The value of universities

I spoke recently at the Guardian’s Future of Higher Education Summit about the importance of universities, and it’s now gone up on their website. You can watch the talk here, or read the text below.

“As a panel we were asked to speak about what the sector can do to pull together and communicate the value of higher education to politicians and the public. I just want to make three points.

First, I think we need to begin by calling the problem by its name; the problem that besets British universities at the moment. We often get caught up in all the issues whether that’s open access or REF or student fees – we get lost in the detail or we get crisis fatigue. But I think these are all symptoms of a problem that I call the enclosure of the epistemic commons.

Second, I think we can put our own house in order. That involves a number of things. It involves thinking about ourselves as engaged in a shared project across our various diverse institutions; it involves abolishing the mission groups; and it also involves democratising internally – there is often a real disconnect between the official image of a university projected by managers and that which academics such as myself feel that we are engaged in, which is very messy and involves students crying in your office sometimes.

But then third, and perhaps most importantly, I think we need to tell new kinds of stories about who we are and what we do. At the CDBU* we have various ideas about how we can do this, but I think we need to articulate the value of our institutions. I think universities are really remarkable kinds of institutions. They are one of the few places where older people and younger people come together in a partnership; where alive people and dead people talk to each other across the distances of time; where people who are inside the institution collaborate with people who are outside the institution; where people who are here collaborate with people who are far away. They are places dedicated to the messy, on-going, and uncertain business that is life, and this is deeply, deeply human. Unfortunately these are qualities that are not tailored to the marketised, priced world where value is commodified and preferably tradable, but it’s exactly for these reasons that they are very, very precious institutions and it’s the reason that I think we need to defend them.”

*Council for the Defence of British Universities 

Imperial echoes

Across the world, higher education is increasingly characterised by talk of ‘internationalisation’. Taking a number of forms – from charging foreign students full-cost fees to establishing overseas campuses and offering offshore degrees – internationalisation is big business. These activities offer cash-strapped universities a way to increase their income while also advertising themselves as institutions that equip students to work in the global knowledge economy.

But to a historian of the British Empire, much of the current talk about internationalisation sounds strangely familiar. At least four of its contemporary variants can be traced back to the 19th century, when the expanding routes of British trade and empire were creating new kinds of global connections and different forms of educational entanglement. These earlier versions of university internationalisation deserve attention, for they have much to tell us about the possibilities – and the perils – of the phenomenon in the 21st century… read the rest of this article in the THE’s 8 March 2012 issue.

The tales that we tell

In an age of increasing marketisation, how do universities explain who they are? What story can they tell about their role and their value that will reach out and embrace their several constituencies?

Universities seem to approach these questions in a number of different ways. They employ a ‘work preparation’ account that emphasises the value of a university degree to a student’s employment prospects; they invoke a ‘knowledge economy’ story that highlights their instrumental value to national productivity; they tell a ‘personal growth’ tale that stresses a university education as a rite of passage; and they portray themselves as ‘custodians of culture’ devoted to contemplation and preservation on behalf of the whole community. Moreover, they tell all these stories, while continuing to present their ‘intrinsic merit’ as institutions of disinterested scholarship and learning.

Such multiple narratives may well be appropriate to the many roles that universities have and will continue play, but in recent years some of these stories have started to drown out others. In particular, universities’ adoption of the language of instrumentality and their eagerness to sell themselves to governments, industry and students as institutions that are vital to economic growth, has come at the cost of their self-presentation as places that foster the messier, less profitable, and less quantifiable aspects of understanding what it is to be alive. Although a rear-guard action has been mounted in the wake of the Browne Report and the Higher Education White Paper, the ground has been conceded.

In his opening lecture for the Idea of the University series at Cambridge, Stefan Collini recently argued that among the public at large there is a much greater reservoir of appreciation for the work universities do than the official discourses – both those of reform and resistance – recognise or allow. He suggested that, despite their many roles, there continues to be strong a popular desire for universities ‘to incarnate a set of aspirations and ideals that go beyond any form of economic return’. Universities, Collini concluded, need to start speaking to this audience.

It should not need stating that the desire to make meaning of life is not just the province of the privileged. Everyone seeks to understand the mysteries of the world, and everyone searches for stories that frame their existence and that connect them to the past and the future.

Universities are not the only institutions that can speak to this need, but they are increasingly among the few that are explicitly dedicated to doing so. In them teachers and students alike learn about the many and various ways people understand and have understood the world, each other, and themselves. As such they are places dedicated to the messy, ongoing, and deeply uncertain ‘business’ of life – a business they share with us all.

It is high time that universities once again told this story about themselves. Indeed, as Melanie Fullick points out, as the brokenness of the ‘work preparation’ narrative becomes ever more evident to graduates unable to find a job, it becomes increasingly imperative that they do so.

For stories are not just a reflection of reality, they also shape and define it. The stories universities tell about themselves will determine who they become.

Read this post at guardian.co.uk