Introduction
Self-evidently, higher education has meanings and purposes. Writings on the matter, however, occupy an ambiguous situation. For 200 years, there has been a steady stream of writings, in which writers have set out not just their individual thoughts but also their hopes and their urgings. They have sought to promote an idea of the university of their own and to change thinking about the practices in the university. This stream of writing constitutes a great tradition, with many books over that time bearing titles such as The Idea of the University (Jaspers, published in Germany in 1946 and in English in 1960) and The Idea of Higher Education (Barnett 1990) or, more provocatively, The Crisis in the University (Moberly 1949) or even The University in Ruins (Readings 1997). With few exceptions, however, there has been little in the way of scholarly attempts to survey that material and to analyze it. As a result, the literature that seriously attempts to map the meanings and...
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Barnett, R. (2016). The Idea of the University: Renewing the Great Tradition . In: Shin, J., Teixeira, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_11-1
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