The University

The University is an insitution of higher (or post-secondary) education, research and professional training. It is an academic community of faculty, students, adminstrators and support staff. It is often a partner to communities locally, with governments, to other universities, and it is highly networked across institutions and borders. It therefore creates local academic communities, and its members are likely to be part of non-local communities of learning, practise, profession, research or management.

The university is both a primary user and a primary generator of knowledge. Even more distinctly, the university transforms knowledge as it transmits it from generation to generation, not just locally but through the non-local communities.

Learning in a university is not simply acquisitive of information and skills, it has two higher functions in learning and knowledge where the university sets for itself the highest standard. First it teaches critical thinking and reflexivity inseparably the teaching the body of knowledge in a discipline. Therefore, when practised by principle, it expects the student to challenge the teacher and on the whole for the next generation of learners to challenge the body of knowledge and to re-shape it. Second, along with teaching the current body of knowledge of a discipline, it attempts to teach the methods by which knowledge can be acquired. The university is 'learning how to learn' happens. From this, the student graduates from being skilled at acquiring current knowledge and skills from her years in primary, to being skilled at challenging and synthesizing knowledge, to being skilled at learning knowledge independently and finally becoming a contributor to the body of knowledge. Every undergraduate education should also include an understanding of the major paradigms, concepts, models, theories and frameworks that guide research. At the root of these, the education should provide an understanding of the philosophical and historical roots of these structures, and the key assumptions that lie behind study. A graduate education that ends with a Doctor of Philosophy degree, must include a much deeper understanding of way knowledge is shaped and the thesis work itself must constitute a new development in knowledge. Thus the university is the infrastructure for the work of scholarship, a self-organizing system, and an infrastructure for codifying curriculum, an activity that is organized by people.

From Delanty (2001) the university is not reducible to state, culture or power - it is an open space where old and new transform knowledge imaginatively. In this environment of challenging and transforming knowledge, and given the joining of teaching and research in professinal academia, the university is where basic research gives rise to innovation. This innovation may constitute public goods, in which case it is likely, and some would argue more appropriately, to be applied by non-commmercial means. Basic research may also lead to commercialization, either indirectly through the use of basic research by private firms, or where discoveries are patenteable, or where research itself is conducted collaboratively with firms, or where it is funded by firms, sometimes in exchanges for privileges on discoveries.

So, universities are central to the knowledge economy in both the research and teaching functions, by enabling development in public goods and in economic growth in private enterprise through research and innovation, and for training a generation of knowledge workers.