CGHE Webinar 280

Changing Higher Education in East Asia: A CGHE Book Symposium

Date: Thursday, 24 March 2022 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford and University of Bristol
Xin Xu, University of Oxford
Olga Mun, University of Oxford
Yunkyung Min, Seoul National University
CHAIR: Ka Ho Mok, Lingnan University

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

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East Asian higher education has common cultural roots in Chinese civilization, each country has been shaped in different ways by Western intervention, and all are building global strategies. Shared educational agendas combine with long political tensions and rising national identities. Hope and fear touch each other. What are the prospects for regional harmony-in-diversity? How do internationalization and indigenization interplay in higher education in this remarkable and brilliant region, once overshadowed by Western power and now coming back into its own, where so much of the future of humanity will be decided?

These issues are addressed in a new book from the Centre for Global Higher Education, Changing Higher Education in East Asia, edited by Simon Marginson and Xin Xu. The book brings together experts from Australia, China mainland, Hong Kong SAR, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK and Vietnam. Their chapters add new strands to the academic conversation about higher education in East Asia. Issues covered include the role of higher education in furthering the global public and common good in different national contexts, world citizenship education, the internationalization of the humanities and social sciences, geopolitics and higher education development, cross-border academic mobility, the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on regional student mobility, and future regionalization in East Asia.

In this CGHE webinar Simon Marginson and Xin Xu will introduce the book, and Olga Mun and Yunkyung Min discuss their chapter. ‘Global Public Good in Korea as Jeong’. A Q&A session will follow that will be chaired by Ka Ho Mok, who also contributed a chapter to this book, ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic and International Higher Education in East Asia’. Other chapter authors will share the Q&A and discussion section of the webinar. Please join us to discuss this important new book.

CGHE webinars are fully open to participants. They are interactive, enabling attendees to speak directly in the webinar, ask questions of speakers when called in by the chair and see all other participants. At any time you can communicate directly with others, either all together or on a one-to-one basis, through the webinar Chat.

Event Materials

This event is now archived and we are pleased to provide the following event media and assets, along with the original event overview.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk

Dr Xin Xu

Xin Xu (许心) is a Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education at the University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on higher/tertiary education and research.

Olga Mun

Olga is a doctoral student at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Olga’s main research interest is in the topics of epistemic injustice across all levels of education and across national borders with a focus on higher education and the process of knowledge production in academic institutes and universities. Her core interest lies between the areas of social epistemology, research on research (RoR) and comparative and international education (CIE).

Yunkyung Min

Dr. Yunkyung Min completed her Ph.D project regarding National universities’ governance in South Korea in Educational Administration and Policy Studies at Seoul National University. She is currently an associate research fellow at Center for Colleges evaluation and consulting of the Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI).