Dear Friends,

At the last meeting of GACER in Bonn in May of 2012, Prof Hans Schuetze, one of the best known Higher Education scholars working in the field of comparative studies agreed to lead a discussion about engagement and the rankings game. To this end he has launched a blog space to begin to develop some thoughts about community university engagement in the context of what are popularly known as the "league tables".  Many people working in engaged scholarship feel that the rankings tables are a distraction from more important ways of understanding universities and society.

Having written at great length on these topics,  I have tried to condense some main points into a few words, hoping to attract the attention of the majority with only a few minutes to read,   The topic is nothing less than how to save humanity and the biosphere.  "The economy" refers indifferently to national economies, regional economies, and the global economy.   The premise of this indifference is, as Charles Taylor would say, that the constitutive rules are the same in all three cases.

As you will remember, the "Big Tent" group of regional and international networks in community university engagement developed a communique during the Living Knowledge Conference in Bonn, Germany on May 14, 2012.  This document was sent to the Rio conference courtesy of Daniella Tilbury and the Copernicus Alliance.

Dear Colleagues,

We are in the process of putting together a publication that is part of a PASCAL book series concerned with universities and regional engagement to be published by the University of Manchester Press.  The series as a whole has already been approved by the publisher, and the first three books have been completed by the authors/editors.

Subscribers may be interested to know that U21 is a partner to the UN's Academic Impact initiative and has consultative status with the Economic and Social Committee of the UN (ECOSOC), the only network of universities with that status.