Expansion and Internationalization of Higher Education in Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East – serie

The globalization of American style higher education is a field of study that is undergoing a significant phase with the current expansion of American branch campuses and curricula around the world. This volume contributes to the scholarship on the project of implementing and expanding U.S. influenced curricula in the Middle East and Asia. Many of the branch campus projects are only a few decades old making this a liminal moment in the translation and development of higher education worldwide that needs to be captured. What are the challenges, opportunities, and considerations faculty encounter in classrooms in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia? How do faculty translate western higher educational principles in new contexts? Projects like the multiversity international branch campuses of Education City, in Doha, Qatar, demonstrate the interest of foreign governments in western education and training. Other collaborations, like the Yale National University of Singapore College, demonstrate a nationalistic approach, where the nation’s premiere university maintains as high a profile as the invited collaborator. Such a wide range in mission and matriculation of students deserves further study. We open the conversation about the complex teaching and learning environment of American style education in a global context. Contributions include case studies, pedagogical interventions, and reflections. This volume features chapters by faculty teaching at international branch campuses (IBCs) or institutions using western curricula, such as the worldwide, privatized American University system

The expansion of Western education overseas has been both an economic success, if the numbers of American, European, and Australian universities setting up campuses in Asia and the Middle East is a measure -- and a source of consternation for academics concerned with norms of free inquiry and intellectual freedom. Faculty at Western campuses have resisted the new satellite campuses, fearing that colleagues on those campuses would be less free to teach and engage in intellectual inquiry, and that students could be denied the free inquiry normally associated with liberal arts education. Critics point to the denial of visas to academics wishing to carry out research on foreign campuses, the sudden termination of employment at schools in both the Middle East and Asia, or the last-minute cancellation of courses at those schools, as evidence that they were correctly suspicious of the possibility that liberal arts programs could exist in those regions. Supporters of the project have argued that opening up foreign campuses brings free inquiry to closed societies, improves educational opportunities for students who would otherwise be denied them, or, perhaps less frequently, that free inquiry will be no more pressured than in the United States or Western Europe. Normative Tensions examines the consequences not only of expansion overseas, but the increased opening of universities to foreign students.