“Horizon of the Future”: Realities and Aspirations of Top-Ranking BRICS Universities (Analysis of Mission Statements)

Educational systems are key actors in social modernization. In order to assess whether BRICS can become an alternative platform for new international collaboration, the authors investigate how the top universities in BRICS countries describe their national and international role, goals and aspirations in their mission statements and other identity narratives. These texts reflect how higher education institutions (HEIs) see themselves and how they want the major stakeholders to see them. Thus, the universities’ mission statements help to legitimate their activities to stakeholders and to differentiate their identity in the global educational market. For the sample, the authors selected 10 universities for each BRICS country that occupied top positions in the QS BRICS University Ranking in 2019. Mission statements and similar documents were collected from the universities’ official websites. In the content-analysis, the authors relied on the methodological approaches proposed by C.C. Morphew et al. (2016) and J. Mampaey (2018). Following these studies, the authors identified 7 clusters of values: excellence, social justice, third mission, academic orientation, internationalization, evaluation, and history. Content-analysis was supplemented by discourse analysis, which included texts in the native languages and in English (for Chinese, Russian and Brazilian universities). Most BRICS HEIs in the sample are public and their key stakeholders are the government and the national public. The third major stakeholder is prospective students and their families, both national and international. This group is usually explicitly targeted through promises of unique campus experience, individual approach and career opportunities, while the government and the public are targeted more implicitly, by referring to social justice and equality, the third mission of universities, etc. For most HEIs, institutional pressures overweigh competitive pressures and, therefore, the legitimating function dominates all the narratives (as opposed to the function of differentiation). In other words, the main purpose of the mission statements is for universities to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the national audiences; therefore, in each subgroup, HEIs tend to use similar rhetorical strategies and language. Although many universities in their missions set forth their plans to internationalize and join the global academic community, none of them specifically mentions cooperation within the BRICS bloc, which means that it is too early to place high hopes on BRICS in higher education as an emergent common alternative platform for South-South cooperation.

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