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

With us today is Maria Yudkevich, a professor of Higher Education at the University of Haifa in Israel. She is the co-author, with Yaroslav Kuzminov of the excellent book Higher Education in Russia, published in 2022 by Johns Hopkins Press. She’s an expert guide to both the elements of change and continuity that have gone along with a century of constant upheaval, and, as a former academic in the Russian system, she also has a strong sense of the current system’s strengths and weaknesses. Maybe her most interesting point has to do with the nature of power in and over Russian universities: that even when universities appeared to have autonomy, the arm of the state was never that far apart. 

With us this week is David Kernohan, Deputy Editor of the website WonkHE. which is as close to a sister organization to Higher Education Strategy Associates as exists anywhere on the globe, David, more than anyone, has been tracking the development of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement since it was a wee nugget of a policy notion. He tells us about how the policy has changed over time, what recent pilot projects tell us about the policy’s chances for success are and – crucially – gives us some odds on the likelihood of this policy ever seeing the light of day given the number of still-unanswered questions on policy details and the upcoming UK elections.

With us today is Courtney Brown, Vice President of Impact and Planning at Lumina Foundation and the person most responsible for making sure the foundation hits its goals and develops new and even more meaningful ones. The conversation covers how Lumina went about its goal setting process, what tactics it's used to build a wide network of alliances across the U.S., how close it's come to succeeding in its goals, and what the organization's next set of goals might be. 

Today's guest is Angela Yung-Chi Hou. She is currently a Professor of National Chengchi University in Taipei and for nearly two decades has been the foremost English-language scholar of Taiwanese higher education. Bu her career has not been restricted to Academia; for much of the past few years she was also head of the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan, which is one of the most important bodies in the Taiwanese higher ed ecosystem. That makes her an ideal guide to the history and politics of higher education in Taiwan.

Our guest this week is Alex Usher, President and CEO of Higher Education Strategy Associates. Alex joins co-producer Tiffany MacLennan to talk about the Canadian Higher Education sector, higher education consulting, and his thoughts on the future of higher education. 

Today's guest is Andrée Sursock, a higher education consultant and Senior Advisor to the European Universities Association. She's here to take us on a guided tour of the French system and its history and also to describe the rapid pace of reforms that have taken place over the last two decades, in particular through the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.

Past episodes referenced:
1.10: Autonomy Scorecard

Books referenced:
Academic Star Wars, Excellence Initiatives in Global Perspective
Edited by Jamil Salmi, Philip Altbach, Maria Yudkevich

Today's guest is Dr. Morshidi Sirat. He’s one of Malaysia’s most experienced higher education observers and policy-makers. Over the last two decades he;s been a Dean, a Vice-Chancellor, Advisor to the Minister of Higher Education, Director General of Higher Education for Malaysia and the Founding Director of Malaysia’s Commonwealth Tertiary Education Facility. In our discussion, he guides us through the ins-and-outs of Malaysia’s success over many decades of higher education investment. 

With us today is Roger Smyth. He’s a consultant based in Christchurch New Zealand and a former senior official in New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, and he’s had a privileged perch to observe changes in the country’s student assistance policies over the past two decades. Roger is skeptical about the value of the new program. But what was fascinating in this interview is how much evidence actually exists that the previous policy of making first year free had almost no impact either.

Links referenced:

• Education Counts: Fees Free tertiary education
• Roger Smyth: The new take on fees free

Today my guest is Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester University of Minnesota and currently a president in residence — that's really a thing — at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. He's just written a book about academic politics with the wonderful title, “Whatever It Is, I'm Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. In it, Rosenberg describes how powerless are most universities, those supposed bastions of evidence and truth, to get their faculty to actually pay attention to anything regarding to the science of learning. Or even getting faculty to collectively agree to change of any sort.

Link to book:
“Whatever It Is, I'm Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education

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