The university has its possibilities (original) (raw)

The idea of a university – the single idea of a university – is dead. Not to worry; there is now a pleasant view as a thousand flowers blossom on its grave: the ‘twenty-first century’, ‘efficient’, ‘world-class’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘borderless’, ‘virtual’, ‘market place’ etc. university, but also the ‘moral’, ‘creative’, ‘critical’, ‘not-for-profit’, ‘socially engaged’, ‘inclusive’, ‘public space’ etc. university. It is almost impossible to collect and classify all of these flowers – and yet new ones are blooming every day. A lot of work for botanists from the next century.

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Three Ideas of the University (The European Legacy, 2019)

2019

What is a university? In the nineteenth century J.H. Newman famously spoke of "the idea of a university". This phrase has dominated all discussions of the nature of the university since. Most contemporary writers are against any attempt to theorise the university in terms of a single idea. But against the now standard view that universities should only be characterised empirically as institutions that perform many different activities, I attempt to defend the idea of the university, not by reviving a single idea of the university but instead by suggesting that there are, at root, three ideas of the university. These are rival ideas, and strictly incommensurable, though they are often found existing together in a state of tension in actual universities. I call them the eternal, the immortal and the immediate ideas of the university. 2 Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, 4. 3 Hofstetter, The Romantic Idea of a University, x. 14 Ibid., 196. 15 Ibid., 340.

Introduction: The University at the End of the World

Critical Times , 2022

The authors organized a conference, “Global Higher Education in 2050: Imagining Universities for Sustainable Societies,” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 4–6, 2020, right before the campus was closed for eighteen months in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event's premise was that the futures of higher education will be plural, must be responsive to large international divergences, and must be actively created by global majorities rather than policy elites. This introduction describes the papers' common project of identifying the key elements in the higher education status quo and features that might lead toward unexpected futures. We summarize the three horizons methodology that guided some of the work. We also outline the activities of the third day, the workshop that sought a means of linking the present to the future. This work continues beyond the horizons of the papers published here.

The Idea of a 'University': What it should or should not be!

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University is a classic work on university education which conceptualised university as a society in which the student absorbs the graces and accomplishments of a higher form of life. It is a place where the pursuit of truth and the active discussion of its meaning integrate into a wider culture, in which the ideal of the gentleman is acknowledged as the standard (Ker, 2011:19). This commentary appreciates the Newman’s idea of ‘University’ and is evolved with an analysis that how universities in India are ‘steered’ from outside and ‘managed’ internally to accept changes as per the political anticipation of the ruling parties. From the last five decades, after every general election, whenever there is a change in the government at central and state level, universities are the first to be affected by the ideology/policy-related ambitions of the political parties which forms the government. This trend is in fashion since old time and is not specific to India only. Even in Germany, when Hitler seized the political power, Frankfurt University was the first one targeted for ideological reasons, owing to which the liberal democratic minded professors and intellectuals were forced to leave Germany. This eventually benefited the UK and US universities not only in making their higher education more liberal with the help of these intellectuals but also enriching their scientific research and inventions in post world war period.

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