Oxford And The Decline Of The Collegiate Tradition

For centuries, the idea of collegiality has been integral to the British understanding of higher education. This book examines how its values are being restructured in response to the 21st-century pressures of massification and managerialism.

For centuries, the idea of collegiality has been integral to the British understanding of higher education. This book examines how its values are being restructured in response to the 21st-century pressures of massification and managerialism.

Much of our writing re?ects a long-term commitment to the analysis of the col- gial tradition in higher education. This commitment is re?ected most strongly in Oxford and the Decline of the Collegiate Tradition (2000), which we are pleased to say will re-appear as a considerably revised second edition (Oxford, The Collegiate University: Con?ict, Consensus and Continuity) to be published by Springer in the near future. To some extent this volume, The Collegial Tradition in the Age of Mass Higher Education, is a reaction to the charge that our work has been too narrowly focussed upon the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (Oxbridge). Not surpr- ingly, you would expect us to reject that critique, while responding constructively to it. The focus may be narrow, and although the relative presence and, more arguably, the in?uence of Oxford and Cambridge may have declined in English higher e- cation, they remain important national universities. Moreover, as the plethora of so-called world-class higher education league tables would have us believe, they also have a powerful international status. This, however, is essentially a defensive response dependent upon the alleged reputations of the two universities. This book is intent on making a more substantial argument. To examine the c- legial tradition in higher education means much more than presenting a nostalgic look at the past.

Oxford is one of the world’s great universities but this has not meant that it is exempt from pressures for change. On various fronts it has been required to meet the challenges that universities almost worldwide have to face. Given the retrenchment of public funding, especially to support undergraduate teaching, it has been required to augment its financial base, while at the same time deciding how to respond to pressure from successive governments determined to use higher education to achieve their own policy goals. While still consistently ranked as a world-class university, it has to decide how it is to acquire the funding to continue in this league, or whether this goal is worth pursuing. Oxford is a collegiate university, which means its colleges share with the University responsibility for the delivery of its central goals. Is this balance of authority shifting over time? If so, how is this to be accounted for, and what are the likely outcomes for the collegiate university? This book sets out to address these questions and arrives at an essentially positive conclusion. Oxford will continue to remain an effective collegiate university and, while its identity will change, its central character will persist.

For centuries, the idea of collegiality has been integral to the British understanding of higher education. This book examines how its values are being restructured in response to the 21st-century pressures of massification and managerialism.

The world's systems of higher education (HE) are caught up in the fourth industrial revolution of the twenty-first century. Driven by increased globalization, demographic expansion in demand for education, new information and communications technology, and changing cost structures influencing societal expectations and control, higher education systems across the globe are adapting to the pressures of this new industrial environment. To make sense of the complex changes in the practices and structures of higher education, this Handbook sets out a theoretical framework to explain what higher education systems are, how they may be compared over time, and why comparisons are important in terms of societal progress in an increasingly interconnected world. Drawing on insights from over 40 leading international scholars and practitioners, the chapters examine the main challenges facing institutions of higher education, how they should be managed in changing conditions, and the societal implications of different approaches to change. Structured around the premise that higher education plays a significant role in ensuring that a society achieves the capacity to adjust itself to change, while at the same time remaining cohesive as a social system, this Handbook explores how current internal and external forces disturb this balance, and how institutions of higher education could, and might, respond.

Islamic schools, or madrasas, have been accused of radicalizing Muslims and participating, either actively or passively, in terrorist networks since the events of 9/11. In Pakistan, the 2007 siege by government forces of Islamabad’s Red Mosque and its madrasa complex, whose imam and students staged an armed resistance against the state for its support of the "war on terror," reinforced concerns about madrasas’ role in regional and global jihad. By 2006 madrasas registered with Pakistan’s five regulatory boards for religious schools enrolled over one million male and 200,000 female students. In The Rational Believer, Masooda Bano draws on rich interview, ethnographic, and survey data, as well as fieldwork conducted in madrasas throughout the country to explore the network of Pakistani madrasas. She maps the choices and decisions confronted by students, teachers, parents, and clerics and explains why available choices make participation in jihad appear at times a viable course of action. Bano's work shows that beliefs are rational and that religious believers look to maximize utility in ways not captured by classical rational choice. She applies analytical tools from the New Institutional Economics to explain apparent contradictions in the madrasa system—for example, how thousands of young Pakistani women now demand the national adoption of traditional sharia law, despite its highly restrictive limits on female agency, and do so from their location in Islamic schools for girls that were founded only a generation ago.

Undoubtedly the most important development in higher education in recent years has been the seemingly inexorable expansion of national systems. In a comparatively short time period many countries have moved from an elite to a mass model. Furthermore, expansion has invariably changed the whole experience of higher education for all the interested parties from, presidents, rectors and vice-chancellors to first-term undergraduates. Structuring Mass Higher Education examines the impact of this change upon the existing national structures of higher education. It also defines and highlights what makes an ‘elite’ university – something which institutions must strive for in order to gain their position as global players. With case studies and contributions from a wide range of international authors, the book explores questions such as: Do higher education institutions retain a national significance, even though the vestiges of an international reputation have long faded? Has expansion undermined the quality of higher education because governments sought to expand "on the cheap"? Is the elite institutional response to mass higher education perceived as a threat to be responded to with purposeful action that sustains their elite status? Does the emergence of the international league tables pose a challenge to those responsible for governing elite institutions? These are critical issues with which both policy-makers and institutional leaders will have to grapple over the next ten years, making Structuring Mass Higher Education a timely, relevant, and much needed text. It will appeal to policy makers and practitioners within higher education as well as student and scholars worldwide.

Most people know what management is but often people have vague ideas about Manageralism. This book introduces Manageralism and its ideology as a colonising project that has infiltrated nearly every eventuality of human society.