Historical Perspective, Research in Higher Education

The engagement with history is an important feature of research in higher education, which has taken various forms and has been driven by various rationales. The variety of objectives, methodologies, and interpretations is precisely what made the contribution of the historical dimension to the understanding of higher education so valuable although it has not come without its challenges

Three stories of institutional differentiation: resource, mission and social inequalities in higher education

This paper explores the historical relationship between the expansion of the UK HE system through sectorial diversification, processes of differentiation/convergence and (in)equalities since the 1960s. It examines the extent to which the connections and tensions between three stories of resource, mission and social differentiations might be influenced (alongside other forces) by the emergence and crisis of successive socio-economic regimes. The empirical analysis of the three types of differentiation compares and contrasts new historical data on funding, enrolment and qualifications for the whole system and its institutional segments. The analysis shows that the ongoing tensions between resource, mission and social differentiations were exacerbated by the effect of the crises of 1973 and 2008 which provoked their misalignment and the destabilisation of the phases of expansion started in the 1960s and the 1990s. This pleads for a new social compromise to overcome the 2008 crisis to which a new HE expansion based on a realignment of, rather than a trade-off between the three dimensions of differentiation might contribute. This realignment requires a reversal of the public/private substitution of funding ensuring that a less unequal resource differentiation reflects and drives fairer processes of mission differentiation or convergence rather than stratifying social inequalities

Higher Education in Modern Europe

The paper explores the history of higher education in Europe by considering three intersected dimensions: the global, national and local spaces or geography of higher education; the contours of the higher education system regarding access, participation and institutional differentiation; and the cultural, political, social, economic rationales driving its expansion. Four historical periods are considered: the emergence of the medieval universities and their spread in the feudal order; the demands posed to universities by nation-states and the enlightenment during the early modern period; the impact of the political and industrial revolutions and the crisis of mass higher education since 1918. Overall, articulation between the rationales, shapes and spaces of higher education has changed periodically across history

Expansion and differentiation in higher education: the historical trajectories of the UK, the USA and France

The 2008 crisis has reactivated crucial debates regarding the relationship and tension between creation of wealth and its redistribution. Those debates coincide with a renewed interest in the understanding of the ways in which the expansion of higher education systems has led, sometimes simultaneously, to significant democratic advances and persistent inequalities. This paper proposes to bridge those debates by offering a historical lens on the connections and tensions between the processes of expansion, democratisation and institutional differentiation in higher education. A key question is whether institutional differentiation might not only reflect diversity but also channel inequalities. The paper seeks to investigate whether, and the extent to which, this link between expansion, stratification and inequalities might be historically contingent. For example, might progress and setback in the integration of various social groups at times be driven and at others constrained by institutional differentiation? To what extent might this depend on resources? This research explores whether and how those links and tensions between expansion and institutional differentiation around questions of structure, mission, and (in)equalities have evolved historically by looking at the contexts of the UK, USA and France since the 1920s. It examines whether and how socioeconomic fluctuations, and notably their influence on funding, might affect and be affected by the relationship between the dynamics of expansion and differentiation of higher education systems. The empirical side of the research relies on the methodology of quantitative history to construct historical datasets on enrolment and funding of the various groups of institutions which have shaped the expansion of higher education in the UK, France and the USA since the 1920s. Those datasets are used to explore the historical trends and patterns of expansion and institutional differentiation of higher education systems. By comparing and contrasting those historical series with key socio-economic aggregates, the paper examines the extent to which periods of economic prosperity and crisis might affect and be affected by the trends in the level and structure of funding, expansion and institutional differentiation in higher education. The historical lens shows that the expansion of higher education and its democratisation have been driven and at times constrained by key institutional transformations and identifies the socioeconomic crises of the 1930s, 1970s and 2008 as key turning points during which the links between structure, mission and contribution to (in)equalities of institutional differentiation are reassessed

Filamentation processes and dynamical excitation of light condensates in optical media with competing nonlinearities

We analyze both theoretically and by means of numerical simulations the phenomena of filamentation and dynamical formation of self-guided nonlinear waves in media featuring competing cubic and quintic nonlinearities. We provide a theoretical description of recent experiments in terms of a linear stability analysis supported with simulations, showing the possibility of experimental observation of the modulational instability suppression of intense light pulses travelling across such nonlinear media. We also show a novel mechanism of indirect excitation of {\em light condensates} by means of coalescence processes of nonlinear coherent structures produced by managed filamentation of high power laser beams.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Public good in French universities: principles and practice of the ‘republican’ model

Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews conducted in four public universities as part of an international comparative project, we examine the cultural, political, social and economic forces at play in the way the ‘public good’ is perceived, translated and debated within the French higher education context. Our findings indicate that a variety of views of the public good value/contribution of higher education co-exist, which, in a context of reform, reflect various understandings of how the principles and practices driving the French ‘republican’ model work or should work