Emmaline Bexley

Further and Higher? Institutional Diversity and Stratification

A broad, heterogeneous higher education sector should offer students choice, and an opportunity to find a course that closely suits their particular needs. However, although a preference for heterogeneity has been clearly signalled by the policies of successive governments, the ‘landscape’ of the differentiated market has itself been unplanned. Very large increases in participation in tertiary education, diversification of provider types and greater institutional differentiation within the university sector itself, has lead to new forms of stratification. No longer can notions of ‘equity’ centre around a consideration of those who do and do not participate in higher education (the underlying concern of A fair chance for all), but rather who participates where, and how – in short, the status game has shifted from the boundary of the academy to within it.

Framing international approaches to university–industry collaboration

ABSTRACT Growing interest in university–industry collaboration (UIC) calls for a need to develop frameworks and compare overseas models to better understand how successful UIC occurs. This article provides a framework for analyzing UIC across three dimensions: environmental, technical, and managerial. It further breaks down these dimensions to suggest key attributes that can inform us about how dimensions can develop and improve. Subsequently, we use the framework outlined to analyze seven countries’ UIC policies and frameworks and present key findings. The findings of this research include the importance of building and training a workforce ready to engage across sectors and of creating clear intellectual property policies, and the need for dedicated programs and national policies that support UIC growth.

Quasi-Absolute Time in Francisco Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations

Suárezs discussion of time in the Metaphysical Disputations is one of the earliest long treatises on time (extending over sixty pages), and includes detailed arguments supporting the view that physical actions take place within an absolute temporal reference frame. Whereas some previous thinkers, such as John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureole, had made tantalising suggestions that time exists independently of physical changes, their ideas were primarily negative theses in response to perceived problems with the dominant view that time was caused by the celestial motion. Suárez, in contrast, provides a positive thesis based on his revision of traditional, Scholastic metaphysics. He argues that the ordering of earlier and later events can only be understood by conceiving events as existing within the embrace of a ‘flowing and successive space’ which he refers to as ‘entirely necessary and immutable in its own flux’ (omnino necessarium et immutabile in suo fluxu) - something at least very like an absolute temporal reference frame. Yet it would be simplistic to describe Suárezs work on time only in terms of its nascent absolutism, since for him there is a second kind of time, a more properly ‘real’ time, which is an accident of material being. This kind of time is ontologically tied to the most intimate existence of objects, creating a plurality of individual continua of time - one for each distinct being. He calls this kind of time ‘intrinsic time’ (tempus intrinsecum). Suárezs dualistic account of time, in which he proposes an ‘intrinsic time’, linked to being, which exists within a second order absolute temporal reference frame, or ‘imaginary succession’, forms a bridge between scholasticism and early modern philosophy providing a foundation for the work of later absolutists like Gassendi and Newton.