Equity and Change in Higher Education

Abstract

A central concern of this study is feminism as change in the academy, and the consequences and challenges for feminist change agents. In this chapter, I examine processes that link macro-changes to micro-consequences by focusing on the dynamic relationship between political and organisational change in higher education in Britain. By so doing I hope to describe the complex configurations of power and organisation in higher education into which feminisms are introduced, with attention to economic, cultural and intellectual changes. This involves interrogation of policies and discourses of New Right reform, new managerialism, mass expansion, equity and postmodernist theories of power, with questions raised about the interconnection of demographic changes and equality of opportunity. Equity is considered in relation to the democratic rhetoric of enhanced access, and connections are made between equality and quality by questioning what is being accessed by changing student populations.