The Idea of a New University: An Experiment in Sussex

"More than any other university I have visited, Sussex gives a feeling of intellectual excitement and enthusiasm," said Richard West in The[London] Sunday Times. The Idea of a New Universityis an account, by the men who thought of it and put it into practice, of the founding of a new kind of university. The planners of the University of Sussex have jettisoned traditional undergraduate education, with its rigidly separated subjects, for a new concept which has attracted large numbers of students, some of whom have turned down scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge in its favor. The degree courses at Sussex have a central "core" subject and related "context" papers, which will bring the specialist in French literature, for instance, into contact with the disciplines of social science, philosophy, or history. The papers themselves include such stimulating topics as "Contemporary Britain" or "The Modern European Mind." Departments have been done away with; there are instead Schools, of Social Studies, of African and Asian Studies, of Physical Sciences and so on.Daiches, David is the author of 'The Idea of a New University: An Experiment in Sussex' with ISBN 9780262540117 and ISBN 0262540118.