The Concept of a University: With a new introduction by the author - Tapa blanda

-This perspicacious, elegant text was first published in 1973, partly in response to the disruptive posturing of the radical students of that era, as the new introduction to the Transaction edition admits in its opening lines. As with Kenneth Minogue's other books, the text contains much enlightenment, and manifests a pleasing absence of pomposity or condescension. The conceptual terrain is vast, ranging across history and politics as well as philosophy, rendering any chosen explanatory mode problematic in the extreme...Minogue offers us a fascinating account of the uneasy but fertile interchanges between academic inquiry and religion.- --Dennis O'Keeffe, The Salisbury Review "This perspicacious, elegant text was first published in 1973, partly in response to the disruptive posturing of the radical students of that era, as the new introduction to the Transaction edition admits in its opening lines. As with Kenneth Minogue's other books, the text contains much enlightenment, and manifests a pleasing absence of pomposity or condescension. The conceptual terrain is vast, ranging across history and politics as well as philosophy, rendering any chosen explanatory mode problematic in the extreme...Minogue offers us a fascinating account of the uneasy but fertile interchanges between academic inquiry and religion." --Dennis O'Keeffe, The Salisbury Review

Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Kenneth Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The fashionable belief that the university is society's handmaiden is confronted by a view of the university as an institution with an independent vitality and function. Minogue at one and the same time reminds us of the sources of admiration for university life in the medieval world, and how it rested squarely on its essential autonomy from the very social pressures that have come to defi ne the modern university.