Understanding the University constitutes the final volume in a trilogy – the first two books having been Being a University (2010) and Imagining the University (2012) – and represents the trilogy’s ultimate aims and endeavours. The three volumes together offer a unique attempt at a fairly systematic and exhaustive level to map out just what it might be seriously to understand the extraordinarily complex entity that is known across the world as ‘the university’. Through examination of the conditions and possibilities underlying and affecting universities, this work offers an understanding of specific ideas of the university which can inform policies, strategies and practices in relation to the university. This book is a must read for leaders and senior managers in universities , as well as those undertaking postgraduate studies in the policy and practice of higher education.

Product Description: The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education provides a single compendium on the nature, function, and applications of critical thinking. This book brings together the work of top researchers on critical thinking worldwide, covering questions of definition, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, research, policy, and application...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Students today are in many ways different from students in the past, though people disagree on how. Some say they have a shorter attention span while others say they are more focused; some argue that they waste their time on the internet during lectures while others argue that, as digital natives, they are using the technology in ways we have not experienced before...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: This provocative and challenging book questions how people think about what universities should seek to do and how they should respond to the grave problems of our age. It addresses issues such as: What is wisdom? Ought universities to seek, promote and teach wisdom and what would this involve? Does it mean we need a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry? What implications would the pursuit of wisdom have for science, for social inquiry and the humanities, for education? Is it reasonable to ask of universities that they take up the task of helping humanity learn how to create a wiser world? Is there a religious dimension to wisdom? What can non-academics do to encourage universities to take wisdom seriously? Would the pursuit of wisdom be possible given that universities are increasingly subjected to commercial pressures? With contributions from leading experts in various fields Wisdom in the University is essential reading for all those interested in the future of universities and philosophy of education...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Looking at changes in higher education - massification, commercialization and changing forms of knowledge production - this book considers a range of practitioner perspectives, the nature of their changing roles and several informed views on change management.

There is greater interest than ever before in higher education: more money is being spent on it, more students are registered and more courses are being taught. And yet the matter that is arguably at the heart of higher education, the curriculum, is noticeable for its absence in public debate and in the literature on higher education. This book begins to redress the balance. Even though the term ‘curriculum’ may be missing from debates on higher education, curricula are changing rapidly and in significant ways. What we are seeing, therefore, is curriculum change by stealth, in which curricula are being reframed to enable students to acquire skills that have market value. In turn, curricula are running the risk of fragmenting as knowledge and skills exert their separate claims. Such a fragmented curriculum is falling well short of the challenges of the twenty-first century. A complex and uncertain world requires curricula in which students as human beings are placed at their centre: what is called for are curricula that offer no less than the prospect of encouraging the formation of human being and becoming. A curriculum of this kind has to be understood as the imaginative design of spaces where creative things can happen as students become engaged. Based upon a study of curricula in UK universities, Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education offers an uncompromising thesis about the development of higher education and is essential reading for those who care about its future.

Product Description: What is the emerging shape of the University? Are there spaces for present activities to be practised anew or even for new activities? If these questions have force, they show that the metaphors of shapes and spaces can be helpful in understanding the contemporary university...read more

Research, teaching and scholarship are the dominant activities in universities and their relationships form the main concerns of this volume. It offers ideas, marshalls evidence, and suggests practices for re-shaping universities and is useful to those interested in the future of universities, including students, researchers, and policy makers.

Product Description: "stimulating and full of insight" British Journal of Educational Studies "a major work ... provocative, unsettling and profoundly challenging. I think it should be prescribed reading for all vice-chancellors." (Professor Colin Bundy, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) "Ron Barnett's latest book lives up to, and possibly exceeds, the high standards he has set himself in his previous books - which are now established as the premier series of reflective books on higher education...read more

Product Description: "Daddy, tell us a story." That is what my sister and I would tell our father as he tucked us into bed each night.The stories were always about London, Siberia, China or Japan. We realized, as we grew older that these were true stories of a great adventure he had experienced...read more

Product Description: The university has lost its way. The world needs the university more than ever but for new reasons. If we are to clarify its new role in the world, we need to find a new vocabulary and a new sense of purpose.The university is faced with supercomplexity, in which our very frames of understanding, action and self-identity are all continually challenged...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study questions whether it is possible to identify a justified, secure and coherent base for our knowledge of the world and of ourselves. Science no longer enjoys an unquestioned pre-eminence in providing objective knowledge, and the social improvement brought about through rational thought has been recently attacked by postmodernism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This work argues that higher education in today's world needs to be informed by the concept of critical being, leading to students reflecting critically on knowledge and developing their powers of critical self-reflection and critical action. This critique is transformative. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Competence is a term which is making its entrance in the university. How might it be understood at this level? "The Limits of Competence" takes an uncompromising line, providing a sustained critique of the notion of competence as wholly inadequate for higher education. Currently, we are seeing the displacement of one limited version of competence by another even more limited interpretation. In the older definition - one of academic competence - notions of disciplines, objectivity and truth have been central. In the new version, competence is given an operational twist and is marked out by know-how, competence and skills. In this operationalism, the key question is not 'What do students understand?' but 'What can students do?' The book develops an alternative view, suggesting that, for our universities, a third and heretical conception of human being is worth considering. Our curricula might, instead, offer an education for life.

Product Description: Across the western world the academic community is sensing that its practices and values are under attack, and is trying to give the impression that it is a single, united community. However, its modern character suggests otherwise, making it easy for the state to play off the different parts (sectors, subjects, modes of study, mission) against each other...read more

Product Description: This text discusses contemporary issues of curriculum change in higher education, and examines various ideas and initiatives concerned with making student learnings more effective. It addresses curriculum purposes, curriculum delivery, and curriculum impact on the wider society...read more