SRHE Newsletter
 |
Published by: SRHE Inhouse publication Frequency: Four issues per year SRHE Members - Free to members |
SRHE Newsletter
This is the newsletter of SRHE. The SRHE Newsletter gives SRHE news, details of upcoming events and reports on recent activities.
SRHE Newsletter is a members only publication and can be downloaded from the Members Area.
Out Now - SRHE News Issue 7 - February 2012
Extract from SRHE News 7 Editorial
What in the long term might be the consequences of current reforms and retrenchment, and what can history teach us? A century ago the revolutionary Victor Serge famously fell out with Lenin in what might be called a methodological dispute. Lenin is said to have justified revolutionary violence by quoting Robespierre: "you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs". To which Serge responded: "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's the omelette?" Four centuries earlier Thomas More, the 'man for all seasons', rebuked Secretary for Wales Richard Rich for his betrayal and perjury, an episode memorably expressed in Robert Bolt's 1966 film, but perhaps not otherwise in exactly these words: "Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?"
We can already see the broken eggs of job losses, spending cuts, higher fees and student debt. Do we risk sacrificing the soul of higher education, and if so, for what? What benefits would make these sacrifices worthwhile? The UK Government justifies its policy experiment in England, making all students pay almost all the cost of higher education teaching, by asserting that greater competition between better-informed students will drive up standards and the quality of the student learning experience. SRHE Vice-President Roger Brown argued in a lecture at the University of West London on 14 December 2011 that there is no evidence to support this proposition, and that quality assurance arrangements still embody the contrary position that quality is best promoted by regulation founded on peer review. His lecture title, 'Raising Quality or Nonsense on Stilts?' referenced another topical issue – a new airport for London – which also gains much from taking the long view. Peter Self in 1970 borrowed Jonathan Swift's phrase in demolishing the supposedly 'rational' analysis by the Roskill Commission of the case for a third London airport.
SRHE Member Savings:SRHE Newsletter is FREE to all SRHE Members.
the global higher education research community…