Dr Graham Downes Academic freedom: often used, not always understood; frequently contested, not always discussed; long history, chequered past.
Today the phrase 'academic freedom' is often used interchangeably with ‘freedom of speech’ but historically (and legally) they are not the same thing. Academic freedom actually refers to academics' ability to go about their work (teaching and research) free from interference. There are grey areas too: it is not clear whether this freedom extends to areas of life beyond an academic’s area of expertise. Does a clinical psychologist have a right to criticise a government’s involvement in foreign conflicts? Or, more pertinently, to criticise the fees set by their university? The 1988 Education Reform Act cleared up some of these issues and did explicitly state that academics do have the right to criticise their own institutions governance but almost no cases have come to light that challenge this, which further muddies the water in a case law system. I have mixed feelings about the concept of academic freedom, particularly in relation to issues of social justice. On the one hand it appears to be an important tool against an increasingly litigious and instrumental society where speaking differently to the dominant discourse seems to become more and more difficult - to speak truth to power if you will. This is particularly so in the field of social research where an increasing preoccupation with risk appears (anecdotally at least) to be pushing researchers away from difficult projects that may contain challenging messages for certain parties. On the other hand, academic freedom could be seen to provide a haven for those engaging in poor and bullying behaviour. A survey in early 2018 revealed the shocking level of sexism and harassment in universities internationally. And we should note that this behaviour appears to go largely unchallenged. The case of Avital Ronell is particularly prescient. An academic superstar, she was suspended by New York University for sexually harassing one of her postgraduate students. But far from her actions being opened up to critical examination, she was supported by a number of internationally established academics whose primary defence of her was her academic esteem. Somehow, a well-established academic profile appears to provide reason for immunity from everyday accusations of improper behaviour. These reflections lead me to an almost disconcertingly straightforward solution. Academic freedom is an important principle for those conducting research but I can see no good reason why academics should have an elevated legal status in their everyday lives, particularly in the classroom. What is poor behaviour by one teacher is poor behaviour to all. This is particularly so given the potentially asymmetric power relationship that exists between teacher and student, which can make it difficult for students to speak out against unjust behaviour. Such a message will jar with many academics that will see it as an attack on critical thought. But as, Bruno Latour once lamented, ‘should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here?’ I’m making a slightly different, but connected, point to Latour. He was opining the demise of criticality because it was a method that had been opened up to to those beyond academia to the point where no truth was possible. The sheer number of people waiting to deconstruct all statements of truth led to a situation where the only truth was ‘non-truth’ (the kind of argument often levelled at social media!). But, I argue, academia is central to this worldview and, because we are in the vanguard of criticality, paradoxically we usually become disembodied in the critical process. It seems that the only group not subjected to criticality are the custodians of the critical project themselves. In effect we have become invisible to the very act of criticality. For those like Latour, this is a big problem because it removes our ability to impose an emphatic critical voice on social contexts. But the filter works both ways: academics are also invisible to critical voices from beyond the walls of academia. And, academia itself only engages in a peculiar type of disembodied criticality, one that does not reduce to the level of the individual actions of its authors. This type of disembodied criticality is well suited to research activities that, after all, seek to generate some kind of truth by moving from the more specific to the more general (Latour would argue that the problem of establishing such truths is a problem in itself), but it is not suited to the dissemination of the outcomes of such truth seeking activities such as teaching. In the spirit of social justice, I propose here that voice and recognition are essential elements of any reasonable human interaction and no situation should omit the possibility for fair and equal interaction between actors in a way that allows all to speak and be heard. What about the autonomy of universities? Is it not desirable, even essential, that such institutions are free from external interventions such as from the state? Should we not be striving to ensure that any established truths maintain some kind of impartial credibility, free from external ideological forces? This point I agree with, which leads me to assert that we should strive to protect the established principles of academic work such as peer review. In particular, academia should never be subjected to externally established curricula. But protecting research should be enough to secure this. As long as academics have a right to carry out research, free from interference, and have the right to disseminate this research within their universities in a similar vein, there should be no need for additional legal protection for the act of teaching. After all, if we are not teaching the outcomes of our research, what are we teaching?
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By Dr Beth Mitchell
Sokal’s famous paper, detailed in his book, The Hoax, was a swipe at postmodernism and complacency in publishing. Although Sokal was a self-proclaimed novice in the field, he managed to get past peer-reviewers with a paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal 2010). Neuroscientist Della Salla (2007), also a myth-buster, is equally sceptical and dismissive of the postmodernist turn, particularly the more radical writing that leaves scholars and laypeople alike, baffled. So why do scholars in education and social justice bother with all this fluffy nonsense that most people find impenetrable? My argument is that postmodern and post-structural theories perform an important role in society by scratching the surface of language, discourse and practice. They provide us with a means to articulate the interconnectedness and fluidity of a fast-moving society, pushed on by the relentless march of technology and its ability to record, store and present more and more information. The computer age has developed immeasurably within my lifetime. We are now in an era of ‘big data’, where countless amounts of data can be collected and stored at the click of a button. This has made it easier to measure ‘improvements’, to monitor and compare outcomes for schools, hospitals, businesses and so on. Technological advances have facilitated the spread of ‘performativity’, a way of judging progress and excellence through number-crunching. Whilst there may be much merit in being able to demonstrate positive change on a mass scale, we must also be cautious about how this can also promote reductionist approaches to research. Statistics can be misleading by claiming ‘truths’ that sound credible and robust, and go on to be developed into slogans and discourses (Munday 2010). So how can the meandering ululations of radical post-modern linguistics and the like protect us from the threat of reductionism and performativity? The battle between empiricism and theory resounds, but perhaps those who work in the (battle)field of education can hear something in the clashing of swords. By accepting numbers as facts we are perhaps building a film-set, flimsy and insubstantial, behind which nothing resides; or perhaps it’s turtles all the way down? (Hawking and Jackson 1993). Two-dimensional discourses may be invisible from the side, but this can make them all the more cutting; consider Trump’s Tweets for example. Arguably unimaginative, crass, inelegant perhaps, but unfortunately, resonant. Perhaps the result is that we build a flat, cardboard world that means nothing. In terms of education, this represents the importance of continuously questioning and critiquing the substance of education, to ensure the result is a society with firm foundations. By continuing along a trajectory of ‘improvement’ and ‘excellence’ we run the risk of pushing things forward without investigating ethics, morals and inequalities; this is a serious problem in education that appears to be sliding backwards into decreasing social mobility and a greater gap between the haves and the have-nots. We need to be sceptical of the sceptics, or we can easily end up in Trump’s world, where long words are useless. References Della Sala, S. 2007, Tall tales about the mind and brain: Separating fact from fiction, Oxford University Press. Hawking, S. and Jackson, M., 1993. A brief history of time. Munday, I., 2010. Performativity, statistics and bloody words. In Educational Research-the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics (pp. 177-188). Springer, Dordrecht. Sokal, A. 2010, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture: Science, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford University Press. By Dr Cassie Earl
The questions that interest me in this area are; How do we work with activists and activism in educational research? And, How do we keep a sense of hope? Within this work, it is my assertion that in this current climate of partial nihilism and hopelessness particularly pertinent to the study of change through education and social movements, are these notions from Arundhati Roy and John Holloway respectively: ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing’ Arundhati Roy ‘The world that does not yet exist displays itself as a world that exists not-yet’ John Holloway One of the first questions that came to my mind when thinking about writing this post concerned why we think of activists as people other than ourselves? When I say ourselves, I am specifically talking about an ‘us’ that includes researchers, and of course, therefore, teachers. There are many different definitions of ‘activist’ from different disciplinary perspectives and political stances, however, as teachers and researchers what we are actually doing is ‘taking action’ to ‘shape the future’ and how we do that could allow us to (self-)identify as activists. Many people think like this, have a read, for example, of Shantz (2013); Amsler (2011); Neary (2012); Neary and Amsler (2012); Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias (2007); Crowther et al. (2005); Edu-Factory Collective (2014) and many, many others. But the tendency in activist research is to posit an ‘us and them’ positionality: ‘us’, the researchers, and ‘them’, the activists, particularly in traditional social movement studies. However, within the community of those scholars of popular education, critical pedagogies, and often critical education more generally, these boundaries between activist and researcher/academic - which were always quite blurred - have begun to blur more and more. The question raised here is whether we can think of education itself as a form of activism and if so, who are the communities with which we should work? Some go even further than thinking of ‘education’ as a form of activism, for example Amsler et al. (2010); Chrysochou and Earl (2015); Earl (2018); Neary (2011); Neary and Amsler (2012); and Giroux (2001) ask whether knowledge in itself can be a social movement of sorts. These authors, and others, do cite empirical evidence of this being a possibility, and the debate is both ongoing and emergent. These ideas raise some interesting questions around how we frame activism and whether those activists we seek to research can, in fact, be us? In my own work I have researched social movements, and particularly learning in social movements, from an outsider perspective, my positionality here has always been one of Denzin’s (2010) critical secretary, or to go further the conceptualisation of not outsider, but not insider either, from Kincheloe and Berry (2004) and Kincheloe and Tobin (2006), wherein the researcher works, as activist in their own right, in solidarity with the social movement to assist in the creation of a form of praxis between the two. This positioning takes courage and a disregard for any form of positivist thinking about objectivity, validity, or reliability of the research, but requires rigour, criticality and often a critical distance from the immediacy of social action to analyse events. I have found that an excellent methodology for working in this way is Bricolage, mainly conceptualised by Kincheloe and Berry (2004) and formulated through thinking in the areas of popular education and critical pedagogy: the twins of radical and emancipatory pedagogies. Bricolage allows the researcher to work with activist communities through a range of methodological negotiations, encouraging forms of auto-ethnography to sit alongside case-study, or action research; critical ethnography and narrative inquiry. Methods are negotiated by the ‘research community’, which consists of all those involved in the co-production, co-creation, and co-imagination of knowledge and the possibilities of futures we would like to live. Bricolage is an intimately hopeful and future orientated methodology as it allows the blossoming of the imaginative and fictive elements, that are inherent in all research, but teased out and made apparent in Bricolage. This assists work with activist communities, whether we see them as ‘us’ or ‘them’, as the research community is able to engage in ‘mutually useful conversation’ (Earl 2017) to ensure that a praxis of change is born through the research, making it socially useful and an action of activism itself. My work with, and in, activism has always been around two areas: educational activism and anti-capitalist movements specifically. I have not engaged very much with identity politics but see these as a part of the same struggle, understanding that identity politics must be anti-capitalist in their own way due to the notion that to prevent all forms of oppression seen today, and for the last few hundred years, there is an ever more urgent need for all these movements and struggles to collectively become (where they are not already) anti-capitalist. This is because the capitalist ideology creates the very divisions and oppressions that people fight against on a variety of different platforms. This was clearly understood by people in the US Civil Rights movement and Black Panthers, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Huey Newton, as well as by many feminist movements around the globe, for example. This means that there is much work to be done in education, on activism as a form of action that can change the world and tease out education’s part in this, and what people learn from being involved. Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about the academic community as activists, particularly when it comes to the act of teaching, research is a form of teaching as well as the more traditional idea of the teacher, but that is for another post… Amsler, S. (2011) Beyond All Reason: Spaces of Hope and Struggle for England's Universities. Representations, 116, 90-114. Amsler, S., Canaan, J., Cowden, S., Motta, S. & Singh, G. eds. (2010) Why Critical Pedagogy and Popular Education Matter Today, Birmingham: Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. Casas-Cortes, M. & Cobarrubias, S. (2007) Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine. In: S. Shukaitis, D. Graeber & E. Biddle eds. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization. Edinburgh, Oakland: AKPress, 112-126. Chrysochou, P. & Earl, C. (2015) Community Education for Social Change: Critical Education as a Social Movement. In: T. Castilla ed. Planes y Programas para la Mejora de la Convivencia en Contextos Educativos y Sociales: Diseño, Desarrollo y Evaluación. Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands: Wolters Kluwer, Crowther, J., Galloway, V. & Martin, I. (2005) Introduction: Radicalising Intellectual Work. In: J. Crowther, V. Galloway & I. Martin eds. Popular Education: Engaging the Academy, International Perspectives. Liecester: National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, 1-10. Denzin, N. K. (2010) The Qualitative Manifesto: A Call to Arms. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press Inc. Earl, C. (2017) The Researcher as Cognitive Activist and the Mutually Useful Conversation. Power & Education, 9(2), 129-144. Earl, C. (2018) Spaces of Political Pedagogy: Occupy! and Other Experiments in Radical Adult Education. London, New York: Routledge. Edu-Factory Collective. (2014) Edu-Factory: Conflicts and Transformation of the University [Online]. Online: http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/about/. [Accessed 13.03.2014]. Giroux, H. (2001) Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy of the Opposition. Westport, CT, London: Bergin and Garvey. Holloway, J. (2010) Crack Capitalism. London, New York: Pluto Press. Kincheloe, J. L. & Berry, K. S. (2004) Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualizing the Bricolage. Maidenhead, New York: Open University Press. Kincheloe, J. L. & Tobin, K. (2006) Doing Educational Research in a Complex World. In: J. L. Kincheloe & K. Tobin eds. Doing Educational Research: A Handbook. Rotterdam, Taipei: Sense Publishers, 1-14. By Dr Graham Downes and Dr Beth Mitchell
‘There should not be more things dreamt of in my philosophy than there are in heaven or earth’. Nelson Goodman All too often, problems in education fall back onto teachers. The deficit ideas of poor communication, lack of innovation, and lack of impact, often lead to solutions being proposed, such as extra training courses. The growing emphasis on ‘what works’, improvement science, measuring impact, and other discourses associated with performativity, can lead to unintended consequences such as the de-professionalization of teachers. In terms of social justice, teachers are given short shrift, accused of lacking skills that can be measured, overriding experience and professional judgement. Perhaps the solution is less to do with filling in perceived cracks, and more to do with how we conceptualise causality in education. To shift away from current notions of mechanistic, technological cause and effect in education, one might draw from medicine and epidemiology to shift the thinking from ‘impact’ to ‘risk’. Causality has become something of a dirty word in in the philosophy of science. As van Imwagen observed, causation is a 'horrible little word…. a morass in which I for one refuse to set foot. Or not unless I am pushed' (van Inwagen, 1983: 65). Explaining the term has been associated with complications and contradictions for many years, at least as far back as David Hume’s infamous ‘riddle of induction’. Correlations between observed events do not necessarily mean that there is a causal connection between them. Causation, Hume concluded, was ultimately a matter for common sense. In the sciences writ large, the tendency has been to shun the word, leaving it to the domain of folk theory in favour of the pursuit of a more sophisticated scientific language that does not include causation. The term has also all but disappeared from the various methodologies that constitute the social sciences. Often associated with ‘instrumental rationality’ and ‘positivism’ the term is placed in opposition to more normative, ideographic methodologies that foreground understanding and insights into complex worlds. The fields of education and healthcare often borrow ideas from each other. As mentioned before, one of the drivers for this is being public sector bodies. Both fields require a high level of accountability for public spending and reporting to government. Both rely on the justification of budget allocation and the demands for evidence to support decisions that will channel resources into effective strategies. Both fields also rely on similar approaches for evidence-based practice. However, whilst this might be considered appropriate for randomised control trials (RCT) for developing new medicines, this hierarchy falls short when researching more sociocultural interactions that take place in both healthcare and education. In healthcare, causality is traditionally associated with discourses of evidence-based practice, randomised controlled trials and more recently, evaluation through realist approaches, sometimes referred to as ‘what works’ (Pawson and Tilley, Greenhaghl, Dixon-Woods). Evidence hierarchy reinforces the status of more scientific and systematic approaches to healthcare research, with the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recently declaring a moratorium on non-scientific articles. Extending this critique, it has been argued that the positivistic, scientific paradigms are not always the most appropriate ways to research healthcare. A case in point would be the Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC). In a recent review, it was argued that nine years of empirical research has accumulated, but has brought us no closer to answering the question of the efficacy of the SSC in terms of morbidity and mortality. Repeatedly, the studies cited multifactorial effects, some of which are sociocultural in nature. This, along with an open letter to the BMJ protesting against its decision not to publish non-scientific articles, highlights the need for approaches that challenge the input/output, pre/post, before and after, scientific empirical approaches that inform so much research in this area. The conceptualisation of causation in epidemiology has long been countered with more descriptive accounts. Harman makes the case from Latour that causal chains cannot be abstracted from other actors (in epidemiology this might be referred to as ‘context’). There is also the argument that these chains are stuck together by other actants (for example, in Pandora’s Hope, Latour describes how Joliot connected policy and atoms). As a consequence, Harman argues that connections always have something else in-between. This conceptualisation of causality presents causality as ‘vicarious’ (mediated through other actors), ‘buffered’ (not in direct contact) and ‘asymmetrical’ (some actants are considered more important than others). In addition to this, is the idea that ‘cause’ does not directly lead to ‘effect’ and that there are many other possibilities that are not realised. Law refers to this as ‘collateral realities’. These could be abstract or concrete. For example, Nietzche’s writing machine was a typewriter in the shape of a ball, which was designed for its transportability, but looks nothing like later typewriters and keyboards. The big ‘so what’ in all of this is that, although it is recognised that current approaches fall short of what is needed in healthcare and education (and this is a widely held view given the number of signatures on the open letter to the BMJ) it is still difficult to articulate causality in any other way when it comes to empirical research design. One area that has come to the fore more recently, and certainly in the field of epidemiology is counterfactual theory. Initially developed by early theorists such as Nelson Goodman, the approach attempts to work with a subset of distinctive conditionals in which the antecedent is always false (in many cases the consequent can also be false but this is not necessary). Cohnitz and Rossberg (2006) use the following example of a counterfactual: if the match had been struck, it would have lit. Here both the antecedent and consequent are false: neither the match was struck nor did it light. Interestingly, despite both being false, the relationship between antecedent and consequent is inferred as positive (when one occurs, so will the other). Counterfactual theorists have tended to highlight the causal dispositions of objects rather than their causal properties. Dispositions refer to inner states of things and, specifically, about the possible states of any given object (Goodman, 1983). This is similar but not necessarily the same as a property of an object. For example, a disposition of the match is that it is flammable whilst a related property (predicate) of the object could be that it is alight. For Goodman, the problem here is: under which circumstance is it acceptable to extend dispositions as possible properties? For example, under what conditions is it acceptable to extend the disposition of the match ‘flammable’ to the property of the match ‘alight’? Goodman’s solution to this problem is to redefine dispositions as projectable properties of objects. Such accounts of counterfactual causality are predicated on a very different set of assumptions to those that underpin regularity theories of causality. These assumptions emanated from the modal realist (many worlds) theory that was developed by David Lewis. The key axioms of modal realism are thus:
(Lewis, 2001) What is distinctive about Lewis’ model is the equal status is gives to our world (actual) and all possible worlds (real). In other words, all possible worlds are as real as our world. The problem is that, when one considers all possible states of all possible objects, the number of possible worlds is almost infinite. Goodman’s work addresses this problem by utilising the notion of manifest predicates. With reference to Liebnitz, not all such dispositions are projectable into the future: some dispositions are necessary (true in all worlds) whilst others are possible (true in at least one). Thus the match is flammable because it is burning in at least one world, even if it is not burn in our actual world. This leads to issues of projectability i.e. how projectable dispositions are into future events. Many counterfactual methods therefore have a strong link with theories of probability as researchers attempt to establish the various combinations of projectable dispositions and their likelihood of occurring. So how does this deeply theoretical discusion manifest itself within the world of research and educational research in particular? One aspect of research that we have noticed is that different fields of study have different tolerances to counterfactuals. One interesting aspect of this milieu is the way these tolerances shift depending on the discursive framing of the original problem. In particular, we have noticed that approaches that focus on ‘risk’ (amelioration) have a propensity towards counterfactual models whilst those that focus on ‘impact’ (affirmative intervention) tend to shift towards regularity models. If we are to believe Foucault, the reasons for these propensities are deeply rooted in the history of discursive formations. In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault maps out the historical development of French medical practices that evolved around the centralising process of ‘the gaze’ (the shift from religious conceptualisations of truth to the revelatory capacities of the human eye and a process of watching. Foucault goes on to establish the empowering nature of the gaze in Discipline and Punish: the gaze establishes timeless and unbounded truth; to gaze is to assume a position akin to omniscience. As Foucault observes, this discourse is integral to medical practices and is inexorably linked to the emergence of the concept of a state, as medical research extended into the realm of the social through projects to stop the spread of diseases. But the gaze is also timeless: it gives license to see all possibilities devoid of time and hence the propensity towards counterfactuals. A quick look through any introductory text on epidemiology reveals the foregrounding of the concept within the discipline. For those examining the spread of disease, the question of other possibilities is entwined with the various interventions being considered. This opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of opportunities, causal chains and the causes of non-events (e.g. the white ball caused the red ball not to move because it hit the yellow ball that would have otherwise hit the red ball). Conversely, to be gazed upon is to be the object rather than sense maker. To act is a weaker form of truth than to watch, to ‘do’ requires judgement from the knowing gaze of another. And herein lies the difference: the prima facie unit of difference in education is the teacher/educator and their effect on other minds, whereas the prima facie object of difference in medicine is disease and its effect on the human body. And they are treated in qualitatively different ways- the apparent agency of the teacher converts into an excessive focus on singular casual relationships, which, in turn, generates a qualitatively different type of discourse. A good example of this is the work of John Hattie (2017). Celebrated for his use of ‘big data’, Hattie plots the influences and effect sizes related to student achievement. Top of his league table is collective teacher efficacy-the collective belief of teachers that they can have a positive impact on pupil attainment. This appears to be an affirming message -all teachers can create positive outcomes through their own self belief- and it certainly resonates with wider liberal assumptions about the nature of the individual and their social responsibilities. But this approach also serves to largely omit the possibilities for counterfactual explanations of pupil attainment. Hattie’s model is often interpreted through the lens of regularity theory- a rule that teacher attitudes generate positive outcomes in terms of attainment. A counterfactual approach would suggest this is unlikely given the significant number of additional causal elements, often constituted as causal chains, which can possibly have an impact on the interactions between teacher and pupil. This is as much the product of the filtering of Hattie’s findings as it is of Hattie’s work itself as educators and policy makers look to apply data in ways that have an impact on educational contexts. So maybe we in education can learn a little from epidemiology in particular. Maybe we should focus a little more on ameliorating the multiple risks to education attainment and less on single interventions and impact. It may not have the rhetorical attraction that a focus on individual actions has but it may just produce more effective results. Bibliography Cohnitz, D. and Rossberg, M. (2006) Nelson Goodman. Philosophy now. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Goodman, N. (1983) Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Harvard University Press. Hattie, J. (2018) Hattie Ranking: 252 Influences And Effect Sizes Related To Student Achievement. [Online] Available from: https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/ [Accessed 26 May 2018]. Hume, D. (1752) Political discourses (Google eBook). Lewis, D. (2001) On the Plurality of Worlds. [online]. Wiley. Usher, R. (1996) Understanding Education Research. In: David Scott & R. Usher (eds.). Understanding Educational Research. pp. : 9–32. doi:10.4324/9780203131923. By Lindsey K. Horner
This post starts with a question I penned to myself at a public seminar on the university recently: What if we deconstruct the university only to discover there is nothing there worth reconstructing? It’s a provocative and playful question, it got a laugh when I asked it. And, of course I don’t believe there won’t be anything worth reconstructing in all that rubble. Outwardly I’m a little dark, pessimistic by nature, but really I’m one of those unlikely optimists. Regardless of the mess I see about me I choose to hope, because it’s a conscious emotion and because I like a challenge. While my question gets a laugh, it hides a lot of issues to think about. What is the current state of our universities? What is of value in them? How do we change the status quo? And this isn’t just an insular question or a practice in naval gazing, the state of the university has ramifications on all of us as it shapes society’s knowledge and power structures. Its recent failures and lack of accountability have arguably played their part in a rise of anti-expert sentiment, where the general public who are not necessarily educated in the Philosophy of Science rely on journalists to translate opaque knowledge into bite-size nuggets, only to find out that scholarship isn’t as straightforward or certain as the interested media like to suggest. Compelling evidence is turned into ‘proof’ and nuanced solutions into ‘silver bullets’ via newspaper headlines, only for the silver bullets to fail and the proof to fall apart (inevitably as they never were those things to begin with). And the academics aren’t innocent in this. Peddling this idea that we know better (rather than differently) our dazzling tricks and smoke and mirrors only fall apart when eventually people see through them. Academics need to take some accountability for the perceived failure of liberal progressivism and the current rise of populism as we are part of the liberal elite who failed. And we failed arguably via exaggeration, with a little help from the media. When two-thirds of scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers' (Feilden 2017) they are not even meeting their own self-imposed criteria for validity. We have the infamous PACE trial on using CBT and graded exercise therapy to treat Myalgic Encephalomyelitis which changed its criteria for success mid-way through the trial and employed researchers who consulted to large insurance companies in a striking conflict of interest (Faulkner 2016). Junk science is littering our newspapers, for example the recent scandal over the politically motivated 2013 paper published in a peer reviewed journal against the welfare state which overstated some results by a factor of 10 (Morgan 2018). What I find even more concerning now however is a new-found taste for controversy for its own sake. I am not shy of controversy and am an advocate of political and academic freedom, however it should not be courted for sensationalism only. Take for example the recent furore over Third World Quarterly’s choice to publish the article: The case for Colonialism. To be clear here I am not objecting to the subject itself, though I disagree with the author he has a right to argue his point and those in the academic community who disagree have the right to strongly rebut it. However, apart from the headlining part of this story there is something else to consider, that allegedly the paper failed to meet the academic standards one would expect for publication in this high-ranking journal. If true the real reason the paper should have never been published has nothing to do with the offence of the paper’s content, but because it is full of inaccuracies and some accounts allege that it was rejected by the peer reviewers (e.g. Heleta 2017) . The article has been pulled from Third World Quarterly’s website so it is not possible to check on the rigour of scholarship, but Sooty Empiric raises some examples though they cannot be checked or verified now.. The peer review process is opaque and the editor’s reasons for publishing it are only known to them, however one might be forgiven for speculating that it was desirable as click bait? Unfortunately this is not the only case of seemingly courting controversy, some academics appear to be building careers on the back of being controversial, such as Esther Crawley who regularly speaks not on her research content, but on her controversial status. Again, to reiterate, controversial research is fine by me, if it’s controversial and good. In this instance we have a researcher who has just been promoted at a Russell group university who is arguably producing questionable science while smearing a marginalised disabled community. In part this crisis of trust in our academics and experts has been caused by the media misconstruing science for facts and over claiming, however academics aren’t rushing to correct them. And this is arguably because we now reside in an industry whose success, and financing, is measured by research excellence and impact criteria. The unintentional warping of scholarship which the Research Excellence Framework (REF) fuels counters the accountability rationale behind it. Through checking up on what Universities are doing with public funds – rightly so, wrong way to do it – the REF encourages researchers to churn out papers and prioritise research with measurable short-term impacts, which tends to impede innovation (Sayer 2014). While many academics entered the profession with a love of knowledge, theory and desire to make positive transformations through knowledge, we now find ourselves in a climate of competition, utilitarian thinking and revenue raising. So it’s not difficult to see when this is mixed with the darker human traits of pride and status that reside in us all, sometimes things go awry and people start pursuing a career rather than knowledge. Some academics may even be deceiving themselves that they need to play the game in order to get to a position where they can ‘make a difference’ – the most dangerous self-justifying delusion of them all. Did I say I was an optimist at the beginning of this post? Well I am. In true Foucauldian fashion I believe that once we realise there is nothing ’natural’ about the social phenomenon we experience then we have the freedom to change it. I don’t believe there will be nothing worth reconstructing after we deconstruct the university, I believe there’s plenty worth saving. And I believe that if we can deconstruct the current narratives about the university, then alternative discourses found in the history of the academy will have their day instead. For example the intention to employ knowledge and scholarship to combat urban poverty that was the founding principle of the UK’s London School of Economics (LSE); the autonomy of the university and it’s role as a social critic; and the unique contribution to knowledge from theory that the university is best positioned to deliver in order to help us view issues from different perspectives, because how we look at something in the first place will effect how we understand it. Of course, these alternative trajectories will only remain pipe dreams without concerted action and conscious hope. There are big challenges in our universities which obstruct these aspirations – from the promotion of the market-orientated university that prioritises disciplines with large income streams, to narrow criteria of success and the policing and disciplining role of the academic disciplines (the clue is in the name) in partnership with journal editors, funding bodies and the REF that arguably obstruct radical alternatives and innovation. But I take hope from small but sprouting innovations – the counter-hegemonic force universities sometimes play in Latin America that we can learn from and the collaborative work between civil society and NGOs we see in pockets of our universities, for example many of the AHRC Connected Communities funded projects. Reasons to be hopeful? Cautiously yes. Definitely there are possibilities to explore further in our new research group. |
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