Publications

For the democratic tradition to return to a vanguard position in education requires a thorough exploration of the problems of democratization in education and an inventory of possible new forms. In this essay, Simon Marginson reviews five books concerned with democracy and education: Michael Apple's Educating the "Right" Way, Denis Carlson's Leaving Safe Harbors, A. Belden Fields and Walter Feinberg's Education and Democratic Theory, Trevor Gale and Kathleen Densmore's Engaging Teachers, and Klas Roth's Democracy, Education and Citizenship. While these authors imagine democracy in somewhat different ways, they have a common interest in the role of public schooling in the formation of democratic agents and practices. The books do not offer a definitive account of the problems of democratization, nor do they embody a major breakthrough in democratic educational thinking, but they all provide helpful explorations of these issues. Marginson concludes with some thoughts on commodification and neoliberal economism in education, a contemporary focus of discussion in democratic educational circles.

No abstract is provided for this article.

<p>Academic freedom is best understood not as an abstract universal principle or an ideal state of being but as concrete university practices nested in specific relational environments. As such, practices of academic freedom vary across the world, according to variations in political cultures, educational cultures and state-university relations. The article discusses these variations with particular reference to differences between universities associated with the limited liberal states of the English-speaking world, and those associated with comprehensive East Asian states in the Sinic tradition, including China. Given the different traditions there is no point in imposing judgments on one system in terms of the norms of another, but worth exploring the potential for common ground. Any world-wide approach to academic freedom would need to combine a universal element with space for context-specific elements.</p>

The gap between the demands placed on education in Australia and the resources allocated to it by government has increased dramatically in recent years. The education system is expected to absorb youth unemployment and play a key role in the modernisation of the economy, yet education spending as a proportion of GDP has declined. The notion of education as being important for its own sake and a key to equality in society seems to have been set aside, and economics now dominates debate on education policy. This book summarises and analyses the major issues in Australian education policy today: the relationship between education and work; the reform of higher education and vocational training; outputs, resources and class sizes; the role of government and the public/private debate in schooling. It also examines the main economic theories about education, including human capital theory and free market theory, and finds them seriously inadequate as a basis for policy. The author argues that economic rationalism has installed a free market agenda at the heart of public education policy, with deep consequences for the academic and democratic development of Australia's citizens.

It costs money to live here in Australia. Having a budget is very important, and keeping to budget and living within one's means. Living within your means is the safest thing to do here, because if you run out of money I don't know where you can get help. If I ran out of money at home I would go to the village and it's alright. The neighbours would come with a bowl of food for me to eat. I wouldn't be hungry.~ female, 40, PhD gender studies, Papua New Guinea

Higher education — particularly the research-intensive university, which is the focus of this article — is the subject of global/national/local effects, and is shaped by hierarchy and uneven development on a world scale. The article theorises social competition in higher education, and traces inter-university competition and stratification on the national and global planes with the help of figures and tables. It argues that social competition is much broader than economic exchange, but in the neo-liberal era marketisation is becoming more important, particularly cross-border markets. Globalisation and markets together are changing the competition for status goods (positional goods) in higher education. The competition is becoming more ‘economised’ because mediated by private capacity to pay, and intensified because there is diminished attention to public good objectives such as equality of opportunity: in any case transnational markets are configured as a trading environment where such objectives are irrelevant. The outcome is the steepening of university hierarchies, the formation of a ‘winner-take-all’ world market in elite and mostly American university education, a tighter fit between social hierarchy and educational hierarchy at the national level, and global patterns of domination/subordination that are as yet scarcely modified by global public goods. This suggests the need to rework the equality of the educational project and situate it globally as well as nationally.

No abstract is provided for this article.

No abstract is provided for this article.

There is no clarity about the meaning of the ‘public’ role of universities in social science or policy discourse, though the public/private division is central to policy discussion of higher education. Notions of the ‘public’ dimension vary by discipline and also vary between political cultures in different countries. In economic theory Samuelson’s ‘public goods’ are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, and subject to market failure, requiring government or philanthropic funding. In political theory, Dewey defines social transactions as ‘public’ when they have relational consequences for persons other than those directly engaged, and become matters of common concern. Each notion can be used to interrogate the other. The chapter argues that the way forward is to combine the economic and political notions of ‘public/private’, and analyses systems and practices of university education and research using a grid representing four different political economies of higher education: civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market, commercial market.

(1992). Education as a branch of economics: The universal claims of economic rationalism. Melbourne Studies in Education: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 1-14.

Choose from multiple link options via Crossref

Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single “league table” for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector. Both the research rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings by the Times Higher Education Supplement have been widely publicised and already appear to have generated incentives in favour of greater system stratification and the concentration of elite researchers. However, global comparisons are possible only in relation to one model of institution, that of the comprehensive research intensive university, and for the most part are tailored to science-strong and English-speaking universities. Neither the Shanghai nor the Times rankings provide guidance on the quality of teaching. It is important to secure “clean” rankings, transparent, free of self-interest, and methodologically coherent, that create incentives to broad-based improvement.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.12.14 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY http://cshe.berkeley.edu/ CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIAN MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 2014 Simon Marginson Institute of Education, University of London ABSTRACT Copyright 2014 Simon Marginson and CSHE, all rights reserved. Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States but in every country. Yet the Californian Model of higher education - which long appeared everywhere else to be ahead of its time – was also specific to its own time and place. The conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. This is the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society by Simon Marginson and organized and hosted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education with the generous support of the UC Office of the President and the Carnegie Corporation and delivered on September 30, 2014 at the David Brower Center, Berkeley. Previous Kerr Lecturers include Harold Shapiro, Charles Vest, Donald Kennedy, Hanna Holborn Gray, and Neil Smelser. Keywords: California Higher Education Model, Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Bob Clark This lecture series is a settling challenge to those invited to participate. It invites us to consider our words with more than the usual care, to summon whatever it is, if anything, that might be distinctive in what we say, and to synthesize and conclude our thought about higher education, a large enterprise populated by intelligent people of almost every description. Yet I accepted without hesitation. I had always liked very much the Uses of the University and saw Clark Kerr as an admirable man. The modern system and institution builders, those who created higher education in the thirty years after World War 2, deserve all our respect. That generation includes my father, Raymond Marginson, the principal executive administrator at the University of Melbourne for more than two decades, still alive and active in university meetings at the age of almost 91. We work within the halls that were built by that generation, first in their minds and then in the world. Clark Kerr was the foremost of the builders. For better knowledge of Clark Kerr and his works, I thank the scholars I have read in recent months, especially John Douglass, Sheldon Rothblatt, and Kerr himself. I begin by discussing the man in terms of the work. First the 1960 Master Plan, the embodiment of what might be called the Californian Model of Higher Education. Second, the 1963 Godkin lectures. Then I move to two other scholars from the University of California, who like Kerr brought Californian thinking to the whole higher education world: Martin Trow and Burton Clark, or Bob Clark as his colleagues call him. I did not meet Kerr but met Trow and knew Clark. Each produced one work that is constantly read and cited. Then I will open the apparent paradox that lurks at the back of all three lectures. The Californian Model, or different versions and aspects of it, has swept across America and the world, becoming installed—at least in the idea—as the modern higher education system norm, in which access and excellence are both secured through diverse provision. The ‘excellence’ component—Kerr’s Multiversity, the large comprehensive science university—is closely imitated in many countries. Yet in California the Californian Model has faltered and the Multiversity is travelling less well. It now seems too difficult to provide access and excellence on a common public basis. The conditions and drivers that sustained the 1960s Model have changed. The Model has changed less. Perhaps that is part of the problem. I will close by pointing the way to Lecture 2.