Global Tunes and National Melodies: Being Global and Sounding Local

Abstract

Traditionally a university has been defined by, and indeed defined itself as, a place. Its architecture and its very physical conception embodied its form. In the medieval and early-modern periods, God and scholastically revealed knowledge was at its centre, so the chapel dominated. Then, following the example of the eighteenth-century German Aufklärung tradition, Thomas Jefferson boldly put the library at the centre of his University of Virginia in Charlottesville. With this a new symbolic notion of the university as a place was born, with secular knowledge, and increasingly contested knowledge, at the heart of the university.