ethic. This mission was tightly bound with the brand of cosmopolitanism articulated by Anthony Appiah and reflected most clearly in a core curriculum that emphasized cross-cultural and global inquiry. The desire to escape national paradigms was equally apparent in the distinctive curriculum of the history program, which was organized according to ocean systems and global patterns of transnational connection. Studied within this historical context, cities offer particular cognitive gains for students and researchers. As nodes of both imperial power and cosmopolitan ideals, cities complicate simple narratives of cross-cultural empathy and translatability. Despite its global connections, the contemporary city is confronted in its materiality as a sequence of boundaries and barriers. Within NYUAD as an institution, however, resistance to the core curriculum has emerged from other disciplines. The desire of the natural and social sciences for a “global” that is “universal” fits uneasily with the dream of a cosmopolitanism that leads to self-reflexivity in regard to one’s own values. And students themselves wonder, who is the cosmopolitan here?

As an international faculty member at a liberal arts college in Seoul, teaching and “doing” comparative literature continues to unfold as a series of open-ended learning experiences. The most fundamental lesson, which seems both epistemological and ethical in nature, has been a pragmatic one: the importance of engaging the many institutional, pedagogic, and scholarly tensions arising in this emergent educational context. In the literature classroom, more specifically, this has taken the form of being attentive to the borders of text and context. Because most Korean students have been trained to read literature contextually, often in terms of preexisting national narratives, learning close literary reading can be a considerable challenge for them. Reading with borders enables students to register the epistemological frames that, heretofore, have limited, defined, and facilitated their knowledge. In crossing borders, we should strive to be as reflective and explicit as possible about what knowledge and relations these borders both preclude and enable. Such an awareness, gleaned in no small part from pedagogic practice, also informs my ongoing scholarly engagement with Korean modernism and the disciplinary tensions between area studies and comparative or world literature.

This article argues that US higher education knowledge production remains localized but gets disguised as global. Consequently, local ways of knowing get projected as universal and students’ worldviews are never complicated or expanded. It offers a pedagogical corrective to this trend and situates the world literature classroom as one of the primary locations that is capable of reimagining global knowledge production in U.S. universities. More specifically, the article explores the fluid movement between close and distant reading as well as the potential of Globally Networked Learning Environments (GLNE) as concrete ways of ensuring that global knowledge production is truly global in scope. Utilizing GNLEs in the world literature class provides a pedagogical model that enables critical engagement with the complexity of global issues through the study and discussion of global texts all while in a global environment. While US institutions seek to expand their global footprints, the educational experiences of students too often remain local. Ultimately, through theoretical and practical examples, the article argues that if students in the US academy are to have a truly global education, teachers and administrators must first start by reforming and transforming local sites of learning.

This article draws on experiences of international academic reorientation, specifically time spent in New Zealand, to reflect on the possibilities of bringing the personal and the theoretical together in relation to transnational study. It asks how experiences outside of U.S. national space inflect U.S-based transnational study and whether we can, and should, make academic time and space to acknowledge how personal experiences in particular locations shape what we notice and the questions that we ask in our critical work. More specifically, the essay relates experiences reading and re-reading Herman Melville’s 1855 novella Benito Cereno in different locations, in order to explore how the reorientation provoked by geographic displacement from U.S. national space can be involved in reading or thinking transnationally. Using Benito Cereno to focus specifically on how U.S.-based scholarship on the nineteenth-century Pacific might work to shift focus from U.S.-centric paradigms, the article argues, more generally, for increased attention to how the places we read from can inflect the questions we ask in our scholarship.

This article reflects on an interdisciplinary first-year course titled “Global America,” which I have co-taught at the University of Sydney. “Global America” examines how the forces of globalization have shaped the United States, but also how the U.S. projects itself within a global sphere. The article outlines the particular challenges and opportunities involved in teaching such a course within an Australian context, before suggesting new scholarly directions in the field of American studies. One key aim of the course was to reformulate the central issues of globalization as experiential rather than abstract phenomena. In this way, the course used the experience of teaching American texts from an external vantage point to challenge institutional as well as the geographical boundaries. In its traditional interdisciplinary framework, American studies invariably attempts to either export U.S. culture to the world or else to represent American liberalism as a universal value. The paper argues for a more materialist, transnational approach, which attempts to bring local narrative and global compass into a mutually enlightening dialogue. Ultimately, the article reveals how a transnational pedagogy of American studies can help creatively to transpose the boundaries of “Global America” and thus foster a productive state of intellectual defamiliarization.