Universities and Civilizations. Franck Leprevost

Higher Education – THE, US News and World Report, Quacquarelli Symonds – QS) and government agencies (Russia, Taiwan) had copied them by launching their own international ranking. Secondly, they have had a profound influence on the behavior of many players who were directly or indirectly linked to the world of higher education: students looking for the most prestigious universities to continue their studies, business leaders anxious to recruit graduates from the best universities, and above all, university leaders increasingly obsessed by their institution’s position in the various international rankings. And finally, they were used to convince a growing number of heads of state to grant significant financial resources for the development of world-class universities, that would worthily represent the intellectual and scientific level of the countries in question.

Over the past decade, several authors have been working to dissect the methodology of university rankings and to expose methodological flaws. Others have studied the impact of these rankings, looking at the transformation strategies of universities seeking to move up the rankings, as well as the “excellence initiatives” adopted by countries seeking to revitalize their underperforming university systems. However, none, to date, have succeeded in doing what Professor Leprévost undertook with his fascinating book on “universities and civilizations”. Not only has he dissected the methodology of the main rankings and carefully analyzed some of the excellence initiatives, particularly the Russian one, he is also the first to reset the course for academic excellence, induced by university rankings in a more global context. Indeed, one of the most interesting contributions of this new book is the analysis of the relationship between the evolution of university policies and the political, economic and cultural context of the civilizations in which they have evolved.

      The author of this very well-documented work, Professor Leprévost, former Vice-Rector of the University of Luxembourg (an institution that has had an impressive track record despite its young age), challenges the reader to examine the recent evolution of major research universities in the context of the clash of great civilizations, carefully studied by Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations. Examining university strategies from the perspective of civilizations is an original approach that allows us to place the impact of international rankings in a relevant geopolitical context, and to more easily understand the diversity of national responses to geopolitical issues. The fundamental question put forward by the author is whether the dynamism of major universities is an adequate indicator of the intellectual vitality of the civilizations from which they originate.

      This original analytical approach sheds new light on the rise of Chinese universities, the decline of American public universities that are increasingly deprived of resources by the States that fund them, the decline of Japanese universities reluctant to play the internationalization card, the efforts of French and German universities to rise in the rankings, or the absence of universities in India, Africa (except South Africa) and Latin America. In this context, Professor Leprévost devotes a fascinating chapter to Russia, studying the “5-100” initiative in detail, which is aimed at placing five universities among the top 100 in the world. This chapter sheds interesting light on the record of investment by the Russian government and the characteristics of the university system, inherited from the Soviet era, that hamper the development of Russian universities, such as the separation between research academies and universities, and governance arrangements reflecting a mentality of control from the national authorities.

This book on “universities and civilizations” evokes a world of increased competition and a break with a long history of cooperation, exchange and collaboration between academic institutions and the teacher-researchers who populate them. It challenges the reader with a series of key questions on the evolution of higher education systems and the role of universities in contemporary societies: are international rankings a revealing indicator of a new geostrategy of knowledge? What is the role of cutting-edge universities? To what extent are excellence initiatives part of the panoply of strategic actions that are deployed by countries to maintain or improve their position among nations? Does the evolution of the ranking of the best universities shed light on the vitality of the civilizations they belong to? To answer these questions, Professor Leprévost reviews the reasons why some countries are investing in their universities, in search of new intellectual and economic leadership: a desire for political power, the definition of higher education as industry, efforts to diversify the economy, and the ambition to increasingly rely on the knowledge economy as an engine of development.

      The answers in this book are organized in three main chapters. First, Professor Leprévost identifies leading universities on the basis of their results in the main international rankings. He then examines their geographical position within the framework of the seven great civilizations defined by Samuel Huntington. After a very instructive detour through Russia, he finally looks at the role of leading universities in contemporary societies and the tension between the traditional logic of contributing to the public good, and the distortions introduced by the new conception of education as a private investment.

      Professor Leprévost ends his book with an incursion into the world of literature, evoking in turn Paul Valéry, Virginie Despentes, Ian Manook and Michel Houellebecq. This last part is an unprecedented way of illustrating, through a few well-chosen quotations, the evolution of contemporary society and its universities under the weight of demographic trends and technological change, resulting in the increasing automation and robotization of production processes. Allow yourself to be seduced by this original book which, with undeniable writing talent, paints a picture of international rankings and higher education, skillfully mixing geopolitics, the world of universities and literature.

      Jamil SALMI

      International expert in university transformation; distinguished Professor of Higher Education Policy at Diego Portales University (Santiago de Chile)

      Washington DC

      August 2020

      Preface

      Elements of Genesis

      “Where are you going?” the boy asked.

      “Far out to come in when the wind shifts.

      I want to be out before it is light.”

      Ernest Hemingway (1952, p. 3).

      The first ideas for this work were jotted down on paper in 2016 while I was living in St. Petersburg, Russia. The initial project involved writing an article on Russian universities by only looking at the international rankings established by Times Higher Education. Many footnotes were already covering the content; limiting oneself to the Times ranking alone was becoming less common. Attending a workshop at MIT in Boston and a conference in Berkeley led me to rethink things. The thinking became more refined as the article grew (without, however, guaranteeing the transfer of proportions). Some ideas were specific to the Russian context, while others took on a more generic turn. The article became a short memo. Then, the idea of writing a book came up, along with the hesitations and doubts that such a long-term commitment implies. Therefore, while writing the book, we decided to make it short and compact to preserve our breath. The book continued to be enriched with new incisions and footnotes, as old ones migrated and mutated into sketches of new paragraphs and chapters. I was aiming for a maximum of 26,000 words like The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway 1952). The comparison with Hemingway ends there: I went overboard.

After a deviation of nearly 62,000 words, you have to stop yourself. This does not imply just writing the final word (or pause). It also means choosing the title and subheading. This is not necessarily the easiest thing to do, all the more so, since it is a matter of making the author’s wishes converge with those of the publisher. Lastly, “universities and civilizations” sums up the substance of the book quite well. While everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the first term, using the second more risky, especially in contemporary academia, and if one takes Huntington’s point of view on these issues. However, to a large extent, the relevance of “the clash of civilizations” analysed by Huntington remains key today. Therefore, I assume responsibility for these choices, risk and title. Of course,