The public university in the global South continues to be trapped in an existential slumber, struggling to self-define/self-diagnose its purposes, rationales, goals and agenda(s). Despite the emergence of the #FeesMustfall, #RhodesMustFall, and more recently the #Asinamali student protests, South African higher education continues to adopt…

In this article, Jackson Toby discusses President Biden's proposal for free community college and substantial subsidies at public four-year colleges. Toby points out that if Biden means to require the beneficiaries to demonstrate that they have enough aptitude to graduate if they choose to study, the idea would be in the tradition of Thomas…

Maintaining an active research agenda while teaching full-time at a community college can be daunting, but with institutional support for scholarly research by way of course release it is possible. This personal reflection offers up evidence of institutional support from a variety of sources within the public university system of New York City,…

In the following Q&A, NEBHE's [New England Board of Higher Education's] Fellow for Open Education, Lindsey Gumb, takes the pulse of Open Education in Rhode Island with two key leaders in the field: Dragan Gill, who is a Rhode Island College reference librarian and co-chair of the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative, and Daniela Fairchild,…

In her provocative book "Rules for a Flat World", Professor Gillian Hadfield makes the important point that our ossified legal system does not meet the needs of our dynamic society. And she rightly notes that legal education is not an ally in meeting this challenge. To move forward, then, legal education must innovate. This essay offers…

Academic integrity matters are relevant to all areas of university teaching, but they are of particular importance to degree programmes whose graduates intend to work in the public service. While a large body of scholarship exists on academic integrity, very little has been written that specifically relates to students who intend to pursue careers…

This paper is a personal reflection that seeks to capture most of the observable changes that have taken place in South Africa and in its public university system as a consequence of the sudden and global spread of the novel coronavirus. The purpose for doing so is to provide a record of how the South African university sector has responded to the…

Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American Studies at Columbia University, author of several books. In this Q&A, "New England Journal of Higher Education" ("NEJHE") Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Delbanco about the state of higher education and intellectual life today.

Public higher education is in danger of failing to respond sufficiently to changing conditions that affect the public's need for services. A recognition of the apparent failure of higher education to keep pace with societal change and to meet the additional challenges of declining funding, increased accountability, and shifts in public attitudes…

In this commentary, author John Byrne reflects on his 1998 "Journal of Public Service & Outreach" article, "Outreach, Engagement, and the Changing Culture of the University" reprinted in this 20th anniversary issue of "Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement." Byrne's 1998 article was a call to modify…

This commentary suggests that new school design is a fertile policy context for advancing research-practice partnerships. The authors represent four public universities that have created new school designs in partnership with urban school districts. Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these university-partnered public schools…

Nearly a year ago, "NEJHE" launched its "New Directions for Higher Education" series to examine emerging issues, trends, and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs, and practices. In this installment, DiSalvio interviews Muriel A. Howard, president of the American Association of State Colleges and…

Like many of her classmates, the author was a first-generation student, but that meant something quite different in the late 1960s than it does now. When she attended, college, the jobs parents had with high school degrees allowed them to provide considerable support for college educations. Paying for college was difficult but not as difficult as…

Those who work in all sectors of higher education--from community and liberal arts colleges to undergraduate programs in public and research universities--often assert that a "liberal education" is precisely the kind of undergraduate education that is needed for both living and working in the challenging 21st-century world. "Liberal education" or…

It has been a long, litigious road from Heman Sweatt, an African-American mail carrier who wanted to attend the prestigious, all-White law school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1946, to Abigail Fisher, a White high school student who failed to win undergraduate admission to the same university a half-century later. Depending on what the…