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Interdisciplinary curricula provide students the opportunity to work with knowledge drawn from multiple disciplines. Following suit, interdisciplinary learning requires interaction of knowledge from different disciplines; integration of knowledge from different disciplines; and an overarching topic, theme, or problem that shapes the learning experience. Since the university curriculum is commonly structured by academic disciplines, and faculty are socialized to their respective disciplinary norms, interdisciplinarity is a complex endeavor for colleges and universities. These endeavors include developing interdisciplinary courses, sustaining interdisciplinary initiatives, and financing interdisciplinary programs. Given the multiple challenges facing 21st-century society, the question of interdisciplinarity is urgent. How knowledge is defined and disseminated; how and what students learn; and how higher education can be responsive to its external environment are crucial issues facing educators. Responding to these issues does not diminish the role of the discipline in education, but rather acknowledges that knowledge is unbounded and potential discoveries lie outside compartmentalized structures.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, an op-ed in the online publication Inside Higher Education questioned the mission of education for its focus on teaching only Western perspectives—perspectives that normalize racial hierarchies, legitimize epistemological racism, and reproduce white supremacy. The postulation of the education system as a motor of white supremacy is not a new suggestion. Black, Indigenous, and Chicana scholars have long articulated the need to diversify and therefore democratize Western epistemology by deconstructing decolonial knowledge. Positioning Chicana Feminist Epistemologies (CFE) as an alternative epistemic will disrupt the philosophical assumptions of colonial epistemology supporting white supremacy by decolonizing the structure of what knowledge is and how it is created in higher education, especially within research and pedagogy approaches. However, CFE work has faced strong resistance within the intersections of public intellectuals, the Western canon of thought, and the intellectual spaces of academia. Nevertheless, Latinx students’ enrollment has increased in postsecondary education for the past decade, emanating a growth in research studies utilizing CFE. A CFE framework urges scholars, educators, and students to move away from colonial research designs rooted in hegemonic procedures to build new inclusive, equitable, liberatory, communal higher education processes that benefit not only Brown and Black students, staff, and faculty communities but also the white population who are dismantling white supremacy. Validating CFE in research, instructional, and pedagogical practices as well as in policy and procedures within education may encourage other scholars to diversify the Western canon of thought and decolonize intellectual spaces in higher education for a more equitable and social just education.

In an age of increasing automation, what separates a human process from automation is the flexibility and autonomy human beings have and operate with in real time. Despite the fact that humans are driven by autonomy to operate and process things, such autonomy is often taken for granted and at times is only alluded to as an afterthought. But what is autonomy? How does autonomy make a person’s actions differ from those of an automated, inanimate being? Autonomy is often talked about as synonymous with freedom. This basic characterization partially responds to the fuller meaning of autonomy. This is the case when freedom is confined to freedom from, which is most often how this concept is used. Autonomy as an internal drive to determine one’s actions necessarily combines both freedom from as well as freedom to. It is no simpler to discuss or pin down “autonomy” within the context of university traditions and practices. The variability of practices and traditions has resulted in different formulations of what autonomy would mean in a university context. Similar to what determines autonomy as concept at an individual personal level, the autonomy of the academic or the academic institution, in this case the university, also brings forth specific understandings of life and its processes. Just as autonomy cannot exist without any forms of life to exercise it, the conditions in African universities today mean that neither traditional communitarian positions nor liberal conceptions are necessarily amenable to the progress of autonomy within these institutions. A neo-communitarian position serves as a more tenable concept that can represent forms of autonomy that are neither alienating nor too deterministic.

The sustainability concept was introduced as a result of growing public concern about the degradation of the natural environment. Environmental movements resulted in the Brundtland report, as the general quest for combining economic development and environmental protection in favor of next generations. Within the sustainability concept, four interrelated pillars are considered important, namely, economic, environmental, social, and cultural. The upper goal of the sustainability approach is the management of natural resources in a way that contributes to human well-being. Within this framework, individuals meet their needs with respect to the quality of the environment. In order to achieve this goal, the role of education is crucial. Several declarations were developed on stressing the importance of education to increase awareness for sustainable development. The sustainable development movement advocated a shift toward more holistic educational processes where, in addition to basic sciences, individuals would be educated to adopt attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors compatible with the principles of sustainability. Within this context, educational organizations, such as universities, are to enhance students’ perceptions toward sustainable development by adopting learning programs and courses that will help individuals to recognize that their consumption habits, as reflected in their own actions, affect their current and future economic and environmental impacts.

The persistent high wage premium associated with college education, despite increasing participation rates, continues to generate a great deal of academic and policy interest. While it is widely agreed that the financial benefits associated with college completion outweigh the costs, modeling and empirically estimating the returns are complicated. A simple theoretical framework on educational investment illustrates the decision-making processes and key factors, such as expected returns, that guide the choice of an individual to engage in higher education and to achieve an optimal level of educational investment. Broadening the investment model, however, is instrumental to account for potential heterogeneous returns to higher education—the variation in returns by institution, field of study, and students’ background characteristics, among others—and to recognize the wider societal benefits of higher education, beyond private returns. The challenges involved in estimating the returns to higher education and the heterogeneity in returns are central in the discussion. Interpreting a naive correlation between education and wages is complicated by the nonrandom selection of individuals into higher education, such that individuals who are most likely to benefit from higher education are also those most likely to attend. Advancements in data collection, the ability to track individuals from compulsory education to the labor market, and improvements in econometric methodologies have enabled researchers to causally estimate the impact of higher education on earnings and allow for an improved insight into the disparities in returns to higher education. Recognizing the links between students’ characteristics (or backgrounds) and associated constraints helps to understand differences in higher education choices. Similarly, identifying differences in labor market returns associated with attending certain colleges or pursuing particular academic disciplines is as important in shedding light on the complex nature of human capital disparities and the signaling effect of higher education. As the costs of higher education provision constitute an increasingly large share of government spending all over the world, the high returns to college raise questions associated with who should pay for attending college and the role of the state. Internalizing the social returns to education and their broader implications on the growth and the persistence of inequality complicates this discussion. Higher education funding is one potential policy instrument to influence college attendance and returns. It is not, however, the only one. Better information on returns to education or access to policies that target members of certain social groups might be other potential tools to overcome constraints.

African philosophies of education are multifold, depending on the specific geographic location in which a particular African philosophy of education is advanced. In northern Africa, African philosophy of education is biased towards Muslim understandings of education, whereas in western Africa, African philosophy of education is mostly attuned to Francophone thinking. In eastern Africa, Anglophone thinking seems to dominate an African philosophy of education. The focus on African philosophy of education is guided by thinking in the southern African region. In the main, African philosophy of education in the southern African region of the continent is considered as a philosophical activity that aims to identify major socio-economic, environmental, and politico-cultural problems on the African continent, and simultaneously to examine the educational implications of such problems for teaching and learning in higher education. It can be construed, for instance, that a military dictatorship is a major political and social problem on the continent, which implies that any form of democratic governance would be undermined. An educational implication of such a problem is that deliberative engagement among university teachers and students would not be regarded as appealing for higher education, as such a practice would be considered incommensurable with dictatorial rule. Identifying any other major problems or dystopias—such as terrorism committed by Boko Haram in western Africa (a violent movement undermining any form of Western education); children being used as soldiers in central Africa; and drug trafficking in sub-Saharan Africa—by proffering reasons why the latter instances are problems, and then examining how educational practices will manifest, are tantamount to enacting an African philosophy of education.

The French social Pierre Bourdieu became known as a key sociologist of education in the 1970s, contributing seminal books and articles to the “new” sociology of education, which focuses on knowledge formation in the classroom and institutional relations. His own social background was modest, but he rose through the elite French schools to become a leading intellectual in the second half of the 20th century. His early studies dealt with Algeria, which he had experienced firsthand in the 1950s at a time of their war of independence. Issues of education and culture grew out of his field studies and formed the basis of further early work in the 1960s. Subsequently, he developed a wider research corpus, which considered the French state and society as a whole: cultural consumption, politics, religion, law, economics, literature, art, fashion, media, and philosophy. Bourdieu developed a highly original “theory of practice” and set of conceptual thinking tools: habitus, field, and cultural capital. His approach sought to rise above conventional oppositions between subjectivism and objectivism. Structure as both structured and structuring was a central principle to this epistemology. Early studies of university students focused on the role that education played in social class reproduction and the place of language in academic discourse. For him, pedagogy was a form of “symbolic violence,” played out in the differential holdings of “cultural capital” that the students held with respect to each other and the dominant ethos of schooling. He undertook further extensive studies of French higher education and elite training schools. He was involved in various education review committees and put forward a number of principles for change in curricula, all while accepting that genuine reform was extremely challenging. He catalogued some of the tensions and conflicts of contemporary education policy. Both his discoveries and conceptual terms still offer researchers powerful tools for analyzing and understanding all national education systems and the particular individual practical contexts within them.

South Korea has experienced a surge of foreign immigration since 1990, and one of the major migrant groups is female marriage migrants. Although the South Korean government has implemented a variety of policies to reform its education system in order to accommodate the growing multicultural population, it has been mainly focused on K–12 education for children of migrants. In addition, the issues of access to and quality of higher education for female marriage migrants in South Korea are seldom discussed in academic and public spheres. Although female marriage migrants have a great degree of motivation to pursue higher education, they face multilayered hurdles before, during, and after receiving their higher education in South Korea. Narratives of female marriage migrants in higher education not only challenge the common stereotype of “global hypergamy” and gender stereotypes related to female marriage migrants but also provide chances to reexamine the current status of higher education in South Korea and the notion of global citizenship. Their stories highlight the changes in self-perception, familial relationships, and social engagement and underscore female marriage migrants’ process of embracing global citizenship. Their narratives articulate how gender, migration, and higher education intersect in their daily lives, how their lives are connected to the globalizing world, and how these reveal two essential components of the sense of global citizenship—dignity and compassion.

The mid-20th century marked the birth of higher education systems in the majority of the 22 Arabic-speaking countries. Driven by post-independence nationalism, ruling elites deemed education, including higher education, as a crucial part of nation-state building, next to the development of the army, bureaucracy, and economy. With government funding, new public universities were established throughout the region. Enrollment steadily increased as governments expanded access to higher education through lax admission and free or highly subsidized admission, and often guaranteeing employment for university graduates in the public sector. By the end of the 20th century, higher education became widely accessible in most Arab countries, but decades of neglect have led to a crisis in quality and research. Academic quality has deteriorated under the weight of decades of neglect from overcrowded classrooms, outdated curriculum, poor pedagogy, underpaid faculty, lack of quality mechanisms, strapped budget to limited autonomy. No more encouraging is the universities’ role as a center of knowledge discovery and innovation, given their lack of adequate qualified human and necessary physical resources. The low performance of public universities on the global ranking systems and the high unemployment rate among university graduates sums up the Arab higher education system’s inauspicious condition. During the last two decades, governments enacted various reform measures. To relieve overcrowded public universities and reduce public finance burden, countries in the region authorized private higher education. Consequently, the number of private universities has mushroomed, many of which are for-profit and exclusively focused on teaching. However, a shortage of cash and limited freedom to manage academic and administrative affairs continue to beset most public institutions. Some countries have made incremental changes, such as introduced measures to increase equity, endorsed new admission policies, and established accreditation and quality assurance bodies. The Gulf countries undertook far-reaching measures to transform the system. Cushioned by oil and gas revenues and a relatively small population, the six Gulf countries have invested considerably in upgrading public universities’ infrastructure, hiring faculty and administrative staff from abroad, and developing a research infrastructure including establishing new research-oriented universities. Consequently, the Arab higher education landscape has become increasingly diversified and with growing differences among countries. To compare the Arab countries on their current state of their higher education system, the countries are ranked on an index composed of three key aspects: access to higher education (gross enrollment ratio), equity (gross enrollment ratio for female), and publication intensity (citable documents per million inhabitants). The ranking shows the Gulf countries vying for the top spots. At the low end of the rank are countries which have been conflict-ridden or poverty-stricken.

Over the last three decades, service-learning has become a well-known experiential learning pedagogy in both management education and higher education more broadly. This popularity is observed in the increasing number of peer-reviewed publications on service-learning in management and business education journals, and on management education topics within higher education journals focused on civic engagement and community-based teaching and learning. In this field of study, it is known that service-learning can result in positive outcomes for students, faculty, and community members. In particular, for students, positive results are related to mastery of course content and group process skills like teamwork and communication, leadership, and diversity awareness. Despite the rise in scholarship, service-learning instructors still face several challenges in the area of best practice standards, fostering deep and cohesive partnerships, and managing institutional pressures that disincentivize engaged teaching practices. With constantly evolving challenges in management education, continued research is needed to understand a variety of service-learning facets such as platforms (face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual learning), populations (graduate vs. undergraduate populations and adult vs. traditional college-age learners), measurement (how to assess university-community partnerships and faculty instruction), and which institutional policies and procedures can enable and reward community-engaged teaching and learning approach.

Academic integrity is an interdisciplinary concept that provides the foundation for every aspect and all levels of education. The term evokes strong emotions in teachers, researchers, and students—not least because it is usually associated with negative behaviors. When considering academic integrity, the discussion tends to revolve around cheating, plagiarism, dishonesty, fraud, and other academic malpractice and how best to prevent these behaviors. A more productive approach entails a focus on promoting the positive values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage (International Center for Academic Integrity, 2013) as the intrinsically motivated drivers for ethical academic practice. Academic integrity is much more than “a student issue” and requires commitment from all stakeholders in the academic community, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers, established researchers, senior managers, policymakers, support staff, and administrators.

Colleges and universities are values-based organizations. These values help anchor an institution around a set of shared principles that, when enacted, provide guidance and stability in the pursuit of one’s mission. The realization of the tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service—and in some cases, community engagement and/or clinical excellence—hinges on the articulation, identification, and manifestation of some set of shared values. During times of stability and normalcy, the embodiment and enactment of core values may come quite naturally to the members of an organization, often with little reflection or deliberation. But amid the perilous conditions often present during periods of crisis, these values have the potential to recede from view as those with formal crisis responsibilities respond to the urgent demands of the moment. Crises, by their very nature, cause disruption, and they have the potential to threaten an organization’s core mission, purpose, or reason for existence. Within the context of higher education, the work of crisis leadership is made especially complex in light of the decentralized and loosely coupled organizational structure of colleges and universities, along with the traditions, decision making patterns, and limited opportunities for training and development that constrain institutions in responding to the complexity, urgency, and interdependent pressures characteristic of contemporary crises. Furthermore, the moral purpose of higher education, the diversity of stakeholders, and the wide range of potential crisis situations make the subject of crisis leadership in this context one of increased relevance and importance for scholars and practitioners alike.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) higher education system has undergone radical change since the perestroika period—the Gorbachev period (1985–1991). Perestroika means restructuring in Russian. In this period, the institutional context of higher education was fundamentally transformed by the major upheavals of the political and socioeconomic institutions of the USSR. The changes in the USSR higher education had a major impact on the higher education of Kazakhstan—a former Republic of the USSR. Thus, to understand the changes in higher education in Kazakhstan, it is important to locate them in the stages of the collapse of the USSR. It could be argued that the “institutional dis/continuities” theory would allow a careful examination of the educational changes in the postsocialist context. The “institutional dis/continuities” of the perestroika period draw on path-dependency and critical juncture concepts within historical institutionalism theory. Perestroika period can be seen as a critical juncture in the historical development of higher education. Also, the policy choices which were made during the perestroika period could establish further path-dependencies in policy-making.

Intellectual virtues are characteristics that motivate individuals to pursue knowledge and understanding. They support the intellectual flourishing of the individual and consequently of society writ large. Scholars are only beginning to examine how these virtues are developed. An interdisciplinary approach that bridges philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and education research is needed to add empirical grounding to philosophical conceptions of intellectual virtues and to provide recommendations for educators to advance these virtues. Schools arguably have a vital role to play in the development of the intellectual virtues. Colleges and universities embrace several core aims, among them fostering the individual flourishing of their students and the broader public good. Interpreted through a philosophical lens, achieving these aims invokes intellectual virtues. Two intellectual virtues—intellectual autonomy and intellectual fairness—are particularly salient for emerging adults in the higher education context. Empirical research has the potential to shed light on how these virtues are developed and what educators can do to better promote them. Although empirical studies suggest that emerging adults in college may be developmentally primed for the virtues of intellectual autonomy and intellectual fairness, many emerging adults do not leave college reliably demonstrating these virtues. Colleges and universities can do more to support their development by (a) providing students with challenging situations and supportive conditions, (b) creating opportunities for self-directed learning and intellectual risk-taking, and (c) raising awareness of cognitive limitations that undermine fairness.

Higher education in South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, is under pressure to reinvent and transform itself. Traditionally it has enjoyed the financial support of the government and has also enjoyed an autonomous existence. In South Africa, since the demise of apartheid, the education policy terrain has shifted remarkably fast and policies have required that universities respond to a national plan for higher education that commits universities to become cost- effective, massified institutions opening access to all who were historically excluded due to apartheid’s policies of educational exclusion. Universities in the higher education sector as a whole are required to generate strategies that broaden access routes for disadvantaged groups and at the same time consider curriculum strategies that ensure success and inclusivity to such groups after access. In addition to these daunting challenges, the higher education sector has experienced a decrease in government funding and an increase in government control. Student-led protest around the cost of higher education has also introduced a new kind of pressure point on universities. These shifts are in sharp contrast to the more elite traditional model of higher education in South Africa, which has been mostly residential institutions focusing on full-time study, with lectures, seminars, and laboratory demonstrations as the dominant forms of pedagogy. This model is also based on sets of internal rules designed to support staff to spearhead the knowledge-production processes. They function best under stable environments and tend to meander and falter when the foundations for stability are threatened.

Pacific research methodologies refer to Indigenous research that is conducted from the ontological and epistemological standpoint of Pacific peoples. Pacific research methodologies are an act of decolonial resistance that recognizes the legitimacy of Pacific ontologies and epistemologies, enabling research that is truly reflective of Pacific peoples. They are a response to colonial research patterns that have framed and stereotyped Pacific peoples in problematic ways. Pacific research methodologies are a resurgence practice that empowers Pacific people to define and critique the Pacific from a Pacific viewpoint. They include but are not limited to vanua, kakala, talanoa, ula, and fa’afaletui. They can be regionally specific, such as the vanua or kakala, and they can also be pan-Pacific and refer to shared values, such as respect, reciprocity, communal relationships, collective responsibility, gerontocracy, humility, love and charity, service, and spirituality. Pacific duality means that Pacific research methodologies can be both pan-Pacific and regional. Pacific research methodologies continue to be developed as more Pacific people enter the research space.

Maladministration is the performance of leadership relative to the considerable mismanagement of official functions centering on conduct described as incompetent, but not illegal. Understandings of maladministration in the literature are extended through portraits of everyday acts of maladministration within university schools and colleges of education. These are meant to complement the existing research on various psychologies of dysfunctional leadership through the specific lens of day-to-day leadership actions. In this article, an examination of organizational symptoms of maladministration is offered along with its overall impact on organizational culture. For purposes of this article, maladministration is defined as the performance of leaders relative to the considerable mismanagement of official functions that centers on conduct described as incompetent, but not illegal. Specific portraits intended to deconstruct maladministrators in their everyday efforts are described. Then, concluding thoughts outline a set of diagnostic tools and advice for those looking to navigate their careers around and even transcend leaders who are guilty of maladminstrative practice. Like the disciplines of medicine and the law, leadership is a professional endeavor built on translating bodies of research, professional skill sets, and dispositions into daily practice. As with other professions, the struggle to define the difference between appropriate practice and substandard work is challenging. Arguably, more attention in the literature has been given to examining the hallmarks of skilled leadership rather than the contours of malpractice. A term used in various global contexts to reference the failed execution of leadership responsibilities is maladministration. For purposes of this discussion, maladministration is defined as the performance of leaders relative to the considerable mismanagement of official functions that centers on conduct described as incompetent, but not illegal. This article extends understandings of maladministration by presenting portraits of everyday maladministration within university schools and colleges of education. Understandings of maladministration in the literature are extended through portraits of everyday acts of maladministration within university schools and colleges of education. These are meant to complement the existing research on various psychologies of dysfunctional leadership through the specific lens of day-to-day leadership actions. This article begins with an examination of organizational symptoms of maladministration along with its overall impact on organizational culture. Next, specific portraits intended to deconstruct maladministrators in their everyday efforts are outlined. The concluding discussion outlines a set of diagnostic tools and advice for those looking to navigate their careers around and even transcend leaders who are guilty of maladminstrative practice.

A state college or university, through its administrators and, in some contexts, its faculty and students, is a constitutional actor. This statement surprises many who work in public higher education. Because students, staff, faculty members, and visitors retain their constitutional rights, those who act on behalf of public colleges and universities are constitutional actors, the paramount duty is to obey the Constitution. The constitutional obligations trump other duties under statutes, regulations, guidance documents, union agreements, internal policies, and faculty rules. Because they are flawed human beings, university administrators are no more or no less virtuous than other governmental actors are. Like other government officials, higher education administrators may pursue their own interests at the expense of the public interests, may reward their friends and punish their enemies, and may subordinate the constitutional rights of others to their own well-intentioned policy objectives. Constitutional conflict and constitutional litigation are inevitable. Like government officials outside of academe, a public college or university’s constitutional actors must ensure their own behavior conforms to the Constitution while striving to ensure their colleagues also comply. Although constitutional conflicts for public universities arise in many contexts, disputes involving the “first freedom” of religious liberty are quite common. Americans are a religious people and, while they differ on fundamental theological questions, there is a broad consensus around the existence of a higher power. Consequently, their government’s foundational documents explicitly acknowledge the unalienable right of religious liberty. This acknowledgment takes the form of the Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from favoring a particular faith, and the Free Exercise Clause, which prohibits government interference with religious practice.

Students with disabilities are becoming more and more common in higher education classrooms, including social work classrooms. The challenges that come with accommodating students so as to allow equal access to the educational experience are surmountable with the assistance of student disability offices. New technology is being developed to assist students with learning both in and out of the classroom. Supportive attitudes from faculty in including students with disabilities allow all students to benefit from the experience. As compliance with laws such as the ADA becomes commonplace for new construction, the concept of universal design makes inclusion a norm.