*/Warwick University Ltd/**: Lessons from 1970 and the *
*higher education sector today*
**
*A conference sponsored by Warwick UCU *
Friday 6 June 2014, 10 am - 4 pm, Woods-Scawen Room, Warwick University
Arts Centre
“Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of
providing, with increasing authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed
intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or
can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free discussion and
action, tolerating and even encouraging ‘subversive’ thought and
activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society within which it
operates?” (E P Thompson, /Warwick University Limited/)
//
/Warwick University Limited/, edited by E.P.Thompson, the great
historian of the English working class and one of Warwick's leading
academics, was published as a Penguin Special in 1970. It followed
events that began with a student occupation of the administration
building and the discovery that some academic staff and students, in
their activity outside the university, had been spied upon by local
businesses. Thompson argued that this, and other correspondence
discovered there, revealed surprisingly close links to business that
compromised the university as an open, academic community. This
conference marks the book’s republication by Spokesman, and is an
opportunity to commemorate a key moment in the university's early
history and to examine the book’s prescient analysis of the ‘business
university’ and its relevance to higher education today.
*Morning session 10 am – 12.30 pm: Warwick 1970*
Chair: Hugo Radice – editor, 2nd ed, /Warwick University Ltd/; Life
Fellow, Leeds University
Speakers: /Student activists from 1970:/
Judith Condon – author, former Workers’ Educational Association
tutor-organiser
Ivor Gaber – broadcaster, journalist, Professor of Political Journalism,
City University
Julian Harber – former Workers’ Educational Association tutor-organiser
Barbara Winslow – Professor of Women and Gender Studies, Brooklyn
College, New York
/Warwick University staff, 1970:/
David Epstein – Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, Warwick University
**
**
Afternoon session 2 – 4.30 pm: Higher education, business and the
state today
Chair: Dennis Leech chair – Warwick UCU branch, Professor of Economics,
Warwick University
Speakers
Tom Docherty – Professor of English, Warwick University
Lucy Gill – Post-Graduate Officer, Warwick University Students’ Union
Joanna de Groot - Senior Lecturer in History, York University; UCU
executive (personal capacity)
Martin Parker – Professor of Organisation and Culture, Leicester University
Nadine El-Enany - Lecturer, Birkbeck Law School; steering committee
member, Defend the Right to Protest
For directions and a campus map see
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting.
--
Professor Jane Holgate
Professor of Work and Employment Relations
Work and Employment Relations Division
Leeds University Business School
31 Lyddon Terrace (room 2.05)
University of Leeds LS2 9JT
email: [log in to unmask]
Mobile: 07960 798399
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