African Histories and Modernities

A Book by Prof. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, the Vice Chancellor of USIU-africa. In August 2016, Palgrave Macmillan published the Vice Chancellor Prof. Paul Zeleza’s The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015, as part of their African Histories and Modernities book series. The new book is a comprehensive overview of the development of higher education across different world regions from the end of the Second World War, right up to the present.This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. This includes the explosions of higher education institutions and enrollments, a development captured by the notion of massification. There were also profound shifts in the financing and economic role of higher education reflected in the processes of privatization of universities and curricula realignments to meet the shifting demands of the economy. Moreover, the systems of knowledge production, organization, dissemination, and consumption, as well as the disciplinary architecture of knowledge underwent significant changes. Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fuelled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement