This article extends current understandings of regulation of tertiary education, in particular, work experience undertaken by tertiary students, by contributing a ‘law in practice’ analysis of the effect of the existing regulatory regime on work integrated learning practice within Australian universities. It considers how Australian universities are responding to, implementing, or overlooking the formal regulatory framework regarding work experience placements. The analysis is informed by data gathered in a series of 68 semi-structured interviews conducted with individuals from 15 universities around Australia and provides unique insights into how Universities are acting as regulators in the broad sense of the word. Understanding the enforcement of educational regulation is important, because it is the only national tool directed to ensuring work experience opportunities afford real learning which will facilitate skills development and increase future employment opportunities and are equitable and safe for student participants.

Humanities research is underfunded, and the institutional sources and intellectual effects of this underfunding are insufficiently appreciated. The paper gives an example of the negative effects of a humanities discipline’s lack of research infrastructure on scholarly work. Section 2 describes the main categories through which research funds arrive on U.S. campuses. Section 3 describes the disproportions between Science & Engineering (S&E or “STEM”) funding and funding for social and cultural disciplines. Section 4 discussions the “institutional funds” that universities use to cover research costs from their own pockets. Section 5 shows that universities do not use their institutional funds to compensate for inequities in humanities funding but to perpetuate them. Section 6 claims that the current state of humanities funding abridges academic freedom and calls on humanities administrative personnel to lead a national campaign to rectify the current situation. Misconceptions about humanities research and its funding must be openly acknowledged and addressed so that it can come to have public effects that reflect its actual intellectual achievements.

Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors. This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair. Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.

Historically, the higher education curriculum in business degrees has contained little or no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (herein ‘Indigenous’) content. With the increase in awareness at the societal level, Australian university business schools need to change and design the curriculum, so that students graduate with the capability to engage with Indigenous businesses, individuals, and communities while understanding contemporary policy and business including sustainability, Human Resources, supply chain, and governance. First, secondary data from Australian Department of Education, Skills, and Employment were collected on Indigenous and non-Indigenous higher education students is presented to establish the current levels of student’s access and completion rates in management, commerce and business areas. Secondly, focus groups were held to gain the views of educators who have taught Indigenous curriculum in Foundation business and commerce curriculum and share their perceptions of the impact of this on students and themselves. The secondary data presented show the imperative of providing strategies to support and opportunities to Indigenous students and that by embedding Indigenous knowledge students can build awareness and connection leading to short and long term improvements. Information gathered from the research can be used to support the largely positive impact teaching Indigenous curriculum thereby addressing government policies in closing the gap of education and employment.

Lately, my students have been asking: “Why should we be here, when there are people suffering out there?” Evidently, they are asking about the public value of higher education. But they are also asking old questions, some of the oldest that human beings have seen fit to ask. Versions of these questions appear in all scriptural traditions, in ancient and modern philosophical works, in stories and novels and songs. They are questions at the core of what we call “the humanities.” Part of why we study the humanities – and why we must – is to get help in asking, articulating, and trying to answer such questions. There aren’t single right answers to any of those questions. Each of us must work answers out for ourselves. But we can work out better answers for ourselves if we spend time in the company of others who take those questions seriously. This is not just an individual task; it’s a collective task of great public import. In this short piece, I defend the idea of the public humanities on these terms.

Fear for the future of democracy in the 1930s and 1940s led university educators to redefine the purpose of general education as preparation for democratic citizenship. This mobilized social scientists to engage in curricular reform and experiment with progressive pedagogical practices in new general education courses. These courses have been overlooked in the scholarship on general education, which focuses on Great Books courses and educators’ efforts to create a common culture linked to Europe. Uncovering these courses demonstrates that general education was an important part of higher education’s commitment to democracy. Mid-twentieth-century social science general education was an innovative form of political education aimed at preparing independent-minded, engaged citizens with democratic values.

This study evaluates the visibility of French-speaking scholars in Canadian political science by analyzing the reading materials assigned in Canadian politics courses. Extending Daoust et al.'s (2022) research, we establish a baseline for their calculations and build an original dataset gathered from all political science departments’ websites and Google Scholar. Our analysis based on three assumptions about the expected academic representation of francophones—Canada's linguistic composition, the makeup of political science departments and faculty members’ productivity—reveals a discrepancy favouring anglophone scholars by up to four percentage points. Our findings extend Daoust et al.'s (2022) contribution by highlighting a similar language-based bias in overall citation practices among Canadian scholars, with French-speaking authors being significantly under-cited compared to their English-speaking counterparts despite demonstrating higher levels of overall productivity. Implications for the future of the discipline are also discussed.

An animal welfare education community of practice (AWECoP) for those teaching animal welfare science, applied ethology, and/or animal ethics was created to develop a dialogue amongst educators within the field of animal welfare science. The purpose of this paper is to describe the history, objectives, and members’ experiences within this community. AWECoP hosts 6–8 meetings annually for members to discuss topics relevant to our community and exchange teaching resources; within its first two years, the community has grown to 121 members representing approximately 70 institutions across six continents. A 12-question, mixed-method survey was distributed to capture member demographics, engagement with AWECoP, motivations for joining, and self-evaluation of AWECoP’s impacts. Quantitative data from the survey are presented descriptively, while reflexive thematic analysis was applied to the qualitative data. Survey respondents (n = 54) felt that AWECoP is a vital community and safe space for members to share their ideas and receive feedback, inspiration, information, and resources regarding subject-specific and broader pedagogical topics. As a result, a majority experienced professional (e.g. development of new contacts) and personal (e.g. increased feeling of belonging in their field) benefits, as well as impacts realised in their teaching practice. We conclude with an examination of challenges faced in ensuring AWECoP remains accessible to a growing membership and offer recommendations for facilitating similar communities to support fellowship and training in the teaching of animal welfare and related disciplines.

This article examines the history of learning disabilities (LDs) on college campuses, from the introduction of the concept in the early 1960s to its spread throughout American higher education during the 1990s. At first, colleges offered relatively little assistance and urged students to compensate for their LDs by working harder and adopting recommended study strategies. After legal and institutional pressures compelled faculty members to provide accommodations for greater numbers of students, many professors worried about the legitimacy of the diagnosis and the possible threat to academic standards. While casting a somewhat sympathetic light on these concerns, the article concludes that many elements of this early set of accommodations were eventually regarded as pillars of competent instruction. This history illuminates the complex tension between institutional support and student responsibilities and the murky distinction between individual accommodations and universally-effective teaching.

In the United States and Europe, para-university institutions have often been viewed as postsecondary institutions that satisfy some needs not addressed by universities. Such para-universities might be technical institutes or research centers affiliated with a parent university and/or a nation-state. In stateless nations, however, para-universities have acquired certain characteristics that, compared with nation-states, distinguish them in their rationale and development. In the Basque Country of Spain, the Basque Studies Society—an institution not born from, or linked to, any parent university—sought to unite the promotion of science and indigenous culture with a demand for educational and political autonomy. The Basque case reveals instructive contrasts that separate para-university practice from that of its European and American counterparts. This article analyzes para-university practice and activities during the first two decades of the Basque Studies Society (1918-1936). With its emphasis upon political autonomy as well as the absence of an established nation-state and the lack of a university that served as a base, this case study challenges traditional conceptions of the para-university in its essence and praxis.

The mental health and suicide rates of further education (FE) and higher education (HE) students have been generating international concern in many countries, including the United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Several charters and national frameworks have emerged to support and inform whole institution provision. There is evidence of sector engagement and investment to support implementation in HE and to a lesser extent, FE, particularly from the USA and UK, although effectiveness evidence is currently lacking. Barriers affecting help seeking and early identification of difficulties, delays in accessing appropriate support, and lack of continuity of care from campus supports into specialist Mental Health services, remain key challenges. This editorial discusses the current position and the next stage of development in student mental health support and suicide prevention. Overall, the transformation of FE and HE provision to address student mental health and suicide concerns still has a considerable way to go.