On April 10th, I delivered the sixth Distinguished Lecture of the Open University of Sri Lanka on the subject of making the university relevant.
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.
The lecture is now on Youtube. The preliminaries take up eight minutes. So start at 8:00. The video is slightly over one hour. Discussion starts at 57:00.
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