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Hello. Thank you for joining us. We are proud to welcome you to our special series, Quality Education, brought to you by Bro. Where we talk about improving our current education systems for the radically changing 21st century global society.
I'm your host, Lee Jungraco. Today I'm speaking with Bud Hall. He's at the University of Victoria in Canada at the Center for Global Studies and a UNESCO Co-Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education. And I'm speaking with Dr.
Rajesh Tandon, a UNESCO Co-Chair and Founder and President of Participary Research in Asia, a global research and training center based in New Delhi, India. Their book is socially responsible higher education, international perspectives, and knowledge democracy. Thank you to you both for coming here today. Thank you very much for inviting us.
We're delighted to be able to interact, or at least to share, some of the viewpoints and the findings from our book with listeners in the Britain-Brizz Humanities series. Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. You begin by looking at social responsibility as attention in higher education in three Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. How have each of those countries enabled social inclusion in higher education, and what are the results so far?
The history in Latin America, when they think about the concept of social responsibility, the kind of institutional response in Latin America goes back almost 30 years to an early declaration that was promulgated in Montevideo, in Uruguay, around the concept of university extension. And university extension, the structures of university extension were agreed upon by the public universities in Latin America all those many years ago. And they were put into place for a number of reasons, some of which were to provide learning opportunities for professionals, continuing professional education. Some was lifelong learning, so people that different ages could acquire higher education.
But a lot of it was in order to meet, to increase social inclusion, to try to find ways so that higher education could be made available to low income people who were living in the favelas and the barrios of the big cities in those countries. The country that probably has moved the furthest in this direction is Argentina. Argentina, all of the universities, public and private, have very strong, what they call service learning programs, whereby students, nearly all of the students, are provided with opportunities for engagement in community, kind of social change or community development projects. And over the years, they have a very strong, kind of civil society organization which supports that.
And in general, they have been leaders in Latin America. Uruguay has also followed suit and kind of a middle road. And so you will find in the Uruguay and universities, you'll find strong extension departments, a lot of community outreach activities and a lot of service learning. Brazil, although inspired by the great Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Ferri, has had ups and downs during the early years of the Lula presidency, their extension units were really fantastic, and going and doing lots of things.
But more recent years with a change in government, the very idea of social inclusion is suspect and a much narrower concept. So the universities in Latin America are influenced a lot in what they can do by the particular political regime, which is in power. And I'm also curious, you talk about this inherent economic inequality in those countries and that contributes to that tension there. But one could argue, you're seeing greater economic inequality in places like the United States as well.
So I'm just wondering how that plays out is that tension unique to these Latin American countries? No, not at all. In fact, you might even argue that the gap between the rich and the poor is larger in the wealthier countries. Latin America, although there are extremes of accumulation of wealth in Latin America, but nowhere near the degree of accumulation in some of the wealthier countries, the UK or the United States or even to some degree, Canada.
And the growth over the last 30 or 40 years in a place like the US, where the graduation rate, if you are black in the United States, the graduation rate in secondary schools would be in the realm of 30 or 40%. And so you can imagine how many, what percentage of that age group is going on to university. And so there are the same concern with inclusion is very much something that's being thought about and some places and some universities are doing quite a lot. But probably we would argue that this kind of that, among the various kind of tensions in the world, the gaps between the rich and the poor in the rich countries and between rich and poor countries is exacerbated sometimes by higher education and sometimes higher education is finding a way to help to bridge those gaps.
And so on that point of inclusion, are there examples of inclusion from other regions? Yes, we have in our book several case studies which illustrate how inclusion is being promoted in other countries and regions. Let me give you an example of Qatar, the university there five years ago, decided to change the language of instruction into Arabic. They were earlier teaching in English and other than engineering all disciplines and degree programs shifted to Arabic.
And the reason they changed was because they were realizing that semi-urban populations predominantly using Arabic language in high school were not able to participate in post-secondary education. And already they are showing very positive impact in registration, enrollment, in completion of degrees. And in fact, a better response from the industry as they joined their first jobs. Another example is from Kazakhstan where the instruction in local Kazakh language has improved enrollment and opened up post-secondary education possibilities for young people which was earlier not available.
So language of instruction is not just language, it is also concepts, contextual meanings of concepts, all these get elaborated and improve inclusion. We have to remember that for first generation, higher education students whose parents did not go to college or university, you know, getting adjusted to such institutional spaces for learning requires an ecosystem approach. And affirmative action alone is not enough though it helps. So you can have reservations as is being done in India for indigenous people and shadulkas communities, but they come into the system and if they face language difficulties, then it begins to make learning more difficult.
So these examples suggest that there are multiple roots and pathways to inclusion and one of which is to support students and another is to look at the curriculum and pedagogy because community engaged learning motivates students and if that happens in a language that they are familiar with that is used in everyday life that certainly keeps them engaged in learning while they are studying in higher education institutions. That's an interesting point you make too about language and concepts because there are some concepts that cannot be translated into another language. I know from speaking a little bit of French that there are some words and phrases like that you see Tae for example, that illustrate something not only about the French language, but also about its history and their way of thinking. So I think that's a very interesting point about changing a language and changing a way of thinking.
Yeah, because you see only three European languages which have dominated higher education system, English, French and Spanish. Even in many countries of Latin America, several sections of the population don't speak either of those, but they don't speak Spanish at them other time. They have different ways of expressing themselves in everyday life and if your higher education does not prepare you to work in everyday life, then it promotes migration, it shifts people away from their context and all highly skilled human capital formation does not serve the society where they get educated. So it's important to keep this in mind as we are discovering in our book.
So kind of on that point of talking about non-Western views in education, you posed this question, why are our rankings so white? Which I think is just fascinating. Can you dig into what's behind the metrics that are used for university rankings and why they skew toward Western institutions? Yeah, let me tackle that one.
There are three chapters in the book which talk about, you know, that raise the question, the one which you just mentioned would provocatively raises the question about the rankings are so white and there's two other chapters that look at metrics from a number of the perspective of a number of countries. So what you have with the major ranking systems, the Times Higher Education, Shanghai and a couple of others, they're quite similar in terms of what do they count? So what do you get points for? Well, you get points for the number of Nobel Prize winners that you have in your university.
What else do you get points for? You get points for publishing in what they call A-list journals that publish in English and which are published in European countries, in England or in Europe or in North America. What else do they count? They count research funding.
So you have national research councils which support academic research in all of the major European countries, but with the exception of South Africa, there's not a single country in Africa that has research funding for their scholars. The African scholars are dependent on partnerships with the North. And lastly, the domination of the English language. If you come from a country where you're a native English speaker, it's a lot easier to master academic discourse than if you're coming from a country where you're probably speaking one tongue at home, another language nationally, and then you have to come into the international arena with English as a third choice.
And so competing with Oxford trained or MIT or Stanford or those kinds of universities is very difficult. So when you wrap it all up, what you end up with, if you look at any of these ranking lists, you'll find basically Europe, England's got a few, the United States, Asia is beginning to have a few, particularly China, but it's out of the top 500, probably 350 are coming from countries that are predominantly white. And predominantly, I would say, there's a preponderance of male scholarships represented in there as well. So I'm curious, in recent years, have you seen any kind of break in that, any institutions that have come forth from say India or China or kind of a non-Western area?
Or given the fact that the basis for this and the gold standard is essentially English or American, whatever you would like to qualify it as. Are we just kind of on this inexorable march toward Western dominance in higher ed? Well, I think it's going to collapse. Pandemic has done a great job.
The primary reason these rankings work is for a student recruitment, international student recruitment and pandemic disrupted that heavily. So what do parents look for when they are looking to send their kids in another country paying $100,000, $100,000 for their undergrad education? They look for these rankings. Now they can't send anybody and nobody's going to give $100,000 for online education, even if it is Harvard.
So already this is being disrupted. There are examples in the book in a chapter where in Francophone, Africa, they have started creating a network of publishing instruments in local language, which is a combination of French, but also with local dialects and flavors. And similar trends are beginning to emerge. And I think we will find very soon that this shift will begin to happen.
The problem lies not so much within the country as it lies in those who are internationally advising countries on higher education structures and on systems. So what is not being measured is what is your contribution in the locality where you are based to climate change and achievement of SDGs? And I can assure you Harvard will fail, just as Oxford will fail. There is more homelessness in and around Harvard campus than anywhere else in US.
So they will fail, but that is not being measured. And that is what is going to be measured in post-pandemic era with climate change and disruption to matrix mania. But was there something you also wanted to add on that point? No, I was saying that the changes when you see, for example, Chinese University moving up the rankings change or university in another majority world country.
What they've been successful in is they've been successful in imitating the performance in Western universities. That means, for example, let me give you an example from Malaysia, the Ministry of Higher Education in Malaysia has told its scholars that they are, as a priority, they should publish in English language international journals. Why should they do that? Because Malaysia would like to see their universities rank higher in a global ranking game.
But what that does is it undercuts a whole large number of Bahasa, mainly Malaysian language journals, which have been producing terrific stuff for years in philosophy and history and science and so forth in their own national language. But if the best among them are drawn away or shoved away or encouraged to publish only in British journals or American journals or Dutch journals, which is published in English, you can see it's going to weaken the scientific language capacity of the national language. And so your heart almost drops when you see university and majority world country that lives in another language, rising up the food chain. That means that they are, as Rajesh said, they are increasingly out of touch, not only with the neighborhood where they're located, but with the polity of the country where they exist.
And Dr. Tandon, I just wanted to note that that is a very interesting point. You made about how the pandemic has shifted things and higher ed. I mean, we've seen it disrupt so many different areas.
And I think it'll be interesting to see how it could move the needle on this as well. I want to talk about radicalization of students, which is of course sometimes a touchy topic. When it comes to preventing the radicalization of students, how do universities ensure that they're not targeting specific ethnic, religious and cultural groups in the process? I want to let me tell you what happened to me when I went to university.
I went from a reasonably very local high school with my mother, Tankenli, to a nationally important Indian Institute of Technology for study of engineers, with professors drawn from America, and UK and other countries. I suddenly met kids from all over the countries. Many of whom did not know my mother, but in those days, we were debating politics. We were debating student union movement, trade union movement.
We used to have on campus discussions like power flows from the barrel of the guns. So in a way, campuses provide space for critical reflection, open thinking, freedom of expression and debate. And this has been so on university campuses around the world. The problem is not about radicalization per se.
The problem is where that radicalization tends to target an ethnic or religious community, as you mentioned. That kind of approach on campuses is triggered, not by students. It's triggered by the larger political system, which tends to feed into this kind of ethnocentric critical conversation. Little do these people realize that way before universities came into being in Europe, the most progressive higher education institutions existed in the Islamic world, between the 9th and 13th century, and even before they existed in Indian Peninsula, between 3rd BC to 11th AD.
So those campuses were also radicalizing because they exposed you to different ideas, different people, different worldviews, different cultures. But they were shared and discussed and debated in a spirit of cohabitation, respect for diversity, and listening to plural voices. Never producing, targeting, or creating stigmas on different others. So what we are witnessing in small pockets of higher education is not unique to the campus.
It is a response to the larger political ecosystem, which feeds including media these days. So I think university campuses do create opportunities for learning beyond your own immediate experience, and that is the best way you can learn face-to-face, not online. So to your earlier point then about how the pandemic has disrupted things, of course so much of university learning has moved online, do you feel that that will actually hurt that traditional sense of debate that's supposed to happen on a physical campus? Do you feel that students might become more radicalized if they are learning mostly online and they're remote?
Well, if you only live in digital world, you're bound to get disconnected from the real world. And it is important therefore that we create hybrid models of learning. I don't think online learning forever is sustainable, is feasible, and is worth it. So this may be a short-term problem.
University campuses can return to opportunities for that kind of an interaction. And without that interaction, you might as well stay inside the computer as opposed to in a society. Dr. Rajesh Tandon and Bud Hall, they are the editors of socially responsible, higher education, international perspectives on knowledge democracy.
Thank you, again to you both. Thank you very much, Lee. Thank you. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast.
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