Abstract
This chapter compares the views of personnel at two elite global universities in America and Britain concerning student admissions, educational aims, and their institutions’ linkages with national society. Although these elite universities have together been seen as a breeding ground for the new global elite class, cultural and organizational differences between them suggest that they cannot be treated as forming a single, undifferentiated global elite educational pathway. Instead, the national endures in them as both a source of cultural variation and a political tether, which likely shapes the way that students move through and experience them. This has implications for whether the emerging global elite class can accurately be conceived as a denationalized social formation.
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Notes
- 1.
Special thanks to the volume editors and to Mitchell Stevens for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
- 2.
For more on the notion of ‘third culture kids,’ see Fail et al. (2004).
- 3.
Of the 20 interviews analyzed for this chapter, 19 were conducted in face-to-face meetings in participants’ offices, and one was conducted via telephone. All of those interviewed gave consent to participate in the study, and interview length varied depending on their availability, with an average interview length of 73 minutes. Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and then analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti.
- 4.
Quotations in this chapter have been reproduced verbatim from the transcripts of the interviews, but false starts were removed. Ellipses with three periods indicate pauses in the comments of the interviewees, and four periods indicate where some text was omitted.
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Friedman, J.Z. (2018). Producing a Global Elite? The Endurance of the National in Elite American and British Universities. In: Bloch, R., Mitterle, A., Paradeise, C., Peter, T. (eds) Universities and the Production of Elites. Palgrave Studies in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53970-6_14
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