In this essay David Lea approaches the decline in the study and teaching of the humanities within the university context from a financial perspective. As humanities departments are either closed down or have their curriculum attenuated, it is obvious that the revenue previously available to support such programs has not been forthcoming. This…

Zdenko Kodelja's purpose in this essay is not to give a comprehensive explanation of the impact of neoliberal ideas and politics on authority (in all of its forms) of universities and their professors. His aims are much more modest: to sketch a theoretical framework for better understanding what the essence of authority is; to show that the…

In this essay Robert Rhoads, Jennifer Berdan, and Brit Toven-Lindsey examine some of the key literature related to the open courseware (OCW) movement (including the emergence and expansion of massive open online courses, or MOOCs), focusing particular attention on the movement's democratic potential. The discussion is organized around three…

In this review of three recent books on higher education, Alexander Sidorkin shows how the disinterested discourse that appears to be anticapitalist and anticommercial is actually a way of obtaining income from state subsidies. What links the books under review--Cary Nelson's "No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom," Frank Donoghue's…

Because higher education brings members of academic communities in direct contact with students, the reflective higher education student is in an excellent position for developing two important intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. However, academic communities differ as to whether their members reach consensus, and their teaching…

In this essay Charles Harvey offers a worried reflection on the range, extent, depth, affects, and effects of the perpetual assessment of the person in (post)industrial nations in the contemporary world. Harvey begins his analysis by appealing to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard to provide an interpretive…

In this essay Thomas Fallace argues that John Dewey can best be described as a pragmatic historicist and a genetic psychologist. This means that Dewey believed that the best way to understand any idea, phenomenon, or entity is to trace its history, that the history of the individual and race pass through distinct stages of development, and that…

In this essay, Steven Burik discusses Jacques Derrida's position with regard to the place of education in philosophy within the university system, and then relates these thoughts to comparative philosophy. Philosophers find themselves constantly having to defend philosophy and the importance of teaching philosophy against pressure from the powers…

In this essay, Peter Trifonas tries to show that there is no overcoming of the techno-philosophical grounding of intellectual freedom and academic responsibility or research action within the speculum of an all-seeing, all-knowing university. Instead, he argues that through Derrida's notion of an open "community of the question," deconstruction…

In this essay, Simon Marginson focuses on self-determining academic freedom in universities, and especially the conditions and drivers of the radical-creative imagination that is manifest in sudden intellectual breaks in knowledge. Marginson's objective is to establish foundations in political philosophy for a sociological study of the effects of…

Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization--and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative…

In this essay, David Bridges explores the notion of practice with particular application to the practice of higher education. He considers whether some of the changes in practices linked to the massification of higher education have in fact resulted in the breakdown of higher education as a "practice," at least on Alasdair MacIntyre's definition…

The purpose of this study is to determine teacher candidates' awareness of the concept of democracy, how they describe this concept, how their perceptions relate to the democratic classroom management process in the faculty of education, and their opinions about the qualifications of faculty members. This research is a descriptive study. This…

This study aims to elaborate a framework for both the foundation and application of professional standards for mother-tongue teachers. The main issue with which this study is concerned constitutes the lack of a set of clear standards for the initial training of mother-tongue teachers. In terms of theory, that which has currently been analyzed in…

We assume, for the sake of argument, that the sole purpose of colleges and universities is the advancement of knowledge through teaching and research, and that academic merit, as defined by each discipline, ought to be the only relevant criterion in admissions and hiring decisions. Even on this restrictive set of assumptions, we argue that hiring…