Understanding the University

Institution, idea, possibilities

Ronald Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138934047
• eBook ISBN: 9781317390596
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Understanding the University constitutes the final volume in a trilogy – the first two books having been Being a University (2010) and Imagining the University (2012) – and represents the trilogy's ultimate aims and endeavours. The three volumes together offer a unique attempt at a fairly systematic and exhaustive level to map out just what it might be seriously to understand the extraordinarily complex entity that is known across the world as 'the university'.

Through examination of the conditions and possibilities underlying and affecting universities, this work offers an understanding of specific ideas of the university which can inform policies, strategies and practices in relation to the university.

This book is a must read for leaders and senior managers in universities , as well as those undertaking postgraduate studies in the policy and practice of higher education.

Part I
Planes of understanding

1
Reading the University

Introduction: the passing of the liberal university

It has become apparent that the liberal university with its sense of the university as a space for free inquiry – untrammelled by considerations of impact, or income generation, or image, or state regulation, or even much in the way of formal accountability – is passé. This is a matter of delight to some and of profound regret to others but of its happening, there can be little doubt. Certainly, this idea of the liberal university was much more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Nevertheless, it is surely apparent that, worldwide, over the past fifty years or so, the university has undergone a profound transformation. In the process, the university has both been repositioned, in effect, as an arm of the state¹ for the cognitive resources it offers in the now-emerged global knowledge economy and, as a transnational institution, been allowed to venture forth in the garnering of cognitive capital on a worldwide basis.

This fading of the liberal university has taken place in two spheres, of the university as an idea and as an institution. The university has changed as an institution in society, but so too have ideas in circulation about the university. While in the past, the university was understood to exist in its own space (with its own integrity), now it is readily considered that the university as an idea has connections with society, the economy and the wider world (and so the university’s integrity is partly a matter of its good standing in and through those extra-mural connections). This interconnectedness has become – to use a term on which we shall be drawing – part of the social imaginary of the university (cf. Taylor, 2007). But the ground of the liberal university should not be abandoned too quickly.

We can still inquire whether any of the connotations of the liberal university might have any purchase on the contemporary university. The liberal university carries with it, after all, ideas of freedom, liberty, critical reason and critical dialogue, independence of mind, consensus building, mutual understanding and respect for persons as equal participants in a conversation. Perhaps there are still places in which such universal ideas can be glimpsed and even sustained and a positive mood justified (cf. Harland 2009). But, heretically, perhaps too these long-cherished universals are in some ways suspect, not least against the background of multiplying uncertainties as to what it is to proffer an authoritative account of the world: it is no longer clear, for example, how to reason or, indeed, whether reason is any longer a helpful category. Further, against a background of increased marketisation, it is no longer clear that reason can be disinterested. Perhaps as well as or, sotto voce, instead of the ideals of critical reason, new languages need to be forged for the university. For example, in a liquid age (Bauman, 2000), perhaps a language of antagonism, conflict, argument, heresy, pandemonium, chaos, instability, iconoclasm and dissensus might seem attractive.

But note: whether we talk of consensus or dissensus, of critical reason or iconoclasm, of rule-following or unstable reason, these sets of conceptual options amount to a critique of the instrumentalism that characterises the university today. This instrumentalism runs through policies and practices and through the idea of the university and its surrounding rhetoric. The encouragement being given – in many countries – to the emergence of private universities, the emergence of public or state universities as hybrids each concerned with its corporate presence, the onward march of neoliberalism, with universities expected to compete with each other for resources, and with students now positioned as customers, are all testimony to a sense that universities are to be valued in virtue of the economic worth that they can realise for their knowledge services and products. Accordingly, a global language of the university has emerged, namely a language of performance, goals, targets, skills, employability, impact, outcomes, competition, innovation, risk, income and success. And this language, and its associated ideas of the university, is pressing itself in the wider political and organisational discourse. It is, put crudely, a discourse of economic reason (Gorz, 1989).²

Two forms of perniciousness

This narrative – of the close association of the contemporary university with economic reason – is familiar enough; but there is a twist to the story. To put it simply, a distinction should be observed between ‘the entrepreneurial university’ and, as we might term it, ‘the bureaucratic university’. Both represent assaults on the liberal university but their assaults come from different directions, and they produce holes in the liberal university in different locations within it. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial university (cf. Clark, 1998) calls for a readjustment in processes of reasoning, inquiry and development. These central features of the university are still to be valued but their value is to be judged against the horizon of economic ‘self-reliance’ (Clark, 2004). Regional development, student development, research outcomes, university engagement in communities, and the university’s presence in other countries (for example, in its establishment of overseas campuses): all are to be judged by economic criteria, both directly and, more indirectly, through a university’s greater positioning power (and thereby its hoped-for greater economic returns in the longer term).

On the other hand, the bureaucratic university calls not so much for a displacement of reason but for its channelling and control. All is now subject to being recorded, set out explicitly, and monitored, audited and evaluated. The name of this movement is that of ‘new public management’, with its associated beliefs that all aspects of the work of universities (and other institutions in the public sphere) can be made explicit and transparent, and so become subject to control and direction. This is the university of the email attachment and the proforma, a Weltanschauung that seeps deeply into the life of the university. Now, there is no hiding place: every activity falls under its sway. For example, what was the private space of the student experience has now been put under tight surveillance through the use of ‘learning analytics’, through which, in a digital institutional environment, a huge array of student movements or even non-movements can be monitored. (Not only can a student’s contributions to an on-line discussion be plotted but so too can her diffidence in contributing: learning itself comes to be subject to control.)

In this process, judgements of internal value of processes and activities fall by the wayside to be replaced by numerical calculation. Knowledge and understanding of academic life is liable to be reduced to the amassing of information which, in turn, is reduced to mere data flows and recording. In the UK, for some universities, academics’ profiles in research income generation are becoming more important than the quality of their publications; and even there, judgements of quality are being increasingly based on numerical data on citations rather than the character of the judgements implied by those citations. A paper may be subject to intense and global criticism but yet fare well as a result of its receiving a large quantity of ‘hits’. But worse, since it is only activities that can have a demonstrable outcome, capable of being recorded and measured, that are felt now to be significant, only those activities will be noticed and valued. Work activities are to be recorded numerically but reading time, thinking time, assessing time, evaluating time, and even informal discussion time are forms of invisibility, unnoticed and unrecorded. Those activities undertaken voluntarily and in one’s ‘free time’, which have long formed part of what it is to be ‘academic citizen’ (Macfarlane, 2007) – such as external examining, reviewing papers, assessing book proposals and the giving of ‘free’ advice to external bodies – fall away. In turn, advances in human understanding and personal development also falter.

In commenting on the modern university, some try to run together the ideas of the entrepreneurial university and the bureaucratic university (Green, 2011), but this is doubly problematic. As stated, the two are different phenomena, with different effects on academic life. The one, the entrepreneurial university, reorients the direction of travel – from epistemic reason (as we may term it) to instrumental reason; from a university-in-itself, concerned to advance inquiry and students’ development in-themselves, to a university-for-itself, now intent on doing well in competition with other universities, on being innovative through ‘third stream’ activities and doing well economically, securing the bottom line, and preferably with a level of economic return (a 3% surplus would be rather nice) to enable it to reinvest and persist in the competitive struggle by advancing its cause certainly across its nation and probably even around the world.

The other entity, the bureaucratic university, calls for a different measure of control. Now that which was implicit is to be made explicit. All is to be stated in terms of goals, targets and performance; and all subject to numerical measurement, calculation and evaluation. Whereas the instrumental reason of the entrepreneurial university calls for the institution to widen and displace its cognitive resources and effects, in ways that attend to the market, the bureaucratic reason (of the bureaucratic university) in a way repudiates reasoning as such. All it recognises are performances that can be counted. Here, accounts have to be rendered electronically and via a set of time-sensitive returns.

Out of this synergy of bureaucracy and the university is emerging, as it might be termed, the algorithmic university (cf. Peters, 2012). And, given the continuing development not only in computing power but in information technology logics and resources, there is no end to the onward march of this bureaucracy: of the increase in audits and data compilation, there shall be no end. Student learning analytics, which we have just noted, now become a form not just of ‘big data’ but of ever bigger data. (Surely, the time is not far away when we shall see appointed Pro-Rectors for Data Assembly and Presentation.)

Both developments – entrepreneurialism and bureaucratisation – are forms of control over academic life but they are profoundly different. The first in a way calls for the expansion – or at least a redirection of inquiry and thinking – albeit in the direction of the market. The other diminishes any kind of reasoning, and its onward march into every academic activity (even the informal sandwich lunch with an academic visitor may need to be recorded and accounted) acts as a diminution in thought as such; for thought is not readily countable.

Of course, there are overlaps between market-led reason and bureaucratic reason. Both have – to use a modish term – a performative aspect.³ The entrepreneurial university seeks to drive up the rate of return of its products and services and the bureaucratic university, too, tacitly has the same effect, in its recording and measuring of its performance in all of its activities. In both forms of the university, academic staff are relabelled without embarrassment, ‘human resources’.⁴ Both amount to forms of biopower and subtle forms of academic governance, in which academic identity is reshaped.⁵ An interest in a university’s position in global rankings serves both motivations, assisting its market position and reflecting an interest in numerical evaluation. But these are still two different orientations in the contemporary university, with different logics and different effects. And the neglect of their differences has serious consequences for understanding the university.

As stated, both orientations exact their forms of control. And both have pernicious effects; but the nature and extent of that perniciousness differs. Within bureaucratic forms of control, academics are required to become rule-followers. In every activity, they are to be accountable, opening themselves to a detailed audit of their activities. The increasing weight of the surveillance measures has the effect of diminishing the space for thought itself. This shift towards numerically based evaluation has its effects on the interstices of university life: academics come to be required to produce a stated number of papers a year in world-class journals, to gain ‘student satisfaction’ scores of no less than 3.8 (on a 5 point scale) and to generate a certain amount of research income. Thinking space diminishes in both research and teaching: not only is there a heightened busy-ness but, more perniciously still, numerical targets displace pure thought as a primary focus of academic life.

The market-led university, on the other hand, perhaps surprisingly, can have the effect of encouraging thought. For now thought has to be oriented to reworking the activities and even the thinking of the university into marketable products and services. Of course, this instrumentalism and its associated elements of privatisation, concerns with money, and the heeding of the economically powerful, and a weighing of people and activities in virtue of their economic return, is heretical to many (not to mention the academic corruption that is engendered in such a competitive environment). But that the entrepreneurial university is markedly different from the bureaucratic university deserves to be noticed. Whereas the bureaucratic university weighs down in its scrutiny, its proformas, its procedures, and its armies of administrators and managers, the entrepreneurial university opens new windows. The sights that those windows open onto are not to everyone’s taste, but at least windows are opening here; and it may be on occasions that some of the vistas are not without their worth.

Possible consequences

This distinction between two understandings of the university – the bureaucratic university and the entrepreneurial university – is crucial for our inquiry here. Within the bureaucratic university, academic life is now so constrained by systems of monitoring, surveillance and measurement that the motto over the door might be ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’. Consequently, if there are no redeeming features in the present university landscape, if it is simply to be cast against a horizon of control, surveillance, diminution of personal worth and an invisibility of much that is crucial to academic life, then the task of understanding the university becomes quite limited. Understanding the university becomes here merely that of recording the elements of this bureaucratised life⁶ and of pointing up the increasing shortfall in relation to the ideas and the self-rhetoric that the university still entertains about itself.

In practical terms, one might retain a personal faith in the university and live it out in its nooks and crannies, hoping to be relatively undisturbed. This, though, is a forlorn strategy for ultimately the forces of bureaucracy will catch up even with those who keep their heads down. There is no hiding-place here, but rather an evaporation of uncontrolled spaces. The ne’er-do-wells who try to hang on to their own spaces are likely to be branded as heretics rather than the true believers that they take themselves to be, and will be likely to be asked to find their way to the exit (as the columns of the UK’s Times Higher Education magazine regularly testify).⁷

On the other hand, if – within the entrepreneurial university – there are spaces opening to universities, perhaps to reach out to others not hitherto within the university’s ambit, and if there are spaces for the university to engage with others, perhaps attending more to their interests, and if there is encouragement to academics critically to review their understandings of themselves (their ‘academic identity’) so that they consider ways in which they might reach out to wider audiences whether in their teaching, research or scholarship, then the task of understanding the university widens. It becomes the much more positive task of identifying possibilities for the university that just might be brought off and that enable it to realise its value background even more than ever before.

Crucial here is that, in this c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter 1
• Frontmatter 2
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors' Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction An understanding at once critical and practical
• Part I Planes of understanding
• 1 Reading the University
• 2 The Great Hole
• 3 Three Planes of Understanding
• Part II The antagonistic university
• 4 Antagonisms
• 5 Seven Forms of Dialectic
• Part III Glimpsing spaces
• 6 The Possibility of Possibilities
• 7 An Inevitable Remainder
• 8 The Real Thing
• 9 Holding Together
• Part IV Positive moments
• 10 Universals and Particulars
• 11 The University as Agent
• 12 Work for the Visionaries
• 13 Coda On not living in the ruins
• Bibliographic Note
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index