2nd Global Conference
The Idea of Education
Friday 4th July - Saturday 5th July 2003
Mansfield College, Oxford
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Session 3: Money,
Commerce & Education
Chair: Tony Tricker
Capital, Field, and Habitus
Lori Colliander
Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Much is written about how school background, family background,
and other components of social and cultural capital affect university-going
behaviour and university choice of undergraduate students. This body of
literature strongly suggests that participation in higher education is
affected by the extent to which one has access to information, people,
and finances.
Even though social class continues to be an obstacle to high education
participation in Britain, many socially disadvantaged students do overcome
such obstacles and make their way to university. Admission does not, however,
guarantee a smooth adjustment or continued success.
While we know quite a bit about the processes by which first-generation
(and otherwise socially disadvantaged) students make their way to university,
we know less about how such students manoeuvre through university. A broad
literature base provides useful perspectives on general student development
and the university experience, and a growing body of literature addresses
the development and experiences of specific student subgroups. Within
this literature, there is a void of work addressing the development and
experiences of socially disadvantaged students at university.
Government calls for wider participation from underrepresented social
groups; we can expect changes to the composition of the student population.
This, taken in conjunction with the lurking possibility of increased fees,
leads me to ask the following question: How, and to what extent, do socially
disadvantaged students perceive their social backgrounds to affect their
early academic and social experiences at university? This question needs
to be addressed, especially in light of research findings indicating that
low-SES students, once in university, are at greater risk of talent loss
as compared to the general student population.
This paper will explore Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, field, and
habitus, and the application of these concepts to a study investigating
the first-year experiences of approximately 40 socially disadvantaged
undergraduates at Oxford.
Edu-Business: the Hidden Presumptions of Commercially Derived Quality
Management in Higher Education
Trudi Cooper
Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
The adoption of commercially derived quality management
techniques in higher education worldwide has led to changes in the language
used to describe both the purposes of higher education and the relationships
between teachers and learners within higher education. This paper examines
whether the presumption that business relationships can be applied to
the context of higher education can be justified. This question is important
because the commercially derived methods of quality management commonly
used in universities rely upon the tacit assumption that the there is
‘business’, which has ‘customers’ who buy ‘products’.
If these terms cannot be meaningfully applied to education, then commercially
derived quality management methods are inapplicable to universities and
the measurement and management of quality in higher education will need
to be re-thought from first principles.
The paper reports part of a study of the application of quality management
in higher education in Australia. The study examines how quality is conceptualised
in government policy documents, by university management and by the quality
review panels that report on the quality of individual courses within
Australian Universities. The study concludes that the current usage of
‘quality’ in higher education relies heavily on the presumption
that the language of business is applicable to education, but that examination
of key document illustrates that application of this language uncovers
irresolvable contradictions. The recommendations arising from the study
suggest that quality in higher education must be conceptualised to take
account of differences between the context of education (its purposes,
the nature of its internal and external relationships) and that of business.
Further, policies to promote quality need to take account of systemic
effects of the total combination of government policy interventions.
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Paper - 
“Show Me the Money” The Changing Nature of the Research/Teaching
Nexus
in the ‘Modern University’
Tom Claes
Department of Philosophy, Ghent University, Belgium
The ‘modern university’ operates within a larger social, cultural, intellectual, political and, last but not least, economic context. The contemporary university—traditionally taken as a free haven for disinterested research and education—becomes more and more embedded within an economic project, tailored to the needs of individual nation-states and regions. Scarce financial resources and the need to promote economic growth deeply influence the dominant models in science policy, and hence the ways of financing and organising the university. Traditionally, the research/teaching nexus is seen as the heart of the university. The basic argument of this paper is that recent changes in the type of preferred research and the way in which this research is carried out has some fundamental consequences for the identity of the ‘modern university.’
In this paper I will focus on three, interrelated, questions:
a) what are the main characteristics of the new economic rationale for
the university?
b) what are the emerging dominant types of university research that accompany
this new rationale?
b) how does this influence the research and teaching mission of the university?
I will argue that modern models of (economic) innovation and of the relation between university, industry and government (cfr. the Triple Helix model), together with recent models and typologies of knowledge production (cfr. the models of Stokes, Gibbons, ‘Jeffersonian science’, etc.) provide an ideological & intellectual justification for a fundamental transformation of the ‘modern university.’ According to some, the changes that result from this could very well have some serious consequences for ‘the university,’ resulting, e.g., in the creation of two distinct types of institutions, one focussing on research, one on teaching, thereby effectively destroying the very idea of a university. Others welcome the new structures and possibilities and argue that the changes could lead to the disappearance of an outdated model of the university, and result in the emergence of types of universities that are better tuned to the needs of society. Both positions will be critically examined.
3.30pm
Tea
4:00pm Roundtable
4:30pm
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