Who needs higher education research, and why?

By Terri Kim. The last seminar of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI)
On June 21st, around 30 present and former CHERI staff, associates, visiting professors, collaborators and friends gathered for a final seminar at Kings Place in Central London. The seminar theme was ‘Who needs higher education research, and why?’. Notes on some of the seven presentations can be accessed here. The seminar also received a message from Professor Craig Calhoun, President of the US Social Science Research Council in New York. Read Professor Calhoun’s message.
‘Who needs higher education research, and why?’ by Terri Kim
First of all, I would like to thank you, John, for giving me this honour to speak in this special CHERI event.
I was first introduced to the CHERI by Maurice and Mary soon after I joined Brunel as a research lecturer in 2003. I still remember clearly when John invited me to become a CHERI Associate. It was in 2006. I was then based in Paris as a visiting scholar at the Collège de France. I was so thrilled and grateful to have the invitation and subsequently receive an official letter signed by the VC Brenda Gourley which was to confer the appointment.
Attending the CHERI Higher Education Study Group seminars was a really important part of my academic identity whilst working in the Brunel Education Department, where I was the only one engaged in higher education research. Looking back, I can see how I have matured over the years to become an academic fully committed to higher education studies and that identity is my intellectual gyroscope and will not change wherever I go.
I find the CHERI seminar question today “who needs higher education research and why? very important and thought-provoking. It was necessary for me to mull it over.
My immediate answer to the question is that we all need higher education research as much as universities serve the needs of individuals, society, economy, politics and culture. However, I would like to emphasise the importance of ‘critical higher education research’ and that is above all and first of all for the university academics.
Higher education that is taking place inside universities is more than professional training, and thus university academics need to be critically aware of the normative assumptions about professional accountability of the politics of our time. Who has provided this definition? Also it seems possible to ask, ‘accountability for whom’? – and in whose interests, and for what purposes?
After all, higher Education research cannot be detached from a particular political and societal context, nor can be unrelated to the interpretations of being and time, invoking Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). Higher education research should raise and answer to some fundamental questions such as:
• What are universities for?
• To whom should they be useful and accountable?
• Who says so and why?
Contemporaneously university academics in the UK and many other countries across the globe, where the new public management has been carried out, are living with surveillance, accountability and managerialism.
The bureaucracy of surveillance grows; surveillance becomes institutionalised within the university; and the surveillance becomes internalised. The neoliberal discourse of corporatist management as ‘governmentality’ (following Foucault) has managed to take hold of, and is entrenched in, the university academic psyche as subjectification (Foucault, 1978). This phenomenon is now - in my judgement - widespread.
Meanwhile, there is a fracturing of the class within the university academic profession, reconstructed as both “managers” and “clerks” – as invoked by Professor Robert Cowen, my former doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Education.
These phenomena have become transnational. We have seen the emergence of a transnational mobile academic elite as well as a mobile academic under-class, (which is a part of my ongoing research funded by SRHE). The process of making universities into managed organisations as subordinate to the values and role of the corporate has required a conversion from academic leadership which used to be primus inter pares to managerial skills & competencies (in line management).
Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich, a Professor of Anthropology in Victoria, New Zealand, who is originally from Germany, offers a powerful analysis of her position as an academic migrant in the neoliberal market-framed university. She says the corporatist performativity regime often creates another layer of culture shock to her as a German academic migrant. I quote - “it is experienced as a deep intrusion into my academic identity. It is an imposition of another learning process in the entrepreneurial system of producing and selling knowledge. Resisting this often means a slow or sudden professional death” (Bönisch-Brednich, 2010).
We, as university academics, need to be critically aware that the University has become a site of ‘managed’ knowledge production, and we should be able to see who defines what counts as ‘product’; and who benefits from the new patterns of ‘a university career’.
As more and more academics are categorised as academic experts, many of them increasingly define their roles as ‘researchers’ with transferable methodological research “skills”.
University academics need critical higher education research to remain alert and see also if T&L has become an ideology, in which knowledge contents are increasingly defined by skills, including “soft skills” which are now seen as key to employability and considered more important than subject knowledge per se.
Similarly, it seems that the majority of university academics no longer need to profess.
In the advancement of online course development, university lecturers are told that they do not need to give lectures anymore. At Brunel University, for instance, the staff development workshops on teaching and learning are increasingly focusing on technology-driven online learning. The workshop instructor invited from Oxford Brooks University as a specialist in online course development said to us that we do not need to create academic contents, as these are already available online.
Nowadays star professors’ lectures are recorded and disseminated online and the role of ordinary academics is to facilitate students’ ‘learning’, coordinating discussion based on online lectures.
All of these, I suggest, confirm the further division of academic labour, commodification of academic knowledge, and academics’ alienation from knowledge capital.
The global expansion of neoliberal market-framed university regimes nowadays has left very little space available for ‘university academics as critical public intellectuals’, who would like to keep the position as a free-floating critical thinker whose creative role is to engage as ‘legislator’ and ‘interpreter’ – invoking Bauman (1989) - contributing to a ‘creative destruction’ and reconstruction of the paradigms of thoughts (Kim, 2010).
All in all, universities are already part of the culture, which, in principle, they should reform. It is in this context that I suggest we/academics need ‘critical higher education research’ more than ever before. Criticality is an essential part of academic identities. However, given the current climate of corporatist academic conformity, being critical is often criticised as if it is the same as being negative and pessimistic.
References
Bönisch-Brednich, B. (2010) 'Strangers on Campus: Academic Migrants and University Policies of Hiring International Excellence', In Mayerhofer, R. & Kriebernegg, U. (eds) Multiculturality and Education. Graz.
Foucault, M. (1978). The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality vol 1. London: Penguin.
Kim, T. (2010) ‘Transnational Academic Mobility, Knowledge and Identity Capital’ In Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Special Issue on International Academic Mobility. Edited by Johannah Fahey and Jane Kenway. Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 577-592 October.