Te Wero—the challenge: reimagining universities from an indigenous world view

This paper provides a foundational framework to bring into conversation indigenous world views in reimagining universities. Highlighting a specific indigenous world view, the university is presented as a site for critical conversation and transformative praxis. We discuss the workplace experiences of indigenous staff in a university and infer from these how management practices related to indigenous staff could be enhanced. Building on our study of Māori academic and administrative staff in a New Zealand university, an indigenous typology and a Wero or challenge matrix is offered, which locates different positions and actions that universities adhere to or seek to emulate. The paper argues for universities to reimagine their policies and practices by drawing from the complex richness of indigenous world views.     

The Labour party and the public schools: A conflict of principles

Abstract

The promotion of ‘Global Citizenship’ (GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within which it is appropriated. This paper seeks to clarify this ambiguity by constructing a typology to identify and distinguish the diverse conceptions of GC. The typology is based on two general forms of GC: cosmopolitan based and advocacy based. The former incorporates four distinct conceptions of GC – namely, the political, moral, economic and cultural; the latter incorporates four other conceptions – namely, the social, critical, environmental and spiritual. Subsequently, we briefly illustrate how the typology can be used to evaluate the critical features of a curriculum plan designed to promote GC in England. The typology provides a novel and powerful means to analyse the key features of the very diverse range of educational policies and programmes that promote GC.     

‘Maintaining competence’: a grounded theory typology of approaches to teaching in higher education

This paper presents a contingency theory of approaches to teaching in Higher Education adopted by university academics who teach heterogeneous student cohorts within a changing university context. The study is located within the substantive context of academics within Australian universities who teach within the broad field of management studies. Orthodox grounded theory is employed to generate a contingency typology comprised of four separate teaching approaches: Distancing, Adapting, Clarifying, and Relating. The model demonstrates how academics utilise a variety of teaching approaches to address their ‘main concern’, namely maintaining their professional competence within the context of a rapidly changing university landscape and significantly heterogeneous groups of students. We have labelled this process ‘Maintaining Competence’. This model stresses the importance of the twin forces of structure and individual agency in determining teaching approaches. It emphasises the value of analysing what academics actually do in the classroom situation, rather than concentrating on normative assumptions of what they should do in terms of best practice.     

我国高校分类与定位新视角

目前我国还没有一种理想的高等学校分类模式。从人类对世界的认识与改造的视角切入,可按认识成分由多到少,实践成分由少到多的原则,将高等学校分为学术研究型、专业应用型和操作实施型三种类型。不同类型高等学校在培养目标中实践成分与认识成分所占的比重各不相同,在实践—认识坐标系中所处的位置不同,导致他们在教育体系的各个方面呈现出差异。     

Managing university culture: an analysis of the relationship between institutional culture and management approaches

Universities are complex social organizations with distinctive cultures. On the one hand, academic freedom and autonomy are inviolable values and, on the other hand, changing environmental conditions exert strong influence on the primary functions of universities. This paper analyzes the ability of university cultures to adapt to these changes and describes management approaches that mirror the specific culture of a university. Various methods for assessing culture are described, a typology for interpreting university culture is introduced, and management approaches are analyzed. For administrators as well as researchers this work helps to explain the implications of university culture for management processes. This integration steers university leadership in a new direction combining strategic and symbolic management actions.     

Beyond ‘export education’: aspiring to put students at the heart of a university’s internationalisation strategy

For many universities around the world, internationalisation means the recruitment of fee-paying international students (so-called export education) for primarily commercial reasons. For UK universities, international (non-European Union) students account for approximately 13% of their annual revenues, making them highly dependent on international student recruitment. This paper discusses the attempt by one UK university to change direction and develop a new approach to internationalisation which puts an international learning experience for all students at the heart of its new strategic plan. It discusses the obstacles to changing direction in this way and shares some of the lessons learned about how to roll out an alternative university-wide internationalisation strategy.     

大学的精神世界与精神教育

人的独特性表现在具有物质世界与精神世界,即物性与心性的双重属性,人的精神属性是其本质属性;大学世界的主体构成是师生两类人,由此决定了大学世界的“属人”性,既然大学世界是一个有别于自然世界的属人世界,那么便可推断出大学世界的根本属性,即大学世界的精神属性,因此,大学的精神世界在大学世界中就具有了根本性、决定性的意义。大学世界是人的世界、精神世界,人的精神属性决定了大学精神世界的构成;大学中人之为人的精神是大学精神世界的根本构成,大学科学（求真）精神与人文（求善求美）精神为大学精神世界的支柱,对大学精神的坚守应是大学发展的永恒主题;大学精神教育便在相应的三个层面上展开,一是精心构筑净化大学精神世界的人为环境,二是突显大学中人之为人的精神教育,三是强化大学的科学精神与人文精神教育。     

Public by Day,Private by Night: examining the private lives of Kenya's public universities

This article examines the emergence of the public university in Kenya as a key provider of private higher education, characterised mainly by the phenomenon of the “private public university student.” It probes the broader socio-economic reforms circumscribing the privatisation of Kenya's public universities and the local and global forces responsible for these reforms. From the enrolment patterns of Kenya's public universities, where state-subsidised students are becoming a diminishing minority and where a range of exclusive programmes for private students (mainly taught in the evenings) are a growing trend, it may be argued that a new kind of private university is emerging; namely, private universities owned by public universities.     

Understanding research strategies to improve ERA performance in Australian universities: circumventing secrecy to achieve success

ABSTRACT

Many Australian universities have prioritised improving discipline performance on the national research assessment – Excellence for Research in Australia. However, a culture of secrecy pervades Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). There are no specified criteria for the assignment of ratings on a 5-point scale ranging from ‘well above world standard’ (5) to ‘well below world standard’ (1). No rationale is provided to institutions for their discipline ratings and university staff on the ERA panels sign confidentiality agreements. However, what is available to universities are the research strategies that each university documents to improve its ERA performance in its Mission-based Compact, a government funding agreement. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the similarities and differences in the research strategies that universities with different performance profiles employ. Following an analysis of the strategies, substantial commonality was identified in strategy use. However, what was different was how universities employed these strategies and the associated contexts.     

From unbundling to market making: reimagining,reassembling and reinventing the public university

ABSTRACT

In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with ‘unbundling’ and outsourcing and culminating in new forms of privatisation, rent-extraction and rebundling. This paper analyses two documents commissioned beyond government to create political momentum for this project: Avalanche is Coming and The University of the Future. These both capture the zeitgeist of reform while simultaneously creating the university futures that they portend. We examine the market-making work they perform in reimagining and reinventing universities ahead of policy reform. We argue that claims made to support fundamental restructuring of public universities lack substance or evidence. Rather, each is underpinned by different configurations of ideology and self-interest that together envelope universities in new agendas of marketisation, financialisation and privatisation. We suggest that in this latest restructuring of public universities critics should pay more attention to the work of consultancies and think tanks alongside the micro-details of market making. By doing so, they too might reimagine public universities, but for a different political project.     

University Marketing: Perceptions,Practices and Prospects in the Less Developed World

ABSTRACT

The article reports on research conducted in Zimbabwe's 11 universities between 2001 and 2003. The research was aimed at finding how vice chancellors and internal marketers perceived the marketing concept and its organization within the universities including the extent to which prospective university customers considered the arrangements for marketing as meeting their expectations for choice and decision making. It is argued that the new university environment in the developing world replicates that which has driven Higher Education institutions in the developed world to embrace marketing as a key strategic option. However, even in the developed world, marketing in Higher Education continues to be based on imported wisdom from the business sector. The article argues that for marketing to occupy its rightful place in Higher Education, it has to be based on a new axis which reflects the core business of universities. It proposes a theoretical basis for considering a curriculum-focused marketing orientation for Higher Education.     

The diversity of university disciplinary profiles in research and teaching

Is the ideal of a one-size-fits-all university model—where universities are capable of successfully performing all competencies simultaneously—ever achievable? Has the balance between teaching and research activities grown even more fragile or is such a balance unfeasible? In this paper, we review studies of institutional diversity in higher education and bibliometric analyses. We prose a two-dimensional typology based on diversity in teaching and research by scientific fields. We investigate the diversity in teaching and research, respectively, at the disciplinary level and address whether these primary activities mirror each other. As a measure of mismatch between the two activities, we assess the distribution of students and publications by scientific fields through a clustering analysis. Our study of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Russia reveals that private universities are less diverse both in research and teaching and have high teaching intensity compared to state universities. Expectedly, universities in the rankings have more diverse profiles and they have a higher research intensity.     

University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity

For various reasons, it is becoming felt that the knowledge function of the university is being undermined. Some, indeed, have come to suggest that we are witnessing 'the end of knowledge' in higher education. The 'end of knowledge' thesis takes three forms. Substantively, it is felt that the knowledge sustained by the university has no particular status: it simply takes its place and its chances amid the proliferating knowledges that society has now to offer. Ideologically, it is felt that the knowledge for which the university stands lacks legitimacy: it can simply be understood as a set of language games of a rather privileged set of occupational groups ('academics') that reflects their interests and marginal standing to the rest of society. Procedurally, it is implied that the university can now only secure its future by becoming entrepreneurial and by marketing its knowledge wares in forms of academic capitalism; in the process, its knowledge becomes performative in character and loses its power to enlighten. Much of this analysis is correct – even as the theses cut across each other – butthe conclusion is wrong. The modern world is supercomplex in character: it can be understood as a milieu for the proliferation of frameworks by which we might understand the world, frameworks that are often competing with each other. In such an age of supercomplexity, the university has new knowledge functions: to add to supercomplexity by offering completely new frames of understanding (so compounding supercomplexity); to help us comprehend and make sense of the resulting knowledge mayhem; and to enable us to live purposefully amid supercomplexity. Knowledge, as a pure, objective reading of the world does have to be adandoned. But the university is not, thereby, delegitimised. In an age of supercomplexity, a new epistemology for the university awaits, one that is open, bold, engaging, accessible, and conscious of its own insecurity. It is an epistemology for living amid uncertainty.     

The Complexity of Change in Universities

This paper relates to the implementation process of the Universitaetsorganisationsgesetz 1993 (University Organisation Act of 1993) at an Austrian university. In accordance with the idea of a managed university, the Austrian government aimed this law at transferring a greater scope of responsibility for strategic decisions and management issues from the ministry to the universities. The empirical basis is derived from a 2‐year, in‐depth field study showing that the transformation to a ‘simple’ management orientation is in itself complex. We suggest therefore a frame of reference that is based on an understanding of universities as complex and self‐referential organisations. This view explains changes in universities as nontrivial transformation and conceptualises the management of change in universities as a paradoxical intervention.     

Language games: University responses to ranking metrics

League tables of universities that measure performance in various ways are now commonplace, with numerous bodies providing their own rankings of how institutions throughout the world are seen to be performing on a range of metrics. This paper uses Lyotard's notion of language games to theorise that universities are regaining some power over being placed on league tables by creating narratives that manipulate their rankings to promote their own strengths. This paper examines the findings of a study involving university responses to global rankings throughout 2016 produced by two major ranking bodies, Times Higher Education and QS Top Universities. The existing literature has established that ranking tables can be used as a vehicle for humiliation and can produce terrors for all those involved. Thus, the significance of this study's findings is in new ways of theorising university responses to appearing on league tables at a time when academia is a high‐stakes activity where institutions’ abilities are measured and reported on at a global scale.     

Curricula and pedagogic potentials when educating diverse students in higher education: students’ Funds of Knowledge as a bridge to disciplinary learning

With the massification of higher education in a knowledge-driven economy, Western universities have struggled to keep pace with the cultural, linguistic, educational and economic diversity of university students and the complex realities of their lifeworlds. This has generated systemic inequities for diverse or ‘non-traditional’ students, and left academics with pedagogic uncertainty. This paper reports on action research that examined curricular and pedagogic practices that made elite academic codes explicit, and utilised students’ Funds of Knowledge as assets for disciplinary learning, in an Australian university. The action research confirmed the potential of creating bridges between the cultural practices and literacies of diverse students and the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, facilitating their negotiation of multiple literacies and the successful participation of all students. Institutional arrangements – governed by economic, cultural and socio-political conditions – that enabled and constrained these potentials were highlighted, suggesting areas for negotiation for the pedagogies’ ongoing and wider use.     

Organising for continuing vocational education in British universities

In 1990 a research and development project set out to identify and promote good practice in continuing vocational education (CVE) in the British universities. This paper explains the origins and approach of this project. It explains the centrality of organisational arrangements to the health and prospects of continuing vocational education, and the different models and assumptions which are commonly encountered, to do with its ‘mainstreaming’ and its supposedly self‐financing nature. Some particular concerns are addressed: the role of specialised units; the evolution of the British extramural tradition into new forms; the relationship with industrial liaison officers; and the supervision of university CVE operations. Desirable elements in the organisation of university continuing education are presented.     

The Network Form of Implementing Educational Programs

The article describes peculiarities of implementation and major differences in network educational programs, currently introduced in Russia. It presents a general typology of models and forms for implementing interaction between educational institutions of Russia, including teacher institutes and federal universities, as well as a typology of educational programs implemented in network form. Besides, it examines a case of a network master's program in Information and Computer Science at one of Russia's regional universities.     

Assessing collaborative learning: big data,analytics and university futures

Assessment in higher education has focused on the performance of individual students. This focus has been a practical as well as an epistemic one: methods of assessment are constrained by the technology of the day, and in the past they required the completion by individuals under controlled conditions of set-piece academic exercises. Recent advances in learning analytics, drawing upon vast sets of digitally stored student activity data, open new practical and epistemic possibilities for assessment, and carry the potential to transform higher education. It is becoming practicable to assess the individual and collective performance of team members working on complex projects that closely simulate the professional contexts that graduates will encounter. In addition to academic knowledge, this authentic assessment can include a diverse range of personal qualities and dispositions that are key to the computer-supported cooperative working of professionals in the knowledge economy. This paper explores the implications of such opportunities for the purpose and practices of assessment in higher education, as universities adapt their institutional missions to address twenty-first century needs. The paper concludes with a strong recommendation for university leaders to deploy analytics to support and evaluate the collaborative learning of students working in realistic contexts.     

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.