Review by Patrick Ainley, former professor of training and education at the University of Greenwich and regular contributor to the Post-16 Educator. The argument in this book is that mass higher education, for all its multiple and irreversible achievements, is experiencing a general crisis’ (150). It is well timed. 58 UK universities struck for three days...Read More

Review by Professor Julian Preece Ronald J. Daniels, the lead author of this original and much-needed book, has been President of Johns Hopkins  since 2007. He was previously head of the Law School at Toronto, then Provost at Pennsylvania. Universities have not only been the centre of his professional life, however. As the child of...Read More

Professor David Midgley concludes his discussion of The Governance of British Higher Education by Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath   Like other analysts of the current situation, Shattock and Horvath bring out very clearly the deleterious effects of marketisation and the senses in which these have been exacerbated by the removal of the student numbers...Read More

Professor David Midgley continues his look at The Governance of British Higher Education by Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath   The impact of the developments described in section I has been far from uniform. In addition to the differences in governance structure between pre-1992 and post-1992 universities that were entrenched by the 1992 legislation, significant...Read More

In the first of three blogposts, Professor David Midgley offers some reflections on The Governance of British Higher Education by Michael Shattock and Aniko Horvath, and what it tells us about the recent history of the university   The question of how the state of health of a university’s core academic activities relates to the...Read More

Professor David Midgley takes a look at a timely new publication that puts the current debates on academic freedom into a historical context   In September 2017 it was widely reported that the Attorney General of the USA, Jeff Sessions, had told an audience of students in Washington that the American university, “once the center...Read More

Patrick Ainley, formerly professor of training and education at the University of Greenwich, welcomes an essay collection aiming to rethink the purpose of tertiary level learning but thinks that it does not go far enough   The Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) is a think tank connected to the trades unions combining ‘grassroots...Read More

Professor David Midgley reviews English Universities in Crisis: Markets without Competition, by Jefferson Frank, Norman Gowar and Michael Naef   The policy objectives against which this book measures the effectiveness of the current system for funding and regulating universities in England are those of the Browne Review: to improve participation rates in higher education among...Read More

Patrick Ainley welcomes a book that rethinks the purpose of a university ­– and offers some radical suggestions of his own Everyone knows who universities are for. As another book in the Bristol University/ Policy Press shorts series concludes: ‘The English education industry functions as a giant sorting machine, rewarding through largely written examinations what...Read More