The concept of academic freedom in higher education is endangered both epistemologically (with the possibility of obtaining objective knowledge in doubt) and sociologically (with the incorporation of higher education systems into the modern state). For higher education to be legitimized, these dangers must be countered. (MSE)

It is argued that the relative value Brazilian university faculty/scholars give to local vs. international research, government infrastructure, the alternative ideology of cultural action for freedom, and the nature of the faculties themselves helps understand how knowledge is defined, valued, and produced in that country. (MSE)

An ethnographic account of the community of academic physicists is based on interviews, and a picture of what physics is like as a discipline is constructed. The features of its epistemology that differentiate it from other disciplines and characteristics (career structure, value-system and preferred modes of communication) are described.…

Interviewed novice and experienced, part-time students in Hong Kong about their teaching and learning beliefs. Novice students with didactic/reproductive beliefs about teaching and learning found it difficult to adjust to higher education if the teaching was not expository; more experienced students tended to hold facilitative/transformative…

This article is part of a larger scale project on some aspects of the process of academic socialization of a group of Iranian Ph.D. students studying in five UK universities, particularly focusing on the relationship between these students and their supervisors. The study included eight engineering and five social sciences/humanities students, as…

An empirical enquiry into the nature of academic disciplines is described. The main similarities and differences of six academic disciplines--physics, history, biology, sociology, mechanical engineering and law--are outlined. Different research styles are identified and characterized as urban and rural research styles. (Author/MLW)

This article reports the findings of a 3 year research project which investigated disciplinary variation in student writing. Within an Open University course in the history of science, students from an arts background were found to achieve significantly higher grades than those from a science background. Textual and interview data suggest that…

Examination of the relationship between academic learning and group relations suggests that the study of each can inform the other. A partnership between the study of group relations and the study of literary theory could give new insights into teaching and learning as discursive practices, power relations in the college classroom, and sources of…

The results of interviews of students of medicine, business administration, and engineering concerning their perceptions of their professional education's relevance to actual professional work, the nature of learning and knowledge, and worldwide economic and technological development are presented and discussed. (MSE)