Introduction: What have we done with Higher Education?

It has been a sobering couple of days in the knowledge factory. Last night one of us attended the launch of his employer’s first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). It was a strange affair: part international branding, part ‘me too-ism’, part adult education reboot, and part hyper commodification. Do 40 six minute videos, with multi choice questionnaires for desert, really qualify as ‘higher education’? Fad, fashion, foolishness or the future? It is very hard to tell at this point. Certainly the University’s chancellor was nervous. A prominent business man, he said he wanted to see the business model before things got carried away. And speaking of questionnaires, one of us yesterday waded through the tick-boxes in his university’s new staff satisfaction survey. No mention of teaching and learning and adult education there though–just anxious questions about whether performance was being encouraged (in what?) and how well we were getting on with our managers. Taken separately the MOOC and the staff survey are unremarkable bits and bobs from contemporary university life. Taken together and alongside the pursuit of commercial income, overseas students and higher slots in various ranking and accreditation schemes, we wonder whether the university as institution has finally succumbed to the pincer movements of commodification and managerialism; the character, strength and acuity of which has been a frequently debated topic in Organization. In this vein and in this edition we publish the last two of ten papers that have appeared in the Speaking Out series entitled: ‘What are we to do with Higher Education’. So what have the authors in the series exposed and proposed? They have dragged into view managerial inaction to international plagiarism (Luke and Kearins, 2012). They have extracted with irony the ‘agonies’ of ‘excellence’ from the academically well-proportioned (Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). They have revealed the scandalous profitability and tax-avoiding ways of commercial journal publishers (Harvie et al., 2012), and plotted, for authors, alternatives to for-profit journal publishing (Beverungen et al., 2012). They have unpacked, in inglorious detail, the