F. R. Leavis: the Creative University

What is it about?

This is a short critical introduction to the educational thought of F. R. Leavis (1895–1978). Leavis was a major English literary critic who taught at Cambridge and York and he had a profound effect on generations of students, teachers and readers, including those who disagreed with him (and they were many who did disagree). Leavis was a controversial, outspoken figure who over the course of a fifty-year career in teaching and publication consistently opposed the academic establishment from within. Yet forty years after his death fewer people have heard of Leavis or know what he really stood for. The book aims to help bring Leavis to a new audience and it provides the first in-depth examination of Leavis’s core educational ideas. It looks in particular at how these ideas stand up in the present moment, when conditions for teachers and students in mass higher education systems are very different to what they were in Leavis's day.

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