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July 15, 2008The university of the future |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: In a world where economies are increasingly dependent upon high-level knowledge, higher education is a key national resource. But a Forward Look initiated by the European Science Foundation (ESF) shows that we need to know more about how universities, and other higher education institutions, are changing in the 21st century. A team led by Professor John Brennan of the U.K.'s Open University has just examined what we know about today's higher education, and what we need to research further. In the report of the Higher Education Looking Forward (HELF) project, Brennan he and a multinational team of experts point out that universities are as affected by internationalisation and globalisation as other actors are, ranging from people and companies to whole countries. This can expose them to financial as well as academic risk, and can call for more financial and management resources than many universities have available. Future research must, Brennan thinks, ask about the connections between contemporary social and economic change, the changes now occurring within higher education, and the roles of academics. How might new forms of comparative research achieve a better understanding of the interactions between higher education and society, and the different forms these interactions take in different parts of Europe and more widely? From a strategic perspective, the launch is particularly remarkable because the ESF SCSS managed to channel the outcome of a Forward Look, the ESF flagship instrument, into an international collaborative research programme and therefore demonstrated the capacity of ESF to provide strategic advice for and through its Member Organisations and follow this up with critical mass programmes fostering the needed synergy in European research.
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