ABSTRACT

Writing from the University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica in 1968, Sylvia Wynter reflects on the institutional dimensions of colonial knowledge: "the University, like the society, is a 'branch plant industry of a metropolitan system' ". This chapter discusses the Wynter's allusion to the university as a "branch plant industry" in the context of the Westernized university's internationalization agenda. This involves consideration of the history of educational institutions in settler colonial plantations. The neo-colonial trajectory of the Westernized university has social, political and economic implications for millions of international students and the societies from which they come. Much scholarship on the Westernized "neoliberal" university is abstracted from its evolution alongside the history of capitalism. There is a relationship between the university and epochal change, problematizing the "transfer of knowledge"; situating this phenomenon as an imperial exchange. A cursory survey of literature on internationalization and the Westernized university reveals an uncritical tendency towards the language of empire.