On Monday, I described some of the big changes of the past 18 months; Tuesday I discussed the first big future trend (“Funding Challenges Forever”), Wednesday the second (“New Pedagogies, New Credentials”) and I want to finish today with what I call “The Return of Politics”.

Historically, universities have always been enmeshed in local politics.  Since the Napoleonic wars, they have been instruments of state power, created and funded to extend national – or at least territorial – wealth and influence.  Because of the decision in the West, particularly America, to keep scientific eminence located within universities even as it buttressed war efforts in WWII, they became crucial to national security (in many Eastern nations, this kind of science was removed to government laboratories).  But then the Cold War ended, and everything changed.  We were briefly in a world which was near-borderless, in which universities around the world were sharing knowledge, and which briefly in the mid-2000s were all united in proclaiming the main goal of universities should be to develop and expand knowledge through basic research (it is not a coincidence that global university league tables began in this period).

It seems a long time ago now.  COVID Is activating a lot of nationalist instincts in various countries.  Heck, here in Canada, the long-time free-trading Conservative Party spent much of the last election talking up the value of economic self-sufficiency.  This makes it harder for higher education institutions to indulge their more internationalist instincts.  You can see it in the way they make their pitches for public acceptance/support.  It’s all about working for “our” community, local service, etc.

It’s been intriguing to watch the way institutions adopt a new language for talking about benefit.  It’s not just the switch from talking about “excellence” (meaning research publications) to talking about “impact”.  It’s the fact that an ostensibly pro-globalist document – namely the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been pressed into service for this purpose.  Despite the internationalist origins and tone of the SDGs (which have been used as a basis for a university ranking by the THE), in fact the way these documents tend to be used is as a device for talking about local impact, about how institutions benefit their immediate communities.

And institutions have good reason to create stronger local support bases, because at the level of national politics, things have got nasty for universities.  In many places, universities have become The Enemy, mainly because of the way they host scholars who tell unwelcome stories, particularly in history and gender studies.  Think of the arguments about Critical Race Theory in the US, or the attack on universities teaching gender studies in Russia.  These attacks wouldn’t necessarily be such a problem if the opposition were solely from fringe parties unlikely to take power, like say the AfD in Germany or the Front Nationale in France: in fact even if it was restricted to dictators like Putin it would be understandable.  But when it is governing parties, it is a different matter.  Public universities are supposed to get along with the governments who fund them.  So when you get freely elected governments effectively declaring war on scientists (for instance in Mexico), or on a set of disciplines (Australia), or actively working to transfer control of universities out of public hands and into one controlled in perpetuity by a particular political party (Hungary), it’s incredibly difficult to fight back.  Even if universities are not learning to fight back, exactly, they are learning how to survive in a much more hostile political environment.

Now, on to all that add the China question.  Primarily what I mean is the return of Cold War politics, the gradual limiting of research co-operation and the possible loss of international students, a scenario we have seen play out across a number of Western countries over the past two years. (although: holy moly, did you see the U-15s pushback on the research safeguards issue this week? I don’t think I have seen any national association push back on national security measures quite so hard.)  But it goes beyond that.  It’s pretty clear that the People’s Republic is keeping tabs on students in foreign countries, and pro-Beijing groups are on campus with a view to containing the airing of views uncongenial to Beijing (mainly on Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang).  And there’s every chance it could be more aggressive on this: consider the shit-storm China decided to rain down on the NBA when one general manager decided to tweet a pro-Hong Kong sentiment, or its insistence that US airlines refer to Taiwan as China on their airplane maps.  There’s absolutely no reason China might not start applying similar pressure on universities in similar manners (indeed, it has been using maps in scientific journals to press its case on the nine-dash line maritime border for some time now).  For some idea of how this might proceed, I direct your attention to this quite brilliant twitter thread by Fordham Law School Professor Carl Minzner, which outlines exactly how China could go down the road of punishing institutions selectively.

As more and more students and academics cross borders, more and more politics cross borders with them.  For the last decade or so, institutions with large numbers of international students have tended to become more risk-conscious, but risk-conscious in terms of money – how exchange rates and fluctuations in enrolments might affect the institution’s prestige.  But it is rapidly becoming clear that risk is becoming broader than that.  It might well be getting to the point where, as Karin Fischer postulated in this excellent Chronicle article, for universities to begin constructing their own foreign policies.

All of which is to say is that at precisely the time where universities are having to deal with persistent funding challenges, they find themselves in the most challenging external environment since at least the end of the Soviet Union.  The temptation for Western universities to submit to political pressures to relieve financial ones is very real.  It must be resisted, for without distance from governments, the basic purpose of Western universities – to search for and speak the truth – cannot long remain.

But there will almost certainly be a cost.