Category: Podcast

Top 10 Stories of 2023 in American Higher Education

Hi.  I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. We’re going to mix up the format a little for this podcast. Joining me today is Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of the genuinely excellent book Higher Education Accountability from Johns Hopkins Press. In my view, Robert is among the sharpest eyes on the American higher education scene, someone who is always worth listening to.  In

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Post-Soviet Higher Education

In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union, despite the immense destruction that had been wreaked across its territory by the Nazi invasion of 1941-44, shocked the world with its rapid acquisition of what was then high technology, in particular with respect to the nuclear and space sectors. It also rose quickly ot have the world’s second largest university system, just behind the United States. Its prowess in education and Science provoked huge investments in higher education in science. But

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The Floating University

Last week I promised you we’d have Isak Froumin on to talk about post-Soviet higher education, but for technical reasons we’ve had to delay that broadcast until next week. Instead, today, we’re going to be taking a trip down memory lane – to 1926, and a rather remarkable educational experiment that originated at New York University. It was called – the Floating University. It was the brainchild of NYU’s James E. Lough—a professor and educational reformer with an entrepreneurial spirit.

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Chile: A Decade of Gratuidad

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and the is the World of Higher Education podcast. One of the biggest events of the last two decades in global higher education was the wave of student protests that hit Chile in 2011 and lasted for well over a year. They were not the most coherent of protests: the range of issues being discussed included financing of higher education, its quality, its governance, its admissions systems: and of course mass protests inevitably brought out others with unrelated

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Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) — Selecting a Rector

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Around the world, there are lots of different names of the people who run universities: Presidents, principals, vice-chancellors, rectors, etc. And there are also various ways of deciding who should get those jobs. Broadly speaking, there are two ways this gets done. In the first, either governments or lay Boards select people, hopefully based on merit. In the second, chief executive officers are elected by some kind

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