SRHE NEWS NO 2 May 2010
The world to come
This issue of SRHE NEWS will be circulated just before the UK general election on 6th May. The financial prospects for UK higher education seem bleak, whatever the election result, and this reflects the situation in much of the developed world, as ‘Cutswatch’ in this issue shows. Echoing 1997’s election-straddling Dearing Inquiry, Labour and Conservative parties have postponed the difficult question of whether to raise undergraduate fees by commissioning a review which will not report until after the election. Liberal Democrats plan to phase out fees and the National Union of Students has persuaded 1000 Parliamentary candidates of all parties to oppose fee increases. But all parties talk of public expenditure as if it were synonymous with ‘waste’, higher education has already taken a financial hit, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that HE must take a further 24% cut to make the parties’ budget arithmetic work.
Gloom abounds, but let us take a longer and broader view. On 22/23 April SRHE and the Council for Industry and HE staged a seminar at St George’s House Windsor on the theme of Trust, Accountability and the World to Come. Educationists and industrialists explored not only our difficulties but also our responsibilities and our opportunities in the post-credit-crunch post-election world to come. The discussions emphasised that as we enter difficult years of restricted funding, growing workload pressure and (perhaps) higher student fees, it will help to stay focused on why we do what we do, and what matters most.
The broad investment in UK HE in the last ten years has been welcome, but motivated by reductionist priorities - to educate individuals for a high-skills economy, and to do good research in relatively few institutions. Fine words about the broader contributions of HE to a healthy society and enlightened citizenship have buttered few parsnips. ‘Wealth creation’ remains an economic rather than human concept and profit is still primary. Government policies and funding cuts intensify competition and overemphasise the student and the institution as the basic concerns of policy. Funding Councils are statutorily responsible for funding institutions, not (as was once the case) for the more community-oriented ‘ensuring adequate provision’ in every area. Widening participation targets are set for institutions; upmarket universities are berated for missing them, and their ‘failure’ is misinterpreted as a failure of the system as a whole. Every funding announcement is read first for its effect on the institution, and institutions gang up in mission groups. But as SRHE President David Watson has argued, the strength of the UK HE system is its ‘narrow reputational range’ and the integrity of the whole, greater than the sum of the institutional parts.
Higher education not only transforms individual lives, it addresses socioeconomic disadvantage, powers economic regeneration, enriches arts and cultural life, and much more. In developed societies higher education has become the passport to full citizenship. If we focus too much on the individual student experience, we lose sight of which potential students are excluded, and how institutions could reach them by working together. If we focus too much on the institution, we lose sight of the power of higher education as a whole to promote social improvement. So in difficult times let us think not only of what the community can do for our institution, and what our institution can do for our students. Those things are important, but let us think too of what our higher education sector, working together, can do for the community in the difficult world to come.
Rob Cuthbert Editor
Contact us SRHE News Editor: Rob Cuthbert [email protected] (0044) 117 328 2624 Executive administrator: Lynn Goh [email protected] (0044) 117 328 4121
Professor Rob Cuthbert Director, Centre for Authentic Management and Policymaking in University Systems (CAMPUS) School of Education University of the West of England Bristol BS41 9ND UK
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2 Contents
Editorial
Policy News Access and widening participation Academic staffing including Working lives Lynne Gornall Cutswatch
People Beneath the auditable surface The art of academic development Dilly Fung Perspectives from a newer researcher in higher education Sian Lindsay Burton Clark: his contribution to the study of higher education
Academic News Management and policy Teaching and learning including I prefer research to feed my teaching, not lead it Ian McNay The student experience Subjects and disciplines Research Technology and learning resources
Global Perspectives International Network takes off Linda Evans Diversity or divergence? Marcia Devlin
Society News SRHE Office News Networks News Higher Education Policy Network Carole Leathwood
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Letters
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Mind your language
SRHE Diary of events
3 Policy News
Policy News aims to be a scholarship-informed commentary on recent developments in HE in the UK and worldwide.
Access and Widening Participation
The Equality Act 2010 was fast-tracked to the statute book in the UK’s pre-election legislative ‘wash- up’. The Act unifies public sector duties to promote equality, bringing together gender, race, disability and other requirements and identifying nine ‘protected characteristics’ relevant for equalities. But this largely welcome tidying up and extension of social legislation unfortunately coincides with HE spending cuts likely to force the closure of outreach programmes such as Aimhigher, and to reduce the numbers available for HE in FE colleges, which have made such a significant contribution to widening HE participation by the socioeconomically disadvantaged and other under-represented groups. Aimhigher works: research by David Chilosi (LSE) and others, published in the Journal of Further and Higher Education in February 2010, suggests that Aimhigher interventions increase GCSE attainment by almost 4%, and increase application rates and admissions to HE by more than 4%:
More broadly, widening participation (WP) works, according to a report on English HE by Mark Corver, one of HEFCE’s team of independent-minded statisticians. The participation rate of people from under-represented groups has increased consistently since the mid-2000s. That’s worth remembering when you read another story about the supposed “waste” of all that money spent on widening participation and access. It’s also worth remembering that the now considerable funds earmarked for WP came originally from unhypothecated teaching funds, which were taken back by HEFCE and then reallocated with strings attached; there was no new money at the start. There’s evidence of a different kind for WP in Miriam David’s edited book from the WP strand of ESRC’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme for Improving learning by widening participation (London: Routledge 2009).
Women have higher participation rates than men in every kind of HE institution, apart from Oxbridge (where male and female participation rates are the same), according to a careful study for 1997-2008 by John Thompson, former data analyst at HEFCE, for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Male and Female Participation and Progression in Higher Education HEPI Report 41). Disaggregate by class and it’s still true: “the poorer performance of men is common to all social groups, but it is getting worse among the poorest.” Women have higher participation rates for both full-time and part-time HE, and once within HE women are more likely to succeed and obtain a degree. Women get 56% of all first class degrees, although they make up less than 50% of the population for the relevant ages. 13.9% of males graduating got a first, compared with 13% of women, but 63.9% of women got a first or a 2:1, compared with 59.9% of men. The differences in achievement at school – at least, for state schools - are (more than) sufficient to account for the differences in HE participation. And the GCSE is to blame, says Thompson: these differences started to appear when the GCSE was introduced, and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment provides supporting evidence. The poorer performance of males is a global phenomenon, perhaps partly explained by greater personal returns on investment in higher education for women than men, although this is a complex issue and a speculative conclusion.
Individual and social returns on investment in HE, and the case for widening participation, are bound up with ideas of social and cultural capital. Blairite former Cabinet Minister Alan Milburn’s Panel on Fair Access to the Professions produced a report which highlighted the role of social capital in preserving social inequalities and led to a Government initiative on internships for students.
4 Psychologists Esperanza Villar and Pilar Albertin (Girona, Spain) report research on student attitudes to investment in social capital through higher education, in Studies in Higher Education (35:2). They argue that students are not unduly instrumental in their networking (what they call a ‘pragmatic’ orientation), but rather that their focus is on making personal friends (a ‘socio-affective’ orientation), with some ‘context-contingent’ responsiveness to their situation. Sometimes it helps to have research that tells you what you always thought, especially if politicians and journalists think something different – perhaps because politicians and journalists are more likely to be very ‘pragmatic’ in networking, even (especially?) in their formative university years. If this is your kind of thing, you might also like van de Werfhorst’s (Amsterdam) article on cultural capital in the British Journal of Sociology of Education (31:2), critiquing Bourdieu (the Dutch do heresy so well).
Meanwhile HEFCE has issued new guidance to English institutions on its control of student numbers in 2010-2011 (circular letter EP02/20100). The tighter controls will make universities even more concerned to use what numbers they do have to the best effect, posing a direct threat to higher education in further education. The Times Education Supplement headlined the threat to the funding of HE in FE on 5th March 2010, reporting Luton VC Les Ebdon as saying that some at HEFCE have suggested that cutting franchise numbers for FE is a relatively easy way of finding the savings needed over coming years. And reporting HEFCE’s denial that it does such things, and the ‘horror’ of unnamed VCs at the suggestion. TES’s FE Focus editorial called for more direct funding of HE in FE to guard against such collateral damage. We think this is not just scaremongering by the 157 Group, those big mixed colleges which wanted their own degree-awarding powers for Foundation degrees. As the TES editorial said: “There’s nothing like shortage of money to test a relationship.” HE has its problems, but they are at least matched in FE, where swingeing cuts have been suffered over recent years, with new reductions arriving every day – such as an average 16% for adult learning, according to the Association of Colleges. The bewildering policy environment makes it worse, with a host of new acronyms to replace the late and unlamented LSC (Learning and Skills Council), so that not even the people who know what they all stand for know yet how to get things done. There may be some help from a new website developed by the HE in FECs expert programme, a HEFCE funded project which has assembled development materials under six themes: the nature of higher education; funding of HE delivered in FECs; management and planning; quality assurance arrangements; policy and strategy for HE in FECs; governance. And case studies on embedding inclusion have been developed in an HE Academy project in which 10 institutions each documented a change project on widening participation and/or disability equality.
Academic Staffing
As HE institutions everywhere review staffing levels, HEFCE has published a compendium of analyses of the UK HE workforce, supported with contextual reports on international experience. The main report on The higher education workforce framework 2010 (with a shorter overview) was produced by HEFCE’s HE Workforce Steering Group, chaired by Paul Curran, the Bournemouth VC soon moving to be VC at City. To accompany these reports HEFCE’s statisticians have produced the sixth report in a series on trends and profiles of staff, this time covering 1995-96 to 2008-2009. Former HEFCE officer Nicola Dowds was commissioned to report on human resource management in higher education in international comparator countries, and William Locke and Alice Bennion (Open University) contributed further analyses of survey results from the international Changing Academic Profession study. And there is more, all on the HEFCE website. It looks like there’s no excuse for not producing evidence-based policy.
And there is evidence to inform the (lack of) debate about those awful public sector pensions which never seemed to be an issue while private sector pay was racing ahead over the last ten years. An
5 article in Fiscal Studies (31:1) by Richard Disney (Nottingham) and colleagues from the Institute of Fiscal Studies says that the changes to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme in 2007 would have reduced the value of pension accruals from 14.7% to 11.2% of current salary, if applied to all TPS members. This reduction is, they say, more than enough to compensate for the extra costs associated with pensioners living longer.
If you are researching early-career academics, the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice is staging its fourth conference in April 2011, on the theme: Academia as Workplace: linking past, present and future. Free to participants, just get your proposal in by the deadline of 15 September 2010, and get it accepted …. If academic workloads and autonomy are more your thing, Michael Lyons and Louise Ingersoll (Western Sydney) in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management (32:2) analyse collective agreements in some Australian universities to test the proposition that the provisions on workload help to regulate academic autonomy. They consider it disproved, since such clauses generally leave things to management discretion, which may not be in the interests of students, staff or policymakers.
We need more research and dialogue between academics, public servants, politicians and others, to examine issues affecting work, life and the balance between them. SRHE member Lynne Gornall reports below on just such an initiative.
Working Lives Lynne Gornall Echoing the call at SRHE’s national 2009 conference for a dialogue between policymakers and researchers, the Working Lives (WL) project research team in Wales has been liaising with ‘key stakeholders’ from the Assembly Government, Funding Council for Wales and HEIs. At their Forum at Glamorgan University on 30th March 2010 Welsh Assembly member Christine Chapman AM argued that politicians needed to recognise the perspectives that researchers could bring and to reach out and nurture HE relationships. David Blaney (HEFCW) spoke about employment cultures, wellbeing, and the nature of modern professional life, and Andrew Thomas (Newport) and Monica Gibson-Sweet (Glamorgan) pledged their business schools’ support and involvement. Keynote academic speaker was SRHE member Linda Evans (Leeds), addressing the motivations and drivers of aspects of academic practice. Building on the work of Eric Hoyle, she discussed ‘professionality’ in the context of the pursuit of the ‘ideal job’, and explored the analogy of designing and constructing a house as a model for understanding academic aspirations ‘in practice’. Jane Salisbury (WL, Cardiff) disclosed the nature of ‘reflexive’ sessions amongst the team, as part of a ‘reporting back’ to the network of WL research participants. Managerialism was under the spotlight as Lynne Gornall, Brychan Thomas (WL, Glamorgan) and Caryn Cook (WL, Newport) presented research findings in informants’ own words. Lyn Daunton (WL, Glamorgan), in closing, emphasised the interdisciplinary nature of the Working Lives programme. The next WL event will be held in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University on Friday 14 May 11-2.30. Attendance is free. To book or for more information, contact [email protected]
US academic pay hits the buffers After rises averaging 4%pa in recent years, a third of all academics in the US have suffered a pay cut in 2009-2010, and overall pay has not increased, according to the latest survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the HR professional body in HE. The best place to be this year? Private doctoral-granting institutions gave a rise of about 1.7% extra this year, on average. No other group paid any significant increase. Here’s a summary of average pay by level and subject area. The salaries of mid-level administrators haven’t fallen, but they didn’t rise either.
6 The labour market has dried up, or alternatively it is currently being flooded by applicants for a dwindling number of jobs. One lament from an untenured American jobhunter, Brian Croxall became a widely-read not-delivered-in-person paper for the American Modern Languages Association conference in 2009. The MLA conference is renowned as an academic labour market. This kind of problem has led to much soul-searching and anguish in the US about the (un)sustainability of the humanities and liberal arts, including a Chronicle special feature. Marc Bousquet, the US Chronicle’s resident leftwing blogger, argues in the Jan-Feb 2010 issue of Academe (the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)) that graduate students could and should ‘occupy’ organisations like AAUP and disciplinary associations by standing for election and organising to achieve the relatively few votes needed to establish new HE-reforming platforms.
There’s a whole generation with a new explanation Researchers at Harvard (you know you shouldn’t believe anything that follows this kind of intro) suggest that ‘Generation X’ academics don’t want to work as many hours as their predecessors and don’t think they should. It’s one of those articles just designed to stir up the readership (which is why we’ve mentioned it, obviously). And the stirring works. Here’s Gina Barreca (age unknown) in good form in her Chronicle blog. Actually, older people don’t want to work 18 hours a day either. Who does?
Cutswatch
John Douglass (California-Berkeley) took time out from the problems of HE in California to analyse HE spending trends in OECD countries, concluding that: “Preliminary indicators show that most nations have not thus far resorted to uncoordinated cutting of funding for higher education that we generally see in US state systems.” But note ‘preliminary … thus far’.
‘Swing the ax gently’, is the message in this article surveying US institutions’ attempts to plan reductions in a considered and consultative way. But people still won’t like it.
California dreaming On 4th March California student and staff demonstrations protested cuts (as the Americans say) in higher education spending. There were reports of some violence and attempts by some demonstrators to block freeways. Nostalgie de rue? We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969, but note the 21st century tone of the first comment on the Chronicle article: “echoes of the 60s and 70s … presumably the new slogan is ‘Power to the privileged’”. There is a useful briefing note on California’s HE system here.
Obama proposes 31% increase in Education budget Yes, you did read it right. President Obama proposed and carried through a 31% increase in the budget for the US Department of Education. And it’s for HE: the increase is driven by proposals to increase Pell grants (for disadvantaged HE students) and to raise the level of the grants faster than the rate of inflation. Higher education leaders ‘praised’ the proposals, it says here. You bet they did. But of course, in the US, HE is a state rather than a federal responsibility, so it’s state budgets that matter most for institutions.
Reading the news, and it sure looks bad The overall basis for the first round of cuts in England was set out by HEFCE in Circular Letter 02/2010 in February 2010. After weeks of stories about fewer student places because of Government cuts in HE budgets, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced in his
7 budget speech on 24th March 2010 that there would be an extra £270million for English HE in 2010- 2011 to fund 20,000 extra places. More details came from Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Lord Mandelson in a follow-up announcement.
HEFCE subsequently announced how it will distribute the £270million. The money is for extra student numbers and ‘modernisation’; HEFCE is tying the two things together, apart from £20 million to develop the ‘shared services’ initiative. £250million is for 20,000 additional student places, equalling the amount HEFCE would have provided to support these additional students throughout their studies. But the money comes with a big catch. A third of the £250million is for student support in 2010-2011 and the rest is for ‘efficiency activities’ for institutions, also to be spent in 2010-2011. There is no more money after that; the efficiency activities are expected to deliver enough savings to pay for the remaining years of the additional students after 2010-2011. There is a list of designated subjects – the ‘strategically important and vulnerable’, other science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and so on – the usual suspects. You can only imagine the glee with which someone at HEFCE hit on the notion of combining additional numbers with efficiency savings in a way which makes the extra money perfectly tuned to Government priorities and completely contained within 2010-2011, and so without prejudice to whatever the new Government priorities are after the election. Expect this wheeze to be copied around the world.
If you wondered where the money from higher fees went, take a look at Universities UK’s report Making it count. Some institutions are in short-term trouble and some are taking a longer view, but all were tightening belts even as Government ministers in Parliament put a braver spin on things: “In fact the real terms reduction in the Higher Education Funding Council for England's teaching grant for the 2010-11 academic year was just 1.6 per cent. ... We see no reason why there need be significant job losses in higher education as a result of recent budget announcements…” (Lord Young of Norwood Green, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State [HL2458]) Here are the detailed cuts, institution by institution.
Anyone for Palaeography? Not at King’s College London, which announced in early February 2010 that 205 jobs would have to go, including the UK’s only chair in Palaeography. Palaeography is the interpretation and examination of ancient documents and manuscripts (but of course you knew that all along). Different priorities (and financial conditions) appear to prevail across the Atlantic, where on 9th February, the same day as the King’s Palaeography story made the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, the US Chronicle carried a story about the recent acquisition of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls by two US institutions, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, Texas and Azusa Pacific University, near Los Angeles, the latter also having acquired a first-edition King James Bible. If they need an expert to take a look, they know where to ask (if they’re quick).
Lights go out at the Academy Email circular to all HE Academy staff on 9th March 2010: “Thank-you to all who have reported the light failures in the toilets. Unfortunately despite trying to replace the bulbs there seems to be something else wrong. The electrical engineer is only available this afternoon so please take care in the meantime. Please note that none of the disabled toilets have lighting.” Staff were flushed in anticipation of severe budget cuts: the Academy is considering future options under acting Chief Executive Sean Mackney. After Paul Ramsden stepped down in December 2009 headhunters Heidrick and Struggles helped in the search for a new chief executive, but as SRHE NEWS went to press there was still no announcement about the outcome, although final interviews had been scheduled some weeks earlier. There is uncertainty about jobs both at the York head office and in the institution-based subject centres, where some staff have contracts only until July 2010. The Academy will meet salary commitments for subject centre staff for the calendar year 2010, but no
8 decisions have yet been taken about the future shape of the Academy organisation. Meanwhile Paul Ramsden has been reflecting candidly on the Academy, as reported in THE 11-17 March, arguing that it has a sustainable future, but not in its present form.
End the university as we know it Of course, if you think that cuts mean apocalypse now, you might want to agree with Mark Taylor (Columbia University), who wrote in the New York Times that: ”Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning”, that is, it produces ‘products’ no-one wants to buy. So he says we should restructure the curriculum, abolish departments, make retirement compulsory, abolish tenure … Wonder what he teaches, and for how many students.
People
Beneath the auditable surface Paul Hoggett (West of England) has described new public management in psychosocial terms as a ‘perverse social defence’, in which the function of a social system as protection against individual anxiety goes beyond its positive zone, and beyond the pathology of narcissism, to the point where politicians, regulators and managers actively collude in self-deception, creating a virtual reality and an ‘auditable surface’ of targets, key performance indicators and other measures and systems which may be superficially coherent but are increasingly disconnected from the reality inhabited by people at the grass roots. News wants to go beneath the auditable surface, through what Dilly Fung’s research calls ‘telling tales’ of real higher education life. To begin, who better than Dilly herself and a new entrant to the educational development world, Sian Lindsay (City). We will run more tales in every issue – please send yours to [email protected]. Non-UK tales will be especially welcome.
The art of academic development Dilly Fung
The work of an academic developer can be likened to a ground-breaking, abstract work of art. It is so multi-faceted, so mixed in texture and form, that onlookers might be forgiven for stopping to ask, what on earth is this thing?
My team and I work to enhance the quality of education at our University, and we do this by many means. We run a range of taught courses on academic practice and teaching-related themes, for academic staff and other colleagues who teach and support students. In this part of our role we teach, act as personal tutors and assess participants’ assignments. Here, our work mirrors that of our academic colleagues, and we are academics by education and inclination, even if our current job descriptions may say otherwise. In the spirit of academia, we encourage our student-colleagues to apply their considerable intellectual prowess and critical thinking skills to the challenge of academic practice. With our encouragement, and in relation to research into higher education, they engage critically with the nature of higher education, its apparent values and direction of travel, and their role within it.
Yet in the spaces between our teaching, we sit on university committees, task groups and subject review panels, actively supporting the organisation – the business – for which we work. We endeavour to contribute to organisational change and ‘effectiveness’, and to promote our institution to others. We belong, and we identify with this university.
9
As with many works of art, these contrasting dimensions are held together in a kind of tension, which is at once pragmatically approached and unresolved. It is a demanding but creative space to fill, but our academic colleagues collaborate with us in a spirit of good grace. From our perspective, the art is worth the admission fee.
SRHE member Dr Dilly Fung is Head of Academic Development at Exeter University and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Perspectives from a Newer Researcher in Higher Education Sian Lindsay
I’m sure that, like many other SRHE NEWS readers, I am not unique in taking a somewhat unconventional route into the field of Higher Education (HE) research. I started my research career in 2003 as a Molecular Biologist and in 2007 I completed my PhD in this area. During my postgraduate study I also taught and supervised undergraduates and took an HEA-accredited teaching course to improve my practice; it was then that I realised I wanted a career in HE where I could further develop my interest in teaching and learning. Issues around classroom engagement and interaction, assessments that encourage rote learning, and increasing student-staff ratios were (and still are) a concern for me. Going alongside this was my passion for all things technological (I had a part-time role as an IT trainer too). When I was offered the post of Classroom Technology Support Officer at City University, London, it meant I could work directly with HE teachers, experimenting with how learning technologies could enhance teaching practice and helping address current teaching and assessment concerns. However, referring to one-off case studies of successful teaching events using electronic voting systems, for example, did not satisfy the researcher in me. I became aware of the importance of evidence-based research to influence educational policy, and wanted to apply academic/scientific rigor to my teaching ‘experiments’. So today this is exactly what I am doing. One of my current projects looks at student attitudes to mobile learning, with the broader aim of assessing a key finding of the 2009 Horizon Report – that mobile devices will be adopted for learning within the next year (Johnson, L., A Levine and R Smith (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium). Another area of research explores the issues contributing to PhD completion rates at City University, with a view to developing ‘risk factors’ that one should be aware of before embarking on PhD study. My job title has since changed to Learning Development Adviser and I find myself at a unique juncture between the research fields of educational development and learning technology, which is challenging but nonetheless very interesting.
Sian Lindsay (PhD FHEA) is Learning Development Adviser in the Learning Development Centre, City University London [email protected]
Burton Clark: his contribution to the study of higher education On 31st March 2010 the London Institute of Education (IoE), in partnership with CHERI and SRHE, staged a fitting tribute to the academic legacy of Burton (Bob) Clark, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education and Sociology at UCLA, one of the founders of the field of research into higher education, who died in October 2009.
Guy Neave provided a warm introduction to the event based on his long personal friendship and academic collaboration with Bob Clark, who spent
10 the largest part of his working life in California at Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA but also worked at Harvard and Yale. Mike Shattock (IoE) and John Brennan (Open University) put together an academically sumptuous and well-attended programme, with Gareth Parry (Sheffield), William Locke (Open University), Gareth Williams (IoE), Peter Scott (Kingston), and John Brennan and Mike Shattock each taking one of Bob Clark’s books and providing stimulating critical retrospective readings which recontextualised the work in today’s HE environment.
Academic News
Academic News covers recent research into HE, publications, reports and (in the best possible taste) gossip, in areas of interest to SRHE members. If your area is under-represented, or if there’s academic gossip we missed, please suggest items for future issues by emailing [email protected].
Management and Policy
People who should know better, like vice-chancellors and presidents, perpetuate myths about academics like ‘managing professors is like herding cats’, according to college president Steven Bahls, who says ‘administrators’ (managers) should avoid the temptation to rubbish faculty (academics) in the supposed interests of better governance. So let’s look at the research: where better to start than with the legendary John Burgoyne and colleagues at Lancaster, who have produced a report on Leadership Development in HE for the Leadership Foundation for HE. For a shorter guide on how to be a head of department here’s some good advice. It’s not easy, with all those plates to be kept spinning, not least because multi-tasking doesn’t work, even if you think it does – at least, that’s what some psychological researchers say. (I think I’ll wait for some gender- sensitive research before I mention this at home.) If on the other hand you’ve suffered at the hands of Ratemyprofessor and just wished there was a Ratemymanager, there’s a handy 2x2 matrix in a great piece by Michael Munger in the Chronicle of HE. How much does your manager take responsibility, how much does (s)he have a need for control? That’s all you need to ask. High responsibility, low control works best.
Sceptics about performance management systems will find some ammunition in a paper by Ana Isabel Melo, Cl udia Sarrico (both University of Aveiro, Portugal) and Zoe Radnor (Warwick) in the March 2010 Public Management Review. In the one research-intensive UK university they investigated there was a noticeable difference in performance measurement, but not much difference in terms of action, especially on individual performance. But for key senior staff there was more accountability of a managerial kind, driven particularly by external pressures from Government and the market. Not what you’d call a ringing endorsement, then. But not much of a sample either.
While we’re bashing new public management, an article by Morton Hansen (University of Southern Denmark) in the same issue says that marketisation of contracting in social services makes no difference to economic performance.
And for all those hankering for an old management fad instead of one of the new ones, here’s a report by Nicola Sayers for LFHE on scenario planning. The kind of thing oil companies used to do in the 1960s, when they were revered for groundbreaking, rather than reviled for earth-wrecking.
11 Academic/manager identity crisis? We need to talk Richard Winter of the Australian National University argues that managerialism polarises academics into two camps, academic managers and managed academics. Academic managers have ideologies and values which are congruent with corporate managerialism; managed academics have incongruent values. The solution, says Winter, is to develop a community of practice through ‘generative conversations’ in which the two groups learn to talk to one another in a meaningful and collaborative way. We too can dream.
Would you use open source software for mission-critical management systems? Some major North American universities, near the end of their tether with the costs of commercial systems, have joined together to develop open-source alternatives for major applications like finance and student administration. Their collaboration is called Kuali (a Malaysian word for a wok), and it involves big names like the University of California, Berkeley and the University of British Columbia. But the student administration project has just suffered its first dropout: Florida State University is still saying good things about the project but prefers to spend its money on other IT demands.
If you’re just looking for a commercial alternative to big-company maintenance agreements, there are smaller-and-cheaper options out there, at least in the US. But they can be risky: Oracle is taking court action against one such provider, Rimini Street, claiming that it is operating on the basis of illegally procured details about Oracle’s software. Rimini Street has issued a counter-suit. Oracle, which has succeeded with this kind of action before, warns universities that if they leave Oracle and then return later, they will have to pay for the intervening period anyway. We think this is what the private sector means by customer focus.
Would you outsource assessment? Lori Whisenant does, as reported in the US Chronicle of HE (7th April 2010). Her 1000 students at the University of Houston write assignments which are now marked in India, Singapore or Malaysia by employees of a company called Virtual-TA, a subsidiary of the US-based EduMetry. The 7 teaching assistants (TAs) employed to support Ms Whisenant couldn’t cope with the workload, says the story. Most respondents to the story condemn the practice; there are more than a few defenders, but we’re with the majority. Outsourcing assessment means teachers lose their professionalism, and universities lose their soul. Ms Whisenant’s course is, as one respondent notes, in business ethics. Sounds like a case study right there.
Academic freedom and ethics There’s been a long and tortuous series of cases in the American courts about whether or not university staff can claim that academic freedom entitles them to make job-related statements critical of their employer, with the balance so far coming down in favour of the university’s right to discipline staff who make adversely critical comments. But now here’s a different view, from an Ohio judgment.
There are many people in universities who could do more to promote and guide ethical behaviour, if only universities would organise to take advantage of their capacity. In particular, says David Hoekoma, a US philosophy professor, academics, student services staff and students’ union officers are perfectly placed to do more. Ethics occupies an ‘undecided space – one where individual conduct and subjectivity are not decided by surveillance-based discipline but performed by active subjects in interaction with each other in relation to that discipline.’, according to Rick Iedema (University of Technology Sydney) and Carl Rhodes (Swansea), writing in Organisation Studies 31:2. Meanwhile organisation theory continues in its entertainingly arcane way to generate new perspectives. In the same issue of Organisation Studies Raffi Duymedjian and Charles-Clemens
12 Rüling (Grenoble Ecole de Management) provide a very French approach, developing the concept of bricolage from Levi-Strauss, and contrasting ideal types of the organisational engineer and the organisational bricoleur ‘doing things with whatever is to hand’.
Teaching and Learning
SRHE scores double top at HEFCE HEFCE has appointed SRHE member William Locke as its new Head of Teaching and Learning. He takes the post formerly occupied by SRHE member Heather Fry, who was promoted to Director of Education and Participation from April 2010, when John Selby retired. This means that policy direction for the whole of education, teaching and learning and widening participation at HEFCE will be provided by academics with a broad and deep knowledge of research into higher education.
I prefer research to feed my teaching, not lead it Ian McNay
I do get irritated by academics who imply that a policy of research-led-teaching (RLT) is an axiomatic good, universally applicable, to which there is no legitimate alternative. Let me question this unthinking approach.
I did a research-led degree, in English, in the 1960s. What I got, then, was a fragmented programme with no internal coherence. It seemed that staff pursued individual research interests and did not talk with one another about the programme as a whole or about the student experience. CNAA did much to improve that in the 1970s and 1980s for the newly emergent challengers to tradition; I do not want to regress. I was interested when one of my students argued he could not use his research in teaching because the gap to where his students were currently situated would take so long to bridge that other more relevant and accessible material would be squeezed out, and students might be deterred.
THE has regular reports of courses, even whole departments, being closed, not because of lack of student demand or poor teaching, but because of RAE results. Jonathan Adams at Evidence UK has shown that the aggregated consequence of such decisions is that some regions have no accessible courses in key subjects. This runs counter to policy on access, disadvantages part-time students, and has implications for the supply of key skills for regeneration, another policy priority.
The paradox is that the policy does not operate in universities where the claim is made. My research on quality assessment led to a conference session where I asked participants whether research policy was linked to teaching policy. Nobody said ‘yes’ out of more than 50 people. Research stood by itself, a discrete entity somewhat apart from other elements of the university. In the US the National Science Foundation requires research bids to show how outcomes will feed into learning. In the Netherlands quality in research and teaching is assessed by the same agency, often together. In Hong Kong the UGC uses all four Carnegie scholarships in its RAE, so discovery, teaching, application and integration form a synoptic framework. But in the UK, even ‘impact’ has not meant changing people’s lives, but influence on other academics in a closed world. When I ask researchers whether internal approval of research requires evidence of how it will lead teaching, I get blank or even scornful looks. When I ask whether teaching validation processes identify how research has an impact on teaching, the same blankness appears. It is not required, nor is it explored by QAA as a quality criterion.
13 If research leads teaching, teaching must follow research and not, by implication, the needs of students nor the expectations of employers. But the role of universities has gone beyond preparing only the teachers and professors of the future. The reflective professional is as valid a source of expertise as the researcher academic. So the claim is dangerous rhetoric.
I do not want to deny a rich potential symbiosis between research and teaching. I use my own research in my teaching, and students may provide data that feed my understanding of my research fields. But note ‘feed’ not ‘lead’. At its extreme an RLT policy would mean not teaching a topic on which you are not engaged in research, an obvious nonsense. Scholarship bringing critical perspectives and different views on a topic is the key to developing such skills in students. Of course, despite their rhetoric, many employers do not want challenging employees who use skills of enquiry, critique and challenge. I once surveyed management students sponsored in a block booking by their employer, an investor in people. They said they could not implement the learning from the course: ‘no new paradigms here’. Sadly, this also applies to universities, which score badly when assessed as learning organisations.
Research-led teaching is a dangerous myth. Research-fed teaching will be good. So will research-fed policy … on research and teaching assessment.
Ian McNay is Professor Emeritus at the University of Greenwich and editor of SRHE Abstracts. This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Compass, the internal journal of the University of Greenwich.
Analysing teaching-learning interactions in higher education Mary Thornton (Hertfordshire) reviews Paul Ashwin’s new book on this theme, subtitled ‘accounting for structure and agency’, in British Journal of Sociology of Education 31:3. It’s dense and difficult sociology, but worthwhile and necessary, she says.
Academic identities SRHE member Caroline Kreber (Edinburgh) has an article in Studies in Higher Education (35:2) based on qualitative research with 9 academics, arguing that authenticity in teaching could be a key issue for staff and students, and that academics’ personal theories of teaching are critical in deciding the scope for authentic pedagogy. Beyond pedagogy, Tony Harland and colleagues (Otago) argue that academics must be both critic and conscience of society, in Teaching in Higher Education (15:1). In Organization (16:6) Damon Golsorkhi (Rouen Business School) and his co-authors take a Bourdieusian view of academics’ role as ‘scholars of practice, practitioners of social science and public intellectuals’, and perhaps as reproducers of systems of domination.
Blimpish columnist Theodore Dalrymple thinks that email encourages academics to be personally abusive rather than academically considered in reacting to what other people write. For abstruse rather than abuse, try this article, ‘Academics in the castle’, by Tom Keenoy (Leicester) and Gustavo Seijo (Universidad de General Sarmiento), which weaves Kafka’s The Castle into qualitative research with a biggish sample of academics. It’s in Organization (17:2), hence the reconditeness. They pick out 6 themes, the last of which is ‘Beyond hissing and singing?’. They add, presumably trying to be helpful: “The Castle is always one step behind but, paradoxically, never comes second.” I probably need to read it more slowly. But if you like that sort of thing, you may well go for the plain weird: try this in the same issue – Christian Borch (Copenhagen Business School) interpreting organisations using the sphereological notion of foam. We do wonder if he’s ever tried it in a corporate boardroom.
14 Tribes and territories in staff and educational development In the Journal of Further and Higher Education (34:1) SRHE member Paul Blackmore and three collaborators with Leadership Foundation connections criticise the lack of integration in what they call (following Becher and Trowler) the ‘tribes’ of educational developers, staff developers, human resources developers and trainers variously. They argue that the best way forward is to aim to reconcile the tribal differences by aligning them in a development programme which is inclusive, strategic, integrated and scholarly. It makes sense to us. And if you ever wanted a comprehensive survey of the attitudes and opinions of the leaders of Australian teaching and learning centres, here it is, from Geelong academics Stuart Palmer, Dale Holt and Di Challis in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management (32:2). If you didn’t, you’re clearly not editing or refereeing the journal.
Effective teaching criteria are variable, not fixed Marcia Devlin and Gayani Samarawickrema of Deakin University in Higher Education Research and Development (29:2) compare the Australian Learning and Teaching Council’s criteria for effective teaching with other criteria drawn from the literature. They argue that effective teaching criteria evolve over time and depend crucially on the teaching context, and that it is best always to be discussing what makes teaching effective, but never to set criteria in stone. This is consistent with Effective learning and teaching in UK higher education, the TLRP’s summary of evidence from its major research programme.
Free resources for graduate employability The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme-funded project Creating Future Proof Graduates, led by Birmingham City University, has created multimedia resources for students to enhance employment skills. The resources, with teaching notes, cover: cultural awareness; providing relevant answers; professional ethics; networking and social confidence; unexpected and extreme emotions and reactions; social responsibility; research skills; and, bullying and the misuse of power.
With grade inflation, comparisons are otiose That seems to be the general reaction to an article reporting that GPA scores in the US are inflated by 0.1 per decade. First, that doesn’t sound like runaway inflation. Second, practices 10 years ago were different, so you’re not comparing like with like. And third, if you want to compare students today, you still have a distribution and you can still work out relative performance. Or not, depending on your faith in inter-institutional reliability and consistency.
The student experience
David Jary (Open University) and Yann Lebeau (East Anglia) in British Journal of Sociology of Education (30:6) adapt an earlier conceptualisation by Dubet to offer a typology of student orientations based on ‘personal project’, integration and engagement, leading to 8 types of student orientation in UK sociology. It’s the kind of understanding that might improve retention, on which case studies and more are available following the Higher Education Academy event on 3-4 March 2010 Retention Convention: What works? Student Retention and Success. Of course, staying the course can be tough: here’s the league table of America’s most stressful colleges, according to the Daily Beast. Yale will be disappointed, missing the top ten.
Students tempted to reduce their stress by cheating don’t prosper at MIT, according to research by MIT professor David Pritchard and colleagues. They found that many more students cheated than admit to cheating in anonymous surveys, but that students who cheated on coursework did much worse in end-of-term exams. Their paper is published in Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, an on-line journal on teaching and learning in physics. John Walker (Massey,
15 New Zealand) also researched what students actually do, as opposed to what they say they do. He tracked his own international business students’ assignments over five years (N= 569) and analysed their plagiarism. Over a quarter of all assignments had some plagiarism, 10% were extensively plagiarised. Plagiarism increased as awareness about it became more widespread, and Turnitin seemed not to be a deterrent. A rattling good read. What should we do about it? Here are some suggestions from Wendy Sutherland-Smith (Monash) in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management (32:1). (PS No, it’s not that John Walker.)
Subjects and disciplines
The trouble with academics According to Harvard’s Louis Menand we want things to change but we don’t know how to reform higher education, especially to create a better programme for undergraduate general education. His latest book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (W.W. Norton) addresses the problems of the liberal arts, including the failings of interdisciplinarity, the marginalisation of the humanities in HE, and the phenomenon of a liberal professoriate in a conservative society. There is an interview with Menand in the Chronicle here.
Critical (of) Business Schools The February 2010 issue of the British Journal of Management has a set of articles aiming to make constructive suggestions about how business schools could improve, to reduce the risk of being blamed the next time the world economy goes into crisis. ‘Forty years of spoon-feeding in management education’ have turned management education away from practice, according to Joseph Raelin in Management Learning (40:4). In the same issue Yiannis Gabriel says that we could make management education more interesting and more socially useful if we could reconcile an ethic of care with the dominant ethic of criticism, which if left on its own makes management as a field of study entirely instrumental. And management itself is losing its cachet, according to Michael Brocklehurst (Imperial College London) and co-authors in Management Learning (41:1).
It’s the theory, stupid Inventing a new theory has become the driving purpose of organisation theorists, in contrast to their earlier concern to validate theory, according to William Mckinley of Southern Illinois at Carbondale in an article in Organization Studies (31:1).
You must remember this But will you remember it the way you want to, or the way an organisation has steered you to? Here’s a critical analysis of how organisational memory is inadequately conceptualised, in Organization Studies (31:1).
Psychology is easy That’s what everyone thinks, according to recent research by three … er … psychologists at Yale, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (139(1) 2010). They say that most people display biased thinking about ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences, the bias emerges early in life, and persists into adulthood.
Anthropology writing Academic writing varies in ways connected to the history and characteristics of the discipline, according to Judith Reynolds (Rhodes, South Africa), writing in Studies in Higher Education (35:1). But contrary to some reports in our last issue, anthropology is alive and well and inspiring graduate students – well, one at least. Here is Dai Cooper, a student at Toronto (Canada) ‘coming out’ as an
16 anthropologist to her parents in song. Educationally uplifting as a hymn to the discipline, some say. Musically, it’s … well, educationally uplifting.
Research
Not a foul REF Responses to HEFCE’s consultation on the Research Excellence Framework overwhelmingly favoured the continuation of a process in which the quality of research outputs is central, and in which expert/peer review predominates. Most responses said they favoured the introduction of an impact measure, in principle, but that measurement needed further work and the hypothesised 25% weighting was too high.
Have no confidence in confidence limits: significance testing is significantly wrong So wrong, in fact, that we should just stop doing it all - that’s the apparently irrefutable argument of Stephen Gorard, Professor of Educational Research at Birmingham and long-term critic of academic and policymaking error, in his article ‘All evidence is equal: the flaw in statistical reasoning’ in the February 2010 Oxford Review of Education 36(1). We asked around, and our biased sample of one other academic said: “I thought everyone knew that”. Gorard points out that this flaw has long been known to statisticians, but we hadn’t heard: it feels like an earthquake just shifted our methodological foundations.
New research formula favours golden triangle The British Government policy of propping up the richest research-intensive universities is a long- running triumph of special interests over evidence-based policy. It continues with HEFCE, following Government instructions, changing the weightings in research funding to steer even more money to those universities (Oxbridge, UCL, Imperial, LSE, Manchester) with higher proportions of ‘world- leading’ 4*-rated research for 2010-2011.
Scottish squabble over Horizon fund Ructions in Scotland (reported in Research Management Briefing 73) over the £100million Horizon Fund established to support the strategic priorities of the Scottish government. The universities and the UCU don’t like what they see as the undue power vested in the proposed six-person Investment Committee, established last December, chaired by John McClelland, a businessman who also chairs the Scottish Funding Council. The problem surfaced early in 2010 over the £21million knowledge transfer element of the Horizon Fund, the equivalent of HEIF monies in England. The SFC propose to abolish automatic formula-based allocations and give control over more than half the money to the Investment Committee. The Horizon Fund was invented after the SNP won power in 2007, but there was no new money: existing funds were simply rebadged without resolving conflicts about how it should work. And Scottish universities are suspicious about the SFC because of the lack of academics in its upper reaches: CEO Mark Batho is a former civil servant.
Alma mater data 48,802 US doctorates were awarded in 2008; among US citizens and permanent residents 6,981 (23% of US citizens and permanent residents) were from ethnic minorities. 19.2% of Americans who were awarded a doctorate in 2008 had attended a community college at some point in their postsecondary education. For American Indians (apparently the new pc term for native Americans) it was more than double that proportion, 39.0%. For Asians, the ethnic group least likely to have attended community college, it was only 12%. The median total time span from baccalaureate to doctorate among graduates was 9.4 years; median duration between starting and completing graduate school was 7.7 years. All this and much more in the latest National Science Foundation
17 report. For the UK, the Higher Education Policy Institute has updated its 2004 study of postgraduate education in a 2010 report by Ginevra House , and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has produced its long-awaited report on postgraduate education.
Retheorising doctoral supervision If you’ve ever been lost in the desert of doctoral supervision literature, there’s something of an oasis in the February 2010 Studies in Higher Education (35:1). Halse and Malfroy (Western Sydney) have conducted a meta-analysis of the (often turgid) literature and in a readable article propose a different way of construing supervision, as professional work with five facets: ‘the learning alliance, habits of mind, scholarly expertise, techne and contextual expertise’. Here’s something else that looks helpful: the British Journal of Sociology of Education (31:3) announced that it will from now on carry reports on every sociology of education PhD completed from 2009 onwards.
Shock news: academics publish more if they have more time for research You will find this and other amazing findings - such as: well-published researchers have more confidence in doing research than little-published researchers - in the Brian Hemmings and Russell Kay (Charles Sturt University) article in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management (32:2). It would be logical, then, to agree to the petition circulating in Europe asking the European Union to simplify the administrative burden and financial regulation of European research funding. You can sign up at http://www.trust-researchers.eu/.
With outspoken celebrities the Schadenfreude is so much more satisfying The new book by prominent French writer Bernard-Henri Levy is called On War in Philosophy, in which he calls Kant a fake. Unfortunately for Levy he cites (extensively) a fake philosopher in evidence, referring to the ‘work’ of Jean-Baptiste Botul, a ‘personnage de fiction’ invented by Frederic Pages, a journalist on le Canard Enchaine, the French equivalent of Private Eye. As the New Statesman reports, the French can barely contain their delight at this debagging of an outspoken commentator and evidence of his questionable ‘research’ methods. Helas, mon pauvre, all it needed was a quick check in Wikipedia.
Academic evaluation and review A 2009 book edited by Ken Hyland (Institute of Education,London) and Giuliana Diani (Modena and Reggio Emiliani, Italy), Academic evaluation: review genres in university settings, gets a positive review from James Hartley (Keele) in Studies in Higher Education (35:1). So that makes this a review of a review of a review of reviews. Susan Behrens, a professor of communications science and disorders (Marymount Manhattan College) has been reflecting on how to give feedback of the academic kind, face to face, in appraisals, and in book reviews. And Malcolm Tight (Lancaster) has been reflecting on how it’s getting harder and harder to get published in SRHE’s top-rated journal Studies in Higher Education. An editorial retrospective in the January 2010 issue tells you exactly how much harder it is now than it was when he became editor in 1999.
Technology and Learning Resources
Is the end of the (virtual) world nigh? Some enthusiasts are having second thoughts about Second Life and looking for exit strategies. Presumably they’re going in the wrong direction, because according to the movie, the trick is to find the exit from the real world and become your avatar. But all is not lost: here’s some research into what university teachers think they can use e-learning for, by Carlos Gonzalez (Pontificia Universidad Cat lica de Chile). The latest survey of academics by Ithaka, a US ‘not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of rapidly advancing information and networking technologies’, says that most academics
18 have no problems with e-journals but only 10% are positive about e-books. And libraries are being cut out of academic search processes as faculty use Google Scholar and similar tools rather than going to book stock or even on-line library catalogues. But librarians have ridden these waves before, and librarians in the UK have broadly welcomed the new UK Digital Economy Act, rushed through the pre-election wash-up in April 2010. However there is a risk that universities as internet service providers will be unduly constrained by the requirements about policing copyright compliance online, according to a statement by Toby Bainton, secretary of the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL).
Blackboard offer their own global perspectives on HE issues, and there are new technologies coming over the Horizon. The 7th Horizon report (a collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative), published in January 2010, once again picks out six technologies which are likely to make a significant impact on educational practice in the near future. In the next 12 months the report’s authors expect mobile computing and open content to hit the mainstream. Within two to three years it will be e-books and ‘simple augmented reality’, and four to five years out gesture-based computing (think Nintendo Wii) and visual data analysis (making sense of large data sets through visual analysis to identify patterns). Simple augmented reality overlays digital information onto real-world experience, something now increasingly possible with widely available mobile devices . For example, Graz University of Technology in Austria has developed mobile tours of its campus in which as you look through the camera on a mobile phone you see tags and descriptions for classrooms and even a commentary on artefacts in the local museum.
Transforming higher education through technology enhanced learning is a new publication from the HE Academy – could this be the answer to Bill Gates’ repeated complaints that education has not reinvented itself to reflect new technological capabilities? No, we didn’t think so either, but there’s plenty to byte into. And things have changed hugely: consider John Willinsky, an education professor at Stanford and a quiet revolutionary who has provided the tools for 5000 on-line journals to be launched.
New developments that caught our eye include California’s development of a new website for community colleges about free on-line resources. We’d not come across Eduroam, but it looks really useful – whichever HE campus you’re on, it enables any Eduroam-enabled user to get internet access and maybe more (like use of printers) on any HE campus which is part of the Eduroam network. There is a new HERDSA Guide to e-assessment by Geoff Crisp (Adelaide), the current president of HERDSA. Todd McCann at Bay College Michigan has started texting students to remind them of assignment deadlines using Textblaster, a system used by rock bands to keep in touch with their fanbase. All we hear is Radio Gaga, but maybe he thinks that without something like this, another student would bite the dust.
I’ve been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way Here’s something that could become a really irritating timewaster: North Carolina State University has a new iPhone app which gives historical information about their campus as you move around.
Cloudy, with a chance of golfballs? An IBM news release on 10th February 2010 offers a range of educational software supposedly supported through cloud computing, but not everyone is convinced. Meanwhile, those of us with pre-Internet memories can remember when ‘new technology’ meant an IBM golfball typewriter.
19 Turn on, tune in, drop out If that resonates with you, then maybe you are among the targets for this self-styled parody of the use of new technology for teaching. Cheap shots can usually find an easy target, but we thought this was just too heavy-handed to be credible.
Global Perspectives
SRHE has probably the most internationally diverse membership of any learned society in the field, and its activities aim to reflect and serve that diversity. This will be reflected in News, and your suggestions on how to do this better will be welcome: contact [email protected]. In this issue we report on the launch of SRHE’s new international Network and feature our regular contributor on Australian HE issues, Marcia Devlin, alongside the usual snippets of news you may have missed.
International Network Takes Off Linda Evans(Network Convener) SRHE’s newest network, the International Research and Researchers’ Network (IRR), got off to a flying start with its inaugural event on March 30th at SRHE’s London office. Almost 40 research students, lecturers, research centre directors, professors, deans and pro vice-chancellors heard two distinguished professors speak on internationalisation and globalisation in higher education research.
Convener Linda Evans explained the network’s purpose of bringing together and supporting two constituencies: UK researchers and policy makers with an interest in international, or non-UK, higher education; and non-UK higher education researchers and policy makers. The two speakers - one Dutch, the other Australian - were a perfect choice for the inaugural event since each met both criteria.
Jeroen Huisman, director of Bath University’s International Centre for Higher Education Management, focused on local responses to the global challenges of the internationalisation of higher education. His extensive knowledge of research and literature in the field underpinned his identification of key themes and proposed research agenda. The Bologna Process is a double-edged sword and as for its future, the jury is still out, he said.
Susan Robertson, reflecting on the globalisation of higher education, extended the parameters of how globalisation is understood. The founding co-ordinator of Bristol University’s Centre for Globalisation, Societies and Education led the way towards her proposed research agenda via a route that had the willing audience waving goodbye to familiar, trusted conceptualisations to shift their thinking ‘outside the box’.
Two excellent presentations offered much food for thought, but the real success of this event lay in the networking. Introductions were made, business cards were exchanged, and common interests identified. The general reaction was expressed by one delegate as she was leaving: ‘It’s been really good; I’m really looking forward to the next one!’ Watch this space.
If you are interested in joining the IRR network or have ideas for how it may be developed, including ideas for speakers and future events, Linda Evans ([email protected]) or Barbara Blake ([email protected]) would be delighted to hear from you.
20 Diversity or divergence? Marcia Devlin
The Australian federal government’s response to the 2008 Bradley Review of Higher Education set the scene for a fundamental change in HE provision in this country. National targets have been set, aimed at increasing the proportion of young Australians with undergraduate qualifications and the proportional representation of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds enrolled in and graduating from Australian universities. But despite the apparently good news there are some worrying aspects of these changes.
First, the policy agenda of the federal government indicates increased vocationalisation of HE. The boundaries between our Vocational Education and Training (VET) and HE sectors are to become very blurred. The Australian Qualifications Framework Council has been commissioned to improve connectivity between the university and VET sectors and the role of Skills Australia has been expanded to provide Government with advice on the effectiveness of the higher education and VET systems in meeting Australia’s labour market needs. National regulatory arrangements for VET are now to be developed alongside those being developed by the proposed HE regulator. Add to this the apparently ever-increasing focus in HE on employment outcomes, graduate attributes and work integrated learning and you get the picture.
The labour market focus, coupled with insufficient funding of research, indicates a fundamental philosophy that values knowledge primarily for its utilitarian ends. This is a dangerous direction for any modern government to take, but the effects will not be evident for some time. Unless this agenda is challenged there is a concern that most Australian HE will become simply a training ground for employment.
Second, there are problems with funding arrangements and agreements between individual institutions and government, and the proposed performance indicators to which funding will be tied. No-one, including the Minister for Education when recently asked, can yet explain how sector wide targets and individual university targets and agreements will interplay. Interim agreements between institutions and government have recently been published; these are generally little more than re-statements of individual missions. But a closer look suggests that the Group of Eight – Australia’s equivalent of the Russell Group – won’t bother themselves with contributing to national undergraduate targets. Instead they will continue to be exclusive and focus on postgraduate education and research. Worrisome trends like this will ensure that although HE is more accessible to low SES students, not all HE is equally accessible.
Third, there is a lack of additional funding to help universities fund the increased costs of meeting participation and equity targets, and adapting to new realities. Financial matters yet to be addressed include financial support for the new directions, income support, student loans and the increasing cost burden of HE on students and their families. Long-term financial arrangements need to be put in place and honoured by successive governments. This is a big ask, and may not be politically realistic. Having said all of that, it is a profound relief that the federal government understands that the growth of HE is a fundamental requirement for the successful future of Australia.
SRHE Member Professor Marcia Devlin is inaugural Chair in Higher Education Research at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. http://www.deakin.edu.au/~mdevlin/
London to get another G spot London has three universities with names beginning with G – Goldsmiths, Greenwich and Guildhall School of Music. Unfazed by the University of Gloucestershire’s withdrawal from their London campus, and the failure of Celtic and Rangers to gain access to the English Premier League, Glasgow Caledonian University plans to open a London base, probably in Spitalfields.
21 Americans think universities care more about money than education In the USA the for-profit sector has been growing faster than traditional higher education. The University of Phoenix now has over 450,000 enrolments and the for-profits have a 10% share (2.6million) of the market for degrees. Private institutions may expand participation, but they may also skim the market for relatively able and affluent students, making the task of engaged and community-focused public institutions even harder. Despite higher US spending levels many disadvantaged US groups and communities still go without HE places, which may be why most Americans think HE institutions care more about money than education - the finding of a recent survey by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. 60% of respondents said that colleges put money first; only 32% thought that education came first. Only 28% thought ’the vast majority of qualified, motivated students have the opportunity to attend college’.
Ivy League Admissions The admissions videos are getting worse: first it was Harvard By the Numbers and now Yale. High School Musical has a lot to answer for. But they beg to be sent up.
Credit Transfer developments in Japan might parallel European Credit Transfer Scheme The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Japan is drawing up a common credit framework with China and South Korea, which would transform Japanese universities’ attitudes to recognition of student achievement in Chinese and South Korean universities. At present most Japanese universities do not accept those countries’ students’ achievements as qualifying them for entry. An initial meeting to discuss the proposed framework is to be held in March in Bangkok. The aspiration is to extend the framework to cover other countries in the region, prompting parallels with the European ECTS and the concept of the European Higher Education Area.
Acculturation x 2 Here’s an interesting take on academic acculturation, in Studies in Higher Education (35:2) - research into becoming and being an academic, with a sample of Chinese academics in 2 British research- intensive universities. The five authors are led by Xiaoli Jiang of Renmin (People’s) University of China, Beijing.
Society news
SRHE Office News
Conferences and events We have issued the call for papers for the SRHE Annual Research Conferences 2010 ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?’ Exploring Meaning, Identities and Transformation in the Academy, and the linked Postgraduate and Newer Researcher Conference “Transforming Identities in Globalised Higher Education”.
22 By very popular demand we are returning to the Celtic Manor in Wales, which does provide excellent facilities, service and space. There are many innovations this year which will include events for international delegates, and first time attendees plus a series of research-led seminars. The PGNR Conference also has an additional half day and the chance to overlap with the first sessions of the SRHE ARC Conference.
We fully understand that Conferences are expensive and budgets are being cut. Unlike many learned Societies we do not set out to make money from our members on conference, we set the budget at break even and negotiate hard on all costs to get the best possible venues and services at the best price. We have held our conference fees this year at 2009 rates in order that as many delegates as possible can make it to SRHE Conference in 2010. The only thing we couldn’t hold down was UK VAT, but this apart, all prices are the same as last year. We do hope to see you in Newport in December.
Publications The Society is exploring options for a new partner for the SRHE Book series and is keen to hear from authors with an interest in publishing work in the series. The series has impressive backlist with many titles still selling well and bringing in royalties for authors and revenue for the Society. We are keen to secure the best new partner and are looking to compile a prospectus which will include a range of new titles and authors so if you have plans for monograph works suitable for the SRHE series do please let us know (SRHE Publications Committee contact [email protected] )
SRHE Networks events are planned for the year ahead and all events booked so far are included in the Events diary at the end.
Welcome We are always pleased to hear from SRHE members on ways in which we can support your work so do please keep in touch and remember that we now have space at 44 Bedford Row for members to call in and make use of the SRHE library and wifi access.
Helen Perkins Director SRHE [email protected]
Networks News
The Higher Education Policy Network Carole Leathwood (Network Convener) This academic year has been a lively one for those interested in higher education policy, with the UK Government producing Higher Ambitions, its new framework document on the future of universities; commissioning an independent review on university funding and tuition fees; and announcing major cuts to higher education funding. Highly contested debates about the role and purpose of higher education, university management and governance, and the financing of the sector in the current economic context, have ensued. The Network has staged two well-attended Higher Education Policy Network events directly related to these key issues this year.
On 29th January 2010, a seminar on Higher Education Policy and the Management of Universities featured excellent papers from Rosemary Deem (Royal Holloway College, University of London) and Rajani Naidoo (Bath). In Universities under New Labour - senior leaders’ responses to government reforms and policy levers - findings from an ESRC project on public service leadership, Rosemary highlighted differing conceptions of university leadership and management and the relationship between government and higher education institutions. Rajani’s paper, Mismanaging Education?
23 Universities, State Bureaucracy and the Quasimarket, also addressed issues of university governance, focusing particularly on the changing articulation of state bureaucracy and the quasi- market.
The second event, on 24th March 2010, took the form of a panel discussion on Higher Education Policy in Recessionary Times, with 15-minute presentations from: Mary Evans (LSE) - Recession, what Recession?; Louise Morley (Sussex) - Desiring Higher Education or the End of the Affair?; Wes Streeting, National President, National Union of Students - The cap on fees and the NUS Funding Blueprint; and David Watson (London Institute of Education) - The roads less travelled? Speakers’ presentations where available are on the Higher Education Policy Network page of SRHE’s website.
After the stimulating contributions from the panel there was small group discussion followed by a plenary question and answer session. The discussion was further enlivened by Wes reporting on the Government Budget announcements on higher education being made in the House of Commons as the seminar took place. The debate encompassed university governance, management, funding and the role of the sector as a whole, as well as raising key issues of equality and social justice. With a general election and the report of the fees review both imminent, things can only heat up. To suggest ideas for future seminars please email [email protected]. If you are not on the network list but would like to receive information about future events, please email Carol Salmon at SRHE ([email protected] ).
Get your Network event covered in News. Send a report (200-300 words) to [email protected]
Join SRHE
Any enquiries on SRHE Membership should be addressed to Carol Salmon, Administration Officer [email protected] +44 (0) 207 447 2525. You can join online or find information about membership and subscription rates at http://www.srhe.ac.uk/join.asp.
Letters
Well, alright then, emails. After the last issue there were many emails and messages to the SRHE office and direct to News, and very positive they were too. They probably weren’t meant for publication, so we won’t repeat them here, but thank you to everyone who took the trouble to send us feedback. Please keep it up – and if you are willing or even eager for your email to be published, let us know.
We haven’t had any letters yet, but we live in hope.
Small ads
The Newsletter is a vehicle for promoting the interests of the Society and advertising the benefits of membership. We will run small ads of a strictly academic kind (no holiday homes or Polish plumbers). This is a place where you can seek collaborators, ask questions of the SRHE membership, do anything you wish which fulfils an academic purpose supported by the Society. Just send your ad or request to [email protected].
24 Visiting Professorship at The Center for Studies of Higher Education, Nagoya University, Japan. CSHE Nagoya invites expressions of interest in a Visiting Professorship, to be held for a minimum 3 months during April 2011-March 2012. Duties involve teaching, writing articles for the CSHE newsletter and the Nagoya Journal of HE, editing English in abstracts of Journal articles and webpages, organising joint research with CSHE to extend beyond the visit. Research interests in internationalisation and globalisation of HE preferred. Salary Y500,000-600,000 per month, accommodation on campus available at reasonable rent. Previous visiting professors include SRHE members Bruce Macfarlane (Portsmouth) and Kerri-Lee Krause (Griffith). To express interest contact Professor Tatsuya Natsume, [email protected].
International Summer School: Implementing Bologna in your institution University College Cork, Cork 5-9 July 2010. Ireland has been very successful in implementing the action lines of the Bologna Process, and is one of the few European countries that has successfully established and implemented a National Qualifications Framework. The key people involved in assisting the implementation of Bologna in Ireland, including Dr Declan Kennedy (author of international bestseller Writing and Using Learning Outcomes), Dr Norma Ryan (Irish Bologna expert), Professor Áine Hyland (member of EUA’s Institutional Evaluation Team) and Dr Jim Murray (CEO of National Qualifications Authority of Ireland) will share their experiences and advise on strategies for effective implementation. The International Summer School is targeted at policy makers, senior managers, lecturers and educational developers in Bologna countries and countries aligning with Bologna. It is hoped to provide accreditation in terms of ECTS credits for those who complete this course. Further information and registration details here.
Working Lives The next WL event (see the story in this issue) will be held in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University on Friday 14 May 11-2.30. Attendance is free. To book or for more information, contact [email protected]
Any Answers?
All I wanna do is have some fun Underwhelmed by the response to the ‘Name the News’ competition in the last issue, we decided to work a bit harder and try a different tack this time, before we give up on the idea altogether. So here’s the thing. In this issue there are titles of or extracts from the lyrics of 10 or more popular songs. At least six share a connection with an event at the London Institute of Education on 31st March 2010. (To do our bit to counter popular culture’s bias to youth, this competition uses only classics with some longevity.) List the six, identify the connection and send your answers to [email protected]. We offered a generous prize last time with nil response so we know money doesn’t motivate you. No prizes then, just the celebrity, admiration and pity that comes when you get a mention in the next issue. Clue: there is one, but only one, of the six within this Any Answers section. Extra anorak points will be gained for identifying song titles, performers, and extending the connection, however tenuously, to more of the planted tunes.
Talking about my generation: who are you? Are you a baby boomer, a Generation Xer, or a ‘millennial’? If you think that you’re in tune with popular culture, try this 2-minute quiz. Before you get smug about the result, don’t you think you should act your age?
25 The most beautiful campuses Here’s one way to start an argument: where are the most beautiful university campuses? Forbes Magazine does a lot of lists, and here’s another, fairly predictable one. Our nominations from among those not listed: Exeter and the University of British Columbia. Send yours to us at [email protected] (pictures too) and if it doesn’t get too boring or bandwidth-hungry we’ll run an alternative list next time.
Mind your language
It is unhelpful and misleading to define ‘Quality’ as ‘excellence’, argues Brian Poole, in Quality Assurance in Education (18:1).
You think we’re picky? Check out Gina Barreca on a bad day (presumably). Now this is our kind of thing: Yiannis Gabriel (Royal Holloway), with encouraging previous form in writing about organisational storytelling, has written Organising words: a critical thesaurus for social and organisation studies, with some help from his friends, about the words such academics use.
Overweight? It’s your own fault We’re talking prose style here, of course. Rachel Toor, longstanding columnist at the Chronicle and former editor/publisher/sufferer from ‘prose bloat’, dispenses some of the advice she usually dishes out as Ms Mentor. Simple things, like: abide by the contract stipulation on book length; if you don’t cut it down, no-one else will, and it may never appear. Read, mark, learn, inwardly digest. I would have written a longer report on this, but I had time to prune it.
The dictionary definition of academic is: “of no practical importance”; but that doesn’t stop academic practical jokes. These are what maths students (and maths academics) seem to like: a Halloween stunt and an April Fool, both down to Matthew Weathers of Biola University. More April Fools here, and if you ever wished it was 1st April every day, you’ll enjoy The Cronk of Higher Education; here’s one article that caught our eye. (In American slang ‘cronk’ means ‘something of poor quality’; in the rather better-known Australian usage it means ‘feeble’ - all from the Yiddish/German krank, for the etymologically minded.)
SRHE Diary of Events
Please note these dates for SRHE Network and other events and remember that attendance at network events is free to individual members of the Society. To reserve a place on the SRHE network event please contact Carol Salmon ([email protected])
13th May 2010 – 11.45am- 3:00pm
SRHE Newer Researchers Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.apn.asp
Surviving the Doctoral Viva: A workshop for newer researchers
Speakers: Dr Carolyn Jackson, University of Lancaster and Dr Penny Tinkler, University of Manchester Venue: SRHE, 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LL Contact: [email protected]
26 21st May 2010 – 10:30-3:00pm
SRHE Graduate Employment, Graduate Employability Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.gesn.asp
Launch Event: Mapping the Research Field, Setting the Research Agenda
Speakers: Professor Kate Purcell, of the Institute for Employment Research, Warwick University
Venue: SRHE, 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LL
We are delighted to invite you to the re-launch of the SRHE Graduate Employability and Employment Network, convened by Dr Leonard Holmes of Roehampton University. The title of the Network is intended to reflect the significance of the relationship between higher education and the employment arena: in public policy discourse, in institutional policy, in labour market processes, and in the lives of those who graduate from higher education. However, the nature of that relationship, particularly as conceptualised and articulated in the discourse of employability, remains contestable and contested. The evidence base for the validity and effectiveness of many graduate employability initiatives remains doubtful.
The aim of this one-day workshop is to give colleagues the opportunity to examine the state of play in this field of research, to debate key matters, and identify critical issues for research.
Professor Kate Purcell, of the Institute for Employment Research, Warwick University, will be the keynote speaker, drawing upon her own extensive research, exploring what this tells us particularly in relation to the recession and the longer term evolution of occupational and organisational change.
24th May 2010 – 1:00pm-4:30pm
SRHE Postgraduate Issues Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.pin.asp
A Debate: Assessment, accreditation and the elusive notion of “Doctorateness”
Speakers: Janet Bohrer, Qulaity Assurance Agency for Higher Education(QAA) and part-time EdD student, Gill Clarke, University of Bristol and UKCGE
Venue: SRHE, 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LL
Contact: [email protected]
This workshop builds on recent discussions that have explored the changing nature of doctoral education in the UK, and posed some important questions about what we mean by the term doctorateness, the quality that at least in principle all doctoral awards (of all types and in all disciplines) should have in common and all doctoral candidates should be able to demonstrate. After an introduction that summarises the key points of those discussions, a panel will lead a debate derived from some of the challenges of reconciling current modes of assessing doctorates with this developing but elusive notion of doctorateness …
JUNE
4th June SWHE SEMINAR 10AM-5PM Higher Education Reform in East Asia and the UK: management and leadership in changing contexts
27 Speaker: Professor Roger Brown, Liverpool Hope University, Professor Ian Jamieson, University of Bath, Professor Rebecca Boden, University of Wales in Cardiff, Professor Shinichi Yamamoto, Hiroshima University, Dr Terri Kim, Brunel University, Dr Li Wang, University of Bristol
9th June 2010 – 10,30am to 4pm
SRHE Student Experience Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.pin.asp
Re-thinking the Dissertation: The Role of Undergraduate Research in Higher Education
Speakers: Professor Patrick Ainley, University of Greenwich, Phillippa Levy, University of Sheffield, Helen Day, University of Central Lancashire, Peter Lumsden, University of Central Lancashire, Mick Healey, University of Gloucestershire, Mike Neary, University of Lincoln
Venue: University of Central Lancs
Contact: Trudi Emmens [email protected]
This free, one-day event offers fresh perspectives on the role of the undergraduate dissertation in higher education. How can dissertations be more effectively integrated into the curriculum? When should students start to become independent learners and researchers? How do different disciplines run dissertations? This workshop will draw directly on new research and will preview upcoming projects that aim to reinvent the dissertation.
Monday 28 June CHEER Seminar Series Summer Term 2010 Higher Education Internationally Global University Rankings and the Academic Reputation Race
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Enders, CHEPS, University of Twente, The Netherlands
This presentation addresses the emergence of global university rankings as a soft mode of multi-level and multi- actor governance fuelling a costly academic reputation race towards biased criteria of ‘world class’. Global university rankings empirically favour traditional academic performance particularly in research, and lead to an increase in highly expensive mimicking behaviour and hence to more homogeneity.
Imperialism and Higher Education in the 21st Century
Dr Rajani Naidoo, School of Management,University of Bath
This presentation explores the extent to which recent theoretical and empirical work on the new imperialism provides greater analytical purchase on national strategies and global patterns of interaction in higher education. It concludes by exploring the impact on global knowledge flows, changing ideas of the value of knowledge and the university as a site for and against imperialism.
Time: 5-6.30pm
Venue: Essex House, Uhniversity of Sussex
Contact: [email protected]
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JULY
Thursday 1st July - 1:00pm-4:30pm
SRHE Postgraduate Issues Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.pin.asp
Enhancing Induction of Postgraduate Research Students
Speakers: Drs Eleanor Loughlin, Elena Martin, Lowry McComb (from the Graduate School Training Team) and Dr Stan Taylor (of the Academic Staff Development Office) of Durham University.
Venue: SRHE, 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LL
Contact: [email protected]
Induction has historically often been conceived of primarily in terms of informing students about the nature of the institution they have recently joined, principally its history, geography, structures, policies, procedures, and regulations. While this remains an important purpose, it can be argued that, in an evolving mass graduate education system where students come from very diverse backgrounds and may have very limited previous experience of research itself or of working within a research environment, induction should have a wider range of functions. It is this perspective which informs the new SRHE series Guide to Induction of Postgraduate Research Students to be launched at this event. The seminar will consist of a mixture of short presentations, individual and group activities, looking at four key questions:
. what should be the key purposes of induction in the 21st century? . what should induction programmes cover in terms of generic content? . how should induction cater for the needs of an increasingly diverse student body? . how should induction be evaluated?
July 20-22 2010
Higher Education Close-Up Conference (HECU5) http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.pin.asp
Questioning Theory-Method Relations in Higher Education Research
Speakers: Professor Martyn Hammersley, Profesor Louise Morley, Associate Professor Suellen Shay and Professor Paul Trowler.
Venue: Lancaster University (website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/events/hecu5/index.htm) [email protected]
Events in planning – dates to be confirmed
SRHE Access and Widening Participation Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.awpn.asp
Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education
Professor Carole Leathwood and Dr Barbara Read
29 Art for a Few: Exclusions and Misrecognition in Art and Design in Higher Education Admissions
Professor Penny Jane Burke and Jackie McManus
SRHE Higher and Further Education Issues Network http://www.srhe.ac.uk/networks.fhen.asp
Skills in Lifelong learning
Professor Chris Winch, King’s College London
SRHE ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2010 – Celtic Manor Resort, Newport, Wales, UK
13-14 December SRHE Postgraduate and Newer Researchers Conference (PGNR) 14-16 December, SRHE Annual Research Conference (ARC)
For more details of SRHE Network events please go to http://www.srhe.ac.uk/events.asp
Members interested in joining the mailing list for any of the SRHE Networks should email the network events coordinator Carol Salmon ([email protected]) stating the Networks for which you would like to receive event information.
More dates for the diary
CHEER Seminar Series Summer Term 2010 5.00-6.30pm Monday 28 June at Essex House, University of Sussex Higher Education Internationally (2 presentations) Global University Rankings and the Academic Reputation Race Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Enders, CHEPS, University of Twente, The Netherlands This presentation addresses the emergence of global university rankings as a soft mode of multi- level and multi-actor governance fuelling a costly academic reputation race towards biased criteria of ‘world class’. Global university rankings empirically favour traditional academic performance particularly in research, and lead to an increase in highly expensive mimicking behaviour and hence to more homogeneity. Imperialism and Higher Education in the 21st Century Speaker: Dr Rajani Naidoo, School of Management, University of Bath This presentation explores the extent to which recent theoretical and empirical work on the new imperialism provides greater analytical purchase on national strategies and global patterns of interaction in higher education. It concludes by exploring the impact on global knowledge flows, changing ideas of the value of knowledge and the university as a site for and against imperialism. Contact: [email protected] on-line transmission For those who cannot attend the above seminar you are welcome to join the on-line transmission and participate in the discussion. The link can be accessed by clicking on: https://connectpro.sussex.ac.uk/endersnaidoo/ The site will be available from 4:45pm (UK time).
3rd Annual HEIR Institutional Research Conference, 29th and 30th June, 2010 “Developing a Framework for Institutional Research: Informing Institutional Enhancement, Practice and Strategy” http://www.dcu.ie/conferences/ir2010/registration.php3
A provisional programme for the conference is available: http://www.dcu.ie/conferences/ir2010/programme.shtml
30 Aisling McKenna [email protected] DCU Conference Organiser on behalf of the HEIR Network.
OECD Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE)’s 20th biennial General Conference will take place from 13-15 September 2010 at the OECD Conference Centre in Paris.The general theme and title of the conference is Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less. This Conference will bring together policy makers, institutional leaders and academic experts. It will explore how the crisis is affecting higher education and how governments, institutions and individuals can be more productive and lead the way to sustainable recovery. It will examine innovative approaches to achieving equity and efficiency and high quality outcomes at a time of increased demand and constrained resources.
Grounded in the OECD’s highly-respected evidence base and in collaboration with some of the world’s leading experts, the conference will identify long-term trends and offer analysis of national policies, institutional case studies and the latest research from the OECD and elsewhere. www.oecd.org/edu/imhe/generalconference. ([email protected]).
Future editions of SRHE NEWS Copy deadline dates and publication dates for 2010 are:
SRHE News 3 Copy deadline 9th August Publication Date 1st September SRHE News 4 Copy deadline 9th November Publication Date 1st December
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