VISITING FELLOWS
Michael Kenny
What are Universities for? Interrogating the Assumptions of Current and Future Higher Education Policy in the UK
I set out to develop an outline for a potential book project on the history of political thinking about Higher Education policy in Britain since the 1950s, looking at one key area of debate that has exerted most pressure upon established notions of ‘the idea’ of the university – the rise of market based thinking. This proved to be a more complicated endeavour than initially envisaged, in part because it involved a detour through the jungle of interpretation and dispute associated with the socalled ‘New Right’. But I was texts in the University Library.
(Professor in English, UC Santa Barbara)
Universities of the Future: Reimagining Innovation in Global Higher Education
I am in the midst of writing a book called Future U: the Uses of the University in the Neutron Economy. It combines critique of the current funding model for US public universities with a sustained description of an alternative model.
At CRASSH, I was able to think and read, attend seminars and lectures, and talk at length with the other fellows. Above all, I was able to sit and experiment with ideas. The process of exploring new ideas takes time. Most of them turn out to be wrong, but other ideas look wrong and turn
My presentation at the CRASSH workinprogress seminar was useful in compelling me to give some order to my rather inchoate thinking and also because it elicited a number of very pertinent comments. I also developed contacts with academics working on Higher Education in terms of policy and social theory, including a couple of PhD students in the Faculty of Education, former CRASSH visiting fellow Clare Donovan and Cambridge faculty such as Stefan Collini, Andrew Gamble and Rob Doubleday.
Overall, I found that CRASSH provided an invaluable idea and a highly stimulating environment in which to (hopefully) having an article published, I suspect that this fellowship will be hugely valuable for the opportunity it gave me to work out what a large project this undertaking would be.
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out to be unexpectedly right, and one needs the space in which to try them out.
I worked on two chapters of this book, both of which contributed to my presentation at the Future University partnerships that did local and shortterm good for particular programmes are destructive to research and teaching when generalised as a model for funding and evaluation. The other chapter discusses new and more were it to orient itself around the need for levels of mass creativity that contemporary societies do not currently sustain. A version of my presentation is now in press at Radical Philosophy.
The overall environment of the University, its colleges, and CRASSH renewed my sense of the value of universities as places that support original thinking – and of the enjoyment that is essential to that process. v events/1585
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