Professor Christopher Newfield (English, University of California at Santa Barbara)
Universities of the Future: Reimagining Innovation in Global Higher Education
What if universities around the world were structured to foster the
full range of innovation in all its technological, social and cultural
variants? What would these universities look like? Although the
university is dedicated to cutivating long-range imaginative projects
for the social good, its current structure, management, and obligations
interfere with as much as they support this mission. If we restructured
the university to sustain innovation for human development, what would
the university become?
My last two books have identified the central reasons for the past and
present decline of the research university as an institution of
enlightenment and general social advancement. I identify as one central
dynamic the increasing reluctance of Western leaders to support the
highest-quality university education for ever-larger and more
socioculturally diverse portion of its populations. We face a major
hurdle that I call “mass quality.” Solving our enormous global problems
will depend on the rapid spread of intelligence in the general
population, as well as on the capacity of leaders to receive and follow
this enhanced public knowledge. We will need better, redesigned
universities to deliver an education traditionally reserved for elites
to the vast majority of any given population.
Universities of the Future seeks to establish a general framework for a
university that is devoted to human development, that can offer
previously scare educational resources to very large numbers of people,
and that serves as a model for learning from society at large. My aim
is strategic as well as substantive: having a strongly humanistic model
of the contemporary university will help end the preponderance of
budgetary and managerial factors that limits our ambition for knowledge
production and sustainable social advancement.
I would use my time in Cambridge to conduct archival research and
interviews on the Cambridge model of university education, which is
well known as an example of small-scale and intensive immersive
learning. I know the literature on the tutorial system, but would like
to interview students and staff in order to understand more clearly
what features are particularly valued and the extent to which they can
or cannot be scaled up to larger populations.
The U.K. continues to offer leading international examples of both
elite and mass education, and a term in Cambridge would offer me an
invaluable opportunity to engage with practitioners in two domains that
my book seeks to interconnect.
