VC’s corner
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be supported and a more radical model of
learning be proposed?
If a university is in some meaningful and
strategic way to be part of its local and
regional community, it must be willing to
prioritise its relations with that locality. This
means more than occupying a campus,
more than being a custodian of buildings and
artefacts, and more than token gestures of
support for local events and people.
A genuine civic university should express
its identity strategically through its core or
discretionary activity so that local people can
be active in the university and the institution
itself can ensure greater contiguity between
civic activity and public priorities.
The civic role of the university then
remains to be reconstructed.
Not only is there a continuing demand and
need for people to be educated as specialists
in professions or in skills as practitioners,
there is also a need for recognition that
learning itself is productive and beneficial to
individuals and to communities.
There are growing numbers of people
who are participating in learning which
would once have been described as ‘liberal
learning’; these are lay intellectuals, or what
Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”.
A society needs an educated population
that goes beyond vocational specialisations.
The continuing growth of the ‘university
of the third age’ – attracting grey armies
and golden gurus alike – and the uptake
of MOOCs worldwide, shows the forceful
nature of learning needs which take place
outside or beyond normal university
provision and are testimony to the fact that
people are motivated and spurred on by the
challenges that surround them in life, no
matter what stage of life they are at.
They want to read a classic text or learn
the language they found beyond them at
school, they are interested in the poet they
never had sufficient time for in their working
life, and they want to examine the social and
political issues that surround them and that
confront society.
Many are desperate to help in the
challenges to our planet that climate
change is bringing. Many wish to be part
of the solution to the global migration,
displacement and poverty that threaten
our social lives.
Many want to challenge the pervasive
inequality across nations and cultures that
disfigures our current lives and threatens
that of the new generations who will be
dealing with it.
It can be argued that adult learning within
its liberal and critical traditions and fostered
by civically minded universities created
access to intellectual life that would not have
been possible for most people. In doing this,
universities responded to a fundamental
human need for knowledge and in going
outside the walls, extramurally in the past,
they contributed to social progress in a
significant and unique way.
In modernity, they must surely review
current practice and thinking about how
they might renew this mission and meet the
new challenges – some of which can be
described as existential, for the planet and for
the human population.
This new challenge is part of intellectual life
which is uniquely both part of and separate
from conventional university provision. It
requires a new look at the curriculum; it
requires a critical curriculum that builds on
the achievements of the past; and it requires
a different form of engagement.
The content of a learning program or
experience should produce engaged students
who have a critical and questioning view of the
world. Who could argue with this? Who could
disagree that what we want for our students is
what in the 19th century was called ‘associative
learning’ – learning that asked the questions that
mattered and made the connections between
what we need and want to know?
How we can understand and grasp the true
meaning of what we must learn?
Surely, we need knowledge and a curriculum
which lets us grasp the connections between
things and gives us the chance to choose to
change. This is really useful knowledge that few
would deny is needed.
THE CIVIC ROLE REIMAGINED
Reimagining the civic role of the university
requires us to take a critical stance on the
nature of university life through the specific
prism of the curriculum, i.e. the organisation
of learning and teaching.
It suggests that the need for reform of
engagement across a broad spectrum of
university activity and thinking requires a
co-existential and consecutive reform of
the curriculum as well. It suggests that
the transformations of learning and its
institutions that we have seen over perhaps
four decades have not been matched by
commensurate changes in what is learned
and how it is taught.
Neither has it been matched by
reformation of the ‘objects’ of learning
and study, some of which include how we
It is not naive to ask that
we renew the purposes of the
university and just what sort
of knowledge we want it to
develop.
understand and study ourselves, especially
in relation to the wicked issues. For our
present existence and the future of our
children, there can surely be no denying the
significance of climate change and global
warming; the life-threatening pollution of the
air and the oceans upon which ultimately
all life depends; the obscenity of poverty
and early death of millions excluded from
progress and affluence; the continuing
impact of war and armaments production;
and the impending conflagrations around
population movement and migration.
These are the contexts and situations for
which the current university curriculum is
inadequate. These issues are not addressed
centrally as a leitmotif, a guiding thread of
concern and critique for all learners since
all people are impacted by them. Which is
not to suggest that all academic disciplines
and boundaries must be abandoned and all
existing curricula be instantly transformed
into an issues curriculum. The realities of the
world out there exist and transformations
may have to be gradual, and as is frequently
stated, we want our brain surgeons to know
a great deal about brain surgery and our
air pilots to know precisely how to fly the
aeroplane we are using to get to the next
university conference across the continent.
But it is not naive to ask that we renew the
purposes of the university and just what sort
of knowledge we want it to develop. The
radical growth and transformation of mass
higher education and the explosive power
of the internet have both occurred within
the last 20 years without a corresponding
change in our approach to learning. It is an
issue whose time has come. ■
The Engagement Australia Conference
2019 will take place in Brisbane on August
29–30. It’s theme will be ‘The Role of the
Civic University in Australia: The Making of
a City Region’.
Professor Jim Nyland is the associate
vice-chancellor at ACU Queensland and
president of Engagement Australia.
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