Tor Halvorsen
Knowledge is often compared to light. When present, it travels the world and enlightens everyone. Or, to use a metaphor from economics:
new knowledge creates its own demand. However, both of these views mask the fact that the global knowledge society is very unequal.
Knowledge often carries the values, norms and political orientations of the context in which it emerges. As we develop it at universities, knowl-edge is a cultural product and, as such, it shapes our selves and our identities. Knowledge is never divorced from the context of its creation, nor can it travel without causing disturbance given the influences it carries. And yet, knowledge does seem to travel easily – it can connect people across cultures and create mutual understandings that tran-scend the contexts in which it is created.
During the 1990s, knowledge for nation-state development was countered by a discourse affirming that internationalisation and glo-balisation were a must for progress. The most internationalised universities were (and still are) ranked the most highly. This seemed to suggest that ‘global knowledge’ is more important for scholars than knowledge of their own national contexts. Accordingly, the amount of knowledge produced by networks of scholars across national and regional borders is growing fast and, as contemporary debates about the UN’s 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development show, knowledge about the globe and its challenges is expanding rapidly.
Scholarly networks are driven by a variety of interests and themes.
Many try to serve the global economy and are highly valued by univer-sity leaders who are concerned with reputation building and institutional
advancement. Competition for income from externally funded pro-grammes (and especially for those that will cover overhead costs) promotes links with an increasingly globalised economy. Meanwhile, the global economic centres remain hegemonic academic centres in terms of measures of quantity and quality, albeit that China as a relative newcomer has perhaps taken over as world leader in the science, tech-nology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In parallel with globalisation that promotes alliances between universities, states and the business sector, an underworld of alternative knowledges is also thriving; (see, for example, debates about the decolonisation of aca-demic curricula and research in Mamdani, this volume). The Norhed programme straddles these two realities; driven by ideas about academia as global public space, it has the potential to contribute to a linking of the global and the local in ways that make cultural variation a resource for all.
To some extent, the Norhed programme counters the dominant trend whereby donors aim to shape universities in the South. The so-called liberation of local economies (linked to the neoliberal politics promoted by multilateral organisations such as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD etc.) has strengthened the functional orientation of higher education. Countries and nation-states are named ‘knowledge economies’, and the role of higher education is to make these econo-mies as globally competitive as possible. Thus, the STEM disciplines are given priority in ways that detach them from the broader social, as well as academic and university context.
It has even been argued that the knowledge economy would be best served if higher education became a commodity within the global trad-ing system. The World Trade Organization’s agreement on Trade in Services promoted the notion that private universities should compete for students, professors and research projects in a global market for education services as regulated by the rules of ‘free trade’. As in other service sectors, where private providers emerged, public institutions had to undergo reform in order to compete with the private sector. The general idea is that global competition between universities should produce ‘better knowledge’. To succeed, institutions are encouraged to
specialise – and be the best at something – and to build ‘networks of strategic co-operation’ to promote themselves in the global rankings.
This idea of a competitive knowledge economy has changed univer-sities in low to middle-income countries (LMICs) far more than those in countries such as Norway for example. The World Bank, in particular, has driven the privatisation of what they call ‘tertiary education’. In many countries, universities have not only had to establish themselves as private businesses, but also resolved to focus on research that can earn them an income through patents and intellectual property rights.
For LMICs, the question might be, why grow research capacity at busi-ness schools if you can secure ‘value for money’ for students by importing and disseminating knowledge from a highly ranked school in one of the world’s economic centres. In many LMICs, private universi-ties now dominate (in terms of student numbers at least), and many of these are subsidiaries of universities in high-income countries.
Inevitably, this has raised the issue of decolonisation once more. In universities, this is primarily about how to acknowledge and transcend colonial influence, but also how to respond to the ways in which con-temporary globalisation undermines academic public space. In essence, globalisation has created new forms of colonisation that cross North – South divides just like the old forms continue to do.
The current focus on the globe as a common space for humanity does seem to have opened up alternatives to the discourse of ‘economic globalisation’, including academic policies and practices embedded in a knowledge commons. The UN’s Agenda 2030, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change both grew out of (often hidden) opposition to the consequences of the neoliberal push to liberate or ‘denationalise’ the global economy.
Today, universities in the South, located in areas where the global chal-lenges are most visible, have gained prominence as arenas for knowledge development that are the most relevant to all of us if we accept that humanity has transgressed the limits of our planet.
The Norhed programme builds on both the old idea that universities are important for independent development and the new insight that universities in the South must be strengthened so as to be able to give voice to the consequences of the global challenge we all face. Although
these consequences are increasing ‘risk’ for all beings on the planet, they are felt most forcefully in the South partly due to its colonial her-itage. That is, the challenges we face might have local consequences, but their causes are clearly global.
We tend to take for granted that academics use their freedom in the realm of research and teaching to secure justice and fairness for all citi-zens of the societies in which they work. However, as Roy Krøvel explains in Chapter 4, the nation-state project (as in becoming Tanzania or becoming Colombia) can be a very repressive project for those that fall outside of its hegemonic cultural sphere. Where universities form part of such nation-building projects, they normalise and justify force-ful adjustment to the orthodoxies of the ruling elites. Those left behind suffer the most from the development risks taken. And as the ruling elites align themselves within the global economy, repression becomes ever more visible, as is the case for indigenous people in Latin America.
To prevent this kind of mental and physical repression, cross-border networks of like-minded academics can create support for an alterna-tive vision of the university that works in opposition to state power and/or market forces.
The Norhed progamme takes for granted that academics can engage with one another across geographic and academic borders in support of those ‘left behind’. It accepts that none of us escape the cultural context within which our thinking develops but we can still communicate across the academic landscape about what we think is true and impor-tant, as well as what is common or public knowledge about injustice and inequality, fairness and sustainability. To promote knowledge as if it is a product in a global marketplace undermines this ability to create a common global public space, and thus also our chance to find solu-tions to the global challenges.
To follow are four chapters and an interview discussing knowledge issues in this interchange between the local and the global, the North and the South, the well-resourced and those ‘left behind’ by both the state and economic sectors.
In Chapter 1, Mahmood Mamdani takes us to two universities in East Africa, Makerere University and the University of Dar es Salaam.
With a broad historical and sociological approach, he raises the issue of
how universities can and should be arenas that help unite the two interdependent roles that every academic must play: that is, to be a scholar and a public intellectual. Mamdani explains that academics move between the global common pool of knowledge and the local context where knowledge is given meaning, and justified as relevant.
He argues that, while ‘standards of excellence’ may be set at the global level (in the hegemonic centres) in ways that make them seem detached from any context, relevance is constructed in interaction with the local (political) society. The way to bring these two dimensions of academic work (the scholar and the public intellectual) closer together is for aca-demics to draw clearer links between the global and the local. Perhaps this means that, as active public intellectuals, academics have to work harder to translate ‘excellence’ into relevance, and thus be the force that defines what relevance is?
In Chapter 2, the global health crisis related to antimicrobial resist-ance is discussed by a collective of 11 authors. The purpose of their collaboration was to build capacity in the health sector to manage this multifaceted issue. Although focused mainly on Malawi and Mozambique, this North–South–South partnership has local backing not only from the leadership of the partner institutions and the local health and education ministries, but is also feeding into global dis-course via links with the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa. This project is an excellent example of how problem-oriented knowledge seeking and a well-integrated university collaboration can use the policy/knowledge interface to link global discourse with a range of influential local actors. What this chapter makes clear is that solving a problem requires more than understanding. For action to follow knowledge, sound institutional and political groundwork is critical.
In Chapter 3, William Tayeebwa and Kristin Skare Orgeret discuss some of the most burning issues of our time for the profession of jour-nalism. New media is changing not only this profession, but also what constitutes ‘news’ and whose news to trust. This is both a global debate and an issue for every local media outlet and the space it occupies in society. What is the role of journalists in promoting a good society?
What ethics should guide their work when truth is relativised, freedom of speech is threatened, and social-media bots are working to control
what people see? In this chapter, the authors link journalism, as a pro-fession with ethical commitments to both truth-telling and interpretation, with Unesco’s role as a guardian of these professional values. In the context of Uganda and Nepal, they demonstrate the value of a capable and ethically sound journalistic profession in societal development. They also explain that transforming Unesco ideals into local practices is no easy task. That is, when global norms and ethics underpin one’s journalistic skills, encounters with local experiences, norms and values can place journalists’ professional integrity at stake.
In Chapter 4, Roy Krøvel shifts our attention to Latin America, an area relatively under-represented within the Norhed programme. This chapter raises crucial issues about how universities, culture and human representation are linked in ways that cannot be explained or subsumed under the nation-state umbrella as conceived in Europe or within Africa’s liberation movements. Rather, the cultural cleavages between the indigenous people and the descendants of the conquerors who have ruled these countries since their independence – in most cases for over 150 years – must be acknowledged as a conflict in which the state remains a tool of oppression. Where indigenous people are admitted to a national university, they have little option but to learn the institu-tionalised knowledge of the oppressor. Krøvel shows how important indigenous knowledge institutions are to the survival of the human collective and the biosphere. He argues that their survival is crucial to the wider world gaining respect for their cosmology, their knowledge, and their ability to share knowledge through a form of solidarity of learning that is alien to Western individualism. Indeed, a global indige-nous movement has emerged out of countless local struggles between states and indigenous organisations. In this process, two things have become clear. The first is the value of indigenous knowledge for the autonomy of indigenous groups. The second is how local movements (like some academic networks) have joined together to gain strength and, in the process, have learned to use ‘globalisation’ as a liberating force. In some cases, these transnational networks of solidarity have been effective in limiting state powers and enhancing respect for the territorial autonomy, knowledge and identity of indigenous groups.
The final chapter of this section is an interview with Edward Kirumira, a representative of Makerere University, which has long been considered a ‘donor darling’. The university was associated with 14 projects in Norhed’s first funding phase and, as principal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kirumira was at the centre of man-aging several of these. In the interview, he considers questions about what North–South and South–South collaboration have added to the university’s academic culture, whether and how these have created new kinds of knowledge, more independent scholars and/or a stronger institution. Kirumira also responds to the question of whether donors should support research institutions in countries where academic knowledge does not seem to be respected or trusted, and where govern-ments spend very little of their own resources on higher education. In relation to this, he responds to the idea of donors considering a tactical hiatus in relation to funding Makerere University in future.