Universities and Society: Whose Terms of Engagement?

Abstract

The idea of a socially engaged university belongs in a long line of moves to assign or appropriate the university for socially preferred purposes. Modernization, national development and nation building, manpower and human capital development, democratization and social transformation, and economic growth and competitiveness have been among the imperatives that have underpinned the arguments for the university to transcend its inwardly defined core functions of teaching, learning, and service and become more socially embedded. See Kerr (1995) on the Land Grant Movement of the 1860s in the United States; and war-related research at U.S. universities during World War II; or Coleman (1994) on Japanese universities in the 1880s supporting “modernization” through their teaching and research; and the political and human resource requirements in the Soviet model of universities. In the current conjuncture, the call for university engagement is part of the discourse of the “knowledge society,” which has seen higher education assume a new prominence within the requirements of a “knowledge-driven economy” but also subject to a sharper accountability discourse driven by governments, global financial institutions, donors, and other social forces.