1. Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF)

2. Background
Autumn 2016
Dean approved the creation of the research centre ‘Centre for Higher Education Futures’ (CHEF) at the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University
CHEF is organisationally anchored as a collaboration between the Danish School of Education (Director and main admin support) and Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media (Deputy Director)
January 2017
CHEF was launched with a launch event (official opening, panel discussion, reception)
Autumn 2017
Dean allowed admin and project support through a manager position (50% over two years) until CHEF could rely on own project funding

3. Organisation Director (professor Susan Wright)
Deputy Director (associate professor Søren Bengtsen)
Manager (Dr Jakob W. Ørberg – end of January 2019)
Steering group (Director, Deputy Director, Manager and 3 coordinators)
Core Members (15 researchers, AU)
Associated members (researchers in Denmark)
International members (researchers from around the world)

5. Ambition
Research the internationally transforming mandates and organisation of universities and higher education
Provide students, faculty, university administrators, university leaders and the higher education policy community with an internationally linked and research-informed space for meta-analysis and reflexive thinking about higher education, and to ensure critical and constructive dialogue between the stakeholders
Be a site for national and international research and experiments on new models for higher education and its institutional forms

6. Roles & activities 1. International networking
International collegiality (networks), future collaborations (projects and consortia), sister centres (links)
2. Facilitator of projects and collaborations
Inspiring research (talks, seminars, conferences), creating communities of 'critically encouraging' academics around projects, and dialogue with policy makers
3. Project hotel
Linked projects (activities, networks), future research (funding, development, commission)
4. Critical and constructive proponent of public debate
Dialogue with policy makers, public dissemination, teaching and graduate research opportunities, summer schools

7. Members & events
CHEF has over 300 members (core, associated, international) around the world, and the list of core members and their research interests can be found on the centre website:
Membership is free
Members are connected through event, invited to give talks, receive newsletters etc.
Events
CHEF Lunch Talks by members and visitors of CHEF (monthly)
CHEF Seminars with visiting local, national and international researchers
CHEF Workshops & Panels Debates with invited partners from the policy community, higher education teaching and learning practice, researchers, university leaders, external partners (companies, non-academic institutions and organisations)
Affiliated with international research conference (PHEC)
Affiliated with international academic association (PaTHES)

9. Research themes
1. The role and positioning of universities and higher education in the world
(Coordinators: Sarah Robinson & Jakob W. Ørberg)
2. Universities’ organisation and inner life
(Coordinators: Søren S.E. Bengtsen & Laura Louise Sarauw)
3. Higher education futures
(Coordinators: Susan Wright & Rikke Toft Nørgård)

10. Theme 1: The role and positioning of universities and higher education in the world
Description
Explores the positioning of universities and the ways they engage with and respond to a range of external stakeholders, including industrial and commercial companies, publishing firms, student recruitment agencies, private institutes providing supplementary or ‘shadow’ education, consultancies and international organisations with policy prescriptions, and governments using universities in their economic and foreign policies.
Projects
European universities – critical futures
Higher education and soft diplomacy in China and Denmark
Internationalisation of higher education in Denmark and beyond

11. Theme 2: Universities’ organisation and inner life
Description
Explores the implications of universities’ location in this new ecology for its internal life, based especially in the global drivers of performance management, massification, digitalization, and quality assurance. Many of these reforms are carried out with the assumption that candidates will gain the skills and inclination to develop careers as ‘knowledge workers’ outside academia, revealing a ‘torn curriculum’ within globalised higher education programmes.
Projects
In search of student time – higher education and student temporalities
Performance management and the audit culture
University leadership in a gender perspective
Building and sustaining doctoral ecologies
Digitalisation of higher education

12. Theme 3: Higher education futures
Description
Develop new insights into the practical implications of our critical research for building alternative futures for higher education. The idea of the future university will be explored. This links to the idea of ‘future making’ and draws on the philosophy of higher education, design thinking, educational philosophy and the history of ideas.
Projects
The ‘Trust University’
Academic citizenship and ‘academics in residence’
The purpose of the future university
Knowledge and the university – reclaiming life
Link to CHEF project website:

13. Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Conferences (PHEC)
2017 – The Purpose of the Future University, Aarhus University:
2018 – Student Being and Becoming in the Future University, Middlesex University
2019 – Reclaiming Study Practices, KU Leuven:
2020 – Uppsala University

14. Publication outlets
LATISS (Learning and Teaching: the International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences) - Susan Wright co-founding editor
Susan Wright co-editor of the series Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies, New York: Berghahn
CHEF working papers:
Søren Bengtsen, member of editorial board of, and editor of special issue for, journal Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, Peter Lang (editor: John Petrovic, University of Alabama)