Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education

In this issue… PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Søren S. E. Bengtsen / Ronald Barnett: Introduction: Glimpsing the Future University

Barbara Grant: The Future Is Now: A Thousand Tiny Universities

Krystian Szadkowski / Jakub Krzeski: Political Ontologies of the Future University: Individual, Public, Common

Finn Thorbjørn Hansen: Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION Nuraan Davids / Yusef Waghid: On the Polemic Special Issue: Imagining the Future University of Private Higher Education in South Africa: Accentuating Criticality As a Public Good Søren S. E. Bengtsen, Aarhus University, Denmark and Ronald Barnett, University College London, Bruce Macfarlane: Reclaiming Democratic Institute of Education, UK Values in the Future University Guest Editors

Merete Wiberg: The Will to Know and the

Radical Commitment to Knowledge in Higher • VOLUME 1 Education

Jan McArthur: Towards a Moral University: Volume 1 Issue 3 November 2019 Horkheimer’s Commitment to the “Vicissitudes • of Human Fate” ISSUE 3

Wesley Shumar / Sarah Robinson: Agency, •

Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship NOVEMBER 2019 Education

Rikke Toft Nørgård / Janus Aaen: A University for the Body: On the Corporeal Being of Academic Existence

ISSN 2578-5753 (Print) | ISSN 2578-5761 (Online)

P T I H E 0 3 2 0 1 9 In this issue… PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Søren S. E. Bengtsen / Ronald Barnett: Introduction: Glimpsing the Future University

Barbara Grant: The Future Is Now: A Thousand Tiny Universities

Krystian Szadkowski / Jakub Krzeski: Political Ontologies of the Future University: Individual, Public, Common

Merete Wiberg: The Will to Know and the

Radical Commitment to Knowledge in Higher • VOLUME 1 Education

Jan McArthur: Towards a Moral University: Volume 1 Issue 3 November 2019 Horkheimer’s Commitment to the “Vicissitudes • of Human Fate” ISSUE 3

Wesley Shumar / Sarah Robinson: Agency, •

Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship NOVEMBER 2019 Education

Rikke Toft Nørgård / Janus Aaen: A University for the Body: On the Corporeal Being of Academic Existence

ISSN 2578-5753 (Print) | ISSN 2578-5761 (Online) PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Special Issue: Imagining the Future University PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Executive Editor John E. Petrovic, The University of Alabama, USA

Responses and Reviews Editor Daniel Saunders, Florida International University, USA

Editorial Board Benjamin Baez, Florida International University, USA Ronald Barnett, University College London Institute of Education, UK Søren Smedegaard Bengtsen, Aarhus University, DENMARK Paul Gibbs, Middlesex University, UK Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, University of Denver, USA Amanda Fulford, Edge Hill University, UK Alex Guilherme, Pontífica Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, BRAZIL Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts, USA Ravi Kumar, South Asian University, INDIA Aaron Kuntz, The University of Alabama, USA Jenny Lee, University of Arizona, USA John Levin, University of CA, Riverside, USA Andrés Mejía, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia Rajani Naidoo, University of Bath, UK Fazal Rizvi, University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Peter Roberts, University of Canterbury, NEW ZEALAND Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, USA Mala Singh, Rhodes University, SOUTH AFRICA Krystian Szadkowski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, POLAND Susan Talburt, Georgia State University, USA Yusef Waghid, Stellenbosch University, SOUTH AFRICA

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Special Issue: Imagining the Future University

Guest Editors Søren S. E. Bengtsen, Aarhus University, Denmark and Ronald Barnett, University College London, Institute of Education, UK

Volume 1 Issue 3 November 2019

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This publication has been peer reviewed. Table of Contents

Introduction: Glimpsing the Future University 1 Søren S. E. Bengtsen, Aarhus University, Denmark and Ronald Barnett, University College London, Institute of Education, UK

Part 1: Critiquing the Future University 1. The Future Is Now: A Thousand Tiny Universities 9 Barbara Grant, University of Auckland, New Zealand 2. Political Ontologies of the Future University: Individual, Public, Common 29 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland 3. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 51 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Aalborg University, Denmark 4. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa: Accentuating Criticality As a Public Good 75 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Part 2: Sightings of the Future University 5. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 97 Bruce Macfarlane, University of Bristol, UK vi Table of Contents

6. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge in Higher Education 115 Merete Wiberg, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark 7. Towards a Moral University: Horkheimer’s Commitment to the “Vicissitudes of Human Fate” 131 Jan McArthur, Lancaster University, UK 8. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 153 Wesley Shumar, Drexel University, United States Sarah Robinson, Aarhus University, Denmark 9. A University for the Body: On the Corporeal Being of Academic Existence 175 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen, Aarhus University, Denmark Introduction: Glimpsing the Future University

Søren S. E. Bengtsen Aarhus University, Denmark

Ronald Barnett University College London, Institute of Education, UK

Does the future university await or is it to be designed? Will it just come upon us or does it lend itself to action in the here-and-now, striving to bring about change? The easy answer is that it is a bit of both. University leadership, it may be said, takes on precisely this character, an imagining of future possibilities and the orchestration of their management. All the while, those efforts at building towards espied futures will be understood to unfold within a turbu- lent world order, an unstable situation exacerbated by universities being—to some degree or other—global institutions. There can never be a sure path to any envisaged future for a university. No matter how much insight accrues from imaginative efforts and no matter how carefully planned and managed, university action plans are always liable to being undermined by unforeseen— and indeed unforeseeable—exigencies. This special issue delves into this matter—of imagining the future university—and teases out some of its intricacies. How intractable, and how powerful, are the forces at work that swirl in and through universities? What, in other words, is the ontological landscape within which the university moves? Just what room might there be even for any imaginative work? Can a multiplicity of future university forms seriously be discerned or has the horizon drawn in, limiting the room for significant innovation? Perhaps imagination is limited largely to projecting into the future current trends; and perhaps those trends are severely constrained, oriented towards instrumental, robotic, digital, economic, and systems forms of innovation. And perhaps, too, large traditional imaginaries of the university, say around

© 2020 Søren S. E. Bengtsen, Ronald Barnett - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.01 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2 Søren S. E. Bengtsen and Ronald Barnett criticality, collaborative and open reasoning, have—largely undetected—been fading from view. On the other hand, it just may be—again, largely undetected—that spaces are opening for quite new forms of the university to emerge in the not-too-distant future. However, if that latter construal has substance, other matters quickly arise as to how future possibilities are to be discerned in and by the university. To what extent is the university a democratic space for wrestling with and coming forward with imaginative sightings of its future; and to what end? But, then, that question hints at thorny matters of human being, for it will be human beings, and perhaps passionate, emotionally charged human beings at that, who will be doing the imagining as they engage with each other. After all, imagining the university will be a pivot on which conflicting views of the university will collide. That consideration prompts concerns over which views are likely to prevail. Perhaps they will be the voices of the powerful. Engaging with the matter of imagining the future university, therefore, brings into view large and yet delicate matters, of value, of human being, and as to what is real, as to the scope of imagination and its burnishing, of democracy, and of the fundamental place and purposes of the university in the twenty-first century. Understood in this way, there is a two-fold challenge. On the one hand, there is the challenge of laying bare the character of the presenting situation and of mounting a critique of the situation in the sense of uncov- ering it, and of seeking an understanding of it. On the other hand, there is the task of assisting in the construction of feasible imaginative futures of the university. And so this special issue has been structured in just that way, so as to do justice to the two tasks of critique and construction. It is surely the matter of imagining the future university has always to be with us, if the university is to survive. The essays here, therefore, may be seen as contributions to that ever-evolving conversation. This special issue has been in process for the last two years (as planned) and was originally an outcome of the world’s first Philosophy of Higher Educa- tion Conference titled ‘The Purpose of the Future University,’ held at Aarhus University in the autumn 2017. From the conference a new international academic association emerged called Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society, which has since been responsible for the organization of two following conferences titled ‘Student Being and Becoming in the Future University,’ at Middlesex University in London in the autumn 2018, and ‘Reclaiming Study Practices,’ at KU Leuven in Belgium in the autumn 2019. The Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education journal is the affiliated journal with the Society and several of the contributors of this issue are members of the Society as well. Introduction 3

Do Universities Have a Future, and Can We Imagine It?

Much academic discussion of the role and purpose of the university and higher education has the character of criticism, foregrounding the challenging circumstances faced by universities and the forces that unduly steer higher education programmes and learning and teaching environments. Much less in evidence in contemporary scholarship and research into higher education are efforts to engage constructively. Scholarly work involved in conceptualizing, imagining, and venturing forward with new meaning and purposes of higher education and the university are too little seen. Even more significantly, we see few attempts to draw up alluring and desired futures beyond, but also that might acknowledge, to some degree, the present state of worldly politics and the economy. Accordingly, this issue brings together scholars who dare to speculate and intellectually conjure possible university futures which also offer rigor and critical depth in probing deeper meanings and purposes that might attach to the future university. Key dimensions in this special issue are ‘freedom,’ ‘value,’ and ‘action.’ While much discussion about the role of the university and higher education today seems to assume that universities are not free and have lost much autonomy, this special issue examines the forms of freedom that may be said to characterize the university still and so offer spaces for its own agency. Here, knowledge is central to the foundational identity of the university not only as to how the university produces, controls, and disseminates knowledge but also in what the university tacitly understands by ‘knowledge.’ Equally important are notions of value and action. What forms of value might the university and higher education sustain or exemplify in the future? To what extent is the university able to cast such value in terms other than ‘economy’ and ‘skills’? What vocabulary would be helpful for valuing knowledge and learning in the university in the future? And what forms of institutional and pedagogical action could such forms of value imply? This special issue, therefore, rests on multiple understandings of the ‘future.’ Clearly this relates to a temporal dimension of the university and higher education. However, the future, in this context, includes spatial, institutional, political, social, moral, epistemological, and ontological dimensions, as the transformation of the university and higher education brings all of these aspects into view. Do we not need a new futurology of the university and higher education? Are university and higher education futures really real, or are they projections of our present concerns and challenges? And does this matter in building new university futures? The essays in this special issue contribute 4 Søren S. E. Bengtsen and Ronald Barnett new philosophical, theoretical, or conceptual tools in response to these matters. They reach across existential, ontological, epistemological, and value-based frameworks, and they explicitly engage with freedom and diversity concerns. In all contributions, intimations of the future university are to be found.

The Heraldry of the Future University

The aim of this special issue is to open paths to possible university futures. Not merely thinking about them, but actually opening them up, ontologically. This is a heraldry of the future university—like the mark on the shield, the banner, and the defining features and values of the house or family—trying to bring out possible university futures by providing a series of understandings and images. Thinking about the future brandishes our thoughts in the present and reveals paths for the university to travel down that lead to new possibilities. To believe in other possible university futures requires that such futures are conceived of and transformed into real understandings and ideas, so they may inspire university leaders and let students, teachers, and wider societal domains navigate towards them already in the present. Critiquing the current status and shape of the university is one thing but reaching into vistas and pathways that might lie on the other side of the present is an entirely different thing. Showing possible futures for the university is to explore the yet unknown and tentative trajectories of university becoming. When possible university futures are discerned, they may start to take root in our present understanding and can inform, qualify, and inspire current debates. Our aim is for this special issue to become a kind of sounding-board for the future university, and to let the contributions, with their speculative and imaginary force, become voices for the future university. The contributions here take root in possible university futures. More concretely, taking root means to move from vague ideas and intuitions into solid, rigorous, and profoundly unfolded and argued understandings of the meaning and purpose of the university as an academic, educational, societal, and cultural institution. To be able to change the current situation to a preferable better one, it is important for members of the university, and society more widely, to be able to imagine the place and situation they wish to change into. When we have started to take root in possible university futures, we may start to design for the called for changes and actions in present universities. The designs can be on the level of leadership, teaching, and learning, in relation to research, and even around the university’s societal and cultural responsibilities Introduction 5 and contributions. As Heidegger relates, “[t]he ‘sign’ in design (Latin signum) is related to secare, to cut—as in saw, sector, segment. To design is to cut a trace … we make a design also when we cut a furrow into the soil to open it to seed and growth.”1 Each contribution makes its own little ‘cut’ or ‘rift’ in the current understanding of where the university is heading. Philosophically and theoretically ‘designing’ possible new ways of understanding the university makes the future more tangible and real. When we start designing the future university, that future university comes close to us and we may start to believe more firmly in its possibility. In the current debate about the role and purpose of the university, the focus is often on the present or near-future of the university. With the contributions in this issue we throw the rock much farther out into the waters and await the ripples to come. After all, the issues on view here could be taken up by leaders planning for a long-term strategy plan for their faculty or department and by study directors wishing to change the curriculum. The glimpses we see in this special issue are ‘hints’2 of the future university, and in every hint there is always the distance of criticality, carefulness, and consideration. When designing the future university, we should not rashly and carelessly follow the loudest voice or the most alluring and seducing path from our current standpoint. All glimpses and hints are possible but not-yet real. They exist in their becoming. On the one hand, a hint may be so powerful that we “release ourselves in its direction without equivocation.”3 On the other hand, the hints provided in this issue may critically refer us, and persistently so, to what is lacking in current conceptions. The glimpses are hints and each contribution becomes its own particular hint and “guide-word”4 for a possible university future.

Underway

In universities today, all over the world, it is of greatest importance that students, teachers, researchers, and leaders understand that the university is not entirely lost, and that the present state in universities is not, one-sidedly, a sign of decline or an academic fall. Sometimes it is difficult to realize the process of becoming of universities, when it is difficult to think clearly ahead. The

1 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. P.D. Hertz (New York: HarperCol- lins Publishers, 1982), 121. 2 Ibid., 96. 3 Ibid., 96. 4 Ibid., 96. 6 Søren S. E. Bengtsen and Ronald Barnett machinery of current managerial practices in many universities may, indeed, muddy the waters. However, as Heidegger reminds us, the “real nature of thought might reveal itself to us if we remain underway.”5 Universities, today, are not absolutely stuck or entirely broken, and we are still “inter vias, between divergent ways. Nothing has been decided yet[.]”6 Being underway demands very close attention to where we are going, and where we are putting our feet in the years to come. This special issue takes nothing for granted, and its imaginative optimism and speculative power should not be taken for mere fantasies and the play, or even idleness, of thought. As is visible in all the contributions, the future is not yet here, and needs to be unlocked from the present. As Heidegger writes, the “future is the ‘not yet now’ (…) [and] [t]he future is what is still absent.”7 The choices made by academics, and perhaps even especially by academic leaders, will significantly help to shape the future. There is no way of escaping difficult choices and hard decisions. Will universities couple themselves even closer to the global market and economy, or will they make efforts to widen to new possibilities? We are, indeed, with Heidegger’s words, on the very “narrow ridge of the momentarily fugitive ‘now’, rising out of the ‘not yet now’ and falling away into the ‘no longer now.’”8 Each contribution to this special issue sheds light on possible university futures in its own way. The contributors here dare to think into the future. They are the “forerunners”9 of the future university. We warmly thank journal editor-in-chief, John Petrovic, who has supported this special issue from the beginning, and who has provided helpful feedback and guidance throughout.

References

Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenngray. New York: HarperCol- lins Publishers, 2004.

5 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenngray (New York: Harper- Collins Publishers, 2004), 45. 6 Ibid., 46. 7 Ibid., 101. 8 Ibid.. 9 Ibid., 138. Part 1: Critiquing the Future University

1. The Future Is Now: A Thousand Tiny Universities

Barbara Grant University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract: This essay draws on reading and experience to meditate on our present moment in the university with an eye to its future. Barbara M. Grant argues that an important question for all who work in our universities is how can we dwell there alert to the daily possibilities for transformation towards our imagined future university. Grant proposes the idea of a thousand tiny universities—a reworking of Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand tiny sexes (2013)—as one that offers a non-antagonistic basis for continually proposing and enacting in the present the kind of university we cherish.

Keywords: future university, resistance, thousand tiny universities, transformation

An Academic Woman in Search of Alternatives

In this essay I draw on reading and experience to meditate on the present moment in the university with an eye to its future. My meditation is inaugu- rated by Ghassan Hage’s reminder about the distinctive contribution of feminist critical thought to social transformation. For one thing, such thought insists on the political importance of passionate, embodied knowing; for another, it insists that “‘the personal is political’ always meant that the ‘personal is alter-political’ [a practice of searching for alternatives] just as much as that the ‘personal is anti-political’ [oppositional].”1 Across the arc of my essay, I draw upon embodied experiences of working as an academic woman in the university to sketch some of the troubles besetting these institutions in the present and attempt to show something of the structure of feeling those troubles induce. I argue that an important question for all who work in our universities is how we can dwell there in ways alert to the daily possibilities of

1 Ghassan Hage, Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 2, italics added.

© 2020 Barbara Grant - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.02 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 10 Barbara Grant not just resistance in the present but, better, transformation towards an alternative: our imagined future university. In autoethnographic mode, I anchor these thoughts to two photographs taken almost ten years apart. Towards the end of my essay, I propose the idea of a thousand tiny universities, a reworking of Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand tiny sexes.2 Such an idea offers a non-antagonistic basis for continually proposing and enacting the kind of university we believe is of most value to our societies, our world.

Writing Submissions

Sometime in the middle of 2018, I found myself writing yet another submission to a university review committee, this time on a proposal to make a large number of academics3 in my Faculty redundant. For some time, teacher education had been on a downward turn and now there were too many academics and not enough students to balance the unversity’s books satisfactorily. What could I say, I wondered? In the end, in an effort to at least steer the course of the process differently, I found some words, but none of them really captured how disloyal and cruel I thought the decision was—to terminate colleagues who had worked hard over years for the good of programmes, students, and co-workers. Indeed, for the good of the university. Before I go any further, and in the promised autoethnographic vein of trying to give some kind of “account of myself ”,4 who is the ‘I’ who writes here, who made this undoubtedly inadequate submission? I am a white academic woman in her 60s who finds herself (once again) sad and angry at the state of university life, which—among many other things—routinely invites us into the meaninglessness of making submissions on matters that have already been decided by others on grounds to which we cannot speak.5 Per- haps somewhat unusually, I have worked my whole academic life in the same

2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre- nia (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 3 In New Zealand (as in most other Commonwealth countries) academic staff are referred to as ‘academics’ in contrast to the North American nomenclature of ‘faculty’. The term ‘Faculty’ used here refers to an academic organisational unit. 4 Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics 31, no. 4 (1991): 27. Butler emphasises the way our accounts are always “partial, haunted by that for which I have no definitive story” (27), an understanding that disrupts a reading of autoethnography as fully truthful. 5 At the time of my submission, the staff of the university was under draconian injunctions from our Vice-Chancellor about where and when and to whom we could speak. Our union contested these injunctions in vain—it appears they were within our country’s employment law even as they were widely seen to contravene the spirit of The Future Is Now 11 large metropolitan (now described as ‘research-intensive’) public6 university in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). My first fractional appointment as a study skills tutor in the mid-1980s turned into ten years of mainly temporary and part- time work in the fledgling Student Learning Unit. Then, in the mid-1990s, that precarious work-life turned into a more settled 15 years as a full-time academic staff developer. (I was lucky: those first two positions were both non-traditional, teaching-intensive academic roles invented in response to the new times of the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays such positions—often occu- pied by women—have largely disppeared again, often morphing into cheaper, non-academic positions.) Throughout much of those two decades, I also studied part-time, finally being awarded my PhD in 2005, which paved the way to being upgraded to Senior Lecturer. Since late 2011, I’ve been Associate Professor7 in my university’s Faculty of Education and Social Work. Although this working life has been punctuated by several disturbing—and disabling— crises, I’ve never doubted that being an academic was for me. All parts of the job—teaching, research and service—remain challenging, satisfying and enriching. And for me, from the outset, they were vitally animated by what Hage describes as a “radical political passion”8 to make the university a better place for all, and indeed to expand the very idea of that ‘all’. At the same time, my entire work-life has taken place under the ever-encroaching shadow of NZ’s 1989 Education Act, which laid the groundwork for a neo-liberal transformation of our sector.9

“critic and conscience”, which is a distinct and special feature of a university’s purpose in New Zealand. 6 For the purposes of this essay, the label ‘public university’ refers to those institutions that receive significant public (state) funding. 7 NZ’s academic ranking system follows the UK’s model rather than North America’s, with the ranks of Associate Professor and Professor being at the apex of the career structure and traditionally reserved for a small minority of (mostly male) academics. This picture is slowly changing: there is now a much higher proportion of Associate Professors and Professors overall and the representation of women is growing (e.g., in 2017 at my university, 33% of Associate Professors and Professors were women, compared with 21% in 2006). 8 Hage, Alter-Politics, 2. 9 Mark Olssen, The Neo-Liberal Appropriation of Tertiary Education Policy in New Zealand: Accountability, Research and Academic Freedom. NZARE ‘State-of-the-Art’ Monograph No. 8 (Wellington: NZARE, 2002.) 12 Barbara Grant

The first photograph: Academic woman in office mugshot (2009) Taken in a university office, the photograph shows a grey-haired woman whose lipsticked smile radiates pleasure in the moment. She looks squarely into the camera’s eye, she knows the score— this photo is for some kind of university marketing purpose. It’s 2009 and she is acting director for a large centre for academic development that year. She’s enjoying the role despite moder- ating many tensions and conflicts among colleagues, mostly legacies of the fairly recent and forcible creation of the centre out of several previously independent units. Renaming and restructuring academic units has been just one unhappy symptom of a much larger set of insta- bilities besetting academic lives for the past 30 years. This long season of constant renovation, heralded in NZ by the 1989 Education Act, has been part of a socio-political sea change that has washed over universities throughout the western world, producing many waves of disturbing consequences.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

What did this change—or revolution—in public university education entail? Commentator after commentator, in books, articles and blogs, has catalogued the radical changes wrought since the early 1980s. First, there has been the ongoing withdrawal of public funding and the shifting of costs to students, who—recast as consumers10—are seen to reap life-long economic benefits from

10 Alistair McCulloch, “The Student as Co-Producer: Learning from Public Adminis- tration About the Student-University Relationship,” Studies in Higher Education 34, no. 2 (2009): 171–83; Mike Molesworth, Elizabeth Nixon and Richard Scullion, “Having, Being and Higher Education: The Marketisation of the University and the Transformation of the Student into Consumer,” Teaching in Higher Education 14, no. 3 (2009): 277–87; Barbara M. Grant, “On Delivering the Consumer-Citizen: New Pedagogies and Their Affective Economies,” in Death of the Public University? The Future Is Now 13 their university qualifications. Second, there has been a trend towards increased institutional accountability to national government via waves of audit11 and increased central steering. This trend has been paralleled by an intensification of accountability from academics to their institutions and what Julie Rowland has called a demand for “academic hyper-performativity”.12 Alongside what some see as desirable shifts towards more programme flexibility and curriculum choices for students, have come a more flexibilised academic workforce, now often described as a precariat,13 and increased student:staff ratios. Then there is the digitalisation of almost everything as, among other ambitions, institutions seek to save on academic and non-academic staffing costs. Lastly, a closer alignment between universities and the needs of industry and the economy has emerged, prompted at least in part by the ideology of global organisations like the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, for whom universities are key players in realising knowledge economies “essential for designing policy frameworks that will drive economic growth and social welfare in the 21st century”.14 This realignment of purpose has led to a striking diffusion of the university’s mission. A common shorthand to describe the new kind of university emerging from these changes is the ‘neoliberal university’.15 This institution is characterised by “commodification, competition, commercialisation and voca- tionalisation”,16 struggles against which there’s been patchy success.17 In this

Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy, edited by Susan Wright and Cris Shore (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 138–56. 11 Marilyn Strathern, “The Tyranny of Transparency,” British Educational Research Journal 26, no. 3 (2000): 309–21; Cris Shore, “Audit Culture and Illiberal Gov- ernance: Universities and the Politics of Accountability.” Anthropological Theory 8 (2008): 278–98. 12 See Rowland’s guest blogpost on Patter, https://patthomson.net/2018/07/30/ you-expect-what-hyper-performativity-and-academic-life/#comment-47458 (Ac- cessed 25 August 2018). 13 Rosalind Gill, “Breaking the Silence: The Hidden Injuries of the Neoliberal Uni- versity,” in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, edited by Roisin Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill (London: Routledge, 2010), 228–44. 14 Global Forum on the Knowledge Economy, OECD, http://www.oecd.org/innovation/inno/globalforumontheknowledgeeconomy.htm (Accessed 9 April 2019). 15 There are problems with the indiscriminate use of the term neo-liberal but I won’t go into them here. 16 Barry Down, “Welcome to Zombie U (Review of The Toxic University: Zombie Lead- ership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology by John Smyth),” Australian Universities Review 59, no. 2 (2017), 94. 17 Nick Lewis and Cris Shore, “From Unbundling to Market Making: Reimagining, Reassembling and Reinventing the Public University,” Globalisation, Societies and 14 Barbara Grant kind of university, leaders are paid salaries up to a 100 times more than their lowest-paid employees to run their institutions as much like corporations as possible.18 For reasons of rankings and reputation, these leaders have sought significant expansion in the echelons of our most highly paid academics while, at the other end of the scale, students face rising levels of debt with diminish- ing opportunities for secure and well paid employment.19 University managers and administrators seem to be a relentlessly growing class:20 Michael Burawoy describes these often well-paid workers as spi- rallists—they spiral in to “develop [expensive] signature projects”, then spiral “upward and onward, leaving the university behind to spiral down” into increasing indebtedness.21 At the same time, the ranks of academics are frozen (in more ways than one), if not reducing, and academic work in many countries is not only more casualised than ever before but suffers both “intensification and extensification”22 under the weight of increased student numbers, 24/7 expectations, and relentless pressures to bring in external funds, to publish publish publish, and show impact in every aspect of our work. Jana Bace- vic observes that these unliveable trends and their consequences for academic work are part of “broader processes of economic and social transformation”, that the “casualisation and precarisation of the workforce are part of the transformation of (cognitive) capitalism in general”.23 We are not alone in the loss of security and viability around our work lives: it’s cold comfort.

Education (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1524287 18 The fight for a living wage for all university employees continues in my country: see http://teu.ac.nz/2018/04/living-wage-rise/ (Accessed 3 September 2018). 19 Mats Alvesson, The Triumph of Emptiness: Consumption, Higher Education, and Work Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See, especially, Chapter 4. 20 In my own university of 5358 full-time equivalent staff in 2017, 3126 were professional staff while just 2232 were academic (University of Auckland Annual Report 2017, available https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/auckland/about-us/the-university/official-publications/annual-report/2017-annual-report-university-of-auckland. pdf, 8) 21 Burawoy is cited by Les Back in “Taking and Giving Hope: A Response to Ros Gill’s “What Would Les Back Do? If Generosity Could Save Us…a Review of Les Back’s Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters (2016: Goldsmiths Press, 272 pp),” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 31, no. 1 (2018), 117. 22 Gill, “Breaking the Silence”, 234. 23 Jana Bacevic, “Book Review The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academ- ic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology by John Smyth,” LSE Review of Books 16 April (2018), http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/01/19/book-review-the-toxic-university-zombie-leadership-academic-rock-stars-and-neoliberal-ideology-by-john-smyth/ (Accessed 19 January 2018). The Future Is Now 15

Scholars have described this new university in various ways: for Ruth Bar- can in Australia, it’s “a composite: a scholarly community, a bureaucracy and a transnational corporation”;24 for Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz in the UK, it’s a “hollowed-out university”, one that no longer has a “distinctive social role and no ethical raison d’etre”;25 while pithily for Bill Readings in Canada, it’s a “university in ruins”.26 Whatever the description, there is no doubt that universities are in some kind of trouble—some would say they are broken.

Ruthlessness of the Present

One line of critique, including feminist voices, has accused academics of inef- fectuality in the face of these changes. Scholars have asked why haven’t we resisted more, especially more openly and collectively.27 In an essay unusually self-critical of the profession, Darin Barney conjectures unhappily that his students will sooner or later ask him some questions he dreads about what has happened to the university: “Where were you? What did you do? How did things get this way? It it because you, professor, allowed this to happen? Is it because you did nothing?”.28 Even more uncomfortably, Barney also says:

The university is the structure of the professor’s enjoyment. It’s not just that we like the university more or less as it is and enjoy the material benefits, privileges, security and status. … It is also that we enjoy the suffering and pain that we endure in order to be part of the university … careerist students who can’t read and can’t write and can’t think; colleagues who are lazy and insufferable; granting agencies that are biased against our work; incompetent, corrupt, bean-counting

24 Ruth Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 42. 25 Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz, “The Hollowed-out University? A Critical Analysis of Changing Institutional and Academic Norms in UK Higher Education.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 34, no. 3 (2013), 338. 26 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 27 See, for example, Bronwyn Davies, “Death to Critique and Dissent? The Policies and Practices of New Managerialism and of ‘Evidence-Based Practice’,” Gender and Education 15, no. 1 (2003), 91–103; Bronwyn Davies and Eva Bendix Petersen, “Neo-Liberal Discourse in the Academy: The Forestalling of (Collective) Resistance,” Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences 2, no. 2 (2005), 77–97; Gill, “Breaking the Silence”; Suzanne Ryan, “Academic Zombies: A Failure of Resistance or a Means of Survival?”, Australian Universities Review 54, no. 2 (2012), 3–11. 28 Darin Barney, “Miserable Priests and Ordinary Cowards: On Being a Professor,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 23–24 (2010), 382 (italics as in the original). 16 Barbara Grant

administrators; governments run by philistines. We enjoy them all. We could not live without them.29

While academics are enjoying such quotidian “suffering and pain”, much that might be treasured about a university education is being steadily down-valued by those with other kinds of ‘treasure’ in mind, such as international rankings, growth in student numbers, high salaries, striking buildings, and award-winning staff who can feature in a university’s marketing materials. There have been instances of collective resistance, such as the “In defence of higher education” movement in the UK, or the efforts that NZ universities made to turn back the proposed legislation in the late 1980s, or the successful students struggles in Chile and South Africa to roll back fees. But, by and large, the machine of change has been unaffected. Western governments in the 1980s were credulous in accepting neoliberal ideology; moreover, despite catastrophic events like the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, they remain faithful to it. How that ideology has played out in relation to universities has varied in different jurisdictions, but the very publicness of public universities makes them vulnerable to government steerage: it is difficult to bite the hand that feeds. Moreover, during the past several decades, other mechanisms that undermine resistance have emerged within universities: for example, the ranks of more well-paid senior academics have swelled at my own university (at least), and research-intensive universities have benefited from national audit- cum-funding distribution mechanisms like NZ’s Performance-Based Research Fund. You could say some institutions/academics have been bought off very nicely, while the rest labour under the hope of such rewards in the future. The absence of individual and collective action on the part of academics has complicated underpinnings. Some of it arises from the structure of enjoyment that Barney alerts us to: although we may feel our work is much less enjoyable than in the past, we don’t want to put our remaining enjoyment at further risk. There is also the exhaustion of keeping up with the intensification of our work coupled with the demoralising ennui of performing myriad accountability exercises and regularly being invited into artificial institutional consultation processes.30 And then there is the complexity of specific ethical

29 Barney, “Miserable Priests”, 384. 30 In 2018, there was also a round of institution-wide consultation on a proposal to radically restructure the university’s library system: after the consultation phase was concluded, our VC wrote to all staff that, on the basis of the 250 submissions received, he had decided to accept the original proposal entirely, defering one proposed element but altering none (Email 21/06/18) The Future Is Now 17 situations we face almost daily in our dealings with students, colleagues and institutions. For example, in his powerful ethnographic fiction “Embodiment, Academics and Audit Culture”,31 Andrew Sparkes describes the personal cost of being a head of department dealing with a staff-member who is not producing enough research outputs of the right kind. In his story, the head has a breakdown. This is not pure fiction: apart from Sparkes’ own claim to the story’s factuality, there are examples in the public domain of academics leaving the university as a result of serious illness—or suicide—brought on by unbear- able work conditions. In another example, Les Back32 describes being asked by a university to provide proof of right to work in the UK in order to under- take an external assessor role for an MA programme at another UK university. His initial refusal—because the requirement is surveilling and particularly discriminatory towards non-UK-born colleagues—becomes capitulation. He learns the requirement is linked to specific anti-terrorist measures imposed by government. If he does refuse, he is told, there could be serious consequences for the institution posing the requirement—in effect, for his colleagues. Navi- gating such complex situations with a steady moral compass is difficult, sometimes impossible. I return now to my earlier scenario about making a submission: I wanted to write something different, something more critical, something that was not about ameliorating the terms of the proposal at hand, something that pointed out the feckless ingratitude of the proposal. The word ‘feckless’ indicates the difficulties in staying calm and clear when faced with such events. What is more, despite advocating elsewhere that we might usefully embrace the subjectivity of “women who make a fuss”,33 in practice it’s often difficult to achieve. There is a kind of latent totalitarian force threaded through the lib- erality of the contemporary university: we are feted—like rock-stars34—when we serve the university’s interests in reputation and income, but ruthlessly discarded when we are a drag on resources. And, despite the university’s

31 Andrew C. Sparkes, “Embodiment, Academics, and the Audit Culture: A Story Seeking Consideration,” Qualitative Research 7, no. 4 (2007), 521–50. 32 Back, “Taking and Giving Hope”, 117. 33 Niki Harré, Barbara M. Grant, Kirsten Locke and Sean Sturm, “The University as an Infinite Game: Revitalising Activism in the Academy,” Australian Universities’ Review 59, no. 2 (2017), 5–13. The phrase “women who make a fuss” comes from the title of a book by Isabelle Stengers,Vinciane Despret and Collective (Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014). 34 John Smyth, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 18 Barbara Grant obligations to its public, we are threatened from taking our concerns to that public with disciplinary consequences. It does not have to be like this. In his email defending a decision to cut 40-odd staff from the library system, the Vice-Chancellor addressed the necessity of the changes: “For 20 plus years, successive governments have favoured policies that reduce the cost of university study to students and government over policies that enhance the quality of universities. As a consequence, New Zealand’s universities have among the lowest levels of income per student in the developed world” (Email to all staff, 21/06/18). The external changes are real, and unfavourable to university budgets, but a university’s response to them can take many forms: the Vice-Chancellor does not say “and this response is one of several options we have”. There seem never to be any options. And, yet there are always options for how a university’s budget might be balanced and for how a university community might respond when one part of it is threatened. The generation of such options needs to be brought to the academic community but, more and more, we are disenfranchised.

The woman in the first photograph with the lying smile often feels as if the university is broken, particularly (again) at the moment; nevertheless, in classrooms and corridors, she keeps putting on her lipstick and offering that smile. Conscious of her younger colleagues just starting out in academic careers, and the many hopeful doctoral students who flock to study at her Faculty, she thinks it’s important to be a heartening presence in her workplace. She knows her university doesn’t much like criticism of its internal policies, practices and culture, neither within faculty committees or staff development events, nor beyond its walls. And she also knows her university is fighting its own battles for funding in an effort to stay afloat and, more, to keep making a good showing in the international rankings, which seem to matter so much for attracting international students. But she can’t help but also notice how the ranks of well-paid senior staff (she’s one of them) have fattened considerably over the past 10 years—she knows that in university budgets, staff salaries are a zero-sum game. More and more these days, the phrase “eating our young” comes uncomfortably to her mind.

Hope for the Future-Which-Is-Now

The future of the university is hard to discern, although there have been many scholarly efforts.35 Some say it will be place-less, that “new forms of digital

35 A recent book on this theme is Raewyn Connell’s The Good University: What Univer- sities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (London: Zed, 2019); see also Ron Barnett’s Imagining the University (Abingdon Oxon: Routledge, 2013); Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Gary Rolfe’s The University in Dissent: Scholarship in the Corporate University (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). The Future Is Now 19 learning will make physical campuses obsolete”;36 that “new technologies, more competitive universities, and more savvy and mobile students have severed the traditional relationship between higher education and place”.37 Some argue that the university will always be “defined by place, and by the local constituencies it claims to support”.38 I incline to the latter view but, as an academic who prizes embodied connections with both colleagues and students, it may be wishful thinking (and recent experience of teaching a senior undergraduate course in which, despite the course being face-to-face in mode, the students mostly enacted themselves as virtual, suggests this is so). And it may well be that only already privileged students will be able to afford access to universities-as-places while the rest will be consigned to much cheaper on-line, mass-delivered, probably mostly applied/vocational higher education.39 How might the future of the university be rethought by those who work there? Recently, Maria Alyokhina, a member of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, was asked if she is optimistic about the future of Russia. Despite having not long before spent over a year in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”, she replied, “The future is now. And now I’m not crying, so maybe it’s good”.40 I take Alyokhina’s stirring reply as an invocation to hope for the future of universities by paying attention to how we are in the present. Here I draw upon the thought of Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers in conversation with Mary Zournazi: “[e]very moment of life has a hopeful potential—if we can assume that our existence in the world is not dependent on guarantees but on situations or events that make them possible”.41 So, let us pay attention to whatever we have come to think of as the guarantees of

36 Adam R. Nelson and Nicholas M. Strohl, “Universities 2030: Learning from the Past to Anticipate the Future,” in A commissioned report prepared for the Global Higher Education and Research (GHEAR) project, Worldwide Universities Network, 43, 10. 37 Lewis and Shor, “From Unbundling”, 3 (paraphrasing a 2013 report of which they are very critical). 38 Nelson and Strohl, “Universities 2030”, 11. 39 The Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi report that the Nick Lewis and Cris Shore (2018) critique (An avalanche is coming, published in 2013 on commission from British think- tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research) predicts a multi-level (i.e., re-stratified) higher education system emerging in the future with, no surprises here, elite universities at one end (the top) and “non-university institutions with degree accrediting powers that deliver lifelong learning” (2018, p. 3) at another (the bottom). 40 Killian Fox, “Protest: ‘They Cannot Cut Out the Eyes of the People’”, Guardian, June 1, 2018, 29. 41 Isabelle Stengers and Mary Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’: Risk, Hope, Change,” In Hope: New Philosophies for Change, edited by Mary Zournazi (Annandale NSW: Pluto Press, 2002), 244. 20 Barbara Grant university life (such as permanent contracts, manageable work-loads, opportunities for promotion and conference attendance):42 let us understand—as feminist scholars remain alert to vis a vis the position of women—that these ‘guarantees’ are always/already provisional. Among the restless restructurings and reviews that characterise the contemporary university, the terms that have enabled those guarantees must be fought and refought for (and we might also remember that any such fight is nothing like the fights for survival going on elsewhere). In this vein, despite not being able to see the future, actually because we cannot see the future, we might hold onto the importance of a “radical politics”43 of hope in the present, hope that is “not about miracles ... [but] about trying to feel what lurks in the interstices”,44 the many cracks and crannies of our institutions. Thinking about what it means to be an activist, Stengers and Zournazi argue we should “try not to postpone the ‘good’ for after the struggle”45 but understand the two as intimately connected: the good must happen inside the struggle, in the manner of Gary Rolfe’s “paraversity”: “an invisible, subversive virtual institution that runs alongside and in parallel to the corporate University of Excellence”.46 For me this suggests the value of not only being critical about injustices and wrongs when we see them occurring in our universities—and when we feel able, which I have already acknowledged is a difficult thing—but, even more importantly, it suggests the principle of living daily in our universities as if they are already, now, what we believe they should be. In other words, we must act now to make the good happen in all sorts of everyday ways. Thinking in this way brings to mind Pierre Bour- dieu’s argument that to change the world “[t]he vision of the engineer must be abandoned in favour of the vision of the gardener”.47 After a life-time of sociological endeavour, Bourdieu sees danger in making “sweeping change” to social systems—including higher education—both in terms of the unpredict- ability of their consequences and the potential for “sweeping backlash” that is unleashed. Instead we might think about activism as gardening: paying attention to the local ‘weather’ and ‘conditions’, pursuing regular small ‘seasonal’ ‘plantings’ and adaptations.

42 For example, my university’s long-standing Research and Study Leave policy is currently under review—academic staff are being ‘consulted’ again, with palpable anxiety about the outcome. 43 Stengers and Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’”, 244. 44 Stengers and Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’”, 245. 45 Stengers and Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’”, 256. 46 Gary Rolfe, The University in Dissent77. 47 Harriet Swain, “Move Over, Shrinks,” The Times Higher, 14 April 2000, 19. The Future Is Now 21

So how might we, who work in universities, forge liveable lives there despite the difficulties and contradictions that beset us? A creative and hopeful way to counteract the totalising-feeling discourse of neoliberalism that swirls around and through us is to cultivate a focusing counter-story for what the university can be at its best. And then to work, gardening-style, to enact this counter-story every day. Stengers and Zournazi remind us there is “hope and risk in thinking itself ”:48 creating counter-stories requires thinking deeply upon our values and beliefs about the moral purpose of a public university education in order to form alternative stories to those imposed by governments and university managers. I see such deliberate hopeful thought as not only individual but also social—perhaps via a reading group49 or an on-line discussion or composing scholarly manifestos, or femifestas,50 that engage with the thought of others (such as I’m attempting here). These small forms of what Ghassan Hage calls an alter-politics seek to produce “alternative modes of inhabiting the [university], alternative modes of social relations”.51 I offer this proposal confident we will produce many different counter-stories of the university,52 which we might welcome as a set of imaginative and practical resources, the disparateness of which—rather than being a source of conflict that divides us—we can learn from. In my own counter-story, the university is most precious for providing a protected place where students and academics come together to think53 and explore worthwhile curricula, in an institution marked by democratic relations and a “modest demeanour”.54 Through shared studying and decision-mak-

48 Stengers and Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’”, 244. 49 Peseta, Tai, Jeanette Fyffe and Fiona Salisbury. “Interrogating the ‘Idea of the Uni- versity’ through the Pleasures of Reading Together,” in Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Prising Open the Cracks, edited by Dorothy Bottrell and Catherine Manathunga (Cham Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 199–217. 50 See, for example, Miriam E. David, “Femifesta? Reflections on Writing a Feminist Memoir and a Feminist Manifesto,” Gender & Education 29, no. 4 (2017), 525–35; Anna Hickey-Moody, “A Femifesta for Posthuman Art Education: Visions and Be- comings,” In Posthuman Research: Practices in Education, edited by Carol A. Taylor and Christina Hughes, 258–66 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 51 Cited in Avril Bell, “Moving Roots: A ‘Small Story’ of Settler History and Home Places,” Qualitative Inquiry 23, no. 6 (2017), 455. 52 Abundant resources exist to spark our thinking about the university: see this essay’s bibilography for a selection. 53 Readings’ (1996) writing in The University in Ruins about the place of Thought (instead of Excellence) as the unifying principle of the university deeply shapes my counter-story. 54 Connell, The Good University, 175. 22 Barbara Grant ing, both come to know the world differently, may indeed become different, and thus be able to conduct themselves differently outside the university. In contrast to trying to make the university of direct service to the economy, the university is for me a kind of Foucauldian heterotopia. As such, it is not like the ‘real world’. Instead of this outsideness being a source of shame and defen- siveness, I see it as one of the university’s prime virtues. As heterotopias, universities are counter-sites that are “absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about”.55 This difference is a source of the university’s strength, not just politically but also epistemologically, in terms of the kinds of knowledges—including knowledges traditionally excluded from the western academy—that can be taught and produced there. Thinking in order to know the world better is both exciting and hard work that can destabilise a sense of self; it requires that we give each other both courage and comfort. That such capacities will be valuable in life outside the university, I take for granted. Most importantly, in the future-which-is- now, this counter-story of the university as a place of modest demeanour that foregrounds the importance of thought and the virtues of engaging with the widest possible variety of ways to think, acts a guide to me for how to inhabit the university and for the modes of social relations I seek to bring into play.

The second photo: Academic woman at work, 2017.

55 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.” (1967/1984), 2. The Future Is Now 23

The woman looks older and there is a noticeable absence of lipstick or smiling. Yet I can tell you she is quite happy. She is working with her dog-companion on her lap—dogs are not allowed on campus so every time she brings the dog she feels a frisson of pleasure in breaking petty rules mixed with the tiniest bit of anxiety about being told off. Sharp pencil in hand, she is engrossed in a writing task during a meeting of her School’s doctoral writing group. Unlike the steady gaze of the first photo, she doesn’t look like a woman who can see the future but, to me, she does look like an academic woman in her right place. She is in a classroom, collaborating with others over learning how to do their craft: specifically in this case, how to think and write well. Academic writing’s not easy work, it involves reading difficult texts, sifting through jumbled thoughts, making sense of chaotic data, forming a coherent argument, trying to write clearly, interestingly. It always takes so much longer than planned and sometimes, for her, still occa- sions serious bouts of self-doubt. But she believes academic writing can be a practice of hope: by thinking with and through the ideas of others, she hopes to come to understand some important matters of the world more deeply, more truly; she also hopes that, by reading her writing, others will find new understandings that may in turn lead to new forms of action. And she wants the doctoral students in the writing group to understand the difficulties of writing are not because they are imperfectly formed—or failing—academics but because this is the unfin- ished condition of being an academic. That’s why she is here and they are here, together, month in and month out.

A Thousand Tiny Universities

In the final fraction of this essay’s arc, I turn to think about counter-stories through the idea of a thousand tiny universities, a riff on Deleuze and Guat- tari’s idea of “a thousand tiny sexes”.56 In offering the phrase, they summon us to recognise the profusion of sexes outside the excluding and cruel western binary of the dominating male and its subordinated other: they want us to think sexes through a multiplicity that is “not defined by its abiding identity or principle of sameness over time, but through its capacity to undergo permutations and transformations”.57 In this essay, I let their phrase incite thought about the university outside the fatalistic binary that places the global neoliberal university as the dominating one and the old western collegial university (say) as its subordinated other. This binary traps us in an unhappy mix of fury and nostalgia, nostalgia which might be mobilising but is just as likely to be pacifying.58 I want us to think ‘the university’ in ways that creatively prolifer- ate its meanings and thus the meanings of what a university education might

56 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 249. 57 Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Topoi 12 (1993), 170. 58 Fabian Cannizzo, “‘You’ve Got to Love What You Do’: Academic Labour in a Cul- ture of Authenticity,” The Sociological Review 66, no. 1 (2018), 96. 24 Barbara Grant be, and which do not require the violence of either a stark binary that pits academics and students against each other or a forced consensus. In her critical exploration of the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for feminist thought, Elizabeth Grosz highlights two points of relevance here. First, she finds an “evident allegiance” between Deleuze and Guattari’s “notions of potitical struggle as decentred, as molecular, multiple struggles, diversified, non-aligned, or aligned in only provisional or temporary networks, in non-hierarchical, rhizomatic connections ... as micro-politics”59 and contemporary feminist thought. This description suggests Hage’s alter-politics, which propose valuing the search for alternatives over more traditional oppositional politics. Second, Grosz alerts us to the importance of the political role of human desire as, not a lack, but a positivity that “produces the real”:60 desire makes things, brings them into being. The fullness of my/our desire for the tiny university of my/our imagining is a crucial element in working towards its realisation. For me, thinking through the politicised but liberating multiplicity of a thousand tiny universities is allied to hope in the future-which-is-now. This hope tries to feel, despite the ever-present sense of being overwhelmed and discounted, “what lurks”61 now in those nooks and cracks everywhere in our institutions. By caring enough, by desiring, to articulate and nourish a counter-story of the university—on our own or, even better, with others—and by making it alive in small everyday ways, we each in a sense become a tiny university. And this tiny university of our hope and desire can be so much better than any mobilised by governments or university managers or slick on-line learning platforms. When Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner ask, “can we not occupy the visible university in the name of an invisible one?”,62 my answer is yes, we can, by virtue of the tiny university we enact daily. Inside the relative ‘invisibility’ of our classrooms, supervision meetings, research projects, writing, relations with colleagues—and secured by so-far enduring governmental and institutional commitments to academic freedom63—there is room to

59 Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” 170. 60 Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” 171. 61 Stengers and Zournazi, “A ‘Cosmo-Politics’”, 245. 62 Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner, “The University as a Place of Possibilities: Scholar- ship as Dissensus,” In Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy, edited by Susan Wright and Cris Shore (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017) 297. 63 Barbara M. Grant, “Room for Improvement: Scoring Aotearoa New Zealand. A Re- sponse to Beiter, Karran and Appiagyei-Atua’s ‘Retrogression in the Legal Protection The Future Is Now 25 manoeuvre, although undoubtedly this freedom will be experienced variably by academics under different working conditions. I return for one last time to consider the photographs included in this essay. The glossy bright one is the poster child of the neoliberal university, a smile that goes on inviting others to join her in this ruined project no matter what (indeed, her lipsticked livelihood depends upon it). The other one really matters to me: I am not smiling but I am not crying either. I’m an aging academic woman thinking and writing in a shabby seminar room on a tired, soon to be sold-off, campus. Crucially I’m in the company of others, including a much-loved dog. This image represents the tiny university I strive to keep alive every day. In that often-flawed striving —flaws that sometimes require others’ forgiveness of me—I have found I stay more fully alive, more hopeful, as an academic. A commitment to this particular tiny university offers me endurance in the long haul of surviving the disquieting institution in which I dwell and working to realise the one I long for.

Acknowledgements

Todd Brackley for critical reading, CRSTIE’s Doctoral Writing Group (specifically Wendy Liyun Choo, Daniel Couch, Penny Lin, Chris Lynch, Vic- toria O’Sullivan and Linlin Xu) for the same, Vanessa Cameron-Lewis for Grosz, Avril Bell for Hage, Bettina Pfaendner for editorial suggestions, and the HERDSA 2018 Conference Committee for their invitation to give a keynote sharing my “perspective on the moral purpose and value of higher education and the impact of higher education on its academic subjects”. This essay is a revised and extended version of that keynote.

Bibliography

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Krystian Szadkowski Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Jakub Krzeski Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Abstract: This essay presents the three current dominant discourses on the university in crisis, as well as the possible scenarios for the university’s future that prevail within them. The focus is on the three different ontologies that underpin these discourses: the individual, the public and the common. To unravel the hidden assumptions that affect the debates in question, the method of political ontology is put forward. A critical examination of the ontological assumptions that support visions of the future university reveals that the first two hegemonic models, although presented as competing alternatives, are united in their view of the sector as a static being. In turn, this essay puts forward the political ontology of relations based on the common as a means for breaking out of the deadlock created by the discourses on the private and public character of the university.

Keywords: higher education, imagination, political ontology, future, the university

Introduction

The sheer scale of changes over the last couple of decades in the higher education and science sector led some to the belief that the modern university is, in fact, a post-historical institution and has no future.1 Even if we are not willing to go as far as this diagnosis, there is undoubtedly a deep sense of crisis among those involved in higher education. Closer ties with the economy and

1 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

© 2020 Krystian Szadkowski, Jakub Krzeski - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.03 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 30 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski industry, new public management and performance measurement systems, and the monopolisation of knowledge circulation, are only some of the forces that guide the university towards its unknown future. Although the final des- tination is uncertain, the very direction the university is heading looms large in the minds of indebted students and precarious academic workers. The crisis, however, is not necessarily a reason for despair, as it opens up possibilities for further transformations. After all, it allows us to realise those desires and demands that were previously constrained. However, what if the crisis we are facing is not only a crisis of higher education as an institution or idea, but is more profound, and affects the very foundations of our thinking or the ability to re-imagine the outlines of a different future for the university? What if what we are dealing with is a crisis of the imagination itself2 and as long as we are unable to overcome it, we will leave the future of the university in the hands of the historical forces that have so far led the sector to mounting contradictions? A cursory glance at the current state of the debates on the condition of the university seems to confirm the fears present in the preceding questions. After all, the vast majority of researchers, who are mainly focused on dissect- ing and maintaining the institutional status quo, rarely refer to a philosophical perspective on the foundations of the contemporary university that would support more future-oriented reflections. In effect, instead of putting forward a new agenda, we find voices advocating for a return to the good old days, when the hierarchical academic community was a self-regulated and autonomous being, and academics could pursue their research out of curiosity, free of external pressure. Assessing the scale of changes against the past is, of course, natural, as it gives us a clear overview of what was gained and what was lost in the process of transformation. The problem arises when the idealised past becomes a normative starting point for the critique of the present, and instead of reinvigo- rating our imagination it weighs heavily on the potential future. After all, even in the most elaborative critiques of the current changes in the higher education sector3 we can find such normative starting points of the critique. It often takes a form of Mertonian normative structure of science or Mode 1 of knowledge production,4 which supposedly governed the behaviour of academics

2 Ronald Barnett, Imagining the University (New York: Routledge, 2013). 3 Richard Münch, Academic Capitalism. Universities in the Global Struggle for Excel- lence (London-New York: Routledge, 2014). 4 Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994). Political Ontologies of the Future University 31 back in the past. However, even if we treat these notions as real material reg- ulators of academic life, and not merely as performative history, that is, as a discursive practice of the academic community deployed to push a particular agenda,5 they were still the products of a definitive historical moment and conditions which can hardly be repeated in the rapidly changing landscape of higher education. Therefore, if there is no simple way of going back, we should instead con- centrate our efforts on developing the tools adequate to the task at hand. They need to enable a break with the university in crisis and move us towards a new form of higher education free of daunting contradictions. To do so, first, we need to examine the implicit consequences of our assumptions and the way these assumptions shape our thinking about possible futures. We assume, in line with a broader ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities,6 that ontological reflection is an adequate tool for imagining the shape of the future university. After all, the political stances on higher education that we adopt are based on particular ontological presumptions, and every ontology entails inevitable political consequences. In what follows, we present political ontology as a method that—through a critical examination of the claims about what exists and how what exists relates to itself—can help us to re-imagine the future university. By adapting political ontology to the higher education sector, we present three approaches to the university of the future stemming from the three different sets of ontological assumptions present in higher education research: the individual, the public and the common. Closer examinations not only unravel the obstacles that have to be faced when re-imagining the future but also help us to gain a foothold in the struggle for reshaping the modern university.

Political Ontology and Higher Education Research

Concepts matter. This self-evident truth is often forgotten within higher education research as many researchers do not engage with theory at all7 and if they do, they remain merely on the ontic and descriptive level. Although

5 Benoit Godin, “Writing performative history: The new new Atlantis?”, Social Studies of Science 28, no. 3 (1998): 465–483. 6 Carsten Strathausen ed., A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 7 Malcolm Tight, Researching Higher Education (Berkshire: SRHE and Open Univer- sity Press, 2012). 32 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski under-theorisation of the field has led to some complaints8 so far not much has been done to fill this gap. Because higher education research is a rela- tively new field and an outcome of different disciplines, and because higher education researchers use many concepts or theories borrowed from various fields, they fill them with their content, often in the process losing the context in which they were embedded. Concepts, however, are the lenses through which the researcher constructs and reveals reality, to frame and grasp it, therefore, the researcher has to make certain presuppositions about it, even if not explicitly. Thus, in this process of translation, higher education researchers move further and further from the claims about the constitutive level made by the original creators of the concepts in use. In turn, they are broadening the gap between the ontological level, absent from their inquiries, and the ontic level of institutions, actors and practices—the main focus of higher education research. Thus, political ontology used in the context of higher education is a method that attempts to examine the ties between these two levels and asks how hidden claims about what exists shape not only our vision of the sector but our politics towards it. By bringing in political ontology, we contend that it is this lack of inquiry into the ontological dimension that is a cause of the inability to think in political categories.9 Having said this, we mean not only thinking about the distribution of power but first and foremost about the capacity to act upon reality in order to change it. Therefore, we can talk about political ontology because ontology itself refers us directly to the issue of the subject formation process, thus posing the question of agency. In other words, it is ontology which can help us to identify the proper agent of change, the one which can realise the future university. Although political ontology has already established itself in the social sciences and could be introduced through different currents of thought, we would like to indicate the two traditions to which we are referring. First of all, political ontology can be traced back to the analytical political philosophy pre- dominant in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.10 In this sense, political ontology is nothing more than an analytical tool that rests on the conviction that whereas “ontology relates to being, to what exists, to the constituent units of reality;

8 Paul Ashwin, “How often are theories developed through empirical research into higher education?”, Studies in Higher Education, 37, no. 8 (2012): 941–955. 9 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London-New York: Routledge, 2005). 10 Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Political Ontologies of the Future University 33 political ontology, by extension relates to political being, to what is politically, to what exists politically, and to the units that comprise political reality”.11 Its importance lay primarily in a critical examination of the consequences of ontological assumptions that have to be made whenever we try to approach reality from the political angle and give us insight into what kind of political positions arise or may result from our claims. However, as this tradition rests on the problematic claim that political ontology refers only to the part of being that can be deemed political, we are bringing in another tradition, which can be conceived as reversion of the relation between ontology and politics or the politicization of ontology itself. For Michel Foucault, ontology is politics that has forgotten itself, in other words being or the ontological order is nothing other than the outcome of political struggles, for which it works as a battlefield.12 This and many other poststructuralist ideas, together with the experience of workers and students struggle of the 1960s, gave an impulse to and contributed to the development of the vision of being as something dynamic, thus seen not as something given, but as something that can be acted upon and transformed.13 To borrow Spinoza’s categories, which are often used by scholars working in this tradition, being and the subject are no longer merely natura naturata, that is, something created and static, but also natura naturans, the creative power that can reshape itself. Thus, political ontology is also conceived here as an inquiry, which looks through the prism of power relations examining both how certain ontological assumptions allow or limit the modes of political action, that is, our capability to reshape being, and how the specific material and intangible coordinates of the situation (what exists) determine the creation and stabilization of particular ontologies. By referring to the traditions mentioned here, this study employs political ontology to reflect on the current debates taking place within the field of higher education research in order to present the extent of the constitutive role of ideas in the determination of potential political outcomes14 and the political standpoints embodied in the research. Every political position on higher

11 Colin Hay, “Political ontology”, in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80. 12 Johanna Oksala, “Foucault’s politization of ontology,” Continental Philosophy Review 43, no. 4, (2010): 445–466. 13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Min- neapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1983). 14 Hay, “Political ontology.” 34 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski education and related concrete activities is based on particular ontological decisions, and every ontology entails inevitable political consequences. Depending on what is assumed to be ontologically primary, the individual, the whole or the relation itself, we deal with different views of being, and therefore different modes of agency and politics. In the first case, the sovereign and individual subject is presumed as the appropriate starting point, it is the concrete individual, with her choices and interactions with other individuals, that plays the role of a lens through which we attempt to grasp the reality at hand. In the second, the whole is presumed, which affects particular elements through dialectical relations.15 The whole is no longer merely an aggregate of the individuals and cannot be reduced to its parts without losing its very essence. Lastly, assuming the primacy of relations, we are dealing with transindividual thinking,16 in which “the essence” is a continuous process of transformation—a becoming rather than being—together with the changing nature of the relations themselves. Therefore, the task set out in this essay is not only to consolidate the method of political ontology for higher education research, but also to present three ideal types of the university of the future arising from the three different ontologies, in order to raise awareness of how our assumptions necessarily shape our politics with regard to the higher education and research sector. Bearing this in mind, in the next sections of this essay we are following in the footsteps of Hardt and Negri,17 who famously went beyond the dichotomy of the public and private via the concept of the common. They argued that to move forward with the construction and the implementation of an alternative, first, we need to cross the fundamental dichotomy that shapes our understanding of the social order as it became apparent that this dichotomy only serves to galvanise the present state of affairs. Currently, the same thing can be observed in the field of higher education, where scholars are engaged in a deadlock caused to a great extent by lack of conceptual tools to delineate the contours of a possible future.18 The division into the private (with the ontology assuming the primacy of the individual and its’ possessiveness) and the public (driven by holistic ontology in which the whole binds the elements

15 Luca Basso, Marx and Singularity: From the Early Writings to the “Grundrisse” (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 16 Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 17 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 2009). 18 Krystian Szadkowski, “The common in higher education: a conceptual approach,” Higher Education (2018). DOI: 10.1007/s10734-018-0340-4 Political Ontologies of the Future University 35 together) lay at the heart of the political ontology of liberalism. The liberal political ontology, formed during the development of the central dichotomies of “the modern” thinking,19 poses a peculiar challenge for the political imagination and political action within the sector of higher education. Ontologies based on the common mobilised by some higher education researchers20 are different in this respect. They reject the hegemony of those two ontological models, not only at the theoretical level but also in their material basis, within the many past and contemporary practices of teaching/learning and collective knowledge production. In the following sections, we will discuss the three different ontological proposals to shed some light on the future of the university that they enable.

Robinsonades or the Political Ontology of Possessive Individualism

That the individual currently prevails as a lens through which we are inclined to look at social reality is not a controversial notion. Even the very notion of liberation and progressive politics is tightly coupled with the idea of individual rights and individual freedoms. This is hardly surprising, as in every attempt to resurrect the collective as a counter notion, vivid memories of the haunting past arise. In effect, in the 21st century, the individual took the dominant position and became the backbone of the reigning ideology.21 The predomi- nance of the paradigm of the individual can, of course, also be traced back to the scientific discourse in which the individual, its choices and possession, as well as interactions with other individuals, is the starting point of many main- stream theories, most notably rational choice theory.22 However, for a long time, the assumption of the hegemonic position of the individual was something far from obvious. In fact, the notion of the individual was highly contested in the past, and first and foremost it was necessary to establish its position and attach it

19 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 20 Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple Univer- sity Press, 2011); Andre Pusey, “Towards a university of the common: Reimagining the university in order to abolish it with the really open university,” Open Library of Humanities 3, no. 1 (2017): 1–27. 21 Read, The Politics of Transindividuality. 22 Uskali Mäki, ed., The Economic World View. Studies in the Ontology of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 36 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski to a broader programme that would carry it forward. We can find attempts to couple the notion of the individual with a stream of thought that would, to a great extent, come to shape our understanding of socioeconomic reality, namely classical political economy. In this matter we can trace the encounter that brought together claims about the individual made by the forerunners of liberalism and the emerging capitalist order, giving rise to a possessive individualism. An individual, which:

was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is proprietor of his person and capacities.23

The outcome of this coupling, the sovereign subject that takes the world as he pleases and subjects it to his will find its most significant depiction in the eponymous hero of Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe. It is worth adding, however, that, as Marx brilliantly indicates, we often forget that Robinson Crusoe “rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books.”24 Thus what at first glance appears to be naturalised social order is in fact imposed from the outside. Bringing in the figure of Robinson Crusoe help us to understand the assumption ever present in classical political economy, namely that on the most basic level we can always find an individual entrepreneur who by sheer strength of his will can overcome adversity. As it turns out, this is often the case in the context of higher education, where the individual reigns supreme. Ontological assumptions about the primacy of the individual, conceived of as being the sole owner of himself and proprietor of his skills, in many respects underlie the ways of understanding the reality of higher education and the praxis of shaping it. The consequences of these activities for the material organisation of life in the higher education systems are robust. They can be traced back not only to the ongoing commodification of education and

23 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 3. 24 Karl Marx, Capital. Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 170. Political Ontologies of the Future University 37 science25 or the exacerbation of devastating competition between researchers or universities,26 but also to the development of evaluation mechanisms,27 or the growing importance of private appropriation of knowledge in the form of patents.28 The process of education and its effects, when seen and designed through the prism of the individual as its subject and beneficiary, takes the form of a commodity. The individually consumed experience of studying translates into the private benefits that the subject will receive in the future in the labour market. The quality of the abstract relationship that links the educated individual with his future successes (and the price of the commodity that follows) are measured by the level of the individually acquired wage. The reduced complexity of the collective educational experience, as well as the sum of social relations forming a given subject at a specific place in the socio-economic structure, are obscured by a narrative about individual effort and talent. A similar myth dominates the area of a research organisation. Making the individual the unit of the measurement underlies the evaluation procedures that drive competition on the individual, institutional, national or global scales. It is a single researcher and his activities, usually publication-related, that become the subject of interest and evaluation. In consequence, institutions or systems are seen through the prism of the aggregate efforts of individuals. Finally, this assumption of the ontology of possessive individualism, on the basis of which the individual is designed as a subject of innovation and knowledge production, also contributes to the pop- ularisation of consent (and institutional promotion) to the private appropriation of knowledge in the form of intellectual property and patents. Although not only the process but also the financing of most of research efforts are of complex and collective character,29 the image of the individual genius still lin- gers in science.

25 Philip Mirowski, Science-mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 2011). 26 Rajani Naidoo, “The competition fetish in higher education: varieties, animators and consequences,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 37, no. 1 (2016): 1–10. 27 Guy Neave, The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-engineering Higher Education in Western Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 28 David Tyfield, “Enabling TRIPs: The pharma-biotech-university patent coalition,” Review of International Political Economy 15, no. 1 (2008): 535–566. 29 Caroline S. Wagner, The Collaborative Era in Science. Governing the Network (Bas- ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 38 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski

The image that can be derived from this possessive individualism remains virtually unchallenged, which can be seen in the current debates around the circulation and dissemination of knowledge, as well as in the evaluation of science and assessing research outcomes. Since the individual, thus conceived, works as the very backbone of this processes, we are reluctant to suspend it and instead prefer to deploy a more revisionist approach that mitigates the adverse outcomes, as, for example, in the case of manifestos for a more responsible use of metrics in science30 or the struggle for Open Access, which opposes oli- gopolistic academic publishers limiting access to knowledge.31 However, to question our claims, to suspend them, even for a brief moment, may give us a chance to glimpse the different scenarios for the future university, outside the patterns we socialised to adopt. By not examining these assumptions, we risk entangling ourselves in a thicker and thicker web of contradictions, instead of removing the cause.

The Holistic Ontology and the Public

On the opposite side of the spectrum lies an ontological model that brings the whole or the totality to the fore. Instead of treating the individual as an ultimate point of reference in this model, we can dissect a broader totality that establishes a framework for individuals to operate within it and sub- sumes them under its rule. This resembles the relation between the state and the citizens in some of the statist political theories of the republican tradition, where the citizens have to serve the state as the public good,32 and the abstract entity of the state is responsible for the regulation of their life in the name of a greater good or abstract public interest.33 Thus, we deal here with the different model of agency in which the subject’s ability to act upon its externality is no longer unlimited but restricted to the point of participation in the whole. Thus, in such a model a community is no longer merely a sum of individuals acting and choosing on the basis of their absolute free will, but it is instead formed through intersubjective mediation by the particular entity that wholly embraces the individuals. It is important to stress, however, that

30 Diana Hicks, Paul Wouters, Ludo Waltman, Sarah de Rijcke and Ismael Rafols, “Bib- liometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics,” Nature 520, no. 7548 (2015): 429. 31 Vincent Larivière, Stephanie Haustein and Philip Mongeon, “The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era,” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (2015): 1–15. 32 Dan Hind, The Return of the Public (London: Verso, 2010). 33 Lok-sang Ho, Public Policy and the Public Interest (London: Routledge, 2013). Political Ontologies of the Future University 39 this intersubjective mediation binds together subjects that are already given— that are somehow pre-constituted. Thus, even though the holistic ontology appears as the absolute opposite of the political ontology of individualism, it in fact shares a common trait—the assumption of the static notion of being. Ultimately in both models, we deal with already established subjects, the significant difference being a capacity to act. In the history of Western philosophy, holistic ontology finds its most mature form of realisation in W. G. Hegel’s theory of the state, in which the state is not an instrument of power but the ethical community. Such ontological assumptions stand behind the vision of the public university, promoted as a solution to the ongoing crisis of higher education and as the foundation of its prosperous future.34 Transcendent to the academic field, the ethical ideal regulating relations within the system and the state model behind it becomes, as the guardian of the public good, an essential point of reference. One such example is Jon Nixon’s35 conception of the public in higher education, which is simultaneously a normative imperative that should guide the system(s) towards more equal and socially just configurations, a tightly interlinked and interdependent composition of resources, and a set of procedures that direct resources towards an assumed aim. Higher education seen through such a prism is becoming a place that “must be treated as an irreducible whole in which everything is connected to everything else,”36 however, what follows is the rule of the whole over its parts. The postulates of re-publicising higher education that comes from such theoretical proposals are based on the assumption of a universally valid force of such a public imperative.37 Although at no point do visions that use this kind of political ontology postulate a return to a rigid bureaucratic control or the ubiquity of the state in the sector, they are not free from particular problems. First of all, they silently ignore the fact that today it is the state that is the leading commander of the changes that, in response to the expectations of the private sector and by the prevailing neoliberal ideology, strengthen competitive and market mechanisms within public universities all over the world.

34 Joanna Williams, “A critical exploration of changing definitions of public good in relation to higher education,” Studies in Higher Education 41, no. 1, (2016): 619–630; Craig Calhoun, “The university and the public good,” Thesis Eleven 84 (2006): 7–46. 35 Jon Nixon, Higher Education and the Public Good. Imagining the University (Lon- don: Continuum, 2011). 36 Nixon, Higher Education and the Public Good, viii. 37 Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 40 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski

Some of the researchers in this context even speak about the hybridisation of the public and the private,38 that is, about the blurring of these orders to such a degree that their easy delineation is no longer possible. The state-funded and state-controlled (even if from a distance)39 universities not only compete with each other on a national and global scale, but they also focus on revenue-generating activities, from fee-based teaching, through services sold to students on campuses, to selling knowledge in the form of patents and intellectual property. Moreover, they implement strict internal management policies and contribute to the precarization of the academic workforce,40 and they thus resemble the private corporation to such a degree that it is hard to point out the very distinctive features of the public university. Secondly, the assumption of the regulative ideal (the public good or the public interest) disregards the cultural diversity of national systems and their respective traditions. The issues of supra-individual good are perceived differently in China, where the individual is a relative concept (always already embedded in family, society and/or international contexts) and the distinction between the smaller-self and the bigger-self, and “all under heaven” organize thinking beyond the simple opposition between the public and the private,41 and differently in Nordic systems, with their focus on the state as active actor in tackling social and economic individual inequalities.42 Cultural traditions may pose a substantial difficulty for any claims to universal validity, whether in higher education or beyond. In every national context, it matters who is (or was in the past) entitled to fill the regulative ideas with their specific content, representing whose interest and through what processes. Thirdly, in the increasingly globalised reality, it is impossible to indicate a subject which, as in the previous stages of development of higher education systems was the nation-state, would guard the public good on such scale.

38 UNESCO. Rethinking Education. Towards a Global Common Good? Paris: UNESCO, 2015; Carolina Guzman-Valenzuela, “Unfolding the meaning of public(s) in universities: toward transformative university,” Higher Education 71, (2016): 667–679. 39 Simon Marginson, “Steering from a distance: Power relations in Australian higher education,” Higher Education 34, no. 1 (1997): 63–80. 40 Aline Courtois and Theresa O’Keefe, “Precarity in the ivory cage: Neoliberalism and casualisation of work in the Irish higher education sector,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 13, no. 1 (2015): 43–66. 41 Lin Tian and Nian Cai Liu, “Rethinking higher education in China as a common good,” Higher Education 77, no. 4 (2019): 623–640. 42 Simon Marginson, The Higher Education and the Common Good (Melbourne Uni- versity Press: Sydney, 2016). Political Ontologies of the Future University 41

Hence, there is a structural lack of an entity that would be interested in not only strengthening and disseminating the ethical imperatives necessary for its maintenance but also securing the support structures for the provision of material and immaterial global public goods.43 In higher education, for instance, the problem of access to publicly funded (in national context) knowledge is still unsolved and unregulated on a global scale, and we are seeing the consolidation of oligopolies of academic publishers that benefit immensely from the current predicament. Finally, the order of the public—especially the postulate of the existence of an abstract, ethical imperative, consistent with the holistic ontology adopted by some researchers44—is something external to the field of science and higher education. It is derived from outside the sector, rather than resembling the material practices that happen internally. Thus, it forms a plane of transcendence extended over an autonomous reality, and intervenes in its order and internal dynamics while being something that is hard to stabilise within it. Thus, the application of the concept of the public university constructed on the basis of an ontological assumption of an external imperative that would solve the problems of competition, commodification or acceleration of the academy, as its above-mentioned advocates seem to postulate, may be an ide- alistic dream, rather than a robust solution for the sector’s current ills or a rec- ipe for its prosperous future.

The Political Ontology of Relations and the Common

In order to fully grasp the nature of the political ontology of the relations that we refer to here, as well as its application to higher education, we need to first make a short detour via Marx’s break with traditional thinking about human essence. In his book, The Philosophy of Marx, Étienne Balibar concentrates on Marx’s innovation in thinking about the subject formation process and the social relations that bind subjects together.45 He refers to the Theses on Feuer- bach where Marx states that: “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. However, the human essence is no abstraction inherent

43 Meghan Desai, “Public goods: A historical perspective,” in Providing Global Public Goods. Managing Globalization, edited by Inge Kaul et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 44 Nixon, Higher Education and the Public Good; Williams, “A critical exploration.” 45 Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (London-New-York: Verso, 2007). 42 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski in every single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations”.46 Although thesis six has been widely interpreted to emphasize Marx’s critique of religion, there is something else that this short passage can tell us. Arguing against Feuerbach’s thesis, Marx polemically addresses the two dominant ways of thinking about the human essence prevalent in Western philosophy: on the one hand, regarding this essence as preceding the individual, and on the other hand, thinking about individuals as ontologically primary. In their place, Marx posits social relations and argues that it is these relations that have ontological primacy over the determined elements. As Balibar admits, Marx’s move beyond either the individualistic or the holistic point of view opened up an entirely new ontological horizon, namely the space in-between individuals, and made it a proper subject of inquiry. This ontological model “for the discussion of the relations between the individual and the genus, substitutes a programme of enquiry into this multiplicity of relations, which are so many transitions, transferences or passages in which the bond of individuals to the community is formed and dissolved, and which, in its turn, constitutes them”.47 In this sense, the ontology of relations goes more in-depth than, for example, the sociology of relations, as its aim is not only to reject essentialist thinking, either steered by the focus on the individual or the collective and to shift our attention from the elements to the system of relations that binds them. Instead, the ontology of relations changes the way we understand the subject formation process and its agency, as the subject appears as only secondary to the relations that constitute it. In other words, the subject is not given but is continuously constructed in the process of becoming. Recently, this ontological discovery has been translated into a robust conceptual lexicon and it steered the debate among political philosophers. Hardt and Negri propose using the relational understanding of socio-economic reality in the context of the broader transformations of the capitalist knowledge economy, which is more and more oriented towards and based on the exploitation of what binds people together, that is, knowledge, affects, information and social relations.48 On the ontological plane, they termed this constitutive element of relationality “the common” and emphasised that to form an alternative to contemporary capitalism we have to set the common free from the

46 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx/Engels, Selected Works, Volume I (Mos- cow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 14. 47 Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 32. 48 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth. Political Ontologies of the Future University 43 exploitative binding and struggle for its autonomy. This productivity-oriented interpretation that sees the common as an outcome of the productivity of life itself has recently been contrasted with the praxis-focused interpretation that conceives of the common as a political principle guiding the struggles and practices dedicated to the realisation of a non-capitalist future.49 Refusing to side completely with one interpretation or the other, we concede that what the private is for possessive individualism, and the public for holism, the common is for the ontology of relations. Thus, we think that the term “the common” describes first and foremost the constitutive element on which this broader political ontology is based. Accordingly, we have to admit that—similarly to both Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval—we see the common as a result of the intensification of the capitalist development on the one hand, and the struggles against it on the other. Moreover, we resist the idea that thinking beyond the public/private opposition leads us to embrace any form of sentimentalism, or to a fascination with guilds or pre-modern communal life, with its closure and hierarchy.50 Instead, if we look to the past, we do so to reclaim the political potential of struggles guided by “the common” for a different future. The common is after all currently developed on an unprecedented scale and forms the real material basis for the autonomous functioning of the alternative, future socio-economic setting. One of the realms where the capitalist entrapment of the common and the potential for its emancipation is most pronounced is precisely the field of science and higher education. The common lies at the heart of the university. The essential element of the common is already contained in the very idea of knowledge.51 One cannot know on one’s own. Moreover, from the perspective of the effectiveness of knowledge production and dissemination, everything that stands in the way of commoning and sharing it should melt into the air. Otherwise, its potential gets blocked. Knowledge, both that transmitted during the educational process and that which is the result of an inquiry, is the proper realm of relationships. Its success is determined by the sum and the intensity of the potential relationships it establishes. Bibliometric indicators or citation counts, so prevalent today, reflect (in a reversed, individualising form) nothing other than the

49 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 50 Antony Black, Guild and State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 51 Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth. 44 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski power of a given researcher, journal or scholarly piece to create relationships. Some even postulate that science is entering a collaborative era, and the global network of science can be seen as one of the most significant human collaborative ventures, yet “governing global science as a conglomeration of national assets or as disciplines, or attempting to renationalize science, threatens to choke off the promise embedded in the emerging system”.52 Collaboratively produced knowledge exceeds both the university and the nation and requires a suitable form that reflects the growing importance of forming and sustain- ing productive relations. However, as we can infer from the above examples, in already existing higher education systems we can trace the essential elements that function in compliance with the logic assumed in the political ontology of relations, yet the idea of a university of the common based on it is still something rather postulative. A project of the future university as an institution of the common assumes the sets of unmediated, immanent and self-determined material relations between the subjects of academic practices.53 These practices are not necessarily solely sector-oriented. These ontological assumptions broaden the scope and include a comprehensive set of productive practices realised on a plane of immanence, traversing the institutional shell of the university and connecting it with its social environment. For this reason, the common in higher education is presented in an antagonistic manner to both the market or capital, and the state that transcends the realm of the immanent relations.54 As the common in higher education is not a new kind of property, it is instead viewed as a drive towards the conversion or dissolution of both public and private property relations within higher education (or the creation of new common relations). This movement is organised in autonomous educational initiatives or networks of cooperatives.55 Cooperative higher education stim- ulates both the internal and external cooperation of institutions or groups. The aim of the higher education sector organised around the common is to enhance the growth of social autonomy and the conditions for extended social reproduction. These processes are supposed to be self-sustained and self-fi- nanced, as they are connected with the broader social movement that aims to

52 Wagner, The Collaborative Era in Science, xi. 53 Krystian Szadkowski, “The common in higher education.” 54 Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge; Pusey, “Towards a university of the common.” 55 Joss Winn, “The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy,” Power & Education 7, no. 1 (2015): 39–55. Political Ontologies of the Future University 45 organise the socio-economic reality around cooperative values: equity, solidarity, mutual help, equality, democratic self-governance and self-responsibility.56 The political ontology of relations based on and oriented towards the common is the project of regaining the immanent and horizontal reality of the university. It is an endeavor that aims to save the relational component of the university from both the oppression of market-oriented and competition-driven individualisation and the transcendence imposed by the state and its agencies that nowadays so often side with the market forces. It is here that we see the ontological order on which the effort to think about the university of the future can find a serious beginning.

Conclusions, or Beyond the Static Models of the Political Ontology of Higher Education

In this article, using the method of political ontology, we have analysed the three sets of assumptions behind the various visions of the university and the solutions to the crisis that are being proposed on their basis. This effort revealed the limitations of these assumptions applied to the higher education sector, and the future scenarios for the university derived from them. In a productive encounter with the reality of higher education, political ontology becomes a tool that can help us reinvigorate our imagination. This method does not claim exclusivity in the question of revealing and fighting for another future of the university. It can be treated as a complement to the existing efforts, such as social ontology or the decolonization of the university.57 At first sight, the political ontologies that we have discussed above seem to differ entirely from each other. The ontology of possessive individualism and the holistic ontology of the public, which underlie the two hegemonic narratives on higher education, ostensibly form a particularly clear-cut opposition. However, in our opinion, this is just an apparent contradiction, as they are both underpinned by significant, shared features—the static conception of being and the resulting essentialism.

56 Susan Wright, Davydd Greenwood and Rebecca Boden, “Report on a field visit to Mondragón University: a cooperative experience/experiment,” Learning and Teaching 4, no. 3 (2011): 38–56; Winn, “The co-operative university.” 57 Ronald Barnett, “Constructing the university: Towards a social philosophy of higher education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, no. 1 (2016): 78–88; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Decolonising the University (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Pub- lishing, 2017). 46 Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski

Although we are convinced that such assumptions are hard to defend in any discussion on aspects of the socio-political or economic order, we see them as particularly problematic within the context of the university and its future. Relying on the assumption of the static character of being results in a situation where we are inclined to look at the sector and its actors through the prism of previously defined roles and categories. We impose the university’s reality on its content (the present and the future) instead of deriving it from the analysed matter. This kind of thinking and the practice of analysis that emerges from it will always impose the limitations on the postulated beings that play a seemingly necessary role in the process of reorganising the sector. On the one hand, it stresses that we are condemned to structures con- ducive to the flourishing of free individuals, such as market-mediated competition or the free functioning of multinational capital. On the other hand, it is assumed that in order to save the public character of higher education, we should strengthen the state control over it or establish supranational entities connecting individual states as their members. Moving within such horizon, being always already trapped between the market coordination and the state supervision, between the private and the public, seems to us a vicious circle that we need to break, rather than embrace—especially if our task is to design and achieve the contours of the university of the future. It seems that the way out of this vicious circle of static understanding of the sector and its actors could be enabled by the political ontology of relations or the common, returning to the constitutive dimension of relations that links and at the same time transforms the actors within the field. This is precisely the advantage given to us in the discussed perspective, that is, the fact that the common (being a material realisation of the ontology of relations) lies at the basis of any scientific or teaching activity.58 In this way, the university of the future and its design are already present in the current shape of the sector. They can and should be derived from within and brought to the fore, rather than imposed from without. For all that, this task requires us to resist the tempting simplicity of the two other models of political ontology discussed in this essay—both in theory and practice. In order to succeed in this struggle, first we need to increase our sensitivity to assumptions that are implicitly present in our thinking and action, and the primary task of this text was to reveal how such assumptions

58 Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge. Political Ontologies of the Future University 47 are not only formed, but also how they have their consequences for designing the future of the sector.

References

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3. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder

Finn Thorbjørn Hansen1 Aalborg University, Denmark

Abstract: Humanities and liberal art are called for in science and innovation. The fast development in Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, etc. demands a new kind of “Responsible Innovation”. How do we in higher education teaching work with ethical, existential, philosophical and even metaphysical questions concerning what a human being and a good life is? In this article the focus will be on learning to innovate through nurturing teaching practices for deep wonder among students and teachers. By taking up Ronald Barnett’s notion of a ‘Metaphysical University” and his description of the Three Voices in university teaching (the Voices of Skill, Knowledge and Being), and by elaborating on the Phenomenology of Wonder and what I call “delicate problems” in contrast to “wicked problems”—this article suggested a model for a Four Voiced Approach to innovation in higher education. The Fourth Voice being the Voice of Ethical Callings.

Keywords: responsible innovation, metaphysical university, phenomenology of wonder, wicked problems, delicate problems

“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough— it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” —Steve Jobs, presentation of iPad 2, March 2011

“Universities are no longer permitted to be places of mystery, of uncertainty, of the unknown. The mystery of universities has ended.” —Ronald Barnett2

1 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Professor, PhD, Centre for Dialogue and Organization, Department of Communication, University of Aalborg (Denmark): e-mail: finnth@ hum.aau.dk 2 Barnett, Ronald. 2011. Being a University. London: Routledge, 15.

© 2020 Finn Thorbjøn Hansen - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.04 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 52 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

Introduction

The humanities and liberal arts are now called upon from an unexpected cor- ner of the universities. In the wake of The Fourth Industrial Revolution,3 scientists in geoengineering, biotechnology and genome editing and technicians of cyborg robotics and artificial intelligence (A.I.) are asking for advice, regulation and ethical criteria for what the direction and restrictions of the upcom- ing technological developments and innovations might be. In the discipline of Responsible Research and Innovation,4 we see this appeal being addressed to the humanities. In the work of ‘human-centered design’ and so-called meaning-driven innovation,5 we also see a new focus on how to bring in a more philosophical, aesthetical and existential dimension when working with meaning and ‘meaning-making’ in innovative processes and in teaching radical innovation at higher education.6 But if we want to create spaces for a more existential, aesthetical and philosophical dimension in innovative learning in higher education then how do we theoretically grasp this need? In this essay, I will to some extent follow the lead of the British philosopher of higher education, Ronald Barnett.7 In his works from 2004 and 2007

3 Schwab, Klaus. 2016. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. London: Random House. 4 Sutcliffe, Hilary. 2011. A Report on Responsible Research and Innovation (Prepared for DG Research and Innovation, European Commission): http://ec.europa.eu/research/ science-society/document_library/pdf_06/rri‐report‐hilary‐sutcli e_en.pdf [accessed: 14.05.2016]; Owen, Richard, John Bessant, and Maggy Heintz. 2013. Responsible Innovation. London: Wiley & Sons; Philbeck, Thomas, Nikolai Davis, and Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen. 2018. Values, ethics and innovation: Rethinking technological development in the fourth Industrial Revolution. (White Paper from World Economic Forum, August 2018: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_WP_Values_Ethics_In- novation_2018.pdf 5 Verganti, Roberto, and Åsa Öberg. 2013. Interpreting and envisioning—A hermeneutic framework to look at radical innovation of meanings. Industrial Marketing Man- agement, Vol. 42: 86–95; Norman, Donald, and Roberto Verganti. 2014. Incremental and radical innovation: Design research vs. technology and meaning change. Design Issues, Vol. 30, Issue 1: 78–96; Verganti, Roberto. 2017. Overcrowded. Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 6 Hasanefendic, Sandra, Julie Birkholz, Hugo Horta, and Peter van der Sijde. 2017. In- dividuals in action: Bringing about innovation in higher education. European Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 7, No. 2: 101–119; Horn, Michael, and Alana Dunagan. 2018. Innovation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education. San Francisco, CA: The Christensen Institute. 7 Barnett, Ronald. 2004. Learning for an unknown future.Higher Education Research & Development, Vol. 23, No. 3, August 2004: 247–260; Barnett, Ronald. 2007. A Will To Learn. Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Berkshire: Open University Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 53 he talks about a missing ‘ontological dimension’ in higher education research and about the need in higher education pedagogy to give space not just for the epistemological “Voice of Knowledge” and pragmatic “Voice of Skills”, but also for the ontological “Voice of Being”, where the student as a unique person with his or her unique passion, aspirations and “authentic self-creation” is nurtured. Later8 his interests are more on how universities can avoid becoming just pragmatic “entrepreneurial universities” or evidence-based “scientific universities”. He calls for a world-oriented higher education—an “ecological university”—which also is qualified and characterized by a responsible wisdom-oriented way of thinking that lets the universal and metaphysical questions and wonder live and inspire the teachers and students.9 I want to press this even further and ask how we can strengthen the sense of wonder, which is cultivated and nurtured in the old Greek understanding of living a philosophical life as a love for wisdom. Or, as the French philosopher and phenomenologist Emman- uel Levinas would say: “Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love”.10 Might this kind of philosophical and wisdom-seeking wonder help us better to “make our heart sing” as Steve Jobs (and Verganti11) urges innovators to have as their final goal.12

Press; Barnett 2011; Barnett, Ronald. 2018. The Ecological University. A Feasible Utopia. London: Routledge. 8 Barnett 2011, 2018. 9 The Dutch educational researcher, Gerd Biesta can be read as being in coherence with Ronald Barnett here. He too calls for a third dimension in education, called Subjectifi- cation, which he sees as an important critical corrective to the dominating dimensions of Qualification and Socialisation in education. He also speaks for a “world-centered education”. See: Biesta, Gerd. 2010. Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Eth- ics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers; and Biesta, Gerd. 2012. The future of teaching education: Evidence, competence or wisdom? Research on Steiner Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 8–21. As I will elaborate later in the essay, the difference between the two researchers might be found in their different philosophical orientations. Where Barnett refers mainly to Heidegger when talking about the Voice of Being, Biesta mainly refers to Levinas when talking about Subjectification. 10 Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise Than Being. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 162. 11 Verganti 2017. 12 In the scope of this essay I will not be able to reflect upon the intriguing question of the relationship between love and wonder in philosophy and educational theory. This is a grand question, which is touched upon by educationalists such as Arcilla, Rene. 1995. For the Love of Perfection: Richard Rorty and Liberal Education. London: Routledge; Taylor, James. 1998. Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education. New York: SUNY Press; Mackler, Stephanie 2009. Learning for Meaning’s Sake: Toward 54 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

In this essay, I will stick to the question of how the sense and experience of deep wonder may influence the students’ and the teacher’s ability to ‘stand in the openness’? Will it strengthen their ability to become innovative? And yet at the same time, will it also give them some sense of the existential and ethical callings in their own life and profession and practices, which a wondrous approach might reveal? In addition to the three voices of skills, knowledge and being suggested by Barnett, I will argue for a ‘fourth voice’—the Voice of the Ethical Callings. This will foster an ability to see where deep wonder has its relevance and its limitations in wanting to cultivate meaning-driven and responsible innovation in higher education.

From Wicked to Delicate Problems

Before I turn to Ronald Barnett and his notion of the ‘ontological turn in higher education’ let me briefly present some arguments for why an ontological dimension is of importance in the research on responsible and meaning- driven innovation. In the research on how to work with radical innovation the concept of ‘wicked problems’ is often used. ‘Wicked problems’ are defined as complex problems that cannot be solved or ‘tamed’ within the current paradigm of a theory, system or a practice.13 To radically think creatively and anew one has to either think within a radical new cognitive framework (knowledge experts

the Hermeneutic University. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. Mackler (2009); and philosophers such as Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. Chi- cago: Chicago University Press; Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Marion, Jean.-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford: Stanford Uni- versity Press. As I have shown ealier—Hansen, F.T. 2015b. Om Wittgenstein som humorist og eksistentiel fænomenolog. In: M. Pahuus, J. Rendtorff, and P. Søltoft (eds.), Kierkegaard som eksistentiel fænomenolog. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 179–210—I primarily follow an existential interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his notion of wonder and what Wittgenstein scholar James Edwards describes as “the ethics of love” behind this philosophical wonder. Edwards, James. 1982. Eth- ics without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life. Tampa: University Press of Florida: 234–255. 13 Ingerslev, Karen. 2014. Healthcare Innovation under The Microscope Framing Bound- aries of Wicked Problems. (PhD dissertation). Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School; Cleland, Jennifer, Fiona Patterson, and Mark Hanson. 2018. Thinking of selection and widening access as complex and wicked problems. Medical Education, Vol. 52, Issue 12: 1228–1239. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 55 bringing surprisingly new knowledge or technology into the field), or a new political framework (policy makers changing the overall political conditions and purpose of the previous system or practice of the field). In my earlier work14 I have argued for a new concept in contemporary innovation research, which can offer the concept of ‘wicked problems’ a more philosophical and existential approach to innovation. The wicked problems are in the main literature on innovation research typically approached from a technical, skill-oriented and cognitive and epistemological approach. How- ever, this may prevent us from touching upon problems which can only be met on an existential and ontological level. Wicked problems such as “The robots are coming – what do we humans do?” or “The growing problem of loneliness in a welfare state—why is that?” or “How do we solve the increasing problem of stress in western societies?” are all touching upon more philosophical, ethical and existential questions such as” What is a human being?” “What is human freedom and human flourishing?” “What is loneliness compared to inner peace and personal integrity?” These are all what I name ‘delicate problems’. They help us to look for the existential, ethical and aesthetical (or maybe even spiritual) dimensions in our professional work life and personal life as such. They are delicate in three ways:

1. They touch upon some very personal and existential issues in our own lives that we cannot ignore, and if we do, they become an existential problem felt as an imperceptible existential uneasiness in the midst of our daily lives.

2. They are delicate meaning understood as very fragile and porously lived experiences of meaningfulness or lack of meaningfulness in our lives, which so easily can be missed or fixed or explained away though social technologies or psychological categories and methods.

3. They are delicate in the sense that they touch upon something very fine and precious in humans’ lives, which seems to carry the human sense of meaningfulness.

These existential, aesthetical, ethical and possibly spiritual experiences of

14 Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. 2018. At møde verden med undren: Dannelse, innovation og organisatorisk udvikling i et værensfilosofisk perspektiv. [To Encounter the World in Wonder: Bildung, Innovation and Organizational Development in an Existential Perspective]. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel. 56 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen deeper meaning are in fact not really to be understood as ‘problems to be solved’ but rather as ‘mysteries to be lived’. For example, is love a problem to be mastered and solved? Yes, in some sense it feels like a problem, when we do not receive love, or when we cannot give it to another person, or when we somehow have lost our love for the world or for the simple things in life. However, as experienced human beings, we will probably also recognize that love as such cannot be defined and ‘mastered’ in the same way that we can master a thing, a tool or a machine. There is something mysteriously unfathomable and ineffable with the living phenomenon of love (or the phenomenon of inner peace, joy of life, beauty, etc.), which poets, philosophers, theologists, artists and novelists for thousands of years have dwelled upon, and which existential philosophers and phenomenologists nowadays are describing as an ontological event15 or as a metaphysical experience of transcendence.16 These existential philosophers and phenomenologists argue for a ‘meaning-giving’-dimension in life, a form of ‘emanation’ from the phenomenon, Being or life itself that is mysterious in nature and which often may bring us to deep ontological wonder and awe.17 If we take these ontological experiences and metaphysical questions into account, which also seem to lay under the philosophical and existential questions that are brought up in the contemporary research in innovation as mentioned above,18 then how are we to make sense of that, and make room for that, in modern higher education? How do we acknowledge this dimension of mystery and deep wonder19 in the midst of academic teaching and educa-

15 Marcel, Gabriel. 2000 [1950]. The Mystery of Being (Vol 1: Reflection and Mystery). South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. 16 Marion 2002. 17 This does not necessarily mean that we must rely on religious or semi-religious understandings and ideas. As modern phenomenologists like Marion, Løgstrup and even Hannah Arendt have shown, such philosophical, ethical and metaphysical questions do not have to be interpreted and answered within a theological and religious framework, but could just as well be understood within a life philosophical, existence philosophical or phenomenological framework or as a kind of ‘Negative Metaphysics’ as Arcilla (1995) proposes. But it does open up for a possibility of a post-secular and post-postmodern re-enchartment of the world, as also Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and Dreyfus, Hubert, and Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2011. All Things Shining. New York: Free Press have described. 18 We see that those who take such a philosophical and existential approach remain in a ‘meaning-making’-paradigm and in a more epistemological understanding of meaning-driven innovation. For a discussion see Hansen 2018. 19 The concept of ‘deep wonder’ is found in the work of the Canadian phenomenologist Van Manen, Max. 2014. Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 236 as Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 57 tion? And what might be the relevance? Is it at all possible to find free spaces for this kind of slow and deep wonder in the contemporary effective ‘cost-benefit universities’?

The Ontological Turn in Higher Education and the University of Tomorrow

Ronald Barnett is indeed concerned about the future of higher education and the possibility of understanding higher research from a kind of ‘Mode-3-research’.20 In several books21 he and commentators ask what kind of university we want to aspire to. Barnett is a proponent for a future university, which he calls ‘the authentic university’22 and the ‘ecological’ or ‘wise university’23.

a concept connected to late Heidegger and the notion of the phenomenological and inceptive reduction. You can also find this concept used by the Dutch educational philosopher Anders Schinkel but not in the same phenomenological and ontological way as Heidegger and Van Manen, see: Schinkel, A. (2017). The educational importance of deep wonder. Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 51, No. 2: 538–553; Schinkel, A. (2018). Wonder and moral education. Educational Theory, Vol. 68, No. 1: 31–48. My way of understanding deep ‘ontological wonder’ is closer to Van Ma- nen, late Heidegger and Wittgenstein as I have elaborated elsewhere, Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. (2008). At stå i det åbne: Dannelse gennem filosofisk undren og nærvær [To Stand in the Openness: Bildung through Philosophical Wonder and Presence]. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel; Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. 2015a. “The Call of Wonder and Practice of Wonder”. In: Michael Noah Weiss (ed.), The Socratic Handbook. Wien: Lit Verlag: 217–244; Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. 2011. “The phenomenology of wonder in higher education”. In: Erziehung: Phänomenologische Perspektiven: 161–178. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann; Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. 2014. Kan man undre sig uden ord? [Can You Wonder without Words?] Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg University Press; Hansen, Finn Thorbjørn. 2016. At undres ved livets afslutning: Om brug af filosofiske samtaler i palliativt arbejde [To Wonder at the End of Life: The Use of Philosophical Conversations in Palliative Care]. Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag; Hansen 2018. 20 Barnett sees his approach as an alternative both to the scientific university and the entrepreneur university, which is also described as the difference between ‘Mode-1 research’ and ‘Mode-2 research’, see: Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny,. Simon Schwartzman,. Peter Scott, and Martin Trow. 1994. The New Pro- duction of Knowledge: Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. 21 Barnett 2007, 2011, 2018; Bengtsen, Søren. 2017. Supercomplexity and the university: Ronald Barnett and the social philosophy of higher education. Higher Education Quarterly, Vol. 72: 65–74. 22 Barnett 2007, 2011. 23 Barnett 2011, 2018. 58 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

He calls for a university, which works in a profoundly interdisciplinary way through ‘knowledge ecologies’, oriented towards the promotion of societal and global wellbeing and students understanding themselves as global citizens. In a way, you could say that he aspires to a ‘world-oriented university’ that transcends both the “scientific university” (the ivory tower ideal) and the “entrepreneurial university” (the market-oriented ideal). He wants, like Ver- ganti,24 students and teachers to be able to learn and teach in innovative ways based on ‘heartfelt’ longings and searching. Like the people behind Respon- sible Science and Innovation, he too wants to create universities and higher education with a closer dialogue with the public domain where focus is on the universities’ responsibility in engaging with the world. He suggests this be done not only in a pragmatic and utilitarian way, like ‘the entrepreneurial university’, but in ways that have the necessary distance through critical reflection and through engaged teachers who have made their value positions clear on how they want to help create a better world. Nevertheless, what I emphasize here is Barnett’s call for a revitalization of ‘the metaphysical university’25 and his earlier pointing out of a missing dimension, a third dimension, in higher education and universities,26 which neither Verganti nor the researchers behind the idea of ‘wicked problems’ nor the discipline of Responsible Science and Innovation seems to have noticed or asked for. It is the dimension of Being, or as Barnett refers to it, the ‘Voice of Being’ as opposed to the ‘Voice of Knowledge’ and the ‘Voice of Skills’. As was mentioned previously, the researchers behind the notion of ‘wicked problems’ usually operate within a horizon determined by two dimensions: the dimension of expert knowledge and the dimension of policy-making.27 In his 2007 book, A Will to Learn. Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty, Barnett is especially interested in how to engage students not just in an epistemological and technical or skill-oriented way. To orient yourself towards the knowledge experts and participate in analytical and critical reflections is not enough. Neither is it enough to engage in political debates and strategic nego- tiations and pragmatic decision-making. The students and teachers at universities and in higher education must also create spaces for more existential and

24 Verganti 2017. 25 Barnett 2011, 11–20. 26 Barnett 2007. 27 See also Ralph Stacy’s matrix of change management and organizational complexity, which in a similar way as the researchers on wicked problem, is suggested as a matrix to grasp organizational problems in highly complex situations and contexts: Stacy, Ralph. 2002. Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 59 ethical reflections he says in 2007, that is, in terms of how they are as persons and in their way of being and how they want to live a ‘good life’. You can have a lot of knowledge and skills, but the real quality of a mature or wise professional is his or her way of using this knowledge and skills in a wise way. This calls of course for an ethical and responsible perspective. But, the Voice of Being (‘What is the meaning or purpose of my life?’) is, Barnett says, closely connected to the Voice of Knowledge (what do I know?) and the Voice of Skills (how do I act?). “The position that I want to press for,” Barnett writes, “is that the student’s ontological and epistemological voices are intertwined, but also, the ontological voice has the upper hand”.28 That the ontological dimension in higher education is prior to the epistemological should, Barnett claims, remind the teachers who care for their teaching “… that their first duty is to engage with the student as a person, respecting her own situation.”29 When Barnett calls for an “ontological turn” in higher education,30 he is critical towards a development in higher education that has happened the last two decades. Because of new liberalism and new public management universities all over the world have become more and more market- and skill-oriented. But only to focus on knowledge and skills is, he claims, not enough when wanting to create good higher education that can prepare students for living in an age of super complexity and uncertainty. The knowledge and skills of yesterday and today are seldom enough to keep up with the problems (wicked or ordinary) that universities will meet in the world of tomorrow. Thus, students’ ability to learn,to be open and to listen to the world and to their own ‘being-in-the-world’ are for Barnett important dispositions or ways of being that teachers of higher education must call upon in their students and in themselves as teachers to live out.

What Do We Really Mean by Saying the ‘Ontological’

However, what does it mean to be and to ‘be-in-the-world’? When Barnett is so keen on creating a higher education that has this third dimension of Being in focus, then what does he exactly mean by this dimension? What kind of understanding of ‘ontology’ is he a proponent of? This is where it begins to get tricky. On the one hand, Barnett is very clear that his notion of Being and

28 Barnett 2007, 97. 29 Barnett 2007, 96. 30 Barnett 2004, 247. 60 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen ontology is closely connected to the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. When Heidegger talks about “being-in-the-world”31 this means for Barnett a special mood of being present and authentic in the world and life of the individual student. Questions Barnett wants the students to reflect on would be questions such as ‘Who and where am I in all these many voices of systems, sciences, professional practices and skills to learn?” “What is my passion, my deeper meaning doing this profession or this education?” “How can I live in a way that I feel is most aligned with what I care for and find worth doing?” As Barnett would say, in an age of uncertainty students have to live with, and they get to have, a personal will to learn how to work with ‘open ontologies’, that is, open possibilities of identities and ways of being that might go against the ‘closed ontologies’ of the systems, ideas, knowledge and skills of tomorrow and today. On the other hand, when being more precise in his description of how to live in the world and with open ontologies he points to a kind of Nietzschean and Sartrean way of “authentic self-creation” as an ideal and also to a ‘critical realism’ and ‘meta-realism’,32 which has a “universal self-realization” as its ideal. However, is this kind of ideal of ‘authentic self-creation’ and the notion of ‘meta-realism’ really in line with Heidegger’s existential and phenomenological ontology? I don’t think so. I will come back to Barnett’s reference to Bhaskar and initially say, that where Nietzsche and Sartre work from within a “Meaning-Making Paradigm”—which, by the way, suits very well many postmodern and social constructivists’ ways of thinking—Heidegger, and especially Heidegger’s later philosophy33—is better described and understood as a thinking which works from within a “Meaning-Receiving Paradigm”. What seems to be at stake here is two very different understandings of what ontology is, and what the “Voice of Being” could be. Is it the voice of the authentic self (Dasein as Heidegger would have said), or is it the voice of the subject matter or phenomenon in and by itself (Sein or ‘Seyn’ as Heideg- ger calls it in his later works)? The first voice make us focus on the subject and the willfulness and dispositions of the individual student and his or her existential self. The second voice make us listen to an Otherness or a Thou34 and some existentials or

31 Heidegger, Martin. 1998 [1927]. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. 32 Bhaskar, Roy. 2002. Reflections on Meta-Reality: A Philosophy for the Present. London: Sage. 33 Heidegger, Martin. 2004 [1954]. What Is Called Thinking?. New York: Harper & Row; Mugerauer, Robert. 2008. Heidegger and Homecoming. The Leitmotif in the Later Writings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 34 Buber, Martin. 2013 [1923]. I and Thou. London: Bloomsbury. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 61

‘attractors’, which is positioned outside the individual person and also outside the cultural and human-made context. This voice calls the student (or teacher) to act or think in a way that is attuned to or in resonance with the phenomenon itself (die Sache selbst), which the person or persons in their inquiry want to get in contact and dialogue with in order to better understand it. This possible philosophical puzzling incoherence in Barnett’s early thinking (Heideg- ger or Sartre/Nietzsche?) is, as I see it, not solved or cleared up in Barnett’s later thinking (Heidegger or Bhaskar?).

Opening Up for a Metaphysical Dimension

In any case, Barnett’s focus has clearly changed in his later thinking from a subject-oriented approach to a world-oriented approach. He even tries to incorporate an openness for a metaphysical dimension in his understanding of higher education,35 which was not displayed in his work from 2004 and 2007. He sees the metaphysical questions as an important dimension of ‘not-knowing’, and as a fruitful experience in higher education for the students (and teachers) of really being caught up by an authentic experience and sense of mystery, wonder and awe.36 This dimension is crucial, he clams, for the teaching at the future universities not to collapse into self-sufficient and self-assured knowledge- and marked-oriented universities. He wants the future universities to connect (in new innovative ways of course) “…with sentiments of being, of spirit, wonder or even emancipation…”.37 If it does not achieve that, he is afraid that the university will “shrink”. What he calls for is a kind of “…re-enchantment for the university, for its epistemologies to be connected with the world and with improving wellbeing in the world…”.38

An Epistemological or Phenomenological Approach to Wonder

Now, I find this call for wonder and a re-enchantment of the university very sympathetic and necessary and I follow Barnett’s many convincing arguments for this request. Personally I have for the last ten years been working with

35 Barnett 2011, 13–20. 36 There seems to be a resemblance here between Archilla (1995) and Barnett (2011) in their sympathy with and emphasis on the importance of the open metaphysical questionings in higher education teaching. However, a further investigation into their possible similarities and differences will have to wait for a future comparison. 37 Barnett 2011, 16. 38 Barnett 2011, 30. 62 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen students in teacher training as well as training of other professionals (nurses, coaches, social workers, architects, designers, school managers, etc.) at my university in master courses in wonder-based dialogues and reflections—also called ‘Wonder Labs’.39 The students and other participants join these courses and Wonder Labs with the purpose of receiving a greater phenomenological sensitivity and Soc- ratic Bildung because they either see these wonder-based learning processes as (1) a kind of personal-academic development,40 (2) as a way to strengthen their ‘phronetic judgment’ in practice,41 (3) as a new way to cultivate a creative and innovative attitude and mindset,42 or (4) as a cultivation process for developing a dialogical and ‘negative capability’43 to facilitate Wonder Labs and Socratic Communities of Wonder in professional settings.44 These many years of working with learning and innovation in higher education through deep wonder have given me manifold experiences of different forms and gestalts of people being in ‘wonder’. It is also on the backdrop of these experiences that I now think that we can strengthen the argument for such a re-enchantment and call for wonder at the universities even more if we elaborate further on what we philosophically mean by ‘ontology’ and ‘being- in-the-world’ and what for instance the difference is between an ‘ontic’ wonder and an ‘ontological wonder’.45

39 Hansen 2015a, 2016. 40 Hansen 2011. 41 Hansen 2008, 2016. 42 Hansen 2014, 2016, 2018. 43 Keats, John. 2002 [1817]. Letters to G. and T. Keats, 21. December, 1817. In: G. Scott (ed.), Selected Letters of John Keats. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 59–64. 44 Hansen 2018. 45 As I have described more in detail in other places (Hansen, 2011, 2015a, 2018) and which is also elaborated and discussed by Keen, Sam. 1969. An Apology for Wonder. New York: Harper Collins; Arendt, Hannah. (1978). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt, Inc; Miller, Jerome. 1993. In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World. New York: SUNY Press; Rubenstein, Marie-Jane. 2011. Strange Wonder. The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press; Vasalou, Sophia. (ed.). 2012. Practices of Wonder. Cross-disciplinary Perspectives. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications; and Schinkel (2017, 2018) the phenomenology of wonder is today a very complex and branched field. The distinction between ontic and ontological wonder, or between active and passive wonder, or hermeneutic and phenomenological wonder, or explaining-seeking scientific wonder and wisdom- and love-seeking wonder, is just a few examples of how nuanced the discussion of the phenomenology of wonder is today. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 63

A key to understanding what ontology and ‘the ontological’ mean in the thinking of Heidegger is namely to understand his distinction between ‘the ontic’ and ‘the ontological’.46 Being in an ‘ontic’ relation with the world is when we are guided by the ‘common sense’ of functionality and pragmatic living, as well as being guided by a scientific (epistemological and methodolog- ical) way of thinking. Both approaches are led by cognitive, self-reflective and intentional consciousness. But to ‘be-in-the-world’ as a human being—that is, being present in where you are and what you say, think and do in an ontological and existential way— is quite another way of being! Dasein, or the existential self, must not be confused with the cognitive or transcendental ego as Heidegger so carefully argues.47 If we talk about ontology as “…a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them…” (when Googling the concept of ontology), or as the science of critical reflection on the basic assumptions, principles or theories humans have on what Being is, or what Language, Rationality, Consciousness or Understand- ing are, then we are only approaching ‘the ontological’ from an epistemological perspective. Thus, when Heidegger talks about ‘ontology’, it is the living ontology— the mood and felt and lived sense of being-in-the-world, not understood and explained in a psychological or cause-seeking way, but understood through a vivid phenomenological description of how a phenomenon is lived and shows itself when human beings live this phenomenon. This is also the reason why Heidegger insists that ontology can only be understood and practiced as a phenomenology.

Where Is the Phenomenological Dimension in Barnett’s Thinking?

When reading Barnett, I am surprised how little focus he seems to put on the phenomenological dimension of ‘being-in-the-world’. For example, when Barnett describes the basic conditions of a university, he only mentions four conditions: empirical, ideological, imaginative conditions and the condition of the value background.48 But none of these conditions can really capture

46 Heidegger, Martin. 1988. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 47 Heidegger 1998. 48 Barnett 2011, 60–61. 64 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen the phenomenological conditions. By referring, as Barnett does,49 to ‘the real’ as opposed to the ‘actual’ and ‘ideological’, and to a critical realism and ‘meta-realism’50 we are not opening us to the call of the phenomenon in a phenomenological way. Even if some, like Budd,51 connect critical realism and meta-realism to phenomenology, this only makes sense, as Michel52 shows, when thinking from within the epistemological and transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.53 If we follow late Heidegger and go even further with ethical phenomenologists like Levinas54 and Marion,55 we learn that the horizon of Dasein is limited. Before acknowledging this limitation, we must go from an ontic and epistemological approach to an ontological and existential relation with the world. This is what Barnett captures when talking about the existential and ontological learning processes guided by six dispositions: a will to learn, to engage, to hold oneself open to experiences, a preparedness to listen and explore and a determination to keep going forward.56

The Difference Between ‘Ontic’ and ‘Ontological’ Wonder

To wonder could indeed be one of the main qualities or six dispositions connected to what Barnett describes as the disposition to “hold oneself open to experience”. But taking a closer look we then have to be more clear on whether we are referring to an ‘ontic wonder’ or an ‘ontological wonder’.

49 Barnett 2011, 134–135. 50 Bhaskar 2002. 51 Budd, John. 2012. Phenomenological critical realism: A practical mMethod for LIS. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter): 69–80. 52 Michel, Torsten. 2012. In Heidegger’s shadow: a phenomenological critique of critical realism. Review of International Studies, Vol. 38: 209–222. 53 It is, though, important to notice, that the Marxist, materialistic and naturalistic worldview that is associated with ‘critical realism’, is later critically revised by Bhaskar (2002) himself with his notion of a ‘meta-realism’. This meta-reality is grounded in a non-dual, trans-individual spiritual worldview or mundane ‘practical mysticism’ with references to Buddhism and Taoism and other wisdom traditions. See: Morgan, Jamie. 2003. What is meta-reality? Journal of Critical Realism. Vol. 1, No. 2: 115–146. It is not clear whether Barnett connects to this ‘meta-realism’ or not, when writing with reference to Bhaskar (2002) that the universities “…have abandoned any sense of meta-reality in which they have their being”(Barnett 2011, 17). 54 Levinas 1998. 55 Marion 2002. 56 Barnett 2007, 102. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 65

Ontic wonder is problem-solution oriented and unfolds in the realm of the horizon of the cognitive, critical and intentional ego. One has to be open- minded and inventive and enterprising when dealing with problems, and the kind of wonder that occurs in these activities is typically the explaining- and solution-seeking wonder ‘about’ something. Schinkel57 calls this kind of wonder the “inquisitive wonder”. Heidegger would say that the scientific and explaining-seeking and solutions-seeking wonder is positioned in the ontic realm. Being in relation with the world through an ontic wonder will help us to explore and explain and master puzzling practical and scientific problems (ordinary as well as wicked problems). This is basically the form of wonder we find described in Egan et al.58 when they focus on wonder in education. Ontological wonder, on the other hand, is a philosophical wonder, where the ‘thatness’ of the world—that this flower, this person, this life, exist— suddenly and overwhelming is experienced in awe and wonder. The pragmatic and scientific explaining-seeking How- and Why-questions should not be confused with the phenomenological ‘How-the-phenomenon-shows-itself-question’ or the philosophical and existential ‘Why-question’. This kind of contemplation is evocated through an existential philosophical approach as well as an aesthetic one.

Is There Even a Pre-ontological Wonder?

Levinas59 and Marion60 want us to go a step further than Heidegger because they see a kind of phenomenological and apophatic61 wonder that emanates— comes to us as a spontaneous inflowing access of meaningfulness—in the encounter with the phenomenon in and by itself—before it, so to speak, hits

57 Schinkel 2017. 58 Egan, Kieran, Annabella Cant, and Gillian Judson (eds.). 2014. Wonder-Full Edu- cation. The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum. London: Routledge. 59 Levinas 1998. 60 Marion 2002. 61 The original meaning of ‘apophatic’ comes from a theological tradition connected to ‘Negative Theology’. In its philosophical term, as I use it here, it is connected to radical philosophizing as such, stating that whatever we come up with, in concepts and in language, will never grasp the surplus of the meaningfulness that emanates from life and the singular life phenomena as such, see: Franke, William. 2014. A Philosophy of the Unsayable. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Therefore a ‘apophatic wonder’ will indicate a pointing towards what cannot be said or written directly but only indirectly and in negation. 66 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen the coastline of, coagulates and is reduced within, our language and conceptu- alized understandings and even within the existential conditions (the existentials) that shape the existential understanding and meaning horizon of Dasein. In this respect, deep wonder flourishes and becomes visible in the acknowledgement of the Other, the Otherness or Thou of the phenomenon.62 Or said in another way: deep wonder happens in philosophizing wondrous moments, when the person tries to give, as Gabriel Marcel says, “a personal response to a call”.63 As I have earlier elaborated,64 this is the kind of pre-ontological wonder where we meet a saturated silence, a silence in excess with a strange abun- dance of meaningfulness. As an example of this silent voice of wonder, where the person experiences a strange resonance with life and the phenomena and materials she or he is engaged with, I will refer to a Danish designer at a design school. She was one of ten design teachers who took part in an phenomenological action research project,65 where wonder-based dialogues and phenomenological writing exercises were used (in the Wonder Lab) in order to inquire phenomenologically into the lifeworld and artistic and wondrous moments of a designer and design teacher. In her own phenomenological descriptions of her lived experience of being in those artistic and wondrous moments she writes:

The reason why I teach has to do with my own experiences of being in these rooms [the analytical room and the silent room, FTH], and maybe especially the ‘silent’…I can recall experiences here, which makes me deeply grateful, and which connects me with the world, get things to happen in front of my eyes through a presence in the actions my hands, the material and the mood I am in…I am not able to seperate these in the moment, when it happens. Hands, material and I are a whole….but I become humble after the event…quiet and grateful.66

When Dasein, or the existential self, are caught in this kind of deep wonder, the self is then—if we follow Levinas and Marion—at the very border of its own horizon, and only out there is it able to hear the Thou of the phenomenon, that is, the Otherness or, in short, the real and unfathomable Mystery of

62 See also Hepburn, Ronald. 1980. “Wonder: The inaugural address,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 54, 14. 63 Marcel, Gabriel. 1973. Tragic wisdom and beyond. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 3. 64 Hansen 2011, 2015a. 65 Hansen 2014. 66 Graabaek in Hansen 2014, 375–376 (my translation). Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 67 the phenomenon. This is what I call ‘ethical and phenomenological callings’. Here it is not the ‘thatness’ of the phenomenon, but a strange ‘givenness’ or excess of meaningfulness of the phenomenon that flows from the phenomenon towards the person, who is grasped by the phenomenon in wonder. In the same text, the designeralso described this moment as “an ethical appeal or as an experience of reverence towards life itself.”67

The Matrix of the Fourth Voice in Higher Education

Now, if we include this ethical phenomenological dimension inspired by Levi- nas and Marion we can draw a figure, which adds a fourth voice to the three voices of Barnett.68

Inspired by Martin Buber’s notion of an I-It- and an I-Thou-relation69 this matrix is basically grounded on a doublesided tension between, on the one hand, an I-It-relation (the Voice of Skills and the Voice of Knowing), and, on the other hand, an I-Thou-relation (the Voice of Being and the Voice of Eth- ical or phenomenological Callings). The I-It-relations are concerned with the ‘ontic matters’ whereas the I-Thou-relations are concerned with the ontological and pre-ontological matters.

67 Schweitzer, Albert. 1969. The Teaching of Reverence for Life. New York: Holt, Rine- hart & Winston. 68 And if we take Gerd Biesta’s three dimensions into account as well (Socialization, Qualification and Subjectification) the fourth dimension here could then be called Emanation. 69 Buber 2013. 68 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

This create four ‘learning spaces’: (1) a theoretical space guided by a scientific and inquiring mind and attitude (the scientific level of deduction), (2) a practical space guided by a pragmatic and problem-solving mind and attitude (the scientific level of induction), (3) a knowledge-based space of innovation guided by a curious and experimental mind and attitude (the scientific level of abduction), and (4) a wonder-based space of innovation guided by an wonderous, contemplative and existential mind and attitude (the level of phenomenological reduction). The first three spaces are led by an epistemological and knowledge-seeking approach: The first is focused on ‘that, which we know that we know and how to build further on that’. The second space is focused on ‘that which we do not know (theoretically) but know through practice’. The third space is focused on ‘that which we know that we do not know’ (epistemological aporia) and therefore seek to gain new knowledge and approaches to know better. The fourth space stands in contrast to the three others by being based on an ontological approach. This is the space which is focused on ‘that, which we do not know that we do not know—but are—or are called to become’. This space of wonder and existential contemplation is guided by a radical unknowing and a listening attitude towards openings of ‘being-in-the-world’ and ‘being-in-dialogue-with-the-Thou-of-the-phenomenon’. As Barnett advises us to consider, one should be careful not to make too strong a distinction between the epistemological and ontological dimension in higher education. Although it makes sense to make this distinction, we also have to acknowledge that they are—in real life—intertwined. Likewise, there will always be an ontic aspect of the ontological, as well as there will be an ontological aspect in the ontic. But you cannot see both at the same time. It’s like looking at the well-known Gestalt picture: You either see the rabbit or the duck. This matrix will help us to better acknowledge the phenomenological and ethical callings in higher education and why a phenomenon-centered and wonder-based approach is different than the existential and person-centered (self-authoring being-dimension) of Barnett, when he talks abut the Voice of Being. It can also show that when Barnett in his later writings talks about a ‘world-centred’ (society-oriented responsibility) approach to higher education it is not to be confused with the pre-ontological and phenomenological ethics and responsibility of Life itself as the philosophy of Buber, Levinas and Marion reveal. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 69

Some Implications When Taking a Wonder-based Approach to Innovation

Verganti70 and the discipline of Responsible Science and Innovation and Bar- nett help us to see that there is a missing dimension of meaning, ethics and being in most innovative research and in higher education learning theory. To ‘solve’ wicked problems in organizations of super complexity and in an age of uncertainty requires innovators, scientists and professionals that have a sense for the existential and ethical dimensions. Some ‘wicked problems’ might be mastered in the way Stacy71 and Ingerslev72 suggest—that is, basically through bringing in new unexpected expert knowledge and a decision-making that is guided by a trans-disciplinary field of professionals as well as politicians and lay people from the public domain. But my point, which I have argued in depth elsewhere73—is that often underneath the wicked problem there are some tacit philosophical assumptions and ideas and, even deeper, phenomenological experiences of what a human is and what a good human life is. These basic metaphysical and ethical assumptions, values and phenomenological experiences are seldom discussed. And if they are discussed—as also in the case of Verganti in his Interpreters Lab and “communities of critical inquiry”74—they are only reflected in a cognitive, critical and knowledge-based way.75 When supplying this cognitive and critical approach with a ‘third Being-dimension’ as Barnett does, we are, in my view, only going halfway. “Authentic self-creating” might bring us from a socialized and cognitive I to an emanci- pated and existential self, but it will not bring us into an encounter and dialogue with the phenomenological and meaning-giving “Thou” of life itself. This might happen in authentic ‘Communities of Wonder’, as I have described and also seen practiced in different professional domains.76

70 Verganti 2017. 71 Stacy 2003. 72 Ingerslev 2014. 73 Hansen 2018. 74 Verganti and Öberg, 2013; Verganti, 2017, 75 One may differ between a rational, cognitive and ontic form of critical reflection on the one hand, and on the other hand, an existential, ethical and phenomenological form of critical reflection. The latter helps us to be open towards the ontological dimension in higher education and critical towards those systems, practices and languages that narrow down our ability to ‘stand in the openness’ and prevent us from hearing the phenomenological and ethical callings of the situation and relations in a professional or educational setting. 76 Hansen, 2015a, 2018. 70 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

I have shown in different action research projects in the area of design teaching,77 existential and spiritual care in palliation in hospices,78 and innovation in public organizations79 and through my own courses in ‘wonder-based dialogues at the university,80 it is possible to create Wonder Labs and the required phenomenological and existential reflections in those different contexts. It is, though, beyond the scope of this essay to describe in detail how I design Wonder Labs and teach in wonder-based dialogues and reflections.81 What I leave as an open question is how we on the more administrative, structural and organizational level can make spaces and find ways to support and care for not only the Voice of Being but also for the Voice of the phenomenological and Ethical Callings. I do not think it is enough only to focus on the empirical, ideological, imaginative conditions and value background if we want to find a way for a re-enchantment of the university and to create a “new kind of metaphysical university”.82 Staying only on those four levels will make us reflect critically and pragmatically on an ontic and existentialist (Sar- trean) level. As I see it, we must also find ways to give space to and cultivate sensitiv- ities for the phenomenological lifeworld and for the ontological and pre-ontological levels in life from where deep wonder wells up. The cognitive and existentialistic eye will only be able to see how those existential and ethical life phenomena appear as constructed and shaped on the psychological (idiosyn- cratic), professional, organizational, cultural and political level. The contemplative, aesthetic and philosophical ‘wonder-eye’, on the other hand, is able to ‘see with the heart’. This is indeed what poets, philosophers, novelists and artists, and spiritual rituals and myths have a sense and musicality for. I think that when Steve Jobs asked for a marriage between technology and humanities he probably sensed the importance of this unfathomable life

77 Hansen, 2014. 78 Hansen, 2016. 79 Hansen, 2018. 80 See: https://www.communication.aau.dk/research/knowledge_groups/cdo/dia- loguelabs/wonderlab. 81 Currently, I am inquiring into how a more playful and an aesthetic approach might be an important supplement to the wonderous and philosophical approach, see: Thor- sted, Ann Charlotte. 2016. Communities of play: A collective unfolding. Interna- tional Journal of Play, Vol. 5, Issue 1: 28–46. At the University of Aalborg’s Centre for Dialogue and Organization, we now work with both Wonder and Play Labs, see: https://www.communication.aau.dk/research/knowledge_groups/cdo 82 Barnett 2011, 18. Learning to Innovate in Higher Education Through Deep Wonder 71 dimension and of the creative force in the sense of wonder that liberal arts and philosophers for thousand of years have kept alive.

Conclusion

My concluding remark will therefore be that university leaders and educators who want to work with and teach in meaning-driven and responsible innovation, and who wish indeed to enhance and cultivate a spirit and an atmosphere of wonder and a development towards a re-enchantment of the university, would benefit, I think, by finding a balance between technology and liberal arts, especially if this is done in respect of the four spaces and the four ‘voices’ in higher education, that I have sketched out in the matrix above. I have followed Barnett in his attempt to show the need for an ‘ontological turn in higher education’, but I have questioned and asked for a further qualification of his notion of the ‘Voice of Being’. This brought me to suggest two diffent ways of understanding, or opening up for, the ontological dimension in higher education. On the one hand, we have an ontology where the ‘Voice of Being,’ as Barnett describes it, is equal to the authentic inner self and his or her “self-creation”. On the other hand, we have an ontology where this voice emanates from the world or the phenomenon itself. This led me to a ‘fourth dimension’ in the philosophy of higher education, which I call ‘the Voice of the phenomenological and Ethical Call’ or ‘Emanation’. In his later works, Barnett points to the need for a more metaphysical voice or practice of wonder and questioning, but when talking about a ‘world-centred education’ this is not to be confused with the Otherness or Thou of the being-dimension. Here Buber, Levinas and Marion have an extra philosophical and phenomenological dimension, which I now have built into the Matrix of the Four Voices in Higher Education. This fourth dimension can, as we have seen, also help us to deepen the understanding of the difference between what researchers in entrepreneurship and innovation call ‘wicked problems’ and what I have called ‘delicate problems’. The latter are, as explained, not really problems to be solved but living mysteries to be released and embraced. In making this distinction I have made an argument for why radical and meaning-driven innovation in higher education can be nurtured by an ontological and possible also a pre-ontological wonder.83

83 For a more practical and ’how-to’-approach to ”wonder-based innovation” and how to facilitate Wonder Labs in higher eduation or professional work, see Hansen (2014, 2015, 2016, 2018). 72 Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

References

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4. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa: Accentuating Criticality As a Public Good

Nuraan Davids Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Yusef Waghid Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Abstract: The escalating anxiety surrounding public higher education in South Africa continues to be amplified by a rapidly expanding sector of private universities and colleges. Reasons and patterns for the privatisation of higher education are often supported and rationalised by a loss of faith in public institutions to deliver quality education. Not only are private institutions clear about their corporatist role, but they are equally emphatic about prioritising economic gains over meeting the needs of what remains a highly stratified society. Seemingly, the increasing privatisation of higher education adds to the complexity of the future of public higher education in South Africa. This article provides a two-fold interest: Firstly, whether the privatisation of university education can sustain reform concomitantly with the enhancement of alternatives to academic capitalism. Secondly, whether the envisaged complementarity between public and private higher education institutions can be extended towards fulfilling a pluralistic and sustainable public good.

Keywords: private higher education, South Africa, social reform, criticality, public good

Introduction

A university—by virtue of what it claims to do and deliver, in terms of epistemology, economic prosperity, as well as the public good—has always projected itself into the future. It operates and sustains itself on a mantra of a ‘promised life’, with a minute guarantee of that promise being actualised in the form of a formal qualification. Hence, even in the face of an incommensurability

© 2020 Nuraan Davids, Yusef Waghid - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.05 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 76 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid between student access and throughput, or between graduation and employment, students the world over aspire towards a future, which is seemingly only realisable through a formal university education. Thanks to the insti- tutionalised demise of apartheid, post-apartheid South Africa has subjected higher education to a series of face-lifts, with futuristic and instrumentalist promises of accessibility, employability, and hence, success. Inasmuch as more South Africans than ever are gaining entry to higher education, persistently relentless and often violent calls for free higher education, coupled with louder calls for decolonised university spaces, have raised more urgent and wider concerns about the public purpose of higher education, and with it, the future of the public university. Post-apartheid educational reform has ensured large-scale reconceptuali- sations and permutations of higher education—both in terms of policy and in the reconfigurations of a number of institutions. Institutional restructuring, by 2001, saw either the closure of the colleges of education, or their incor- poration into universities and technikons. The original 36 public higher education institutions (HEIs) were either merged, unbundled or incorporated to give rise to 11 traditional (research) universities that offer largely degree programmes, six comprehensive universities (one distance education institution in the form of the University of South Africa, also known as Unisa), and six universities of technology, which are intended to be vocationally and career-focused. Currently, South Africa has 26 public universities and 22 private higher education institutions. At the core of various iterations of reform is a yet to be fully realised objective of providing ‘a full spectrum of advanced educational opportunities for an expanding range of the population irrespec- tive of race, gender, age, creed or class or other forms of discrimination’.1 The initial aims, captured in the Education White Paper No. 3 finds continued expression in the National Plan for Higher Education, which, in turn, proposes the achievement of sixteen outcomes.2 These outcomes range from increasing student access, particularly of black communities into the university sector, to enhancing students’ cognitive abilities with respect to technical and professional competences that would not only ensure greater competitiveness in an ever-evolving labour economy, but also increased participation as democratic citizens in service of the ‘public good’.

1 Department of Education (DoE), Education White Paper No. 3: A Programme on the Transformation of Higher Education Transformation. Pretoria: Government Printers, 1997: 1.27. 2 Department of Education (DoE), National Plan for Higher Education. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2001. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 77

As acknowledged by Higher Education South Africa (HESA), a new, dif- ferentiated higher education institutional landscape has not adequately and justifiably addressed the past inequities, more specifically as they relate to the educational, material, financial and geographical elements of the (white) advantaged and the (black) disadvantaged.3 In particular, HESA highlights the under-developed institutional capacities of historically black institutions; the challenges of access pertaining to rural poor and working class black students; and inadequate state support for the historically black institutions to equalize the quality of undergraduate provision compromises their ability to facilitate equity of opportunity and outcomes.4 In turn, although South Africa has doubled the number of students in higher education since 1994, with the most notable increase being among black Africans, university students are drawn from a very small proportion of schools in the top socio-economic bands.5 While one of the major impediments for access to higher education is poor schooling outcomes, post schooling options are limited, with a weak vocational sector, leaving higher education as the only route to social mobili- t y. 6 Evidently, both the imagined higher education reform as well as the role of the university in democratic South Africa have either been seriously over-esti- mated, or poorly managed. Either way, the ensuing consequences of a higher education terrain, which remains largely disparate and out of the reach of the historically marginalised, have yielded to very distinct narratives. On the one hand, is the much-reported on series of student protests, characterised by the #rhodesmustfall movement and the #feesmustfall campaigns of 2015. On the other hand, is the steady emergence and consolidation of Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs). Traditionally, higher education has been strongly dominated by public provision and government regulation, especially in Europe.7 The nota-

3 Higher Education South Africa (HESA). South African higher education in the 20th year of democracy: Context, achievements and key challenges. HESA presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training in Parliament, 5 March 2014, Cape Town. http://www.hesa.org.za/hesa-presentationportfolio-committee-higher-education-and-training 4 Ibid, 11. 5 Jennifer Case, Delia Marshall, Sioux McKenna and Disaapele Mogashana, Going to University: The Influence of Higher Education on the Lives of Young South Africans. Cape Town: African Minds Higher Education Dynamics Series, 2018, 11. 6 Paul Ashwin and Jennifer Case, Higher Education Pathways: South African Under- graduate Education and the Public Good. Cape Town: African Minds, 2018, 5. 7 Pedro Teixeira, “Private higher education: A long history and a recent expansion,” in Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National 78 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid ble emergence of PHEIs is a global trend, and is especially evident in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and in some parts of Europe.8 In many countries PHEIs are outgrowing public institutions.9 One of the dominant factors promoting the role of PHEIs has been the continuous and strong expansion of this sector globally, even in countries and regions where, until recently, access to higher education was restricted to a very small minority.10 Fuelled by a combination of public policies and social demand, student numbers at PHEIs have surged worldwide. At the policy level, governments have increasingly regarded the advanced qualification of human resources as a key factor in promoting national economic competitiveness.11 In turn, the recent expansion of higher education has coincided with a period of increasing constraints on public expenditure that has affected higher education as well—for both richer and poorer.12 Tight national budgets, combined with increased demand for higher education and enrolments have forced countries to relax their controls over the provisioning and running of institutions, thereby creating a fertile environment for the growth of PHEIs.13 In Africa, the emergence of the private higher education sector, “seems to have benefited from the slow development of the public sector and the financial constraints of many African governments, which prevents them from keeping pace with the growing demands for higher education”.14 In South Africa, the rapid emergence of private higher education provision has been greeted with considerable concern by the public sector, which perceived it as a direct threat.15 This response, “was prompted in part by the coincidence in the late 1990s of private expansion and the unanticipated decline in public enrol- ment. There was speculation that eroding confidence in the quality of public

Policy Challenges, ed. Pedro Teixeira, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni and Zulfiqar Gilani. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017, 12. 8 Pedro Teixeira, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni and Zulfiqar Gilani, Zulfiqar, Re- thinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National Policy Challenges. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017, xi. 9 Pedro Teixeira and Pablo Landoni, “The rise of private higher education,” in Rethink- ing the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National Policy Challenges, ed. Pedro Teixeira, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni and Zulfiqar Gilani. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017, 24. 10 Teixera, “Private higher education: A long history and a recent expansion,” 12. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Teixera and Landoni, “The rise of private higher education,” 21. 14 Teixera, “Private Higher Education: A long history and a recent expansion,” 8. 15 George Subotzky, “The nature of the private higher education sector in South Africa: Further quantitative glimpses,” Perspectives in Education 20, no. 4 (2002): 1–15. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 79 provision and its ability to prepare individuals for the labour market was causing students to vote with their feet.”16 PHEIs in South Africa are defined by a wide range of service providers, which offers an array of qualifications—from certificates to doctorates, as well as an assortment of programmes, which include Business Administration and Management, Information Technology, Religion, Marketing and Public Relations, Aromatherapy and Reflexology, Architecture and Manufacturing, and Communication, Media and Journalism. According to statistics compiled by the Department of Higher Education and Training, South Africa has 125 registered PHEIs.17 The diverse offerings in PHEIs are indicative of the contention that “The expansion of the private sector has been marked by (a largely demand driven) institutional differentiation within national and regional systems.”18 In line with regulatory patterns encountered in other countries, all higher education institutions (public and private) have to accredit their programmes with the Council on Higher Education (CHE); and register each qualification with the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), which registers and records the qualification in the National Learner Records Database (NLRD). In terms of student demographics at PHEIs, African black students constitute the majority at approximately 65,000, followed by 27,000 white students.19 For the purposes of this article, however, we are not interested in the broad category of PHEIs. Rather, our concern is with private universities, which specifically see themselves as fulfilling a complementary function to public universities, but, that, in terms of DHET regulations, are not allowed to refer to themselves as universities. In light of this regulatory restriction, we will proceed by distinguishing between public universities and private ‘universities’. We commence by reflecting on the emergence of private ‘universities’ in South Africa, while taking a simultaneous account of a highly volatile higher education landscape.

16 Ibid., 1. 17 Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), Higher Education Act 101 of 1997: Regulations for the registration of private higher education institutions. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2016. 18 Teixera and Landoni, “The rise of private higher education,” 21. 19 Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), 2016. 80 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid

The Expansion of Private Higher Education in South Africa

The expansion and function of private ‘universities’ in South Africa is supported by a view by the National Plan for Higher Education, which sees the existence of these ‘universities’ as complementary, rather than threatening.20 The idea of a complementary relationship between public and private HEIs is one supported by Levy, who asserts that whether based on gender, religion or ethnicity, private HEIs “tend to promote a partly distinctive development approach as compared to that in the public sector.”21 Similarly, the potentially complementary role that PHEIs could play in human resource development in South Africa could and should extend to conducting research.22 While the public sector approach emphasizes national unity, common purpose, and a strong, centralized, identifiable public pursuit, the private approach emphasizes particular group pursuits involving distinctive roles and places within a varied, pluralistic, development context.23 In this sense, “the private approach is thus much more compatible with inter-sectoral higher education relations that involve complementary or competitive roles, though not precluding elements of commonality or cooperation.”24 Given the relative newness of private HEIs in South Africa—only emerging since 1995—it is not abundantly clear whether the views expressed in the National Plan for Higher Education or by Levy reflect a correct assessment of the relationship between private and public HEIs, or between private HEIs and the state. What we do know, and as will be highlighted in the ensuing discussion, is that the existence of private HEIs in South Africa raises many complex unan- swered questions. At the heart of these questions is the concern of the role of the university as a public good, and how well, or indeed, if at all, private ‘universities’, in particular, complement this public good. In other words, are private ‘universities’ in South Africa geared at fulfilling a complementary role of pluralistic and sustainable development? In addressing this question, it is

20 Department of Education (DoE), National Plan for Higher Education. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2001. 21 Daniel C. Levy, “Public-private interfaces in higher education development: Two sectors in sync?” Paper for Conference on Higher Education and Development, 1–22. The 2007 World Bank Regional Seminar on Development Economics, Beijing, 2006, 7. 22 George Subotzky, “Private Higher Education and Training,” in Human Sciences Re- search Council Human Resources Development Review. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2003. 23 Levy, “Public-private interfaces in higher education development: Two sectors in sync?” 7 24 Ibid. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 81 necessary to understand the promulgation of PHEIs in post-apartheid South Africa, how they conceive of their roles within a broader higher education context, and why they attract students. On one level, it is logical to conceive of the proliferation of private ‘universities’ in South Africa as an inevitable response to the massification of higher education and the inadequacy of student funding. It is important to note— as amplified during the #feesmustfall campaigns—that prohibitive tuition costs continue to stratify students along the lines of historically advantaged and historically disadvantaged, thereby paralysing substantive socio-economic reform. According to the White Paper on Higher Education,

The Ministry recognises that private provision plays an important role in expanding access to higher education, in particular in niche areas, through responding to labour market opportunities and student demand. The key challenge in expanding the role of private institutions is to create an environment which neither suffo- cates educationally sound and private institutions with state over-regulation, nor allows a plethora of poor quality, unsustainable ‘fly-by-night’ operators into the higher education market.25

Following the above view, the Council on Higher Education (CHE) con- tends that given the expansion of private ‘universities’ and PHEIs as a sector, there is a critical need to take due consideration of their respective roles and potential contribution in relation to both higher education and societal gains.26 Moreover, the CHE maintains that it is necessary that these service providers are managed “in a regulatory framework that not only ensures that they will uphold quality standards but also that they will be important actors in the achievement of a transformed single coordinated higher education system capable of serving broader societal needs.”27 In sum, while the CHE views the prevalence of PHEIs as a necessary partner in higher education, it also recognises and emphasises a regulatory approach to their existence and their functions. The experience of PHEIs in relation to the role of the CHE is not necessarily only understood as regulatory. PHEIs report experiencing unrelenting pressure to expand access opportunities to students, while also

25 Department of Education (DoE), Education White Paper No. 3: A Programme on the Transformation of Higher Education Transformation. Pretoria: Government Printers, 1997. 26 Council on Higher Education (CHE), The State of Private Higher Education in South Africa. Higher Education Monitor, no. 1. Pretoria: The Council on Higher Education, 2003. 27 CHE, 2003, 1. 82 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid improving their current educational quality, but without any funding pros- pects from government.28 It is important, however, to note that although a significant number of PHEIs, in general, and private ‘universities’, specifically, attract students because of their lower fee structures, all PHEIs do not necessarily charge less expensive tuition fees. The types of PHEIs in South Africa are quite diverse— both in terms of their focus and content offerings, as well as their economic targeting. For many South African parents and students (as is the case elsewhere), the idea of ‘private’ is often associated with ‘quality’. Consequently, parents and students are prepared to pay a lot more at private ‘universities’ than at public universities, but demand quality education and a better student experience.29 On another level, South Africa’s shift into a democratic climate has invited all its additional symbols, most notably encompassed within a neoliberalist imperative. Public universities, though ‘public’ rely heavily on corporatist funding and investment, and become less reliant, or less willing to rely on the state. Public universities charge high tuition fees because this is what the commodification of knowledge entails. Excessive tuition fees are justified on the basis that it benefits the individual, thereby rendering university education as a private good.30 The patterns followed by private ‘universities’ are not any different—they, too, hold onto the same neoliberal prosperity by serving their own good. As such, there are no no-profitable private ‘universities’ in South Africa, which means that these ‘universities’ serve individual and private interests. The point being made here, is that although a distinction is made between public and private universities by virtue of their status in relation to the state, notions of private and privatisation are not limited to private ‘universities’. The trend towards privatisation also has meaning in the public sector where institutions are being encouraged to decrease their dependence on public funds, to be more “entrepreneurial” and competitive, and to demonstrate efficient professional management.31 In the South African context, public universities have

28 L. Froneman, “Private higher educational institutions in a changing South African environment,” Acta Commercii 2 (2002): 35–44. 29 Peter Materu, “Higher education quality assurance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Sta- tus, challenges, opportunities and promising practices,” World Bank Working Paper, 2007. 30 Philip G. Altbach, Liz Reisberg, and Laura E. Rumbley, Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution. A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education. Paris: UNESCO, 2009. 31 Ibid, 79. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 83 no choice but to continually seek means of third and other streams of funding; it has become crucial to their overall strategies, and hence, wellbeing. On yet another level, the emergence and thriving of private HEIs in South Africa can be ascribed to the country’s favourable constitutional conditions.32 Despite these favourable conditions, the regulatory role of the state, which includes the provision of window-periods; de-accreditation of certain Masters in business administration programmes; and moratoriums being placed on new partnerships, including the use of the terminology ‘university’—creating an impression of a somewhat “restrictive welcoming”.33 Seemingly, the sense of a “restrictive welcoming” is not unfounded. According to a report by the CHE, “a significant segment of private higher education provision seems to be characterised by a qualification upward creep which distorts the value of higher education degrees.”34 Secondly, the report suggests that, at this time, there is insufficient evidence to suggest that PHEIs are particularly responsive to the socio-economic needs of the country. Instead, they apparently exist for their own private gain and purpose. In this regard, the localisation of private providers in economic hubs seems to be more related to the availability of a money supply in the form of fees than to a conscious response to skills development needs. Thirdly, despite the predom- inance of a vocational orientation among the offerings, it is noteworthy that with the exception of information technology, and to a minor extent business administration, none of the programme offerings respond to the explicit skills needs of the country, especially in relation to science, engineering and technology.35 The fourth concern centres on both teacher/lecturer and student preparedness. On the one hand, even those programmes, which respond to actual market and national skills needs, do not always offer the necessary knowledge, skills and competencies needed by young higher education graduates.36 On the other hand, given the level at which these courses are taught, no doubt as a consequence of the low admission criteria, students are not actually ready to be trained adequately, for example in maths and programming, to enter the job market successfully.37

32 Beverly Thaver, “The private higher education sector in Africa: Current trends and themes in six country studies,” Journal of Higher Education in Africa 6, no. 1 (2008): 127–142. 33 Ibid., 138. 34 CHE, 2003, 3. 35 Ibid., 8. 36 Ibid., 9. 37 Ibid. 84 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid

The additional concern linked to the responsiveness of private ‘universities’ to the socio-economic needs of South Africa, pertains to the issue of research. A report by the CHE found that the contribution of PHEIs to national research production is limited.38 Seemingly, since the publishing of the CHE report, nearly a decade ago, very little is known about, whether, and what kinds of research are being undertaken at PHEIs.39 One of the most important drivers of research is the availability of funding. Unlike public universities, private ‘universities’ in South Africa do not qualify for subsidies on research outputs. Because PHEIs do not qualify for subsidy on research output, these institutions might not consider research as critical to their business.40 Rather than generating income, research would incur additional expense. Furthermore, PHEIs that do not offer postgraduate courses might not necessarily have adequate capacity to engage meaningfully with research, or see the need to do so in the absence of higher degree offerings in their institutions.41 Despite almost two decades of development of the PHEI sector, “there are only a few pockets of good research at PHEIs, only a handful of good researchers, and a smatter- ing of quality research outputs.”42 In sum, the CHE report has put a question mark on the actual responsiveness of PHEIs’ offerings to the economic needs of the country and has suggested that the creation of a market for students is not the same thing as being responsive to the market.43 It is interesting to note that while the role of PHEIs is described as “demand-absorbing”, this demand is not necessarily created by over-crowding at public universities.44 If one takes into account the concerns raised by the CHE report regarding low levels of student admission criteria, then students are very clearly opting for private ‘universities’ because they do not qualify to access public universities. Seemingly, the low admission student criteria are met by, at times, an equally low base of knowledge and

38 CHE, The State of Higher Education in South Africa. Higher Education Monitor no. 8. October. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education, 2009. 39 Roger Deacon, Rex van Vuuren and Dave Augustyn, “Research at private higher education institutions in South Africa,” Perspectives in Education 32, no. 3 (2014): 5–21. 40 Ibid, 16. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 20. 43 CHE, 2003, 47. 44 Altbach et al., Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution, 2009. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 85 skills by teachers/lecturers within the private sector.45 In this sense, massification has yielded to a lowering of standards. There are a number of key issues here that warrant consideration. In spite of stringent regulations, there is no indication that the growth of private ‘universities’ in South Africa will be anything but steady. As the gap between the historically privileged and historically disenfranchised widens, the demand for university education increases. There are clear limits to the capacity of public universities to accommodate the increasing numbers of students, not only in terms of access, but also in terms of attending to the financial constraints, experienced by the majority of students. To this end, private ‘universities’ are filling the gaps left by the incapacity of public universities; private ‘universities’ constitute a “feed-off ” to the infrastructural base of public universities.46 Furthermore, if students are not being adequately trained to enter the job market, and if private ‘universities’ are not operating in a responsive manner to the market, then the chances of socio-economic transformation remains elusive not only for ‘university’ graduates, but for the state. As emphasised in the CHE (2003, 47) report, transformation cannot exist without quality.47

Private Higher Education and Calls for Free Education

Seemingly, the increasing privatisation of higher education adds to the complexity of the future of public higher education in South Africa. The interests of this essay lies, firstly, in considering whether the privatisation of university education can sustain reform concomitantly with the enhancement of alternatives to academic capitalism. And secondly, whether the envisaged complementarity between public and private higher education institutions can be extended towards fulfilling the public good of an equally complementary role in relation to pluralistic and sustainable development. Unlike some higher education analyses, in particular that of the CHE and many critical scholarly contributions in the country, our analysis is underscored by a post-critical turn.48 In this sense, we are attracted to post-structur- alist thought whereby we look at both a critical and post-critical dimension of higher educational discourse. Our paradigmatic orientation is critical in the

45 CHE, 2003, 48. 46 Thaver, “The private higher education sector in Africa: Current trends and themes in six country studies,” 138. 47 CHE, 2003, 47. 48 Council on Higher Education (CHE), South African Higher Education Reviewed: Two Decades of Democracy. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education, 2016. 86 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid sense that we, like the CHE contributors, envisage a transformative change in higher education vis-à-vis equitable redress and democratisation of education. However, as post-critical scholars we are also concerned about what becomes of higher education beyond achieving equitable and democratic transformation. And, our philosophical positioning, in a way, is connected to a denudation of higher education discourse—that is, one that requires of us to clarify “beyond all mystery and all meaning”.49 When one embarks on denudation one says everything she thinks and “to perceive its pure knowability beyond every secret, beyond or before its objective predicates.”50 This does not imply that we will ever know everything in and about higher education transformation, but what we know and present would not be veiled. In other words, what we know becomes a quivering in which the image (of higher education analyses) allows itself to be known.51 Mistrust in public higher education is growing in South Africa on the grounds, that its delivery has mostly being associated with inept curricula implementation in the public higher education sector considering that inter- ruptions in its expedition have been reinforced by student protestations and absence from formal classes especially prior to examinations; and, university managers’ reluctance to over-extend its teaching time, especially at formal historically disadvantaged universities. For many students and their parents, private higher education would at least guarantee students’ attainment of a formal qualification that could advantage them in an ever-increasing competitive labour market economy. The latter seems to be the understanding—at least, in theory. In practice, however, as captured in the aforementioned discussion, students are not necessarily opting for private ‘universities’ because public universities cannot offer them spaces. Rather they are opting for private ‘universities’ because the criteria for access are lower than that at public universities. The criticism of exorbitant payment of tuition fees seems to be reserved for public universities, as in many instances, fees at private ‘universities’ are much higher than at public universities. In addition, the escalation of private higher education in the country also seems to favour already privileged communities in the sense that such communities can afford to pay for rising costs in tuition fees and scholarly resources such as text books and access to online course materials. In a way, privatisation of higher education is commensurate

49 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities. Trans. D. Kishikand S. Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, 81. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 83. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 87 with an intensification of student inequality and access to private ‘universities’. Although, privatisation of higher education, in some instances, can address some of the curricular weaknesses prevalent in existing public higher education mostly exacerbated by a loss of time on tasks due to student disruptions, it also has the potential to further deepen existing inequalities in students’ learning. Simply put, private higher education can further stretch the malaise in students’ learning in public higher education on the basis that their (students) uninterrupted access to higher education invariably gives them an epistemological edge over other students in the public sector and by implication, in the country. However, inasmuch as private ‘universities’ might purport to have a curricular and or epistemological edge unequally over public higher education in the country, it seems as if the private sector is not as amiable to developments of a transformative kind. Here, we specifically refer to the accentuation and implementation of university curricula that seem to undermine hegemonic discourses often associated with an imposition of power and power relations among students and academics. We specifically refer to university curricula that seem to be prejudiced towards accentuating an uncritical pedagogy that works against a pedagogy of resistance. University curricula are replete with pedagogical enunciations that seem to pay very little attention to inclusion and emancipation. And, often, the onus has been placed on university students to identify the pedagogical inconsistencies and exclusions in such curricula. Notably, the persistent uncritical references to enunciations of the colo- nial and apartheid past in South Africa, lauded by some, and painstakingly challenged by many, especially formerly disadvantaged students, has brought public higher education into sharper focus and, we should add, disrepute. It is often claimed that although curricular concerns of the latter kind can legitimately be taken up in public higher education, private higher education seemed to have offered little opportunity for students and university teachers to undermine its hegemonic discourses and by implication, claims of truth. Furthermore, the emphasis of private higher education on academic capitalism—that is, focusing solely on the settlement of tuition fees often at the expense of a responsive decolonial type of higher education—invariably brings it into disrepute with plausible academic advancement. For us, it is equally important to acquire a formal qualification that is responsive to a transformative agenda in South Africa, than to simply focus on the exclusive attainment of such a qualification. That is, we are concerned with a higher education sector that is both credible in terms of its success to produce graduates, as well as the criticality of graduates’ transformative and emancipatory higher education. It does not always seem as if the latter—critical human 88 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid agency—can productively be attained by private higher education. Hence, our disconcertedness with such a form of private higher education. South African higher education cannot just be overwhelmingly concerned with producing graduates that are eloquently geared towards fitting into a new society in which the commodification knowledge holds sway. Rather, we contend that higher education also needs to produce critical students who can competently deal with the forms of inequality and inequity that persist in our societies. Consequently, we show a measured reluctance to embrace an uncritical form of private higher education. Unless, private higher education can also cultivate the kind of critical human agency associated with public higher education in the country, we are not convinced that the privatisation of university education in South Africa might be transformative enough and helpful to the country’s higher education sector at all. A higher education system that is not prepared to engen- der critical human agency in its discourses, would not adequately shape the democratic educational agenda in the country. For us, the democratisation of higher education requires that the sector produces academics and students that would be open and willing to engage with the prejudices which continue to beset our education system. This means, unless students and university academics do take seriously what deliberative inquiry, academic inclusion, and, equitable and equal learning bring to higher education, privatisation of universities would not contribute largely to such a transformative higher education agenda.

Higher Education, Social Reform, and the Public Good

Already more than a decade ago, arguments have been made that South African universities (public and presumably, private) should simultaneously retain its status as a community of reason through the construction of disciplinary knowledge or producing knowledge for its own sake, and fulfill its social mission in the process of nation building and development—a matter of producing socially distributed knowledge in the quest to be responsive to the social, economic and political injustices that continue to afflict the continent.52 Similarly, strong arguments have been made that to avoid further putting the continent at risk, South African and African universities should advance scientific knowledge for peace, human security, the environment, social and gender equality, individual and collective liberty, and rigorous research agendas

52 Yusef Waghid, “Rationality and the role of the university: A response to Philip Higgs,” South African Journal of Higher Education 16, no. 2 (2002):18–24. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 89 for social progress.53 As already hinted at in this essay, bold steps have indeed been taken via higher education reform to re-define and re-shape the role of higher education in relation to political, social and economic reform. In turn, the proliferation of PHEIs and private ‘universities’ have taken on ambiguous forms, roles, and hence receptions. Their ambiguity is seemingly mixed with concerns of low access criteria; poorly qualified and trained lecturers; ques- tionable curricula; and equally poorly trained and prepared student graduates. In spite of these concerns, and many more detailed and systemic ones, as raised in the CHE report, the growth, and hence, influence of private ‘universities’ on the South African landscape does not seem to decelerating.54 We would hasten to add and emphasise that it is not our argument that private ‘universities’ should not exist. We are of the opinion that not only is a complementary relationship between public and private HEIs possible, it is, in fact, desirable in a country where public education is in dire need of both support and productive competition with regard to particularistic development and social reform. Quite simply, in light of the myriad and complex challenges, which continue to loom over public universities, the potential role and contribution of PHEIs can be a social and economic relief, if, and only if, government succeeds not only in its regulatory role, but more importantly, in its political responsibility to public HEIs. At this stage, neither role nor responsibility seems to evoke too much comfort. In terms of the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE), the key challenges facing the South African higher education system are redressing past inequalities, transforming the higher education system to serve a new social order, meeting pressing national needs, and responding to new realities and opportunities.55 More than two decades have passed since these challenges have been identified. In the meantime new mergers between public HEIs have taken shape, and private HEIs continue to sprout. Yet, as made apparent in the most recent student protests, while much has been restructured, very little has changed. A new social order, which many see as possible through a systemic process of decolonisation, has yet to be thoroughly debated and conceptualised, let alone actualised. Pressing national needs have been increased with even more pressing needs—at the heart of which is not only the roles

53 N’Dri Assié-Lumumba and Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo, 2011. “The idea of the public university and the national project in Africa,” in Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University, ed. Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 283. 54 CHE, 2003. 55 Department of Education (DoE), National Plan for Higher Education. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2001, 4. 90 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid and responsibilities of public and private HEIs in South Africa, but in and for Africa. As for the new realities—these have not changed since the old ones were made abundantly clear, even before the onset of democracy. Historically disadvantaged, black students, and especially those from rural communities, continue to struggle to access HEIs—whether public or private. Even upon accessing, they face unrecorded odds in retaining their positions and identities as students, and they face challenges to finally obtain the goal of graduating. For as long as the social and economic reform—as declared in every single HE policy—remains missing from the society in which all HEIs find themselves, it is reasonable to conclude that the public and private HEIs alike have yet to realise and embody their social and societal responsibilities. We concur with, and reiterate the findings of the CHE that changing the higher education environment cannot just be about initiating empirical changes, such as enhancing access in the demography of its students; increasing research outputs; working towards international recognition; and merely paying increased attention to teaching and learning.56 A reimagined higher education landscape would need to call upon a reconsideration and re-articu- lation of how post-apartheid South Africa understands, responds to, and ini- tiates change. Our contention is that for higher education to experience any form of legitimate change, teaching and learning ought to be underscored and guided by a notion of criticality that requires of students and university teachers to be more reflective, analytical, and responsive to societal developments. In other words, it is through criticality that teaching and learning can become more responsive to addressing societal inequalities, and individual social mobility, thereby speaking to the public good. Inasmuch as it is both possible and desirable for public and PHEIs to complement and enhance each other, this complementarity has to serve the public good. How this public good is to be achieved is to pause in the moment—to listen, and to reflect not only upon the purpose of higher education, but on the purpose of democracy within a context, such as South Africa. As aptly enunciated by the CHE, teaching and learning in South African higher education “has not yet achieved its potential in becoming a deliberative encounter.”57 Through deliberative encounters students and teachers are sum- moned to engage with one another on account of justification and argumen- tation. They are expected to justify their truth claims on the basis of plausible evidence and thinking that invokes autonomous action and responsiveness

56 CHE, 2016. 57 Ibid, 169. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 91 towards one another. That is, criticality requires of students and university teachers to invite one another on the grounds of engagement and concern for the other. They do not just see things in a critical light but also look at things as they could be otherwise such as how dissent and diversity of understandings can cultivate enhanced social identities. And, through deliberative encounters, the potential for criticality will be much more enhanced. In conclusion, this essay has attempted to offer some insights into the existence and roles of PHEIs and specifically, private ‘universities’ in South Africa. Specific attention has been paid to whether private ‘universities’ are positioned to serve the public good of a society, which finds itself in a strife- filled higher education domain and time. At the core of free higher education in South Africa is an implicit call for critical human agency—that is, the production of students who can engage deliberatively, think critically, and contribute towards an emancipatory society based on equality and equity. Free higher education cannot parochially be looked at vis-à-vis university access without tuition fees. Such universities would, in the first place, not be free! Freedom only comes when learning and speech can manifest unconstrainedly in the higher education sector. And, if private higher education cannot be responsive to the latter—and it seems to be the case in South Africa—then such universities cannot justifiably accentuate their statuses as higher education institutions. Of course, in line with our denudative analyses, we envisage that not everything about higher education transformation can ever be known in advance. However, some of the mysterious possibilities that ought to show their face within the realm of imagination would be tied to the capacity of higher education practitioners to resist and hold students in suspension, and to return higher education to a present “where we have never seen”—that is, one that shows a potential to create a new higher education discourse that remains pending.58 Finally, producing critical university students on the part of higher education, both private and public in South Africa is necessary. But then, such a form of higher education ought to be more concerned with at least two matters: First, that university academics and students become more open and reflexive to that which they value, that is, their epistemologies and curricular concerns. Learning to become reflexively open to what they are deeply attached to or to that which they are initiated into, is a matter of taken their own learning into some sort of critical controversy. Yet, and secondly, being critical about their indigenous knowledges, is not enough as they should also

58 Agamben, Nudities, 7, 18. 92 Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid become openly and reflexively critical to that which is still in becoming—a matter of remaining open and reflexive to that which is still to come.59 If the latter occurs, higher education—be it private or public—can fulfil a much more credible and justifiable academic task in the quest of cultivating multiple forms of knowledges.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Nudities. Trans. D. Kishik and S. Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Altbach, Philip G., Liz Reisberg, and Laura E. Rumbley. Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution. A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education. Paris: UNESCO, 2009. Assié-Lumumba, N’Dri T., and Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo. “The idea of the public university and the national project in Africa.” In Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University, edited by Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun, 251–89. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Ashwin, Paul, and Jennifer Case. Higher Education Pathways: South African Undergraduate Education and the Public Good. Cape Town: African Minds, 2018. Case, Jennifer, Delia Marshall, Sioux McKenna, and Disaapele Mogashana. Going to University: The Influence of Higher Education on the Lives of Young South Africans. Cape Town: African Minds Higher Education Dynamics Series, 2018. Council on Higher Education (CHE). The State of Private Higher Education in South Africa. Higher Education Monitor, no. 1. Pretoria: The Council on Higher Education, 2003. Council on Higher Education (CHE). The State of Higher Education in South Africa. Higher Education Monitor, no. 8. October. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education, 2009. Council on Higher Education (CHE). South African Higher Education Reviewed: Two Decades of Democracy. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education, 2016. Deacon, Roger, Rex Van Vuuren, and Dave Augustyn. “Research at private higher education institutions in South Africa.” Perspectives in Education 32, no. 3 (2014): 5–21. Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). Higher Education Act 101 of 1997: Regulations for the registration of private higher education institutions. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2016. Department of Education (DoE). Education White Paper No. 3: A Programme on the Transformation of Higher Education Transformation. Pretoria: Government Printers, 1997. Department of Education (DoE). National Plan for Higher Education. Pretoria: Government Printers, 2001. Froneman, L. “Private higher educational institutions in a changing South African environment.” Acta Commercii 2 (2002): 35–44.

59 David T. Hansen, The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Educa- tion. New York & London: Routledge, 2011. On the Polemic of Private Higher Education in South Africa 93

Hansen, David T. The Teacher and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Higher Education South Africa (HESA). South African Higher Education in the 20th year of Democracy: Context, Achievements and Key Challenges. HESA presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education and Training in Parliament, 5 March, Cape Town. Retrieved from http://pmg-assets.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws. com/140305hesa.pdf Kruss, Glenda, and Andre Kraak. “A contested good? Understanding private higher education in South Africa.” Perspectives in Education 20, no. 4 (2002): ix–xiii. Levy, Daniel C. “Public-private interfaces in higher education development: Two sectors in sync?” Paper for Conference on Higher Education and Development, 1–22. The 2007 World Bank Regional Seminar on Development Economics, Beijing, 2006. Materu, Peter. “Higher education quality assurance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Status, challenges, opportunities and promising practices.” World Bank Working Paper, 2007. Subotzky, George. “The nature of the private higher education sector in South Africa: Further quantitative glimpses.” Perspectives in Education 20, no. 4 (2002): 1–15. Subotzky, George. “Private higher education and training.” In Human Sciences Research Council Human Resources Development Review. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2003. Teixeira, Pedro. “Private higher education: A long history and a recent expansion.” In Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National Policy Challenges, edited by Pedro Teixeira, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni and Zulfiqar Gilani, 3–20. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017. Teixeira, Pedro, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni, and Zulfiqar Gilani. Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National Policy Challenges. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017. Texeira, Pedro, and Pablo Landoni. “The rise of private higher education.” In Rethinking the Public-Private Mix in Higher Education: Global Trends and National Policy Challenges, edited by Pedro Teixeira, Sungwoong Kim, Pablo Landoni and Zulfiqar Gilani, 21–34. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017. Thaver, Beverly. “The private higher education sector in Africa: Current trends and themes in six country studies.” Journal of Higher Education in Africa 6, no. 1 (2008): 127–142. Waghid, Yusef. “Rationality and the role of the university: A response to Philip Higgs.” South African Journal of Higher Education 16, no. 2 (2002):18–24.

Part 2: Sightings of the Future University

5. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University

Bruce Macfarlane University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: The changing role and interpretation of values within higher education and its curriculum needs to be understood by reference to a series of (re)appropriations connected with the successive influences of the church, the state and, more latterly, the market. This essay explores the role played by religious, democratic, performative and transformative values and argues that the university has become increasingly self-conscious in endorsing values of positionality that have largely displaced values for learning. This shifting meta-narrative poses a threat to academic freedom on campus by validating contemporary normative values, such as global citizenship, social justice and sustainable development, as opposed to providing students with the learning environment they need to scrutinise knowledge claims critically. The future university needs to reclaim the centrality of democratic values as a means of nurturing and protecting student academic freedom and maintaining a genuinely ‘higher’ education in which students can learn in peace.

Keywords: values, curriculum, positionality, academic freedom, liberal education

Introduction

This essay1 explores the evolution in the interpretation of values in higher education with particular reference to the curriculum. Such values have been the subject of regular and ongoing re-interpretation over several hundred years, re-shaped as the sponsor of the university has passed from the church to the state and, more latterly, become subject to the effects of global market forces. The university, and the education it offers, has reflected these shifting influences through the way in which the transmission of values to students is understood. The affect has been appropriated and re-appropriated according to the social milieu. A key element of my argument is that values understood

1 I would like to thank Mayble Pitt for proofreading the manuscript. © 2020 Bruce Macfarlane - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.06 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 98 Bruce Macfarlane in the liberal education tradition for much of the twentieth century, or what I call ‘values for learning’, have been supplanted by values shaped by a more self-conscious and performative age which I label ‘values of positionality’. Values for learning are about respecting democratic principles necessary to participate and learn in higher education with an emphasis on tolerance and a willingness to listen to the views of others. Values of positionality, by contrast, are about the endorsement of contemporary social and political values, such as global citizenship or sustainable development, that sanctify such beliefs as beyond the bounds of academic scrutiny. I argue that the institutionalisation of values of positionality threatens the academic freedom of students to contest the knowledge claims they encapsulate, closing down rather than opening up ideas to critical scrutiny. In tracing the reinterpretation of values, this essay draws on the concept of student performativity defined as the measurement of observable student behaviour and attitudes audited in a public learning space.2 This phenomenon has grown as universities have instituted student engagement policies in response to financial penalties imposed by governments in relation to student non-completion. Student engagement policies impose strict rules and often grade incentives in relation to the attendance of lectures and other classes, the assessment of class participation via other easily audited means, such as asking questions or making other oral contributions, and compliance with the social values promoted by the university, such as global citizenship. Students are subject to increasing surveillance as a result of universities deploying the technology of learning analytics to monitor their ‘engagement’ via data col- lected through online learning and swipe cards. These systems are a very real illustration of the way in which Foucault’s panopticon is now a contemporary reality in the modern university. The students are the prisoners spied on and controlled by the surveillance technology of the twenty-first century.

The Appropriation of the Affect

When talk of the school or higher education curriculum occurs it invariably involves reference to a three-fold classification of educational aims in terms of knowledge, values and skills. This draws on classic definitions of learning

2 Bruce Macfarlane, “Student performativity in higher education: Converting learning as a private space into a public performance”, Higher Education Research and Devel- opment, 34, no. 2 (2015): 338–350. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 99 objectives in education, notably the one associated with Bloom3 who identified three domains: the cognitive (knowledge), the affective (values and attitudes) and the psychomotor (action-based skills). Bloom’s classification applies to all phases of education and can often be found, either implicitly or explicitly, in both theoretical and policy-based analyses of the aims of higher education. In addressing the higher education curriculum, Bligh, Thomas and McNay4 summarise its aims by reference to cognition (knowledge and understanding), the psychomotor (skills), and the affect (values and attitudes) identifying the ways in which fulfilling these aims benefits both individuals and society as a whole. Barnett and Coate5 similarly recognise these domains through the terminology of ‘knowing’, ‘being’ and ‘acting’. The aims of the curriculum are further reflected in policy-based visions with respect to the purposes of higher education. The Robbins report on UK higher education6 argued that a proper balance needed to be found between the acquisition of knowledge ‘to promote the general powers of the mind’, ‘instruction in skills’, ‘the advancement of learning’ through research and the search for truth, and, finally, ‘the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship’. Here, with the addition of the research function, this is essentially a restatement of the three-fold classification of the aims of the curriculum. According to a number of theorists of higher education, such as von Humboldt and Jaspers, the research function of the university is one of its distinct features although others, notably Newman,7 have taken a contrary stance. Yet, despite the centrality of values and attitudes both as an aim of a higher education, and more specifically within its curriculum, attention to this subject has been limited for a number of years, something Cowan8 has described as the ‘atrophy of the affect’. Glance at any higher education course, unit or module within a contemporary university syllabus and there will normally be a long list of learning outcomes organised under the twin headings of

3 Benjamin Bloom, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educa- tional Goals (New York: McKay, 1956). 4 Donald Bligh, Harold Thomas and Ian McNay, Understanding Higher Education (Exeter and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 1999). 5 Ronald Barnett and Kelly Coate, Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (Maidenhead: OUP/ Society for Research into Higher Education, 2005). 6 Lionel Robbins, Higher Education Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins (London: HMSO, 1963:6–7). 7 John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (London: Longman’s and Co, 1910, orig. pub. 1852). 8 John Cowan, “Atrophy of the affect in academia or what next, after 40 years in the wilderness?”, In Values in Higher Education, edited by Simon Robinson and Clement Katulushi, 159–177 (Leeds: Aureus & University of Leeds, 2005:159). 100 Bruce Macfarlane

‘knowledge’ and ‘skills’. Explicit reference to values or attitudes within the university curriculum seems to occur rarely, if at all. However this apparent neglect belies a subtle trend: the appropriation of the affect as dispositions now commonly labelled under the heading of ‘skills’. This appropriation of the meaning of the affect within the higher education curriculum is just the latest twist in a long history of re-interpretation. Any appropriation of a word into a new meaning assumes that it must have had a previous one. Until the 1960s, for example, the word ‘gay’ referred to a person who appeared to be cheerful, happy and led a carefree existence. Subsequently this word has been appropriated as a descriptor for individuals and cultures associated with homosexuality. Similarly, the meaning of values has shifted as the dominant purposes of higher education have been recast. Successive appropriations of the affect are linked to historical changes in the power and influence of the principal sponsor of the universities with the baton passing from church, to state, and, more recently, the (global) market. In this respect, the medieval university was largely organised to serve the interests of the Church in training the clergy and, then, through the expansion of universities, especially in the UK, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the state allied to the need for men to serve in leadership roles within the British Empire. During the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, especially since the Second World War, the needs of the market have become an increasing locus of power and influence in addition to that of the state. These changes in ‘sponsorship’ have brought about concomitant and quite fundamental shifts in understandings about values in higher education. This essay explores these transformations within the higher education curriculum via a framework that seeks to explain competing meta-narratives.

From Religious to Democratic Values

The history of the medieval university is intimately connected with that of the established Church, shaped by both the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, in a Western European context. In England, until the early part of the nineteenth century only Anglicans who were prepared to conform with the 39 Articles of the Church of England were permitted to attend university. These articles and doctrines date from the sixteenth century and represent a summary of the beliefs of the Church of England. The requirement to pledge obedience to the 39 articles excluded non-conformists such as Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Quakers as well as atheists from a university education. It was not until 1871 that the Universities Tests Act was passed by Parliament abolishing the communion ‘Tests’. In Scotland, three of its ancient Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 101 universities—St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen—were founded by Papal Bull, a decree issued by the Pope. All students and faculty of these institutions were Catholic. The ancient universities of Bologna and Paris, while not for- mally founded by Papal Bull, were granted one in the thirteenth century. Whilst the formal ‘curriculum’ of higher education, as we might understand the term today, did not exist in terms of statements in respect to aims and learning outcomes, the educational goals of universities did, symbolised through their mottos. Many of these demonstrate the religious origins and commitments of universities at this time. Dominus illuminatio mea (‘The Lord is my light’) was the motto of Oxford University, while the relevantly similar Lux et veritas (‘Light and truth’) was adopted by Yale University. The regular appearance of the Latin word for truth (veritas) in university mottos needs to be understood in the sense of this being God’s truth as opposed to one born in the spirit of the enlightenment. Even in the seventeenth century this interpretation of the core values of a university held sway as the founding motto of Harvard—‘truth for Christ and the church’—testifies. Harvard’s motto was altered to veritas alone in the 1840s, an illustration in itself of the way that the university has consistently re-interpreted its own mission and values. It was not until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that newly founded universities incorporated values into their mottos that reflected more meritocratic ideals. Examples include University of Birmingham’s Per ardua ad alta (‘Through hard work, great things are achieved’) and Cuncti adsint meritaeque expectent praemia palmae (‘Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward’) at University College London, the first English institution to permit non-conformists to attend. John Henry Newman’s vision for the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College, Dublin) came about as a result of his own conversion to Catholicism and resignation from a teaching position at Oxford, offering an alternative for Irish Catholics in similar fashion to the goals of University College London for non-conformists.9 Newman’s vision of a liberal education and the development of character was highly influential in connecting religious values with the extension of the role of a higher education, in a British context, from training the clergy to developing young men of good character to administrate the British Empire. While the zenith of faith-based influences on universities in Western Europe has long passed, the religious foundations of institutions are still apparent— and in some cases comparatively recent—such as the former church colleges

9 David Willetts, A University Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 102 Bruce Macfarlane of higher education in the UK founded largely in the 1960s, most of which became universities after 2002. The emergence of new civic universities towards the end of the nineteenth century in both the UK and US led to a gradual shift away from the dominance of religious values. The new civics were substantially shaped by politicians, industrialists and wealthy individuals such as Josiah Mason who helped to found the University of Birmingham, with commitments to widening access to the middle and working classes and to women.10 The curriculum of the civics incorporated emerging subjects, such as engineering, reflecting the world that had been shaped by the industrial revolution. However, the Humboldtian model of the university, representing the unity of teaching and research and the search for truth as an egalitarian pursuit, which both students and faculty share in common, has been most influential internationally in bringing to the fore the importance of democratic values. These were considered essential pre-conditions for the achievement of a ‘higher’ education that treated knowledge as a continuous search for truth. Both the student and the teacher, while not social equals, were seen as co-investigators in this scholarly enquiry. Jaspers11 provides, perhaps, one of the clearest expositions of the Humboldtian philosophy arguing in the very first sentence of his book, The Idea of the University, that ‘the university is a community of scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking the truth’. In order to make this vision a reality the style of teaching needs to be Socratic, through questioning, rather than via transmission which Jaspers labels ‘scholastic instruction’.12 The student needs the freedom to learn in order to become an independent thinker, a critical listener, and to take responsibility for his or her own learning. Socratic teaching places students on a more equal footing with university teachers as learners than the scholastic approach. Following Jaspers, Barnett13 identifies a number of values which he argues are central to higher educational learning. These include ‘the pursuit of truth and objective knowledge’, ‘a neutral and open forum for debate’, and the ‘development of the student’s own critical abilities’. Both Jaspers and Barnett regard such values as essential in order to make a ‘higher’ education possible. This vision finds its way into the policy

10 Eric Ives, Dian Drummon and Leonard Schwartz, The First Civic University: Birming- ham, 1880–1980: An Introductory History (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000). 11 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University (London: Peter Owen, 1959). 12 Ibid., 62 13 Ronald Barnett, The Idea of Higher Education (Buckingham: Open University/Society for Research into Higher Education, 1990). Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 103 arena in the late 1990s via the Dearing report14 which contained a statement about ‘shared’ values that are squarely derived from the liberal democratic tradition including a ‘commitment to the pursuit of truth’ and ‘a willingness to listen to alternative views and judge them on their merits’. At the macro level the state and civil society benefits from democratic values as it encourages attitudes that underpin a healthy democracy—such as tolerance of difference, debate, and a willingness to participate in co-operative processes.

The Shift to Performative and Transformative Values

Democratic values are focused on what happens within the learning process at university and may also help to inculcate attitudes that will contribute towards the maintenance of a participative social democracy. They are not principally orientated towards the benefits that students may derive in terms of future employment although, of course, this does not necessarily preclude their application in the workplace as has been widely recognised.15 The university can have practical objectives and students come in order to prepare themselves to enter the professions, but the best means of achieving these is through the unfettered pursuit of truth.16 Yet, the argument that democratic values will provide indirect benefits to society and the economy is no longer seen as sufficient justification. The emphasis has shifted firmly from values to skills as the forces of neo-liberalism have re-shaped the role of higher education to serve the labour market more directly. The apparent omission of values or attitudes, in favour of skills within the curriculum, does not mean that they have necessarily disappeared though. They have simply been re-packaged as a constituent element of ‘21st century skills’, a phrase now in vogue and the title of a hugely influential book by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel,17 the authors of which identify the centrality of learning and innovation, digital literacy, and career and life skills. This framework colonises a number of values and attitudes, especially with respect to so-called ‘career and life skills’, such as the exercise of ‘responsibility’ or dispositions towards ‘collaboration’. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning (or ‘P21’) is a powerful alliance of business, policymaking and school education

14 National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, Higher education in the learning society: Report of the National Committee (London: HMSO, 1997:97). 15 Harold Silver and John Brennan, A Liberal Vocationalism (London: Methuen, 1988). 16 Jaspers, 1959. 17 Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). 104 Bruce Macfarlane interests in the US. It was formed originally in 2002 and is now closely linked to the work of Trilling and Fadel with Intel, Pearson and the Ford Motor Company named among its members. 21st century skills has become an educational mantra about the prepara- tion of students for the changing nature of the knowledge economy and the digital society in particular. Those who promote this vision are often intimately connected with the technology companies that benefit most from this interpretation of skills.18 Sometimes the term ‘competency’ or the phrase ‘graduate attributes’ is also applied in a relevantly similar sense conveying work-read- iness. The development of quality assurance frameworks for the university curriculum, such as that in the UK and others relevantly similar on an international basis, reinforce this trend. Here, values, such as respect for the cultures of others, are operationalised as the possession of (inter-cultural) skills that will help students to succeed in the workplace. These may be described as performative values since they require the student to commodify how the acquisition or mastery of such values will enable them to perform better in a workplace setting. The skills meta-narrative is firmly embedded in the quality framework for awarding university degrees in the UK developed by the Quality Assurance Agency.19 This provides another example of the appropriation of values through a series of so-called descriptors for bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees. These descriptors are limited to the use of the terms ‘understanding’ and ‘skills’ to define the types of achievements that are expected of students in higher education. The word skills appears 34 times in the UK Quality Code, whilst the word ‘values’ is absent. As a result, UK degrees identify aims and learning outcomes in relation to knowledge and skills but not in relation to values and attitudes. A blizzard of largely undefined phrases appear in the Quality Code seeking to differentiate different sorts of skills including ‘higher-level skills’,20 ‘analytical skills’,21 ‘subject-related and transferable skills’,22 ‘general and specific skills’,23 as well as ‘transferable skills for employment’.24

18 Jim Greenlaw, “Deconstructing the metanarrative of the 21st century skills movement,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47, no. 9 (2016): 894–903. 19 The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, UK Quality Code for Higher Education, Part A: Setting and Maintaining Academic Standards (Gloucester: QAA, 2014). 20 Ibid., 9 21 Ibid., 9 22 Ibid., 25. 23 Ibid., 31. 24 Ibid., 26. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 105

With respect to this latter category the definition includes ‘the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility’.25 In the UK, perhaps one of the most significant signals of the shift to performative values came in the shape of the Enterprise in Higher Education initiative (EHEI), a government programme that sought to embed enterprise and employability as legitimate concerns within the university curriculum between 1987 and 1996. Symbolically, the EHEI was originally funded by the Employment Department (and later by the Department for Education and Employment). The emergence of performative values has also taken place against the backdrop of the re-packaging of values as skills. A good example of operationalising and, in the process, re-packaging a value as a skill is provided by the disposition of co-operation. To work or learn with others in a co-operative manner is, it might be argued, an essential value for liberal learning. Jaspers,26 refers to the centrality of ‘respect’ in education without which only ‘…industriousness at best remains’. Echoing this value Barnett27 identifies ‘a neutral and open forum for debate’. However, this value has taken a performative turn and is now more commonly described as ‘collaboration’ or ‘working with others’. This is a term closely associated with the needs of employers and the workplace for individuals with a preparedness to work on tasks and projects as part of a team. It is further reflected in the shifting language and pri- orities in major government reports concerning its future direction, with the Dearing report in 199728 signaling a significant change of direction for UK higher education from the language of its predecessor, the Robbins report of 1963.29 Resilience is a more recent example of a performative value within the curriculum. Many universities, such as Bristol and Brighton in England, now identify resilience or self-reliance as one of the qualities or dispositions that students need to develop. The emergence of ‘resilience’ needs to be understood in the context of growing concerns about the mental health and well-being of university students. Building the resilience of the future workforce for high stress professions, such as social work, is seen as critical.30 It needs to be

25 Ibid., 26. 26 Jaspers, 1959, 64. 27 Ibid., 8. 28 Ibid. 29 Ronald Barnett, “The coming of the global village: a tale of two inquiries.” Oxford Review of Education 25, no. 3 (1999): 293–306. 30 Louise Grant and Gail Kinman, “Enhancing wellbeing in social work students: building resilience in the next generation”, Social Work Education, 31, no. 5 (2012): 605–621. 106 Bruce Macfarlane understood as a performative value that will help students to adapt both to the demands of university life and to that of the workplace that awaits them. Finally, universities now commonly stress that students must develop a commitment towards normative concepts such as social justice, global citizenship, and sustainability, often linked to community action or volunteering.31 These are transformative values. Expectations that students will participate as members of a democratic society have long held sway as a by-product of liberal values, but now higher education is called on in a more directive manner to produce ‘good global citizens’ or ‘leaders for the 21st century’.32 Evidence of social commitment is required and these expectations are enacted in the curriculum through a variety of initiatives, such as service learning programmes in the US, work placements with charities and other non-governmental organisations, study abroad programmes, electives or general education courses in four-year undergraduate degrees, and via cross curricular themes within a student’s major.33 Elwick’s study34 of the values of English universities reveals that a number of newer UK institutions, such as the University of Winchester, identify social justice as a core value whereas this type of language is absent from the value statements of the older, more research-intensive Russell Group. Transformative values play an increasingly important role in the assessment of students in higher education via the growing popularity of reflection and reflective practice within subjects across the spectrum from engineering to nursing. Through reflective assignments the extent to which students have ‘transformed’ in their understanding of concepts and attitudes to professional practice is monitored and assessed. The assessment of professional practice, mobility programmes and experiential learning projects lend themselves to reflections ‘before’ and ‘after’, calling on students to emotionally engage with the ways in which their understandings and attitudes have been re-shaped through such experiences.

31 Doug Bourn, Chris McKenzie and Chris Shiel, The Global University: The role of the curriculum (London: Development Education Association, 2006). Alexander Astin, “Higher education and the cultivation of citizenship”. In Cul- tivating Citizens, edited by Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty, 91–102 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002). 32 Alexander Astin, “Higher education and the cultivation of citizenship.” 33 Bruce Macfarlane, Freedom to Learn: The threat to Student Academic Freedom and How It Can Be Reclaimed (Routledge/Society for Research into Higher Education, New York/Abingdon, 2017). 34 Alex Elwick, “The values of English universities: Questioning the role of value statements and mapping their current focus”, Higher Education Policy, 2018, available online at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-0112-x. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 107

Performative Transformative

Private Career success Personal happiness (e.g., resilience) (e.g., spirituality)

Public Economic growth Social justice (e.g., entrepreneurialism) (e.g., global citizenship)

Figure 5.1: The appropriation of values

Transformative values can be thought of both as related to the private rather than the public sphere since there are ways they are perceived to benefit the individual by increasing their personal happiness and wider society via social justice (see Figure 5.1). Here, spirituality is an example of a private transformative value that has come to the fore in recent years connecting religious values with a multi-faith world and secular interest in human potential and well-being.35 Religion, it has been argued, is giving way to spirituality representing a value that is socially acceptable in largely secular societies.36 When contemporary higher education institutions express their values through mission statements, newer universities with religious foundations, such as Winchester, Canterbury Christ Church and Bath Spa in the UK, often identify well-being and personal development as a key commitment.37 In the public sphere, the term social justice is a catch-all frequently used to denote a commitment to bringing about greater equality. Here, global citizenship is an example of a public transformative value since it is indicative of concerns across the planet such as world poverty or the movement to protect the natural environment

35 Michael D. Waggoner, “Spirituality and contemporary higher education”, Journal of College and Character, 17, no. 3 (2016): 147–156. 36 Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). 37 Elwick, 2018. 108 Bruce Macfarlane for future generations. The latter example is seen as securing inter-genera- tional equity. Performative values represent the economic benefits that derive from a higher education both to the individual and society more broadly. Such values are seen as conferring private or individual benefits by making students more employable and likely to enjoy career success. Both resilience and punctuality are examples of work-related dispositions that are seen as critical. In the public sphere entrepreneurialism or enterprise are popular expressions of the disposition students as a group can bring to the economy once they fully enter (or re-enter) the workplace.

Renewing the Commitment to Democratic Values

Values in higher education have undergone many shifts as a result of the wan- ing influence of the church, and the rising importance of state sponsorship and the market. As suggested earlier, a useful distinction in understanding this landscape can be made between values for learning in higher education and values of positionality. Values for learning include respect for intellectual property, tolerance, self-reflection, openness, and respect for others. These are a set of values that make it possible for higher learning to take place on the university campus. They essentially facilitate the learning process and help to ensure that the primary mission of higher education—the critical scrutiny of proposi- tional or professional knowledge—can be carried on. On the other hand, values of positionality institutionalise a commitment to a set of normative values that are currently fashionable in society (e.g., global citizenship, social justice, sustainability, etc). Such values have displaced the emphasis on religious values up until at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. Democratic values—or values for learning— are still essential to a genuinely ‘higher’ education premised on the idea that all knowledge claims need to be openly and rigorously scrutinised. Respect for others and their intellectual property, openness, tolerance, and a preparedness to listen are widely acknowledged as dispositions critical to protecting this participative and democratic ideal. However, in the university curriculum, and via the mission statements of institutions, values of positionality appear to be more strongly on the rise. These are commitments to socio-political values aimed at some form of social change. Such values relate to the identity and beliefs of individuals within society rather than behavioural norms essential for democratic learning. One of the pernicious effects of this development is that universities have contributed toward a culture that is becoming increasingly intolerant to debate on campus through sanctifying socio-political norms. Student bodies in the UK, US and elsewhere have instituted so-called ‘no platform’ and ‘safe spaces’ policies that Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 109 classify speakers or organisations with views that deviate from the received wis- doms of the age as a threat to the safety and well-being of students. The university has always been a battleground of ideas, and rightly so. In the 1960s students pressed for more participation in university affairs and brought high profile social and political issues to the fore such as nuclear disar- mament, apartheid in South Africa, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. On today’s campus, the de-colonisation of the university/why is my curriculum white? and other populist movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have risen to prominence. These campaigns are owned by students who, crucially, can choose to either opt in or opt out of related protest and debate and determine their own stance. The agenda can include matters that cause discomfort to the university authorities, such as student protests that took place at Birmingham and Sussex universities in 2013 against plans by the senior management to outsource campus services. This is real student engagement, as opposed to the compliant and domesticated form that institutions would prefer. However when the university authorities seek to domesti- cate normative political agendas within the formal curriculum students do not have any effective choice. They must demonstrate their compliance. This cor- poratisation of values does not sit easily with academic freedom for students or academic staff. It is important, therefore, that the university of the future rebalances the claims of competing interpretations of values—religious, democratic, performative and transformative. In so doing, democratic values should be recognised as central to the essence of the higher education curriculum since they alone provide the basis for nurturing student academic freedom and securing the conditions necessary for the development of intellectual independence. A number of institutions, led by the University of Chicago, have recently stood up to the growing censorship of freedom of expression on campus and re-as- serted the importance of democratic values.

In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to action those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.38

38 The University of Chicago. Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, 2015 https://freeexpression.uchicago.edu/sites/freeexpression.uchicago.edu/files/FOECom- 110 Bruce Macfarlane

The rise in performative and transformative values threatens student academic freedom understood as a meta-value in the liberal, Humboldtian tradition. Here, forms of student performativity have emerged as a means by which learners manage the demands of these new expectations. Student behaviour and attitudes are audited, measured and assessed in a public learning space aided by the increasingly widespread use, and acceptance, of learning analytics. Compulsory attendance requirements, often justified on the basis of developing work-related skills such as punctuality, have resulted in bodily performativity while forms of assessment and learning, such as reflective assignments, have instituted emotional performativity.39 These forms of performativity require learners to enter into inauthentic practices that are based on observations of their social and behavioural compliance; a ‘forced’ form of engagement with learning and assessment to satisfy performative expectations. The increasing emphasis in higher education globally on the merits of student engagement, and the reward of ‘time and effort’ in respect to learning, has accelerated this trend. It is further clear that transformative values, such as community volunteering, have a performative worth in the crowded marketplace as a means for a student to differentiate his or herself from another student looking for a job. The academic freedom of the student is compromised by the way that transformative values require students to enact the rituals of emotional performativity. Students are encouraged to capitalise on the performative value of transformative values, such as gap year tourism, a process that has been labelled self-commodification40 Students need to be able to express their ideas in an atmosphere of tolerance where all views are subject to critical scrutiny promoting rationality in relation to knowledge claims in the process. Asking students to adopt posi- tional values, such as global citizenship and social justice, contrasts sharply with Jaspers’ argument that the only purpose of the university is to allow people to congregate ‘for the sole purpose of seeking the truth’.41 Hence the rise of transformative values runs counter to the liberal tradition of Popper’s open society42 and means that universities are seeking to impose a normative positionality on students without problematising the knowledge claims contained

mitteeReport.pdf, Accessed 31 August, 2018. 39 Macfarlane, Freedom to Learn. 40 Bonnie Urciuoli, “Skills and selves in the new workplace”, American Ethnologist, 35, no. 2 (2008): 211–228. 41 Jaspers, 1959:19 42 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945). Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 111 within them. The classroom should be a safe space for discussion and dialogue rather than a pseudo-political one. As Hannah Arendt argued, education should not be used as a political tool and students should not be treated as political pawns.43

Conclusion

The medieval origins of the university were intimately connected with religious values through the training of the clergy and in compliance with the established faith of the state. This understanding was gradually displaced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by democratic values based on the Western liberal tradition of higher education shaped by the development of the Humboldtian model of the university. More recently, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this interpretation of values in relation to the university curriculum has given way to one based on the assumptions of the market. This has resulted in the rise of performative values, associated with neo-liberal interpretations of the purpose of a higher education. The university is also increasingly self-conscious about how to market its social role and promote values that align with societal norms. This has led to the emergence of a greater emphasis on transformative values based on global social justice. These values seek to shape the student’s positionality on social issues or influence their state of personal happiness and are increasingly in evidence in the contemporary HE curriculum across the world. Promoting socio-political agendas, such as global citizenship, social justice, and sustainability, undermines the freedom of students—and academic faculty—to question, debate and contest the knowledge claims that are wrapped up in these concepts. Such normative agendas pose a risk to both student academic freedom and the authenticity of the learning process. It means that certain topics cannot be seriously debated in the modern university without those entering into this process risking censure if they take issue with received wisdom. In reality the most potent threat to academic freedom is self-censorship as the student, and the academic faculty member, learns to comply with the tacit boundaries as to what is contestable. The university of the future needs to reclaim the centrality of democratic values and be wary of espousing commitment to values of positionality. This demands a commitment to the opening up, rather than closing down, of debate and encouraging the unfettered intellectual scrutiny of ideas.

43 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1954). 112 Bruce Macfarlane

References

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin, 1954. Astin, Alexander. “Higher education and the cultivation of citizenship”. In Cultivating Citizens, edited by Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty, 91–102. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. Barnett, Ronald. The Idea of Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University/ Society for Research into Higher Education, 1990. Barnett, Ronald. “The coming of the global village: a tale of two inquiries.” Oxford Review of Education 25, no. 3 (1999): 293–306. Barnett, Ronald and Kelly Coate. Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education. Maidenhead: OUP/ Society for Research into Higher Education, 2005. Bligh, Donald, Harold Thomas and Ian McNay. Understanding Higher Education. Exeter and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 1999. Bloom, Benjamin. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. New York: McKay, 1956. Bourn, Doug, Chris McKenzie and Chris Shiel. The Global University: The role of the Curriculum. London: Development Education Association, 2006. Cowan, John. “Atrophy of the affect in academia or what next, after 40 years in the wilderness?”, In Values in Higher Education, edited by Simon Robinson and Clement Katulushi, 159–177, Leeds: Aureus & University of Leeds, 2005. Elwick, Alex. “The values of English universities: Questioning the role of value statements and mapping their current focus”, Higher Education Policy, 2018, available online at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-0112-x Grant, Louise and Gail Kinman. “Enhancing wellbeing in social work students: Building resilience in the next generation”, Social Work Education, 31, no. 5 (2012): 605–621. Greenlaw, Jim. “Deconstructing the metanarrative of the 21st century skills movement”, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47, no. 9 (2015): 894–903. Heelas, Paul and Linda Woodhead. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Ives, Eric, Dian Drummon and Leonard Schwartz. The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880–1980: An Introductory History. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2000. Jaspers, Karl. The Idea of the University. London: Peter Owen, 1959 (orig. pub. 1946). Macfarlane, Bruce. “Student performativity in higher education: Converting learning as a private space into a public performance”, Higher Education Research and Development, 34, no. 2 (2015): 338–350. Macfarlane, Bruce. Freedom to Learn: The Threat to Student Academic Freedom and How It Can Be Reclaimed. Routledge/Society for Research into Higher Education, New York/Abingdon, 2017. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University London: Longman’s and Co, 1910, (orig. pub. 1852). Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945. Robbins, Lionel. Higher Education Report of the Committee Appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins. London: HMSO, 1963. Silver, Harold and John Brennan. A Liberal Vocationalism. London: Methuen, 1988. Reclaiming Democratic Values in the Future University 113

Slaughter, Sheila and Larry Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Trilling, Bernie and Charles Fadel. 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. The University of Chicago. Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, 2015. https://freeexpression.uchicago.edu/sites/freeexpression.uchicago.edu/files/ FOECommitteeReport.pdf, Accessed 31 August, 2018. Urciuoli, Bonnie. “Skills and selves in the new workplace”, American Ethnologist, 35, no. 2 (2008): 211–228. Waggoner, Michael D. “Spirituality and contemporary higher education”, Journal of College and Character, 17, no. 3 (2016): 147–156. Willetts, David. A University Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

6. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge in Higher Education

Merete Wiberg Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark

Abstract: The world’s challenges, including climate change, income inequality around the globe, civil wars, and many other concerns, require what Karl Jaspers denotes ‘a radical commitment to knowledge’ on the part of researchers and students at higher education institutions. As developing academics and established citizens of the world, students are the ones who will introduce new ideas about, and perspectives on, the challenges the world faces. This essay takes Ronald Barnett’s concepts of ‘the ontological turn’, ‘student being and becoming’ and ‘a will to learn’ and Karl Jaspers’ theory of ‘the Encompassing’ as its points of departure, which lead to a focus on Karl Jaspers’ concept of ‘the will to know’. This essay aims to develop a perspective on the student’s being and becoming with regard to the will to know.

Keywords: the existential will to know, student being and becoming, the ontological turn, the role of philosophy in research, the Encompassing, Jaspers

Introduction

To be a student at a research institution such as a university requires, according to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, the ‘unqualified will to know’. Like the researcher, the student is expected to view the search for knowledge as an essential key to self-realization. Karl Jaspers describes this phenomenon as the ‘unqualified will to know’1 (‘das unbedingte Wissenwollen’2). The will to know is the neverending search for truth and the hope that one will

1 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, trans.H.A.T.Reiche and H.F. Vanderschmidt (London: Peter Owen, 1965), 3. 2 Karl Jaspers, Die Idee der Universität (Berlin: Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980 [1946]) 26.

© 2020 Merete Wiberg - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.07 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 116 Merete Wiberg determine good questions and answers to the mysteries of the world and the human condition. Ronald Barnett developed the idea of the student as a being with a ‘will to learn’.3 The will to learn addresses the student’s way of being and becoming in the higher education context. The will to know supplements this idea with regard to how the student is to deal with knowing in a research context. Students at a research institution must specifically address the complexity and uncertainty of knowing. Research institutions have demanding expectations with respect to skills, and high hopes for engagement amongst the student. However, an increasing focus on skills and learning outcomes may undermine a more authentic and personal approach to how students deal with knowing and knowledge creation at research institutions.The concept of the will to know is closely related to Karl Jaspers’ concept of ‘the whole of being’, which is also connected to his concept of ‘the Encompassing’. The whole of being is a philosophical way of being in the world, which, at a basic level, concerns the human circumstance4 that we always reach a limit to our understanding. Philosophical ideas such as ‘Being’, ‘the infinite’, the ‘whole of being’ and ‘the thing in itself ’ all refer to something which is beyond human sense perception. Immanuel Kant, in Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason),5 acknowledges that human mind produces speculative ideas in order to make sense of reality. Jaspers’ conclusion is that science and philosophy need each other. Philosophy needs the knowledge of science whereas science needs philosophy’s existential wondering, and its fundamental reflection on the criteria for and limits of knowing. In a higher education context, wondering about the whole of being is, in this essay, seen as an existential endeavour that requires the individual student to raise her head and attempt to understand whether or how postulated knowledge and ways of knowledge creation in her area of research make sense. Usually, students’ existential thoughts and wonder regarding their choice of study are not part of the programme of study, but this essay suggests that they might be. Students should be encouraged to reflect on how their endeavour to learn about, and work with, a specific area of knowledge makes sense. However, what kinds of questions are students supposed to ask? In The Idea of the University, Karl Jaspers offers the following statement: ‘Without reference to the whole of being, science loses

3 Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn (Maidenhed Berkshire: Open University Press, 2007). 4 Charles F. Wallraff, Karl Jaspers. An Introduction to His Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970) 198. 5 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 117 its meaning’.6 If we follow this idea, the students might recast the statement as, ‘How does the area of knowledge I have chosen to study refer and contribute to the whole of being?’ A literature student might ask whether and how the study of literature makes sense. How does the study of modernist poetry contribute to an understanding of the way human beings exist in the world? A biologist might ask whether and how the study of animals and plants makes sense. How does the study of animals and plants help human beings to understand their own condition and existence in the world? If we push the foregoing question to its limits, the student might ask whether it makes sense to have the will to learn, as well as the will to know. For the student, this is a consideration of her being and becoming in the educational context.7 An example of a young person, a schoolchild, who considers her being in school is the Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg. In 2018 she began a solo protest in Stockholm because she could not see any sense in attending school at all if her future is destroyed because of climate change. The idea of the climate strike has spread around the world, and children and young persons, including university students, participate in climate strikes in cities all over the world.8 Furthermore, Greta Thunberg raises a question that addresses being and becoming in educational settings. Why should young people have the will to learn and know if there is no future for them? Students around the world, at schools and universities, probably address similar questions. Some of these concern the fundamental conditions of human existence, including the survival of life on the planet, whereas others might address more personal and existential questions.To address ‘the whole of being’ in an educational context is a question of sense-making with regard to human existence and the way of being in the world. An important point of this essay is that research within all disciplines must walk hand in hand with philosophy to do the job. This essay aims to develop a perspective on the student’s being and becoming regarding the will to know. This endeavour stands on the shoulders of the educational thinkers Ronald Barnett and Karl Jaspers. Specifically, the following concepts will appear throughout the essay: the ‘ontological turn’ which views the student as being and becoming9 and Karl Jaspers’ concepts of ‘the

6 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 38. 7 Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn, 68. 8 Sandra Laville, Matthew Taylor and Daniel Hurst, “‘It’s our time to rise up’: youth climate strikes held in 100 countries,” The Guardian, March 15, 2019, https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/15/its-our-time-to-rise-up-youth-climate- strikes-held-in-100-countries 9 Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn. 118 Merete Wiberg

Encompassing’10 and ‘the whole of being’ seen in relation to his concept of ‘the will to know’. The concept of ‘the Encompassing’ addresses the human as a ‘knowing being in the world’, and as students are, at least by definition ‘becoming knowing beings’, this concept may offer an analytical perspective on students’ being and becoming. This essay is organized in the following way. The first section positions the concept of the ‘will to know’ in the paradigm denoted the ontological turn. I also discuss how Ronald Barnett’s student-centred ontological turn is distinct from outcome-based, student-centred approaches. The second section addresses Jaspers’ concept of ‘the Encompassing’, with a focus on a specific mode of the Encompassing, namely ‘Existenz’, which addresses how the individual becomes a unique person. The third section draws on Jaspers’ view on the idea of the university and addresses the relationship between science and philosophy. This section also goes more deeply into how a radical commitment to knowledge is connected to the student’s existential will to know and the idea of the whole of being. The fourth section presents listening to music as a metaphor for how researchers and students make sense of isolated phenomena, such as data and words. This section addresses how the will to know becomes important when already-known theories and ideas come to the limit of their explicatory force and the student, with reference to Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’, must develop new ideas for the future. This essay ends with a concluding remark.

The Ontological Turn: An Alternative Approach to Student-centred Learning

The theoretical approach presented in this essay draws primarily on Karl Jaspers’ existential and educational philosophy. However, the discussion in the essay also relates to the discourse often referred to as ‘the ontological turn’ developed by Ronald Barnett.11

10 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie (Berlin, New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1974); Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (München: Sammlung Piper, 1991). 11 Gloria Dall’Alba and Robyn Barnacle “An Ontological Turn for Higher Education,”- Studies in Higher Education 32 no. 6 (2007) 679–691; Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn; Mariann Solberg and Finn Thorbjørn Hansen (2015) “On Academic Bildung in Higher Education: A Scandinavian Approach” in Academic Bildung in Net-based Higher Education:, edited by Trine Fossland, Helle Mathiasen and Mariann Solberg (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 28–54. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 119

The ontological turn involves a shift from a focus on decontextualized knowledge acquisition to a focus on our everyday being in the world.12 The ‘ontological turn’ paradigm takes Heidegger’s philosophy and his concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ as its points of departure. In a higher education context, the focus is on the student and her being and becoming in the world (Barnett 2007). Since the focus is on the student, to some extent this approach is student-centred. The student-centred focus is well-known from various theories of learning that emerged in the educational landscape since the end of the twentieth century.13 However, the ‘ontological turn’ paradigm is very different from student-centred approaches that aim for learning outcomes and an alignment between learning and assessment.14 In the ontological turn paradigm, the student’s being and becoming comprise the point of departure. Ronald Barnett’s view is that ‘a will to learn’ is more important than knowledge acquisition, because without a will to learn, ‘the idea of person cannot get off the ground’.15 Ronald Barnett explicitly considers the student a person, and therefore, the will to learn is essential for being a student in an authentic, personal, and not in an exclusively instrumental way. The ‘turn’ is an alternative to student-centred learning approaches because it addresses and values the personal and existential aspects of being a university student. This is very different from, for example, John Biggs’ SOLO-taxonomy approach (Structure of the observed learning outcomes). Biggs’ principal idea is that the teacher identifies and plans intended learning outcomes, teaching, and assessment according to the SOLO taxonomy, which consists of a hierarchy of verbs that indicate various levels of performances of understanding,16 such as the ability to identify, compare, and reflect. Since the focus of Biggs’ approach is the SOLO taxonomy, which categorizes student cognitive capacity and the learning outcomes, it unmistakably conceptualizes the idea of the student in a quite different way than Ron Barnett’s ‘turn’:

12 Gloria Dall’Alba and Robyn Barnacle, “An Ontological Turn for Higher Education,” 681. 13 Ane Qvortrup, Merete Wiberg, Gerd Christensen and Mikala Hansbøl, On the Defi- nition of Learning (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2016); Anna Sfard, “On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Danger of Choosing Just One,” Educational Researcher Vol. 27 No. 2 (1998): 4–13. 14 John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Maid- enhead, Berkshire England: Open University Press, 2007), 50–63. 15 Roland Barnett, A Will to Learn, 18. 16 John Biggs and Catherine Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning, 74. 120 Merete Wiberg

I distance my position here from ‘outcomes’-based approaches to teaching. I am not concerned to rail against the idea of ‘outcomes’ as such; I am rather taken up with advancing a particular idea of higher education, but which I not infrequently observe, en passant, is in effect a repudiation of outcomes orientated curricula. The vocabulary, the ideas and the conceptualization of what it is to be a student and to educate for such student being do not live in the same educational universe as inhabited by the outcomes approach.17

Barnett notes that the entire conceptualization of the student in learning-outcome-based approaches belongs to a very different ‘educational universe’, one inhabited by students of another kind. I do agree with Barnett that there is a problem with conceptualizing the student as an achiever and producer of learning outcomes. The problem with the learning-outcomes-based view of students is that it does not consider that students are personal beings who strive to make sense of the world they live in. Barnett’s argument concerning the importance of the will to learn is a very valuable contribution to the understanding and characterization of the student. This essay adds ‘the will to know’ to the characterization of the student. Since the student operates in a research institution, the will to know must be a guiding or ‘regulative’ idea in the Kantian sense for the students’ being and becoming.

The Encompassing and the Will to Know

Jaspers presented the concept of the Encompassing in three lectures given in Germany in 1937. This was the year the Nazis suspended him from his position as a university professor because his wife was Jewish.18 The lectures were published in 1938. In the afterword to the second edition (1956), Jaspers recalls the atmosphere of the time, and remarks that the only thing he could speak about without danger was philosophy, which, according to Jaspers, the Nazis despised, but did not understand.19 The reader of these lectures will find that Jaspers is critical of any form of totalitarian thought. The concept of the Encompassing is also central to Jaspers’ work, Von der Wahrheit,20 published after the Second World War. In this work, he specifies and extends the ideas he presented in his early lectures. The concept of the Encompassing is a complex theoretical construct that addresses two fundamental ontological and epistemological aspects of human being: immanence

17 Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn, 5. 18 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 98. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 121 and transcendence. The concepts of ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ appear in various yet related ways in the history of philosophy. In Jaspers’ philosophy, which is inspired by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Kant, ‘immanence’ refers to human beings’ immersion in a world of objects that are accessible through experience. ‘Transcendence’ refers to the capacity of human mind to go beyond the limits of what it can actually perceive. An important point of Jaspers’ philosophy is that the human being needs transcendence to become a person, because transcendence is a prerequisite for human freedom. Therefore, without transcendence, human beings would not be able to develop new ideas and opportunities. Jaspers developed the concept of the Encompassing to describe human beings’ complex way of being in the world. In this essay, I touch on only a few aspects of the Encompassing. I focus on Jaspers’ conceptualization of the human being as ‘Existenz’, which refers to the transcendence of the human being. According to Wallraff, Jaspers did not regard the schema below of the Encompassing as final, but as a ‘tentative schema to be revised in the light of further insights. It is not a creed, but a representation of our situation, lying somewhere on the “boundary between scientific knowledge and existential philosophy”’.21 The schema below is from Von der Wahrheit22 and is translated by Wallraff.23

21 Charles F. Wallraff, Karl Jaspers, 197. 22 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 50. 23 Charles F. Wallraff, Karl Jaspers, 195. 122 Merete Wiberg

According to Jaspers, human beings are modes of the Encompassing. Jaspers describes seven modes of the encompassing, each of which is specified in the schema. The immanent modes are world, existence, consciousness in general and spirit while the transcendent modes are ‘Existenz’ and transcendence. Reason has its own position in the schema because its role according to Jaspers is to unify all the modes.24 According to Jaspers, these seven modes are ways in which the human being is present in and addresses the world and, therefore, human beings always are immanent as well as transcendent modes of being. This essay focuses on ‘Existenz’ because this mode addresses the individual unique being and its ability to go beyond what is already known, but I will very briefly discuss the other modes of the Encompassing. To exist is to be somewhere in the world as an organic being (existence [Dasein]).25 Man attempts to come to grips with the world via his ‘consciousness in general’, which helps him to categorize experiences and objects in the world. The spirit is the locus for the creation of ideas and according to Richard F. Grabau these ideas are universal:

“Jaspers often talks of spirit as a kind of synthesis of existence and abstract consciousness in general. Like existence, it is concrete and historical. Like consciousness in general, it is universal. It is, then, a concrete universal which Jaspers calls ‘“idea”’. As men participate in this concrete universal, they are bound together into historic unities. Examples of such unities are: the nation, a church or religion, a cultural tradition, professional organisations, etc.”26

The transcendent modes are Existenz and transcendence. The mode ‘transcendence’ is confusing because it also is an inclusive term for the transcendent modes. I will not go deeper into these complicated ontological questions in this essay. Reason has the function to unify all the modes into views that make sense. In this sense, Kant explicitly inspires Jaspers,27 thanks to Kant’s distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft). Kant acknowledges that human beings generate ideas that transcend experience, but views these ideas as guiding (regulative) for the way human beings make sense of reality. Relatedly, Jaspers acknowledges the function of transcendent ideas generated by human beings.

24 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 52. 25 Ibid., 53. 26 Richard F. Graubau, “Preface,” in Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, xix. 27 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 21–22. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 123

Lastly, science presupposes that we let ourselves be guided by ideas. It is only through such ‘schemes of ideas’ as Kant called them, that our minds are guided by the encompassing whole around us, even though the encompassing whole cannot itself become an object of cognition and all our conceptual schemes have only auxiliary and provisional significance….Yes these guiding ideas have to come alive in the scholar himself before learning can have any meaning.28

‘Existenz’ is the existential mode of being, where the individual transforms itself and emerges as a unique person.29 However, it is difficult to get a grip of Jasper’s schema of the Encompassing and especially the function of the transcendent modes and their connection with the immanent modes. One might say that it always will be a postulate that human beings are able to go beyond and transcend what already is. However, this is a way to uphold the idea of human freedom. Therefore, Jaspers’ concept of Existenz is a reminder of the paradox that a universal idea such as freedom refers to our trust in human being as a unique person. Bearing this in mind we might say that if the student becomes aware of herself as Existenz, it may open her eyes to her responsibility for the future world. She is not only a student, but also a responsible person and citizen of the world who is to deal with what is to become. Jaspers’ view that a human being becomes a person by means of transcendence is different from that of Barnett, who does not include transcendence in his views on the student’s being and becoming. However, for Barnett the idea that the student must be viewed as a person is a pivotal point, and this works well with Jaspers’ views on the student as a being with the will to know:

The university is not a church, no religious order, no mystery, nor is it a place for prophets and apostles. Its principle is to furnish all tools and offer all possibilities in the province of the intellect, to direct the individual to the frontiers, to refer the learner back to himself for all his decisions, to his own sense of responsibility. The sense of responsibility has become awakened through his learning and is brought through it to the highest possible level and the clearest awareness. The university demands a ruthless will to know.30

The Encompassing also plays a role in Jaspers’ view on the role of philosophy in science. Philosophy’s role in science is, according to Jaspers, to create a space for possibilities. Jaspers expresses it in the following way:

28 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 35. 29 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 38. 30 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 66. 124 Merete Wiberg

The philosophical task within every science is positively to develop what comes to be known. All practice on the basis of knowledge must rely on the unseen encompassing: medical treatment must rely on un-understood life; planned alteration of human existence on real, un-understood faith, and on the encompassing nature in the ranks of man. All true practice is therefore guided also by the encompassing, which, however, nowhere displaces knowledge.31

The Encompassing is a quite complex theoretical construct concerning various modes of human being. On the one hand, it identifies the worldly modes of human being, which consist of various human-created horizons of meaning. On the other hand, the Existenz is a mode where human being, according to Jaspers, somehow is beyond these human created horizons of meaning. Existenz is the mode where human being is in a horizonless realm: ‘.an open, horizonless realm encompassing all horizons, I hear what speaks to me and perceive the flashing signals that point, warn, tempt—and perhaps reveal what is’.32 In this quotation, Jaspers apparently refers to a horizonless realm that encompasses all horizons. This is the realm of possibilities. Concepts such as nothingness (Heidegger) or the absurd (Camus) come to mind, and Jaspers reveals himself as a true existentialist.33 Jaspers stresses that the task of philosophy is ‘to develop what comes to be known’.34 His concept of the Encompassing may be diffuse and the idea of a ‘horizonless realm’ might be impossible, but what is very important is Jaspers’ emphasis on the philosophical dimension as a fundamental source for development of new ideas in scientific inquiry. According to Jaspers, philosophy is not science itself, but the foundation of science. Higher education often includes modules in which students learn philosophical theories and concepts. Often, the students do not understand why they should learn philosophy if they are studying physics, computer science, or modern languages, but I think that Jaspers helps to understand this by providing an argument for why philosophy must go hand in hand with all research disciplines. As mentioned previously in this essay, Jaspers reminds us that ‘without reference to the whole of being, science loses it meaning’.35 We might add that without philosophy, science loses its meaning. The next section focuses on the relation between philosophy and science.

31 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 24. 32 Ibid., 26. 33 Ibid., 28. 34 Ibid., 24. 35 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 38. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 125

Philosophy and Science and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge

According to Karl Jaspers, addressing the whole of being is a philosophical undertaking that distinguishes it from scientific research:36

To address oneself to the whole is what is called the ‘philosophical’ point of view. All science is ‘philosophical’ in this sense, so long as it does not neglect the end for the means, and so lose itself and its ideal in a concern for cataloging words and facts, for apparatus, collections, techniques, or isolated phenomena.37

Jaspers’ remark reminds us that in research, cataloguing and collecting isolated phenomena are only means to an end. His comment is highly relevant today, when in some fields including educational research, collecting data is apparently viewed as the aim of research. Today big data approaches are popular in research within all disciplines but also subject for careful scrutiny.38 An important consideration related to this essay is that data and facts always need a conceptual framework for interpretation. For this endeavour, philosophy is the discipline that offers fundamental conceptual frameworks that are the prerequisite for putting ‘things’ in perspective. Indeed, philosophical concepts are always subject to discussion, but this is part of philosophy’s job. Specifically, the search for a composite whole, even a fragmented one, is an important part of being a researcher and a student at a research institution. The student who studies history might attempt to view a period in history such as the Second World War in connection or disconnection with other historical epochs. She might ask why the Second World War took place at this specific time in history? Were there tendencies in this epoch of history that we could find in other periods in history? Even the idea that we might spot tendencies in different epochs of history, which we might find again in other historical epochs points at the idea of history as a composite whole. If the student or the researcher

36 James O. Bennett argues that Jaspers presents two different views of the philosophy/ science relationship: the exclusive view and the dual aspect view. See James O. Bennett, “Karl Jaspers and Scientific Philosophy”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31, no. 3 (July 1993), 437–453. His interesting point is that if Jaspers holds an exclusive view in which philosophy is strictly separate from scientific research, he has reached a radical position of philosophical disagreement and debate where, ‘rational control has been eclipsed’. Ibid., 445. 37 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 60. 38 Anders Blok and Morten Axel Pedersen, “Complementary Social Science? Quali-Quan- titative Experiements in a Big Data World.” Big Data & Society 1, no. 2(2014). 126 Merete Wiberg finds that history is fragmented this relates to an idea of a broken composite whole. Students at research institutions usually strive to understand and put into perspective the knowledge they acquire and work with. I include an excerpt from an interview I conducted as part of an investigation into the role of the course ‘theory of science’ in study programmes. The students quoted in the following passage were studying politics and administration in their second year of university. I asked the students whether they applied philosophical theories when dis- cussing decision theory.

Student 1: We use theories, that tell that human beings do think rationally. At the same time, the theory states that the ability to think rationally has its limits, and therefore, has consequences for the decision-making process. This might be seen as a kind of recognition that human beings do not always know what to do—do not always have a plan, owing to limitations that hinder that they achieve the best set of conditions or results. In this sense, we come to terms with what it means to be a human being in reality, and the consequences it might have. I do not have a theory of science position I can relate it to—because I do not feel that I have an overview.

Student 2: …If we look at how a decision-making process works, we do understand it with regard to theories of how human beings are. We are trained to make it fit into one of these boxes [theories]. Are you a positivist or what are you? This is the way I feel we have learned it.39

These statements suggest that Student 1 comprehends the act of decision-making in terms of various theories and also reflects on the implications of these theories. According to Student 1, to be a rational being is not clear-cut, but involves different ideas of rationality and different images of what it means to be a human being. Student 2 states that he attempts to put various instances of decision-making into one of the ‘theory boxes’. Student 1 appears to have a more complex and sophisticated view of how to use philosophical or other kinds of theories. What happens if none of the theories with which a student is familiar offers a suitable perspective on a phenomenon? According to Jaspers, human beings, including researchers and students, must transcend knowledge, in order to develop new ideas:

39 Translation of an interview conducted in spring 2011 at a university in Denmark. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 127

The only satisfaction which man derives from a radical commitment to knowledge is the hope of advancing the frontier of knowledge to a point beyond which he cannot advance except by transcending knowledge itself.40

The phrase a ‘radical commitment to knowledge’ indicates how important the researcher’s personal engagement is. The existential dimension of being a researcher or a student at a research institution seems to be of utmost importance. Jaspers’ concept of ‘Existenz’ is useful for understanding this aspect of being a student. In the complex ontological and epistemological construct of the Encompassing, ‘Existenz’ is, according to Jaspers, the way of human being where the individual steps forward as a unique person.41 Existenz is the mode of being where the individual transcends what she already knows, metaphori- cally climbs the mountain and views the unbounded horizon(s). She may see the horizon line, but she knows that there is always a horizon beyond the horizon. However, she must continue her search for new horizons, because she has the will to know. According to Jaspers, the Encompassing is ‘the source from which all new horizons emerge, without itself ever being visible as a horizon’.42 It may be too much to expect of a student that she is able to come to this point. However, the crucial point is that the will to know metaphori- cally should be a part of the student’s DNA. In this sense, and with reference to Ron Barnett, the will to know is a defining concept for the student’s being and becoming.

Listening and the Will to Know

The will to know requires that the student attempts to extract meaning from apparently isolated elements, such as data in all kinds of empirical studies, words in literature and language studies, human organs in health studies, and expressions of feeling (in psychology). The process of understanding may be compared to the interpretation of music. Temporal succession, scales, contrapuntal and harmonic work are characteristics of not only classical music, but also other kinds of music. Listening to music involves the awareness of a succession of sounds, while being aware of the structure and wholeness of the music. Listening to music is not just hearing sounds. The German–Latvian philosopher Nicolai Hartmann expresses what it is to listen to music in this way: ‘Listening to music transcends sensible

40 Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, 32. 41 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 38. 42 Ibid., 18. 128 Merete Wiberg hearing’.43 According to Hartmann, to listen to music is to transcend the individual parts of the music in order to determine its meaning.

For it is not the instantaneous sound, but only the whole in the unity of its succession, that constitutes the musical organization of the movement’s tones. Only out of this whole do the details that were built into it—the elements that can be sensibly heard together acquire a meaning.44

However, although music is a human-made construct of reality, listening to music may be exemplary, when it comes to understanding the complexity of the whole of being. This is due to the combination of the flux and structure of music. In polyphonic music such as fugues or certain kinds of jazz, two or more tunes are combined and interact with each other. A canon is an example of a simple polyphonic and contrapuntal work. Other works may have a homophonous structure. This means that one tune is supported by a progres- sion of chords. This is not the place for music theory, but my point is that music, owing to being fluid and structured in various ways, requires that the listener is able to alternate between part and wholeness. To listen to music is to draft configurations of wholeness. The psychologist ‘listens’ to expressions of feeling, and tries to establish a meaningful image of the persons with whom she speaks. The biologist ‘listens’ to the complexity of nature, and tries to establish a meaningful image of how plants and animals contribute to life on earth. The doctor ‘listens’ to the parts of the body, and tries to determine how all the parts interact. Moreover, the literature researcher tries to determine how all the words in books such as Ulysses create a meaningful universe. The preceding are examples of ‘listening’ in selected disciplines. The will to know shows itself when the researcher or student reaches to a point where well-known theories and methods no longer contribute to the development of meaningful answers. In this case, the researcher or the student must transcend what they already know, and, it is hoped, generate new ideas and theories that help them to move forward. In this process the researcher or student is in what Jaspers calls the mode of Existenz. They step forward as persons in an authentic and transcendent process of searching for meaning. The student as a developing academic is someone who should learn to dive deeply into, and listen to, the complexity of the whole of being in order to become aware of questions not yet seen or heard. In this process, she is to

43 Nikolai Hartmann, Aestetics, trans. Eugene Kelly (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 128. 44 Ibid., 126. The Will to Know and the Radical Commitment to Knowledge 129 draft configurations of wholeness, in order to navigate the world. She is the one who, in the future, must challenge and transcend the premises of the old world. We might compare this with Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’.45 All human beings enter an already-furnished world, but because they are new- comers, they can alter the setup. They may alter and transform old ideas and theories into new ways of understanding the world. We might describe this as ‘creating new constellations of wholeness’. The concept of ‘the encompassing’ offers an image of how human beings are positioned in the world. An important point of Jaspers’ philosophy is that in various ways, human beings themselves are modes of the Encompassing, which refers to the human awareness of reality from immanent as well as transcendent positions.

Concluding Remarks

In the future, there will be a tremendous need for researchers’ and students’ ‘will to know’. The world’s challenges, such as climate change, inequality of life opportunities around the globe, civil wars, and many other concerns require the commitment of the researchers and students at higher education institutions. As developing academics and established citizens of the world, students are those who will introduce new ideas about, and new perspectives on, the challenges the world faces. Higher education institutions should not only focus on students’ performance with regard to ready-made learning outcomes, but also encourage the students to commit themselves to diving deeply into the area of knowledge they work with, and if necessary, to transcend what they already know. Researchers’ and students’ ‘radical commitment to knowledge’ is necessary if universities are to contribute not only to solutions to the challenges the world faces, but also to the development of new ideas about how to live sustainably on earth in the future.

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Barnett, Ronald. A Will to Learn. Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2007. Bennett, J. O. “Karl Jaspers and Scientific Philosophy”. Journal of History of Philosophy, 31 no. 3 (1973): 437–453.

45 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago/London: The University of Chi- cago Press, 1998), 247. 130 Merete Wiberg

Biggs, John, and Catherine Tang. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2007. Blok, Anders, and Morten Axel Pedersen. “Complementary Social Science? Quali- Quantitative Experiments in a Big Data World”. Big Data & Society, 1 no. 2 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2053951714543908 Dall’Alba, Gloria, and Robyn Barnacle. “An Ontological Turn for Higher Education”. Studies in Higher Education 32, no. 6: (2007) 679–691. https://doi. org/10.1080/03075070701685130 Graubau. Richard F. “Preface”. In Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Hartmann, Nicolai. Aesthetics. Translated by Eugene Kelly. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2017. Jaspers, Karl. Existenzphilosophie. Berlin, New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1974. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy of Existence. Translated by Richard F. Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Jaspers, Karl. Von der Wahrheit. München: Sammlung Piper, 1991[1947]. Jaspers, Karl. Die idee der Universität. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer-Verlag 1980 [1946]. Jaspers, Karl. The Idea of the University. Translated by H.A.T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. London: Peter Owen, 1965. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982[1787]. Laville, Sandra, Matthew Taylor, and Daniel Hurst. “‘It’s our time to rise up’: youth climate strikes held in 100 countries”. The Guardian, March 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/15/its-our-time-to-rise -up-youth-climate-strikes-held-in-100-countries. Qvortrup, Ane, Merete Wiberg, Gerd Christensen, and Mikala Hansbøl, eds. On the Definition of Learning. Odense: University of Southern Denmark, 2016. Sfard, Anna. “On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One”. Educational Researcher, Vol. 27 No. 2: (March 1998) 4–13. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/1176193. Solberg, Mariann, and Finn Thorbjørn Hansen. “On Academic Bildung in Higher Education: A Scandinavian Approach”, In Trine Fossland, Helle Mathiasen, and Mariann Solberg, eds. Academic Bildung in Net-based Higher Education. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Wallraff, Charles F. Karl Jaspers. An Introduction to His Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. 7. Towards a Moral University: Horkheimer’s Commitment to the “Vicissitudes of Human Fate”

Jan McArthur Lancaster University, UK

Abstract: This essay proposes that the future university should be a moral university, understood through the lens of critical theory. It draws inspiration from the lecture Horkheimer gave when he became Director of the Institute for Social Research (known as the Frankfurt School) in 1931, in which he attaches the purposes of higher education to the vicissitudes of human fate. Key here is the understanding of this fate in the dialectic relationship between individual and social wellbeing. Inspired by Horkheimer, this essay suggests four foundations for this future, moral university: community reflecting this relationship between the individual and the social, interconnections between the social and economic realms, complexity in terms of knowledge engagement and change, that is the commitment to transcending the status-quo.

Keywords: critical theory, Horkheimer, Adorno, higher education, social justice

Introduction

Thinking about the future university is mired in difficulties while we remain embedded in the status-quo of current arrangements and assumptions. This is especially so if we have an explicit commitment to greater social justice within and through higher education, as is the case with critical theory. How can we pursue greater social justice from within a prevailing system imbued with injustice? Early critical theorists, Horkheimer and Adorno, were well attuned to this paradox of seeking to look beyond current social practices while so

© 2020 Jan McArthur - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.08 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 132 Jan McArthur clearly situated within them. It is a dilemma Adorno refers to often, such as when he rails against ‘the passive acceptance of what is merely the case’.1 In this essay, I suggest that one fruitful way of freeing ourselves from current contexts, in order to imagine things differently, is to use a device from another time in the history of the university, to afford the dual senses of looking back as a form of stepping outside, while clearly remaining connected to the present, and the future. To this end I draw upon the inaugural lecture that Horkheimer gave when he became Director of the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) in 1931. As Wyatt2 observes, it is rare indeed to have this sort of philosophical exposition of the purposes of a university from an institutional leader. What is clear in Horkheimer’s speech is the need for a careful, considered and planned vision of what an institution of higher education should be. This is not the same as a marketing plan or a strategic plan in the modern sense—full of performance targets, catch phrases and clichés. This is a philosophically rigorous telling of the purposes of that institution. The future university, as inspired by Horkheimer’s critical theory, is one with a moral purpose. Indeed, in this article I use the term moral university to represent what is envisaged for the future university. By this I mean that such a university nurtures the dialectically entwined aspects of individual and social well-being, and seeks not to carve intellectual life into competitive territories of winners and losers. A moral university is socially just in the sense that it contributes to all citizens leading good and fulfilling lives. This moral purpose, therefore, positions the university as contributing to the social good; a term I use to transcend the dichotomy of public or private goods. What the notion of a social good offers is the complex inter-relation between the individual and the social that is at the heart of critical theory. Unlike a liberal perspective on either social justice or the purposes of higher education, this critical theory approach sees advancement towards “the good life” as not the aggregate of individual actions but as something mediated by what Honneth3 terms cooperative self-actualization. The pursuit of a good and just life is bound up with our social membership and the forms of rationality that are nurtured through that: social justice is that which moves all citizens closer to being able to live this type of life. A

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 121. 2 John Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1990). 3 Axel Honneth, “A social pathology of reason: On the intellectual legacy of critical theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 336–360. Towards a Moral University 133 moral university, therefore, is one that nurtures the socially-constituted wellbeing of all citizens, be this directly through engagement in higher education or indirectly through the dispositions and actions of those educated within the university which then influence the social roles they play. Thus as teachers, engineers, lawyers or doctors these graduates perform their roles in a social context that respects and nurtures the wellbeing of others. The moral university would be a beacon for compassionate rationality: an example of a progressive and radical institution. Speaking in 1931 Horkheimer outlines a realistic but hopeful vision of the power of intellectual activity, founded on a commitment to an unblinking pursuit of truth. Here Horkheimer takes the notion of a ‘future’ seriously and attends to it with a valuing of justice, intellectual endeavour and social transformation. Based on a genuinely radical form of interdisciplinarity, Horkheimer’s vision reminds us that all parts of the university must be grounded in the social world in which that university resides. Revisiting Horkheimer’s speech in a twenty-first century context provides a potentially emancipatory perspective from which to grapple with the challenges that we face within society and across disciplinary areas. Universities today, it can be argued, are becoming more distorted by neoliberal pressures to act as businesses buying and selling knowledge “experiences”. This is not only unsatisfying for individuals within the university, but utterly at odds with its social remit. Issues such as climate change, vast disparities in wealth and resources and barriers to political participation all require a holistic understanding of the university in which different forms of disciplinary knowledge can complement one another in pursuit of complex and inclusive solutions. Horkheimer’s vision is daringly ambitious in its aims. It is audacious and far-reaching. So too should be our hopes for the future university. Indeed, Horkheimer states that the purposes of social philosophy, and by implication of this new academic institution known as the Institute for Social Research, as:

Its ultimate aim is the philosophical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human fate—the fate of humans not as mere individuals, however, but as members of a community. It is thus above all concerned with phenomena that can only be understood in the context of human social life: with the state, law, economy, religion—in short, with the entire material and intellectual culture of humanity.4

4 Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (Cam- bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 1. 134 Jan McArthur

I suggest that in this quote we have many of the important elements to consider for our future university. Clear here are again the interconnections between individual and social life. Also apparent is the breadth of this vision of what a higher education institution can be. This is in sharp contrast to the prevailing neoliberal university, the vision of which is narrowed to not simply a largely economic role, but an economic role dominated by the interests of the elite and powerful. The fevered pursuit of a neoliberal agenda distorts human activity and wellbeing by reducing achievement to a selective economic realm, failing to maintain the necessary mutuality between economic, social and cultural life. The relentless pressures of marketisation and commodification in a neoliberal sector give rise to distortions and social pathologies. A notable example of this is the distorting effects that have accompanied the rise of league tables and other metrics of institutional performance. These league tables distort our understanding of what really goes on within higher education institutions and lead to prestige alone being given more credence than actual intellectual engagement or achievement.5 Further there is an ahistorical character to many of the policies that seek to promote higher education as a commercial good to be traded like any other.6 The current situation is increasingly grounded on a mirage of status and reputation rather than intellectual endeavour. This distorts our engagement with knowledge, surely the key role of any university, and it damages the moral wellbeing of those within these institutions and restricts the ways in which the university can contribute to the greater wellbeing of all citizens. Indeed Locke7 argues that the focus on competitive rankings and league tables diverts investment from student learning or the development of academic staff. Similarly Brown8 demonstrates that the pursuit of status is a poor use of limited resources. As some universities go up the league tables, others move down. There is no gain, just the simulacrum of progress for some and the ignominy of failure for others. A moral university only makes sense if we truly yield to the idea of the social whole.

5 William Locke, “The Intensification of Rankings Logic in an Increasingly Marke- tised Higher Education Environment,” European Journal of Education 49, no 1 (2014):77–90. Monica McLean, Andrea Abbas, and Paul Ashwin, Quality in Undergraduate Ed- ucation: How Powerful Knowledge Disrupts Inequality (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 6 Ewan Ingleby, “The house that Jack built: neoliberalism, teaching in higher education and the moral objections,” Teaching in Higher Education 20, no. 5 (2015):518–529. 7 Locke, “The Intensification of Rankings Logic”. 8 Roger Brown, “Higher education and inequality.” Perspectives:Policy and Practice in Higher Education 22, no. 2 (2018):37–43. Towards a Moral University 135

The rest of this essay is structured as follows. After two short sections giving background on the Frankfurt School and Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture, I consider four aspects of the future university inspired by Horkheimer and critical theory. These are four elements upon which we could realise our moral university and which encompass Horkheimer’s vision based on the vicissitudes of human fate. Firstly, the idea of community; that the future university should be one in which the social nature of human experience is at the forefront of what we do and how we go about it. Secondly, interconnections; a careful positioning of the university in terms of its social and economic purposes, and a firm warning against the narrowing of such purposes to the aims of particular elites. Thirdly, complexity; thinking of the core purposes of the university our focus should be on rigorous engagement with complex, dynamic and contested knowledge. Finally, change; I argue that perhaps the greatest challenge for the future university is to genuinely locate its mission in terms of emancipatory social change, for all members of society, not simply those who work or study within its walls. Inspired by Horkheimer so long ago, these four features lay a foundation, a starting point, on which to consider the idea of a moral university.

The Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School)

The irony of using Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture to explore the theme of the future university lies in the fact that the Institute was initially deliberately established to be outside the constraints of the formal German university system. As Wyatt describes, it is a ‘peculiar organisation’.9 It is not part of the formal university system and does not become so until the 1950s after return from exile in the United States. But even in its early years the Institute had close relations with the University of Frankfurt and its members undertook teaching responsibilities. Indeed, it was also a condition of the rules under which the Institute was founded that its Director also held a Chair at the university. Similarly, while in exile the Institute was sustained by the support offered by Columbia University in New York. It is also an unusual institution of higher education by virtue of being privately funded by a wealthy benefactor and yet firmly positioning itself as a public institution of research. Thus the reach of the Institute’s ambitions has at all times extended well beyond its small, formal membership. It can only really be understood in terms of the network of connections between its thought, research and activities and nearly all aspects of wider society. Their research

9 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education, 70. 136 Jan McArthur interests did not stay confined to that which had already been researched or written about, but roamed over new territories wherever they perceived social oppression, be it large or small. The unifying theme throughout is the dual focus on a critical form of humanity rationality located in a complex inter-relationship between the individual and society, and located in an historical context. A further particular feature of the Institute’s work is the range of theoretical influences they drew upon. Most famous here is the unique combination of Marx and Freud, and as Jay10 explains, it is difficult today to appreciate how audacious this ‘unnatural marriage’ of Marx and Freud was at the time. From these ideas the members of the Institute, and particularly Horkheimer and Adorno, developed their own form of dialectics. This would go on to shape some of Horkheimer’s major works such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Adorno) and Eclipse of Reason (influenced by his collaboration with Adorno). Indeed, Adorno would take this furthest and put his own mark on critical theory’s approach to dialectics with his notion of negative dialectics. Though Adorno did not write that volume until the 1960s, its antecedence can be found in much earlier critical theory, with the refusal to believe that a neat and happy outcome is the end-result of a dialectical process. Rather, meaning and meaning-making are complex and multi-faceted, as are the points at which they intersect with the social world. Thus in his lecture Horkheimer gives early warning of this particular approach that would go to characterise the Frankfurt School and its critical theory. Jay11 explains this feature of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work in terms of being ‘always rooted in a kind of cosmic irony, a refusal to rest somewhere and say finally, Here is where truth lies’. I suggest it is this restlessness that gives their work such radical potential. This is also a moral restlessness. It is an ongoing unease with past suffering which cannot be redeemed, present suffering which can easily go unseen and future suffering lying await in the terrifying and unimaginable new ways humans find to do harm. The radical character comes with the refusal to settle for either the status-quo or an apparently inevitable future (so defined by the prevailing system). And yet this is very far from utopianism of any sort, as critical theory lies embedded in the historical quality of human experience.

10 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 86. 11 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 67. Towards a Moral University 137

Horkheimer’s Lecture: The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research

The title of Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture reflects the two key parts of what he had to say: The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research.12 Here again we see the unusual character of the Institute with its apparent focus on just one area of academic activity, namely social philosophy. But I suggest that while the activities of the Institute can be clearly seen as clustered around this area of enquiry, this does not mean they were constrained by it. Indeed, one of the reasons for looking back at Horkheimer’s lecture is because of the ways in which it justifies the role of social philosophy in all aspects of our consideration of the nature and purposes of the university. Clearly members of the Institute did not study everything, but that is not to say that anything was beyond their gaze or the relevance of their work. It is on this basis that I extend the key messages of this lecture to higher education as a whole. Moreover, Wiggershaus13 describes Horkheimer as ‘acting from the conviction that he was the bearer of a revolutionary message’. I suggest that as we look to the future university it is just such a revolutionary message that we need as our guide. Horkheimer’s lecture reminds us that there are possibilities beyond the apparent inevitability of current arrangements. In his lecture Horkheimer explains the development of social philosophy, particularly through Kant and Hegel. He rejects Kant’s emphasis on isolated individuals in favour of a more Hegelian focus on social beings. But he sees limits in Hegel as well, particularly a tendency towards idealism and an acceptance of the prevailing social organisation.14 Horkheimer’s aim, therefore, is to envisage an alternative for social philosophy, one grounded in criticality and change. While it would not be until his famous essay of 1937 that Horkheimer first uses the term “critical theory”, this lecture is in many ways its first exposition.15 However Abromeit16 would argue the antecedence goes back as far as Horkheimer’s work from 1925 onwards. What is clear, I suggest, is how much contemporary relevance there is in Horkheimer’s early

12 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science. 13 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 39. 14 Douglas Kellner, “Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory,” Sociological Per- spectives 33, no. 1 (1990):11–33. 15 See Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1995). 16 John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 138 Jan McArthur work.17 In particular there are two dimensions to this relevance. Firstly, the fundamental positioning of an institution of higher education as having a moral role, understood in terms of society as a whole. Secondly, the appreciation of how moral and social wellbeing plays out in the dialectic between individual and social experience. The timing of Horkheimer’s lecture needs to be addressed, as it plays no small part in the tone he adopts. How different might things have been if Horkheimer was speaking three years later when the full nature of Nazi totali- tarianism became apparent? Indeed, by 1933 the Institute had been closed by the Nazis and its members fled into various forms of exile. There is, therefore, an optimism (or perhaps lack of pessimism) in Horkheimer’s lecture which is harder to find in later work. Indeed, this sense of pessimism is for many writers, such as Brookfield,18 a defining feature of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work. While I do not fully subscribe to the view of their work as full of utter hopelessness, I do concede that there is a hopefulness looking forward in this inaugural lecture that may be missing later. Wiggershaus19 describes it as a tone of ‘measured hope that real discoveries as opposed to transfigurative ideology could serve humanity as a means of bringing meaning and reason into the world’. Again, we come back to this connection between human reason and moral potential. The legacy of Horkheimer’s inaugural speech was to position the Institute as an institution of higher education, including research, with a specific remit to consider human reason in an historical context and as fulfilled through the interplay of individual and social experience. While over time there have been different interpretations of critical theory, these central facets have remained common.20 Wyatt21 argues that the Institute was able to survive the long period of enforced exile precisely because of the strong foundations laid out in Horkheimer’s inaugural address and subsequent leadership. I suggest further that the continued relevance of critical theory today lies in no small part due to the radical vision of Horkheimer back in 1931. I therefore now turn to the four themes I suggest we can draw from Horkheimer’s vision as we consider the future university: community, interconnections, complexity, and change. Together these lay the foundations for a moral university, committed to the

17 J.C. Berendzen, “Suffering and theory: Max Horkheimer’s early essays and contemporary moral philosophy.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, no. 9 (2010):1019–1037. 18 Stephen Brookfield, The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning and Teaching (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005). 19 Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, 39. 20 Axel Honneth, “A social pathology of reason,” 336–360. 21 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education. Towards a Moral University 139 complexity of human reason. These themes adhere towards an understanding of the moral purposes of higher education as a place for engagement with complex and difficult thought because it is only through such thought that we can take forward genuine, emancipatory progress.

Community: The Social Nature of Human Experience

The first theme I draw from Horkheimer might not at first appear particularly radical. Certainly in a higher education context we often speak about a community of scholars and place emphasis on collegiality. But, I refer back to the points made in the introduction about the dialectic relationship between individual and social in critical theory. It is in this social aspect that Horkheimer draws most on Hegel, though he also seeks to move beyond his idealism. Thus he states:

The destiny of the particular is fulfilled in the fate of the universal; the essence or substantive form of the individual manifests itself not in its personal acts, but in the life of the whole to which it belongs.22

A definitive aspect of Horkheimer’s reference to community is that it should not inspire feel-good thoughts of a benevolent gathering of fellow citizens. This is not the way of critical theory. Thus community, as used by Horkheimer, and as I intend for the moral university, has an altogether more critical edge. We must understand the hidden forces that can pathologise and distort our opportunities to fulfil our potential, within and outside the university, both as individuals and as members of the social whole. I have already mentioned league tables and various metrics by which universities are judged as successful in the current neoliberal climate. The competitive aspect to these developments, the necessary fact of winners and losers, is just one of the pathologies I am referring to in the current situation of higher education. And these distortions can be complex and hard to detect. As McLean et al.23 have shown, students at less prestigious institutions do not necessarily have a lesser student experience and can have very transformative encounters with knowledge, but they suffer from the stigma of having had a “lower quality” education even though this is untrue. This is a typical distortion thrown up by the neoliberal

22 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 2–3. 23 Monica McLean, Andrea Abbas, and Paul Ashwin, Quality in Undergraduate Edu- cation. 140 Jan McArthur university and reflects the myth of capitalist competition as a way of organis- ing what is essentially a social good. I suggest the moral university must transcend and transform the rather muddled relationship between notions of community and the individual which have been fostered within a narrowly market-driven system. For example, within the university we have witnessed greater recognition of the social nature of learning itself, but have persisted with assessment methods that are highly individual and competitively driven.24 It has been acknowledged for some time that assessment is a powerful force in shaping what and how students learn and thus we need to consider more co-operative forms of engagement with knowledge, through which individual success and social success are mutually assured. While we insist in measuring progress in terms of a percentage mark or degree classification, transformative opportunities to engage with knowledge will always remain truncated. The generation and critique of knowledge, which should lie at the heart of the university’s mission, is itself a social activity and one undertaken to feed into the broader social sphere and moral progress. But if knowledge is reduced to an individual private good, and the university to merely an aggre- gation of individual pursuits, then we fall well short of this goal. What is being suggested here is a liberation of the university from forms of consumerism and marketisation which urge on an individualism and false competitiveness. Clearly, these are modern threats and not those envisaged by Horkheimer. But there is resonance between the narrowing quality of such contemporary threats and the perceived confines of the traditional German university which the Institute sought to escape. But what is being suggested is no simple thing to achieve. Again, we come back to the dilemma of how to effect greater social justice from within a society that is itself unjust. Similarly, how to enable higher education to work as a genuine learning community while so many structures (government policy and metrics of success for example) push towards isolation and individualism? The future university must embrace the dialectic of simultaneously being within and without that is fundamental to radical social change. Indeed, there is a strong theme of exile that runs throughout the work of members of the Frankfurt School and which we can understand today as offering insight into how to harness the radical potential of the university. Wyatt25 states that a

24 Jan McArthur, Assessment for Social Justice (London, Bloomsbury, 2018). Gwyneth Hughes, Ipsative Assessment: Motivation Through Marking Progress (Lon- don: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 25 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education, 69. Towards a Moral University 141 phrase often associated with the Institute was nicht mitzumachen, meaning ‘not to join in’. But this should not mean that the Institute encouraged isolation from the broader social realm. But it did require a refusal to participate in those forces which perpetuate and sustain an unjust status-quo. The social nature of human experience necessarily encompasses the historical nature of such experience. Here again, Horkheimer is useful. We must understand our universities as historical institutions and consider the implications of this. Looking to the future has to be based on an understanding of the past. For example, the future university must be a decolonial institution and explicitly recognise its past actions in furthering the advancement of elites at the expense of other members of society. And such elites still disproportion- ately benefit from higher education today. Wealth still counts for far too much within the current university. This encompasses the wealth of institutions and the relative wealth of many of their students. The university as a means for individual accumulation of wealth is itself a social distortion. Thus the moral university would be one in which individuals work together for the wellbeing of all society, and in so doing achieve their own fulfilment. Today there is no shortage of social problems to which the university and its graduates can address their activities. And, clearly, there is already a substantial amount of socially-directed research and engagement in universities today, despite the overall neoliberal climate. But what Horkheimer reminds us is that our solutions will only ever be partial unless they are on the foundation of appreciating the unique relationship between individual and social wellbeing that is at the heart of critical theory. We will always end up in dead ends or compromises unless the welfare of all citizens genuinely guides the rationality of our decision making.

Interconnections: Relationships Between the Social and Economic

In this section I consider further some of the constituent parts of this notion of community, of social experience, that should underpin the future university. In particular I am keen to outline how the underlying relationship between the social and economic spheres should play out. Again, Horkheimer is useful here. With one foot in Marxist theory Horkheimer is clear that economic relationships form other social bonds and opportunities. However, with his other foot outside Marxism, he also warns against narrow or simplistic economic determinism. The irony I want to highlight is that such economic determinism is as much a fault of contemporary neoliberal understandings of society, as orthodox Marxist ones. Both conceive of the economic realm narrowly and disarticulated from the social. Thus it is essential that the future university is 142 Jan McArthur built on a foundation within which the social and economic spheres are held to be inter-related in complex and broad ways. There are several elements to this. Firstly, what constitutes the economic sphere is not taken to simply be the interests of government, big business or other powerful and wealthy groups.26 It is imperative that the future university rests on an understanding of economic life that is diverse, inclusive and multi-faceted. The economic purposes of the university thereby become equally diverse and inclusive. As such, those who work and study within the university come to understand the economic sphere, and their place within it, critically. Thus, it is not about conforming to be willing members of a workforce alienated from one’s talents and contributions.27 Instead the focus is on creativity and criticality. This must, therefore, include a refusal to accept, as Adorno warned, that which merely exists. We should not underestimate what a radical shift this requires of our future university, compared with past and present. While many of us who work in higher education can relate to this notion of criticality, there are real limits to its fruition when considered at an institutional level. We must be clear eyed and refuse to romanticise the university, however much affection we feel for it. We must acknowledge that since their inception universities have served the interests of specific groups in society, be it early craft guilds or the manda- rins of government today. This must change. Here again, the future university can only be built on a clear-sighted recognition of the past and of previous injustices and privilege. Horkheimer’s task was, therefore, much easier than our own. His Institute was small, focused and financially independent. But we can still take inspiration. Horkheimer conceives the foundational philosophical problem as the connection between:

the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrow sense (to which belong not only the so-called intellectual elements, such as science, arts, and religion, but also law, cus- toms, fashion, public opinion, sports, leisure, activities, lifestyle, etc).28

Here Horkheimer encapsulates the gloriously ambitious reach of the Frankfurt School’s interests. This is not a discrete and easily isolated discipline of social

26 Jan McArthur, “Reconsidering the social and economic purposes of higher education,” Higher Education Research & Development 30, no. 6 (2011):737–749. 27 Ibid. 28 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 11. Towards a Moral University 143 philosophy—this is about an engagement with the world as it is, and as it could be. Nothing less. Moreover, if we tease apart the above quote from Horkheimer it has interesting parallels with what modern universities claim to do. First, there is the economic sphere, second, the personal development of individuals, and, third, society as a whole. All three neatly reflect many of the mission statements and strategies of our current universities. But Horkheimer’s vision and our current reality are not the same. The importance of what Horkheimer is arguing lies in that inter-connection between realms, and this is largely missing—often glossed over—in the current way universities proclaim their character and purposes. It is not my intention to paint a black–and-white picture, whereby the current state of the university is bad and critical theory is the only way to conceive of a “good” university. Many universities do proclaim a social mission and this is sincerely made. But these same universities also often buy into a neoliberal logic of assumed competition and commodification that is simply inconsistent with social progress. And it is inconsistent because it is based on a disarticulated relationship between the economic and social realms, and between individual and social experience. To be clear, the problem is not associating the university with an economic role. Indeed, Horkheimer clearly states that the economic life of society is one of the three pivots on which the enquiry he is arguing for rests. Further, I’ve argued elsewhere that the problem is not higher education having an economic role, but rather the narrow way in which that role is understood.29 We can draw some inspiration for the moral university from recent developments to demonstrate the connection between professional education within the university and a transformative social role. Work by Kreber30 and Walker and McLean31 is helpful here, demonstrating the need, challenges and opportunities for the furtherance of social justice and social wellbeing through the work of university-educated professionals. Indeed, it is the dispositions and actions of these professionals that play a crucial role in expanding the role of higher education beyond those who study and work within it. The moral university has to be both a place that is dialectically inter-related with the society it should serve and meaningfully separate from dominant forms of power in order to see the possibilities that lie beyond simply maintaining the status-quo. It is thus essentially an institution within and

29 McArthur, “Reconsidering the Social and Economic Purposes of Higher Education”. 30 Carolin Kreber, Educating for Civic-mindedness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 31 Melanie Walker and Monica McLean, Professional Education, Capabilities and the Public Good (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 144 Jan McArthur without society. That, I believe, can be higher education’s unique contribution to the realm of ideas and to our engagement with knowledge.

Complexity: Nature of Knowledge and Critical Interdisciplinarity

I now turn to the question of the nature of knowledge and the future university. Clearly, the engagement with and generation of knowledge is at the heart of any future university. This is arguably also true of current or past universities, however, critical theory necessitates that we understand knowledge within the university in particular ways. I have described this in terms of being contested, dynamic and not easily known.32 Thus, to realise the breadth of this vision across the social and economic spheres requires a particular understanding of what we teach and research within the university. Horkheimer talks about the bringing together of social philosophy and the social sciences; of bringing together philosophical and empirical enquiry:

the question today is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration.33

Thus he proposes a radical form of interdisciplinarity in two senses. Firstly, it is challenging and novel compared with the entrenched silos in which some disciplines operated at the time, and in some cases continue to today. Secondly, it is pursued for radical ends. This means that it is about harnessing the collective insights of different disciplines towards broad social transformation. But what of the natural sciences? While Horkheimer does not address them particularly in terms of the work of the Institute, I believe we can extrap- olate his thinking here to fit the future university. Certainly, despite his critiques of positivism, Horkheimer was not, as some have thought, hostile towards the natural sciences.34 In fact, his ire is directed at a particular form of science, narrow, isolated and unrelated to other forms of research.35 Thus Horkheimer states:

32 Jan McArthur, Rethinking Knowledge in Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice (London: Bloomsbury). 33 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 9 34 Berendzen, “Suffering and theory”. 35 Ibid. Towards a Moral University 145

The task is to do what all true researchers have done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. With this approach, no yes-or-no answers arise to philosophical questions. Instead, these questions themselves become integrated into the empirical research process.36

Indeed, the distinction between the human and natural sciences or between social and natural sciences is illusory. In contrast to Biglan’s37 famous classification of disciplines in which he distinguishes between life and non-life— all disciplines are about human life as all are the product of human thought. Furthermore, all human enquiry impacts on human society. The moral university would champion the diversity of disciplines, seeing in them the hope for radical and transformative engagement with knowledge. Thus social philosophy, or critical theory, is as relevant to the natural sciences as to social sciences. No part of the future university should pursue knowledge that is not connected to greater social justice for all. Thus far from the humanities today becoming less relevant, they are at the heart of what the university does because it is through these disciplines that we debate, consider and construct our understandings of greater social justice—in cooperation with other disciplines. Horkheimer’s lecture is so powerful because it challenges us to consider a philosophical re-telling of the core purposes and nature of the future university, but this is a re-telling in conjunction with all other disciplines. Such radical interdisciplinarity is thus a way of life, rather than an occasional activity. It accords with what Rowland38 has described as a critical interdisciplinarity, one which builds bridges between legitimate disciplinary identities rather than simply some form of epistemological merger. Meaningful engagement with disciplinary knowledge can only be done in a broader interdisciplinary space. Rather than these two forms of engagement being alternatives, they are necessarily incumbent on one another. For example, let us take a discipline such as chemistry. We do not simply tack on a bit of social philosophy to chemistry or, worse still, look for some common ground and reduce both disciplines

36 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 9–10. 37 Anthony Biglan, “The Characteristics of Subject Matter in Different Academic Areas.” Journal of Applied Psychology 57, no. 3 (1973):195–203. 38 Stephen Rowland, The Enquiring University (Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 2006). 146 Jan McArthur down to that.39 Indeed, what that would look like is hard to imagine. Instead, the logic to be followed through from Horkheimer’s vision is that within the moral university chemistry must be understood as a human discipline and that its purpose must relate to the furthering of human wellbeing, in its many different forms. That is the space of critical interdisciplinarity: human wellbeing. Indeed, this is what defines the academic space itself. The contemporary privileging of STEM and vocational disciplines is pred- icated on exactly the narrow understanding of the social and economic spheres which the future university must eschew. Such privileging disarticulates practical activity from philosophical appreciation of the implications for human society. As such it denies the possibility of transformative change, as well as actually doing these disciplines a disservice. Social philosophy, I would argue, offers that pathway out of current assumptions about the disciplinary organization of knowledge. It offers a radical way to rethink interdisciplinarity, not simply as work that falls within, or between, two disciplines. This is about the manifest reinforcement that all intellectual enquiry should serve the social good, while simultaneously bringing into restless questioning what we believe that good to be. This is the dialectic so typical of the Frankfurt School that Horkheimer helped to nurture. Indeed, in his history of the Frankfurt School, Jay40 argues that it is the dialectic between the empirical and the philosophical which ‘gave Critical Theory its cutting edge’. Thus Wyatt41 warns that the role of social philosophy in regard to other disciplines is not to act ‘as a censorious, rigid, controller dominating and perverting the true functions of the collaborating disciplines’. In contrast, Horkheimer is envisaging social philosophy in more open and dynamic terms. Here again we are brought back to the dialecticism that is so important to what Horkheimer is saying. Social philosophy does not laud itself over these other disciplines but is formed by its interactions with them: just as the work of the Frankfurt School was shaped by the intersections between their work and other forms of research. Wyatt42 captures the nature of Horkheimer’s interdisciplinarity well when he refers to the distinction between the ‘rounded whole’ and the ‘many isolated facets left isolated in the modern dispersion of ideas’. Horkheimer was clear about the potential threats to his intellectual programme, notably ‘dogmatic

39 Jan McArthur, “Time to Look Anew: critical pedagogy and disciplines within higher education.” Studies in Higher Education 35, no. 3 (2010):301–315. 40 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 48. 41 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education, 68. 42 Ibid., 67. Towards a Moral University 147 rigidity and … sinking into empirical—technical minutiae’.43 The university of the future must be one of promiscuous forms of thought, that challenge and disrupt the taken-for-granted. What social philosophy does is to sharpen our gaze at an overarching idea, within which the academic disciplines with which we are more familiar then operate.44 Thus what is meant by Horkheimer’s radical interdisciplinarity is not simply two disciplines working together. It is the injection into every research process of this moral imperative to connect with the nature and consequences of human suffering, as it exists in the object of that research. By extension, social philosophy itself is no isolated discipline or field of enquiry but is implicated in all intellectual endeavour, within the moral university. Thus Horkheimer states:

to the extent that philosophy—as a theoretical undertaking oriented towards the general, the “essential”—is capable of giving particular studies animating impulses, and at the same time remains open enough to let itself be influenced and changed by these concrete studies.45

Thus our future university no longer buys into the discourse of necessary choice between a focus on the sciences or on the humanities, a choice which in an economically-driven, marketised sector inevitably falls in favour of the sciences. Instead, the philosophical and the sciences are mutually reinforcing in order to truly contribute to greater social justice. Indeed, empirical research is key to the type of enquiry, and institution, outlined by Horkheimer. He rejects both metaphysics and philosophising in some feel-good sort of way. His attention is sharply attuned to real existence, and to the suffering therein.

Change: A Commitment to Emancipation and Social Justice

In Horkheimer’s vision the mission of higher education lies in its ability to challenge and disrupt. In contrast, one may argue that the neoliberal university is an altogether more reassuring entity. Such a description may seem strange, even at odds with the driven forms of innovation and rapid change also associated with neoliberalism. But I suggest that the neoliberal university is a source of reassurance to the dominant social organization through its links with government and large business. Under the guise of being relevant higher

43 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 14. 44 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education. 45 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 9. 148 Jan McArthur education solves the technical problems of industry and government. Yes, of course, there is also research into poverty, social deprivation and health and wellbeing. But such research is anomalous with other pressures driving financial competition in the sector. In the moral university these issues—including their philosophical consideration—move to centre stage across the disciplines. In so doing, change becomes a way of intellectual life as the challenge of ensuring individual and social wellbeing is never a finished product. Thus we get to the heart of Horkheimer’s radical vision and its importance to the future university. For in many ways the choice is stark. Do we continue this model in which the university supports the status-quo, which inevitably includes established forms of privilege, or do we assert an intellectual independence that has long been valued in some quarters, but strug- gled for realisation? Indeed, a fair diagnosis of higher education over the past decades has been the reduction of this scope for independence. Which is not to say there was once a golden age of the beautiful pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Nor, indeed, should there be. The type of educated person being advanced by Horkheimer is ‘a person of action, of will and of courage, as against a passive receptor educated by a curriculum of devices and mechanisms, of inputs and outputs’.46 I suggest that Horkheimer’s speech throws into relief the problem with the contemporary importance given to evidencing the impact of research. Increasingly the metrics used to judge academic research include this notion of impact: what has been done differently as a result of this research. But Horkheimer suggests how this misses the crucial step that would give meaning: what should be done differently as a result of this research. Any notion of impact severed from its moral purposes will be necessarily limited and abridged. Similarly, in the teaching realm of the future university we have to be prepared to cast out some of our treasured practices, even some of those we currently hold dear due to associations with standards or quality. I return to the question of assessment in higher education because it is an area that has proven resistant to change and innovation, often in the name of standards. When I have suggested, for example, that we need to consider relationships of trust with our students, even in an assessment context, this has been met with no small amount of disbelief and resistance.47 And it is understandable why. I don’t want to just ‘trust’ that the doctor who treats me is qualified and has met the requirements of fitness to practice. Intellectual rigour should be

46 Wyatt, Commitment to Higher Education, 67. 47 McArthur, Assessment for Social Justice. Towards a Moral University 149 at the heart of the moral university, and is envisaged as such by Horkheimer. But we also need to consider that distrust is not consistent with the nurturing of emancipatory dispositions. Thus moving to a level of practicality beyond Horkheimer’s lecture, I suggest that assessment reform would also have to be central to the moral university.48 Taken seriously, a university inspired to fulfill the ambitions of critical theory would face many obstacles, from within and without its walls. The current climate of individual competition has its winners (though critical theory would suggest these are Pyrric victories) and these winners are likely to want to remain so. Those who are not winners probably want to become them, such is the power of the neoliberal discourse. Thus change can never just be about the future university but is again nested in the dialectic relationship between the university and society. But it is undeniable that the starting point is this belief that the university can be different to what has come before, and in striving to achieve that it would move towards fulfilling the radical and emancipatory potential that serious engagement with knowledge should bring.

Conclusion: A University with a Moral Purpose

Horkheimer concludes his lecture with the following vision for the Institute:

May the guiding impulse in this Institute be the indomitable will unswervingly to serve the truth!49

Truth here, however, must be understood through the lens of critical theory, with its rejection of both positivism and relativism. Truth exists and is worth serving unswervingly, but it is complicated, nuanced and elusive. The future university should be a place for difficult thought. Practical problems such as climate change require the collaborative solutions of science, philosophy and many other disciplines. This is one issue among many, but it is useful in order to focus the problem. For Horkheimer inspires us to appreciate that the future university should be a moral university. To stay with the example of climate change, this is not simply a subject to be studied and researched, but has implications for all aspects of the university’s life, ranging from day-to-day recycling practices to major investment decisions.

48 For more on the connection between assessment and social justice see McArthur, Assessment for Social Justice. 49 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 14. 150 Jan McArthur

Critical theory challenges basic assumptions about how to explore the social world, and how that world should be structured. As Jay50 wrote of the Institute for Social Research,

The role of the intellectual, the Institut came to believe with growing certainty, was to continue thinking what was becoming ever more unthinkable in the modern world.

Our future university should, therefore, be an unthinkable university, the meaning of which is two-fold. Firstly, its basic premise may seem unthinkable in the current neoliberal climate as it challenges many of the pillars on which that is based. Secondly, it is about an ongoing commitment to this unthinkable form of thought inspired by critical theory. This is thought which never accepts simply what already exists. This future university is hard to imagine in detail because this genuine commitment to emancipatory change involves transformations small and large, some of which (such as student assessment) are very hard to see as possible. This future university can be built only by rejecting the logic of the status-quo and being prepared to think differently about how and why we engage in scholarly work. This is a process built on a multitude of critical moments and actions. It is thus about deeply personal beliefs and practices, and shared social commitments. Given its powerfully well-educated workforce, surely it is the responsibility of the future university to step outside what already exists and to be the place in which the unthinkable can be thought: in critical, compassionate and creative ideas across all disciplines, and for the moral wellbeing of all in society.

References

Abromeit, John. Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Adorno, Theodor W. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1959). Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Berendzen, J. C. “Suffering and theory: Max Horkheimer’s early essays and contemporary moral philosophy.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, no. 9 (2010):1019–1037. Biglan, Anthony. “The Characteristics of Subject Matter in Different Academic Areas.” Journal of Applied Psychology 57, no. 3 (1973):195–203. Brookfield, Stephen. The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning and Teaching. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005.

50 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 80. Towards a Moral University 151

Brown, Roger. “Higher education and inequality.” Perspectives:Policy and Practice in Higher Education 22, no. 2 (2018):37–43. Honneth, Axel. “A social pathology of reason: On the intellectual legacy of Critical Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, edited by Fred Rush, 336–360. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Horkheimer, Max. Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1993. Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Continuum, 1995. Hughes, Gwyneth. Ipsative Assessment: Motivation Through Marking Progress. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ingleby, Ewan. “The house that Jack built: neoliberalism, teaching in higher education and the moral objections.” Teaching in Higher Education 20, no. 5 (2015):518–529. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Kellner, Douglas. “Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory.” Sociological Perspectives 33, no. 1 (1990):11–33. Kreber, Carolin. Educating for Civic-mindedness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Locke, William. “The Intensification of Rankings Logic in an Increasingly Marketised Higher Education Environment.” European Journal of Education 49, no. 1 (2014):77–90. McArthur, Jan. “Time to Look Anew: critical pedagogy and disciplines within higher education.” Studies in Higher Education 35, no. 3 (2010):301–315. McArthur, Jan. “Reconsidering the social and economic purposes of higher education.” Higher Education Research & Development 30, no. 6 (2011):737–749. McArthur, Jan. Rethinking Knowledge in Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. McArthur, Jan. Assessment for Social Justice. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. McLean, Monica, Andrea Abbas, and Paul Ashwin. Quality in Undergraduate Education: How Powerful Knowledge Disrupts Inequality. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Rowland, Stephen. The Enquiring University. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 2006. Walker, Melanie, and Monica McLean. Professional Education, Capabilities and the Public Good. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Wyatt, John. Commitment to Higher Education. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1990.

8. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education

Wesley Shumar Drexel University, United States

Sarah Robinson Aarhus University, Denmark

Abstract: Universities around the world face a number of pressures. To cope with these pressures the language of entrepreneurship and innovation has arisen out of neoliberal ide- ologies. However, in some contexts, especially in Scandinavia, entrepreneurship has been re-defined to encompass a wider set of values than just the economic. Value today is most often thought of as economic value. But the role of the university could be to discuss what do we value. Learning focused around the things a society values involves a dynamic process of becoming for students and faculty. Students should be re-integrated into the core of knowledge production and creating new values. This is a process of transformation, of becoming for the students, where they act upon the world, take risks and grapple with the new, transforming themselves through the process. It is an agentic process that benefits both the individual and the communities they work with.

Keywords: agency, entrepreneurship, higher education, becoming

Introduction

All of us experience aspects of our everyday lives, at times, as unpleasant or uncomfortable, but most of us just accept these “disharmonies” as part of our reality. In Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity, the authors discuss the ways entrepreneurs not only create new products and services, but how they bring about “new worlds” in the process.1 The entrepreneurs are focused on a

1 Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge,

© 2020 Wesley Shumar, Sarah Robinson - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.09 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 154 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson process of becoming and are not just situated in the current social world. The authors also argue that in a related way, individuals involved in democratic action do something similar. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus suggest that entrepreneurs are individuals who remain focused on disharmonies and think about how to overcome them.2 In order to do this, they need to assess how much the disharmony is a social phenomenon—how many others share the same discomfort. And then they must marshal their resources, imagination and social capital in order to think about how to change their situation. As stated above, this may bring new products or services into the world, but it also necessarily and fundamentally brings about a new social world in the process.3 This dynamic process of becoming, is not only about a world in process, but it is very much about the agency of social actors, as well as a set of practices that might define a community of people working together. Much of the discussion of agency in social theory grows out of a Durkheimian and struc- turalist/poststructuralist position. As such agency and structure are seen as a fixed binary pair of concepts. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus come much more from a phenomenological perspective and specifically from Dreyfus’ work on Heidegger. While still acknowledging structural impediments, the overall focus is on process and on process that is dynamic and change oriented. As such, agency at the individual and collective level can play a greater role. People and the world they are part of are always in a process of becoming, it is definitive of what they are. It is this focus on agency that one sees in the literature on entrepreneurs, and the related practices of taking risks and putting one’s self on the line that has important implications for higher education, and a vision of teaching and learning in higher education. This entrepreneurial vision of agency is central to the paper. It is not just about human action, the entrepreneurial framing of agency is about the potential for creative transformation. The world gets

MA: MIT Press, 1997). 2 Ibid. 3 One only needs to think about the invention of the smart phone to see this idea in practice. Marc A. Smith gave a talk at Drexel University in the 1990s about new technologies. At the time Dr. Smith was at Microsoft Research, he is currently runs a consulting group called Connected Action (http://www.connectedaction.net). In the talk, Dr. Smith held up a cell phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA) and a digital camera. He said to the audience, in the future these devices will be rolled into one. At the time, it was a little hard for the audience to imagine this. Of course, the smart phone was the solution to a number of disharmonies at the time. And as we know, it brought with it social media the mobile revolution, the social world changed. Of course, social media has now created a number of disharmonies of its own, and so the world is constantly becoming. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 155 transformed through these creative processes. And while individuals are very much at the core, it is the individual within a social discourse and social process. Groups of people change the world through their conscious action. They do not always know what their doing does, but they are fully engaged in the process of transformation. This progressive view of entrepreneurship could be very important for the revitalization of universities. It could be the twenty-first century version of the eighteenth-century vision of the modern research university. However, the dominant vision of entrepreneurship, at least in the United States and many other countries as well, is its association with global capitalism and as one of the drivers of capitalist expansion. It is certainly the case that many entrepreneurs have become the heads of major capitalist enterprises. One only needs to look at the current leaders in the tech industries to see that that is true. This is because entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship has been associated with the production of economic value and specifically money, that is the dominant form of value in our world. As such, creating economic value has been the primary way that entrepreneurs have been understood. But increasingly, there are scholars, especially in Scandinavia, who are seeing the production of value more broadly. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus have also played an important part in articulating the production of more than one kind of value. In order to explore the potential of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education as a vision for the twenty-first-century university, this essay first looks at how the entrepreneurial university has been written about so far. Much of the focus on the entrepreneurial university has not broken with the vision of entrepreneurship as important in creating economic value. In this vision, universities need to find ways to finance themselves in order to stave off fiscal crisis from a declining state investment. Similarly, universities are also imagined as significant engines of “knowledge” for a knowledge economy and they could become central institutions in future capital accumulation. These visions are caught in the current contradictions of capital accumulation and the social, environmental and cultural problems created by unchecked neoliberal capitalism. Next, this essay looks at how entrepreneurship has developed in economic discourse itself. It discusses how classic thinkers, like Schumpeter, saw the relationship of entrepreneurship to capitalism. It also goes on to pose ideas about different forms of value and the ways the entrepreneurs could be, and have been, central to creating other forms of value. Value creation is a central 156 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson activity in all human societies.4 It is perhaps the one thing that human groups focus their sense of meaning and purpose on. But in the West, we have had too narrow a sense of what value is, and why it is important to people. This essay suggests a broader conception of value that not only is important for the society, but for thinking about the purpose of the university as well. Next, the essay turns to how an entrepreneurship education, which embraces a broader conception of value, could be important for university curricula and for engaging students in a process of meaningful activity that produces value for the individual and the society. This perspective is very much in line with current educational theory that focuses on engaging students in active learning in real world contexts. Two examples will be drawn from the authors’ experiences to underscore the value of this kind of active and change oriented pedagogy. This essay concludes by suggesting that universities have a central role to play in the process of deciding what values are good for the society as a whole. The university can be a key site in training individuals to focus on the production of pro-social values and orienting them towards becoming agents of transformation. This is a vision of the university as an institution of exploration, a home for individuals to focus on our collective becoming, and an institution that can function as the consciousness of the society and making pro-active choices about the direction to take. We see this vision of the entrepreneurial as consistent with those who say the university must change in the twenty-first century if it is to survive. But we also see this vision as very different from the entrepreneurial calls that focus only on institutional survival, or the institution as support for the growth of global neoliberal capitalism.

The Entrepreneurial University

In 1998 Burton Clark wrote, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities.5 It has been a watershed text. As Rhoades and Stensaker point out, the book has 4,200 citations in Google Scholar.6 Further, they suggest Clark’s use of the term entrepreneurial was about a conscious process of deciding where universities need to go. While Clark had a strong belief that becoming entrepreneurial

4 David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 5 Burton R. Clark, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 1998). 6 Gary Rhoades and Bjørn Stensaker, “Bringing Organizations and Systems Back To- gether: Extending Clark’s Entrepreneurial University” Higher Education Quarterly 71 no. 2 (2017) 129. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 157 was a way to help universities survive, more recently, the term entrepreneurial has come to have negative connotations. Often, faculty see entrepreneurial as code for re-shaping them in undesirable ways. First, through commodification, universities provide products to markets in order to remain financially solvent. Second, through neoliberalization, universities using market mechanisms to discipline their workforces in order to again be financially solvent. The end of the 1990s saw twenty years of financial contraction and problems for universities in many parts of the world. This contraction was really part of the decline of the welfare state that began in the 1970s and the shift to a more globalized and “free-market” ideology.7 At the same time, with the expansion and massification of tertiary education, a withdrawal of state support was justified in many places as the education of a larger percentage of the populace was seen as too great a burden to put on the state. These forces have led universities in many countries to seek alternative forms of funding and to seek a paying student market. They have also led to massive increases in student debt. The same impact can be seen in the UK but, quite shockingly, in a much shorter timescale and with a more severe model of quality assessment. Rhoades and Stensaker summarize these pressures as three movements: (1) an “austerity agenda” linked to the contraction of state support for university education, (2) an accountability agenda that pushed for market discipline to be used to rationalize work in the university and (3) the shift in faculty employment and declining traditional student base.8 Given this highly pressurized environment where institutions needed more students and more finances in order to survive, Clark’s innovative approach in his book was not to talk so much about higher education systems and these kinds of systemic responses, but rather to look at a specific set of institutions and how they were being innovative. One of the key things about Clark’s approach is that he takes the landscape of declining state support as a given. He then focuses on the ways that particular institutions are innovative given that reality. This is certainly a way to approach thinking about how universities can be innovative and entrepreneurial. As Rhodes and Stensaker emphasize,

7 For examples see Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Cor- porate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000). Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (The William G. Bowen Series) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodification of Higher Education (London: Falmer Press, 1997). Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Ac- ademic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 8 Rhoades and Stensaker, “Bringing Organizations and Systems Back Together,” 130. 158 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson for Clark this was about institutions being proactive and taking charge of their situations and not just being buffeted by the forces around them. More recent criticisms from the left see the entrepreneurial university as synonymous with the neoliberal university. This is perhaps because the short- term strategy for survival, at many universities, led to a focus on increasing revenues and being overly focused with making money. Just as the contradictions of welfare capitalism, with the limits of economic growth and the stag- flation of the 1970s, led elites to pressure for deregulation, the opening of markets and a neoliberal ideology, Clark’s entrepreneurial university is really about a university that accepts that it is too weak to challenge the large-scale state reforms that have led to the precarity of universities. So, the entrepreneurial university is really the university that is engaging in “weak resistance”.9 Unwilling or unable to really question the withdrawal of state support, universities focused on revenue production. In this context, innovation, knowledge production, supporting students in the development of twenty-first century skills were all about producing enough money to survive. But as Rhoades and Stensaker suggest, the neoliberal move on the part of the state does not necessarily make universities more innovative or lead to the kinds of production of knowledge that are good for people and good for the economy.10 One outcome that Clark does not challenge is the re-definition of university education and knowledge as instrumental knowledge. Accepting the larger landscape of declining state support and becoming entrepreneurial as a way to survive, does not allow universities to ask the larger questions of our ultimate concern. Is this knowledge that we are producing with our students ultimately the knowledge and learning that we want to produce? Rather than being called to some higher purpose, such as the critical conscience of the society and leading us towards better futures, the university remains focused on economic survival and monetary forms of value. The entrepreneurial university is about survival and the production of capital, enough capital to guarantee their existence. And as such, a market logic comes to dominate the logic of an institution that might otherwise have a very different logic. In an indirect way, this leads to the thinking that entrepreneurship = neoliberalism. This further traps many universities and higher education in a kind of legitimation crisis.11 While some universities, especially elite universities, remain focused on being a central institution in modern societies, most other

9 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 10 Rhoades and Stensaker, “Bringing Organizations and Systems Back Together”. 11 Ronald Barnett, Thinking and Rethinking the University: The Selected Works of Ronald Barnett (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2015). Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 159 universities become preoccupied with basic institutional survival. And the elite institutions that can remain central institutions are focused on supporting capitalist development and being regional economic development drivers.12 Barnett points out that the nineteenth-century view of higher education and the founding of the modern university rested on the emancipatory potential of higher education and its calling to take individuals and the society to a higher place through discovery and the production of knowledge.13 This vision, while it may not be a core focus in the literature on higher education, is an important one for higher education still. Barnett suggests, the focus on producing skilled workers and instrumental knowledges for the economy, while not bad functions in themselves, is a smaller vision than the view of the emancipatory potential of higher education. And as stated above, universities are competing for students to train for the current economy. This has led the university to become preoccupied with its own survival. What we have seen in this section is that larger shifts in state support for higher education and a growing ideology of neoliberalism in many societies have left universities in a precarious position.14 What began as a process of survival, later becomes valorized as becoming entrepreneurial. Clark’s work was certainly part of that process as he shifted from looking at systems to looking at specific institutions and how they creatively imagined their situations. This is certainly one kind of entrepreneurial creativity, but it is a limited one.

Entrepreneurship in General

Schumpeter is the economist who is most often associated with the ideas of the entrepreneur and the role of the entrepreneur in modern capitalism.15 Schumpeter felt that Marx’s critique of capitalism was lacking in one very important respect. He thought that Marx, like other liberal economists, focused too much on monetary exchange and the role of money in the production of

12 Sheila S. Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Joyce Canaan and Wesley Shumar (Eds.), Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University (New York, Milton Park: Routledge, 2008). 13 Barnett, Thinking and Rethinking the University. 14 Simon Marginson, The Dream Is Over. The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 15 Joseph A. Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London, New York: Routledge, 2003(1943)). 160 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson value.16 For Schumpeter, the engine of capitalist production was innovation and the role of what he called “creative destruction.” Entrepreneurs were individuals who saw limitations in an economic system and exploited those limitations to create new products and services. In so doing, they would overthrow older processes of production and bring about a new order where new forms of value were created. It was this creative process that was the engine of value creation in the capitalist economy. Like Marx, Schumpeter thought that socialism was going to replace capitalism and come to dominate the modern economy, but not through dialectical tension and revolutionary overthrow. Rather, he thought that the bureaucratic corporations that capitalism built would put so much normalizing pressure on entrepreneurs that it would kill the innovation process. Further, he thought intellectuals and university-educated policy makers would demand more social welfare benefits and so push the society towards an economic socialism.17 From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, one can see why Schumpeter thought the way he did about the movement towards socialism. What he could not have predicted was the stagnation of welfare capitalism and the return to liberal economic theory with neoliberalism. In a sense, capitalism has returned to the liberal economic thinking of the nineteenth century, with a withdrawal of state support, and belief in free open markets, what people today are referring to as neoliberalism. Today we still have market regulation, like the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States. But the welfare state of the postwar period is in serious decline. However, in one sense Schumpeter was right about a dynamic tension between corporatism and entrepreneurial innovation. This tension is felt in a number of large companies. One can see it in technology companies like Microsoft and Apple. These companies began as very nimble entrepreneurial ventures. But they are now often bogged down by their more rigid corporate structure. Since Schumpeter’s pioneering work, entrepreneurship has been thought of primarily as venture creation. Furthermore, it is often thought of as practices that create wealth in a dynamic, market capitalist system. Certainly, this is the dominant view of entrepreneurship and one view of entrepreneurs. But more recently, there has been much work on different conceptions of entrepreneurship that focuses not only on the creative aspect of innovative practice

16 Herbert Gintis, “Why Schumpeter Got It Wrong in Capitalism, Socialism, and De- mocracy” Challenge Magazine (August 1990) 1–13. 17 Schumpter, Capitalism Socialism and Democracy; Gintis, “Why Schumpter Got It Wrong”; Israel M. Kirzner, “Creativity and/or Alertness: A Reconsideration of the Schumpeterian Entrepreneur” Review of Austrian Economics, 11 (1999) 5–17. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 161 but also on other forms of value that are created by entrepreneurs.18 For example, we have notions of social entrepreneurship and green entrepreneurship. The signifiers “social” and “green” mark these forms of entrepreneurship as a new kind of entrepreneurship in that they create forms of value that are not just economic. But social and green entrepreneurship are not the only ways in which scholars are thinking about how entrepreneurship might be viewed differently. Increasingly research in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are focusing on the ways that innovation is not just about creating new opportunities for wealth accumulation, but are also focusing on the ways that we can solve environmental problems, problems of war, poverty, and health as well. Steyaert and Katz see the focus on these other forms of value as just as important, perhaps more important than wealth creation.19 And to address these larger problems and produce “value” requires that individuals are able to engage in an agentic process of becoming, rather like the process described by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus.20 So, it is to Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ model and the focus on the idea of disclosure that we turn to next.

Entrepreneurship as Disclosure

Perhaps one of the most important works that discusses entrepreneurship in a broader frame is Disclosing New Worlds, by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus. They begin with the notion of “disclosive spaces.”21 They draw on Heidegger’s concept of worldhood to explain disclosive space as essentially a space within which people engage in practices that both produce meaning and value within a particular context. It is an organized set of practices, the tools, materials, and ideas that are needed to carry out some practice. The idea of world disclosing is a central notion in Heidegger’s thought. In Being and Time, Heidegger suggests we are born into a world that is already formed, the tools, things, words and meanings are pre-given.22 But at the same time, the individual acts upon that world, the individual is in the process of becoming and in the process of changing the world. Majorie Grene says:

18 Chris Steyaert and Jerome Katz, “Reclaiming the Space of Entrepreneurship in Soci- ety: Geographical, Discursive and Social Dimensions” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 16 (2004) 179–96. 19 Ibid. 20 Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds. 21 Ibid., 17 22 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962 (1927)). 162 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson

It is this aspect of the human being which Heidegger later calls transcendence (Transzendenz): a better name for it, since it carries with it the meaning of antic- ipation, of going beyond the given.23

Grene goes on to say that for Heidegger, while disclosure is an essential part of what it means to be human, most of us are caught up in the everyday life and everyday concerns that distract us from this creative potential we have to re-shape the world in creative new ways.24 Disclosing new worlds then comes very much from Heidegger’s philosophy for Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus. They contribute to a more detailed view of world disclosure. They are also able to focus on the few individuals who are able to rise above the noise of the everyday and are able to stay focused on particular disharmonies in life. These individuals then not only focus on the disharmonies, but also marshal their resources, human and otherwise, in order to work to bring about change. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus focus on both the entrepreneur and the individuals engaged in democratic civic action as the kinds of people who can help to “disclose new worlds.” This concept of disclosive space bears similarity to Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and social field.25 Like social field, the disclosive space is a world that has existed before us and given to us. And further that world is already structured by habitual action and pre-given meanings. Unlike Bourdieu, Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus focus on the individuals who might rise above their own habitus in order to focus on ways the space is disharmonious. Perhaps the disclosive space is more similar to Lave and Wenger’s community of practice (CoP) being a social space where practices are learned and shared, and identities are formed in relation to the practice. In a CoP, the key individuals are legitimate peripheral participants, a term Lave and Wenger use for new members of a community of practice. These individuals enter into the CoP and learn the practices of the community. As they learn to use the tools, engage in the activities and share the knowledge of the community, they are also the ones who, as they become more seasoned and core members, introduce new innovations and move the knowledge and the practice of the community forward.26

23 Marjorie Grene, Martin Heidegger: Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957) 23. 24 Ibid., 25–26. 25 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 1990). 26 Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participa- tion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 163

The activity in a disclosive space is organized by another concept, and that is the notion of style. Style is what makes the practices within a disclosive space meaningful.27 Style is very similar to the notion of culture, but one could say that style is a particular aspect of culture. It is the ways of doing things in a culture that are habitual and largely unconscious. The authors use the example of queuing up. In a culture where queuing is important, everyone understands that you stand in a line in a variety of contexts. Style is not an aspect of the space, as Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus point out, but really definitive of the space, the things within it and the practices that people engage in.28 Their concepts of style and disclosive space are very important. They show that entrepreneurship is not just a matter of bringing a new product to an already established world and adding that product to the existing world. Rather, they show that the new is something very different and it changes, meaning and practice as it comes into being. If the disclosive space is a world, that is not only organized by a style but has the potential to become something else, it is the entrepreneur, who can remain focused on the ways the current world is disharmonious, and who can work to change that disclosive space such that it becomes a new world. The style, the thing that is in the background and no one questions, is the very thing the entrepreneur needs to look at and think about how this world might be organized differently. Again, all one has to do to understand this is to think about the world before smartphones (for example) and the world afterward. The question then is, how is something new created? Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus suggest that entrepreneurs are interesting people. They look at the current world and they can see how that current world works in some ways but does not in others. They are able to identify disharmonies.29 Most of us just accept disharmonies as part of the world, seeing them as part of the way the world is. Entrepreneurs are people who are willing to engage with others in a process of attempting to imagine what a world might be if we could transcend the disharmony. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus point out that people working for democracy and solidarity are like entrepreneurs in that they try to see past the disharmonies and imagine a new and better world as well. (Of course, all of this involves an ethics of what is the “good” and what should be.) Further, these individuals then engage with others, in a process of social production where they work to produce new things that will indeed resolve the disharmony. But, of course, to create new things is not a simple matter. It calls for the creation of an opening in the disclosive space where more than a new

27 Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds, 19. 28 Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds, 19-20. 29 Ibid., 41. 164 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson object is created. What we mean by an opening, is that the culture needs to be bracketed and put into question, in order to imagine how it might change. Being able to do this is helped by the ability to see that what is, is temporary. This is a very special kind of agency, better described by Heidegger’s notion of becoming. The social world, after entrepreneurial invention, becomes a different world than the one before the new invention. This process of world changing is the process of human becoming, and is a similar process, whether changing the social world, political world, or creating new knowledge.30 Today many universities are trying to be more instrumental and more effective within their marketplaces. As stated earlier, this is often a weakness that masquerades as a strength and it ends up valorizing the neoliberal ideology, which has now become the status quo. Ironically, this is very different than Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ view of entrepreneurship. University focusing on the instrumental values are not questioning the cultural values of this neoliberal moment at all, but rather valorizing neoliberal economic ideology as the perfect context to be entrepreneurial. Universities are better suited to a different notion of entrepreneurship which involves developing new knowledge in order to imagine a new and better world.31 This process of imagining a better world would be linked to Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ idea of responding to disharmonies that are experienced by groups of people. It would also mean that universities would not only focus on the “becoming” but would also be the place where the communities ask the questions, ‘what is a better world?’ and ‘what kind of things do we value as a society?’32 This, by necessity, means that the focus on imagining a better world means that we need to think about what we value and how we produce different kinds of value. The notion of value implicit in this process of knowledge creation aligns with what the anthropologist David Graeber defines as an anthropological conception of value. For Graeber, value is created through the social activity of a group of people. It is created with groups of people to produce new meanings together by engaging in practices that make things

30 Chris Steyaert, “Creating Worlds: Political Agendas of Entrepreneurship” (Paper presented at the 11th Nordic Conference on Small Business Research, Aarhus, DK, June 18-20, 2000). 31 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson, “Rethinking the Entrepreneurial University for the 21st Century” In The Idea of the University: Volume 2 – Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Michael. A. Peters, & Ronald Barnett, Peter Lang, 2018. 32 Morten Levin, and Davydd Greenwood, Creating a New Public University and Reviv- ing Democracy: Action Research in Higher Education (New York: Berghahn, 2016). Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 165 that are shared with others and seen by others as valuable.33 This process of human value creation would subsume within it the production of market values. Of course, at a basic level all humans need food, shelter, and clothing, and so economic values are often core values. But it would be the case, that some societies might value things like kinship relations much more than what we traditionally think of as economic products. This conception of value is much broader then and engages with the ethics of a social group as well. Universities could not only be places where the disharmonies of the present world are thought about, but also how to transcend how that world could be imagined as well. In addition,they could be the place where we as a society ask the question of whether the direction we are going is a good one or not. Of course, we already do that in philosophy department in universities. But this questioning of who we are and the ethics of where we are going has become less important in contemporary universities. It is then to this broader notion of the entrepreneurial university and the process of becoming within it that we now turn.

Agency, Risk-taking, Identity

The entrepreneurial university takes many forms and for students this has meant the introduction of courses and programmes that are focused on teaching entrepreneurship or, in the UK, enterprise education. While the courses were initially offered in business schools, they are currently to be found broadly throughout the university. Teaching entrepreneurship has developed as a field. Entrepreneurship education has been structured as (1) about entrepreneurship where students are taught the theories and knowledge that they need to know about the subject; (2) for entrepreneurship where students are provided with the tools required for entrepreneurship which they then apply to for example a given case; and (3) through entrepreneurship where students are expected to practice and go through experiences as if they were entrepreneurs. This last type of course has the potential to be most successful in encouraging students to become entrepreneurs, but it is also the most difficult one to evaluate for that goal.34 Much work in entrepreneurship education, especially in Scandinavia, has promoted the broader vision of entrepreneurship being proposed here and

33 David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 34 Luke Pittaway and Corina Edwards “Assessment; Examining practice in Entrepre- neurship Education” Journal of Education and Training Vol. 54 Issue: 8/9, (2012) 778–800. 166 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson the kinds of values that entrepreneurs might be engaged in producing. Martin Lackéus has suggested that entrepreneurship education can fulfill some of the promises of a more progressive pedagogy that is about creating social value together. It is a form of knowledge production that is engaged in a real- world context, rather than abstract, and must be a collaborative process.35 What Lackéus points to is that the values of a broader entrepreneurship education focus on students learning in real world context, dealing with real world problems, and the students are the drivers of that learning. They are taking charge of the work they are doing. In the same way, Blenker et al. suggest that entrepreneurship education could be rooted in ways we approach the world, drawing on our everyday practice when we are faced with challenges.36 This is very much like what one might imagine would happen in a community of practice where challenges are approached and solved together.37 Further, the Scandinavian vision of entrepreneurship education draws directly on Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ notion of disclosing and links the individual, through the disclosing of one’s personal disharmonies, to a larger social context where the personal disharmonies are recognized by others and where they together work through the process of knowledge production. Examples are provided later in the text. As Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus suggest, it requires a particular talent to hold on to the disharmonies that one experiences and then to link those personal disharmonies to the ways that others might experience them. This is an agentic process in that it involves holding on to a vision of the world that others simply accept as the way things are. It puts one outside and maybe at odds with the culture at particular moments in time. This standing outside of the culture and remaining focused on a disharmony opens up a space of becoming, but it is also a large risk. It involves a risk to the self as one begins to imagine a new world and how that new world might look. There is a potential identity threat in that one must go into unknown territory with unpredictable results.38 It can also be that people might fear greater risks as the

35 Martin Lackéus, “A ‘Value’ and ‘Economics’ Grounded Analysis of Six Value Creation Based Entrepreneurial Education Initiatives” Paper for 3E ECSB Entrepreneurship Education Conference. Leeds, UK, 11–13 May, 2016. 36 Per Blenker, S. H., Frederiksen, Steffen Korsgaard, S. Müller, Helle Neergaard, and Claus Thrane, Entrepreneurship as everyday practice, Industry and Higher Education 26 no. 6 (2012) 417–430. 37 Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning; Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 38 Kathy Lund Dean and James P. Jolly, “Student Identity, Disengagement, and Le- arning” Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2012) Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 167 innovation begins to increase number of people engaged in the process and people become invested in moving from the situation of disharmony to a new order. These risks can be both symbolic and material, in terms of what things mean to individuals and the kinds of physical objects they are invested in. And as we have said earlier, this entrepreneurial process is a process of becoming as something new is potentially created and knowledge will emerge, individuals change (identity is shifted), value is created and the social world is changed. In this section of the essay we provide two examples. These are not meant to be data as one might find in an empirical paper but, rather, offer more concrete examples to think through the implications of the above presented ideas. A few years ago, one of us was involved in a computing education project at a research university. The project involved several universities involved in using Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) as an object to focus the computing education curriculum.39 The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is an entrepreneurial movement in itself. Software developers work on code that is open licensed. Individuals and groups have the right to use the code, and they commit that any development of the code they write will be open source too. A number of companies will pay to allow some of their software developers time to work on open source code and they find that the code will be useful to them and their work. This view of software fits within a more traditional notion of economic value and entrepreneurial activity, except that the social production is much more organized around the principles of generalized reciprocity than most work in the economy. HFOSS is also open source software, but it is specifically developed by a community of software developers working toward some product that will serve humanitarian goals. So, it is doubly generalized reciprocity for the good of humanity. The university projects using these object HFOSS software tools, used them to solve a specific set of pedagogical problems in computing education. Learning to program is a very solitary activity. For many students it is very intimidating. For other students, it is an exciting challenge that they enjoy working out on their own. Interestingly, software development is like Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’ notion of disclosing new worlds in microcosm. More than one software developer, when interviewed, pointed out that there is nothing that cannot be created through programming. Certainly, we have

228–243. 39 Heidi J. C. Ellis, Gregory W. Hislop, Stoney Jackson, and Lori Postner. “Team project experiences in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS).” ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 15, 4, Article 18 (December 2015), 23 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.1145/2684812 168 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson seen our world continue to change in dramatic fashion as software development has become such a central part of the culture. Nevertheless, most software development projects in most companies are collaborative, team-based projects that look more like a community of practice. But college graduates in computer science have learned to work and be evaluated on in a solitary fashion on their work. These graduates do not fit well into the world of work when they graduate, even though they may have the requisite skills to do the jobs they are hired for. The curriculum organized around the HFOSS projects allowed the faculty to take computer training out of the traditional pedagogy and curriculum setting and put students into a context where they worked collaboratively on real world projects trying to design solutions to real world problems. Further, they organized the curriculum in a hierarchical fashion where the more advanced students would be the team leaders and interfacing with the HFOSS community and the freshmen and sophomores would have more defined roles and report to their upper-class counterparts. In this model, students are not just engaging in more authentic learning, but they are really taking charge of a process of disclosure, where they work through the disharmonies they experience, come up with collective solutions, marshal the talent and resources to change things and then produce a product that might impact the world outside the university walls. The second example comes from a Humanities Master’s level program. The Master’s program was newly constructed to support language and humanities students to articulate their competences and disciplinary backgrounds in new settings. This Master’s had an intercultural focus and brought together not only students with second language skills but also students from a range of humanities backgrounds who were interested in the intercultural interactions in society. The entrepreneurship module was set up with the aim to encourage students to work on a project with stakeholders from intercultural organizations and by focusing on a challenge they identified together to create value for these organisations. Initially the students work by articulating their own competences and skills for others before forming teams around a common interest. The example here describes how one team, made up of students with disciplinary backgrounds in media and intercultural communication, religious studies, applied languages, German and French worked together to create an event at the beginning of the city’s Cultural Week. The event was described and planned and presented to the stakeholders responsible for the Cultural Week and was part of the students’ final assessment for the course. Those responsible for the Cultural Week were so impressed by the presentation and the event idea that they asked the students to carry out the event for real. So, Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 169 four months later, even though the module was complete and the students had been graded, the team got together again and carried out the event for over 300 people at the beginning of the Cultural Week. Here we see production of value, for the students and for the City and the participants at the event. In these two examples, a number of matters are important: the connection between a learning process, the real-world context, and the disciplinary knowledge. It may be said that the university already offers this type of teaching in other forms. For example, it is not unusual for courses to arrange for a company to come into the university and present a case that the students should solve. While these may be successful to some extent, they do not allow the students themselves to identify problems, research them and generate solutions. The focus in the problem solving is about coming up with ideas for others. These cases are sometimes taken a step further and turned into competitions which mean that the focus is on winning and not necessarily on the learning process. The difference between idea generation and case competition and the two examples we have described is that, in our two examples, the students do not work on a given problem but are able, through their disciplinary insights, to disclose issues that they identify as problematic. Their ability to research, analyse, evaluate and identify problems are competences that are deeply valued in academia. Engaging with stakeholders allows the students to gain insight into how practices unfold and allow for an opportunity to collaboratively create new forms of value where there was none before.

Conclusions

Many universities these days are thinking about programs that immerse students in authentic problems and try to create a context where both the community and the students benefit from these interactions. The programs are worthwhile and are often associated with initiatives like community-based learning. But they are also seen as additions to the university curriculum just as social entrepreneurship and green entrepreneurship are framed as a special form of entrepreneurship but not the core. In the examples we have given above, we have illustrated that through linking disciplinary knowledge to real life problems and allowing students to take ownership of a creative process, establish relationships with stakeholders outside of the university, engage in a collaboration around developing solutions to problems which are recognised by the stakeholder and generate shared value for others—entrepreneurship can be practiced. Therefore, we would suggest that the central goal of a university is to engage students in the knowledge production process, that that process is one of “disclosing new worlds.” 170 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson

Universities around the world are under attack from many sides. Yes, governments are looking to transform (if they have not succeeded already) universities from a public good to a private good. This process involves using the language of entrepreneurship and innovation. However, this crisis is part of a larger crisis, where universities have really lost a sense of purpose and role in contemporary society and the public has really lost a sense of itself as a public. These are all larger social problems that have been much examined. Part of the above-mentioned crises is a battle over the term entrepreneurship. For many the term suggests a neoliberal economic ideology. For those like Clark, and within the sphere of higher education, it implied an instrumental focus on what the university is doing and how we should measure its success. While Clark did not at all imagine the university as neoliberal, he did not really question the landscape of financial disinvestment that higher education faced and he saw individual universities who responded to this landscape “entrepreneurially” as the way forward. Framing entrepreneurship in this way supported the dominant view of entrepreneurship as about generating revenue and innovation as coming up with ways to produce financial capital. We have tried to articulate a very different conception of entrepreneurship and it is one argued by many in Scandinavia.40 We think that this redefinition of entrepreneurship, as well as ideas about innovation, is critical for the future of the university, because universities should be at the center of value production that is explicitly connected to an alternative but still legitimate sense of entrepreneurialism. David Graeber suggests, as we saw above, that value is meaningful activity that is imaginative and appreciated by members of society.41 Part of the problem Graeber and other anthropologists are trying to solve, is a definition of value that would be inclusive of our ideas about economic value, but also extend to societies where other forms of status are more important. This question of a broader definition of value and is central to understanding behavior in kin-based societies, has become more important, in our view, in the so-called developed world too. Many people are seeking a deeper and more creative experience in their lives and so their consumer behavior and identity is no longer simply linked to traditional products and services, but rather to a larger range of things. We suggest that universities should take a central role

40 Blenker, Frederiksen, Korsgaard, Müller,Neergaard, and Thrane, “Entrepreneurship as everyday practice”; Steyaert and Katz, “Reclaiming the Space of Entrepreneurship in Society”, Martin Lackéus, “Does entrepreneurial education trigger more or less neoliberalism in education” Journal of Education and Training 59 no. 6 (2017) 635–650. 41 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 171 in fostering a new imagination of value production. To our mind, this is an entrepreneurial process. The university should provide an environment where people think more creatively about what the new world could look like, what the things in it might be, and how people might engage in social interaction around these things and with each other in ways they find meaningful. Thinking about universities this way redefines them as a central institution in contemporary societies. Part of the process of that re-centering involves returning to some aspects of the Humboldt vision for the university. Students should be re-integrated into the core of knowledge production and academic freedom in the process of creating new values.42 Right now, teaching students is thought of as one aspect of the instrumental function in the modern business of a university. We suggest a re-focusing so as to bring students as partners into the knowledge production and value production process—as we have seen in our above examples. This central partnership, where students genuinely are individuals learning to become part of a community of practice. As we have seen above, this is a process of transformation, of becoming for the students, where they act upon the word, and take risks in their grappling for the new, and transform themselves through the process. It is an agentic process that benefits both them as individuals and the communities that they work with. As universities become central institutions in the redefinition of value and the production of values there is a politics and an ethics to this process.43 Universities should also be lead institutions in not only helping to define new values, but in asking key questions: who are we producing value for, and what kinds of value are important? In this way, we imagine the university to be a kind of “ecological university” in Barnett’s words, becoming a university for-others.44 This would also transform the entrepreneurial process for the students. As they seek to resolve disharmonies and disclose new worlds, they will also be thinking about the well-being of others in this process. All of this is definitive of the notions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education we have argued for here. The vision of entrepreneurship education set out here in no way excludes the production of economic value and creating new ventures. Venture creation is, therefore, just a part of a larger vision of social change and student agency.

42 Shumar and Robinson, “Rethinking the Entrepreneurial University for the 21st Cen- tury.” 43 Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. 44 Barnett, Thinking and Rethinking the University, 88. Ronald Barnett, The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2018. 172 Wesley Shumar and Sarah Robinson

One of the significant failures of current views of entrepreneurship is that they are not articulated within a larger ethical and environmental framework. The vision of entrepreneurship education presented here might be able to point the way to a better future for students and for the world.

References

Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. Barnett, Ronald. Thinking and Rethinking the University: The Selected Works of Ronald Barnett. Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2015. Barnett, Ronald The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2018. Barrow, Clyde W. The Entrepreneurial Intellectual in the Corporate University. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Barth. Fredrik. Introduction. In The Role of the Entrepreneur in Social Change in Northern Norway, pp. 5–18. Edited by Fredrik Barth. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1963. Blenker, Per, Frederiksen, Signe H., Korsgaard, Steffen, Müller, Sabine, Neergaard, Helle, Thrane, Claus. Entrepreneurship as everyday practice, Industry and Higher Education 26(6) (2012) 417–430. Block, Fred L. The Vampire State: And Other Myths and Fallacies About the U.S. Economy. New York: The New Press, 1997. Bok, Derek. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (The William G. Bowen Series). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Canaan, Joyce and Shumar, Wesley (Editors), Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. New York, Milton Park: Routledge, 2008. Clark, Burton R. Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 1998. Dean, Kathy Lund and Jolly, James P. “Student Identity, Disengagement, and Learning” Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2012) 228–243. Ellis, Heidi J. C., Hislop, Gregory W., Jackson, Stoney,and Postner, Lori. “Team project experiences in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS).” ACM Trans. Comput. Educ. 15, 4, Article 18 (December 2015), 23 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.1145/2684812 Gintis, Herbert. Why Schumpeter got it Wrong in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Challenge Magazine (August 1990): 1–13. Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Grene, Marjorie, Martin Heidegger: Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962 (1927). Kirzner, Israel M. “Creativity and/or Alertness: A Reconsideration of the Schumpeterian Entrepreneur.” Review of Austrian Economics, 11 (1999) 5–17. Agency, Risk-taking and Identity in Entrepreneurship Education 173

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9. A University for the Body: On the Corporeal Being of Academic Existence

Rikke Toft Nørgård Aarhus University, Denmark

Janus Aaen Aarhus University, Denmark

Abstract: The article creates a framework for considering academic existence and embodied being at the university through highlighting the corporeal dimension of university life. Considering the human beings inhabiting the university to be of both mind and flesh, the article uses corporeal philosophies to conceptualise academic existence in the flesh. This is done through evoking the sensibilities, feelings, sensuality and interplay of body and thinking as well as reflecting on the implications of the current absence of the body in relation to loss of knowledge, academic experience and a more humane university. The article addresses these issues through contributing with a conceptual framework for thinking about a university of the body, a corpo-mology or language for talking about embodied academic existence as well as a value-framework for supporting and promoting the university as a liveable environment.

Keywords: academic existence, the liveable university, embodied being, the absent body, corporeal philosophy

Introduction: The Absence of the Body in the Idea of the University

In this essay, we point towards the possibility of a future university fully embracing the living beings inhabiting it; a university for the body. Building on ecological philosophies1 of the body, emotion, movement and being alive, we

1 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding.

© 2020 Rikke Toft Nørgård, Janus Aaen - http://doi.org/10.3726/ptihe.2019.03.10 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 176 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen suggest the conceptualisation of a university that to a larger extent recognises and embraces the fundamental carnality of academic being. In order to do so, we formulate a beginning corpo-mology, corporeal epistemology and bodyscape for the university to envision a university for the body. Scholars within philosophy of higher education have argued that an ontological dimension is missing from the way the university is practiced today. According to Dall’Alba and Barnacle2 and Barnett,3 universities have to a large extent been preoccupied with the production and dissemination of knowledge at the expense of a more fundamental and organic dimension of university being and ways of making room for the being of humans at the university.4 Following this call, there has recently been a focus on the fact that it is human beings that inhabit the university, for example, in the matter of student voice,5 student experience6 or the embodiment of teachers, researchers and doctoral students.7 However, reading across much literature on the idea of the university, we suggest that this ontological turn in relation to human beings and being human in higher education research to some extent overlooks the corporeal dimension. Admittedly, there are isolated examples such as the above. But given what we identify as a general shortcoming, we see potential in a framework focused on formulating a university for the body. This would entail a university that critically considers the living fleshy humans within it to be equally of mind and flesh. It is a university emerging from and carried forth in the breathing being of students, faculty and administrators; a liveable university where academic existence is experienced through being alive, having bodies that move and are being moved and which come together as whole corporeal thinking beings. Such beings should not suffer under mind-body dual- ism, but should be embraced by the university as body-minds or mind-bodies. Following from this, in this essay we are not addressing academic existence as embodied thinking or as unfolding along mind-body dimensions, but rather, as bodily through and through. Hence, we explore the implications

2 Dall’Alba and Barnacle, “An Ontological Turn for Higher Education.” 3 Barnett, “Learning for an Unknown Future.” 4 Barnett, Imagining the University; Barnett, The Future University: Ideas and Possibil- ities. 5 Barnett, A Will to Learn; Batchelor, “Vulnerable Voices.” 6 Bell and Stevenson, The Future of Higher Education. 7 Douglass, “Embodying Authenticity in Higher Education”; Bolldén, “Teachers’ Em- bodied Presence in Online Teaching Practices”; Shahjahan, “Being ‘lazy’and Slowing down: Toward Decolonizing Time, Our Body, and Pedagogy”; Hopwood and Paul- son, “Bodies in Narratives of Doctoral Students’ Learning and Experience.” A University for the Body 177 of a university for the body that acknowledges and embraces thinking, not as embodied, but bodily.

Approaching the Body in the University

This essay establishes a framework for academic existence as corpo-real within a university for the body in the attempt to enlarge and deepen the field of higher education philosophy and theory by way of considering and including corporeal sensibilities, fleshy feelings, carnal experiences and bodily thinking as a prominent and inescapable dimension of knowing, being and doing in higher education. Specifically, it considers the ways in which the body might be central to making sense and coming to know. The essay argues that this is particularly relevant in order to understand the intricate interplays of body, sense, sensibility and sensuality at the university. Knowledge might be found in the interweaving of one into the other as a dance between corpo-reality and cogni-sensuality that carries the potential of dissolving some of the tacit dichotomies ruling much higher education research. The fleshy breathing living corporeality of human existence seems to sometimes be left at the gates of the university without considering the academic implications or loss of knowledge when turning a blind eye to the body. Keeping an eye on academic corporeality is, however, not an easy task. Even though the body with its emotions, kinesthetics, carnality and experiential being has played a prominent role in both our PhD dissertations, these fleshy dimensions seem to dissolve even in our own research articles and book chapters within the field of higher education theory. Therefore, through intentionally focusing on establishing and exploring such a corporeal view on academic existence in the present essay, we hope to provide a framework that might support the conceptualisation of a university for the body. The hope is that such a contribution might help prevent the university from slicing the academic human condition so thin and subduing the body so thoroughly that desire disappears—not only from the body but also from thinking. In Imagining the University,8 Ronald Barnett examines the diversity in form and structure of the university and maps the landscape of different university formats. This is done in an effort to enrich and deepen this landscape and push the conceptualisation of the university beyond contemporary formats of the neoliberal university. In the book, Barnett develops a grid for mapping the idea of the university into four quadrants, each with its own structure and being, resulting in a multitude of different universities—or ‘imaginings of

8 Barnett, Imagining the University. 178 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen the university’.9 These four zones, containing the university as multifarious being and idea, are

• the idea of the superficial/endorsing university (for example, the world-class university), • the idea of the deep/endorsing university (the entrepreneurial university), • the idea of the superficial/critical university (the virtual university), and • the idea of the deep/critical university (the ecological university).10

From this grid, Barnett charts possible ideas and existing sightings of the university and maps these onto an extensive list containing 112 such different instantiations of the university as it is described within higher education research (and in Barnett’s own imaginings). However, these ideas and sightings include the body. Academic existence as living flesh, ecological body or phenomenological carnal existence is simply a non-existence when it comes to the idea of the university. To play on the subtitle of Barnett’s book the ecological university,11 we claim that the university is disregarded as a fleshy utopia and left in the shadows of current higher education research and practice. Overall, one could get the impression that the body is of little relevance to university theory and practice as well as higher education teaching and learning and academic existence. As a counterbalance to this propensity in thinking and practice, this essay attempts to develop a corpo-mology—a vocabulary and framework for a university for the body—a language of and through the body, its sensations, localisations, knowings and imaginations as they are embodied and expressed as academic being. This essay does this by (1) describing the absent body and some of its implications and consequences for the university; (2) establishing a vocabulary and framework for thinking and speaking about the body; (3) addressing and reflecting on some of the joys and horrors involved in bodily academic existence; and (4) pointing towards the possibility of a university for the body through presenting a value-framework for supporting and promoting it.

9 Barnett, 67. 10 Barnett, 54–56. 11 Barnett, The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia. A University for the Body 179

Bodily Presence: The Ghost in the Shadow Haunting the University

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.12

Philosopher Gernot Böhme, writing on the concept of atmosphere and the notion of atmospheric architecture, makes a critical distinction between the space of representation and the space of bodily presence.13 Often, however, the two types of spaces are treated as one and the same, resulting in a space where—if the body is taken into account at all—“…bodily presence is conceived as a state of being placed among things, and the order existing between things is understood as the order of their simultaneity, that is of their recipro- cal presence.”14 This mistake results, according to Böhme, in a subdued bodily presence that is only able to live in the shadows of the space of representation. Within such spaces, university and body connect only in an abstract or even non-sensory way; bodies are framed as thing among things in need of topological university spaces such as bathrooms, cafeterias, group work spaces, lecture halls, offices and other spatial containers for the body containing the mind of the academic student, teacher or researcher. Topological spaces for containing the body can be planned and measured out through utilising metrical space—a system of coordinates—transforming topological space into pure mathemat- ical abstract space. Offices are measured in square meters, bathrooms needs drains plotted in on maps and connected to the sewer system, lecture halls need rows of functional chairs for maximum exploitation of expensive university space and hallways where bodies can travel to and from container spaces. In this way, the university is transformed, first into topological space rendering the university into bodily containers or traversal spaces, secondly into abstract geometrical space in the form of blueprints, digital 3D models and campus systems. In such a university there is not much space for academic existence expressed and experienced in the flesh as lived bodies. Following Böhme, there is a need to move beyond superficial or alienating connections between body and university through envisioning it as bodily space which signifies:

12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 235. 13 Böhme, “The Space of Bodily Presence and Space as a Medium of Representation.” 14 Böhme, 1. 180 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen

...the manner in which I myself am here and am aware of what is other than me— that is, it is the space of actions, moods and perceptions [...] It might be said that the space of bodily presence is an existential concept in the Kierkegaardian sense: it refers, not to the determination of something, but the “How?” of my existence.15

The result of this is a call for a more ecological university16—also when it comes to the body. This entails establishing a corporeal epistemology of the university, where bodily sense, sensibility and sensuality shape how the university is conceptualised and materialised rather than the other way around. To become environments for academic bodily existence, universities might take into consideration the foundation of our bodily sensuous being in and making meaning of the world. This entails that universities acknowledge and cater for the intertwined nature of fleshy bodily presence and the purpose of the university as a place that is (also) sensed and felt. In other words, the university needs to reconfig- ure itself from metrical or topological space to liveable space or space of bodily presence. The university as habitat for academic knowing, doing and being, may also be conceived of as an environment for living, feeling, fleshy human beings. Otherwise we run the risk of creating hollow universities containing academics without joie de vivre. In such a world, according to philosopher of space and place Edward S. Casey, the university might end up with

...the lived fact of experiencing the world from and in and with just this body, my body, was exorcized or, perhaps more exactly, volatilized. Given the forced choice between res extensa and res cogitans, the lived body (for which the Germans have invented a separate word: Leib) had no place to go: still worse, no place of its own. But like any good ghost, it has returned to haunt its exorcists.17

The implications of this can potentially manifest in different ways. Firstly, the body-turned-ghost comes back to haunt the university, causing all kinds of trouble and grief (emerging, perhaps, as stress, depression, loneliness, antip- athy or alienation). Secondly, by doing this, the university squanders away opportunities for meaning, thinking and knowledge by expelling knowledge forms that it finds inappropriate or ungovernable (such as sensuality, carnality,

15 Böhme, 5. 16 Barnett, The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia. 17 Casey, “The Ghost of Embodiment: On Bodily Habitudes and Schemata,” 207. A University for the Body 181 passion, somaesthetics, body contact, rapture, turmoil or disgust). These kinds of knowledge forms are what Merleau-Ponty calls incarnate meaning.18 If students and staff find themselves with neglected bodies, turned into detached minds of cool cognition inhabiting bodies-as-vessels that travel hallways and occupy lecture halls, their being as living, thinking, feeling warm flesh recedes into the shadows, leaving them ghost-like. What the university for the body implies is not an ecological university for the thinking mind, but an ecological university for the breathing, feeling, blood-filled humans that move and are moved by encounters and lifeforms in the ecosystem. By giving the body its due, the corporeal lifeform pushed into the shadows by framing it as body-as-vessel, might spring to life as a significant part of academic existence and thinking. The central point of trying to formulate a beginning corpo-mology for the university—a university for the body—is to make the university more intimately relevant and connected to human life through embracing and embodying bodily dimensions of human meaning and value. For the university to realise this, it may seek to establish a visceral connection to the lived academic experience of its inhabitants. The university’s facility for thinking would benefit from a groundedness in a vocabulary and framework for bodily academic living that acknowledge the human connection to the-more-than-human-world—or what Mark Johnson calls ‘ecological philosophies’.19 Following this, academic knowledge, thinking and learning would imply inviting in also the bodily qualities, sensations, perceptions, values, imaginations and so on involved in being at the university. Importantly, doing so does not in any way imply that we should banish truth, quantifiable science, rationalism or cool cognition. Conversely, however, when light begins to shine onto the banished academic corporeality residing in the shadows, it will at first render visible all the ontological and epistemological imbalances that previously were invisible in the cerebral and incorporeal knowledge of a university that, despite being a homestead of myriads of sprawling academic lives and lifeforms that move and are moved by knowledge, seem lifeless and ghostlike. A lifeless university has emerged over time through emphasising mind over body, cognition over emotion, fact over emotion, knowledge over fantasy, effect over affect, rationality over attitude. By insisting on recovering the body in all its fleshiness, fluids, feels and fears, a university for the body has the opportunity to make visible and acknowledge the exuberant lifeworld of academic

18 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 166. 19 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, 264. 182 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen existence. In this way, the university might come alive through shedding its skin of abstract cool cognition and stand by the emotional, carnal and seemingly irrational academic aspects of life within it. As such, it would be a university that is embracive towards the way that menstruation cramps, lust or insomnia might impact and shape thinking, how the diversity of bodies and their appearances, weight, disabilities or expressivity might cater for different knowledge forms or academic existence, or how boredom, fatigue, anxiety or hopelessness might shape academic writing and thinking. In other words, a university for the body opens up for and lets in new ways of academic thinking, doing and being. To bring the ghostlike body of academic existence back into life entails a university that recognises that there is no academic existence that is not simultaneously bodily being and that bodily being shapes academic existence. Ingrained in the university for the body is the biologic, physiognomic, phenomenal, personal, emotional, cultural, social, and professional constituents of academic existence entangled in and dancing with one another. A feasible utopia of the university for the body implies acknowledging that everything is dancing together in an interlocking academic bodyscape where bodily being becomes inescapable and inseparable from academic existence. The ecological university for the body recognises itself as it comes alive in and through the multitudes of bodies living there. Bodies constantly interact, move and are moved by the world and each other to create instances of academic life and knowledge reverberating through the idea of the university.

The Coming of the Bodily University: What Is the Body and How Do We Get It Back?

Philosophy has succeeded, not without struggle, in freeing itself from its obses- sion with the soul, only to find itself landed with something still more mysterious and captivating: the fact of Man’s bodiliness.20

Creating a university for the body through creating spaces of bodily presence21 at the university is not possible if we only consider the body from medical, biological or ergonomic perspectives. Spaces of bodily presence require the university to engage the full bodily spectrum in relation to knowing, being and doing, for example, through recognising academic thinking in, through and for the body whether this be evocative “emotional” research that creates

20 Nietzsche, The Will to Power. 21 Böhme, “The Space of Bodily Presence and Space as a Medium of Representation.” A University for the Body 183 sensation just as much as it makes sense or “strange” incoherent thinking through “strange” irregular bodies. As such, the university for the body is a call for the acknowledgement, not only of the idea of the body, but of the full life of academic existence—flesh, fluids, feels and all. As Harré writes:

Metaphysically the concepts of body and of person are intimately interrelated. This is the most important fact about the concept of the human body as it is put to use in the contexts of everyday life. It exerts ubiquitous influence on the ways we think about the bodies of ourselves and others.22

Human bodies are not just things or vessels in which we are embodied. Rather, they sustain persons and are alive as humans present themselves to each other through human sensibility and to humans in themselves through coming to know from within. Following Harré, we call for the consideration within higher education of acknowledging that people have bodies, and bodies are persons:

In like manner to Merleau-Ponty I am not trying to remedy an unfair neglect of the body as opposed to the flattering attention given to the more interesting mind. That tack would preserve Cartesianism. Rather I am engaged in building a conception of human bodies as embodied persons; not accidentally conjoined with personhood, but essentially.23

Following this, what we are proposing is a shift from the present ghostlike spirit of academic existence or out-of-body-experience that seems to haunt the university and academic thinking within it. Only through bodily personhood do humans, and academic existence, have agency and the possibility of not only knowing-that through consciousness, but also knowing-how through our embodied action.24 Inviting the academic body out of the shadow and to come alive also encompasses the cycles and rhythms of the fleshy bodies and their biological clocks and how this impacts both our knowing, being and doing at the university. Hunger, depression, desire, pain, menstruation cramps, being hungover, aching backs, exhaustion and fear all constitute part of the existential terrains of thinking and acting at the university.

22 Harré, Physical Being: A Theory for a Corporeal Psychology, 3. 23 Harré, 15. 24 Harré, 29. 184 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen

Our corporeal existence, the way we carry ourselves as persons in the flesh, opens up what Drew Leder in The Absent Body calls our corporeal field.25 In Leder, we find an explanation for why the body as something beyond biology so easily becomes absent from the university—it dis-appears both con- ceptually in thinking and research, as well as literally in university space and organization:

Absence, according to its etymology, refers to all the ways in which the body can be away from itself. One manner is simply through disappearing from self-awareness […] Disappearance, in my usage, trades on the frequent use of dis-as a straight- forward prefix of negation. To ‘disappear’ in this sense is simply to not-appear.26

When the university neither in thinking nor practice conceptualises itself as space for bodily presence, the body becomes a ghost and withdraws to the shadows. Deep practice of the living body somewhat withdraws from the idea of the university; academic existence runs the risk of becoming an absent body shrouded in shadows, only fleetingly reappearing as physiognomy (for example, the need to change position in the chair while listening to the lecture or move to and from lecture halls or campus) or biology (for example, the need to eat and drink between or during lectures or to go to the bathroom). In such grave cases, the body as personhood is simply not there. Universities that have the tendency to disregard the corporeality of academic existence might reduce the living body to a biologic taken-for-granted body; a somewhat annoying and often inconvenient vehicle for the cerebral activity of academia. The body becomes a necessary evil and only surfaces and presents itself in times of breakdown or problematic performance. Or, what Leder terms dys-appearance:

That is, the body appears as thematic focus, but precisely in a dysstate—dys is from the Greek prefix signifying “bad”, “hard” or “ill” and is found in English words such as ‘dysfunctional’.27

The risk for such a biologic-but-lifeless dys-functional university is that the body only appears in its dysstate, and as such is considered, addressed and managed as always already problematic within the context of the university: It needs spaces so it doesn’t get too hungry to think, spaces to pee when the

25 Leder, The Absent Body. 26 Leder, 26–27 (emphasis in original). 27 Leder, 84 (emphasis in original). A University for the Body 185 bladder becomes too full, chairs to sit on when receiving lectures, heaters so it doesn’t shake too much to work and so on. This fosters a Cartesian epistemological distrust in or neglect of the body in relation to the university: “Largely forgotten as a ground of knowledge, the body only surfaces as the seat of deception”.28 The body is already always problematic: sitting achingly but motionless in chairs in the lecture halls, running to the toilet in the breaks, eating hastily in the cafeteria, lying at home sick in the bed, changing the too bloody tampon, drinking and puking at the Friday bar or being out of control at the yearly Christmas party. The discourse of the body becomes that of a faulty body occasionally dys-appearing in ways that disturb or get in the way of “real academic work” at the university. As stated in the last section, false dichotomies and misrepresentations of the body need to be dissolved in order to make the disappeared living body in academic existence reappear from the shadows and replace the dys-appearing bodies in ways that acknowledge and invite inherently corporeal ways of doing, knowing and being. This opens up for the university as habitat and life- word and for a bodily being embracing new ontologies of academic existence in body and spirit. To achieve this, the university might work to transform itself into a Lebenswelt or bodyscape in which the interplay of body and university appears as a tightly woven fabric where the one is dependent on and working within the other. A university for the body represents a possibility for the thinking university (and for thinking about the university) to come alive and be transformed from dead qualities to active qualities in the Merleau-Pontian sense where we through sense experience

...invest the quality with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for that heavy mass which is our body, whence it comes about that it always involves a reference to the body. The problem is to understand these strange relationships which are woven between the parts of the landscape [or university], or between it and me as incarnate subject.29

Such an inherently entwined relationship between academic existence and university as lived-through calls for a certain manner of being-in-the-world from both university and its inhabitants. It might be a somewhat practical inclusion of the bodily being of academic existence such as allowing people to get up and walk around during lectures (or lie down), eat and drink, tinker, fiddle and draw or interact corporeally with each other through touching, playing,

28 Leder, 86. 29 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 61. 186 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen hugging or supporting each other. Or it might be a more scholarly inclusion of the bodily being of academic existence such as establishing corporeal ways of doing research, truth based on emotion, more sensuous academic writing or new ways of expressing academic knowledge based on more bodily ways of thinking through dancing, singing, craftsmanship or other forms of corporeal research and dissemination. Overall, reflecting on the need to dissolve dichotomies between university and living body, more intimate fusions of mind-body, cognition-emotion, fact-feeling, knowledge-fantasy, effects-affect, rationality-attitude and so on might be needed so academic existence can move beyond the body-as-vessel both practically and scholarly where “...the living body became an exterior without interior, subjectivity became an interior without exterior, an impar- tial spectator”.30 As bodily being, academic existence needs to exist within the university, to have it as a world and belong to that world. A university for the body needs to be open for and welcoming towards academia as in-carnate thinking, doing and being in the world. Bodies and universities need to play together and allow themselves to touch and be touched, move and be moved, have affection and be in affect. This is needed, both in order for the idea of the university to fulfill its potential, as well as for its inhabitants to feel alive and living. Without daring to be touched or to be touching, academic thinking runs the risk of becoming stillborn. To resuscitate academic existence in the flesh a university is needed that

...is concerned with more integrated existences, and the reflex in its pure state is to be found only in man, who has not only setting (Umwelt), but also a world (Welt) [...where] the union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted in every instant in the movement of existence.31

Following Merleau-Ponty, academics can only fully have and belong to a university through co-existing with each other in the university both through its practical setting and scholarly lifeworld. Academic existence finds its place at the university and its place in humans through being lived through as a space of bodily presence. The phenomenal university for the body becomes in-carnated in the phenomenal body of academic existence, as university and body

30 Merleau-Ponty, 64–65. 31 Merleau-Ponty, 100–102. A University for the Body 187 find, dance and ‘come to grips’ with each other as we will try to explicate in the list that follows. Considering the above, the body should not be reduced to either a cultural, symbolic, biological or physiognomic object, but be embraced in its full incarnation of sense-giving through which we concretely grasp (Griefen) and abstractly point out (Zeigen) meaning. This phenomenological and ecological body then becomes a general medium of belonging, thinking and having a world:

I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it [...] Whether a system of motor or perceptual powers, our body is not an object of an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium.32

By reviving the body at the university, academic existence is granted the possibility of new forms of thinking, being and doing at the university where the fact that “… [m]y body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘com- prehension’”33 is acknowledged, supported and advanced. It could be through propagating decidedly expressive ways of being academic, drawing on, for example, the performing arts,34 craftsmanship,35 jazz piano36 or sensory ethnography.37 If the university does not find a way back to the body, academic existence risks losing its opportunity to be fully at home in that world, to dwell in it and to be alive in it:

...my body is the general power of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains […] I am not myself a succession of ‘psychic’ acts, nor for that matter a nuclear I who bring them together into a synthetic unity, but one single experience inseparable from itself, one single ‘living cohesion’, one single tempo- rality which is engaged, from birth, in making itself progressively explicit, and in confirming that cohesion in each successive present.38

Consequently, the task at hand is to re-member rather than dis-member the corporeality of academic existence and posit it as an intimate condition of

32 Merleau-Ponty, 173 and 177. 33 Merleau-Ponty, 273. 34 Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement. 35 Sennett, The Craftsman. 36 Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. 37 Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography. 38 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 363 and 474. 188 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen knowing, being and doing at the university. The body of the academic was never only ‘things’, but always what Merleau-Ponty calls phenomenal bodies, which is the coming together of multiple ‘bodies’ within academic existence to support and express this thing called thinking. As such, the university for the body needs to be able to nurture and cater for all of the bodies nesting within academic existence. Drawing together the theory and philosophy of the body above, we can, building on Johnson and his enumeration of bodies in The Meaning of the Body,39 point towards—at least—the below bodies co-existing as babushka dolls within each other.

Body Description Example The biological The living flesh-and-blood Eating and drinking in the body creature, that is, the body classroom when hungry or as functioning breathing thirsty biological organism. It is Standing up and walking body and consciousness around during teaching or entwined into one human meetings when needed corporeality. Laying down to listen if one has been up all night with a sick child The ecological The organism-in-environ- Offices, classrooms or body ment, that is, the body students spaces designed immersed and ingrained based on the being alive into its environment. It and expressing life rather is body and environment than the body as a vessel fused into one living eco- for thinking system. Academic existence as something that corporeally impacts the university or actively rework the campus to make it fit the totality of academic vitality

39 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, 275–278. A University for the Body 189

The phenome- The experienc- Bodily expressions of nological body ing-body-in-its-world, academic knowledge and that is, the body as thinking such as dancing, moving, feeling, sensing singing or painting kinaesthetic body in the Thinking or writing that world. It is body and life- moves the reader, makes world dancing together the reader think through as one. feeling, takes action or uses sensuous ways of commu- nicating The social The body-with-others- Being able to touch and body in-the-world, that is, the be touched by others as body partaking in the so- natural ways of relating in cial world through being the academic sphere entangled and in conver- Collective ways of academ- sation with others. It is ic existence or collective body and body merging bodily expressions wherein and sharing in intersub- the individual academic jectivity. dis-appear through shared corporeal being together The cultural The body-as-cultural- Inviting for and exploring body ly-conditioned, that is, the other ways of academic body enmeshed in gender, thinking or expressions that class, institutions, practic- are thoroughly grounded es, rituals, race, habits and in gender, religion, disabil- so on. It is body and cul- ity, class or ethnicity such ture shaping and enacting as research that praises or each other. research grounded in being blind.

For the university to become a university for the body all these coexisting bodies nesting within academic existence need to be fully recognised and acknowledged as part of being at the university, to feel cared for, to dwell there and to realise the full potential of academic thinking. Through working intentionally and inclusively with this on all levels the phenomenal university for the body emerges as in-carnated in the phenomenal body of academic existence and vice versa. 190 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen

Body Out of Control? Academic Existence and Horror

As explicated in the preceding section, the body at the university often only reveals its presence as dys-appearance;40 an unwelcome appearance that in a way betrays persons at the university in their efforts to remain in control of a given situation. Drawing on the works of Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas, Dylan Trigg41 suggests that although humans are their bodies and the bodies are them, the body is also something existing beyond the cool cognition of the individual; it is often beyond control or understanding. The corpo-reality of individuals, then, is larger than their reflective or intentional self. It encompasses a ‘prepersonal’ body, as Merleau-Ponty42 puts it, which is the foundation of the thinking and being of the personal self. Trigg explains:

...the unity of embodiment is made possible thanks to an anonymous subject existing ‘beneath’ my personal existence, such that I am kept ‘alive’ by this absent presence. How am I kept alive? In certain cases, my body ‘lends itself without reserve to action’, establishing a continuity that would otherwise be dispersed, were I simply a mental substance with an attached body.43

This thing-me, the prepersonal body, strange and outside the control of intentional-me as it is, is foundational for the personal self, in a sense predating what we in everyday language call ‘thinking’ and reaching back to the origins of life. It is an anonymous other-than-self or non-me, which is alien to the personal self, invisible and inaccessible, but at the same time the very thing that allows us to perceive the world, indeed allows us to live in it and be part of it. This may be profoundly unsettling for persons at the university. After all, the personal self may intentionally move its body through moving its mus- cles and make itself think deliberate thoughts. But the conditions for its fleshy, breathing and thinking existence is beyond its realm of agency, signifying an acknowledgment of an inherent lack of control over its own being. This lack of control, according to Trigg,44 may induce a horror in the individual, which is tied to the fact of the inevitability of its decay and death. The personal self may want to live, but in the end, it is killed by its own body, by the thing-me. In times when the body acts as a full-functioning smooth machine, lend- ing itself without reserve to the personal self, it may hardly be noticed. But the

40 Leder, The Absent Body. 41 Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. 42 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 296. 43 Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror, 70. 44 Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. A University for the Body 191 unsettling capabilities of the body’s mortality represents a looming horror that may spring to the forefront of existence in a heartbeat as the thing-me reveals itself. When academic existence is sufficiently challenged by stress, sickness or injury, the personal self fails at maintaining its facade of cool cognition, and the body emerges to attention as dys-appearance. The academic, building most of her university life around suppressing this body, constantly push- ing it into the shadow attempting to render it without influence over her cool cognition, is terrified when her strategy of bodily dismissal and tunnel vision breaks down. She loses control and is delivered to her own existence, at the mercy of the quirks and whims of her thing-me. However, the prepersonal body is by no means solely a harbinger of horror. The loss of control may also be of a different nature and may accompany bodily states of rapture, desire or ecstasy. Drawing on Lévinas,45 such states may offer a possibility of transcendence, an opening towards the strangeness of the world—Otherness as Lévinas would put it. Real transcendental desire— as opposed to mere needs, which are more tangible and attainable in nature— signifies a not-having of something that is unknown, a lust for impossibility, an unquenchable thirst for that which cannot be possessed. Drawing on Bataille,46 desire points towards a fleshy continuity between individuals. It signifies a carnal, embodied lust for transgression of the self, which opens visions of the impossible realms of ‘destiny’, the ‘real’, ‘truth’ and ‘totality’.47 This lust might be sexual in nature, but it also represents a more profound longing or urge. Enraptured by desire, claims Bataille,48 persons may cast aside their inhibitions and in that way they retain the chance of becoming more fully in-carnated human, filled with sprawling life ignited by the unknown. They strive and yearn towards ecstasy; towards being as it exists outside themselves in the bodyscape, towards turning their bodies inside out and being a part of that which they cannot be a part of; that which is otherwise than their selves; Otherness. Desire, then, becomes a fabric of life at the university. It does not spur on cool cognition, but rather brings with it an invigora- tion—a weird, embodied meaning. A type of meaning that may bring with it a much-needed infusion of life into the university and its inhabitants. Roughly speaking, in the university of today, there is often little room reserved for the ‘thing-me’. The loss of control it induces may be considered

45 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity. 46 Bataille, Erotism. 47 LaFountain, “Bataille’s Eroticism, Now: From Transgression to Insidious Sorcery,” 27. 48 Bataille, Erotism. 192 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen inappropriate and out of place, and the ideal is often to calm the affective body-thing and keep it in a ghostlike dormant state, so that cool cognition may continue to reign. There are numerous strategies for this. When students tremble, sweat and become short of breath at the exams, they consume beta blockers to reduce the agency of the ‘thing-me’. When academics get bored and their bodies fall asleep during lectures or seminars, they drink coffee (or maybe even other drugs) to stay awake and presenters try to be more intellectually entertaining. When the body falls ill, its physical presence is often banned at the campus. And when confronted with the displays of lust, affect or the loss of control that comes with real desire, university culture often fails to acknowledge it as relevant or appropriate within the institution. And while some of these strategies might be sensible (we certainly don’t want disease to spread or abuse to happen), the lack of acceptance of the body may keep the inhabitants of the university from engaging with the invigorating power of the ‘thing-me’. A by-product of fighting of horror by subduing the body perpetually may—as shown above—constitute an undue undermining of real desire. But, moreover, there may be unfortunate consequences of not dealing with the horror caused by the thing-me. When employing a strategy of prevalence in the face of bodily horror—which aims to remain in control, to suppress the prepersonal body through willpower or by simply ignoring it—a chance for authenticity may be lost. Drawing on Heidegger,49 it may be in the time of engagement with this horror—when in the mood of anxiety as Heidegger terms it—that human beings at the university may be able to care authentically for their own and each other’s academic being-in-the-world and the university as lifeworld. When subduing desire, we risk a death within life, an existential boredom,50 where nothing really matters, where the ‘infusion of life’ into our being-in-the-world is denied. Without recognising the thing-me, with all its horrors and desires, as native to the university, we risk losing ourselves as well as the potentials of horror and desire in relation to our thinking, doing and being at the university. The university might end up slicing the academic human condition so thin and subduing the thing-me so thoroughly that the chance for authenticity is undermined and bodily desire—and with it academic desire—disappears.

49 Heidegger, Being and Time. 50 Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom. A University for the Body 193

Conclusion: A Value-Framework for the University of the Body

A society can be so stone-hard // That it fuses into a block A people can be so bone-hard // That life goes into shock

And the heart is all in shadow // And the heart has almost stopped Till some begin to build // A city as soft as a body —Inger Christensen, It 51

Following Inger Christensen’s invocation of a city as soft as a body, a university as soft as a body would imply a university where corporeality, emotion, cognition, affect, expressivity and so on are recognised and treated as valuable, relevant, integrated and equal in academic existence. Such a university would be a fleshy feasible utopia, a university of bodily presence, where academic ghosts materialise as living bodies through a corpo-real ecosystem for sprawling life that is acknowledging and welcoming the totality of academic existence. The university of the body is a university where all these dimensions are ‘in-synchrony’ which implies “that the overall feeling is one of together- ness, of consistently cohesive part coordination in sonic [and bodily] motion and participatory experience”.52 As Sheets-Johnstone underlines in The Primacy of Movement,53 the body comes into being as itself through the unity of the senses in thinking. Movement and being moved—also in thinking—“...is the generative source of our aliveness and our primal capacity for sense-making”.54 To fully exist—also academically—the university needs to be a place for feeling thoroughly alive and for expressing academic thinking and practice based on such vitality. As academics move, individually or collectively, emotionally or biologically, inclusively or diversely, they discover themselves, each other, thinking and the university in and through movement. According to Sheets-Johnstone,55 there is no bridge to be crossed between bodily thinking and bodily doing, something a university for the body understands, acknowledges and is based on: To be thinking bodies, does not imply that academics are thinking by means of their

51 Christensen, It. 52 Feld, “Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology of Environ- ments,” 179. 53 Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 148. 54 Sheets-Johnstone, 132. 55 Sheets-Johnstone, 227. 194 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen bodies, but that they are thinking bodies through and through: “There is no ‘mind-doing’ that is separate from a ‘body-doing’”.56 If the university disregards the corporeality of academic existence, it will, following Christensen, easily end up as a stone-hard society where its inhabitants solidify into bone-hard people and where thinking and life itself at the university runs the risk of going into shock. This essay’s attempt to explicate a vocabulary and framework for a university for the body through establishing a corpor-mology and bodyscape for academic existence is simultaneously a defibrillator for the heart of the university and its inhabitants—a possibility for having a liveable university as soft as a body, a feasible fleshy utopia where the corporeality of thinking, being and doing is considered as part of the foundational identity of university existence. From this essay’s proposal for a university for the body at least three implications follow:

1. Minds are not embodied, but thinking is bodily through and through. The university needs to cater for academic existence as bodily thinking: “The human mind is not contained in the body but emerges from and co-evolves with the body”57 and as such we cannot have a liveable university that is not simultaneously a university for human beings as body-mind.

2. Human meaning exists in the body, and as such, the university must always be a university for meaningful corporeal academic existence: “Things are meaningful by virtue of their relations to other actual or possible qualities, feelings, emotions, emotions, images, image sche- mas, and concepts”58 and as such we cannot have a liveable university that is not in itself emotional, embodying, feeling and embracing of what it means to be alive as moving and moved human beings.

3. Understanding, thinking and reasoning are never not-body. Simply put, academic thinking cannot make sense of the world without or outside corporeal academic existence: “the human world can only be understood and engaged by us via the structures and processes of human understanding and action. Our meaning is human meaning— meaning grounded in our human bodies, in their humanly encountered

56 Sheets-Johnstone, 487. 57 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, 279. 58 Johnson, 279. A University for the Body 195

environments. All of the meaning we can make and all of the values we hold grow out of our humanity-interacting-with-our-world”,59 and therefore a university that is not conceptualised and concretised as a university for the body through in-carnate body-environment couplings is not a truly liveable university.

In conclusion then, we can, from the above formation and implications, establish a value-framework for the university of the body. This value-framework is slightly unfolded below, as a way of pulling together and summing up the pos- itive implications as well as the necessary obligations when locating the ghost in the machine, dragging the body out of the shadow and acknowledging academic existence as ‘Leib’ or lived body.

1. Thinking at the university should get the body: Before you claim to include the body, watch, sense and feel how it behaves you must: Study its beat. Embrace how it moves and moves you. Watch it work and think. Include people that get the body in higher education research and development. Beginning with the living mess that is the body forces the university to focus on fleshy humans, not thoughts, systems or data.

2. The university should embrace the bodyscape: Do not just cater for the body in the light but also the bodies piled up in the shadow. Re-connect the bodies that constitute us with each other and create systems that embrace them: biological flesh-and-blood creature reconnected with ecological organism-in-environment reconnected with phenomenological experiencing-body-in-its-lifeworld reconnected with social body-with-others-in-the-world reconnected with cultural body-as-culturally-conditioned. Reconnect inhabitants with body after body until they turn into vibrant matter transforming the university into a resonating bodyscape.

3. Expand academic thought horizons: The body is not only an object of experience and a vessel for thinking, it is also the medium of experience and thinking itself. Recognise, embrace and nurture the forces and conditions that make bodily knowing come alive. Do not allow the university to become a systematic machine that destroys its own potentials for thinking. Before deciding what proper thinking is,

59 Johnson, 283. 196 Rikke Toft Nørgård and Janus Aaen

listen to the wisdom that is living and breathing there in the shadows. Follow thinking wherever it leads. Integrate the bodyscape and all its forms of thinking in the system. Allow for infectious new body- thoughts. Unleash the ghosts in the machine. Listen to what the body tries to tell you—even when it doesn’t make sense.

4. Make the university liveable for the body: Aid and encourage the structures and systems that help turn the university into a sustainable liveable environment. Don’t disrupt or destroy the ecobalance where it works. Before you charge in, pay attention to where, how and why life is already thriving within the system. Don’t be afraid to dis-member parts of the system that do not re-member what it is to live and be alive. Nurture the university so as to enable it to transform from trans- parent uniform water drop system into an ecological puddle brim- ming with life.

5. Embrace the horror and desire of academic existence: Trust the body. Even when it is out of control, it has you. Obtain personhood. Do not leave the body at the gates. Introduce ‘thing-me’ and ‘intentional-me’ to each other and make them roam the university together. Academic horror and estrangement is part of academic desire and rapture. And all is part of being alive at the university. Do not fear the abyss. Feel alive. Build bridges or aeroplanes. Trust others to be your lifeline. Bungee jump off the bridge or plane.

6. Locate responsibility for the lived body within the university: The system should assume intrinsic responsibility and correct mistakes wherever the lived body does not thrive. Pay attention to triggering events. System ethics and flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries or acknowledge a need to shift—come before any system requirement. The possibility for its living organisms to survive, their conditions and enjoyment of life are dependent upon the biodiversity and nutritional content within the ecosystem. The inhabitants and their well-being, lifeworld and academic existence always take precedence over any system truth or fact.

7. Materialise the fleshy utopias rising from body-university ecosystems: Invite feasible fleshy utopias by fusing Lebenswelt, Körperwelt and Umwelt. Make ‘Körper’ and ‘Leib’ one and the same. Capture the body-university ecosystems that emerge from the amalgamation of life-world, corpo-reality and eco-system. Leave rigid, inanimate forms A University for the Body 197

behind. Create spaces of bodily presence in the ecological university. Construct systems from squishy circuits. Probe the feasible university for its ability to sustain and embrace breathing feeling pulsating life. Ask whether it was conceptualised with fleshy organism-environment couplings in mind. Inquire whether it is prepared for and appreciative of bodily contact, emotional encounters and in-carnate relationships.

8. Enlarge the meaning of the thinking university through caring for all of what is human: Don’t maximise subsystems that are desirable while disregarding the whole. Aim to expand the horizons of caring. No part of living or human life is separate from the others. Academic existence is part of being alive, and as such inseparable from life. Changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to distort the intelli- gibility or appropriateness of the current logic of the system. But the system cannot survive without caring for all of the bodyscape. The university must perceive itself as lived through and being alive, as being capable of embracing and expressing sense, sensibility and sensuality in its system.

Through reconfiguring its understanding of academic existence by re-mem- bering the body, the university can learn to listen to and include a deeper understanding of what it is to be alive and living as an academic at the university. It is an opportunity for the university to discover other forms of thinking, doing and being in academic research and practice through the ways that properties, values and knowledge work together at the university to bring forth a university for the body. Steps towards this goal require the integration of a vocabulary for the body, a deeper and broader understanding of academic corporeality and integration of a value framework for the university of the body. The value framework proposed here is a first step and most likely not complete or even sufficient. There are many viable ways to frame the relationship between university and body. Nevertheless, the vocabulary, bodyscape and value framework presented in this essay are offered as helpful first moves in reclaiming the fleshy reality of academic thinking and practice and helping the university in becoming a university for the body.

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