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Bill Brydon

University governance reforms: potential problems of more autonomy? - Higher Education - 0 views

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    University governance reforms are very much a reflection of the broader New Public Management reforms that are focusing on increasing efficiency in public organizations. The article deals with how university reform ideas of a generic nature, emphasizing that universities should be treated and reformed like any other public organizations, are important and reflected in specific reform measures. The special empirical focus is on that universities through reforms are changing their formal affiliation to superior ministries in a more autonomous direction, implicating more autonomy in financial, management and decision-making matters. One the other hand, universities are also through reforms more exposed to more report, scrutiny and control systems, financial incentive systems, pressure to get resources from other sources than the government, cut-back management, etc. So a main question in the analysis is whether universities, as traditionally having quite a lot of real autonomy, through the reforms in fact are getting less autonomy, not more, like the reforms entrepreneurs often are promising.
Bill Brydon

Donna Palmateer Pennee Looking for Autonomy through Service - 0 views

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    "Speaking as an ex-administrator and a tenured professor with a long and varied service record, I want to suggest that service is that part of our collectively negotiated professional workload through which autonomy is most likely to be protected from further erosion if exercised accountably. Service (to the university and the profession) is the least valued of our three areas of responsibility when we consider that typically it "counts" for 20 percent of our workload and annual performance evaluation (APE), two matters of university self-governance over which the academic unit still exercises considerable control and discretion at most universities in Canada. We do ourselves and our profession a lot of damage when we limit our use of collective agreements to punish-and-grieve or grieve-and-punish manuals when they can be key mentoring documents for the profession. Having "paid one's dues" is only the beginning, not the end, of understanding and accounting for our roles in collective institutional governance. Service is the perfect place to learn about and to practice autonomy in the university, because it is through service that we act on what our own academic units have determined to be our workload and the terms of our performance evaluation. The bulk..."
Bill Brydon

State‐guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge producti... - 0 views

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    The purpose of this study was to critically review the reform movement of Higher Education by the Ministry of Education and how its reform policy toward global competition has created a discrepancy between the knowledge produced and the needs of local society. The study found, first of all, that the state‐driven reform policy has decreased the autonomy of South Korean universities, although the state, including the Ministry of Education, did not increase financial support. South Korean universities have enjoyed little autonomy in terms of financial expenditure, offering courses, recruitment of professors, the number of students, etc. Bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education are able to filter most of the policies and measures. Secondly, the study looked into the consequences of the policy emphasis of global competition. The governance and management of South Korean universities have again turned towards the 'business university,' rather than toward the research university and as such, tends to produce knowledge and human resources for immediate societal needs. To support these assertions, the study examined how the reform policies for global competition surrounding the emphasis of SSCI journals might produce globally competitive but also perhaps locally unsuitable knowledge. The study found that there is indeed a disjoint between the knowledge produced in the research sphere and the needs of the local society. Local researchers are compelled to adopt mainstream theoretical frameworks of North America and Europe in order to get their work published in the indexed journals. Local issues and problematics are subsequently neglected and/or relegated to the margins of pertinent academic research interests.
Bill Brydon

Academic Freedom, Intellectual Diversity, and the Place of Politics in Geography - Orze... - 0 views

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    "This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater "intellectual diversity" in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self-regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do."
Bill Brydon

Views from the blackboard: neoliberal education reforms and the practice of teaching in... - 0 views

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    "This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging 'culture of fear' in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy."
Bill Brydon

Accountability in higher education: A comprehensive analytical framework - 0 views

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    Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of 'accountability' they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.
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