The Future University
CRASSH’s two year project for 2007-09, Cultural Transmission and Disciplinary Change, abuts on a second project for 2009-11 that addresses the idea of the sustainable, renewable, or ‘future’ university. A university in transition (or translation) is a site of cultural encounter and transformation. Given its emphasis on disciplinary innovation, CRASSH is well-placed to carry out such an inquiry.
As well as being shaped by its past - its modes of investigation and intellectual exchange, its ancient and recent disciplinary formations and dialogues - the modern university has to look to its future survival, beyond its current disciplinary organisation. This involves identifying new forms and organisations of knowledge, and new modes of transmission. Twenty-first-century technologies have speeded up knowledge exchange and academic globalisation, yet disjunctions remain.
The modern university is shaped by public, political and economic agendas, as well as by changing conceptions of what it owes to the wider community. It has to respond effectively to these challenges and keep pace with a complex and rapidly changing world. But to retain its capacity for innovation, it also needs to preserve a space for critical reflection and creativity. Located within the University of Cambridge, CRASSH provides a microcosm of such a space.
The Theme in Practice
(For applicants to the Visiting Fellowship Programme and to the Conference Support Programme)
Applications may constitute wide-ranging historical or conceptual inquiries, or, alternatively, focus on particular case studies and examples. Scholars are encouraged to investigate transformations of ideas and practices that relate to the future university, across historical periods or geographical and social areas, as well as the migration of ideas between the arts, humanities, and social sciences and science and technology, including information science. Applicants are invited to consider, among other aspects of the theme, the following potential topics:
- Histories or case studies of disciplinary formation and disciplinary division, and their consequences;
- Past and present transformation of disciplines and methodologies, or the instituting of boundaries;
- The potential for innovation via new or emerging fields, combinations, or transdisciplinary alliances;
- Comparative analysis of the disciplines, past or present, in relation to their directions, methodologies, or practices;
- The migration of ideas across historical, national, and institutional boundaries and their impact on the idea of the university;
- The organization, funding, governance, and auditing of universities, and their implications for knowledge;
- The role of academic freedom from political, religious, or other restrictions in relation to the production of knowledge;
- The impact on universities of new forms of knowledge, new technologies, and new social practices;
- The impact of the arts and artistic practices on research culture in universities;
- The role of artifacts, museums, and collections in university teaching and research;
- Advances in the digital Humanities and the role of digital knowledge in teaching, learning, and research;
- The university as a sustainable built environment and its relation to setting, location, and design;
- The effects of globalization on universities and their response to global imperatives (cultural, economic, political);
- The ethical responsibilities of universities in relation to the direction and conduct of research;
- The public role of universities in society and the perceived directions and purposes of higher education;
- Paths not taken, controversies, crazy ideas, utopias, and experiments;
- Visions or models--humanistic, technological, or scientific—for the university of the future.
