Making the Global Look Like It's Big: Practices of Internationality and Size-Building in German Universities

Universities have always been special places. Not necessarily because they taught different content to other schools but because they were privileged by political and religious inter-territorial network-institutions: the pope and the emperor. Depicted in the emperor’s “orb” (globus crucifer) and the globe at the apex of the papal triregnum: privilege was assigned by truly global authority. The privilege entitled the universitas to establish a jurisdiction across nationes that was distinct from the town or territory the universitas was situated in. It also expanded to the scholars travelling there. While universities still see themselves as extraordinary places, they have lost both the distinct jurisdiction and the global authority that assigned such privileges. They are today less run by medieval nationes but as organizations with a global outreach. Universities still draw scholars and students of different nations and they still aim for global recognition, but the means to achieve global size and visibility have changed. Global maps that allow to see and compare the University of Cambridge and Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg along the same scale are not universal. They are built on imaginations of a field by particular devices and the way these devices define the means by which universities build up size. These means expand beyond those universities explicitly visible on a given map: the themes rankings, accreditations and search engines draw on are also those that a global higher education discourse mobilizes and carries into the everyday work of universities. Authority today is not assigned through a visual depiction of a globe as a symbol of authority but through establishing visual depictions of the world based on a specific geography of themes in higher education. In the same way the emperor’s “orb” in Vienna is only a depiction of former orbs and a new triregnum comes with every new pope, themes can be understood as a constant repetition and translation between maps and practices, carrying a specific idea that makes the university (cf. Czarniawska and Joerges 1996). In this way depictions are not just signifying ideas but also the very significate, the actual geography of higher education. The globality of a map has to be made big in everyday interaction. The paper traces the theme of “internationality” – a core value of the modern university – as it plays out in university life based on seven case studies in aspiring German degree programs: only through depictions of maps on the wall, in-course interaction, barbecue queues, multi-media use and language practice can very local settings be understood as “truly international” and “multicultural to the core”. Today, it is not a privileged jurisdiction but establishing locally the size of distance that – under the logics of such global maps – turn universities into extraordinary places. Czarniawska, Barbara; Joerges, Bernward (1996): Travels of ideas. In: Barbara Czarniawska und Guje Sevón (eds.): Translating Organizational Change. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter (Studies in Organization), pp. 13-48.