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Perceptions of Higher Education: Quality, Equality, Equitability within a Globalised World
Authors: John W. A. Netting

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My initial proposition is that, in its current form, higher education through the ‘university structure’ is no longer fit for purpose. The author H.G. Wells commented, ‘We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organisation, education, graduation, for a century – in fact, for several centuries.’ Eighty years on from H.G. Wells comment, the situation remains largely the same; in fact, in recent years we have probably, whilst retaining a largely fifteenth century administrative structure within our universities, exacerbated the increasingly uncomfortable life within universities by subjecting them to unmitigated new stresses. I will come to some of those stresses later in the lecture.