Iain Crawford – författare

This topical volume tells the story of the UK debate on financing higher education, illustrating a head-on collision between the economic imperatives of student loans and regulated market forces, and the political imperative of 'free' higher education. In telling the story of the partnership of an economist and a political professional, the book offers lessons about both policy design and the politics of reform: of particular relevance to countries which have not yet addressed the issue, including many OECD countries, the more advanced post-communist reforming countries and, increasingly, to middle-income developing countries. No longer the exclusive province of a small intellectual elite, higher education is a key element in national economic performance. A modern economy needs a high-quality university system, and needs to make it accessible to everyone who can benefit, but mass higher education is expensive, and competes for public funds with pensions and health care, to say nothing of nursery education and schools. How to pay for higher education has thus become a central issue, and Barr and Crawford’s book expertly covers the debates and issues involved.

This topical volume tells the story of the UK debate on financing higher education, illustrating a head-on collision between the economic imperatives of student loans and regulated market forces, and the political imperative of 'free' higher education. In telling the story of the partnership of an economist and a political professional, the book offers lessons about both policy design and the politics of reform: of particular relevance to countries which have not yet addressed the issue, including many OECD countries, the more advanced post-communist reforming countries and, increasingly, to middle-income developing countries. No longer the exclusive province of a small intellectual elite, higher education is a key element in national economic performance. A modern economy needs a high-quality university system, and needs to make it accessible to everyone who can benefit, but mass higher education is expensive, and competes for public funds with pensions and health care, to say nothing of nursery education and schools. How to pay for higher education has thus become a central issue, and Barr and Crawford’s book expertly covers the debates and issues involved.

Reframes the long-standing critical narrative of the relationship between Harriet Martineau and Charles DickensDemonstrates, through new readings of Martineau and Dickens’s travel in and writing about the United States, how their encounters with the American public sphere were crucially formative in both writers’ careers and in their shaping as journalistsPlaces Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism, thereby expanding our reading of them beyond earlier schema framed in narrower terms of political economyExpands understandings of transatlantic literary exchange to offer a more comprehensive reading than those offered through an earlier critical focus simply on the issue of international copyrightFocusing on the importance of Martineau’s contribution to the development of the early Victorian press, this book highlights the degree to which the public quarrel between her and Dickens in the mid-1850s represented larger fissures within nineteenth-century liberalism. It places Martineau and Dickens within the context of Anglo-American liberalism and demonstrates how these fissures were embedded within a transatlantic conversation over the role of the press in forming a public sphere essential to the development of a liberal society.