Product Description: The image of the university is tarnished: this book examines how recent philosophies of education, new readings of its economics, new technologies affecting research and access, and contemporary novelists' representations of university life all describe a global university that has given up on its promise of greater educational equality...read more

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: 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: In The Humboldtian Tradition, eleven scholars consider Wilhelm von Humboldt as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary symbol. Inspired by the growing body of literature that in recent years has problematized the modern research university, they put Humboldt s basic academic principles into context and discuss their significance for the current debate about higher education...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

The world in which we learn is changing rapidly. That rapidity is driven by a range of influences, conveniently, but inadequately, clustered under the rubric of globalisation. . The context in which globalisation and education is often linked is that of progression, progression realisable through technology, the free movement of finances and the optimum utilisation of human capital. To fuel this progression, formal educational institutions have grown, adapted and changed to provide highly skilled ‘outputs’ to satisfy demand. Along the way, I will argue, the questioning, learning, reflecting and worthiness of formal education has been sacrificed for instrumentality, compliance and self-interest. This is seen throughout the educational system but this book concentrates on higher education and, more importantly, higher educational institutions that are known as universities. I will try to argue for a distinctive place for universities that does not resist progression but defines it differently from that allowable by the market. I propose a university system where students and faculty are together allowed to ‘let learn’ who they might become, rather than realise their being as the artefact of economic imperatives. I accept from the very beginning that this might be incompatible with universities being in the world of commerce and industry, in fact, I demand that they are not! However, my text is not a polemic against the capitalist entrapment of education per se but for the development of centres that question whilst engaging with the realities of our existence.

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: Since the 1930s the role of universities has changed dramatically, from that of institutions attended by a small intellectual or social elite to one where attendance has become more or less obligatory for a wide range of occupations and social classes.

Product Description: Professor Kohr, originator of the ""small is beautiful"" philosophy, looks at the universities, their purpose, size, & independence, and forces us to re-examine our ideas about academic freedom, the cult of youth, democracy, bureaucracy and much else.