Mitchell Young
(Charles University)
This guest entry is written by Mitchell Young who is currently working at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) in the Department of West European Studies where he is conducting his doctoral research on issues related to European Higher Education and Research Area.
In the guest entry he gives his insights about the recent CHER (Consortium for Higher Education Researchers) conference in Lausanne. And – we would also like to highlight that Mitchell received the best PhD paper award at the CHER conference – well done!
The 2013 annual conference of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER) was held in Lausanne, Switzerland from September 9-11. It was my second time attending the CHER conference, and thus I approached it with a bit less trepidation but a bit more tiredness after having spent the previous four days attending the ECPR conference. Arriving in Lausanne I went directly to a preconference workshop of the Early Career Higher Education Researchers network (ECHER), where Manja Klemenčič, the incoming editor of the European Journal of Higher Education, gave a talk entitled “How to get published in journals and tips on improving your academic writing, from the vantage point of the European Journal of Higher Education.” She provided valuable insights into the process of getting published and encouraged us to make our academic writing more interesting, engaging and concise, recommending a book by Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing. There was ample time to discuss our ideas and concerns with her, such as working on collaborative papers, self-citations, how much to use quotations in qualitative articles, getting feedback, recognizing when a paper is ready to be submitted to a journal, reasons for rejection, and the importance of a good title.
The CHER conference began on Monday morning. The theme of this year’s conference was The Roles of Higher Education and Research in the Fabric of Societies. The call for papers noted the “growing if somewhat fragmented body of research on HER systems” and envisions the theme as “umbrella” under which to foster discussions that might cross the usual boundaries. The weather forecast also called for an umbrella of the more physical sort, but as dictated by Murphy’s law, once I had purchased one, the rain held off allowing us to move around the University of Lausanne campus without getting soaked. The theme of the conference led us to ponder the roles of higher education and research, but also required an answer to the question of what is meant by the “fabric of societies”? That more sociological direction was evidenced by the choice of keynote speakers Michele Lamont and Sheldon Rothblatt. Overall, though, the conference included papers from a broad set of disciplines.
The CHER conference is a relatively small affair with 32 panels and around 150 participants. It does not try to be all things to all researchers (notably, teaching and learning issues are not included) and this creates a collegial environment in which there are many shared and overlapping interests; it also makes it very difficult to choose which panel to attend, as so many of them are enticing. The mix and particularly the open communication of leading scholars with doctoral students and all those in-between, made for a stimulating three days which left me excited and energized (though admittedly somewhat exhausted by the end).
The theme provided a basis on which to branch out into a number of more traditional research questions around Higher Education and Research: the mission of the university, the complexificaton of the HER systems, the academic profession, the identity and differentiation of HEIs, student access, and the role of disciplines. It also enabled territories to enter the discussion, and this field was given prominent placement as one of the four tracks. It emphasized both regional issues and innovation, seeing territory as a physical geography, but also opened up alternative meanings with papers that examined networks as a form of territory and de-territorialization in terms of mobility. The academic profession and workplace was also a popular sub-theme, which had its own track and also spilled over into panels in other tracks. The highly theorized university-state dynamics seemed less prevalent and contested in the papers this year, signaling perhaps that the discourse has been embedded to a large extent.
Michele Lamont keynote speech
“How Professors Think”
The two keynotes brought out a couple of common threads which were also touched on by many papers. Both keynotes addressed boundaries and the socially constructed criteria by which selections are made; they did this from both research and higher education perspectives though studies of the process of selecting grant proposals for funding and of selecting students for admission. Michele Lamont drew on her book How Professors Think which studied the way in which peer review evaluators in funding bodies make their decisions. Sheldon Rothblatt addressed the student admissions procedures from the historical perspective of California in the 20th century. Both of them challenged the idea of that a mechanistic process of selection could effectively capture quality or worth. Rothblatt argued that rather than seeking an objective measure of merit as might be identified in standardized test results, personal character should be included in admissions decisions.
With both of the keynotes coming from North American institutions, there was also a strong comparative element in both their talks and the conference as a whole. Lamont asked us to think about “how templates of worth are institutionalized” by different national systems, and more generally, what a successful society is. This segued perfectly into the following panel in which Simon Marginson’s presented his newly underway study examining the different ways in which public goods are understood in societies across the globe. At the coffee break, quite a number of people were discussing this and looking forward to hear more as that project progresses. In one of the few panels dedicated to methodological issues, Comparative methods and institutional theory, Jussi Välimaa introduced ideas about how the theory of social dynamics addressing time, space and context, could enrich the study of higher education particularly by understanding how these elements differ across cultures. This might suggest that a stronger cultural and ethnographic element is working its way into higher education studies.
At the final dinner, Barbara Kehm introduced the book Development of Higher Education Research in Europe: 25 Years of CHER which she edited with Christine Musselin. In addition to providing a history of the organization on this significant anniversary, the book promises a broader look at the emergence and institutionalization of Higher Education as a field of research in Europe.
There were several changes on the CHER Board of Governors. Mari Elken was elected to a new position that had been created for an early career researcher. Also Manja Klemenčič and Gaële Goastellec were elected to seats on the board. A new Chairman, Patrick Clancy, and Secretary, Pedro Teixeira, were also named.
Further congratulations are due to Gaële Goastellec and her team who did a wonderful job organizing the conference and making sure everything functioned smoothly.
The 2014 CHER conference will be held in Rome in early September, with final dates to be announced.