Search results

Is the aim of the university to prepare citizens to contribute to civic and social life as well as to travel flexibly and successfully through a rapidly changing work world? Or is the purpose of higher education more narrowly to advance students’ individual economic interests as they understand them? Should we think of students as citizens or consumers? Many analysts argue that, in recent years, the notion that higher education should serve to advance students’ individual economic position has increasingly taken prominence over broader notions of the purpose of American higher education. In this paper, we examine whether and to what extent a shift from considering students-as-citizens to students-as-consumers has occurred in US higher education. We provide a longitudinal analysis of two separate and theoretically distinct discourse communities (Berg, 2003): higher education trustees and leaders of and advocates for liberal arts education. Our data suggest a highly unsettled field in which commercial discourse as measured by the student-as-consumer code has surely entered the US higher education lexicon, but this code is not uncontested and the more traditional citizenship code remains significant and viable.

Past research on the immigrant health paradox suggests that children with immigrant parents may have a health advantage over those with US-born parents, especially if the parent is a recent immigrant. Other research emphasizes the social and economic challenges children with immigrant parents face, in part due to disadvantaged social class and racial/ethnic positions. Underlying physiological changes due to chronic stress exposures among children in immigrant families is one potential health disadvantage that may not yet be apparent in traditional health measures. To explore these biological disparities during childhood, I use national biomarker and survey data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES) (N = 11,866) to evaluate parent nativity and educational status associations with low-grade inflammation, indicated by C-reactive protein (CRP), in children ages 2–15 years. I find that children with an immigrant parent, and particularly a low-educated immigrant parent, have higher CRP, net of birth, body mass index (BMI) and other factors, than children with a US-born parent with either a low or higher education. Comparing children with low-educated parents, those with a foreign-born parent have higher predicted CRP. The findings from this study provide new evidence that children living in immigrant families in the US may be facing higher levels of chronic stress exposure, as indicated by the increased risk of low-grade inflammation, than those with US-born parents. The physiological changes related to increased risk of inflammation, could set children in immigrant families on pathways toward mental and physical health problems later in the life course.

The purpose of this paper is to examine: how financial practices are diffused across countries and who are the carriers of diffusion; and to determine why the nature of adoption varies across countries and specific institutional fields and why certain practices are adopted in some settings but not in others.

In the macro portion of the study the authors document how World Bank loans in Latin America have encouraged the adoption of particular configurations of accounting and accountability practices. In the micro portion of the study, they analyze the cases of Guatemala and Mexico as a way of illustrating the ways in which the configuration of institutional players, capitals and habitus within these two sites have influenced the adoption of Bank recommended financial practices.

First, the analyses illustrate that the World Bank functions as an agent of diffusion via direct contact and through indirect modelling activities. Second, the analyses show that diffusion is not an automatic process – rather the predisposition of national governments, the embodied history of higher education and the distribution of capitals within the field influences whether financial reforms will be attempted. Third the analyses illustrate that, even when the introduction of new accounting and accountability mechanisms are attempted, other important field participants such as students can partially block the introduction of financial reforms.

The current study illustrates that international organizations such as the World Bank facilitate the diffusion of accounting and accountability practices but that local actors influence if, when and how accounting will be introduced and implemented.

Due to the diversity of academics engaging with research into higher education, there is no single methodological approach or method that would embody higher education research. In this chapter, we put forward the case that this is a good thing and argue that higher education research can benefit from fusing existing methodological and theoretical paradigms with more creative, playful and artistic approaches, more commonly associated with sociological or anthropological research and performance-based disciplines. In order to frame this attitude of creativity, playfulness and openness, we start by providing a brief delineation of the research field and methods of higher education research. In this context we introduce the Deleuzoguattarian concept of rhizomes and assemblages to provide the grounding for what we mean by creativity and playfulness, which leads to our proposal of a renewed approach to research into higher education. We draw upon our own work on embodied academic identity and trainee teachers’ perceptions of their placement experiences in order to critically explore the benefits and potential pitfalls of incorporating this creativity and playfulness into higher education research.

The operational paradigms guiding leadership strategies and practices, and their related policies, are archaic, and neither varied nor flexible. Arguably, many institutions of higher education still operate on an economized production paradigm of product-profit. The unintended consequence of such a paradigm is the continued dehumanization and objectification of all those involved.

This chapter challenges the particular uses of metaphors in higher education that, on our view, continue the reified product-profit paradigm. By crafting an alternative conceptual metaphor for higher education as a learner rather than debtor, we help those in higher education begin to make institutions more socially responsible and more democratic simply by calling upon those within higher education to reduce the amount of human commodification occurring through the language we use. We do this by sketching the history of the institution as debtor, making clear and transparent the consequences and impact of this metaphor, and by providing an alternative metaphorical paradigm for institutions of higher education.

The higher education industry is experiencing fiscal, organizational, and competitive stress in today's competitive environment (Bowen, 2018; McCaferty, 2018). As educators and higher education leaders, we believe that our role in society is essential ecause our collective work inherently concerns student learning, research and service to our university and the broader society. Yet, with today's competitive higher education market, universities and colleges ask more and more of faculty, staff and administrators to ‘get the work done’, creating mental, physical, emotional and spiritual stress. This chapter shares insights, practices and research designed to help university and college workers become resilient in the face of this set of extreme challenges In particular, the focus of this chapter is resilience and its four dimensions including physical, emotional, spiritual and mental resilience. It is argued that by investing in our own resilience as leaders, we foster the resilience of our colleagues, peers, teams, and institutions such that we can thrive in today's higher education environment despite its ongoing challenges.

The tradition in academic institutions seems to favour individual effort and achievement. In counterpoint, a group of four Māori women from Aotearoa New Zealand – Nan Wehipeihana, Kataraina Pipi, Vivienne Kennedy and Kirimatao Paipa – share their experiences of journeying together as a kaupapa whānau, ¹ enhanced by their whakapapa ² links to collectively navigate a higher education pathway. They asserted their ways of working and being supportive to each other through a postgraduate diploma in evaluation and research. Their collaborative way of working challenged the academic system where learning is focused on individual effort and achievement. Pushing the boundaries to ensure the benefits of a culture of inclusiveness, collaboration and collectivity in an academic sphere of learning requires a mixture of willingness and cooperation between students and the institution. This chapter describes how this group of four mature Māori students overcame challenges in asserting a cultural stance that was a key enabler to them in successfully attaining their higher educational learning goals.

How do racial meanings structure the institution of higher education and the organizations and networks it encompasses? This chapter develops a theory of racial activation to usefully link conceptualizations of race and organizations. This theory examines how racial meanings shape organizational fields, forms or types of organizations, and the strategic use of racial meanings by actors in organizations to create a more robust understanding of the processes by which organizations are themselves made racialized. Predominant scholarship on race can largely be characterized as theorizing the mechanisms by which race is constructed or uncovering the patterns and consequences of inequality along racial lines. Much existing research hovers above at a macro level where national, state, and global powers are understood to impose racial categories, symbols, meanings, and rules onto daily life while higher education has largely been studied as a site where we see the effects of broader social disparities play out. This chapter draws on insights from inhabited institutionalism to develop a theory of racial activation that usefully links conceptualizations of race and organizations to provide an intersectional and interactional approach to the study of fields.

The purpose of this paper is to apply a feminist perspective to the crisis in prison higher education in the US by exploring whether gender shapes access to on‐site, non‐occupational college programs in state prisons differently for women than for men.

The paper utilized a content analysis of official US state departments of correction websites and an email survey of state directors of education.

Findings show that while both women and men had little access to on‐site, non‐occupational college programming in the 2005‐2006 academic year, women in state prison had slightly greater access than men.

Theoretical implications of the findings include the importance of focusing a gender lens on correctional education programming, as well as the importance of extending analysis beyond gender alone towards an analysis of the intersections of gender, race, and class inequalities on access to prison higher education.

Practical implications include the identification of an emergent educational justice movement in the USA, and the presentation of exploratory data on the current college‐in‐prison programs useful for progressive activists, policymakers, correctional education administrators, equity scholars, and others interested in organizing around democratic access to postsecondary correctional education.

As there is little current research on college‐in‐prison programs in the US, and less on the gendered dimensions of program access, the paper makes an original valuable contribution to several literatures.

In this chapter, we argue from a theoretical perspective that globalisation has impacted differentiation within higher education systems. The three propositions about mechanisms affecting diversity distinguished by van Vught (environmental conditions, competition for resources and academic norms) remain the same, but the initial conditions have changed. Governmental policy, in particular, affects the degree of openness of higher education systems (positively or negatively), either through (de-)regulation or by affecting higher education institutions’ strategies for internationalisation. Thus, we add as a fourth proposition that increasing institutional autonomy increases system diversity in the context of globalisation.