| Summary: | ‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’ That vivid opening to David Lodge’s Changing Places captures how globalization has reached the modern university. We saw in Chapter Four that only 28 per cent of British academics are defined as ‘sedentary’ having never worked abroad. 50 per cent have worked abroad for up to two years. The rest have migrated, moving away for more than two years or coming back after such a long stay abroad. We have fewer sedentary academics than any comparable country, apart from Canada which has an open border with the US. Thirty-six per cent of German researchers are sedentary—and 52 per cent of Italians. Half of research papers by British academics are now co-authored with someone overseas and they are more likely to be cited. David Lodge’s two professors were travelling back to the future: in the Middle Ages Europe’s universities formed a highly integrated international system. The structure of the medieval disciplines was the same across Europe and so were the key texts. There was a common language of scholarship—Latin. Degrees were recognized across Christendom, entitling a teacher to teach anywhere (the ‘Licentiate ubique docendi’). Scholars and students such as Thomas Aquinas or Erasmus moved between Rome, Paris, and Cologne. Now Europe’s Bologna and Erasmus programmes are gradually re-creating levels of integration which our universities achieved in the Middle Ages: we must hope that Brexit does not cut Britain off from this. The Bologna process is not an EU programme: it is an intergovernmental declaration agreed in 1999 which sets a common structure of university study to make it easy for students to move between European countries. Heavily influenced by the English model, it specifies that a Bachelor’s degree takes 3–4 years, a Master’s degree 1–2 years, and a doctorate 3–4 years. Erasmus, by contrast, is the EU programme for promoting student and ...
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