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Kaplan, Inc., the leading global education provider and a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (WPO), today announced the formation of Kaplan Global Solutions for the Americas, as part of its Kaplan Ventures division.

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

"This article is the first comprehensive review of speed dating in the tertiary sector. While speed dating has its origins as a networking technique to connect singles, it has only more recently made its way into the academy. Since 2005 universities world-wide have begun to adopt speed dating protocols as a tool for building research culture. An extensive review of the brief history of speed dating in university settings indicates that the motivation for organising events tends to fall into six clusters. Each motivation is discussed here, as well as two potential as-yet-unexplored outcomes for research students in academe: increasing wellbeing through improving social relations and aiding the conceptualising of theses. Finally the authors raise the need for further research in this area to establish its real impact and to identify best practices."

"How prepared are you to teach a course on "corporate" literature? What would you say to someone who does not recognize the value of a liberal arts education? How would you argue for the value of reading contemporary fiction-to someone who aspires to be an accountant? The ongoing challenges facing the humanities are making these questions more common-and responses to them more significant. Many believe that the future of the humanities hinges in large part on the ability of people who share a passion for the liberal arts to be able to articulate that passion to others. Seeing and hearing people who are fully committed to their art is often believed the best way of supporting the arts. The poet who intensely and emphatically reads her poetry reveals her commitment to her art; the philosopher who cleverly turns every statement into a question and undermines beliefs demonstrates the perennial and complex nature of philosophy; the novelist who convinces others to believe in her characters and care for their well-being shows the power of mimesis."

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.

Since the late 1980s, research on post-industrialized economies shows that the boundary between work and family is increasingly becoming blurred. The continuing evolution of e-technology allows work for some to be done anywhere, anytime. This article examines the degree to which e-technology has transferred work into the home lives of academics and how this has affected their work/life balance. Drawing on a study in an Australian university of academics with young children, we utilise the terms 'work extensification' and 'work intensification' to explore whether these new technologies are a blessing or a curse in their work lives. At the same time we describe the deteriorating working conditions for Australian academics whose work has intensified and extended into their private lives with longer working hours in a speeded up environment. Our findings revealed the use of metaphors such as invasion and intrusion of e-technologies into academics' homes and their need to establish boundaries to separate work and family life. Most felt that having e-technologies at home was of benefit to their work but they came at a cost to their family life-delivering a blessing and a curse.

The papers in this issue address different aspects of the relationship between SoTL and the institutions within the current context. They provide snapshots of, and insights into, SoTL from institutional perspectives from across the world including North America, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden and Australia.

Ten years have passed since the signature of the Bologna declaration. Seventeen countries have joined the process; since then, several new action lines have been added and the original action lines have often gained a new and more sophisticated content. The 2009 Bologna Stocktaking exercise included the traditional quantitative indicators, the criteria this time being designed to evaluate the goals set for 2010. In addition, particular emphasis was put on qualitative analysis on this occasion to provide a realistic picture of what has been achieved and which initiatives will take more time than anticipated to implement. The 2009 stocktaking shows that while there has indeed been important progress since 1999, following progress since 2007, not all the goals of the Bologna Process will be achieved by 2010.

This paper analyses the way in which global university models are adopted in research universities in Indonesia and Malaysia. It first provides the global context in which these models have evolved and the processes through which they spread. How these global models interact with local policies and institutions is the topic of the empirical part of the paper. Even though the global discourse is apparent and similar in different countries, local adoption is path dependent and embedded in wider structures. This might result in dissonance and discrepancy in the implementation phase, an outcome which is inevitable, but not necessarily harmful.

This article uses four academics' gendered and cultural responses to life in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand under the new managerialist regime. Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) requires academics to submit evidence-based portfolios every six years to categorise and rank them, with government funding assigned accordingly. When the authors met as members of a writing group, the talk often turned to negative aspects of PBRF. Using co-operative enquiry, the four co-researchers began writing observations of their individual experiences, differences and identities to help them reflect and understand the impact of the changed environment. The four phases of writing as enquiry were: deciding on a focus, writing observations, engaging with the written accounts and interpreting the outcome through metaphor. The article process facilitated a positive outcome by helping the authors regain a sense of collegiality and mutual support, along with a sense of preserving their academic identity by writing and publishing as a group.

Within some significant circles, where hegemonic representations of the idea of 'science' are produced, certain orientations of scientific research are carried out, and science and higher education policies are made and applied, references to the alleged existence of two kinds of knowledge, one of which would have 'universal' validity, and 'the other' (in fact the several others) would not, are frequent and do have crucial effects over our academic work. Although some outstanding authors within the very Western tradition have criticized from varied perspectives such universalist ambitions/assumptions, and although many colleagues have reached convergent conclusions from diverse kinds of practices and experiences, such hegemonic representations of the idea of science are still current. The acknowledgment of this situation calls for a deep debate. This article responds to such a purpose by attempting to integrate into the debate a reflection on the shortcomings of hegemonic academic knowledge to understand social processes profoundly marked by cultural differences, historical conflicts and inequalities, as well as significant perspectives formulated by some outstanding intellectuals who self-identify as indigenous, and the experiences of some indigenous intercultural universities from several Latin American countries.

"The traditional 'lone scholar' view of an Arts and Humanities doctoral student sits uneasily with the skills-based discourse underpinning policies aimed at enhancing researcher development and employability. This paper reports on a case study of a research training programme for doctoral students in the Arts and Humanities at a UK university. It calls for the embedding of the generic skills agenda within a more clearly articulated pedagogic discourse and formulates four pedagogic principles for research training programme design. Additionally, the paper problematises the research trainer role and highlights the importance of paying attention to the students' own learning agendas and the learning value they are prepared to derive from training."

International postdoctoral researchers are growing in number and importance in academic research around the world. This is contextualised by a shift to international and enterprise modes of academic production. Through a multiple case study, this paper analyses the role of international postdoctoral employment in life sciences and engineering fields at universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. In doing so particular attention is given to understanding why there are increasing numbers of postdocs from abroad working in these fields and countries, and the ways in which international postdoctorates are incorporated into research laboratories and projects. International postdoctoral employment appears driven by the same factors in the US and UK but is related to different modes of academic production. The findings of this study have implications for research on academic labour, and the organisation of academic production.

The theory of academic capitalism is used to explore US and EU marketization trajectories. Comparisons are made along the following dimensions: creation and expansion of intermediating organizations external to universities that promote closer relations between universities and markets; interstitial organizations that emerge from within universities that intersect various market oriented projects; narratives, discourses and social technologies that promote marketization and competition; expanded managerial capacity; new funding streams for research and programs close to the market; and new circuits of knowledge that move away from peer review and professional judgment as arbiters of excellence. We also consider the status of fields not closely integrated with external markets, and see fragmentation of the humanities, fine arts and (some) social sciences to be a sign of research universities marketization.

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."

"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..."

"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..."

"In Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insidious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely the underfunding of the arts and humanities. Working against the increasing commercialization of the academy, Nussbaum sets out a vision of the arts, and especially literature, as central to the functioning of a healthy democratic society, first because they underpin skills of reasoning, argument, and critique, and secondly because they cultivate imaginative, caring, and empathic citizens. Nussbaum's passionate defense of the humanities coincides, and to some degree overlaps, with the emergence of the medical humanities over the past decade or so. Tying the notion of the "healthy" society more particularly to health-care institutions and systems, the medical humanities have pointed to a contemporary crisis of care in Western societies that emerges out of a number of factors, including the increasing bureaucratization and privatization of care services, and the fragmentation of the patient among subspecializations. Having thus diagnosed an ailing system of health care, the medical humanities have, like Nussbaum, prescribed the reading of literature as the cure, asserting that it is particularly good at making better health-care professionals by widening perspective and developing the sensibilities.1 In other words, literature is seen to be valuable because it can help doctors and other health-care practitioners to nurture an empathetic response to the suffering of those who are in their care. What seems emergent, then, across Nussbaum and the medical humanities, is a nexus of concern with a prevailing "health" crisis (whether of democracy or of systems of care), for which the revitalization of the humanities emerges as the necessary panacea, because the arts, and especially literature, make us more enlightened and"

"As the only state university that bears the name of the country, the Universitas Indonesia (UI) has played an important role in the history of the Indonesian nationalist movement for over half a century. Now located at two sites, one in the center of the city and the other on the outskirts, the history of this leading state university-its architecture and location, as well as its campus life and student movement-reflects the clashes of various forces and competing ideologies. This study looks at the relationship between public space and nationalism in Universitas Indonesia in an interdisciplinary perspective. It relates architecture and urban history with the operations of power and memory in a campus, which is seen both as an arena of struggle as well as containment. In that sense the campus is a reflection of public space in a broader sense. This paper raises a question about the kind of civic space emerging from the tension between the physical structure and environment of the campuses and the inner space of campus politics and students movement."

"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."