Kasja Weenink The study ‘We’re stubborn enough to create our own world’ (Weenink, Aarts, & Jacobs, 2021) addresses how directors of educational programs understand and enact higher education quality in interdependence with its environment. It reveals that the directors’ room to play out their quality views depends on their position within the academic hierarchy and […]

Martina Vukasovic In 2015 the Norwegian government launched a large-scale re-organisation in higher education. The policy solution proposed, like in many other cases, involved mergers of higher education institutions. There were several formal policy goals, such as robust academic environments, good access to education and expertise, contribution to regional development and effective use of resources. […]

What is resilience and how do different disciplines and fields approach it? What does resilience mean in different sectors? And what does resilience involve in times of global pandemic? These are some of the questions addressed in a new open access book Towards resilient organizations and societies. A cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary perspective, edited by Rómulo Pinheiro, […]

Nicolas Rüffin In a recent paper, Simon Marginson (2021) analyzes four competing narratives commonly used to explain the growth of global science. He concludes that each of the predominant narratives—growth of networks, international arms races, global markets, and centre-periphery models—falls short from fully explaining all facets of the phenomenon of global science. Consequently, Marginson calls […]

Pradeep Singh and Bowen Xu The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) had its second virtual General Conference held between 30th August – 3rd September 2021. This year ECPR has attracted over 2,400 scholars worldwide participating in 66 sections covering a wide range of topics and presentations. For the ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and […]

Alexander Mitterle Working in academia comes with adapting to different timeframes: some universities use semesters, others quarters or terms. A course at a German university can be timed in semester weekly hours (SWS) or in credit points. In both cases they differ – with a usual time-span of 45 minutes – from the U.S. equivalent: […]

Alina Felder Convening virtually over the course of three days (30 June – 2 July 2021), twelve PhD students from six countries exchanged about current research and challenges to researching the area of higher education. The workshop on ‘European higher education in times of uncertainty’ comprised two keynote lectures by senior researchers – Jeroen Huisman […]