Engaging (with) New Insights: Where to Start to Move Scholarship and the Current Debate Forward

Abstract

In this wrap-up essay, we first pay careful attention to the revised Higher Education Law 2018 and Degree No. 99 to offer a nuanced commentary on institutional autonomy and privatised HE in Vietnam. Together with picking up a number of key questions, observations and arguments put forth throughout the book and engage with them further, we also bring in the discussion new writings in Vietnamese and from local sources, particularly those that have been published since the revised Higher Education Law was passed at the end of 2018. In doing so, we hope to grasp a sense of the current and what Vietnamese policy makers, critics, administrators, academics, and scholars from within the system are concerned about and discussing/debating. We, however, do not let our engagement confined to the existing writings; but rather we treat them as the springboard for our adventurous thoughts, assessment, analysis, and projection of ever ‘new’ Vietnam higher education. We argue ‘new’ players, ‘new’ values and discourses, ‘new’ practices, and ‘new’ flavours have collectively necessitated ‘new’ status, ‘new’ order, ‘new’ challenges, and ‘new’ aspirations in Vietnam in general and Vietnam’s HE in particular. At the same time and in this very context, we would argue that the battle between the Soviet tradition and the US-styled model of HE continues to be seen in both policy and practice; and the socialist legacy has found ‘new’ ways within the ‘autonomous’ and ‘privatised’ HE system to exert its influence.