This article considers how higher education institutions change over time, using the United Kingdom system as an exemplar, and focusing on the 15-year period between 1994/95 and 2009/10. While there are many aspects of institutional change worthy of study, the focus here is on how institutions appear to others. Thus, the article examines the…

Following the dismissal of a Canadian professor over disputed grading practices, Hill produced his triangle model of competing interests of academics, administrators and students. In the UK, academic freedom in relation to grading is increasingly constrained reflecting more assertive institutional management supervising over-burdened academic…

Higher education systems worldwide are currently facing a trio of competing challenges: increasing access and absorbing demand; promoting and safeguarding quality; and reducing and minimising costs to students, taxpayers and other investors. The growth of private (profit and not-for-profit) educational provision worldwide, in addition to other…

This article presents a new alphabet of the arts that shows how the arts world has been transformed the past five years. Beginning with "A" for assessment and continuing through "Y" for year end, the ABC of the arts illustrates the ways in which the arts world is judged, managed, and evaluated, and shows that the skill of arts…

This article proposes lifelong learning as a socio-personal process and a personal fact. As such, it is conceptually distinct from an educational provision, which constitutes one kind of institutional fact. In making this distinction, this article seeks to elaborate a major flaw in the precepts for conceptualisation and enactment of the report…

The call to be strategic--and with it the concept of strategic management--can bring to mind a wide range of definitions, and there is now a huge array of academic literature supporting the different schools of thought. At a basic level, however, strategic thinking is probably most simply about focusing on the whole, rather than the part. In…

This article discusses academic entrepreneurship in the context of ongoing changes in university management and governance in European universities. The comparative perspective is provided by the European Union (EU) research project "European Universities for Entrepreneurship: Their Role in the Europe of Knowledge" (EUEREK) comprising…

This paper is based mainly on responses--nearly 300--to a web-based survey of academic staff in UK higher education. The survey examined their personal and professional values and their views on the values that should underpin higher education. Their perceptions of current reality in terms of national policy and processes and of institutional…

"IMHE-Info" is the newsletter published by the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme of OECD. This issue includes: (1) Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society; (2) The Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO); and (3) City-Regions in Focus. Publications of interest, IMHE News, and a calendar…

The contribution of higher education institutions to regional development is a theme that has attracted growing attention in recent years. Knowledge institutions are increasingly expected not only to conduct education and research, but also to play an active role in the economic, social and cultural development of their regions. The extent to…