The Next Fifty Years: Imagining the Feminist

University of the Future

Professor Valerie Hey

Professor Louise Morley

Centre for Higher Education and Equity

Research (CHEER)

University of Sussex, UK

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

20 April 2023

The Story So Far? Pollyanna and Cassandra Un/Do 3 Rationalities

•1960s liberal humanism/

meritocracy – renaissance

or ‘the glad game’?

•1980s- present neo-liberal

realism

•Feminist Futures

•‘We inherit the future, not

just the past’ (Barad, 2010: 257).

Optimism and Openings

• Expression of Welfare State/Democratic

Impulse & Impetus

• Overcoming of 5 evils including Ignorance

• Role of (LSE) public intellectuals – for the

solidary supportive state e.g. Titmus

• Evidenced-based policy – para-utopian

• The positive spirit of the age

• Affirmed the virtues of a liberal education

• Context of reform e.g. secondary

education

• Egalitarian – inclusive – women, working

class & ?

Values, Not Value

• The Robbins axiom:

‘ courses of higher education should be

available for all those who are

qualified by ability and attainment to

pursue them and who wish to do so.’

3 core values

• Public value of higher education in

producing ‘cultivated’ men and women

• Securing the advancement of learning

through the combination of teaching

and research,

• Providing a common culture and

standards of citizenship.

20 April 2023

‘A Realm of Free Enquiry’: Robbins

…the essence of higher education that it

introduces students to a world of intellectual

responsibility and intellectual discovery in

which they are to play their part … The

element of partnership between teacher and

taught in a common pursuit of knowledge

and understanding, present to some extent

in all education, should become the

dominant element as the pupil matures and

as the intellectual level of work done rises

… …he is not being presented with a mass

of information but initiated into a realm of

free inquiry.

From Social Repair to Cruel Optimism

Lionel Robbins

•Neoclassical economic theorist

•No admirer of socialism or left-wing ideas more

generally

•A social repairer – no radical

Believed in:

•Post- war competitive state/ reconstruction (at Bretton

Woods)

•Expansion for global human capitalism / wasted talent.

•International Context- visited universities/ colleges in

Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and

Switzerland/ Longer visits to the United States and the

Soviet Union.

•N.B.

•1963 UK had quarter of a million students (free)

•Currently 2.5 million (consumer pays).

•Robbins recommendations implemented by Wilson’s

Labour Govt.- from 1964.

20 April 2023

Value, not Values

• Robbins’ pronouncements on the nation’s

‘needs’ and social benefits =

instrumentalisation of knowledge.

• ‘Equality of opportunity’ and ‘cultivated men

and women’ BUT

• Education required a quantifiable use value.

• Cast new universities in same mould as

existing elite.

• HE now re-cast as a private investment in

human capital and as contributing to

economic growth (Willetts, 2013).

From Meritocracy to Market

• Robbins Report = mitigated

inherited stratification/ hierarchy

among institutions.

• Today higher education re-imagined

as a driver of inequality, rather than

a vehicle for social mobility.

• Changes designed to create

hierarchy and reinforce divisions.

• Expansion = Privatisation.

Rabid Re-Imaginings

• Market competition and the

support of for-profit higher

education, which were not part of

the Robbins agenda (Holmwood, 2013).

• At the moment the waters around

higher education institutions are so

full of eager predators may

suggest, even to the most naive,

that they have been aroused by the

scent of profit (Collini, 2013).

Gender in Robbins?

• Gender as Description =

Demographic Variable

• Women as reserve labour

force

• Women excluded from

process- only 2 women

members of 12-strong

Robbins Committee(Dame Kitty Anderson, D.B.E. and

Miss H. L. Gardner)

Confounding Cassandra? The Law of the Unintended Consequence

Access to higher education for women:

•Spearheaded staking political claims;

•Demanded new forms of knowledge

and pedagogy;

•Facilitated entry into professions;

•Introduced Curriculum innovation e.g.

women’s studies;

•Strengthened the women’s liberation

movement.

20 April 2023

Confirming Cassandra :Women in Leadership or Being Led?

Widening Access but Deepening Divisions

• 4% of UK poorer young people enter higher education

(David et al, 2009; Hills Report, 2009).

• 5% of this group enter UK’s top 7 universities (HESA, 2010).

• Universities = hereditary domain of financially advantaged (Gopal, 2010).

• Opportunity hording by privileged social groups? (Morley, 2012)

The University of the Future?

20 April 2023

Resistance/ Imaging Alternative Universities

• Tent City University/ Bank of

Ideas, London, Occupy

Movement, UK

(dreaming another world awake)

• Unitierra, Mexico

(de-schooling, community

projects) 

• UNILA (University of Latin

American Integration), Brazil.

(state finance for LA issues)

• QUEST University, Canada

(private, inquiry-based, block

teaching, no departments). 20 April 2023

Imagine the Feminist University of the Future?

• Move beyond critique and

into futurology.

• How would a feminist

university be different from

current models in terms of

leadership, curriculum,

pedagogy, values, learning

landscapes?

The Feminist University of the Future Needs to...

• Value, nurture and respect women

• Stimulate mass autodidactism?

• Provide MOOCS for you!

• Encourage Pop up discourse

• Be remade anew with a habitus that is non-alienating and generative for all who work, teach and study there

• Be a safe, culturally and ethnically diverse, space.

• Generate knowledge fit for a moral purpose of ‘doing no harm’

• Be gender free. OFFEM with pazzaz!

Follow Up?• ESRC Seminar Series:

‘Imagining the University of the Future’

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/

esrcseminars

• Special issue of Contemporary Social

Science (6:2) 2011: ‘Challenge, Change or

Crisis in Global Higher Education?’

• Morley, L. (2011) Imagining the University of

the Future. In, Barnett, R. (ed) The Future

University: Ideas and Possibilities. London:

Taylor and Francis: 26-35.

20 April 2023