An Assessment of the Legal Framework Safeguarding Academic Staff: A Factor in the Declining Quality of Higher Education in Kenya

A paper that seeks to investigate the legal framework safeguarding academic staff; whether or not, it has an impact on the declining quality of higher education in Kenya. Due to globalization and privatization of higher education, the field has been open to forces, which have seen institutions, become the centers of exploitation. Incidents in which university staff have threatened to strike or put down their tools have become the norm. Such situations have denied youth the right to access education. To remedy the foregoing problems, the parliament of Kenya enacted various legislation as part of reform efforts aimed at enhancing the efficiency, integrity and equity of Kenya's higher education system. Thus, purpose of the paper is to clearly analyze the legal framework and safeguards that relate to academic staff with the view to understand it's impact on Higher Education. Hence, quantitative research using a survey questionnaire to collect data from respondents was conducted. The end results of the study revealed that the current structured legal framework and safeguards for academic staff had a positive impact thus not a push factor in declining quality of higher education in Kenya.

Privatizaion of Higher Education and Excellence Without a Soul

Privatization of education in both developed and developing countries over the last century has registered a positive trend in the field of education. With the rise of capitalism and privatization of higher education by the government of Uganda, there is an increasing attempt to privatize public services, including education, so that citizens will have to buy them at market value rather than have them provided by the government. The department of higher education in Uganda concentrates strongly on the role of education in servicing the economy through taxation to the neglect of its social and developmental responsibilities. The vision of the university as a place for the education of the elite and for elite education has had a powerful historical precedent in Plato’s Academy. To what extent the Platonic view of education still dominates our thinking about the role and purposes of universities is arguable. Commercialization is normalized and its operational values and purposes have been encoded in the systems of all types of universities. Correlatively, what is happening in the universities is that they are being asked to produce commercially oriented professionals rather than public-interest professionals. While this may seem like merely a change in form rather than substance, the danger with this advancing marketised individualism is that it will further weaken public interest values among those who are being educated in private universities. In this paper, the writer presents an examination on the impact of privatization of higher education on the original purpose and values of education to the individual, the society and the Ugandan nation as a whole hence promoting privatization of higher education and excellence without soul.

Review of The University and Social Justice: Struggles across the Globe edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (Pluto Press / Between the Lines)

In this edited collection, Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally present reflections and analyses from scholar-activists in education studies, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies describing university-based and affiliated social movements. Through thirteen essays covering case studies in twelve countries, the anthology offers a broad review of student organizing against neoliberalization and more specifically, the privatization of higher education; intersectional and coalitional strategies imagined through these struggles; and alternative modes of knowledge production pre-figured in their organizing. Geographic and disciplinary breadth make the anthology a welcome addition to the growing corpus of (transnational) critical university studies.

Universities

In the UK, Creative Writing programmes have been established in higher education for over thirty years, and for much longer than that in the US. Yet an independent quality assurance benchmark recognizing the unique teaching methodologies of Creative Writing in the UK was established only in 2016. Meanwhile, writers outside academia have attacked its teaching methods, assessment criteria, and outcomes as inauthentic and invalid since the subject’s inception. Originally conceived as practice-based and student-centred within the values of a socially inclusive education system, Creative Writing’s foundational values are now being repositioned as transactional expectations through a neoliberal focus on fees generation, marketization, and privatization of higher education. This chapter explores the consequences of these changes for writing tutors and student writers and for the discipline itself.

Trabalho docente no setor privado da educação superior e a reforma trabalhista: Destruição de direitos e precarização da vida

The purpose of this paper is to present and debate the implications of the so-called Labor Reform (Law n° 13.467/2017) for teaching work in private higher education institutions (HEIs). It is important to emphasize that, in the Brazilian case, the impacts of this Reform need to be analyzed in the context of the process of commercialization, entrepreneurship and privatization of higher education, which is expressed in many ways, but here analyzed through the prism of the formation of large educational conglomerates and financialization, articulating a movement of concentration and centralization of capital and financialization of the sector, with the opening of capital, presence of investment funds and international educational services companies, with broad support in a political-legal framework and sustainable public policies by the state in a country with immense social and educational inequalities. For this text, was used bibliographic research and documentary research, with consultation with the Federal Senate law bank, and also with secondary sources, such as news and information from the Teachers Union of São Paulo (SINPRO-SP), and employers' unions, such as the Brazilian Association of Higher Education Matters (ABMES) and the Forum of Representatives of Private Higher Education (FERESP). Based on a critical analysis, it was concluded that the Labor Reform not only met the interests of the private sector in terms of precariousness and flexibility of labor relations - and the conditions of existence of these workers -, but was still the object of appreciation by entrepreneurs this sector and its experts prior to its legislative referral, demonstrating their support.

Higher education in times of neoliberal adjustment and loss of rights

This article presents some of the reflections made in a research group of the Graduate Program in Social Work of the Fluminense Federal University in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The reflections are based on bibliographic research and document analysis regarding the different phases of neoliberal counterrevolution in Brazil, discussing the permanent fiscal adjustment policy - that aims to ensure the payment of public debt - and its consequences in public spending on higher education. The conclusions indicate that government actions lead to deepening the precariousness of public universities, expansion of the privatization of higher education, and regression of workers’ rights, suggesting the rise of a new stage of the class struggle in the country.

Building World-Class Universities: Some Insights & Predictions

Innovations in higher education model are finding importance than ever before due to enhanced higher education institutions and the advancement in technology adopted mass education opportunities. After privatization of higher education, there is an enhanced competition between universities to attract students globally. Universities are competing with each other in terms of their physical and intellectual assets. It is postulated that the six essential assets to be developed by a university based on our predictive analysis for the growth and prosper as world-class university are (1) Physical infrastructure, (2) Digital infrastructure, (3) Innovative academic & training Infrastructure for confidence building, (4) Intellectual property infrastructure, (5) Emotional infrastructure, and (6) Networked infrastructure. In this paper, we have determined the primary focus of these infrastructures along with their essential objectives in detail. We have also discussed the various generic strategies to be followed to develop such infrastructures along the lifecycle of the university including Survival, Sustainability, Differentiation, and Growth & prosperity are analysed. The necessary and sufficient conditions of developing such infrastructures using all the above strategies towards building World-class universities are identified. It is estimated that Physical, Digital, and Innovative Academic infrastructures are necessary conditions and Intellectual Property, Emotional, and Network infrastructures are sufficient conditions respectively.