Thursday, 16 June 2011, 11:00 - 11:55 at UNU-IAS in Yokohama

Postdoctoral & PhD Fellows’ Final Presentations 2011

A Presentation by

Rasmus G. Bertelsen

JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-IAS
 

Dr. Rasmus Bertelsen giving his final presentation
Photo: Makiko Arima / UNU-IAS

Presentation description
Language: English

Higher education and its institutions have played a central role in economic development and state building, historically and currently. Throughout the world today, states are seeking to become knowledge economies, sometimes transitioning from natural resource dependent economies. Transnational flows of information, ideas, human talent and financial resources play a key part in both the development of knowledge economies and of higher education institutions. Universities are quintessential transnational knowledge actors, historically and currently moving information, ideas, people and money between societies. However, universities have been overlooked in International Relations literature on transnational relations in world politics. First the Global North and later the Global South has seen a great expansion of higher education, massification. In the Global South, this expansion has been driven by demographics of large young populations and previous investments in primary and secondary education producing many more secondary school graduates for higher education. However, the Global South has usually not been able to expand national higher education to match this demand, which has led to a great expansion of—often for-profit—private higher education in the Global South. This expansion of for-profit private higher education raises governance, quality assurance and funding issues. The expansion of higher education in the Global South, both non-profit and for-profit, has often had strong transnational elements for quality assurance and knowledge transfer purposes. This talk will present work on transnational universities in the Middle East, China and Japan and how these universities have contributed to transnational flows of information, ideas, talent and financial resources as well as state building and development of knowledge economies. The talk will focus on the importance of public policy and university governance for such contributions. It will show the transnational and academic success of original missionary universities in the Middle East and East Asia based on non-profit governance. The talk will analyze and discuss the public policy and governance challenges to recent developments of transnational universities in the Middle East and East Asia for contributions to knowledge economies. Based on this analysis and discussion, the talk will present policy lessons for using transnational higher education institutions for building knowledge economies in the Global South.

Speaker's Biography

During his JSPS-UNU research fellowship, Rasmus G. Bertelsen has pursued research on the role of private Western-associated universities in the Global South for creating transnational bridges for information, talent and financial resources with the Global North and for building knowledge societies and economies. This work has focused on both historical and current cases in the Middle East, China and Japan. He has a forthcoming paper in ‘Foreign Policy Analysis’ on ‘Private Universities Abroad, the State and Soft Power: the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo’ and together with Steffen Thybo Møller on ‘The Soft Power of American Missionary Universities in China and of their Legacies: St. John’s University, Yale-in-China and Yenching University’, Asia Research Centre,Copenhagen Business School. His work on current higher education policy and governance issues in the Middle East is under review at the ‘Revue des mondes musulman et de la Méditerranée’ and the Gulf Research Center. He has organized panels and presented this work in the International Studies Association annual meetings 2010 and 2011, at Meiji Gakuin University and the University of Quebec at Montreal. In parallel, he has a research interest in climate change and Arctic affairs, published in ‘Strategic Insights’, under review at ‘Polar Research’ and presented at UNU-IAS, International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, American Political Science Association, Meiji Gakuin University and Arctic Frontiers. Rasmus has contributed to organize talks at UNU-IAS on geothermal energy and sustainable transportation and the Japan Iceland Geothermal Forum.