The 13th EUREDOCS Conference will focus on the theme: “Higher education between selection and discrimination, elitism and universalism. Organizational and identity dynamics.”.

Since European universities were first founded, the characteristics of the students and the teachers that are recruited, as well as the rights and resources associated with their characteristics and status, have been at the core of negotiations between the academic profession, the students, the universities, and their rulers.

Those issues remain constitutive of today’s higher education challenges, even though the University rationale and its organizational model seem to have changed over the second half of the twentieth century along with the democratization of access and the enlargement of higher education sector. Debate about those issues has further intensified in recent decades with the development of managerial academic governance and the market rules organizing the sector.

On the one hand, aligning the demand for access with the offer of study places is the object of increased number of struggles, policies, and instruments. The latter variably articulate a universalist view and an understanding of educational merit tentatively associated with meritocratic principles. Selecting students on various bases, to answer both the needs of the labour market and society in terms of perceived justice, appear important. Research documenting the multiplicity of the processes nurturing inequalities of educational trajectories, including the systemic discrimination ones, largely contribute to the setting up of this agenda.

How are higher education systems, institutions, actors, and students coping with these injunctions? Through which types of configurations, regulations, instruments, strategies? With which effects on students, on Higher Education Institutions, organisations, positioning, identities?

On the other hand, massive changes keep on impacting research organization and the academic profession. There is a rising proportion of precarious positions, pressure at the entrance of the profession, differentiation and concentration of funding resources on a happy few, multiplication of the type of tasks carried by researchers, transformation of teaching modalities and the relationship with students, differentiation of the tasks between academics, increased number of Higher Education professionals, and redefinition of the power relationships between academics and administrative staff. The transformations are massive. And funding models deeply transform the modalities of doing research, hence of following an academic career.

How do these transformations take shape in different national, institutional and organizational contexts? How do they relate to wider transformations taking place in Western societies? To European policies?