This book offers philosophical readings of contemporary Higher Education and is motivated by a series of pressing challenges in the global context of Higher Education. It argues that university is a place for community, for refuge, for enlightenment and the careful questioning of knowledge, as well as a place for visceral ambition and for intellectual cowardice, for blinkered individualism and professional competitiveness.In the context of a highly competitive post-crash global economy, students are placed under increasing pressure to distinguish themselves from their peers via a portfolio of learning excellence and extracurricular achievement. Growing numbers undertake part or full-time employment in order to cover registration fees and the basic costs of living. University staff take on very different forms of pressure that operate across the life-course of an academic career – from early-career anxieties to the worries of more privileged and permanent faculty who fear they do not meet ever-changing structures, assumptions and demands of the university itself.This book argues that these interlinked agendas demand consideration from philosophers of education in Ireland, Europ and further afield. It will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and advanced-level undergraduates in Philosophy, Education and Irish studies in both North America and Europe.weiterlesen