Internationalization in higher education and scientific contacts offers important opportunities for inter-university co-operation. This paper briefly outlines how these exchanges have been exploited recently to broaden the basic science base at the institutions of higher learning in Finland.
It cannot be successfully argued that there is no politics in higher education and science. That would almost mean refusing the knowledge that contemporary higher education, technology and science are not much different today compared to the 12th and 13th centuries. The Renaissance and dominance of ecclesiastical interests even at this semi primitive demonstrative level bordered strongly on what to many could be analogised with political interests today. More dramatically we are finding today that international relations and politics play key parts in higher education, science and technology. This is witnessed by the more or less dominating role of formal agreements. Education, science and technology have expanded in scope as national states become more and more self and development centered.
This paper aims at stimulating more research. I had to take a round about road to do it, in order to articulate too the need for political democracy, and hence the values of "political freedom" and "human rights". But I could not consider succeeding without help from science policy and national development values based on Nigeria's political leadership history between the 1960s-1970s. Here lies the hope that this innovation will stimulate new research on similar problems for the 1980s and 1990s. That is because, I assume, that even here also "human rights" questions are equally challenging, as well as worth examining in the Nigerian context, since the political leadership eras of the Generals: Babangida and Abacha make Nigeria relatively more politically and developmentally controversial than those of their predecessors. To provide the frame for further research, the expressions: "new scientific culture" has been constructed. It enhances a critical comparison of the Balewa, Gowon, Mohammed and Obasanjo eras: their bases and preparedness to learn the art of institutionalising science and making the policies using it to support and advance national development. But, in any case, political instabilities and the lack of a democratic political culture to support the new scientific culture are a continuous source of embarrassment to the nation, its scientists, its development values and sadly too its international esteem.
The project learning and science culture in transition: processes of, and attitudes to entrepreneurial university in selected SSA countries, is an interdisciplinary research project linking a larger foreign ministry, department of international development co-operation project an institutional management capacity building program for sustainable development in Africa. The former is a basic research project, planned also for graduate school in international development education. And the latter is a development-work based project, aimed at pilot universities in the Southern African region. Similar pilot universities are also the object of the project now submitted for research grants.
The project is interdisciplinary. It mediates two social science sub-fields: development studies and social studies of science and higher education, hence the keywords learning, science, culture, transition, processes, attitudes and entrepreneurial university. Its aim is to use the latter to study the effects of transition on development in learning and science culture in SSA, using sample-values of similar studies outside Africa. That maces "processes" an operational research concept defined by the five dimensions: a strengthened administrative core, an expanded developmental periphery, a diversified funding base, a stimulated academic heartland and an integrated entrepreneurial culture.
Development arguments in science relate to tangible and intangible things. With the social functions of science and higher education gaining upper hand in development values in these days, how do SSA universities understand flexibility and balance? The question explains why attitudes are an important study object in the project. Open boundary approach of entrepreneurial university is a matter of concern for the internal university management. African universities are reported as suffering the symptoms of inflexibility and retrogression, hence need revitalization. Development is contextually a transition problem. Transition makes therefore the universities in SSA analytically and comparatively good basic research objects for exploratory attitude study and framework-construction. It also makes it possible to advance development studies knowledge indirectly round the turmoils in higher education.
African Political Studies
African political studies are changing somewhat in method, context and style. In addition to the ingenuity behind these, perhaps, the single most outstanding characteristic of today's studies, especially by the new-breed scholars in this particular field is that of openness. The approaches are not anymore solely traditional. Econimic liberalism and democracy address African geo-political realities and history more than when modernization theories and abstract comparative systems analysis provided the start. In short, the changes mean more country-studies and critical analysis of multivariate African political and development datas. It would be otios not to believe that they have innovative influence on the knowledge of African politics.
This article examines paradigm values and their outcomes for the evolution and progress in politics and society studies of Africa. Analysis and concrete questions concentrate on paradigm structures and their values. The values are important from the point of view of how their explanations interprete Africa and encourage understanding for its development problems. Arguments that Africa is a unique field in political studies are due to their vagaries. The main aim has been to examine the changes and shift that have taken place in the paradigm values during the periods late 1950s and early 1990s. Modernisation, development, dependency and underdevelopment are treated as the oldest paradigms. They dominated in the studies throughout the late 1950s and 1970s. Improved research findings hastened their criticisms and revisions from the late 1970s and by the first quarter of the 1980s, the newer paradigms: bureaucratic bourgeoisie, statism and later the political choice were adopted in the studies as products of the latter process. Economic liberalization and political democracy arguments resurged more aggressively in the last quarter of the 1980s into the 1990s to contest as a "born again paradigm" for modernisation. The latter reveals the entrenching conservative character of the old liberal Western school in the studies, and more generally points at the problem of the theoretical status of the state in the studies affecting the Third World. This study particularly shows that in politics as a social science where ideologies make its studies not value-free, the processes leading to changes and shift in paradigm values raise a false sense of the Kuhnian paradigm-breaking and lead to the following conclusions: (i> that African political studies are not directed by "core" but diverse paradigm structures; (ii) that diversity implies pluralism of values, vulnerability to criticism and revisions; (iii) that albeit the latter may or not lead to changes and shift in paradigm values, no guarantee is given that any next paradigm is final; and (iv) that bercause paradigm structures cluster around values and empirical facts as the primary factors of interest in the analytic eyes of the academic world dealing with them, their usefulness for practical solutions to development is remote in Africa, but academically stimulating for further studies there.
Arnold Brecht (1970) stated that "scientific political theory", that is, the "scientific theory of the state" has been going through an unprecedented crisis in this century and still is in the center of the crisis. The statement is potent and challenging simultaneously for political science theories and methods at the present stage of the intellectual history confirming its status as a discipline. In political science research conducted on Africa the experience of the crisis differs in two remarkable ways: firstly, the theory of the state has been absent in the research (Hyden 1995); and secondly, its theories and methods have followed different tracks between 1960s and 1970s (Chazan et al 1988; Sangmpam 1992; Efana 1995). At this stage of knowledge accumulated about "values" as the bedrock of theories obviously the burden of "rethinking" the interrelated problems falls somewhat on method. The African Studies Association (ASA) is awake to the challenges addressing the need to rethink the theory of political development, but with a greater emphasis on the "methods" in political research on Africa (ASA Newsletter XXIX/I 1996; Bradshaw, Kaiser and Ndegwe 1995:39-65; Hyden 1983).