This paper reports findings from a study that focused on the experiences of research-intensive academics in relation to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Framework. Interviews with academic staff at different career stages and across all academic faculties followed completion of a short survey in which respondents compared their…

In late 1987, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White circulated a draft opinion to his colleagues in a case about whether high school journalists had the right to be free of interference from school administrators. His opinion in the case, "Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier," sided with Missouri administrators who some four years…

Independent scholars are a growing part of the academic landscape. They may have been jilted by the academic job market, or are uninterested in either being on the tenure track or in cobbling together full-time work as adjuncts. Like traditional professors, they perform research, secure grants, and publish books and papers. In some cases, their…

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources without proper attribution. Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized…

A study of human rights prepares students for their role as global citizens and their study of practices in the world's countries that relate to the rights of human beings. Today, when one talks of human rights it is usually with reference to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It is the task of teachers to give students the…

The generation of a public-good, capabilities-based approach to professional education in South African universities is outlined and proposed as a contribution to wider social transformation. The relevance and importance of understanding what Amartya Sen describes as "capability failure" in the lives of people living in poverty is…

In a time of rapid and unprecedented social change, the concepts we use to make sense of the ways in which young people understand and interact with the world are very much under the microscope. Some researchers argue that we need to reinvigorate our conceptual repertoire, while others argue that our theoretical tool box still has the capacity to…

Time, space, causality, communicating and acting together set limits on our freedom. Starting from the position of Wittgenstein, who advocates neither a position of pure subjectivity nor of pure objectivity, and taking into account what is implied by initiation into the symbolic order of language and culture, it is argued that the limitations on…

The purpose of this article is to analyse three case study examples of musical "folkbildning" in Sweden. The first case study is from the establishment of the state-funded Framnas Folk High Music School in the middle of the last century. The second case study, Hagstrom's music education, is from the same time but describes a music school…

In this essay Tyson Lewis reevaluates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's assessment of the pedagogical value of fables in Emile's education using Giorgio Agamben's theory of poetic production and Thomas Keenan's theory of the inherent ambiguity of the fable. From this perspective, the "unreadable" nature of the fable that Rousseau exposed is not simply the…

The academic profession in Russia, represented by the personnel of scientific institutes and by university instructors, is going through difficult times. On the one hand, there are ongoing serious debates and discussion concerning the future of the Russian Academy of Sciences and directions in its reform; on the other hand, education reform and…

It makes sense for college and university faculty to ally with the free and open-source software community. They share common values. A marvelous additional benefit is that free software on campuses would significantly advance pedagogy and scholarship, increase efficiency, and save money. Only unquestioning obedience to market fundamentalism--or…

This paper explores the relationship between girls' schooling and empowerment in western China in the first decade of the 21st century. This paper adopted a capability-empowerment framework based on Sen's capability approach into which were integrated concepts by Bourdieu, Appadurai, Nussbaum, Kabeer, and Unterhalter, to help to understand the…

The imposition of the audit culture on schooling has severely limited teachers' freedom and dignity, exacerbating traditions of teacher education and employment that are infantilizing. If teachers are to participate in the politics that determine curriculum and pedagogy, education programs must provide differentiated credentials that welcome…

The distinctive role of the university in society is always fragile and always in jeopardy. At its core, that role is primarily extending and deepening human understanding through research, scholarship, and teaching. This report presents an analysis of the following 12 collaborations between Canadian Universities and corporations, donors, and…