Week 5: Vy Nguyen A02

This week’s readings look at how U.S academy legalizes and rationalizes American exceptionalism and expansion domestically and globally through what Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira terms as “imperial university". This is particularly evident in the high rising ‘normalized’ violences imposed on student protests after 9/11. Academic freedom is severe danger as “containment and censorship of political critique [is now determined by] the collusion of the university, partisan off-campus groups and networks, and [most dauntingly] the state.” (Maira and Chatterjee, 2014, p. 5).

Maira and Chatterjee also discusses the concept of ‘manifest knowledge' and how U.S. higher education dictate and monitor ideologies of its population. This reminds me of a study conducted by Alexis Redding, a Harvard Graduate Student, who examined how American universities practice ‘Manifest Destiny' through ‘the branch campus phenomenon’. American colleges and universities have been looking overseas to “form collaborative partnerships that can enhance institutional prestige and increase revenue” (Redding, 2012). There are also plans to branch campuses to China and Korea, as international students from these two specific countries flock to America every year to study at its top universities (Choi and Kim, 2014). Though the rise in global branch campus helps transform higher education, these relationships can pose transnational difficulties and conflicting political ideologies. Moreover, given that the U.S. has been a settler-colonial for decades, over the years, it has developed “various strategies of control … [in order to maintain its] dominance around the globe” (Maira and Chatterjee, 2014, p. 7). The power dynamic is already heavily skewed, therefore, through higher education and cultural interventions and ‘soft power', the U.S. can easily legitimizes the concept of Manifest Destiny and manipulate populations abroad. Thus, higher education will no longer be our weapon against institutional oppression, but rather be, it will be our greatest obstacle towards freedom.

Question: Before Chatterjee and Maira's readings, I never saw the ‘imperialist' nature of American university. What are some practical ways we can shine light/bring forth issues like this so that students, like myself, can stay open-minded?

References:

1. Aktas, F. (2013, March). The Boom of International Branch Campuses: Western Universities and the Export of Knowledge [Digital image]. Retrieved from https://educationpolicytalk.com/2013/03/04/the-boom-of-international-branch-campuses-western-universities-and-the-export-of-knowledge/
2. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira. "The imperial university: Race, war, and the nation-state." The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent (2014). 1-50.
3. Choi, C. (2014). American universities are setting up campuses on the mainland. Retrieved from http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-education/article/1427882/american-universities-are-setting-campuses-mainland
4. Kim, J. (2014, July). Asia Matters for America by the East-West Center. Retrieved from http://www.asiamattersforamerica.org/korea/american-universities-seek-to-expand-their-presence-in-south-korea
5. Redding, A. B. (June 2012). Manifest Destiny in American Higher Education: Elite Tertiary Institutions and the Branch Campus Phenomenon. Good Work Project, 78th ser., 1-33. Retrieved from http://thegoodproject.org/pdf/78-Manifest-Destiny-in-American-Higher-Education.pdf