The New Power University: The social purpose of higher education in the 21st century

Chapter 8

The university integrated with its community

The New Power University must shift from the idea of place making towards community organising

The relationship between a university and the people who live around it has often been a tense one. As we saw in Chapter 1, the 11th century founding of the nationes in Bologna, Italy, occurred because the soon-to-be-students felt persecuted by the locals. This community activism was the grit that grew into the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university. In a similar vein, after two Oxford scholars were hanged in 1209 by some locals for a murder that they did not commit, a number of their colleagues fled to Cambridge, leading to the foundation of the university there. Tensions in Oxford ...