Troy Heffernan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• All Souls College at University of Oxford

Casual and fixed-term employment is rife across Australian universities , with current estimates suggesting that around 60% of the workforce are precariously employed. This level of precarious employment poses substantial challenges for individual employees, and for the quality and sustainability of teaching and research in universities. The Austra...

This is the first international reference work to map out how Pierre Bourdieu has been used in educational research. Written by scholars based in Australia, Canada, China, Croatia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the UK, and the USA, the handbook provides a unique and cutting-edge picture of how Bourdieu has been both used and adapted in educati...

Since the beginning of higher education, universities have remained largely closed off spaces for disabled students. This paper examines how, and why, it has largely been in the last fifty years that these students have slowly been able to enter universities as the sector has made incremental improvements to enable the entry of students from differ...

In this chapter I was fortunate enough to work with Jamie Burford and his expert knowledge of sexual identity in university spaces. The chapter highlights how universities are social spaces that reflect the societies they are within, and so sexual identity is something that may have always existed in higher education, but it is only in the very rec...

Women comprise the largest marginalised group in the higher education sector, but higher education continues to reward men as it was a system designed by men, and for the advancement of men. In this chapter I worked with Kate Smithers who provided her expertise in evaluating the current literature. The chapter demonstrates how even in 2022/23, the...

Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua helped shape this chapter and its examination of the current literature and studies, and what we can learn about issues within the sector. For students and staff, the impact of race in higher education can be highly dependent on location, and community approaches to race. Yet even inside the relatively progressive confines of...

The chapter begins with a brief acknowledgement that higher education has a different relationship with disabled people from different backgrounds. For example, those marginalised by mobility have faced different obstacles to those marginalised by sensory or neurodiversity. The chapter highlights how people disabled by different factors have had di...

This chapter examines Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, field, and capital, as well as touching on some of his other ideas which help this book explore what power looks like in higher education. The chapter may also prove beneficial to some readers in understanding their own settings regardless of whether that setting is a university, another typ...

This chapter explores the life and work of Bourdieu to help establish why he is a theorist so often used in education, and higher education in particular. In a book about how those from marginalised groups face increased difficulty in entering academia compared to their privileged peers, Bourdieu’s non-privileged upbringing ensures there was always...

This chapter provides a brief historical analysis to highlight how the privileged origins of the university began and continued unabated for centuries. This is a key discussion as Bourdieu routinely argued about the privileged origins of higher education, and this analysis makes clear why he was right. This examination is also relevant to the follo...

This chapter examines the complications staff and students from different social backgrounds experience when they enter a field designed by and for the middle, and upper-middle, classes. Leanne Higham’s expertise in understanding the challenges presented by social class in educational settings has been pivotal in this chapter as it explores why dec...

This chapter provides two discussion points. The first is the culmination of what being from a marginalised community looks like in higher education. When we know that universities are privileged spaces that have made great strides forward by including people in the space, but have made few advances in ensuring they have an equitable experience onc...

This book examines how the higher education sector has approached marginalised student and staff populations. The author highlights how universities were historically, and largely remain, the domain of the privileged, and demonstrates how institutions have implemented systems to enhance access for people marginalised because of their gender, race,...

Across the international higher education sector, existing studies highlight that student evaluations of courses and teaching are biased and prejudiced towards academics and can cause mental distress. Yet student evaluation data is often used as part of faculty hiring, firing, promotion, award and grant decisions. That a data source known to be pre...

During the latter-half of the twentieth century, researchers argued that the notion of universities being communities of scholars that were governed by scholars had been replaced by a mass-market higher education system. The new system is shaped by competition for students, a need to be budget conscious and, ultimately, a requirement for university...

Internationally, changes to university funding arrangements have put pressure on the workloads of tenured academic staff and increased the reliance on casual academics to backfill teaching and research positions. Limited research has focused on the effects of casualisation on research academics and the institutions in which they work. This paper dr...

This paper examines the volume and type of anonymous comments academics receive in student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) at the 16,000 higher education institutions that collect this data at the end of each teaching period. Existing research has increasingly pointed to the negative issues of student surveys, but very little research ha...

Over the last forty years, Australasian researchers have witnessed problems and negative trends relating to academics and students from marginalised groups operating within the higher education sector. This article demonstrates that these researchers have become increasingly aware of the need for more equitable practices in higher education. Howeve...

This chapter begins with an assessment of what the role of the university vice chancellor or president (the highest-ranking position depending on terminology and location) traditionally involved, who was selected, and what issues they had to watch out for/contend with to complete their role. The chapter uses interviews with vice chancellors from En...

This chapter discusses how surveys with academics paint a picture of existing academics who have had to change their practices as they are now teaching students with more consumer like demands, while also having to conduct research that is likely to be published in higher ‘quality’ journals, and more likely to lead to funding opportunities. At the...

This chapter offers a brief history of what universities were once like and how they might be perceived by the public today to assist in determining how strong the contrast is between memories and the fiction of the entertainment industry. This is not simply for the purpose of pointing out the differences, this is because of the damage these memori...

The chapter examines Bourdieu’s notions of fields, what they are, what influences them, and how someone’s habitus does or does not allow them to fit easily within a field. The chapter explores what fields can look like in a higher education setting. They can be the field of the university, the field of a faculty, the field of early career academics...

This chapter uses interviews with faculty deans to assess what they anticipated their role would involve, for many this was primarily guiding teaching and research, compared to what their role entails. The chapter explores how deans see their role primarily as managers tasked with reaching KPIs set by those above them, and also contending with the...

This chapter draws together to examine the key themes within the book, and highlights how as individual roles within the university have changed, they have also changed the relationship between people and structures within the institution. This chapter is primarily concerned with Bourdieu’s notion of fields and how they relate to each other in a un...

This chapter is the culmination of the previous chapter’s focus on habitus and field. The chapter explores what capital looks like in a higher education setting such as the number of publications someone has, the value of their grants, their position in the academic hierarchy, and the collaborations and networks they hold. The chapter then investig...

This chapter provides a brief history and introduction of Bourdieu as an academic and philosopher. The chapter outlines what motivated Bourdieu’s work, and discusses how his theories have been applied to many evaluations of society and the mechanics of class and cultural trajectory. The chapter also outlines how and why Bourdieu designed and refine...

This chapter explores the Bourdieusian concept of habitus. The chapter examines how habitus is the combination of the elements and aspects of someone’s life that they are born into, raised in, and surrounded by throughout their life that shape them as an individual. It examines how someone’s history, and their family’s history, creates a cultural t...

This book introduces Bourdieu in the context of higher education for unfamiliar readers or those who would like to see his theories applied in the higher education setting. It builds upon previous research into higher education leadership and administration to examine how the university sector has changed over recent decades and how it has been res...

Current research suggests partnerships between universities and schools create learning advantages for pre-service and beginning teachers while opening new research avenues and school relationships for academics and universities. This paper argues that these findings are often based on a business-orientated definition of ‘partnership’ and originate...

Purpose Universities claim to provide many benefits to their context. What remains less clear is what is meant by context. Whatever it is, context is fundamental to decision-making. Understanding what context means is crucial to understanding leadership in higher education. Design/methodology/approach Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational...

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on dean's leadership and explores the impact of corporate managerial practices and neoliberal ideology on the mindset and actions of 15 deans and heads of school in eight universities in Australia. We offer perspectives of leaders as emotional individuals who on a daily basis attempt to live up to and...

Research surrounding higher education workplace aggression is regularly focused on acts of bullying down the hierarchical chain. This paper examines the data generated from interviews with 20 faculty deans to demonstrate that a shift in negative higher education workplace behaviour is occurring. This change primarily results in the well-defined and...

This paper analyses the current research regarding student evaluations of courses and teaching. The article argues that student evaluations are influenced by racist, sexist and homophobic prejudices, and are biased against discipline and subject area. This paper’s findings are relevant to policymakers and academics as student evaluations are undert...

Bullying in higher education institutions amongst staff is an evolving area of research that has been examined from multiple perspectives, but significant scholarly voids remain. This paper examines the views of 20 faculty deans and their experiences with bullying and the hostility of workplace incivility. The paper examines what bullying looks lik...

Research has noted an increase in negative workplace behaviours in the higher education sector between leaders and staff. A component of this change has been attributed to the managerial shift associated with faculty leadership roles. Positions such as dean are now sometimes filled via evidence of management experience when traditionally these role...

Academic networks have been found to play a significant role in career trajectory via employment opportunities, publishing openings, or being alerted to prospects not widely advertised. These results are reflective of Bourdieu's notion that social capital can see an individual's position within a field (in this article the field of academia) increa...

The Australian government now mandates initial teacher education (ITE) providers to form partnerships with schools in order to maintain accreditation. The emphasis on partnerships as the crucial means of improving ITE is not new, and a body of literature from the Australian context describes a vast number of partnerships that have been enacted over...

Higher education has seen a shift that means its leaders are no longer only being recruited and perceived as senior academics who lead teaching and research. Leaders are now sometimes recruited and viewed as managers who oversee the operation of their institution, college, faculty, or school. This paper analyses the initial findings of an internati...

This paper probes the resonances between neoliberal education reforms and the wizarding world of Harry Potter. This interdisciplinary research project aligns the sociologies of literature and education to reveal how the neoliberal reforms found within the Global Education Reform Movement [GERM] manifest within popular culture, and how popular cultu...

Vice-chancellor salaries have been a topic of media interest and scholarly research for decades. In recent years, however, the media’s interest and criticism of vice-chancellors’ salaries has escalated, as negativity surrounding university performance and administration has led to a significant increase in articles concerning these matters. This ar...

Since 2007, ‘Closing the Gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been an ambition of Australian state and federal governments in areas including education, employment, and health. This paper examines media responses to government policies aimed at closing the achievement gap in schools. The paper analyses print and online newspaper ar...

Students at America’s most renowned private universities face different acceptance rates, college wealth, class sizes, and potential graduate earnings even in comparison with students at the nation’s highest-ranking public institutions. The analyses that led to these findings frequently focused on national or state-wide comparisons of public versus...

Levels of career support for sessional academics vary widely. This paper surveyed 109 sessional academics and demonstrates that a lack of career development for them is a widespread issue. The study finds that some sessional academics receive career support opportunities, while others receive nothing. As the number of sessional academics continues...

Recent studies argue that in the next 5 years, the higher education sector will see half to two-thirds of its academic workforce leave the academy due to retirement, career burnout, or job dissatisfaction. This study surveyed over 100 working academics in Australia, North America, and the United Kingdom to determine their aspirations for remaining...

Queen Anne’s unremarkable position in the line of succession during her formative years resulted in her being differently prepared to rule England as a queen regnant compared to many of her male and female predecessors. Her schooling also contributed to her unpreparedness in many attributes of leadership because she was educated as a late seventeen...

A common theme in higher education research is the factors that affect university funding. Studies frequently examine how universities cope with funding cuts and the changes that have stemmed from operating in a neoliberal age, a period that now sees institutions commonly functioning on a cost/benefit basis. This paper offers an original contributi...

League tables of universities that measure performance in various ways are now commonplace, with numerous bodies providing their own rankings of how institutions throughout the world are seen to be performing on a range of metrics. This paper uses Lyotard's notion of language games to theorise that universities are regaining some power over being p...

In 1666, the English physician Thomas Sydenham determined that patients with smallpox could remain contagious for 41 days, that apparent health was no indicator of contagiousness, and that children were the most susceptible of contracting the disease. Yet in 1677, when 12-year-old Lady Anne Stuart (later Queen Anne) contracted smallpox, only 21 day...

This collection explores the experiences of women during a tumultuous time in Britain’s history, when popular beliefs and practices of religion were in upheaval, from a multidisciplinary perspective; it includes essays from the fields of history, literary studies, and theology. It focuses on historical understandings of the contributions made by wo...