Nigel Thrift

The British university system, like the systems in a number of other countries, is being transformed as it grows in size and function into a set of industrial combines that power a process of mass production which is both downgrading the role of academics and threatening the production of creative work. I enumerate some of the reasons why this is h...

Nigel Thrift explores recent changes in the British research university that threaten to erode the quality of these higher education institutions. He considers what a research university has now become by examining the quandaries that have arisen from a succession of misplaced strategies and false expectations.

Once upon a time, universities were corporations, like the corporation of a town. They were often vocational, charged with the professional training of administrators, lawyers, doctors, the clergy, and the like. But gradually these institutions coalesced around the idea that they had to represent an ‘idea’. They were given an all but sacred mission...

So what to do? The process of design – or rather redesign – of universities and university systems doesn’t have to be seen as a benighted rebirth of central planning or as a playing field for consultancies. Design is not an alien concept to universities and university systems. For example, pretty well each and every system of higher education has b...

Undergraduate students Then, there are, of course, undergraduate students … All kinds of rubbish has been talked about students over the last few years. For example, according to some, they’ve all turned into snowflakes. T’was always thus, one might say. In many ways, this is just the latest variant on the ‘young people, I don’t know what’s got int...

So does one cope with all of the changes and leadership challenges I have outlined in previous chapters? One of the key university leaders is the vicechancellor. In previous chapters, I have sometimes been critical of the stances taken by university leadership. However, that does not mean that I think that being a vice-chancellor/university preside...

Nigel Thrift explores recent changes in the British research university that threaten to erode the quality of these higher education institutions. He considers what a research university has now become by examining the quandaries that have arisen from a succession of misplaced strategies and false expectations.

This is a book about universities. There are plenty of those around already, so what makes this book any different? Roughly speaking, books about universities can be divided into four types. First off, there are the jeremiads, lamenting the loss of past glories and criticising much of what is presently occurring. Usually sparked off by opposition t...

There are certain perennial and perennially important issues that have arisen out of this recent history of British higher education. They are persistent dilemmas which, because they are so important, have to be included in any survey. They continue to crop up and none of them show any sign of going away soon. They are: the balance of public and pr...

I have an awful lot to thank universities for. To begin with, I have had considerable freedom in choosing what to do, with the result that I have been able to think about all kinds of issues and ideas in a way that just isn’t open to most people. Then, universities have given me some extraordinary experiences. Just two will suffice. One was a resea...

So, having got some sense of what research universities are about, it is now possible to survey what has happened to them, mainly over the last decade or so. That is what the next four chapters try to achieve by taking different perspectives on their recent history. Research universities have changed and I doubt that many academics would argue that...

So what are the proximate causes of all this dissatisfaction? I have lived through a time when universities were still given quite a lot of freedom. There were reasons for this but most particularly they didn’t matter as much as they do now to government and business. Universities were still quite small and, by and large, they taught and were a par...

Let me summarise the argument of this book so far. The problem in UK higher education is that, like the British natural environment, British research universities are the victims of a receding baseline. Things that we would never have envisaged are coming true, things that we all cleaved to have gone extinct, things that were threats have become re...

This chapter introduces the book’s contents and main arguments. It takes a considerable amount of space in order to explain what I call unlearning as the main way in which the knowledge generated by research universities progresses.

This book makes an argument for the existential importance of the research university in a world beset by climate change and general short-termism. It is in three parts. The first part provides a description of what the research university consists of – buildings and spaces, academics and students, research and teaching. I argue that the motive for...

This chapter argues that a much better explanation of recent developments in research universities than marketisation is provided by the intersection of a series of three processes: financialisation, nationalisation, and student number growth arising out of a model of higher education which might be considered Australian in character in its concent...

This chapter considers issues that never go away, namely the balance of public and private funding, student access, tuition fees, research funding, research integrity, pensions, league tables, and autonomy (or the lack of it). The chapter concludes by describing the high degree of dissatisfaction that can now be found in and with many British resea...

This chapter is concerned with the large number of changes that have happened in the university system since the 1990s. The chapter gives a brief account of the main events and the key issues animating the history of the expansion of the UK university sector over the last few decades, culminating in the current sort of market, sort of state, takeov...

This chapter continues from Chapter 2 in surveying the different constituencies that go to make up a university, concentrating on students, parents, council and alumni. There is a substantial digression on freedom of speech.

This chapter considers some of the main actors that go to make up a university, concentrating on the roles of the built environment, academics, technicians, contract research staff, postgraduates and administrators. There is a substantial digression on the growing role of online teaching.

This chapter is a brief description of what a vice-chancellor of a research university does, considering both the typical work pattern and the challenges of the job. It also explores what some of the ingredients of success may look like.

This chapter provides a core definition of the research university based on the concept of four particular duties. It then turns to the question of excellence. Do recent developments in research promote more excellent research or not. This is a pressing question since excellent research will be one of the planet’s only lifelines as climate change b...

This chapter considers a number of system, teaching and research policies that might begin to boost research universities chances of doing excellent research that can establish a future for the planet such as national universities, enhanced cooperation, a pared-back residential model, and boosting institutional capacity through research centres. Th...

The contributors to Grammars of the Urban Ground develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for capturing the complex, ever-shifting, and interactive processes that shape contemporary cities. Building on Marxist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory as well as the ontological turn in urban studies, they propose a mode of analysis that r...

There are many shades and intensities of space, beginning with the most obvious: how we know where we are, transiting to how we experience space as a sensory realm: how we feel where we are. The where and the how are being transformed as we move into a period in which our infrastructures are being inscribed on the planet as a new era, known as the...

This chapter considers the promises and problems of fandom and enthusiasm within capitalism. Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative way of funding creative projects in the face of the more cautious investments of record companies following the MP3 crisis. Through crowdfunding artists seek to harness the affect and emotions of fans to access new...

In this paper, I read across from universities to Latour and back again. The paper is in four parts. In the first part, I attend to the new strands of activity that have accreted to universities over the last twenty years or so and, at the same time, to the growth in variation in what is called “university.” The second part of the paper alights on...

This paper examines the future of Western higher education. Situated midway between an analysis and a polemic, it concerns itself with how we might begin to actively design the universities of the future. That will require a productionist account of higher education which is so far sadly lacking. But there are signs that such an account might be po...

The claim is frequently made that, as cities become loaded up with information and communications technology and a resultant profusion of data, so they are becoming sentient. But what might this mean? This paper offers some insights into this claim by, first of all, reworking the notion of the social as a spatial complex of ‘outstincts’. That makes...

Marilyn Strathern has produced a remarkable body of work that not only demonstrates range and tenacity but also has produced a host of inspirations that have made their way into the world. This Afterword to the special issue 'Social Theory After Strathern' dwells on the subject of the modesty of what Strathern is proposing and how it relates to spa...

Foreword by Professor Thrift

Introduction Habitat Ecology Cultivation Conclusion

This paper will consider how we might think about the capitalist economy that now seems to be emerging, one based on spontaneous synthesis. Following an extended introduction, the first part of the paper examines the main changes that have been taking place in the economy grouped around the notion and value of innovation. I will argue that these ch...

This article is an edited transcript of a panel discussion on ‘Space and Spatiality in Theory’ which was held at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Washington, DC, April 2010. In the article, the panel map out some of the challenges for thinking, writing and performing spaces in the 21st century, reflecting upon the emer...

Can we detect changes in the way that the world turns up as they turn up? This paper makes such an attempt. The first part of the paper argues that a wide-ranging change is occurring in the ontological preconditions of Euro-American cultures, based in reworking what and how an event is produced. Driven by the security-entertainment complex, the aim...

There is no abstract for this paper.

This paper takes the emergence of new localized industrial complexes seriously, but seeks to set them firmly within a context of expanding global corporate networks. The paper is in four parts. The first summarizes the key arguments of the "localization' thesis which predicts a return to industrial districts. The second attempts to reformulate the...

The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007--2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the...

This paper begins with an appreciation and critique of the remarkable work of Peter Sloterdijk which makes it possible to open up a number of issues concerning philosophy and its relation to the social sciences and humanities, most particularly concerning the role of evidence and the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism. In particular, the paper argues th...