Tuesday 12 February 2019

Letting the bad guys take over: what it means for the future of the university

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's brilliant performance at the congressional committee where she invited her fellow politicians with "let's play a game" (https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2019/feb/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-brutal-take-down-of-us-political-finance-laws-video) was a simple (and rare) political pedagogical intervention which lifted the lid on the dynamics of power. I'm sure this speech will be analysed by politics students for many years to come.

It's not just the dynamics of power that puts a president above the law though. It's the dynamics of power which puts the likes of Philip Green, Mike Ashley, Harvey Weinstein, etc, in power. So many big institutions and corporations have unpleasant characters at the top who are out for themselves.

The acid test to spot these people is to consider if they care about their business, corporation or institution's future after they retire. It is whether they act in the interests of a viable future for the institution for the next generation. But the mentality that put them in charge is often a selfish one. Its become socially acceptable to say "Why should I care about that? It's not my problem". Yet for the institution itself, it is a perilous position. How did these people get appointed in the first place?

I'm tempted to play a similar "let's play a game" with those at the top of our universities. A number of them are losing their jobs at the moment, and a number of institutions are in serious trouble. There has been a blind dash for cash in monetising education in what is presented as a global market (but is something else I suspect). Universities have raised small fortunes by issuing bonds in themselves with the narrative that "We've been here for 900 years. We're not going away. We are a secure investment". Ironically the narrative of security has created the conditions for the employment of people at the top of institutions who have become the greatest threat to their long-term survival.

These are people who believe that universities are so secure, there's nothing anyone can do to destroy them. So sell bonds, spend huge amounts on building overpriced student accommodation, push up fees, reward senior managers with huge salaries... it doesn't matter. The universities will be here for ever. Nothing can go wrong.

As we now know from Reading, Cardiff and de Montfort, things are going wrong. But this is nothing compared to what's going to happen in the next 20 years or so.

Today's students are tomorrow's parents. Most of them will be poorer than their parents. Many of them will struggle to buy a house, and their employment will be seriously threatened by technology. Some of them will be still paying off their student loans when their own kids are 18.

The problem is the inter-generational narrative about universities. And this will co-exist with technological options for higher learning which we haven't conceived of yet, but which will offer increasingly rich opportunities for higher learning and self-development that have far greater flexibility than the rigid institutional offering of conventional institutions.

That this is going to happen is obvious. But few at the head of the sector want to think about it. It is, after all, going to happen after they retire. "It's not my problem".

I think this thinking at the top of institutions is new. 30 years ago, people at the head of universities saw themselves as custodians, whose job it was to care for and hand over the institution to the next generation. They would have worried about this, and they would have taken action in their own present time to head-off future threats.

As universities are faced with so many concerns in the here-and-now, and these appear to be getting more and more complex, the capacity for thinking ahead is disappearing. Yet if we don't think ahead and prepare for the most substantial threat of the "inter-generational narrative", universities are simply done for.

The question to think about then is whether the demise of the university is a problem. If technology takes over, isn't that ok? I'm not sure about this. Somehow we need to preserve what's best in the institution: the maintenance of a discourse which connects the past to the future, the library, the archives, and a space for scientific inquiry. Can technology do this? Perhaps, but it needs planning for.

This is what should be happening now. That it largely isn't should concern us all. 

1 comment:

Ema said...

I think that this is a crucial point: "Today's students are tomorrow's parents". Isn't it that the point of having an institution is "the maintenance of a discourse which connects the past to the future"? We need that thread connecting past, present and future.