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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