Dr Seán M. Muller

Research Associate
Name: Seán Muller
Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education  Staff Members

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About Dr Seán M. Muller

Dr Seán Mfundza Muller is an economist by training, with degrees from the University of Cape Town where he was a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Partnership Fellow and the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

His work spans a broad range of topics and issues, from practical policy problems to abstract theoretical analysis, and his experience ranges from advising members of parliament on public finance issues and legislation, to methodological and philosophical critique of approaches to causal inference.

His academic articles have been published in journals in economics, higher education, development, and philosophy, and he has been a regular contributor to the popular press on matters related to public policy and higher education. One area in which he has developed extensive expertise, starting with his doctoral work in applied microeconometrics, pertains to the role of randomised trials in informing policy decisions.

His first book on higher education, The Incentivised University: Science Revolutions, Policies, Consequence, is a philosophical work that addressed the dynamics of higher education institutions and systems in relation to the use of incentives to direct academic research and inquiry.

This built on earlier work on rent-seeking behaviour by academics, with a particular focus on South Africa. Among the other topics in higher education that he works on are: decolonisation of curricula, disciplines and universities; funding of higher education institutions; student funding and the change to ‘free higher education’ in South Africa; research quality; academic freedom; systems of peer review; graduate labour market outcomes; and, institutional epistemology.