The Good University: From Critique to Strategies for Change

By many measures, higher education is doing wonderfully well: 200 million students worldwide, 2.5 million research papers published each year, university Presidents paid over a million dollars per year, and Elsevier making record profits off journals.  There are, however, troubling trends lurking: student debt totals well over a trillion dollars, student protests have become common around the world, most of the university workforce are in precarious employment, staff and faculty strikes have multiplied, and the Laureate Corporation owns universities in ten countries with 150 campuses. In this talk, Raewyn Connell discusses the shape of challenges, local and global; available resources (some unexpected) for dealing with them; and imaginative, democratic pathways into a different future. She invites discussion of her ideas of a good university and strategies for realizing them.

Click here to view the video of this talk.

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, and Life Member of the National Tertiary Education Union. She has taught in several countries and is a widely-cited sociological researcher. Her books include The Good University; Southern Theory; Masculinities; Gender and Power; Making the Difference; and Ruling Class, Ruling Culture. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages. Raewyn has been active in the labour movement, peace movement, and work for gender equality and educational change.

Photo by Katje Ford, used courtesy of Ethics Center Sydney