Aniko Horvath

School of Social Science & Public Policy

Department of Education and Professional Studies

King’s College London

Who ‘Owns’ the Future of UK Higher Education?

Universities in the Knowledge Economy:

Perspectives from the Asia-Pacific and Europe

11 February, 2015

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Broad research questions

What have been the impacts on academics of the institutional and policy changes that have taken place in higher education over the past decades, and more specifically, after the 2010 restructuring?

How do academics mobilize economic, social, and cultural resources to cope with such changes over the course of their career and more specifically, under the current circumstances?

How do academics make sense of their past and present ‘professional’ lives in the context of the current restructuring in higher education, and how, in turn, do these understandings and interpretations inform their ‘coping’ strategies?

Methods

(Professional) life history interviews with 22 academics Ethnographic participant observation, for example at:

Academic strikes, union meetings Protests University open days Conferences Academic workshops and seminars Public talks by well-known/ ‘famous’ academics Other formal and informal academic/professional settings Alternative higher education initiatives HE forums (e.g. Guardian University Forum, Guardian

University Awards ceremony, etc.)

Data used for this presentation 21 interviews, ranging between 60 and 160 minutes, most of

them at app. 120 minutes; questions were structured in two blocks – first part was on personal life events; second part on broader issues, such as place/role of academics in public sphere, academic freedom, academic loyalties, unions, policy changes over the years of their academic career, etc.

We tried to cover as big a variety of life trajectories as possible – age, gender, ethnic/national background, immigrants/emigrants, types of contracts, people who left academia altogether, types of institutions, regional distribution, variety of academic fields in social sciences, diversity of opinions on current changes, etc.

Analysis of government reports, white papers, and OECD documents.

Methods of data analysis

Narrative analysis Critical Discourse Analysis Life as ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu) Analysis of ethnographic data

Some limitations

Limitations on understanding the interconnections within the whole higher education system (can be complemented with research data from the work of others)

Only academics from social sciences included Only 4 interviews with administrators/management No HE policy makers

Interviewee 1 (academic): “In our department we’ve got pictures of the miners’ strikes,

demonstrations, all kinds of protests, and the pictures stop at 1985, so I have a huge poster on my door about the bedroom tax [introduced in 2012], just to say we have to update this gallery of processes of the past... and so I kind of think, oh that’s a bit hypocritical of my colleagues in that situation.

How did your colleagues react when you got involved in HE protest movements?

Hardly any colleague in my institution speaks to me about it. So you just all behave like it’s not happening? They behave like I’m not happening. So I will go to

occupations and discuss, there won’t be many colleagues there, and people behave, my colleagues behave like it’s not happening.”

Interviewee 1 (continuation): “How does a department meeting look like when they start

presenting the department with cuts, with making people redundant?

Well we have had a situation of a colleague being made redundant... that was a difficult situation. It’s not so much cuts, because this is often not coming in in the form of cuts, it’s coming in in the form of changing the conditions of what you do. So everyone was sort of very hostile to it... But then, you know, our new vice-chancellor came in saying I’m going to save ten million, raise ten million, spend twenty million. So some people heard the spend twenty million, I kind of heard the save ten million, and thought OK, that’s some people sacked in order to... And it was very difficult to organise people around opposing saving some money... “

Interviewee 1 (continuation): “I had a departmental meeting when we’ve had to discuss cuts

in that difficult context. We are facing an issue of sort of having a deficit again and, as I’ve already said, I don’t think, you know, that in the current situation you could be satisfied with running a deficit. So I like to come up with plans for the deficit, and if you come up early with them, the plans for the deficit don’t involve redundancies, so people have been really happy with the suggestions I made in order to avoid the deficit, and turn things around, improve recruitment and so on... But when I said, OK, now I’ve put a lot of effort into how we can change the curriculum, how we can do different things, but we ought to be opposing these three things that have come down from the university... [And then my colleagues said that] oh no, the university has said we need to do this. So when I oppose those within the university I do it as an individual...”

Jane I. Guyer: Prophecy and the near future (American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 409-421, 2007)

“For me, a sense of foreignness in the current present has come to revolve around a strange evacuation of the temporal frame of the “near future”: the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping, of tracing out mutual influences, of engaging in struggles for specific goals, in short, of the process of implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the social and material world that used to be encompassed under an expansively inclusive concept of “reasoning.” (...) It seemed that ultimate origins and distant horizons were both reinvigorated, whereas what fell between them was attenuating into airy thinness, on both “sides” (past and future) of the “reduction to the present.”

Guyer (continuation): 1990s in Nigeria: “Vistas of long-term growth were invoked in

newspapers that were diligently recycled as market packaging ... and toilet paper, as people managed the actualities of a desperately disturbed everyday life.” (pp. 409-410)

“At the time, this combination of fantasy futurism and enforced presentism seemed specific to the lived implications of the economic policies of structural adjustment under military rule in Africa. Years later, the same rhetoric about horizons of long-term economic growth has become far more generalized, powerful, and confident. (...) It seemed that ultimate origins and distant horizons were both reinvigorated, whereas what fell between them was attenuating into airy thinness, on both “sides” (past and future) of the “reduction to the present.” (pp. 410)

Guyer’s argument resonated strongly with my own sense of an ‘emptying’ of the ‘near future/past’ and a ‘reduction to the present’, as well as an enforced ‘futurism’ in higher education.

Political and policy discourses on higher education argued for the desirability of “long-term financial sustainability”, “sustained growth” and “improving quality and efficiency” in the sector. Implicitly embedded in all these notions were particular understandings of ‘time’, perceptions that contained an underlying claim of an absolute right to imagine the future of higher education (e.g. OECD papers and conferences on the future of HE, UK reports and white papers on HE, political speeches).

In contrast, academic and student narratives often failed to stimulate – or so it seemed – widespread discussions of ‘alternative futures’ for higher education.

Consequently, prompted by Guyer’s argument, during the interviews and fieldwork, I started to explore how temporal frames in academia operate, both in discourse and in practice; who and how ‘inhabits’ the ‘near future’, and what happens to the ‘longer-term’ in academic narratives/practices.

While in our research at King’s we wanted to understand how the 2010 restructurings in UK higher education impacted on academics and academic work, we also wanted to understand why such changes were possible in the first place. It seemed that looking into how different temporalities are ‘manipulated’ within academia would give us a better understanding of how forms of sociotemporal power operate in relation to HE.

Erik Harms: Eviction time in the new Saigon, 2013 (CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 2, pp. 344–368)

“Temporal instability makes it difficult for people living in zones slated for redevelopment to plan for the future. But planning for the future is precisely the logic organizing the Thu Thiêm project. In this context, a presentist mode of living – what Guyer calls the “evacuation of the near future” – can actually challenge the very temporality that drives the project. (...) The brute exercise of power and influence to strip people of their land while compensating them at rates well below the anticipated profits is founded on planning for the future.” (pp. 364-365)

Erik Harms: Saigon’s Edge (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)

“People often critique the Communist Party, but they seem to agree, wittingly or unwittingly, with the party’s teleological ideals of progress and tradition. Looking carefully at time orientation on Ho Chi Minh City’s rural urban margins gives us an understanding of how political legitimacy builds upon a notion of ‘urbanization’, ‘development’, and ‘progress’ that promises a forever-arriving better future. Examining these concepts of forward advancement through time also gives us a clue to the operation of power through the manipulation of access to different temporal models. ” (pp. 91)

How is this relevant to higher education in the United Kingdom (and beyond)?

I started searching for temporal concepts in different contexts in academia, at this stage focusing especially on the overlaps between the futures envisaged by politicians and policy makers, institutional managers and the use, negotiation, application, reproduction and internalization of such norms/values among academics.

What are the categories that we reproduce in academia about past, present and future and what can they tell us about power and domination?

Some categories that emerged were those that linked HE to excellence/merit, broadening participation, and engagement with the world beyond academia.

We know from anthropological work on the use of discursive terms that different groups can have very different understandings of the very same notions.

However, if we think about the three above terms in frameworks that are linked to ‘temporality’ we can discover overlaps in political/economic/management understandings and in the values attached to them by academics, especially when/if they imply progress/development over time.

Some points of connection in academic narratives and political discourse on HE: a move from one point in time – seen as holding a negative comparative value – to a point in time where it holds positive value – e.g. past elitism (i.e. ivory tower) versus current engagement with the world beyond academia; or past selectivity (class) versus broadening participation, realization of ‘mass education’; or past elite reproduction versus excellence/merit based selectivity.

What were also emphasized quite often in narratives were self understandings of being radical, disrupting dominant HE practices, not being part of the establishment.

However, how does this contrast with the ways in which we reproduce position, status, and lifestyle within and beyond academia? Is there space for alternatives in our own lives? How are these spaces carved out – and what are the contradictions that exist around them? Can we disconnect the ‘everyday’ of our lives from our practices in HE?

Some examples: while most academics did reflect critically on all sorts of rankings in their narratives (questioning discourses of elitism/merit), in their everyday practices there was still a legitimization of the (implicit) ideas that UK (and English language) HE institutions and publishing were somehow superior – not necessarily in terms of ‘quality’ but when making ‘strategic choices’ of one’s own career advancement (future): high level of awareness of rankings (and ‘strategizing’ about them) in job applications; considering rankings when making decisions about the types of journals and publishing houses where they decided to submit their work – often arguing that the “rigorous peer-review of such journals is in itself a warranty for quality”.

As one academic put it when talking about rankings “right now this is the only game in town” (monolithic and exclusionary views of present/future in HE).

Nevertheless, from narratives it was clear that an attempt is made to ‘disrupt’ such practices (increase in open access publishing, blogging, collaborating with sites such as ‘Discover Society’, wonkhe, etc.); however this only worked for ‘established’ academics – the young academics that I interviewed and who ‘lived by’ these ‘values’ were often ‘pushed out’ of academia – sometimes by the very same established academics who argued for change but set on hiring committees/fellowship boards and implemented the ‘institutional norms’ they said they were “expected to implement”.

Interviewee 2 (former academic): “I remember one job interview for a lectureship where I knew the

people interviewing me quite well, and they were saying well you haven’t published your PhD as a monograph, and I said what’s the point of it? It’s a PDF on my website, on my blog, people can download it. I could spend some time editing it to make it a bit tidier for an academic audience, that would be great, but it would take me several months and then it would be put in a library and no-one would read it, it would be very expensive, it would make a bit of money for Routledge, or whoever I got as publisher, if I was lucky enough to get Routledge, but you know, some academic publisher, and it would give me points, it would give me academic points, which allow you to then turn that into money somewhere else, but it wouldn’t really do the world more good in any way, in fact it would suck time which I could be spending building a public engagement strategy or blogging or teaching or doing some new research. So why would I do that?”

Interviewee 2 (continuation): “You are employing me to be a lecturer in communication, I

think it would go against everything that I lecture about to spend my time turning this PhD into a monograph. And they kind of smiled and went yes, that makes sense, but we still need to be accountable to our research matrix, and I didn’t get the job. They were sort of laughing in the room of like it’s sweet that you still think like that. And that would be generally the attitude, and I’ve had that several times, oh we feel that too but you are actually doing it. Somebody called me gutsy recently; but this is not that gutsy at all, we should all just do it and stop playing this stupid game. There are more senior scientists who get away with it, I think, but I was not senior enough to be able to make it work.”

A more subtle manifestation of the contradictions that surround discourse and everyday practices of academics was, for example, the way academics talked about their children’s education, and of the advice/support they would give to their children in terms of choosing a university.

Even when talking about advising their children to go to university in Europe, this was most often linked to ideas of experiencing other societies, mastering new languages; there was not one argument that claimed that they could get a ‘better’ education there (whatever that would mean). So while UK education was often described as “not worth the money” – there was (almost) no argument on education in Europe/or any other countries being better (or even the same).

It could be argued that talking about our children’s education is implicitly talking about the ‘imagined future’ of higher education – that is, there was very little ‘disruption’ of the mainstream imaginings in that respect.

This also involves issues of ‘trust’ when making decisions about the future:

For some, ‘trust’ meant ‘navigating’ the system and implicitly accepting the idea that some brands hold (better) value when it comes to one’s future/employment – as one academic put it in an informal discussion about the local school pushing them to allow their children to be prepared for a Cambridge/Oxford education:“I can experiment with my own ways of practice, but cannot experiment with my children’s future”.

It also involves issues of ‘trust’ in ourselves as parents and in our status in society – some of the academics I interviewed encouraged their children to ‘experiment ‘with the education system and not go into private or ‘best practice’ schools; however, I was then often told that “we can compensate at home in what the system is failing them” – implicit assumptions of (class) reproduction, and the transmission of cultural capital – disconnect/contradiction between discursive values and everyday practices (also, what exactly do we compensate for?).

Now, if we return for a moment to the ‘edge’ of Ho Chi Minh city, what can it tell us about these processes in UK academia?

Erik Harms: “The presence of a form of time reckoning in and of itself does not say very much about the social experience of time. That experience of time depends more on social action and the distribution of agency within time, for what time ‘means’ really depends on how ‘we make, through our acts, the time we are in’ (Munn). Indeed, this is the point; time orientation is not mystical or magical in any sense, but the social effects of time depend on acts that are situated within but also create relationships of power, legitimacy, and authority.” (Saigon’s Edge, pp. 102)

Interviewee 3 (academic): I think that generally the feeling was it would have been nice if this

money had come from people other than the students directly, but it was never gonna do that and it hadn’t been doing that for years, and there was no political way that was ever going to happen. So at least now we are getting the money... And so I’d rather have the system we’ve got at the moment where at least we can still teach the students in the way I enjoy teaching them and draw on our own endowments and hopefully in time increase the tuition fee, always with plenty of bursaries of course, always ensuring you don’t actually have to have this money in your hand when you walk through the door, you just have to be prepared to sign something to say you’ll ultimately pay it to us. Let’s go down that path then, because it’s more important to me that we preserve this mode of teaching than it is that it actually be free of charge for them sort of in perpetuity rather than just in effect free at the moment they walk through the door and ultimately pay for later.