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In this special issue, the first article provides a retrospective look at past articles published in this journal, the themes addressed by the authors, the authors' backgrounds and geographical distribution, and citations. The second article expands upon an earlier article, published in 2000, on hybrid-steering approaches in higher education. The third article takes a look back at a special issue published in 1995 and devoted to the future of universities. In the fourth article, the influence of organizational studies in higher education policy over the past 25 years is discussed. The fifth article reflects on past papers in this journal focusing on the external orientation of universities. In the final article, previously published papers on academic freedom and university autonomy are reviewed with the benefit of hindsight.At the University of Basque Country in Spain, interviews were held with students, academics, and administrators about the effects of globalization and internationalization on the university, the impact of English as the language of instruction, and perceptions of the university's multilingual language policy (English, Spanish, and Basque). The participants did not view globalization and internationalization as a new development but as a continuation of a trend. They valued English as a medium of instruction, but they worried about the threat English posed to linguistic diversity by forcing other foreign languages off the curriculum. Even so, the participants wanted to improve their English. (24 ref)-English Studies,

Commodification has been and still is one of the key processes within capitalist market economies. Since the 1970s, different forms of knowledge have increasingly been subjected to this process. In this paper the commodification of knowledge in the field of higher education is defined in a broad sense as an example of the intensive enlargement of capitalism. I argue that knowledge shares some features of public goods and can be subjected to commodification both as an educational product and academic research itself. However, the simple dichotomy of public vs. private good is not nuanced enough to understand the status of knowledge within higher education. How to reconstruct this dichotomy, whether knowledge should be commodified, and how to justify one’s normative stance in this respect are three important issues for further study.

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The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of moral economy for higher education studies through a study of Finnish research universities' patent policies. Patent policies not only stimulate the commercialization of research, they also set norms for behavior and aim to clarify how to distribute rights and responsibilities during the commercialization of research results. My main research finding is that even though institutionalized university patenting is a very recent phenomenon in Finland, policies regulating it have significant similarities to the US case. The main conclusion of this paper is that the question of university patent policies should not be disconnected from broader questions regarding contemporary globalizing knowledge capitalism. Overall, this paper contributes to higher education studies by showing the relevance of the concept of moral economy in studying contemporary university changes and transformations by demonstrating the moral economic nature of patent policies.