This revised edition offers college and university leaders an up-to-date analytical perspective for resolving basic academic issues. Brubacher reexamines, refines and extends earlier arguments and other key questions in response to significant new social, economic, legal and educational developments. He discusses the limits of autonomy, the exercise of academic freedom, the desirability of open admissions, prescribed curricula and collective bargaining. He also investigates such emerging new problems as accountability, corporate interests on campus, and the right to confidentiality; expands on ways to promote equal access and specialized education without undermining the criteria for admission.

Providing a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of higher education this book steps nimbly through the field, leading it into new areas and advancing an imaginative ecological realism. Each chapter takes the form of a short essay, tackling a particular topic such as values, knowledge, teaching, critical thinking and social justice. It also examines key issues including academic freedom, the digital university and the Anthropocene, and draws on classic as well as contemporary texts in the field. Composed of five parts, the book travels on a compelling journey: Part one identifies foundations of the field, distinguishing between the ideas of university and higher education, Part two examines key concepts, including research, culture, academic freedom and reason, Part three focuses on higher education as a set of educational practices and being a student, Part four is concerned with the university as an institution and includes the matters of leadership and the spirit of the university, Part five turns to the university in the world, and argues for an ecological perspective. Written in a lively and accessible style, and ideal for anyone coming to the field for the first time but also of interest to experienced scholars, this book offers sightings of new possibilities for higher education and the university.

This book advances a re-imagined view of caring in higher education. The author proposes an argument of rhythmic caring, whereby teachers hold back or release their judgments in such a way that students’ judgments are influenced accordingly. In doing so, the author argues that rhythmic caring encourages students to become more willing and confident in articulating their understandings, judgments and opinions, rather than being prematurely judged and prevented from re-articulating themselves. Thus, rhythmic caring can engender a different understanding of higher education: one that is connected to the cultivation of values such as autonomy, justice, empathy, mutual respect and Ubuntu (human dignity and interdependence). This book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of caring within education, as well as Ubuntu caring through the African context.

This book features a group of top-notch philosophers tackling some of the biggest questions in higher education: What role should the liberal arts have in a college education? Should colleges orient themselves to the educational demands of the business sector? What is the role of highly selective colleges in the public sphere? To what extent should they be subsidized directly, or indirectly, by the public? Should they simply teach students skills and academic knowledge, or should they play a role in shaping character, and if so to what end? Should highly selective colleges admissions practices give an edge to racial minorities, or legacies, or poor students? How much should the public purse subsidize disadvantaged students attending such institutions? These questions are fundamentally about moral and political valuesquestions of distributive justice and of what constitutes valuable education. Philosophers are trained to identify value considerations in great detailindeed, often with more precision than is ever needed for practical purposes!but most disagreements about policy and practice proceed with minimal attention to the values assumed on either side, and all sides can benefit from more clarity about exactly what moral values are at play. The philosophers here, then, address some of the fundamental questions underlying debates about higher educationand in ways that are interesting and accessible to others."

Transformation of the University imagines preferable futures for the university, building hope for the institution’s necessary transformation. It transcends old criticisms and presents fresh ideas on how the institution might be conceived, organised and put into practice while safeguarding that which makes it a university – the pursuit of knowledge. This book is divided into three main parts: Part One – ‘Knowledge’ assumes the role of the university in generating knowledge for the benefit of society; Part Two – ‘Cultural Growth’ expands on how the university might contribute to and benefit from the cultural growth of society, with both explicit and implicit connections to social and epistemic (in)justice; and Part Three – ‘Institutions’ focuses on imaginative processes for enacting the university as an institution that meets the unforeseen future challenges facing societies around the world. With contributions from scholars across the world, Transformation of the University is an essential read for all academics, practitioners, institutional leaders and broad social thinkers who are concerned with the future of the university and its contributions to society.

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

This introductory text, now in its fourth edition, is a classic in its field. It shows, first and foremost, the importance of philosophy in educational debate and as a background to any practical activity such as teaching. What is involved in the idea of educating a person or the idea of educational success? What are the criteria for establishing the optimum balance between formal and informal teaching techniques? How trustworthy is educational research? In addition to these questions, which strike to the heart of the rationale for the educative process as a whole, the authors explore such concepts as culture, creativity, autonomy, indoctrination, needs, interests and learning by discovery. In this new updated edition, the authors draw on the latest research in genetics to argue that education is uniquely human and is essentially what develops us as humans. Resisting modern tendencies to equate knowledge with opinion, and value judgements with taste, this book leads the reader into the business of philosophising and champions the cause of reason in education.

Transitioning Students in Higher Education focuses on the relationship between philosophy, pedagogy and practice when designing programs, units or courses for transitioning students to new educational spaces in the university environment. The term 'transition' is used to describe the academic as well as social movement and acculturation of students into new higher educational spaces. This book offers both theoretical perspectives and real-world practical examples that reveal the successes and challenges of implementing philosophically driven pedagogies with diverse transitioning cohorts. Drawing on examples from Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada, it writes through the relationship between philosophy, pedagogy and how it can effectively shape the practice of transition and develop the flourishing student. This book is split into three main sub-themes: Flourishing in Transition, Engaging Diverse Cohorts and Challenges for Educators, and sits at the intersections between philosophy and pedagogy in the practice of effectively engaging and transitioning different enabling groups. This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students, researchers and educators working in the areas of enabling or bridging education, higher/tertiary education, distance learning, and indigenous as well as culturally diverse cohorts.

Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialog in K-12 Classrooms is a textbook in the fields of pre-college philosophy and philosophy of education, intended for philosophers and philosophy students, K-12 classroom teachers, administrators and educators, policymakers, and pre-college practitioners of all kinds. The book offers a wealth of practical resources for use in elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms, as well as consideration of many of the broader educational, social, and political topics in the field, including the educational value of pre-college philosophy, the philosophies of education that inform this philosophical practice, and the relevance of pre-college philosophy for pressing issues in contemporary education (such as education reform, child development, and prejudice and privilege in classrooms). The book includes sections on: the expansion of philosophy beyond higher education to pre-college populations; the importance of wondering, questioning and reflection in K-12 education; the ways that philosophy is uniquely suited to help students cultivate critical reasoning and independent thinking capacities; how to develop classroom communities of philosophical inquiry and their potentially transformative impact on students; the cultivation of philosophical sensitivity and positive identity formation in childhood; strategies for recognizing and diminishing the impact of social inequalities in classrooms; and the relationship between introducing philosophy in schools and education reform.

An underlying assumption undergirding institutions of higher education is that they serve as a means to upward socioeconomic mobility and, in turn, a way to address poverty that is tied to certain racialized/sexualized bodies. Although the education crisis is not an American or European problem in the geographic sense, but instead a global problem that plays itself out differentially across space and time, this volume focuses on the westernized university, in the US and abroad. It asks questions about what is westernized about the university, what its aims are, and how those who work in, through and outside these sites of knowledge production—with local or global social movements—can participate in the slow, careful process of decolonizing the westernized university. Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world. As an intervention in the philosophy of education discourse, which tends to assume the university is a neutral space, this collection will be of particular value to students and scholars working in philosophy of education, Latina/o philosophy, Africana philosophy, social epistemology, education, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to intellectual activists in the United States, south of the border, and around the world.