Higher Education Communities and Academic Identity

The slippery use to which the word ‘community’ is applied in higher education studies and pronouncements makes it desirable that it should be better defined and related to more bounded assumptions about individual academic identity and relationships within academe. There is discussion of the academic communities of the invisible colleges and their modes of internal governance by elites and the communitarian implications of the changing pattern of institutional management. The relationship of academics and their institutions to the wider world of society and the economy is considered. It is concluded that external connections are not best pursued through assumptions of shared community but of acceptance of differentiation and exchange.