Sunday Posts

I switched my career to what I thought was Higher Ed (in reality, private training) about thirteen years ago and never stopped being fascinated about it. My fascination, however, is always about how little Higher Education sector knows about itself and wants to learn. A lot has changed in the last thirteen years though. About when I was getting started, a number of studies started coming out. This was also the time when private investor attention turned to Higher Ed and many 'ventures' were launched. Impacted by the global recession, public universities became more entrepreneurial. India started its rapid - and unplanned - expansion of the sector. New frontiers, Africa mainly, were opened and private Higher Ed moved in. Just predating it was the rapid expansion of International Education, which was driven by the growth of private sector. Soon, private Higher Ed, with its teaching focused, no-frills education, was out in the open.  Yet, when I defended my thesis on the sector se...

My contention that the idea of the university has changed since last time we noticed and talked about such changes (in works such as Jencks and Riesman's The Academic Revolution) and undergone what amounts to an ' Institutional Corruption ', which undermines the effectiveness of the institution in discharging its public duty and undermines the public trust in the institution in discharging its public duties; and that such changes are primarily due to 'financialisation' of the institution, which can roughly be understood as enabling finance (financial institutions, financial rules, financial prism) to determine the shape, the priorities and the objectives of the institution. Financialisation as a concept is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly interest. While the concept has popular acceptance, and there is a growing unease about the roles financial institutions play in our societies and how they shape the priorities, financialisation as a concept has w...