University

The late twentieth century saw a renewed interest in the postcolonial development of higher education systems within broader literature on globalization and education policies. Particularly, efforts by international institutions, such as the World Bank, to prevent the global and local effects of the so-called knowledge divide, led to a number of policy documents and initiatives aimed at leveling the pace of changes and development in higher-education landscapes of rich and poor countries. Policy in this domain seemed largely influenced by studies that presented the gradual domination of managerialism in the organization of both teaching and research, the commercialization of research, and the outsourcing of many services to create leaner structures as inevitable consequences of globalization and the "knowledge explosion." As a result, most developing countries were restructuring their already inherited systems of higher education along similar patterns to those observed in the West and the Pacific Rim. How this process—sometimes described as the "recolonization" of education—translates into actual higher education landscapes around the world seems to depend on a number of contextual variables.