"Many educators can recite the faults of their schools or universities, but far fewer can recognize and develop existing strengths to benefit a wider audience. Sukhwant Jhaj has crafted a refreshing ...new look at how imaginative leadership and a shift in perspective can propel institutions to reach at-risk or underrepresented members of their communities. Delivering on the Promise of Democracy pulls back the curtain on seven high-performing universities to reveal which daily decisions, including listening to the community, embracing conflict, and implementing effective strategies through routine, guide administrators in achieving exceptional results. Through in-depth interviews that offer a close look at these seven universities, Jhaj traces a new trajectory for higher education: a call to question a university's effectiveness through its accessibility to the community it serves. Jhaj's book will inspire anybody interested in widening access to education with its call to renew their institution's mission through powerful and effective leadership. "
Engaging excellence? Perkmann, Markus; King, Zella; Pavelin, Stephen
Research policy,
05/2011, Volume:
40, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
► We examine how the research standing of universities impacts on industry engagement. ► Our focus is on collaborative research, contract research and consulting. ► We find differences across ...disciplines. ► In technology-oriented disciplines, faculty quality is positively related to industry engagement. ► In the medical and biological sciences, and the social sciences this relationship applies to a lesser degree.
We investigate how universities’ research quality shapes their engagement with industry. Previous research has predominantly found a positive relationship between academics’ research quality and their commercialization activities. Here we use industry involvement measures that are broader than commercialization and indicate actual collaboration, i.e. collaborative research, contract research and consulting. We hypothesise that the relationship between faculty quality and industry engagement differs across disciplines, depending on complementarities between industrial and academic work, and resource requirements. Using a dataset covering all UK universities, we find that in technology-oriented disciplines, departmental faculty quality is positively related to industry involvement. In the medical and biological sciences we find a positive effect of departmental faculty quality but establish that this does not apply to star scientists. In the social sciences, we find some support for a negative relationship between faculty quality and particularly the more applied forms of industry involvement. The implication for science policy makers and university managers is that differentiated approaches to promoting university–industry relationships are required.
How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. ...Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret. "Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion. That may change with the publication ofInside Graduate Admissions…While the departments reviewed in the book remain secret, the general process used by elite departments would now appear to be more open as a result of Posselt's book." -Scott Jaschik,Inside Higher Ed "Revealing…Provides clear, consistent insights into what admissions committees look for." -Beryl Lieff Benderly,Science
There are several common trends and challenges in the higher education (HE) system around the world, like expansion and diversification of HE, fiscal pressure and orientation to markets, demand for ...greater accountability and great quality and efficiency (e.g. The financing and management of higher education: a status report on worldwide reforms, 1998; Internationalisation of higher education and global mobility 43-58, 2014; Global policy and policy-making in education, 2014; Higher Education Policy 21:5-27, 2008). These trends and changes have reshaped university governance as well. Public universities are the main institutions to carry out HE in Australia and China. The engagement between Australia and China in HE sector has become closer and closer in recent years. To conduct better and further cooperation and collaboration between Australian and Chinese universities, it is critical to understand and acknowledge the differences in two nations' university governance. Moreover, by conducting this comparative study of two nations, it also helps us to figure out the changes in university governance over times under the global trends and the interactions between global and local factors. This comparative study focuses on the university level and attempts to identify the differences of university governance in Australian and Chinese public universities in three dimensions, state-university relation, university internal governance and university finance. This paper sketches the university governance in Australia and China and finds that the relationship between government and university is looser in Australia than that in China and Australian universities enjoy more autonomy and power than Chinese universities; as to university internal governance, Australian universities use a more business-oriented management mechanism; funding associated with full-fee paying international students has become very important for Australian HE while Chinese government funding has been decreasing as well but funds from international students play a minimal financial role. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
This article examines changes in the formal organization of two universities and two schools within these universities, the University of Oslo and Stanford University. We focus on role ...differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking structures and describe organizational developments along these dimensions. We find that both these universities travel similar routes involving greater role differentiation, rule formation, and resource seeking activities. Both universities more explicitly function as organizational actors influenced by a global environment that favors the more socially embedded and the more managed university. However, we also find persistent differences in how these universities respond to the global environment, differences that reflect the different historical roots of different universities. A tradition of professorial self-governance at the University of Oslo, for example, fosters greater resistance to the managed university ideal. The latter emerges earlier and develops to a greater degree at Stanford University. We conclude that university routes are influenced both by common (now globalized) rules of the game and by their different organizational roots. We use ideas from the neo-institutional and path dependency perspectives to make sense of both growing commonalities and persistent differences.
Unlocking the gates Walsh, Taylor; Walsh, Taylor
Princeton University Press,
2010., 20101228, 2010, 2011, 2011-00-00, 2011-01-01, Volume:
57
eBook, Book
Over the past decade, a small revolution has taken place at some of the world's leading universities, as they have started to provide free access to undergraduate course materials--including syllabi, ...assignments, and lectures--to anyone with an Internet connection. Yale offers high-quality audio and video recordings of a careful selection of popular lectures, MIT supplies digital materials for nearly all of its courses, Carnegie Mellon boasts a purpose-built interactive learning environment, and some of the most selective universities in India have created a vast body of online content in order to reach more of the country's exploding student population. Although they don't offer online credit or degrees, efforts like these are beginning to open up elite institutions--and may foreshadow significant changes in the way all universities approach teaching and learning.Unlocking the Gatesis one of the first books to examine this important development.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including extensive interviews with university leaders, Taylor Walsh traces the evolution of these online courseware projects and considers the impact they may have, both inside elite universities and beyond. As economic constraints and concerns over access demand more efficient and creative teaching models, these early initiatives may lead to more substantial innovations in how education is delivered and consumed--even at the best institutions.Unlocking the Gatestells an important story about this form of online learning--and what it might mean for the future of higher education.
Since its inception, the research university has been the central institution of knowledge in the West. Today, however, its intellectual authority is being challenged on many fronts, above all by ...radical technological change. Organizing Enlightenment tells the story of how the university emerged in the early nineteenth century at a similarly fraught moment of cultural anxiety about revolutionary technologies and their disruptive effects on established institutions of knowledge
Late eighteenth-century Germans, troubled by a massive increase in the publication and availability of printed material, felt threatened by a veritable “plague” of books that circulated “contagiously” among the reading public. But deep concerns about what counted as authoritative knowledge, not to mention the fear of information overload, also made them uneasy, as they watched universities come under increasing pressure to offer more practical training and to justify their existence in the age of print.
German intellectuals were the first to settle on the research university, and its organizing system of intellectual specialization, as the solution to these related problems. Drawing on the history of science, the university, and print, as well as media theory and philosophy, Chad Wellmon explains how the research university and the ethic of disciplinarity it created emerged as the final and most lasting technology of the Enlightenment. Organizing Enlightenment reveals higher education’s story as one not only of the production of knowledge but also of the formation of a particular type of person: the disciplinary self. In order to survive, the university would have to institutionalize a new order of knowledge, one that was self-organizing, internally coherent, and embodied in the very character of the modern, critical scholar.
Higher education, an integral part of China's nation-building project, is a critical element in China's strategic policy initiative of building national strength through science and education. One ...way to achieve this goal is to develop a higher education system of international stature. Perhaps more than any other country, through national programs such as 211 and 985, China has been explicit in selecting its best universities for intensive investment, with the expressed aim of making them world-class within coming decades, and contributing more to overall R& D and scientific development. Analysing how these top-tier universities in China are reaching for the gold standard, and using Tsinghua University as an example, this article examines the role of higher education in China's rise and how Chinese universities are responding to the drive for innovation, against a background of globalisation and internationalisation. It analyses the experience of Tsinghua, a Chinese flagship university, sometimes dubbed 'China's MIT', through an in-depth case study in an international context, seeking to answer the question of how far Tinsghua embodies the qualities of a world-class university.
Although research universities represent only fifteen to twenty per cent of national university systems worldwide, they provide the bulk of fundamental research and doctoral training. Written by two ...veteran university administrators, Leading Research Universities in a Competitive World focuses on the international ranking systems’ uneven distribution of these institutions in industrialized countries, and the organizational factors affecting their efficacy, prestige, and performance. Robert Lacroix and Louis Maheu argue that research universities, despite being embedded within academia’s mindset and rules, have to master market influences and relationships in order to produce new knowledge and attract the rare talent and limited financial assets required for successful research and education activities. Comparing the configuration of higher education systems in the US, UK, France, and Canada, the authors outline the ways in which research universities, which need public funding and have to engage diverse forms of state regulation, may possess sufficient autonomy to behave as independent actors. They demonstrate that reaching an equilibrium between autonomy and state regulation, though challenging, is an essential element in the success of high performing research universities. Leading Research Universities in a Competitive World illuminates the operation of these institutions through substantive quantitative and qualitative datasets to address the fundamental question of why universities perform differently.
The first research conducted on violence against women in the university context in Spain reveals that 62% of the students know of or have experienced situations of this kind within the university ...institutions, but only 13% identify these situations in the first place. Two main interrelated aspects arise from the data analysis: not identifying and acknowledging violent situations, and the lack of reporting them. Policies and actions developed by Spanish universities need to be grounded in two goals: intransigence toward any kind of violence against women, and bystander intervention, support, and solidarity with the victims and with the people supporting the victims.
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