Globalization and higher education in Southern California: Views from the professoriate

In this study, faculty at institutions of higher education in Southern California were surveyed to determine the ways they interpret the effects of globalization dynamics upon their various teaching and research activities. Faculty in the state's three higher education tiers spoke positively about the intellectual benefits to be gained by exposure to different worldviews made possible by an increasingly diverse faculty and student body. Divisions were noted among the different tiers, however, with respect to their disparate levels of engagement with the private sector. The private sector was seen as having a negative impact upon the public sector's research agenda while simultaneously being embraced by faculty at the community colleges. Faculty at the research institutions were typically critical of the overarching neoliberal paradigm and spoke in political terms about the ways this largely economic-efficiency model was reorienting their teaching and research roles.