Rereading the University Classics, Part 3

Reblogged from the Chronicle. Knowing where we've been is part of better understanding where we're headed (Whither U?) and deciding accordingly on strategies.  See also: Ortega y Gasset, Thorstein Veblen and Karl Jaspers on the university. 

Part 3 by Kai Hammermeister, from The Chronicle of Higher Education

"(Chronicle) Editor's Note: This is the third in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions. The first two columns are here and here.

John Henry Newman's 1852 collection of lectures and essays, The Idea of a University, goes to great length to defend the inclusion of theology in the curriculum of the then-new Dublin unversity. Newman, who had converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, was the driving force behind the university's founding and its first rector. For American universities, teaching theology was never an option, and thus many of Newman's efforts seem to evaporate instantly. Yet the way he advocates the inclusion of religious instruction contains ideas that are applicable to today's curricular debates."

Read the rest at Rereading the University Classics

Reading the University Classics, Part 2

This is either an admittedly indirect follow up or counterpoint to yesterday's October 7th actions kicking off a "global wave of action for education." I haven't decided which yet. Perhaps I'll have a clearer notion after post-7 rss feed reader skimming. Until then... history. Student actions are part of the history of the institution's history. Long preceding last century's 60s student actions, there was another set student and youth actions the century before.

Ortega y Gasset was the previous and 1st entry in this series. Did you know that Thorstein Veblen wrote about the university too?

"From the distance of more than half a century, Karl Jaspers's 1946 treatise, The Idea of the University, reads both like a farewell to the 19th-century German university and a lucid anticipation of several of today's academic problems.

Jaspers wrote his book at the end of World War II. The Nazis had suspended him from his position as professor of philosophy. One of his reasons for writing this treatise was to lay the groundwork for a thoroughly democratic restructuring of higher education in Germany. However, Jaspers also insists that the university is a genuinely transnational institution and that his elaborations concern higher education everywhere."

Read the rest of Reading the University Classics, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education by Kai Hammermeister

CHE Editor's Note: This is the second in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.