Higher Education A Critical Business

Higher Education: A Critical Business is a bold statement about higher education in the modern age. It continues Ronald Barnett's thinking of his earlier books but offers a completely new set of ideas in a challenging but engaging argument. A defining concept of the Western university is that of critical thinking, but that idea is completely inadequate for the changing and unknowable world facing graduates. Instead, we have to displace the idea of critical thinking with the much broader idea of critical being. In this idea, students reflect critically on knowledge but they also develop their powers of critical self-reflection and critical action. This critique is transformatory. An education for critical being calls for a new approach to the process of higher education. It also has implications for the organization and management of universities, and for the relationship of universities to the wider worlds of work, professionalism and intellectual life. "Barnett reviews what the academy customarily means when it talks about critical thought, explains why that talk is so often shallow and pessimistic, and holds up for contemplation a positive conception of a 'very wide self' formed through education.... He breathes completely new life into the dead notion of academic as intellectual" - Professor Sheldon Rothblatt, University of California, Berkeley and Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden Anyone interested in understanding how we might develop universities and higher education for the modern world should read this important book.

Criticism of Shakespeare's comedies has shifted from stressing their light-hearted and festive qualities to giving a stronger sense of their dark aspects and their social resonances. This volume introduces the key critical debates under five headings: genre, history and politics, gender and sexuality, language and performance.

In this timely and innovative book scholars from Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, explore their own sense of identity, reflecting both on their research and scholarly interests, and their work experiences. Taking the form of a debate, Changing Identities in Higher Education helps to widen the contemporary space for debates on the future of higher education itself. The book is split into three parts: part one presents a set of essays each on a set of identities within higher education (academic, student, administrative/managerial and educational developers). part two includes responses to Part one from authors speaking from their own professional and scholarly identity perspective part three illustrates perspectives on the identities of students, provided by students themselves. With its original, dialogic form and varied content, this book is of interest to all those concerned in current debates about the state and nature of higher education today and those interested in questions of identity. It makes especially useful reading for students of higher education, lecturers in training, academics and managers alike.

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Thinking in Higher Education provides a single compendium on the nature, function, and applications of critical thinking. This book brings together the work of top researchers on critical thinking worldwide, covering questions of definition, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, research, policy, and application.

Providing a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of higher education this book steps nimbly through the field, leading it into new areas and advancing an imaginative ecological realism. Each chapter takes the form of a short essay, tackling a particular topic such as values, knowledge, teaching, critical thinking and social justice. It also examines key issues including academic freedom, the digital university and the Anthropocene, and draws on classic as well as contemporary texts in the field. Composed of five parts, the book travels on a compelling journey: Part one identifies foundations of the field, distinguishing between the ideas of university and higher education, Part two examines key concepts, including research, culture, academic freedom and reason, Part three focuses on higher education as a set of educational practices and being a student, Part four is concerned with the university as an institution and includes the matters of leadership and the spirit of the university, Part five turns to the university in the world, and argues for an ecological perspective. Written in a lively and accessible style, and ideal for anyone coming to the field for the first time but also of interest to experienced scholars, this book offers sightings of new possibilities for higher education and the university.

The University has lost its way. The world needs the university more than ever but for new reasons. If we are to clarify its new role in the world, we need to find a new vocabulary and a new sense of purpose. This book offers nothing less than a fundamental reworking of the way in which we understand the modern university.

This insightful book offers a critical stance on contemporary views of international students and challenges the way those involved address the important issues at hand.