Research management and administration (RMA) has professionalized rapidly into a distinct domain of higher-education governance, yet its scholarship remains overwhelmingly anchored in the global North and, where it turns to Africa, tends to treat the continent as a single administrative space. This article argues that such treatment obscures a consequential structural feature: the colonial language divide that partitions African higher education into anglophone and francophone administrative worlds, each with distinct legal families, funding geographies, supranational governance architectures and languages of science. The paper re-conceptualizes the divide as an institutional variable, grounded in the mechanisms of path dependence and transaction cost, and shows how it structures the research management lifecycle from funder access and contracting to financial compliance, ethics regulation, professional recognition and impact assessment. It then tests the argument against original data. Official framework-program participation, once normalized for research system size, shows no francophone funding penalty—the apparent volume gap is an artifact of size, and francophone systems in fact convert research output into grants somewhat more efficiently. The divide’s measurable footprint lies instead in the language of knowledge, where francophone output is far less visible in English-indexed metrics, and in collaboration, where cross-bloc co-authorship is roughly an order of magnitude rarer than within-bloc partnering. The paper concludes by deriving an institutional design response: a bilingual, bridging architecture, led by regional associations that lowers the cost of crossing the divide without pretending to abolish it.
The operating environment of higher education in the twenty-first century is undergoing rapid change. Public universities are in an imagination crisis, searching for alternative roles in the knowledge-based economy. To find the right actions at the right time, many universities have begun to incorporate foresight into their strategic thinking processes. This study investigates foresight practices in public universities through the lens of futures research, an interdisciplinary field concerned with the systematic study of possible, probable, and preferable futures. It begins by addressing key environmental tensions that shape the strategic challenges faced by public universities today, exploring how foresight and futures thinking contribute to the strategic capacity of these institutions, and reflecting on what can be learned from current foresight practices in public universities. Our findings suggest that foresight approaches are of significant assistance to public universities in identifying alternative futures, preparing for environmental changes, and capitalising on market-driven opportunities. Nevertheless, university foresight remains conservative and reinforces the traditional roles of universities in education and research. We recommend pursuing participatory and continuous foresight to capture novel potentials and stretching the temporal aspects of strategic thinking to enable more ambitious, long-term, and transformative roles for public universities in society.
This paper examines the association between the disciplinary composition of international students and the prevailing logic of university internationalization in the given country in historical perspective. It uses an original longitudinal dataset compiled from archival records and administrative statistics across several benchmark points from the mid-1970s to 2024, to analyse the disciplinary structure of international student enrolment at Soviet and Russian universities across four historical periods, each characterized by a distinct combination of political, market, and administrative logics. It is shown that the association between disciplinary composition and prevailing governance logic operates through two mechanisms: recruitment instruments that define or constrain field of study choices for state-funded students, and country of origin composition that generates disciplinary demand patterns among students attracted through market mechanisms. Findings demonstrate that longitudinal monitoring of disciplinary distribution provides a deeper understanding of how internationalization policies function in practice than total enrolment numbers alone.
Mutual benefit is central to how China describes its international aid principles. In the past decades, China has strived to promote technical cooperation and knowledge sharing with Global South countries. Providing university scholarships to study in China has been China’s primary means of achieving these goals. However, the extent to which mutual benefit is perceived in the meso-level relations between Chinese and Global South participants in these scholarship programs is under-researched. This study adopts a multisite case study design. Situated within an adult higher education context, we use Cervero and Wilson’s “working the planning table” theory to study the negotiation of the program objectives in China’s scholarship programs. The study finds that Cervero and Wilson’s consultation form of negotiations for a mutually beneficial synergy prevails among Chinese program planners and Global South student participants in the scholarship programs.
A new Cold War is emerging and in turn a Neo-Academic Cold War that reflects emerging geopolitical rivalries. The context of the Neo-Academic Cold War is different from the previous Cold War which featured bipolar competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for military superiority and spheres of influence that included distinct scientific and academic ecosystems. This has given way to a multipolar and complex world of rivalries and semi-autonomous silos of transnational science cooperation and science diplomacy. This paper explores the evolution of the Neo-Academic Cold War as a geopolitical story tied to a series of global traumas, including 9/11, a diaspora of war and economic refugees, the rise of neonationalism and illiberal democracies, the return of Russia and China as geopolitical adversaries to the U.S. and the European Union, the impact of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally the deleterious effects of Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency. There are winners and losers in this Neo-Cold War, specifically China and Europe are beneficiaries of America’s declining scientific capabilities and its protectionist policies. Among the loosers: open science and the ability of a global science community to mitigate or solve challenges like climate change and future pandemics.
Expansion of higher education in federal states is often expected to reduce territorial and social inequalities. Using harmonized administrative data from the University Grants Commission’s Education Management Information System (EMIS), we examine how Nepal’s higher education system changed between 2013 and 2023 across institutions, provinces, fields, and gender. We find that expansion occurred without substantial structural redistribution. Tribhuvan University remained dominant throughout the period, enrolling 83.8
Academic accreditation is commonly described as a quality assurance process, yet its decisions may affect institutional reputation, programme continuity, student expectations and public confidence. This article examines how accreditation review reports can remain procedurally defensible when they operate as the evidentiary basis for consequential decisions. It develops a document-based comparative governance analysis of Saudi Arabia and Australia. Saudi Arabia is treated as the principal case; Australia is used as a functionally relevant comparator because Saudi external quality assurance has developed within a transnational field of standards-based accreditation and because TEQSA provides a developed example of risk-sensitive, standards-based and reviewable higher education regulation. The article argues that the unresolved governance issue is not whether accreditation should be legalised, but when a defect in an external review report becomes material enough to require correction. It proposes a corrective governance model centred on professional due care, materiality, evidence discipline, reasoned reporting, conflict control, institutional response and reviewability.
This study examines the post-earthquake social contribution of two public universities in Türkiye—Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University and İnönü University—after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes. Using a structured comparative case-study design, it analyzes 137 coded events drawn from official university announcements and institutional reports covering the period from 6 February 2023 to 6 February 2025. The analysis focuses on three dimensions: contribution domains, institutional capacities, and governance ties. The findings show that both universities displayed broad contribution profiles rather than concentrating on a single area. Contribution also changed over time, with immediate needs more visible in the response phase, psychosocial support becoming more prominent in early recovery, and disaster awareness gaining greater visibility in recovery. The findings further suggest that crisis-time social contribution was enabled through organizational capacities and external coordination rather than through a single common model. At the same time, aggregate statistical results indicate only limited separation between the two universities in either primary contribution domains or primary institutional support capacities. Overall, the study shows that disaster settings make university social contribution more empirically visible and more analytically traceable as an organizationally mediated form of public contribution.
This study aims to examine the implementation dimension of quality assurance systems in higher education institutions in Türkiye from an evaluative perspective. The study was designed using a phenomenological approach. Data were collected through purposive sampling and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 evaluators who had received formal training in quality assurance and accreditation processes and participated in at least one external evaluation site visit. The findings show that the quality assurance system improves data-driven decision-making and self-assessment awareness in institutions. The system was found to be successful in increasing stakeholder participation, strengthening sectoral ties through accreditation, and guiding institutional learning. However, it was revealed that cumbersome bureaucracy, manual data collection infrastructure, and excessive documentation burden encountered during the implementation phase caused the system to transform from a development-oriented structure to a document-oriented one. In addition, managerial approaches, communication problems, and limited awareness of quality assurance principles hinder the internalization of quality culture. The sustainability of quality assurance systems depends on corporate ownership, stakeholder engagement, continuous employee development, and the integration of quality management into strategic processes. The application of digital technologies in a way that supports a quality culture also contributes to this process.
This paper examines a specific case of policy formulation and implementation to shed light on the dynamics of higher education policy implementation in Georgia. As in many post-Soviet countries, Georgia’s higher education sector has undergone significant policy shifts; however, academic analyses of the drivers and implementation of these reforms remain fragmented. This paper focuses on the recent Doctoral Education Framework (2024), offering insights into persistent systemic challenges related to policy implementation. The analysis draws on interviews with policymakers and institutional actors responsible for enacting the new doctoral regulations and examines the intended objectives and anticipated outcomes of the 2024 framework. This approach enabled us to examine stakeholder understandings of policy intent, implementation processes, actor mandates, and anticipated behavioural responses. The study relies on primary qualitative data supported by secondary qualitative and quantitative sources. In doing so, it contributes to the developing literature on higher education policy realization, which—despite recent studies—remains historically underdeveloped.
How can authoritarian states sustain transnational higher education partnerships despite tensions between academic norms and political control? Analyzing China’s Chinese-Foreign Cooperative Running Schools policy from 1978 to 2024, this study identifies strategic ambiguity as a deliberate governance technology. Three ambiguity forms emerged across developmental phases: permissive (1978–2003), bounded (2003–2018), and aspirational (2018–present). Bifurcated approval systems and retrospective legitimation enable adaptation while preserving central authority, yet these mechanisms also produce interpretive and quality stratification. Elite institutions leverage interpretive capital to innovate, whereas less resourced institutions resort to ceremonial compliance, prompting the termination of 234 programs between 2018 and 2021. Strategic ambiguity thus offers a transferable governance model for nations navigating transnational education under resource constraints, though its long-term sustainability requires complementary regulatory investments to prevent the cementing of educational disparities.
‘Excellence’ is part of a routine academic vocabulary. Alongside informal usage, ‘excellence’ features in assessment criteria and lends its name to national research assessment exercises. The term has received criticism for being ill-defined and promoting hypercompetition. A key concern is that expectations of excellence promote practices detrimental to those involved in research, to research quality, and to its societal contributions. Other perspectives hold on to excellence as a non-negotiable value with some advocating for redefinition. This study explores research-intensive universities’ constructions of excellence in their strategies and their positioning of excellence in relation to research culture. Using a discursive approach to document analysis, we seek to better understand how the label is used in practice and to identify potential for both congruence and conflict between excellence and research culture narratives in the context of ongoing research evaluation reform. Our findings suggest that excellence is used to signal prestige and conformity with sector-wide values but also that it is heavily connotated with competition and assumptions of objective ‘assessability’. Constructions of the relationships between excellence and research culture vary in their clarity and show a significant scope for tensions.
This study evaluates Taiwan’s national competitive research funding scheme in higher education from both effectiveness and equity perspectives. Drawing on a 20-year scholar–year panel of 941 Industrial Engineering and Management scholars (2004–2023), we link administrative data from the National Science and Technology Council Research Talent Database to annual measures of research funding and publication output. Academic productivity is captured by the number of journal articles indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, as well as an impact-factor-weighted publication count. Scholar- and year-fixed-effects logistic and linear regression models are used to estimate associations between prior publications and subsequent funding success and amounts, and between prior funding and later publication incidence and volume, under varying accumulation windows. Results show strong positive associations across all accumulation windows, with larger coefficients in shorter windows. Descriptive comparisons further reveal disparities in both productivity and funding across institutional sectors and, to a lesser extent, across recorded gender categories, raising concerns about cumulative advantage and stratification within the system. The study demonstrates how large-scale administrative data can support longitudinal evaluation of performance-based research funding in a non-Western, high-R D-intensity context and informs debates about the design of competitive grant schemes.
China’s higher education operates under a hybrid governance regime—an authoritarian neoliberal socialist amalgam that simultaneously deepens marketization while tightening ideological control. Within this contradictory logic, university educators engage in everyday pedagogical resistance that challenges both Western-centric neoliberal hegemony and domestic epistemic hierarchies. Why are such micro-practices of dissent tolerated rather than systematically suppressed? Through critical qualitative research integrating policy analysis, interviews with twenty academics and students, and forty-five hours of classroom observations across six research-intensive universities, we theorize this phenomenon as contained resistance: Principled, agentive acts operating within parameters tacitly set by the state’s calculated tolerance. Through a dual critique—synthesizing Apple’s official knowledge with Santos’s cognitive justice—we document three tactical formations: strategic curricular appropriation, Socratic questioning of structural inequalities, and student-initiated epistemic communities. These practices reveal how educators defend education’s humanistic core even in constrained environments. We conclude by theorizing contained resistance as a distinctive governance–resistance dialectic within authoritarian neoliberalism—neither heroic defiance nor mere co-optation, but a lived paradox illuminating both possibilities and limits of pedagogical agency under adaptive authoritarian governance.
This study presents a comparative analysis of two contrasting models of higher education regionalisation: the Bologna Process, which established the European Higher Education Area, and China’s aspiration for building an emerging educational community through its Belt and Road Initiative. This comparison focuses on their divergent governance architectures, policy instruments, development pathways, and geopolitical underpinnings. The Bologna Process exemplifies a supranational governance model, which relies on multilateral soft coordination, standardised policy tools, institutionalisation mechanisms, and a shared vision of European harmonisation, legitimated by a crisis narrative while being endorsed as part of the wider European integration project. In contrast, the Belt and Road represents a state-led and development-driven model of regional collaboration, where education serves as a strategic ‘soft infrastructure’. Its educational community is advanced primarily through bilateral agreements and project-based networks, involving numerous state and non-state actors and stakeholders to forge a multi-level knowledge space that meets signatories’ diverse needs. Reflecting on the established European paradigm as a universal template and the ongoing China-led education community-building, this study portrays the evolving landscape of and pluralistic approaches to higher education regionalisation, offering insights for policymakers and scholars navigating this increasingly complex field of regionalisation, policy and governance in non-Western/Global South contexts.
In the current trend towards authoritarianism and insularity at the national level, the impact on policy fields such as higher education is inevitable. However, while primarily the domain of governments, international organizations (IOs) also seek to shape policymaking on higher education. This paper explores how IOs aim to influence higher education policy in light of growing national authoritarianism with a longitudinal case of ex-Soviet autocratic Tajikistan from 1991 to 2025. The concept of ‘amicable contempt’ helps explain why democracy-promoting IOs continue operating under authoritarian restrictions and why states permit their ongoing activity. Integrating concepts of ‘donor logics’ and ‘mechanisms of influence’ enables the exploration of how three IOs—the World Bank, the European Union, and the Aga Khan Development Network—have sought to influence higher education policy over time. Whereas World Bank and European Union policies appear less affected by authoritarian decline, the Aga Khan Development Network, as an IO with a civil society donor logic, appears to be most at risk as the Tajik government makes ever bolder moves to shut down or renationalize its ventures. The paper makes a highly timely contribution to building theoretical and empirical knowledge on how IOs operate in higher education in an increasingly authoritarian world.
Employing academic drift theory, this grounded theory study based on 39 faculty interviews in Chinese Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) explains how drift originates in contradictions among policy logic, academic logic, and market logic. These tensions produce policy alienation and evaluation misalignment, leading to three faculty strategies shaped by resource endowment: academically dominant faculty reinforce drift through capital reproduction; practice-capital holders pursue breakout via collective bargaining; dual-low-capital faculty resort to adaptive survival. Faculty agency drives a power redistribution arena where strategic contestation—mediated by asymmetrical capital convertibility—reshapes institutional rules through feedback and negotiation. This three-phase bidirectional construction mechanism repositions faculty as institutional co-constructors within systemic cracks, illustrating how micro-strategies reconfigure macro-institutional evolution.
This paper examines the roles of two Southeast Asian regional organisations and key policy entrepreneurs in higher education policy development. We analyse how multi-level governance structures and critical events, such as the 2024 Joint Declaration, have shaped the Southeast Asian Higher Education Common Space. Drawing on structure–agency and policy entrepreneurship theories, in combination with the process-tracing and elite interview methods, we study influential policy entrepreneurs who, despite their fixed-term appointments and latent tensions, drive long-term regionalisation. Conceptualised as storytellers, networkers, and architects, these Asian entrepreneurs possess different capabilities to leverage policy windows and institutional complementarities to achieve regional policy goals. Their actions create a paradigmatic shift from an externally driven to an internally grounded model of region-building. The findings further highlight the critical interplay between institutional structure and individual agency, offering insights into how policy entrepreneurship is enacted within regional organisations to sustain momentum for advancing cooperation.
Since the 1990s, China has increasingly localised neoliberal-inspired tenure-track policies in its higher education system, replacing the traditional bianzhi system with a competitive ‘up-or-out’ model. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with early-career academics and university administrators, this study critically explores how such policies affect academic well-being. It identifies three key findings: (a) the relentless evaluation cycle fosters constant pressure, undermining professional well-being; (b) contract-based employment and high-performance demands cause psychological stress and job insecurity, with those failing to meet expectations facing unemployment and psychological distress; (c) while administrators acknowledge these harms, they strictly enforce the policy to boost productivity, reflecting broader structural constraints and neoliberal logics prioritising output over support. This study contributes to understanding how neoliberal governance reshapes academic careers in centralised systems, revealing tensions between global higher education models and local policy adaptations that directly impact the well-being of early-career academics in China’s evolving university sector.
Although precarity and casualisation are not new phenomena in academia, international organisations such as the OECD explicitly acknowledging their existence and perpetuation, while providing recommendations to tackle this problem, create enhanced opportunities for national governments and higher education and science institutions (HESIs) to develop legislation to address this problem. Using discursive institutionalism as a theoretical framework, this study examines academic precarity in Portugal by analysing national legislation and OECD documents to determine the extent and mechanisms through which this international organisation shapes national and institutional policies and practices. Interviews with 10 Portuguese actors in different academic career stages and institutional leaders were carried out to complement this analysis. Findings indicate that over the past two decades, the OECD has flagged the (un)sustainability of Portugal’s scientific system, fostering segmentation between permanent and temporary staff, with meaningful action only recently taken by governments and HESIs.
