(Department of Education, University of Bath)
Any study of the contemporary university is best approached with cognisance of an institution and ideology in the grip of profound change; contested change; and some would claim, crisis. The fabled playground of the intelligentsia has been reimagined as an institution that beats to the drum of a global mass market economy of higher education (HE) and obliges the (habitually economic) needs and demands of local, national and international stakeholders embodied in government, industry and business. Amidst this reordering, indeed repurposing, a public gaze over what A.H. Halsey called ‘the donnish dominion’ has intensified and resulted in academics abandoning what some have justifiably decried as a privileged and cloistered – if mythicized – existence in worlds exclusively of imagination and theory. A life of splendid isolation in ivory towers cut off and insulated from the affairs of the ‘real-world’ is, no matter how gross a caricature, one that has rapidly been consigned to the dustbin of institutional history. Reincarnated as service-providers or impactful knowledge workers, academics are now challenged to alter their focus to ‘real world’ applications and concurrently make visible and available the fruits of their labour. An accelerating – and enforced – transparency of academic labour is intended, however, not only for the purpose of extended public access – so that the greatest number might make ‘use’ of academic knowledge or culture knowledge synergies – but that through such utility-making, academics, particularly in the context of research, will achieve public accountability or more specifically, fiscal rationalisation. This kind of occupational justification is considered especially necessary where academic livelihood depends so vastly on the benefaction of the public purse.
Academics being publically facing or engaged is of course not without precedent. There is a rich history of them engaging the publics in a variety of ways, many being philanthropic and predicated on a notion of the academic as an agent and custodian of the public good and which, furthermore, exhibit aspirational ties to a discourse of the public intellectual and public university. However, in more recent and neoliberalized times and an era of ‘new managerialism’, academics’ public interface may be not so much propelled by (or incentivized by appealing to) a sense of moral obligation and/or virtuous practice but instrumentalist and individualistic motivations predominantly connected to public engagement as a condition of research funding or criterion of research evaluation. Notwithstanding, there are many academics who choose to engage the public on the basis of it being an innately good thing and or something they enjoy or take fulfilment from doing. These are also a cadre who risk becoming, as I discussed in a recent issue of EJHE, ‘lost in the third space’. It was in this article, that I elicited the negative impacts of (and/or arrested development caused by) public engagement undertaken by academics working in UK universities, on research profiles and career progression, to illustrate the way with which the normalization of neoliberal ideology in higher education – and market and managerial fundamentalism – is undermining and foreclosing academics’ critical and creative freedom and an ability to define themselves in ways any other than might be evaluated on performance terms. The case of the deleterious effects suffered by academics undertaking public engagement, provides compelling evidence of the contradictions and tensions that exist between higher education policy and academic practice, which characterise the kinds of organisational change experienced in HE contexts and the strange and complex mutations of the university.
It occurs, therefore, that the management of institutional change in higher education demands a change in tack, where the patently obvious yet avoided truths that frustrate and inhibit the fruition of aspirations like the public intellectual are articulated and confronted. This requires academics move from out of behind the curtain of fear; the utopian day-dreaming; and false remembering of vintage days that tend to dominate meditations on the state of the profession and which collectively contribute to stalling the potential for ‘real’ change and an alternative ‘public’ vision of the university. Honest, critical self-reflection by the academic community is the first move in exposing and collapsing the various contradictions and compromises of academic practice that are too often blindly and passively committed and effortlessly perpetuated. Not even so much the seeding of a culture of resistance as opposed to a culture of critical self-awareness, openness and responsiveness will enable academics to claim fuller ownership over the challenges (and their resolutions) of policy-engineered transitions. A middle ground theorisation of the interface between HE policy and academic practice is exigent.