This blog is designed to support the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Ideas and Universities Project. It is our intention that the Ideas and Universities blog function as an open, inclusive, free and conducive space for thinking about the purpose and value of universities through different times and places.
The Ideas and Universities initiative explores the way in which ideas have found institutional expression in universities from the emergence of the earliest European universities in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries until today. The project considers ideas about how the mind works, how people learn, how people generate new knowledge, how we divide knowledge into different subjects or disciplines, how the lifestyle of intellectuals shapes their thinking, and what relationship intellectuals should have with the societies in which they live.
It also looks at the governance of universities (their constitutional structures and where the power to make decisions is located), their internal structures (departments, schools, faculties, etc.), curriculum, teaching methods, and the relationship between teaching and research. Crucially the project explores the relationship between these ideas and these institutional aspects of universities in different places at different times.
The project is interdisciplinary, with the changing relationship between the sciences and the humanities, a key theme. WUN membership provides the opportunity to compare the intellectual cultures of European, North American, and Chinese universities.
