Contents contributed and discussions participated by 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..."
Neta Gordon "Where are we now?": Negotiating a Changing Model of the University - 0 views
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"For Congress 2011, held at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton the
ACCUTE Committee for Professional Concerns (CPC) organized two panels,
"Situating Sessionals" and "The Corporate University." As I was preparing to
present my own paper on "The Corporate University" panel, and while I was in the
initial stages of bringing together contributors for this readers' forum, I was
also in the thick of working on behalf of my university's faculty association as
we negotiated a new collective agreement (which is likely why the term
"negotiating" found its way into the title of this forum). Thus, at the time, I
was philosophically and substantively absorbed in the idea of the collective
rights and responsibilities of the..."
A Masterclass in Interdisciplinarity: Research into practice in training the next gener... - 0 views
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"This paper draws on evaluations of a number of interdisciplinary studentship and
fellowship schemes to discuss some of the challenges of developing
interdisciplinary research skills in early career researchers. It describes
efforts to support such capacity-building in the UK through a series of
Interdisciplinary Masterclasses which used workshop-based elicitation techniques
to develop smallscale studies in order to synthesise experiential knowledge and
foster mutual learning. This has enabled us to build important bridges between
research and practice, thereby supporting and developing the interdisciplinary
careers of early- and mid-career researchers, as well as research managers and
leaders. This paper describes an approach to interdisciplinary capacity-building
derived from actual practice. Based on learning from these activities, we offer
some suggestions for improved supervision and mentoring of interdisciplinary
graduate students and young postdoctoral researchers. If we are to develop
effective, future interdisciplinary capacity, we advocate that
supervisors/mentors need to focus, not just on the research, but on the
particular forms of professional support and mentoring required by inexperienced
interdisciplinary researchers in terms of career guidance, the development of
publications strategies and network building"
The Reproduction of Privilege Thomas B. Edsall - 0 views
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"An integral part of the "American Dream" is the idea that post-secondary
education dissolves long-standing class hierarchies. Instead of serving as a
springboard to social mobility, however, college education has reinforced class
stratification the last six decades. Today, seventy four percent of those
attending colleges classified as "most competitive" come from families with
earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families
in the bottom quartile. A vicious circle is established in which, as children of
the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely
to become rich, an even more unequal and economically polarized society is
crafted."
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."
International Student Mobility and the Bologna Process - Research in Comparative and In... - 0 views
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"The Bologna Process is the newest of a chain
of activities stimulated by supra-national actors since the 1950s to challenge
national borders in higher education in Europe. Now, the ministers in charge of
higher education of the individual European countries have agreed to promote a
similar cycle-structure of study programmes and programmes based on the
strategic aim of enhancing student mobility in two directions: to increase the
attractiveness for students from other parts of the world to study - primarily
for the whole study programme - in European countries, and to facilitate
intra-European - primarily temporary - mobility. Studies aiming at establishing
the results of this policy face various problems. Statistics move only gradually
from 'foreign' to 'mobile' students, but remain insufficient with respect to
temporary mobility. Individual European countries opt for such varied solutions
that an overall overview is hardly feasible. Yet, some general trends are
visible. First, Bologna has contributed to greater internal mobility of students
from other parts of the world, but not to a more rapid increase of
intra-European student mobility. Second, the event of outwards mobility during
the course of study up to graduation has turned out to be more frequent than
expected by many experts, but differences by country do not fade away. Third,
the value of student mobility gradually declines as a consequence of gradual
loss of exclusiveness."
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."
Can a Knowledge Sanctuary also be an Economic Engine? The Marketization of Higher Educa... - 0 views
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"Universities, particularly research-intensive ones, have responded to a
variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions,
culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market
opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education:
organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge-driven and
profit-driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties
over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that
these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the
three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student
learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create
areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market
logics and business-oriented practices contradict academic values. Within
knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement
should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning,
the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic
citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter
mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare
while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies."
The complexities of 21st century brain 'exchange' - University World News - 0 views
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"The emerging economies of the BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India and China - will, it
is assumed, lure back home both students who go abroad to study and some
graduates who have settled in the West, because of their dramatic economic
growth and expanding higher education systems. The problem is that data seem to
show this is not the case.
The brain drain, now euphemistically called
the brain exchange, seems to be alive and well.
International Higher
Education published research last August by Dongbin Kim, Charles AS Bankart
and Laura Isdell showing that the large majority of international doctoral
recipients from American universities remain in the United States after
graduation."
Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research - Science as Culture - - 0 views
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"The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various
forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations.
Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies,
collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of
knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science,
collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in
the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres;
however, the policy metaphor of 'collaboration' stands for a variety of
different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From
a discourse analysis perspective, 'folk theories' of nano collaboration help to
explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific
organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists,
university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US
universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for
scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and
commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual 'nano' cases
into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and
experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of
collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions,
audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable
accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise
specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging
fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging
discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of
shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved."
The Development of Transnational Higher Education in China - 0 views
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"This article presents an empirical study of transnational higher education in
China at the institutional level. The units of analysis are
the Chinese partner universities of transnational higher education programs.
Through comparison of research universities and teaching
universities, the study finds that transnational higher education programs are
developed and perceived differently by these two categories
of universities. For teaching universities, transnational higher education is
mainly used to expand enrollment. It is the most active
internationalization activity on campus. For research universities, especially
top research universities, transnational higher education's
major function is to provide academic opportunities for those
aspiring for advanced professional degrees. It is only one of the many
internationalization activities on campus. Teaching
universities tend to use transnational higher education more to generate revenue
and reduce cost."
On Failure (On Pedagogy): Editorial Introduction - Performance Research - Volume 17, Is... - 0 views
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"What has upped the stakes in this absurd drama is the cultural dominance of hope and success in a neolibera...l age, now the mandate, measure and mantra of the corporatizing university. We live in the depressive ruins of the university, an entity dedicated to the rabid pursuit of illusory success when any substantive mission that might give that success substance has long since been mortgaged to market values (see Readings 1996 and Werry and O'Gorman 2009). The fetishization of excellence and outcomes, the prevalence of 'audit culture' (Strathern 2000) and prevailing instrumentalism and vocationalism, all institutionalize, codify and restigmatize failure. Now the encompassing regime of the test eclipses all other ways of understanding and valuing schooling: through standardized testing, student evaluations and bureaucratic measures of school 'performance', the threat of failure is the defining condition under which we (not just students but also teachers and institutions) operate. In these contexts, accidental failure is perilous, and the strategic, emancipatory or experimental use of failure - however much it is still necessary - is freighted with risk, danger and difficulty. The right to fail (with all its promise of inclusiveness, generosity, freedom) can only be claimed at an ever-mounting cost."
Donors and higher education partners: a critical assessment of US and Canadian support ... - 0 views
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"Linking key policy themes of interest in the published literature on development
studies and comparative education, the article initially explores the potential
benefits and risks of partnering transnationally for contextually informed
research and sustainable development from the perspective of Southern and
Northern higher education institutions. Higher education partnerships recently
supported by the development-assistance agencies of Canada and the United States
are compared and critically assessed according to the internationally relevant
themes of external and internal funding, the involvement of additional partners
and funders, and project duration. Comparative analysis of datasets compiled
from AUCC- and HED-managed sources that encompass 74 CIDA-supported and 186
USAID-supported university partnerships active during 2007-2009 shows that CIDA
awards tend to be substantially larger in amount and longer in duration than
most USAID awards and that participating universities have contributed
impressive cost-share resources. The concluding section draws out wider
implications of study findings for North-South higher education partnerships
with sustainable-development objectives and for the literature on the
possibilities and limitations they embody."
Rethinking the mission of internationalization of higher education in the Asia-Pacific ... - 0 views
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"This article adopts the critical theory approach to reflect and analyse the
impacts of globalization on the internationalization process of higher education
in the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that globalization forces many of the
higher education institutions in the region to follow global practices and
ideologies of the Anglo-American paradigm without developing their own unique
systems and honouring the rich cultures of their own countries. While higher
education institutions are indulging in internationalization in terms of
marketization and economic pragmatism, they have to ask themselves, 'What is
missing in the process of internationalization?' This article argues that
internationalization of higher education contributes to building more than
economically competitive and politically powerful states. It represents a
commitment to the development of an internationalized curriculum where the
pursuit of global citizenship, human harmony and a climate of global peace is of
paramount importance."
'It's the end of the university as we know it (and I feel fine)': the Generation Y stud... - 0 views
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"This paper examines discussions of Generation Y within higher education
discourse, arguing the sector's use of the term to describe students is
misguided for three reasons. First, portraying students as belonging to
Generation Y homogenises people undertaking higher education as young,
middle-class and technologically literate. Second, speaking of Generation Y
students allows constructivism to be reinvented as a 'new' learning and teaching
philosophy. Third, the Generation Y university student has become a central
figure in concerns about technology's role in learning and teaching. While the
notion of the 'Generation Y student' creates the illusion that higher education
institutions understand their constituents, ultimately, it is of little value in
explaining young adults' educational experiences."
Interactive planning for strategy development in academic-based cooperative research en... - 0 views
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"The evolution of strategic management concludes that formulation and
implementation is an emergent process. In today's knowledge-based society this
requires that managers develop more creative ways to align strategies with core
competencies to maximise organisational performance and efficiencies. This paper
evaluates the approach taken by a university-based research collaborative to
illustrate an integrated planning process that supports strategic management in
higher education environments. Utilising the concepts of road mapping and
interactive planning, this case study provides insights into the participative
approach used and provides a modification of several conceptual models to
illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of this process."
Is interdisciplinarity old news? A disciplined consideration of interdisciplinarity - B... - 0 views
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This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with ‘problem-based’ curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential consequences of such a shift in higher education policy for the identities of university teachers, researchers and students, and suggests that these calls for reform are premised especially on the problematic assumption that, in Bernsteinian terms, ‘regionalised’ curricular inputs can be expected to produce ‘generic’ knowledge outcomes within the university.
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"This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent
applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to
recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and
departments with 'problem-based' curricula and programmes of study. It
considers, particularly, the potential consequences of such a shift in higher
education policy for the identities of university teachers, researchers and
students, and suggests that these calls for reform are premised especially on
the problematic assumption that, in Bernsteinian terms, 'regionalised'
curricular inputs can be expected to produce 'generic' knowledge outcomes within
the university."
Conservatives, politics and the crisis of modern education in Australia - Policy Studie... - 0 views
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"This article offers an analysis of conservative critiques of education with
particular attention given to how policy problems are framed to build public
consensus. It investigates how conservatives claim political legitimacy and
describe education and social problems in ways that promote a conservative
agenda. Using a case study of the Australian Howard Government's education
policy, the article draws on Lakoff's work and particularly his 'moral
accounting schemes' to identify the politics that are not always apparent in
debates, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in popular and policy
understandings of schools and universities and which help shape policy solutions
to the problems those educational institutions are said to face."
Cost and price in higher education, again - Changing Higher Education - 0 views
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"As
economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations
on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major
reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An
understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that
preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional
mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about
over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the
current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the
problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find
my many earlier takes on this issue collected
here"
theorising there is a need to forgo the exclusionary preoccupation with English
and Western critical theories. The debates informing the international
circulation of Bourdieu's (1977, 1993, 1999, 2004) ideas provide methodological
lessons for moving from critical sociology of education to educational
research for critique. This study reports on the use of Chinese metaphors to
critically theorise evidence of Australian education. It provides an analysis of
the translation of Chinese metaphors, their use as theoretical tools and the
preempting of the antagonistic reception of Chinese metaphors by Western
Anglophone educators. A worldly education of linguistic connectivities and
critical theorising is shown to engage in the reflexivity necessary for making
Chinese research students' bi- or multilingual competence a presence in
Australian teacher-researcher education. At the, same time they are articulating
claims for reconfiguring its internationalisation."