Ronald Barnett

Ideas and Possibilities

Future University

Around the world, what it is to be a university is a matter of much debate. The range of ideas of the university in public circulation is, however, exceedingly narrow and is dominated by the idea of the entrepreneurial university. As a consequence, the debate is hopelessly impoverished. Lurking in the literature, there is a broad and even imaginative array of ideas of the university, but those ideas are seldom heard. We need, consequently, not just more ideas of the university but better ideas. Imagining the University forensically examines this situation, critically interrogating many of the current ideas of the university. Imagining the University argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short feasible utopias of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re-imagine itself.

Imagining the University

Amanda Fulford

This book shows the significance of the thinking of philosophers (and other key thinkers) in understanding the university and higher education. Through those explorations, it widens and substantially adds to the emerging philosophy of higher education. It builds on the historical literature on the idea of the university, and provides higher education scholars with highly accessible introductions to the thinking of key philosophers and thinkers, alerting them to a set of literature that otherwise might not be encountered. Until very recently, most of the debate on higher education – both in the public domain and in the scholarly literature – has been conducted with little regard to the philosophical literature. This is odd for two reasons. Firstly, much of the historical literature on the idea of the university – over the past two hundred years – has been written by philosophers and their thinking has largely gone unmined. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, many of the issues in the higher education debate are either philosophical in their nature, or require reflective thinking, and there lies to hand huge resources in the philosophical literature that can help in working through those issues. Issues such as what is to count as knowledge (in the university), wisdom, voice, democracy, culture, what it is to ‘be’ a student or academic, academic freedom, communication, work and disciplinarity cry out for the kind of insights that the philosophical literature – very broadly understood – can offer. This book attempts precisely to do this, to show how the work of key thinkers can help in deepening the higher education debate. Each chapter focuses on an individual thinker, giving both an insight into the thinker in question and accessibly drawing out something of their thinking and showing its significance in understanding the university and higher education. The editors provide a full-length introduction that marks out this large territory and prepares the ground for the reader. The book impressively builds a rich meshwork of careful and thorough thinking around the university and higher education by way of introducing 14 important philosophers on timely subjects such as culture and the university, higher education and democracy, and the role of the university. The volume is a great contribution to the important task of deepening the debate about higher education and the university, through introducing important philosophers in ways that might help the university and higher education work through some of the issues and challenges that it is currently facing. As such, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to wander and wonder deeper into the core purposes and possibilities of higher education in the good companionship of outstanding thinkers and distinguished academics on these matters. A playground for philosophical thought and adventure.Rikke Toft Nørgård, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark 'This book is an excellent introduction to a wide range of famous thinkers and what they have to say about the university and higher education today. It goes beyond the contemporary preoccupation with metrics, based on managerialism, and takes a much needed philosophical look at what higher education should be, or should aspire to be.'Assoc. Prof. Stephen Loftus, Foundational Medical Studies, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, USA

Reconsidering Higher Education

Philosophers on the University

There is an extraordinary but largely unnoticed phenomenon in higher education: by and large, students persevere and complete their studies. How should we interpret this tendency? Students are living in uncertain times and often experience anxiety, and yet they continue to press forward with their studies. The argument here is that we should understand this propensity on the part of students to persist through a will to learn. This book examines the structure of what it is to have a will to learn. Here, a language of being, becoming, authenticity, dispositions, voice, air, spirit, inspiration and care is drawn on. As such, this book offers an idea of student development that challenges the dominant views of our age, of curricula understood largely in terms of skill or even of knowledge, and pedagogy understood as bringing off pre-specified ‘outcomes’. The will to learn, though, can be fragile. This is of crucial importance, for if the will to learn dissolves, the student's commitment may falter. Accordingly, more than encouraging an interest in the student's subject or in the acquiring of skills, the primary responsibility of teachers in higher education is to sustain and develop the student's will to learn. This is a radical thesis, for it implies a transformation in how we understand the nature of teaching in higher education.

EBOOK: A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an age of Uncertainty

Paul Gibbs

With higher education around the world in a period of extreme flux, this volume explores its underlying philosophy, a core element of the ongoing debate. Offering a diverse range of perspectives from an international selection of renowned scholars of higher education, the book is full of imaginative insights that add up to a substantive contribution to the discussion. As universities attempt to adapt to a new environment characterized by stiff international competition, networked remote learning, burgeoning student numbers and comparative performance assessment, how we conceptualize the purpose and ethos of our higher learning institutions is more important than ever. This publication features a multitude of distinctive approaches that illuminate potential solutions to the complex issues universities must grapple with in these uncertain times. Rather than espousing a singular philosophical approach, the editors have assembled views from across the spectrum and from differing national contexts, representing a multidisciplinary response to the situation. This collection of papers aims thus to inspire fresh developments in the way we think about the complexities of and options available to, higher education.

Thinking about Higher Education

Winner of the Comparative and International Education Society Higher Education Special Interest Group Best Book Award for 2014! As universities increasingly engage with the world beyond the classroom and the campus, those who work within higher education are left to examine how the university’s mission has changed. Official reviews and debates often forget to inquire into the purposes and responsibilities of universities, and how they are changing. Where these matters are addressed, they are rarely pursued in depth, and rarely go beyond current circumstances. Those who care about the university’s role in society are left looking for a renewed sense of purpose regarding its goals and aspirations. The Future University explores new avenues opening up to universities and tackles fundamental issues facing their development. Contributors with interdisciplinary and international perspectives imagine ways to frame the university’s future. They consider the history of the university, its current status as an active player in local governments, cultures, and markets, and where these trajectories may lead. What does it mean to be a university in the twenty-first century? What could the university become? What limitations do they face, and what opportunities might lie ahead? This volume in the International Studies in Higher Education series offers bold and imaginative possibilities.

The Future University

Universities continue to expand, bringing considerable debate about their purposes and relationship to the world. In The Ecological University, Ronald Barnett argues that universities are short of their potential and responsibilities in an ever-changing and challenging environment. This book centres on the idea that the expansion of higher education has opened new spaces and possibilities. The university is interconnected with a number of ecosystems: knowledge, social institutions, persons, the economy, learning, culture and the natural environment. These seven ecosystems of the university are all fragile and in order to advance and develop them universities need to engage with each one. By looking at matters such as the challenges of learning, professional life and research and inquiry, this book outlines just what it could mean for higher education institutions to understand and realize themselves as exemplars of the ecological university. With bold and original insights and practical principles for development, this radical and transformative book is essential reading for university leaders and administrators, academics, students, and all interested in the future of the university.

A Feasible Utopia

The Ecological University

Thomas Jones

Robert Parris

Dorothy Skidmore

The Book of Imaginary Beings

ما الشكل الجديد الذي ستتخذه الجامعة؟ هل ثمة مساحة يمكن ممارسة الأنشطة الحالية فيها من جديد, أو حتى مساحة لأنشطة جديدة؟ إذا كان لهذه الأسئلة أهمية, فهي أنها تثبت فائدة الاستعارات التي تستخدم الأشكال والمساحات في فهم طبيعة الجامعة المعاصرة. يظل البحث والدرس العلمي والتدريس هي الأنشطة السائدة في الجامعات؛ لذلك فعلاقاتها ببعضها بعضًا هي ما يركز عليه هذا الكتاب. فهل تشهد هذه الأنشطة تباعدًا عن بعضها بعضًا؟ أم أن من الممكن تقريبها من بعضها بعضًا بأساليب مستنيرة؟ وهل ثمة مساحة لإعادة تصميم هذه الأنشطة، بحيث يستنير الواحد بالآخر؟ وهل ثمة مساحة للمزيد من الأهداف؟ في هذا الكتاب يتناول مجموعة من المتخصصين المتميزين، هذه القضايا المتشابكة, بل الشائكة, فيقدمون أفكارًا ويسوقون البراهين على ممارسات تشير إلى إمكانية إعادة تشكيل الجامعة. يخاطب كتاب إعادة تشكيل الجامعة المهتمين بمستقبل الجامعات بمن فيهم الطلاب والباحثين والمديرين وصناع السياسات. كما يتناول قضايا كوكبية، ومن ثم فإنه سيجذب اهتمام مجتمع التعليم العالي في العالم بأسره. العبيكان للنشر

Reshaping the University (Society for Research Into Higher Education)

إعادة تشكيل الجامعة

Norman Jackson

Ecologies for Learning and Practice provides the first systematic account of the ideas of learning ecologies and ecologies of practice and locates the two concepts within the context of our contemporary world. It focuses on how individuals and society are being presented with all manner of learning challenges arising from fluidities and disruptions, which extend across all domains of life. This book examines emerging ways of understanding and living purposively in these new fluidities and provides fresh perspectives on the way we learn and achieve in such dynamic contexts. Providing an insight into the research of a range of internationally renowned contributors, this book explores diverse topics from the higher education and adult learning worlds. These include: The challenges faced by education systems today The concept of ecologies for learning and practice The role and responsibility of higher education institutions in advancing ecological approaches to learning The different eco-social systems of the world—local and global, economic, cultural, practical, technological, and ethical How adult learners might create and manage their own ecologies for learning and practice in order to sustain themselves and flourish With its proposals for individual and institutional learning in the 21st century and concerns for our sustainability in a fragile world, Ecologies for Learning and Practice is an essential guide for all who seek to encourage and facilitate learning in a world that is fundamentally ecological in nature.

Emerging Ideas, Sightings, and Possibilities

Ecologies for Learning and Practice

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international scholars compile career-long selections of what they judge to be among their finest pieces so the world has access to them in a single manageable volume. Readers are able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. Over more than three decades, Professor Ronald Barnett has acquired a distinctive position as a leading philosopher of the university and higher education, and this volume brings together 15 of his key writings, particularly papers from leading journals. This volume also includes, as his introductory chapter, an intellectual autobiography, in which Professor Barnett recounts the history of his scholarship and writing, traces its development across five stages, and identifies the themes and sources of inspiration that lie within his corpus of work. Ronald Barnett has described his corpus of work as a social philosophy of the university that is at once conceptual, critical, practical and imaginative. His concepts of criticality, critical interdisciplinarity, supercomplexity and the ecological university have been taken up in the literature across the world. Through telling examples, and with an incisive clarity of writing, Ronald Barnett’s scholarship has helped to illuminate in fresh ways and reorient practices in the university and in higher education. The chapters in this volume reveal all of these qualities so making this volume a compelling overview of a passionate and yet constructive critic of the university.

The selected works of Ronald Barnett

Thinking and Rethinking the University

Oili-Helena Ylijoki

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela

Higher education and the institution of the university exist in time, their essential nature now continually subject to change: change in students, in knowledge, in structure and in their own communities and those they service. These changes are accompanied by a quickening of time, leading to a heightened intensity of academic life. Yet the nature of time in all the contemporary work on the university has been largely overlooked. This is an important omission and Universities in the Flux of Time has gathered leading academics whose contributions to the volume raise a debate as to the influence and use of time in the university. They do this in an exploration of how these changes are perceived in higher education and how these affect its temporality from local, national and global perspectives. By dealing with the time within the university, the book opens new spaces for the development of the university and civic society. The book develops an interdisciplinary understanding of the temporal issues of engaging with the past, present and future of higher education and its institutions, through consideration of the increased speed demanded for the production of able students and innovative research, to the accountability pressures from central governments and commerce. Reflecting on these issues in the higher education sector, Universities in the Flux of Time is split into three parts, with each one addressing time and its multiple relationships with the university: Past, present and future Knowledge and time Living with time This volume will provide essential reading for those on higher education studies courses as well as a wider audience of managers, practitioners, policy makers, academics and students and from many disciplinary perspectives including sociology, organisation studies, social psychology and the philosophy of education.

An exploration of time and temporality in university life

Universities in the Flux of Time

There is no single idea of the university. Ever since its medieval origin, the concept of the university has continued to change. The metaphysical university gave way successively to the scientific university, and then to the corporate and the entrepreneurial university. But what, then, might lie ahead? Being a University both charts this conceptual development and examines the future possibilities for the idea of the university. Ronald Barnett pursues this quest through an exploration of pairs of contending concepts that speak to the idea of the university – such as space and time; being and becoming; and culture and anarchy. On this foundation is developed an imaginative exposition of possible ideas of the university, including the liquid university and the authentic university. In the course of this inquiry, it is argued that: Any thought that the idea of the entrepreneurial university represents the end-point of the evolution of the idea of the university has to be abandoned. The entrepreneurial university is excessively parochial and ill-matched to the challenges facing the university A responsibility of the university is precisely that of working out an imaginative conception of its future possibilities. The boldest and largest thinking is urgently required The fullest expression of the university’s possibilities lies in a reclamation of the universal aspirations that lay in earlier ideas of the university. The ecological university represents just such a universal aspiration, suited to the unfolding demands of the future. Being a University will be of wide interest, to institutional leaders and managers, higher education planners, academics in all disciplines and students of higher education, in educational policy and politics, and the philosophy, sociology and theory of education, and indeed, anyone who believes in the future of the university.

Ronald Barnett

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