ABSTRACT
Since its inception, the Thai higher education sector has selectively borrowed Western elements to serve political, economic and cultural purposes. It is the intention of this chapter to trace a century of Thailand’s higher education reform in relation to the burgeoning influences of westernisation, globalisation and internationalisation. The author is interested to understand how elements of Western origin have been enmeshed with Thai contexts. Three periods are considered in this chapter: Europeanisation, Americanisation and Globalisation/Internationalisation. During the first period, European legacy was used as the standard par excellence for policy borrowing. In 1917, Chulalongkorn University, the first in Thailand, was established to train civil servants to serve the creation of the Thai state. With the influence of European legacy, Chulalongkorn and other schools were heavily elitist and centralised with the government as the sole actor of the policy provision and administration. In the second period, Thailand moved towards an Americanisation of higher education reform. Regionalisation and privatisation became the main mantras of this period. Since the 1990s, Thailand has entered the third phase of globalisation/internationalisation. Instead of having a bilateral country as an exemplar of higher education reform, an imagined community of globalisation/internationalisation has been set as the policy aspiration.
