Upon the conclusion of Big Meetings for Big Bureaucrats in Leuven, Belgium last week, where the Bologna Process was to be pushed along, I was reading the GlobalHigherEd blog for a response.

The Bologna Process is, basically, the alignment of higher education standards in 46 mostly-European countries; the idea is to create a European interior market for university degrees. The subtext, always lingering, is the apparent global success of US-American universities, relative to European ones.

Writing in GlobalHigherEd, Peter Jones (University of Bristol, UK) comments on the lack of legitimacy to the student delegation at Leuven, claiming the European Students Union (ESU) to have a breathtaking "acquiescence with the Bologna scripts," as evidenced by a lack of criticism of the process.

The ESU would not be the first representative body to be taken up by bureaucratic and careerist agendas and seduced by proximity to forums of power and influence.

But to the meat here: Jones then offers some suggestions for rallying points for opposition to Bologna, wishing the ESU would voice these concerns. First pointing out that the ESU views mobility (meaning the ability to transfer between universities within the entire system) “as an unalloyed good”, he quotes from their position paper:

[Mobility’s] benefits for students, academics, institutions and society as a whole are undisputed. Xenophobia exists and becomes especially evident in the event of an economic crisis such as the one we are currently facing. Mobility will require openness and will contribute to a more tolerant European society…

Jones then proposes his main objection:

In fact of course mobility is a far more problematic issue than this. The ESU does recognise the dangers of the commodification of higher education, the promotion of brain drain and the creation of a higher education market but seems to see these as somehow side-effects rather than of the essence of the Bologna Process. The ESU both opposes making a market out of higher education and actively calls for the process which is contributing to it to be extended and implemented.

Never mind the disingenuousness of a researcher at a British University—beneficiaries of brain drain if there ever were any—Jones’ critique is deep and important. It’s basically the question of whether good local education might be squelched in the effort to be global.

Expanding further, this seems to be the same question of whether local or transnational is more capable of germinating vision.