ABSTRACT
The questions we are trying to confront in this book, as I see them, concern the role of universities in the transmission and creation of forms of culture and knowledge. Should we see universities around the world as independent arenas of education, as institutions isolated from their social, cultural, and political environments, in which professors and students work together in a collaborative effort to push forward the frontiers of knowledge? Should we see universities as part of an interconnected system of global knowledge transfer through which ever more accurate knowledge about the world is dispersed to an ever greater number of students? Should we, from a rather different perspective, see universities as key sites of cultural and epistemological invasion, where inappropriate and irrelevant forms of Western culture and knowledge are thrust upon an unwitting student population? Should we perhaps look at universities as a key site of struggle, where local knowledge meets global knowledge in a battle to represent different worlds in different ways? How we view universities around the world and their relationships with each other clearly depends on how we understand culture, knowledge, education, and international relations.
