This paper provides a comprehensive survey of studies on the measurement of frontier efficiency in higher education. We review the database of 89 studies assessing higher education efficiency by applying both parametric and non-parametric methods. For the selection of studies, the Scopus-indexed journals from 1977 to 2022 are screened and…

The decline and fall of classical education signify a hidden group hatred of the tensions affiliated with the higher powers of the mind; they express social and historical tension-evasion, a thirst for inertia, and entropic decline. But isn't aversion to work ordained by entropy? The author concedes that we enrich our minds for the same reason we…

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits…

This article, delivered as one of two keynote lectures at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Milan in September 2022, offers an example of an autosociobiographical approach to the history of education, in which the life story of the author is entangled with the collective movement of a generation of…

The political, social, and institutional environments in which contemporary universities operate have changed rather dramatically over the past two decades in ways that threaten the resilience of the academic core, both in its ability to map knowledge comprehensively and also to maintain a balance between the branches of the humanities, social…

The idea of the university has been a matter of intense debate for well over a century. The essential nature, role and purpose of the university have long been questioned. The debate has only intensified as universities have multiplied and expanded across the globe, and the demands made upon them by different stakeholders have grown and…

As the Bologna process emerged in the framework of European integration, its objectives are closely linked to the process of voluntary convergence of public policies of members of the European Union. In this context, it can be challenging to understand possible convergence or divergence trends in Bologna member countries that are outside the…

We explore the literature on internationalization in higher education and distinguish between the mainstream and radical approaches to critical scholarship. We argue that the mainstream approach continues to steer internationalization towards socially progressive and equitable aims, while growing concerns have surfaced especially with regard to…

The work of the 1946-1948 President's Commission on Higher Education was unquestionably influenced by the immediate aftermath of World War II. In this article, we examine the backgrounds and ideas of 10 commissioners to argue that their efforts were also deeply influenced by their experience of a different world war. The 1914-1918 "Great…

Nowadays, university rankings are a familiar phenomenon in higher education all over the world. But how did rankings achieve this status? To address this question, we bring in a historical-sociological perspective and conceptualize rankings as a phenomenon in history. We focus on the United States and identify the emergence of a specific…

This paper is a theoretical contribution to discussions about the emancipatory potential of citizenship education across four sites (i.e. Catalonia, Colombia, England, and Pakistan). By reflecting on policy and empirical data from our four contexts of study, we discuss whether citizenship education manifests different conditions of emancipatory…

Notwithstanding the dramatic admission of the historical injustice against females in the Ethiopian constitution three decades back and the education policy that reflected the enthusiasm to address gender inequality, in practice, it failed to create a fairly inclusive higher education environment that is friendly to women. The aim of this study is…

This paper uses biographical, historical and comparative perspectives to examine some of the work of Lawrence Stenhouse, widely regarded as one of the leading curriculum theorists of the twentieth century. Although his best-known work was carried out in England, he had strong Scottish connections and some of the influences on his output can be…

In the 3 years prior to Harry Truman's establishment of the President's Commission on Higher Education in 1946, the Association of American Colleges (AAC), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and Harvard University all released reports on the relationship of general or liberal education to the political order. This historiographical…

In this study, we aimed to identify the basic structure, trends, and dynamics of research about designed learning environment in the field of education between the years 1970 and 2022. In this process, we determined the most-effective concepts and words used in keywords, abstracts, and titles in articles on creative thinking, as well as the most…