Session #117

– Paper Presentations –

Is there any care left in higher education?

Five decades ago, the boomer-students condemned paternalism from interjecting in their pathway towards freer learning and adulthood. As parents of a newer generation, today they paradoxically partake in the over-protection of their adolescent kids as they still expect someone to act in loco parentis. With education turned into a commodity, and universities having become defective businesses mostly focused on avoiding bankruptcy, how can the process of emancipation from adolescence to adulthood be supported and who should be responsible for it? Traditionally, student housing has been a complementary way for higher education institutions to exert their caring role. This has happened in very situated ways depending on the specificities of national educational systems, resulting in different types of residential environments. Today, in many countries student housing is increasingly being provided privately as both a response and trigger to the withering of public institutions of education from their caring role. Despite its historically important role and despite its current crisis begging for urgent consideration, student housing remains an understudied topic even within the ever growing criticism of the current status of higher education. This session aims to fill this gap by reconsidering the fundamental role that student housing plays in the formation of humans from a state of adolescence to adulthood. Papers are invited from as wide geographical and cultural contexts as possible that review different traditions or current situations of student housing. In particular, the session is interested in gathering critical discussions of case studies that show possible alternatives to both the privatising route and the return of institutional in loco parentis – with specific focus on bottom-up, grassroots initiatives such as cooperatives and associations. Instead of searching for universal solutions, the session is interested in discussing the richness of different examples.