‘We are helpless, we are not the authority’: colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan transnational education institution

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education r Fo ‘We are helpless, we are not the authority’: Colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan transnational education institution Pe Journal: Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Manuscript ID CCOM-2020-0112.R3 er Manuscript Type: Original Article Keywords: Re Higher Education < Level, Governmentality < Subject, Neoliberalism, International Education, Colonialism w vie This study examines colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan partner institution of University of London (UOL) through semi-structured interviews with students and faculty. UOL began administrating colonised educational spaces in the 19th century, and now governs approximately 80 partner institutions throughout the global South. Its governmentality structures an arterial topology of power that grants limited inclusion to students while excluding their lecturers from formal recognition. Faculty at partner institutions do not assess students. Instead, assessment Abstract: consists of annual British examinations, effectuating rote pedagogies that centre European knowledge. This extraction of faculty authority shapes delegitimated and disempowered subjectivities. The same process augments UOL’s expertise on Southern educational spaces, contributing to a broader project of universalising Western epistemology. The findings suggest a need for further research that examines colonial governmentality in international education, and particularly its mechanisms of epistemic extraction. ly On URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 1 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 1 ‘We are helpless, we are not the authority’: Colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan transnational education institution David Golding Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK d.golding@lancaster.ac.uk ORCiD: 0000-0003-3793-8206 Pe David Golding r Fo Department of Educational Research County South er Lancaster University Re Lancaster, UK vie A1 4YD w On Biographical note David Golding is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University. He ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 recently completed five years of teaching in public and private universities in Sri Lanka, during which he taught peace studies, development geography, and global sociology. Previously, he worked as a human rights observer in Guatemala and Mexico. URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 2 of 36 2 ‘We are helpless, we are not the authority’: Colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan transnational education institution This study examines colonial governmentality in a Sri Lankan partner institution of University of London (UOL) through semi-structured interviews with students and faculty. UOL began administrating colonised educational spaces in the 19th century, and now governs approximately r Fo 80 partner institutions throughout the global South. Its governmentality structures an arterial topology of power that grants limited inclusion to students while excluding their lecturers from Pe formal recognition. Faculty at partner institutions do not assess students. Instead, assessment consists of annual British examinations, effectuating rote pedagogies that centre European er knowledge. This extraction of faculty authority shapes delegitimated and disempowered subjectivities. The same process augments UOL’s expertise on Southern educational spaces, Re contributing to a broader project of universalising Western epistemology. The findings suggest a vie need for further research that examines colonial governmentality in international education, and particularly its mechanisms of epistemic extraction. w On Keywords: higher education, international education, governmentality, subjectivity, neoliberalism, colonialism ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 3 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 3 Introduction Neoliberal governmentality has become an influential field of research in higher education studies. Scholars identify increasingly pervasive mechanisms of performativity, audit, marketisation, and public-private partnerships that govern research and teaching in universities (Olssen and Peters 2005; Shore 2008; Brown 2015). Governmentality mechanisms translate neoliberal institutional objectives into governing rationalities, which are instilled within r Fo ‘individual or collective subjects faced with a field of possibility in which several conducts, several reactions, and various modes of behavior can take place’ (Foucault 2007, xxiv). Pe Neoliberal governmentality and its transformation of subjectivities has been principally analysed in the context of universities of the global North. Despite neoliberalism’s origins in er developmental relationships through which policy experiments were conducted in the global Re South, ‘in education policy studies there is a clear gap in research that adapts governmentality to a non-Western context’ (Fimyar 2008, 12). This study accordingly examines governmentality in vie a Sri Lankan partner institution of University of London (UOL). w UOL is a British collegiate university that currently enrols over 50,000 ‘distance On learning’ students, most of whom study at approximately 80 higher education institutions in the global South (UOL n.d.-a). After its founding in 1836, UOL became instrumental in colonial ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 education, administering examinations for higher education institutions in Nigeria, Uganda, West Indies, and other British territories. Many such institutions, including Ceylon University College (CUC), dissolved their partnerships with UOL around independence to become the first postcolonial universities in their respective countries. Although UOL’s partnership with CUC enabled teaching and research on locally focused disciplines such as Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhala, oriental studies, philosophy, and various social sciences, ‘educational nationalists’ called for URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 4 of 36 4 CUC’s decolonisation since ‘external examinations conducted by British universities were a poor substitute for a real university education in an indigenous university’ (de Silva 2005, 514). To gain autonomy from UOL, CUC was reconstituted as University of Ceylon in 1942. UOL education returned to Sri Lanka in the 1990s, when UOL partnered with a for-profit higher education institution in Colombo that I will call London Institution of Higher Education (LIHE). LIHE enrols approximately 1,000 undergraduates, most of whom are UOL students. r Fo Approximately 80% of the UOL degrees conferred at LIHE are in business or British law, reflecting the desocialisation of academic disciplines in the neoliberal university described by Pe Baltodano (2012). A three-year UOL degree at LIHE costs 25,000,000 Sri Lankan Rupees (15,000 Euros), over 18 years of income at the country’s median per capita income (Department er of Census and Statistics 2016), with roughly half that amount comprising UOL tuition. Around Re 90% of LIHE lecturers are part-time, while 10% are full-time administrative faculty. As is typical of private institutions in Sri Lanka, LIHE omits the word ‘university’ from its name to vie eschew state regulation of its educational activities (see Fielden and Varghese 2009). Since UOL w is the sole governing actor, LIHE is exemplary of nonstate governmentality in higher education. On UOL governs by providing subject guides of 150-250 pages and conducting annual examinations that constitute the entirety of student assessment. These minimal interventions structure the ‘field ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 of possibility’ for an expansive domain of student and faculty conduct (Foucault 2007, xxiv). The partnership between UOL and LIHE occupies a market space that neoliberal policy previously opened. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund mandated a series of structural adjustment programs in Sri Lanka that restricted public education funding (Chandrasiri 2003). Consequently, only 9% of entrance examinees are admitted into any public university (Liyanage 2014). To capture the surplus demand for higher URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 5 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 5 education, for-profit institutions often access legitimacy by partnering with Northern universities. This presents market opportunities for UOL (2018), whose largest income sources are tuition fees from ‘distance learning’ students and contracts with institutions like LIHE. UOL (2014, 1321) embraces a ‘commercial business model’, envisioning itself as a ‘services business’ whose ‘core asset’ is a ‘brand’ that generates ‘additional income from new customers and new markets’ in order ‘to increase the financial surplus from service expansion’. In exchange, it certifies r Fo graduates and partner institutions, resembling the ‘generosity of expertise’ that often rationalises education in neoliberal development (Rose 1999, 92). Sidhu (2007) observes that transnational Pe education institutions often employ new developmentalist rationality and its language of expertise to make ‘claims of political neutrality and scientific legitimacy’. These discourses er conceal the fact that ‘their political-epistemic foundations are informed by neoliberal notions of Re market value and neocolonial ideas about difference, progress, and development’ (208). Transnational universities configure ‘connections among far-flung sites, shaping what might be vie called an ecology of expertise’ (Ong 2008, 118). In this ecology of expertise, the colonial w difference is spatialised as ‘knowledge gaps’ to be closed by Northern interventions into On Southern education (Olssen and Peters 2005, 335). Lönnqvist et al. (2018, 5-11) suggest that while Northern universities seek Southern partners for mainly ‘altruistic motives’, they also ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 benefit by enhancing their ‘image and brand’ to attract ‘new projects and new customers’. Using semi-structured interviews, this study investigates whether UOL’s ecology of expertise altruistically develops Southern partner institutions, or whether its relationship with LIHE is extractive like other neoliberal and colonial projects. It intends to ‘discern colonial power’s point of application, its target, and the discursive and nondiscursive fields it sought to encompass’ URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 6 of 36 6 (Scott 1995, 204). As will be argued, UOL’s application of power and its attendant subjectivities exemplify colonial governmentality in higher education. Methodology While teaching at LIHE, I conducted hour-long, semi-structured interviews with LIHE students and faculty. I asked mostly open-ended questions on experiences and feelings regarding UOL, r Fo LIHE, and how they understood their relationship to each. Interviewees were purposively sampled for proportional representation of gender and position at LIHE. They comprised of nine Pe students, four lecturers without administrative duties, three administrative faculty members who also lecture, and one top-level administrator. ‘Top-level administrator’ could refer to LIHE’s er chairperson, president, or CEO. All interviewees were of Sri Lankan origin except two students. Re All faculty had completed UOL undergraduate degrees at LIHE, and often commented on their experiences as students. Interviewees have been numbered and quoted using the code STU for vie students, LEC for lecturers, ADF for administrative faculty, and TLA for top-level w administrators. This research has been reviewed and approved by the FASS-LUMS Research Ethics Committee of Lancaster University. On This research is also based on my notes and reflections from four years of teaching at ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 LIHE, which I cite as NOTES. I am an educator of US origin. As the only foreigner to ever teach at LIHE, my terms of employment were the same as Sri Lankan lecturers. Nevertheless, my Northern origin sometimes came with advantages. Educators from the global North have held positions of authority in Sri Lankan educational institutions since the 19th century, when British and US missionaries founded dozens of schools across the country (Coperehewa 2011). At LIHE, the rendition of the coloniser as an educational expert was reinforced by UOL’s URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 7 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 7 governance, examinations, and curricula written from an explicitly Western perspective. UOL’s privileging of Western epistemology likely benefitted me, even as I attempted to conduct research and teaching against that very privilege. Yet the way in which our educational spaces were governed left me with feelings of frustration, disempowerment, and invisibility similar to those expressed by my colleagues and students. I often internalised UOL’s governing rationalities within my own subjectivity, eventually questioning whether we were really r Fo lecturers, and whether there was any university at all. I understood that the value of my research was predicated on the extent to which I became part of the faculty at LIHE and taught in a Pe colonised educational space. I did not want to reproduce the colonial aspiration for an outsider’s objectivity (Lewis 1973; Mullings 1999). As I will argue, UOL’s governmentality of inscription er and numbers undergirds its claims to universalist knowledge and expertise on Southern Re educational spaces. To resist this epistemic injustice, I refused to imagine myself to be collecting ‘data’ in order to produce objective knowledge, nor did I intend to posit suggestions that could vie enhance the efficacy of UOL’s colonial education. This meant that I favoured comprehensive w read-throughs of interview transcripts while limiting my use of coding and other data-oriented On approaches. Considering that ‘episteme claims universality; techné is closely allied to time and place’ (Cortina et al. 2019, 502), I focused on the technés through which the coloniality of ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 knowledge is reproduced rather than critiquing the content of that knowledge. Therefore, emphasis is placed on grounded experiences and counternarratives that do not register in UOL’s globalised and numericised domain of intervention. Sidhu et al. (2016, 1509) identify a need for research on ‘the textured and grounded transformations in the spaces and subjectivities of globalizing universities’. A salient texture of education at LIHE is one of tension between UOL’s governmentality and the counter-conduct of its subjects, and between UOL’s discourse and the URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 8 of 36 8 counternarratives that more critically describe the education that takes place (see Giroux et al. 1996). Conduct at LIHE, the governmentality through which it is structured, and the subjectivities it forms are analysed by foregrounding the voices of interviewees. The focus is not on UOL’s audit mechanisms detailed in its Teaching Centre Recognition Framework (n.d.-c). According to LIHE’s top-level administrator, UOL audits are ‘not valid at all’ and amount to r Fo ‘nothing at all’. UOL cannot be said to govern through an audit culture, but instead implements ‘the new “lighter touch” approach [which] now requires that organisations review and police Pe themselves’ (Shore 2008, 281). Yet LIHE conducts ‘no academic supervision of lecturers at all’ (LEC3) and does not ‘get directly involved with the academic process unless it is about selecting er academics’ (LEC2). The governance of UOL education through annual examinations effectuates Re a radical self-responsibilisation of students and lecturers, resembling a lighter-touch version of the ‘race for rewards and credentials, within which they are persistently assessed, audited, and vie ranked’ by mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality (De Lissovoy 2017, 5). In contrast to the w grids of performance metrics that configure neoliberal subjectivities amongst US and UK On teachers (Ball and Olmedo 2013), UOL’s lighter-touch governmentality seems to afford more freedom. However, the freedom of the subject is often the very target of governmentality (Rose ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 1999). In coloniality, the subject is governed not only through its enclosure within a governable domain, but also through inscribed forms of partial exclusion (Pesek, 2011). This mechanism of colonial governmentality, which I will refer to as arterial inscription, shapes subjectivities by delimiting and displacing authority. This study focuses on subjectivities formed around UOL’s governmentality to ‘evaluate practices in terms of the extent to which they accord those caught up within them the capacity to judge, accept or transform the practices that subjectify them’ URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 9 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 9 (Rose 1999, 97). Agency ‘cannot overcome these prior and constituting dimensions of social normativity’ (Butler 2016, 19), yet subjects often find agency in contact with and resistance to governmentality. What forms of agency and authority does UOL govern in its Southern partner institutions? What subjectivities are engendered amongst faculty and students when neoliberal governmentality operates across the colonial difference? These questions seek decolonial resonance in Rose’s call for governmentality research: r Fo What is to be destabilized, what we are to try to think beyond, are all those claims made by others to Pe govern us in the name of our own well-being, to speak for us, to identify our needs, to know us better than we know ourselves. (Rose 1999, 59) er UOL’s governing rationality projects a global and developmental need for its examinations. It Re also structures practices and subjectivities throughout UOL’s transnational education system, of which LIHE is a component. On Arterial inscription w Findings & Discussion vie UOL arranges partner institutions, lecturers, and students into an arterial topology using ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 differential inscriptions. Rose (1999, 37) sees inscription as ‘material techniques of thought that make possible the extension of authority over that which they seem to depict’. In neoliberal governmentality, inscription is a microtechnology that operates at a ‘capillary level of power’ (Foucault 1980, 39) to materialise connections between governing actor and subject. Cooper (1994, 1533) states that ‘power in colonial societies was more arterial than capillary— concentrated spatially and socially, not very nourishing beyond such domain’. Colonial URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 10 of 36 10 governmentality employs arterial power to inscribe subjects with disparate governing rationalities. Pesek (2011, 46-7) recommends that studies of governmentality within colonial contexts address this heterogeneity of subjectivities because in conceptualising capillary power, ‘Foucault is rather assuming that governmentality is characterised by the accomplishment of [a] single or at least a dominant political rationality’. This section will discuss the differential governing rationalities that UOL (n.d.-a) mobilises by inscribing students as ‘external’, r Fo classrooms as ‘local teaching centres’, and withholding inscription from lecturers altogether. UOL inscribes students as ‘external’ to dislocate education from the classroom. Students Pe enrol with UOL for its inscription, which signifies ‘recognition. Having a UOL degree is a pass for us to many jobs’ (STU8), leading some to believe that ‘the UOL degree I have is the only er thing that matters’ (ADF1). As typical in neoliberal higher education, ‘students do not pay to be Re taught a discipline by professionals who have proven expertise and subject knowledge based on professional criteria. Instead, students pay for the end product of education’ (Lorenz 2012, 622). vie Inscribing students as external suggests that LIHE and its lecturers are not a source of education, w but instead ‘a means to an end. We want the degree, but we have to put up with LIHE’ (STU4). On UOL’s end product is a distinctly colonial inscription, which resonated with many studentcustomers’ ‘colonial upbringing. We have a high regard for anything British’ (STU8). LIHE ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 brands itself accordingly, as evidenced during a graduation speech in which its top-level administrator explained that UOL’s colonial history with CUC contributes to LIHE’s prestige (NOTES). UOL (2014, 7) similarly justifies its ‘Worldwide’ interventions with British cosmopolitanism: ‘While our roots are in London, we have a national and global reach through our academic work and have a brand that is the envy of others’. This aspirational envy motivates students who UOL localises in a peripheral imaginary: ‘Wherever you are in the world, you can URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 11 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 11 gain a valued qualification’ by studying at a ‘local teaching institution’ dispersed throughout ‘every corner of the globe’ (University of London, n.d.-b). Ferguson and Gupta (2002, 988) note the irony that ‘the agents of localization were precisely those entities . . . that claim for themselves geographies and interests that are national and universal’. They therefore identify a ‘transnational governmentality’ through which spaces are ordered hierarchically through verticality and encompassment. A similar spatial inequality reinforces that ‘UOL is much bigger r Fo than LIHE could ever be. I think it’s a symbiotic relationship, but it’s one that certainly favours UOL more than LIHE’ (LEC2). The inscription of ‘external’ UOL students dislocates them from Pe their ‘local teaching centres’, marking them as recipients of British knowledge rather than participants in classroom education. er Students often felt dislocated from UOL despite their matriculation. Many expressed that Re since UOL ‘only deals with the study material and the exams, you definitely feel removed from UOL’ (STU1) and ‘very disconnected. We’re basically just a franchise, like McDonald’s’ vie (STU4). They ‘sometimes forget that I’m a UOL student’ (STU3), although many ‘would like to w be a UOL student. I don’t want to be an LIHE student’ (STU4). Despite their aspirations, UOL is On not ‘actually helping you in any way other than just giving you your certificate. You depend more on your LIHE lecturers than whatever material UOL gives you. You don’t really feel a part ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 of UOL’ (STU6). Students often saw UOL’s role as limited to inscribing certifications. When asked if they felt like a UOL or LIHE student, one responded, ‘neither. My goal is to just finish, get my qualification, and start working’ (STU7). Many felt distant from their education, even while regularly attending classes. UOL (2018, 9) inscribes ‘distance education’ upon students to establish that although they attend a ‘Teaching Centre’, their classrooms are not learning spaces, and their educators are not really educators. The inscription of distance arrogates educational URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 12 of 36 12 authority to UOL while obscuring that ‘the contact our lecturers and students have with UOL is just administrative, not academic’ (TLA). Distance is applied not as an educational model, but rather as a governing rationality that delegitimates lecturers and their classroom teaching. UOL (n.d.-c) regards faculty as ‘lecturers/teachers’ while inscribing them with no formal UOL affiliation. At LIHE, most worked without contracts due to a ‘legal issue’, according to one administrator. Despite their formal exclusion, most faculty saw themselves as UOL lecturers. r Fo When asked if they felt like a UOL lecturer, one responded, ‘I do, in the sense that I’m very familiar with the course material, the examiner commentary, what kind of ideological bent they Pe have towards certain subjects’ (LEC3). Another specified, ‘I’m part of UOL, which teaches in Sri Lanka . . . I would be comfortable saying I’m a lecturer for UOL International Programmes’ er (LEC2). Most faculty felt ‘not closely integrated with LIHE in any way. As a visiting lecturer, Re you usually come after hours. The office is closed. You do your lectures and go’ (LEC3). Rawolle, Rowlands, and Blackmore (2017) examine the neoliberalisation of Australian vie universities as a case study, concluding that contractualism erodes academic community. At w LIHE, informalisation posits lecturers as even more institutionally external. Without formal On contracts or recognition, the lecturers who educate UOL’s students are invisibilised at the periphery of its arterial topology. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 UOL’s arterial inscription gave many students and faculty the perception that their university is fragmented or absent. A university ‘is a community, whereas here, people do not know each other. They come for lectures and they go’, since ‘they have no facilities for them to stay’ and ‘no opportunity for lecturers to get professional advancement’ (TLA). Interviewees diverged in describing LIHE as a ‘university’ (STU8, LEC4), a ‘college’ (STU4, STU7), or a URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 13 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 13 ‘tuition’ provider (LEC3, TLA). Most interviewees had nonetheless expected a ‘real university experience’ from LIHE. One elaborated: I’ve heard a lot of my friends who I’ve studied with at LIHE, or even my students, refer to LIHE as ‘university’. They say, ‘I know him from uni. He was my lecturer at uni’. If you think of ‘university’ as a place where you got your degree, absolutely. (LEC4) r Fo LIHE sometimes appears as ‘just a tuition centre . . . because we don’t provide any of our own material when it comes to the education. We just take the material that’s been sent by London Pe School of Economics (LSE) and reproduce it for our students’ (ADF2). In Sri Lanka, ‘tuition’ er refers to private supplementary courses that typically use rote pedagogies to prepare grade- Re school students for examinations (Subedi 2018). Yet LIHE, the only place where students have contact with educators, is not supplementary. Thus, another administrator insisted, ‘we do not vie function as a tuition. We say that we are almost a university. The only difference is that we do not mark our own papers’ (ADF3). Characterised by their lack of authority, ‘colonial universities w both were and were not European universities; they aspired to be but were not quite’ (Mignolo On 2003, 99). LIHE ‘provides most of the elements of a university without being a university’, resembling ‘a vessel that’s occupied’ by UOL (LEC2). Faculty at the occupied university ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 educate UOL students without assessment authority or formal affiliation. UOL, the occupier, inscribes this education as its own to expropriate higher educational legitimacy. Colonial governmentality structures an arterial topology by selectively bestowing and withholding inscriptions. UOL’s (n.d.-a) partner institutions are delegitimated through their inscription as ‘local teaching centres’. This designation precludes research activity, cosmopolitan purpose, and university status, all of which UOL secures and markets as its own. It imparts that URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 14 of 36 14 ‘if the university is UOL, then LIHE must be not the university’ (LEC 4). A similar exclusion operates by withholding from students the inscription of LSE, who designs UOL’s business and social science programs and conducts their examinations. Instead of LSE degrees, students receive UOL degrees that read, ‘having registered with UOL and passed the approved examinations conducted by LSE’. LIHE advertises in newspapers its ‘academic direction of LSE’, and students often call themselves ‘LSE students’ (STU3, STU5, NOTES). Scott (1995, r Fo 197) observes that colonial governmentality delineates ‘whether or not and by what sign of difference power included or excluded portions of the native population’. UOL’s arterial Pe inscriptions demarcate inequalities between global university and ‘local teaching centre’, UOL faculty and informal ‘lecturer/teacher’, LSE student and ‘external’ UOL student. Another sign of er difference, ‘distance education’, displaces educational authority from the Southern classroom. Re These differential inscriptions exclude Southern educational spaces from the legitimacy associated with authorised lecturers at real universities. Annual examinations secure authority vie within British institutions at the interior of UOL’s arterial topology, far from LIHE. w The power of the single examination On UOL’s usurpation of authority renders Southern institutions and faculty incapable of educating ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 students, a deficit of expertise to be ameliorated by British examinations. UOL partner institutions like LIHE could therefore be included in what Aikman et al. (2016, 318) call ‘“deficit” groups’, which are populations that deficit discourses define by their need for Northern guidance. Escobar (1995, 37) challenges developmental conceptions that characterise the global South with deficiency, stressing that while expertise on Southern spaces has consolidated ‘new knowledge and capabilities, it also implied a further loss of autonomy and the blocking of URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 15 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 15 different modes of knowing’. UOL examinations maintain the primacy of British knowledge within colonised educational spaces. They constitute the numerical component of the ‘technologies of inscription and control through numbers, calculations, and accounts’ that typify colonial governmentality (Kalpagam, 2000a, 434). Raaper (2016) similarly investigates the standardisation of student assessment in a UK university as a technology of neoliberal governmentality. However, while numerous assessment regulations characterise the performative r Fo neoliberal governmentality of Northern educational spaces (Ball 2012), UOL governs partner institutions with a singular metric. Pe UOL programs at partner institutions consist of year-long courses assessed through a three-hour examination. Questions vary between short-answer, essay, and multiple choice. LSE er centrally marks examinations and conveys results through a single number without written Re feedback, indicating that they are governmentality mechanisms rather than pedagogical tools. This instrumentalises ‘the power of the single figure’ by reducing ‘the complexity of experience vie to a single comparable, quotable, calculable number’ (Rose 1999, 205). UOL examinations w motivate study behaviours, influence classroom pedagogies, delineate important from On unimportant knowledge, inform the hiring and evaluation of faculty, incentivise partner institutions by rewarding them with marketable metrics, and perform the minimum assessment ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 necessary to inscribe UOL’s legitimacy upon students (ADF1, ADF2, LEC4, NOTES). In addition to governing this range of conduct, UOL encourages particular forms of ‘counterconduct’, defined by Foucault as ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’ (Foucault 2007, 201). Odysseos (2011) adds that contemporary colonial governmentality often permits and redirects counter-conduct towards its own ends, which UOL does in multiple ways. URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 16 of 36 16 Studies at LIHE mostly involve analysing past examination papers obtained from UOL’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), a strategy known as ‘question-spotting’. The reason ‘most of the students question-spot’ (STU5) is that ‘the questions are very fixed. You can always predict questions’ (STU4). Students generally ‘find the pattern in the exam and target, because it’s best’ (STU6). In preparing lessons, lecturers ‘have already question-spotted for us. That’s how they teach you’ (STU4). They ‘teach purely for the exam’ (LEC4), directing ‘100 percent’ r Fo of classroom time to examinations (ADF3). In an eight-month course, ‘we do exam questions from October until April continuously’ (ADF1). UOL ostensibly discourages question-spotting, Pe which renders it counter-conduct and obscures its predominance. Simultaneously, UOL’s arterial topology invisibilises its lecturers and educational spaces, enabling the rote learning that makes er single-examination assessment feasible. By consistently rewarding question-spotting, UOL Re examinations govern counter-conduct to align classroom teaching with British knowledge. While UOL examinations encourage question-spotting as sanctioned counter-conduct, vie they unequivocally discourage critical pedagogies. Learning beyond question-spotting is contrary w to UOL’s governmentality because ‘students who conform really closely to the subject guide, On who don’t read anything else [and] students who’ve gone above and beyond, always reading outside the subject guide . . . both sets can do quite well or quite badly’ (LEC2). Students often ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 objected when lecturers taught beyond examination material, in which case they ‘leave out what lecturers teach me, and I study according to the papers’ (STU4). When a lecturer asked students to write a research paper, one student felt that ‘we are not supposed to do it. It doesn’t affect our exams’ (STU6). Another lecturer taught critical thinking through a rigorous examination-writing method to earn marks of ‘seventy-plus, that so-called “critical awareness space”’ (LEC2). They worried, however, that this neglected ‘how much curiosity you have, the will to ask the right URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 17 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 17 questions. It’s very hard to measure that. How are you going to do that with one exam?’ One student was also unsatisfied by this reduction of critical thought to examination writing, recounting that in class, ‘if you don’t fit into that structure, you get deeply criticised for it. That obviously affects you mentally’ (STU6). Many interviewees said that the quality and breadth of their education had been compromised by examinations because ‘you’re not asked to learn or explore. It’s just a tuition class where a teacher is a transmitter and you’re just a receiver . . . It’s r Fo like a master-slave sort of thing. You have to obey’ (STU4). Some interviewees reflected that UOL examinations denied them a ‘holistic education’ (STU3) or liberal arts education ‘to Pe cultivate a full human being’ (LEC4). Sidhu (2007, 220) cautions that in transnational education, ‘casual teaching staff will be stymied in facilitating the higher order critical thinking skills er associated with university-level study’. UOL examinations enact banking education on a global Re scale by projecting ignorance onto Southern educational spaces, which renders critical learning and teaching as counter-conduct (see Freire 1997). UOL regards students and lecturers as vie recipients of knowledge, not creators. With one governmentality mechanism, UOL dislocates w three pedagogical processes: designing curricula, assessing students, and encouraging critical engagement. On Nearly all interviewees saw LIHE faculty as experts despite UOL’s denial of their ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 pedagogical authority. Lecturers are ‘very highly qualified alumni, the ones who got firsts and did masters’ abroad’ (LEC3). Faculty ‘work at different institutions’, most commonly nongovernmental organisations, intergovernmental organisations, and business process firms (ADF2). Amongst law lecturers, ‘almost every one of them practices law, so they are experts in their fields,’ with some alumni and lecturers working in the Supreme Court (ADF3). Students commonly cited lecturer expertise as a decisive factor in choosing LIHE. UOL capitalises on URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 18 of 36 18 Southern expertise while disregarding its value beyond examination preparation. One lecturer sidelined their own perspective they had developed while completing an MPhil at Oxford: ‘I wouldn’t bring that into this. I would teach the one that’s in the subject guide, because that’s what the students are going to be assessed on’ (LEC3). In neoliberal education, ‘teachers’ capacity to make autonomous judgment about curriculum and pedagogy in the interests of their actual pupils is undermined by the system of remote control’ (Connell 2013, 108). UOL’s control r Fo across the colonial difference empties expertise from Southern faculty. Most interviewees criticised UOL’s Eurocentrism. In South Asia, British education Pe institutions have long employed colonial governmentality to orient educators and students towards Western epistemologies (Shani 2006). British rule permeated Sri Lanka with colonial er governmentality to establish ‘a public sphere in which only certain kinds of knowledges and not Re others could circulate with any efficacy’ (Scott 1995, 209). Likewise, UOL’s modules are ‘only focused towards the West and Europe’ (STU9), actualising a ‘very masculine, white, Eurocentric vie approach’ (LEC2) that regards Sri Lanka as ‘not even a speck on the map’ (STU3). One student w saw UOL examinations as ‘very European-centred. To get the mark, you could mention Sri On Lanka, but you had to first mention a European country’ (STU6). For another group of students, curricular Eurocentrism was ‘the first thing we talked about in our first year at LIHE’ (STU1). ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Some gave justifications from colonial history: ‘Sri Lankan law is based on UK law, so ultimately you’re teaching some [Sri Lankan law] as well, but not directly’ (ADF3). Many, however, were unsettled by UOL’s colonial dynamics: If you are in a system of power where British education is well-regarded, it becomes almost silly to resist from a pragmatic sense. In a principled sense, this is not great. Many decades after colonialism, URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 19 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 19 you’re still looking to a British-centric system of education . . . They still don’t really acknowledge colonialism . . . As a postcolonial state, that is not ideal. (LEC3) In UOL subject guides, ‘the Eurocentrism is there. Sometimes you read it and you’re like, “but we don’t feel that way”’ (STU5). One UOL subject guide introduces international development by stating that ‘the ideas featured here predominantly originated within Western traditions of r Fo thought. We make no apology for this’ (Forsyth et al. 2011, 19). In response, a student suggested that UOL include non-Western theorists like Sun Tzu, since ‘you can’t understand an Eastern country through the same framework’ of European thought (STU3). Eurocentric curricula Pe reproduce what Gamage (2016, 10) calls the ‘captive mind’ of internalised colonial oppression, er which necessitates in South Asia ‘an indigenous Sociology—or for that matter Social Sciences— Re that enable us to comprehend our own problems and [devise] solutions’. This effort is impeded by UOL’s colonial governmentality. vie Almost all interviewees desired other forms of assessment. Many saw UOL examinations w as ‘cruel’ (LEC2) and ‘psychologically’ (LEC1) strenuous, causing ‘a lot of crying’. Students grew ‘stressed out and depressed’ because one examination ‘will decide your future. It’s not fair On . . . The system needs to be changed’ (STU8). For one student, not having ‘assignment-based ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 assessment is the one regret I have with UOL, 100 percent. I regret even joining UOL’ (STU4). Another student who took loans to move to Sri Lanka and study at LIHE said that if they had known about UOL’s single-examination assessment, ‘I would have stayed back home and just paid UOL and not gone to lectures, done self-study’ (STU9). Lecturers also wished UOL was ‘less marks-oriented’ because ‘students aren’t focused about learning the subject’ (LEC4). Other forms of assessment such as ‘assignments and a project would . . . give you a good understanding of the whole theory’ (STU4), enable ‘a more personal connection’ with lecturers (LEC1), help URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 20 of 36 20 students ‘learn to write papers’ (LEC3), and UOL education ‘would definitely be less Eurocentric’ (STU1). Additionally, ‘if there was constant grading and papers handed in, like you would have at a normal university, they would have an incentive to study throughout the year’ (LEC4). LIHE, as an abnormal university, is governed away from such pedagogical diversity. UOL continues its single-examination assessment despite nearly a century of calls for alternatives. The CUC Administration Report of 1927-1928 criticised that UOL examinations r Fo served to ‘stifle initiative and originality in the student’, causing a ‘bias in the curricula that resulted in the retardation of the indigenous languages and scientific development in the country’ Pe (Warnapala 2011, 42-61). The principal of CUC expressed concern that in regard to economics and history, UOL ‘examinations naturally do not, nor are they ever likely to include any er reference to local history, conditions, or circumstances in either subject’ (57). Students saw CUC Re ‘as a mere coaching institution where students purchased instruction’ on UOL examinations (47). In 2011, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education found that UOL examinations vie involved ‘little formative function’, regarding which many students had ‘commented w unfavourably’ (18). More recently, LIHE requested from UOL that LIHE lecturers assess On students, ‘but they said no because it is their exams. Their examiners are doing it. What they expect is only that we conduct their lectures’ (TLA). UOL continues its extensive colonial history of dispossessing authority from Southern faculty. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 UOL examinations dilute classroom teaching and make attendance unnecessary. Students frequently disclosed that ‘my close friends and I haven’t gone for lectures in months’ (STU1), or ‘I’ve gone for zero lectures this year. I went for only one lecture last year’ (STU4) because ‘there is no need to go to LIHE’ (STU9). During a faculty meeting, a top-level LIHE administrator blamed low attendance on their lack of assessment authority and ‘ownership’ of the students URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 21 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 21 (NOTES). Another administrator said many students ‘drop out’, meaning ‘they’re still enrolled at LIHE, but they don’t end up going for lectures and they do it by themselves’ (ADF1). Some lecturers encouraged this practice: ‘I start every class, every year, by saying this is a self-study program’ (LEC4). UOL requires that partner institutions report students with attendance lower than 80 percent, which would disqualify them from examinations. However, LIHE administrators report almost no students because ‘it was not really 80 percent we looked at. r Fo Something really bad, like maybe 20 percent attendance’ would be reported to UOL (ADF2). Their counter-conduct was justified because students ‘spend a lot on their education, and it’s not Pe fair for them to be removed’. By limiting attendance reporting requirements to students below a threshold, UOL divests itself of responsibility for the disintegration of classroom learning that er results from its retention of assessment authority. Like question-spotting, the underreporting of Re low attendance is counter-conduct that UOL invisibilises to legitimate its education. UOL examinations distil Sri Lankan academic expertise into British examination vie expertise. Lecturers become ‘experts in making sure you get through’ (STU6) whose ‘job is w more like filtering these materials’ according to importance for examinations (LEC2). LIHE’s On encompassment by broader circulations of examination expertise imperils its profitability, particularly when lecturers provide individual tuition classes. One interviewee discussed a friend ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 who ‘had to sell land to pay UOL, LIHE, and a tuition class’ taught by an LIHE lecturer (STU8). During a faculty meeting, a top-level administrator described tuition classes as the ‘curse’ of Sri Lanka and asked lecturers to identify their tuition-providing colleagues (NOTES). Their frustration reflected UOL’s decoupling of assessment authority and expertise from institutions and lecturers, which threatens LIHE’s purpose entirely. UOL transmutes higher education into examination expertise, a numerable and extractable resource. URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 22 of 36 22 Extracting authority Single-examination assessment enables UOL to accumulate expertise through an extractive relationship with Southern spaces. Many faculty saw UOL as a ‘heavily-marketed and profitoriented . . . revenue-making venture’ (LEC4). At faculty meetings, LIHE administrators often criticised UOL’s commercial business model and capture of LIHE’s revenue (NOTES). r Fo Alongside fees from students and partner institutions, UOL extracts intangible resources like knowledge, legitimacy, and expertise that maintain its global authority. Mignolo (2003, 97-110) Pe situates the ‘corporate university’ within the colonisation of knowledge production, arguing that ‘the accumulation of money cannot be detached from the institutional accumulation of meaning er and knowledge at the university . . . “epistemic dependency” runs parallel to economic Re dependency’. The authority to produce knowledge is secured within Northern institutions, structuring epistemic inequalities that rationalise Western ‘technical expertise and universalist vie discourses of education and technology transfer’ (Appadurai 2001, 24). Accordingly, this section w traces the extraction of authority from subjectivities at the periphery of UOL’s ecology of On expertise into its calculative centre, where it is appropriated as the coloniser’s universalist knowledge. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Just as ‘neoliberalism is experienced and perceived in the classroom and in the soul’ (Ball and Olmedo 2013, 90), faculty often internalised the diminishment of their expertise. Some extended their loss of assessment authority to other pedagogical areas: ‘If you’re trying to do right by your students, if you have no control over the exam, I don’t feel like you should be messing around too much with what you’re teaching’ (LEC3). They responsibilised themselves, rather than British colonial education, for reproducing a culture of rote learning: URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 23 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 23 I always go on the principle that lecturers should be unimportant. I tell my students all the time, especially . . . before the exam: If this is not useful for you . . . stop coming for class, don’t waste your time. I think it’s just an unfortunate fact of how teaching happens in Sri Lanka in primary and secondary school. Lecturers become very important here simply because students are not used to working without guidance. You have to deal with that kind of socialisation, cultural aspect of it. (LEC3) r Fo Lecturers often saw themselves in terms worse than a necessary evil: as an expendable one. Their Pe expendability was underscored in a meeting between UOL representatives and LIHE lecturers er about a project to overhaul and expand the VLE. The representatives warned that lecturers ‘cannot do the same things as they have before’. Lecturers would now merely ‘add value’ to Re VLE content through its ‘localisation’ (NOTES). One interviewee recalled that while the UOL vie representative assured lecturers that their jobs were safe, they ‘gave a little wry smile, didn’t they? That bastard’ (LEC4). Another observed that ‘they’re pushing out the institutions and their w lecturers. Institutions are kind of pushing back, but I don’t know how much you can. At the end On of the day, the power is completely with UOL’ (ADF1). A top-level administrator similarly reported that when UOL visits LIHE, ‘there is no point in dialoguing with them’ because ‘we are ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 helpless, we are not the authority’ (TLA). LIHE faculty experienced UOL’s dispossession of their authority as profound disempowerment. By expropriating faculty authority, UOL augments its claim to expertise. For some students, LIHE’s lack of assessment authority indicated a lower quality education and produced ‘this lingering feeling that you get: Is my course as good as a course that LSE teaches?’ (STU5). They questioned whether they were ‘as good as the students who are studying with universities’, URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 24 of 36 24 meaning real universities. Their ‘insecurity’ stemmed from a lack of ‘contact with the professors’, meaning professors vested with pedagogical authority. Some wanted to be taught by British ‘lecturers who have written the books’ (STU9) because the ‘study guide authors . . . probably know the background better. It would be directly from them, so much better’ (STU2). Similarly, one lecturer reasoned: r Fo Since they have the right to set the guide, set the standards, set the requirements, then the corresponding obligation seems that they ought to mark it. They have the best grasp of it. There’s the advantage of aggregation, the fact that these people have access to so many papers. I might have only Pe two or three students sometimes, whereas these guys might have a full list of hundreds, if not er thousands, of students. (LEC2) Re Authority is established not through the education of students, but rather through the vie accumulation of inscriptions. UOL expropriates the authority generated through assessment by relegating its uninscribed lecturers to an external, extractive domain of governance. Connell w (2018, 3) indicates that ‘the global South is as vital a source of raw materials for the knowledge On economy as it is for the material economy. It yields data’ that is aggregated in Northern institutions. This means ‘intellectual workers in the global periphery are pushed towards a ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 particular cultural and intellectual stance’. UOL’s extractive ecology of expertise secures epistemic and practical authority within British institutions, governing Southern faculty to align their teaching with European ways of knowing. UOL’s encompassment and inscription of Southern educational spaces reproduces the universality of its expertise. Rose understands inscription to be essential to the establishment of ‘centers of calculation’: URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 25 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 25 Events must be inscribed in standardized forms, the inscriptions must be transported from far and wide and accumulated in a central locale, where they can be aggregated, compared, compiled and the subject of calculation. Through the development of such complex relays of inscription and accumulation, new conduits of power are brought into being between those who wish to exercise power and those over whom they wish to exercise it. (Rose 1999, 211) r Fo The inscription of examination results constitutes the currency that circulates UOL’s ‘economy of merit and fault’ (Foucault 2007, 173) and enriches its calculative centre. UOL is one of many Pe Northern institutions that govern Southern education by creating ‘an illusion of research and er intellectual reasoning through their multitude of data from different sources’ (Dahlstrom 2009, 169). Numbers and capital often define the objectives of Northern interventions upon Southern Re education, resulting in a ‘neoliberal superficiality’ that overrides ‘individual and institutional vie needs for narrative space and agency to be able to interpret what is happening beyond the surface’ (170). UOL reduces higher education to a single numerical inscription and governs w faculty according to ‘UOL’s requirements of form over substance’ (LEC2). Kalpagam (2000b, On 44-7) posits that in colonial governmentality, ‘statistical narratives render both Western sciences and these practices universal’, and therefore represent ‘the most important language in the ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 narrative legitimation of modernity, that is, for telling stories about progress, of accumulation of wealth, control of nature, the wellbeing of humanity’. Although its role is ‘just administrative, not academic’ (TLA), UOL brands itself as an education provider to disguise its extraction as developmental benevolence. LIHE’s top-level administrator thus described UOL: URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 26 of 36 26 without using the word ‘colonial’, but it has those characteristics, yes. They are the academic authorities. Well, it’s more than an academic authority. It is not only a regulator. They are running their own program here. We just have to deliver the program, that’s all. (TLA) UOL accumulates its universalist expertise through an extractive occupation of Southern institutions like LIHE. It empties these spaces of the agency and authority required to produce original knowledge, which rationalises its colonial intervention. r Fo Conclusion Pe Despite frequent feelings of disempowerment, LIHE students and faculty engaged in multiple er practices of counter-conduct against UOL’s colonial governmentality. Many challenged UOL’s Re educational authority by expounding numerous critiques of UOL examinations and engaging with knowledge beyond their Eurocentric subject guides. Interviewees often rejected UOL’s vie arterial inscriptions like ‘Teaching Centre’ and ‘distance learning’ by calling LIHE a university, regarding lecturers as faculty, and locating higher education within the classroom. The struggle w over epistemic authority takes place in educational spaces governed by inscriptive and extractive On technologies that render students and educators as unauthorised, inauthentic, and subordinate. The evacuation of epistemic authority engenders subjectivities of precarity and resistance. Butler ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 (2016, 18-22) understands vulnerability as ‘a deliberate exposure to power’ in which the subject makes themselves ‘vulnerable to a certain name-calling from the start’ with the intention of resisting that same definitory power. Governmentality studies hold promise for grounded analyses of ‘the way vulnerability enters agency’ and the resultant tensions between subject and power, resistance and dependency (25). Research in international education should further investigate the technologies, practices, and discourses of transnational governmentality that often URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 27 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 27 include yet marginalise Southern students and faculty. Such research could attend to the agentic politics that are contested when subjects seek arterial inscriptions to access power, thereby enabling resistance to epistemic dependency through counter-conduct, counternarratives, and critiques. LIHE instantiates a dispossession of educational authority that has been vital to the modern/colonial project of centring and universalising Western epistemology. UOL’s colonial r Fo governmentality reflects the ongoing significance of Stein’s (2017, S28) postulation that ‘modern Western universities were not autonomously formed in Europe and then simply exported to Pe colonies; rather, conquest and enslavement were integral to the formation and growth of these institutions in both locales’. Through these extractive relationships, Northern universities er maintain the dominance of modern Western epistemology, which ‘is oriented toward the pursuit Re of universal reason and totalizing accounts of reality, and treats knowledge production, accumulation, and mastery as a means of describing/containing the world in order to vie control/determine it’ (S41). UOL secures its universalist expertise by inscribing and w encompassing Southern educational spaces as its external yet governable domain in which it On takes no educational role. Its governmentality obstructs the pedagogical processes through which students and faculty could produce original and critical knowledge. UOL thus exemplifies ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Mignolo’s (2002, 81-2) theory of ‘coloniality as constitutive of modernity . . . not only is such a historico-structural dependency economic or political; above all, it is epistemic’. UOL’s universalist expertise is constituted by the extraction of epistemic authority. Southern universities are governed as ‘colonial surrogates . . . [in] that critical scholars, scientists, and intellectuals trained in the universities of colonial, third world, or emerging countries will not fail to recognize their position vis-à-vis Western universities’ (Mignolo 2003, 99). UOL’s arterial URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 28 of 36 28 inscription and arrogation of assessment authority reproduce its colonial claims to epistemic and institutional superiority. By marginalising students and faculty, colonial and neoliberal governmentalities may diminish the capabilities of Southern higher educational spaces to empower democratic subjects. In many Northern universities, subjects are dismembered by the multiplicitous functions that neoliberal governmentality demands from higher education (Shore, 2010). Conversely, UOL’s r Fo colonial governmentality ascribes little value to partner institutions and faculty, leading many interviewees to doubt whether there is any university at all. In Northern universities, the Pe ‘increased use of casual academic labor . . . and neoliberal governance erodes research-faculty control over curriculums, degrees, and major requirements, the last force within public er universities potentially sustaining the ideal of the well-educated citizen’ (Brown 2015, 194). Re UOL’s colonial governance effaces faculty authority entirely, dispossessing Southern universities of their role in developing critically-minded citizens. At LIHE, students do not vie ‘know what the university community is because they have never experienced that. They can’t w even expect it because they don’t know what it is’, since they would ‘have to know what is On beyond only the tutors’ (TLA). Colonial and neoliberal governmentalities converge upon the democratic subject to uproot its constitutive practices: ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Why would peoples want or seek democracy in the absence of even its vaporous liberal democratic instantiation? And what in dedemocratized subjects and subjectivities would yearn for this political regime, a yearning that is neither primordial nor cultured by this historical condition? (Brown 2015, 18) URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 29 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 29 By governing its students and lecturers as external, UOL excludes them from the university as a democratic space in which demands could be formulated and change could be effected. Research on governmentality should consider its colonial dimensions, and particularly the subjectivities shaped by arterial power. Neoliberal development introduces new articulations of universalist expertise to the epistemic dependency that has been instrumentalised by colonial governmentality for centuries. Transnational education institutions inscribe gradations of r Fo inclusion throughout global networks of legitimacy, delineating an arterial ecology of expertise. At this topology’s extractive periphery, subjectivities may reflect the liminality experienced Pe within coloniality (Bhabha 2004) and the poverty of knowledge projected by developmental schema (Escobar 1995). UOL’s colonial governmentality instils within ‘external’ students that er their lecturers are not quite lecturers because they cannot conduct assessment, and that their Re university is not quite a university because it cannot govern itself. This suggests that Northern governing actors sometimes secure their authority and legitimate their interventions by inscribing vie deficiency and incompleteness onto Southern subjectivities. Further studies should explore w governmentality, conduct and counter-conduct at sites like LIHE to situate the neoliberal On knowledge economy within colonial projects of epistemic extraction. Acknowledgements ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Murat Oztok, for his support throughout this research, and particularly with interview methodology. I would also like to thank Florita Gunasekara and Kyle Kopsick for insightful theoretical discussions on this case study. References URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 30 of 36 30 Aikman, Sheila, Anna Robinson-Pant, Simon McGrath, Catherine M. Jere, Ian Cheffy, Spyros Themelis and Alan Rogers. (2016). “Challenging Deficit Discourses in International Education and Development.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 46 (2), 314-334. doi:10.1080/03057925.2016.1134954 Appadurai, Arjun. 2001. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Environment & Urbanization 13 (2), 23-44. doi:10.1177/095624780101300203 r Fo Ball, Stephen J. 2012. “Performativity, Commodification, and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University.” British Journal of Educational Studies 60 (1), 17-28. Pe doi:10.1080/00071005.2011.650940 Ball, Stephen J., and Antonio Olmedo. 2013. “Care of the Self, Resistance and Subjectivity er Under Neoliberal Governmentalities.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (1), 85-96. Re doi:10.1080/17508487.2013.740678 Baltodano, Marta. 2012. “Neoliberalism and the Demise of Public Education: The vie Corporatization of Schools of Education.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in w Education 25 (4), 487-507. doi:10.1080/09518398.2012.673025 On Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. Oxon: Routledge. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Zone. Butler, Judith. 2016. “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 12-27. Durham: Duke. Chandrasiri, Sunil. 2003. “Financing of University Education in Sri Lanka.” Higher Education 45, 91-108. doi:10.1023/A:1021296210946 URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 31 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 31 Connell, Raewyn. 2013. “The Neoliberal Cascade and Education: An Essay on the Market Agenda and its Consequences.” Critical Studies in Education 54 (2), 99-112. doi:10.1080/17508487.2013.776990 Connell, Raewyn. 2018. “Intellectuals and the Global South.” Social Affairs 1 (9), 1-13. Cooper, Frederick. 1994. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History.” American Historical Review 99 (5), 1516-45. doi:10.2307/2168387 r Fo Coperehewa, S. 2011. “Colonialism and Problems of Language Policy: Formulation of a Colonial Language Policy in Sri Lanka.” Sri Lanka Journal of Advanced Social Studies 1 (1), 27-52. Pe Cortina, Regina, Linda Martin Alcoff, Abadio Green Stocel and Gustavo Esteva. 2019. er “Decolonial Trends in Higher education: Voices from Latin America.” Compare: A Re Journal of Comparative and International Education 49 (3), 489-506. doi:10.1080/03057925.2019.1579520 vie Dahlstrom, Lars. 2009. “Education in a Post-Neoliberal Era: A Promising Future for the Global w South?” Power and Education 1 (2), 167-77. doi:10.2304/power.2009.1.2.167 On Department of Census and Statistics. 2016. Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Colombo: Ministry of National Policies and Economic Affairs. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 De Lissovoy, Noah. 2017. “Pedagogy of the Anxious: Rethinking Critical Pedagogy in the Context of Neoliberal Autonomy and Responsibilization.” Journal of Education Policy 33 (2), 187-205. doi:10.1080/02680939.2017.1352031 de Silva, Kingsley M. 2005. A History of Sri Lanka. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 32 of 36 32 Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnology 29 (4), 981-1002. doi:10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981 Fielden, John, and N. V. Varghese. 2009. “Regulatory Issues.” In A New Dynamic: Private Higher Education, edited by Svava Bjarnason, Kai-Ming Cheng, John Fielden, MariaJose Lemaitre, Daniel Levy, and N. V. Varghese, 71-89. Paris: UNESCO. r Fo Fimyar, Olena. 2008. “Using Governmentality as a Conceptual Tool in Education Policy Research.” In “Kaleidoscope,” special issue, Educate, 3-18. Pe Forsyth, Tim, Elliott Green, and Jon Lunn. 2011. Introduction to International Development. London: University of London. er Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Re Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, territory, population. New York: Picador. Freire, Paulo. 1997. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Penguin. vie Gamage, Siri. 2016. “Academic Dependency on Western Disciplinary Knowledge and Captive w Mind Among South Asian Sociologists: A Critique.” Social Affairs 1 (5), 1-12. On Giroux, Henry A., Colin Lankshear., Peter McLaren, and Michael Peters, eds. 1996. Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York: Routledge. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Kalpagam, Uma. 2000a. “Colonial Governmentality and the ‘Economy.’” Economy and Society 29 (3), 418-38. doi:10.1080/03085140050084598 Kalpagam, Uma. 2000b. “The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge.” History of the Human Sciences 13 (2), 37-55. doi:10.1177/09526950022120665 URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 33 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 33 Lewis, Diane. 1973. “Anthropology and Colonialism.” Current Anthropology 14 (5), 581-602. doi:10.1086/201393 Liyanage, I. M. Kamala. 2014. Education System of Sri Lanka: Strengths and Weaknesses. http://www.ide.go.jp/library/Japanese/Publish/Download/Report/2013/pdf/C02_ch7.pdf Lönnqvist, Antti, Harri Laihonen, Yuzhuo Cai, and Kirsi Hasanen. 2018. “Re-framing Education Export from the Perspective of Intellectual Capital Transfer.” Journal of Studies in r Fo International Education 22 (4), 1-16. doi:10.1177/1028315318773141 Lorenz, Chris. 2012. “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You Under Surveillance? Universities, Pe Neoliberalism, and New Public Management.” Critical Inquiry 38 (3), 599-629. doi:10.1086/664553 er Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” South Re Atlantic Quarterly 101 (1), 57-96. doi:10.1215/00382876-101-1-57 Mignolo, Walter. 2003. “Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowledge: The Role of the vie Humanities in the Corporate University.” Nepantla: Views from South 4 (1), 97-119. w Mullings, Beverley. 1999. “Insider or Outsider, Both or Neither: Some Dilemmas of On Interviewing in a Cross-Cultural Setting.” Geoforum 30, 337-50. doi:10.1016/S00167185(99)00025-1 ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Odysseos, Louiza. 2011. “Governing Dissent in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve: ‘Development,’ Governmentality, and Subjectification Amongst Botswana's Bushmen.” Globalizations 8 (4), 439-55. doi:10.1080/14747731.2011.585845 Olssen, Mark, and Michael A. Peters. 2005. “Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism.” Journal of Education Policy 20 (3), 313-45. doi:10.1080/02680930500108718 URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 34 of 36 34 Ong, Aihwa. 2008. “Scales of Exception: Experiments With Knowledge and Sheer Life in Tropical Southeast Asia.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29 (2) 117-29. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00323.x Pesek, Michael. 2011. “Foucault Hardly Came to Africa: Some Notes on Colonial and PostColonial Governmentality.” Comparativ 21, 41-59. Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. 2011. Audit of Overseas Provision: University r Fo of London International Programmes and the Singapore Institute of Management. http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/University-of-London-International- Pe Programmes-and-the-Singapore-Institute-of-Management-AOP-11.pdf Raaper, Rille. 2016. “Academic Perceptions of Higher Education Assessment Processes in er Neoliberal Academia.” Critical Studies in Education 57 (2), 175-90. Re doi:10.1080/17508487.2015.1019901 Rawolle, Shaun, Julie Rowlands, and Jill Blackmore. 2017. “The Implications of Contractualism vie for the Responsibilization of Higher Education.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural w Politics of Education 38 (1), 109-22. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1104856 On Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Scott, David. 1995. “Colonial Governmentality.” Social Text 43, 191-220. doi:10.1002/9780470775875.ch1 Shani, Giorgio. 2006. “Empire, Liberalism and the Rule of Colonial Difference: Colonial Governmentality in South Asia.” Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies 5, 19-36. URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Page 35 of 36 Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 35 Shore, Cris. 2008. “Audit Culture and Illiberal Governance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8 (3), 278-98. doi:10.1177/1463499608093815 Sidhu, Ravinder. 2007. “GATS and the New Developmentalism: Governing Transnational Education.” Comparative Education Review 51 (2), 203-27. doi:10.1086/512020 Sidhu, Ravinder, Francis Collins, Nicolas Lewis, and Brenda Yeoh. 2016. “Governmental Assemblages of Internationalising Universities: Mediating Circulation and Containment r Fo in East Asia.” Environment and Planning 48 (8), 1493-513. doi:10.1177/0308518X16644255 Pe Stein, Sharon. 2017. “The Persistent Challenges of Addressing Epistemic Dominance in Higher Education: Considering the Case of Curriculum Internationalization.” Comparative er Education Review 61 (S1), S25-S50. doi:10.1086/690456 Re Subedi, Khim R. 2018. “Shadow Education: A Role of Private Tutoring in Learning.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (2), 29-42. vie University of London. n.d.-a. Choosing a Teaching Centre. Accessed July 15 2019. w https://london.ac.uk/ways-study/study-a-local-teaching-centre/choosing-a-teaching-centre On University of London. n.d.-b. Our Global Reputation. Accessed July 15 2019. https://london.ac.uk/about-us/our-global-reputation ly 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 University of London. n.d.-c. Teaching Centre Recognition Framework. Accessed July 15 2019. https://london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/governance/TCRF-criteria.pdf University of London. 2014. Strategy 2014-2019. https://london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/governance/University-of-London-Strategy-201419.pdf URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education Page 36 of 36 36 University of London. 2018. Financial statements 2017-18. https://london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/governance/UoL-Financial-Statements-2018.pdf Warnapala, Wiswa. 2011. The Making of the System of Higher Education in Sri Lanka: An Evaluative Study. Colombo: Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited. r Fo er Pe w vie Re ly On 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 URL: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccom