David Palfreyman

Higher Education and Social Justice

Langdell himself was the product of academic meritocracy, in that he started life on a humble farm in a small New Hampshire town, experiencing both poverty and the disintegration of family life. Despite this, he ended up at Harvard College – but dropped out, got a job with a law firm, and then eventually entered Harvard Law School. By the time Langdell died in 1906 he had succeeded in what Kimball sees as his

Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education

He addresses the complaints that American colleges and universities are ‘becoming decidedly mediocre’, and that they are ‘already unaffordable, unaccountable, and uninspiring’ – and that, all in all, their attitude of ‘business as usual’ will no longer ‘suffice’ in the context of ‘heightened global competition’. In terms of achieving any improvement/change, however, he is sceptical of the process of ‘accreditation’ as an external method for policing quality – ‘a process that brings few benefits to the institutions and satisfies none of those who think colleges and universities need to be held more accountable for what they teach and what their students learn’. He notes along the way the ‘near obsession that has made getting a medallion degree at almost any price the sine qua non of uppermiddle-class status’! He recognises that HE has become increasingly commodified, and hence has descended further from the Acropolis towards the Agora: from its once Olympian heights down to the hurly-burly of the market-place. He takes the view that universities must now learn to recapture some ‘sense of being special’, and that this

The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C.C. Langdell, 1826–1906

But UK HEIs clearly, as observed earlier, will have to handle a decline in the Unit of Remit, just as for HEIs in the US and across Europe as Western governments/ taxpayers fund the recent horrifyingly expensive rescue packages for ‘banksters’. Yet UK HEIs (like Australian ones) are also very vulnerable to any dropoff in the recruitment of international students, especially from China – too many UK HEIs are bankrupt if demand falls by as little as ten per cent! And most will be hit over 2010-20 by demographic change as the number of UK eighteen-year-olds tails off. Finally, increased competition, from a very smart player indeed, may be about to be unleashed on the many second-rate business and law schools that are probably cash-cows in some thirty to fifty UK HEIs as Apollo-Phoenix enters the UK HE market-place: here is the story ... Apollo Group is a massive US public company; it owns eighty per cent of Apollo Global (Carlyle, the private equity group, owns the other twenty per cent) and it also owns the University of Phoenix that is the world’s largest provider of MBAs and the fastest-growing (and now largest) HEI in the USA: this Apollo Global in turn owns Apollo UK, and the latter has offered over £300 million to buy BPP (driving its stock up from 365p per share to 617p since the offer is at 620p per share – and I’m not telling whether New College owns a bit of Apollo UK and perhaps even the US Apollo Group!); BPP is, of course, the UK’s only commercial for-profit provider of business/law courses with degree-awarding powers, and, subject to the BPP share-holders accepting the offer, Apollo/Phoenix will now have a bridge-head in the UK. Watch this space and Be Very Very Afraid if you are Coketown University that currently delivers mediocre MBA/business/law degrees but turns a nice profit on them that adds to the HEI’s bottom line: BPP, with Apollo’s financial might behind it, may be soon operating from a business-park or town-centre office block near you and stealing at least your part-time mature students if not your full-time internationals. And remember, market competition is a Good Thing (well, except in financial services/banks when managed by incompetent spivs in pinstripes!), especially in an over-regulated/over-protected pseudomarket such as HE: see OxCHEPS Paper 29 on ‘Markets, Models and Metrics’.

Recruitment and Selection of Vice‐Chancellors for Australian Universities

his book arises out of a PhD thesis – and, at times, it shows, in that the density of data overrides the clarity of analysis! That said, the book makes a timely and useful contribution to the conundrum of how to find a decent vice-chancellor. The essence of the conundrum, of course, is that, on the one hand, we are seeking a CEO for our dynamic and entrepreneurial institution as is fitting for the twenty-first century but that, on the other hand, we still want somebody of a respectable academic pedigree who can give intellectual credibility to the institution as a real and meaningful university, as universities used to be in the good old days... The book begins by making this conundrum clear: