This book focuses on developing an understanding of the complex interplay of forces acting on individual universities and higher education systems to enable leaders and practitioners to take purposeful and strategic action. It explores the challenging landscape of higher education and the pressures that are reshaping the university as a societal institution, describing the complex interplay of technological, sociological, political and economic forces driving change. The issues analysed are global in scope, reflecting the diversity of contexts, but also the common nature of the challenges facing institutions individually and collectively. The analysis draws on the lessons learnt and evidence from over fifty organisational case studies undertaken by the author over the past decade, exploring organisational change in higher education institutions in New Zealand, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and on his engagement as president of the ACODE organisation with colleagues responsible for learning technological change in Australasia. The book helps institutions respond to technological change purposefully, in ways that build upon a clear understanding of the complex nature of the existing institution, its students and the organisational context.

This volume addresses the central question facing the future of higher education around the world, whether and why universities need to exist at all. This book accepts the question’s premise: It is not clear that the university is any longer needed as an institution -- that is, unless its defenders recover what had made the university the revolutionary institution that over the past two centuries has not only defined the shape of modern systematic inquiry but also the distinctiveness of the societies that have housed them. In short, what is required is a reanimation of the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt for our times; hence the book's title and subtitle. Humboldt was responsible for relaunching the university as the vanguard institution of 'Enlightenment' to which we continue to pay lip service – and sometimes not much more than that. Admittedly, the task of relaunching Humboldt today is made difficult because many of the concrete achievements associated with the Humboldtian university – not least academic disciplines and nation-states – are increasingly seen as problematic if not obsolete. However, the global reach of the Humboldtian vision in its 19th century and 20th century heyday offers hope that it may be recovered in the 21st century. The book focuses on the performative character of the academic vocation, what Humboldt memorably characterized as the 'unity of research and teaching' in the same person, a role model for students and society at large. The book's seven chapters develop this theme in a historically and philosophically nuanced way in terms of the Humboldtian vision of knowledge, sense of free expression and critical judgement, and commitment to translation and publicity.

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. Official reviews and debates often forget to inquire into the purposes and responsibilities of universities, and how they are changing. Where these matters are addressed, they are rarely pursued in depth, and rarely go beyond current circumstances. Those who care about the university’s role in society are left looking for a renewed sense of purpose regarding its goals and aspirations. The Future University explores new avenues opening up to universities and tackles fundamental issues facing their development. Contributors with interdisciplinary and international perspectives imagine ways to frame the university’s future. They consider the history of the university, its current status as an active player in local governments, cultures, and markets, and where these trajectories may lead. What does it mean to be a university in the twenty-first century? What could the university become? What limitations do they face, and what opportunities might lie ahead? This volume in the International Studies in Higher Education series offers bold and imaginative possibilities.

"The rise of the internet, new technologies, and free and open higher education are radically altering college forever, and this book explores the paradigm changes that will affect students, parents, educators and employers as it explains how we can take advantage of the new opportunities ahead"--

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

An unusually multifaceted approach to American higher education that views institutions as complex organisms, Academia Next offers a fresh perspective on the emerging colleges and universities of today and tomorrow.

In advocating an action-oriented and issues-based curriculum, this book takes the position that a major, but shamefully neglected, goal of science and technology education is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to confront the complex and often ill-defined socioscientific issues they encounter in daily life as citizens in an increasingly technology-dominated world carefully, critically, confidently and responsibly. In outlining proposals for addressing socioscientific issues through a curriculum organized in terms of four increasingly sophisticated levels of consideration, the author adopts a highly critical and politicized stance towards the norms and values that underpin both scientific and technological development and contemporary scientific, engineering and medical practice, criticizes mainstream STS and STSE education for adopting a superficial, politically naïve and, hence, educationally ineffective approach to consideration of socioscientific issues, takes the view that environmental problems are social problems occasioned by the values that underpin the ways in which we choose to live, and urges teachers to encourage students to reach their own views through debate and argument about where they stand on major socioscientific issues, including the moral-ethical issues they often raise. More controversially, the author argues that if students are to become responsible and politically active citizens, the curriculum needs to provide opportunities for them to experience and learn from sociopolitical action. The relative merits of direct and indirect action are addressed, notions of learning about action, learning through action and learning from action are developed, and a case is made for compiling a user-friendly database reflecting on both successful and less successful action-oriented curriculum initiatives. Finally, the book considers some of the important teacher education issues raised by this radically new approach to teaching and learning science and technology. The book is intended primarily for teachers and student teachers of science, technology and environmental education, graduate students and researchers in education, teacher educators, curriculum developers and those responsible for educational policy. The author is Emeritus Professor of Science Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), Adjunct Professor of Science Education at the University of Auckland and Visiting Professor of Science Education at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include considerations in the history, philosophy and sociology of science and their implications for science and technology education, STSE education and the politicization of both students and teachers, science curriculum history, multicultural and antiracist education, and teacher education via action research.

Shifts the narrative around the history of US higher education to examine its colonial past. Over the past several decades, higher education in the United States has been shaped by marketization and privatization. Efforts to critique these developments often rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. In Unsettling the University, Sharon Stein offers a different entry point—one informed by decolonial theories and practices—for addressing these issues. Stein describes the colonial violence underlying three of the most celebrated moments in US higher education history: the founding of the original colonial colleges, the creation of land-grant colleges and universities, and the post–World War II "Golden Age." Reconsidering these historical moments through a decolonial lens, Stein reveals how the central promises of higher education—the promises of continuous progress, a benevolent public good, and social mobility—are fundamentally based on racialized exploitation, expropriation, and ecological destruction. Unsettling the University invites readers to confront universities' historical and ongoing complicity in colonial violence; to reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges at institutions of higher education; and to accept responsibility for redressing harm and repairing relationships in order to reimagine a future for higher education rooted in social and ecological accountability.

Why is it important to have a revolutionary critical pedagogy? What are the new inter/disciplinary engagements possible within the university? What will it be like to live and learn in this university of the future? Drawing on these essential questions, this volume explores the political future(s) of the university. It does not take a simplistic recourse to the tenets of liberal democracy but seeks a more engaged positioning of the university space within everyday practices of the social. It cross-examines the history of this ‘ideal’ university’s relationship with the banal everyday, the ‘apolitical’ outside and what exceeds intellectual reason, to finally question if such historicizing of the university is necessary at all. Along with its companion The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts, this brave new intervention makes a compelling foray into the political future(s) of the university. It will be of interest to academics, educators and students of the social sciences and humanities, especially education. It will also be of use to policy-makers and education analysts, and be central to the concerns of any citizen.

Introduction -- American dreams : access, mobility, fairness -- Free minds : educating democratic citizens -- Hard facts : knowledge creation and checking power -- Purposeful pluralism : dialogue across difference on campus -- Conclusion.