Collaboration, Communities and Competition

Book excerpt: Higher Education providers face enormous challenges in an increasingly competitive and globalised environment. It is perhaps obvious to those engaged in teaching and research that academia is both a competitive and a collaborative endeavour. Many national systems now assume in their legal or governance frameworks competitive rather than co-operative behaviour and increasingly regulate based on that assumption. Institutional leaders and educators wrestle with the issues around the commoditisation of learning and the pressure to treat students as customers. In tandem, students themselves are experiencing cuts in public financing and a transfer of the cost burden to them as the perceived private beneficiaries of a product. This book asks whether there is an alternative approach to this now transnational competitive logic. Can collaboration and partnership (re-)emerge as an antidote to the consumerist and competitive approaches taken by governments toward regulating their higher education systems? The question of competition, collaboration and community is addressed here at three levels of analysis. The macro-level or the international system level, observes competition and collaboration between countries and between institutions. The meso-level, includes competition and collaboration between academics and students, and at inter- and intra-disciplinary levels across organisational boundaries. Finally, competition and collaboration at the micro-level considers the interface between individual academics, and between academics and students as learners.