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Paradoxes in Education Learning in a Plural Society 1st

Edition Rosemary Sage (Auth.)

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Acts of Knowing Critical Pedagogy in Against and Beyond

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The University as a Critical Institution?
HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCH IN THE 21ST CENTURY SERIES

Volume 10

Series Editors

Pedro Teixeira, CIPES and University of Porto, Portugal

Jussi Välimaa, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

International Editorial Advisory Board

Mari Elken, University of Oslo, Norway

Gaële Goastellec, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Manja Klemenčič, Harvard University, USA
Simon Marginson, University College London, United Kingdom
Emanuela Reale, Institute for Research on Firm and Growth CERIS – CNR Rome,
Italy
Creso Sá, University of Toronto, Canada

Scope

This series provides overviews about state of the art research in the field of higher
education studies. It documents a selection of papers from the annual conferences of
the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER), the world organisation
of researchers in the field of higher education. This object and problem related field
of studies is by nature interdisciplinary and theoretically as well as methodologically
informed by disciplines such as sociology, political science, economics, history,
philosophy, law and education. Each book includes an introduction by the editors
explaining the thematic approach and criteria for selection as well as how the book
can be used by its possible audience which might include graduate students, policy
makers, researchers in the field, and practitioners in higher education administration,
leadership and management.

Please email queries to Pedro Teixeira: [email protected]

The University as a Critical Institution?

Edited by
Rosemary Deem
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
and
Heather Eggins
Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, UK
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6351-114-8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-94-6351-115-5 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-94-6351-116-2 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

P.O. Box 21858,
3001 AW Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/

All chapters in this book have undergone peer review.

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2017 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction

1. The University as a Critical Institution? An Introduction 3

Rosemary Deem and Heather Eggins

Part 1: The Contemporary University: Governance and Organisational

Futures

2. Can the University Be a Liveable Institution in the Anthropocene? 17

Susan Wright

3. Hard and Soft Managerialism in Portuguese Higher Education Governance 39

António Magalhães, Amélia Veiga and Pedro Videira

4. Understanding the Changes of the Higher Education Governance in

Poland and Ukraine: Institutional Analysis 55
Myroslava Hladchenko, Dominik Antonowicz and Harry de Boer

5. What Does Academic Freedom Mean for Academics? A Case Study of

the University of Bologna and the National University of Singapore 75
Sina Westa

Part 2: Widening Participation, Curricular Innovation, Research Policy

6. How Can We Widen Participation in Higher Education? The Promise of

Contextualised Admissions 95
Vikki Boliver, Stephen Gorard and Nadia Siddiqui

7. Liberal Education Under Financial Pressure: The Case of Private

German Universities 111
Daniel Kontowski and David Kretz

8. Heterogeneous Responses of Portuguese Polytechnics to New Research

Policy Demands 135
Sandra Hasanefendic, Maria Teresa Patricio and Frank G. A. de Bakker

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 3: Higher Education Policies and Practices on Teaching Quality

and Excellence, Research and the Student Experience

9. The Perceptions of Quality Management by Universities’ Internal

Stakeholders: Support, Adaptation or Resistance? 157
Maria J. Manatos, Maria J. Rosa and Cláudia S. Sarrico

10. Internationalization – A Tool to Enhance Intercultural Competence in

Higher Education? 173
Tone Horntvedt and Ellen Carm

11. University Student Participation in Out-of-Class Activities:

Consequences for Study Career and Academic Achievement 185
Monia Anzivino and Michele Rostan

12. Unravelling Tacit Knowledge: Engagement Strategies of Centres for

Excellence in Teaching and Learning 217
Andrea Kottmann

List of Contributors 237

vi
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the tenth in the series produced from selected papers presented at the
annual conferences of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER).
It could not have been produced without the assiduity of its authors who have been
under considerable pressure to finalise their chapters for publication to meet the
publication date before the 2017 conference. We also wish to acknowledge the help
of members of the Conference Organising Committee in reviewing these chapters,
and particularly Jurgen Enders, Terri Kim, Ye Liu, Lisa Lucas, Simon Marginson,
Peter Scott and Patrick Clancy. We wish to thank Jack Simmons and Emma Berndt
for their help with the preparation of the manuscript. We also wish to acknowledge
the ongoing support of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, whose
sponsorship enabled the conference and its publication to be successfully undertaken.
We thank all colleagues drawn from 26 countries who attended the 29th CHER
conference in Cambridge, and contributed to the lively and informative event which
has enabled this volume to be produced.

vii
INTRODUCTION
 ROSEMARY DEEM AND HEATHER EGGINS

1. THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

AN INTRODUCTION

The notion of the university as a critical institution is far from new but the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries have provided many profound challenges for higher
education institutions, both in Europe and beyond, from the growth of a globalised
context and massification of their undergraduate education cohorts (Altbach, 2015)
and dealing with diversity and social inequality (Smith, 2009; Eggins, 2017; Deem,
2018), through audits of their research and teaching and league tables/rankings
(Cheng, 2009; Shore & Wright, 2015), to funding regimes (Jongbloed & Vossensteyn,
2016), the changing meaning of the ‘public good’ (Marginson, 2016), academic
capitalism (Rhoades & Slaughter, 2004), new managerialism (Deem & Hillyard
et al., 2007), student consumerism (Budd, 2016) and student employability (Rooney
& Rawlinson, 2016 ). Whether universities can survive as critical organisations in
the current time is an open question, as digitalisation challenges the monopoly of
knowledge, MOOCS question the necessity of university campuses and would-be
students in countries where higher education fees are high start to consider more
carefully whether they really want or need a degree. Universities are also affected by
contemporary concerns such as what happens to higher education in war-zones and
the impact of migration, anti-migrant ideologies, political populism, the post-truth
era and the rejection of ‘experts’. A great variety of authors have written critiques of
the changing nature of the university from Lyotard in the 1980s (Lyotard, 1984) to
Collini in the 2000s (Collini, 2012) but that is somewhat different from encouraging
criticality within universities among both students and staff and thinking about the
organisational nature of contemporary universities and whether there are alternatives
to the forms, governance and management we have now.
In the call for papers for the 2016 CHER Conference, this was our opening gambit
on the university as a critical institution:
The capacity of higher education to contribute to society, policy, economy and
cultural formation depends above all on its capacity to sustain open and critical
thought; to relentlessly scrutinise society, the natural world and the human/
nature interface using a range of different lenses; to continually develop and
explore alternative ways of thinking and social organization; and to prepare
graduates with capacities in critical thought and reconstructive practices. If
the gift of Europe to the world is that of the university centred on critical
thought and imagination, that gift can never be taken for granted. Nurturing

R. Deem & H. Eggins (Eds.), The University as a Critical Institution?, 3–14.

© 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
R. DEEM & H. EGGINS

the conditions for open critical thinking and autonomous discussion and
communication are part the permanent remit of higher education institutions. In
a more instrumental period, with rapidly growing obligations of and pressures
on higher education, the vision of the university as a critical institution needs
to be renewed—just as it has been periodically renewed throughout its history.
The chapters in this volume are a selection of those presented at the Conference
in Cambridge in September 2016. We have tried to choose a variety of papers
illustrative of the main strands from the much larger number of papers given at
the original event, some offering overviews of a number of different HE systems,
others focused on developments in a particular context and system but all in some
way related to the notion of the critical (or in some cases uncritical) university. Each
paper concerns itself either with some aspect of a broad research-informed critique
of universities, takes a critical perspective on some aspect of current practice in
higher education institutions or system or explores the potential for the future of
universities as organisations. The chapters will be of interest not only to academics
and students studying higher education themes but also to HE leaders, managers and
policy makers.
There are four papers in the first section on ‘The Contemporary University:
Governance and Organisational Futures’, the first one a theoretical and philosophical
overview of how universities might be organized in a different way to the current
neo-liberal and managerialist model, the second a detailed analysis of staff responses
to different varieties and dimensions of managerial narratives and discourses in
Portuguese universities, the third a comparison of the different recent paths of
universities in the Ukraine and Poland in respect of management and governance
and finally a comparison of academic freedom in one Italian and one Singaporean
university in very contrasting situations. The opening paper in the first section, based
on a plenary address given at the conference by Susan Wright, asks a provocative
and extremely critical question about what is happening to higher education in the
Anthropocene, an epoch in which humans largely shape the planet, in conjunction
with what Wright calls the Capitalocene (a reference to the huge extent to which
capitalism now defines what happens in the world). She enquires as to whether it is
possible to conceptualise a more liveable university than those we have today, driven
as the latter are by key features such as ‘world class universities’, entrepreneurial
universities, marketised university systems and competition states, where universities
are given a special role to support and trigger knowledge-economy competitiveness.
Wright notes how universities are now positioned alongside businesses and industries
and other organisations, conceptualized as an externalized economy. She wonders
if an alternative conception of universities as an ecology could offer some plausible
and original alternatives to the current position of higher education institutions by
disrupting existing power relations and supply chains and putting academics back
in the institutional driving seat. This, she observes, has already happened with some
powerful Danish professor ‘project barons’ who determine for themselves how they

4
 THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

run their research activities. It might also involve encouraging those who work or
study in public higher education institutions to be both critically reflexive and willing
to act politically on changing the organizational, cultural, social and political basis
of higher education. This could include protests and other what she calls ‘system
disturbances’ which question the current way in which particular universities are
organized and run. Wright mentions that the Marie Curie International Training
Network Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE) she directed, has
produced, first in Auckland, then in Copenhagen, a declaration of six principles
of the organization of public universities [Public Good, Social Responsibility,
Academic Freedom, Educational Autonomy, University Independence and Humane
Workplace] which have already been discussed at various European and international
gatherings. It is intimated that the declaration could form the basis of a new ecology
for higher education, thus providing a form of liveable university that could be along
co-operative or Trust-type lines whereby all staff and students would have a genuine
financial and organizational stake in their institution and the university could not be
sold to a private venture capitalist. This would transform the organizational basis
of universities and also offer an escape from managerialism (the dominance of
management), neo-liberalism (the rise of markets) and ‘boardism’, the emphasis on
external stakeholders having a say in how universities are run (Veiga & Magalhães
et al., 2015).
The other papers in this first section on ‘Governance and Organisational Futures’
explore through a critical lens what is happening to governance, or to related
concerns such as academic freedom, in individual countries. Magalhães, Veiga and
Videira note that New Public Management in European universities often exists
alongside other governance narratives and practices such as ‘new governance’
and ‘networked governance’. They explore, using a 2014–2015 on-line survey of
staff, including managers, administrators and academics, in all Portuguese higher
education institutions (both public and private), respondents’ views on governance
and management held in those organisations after the 2007 reforms to HE governance
in Portugal. These reforms have encouraged a shift away from academic collegiality
towards a greater emphasis on strong rectorates and deans, a private-sector type
of Human Resource Management, managerialism and ‘boardism’, which is where
outside people from business are brought in to oversee institutional governance,
with matching rhetorics (Veiga & Magalhães et al., 2015). Government narratives
about managerialism, it is suggested, may have reinforced institutional autonomy in
Portugal by drawing on and interacting with both networked governance and collegial
governance in order to invest in and fix the meanings of core concepts of governance
and management. The authors note that their respondents had experienced a range
of forms of managerialism and governance narratives, on a continuum from hard
to soft managerialism. The authors argue that the influence of managerialism does
not happen with the same intensity in different governance dimensions, such as
management hierarchies, how academic work and outputs are managed, strategic
goal setting and the relative strength of competitiveness versus collaboration. Hard

5
R. DEEM & H. EGGINS

managerialism emphasizes managerial skills and sharp hierarchies, objectives linked

to measurable outputs and performance indicators, commodification of activities
and competition within and outside the institution, whereas soft managerialism,
by contrast, puts much more emphasis on distributed leadership and interpersonal
networks, the relationship of organizational goals to organizational mission
statements, collaboration and cooperation, and uses negotiation and persuasion
and seeks to empower staff. The findings of the study showed that non-academic
staff working in higher education for less than 8 years, as well as those high up
the institutional decision-making hierarchy, were more likely to perceive a growing
influence of external stakeholders on governing bodies but regarded this as soft
managerialism. Whilst those new to academic work tended to take managerialism
for granted, staff who had worked in academe for longer periods saw the creeping
influence of hard managerialism. In the public universities and amongst teaching
staff, there was a greater perception of the influence of hard managerialism than
amongst administrators and those who worked in private universities.
Hladchenko, Antonowitch and de Boer’s chapter documents and compares
some of the recent changes in university governance in two former Communist
regimes, Poland and the Ukraine. The two systems are compared using the public
sector governance equalizer model (de Boer & Enders et al., 2006) utilizing the five
dimensions, viz state regulation, stakeholder guidance, academic self-governance,
managerial-self- governance, and competition. Whilst Poland joined the EU in 2004,
the Ukraine experienced two revolutions (2004 and 2013–2014) as well as retaining
some of the power hierarchies of the former Communist regime. After 1990, Poland
initially gave universities a high degree of freedom but in 2010 the government tried
to regain its steering role. University leaders were initially administrator-academics
and whilst rectors’ roles have changed, they and deans are still elected by and
accountable to their peers, but with their powers limited by central regulations. Since
2005 the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools has had a legal monopoly in
representing HE institutions at the national policy level. Competition has developed
for students between public and private institutions, and also for research funding.
The influence of the EU and the Bologna process on Poland’s HE system is very
evident. In the Ukraine, the inherited division between teaching-oriented higher
education institutions and research-only institutions has remained in place. State
regulation of higher education is still strong but weakened through the development
of a private higher education sector after 1991. Public universities now also charge
fees. A National Agency of Quality Assurance of Higher Education (established in
2015) was rocked by a series of scandals about allegations of plagiarism by candidates
seeking election to it, which did not aid its legitimacy amongst universities. Steps
have been taken to extend financial autonomy to public universities, though student
fees can only be used for academic salaries or improving teaching not for research
purposes. There is little emphasis on competitive research funding. The lack of a
common HE framework in the Ukraine and the absence of broader international
practice is very evident. The authors conclude that both countries have come

6
 THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

somewhat closer to New Public Management with less state regulation, more
stakeholder guidance, more managerial self-governance and increased competition
for students and/or for research funding but both systems, it is claimed, still remain
less embedded in NPM than is the case for management and governance regimes in
most European countries, with state regulation still substantial, as well as limited
stakeholder guidance and academic self-governance (the latter particularly so in
Poland). Also in both systems, academics who are openly critical of their higher
education system still appear to make themselves vulnerable to attack or dismissal.
Finally in this section, Westa examines the contested and complex phenomenon
of academic freedom, which has close links to criticality and institutional autonomy
and which is a hot topic in many countries now like China and Turkey, where
politicians have attempted to significantly limit academic freedom of speech and
political activity. The author develops her arguments in the context of two very
different higher education systems, Italy and Singapore. In Italy, academic freedom
is a constitutional right. But there have been some recent reforms to Italian higher
education in 2010 (the Gelmini Reforms) which on the one hand have given universities
more autonomy in financial and material ways but on the other hand have restricted
how many faculties are allowed and how many particular types of appointments
may be made and for how long. Italian universities are also increasingly dependent
on external evaluation of both teaching and research, which can hinder academic
freedom in relation to research topics and even teaching. Academic freedom is not a
constitutional right in Singapore (even though a general freedom of speech exists for
citizens of the country, in practice this is restricted when security concerns arise) and
regulations and laws relating to academics make no mention of the term. Westa notes
a history of informal bans about academics mentioning certain topics connected to
religion, local corruption, governmental policies and politics etc in their teaching.
The research focusses on two institutions, the university of Bologna (formed in
1088) and the National University of Singapore, formed as a medical school in 1908
in Malaysia and becoming a full university in 1962 on Singapore’s independence.
As part of her research, Westa conducted a series of interviews with academics in
both universities in relation to academic freedom. She found some similarities of
views in both countries, with both sets of respondents seeing connections between
academic freedom and responsibility for students and society and in addition many
observing that not all academics took the latter seriously. Interviewees from both
countries mentioned the stress connected with the requirement to publish their
research outputs (which could be interpreted as limiting freedom to publish when
they wished and on a topic of their own choice) but even in Singapore there seemed
some signs that academic freedom in other respects was opening up.
In Section 2 on ‘Widening Participation, Curricular Innovation and Research
Policy’, there are three papers which focus on critiquing the practice of elite UK
universities dealing with widening participation, the growth of student centred
liberal arts degree programmes in private universities in Germany and how two
Portuguese polytechnics are responding to current government policy on research

7
R. DEEM & H. EGGINS

activity by academics. The first chapter by Boliver, Gorard and Siddiqui critiques,
underpinned by a considerable amount of quantitative evidence, some of the
limitations of English universities’ responses to the current government policy
requirement to widen participation to universities by students from disadvantaged
households and/or first generation university applicants. Like Wright’s opening
piece in Section 1, this paper is based on a plenary address originally given in
Cambridge by Boliver. The authors examine what universities in England have done
to date to encourage non-traditional and disadvantaged household students to apply
to universities, particularly to what have become known as ‘selective’ universities
which have many more applicants than places (mostly but not exclusively members
of the elite Russell mission Group), as contrasted with ‘recruiting’ universities that
have more places than applicants. Efforts to date have largely consisted of two main
strategies. One is trying to improve the pre-application attainments of would-be
applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, by devices such as summer schools,
workshops, and even universities taking over the running of secondary schools in
less well-off areas. The second strategy has been to endeavor to raise the aspirations
of potential applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, though the authors suggest
that the aspirations of those who want to attend university may already be quite high.
Experiments using contextualized admissions data which give information about the
number of pupils going to university and socio-economic data about the typical pupil
background have led some research- intensive universities to lower the entry grades
for students from under resourced schools in areas of economic deprivation but in
the case of Bristol University, which did this in the mid-2000s, it led to a backlash
from angry private-school head-teachers. The authors suggest that considerably
lower grade offers could be made to students from disadvantaged schools and areas
but with the proviso that even this is not enough, as universities also have to give
greater support, including changing their pedagogies, to such students when they
are actually studying at university. It is perhaps the latter which elite universities
may resist the most. But as the authors note, accepting students from disadvantaged
backgrounds with lower grades is not in itself enough to ensure that those students
succeed in their degree studies. Perhaps the message here is that elite institutions are
insufficiently self-critical of their own attempts to widen participation and unwilling
to change traditional pedagogic modes aimed at elite students. There would also be
a cost factor to the university to provide the necessary support.
Kontowski and Kretz offer a very different focus on critical higher education
institutions, examining a form of student-centred or progressive higher education
in the shape of the liberal arts degree, which offers students considerable latitude
and scope compared to many conventional and constrained bachelors degree
programmes in much of mainland Europe (unlike the US where liberal arts
universities are well established but perhaps on the basis of a somewhat different
model). The authors chose to explore how a small number of private fee-paying
higher education institutions in Germany have experimented with liberalizing the
curriculum at first degree level, thus allowing students a greater choice of both what

8
 THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

and how they study. Following such a path in a country with free comprehensive
university programmes (but mostly mono-disciplinary) easily available almost
everywhere is not straightforward and as the authors show, each of the three
universities they investigated experienced crises of various kinds, particularly
financial crises (since there is no tax relief regime for philanthropy in Germany
comparable to that found in the USA for example) but also challenges to leadership
as well as to the stability and continuity of the institutions concerned. The three
institutions tend to emphasise teaching rather than research, though one of the case
study institutions did attract some strong researchers. The authors point out that the
advantages of these institutions lies in their small size and flexibility, factors that
lend themselves to educational experimentation and offer an alternative to the now
increasingly dominant neo-liberal institutions in which most European students find
themselves studying. There is also an emphasis on non-vocational degrees. Highly
structured programmes, the authors contend, merely reinforce existing inequalities
and do not challenge social injustice in the same way as less structured degrees
(Nussbaum, 1998). The preceding Boliver/Gorard/Siddiqui paper showed how elite
universities in England tend to reproduce rather than challenge social inequalities.
The full integration of egalitarian academic learning with no strong student/
teacher demarcation on campus-based communities can encourage student self-
organization and help democratize university bureaucracies, though the importance
of charismatic leaders in the case-study universities somewhat challenges this
idea. However, even where financial help is made available at private liberal arts
universities in Germany for students from lower income households (not easy given
that all three institutions experienced financial difficulties including having to shed
staff), it is difficult to see how this could become a mass model for higher education.
But there is clearly much here for more conventional institutions to learn from and
indeed liberal arts degrees are also now beginning to appear in public institutions
outside North America.
Finally in section 2, Hasanefendic, Patricio and de Bakker examine how two
different Portuguese polytechnics have responded to twenty-first century government
policies in Portugal which require polytechnics to pursue applied rather than pure
or ‘blue skies’ research, as well as teaching vocational education programmes or
those that attend to the needs of society. Both attempt to differentiate their ethos
significantly from that of the public universities. The authors argue that much
research on universities and other higher education institutions tends to emphasise
the cumulative effects of external policy drivers on organizational cultures and
practices both within and across different countries, assuming that this induces a
sense of similarity rather than difference in organizational responses and cultures.
Furthermore, some interpretations of institutional theory, it is suggested, have
focused our attention on how isomorphic many universities in different parts of
the world have become (though often while theories do suggest this, the empirical
evidence for identifying isomorphism is thin). By contrast, in this chapter the authors
concentrate on how the two institutions studied have responded very differently

9
R. DEEM & H. EGGINS

to a uniform policy aimed at all polytechnics in a single higher education system,

with actors using policy ambiguities, staff biographies and different institutional
ambitions to move in different directions in the two institutions. The paper draws
on views and responses from a wide range of actors including teaching staff, Deans,
Programme Directors and the Presidents of the two polytechnics chosen for the
study (we are not told whether the two institutions were selected because they were
known to be different or whether that was accidental). The fieldwork included
participant observation, interviews, documentary analysis and information drawn
from websites. As the authors point out, many academic staff in both institutions
themselves studied in Portuguese universities, not polytechnics and a good number
of them can see no reason why their teaching and research should be any different
from the place where they studied. Furthermore, some academics pointed out that
they are required to publish research outputs at the same time as being told to
collaborate with industry which does not often permit publicly available outputs
as a research outcome. Additionally, nationally accredited Masters Programmes
via the Portuguese higher education quality agency A3ES require academic staff to
have a doctoral degree and research outputs. One institution wanted to be just like
a university and so followed a course of action leading in this direction (a Wannabe
approach), whereas the other aimed for a hybrid status mid-way between a university
and a polytechnic (the Hybridizer approach), partly due to geographical location and
a desire to serve the local community and its industry, whilst continuing to publish
conventional scientific outputs. Both polytechnics emerge as critical institutions
that are carefully considering their possible future path-dependency and exploiting
policy inconsistencies to their own benefit.
In Section 3, on ‘Higher Education Policies and Practices on Teaching Quality
and Excellence and the Student Experience’, there are four papers which cover
quality assessment issues, different aspects of the student experience and how best
to nurture and develop teaching excellence. Manatos, Rosa and Sarrico’s chapter
examines the effects on institutions and the views of internal stakeholders, including
students and both academic and administrative staff in Portuguese universities after
Portugal set up a new Higher Education Quality Agency, A3ES, in 2007. A3ES is
a private foundation that validates teaching programmes in universities and audits
institutional quality systems. Existing literature shows that university staff in general
but particularly academics tend to distinguish between the development of quality
assurance systems and actual improvements in quality, focusing more on their
concerns and views about the processes put in place rather than considering how
these are related to changes to the quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
The literature also shows that academics are less favourably disposed towards
quality assurance than are administrators and other staff who are not directly
engaged in teaching. Academics have also been reported as regarding the idea of
quality assurance as contradictory to academic cultures and values. The research
study involved case studies of three different universities that were the first higher
educational institutions in Portugal to establish internal quality management systems.

10
 THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with different stakeholder groups –

students, academics and administrators in three academic fields: Engineering,
Language and Literature, and Education, including both those closely involved with
quality assurance and those less involved. Those staff closely involved with quality
assurance tended to have more positive views about the processes and their links to
improving quality, whilst those academics less involved were often the most resistant
and some saw QA mechanisms as being more about controlling academic staff than
the quality of teaching, learning and assessment. Staff resisters claimed they could
detect no positive effects of QA procedures. Some student respondents were also
very critical and did not understand the purpose of surveys linked to QA, as well as
being somewhat cynical that universities would act upon the results of these surveys.
A number of students also said not everyone could be bothered filling in these forms.
The researchers suggest more staff development needs to be done and more work
with students too, explaining why quality assurance is necessary and what it tries
to achieve, thus ensuring that a higher proportion of academics are engaged in QA
processes and so that students come to see themselves as critical but vital partners in
the QA processes rather than sceptical and passive bystanders.
Horntvedt and Carm’s work relates to both student experience and
internationalization and particularly to what degree of intercultural competence and
related criticality is acquired as a result of students going on international exchanges.
The research they conducted was based in Norway in a single higher education
institution that has a tradition of sending bachelors degree students to other countries
in the global south as part of their programme. Most undertook a project whilst
abroad. The researchers compared the views and attitudes of young students on full-
time professional training programmes such as healthcare, social work and teaching
with adults studying part-time to be teachers based on their previous occupations
in which they all held vocational diplomas. International exchanges are in theory
intended to give students experience of living and studying in another country
and to develop their understanding of a different and unfamiliar culture, as well as
learning to relate to people whose way of life is different from theirs, although some
researchers question whether just going abroad is sufficient, as some exchangers
may remain isolated from people in the country concerned and just stay with people
from their own culture (de Wit, 2013). As part of the study, the researchers analysed
dissertations and projects written as part of the exchange process to see how they
discussed intercultural competence and also interviewed a sample of students
from both groups before, during and after the exchange visits. The findings were
perhaps somewhat surprising in that, of the responses to the exchanges, two groups
exhibited either direct racism or zenophobia (dislike of people from other countries).
A third group wanted to be assimilated in the new culture as quickly as possible and
a fourth group did show real signs of both appreciating and trying to understand
the new culture and relating it to their own culture and were beginning to develop
intercultural competence. The only other difference was that the part-time adult
students presented themselves abroad in relation to their previous occupation, not

11
R. DEEM & H. EGGINS

the one they were training for, whereas younger students wanted to connect their
current training to the context they were in on exchange.
Anzivino and Rostan’s paper also focuses on an aspect of the university student
experience, this time using a study based in a research-intensive university in
Italy, but in this case the lens is on another aspect of extra-curricular activity, not
exchange visits as in Horntvedt and Carm’s chapter but other outside-class events
and activities which involve interaction with other students and university staff. The
authors are not just interested in the activity per se but in the extent to which such
non-curriculum activities affect the study career of individuals during their degree
programme (do they finish on time or delay their studies?) and the level of academic
achievement attained. The paper is an example of the critical university at work,
as one of the authors is also a University Vice Rector for Student Affairs: using his
management work to shape research is a strategy that he has consciously adopted
(Deem, 2016). Previous research shows some positive effects arising from out of
class activity but much of the context is in Anglo-Saxon countries and there is some
uncertainty as to the effects on things like degree study regularity and attainment
level. A large sample of undergraduate and postgraduate students at Pavia University
were surveyed during the 2014–2015 academic year on their outside class activities
and the responses linked to a range of information about their academic attainment
and study lifecycle as well as to their individual characteristics as derived from the
survey and institutional data. 2,186 students returned the survey, a response rate
of 32.3%. Pavia has a system of halls of residence which also act as college-like
organisations for those who obtain good grades but a high percentage of those not
living in halls commute to the university from outside the city. The survey found
some positive results connected to study regularity including studying together with
peers, intense involvement in leisure activities and interaction with academic staff.
Interaction with staff outside of formal classes is also linked to getting good grades,
though interaction with other students outside of class isn’t. So far as individual
characteristics are concerned, being under 25, having a lot of family cultural capital,
studying certain subjects, attending a second cycle course, passing from first to
second year and staying in Pavia during term all favour studying with peers, taking
part in leisure activities and interaction with Faculty members, though over 25s
have the highest levels of interaction with Faculty. Some policy implications are
suggested at the end of the paper. The chapter is a good example of how in a senior
management role it is possible to take a critical lens to what is happening on your
own doorstep.
Finally in this section, Kottman’s chapter explores the idea of Centres of
Excellence and their role in improving teaching in higher education institutions.
This is a different kind of being critical, because it relates to the capacity of teachers
in higher education to become involved in reflection upon and development of their
own teaching, which as previous research on leading teaching demonstrates, is a
complex task (Gibbs & Knapper et al., 2009). In the chapter, Kottman describes a
study which compares a central Teaching unit based in a comprehensive German

12
 THE UNIVERSITY AS A CRITICAL INSTITUTION?

university and largely paid for by institutional funding but having one externally
funded project, with what is effectively a teachers network funded by a national
initiative and based in a very small specialist music college in Norway. The intention
of the study was to examine the effects of both Centres on teachers’ engagement
with pedagogic and curricular practice, as well as to explore the micro-cultures
surrounding teaching in each institution. It is probably no surprise that it was the
teachers’ network with its own staffing and project money, which seemed to have
the greatest chance of making HE teachers develop a critical approach to their own
teaching, because it was a collaborative entity, not a remote unit but also something
localized and contextualized. In that setting, teachers can feel confident to share
things, a finding replicated by researchers looking at different kinds of collaborative
micro teaching cultures (Mårtensson & Roxå, 2016). The large central unit in the
German university is largely disregarded by the majority of experienced teachers
in the institution because it is not linked to any particular disciplinary schools or
faculties, and does not seek out academics to invite them to take an active part (there
are no incentives to do project work). Though it is run by those who are also teachers,
perhaps teaching other teachers is not always seen as equivalent to teaching students.
During interviews it became clear that in the German university there was little
sharing of teaching practice: learning more about teaching for more experienced
staff was a question of trial and error and there was little interest in or knowledge
of the institution’s learning and teaching strategy. In the small Norwegian teachers’
network, in contrast, there were incentives to do projects, there was no real staff
hierarchy, and the micro-culture was supportive of thinking about teaching (in effect
becoming self-critical).
We hope that the volume will have something to help all our readers reflect on
the 21st century concept of the university as a critical institution. If universities stop
being a space where different views may be aired and if they are no longer able
to encourage their staff and students to think and act critically, then the era of the
university would truly be over.

REFERENCES
Altbach, P. (2015). Globalization and forces for change in higher education. International Higher
Education, 50.
Budd, R. (2017). Undergraduate orientations towards higher education in Germany and England:
Problematizing the notion of ‘student as customer’. Studies in Higher Education, 73(1), 23–37.
Cheng, M. (2009). Changing academics: Quality audit and its perceived impact. Saarbrücken, Germany:
VDM Verlag.
Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? London: Penguin.
de Boer, H. F., Enders, J., & Schimank, U. (2006). On the way towards new public management? The
governance of university systems in England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. In D. Jansen
(Ed.), New forms of governance in research organizations – Disciplinary approaches, interfaces and
integration (pp. 137–154). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.
de Wit, H. (2013). Internationalisation of higher education, an introduction on the why, how and the what.
In H. de Wit (Ed.), An introduction to higher education internationalisation. Milan: Vita e pensiero.

13
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Deem, R. (2016). Higher education researchers as managers and leaders in universities: Contributing
through co-production of academic knowledge? (Unpublished paper). European Conference of
Educational Researchers. Dublin: University College.
Deem, R. (2018). The gender politics of higher education. In B. Cantwell, H. Coates, & R. King (Eds.),
Handbook on the politics of higher education. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Deem, R., Hillyard, S., & Reed, M. (2007). Knowledge, Higher Education and the new managerialism:
The changing management of UK Universities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eggins, H. (Ed.). (2010). Access and equity: Comparative perspectives. Rotterdam, the Netherlands:
Sense Publishers.
Eggins, H. (Ed.). (2017). The changing role of women in higher education. Dordrecht, the Netherlands:
Springer.
Gibbs, G., et al. (2009). Departmental leadership of teaching in research-intensive environments. London:
Leadership Foundation for HE (UK).
Jongbloed, B., & Vossensteyn, H. (2016). University funding and student funding: International
comparisons. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 32(4), 576–595.
Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Marginson, S. (2016). Public/private in higher education: A synthesis of economic and political
approaches. Studies in Higher Education, 1–16
Mårtensson, K., & Roxå, T. (2016). Working with networks, micro cultures and communities: The
staff and educational development series. In D. Baume & C. Popovic (Eds.), Advancing practice in
academic development (pp. 174–187). London: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1998). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rhoades, G., & Slaughter, S. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Rooney, S., & Rawlinson, M. (2016). Narrowing participation? Contesting the dominant discourse
of employability in contemporary higher education. Journal of the National Institute for Career
Education and Counselling, 1(36), 20–29.
Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Audit culture revisited: Rankings, ratings, and the reassembling of society.
Current Anthropology, 56(3), 421–444.
Smith, D. G. (2009). Diversity’s promise for higher education: Making it work (2nd Edition). Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Veiga, A., Magalhães, A., Amaral, A. (2015). The palgrave international handbook of higher education
policy and governance. In J. Huisman, H. de Boer, D. Dill, & M. Souto-Otero (Eds.), From collegial
governance to boardism: Reconfiguring governance in higher education (pp. 398–416). London:
Palgrave Macmillan.

Rosemary Deem
Royal Holloway University of London

Heather Eggins
Lucy Cavendish College Cambridge
Staffordshire University and CHEER
Sussex University

14
 PART 1
THE CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITY: GOVERNANCE
AND ORGANISATIONAL FUTURES
 SUSAN WRIGHT

2. CAN THE UNIVERSITY BE A LIVEABLE

INSTITUTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE?

WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE

On Monday 29 August 2016, the International Geological Congress meeting in

Capetown, declared the start of a new geological epoch. The Holocene (defined by
glaciers) was over. Its successor, the Anthropocene, is an epoch in which humans
are the greatest shapers of the planet. They dated the start of the Anthropocene to
1950. That was when nuclear tests meant radioactive sediments, radionuclides,
formed a new stratum on the earth’s surface. The great acceleration in mid-20th
century capitalism changed the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and saw
the increased discarding of metals, concrete and plastic (AWG, 2016). Indeed a rival
name for the era was the Plasticene, because another geological change in the world
is the 288 million tons of plastic produced each year, much of which finds its way
into the ocean so that by 2050 plastic will outweigh the fish in the seas (Oceans at
MIT, 2014; WEF, 2016, p. 14). One quip was that dating in this era would not be
by tree rings but by multinationals’ product design manuals. The transition to each
new geological epoch also has to be marked by a new fossil record – in this case,
chicken bones. Chickens have become the world’s most common bird – 60 billion
were killed in 2015 – and their bones go into landfills. Between 1945 and 1950 in
the U.S, a quick-fattening chicken with bigger bones of a distinctive shape called
Arbor Acres was developed and it now dominates the world’s genetic stock – half
of all other chicken breeds have disappeared (Carrington, 2016). They spread so fast
because of the development of factory farming and the liberalisation of trade.
Curiously, the literature most often represents the emergence of the Anthropocene
as a switch in the binary relationship between ‘humans’ and ‘nature’: nature used
to be a passive or supportive backdrop to human action; now human action is
ruining nature and endangering the planet. This treats ‘humans’ as an essentialised
species, as if they are all equally implicated, whereas there is a global landscape of
inequality in which some people and some countries gain benefits by pursuing these
changes and the peripheralised and dispossessed feel the negative effects. As Moore
(2016) puts it, the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species, but of a system,
capitalism. Indeed the above outline of the World Geological Congress’ markers
for the new epoch concerns the impacts of the post-Second World War military-
industrial complex and the vast expansion of resource extraction and waste, factory
farming and global trade. As Moore argues, the epoch really should be called the

R. Deem & H. Eggins (Eds.), The University as a Critical Institution?, 17–37.

© 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
S. WRIGHT

Capitalocene. Such a focus on capitalism moves the argument away from how
to patch up the damage humans cause to nature with technocratic fixes. Instead,
a system approach turns attention to the social, political and economic processes
involved, the institutions that people build and the political economy they form.
Even though universities are not the most important institution in the Capitalocene,
they are nonetheless implicated in its formation. Since the 1950s, especially in the
U.S., they have been bound up with the military-industrial complex and since the
1990s politicians have turned to universities to ‘drive’ what they call the ‘global
knowledge economy’. Universities have been reformed to make them focus more
narrowly on producing what Slaughter and Rhoades (2004, p. 17) call the two crucial
raw materials for this economy – knowledge and high-skilled labour – and to do so
at a time when the negative consequences of such a constricted economic focus
are finally being identified, named, measured and analysed in the Anthropocene/
Capitalocene. This chapter explores the consequences of universities’ becoming
entangled with such a predatory system and, using Polanyi’s (2001 [1944])
distinction between a ‘formal economy’ and a ‘substantive economy’ or ‘ecology’,
asks instead how they can be re-embedded in a wider range of interlaced social,
political and economic relations and responsibilities. The situation of academics
within this political economy behoves us to question, how can we educate ourselves
and our students to be critically reflexive about the ‘scene’ universities are in? In
universities that have been reformed into alignment with the processes generating
the Anthro/Capitalocene, how can we use our critical skills to find space to act, so as
to develop universities as responsible institutions producing knowledge and citizens
with a sense of care for the future not just of humanity but of the globe itself?

UNIVERSITY REFORMS

Since the 1990s, university reforms have been so widespread around the world that
they resemble what Morton (2013) calls a Hyperobject. That is, something that is
so massively distributed throughout the globe and takes so many different detailed
forms, that it is hard to grasp how all its manifestations somehow contribute to a
general trend and achieve similar effects. Morton develops this concept in relation
to species extinction but it also seems applicable to university reforms and their
contribution to what Sassen (2014) calls the ‘expulsions’ of capitalism. She argues
that capitalist systems have developed much narrower interests and sharper edges,
beyond which surplus people and unprofitable things are not just ‘externalised’ and
marginalised but expelled and made invisible. How, through a range of different
reforms, have universities gradually shífted from a responsibility for being the
‘critic and conscience of society’ (as framed in New Zealand’s legislation) to
becoming increasingly implicated in the expulsions of the Capitalocene? The range
of ways that universities have been reformed can be illustrated by describing four
main approaches: to create ‘world class’ universities; entrepreneurial universities;
universities that are part of a market state; and universities that are drivers of a

18
 CAN THE UNIVERSITY BE A LIVEABLE INSTITUTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE?

competition state. The World Bank promoted the first policy, the idea that countries
should compete in a so-called global knowledge economy by trying to ensure they
had one or more ‘World Class Universities’ (Salmi, 2009). To achieve this, they
should ‘pick winners’, focus their resources on those universities and engage in
‘internationalisation’. The World Bank offered a smorgasbord of methods to achieve
this: by distributing public funding on a competitive basis, privatisation of provision,
or ‘cost sharing’ (i.e, charging students’ fees). Even countries with state socialism,
like Vietnam, found that when they implemented one of these methods, it quickly
entailed the others, including pursuing the World Bank’s agenda of bringing private
and capitalist interests into the state sector (Dang, 2009). In Chile, where Milton
Friedman’s Chicago Boys created arguably the most privatised education sector in
the world with the highest student fees, sustained street protests over many years
have led to a change of government and a request to the World Bank to advise them
on how to reverse that process (Bekhradnia, 2015). There is not yet a word for how
to ‘re-public-ise’ the sector and move out of neoliberal governance, privatisation and
the market state.
A second reform route, to create what they call an entrepreneurial university,
has been taken by Australia and New Zealand. This means that income generation
pervades every aspect of the university. A consultancy report for Australian
Universities recommends they should develop new business models for universities,
‘streamlining’ different income streams (EY, 2012). A report (Barber et al., 2013)
staffed and funded by the education publisher and private provider, Pearson, used an
older term (first used in Thorne, 1999). They proposed ‘unbundling’ the activities
whose interlacing (and cross-subsidising) has up to now been the distinctive feature
of a university. Each activity should be treated as a separate, income-generating
stream, and organised in such a way as to maximise its own added value. Those
that do not make a profit should be closed. Auckland University is perhaps New
Zealand’s most exemplary ‘enterprise university’. In this case, income generation
and the realisation of intellectual property assets are the most important criteria when
setting research priorities. The appointment of staff is based on the enterprise unit’s
assessment of how much income their research will bring in (rather than academics’
assessment of its intellectual quality or the person’s contribution to teaching). The
conditions of employment have also been changed to reward ‘enterprise’, with
everyone responsible for leadership of the university in that direction (Amsler &
Shore, 2015).
The third reform policy is best exemplified in England, where successive
governments have attempted to turn the university sector into a competitive market
for higher education. From the 1980s, reforms have had four main features: university
activities were valued in purely economic terms; systems of top-down decision
making were introduced, so that, mimicking a corporation, universities could
respond to changes in the market; the sector was fragmented according to institutions’
‘distinctive missions’ so they could compete in different markets; and students were
reinscribed as consumers and universities were reframed in terms of the discourses,

19
S. WRIGHT

and to some extent the practices, of commercial enterprises (Wright, 2004). Much of
the push for marketization has centred on student fees. In the 1960s, the state paid the
fees of each qualified student and provided a means-tested maintenance grant. But
from 1976 to 1997, government funding per student was reduced by 40% (Dearing,
1997, p. 267, para 17.16), resulting in a £2 billion annual shortfall in funding for
teaching. The Dearing Report argued student numbers should increase to 45% of the
18–19 year cohort to meet the needs of the knowledge economy and graduates should
repay 25% of their tuition costs as their personal benefits from higher education were
greater than those of industry or society. Instead of following Dearing’s plan, the new
Labour government first introduced an up-front annual fee for all students of £1125
and then the 2004 Higher Education Bill turned the sector into a market by allowing
universities to charge a variable fee based on how they ranked each course in the
market. As McGettigan (2013) showed, taxpayers now paid for education twice, first
in taxes and then in fees. And the government only squeezed the legislation through
Parliament by ‘capping’ the fees at £3000 for three years. All universities charged
the top fee for all courses because of the funding shortage, but the legislation for a
higher education market had been put in place. Following another national review
(The Browne Report, 2010) the Coalition Government in 2010 raised the cap on
annual fees to £9,000, ended government funding of teaching through the block grant
(except for STEM subjects), and replaced nearly all student grants with tax-funded
student loans. Their argument was that this created a ‘level playing field’ between
public universities and for-profit providers. The result was a spawning of companies
offering higher education whose students were eligible for student loans to pay £6000
tuition fees and maintenance costs. Quality checks were not in place to see if the
students attended, if the courses were actually taught, and to calculate the completion
and drop-out rates. Vast profits were made. For example, St Patrick’s International
College was too small to register for public-backed loans for students in 2011–2012
but grew within a year to receive £11 million in public-backed funding in 2012–2013
from its 4,000 students. This so-called marketization has generated a system of risk
free, state-funded capitalism (Wright, 2008, 2016).
In the fourth policy approach, in Denmark, the elements of the argument for
reform were assembled in quite a different way to Chile, Australasia or England.
A law in 2003 brought universities under wider public sector reforms to create a
‘competition state’ in which universities were given a special responsibility to drive
Denmark’s competitiveness in the Global Knowledge Economy and thence sustain
its position as ‘one of the richest countries in the world’ (Danish Government, 2006).
Rather than being directly marketised, privatised or expected to be enterprising
themselves, public universities received vastly increased government funding in
order for them to produce a faster throughput of qualified knowledge workers
and research that could be turned into innovations by industry. The minister’s
catchphrase for the reform was ‘from idea to invoice’, and the purpose of increasing
public investment was to yield knowledge and high-skilled labour that could be
harvested effectively by private-sector knowledge industries. The 2003 law gave

20
 CAN THE UNIVERSITY BE A LIVEABLE INSTITUTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE?

universities the status of legal persons, which made them responsible for their own
solvency, and meant they could enter into contracts with government and other
private and public organisations. The government made them into ‘free agents’, no
longer protected by the state against economic and political interests but responsible
for exercising their own agency. Indeed, they were now legally obliged to exchange
knowledge with ‘surrounding society’ whilst protecting their own research freedom
and ethics. The law also changed the management of universities, establishing
strategic leaders of clearly bounded organisations and units, who had the freedom
to manage and to deliver on contracts. Perversely, the government could now steer
these ‘free agents’ much more tightly by setting political aims for the sector, which
were translated into performance indicators in ‘development contracts’ with the
strategic leaders, and by tight control of universities’ liquidity.
These four examples of university reform illustrate how widespread they have
been and also how they differ in terms of how the components have been put together
and which aspect of the assemblage has been emphasised and made into the key
concept and argument for reform. But if spread and variety are characteristic of a
‘hyperobject’, another feature of Morton’s concept is that the reforms all somehow
contribute to general trend and achieve similar effects. Taking this insight, the reforms
seem to share two main features that are changing the place of universities in the world
and implicate them in wider systemic relationships that were introduced above as the
Anthropocene or Capitalocene. First, universities are conceptualised as a new kind of
subject in a new context; and, second, this context is treated as an ‘economy’ in which
universities are allocated an instrumental role in the production of knowledge and
human capital deemed necessary for successful global competitiveness.

NEW CONTEXT OR FIELD OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The first shared feature of this torrent of reforms is that universities are no longer
thought to be in a ring-fenced ‘sector’ supposedly protected from the dominance of
economic and political interests and charged with providing education, research,
and public service to the citizenry: they are now a site for value extraction in the
Capitalocene. Since the Second World War, especially in the U.S., universities have
been deeply engaged with capitalist agriculture and research and development for
pharmaceuticals and defence, but now they are positioned amidst a complex array
of industries and organisations that connects them to and makes them effective and
intelligible within the ‘global knowledge economy’. They range from publishers with
new business models, to specialists in bibliometrics and data harvesting, organisations
producing the university rankings that students use to select their university and other
universities and industrial firms use to choose collaboration partners, and also credit
ranking agencies whose grades affect the cost of bank loans or finance capital for
developing the new buildings and campus services needed to attract ‘world class’
researchers and students. Whereas universities were meant to service a market, they
have in many cases become markets themselves (Robertson & Komljenovic, 2016;

21
S. WRIGHT

Hartmann, 2008). Companies are specialising in selling software to standardise

and manage university administration, staff performance, ‘learning platforms’ and
interfaces with students. Where university functions have been unbundled, a plethora
of companies take over not only security, cleaning and catering, but admissions, course
delivery, exam marking etc. Some universities have turned all their administration
into a service delivery company that then bids to take over the administration of
other universities. Internationalisation has spawned new for-profit student recruiters
and ‘pathway providers’ who oil the international trade in fee-paying students, some
offering pre-degree or first year courses, often on university campuses. Burgeoning
for-profit providers of higher education are establishing colleges throughout the
world using a range of business models, often linked to on-line courses, especially
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in which companies developing computing
hardware and software, information technology and social media have a major
interest. Meanwhile consultancies and audit companies, such as McKinsey, Deloitte
and PricewaterhouseCoopers, advise university leaders on how to manage their
university’s relations with these surrounding interests and ever-changing government
policies. They also provide governments and increasingly influential international
agencies, such as OECD, World Bank and EU, with ideas for future reforms.
In short, the first common feature of the reform hyperobject is that universities are
now located in this vastly expanded field of higher education, surrounded by myriad
interests all entitled to make demands on research and education. The university has
to become a new kind of subject, responsible for negotiating its relations with these
diverse economic, political and social interests in ‘surrounding society’, and is made
responsible for determining its boundaries and maintaining its own values, research
freedom and ethics.

THE FIELD OF HIGHER EDUCATION TREATED AS AN ECONOMY

The second common feature of the reform hyperobject that ties the university into
the Capitalocene is the way this field of higher education is conceptualised as an
economy. This has implications for how universities and their leaders, academics
and students can act within this field and the space for manoeuvre they might find.
An example of this economy discourse is found in the UK government’s white paper,
Success as a Knowledge Economy (BIS, 2016). The paper starts with a brief mention
of the university’s role in fostering democracy, culture, criticality and social change,
but this discourse is quickly dropped in favour of a dominant focus on ‘driving
economic growth’. In the white paper emanating from the ministry for business,
claims that the ‘need for knowledge’ is to drive competitiveness and innovation, and
the purpose of ‘excellent teaching’ is to support students’ future productivity. The
white paper depicts universities in the language of a formal economy. Education and
students are turned into commodities, described in terms of markets, competition,
price, instrumental outcomes and pursuit of individual interests. It is as if all the
university’s relations with stakeholders were dislocated from academic and ethical

22
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