Our guests this week are Andrea Petö from the Central European University in Vienna and Jo-Anne Dillabough of Cambridge University in the UK. These two are collaborators on the UK ESRC project Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey and the Horizon Europe project Rising nationalisms, shifting geopolitics and the future of European higher education and research openness. In early May, they jointly penned an article for University World News entitled New Deceptions: How Illiberalism is hijacking the university. Today’s discussion ranges over the history of higher education (haven’t universities been illiberal for most of their history), institutional ownership (are private universities necessarily illiberal?) and the role of federalism in moderating illiberalism. 

This week's guest is Dr. Gero Federkeil, head of international projects at the Centrum fur Hochschulenwicklung, or Center for Higher Education, in Gütersloh, Germany. He's with us to talk about two totally unrelated topics: the changing profile of university enrolments in Germany, and rankings — specifically U-Multirank. 

Today's guest today is Dr. Jisun Jung of the University of Hong Kong. She is an expert in Korean higher education and the discussion today ranges from the post-war history of higher education to the very real and immanent challenges that institutions are facing with respect to declining enrolment. 

Today's guest is Thomas Jorgensen, the Director for Policy Coordination and Foresight at the European University Association. He walk us through the way policy is made in Brussels and how European Commission has gradually acquired competencies in areas relevant to higher education.

This week's guest is Dr. Gerard Postiglione, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. In this episode, Gerry takes us through changes in higher education in China, from the initial opening under Deng Xiaoping, through the rapid system expansion under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, to the present system under Xi Jinping. 

To help sort out all the complexities of the US system, our guest today is Brendan Cantwell, professor at Michigan State University who specializes in the political economy of higher education. He takes us through some of the more notable state-level battles going on right now in America, the difference in how Republicans attack public vs private institutions, and most interestingly of all, the question of whether there is some actual governance objectives behind all of the culture wars, or whether it is just performative theatre.

Today my guest is Phil Hill, an ed tech consultant and Lead at Phill Hill and Associates. Today he joins us to talk about the last twenty years and how they have shaped the sector. The conversation ranges pretty widely across a number of topics here, one of the most interesting has to do with the historic role of MOOCs. Alex and Phil agree that they are a historic failure judged by the claims made about their impact at the time, but Phil argues – pretty persuasively, that they might just possibly have been a key turning point in the history of the delivery higher education.

Links:

• Phil Hill and Associates
• HESA's 2024 Canadian Federal Budget Commentary

Today's guest is Professor N. V. Varghese, the Vice Chancellor of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration in New Delhi. He's the co-editor of a recent book entitled India Higher Education Report 2021, Private Higher Education and he's with us today to discuss his book. Two points really stand out. The first is the truly different worlds inhabited by private colleges in India and that inhabited by private universities. And the second is the role that large corporations and philanthropists are playing in the development of these new top universities. 

Today's guest is Dr. Mykola Trofymenko, the President of Mariupol State University. He agreed to join the show to talk about the events of early 2022, how he steered the institution through the siege and after it, and how the institution, now known as “the Invincible University” came to gain a new home in Kyiv. It’s a harrowing story, but also an inspiring one — and one that gets to the heart of the question: what makes a university — bricks and mortar, or people?

To support Mariupol State University please click here.

This week we welcome back our very first podcast guest, Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy at Australian National University, to follow up on the Australian Universities Accord. Andrew has been at the forefront of higher education policy debates in Australia for over two decades, and is the author of several editions of “Mapping Australian Higher Education”. Today, Andrew's back to give us his expert take on questions including, what exactly does the final report recommend? How workable are recommendations? How much of it will the government actually choose to implement?

Links:

• Australian Universities Accord
• Mapping Australian Higher Education 2024
• The World of Higher Education, Season 1 Episode 1