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>
No abstract is provided for this article.
"How Universities have Been Positioned as Teams in a Knowledge Economy World Cup" published on 01 Jan 2010 by Brill.
University rankings widely affect the behaviours of prospective students and their families, university executive leaders, academic faculty, governments and investors in higher education. Yet the social science foundations of global rankings receive little scrutiny. Rankings that simply recycle reputation without any necessary connection to real outputs are of no common value. It is necessary that rankings be soundly based in scientific terms if a virtuous relationship between performance and ranking is to be established, the worst potentials of rankings are to be constrained, and rankings are optimised as a source of comparative information. This article evaluates six ranking systems, S hanghai ARWU , L eiden U niversity, QS , S copus, T imes H igher E ducation and U ‐ M ultirank, according to six social science criteria and two behavioural criteria. The social science criteria are materiality (rankings must be grounded in the observable higher education world), objectivity (opinion surveys should not be used), externality (ranked universities should not be a source of data about themselves), comprehensiveness (rankings should cover the broadest possible range of functions), particularity (ranking systems should eschew multi‐indicators with weights, or proxy measures) and ordinal proportionality (vertical distinctions between universities should not be exaggerated). The behavioural criteria are the alignment of the ranking with tendencies to improved performance of all institutions and countries, and transparency, meaning accessibility to strategy making designed to maximize institutional position. The pure research rankings rate well overall but lack comprehensiveness. U ‐ M ultirank is also strong under most criteria but stymied by its 100 per cent reliance on subjective data collected via survey.
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The development of market relations is a striking feature of education in Australia and comparable countries. Education continues to produce non-market outputs (‘use values’) as well as market outputs, but participation in schooling is being reworked as market consumption; schools, TAFE institutions and universities are now required to sell themselves, and a range of services is provided on full cost basis. This article re-theorises markets in education, drawing on political economy and social theory (including the literature on post-modernism). It defines educational markets and describe four types of commodity produced: positional goods, self goods, training goods and knowledge goods. Post-compulsory education's long-standing role, as a vast competition for scarce social position, constitutes a form of market (one ordered by both government and private interests), and is the platform on which more orthodox economic markets in training and knowledge goods are being erected.
No abstract is provided for this article.
This paper assesses how UK universities seek to maintain their global dominant position post-Brexit through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key European institutions as part of their internationalisation strategies. Drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews conducted from November 2017 to July 2018 in 12 UK universities vertically differentiated and spread along the highly hierarchised spectrum of British universities in all four nations, we aim to examine which types of universities are most inclined to form international comprehensive university-wide strategic partnerships, and how they identify their partners. The analysis is framed within Bourdieu’s theory of “economy of practices” which considers all university practices as economic practices that are ultimately tailored towards maximising either material or symbolic profit. Unlike in business and industry, where organisations traditionally compete to maximise profit, universities must both compete and collaborate with one another in order to improve (or maintain) their position in the field. UK universities will need to navigate the post-Brexit space they find themselves thrown into, and in the process will need to review international institutional links with both European Union (EU) based and non-EU universities. This paper will assess how UK universities seek to maintain their dominant position in the field through comprehensive strategic partnerships with key foreign institutions.
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
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.
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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.
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The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism-influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life.
No abstract is provided for this article.
I do not hold that the main virtue of education reposes in its economic consequences. Quite the reverse. I should tonight advocate a greater educational effort in Australia, even if its sole economic consequences were to reduce national production … I should do this since I believe that democracy implies making educational opportunities as equal as possible and that the working of democracy depends on increasing the number of citizens with the capacity for clear and informed thought on political and social issues. Moreover, I hold that the areas of expanded activity which education opens should be made as wide as possible.Peter Karmel, ‘Some economic aspects of education’, the Buntine Oration, 18 May 1962
