Values and Virtues in Higher Education Research.

Critical perspectives

Jean McNiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317423911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Values and Virtues in Higher Education Research centres on practitioners studying and researching their practices in higher education settings, in order to improve those practices for the benefit of others and themselves. Making research public is a key aspect of ensuring the quality of educational research and educational practices: Values and Virtues in Higher Education Research raises questions and develops conversations about why higher education practitioners should study and improve their work, how this may be done, and what might be some of the benefits of doing so. What we do as practitioners is influenced by and linked with what we value, what we believe is good. Improving practices therefore involves becoming aware of and interrogating the values that enter into and inform those practices; a study of practices becomes a study of the relationships between the practices in question and their values base.

From an international group of contributors in this growing field, this book provides strong theoretical resources and case study material that shows how this transformation may be achieved, including topics such as:

• Theorising practices to show personal and organisational accountability
• Developing inter-professional and inter-disciplinary dialogues for social transformation
• Establishing communities of inquiry in higher education and other workplace settings
• Reconceptualising professional education as research-informed practice
• Locating educational theory in the real world for human and environmental wellbeing

Showing the evolution of theory through critical engagement, this text will be a valuable companion for lecturers, students and professional developers in higher education. This book will form core reading for those who are interested in engaging in practice-based research, and as additional reading for those whose aim is to broaden their thinking in relation to the role of values and virtues in educational research.

Jean McNiff is an independent researcher and writer, Professor of Educational Research at York St John University, and Visiting Professor at Oslo and Akershus University College, Beijing Normal University and Ningxia Teachers University. She is also the author of key texts Action Research: Principles and Practice, You and Your Action Research Project and Writing Up Your Action Research Project.

Chapter 1Values in higher education

Articulation and action

David Maughan Brown

DOI: 10.4324/9781315689364-2

Introduction

The Magna Charta Universitatum, signed by several hundred university Presidents and Rectors from around the world in Bologna in 1988, on the 900th anniversary of the founding of the world's oldest university, is probably the closest one can get to a globally recognised reference for the fundamental values and principles of the university. This kind of recognition of the core values and principles of the university is essential, because these contribute to an understanding of how the purposes of higher education research may be construed and how research should be supported.

In discussing universities' contemporary ‘responsiveness and responsibilities’ in the light of the Magna Charta Universitatum, Luc Weber comments:

Because society is changing, it needs references and frames for social, political and economic debate, construction of meaning, identity and consensus on policies. The universities have a key role in providing these…. Some of the duties that higher education is entrusted with can quite easily conflict with each other. In these cases higher education must exercise its sense of responsibility vis-à-vis society, by adopting solutions that maintain and reassert the intellectual, ethical and social values on which it is built. (Weber, 2002: 63)

The general thrust of this chapter will be a reflection on the extent of UK higher education's success or otherwise in maintaining those intellectual, ethical and social values in the face of mounting pressures. My reflections are based on three decades of higher education (HE) experience in South Africa – twenty-one years in a Department of English under apartheid and eleven in university management following the unbanning of the African National Congress – and eleven years in university management in the UK. They lead me to conclude that in the face of relentless external pressures it is just as important for universities in the UK in 2016 to keep the intellectual, ethical and social values on which HE is built to the forefront of their institutional consciousness as it was for universities in South Africa to do so under the apartheid regime in the 1970s and 1980s.

The political context of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s under the Nationalist government bears little comparison with that of the UK over the past fifteen years, even if they have started to become significantly less dissimilar since 9/11 than one would have hoped. But the extent to which government and media pressures have been brought to bear on HE in the UK over the past decade to shape it to ideological ends is not unlike the way the Nationalist government tried to use HE to serve its ideological ends in South Africa. In both instances the ideological ends have been in tension with, if not actively hostile to, the core values of a liberal higher education. This requires a consideration of what those values might be.

What are the core values of a university?

In exploring this question it is perhaps best to start with what individual higher education institutions publicise as the institutional values that inform their activities. These can be read off from their mission statements. However different the contexts, the values underpinning such statements will usually be found to share a great deal in common.

For example, the Mission Statement of York St John University (the host institution for the series of conferences on Value and Virtue in Practice-Based Research, where the paper that was to become this chapter was first presented) is distinctive mainly in the active assertiveness of its commitment ‘to the provision of excellent, open and progressive higher education that embraces difference, challenges prejudice and promotes justice, and is shaped by York St John's Church foundation’. Building on this foundation, the statement goes on, the university will, among other things: ‘Foster a supportive, creative, critical and reflective community which promotes personal and professional development for both students and staff’.

The values being articulated here are easily discerned: openness, diversity, equity, inclusiveness, community, creativity and self-reflexiveness. The university is a community of scholars; its role is to enable the personal and professional development of its students and staff. ‘Personal’ implicitly involves both intellectual and spiritual development. Personal and professional development is generally agreed to involve equipping graduates for productive and ethical employment after they leave university.

However, these values are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the values that have come to inform the dominant discourse about HE in the UK. Further, a sector-wide consideration about ‘the kind of university education which is worthwhile, ethical and advances a democratic society’ that Melanie Walker identifies as having characterised HE in South Africa over the past forty years (Walker, 2012: 49) seems to have been almost entirely missing from the debate about HE in the UK over the past decade.

In apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s the central value on which the liberal English language universities set out their stall was academic freedom, articulated in terms of the freedom to choose who should be taught, what they should be taught and who should do the teaching. All three strands of this perspective were anathema to apartheid's segregationist ideologues. Beyond that, the object of the exercise was seen as being to enable each individual student to achieve his or her potential to the fullest.

The concomitant benefits to society were understood along the lines later articulated so well for the UK by Bill Taylor in the Taylor Report, New Directions for Higher Education Funding. Taylor argued that good higher education enhances the quality of life, helps to create a more responsible and informed electorate, encourages longer time perspectives and assists in raising cultural tolerance and understanding. This last was particularly important in a South African society deeply divided along ethnic and cultural lines. Higher educational levels also, for Taylor, ‘encourage creativity, imagination and the visual and performing arts’ (Universities UK, 2001: 2–3).

However, the Afrikaans language universities did not share the same interpretation of academic freedom as the English language universities and were willing to be used by the government as vehicles for the furtherance of Afrikaner Nationalism. It was from these universities that the Nationalists drew their political philosophers, historians and theologians as well as their politicians and the high level functionaries of the apartheid state. History had to be shaped to accord with the segregationist narrative of Nationalist Afrikanerdom; a ‘Christian’ rationale for racial discrimination needed to be mined from the Bible and apartheid needed to be theorised. Consequently, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ universities were established and universities for Africans set up in the ‘Bantustans’ – the supposedly ‘independent’ ‘Homelands’ – in line with the philosophy of ‘separate development’. Universities were thereby perceived as, and used as, key instruments for the furtherance of the Nationalist government's apartheid ideology. All the while, government ministers declared an unwavering commitment to university autonomy, even as they manipulated the funding formulae to the severe disadvantage of universities that opposed their policies.

A comparison between the South African and the UK situation reveals a disturbing parallel. While the ideological ends to which universities are being directed are clearly not the same, there has been in the UK over the past fifteen years a deeply disconcerting descent into an equivalent instrumentalism in the discourse around higher education. This is best exemplified via a brief comparison of the Dearing and Browne reports. For Dearing (as for Taylor) the main purposes of higher education are:

• to inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest potential levels throughout life, so that they grow intellectually, are well-equipped for work, and can contribute effectively to society and achieve personal fulfilment;
• to increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake and to foster their application to the benefit of the economy and society. (Dearing, 1997: 5.11)

Being well-equipped for work and benefiting the economy are explicitly second-order imperatives: what universities are for is ‘to play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society’. It is, says Dearing: ‘… a hallmark of a civilised society that it pursues knowledge at the highest levels for its own sake and that it seeks knowledge for altruistic, and not only commercial, ends’ (Dearing, 1997: 5.44).

Dearing, as recently as 1997, could assert that ‘there are values shared throughout higher education and without which higher education, as we understand it, could not exist’. He lists among such values:

• a commitment to the pursuit of truth;
• a responsibility to share knowledge;
• freedom of thought and expression;
• analysing evidence rigorously and using reasoned argument to reach a conclusion;
• a willingness to listen to alternative views and judge them on their merits;
• a commitment to consider the ethical implications of different findings or practices. (Dearing, 1997: 5.39)

In 1997 Dearing identified the main beneficiaries of higher education and, concluding that ‘the costs of higher education should be shared among those who benefit from it’, identified three: the individual, the employers of graduates, and the State (Dearing, 1997: 18.26).

Fifteen years later, by contrast, Browne starts off by asserting that ‘a strong higher education system is an important element in the economy and culture of a leading nation’ (Browne, 2010: 14). The precedence given to ‘economy’ over ‘culture’ is symptomatic. The discourse, in keeping with the dominant discourse of the UK government over the past decade, is instrumentalist and, although it makes passing and somewhat token reference to the wider value of HE to society, the dominant value – that of economic growth – invariably shows through, as in: ‘Higher education institutions (HEIs) generate and diffuse ideas, safeguard knowledge, catalyse innovation, inspire creativity, enliven culture, stimulate regional economies and strengthen civil society’ (Browne, 2010: 14).

Any non-financial benefits that might accrue to graduates are therefore always subordinate to a much fuller elaboration of the economic benefits to individuals than had characterised the Dearing Report. According to Browne:

Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next. Participating in higher education enables individuals from low income backgrounds and then their families to enter higher status jobs and increase their earnings. (Browne, 2010: 14)

‘Transforming the lives of individuals’ is seen in purely economic terms. Higher education is transformative for the individual because it enables people to make more money and, for society: ‘Higher education matters because it drives innovation and economic transformation’ (Browne, 2010: 14). It could, of course, be argued that graduate employment is important, but HE doesn't exist solely to give students the certificates they need to get jobs.

We are told by Browne at some length that HE helps to produce economic growth and output through innovation. The core of the argument goes:

These benefits are captured in the premium employers pay to employ graduates. A degree provides graduates with an entry to employment as well as a habit of learning. Over the course of a working life the average graduate earns comfortably over £100,000 more, in today's valuation and net of tax, than someone with A levels who does not go to university. (Browne, 2010: 15)

So where Dearing recognised the three main beneficiaries of HE as the State, the individual and employers, it comes as no surprise after this that Browne's focus is entirely on the individual. He downplays the benefit to the State, and while acknowledging that the economy and the employers benefit, he can't think of a way of making employers contribute beyond their employment of graduates. Employing graduates is hardly altruistic. And the current situation is that, with the notable exception of a minimum academic threshold for admission to HE, almost every one of Browne's recommendations has been implemented.

The dominant values are economic and individualistic – shared no doubt with a great many contemporary bankers who have had them reinforced by their university experience. Universities are understood as being about equipping graduates with higher-level skills, and they are expected to put ‘employability’ at the top of their agendas. Further, universities that wish to aspire to the liberal HE values articulated so well by Dearing are, like the liberal universities in apartheid South Africa, likely to find themselves increasingly isolated. Informed by a dominant ideology that is highly elitist and, for all lip service to the contrary, highly exclusive, UK governments this century have, like the Nationalist government in South Africa, been wholly unashamed in using funding levers to shape the sector to their ideological ends.

Contrast the values inherent in both reports. For Dearing a university education was a public good, though individuals clearly benefit and should share some of the cost. The values imbued in the university include truth, community and public responsibility; virtue resides, among other things, in ethical behaviour. For Browne a university education is overwhelmingly a private good and values are overwhelmingly economically orientated; virtue consists in earning over one's lifetime £100,000 more than people who didn't go to university.

One can only agree with Mark Cleary's comment that there ‘… is a sense that the role of universities in providing for and building the “public good” is in danger of disappearing with the increased ferocity of a competitive, market driven rhetoric in which individual employability and the graduate premium is the ultimate measure of what a university does’ (Cleary, 2011: 41).

One brief example must suffice by way of illustration of the kind of outcome one can expect if governments are going to manipulate higher education evaluation processes and funding mechanisms to narrowly focussed and politically expedient ideological ends. November 2013 saw the deadline for submissions to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) which determined universities' research funding for the six years after 2015. The increasing instrumentalism that characterised Browne's vision of higher education has resulted in a Treasury-driven insistence that a significant portion of the future funding of research should be based on its measurable economic, social and cultural ‘impact’. In the process, blue-sky research – the increase in knowledge and understanding for their own sake – has been drastically devalued.

So in seventeen years we have moved a long way away from Dearing's ‘… a hallmark of a civilised society [is] that it pursues knowledge at the highest levels for its own sake and that it seeks knowledge for altruistic, and not only commercial, ends’. If it is, as the Dearing report suggests, ‘a distinctive feature of an advanced civilisation to seek the advancement of knowledge for its own sake …’ (Dearing, 1997: 5.24), the utilitarian instincts of twenty-first century UK governments have clearly set our civilisation on a regressive path. It may have been salutary for the architects of the REF ‘impact’ agenda to pause for a moment over one...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Values in higher education: articulation and action
• 2 Ethicality, research and emotional impoverishment in a technological era
• 3 Why me? Reflections on using the self in and as research
• 4 Personalism and the personal in higher education research
• 5 The emergence of open-logic sense-making: a practitioner-researcher’s experience of openness and criticality
• 6 Perspectives on criticality and openness in educational research in the context of Latvia
• 7 The ‘questionableness’ of things: opening up the conversation
• 8 Sharing the learning from community action research
• 9 Constructing Comenian third spaces for action research in graduate teacher education
• 10 Reconceptualising middle leadership in higher education: a transrelational approach
• 11 From studying educational inequalities to building equitable educational environments
• Index