Introduction

In this chapter, we examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today's global competition for talent. In contemporary policy making, the assumed practices of the medieval scholar often inform the common image of an academic today. This scholar is a man (gender specific) who possesses deep and unique knowledge in his field of learning. He is perennially on the move, trekking from one centre of learning to another, sharing his latest inventions and discoveries with learned colleagues while spreading his doctrines to eager disciples. Patrons – often royal or religious – support his scholarly ventures: financially (by funding travel, subsistence or access to collections) and politically (by granting safe passage). A visual that emerges is one of free flow of knowledge even though the actual practices of scholarly mobility – especially in medieval times – are hardly without incident (Cobban 1971, 1975; de Ridder-Symoens 1991). So why is this image so enduring and how does it affect our contemporary debates concerning the global competition for talent? For policy makers at multiple governance levels – university, national, regional and international – this image is ever present because a mobile scholar generates seemingly untold benefits, not least in scientific terms, and, more recently, economic competitiveness gains and cultural diversity.

We reveal that the two modalities we associate with knowledge alchemy are present in this transmutation process: first, the emergence of presuppositions concerning the connections between scientific mobility and innovation capacity, and, second, the embedding of these presuppositions into policy models (particularly in higher education policies and migration policies), as well as university recruitment practices. The interdependence of these two modalities of knowledge alchemy is so powerful that, we argue, these presuppositions persist in informing university, national, regional and international policy actors about how to be ‘competitive’ in the ‘global war for talent’; indeed, it is now a taken-for-granted approach that has been embedded in regional, transregional and city-level strategies (see Chapter 6). As we shall also show, these presuppositions are removed from the everyday practices of academic mobility from the perspective of scholars and scientists, who are motivated by a combination of professional and very personal factors to become mobile that may have very little to do with enhancing innovation capacity.