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Teaching in Higher Education
ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20
Argumentative and trustworthy scholars: the construction of academic staff at research- intensive universities
Sioux McKenna & Chrissie Boughey
To cite this article: Sioux McKenna & Chrissie Boughey (2014) Argumentative and trustworthy scholars: the construction of academic staff at research-intensive universities, Teaching in Higher Education, 19:7, 825-834, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2014.934351
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.934351
Published online: 07 Jul 2014.
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Argumentative and trustworthy scholars: the construction of academic staff at research-intensive universities
Sioux McKenna* and Chrissie Boughey
Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
(Received 6 September 2013; accepted 6 May 2014)
Research-intensive universities, such as the Russell Group in the UK, the Ivy League Colleges in the USA and the Sandstone Universities in Australia, enjoy particular status in the higher education landscape. They are, however, also often associated with social elitism and selectivity, and this has led to critique as higher education systems seek to widen access. This article looks at how academic staff are discursively constructed in five such institutions in South Africa through an analysis of docu- mentation submitted as part of a national review. Three interrelated discourses are identified: a discourse of ‘staff as scholars’ whereby research is privileged over teaching, a discourse of‘academic argumentation’ whereby a critical disposition is valued and is called upon by academics to resist development initiatives and a discourse of‘trust’whereby it is assumed that academics share a value system and should thus be trusted to undertake quality teaching without interference.
Keywords: research-intensive; academic identity; quality assurance; academic development
Introduction
Since the first democratic election in 1994, higher education policy work in South Africa has focused on the construction of a renewed system that will provide a quality education to all. Under apartheid, separate groups of institutions had been established to serve the different racial categories identified by apartheid ideology. A group of well-resourced institutions were developed to serve white racial groups. These differed from those developed for black students not only in relationship to their location and the quality of facilities but also in what they taught. Black universities aimed at suppressing black intellectuals by developing citizens who would serve society in the limited ways deemed appropriate by the state (Mamdani 1999). As a result, these institutions tended to be impoverished at the level of curriculum and also with regard to research production and the production of postgraduate students.
Since 2004, the 36 universities of the apartheid era have been reduced, through a series of mergers and incorporations, to 23, open to all regardless of social group.
Although the aim has been to produce an equal system, apartheid structuring continues to exercise enormous influence. As a result, what are now termed ‘historically black universities’, institutions established in rural ‘homelands’ or on the fringes of urban
*Corresponding author. Email:[email protected] Teaching in Higher Education,2014
Vol. 19, No. 7, 825–834, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.934351
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
settlements with minimal resources, continue to be the only option available to many black students for whom higher education offers a route out of poverty. At the same time, the ‘historically white universities’ continue to enjoy considerable advantages. Their reputations and resources ensure that they continue to attract the most highly qualified and research-productive academics, and they are also able to take their pick of school leavers. Though the universities reported on here enjoy strong reputational standing, much of their status emerges from a pitiful national history rather than a proud institutional heritage (Bawa and Mouton 2006). Differentiation of institutions in South Africa thus remains a contested notion because of these socio-political and economic conditions (Singh 2008).
A fairly recent piece of research (Bunting et al. 2010) analysed the entire South African higher education system against a range of input and output factors. Input factors included ratios of academic staff to students, enrolments in Science, Engineering and Technology, postgraduate enrolments, the number of staff with doctoral degrees and the private income the institution was able to earn. Output factors included success rates, graduations and weighted research outputs per permanent academic staff member. The analysis resulted in the identification of three distinct groups of universities, one of which, known as the‘red cluster’, clearly emerged as research-intensive (Cloete 2010).
This cluster included the five institutions that are the cases for this study.
In common with research-intensive universities globally, these five universities enjoy prestigious national reputations, can offer a large number of bursaries and scholarships, and comprise well-resourced campuses and so on. Given the significant portion of postgraduate output and research emanating from these institutions,1 it is unsurprising that 45% of all black Ph.D. graduates come from just these universities. Cloete (2010) has indicated that achieving an increase in the number of black academics so badly needed across the entire higher education sector will rely primarily on the production of doctorates in these research-intensive universities. He further noted that the research- intensive universities need to increase their enrolment of black graduates at all qualification levels. Because of their high entrance requirements, and the ongoing racial inequalities in the school system, this group of universities struggles to recruit black working-class students in particular.
Against this background, other research shows that black students fare less well than their white peers across a range of indicators regardless of field of study, level of study, institution and so on (Scott, Yeld, and Hendry 2007). This means that the group of research-intensive universities not only recruits too few black students, but also then these students do not fare as well as their white peers once in the institution. The extent to which this group of universities maximises its ability to contribute to the black graduates needed by the new democracy must then be called into question.
This article focuses on academic staff at five research-intensive South African universities and, more specifically, on the way academics are discursively constructed in relation to their roles as teachers. This article is based on a wider piece of research, which was commissioned by the Council on Higher Education (CHE), and which aimed to produce a‘meta-analysis’of teaching and learning in the South African higher education system (Boughey 2009, 2010; Boughey and McKenna 2011a, 2011b). The data comprised audit documentation from the first round of institutional audits recently completed by the national body for quality assurance, the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), which operates under the auspices of the CHE. The audit
methodology and criteria required universities to address a range of institutional functioning including teaching and learning.
Research design
The design of the research acknowledged the existence of discourses, defined by Fairclough (2005) as elements of social practices that subsume both the linguistic and the semiotic elements of social events and social structures. In common with most discourse analysts, Fairclough (2005) argues that discourses have causal tendencies over how we view the world and act within it. However, Fairclough rebuts the view of discourses that is evident in‘extreme social constructivism’(2005, 3) whereby they are understood to function in deterministic ways. Instead, he argues for analytical dualism, whereby the power of discourses as structures intersects with the agency of individuals who draw on discourses in ways that reinforce or subvert them.
More specifically, and in line with Fairclough (2005, 2006), this research design acknowledged discourses as mechanisms existing at the level of the real in Bhaskar’s (1978) layered ontology. Bhaskar’s ontology (1978, 1979, 1997) is realist in that it acknowledges the existence of an intransitive layer of reality consisting of structures and mechanisms that are comparatively enduring. From this layer of reality, emerge events (located, in Bhaskar’s schema, at the level of the actual) and multiple experiences of those events (at the level of the empirical).
This meant that, conceptually, discourses were understood as mechanisms with causal tendencies. These would contribute to the emergence of events related to teaching and learning and to the experiences and observations of staff members and others of those events. Fairclough (2005) argues from a critical realist perspective that discourses are not the only mechanisms from which events and experiences emerge, but rather that they have important causal properties constraining and enabling ideological positions in the world as it happens and is experienced. He argues that we need to have a layered ontology in order to make sense of how mechanisms with causal tendencies, such as discourses, intersect with agency.
The role of a researcher analysing discourse from a critical realist perspective is to move from the empirical data (interview transcripts, for example, or, in our case, the observations made by institutions about themselves in audit documentation) to identify the discourses existing at the level of the real and having potential causal powers. We then need to look at the implications of such discourses for the ways in which they are taken up by agents, such as academics and institutional management.
The data used in this study were generated as part of the process of institutional audits undertaken by the CHE between 2004 and 2012. It comprised two sets of documents from each of the five institutions:
(1) Institutional self-evaluation reports in which institutions responded to a set of 19 criteria. These reports averaged 130 pages and included up to 25 appendices.
(2) Audit reports produced by the HEQC as a result of the audit process. The audit process included a review of the institutional self-evaluation reports, a site visit by a panel of international and national academics and the CHE members.
The documentation related to the five research-intensive universities reported here was understood to form a sub-set of the entire higher education system. Each of the Teaching in Higher Education 827
universities was treated as a single case. We then conducted a cross-case analysis to look for discourses constructing academic teachers and teaching across all the five institutions, which is what we report on here. We have named the three interrelated discourses: the discourse of the scholar, the discourse of the argumentative academic and the discourse of trust. It is important to note that while these discourses were dominant in the data, they were not monolithic and there were examples of contradictions and overlaps. We begin by describing each of the discourses as they were evidenced in the data and then consider their significance in terms of how these discourses are taken up by agents within the universities.
Discussion
The discourse of the scholar
Evident across all the five universities was a discourse constructing staff as scholarly individuals intent on critical enquiry and located in‘basic disciplines’, which represent the ‘principal modes of contemporary scholarly enquiry’ (RIU1 – SER).2 They were constructed as being‘experts’and it was noted that many were‘internationally regarded specialists’(RIU3– SER). Such scholars were seen to need the freedom to explore the disciplinary fields in which they practice without interference from staff developers, heads of departments and other agents who might try to call academics to account in relation to their teaching, even though there was no claim that their disciplinary expertise encompassed expertise in pedagogy.
One university, for example, provided academics with‘principles’of good teaching (RIU2–SER) but these were simply guidelines, and curriculum development was seen to be a private matter for an individual academic or department. The principles of good teaching referred to‘efficiency’and ‘innovation’but did not indicate understandings of curriculum as a contested space where power and dominance are at play (Maton and Muller2007). Teaching and learning documents such as these thus seemed to have little potential to encourage engagement with what it might mean to teach for greater social inclusion or widened access to the knowledge of the academy.
Resistance to academic staff development initiatives as being in contradiction to notions of academic freedom and autonomy has been noted elsewhere (see, for example, Quinn 2012), and so it is unsurprising that in all the five of the research-intensive institutions, staff development initiatives were voluntary.
Furthermore, a number of such initiatives were constructed without an explicit focus on teaching and learning per se, focusing more on supporting staff to improve qualifications, attend conferences and publish research. The reports noted that initiatives related specifically to teaching and learning development, such as the use of student evaluations for curriculum and pedagogical improvement, were sporadically implemen- ted, even where institutional policy indicated that such processes were obligatory.
One of the institutional reports indicated that policies related to teaching and learning, developed by the Teaching and Learning Committee, included the requirement that Heads of Department report on an annual basis on the way the policies have been implemented at a department level (RIU3 – SER). The report stated that ‘monitoring of such policy implementation is weak’ –a manifestation of the trust placed in Heads of Departments to ensure that their departments run as they should because of the sharing of a common set of values at institutional, departmental and individual levels. The report goes on to note a
degree of ‘cynicism’ on the part of Head of Departments about the need to report on policy implementation and to manage teaching and learning more generally.
A number of these research-intensive institutions had uneven internal structures related to teaching and learning, with, for example, some faculties having Teaching and Learning Committees and others not. In some faculties, there were structural spaces for the development of teaching and learning and in others such structures would no doubt have been seen to be an affront to academic autonomy. In the case of one of the institutions there was an institutional Teaching and Learning Committee, but this committee, unlike its Research Committee counterpart, did not report directly to Senate and, according to the panel auditing the university,‘lacks the necessary weight to have a strategic role’(RIU4–AR).
The extent to which open discussion and accountability around issues of teaching and learning could take place was limited by what we have termed the ‘discourse of the scholar’. For example, one of the institutions noted that there was an articulation gap between the foundation phase in ‘extended’ programmes developed for students identified as being ‘underprepared’ (in South Africa a proxy for black and working class) and the regular curriculum which comprised the rest of the programme. The inability to address this gap by making adaptations within the ‘mainstream curriculum’
was a ‘key obstacle to improved performance’ (RIU1 – SER). The ‘discourse of the scholar’allows us to see that the institution would be hamstrung in focusing attention to teaching in the mainstream curriculum because of the strong privileging of academics’
autonomy in the classroom.
This resulted, in all the five universities, in student support generally taking the form of add-on initiatives being implemented outside of the disciplines and in ways that did not impact on the curriculum. Systems of stand-alone student support allow students’
learning ‘problems’to be dealt with on the margins of mainstream activity in ways that do not necessitate the opening up of teaching practices to public discussion.
The potential for various educational development structures within these research- intensive universities to impact at a systemic, curriculum level could be seen to be countered by collective agency exercised in other structures such as the Senate. One report identified this phenomenon as related to the subordinate status accorded to teaching and learning (RIU4– SER).
This was not the case for research, since discourses in this arena focused on the need for measurable productivity. Accountability in the realm of research is made easier by a national system of quantifying research output through units being accrued to accredited publications and postgraduate output. The nature of the research-intensive universities means that enormous prestige is placed on research output, which is also rewarded through systems such as personal promotion and tenure. In all the five institutions, promotion criteria emphasised research output with limited mention of teaching capacity (RIU1–5 – SERs). In addition, state funding for higher education favours research production, and some of this funding finds its way to individual researchers via funding for conference attendance and so on. It should also be acknowledged that such privileging of research could enhance the prestige of the institution even if this were to be at the expense of a focus on good teaching. All these mean that for academics employed in the research-intensive universities, research is likely to garner more of their attention than teaching.
It would appear that the interplay of the discursive construction of research along with discourses constructing staff as needing to be free to pursue it resulted in a lack of Teaching in Higher Education 829
attention being paid to teaching. Furthermore, the relationship between academics’ research and their teaching was presented as unproblematic and direct: ‘research will enrich our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching’(RIU5–SER):
Independent enquiry should result in innovation in teaching, learning and research and engagement, which will enable the University to remain at the frontiers of the disciplines in which it engages. (RIU5–SER)
While independent enquiry might lead to findings from research being available to inform the curriculum, there is no reason to believe that it will allow academics to innovate in their teaching practice and, thus, to accommodate diverse groups of students.
In the few places where research into teaching and learning was highlighted in the reports (RIU1, 3 and 4 – SERs), with its potential to improve teaching practice, such research was undertaken almost exclusively by those working within the field of Educational Development and not within mainstream academic departments. In addition, this research seemed to have had limited impact on actual teaching and learning practices.
The discourse of the argumentative academic
A discourse related to that of academics as scholars was one that privileged independent thought and constructed academic staff as argumentative as a result of its pursuit. This critical disposition was seen to be central to an appropriate academic identity. Castells (1997, 7) argues that the social construction of identity takes place within the context of power relations and that of dominant institutions, such as the research-intensive universities focused on here, ‘extend and rationalize their domination’ by legitimating such identities and practices.
Integral to the practice of academic argumentation was the right for academics to challenge proposed changes. A strong Senate, peopled mainly by academics, was highly valued in the documentation (RIU2, 3 and 5), and this was seen, in at least one case, to be crucial in limiting the‘increase in managerialism’(RIU3–SER). But this valued critical disposition can also be seen to have thwarted attempts to get academics to engage with activities related to the management or enhancement of teaching. Because the university was constructed as an ‘intellectual organisation’ (RIU5 – SER) which prioritises diversity of expression, it was seen to be inappropriate to require that teaching be more overtly managed or even that there be more institutional deliberation around teaching and learning.
Freedom necessarily brings responsibility; however, in South Africa this means that academics are now responsible for the teaching of students from an array of sociocultural, economic and linguistic backgrounds. One of the most frequent complaints made against students as the higher education system has diversified, however, is that they are
‘underprepared’ for higher education and this was raised repeatedly in all the five institutional portfolios (RIU1–5– SERs). What appears to be the case, therefore, is that the discourse of academic argumentation and independent thought allows academics to avoid the responsibility of engaging with the needs of a changed student body. One of the universities indicated that because of:
the diversity and cultural capital of such students, there is an argument that mainstream curricula need to change to cater for all students. This model would require strengthened and
adjusted curricula and is best described as‘bringing academic development off the periphery and into the mainstream’. (RIU5 - SER)
However, the privileging of critique and argumentation makes this difficult to implement.
This university goes on to indicate that ‘attempts to regulate and “professionalise”
teaching are not always accepted’(RIU5).
The discourse of trust
Significant across the institutions was what we termed a ‘discourse of trust’ –trust that academics would do the ‘right’things in respect of teaching and learning because they shared a common set of values, attitudes and principles related to academic quality. This trust of academic staff meant that management of their activities was unnecessary in that the universities could be assured that individuals were competent to understand how teaching needed to proceed and what sort of assessments were appropriate to ensure quality standards. As one of the Audit Reports noted, accountability in the institution was understood to comprise‘collegiality’and ‘trust’(RIU5– AR).
All the five research-intensive universities positioned themselves as‘excellent’in a number of different ways, including through reference to international rankings. The reports indicated a need to‘grow a global profile’and ‘exploit…first world credibility’
(RIU1–SER) and referred to a‘gold standard’and to the university as being a‘trustee of standards’ (RIU2 – SER). This ‘quality as exceptional’ understanding of the notion of quality carries the implication that quality is elite, and that its criteria cannot be made explicit because it relies on the implicit and internalised value systems of academics (Harvey and Green1993).
Notions of excellence in the institutional reports included reference, in all the five universities, to the high quality of academic staff. This fed into the valuing of autonomy and freedom from interference because academics were characterised as already possessing quality and should therefore be trusted to teach in quality ways. In one case this was explicitly articulated as:
[The university] trusts that academic and students will demonstrate the capacity to function independently in line with the quality standards, principles and values of the University and in accordance with the mandates and responsibilities that may impact on particular areas of work. It is thus expected that the University will largely self-regulate. (RIU5–SER)
Another of the universities prided itself on the ways in which an institutional ethos of
‘collegiality’ ensured the minimal impingement by ‘bureaucratic and managerial struc- tures’(RIU3–SER). The implication is that because colleagues share a common under- standing of goals, there is no need for structures that will facilitate the attainment of those goals. What this effectively means is that the assurance of quality rests on a trust that colleagues, who it is assumed share the same values, will do what is needed to ensure that the‘excellence’prized by the institution is maintained.
The ‘collegiality’privileged in one institution’s account of itself was linked to what was identified in the report as the dominant‘white middle-class’culture (RIU3– SER).
Senior black staff members, readers are informed, have noted that this culture is not an obstacle to the inclusivity prized in institutional discourse. It is unclear whether younger black staff members have the same sense of inclusivity. Another university acknowledged that ‘some institutional cultures’ may be experienced as ‘unwelcoming’ by some staff Teaching in Higher Education 831
members and that they may also work ‘unproductively to shape the student experience’ (RIU5–SER).
Another report identified the ‘tension between collegial governance … and central decision making’(RIU4–SER). This played out in the arena of teaching and learning as the audit panel indicated that it had the impression‘that the conceptualisation of teaching and learning in the Teaching Management Plan is not given consistent effect across [the university]’(RIU4–AR).
One of the problems with the discourse of trust was that the student body had changed since most academics had been educated. Although the student bodies at all the five universities failed to represent the racial and socio-economic demographics of the country, all the institutions had diversified in terms of their student bodies. The implementation of structural student support, such as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, has led to an intake of students from a wider range of economic groups. There is ample research in South Africa and elsewhere, and that the practices demanded for higher education success privilege some sociocultural groups more than others (see, for example, Boughey2005; Thesen and Van Pletzen2006; Jacobs2007; McKenna2004). Only one of the reports acknowledged that ‘not all students have the same kind of experience at [the university]’(RIU3–SER), but it did not examine what the implications of this were for academics and teaching.
Changes from a relatively homogenous student body with much in common with the academic body to a heterogeneous student body necessitates significant changes in teaching approach and curriculum. We argue that the discourse of trust foreclosed interrogation of what such changes might entail.
In addition to changes in the student body, there have been other significant shifts in higher education that would presumably also necessitate reflection on issues of teaching and learning. Institutions themselves had been forced to adapt to pressures of globalisation and the changing roles allocated to them as a result. South African discourses around universities as having a particular role to play in economic development and the ways in which universities need to engage with shifts in knowledge production (Castells 2009) have implications for teaching. The extent to which institutions can simply trust that the values, attitudes and beliefs inculcated in academics during their own educations are still appropriate in a changed world and changed institutional contexts therefore has to be called into question.
Significance of the discourses
We have thus far demonstrated that, at least as reflected in the audit documentation, academics in the five institutions are discursively constructed as argumentative scholars who should be trusted to get on with their work. We argue that this construction is one of the mechanisms leading to the ‘light touch’ employed in the management of academic staff in relation to teaching and learning and noted in the audit reports on these institutions (RIU1–5– AR). The universities had all developed policies and procedures intended to assure quality in teaching and learning but these were not fully or consistently implemented (RIU1–5–SER), and staff were allowed to proceed as they always had in spite of the huge changes which had taken place in student demographics and in spite of calls for curricula to be more responsive to a changed social order.
The concerns we raise about the discursive constructions could be easily miscon- strued as calling for the kind of managerialism so clearly countered by the ethos of these
universities. It is true that the demand for accountability in the field of teaching and learning has at times led to the university being constructed in neoliberal terms as a training ground for industry (Shore2010; Wright and Rabo2010) where compliance with managerialist demands overwhelms concern for the academic project. There is also an undoubted cause for concern that an uncritical audit culture can undermine academic identities and act in ways that are dangerously ignorant of disciplinary norms and values (Strathern 2000; Shore and Wright 2000). It is important that our critique of the discourses constructing academics in the research-intensive universities is not seen to be a call for uncritical inspection, monitoring and measurement of teaching and learning.
Rather, analysing the discourses constructing academic staff within the research- intensive universities has allowed us to begin to identify what must be challenged– to identify questions that need to be asked and problems that need to be raised. We need to ask whether the hands-off approach to the management of teaching serves all academics and students equally. We need to question the relationship between research expertise and good teaching practice. We need to question the assumption that academics share values, that these automatically lead to excellence and that the act of questioning these is an infringement on academic freedom.
The discourses of the academic as scholar, who is argumentative and who should be trusted, act as mechanisms that close down debates as to what the purpose of teaching is and result in few systematic deliberations as to how best to go about it within each context. We need to challenge the valorising of research over teaching, and the lack of engagement as to the relationship between teaching and research, in a context where all South African universities, including the five reflected on here, are primarily under- graduate teaching institutions. We also need to ask questions about the purpose of developing policies and procedures if they are not going to be implemented.
Although our analysis is based on universities in a particular national context, as we note at the beginning of this article, the research-intensive university as an institutional type exists beyond our borders. We would argue that while the transformation agenda takes on a particularly acute resonance in post-apartheid South Africa, the concern that research-intensive universities should enable broader social access to powerful know- ledge and, critically, powerful ways of knowledge making is an international concern. As a result, we believe our work has relevance for those interested in the enhancement of teaching in order to further social justice elsewhere.
Notes
1. Over 50% of doctoral graduates come from just these five universities (ASSAf 2010).
2. Each of the five institutions was randomly assigned an anonymous code of RIU (Research Intensive University) 1–5. SER then indicates that the data come from the Self-Evaluation Report produced by the university itself or AR indicates that the data come from the Audit Report produced by the CHE.
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