Karyn E Miller

Mark A Menaldo

This paper advances a critique of world culture and public goods theories of educational expansion and provides a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework for the argument that political leaders, as agents, act independently upon educational institutions. We conceive of three modes to describe policy change in regards to educational expansion. Leaders may a) strategically, and contingently, reallocate existing resources and expand educational through material means, b) apply innovative ideas and practices during expansion so as to change the character of educational institutions, and c) attempt radical overhauls of existing educational institutions that effect long-lasting societal transformation. In support of our argument, we present three cases: Fidel Castro of Cuba, King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, and Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States. Each expanded educational opportunities to their citizens in ways that follow the aforementioned different modes and magnitudes of change.

Zhizhou Du

Qingli Meng

Corruption in the Chinese higher educational sector is an increasing concern but it has not been systematically studied. This paper distinguishes three major intermingled structural typologies of corruption in the Chinese higher education sector: academic specific, non-academic specific and a combination of the two. Data supporting this conceptualization come from a case statistical analysis of a non-randomized sample of 215 court decisions on corruption cases detected in Chinese universities during 1994-2009, complemented with a perception-based survey in different Chinese universities. The result postulates taxonomy of the distribution of corruption among the three typologies. This study finds non-academic specific corruption cases take up a disproportionately high portion of corruption compared to that of academic specific corruption in the Chinese higher education sector. None of the scholarly academic corruption cases was detected from the case statistical analysis though there is obvious reflection of scholarly academic corruption in the perception-based data. What has been neglected is the lack of sector-specific Chinese central government anti-corruption initiatives, especially those that are scholarly academic related even though the consequences could be more detrimental than corruption in the non- academic field.

UI Research Center

The 4th Untested Ideas International Research Conference Building Global Connections in Research and Practice June 24 – 26, 2016 The University of North Florida (UNF) Jacksonville, Florida, USA