Study on the Current State of Textual Expression in Private University Charters in China: Based on Textual Analysis of the Charters of 105 Private Undergraduate Universities

Abstract

The key task in the establishment of a university charter is ensuring that the text of the charter is in conformity with the law, in compliance with regulations, and rational. This paper proposes a system of observed indicators for textual expression in private university charters in China, including 6 dimensions for Level 1 indicators and 20?key elements for charter content. Through textual analysis of the charters of 105 private undergraduate universities in China, the authors found that, in terms of their textual expression, private university charters universally exhibit issues such as incompleteness of the key elements of content, failure to highlight individual characteristics, an imbalanced internal power structure, unstandardized operations, imperfect mechanisms for democracy and oversight, and so on. The state’s implementation of categorized management of nonprofit and for-profit private schools should be regarded as a golden opportunity to further strengthen the effective supply of external institutions for private universities, perfect the internal governance structures of private universities, improve the mechanisms by which academic organizations at private universities exercise their roles, and achieve effective linkage between private university charters and concrete internal regulations.     

Some implications of ‘public/private’ space for professional identities in higher education

The interplay of public and private sector dynamics in higher education has impacted not only on the roles and identities of academic staff, but also on those of professional staff, who often have the task of bringing together, and achieving congruence between, activities that are geared towards the public good and also towards more commercially oriented enterprise. In this context, a new cadre of “blended professionals” has emerged, whose roles include initiatives associated with the social responsibilities of institutions to their communities, as well as more market-oriented, income generating projects (Whitchurch 2008, 2009). This paper reports on case material relating to a sub-set of these staff, working specifically in the area of Community and Business Partnership, and on the impact of their work for traditional management structures and relationships. It will be argued that, although unlikely to be acknowledged in formal accounts of the university such as organisation charts or institutional plans, these staff are responsible for providing and maintaining a framework that holds together more publicly oriented strands of activity, such as widening participation, with more privately oriented strands, such as enterprise. In so doing, they make extensive use of multi-professional team- and networking with a range of colleagues, both inside and outside the university, not only helping to re-balance their institutions, but also to protect them against undue organisational fragmentation and bureaucracy. They therefore contribute to an increasingly ‘mixed economy’ of broadly based portfolios of activity. The implications of these ‘public/private’ spaces and activities for professional identities are explored in the context of institutional management.     

The story of Samantha: the teaching performances and inauthenticities of an early career human geography lecturer

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an autoethnographic account of my first academic year as a Human Geography lecturer at a ‘new’ public university in the North West of England. This research is timely and much needed, since teaching at universities in England has recently come under increasing scrutiny. The Teaching Excellence Framework is a new scheme, which aims to recognise and reward excellence in teaching, learning, and outcomes, and helps to inform student choice. This paper is theoretically framed by drawing on notions of theatrical performance, and performativity. This paper offers insight into the coping strategies, in respect of teaching, that I deployed as a new university lecturer. Findings are discussed around the themes of: performing teaching identities, and inauthenticity. With regard to performing teaching identities, this paper discusses the need for identity to be multiple and shifting, and how, as a young female, I undertook identity work, in order to perform competence. I also bring to the fore feelings of inauthenticity; that is, how I did not feel as if I was a genuine academic, and how I fabricated / falsified aspects of my academic identity in order to ‘fit in’ with the expectations of both students and staff. As the voice of a new lecturer in her first year of teaching, this paper makes a useful contribution to the scholarship on early career academics and teaching development. This paper concludes with recommendations for change in practice-based settings, in order to assist new lecturers to settle into the job role, and enhance and enrich teaching practice.     

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.

     

Educational attainment in the short and long term: was there an advantage to attending faith,private, and selective schools for pupils in the 1980s?

ABSTRACT

This paper asks whether private, selective, and faith schools in England and Wales in the 1980s provided an academic advantage to their pupils, both in the short and longer term. Using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, we examine academic outcomes in compulsory schooling and further education, and the highest qualification gained by age 42. School sector differences are substantially attenuated by controlling for prior pupil characteristics. Nevertheless, a residual effect of private, grammar, and secondary modern schooling remains, both in the short and long term, controlling for both pupil and school characteristics. In the case of faith schools, however, the apparent advantage is restricted to the short term once pupil characteristics are controlled. A unique feature of our analysis is that we control for the individual’s faith of upbringing, which is important in reducing what could otherwise be seen as a distinctive Catholic school advantage.     

Academic staff participation in university governance: Internal responses to external quality demands

Abstract

Higher education in Croatia is confronted with new trends and quality demands mostly connected with Bologna processes. It is assumed that Croatian universities with their existing governance structures, characterised by strong state regulation and weak institutional administration, cannot respond effectively to new demands. Findings of the survey on conceptions of governance at the Croatian universities are presented in the paper, with its main aim to explore academic staff's perception of university governance. The idea of the university as a “learning organisation” with strong leadership and engaged academic staff is taken as the desired model. Mapping the opinions of academic staff on the present governance structures, their role in governance issues, and making an inventory of their perceptions of strengths and weaknesses of governance processes, forms important background for reflections on adequate modifications in academic governance.     

Positioning ourselves in our academic lives: exploring personal/professional identities,voice and agency

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a rationale for understanding personal/professional identities to support personal/professional learning and positioning in academe and higher education. It explains the importance of women writing and speaking out the stories of their lives (everyday and academic), having their voices heard and responded to, and using embodied knowledge to question and challenge workplace systems and structures of power and sexism and invisibility. Importantly, this paper opens the space for women’s visibility, voice and agency in academic and educational life.     

International students: language,culture and the ‘performance of identity’

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the multiple, intersecting identities expressed by international taught-post graduate students who are studying in a culture and language that is not their own. The study presented includes the collection of data around and beyond a planned pedagogical intervention on a pre-sessional EAP programme. The data were thematically analysed. Conflicting and intersecting identities emerged around themes of: performative, representational and core identities; international, national and individual identity; troublesome and transformative knowledge; power, agency and choice. These interwove with key underlying pre-occupations: language development; disciplinary knowledge and societal structures. By focussing on identity studies alongside the language and culture of academic contexts, international students developed an understanding of, and reflexivity around, their position within UK HE contexts. I argue this focus eased transition into a new study environment and allowed students to both better access the taught and hidden curriculum, and to understand their resistance to it.     

Attitudes of academic staff towards their job and organisation: An empirical assessment

Abstract

The relationships and differences in how academic staff perceive their work and organisation are of great importance for human resource strategies in the higher education sector. The present study examines work‐related attitudes of academic staff, namely job satisfaction, self‐efficacy and organisational commitment. The purpose is to analyse how these attitudes differ among groups of individuals. Results show that there is an alternative way of classifying academic staff into distinct groups based on work‐related attitudes apart from the conventional classification based on position alone. Findings suggest that university managers should be careful in balancing between different systems of control or incentive.     

The role of private universities in the provision of higher education in Uganda: Growth and challenges

Abstract

Although the first private university in Uganda was founded in 1988 and the private university sector has since grown rapidly to become one of the most prominent features of higher education (HE) in Uganda, the contribution of private universities (PUs) to the provision of HE has remained largely unexplored and as such, less understood. The purpose of this paper, then, is to analyse the contribution of PUs to the provision of HE in Uganda, using theories of the non-profit organisations and Geiger's conceptual framework about rationales for growth of the PUs. The paper is based on data that were collected through qualitative interviews conducted in 2008 with six faculty deans from Uganda Christian University (UCU); reviews of paper and web-based documents from the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) and the PUs in Uganda; and reviews of national and internal literature about private higher education (PHE). Data analysis reveals that excess demand for HE, per se, was not responsible for the growth of the PUs in Uganda; instead, it created opportunities for individuals and organisations to establish PUs. Because of their diverse backgrounds and the policy environment in which they exist, PUs undertake various roles in the provision of HE.     

The locker room : Eroticism and exoticism in a polyphonic text

Critical race theory now encompasses a polyphonic telling of story in which multiple, shifting identities are seen in relation to each other and situated within historical contexts. Locating the fictive voice of an administrator forced to deal with change at a small private university, the article begins with a flashback to confrontations demanding that he reexamine his positions in relation to both work and social life. The second part of the article is an analytic discussion of the voices of narrator and other actors and concludes with a critical reconceptualization of polyphony. Much in the same way that critical race theorists have injected story-telling into legal scholarship in order to deconstruct and then reconstruct knowledge, the authors urge education researchers to move away from methodologies and systems of analysis that derive from white liberal discourse and ironically serve to maintain the status quo by leaving in place conservative structures and reward mechanisms.     

Private Agricultural Extension System in Kenya: Practice and Policy Lessons

Abstract

Private extension system has been at the centre of a debate triggered by inefficient public agricultural extension. The debate is anchored on the premise that the private sector is more efficient in extension service delivery. This study evaluates the private extension system in Kenya. It employs qualitative and quantitative methods. The results indicate that the private extension is skewed towards high potential regions because it is either driven by profits or quick results. The private system benefits from the public extension staff, thus some form of commercial contracting of public staff to serve the private systems is appropriate. Public extension should not overlap in the areas efficiently served by the private system. The government should consider contracting the private sector to deliver extension to neglected areas. The government has a role in extension services funding, quality control, arbitration, monitoring and in provision of quality infrastructure to lower private sector players’ costs.     

ACADEMIC DRIFT AND BLURRING OF BOUNDARIES IN SYSTEMS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

A tendency towards academic drift and the blurring of boundaries exists in most differentiated higher education institutions as faculty members, particularly in non‐university sector institutions, seek to emulate the research paradigm of universities. As non‐university sector institutions perform essential educational and training roles in meeting the labour requirements of complex developed societies, their specific characteristics and functions must be protected. The best way to guarantee protection is to maintain the separate administrative identities of non‐university sector institutions and to encourage an ethos favouring such separation.     

The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education

Abstract

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.     

Private higher education: challenges for Australia and beyond

Among the chief characteristics of the post‐industrial society are ambiguity and paradox. In Australian higher education, as in other sectors of Australian Society, these have found expression in individualism, private initiative and entrepreneuship.

The ‘privatization’ of higher education now includes the imposition on enrolment charges, the re‐introduction of ‘full cost’ fees, especially for private overseas students, moves towards the deregulation of salaries and conditions of employment of academic staff and the establishment of new ‘self‐contained’ and ‘hybrid’ private higher education institutions.

In response to these developments, debate has tended to centre upon a number of mythologies which inter alia assert that private higher education is new to Australia, that it is foreign to the Western academic tradition and that such education avoids the employment of public funds. Moreover, it is claimed that while private higher education is ipso facto elitist, it will, through competition, result in a more effective and efficient public sector.

The above mythologies are examined in the light of past, present and proposed developments in Australian higher education, with particular note being taken of the establishment of the Bond University in Queensland.     

Improving Performance Indicators in Higher Education: The academics' perspective

Performance Indicators (PIs) are playing an increasingly important role in many western governments' approach to the management of higher education (HE) institutions, and this includes Australia. However, the introduction of PIs by these governments in the HE sector has been far from smooth. The literature on the limitations of PIs, particularly in research and teaching, are plentiful. This paper argues that an effective way to improve the application of PIs is to obtain input from university academics. It starts with a survey of the attitudes of Australian academics from four representative universities towards the application of PIs in their institutions. Although this was found to be generally negative, the academics did point out some strengths in the current PI system. Reasons for their dissatisfaction with the indicators were also covered, such as the inability of the current indicators to capture the dimensions of academic work, and privileging research over teaching. Furthermore, the academics provided numerous suggestions for improving the application of PIs in HE.     

Tibetan students at an interior university in China: negotiating identity,language, and power

ABSTRACT

Using Norton’s conception of identity and Harré and Moghaddam’s positioning theory, the current study examines how a group of Tibetan students’ situated context affects their identity (re)construction in a traditionally non-multiethnic interior university in China. Drawing from interview, biographies, document, and artefact data, our findings suggest that the construction and negotiation of ethnic Tibetan students’ identities is a complex, power driven, and unstable process. In particular, the participants’ identity positioning at the host university is inextricably linked to stereotypical images of Tibetans, linguistic integration in the interior academic environment via English, Putonghua, and Tibetan language, and larger institutional practices. Tangible pedagogical implications are discussed, such as providing critical multicultural and multilingual education at the university are discussed.     

Armed with real guns: student unions,student identity,and violence in Côte d’Ivoire

ABSTRACT

African higher education has been the site of repeated contestations over identity. Higher education institutions, as spaces made up of individuals claiming a diversity of identities, are susceptible to conflict when identities are influenced by politicians and paramilitary groups seeking to advance their political agendas on campus through the use of ethnic, religious, and nationalist rhetoric. This qualitative case study of a university in Côte d’Ivoire explored how students engaged in violent political student union activities on campus constructed and enacted their identities through the lens of self-authorship. Findings suggest that student identities are context-dependent and change according to the observer; that self-authorship is difficult due to highly politicized external formulas and social structures; and that, without student support services, vulnerable students may succumb to violent identity enactment and discourse mechanisms.