Academic Elitism Research Articles

Comparative ethical analysis of educational competition in academia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of equitable, equal, and merit equity of social and economic privileges for both gifted intellectual people and laypeople in higher educational systems.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a conceptual comparative analysis of mass education and elitist education within the context of academic justice and academic ethical fairness. This paper is based on a review of the literature pertinent to justice and fairness in designing and implementing higher educational systems.FindingsThe research undertaken reveals that there are significant fundamental differences between academic justice and academic fairness. An analysis of perceptual similarities and differences, however, reveals that more variable perceptions exist between mass education and elitist educational systems. Although both sets of models consistently place great emphasis on the issue of competitive meritocracy among students, academic justice is based on a conventional idealistic system in terms of equality, whereas academic fairness is founded on a type of holistic judgment free from bias, prejudice, dishonesty, or illegitimacy that pursues ethical and moral considerations in regards to decisions and actions. Academic massification, however, shows tendencies to emphasize bureaucratic cost‐benefits in order to implement justice for all, while academic elitism places more emphasis on meritocratic cost‐effectiveness analysis.Research limitations/implicationsSince this paper is based on an ethical conceptual deductive analysis of two major systems of higher education, it has pros and cons concerning each system. Ethics is a relative conceptual reasoning; therefore, there could be other types of reasoning that could be followed by other researchers.Originality/valueThis paper opens arguments concerning how to respond to the needs of students with a consideration of cost‐benefit analysis and cost‐effectiveness analysis.

The education of innovative engineers

PurposeTraditional engineering education in the UK, as established in the nineteenth century, is based on the principle that a degree in engineering should be focused on engineering science and not on the practice of engineering. This has proved to be seriously negative to the development of engineering ability in general and innovative engineering in particular. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons for this situation.Design/methodology/approachFeatures of innovative engineering are outlined and a structure for learning which has potential to promote innovation is proposed.FindingsBecause of principles based on misplaced academic elitism established in the nineteenth century, traditional engineering curricula tend to develop an academic mindset rather than an engineering mindset in students. They do little to support innovative engineering. As a result, the large amount of money spent on engineering education in the UK does not represent a good investment. The academic mindset does not well support any professional context.Originality/valueThe paper provides a challenge to universities and professional engineering institutions which should be addressed.

Finding voice: Promoting the right of free speech for mental health nurses

Finding voice: Promoting the right of free speech for mental health nurses

Macbeth (review)

Reviewed by: Macbeth Tara E. Lynn Macbeth Presented by the Actors from the London Stage at the Clarence Brown Theatre on the campus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. October 12–15, 2007. With Will Ashcroft (Banquo, Lennox, Seyward, Son of Macduff, Scottish Doctor, Porter), Charlotte Allam (Malcolm, Caithness, Wife of Macduff, First Witch, Murderer), Chris Donnelly (Macbeth, Bloody Captain, Old Man, English Doctor, Murderer), Brigid Zengeni (Donalbain, Ross, Menteth, Fleance, Lady Macbeth, Third Witch), and Dan Winter (Duncan, Macduff, Angus, Second Witch, Murderer). [End Page 77] In the satisfyingly gut wrenching ending of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macduff carries the titled villain’s head onto the stage. Of late, several American productions have “enhanced” the Folio stage directions by having Macduff subsequently toss the head across the stage in disdain. During this maneuver, it is customary to use a burlap sack filled with all manner of materials (small watermelons and tomatoes are favorites) as the prop. Some audiences have come to expect the thud-splat of Macbeth’s head as part of their catharsis, allowing us to share Macduff ’s triumphant revenge and reminding us of the fact that overreaching arch-villains do not, in fact, always succeed. Therefore, it was with some sadness and horror that I watched and heard the sack representing Macbeth’s head bounce across the stage and roll to a stop during a recent performance of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. In no way did the ball inside the sack sound, look, or act like what one might expect from a decapitated head. If this had been a collegiate performance, I might have excused and even laughed at the gaffe (as many of the audience members around me did). Instead, I was watching the professional troupe, Actors from the London Stage perform what is arguably one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and undermine a crucial emotional moment with a bouncing ball prop. That said, I hasten to point out that the overall performance was very good. But I begin with this minor misstep because I think it instigates an important discussion. As a professional Shakespearean, I have certain expectations of what Shakespeare should be. The four full rows of undergraduate students behind me did not murmur aloud as I did; in truth, they probably had no idea what I found so annoying as to snort in derision at that point in the performance. Unfortunately, the difference in their reactions and mine is just one example of what happens to all of us as we advance further in our studies. As we develop intricate, multifaceted lenses through which to view early modern theatre, our experience of Shakespearean productions often suffers because they cannot possibly live up to our lofty, idealized, quintessential performance. As academics, the arroyo between criticism and mere enjoyment as an audience member is a problematic one to attempt to traverse and/or to fill. The gloss of academic elitism, though, must sometimes be torn asunder to allow new acolytes a view of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as something more than mere consecrated words on a page. The AFTLS performance of Macbeth at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville was part of such an attempt. In the spring of 2001, an interdisciplinary group of faculty members, led by history professor Dr. Robert Bast, applied for a UT Presidential [End Page 78] grant and formed the Medieval and Renaissance Curriculum and Outreach Project, or MARCO. Subsequently, MARCO won a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant of three million dollars in 2003 for its academic and community outreach programs. Since its formal acceptance as a separate Institute within the university in 2004, the faculty of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has won a number of major research fellowships. Most recently, Marco and University of Tennessee chancellor Loren Crabtree declared Fall 2007 the “Renaissance semester” and planned a wide span of symposia, courses, seminars, and performances for the campus and the public throughout the semester. These events included the annual Renaissance Faire; public lectures by scholars such as A.R. Braunmuller, Elizabeth Clark, Lester Smith, Kathryn Salzer, and Jay Rubenstein; the annual Marco Symposium, entitled “Saints and Citizens: Religion and Politics in the Middle...

Eric James and the ‘Utopianist’ Campus: Biography, Policy and the Building of a New University during the 1960s1

The building of the English new universities during the 1960s symbolized the liberating possibilities of higher education. New institutions for a new age, their campuses were arguably part of a wider ‘utopianist’ movement for community that sought to challenge academic elitism and conservatism. This paper considers the era of university expansion as conceived and implemented during the early development of the University of York. Taking a biographical perspective, it examines the influence of the University’s first vice‐chancellor, Lord (Eric) James of Rusholme, on the complex process of institution building. Although one of the most prominent educationists of the period, James’s vision for York was as much backward as forward looking, harking back to an older collegiate model of community for living as well as learning. What emerged in the meadows to the east of the old Cathedral city was far from utopian but a clear and highly pragmatic expression of how James believed the university, as a liberal and liberating institution, might be refashioned to meet the challenges of a new age of science and technology, mass democracy and education for leadership. 1 This paper is based on research into records held at the Borthwick Institute, University of York, and National Archives (NA), formerly Public Record Office (PRO), Kew. Lady Cordelia James and the University of York granted permission to consult the James Papers and Vice‐Chancellor’s Papers held at the Borthwick. Thanks are due to them and to the British Academy for funding the initial research on which the paper is based (“Lord James of Rusholme: An Educational Life”, Award No. SG‐32493). The author would also like to thank Lady James, Dr Janet Coles, Professor Ian Lister, Professor Harold Silver and anonymous referees for comments on previous drafts of the paper. Any remaining deficiencies are due entirely to the author.

Against Academic Elitism

Against Academic Elitism

From clinical credibility to academic elitism

This article discusses the perceived clinical credibility of midwifery lectures. Are midwife teachers practical teachers with academic expertise or pure theorists? Research findings will highlight the opinions of clinicians, student midwives and lecturers with respect to the nature of clinical credibility.

The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (review)

Reviewed by: The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume Vicki J. Sapp The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, by Adam Potkay; xii & 253 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $36.95. With the memory still fresh of Jerome Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment, I experienced no small anxiety on reading Adam Potkay’s first acknowledgment, to Prof. Christensen and his “provocative seminar” on Hume. I finished a third of The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume before the overt nod, when Potkay spotlights the essayist Hume’s appeal to a female readership: “Within this doux commerce, the figures of classical eloquence are entirely too priapic—too ‘swelling . . . monstrous and gigantic’—to be admitted” (p. 75). However, Hume’s self-castration wound is mercifully left unprobed, and the priapus doesn’t come up again until Potkay’s own prosopopoeia, “ancient eloquence’s priapic energy” (p. 158). Although he follows Christensen’s equation of polite letters with effeminacy, Potkay treats gender more materially than metaphorically. Although attending to his poststructuralist debts with such observations as “Hume, the unmoved mover, observes the spiritual implosion of one whose passions cannot, like his own, be alleviated through voyeurism” (p. 125), Potkay ultimately fulfills his promise to draw his insights from “a history of eighteenth-century reading and reception” (p. 22). In a clear prose he conveys his focused argument, about “the fate of eloquence” in the modern [End Page 244] reconfiguration of society, through a variety of illustrations; as a result, the book has broad appeal to readers interested in literary contexts of rhetoric, gender, and culture. Situating Hume as the center of shared interest and assumption, Potkay defines an “Age of Hume,” a constellation of writers responding to and producing a tension between an ideal of classical eloquence and modern codes of politeness. Boldly establishing this tension “as the characteristic theme of the era,” Potkay makes a compelling case for politeness as the primary means of class stratification for emergent capitalist society. (Paul Fussell has also applied an eighteenth-century literary mind to contemporary sociology in his Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.) In his epilogue, Potkay brings his thesis home, to the ironies of academic publishing elitism and the “peculiarly American commitment to civic equality.” Several ruling assumptions guide Potkay’s treatment of the eloquence/politeness dualism. Reading high-canon writers and moral philosophers, Potkay defines eighteenth-century Britain as an age “that does not want its passions inflamed” and suspects eloquence of aiming to seduce the masses with rhetorical figures and physical gesture. Equated with popular government, eloquence threatens to manipulate “our untutored responses”—passions unmediated by moral and social education—within an exclusively “masculine” political economy. Echoing Christensen, Potkay finds “a characteristic irony” of the new “sentimental commerce” in the “polite restraint of the sexual passions that covertly fuel it” (p. 147). Writers must adapt to the paradigm shift of a new commercial and literary economy which included a sentimental ideal of woman as social sovereign—a model of polite literacy and civility which Hume described in his initial piece, “Of Essay Writing.” Potkay diffuses his gender-based thesis over a broad political and philosophical perspective. Politeness redressed the conflict between masculine populism (Bolingbroke) and effeminate luxury (Walpole) and “served to compensate for virtue lost through commercial progress” (p. 194). Potkay points out the ultimately political association of eloquence with vulgarity: savages, children, and the insane speak a language “thought to abound in figures”—a convenient habit in those whom a ruling class would exclude from “mature, rational discourse” (p. 68). (Here, Potkay elides the more complex “woman” from the above marginalia, for immediate reasons of either obviousness or neatness.) On the philosophical front Hume variously affirmed and problematized a “topos of eloquence as error.” Treatise-lovers may regret that he simmered this passionately figurative text down into the duller and drier Enquiries in order to fulfill a polite—and commercial—demand for the replacement of oral with written culture, of emotional gesticulation with “rationality, abstraction, logic” (p. 63). Potkay’s arguments suggest a ruling irony in this paradigm-shift: the association of eloquence (masculine) with emotionalism and politeness (feminine) with rationality and...

Overcoming Obstacles to Collaboration and Integration in Physical Education

This paper identifies subdisciplinary fragmentation, academic elitism, and negative stereotyping as obstacles impeding the process of collaboration among different groups within the profession of physical education. It provides examples of projects in which academics interacted among themselves and with physical education teachers, classroom teachers, and volunteer coaches. To the extent that these interactions reduce fragmentation and allow academics and practitioners to act as equal partners in the process of problem setting and problem solving, they are offered as ways to “connect” in physical education and as a basis for professional integration.

Akademie en politiek 1

The purpose of (his article is to develop a view concerning the relationship between academy and politics, particularly by taking into account the way in which developments in the institutionalised practice of the university are relevant or irrelevant for our understanding of the idea of the university. The specific question which the author addresses is: what are the peculiar characteristics and mutual relevance of the two hum a n activities which we respectively call academy and politics Firstly, he discusses views in temis of which academy and politics are radically separated and in terms of which arguments for the alleged political neutrality of the university are developed. Secondly, he identifies three cultural and philosophic developments which, since the advent of modernity, have challenged the viability of such separation. Thirdly, he develops a position which mediates between the extremes of an historical academic elitism and a historisiic ideologising of university and science.