What are universities for today? The usefulness of "useless" knowledge

Are our universities facing an existential crisis by trying to be too many things? Places for learning, research, the production of new knowledge, the production of job-ready graduates, and profit-making enterprises? Does everything they do have to produce a tangible, measurable, practical, or profitable outcome? Should they also foster intellectual life and the pursuit of ideas just for curiosity's sake? Or is that an elite, outdated mission? Who gets to judge what knowledge is deemed useless or useful? 

Join Big ideas host Natasha Mitchell with guests to mark the 25th anniversary of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia.

Speakers

Associate Professor Oron Catts, Academic lead of the Institute of Advanced Studies, pioneering artist and founder of Symbiotica: The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts

Dr Jessyca Hutchens, Palyku woman, art historian, indigenous studies lecturer and co-director of the Berndt Museum, University of Western Australia.

Terri-Ann White, former founding director of the Institute for Advanced Studies, former head of UWA Publishing, and founder of the independent publishing house Upswell

Further reading

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Abraham Flexnor (Harpers, 1939)Famous educator and reformer Abraham Flexnor was founder of the first Institute for Advanced Study in 1930. Albert Einstein was a member of its founding faculty and at least 37 Nobel Laureates have found an intellectual home there since.