Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

The question these observations raise is the extent to which the reform processes simply reinforce an international hierarchy and help to reshape this along the lines of a global capital flow. In this respect, Olssen and Peters argued that the prospect of higher education serving a useful social purpose is increasingly circumscribed by the operations of the market and the extent to which individual nations embrace a ‘neoliberal ethic’ (2005, 314–324). This claim hinges upon the idea that a significant material change that ‘underpins neoliberalism is the rise in the importance of knowledge as capital’, a change that more than any other propels ‘the neoliberal project of globalisation’ (Olssen and Peters 2005, 330).

This raises the question of just how fundamental the commoditisation of knowledge is to reshaping citizenship and which key factors mediate global impacts within individual nations. Moreover, these ideas clash head on with a new school of thought that argues that globalisation of higher education will forge a new paradigm in which the university will become the ‘cradle for global civil society’ (King 2004, 65–66), combining the traditional function of the university with the new demands of the twentieth century (Denman 2005). In this way, the university is seen to continue its vital role as the central location for ‘ideal speech’, bringing together scientific research and scholarship (Habermas 1981; Habermas 1989, 107) in ways that can inform a ‘technological citizenship’ (Delanty 2001, 9). All of this may provide a newly revised purpose and rationale for the university, though it is difficult to see, as yet, how the ‘public sphere’ (through which this new global citizenship might be expressed) will manifest on the global stage.

These debates point to core problems relating to conflicting notions across, but especially between, political disciplines, about conceptions of the nation state and how these are changing due to the impacts of globalism. Moreover, how do these changes relate to the role and purpose of higher knowledge in relation to citizenship, national identity, and political power? What is currently ‘the idea’ of the university? How is it possible to define the purpose of ‘higher learning’ in the light of globalism?