Questing Excellence in Academia
A discussion with Knut H. Sørensen and Sharon Traweek about their recently published open-access book, Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities (London: Routledge, 2022).
*NOTE SPECIAL DATE AND TIME*
Click on the book title to access a description of the book, its table of contents, and a link to free digital copy of the book.
From the authors to guide our discussion:
To build our argument about variations in global higher education we juxtapose changes at two public universities over the last 75 years: NTNU and UC/UCLA, both prominent and serving wealthy regions. We claim that universities are disciplined by multiple forces to generate both public and private goods. We focus on the changing cultural, economic, material, political, and social techniques and technologies of both the disciplining and generative processes at NTNU and UCLA, as well as the different strategies those two universities have developed for adapting to and avoiding the changing demands imposed upon them.
We show that there is no singular ‘neo-liberal university’ but a patterned array of strategic engagements with differently configured local and global ecologies. Among other positions we argue that the current governing infrastructures are unsustainable; we also claim that teaching about our research is the primary way that universities engage with innovations in global political economies. We present 4 concepts to convey our interpretative strategies: domesticating, co-morphing, meshworking, and faultlines. Some key topics in our interpretation are sustainability, funding, governance, rankings, revenue streams, reputations, factions, and the required 'subject formation' of students, faculty, and administrators.
Tersely, we suggest reading pages 5-9, 13-22, 26-35, note the keywords listed on pages 221-225, and then pick a chapter of interest to you. There are very brief histories of NTNU and UCLA, plus the systems in which they are embedded on pages 26-32. The book’s argument is summarized on 5-9 and the book’s structure is described on 33-35. Our recommendations are presented 200-205. We use archival, ethnographic, and interview research methods, as described on pages 18-22. We invoke and challenge scholarship from four fields: higher education studies, organization studies, and history of universities, plus Science, Technology, and Society studies (STS), as discussed on pages 13-18.