THE PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: IN PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE AND OF EQUITY

A bstract .  In this essay, David Bridges explores the notion of practice with particular application to the practice of higher education. He considers whether some of the changes in practices linked to the massification of higher education have in fact resulted in the breakdown of higher education as a practice , at least on Alasdair MacIntyre's definition of the term. Specifically, Bridges examines whether higher education has lost its sense of the forms of human excellence around which its life is constructed. Finally, he points to issues of equity raised by the huge variety of forms that higher education now takes and asks whether this variety might mean that students are winning entry to some very different qualities of experience when judged against the requirement that they should contribute to the development of human excellence.