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Excavating the role and purpose of university education in the postmodern age: historical insights from the South
Policy Reviews in Higher Education
Abstract
Universities in the early twenty-first century have become captive sites of global capitalism. The role of universities in this neoliberal knowledge system is to produce consumable knowledge for transnational corporations and flexible, knowledge worker-entrepreneurs. It is difficult to see where the university’s roles in social justice and equity fit into the current higher education policy environment. While these are global trends in higher education, the focus of this article is on analysing key Australian policy documents from the 1950s to the 2000s. These policy texts contain discursive constructions of universities that both mirrored and produced powerful social imaginaries about higher education. Building upon earlier research, I analyse these policy documents using a form of Foucauldian archaeological analysis that seeks to trace the ways in which discourses define and delimit possible constructions of universities. This article makes an original contribution to contemporary debates about higher education policy because it engages in detailed Foucauldian archaeological analysis that opens up the present to critique, enabling us to trace how constructions of the postmodern university have emerged over time and have come to be normalised. It also offers counter-narratives about how policy futures might be [re]constructed.
... There is an underlying assumption that under-represented groups have, to date, failed to be competitive in the labour market and "students from disadvantaged backgrounds are being enlisted into university in order to achieve the nation's economic aspirations" (Gale and Tranter 2011, p. 42). Multiple authors present this discourse as dominant in Australian key policy documents since the Second World War (Gale and Tranter 2011;Manathunga 2017). This discourse suggests widening participation should be focused on massification and increasing access. ...
... According to economist discourse, the role of the university is to train skilled members of the workforce to build the nation's economy and better perform in a competitive global market (Barkas 2011;Gidley et al. 2010). A privileging of science and technology over the humanities can be viewed within this discourse (Manathunga 2017). ...
Despite Australian universities prioritising social equity in higher education, limited improvement is seen among students in under-represented groups. This has prompted the United Nations (UN) to set Sustainable Development Goal Four (SDG4) prioritising access to education for all. We argue that one of the challenges in achieving goal four is the discourses that relate to the rationale for seeking social equity in higher education. This chapter explores four discourses that can be identified as meritocratic, economist, social justice and human potential. This chapter contends that three factors have or will, significantly impact these discourses. First, the steady massification of higher education where elitist discourses were largely abandoned. Second, key political documents wielded great influence on discourse. Chronologically, this chapter begins with the 1957 Murray Report and ends with discussion of the impending Performance-Based Funding (PBF). The final factor significantly impacting social equity discourse is the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this chapter is to alert stakeholders to the role they play in reinforcing, as well as shaping, social equity discourses and how this, in turn, may affect the achievability of the UN fourth goal. It is also important to counsel stakeholders to discontinue engaging in the debates surrounding discourse and begin collaborating to solve this wicked problem.
... It follows naturally that political and economic discourses are integrated in such development, although research reveals that these discourses occurred already before the expansion of HE (e.g. Kenny, 2013 ;Manathunga, 2017 ). According to history in Western and former communist countries alike, governmental economic directives have contributed more or less to restricting the autonomy of HE institutions and individual academics ( Dobbins, 2011 ;Enders, 2007 ). ...
This study aims at exploring multimodal discursive images of academic teachers from 1950 and 1980 in Sweden. Using a discourse-historical approach, linguistic and visual data were analysed in a government report and three media sources related to a single Swedish university. Findings reveal how four dominant ideologies of academic teaching contributed to constructing eight discursive images of teachers via various stakeholders. Overall, a discursive degradation of academic teachers could be noticed between 1950 and 1980. Also, the image of teachers changed from societal critics in 1950 to political critics in 1980, when the government forced scholars to become all-round labourers processing the new mass of students. In turn, this led to an undecided debate about the scholarly role of teaching researchers. Throughout the material, female academics were almost invisible, and a feminist voice was absent. The image of academic teaching is a gendered issue that deserves further attention.
... Arguably, market models that are theoretically underpinned by neoliberalism provide some solutions to modern challenges in HE. For instance, Manathunga (2017) maintains that the role of universities in the modern neoliberal knowledge system has evolved to include the production of consumable knowledge for transnational corporations. In particular, neoliberalism follows the assumption that markets represent an efficient way of making decisions and an effective way of promoting human welfare (Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini 2019;Harvey 2005). ...
Transnational education (TNE) has developed over the years as a branch of international education that focuses on cross-border teaching and learning through local partners and branch campuses in host countries. While there have been concerns over the quality of TNE delivery in host countries, there is a paucity of empirical research that highlights education delivery, especially in host institutions. This study examines the benefits, challenges and prospects of TNE delivery in a host institution in Ghana. Using a mixed-method approach, we collected and analysed data from management representatives (n = 2), academic staff (n = 5) and students (n = 197). Results show that TNE enhances students' learning experiences through diversified and reflective curriculum, highly rated pedagogical approach and acquisition of knowledge in global business practices. Lecturers reported enhanced pedagogical skills and knowledge of cutting-edge quality assurance and assessment processes. Challenges such as lack of clear policy guidelines governing TNE partnership, cultural differences among partners, inadequate learning resources for students, high cost of fees and difficulty in designing a bespoke curriculum to meet local needs were highlighted. The study further articulates the importance of developing policies that guide TNE delivery and the relationship between partners by regulatory bodies in the higher education sector.
... According to Jonbekova (2019), the economic value gained by students includes enhanced employability, higher earnings, and improved financial and economic well-being, while social outcomes refer to aspects such as university graduates being active participants in civil society and helping other people. Manathunga (2017) argues that universities in the twenty-first century have become captive sites of global capitalism and they are constructed as knowledge businesses. She asserts that students are perceived as learners who consume degrees to become credentialed knowledge workers, while academics are positioned as technical functionaries and learning product suppliers. ...
Purpose
The emergence of social media has provided an alternative mechanism for students to provide and access online reviews about universities. These forms of feedback are often not systematically monitored and interpreted by universities. The purpose of this paper is to analyse quantitative ratings and qualitative comments provided by students via Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. The qualitative comments were analysed via thematic coding which identified four key themes including quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. The data were also subjected to automated content analysis using the text analytics software Leximancer to enhance the objectivity and reliability of findings.
Design/methodology/approach
The study involved the extraction of quantitative ratings as well as qualitative comments from Google reviews of 40 Australian universities. Each university was searched on Google and their rating and comments were collected as of August 2019. The qualitative data were included in an Excel spreadsheet along with the name of the universities, and their quantitative ratings. Using thematic coding techniques, the qualitative data were manually coded into four themes: quality of teaching, course design, learning environment and administrative support. Furthermore, the qualitative comments were grouped into two categories: positive comments and negative comments.
Findings
The paper argues the need for universities to actively monitor these new forms of student feedback which have provided autonomy and freedom for students and other stakeholders to access and provide 24/7 feedback. The study found common themes emerging from the positive and negative student comments related to: quality of teaching, course design, learning environments and administrative support. These aspects contributed to the students’ satisfaction levels when they reflected on their educational experience on Google reviews. The study also found that institutions with high numbers of negative comments tend to have lower ratings compared to those with positive comments.
Research limitations/implications
The study did not use other learning analytic tools to measure and assess the feedback from students using social media and other forms of feedback.
Originality/value
Many studies have been undertaken on student experience. Studies have focussed on the experience of home and international students, on-campus and online students, and students from various underrepresented backgrounds. So far no study has been undertaken on the reviews provided by students using Google reviews.
This research analyzed the University of Manitoba (UofM) Strategic Plan to both quantify the occurrence of specific keywords and make inferences about the purpose, messages, and effects being communicated by those keywords. In the first section of this paper, we provide an overview of the historical development and purpose of the neoliberal university. Second, we engage with content and critical discourse analysis to understand how academic work and academic identities are established by the strategic plan, a document that few faculty members consult regularly, and fewer still have a hand in developing. The foundational ideals of the UofM, cited at the beginning of the Strategic Plan are tracked through the document, and keywords as determined by frequency count are then similarly tracked. The findings reveal that most of the foundational ideals are not well-represented in the strategic plan; others, like sustainability, are euphemized. Keywords related to increasing workload are found over 60 times in the document, all in the context of decreased funding. We conclude that the strategic plan is a clear mandate for more to be completed with less. We refer to this aspect of workload creep as the need for “magic time.” Key words: workload creep, magic time, neoliberalism, higher education, keyword analysis. Cette recherche a analysé le plan stratégique de l'Université du Manitoba afin de quantifier l'occurrence de mots-clés spécifiques et de faire des inférences sur l'objectif, les messages et les effets communiqués par ces mots-clés. Dans la première section de ce document, nous présentons un aperçu du développement historique et de l'objectif de l'université néolibérale. Ensuite, nous nous engageons dans une analyse du contenu et du discours critique afin de comprendre l’établissement du travail et des identités universitaires par le plan stratégique, un document que peu de membres du corps enseignant consultent régulièrement, et à l'élaboration duquel encore moins participent. La présence des idéaux fondateurs de l'Université du Manitoba, cités au début du plan stratégique, a été suivie tout au long du document et l’emploi des mots-clés, déterminés par le comptage de fréquence, a ensuite été suivi de la même manière. Les résultats révèlent que la plupart des idéaux fondateurs ne sont pas bien représentés dans le plan stratégique ; d'autres, comme la durabilité, sont euphémisés. Les mots-clés liés à l'augmentation de la charge de travail se retrouvent plus de 60 fois dans le document, tous dans le contexte d'une diminution du financement. Nous en concluons que le plan stratégique est un mandat clair pour que l'on fasse plus avec moins. Nous appelons cet aspect de l'augmentation de la charge de travail le besoin de « temps magique ». Mots-clés: progression de la charge de travail, temps magique, néolibéralisme, enseignement supérieur, analyse des mots clés
In this chapter, I provide a perspective about what can constitute the struggles of the educational development practitioner for social justice and equity from the position of a senior manager. I enunciate the case of three crisis events about educational development from the social realist explanatory program, which draws on the critical realist philosophy, by arguing that what can be the crisis cases in the academic project can take place because the actors in such cases might be informed by the privileged discourses of economic rationality and neoliberalism (ER-NL) instead of social justice and equity (SJ-E). The instrumentalist and personal interests can allow for what can ultimately become more of the reproductive than what ought to be transformative outcomes. Such cases are antithetical to the value of university education as the public good. The analysis about the cases took a particular focus on the university education phase of its development as the two management and governance regimes were grappling with the institutional transformation change in general and the challenge of the academic project. The scholarly engagement of the cultural and human systems for some crisis events during the “change of guard,” albeit with demonstrable silences about the critical construct of quality enhancement, allowed for what could be finally declared as the exploratory research. The significance of such exploratory research is thus the advancement of what ought to be the theorization and conceptualization about social practices in contexts of historical and structural disadvantage and their expressively veracious considerations.
The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have achieved these efficiency, competition, and funding objectives. It does so by examining their financial performance over time, applying the techniques employed by investment analysts in the private sector to assess the performance of market participants. It demonstrates that the policy changes have reduced efficiency and competitiveness, and weakened the financial position of a number of universities. It provides empirical support for previous research highlighting the significant structural and regulatory constraints on the creation of a competitive market in higher education. Furthermore, it demonstrates that 35 years of policy change have merely reinforced pre-existing market positions and that, even before the impact of the COVID pandemic is considered, the financial position of the sector has been weakened as a result of the changes.
Social equity in higher education has been a priority for universities and policy makers throughout Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations for more than a decade. Limited improvement is seen among students in under-represented groups which remains a concern and for this reason social equity in higher education is presented as a wicked problem. This article will outline the steady massification of higher education where elitist discourses were largely abandoned, while social equity discourses flourished. The discussion will include key documents that have wielded great influence on discourse including The Bradley Review , Performance-Based Funding (PBF) and the Job-Ready Graduates legislation. After illuminating the Australian political context, this article will define four social equity discourses currently distinguishable in higher education literature: meritocratic, economist, social justice and human potential. Interrogation of these discourses will reveal complexity and divergence that contributes to the wicked nature of improving social equity in higher education.
The experience of first in family (FiF) students has been of particular interest and relevance to the higher education community for many years.
In concluding the book, we considered what we had learnt about FiF students and their experience of attending university. While doing so we realised how resilient, strong and brave the pioneers who participated in our study are and had our assertions about the purposes of higher education both assured and broadened. We therefore felt it appropriate to end by considering the responses to a range of questions. What is university for? Is it to acquire new knowledge and prepare students for the workforce? Is the aim more entrepreneurial—to create individuals who can make purposeful contributions to society? Must it show a contribution to economic growth? Is it a space to create lifelong friendships, challenge prejudices and nurture an altruistic spirit?
This article describes a project titled Mapping Contemporary Cinema (MCC) that forms part of the final year undergraduate curriculum in a film studies programme at a UK Russell Group university. The project is a distinct and innovative synthesis of critical pedagogy with research-based learning and is here considered in the light of Gert Biesta’s educational thinking. The article first glosses the concepts of critical pedagogy and research-based learning, and how they relate to Biesta’s work. There follows a description of the setting up of the project and an account of its development and execution between 2011 and 2017; this description continues to call on Biesta and is interspersed with discussion of practical and theoretical issues stemming from the blending of the two approaches. The article concludes that critical pedagogy and research-based learning are complementary and share commonalities, especially a concern with generative learning.
Openings toward participatory education and governance during the 1970s reflected social change that pushed toward greater equality on many fronts. These openings were rapidly shut down in the neoliberalisation of universities, enforced internally through managerialism that has stratified academic positions and largely replaced democratic workplace processes with radical individualism and privatised accountability. In this chapter we reflect on the resistances articulated by our contributors and highlight cracked continuities with the projects of cultural democracy. We also argue that it is necessary to consider the interrelated workings of silencing, privilege and resistance under managerial regimes. Working through hierarchical structures and horizontally, as technologies of responsibilisation, silencing and privilege enmesh passion, position and politics through which resistance is formed and enacted.
Despite the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in universities, there remain significant pockets of freedom. In this chapter, we argue for the development of an ecology of decolonisation within the academy that shifts thinking Southward; that resists rankism; that mobilises labour and communities and that encourages individuals to work continuously to decentre whiteness. This volume contains ingenious, determined efforts by academics to prise open the cracks within neoliberal universities and mobilise opportunities created by neoliberalism’s cracked logics. It explores the emergence of new counter-hegemonic academic ontologies and practices that flourish once the light is let in. These creative modes of criticality, resistance, collegiality and solidarity create the conditions for radical hope in universities and in the communities they serve. They take seriously the fundamental work of universities towards equity and social justice and illustrate the central role universities can continue to play in the struggle for cultural democracy.
Working in universities in the twenty-first century is a challenging endeavour. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the extent to which neoliberalism is crushing the lifeblood of inspiration out of academe. Vivid testimonies abound of the toxicity, barbarism and horrific psychological cost of neoliberal universities. This volume seeks to trace how we might prise open the cracks in neoliberal logic and find ways to follow Readings call to “dwell in the ruins”. We draw on recent examples of managerial ruthlessness to expose the cracks or flawed logic that permit conditions of possibility for collegiality, creativity and activism and new counter-ontologies of critical resistance and radical hope. These chapters highlight the importance of relational and collective processes in formation of counter-ontologies and praxis, drawing attention to feminist, intersectional and decolonising criticalities that are necessary to mobilise in our struggle.
Many governments in Western democracies conduct the work of leading their societies forward through policy generation and implementation. Despite government attempts at extensive negotiation, collaboration and debate, the general populace in these same countries frequently express feelings of disempowerment and undue pressure to be compliant, often leading to disengagement. Here we outline Plan B: a process for examining how policies that emerge from good intentions are frequently interpreted as burdensome or irrelevant by those on whom they have an impact. Using a case study of professional standards for teachers in Australia, we describe how we distilled Foucault's notions of archaeology into a research approach centring on the creation of ‘polyhedrons of intelligibility’ as an alternative approach by which both policy-makers and those affected by their policies may understand how their respective causes are supported and adversely affected.
In recent times critical approaches to educational policy studies have been subject to increasing interrogation over methodological issues, often by critical policy researchers themselves. In the main, their reflexive posturings have been informed by critique which proceeds that beyond brief descriptions of research logistics and a general commitment to the methodologies of a critical orientation, critical policy analyses offer few explicit accounts of the connections between the stories they tell about policy and the data used to tell them. As a way of addressing these silences, this paper proposes three methodological approaches within which to explore and explain matters of policy, each generating its own particular view of the (policy) issues worth looking for, where they can be found and how to look for them. Drawing on research into the production of Australian higher education policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the paper illustrates the characteristics of these approaches, referring to them as policy historiography, policy genealogy and policy archaeology. Without claiming absolute distinctions between their interests, the paper couples policy historiography with the substantive issues of policy at particular hegemonic moments, policy genealogy with social actors' engagement with policy, and policy archaeology with conditions that regulate policy formations.
This article provides a synoptic account of historically changing conceptions and practices of social justice in Australian higher education policy. It maps the changes in this policy arena, beginning with the period following the Second World War and concluding with an analysis of the most recent policy proposals of the Bradley Review. Concurrently, it explores the different meanings ascribed to social justice, equity and social inclusion over this time span and what these have meant and will mean for students, particularly those from low socio-economic backgrounds. It concludes that a relational understanding of social justice – ‘recognitive justice’ – is yet to inform student equity policy in higher education, although this is now what is required in the context of the planned shift from mass to universal participation.
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At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics in Britain and the settler world in the age of ‘Victorian’ globalization. It argues that long-distance personal connections were crucial to the ways late nineteenth and early twentieth century universities operated and central to the making of knowledge in them, and shows that such networks created an expansive but exclusionary ‘British academic world’ that extended far beyond the borders of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book remaps the intellectual geographies of Britain and its empire. In doing so, it provides a new context for writing the history of ideas and offers a critical analysis of the connections that helped fashion the global world of universities today.
At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Now available in paperback, Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics across the colonial world in the age of 'Victorian' globalization. Stretching across the globe, these networks helped map the boundaries of an expansive but exclusionary 'British academic world' that extended beyond the borders of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, this book remaps the intellectual geographies of Britain and its empire. In doing so, it provides a new context for writing the history of ideas and offers a critical analysis of the connections that helped fashion the global world of universities today.
This text explores the different ways in which the various social practices in which people participate becomes signed as learning, how and why that occurs and with what consequences. It takes seriously the linguistic turn in social theory to draw upon semiotics and poststructuralism through which to explore the significance of lifelong learning as an emerging discourse in education. The text explores the different ways in which learning conveys meaning and is given meaning. Given this, lifelong learning therefore is a way, and a significant way, in which learning is fashioned. The text then explores the notion that, if learning is lifelong and lifewide, what precisely is learning as distinct from other social practices and how those practices are given meaning as learning.
This article examines the university institutional in relation to the notion of time by postulating the concept of "the epoch of digital reason." Within this epoch the university exhibits "fast knowledge" flows of knowledge in the circuits of "cybernetic capitalism." The paper introduces the university on speed through the work of Paul Virilio and then in the next sections examines "the epoch of digital reason," fast knowledge and fast capitalism and "the cybernetic hypothesis" including a conception of the university and "speed politics" within cybernetic capitalism.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the diverse rendering of the idea of nation and the role of universities in nation-building in the 1950s Murray and Hughes Parry Reports in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This paper provides trans-Tasman comparisons that reflect the different national and international interests, positioning of science and the humanities and desired academic and student subject positions and power relations.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach that is informed by Wodak’s (2011) historical discourse analysis in order to analyse the reports’ discursive constructions of the national role of universities, the positioning of science and humanities and the development of desired academics and student subjectivities and power relations.
Findings
– The analysis reveals the different positioning of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand in relation to the Empire and the Cold War. It also demonstrates how Australian national interests were represented in these reports as largely economic and defence related, while Aotearoa/New Zealand national interests were about economic, social and cultural nation-building. These differences were also matched by diverse weightings attached to university science and the humanities education. There is also a hailing of traditional, enlightenment-inspired discourses about desired academic and student subjectivities and power relations in Australia that contrasts with the emergence of early traces of more contemporary discourses about equity and diversity in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Originality/value
– The paper demonstrates the value of transnational analysis in contributing to historiography about university education. The Foucauldian discourse analysis approach extends existing Australian historiography about universities during this period and represents a key contribution to Aotearoa/New Zealand historiography that has explored academic and student subjectivities to a lesser extent.
The rise of corporatism in the North American University was charted by Bill Readings in the mid nineteen-nineties in his book The University in Ruins. The intervening years have seen the corporate university grow and extend to the point where its evolution into a large business corporation is seemingly complete. Rolfe’s book examines the factors contributing to the transformation of the university from a site of culture and knowledge to what might be termed an ‘information factory’, and explores strategies for how, in Readings’ words, members of the academic community might continue to ‘dwell in the ruins of the university’ in a productive and authentic way.
State-university relations across Europe have undergone massive transformations, ranging from establishing new control institutions to reaffirming institutional autonomy. In this reform wave Denmark can in many ways be seen as an extreme case as the reforms affecting the Danish higher education system have gone further than in many of the comparable European countries. In this article, Danish higher education policy is examined as an exemplary case of how differing ideas transform the perception of the higher education system over time. The Danish case is thus in addition to being an exemplary case of a common European trend an excellent opportunity for examining the dynamics of a reform process within higher education and particularly the notions of autonomy and control have taken on different meanings over time, changing how the role and governance of higher education institutions is perceived. The most recent developments in Danish higher education policy are discussed in terms of the concept of the competition state and the notion of ‘conduct of conduct’, in order to offer new insights into the state-university relation.
The emergence of academic development in Anglophone higher education was linked to post Second World War massification and concerns about student failure. These concerns were driven by increasing statistical investigations into student attrition and degree times to completion, particularly in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. There was a dominant discourse about student ‘wastage’ (the deviant student). However, if we fast-forward to the late 2000s, we can see that these discourses have been replaced by discourses about university responsibility and teaching quality. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, this paper aims to trace the historical roots of contemporary teaching and learning dilemmas and to show how the responsibility for student failure was gradually shifted from perceptions of deviant students to perceptions of teacher ‘deviance’, which academic development units were designed to ameliorate.
This paper considers the idea of a university as it exists and is discussed in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Australia's history and partly derivative culture provide the relatively unintellectual context for sceptical utilitarianism in relation to a system which has expanded rapidly and is frequently described as being in crisis. Resource constraints and pressures to marketise and become more entrepreneurial have increased managerialism at the expense of a perhaps mythical ideal of a community of scholars. Different interests, influences and ideals jostle in a process that continues to determine the character of higher education, and the character of the different institutions that comprise the sector. The influence of national politics is recognised, including the possibility of softening the extreme free market position of recent years.
Policy archaeology is a radically different approach to policy studies in education, drawn from the post‐structuralist work of Foucault, which completely reconceptualizes policy studies and, thus, significantly expands it as a critical problematic. Rather than beginning after social and education problems have emerged into social visibility, policy archaeology studies the social construction of these problems. Rather than acquiescing to the range of policy solutions debated by policy makers and policy analysts, it interrogates the social construction of that range. Rather than accepting policy studies as a ‘neutral’ social science, it questions the broader social functions of policy studies. And, finally, rather than concluding that social and education problems, policy solutions and policy studies are created by the conscious interplay of the free agents of history, policy archaeology proposes that a grid of social regularities constitutes what is seen as a problem, what is socially legitimized as a policy solution, and what policy studies itself is.
When James Conant visited Australia in 1951 he unwittingly entered an existing, lengthy debate about the value of university-based knowledge in Australia. The Second World War, with its significant reliance on academic expertise, had suggested that if knowledge could win wars, the labour of academic staff could be considered to normally have social and economic value to the nation. In 1951 Conant had no way of foreseeing that steps made, in this light, at Federal level during and after the war, would culminate in the 1957 Review of Universities in Australia, chaired by Sir Keith Murray, and the injection of a large amount of funding into the university system. Conant’s confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation does show that he saw the system in desperate need of funding, which wasa reality that everyone agreed upon.1 The long debate included options for university funding and the potential change to the character of universities if the community, rather than the cloister, was to determine the purpose and character of knowledge. Conant’s report reflects this debate, centring (as many other participants did as well) on the value universities would gain if they were more obviously useful and relevant to industry and if their reputation was less stained by elitism and arrogance. Conant could not gather sufficient data in his visit to identify the nuances of this long discussion nor could he see the depth and spread of its influence over the decade or so preceding his visit. As a result, his particular agenda seems to obscure the perception of the threat that change provoked to some of the traditional values associated with academic work. To consider the debate and the character of academic work in the university scene that Conant fleetingly visited, we need to look back just a few years to another, but very different, visitor to the Australian system.
This paper uses one national case to illustrate how diverse ideological agendas of central state agencies contest the discursive space within which major education policy reforms are developed. In Aotearoa New Zealand in 1988, ‘self‐managed’ schools were promoted ostensibly to allow parents more say in their children’s education and local school administration. The Tomorrow’s Schools reform policy texts included an existing social democratic partnership rhetoric, positioning principals as professional leaders working collaboratively with elected parent boards of trustees. However, the new ideology of ‘parental choice’ of school within a local schooling marketplace, underpinned by a chief executive or market managerial model of principalship, was later operationalised through mechanisms of ‘steerage’ from the centre. To explain this shift, we examine selected policy text pre‐cursors to the reforms and identify how contrasting forms of ‘principal’ and ‘teacher’ identity emerged within social democratic, neo‐liberal and market managerial ideologies. We further show that while radical (Treasury) market liberal arguments for labour market deregulation and consumer choice failed to gain widespread support, the State Services Commission preferred market managerialist strategies for promoting public accountability of schools (based on aggregate student achievement outcome data and centrally determined national educational priorities) were successfully embedded during the 1990s.
Rizvi and Lingard's account of the global politics of education is thoughtful, complex and compelling. It is the first really comprehensive discussion and analysis of global trends in education policy, their effects - structural and individual - and resistance to them. In the enormous body of writing on globalisation this book stands out and will become a basic text in education policy courses around the world. - Stephen J Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London, UK, In what ways have the processes of globalization reshaped the educational policy terrain?, How might we analyse education policies located within this new terrain, which is at once local, national, regional and global? In Globalizing Education Policy, the authors explore the key global drivers of policy change in education, and suggest that these do not operate in the same way in all nation-states. They examine the transformative effects of globalization on the discursive terrain within which educational policies are developed and enacted, arguing that this terrain is increasingly informed by a range of neo-liberal precepts which have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about educational governance. They also suggest that whilst in some countries these precepts are resisted, to some extent, they have nonetheless become hegemonic, and provide an overview of some critical issues in educational policy to which this hegemonic view of globalization has given rise, including: devolution and decentralization new forms of governance the balance between public and private funding of education access and equity and the education of girls curriculum particularly with respect to the teaching of English language and technology pedagogies and high stakes testing and the global trade in education. These issues are explored within the context of major shifts in global processes and ideological discourses currently being experienced, and negotiated by all countries. The book also provides an approach to education policy analysis in an age of globalization and will be of interest to those studying globalization and education policy across the social sciences.
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