Tertiary education policy is increasingly important on national agendas. The widespread recognition that tertiary education is a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy has made high-quality tertiary education more important than ever. The imperative for countries is to raise higher-level employment skills, to sustain a globally competitive research base and to improve knowledge dissemination to the benefit of society.

Tertiary education for the knowledge society

Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Nel Noddings. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2002. 342 pp. ISBN 0-52022556-2. $19.95 (paperback). Nel Noddings `starts at home' to develop an ethic of care to guide how social policies should cope with social problems. Beautifully and clearly written, she engages an extensive literature on ethics and care to challenge conventional scholarly work on the family and state. Philosophers have long thought it important to first envision an ideal state and then look to how families could support that state. In contrast, Noddings starts with ideal families and then looks to how the state can support those families. The result is her emphasis on an ethic of care, which underscores needs, as opposed to an ethic of justice, which more common to traditional liberal thought, underscores rights. The first section articulates a carefully thought out theory of care. First, she establishes that an ethic of care must `prevent or alleviate harm to others and to oneself' as well as responds to both the expressed and inferred needs of others. She critiques the liberal rational individual by emphasizing coercion can be necessary to meet inferred needs, such as preventing individuals from harming themselves. Moreover, in an insightful critique of liberalism's focus on `rights,' she argues that rights must be based on needs. Thus needs must be understood before rights can be established. Finally, she develops the concept of a relational self that beautifully challenges the liberal concept of a rational individual by emphasizing interdependence over autonomy. The concept of relational selves leads to the next section, which sets policy guidelines by establishing how `strong selves' are developed in `ideal homes.' Basic needs like shelter and adequate material resources are integral to all `ideal homes.' Further, careers must never inflict unnecessary pain and must attempt to remove or alleviate pain. In regard to shaping behavior, she makes a distinction between positive and negative desert. With negative desert pain is deliberately used to discourage unwanted behavior. Instead, she argues for positive desert, which structures positive incentives for acceptable behavior. In the final section she draws on lessons learned from ideal homes to inform policy approaches to three specific social problems: homelessness, deviance, and education. Homelessness is an expressed need that must be eradicated because a home is both a basic need and a part of one's identity. Deviance, in contrast, is an inferred need. Policies aimed at punishing deviance should be reconceptualized to meet the concept of positive desert. For example, instead of maintaining what is increasingly a destructive drug policy, policies should address the social problems that lead to problematic drug use. Finally, she argues education policy can both improve home life and make society more caring by educating for both private and public life. …

Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1016/S0952-8733(97)00011-1.pdf

Higher education markets and public policy

Mapping Australian higher education

New models of leadership are needed for the higher education sector to continue to graduate students with leading edge capabilities. While multiple theories of leadership exist, the higher education sector requires a less hierarchical approach that takes account of its specialised and professional context. Over the last decade the sector has explored new leadership approaches based on public and private sector models accompanied by an increase in managerial control, market competition, government scrutiny and organisational restructuring. These changes have increased the gap between academics and ‘other’ staff as academic autonomy has been reduced. This paper presents a distributive leadership approach that places emphasis on collective collaboration rather than individual power and control. It describes a self-enabling tool developed from the experience of four Australian universities that used a distributed leadership approach to build leadership capacity in learning and teaching. The authors identify t...

Distributed leadership: a collaborative framework for academics, executives and professionals in higher education

Higher education policy in international perspective: an overview (L. Goedegebuure, F. Kaiser, P. Maassen, E. de Weert). Higher education policy in Australia (L. Meek). Higher education policy in Califomia (W. Fox). Higher education policy in Denmark (P. Bache, P. Maassen). Higher education policy in France (F. Kaiser, G. Neave). Higher education policy in Germany (E. Frackman, E. de Weert). Higher education policy in Japan (A. Arimoto, E. de Weert). Higher education policy in the Netherlands (L. Goedegebuure, F. Kaiser, P. Maassen, E. de Weert). Higher educational policy in Ontario (G. Jones). Higher education policy in Sweden (G. Svanfeldt). Higher education policy in Switzerland (K. Weber). Higher education policy in the United Kingdom (J. Brennan, T. Shah). International perspectives on trends and issues in higher education policy (L. Goedegebuurre, F. Kaiser, P. Maassen, L. Meek, F. Van Vught, E. de Weert).

Higher Education Policy: An International Comparative Perspective

This is a pre-print of the report The attractiveness of the Australian academic profession: a comparative analysis [2009] published by LH Martin Institute, University of Melbourne & Australian Council for Educational Research & Educational Policy Institute.

/pdf/the-attractiveness-of-the-australian-academic-profession-a-4ezod8im9a.pdf

The attractiveness of the Australian academic profession : a comparative analysis

Australia's Casual Approach to Its Academic Teaching Workforce

Publisher’s version is restricted access in accordance with Taylor & Francis policy. The original publication is available at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1360080X.asp

Across the great divide: what do Australian academics think of university leadership? Advice from the CAP survey

In this section we present a preliminary overview of the outcomes of the Australian CAP survey. We must emphasize that this indeed is a first run through the data, that a full analysis has not been possible due to the limited time available since the closing of the survey, and that we still are in the process of coding the open questions. We therefore can only present some initial results. Since our responses are evenly distributed across males and females, and representative of the target population, we have chosen to present the results not in terms of the “average Australian academic” but rather in the persona of Colin and Cheryl (two popular names in 1960, the average year of birth of our respondents). When they are addressed as a couple, the outcomes pertain to the overall mean score on the item; when addressed separately, the outcomes obviously reflect the male and female positions. Percentages in brackets in the text indicate the mean score. The reader is referred to the questionnaire for the individual questions and their relevant response categories. This questionnaire is available from http://www.une.edu.au/chemp/projects/cap/resources.php

Lynn Meek

Papers

Higher Education Policy: An International Comparative Perspective

The attractiveness of the Australian academic profession : a comparative analysis

Australia's Casual Approach to Its Academic Teaching Workforce

Across the great divide: what do Australian academics think of university leadership? Advice from the CAP survey

The Australian academic profession in 2007 : a first analysis of the survey results