Convention for Higher Education

University of Brighton


Friday 24 & Saturday 25 May 2013

Watch the edited highlights 

Organised by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton, and co-sponsored by the Campaign for Public Universities, the Council for the Defence of British Universities, and the UCU at the University of Brighton, this two-day conference on  Higher Education - What it is for, and how to defend it: towards a Charter for Higher Education in the UK investigated the current changes that British Higher Education (in England and Wales) is undergoing.

The Convention was designed to enable colleagues from the full range of university disciplines to address how to preserve a properly described ‘higher education’ from the effects of current proposals, and from the redefinition of universities and of higher learning. As a complement to the Council for the Defence of British Universities and the Campaign for Public Universities, it considered, and adopted a draft of, a Charter for Higher Education that was debated and refined in most or all institutions of higher learning throughout the UK, and which could then form the core of values around which colleagues could cohere, whether as members of Councils and Academic Boards, Faculty or School Boards, as members of their Course Committees, or as union members.

The Convention has been occasioned by the 25th anniversary of the Humanities Programme at the University of Brighton. Born in in adversity in 1988 -- in the midst of an earlier assault on the Humanities -- it has survived and thrived by resisting both governmental pressure and temporary fashions in education and pedagogy. It is an interdisciplinary, non-modular range of degree courses based on small-group teaching, and research-focused student development. 

Keynote speakers:

Priya Gopal, Colin Blakemore, John Holmwood, Martin McQuillan, Gill Scott, Will Hutton,
 Martin Hall, Luke Martell, Bob Brecher,
 Peter Scott, Tom Hickey, Colin Green, Caroline Lucas (MP), Thomas Docherty

 

Discussion:

a draft Charter for Higher Education

plus

• The Ambit and Character of a University for the 21st Century

• What is Special about a Public University System

• Knowledge and Dissemination: the Commercialisation of Learning & Research

• Constraints and Conformities: Defining Economic and Social 
Engagement

• Academic Freedom: its Meaning in the New Century

• Work and Contracts in a Corporate University

• The Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in Adversity: Governmental Myopia

• How Mass Higher Education Does Not Entail Lower Standards (Humanities at Brighton)

• Research Supervision: Craft or Mass Process?

• Of Education, Entertainment and Satisfaction: Student Evaluation vs the NSS

• Students, Staff and Democracy in the Academy

• The Bureaucratisation of Learning: aims, objectives, methods, 
outcomes

• Of Careers and Careerism - Who Benefits: the Equality Agenda

• Global HE as International Trade: Commerce and Contradiction

• Quantum of Recognition: Vacuities of Research Measurement