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The agency of international students has long been neglected and undertheorised, though recent literature indicates that this has started to change. This paper systematically reviews 51 studies that address student agency in international higher education. Focusing on research published in the last two decades (2000–2020), the review draws on studies that foreground student voices, or international students' perspectives, rather than the perspectives of teachers, administrators or policymakers. A detailed discussion of how international student agency is positioned in the literature found that agency appears as either: a research object, as part of a theoretical or conceptual framework, or an emergent finding. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the term "agency" is often used as a buzzword rather than as a fleshed-out concept. Thus, drawing on this initial analysis, the review synthesises varying but overlapping conceptualisations of international student agency in the literature into an integrative framework. Implications for future research are drawn, based on our findings about the understudied populations and methodological limitations in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on state investment, intensive national network building, and international engagement, without integrating tightly into the global duopoly. The dual global/national approach pursued by these systems, including China, South Korea, Iran and India, is not always fully understood in papers on science. Nevertheless, China is now the number two science country in the world, the largest producer of papers and number one in parts of STEM physical sciences. The paper investigates the remarkable evolution of China's science funding, output, discipline balance, internationalisation strategy and national and global networking. China has combined global activity and the local/national building of science in positive sum manner, on the ground of the nationally nested science system. The paper also discusses limits of the achievement, noting that while China-US relations have been instrumental in building science, a partial decoupling is occurring and the future is unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commonwealth Government should move to the funding of undergraduate courses for Australian students through the students rather than by way of direct grants to institutions. An independent coordinating body should be re-established to report on the higher education sector, advise the Commonwealth and administer Commonwealth higher education programs. Public funding of undergraduate education and research training should be decentralised through a system of scholarships. Undergraduate scholarship holders should pay charges determined by universities under HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) arrangements. HECS arrangements also should apply to full fee paying undergraduates and PELS (Postgraduate Education Loan Scheme) arrangements to full fee paying research students. Institutional research funding should be on a disciplinary basis, taking account of the volume and quality of outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching and learning in higher education is informed by a multitude of conditioning factors, not least the values systems and outlook of academics. Understanding the epistemological positioning taken by academics in relation to teaching and learning is therefore important if we are to make judgments about how we educate now, and could do so in the future. Developments in educational theory and digital technology have opened-up new possibilities for the ways in which students learn, and to a degree this has been accelerated by the responses from universities to the COVID-19 pandemic. How then should we conceive the future? Heutagogy is one of a number of theoretical approaches that has attracted interest from those who wish to see greater student control over the learning journey- but how widespread is this view amongst academics? This paper reports on a qualitative study in which 12 academics in an English Business School were asked to describe their views on teaching and learning, which we can encapsulate through the concept of epistemic cognition. The findings infer that there is little epistemological underpinning for heutagogy and that if academics are going to innovate, then additional resource and professional development should be put in place to support epistemic reflexivity, and a shift in their epistemological positioning. The paper conceptualises academics' positioning through a typology of epistemic views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the volume and type of anonymous comments academics receive in student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) at the 16,000 higher education institutions that collect this data at the end of each teaching period. Existing research has increasingly pointed to the negative issues of student surveys, but very little research has focused on the volume, type, and impact of anonymous student comments on academics. This paper analyses the survey results of 674 academics to inform higher education leaders and the sector more widely of the amount and type of abusive comments academics are receiving. The work also demonstrates that the highest volume, most derogatory, and most threatening abuse is directed towards women academics and those academics from marginalised groups. The paper finds that previous estimates of the rate and severity of abusive comments that academics receive, and the impact to academics' wellbeing, mental health, and career progression, have underestimated what is taking place. The paper argues that many universities are failing to protect their staff from this abuse, and the prejudice nature of SET results, which will continue to have a negative impact on the career progression of marginalised academics - a major flaw in a sector that prides itself on diversity and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic genres are not static, but they may change according to the values and demands of the particular discourse communities that shape them. This paper explores the research article (RA) abstract, a relevant informative and promotional genre that exhibits the prevalent rhetorical practices of a specific disciplinary community. From a diachronic perspective, our purpose is to examine how these practices have evolved over time. To this end, using a genre-based approach, we have analysed the rhetorical moves and steps of 180 RA abstracts published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, over a period of nine decades (1940–2022). The findings revealed that the abstracts have increasingly become more promotional in terms of the persuasive rhetorical strategies that the authors use to enhance the contribution of their research. This is seen in the fact that the texts of more recent decades present a growing number of promotional communicative functions, mainly the moves/steps that claim the importance of the research topic and state the implications or significance of research. This study can have pedagogical implications for English for research publication purposes (ERPP) practitioners and early career researchers who seek to publish in international medical journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, higher education globally had started to change radically in terms of the proportion of young people enrolled in the system as well as society's expectations for what this would deliver. From the outset, Higher Education has featured research interrogating various aspects of inequality in higher education, including institutions and staff as well as students. This article offers an overview of that work. Our analysis is structured around three levels at which major questions on this topic have been framed and investigated. The macro level focuses on national systems and looks at widening participation, especially the increase in access to higher education for young people. The meso level mostly focuses on institutions and their engagement with organisational inequality. The micro level focuses on the lived experiences of academics, in this case focusing on gender and race. We adopted a thematic and purposive approach to article choice, ultimately selecting key papers for further illustrative analysis. In our analysis, we tracked changes in areas of empirical or other emphasis, the use of a variety of theoretical and epistemological frameworks and methods, policy recommendations, and the geographical locations of authors and their content. We noted a growing emphasis on intersectionality and a widening range of countries but also more critical analyses and suggestions for more radical changes in higher education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand how the digitalization of higher education influences the inter-relationship between students, teachers, and their broader contexts, research must account for the social, cultural, political, and embodied aspects of teaching and learning in digital environments. Digital ethnography is a research method that can generate rich contextual knowledge of online experiences. However, how this methodology translates to higher education is less clear. In order to explore the opportunities that digital ethnography can provide in higher education research, this paper presents a methodological review of previous research, and discusses the implications for future practice. Through a systematic search of five research databases, we found 20 papers that report using digital ethnographies to explore teaching and learning in higher education. The review synthesizes and discusses how data collection, rigour, and ethics are handled in this body of research, with a focus on the specific methodological challenges that emerge when doing digital ethnographic research in a higher education setting. The review also identifies opportunities for improvement—especially related to participant observation from the student perspective, researcher reflexivity in relation to the dual teacher-researcher role, and increased diversity of data types. This leads us to conclude that higher education research, tasked with understanding an explosion of new digital practices, could benefit from a more rigorous and expanded use of digital ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to empirical work on widening access to understand the silence on race matters in English higher education. This work repurposes a critical race theoretical framework that offers a glimpse of how the issue of unequal access to higher education has been framed in the research field. It is argued here that the framing of widening access reveals a persistent colour-evasiveness that is dominant. The findings show that widening access policy has not benefitted students of colour as they are not accessing higher education with the same kind of success as their white peers. The paper concludes for a call for race-conscious interventions to remedy the continued race inequity in accessing highly rejective institutions based on the evidence gathered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jonathan Shay argued that social, relational, and institutional contexts were central to understanding moral injury and conceptualised moral injury as a normative response to the betrayal of an individual's understanding of what is right by a more senior/authoritative "other". Using the conceptual lens of moral injury, this paper investigates academic staff experiences of HE during the COVID-19 pandemic and explores the rapid transition back to face-to-face teaching that took place in autumn 2020. To collect data, we used an online survey that opened in January 2021 and ran until the end of March 2021. A total of 663 complete questionnaires were received across the survey period. The questionnaire was comprised of ten topic-related questions, each of which included follow-up sub-questions and also invited participants to write in additional information. The majority of participants felt that during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, they had acted in ways that put their own health and wellbeing at risk. Of those who had acted in ways that put their health and wellbeing at risk, they believed that their senior management were the most responsible for them acting in such ways, followed by the UK government. Qualitative data showed a systemic absence of leadership in the sector during the time, a sense of betrayal of staff and students by senior management and the government, and feelings of compulsion to act in ways which put lives at risk. On the basis of these results, we argue that there could be synergies between the situation facing healthcare staff and academics during the pandemic. Many of the experiences of HE academic staff during the pandemic reported to us in this research are resonant with the concepts of betrayal and moral injury and resulted in affective responses which we understand here in relation to feelings of guilt, shame, and anger, leading ultimately to poor mental health and wellbeing. This paper discusses implications for the HE sector going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-income students' preferences for higher education might depend on the uncertainty of financial aid. Using a time discontinuity design, this paper exploits the unanticipated cancellation of a nationwide Colombian merit and need-based scholarship, called Ser Pilo Paga, to study its consequences on students' preferences for higher education. Preferences are measured using a discrete choice experiment administrated to 949 low-income high school students in 2018. The findings reveal that the scholarship's cancellation reduced higher education ambitions among low-income students due to the decreased interest in both financial aid and high-quality universities. The effects were particularly concentrated on income-eligible individuals who were more likely to obtain the scholarship, as their choices for financial aid and high-quality institutions declined by 15 to 50% of the baseline preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher Education Institutions are expected to stimulate the innovation system and to contribute to the development of societies in a global perspective. Within this context, there is an increasing focus on internationalization. HEIs are developing institutional mechanisms to support internationalization while academics are expected to carry specific practices that allow them to improve the internationalization of knowledge production. At the same time, they are encouraged to engage with non-academic partners to co-produce and transfer knowledge, contributing, in this way, to economic and social development. Although there is some research on the impact of internationalization on academic entrepreneurship, studies on the effects in other dimensions of academic engagement with society are almost absent. This paper aims to fill this gap by analyzing the relationship between academics' internationalization practices and perceptions and the development of different types of academic engagement. Our analysis draws on quantitative analysis with data provided by an international survey (APIKS) and explores the Portuguese context. Findings show that the different practices and perspectives on internationalization impact differently on the way scientists engage. While there are positive effects of internationalization of research on engagement, the time academics stay abroad and the high focus on publishing in internationally high-rated journals may negatively affect academics' orientation towards the local community. This paper contributes to the debate on the role of the internationalization in the context of a knowledge-based society, considering different dimensions and a broad spectrum of knowledge-based engagement activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal practices such as managerialism and academic casualisation impact higher education systems globally. While these practices can constrain any curriculum aimed at enabling transformative learning, this paper shows that they place particular limitations on arts and humanities curricula intent on cultivating criticality and a sense of social responsibility. I draw on data from an English literature curriculum study at a mega distance education institution in South Africa and use Legitimation Code Theory to take a close-up look at how two neoliberal practices: managerialism and academic casualisation cause misalignments between the underpinning values of the curriculum and the kinds of pedagogic and formative assessment practices that are employed. I conclude that decisions regarding administration, enrolments and staffing based on neoliberal values can frustrate students' epistemological and ontological access to humanities disciplines and limit the potential of humanities curricula to offer a higher education in service of the social good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deploying systems-theoretical conceptuality, this paper improves understanding of the organisational consequences of the intensified societal engagement of a research university. Aligning its work with Luhmannian organisational analysis, it addresses the dynamic interplay between two modes of administrative decision-making communication, namely, the traditional professional administration and the New-Public-Management-oriented (NPM) managerial techniques. Our research observes how the politico-economic conditions of the society translate into the university's decisions concerning an initiative to engage in start-up entrepreneurship. The article contributes to higher education literature by showing that the university's professional administration is a discrete organisational function internally differentiated into specialised administrative branches, each of which operates according to a sense-making regime associated with its primary societal system reference, such as education, science and the economy. The article also demonstrates the structurally conditioned differences in branch-specific temporalisations of the entrepreneurial initiative during decision-making. Inspired by the Luhmannian view on temporality, we demonstrate how administrative decisions synchronise the varied structural time horizons within the university's professional administration. Focus on temporality in decision-making thus allows us to see how the NPM-inspired managerial techniques are operationalised in administrative communication at universities. Consequently, the paper argues that university administration is a complex dynamic entity, which varyingly aligns itself to national policy scripts, and only selectively enacts features of a global trend known as NPM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing internationalization of Higher Education Institutions has facilitated universities from East Asian countries like Taiwan, Korea, and China to value university rankings more in enhancing their admissions and reputation. Especially when Taiwan and China are all considered belonging to Chinese social community, returnee doctorates are assumed to possess international experience that is theoretically helpful to improve their research productivity and university employers generally prefer foreign-trained doctorates. However, there is little research to prove that returnee doctorates are more productive than local doctorates because of more frequent international mobility. This research examines a University in Taiwan, a prominent academic research university, credible for its research productivity. From the perspective of bibliometrics, this study used the Scopus International Academic Database to identify publications, citations, and Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) as credible indicators of research productivity, controlling for personal background, doctoral training, international mobility, and research collaboration. We hope that the differences in research productivity between local and returnee doctorates can be measured more comprehensively and objectively. The results of this study found that there is a significant difference in the higher FWCI score of research publications between local and returnee doctorates, and further found that there is a significant positive relationship between local doctorates, published papers during doctoral studies, prestige of supervisors, and international and domestic research collaboration on research productivity. Those that identified international mobility in careers had a stronger impact on research productivity compared to those of the doctorate educating stage, and both international and domestic research collaboration were important for research productivity. The results based on empirical analysis broke the myths of returnee doctorate corresponding to high research productivity in this study, and can serve as a reference for faculty recruitment and research environment enhancement in research-oriented universities in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Policy implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuing education overseas is a high impact practice in higher education. Students who identify as LGBTQIA + —commonly referred to as "queer," an umbrella term—may be more likely to participate yet face additional unique challenges. Using a systematic review of literature across multiple disciplines, this paper explores LGBTQIA + students' motivations, identity development, and university experiences while participating in education overseas. It also aims to define the term queer international student and examines the theoretical frames used to understand this population in the literature. Findings show that literature carves out a composite of students who view, and sometimes actively seek, overseas education to develop themselves, express their identities, and live in communities that are more welcoming and safer than those at home. However, they also face conflict in English language classrooms, on campuses, and with their families as they navigate expectations, with some switching between cisheteronormative and queer identities in different communities. On university campuses, scholars noted, queer international students can be viewed singularly as international students, with their sexual orientations and other intersectional identities going unrecognized or being erased. Moreover, higher education scholars and practitioners often do not designate—or perhaps exclude—international students in studies and programming for LGBTQIA + students. As a result, queer international students may not feel like they belong in any group and risk being double-marginalized in higher education. This paper concludes with five recommendations for additional research in this emerging subfield of higher education literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quarter of a century after South Africa's transition to democracy, the rhetoric of 'transformation' remains firmly ingrained in its higher education policy and discourse. In many of the reviews, reports, proposals, and frameworks on the transformation of the South African university system, one thing stands out: an oversupply of rhetoric and a dearth of empirical data. This article is a direct response to how infrequently data has been used and seeks to reveal the actual quantum of change, albeit with a focus on an admittedly singular element on the transformation spectrum but one which nevertheless preoccupies South Africans: equity (or race). The evidence presented in the paper shows that the absence of a clear articulation of transformation, accompanied by a lack of indicators and targets to track progress over time, hinders the progression of the discourse to equally important dimensions of performance such as efficiency, success and productivity—all of which are critical in determining the university's role in national development. The paper goes on to show that based on the data available, the public university system in South Africa is transforming given the increases over time in the number of black students and staff. However, without a clearly articulated idea of what constitutes change, one cannot claim a transformed system, and the political narrative of no transformation is likely to prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2002 'glonacal' paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remade and newly invented. The glonacal paper has been widely used in higher education studies, though single-scale nation-bound methods still have a strong hold. Drawing on insights from human geography and selected empirical studies, the present paper builds on the glonacal paper in a larger theorization of space and scale. It describes how material elements, imagination and social practices interact in making space, which is the sphere of social relations; it discusses multiplicity in higher education space and sameness/different tensions; and it takes further the investigation of one kind of constructed space in higher education, its heterogenous scales (national, local, regional, global etc.). The paper reviews the intersections between scales, especially between national and global, the ever-changing ordering of scales, and how agents in higher education mix and match scales. It also critiques ideas of fixed scalar primacy such as methodological nationalism and methodological globalism—influential in studies of higher education but radically limiting of what can be imagined and practised. Ideas matter. The single-scale visions and scale-driven universals must be cleared away to bring a fuller geography of higher education to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experience of higher education (HE) has come to characterise many contemporary political divisions, including those related to Brexit, Trump and coronavirus policy. However, the academic literature is unclear whether HE plays a causal role in changing peoples' political attitudes or is simply a proxy. Furthermore, in many contexts, there is limited descriptive evidence on whether students' political attitudes change during HE. This paper focuses on the UK, using data from the British Election Study, to make a twofold contribution. Firstly, the paper introduces recent political science theorising on the nature of contemporary political divisions, which has remained largely outside the HE literature to date. This theorising is illustrated through a cross-sectional analysis, comparing the political attitudes of those with and without experience of HE, showing that the former tend to be more left-leaning and less ethnocentric. Secondly, a longitudinal analysis is performed to assess how students' political attitudes change during their time in HE. While in HE, students tend to make small movements to the left and become less ethnocentric, representing approximately 20–33% of the overall division between those with and without experience of HE. These findings are interpreted through a critical realist lens—they evidence that HE could have a causal role to play in creating contemporary political divisions. However, to establish whether HE does play a causal role, further intensive research is needed to explore how particular aspects of HE might bring about these changes and how this varies for different students in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon French philosophy, this study offers a novel empirical and conceptual understanding of the newly launched European Universities Initiative. In 2019, higher education institutions across the European Union created 17 new alliances as part of the first pilot phase of the initiative. This is an experiment in European and global higher education. This paper offers a conceptual contribution to the field of higher education studies, making use of a rhizomatic analysis to explore how university alliances build what the European Commission refers to as the 'European universities of the future.' Based on the conceptual reflection and findings from a small-scale empirical study, this paper concludes that the alliances within the European Universities Initiative rely on pre-existing higher education and research partnerships while at the same time experimenting to foster a diversity of institutional forms to achieve the ambitious goal of creating 'European Universities.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crisis makes bold policy actions possible. In responding to socioeconomic and technological ruptures, policymakers create new imaginaries or revitalise existing ones. With the Australian Government's Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) reform during the COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical case, this paper shows how crisis instrumentalism and policy imaginaries intersect to effect swift policy changes. Drawing on a thematic analysis of key documents that constitute the JRG reform, we highlight three findings. First, the reformers used a new crisis context to repackage pre-existing policy agendas. Second, in justifying the timeliness of the reform, rather than constructing new imaginaries, the Government reactivated old neoliberal visions of society and the economy. Finally, the reform agendas are characterised by reductionist accounts of the value of university education, a nativist view of the future workforce, and the omissions of key issues: research training, social justice, and the urgency of decarbonising the economy. We close the paper by arguing that crisis makes swift reform possible to the extent that key actors can mobilise new or pre-existing policy imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global university rankings (GUR) have become increasingly influential as a proxy measure of higher education quality. The more recent development of regionalised forms of rankings has increased their global reach, drawing a greatly expanded range of institutions into their orbit. As a result, regionalised GUR have developed an increasing potential power to shape social perceptions, institutional actions, and everyday academic practices. In this paper, the perceived impact of regionalised forms of GUR is analysed from the perspective of Latin American higher education. Based on a critical meta-synthesis framed by a glonacal heuristic (Marginson and Rhoades, Higher Education 43:281–309, 2002), the tensions arising around the application of regionalised forms of global rankings are mapped. Specifically, the impact of rankings on conceptions of the mission of universities is foregrounded. The meta-synthesis identifies three primary tensions around the regional application of GUR in Latin American contexts: how conceptions of regional higher education quality are most effectively developed, how the local university is imagined under the weight of global expectations, and the relativised value of local agency in assessing quality outcomes. The findings suggest that GUR have created strong fissures in Latin American higher education regarding the missions of institutions, particularly in confronting the powerful hegemonies of the epistemologies of the Global North imposing themselves on Latin American higher education. The paper concludes that the stratification and social anxiety caused by the regional applications of GUR may not be necessarily productive in encouraging regional institutional diversity or in enhancing the local relevance of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political, social, and institutional environments in which contemporary universities operate have changed rather dramatically over the past two decades in ways that threaten the resilience of the academic core, both in its ability to map knowledge comprehensively and also to maintain a balance between the branches of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This paper traces historical changes (2003–2019) in the academic core of two "flagship" research-intensive universities located in Northern Europe. The results show that some branches of the academic core are undergoing dynamic processes of program churn that make them resilient. Furthermore, the data show that this resilience is enabled in large part by bridging different branches of knowledge by establishing what we term interbranch programs. In addition to the abovementioned findings, the paper links ongoing discussions regarding change in HE systems and institutions to the literature on organizational resilience, and it advances insights for a possible future theory of how adaptation plays out in the academic core over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of higher education in fiction-based sources contribute to forming public perceptions of academia, and so are a form of public pedagogy. Within popular culture representations, understandings of academics are constructed using particular tropes which build shared meanings of the profession. Conferences are one of these tropes and can thus be used as a focus to explore the construction of the academic profession in popular culture representations of higher education. This paper draws on a research project which explored representations of conferences in narrative fiction texts (novels, graphic novels, short stories). In this paper, we analyse references to conferences for what they teach us about the academic profession. The paper is based on analysis of 98 symbolic references to conferences from a sample of 23 fictional texts. Symbolic references are short references which serve as a shorthand to signal aspects of the academic profession, and in this paper, they have been analysed in terms of what they portray and where they position the reader. The paper argues that popular culture representations of academia are pedagogical, in that they show the profession to be desirable to others but encourage a disidentification with academics, reinforcing the exclusionary nature of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In higher education institutions, critical race theory (CRT) is known to be associated with fields that study racial disparities or systemic oppression such as law, education, and ethnic studies. The impression that CRT is unrelated to fields like business or computer science may have led scholars and practitioners from these disciplines to put their focus on elsewhere than on racial inequality and its implication in their research and practice, despite apparent need. To counter such fallacy, this review article—focusing primarily on the US context—discusses CRT literature in fields where its presence is less known which are nevertheless among the major domains of higher education institutions: health sciences, computer science and information technology, sports, business, and religion. By discussing example research of how scholars have utilized CRT in different fields to challenge the race-neutral thinking that often obscures structural racism, this paper exposes racism's ability to alter manifestations and to appear through various shapes and forms within the higher education context. Initial recommendations on how educators may engage in further discussions or actions will also be considered. This paper concludes that racist ideologies are often hidden behind discipline-specific vocabulary or technical language, and it is by tackling the ideologies at work underneath the technicalities can we address the chameleon-like nature of racism more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC) is typically approached very differently across national, institutional and disciplinary contexts. This paper reports on research on internationalisation of the curriculum in Latin America and discusses its potential to provoke disruptive innovation in higher education internationalisation. Traditionally, approaches to internationalisation of the curriculum in Latin American universities have been focused almost solely on student mobility programs. The research reported in this paper was conducted by a project team from Brazil and Australia in 2021–2022. A qualitative methodology was used. Methods included a tri-lingual literature review of scholarly publications on curriculum internationalisation in English, Portuguese and Spanish and a modified e-Delphi methodology with a panel of experts comprising international higher education scholars and practitioners working in Latin America (and conducted in Spanish, Portuguese and English). The purpose of the research was to identify ways in which existing approaches to internationalising the curriculum in Latin America might be enhanced in order to provide more students with opportunities to develop international perspectives and intercultural knowledge and skills. The research found that there is significant potential to achieve this outcome if the process of internationalising the curriculum is approached as a long-term project involving complex collaborative boundary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities are expected to strive for excellence but also for gender balance. Narrow interpretations of excellence in universities hinder women's advancement in academia. In this paper, we ask if there are ways that these policies may be reconciled. Excellence is an "empty signifier" that must be filled with meaning. We have investigated how Heads of Departments enact "excellence" and gender balance in hiring processes in four Norwegian universities. Many HoD argued for broadening excellence criteria and framed excellence as a collective rather than an individual concern. This allows for reconciling top-down institutional demands for excellence and diversity while catering to local needs. Thus, our paper suggests that in a context where increased diversity among faculty is called for, this may open up a space for critical reflection about the criteria for assessing academic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mechanisms through which higher education institutions (HEIs) explore, focusing on organizational status and institutional logic. We hypothesize that the exploration mechanisms differ depending on the public and private sectors. Revisiting middle-status conformity, we assert that the U-shaped relationship is stronger for private HEIs than public HEIs, as private HEIs are more concerned about status. We also argue that the congruence of institutional logics between HEIs and their funding partners foster exploration based on the sense of security. In contrast, when HEIs receive funding from partners with incongruent logics, they explore less because of their tendency to avoid additional uncertainty. We empirically test our hypotheses using data on US HEIs between 2014 and 2020. Our results demonstrate that a U-shaped relationship between status and exploration is stronger for private HEIs. Moreover, non-market funding providers, whose institutional logic congruent with public HEIs yet incongruent with private HEIs, increase the exploration of public HEIs and decrease the exploration of private HEIs. By integrating theories on organizational learning, status, and institutional theory, our study contributes to a nuanced understanding of the differences between public and private HEIs with respect to exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, international or migrant faculty researchers have explored the work roles, academic experiences, and identities of this community, while a new body of research has begun to draw on insights from migration studies to investigate to what extent and how they are integrated on campus. This paper seeks to extend these discussions by considering on-campus support for international faculty, their integration into the host society, and the relationship between these factors. Focusing on Japan and drawing on both a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews of recipients of the prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Post-Doctoral Fellowship, this study reveals that on-campus support is associated with higher levels of integration in Japanese society, but there are notable deficiencies in the linguistic and social support offered by universities. These findings indicate that universities seeking to attract and retain international talent should initially invest in language learning support services and reflect on the intermediary role they play between international faculty members and the local community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector's contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England after nearly a decade of full marketisation. The study, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries, consisted of a review of major policy reports, and 24 semi-structured interviews in universities (13) and among higher education policy professionals (11) including regulators, national organisations and experts. England has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than attenuated performative outputs such as graduate salaries, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation, understood as individual access to education as a private good. Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the imposition of a market in the centralised English system. This has coincided with a shift from direct government funding and collaborative stewardship by state and institutions, to student funding and top-down regulation. Nevertheless, most interviewees, including regulators, advocated an open-ended public good role and provided many examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum relation of private and public outcomes, corresponding to the split of private/public costs, was rejected in favour of a positive-sum relation of private and public outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on de Sousa Santos's work on Epistemologies of the South (2014), this paper critically examines the patterns of publication in higher education studies in mainstream and non-mainstream journals in Latin American between 2000 and 2015. An analysis of 1370 papers—130 indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection indexes and 1240 indexed in the Scientific Electronic Library Online index (SciELO)—indicates that Latin American academics are engaged in lively practices of publication. However, a dual pattern of publication is identified, characterised by researchers extensively publishing in non-mainstream journals and also maintaining a presence in mainstream journals. Issues related to language, rankings and prestige, the North/South divide, the distinction between hard/basic and soft/applied sciences and the nature of higher education studies are used to explain such a pattern. Although there is a tense process of securing a dual epistemic recognition, there is also a positive tension that involves collaboration across a plurality of knowledges. Finally, this paper offers the concept of zones of epistemic influence, which opens spaces for an ecology of knowledges in which knowledges from both the North and the South constitute a new assemblage that accords due weight to a plurality of epistemic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the 50th anniversary special issue of Higher Education recounts the history of the journal and reflects on the evolution and expansion of the journal and the field. Higher education studies is an object-oriented field that combines academic explanations with practical interventions. The journal takes an agnostic approach to disciplinary frameworks, theories, and methodologies and an eclectic and inclusive approach to topics. It began in 1972 with a preoccupation with the nature and implications of mass higher education systems, including internationally comparative analyses, and with a focus on policy and planning. Most of the earlier themes of research in the field have continued to the present, but as mass higher education systems have spread across the world, so has the journal's author list and editorial group. Higher education studies remain biased to the Anglophone and Euro-American worlds in their topics, theorizations, and author lists. Between 1996 and 2018, the USA and other English-speaking countries accounted for about 70% of authorship in the six journals with the highest impact factor. However, in Higher Education, that proportion was just over 45%, indicating some progress in the journal's efforts to pluralize, partly through the growth of papers from China. The introduction looks forward, anticipating growth in contributions from the global South, and further inquiry into the purposes of higher education and into its relations in social context. Finally, the introduction discusses the 50th anniversary papers that follow, contributed by twelve present and past editors of the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, while conceptual in nature, is informed by both research and practice. Exploring the "engagement interface" as the site for student engagement (SE), we offer a conceptual contribution in engaging with the Kahu and Nelson (2018) model by bringing in a fuller understanding of SE grounded in the higher education context rather than being uncritically transplanted from a compulsory education context. This involves consideration of the multiple facets of SE as well as the dynamic, shifting and multilocal nature of the construct. The paper then proceeds to enhance the details of the model, grounding them in a finer-grained reading of the literature and relating educational constructs to the model's proposed "mechanisms" in a conceptually substantiated way. This further extends Kahu and Nelson's aim of illuminating the "black box" of SE. Our third contribution is to practice by proposing tactics: informed by the literature, we invite practitioners to consider ways in which they can increase the likelihood of facilitating engagement with, and by, students more constructively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanitarian events are increasing globally, both in number and intensity. In response, the international community spends approximately US$30 billion annually to alleviate both the immediate consequences of these climatic, geographic, and human-induced events but also to support mitigation and recovery. Over the past two decades, the humanitarian sector has increasingly professionalised. One under-studied aspect of this professionalisation is an increase in postgraduate studies in humanitarian action over the last 20 years. Despite this increase, there is no agreement on core curriculum or pedagogy across humanitarian studies courses. How do current Masters of Humanitarian Assistance (MHA) offerings converge and differ, and how can such courses further their contribution to the humanitarian endeavour? This paper surveys 26 anglophone courses offered in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Nigeria, exploring key characteristics of course entry requirements, flexibility, research, practical components, and academic foci. It does not recommend what a core curriculum for humanitarian courses should be, but does argue that core curriculum for humanitarian courses should be identified by relevant and diverse stakeholders such as affected communities, humanitarian agencies, disaster management bodies, and governments, to ensure that courses in this field provide appropriate learning outcomes. The paper suggests how such a 'charter' may be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies educational inequality in the Philippines from 1950 to 2015, examining changes in the association between social origin and educational attainment against a backdrop of educational expansions and fluctuating economic conditions. Using data from the World Bank STEP Skills Survey, the study employs a sequential logit model to illustrate trends in secondary and college completion, followed by a multinomial logit model to look into differences in college destinations (type and status) between advantaged and disadvantaged students. The findings indicate that despite sustained expansions in the past six decades, disparities in secondary and tertiary completion deepened in relation to social background. The paper also finds that although expansions occurred mainly in public higher education institutions, it did little to alter the trends in college destinations, with advantaged students still more likely to complete in "high-status" universities than disadvantaged ones. Finally, the paper sheds light on how economic recessions have varying consequences on educational attainment, routing disadvantaged students out of college in the short term, while resulting in significant declines in the likelihood of completing higher education for advantaged students enrolled in "high-status" public entities in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific and technological advancements over the last three decades have failed to reduce the widespread prevalence of academic dishonesty in higher education, in large part because institutional barriers prevent faculty from adopting existing tools to curb cheating. We conducted a systematic literature review of research on cheating and found that the majority of studies propose new tools without advancing theory or even utilizing existing theory. Although some studies note the systemic nature of academic misconduct, the academic integrity literature requires a robust theoretical framework to model its systemic nature and derive practical strategies. Building on theory from several domains, we propose a systemic model of academic (mis)conduct which predicts group-level effects on students and offers practical guidance for faculty overcoming institutional barriers to curb cheating. We leverage game theory for useful models of systemic, group-level phenomena in this context, and we leverage education reform literature for insights on how to support instructors' adoption of new tools. Our model, the spectrum of academic conduct, identifies trust as a single dimension governing both cheating behaviors and productive learning behaviors. Integrating insights from pedagogy, conflict management, and organizational psychology, we discuss multiple practical strategies to lower students' opportunity, motivation, and rationalization to cheat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extension of the concept of organizational actorhood. This concept is very useful to understand contemporary higher education institutions, but it pictures these organizations as relatively passive, subject to normative pressures. The conceptualization lacks attention to dynamic agency of higher education institution. Using notions of accountability, legitimacy and identity, a reconceptualization is proposed. That reconceptualization stresses the agentic potential of higher education institutions to pro-actively test the boundaries of legitimacy and accountability and its capacity to continuously (re)negotiate its position in institutional contexts. Suggestions are offered for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased use of student internships and other forms of work placements in higher education programmes brings recognised benefits to students but also changes the risks for higher education institutions (HEIs) globally. This paper responds to the under-addressed problem for HEI managers of understanding the varying levels of risk of harm to students and HEIs, and the HEIs' strategic responsibilities to understand how to mitigate the risk for both parties. We develop a typology of the main types of internship placements and theorise their associated levels of risk according to the HEI's levels of responsibility and operational control. The risk types are then plotted in a model of risk mitigation, mapped against the frequency of their occurrence and the severity of their impact, with a focus on HEIs and students. We conclude with practical and policy implications for HEIs and their managers. Our paper argues that HEIs must balance their risks and responsibilities with the costs and benefits of student internships and work placements, and contributes to understanding potential gaps between HEI strategic decision-making and operational practice at the programme level, along with solutions to address these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, much has changed in the governance of universities since the adoption of corporate management approaches. A strong focus on efficiency, productivity and accountability arising from these approaches has been well documented in the literature. Reductions in government funding have caused universities to become more competitive and entrepreneurial. However, little is known about the impacts of these changes on the working lives of individual academics. This paper is part of an ongoing study exploring the lived experiences of 2526 Australian academics who responded to a national questionnaire. This paper builds on earlier work by holistically drawing together the earlier findings which separately analysed the teaching, research and administration/service aspects of their work. In examining the effectiveness of universities through the ability of their academics to undertake their roles, we found the voices of academics that need to be heard in the development and implementation of key policies, such as academic workload and performance, to preserve the essentially self-managed nature of their work. By combining the learning from the project through the literature review, the statistical analysis and themes from the open-ended questions, we developed a set of principles to underpin these policies in universities. These principles can guide universities to shift towards a more collaborative working relationship with academics, based on trust, and actively encourage them to play be more active in institutional decision-making, especially in relation to policies that directly affect their work. These results have implications for improving the productivity of academics and the institutions in which they work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many papers have focused on socially unequal admissions in higher education, this paper looks at the persistence of class differentials after enrolment. I examine the social class gap in bachelor's programme dropout and in the transition from bachelor's to master's in Denmark from the formal introduction of the bachelor's degree in 1993 up to recent cohorts. Using administrative data, I find that the class gap in bachelor's departures has remained constant from 1993 to 2006, with disadvantaged students being around 15 percentage points more likely to leave a bachelor's programme than advantaged students, even after adjusting for other factors such as grades from upper secondary school. Importantly, the class gap reappears at the master's level, with privileged students being more likely to pursue a master's degree than less privileged students. The size of the class gap is remarkable, given that this gap is found among a selected group of university enrolees. As other studies have found that educational expansion in higher education is not necessarily a remedy for narrowing the class gap in educational attainment, scholars need to pay more attention to keeping disadvantaged students from leaving higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diffusion of evaluation systems based on research excellence has been confronting scholars with the dilemma of how to combine the different activities and roles characterizing the academic profession. Besides research, other types of knowledge transfer and academic citizenship, i.e., the service activities and roles carried out on behalf of the university within and outside organizational boundaries, are in fact cornerstones of universities' functioning that allow for their thriving and need to be valued. This study investigates the complementarity, substitution, and independence effects between the various types of knowledge transfer and academic citizenship in a sample of 752 Italian academics working in business schools. We collected data combining different sources including CVs, publication records, and national datasets. Multivariate path analysis was employed to measure covariances between knowledge transfer and academic citizenship. We contribute to the debate on academic citizenship by showing that public and discipline-based service are complementary to knowledge transfer activities, while institutional service is independent from knowledge transfer. Remarkably, journal papers are research outcomes complementary to most academic activities, and the same holds true for dissemination at workshops and conferences. Running counter dominant rhetoric, this study testifies to the likelihood of faculty being "all-round" professionals. We disclose that activities and roles are influenced by academics' previous pathways and research grants and discuss the need to value academic citizenship in performance measurement systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance and prominence of the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method has recently increased in higher education research, especially in explanatory and predictive studies. We therefore first aim to assess previous PLS-SEM applications by providing a systematic review; second, we aim to highlight and summarize important guidelines for conducting a rigorous PLS-SEM analysis of the current state of results reporting in higher education journals. Specifically, this study focuses on empirical PLS-SEM applications in 14 major higher education journals indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science and in the Elsevier-Scopus databases between 1999 and 2018. We initially identified 49 relevant papers published in 10 higher education journals. Based on these papers' generally followed guidelines, we thereafter identified various issues related to data screening, model characteristics, measurement model evaluation, structural model evaluation, and the application of state-of-the-art PLS-SEM advanced methods requiring particular attention. Furthermore, we recommend recent guidelines to improve PLS-SEM applications and practices, besides providing specific suggestions regarding utilizing the method's strength in terms of relevant higher education research questions. Our findings remind researchers, reviewers, and journal editors to remain vigilant, should help them avoid inaccuracies in future publications, and ensure rigor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much work has focused on pedagogical innovation processes within universities, less has been said of the processes and cultures which foster and give rise to creativity within higher education and the ways in which faculty members are encouraged to develop their pedagogy across disciplines and within their departments. This paper examines the ways campus spaces at a UK university are utilised by staff for peer learning and the barriers and affordances for innovation and creativity in educational practice. Utilising an interdisciplinary design, this paper suggests that the various spaces available to university teaching staff are able to be further utilised to support creative practice and peer learning, presented as four design principles: innovation happens in everyday spaces, communal spaces need social functions, forums have different scales, and collaborative spaces require a collective culture. The normalising of a culture of innovation requires both physical and behavioural adjustments to the use of space, suggesting that both faculty and institutions need to work together to reimagine spaces for faculty peer learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid internationalizing shifts in higher education, universities around the world are simultaneously becoming more integrated and more disparate. This paper examines the role of immigration policy in producing convergent and divergent educational attainment among international and domestic students at Indian and US universities and shows that student and work visas influence international students' decisions about where to study, what to study, and how much education to pursue. Using original data sources and a transnational data collection strategy, this study develops new approaches to measuring international student mobility and offers a window into transnational phenomena not easily observable in other datasets. An analysis of 7177 education histories and 105 in-depth interviews with international students, university administrators, and immigration lawyers shows that migration policy contributes to the growth of international student enrollment and multinational educations but also creates asymmetrical student flows and funnels international students into certain fields of study. The results of this study indicate that migration policies simultaneously contribute to integration and differentiation between the US and Indian university systems. The findings show that immigration policies play an important role in regulating the flow and nature of international student migration streams and lead to simultaneous convergence and divergence in the educational attainment and field of study between Indian international students enrolled in US universities and their domestically educated peers in India. Through an empirical case, this paper develops a conceptual bridge between two dominant frameworks on internationalization and theorizes the central role of migration policy in shaping processes of higher education internationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, higher education institutions (HEIs) have a governance arrangement in which the university president and the party secretary occupy key roles. However, their legal roles as institutional leaders are vaguely specified in existing legal frameworks. Based on a four-dimensional theoretical model, this paper (i) clarifies the leadership roles in the dual governance structure, (ii) explores how HEI leaders (i.e. presidents and party secretaries) perceive their leadership, and (iii) applies the unique Chinese practices as a valuable test bed for critical reflections on how existing theoretical models of leadership are relevant in Chinese contexts. Through in-depth interviews with six top-level leaders from six Chinese public HEIs, our findings indicate that Chinese HEI leaders apply more structural than symbolic dimensions in their leadership practices. Whereas studies on institutional leadership conducted outside China tend to highlight the symbolic dimensions of leadership practices, our study suggests that top-level Chinese HEI leaders may assume the role of university managers rather than institutional leaders. We offer some reflections on the relevance of existing theoretical models of leadership and suggest the directions for further theoretical enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, scholarships for international higher education play a critical role in human capital development. While substantial research has documented the benefits such scholarships provide for individuals, their impact on the creation of pathways for social change remains under-researched. This paper bridges this gap by examining the extent to which a government scholarship for international education has created pathways for social change in Kazakhstan. Data were collected through interviews with 67 scholarship alumni. Drawing on Dassin et al.'s (2018) framework for pathways to social change, the findings reveal that international education fosters social change in Kazakhstan in four ways. First, the scholarship program develops local talent and builds agents of change. Second, it widens access to international education, particularly for individuals from marginalized communities, who would otherwise lack access owing to their scarce financial resources. Third, the program develops alumni's cosmopolitan and intercultural competencies and strengthens international collaborations. Finally, it creates associations and groups through which alumni can collectively contribute to society. The findings highlight that while the interviewed alumni foster strong patriotic feelings and are determined to contribute to the prosperity of their country, underdeveloped industries, economic volatility, and top-down bureaucracy in workplaces limit their potential contributions to social changes. These findings may help policymakers and administrators to reconsider and improve on the design and structure of scholarship programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of research to allocate government funding to universities is now common across the globe. The Research Excellence Framework, introduced in the UK in 2014, marked a major change by extending assessment beyond the 'quality' of published research to include its real-world 'impact'. Impact submissions were a key determinant of the £4 billion allocated to universities following the exercise. The case studies supporting claims for impact are therefore a high stakes genre, with writers keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work. In this paper we examine 800 of these 'impact case studies' from disciplines across the academic spectrum to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact. We do this by analysing authors' use of hyperbolic and promotional language to embroider their presentations, discovering substantial hyping with a strong preference for boosting the novelty and certainty of the claims made. Chemistry and physics, the most abstract and theoretical disciplines of our selection, contained the most hyping items with fewer as we move along the hard/pure – soft/applied continuum as the real-world value of work becomes more apparent. We also show that hyping varies with the type of impact, with items targeting technological, economic and cultural areas the most prolific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies Appadurai's notion of scapes in globalisation to study international student mobility. Thirty mainland Chinese students were interviewed; the majority of whom studied at prestigious institutions in the West before enrolling in their current PhD programmes at a research-intensive university in Hong Kong (HK) in the immediate aftermath of HK's large-scale social protests and amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. We seek to understand why these students relocated to HK to further their studies given these turbulent circumstances and how their mainlander identity and sojourns in the West influence their perceptions of HK's social movements from the perspectives of ethnoscape and ideoscape, respectively. Our findings reveal that HK represented the 'best' compromise for our participants, mitigating their nostalgia for home (i.e. mainland China) whilst offering a superior education to the Chinese mainland. Most participants perceived HK as a nationalistic ideoscape, wherein HK people's pursuit of autonomy is subordinated to the putative Chinese national interests. Moreover, ethnoscape and ideoscape dynamics were found to crisscross other scapes. Generous scholarships (i.e. financescape) provided additional incentives driving student relocations. The persistent consumption of Chinese social media (techno-mediascape) was found to have resulted in worldview conformity between our participants and the Chinese state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International higher education branch campuses (IBCs) in China and elsewhere possess dual identity. There are stakeholders on both the home and host sides. While international branch campuses receive scholarly attention, there has been little study of their research and the role of institutional dual identity in research capacity building. This paper develops a conceptual framework that brings the conditions, practices, and outcomes of research together with dual institutional identity, to study research capacity building at NYU Shanghai. Data from 16 semi-structured interviews with academics, administrators, and university leaders indicate that institutional dual identity is central to what the institution has achieved in building research, influencing every aspect of the process. NYU Shanghai's American identity has shaped academic practices and workloads, and NYU's multi-site structure provides significant networks and resources, yet the institution has also adapted to its Chinese identity and local stakeholders. Dual identity has generated policy conflicts and logistical hurdles yet has also opened institutional and academic opportunities unavailable to other US institutions. While every IBC is embedded in a complex and partly unique context, this study suggests a reflexive understanding of research capacity building in such settings, and contributes to empirical knowledge of cross-border institutions, especially in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the drivers of student dropout from higher education has been a policy concern for several decades. However, the contributing role of certain factors—including student mental health—remains poorly understood. Furthermore, existing studies linking student mental health and university dropout are limited in both methodology and scope—for example, they often rely on small and/or non-representative samples or subjective measures, and focus almost exclusively on main effects. This paper overcomes many of these shortcomings by leveraging unique linked administrative data on the full population of domestic students commencing undergraduate studies at Australian universities between 2012 and 2015 (n = 652,139). Using these data, we document that approximately 15% of students drop out of university within their first academic year. Critically, students receiving treatment for mental health problems are 4.3 (adjusted) to 8.3 (unadjusted) percentage points more likely to drop out of higher education. This association remains in the presence of an encompassing set of potential confounds, and is remarkably uniform across segments of the student population determined by individual, family, and programme characteristics. Altogether, our findings call for increased policy efforts to improve student mental health and to buffer against its deleterious effects on retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]