Читать книгу Universities and Civilizations - Franck Leprevost - Страница 17

As a first approach, let us embrace Samuel Huntington’s reading of the world. However, before looking at the role that universities could play in this reading grid, let us also make the nuance that Régis Debray (Debray 2017, especially pp. 20–27) makes between civilization and culture, which are too often mistaken for one another⁸, our own. Let us give him the floor:

Just as a mother tongue radiates in regional dialects, a civilization de-compartmentalizes the culture from which it comes […]. A culture builds places, a civilization builds roads. It assumes and requires a foreign policy. A civilization acts, it is offensive. A culture reacts, it is defensive. There is no civilization that does not take root in a culture, but a culture does not become a civilization without a fleet and an ambition, a great dream and a mobile force. […] ‘Imperial civilizations’ is a redundancy. Just as an empire is multi-ethnic, a civilization, in the prime of life, needs all the talents available and must control several cultures as enclaves, outposts or relays […]. (Debray 2017, pp. 23–24)

Let us spend a little more time on Debray’s analysis⁹, that “an economy alone has never made a civilization” (Op. cit., p. 26) and that “it is an economist’s myopia to measure the vitality of a civilization by the yardstick of its industry or its currency” (op. cit., p. 27). Relying on the redundancy of the expression “imperial civilizations”, Debray ultimately asserts that:

In short, supremacy is established when the imprint survives the grip, and the grip survives the empire. […] A civilization has won when the empire from which it proceeds no longer needs to be imperialist to make its mark. (Debray 2017, p. 27)

Debray’s nuance between civilization and culture¹⁰, and the irreducibility of the latter to a (myopic) purely economic vision of the world, reinforce the relevance of the question that is at the origin of the present reflection. Universities play a pivotal role in the matters of civilization, given their importance in an analysis in terms of culture and the development of armament capacity. They are a place where the transmission of universal and cultural knowledge transpires; they can be used to defend a given culture, or to promote it; they can be the instruments of “power” that can certainly remain “soft”, but can also become “hard” and contribute to a cultural hegemony that Gramsci would not have denied. According to Huntington:

The balance of power between civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures. (Huntington 1996, p. 20)

Are some of the changes Huntington observes also measurable, at least in part, with respect to the world’s top universities? Is the evolution of these university rankings an indicator of the intellectual vitality of these civilizations?

While shedding light on the global landscape of higher education and research in terms of civilizations may, at least in part, be justified by the above arguments, we choose to confine this light to the leading universities, in other words, to those that contribute to a significant production¹¹ of knowledge in addition to the transmission of that knowledge. We are, of course, fully aware that the reality of the global higher education landscape is much more complex. Indeed, other institutions, by far the most numerous – more than 90% – transmit knowledge without producing it.

However, the latter are intent on responding to a challenge whose great complexity is already increasing day by day: mass education.

The number of students on earth is projected to double by 2025, compared to 2012 (see (Bjarnason et al. 2009) and (Goddard 2012); see (Maslen 2012) for a summary of the latter), to reach 262 million. Almost all of this growth will be outside Western civilization, with more than half coming from China and India (Altbach 2009).

In addition, there are calls¹² within countries or groups of countries to achieve high minimum quotas (generally above 40%) within an age group, with a higher education degree or with an equivalent level of education.

Lastly, if the countries where this growth is taking place fail to provide adequate university infrastructure at the necessary pace, it is estimated that by 2025, about 8 million students (three times as many as in 2012, and twice as many as in 2017) will go abroad¹³ for their education (see (Bhandari 2009) cited in (Goddard 2012)).

These figures speak for themselves: demographic pressure¹⁴makes these institutions crucial and indispensable in this generation of educated and self-reliant citizens, and therefore¹⁵, in the development of a stable and productive middle class, at least that is their purpose. The main challenge for higher education institutions is, of course, the quality of education, pedagogical innovations in this field, and their capacity to change the lives of learners¹⁶.

This task is extremely difficult and also largely ignored by current ranking systems¹⁷. It is therefore with a touch of bad conscience¹⁸, and at the cost of numerous cross-references to the (numbered) notes grouped together in the Notes, Insertions and Tangents section of this study (a description of the content of each of the sections of this study is given below), that we have left more than 90% of universities out of this reflection, in order to concentrate on the small portion of those with significant research activity, and among them, the even smaller portion of universities in the international rankings. For convenience, we refer to the latter indiscriminately as “leading edge” or “elite” universities. Let there be no mistake: the author thinks, says and constantly repeats that the strategy of universities should not be based on international rankings. He is not a blissful admirer of the results of these rankings. However, it is clear that these international rankings have largely penetrated the landscape of higher education and research since 2003, and the first so-called Shanghai ranking, followed by about thirty others, including those of QS-THE (before these two organizations split and gave birth to two separate rankings) and more recently, the Leiden ranking¹⁹. We therefore try to take advantage of the phenomena that these rankings may reflect, regardless of how the experts feel about them²⁰.

With the three limits set – acceptance of Samuel Huntington’s vision of the world in terms of civilizations and leading countries, Régis Debray’s refinements and nuances on the fact that a civilization is more than a culture and cannot simply be reduced to an economy, and a focus on the best universities in the world as rendered by international rankings – our approach is articulated in the form of a triptych, each part of which deals, in essence, with a question in a nutshell.