The university in Europe – as a central institution of society – is presently met with many new expectations challenging established practices and self-understandings of academics across Europe. In the European Union, the higher education and research system has become a foremost tool of change. Current reforms across national higher education systems are seen as a potential for creating a European Higher Education Area, as well as an opportunity to introduce EU policies and ideas addressing how reforms can contribute to promote this as an EU dimension. An argument that only reforms of the higher education institution – in particular the research university, as a European institution – can make Europe regain its competitive force and economic growth-potential has gained currency in the last decade with reference to the US. The university system of the US, particularly its highly regarded elite universities, is also held forth as a model for the developments in the EU, and thus for the reforms of the different countries of EU. In this book, however, it is demonstrated that much of the political rhetoric about the construction of the future knowledge economy of Europe and the promotion of a European Higher Education Area may contradict basic values that give Europe its identity as a cultural region. Promoting the US university as an ideal model does not do justice to the kind of problems the US is facing in their own reform efforts, nor does it reflect properly the social costs of copying such an elite system. The book raises a number of issues relating to elitism and democracy, internationalisation and regionalisation, and new forms of governance in higher education and research which current EU policies seem to neglect.

The Research Handbook on the Transformation of Higher Education captures the complexities and paradoxes associated with higher education transformation. Drawing upon current empirical and theoretical scholarship, it identifies the drivers, actors, developments and outcomes of transformational processes within the field.

This 50th volume examines current global trends in higher education, which include the situation of academic faculty, the demand for access, the role of the university in society and its governance, funding trends, and higher education’s international dimensions.

There is an urgent need to provide academic professionals with individual, institutional, and contextual accounts of their careers and career-making endeavors. An individual account makes academicians think about what they do and how they might do it better. An institutional account makes academicians reflect upon the organizational environment in which they function and ponder what they might do to improve it. A contextual account connects academicians and their work to knowledge, the knowledge enterprise, and the larger social structure so that they know and understand the impact they and their career-making efforts have on themselves, academia, and general social processes. This book examines academic careers and career-making activities with respect to their main aspects, milestones, and general pathways. In content, it divides into four identifiable parts. Part I focuses on professional preparation. It examines education, degree, reeducation, job search, and job change. Part II centers on organizational employment. It investigates position, research, teaching, service, and tenure. Part III revolves around professional networking. It looks into publication, conference presentation, application for grants and awards, and membership in academic associations. Part IV rises above specific issues. It explores general career pathways and overall scholarly identity.

The Bologna Process opened a new chapter in the history of the European higher education. The idea of a common European Higher Education Area was developed in Western Europe and accelerated increasingly there in the second half of the 20th century, as a phenomenon of globalization. For the post-communist states in Eastern Europe the complete change of the political system made it possible to join the European Union and the Bologna Process. These changes had an impact not only on the educational policies but also on the educational system and the educational culture as well. This book shows the changes in the higher education of ten countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The country studies are supplemented with an international and a historical comparative analysis, to point out the special features of the implementation of the Bologna aims in the region.

This Handbook provides a wide-ranging frame of reference for researching adult and lifelong education and learning. With contributions from scores of established and newer scholars from six continents, the volume covers a diverse range of geopolitical and social territories across the world. Drawing on the multiple heritages that underpin research on education and learning in adulthood, this Handbook addresses the inner tensions between adult education, adult learning, lifelong education, and lifelong learning, by using current research and theorizations from disciplinary backgrounds, including philosophy, psychology, biology and neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, and economics. It provides an explicit discussion of the differences and tensions between adult and lifelong education and learning, and locates these in different policy and historical contexts, theories and practices. It explores a variety of discipline-based theoretical perspectives, and highlights how these have influenced, and been influenced by, research in the education and learning of adults. The Handbook also explores the inevitable frictions and dilemmas these present, and carefully examines the role of the international dimension in researching education and learning in formal, non-formal and informal contexts, beyond traditional schooling. This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook is the first of its kind to explore adult education, lifelong education and lifelong learning fully as distinct activities on an international scale. It will be an indispensable reference resource for students of education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and for academic researchers, professionals and policy-makers concerned with adult and community education, further and vocational education, or work-based training and human resource development.

The concept behind the Creative University is about knowledge cultures, critical creative thinking and innovative learning processes, situating the university as flexible, open and responsive to contemporary educational ideologies. Its vision reflects world-wide interest in students’ engagement with diverse knowledges that challenge and break with habitual actions and thought and elevates creativity as central to the design of new and innovative pedagogies. In The Creative University: Contemporary Responses to the Changing Role of the University, leading authors position the university to inviting exploratory constructions and approaches that respond to past, present and future social and educational tensions and developments. This volume is a provocation for discovery, fostering and critiquing creativity, and advancing innovation.

Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

This book examines the transformative power and the limitations of one of Europe’s most significant university reforms from an ethnographic and historical perspective. It incorporates voices positioned across university and policy-making hierarchies in its analysis of how Danish universities have been transformed. To do this, the book continually juxtaposes two meanings of ‘enactment’: a top-down view based on laws and institutional power, and a bottom-up view of multiple actors shaping their institution in day-to-day life and in actively contested changes. By conceiving of the university as ‘enacted’ in both ways at once, the book explores how and why the university comes to be imagined and instantiated in new ways. The book traces the arguments for reform through a two-decade long, dynamic struggle between international forums and national industrial, political and academic interests over the definition of the university. It discusses which ideas finally became dominant and how this happened. It looks at government reforms from 2003 onwards, and, by means of notable ‘telling moments’, explains how the governance and management of the university were transformed. It examines how academics found room to manoeuvre between contesting discourses that affect their identity and work. Finally, it shows how students engaged with new versions of historical debates about their participation in shaping their own education, their institution and society.

The pursuit to construct “world-class” universities is an ongoing global obsession across the world, which lays emphasis on the development of competitive higher education and research systems as core national economic approach. The portrayal “world-class” is more contextual rather than absolute, the expression “world-class university” has an irrefutable cachet. There is no solo, clear-cut definition of what organises a world-class university (WCU), but there are few common attributes that majority of the experts point towards. The three attributes stated by Philip Altbach and Jamil Salmi that focus on a high concentration of talent, abundant resources and favourable governance have been widely discussed in writings and practice. Both in developing and developed countries, policymakers and higher education leaders are attempting to identify and outline their desires and plans aimed at achieving global ranking for their university/universities. Despite condemnation of the methodology, the choice of indicators and weightings, and the reliability and quality of data used for comparing performance, the obsession for constructing world-class universities has increased over the period of time. But how much do we really discern or comprehend regarding the ranking systems? What do the rankings really measure? Do rankings measure the quality and help in attaining the broad assignment of higher education? Does the competition as outcome of ranking raise standards? Is the ranking system an apposite instrument to frame higher education policies? This edited volume tries to look at the concept of world-class universities in milieu of different countries of the world and explore their experiences either in existing WCUs or constructing WCU or attempting to create WCU. The country-based chapters show differentiated paths of achievements and their approach towards the concept of WCU.