Tag: mission

  • Support the Mission of the University of Oregon (United Academics of the University of Oregon)

    Support the Mission of the University of Oregon (United Academics of the University of Oregon)

    Tuition has increased faster than
    inflation. State funding has increased faster than inflation.
    Administrator salaries have increased faster than inflation. Yet, the
    administration is demanding that the teachers, librarians, and
    researchers who drive the university’s educational mission take real
    wage cuts. 

    While everyone acknowledges the
    financial challenges facing higher education, the UO is receiving more
    money per student than ever before. If this money isn’t going toward
    student education and knowledge creation, where is it going?

    The Facts:

    Quality Education Requires Investment in Faculty

    The value of a University of Oregon degree depends on the quality of
    its professors, instructors, researchers, and librarians. When faculty
    wages erode due to artificial austerity, neglect, or slow attrition, it
    affects not only the quality of education and research, but also the
    long-term value of a UO degree for students and alumni alike.

    • UO faculty salaries rank near the bottom among our peer institutions in the American Association of Universities (AAU).
    • United Academics has proposed fair wage increases that would merely adjust salaries for inflation and restore them to pre-pandemic budget levels.
    • Despite pandemic-related learning loss, the administration is spending less on education per student (adjusted for inflation) than before COVID-19.
    • The administration has prioritized administrative growth over academic excellence, while faculty have taken on increased workloads since the pandemic.

    Faculty Sacrificed to Protect UO—Now It’s Time for Fair Wages

    During the pandemic, faculty agreed to potential pay reductions to
    help UO weather an uncertain financial future. We made sacrifices to
    ensure the university could continue to serve students. Now, as we
    bargain our first post-pandemic contract, the administration refuses to
    offer wage increases that:

    • Cover inflation
    • Acknowledge additional faculty labor since the pandemic
    • Recognize our unwavering commitment to UO’s educational mission

    Our Vision for UO: Excellence in Teaching & Research

    The University of Oregon’s mission is clear:

    “The University of Oregon is a comprehensive public research
    university committed to exceptional teaching, discovery, and service. We
    work at a human scale to generate big ideas. As a community of
    scholars, we help individuals question critically, think logically,
    reason effectively, communicate clearly, act creatively, and live
    ethically.”

    Our vision for the University of Oregon is one where the educational
    and research mission are at the fore; an institution of higher learning
    where we attract and maintain the best researchers and instructors and
    provide a world class education for the citizens of Oregon and beyond.
    Yes, this will take a shift in economic priorities, but only back to
    those before the pandemic. Our demands are neither extravagant nor
    frivolous. Our demand is that the fiduciaries of the University of
    Oregon perform their primary fiduciary duty: support the mission of the
    University of Oregon.

    Why This Matters Now

    We are currently in state-mandated mediation, a final step before a
    potential faculty strike. Striking is a last resort—faculty do not want
    to disrupt student learning. However, the administration’s arguments for
    austerity do not align with the university’s financial situation or
    acknowledge the increased faculty labor and inflated economic reality
    since the pandemic. If the administration does not relent, we may have
    no choice but to strike.

    We Need Your Support

    A strong show of support from the UO community—students, parents,
    alumni, donors, legislators and citizens of Oregon and beyond—can help
    pressure the administration to do the right thing. 

    Sign our Community Support Letter

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  • UK-Egypt mission sparks new era of higher education partnerships

    UK-Egypt mission sparks new era of higher education partnerships

    From 16-18 February 2025, a high-level delegation from the UK visited Egyptian universities: Ain Shams University, and European Universities in Egypt (EUE); with a planned visit to New Cairo Technological University, to explore possible collaborations between the two countries.

    “Over the course of three enriching days, the education team in Egypt led a higher education mission that was launched in the New Administrative Capital, under the patronage of the Minister of Higher Education through the Supreme Council of Universities and the Egyptian Bureau for Cultural and Educational Affairs in London in collaboration with the British Council in Egypt, and the support of the British Embassy,” Heba ElZein, director of education at the British Council in Egypt told The PIE.

    The delegation comprised representatives from prestigious UK universities, including Sheffield Hallam University, Loughborough University, the University of Essex, the University of East Anglia, the University of Exeter, and the University of Chester.

    Universities UK International representatives were also in attendance, with Anouf El-Daher, policy officer for Africa and Middle East at UUKi, presenting at the British Embassy in Cairo and British Council Egypt, highlighting the value of international collaboration and the potential for long-term, mutually beneficial, EU-Egypt education relationships.

    “Over three days, we visited higher education institutions across Egypt, gaining valuable insights into the local landscape and exploring opportunities for deeper collaboration. This mission allowed us to engage with key stakeholders, understand the evolving higher education landscape in Egypt, and witness the impact of UK-Egypt partnerships firsthand,” a LinkedIn post from UUKi read.

    Over the course of three enriching days, the education team in Egypt led a higher education mission that was launched in the New Administrative Capital
    Heba ElZein, British Council

    The mission offered numerous networking opportunities, as well as joint meetings for Egyptian universities wishing to cooperate and discuss opportunities with their British counterparts.

    The delegation’s primary focus was to foster academic exchange, establish international university branch campus opportunities, and strengthen research collaborations. One of the most significant outcomes of the visit was the signing of multiple Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) between UK and Egyptian universities.

    During that high-profile participation, three MoUs were signed between the University of Essex and Ain Shams University, the University of East Anglia and Ain Shams University, and the University of Sheffield Hallam and the British University in Egypt.

    These agreements are expected to facilitate joint programs, faculty exchanges, and shared research initiatives in the coming years.

    Students in Egypt show a strong interest in TNE as the UK-affiliated programs offer tuition fees from £800 to £13,500, depending on the partnership model. And due to economic and currency challenges, Egyptians are increasingly likely to opt to study in Egypt on a TNE model, as well as inbound students to the country, primarily from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria, and Iraq.

    Thus, with a population of around 111 million, and a youthful median age of 24.3, Egypt leads the MENA region in TNE enrolments with 27,865 students in 2022-2023, making it the 5th largest UK TNE host country globally.

    Egypt has emerged as a leading host of UK transnational education students in the MENA region, and the UK remains Egypt’s largest partner in higher education.

    This delegation’s visit is part of a broader initiative to further deepen these ties and provide Egyptian students with greater access to high-quality British education.

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  • Higher ed must resist authoritarian rule. It’s the mission.

    Higher ed must resist authoritarian rule. It’s the mission.

    Together, we should be clear on what President Donald Trump is trying to do to higher education.

    Destroy it. Whatever public rationales he or his administration release, the intent of his actions is clear, so if we’re going to discuss responses to those actions, we must remember, always, that Donald Trump is trying to destroy higher education.

    Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times gets it; the rest of us should, too.

    This goal is not new. In 2021 in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, future vice president JD Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance (and Trump) are open admirers of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, who has subjugated the once-free higher education institutions of his country to his own needs.

    This is the Trump/Vance playbook. The unannounced, unilateral (now paused thanks to court intervention) cuts to NIH grants, and the Dear Colleague letter that goes well beyond, and even actively distorts current law to threaten institutions with punishment for failing to obey, are just the latest attacks in a war that has been going on for quite some time, and not just at the federal level, but in the states as well, as exemplified by Ron DeSantis’s wanton destruction of Florida’s New College.

    Sadly, as callous, counterproductive and wasteful of taxpayer money as it was, DeSantis taking a wrecking ball to New College in order to install his cronies while recruiting enough athletes for three baseball teams—despite New College not being in an athletic conference—was within the power of the state’s chief executive.

    What Trump is doing to higher education institutions is not. It should be unthinkable for institutions to obey diktats that are not only unlawful, but in direct conflict with the purported mission of the institution.

    If any institutional leaders are thinking that if they do just enough compliance with Trump’s demands, he will stop the war, they are kidding themselves.

    How is the rush to declare institutional neutrality to not just words but actions, as enacted by Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier last year, working out? Surely they are feeling secure knowing that they got ahead of the abuse.

    What’s that? That isn’t happening? Turns out Vanderbilt has had to pause graduate student admissions because of concerns about funding. I guess surrendering in advance wasn’t the way to go.

    I used Vanderbilt only because it was a recent, handy example, not the only one. The silence from major, well-resourced higher education institutions is truly deafening.

    Writing at her personal website, Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education and civil rights attorney, calls the Dear Colleague letter “regulation by intimidation,” which is exactly right. Bending the knee at this moment only demonstrates the effectiveness of intimidation.

    Wernz walks through a number of ways the advisories in the letter go well beyond well-established law, while also making an additional important point: Trump is busy gutting the very agencies that would be able to do the investigation and enforcement of institutions they believe are in violation of legal regulations. This reality, plus the various procedural steps involved in these investigations, suggests that it may be far more advantageous to dig in and run out the clock of this initial flurry, particularly when existing law is clearly on your side.

    But this doesn’t seem to be the strategy for most institutions. They are going to hope this goes away. Trying to make yourself a smaller target doesn’t mean the people intent on destroying you are going to stop attacking.

    Interestingly, the group of higher ed leaders who are … uh … leading belong to the Education for All coalition, primarily consisting of community college administrators. Under the “freedom’s just another world for nothing left to lose” theory, this should not be surprising. Giving in to the Trump administration’s demands to give up on providing educational opportunities to diverse cohorts of students with different desires and needs would be to abandon their work entirely. Their defiance is both principled and practical.

    To me, this suggests that the more prestigious institutions that are cowering in the face of the intimidation perhaps do not see their mission in terms of providing access to all. In a lot of ways, the present situation is primarily revealing that which we already knew—that the interests in diversity, equity and inclusion in elite spaces were a virtue-signaling scrim over the much less savory reality of wealth and exclusion.

    Look, I’m getting worked up here. The truth is, I don’t wish any harm on any higher education institution, but the institutions with the most resources, most power and most influence must step up.

    The present threat goes well beyond an attack on the institutional coffers. These attacks on higher education are part of a much broader push toward authoritarianism as a federal executive (and his minions) direct the actions of formerly free institutions and people.

    The good news is that should institutions stand up for themselves, I think they will find many people standing up with them, including, most importantly, the students. Unfortunately, the longer institutions hesitate to stand for the values they claim to hold, the more distrust they’re sowing with the very constituencies who could save them, who do not want to destroy them, but the opposite, who want to see them thrive.

    The stakes are almost impossibly high. Shouldn’t we act like it?

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  • A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    by Ellen Hazelkorn, Hamish Coates, Hans de Wit & Tessa Delaquil

    Making research relevant to policy

    In recent years there has been heightened attention being given to the importance of scholarly endeavour making a real impact on and for society. Yet, despite a five-fold increase in journal articles published on higher education in the last twenty years, the OECD warns of a serious “disconnect between education policy, research and practice”.

    As higher education systems have grown and diversified, it appears with ever increasing frequency that policy is made on the slow, on the run, or not at all. Even in the most regulated systems, gone is the decades-long approach of lifetime civil servants advancing copperplate notes on papyrus through governmental machines designed to sustain flow and augment harmony. In the era of 24-hour deliberation, reporting and muddling through, it may seem that conceptually rooted analysis of policy and policymaking is on the nose or has been replaced by political expediency.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a more important time to analyse, design, evaluate, critique, integrate, compare and innovate higher education policy. Fast policy invokes a swift need for imaginative reflection. Light policy demands counterbalancing shovel loads of intellectual backfilling. Comparative analysis is solvent for parochial policy. Policy stasis, when it stalks, must be cured by ingenious, ironic, and incisive admonition.

    Governments worldwide expect research to provide leaders and policymakers with evidence that will improve the quality of teaching and education, learning outcomes and skills development, regional innovation and knowledge diffusion, and help solve society’s problems. Yet, efforts to enhance the research-policy-practice nexus fall far short of this ambition.

    Policy influencers are more likely to be ministerial advisory boards and commissioned reports than journal articles and monographs, exactly opposite to what incentivizes academics. Rankings haven’t helped, measuring ‘impact’ in terms of discredited citation scores despite lots of research and efforts to the contrary.

    Academics continue to argue the purpose of academic research is to produce ‘pure’ fundamental research, rather than undertake public-funded research. And despite universities promoting impactful research of public value, scholars complain of many barriers to entry.

    The policy reviews solution

    Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRiHE) aims to push out the boundaries and encourage scholars to explore a wide range of policy themes. Despite higher education sitting within a complex knowledge-research-innovation ecosystem, touching on all elements from macro-economic to foreign policy to environmental policy, our research lens and interests are far too narrow. We seem to be asking the same questions. But the policy and public lens is changing.

    Concerns are less about elites and building ‘world-class universities’ for a tiny minority, and much more about pressing social issues such as: regional disparities and ‘left-behind communities’, technical and vocational education and training, non-university pathways, skills and skills mismatch, flexible learning opportunities given new demographies, sustainable regional development, funding and efficiency, and technological capability and artificial intelligence. Of course, all of this carries implications for governance and system design, an area in which much more evidence-based research is required.

    As joint editors we are especially keen to encourage submissions which can help address such issues, and to draw on research to produce solutions rather than simply critique. We encourage potential authors to ask questions outside the box, and explore how these different issues play out in different countries, and accordingly discuss the experiences, the lessons, and the implications from which others can learn.

    Solutions for policy reviews

    Coming into its ninth year, PRiHE is platform for people in and around government to learn about the sector they govern, for professionals in the sector to keep abreast of genuinely relevant developments, and for interested people around the world to learn about what is often (including for insiders!) a genuinely opaque and complex and certainly sui generis environment.

    As our above remarks contend, the nature of contemporary higher education politics, policy and practice cannot be simplified or taken for granted. Journal topics, contributions, and interlocutors must also change and keep pace. Indeed, the very idea of an ‘academic journal’ must itself be reconsidered within a truly global and fully online education and research environment. Rightly, therefore, PRiHE keeps moving.

    With renewed vim and vigour, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) has refreshed the Editorial Office and Editorial Board, and charged PRiHE to grow even more into a world-leading journal of mark and impact. Many further improvements have been made. For instance, the Editorial Office has worked with SRHE and the publisher Taylor and Francis to make several enhancements to editorial and journal processes and content.

    We encourage people to submit research articles or proposals for an article – which will be reviewed by the Editors and feedback provided in return. We also encourage people to submit commentary and book reviews – where the authors have sought to interrogate and discuss a key issue through a policy-oriented lens. See the ‘instructions for authors’ for details.

    Read, engage, and contribute

    This second bumper 2024 issue provides six intellectual slices into ideas, data and practices relevant to higher education policy. We smartly and optimistically advise that you download and perhaps even print out all papers, power off computers and phones, and spend a few hours reading these wonderful contributions. We particularly recommend this to aspiring policy researchers, researchers and consultants in the midst of their careers, and perhaps most especially to civil servants and related experts embedded in the world of policy itself.

    SRHE and the Editorial Office are looking ahead to a vibrant and strong future period of growth for PRiHE. A raft of direct and public promotion activities are planned. PRiHE is a journal designed to make a difference to policy and practice. The most important forms of academic engagement, of course, include reading, writing and reviewing. We welcome your contribution in these and other ways to the global PRiHE community.

    This blog is based on the editorial published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 16 November 2024) A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates. She is Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.

    Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert.

    Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Senior Fellow of the international Association of Universities.

    Tessa DeLaquil is postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at University College Dublin.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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