European quality assurance has a complicated history that must be viewed as taking place on two levels: first, in a national effort to deregulate the public sector and to make universities accountable for their teaching performance; and second, a supranational endeavor to accomplish European integration in the field of higher education. Similarly,…

This paper reports on an experiment concerning the social construction of statistical definitions, where the first census of Higher Education Institutions in Europe has been developed. It conceptualizes the construction of indicators as a social process of definitions and boundaries' negotiation, involving value judgments, social and…

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the "cultural cold wars." In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote "science studies" as a distinct--and politically relevant--area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for…

Major changes in the governance of higher education and the public sciences have taken place over the past 40 or so years in many OECD countries. These have affected the nature of authority relationships governing research priorities and the evaluation of results. In particular, the increasing exogeneity, formalisation and substantive nature of…

Neoliberal precepts of the governance of academic science-deregulation; reification of markets; emphasis on competitive allocation processes have been conflated with those of performance management--if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it--into a single analytical and consequent single programmatic worldview. As applied to the United…

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering--channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and…

In 1925, A.J. Balfour, first Earl Balfour and author of the famous "Balfour Declaration", attended the inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His education and experience of foreign policy equipped him to take a prominent role. However, the conditions of strife-torn Palestine weighed heavily upon him, and raised wider interests of…

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge had developed different attitudes towards the award of honorary degrees through the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Recently, both have adopted a similar cautious and apolitical stance. This essay describes the role of honorary degrees in the production and reproduction of their cultural…

Between 1940 and 1960, the British Government became increasingly concerned with the welfare of students coming to Britain from the dependent territories of the Commonwealth. The reasons were political, cultural, and economic. This essay traces the transition of official attitudes, from modest promotion to active policy. With the coming "end of…

This paper describes the academic profession in Saudi Arabia, a state dependent upon oil exports, and explores how different social groups are accommodated within the higher education system. The discussion examines the relationship between political power and academic labour, and seeks to explain how local policies and practices are negotiating…