The Transatlantic Dialogue on Higher Education

Book excerpt: Comparing apples and oranges frequently, this is what we do when we talk about similarities and differences regarding higher education in the United States and Europe. Based on the assumption that higher education policy texts are cultural texts to be interpreted, this book deconstructs four US American cultural narratives within higher education (co-opetition, the frontier myth, McDonaldization, and the narrative of security), and compares these to discourses prevailing in Europe. Disputing the prevalent claim that both the recent European higher education transformation initiative, the Bologna Process, and the establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have had absolutely no impact on US institutions of higher learning, this study proves that cultural narratives in the last decade have strongly determined political and structural developments in higher education on both sides of the Atlantic. This book therefore adds another facet to the transatlantic dialogue on higher education by providing a cultural critical perspective, including the Foucauldian theory of governmentality as well as aspects of postcolonial theory.