Continuum Higher Education and the Public Good: Imagining the University

About the Author Jon Nixon is Honorary Professor in the Center for Lifelong Learning Research and Development at The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, UK. Product Description What constitutes the public good in a highly individualistic, consumerist and privatized society? The global financial crisis of 2008 revealed the extent to which the public realm had been eroded over the last thirty years and the inroads that privatization and commercialization have made into the higher education sector. This book explores the institutional and sector-wide implications of the financial crisis for higher education and the lessons to be learnt from that crisis and its aftermath for the university sector as a whole. Jon Nixon argues that the university now has to be re-imagined as a social, civic and cosmopolitan good that is central to the well-being of civil society and its citizens. Key chapters focus on capability, reasoning and purposefulness as the common resources of higher education. There is an urgent need for sector-wide planning and collaboration, the development of a public culture across institutions, and a broadening of the higher education curriculum. Higher Education and the Public Good points a way forward to the new and emergent civic and cosmopolitan spaces of learning. Review 'In this excellent book, Jon Nixon salvages higher education from the wreckage wrought by three decades of commercialisation, commodification, competition and classification. He articulates a powerful, cogent and realisable vision of higher education as a public good a site for the development of human capability, reason and purpose, existing within and contributing to the social interconnectivities of the res publica and cosmopolis.'--Sanford Lakoff'Beautifully written, of wide scope and offering a much needed and humane vision of higher education as serving the public good - it is difficult to imagine a better book on the university than this. If only every university vice-chancellor and principal would pay it at least some attention.'--Ron Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education and Consultant, Institute of Education, University of London, UK