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3:30 PM
BST
Universities were built for a different age. As artificial intelligence, demographic change, geopolitical uncertainty, and economic pressures reshape society, long-established assumptions about how universities are governed, funded, organised, and valued are coming under increasing strain. What kinds of institutions will be needed in 2050? Which traditions should be preserved, and which structures may need to be reinvented? Bringing together perspectives from higher education leadership and technological change, this session will ask whether the university as we know it is fit for the decades ahead – and what new models of knowledge, learning, and institutional life might emerge by 2050.
Vivienne Stern took up the role of UUK Chief Executive in September 2022. Vivienne has over 25 years’ experience of working in higher education policy and politics at national and international level. She previously worked for the Chair of the Education Select Committee of the UK Parliament; as a policy specialist and then Head of Political Affairs for Universities UK; and most recently as the Director of Universities UK International (UUKi) which represents UK universities around the world. She is a member of the UK Government’s Soft Power Council; the Higher Educational Advisory Group; the Skills Advisory Group and the GREAT Private Sector Council. She is Deputy Chair of the Council for At Risk Academics and chairs its Nominations and Governance Committee. She was awarded an MBE for Services to International Education in the New Years’ Honours List 2022. In 2021 Vivienne received the European Association of International Educators’ “Vision and Leadership” award. Vivienne is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where she studied English Literature.
Jamie Bartlett is one of the UK’s leading technology writers and thinkers. His previous books include The People Vs Tech, winner of the Transmission Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and The Dark Net. In 2010 Jamie founded a research centre at leading ThinkTank Demos that specialised in designing and applying AI to understand social trends.He has written and presented several hit BBC podcast series, including The Missing Cryptoqueen, which reached number 1 in the podcast charts around the world, and his Ted Talk about the dark net has been watched nearly six million times. He has previously written on the intersection of tech and politics for the Telegraph, the Spectator, and the Guardian.
Ben Wildavsky is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the award-winning author of The Great Brain Race (Princeton) and the coeditor of Reinventing Higher Education and Measuring Success. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and many other publications.
Marion Thain comes to Edinburgh Futures Institute from her role as Professor of Culture and Technology at King’s College London, where she was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for 6 years. While at King’s she founded and led the Digital Futures Institute, which grew out of her Centre for Attention Studies. She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University, and worked in English departments at Russell Group universities before moving to New York University as a professor of Arts and Literature (in English and the school of the interdisciplinary global liberal arts) and Director of Digital Humanities. She returned to the UK in 2018. Marion is interested particularly in the relationship between culture and technology (considering ‘technology’ in the broadest sense), and in formations of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) building, The University of Edinburgh, 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9EF *Deliveries via West Entrance on Nightingale Way.Email: efi@ed.ac.uk
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