Quality’s Higher Education Dividends: Broadened Custodianship and Global Public Scholarship

ABSTRACT

This paper speculates on the possible contribution of the quality movement to higher education and the perceived dividends received from this, in general, over the past two decades but also, more specifically, with reference to the author’s institution in South Africa. The first major quality contribution is a gradual broadening of higher education custodianship, ensuring that academic provision more closely resembles societal expectations. It is hoped that the dividend stemming from this will be renewed public trust in higher education. The quality movement put public scholarship globally into action via its tested strategies of self‐reflection, interrogation, assessment and, especially, via the airing, sharing and exchange of research findings and practices that work. This scholarship, which increasingly contributes to the integration of various higher education subsystems and which is also respectful of contextual difference and institutional identity, is perhaps the quality revolution’s most extraordinary contribution and dividend.

Keywords:

• quality in HE
• HE quality revolution
• quality’s dividends
• public trust in higher education