My life in Higher Education: To be or not?
Indeed. I am abandoning my heroic pretensions - it's time for plain-speaking. I got to a dead-end in 2024 when my attempt to construct a new type of higher education got diluted beyond recognition. Someone somewhere decided that it is only about storytelling, no need to sweat about the details. I was told - students don't want anything good, they want cheap. There was an objective disconnect: While I held that the brands are stories with substance, my colleagues in private higher education decided that anything with a university logo stamped on it should be enough. I did my Quixotic act since then, but that spectre of mediocrity won't leave me. It seems we have lost the sense of what higher education was meant to be. I wonder though how this state of affairs came to be. Some of these are surely due to privatisation, the money power in education business, which passed the educational decision making in the hands of money men and the brain-dead bureaucrats who enable them. In...