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The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, publishing, and cross-border papers, is expanding rapidly and spreading to a growing number of countries. Strong national science systems have emerged outside Euro-America. Yet the multipolarization of economic capacity and scientific output plays out within a continuing Euro-American science world regulated by an inside/outside binary. Global science remains primarily Anglo-American in language, leading institutions, disciplinary and publishing regimes, agendas, and topics. Non-English and endogenous knowledges are excluded. The article critiques the world-systems theory interpretation of relations of power in science. The determinist center-periphery model fails to grasp the growth and pluralization of global science and its relation with national science systems. It normalizes the Eurocentrism it opposes, radically underestimating agency outside the "center" countries. The article argues for a more ontologically open theorization of global power in science, in terms of cultural hegemony, and for an ecology-of-knowledges approach.

The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism--influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life.

Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China's science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear.

This article discusses the University as an institution in three parts, moving from the abstract to the concrete. The first and longest section begins with the University as a social form or type: what it is, its inner motors, what holds it together; and its outer drivers, what holds it in society. The second section remarks on tendencies in the university in which we now live, the contemporary university. The third and concluding section discusses limits and problems of the University. It is called 'The insecurities of the University'.

This introduction to the 50th anniversary special issue of Higher Education recounts the history of the journal and reflects on the evolution and expansion of the journal and the field. Higher education studies is an object-oriented field that combines academic explanations with practical interventions. The journal takes an agnostic approach to disciplinary frameworks, theories, and methodologies and an eclectic and inclusive approach to topics. It began in 1972 with a preoccupation with the nature and implications of mass higher education systems, including internationally comparative analyses, and with a focus on policy and planning. Most of the earlier themes of research in the field have continued to the present, but as mass higher education systems have spread across the world, so has the journal's author list and editorial group. Higher education studies remain biased to the Anglophone and Euro-American worlds in their topics, theorizations, and author lists. Between 1996 and 2018, the USA and other English-speaking countries accounted for about 70% of authorship in the six journals with the highest impact factor. However, in Higher Education, that proportion was just over 45%, indicating some progress in the journal's efforts to pluralize, partly through the growth of papers from China. The introduction looks forward, anticipating growth in contributions from the global South, and further inquiry into the purposes of higher education and into its relations in social context. Finally, the introduction discusses the 50th anniversary papers that follow, contributed by twelve present and past editors of the journal., Author(s): Brendan Cantwell [sup.1] , Jenni Case [sup.2] , Simon Marginson [sup.3] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.17088.36, 0000 0001 2150 1785, Michigan State University, , East Lansing, MI, USA (2) [...]

The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism-influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life., Author(s): Simon Marginson [sup.1] [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.4991.5, 0000 0004 1936 8948, Department of Education, University of Oxford, , 15 Norham Gardens, OX2 6PY, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK (2) grid.1008.9, [...]

The article moves from a theorisation of the global scale in higher education and knowledge to a critical review of actual global imaginings and practices. Geo-cognitive scales such 'the global' or 'the national' are constituted by three elements: pre-given material structures, the imaginings and interpretations of agents, and the social practices of agents. Synchronous networks, time/space compression and travel have materially expanded the scope for relationality, including world-spanning systems such as science, cross-border connections, and global diffusion of ideas and models. Potentials for multi-scalar understanding and 'thinking through the world' have been enhanced. However, these imaginaries are not dominant. More prevalent are methodological globalism, in which the global displaces the national, or methodological nationalism, which blocks one-world potentials from view. In a Hobbesian global space without relational ethics, global higher education is ordered by an Anglo-American hegemony, manifest in neo-liberal economics, cultural and linguistic homogeneity, and White Supremacy in continuity with colonialism. Methodological globalism facilitates the neo-imperial claim to intervene anywhere, while methodological nationalism justifies claims to cultural superiority without obligation to engage with the other. However, no relations of power are fixed or wholly homogeneous and in global higher education there is continuing potential for multiple positionality, mutual respect and unity-in-diversity.

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledge flows and collegial collaboration and has partial autonomy. Four different interpretive frameworks (narratives) have evolved to explain global science: science as an expanding cross-border network; science as an arms race between competing nations; science as a global market of competing 'World-Class Universities'; and science as a centre-periphery hierarchy in which emerging countries are permanently constrained by Euro-American dominance. The paper reviews each narrative in relation to the literature, especially in scientometrics, and empirical tendencies in global science, tracked in secondary data derived from bibliometric collections. While each narrative contains at least a grain of truth, each also conflicts with the others and each is radically insufficient. A better explanation of the drivers of global science combines (1) flat open networked relations with (2) the inequalities and closures shaped by global hegemony, arbitrarily modified by (3) national governments and specific resources.

The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of 'public good' and 'public goods' and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures ('traditions'), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the critical function, higher education in civil society, and global "tianxia" and global common good. A key issue in symmetrical cross-cultural comparison is the position from which it is made; and as well as elucidating similarities and differences the paper develops what Sen calls a 'trans-positional' view based on integrating the two positional views. The two traditions are not closely aligned. However, aside for the Anglo-American public/private dualism in economics (which occludes collective outcomes), all ideas in both traditions can contribute to transpositional understanding of the individualised and collective outcomes of higher education.

In the last three decades, a networked global system has emerged in the natural-science-based disciplines, sustained by collegial epistemic relations in universities. Nationally ordered and funded science has expanded alongside the global science system. The common global pool of papers, defined by bibliometric collections, nevertheless excludes large components of knowledge. In the global system, four tendencies are apparent: (1) rapid growth of papers, (2) diversification of scientific capacity to many more countries, (3) expansion of networked international and national collaboration as measured by co-authorship, (4) growing multi-polarity of capacity, outputs and quality, with the rise of China and several middle-sized national systems outside the Euro-American bloc. The paper critiques the interpretation of global science dominant in scientometrics, in which positivist data analyses are applied to performative national comparisons. It argues for a historical-synthetic explanation of the global system that combines data and theorisation, and accounts for relations of power.

Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China's science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear., Author(s): Simon Marginson [sup.1] [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.4991.5, 0000 0004 1936 8948, Department of Education, University of Oxford, , 15 Norham Gardens, OX2 6PY, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK (2) grid.410682.9, [...]

During the pandemic in the United States and United Kingdom (unlike East Asia and parts of Europe), high individualisation and low social responsibility have been associated with an exceptional death toll, the undermining of higher education institutions in marketised systems, and continuing risks to the health of students and staff.

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines graduate outcomes. However, human capital theory fails the test of realism, due to weaknesses of method: use of a single theoretical lens and closed system modelling, inappropriate application of mathematical tools, and multi-variate analysis of interdependent variables. Human capital theory imposes a single linear pathway on the complex passage between heterogeneous education and work. It cannot explain how education augments productivity, or why salaries have become more unequal, or the role of status. These limitations are discussed with reference to research on social stratification, work, earnings and education.

The paper reviews the rapid development of higher education and science in China in the last forty years. It discusses the conditions and strategies of that development, including the ways that it embodies a distinctive Chinese approach to higher education. In particular, the paper reflects on the policies whereby China coordinated with globalization in higher education and science after 1978, in building national capacity and global influence. Scale, nation-state policy goals and accelerated investment on their own are necessary but not sufficient (otherwise Saudi Arabia's research universities would be stronger than they are). The effective national/global synergy developed by China, made possible by the international openness and part-devolution to science communities that was implemented in the Deng Xiaoping era, has been crucial in the rapid rise of China's universities and science. This national/global synergy--and its potentials, tensions and limits--in turn has determined the nature of the achievement and will shape its future evolution.

In discussing the functions of education Gert Biesta distinguishes qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In subjectification higher education facilitates the evolution of students as distinctive self-determining persons. This paper foregrounds and discusses 'student self-formation', a paradigm of subjectification with fecund potentials for empirical inquiry. Self-formation emphasises reflexive agency, whereby students consciously monitor and develop themselves on an ongoing basis. The paper draws especially on Margaret Archer's discussion of reflexive agency. It argues that the core features of self-formation that are specific to higher education are engagement in disciplinary knowledge, and in activities and relations beyond the classroom that are part of student life. Student self-formation is both a norm to be achieved, with lifelong learning potentials, and a descriptor of existing practices. By its nature self-formation is never complete and its incidence is uneven among students, with some of them scarcely experiencing it. Conditions and potentials for reflexive self-formation vary on the basis of factors including the degree of immersion in higher education, the scope for agentic initiative, personal resources and support, institutional and pedagogic resources and arrangements, and existential challenges (e.g. transitions between countries and cultures) that can trigger accelerated self-reflection and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or 'all under heaven', the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Both strands have been influential through Chinese history. In the last twenty years discussion of tianxia has revived, especially through Zhao Tingyang, stimulated by globalisation and the need for practical relations beyond the nation state. This paper proposes one version of tianxia as a heuristic for understanding, rethinking and remaking ethical relations in worldwide higher education. It reviews different understandings of tianxia in China, identifies a world-centred (rather than China-centred) tianxia , and discusses the potentials of tianxia in higher education. Tianxia is appropriate to world higher education because of its spatiality and its ethical commitment to universal benefit in diverse settings on the basis of mutual respect. The article suggests four clusters of relational values that could constitute a tianxia order in higher education, and compares tianxia to existing practices of globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]