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.

Phan Le Ha is Senior Professor in the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam where she is also Head of the International and Comparative Education Research Group. While in Brunei, she remains affiliated with the Department of Educational Foundations in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA.

Doan Ba Ngoc was Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of South Australia.