Yann Lebeau

Who Shall Pay for the Public Good? Comparative Trends in the Funding Crisis of Public Higher Education.

Who shall pay for the public good? Comparative trends in the funding crisis of public higher education Yann Lebeau a , Rolf Stumpf b , Roger Brown c , Martha Abrahao Saad Lucchesi d & Marek Kwiek e a University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK b Former Vice Chancellor and Rector, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa c Liverpool Hope University, UK d Permanent Researcher, Center for Public Policy Research, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil e Director, Center for Public Policy Studies, Poznan University, Poznan, Poland

Universities and social transformation in sub‐Saharan Africa: global rhetoric and local contradictions

This papers principal purpose is to explore the range of ways in which African universities act as public institutions – i.e. how they both are shaped by and influence the social, political and economic contexts in which they are situated. In particular, it considers the multiple dimensions, often resulting in tensions in contexts of poverty, instability and radical transformation, of African universities as actors in politics, civil society and the public sphere. Drawing on recent projects and discussions in which the author took part, the paper tries in particular to explain how the degraded state of most universities in the region which began in the late 1970s and into the 1980s should not be taken to mean that they had become irrelevant to the societies and polities in which they were embedded. Examples are offered of how higher education institutions, and especially the major public universities (often of colonial origin), have often remained key sites for upward mobility strategies, critique and mobilisation on behalf of political change even in the face of authoritarian and corrupt regimes, in contexts of weakened national economies, and even when higher education (primarily encapsulated in public universities) fell out of favour of multilateral and bilateral cooperation agencies. In conclusion, the paper discusses current initiatives by international donors and development agencies to revitalise higher education in Africa, and ensure an ‘expansion of tertiary institutions constructed as sites for personal advancement and private benefit’ (The World Bank 2002) and how their managerial and cost‐effective orientations may thin out the crucial public good dimension of African universities.

Rethinking the ‘third mission’: UK universities and regional engagement in challenging times

Drawing on the experiences and statements of two universities, this article sets out to relate current trends and discourses of engagement of UK higher education (HE) institutions with their regional environment in the context of major policy shifts in HE and in regional governance. The ‘third mission’ is considered as an aspect of what universities do in place and in relation to other place-based agencies. In this process of exploration, we attempt to identify adjustment behaviours and discourses in contrasting regional contexts and to relate them to the unequal power of universities and to their structural embeddedness in a local socio-economic and policy fabric.

Conceptions and expectations of research collaboration in the European social sciences:Research policies, institutional contexts and the autonomy of the scientific field

This paper investigates the interactions between policy drivers and academic practice in international research collaboration. It draws on the case of the Open Research Area (ORA), a funding scheme in the social sciences across four national research agencies, seeking to boost collaboration by supporting “integrated” projects. The paper discusses the scheme’s governance and its place within the European policy space before turning to awarded researchers’ perceptions of its originality and impact on their project’s emergence and development. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, we analyse the scheme’s capacity to challenge researchers’ habitual collaborative practice as well as the hierarchical foundations of the social science field. We relate the discourses of researchers, located in France, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to such structural dimensions of the academic profession as, disciplinary cultures, institutional environments and national performance management of research careers. The paper argues that the ORA introduced novel mechanisms of power sharing and answerability in social sciences research capable of unsettling the autonomy of the scientific field. This analysis offers a new perspective on the often unquestioned superiority of the model of international collaboration induced by schemes such as the ORA.

The Regional Role of Universities: Some Answered and Unanswered Questions

There are many activities of universities which are intended to ‘make a difference’ to the communities that surround them. Some focus on the economic well-being of a region as a whole. Some are directed at particular areas or groups within a region, reflecting perceived special needs or relative disadvantage. Some university activities will be a result of special initiatives whereas others will reflect the ‘core business’ of teaching and research. For the former, there are questions of sustainability once the initiative has ended, and for the latter, it can be difficult to disentangle local agendas and impacts from other larger goals of knowledge production and transmission.

The fourth way: the inspiring future for educational change

Written at the height of the credit crunch, but also at a high point of optimism, this book is a yes-we-can manifesto for educational change. Recapitulating and building on the research and learning of the authors and many others, it seeks to seize the moment when all seemed possible just after Obama’s election, taking to heart his (then) chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s adopted dictum: ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, educational change gurus with fully-paid-up liberal democratic credentials, are aiming for impact, relevance, and engagement with a broad audience. Reading this book now may, as they intend, renew our inspiration but also tests it, by prompting three questions. As the Tea Party continues and the bankers’ bonuses return, has the ship of state already washed up on the reefs of greed in the squalls of hate, or can we still allow the audacity of hope? Can we really identify a Fourth Way, and was there ever even a Third Way? And maybe a fourth question: who are the intended audience? As a student and practitioner of higher educational management and policy I may be at the margins of that audience, but the book’s argument can nevertheless be applied with advantage to the current travails of English higher education policy. After the global financial crisis ‘the status quo is no longer an option’. Hargreaves and Shirley start from here, setting out their credo assertively. It is ‘askew’ to argue for: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 32, No. 4, July 2011, 643–663

Image, Culture and the Drivers and Resistances to Change

This chapter further develops aspects of the discussion introduced in Chap. 4 by shifting the focus from economic development and regeneration to related but distinct questions about image and culture. At its simplest, this is reflected in the relationship between universities and the ‘image’ of the places within which they are located. The greater the cultural attractiveness of a region, the greater the opportunities are for attracting students, businesses and influencing wider perceptions both nationally and internationally. Image is a common discourse running through our case studies, particularly in the context of university branding as each seeks to sell itself to students, but also to position itself in a range of national and global hierarchies and league tables.

Universities Making a Difference: Balancing the Global and the Local

There are significant differences in the local and regional roles of universities in the UK. These reflect differences between the individual universities themselves and in the characteristics of their regional contexts. They reflect both differences in intentions and differences in circumstances. But there are also some similarities in the regional roles, and these arguably reflect more global trends. Universities are ‘global’ institutions in many ways, but they are all located in ‘places’ and the place impacts on the university and the university impacts on the place. The final chapter attempts to locate the universities and the places examined in this book within the wider contexts of the changing roles of universities within emerging knowledge societies and economies.

Universities, Community Engagement and the ‘Public Good’

The prospects of regional partnerships may have been successfully boosted by public policies and economic circumstances of the past two decades, but the notion of public and community ‘engagement’, often understood at local level, has always been a distinctive mission associated with universities. In recent years, discourses of engagement have also tended to emphasise historical and geographical circumstances of universities as key drivers of expression of their civic engagement (Goddard 2009). It is with this attention to contexts in mind that this chapter seeks to highlight and analyse the patterns of public and community engagement observed in the case studies of our research project.

Universities, Economic Development and Regeneration

The chapter draws on findings from the project’s four case studies to critically assess the contribution of universities to their regional economic development through three lenses. The first of these relates to the particular economic and development initiatives that universities are involved in and which are explicitly targeted at economic growth or urban regeneration. The second relates to assumptions about the particular status of universities as knowledge hubs. The third considers universities as significant business actors in their own right, whose decisions often have powerful impacts locally. The chapter suggests that the unintended consequences of university activity on places and their regeneration may be as important as the intended ones.