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Sustainable Futures for Higher Education pp 327–340Cite as

Higher Education: From Intellectual Asylum and Fulfilling of Social Orders to Creating Arenas for Scientific Revolutions

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Part of the book series: Cultural Psychology of Education ((CPED,volume 7))

Abstract

This conclusive chapter of the volume summarizes the different perspectives on higher education that are represented in the book. The ambivalences introduced by the “Bologna system” into higher education are outlined, with the suggestion that new alternatives to that politically motivated intervention be considered so as to guarantee the leading role of universities in the preparation of new generations of knowledge makers. A suggestion is made for establishing a privately funded University Without Borders that would raise the international collaboration to new level in the cooperation of scholars, minimizing the possibilities of pilurcal political interference into higher education by any particular country of bloc of countries.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In contrast to corporational privatization of higher education that supports different research efforts in universities with the move of the resulting intellectual innovations from the public to the patented corporate knowledge domains.

  2. 2.

    This general mechanism can be summarized in one sentence: “We (institution) tell you that you do feel happy with the kinds of conditions we offer you”. A directed institutional imperative for how the autonomous person must feel/think on their own initiative, together with the unconditional blocking of any doubt in the trustability of the source of the message is the usual way of bringing personal worlds in line with societal expectations.

  3. 3.

    A recent initiative in this direction within the USA is the Minerva University (https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/academics/)—established in California in 2012 with very strict acceptance rate (2% of the top) and small groups of students (paying half of the tuition rates of the US Ivy League private universities) studying in seminar-oriented forms of Bildung. It is an experiment within US higher education to build on the best features of existing universities while eliminating the inefficient ones..

  4. 4.

    There already exist a number of completely internet-based universities that offer degrees in different areas. Their focus is to compete with regular (“face-to-face”) colleges and universities in providing degrees as a result on e-learning (e.g. https://www.capella.edu). They make the existing “degree factory” function of universities more intense and precise, based on business model of making a product. This extension of the traditional institution into the virtual sphere is neither productive (Tanggaard 2018) nor pleasant (Mihalits and Rodax 2018). In contrast, the University without Borders offers the Internet-based freedom space for developing innovation capabilities of students through joint problem-solving efforts rather than successful passing of all textbook-based examination tasks.

  5. 5.

    This protection can be achieved by running the university in ways similar to an insurance company—students pay monthly premiums (which must be lower than in comparable regular fee-demanding universities) which go into the investment process to multiply the money through stock market operations. Institutions interested in having the chance to make first offers to students when they near graduation can make charitable contributions to the University. Faculty who lead the co-learning tasks will be given honoraria (not fixed salaries) for their work depending upon the content-based productivity of their work. The face-to-face meeting of the research team members occurs in short 3–5 day workshops as those are needed for joint work and are paid by the university. The administrative costs will be strictly kept to a minimum (e.g. 5% of the budget) So, in sum—the students pay for their higher education, but also are provided study conditions they need. Financially the well-being of the university is fluid—depending on enrolment and stock market conditions.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nancy Budwig, Lene Tanggaard, Luca Tateo and Virgil and Geanina Nae for productive suggestions on the earlier draft of this chapter.

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  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Jaan Valsiner

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  1. Jaan Valsiner
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  1. Department of Cultural Psychology, Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Jaan Valsiner

  2. Monarch Business School, Hagendorn-Zug, Switzerland

    Anastasiia Lutsenko

  3. Institute of Mathematics, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev, Kievs’ka, Ukraine

    Alexandra Antoniouk

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Valsiner, J. (2018). Higher Education: From Intellectual Asylum and Fulfilling of Social Orders to Creating Arenas for Scientific Revolutions. In: Valsiner, J., Lutsenko, A., Antoniouk, A. (eds) Sustainable Futures for Higher Education. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96035-7_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96035-7_27

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