Are British research universities losing their way or are they finding a new way?

Nigel Thrift, a well-known academic and a former Vice-Chancellor, 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.

Challenging both higher education policy and leadership, he argues that the focus on student number growth and a series of research policy missteps has upset research universities’ priorities just at a point in the history of planetary breakdown when their research is most needed.

Professor Nigel Thrift is currently Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management. Previously he was Executive Director of Schwarzman Scholars. Before that he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Oxford. He is Visiting Professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. His research spans international finance; cities in their many manifestations; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of timekeeping.