The future of higher education is in crisis. Between falling undergraduate enrollment, rising student debt, program elimination, and widespread faculty burnout, families across America are left wondering: Is college worth it? In "The Conversation on Higher Ed," editor Mary Churchill explores the complicated landscape of academic life in…

Ethical research in war zones is crucial yet underexplored, especially when analysed as a practice of freedom. Existing scholarship primarily focuses on safety challenges, the implications of researchers' outsider position, and the politicisation of research in war zones. This paper addresses the gap in understanding the emancipatory potential of…

Article 12 (1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out the right of children who are capable of forming their own views to freely express them in matters that affect them. Such views should be considered when making decisions, paying attention to the child's age and maturity. This study explored children's…

This project investigates the relationship between joy, critical consciousness, and critical civic learning that exist in critical hip hop pedagogy. In order to discover what is revealed about young people's collective definitions of joy, critical consciousness, and civic identity/literacy, I designed a methodology called Blackout Rap…

This paper was invited as a commentary on the keynote paper for this special issue by Simon Marginson and Lili Yang. The paper begins by noting the importance of a fully balanced approach to comparison in higher education, that gives equal value and weight to Sinic and Anglo-American views by adopting a transpositional approach and also…

This book theorises the public university as a real utopia, drawing upon the work of the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright. The book explores institutional democracy, academic freedom and the curriculum as the real utopian 'constituents' of the public university. In doing so, the author puts forward an argument for the redevelopment of public…

In the same way that libraries defend the privacy rights of library users so should they respect library workers' privacy of thought. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, as it has been approached in recent years, impinges on privacy of thought and cognitive liberty. It is possible to see the profession's shift away from a…

This qualitative study examines how elementary students of Color develop and enact an abolitionist praxis as part of a "Freedom Dreaming" literacy unit. The analysis of focus-group interviews elucidates how, after learning about freedom dreaming and the abolition of prisons and police, students positioned historical anti-carceral…

This study investigates managerial logic and academic logic by analysing the impact of institutional strategy on undergraduate teaching at a Chinese research university. By reviewing the university strategy and education strategy and interviewing academics from the Engineering faculty, this research provides empirical evidence supporting the…

Academic freedom is understood as a set of individual protections and community practices for faculty to assess quality, promote truth-seeking, and advance the common good through research, teaching, and other expression. It is also understood as a set of institutional principles for universities when it comes to decision-making about academic…

Activism is becoming more pervasive within academia. Within this paper, we analyse different types of academic activism, focused on the effect these acts will have when enacted by a lecturer. First, a framework is created based on the concept of academic freedom, both in the form of Lerhfreiheit and Lernfreiheit. Second, a scale is suggested,…

The study aims at describing the role of recognition in education theory. Its starting point is the meaning and relevance of recognition in NAT (non-affirmative theory of education and Bildung). While NAT widely refers to classical modern approaches, two directions of present recognition theory are investigated to problematize NAT's triadic…

This article argues that it is only possible to teach without dread today if one does not value academic freedom. For these people, it is perfectly acceptable to be told what course they will teach, the content of those courses, and the modality of instruction. If one does not care about such things, then neoliberal academe with regard to teaching…

Determining the curriculum is the government's authority, in early 2022, the independent curriculum was launched. Implementing an independent curriculum is a challenge in itself for education in North Kalimantan. The reason is educational facilities in this region are not evenly distributed. However, several agencies have made efforts to continue…

This article addresses the problem of two extreme positions in the self-understanding of human beings namely ignoring culture or its over-determination. Though Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci are widely known to differ from each other in many respects, we endeavor a congruent reading to evolve a comprehensive perspective. We make avail of their…