EditorialBack to the Future?hequ_510 1..2

This issue’s papers not only illustrate the range of endeavour withinhigher education but also the impact of key policy strands that drive andinfluence that endeavour. David Pick, Stephen Teo and Melissa Yeung,in contrast to multiple studies demonstrating the effect of ‘managerial’approaches on academic staff, illustrate that administrative staff, in thiscase in Australian universities, also feel pressures from time and resourceconstraints, inadequate communication, and a lack of autonomy. Asa positive student experience becomes an increasing imperative forindividual institutions, support for staff working at the point of servicedelivery, for instance via professional development and mentoring, arelikely to assume greater priority and prominence.

Philip Kelly and Yvonne Moogan focus specifically on the studentexperience as it relates to internationally mobile students and considerthe transition issues that they face, including language, culture, andimplicit social rules. They recommend that a transition period be builtinto the curriculum to ameliorate ‘transition shock’. Such a period wouldinclude additional tutor support and study-skills sessions. At the post-graduate level, Robin Humphrey, John Marshall and Laura Leonardoreview the increasing professionalisation of doctoral education via theintroduction of formal research training and codes of practice in the UKover the last decade.They conclude that this has had a positive effect onboth submission rates and educational outcomes. Furthermore, ‘Animportant challenge for the future will be to maintain recent improve-ments in doctoral education while adapting current institution-specificarrangements to meet the challenge of cross-institutional collaboration,which will be increasingly encouraged by the research councils’. In turn,John Douglass and Gregg Thomson consider the integration and perfor-mance of lower-income students in the more prestigious public univer-sities in the United States, in the context of declining representation ofsuch students, of the prospect of high unemployment in a period ofrecession, and of rising tuition fees.They call for more research into theextent to which such students are effectively priced out of the market by‘actual knowledge on the availability of financial aid and perceived andreal concerns with debt’.

Higher Education Quarterly, 0951–5224DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2011.00510.xVolume 66, No. 1, January 2012, pp 1–2

© 2012 The Authors. Higher Education Quarterly © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4, 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

By contrast, and in response to proposals in the United KingdomWhitePaper (BIS, 2011), Paul Gibbs and Carol Costley propose an alternativemodel of the university that might be termed ‘back to the future’, callingfor the development of a ‘pragmatic, workers’ community university’,based around learning contracts, localised provision by tutors, and ‘cre-ative engagement with pressing social problems’. Finally, and reflectingdebates about the purposes of higher education, Ourania Filippakou,Brian Salter and Ted Tapper consider whether the English higher educa-tion system can any longer be seen as a unitary system, as opposed to aseries of ‘overlapping, competing and somewhat unstable sectors’.

All these papers demonstrate current perturbations at global, systemand institutional levels, arising from the multiple arenas in which insti-tutions operate, and the competing considerations with which they areobliged to grapple, as they seek to both respond to and pre-empt therequirements of governments, students, clients and partners.

Reference

Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) (2011) Students at the Heart of theSystem. White Paper. London, The Stationery Office.

Dr Celia WhitchurchProfessor Lee Harvey

2 Higher Education Quarterly

© 2012 The Authors. Higher Education Quarterly © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.