ABSTRACT
The Thinking University Expanded considers how the university can be extended and developed to an institution of play that becomes a gateway to new compositions and enactments of opportunities and happiness for university academics and students alike. A university of and in continuous play can shape the public sphere in ways that reimagine both the epistemological and political, and the metaphysical and the ethical.
Without abandoning the university’s emphasis on thinking, the book examines the prospects of opening the university to ‘a new, possible use’. The singular outcomes-based lens of seeing higher education distorts the humane and ethical nuance of what a university can potentially do and aspire towards. For this reason, the book intends to find a new use for the idea of a university – one that is responsible and responsive in both its pursuit of the truth and being open to different kinds of truth, as made manifest in diverse contexts and life-worlds.
This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the field of higher education.
1. The thinking university reconsidered. 2. On searching for truth and the justification for telling the truth. 3. Student alienation and the democratic mission of a university re-examined. 4. On some of the limitations of citizenship and the thinking university. 5. Towards a university beyond critique. 6. On a university without condition. 7. Against the exclusive entrepreneurial university. 8. Al-Rumi and the notion of a university beyond critique. 9. An argument in defence of a playful university. 10. On a university in perpetual play
