The Cambridge Tripos in Economic and Political Science

This chapter outlines the final phases of Alfred Marshall’s campaign to expand the teaching of economics in Cambridge by creating a three-year bachelor’s degree as the exclusive vehicle for the teaching of economics. Detailing the university politics and arguments employed for and against the teaching of economics, it shows why the particular content and structure of the curriculum took the form that it did. Some of this is a familiar story; but the founding of the new Tripos was only a new starting point, and too often it has simply been assumed that there is no need to consider how this new Tripos actually functioned in the ensuing years—the ‘success’ in creating the degree is read across to its subsequent history. By examining a database of student results over the first 50 years, a more nuanced picture is obtained. In particular, Marshall had laid great stress on a three-year programme. However, the degree was divided into a two-year Part I and a one-year Part II (revised to a one-year Part I/two-year Part II after 1930) and it can be shown that for some time a minority of students of economics completed three years: some just studied Part I, some just Part II. Furthermore, it can also be demonstrated that for most of the interwar years, students studying for three years were less successful in the final classification than those who had studied for Part II only.

Navigating Shomoyscapes: Time and faculty life in the urban Global South

We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word “shomoy” literally means “time,” it goes beyond “clock time” and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal categories, constraints, agencies, and to various degrees, embodies hybrid times (i.e., modern time coexisting with non-linear local/traditional time). Drawing on interviews and participant observations with 22 faculty in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we demonstrate the efficacy of shomoyscapes by illuminating how faculty experience, contest, and manipulate their time(s) amid rapid socio-economic transformations of Dhaka, an urban, Global South mega city. We show how shomoyscapes manifest as faculty experience temporal constraints, such as (a) traffic, (b) party-based university politics, and (c) caring for others. We suggest that Bangladeshi faculty experience and navigate shomoyscapes that are constituted by both larger temporal constraints (spatial, structural, or relational) and their temporal agency in response to these same constraints. Using a temporal lens, we contribute to a more in depth understanding of the experiences of faculty working and living in an urban, Global South context, highlighting how life “outside the academy” spills over into working “inside the academy,” rather than vice versa. We argue that shomoyscapes offer a useful temporal heuristic to help contextualize human/social relations in different arenas of social life that would otherwise remain invisible.

Science and University Politics

After Reading This Chapter, You Will: Understand how political factors impact modern science Appreciate in what ways the replication crisis endangers the values of science Know how publication pressure and perverse incentives challenge scientific practices See why teaching ethics requires reactive, proactive, and reflexive education

Gaining qualitative perspective: A career interview with Roy Ruckdeshel

Qualitative Social Work has a tradition of publishing career interviews of distinguished social worker scholars who have been influential in conservations on qualitative inquiry. This career interview with Roy Ruckdeschel, an American social worker who held a faculty position at St. Louis University for 38 years, blends his personal, professional, and intellectual biography. It is based on an extended career interview with Professor Ruckdeschel and on his scholarly writing. Starting with his working class background and conservative Lutheran education, the article traces his advanced education decisions which were shaped by coming of age during a particularly turbulent era of American history. This included escalating American involvement in the Viet Nam War and widespread racial and civil unrest in major U.S. cities. Ruckdeschel studied both social work and sociology, choices largely driven by a quest for “rigor.” Although he started his career as a classic survey researcher, he was quickly disillusioned by its lack of attention to interpersonal interaction and context. As Ruckdeschel’s scholarship matured, he argued for a “qualitative perspective” as a way of melding theories of social action with strategies of qualitative inquiry. It was a synthesis that became a life philosophy influencing his understanding of research, practice, and university politics. In 2002, Ruckdeschel accepted Ian Shaw’s invitation to launch a new journal, Qualitative Social Work, in order to create an institutional home for scholars who choose a qualitative path but were largely shut out of mainstream social work institutions. Ruckdeschel offers advice for those who follow a qualitative life path.

University Elections and Political Socialization in the Developing World

Foundational political behavior scholarship posits that institutions of higher education foster the types of attitudes and patterns of civic engagement that sustain liberal democracy. Yet throughout the developing world, authoritarian, ethnosectarian, and clientelist political parties often intervene in university politics, particularly through competition in student elections. We argue this intervention limits the liberalizing effect of participation in university associational life. To test this argument, we measure the effect of political party intervention in university life using a panel survey experiment conducted at the American University of Beirut (AUB) during the university's annual student elections. Using a choice-based conjoint experiment embedded in a difference-in-differences design--the first of its kind--we estimate the causal effect of participation on non-partisan students. We find that processes of university socialization reproduce status quo politics and limit the ability of these environments to encourage critical, tolerant, and liberal-minded citizens.

The Privilege of Being Politically Active – a Qualitative Study on the Political Commitment of University Students

This article presents the most important results of a study on the university political commitment of students at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg. The study focuses on the question of why and how students at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg become involved in university politics. Semi-standardized interviews are conducted with students from different educational backgrounds. The Civic Voluntarism model by Brady, Schlozman and Verba, and Bourdieu’s capital theory were used to evaluate the interviews. This provides an insight into the relationship between participation-relevant resources, or capital, and political commitment. On the basis of a comparison of the interviews, hypotheses are developed that can be regarded as the results of the study. The study thus provides insight into the significance of social origin and political participation, as well as socialization-related factors.

Statistical Analysis of the Influence of Students‟ Involvement in School Politics on Their Academic Performance

The study investigates the effect that students’ involvement in University politics has on their academic performance by comparing their results when they were not involved in politics with the results after involving in active politics. The data used for the study was gotten from questionnaires in a University in Nigeria. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was employed for analysis and other descriptive statistics were considered.