Transcript Taking equality seriously:

Aniko Horvath
School of Social Science & Public Policy
Department of Education and Professional Studies
King’s College London
Who ‘Owns’ the Future of UK Higher
Education?
Universities in the Knowledge Economy:
Perspectives from the Asia-Pacific and Europe
11 February, 2015
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Broad research questions
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What have been the impacts on academics of the
institutional and policy changes that have taken place in
higher education over the past decades, and more
specifically, after the 2010 restructuring?
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How do academics mobilize economic, social, and cultural
resources to cope with such changes over the course of their
career and more specifically, under the current
circumstances?
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How do academics make sense of their past and present
‘professional’ lives in the context of the current
restructuring in higher education, and how, in turn, do these
understandings and interpretations inform their ‘coping’
strategies?
Methods
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(Professional) life history interviews with 22 academics
Ethnographic participant observation, for example at:
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Academic strikes, union meetings
Protests
University open days
Conferences
Academic workshops and seminars
Public talks by well-known/ ‘famous’ academics
Other formal and informal academic/professional settings
Alternative higher education initiatives
HE forums (e.g. Guardian University Forum, Guardian
University Awards ceremony, etc.)
Data used for this presentation
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21 interviews, ranging between 60 and 160 minutes, most
of them at app. 120 minutes; questions were structured in
two blocks – first part was on personal life events; second
part on broader issues, such as place/role of academics in
public sphere, academic freedom, academic loyalties,
unions, policy changes over the years of their academic
career, etc.
We tried to cover as big a variety of life trajectories as
possible – age, gender, ethnic/national background,
immigrants/emigrants, types of contracts, people who left
academia altogether, types of institutions, regional
distribution, variety of academic fields in social sciences,
diversity of opinions on current changes, etc.
Analysis of government reports, white papers, and OECD
documents.
Methods of data analysis
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Narrative analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis
Life as ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu)
Analysis of ethnographic data
Some limitations
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Limitations on understanding the interconnections within
the whole higher education system (can be complemented
with research data from the work of others)
Only academics from social sciences included
Only 4 interviews with administrators/management
No HE policy makers
Interviewee 1 (academic):
 “In our department we’ve got pictures of the miners’ strikes,
demonstrations, all kinds of protests, and the pictures stop at
1985, so I have a huge poster on my door about the bedroom
tax [introduced in 2012], just to say we have to update this
gallery of processes of the past... and so I kind of think, oh
that’s a bit hypocritical of my colleagues in that situation.
 How did your colleagues react when you got involved in HE
protest movements?
 Hardly any colleague in my institution speaks to me about it.
 So you just all behave like it’s not happening?
 They behave like I’m not happening. So I will go to
occupations and discuss, there won’t be many colleagues
there, and people behave, my colleagues behave like it’s not
happening.”
Interviewee 1 (continuation):
 “How does a department meeting look like when they start
presenting the department with cuts, with making people
redundant?
 Well we have had a situation of a colleague being made
redundant... that was a difficult situation. It’s not so much
cuts, because this is often not coming in in the form of cuts,
it’s coming in in the form of changing the conditions of what
you do. So everyone was sort of very hostile to it... But then,
you know, our new vice-chancellor came in saying I’m going
to save ten million, raise ten million, spend twenty million. So
some people heard the spend twenty million, I kind of heard
the save ten million, and thought OK, that’s some people
sacked in order to... And it was very difficult to organise
people around opposing saving some money... “
Interviewee 1 (continuation):
 “I had a departmental meeting when we’ve had to discuss cuts
in that difficult context. We are facing an issue of sort of
having a deficit again and, as I’ve already said, I don’t think,
you know, that in the current situation you could be satisfied
with running a deficit. So I like to come up with plans for the
deficit, and if you come up early with them, the plans for the
deficit don’t involve redundancies, so people have been really
happy with the suggestions I made in order to avoid the
deficit, and turn things around, improve recruitment and so
on... But when I said, OK, now I’ve put a lot of effort into how
we can change the curriculum, how we can do different things,
but we ought to be opposing these three things that have come
down from the university... [And then my colleagues said that]
oh no, the university has said we need to do this. So when I
oppose those within the university I do it as an individual...”
Jane I. Guyer: Prophecy and the near future (American
Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 409-421, 2007)
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“For me, a sense of foreignness in the current present has
come to revolve around a strange evacuation of the temporal
frame of the “near future”: the reach of thought and
imagination, of planning and hoping, of tracing out mutual
influences, of engaging in struggles for specific goals, in short,
of the process of implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the
social and material world that used to be encompassed under
an expansively inclusive concept of “reasoning.” (...) It
seemed that ultimate origins and distant horizons were both
reinvigorated, whereas what fell between them was attenuating
into airy thinness, on both “sides” (past and future) of the
“reduction to the present.”
Guyer (continuation):
 1990s in Nigeria: “Vistas of long-term growth were invoked in
newspapers that were diligently recycled as market packaging
... and toilet paper, as people managed the actualities of a
desperately disturbed everyday life.” (pp. 409-410)
 “At the time, this combination of fantasy futurism and
enforced presentism seemed specific to the lived implications
of the economic policies of structural adjustment under
military rule in Africa. Years later, the same rhetoric about
horizons of long-term economic growth has become far more
generalized, powerful, and confident. (...) It seemed that
ultimate origins and distant horizons were both reinvigorated,
whereas what fell between them was attenuating into airy
thinness, on both “sides” (past and future) of the “reduction to
the present.” (pp. 410)
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Guyer’s argument resonated strongly with my own sense of an
‘emptying’ of the ‘near future/past’ and a ‘reduction to the
present’, as well as an enforced ‘futurism’ in higher education.
Political and policy discourses on higher education argued for
the desirability of “long-term financial sustainability”,
“sustained growth” and “improving quality and efficiency” in
the sector. Implicitly embedded in all these notions were
particular understandings of ‘time’, perceptions that
contained an underlying claim of an absolute right to imagine
the future of higher education (e.g. OECD papers and
conferences on the future of HE, UK reports and white papers
on HE, political speeches).
In contrast, academic and student narratives often failed to
stimulate – or so it seemed – widespread discussions of
‘alternative futures’ for higher education.
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Consequently, prompted by Guyer’s argument, during
the interviews and fieldwork, I started to explore how
temporal frames in academia operate, both in discourse
and in practice; who and how ‘inhabits’ the ‘near future’,
and what happens to the ‘longer-term’ in academic
narratives/practices.
While in our research at King’s we wanted to understand
how the 2010 restructurings in UK higher education
impacted on academics and academic work, we also
wanted to understand why such changes were possible in
the first place. It seemed that looking into how different
temporalities are ‘manipulated’ within academia would
give us a better understanding of how forms of
sociotemporal power operate in relation to HE.
Erik Harms: Eviction time in the new Saigon, 2013
(CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 2,
pp. 344–368)
 “Temporal instability makes it difficult for people
living in zones slated for redevelopment to plan for the
future. But planning for the future is precisely the logic
organizing the Thu Thiêm project. In this context, a
presentist mode of living – what Guyer calls the
“evacuation of the near future” – can actually challenge
the very temporality that drives the project. (...) The
brute exercise of power and influence to strip people of
their land while compensating them at rates well below
the anticipated profits is founded on planning for the
future.” (pp. 364-365)
Erik Harms: Saigon’s Edge (University of Minnesota
Press, 2011)
 “People often critique the Communist Party, but they
seem to agree, wittingly or unwittingly, with the party’s
teleological ideals of progress and tradition. Looking
carefully at time orientation on Ho Chi Minh City’s rural
urban margins gives us an understanding of how political
legitimacy builds upon a notion of ‘urbanization’,
‘development’, and ‘progress’ that promises a foreverarriving better future. Examining these concepts of
forward advancement through time also gives us a clue to
the operation of power through the manipulation of
access to different temporal models. ” (pp. 91)
How is this relevant to higher education in the United
Kingdom (and beyond)?
 I started searching for temporal concepts in different contexts
in academia, at this stage focusing especially on the overlaps
between the futures envisaged by politicians and policy
makers, institutional managers and the use, negotiation,
application, reproduction and internalization of such
norms/values among academics.
 What are the categories that we reproduce in academia about
past, present and future and what can they tell us about power
and domination?
 Some categories that emerged were those that linked HE to
excellence/merit, broadening participation, and
engagement with the world beyond academia.
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We know from anthropological work on the use of discursive terms that
different groups can have very different understandings of the very
same notions.
However, if we think about the three above terms in frameworks that
are linked to ‘temporality’ we can discover overlaps in
political/economic/management understandings and in the values
attached to them by academics, especially when/if they imply
progress/development over time.
Some points of connection in academic narratives and political
discourse on HE: a move from one point in time – seen as holding a
negative comparative value – to a point in time where it holds positive
value – e.g. past elitism (i.e. ivory tower) versus current engagement
with the world beyond academia; or past selectivity (class) versus
broadening participation, realization of ‘mass education’; or past
elite reproduction versus excellence/merit based selectivity.
What were also emphasized quite often in narratives were self
understandings of being radical, disrupting dominant HE practices, not
being part of the establishment.
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However, how does this contrast with the ways in which we
reproduce position, status, and lifestyle within and beyond
academia? Is there space for alternatives in our own lives? How are
these spaces carved out – and what are the contradictions that exist
around them? Can we disconnect the ‘everyday’ of our lives from
our practices in HE?
Some examples: while most academics did reflect critically on all
sorts of rankings in their narratives (questioning discourses of
elitism/merit), in their everyday practices there was still a
legitimization of the (implicit) ideas that UK (and English language)
HE institutions and publishing were somehow superior – not
necessarily in terms of ‘quality’ but when making ‘strategic choices’
of one’s own career advancement (future): high level of awareness
of rankings (and ‘strategizing’ about them) in job applications;
considering rankings when making decisions about the types of
journals and publishing houses where they decided to submit their
work – often arguing that the “rigorous peer-review of such journals
is in itself a warranty for quality”.
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As one academic put it when talking about rankings “right
now this is the only game in town” (monolithic and
exclusionary views of present/future in HE).
Nevertheless, from narratives it was clear that an attempt is
made to ‘disrupt’ such practices (increase in open access
publishing, blogging, collaborating with sites such as
‘Discover Society’, wonkhe, etc.); however this only worked
for ‘established’ academics – the young academics that I
interviewed and who ‘lived by’ these ‘values’ were often
‘pushed out’ of academia – sometimes by the very same
established academics who argued for change but set on hiring
committees/fellowship boards and implemented the
‘institutional norms’ they said they were “expected to
implement”.
Interviewee 2 (former academic):
 “I remember one job interview for a lectureship where I knew the
people interviewing me quite well, and they were saying well you
haven’t published your PhD as a monograph, and I said what’s the
point of it? It’s a PDF on my website, on my blog, people can
download it. I could spend some time editing it to make it a bit
tidier for an academic audience, that would be great, but it would
take me several months and then it would be put in a library and
no-one would read it, it would be very expensive, it would make a
bit of money for Routledge, or whoever I got as publisher, if I was
lucky enough to get Routledge, but you know, some academic
publisher, and it would give me points, it would give me academic
points, which allow you to then turn that into money somewhere
else, but it wouldn’t really do the world more good in any way, in
fact it would suck time which I could be spending building a public
engagement strategy or blogging or teaching or doing some new
research. So why would I do that?”
Interviewee 2 (continuation):
 “You are employing me to be a lecturer in communication, I
think it would go against everything that I lecture about to
spend my time turning this PhD into a monograph. And they
kind of smiled and went yes, that makes sense, but we still
need to be accountable to our research matrix, and I didn’t get
the job. They were sort of laughing in the room of like it’s
sweet that you still think like that. And that would be
generally the attitude, and I’ve had that several times, oh we
feel that too but you are actually doing it. Somebody called me
gutsy recently; but this is not that gutsy at all, we should all
just do it and stop playing this stupid game. There are more
senior scientists who get away with it, I think, but I was not
senior enough to be able to make it work.”
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A more subtle manifestation of the contradictions that surround
discourse and everyday practices of academics was, for example,
the way academics talked about their children’s education, and of
the advice/support they would give to their children in terms of
choosing a university.
Even when talking about advising their children to go to university
in Europe, this was most often linked to ideas of experiencing other
societies, mastering new languages; there was not one argument that
claimed that they could get a ‘better’ education there (whatever that
would mean). So while UK education was often described as “not
worth the money” – there was (almost) no argument on education in
Europe/or any other countries being better (or even the same).
It could be argued that talking about our children’s education is
implicitly talking about the ‘imagined future’ of higher education –
that is, there was very little ‘disruption’ of the mainstream
imaginings in that respect.
This also involves issues of ‘trust’ when making decisions about the
future:
 For some, ‘trust’ meant ‘navigating’ the system and implicitly
accepting the idea that some brands hold (better) value when it comes
to one’s future/employment – as one academic put it in an informal
discussion about the local school pushing them to allow their children
to be prepared for a Cambridge/Oxford education:“I can experiment
with my own ways of practice, but cannot experiment with my
children’s future”.
 It also involves issues of ‘trust’ in ourselves as parents and in our status
in society – some of the academics I interviewed encouraged their
children to ‘experiment ‘with the education system and not go into
private or ‘best practice’ schools; however, I was then often told that
“we can compensate at home in what the system is failing them” –
implicit assumptions of (class) reproduction, and the transmission of
cultural capital – disconnect/contradiction between discursive values
and everyday practices (also, what exactly do we compensate for?).
Now, if we return for a moment to the ‘edge’ of Ho Chi
Minh city, what can it tell us about these processes in
UK academia?
 Erik Harms: “The presence of a form of time reckoning in
and of itself does not say very much about the social
experience of time. That experience of time depends more
on social action and the distribution of agency within
time, for what time ‘means’ really depends on how ‘we
make, through our acts, the time we are in’ (Munn).
Indeed, this is the point; time orientation is not mystical
or magical in any sense, but the social effects of time
depend on acts that are situated within but also create
relationships of power, legitimacy, and authority.”
(Saigon’s Edge, pp. 102)
Interviewee 3 (academic):
 I think that generally the feeling was it would have been nice if this
money had come from people other than the students directly, but it
was never gonna do that and it hadn’t been doing that for years, and
there was no political way that was ever going to happen. So at least
now we are getting the money... And so I’d rather have the system
we’ve got at the moment where at least we can still teach the
students in the way I enjoy teaching them and draw on our own
endowments and hopefully in time increase the tuition fee, always
with plenty of bursaries of course, always ensuring you don’t
actually have to have this money in your hand when you walk
through the door, you just have to be prepared to sign something to
say you’ll ultimately pay it to us. Let’s go down that path then,
because it’s more important to me that we preserve this mode of
teaching than it is that it actually be free of charge for them sort of
in perpetuity rather than just in effect free at the moment they walk
through the door and ultimately pay for later.