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Speakers
Professor Hugh Lauder - Conference Speaker
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Professor Hugh Lauder
Professor of Education and Political Economy, University of Bath and author of Global Auction
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Research Interests
Political economy of skill formation
Educational policy
Political economy of education
School effectiveness
Teaching Programmes
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Activities & Links
Editor, Journal of Education and Work
The Journal of Education and Work is a major international forum for academic research and policy analysis which focuses on the interplay of the education and economic systems.
Key Publications: The Global Auction
How the global economy really works and how to thrive in it
For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Challenging this conventional wisdom, the Global Auction thesis forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. The competition for good, middle class jobs is now a worldwide competition--an auction for cut-priced brainpower--fuelled by an explosion of higher education across the world and a fundamental power shift in favour of corporate bosses and emerging economies such as China and India. These drivers of the new global high-skill, low-wage workforce threaten the aspirations of all those in the West who see a university degree as the means to a good job. Fighting for a dwindling supply of good jobs will compel those in the west to devote more time, money and effort to set themselves apart in a bare-knuckle competition that will leave many disappointed. At the same time the research and development capacity being developed in the East means that the traditional advantage of western universities is being eroded. Also, in a global free-market for higher education researchers no longer need to serve the needs of particular nations so that research done in the UK may be cashed out in other countries.
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Professor Maria Helena Nazaré - Conference Speaker
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Professor Maria Helena Nazaré
President European Universities Association
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Maria Helena Nazaré began her academic career in Mozambique lecturing at the University Eduardo Mondlane in 1973. Before her special interest in Physics was to take her to the University of Aveiro in Portugal, where she served as Rector, she spent three years working on her PhD at King’s College London, graduating in 1978. In 1986, she took up leadership of the research group in Spectroscopy of Semiconductors in the Department of Physics at the University of Aveiro, working with national and international funded research projects and has publishing over 70 articles in scientific journals.
She has participated actively in decision-making, whether it be as President of the departmental scientific and pedagogical commissions (positions she held on various occasions between 1978 and 1988) or as Head of Department between 1978 and 1980 and again between 1988 and 1990. In 1990 she was made Vice-President of the University of Aveiro Scientific Commission and in 1991, Vice-Rector of the University, a position she held until 1998. She was elected Rector of the University of Aveiro from 2002-2010 and became an EUA Board member in March 2009 and EUA President in 2011.
A new old role for University.
It is part of the accepted discourse that the welfare of a nation depends, in the long run, on the quality of human resources, that is, on people and their ideas. This linked with individual expectations has led to an explosion (massification) of Higher Education. However the sector was not prepared to deal with the challenges of the increasing demand; consequently, during the last decade, the European higher education landscape has undergone tremendous alterations both at system and at institutional levels. Many of those were directly linked with, or driven by, the needs for efficiently qualifying the workforce, within an appropriate span of time, and equipping it with the skills required by a global competitive world market.
In the same span of time, unemployment increased (notably among the young population) across an ageing Europe facing workforce qualification problems, loosing brains for emerging economies and no longer detaining the primacy of knowledge producing. By the end of the first decade into the XXI century, Europe is confronted with one of the worst economic and financial crisis since the great recession, together with very adverse demography.
What went wrong? Our endeavours to correct the trajectory, are they appropriate?
The Europe 2020 Strategy, the weakling successor of the Lisbon Agenda, does not look promising in dealing with such challenging environment! There are severe limitations to the success of the 2020 Strategy, namely, those related to the disparity of demographic trends within Europe and the way governments are dealing with the economic crisis which is impacting very negatively on European universities. These issues undermine the overall objective of the realisation of a cohesive, inclusive and economically strong Europe. If demography is not directly responsible for the crisis is a powerful catalyst. Retraining actives, fighting unemployment and promoting a better integration of migrants are obviously necessary in the present situation.
What role is there for Universities and who pays for it?
There are a number of interrelated issues ranging from demographics to prioritization of certain fields of knowledge and league tables which are behaviour inducing. There is a need to understand to what extend these phenomena can be made compatible with (used for?!) better meeting societal needs
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Is it possible for a University to have a prominent position in the rankings and league tables and at the same time cater for the social improvement of its region? Why existing knowledge is not used in political decision making? Is it because is not in an appropriate format? Or are the reasons linked to a rather limited way of understanding the relationship between policies and partisanship. Shouldn’t universities pay more attention to the promotion of the public understanding of Science?
University education must be about training sustainability aware citizens, be it as medical doctors, economists, layers, philosophers or physicists. Responses to the Grand Challenges cannot be found without the contribution of University research and research based education.
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Professor Sir David Watson
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Professor Sir David Watson
SRHE Honorary President
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David Watson is an historian and Principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He was Professor of Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London, from 2005-2010, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton between 1990 and 2005. His most recent books are Managing Civic and Community Engagement (2007), The Dearing Report: ten years on (2007), and The Question of Morale: managing happiness and unhappiness in university life (2009).
He has contributed widely to developments in UK higher education, including as a member of the Council for National Academic Awards (1977-1993), the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (1988-92), and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (1992-96). He was a member of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's National Commission on Education (1992-1993), and the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education chaired by Sir Ron Dearing (1996-1997). He was the elected chair of the Universities Association for Continuing Education between 1994 and 1998, and chaired the Longer Term Strategy Group of Universities UK between 1999 and 2005. He is President of the Society for Research into Higher Education, a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, a Companion of the Institute of Management, and a National Teaching Fellow (2008). He chaired the national Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning, and co-authored its report Learning Through Life (2009). He was knighted in 1998 for services to higher education. In 2009 he received the Times Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award. |
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