Abstract
The two key questions addressed by this edited collection are: (a) what makes a perspective ‘cosmopolitan’? and (b) what do ‘cosmopolitan’ perspectives bring to the debate that other perspectives don’t?
Feng Su and Margaret Wood’s collection supplies answers to both questions, offering a much-needed overview of the alternative spaces from which more socially-engaged and globally-aware university practices might emerge, and the kinds of leadership required for such spaces. Though ‘cosmopolitanism’ is interpreted in different ways by different contributors, I am richer for all ten of the book’s chapters and wiser for Helen Gunter’s measured response to them.
Smyth’s critique of academic leadership opens Part One of the collection, usefully foregrounding issues of reflexivity and criticality. Rizvi and Beech then offer a fascinating history of cosmopolitanism, covering key traditions and readings, and moving helpfully towards practice with their work on ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’.
Part Two of the collection – arguably the meat of the book’s sandwich – draws on the ‘lived experience’ of educational leaders to bring abstract notions of cosmopolitanism to life. Tamish’s sobering discussion of Palestinian Higher Education puts problems in the Westernized sector into proportion. Noting that notions of the university as a tool for emancipation are being marginalized as academics are increasingly asked to perform ‘new, artificial tasks’, Tamish reminds us that some geographical and political contexts can multiply the difficulties faced by university staff.
Leadership in turbulent times is a theme also addressed by Nebres, this time using the Philippines as a case study, while a series of personal reflections on being ‘female and foreign’ leads Yamamoto to troubling conclusions on the challenges faced by women leaders when attempting to strike an appropriate work–life balance. Duke’s remarkable globe-trotting career is sketched in Chapter 8, his reflections from retirement offering a useful lens through which to view the long-term challenges and pitfalls of leadership in the sector.
Taylor and Stevenson bring a different viewpoint to their Part Two contribution, focusing on the peculiarities and paradoxes of the UK Higher Education system with a fascinating series of vignettes that capture the divisive, perhaps anti-cosmopolitan, undertones of internal REF-driven grading processes. That ‘writing is connected deeply to identity’ emerges strongly through the often troubling vignettes, and though no perfect solution is offered, the suggestion is made that a key principle of cosmopolitanism must be the acceptance of scholarly difference.
Part Three of Cosmopolitan Perspectives discusses the implications for those involved with running universities and developing leadership. A managerial tone is struck by Layer in his chapter on ‘academic entrepreneurialism’, and Shakespeare’s Henry V is drawn on to personify inspirational leadership. Cook-Sather and Felton’s contribution returns us to the critical, powerfully noting the capacity of Higher Education to ‘dehumanize’ in a neo-liberal context, and offering routes to ‘re-humanization’.
Cosmopolitanism is understood differently by this book’s many authors. For some, it is a cultural theory; for others, an educational disposition. However, its traditions are reimagined thoughtfully and constructively in the context of contemporary Higher Education. Though an edited book collection of such diversity is bound to lose its thread in places, the overall message is both valuable and clear: it is time for universities to reconstruct and reposition themselves in relation to the world around them.
Gunter’s coda rightly acknowledges the critiques of cosmopolitanism. For example, she warns that we must be mindful of ‘elite cosmopolitanism’ (‘we seem to be talking to ourselves and to people like us in Higher Education’). Gunter’s conclusion – that cosmopolitan perspectives will work only if they are socially and politically critical – is one that emerges between the lines of each of the book’s chapters. It is also one with which this reviewer concurs.