Event Details

This is a public webinar. Our speaker is Adam Matthews from the University of Birmingham.

A common discourse of the contemporary university is one of higher education for instrumental purposes under the social, economic and political epoch of neoliberalism. Idealised views of the university of the past are often in direct contradiction with the present and future visions of the university. In this webinar, we will explore some of these contradictions. ‘Strands of history’ will be traced through the lens of key thinkers of the modern university including Kant as Enlightenment ‘disrupter’ in the late 18th century, Humboldt as architect of the modern European university, Newman’s Oxford perspective, Clark Kerr’s US adaption of the European research university, neoliberal massification and the emerging posthuman, unbundled digital university of the future.

The purpose of these insights and interpretations is to open up debate and thinking which can take us beyond a narrow view of the purpose and role of a university in the context of research, teaching and digital technologies.

Our speaker is Adam Matthews, who is a postgraduate researcher in the process of completing his PhD titled: ‘A Genealogy of the Idea of a University: Past, Present and Future’. Adam’s thesis in alternative format, will include published papers alongside traditional chapters. Alongside a genealogy of key thinkers on the idea of a university, published papers conduct corpus assisted discourse analyses of UK institutional documents such as regulatory statements, prospectuses and mission statements.