This is the third in a series of blogs that reflect on the educational and organisational challenges facing universities as they navigate intersecting existential, epistemic crossroads. I have called the series ‘The Mirror University’ for several reasons. The Mirror Universe is an alternate reality from the cultural phenomena that is Star Trek, in which people who exist in the prime universe have ‘evil’ alternates in the mirror universe. These alternates maintain the structures, relationships, roles and even identities of the ‘prime’ characters but exhibit traits, morals and behaviours that are the anthesis of the higher moral ground taken by our heroes. The mirror university maintains the structures, organisation, practices, and mythologies of what we understand to be a higher education institution but behaves in ways that are the antithesis of the ways of being they aspire to.
The mirror university is a construct.
It doesn’t represent any single institution.
It is not an allegory for the overarching influence of ‘management’.
The aspirational contradictions create a sense of emotional and idealistic liminality for those whose personal, intellectual, or professional identity is deeply rooted in the altruistic conceptions of university as a site of transformational social good for the community, our students, and the academy itself.
There is a comprehensive, deeply debated and often highly inflammatory corpus of literature on the neo-liberalisation of the university sector. It is a not new framing of how universities are being reshaped and redefined in a highly competitive, marketised and global education sector. Many of the studies are interrogated through the lens of organisational structure, governance and leadership (see Peters, 2013 and Ross and Savage, 2021 for example), risk appetite and subsequent reliance on audit and compliance (see Morrish, 2019), the efficacy and ethics of deeper integrations with industry, especially the top end of town (see Smyth, 2018 which is an interesting philosophical interpretation of this as the toxic university) and the ongoing dangers of funding gaps, reliance on international student income and the underfunding of research activity (see Parker et al, 2021 and Guthrie and Lucas, 2022).
The neo-liberalisation of all aspects of higher education has created intersecting crises of identity made manifest and organisationally visible in strategic plans, recruitment, governance, and relationship building ecosystems (Zajda, 2018). The kinetic force of these ecosystems, generated by the perceived or real necessity for corporate good (as a function of or despite social good) has fractured and reoriented the agency universities and their staff and students have over the research and teaching functions towards market-driven actions and language (see Giroux, 2002 and Croucher and Lacy, 2022). However reduced the government funding envelope (especially in Australia and the UK where universities have been historically majority public funded), legislative and politically populist measures of activity and success in universities have pivoted towards outcomes-based metrics such as graduate employability and research assessment exercises to measure performance and success (Martin-Sardesai & Guthrie, 2021 Wilson et al., 2017) and the attainment of high rankings on comparative institutional indices (Mari?i? et al., 2016). Field (2012) argues that the changes in government policy globally have moved higher education away from its goals of individual development and sustainable societal benefit towards being a means for asserting a countries economic, innovation and growth bona fides. This is further complicated by student recruitment, rankings and market positioning challenges.
I have coined the term intellectual ecology to represent the intersecting, dependent and rhizomatic academic life of the university as expressed through research, teaching, and engagement. An intellectual ecology defines how these functions interact with the environment around them (which are the concentric circles of habitus within a Humboldtian institutional architecture (department, faculty, discipline, program, and community). In a neoliberal institution the intellectual ecology can act as a counterforce to the organisational ecology which repositions these concentric habitus in the frame of marketised language, financially informed decision making, government policy engagement (or compliance) and amplified cost/benefit analysis. as Ashwin (2020) argues:
[University leaders] need to be clearer about the limitations of what a university education can offer rather than implying that it can meet any challenge thrown at it by policy makers providing that their responses to these challenges are only properly funded. University leaders need to be more vocal in their protests about the ways in which commercial university rankings are compiled and stop providing their data for such exercises. They also need to stop paying for the services that commercial university rankers provide and playing the game of trying to enhance their reputation through brand recognition. They need to be more honest with prospective students about the limitations of rankings for informing them about the quality of degree programmes and offer them alternative ways of understanding the quality of their degree programmes. (p122)
Alternately, the transformational ideal of a university is embedded within the perceived, aspirational, or actual of the institution as a social good. This is reinforced publicly and through collective actions because an institution (in theory) without fear and favour, with the protections of academic freedom and with the insightful, unpredictable, and rigorous impacts of teaching and research has the intellectual ecology to influence and effect real change. This role, whilst existing within the frame of public funding, frequently runs contrary to the ideological or political positions of the government of the day. And in practice it can either perceptually or industrially run counter to how the university wants or needs to be run which itself creates tensions and inertia within institutions. As Ashwin (2020) noted:
For academics, [transformational change] involves taking curriculum design and teaching seriously rather than dismissing it as the incursion of university bureaucracy on their academic freedom. Similarly, those engaged in other roles need to consider how what they do relates to the provision of a transformative education for their students. It is important to recognize that there are many students who would have withdrawn from their studies without the care and support of members of administrative and support staff. When university administration and student support are done effectively, they play a key role in ensuring students complete their programmes successfully and are transformed by their engagement with knowledge. (p.123)
The intellectual ecology of a university living the transformative ideals evolved to effect real change, from those who were part of its learning community to the society who benefited from the breakthroughs, ideations and reimagining catalysed by research. This is historically undeniable in almost every country where universities have proliferated. Universities were transformative spaces. But at different points in time, dancing different political cadences and navigating an ever increasing instrumental, polarised, and ideological public discourse the transformational ideal was challenged, subjugated, and marginalised. Social good became a brand and a strapline. The actions and outcomes of effecting real, measurable, and impactful change were appropriated as the product and the agents of that change either the customer or the machines of manufacturing often working as academic sole traders that protect their ideas vociferously.
Transformative, transactional or…
The aim of this blog is not to re-prosecute the neoliberalist versus transformative idealist arguments There has been a clearly identifiable move of universities (certainly in Australia and the United Kingdom) away from institutions that create social good to institutions that create corporate good, either for themselves as neoliberal ‘organisations’ or for the industries they research with/for or who employ their graduates. There is also an increasing number of universities that can rightfully or superficially claim to be making a difference through the teaching, research and engagement. This post is also not a manifesto decrying the current state of higher education and longing for a return to the good old days. The structures, funding, policies, and societal roles of universities in the 21st century are deeply out of alignment with the outdated nostalgic vision of the transformative university. The precepts and assumptions that drive the conceptualisation of a university as a transformative experience for graduates are also out of alignment with a graduate cohort (past, present and future) and their employers who are seeking a significantly more transactional university, one where knowledge exchange is akin to an immediate cost-benefit proposition rather than a developmental, aspirational, or transformative delayed benefit realisation.
The skills that are delivered by programs and evaluated as sufficient (or more frequently insufficient) by industry are adjudged through the lens of transactional performance (in the form of grades, recognition, value for money, graduate employability, lifelong learning or certification) (Singh & Fan, 2021). The integration of the principles and practices of transactional neo-liberalism in universities, however explicitly or tacitly, has imbued many educational programs with a positivist privileging of the status quo in curriculum and the rusting on established educational orthodoxies at risk of creating satisfaction dissonances (Mirabella et al., 2022). Scott (2022) argues that this neo-marketisation creates a ‘new symbiosis’ that catalyses ‘transgressive State-market spaces’ producing rather than educating graduates as a means to an (employable) end enabling learning within transactional spaces.
However, the structures, funding, policy, and societal role of universities in the 21st century are also out of alignment with an entirely corporatised and neoliberal vision of profitability, consumer orientation and research commercialisation. Universities and the people who work for them are still deeply committed to the idea of making a difference and effecting real change. They are committed to a university education as critical to developing and opening up transformative lifelong learning pathways for students. Hill et al. (2016) conceptualise this tension as borderland spaces where ‘the traditional power hierarchies of higher education may be scrutinized and destabilized, enabling students to draw more freely from their own experiences and to work in partnership with each other and with faculty, prompting the construction of new identities’ (p.379).
Universities are at a fork in the road. The university of 2024 can go in many directions in response to the existential crises they are facing. Some would argue that neoliberalism got us into many of these crises, whether it be through an over reliance on metricised rankings performance, the application of corporatism to the delivery of educational ambition or the strategically unwise reliance on singular, mono-market income streams. On the other hand, others might argue that the liberal ideal of publicly funded, open discoursed transformative academy free to teach and research in whatever intellectual or ideological direction it chooses is fiscally irresponsible or unsustainable. It is the tension between the aspiration and the reality that places pressure on the intellectual ecology of our universities to function in counter-productive and counter-motivational ways.
The post-transformative university
There is a third way for universities. One that leverages the intellectual ecology of the academy as an engine for authentic, real change that makes a difference to people, to communities, to societies. One that recognises there is a not a pot of gold of endless public funding at the end of the rainbow and the economic imperatives to engage outside the academy, generate revenue and spend responsibly are not neoliberal battle cries but fundamental enablers of how impactful, authentic societal change can be made real. The notion of the post-transformative university describes the third way forward. It is not a hybridisation of the neoliberal agenda and the transformational ideal. These two positions as they are articulated in many institutions are essentially polarised and have resulted in activities that can run contrary to each other, generating industrial and political tension, financial uncertainty, precarious employment, and public discourses questioning the societal efficacy of funding or even supporting higher education. The current internal and strategic momentum of universities is not sustainable and is in part the reason for the generational dissonance I discussed in the second of this series ‘The Mirror University 2’.
In 2015, Professor Paul Gibbs from Middlesex University and Dr Aftab Dean of Leeds Beckett University wrote an article called ‘Student satisfaction or happiness? A preliminary rethink of what is important in the student experience’ (2015) where they proposed the notion of profound happiness (in relation to the student experience in higher education):
‘…not as a short-term period of joy and ecstatic eruption of pleasure, but as the finding of a life course… profound happiness is not strictly Aristotelian eudaimonia, which prioritises well-being based on moral, wealth or health imperatives, although it does retain notions of agentic-directed growth, meaning and purpose… Profound happiness, then, is a blend of both these traditional forms of happiness theory, realised through one’s temporal being and requiring a willed life plan that becomes attuned to one’s being within the consequences of one’s agentic capability… To achieve this profound attunement within one’s world requires education, vision, courage, and tenacity to establish how one’s being best fits into the world alongside others, while avoiding compromising one’s being for the sake of simply “fitting in” for the temporary benefit of others.’ (p.8)
A post-transformative university enables some of the similar traits that Dean and Gibbs have ascribed to profound happiness. The profundity is key here. Higher education a deep, life- wide vocation for many staff and students. It requires an attunement not just with the world as it ahppens but with the resonant opportunities created by the education experience long after the immediacy has passed. This is not a singular model of a university, nor can it be defined by comparable metrics, nor is it a singular solution to all that ails higher education. Such an assertion would be foolish to make and nonsensical to enact. Rather, the framing of the post-transformative university takes elements of the intellectual ecology that are already in front of us, that work to try and achieve both the neoliberal agenda and the transformative ideal often simultaneously and sometimes despite each other.
These elements can be found in Dean and Gibbs definition (the critical importance of identity, the capability to be, work and live collectively, the agency over ‘growth, meaning and purpose’ and willing ownership of consequence, both positive and negative). Enacting them strategically and organisationally is a complex ecosystem of existential, institutional, and personal change that won’t be enacted by a few workshops, some buzzwords and the next strategic plan that looks remarkably like the last one (or one that generative AI could write in seconds). A commitment to making a real, authentic, and measurable difference to the critical global, local, and personal challenges disrupting and threatening society and our communities should be at very core of being for a university.
- Collegiality
This is a fundamental tenant of a good university. Yet, I am sure there are many of you who quite rightly would question with significant and sometimes traumatic evidence that such a truism doesn’t hold water. The rise of the academic sole trader, the (over) metricisation of research (against the actual impact of the research) and the (over) reliance on the subject coordinator to enact every policy, practice, and regulatory change in ever decreasing windows of reflection created by increasing durations and numbers of teaching periods have undermined the benefits of collegiality in many institutions.
True collegiality comes when the machinery of a faculty, school, department, or teaching team hums in unison (when the intellectual ecology harmonises, if you will). It generates a momentum of innovation, ideation, reflection, and challenge. Collegiality infiltrates decision making, problem solving and strategic planning. It is not a kumbaya-filtered sense of uncriticality. True collegiality is a respectful, competitive, and collective environment where research, teaching and engagement have common purpose and collective responsibility. What makes a post-transformative university great is where collegiality delivers outcomes. Collegiality for its own sake sets a structural foundation but is not enough on its own. Collegiality embraces but is not bound by structure. Collegiality values criticality as a means of making research and teaching better. A collegial institution is defined by how voices are heard, integrated, challenged, and respected.
In a post-transformative university collegiality is more than a virtue. It is a means to an end. It brings together people in transdisciplinary hubs to find and celebrate the differences between disciplines and make new things in the spaces and intersections. It encourages academic structures to find new ways of thinking about old and emerging problems through knowing that spaces in-between practices have as much value as those of the academic sole trader, the student learning and the employer waiting for graduates. It connects people who have no other way to find and make these deep and lasting or fleeting connections because their worlds would never normally cross.
- Mediated risk
In both the neoliberal agenda (NLA) and the transformative ideal (TI) risk is anathema to effective operation. In the NLA, risk needs to be calculated, ranked, and mitigated. Risk extends to entirely non-educational functions such as compliance, financial security, and reputation (although these are not inconsequential to the viability or effectiveness of the TI). In the TI, risk is held by others. Principles like academic freedom, research ethics and institutional governance and policy ameliorate risk for the idealist although they may impact creativity, inspiration, and ideation in dissociative ways. Mediated risk represents the ways in which an institution and its staff can enable safe spaces to succeed through collective responsibility, an informed criticality of how principles are enacted not to defend all behaviour but to enable the behaviours that create the environment that promulgates impactful authentic societal change.
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Institutions waste enormous amounts of time and resource in the elimination of risk. They waste an equal amount of time defending for or against a set of principles that, whilst important, paralyse an institution from taking any risk. Mediated risk is defined by what it’s mediated through. The policy infrastructures, recruitment and remediation strategies, the research and teaching ecosystems all need to support risk safely, not without consequence but with mediated consequences and supported outcomes. Risk in a post-transformative university is an enabling or catalysing force, not a limiting factor or a war cry against radical thinking. Risk comes with benefit trade-offs. Risk turns transaction to transition, where the realities of the research and teaching have real and safe(r) consequences and learning happens through the recognising and taking of risk, not the avoidance or strangling mitigation of it.
- Collective mission
Collegiality and mediated risk are great when you are the one defining them. It’s easy for a leader to talk about them but end the sentence with “the buck stops here” or “leaders have to lead”. Equally, the academic sole trader model, when allowed to become the dominant paradigm, places the responsibility to lead in part on the academic sole trader and part of the institution to lead the bits that are not of concern to them or to lead the architecture that is critical for their individual success (ICT, for example). These two leadership roles are rarely balanced, and they are often pejoratively labelled strategic or intellectual versus operational.
Collective mission must be more than branding sloganry and assertions of being good, or sustainable or transformative. A collective mission is collectively defined and owned. It is not a mantra or a lazy reversion to spouting phraseology to defend an already determined academic position. The effecting of impactful authentic real change internally and the integration of the intellectual ecology to initiating that change externally is dependent on a common direction not a common directive. Collective mission is hard to promulgate, and yes, can be like herding cats. But in a post transformative institution it leverages both the neoliberal agenda and the TI to achieve the same thing.
And therein lies the opportunity. Neither the NLA nor the TI are wrong. Those who argue for a reversion or in defence of either position have more to gain from the ending of the other than they do from defending their own deeply entrenched position. A post transformative university needs both. The NLA navigates the deficit of public funding, the unbalanced research teaching funding nexus, and the increasing complexity of the global higher education market. The TI enables and unlocks the staff and student idealism, aspiration, and potential to make change happen. A post-transformative state has the potential enable profound happiness in both perspectives. It empowers people to engage in change that has meaning, ideation with impact and collaboration with criticality and do so sustain, responsibility and within the capabilities of the organisation to support and fund it.
But it also creates a “workforce” that includes staff, students and partners that want to work together collectively and collegially to make a difference, to recognise that making a difference is a rewarding and liberating vocation and that universities don’t have to choose between being corporate behemoths or liberalist nations. Both the NLA and TI positions are in part informed by what Bengtson and Barnett (2014) philosophically explore as the dark side of education. They argue that when faced with the need to address the challenges of higher education (and I would argue the global, local and [personal challenges that society expects universities to engage with and crack) there an ‘importance of lowering one’s guard and facing the dark side of educational institutions; the fear, the isolation, but also the learning potential of giving of oneself instead of merely receiving.’. A post-transformative university draws passion, courage, inspiration, and creativity from the humanity of the struggle, the collective effort of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and the profound happiness of doing impactful, authentic, and resonant good, not just now, but with a long tail of influence and inspiration for others yet to be a part of the university. Bengtson and Barnett (2014) argue that:
‘…the future university is already here among us. In the darkness lies the potential that we might find courage and endurance to make the university a place not only for specific purposes such as study, research, development, teaching, administration, leadership, and so on—but also a place for non-purposive activities and forms of being and becoming. In this way, the university becomes a more integrated part of our lifeworld, and all the dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears, triumphs and failures that go along with it. Maybe, then, the future university might emerge as a more humane place for learning—fallible and rugged, but with possibilities for open-ended learning and growth.’