In this commentary, the author raises two critical aspects not adequately addressed in John Radford's (2008) wide ranging article on the teaching of psychology in higher education. The first aspect is the relevance of boundaries. The second aspect is the political context(s). These two issues, though artificially dissociated for current purposes,…

In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis-and-success narrative of British education reform to de-territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching…

This article proposes a framework within which the question as to the purposes of open universities should be examined. It argues that the question has become submerged over time through the establishment of so many open universities that have become natural elements in a higher education landscape rather than remaining radical and innovative…

While White politicians have long retreated to the academy in pursuit of highprofile jobs as professors and university presidents, the trend is relatively new for Black politicians who come to the academic setting after having served long political stints as state legislators, mayors and congressional leaders. Dr. Ronald Walters, a professor of…

This article reports that new federal ethics rules are creating headaches for colleges--and heartburn for their lobbyists. The rules, enacted last year in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, require colleges and lobbyists to report their political contributions and certify that they have complied with a new ban on gifts to members of…

According to a recent article in The New York Times, the political makeup of academe may be changing. In 2005 more than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50, compared with just 22.5 percent in 1969. Patricia Cohen, a reporter for the "Times," couples that with another intriguing fact: Recent studies…

The work of Edward Said and Raymond Williams exemplifies an important aspect of the role of the public intellectual as educator. This paper concentrates on the significance of their work as public educators and on the tradition of interpretive criticism as they developed it within the field of literary and cultural theory. The argument builds from…

Disability should be a concern for those interested in analysing and subverting the cultural politics of education. In this paper we address this concern through connecting critical analyses of "developmental disabilities" (formerly "mental retardation"), disability studies and poststructuralism. We target normative constructions of "developmental…

This paper addresses key themes in a new book of posthumously published writings by Paulo Freire, "Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished" (Paradigm Publishers, 2007). The paper comments on the structure and content of the book and places it in the context of Freire's wider corpus of published works. Particular attention is paid to…

In this article the author responds briefly to the three authors who reviewed his manuscript. Furthermore, he states that the service model that he proposed was not a compromise or a lesser goal for teachers than professional status; it was a more accurate and uplifting goal. The teacher as a service professional could have widespread support…

As both Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire would remind that obstacles must be named before being transcended, the author writes then with the intention of naming, and he names with the hope of transcending. For the purposes of this paper, transcendence means the replacement of a homogenizing public school system--one that indoctrinates children…

This article reports that a state ballot measure to ban affirmative-action programs based on race, gender, and national origin at public colleges and other state agencies was defeated. Colorado voters narrowly rejected such a referendum last week by a razor-thin margin that took two days to become official. Voters in Nebraska, however, took the…

Lyotard (1988) argued that the major problem of this time may be understood in terms of two issues: the impossibility of avoiding conflicts and the absence of a universal genre of discourse to regulate them. In this article, the authors closely follows Lyotard's ideas to problematize claims about the university of justice. Then, the authors…

This paper analyses the unfolding of the quality agenda in England from 1992 to the present. By using two disciplinary approaches, "political science" and "social philosophy", the article traces the recent transition from quality assurance to quality enhancement. How is this development to be explained and how significant is…

I analyze the current return of academic rural doubt in the US in terms of an old intellectual quandary: what is the rural? I argue that scholars have two dominant epistemologies of the rural, what I term first rural and second rural, and correspondingly different political visions. By first rural I mean the material moment of the rural, to which…