Home - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

We recommend

Cultural Studies
Art and Identity: Visual Culture, Politics and Religion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Film and Theatre Studies
The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89

Film and Theatre Studies
The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema

Interesting reviews

From Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre: A Paleo-Postmodern Perspective

''Catriona Ryan has more than achieved what she set out to do.She has emphatically presented Tom Mac Intyre as a writer with a distinctive voice who not only provides a crucial link in the chain that goes back through Kavanagh to Yeats, but as a bridging figure, a transgressive author whose reflections on the Irish literary scene, and on writing more generally, have much to tell us about the ways in which constrictive critical currents can cut off living literary streams. It is clear from Catriona Ryan's painstaking excavation that Mac Intyre has been wrongly neglected. Her thoughtful and perceptive critical intervention will remedy that wrong.''
- Willy Maley, Litteraria Pragensia, 22:44 (2013), 131-134, p. 134.

“This is a critically independent piece of work that very much constructs and defines its own project, and maps an intellectual terrain of its own. It is an impressively original and also critically self-assured piece. It is marked by a sense of intellectual brio and also by the excitement of discovery.”
– Dr Steven Vine, Swansea University

“Since Tom Mac Intyre is a writer and dramatist who has received very little critical attention, this work intervenes in an under-researched area and offers an innovative and valuable extension of the frontier of knowledge in the field of Irish literary and dramatic studies.”
– Dr Aidan Arrowsmith, Manchester Metropolitan University