In the 1990s globalisation provided the rationale and opportunity for the rapid expansion of higher education. Across the world universities began to position themselves as part of a global landscape. International research collaborations, student mobility, and higher education participation rates all reached new heights. Next came world university rankings, reinforcing and reifying this global imaginary. Amidst what has been called academic 'star wars', states competed to attract the best researchers and boost their universities up the global league tables. Meanwhile, academic staff experienced a new culture of productivism, with narrow conceptions of research 'excellence', and an emphasis on 'outputs' over teaching and service.

Today new geopolitical rivalries, destructive regional conflicts and elite competition are rupturing the global higher education community. The research inequalities created by bibliometric coloniality and Eurocentric knowledge systems continue to widen. In many places, the future of higher education funding, student finance, academic mobility, research assessment and publishing, academic freedom, and the tertiary sector more broadly, are contested and uncertain. At the same time, nation-states increasingly rely on higher and tertiary education to support individual flourishing and skill development, place-based regional economies and national innovation systems: can higher education meet these conflicting societal expectations?

The challenge for researchers and higher education policymakers is to engage in epistemic and infrastructural repair. Around the world, student activists have insisted that it is the responsibility of universities to actively respond to political violence, social injustice and the climate crisis. Universities provide a moral compass, as well as a catalyst for social change.