Category: Research

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

Back in the beginning, all higher education institutions were either professional schools or “ivory towers”. Town-gown relations were mostly about who had the right to punish students, and under what conditions landlords could charge students for lodging. The idea of the university as a national asset dates back only about two centuries, and as an industrial partner even more recently than that. Both of those ideas came from Germany. But the idea of a university as an engine of regional

When it comes to higher education, Africa is in a dilemma.  On the one hand, there are enormous pressures to expand access to higher education, ever more so since most countries introduced Universal Secondary Education twenty years ago.  On the other hand, the resources available to satisfy this demand – either public or private – are extremely limited.  What gets sacrificed?   Too often, it is universities’ research missions, where the payout is both long-term and uncertain. But that is hardly