Rethinking Higher Education And The Crisis Of Legitimation In Europe

Building on Ourania Filippakou’s previous work on higher education in the fields of governance, neoliberalism, university entrepreneurialism and marketization, institutional and social stratification, Rethinking Higher Education and the Crisis of Legitimation in Europe contributes to the debate on higher education from a critical policy perspective. Introducing new ideas on the relationships between the alleged pursuit of excellence in higher education and the ways in which both deploys and reflects how power is wielded in Europe and other neoliberal capitalist societies. The term "legitimation" is here coined to emphasize how new coercive strategies, political decisions, and management styles have emerged in the age of excellence in higher education. The book concludes with a more personal reflection on the neutrality of higher education and its illusory promises.

Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.

Surveillance Education explores the pervasive use of digital surveillance technologies in schools and assesses its pernicious effects on students. Recognizing that the use of digital technologies will persist, the authors instead offer practical ways to ameliorate their impact. In our era of surveillance capitalism, digital media technologies are ever more intertwined into the educational process. Schools are presented with digital technologies as tools of convenience for gathering and grading student work, as tools of support to foster a more equitable learning environment, and as tools of safety for predicting or preventing violence or monitoring mental, emotional, and physical health. Despite a dearth of evidence to confirm their effectiveness, digital data collection and tracking is often presented as a way to improve educational outcomes and safety. This book challenges these fallacious assumptions and argues that the use of digital media technologies has caused great harm to students by subjecting them to oppressive levels of surveillance, impinging upon their right to privacy, and harvesting their personal data on behalf of Big-Tech. In doing so, the authors draw upon interviews from K–12 and higher education students, teachers, and staff, civil rights and technology lawyers, and educational technological programmers. The authors also provide practical guidance for teachers, administrators, students, and their families seeking to identify and combat surveillance in education. This urgent, eye-opening book will be of interest to students and educators with interests in critical media literacy and pedagogy and the sociology of technology and education.

Not since sixties student turmoil and unrest wreaked havoc on the nations's campuses has American higher education been the subject of so much controversy. Confusion over fundamental priorities and purposes, the author argues, lies at the heart of the dilemma facing end-of-the-century higher education. Having failed in its attempt to be all things to all people, the academy must now reinvent itself to meet the challenges of the millennium ahead. Thoughtful and timely, Crisis in the Academy offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary higher education and makes an important contribution to the ongoing public debate over the future of America's beleaguered and diverse institutions of higher learning.

This volume presents the state of the art with respect to the most important elements of the Bologna process. The reflections on the past are also used to fuel the debate on the next decade.

This book focuses on the relations between social justice and higher education research. Jan McArthur and Paul Ashwin bring together chapters from international researchers that explore these relations in a range of national contexts and consider their implications for policies, pedagogy and our understanding of the roles of graduates in societies. As a whole, the book argues that social justice needs to be more than a topic of higher education research and must also be part of the way that research is undertaken. Social justice must be located in research practices as well as in the issues that are researched.

Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are essential for universities to produce the research and teaching necessary to improve society and the human condition. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are increasingly important components of the development of democracy. At the same time, these fundamental democratic values are subject to pressure in many countries. The relationship between academic freedom, institutional autonomy and democracy is fundamental: it is barely conceivable that they could exist in a society not based on democratic principles, and democracy is enriched when higher education institutions operate on this basis. Higher education institutions need to be imbued with democratic culture and that, in turn, helps to promote democratic values in the wider society. None of these issues are simple and the lines between legitimacy and illegitimacy are sometimes hard to discern, as is illustrated by perspectives from Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and the Mediterranean region.

In recent decades, we have seen the emergence of private higher education as a global reality. Although there are specific reasons for its appearance in each system, there is also a significant degree of commonality in the context and purposes surrounding the rise of private higher education as an important factor in many systems. The analysis of private higher education has tended to be focused at the national level, often highlighting national peculiarities and variations. In this volume the authors move forward by proposing a unifying and coherent, but flexible, theoretical framework that may be applied in different countries and diverse systems. Hence, the overall goal of this book is to provide a framework for a better understanding of the public-private mix of higher education and a set of policy guidelines in dealing with the expansion of private higher education from a comparative perspective. This analytical framework will be applied to four case-studies (Pakistan, Portugal, South Korea and Uruguay). These cases illustrate the diversity of contexts in the development of private higher education, though they also highlight important commonalities. Based on that analysis, we present some general recommendations to build a more effective policy-framework that takes advantage of the private sector in order to fulfill better the missions of the higher education system.