Ignorance or deliberate imperialism?

At the 2007 ALT-C Conference in Nottingham, I was struck by comments by one of the keynote speakers - Michelle Selinger, from Cisco Systems.

She mentioned chasms between opportunities for education in the developing world and the developed world, and asked what we can do to bridge those chasms. However, her responses were curious. For example, one example approach is to build a free campus, and populate it with lecturers from developing countries. I can think of few worse approaches. My assumption (which I'd like to be corrected on) is that there is no benefit to the local economy in terms of construction contracts and lecturer's pay, and, in addition, a foreign curriculum is imposed on the students. This is cultural imperialism of the highest order.

It was great to see the question from George Roberts about GATS (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) come up on the ALT-C screen in response. Spot on, George! I think the university sector pays too much attention to the business of being 'successful' universities, and too little attention to our role as critical thinkers within society at large.

Most people in the West seem complacent about the short term successes of the western economic and structural development, and forget that our material benefits are increasingly delivered at the expense of environmental damage and social exploitation in poorer countries, and social divisions in our own countries. Most are also are ignorant of the frequent bias in favour of rich countries imposed by the World Bank and WTO on poorer countries, frequently imposing measures on those countries which reduce access to public health systems and to education and wreak environmental havoc for temporary gain.

It's surely time that we allowed the rest of the world freedom to develop models of sustainable societies by whatever route they choose, rather than continuing to impose our own flawed cultural values on other countries. It's difficult to know whether that proposal to 'give' universities to other countries stems from ingorance or deliberate imperialism, but I can only hope they rethink before the idea becomes reality.

At least Hans-Peter Baumeister, theme speaker for the Learning and Internationalism strand, redressed the balance a little. He articulated assumptions about the Western perceptions of education and business models, and questioned whether the networked [globalised?] society is really a benefit of the whole world. - we harvest the best minds from developing countries, and they don't receive equivalent benefits in return. Thankyou Hans.