The evolution of the quality agenda in higher education: the politics of legitimation

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Educational Administration and History on 17 Jan 2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2017.125273

A Time for Hope in Dark Times

Soon after the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election a striking image appeared on a social media network. This was a photograph of a pavement advertisement board outside a bookshop. The board read: “Dystopian fiction now found in the political history section”. The end of history has not led to the clash of civilisations as much as the very conditions that may force one to ask with Nicholas Lash whether “a global conversation” is now even possible when non-agonistically disciplined relations become scarce and the ‘common’ of common interests or the common good is reduced to semantic nostalgia. A number of academic political analysists have developed Hannah Arendt’s notion of “dark times” in order to capture a sense of political conditions depictable in terms of concerns over the erasure of liberal democracy and the rise of an apocalyptic imagination. In this special edition on Hope in Dark Times, papers are invited that help wrestle with these crucial questions for the time

Militarization in the Age of the Pandemic Crisis

Copyright ©.The Authors 2020 We live at a time when the terrors of life suggests the world has descended into darkness. The COVID-19 crisis has created a dystopian nightmare which floods our screens and media with images of fear. Bodies, doorknobs, cardboard packages, plastic bags, and the breath we exhale and anything else that offers the virus a resting place is comparable to a bomb ready to explode resulting in massive suffering and untold deaths. We can no longer shake hands, embrace our friends, use public transportation, sit in a coffee shop, or walk down the street without experiencing real anxiety and fear. We are told by politicians, media pundits, and others that everyday life has taken on the character of a war zone. [Available at: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/22/militarization-in-the-age-of-the-pandemic-crisis/ All content on the website (with the exception of images) is published under the following Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

The psychological turn in higher education and the new taxonomy of attitudes and emotions: Denmark as a case study

Everyday use of the concept of ‘well-being’ usually refers to happiness and health and often these terms are used interchangably in the public domain (Layard, 2005; Oxford English Dictionary, 2022). For OECD (2004) and later in higher education policy discourse, wellbeing refers to to life satisfaction, quality of life and sustainability. This article analyses the increased concern with students’ well-being in higher education as a mode of governance that goes hand in hand with new mechanisms of exclusion. Focusing on a new student survey in Denmark, which measures students’ well-being, we show how the well-being agenda is entangled with a new ‘taxonomy of attitudes and emotions’ that align with neoliberal ideals about the self-efficient and self-governing individual. Implied is a notion of learning as a smooth and effortless process, which may lead to individualisation of structural and pedagogical challenges. With particular although not exclusive reference to the Danish case, we suggest that these new entanglements between well-being and leaning represent a narrowing view on the role and purpose of higher education, which devaluates the educational value of of doubt, bewilderment and moments of uncertainty (Aaen, 2019; Dall’Alba and Bengtsen, 2019). Paradoxically, the well-being agenda may therefore lead to the pathologisation of students who struggle while at the same time eroding the language for critique

Pedagogía Crítica en la Era del Autoritarismo: Desafíos y Posibilidades

The discourse of authoritarianism and the echoes of a fascist past resurface.In this context, higher education, beyond favoring practices of freedom, has become an instrumentalized institution in order to reproduce and legitimize dynamics of domination. This article questions this reactionary form of educational and pedagogical action, particularly in its neoliberal version. At the same time, it explores how education can provide the theoretical and practical foundations to rethink its own purpose, together with the very nature of politics. In this sense, this article proposes that education and politics are completely inseparable dimensions

In the Shadow of Celebrity? World-Class University Policies and Public Value in Higher Education

The growing popularity of the concept of world-class universities raises the question of whether investing in such universities is a worthwhile use of public resources. Does concentrating public resources on the most excellent universities improve the overall quality of a higher education system, especially if definitions of excellence and world-class are made by external ranking organizations? This paper addresses that question by developing a framework for weighing up trade-offs between institutional and system performance, focusing on the potential system-wide improvements which world-class university programmes (WCUPs) may bring. Because WCUPs are in a relatively early stage of their development, systemic effects are not yet clear. We therefore analyse the ex ante reasons that policy makers have for adopting WCUPs to see if they at least seek to create these systemic benefit

Quality assurance in higher education: thinking beyond the English experience

Since 1992, the assessment of the quality of the teaching and learning process in the United Kingdom has generated considerable political controversy. This article traces the evolution of the quality regime to the present day, which appears to signify that the contemporary arrangements are underwritten by a measure of political consensus and an emerging interest in moving beyond quality assurance to quality enhancement. The focus of the article is to provide an interpretation of the British quality agenda that recognizes the inevitability that higher education policy will be shaped by compromises arrived at between dominant political interests. And yet policy is also driven by ideas, and the article interprets the shifting quality agenda as a conflict of values about the relationship between state, the wider society and higher education. As interest in creating quality regimes for teaching and learning spreads to other systems of higher education, the question arises as to what, if anything can be learnt from the British, and more especially the English, experience