Changes in the Management of Doctoral Education

This article deals with the current reform of European doctoral education. It is argued that the concrete results of the reform can be better understood by analysing changes in the management of doctoral programmes. This rests on the case study of a Norwegian PhD programme in finance and is based on an analytical framework composed of three public management narratives: New Public Management (NPM), Network Governance (NG) and Neo-Weberian-State (NWS). The latter allows for a particular focus on the instruments, actors and objectives of governance. The article concludes that the examined doctoral programme's management story can be divided into two episodes. The first — the 'internationalisation' episode — is shaped by the academic profession in finance which uses a wide range of constraining NPM instruments and applies them in a comprehensive manner to doctoral education in order to achieve its overall objective, namely to implement an internationally competitive PhD programme. The second — the 'integration' episode — is about a recently developed policy instrument with relatively non-constraining NWS elements, used by the State to establish National Research Schools. The latter are principally aimed at the better development and coordination of doctoral training between small and large higher education institutions. Due to those differences between the two episodes in terms of constraining character and scope, the reform of the examined doctoral programme is strongly shaped by the first episode. Hence, the reform essentially consists in a doctoral programme with an international and academic character.     

Determinants of PhD student satisfaction: the roles of supervisor,department, and peer qualities

Understanding the determinants of PhD student satisfaction is likely to become increasingly vital for universities as student satisfaction rankings already ubiquitous at undergraduate and master degree levels extend more broadly to the PhD level. Moreover, as PhD student populations and university competition become increasingly transnational, there is a growing need to understand cross-nationally common determinants of satisfaction. Building on prior research into PhD student satisfaction, and drawing upon relevant conceptual and metrical refinements in the measurement of satisfaction from cognate domains of psychology, we use cross-sectional data (N?=?409) from PhD candidates across the sciences, social sciences and humanities in 63 universities from 20 countries to examine how overall PhD student satisfaction is determined by, respectively and in combination, supervisor, department and peer-group, in terms of both their academic qualities and supportiveness. Taken together, we find that supervisor supportiveness is the greatest predictor of PhD student satisfaction, but that supervisor academic qualities have no significant effect. However, both the academic qualities and supportiveness of departments significantly predict PhD student satisfaction, suggesting university departments and PhD supervisors would ideally work jointly, and perhaps more closely than many currently do, to achieve competitive levels of PhD student satisfaction.     

Competition in UKHigher Education: Competitive Advantage in the Research Assessment Exercise and Porter's Diamond Model

The UK public sector has been exposed to competition as a means of enhancing its performance. HE institutions now compete for resources on the basis of research. In this competitive environment the crucial question is not why one HE institution is more successful than another at research but why some institutions are home to a large number of departments that are successful. The answer lies in exploring what gives competitive advantage at the level of the department, discipline and nation. Porter' three layer ‘diamond’ model of competitive advantage is proposed as a framework for this exploration. This identified four major components: factor conditions (research orientation and accumulated wealth of institution); demand conditions (demand by academy for departmental research as measured by ability to secure external income/research students); related and supporting departments (research strength of institution and presence of a relevant cluster of research‐strong departments) and departmental strategy, structure and rivalry (ability to focus departmental attention on the successful training of research students and publication in refereed journals). In a linked paper this model provided a framework to evaluate research performance in the discipline of geography (Curran, 2001).     

Models of academic governance during a period of nation-building: the Hebrew University in the 1920s–1960s

This paper explores the development of the structures of university governance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem between the 1920s and 1960s. The model that ultimately prevailed, a state-sponsored model of governance, dominated the higher education system in Israel until the early 2000s and was characterised by the dominance of academic faculty, a status that the government accorded to the faculty in exchange for their acceptance of the state’s normative vision for universities’ role in society. Two main governance models that were instituted at the HU are identified: (1) the Diaspora university, 1925–1950, a distinctive governance model that emerged in the pre-state period and was controlled by Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and (2) the state university, 1950s–2000s, which shifted the centre of gravity to the state. These models are further divided into sub-models and the processes described through which academic autonomy was institutionalised during a period of nation-building.     

Mentorship Efforts to Support Part-time Social Work Faculty Members

Social work faculty experience increasing demands to develop and maintain a research portfolio that includes external funding and publications. Given the increase in research expectations, more part-time instructors are needed to teach courses. In addition to the literature review, we briefly describe a pilot part-time faculty mentorship project developed by our school to build a strong, connected, and consistent part-time faculty team. However, we also wanted to examine mentorship programs at other schools/departments of social work; as a result, we conducted an exploratory research study with social work deans and directors nationwide. Findings suggested that while schools of social work are more likely to employ greater numbers of faculty overall, departments tend to have higher teaching expectations for full-time tenure-track faculty. Despite variability among responses, most schools and departments provide some form of support to part-time faculty members; a lack of resources was given as the primary reason for limited mentorship activities.     

Governing the governors: A case study of college governance in English further education

This paper addresses the nature of governors in the governance of further education colleges in an English context. It explores the complex relationship between governors (people/agency), government (policy/structure) and governance (practice), in a college environment. While recent research has focused on the governance of schooling and higher education there has been little attention paid to the role of governors in the lifelong learning sector. The objective of the paper is to contribute to the debate about the purpose of college governance at a time when the Learning and Skills Council commissioning era ends and new government bodies responsible for further education and training, including local authorities, arrive. The paper analyses the nature of FE governance through the perspectives and experiences of governors, as colleges respond to calls from government for greater improvement and accountability in the sector. What constitutes creative governance is complex and controversial in the wider framework of regulation and public policy reform. As with other tricky concepts such as leadership, professionalism and learning, college governance is best defined in the contexts, cultures and situations in which it is located. College governance does not operate in a vacuum. It involves governors, chairs, principals, professionals, senior managers, clerks, community, business and wider agencies, including external audit and inspection regimes. Governance also acts as a prism through which national education and training reforms are mediated, at local level. While governing bodies are traditionally associated with the business of FE—steering, setting the tone and style, dealing with finance, funding, audit and procedural matters—they are increasingly being challenged to be more creative and responsive to the wider society. Drawing on a recent case study of six colleges, involving governors and key policy stakeholders, this paper explores FE governance in a fast changing policy environment.     

Accommodating project-based professionals in higher education institutions in Japan

In the shifting environment of higher education, characterised by financial constraints, institutional competition and governmental steering, universities adopt a new stream of missions. In Japan, internationalisation and the acquisition of a global outlook have become a key strategy. The trend is endorsed through competitive public funding schemes, based on the belief that competition fosters so-called world-class universities. These schemes necessitate not only internationalisation of curriculum and research but also a wide range of projects and programs, which require talents that may not be readily found in the existing cadres of university workers. This empirical research assesses experiences and perceptions of project-based professionals in Japanese universities. It found unique ways in which ‘Specially appointed academic staff’ are given project and administrative responsibilities but with limited access to environment and/or support system for research. Discussions focus on impacts of such appointment on their academic career and explore how these institutional projects may be handled in regards to university organisation.     

Privatisation and marketisation of higher education in Indonesia: the challenge for equal access and academic values

Increasing costs of running educational institutions and funding educational programs, coupled with decreasing government subsidies to support such costs, have made privatisation and marketisation of higher education a common phenomenon throughout the world. The article presents the development of this trend in Indonesia utilizing two recent government regulations: Badan Hukum Milik Negara (BHMN/State Owned Legal Institution) law of 1999, and Badan Hukum Pendidikan (Educational Legal Institution) law of 2009. Three main criticisms to the regulations include impartiality towards low-income students, the government’s reduced responsibility and commitment to education, and commercialization of public universities. The article argues that the regulations and their main criticisms have failed to address the underlying causes to educational inequity and the lack of emphasis on the impacts of privatisation and marketisation on academic values and purposes of higher education. The article emphasizes the need to revisit the purposes of higher education, to reinforce academic standards and values, and to strengthen the teaching profession.     

Exploring Student Skill Learning: A Case for Investigating Subjective Experience

Doctoral dissertations reflect academic specialization in physical education in terms of both graduate programs and authors' future academic orientations. This research project examined specialization as reflected in virtually all of the dissertations written in physical education between 1964 and 1983. Through sequential matching of listings in Dissertation Abstracts Interntioml, Completed Research in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, and American Doctoral Dissertations, abstracts of 5,344 physical education dissertations were identified and subsequently coded. Selected results included the following: (a) functional effects was the most common academic specialty, (b) the distribution of dissertations among specializations across time changed minimally, (c) the most common academic specialty for DA, EdD, and PED degrees was program development, but the most common specialty for PhD degrees was functional effects, and (d) there was no association between specialties and doctoral program prestige. The results are discussed within the context of the field of physical education in higher education.     

Balanced Development for Provincial-Level Coordination and Higher Vocational Education

Abstract

In the rapid development of Chinese higher vocational education, large gaps have appeared in the scale of development and resource generation among the provinces, among regions in the provinces, and among higher education institutions in the provinces. Balanced regional development and provincial-level coordination have become policy focal points, but a discussion of the relationship between the two has been lacking in the academic world. Based on 2009 data on vocational colleges in China, the quantitative analysis in this paper shows that there is a tension between the governance models of higher vocational education and balanced development of vocational colleges within provinces. Research findings show that school affiliation is related to the ability to attract public funding, appropriations for public schools are significantly higher than for private schools, and tuition for private schools is significantly higher than for public schools; school affiliation is related to output, and the new student registration rate and number of cooperating enterprises is higher for public schools than private schools; and there is a significant positive correlation between the ratio of prefecture-level city schools and the average number of cooperating enterprises for schools in a province, and a significant positive correlation between the ratio of private schools and the average tuition of schools in a province. This paper suggests that to achieve the dual objectives of balance and development, provincial-level governments should adjust their administrations and financing for higher vocational education and decentralize their authority to local governments, in order to build a diverse and flexible new model for higher vocational education governance.     

Fostering Good Governance at School Level in Honduras: The Role of Transparency Bulletin Boards

Corruption is at the core of weak governance. In the education sector, corruption is a threat to the quality of and access to education. Although the diagnosis is straightforward, effective reforms are more difficult to implement. The principles of good governance (transparency, participation, accountability, and integrity) provide us guidance, but innovative ways need to be found to fill these principles with life and create dynamics of change. We present a simple, efficient experience of introducing transparency and fostering participation and therefore accountability at the school level in Honduras. The transparency bulletin boards (murales de transparencia) are a homegrown response to the call for improving governance in a challenging environment.     

New organisational structures and the transformation of academic work

This article will particularly focus on Norway and the consequences for academic work. Frequently in studies of academic work, focus has been on academics’ individual autonomy and to what extent the latter is challenged (Altbach in Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 448:1–14, 1980; Shattock in High Educ 41:27–47, 2001). One of the shortcomings in literature dealing with academic workplace is lack of attention paid to the emerging division of work generated by an increasing differentiation of the academic profession (Musselin in Knowledge Matters, The public mission of the research university, 2011). In order to better address complexities and dynamics that surround academic work, the article will in particular examine whether academic work is subject to an increasing specialization and collectivization. In our attempt to observe changes in the practices of academic work, particular interest is given to “how the organization of an academic enterprise affects academic work” (Blau in The organization of academic work. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1994:8). Inspired by organizational theorists such as Brunsson and Olsen in The reforming organization. Brunsson and Olsen (The reforming organization. Fagbokforlaget, Bergen, 1997) we also want to attend to the relations between organizational change and academic work. Here we address the relationship between formal organization and informal organization which is likely to develop as decoupled structures—one adapted to institutionalized norms of society and the other for coordinating activities. Furthermore, there are tendencies suggesting that universities are becoming less special as an organization (Musselin in Key challenges to the academic profession. INCHER-Kassel, Paris, 2007) and converge to more general organizational characteristics by constructing dimensions of organizations such as identity, hierarchy and rationality (Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson in Constructing organizations: the example of public sector reform, Organization Stud 21:4, 2000). In this article we are mainly interested in how hierarchy is constructed enabling coordination by an “authoritative centre” (Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson in Constructing organizations: the example of public sector reform, Organization Stud 21:4, 2000:726) and how it interferes with traditional forms of organizing the university. This calls for a concern to whether the specificity of academic work, built of the mainly individual exercise of a large diversity of tasks, remains a key characteristic for organizing academic activities at universities. Empirically this article studies changes in academic work regarding new patterns in organizing research funding and doctoral education in Norway that emerged in the last decade. Like in other European countries, new policies for research funding and doctoral education have led to the creation of new organisational structures within Norwegian HEIs, namely research centres and doctoral schools.     

境外高校独立办学立法的现实诉求与思考

推进境外高校独立办学立法是重大教育改革于法有据的必然要求,是支持跨境教育新业态健康发展的法治保障,也是推进跨境教育治理现代化的必由之路。海南自由贸易港应尽快制定境外高校独立办学的专门管理法规,以区域性跨境教育先行先试,进而辐射更大区域、更大范围乃至带动全国教育领域改革开放的协同发展。境外高校独立办学立法的主要原则是教育主权原则、教育公益性原则、高校独立办学原则和透明原则。立法的重点是厘定独立办学机构的法律地位,明确其法律权利和义务,规范其审批程序,加强政府部门对独立办学行为的监管和不当行为的责任追究,实现境外高校独立办学法治化、规范化。     

新自由主义常识与全球性大学：高等教育中的知识商品化

知识是组织高等教育活动的基本材料和学术生活的基础。传统上作为公共产品的知识正在发生转向,其商品属性和交换价值趋于增强,成为兼具公共产品与私人产品性质的一种混合型产品。在高等教育领域,知识商品化具有多种表征形式,侵蚀了高等教育的公共性。本文结合哈贝马斯和布迪厄的理论框架,阐述了以下观点:知识的公共产品性质是高等教育的公益性、高校的公共形象和学术人的公共身份的基础,也是基础研究的核心价值观之一。坚持知识的公共产品性质,抵制知识商品化的消极影响,既是知识的内在要求也是高等教育的内在要求。     

Some proposals for change to the role of the catholic sector in the Australian school funding policy process

This paper is set against a history of school funding policies in Australia that begins with the first public policy recognition of the disadvantages experienced by government and non-government schools in the 1973 Schools in Australia (Karmel) Report. The paper traces a history of school funding policy linking it with the current backlash against public education and retaliatory backlash constructions of public schools as the new disadvantaged in an increasingly competitive and deregulated school funding policy environment. These backlashes, argued to be against the indiscriminate funding of independent schools policy by several protagonists of public education, are framed in terms equivalent to what Lingard and Douglas (1999) have called ‘recuperative’ politics. From the kind of recuperative statist politics considered in this paper, construing the backlash effects of public and private schools as damaging and unproductive as those emerging from the gender wars in education policy, I propose a move to an Australian school funding arrangement in which all schools, both public and private, are integrated into one deregulated and equally funded sector, as typify diverse school provisions in several OECD polities (Caldwell 2004, FitzGerald 2004).While briefly tracing a school funding policy chronology, this paper also concentrates on the current policy moment in relation to school funding, that signals the end of distinctive public and private education sectors, and in the context of which it argues that private schools should be funded equally to state schools, a trend in evidence since 1996. The focus on the current policy moment entails an abbreviated analysis of the Fitzgerald Report (‘Governments Working Together: A Better Future for All Australians’ 2004), which makes a number of recommendations to the Victorian and other governments in relation to the public funding of all Australian schools¹. The paper addresses the impact of this trend especially on the funding of Australian Catholic schools.     

Creating entrepreneurial networks: academic entrepreneurship, mobility and collaboration during PhD education

Network-building activities of PhD students are an important area of study in furthering our understanding of academic entrepreneurship. This paper focuses on PhD students’ participation in network-building activities defined as mobility and collaboration, as well as own interest in and perceived grade of support for commercialisation from various levels of the university hierarchy. The results of a large-scale survey (of 1,126 PhD students at Link?ping University, Sweden, 41% response rate) presented here show that the majority of PhD students are engaged in collaborations with external organisations, though quite few (one quarter) have spent a part of their PhD education outside their home university. PhD students from all faculties are on average interested in commercialisation and in favour of it. However, PhD students from the faculty of Health Sciences state that it is difficult for them to combine research and commercialisation. Furthermore, interest in commercialisation of research results is relatively lowest amongst those PhD students who are undertaking mobility placements at other universities, thus pointing to an experienced incompatibility of research and academic entrepreneurship.     

Corporatization of higher education through internationalization: the emergence of pathway colleges in Canada

Through increased international student tuition revenue, internationalization provides public Canadian higher education institutions opportunities to offset the effects of stagnant provincial operating grants or earmarked governmental allocations. Pathway colleges, institutions that are either operated by host institutions or as private corporations, offer international students alternative routes to bachelor’s degrees, pathways that are intended for students who do not meet the entrance criteria of Canada’s public sector universities. While beneficial for some students, our analysis shows that pathway colleges tilt the public university towards an academic model that eschews collegial governance structures, privileges a consumerist vision of education, and relies on contract and precarious academic labor.We presenta typology of pathway colleges, providing examples of this trend across Canada. Our study examines the potential increase of human vulnerability that these colleges both produce and rely upon for staff and student recruitment.

     

Issues and Trends in Higher Education Health

ABSTRACT

Public speculation about bioterrorism and the increasing obesity epidemic are examples of current public health issues that continue to be illuminated in the spotlight. Major public health threats continue to drive the health job market and impact higher education health curricula (e.g., public health, health promotion, community health). Also, higher education institutions are dealing with more campus health-related challenges than ever before, thus driving a major focus on lowering risk with initiatives such as combating increasing mental health issues, drug abuse, sexual assault, and possible active shooter situations, among others. The current landscape of higher education academic health programs is changing due to a scarcity of funding and national focus on possible threats. Trends in degree offerings, effects of technological changes, possible solutions to current higher education health challenges, and a future forecast of higher education health are discussed.     

Different research markets: a disciplinary perspective

Drawing upon the notions of academic capitalism and the transformation of academic research from traditional academic orientation into market orientation, the paper sets out to empirically scrutinize the changing nature of academic research, focusing especially on disciplinary differences. The paper is based on a survey of heads of departments and research units at Finnish universities representing all disciplinary groups (n = 255) and on in-depth interviews with Finnish academics (n = 31) in the fields of humanities, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. Based on the survey data, the funding, selection of research topics, collaboration partners, audiences and publication forums in research are analysed. Following this, five research markets are discerned: academic, corporate, policy, professional and public market, each characterized by its own values and rationality as to what is considered the reference group, basic objective and outcome of research. The paper concludes that the transformation thesis needs to be revisited and specified since on the one hand, academic orientation still remains crucially important in all disciplinary groups, and on the other hand, market orientation entails several kinds of markets, pointing to the versatility of the university–society relationship.