Since the late twentieth century, institutional autonomy has become a major issue in the relationship between the government and higher education institutions, with autonomy being presented as a virtuous option that satisfied both government’s regulatory aims and institutional capacities to develop in an increasingly dynamic and complex sector. Due to concerns about the effectiveness of higher education, the development of autonomy was increasingly linked to a market-like logic, with a growing emphasis on competition and efficiency. Thus, what was initially regarded as a path to emancipation of institutions from government’s influence became a mode of relationship that could curtail previous dimensions of autonomy. One of the major regulatory dimensions that helps understand the reversals and nuances of institutional autonomy is funding. Like other regulatory dimensions, recent decades have seen the emergence of new forms of funding that have influenced institutional governance and management. In this text, we analyse these trends in European higher education by mapping changes in governments’ approaches to the sector, specifically the evolution of funding mechanisms and how these highlight a shift in the pendulum between degrees of autonomy and modes of government’s influence in institutions.

Is it permissible to implicate non-epistemic values in the ‘core’ of scientific reasoning? This paper offers an appraisal of Parker’s (2024) Epistemic Projection Approach (EPA) prescribing acceptable relations between epistemic and non-epistemic values in research conduct. Non-epistemic values are granted a role in determining epistemic characteristics for a research project but are meant to be ‘screened off’ from core research decisions via epistemic projection. This discussion takes the EPA for a test drive. We identify three challenges to its conceptual and practical viability and show how EPA currently lacks resources to address them, indicating a need for further development.

Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) gave expression to a pervasive feeling of cultural crisis in early twentieth-century European intellectual life. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his reactionary politics and nationalist sympathies, Spengler’s work met with a muted reception in metropolitan France. More open to his message were members of imperial France’s modest colonial intelligentsia; Spengler’s French translator was Mohand Tazerout (1893–1973), an Algerian-born World War I veteran, schoolteacher, and aspiring sociologist. This article tells the story of The Decline of the West’s initial appearance in French before exploring Tazerout’s own intellectual project, which both built on and reached beyond Spengler’s thinking. Contemporary and subsequent North African intellectuals were no less drawn to themes of cultural decline and renewal; however, the unique circumstances that pushed Tazerout to embrace Spengler’s ideas were quickly swept away in a vortex of postcolonial contention.

During the past few decades, higher-education and research systems have been experiencing profound waves of reformed governance and organization resulting in a stronger emphasis on hierarchy, more well-defined boundaries between universities as organizational actors and their environments, more rigorous performance measurements at the organization level and a changed political control. Administration has been centralized and relations between academic and administrative staff have been transformed. Changes in university governance are sometimes described as a shift from collegiality to enterprise management. However, in previous studies we have found that this development could rather be described as a remixed governance. Universities are subject to mixed modes of governance related to the many tasks and missions they are expected to fulfil. Mixed modes of governance also stem from reforms based on widely held ideals of governance and organization. Much previous research has analysed the changing roles and influence of faculty and leadership that follow on these reforms. The diverse modes of governance also imply diverse roles for administration. Furthermore, with mixed modes of governance, the roles of administrators and their relations with academic faculty may vary depending on issues and situations. Based on observations of the governance mix of universities, in this article I ask: administration for what, how and by whom?

While immigration status is often arbitrarily ascribed, the moral meanings of undocumented status are central in the growing polarization and punitiveness of immigration politics in the United States. How do political actors construct the moral meanings of undocumented status and reason their preferred redresses? Existing substantialist approach’s search for a coherent list of moral traits is unable to locate the basis of such construction. Through interviews with a multiracial group of 65 Democratic and Republican activists, this paper identifies the relational meaning-making process underlying the construction of migrant morality, which I label as “Folk Durkheimian.” I find that, like Durkheim, activists believe that law exists to uphold social solidarities and therefore legal categories mark people as belonging or threatening to the social body. I further find that activists construct belonging and threat along two axes: similarity and division of labor. As both Democratic and Republican activists construct migrants as simultaneously belonging and threatening on different axes, both prefer the ambivalent redress of pathways to citizenship for a limited subset of migrants. This Folk Durkheimian understanding advances a relational and integrated framework for understanding morality, group politics, and punitive attitudes.

Can feelings of loneliness and depression be adaptive for adolescents? Yes, suggests the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness: initially, loneliness activates depressive responses for self-preservation. In turn, these feelings prepare adolescents for reaffiliation, thereby reducing loneliness (H1a: short-term balancing feedback loop). If this fails, loneliness and depressive symptoms may become long-term traits that exacerbate each other over time (H1b: long-term reinforcing feedback loop). Therefore, the short-term balancing feedback loop between loneliness and depressive symptoms may buffer against their long-term increases (H2: across-timescale influence). We tested these hypotheses in Dutch adolescents (Mage_Wave1 = 12.9, SDage_Wave1 = 0.7, 53% female) using six-wave, half-yearly panel data (N = 774; 2017–2021) and 7-day, 1.5-hourly experience sampling data (nsubsample = 84; mid-2021). Residual dynamic structural equation modeling revealed reinforcing feedback loops at both short-term (1.5-hourly) and long-term (half-yearly), supporting H1b but not H1a. Bayesian latent change score modeling supported H2: Adolescents who felt more depressed an hour after heightened loneliness showed smaller half-yearly increases in trait loneliness. However, this buffering effect was not predicted by the hourly depressed-to-loneliness relation, nor did either hourly relations predict half-yearly changes in depressive symptoms. Our findings suggest that feeling depressed shortly after loneliness may protect adolescents from long-term loneliness.

A cosmopolis may be understood as a durable, cross–regional cultural–political order in which a prestigious bridge language provides the central anchor and the shared medium for knowledge, cultural authority and institutional practice across multilingual settings. In this article I hypothesise that, in the early 21st century, English in international employ is beginning to occupy a socio–cultural position comparable in certain respects to that of the pre‑modern formations associated with Sanskrit, Latin and Classical Arabic. To examine this possibility, I begin with a deliberately broad, first‑pass identification of the most salient cosmopolis features, limiting the analysis to the characteristic profile of the prestige bridge language that underwrites each cosmopolis. I then consider whether a comparable profile plausibly holds for global modern English, drawing on existing research on its global role. The results are preliminary, but they suggest that this perspective may offer a useful analytical lens for investigating English in its present sociolinguistic position, and that it merits more systematic follow‑up work.