Universities and Civilizations. Franck Leprevost

over the other was to mark, in their view, the end of the great conflicts and open an infinite period of near-planetary peace: “the end of history”, to quote Francis Fukuyama’s famous prophecy⁵ about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

      However, as early as the summer of 1993, Samuel Huntington published an article in the Foreign Affairs journal entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Huntington 1993). In view of the controversy generated by this article on all continents⁶, the Harvard professor decided to develop his analysis of the world in a more substantial work. He would do so again three years later with his now famous 500-page book: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Huntington 1996). The reasonable doubt he had in 1993 is no longer relevant in 1996: the question mark at the top of his article disappeared from the title of his book.

The very rich substance of Huntington’s work goes far beyond⁷ the scope of this chapter in describing the genesis of a thought. Let us content ourselves by summarizing the main message here: history is not finished with us; new conflicts of great magnitude will arise; these conflicts will no longer be based on ideologies, but on differences of civilizations and therefore on differences of cultures. Huntington gives the following definition of civilization in the second chapter of Part I of his book:

      A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies. Civilizations are the biggest “we” within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other “thems” out there. (Huntington 1996, p. 43)

      In the third chapter of Part I (Huntington 1996, pp. 56–78), he develops his argument to contest the very existence of a “universal civilization”, and justifies the fact that the “bigger us” opposing all the other “them” are the civilizations he designates and defines, and that they are strict parts of all humanity. In other words, the whole of humanity certainly distinguishes man from other animal species, but does not constitute a civilization. It merely encompasses civilizations, which is already a broad agenda. Let us jump to Huntington’s conclusion of this chapter:

      It would, as Braudel observes, almost “be childish” to think that modernization or “the triumph of civilization in the singular” would lead to the end of the plurality of historical cultures embodied for centuries in the world’s great civilizations. Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West. In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western. (Huntington 1996, p. 78)

Returning to 1989 and 1991, the successive falls of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet empire, did not mean the end of the conflicts. For humanity, they mark the transition from a bipolar world to a multipolar, multi-civilizational and multicultural world. More specifically, the cartography proposed by Huntington structures the world around the following civilizations and flagship countries:

       – Western civilization, whose leading country is the United States;

       – Chinese civilization, whose leading country is China;

       – Hindu civilization, whose leading country is India;

       – Japanese civilization, whose leading country is Japan;

       – Orthodox civilization, whose leading country is Russia;

       – Latin America, without a leading country;

       – Muslim civilization, without a leading country;

       – and (if possible) the African civilization, without a leading country (Huntington 1997, pp. 51–56, including “if possible”).

1.3. The role of universities in the race for global intellectual leadership

      As a first approach, let us embrace Samuel Huntington’s reading of the world. However, before looking at the role that universities could play in this reading grid, let us also make the nuance that Régis Debray (Debray 2017, especially pp. 20–27) makes between civilization and culture, which are too often mistaken for one another⁸, our own. Let us give him the floor:

      Just as a mother tongue radiates in regional dialects, a civilization de-compartmentalizes the culture from which it comes […]. A culture builds places, a civilization builds roads. It assumes and requires a foreign policy. A civilization acts, it is offensive. A culture reacts, it is defensive. There is no civilization that does not take root in a culture, but a culture does not become a civilization without a fleet and an ambition, a great dream and a mobile force. […] ‘Imperial civilizations’ is a redundancy. Just as an empire is multi-ethnic, a civilization, in the prime of life, needs all the talents available and must control several cultures as enclaves, outposts or relays […]. (Debray 2017, pp. 23–24)

Let us spend a little more time on Debray’s analysis⁹, that “an economy alone has never made a civilization” (Op. cit., p. 26) and that “it is an economist’s myopia to measure the vitality of a civilization by the yardstick of its industry or its currency” (op. cit., p. 27). Relying on the redundancy of the expression “imperial civilizations”, Debray ultimately asserts that:

      In short, supremacy is established when the imprint survives the grip, and the grip survives the empire. […] A civilization has won when the empire from which it proceeds no longer needs to be imperialist to make its mark. (Debray 2017, p. 27)

      Debray’s nuance between civilization and culture¹⁰, and the irreducibility of the latter to a (myopic) purely economic vision of the world, reinforce the relevance of the question that is at the origin of the present reflection. Universities play a pivotal role in the matters of civilization, given their importance in an analysis in terms of culture and the development of armament capacity. They are a place where the transmission of universal and cultural knowledge transpires; they can be used to defend a given culture, or to promote it; they can be the instruments of “power” that can certainly remain “soft”, but can also become “hard” and contribute to a cultural hegemony that Gramsci would not have denied. According to Huntington:

      The balance of power between civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures. (Huntington 1996, p. 20)

      Are some of the changes Huntington observes also measurable, at least in part, with respect to the world’s top universities? Is the evolution of these university rankings an indicator of the intellectual vitality of these civilizations?

While shedding light on the global landscape of higher education and research in terms of civilizations may, at least in part, be justified by the above arguments, we choose to confine this light to the leading universities, in other words, to those that contribute to a significant production¹¹ of knowledge in addition to the transmission of that knowledge. We are, of course, fully aware that the reality of the global higher education landscape is much more complex. Indeed, other institutions, by far the most numerous – more than 90% – transmit knowledge without producing it.

      However, the latter are intent on responding to a challenge whose great complexity is already increasing day by day: mass education.

      The number of students on earth is projected to double by 2025, compared to 2012 (see (Bjarnason et al. 2009) and (Goddard 2012); see (Maslen 2012) for a summary of the latter), to reach 262 million. Almost all of this growth will be outside