What Could A University Be: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future
When and Where
Description
Two Presidents respond to What Could A University Be: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future, by Robert Gibbs. This new book imagines a university where all students in all levels and across all faculties, including professional schools are learning how to do research.
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. This future university embraces discord and different perspectives on what knowledge is and 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.
David Naylor, President Emeritus of U of T, and Rhonda MacEwen, President of Victoria University will share their reflections on the future of research universities in relation to this book.
Panel 5:30-6:45pm
Reception (Upper library) 6:45-8:00pm
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.
