The Open University of Sri Lanka invited me to deliver the sixth in a series of distinguished lectures on the 10th of April 2015. Looking through the titles of the previous lectures, I saw that the common theme is the university and higher learning. Therefore, I proposed “Making the university relevant” as the topic and described the content as follows:
In an increasingly complex world where difficult decisions have to be made by those in government, there is demand for evidence to support political and policy choices. The university is the default source where one looks for evidence or for those who can generate evidence. But on most occasions, scholars and policy makers do not connect. Demands for teaching and for increased publications results in even less incentives for the conduct of policy-relevant research and engagement with policy makers. Based on analysis of over eight years of the activities of Communication Policy Research south, a multi-country initiative to develop policy intellectuals, an outline of the solution to improve the availability of policy-relevant scholarship will be presented.
I understand the lecture will be streamed. It is scheduled for 1030 on Friday, April 10th. The slides I plan to use are here.
1 Comment
Alison Gillwald
What an honour Rohan and excellent positioning of CPRsouth and think tanks in the discussion of intellectual contribution to national debates… perhaps the ‘no promises, limited contribution’ scenario you paint in Sri Lanka is not much worse that the ‘over promise, under delivery’ by European academics that Nic Garnham portrayed in Contradictions, Confusion and Hubris:A Critical Review of European Information Society Policy?