Panel discussion
Thursday 16th February 2012, 6pm to 8.30pm, New Delhi, India
Speakers: Craig Calhoun and Nicholas Stern
Chair: James Bevan
By invitation only
An understanding of society is crucial to governance and to international relations in the modern world. University and educational sectors are drivers of growth, both as industries and as investing in the skills of the future. Universities are builders of international and local relationships through their students and staff, through their relationships with the communities where they are situated, and as a place where people from all walks of life and places come to speak and listen. Universities are places where ideas are challenged as well as created.
Universities have a public mission that transcends merely offering access to training and credentials that advance individual careers. This includes advancing knowledge through research, bringing research-based knowledge to bear on issues of public concern, nurturing and modelling the virtues of open intellectual debate. It also includes helping students strengthen their awareness of public issues and the knowledge-base for addressing them, their capacity for critical evaluation of arguments and claims to knowledge, and their intellectual, ethical, and social capacities to work, both individually and in cooperative and organizational settings. Fulfilling this public mission depends on knowledge (and communication) being treated significantly as a public good both in the primary economic sense of unimpeded and non-rivalrous access and in the sense of being of crucial public importance.
Professor Craig Calhoun is Director Designate, LSE.
Professor Lord Nicholas Stern| is the IG Patel Chair of Economics and Government, Director of the India Observatory and Chairman of the Asia Research Centre.
Mr James Bevan is British High Commissioner to India.