Academic Identities—Academic Challenges? American and European Experience of the Transformation of Higher Education and Research
Editor: Tor Halvorsen and Atle Nyhagen
Date Of Publication: Dec 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3439-1
Isbn: 1-4438-3439-4
The university in Europe – as a central institution of society – is presently met with many new expectations challenging established practices and self-understandings of academics across Europe. In the European Union, the higher education and research system has become a foremost tool of change. Current reforms across national higher education systems are seen as a potential for creating a European Higher Education Area, as well as an opportunity to introduce EU policies and ideas addressing how reforms can contribute to promote this as an EU dimension. An argument that only reforms of the higher education institution – in particular the research university, as a European institution – can make Europe regain its competitive force and economic growth-potential has gained currency in the last decade with reference to the US. The university system of the US, particularly its highly regarded elite universities, is also held forth as a model for the developments in the EU, and thus for the reforms of the different countries of EU.

In this book, however, it is demonstrated that much of the political rhetoric about the construction of the future knowledge economy of Europe and the promotion of a European Higher Education Area may contradict basic values that give Europe its identity as a cultural region. Promoting the US university as an ideal model does not do justice to the kind of problems the US is facing in their own reform efforts, nor does it reflect properly the social costs of copying such an elite system. The book raises a number of issues relating to elitism and democracy, internationalisation and regionalisation, and new forms of governance in higher education and research which current EU policies seem to neglect.

Tor Halvorsen is Associate Professor at Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen, Norway. His research and publications concern relations between knowledge, politics and globalisation. Together with Atle Nyhagen he has been responsible for the yearly conferences on Knowledge and Politics at the University of Bergen.

Atle Nyhagen is a Researcher and PhD Candidate at the Department of Administration and Organisation Theory, University of Bergen, Norway. Together with Tor Halvorsen he has been responsible for the conferences on Knowledge and Politics at the University of Bergen.

“This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how current transformations of higher education and research play out in European and US settings. With contributions from a number of well known scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, it offers an inspiring variety of perspectives through which these processes may be understood. This book will be an illuminating guide to current scholarly debates on the internationalization of higher education and research in the early 21st century.”

– Ivar Bleiklie, Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen; Project Leader of TRUE (“Transforming Universities in Europe”)

“This book offers a welcome wealth of perspectives on how to understand the changing politics of knowledge, and the impact on traditional academic understandings of the role of universities in Europe and the US. A lively addition to the literature for seeking explanations in historical and political analyses at European and institutional level as well as the familiar neo-liberal variants of globalisation, competition, and corporate forms of academic leadership.”

– Anne Corbett, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science

Price Uk Gbp: 49.99
Price Us Usd: 74.99

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