ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of new academic specialisms and disciplines and the expansion of universities’ scale and scope. A seemingly ever-increasing range and quantity of people and organisations are becoming linked to universities as students, staff, sponsors or partners. As governments and societies place faith in the capacity of academic knowledge to help solve economic, technological, environmental, societal, health and security challenges, surely academia is an institution that is thriving? Yet many believe that academia, far from thriving, is barely surviving. Intertwinement with political and industrial powers is perceived by some not as authentic agency but of weakness, with academic freedom and autonomy being challenged on multiple fronts. The paradox of the twenty-first-century university, then, is that to thrive it must cross and confront its boundaries in a multidimensional and increasingly knowledge intensive society; but to survive must simultaneously reinforce its boundaries and protect what is distinctive, and distinctively valuable, about academia. This book represents an attempt to develop conceptual tools to direct thought and action towards securing the university’s future as an institution which neither overly strengthens its boundaries, isolating itself from the ‘real world’, nor overly weakens its boundaries, risking its identity and autonomy.
