Universities – Good at and Good for – for what?

I will obviously do what I can to promote interest in OTB, both by way of readership and hopefully contributions, as an emerging part of the PASCAL offer.  Anyone who has a twitter account please follow PASCAL @obspascal and retweet anything they think useful / important to their followers.  That is one way to grow the reach of OTB within Pascal.

I think a theme in OTB on higher education along the lines you mention would be very welcome.  Could its focus be though not so concerned with implications for Pascal's own HE work, but more outward-looking on perhaps emerging roles and policy implications for wider society?  That way would help draw people from different backgrounds to the material, and help it connect with other elements within the Pascal site, and drive the focus of the Pascal USP as being on place and learning.

Here’s an example of how I see the different elements within PASCAL outputs working together. Go to the PASCAL Twitter site  www.twitter.com/obspascal and you will see, among the recent posts, one on Keeping public priorities in public universities by Andrew Norton of the Grattan Institute published in the Conversation on 27 May in which he discusses how to keep the 'public' in public universities, given current changes to the HE policy framework in Australia, and another entitled Mass universities good for equity, but must it be also bad for teaching by Hannah Forsyth at Australian Catholic University, also published in the Conversation the day before.  

It could be that these 2 posts (and maybe others you can find on our twitter page) will stimulate a piece reflecting on where policies in Australia are taking HE, which could go on OTB. In turn, I would tweet a link to the OTB piece with suitable hashtags and invite people to join the discussion.  Such a post could be linked to publicity about the Catania conference, and to potential policy briefings about the role of regional HE and blogs on the main site about emerging HE/regional links. Once again, through Twitter (and Facebook and Linkedin) we can extend the reach of such exchanges. It is though such 'joined-up' steps that we can get our work to the fore.  

Very powerful and articulate note.  Thanks, Steve, for the energy. 

There are thousands of us who share this perspective. 

Decolonizing our universities is one way that we speak of it where i live and work. 

There will also be a quite radical conference on higher education in Canada, July 2015 in Regina, Saskatchewan. Check that out for speakers and approaches.

I suggest Chris that you convene anyone at Catania who wants to see a radical reinvention of the university.* 

Here in Canada we have a good space called CUExpo where many of us meet each two years. I am there now [May 2015]. There are over 400 of us here. 

[*There is a banner headline on the PASCAL site and the conference site itself is http://conference.pascalobservatory.org.  ed ]

Diana Robinson and I have just finished editing the PASCAL publication University Engagement and Environmental Sustainability, so have spent a great deal of time looking at this. I won’t go into all the points here but the first part of the book lays the foundation for how we might transform our universities to address environmental issues, and the second provides examples of such practice.  The answer is not so much how we engage, but how we transform our institutions.  Organizing institutions and support services according to bioregions rather than political jurisdictions provides an effective basis for regional policy development.  In his book Communities and the Politics of Place Daniel Kemmis states that ‘no real culture - whether we speak of food or of politics or of anything else - can exist from place’.  

This is the real challenge - to address regional policies in the face of political realities.  I was drawn to PASCAL because of the focus on building sustainable economies honoring place and society through lifelong learning.  Seeing that the economy is at the heart of violence, both local and global, looking at developing ‘grounded economies’ would seem to provide a clear focus.  The conference in Catania will continue this conversation.

Universities can and should do more, but we can't paint them all with the same brush. There is much good work going on, and that needs to be brought higher up the agenda. The book that Budd, Rajesh, Cristina, my colleague Jesus and others edited for GUNI on the community-engaged role of universities provides many examples from around the world. The continuing work of many universities in the Big Tent network of which we are part is a further illustration.

If I look at my own university and a recent meeting of some 40 people from my college and our Institute of Well-being (which crosses Medicine and Social Sciences) recently, the overwhelming majority of people's primary objective is to provide teaching and research for the good of the city, the country and the wider world. It is up to the people inside universities and those outside to keep reminding those in leadership roles of these objectives.

I forgot to say that Catania provides opportunities for people to pitch Big Ideas – perfect for this group. 

I feel that Mike Osborne missed my point. My comments are about the huge amount of human capital that flow through these institutions and then out into the wide world. Of course we can always point to a few isolated examples of in-house good practice, although they may not be assessed against any consistent ethical criteria. I have had published reports of my own that have such examples.

Thanks colleagues for this interesting discussion. I'm adding my thoughts at this point as it seems to me that the crucial distinction is a strategic one. While Mike and I have indeed written about various examples of engagement and university service, I increasingly am coming to share Steve's perspective on this question.

I doubt that there is a university in the world where there is not at least a few if not many staff who do things that seek to contribute to constructive and balanced development. However, there are very few where serving the planet is a grounded, explicit and key strategic challenge which recognises that calamitous state of the world and wishes to intervene in those processes. My own university is a very good example of an applied university which depends on engagement for much of its reputation, energy and resources. However, too much of that effort is shaped by the university's own interests, and by those in powerful positions. As a large commercially-minded organisation, the bottom line continues to shape much of the thinking.

That's not to say that there are not many people who are sharp and keen to share their expertise in positive ways. This, to me, is the core of it all. My colleagues (and I) do not have sinister motives, but are locked into a policy and institutional environment which also pushes us to consider what is in the institution's interest, rather than those of the communities and environments that continue to suffer from an increasingly polarised dynamic.

Steve's question is about what we are 'good for', rather than 'good at'. I'm struck by the difference between 'inside out' and 'outside in' thinking.

That is to say, does our concern start with the interests and priorities of ourselves, and ask how it can be useful, or with the needs and interests communities and regions?  To my eye, it's the latter that has to be the starting point for a university that wants to make a difference...