Higher Education in Market-Oriented Socialist Vietnam

This book inspects higher education reform in market-oriented socialist Vietnam, with a focus on newness narratives and enquiry. Engaging in dialogic conversations with global and regional forces and exploring convergences in the domains of policy, curriculum, research, pedagogy, and society, chapter authors analyse ideologies that have entered Vietnam's educational landscape. Chapters include discussions of post-Soviet legacies, socialist thought, privatization, neoliberalism, global rankings, academic freedom, autonomy, and elitism, as well as the actors, discourses and practices through which they manifest. In so doing, authors' commentaries juxtapose phenomena in Vietnam with other national contexts such as the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam, Japan, Australia, and Trinidad and Tobago.

1. Introduction and Foregrounding the Work: 'New' Players, 'New' Discourses, 'New' Practices, and 'New' Flavours.- 2. A Review of the Reform Agenda for Higher Education in Vietnam.- 3. 'Standing between the flows': Interactions among Neoliberalism, Socialism, and Confucianism in Vietnamese Higher Education.- 4. A Review of University Research Development in Vietnam from 1986-2019.- 5. What Impacts Academics' Performance from the Learning Organisation Perspective? A Comparative Study.- 6. Commentary - Modernity and Reflexivity in Vietnamese Higher Education: Situating the Role of the Ideological, Capacity Building, Learning Organisation, and Policy Reform.- 7. Critiquing the Promotion of American-Biased "Liberal Arts Education" in Post- “Đổi mới” Vietnam.- 8. Fighting the Stigma of "Second-Tier" Status: The Emergence of "Semi-Elite" Private Higher Education in Vietnam.- 9. The Emergence of Mergers and Acquisitions in the Private Higher Education Sector in Vietnam.- 10. Vietnam's Community College: The Question of Higher Education Decentralisation in Contemporary Vietnam.- 11. The Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction of Academic Freedom in Vietnamese Universities.- 12. Impact of the New Southbound Policies on International Students in Taiwan: An Exploratory Study from Vietnamese Oversea Students.- 13. Commentary - What Lies Ahead? Considering the Future of a "New" Vietnamese Higher Education.- 14. English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in Vietnamese Universities: Policies of Encouragement and Pedagogies of Assumption.- 15. Training English-medium Teachers: Theoretical and Implementational Issues.- 16. Assessment Practices in Local and International EMI Programmes: Perspectives of Vietnamese Students.- 17. Commentary - Who is EMI for? From Vietnam, Thinking about a Clash of Realities Behind the Policy, Practice, and Pedagogy in Japan.- 18. Commentary - 'Expectations vs. Practicalities': Key Issues of EMI Policy and Pedagogical Implementation in Higher Education in Vietnam, with Reference from Brunei Darussalam.- 19. Commentary - Postcards from Vietnam: Lessons for New Players in Higher Education.- 20. Engaging (With) New Insights: Where to Start to Move Scholarship and the Current Debate Forward.- 21. Afterword: Challenges Facing Vietnamese Higher Education.