The World of Globalization 5
interconnectivity creates opportunities for nations to learn from and sup-
port one another despite their differences. It can also help nations share
resources and power collectively across the world to tackle global and
local problems. With mutual support and understanding, we can leverage
this interconnectivity to create a world of peace, love, and prosperity. On
the other hand, globalization also has its dark side. War, nuclear weapon
competition, terrorism, drug dealing, human trafficking, religious hatred,
energy war, disease, and the polarization of wealth and power are also
global in scope, thus harming more people and nations than ever before.
In other words, globalization is a very complex phenomenon. Some
perceive globalization as a totalitarian process, where the national cul-
tures and identities yield to the most powerful nation’s cultures and ideol-
ogies and where the nations in the world become more and more similar
regarding values, ideologies, and identities. However, in the process of
globalization, local resistance cannot be ignored. Globalization and local-
ization are twins. Although the world is becoming more globalized, to a
large degree, it is also becoming more localized. In fact, a third condition
emerges: a hybridity of the global and the local. Also, these multiple
dimensions of globalization do not have a harmonious relationship. The
disjointed political, economic, cultural, human, and technological dimen-
sions of globalization add even more complexities to the world and to
human life ( Appadurai, 2006 , pp. 468–472).
All of these dimensions of globalization have had strong impacts on
higher education ( Altbach, 2016 ; Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2009 ),
specifically manifesting through an agenda of neoliberalism. Embracing
market value as the core ethics for all human actions, neoliberalism has
become a dominant thought and practice throughout much of the world
since 1970 or so ( Harvey, 2007 ). Due to neoliberalism’s core value of
market behavior, state intervention in the economy is minimized and finan-
cial support to higher education is reduced. As a result, higher education
has become more and more a commodity where commercialization,
privatization, and marketization are trending ( Altbach, Reisberg, &
Rumbley, 2010 ). These trends are turning universities into entrepreneurial
“McUniversities,” where universities all over the world compete with one
another ( Lorenz, 2006 , p. 12), resulting in the emerging academic capi-
talism ( Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004 ). These market-driven universities
are seeking standardization (i.e., of institutions, managers, academics,
and students), managerial power, efficiency, accountability, and rankings
( Lorenz, 2006 , pp. 13–14). In these “enterprise” universities, the faculty
and administrators can be called “entrepreneurs,” while the real entrepre-
neurs become the “stakeholders” of the “McUniversities” (p. 15). With
these challenges from globalization, universities are rapidly changing,
constantly being restructured, and adopting practices more commonly
found in businesses ( Currie, 1998 ). Globalization has brought into today’s
universities less government funding, increasing technoscience, a focus on