definition for: #IsASHEGlobal

ARE OUR LIVES AND INSTITUTIONS MORE GLOBALLY ENGAGED THAN OUR SCHOLARSHIP? Our symposium operates from the premise that one cannot fully understand higher education in any setting without understanding comparative and intersecting global, local, and national dimensions of higher education systems, institutions, and flows. This year is the 20th anniversary of the establishment of ASHE?s International Pre-conference. It is a time when ?internationalization? and ?globalization? are a common part of practitioners? and scholars? vocabularies. It is a time when our professional and personal lives very often involve intersections across various international boundaries. Yet our lives and our institutions in higher education are often more international than our scholarship and our instruction. Our symposium offers a possibility to more fully incorporate the complex and cross-boundaried character of our lives into our research, teaching and service. It is the 30th anniversary of Burton Clark?s seminal book, The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective (1983), which was translated into Russian this year, as a testimony to its ongoing significance. Clark?s triangle heuristic, which categorizes higher education systems into a balance between state, markets, and the academy, both expresses and shapes the constructs that define much work on higher education professions, organizations, and systems. Each of these constructs frames the questions we pose, the scholarship we conduct, and the curricula we teach about faculty, universities, and state policy. Indeed, Clark?s conceptualization of academic organization (which is embedded in the full body of his work) helps define our work not just in comparative higher education but also in the study of professors, colleges, and state policy in the U.S. and in other national contexts. The academic profession is seen as distinct from ?the state? and ?the market.? The state is conceptualized in nationally coherent terms, and as distinct from ?the market.? And the market itself is defined in nationally contained and distinctive ways. Clark?s work has had remarkable yield historically. Yet the conceptualizations of the triangle heuristic can also act as blinders. They can close the field off from understanding important dimensions of academic professions, organizations, and systems, within and beyond national boundaries. The panelists in the symposium will articulate four different ?takes? on the issues at hand. They will be offering heuristics that go beyond the boundaries of nation-based conceptions of students and diversity, of organizations, and of national systems. The analytical hooks that we will offer by way of advancing the field are neoracism (Lee and Rice, 2007), regional hubs and regional zones (Marginson, 2007), methodological nationalism (Shahjahan and Kezar 2013), academic capitalism (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004), and glonocal agency (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002). In each case, panelists will be commenting on the latest examples and breaking iterations of this conceptual and empirical work. At one and the same time, we are essentially paying homage to the work of Clark, as well as of others who have framed the cross national study of higher education, and we are providing other conceptualizations embedded in work that we believe can inform higher education scholarship more broadly. In the International Track of the main 2013 conference, we invite you to consider and address these and other issues, in the Symposium: Domestic Insights and Comparative Heuristics: From Clark?s Triangle to New Heuristics (Thursday, 14 November at 2:30, Regency F). Our Symposium has been designed to foster a discussion grounded in the conceptual heuristics, substantive focal points, empirical foci and methodological thinking needed to test our basic assumptions about international and comparative higher education research around the world. In this Symposium, scholars based inside and outside North America ? online and in the room ? will squarely address the domestic relevance of international scholarship. Our Symposium discussion has begun and can be can be found here on FaceBook, and in our ongoing dialog within #ASHE2013 and #IsASHEGlobal