Warwick Universities Summit 2014 discuss the purpose of Higher Education

The Warwick Universities Summit took place on Saturday 15 February, with around 30 students and teachers in participation.

Leading university theorist and Cambridge professor Stefan Collini opened proceedings with a keynote speech summarising his thoughts on the difficulties to do with the purpose of the university institution.

He argued that universities today are seen as vehicles for myopic economic growth, merely providing training procedures for students to enter the workplace at a higher level of learning.

He encouraged his listeners to take a more long term view of the institution and recognise the huge benefits received by societies which contain places where thought can be free from the influence of the market drive.

He also posited that most people on the street would agree that having locations where blue sky research and the like can be performed is a net benefit to economic growth in the long term.

This was followed by a discussion of ‘The measure of a good education’ led by Professor Michael Neary of the University of Lincoln and Dominic Passfield from the Quality Assurance Agency.

This panel saw the two speak and then the audience break into groups in order to discuss their own thoughts on the model.

Many understood the prestige and quality of universities to be a measureable quantity, while some held the opinion that perhaps such measures available today, such as the National Student Survey, are integrally flawed.

After this a series of workshops were conducted with the participants discussing university development ideas such as ‘Widening Participation: making HE accessible to all’.

There was a further panel entitled ‘The future of the university classroom’.

Though the attendance for this year’s summit was less than expected, this may be easily ascribed to weather conditions.