No one in their right democratic mind wants universities to be finishing academies for the privately educated sons and daughters of privileged elites. Higher education must help re-define new forms of civic engagement.
The gains of the post settlement were, across the UK, of huge democratic importance. But we cannot simply loop back to that earlier social democratic settlement. Nor can we wholly reject it. Higher education still has to find a voice within this debate on what constitutes citizenship within the 21st Century.
The crucial issue then, as now, is how to move beyond a meritocratic framework which has manifestly failed to deliver on the basic requirements of a fair and equal society. Finally, the public good now has to be defined with reference to a pluralist world society.
The internationalisation of higher education has become so marketised and commercialised that there is a possibility of losing sight of the broader cosmopolitan vision of global governance, cosmopolitan learning, and global citizenship. Higher education must be about helping ourselves to live together in a world of incommensurable difference and uncompromising contingency.
All occurrences are both local and global and as such have both unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences. The world is not going to stop being like this. On the contrary it will become increasingly super-complex in its inter-connectivity and will make ever increasing demands on our human capacity to understand.
VII But none of this is do-able — or even conceivable — without the renewal of a shared language of, and for, higher education. It is hard-nosed but successful because the private sector on which it is based is hard-nosed and successful. It is efficient: it abhors waste; it provides all the answers. It has become the way in which those in command wield power. I rather doubt it.
Do we have a full and detailed defence of our not for profit higher education system? I doubt it. Correspondence: nixonjon live. Auden Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, pp. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Reclaiming higher education as a public good. Jon Nixon. A short summary of this paper.
Thompson2 I was reminded of these lines when I visited Beijing for the first time last year. Edward Thompson wrote them as part of a sequence of poems — Power and Names — that had been prompted by a visit he had made to China. You enter the forecourt, join the queue, pay the fee, pass the security cordon, and enter through the Meridian Gate into the outer precincts of the Forbidden City.
Along the way you will be closely observed by security guards, plainclothes policemen, and other shadier agents of the state. You will also be watched over by innumerable carved dragons at play and the stone lions forever protective of the forbidden places. Bailey and D. London and New York: Routledge, 2 E.
Thompson Collected Poems. This paper explores why I think we should re-assert that claim in that way — and, crucially, what I consider to be some of the immense challenges in doing so. Multiple individuals can consume such products or services without diminishing their value and an individual cannot be prevented from consuming them whether or not the individual pays for them. This is a privatised — and a privatising — public. It is a public without a polity, a polity without a citizenry: a public the economic sustainability of which is based not only on pre-existing levels of inequality, but on escalating inequality.
That the gap between the extremes is widening and has been for the past thirty years is an incontrovertible fact. By , the typical FTSE boss earned Independent news sources are also key to democratic debate and oversight, enabling informed participation.
The point is that there is plenty to be proud of in our history in terms of the way we have, and still do, look after each other. The list above is full of love: the active decision by the Australian population to share resources and wealth in a way that aligns with the values of Australia reMADE : the values of equality, interdependence and community, and unity with nature and the assumption of responsibility to leave the social and physical world in increasingly better conditions for generations to come.
Creating the public good then means making decisions that prioritise the needs of people and planet rather than the wants of money and markets. Despite these strong foundations, so many of us are disconnected from a sense of ownership of the public good and find it difficult to be proud of what it is that we have. Much of this work excluded, and in some instances continues to exclude, intentionally or otherwise women, First People, people of colour, temporary visa holders etc, as well as nature most significant environmental regulations have been gutted in recent years.
And leaving this exclusion unacknowledged and unremedied will limit our ability to truly create public good for all our people and our planet. It is not only a history of exclusion that challenges our ability to reclaim public good. It is worth noting the intentional attacks on the public good.
A key neoliberal strategy has been to continually run down, financially and reputationally, the ability of government and the non-marketised collective to provide for the public good.
As a result, for example, we have underfunded health services, a punitive and inadequate welfare system, and the shrinking capacity of our public broadcast network. Of course there is no silver bullet, or silver net, for catching all of our issues at once and public good is not without its limitations.
While Australia has an incredible history of public good and therein lies potential for the building of a new shared narrative, it also exists on top of and beside a history of traumatic colonisation. Indeed in Australia today many First Nations People as well as other marginalised communities are far too often excluded. So is there still room to be proud of our history of providing the public good?
We know that working together means benefits for all. For us to achieve an Australia reMADE it can no longer conscionable to exclude anyone or any living thing from any of the benefits of public good. We need to embrace our commitment to an inclusionary public. And second, we need to expand and articulate what we think could, and should, be considered a public good.
So what is the public good? Where do we find it? How is it implemented? Quick sidebar: in law and economics, the public good and associated ideas have rather narrow, technical definitions which in the right context can be very helpful — you can explore them more here. So for example the material things like hospitals, schools, libraries and sewerage systems.
But public good is so much more than that as seen above. It is also the contexts in which we exist as a society. It is the rules and regulations that help us to exist as a community, not just individuals. It is our right to organise as workers; it is our environmental protections; it is our gun laws and it is our democracy. And finally, we have public goods that enable us to participate well and wholly in society, in order to maintain and pursue our own lives, but also other public goods yes, that unsexy thing of maintenance that we all need to do!
It explores how narrowly conceived epistemic virtues might be broadened out by seeing those who work and study in the university in their full humanity. In an era characterized by deep and enduring social and cultural divisions, it offers a timely, accessible and critical perspective on the perils of retreating behind disciplinary boundaries, reminding readers of the need to remain open to the other in a time of increased social and political polarization.
Drawing on the work of Leonard Cohen, Ali Smith, Italo Calvino and Raymond Carver, the book seeks to move across disciplines and distort the line between the humanities and the social sciences as a way of bringing them closer together.
Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship will be vital reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, research methods in education and education policy. Using rich case studies drawn from South African research, the book comprehensively provides a myriad of new perspectives on what constitutes a set of appropriate public-good professional capabilities that will translate successfully into contributions to human development.
It challenges universities to produce professionals who have the knowledge, skills and values to improve the lives of people living in poverty in urban and rural settings. It covers issues such as: Conceptualising Public-Good Professionalism Global Issues and Professional Education South African Debates about Higher Education Institutional conditions and professional education arrangements Social Constraints on educating ethically aware public professionals By drawing on an approach that focuses on differing public-good professional capabilities in five professions, this book produces a crucial new framework for the preparation of professionals relevant to the global study of higher education policy.
This book will be of great interest to all scholars of higher education involved in higher education studies, comparative education, and development studies. It will also prove valuable to policy makers, higher education leaders and lecturers and graduate professionals in diverse organizations. The book presents a careful understanding of structure, finance and governance of higher education and advocates a new way to look at increasing the capability of students to secure their future.
Attention has also been drawn to the inequalities prevailing in the system of higher education and pursuing inclusive approach so as to have sufficient employment opportunities for students in the labour market. The book is divided into three parts.
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