CGHE Webinar 129

Public good, French universities and the Republican model of higher education

Date: Thursday, 13 February 2020 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Location: Bedford Way (26) G03, UCL Institute of Education

Speaker(s):

Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews conducted in four public universities as part of a CGHE international comparative project on the public good in higher education, we examine the cultural, political, social and economic forces at play in the way the ‘public good’ is perceived, translated and debated within the French higher education context. Our findings indicate that a variety of views of the public good value/contribution of higher education co-exist, which, in a context of reform, reflect various conceptions of the ways in which the principles and practices driving the French ‘republican’ model work or should work.

Dr Vincent Carpentier

Vincent Carpentier is a Reader in History of Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. He was responsible for CGHE Project 7, ‘A historical lens on higher education staffing: UK and France’. Key outcomes from this project included papers such as Three Stories of Institutional Differentiation: Resource, Mission and Social Inequalities in Higher Education (Policy Reviews in Higher Education 2021) and Academic Workforce in France and the UK in Historical Perspectives (Comparative Education 2023- with Emmanuelle Picard), recently reported in the Conversation (2023) . He was also a Co-Investigator on Project 8, ‘Local and global public good of higher education: 10 nation study’ examining the French context presented in the paper Public Good in French Universities: Principles and practices of the “Republican” Model of Higher education (Compare 2022- with Aline Courtois).

Dr Aline Courtois

Dr Aline Courtois is a Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath. Before coming to Bath she was a Research Associate at the Centre for Global Higher Education, working on programme 1 as well as on the ‘Brexit and higher education in the UK and Europe’ project. Previously she held the National University of Ireland Dr Garret FitzGerald Fellowship in the Social Sciences and lectured in Ireland and in France. She has published widely on student mobility, academic precarity, and elite education.