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In this broad sweep, Mayo explores dominant European discourses of higher education, in the contexts of different globalisations and neoliberalism, and examines its extension to a specific region. It explores alternatives in thinking and practice including those at the grassroots, also providing a situationally grounded project of university–community engagement. Signposts for further directions for higher education lifelong learning, with a social justice purpose, are provided.
minimises the role of the state and leaves everything to the market. Blame for failure is to be apportioned on to the individual rather than the state’s inability to provide the right structures for effective learning to take place at different stages of a person’s life. Many aspects of LLL are marketed as consumption goods, especially university extension study units recognised within the European credit transfer system (ECTS). Several learning opportunities are therefore provided at a price through the establishment of an education market. The discourse also made its
(Ball, 2007), helping to create or sustain, or both, a higher education market (Darmanin, 2009) as part of a market for LLL in general. This has been occurring in many countries of the Mediterranean 47 48 Higher education in a globalising WORLD for quite some time. One did not need to anticipate the creation of a higher education Mediterranean space for neoliberal tenets to creep in. They have been there for quite some time, assisted in certain cases by the adoption of military action (e.g., the 1980 coup in Turkey6). In many countries of the Mediterranean
10 The audit era and organisational learning – benchmarking and impact Context The increasing internationalisation of higher education markets has led to a surge in interest in the development of the measures which allow universities to measure themselves against each other, and to claim a relative pre-eminence of one kind or another that they can then use in marketing. ‘League tables’, as they are sometimes described, have proliferated in the last decade. At this point, there are no fewer than thirty noteworthy rankings, ranging from broad rankings of national
dominating common patterns of behaviour occurs in many fields of endeavour under twenty-first-century global free-market c onditions. Mass higher education is no exception. The Bologna Agreement is a prominent example of European governments moving towards a common structure for degrees and for quality assurance. Internationalisation of the higher education market puts pressure on some non-European nations to approximate the same arrangements. EU policies and EC funding induce approximation if not harmonisation: in research collaboration and industry partnership; in free
variables – the effects of government policies – from a host of others (Smithers 2007: 383). As a result, no consensus view has emerged. To take – for illustrative purposes – the issue of secondary education. On the one hand, Gorard and Fitz found ‘no evidence . . . to link education markets with increasing concentrations of disadvantaged children in some schools and their absence in others’ (Gorard and Fitz 2006: 281). Indeed, there was evidence of ‘some narrowing of the attainment gap between the most deprived and least deprived’ (Hill 2007b: 271). On the other
sector providers may need to stop providing a course or close a campus. Managed course changes and orderly institutional exits are a feature of a healthy, competitive and well-functioning higher education market.’20 This is obviously counter-intuitive in all kinds of ways. To suggest that failure is a natural sign of health is hardly rational: it is akin to suggesting that heart failure is a precondition of cardio-vascular and respiratory health in a human organism. It also implicitly endorses the idea that failure – and thus the ‘Closed University’ – is an absolute