Revisiting the policy on Philippine Higher Education Internationalization: Communicative rationality, neoliberalism, and emancipatory possibilities

This article offers a philosophical re-examination of the Commission on Higher Education’s Memorandum Order No. 55, s. 2016 (CMO 55), commonly framed as the policy on the “Internationalization of Philippine Higher Education.” It argues that CMO 55 does not merely outline internationalization as a technical agenda but discursively aligns it with neoliberal priorities by framing global competitiveness, human capital formation, and quality assurance as central purposes of higher education. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, the study analyzes how CMO 55 interweaves communicative and strategic rationalities, appropriating the language of cooperation, stakeholder participation, and quality to legitimize market-oriented reforms and performance-driven governance. The analysis of selected provisions and coded themes shows that, while CMO 55 presents itself as promoting intercultural exchange, institutional collaboration, and enhanced academic standards, its discourse functions as strategic communication that normalizes labor-market alignment, institutional differentiation, and global benchmarking as taken-for-granted policy imperatives. Universities are constructed as competitive providers in a global education marketplace, and students and faculty are positioned as mobile, self-optimizing subjects. From a Habermasian perspective, communicative action is not realized within the policy; rather, it serves as a normative benchmark that highlights a gap between the rhetoric of dialoge and participation and the policy’s underlying strategic functions. In this sense, CMO 55 reinforces broader neoliberal patterns in which education is increasingly commodified and oriented toward economic utility, with democratic, civic, and humanistic purposes pushed to the margins.