A personal view on globalization. By Alan Hertz

In higher education, globalization can mean many things. Most obviously, perhaps, it can mean the movement of people for an educational purpose, and this is nothing new. Even in the Middle Ages, great European universities were magnets drawing scholars and would-be scholars across the continent. In the 17th and 18th centuries, aristocratic graduates of Oxford and Cambridge would complete their studies with the Grand Tour, a version of "Study Abroad" which often took several years, involved dozens of servants and coachmen and tutors, and created whole industries in Rome, Naples and other Mediterranean cities. More recently, the semester or year abroad has been a common feature of American undergraduate education, and European and American universities have been enormously enriched, culturally and financially, by large numbers of overseas students. The students and scholars involved in these processes have had access to a wider range of people, of educational resources, of educational experiences than would have been possible otherwise.

Globalization of higher education can also mean the standardization of educational provision – curricula, means of instruction, qualifications, specialized vocabularies – across national boundaries, and this too has a long history. In biological classification and mathematical notation, this standardization has emerged over at least 400 years. More recently, international standards of historical documentation, for example, have ensured common standards in research. Moreover, some degrees, even though they are offered all over the world, imply a course of study that is standardized to some extent in subject matter and in pedagogy – the MBA is a good example.

It is important to recognize that these two long-standing practices are not only different – they are apparently contradictory. Scholars who travel for education doubtless believe that the experience will be significantly different and more beneficial than any available closer to home. On the other hand, those who develop global standards attempt to ensure the opposite – that educational experiences have important common features wherever they occur.  In my opinion, institutions succeed in global education to the extent that they reconcile this apparent tension. If they can provide the variety and enrichment of several locations and the consistency of international standards, they will give students, if not the best of both worlds, the best of this one.

Recent developments have made exciting new approaches possible. They pose new challenges but also offer new curricular and pedagogical possibilities. One is the development of on-line and distance learning – this uses new technologies to take the standardization of provision much further than was ever possible before. Students of the UK's Open University, for example, can be studying anywhere on earth and, thanks to the internet, still receive substantially the same undergraduate and postgraduate study. The advantages are obvious. In contrast, the development of single-university multi-campus networks makes physical travel much easier for students than ever before – MBA students at my own institution, normally study in at least three locations.   

One last point – and to me this is perhaps the most important of all. A global education should involve a global learning community. Wherever the university is located, whether the students work on-line or not, it is global only to the extent that the student body, the faculty, the staff are diverse. And here is a simple test: a truly global institution is one where no single nationality or culture is dominant, where no group can feel that their cultural practices are normal, while others are exotic or weird or even foreign. In such a community, the varied background of the people involved becomes the most important learning resource. More interestingly, the boundary between students and faculty becomes blurred – since students are inevitably more knowledgeable about their own cultures than those who nominally teach them. Whether the subject is art or politics or finance, a university that passes my test provides the richest of all educational experiences to students and faculty alike. I feel greatly privileged to spend my working life in such an environment.

Alan Hertz has a BA in English from Yale, an MA in Victorian Studies from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in English from Cambridge. His research interests are in mid-Victorian British Culture, especially the cultural history of Victorian London. He has been teaching in American-curriculum institutions in London – a thrillingly global educational environment – for over 30 years. He is currently Associate Professor of Humanities at Hult International Business School