Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval: On Common Goods, Geopolitics and Decolonization

In this open access book, leading scholar Simon Marginson discusses the major trends, events, issues and dilemmas that have shaped and are still shaping global higher education. Higher education and research have grown rapidly, becoming more international and embroiled in the politics and economics of an increasingly conflicted world. The global research university has spread from the Euro-American West to the global East and South, becoming key to emerging multipolar and decolonial power. In the Anglosphere, however, the market model is failing. In highly unequal societies, education cannot universalise opportunity and employability. Neoliberal governments have defunded and emptied out the work of universities for the common good – and populist-conservatism is filling the vacuum with a backlash against cross-border students, against crucial East-West collaboration in research, and in the United States, where global research universities began, against university autonomy, climate science and academic freedom. In a tumultuous and unstable time in which old certainties are crumbling, Marginson makes an original and probing argument, supported by data-based review, theorising, and critical analysis, that pushes in a radically different direction to both neoliberalism and Trumpism. It is an ambitious call to sweep away the accumulative-competitive model of society and education, which positions us as sovereign individuals without collective responsibility, in nations likewise driven solely by self-interest (sovereign nationalism) in a war of all against all. The book pulls apart policies on student fees, human capital and employability, calling for negotiated education-work partnerships. It unpicks the neocolonial mindset in Western science and international education, suggesting that no single culture has all the answers; that respect for diversity and cooperation on shared problems are integral to the global common good. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

• Publication date: 5 February 2026
• Page count: 336
• Dimensions: Height 236 mm; Width 158 mm; Thickness 24 mm
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781350540064