World Class Universities

Sharon Rider is Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University, specializing on the cultural conditions for knowledge and rational agency. She was Vice Dean of the Faculty of Arts 2008-2014, and is currently Deputy Director of the Swedish Research Council-funded Engaging Vulnerability Program. Rider is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Swedish International Cooperation Agency, and a member of the Royal Society of Humanities. In 2015, she was the first recipient of the HumTank award for significant contribution to the humanities. Michael A. Peters, FRSNZ is Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, P.R. China and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA. He is editor-in-chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory and Beijing International Review of Education, and founding editor of six international journals. His interests are the intersections of philosophy, education and political economy and he has written over 100 books, including works on Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard. He was awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015. Mats Hyvönen is a Media and Communications scholar at Uppsala University and research coordinator for the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program. Specializing in media history, he is interested in the vulnerability of the public sphere and how media both feed and resist that vulnerability. Mats is currently conducting research on contemporary and historical links between journalism and academic scholarship.Tina Besley is a Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University, P.R. China. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK; of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, and the Association for Visual Pedagogies. Tina is deputy editor for Educational Philosophy and Theory, associate editor for the Beijing International Review of Education and is Project Manager for PESA Agora.  She is Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Past President and Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies.

• 1 Welcome to the World Class University: Introduction.- Part I What's in a Word?.- 2 Disorderly Identities: University rankings and the re-ordering of the academic mind.- 3 Becoming World Class: What it means and what it does.- 4 Three Notions of the Global.- Part II World-Class Around the World.- 5 The Kafkaesque Pursuit of 'World Class': Audit culture and the reputational arms race in academia.- 6 Complicit Reproductions in the Global South: Courting world class universities and global rankings.- 7 Realizing the World Class University: Litigation and the state.- 8 World Class at All Costs.- 9 The Paradox of the Global University.- Part III Playing the World-Class Numbers Game.- 10 World Class Universities, Rankings and the Global Space of International Students.- 11 What Counts as World Class? Global University Rankings and Shifts in Institutional Strategies.- 12 The State Role in Excellent University Policies in the Era of Globalization: The case of China.- Part IV The Future of World-Class Universities.- 13 The Marketingisation of Higher Education.- 14 Contesting the Neoliberal Discourse of the World Class University: 'Digital Socialism', Openness and Academic Publishing.- 15 Spaces of Life: Transgressions in Conceptualising the World Class University.- 16 Realising the World-Class University: An Ecological Approach.