Researching Higher Education in Asia History, Development and Future

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researchers is constituted of Western theories with local examples. The “academic
colonization” defined by Hwang ( 2016 ) remains prevalent throughout East Asia.^4


End Remarks

East Asian societies have recently made remarkable some progresses in higher edu-
cation. While the achievement has been widely acknowledged, assessment of their
future development is not. The developments and the highly differing assessments
of such developments raise questions of profound significance not only about how
researchers of higher education have conceptualized East Asian higher education
development but also about how the scholarly communities that produce such
knowledge function. Both those studying East Asia from outside and the East Asians
themselves have often been bogged down into a quagmire of a tradition-modernity
contrast in their interpretation of what’s happening in East Asian higher education.
Regarding contemporary East Asian development as a modernization process, they
have equated modern with Western and Western with advanced. As a result, the
West and Western practices become the standard to assess East Asia, whereas any-
thing unfound in Western practices have been considered as insignificant or do not
get considered at all. Their assessments arouse uneasiness, not necessarily because
the interpretations are incorrect, but because they are consistent with a mindset
based on Western primacy, despite strong assault on such hold since the 1950s.
Ever since their early encounters with the West, East Asian societies have been
struggling with the relations between the two strikingly different yet mutually intol-
erant cultures. While East Asian states have been keen to embrace Western civiliza-
tion, East Asian people are not willing to give up their traditions. For East Asians,
the past one and a half centuries are thus culturally soul-stirring. Such an experience
adds importance to a cultural and historical perspective on one hand and increases
the difficulty for East Asian thinkers not to be affected by their strong emotions in
their scholarly work on the other. East Asian higher education development is fun-
damentally about the relations between Western and their indigenous higher educa-
tion traditions. The greatest challenge for East Asia is that their universities have not
yet figured out how to marry the “standard norms” of Western higher education to
their traditional values. After delving into the theorization of perspective and hori-
zon in social research and citing some recent English literature as an example, this
chapter argues for a multiplicity of research perspectives, especially for a cultural
and historical perspective that gives weight to the impact of traditional ways of cul-
tural thinking on contemporary development of East Asian higher education.


(^4) It is important to point out that with recent remarkable social development in major East Asian
societies, a small number of (usually the best) local researchers have started to become more con-
fident. At the same time, and quite unfortunately, there have been some signs of dangerous aca-
demic nationalism.
R. Ya ng

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