Who should be responsible for the Future of Higher Education?

In this module: ’contemporary issues in teaching and learning’ we try to explore and critique how higher education is done. This is explicitly stated in the course materials, i.e. we are asked to critically examine, reflect and adapt our own teaching practice based on our new critical engagement, and ‘contribute to and inform the discussion’. Just below the surface, there is an understanding that higher education is a work in progress and the people most likely to influence changes for the better are the ‘next generation’ of academics and higher ed administrators – current PhDs. By putting together this blog we show the wider academic community and each other that we are concerned about the issues which affect how our careers are likely to unfold, and are putting intellectual labour into considering their effects, if not offering solutions.

This image has nothing to do with the post – i just like it. credit to @osborne_macharia

In the very first seminar of this module something strange happened. We had discussed at length various issues related to higher education, such as REF and TEF, the competing demands of teaching and research, and what effect the commercialisation of higher education might have. All of these are important issues, which are unlikely to be solved before the time when my generation of PhDs become the people who make a lot of the important decisions. We were all on the same page, having a good moan about the issues as we see them and imagining brighter futures. Then we were informed that we would develop these ideas into a public blog.

The mood changed, some were nervous about writing in a new style, which is perfectly understandable. But many were worried about putting critical ideas on paper, lest they come back to haunt them, or hinder their future careers. At the time I was truly unsettled, had we really just spent the past hour discussing the abysmal student experience in our own university, how some students are marginalised and the perils of the tracking bureaucracy, to then just turn our backs when we actually have a chance to speak up, a chance to do something, however small that something might be?

Freeze frame from the film ‘Dear White People’ 

I tried to speak up at the time, my voice quivered, which is untypical of me. Partly because I was holding back the urge to say, ‘see, you don’t really care – unless you’re affected!’. Now I’ve had some time to think about what happened that day, and to read some of the literature, I think that maybe, though the aims of the course are noble, that we have made at least one fallacious assumption – that current PhDs are the ones who can/are willing to build the future in a way that tries fix our current problems.

In my PhD, one of the key theoretical tools that I use is Social Representation Theory (Moscovici, 1988), which helps us to understand how knowledge is constructed in societies and transmitted through interaction with the symbolic environment, communication between individuals and groups. Many disciplines have theories about how knowledge is created, disseminated, contested and changed. So, the tenets of the theory aren’t too important.

What is interesting is that it appears that the social representation of the performative academic (Ball, 2003) is already embedded in the minds of PhD students. Performativity in this context relates to the ways that, to paraphrase Ball, ‘social processes and events are translated into simple figures’ (p.217). The difficulties come in whether such processes are even possible to quantify and if they are, what should be quantified i.e. overall attainment or progress, number of widening participation undergrads who come in, or the number who leave with a good degree? etc.

Ball argues that these processes regulate the behaviour of teachers rather than de-regulating their actions, as can be argued. This is because, although it may be possible to arrive at the outcome desired by the measures in a variety of means, the place at which one must arrive to be ‘successful’ is always the same.

So, for example, if students must express ‘satisfaction’ with your teaching in order for you to receive tenure, it doesn’t really matter if you make assignments easier so everyone gets a good grade, or provide a huge amount of office hours to ensure students are fully prepped for the assignment. As long as at the end of the day they are ‘satisfied’ (I realise I have equated satisfaction with grades but given the cost of education at LSE, many feel that they are buying their qualifications, ergo satisfaction/grade are probably closely related).

In this way Ball argues that this is a new form of control, “controlled de-control”. But, perhaps at this point, 15 years on from the original article, the control is already embedded in the social representations of what it means to teach, or even to exist within the sphere of higher education. As Ball also notes, the standards and accountabilities in higher education are often changing, or not clearly spelt out. As such, when PhD students recoil from critiquing the system perhaps that’s the sensible thing to do. Therefore the ‘technicians of behaviour’ are no longer needed, the architecture of behavioural control is already embedded in the minds of the next generation.

Today we may argue one thing, and 5 years from now the thing we argued for is akin to arguing for Eugenics, as some ‘scholars’ still do. So, if the aim is to succeed within the current system then the crucial thing might be to not argue for anything and just follow the emerging status quo.

We must also consider that in general any PhD student, or academic for that matter, has been successful in the education system as it is. How can we then offer credible critique? The system works for us, why would we want to change it?

When I was younger and trying to find myself, I got clued up to a phrase which I try to use as a personal motto – “if you make an observation, you have an obligation”. That pretty much means if you see something wrong you should say or do something. I see that many aspects of higher education are problematic, for instance, the fact that out of 16,000 professors in the UK only 85 were black in 2015, that science is gendered, that people from backgrounds like mine are more likely to be in prison, than in higher education.

So, I will personally try to break down barriers and one of the easiest ways to do that is to tell LSE to its face that, despite all of the great minds, it’s still not smart enough to figure out how to be fair and equitable either in student acceptances, attainment or as an employer. Similarly, it has not yet been radical in re-imagining what higher education should look like, instead, like others it simply chases the ‘Terrors of Performativity’.

Just another cool pic – don’t know the artist this time 😦

I now know that if I want to be involved in the changes that might bring about an end to the issues I’ve discussed then doing it as a ‘PhD’ probably won’t work, after all, as Audre Lorde (1984) famously said, ‘The Masters Tools will never Dismantle the Masters House’ and to be honest a PhD student is the ‘masters’ key tool. Maybe then we cannot entrust the future of higher education to future academics, perhaps it should be students, or employers, or someone else, but whoever it is, it probably shouldn’t be us.

References

Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. http://doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043065

Lorde, A. (1984). The Masters Tools will never dismantle the masters house. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (pp. 110–114). Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.

Moscovici, S. (1988). Notes towards a description of Social Representations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 18(3), 211–250. http://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420180303