University in Crisis

From the Middle Ages to the University of Excellence

Michael Schapira

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798881873165
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

As is obvious to the casual newspaper reader, the debt-saddled student, the increasingly precarious university teaching force, the reactionary politician, and the budget-constrained administrator, the entire system of higher education is in crisis. This book brings necessary clarity to contentious debates about the state and future of the university by reconstructing the institution's history around the theme of crisis.

Since its origins in medieval Bologna, the university has been a site where humanity has worked out many of the thorniest questions of individual and collective purpose, often in what were described as crisis conditions. This book is not just a history of the university or a survey of contemporary debates, though. It is also an impassioned defence of the university as a privileged institution through which threats to collective self-governance are most acutely felt and from which strategies for its rehabilitation can be most fruitfully developed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Past vs. the Future
• Chapter 2: The Student vs. the Society
• Chapter 3: Discipline vs. Discipline
• Chapter 4: The Global vs. the Local
• Chapter 5: The Professor vs. the Administration
• Chapter 6: The Educational vs. the Economic
• Chapter 7: Kant vs. the Managers: Managerialism, Self-Governance and the Burden of Institutional Reproduction
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author