CANADA: The insecurity of higher education research

Academics are often characterised (and caricatured) as pompous, confident that they are the smartest people in the room and eager to prove it. But arrogance and insecurity are sometimes flip sides of one coin, and the professoriate has seen a rash lately of scholars expressing dismay at their perceived marginalisation. But when it comes to a field with an inferiority complex, few have it over scholars who study higher education, writes Doug Lederman for Inside Higher Ed.

They, like many of their colleagues in the social sciences, yearn for more attention from and influence with policy-makers, as was the subject of numerous discussions at a recent meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education held in Vancouver, Canada.

But higher education researchers also feel as if they get short shrift from other scholars within the academy, several of them argued at a panel called "The Trouble With Higher Ed Research". The tricky part about the discussion about the field's status was that those commenting had greatly varying perceptions of how they perceived the problem, and therefore about what might be done to fix it.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site