Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World

Citation

Ziguras, C. (2006), "Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 90-92. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880610643647

In the past few years, it seems, that there is nothing academics like more than writing about the difficulties of being academics, and that there is nothing more that humanities scholars like than inventing new terminology. Walker and Nixon's collection of essays carries on a well‐established tradition of complaint about some of the forces that have transformed Anglophone universities, and in particular, the book variously targets neoliberalism, neoconservatism, new managerialism and new media. The book's authors attempt to sketch the current conditions of higher education (corporate, consumerist, economized), to invent a new language that will help to reclaim the university.

The book is heavy with the language of crisis and despair, particularly the first four chapters, grouped under the section heading “Dark times”. The first of these chapters describes an imaginary but “realistic” anecdote to illustrate the kinds of tensions that arise when funding constraints require academic staff to act in ways they consider unethical (in this case, not to employ a tutor who had previously been verbally offered work). Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan claim that new “managerial” norms are “troubling the hearts and spirits of many academics in the university field who sense that the very dispositions which led them into the field are in jeopardy” (p. 24). Lisa Lucas's chapter on research assessment in the UK illustrates the ways in which technical performance measures are being used in decision‐making, and are eroding older forms of peer valuation of research quality and output. Steven Selden's chapter on the critiques mounted by conservative think‐tanks in the USA on undergraduate curricula is perhaps the only chapter in the book that seeks to understand the forces pushing for change within universities. Examining the history of funding and activities of various conservative think‐tanks, the chapter provides a valuable analysis of the inconsistencies and contradictions implicit in the religious Right's assault on liberal education. Michael Peters points out that if there ever was a broadly held “idea” of the university, there is no longer one. Abandoning the task of developing a single unifying idea, he proposes, instead, a “constellation or field of overlapping and mutually self‐reinforcing ideas of the liberal university, based on family resemblances” (p. 79). The resulting list is unsurprising: critical reason, pedagogy based on an ethical relationship of self and other, and a shift to post‐literary culture. The book is replete with such “reimagininations”. But in an era when the meaning of the term university is a pressing concern, it is far from clear how such proposals would help governments and accreditation agencies around the world to establish criteria for determining which institutions should be awarded “university” status.

The book's second section, “Languages of reconstruction”, opens with Jean Barr and Morwenna Griffiths' chapter which presents “a new metaphor of public space, in the hope that it will help in the task of freeing up ossified patterns of understanding the democratic possibilities of public space in universities” (p. 93). They are in favour of plurality, imagination and engagement with individuals and groups outside the academy, and opposed to the introduction of market criteria in universities. Judith Sachs reflects on her experience as the Chair of the University of Sydney's Academic Board, and her involvement in quality improvement in initiatives at several other Australian universities. This chapter is refreshing in its understanding of the need to reconcile demands from funding bodies for greater accountability with the need for intellectual autonomy and decentralised decision‐making. Jon Nixon puts forward yet another set of novel terminology with which to reclaim the university. He argues for “deliberative democracy” in universities that would be founded on a “new Aristotelianism”, a discursive framework that challenges the view that learning outcomes can be pre‐specified, the idea that learning is an isolating activity, and the notion that learning can be compartmentalized from a “whole way of life” (p. 126).

The last section of the book, “Pointing to hope”, begins with Melanie Walker's essay that aims to develop “pedagogies of beginning” which promote critical, democratic, moral and ethical approaches to teaching and learning. She provides several illustrations of the ways in which critical pedagogy can be implemented in classrooms. Rob Walker's chapter discusses some of ways in which new technologies are changing the way things are done in universities, but as is often the way with these things, this chapter is already outdated by the speed of change, since much of the developments described have already taken place. Colin Bundy's analysis of the development of managerialism is refreshingly jargon‐free and balanced, and acknowledges that good management is that which enhances the educational mission of universities. Melanie Walker's second chapter seeks to distinguish between bad research (apparently anything funded by the pharmaceutical or oil industries) and good research (that which produces “liberating knowledge”). This is all very well for humanists, but I am not sure what the geologists will make of it. Ronald Barnett's epilogue is an interesting attempt to link the previous chapters to each other and to reflect on how they might be of use in dealing with the practical issues facing universities, but even this ends up preoccupied with yet another re‐imagination, this time, in terms of what it might mean to be an “authentic university”.

The book is filled with interesting observations, anecdotes and reflections and will appeal to some within the humanities with an interest in contemporary developments in higher education. The sad irony of the collection of essays is that despite the repeated calls to engage across difference, to speak to the other, with a couple of exceptions, the authors seems to be speaking to themselves and their immediate colleagues, in ways that will baffle and alienate those outside their disciplines.