"America's constant push to make its colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, in Other People's Colleges, Ethan Ris argues that the reform impulse is baked into American higher education. For well over one hundred years, elite reformers have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. Colleges and universities have responded with a combination of resistance and acquiescence. The end result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. When that reform is beneficial (offering major rewards for minor changes), colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile (attacking autonomy or values), they know how to resist it. In the early twentieth century, the "academic engineers," a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but their efforts fell short, despite their wealth and power, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians are again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But top-down design is not destiny. Today's reform agenda in higher education should not be viewed as a new existential threat. It is a longstanding fact of life to be assimilated, diverted, or subverted on an ongoing basis"--

"Academic freedom, the intellectual bedrock of American intellectual activities, was not always a shared value, but one that emerged from faculty collective action. This book provides a detailed history of the founding and early activities of the American Association of University Professors set into the broader societal and intellectual circumstances that affected its initial development. Key to the story, of course, is the influential work of Arthur O. Lovejoy at Johns Hopkins and John Dewey at Harvard in establishing this national association and very early professional trade union. The professionalization of the faculty, which accompanied the development of the American research university, identified academic freedom as a central element of professional autonomy. Public debates over academic freedom occurred within the broader debate of the balance of power in the American university. This debate was strongly influenced by the perspectives of the Progressive Era: the goal to democratize university governance was presented frequently in terms similar to the broader goal of democratizing American society. These developments were central to the establishment of the Association, and individual founders of the AAUP played an active part in many of them, inside and outside of academe"--

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of implementation analysis in higher education and an extensive review of relevant recent literature. Coverage analyzes the effective and specific complexities of the implementation of higher education policies in several countries, including: Australia, Austria, Finland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher educationùwho's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand. Robert Zemsky, one of a select group of scholars who participated in Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, signed off on the commission's report with reluctance. In Making Reform Work he presents the ideas he believes should have come from that group to forge a practical agenda for change. Zemsky argues that improving higher education will require enlisting faculty leadership, on the one hand, and, on the other, a strategy for changing the higher education system writ large. Directing his attention from what can't be done to what can be done, Zemsky provides numerous suggestions. These include a renewed effort to help students' performance in high schools and a stronger focus on the science of active learning, not just teaching methods. He concludes by suggesting a series of dislodging eventsùfor example, making a three-year baccalaureate the standard undergraduate degree, congressional rethinking of student aid in the wake of the loan scandal, and a change in the rules governing endowmentsùthat could break the gridlock that today holds higher education reform captive. Making Reform Work offers three rules for successful college and university transformation: don't vilify, don't play games, and come to the table with a well-thought-out strategy rather than a sharply worded lamentation.

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.

This collection, now in paperback, explores how universities are coping with the range of reforms and changes taking place across higher education today. Analyzing areas such as leadership, quality management, strategic thinking, collegiality and academic work, and from the perspective of different agents within higher education including students, academics and management, this book examines the various differences between reform attempts and the actual changes happening in universities.

The Bologna Declaration started the development of the European Higher Education Area. The ensuing Bologna Process has run for already 20 years now. In the meantime many higher education systems in Europe have been reformed – some more drastically than others; some quicker than others; some with more resistance than others. In the process of reform the initial (six) goals have sometimes been forgotten or sometimes been taken a step further. The context too has shifted: while the European Union in itself has expanded, the voice for exit has also been heard more frequently. Higher Education System Reform: An international comparison after Twenty Years of Bologna critically describes and analyses 12 Higher Education Systems from the perspective of four major questions: What is currently the situation with regard to the six original goals of Bologna? What was the adopted path of reform? Which were the triggering (economic, social, political) factors for the reform in each specific country? What was the rationale/discourse used during the reform? The book comparatively analyses the different systems, their paths of reforms and trajectories, and the similarities and the differences between them. At the same time it critically assesses the current situation on higher education in Europe, and hints towards a future policy agenda. Contributors are: Tommaso Agasisti, Bruno Broucker, Martina Dal Molin, Kurt De Wit, Andrew Gibson, Ellen Hazelkorn, Gergely Kovats, Liudvika Leišytė, Lisa Lucas, António Magalhães, Sude Peksen, Rosalind Pritchard, Palle Rasmussen, Anna-Lena Rose, Christine Teelken, Eva M. de la Torre, Carmen Perez-Esparrells, Jani Ursin, Amélia Veiga, Jef C. Verhoeven, Nadine Zeeman, and Rimantas Želvys.