Today's guest is Philip Altbach. Phil is Professor Emeritus at Boston College, the former Founding Director of that university's internationally-renowned Centre for International Higher Education, and author of countless books and articles on HE. The new book "Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective", which consists of a series of nine national case studies edited by Philip Altbach, Maria Yudkevich, Jamil Salmi is available here:

Academic Star Wars: Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective
Open Access Link

Joining us 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 his pre-administration life when he was at Seton Hall University, Robert kept up a very active blog o higher education issues, and one of his most-read features was an annual list of the top ten most important stories in American Higher Education, published each December.  We asked Robert a couple of months ago if he’d come on the show to reprise the top ten and to our great delight, he agreed.

Book link:
Higher Education Accountability

This week, we welcome Professor Isak Froumin onto the podcast. Froumin is Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Jacobs University, in Bremen Germany and the co-editor of two key books on what has happened to universities across the 15 ex-republics. The first, 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity, which appeared in 2018, and the second is Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries, out earlier this year from Palgrave Macmillan. The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics: how to develop system typologies in post-Soviet space, how various nations went about de-Sovietifcation and also how a few seem now to be re-Sovietizing just in the past couple of years.

Books:
25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity
Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from Post-Soviet Countries

With us today is Tamson Pietsch, author of a new book on the Floating University from the University of Chicago Press. Her book covers a number of facets of this story: the extraordinary journey itself to over 40 ports around the world, the students’ curriculum and on-shore activities (which included meeting an extraordinary number of world leaders), and the extraordinary shenanigans that went on between NYU and Lough that threatened to stop the voyage before it even began. It’s a multi-faceted story, concentrating to a significant extent on the politics of educational tourism: which students got to take part, what parts of the world were they shown, and how were local issues framed?

Book:
The Floating University

This week's episode features Paula Clasing Manquian, a postdoctoral researcher in education from Chile’s Nucleo Milenio de Educacion Superior. The discussion takes a look back at the past dozen years and how the politics of higher education in Chile have changed, including the rise of individuals such as Gabriel Boric, Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, the compromises that were required to bring “gratuidad” into existence, and how this policy has become universally accepted across the political spectrum. 

Today's guest is Marion Lloyd, a higher education researcher at UNAM, and she’s here today to give a tour of UNAM’s electoral system, the behind-the-scenes power politics that accompanies this process and handicaps the current race which is coming to a head in the next week or so.    

Today's guest is Raffaele Trapasso, a Senior Economist at the OECD who heads the that organizations Platform for the Entrepreneurship Education Collaboration and Engagement Network or EECOLE. This episode ranges over a number of issues including the role that the UN Sustainable Development Goals in focussing collaborations, how best to formalize ties between institutions and communities, and the continuing differences between Europe and America in terms of the pattern of collaboration.

Related Blog Post:
Smart Specialization

Today's guest is Dr. Ernest Aryeetey. He has not only led one of Africa’s premier universities — the University of Ghana — but is also currently the Secretary-General of the African Research Universities Alliance, or ARUA.

Previous episodes mentioned:
2.4: Higher Education in India
1.5: Corruption in South African Higher Education

Today our guest is Professor Marcelo Knobel.  He is a highly respected Physicist and Science Educator.  He also holds the rare distinction of having been a rector both at one of Brazil’s top public universities, Universidade Estadual de Campinas or UNICAMP and also at a rising private university, the Insper Institute of Education and Research in Sao Paolo.  And that makes him a fantastically knowledgeable guide to the growth, structure and politics of higher education in Brazil.

Today's guest is Dr. Pushkar — just one name — the Director and Chief Executive of the International Centre Goa, and a frequent commentator on higher education in India. Dr. Pushkar and Alex cover how the Modi government is attempting to raise standards through the creation of a National Research Foundation, a system of “Institutions of Eminence” and by inviting foreign universities to set up campuses on the country.