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Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Big tech, AI, and the future of epistemic agency in higher education

by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manuel F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum

Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.

At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.

From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers

Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.

Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.

This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.

Big tech and the politics of knowing

The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.

This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.

The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant

The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.

That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.

The drift toward organised immaturity

Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.

In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.

Reclaiming epistemic agency

So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.

In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’

In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.

Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.

Why this matters to you

Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.

Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.

Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.

Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.


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Studying abroad at home: why Korean students are choosing US branch campuses in Korea

by Kyuseok Kim

In South Korea, education has long been the most powerful route to social mobility and prestige, but a recent study shows how that pursuit is changing. Published in the Asia Pacific Education Review (2025), one of the newest article in transnational education (TNE) research investigates why Korean students are now choosing to study at US branch campuses located inside their own country rather than traveling abroad. Focusing on N University, a US-affiliated institution within the Incheon Global Campus, the study explores how students balance ambition, constraint, and identity in one of the world’s most competitive education systems.

Korea’s higher education landscape is characterised by rigid hierarchies in which the name of a university often outweighs individual academic or professional ability. Admission to elite institutions such as Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei University is still viewed as a ticket to success. At the same time, US degrees continue to hold exceptional symbolic power, representing international competence, social status, and career advantage. Yet, for many families, studying abroad is prohibitively expensive, while competition for domestic university places remains intense. The result is that a growing number of students are enrolling in American branch campuses at home, institutions that promise the prestige of a US education without the cost and distance of overseas study.

To explain this trend, the researchers propose a Trilateral Push–Pull Model. Traditional models of student mobility describe decision-making as a process between two countries or schools: one that pushes students out and another that pulls them in. However, international branch campuses (IBCs) add a third dimension. Korean universities push students away through limited access and rigid hierarchies. US universities attract them with prestige and global capital but are often out of reach financially and logistically. The IBC exists between these poles, offering an American degree and English-language instruction within Korea’s borders. This framework captures how students navigate overlapping pressures from domestic and global systems.

Drawing on interviews with 21 Korean students, the study reveals several interconnected findings. Many participants viewed the IBC as a second choice, not their first preference but a realistic and strategic option when other routes were blocked. They were attracted by the prestige of American degree, USstyle curriculum (in English), smaller classes, and opportunities for studying at the home campus abroad. At the same time, they expressed anxiety about the ambiguous status of their institution. Several students described N University as “in between”, uncertain whether it was truly American or fully Korean. This ambiguity, they said, made it difficult to explain their school to relatives, peers, or teachers, who were unfamiliar with the branch campus model. In a culture where school reputation carries great weight, such uncertainty caused unease even when students were satisfied with their learning experience.

The study also underscores the continuing role of family influence and educational aspiration. Many students reported growing up in households where parents believed education was the only reliable path to success and were willing to make sacrifices for English proficiency and global exposure. For these families, IBCs offered a middle ground: a way to obtain a foreign education without leaving home or paying international tuition. Students who attended Korean secondary schools typically saw the IBC as an alternative after failing to gain admission to top domestic universities. Those with international or bilingual school backgrounds viewed it as a substitute for studying abroad, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic made overseas education less appealing or feasible.

In both groups, the IBC served as a strategic compromise. It allowed students to maintain a sense of global ambition while avoiding the financial, emotional, and logistical risks of full international mobility. It also provided a form of what sociologist Jongyoung Kim calls global cultural capital: the symbolic value and recognition that come with foreign credentials. By earning an American degree at home, students could claim global status without physically migrating. This pattern illustrates how globalisation in higher education is increasingly taking place within national borders.

Beyond individual motivations, the study connects these choices to larger demographic and policy challenges. Korea’s declining college-age population and government-imposed tuition freezes have created fierce competition among universities for a shrinking pool of students. In this environment, IBCs serve dual roles: they act as pressure valves that absorb unmet domestic demand and as prestige bridges that connect local students to the symbolic power of American education. However, their long-term sustainability remains uncertain. Many IBCs struggle with limited public visibility, uneven recognition, and questions about academic legitimacy. Unless they establish a clearer institutional identity and stronger integration within the local higher education system, they risk being viewed as peripheral rather than prestigious.

The research also broadens theoretical understanding of international education. By incorporating the IBC as a third actor in the push–pull framework, the study challenges the assumption that global learning always requires cross-border mobility. It also refines the concept of global cultural capital, showing that students can now accumulate globally valued credentials and symbolic advantage through domestic avenues. In countries like South Korea, where education is deeply tied to social status, this shift represents an important transformation. The global and the local are no longer opposites but increasingly intertwined within the same institutional spaces.

In conclusion, Korean students’ choices to enroll in US branch campuses reveal a strategic negotiation between aspiration and limitation. These institutions appeal not to those lacking ambition but to those who seek to reconcile global goals with financial and social realities. They reflect a world in which higher education is simultaneously global and local, mobile and immobile. For IBCs to thrive, they must move beyond copying Western models and instead cultivate programs that are meaningful in their local contexts while maintaining international quality.

This article summarizes the research findings from ‘Choosing a U.S. Branch Campus in Korea: A Case Study of Korean Students’ Decision-Making through the Trilateral Push–Pull Model’ by Kyuseok Kim, Hyunju Lee, and Kiyong Byun, published in the Asia Pacific Education Review (2025).

Kyuseok Kim is a PhD candidate at Korea University and a Centre Director of IES Seoul.


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Higher Education, High Hopes, and Heavy Bureaucracy

by Phil Power-Mason and Helen Charlton

UK higher education is pulled between its lofty ambitions for transformative learning and the managerialism that sometimes constrains their realisation. This tension defines the contemporary Higher Education workplace, where the mantras of “more with less” and “highly regulated freedom” collide with the desire for rich, personalised student experiences amidst fiscal belt-tightening, quantification, and standardisation. Bubbling through the cracks in any long-term political or economic vision for the sector is a professional identity steeped in ambivalence of purpose and position, one whose contradictions are nowhere rendered more vividly than in England’s higher and degree apprenticeships (HDAs). Conceived to braid university learning with workplace productivity, HDAs promise the best of both worlds yet must be delivered within one of the most prescriptive funding and inspection regimes in UK higher education. This provision also sits amidst a precarious and volatile political landscape, with continuous changes to funding rules, age limits and eligibility of different levels of study, and ‘fit’ within a still poorly defined skills and lifelong learning landscape.  

At the heart of this ongoing policy experiment stands an until-recently invisible workforce:  Higher Education Tripartite Practitioners (HETP). These quiet actors emerged as a series of pragmatic institution level responses to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA, now subsumed into the Department of Education) related to progress reviews involving the provider, apprentice, and employer. Yet, as we argued in our paper at the SRHE International Conference in December last year, they have evolved into nuanced, often misunderstood boundary-spanners who simultaneously inhabit academia, industry, and compliance. Part coach, part conduit, part compliance specialist, they facilitate developmental conversations, broker cultural differences, and ensure every clause of the ESFA rulebook is honoured. The quality of this brokerage is decisive; without it even the most carefully designed apprenticeship fractures under audit pressure.

Consider the core activities of HETPs. Much of their time is spent in close personal engagement with apprentices – fostering professional growth, guiding reflective practice, and offering pastoral support traditionally associated with mentoring. They encourage apprentices to think holistically, integrate theory with workplace reality, and map long-term career aspirations. Almost simultaneously, they must document progress reviews, monitor the evidence of every single hour of learning, and tick every regulatory box along a journey from initial skills analysis through to end point assessment.

This duality produces a daily oscillation between inspiring conversations and tedious paperwork. The tension is palpable and exhausting, revealing a deeper struggle between two visions of education: one expansive, transformative, and relational; the other restrictive, measurable, and dominated by compliance. Fuller and Unwin’s expansive–restrictive continuum maps neatly onto this predicament, underscoring how universities are urged by policymakers to deliver high-skilled graduates for economic growth while simultaneously squeezed by intensifying regulation and managerial oversight.

Little wonder, then, that HETPs describe their roles with the language of complexity, ambiguity, and invisibility. They are neither purely academic nor purely administrative. Instead, they occupy a liminal institutional space, mediating competing demands from employers, regulators, apprentices, and colleagues. Esmond captures the resulting “subaltern” status of these practitioners, whose contributions remain undervalued even as they shoulder the brunt of institutional attempts to innovate without overhauling legacy systems.

Their experiences lay bare the contradictions of contemporary university innovation. Institutions routinely trumpet responsiveness to labour-market need yet bolt new programmes onto structures optimised for conventional classroom delivery, leaving HETPs to reconcile expansive educational ideals with restrictive managerial realities. The role becomes a flashpoint: universities ask boundary-spanners to maintain quality, build relationships, and inspire learners within systems designed for something else entirely.

Yet amidst these tensions lies opportunity. The very ambiguity of the HETP role highlights the limits of existing support systems and points towards new professional identities and career pathways. Formal recognition of boundary-spanning expertise – relationship-building, negotiation, adaptability – would allow practitioners to progress without abandoning what makes their contribution distinctive. Communities of practice could break the apprenticeship echo-chamber and enrich the wider HE ecosystem, while institutional investment in bespoke professional development would equip practitioners to navigate the inherent tensions of their work.

Senior leadership must also acknowledge the strategic value of these hidden roles, reframing them not as incidental administrative burdens but as essential catalysts for integrated educational practice. Making such roles visible and valued would help universities reconcile expansive aspirations with regulatory realities and signal genuine commitment to reshaping education for contemporary challenges.

Policymakers and regulators, too, have lessons to learn. While accountability has its place, overly rigid compliance frameworks risk stifling innovation. Trust-based, proportionate regulation – emphasising quality, transparency, and developmental outcomes – would free practitioners to focus on learning rather than bureaucratic survival. The current neo-liberal distrust that imagines only regulation can safeguard public value inflates compliance costs and undermines the very economic ambitions it seeks to serve.

Ultimately, the emergence of HETPs challenges HE institutions to decide how serious they are about bridging academic learning and workplace practice. Recognising and empowering these quiet brokers would signal a genuine commitment to integrated, expansive education – an education capable of meeting economic demands without losing sight of deeper human and intellectual aspirations. HETPs are far more than practitioners managing checklists; they are a critical juncture at which universities must choose either to treat boundary-spanning labour as a stop-gap or to embrace the complexity and potential it represents.

Dr Phil Power-Mason is Head of Department for Strategic Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, where he leads a diverse portfolio spanning executive education, apprenticeships and professional doctorates. A practice-focussed academic with a passion for innovative workforce development, Phil has overseen significant growth in the school’s business apprenticeships, MBA, and generalist provision, while nurturing cross-sector partnerships and embedding work-aligned learning at every level. With a research background in educational governance and strategy, he is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and co-convenor of national apprenticeship knowledge networks. Phil’s research and sector leadership focus on emerging pedagogic and HE workforce practices, driving collaborative solutions that meet employer, learner and university needs. An invited speaker at national forums and a frequent contributor to sector conferences and publications, he remains committed to transforming vocational and work-ready learning practice for the future. (herts.ac.uk)

Dr Helen Charlton is Associate Professor of Work Aligned Learning and Head of Executive Education at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, where she leads the school’s business apprenticeships, executive CPD and distance-learning programmes. After almost a decade steering apprenticeship design and compliance, she stays keenly attuned to each fresh regulatory tweak – and the learning opportunities it provides. A former senior HR manager in the arts and not-for-profit sectors, Helen holds a Doctorate in Education and an MSc in Human Resource Management, is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE, a Chartered MCIPD, and a Chartered Manager and Fellow of the CMI. Her research examines how learners, employers and universities negotiate the tripartite realities of degree apprenticeships. (northumbria.ac.uk)


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Branch campuses and the mirage of demand

by Kyuseok Kim

As US universities confront declining domestic enrolments, political instability, and intensified scrutiny over their financial and ideological foundations, a growing number are once again looking outward. International branch campuses (IBCs), once celebrated as symbols of academic globalism and later scrutinized as costly misadventures, seem to be returning to the strategic conversation, not only as diversification mechanisms but also as protective pivots in an era of unpredictability.

Georgetown University’s decision to extend its Qatar campus for another decade and the Illinois Institute of Technology’s plan to launch a new campus in Mumbai are recent examples. Behind such moves lies a quiet but growing calculus: that global presence may serve as both brand amplifier and institutional hedge, especially in the face of resurging nationalism, culture wars, and regulatory constraints at home.

South Korea’s Incheon Global Campus (IGC), a government-backed transnational education hub, is now preparing to welcome two additional foreign universities and one of them is American. But as the IGC experiment has already entered its second decade, its mixed results offer not a template but a cautionary tale. For any U.S. institution considering overseas expansion, IGC reminds us that expectations of seamless demand, regional magnetism, and reputational uplift often collide with complex realities.

The pitfall of assuming “If you build it, they will come”

At the heart of many US institutions’ international ventures lies a persistent assumption: that placing an American university within geographic proximity to large student markets will organically generate demand. IGC was envisioned as a Northeast Asian education magnet, ideally situated to recruit from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and beyond. The notion was that Korea’s infrastructure, safety, and proximity, combined with US academic credentials, would make IGC highly attractive.

But the numbers tell a different story. As of 2024, IGC’s five institutions, SUNY Korea (Home of Stony Brook University, Fashion Institute of Technology), George Mason University Korea (GMUK), University of Utah Asia Campus (UAC), Ghent University Global Campus (GUGC), enrol about 4,300 students, far short of the original 10,000 target. Among them, only 400 are international students, accounting for 9%. And of those, just around 20 are from China, the very country that was expected to be a key source of enrolments.

This dearth is not for lack of infrastructure or academic rigor. Rather, it illustrates the limitations of relying on passive geographic logic. In an age where students and parents are increasingly sophisticated consumers of education, recruitment requires far more than proximity or even prestige. It demands clarity of value, strong brand presence, affordability, cultural alignment, and a persuasive post-graduation pathway.

English-medium instruction as a double-edged sword

US institutions often assume that English-medium instruction (EMI) automatically confers competitive advantage in Asia. At IGC, all programs are delivered entirely in English, and faculty are predominantly international; 188 of the 304 faculty members across the five campuses are foreign nationals. On paper, this aligns with global academic norms and affirms a commitment to international standards.

However, EMI can paradoxically limit access. While affluent Korean students may see EMI as an elite advantage, students from Vietnam, China, and Indonesia often seek local cultural immersion, language acquisition, and regional relevance. For many Chinese students in particular, one of the draws of studying in Korea is precisely to learn Korean and gain access to Korean labour markets. EMI-only models thus alienate both local integration seekers and English-language learners.

Moreover, when EMI is not paired with robust academic support services, such as English-language tutoring, multilingual advising, or transitional curriculum tracks, it can undermine retention and student success. IGC’s high leave-of-absence rate (26% of total enrolment) may in part reflect this challenge. The EMI strategy, while noble in intent, must therefore be contextualised. In transnational campuses, language policy is not just a delivery decision, it is a recruitment strategy.

Misplaced confidence in institutional brand recognition

American universities often overestimate their brand power abroad. SUNY Korea, anchored by Stony Brook University, and GMUK both represent reputable public institutions in the US academic ecosystem. Yet in East Asia, brand equity does not always travel well. Many students and parents in China, Southeast Asia, and even Korea struggle to distinguish among US institutions unless they are among the globally top-ranked or highly visible.

In contrast, joint-venture universities such as NYU Shanghai or Duke Kunshan benefit from stronger recognition, thanks in part to the halo effect of globally prestigious parent institutions and active marketing within China. These institutions also benefit from location-based credibility; being within China, their offerings align more naturally with Chinese career and immigration aspirations.

Geopolitical frictions and the fragility of demand

US institutions frequently see international branch campuses as safe havens from domestic politics. Yet international expansion brings its own geopolitical risks. IGC’s failure to attract Chinese students cannot be separated from the lingering effects of the 2017 THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) dispute – a regional conflict that emerged when South Korea agreed to deploy a US missile defense system on its soil. China strongly opposed it, viewing the system as a threat to its own strategic interests. In response, China imposed strong sanctions on South Korea, which led to the challenges in  educational diplomacy between two countries. Nor can it be divorced from the broader geopolitics of US-China relations, which makes Chinese families wary of American degrees, especially those delivered from politically allied countries like Korea.

There is also the perception gap between a degree “from a U.S. university” and a degree “earned in Korea.” Even when academic standards and credentials are identical, students and employers may view transnational degrees as second-tier or less prestigious. For example, in Korea, IGC campuses are often viewed as a second choice in the stratified higher education structure locally. The reputational buffer that a US degree once offered is increasingly interrogated, especially in environments where political affiliations, social conditions, and post-graduation options matter more than branding. In this sense, branch campuses are not outside the storm; they are situated in a different part of it.

A US-oriented reality check within the local contexts

For US universities, the decision to open a branch campus abroad is no longer a question of academic vision alone; it is a financial and reputational calculation. The domestic context is sobering: declining birth rates are shrinking the college-aged population, public trust in higher education is waning, and federal support for research and student aid is increasingly politicised. Internationalisation is no longer just an opportunity; it is increasingly seen as a survival strategy.

But survival strategies must be strategic, not reactionary. IGC’s challenges illustrate what happens when institutions pursue global expansion without first understanding the local education marketplace. Without granular market research, locally embedded partnerships, and nuanced branding strategies, even well-intentioned ventures become “white elephants”, costly and underutilized. A forthcoming US institution entering IGC would have an opportunity to learn from these lessons and chart a different path. But it must begin with humility and cross-cultural understanding.

This concern is heightened by structural reforms driven by demographic decline and the growing uncertainly embedded in Korea’s higher education system. As competition for enrolment intensifies, some struggling institutions see IGC’s local recruitment as a threat, even calling it a “brain drain within Korean territory,” since most IGC students are Korean. While IGC claims it draws students who would have studied abroad, offering a net economic benefit, that argument may fall flat for universities fighting to stay afloat.

Conclusion: toward a more grounded globalism

The story of Incheon Global Campus is not one of failure, but rather a valuable case study. It reflects a potential disconnection between institutional ambition and market behaviour; between the idea of internationalisation and its on-the-ground execution. It reminds us that proximity to students is not the same as access, and that transnational education requires more than exporting curricula across borders, it demands building relevance across cultures.

For US universities hoping to extend their reach, the time for romantic notions of global campuses has passed. What is needed now is realism. That means conducting rigorous market analysis. It means understanding the competitive landscape; not just in Seoul or Shanghai, but in second-tier cities where price sensitivity and post-graduation pathways determine enrolment decisions. It means creating flexible programs that can respond to local aspirations and global uncertainties. It means designing campuses that feel anchored, not transplanted.

The myth that a US branch campus in South Korea will become a magnet for students across Asia, particularly from China, has not materialised. With only a handful of Chinese students across IGC’s entire enrolment, it is clear that assumptions must be rethought. Transnational education remains a worthy goal. But if the next generation of branch campuses is to thrive, especially in East Asia, it must be forged not in the image of prestige, but in the crucible of strategy. It must be attentive, adaptive, and above all, aware.

Kyuseok Kim (KS) is the inaugural Center Director of IES Abroad Seoul, where he leads strategic, academic, and operational initiatives while building partnerships with local institutions. He brings extensive experience in student recruitment, international relations, and business development, with prior roles at UWAY, M Square Media, SUNY Korea, and Sungkyunkwan University. KS is a Fulbright Scholar and a doctoral candidate in Educational Administration and Higher Education at Korea University. He holds an MBA from Sungkyunkwan University and a BA in English Language Education from Korea University. As a scholar-practitioner, he contributes regularly to both international and South Korean publications on global education topics. ks.kyuseok.kim@gmail.com  www.linkedin.com/in/ks-kim-intled


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Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy

by Fadia Dakka

The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022).  These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.

In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.

Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.

In such a climate, pressures to develop core academic skills such as academic writing abound, as a quick glance at the vast literature available to both novice and accomplished researchers to help them improve the quality and quantity of writing reveals (eg Sword, 2017, 2023; Murray, 2025; Wyse, 2017; Moran, 2019; Young & Ferguson, 2021; Thomson, 2023; Sternad & Power, 2023). 

Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).

Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1] [FD2] 

In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.

The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.

As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.

Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’  with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.

Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.

The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).

The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld.  Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.

This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).

The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.

The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.

The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.

Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.

Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.

Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).

However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.

The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.

Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.


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Promoting access to higher education worldwide

by Graeme Atherton

The shift to the political right in many countries in the world, including it appears the UK now, presents a new set of challenges for equitable access and success to higher education. Not that it needed any new ones. Inequalities in participation in higher education are pervasive, entrenched and low on the list of priorities of most governments. Since the early 2010s we have been working with other organisations across the world including the World Bank and UNESCO to understand the extent and nature of these inequalities but more importantly to initiate activities to address them. In 2016 working with colleagues including the late, great Geoff Whitty I undertook a project to bring together as much secondary data we could on who participates in higher education by social background across the world.

The Drawing the Global Access Map report found that in all the countries where we could find data (over 90%) higher education participation was unequal. The extent of this inequality differs but it binds together countries and higher education systems of all varieties. Following convening 2 global conferences on higher education access around the time of this report in an attempt to galvanise the global higher education community, we then launched World Access to Higher Education Day (WAHED) in 2018. The aim of WAHED was to create a vehicle that would enable universities to launch activities to address inequalities in access and success on the day in their own place. As the pandemic hit we also started a global online conference and up to 2022 over 1000 organisations from over 100 countries engaged in WAHED. We also produced research to mark the day including the All Around the World – Equity Policies Across the Globe report in 2018 which looked at policies on higher education equity in over 70 countries. The report found that only 32% of the countries surveyed have defined specific participation targets for any equity group and only 11% have formulated a comprehensive equity strategy.

WAHED played an important role as a catalyst for activism, especially in contexts where individuals or departments felt that they were acting in isolation. However, progress will be limited if efforts are restricted just to an International Day of Action. Hence, in December 2024, working again with the World Bank, UNESCO as well as Equity Practitioners in Higher Education in Australasia (EPHEA), and a number of educational foundations, we launched the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). The aim of WAHEN is to construct an alliance for global, collective action on higher education equity and more information can be found here. It will focus on:

•              Capacity Building via the sharing, professionalisation and enhancement of practice in learning, teaching and pre-HE outreach

•              Collaboration – enabling organisations to formulate and deliver shared goals through a set of global communities of practice.

•              Convening – bringing together those from across countries and sectors to affect change in higher education through World Access to Higher Education Day.

•              Campaigning – advocating and working with policymakers and governments around the world producing research and evidence.

•              Critical thinking – creating an online space where the knowledge based on ‘what works’ in equitable access and success can be developed & shared.

It was because there was a national organisation that works to tackle inequalities in higher education in the UK, the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), that I founded and led for 13 years, that WAHED and WAHEN happened. NEON led these efforts to build a global network. There remains a large way to go for WAHEN to be sustainable and impactful. We are working intently on how to position WAHEN and how it should focus its efforts. Inequalities in access and success are locally defined. They can’t be defined from a Euro-centric perspective, and they can also only be tackled through primarily work that is regional or national. The added value of international collaboration in this area needs to be articulated, it can’t be assumed. But at the same time, nor should the default assumption be that such a network or collaboration is less required where equitable access and success is concerned than in other parts of higher education. This assumption encapsulates the very problem at hand, ie the lack of willingness to recognise the extent of these inequalities and make the changes necessary to start to address them.

The present challenges to higher education presented by the global shift to the right brings into sharp focus the consequences of a failure to deal with these inequalities. Universities and left leaning governments are unable to frame higher education as open and available to all with the potential to enter. The accusations of elitism and the threats to academic freedom etc then become an easier sell to electorates for whom higher education has never mattered, or those in their family/community. It is more important than ever then that something like WAHEN exists. It is essential that we develop the tools that give higher education systems across the world to become more equitable and to resist populist narratives, and that we do this now.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford.

A hybrid conference Access and Geopolitics: Next Steps in Tackling the Equity Crisis in Global Higher Education, was held on 3 June 2025 at the Department of Education in Oxford, jointly organised by WAHEN, The Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). There were almost 40 presentations on: the politics – and geopolitics – of widening participation; the challenge of financing access; private provision and higher education as a public good; populism and the equity ‘backlash’; and, the challenge of generating meaningful participation data. Speakers included: John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, England;  Dr Jamil Salmi, global tertiary education expert; Professor Shamit Saggar, Executive Director of Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success; Professor Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education, Oxford and President of the British Sociological Association; Professor Johanna Waters, Professor of Human Geography, UCL; Dr James Robson, Director of SKOPE and Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, Oxford; Graeme Atherton, Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN) and Vice Principal, Ruskin College, Oxford; and Danielle Watkis, DPhil student, Department of Education, Oxford. A full record of the event will soon be available on the CGHE website.


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Risk-based quality regulation – drivers and dynamics in Australian higher education

by Joseph David Blacklock, Jeanette Baird and Bjørn Stensaker

Risk-based’ models for higher education quality regulation have been increasingly popular in higher education globally. At the same time there is limited knowledge of how risk-based regulation can be implemented effectively.

Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) started to implement risk-based regulation in 2011, aiming at an approach balancing regulatory necessity, risk and proportionate regulation. Our recent published study analyses TEQSA’s evolution between 2011 and 2024 to contribute to an emerging body of research on the practice of risk-based regulation in higher education.

The challenges of risk-based regulation

Risk-based approaches are seen as a way to create more effective and efficient regulation, targeting resources to the areas or institutions of greatest risk. However, it is widely acknowledged that sector-specificities, political economy and social context exert a significant influence on the practice of risk-based regulation (Black and Baldwin, 2010). Choices made by the regulator also affect its stakeholders and its perceived effectiveness – consider, for example, whose ideas about risk are privileged. Balancing the expectations of these stakeholders, along with their federal mandate, has required much in the way of compromise.

The evolution of TEQSA’s approaches

Our study uses a conceptual framework suggested by Hood et al (2001) for comparative analyses of regimes of risk regulation that charts aspects respectively of context and content. With this as a starting point we end up with two theoretical constructs of ‘hyper-regulation’ and ‘dynamic regulation’ as a way to analyse the development of TEQSA over time. These opposing concepts of regulatory approach represent both theoretical and empirical executions of the risk-based model within higher education.

From extensive document analysis, independent third-party analysis, and Delphi interviews, we identify three phases to TEQSA’s approach:

  • 2011-2013, marked by practices similar to ‘hyper-regulation’, including suspicion of institutions, burdensome requests for information and a perception that there was little ‘risk-based’ discrimination in use
  • 2014-2018, marked by the use of more indicators of ‘dynamic regulation’, including reduced evidence requirements for low-risk providers, sensitivity to the motivational postures of providers (Braithwaite et al. 1994), and more provider self-assurance
  • 2019-2024, marked by a broader approach to the identification of risks, greater attention to systemic risks, and more visible engagement with Federal Government policy, as well as the disruption of the pandemic.

Across these three periods, we map a series of contextual and content factors to chart those that have remained more constant and those that have varied more widely over time.

Of course, we do not suggest that TEQSA’s actions fit precisely into these timeframes, nor do we suggest that its actions have been guided by a wholly consistent regulatory philosophy in each phase. After the early and very visible adjustment of TEQSA’s approach, there has been an ongoing series of smaller changes, influenced also by the available resources, the views of successive TEQSA commissioners and the wider higher education landscape as a whole.

Lessons learned

Our analysis, building on ideas and perspectives from Hood, Rothstein and Baldwin offers a comparatively simple yet informative taxonomy for future empirical research.

TEQSA’s start-up phase, in which a hyper-regulatory approach was used, can be linked to a contextual need of the Federal Government at the time to support Australia’s international education industry, leading to the rather dominant judicial framing of its role. However, TEQSA’s initial regulatory stance failed to take account of the largely compliant regulatory posture of the universities that enrol around 90% of higher education students in Australia, and of the strength of this interest group. The new agency was understandably nervous about Government perceptions of its performance, however, a broader initial charting of stakeholder risk perspectives could have provided better guardrails. Similarly, a wider questioning of the sources of risk in TEQSA’s first and second phases could have highlighted more systemic risks.

A further lesson for new risk-based regulators is to ensure that the regulator itself has a strong understanding of risks in the sector, to guide its analyses, and can readily obtain the data to generate robust risk assessments.

Our study illustrates that risk-based regulation in practice is as negotiable as any other regulatory instrument. The ebb and flow of TEQSA’s engagement with the Federal Government and other stakeholders provides the context. As predicted by various authors, constant vigilance and regular recalibration are needed by the regulator as the external risk landscape changes and the wider interests of government and stakeholders dictate. The extent to which there is political tolerance for any ‘failure’ of a risk-based regulator is often unstated and always variable.

Joseph David Blacklock is a graduate of the University of Oslo’s Master’s of Higher Education degree, with a special interest in risk-based regulation and government instruments for managing quality within higher education.

Jeanette Baird consults on tertiary education quality assurance and strategy in Australia and internationally. She is Adjunct Professor of Higher Education at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.

Bjørn Stensaker is a professor of higher education at University of Oslo, specializing in studies of policy, reform and change in higher education. He has published widely on these issues in a range of academic journals and other outlets.

This blog is based on our article in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 29 April 2025):

Blacklock, JD, Baird, J & Stensaker, B (2025) ‘Evolutionary stages in risk-based quality regulation in Australian higher education 2011–2024’ Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1–23.


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Talking the talk: language for learning in higher education

by Estefania Gamarra, Marion Heron, Lewis Baker and Harriet Tenenbaum

Do you remember when you started university, and you were expected to use a whole new language? We don’t just mean new nomenclature such as ‘seminars’ or ‘tutorials’, but language that can help you make a clear argument or disagree politely with a classmate. This language, or educational dialogue, and in particular disagreeing politely, is critical to be an engaged citizen in a healthy democracy, without otherwise descending into unhealthy practices such as ‘cancel culture’ as recently highlighted in the media. In this blog post, we argue that universities have a responsibility not only to teach students how to talk in an academic context, but also for this teaching to be discipline-specific and embedded in the disciplinary study where possible.

There is a long-held misperception that all students who start university are able to talk the talk of the university, that is, they have the language skills, the terminology, and the confidence to articulate their opinions from their first day. This is just simply not true for many undergraduate students. Having English as a first language is also not necessarily an advantage. Bourdieu et al (1994, p8) said, “academic language… is no one’s mother tongue, not even that of children of the cultivated classes”.

What do we mean by language here? We have drawn on the pedagogy and research from compulsory school education, namely the work of scholars at Cambridge University. Their work on educational dialogue has been successfully incorporated into school teaching with impressive results. Educational dialogue here refers to communicative acts such as agreeing, disagreeing, reasoning and expressing ideas. Research in school settings has shown that encouraging such dialogue can boost academic attainment. One study highlighted the relationship between elaborating on ideas and attainment in reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Despite this compelling evidence, similar strategies have been underexplored in higher education.

In our university classrooms, we hear students say things such as: ‘I know the answer, but don’t know how to phrase it’ and ‘I need to learn how to express my answer like that’. So, if students are themselves noticing a need for academic language, why are we so behind in the higher education context? And more importantly, what language do these students need? Do they all need the same academic language to confidently talk the talk? This is exemplified by the dialogue below between two engineering students working on answering multiple-choice questions together, an excerpt from our forthcoming research:

Student A:  Yeah, listen, we need to be able when we say “force”, to say why.  

Student B:  Yeah, to flip it.  

Student A:  Because we were right, like, C is incorrect, but we don’t say why it is not incorrect.  

Student B:  I don’t know how to word it, you know.

In our current research project, supported by a Nuffield Foundation grant, we explore whether pairs of Foundation Year students across Engineering, Psychology and Bioscience, engaging in discipline-specific multiple-choice questions, can learn to develop these academic language skills and the extent to which they can do this in an academic year-long intervention programme.

Our early findings indicate that while students are capable of using academic language, the forms they adopt vary by discipline. For example, consider one of the most basic interactions in academic discussions – giving and asking for reasons. Typically, the default marker for requesting justification is “why?”. The following extract from a psychology discussion illustrates this:

Student A:  Why do you think that is?

Student B:  Because, uh, if you got negative emotion, you know, so that is not called positive psychology. Yep, yeah, so I’m thinking about understanding like how to prevent negative emotions.

In contrast, in science courses such as biology or engineering, it was more common to use “how?” rather than “why?” when asking for reasoning. Consider this extract from an engineering discussion:

Student A:  Yes. Then the same as D.

Student B:  D? How?

Student A:  And then it’s…

Student B:  Oh.

Student A:  And this is…

Student B:  So the arrow goes this way…

Student A:  So then P goes this way…

Here, Student B not only asks for the reasoning by using “how?”, but the response unfolds as a sequence of steps outlining the reasoning process. This example also highlights another subject-specific difference: while psychology students typically expand on each other’s arguments or examples, engineering students more frequently build on each other’s equations, often with the assistance of pen and paper.

So, based on these snippets of authentic student dialogues, let’s return to the question posed at the beginning. Yes, all students can and do need to learn academic language to talk to each other and develop understanding, but the type of language depends on the discipline. Disciplinary differences can be seen in the way students build on each other’s ideas (eg long turns, short turns) as well as the words and phrases used. The evidence from our project shows this.

We argue that learning to talk the language of higher education should not be considered a prerequisite but instead, should be an essential feature of the higher education curriculum embedded within disciplinary studies.

Why is this important? Integrating academic language training into the curriculum can enhance students’ academic confidence, foster a stronger sense of belonging, and ultimately improve retention rates. In a post‐COVID world, where student engagement is waning, this conversation‐based approach may also help rebuild the social and collaborative fabric of university life.

Moreover, the skills developed through such training are highly transferable beyond academia. Students acquire essential discussion and teamwork abilities that prove invaluable in their future careers. It is important to emphasise that developing these skills requires deliberate training; we must not assume that students will acquire them without practice and guidance.

Although students may already use discipline‐specific language, targeted training helps them become accustomed to engaging in – and, more importantly, listening to – disagreement. These conversational practices become part of their repertoires, enabling them to generalize these skills across various contexts. As noted earlier, we must all learn to engage in constructive disagreement to counteract cancel culture. While the manner of such discourse may vary by discipline, developing these skills is essential for active participation in a healthy, thriving democracy.

Estefania Gamarra Burga is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Surrey. Her research interests include educational dialogue, discourse analysis, gender, and spatial cognition in STEM and higher education.

Marion Heron is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey. She supervises doctoral students on topics in the field of applied linguistics and higher education. She researches in the areas of language and education, with a particular interest in classroom discourse, genre and doctoral education.

Lewis Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and a Chartered Science Teacher. His research interests include teaching pedagogy and science education, often within a foundation year context.

Harriet Tenenbaum is Professor of Social and Developmental Psychology. Her research focuses on social justice in young people, everyday conversations, and teaching and learning across the lifespan.


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Private international foundation courses, and what they say about university leadership

by Morten Hansen

My research on the history of private international pathway providers and their public alternatives shows how some universities have stopped believing in themselves. Reversing this trend requires investment in their capabilities and leadership.

The idea that universities have stopped believing in themselves as institutions that can take on the challenges of the day and find solutions that are better than those developed by private rivals echoes a point recently revived by Mariana Mazzucato. Mazzucato explains how private firms often are portrayed like lions. Bold animals that make things happen. The public sector and third-sector organisations, on the contrary, are too often seen as gerbils. Timid animals that are no good at developing new and innovative solutions.

Skilled salesmen convinced some universities that private companies are better than universities at teaching and recruiting for university preparatory programmes. The inbuilt premise of this pitch is that universities are gerbils and private providers are lions. One university staff member explained what it felt like meeting such salesmen:

“The thing that sticks most in my mind is the dress. And how these people sat differently, looked differently, spoke differently, and we felt parochial. We felt like a bunch of country bumpkins against some big suits.” (University staff)

The lion-gerbil pitch worked in institutions across England because universities were stifled by three interlocking practices of inaction: outsourcing capability development; taking ambiguous stands on international tuition fees; and refusing to cooperate with other universities.

Outsourcing capability

Universities are increasingly outsourcing core aspects of their operations, such as recruiting international students. While university leadership is often characterised as conservative, my research suggest that this trope misses something critical about contemporary university leadership in English higher education. The problem with the term ‘conservative’ is that it implies that leadership is risk-averse, and comfortable projecting past power structures, practices and norms into the future. This does not correspond to historical developments and practices in the sector for international pathways.

The University of Exeter, for example, submitted incorporation documents for their limited liability partnership with INTO University Partnerships only six years after the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000 was passed, which marked the first time in England’s history that this legal setup was possible. They took a big leap of faith in the private sector’s ability to recruit students for them, and after doing so invested time and resources helping INTO to further develop its capability. They even invited them onto their campuses. It is hard to overstate how much these actions diverged from historical practice and thus ‘conservative’ leadership.

What was once a highly unusual thing to do, has over the last two decades thoroughly normalised—to the extent that partnering with pathways now seems unavoidable. One respondent from the private sector explained this change in the following way:

“In 2006, ‘07, ‘08, ‘09, ‘10, the pathway providers were, if you like, the unwelcome tenants in the stately home of the university. We had to be suffered because we did something for them. Now, the relationship has totally moved. It’s almost as if they roll out the red carpet for the pathway providers” (C-suite)

The far more conservative strategy would have been to lean into the university’s core capabilities – teaching and admissions – and scale this up over time. Yet that is precisely what my respondents said ‘conservative’ university leaders were unwilling to do: they did not believe the university could manage overseas recruitment by themselves. As argued by former Warwick VC Nigel Thrift, this timidity is not unique to the recruitment of international students, but also extends to their engagement with government agencies. University management by and large “has done as it has been told. It hasn’t exactly rolled over and played dead, but sometimes it can feel as though it is dangerously close to Stockholm Syndrome” (Thrift, 2025, p3).

Ambiguous stands on international fees have deepened the current crises

There is no law in England that compels universities to charge high international students fees. By setting them as high as possible and rapidly increasing the intake of international students, universities de facto offset and thus obfuscated the havoc that changing funding regimes wreaked on university finances. This has contributed to what Kings’ Vice Chancellor Shitij Kapur calls the ‘triangle of sadness’ between domestic students, universities, and the government.

Had universities chosen to stand in solidarity with their international students by aligning their fees more closely to the fees of home students, then the subsequent crises in funding would have forced universities to either spend less money, or make it clearer to the wider public that more funding was needed, before building up the dependencies and subsequent vulnerabilities to intake fluctuations that are currently on full display. These vulnerabilities were exacerbated by overoptimistic growth plans, and university leadership not always fully understanding the added costs that came with such growth. In an example of this delayed realisation, one Pro-Vice-Chancellor explained to me what it felt like to partner with a private foundation pathway:

“At the time you are signing up for these things, there is euphoria around because they are going to deliver against this business plan, which is showing hundreds of students coming in. International student is very buoyant, you sign up for a 35-year deal. So, everything is rosy. If you then just take a step back and think ‘so what am I exposing the university to?’  …  because in year seven, eight, ten, fifteen whatever, it can all go pear-shaped, and you are left then with the legacy building.” (Pro-Vice-Chancellor)

By seeing fee setting as a practice, that is, something universities do to their own students rather than something that is inflicted by external (market or government) powers, we make visible its ideological nature and implications. The longer history of international fees in Brittan was thus an important site of ideological co-option; it was a critical juncture at which universities could have related in a more solidaric manner towards their students.

Unwillingness to cooperate on increased student acquisition costs

You might, at this stage, be wondering: what was the alternative? The answer is in recognising the structure of the market for what it is: efficiently recruiting and training a large number of international students requires some degree of cooperation between universities. My research, however, suggests that universities have often been unwilling to cooperate because they see each other chiefly as competitors. This competition is highly unequal given the advantage conferred to prestigious universities located in internationally well-known cities.

The irony is that many universities nevertheless end up – perhaps unwittingly – cooperating by partnering with one of the few private companies that offer international foundation programmes. These private providers can only reach economies of scale because they partner with multiple universities at the same time. One executive explains how carrying a portfolio of universities for agents to offer their clients is precisely what gives them a competitive advantage:

“The importance of the pathways to the agents is that they carry a portfolio of universities, and the ambition is that you have some which are very well-ranked and academically quite difficult to get into. And, you try and have a bottom-feeder or two, which is relatively easy to get into academically. The agent is then able to talk to its clients and say, look, I can get offers into these universities. Some of them are at the very top. If you are not good enough there, then you might get one in the middle and I’ve always got my insurance offer for you. […] what the pathways do is that they provide a portfolio that makes that easier.” (Private Executive)

A public consortium with pooled resources and that isn’t shy about strategically coordinating student flows would have functioned just as well, and the Northern Consortium is living proof of this. The consortium in fact inspired Study Group to get into the pathway business themselves. The limited growth of the Consortium, relative to its private rivals, is equally proof of missed chances and wasted opportunities.

Could the gerbil eat the lion?

Private providers can use and have used these practices of inaction to pit universities against each other, over time resulting in lower entry requirements and higher recruitment costs. In this climate, public alternatives such as in-house programmes struggle to survive. Once invited in, pathway companies are also well positioned to expand their business with their partner universities in other ways, deepening their dependence. As one senior executive told me:

“Our aspiration is to say that the heart of what we are is a good partner to universities. They trust us. […] for some of our core partners, we bring in a lot of revenue. And, that then puts us in a really good position to think about the other services that we can add of value.” (Private Executive)

The economic downside of relying on these ‘good’ partners is the expensive and volatile market dynamics that follow. As long as universities are trapped by the notion that they are chiefly competitors best served by outsourcing capabilities to sales-oriented firms and leaving international students to pick up the bill, there is limited hope for any genuine inter-university collaboration and innovation. This limits the public potential for scaling an economically viable and resilient market in the long-run.  As a sector, HE has the know-how, experience, capital, and repute to do this. It’s just about getting on with it!

Morten Hansen is a Lecturer in Digital Economy and Innovation Education at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

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Editorial: 60 Years of the Society for Research into Higher Education

by Rob Cuthbert

Yesterday

Issue No 60 of SRHE News appears by happy coincidence in the 60th year since the Society for Research into Higher Education was established (“all my troubles seemed so far away”). Reminiscences can often be reinforced by the musical soundtrack of the time, as ours will be. Many readers of SRHE News and Blog weren’t born in 1965, but let’s not allow such small obstacles to deflect us, when everybody knows the tunes anyway. Here are a few reminders of how things were 60 years ago, in 1965.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

As the Rolling Stones sang: “I tried, and I tried, and I tried and I tried, I can’t get no satisfaction”, the message resonated with 30,000 potential HE students who could not get admitted to higher education in UK universities in 1965, with only 50,000 places available. Only about 4% of the rising cohort of 18 year olds won admission to the 25 universities in existence in 1965. Most people left school at 15; the school-leaving age was only raised to 16 in 1971.

The Robbins Report two years earlier had punctuated, but not initiated, the accelerating expansion of demand and need for more higher education, reflected in the 1960s with the creation of the new plateglass universities, including Kent and Warwick in 1965. Robbins had proposed a new breed of scientific and technological universities but these were not established; development relied instead on the organic growth and expansion of the colleges already in existence. That growth was significantly helped and supported by the new Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), created in 1965 to begin the validation of degree courses outside universities.

In a Parliamentary debate in December 1965 Lord Robbins aimed to set at rest the ‘more means worse’ argument championed by Kingsley Amis:

“On the occasion of our last debate, the two leading issues discussed were the question of numbers and the question of the machinery of government. On the first of these issues, whether the expansion proposed by the Committee on Higher Education involved a lowering of entry standards, I think it may be said that discussion is at an end. Even The Times newspaper, which is not over-given to retraction, has had to admit that its accusations in this respect rested on misapprehension; 1250 and the latest figures of qualified persons coming forward show, without a doubt, what our Committee always emphasised: that its estimates were on the low side rather than on the high.”

Continuing rapid expansion allowed more and more 18-year-olds to join: “I’m in with the in-crowd, I go where the in-crowd goes”. This was before fees; students had grants they didn’t have to repay, with their real value still rising (they peaked in 1968): boomers could happily sing with The Who about My Generation.

 We Can Work It Out

The non-university colleges would first become polytechnics, following the 1966 White Paper A Plan for Polytechnics and Other Colleges, written by civil servant Toby Weaver. Secretary of State for Education Tony Crosland promoted the new policy idea of the binary system (“Try to see it my way”) in his seminal Woolwich speech in April 1965, but Crosland had been mainly occupied with the comprehensivisation of secondary schools. DES Circular 10/65 was the first of a series which dealt with the issue of comprehensivisation, as Harold Wilson’s Labour government asked local education authorities to submit plans for reorganising their schools on comprehensive lines. It was the first major schools reform since Butler’s 1944 Education Act under Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Expansion of HE was substantially driven by the colleges, still very much part of the local authority sector. The polytechnics would increasingly chafe at the bureaucratic controls of local authorities but it would be more than 20 years before the 1988 Education Reform Act ripped the polytechnics out of the local authority sector. In 1965 the replacement of the London County Council by the Greater London Council was big news for the expanding HE sector, especially because it entailed the creation of the Inner London Education Authority, responsible for no fewer than five of the 30 polytechnics, and a range of other specialist HE institutions. Nowadays that kind of restructuring would barely merit a mention in Times Higher Education, which itself was not even a glint in the eye of Brian Macarthur, the first editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, not launched until 1971.

I Can’t Explain

The colleges to become polytechnics would soon be calling for ‘parity of esteem’ (“Got a feeling inside – can’t explain”). Although ‘poly’ would eventually be replaced in the vernacular by the execrable but inescapable ‘uni’, some features of the HE system proved extremely persistent. League tables had not yet made an appearance but would soon become not only persistent but pernicious. Some things, like HE hierarchies of esteem, seem to be always with us, just as Frank Herbert’s mediocre scifi novel Dune, first published in 1965, has recently seen yet another movie remake.

A World of Our Own

In contrast David Lodge, professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, would go from strength to strength, writing about what he knew best – “we’ll live in a world of our own”. 1965 was before his campus trilogy, rated by some as the best novels ever about university life, but in 1965 he did write about a PhD student, in The British Museum Is Falling Down. In the same year Philip Larkin, still only halfway through his twenty years’ service as Librarian at the University of Hull, was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

It’s Not Unusual

For those whose memory is punctuated by sporting events there was still a year to wait before England’s triumph in the football World Cup, which sadly was unusual, indeed unique. A more usual hierarchy of football esteem began in 1965 with Liverpool’s first ever win in the FA Cup, and an era ended with Stanley Matthews’ final game in the English First Division. Tom Jones began his own era of success in 1965 with his first No 1 hit, It’s Not Unusual.

Eve of Destruction?

US president Lyndon Johnson announced the Great Society in his State of the Union address in January 1965, but Martin Luther King marched in Selma and  Montgomery. The first American troops arrived in Vietnam, and a Students for a Democratic Society demonstration against the war drew 25,000 people in Washington. Student protests, too, are always with us (”The Eastern world, it is exploding”).

How sweet it is

Dorothy Hodgkin had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry just a year earlier, and in 1965 she was made a member of the Order of Merit. The Social Science Research Council was established in 1965. It was later renamed the Economic and Social Research Council in an early skirmish in the culture wars, precipitated by Keith Joseph as Education Secretary under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – who had been taught by Dorothy Hodgkin at Somerville College, Oxford.

Act naturally

The field of research into higher education was sparsely populated in 1965, but for the founders of the Society for Research into Higher Education it was a natural development to come together. The learned society they created has, in the 60 years since then, grown into an internationally-oriented group of researchers, dedicated to every kind of research into a global HE system which could scarcely have been dreamed of, but would surely have been celebrated, by SRHE’s founders. Let’s hang on, to what we’ve got.

The Society has planned a range of activities to celebrate its platinum anniversary, including a series of blogs reflecting on changes to higher education during those 60 years. If you would like to contribute to the series (Help! I need somebody) please contact rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.