Universities and their regions: intended and unintended impacts
- John Brennan, London School of Economics
Universities may be becoming increasingly ‘global’. But they are always located ‘somewhere’. An ESRC project on ‘Higher Education and Regional Transformation’ (the HEART project) has examined the regional role of universities with an emphasis on social and cultural perspectives.
The project examined the relationships between universities and their regions by undertaking case studies of four contrasting universities in four contrasting UK regions. The book of the project, ‘The University in its Place: social and cultural perspectives on the regional role of universities’, by John Brennan, Allan Cochrane, Yann Lebeau and Ruth Williams, will be published by Springer next year.
This presentation will report on the main findings from the project and locate them within larger policy discourses about the regional role and impact of universities, which typically adopt more economic perspectives.
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John Brennan directed the HEART project when he was director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information at the Open University. He is now Emeritus Professor at the Open University, Visiting Professor at the University of Bath and the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University. He remains active in higher education research nationally and internationally with work on topics such as graduate employment, quality assurance and the transformative/reproductive impacts of higher education upon society. He has co-authored or co-edited 13 books on higher education and many journal articles and book chapters.