Sunday Posts

The issues surrounding For-Profit institutions have been contested around whether allowing For-Profits inevitably means profiteering, and given the prospect of students taking loans to go to For-Profit institutions, profiteering at the taxpayers’ expense. On the other hand, For-Profit institutions argued their case as the ones driving educational innovations in cost and delivery, challenging the status quo in Higher Education, which has, they claimed, failed to change with time. These battles over entitlements, however, should be seen in the context of a broader debate about what the universities are for. Collini (2012) defines the ‘modern university’ with the following four characteristics: “1. That it provides some form of Post-secondary-school education, where education signals something more than professional training. 2. That it furthers some form of advanced scholarship or research whose character is not wholly dictated by the need to solve the immediate practical pr...

U-Aspire is meant to be a 'Global University'. It is not unduly ambitious: This is indeed the plan. It is not just rhetoric: This is an article of faith in the founding team that a platform must be created to serve the groundswell of global aspiration.  Higher Education is an innovator's paradise now, as most people seem to agree that it is broken. The Higher Ed sector collectively may not have made a smooth transition to post-industrial economy, and the need to do so is urgent. And, this transition will change everything: Not just the institutional structures and cost of delivery, which is a huge problem, but also the academic roles and cultures, and deeper embedded values. This isn't about public and private, whether or not Higher Ed should be a business, but really about finding a way to equip a global, aspirational, mobile generation, a generation of 'Makers', as Chris Anderson will call them. In context, 'Global University' isn't a gran...

The universities are grand things, or so they have come to be. The image of an university is constructed not just of manicured lawns and grand buildings, but also of an unhurried lifestyle and leisurely pursuit of sports or intellect or romantic interests. They embody, typically, privilege and power, and getting through the university and earning the credentials have been, and remains, the rite of passage into socially privileged realms. However, universities have been changing. They were changing as the societies change and knowledge work becomes more common: Suddenly, it was not just the diplomats and the bridge-building engineers who needed Higher Learning, but even a person who merely programmes a desktop computer and lives in a rented flat needed to attend university. The rhetoric of opportunity society, that one will have a fair shot at life's pleasures no matter where s/he comes from, also made universities central to democratic governance and public conversation: This ...