ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ways that contemporary change in the understanding of the university has inevitable implications for teaching and learning, and in consequence for the substance of what is taught, and I propose to show that this is of significance for the public role of the university in circumstances of democracy. Notwithstanding policy statements in some countries that reaffirm the importance of teaching, in the US and the UK most obviously, the broad trend in higher education has been towards the promotion of learning in such a way as to efface teaching. There are, it is true, some good reasons for the emphasis on learning: first, teaching in the university has sometimes taken complacent and unimaginative forms, with insufficient sensitivity to students’ individuality and motivation; second, the extended possibilities of learning that are opened by new technology should indeed be exploited, for they can be an important aid to widening participation; and third, learning must in some sense, to be sure, be the raison d’être of teaching. With the fashionable emphasis on “learner autonomy,” however, there has been a neglect of the dynamics of teaching and learning. Moreover, in this climate current attempts to enhance teaching, especially through the provision of generic training courses, have in key respects curtailed teaching’s possibilities. My purpose, however, is not to detail and to diagnose the current malaise—it is surely a malaise that currently confronts us—but rather to weigh the consequences of this effacement of teaching.
