Presentation Schedule
Interculturality as Transparency: Liberal Arts, Public Good, and East Asia’s Higher Education Futures (104100)
Session Chair: Akiko Nishio
Sunday, 12 July 2026 09:55
Session: Session 1
Room: UCL Torrington, G09 (Ground Floor)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Few higher‑education debates are more unresolved than whether universities constitute a public good. Simon Marginson argues that higher education cannot be reduced to private returns or market logics; it produces collective benefits—social trust, cultural cohesion, civic capacity. Yet institutions are asked to serve society but measured as private commodities. This paper contends that interculturality, made transparent through evidence‑based research, is a structural condition of the public‑good role. Transparency is scholarly visibility: making clear how knowledge flows across disciplines, cultures, and borders. The case study is the Alliance of Asian Liberal Arts Universities (AALAU), analyzed through a purposive sample of 25 institutions across East Asia. Research output from Clarivate InCites (2018–2024) serves as a proxy for intercultural engagement. Collaboration is quantified with an original adaptation of the Rao–Stirling Diversity Index (commonly for interdisciplinarity) for interculturality to highlight cultural distance. Cultural distance uses Hofstede’s six dimensions, consolidated via the Kogut–Singh index, and applied to publication distributions. Scores are standardized as z‑values for comparability across institutions and years. Findings reveal three durable tiers of performance, with Duke Kunshan University and NYU Shanghai sustaining high intercultural profiles. Scale moderates volatility but not direction: smaller liberal arts and sciences institutions can punch above their weight when interculturality is embedded as mission. By combining Marginson’s public‑good framework with empirical measures of interculturality, the paper suggests that East Asian liberal arts and sciences institutions are cultivating infrastructures of trust and cooperation—conditions that echo beyond academia and reach toward the long‑term project of world peace.
Authors:
Huiyuan Ye, Shanghai Jian Qiao University, China
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Huiyuan Ye is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Shanghai Jian Qiao University in China
Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/huiyuanye/
Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Huiyuan_Ye
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