Higher Education and Love Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Trajectories

This book explicitly unites the concepts of higher education and love to examine how these concepts are mutually compatible. As the world of higher education moves towards the metrics of value, and the worth of knowledge becomes more valued in its use rather than its discovery, a crisis brews. If higher education is to contribute to the wellbeing of the self and of others, then the institution needs to be radically reviewed to see if, and how, love contributes to higher education within and beyond its walls. This book addresses the core question of what would the university might be like, today and into the future, if the timeless notion of love was the basis of its educative process, notwithstanding the material artefacts the university helps to create, but also as a way of framing approaches to higher education.

Introduction: What’s love got to do with it?

Chapter One: Love and the University

Samuel Rocha

Simon Robinson

Chapter Three: Confucian Love in Higher Education

Kam Cheong Li

Chapter Four: Academic Citizenship, Service and the Cherishing of Community

Andrew Peterson

Chapter Five: On the Possibility of Love Within University Education

Yusef Waghid

Chapter Six: Academic friendship: a love founded on truth-seeking in a world of managerial pragmatism.

Paul Gibbs

Carol A. Taylor* and Susanne Gannon

Chapter Eight: Love of Learning as a Humanizing Islamic Pedagogic Vocation: perspectives from traditions of higher learning in Islam.

Abdullah Sahin

Chapter Nine: Love in a Cold Climate: Teaching teachers to teach with quest and daring and growth

Victoria de Rijke

Chapter Ten: The Hermeneutics of Love

Jon Nixon

Chapter Eleven: From falling in love to loving: the value gerund in higher education

Kate Maguire

Coda: Love is not restricted to the institution and neither is education

Victoria de Rijke is Professor of Arts and Education and Research Director for CERS, the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship at Middlesex University, UK.

Andrew Peterson is Professor of Character and Citizenship Education at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, UK.

Paul Gibbs is Emeritus Professor of higher education at Middlesex University, UK and Director of the Higher Education and Doctoral Research Institute at East European University, Georgia.