The Changing Form and Purpose of Higher Education Institutions: How to Maintain Impact in a Precarious World

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as organizations are facing changes in their formats and purposes. In particular, some authors name new formats as “The Neoliberal University” (Fleming, 2020), in which collegiality is facing the challenges of managerial controls. In this sense, in some HEIs, the number of administrative staff is growing whereas the number of professors is decreasing. The teaching load is growing to the detriment of research time. Moreover, distance learning (DL) and artificial intelligence are changing the methods of education and, hence, HEIs’ formats. For instance, Vitru (vitru.com.br) in Brazil with over 900k students in pure DL is probably the largest HEI of this kind in the world. We invited panellists from different regions of the world to discuss the impact of such challenges in HEIs in their own country/regions and to debate which are the pathways for impact in a precarious world.

25th September 16:00-17:30 CEST

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Teresa de Jesús Vargas Vega

Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo

David Higgitt

Lancaster University

John Aubrey Douglass

UC Berkeley

Kerstin Sahlin

Uppsala University

Francois van Schalkwyk

Stellenbosch University

Chair – Sérgio Eduardo de Pinho Velho Wanderley

Universidade Unigranrio