Politics of higher education

This Brief explores the issue of higher education as a critical political problem in the Arab Middle East. After reviewing the main trends in higher education in  the  region,  along  with  the principal  locations  and  actors  figuring  in  the current  academic  boom,  the  brief  explains  why  higher  education  is  a  central issue  in  the  Arab  world  and  then  proceed  to  analyze  the broader  political background underlying  these  new  academic  dynamics.  Finally,  the  main challenges,  domestic  and  international,  facing  higher  education  in  the Arab Gulf are assessed.

Duke University was founded on tobacco wealth, and now it has a tobacco-free campus. How should we understand this change? How can communities around this university, and higher education broadly, reckon with our historical and ongoing complicities with tobacco capitalism? This article examines how the individualized subject has been historically constructed, in response to resistances, through supplementary relations between the university and tobacco industries. With abolitionist university studies, the authors focus on the postslavery university as a key site for these individualizing processes. They situate Duke as a nexus of new means of capitalist accumulation, including, on the one hand, the postslavery university as an institution for disciplining, individualizing, and differentiating wage laborers and, on the other, the tobacco industry's shift to monopolization and mass consumption of tobacco commodities. The long Black freedom movement continues in the post-WWII era with resistances that push capitalism into crisis, while simultaneously, capitalism's coping mechanism of tobacco use has the unintended consequence of mass death. This article explores how, at the site of Duke, part of capitalism's response to resistance movements has been to deepen the individualization processes, charging individuals with taking on responsibility for the costs of both tobacco use and higher education. The authors ask how narratives of smoke-free and tobacco-free campuses could interlink with postracial narratives to obscure how the tobacco companies and universities have accumulated capital through racism, deception, dispossession, and exploitation.

Intergovernmental regional cooperation is one of the defining characteristics of political Europe. This article investigates it in the area of higher education and research. Specifically it explores what types of intergovernmental regional alliances exist and to what extent their member countries coordinate their higher education and research policies. The article focuses on six most prominent and most formalized intergovernmental regional alliances: the Benelux, Norden–The Nordic Cooperation, the Visegrád Group, the Franco-German Cooperation, the Western Balkans, and the Baltic Cooperation. There has been much research devoted to study of policy diffusion from the European to the national level, but the intergovernmental regional level has largely been ignored. This article argues that there clearly exists a multi-level governance system in the area of higher education and research, in which regional intergovernmental alliances also perform policy coordination. Therefore, the politics of European higher education policy-making cannot be fully understood by ignoring intergovernmental regional cooperation.

Since the adoption of Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship program, seven additional southeastern states have adopted similar merit-based financial aid programs, most of which are also funded by state lotteries. This study examines why North Carolina after adopting a state lottery in 2005 did not allocate its proceeds for a merit scholarship program. This in-depth case study considers the explanatory power of a revised multiple streams model and the integrated diffusion model by analyzing data collected through elite interviews and archival documents. Our analysis suggests that internal determinants, such as North Carolina’s educational and economic context, trumped regional diffusion trends and that the multiple stream model’s “black box” influences, such as political tactics and gamesmanship, provide the most conceptually compelling explanation for why merit aid became a “non-event” in North Carolina. Indeed, by considering decisions and non-decisions, researchers may capture a broader array of state-level characteristics that influence policy adoption.

Auf den ersten Blick erscheint die Wissenschaftslandschaft in Großbritannien attraktiv: Für eine internationale Karriere ist Englisch als Wissenschaftssprache unabdingbar, und der dynamischere Arbeitsmarkt erleichtert die Planbarkeit akademischer Lebensläufe. Andererseits erschweren unterschiedliche Qualifikationsstrategien, unter denen das „Fehlen“ der Habilitation in Großbritannien nur die augenfälligste ist, den Transfer zwischen beiden Wissenschaftssystemen. Außerdem bieten britische Universitäten einen Vorgeschmack auf eine globale Wissenschaftskultur, die von betriebswirtschaftlichen Zielvorgaben bestimmt wird und von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern strategische Positionierung und Selbstoptimierung verlangt: Wissenschaftliche Qualifikation findet zunehmend im Rahmen befristeter und thematisch eng definierter Projektstellen statt; die Universitätslandschaft differenziert sich zunehmend in forschungsintensive und berufsqualifizierende Institutionen; und regelmäßige landesweite Forschungsevaluationen (zuletzt REF 2014) regulieren die Vergabe von Fördermitteln und prüfen die gesellschaftliche Relevanz von Wissenschaft für den Steuerzahler.