V-Charged: Powering Up the World-Class University as a Global Actor

This paper engages with the challenges raised by this panel; of how a politics of size can reveal the ways in which distance, volume, capacity, agency and relationality are mobilised to reconstitute higher education as a global enterprise and universities as global actors. In this paper I explore the types of spatial politics at play in charging up, and powering forward, the world class university. This spatial vocabulary includes vision, visibility, verticality and vertigo. In relation to vision, different ways of representing particular kinds of academic activity, and making this commensurate with how near and how far this takes the institution from producing knowledge economies, new vantage points and sightlines are established. Through making those universities ‘that matter’ visible, they are represented as actors in the global landscape, with new kinds of relationality – from geographic (e.g. Central Asia) to temporal (e.g. universities established in the last 50 years) to institutional (e.g. Liberal Arts as mission). This sets up a politics of visibility and invisibility. Those seeking to exit these different topological spaces are also unable to escape from view, and efforts to do so are derided, whilst those made invisible are constructed as worthless. By ranking universities using principles of ordinality – ‘vertical vision’ (Robertson, 2018) now directs the nature of forward momentum through its own relational principles and logics – that of hierarchy, worth and value. Differences are also standardised, imposing a new kind of rationality on the sector. Finally, the fear of losing one’s place in space gives rise to vertigo and powers the actorliness of the institution – to mobilise for itself in relation to others. Taken together, these modalities of space ‘V-Charge’ the reimagining, recalibrating and remaking of higher education as a global enterprise.