Imanol Ordorika Sacristán

When University World News published the commentary by Philip G Altbach, Hans de Wit and Chris Glass, “Not all aspects of shift in HE world order are positive”, as a top story, it captured an anxiety that is palpable across parts of the North Atlantic academy. The piece frames today’s rebalancing of global higher education as a source of “turmoil”, implicitly measuring change against benchmarks long set by Anglophone and European systems.

That worry is understandable, but it is also a soft-colonial reflex that universalises Western standards while casting alternative centres of knowledge as potential risks. A healthier response is to provincialise those standards, name coercion wherever it emerges and design cooperative architectures fit for a genuinely multipolar world.

Consider the worldview implicit in Altbach, De Wit and Glass’s argument. For decades, rankings, citation metrics and English as lingua franca structured visibility and status, privileging institutions already embedded in Euro-Atlantic circuits. The current shift – especially the rise of Asian research systems – upends that cartography.

Yet if we treat historic Western centrality as the normative baseline of “quality”, we are bound to misread pluralisation as decline. As Futao Huang argues in his response, the way forward is to move beyond Cold War binaries and to build cooperation based on diversity and mutual learning rather than on civilisational sorting. That means shedding the reflex that equates Western hubs with neutrality and everyone else with threat.

The old universalism was never neutral

Two conceptual tools can help reframe the debate. First, Simon Marginson’s recent work situates global higher education at the crossroads of common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation, arguing that the rules of the game – from mobility to evaluation – carry the imprint of hegemonic power and must be re-imagined for a post-unipolar era.

Second, we can map how market instruments – rankings, competitive funding, audit cultures – have been fused with identity-driven state coercion (funding conditionalities, accreditation redesign and speech policing) into what I call a new ideological-punitive stage (forthcoming).

The first step is acknowledging that the old universalism was never neutral; the second is recognising that today’s coercive turn is not confined to ‘elsewhere’ – it is spreading across North and South alike.

The Western-centred lens persists even where Altbach and De Wit themselves have previously acknowledged structural dominance by Anglophone and European systems and persistent inequalities in internationalisation. Those recognitions are crucial, but the University World News commentary falls back on arguments of “standards” and “risk” that leave the infrastructures of advantage (English, rankings, auditability) intact.

If the only knowledge that counts is the kind legible to Anglophone metrics, the field will continue to confuse legibility with quality and auditability with excellence, a confusion that has long reproduced centre-periphery hierarchies.

Naming coercion everywhere

There is also a politics we must not euphemise. The past four decades of market managerialism normalised competition and metrics as the universal language of performance. In many systems, this softened the ground for a harsher, identity-assertive state that now deploys punitive repertoires – from selective defunding to curricular surveillance – to discipline institutions and scholars.

This is not a pathology that is exclusive to “authoritarian others”. It is visible across multiple regions, including in well-established Western democracies, where culture-war scripts and funding levers are increasingly used to reshape curricula, muzzle protest and recast peer review as loyalty testing.

To defend academic freedom credibly, we must name coercion everywhere, not just on the far side of our geopolitical preferences.

Towards multiple literacies

What, then, should a post-soft-colonial agenda look like? First, we must provincialise Western templates. Treat rankings and citation regimes as historically situated – not natural law. Diversify validity claims beyond what is instantly countable in English-language databases. Excellence needs multiple literacies: methodological rigour and public value in languages and formats that global metrics currently discount.

Second, we need to rebuild cooperation on plural architectures. Huang’s call to abandon Cold War binaries is a practical design brief: invest in South-South research circuits, multilingual knowledge platforms and reciprocity rules that prevent any single hub – Western or otherwise – from monopolising agenda-setting.

Third, we must hard-wire protections against the ideological-punitive turn. If the ideological-punitive stage marries metrics with coercion, the antidote is to insulate peer review, collegial governance and institutional autonomy from ministerial and partisan interference through funding compacts, accreditation firewalls and due-process standards that are portable across borders.

Finally, we need to repoliticise the university as a common good. Depoliticisation was the conceit of the audit era; it treated governance as a technical matter of metrics and incentives. But internationalisation is never neutral – it allocates prestige, resources and voice. Reclaiming the university’s state-building and public-mission roles requires articulating how research, teaching and outreach produce common goods that markets cannot.

The debate stirred by Altbach, De Wit and Glass is an opportunity – if we resist the gravitational pull of soft colonialism. A multipolar world will inevitably redistribute voice and visibility. Our task is to ensure that redistribution strengthens, rather than fragments, the global commons of knowledge.

That means decentring Western yardsticks; exposing coercion, including at home; and designing plural, protected infrastructures for collaboration.

We can do better. University World News has already hosted voices urging us to move beyond Cold War framings and to reimagine cooperation for an era in which Asia and the Global South are not “exceptions” to be managed, but partners shaping the rules. Let’s take that invitation seriously and write the next chapter – together, and on new terms.

Imanol Ordorika is professor of social sciences and education at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He has worked and published extensively on higher education politics, international trends, policies and governance, among other topics.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.