Category: Podcast

Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960 with Dr. Miles Taylor

There’s something distinctive about universities that were founded in the 1960s. Maybe it’s the brutalist architecture. Maybe it’s the wild, naive but hopeful sounding principles on which they were formed, but they seem very different. And even though decades later, their distinctiveness may have been worn down by the winds of isomorphism, there’s still something that  lingers and distinguishes them from both their older and younger neighbors. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced in England, where these universities were at

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Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaboration, and Knowledge Production with David Baker

Science makes the world go around.  Even if the political world we inhabit is increasingly vibes-based rather than evidence-based, the physical world around us is becoming more driven by technology and science every day. Nowadays, science and universities are seen almost as two sides of the same coin. But it wasn’t always that way and there have been alternatives. Go back 250 years and it wasn’t at all clear that science and universities were meant for each other for laboratories were often

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Dutch Higher Education at a Crossroads: Coalition Politics and University Futures with Marijk van der Wende

A few months ago, there was an election in the Netherlands, one in which the most seats went to was the anti-immigration Party for Freedom, or PVV led by Geert Wilders.  After a few months of coalition negotiations between parties (something that is largely unknown in the anglosphere but is pretty common in Europe), a new governing majority was created that collectively agreed to a new set of priorities.  One of those priorities?  Cutting the living daylights out of funding

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Centers for Teaching and Learning with Mary C. Wright

One of the many ironies about universities are its hiring processes. Universities need good teachers, and so of course they find the best researchers to fill those jobs. It was an understanding of the problematic nature of this approach that led to the creation of various activities in universities designed to assist professors in developing their craft as teachers. This in turn led to a more sophisticated understanding of teaching as merely the complement of learning, and from there it

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Building the Future: Inside Qatar Foundation’s Vision for Education and Innovation

Change of plan today. I was supposed to be interviewing Mary C. Wright about her new book on Centres for Teaching and Learning. However, a scheduling issue arose, so we took the show on the road, around the world, to a place that maybe doesn’t get discussed enough. The city of Doha in Qatar. Thirty years ago, the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his wife, Sheikha Moza, created the Qatar Foundation. Among the Foundation’s most important

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