What Could a University Be?
What Could a University Be?
Revolutionary Ideas for the Future
Students are not clients, job seekers, or consumers. Their purpose is the pursuit of knowledge. So why do universities largely restrict inquiry to professors and graduate students? In What Could a University Be? Robert Gibbs imagines a university focused on engaging students in research at all levels and across all faculties, including professional schools.
Gibbs proposes a widely applicable model that reverses the traditional top-down flow by teaching students how to conduct research and become knowledge creators rather than passive recipients. Instead of replicating themselves through their graduate students, professors multiply knowledge by teaching others how to teach and how to inquire. Gibbs’s future university embraces discord and different perspectives on what knowledge is, and he turns the current model inside out by suggesting that universities draw from and exchange with society around them. Gibbs situates the responsibilities of higher education in a world of widely distributed, sometimes distorted, information and rapidly changing technology.
What Could a University Be? will change how readers understand teaching, research, the kinds of thinking students should learn, and the role of the university in solving the many challenges of our time.
This timely and inspiring book offers new insights for university leaders around the world, especially mid-level academic managers, and for faculty, especially in the teaching stream. It is also essential reading for students who want to understand the true purpose of their education, and for the parents who send them to university.
I have read many books on the future of universities. Professor Gibbs’s effort is by far the most thoughtful, deeply critical, and yet encouraging. Gibbs is a philosopher who also has pertinent practical experience in a ‘management’ role. He draws on his leadership experience to great effect, with many practical examples and insights. At the same time, his close readings of classical, theological, and philosophical texts are accessible, engaging, and deeply instructive.
With originality and insight, Robert Gibbs challenges us to consider why the research university excludes research as a fundamental component of an undergraduate education. The proposal Gibbs offers will change how we think about the nature of higher education, the creation of new knowledge, and the meaning of undergraduate and advanced degrees.
Robert Gibbs is a professor of philosophy and religion and was the inaugural director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. He has been a member of the international advisory board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the Humanities Initiative Steering Committee for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His numerous publications include Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas and Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities. He has lectured widely on higher education, including presenting the J.V. Clyne Lectures at Green College at the University of British Columbia. He lives in Toronto.
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