Chapter 1: Academic freedom and institutional autonomy – the concepts
3. Conceptual grid
3.4 The „embedded‟ version of academic freedom – Quadrant Four
location of the pursuit of knowledge as the discovery of truth has been called into question. Instead, knowledge is seen as having its source in a multiplicity of contexts and as having the character not of a body of immutable truths but provisional understanding that is applicable in those contexts. There are considered to be many knowledges and the university‟s role in knowledge production is regarded as necessarily being responsive to constructing and developing those local knowledges rather than propagating a particular canon of works embodying established truth. The university also becomes one of a multiplicity of knowledge producers – local communities, giant corporations, research centres – and thus loses the special status accorded it in the other quadrants, Two and Three especially, as a protected site for the pursuit of knowledge through the application of the principle of academic freedom.
A second fundamental difference with Quadrants One and Three, is an emphasis on positive freedom and in this paradigm, words such as “empowerment”, “development”,
“reskilling”, “facilitation” and “enabling” are definitive. Knowledge as a particular canon to be imparted is replaced as a concept by the elevating of previously subjugated local knowledges which are co-constructed in dynamic partnerships between academics and local communities for the express purpose of the empowerment of those individuals and the upliftment of those communities. Freedom consists in the empowerment outcome of the co-creation or co-construction of knowledge, not in being left alone to pursue one‟s own ends. This is the ethical impulse in postmodernism. Partly too, as a result of globalising forces, extreme individuality in academic work in this quadrant begins to give way to a greater occurrence of working in teams and partnerships. Academic freedom is closely bound up, not with solipsism, but engagement with a variety of actors and communities, a deeply reflexive criticality that is also constructive in terms of working towards ends shared by society as a whole.
A third difference relates to the permeability of the institution and its embeddedness in a plural and very diverse society. Universities in a global world are part of extremely complex network societies, acting in response to and actively influencing a whole range of external factors – constraints, influences and stimuli – whether these be market-led, state-led, knowledge-driven or simply nodes of energy in an ever-expanding and multi- layered network. Given new roles for universities in this quadrant, as global knowledge producers, or entrepreneurs, or the fuel of an increasingly technological world in
producing high-level technological knowledge and human capital, or as catalysts in the co-construction of local knowledges, or all of these simultaneously, the context in which they are embedded defines the extent and the limits of academic freedom in quite different ways from the other quadrants. In this quadrant, there can be no academic freedom without democracy and without a confluence of values and ends between the institutions and the major organs of national, regional and, to some extent, international society. Democracy is generally a precondition for academic freedom in the other quadrants too (although of course academic freedom as a concept predates democracy), but there is less risk involved. It is possible, for instance, to imagine academic freedom as in Quadrant One in a non-democratic society, as long as academics are left alone to teach and research in a protected space. The conceptions of academic freedom, and institutional autonomy, in Quadrant Four offer the best possibility of the most amount of freedom but at the same time, because of the very openness and permeability of the institutions, are subject to the greatest risk.
Indeed, Quadrant Four is all about risk. There is the risk of losing academic identity, of no longer holding a near-monopoly on knowledge production, being one player among many, of increasing privatisation. There is the risk of increasing compliance to external demands, from the state, from the markets, from a whole new range of quasi-state quality agencies, from funding bodies, from multi-nationals determining the research agenda. In this regard, there is the risk of Lyotard‟s “performativity-principle” (discussed at length in Chapter Four) becoming the prevailing value. Lyotard‟s argument is that with the advance of technology, knowledge has itself become a technology, subject to performativity rather than truth tests. Its value is not in whether it is true but how efficient and effective it is “in achieving the best possible input/output equation.”79 Performativity supplants the pursuit of truth (the legitimating idea underlying the institution in the other quadrants) and, as he writes, “Idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation are abandoned in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today‟s financial bankers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.”80
79 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p.46.
80 Ibid. p.46.
In a benign society, where all players are concerned to achieve similar ends in an open and relatively “unfettered” way, the scope of academic freedom and institutional autonomy is broad, with groups of academics forging external partnerships in pursuit of the betterment of the whole. But the risk involved here is of one set of players becoming dominant and irreparably altering academic work and academic identities. In Quadrant Four, the state-institution relationship is quite different as the state, society and institutions are no longer seen as separate institutions but as part of the general whole.
The general understanding in this quadrant, though this is contentious, is that the nation- state is weak and permeable too, being subject to globalising forces and is not, therefore, in a position to act as a protector of academic freedom or a facilitator thereof.
At the same time, it may, certainly in developing countries, in attempting to cope with a myriad of local and global challenges, become an exploiter of its academic institutions for its own ends. Without a concept of a protected institutional space, universities are open to both benign and malevolent external forces.
For that reason, there is a shadow over Quadrant Four in the matrix diagram; this indicates the possibility of both the greatest amount of freedom and the greatest amount of “unfreedom”. Giddens points out that in a globalising world, cosmopolitans welcome openness and difference but the very fabric of society can be utterly changed where that difference is experienced as threat and feeds fundamentalism and violence.81 In ways perhaps more than ever before, academic freedom and institutional autonomy have become inseparable from the nature of the fabric of the wider society in which universities are embedded.
Roots
The roots of this particular version lie in the postmodern movement, and while not all positions within this Quadrant are necessarily postmodernist, certainly the concept of knowledge underlying it derives therefrom. The epistemological challenge arises in the
81 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives, London, Profile Books, 1999, pp.6-19.
main from postmodernist thinkers82 writing mainly from the perspective of first world institutions, and this is discussed further in Chapter Four.
Theories of globalisation too, the subject of Chapter Six, inform the understanding in this quadrant, in that they posit both external and internal influences on academic life, identities and work that are reshaping it fundamentally, from technological advances in communication, changes in funding patterns for higher education, changes in institutional organisation and the way in which they are managed. Deem sums up four main concepts in use in globalisation theories as follows:
The first of these is globalisation (that is, the global spread of business and services as well as key economic, social and cultural practices to a world market, often through multi-national companies and the internet). The second concept is of internationalisation (the sharing of ideas, knowledge and ways of doing things in similar ways across different countries). The third concept is the ideology of new managerialism, that is, the extent to which contemporary business practices and private sector ideas or values have permeated publicly funded institutions and work practices. The fourth concept is of entrepreneurialism in higher education, where academics and administrators explicitly seek out new ways of raising private sector funds through enterprising activities such as consultancies and applied research.83
As she writes, however, “the question of whether globalisation and internationalisation of universities lead to greater diversity in higher education, or greater convergence, is still unresolved.”84
Amid all these conditions of uncertainty and change, and what Barnett has termed
“supercomplexity”, the role of the university and, indeed, its very existence, is the subject of much debate and contestation.85 Barnett outlines six conditions in a situation of great conditionality that universities will need to fulfil to be “realized” in an age of supercomplexity. These are:
82 I have used “postmodernism” quite loosely and broadly to include poststructuralism. Such thinkers include Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault (who is not in all respects a postmodernist but on whose work postmodernists draw).
83 Rosemary Deem, “Globalisation, new managerialism, academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism in universities: is the local dimension still important?”, Comparative Education, 37 (1) 2001, p.7.
84 Ibid. p.8.
85 Ronald Barnett, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Ballmoor, Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press, 2000.
Critical interdisciplinarity. Universities need to engage with uncertainty and in order to do so, they need to be structured such that fresh perspectives are likely to emerge. In this sense, the structural support for interdisciplinary responses is important. Disciplinarity and intersdisciplinarity are the subjects of Chapter Five.
Collective self-scrutiny. Barnett argues that supercomplexity requires reflexivity, and the university should not be engaged in collective self-evaluation and self- regulation only as a move to keep out the evaluative state. Instead, it has a responsibility to be constantly engaged in this type of activity in order to generate new perspectives for its activities. This theme is discussed in Chapters Four, Six, and Seven.
Purposive renewal. While universities need to engage in conversations of strategic planning and their positioning vis-à-vis its local, national and global competitors, and to identify and exploit new opportunities, these conversations need constantly to be re-interrogated. In a supercomplex world, statements of strategic purpose only have short-term relevance.
Moving borders. Barnett argues that in the postmodern university, borders, boundaries and demarcations are impermanent and constantly challenged.
Academic identities have to be formed across both epistemic and bureaucratic domains in a situation of constant change.
Engagement. Barnett argues that the university needs to engage with multiple communities, other producers of knowledge and other clients, in order to fulfil the role of producing diverse and contending perspectives.
Communicative tolerance. For Barnett, the university in an age of supercomplexity has to maximise opportunities for different voices to have a hearing. This is where freedom of expression becomes important. Barnett argues that “the university is saturated with organizational and epistemic power: many staff feel diffident about expressing themselves. Indeed, the „modern‟ university regards silence as a sign of both high morale and that the university is operating
„efficiently‟. The supercomplex university, on the other hand, will go out of its way to offer space to all to express themselves without feeling unduly vulnerable”. 86
86 Ronald Barnett, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Ballmoor, Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press, 2000, pp.104-110.
Barnett‟s conditions are echoed in Griffin‟s understanding of autonomy, which fits well in this quadrant. She writes:
Both learner and teacher are involved in a reconceptualisation of values, including the value of autonomy. Autonomy is not a „once-off‟ achievement, but develops in dynamic relation to the social practices and values which may inhibit or develop it, and the individual needs and desires which may fuel it. It is not to be gained from some abstract Enlightenment form of reason but could come about through the kind of reason Dewey calls social intelligence, and Aristotle called phronesis: a form of practical reasoning which requires collective deliberation about the relative attractions of various courses of action.87
In summary, given the embeddedness of universities in society, the key to freedom and autonomy lies in the openness of that engagement with a multiplicity of communities, difficult as it becomes to define which are internal and which external, and the “collective deliberation” about ways to construct knowledge and social reality.
Relationship of institution to state and society
In this version, as noted above, the university is embedded in society, and the lines between society and state are blurred at best. The state is the embodiment of society and the university is one among many bodies responsive to those needs with a function to further them, although not in a simple utilitarian way. The change in the status of knowledge has a direct implication in changing the role of the university from an autonomous institution that furthers the pursuit of truth to a much more functional institution concerned with increasing its performativity. It no longer has a special place in relation to the state, but is embedded within the broader society as one among many knowledge producers. The nation-state too, is different from in the other quadrants, as in a globalising world the extent to which nation-states are still able to exercise sovereignty is open to debate. Universities in this quadrant, are, however, important contributors to the construction of new knowledges.
87 Anne Griffin, “Knowledge under attack: consumption, diversity and the need for values”, in Barnett, R. and Griffin, A. (eds), The End of Knowledge in Higher Education, London, Cassell, 1997, p.3.
Main metaphors
In this quadrant, boundaries or „gentlemen‟s agreements‟ do not apply as they presuppose separate relatively autonomous entities. While metaphors in use to describe the relationships in this quadrant are usually related to networks, and these are useful, I have thought of this more as a societal alphabet soup – the parts are related to each other, just as letters of the alphabet are, but they can either be totally chaotic or combine to make meaning in a myriad different ways. Furthermore, chaos and meaning can coexist.