1. Higher education and globalization : an indissolubly technical and ethical association,
between competition and partnership.
First vision of globalization:
multipolarity as division of the world
Difference, synonymous with inequality of development,
feeding competition between the nations and the continents
Consequences for the universities:
- No world public culture
- Manipulative elites
- performance against ethics
**
Second vision of globalization:
an irreversible technological homogenization
The race for diplomas and patents anticipates
and precipitates the advent of a managerialized world
Consequences for the universities:
- A world public culture based on a general deculturation
- Cosmopolitans fearing neither God nor man (without faith and law)
- Knowledge as cognitive technology (capital)
**
Third vision of globalization:
the need for a cultural commun good
The promotion of a pluralist public culture becomes
an universal purpose, with the reciprocity as driving force
Consequences for the universities:
- A public culture as an answer to the challenges of globalization
- Treating the aptitudes (abilities) like vocations: the choice of creativity
- plurality as symbolic (linguistic) requirement for entrance into the world
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2. This table is a sketch, intended to bring out the principal mental representations which can be
used as background for the questions and the discussions.
First vision of globalization:
multipolarity as division of the world
Difference, synonymous with inequality of development,
feeding competition between the nations and the continents
Globalization is seen as a multipolar reality, marked by the emergence of new powers:
globalization is a reality without unity, in which State and each great area claims the right to
assert its identity and to choose the path of its prosperity; there is no common master, but only
actors everyone acting for himself.
As we enter a culture of knowledge, in the sense that we need to know to transform
knowledge into wealth, concurrence is for students and researchers the way for seeking to
take a leading position among the new elites of globalization, which are, in the words of the
economist Robert Reich, “manipulators of symbols", those who impose codes and modes,
being always ahead in innovations and inventions.
Globalization is for them a sum of opportunities to saiz and exploit: thus, the extraordinary
expansion of the power conquered by the symbolic innovation in the field of information,
finance, technology and spectacle gives rise to an invisible power, a soft power, not acting by
violence but only by suggestion and influence, creating accepted conditionings.
This supranational power is in the hands of those who are sufficiently cultured to become
"symbolic manipulators" whose inventions are immaterial (concepts in the field of art or
advertising methods, calculation methods, software ...) and they are lawyers, journalists,
managers, stars etc.
This new power of the knowledge economy, known for the pharaonical remunerations of the
most prominent VIP (very important persons) is actively promoted by individuals subjected
to global “concurrence”, post-national citizens unattached who devote all their energy to
contribute to the new performances of the "information age."
Consequences for the universities:
- No world public culture
- Manipulative elites
- performance against ethics
When the process of creation of wealth and well-being (welfare) is no longer national but
global, the scale becomes qualitative and does not only modify the activities, it also
transforms space, time and men. With the revolution which one says "post-industrial",
economic transformations lead in fact to the change in social relations.
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3. A mental revolution is necessary to understand that the assets, property, wealth are so much
dematerialized that the become in a way simple movement, that is mobility as well mental as
financial. Isnt the high technology anything else than permanent innovation, continuous
transformation of products, services and human relations?
The power of mobilization of the resources concentrates then on the most mobile of them,
which is knowledge. Knowledge becomes the main resource of power in the sense (that)
where cerebral energy becomes the rare element, the most required one, the most creative and
versatile immatarial matter.
Science consists in joining, modifying, transfering or recreating (acquired) knowledges -
which includes scientific and technical abilities as well as the representations (ethical and
esthetic) and the ideological stakes of a culture. They are attitudes, behaviors and
expectations.
In an international context dominated by uncertainty, it is necessary to change with the change
in order to convert the change into opportunities; the supreme duty, which imposes its finality
on all the others, is to assume what is unique in the human resources: the permanent
mobilization of oneself by oneself.
To know to be provisional, to make the transition between two novelties, to learn all alone, to
find in oneself the motives of engagements and creative resourcings, to face the
unpredictability with unforeseeable answers, here what means being “rare” resource as an
autotransformable resource, able to regenerate and recycle its own energy by making
professional life a permanent apprenticeship, a lifelong learning.
On this assumption, universities can conform with the cult (religion) of performance by
entering themselves a general concurrence at worldwide level: they are judged, evaluated,
classified and downgraded. It is necessary to be realistic: the need for elites exists and it
would be aberrant that universities do not aim at excellence. But is performance excellence?
One can make a distinction between the competition, in a sporting sense (which means that
one improves oneself in the rivalry with the other) and the “concurrence” in an economical
sense (which means that one gains by the destruction of the rival); it is the distinction which
opposes a self-critical liberalism to a wild liberalism.
The performance at all costs can be conter-productive: the kind of man who sets himself up as
elite inspires neither desire nor faith when he is a « hustler» ready to accept all
compromisings, a technician of the ability, a cynical man who expects from university the
training of a “mercenary” of knowledge.
Thus a new inequality of classes at planetary level becomes apparent: the sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman names “tourists” o n one side, those who travel to obtain success, fortune and the
recognition and “vagrants” of the other side, those who move only because they are forced
(unemployed, refugees, migrants): losers of globalization.
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4. Second vision of globalization:
an irreversible technological homogenization
The race for diplomas and patents anticipates
and precipitates the advent of a managerialized world
There is a second vision of globalization, whose the requisites are quite different: that which
considers globalization as a cultural homogenization which unavoidable and irreversible. The
decline of States and the elimination of bounders means the decline of languages and cultures
in favour of a single universal language of communication, itself denatured, English
modulated in various accents and reduced to the lowest "common" translator of all languages.
Homogenization also prevails thanks possession of know-how which are now indispensable:
the powerpoint, download, SMS etc. Technical knowledges which need neither soul nor
spirituality nor ethics: the basic knowledge that bring the students in globalization is a
knowledge that does not need culture. It is not necessary to share the values of the civilization
of Enlightenment, it is not even necessary to be modern to learn to master the power of all
powers: the technological efficiency. The languages of information, management, credit etc..
are knowledges that do not need culture: they are easy transmitted and imitated throughout the
world thanks their cultural anonymity. They are carried without the users having to share the
values that gave rise to the rationality the product of which they are: one can be in computers
without sharing the ideals of human rights.
A new universal democratic competence tends to prevail: the science of management as a
technique for managing all social reality. There is a management of artworks as there is a
management of non-profit-making associations, as there is a management of business and of
universities. Management would like be the art of discovering and revealing the talents to
make them creative forces, but globalization reduces it to a marketing communication.
One can not avoid thinking of the formula Thomas Stearns Eliot:
“Where is the life We have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we lost in information?1”
A cultural globalization reduced to a utilitarian conception of knowledge leads to a general
deculturation (cultural desintegration) of elites, which is both the condition and the effect of
the taking-part of young people in a race for diplomas from which they expect an international
recognition: must the label "Erasmus Mundus" be synonymous of a possession of a "cognitive
1
Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Rock, 1934.
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5. capital", which means the total involvement of knowledge in the productive dynamic:
“Knowledge is no longer a phenomon which is external to the economy. It becomes
endogenous.2”
Consequences for the universities:
- A world public culture based on a general deculturation
- Cosmopolitans fearing neither God nor man (without faith and law)
- Knowledge as cognitive technology (capital)
When globalization is identified with the emergence of a vast world civil society populated
with mobile people, without borders and included in a same generalized productivism, we
have the feeling of being definiftively entered a postmodern age of the culture, where
generally coincide cultural cosmopolitanism and economic globalization. Through the
globalized elites are organized exchanges, information and knowledge that broadcast the same
ways of thinking and deciding. Interest for economic development not only becomes essential
as a transnational factor of increased exchanges and communications, but it involves also the
necessity to internationalize, because of the need for commun regulations, a certain number of
social, legal and cultural adaptations.
The formation of an international public space creates an "abstract (and formal) solidarity"
between foreigners (in the words of the philosopher Habermas). Media, intellectuals, lawyers,
journalists, writers, academics become global players in search of common legal rules, but
which are general and outside the concrete life of the people. Each one can consider himself
as a "world citizen" provided he adopts a denationalized mind that no longer refers to a
community of language and destiny. The information transmitted by the mass media have
both deculturalising and acculturalising effects. In both cases, it is the question of informing
the public opinion in order to use (make) it as a caution for public decisions. But if the public
debates of experts do nothing but to rally individuals equally deculturated, globalization is a
cultural universal expropriating: it is on the condition of being without country and without
culture that world citizens should be recognized as abstract post-national people. Could
cultural globalization thus prevail on the consensual basis of a collectively accepted
deculturation?
One aspect of the deculturation concerns universities particularly: the gap between
professional success and culture is obviously favorable to the temptation of ignorance
(inculture). A word is used to designate the winners of this successful deculturation: they are
the " indifferent cosmopolitans" (elitist indifference), indifferent to the fate of each individual
country, including their own. Thus two extremes attitudes enter in concurrence at global level,
the "short-sighted nationalism", on one side, and the "indifferent cosmopolitan" on the other.
But an indifferent cosmopolitanism is not necessarily the best economic adviser, and on the
human plain, it destroys any solidarity.
2
Bernard Paulré, Vers un capitalisme cognitif. Entre mutations du travail et territoires,2001.
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6. Third vision of globalization:
the need for a cultural commun good
The promotion of a pluralist public culture becomes a universal purpose, with the
reciprocity as driving force
In the first and the second case, the universities do nothing but follow and accompany a
movement caused by economic globalization: they obey external constraints and adapt the
formation to the market needs. But another vision of the role of the university vis-à-vis the
globalization is possible and necessary: because globalization requires a specific and new
design of culture, a conception of culture as common good across the world. For the moment
when a fierce “concurrence” divides peoples and minds, we need a public culture able of
promoting the creativity of everyone in a climate of peace for all. It is the reason why we have
to recognize pluralism as a common good, as an universal good, as the motive of a cultural
together-living. Universities can then work for promoting such a public culture.
Pluralism is a common good so long as it is reciprocal: we must fight at once against the
cultural homogenization (a world of mass culture) and against the cultural tribalization (self-
culture in contempt or hatred of the other). There cannot be any intercultural dialogue only if
we recognize that, as beings of language, we do not exist just one beside the other, but one by
the other.
Consequences for universities:
- A public culture, as an answer to the challenges of globalization
- Treating the skills (abilities) like vocations: the choice of creativity
- Plurality as symbolic (linguistic) requirement for entrance into the world
To succeed in making pluralism a consensual and universal value, we must go beyond the
technical and utilitarian design of knowledge through (thanks) an ethical and communication
design. A culture is not an impervious reality, closed in itself, a closed and completed
language similar to a dead language and which would reproduce indefinitely its own past, it
can, on the contrary, enrich itself by that it let the others understand and interprete of itself
(by the understanding and interpretations of itself by others.) Whereas in a technical sense,
knowledge prevails as a of power of conditionning and dominating, in an ethical sense, it is
recognized as a power of inspiring. In a globalized world, a cultural value will be less a self-
assertion than the ability to create relationships and interactions with the others.
There is a specific academic responsibility in a globalized world: the responsibility for the
access of all to the symbolic power. The symbolic power is not simply the force to dominate
through the scientific, literary and artistic knowledge: it is a symbolic construction of reality,
it introduces individuals and peoples into the symbolic reality of the world. So an intercultural
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7. dialogue considers itself as something else than a power area : as an intention to produce
meaning, to create reasons for action, to legitimate collective decisions.
An ethical and communication design of the high education has important consequences on
the formation and on the application of knowledge.
-On formation : faith in formation is a resource as important as the technical content of the
formation ; we must treate talents as vocations and not as instruments; to treat a talent, a gift
or an aptitude (ability) as a vocation is to treat the student as a developing finality. To form
him is not to formate an aptitude, it is to give him on the contrary his full indeterminacy : the
capacity to choice for himself various goals and various possible achievements possible.
There is no creativity if talent is not the creative ability of new possibilities.
-On the application: knowledge can not be considered as a simple particular heritage, as the
ownership of intellectuals and as the pure mastery of abstract languages. It is not as a set of
specialized knowledges, but as a reserve of projects of sense whose validity can be recognized
and adopted because of their social value, because it is creative of a shared interest, because
culture is not no longer the property of a group, a class or a generation, but it can be
transmitted and mobilized by interaction and not by domination. To transform specialized
knowledges into public goods, worthy to belong to a public culture, it is to make the mutual
understanding of the actors the condition for a possible cultural solidarity and for their
common access to the same reality: the reality which is made with all the dangers we have to
know in order to face them. This is the very challenge of globalization, which must be
resolved as a common problem. The task of universities is to make this problem publicly
understandable.
Conclusion: The unequal access to symbolic power creates cultural fractures which increase
the divisions and the dangerosity of the world. In order to enter a universe which could be
intellectually habitable by all, it is important to remember that the communicability of
cultures begins with the translation: translation of the letter of the texts, and translation of
their spirit and symbolic resources. Access to culture is then less to withdraw to a particular
heritage than to make it a public property, to make it a source of inspiration, creation and
sharing.
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