Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

by Morten Levin

Author	: Morten Levin
Publisher	: Berghahn Books
Total Pages	: 230
Release	: 2016-11-01
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1785333224

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Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

Shaping the Future of Higher Education

by Lesley Wood

Author	: Lesley Wood
Publisher	: Helsinki University Press
Total Pages	: 251
Release	: 2024-10-24
Genre	: Reference
ISBN	: 9523691104

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The university is struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-changing world, and, as a system, higher education generally does not respond quickly to change. Its institutions produce valuable knowledge about social issues and problems, but this is so often not followed by action constructively using that knowledge to effectively address these problems. Shaping the Future of Higher Education generates knowledge to enable researchers, teachers and leadership in higher education to learn how to positively embrace constant change through innovative, collaborative, systemic, critical and creative thinking and action. Through a participatory and transformative paradigm, it strives to create knowledge to enable everyone involved in higher education to move from talking about change to actioning it. The book presents possible structures and processes for learning, teaching, research, community engagement and leadership. It provides pathways to shape a higher education system that is inclusive and student-centred, that promotes knowledge democracy, and is responsive to and relevant for dealing with pressing social issues as they arise. The contributing authors of this book are internationally renowned researchers with years of experience in their respective roles in higher education. Their ideas will benefit all who are involved in, concerned about, and/or actively promote most effective higher education practices.

Death of the Public University?

by Susan Wright

Author	: Susan Wright
Publisher	: Berghahn Books
Total Pages	: 349
Release	: 2017-05-01
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 178533543X

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Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.

Collaborations

by Emma Heffernan

Author	: Emma Heffernan
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 219
Release	: 2020-05-31
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1000181960

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Collaborations responds to the growing pressure on the humanities and social sciences to justify their impact and utility after cuts in public spending, and the introduction of neoliberal values into academia. Arguing ‘in defense of’ anthropology, the editors demonstrate the continued importance of the discipline and reveal how it contributes towards solving major problems in contemporary society. They also illustrate how anthropology can not only survive but thrive under these conditions. Moreover, Collaborations shows that collaboration with other disciplines is the key to anthropology’s long-term sustainability and survival, and explores the challenges that interdisciplinary work presents. The book is divided into two parts: Anthropology and Academia, and Anthropology in Practice. The first part features examples from anthropologists working in academic settings which range from the life, behavioural and social sciences to the humanities, arts and business. The second part highlights detailed ethnographic contributions on topics such as peace negotiations, asylum seekers, prostitution and autism. Collaborations is an important read for students, scholars and professional and applied anthropologists as it explores how anthropology can remain relevant in the contemporary world and how to prevent it from becoming an increasingly isolated and marginalized discipline.

Universities As Transformative Social Spaces

by Andrea Kolbel

Author	: Andrea Kolbel
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 353
Release	: 2022-08-23
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 0192865579

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The realm of higher education, much like everything else in a global and mobile world, has rapidly altered in the last few decades. More and more universities and seats of higher education are using strategies towards ' 'internationalization'; by increasing heterogeneity in rank, student composition, resource endowments, faculty profiles, and their social spaces. The essays in this volume take a critical look at universities across South Asia, more specifically, at the dynamics of student mobility and mobilizations existing in such localized social spaces, and compares these with their counterparts in universities across the world. While elite universities in South Asia, as elsewhere, have been caught in a stiff international competition and are aspiring for the highest ranks, students from the most excluded communities and remote parts of the country seek entry to badly endowed universities, facing obstacles during their courses, and upon seeking entry into employment. The volume evaluates such universities as spaces for mobility opportunity and mobilizations in a globally networked world. It combines local and international perspectives with thorough observations of the dynamics in localized university spaces while embedding them in transnational processes.

Realizing the Ecological University

by Ronald Barnett

Author	: Ronald Barnett
Publisher	: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages	: 387
Release	: 2024-08-22
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1350450898

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The ecological university takes its interconnectedness with the world seriously. This is challenging, for the world is in difficulty and is shot through with antagonism. The university is partly culpable for those difficulties and so has responsibilities towards the world. Realizing the Ecological University spells out this thesis by charting the university's entanglements with eight ecosystems – knowledge, learning, persons, social institutions, culture, the economy, the polity and nature. The book identifies ways in which each of the eight ecosystems is impaired and points to possibilities through which universities can help in repairing those ecosystems. This book also sets out broad principles in helping to realize the ecological university in each of the eight ecosystems. Wearing his scholarship lightly, Ronald Barnett draws widely from philosophy, social theory, comparative higher education and ethics, and advances a particular form of the philosophy of higher education, at once realist, societal, critical, worldly and Earthly. Written with wit and lots of examples – actual and fictional – the text has a compelling vibrancy, made manifest in its concluding Manifesto.

Higher education in a globalising world

by Peter Mayo

Author	: Peter Mayo
Publisher	: Manchester University Press
Total Pages	: 217
Release	: 2019-07-04
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1526140942

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This book focuses on current policy discourse in Higher Education, with special reference to Europe. It discusses globalisation, Lifelong Learning, the EU’s Higher Education discourse, this discourse’s regional ramifications and alternative practices in Higher Education from both the minority and majority worlds with their different learning traditions and epistemologies. It argues that these alternative practices could well provide the germs for the shape of a public good oriented Higher Education for the future. It theoretically expounds on important elements to consider when engaging Higher Education and communities, discussing the nature of the term ‘community’ itself. Special reference is accorded to the difference that lies at the core of these ever-changing communities. It then provides an analysis of an ‘on the ground project’ in University community engagement, before suggesting signposts for further action at the level of policy and provision.

The Toxic University

by John Smyth

Author	: John Smyth
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 240
Release	: 2017-06-23
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 1137549688

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This book considers the detrimental changes that have occurred to the institution of the university, as a result of the withdrawal of state funding and the imposition of neoliberal market reforms on higher education. It argues that universities have lost their way, and are currently drowning in an impenetrable mush of economic babble, spurious spin-offs of zombie economics, management-speak and militaristic-corporate jargon. John Smyth provides a trenchant and excoriating analysis of how universities have enveloped themselves in synthetic and meaningless marketing hype, and explains what this has done to academic work and the culture of universities – specifically, how it has degraded higher education and exacerbated social inequalities among both staff and students. Finally, the book explores how we might commence a reclamation. It should be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology, and anyone interested in the current state of university management.

The University as a Critical Institution?

by Rosemary Deem

Author	: Rosemary Deem
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 237
Release	: 2017-09-12
Genre	: Education
ISBN	: 9463511164

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Whether universities can survive as critical organisations in the current time is an open question which this volume seeks to address. The book examines particular aspects of three main themes: governance, critical regulation and regulated criticism; growth, equality, movement and instability in higher education systems; and teaching and learning. Topics range from ‘University Futures’ to an examination of governance by procedure and the loss of the social process of the university; a discussion of the meaning of academic freedom; and approaches to managerialism. Quality management is discussed, along with the question of whether European Liberal Education actually exists. Various aspects of the theme of teaching and learning are examined, from student participation in out-of-class activities, to the role of Centres of Excellence, and a consideration of widening participation. The book is international in its reach, and addresses the continuing dilemmas faced in higher education systems, within Europe and beyond.