For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. For the University is a book both about and for the university in an age of mass and globalized education. Thomas Docherty analyses the current problems facing the university as an institution, and also offers some positive arguments for a revived and vibrant set of institutional arrangements and governing principles. The book considers the place of the university as an important global institution, now in a charged political and international public sphere. Docherty places current debates within their wider economic and political context, focusing on the relationship of the university to current and emerging models of democracy. The question of what the university will be -- rather than it is, was, or might be -- is at the heart of this book, and Docherty ably traces its history and present condition in order to offer us a vision for the future.

Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the renaissance to the present day. He specialises in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. Some of his previous publications include John Donne Undone (Methuen/Routledge, 1986), Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia UP, 1993), Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford UP, 2006) and The English Question (Sussex Academic, 2008).

Full marks to this book for topicality...There are many original ideas, many acute observations, many interesting connections...a thorough engagement with the topic. * Times Higher Education Supplement (16 June 2011) * a useful and telling indictment of much that is wrong with how universities are viewed and managed at present * New Statesman (4 July 2011) * For the University makes a powerful and spirited case for the importance of university education in the UK and beyond. It deserves to be read, pondered and discussed on Canada's campuses to remind us of the broader social relevance of the university, and to warn us about some subtle, and not-so-subtle, trends that threaten higher education in this country. -- Cary Watt, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick * CAUT Bulletin *