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The project
The Ideas & Universities project explores the way in which ideas have found institutional expression in universities from the emergence of the earliest European universities in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries until today. The project considers ideas about how the mind works, how people learn, how people generate new knowledge, how we divide knowledge into different subjects or disciplines, how the lifestyle of intellectuals shapes their thinking, and what relationship intellectuals should have with the societies in which they live.
It also looks at the governance of universities (their constitutional structures and where the power to make decisions is located), their internal structures (departments, schools, faculties, etc.), curriculum, teaching methods, and the relationship between teaching and research. Crucially the project explores the relationship between these ideas and these institutional aspects of universities in different places at different times.
The project is interdisciplinary, with the changing relationship between the sciences and the humanities, a key theme. The opportunity to compare the intellectual cultures of European, North American, Australian and Chinese universities, through the WUN membership is very exciting.
Key activities
The project is build around a regular research video seminar programme, complemented by face-to-face international conferences and publications, for example, in a special issue of the Journal of Higher Education Policy.
Overarching themes to be addressed in all strands of activity include:
- The purpose of universities: ideals and realities
- Internationalisation
- Causes and mechanisms of change
Specific strands for seminars and conferences
- Freedom versus constraint
- Externals pressures and agenda
- How universities manage contradictory pressures
- Configuration and reconfiguration of disciplines
- Transformation of students
- Communities; identities; loyalties
- Different/inconsistent discourses
In addition to these more or less traditionally ‘academic’ outcomes, this project will have a significant ‘policy’ outcome. This project seeks to inform debate about the future of universities. The process of comparing universities in different societies at different times will create awareness of a greater range of possibilities, and allows us to offer a more informed critique of current planning. In particular we aim to lead the debate about ‘global’ universities.
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