Universities with a Social Purpose - Intentions, Achievements and Challenges

This book is a narrative of conversations between two professors, with different backgrounds, academic disciplines, life experiences, and from different continents. It shows how their discourse has brought them to a single destination defined by a mutual interest in the social purposes of universities, and a hope in common that their academic efforts will somehow do good in the world.
The seventeen internationally-agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide focus for aspirations and plans regarding sustainability, but notably, the SDGs' targets and indicators rarely provide detailed accounts of who is expected to enact change. This book addresses the role of higher education in this context and explores the social purposes of universities and their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. It presents an academic analysis of this complex situation, based on insights from published literature on higher education, and the personal but very different experiences of two professors with this shared interest.




 
Professor Kerry Shephard is Professor of higher education development at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He researches higher education, conceptualising this as a part of the discipline of education, but with a focus on the functioning of universities and on the nature of learning and teaching within universities. Kerry's area of interest is the affective domain of attitudes, values and dispositions and how our students' higher education experiences impact on these as outcomes. Kerry maintains that the challenging aspects of education for sustainable development are affective in nature, rather than cognitive, and he has researched how affective outcomes are described, taught and measured in universities over more than two decades. Kerry has a background in a different discipline, and his present disciplinary perspective has been influenced by, and is grounded in, his prior 25 years of research and teaching as a biologist. Kerry has taught and researched in universities in New Zealand and in England and currently teaches about academic leadership in higher education pedagogy programmes.
 
V. Santhakumar is a professor at Azim Premji University in India. Santha was born in Kerala and became a civil engineer. While working as a civilengineer on a non-governmental initiative to plan watershed management in the late eighties, Santha felt the need for a social science education, to help him to transfer the possibilities of engineering improvement to the social well-being of people. After Master's and Doctoral degrees in social sciences, research analysing and designing mechanisms of governance and the economics of conserving natural resources, Santha's current focus is on the interlinkages between development and education, and ways to mitigate the 'development differences' between population groups. Santha is interested in the impacts of school teachers in remote parts of India, in overcoming the social injustices inherent to the caste system and dowry, and the part played by education in reproducing social injustice and in overcoming it. Santha, always a pragmatist, attempts to persuade Kerry that radical change in most of our universities is not necessary and promotes in particular the development of universities with specific social purposes. Santha is an educational activist by nature. His writing, essentially narratives, reflect his nature and his experiences in India and in the less developed parts of the world.