Cooperation vs. integration: Distinct ground for North American higher education collaboration

Passage in 1994 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by Mexic o, the United States, and Canada launched an effort to integrate the econom ies of these three countries in North America. Two years before passage of NAFTA, the governments of the three countries had already quietly launched a policy of educational cooperation in higher education between them.. The new educational policy was intended to support the economic integration cha mpioned by NAFTA with a Similar northamericanization initiative in the cult ural domain. The language. of cooperation that the governments and their re presentatives used at the beginning of that effort has recently, been repla ced by a rhetoric of integration. This essay explores how and why the word integration -notwithstanding its use in the economic domain- is not the mos t apt term for describing the new North American educational policy of coll aboration in higher education. Use of the word integration: 1) assumes a pa rallelism that does not exist between North American higher education colla boration efforts and the better known yet similar efforts in Europe; 2) ref lects a lack of general understanding pf education as a process and as a pr ofession, and 3) reflects the mistaken conflation of two kinds of integrati on that Archer (1985) calls cultural systems and socio-cultural integration .