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An American Perspective on British Higher Education: The Decline of Diversity, Autonomy and Trust in Post-war British Higher Education
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Trow, Martin |
| Copyright Year | 2005 |
| Abstract | Revised and edited) An American Perspective on British Higher Education: The Decline of Diversity, Autonomy and Trust in Post-war British Higher Education 1 Martin Trow The Goldman School of Public Policy, and The Center for Studies in Higher Education UC Berkeley, CA 94720 Trow@socrates.berkeley.edu This paper takes the form of reflections on the history of the relationship between British higher education and various British governments since WW II, and most particularly since 1980, the beginning of the Thatcher revolution, putting current events into an historical as well as a comparative perspective. And I do this quite consciously as an American observer, with all the handicaps and advantages that accrue to that perspective. While there are great disadvantages for an American attempting to study higher education in Britain (or any foreign country), there are also some advantages. One advantage is the tendency of a foreign observer to stand outside the institution and its political context, and to raise questions about what natives ordinarily take for granted. So I begin with a series of “surprises” to this observer as I learned about British attitudes and values attached to higher education, surprises at aspects of the system that most English academics would take for granted, but which seemed strange to an American. Ten of these “surprises,” for this foreigner, together constitute a set of assumptions made or values held by most English people who think about their own universities. This set of assumptions or values together characterize the normative framework which has shaped much thinking and governmental policy toward HE in this country since WW II. I do appreciate that there will not be consensus among all English academics on these assumptions, and maybe less agreement among British students of higher education. (Students of higher education are more inclined to question its assumptions than most people.) Moreover, views on some of them seem to be changing. Nevertheless, my hypothesis is that these assumptions or Paper prepared for a conference on the White Paper of 2003, sponsored by The Center for Studies of Higher Education, UC Berkeley, and New College, Oxford, in Oxford, September. 28- 30, 2004. A summary version of this paper has been published as “The Decline of Diversity, Autonomy and Trust in Post-War British Higher Education: an American Perspective,” in Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 4, October 20004. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt1mg88095/qt1mg88095.pdf?t=kro70l |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
