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I look at the changes in higher education (HE) and women's lives over the last 50 years, drawing on my recent book "Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion & Pedagogies" which is a life history of feminism entering academe. The Robbins Report (cmnd 2154 1963) on HE was published in the same year that I went to university. It inaugurated a process of change and educational expansion that was linked to other major social transformations, including feminism. Its effects have been widely felt such that women now participate in education and employment on unprecedented levels. Indeed, it has opened up opportunities for education and employment for women including individual and social mobility. From my study I show how it opened up opportunities for women from both middle class and working class backgrounds to be first-in-the-family to go to university. I will also argue that whilst there have been very welcome changes in education, and HE especially, such that there is a gender balance of undergraduate students in HE, this does not mean that gender equality has been achieved. Patriarchy or hegemonic masculinity in HE is still strongly felt and experienced despite women's and feminist involvements in academe over the last 50 years. The question remains about how to transform universities to achieve genuine gender equality across all students and academics in HE.

This is a reflective account of the publication of two books in the same year (2016): "Reclaiming Feminism: Challenging Everyday Misogyny" and "Feminist Manifesto for Education." The former is a popular but scholarly memoir, and the latter is an academic text for sociology and education. It was never my intention to publish one, let alone, two books but I was spurred to do so by the prevailing socio-political and cultural climate: what I now see clearly as everyday misogyny.

This article focuses on feminist activist academics who were instrumental in creating the UK Gender & Education Association at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on my own intellectual biography (David, M. E. 2003. "Personal and Political: Feminisms, Sociology and Family Lives" Stoke-on-Trent. Trentham Books.) linked to the collective biography and life history of feminism in academia over the last 50 years, "Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies" (David, M. E. 2014. "Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion & Pedagogies." Farnham: Wheatsheaf.), I consider how we, as feminist educators, developed our pedagogies and professional approaches to gender and education. In so doing, I also look at three cohorts or generations of feminist academics, from the university pioneers of second-wave feminists like myself, through to those who might be considered third wave feminists. In this it is clear that whilst feminist values of women's liberation and/or gender equality shine through, there are clear differences of emphasis. This is in relation to personal, political and professional values, and approaches to education through teaching or the social sciences. Indeed, neither feminism nor gender was in the lexicon of higher education or public policy when we were starting out, and by the third cohort gender equality had become incorporated into forms of neo-liberalism. In reviewing the developments of feminisms in higher education, I also look towards what might be considered a feminist future in global higher education, given learning from previous waves to new waves of feminists such as fourth wave and beyond. Here I briefly consider the work of our EU Daphne funded research project (2013-2015) into challenging gender-related violence (GRV) through education and training for professionals working with children and young people.

In this invited commentary, I offer a critique of two lacunae in the emerging field. I consider how aspects of research on the transformations of global higher education constitute an emergent sociology of higher education, and I also review how the dominant tendencies occlude gender and feminist perspectives. By way of enticing readers to consider these absences, I present research evidence from a feminist and sociological perspective about the innovative and refreshing critiques of transformations in HE and the future of universities. I also contend that women's learning lives on in feminist scholarship and emergent new knowledge that may contribute to the university of the future. First, I present some recent feminist and sociological research that was published in a special issue of a new Routledge journal for the UK's Academy of Social Sciences, "Contemporary Social Science", which drew on a seminar series about Imagining the University of the Future. All the contributors presented critiques of the current dominant perspectives in research on global higher education. They also presented narratives that constitute new knowledge created with new methodologies and gendered or feminist frames of reference. Second, I present evidence from another Routledge journal, but this time the long-standing "British Journal of Sociology of Education", to develop a sociology of higher education through a recent virtual special issue which brings together articles over the last five years. This demonstrates the rich theoretical diversity of sociological studies of the transformations of global higher education, including from a gender and feminist perspective. Finally, I conclude with offering a comment about the vitality and vibrancy of women's learning across their lives, especially through the contributions of generations of feminist scholars to these new fields of endeavour. Feminist knowledge and scholarship are important to understanding global HE and the university of the future.

This paper is about changing concepts of equity in UK higher education. In particular, it charts the moves from concepts about gender equality as about women's education as a key issue in twentieth century higher education to questions of men's education in the twenty-first century. These changing concepts of equity are linked to wider social and economic transformations, the expansion of higher education and the growth in the knowledge economy, or what has been called "academic capitalism". Feminist theorists and activists, often called second wave feminists, developed concepts of gender equality in education, including higher education in the twentieth century, and these have been incorporated into higher education and policies with the expansions of higher education, especially around notions of widening participation. Notions of widening participation in policy and practice arenas focus on equity as about social class, socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity and race, rather than specifically on gender questions. Equity is now twinned with diversity and where gender is now invoked it is largely about young and working class men's disadvantage in relation to higher education. In this paper, I will also provide research evidence from the UK's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) which has been the UK's biggest ever initiative in education research about equity and diversity as currently conceived in UK higher education. I will show how gender has been incorporated with diversity questions and has lost its critical and feminist edge. I conclude with addressing questions about the future of higher education policies and practices to address questions of equity and diversity, attempting to counter the systemic inequalities in current forms of UK higher education. There are opportunities for developing new, critical and feminist pedagogies. More inclusive or "connectionist" approaches, rather than "teaching to the test", would engage socially diverse men and women students in a range of higher education subjects and settings.

In this article, the author draws together the diverse approaches to equity and widening participation found in the innovative international research conducted in Ghana and Tanzania by contrast with those in the "global North", using the United Kingdom as a case study. In particular, the author considers the utility of equity scorecards around the theme of the three Rs--"recruitment, retention" and "results"--in the context of very diverse national and international cultures and contexts. The focus of these scorecards is on equity in terms of gender, age and socio-economic backgrounds. Using research evidence from the United Kingdom's Teaching and Learning Research Programme on fair access and widening participation in higher education, the author also draws out further conceptual considerations about equity and diversity as key to developing policies, practices and pedagogies for the future of global universities in the twenty-first century. What are the obstacles and opportunities for envisioning equitable and fair policies, practices and pedagogies for the three Rs to enable and enhance higher education for women and other socio-economically disadvantaged groups? (Contains 1 note.)

This article is a critique of the expansion of higher education in global and national contexts. First I provide an analysis of the transformation of higher education as a form of "academic capitalism" and how second-wave feminist critiques and pedagogies have become incorporated as have women, amongst other social groups, in increasingly diverse forms of post-compulsory education. Yet, the transformations in global higher education have not been in the direction of greater gender or social equity. Second, I provide evidence of the policies and practices of the U.K. government in widening participation to U.K. higher education, drawing on research, commissioned by the U.K. government, and conducted by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. I provide detailed research evidence, from the seven projects, about the policies, practices and pedagogies within English higher education. I argue that, although neither gender nor social equality has been accomplished, there is evidence of practices that value and respect social diversity and inclusion of women's diverse perspectives and feminist pedagogies.

This paper takes a feminist perspective on the UK literature on mass higher education in the 21st century, building on US critiques about marketization, neo-liberalism and "academic capitalism". Concepts of equality and diversity have been transformed by neo-liberalism and how these changes have constrained democratic contributions to UK higher education policies and practices is the focus. Diversity has replaced more traditional conceptualizations of socioeconomic inequalities, and has shifted from being about ethnicity/race to one of "widening participation" or "fair" access to higher education, including social class, disabilities, gender and age. Debate focuses on individual students on first or undergraduate degrees, whether full or part-time, and how higher education institutions can contribute to graduate employment, individual or social mobility, rather than re-inscribing social stratification. I present an analysis that demonstrates the challenges and dilemmas about equality and diversity in UK mass higher education and conclude that despite expansion of higher education "persistent inequalities" remain. I reveal UK policy shifts around gender as concerning women, as students or academics, to one about lack of educational opportunities in post-compulsory education for young men from poor or disadvantaged family backgrounds as students, ignoring the question of women's opportunities and contributions to new forms of academic practice. I argue that this illustrates how new forms of higher education, despite expansion and increasing participation, remain resistant to some of the feminist and critical yet creative challenges about transformations in academic practice and development.

This article provides an overview of global higher education focusing particularly on issues of diversity and gender. The main evidence is drawn from seven unique projects on Widening Participation in Higher Education funded by the British Government's Higher Education Funding Council for England and administered through the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The issues are contextualised from a feminist perspective, current global and national policy debates about extending fair access to, and participation within, higher education and the contestation about these debates on global higher education in the twenty-first century. Whilst there is clear evidence that participation in higher education has increased, especially for women, by contrast with traditional students defined as young, white, male and middle-class, this participation is neither equal nor fairly distributed. There are systemic and systematic inequalities but, nevertheless, opportunities for critical and feminist pedagogies within the global academy have increased and offer the potential for the future of the twenty-first-century global academy.

In this paper, in keeping with developing feminist methodologies, we reflect on how we became second-wave feminists in the 1970s. We consider how the theories and practices that we were involved in have been changed as the global socio-political context has transformed higher education practices. Second-wave feminism originated as a political project around "the personal". As it entered the academy, feminism developed and drew on emerging concepts in the social sciences and humanities to develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of the personal. Personalization and the personal have now become ubiquitous in the pedagogical discourses of higher education. As higher education has expanded in the context of globalization and itself become global, it has both elided and incorporated questions of diversity, difference, inequality and power. Concepts such as the personal, love of learning and knowledge, have entered the new literatures of learning and teaching in global higher education. However, in some of these versions concepts of the personal appear to be based upon an impersonal and disembodied subject. New forms of global higher education have built upon feminist theories and yet, at the same time, they have done so by the marginalization and occlusion of feminist critiques. This is evident both within the mainstream neo-liberalism and also within the critical and post-structuralist literatures. In this paper, we offer an alternative critical feminist reading of some of these tendencies and speculate on the lack of personal reflexivity which allows some British authors to expunge feminist analysis from their texts. This leaves a denuded and a-historical concept of the personal, a pale shadow of the agentic political subject of second-wave feminism. The personal as a political project forms the basis of our critique of global higher education practices. It allows for a re-imagining of universities not as disembodied sites of masculine freedom but as socially situated spaces for creative thinking for the twenty-first century.

The changing climate of children's education at the turn of the twenty-first century through sociocultural and global political changes is my focus of attention. I will discuss the changing social context and environments for research on children and education, considering various transformations in the social and policy contexts that have led to new forms of research, new ethical procedures and the ways that social diversity has influenced research and policy on equity questions. One key context is how the British New Labour Government from 1997 to 2006 attempted to transform the education policy agenda towards personalization or individualization and children's services and rights, with new discourses about teaching and learning, social exclusion or inclusion and equality. I will also address the changing sociocultural climate of increasing social diversity and how new moral responsibilities and political values underpinning these personal, private and public issues are addressed within education. However, I will conclude that these policy measures remain ambivalent about wider sociocultural changes and the evidence amassed from research about how to improve teaching and learning. Policy developments sustain traditional political values rather than empowering children and young people.

This paper discusses whether the massification of higher education (HE) in the majority of developed countries over the last few decades has led to changes in the form of involvement in universities for the masses, or massive universities for the expanding middle classes. Situating our argument with the evidence of massive expansion of HE in England and Spain, and using Bourdieu's theoretical framework, we compare two studies that looked at whether these changes led to a revised structuring of educational opportunities by social class and to universities accessible to the masses or merely massive universities. The English study considered the choices, and the Spanish study, the experiences of students and how they felt about being students. Our conclusions stress the relation between the social construction of the category "youth" or young people in relation to HE, and the different structures of economic rights and duties of different social classes. While upper and middle class male and female students live their university lives with a clear feeling of entitlement, lower middle class and working class students need to justify their economic dependence on the family and so their university status. Developing concepts used in the English study for ethnic minority students we distinguish an "embedded" style, that is a taken for granted perspective, from a "contingent" style or one where students need to justify their choices of being students. These lead to different degrees of legitimacy of higher educational investments corresponding to different "familial habituses".

This article uses feminist methodologies of critical and personal reflections to consider the contributions that feminist sociology and sociology of education have made to developments in the pedagogies and practices of higher education, particularly professional and postgraduate education. First, the article reviews the contributions of women and feminists to developing feminist theories and methodologies over the last three or four decades. It considers, in particular, the ways in which these developments around the notions of personal and political have become more complex as generations of women as academics and students have entered the academy. These complexities are linked to the wider social and economic transformations and especially changing forms of liberalism, from social democracy, through economic liberalism to neo-liberalism. These developments are spelled out briefly and linked to changing forms of higher education. The second half of the article concentrates on developments in higher education and the mystification of postgraduate and professional education under neo-liberalism. A case study of the developments in doctoral and professional education is provided, with an emphasis on how women have become engaged in these practices. Consideration is also given to changing pedagogies and the practice of more personal pedagogies in higher education and how this has developed with respect to a professional doctorate in education. In conclusion, consideration is given to the prospects for the future of these changing developments and the contribution of feminist pedagogies and practices for the renewal of sociology and the sociology of education a d forms of knowledge within the academy.