Hi all.  Enjoying summer yet?

Three recent works that I think are worth a peak at over the summer:

1.       George Fallis’ Rethinking Higher Education: Participation, Research and Differentiation.  The thing you need to know about George Fallis is that the size of the books he writes are all out of proportion to the point he is trying to make.  They’re good books, substantial books, useful books, but the actual point he makes could probably be made in an article of 15 pages or so.  And so it is here: this is a pretty good all-around 250 page look at the Ontario university system.  And at the end of the day he makes two original points: 1) demographic change means that there probably isn’t too much growth left in the Ontario system, so we should stop framing policy in terms of access; and, 2) what Ontario really needs is a policy on university research and graduate studies, rather than allowing them to continue to grow haphazardly as afterthoughts to undergraduate enrolments. I’m not entirely sold on the first proposition (there’s scope from growth in people switching from colleges and universities, and there’s scope to grow from continued international enrolments), but he’s absolutely bang-on for the second one.  As a recommendation for policy it’s so far from current government practice that it’s basically in another time-zone, but it’s a point that needed to be made.

2.       Just released last week by The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada was a fascinating report entitled The Role of Education Agents in Canada’s Education Systems.  Authored by Robert Coffey and Leanne Perry of Michigan State University, the report provides everything from a survey of education providers about their use of education agents (less enlightening than you’d think), to an international comparison of rules and codes of conduct regarding the use of agents (Canada is apparently more of a wild west than, say, Australia or the UK), to a really top-notch discussion of why and how institutions use agents in the first place, and how misconduct occurs and is dealt with.  There’s little that’s earth-shattering in here, but as a primer on an increasingly important topic, it’s well worth a read.

3.       An edited volume of works on Australian higher education called The Dawkins Revolution 25 Years On (not available in Canada, but can be ordered directly through Melbourne University Press).  Back in 1988, the country’s Education Minister, John Dawkins, brought in a series of changes (converting colleges into universities, introducing a limited amount of competition into funding, and introducing student charges via the Higher Education Contribution System) that fundamentally restructured higher education in a way rarely seen anywhere in the world, let alone Australia.  This excellent book of essays from people like Simon Marginson, Bruce Chapman, Gavin Moodie, Julie Wells ,and Andrew Norton both traces the development of the Dawkins agenda and cogently explains its impacts over the subsequent 25 years.  It’s the kind of book you read and wonder “why can’t we write this kind of stuff in Canada”?  Part of the answer to that, of course, is that our system is much more fractured nationally and less amenable to single narratives than is Australia’s; part of it too is that we’ve never had anything as interesting as Dawkins’s reforms to write about.  But even so, our attempts at similar essay-collections (for example, Higher Education in Canada and A Challenge for Higher Education in Ontario fall short of the standard set here.  This book deserves a wide readership.