Author Description

It is customary, in a Foreword, to begin by sketching a large context in which the book in question might be comprehended and then perhaps to pick out one or two of its key features and end by affirming the value of the book in front of the reader. On this occasion, I shall reverse this order. Let me start, therefore, by asserting that A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is both a splendid book and, for all those who care about higher education and universities, a crucially important book. That assertion actually contains a number of suggestions on my part. One is that this book offers important insights separately for higher education and for universities, that is to say both for students and their learning on the one hand and for universities as organisations on the other hand. Every page is packed with insights and practical suggestions for advancing students' learning and their wider experience: that is immediately evident. Furthermore, in the Connected Curriculum idea, there are the makings of a coherent vision and plan of action for institu-tional transformation. At the centre of the Connected Curriculum idea lies the hope and, indeed, the demonstration that it is possible, within universities, to improve the relationship between teaching and research. In a sense, of course, this thought should never have needed to be uttered. For 200 years, since the modern idea of the university was born at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, it has been taken for granted in many quarters that a distinguishing feature of universities is that they be institutions that not only are spaces of both teaching and research but also that those two functions are intimately intertwined. However, for the past three decades or so, huge forces (national and global) have tended to pull research and teaching apart; and so the matter of their relationship has become a matter of wide concern. It might be tempting to address this matter in a rather lim