Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis

A University for the Common Good

Richard Hil, Kristen Lyons, Fern Thompsett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000486025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This book calls into question the colonial and neoliberal university, presenting alternative models of higher education that can more effectively respond to today's intersecting social, economic, environmental and political crises. The authors argue that universities should be driven by a different set of core values – one that promotes the common good over private or commercial interests, individualism and market fundamentalism. Presenting a broad range of educational initiatives from around the world that reflect life-affirming regenerative and relational practices, Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, and principles of social and ecological justice, the authors contend that pathways toward transforming higher education already exist within and without the university. This task, say the authors, is urgent and necessary if universities and other institutions are to hold relevance in a rapidly changing global environment.

This book makes a unique contribution to critiques of the modern, neoliberal university by looking for alternatives within and beyond traditional institutions of higher education. In doing so, the authors dismantle the longstanding 'ivory tower' image of the university, instead resituating education within broader social and ecological communities.

Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis is aimed at all those who have a direct or indirect interest and stake in universities, from the general reader to futurists, ecologists as well as students, academics, administrators, managers, policy makers and politicians.

Part I

Context and challenges

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021117-2

1 The colonial roots and neoliberal takeover of higher education

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021117-3

We remain invested in the continuity of a modern/colonial system that is both modern higher education’s condition of possibility and the root cause of climate change. As long as we remain invested in this continuity, we will continue to deny the racial and ecological violence that has been inflicted by this system, the inherent unsustainability of the system, and the fact that climate change will likely spell an end to this system.

(Sharon Stein 2019a, 199)

Heading upstream

In examining the transformation of universities in the Anglosphere over the past few decades, we are required, as a matter of analytical necessity, to venture ‘upstream’.¹ That is to say, many of the features and characteristics of today’s universities can be traced through various ‘lines of continuity’ (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016, 116), including to the most basic tendencies and colonial mentalities of nascent capitalism (Bonefield 2011). The violent domination of lands and people figures prominently throughout this history, as do the cultural chauvinism and exclusionary practices that privilege some bodies of knowledge and ways of being over others (Dwyer and Nettelbeck 2018; Giroux 2014; Wagner 2018).²

This history has in many ways been written out of the genealogy of the modern university. Indeed, the deeper historical foundations of what is commonly referred to as the ‘neoliberal takeover’³ or ‘enclosure’⁴ of the modern university have yet to be fully articulated in much of the scholarly literature, although decolonial critiques offer vital and compelling insights (see for example Bond et al. 2020; Grande 2018; Stein 2019a).

To be sure, there is an abundance of scholarly work focused on the rise of the neoliberal (also referred to as ‘privatised’⁵ or ‘corporate’⁶) university, with most accounts – depending on national and geographic context – focused on specific domestic policies and parallel economic and political global developments (see Davies 2010; Coldrake and Steadman 2016; Croucher and Waghorne 2020).⁷ To an extent, we agree with this focus. While modern universities have been shaped by their specific histories (Watts 2017, 8), their current forms are best understood, we argue, in the context of the free-market ideologies that emerged in the post-war era. Indeed, higher education policies, new technologies and management regimes have given expression to a new tertiary orthodoxy that is entangled in the agendas of the neoliberal and corporatist state.

However, such historical accounts often fall short of adequately cataloguing the complex antecedents of higher education policies and institutions, and the significant differences between them (Forsyth 2014; Watts 2017). Neoliberalisation originates in the logics of early capitalism which, despite having altered over time, reflect enduring aspects of exploitation, dispossession, exclusion and the disciplining of subject populations. But there are additional continuities. Early capitalism involved the invasion, conquest and violent colonisation of Indigenous lands and people. ‘Settlement’ was in fact tantamount to permanent occupation. The ‘othering’ of colonised peoples, as occurred in Australia and elsewhere; the dismissal of First Nations’ histories, worldviews and cultural practices; and the attempted erasure of Indigenous epistemologies, are foundational to early forms of colonial domination, even though these histories have often been hidden from view (see Lipartito and Jacobson 2020; Zinn 1995; Tharoor 2017; Reynolds 2000).⁸

Over time, educational institutions, including universities, colleges and schools, along with religious, political and cultural institutions, became the enthusiastic enablers of colonial projects that continue to this day, albeit glossed over somewhat by countervailing stories of ‘settlement’ and military triumphalism (Grande 2018).⁹ The historical threads linking the past with the present neoliberal order are revealed, as Lloyd and Wolfe (2016, 116) write, in various ‘colonial logics’. This includes ‘the contested enterprise of ‘primitive’ accumulation’ that is, Lloyd and Wolfe (2016, 112) assert, inseparable from the no-less contested current phase of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This has seen the refunctioning of settler colonial logics of law and violence as the means to further safeguard the neoliberal economic regime. These continuities are evidenced today in violent extractivism and resource wars, as well as state-crafted biopolitical strategies that separate and exclude populations, alongside modern-day slavery, and legal, political and policy contexts that marginalise already disadvantaged groups (Pokornowski 2016; Giroux 2014; Marshall 2018; Rees 2020).

The colonial project was deployed on the continent now known as Australia in the late eighteenth century, when it was invaded and occupied by the British military and settlers. So-called ‘civilising’ Judeo-Christian values and beliefs served to legitimate the attempted genocide of First Nations peoples, as well as enable the wholesale appropriation and exploitation of lands and resources for industrialisation and capital accumulation (Watson 2016; Crook and Short 2019; Haebich 2015). This ever-expanding frontier of domination continues to drive the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and communities and remains justified on the basis of economic expansionism and wealth creation. Demonstrating this, colonial fictions such as the doctrine of ‘discovery’ and terra nullius continue to order the political economy, grounding contemporary law, politics and the economy in legacies of domination and conquest that enable the ongoing disavowal of Indigenous rights and interests.¹⁰ As part of the rendering invisible of violent appropriation upon which colonial systems rely, complex systems of ownership and stewardship are overwritten with private property regimes; ultimately legitimating the seizure of lands, including those upon which today’s universities stand (Douwe van der Ploeg 2020; Watson 2016).

Tertiary education institutions – alongside other settler colonial state apparatus – have arisen against this backdrop of land seizure, and the privatisation and commodification of nature. As part of this ultimate disappearance trick, the coloniality of power has destroyed the very thing many of us aspire towards, especially in the context of the current crises we face; the commons and the common good. As Stein (2017, 12) succinctly asserts; ‘colonial modernity … actively prevents us from commonisation’. By commonisation, Stein is referring to the

(seemingly) exceptional sensorial experience of unexceptionalism, where people feel that they are entangled and interwoven with (and co-constituted by) everything; that they are part of a largely unknowable wider metabolism; that all life has intrinsic value; and that uncertainty, death and pain are integral to life itself and should not induce fear.

(Stein 2017, 12)

As Australia – like many other settler colonial nation-states – has transitioned over the course of the past two centuries into a modern industrial and so-called multicultural state, it has yet to come to terms with the injustices of this past that have denied voice, presence and rights to Indigenous people that have cared for Country via complex governance and land management systems for many tens of thousands of years (see Gammage 2012; Reid 2020; Grant 2017). This reckoning must be central to reimagining any aspect Australia’s present political landscape, not least its universities.

Neoliberal enclosure and its origins

The current order of things, or as Stein (2019b, 669) aptly names it, the ‘house that modernity built’ is, according to theorists of coloniality, made up of four main pillars: ‘…the political architectures of the nation-state; the economic architectures of global capitalism; the epistemic architectures of universalist Enlightenment knowledge and values; and the relational architectures of separability and individualism’. Together, these pillars form the structures around which various systems, institutions and relational practices have evolved over centuries. Embryonic institutions gave expression to an entrenched order based on specific and highly instrumental power relations. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that the elite ‘sandstone’ universities in Australia that were founded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were modelled on British institutions that had long been the preserve of male members of privileged classes.¹¹

Women were historically prohibited from entry into these masculinist spaces, with the first Australian university only allowing entry for women in 1880 – nearly 30 years after the first university (the University of Sydney, in 1851) was established. In 1883, feminist suffragist and political activist Bella Guerin became Australia’s first female university graduate, though she remained an outlier in what has stayed – until the last fifty years – a male dominated space. Yet despite women now occupying 58% of all enrolments at Australian universities (Larkins 2018), structural disadvantage continues to curtail career progression and pay parity for women, even after attaining tertiary qualifications. Universities themselves also continue to discriminate when it comes to the appointment of women. Whil...