In this webinar, Professor Barnett shares some thoughts as to how steps might be made in realizing the ecological university.

The university is not just encircled by but is entangled with several major ecosystems of the world and, whether recognized or not, the university is influenced by them and negotiates its way through them. Eight ecosystems stand out in particular, those of the economy, knowledge, social institutions, learning, persons, culture and the natural environment.

The ecological university is a university that takes this ecological setting seriously, and does what it can not just to be sensitive to those eight ecosystems but plays its part in improving each of them - for, being ecosystems, they each fall short of their potential.

Against this background, the concepts of wellbeing and the healthy university each has a particular twist. Under conditions of entanglement, the health of the university is tied up with the health of society and vice versa. The university has agentic powers to assist the health - or wellbeing - of society and vice versa. 

It is a matter of judgement for any university as to where and how it might do this, in its teaching, its research and in its engagements with the wider world. The university as an institution has its part to play alongside its individual programmes of study. And its programmes of study will vary in their possibilities, across the disciplines and their connections with the wider society.

At present, attention is given primarily to economy as an ecosystem. Some wish to play it up still further (being strong advocates of ‘skills’ for the economy); others - critics of neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism – wish to diminish its significance, for they believe that there is a neglect of the other (seven) ecosystems. However, for the ecological university, the economy is important but it will not be privileged in the pursuit of health and wellbeing (of society, of the university and of the members of the university).

In this webinar, Professor Barnett shares some tentative - and very broad-brush - thoughts as to how steps might be made in realizing the ecological university, with considerations of health and wellbeing in mind, especially in teaching, learning and the student experience.

Speaker Profile

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Institute of Education, where he was a Dean and a Pro-Director. He is a past Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), was awarded the inaugural prize by the European Association for Educational Research for his ‘outstanding contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice’ and is the inaugural President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the SRHE and the Higher Education Academy, has published 35 books (several being prize-winners), written over 150 papers, given 150 keynote talks across the world and is a consultant in the university sector. He has been cited in the literature over 20,000 times and has helped to establish the philosophy of higher education as a field of study. He has been described as a ‘thought leader’ in higher education and ‘the master scholar of the university’.