Workshop „The History and Legacy of Reform: Changing Promises and Realities of Higher Education“

The ERUA research group is inviting to its second workshop: “The History and Legacy of Reform: Changing Promises and Realities of Higher Education”, held in Konstanz May 5-7, 2022,

Workshop “The History and Legacy of Reform: Changing Promises and Realities of Higher Education”

This is the second instalment of a workshop series, organized by the ERUA WP 2 research group designed to explore both the existing and the plausible future alternatives to Higher Education. Over the next two years, we will be discussing the questions of how and why reform universities emerged, what it meant to be an alternative in the past and what it would mean to be an alternative today in the modern landscape of Higher Education. Changes took place as the result of historic processes characterized by the rise of vocational universities and the contestation they had to face by alternative forms of learning and researching. From their origins, reform universities had embodied the expectation to convey a project of empowerment and social emancipation from the domination of societal strongholds such as church and state. Therefore, we approach reform as a promise of departure that is bound to shape new modes of interaction and knowledge production. To understand the current reality of reform universities, we rely on the idea that the past lives into the present as handed down order. This enables us to ask what it is that we want to hand down to future generations.  Within this framework, our workshop investigates the relationship between major socio-political transformations and reform initiatives. In the duality of promises and realities, the workshop will investigate two major problem fields concerning: 1. the scope and impact of Higher Education and 2. the transformation of Higher Education by new forms of funding, evaluation, and organization.

The workshop is open to the public. The program can be found here. If you would like to attend the workshop without a paper presentation or as an external guest, please sign up here until April 26th.

As part of the workshop, a keynote lecture will be given on reform and the university through History. The lecture will be opened by Dorothea Debus (UKon) and Anne Kwaschik (UKon) and is followed by a reception held on K7. Find out more about the talk here.