SPEAKING OF UNIVERSITIES

The aim of this course is to enable our Duke undergraduates to develop a comprehensive understanding of the university and how, at various points in time, its purposes and ends have been diversely articulated. We stress that even as there is a historical component to this course, it does not mean to present a "history of the university." Rather, by juxtaposing contemporary with older reflections about the university, we aim to enable students to understand the historically contingent evolution and character of the university in which they find themselves today. The typical eighteen-year old arriving at Duke today will likely accept as objective and immutable fact the institutional landscape of schools, departments, disciplines, sub-fields and the many ways in which, more recently, these entities have sought to collaborate with and enhance each other. At the same time, the sheer complexity and fluidity of the modern research university is bound to bewilder students who must chart a meaningful and worthwhile course through its labyrinthine structures within four short years. Yet inasmuch as the objectively given structures encountered by new students constitute the only institutional reality they know, their academic choices, habits of learning, and they way they impinge on their overall flourishing as persons unfold in something of a vacuum. The premise of our course, then, is that students will want to have a fully articulated understanding of the institutional framework they now inhabit and how it variously advances or impedes personal, intellectual, and professional flourishing.

2012

Higher Education, 2014

Higher education research frequently refers to the complex external conditions that give our old-fashioned universities a good reason to change. The underlying theoretical assumption of such framing is that organizations are open systems. This paper presents an alternative view, derived from the theory of social systems autopoiesis. It proposes that organizations, being open systems, are yet operationally closed, as all their activities and interactions with the environment are aspects of just one process: the recursive production of themselves, according to a pattern of their own identity. It is their identity that captures exactly what can and what cannot be sustained in their continuous self-production. Examining the organizational identity of universities within the theoretical framework of autopoiesis may hence shed new light on their resistance to change, explaining it as a systemic and social phenomenon, rather than an individual and psychological one. Since all processes of an autopoietic system are processes of its self- production, this paper argues that in the case of traditional European universities, the identity consists in the intertwinement of only two processes: (1) introducing continuous change in the scope of scientific knowledge and (2) educating new generations of scholars, who will carry on this activity. This surprisingly leaves at the wayside seemingly the most obvious ‘use of the university’: the adequate education of students for the job market.

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2015

This book aims to provide readers with an in-depth understanding of the many ways in which universities contribute to economic development and growth. It does so by discussing numerous theories of the micro-and macro-level causal interactions between university activities and economic outcomes, and by presenting up-to-date quantitative and qualitative evidence in support of these arguments. By providing readers with theoretical tools and evidence to explain the channels and degrees to which university activities impact upon the economic system, the book underpins the analysis of what are the strengths and weaknesses of specific university systems; while many examples in the book are based on the case of several European countries (Italy and the United Kingdom, primarily) the application to other university systems, in a comparative perspective, is immediate. The book is aimed at academics, policymakers, managers and professionals working in universities. It may also be of interest to a wider reading public who wish to expand their knowledge of the economic impact of academic activities and of how the structures and incentives within higher education systems can be improved to attain greater effectiveness and efficiency. With this broad potential readership in mind, the authors have avoided technical jargon as much as possible. While national and local policymakers, university managers and lay readers at large are the key audiences for this book, it may also be used as a textbook in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The economics of science and of the university are increasingly included in the curricula of undergraduate and postgraduate modules on the economics of innovation and/or the economics of knowledge. This book can therefore be used alongside journal articles as reading on such courses. It can also be adopted for undergraduate courses on the economics of education. Last but not least, it certainly complies with the reading lists of economics and policy modules in education degrees. After this short introductory chapter providing the general context for

History of education & children's literature, 2014

The current university in a globalised world is facing all kinds of new challenges: an increasing commodification of research, a growing number of cases of scientific fraud, pressure on teaching, and internationalisation within still predominantly national frameworks. Taken together, all these elements contribute to the impression among the general public of a certain crisis of the current university. The central question of this paper is to what extent the original ideal of the university as a universal institution, in the period of its foundation in the High Middle Ages, can function as a source of inspiration for the concerns of the contemporary university. It will be shown that many traditions connected to this ideal can still function as valid models to reflect upon the university today, offering as such a nice example of how history of (university) education can be of use in the ongoing public debate and policy making process. The exercise to think about the university in this...

Debaditya Bhattacharya, ed. The University Unthought: Notes for a Future (New York: Routledge) , 2018

In a brief essay -written in the form of a letter -prefaced to a book by his colleague John Higgins at the University of Cape Town, the novelist J. M. Coetzee offered a pessimistic coda to Higgins's powerful appeal for the autonomy of the university and the role of the humanities in fostering 'critical literacy'. As Coetzee noted, All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.

British Journal of Educational Studies, 1993