Educate or Litigate? The Mindsets of Advancing Knowledge and Maintaining Financial Stability in Higher Education

The educational mindset for online higher degrees, specifically the master’s and doctoral journey, shifted from the refractive thinking perspective as transformational experiences, producing objective decision-making processes, to transactional business exchanges, and in some institutions, an exchange for investors and stakeholders. Nehrlich (2006) coined “transactional exchange” as an exchange of one thing for another involving some form of gain. This chapter presents the business of marketing higher education programs (i.e., master’s and doctoral degrees) and the front-line faculty positioned to achieve an institution’s profit margin derived from degree production. Our goal is to discuss the losses and gains when faculty, who previously focused on innovation, comparative thinking, and mentoring, add an institution’s financial stability to their responsibilities (Kaufman-Osborn, 2023). Stakeholder needs range from graduating learners with innovative ideas to meeting an institution’s financial needs (Ramadoss et al., 2022). While the profit margins of public institutions have dropped precipitously (Macrotrends, 2023), for-profit and not-for-profit institutions of higher education must leverage The Refractive Thinker® Volume XXIII 112 program efficacy with financial viability (Wally Boston, 2020). In the United States, private and increasingly public postsecondary institutions must consider political goals; thus, for-profit and not-for-profit institutions can experience increased demands for financial solvency. The profitability versus a learner’s goals then must undergo a balancing exercise. This chapter briefly explores the progression of academic faculty from traditional harbingers of innovative programs to increased profitability, a nuanced yet pervasive mindset (PEW, 2019; Schwartz, 2022)

Life-long learning on the inclusive web

If our formal education systems were to be graded on achieving the following assignment: “to enable all students to reach their diverse, full potential, so that they can be prosperous, self-guided contributors to our global community,” our systems of education would be flunking. The impact of this failure will exponentially worsen over time, given socio-technical trends. To achieve this crucial learning goal we need more than incremental improvement. We need disruptive innovation. Can the Web be the disruptive impetus and generative scaffolding for an education system that can achieve this goal? How can we both reform and leverage Web accessibility approaches to support this mission? These are the questions explored in this article. Complex adaptive systems, emerging decentralized systems of trust, “small” and “thick” data analytics, Internet of things sensing, open platforms, but most importantly --connected communities, are all recruited in the thought experiment to craft a candidate response

Contested Challenges: universities, globalisation and human migration

For more than a decade, scholars have been documenting the shift in global higher education towards greater emphasis on the commercial and political economy side of the academic enterprise (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Clark, 1998; Breton and Lambert, 2003; and Bok, 2003). Counter trends have also been described that re-assert the universities historic civic missions, through new ventures in civic engagement and civic responsibility. Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett (2007) recently explored in detail the 20-year journey of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Community Partnerships. This session reviews an increasingly obvious and emerging set of contested challenges for institutions of higher education, especially when demands for mixed revenue streams confront the realities of what researchers are now labeling the new era of Global Migration. Others have argued that migration, at the levels we are now witnessing across the world, is simply the natural byproduct of globalization and as a complex phenomenon it is unlikely to end in this century and maybe ever, becoming accepted as a permanent part of human history. (See, for example, the personal essay by Morris Fahrl entitled “All History is the History of Migration” in Eurozine (2007) which expounds on this argument).Peer Reviewe

An Ontological (re)Thinking: Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education

Institutions of higher education, the nation’s ideological filters, shape our world and our very being-in-the-world. Given the current anthro-cultural state of affairs around the globe, this investigation posits institutions of higher education’s complicity in the proliferation of societal dis-ease and its responsibility in assisting to recalibrate the global moral compass. Following these assertions this inquiry is focused on the other-than-ness of higher education, and re-imagines both humanity and higher education to be what it is not yet, but must become. More specifically, through Buddhism and Ubuntu, this investigation (re)thinks institutions of higher education as transformational educative environments of human becoming rather than factories of knowledge acquisition and workforce deployment. Exploring the shift in the aim of higher education beginning in the latter half of the 20th and intensifying in the 21st century, this study theorizes the necessitation of an ontological revolution—a (re)turn to the equanimous privileging of ontology and epistemology—which opens up to the possibility of being differently in the world. Utilizing two non-Western knowledges/philosophies, the South African philosophy of Ubuntu and Eastern Buddhism, this inquiry de-centers Western ontological and epistemological positionalities. Asserting the inseparability of ontology and epistemology, this inquiry embarks on a re-conceptualization of the Western subject. The newly re-conceptualized Being-West sets the inquiry on a futural line of flight, (re)imagining an absent present-future in higher education bolstered by a new conception of self, and an onto-educational philosophy of higher education, which engenders being-becoming more human and an understanding our shared humanity. Finally, this conceptual inquiry offers no solutions, but provokes, encourages new lines of flight, which generate rhizomatic nodes of becoming, pregnant with the possibility of catalyzing a revolutionary human becoming

The state of the discipline: Hispanic literature and film in UK Spanish degrees

This article examines the shape of the pedagogical canon of Spanish degree courses in UK Higher Education institutions. After identifying briefly the current challenges to the sector, the article discusses the results of a data set relating to the academic year 2015/2016, before comparing them to data sets from the academic years 2006/2007 and 1998/1999. It will be shown that there is a demonstrable dissipation of any sense of a canonical core. The article concludes by suggesting that the shift away from a literary core towards a greater array of literary and cultural objects of study is part of the evolution of modern languages, and may be of benefit to the discipline

Internationalisation and the role for student affairs professionals: Lessons learnt from the International Student Engagement Meeting Initiative

No Abstrac

Leading Student-Athletes to Success Beyond the Field: Assessing the Role of Leadership in Adopting High Impact Practices in Intercollegiate Athletics

Given the current culture and climate on college campuses, it is imperative that all students have the opportunity to participate in deep learning experiences, impacting their time on campus and preparing them for their impending transition into the workforce. While high impact practices (HIPs) are readily available, and encouraged, to the majority of the student population, it can be difficult for student-athletes to partake in such endeavors. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role that leadership plays in the integration (or lack thereof) of HIPs into the student-athlete development process. Through semi-structured, phenomenological interviews with 21 staff members (administration, coaching, academics) of a mid-major Division I intercollegiate athletic program, the researchers were able to further understand the impact of leadership on HIPs in intercollegiate athletics. With this, three primary themes, with multiple sub-themes, emerged. These include Resources, Messaging, and Relationships. While there was a mix of positive and negative aspects of each theme, the general idea was that without a university directive, or a transformational leader, this type of pursuit would not be an overarching priority. Both theoretical and practical implications, as well as recommendations, are discussed

Practitioners\u27 News - Summer 2002, Volume 29, Number 4

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