Expanding global higher education policy ontology: the challenge of postcolonial ideas of the university to international organisational higher education policy ideas
Tessa DeLaquilPurpose
Treating the World Bank and UNESCO as powerful international organisations in the global governance of higher education, I challenge the universalisation of IO policy ideas in framing what the university is, is for, and ought to be, and the resulting “elite capture” of what the university can and should be (Táíwò, 2022) in postcolonial contexts, through the analysis of postcolonial ideas of the university.
Design/methodology/approach
The theoretical foundation for this study is the conceptualisation of “policy ontology” from Gibson and Bengtsen (2024). With this, I create space for alternative ways of enacting what the university is in social and political reality, drawing on Tagore's (1927) An Eastern University and Du Bois' (1933) A Negro College. These postcolonial ideas of the university are contrasted with the discursive construction of the university in UNESCO and World Bank policy documents.
Findings
Considering postcolonial conceptualisations of the human person and society, analysis shows that UNESCO and the World Bank higher education policy tend to hold economic/developmental ideas of the university within a closed policy ontology. Postcolonial ideas of the university tend to foreground human dignity as the core purpose of the university, influencing teaching and research functions.
Originality/value
What this kind of analysis makes explicit is how policy ideas of the university operate within a closed policy ontology, at the expense of alternative ways of seeing what higher education is and is for, as offered by postcolonial theorists.