Higher Education and Hope: Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Possibilities [1st ed.] 978-3-030-13565-2;978-3-030-13566-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxxv
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason (Jon Nixon)....Pages 3-19
Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness: The Social-Political Role of Higher Education in Contemporary Societies (Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen)....Pages 21-48
A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional Possibilities, Pedagogical Advancement, Individual Benefit, and State Economic Development (Rebecca Watts, Gabriel Swarts, Leslie Rush, Cynthia Brock)....Pages 49-69
Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark (Marianne A. Larsen)....Pages 71-89
Front Matter ....Pages 91-91
Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? Exploring the Conceptual and Practical Impediments to Operationalizing Care in Higher Education (Caroline Walker-Gleaves)....Pages 93-112
The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope: Repurposing the University Through the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda (Paul Warwick, Alun Morgan, Wendy Miller)....Pages 113-134
Folds, Fractals and Bricolages for Hope: Some Conceptual and Pedagogical Tactics for a Creative Higher Education (Craig A. Hammond)....Pages 135-155
The Enchantment of Social Theory: Engaging Equity Imaginaries in the Neoliberal Academy (Linda Muzzin)....Pages 157-176
Cultivating Confucius’ Ren in Hong Kong Higher Education (Cindy Sing Bik Ngai, Rita Gill Singh)....Pages 177-196
Front Matter ....Pages 197-197
A Hope to Believe in: A Transition Programme to Support Mature Students’ access to Higher Education (Angela Scollan)....Pages 199-221
Is Higher Education Inherently Good, Educative Practices Intrinsically Good and Universities Instrumentally Good? What Should We Hope For? (Paul Gibbs)....Pages 223-239
Centering Humanism Within the Milieu of Sustained Student Protest for Social Justice in Higher Education Within South Africa (Labby Ramrathan)....Pages 241-257
Working in the Neoliberal University: Other-Regarding Virtues and Hope (Andrew Peterson)....Pages 259-274
Back Matter ....Pages 275-286

Citation preview

Higher Education and Hope Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Possibilities

Edited by Paul Gibbs Andrew Peterson

Higher Education and Hope

Paul Gibbs · Andrew Peterson Editors

Higher Education and Hope Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Possibilities

Editors Paul Gibbs School of Health and Education Middlesex University London, UK

Andrew Peterson Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-13565-2 ISBN 978-3-030-13566-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932952 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Dean Terry This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Sonny, Maggie, Zoe and Leo from Grandpa —Paul Gibbs To Jessica, Oliver and George —Andrew Peterson

Acknowledgements

We owe our thanks and gratitude to a number of colleagues and friends, without whom this book would not have been possible. First and foremost we are indebted to Dr. Debbie Jack whose foresight enabled the seminar from which the book sprung. That seminar, convened by Paul Gibbs in the summer of 2017, provided the inspiration and impetus for the collection here. The focus of that seminar—at least explicitly—was not on hope per se, but was rather on compassion and higher education. As our conversations grew and extended into related territories, however, it became clear that underlying, or at least connected with, each of our discussions were notions of hope. Though we understood and approached hope differently, all in attendance centred hope as central to and for optimistic and compassionate perspectives on higher education. Although not all have made contributions to this book, we are grateful to those colleagues who participated in the seminar for the rich and varied insights shared. Second, we recognise the efforts and wisdom of the colleagues who have generously contributed to this collection. Though a number of the authors did not attend the aforementioned seminar, all have responded to the aims and scope of the collection with thoughtfulness and vii

viii     Acknowledgements

perception. In particular, they have accepted that the collection aims to bring together authors from a range of contexts and perspectives to explore the issues at hand in ways that combine critical with optimistic analysis. Third, we are very appreciative of the support and encouragement provided by our colleagues and friends at Palgrave Macmillan—Eleanor Christie and Rebecca Wyde—who, as always, have been a pleasure to work with. Our thanks to you all.

Contents

Part I  Institutional Possibilities 1

Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason 3 Jon Nixon

2

Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness: The Social-Political Role of Higher Education in Contemporary Societies 21 Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen

3

A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional Possibilities, Pedagogical Advancement, Individual Benefit, and State Economic Development 49 Rebecca Watts, Gabriel Swarts, Leslie Rush and Cynthia Brock

4

Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark 71 Marianne A. Larsen ix

x     Contents

Part II  Pedagogical Possibilities 5

Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? Exploring the Conceptual and Practical Impediments to Operationalizing Care in Higher Education 93 Caroline Walker-Gleaves

6

The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope: Repurposing the University Through the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 113 Paul Warwick, Alun Morgan and Wendy Miller

7

Folds, Fractals and Bricolages for Hope: Some Conceptual and Pedagogical Tactics for a Creative Higher Education 135 Craig A. Hammond

8

The Enchantment of Social Theory: Engaging Equity Imaginaries in the Neoliberal Academy 157 Linda Muzzin

9

Cultivating Confucius’ Ren in Hong Kong Higher Education 177 Cindy Sing Bik Ngai and Rita Gill Singh

Part III  Inter-/Intra-Personal Possibilities 10 A Hope to Believe in: A Transition Programme to Support Mature Students’ access to Higher Education 199 Angela Scollan 11 Is Higher Education Inherently Good, Educative Practices Intrinsically Good and Universities Instrumentally Good? What Should We Hope For? 223 Paul Gibbs

Contents     xi

12 Centering Humanism Within the Milieu of Sustained Student Protest for Social Justice in Higher Education Within South Africa 241 Labby Ramrathan 13 Working in the Neoliberal University: Other-Regarding Virtues and Hope 259 Andrew Peterson Editors’ Coda 275 Index 281

Notes on Contributors

Cynthia Brock  is a Professor at the University of Wyoming where she holds the Wyoming Excellence in Higher Education Endowed Chair in Literacy Education. Brock’s scholarly research agenda centers on the study of opportunity to learn. She explores the literacy learning opportunities of elementary children from diverse cultural, linguistic and economic backgrounds; she also explores ways to work with pre- and in-service teachers to foster the literacy learning opportunities of children from non-dominant backgrounds. She has conducted qualitative research in cross-cultural contexts including the United States, Australia, England, Fiji, Thailand, Laos, Spain, Chile and Costa Rica. Paul Gibbs is Director of Education Research at the University of Middlesex. He is a professor of the University, founder of the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship Distinguished Professor at the Open University in Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at Technical University Sydney and fellow of the Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies. He has published widely. He has recently published three books in 2017: Transdisciplinary Higher Education, Why Universities Should Seek Happiness and Contentment, and The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education and in 2018 jointly edited xiii

xiv     Notes on Contributors

Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice and Education. He is also Series Editor of SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education and Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives and editor of Higher Education Quarterly. Craig A. Hammond is currently Programme Leader for the B.A. (hons) Education Studies programme at Liverpool John Moores University; he is actively involved in the Centre for Educational Research (CERES), and is co-convenor for the British Educational Research Association (BERA) ‘Higher Education’ Special Interest Group. Craig’s recent publication Hope, Utopia and Creativity in Higher Education: Pedagogical tactics for Alternative Futures (Bloomsbury, 2017), reappraises ideas and concepts associated with Ernst Bloch, Roland Barthes and Gaston Bachelard, with a view to enhancing the transformative, creative and collaborative potential of education. Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, DSocSci  is a Postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. He has published several articles and book chapters on the political thought of Hannah Arendt and various questions in contemporary world politics. His work has appeared, among other places, in Political Theory, European Journal of Social Theory, Philosophy Today, New Perspectives, Journal for Cultural Research, Redescriptions, Resilience, and in edited volumes published by ECPR Press and Bloomsbury. He has been a visiting fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College (2014–2015). Marianne A. Larsen is a Professor at the Faculty of Education, Western University in London, Canada. She has been concerned throughout her work with re-theorizing concepts of space, place, time and mobilities in comparative and international education research. Her 2016 book, Internationalization of Higher Education: An Analysis through Spatial, Network and Mobilities Theories brings together her interest in post-foundational theories and global processes of higher education internationalization. Dr. Larsen is interested in pushing the boundaries about how we think about the effects of globalizing processes including neoliberalism within educational contexts. Her work challenge takenfor-granted assumptions about how we (should) conduct our research

Notes on Contributors     xv

and play out our roles as academics within internationalized and corporatized universities. She is currently working on a research project about academic mobility and the barriers that academics, worldwide, face in their efforts to travel abroad for their work. Wendy Miller has worked in UK higher education since the 1990s after graduating in Environmental Science. In the early 2000s, she was the ESD lead for the Higher Education Academy’s Subject Centre for Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, helping to coordinate initiatives on pedagogy and practice. More recently as a researcher in PedRIO at the University of Plymouth, she has undertaken research and co-authored papers on sustainability in the curriculum, energy literacy amongst UK HE students, and interdisciplinary curricular innovations. Alun Morgan  is currently a Lecturer in Education at the University of Plymouth where he leads courses on Environmental and Sustainability Education, Global Education and Outdoor Learning. He has worked in a variety of contexts over thirty years including as a school teacher, teacher advisor and lecturer and researcher in a number of Higher Education Institutions. He has a long-standing research interest in Place and Landscape as integrative concepts for learning, and a background in Geography and Science Education. He works across educational phases (primary through to Higher Education) and formal-informal learning sectors, and promotes intergenerational, lifelong and community-based learning. Linda Muzzin  is Professor and Coordinator at the Higher Education Group at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education of the University of Toronto, where she teaches graduate courses on education and professions, the professoriate, theory and methods. She has coordinated the M.Ed. program in Health Professions for 20 years. She has also supervised 16 doctoral and 42 master’s theses by professionals who are leaders in the transformations of their fields to incorporate ethics and social justice perspectives into the curriculum. Her recent research and writing includes a review of professors and professionalism in the academy for a Routledge Handbook on Professions; articles on

xvi     Notes on Contributors

professorial identity; and research on college instructors and equity considerations from a national study of Canadian colleges. Cindy Sing Bik Ngai, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include Chinese culture and theatre study, teaching and learning in higher education and bilingual communication in the corporate context. She has published several research books on Chinese theatre study and corporate communication such as Theatre Adaptation Theory of Feng Meng-long (2011), An Exploratory Study of Chinese Drama Translation (2012), New Trends in Corporate Communication: Language, Strategies and Practices (2012) and Role of Language & Corporate Communication in Greater China: From Academic to Practitioner Perspectives (2015). Her work has also appeared in international peer-reviewed journals like Public Relations Review, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, International Journal of Business Communication, Discourse and Communication and Studies in Higher Education. Jon Nixon is a Visiting Professor, Middlesex University, UK, and Honorary Professor, Education University of Hong Kong, China. Recent publications include Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal (Pluto, 2018), Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination (Springer, 2017) and Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (Bloomsbury, 2015). His Hannah Arendt: The Promise of Education will be published by Springer in 2019. Andrew Peterson is a Professor of Character and Citizenship Education at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, UK. His research focuses on the relationship between character and citizenship education, particularly the nature of civic virtues and on a number of related themes connected to character and citizenship education, including global citizenship education, history education and religious education. He has published extensively in these areas, and his most recent monograph was Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities (Palgrave). He has recently co-edited the Palgrave International Handbook of

Notes on Contributors     xvii

Education for Citizenship and Social Justice and the Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education. Labby Ramrathan is a Professor at the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a NRF rated researcher with global recognition. He has been in leadership positions within the School in various capacities including Head of School, Acting Deputy Dean and Acting Dean. He has been involved in teaching education for more than 20 years spanning academic teaching, researching higher education, teacher development and curriculum studies. He has been involved in several institutional, national and international project works and has published widely in these areas of scholarship. He has been awarded several competitive research grants to research issues related to education. He currently serves as secretary for the South African Education Research Association (SAERA). He has supervised to completion more than 60 Masters and 20 Ph.D. students. Leslie Rush is Professor and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming. She has taught in high school and university classrooms for three decades. Dr. Rush was the co-editor of English Education from 2010 to 2015. Her research includes disciplinary literacy in English/Language Arts and English pedagogy coursework in university-based English teacher education programs. Dr. Rush is the recipient of the 2018 Richard A. Meade Award for Research in English Education, along with colleagues, for a book, titled Secondary English Teacher Education in the United States. Angela Scollan  is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Studies and Education at Middlesex University leading modules in Children’s Rights, Enabling Pedagogies and Environments. Angela opened her own training company ‘Emerald Early Years and Education’ in 2010 offering bespoke training and CPD that promotes high quality, sustainable and reflective early years leadership and provision. Since the early 90’s Angela has worked directly with and for children positioning her practice within a transdisciplinary approach and as a rights-based advocate for her teaching philosophy, research and writing focus on the child

xviii     Notes on Contributors

first, and the role of a learner within education, as secondary. Currently Angela is investigating the concept of self-determination and shared spaces within classroom environments applying pedagogical innovation to promote children’s voices in education. Rita Gill Singh  is a Senior Lecturer in the Language Centre at Hong Kong Baptist University. She teaches English for academic purposes and business communication courses. Having been born and raised in Hong Kong, she is fluent in Chinese and familiar with Chinese culture and history. Her research interests include pedagogical practices, corporate communication, materials development, and blended learning. She has published articles in International Journal of Business Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Discourse & Communication, and Journal of Communication Management. She has also presented at international conferences on the subjects of corporate communication and language teaching. Gabriel Swarts  is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming. Before being awarded his Ph.D. from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio in 2017, Dr. Swarts was a high school social studies teacher for ten years in school districts located in Northeast Ohio. Dr. Swarts’ research interests include information and communication technologies, citizenship and civic identity, and how adolescents form conceptions of community and identity. Caroline Walker-Gleaves is a Professor of Education at Newcastle University, within the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. A former research physicist and school teacher, she teaches Education theory and pedagogic practice to undergraduate Education students and PGCE students and also supervises doctoral students in the areas of teachers’ beliefs and practices. Her current research focuses on trying to establish a basis for caring relationships in higher education, in terms of instructional impact and learning gains broadly defined. Paul Warwick  currently serves as an Associate Professor and Centre for Sustainable Futures Lead at the University of Plymouth. This role involves working with staff and students to catalyse sustainable

Notes on Contributors     xix

education and community engaged learning within the curriculum and broader student experience of Higher Education. Paul has worked in the field of civic education for the last 25 years, beginning with developing person-centred educational programmes with young people in care. He has a research and practice interest in education for sustainable development and citizenship education, particularly as they relate to student voice, experiential learning, and compassionate processes for educational change. Rebecca Watts  earned her Ph.D. in higher education leadership from Ohio University in 2013. Prior to working as the Executive Director of the Trustees Education Initiative in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming, Dr. Watts served as chief of staff to the Ohio University president; deputy director and chief of staff to the president of Murray State University; and executive director for public information for Lincoln Land Community College in her hometown of Springfield, Ill. Dr. Watts has just assumed a new position at the Inaugural Chancellor of Western Governors University—Ohio.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 9.1

Service-learning at risk model 128 The University of Plymouth Graduate Compass 129 The Fold (Deleuze 2006b, p. 120) 138 The matrix of ren in Confucius’ Analects 183

xxi

List of Tables

Table 6.1 The UN sustainable development goals (United Nations 2015) 117 Table 9.1 Universities’ motto and the core values of ren 180

xxiii

Editors’ Introduction

Across many nations, the context of Higher Education is increasingly shaped by discourses of employability, national/international rankings, student satisfaction, securitisation, academic integrity, competition and choice. Under these conditions, the role of universities in preparing students for all facets of life and in contributing to the public good is (re)shaped in significant ways. Over the last 40 years, many systems of higher education have witnessed a deliberate widening of participation with increasing numbers of students entering universities. While welcome in many ways, the growth in the numbers of those attending Universities has placed pressure on the financing of higher education places. In the face of pressure on the public purse, governments in a number of nations have offered various policy responses, including introducing and increasing student tuition fees and, often not unconnected, placing more onus on higher education institutions to demonstrate “value” for money (whether to individual students or the public more widely). For many commentators, the marketization of higher education systems, and indeed of the working lives of universities, raises significant and pressing questions about the nature and role of xxv

xxvi     Editors’ Introduction

universities as formative educational institutions—questions which cut across policy, curricular, pedagogy and practice, as well as the purposes of higher education. Within this context, a resounding feature of recent academic literature on higher education has been to explore the ways that the marketization of higher education places pressure on and complicates the relational work central to, and within, universities. Such key relationships include those between: government and HEIs, government and university students, government and the wider public, universities and their staff, universities and their students, as well as those between and among university staff and university students. In 2017 a group of academics—including the two editors of this collection and a number of the contributors—met for a two-day symposium to share our own research and perspectives on the current context of higher education in the UK. While each of those who participated in the symposium had something to say about the current context of higher education, what struck all participants was the importance and value of hope as a concept for thinking through and deliberating about positive ways forward for higher education, whether that be at the systemic, institutional, pedagogical, interpersonal or intrapersonal level. In identifying an edited collection as a fruitful way to share and extend the outcomes of the symposium, we were conscious of the relevance of our focus for those working beyond the United Kingdom. With this in mind, in addition to chapters drawing mainly on a UK focus, we have added further chapters from leading international scholars. While we would not claim that the contexts including in this collection is exhaustive (that would be impossible in a book like this) we would argue that key commonalities across the range of international contexts included—the UK, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, South Africa and the United States—are suggestive that the trends of marketization which we seek in this collection to identify, critique and counter have been pervasive. As editors, our expressed aim in this collection was to include not only a range of contexts, but also to include a range of viewpoints and theoretical positions. With this in mind, our contributors come from diverse, and not always complementary, perspectives. So too, they come

Editors’ Introduction     xxvii

from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Our hope is that including these different perspectives together in one collection will offer more to readers than would an authorship drawing on similar viewpoints. With this in mind, we asked authors to compile their contributions with the following guidelines in mind: The chapters in this edited collection will each seek to (i) critique the current milieu and (ii) offer hopeful possibilities for universities based on humane relationships and notions of the good. With regard to the latter, chapters will make explicit notions related to a more humane and compassionate framing of the work of, and in, universities—including compassion itself, trust, sustainability, empathy, friendship, care, kindness and love. In doing so, each chapter will offer a hopeful account of universities’ work.

By bringing what we hope are wide-ranging perspectives to bare on the issues at hand, this book seeks to contribute to current conversations and debates regarding the purposes and practises of universities today, as well as to changing the debate to one of hopefulness and inspiration about the role of higher education for the public good. Before we progress to the chapters themselves, it is worth us spending some time in this introduction offering some thoughts about what we understand the meaning and importance of hope to be.

Why Hope? In focusing on hope our intentions are both pragmatic and conceptual. Our pragmatic interest was to offer contributors a space to explore and share practical, useful ways that academics working in universities today have found, and could find, to respond to the marketization of higher education funding, pedagogies and relationships. That is, practical ways which offer positive, hopeful alternatives to the dominant theme of control that, albeit implicitly, suggest something of an acquiescence on behalf of university staff and students. In seeking to explore practical instantiations of hope in universities today, we were struck by two— not unrelated—contentions. The first is Michael Apple’s (2011, p. 23)

xxviii     Editors’ Introduction

provocation that ‘among the tasks of critical educators is both to participate in movements that aim to create more critically democratic institutions in education and the larger society and to act as secretaries of these movements and institutions so that such successes are made visible’. The second is Čapek’s (2010, p. 275) suggestion that ‘there is more ignorance than intrinsic badness in the world; at the same time there is enough sympathy and trust, affability and good will to make it impossible to write off the world of people as past hope’. In line with these reflections, we are interested in how hope is recognised and enacted within universities today. This said, to conceive and understand the practical realization of hope, we clearly need to start from a given conceptual and theoretical base. While contributions in this collection differ as to their given conceptual and theoretical bases, all authors start from the shared premise that hope is a relevant and important notion for the way in which we construe our being qua humans. This said, hope clearly is a contested concept. Perhaps its most famous critic, Nietzsche (1878, §71; 1984, p. 58) warned that hope was ‘the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torments’. In a recent literature review, Webb (2014) outlines five modes of hoping: patient, critical, sound, resolute and transformative which he uses to delineate a range of pedagogies of hope. But the most the generalised notion of hope is of a desired outcome and the belief that such an outcome is possible but by no means certain. Hope is something that is desired, and because we are unable to measure its likelihood it has a sustained power over our behaviour, even when evidence would reduce our confidence in something occurring which we might expect or feel entitled to. When we hope we reflect, rationalise, imagine and dream, even fantasise about the hoped-for outcome. These activities give us reason to feel optimistic (although see Eagleton 2015) and upon these we incorporate our feeling as emotional justifications for the hope. When our hopes materialise we tend to be joyful and when our hopes are thwarted we feel disappointed. This is where hope differs from expectations. With expectations, we tend to be more certain than we are when we hope as to the possibility that a given outcome will come about. On this reading, the comparable feelings for expectations might be relief and anger (just think of that super paper submitted to a prestigious journal and one sent to a journal less highly ranked).

Editors’ Introduction     xxix

According to Day (1991), the central insight captured in this view is that hope has both a conative and a cognitive aspect: conative insofar as hope always involves desire for something; cognitive insofar as it also involves some estimation of probability. Day agrees that, from a psychological point of view, hope involves a feeling of pleasure (arising from the idea of proximity to some good), if always mixed to some extent with pain (arising from the awareness that the good hoped for, the satisfaction of the desire, is still out of reach). Moreover, as Smith (2010) suggests, when relating hope to expectation and anticipation, ‘Whereas the subject who expects stands back, observes and awaits, the subject who anticipates is from the beginning saturated, so to speak, with a readiness for action. Anticipation thus involves an active “taking up” of a stance and a projective preparedness that reflect the subject’s immersion in and engagement with the environment’ (ibid., p. 17). Perhaps the most relevant educational commentator on hope is Paulo Freire. In his book, Pedagogy of Hope, Freire discusses the importance of hope for, as well as in, the edifying process. He recognizes that hope alone will not change much and writes that, ‘my hope is necessary but it is not enough. Alone it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water’ (2016, p. 2). Freire’s words here remind us that, much like the water in which fish swim, hope is vital and sustaining. And yet, again like the water, when we are immersed in day-to-day realities and experiences, the importance of hope may be taken for granted and under-recognised. Our aspiration is that by stepping back and reflecting on the day-to-day realities and experiences of working within the contemporary university, the chapters in this collection all have something to say about the importance and vitality of hope—both for education specifically and for the human condition more generally.

The Chapters The book is divided into three main parts, which in turn consider respectively the institutional possibilities, pedagogical possibilities and inter-/intra-personal possibilities of hope in Higher Education. While

xxx     Editors’ Introduction

the authors in each part took either the institutional, the pedagogical or the inter-/intra-personal as their primary focus, most if not all of the chapters have something to say about how the institutional, pedagogical and inter-/intra-personal intersect. In Chapter 1, Jon Nixon begins by noting that what distinguishes those who hope from those who merely indulge in wishful thinking is their willingness to confront and challenge the apparent hopelessness of the situation in which they find themselves. Suggesting that we are living in a divided and divisive world in which the need for global interconnectivity clashes with a renewed emphasis on cultural and national boundary maintenance, Nixon argues that hope requires us to acknowledge—in our own lives and the lives of others—the consequences of this contradiction, and to find within it the necessary resources to seek to resolve it. Here, Nixon identifies a role for the university as the possessor of two invaluable resources of hope: its passion for truth and its insistence on the necessity of reasoning together. By providing a space in which these resources can be developed and used for the common good, universities provide—in the face of a deeply divided world—hope of a common world: not an ideal world, but a better world in which the cravings of competition and the striving for cooperation and collaboration find a kinder balance. In Chapter 2, Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen argues that there is a link between critical thought and the ability to remain hopeful even under highly problematic conditions like the neoliberal environment of contemporary higher education. He discusses Hannah Arendt’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on thinking and hope and suggests that despite their different starting points, the two authors share much. In particular, both reiterate the idea of Socratic irony and maieutic in a twentieth-century context. Also bringing Rorty and Arendt into disagreement Hyvönen contends that because of its adherence to facts and events, Arendt’s thought is better able to produce meaningful criticism of existing conditions, accompanied with hope for changing them. In Chapter 3, Rebecca Watts, Gabriel Swarts, Leslie Rush and Cynthia Brock examine the case of the University of Wyoming (UW) as a land grant, flagship American public institution, exploring the University’s transformation to connect the University’s values with

Editors’ Introduction     xxxi

Wyoming’s twenty-first-century needs while fostering a harmonious balance in the state takes place in a unique context. After establishing the context of University’s relationship with the State, the chapter explores US flagship, land grant institutions and UW’s unique role as the state’s sole university; the renewal of UW’s connections throughout the state in service to its people, and UW enterprises created to reinvigorate the embodiment of its institutional virtues. In exploring these themes, the chapter identifies the hopeful ways that reinvigorating institutional virtues while connecting to current, relevant service can provide a joyful, positive and meaningful role for higher education in the current era. In Chapter 4, Marianne A. Larsen outlines the ways in which Denmark has ushered in market-driven reforms to the Danish higher education system to enhance their institutional competitiveness over the past 30 years. In this context, Larsen presents an overview of the concept of hygge. Larsen recounts her experiences as a Canadian academic on sabbatical at a Danish university in 2017, illustrating the ways in which she experienced hygge in the Danish university setting. Larsen argues that hygge can be viewed as a retreat from the individualism, competition, market stratification and other challenges associated with neoliberalism and as such offers hope to resist the alienation associated with neoliberalism as well as providing an alternative ethos for close and safe social relations within academia. In Chapter 5, Caroline Walker-Gleaves commences Part II by focusing on caring pedagogy. She argues that while caring is a complex and fundamental human relational assumption around which all institutional and personal educational interactions are planned and which is often behind what academics and teachers do as the core of their work and consequently appears in missions, visions and values statements for colleges and universities worldwide, there seems to be a profound mismatch between what learners and teachers feel and expect about caring, and what institutions operationalize in their attempts to somehow capture and cultivate care. Based on a thoughtful analysis of care and caring pedagogy, Walker-Gleaves contends that caring pedagogy isn’t so progressive at all and that while it may be risky, it is so in a rigorously scholarly exposing sense, rather than an emotional and well-being sense. The chapter examines the possible impact on students’ learning in

xxxii     Editors’ Introduction

relation to a reconceptualization of relationships, and asks what direction we should take to properly understand the relational and cognition satisfaction, not to say joy, of caring and how it is possible to properly care within a risky higher education context, whilst still holding out for hope. In Chapter 6, Paul Warwick, Alun Morgan and Wendy Miller offer an important exploration of higher education for hope within the civic context of global social justice and environmental points of crisis. Focusing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for societal change they look at ways that education can incubate hope through students’ compassionate civic action for the common good. By looking at the place based pedagogical approach of service-learning, they conclude with a case study of emerging practice at a UK University and highlight key challenges to engaging students with creating more sustainable futures in a local context. In Chapter 7, Craig A. Hammond starts from the view that one of the main tasks confronting contemporary educators, is to maintain optimism and hope and be pro-actively creative amidst the bureaucracy and perfunctory processes of the university. He argues that, despite expectations to conform to institutional prescriptions, pedagogical tactics can be invoked which can operate to repurpose the strategies and established practices of the learning environment. To develop this argument, he adapts and develops a range of concepts as pedagogic possibilities, associated with Gilles Deleuze (The Fold), Deleuze & Guattari (the Rhizome), Benoit Mandelbrot (Fractality) and Michel de Certeau (tactics). Hammond invites educators to investigate and facilitate the possibility of fostering alternative and ultimately creative and hopeful learning approaches (also incorporating bell hooks), that incorporate the unpredictable emergence and heterogeneous ruptures and Folds of individual learners, arguing that beyond established curriculum and pedagogy, untapped spaces of collaborative hope and possibility can be recognised and embraced. In Chapter 8, Linda Muzzin replies to how neoliberalism is constructed within the academy, exploring emancipatory imaginaries that provide metaphorical space and time for scholars to experience fun, creativity, the beauty of nature, and a slowing of time, among other

Editors’ Introduction     xxxiii

pleasures of scholarship. Muzzin argues that it is in these theoretical spaces, professional responsibility is forged. The chapter engages with examples from the university that provide a glimpse of how everyday activism is sparked by social theory and how engagement with social theory can infuse hope and well-being. Muzzin suggests that we can take strength from scholarly work through engaging with the beauty of the physical and scholarly world, and connecting with intellectual role models and their imaginaries that promote a myriad of enchanting ways to proceed with one’s own lifework. Here, equity imaginaries resonate with theories of education that promote engagement or caring, everyday/everynight attention to power relations and ethical praxis, maintaining long term health, well-being, and hope in the academy. In Chapter 9, Cindy Sing Bik Ngai and Rita Gill Singh take as their focus Confucian ideology, particularly Ren, which is characterized as realized full humanity or a moral self guided by compassion and rooted in relations. They argue that cultivating Ren by embedding it in the curriculum in higher education is of crucial importance and offers hope given that students will be the future pillars of society and this value profoundly influences different professions. Ngai and Singh suggest that, in this respect, pedagogical approaches that are integrated into the curriculum, focusing on reflective learning tasks, learning projects, service learning, peer mentoring and group sharing, can enable learners to reflect on themselves, examine their strengths and weaknesses, perform to the best of their ability, practise the values, and show concern and care for their peers and the community at large. In the first chapter of Part III (Chapter 10), Angela Scollan presents and examines a case-study from a Higher Education institution in the UK where a project of pedagogical innovation, the ‘Transition Programme’, successfully solved the paradoxical status of selective procedures that are caught between the principle of inclusiveness within the widening participation agenda and the contrasting principle of recruiting with integrity. In the chapter, Scollan employs hope to contextualise sociologically the motivations underpinning mature applicants’ choice to access Higher Education. Such choice is positioned as a movement from the familiar world to a more complex social world, characterised by risky decision. The chapter criticises the implications of selective

xxxiv     Editors’ Introduction

processes for mature applicants’ trust in the Higher Education system, as well as their well-being, self-esteem and happiness, enabling Scollan to re-contextualise within a discourse centred on hope in the Transition Programme. In Chapter 11, Paul Gibbs begins with the reflection that while there has been considerable debate in contemporary literature on the erosion of public good in higher education, most of it has concentrated on the word ‘public’ in the phrase rather than on the notion of ‘good’. In the chapter, Gibbs focused on the good, including the distinctions between inherent, intrinsic and instrumental used in a framework devised by Audi (2004) to develop the following ideas: that education is inherently good; that aspects of its practice are feasibly intrinsically good; and the institutions in which the practice of higher education is delivered is contributive and thus of instrumental value. Gibbs ultimately concludes that if education is intrinsically good then it is something we can all hope for as a common good. In Chapter 12, Labby Ramrathan sets out the current context of universities in South Africa within which student protest actions coupled with massification and an inefficient tertiary system raise questions of quality and the worthiness of its graduates. He argues that while systemically the current higher education milieu projects stereotypical conceptions about different student groupings leading to a normalising discourse, taking a humanistic perspective opens up a possibility discourse within which higher education studies have provided life changing opportunity for students. Ramrathan draws on an institutional case study to explore a humanistic perspective that prioritises understanding people’s subjectivity, and asks, ‘what is it like to be this person?’ in making sense of the multiple forces and factors that students have to negotiate in accessing and sustaining their studying in a higher education institution, moving beyond universal reasoning to individual reasoning that is textured, layered and discursive to illuminate hope and joy in students realised through their higher education studies. In Chapter 13, begins by identifying certain core conditions of the neoliberal university. Drawing on recent scholarship in the field which

Editors’ Introduction     xxxv

has viewed the neoliberal university as ‘toxic’ (Smyth 2017) and as operating a regime of ‘terror’ (Roberts 2013) he draws on Gravlee’s (2000) work on Aristotle and hope to examine more optimistic forms of academic life in the neoliberal university. He argues that hope is needed for deliberation with others and that other-regarding virtues can provide pathways for hope in academic workplaces through their focus on relational ways of working based on mutual concern and solidarity.

References Apple, M. W. (2011). Democratic Education in Neoliberal and Neoconservative Times. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 21(1), 21–31. Audi, R. (2004). The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition in Intrinsic Value. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Čapek, K. (2010). Believe in People: The Essential Karel Čapek. London: Faber and Faber. Day, J. P. (1991). Hope: A Philosophical Analysis. Acta Philosphia Fennica, 51, 1–101. Eagleton, T. (2015). Hope Without Optimism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gravlee, G. S. (2000). Aristotle on Hope. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38(4), 461–477. Nietzsche, F. (1878/1984). Human, All Too Human. (M. Faber, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics. Roberts, P. (2013). Academic Dystopia: Knowledge, Performativity and Tertiary Education. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 35, 27–43. Smith, N. H. (2010). From the Concept of Hope to the Principle of Hope. At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 67, 3–23. Smyth, J. (2017). The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Webb, D. (2014). Pedagogies of Hope. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(4), 397–414.

Part I Institutional Possibilities

1 Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason Jon Nixon

Introduction We are living in a period of immense geopolitical instability and insecurity. Once again the spectre of nuclear war—as Jeffrey Lewis (2018) so brilliantly and terrifyingly highlights in his virtual history of 2020— haunts the globe, contributing to a general sense of powerlessness in the face of unpredictable and volatile forces beyond the control of any Throughout this chapter, I refer to each cited author by her or his full name on first citation and thereafter by the surname alone. The only exception to this self-imposed rule is in the case of authors who share the same surname and where confusions could therefore arise as to which particular author is being cited.

J. Nixon (*)  School of Health and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] Centre for Lifelong Learning Research and Development, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_1

3

4     J. Nixon

single individual or institution. It is true, of course, that some of the fear and insecurity is manufactured for commercial and political gain: in a deeply unequal society consumerism profits from insecurity, while in an increasingly divided society non-democratic and anti-democratic political forces thrive on fear. But it is also true that whatever peace exists is precarious and highly vulnerable. Not all our fears and insecurities are unfounded. It is at such times that hope gains traction, but only if it is imbued with social content; only, that is, if—in full recognition of the seeming hopelessness of the situation—it points a clear way forward. In this chapter, I argue that institutions of higher education have a crucial role to play in creating a context in which people acquire the dispositions necessary for peaceful cohabitation in an increasingly divided world. Universities, colleges and conservatoires may not be able to change the course of history, but they can provide people with the resources of hope necessary to reason together in a spirit of truthfulness and trust. Following a brief discussion of the nature of the divided world in which we live, I argue that the institutions that comprise civil society are an expression of the human hope in civil association as a bulwark against social division and political strife. Having outlined in general terms how institutions of higher education can contribute to that journey of hope, I argue that the quest for truth and the practice of reasoning together are fundamental to higher education. They provide the resources necessary for living together in an increasingly divided world—and thereby laying the foundation of a common world based on truth, trust and reason. Institutions cannot compensate for the geopolitical realities of a deeply divided world. But they can enable us as citizens of the world to gather the resources necessary for building a more secure and peaceful world. These resources—the resources of hope—include the human capacity for truthfulness fulfilled through the age-old practice of reasoning together. The university—in its various manifestations—provides a space for the preservation, sustainability and development of these resources. Without the university—for all its faults and failures—where would there be a space dedicated specifically to the quest for truth through the practice of reasoning together?

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     5

A Divided World Hope is premised both on an understanding of the world as indeterminate and uncertain and on a belief in the human capacity to confront and cope with that indeterminacy and uncertainty. ‘Hope alone’, wrote Jürgen Moltmann (1967), ‘is to be called “realistic”, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change’. It is precisely because our experience of the world continually brings home to us the sheer contingency and unpredictability of human affairs that hope is essential: ‘Only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense in earthly hopes’ (p. 25). Those who hope, suggests Moltmann, stare fraught reality in the face, while perceiving whatever slim and seemingly impossible opportunities it affords. Nowhere is this notion of hope more evident than in the age-old struggle to achieve lasting peace in a world partitioned and defined by war and its geopolitical consequences. Even those waging war invariably justify their actions on the grounds that war is the only hope of achieving—at some indeterminate point in the future—a final resolution that will bring about peace. There are, of course, exceptions, to this rule: tyrants who glory in war for its own sake; psychopaths for whom violence is an end in itself; sadists who take a perverse pleasure in the infliction of pain. But these are generally considered to exist on the outer fringes of humanity. They are exceptions to the general rule. We humans like to think of ourselves as unequivocally on the side of peace. Whether we are right or wrong in this somewhat self-congratulatory perception of our own humanity is open to question. (Freud, Marx and Nietzsche—the great triumvirate of modernism—were more than a little sceptical regarding our innate propensity for peaceful cohabitation.) What is less open to question is that, while most people would prefer to avoid war, few actively seek to promote peace. In the main we settle for negative peace: the absence of overt conflict. Positive peace—creating the conditions necessary for sustainable co-existence—is another matter.

6     J. Nixon

The tragedy of our species may prove to be its willingness to settle for the provisional safety of negative peace while failing to contribute to the constitution of a lasting peace sustainable across generations. The barbarity of what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) termed ‘the short 20th Century’ shocked Europe and much of the rest of the world into a realisation that the conditions necessary for lasting peace had to be re-constituted: rebuilt from the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombed cities of the Ruhr, the townships and ports laid waste across Europe.1 Of course that was in a previous century. Now—in the first quarter of the twenty-first century—we have seen the same destruction of cities, communities, peoples, kinships and histories. Millions of humans are now wandering stateless—without citizenship or any of the rights that citizenship confers—across North Africa and the margins of the Mediterranean to regain a foothold on peace (see Kingsley 2016). For the upholders of negative peace, they pose a question: can your peace contain our fragility? The answer to that question—as echoed across Europe and the USA—is a resounding ‘no’. Pull up the drawbridge, build the wall, ban people of difference, re-trench into nationalism and retreat into cultural isolationism: these are the ways in which negative peace is preserved and protected. Conflict is avoided through a process of self-isolation, whereby the insularity of the self-affirming community is celebrated in the name of some or other form of exceptionalism: national sovereignty, the primacy of one religious or racial group over others, cultural hegemony, etc. Plurality and heterogeneity are thereby denied in the interest of a self-preserving peace which refuses to engage with whatever lies beyond its own boundaries—or, if it does so, engages in either self-defensive recoil or aggressive posturing. This self-preserving peace is a variant of the age-old victor’s peace: a peace owned and maintained in the interests of the more powerful and at the expense of the less powerful. 1It is worth bearing in mind the sheer barbarity of the Allied bombing campaigns during World War II, whereby the Allied forces dropped incendiaries to set fire to German and Japanese cities and then launched a second wave of bombers with explosives in order to kill the firefighters attempting to put out the fires—a strategy employed to this day in Syria.

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     7

The reassertion of national borders, argues the political theorist Manlio Graziano (2018), is a recent and dangerous feature of the contemporary geopolitical scene. Following the opening of the first border crossing between the two parts of Berlin on November 9, 1989, and at least until the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later, there was a brief period during which the hope expressed in the famous graffiti on the wall—‘No more wars, no more walls. A united world’—seemed as if it might be realised. That hope was short-lived. In the eighteen years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the European continent and its Eurasian margins added about 16,600 miles of official, internationally recognised borders. (If one were to add informal and unrecognised borders the number would increase considerably.) ‘In sum,’ writes Grazioni, ‘for every mile of dismantled borders (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new (official in 2007) borders have been built in Europe’ (p. 29). With the increase in borders has come a resurgence of nationalism and a return to protectionist economic policies, both of which present a serious threat to an economic and political order that relies on market integration. Under such circumstances, claims Grazioni, ‘protectionism and the closing of borders are the inescapable prelude to a generalized war’ (p. 32); a claim less hyperbolical than it might otherwise seem given the wilful waging of a ‘trade war’ by the current USA administration and the willingness of the UK government to even consider severing its historic and hard-won trade deals with Europe. Given the unprecedented levels of interconnection required by the global economic market, ‘[t]rying to interrupt the intersecting flows of raw material, demi-finished products, and labor would’, insists Grazioni, ‘be the equivalent of cutting the veins of the world economic body’ (pp. 84–85). Of course, ‘the world economic body’ is far from healthy, with, in particular, its blatant and callous disregard of inequality within and across national boundaries. Nevertheless, those who peddle a potential remedy for neoliberal disorder in the form of border maintenance and proliferation are, as Grazioni writes, hopelessly misguided: ‘Their compulsive rage for borders places them at the vanguard of a growing and widespread movement that demands isolation, protectionism, and autarchy at a time when isolation, protectionism, and autarchy are no

8     J. Nixon

longer possible’ (p. 79). This is a recipe not even for negative peace— and certainly not positive peace—but for a precarious peace reliant on threat and counter-threat, proxy wars, the demagogic posturing of world leaders, and an increasingly fragile world order. If, as Moltmann suggests, the prime task of those who hope is to recognise both the fraught reality in which we find ourselves and the opportunities afforded to us by virtue of our participation in that reality, then the question arises: what resources of hope can the academy, as an association of artists, researchers, scholars and teachers, contribute to the sustainability of a divided world in a time of—at best—precarious peace? Before addressing that question directly—with specific reference to the notions of truth and reason—I shall outline what I consider to be the significance of the institutions of civil society generally and the wider role of the university as a crucial space of civil association.

Civil Association The public institutions of civil society stand between the state and the individual. They uphold the rights of both, while preserving their own right to challenge and question those rights as and when appropriate. Of course, institutions frequently fail to live up to these high expectations. All too often they ossify, become inward looking and surrender to the allurements of managerialism and corporatism. But their democratic potential for ensuring our social freedoms remains of paramount importance. Those which seek to realise that potential—or even, under unpropitious circumstances, hold onto the hope of doing so—are what the social philosopher Axel Honneth (2014) terms ‘institutions of recognition’. Only on the basis of ‘intersubjectively binding rules and symbols’, argues Honneth, ‘can individuals agree to identify with each other as members of a general community and to realise their aims and intentions reciprocally’. Thus, ‘[i]nstitutions of recognition are … not mere addenda or an external condition of intersubjective freedom’. On the contrary, ‘[b]ecause subjects cannot become aware of their

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     9

mutual dependency without such institutions, the latter are at once the basis and the space of realization for this kind of freedom’ (p. 49). ‘Institutions of recognition’ are the realisation of our potential as free agents to recognise our inter-dependence and—in so doing—learn to live together in a shared world of difference. Universities have historically aspired to be ‘institutions of recognition’. In practice, of course, they have colluded with privatisation, overseen a period of appalling professional atomisation, and entered a neoliberal market place in which competition and consumerism reign supreme. They have bowed over and over again to what the acclaimed author and theatre director Richard Eyre (2003) characterised as ‘the three horsemen of the new apocalypse—management, money and marketing’. But, historically, institutions of higher education—whether formally defined as universities, polytechnics or colleges—have always aspired a little higher. Their priorities have never quite accorded with the neoliberal agenda to which their over-paid vice-chancellors and managerial minions so assiduously adhere. It is those semi-dormant priorities, defining an alternative set of institutional responsibilities, which now urgently need to be re-affirmed, re-asserted and re-claimed. The prime responsibility is to insist on the distinction between truth and untruth, verifiable belief and wishful thinking, fact and fantasy. ‘Our concern’, as the philosopher Bernard Williams (2002, p. 133) put it, ‘is with the virtues of truth’. Those virtues cannot be discovered ready made within a single ‘method’. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (2001, p. 42) insisted, truth resides in our commitment to ‘the questionableness of something and what this requires of us’. Methods matter, but they cannot provide us with a ladder of perfection that inevitably leads us to ‘the truth’. The quest for truth is always a messy and muddled affair characterised by false starts, blind alleys, occasional insights, provisional resolutions, and leaps of ‘the hermeneutical imagination’. Higher education exists to provide us with the resources necessary to engage in this lifelong process of truthfulness. Second, universities are—as the term suggests—universal. They are by definition inclusive. ‘Universal’ means much more than—and, indeed, something very different from—the international marketization

10     J. Nixon

of higher education with a view to the recruitment of overseas students. It means developing what Feng Su and Margaret Wood (2017) call a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’: an outlook that circumscribes both the local and the global and perceives the interplay between the two. This is what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005, pp. 213–271) terms ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ or ‘tenable cosmopolitanism’: a cosmopolitanism that one can hold on to and that is grounded in the here and now. It resists insularity and any form of institutional belongingness that relies on exclusivity. It is responsible for, and committed to, the extension— and fusion—of our horizons of understanding. Third, universities are, within the broader framework of civil society, spaces of dialogue and critical reflection: spaces that acknowledge as their raison d’être the need for dissent and disagreement within an agreed framework of deliberative endeavour. Universities are places where we learn how to disagree and where disagreement forms the basis of rational discourse. Such discourse is impossible in the absence of mutual respect and the willingness to listen, which is why universities are also places of civility and civic engagement. It may be true that, as Walter Benjamin (1969 [1950], p. 256) put it, ‘[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’, but it is also true that those same documents can enable us to construct a civic order that stands as a bulwark against future acts of barbarism. Finally, universities provide us with a distinctive idiom: explorative, nuanced, self-questioning, tentative, uncertain, and forever in search of fine distinctions. That idiom—the idiom of Socrates—has always fallen foul of regimes and political cultures that, even when democratic in name, obstruct the free interplay of ideas and arguments. Universities are responsible for encouraging and supporting this idiom, ensuring that it retains a presence in social and political discourse, and providing it with the wherewithal for present and future generations to speak truth to power. The university exists not only to remind us that uncertainty is intrinsic to the human condition, but to provide us with the wherewithal to acknowledge the inescapability of uncertainty and to dwell within it.

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     11

A Journey of Hope Bur institutions are only as good as the practices they sustain. In the case of universities those practices comprise—primarily—research, scholarship and teaching, each of which requires of its practitioners a particular value-orientation. An academic practitioner who had no regard for truthfulness and reason would be a very poor practitioner. Indeed, to ascribe the term researcher, scholar or teacher to such a person would be a gross misnomer. Truthfulness and reason are intrinsic to the practices we associate with the academic life. It is the dispositions we acquire through those practices that guarantee their survival and development into the future—dispositions that constitute for each generation a journey of hope. Without those dispositions and the traditions upon which they rely, there can be no hope of a common world.

Truth as Quest ‘Truth, and specifically the virtues of truth,’ argues Bernard Williams, are connected with trust. The connections are to be seen in the English language. The word “truth” and its ancestors in Early and Middle English originally meant fidelity, loyalty, or reliability … Truthfulness is a form of trustworthiness, that which relates in a particular way to speech. (Williams 2002, pp. 93–94)

To act truthfully is to have cognisance not only of the criteria by which veracity may be assessed, but to act in accordance with the provisional and contestable norms of the community within which one is a moral agent. Truth, by this reckoning, is a condition of social sustainability; it has to be recognisable and comprehensible; amenable to understanding. There is, in other words, a communicative aspect to truth: ‘truth itself is communicative’, wrote Arendt (1970, p. 85), ‘it disappears and cannot be conceived outside communication’. Socrates knew this well. Hence, the rich tradition of rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, that flowed from this notion of truth as reliant upon truthfulness.

12     J. Nixon

Now, as then, truthfulness is highly vulnerable: vulnerable to the old charge of sophistry from absolutists and fundamentalists of all persuasions who choose to interpret its emphasis on communicative competence as a necessarily corrupting influence; vulnerable, also, to the charge levelled against it by relativists of all persuasions who choose to interpret its emphasis on the possibility of achieving collective action based on shared belief as naïve or futile. Against these charges the idea of truthfulness holds its ground: the ground, that is, upon which troubled individuals seeks to bring to some provisional accord their beliefs, their sense of the accuracy of these beliefs, and their determination to act sincerely on those beliefs within an increasingly differentiated world. This position is not dissimilar to that of George Lakoff and Marrk Johnson (2003), who argue (against the common sense assumption that understanding is based on truth) that ‘truth is based on understanding’. They offer what they call an ‘experientialist account of truth’, whereby a statement is ‘true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes’ (p. 179): I hold a statement to be true because it corresponds to my understanding of whatever that statement refers to and because my understanding renders it coherent. The beliefs we hold onto as being more rather than less true are the beliefs that best fit our experience of being together in the world—and, crucially, the understanding that we derive from that experience. Being truthful is conditional upon our capabilities of understanding. The activities of teaching, research and scholarship are fundamental to the task of being true to our own understandings of the world. Academic practice is centrally concerned with making these activities more accessible. A large part of being an academic has to do with making truthfulness one of the available resources of hope: enabling ourselves and others to sift our beliefs, to negotiate those beliefs with the beliefs of others, and to begin to define a public space within which rational discourse becomes a possibility. It is that complex and sometimes anxiety-ridden process that the notion of truthfulness—of being true to oneself and others—denotes. Seeking to engage with this process, Bernard Williams (2002, p. 2) remarks upon the ‘significant difficulty’ inherent in ‘the tension between

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     13

the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any truth to be found’. In seeking to reconcile this tension, he argues against both the ‘deniers’ of truth and the ‘commonsense’ of those who assume truth to be ‘fundamental’. He attempts, instead, to elaborate the moral significance of truthfulness for a world within which the notion of truth can no longer be taken for granted. His starting points are questions which hold these dichotomies in tension: ‘If you do not really believe in the existence of truth, what is the passion for truth a passion for? Or—as we might also put it—in pursuing truthfulness, what are you supposedly being true to?’ Universities are a space within which ‘the passion for truth’—and the question of what that passion is for—is of paramount importance. Universities exist to sustain that passion and to constantly refocus that question with reference to the circumstances, requirements and challenges of contemporary society. That is how universities—as part of the civil order—contribute to imagining and in part realising a common world: a world based not on assent and consent, but on reasoning together from very different positions, backgrounds and interests. A world of difference and plurality.

Reasoning Together In such a world our potentiality for reasoning together becomes of supreme importance. ‘We deliberate’, argued Aristotle (1976) in The Nicomachean Ethics, ‘about practical measures that lie in our power … where the result is obscure and the right course not clearly defined’ (pp. 118–119). ‘Nobody’, Aristotle goes on to argue, ‘deliberates about things that are invariable, or about things that he cannot do himself ’ (p. 209). Our capacity to deliberate or reason together is, in other words, necessary in those situations where action is required and where we have the power to act but where no prescribed formula can be readily applied regarding the right course of action. In choosing which course of action to adopt we may need to modify or reconceptualise our original ends and purposes in the light of whatever means are available and deemed appropriate. Deliberation (what Aristotle terms phronēsis )

14     J. Nixon

thereby involves taking responsibility for both the means available and ends in view. In an increasingly pluralistic world in which prescriptions regarding the right course of action are highly contested and open to multiple interpretations, our capacity for deliberation is of vital importance. The collective problems we face both locally and globally require collective solutions—and we can only arrive at such solutions by taking responsibility for the problems, acknowledging the uncertainty that surrounds them, and reasoning together regarding a practicable course of action. Deliberation thereby becomes a process grounded in the plurality of the participants: not a linear process that unfolds step by logical step from first premises, but a dialogical process that progresses dialectically through human interchange. We reason together regarding the nature of the common good and the form that right action will take in any given situation. Certain abilities— for example, drawing on relevant information, arguing a case, speaking persuasively—enable us to participate effectively in this process and can be acquired through practice. Gadamer (2006)—following Aristotle— locates these abilities within the broad category of rhetoric, which he defines as ‘the art of persuading without being able to prove anything’ (p. 55). Rhetoric, Gadamer insists, is not a competitive game of discourse played for the sake of winning a contest with the other: ‘it’s a question only of getting someone to understand our point of view or our opinion and communicating it to that person—just without being able to prove it’ (p. 56). To achieve that end, he continues, ‘we need to put ourselves in the place of the other without desiring to wage war on him’. There is, then, a clear relation between rhetoric and ethics, since rhetoric assumes a respect for the other’s point of view and aims at shared understanding based on that mutuality of respect. ‘The point of rhetoric’, Gadamer maintains, ‘is to teach one how to deliver or compose a speech so as to make possible a genuine understanding (synesis ) and an authentic communication (syggnome ), which constitute the basis for an actual consensus’ (p. 57). The composition and delivery of the speech may involve skills and appropriate know-how (technē ), but these are secondary to its overall ethical purpose.

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     15

Implicit in Gadamer’s understanding of how—in practice— understanding is possible are three crucial points that have a direct bearing on the ends and purposes of higher education. The first is that we may speak of that which we cannot prove. We are not rendered silent by the unverifiable. Language can, in other words, operate hermeneutically, as a way of moving towards new understandings rather than simply asserting prior understandings. Indeed, this is how language works when, to return to Aristotle’s previously quoted statement, ‘[w]e deliberate about practical measures that lie in our power … where the result is obscure and the right course not clearly defined’. If, as Gadamer suggests, this aspect of language is crucial to human understanding, then education has a vital role in enabling and encouraging students to express viewpoints and opinions that are unprovable: to think aloud, try out ideas, speculate and risk getting it wrong. Moreover, teachers have an educational duty to endorse such speculative talk and to create an atmosphere in which ‘getting it wrong’ is alright. The second point that Gadamer makes in his comments on rhetoric is the need to acknowledge the position of those to whom we are speaking. We must establish an affective and cognitive correspondence between the addressor’s horizon of understanding and that of the addressee. In dialogue this correspondence is achieved through the interplay of speaking and listening. We judge what to say and how to say it by listening to what is being said and—as the saying goes— ‘wrapping our head around it’. It is only in the interplay of speaking and listening that we achieve a meeting of minds. Listening then becomes a hermeneutical act: an interpretive filter which allows us to hear what has been said. Without that interpretive filter we are hermeneutically deaf.

A Common World The third point implicit in Gadamer’s argument is that a society in which its members reason together across cultural and historic divides is a society in which individuals and groups are encouraged to voice their opinions regardless of whether they are minority opinions or whether

16     J. Nixon

those who express them are experts; a society in which people listen to the opinions and arguments of others and seek to understand them even when—or especially when—they disagree with the views being expressed; a society intent upon cultivating the human qualities and dispositions that go to the making of what Elise M. Boulding (2000) termed ‘cultures of peace’: cultures that build from the everyday processes of interdependence towards ‘a global civic culture’. All human exchanges are located on a spectrum of exchange involving a trade-off between cooperation and competition. At one end of that spectrum are win-win exchanges which are overtly reciprocal and at the other end are winner-takes-all exchanges in which there is no reciprocity. In the middle ground between these extremes—the ground of realpolitik— lie various forms of zero-sum exchanges whereby one individual’s or group’s gain becomes another’s loss. But even zero-sum exchanges— unlike winner-takes-all exchanges—entail a certain degree of cooperation in terms of setting the ground rules and playing according to those rules. Moreover, as Richard Sennett (2013, p. 84) puts it, ‘win-lose is seldom total and absolute; instead the winner will leave something for the loser’. Without that ‘something’ all exchange ceases and—with it—any possibility of the winner capitalising on the winnings. It is in this middle ground—where cooperation and competition achieve a fragile balance—that we learn to reciprocate: learn, that is, to recognise one another as autonomous agents and to value mutuality. As humans we are born into a condition of helplessness, in which we are reliant on others for our nurture and survival: ‘the prolonged helplessness of the human infant marks its history’, as Martha C. Nussbaum (2001, p. 182) puts it, ‘and the early drama of its infancy is the drama of its helplessness before a world of objects’. That condition requires of us a need to acknowledge this external world upon which we are reliant, and—in order to achieve autonomy—understand ourselves in relation to it. Our uniquely prolonged period of infant helplessness goes hand in hand with the uniquely rapid growth of emotional and intellectual intelligence associated with that same period of infancy. We are learning to navigate the middle ground from day one—beginning, that is, to construct a common world. The construction of such a world begins with that early experience of coming to terms with ‘a world of objects’: learning how to acknowledge it and navigate it; achieving a sense of wonder and curiosity about

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     17

it; becoming less fearful of it; reconciling ourselves to it through argument and dialogue. Education is, at best, part and parcel of this long haul of learning to live together, if not in some ideal nexus of winwin exchanges then at least in some middle ground that allows for the mutual recognition of equal worth—a process that begins at birth and continues into the early years of schooling when the social dimension of learning is of vital importance. As that process follows though into the years of compulsory and post-compulsory education, the emphasis on deliberation and dialogue becomes ever more important: learning how to disagree; how to achieve workable agreements; how to move forward into collective action. Schools, colleges and institutions of further and higher education that value and sustain that process are what Honneth terms ‘institutions of recognition’. Such institutions value the social dimension of learning, acknowledge the indeterminacy of learning outcomes, and celebrate the surprising, the speculative and the unexpected that are inherent in the process of learning. Education is centrally concerned with encouraging and sustaining a passion for truth and a disposition towards reasoning together, particularly—to return to Aristotle—‘about practical measures that lie in our power … where the result is obscure and the right course of action not clearly defined’. Such learning relies crucially on a shared sense of purpose, but that sense of purpose cannot be reduced to a set of pre-specified ‘goals’ or ‘targets’. It is revealed—and fulfilled—through the process of reasoning together in a spirit of trust and truthfulness. It is by virtue of that process that we learn to live together in difference and disagreement, and—by so doing—construct the conditions necessary for the sustainability of a common world.

Conclusion What distinguishes those who hope from those who merely indulge in wishful thinking is their willingness to confront and challenge the apparent hopelessness of the situation in which they find themselves. Therein lies the paradox of hope. The situation in which we—located in the first quarter of the twenty-first century—find ourselves in is one of increasing instability and insecurity. We are living in a divided and

18     J. Nixon

divisive world in which the need for global interconnectivity clashes with a renewed emphasis on cultural and national boundary maintenance. Hope requires us to acknowledge—in our own lives and the lives of others—the consequences of this contradiction, and to find within it the necessary resources to seek to resolve it. Some at least of these resources lie in the public institutions of civil society: institutions that—by their very existence—acknowledge the importance of civil association and the recognition of equal worth. As one such institution, the university has two invaluable resources of hope to bring to our divided world: its passion for truth and its insistence on the necessity of reasoning together. By providing a space in which these resources can be developed and used for the common good, universities provide—in the face of a deeply divided world—hope of a common world: not an ideal world, but a better world in which the cravings of competition and the striving for cooperation and collaboration find a kinder and more equitable balance. But, of course, this, too, is an expression of hope—hope that the liberal university, bedevilled as it is by privatisation, marketization and managerialism, can live up to its historic mission. As Raymond Williams (1983, pp. 268–269) maintained in one of his final works, we can— once we have begun to question the seeming inevitabilities of the divided world we inhabit—gather the resources necessary for a journey of hope. There are, as he rightly pointed out, no easy answers. But there are the available and discoverable answers that can be gained through the quest for truth and the hard slog of reasoning together. ‘This has been,’ as he wrote, ‘from the beginning, the sense of the long revolution’.

References Appiah, K. A. (2005). The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ, and Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Arendt, H. (1970). Men in Dark Times. London: Jonathan Cape. Aristotle. (1976). The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (J. A. K. Thompson, Trans. & H. Tredennick, Rev. with Notes and Appendices). London: Penguin Books.

1  Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason     19

Benjamin, W. (1969) [1950]. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (H. Arendt, Ed. & H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. Boulding, E. M. (2000). Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Eyre, R. (2003, September 27). The BBC Is One of the Few Things in Britain That Works. The Guardian, p. 22. Gadamer, H.-G. (2001). Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (R. E. Palmer, Ed. & Trans.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (2006). A Century of Philosophy: A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori (R. Coltman & S. Koepke, Trans.). New York and London: Continuum. Graziano, M. (2018). What Is a Border? Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1994). Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914– 1991. London: Michael Joseph. Honneth, A. (2014). Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (J. Ganahl, Trans.). Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Kingsley, P. (2016). The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. London: Guardian Books and Faber and Faber. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lewis, J. (2018). The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel. London: W.H. Allen. Moltmann, J. (1967). Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of Christian Eschatology (J. W. Leitch, Trans.). London: SCM Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. (2013). Together: The Rituals and Politics of Cooperation. London: Penguin Books. Su, F., & Wood, M. (Eds.). (2017). Cosmopolitan Perspectives on Academic Leadership in Higher Education. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Williams, R. (1983). Towards 2000. London: Chatto & Windus and The Hogarth Press. Williams, B. (2002). Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

2 Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness: The Social-Political Role of Higher Education in Contemporary Societies Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen

Introduction “At the end of this course, students will be able to…” SOCRATES: “…know that they know nothing.” EDUCATION ADMINISTRATOR: I’m sorry, but that is not a measurable learning outcome. @apollodorus9, Twitter, August 22, 2018

Recently, the above tweet went viral in the academic circles of social media. It is easy to see why. The state of higher education—especially in liberal arts and the humanities—is looking gloomy. Standards external to the core academic activities—thinking, reading, teaching—are constantly imposed on faculty and students. Managerial logic increasingly defines what counts as good pedagogy; entrepreneurial ethos guides assessments of good research and societal interaction. For large segments of faculty and students, the contemporary situation seems

A.-E. Hyvönen (*)  Tampere University, Tampere, Finland © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_2

21

22     A.-E. Hyvönen

somewhat hopeless. Many have raised concerns on the “(im)possibility of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes” and the destruction of collegiality as a result of competition and frequent audits (Davies 2005; Berglund 2008). In order to envision channels from despair to hope, the present essay turns to two twentieth century authors rarely discussed together—Richard Rorty and Hannah Arendt. Of the two, Rorty is better known for his melioristic outlook. In fact, Arendt felt certain affinity to the Ancient Greeks who—according to one reading— considered hope as one of the evil spirits contained within Pandora’s jar. Yet, I argue, if we read Arendt and Rorty together they provide important insights into how to combine hopefulness with thoughtfulness, even under contemporary conditions. Although on the first glance Arendt and Rorty do not seem like a particularly close match, there are interesting resonances between the two thinkers (see Bernstein 2005, pp. 81, 128–129n6). Both responded to their experience of the twentieth century American society and to the shadow of totalitarianism. Both were suspicious of the philosophical tradition that they identified with Plato, and the appearance/reality distinction associated with it. Vehement defenders of plurality, both had left behind the idea that there are eternal standards applicable to human affairs (Arendt 1994, p. 432; 1998 [1958], p. 15; Rorty 1989, pp. 27, 35; 1999, p. 266). Both were persistent critics of theoreticism and the related tendency to posit forces behind the backs of concrete actors. Most importantly, however, their positions overlap— but not without productive tensions—on the questions relating to the role of universities and higher education. In order to provide a concrete context for their contributions, however, the chapter begins by discussing Finnish higher education policy of the last decades, and the merger process of a new University of Tampere, in particular. What is to be done when the very categories of hope, progress, critical thinking, and change have been appropriated by the powers that be in a manner that violates the very foundations of university life and its inherent purposes?

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     23

The Bullshit of Progress The Finnish higher education system has undergone serious structural changes in the past decades.1 In 2009, a new university legislation— although sold as a way of increasing the autonomy of universities by making them independent from the state—strengthened ­ ‘strategic’ funding instruments over basic funding, and increased the power of market forces over universities. The current government, serving from 2015 to 2019 has declared a comprehensive reform of the education system as one of its key goals. In the fall of 2015, the Minister of Education sent a letter addressed to the institutions of higher education in Finland. In it, she urged for renewal and reform, indicating that “international comparisons” have disclosed the relative ineffectiveness of the Finnish system—a claim that does not seem to be a particularly well founded one.2 The letter—and policies implemented both before and after the letter—called for specialization and profiling. Each university must pinpoint key research areas in which they should strive to become “the best in the world”. This also implies the need to eliminate—the preferred euphemism is “elect away”—marginal or nationally redundant fields of education and research. While paying lip service to the importance of basic research, the letter also called for stronger ties to business, including better commercialization of research results. The current government has also implemented heavy austerity measures, and higher education has been among the key targets. The overall funding of research has been radically cut. More and more of the remaining public funding is competitive and allocated for strategic projects, profiling and flagship programs, for research that fosters innovations, has close ties to business and is capable of promoting economic growth in the short term. As the terms just listed—flagship programs, 1For

some overviews, see Ahola and Hoffman (2012) and Ylijoki et al. (2012). See also (in Finnish) Tomperi (2009) and Tervasmäki and Tomperi (2018). 2The University 21 ranking of 2018, for example, ranks Finland sixth overall and number one when controlled for GDP per capita (Williams and Leahy 2018).

24     A.-E. Hyvönen

innovations, strategic projects—already indicate, there has been a strong push for universities to adopt an entrepreneurial ethos (see Hyvönen and Harni 2017). Universities are to become “motors of growth” and “innovation ecosystems” for the national knowledge-based economy. One of the most noteworthy reforms currently taking place has been the fusion of the three higher education institutions in the city of Tampere (University of Tampere, Tampere University of Technology, and Tampere University of Applied Sciences).3 In the process, University of Tampere transforms from a public to private foundation-based university. The new university is commonly known as Tampere3, T3 in short, although its official name is Tampere University. The fusion is in many ways an epitome of recent trends in national and international policy. In Europe, partially as a response to the economic crisis, recent years have brought about a “merger mania” (Pinheiro et al. 2016, p. 2). Nationally, the T3 endeavor is a response to the policies just discussed. It also clearly follows the model of a previous merger, the establishment of Aalto University in 2010. In both cases, the expectation has been that bringing together different areas of study would foster innovation.4 Motivation for the T3 fusion relates to the need to achieve an internationally acknowledged position in key areas of research, although it is not clear how the fusion actually brings this about. More immediately, the goal is to cope in the national competition against other universities. The staff, faculty, and students of the old University of Tampere, including the present author, have been less sanguine about the possibilities opened by the merger. Like other recent policy-developments, it seems to entail a further attempt to entrepreneurialize the university. Obviously, mergers usually also lead to cuts. But there are two more specific issues that have produced critical reactions from the university community: the language used to justify the merger and brand the new university, and the way the merger has been handled management-wise. I will focus on these two critical points in more detail. 3The

following was written in the midst of the fusion process, in mid-2018, which is reflected in the present tense mostly used in it. In order to better reflect the experiences described, I have opted not to make the change to past tense, which would be more accurate given that as of January 1, 2019, the fusion has officially taken place. 4On the Aalto merger, see Tienari et al. (2016).

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     25

First, the rhetoric used in the branding of the new university ticks most of the boxes that characterize what André Spicer (2018) has called “business bullshit”. Like the government’s strategy papers, the university’s preferred vocabularies also include terms such as “motors of growth”, “flagship programs”, and are filled with strategies, visions, agile leadership, missions, and other words best known from the management speak of the corporate world. The most characteristic feature of such language, Spicer points out, is that it is “meaningless by design”, largely exchangeable across different organizations in wildly different branches, and generally attracts “no real believers” (Spicer 2018, pp. xii, 3–6). The new university’s brand was launched in late 2017 with the slogan “people are the key” and a strong emphasis on solving the challenges faced by “humanity”. The advertisement video created for establishing the brand appropriated figures such as Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, and even Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, whose faces were linked to questions such as “who can solve all the problems of the world?”, “who can find the cure?” “heal the sick?” “help the poor?”. The answer: “We all can. Together. Because we believe that in the end, our human potential is unlimited” (Tampere3 2018a). All this fits quite seamlessly to what Spicer notes as the first red flag marking out bullshit, i.e. a flagrant lack of reference to any “real facts”, real people, places, objects, or actions (Spicer 2018, pp. 27, 58). This is what makes bullshit a mode of empty speech. It does not connect with specific realities, but presents a flawless image that, while embracing the world, avoids any contact with it. For an advertisement, this could still be acceptable. The university’s strategy and promotional webpage, however, were produced in the same style. There was, unsurprisingly, an optimistic and almost hyperbolic tone that defined almost everything related to the new university. Rather than being a reactive supplier for pre-existing demand, the university seeks to make an impact of the global markets, creating “a new demand for Finnish knowledge across the world”. Tampere3, further, “is driven by progress” (Tampere3 2018b). The new university is presented as something truly novel and unique. It is unclear, however, where the uniqueness is exactly located. As Spicer notes, universities like to present themselves as unique, but do so by using “exactly the same stock of

26     A.-E. Hyvönen

words to describe what makes it special as almost any other university in the world” (Spicer 2018, p. 96). According to the strategy of T3, the goals of the university are “to solve society’s major challenges and create new opportunities by linking pioneering research and innovation, promoting interdisciplinary education and life-long partnerships, and generating unique expertise in industrial and public-sector implementation”. “We recognise and know how to systematically anticipate the most demanding global, national and regional phenomena, challenges and opportunities” (TUNI 2019). These are big goals, but the strategy also provides thoughts on how to meet them, in other words, by “strengthening the international networking culture and creating a digital campus, developing novel ways of working and crossing boundaries in all our endeavours, driving sustainable societal renewal in a measureable way” (TUNI 2019). What is noteworthy about the ways in which the goals are to be reached is that they seem to have very little to do with academic activities and are highly general. “We work via networks”—well, in a networked society, who doesn’t? Besides, there are very little clues that give away the fact that we are indeed talking about a university. Similar ethos is detectible in the first letter sent by the new university’s President, Mari Walls, to staff members: “I have voluntarily entered my discomfort zone! […] Every day something new! Every day something to question! […] Every day a new encounter […] Every day seen as an opportunity to seek professional development. Every day a commitment to a strong purpose and impact”. On a purely linguistic level, the amount of bullshit produced by the new university’s representatives should be worrying in and of itself. Even though they are not exactly the same, the affinity of bullshit to the so-called post-truth politics should ring alarms.5 There is a good argument to be made that links the kind of empty talk just discussed to the general devaluing of factual truth in society and politics. It should be rather uncontroversial that the universities ought to be fighting against such tendencies instead of enhancing them. This language also presents 5On

the similarities and differences between bullshit and post-truth, see Hyvönen (2018a).

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     27

the societal role of university quite narrowly as a problem-solver for pregiven problems and a servant of the export-economy on which Finland relies for its societal well-being. This, however, is just one aspect of the problems related to the Tampere3 process. In a university that has a long history in liberal arts education (although the term is not used in Finland), the reform seems like a hastily covered up attempt to strengthen the power of business interests within the university. Indeed, the foundation that runs the university is led by a lobbying organization called Technology Industries of Finland whose agenda is to enhance competitiveness of technology industry. To add insult to injury, the monetary contributions of the Technology Industries to the new university’s initial capital have been marginal when compared to public funding. If integration of staff is usually a challenge in academic (and other) mergers, as has been argued (Pinheiro et al. 2016, p. 3), the handling of the merger process of Tampere3 has not really helped. As a familiar tactic already from the struggle on the new legislation a decade earlier, the reform has been hurried through in way that has left little time for critical scrutiny. Furthermore, the whole process has been characteristically anti-democratic, which is particularly striking in Finland that has— until the new legislation in 2009—only had public universities, and a strong tradition of university democracy within them. The staff, faculty, and students have had considerable powers in the decision-making bodies of universities. The actors responsible for establishing the new university in contrast have sought to overrule the voices and power of the university community throughout the process. Those voicing criticism have been labelled as being principally resistant to change. The Transitional Board, which was selected by the acting Boards of the two universities, introduced a draft for the new university’s regulations in February 2018, giving the community one week for ­comments. As response, there was a walkout on February 8, protesting the tight schedule, the exclusion of internal members from the Board, and other details of the regulations draft. This led to mostly cosmetic changes, but left the question of internal members for the Academic Board to decide. In March, members of the university community filed a complaint about the regulation to the Administrative Court and Parliamentary

28     A.-E. Hyvönen

Ombudsman, arguing it violates not only the University Act but also the Finnish Constitution. While this process was underway, the Transitional Board unilaterally decided in May to change the university regulations, increasing the power of the temporary chairperson of the Academic Board—the only member of the Academic Board who has not been elected by the community, but appointed by the Board (and whose authority was a central aspect in the legal complaint). In June, by vote of 10-10, and settled by the temporary chairperson’s vote, it was decided that the new university’s board cannot include members of staff as they would “jeopardize the independence” of the Board. This interpretation has been challenged, among others, by the Constitutional Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament, which stated during the law reform process of 2009 that “no regulation chosen by the legislator should disallow the university community from choosing the majority of the University Board from among its own member groups”. This situation often stipulates the experiences of hopelessness and despair among the academic staff. Against this background, it is worth reconsidering how the members of the university community can, within and without their professional/student activities, not only fight back but find ways of protecting and further developing the core academic activities of researching, thinking, teaching and learning? How to retain hope rather than hopelessness or hopeless optimism?

Richard Rorty and Hannah Arendt on Hope and University Education In the quest for hope, I first turn to Richard Rorty. There are good reasons for doing so. After all, Rorty is perhaps the most well-known philosopher of hope after Ernst Bloch. Even though the word ‘hope’ appears in the title of only one of his books, Philosophy and Social Hope, a 1999 collection of essays geared for a wide audience, the theme cuts through all of his writings. His version of pragmatism, as he put it in one of the section titles of the aforementioned collection of essays, was about putting “hope in place of knowledge”. For Rorty, to move from

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     29

knowledge to hope means to move from stability to constant transition. It is to move from the idea that there are certain limits and foundations for our politics—such as “human nature”—to the idea that the only limits to human thought and practices and are set by poetic imagination, our ability to come up with new ways of speaking (Rorty 2016, pp. 3–7, 13). This move requires heavy theoretical, political, and ethical investment into the idea that the future can (unspecifiably) be different, better, and freer than the past and the present (Rorty 1999, p. 120). He urges us to imagine a better future, while abstaining from creating blueprints or claiming to know how the future will turn out (Rorty 1999, pp. 28, 204–205, 209). Rorty’s thinking strongly embraced the idea expressed by Emerson a century earlier. “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” (Emerson 1982, p. 237). For Rorty, this Emersonian line of thinking became linked to what he in his later works called “cultural politics”, i.e. the invention of new social practices and new vocabularies to take “humanity’s ongoing conversation about what to do with itself ” one step further (Rorty 2007, pp. ix, 3–5). Although the term cultural politics was adopted by Rorty only towards the end of his life, the same ethos characterizes his writings at least from the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) onwards. What should concern us most, he consistently urged, is not “whether what one believes is well grounded” (knowledge), but “whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present believes” (hope) (Rorty 1999, p. 34). In other words, he was most afraid of “freezing over of culture [and, a fortiori ] the dehumanization of human beings” (Rorty 1979, p. 377). But what does freezing over of culture exactly mean? At this point, Rorty makes a crucial distinction between normal and abnormal discourse. Normal discourse is an established way of speaking, acting, and judging, a language game with agreed upon criteria and conventions (Rorty 1979, pp. 11, 319–320). It is a collection of old metaphors that have died into literalness, to such extent that we have ceased seeing them as metaphors (Rorty 1989, pp. 15–18). By abnormal discourse Rorty means a discussion where one or more participants either sets aside or is ignorant of the conventions of normal discourse. In other words, they start speaking with new metaphors.

30     A.-E. Hyvönen

Change is of paramount importance to Rorty’s politics. Progressive liberal politics, for him, takes the form of constant transition from one state to another. Such changes, i.e. social progress, come about when people try to “actualize hitherto-undreamt-of possibilities by putting new linguistic and other practices into play” (Rorty 1998a, p. 208). Hence, the primary instrument of social change is a talent of speaking differently, that is to say metaphorically, and therefore developing a new vocabulary, a whole new way of thinking, acting, and judging. Over time, such novelties will turn into normal discourse, making what seemed like absurd proposition into common sense of the next generation (Rorty 1989, pp. 7, 12, 17; 2007, p. 85). Rational argumentation— insofar as it follows already established rules—can only achieve minor adjustments, whereas: the method of utopian politics or revolutionary science (as opposed to parliamentary politics, or normal science) […] is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions. (Rorty 1989, p. 9)

Rorty’s views on education are directly linked to his general ideas about politics and culture. For him, it is the role of college education in particular to generate students capable of acting out transformations in the liberal institutions as they currently stand. Rorty makes his point by contrasting his views of higher education to what he presents as the default right-wing and left-wing approaches to education. People on the political right, he argues, typically see education as a means of inculcating certain foundational truths in the minds of the young. The left, on the contrary, treats such truths as parts of the oppressive machinery depriving people of their freedom and sees the task of education as that of setting the students free of their weight. Both sides believe there is a “true self ”. For the conservatives it coincides with human rationality capable of adhering to the fundamental truths; for the radicals it names an entity that emerges once the repressive

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     31

influences of socialization are removed (Rorty 1999, pp. 114–117). For Rorty, there is no such core, true self. The self is a contingent social construction all the way down. For Rorty, the left is right to emphasize the primacy of freedom to truth. He simply wants to emphasize an understanding of freedom that is more mundane than the one he associates with the radical left. For him, it suffices to say that “if you take care of economic, cultural and academic freedom, then truth will take care of itself ” (Rorty 1999, p. 117). Freedom, in other words, is a bourgeois, mundane, even a bit boring thing provided by liberal democracies. The role of college education, then, Rorty argued, is not about freeing the true self from the repressive ideologies or making it receptive for the great timeless truths handed down by tradition. On the contrary, the role of college education is simply: to help the students see that the national narrative around which their socialization has centred is an open-ended one. It is to tempt the students to make themselves into people who can stand to their own pasts as Emerson and Anthony, Debs and Baldwin, stood to their pasts. This is done by helping the students realize that, despite the progress that the present has made over the past, the good has once again become the enemy of the better. (Rorty 1999, p. 124)

It is inevitable that even colleges engage to some extent in direct and indirect vocational training that prepares the students to the expectations of work-life outside the campuses. Nevertheless, the main, although implicit, function of college teachers has been and should be the encouragement of Socratic skepticism in the students. In other words, it is about encouraging different forms of self-creation, both on the communal scale and in the individuals (Rorty 1999, p. 126). Rorty wants to enlist his students to the “party of hope” (Rorty 1998b, p. 14), helping them—in the words of Roberto Mangabeira Unger— to imagine themselves “more fully as the context-bound yet contextresistant and context-revising agents we really are” (Unger 1987, p. 200). As this description gives away, Rorty’s idea of college education takes the humanities and social sciences as paradigmatic fields of

32     A.-E. Hyvönen

study. This is not to say he ignores the role of sciences. In fact, we can see echoes of William James’s very broad employment of the term “humanities” in Rorty’s position. For James, the humanities included “masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor” (James 1987, p. 107; see also Goldman 2019). Rorty’s thought retains some of that attitude, and indeed his Kuhnian approach to science would allow a reading that focuses on the importance of self-overcoming also in the field of sciences. Be it as it may, the focus of Rorty’s concerns lies outside the science departments and in the role of “humanistic intellectuals”, whose job is not strictly speaking research or teaching, insofar as both words implicate the acquisition or communication of knowledge. Their job is mostly about “stirring the kids up”, about “instilling doubts […] about the student’s own self-images, and about the society to which they belong” (Rorty 1999, p. 127). This is one of the areas in which it becomes fruitful to build bridges between Arendt and Rorty. Both separate knowing from thinking or, in Rorty’s words, from “expanding one’s moral imagination”. For Arendt, knowing is the product of our cognitive capacities, our intellect (Verstand ), and can produce highly useful results. During the era of modern science, in fact, knowledge reached into ever-new areas of practicality, producing know-how not even imaginable before (Arendt 1978, pp. 13–15; 1998 [1958], p. 268). In the same fashion, Rorty distinguishes his “humanistic intellectuals”—who are to be found in a plurality of departments and faculties within the university—from “people busy conforming to well-understood criteria for making contributions to knowledge” (Rorty 1999, p. 127). For the sake of politics and the world we share with other people, knowing alone is not enough. We need to engage other mental activities as well. For both Arendt and Rorty these other mental activities are crucially linked to the faculty of imagination. For Rorty, a “humanistic intellectual” is someone interested in expanding their moral imagination. Such task includes the invention of new linguistic practices capable of altering our instinctive emotional responses to different social situations and enlarging our sense of what is possible (Rorty 1998a, p. 204; 1999, p. 127). Before this can take place, however, there is a need for groundwork, simply learning to see increasing amount of strange people as

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     33

fellow sufferers. This happens, first and foremost, by reading books, journalistic reports, ethnographic works, watching docudramas, and so on (Rorty 1989, p. xvi; 1999, p. 127). Imagination also plays an important role in Arendt’s conception of thinking. In a course she taught in 1968 on “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century”, she emphasized to her students: “The mental capacity to which we apply here is Imagination. I could have called this course Exercises in Imagination” (Arendt 1968). For her, imagination is the key to what she called “representative thinking”; that is, a kind of thinking that puts things in perspective, relates them to each other, and seeks to understand “the common world as it appears to others” (Arendt 2003b, p. 451; 2006a, p. 236). The biggest difference between Arendt and Rorty on this score has to do with the respective role of empathy in the conceptualizations. For Rorty, empathy is an essential aspect of imaginative thought, whereas Arendt holds that “feeling in flesh” is not a prerequisite for placing oneself to someone else’s position.6 For both, however, literature is a key channel for adopting the perspectives and experiences of others. The effects of imaginative thinking are also described in a related fashion by both thinkers. Rorty’s take on the purpose of higher education and the role of humanistic intellectual harks implicitly back to a type of person his second magnum opus, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, called an “ironist”. An ironist, much like Rorty’s ideal college-bred, is “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires” (Rorty 1989, p. xv). An ironist is a person who “has radical and continuing doubts” about the vocabulary that defines their central beliefs and understands that there are no noncircular theoretical or argumentative resources for defending their belief-systems (Rorty 1989, pp. xv, 73). Although Rorty does not emphasize his debt to Socrates, one of the key elements linking Arendt and Rorty together is nevertheless

6This

is not to say Arendt dismisses the political role of emotions altogether. This false reading of her thought has been questioned quite powerfully in recent scholarship (e.g. Degerman 2016; Guaraldo 2018).

34     A.-E. Hyvönen

the inheritance of Socratic irony.7 Both insist, in their own ways and in their own “vocabularies”, that the constant questioning Socrates was engaged in is of high moral value. Rather than ready ethical systems and answers, the tasks of thinking and imagining themselves are considered as bulwarks against evil. Socratic irony is indeed probably the paradigmatic example of thinking that prevents the “freezing over” of vocabularies that worries Rorty. Although this is not a metaphor Plato’s Socrates uses—probably for obvious climatic reasons—it seems correct to describe the Socratic maieutic in terms of “unfreezing” as J. Peter Euben does (2001, p. 190). In the rare moments when Arendt talked about her own pedagogical goals, she mentioned the attempt to arouse thinking in her students. The kind of thinking she was talking about was non-technical and did not seek to indoctrinate the students to certain beliefs. The activity of thinking, corresponding to reason (Vernunft ), produces very few palpable results. The need to think emerges simply out of quest for meaning. In contrast to knowledge, the quest for meaning inherent in the activity of thought runs against common sense. From the perspective of common sense, the endless questioning of thinking is “meaningless” because its questions are unanswerable (Arendt 1978, pp. 13–15, 58–59; 2003a, pp. 44–45). The only direct result of thinking, for Arendt, is that it shields us against the zeitgeist, or with just a little bit a stretch, the Rortian “normal discourse” and instinctive reactions. Thinking has its dangers. “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous ”, Arendt argued in one of her most memorable quotes. But what is decisive for her is that in politics, non-thinking is even more dangerous, because it teaches people to “hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society” (Arendt 2003a, pp. 177–178). The danger thinking poses, indeed, is precisely danger for these prescribed rules of conduct. In her own experience and research on totalitarianism, she had found out in extremis what havoc established rules of conduct can sow. If one is used to 7While not directly connecting Arendt and Rorty, Richard Bernstein notes in his Ironic Life the overlap between Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socratic irony and what Arendt (based on Socrates) says of thinking (Bernstein 2017, pp. 121–122).

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     35

having clear rules to follows, there are no bulwarks against replacing one set of rules with another. Only critical thinking, the Rortian “radical and continuing doubts”, can act as a bulwark against being carried away with dangerous torrents of the zeitgeist. This is what Arendt aimed to achieve in her classroom too. What mattered was that “I don’t let myself get away with repeating the clichés of the public mood” (Arendt 2018, p. 449). Just like Rortian irony, then, Arendt’s thinking is destructive for the contemporary moral-political vocabulary. By a curious implication, for colleges to be able to carry out the function of inducing irony and thought, pre-college education need to be focused on socialization. Both authors envisioned the role of schooling as relatively conservative, and the role of higher education as somewhat revolutionary.8 Both also justified their position in the same fashion, arguing that it is best for the democratic polity that children are first introduced to the world as it is, and then allowed to take their chances at changing it. An ironist in the Rortian sense is indeed constantly worrying that they have been socialized in a “wrong way”, without necessarily being able to define what they mean by wrong. Thus, they try to familiarize themselves with as many alternative ways of thinking as possible, so as to escape the imprisonment into their primary socialization (Rorty 1989, pp. 74–75, 80–81). In this sense, ironism is always reactionary and presupposes successful socialization—including the knowledge of the “basic facts”. “Primary and secondary education will always be a matter of familiarizing the young with what their elders take to be true, whether it is true or not” (Rorty 1999, p. 118). But neither is willing to stick with mere destruction. Rorty in particular, as we saw, wants to take the step towards developing new vocabularies. Arendt, on the other hand, warns against developing the resultlessness of thought into a negative result, viz. nihilism. For nihilism “is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of

8Here,

Rorty departs from some parts of his Deweyan heritage, arguing that Dewey could not foresee the utter devastation of American school system and hence its ability to carry out the most basic function of piling up information.

36     A.-E. Hyvönen

negations of the current, so-called positive values to which it remains bound” (Arendt 2003a, p. 177). Only on exceptional, emergency moments does thinking become a politically central affair: When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action. The purging element in thinking, Socrates’ midwifery, that brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and thereby destroys them – values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions – is political by implication. For this destruction has a liberating effect on another human faculty, the faculty of judgment, which one may call, with some justification, the most political of man’s mental abilities. (Arendt 2003a, p. 188)

“Life only avails, not the having lived”, wrote Emerson (1982, p. 44); the same can be said of thinking. It is only the constant thoughtful attention to things and events that avails—activates the critical faculty of judgment—not the results of previous thoughts.

Against Bullshit and Neocracy: Questioning the Role of Facts and Experience As we have seen, neither Arendt nor Rorty would agree with the view articulated by a long-time President of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, according to whom the object of higher education was to implant the students’ minds with “certain great truths which lie at the foundation of democratic social theory” (Eliot 1926, p. 98; quoted in Goldman 2019, p. 8). Thinking does not lead to truth and the point of teaching is not to communicate truths to students. In this section, however, I will argue that the problem of truth, broadly construed, constitutes a critical fork in the road thus far shared by Arendt and Rorty. Although the differences between the two are minute, Arendt’s views regarding factual truth and the role of experience in thinking make her approach more promising in the task of opposing the broad trends described in the first section of the chapter.

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     37

It is common to accuse pragmatism for its lacking sensibility for the tragic. Yet, as writers from Sidney Hook to Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. have argued, there are many resources for grabbling with the tragic dimension of life in the pragmatist tradition (e.g. Hook 1960; West 1989, pp. 226–235; Glaude 2007, pp. 5, 17–49). In many ways, the pragmatists share with Arendt the “vision of tragedy that does not leave you despairing” that Karl Jaspers detected in her On Revolution (Arendt and Jaspers 1992, p. 505). This is also the case with Rorty, at least in part. Despite his emphasis on remaining hopeful, he was not a naïve optimist in any sense. In fact, his predictions of the future trajectories of the United States were usually in contradiction with his hopes (Rorty 1998a, p. 201n26; 1998b, p. 87; 1999, pp. 273–274). Something essential of Rorty’s thinking is indeed expressed in a statement he once made in an interview: “If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?” (Rorty 2003). Rorty, then, was quite aware of the fact that our cherished values can conflict with each other, and that our actions do not often lead to the consequences we were hoping. In this sense, his thought is tragic (see also Rorty 1998b, p. 33). Nevertheless, there are two particular shortcomings that dilute the ability of Rorty’s thought to shed light on the tragic aspects of (political) existence and—consequently—weaken the hopeful element in his thinking. The first shortcoming relates to a failure of imagination. As many critics have (rightly) complained, there seems to be a trend in Rorty’s work (especially in the 1980s) towards a theodicy-like assumption that contemporary liberal society is the best of all possible worlds. He seemed to be guilty of freezing over of his own political culture in that liberalism was taken to be the indisputable limit of political imagination. While Rorty partially backed from this position during the 1990s, liberalism remained his blind spot, partly undermining his democratic aspirations (Hutchinson 1989, p. 557; Fraser 1990). Second, while Rorty’s emphasis on the importance of hope is valuable, it the particular type of hope emerging from his work that seems insufficient in the social and political struggles in the context of HEIs today. In the terms coined by Ernst Bloch, Rorty seems to be too

38     A.-E. Hyvönen

focused on the “subjective hope”, and does not say enough of the “objective substance of hope in the world itself ” (Bloch 2018, p. 39). As we saw above, Rorty’s idea of criticism follows Dewey’s famous formulation in Art as Experience: “[D]isclosure […] [of a] sense of possibilities that are unrealized and might be realized are when they are put in contrast with actual conditions, the most penetrating ‘criticism’ of the latter that can be made” (Dewey 1980, p. 360). The problem, however, as Chris Voparil has brilliantly argued, is that the actual conditions against which the utopian scenarios should be assessed have “an uncertain place in Rorty’s vision” (Voparil 2006, pp. 45–48). For Rorty, thinking (or irony) is all about linguistic innovation, finding new and better ways of talking. The only worry worth having, he argues, is “whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs” (Rorty 1999, p. 34). There is a hint of linguistic voluntarism in Rorty’s position. It is all about inventing new ways of speaking, of playing vocabularies against each other. He emphasizes the voluntary aspect of this process so much that he loses sight of events, of how worldly incidents trigger and indeed force us to change the way we speak. What about cases, for instance, where language changes as a response to experiences, rather than the other way around? Democratically, it is also worrying that Rorty seems to leave little room for actual, concrete collisions of different perspectives, for scenes of dissensus. And if the criterion to decide which words to use comes down to the difference between more useful and less useful, is it in any way obvious for example that it is more useful to describe the Holocaust as something real, rather than denying it (e.g. Rorty 1999, pp. xxii, xxiv)? In an interview with Philosophy Now, Rorty identified the social function of philosophy as keeping track of cultural changes, trying to “adjust our ways of speaking so as to take account of new things that have happened” (Rorty 2003). This latter formulation is more promising than the version that focused on linguistic innovation based on strong imagination alone. Two things, however, need to be noted. First, the latter formulation is indeed a description of philosophy’s role in culture, whereas the former relates to thinking, academy, or ironism more broadly. Second, the examples cited by Rorty (Galileo, Newton,

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     39

Darwin, the French Revolution), still leave something to hope for in terms of thinking political/societal experiences and adjusting thinking accordingly. These are scientific paradigm changes, accompanied with one of the most momentous political events in recorded history. I find more promise in Arendt’s emphasis on experience, on “the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence” (Arendt 1978, p. 4). If there is a lack of tragic sensibility in Rorty’s thought, and I argue there is, it because the marginal status of concrete events in his thought. Here, Arendt can offer a corrective that, nevertheless, keeps with the most important insights of Rortian thought. The keys to this Arendtian corrective are the role of experience and the importance of factual truth for thinking, and relatedly, for education. To quip: if we take the word pragmatism literally, and consider the meaning of πρᾶγμα as referring to concrete things, events, facts, deeds, and acts, it may turn out that Arendt is a better ‘pragmatist’ than Rorty. For Rorty, in most of his writings, all references to truth or reality necessarily take the form of having reality on your side. This does not need to be so, and I argue that Arendt offers an important and viable alternative perspective to the role of truth and reality for critical thought. For Arendt, thinking begins with thaumadzein, the speechless horror or wonder in the face of what the world presents to us. This speechless wonder and horror can also be identified with what Arendt called the “shock of reality” (Arendt 1973 [1951], p. viii). The shock itself, however, does not reveal meaning or act as a foundation for thought. It is not an unwarranted escape to extra-linguistic authority, as Rorty would suggest. But it does function as a gesture suggesting that there are events and facts that thinking needs to face. Arendt does not subsume politics to truth any more than Rorty does. She points out, however, that both thinking and democratic debate rely on the existence of modest factual truths. Unlike the moral truths that are almost exclusively in Rorty’s focus, Arendt highlights the “brutally elementary” factual data—verities such as “Germany invaded Belgium in the First World War, not the other way around”—as a prerequisite of political thought (Arendt 2006a [1961], pp. 227–238; Hyvönen 2018a). Without acknowledging these contingent and vulnerable

40     A.-E. Hyvönen

truths, we become estranged from the common world we share with others. Although his emphasis for most part lies elsewhere, Rorty himself in fact occasionally hinted towards a related view. In an interview, he emphasized the need of “truthfulness” in politics, as opposed to the “really technical” discussions on truth in analytic philosophy (Rorty 2006, p. 57). He also noted in a post-Wittgensteinian manner that when we learn how to use words in everyday language, we “automatically acquire lots of true beliefs” about them. Of course any such truths can be questioned, “but not all of them at once” (Rorty 2016, pp. 2–3). For Arendt, when we face these facts thoughtfully, give them names, and bring them into our language games, they become the focal points of the kind of Socratic thinking that both Rorty and Arendt appreciated. Arendt’s name for this focal point of thought is experience. Unlike later linguistic critics, she does not consider experience as something determined by established meanings; on the contrary, the word denotes a fracture in the meaning-making practices we currently utilize.9 “The need to think arises whenever we find that words taken in their ordinary sense are obscuring rather than revealing.” (Arendt 2003b, pp. 770, 48). The poet, the historian, and the novelist are the particular vocations named by Arendt as those whose role it is to find ways of transferring or carrying over (metapherein ) experience into the language of thought. Metaphors, conceptual frameworks, and “single brief sentences and condensed aphorisms” such as those found in Faulkner’s novels give us the “words we live by” (Arendt 2006b [1962], pp. 272, 307n4). Arendt then, no less than Rorty, highlights the metaphoric and poetic origins of linguistic changes: “All philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were” (Arendt 1978, p. 104). But unlike Rorty, Arendt emphasizes the active element of the world in initiating these metaphoric changes. This way, she is more successful in avoiding the risk of linguistic voluntarism located in Rorty. One more aspect of contemporary reality that calls for rethinking of Rorty’s position is what Spicer calls neocracy, “rule by the new” (Spicer 2018, p. 104). As exemplified in the frequent reform cycles 9I

develop this view of experience in Hyvönen (2018b, pp. 137–144).

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     41

in Finnish HEIs, the organizational logic revolves around continued re-organization of functions, metamorphosis and transformation of strategies, goals and responsibilities. These reforms are usually accompanied by new ways of speaking, the latest trend in business bullshit that finds its way to the corridors of universities. Combined with a precarious status of criticism of actual conditions, Rorty’s way of highlighting new ways of speaking remains somewhat powerless against these type of tendencies. In fact, the same kind of subjective, unfounded hope that I have identified with his thinking is also the motor of neocracy. “By remaining hopeful,” Spicer’s argues, “people are able to keep their reforming efforts going despite lots of evidence that they are not working. One of the most efficient ways people can maintain hope […] even in the most tricky situations is to sidestep the messy world of practice altogether” (Spicer 2018, p. 107). It is hard not to notice certain homology between this description and the criticism of Rorty I have just articulated. Rorty’s critical edge is too much directed against the old type of conservatism that is past-oriented, tends to ossify structures and resists change of any type. What we now face, however, is a discourse that is better characterized as being fixated on the future and seeks to actively discard past lessons. In a world of constant reforms, innovation, rule by novelty, there is an additional critical edge in Arendt’s description of the jarring effect of thinking, its character as stop-and-think.

Conclusion Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.—Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 235

For both Arendt and Rorty, as I have presented their positions in this chapter, critical thinking is a crucial tool for coping, making oneself at home in the world without selling one’s soul to it. The pedagogical lessons of the two thinkers come down to critical questioning of the present in a way that does not succumb to despair. They call for teaching that builds both on dialogue and on the chance temporarily isolate

42     A.-E. Hyvönen

oneself from others in order to read and think. Theirs, in the words of two Arendt scholars is both a “pedagogy that aims to get thinking under way by orchestrating experiences of positive independence” (Duarte 2001, p. 216) and one that emphasizes human relationality, the need to think in dialogue with others. Both aspects of thought are important so that we can prepare “for the unpredictability of thinking” (Nixon 2012, pp. x, 14, 63, passim ). Thinking is also directly connected to hope. Although this aspect is more pronounced in Rorty—and in this sense, his position may be seen as a corrective of Arendt’s—it is certainly present in both. The current state of politics—in higher education and elsewhere—is a part of an open-ended story. It is the task of action—inspired by critical thought—to make the future better than the present and the past. For Arendt, remembrance is a crucial element in such future-oriented disclosure of possibilities. Following Walter Benjamin, she used the metaphor of “pearl-diving” when describing her relation to the past. The point, in this view, is not to return to past glories (such as the high moments of Humboldtian public university in Finland), but to interpret the past pearls with the “deadly impact of new thoughts”, fed by our newest experiences and fears (Arendt 1978, p. 212, 2001 [1968], pp. 199–201). With the aid of such past pearls as inspiration, the crucial thing is to assume active and persistent political stance. The problem is not to create resistance; there are, as I noted in the first section, existing modes of contestation to the prominent and threatening tendencies of higher education policy. The focus should lie instead in amplifying the existing forms of resistance so that they become more than mere resistance— acts of world-building. This requires active and strong-willed revitalization of the collegiality and solidarity on which the idea of colleges was originally founded. It requires active political action to build solidarity between disciplinary boundaries, between teaching faculty and other members of staff, and between faculty and students. This must be connected, finally, to a strong sense of responsibility towards—and alliance building with—the world outside the university. For Arendt, humanists are generalists who know “how to take care and preserve and admire the things of the world” (Arendt 2006a [1961],

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     43

p. 222). This makes the humanities particularly important in the fight for the university. In fact, the university needs the humanities if it is to survive. As Jürgen Habermas has argued, and both Arendt and Rorty would agree, the critical and ethico-political mission of the university is inseparable from its scientific function. Discourse on values, concepts, and other linguistic resources is the condition of possibility also for fields such as physics and mathematics (Habermas 1971, p. 11). The question, however, is how to best channel this promise of humanities in the current fight, especially given the constant talk of the “crisis of humanities”? With Arendt, I would argue that one of the most important lessons the humanities could teach within the university and in the society at large concerns the limits of instrumentality. The edge of our criticism must be focused on the constant questioning of instrumental language that cuts through everything—bullshit not excluded—that is said and written about the university today. Consequently, pace the Rortian idea that reading a lot of books will make you a better person, or the more general idea that humanities give many important career-skills needed in today’s neoliberal job market, perhaps we should defiantly affirm with Toni Morrison a certain uselessness in liberal, humanistic education. Selling humanities with instrumental language will backfire, as it necessarily commits one to some form of philistinism or another. *  *  * While it is the wager of this chapter that there are many important lessons we need to learn from Arendt and Rorty, it is also worthwhile to note that in some respects we need to also acknowledge their respective failures of imagination. To take one example, neither of the two thinkers offers much in the way of taking into consideration the impact of such issues as race, gender, or class on education. We need to consult other sources in order to gain insights into developing sensitivities towards structurally disadvantaged students. This applies throughout the “education path”, and it challenges in particular Rorty’s and Arendt’s view of primary and secondary education as conservative introduction into the world as it is. As James Baldwin powerfully notes in his 1963 address “A Talk to Teachers”, from the perspective of a child whom

44     A.-E. Hyvönen

the society oppresses because of their identity, education must include teaching the students that the world is ruled “by a criminal conspiracy to destroy him”. To do otherwise is to cause psychological damage (Baldwin 1998, pp. 679, 685). By and large, the Rortian-Arendtian call for expanding one’s moral imagination and acquiring different perspectives through engaging with literature and other such sources is exactly what is needed. We just need to push harder than either Arendt or Rorty to break free of the Eurocentric biases when selecting the perspectives with which to engage. In today’s context, enlarging one’s moral imagination, imagining other perspectives to the world we share with others, has to mean engaging with/in, inter alia, the decolonization of curriculum. Having said that, I want to conclude by emphasizing once more the importance of the Socratic thought particularly in its Arendtian and Rortian modes. Arendt once noted that there is little hope that political actors will emerge who match the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century in their “practical and theoretical wisdom”. Nevertheless, she continued, “that little hope, I fear, is the only one we have that freedom in a political sense will not vanish again from the earth for God knows how many centuries” (Arendt 2018, p. 386). I have little doubts that Rorty would agree with Arendt on this assessment (although he might phrase it differently). It also seem that recent years have amplified the fears articulated by Arendt. Obviously, these threats to political freedom are not limited to North America. Educating ourselves and the new generations entering the universities for critical thought that knows how to take care of the world democratically is therefore of utmost importance. Reminding ourselves that there are alternatives is crucial. Furthermore, as Arendt highlighted, the fight for these alternatives—i.e. political action—contains considerable promises. There are forms of joy—the experience of what she called public happiness—to be found on the public sphere, perhaps making it worthwhile to leave the scholia (quietude) of academic life for the agora every now and then. Arendt and Rorty, I argue, help considerably in our attempt to meet the obligation identified by Drucilla Cornell when she writes that “We are obliged, in a profound sense, to keep alive hope in the name of those who refused to give up their own faith for a better world even as

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     45

they succumbed to death” (Cornell 2008, p. vii). This obligation brings together, quite beautifully, the human activities of thinking, learning, and acting. It is in this sprit that I give the last word to Baldwin: The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions […] The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change. (Baldwin 1998, pp. 678–679)

References Ahola, S., & Hoffmann, D. M. (2012). Higher Education from a Finnish Perspective: An Introduction. In S. Ahola & D. M. Hoffman (Eds.), Higher Education Research in Finland: Emerging Structures and Contemporary Issues (pp. 11–25). Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä Press. Arendt, H. (1968). Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century. Course Delivered at the New School for Social Research. Library of Congress, Arendt Archive. Arendt, H. (1973) [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind, One: “Thinking”. New York: Harcourt. Arendt, H. (1994). Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken. Arendt, H. (1998) [1958]. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (2001) [1968]. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt. Arendt, H. (2003a). Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken. Arendt, H. (2003b). Denktagebuch, 1950–1973. Munich: Piper. Arendt, H. (2006a) [1961]. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin. Arendt, H. (2006b) [1962]. On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Arendt, H. (2018). Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding II. New York: Schocken. Arendt, H., & Jaspers, K. (1992). Correspondence 1926–1969 (L. Kohler & H. Saner, Ed., R. Kimber & R. Kimber, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace.

46     A.-E. Hyvönen

Baldwin, J. (1998). A Talk to Teachers. In J. Baldwin, Collected Essays. New York: Literary Classics. Berglund, E. (2008). I Wanted to Be an Academic, Not ‘A Creative’: Notes on Universities and the New Capitalism. Ephemera, 8(3), 322–330. Bernstein, R. J. (2005). The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bernstein, R. J. (2017). Ironic Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bloch, E. (2018). On Karl Marx. London: Verso. Cornell, D. (2008). Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Davies, B. (2005). The (Im)possibility of Intellectual Work in Neoliberal Regimes. Discourse, 26(1), 1–14. Degerman, D. (2016). Within the Heart’s Darkness: The Role of Emotions in Arendt’s Political Thought. European Journal of Political Theory. Published Online Before Print, May 18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116647850. Dewey, J. (1980). Art as Experience. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group. Duarte, E. (2001). Eclipse of Thinking: An Arendtian Critique of Cooperative Learning. In M. Gordon (Ed.), Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World. Boulder, CO: Westview. Emerson, R. W. (1982). Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Euben, P. (2001). Hannah Arendt on Politicizing Education and Other Clichés. In M. Gordon (Ed.), Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing Our Common World. Boulder, CO: Westview. Fraser, N. (1990). Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty Between Romanticism and Technocracy. In A. R. Malachowski (Ed.), Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Beyond (pp. 303–321). Oxford: Blackwell. Glaude, E. S. (2007). In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldman, L. (2019). Revisiting the Social Value of College-Breeding. In C. S. Stagoll & M. P. Levine (Eds.), Pragmatism Applied: William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life. New York: SUNY Press. Guaraldo, O. (2018), Public Happiness: Revisiting an Arendtian Hypothesis. Philosophy Today, 62(2), 397–418. Online Before Print, June 12. https:// doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201866218. Habermas, J. (1971). Toward a Rational Society. London: Heinemann. Hook, S. (1960). Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 33(1959–1960), 5–26.

2  Pedagogies of Hopefulness and Thoughtfulness …     47

Hutchinson, A. C. (1989). The Three ‘Rs’: Reading/Rorty/Radically. Harvard Law Review, 103(2), 555–585. Hyvönen, A.-E. (2018a). Careless Speech: Conceptualizing Post-truth Politics. New Perspectives, 26(3), 31–55. Hyvönen, A.-E. (2018b). The Janus Face of Political Experience. Arendt Studies, 2, 125–147. Hyvönen, A.-E., & Harni, E. (2017). The Politics of Austerity and Entrepreneurialism: Reflections on the Role of Humanities. In J. Nixon (Ed.), Higher Education in Austerity Europe. London: Bloomsbury. James, W. (1987). Essays, Comments, and Reviews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nixon, J. (2012). Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education: Arendt, Berger, Said, Nussbaum and Their Legacies. London: Bloomsbury. Pinheiro, R., Geschwind, L., & Aarrevaara, T. (2016). Mergers in Higher Education. European Journal of Higher Education, 6(2), 2–6. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1998a). Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1998b). Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin. Rorty, R. (2003). Interview with Richard Rorty. Philosophy Now (October/ November). Rorty, R. (2006). Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rorty, R. (2007). Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers (Vol. 4). Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (2016). Philosophy as Poetry. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Spicer, A. (2018). Business Bullshit. New York: Routledge. Tampere3. (2018a). Belief in humanity, belief in academic rigour—Tampere Universities. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3NAkSCWZVQ. Accessed February 27, 2019. Tampere3. (2018b). www.tampere3.fi. Promotional webpage (no longer accessible). Partly available through http://web.archive.org/web/20180826142414/; https://www.tampere3.fi/en/. Accessed February 27, 2019.

48     A.-E. Hyvönen

Tervasmäki, T., & Tomperi, T. (2018). Koulutuspolitiikan arvovalinnat ja suunta satavuotiaassa Suomessa. niin & näin 2. Tienari, J., Aula, H.-M., & Aarrevaara, T. (2016). Built to Be Excellent? The Aalto University Merger in Finland. European Journal of Higher Education, 6(2), 25–40. Tomperi, T. (2009). Akateeminen kysymys? Yliopistolain kritiikki ja kiista uudesta yliopistosta. Tampere: Vastapaino. TUNI. (2019). Key Information—Our Strategy. https://www.tuni.fi/en/ about-us/key-information#show-education-strategy-of-the-tampere-university-community--id2868. Accessed February 27, 2019. Unger, R. M. (1987). Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voparil, C. (2006). Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. West, C. (1989). American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. Williams, R., & Leahy, A. (2018). U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems. Universitas 21. Available at https://universitas21.com/sites/default/ files/2018-05/U21_Rankings%20Report_0418_FULL_LR%20%281%29. pdf. Ylijoki, O.-H., Marttila, L., & Lyytinen, A. (2012). The Role of Basic Research at the Entrepreneurial University: Back to Basics? In S. Ahola & D. M. Hoffman (Eds.), Higher Education Research in Finland Emerging Structures and Contemporary Issues. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press.

3 A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional Possibilities, Pedagogical Advancement, Individual Benefit, and State Economic Development Rebecca Watts, Gabriel Swarts, Leslie Rush and Cynthia Brock

Introduction America’s public universities have a symbiotic relationship with the states that support and house them, requiring a delicate balance between institutional possibilities, pedagogical advancement, individual benefit, and state economic development. The people served by a university often look to the institution for hope—defined in the Oxford dictionary as “grounds for believing that something good may happen.” R. Watts (*)  Western Governors University (WGU) Ohio, Columbus, OH, USA G. Swarts · L. Rush · C. Brock  University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. Rush e-mail: [email protected] C. Brock e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_3

49

50     R. Watts et al.

State policymakers support institutional efforts to serve the public good by determining what portion of a state’s revenues will be directed to subsidize each institution, as well as appropriations for scholarships and grants for state residents. In turn, policymakers expect that institutions of higher education will design and deliver high quality, current, relevant educational programs and research that prepare individuals to be engaged citizens. This requires unceasing institutional transformation, expansion of knowledge through research, and responsiveness to stakeholder needs, including the development of an educated workforce to support and grow the state’s economic engine. Measures of a university’s efficacy vary widely among key ­stakeholder groups. Prospective students and families seek access to affordable, high quality education in a safe, positive environment that leads to career and holistic long-term success. Policymakers call on universities to strengthen the state’s economy by preparing for future industry demands, tailoring educational programs to meet those demands, and partnering with key industries on research to proliferate and diversify the economic development opportunities in the state. Industry leaders expect universities to align their educational and research missions to the needs of industry to provide a career-ready workforce. The expectations of boards of trustees, often gubernatorially-appointed business leaders, align closely with the expectations of policymakers and industry leaders. Within the university community, faculty expect to control the design and delivery of programs of study, determine academic ­appointments and promotions, establish academic calendars and work schedules, govern certification for entrance into many professions, and maintain a strong voice in university affairs through the academic senate (Brubacher and Rudy 2008). Students expect current, relevant programs of study that prepare them for the realities of citizenship and employer expectations as well as a healthy, safe learning environment, modern student housing amenities, recreational activities, health services, counseling services, and voice through student government. Alumni and private donors expect that the university will maintain a stellar reputation, produce high-achieving graduates, garner grants and awards for research, and maintain strong connections with alumni for

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     51

engagement opportunities through arts experiences, athletic events, and intellectually enriching events. Although university leaders and faculty must meet the expectations of these stakeholders, they face new fiscal realities. State funding for higher education in the United States decreased by $9.9 billion between 2007 and 2016, reflecting a 10.9% reduction. Over this same period, enrollment in public colleges and universities increased by 8.67%, resulting in a decrease in per-full-time-student state appropriations of 18.03% (Mitchell et al. 2016). Between 2005 and 2015 higher education revenues from private grants increased significantly, off-setting the reduction in state appropriations. However, these new revenue sources are often accompanied by expectations that universities set aside traditions of the academy such as shared governance. Funders often expect program design and delivery to be driven by industry needs, believe that research foci should be on applied research to support industry innovation, and want universities to eschew reliance on meta-analyses, instead of innovating and risk taking. In the following section, we situate the University of Wyoming (UW) within the broader context of American land grant universities. Then, we detail current UW enterprises created to reinvigorate the embodiment of its institutional virtues and to strengthen the university’s connections throughout the state to serve its people. In exploring these enterprises, we reveal the hopeful ways that reinvigorating institutional virtues while connecting to current, relevant service can provide a joyful, positive and meaningful role for higher education.

The Evolution of the American Public University The influences and circumstances surrounding the founding of America’s state universities provides historical context for the interdependence between public universities and American states. The founders of Harvard, the first American university, were firmly rooted in the Elizabethan statutes of the University of Cambridge, providing the prototype for all later colleges of English America. Expansion later moved to the southern, eastern, and midwestern regions

52     R. Watts et al.

of the country. These new institutions were influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, emigrants from the New England region, and the traditions of the centralized French educational system and the Germany university model. One of the strongest catalysts for founding of state universities was the federal government’s granting of public lands for the establishment of universities, beginning in 1787 for the establishment of Ohio University. Jonathan Baldwin Turner, a Yale University graduate, traveled westward in 1833 to serve as a professor of Belles Letters, Latin and Greek at Illinois College in Jacksonville. Turner’s teaching reached a young farm hand, Abraham Lincoln, who worked land owned by the parents of two of Turner’s students, William Green and his brother. On returning home at the end of an academic term, the brothers found that their widowed mother had hired Lincoln as a farm hand. Lincoln’s quest for learning led the brothers to share their books with him and share stories of Turner as their teacher. Years later Lincoln became well-acquainted with Turner, who had left Illinois College to advocate for the creation of a publicly funded industrial education system in the US. In 1860, Turner received commitments from both US presidential candidates that if elected, they would sign a bill establishing a state university system. Upon winning, Lincoln kept his pledge and in 1862 signed the Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act, known as The Morrill Act of 1862. Turner had worked closely with Congressional Representative Justin Morrill to develop and garner the necessary support for the Act’s approval by Congress and submission to President Lincoln (Lewis 1986). The Act established land-grant colleges required to provide agricultural, mechanical, and military programs, giving applied sciences and mechanical arts a recognized place in the academy. A second Morrill Act in 1890 established federal appropriations to ­support the land grant institutions only to states which did not discriminate against blacks in admission to their tax-supported colleges. That initial federal legislation spawned a movement that grew beyond its targeted universities. In 1868 Cornell University founder Andrew Dickson White asserted that America’s university structure must be adapted to meet the requirements of modern times. The Cornell Plan moved away from the earlier humanistic, denominationally-controlled

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     53

colleges that offered a limited number of learned professions into an age of secular higher learning for a wide variety of specialized and technical occupations. In the early twentieth century, a prominent University of Wisconsin professor, Richard Ely, stated that the people of Wisconsin “knew they wanted something different and new, something responsive to their needs, something which they called practical” (Brubacher and Rudy 2008). In his inaugural address in 1904, University of Wisconsin President Charles Van Hise, stated the following objectives of the Wisconsin Idea: the university would combine the best features of the English residential college and the German research university to take an active part in improving society and serving as an essential instrument of public service. A key characteristic of the Wisconsin Idea was the close partnership between the state government and the university. By the late twentieth century, college curricula had expanded to include studies focused on issue of women, blacks, the environment, and culture. Institutions engaged students and faculty in civic leader­ ship and social services to disadvantaged populations including homeless and those facing health crises. In this same period, colleges and universities made programmatic changes to assure that older, non-traditional students and students with disabilities could access ­education and receive the support they needed for success.

The Cowboy State’s University in Its Second Century The remainder of this chapter details the context and key efforts of the University of Wyoming (UW) to provide a source of hope to Wyoming through its academic programs, outreach, access, and ­affordability. UW—an American flagship, land grant, higher education institution—is the sole university in the state.1 The broad dispersion of the sparsely-populated state’s people creates challenges for access

1We

have interviewed UW stakeholders who are responsible for some of the key initiatives we share in this chapter. We include some of their comments in the remainder of the chapter.

54     R. Watts et al.

to traditional delivery of higher education. Further complicating the challenge of university access, the University of Wyoming is situated in the extreme southeast corner of the state, a great distance from most of the state’s residents. The challenge of distance is exacerbated by the likelihood of snow and blizzard conditions September through May each year. Yet, even with these daunting challenges, throughout its 132-year history, UW has engaged in concerted efforts to deliver to the people of Wyoming hope for the future through education, research, and service. In this context, and based on the tenets of the Morrill Act of 1862, UW was founded within a second round of higher education expansion into the Western area of the US. The aim was to establish a homebased educational facility with important connections to the specific needs of the state. On September 27, 1886, the construction of UW’s facilities began with the building of “Old Main.” A foundation for the structure is chiseled with the Latin phrase, Domi Habuit Unde Disceret, which is often translated, “He need not go away from home for instruction” (Larson 1990). The concept of university-to-public connection is exemplified by the founding vision of UW and the aims of the US land grant system; a university dedicated to outreach and engagement in the Western frontier exemplified the changing perceptions and responsibilities of public educational institutions in the nineteenth century.

Outreach and Engagement: A Historical Responsibility From its inception, UW was tasked with understanding and planning for the diverse needs of a scattered populace. Governor John Hoyt, who later served as UW’s president, championed higher education in the state. Initially located in the capital of Cheyenne, Hoyt founded the Wyoming Academy of Arts and Sciences which was eventually subsumed by the 1886 declaration of intent to found UW as a land grant institution. The first tax levies raised $50,000 and allowed for construction on a new campus in Laramie (University of Wyoming and Community Colleges 2018). Hoyt, a former college professor and staunch public university advocate, stewarded the formation of UW during the first years of the university, which at the time consisted of a

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     55

faculty of five and enrollments never higher than 50 students. Hoyt was determined to provide access to public education in Wyoming regardless of statehood or territorial status (Albany Country Tourism Board 2014; University of Wyoming 2017). The University grew steadily and began more directed work in outreach and engagement through its first century. Early on, UW played an important role in the expansion of public education in the state. President Hoyt drafted much of the language of the state’s Education Article during the State Constitutional Convention of 1889. By 1917, a model school, the Rural Demonstration School, had been built on campus by the College of Education. This facility was constructed to emulate rural schools of the state to provide experiences for preservice teachers to prepare them for service in the far reaches of the state (University of Wyoming and Community Colleges 2018). The link was formed between local districts and the university to take advantage of student-teaching placements, professional development, and educational outreach programs (discussed in more detail later in this chapter). Statewide support at UW also had a military and agricultural focus. For example, since the 1920s the University has had a strong partnership with the US military and National Guard, providing housing and training facilities on campus including a state-of-the-art athletic and fitness facility known on campus as “Half-Acre Gymnasium” (Wyoming Postscripts 2014). UW has also received annual grants through the Hatch Act of 1887 for the construction and maintenance of experimental agricultural stations to conduct statewide research and experimentation. UW’s most recent grant was for $1.275 million in 2018 (Hatch Act 1887: Regular Research 2017). In a much more direct fashion the state of Wyoming controls UW tuition through a combination of state authority and student subsidies. The state legislature has control and responsibility for the university budget resulting in public funds representing a much higher portion of UW’s revenues than public institutions in other states (American Council on Education 2012). This scenario allows for low in-state tuition rates (currently at $5217 annually) which are made even more affordable through the statewide Hathaway Scholarship. Established in 2005, the Hathaway Scholarship is funded through a permanent endowment of $400 million

56     R. Watts et al.

dollars and aims to provide up to $1680 per semester for Wyoming students who qualify through high school grade point average (GPA), completion of required preparatory coursework, and ACT scores. Established by a former state governor, the aim of this program is to provide postsecondary funding support for the vast majority of the state’s high school graduates to attend a public community college or UW. A full Hathaway scholarship award could cover up to 64% of a student’s UW tuition costs per year (Hathaway Scholarship 2018).

Outreach and Engagement: New Pathways From financial incentives and agricultural programs, to lab schools and research outposts throughout the large, mountainous land mass, UW is charged with facilitating and maintaining direct outreach and connection. UW’s current president, Laurie Nichols, takes seriously the university’s intimate connection with and responsibility to the people of Wyoming articulating what she sees as the institution’s tripartite mission “…to provide a higher education to the citizens of the state of Wyoming….We also are a research university, so that means that we engage in scholarly activity and we produce research that is relevant to the state of Wyoming and obviously beyond, too….And then finally, we are a land grant university that is engaged with our state.” As an extension of UW’s latest strategic plan “Breaking Through: 2017–2022, A strategic plan for the University of Wyoming,” President Nichols has spearheaded UW’s outreach and engagement in new ways, firmly sustaining, and further developing, the state-university partnership (University of Wyoming 2017). This renewed focus on outreach and engagement includes important feedback from education and business leaders, elected officials, the public, UW faculty and students, and other stakeholders throughout Wyoming. A 2018 draft report entitled “Envisioning Community Engagement and Outreach at the University of Wyoming” outlined key findings which had emerged from statewide listening sessions with UW President, Laurie Nichols. Nichols instituted an Engagement Task Force that is implementing “a new vision for engagement and outreach with

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     57

our communities.” The task force set in motion an institutional selfstudy, which included review of earlier listening sessions, focus groups in 12 Wyoming communities, survey of faculty and staff engagement and outreach, and a comparison of UW’s results to national, peer-level institutions. As part of the larger, statewide results, there were eight emergent themes in the collected data. The aim of the report and the publication of these themes identified a key shift in how the University operated the engagement and outreach model in the state. Specifically, the report stated that: Changing our engagement and outreach model from individualized practice to a strategic, coordinated model where UW builds partnerships with a conscious ethos of reciprocity will take a long-term commitment on the part of our administration, faculty, staff, and students. The ability to execute these recommendations will rely on a structure and team of professionals with reach across the state dedicated to year-round engagement and service. (University of Wyoming 2018, p. 2)

Eight themes were identified as key components of a new outreach and engagement path illustrating that the university hopes to create a culture change in its role as a land grant, flagship institution and how its connections to the state and its populace are cultivated and maintained: 1. Create an office of engagement and outreach. 2. Strengthen UW’s culture of community engagement and outreach best practices. 3. Develop practices and structures to expand mutually beneficial relationships. 4. Communicate regularly and effectively about engagement and outreach. 5. Embrace diverse cultural perspective and experiences. 6. Develop robust connections between engagement and student learning. 7. Seek recognition for UW’s engagement and outreach strengths by joining national efforts. 8. Assess community engagement and outreach activities to drive future decisions (University of Wyoming 2018).

58     R. Watts et al.

Building on President Nichols’ listening sessions and stakeholder input, these themes show a concerted effort to shift institutional culture towards mutually beneficial, sustainable relationships and connections that help both the public and the university. In a series of interviews to inform the development of this chapter, UW leaders, including College of Education Dean Ray Reutzel, echo the central role that UW must play in building and enacting new pathways to benefit the state of Wyoming. Reutzel argues that UW should “…be the intellectual engine of the state, to drive forward the economic development of the state through use-inspired, applied research that actually helps the state diversify its economy and build a better, stronger future for its citizens.” Key areas of focus for the new pathways included in the 2018 UW report are programs related to community-based service-learning, top-down and bottom-up processes, and a focus on facilitating economic and cultural diversity throughout the state (University of Wyoming 2018). Continuous interaction with constituents around Wyoming is, ­perhaps, one of the most crucial aspects of effective enactment of these new pathways. UW’s Director of Transfer Relations, Mary Aguayo, epitomizes the central role that UW’s leaders strive to play as they travel the state to maintain ongoing contact with constituents. Regarding her role liaising with Wyoming community colleges, Aguayo asserts that her work “…involves a lot of relationship building and…face time… [to] make sure that everybody is ‘feeling the love’ from the University of Wyoming and feeling as though that we’re prioritizing their students.” More specifically in the College of Education at UW, where the authors of this article are housed, programs and outreach initiatives include science and engineering, seminars, professional development, teacher certification standards, community college collaboration, and training programs. One example of a longstanding College of Education outreach initiative, the Science and Math Teaching Center (SMTC), stands as an exemplary model of community engagement and outreach. Discussing the central role that the SMTC plays in providing science and math initiatives in Wyoming, Sylvia Parker states, “…I think the sense of belongingness to the university is really, really high, and I think that they [Wyoming teachers and administrators] are open to an ongoing

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     59

relationship….When something [like professional development through the SMTC] is made available to them…they’re there.” Ana Houseal, a science education professor in the College of Education has worked through the SMTC for years traveling across Wyoming to provide high-quality professional science development; in fact, statewide professional development outreach comprises 25% of her position. The success of SMTC work across the state can be attributed to scholars like Parker and Houseal who build relationships in their work and strive to meet the unique needs of Wyoming communities and schools. To this last point, Houseal states: I feel like you have to be interacting with people and you also have to take into account…their context…you can’t know that context unless you go into the field…You talk to the people and you listen to what they’re concerned about…I think that is part of my role, is to find out what their needs are [with respect to science professional development] and then to help address those needs specifically for that…community because each community is different.

Historically, and in present initiatives, UW has embraced its land grant, flagship responsibilities with administrators, faculty, and students charged with finding new and creative ways to engage with the people of the state. Key programs and funding options have been modeled to begin developing the eight themes outlined previously. We have identified four hopeful opportunities, for achieving the delicate balance at UW.

Funding Drives Institutional Action The second decade of the twentyfirst century has brought a series of new initiatives to the University of Wyoming, each related to hope for the future in terms of institutional possibilities, pedagogical advancement, individual benefit, and state economic development. Two of the initiatives—the Science Initiative and the Engineering Initiative—are funded and catalyzed by state policymakers with clear expectations for a positive impact on the state’s economic development. A report from Wyoming Governor’s Economically Needed Diversity Options for

60     R. Watts et al.

Wyoming (ENDOW) Executive Council (2017) shows that when compared to other states across the nation, Wyoming’s mining, quarrying, oil, and gas extraction sector is the most significantly overrepresented industry in the state in both gross domestic product and employment. The report also identifies growth opportunities in the state’s most underrepresented industries in comparison with other American states to be: professional and business services, finance, insurance, and real estate; manufacturing; and education and healthcare. Notably, the two largest state-driven initiatives at the University relate to the overrepresented sectors with no state-targeted efforts to date on the underrepresented industries identified by ENDOW as potential growth opportunities for the state. The University of Wyoming Science and Engineering Initiatives are driven and funded by state policymakers seeking to target the university’s research efforts and academic programs on key industries on which the state historically has relied and, notably, for which the state is already over-represented. A privately-funded effort, the University of Wyoming Trustees Education Initiative (TEI), was created by the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees in response to feedback from school leaders and policymakers in the state. Although to date there has been no state funding to support this effort, the university trustees have signaled that they will look to the Wyoming Legislature for sustained future funding. The trustees have, pragmatically, tied TEI’s goals to state economic development by citing a well-prepared workforce emerging from the state’s high schools as a key performance metric for the initiative. The fourth endeavor, the University of Wyoming Native American Education Research and Cultural Center, is entirely funded by the University and has been decades in the making. The Center finally came to fruition in Fall 2017 through the dogged commitment of the President Nichols and her efforts to bridge historic chasms between the state’s Native American nations and the university. In fact, interest in working effectively with first nation peoples in the US is a longstanding personal concern for President Nichols, who stated, “…I’m pretty passionate about it. It’s really about equity…It’s about trying to make sure that you really are an accessible university for all people in the state.”

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     61

Each of the endeavors described in detail below was selected for this chapter to illustrate the balancing act a public university must perform in responding to the demands of policymakers, faculty, students, and private funders. Meeting these demands requires courageous efforts to step outside existing paradigms. Internal and external resistance to change may be the greatest barrier to UW’s ability to fully deliver on the promise of hope through higher education. The stakes are high for Wyoming’s sole public university, and there is scrutiny on the outcomes of each of these efforts.

The Science Initiative The Science Initiative was launched in 2014 when Governor Mead and the Wyoming Legislature challenged UW to develop a plan to address its outdated science laboratories and improve the quality of instruction and research in the sciences. A gubernatorially-appointed task force informed by UW faculty representatives developed a vision for the university’s core science programs in: botany; zoology and physiology; molecular biology; chemistry; and physics and astronomy. The plan charts a clear course for these programs to rise to national top-tier status and build on other state efforts, including the Engineering Initiative, which is described in detail in the next section of this chapter. The first phase of the Science Initiative involves design and construction of a new facility that includes active learning classrooms, stateof-the-art facilities to support innovation and research in advanced scientific imaging and integrative biology, and rooftop greenhouse facilities. The initiative’s second phase includes plans for renovating existing spaces and developing a 4.3-meter telescope center on Jelm Mountain, an hour southwest of the university’s Laramie campus. The Science Initiative has established a series of goals and metrics that include: increase by 100% the number of undergraduate students involved in a high-quality productive research experiences; improve the quality of undergraduate science education, including candidates for licensure as elementary and secondary education teachers; increase the five-year undergraduate graduation rates for core science majors by 100%; increase the number of doctoral students graduated in each

62     R. Watts et al.

Science Initiative department by 25%; increase the number of published peer-reviewed manuscripts by Science Initiative faculty and students by 25%; increase the monetary value of grants and contracts by 25% indexed to federal research funding levels after full implementation; achieve top-quartile status in publication rate per full-time faculty member; and increase the rate of faculty members holding a doctorate relative to peer institutions. At the heart of the Science Initiative is the drive to elevate science education and research to strengthen individual learning to support Wyoming’s historically strong, yet overrepresented industry sectors to fuel the state’s economy.

The Engineering Initiative In 2012 Governor Mead, the Wyoming legislature, and an integration task force on energy, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) articulated a vision to advance the University of Wyoming and its College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) to national prominence in undergraduate education and selected areas of research, and to enhance economic development in Wyoming. Referred to as the Engineering Initiative, university faculty, staff, and leaders as well as industry partners embraced its vision and committed to its fulfillment. In 2014, the state funded $8 million for the engineering initiative’s first phase and $18.4 million for facilities development. The Engineering Initiative’s strategic goals include excellence in undergraduate and graduate education leading to national recognition, interdisciplinary research addressing pressing problems, actualization of research that catalyzes economic development in the state, and statewide school partnerships to strengthen STEM education in elementary and secondary education. To achieve the goals, CEAS added six new faculty members in petroleum engineering and energy fields, increased the number of engineering and applied science undergraduate scholarships by 30, extended its research programs in water resource management and primary energy conversion, invested in research equipment, facilities, and people, and established a seed funding mechanism to attract external research grants and awards.

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     63

The Engineering Initiative’s efforts to strengthen elementary and secondary STEM education in the state include a summer engineering professional development program for teachers in Wyoming schools. Direct services to the state’s youth include an annual Engineers Week program in which CEAS and its partner professional organizations match professional engineers with third grade classrooms for an hourlong activity. For high school juniors, CEAS hosts a summer program of hands-on experiences in a variety of engineering fields. For students in grades six through 12, CEAS hosts an annual Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science (TEAMS) Engineering a Greener World Competition in which teams of students complete an engineering design challenge requiring problem solving, communication, and teamwork skills. For students in grades six through eight, CEAS hosts an annual Mathcounts® Competition where students engage in timed contests of solving mathematical problems. Target outcomes for the Engineering Initiative by 2025 include a 57% increase in CEAS undergraduate enrollment, an increase in graduate enrollment, a 100% increase in financial awards and scholarship, the establishment of research centers of excellence in at least six critical engineering and applied science areas consistent with the potential to have positive economic impact on the state. State policymakers were the catalyst and funding support for the Engineering Initiative desiring to leverage the UW College of Engineering and Applied Science to: (a) strengthen the state’s economy through a skilled workforce pipeline for the state’s energy industries, (b) spark innovation to maximize the extraction and marketability of the state’s energy resources, and (c) to increase state revenues from severance taxes, a funding stream upon which the state relies heavily to spare its residents the fiscal burden of any income tax.

Trustees Education Initiative In response to feedback from school district leaders and elected officials around the state, the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees passed a resolution in late 2014 creating the Trustees Education Initiative (TEI).

64     R. Watts et al.

The vision for TEI was to elevate the university’s college of education to national preeminence in educator preparation. Armed with a passion for undefined preeminence and a desire to develop innovations that would elicit greater satisfaction from the state’s school leaders, a small group of trustees and university administrators sought initial funding from a private foundation housed outside the state. The foundation leaders committed to an initial planning grant of $500,000. After the planning period was successfully completed, the funders committed an additional $4.5 million to develop and implement educator preparation practices that elevate the university to national preeminence for the benefit of K–12 education in Wyoming as measured by improved elementary and secondary student learning in the state. While there is broad consensus among UW faculty that optimal learning outcomes for K–12 students is a key measure of an educator preparation program’s success, challenges in gaining faculty support have arisen due in large part to the genesis of the TEI. The UW Board of Trustees 2014 resolution included minimal engagement of faculty and was perceived to be a wholesale critique of the existing educator preparation practices at the university, specifically in the College of Education. Exacerbating the negative perception was the absence of educational expertise among the university trustees who stepped forward to lead TEI, most of whom are attorneys specializing in resource law. Further frustration on campus early on was a heavy reliance on limited anecdotal negative feedback from a few school district leaders. Additionally, TEI’s work includes expectations of the private funder, a foundation steeped in the strongly-held beliefs of its founder, which eschew core principles of the academy including shared governance, tenure, academic freedom, and the central role that faculty must play for long-term success of the TEI. The funder also exerts pressure to model TEI’s processes after business models, to accelerate the development and implementation of new models, and to partner with business organizations to advise how educators should be prepared. The aforementioned complexities notwithstanding, by early 2018, the UW Board of Trustees had approved six TEI pilot projects including: the use of augmented reality avatars to strengthen educator candidate clinical practice, an ethical educator preparation program using

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     65

case studies and online modules, a statewide professional development program focused on peer-to-peer coaching and support, an early childhood educator professional development network, participation in a national peer group using a common set of metrics, and a comprehensive educator preparation model spanning an educator’s pre-college through professional induction process. As the TEI pilots move forward TEI is seeking school district partners for the collaborative aspects of each pilot and engaging state policymakers to report on TEI’s progress. While state policymakers did not call for or fund this initiative, they have expressed interest in its success and recognized that as new educator preparation models are put in place they will require long-term sustained funding from the state. As the pilots proceed, it will be essential to assure policymakers that the work will support the economic interests of the state and to demonstrate that the improved elementary and secondary student learning outcomes correlate to existing industries and industry sectors with potential for growth in the state. TEI’s success relies on the long-term commitment of university faculty and leaders to work collaboratively with the state’s school district leaders, teachers, and policymakers. The collaborative work emerging from TEI has the potential to strengthen long-term relationships in pursuit of ongoing hope for the people of Wyoming.

The Native American Education Research and Cultural Center The UW Native American Education Research and Cultural Center opened in Fall 2017 to support the success and optimize the college experiences of Native American Students. The Center’s goals include enriching the experience of all UW students as they broaden their knowledge of indigenous people, their history and culture. The Center honors American Indian heritage and demonstrates respect for the cultures, traditions, laws and diverse expressions of sovereignty of native peoples. Housing a student retention advisor and offering academic support services, the Center provides an American Indian Studies program, the High Plains American Indian Research Institute, the student

66     R. Watts et al.

organization Keepers of the Fire, and other programs designed to recruit and retain American Indian students. Although the Wyoming legislature did not mandate or fund the University of Wyoming Native American Education Research and Cultural Center, there is synergy statewide around work to support the state’s first people. In 2017 Governor Mead signed into law a requirement that all Wyoming elementary and secondary school students learn about American Indian tribes of the region, including the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. The statute requires the Wyoming State Board of Education to review the state’s social studies learning standards to ensure the cultural heritage, history, and contemporary contributions of American Indians are addressed. Further, the law requires that the Wyoming Department of Education consult with the tribes to make available materials and resources on the agency’s website to help state school districts meet the learning requirements on the study of American Indian tribes. Whereas the work to dramatically increase the shared knowledge of and appreciation for the history, culture, and contributions of Wyoming’s Native American tribes is not a state priority related to economic development, this effort strengthens UW possibilities, the potential for pedagogical advancement, and individual benefit. The University of Wyoming Native American Education Research and Cultural Center is exemplary of the balancing act that the University of Wyoming must perform to link higher education to hope for all the people it serves.

Conclusion Understanding the evolution of higher education that led to the development of the US system flagship, land grant institutions provides context for a deeper examination of one of these institutions, UW. As the sole public university in a sprawling, rural state, UW is undertaking a cultural transformation to connect with its stakeholders in new, relevant, future-focused ways. Some of these efforts are embedded in the Science Initiative, Engineering Initiative, Trustees Education Initiative,

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     67

and Native American Culture and Research Center. Each of these efforts reflects engagement with key stakeholders to establish grounds for belief that something good may happen—in short to create and ­sustain hope. A current challenge for US universities is how to effectively achieve the delicate balance between institutional possibilities, pedagogical advancement, individual benefit and state economic development. To author hope in higher education, it is necessary to form a deep connection to the population that each university serves. This is a delicate act of balance and harmony, as there are competing voices and aims that can bolster or challenge the ethos of a university system while offering multiple opportunities for further connection with various groups and stakeholders. The US land grant mission was and is founded on such possibility for the greater public to be guided by education and research towards further connection and hope. Each university must approach these challenges, which include economic drivers, political leaders, university governing bodies, private funders, faculty, and students to deliver a public good while preserving the relevant traditions upon which the academy was founded. As is the case with all balancing acts, the work of hope in higher education is dynamic, requiring relentless care and attention. Although institutions of higher education have the power to ­engender hope, because America’s public universities have a symbiotic relationship with the states that support and house them, realizing hope relies on synergies with policymakers, industry leaders, elementary and secondary schools, and the people of the state. For more than 125 years, the University of Wyoming has evolved to support the state’s changing needs. UWs commitment to re-invention has served as a source of ongoing hope for the state. The efforts detailed in this chapter epitomize hope, providing the people of Wyoming with grounds for belief in the common good. Yet it remains to be seen whether the promise of UW’s efforts will be fulfilled or will instead be stymied by forces outside the university. The state’s longstanding reliance on a narrow set of economic drivers, and the desire by some to resist change, are barriers to fully realizing this promise of hope.

68     R. Watts et al.

References Albany County Tourism Board. (2014). The Historic Campus of the University of Wyoming. Brochure. Retrieved from http://visitlaramie.org/ the-historic-campus-of-the-university-of-wyoming-brochure. American Council on Education. (2012). State Funding: A Race to the Bottom. Retrieved from http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx. Brubacher, J., & Rudy, W. (2008). Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities (pp. 3, 76, 154–173, 375). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Economically Needed Diversity Options for Wyoming. (2017). Socioeconomic Assessment of Wyoming. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/26n3prcs0mbbuap/ AADdvKgrQL4S48nW16m3vdjLa?dl=0&preview=ENDOW+Socio economic+Assessment.pdf. The Hatch Act of 1887: Regular Research. (2017). United States Department of Agriculture & The National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Washington, DC: USDA. Retrieved from https://nifa.usda.gov/sites/default/files/ resources/FY18HatchActRegModification882017.Pdf. Hathaway Scholarship. (2018). About the Scholarship. Retrieved from https:// hathawayscholarship.org/hathaway-scholarship/about-the-scholarship/. Larson, T. A. (1990). History of Wyoming (2nd ed.). Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Lewis, P. B. (1986). Jonathan Baldwin Turner: Evangelist of the Land-Grant University Movement. In The USDA Yearbook of Agriculture: Research for Tomorrow (pp. 11–14). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Mitchell, M., Leachman, M., & Masterson, K. (2016). A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding: State Cuts Have Driven Up Tuition and Reduced Quality. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Available at https:// www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2017_higher_ed_8-22-17_ final.pdf. University of Wyoming. (2017). Breaking Through, 2017–2022: University of Wyoming Strategic Plan. Retrieved from http://www.uwyo.edu/ strategic-plan/. University of Wyoming. (2018, April 16). Envisioning Community Engagement and Outreach at the University of Wyoming. Executive Summary, Draft Report.

3  A Public University’s Balancing Act: Institutional …     69

University of Wyoming and Community Colleges. (2018). Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. Retrieved from http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/ Schools/History/UWCC.aspx. Wyoming Postscripts. (2014). The Past Future of the University of Wyoming’s Half Acre Gym. Retrieved from https://wyostatearchives.wordpress.com/2014/ 11/21/the-past-future-of-the-university-of-wyomings-half-acre-gym/.

4 Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark Marianne A. Larsen

Introduction Higher education institutions have been profoundly reshaped over the past 40 years or so by processes associated with neoliberalism. In a nutshell, neoliberalism as a theory means that the world and all social behaviour are viewed through the lens of the market. Harvey (2005) calls this “the financialization of everything” (p. 33). The idea of the superiority of the market has led to the privatization of public assets, de-regulation of business and industry, and free trade. Through such processes, nation-states have been forced to transform themselves into national competition states. Rather than being undermined by the unavoidable forces of globalization, the competition state has become both the engine room and the steering mechanism of political globalization (Cerny 1997, p. 274).

M. A. Larsen (*)  Western University, London, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_4

71

72     M. A. Larsen

Although a strong welfare state, Denmark has not remained immune to the forces of neoliberal globalization. Since the 1990s, various Danish governments have implemented a range of new public management (NPM) reforms to the public sector. In this chapter, I begin by providing a brief background on general higher education neoliberal reforms before turning my attention towards the manifestation of neoliberalism through NPM reforms to Danish institutions of higher learning. The impact of these reforms constitutes the next part of the chapter in which I draw upon scholarly literature and my own experiences in a Canadian university to demonstrate the ways in which NPM reforms focusing on individualism, performance, competition and the commodification of higher education produce stress, anxiety and insecurity and shape academics as self-regulating and performing competitors in the global knowledge economy. Through these reforms, I argue, what it means to be an academic and engage in scholarly work is fundamentally changed. The rest of the paper focuses on the Danish notion of hygge, broadly understood to be associated with cosiness, intimacy, friendship and warmth, and how I experienced hygge within a Danish University during my sabbatical in 2017. I contend that the concept of hygge and how it is made manifest in Danish universities provides an alternative hopeful ethos to the competitive, market-driven, individualistic focus of NPM reforms in higher education. Rather, hygge provides opportunities for individuals to gather together in secure and beautiful settings to engage in friendly, relaxed and informal discussions. Hygge marks out the boundaries between the cold and heartless market-place and the warm and cozy place. Hope for our academic work lies in embracing the ideas associated with hygge, which offers academics hope to resist the alienation associated with neoliberalism and provide an alternative ethos for close, warm and safe social relations within higher education.

Neoliberalism and Higher Education Neoliberals claim that our well-being can best be advanced by allowing us to all be entrepreneurs in a society that has strong private rights, free markets and free trade. Central to neoliberal theory is the idea of

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     73

competitive individualism. Individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market. Individuals are conceived as subjects that are active citizens as autonomous entrepreneurs, economically self-interested, and rational decision makers who are the best judges of their own interests and needs. In addition to creating conditions for profitable capital accumulation in global markets, the state’s role is to facilitate conditions for the development of such entrepreneurial individuals (Harvey 2005; Olssen and Peters 2005). One of the ways states have done this is through market-oriented reforms to higher education, a response to the so-called panacea of market capitalism. To promote national economic prosperity, higher education institutions (HEIs) and schools are reformed so that they contribute to economic competitiveness (Wright and Ørberg 2018). Such reforms are broadly characterized as ‘new public management’ (NPM) reforms. NPM is broadly related to the massification of higher education and simultaneous rise of knowledge economy discourses since the early 70s when Daniel Bell (1973) suggested that knowledge will replace energy as the primary resource of the emerging society. The central commodity of the new global economy would therefore be ‘knowledge’ and competition lay in transforming knowledge into innovative products or services for profit. Investments in higher education are supposed to lead to economic competitiveness among HEIs nationally and internationally, which is exemplified by a reconfiguring of students as consumers and HEIs as producers of human capital (Neave 2012). Thus, the focus shifts from society or community to the individual within HEIs. The individual student is to shape herself as an entrepreneurial actor, becoming responsible for her own future. “In this way the competition state pushes responsibility onto individuals, who must develop and deploy their personal capital, and deflects attention from structural factors, including lack of employment opportunities, a congested local labour market and a global auction for knowledge workers” (Wright and Ørberg 2018, p. 84). Higher education reforms based on competition, effectiveness and efficiency, and individualism reflect a utilitarian notion of higher education and contribute to the reconfiguration of the university to produce an adaptable, skilled, and flexible labour force that maximizes its own interests.

74     M. A. Larsen

Neoliberal Reforms and Danish Higher Education Since the 1980s, Denmark, a small state with strong social welfare and equity traditions, has ushered in NPM reforms, although in comparison to other Western countries, the country has implemented such reforms at a slower pace (Greve and Hodge 2007). Among these have been market-driven reforms to the Danish higher education system to enhance their institutional competitiveness. Attention has shifted to education as an investment in human capital in order to secure Denmark’s position on the competitive global market as a knowledge-based economy. NPM reforms to higher education began in the 1980s when Denmark’s government introduced systems of quality assessment for HEIs, ­establishing various agencies to inspect and evaluate all levels of the educational sector. In 1994 the taximeter system was introduced whereby funding was to be allocated competitively to universities each time a student passed an examination. This system was based on the idea that universities would be rewarded economically for having the most graduates, leading to competition among institutions for the brightest and the best (Degn and Sørensen, n.d.; Rasmussen 2009; Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017). In 1999, the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation brought in development contracts, which become planning tools for higher education institutions, and management and control tools for the state. The first set of development contracts focused on quality assurance, internationalization, IT-based learning and innovation. After 2004, they focused on the strengthening links with society, national and international cooperation, quality assurance and benchmarking with universities abroad (Schmidt 2009). Further NPM reforms were brought in over the following 20 years or so through various pieces of legislation. These have included the 1997 Danmark som foregangsland (Denmark as exemplary country); 2002 Bedre uddannelse (Better education); 2003 University Act (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, 2003) (Universitetsloven); 2007 Danmarks strategi for livslang læring (Denmark’s strategy for lifelong

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     75

learning); 2011 Regeringsgrundlaget (Government platform); and 2012 Danmark i arbejde – 2020 planen (Denmark at work—the 2020 plan). Together these reforms, although passed by different governments, have aimed to make Denmark competitive in the global economy by fostering “world top level universities” (Danish Government 2006). The 2003 University Act reformed the functions, management and governance of Denmark’s universities by closing down a number of hitherto powerful governing bodies such as the Senate and Faculty Councils and introducing a (partially) external governance system with new boards of governors with an external majority no longer necessarily recruited from among the university’s academic staff (Degn and Sørensen 2015; Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017). The aim of the Act was to strengthen management and smoothen decision making and implementation of strategic targets by establishing self-governing institutions (Schmidt 2009). Universities (like the neoliberal individual) were to be reshaped as autonomous, self-governing entities. Although granted the status of being self-governing, overall responsibility for the performance of the institutions would lay in the hands of a board comprised of a minority of collegial representatives (i.e. staff and students) and a majority of external stakeholders (e.g. business representatives) (Degn and Sørensen 2015). These governance and related management reforms constituted a radical break with traditional academic governance structures. As Degn and Sørensen (2015) explain: “The new governance model introduced in the 2003 Act meant that the balance of power was now turned upside down at universities—as well as inside out. External stakeholders were given a key position in the governance structure and one could argue that Danish universities went from a bottom-up to a top-down governance model” (p. 936). The 2011 University Act completed the process of streamlining the managerial system, introducing boards of governors and ­self-ownership. Both control and devolution of power occurred as universities were said to have more autonomy (e.g. over internal structures), but the state retained authority in key areas (e.g. accreditation; setting goals for development contracts). Thus, while the universities may have gained

76     M. A. Larsen

greater formal institutional autonomy, that autonomy was accompanied by an expectation from the state that it would be used in particular ways. These reforms fundamentally changed state-university relations. The autonomy that universities had gained was not ‘real’ in terms of being free from being steered (Degn and Sørensen 2015). Henceforth, the state would steer or govern the work of universities, creating what Neave (2012) has termed the ‘evaluative state’. NPM reforms have also had a direct impact on teaching and research within Danish HEIs. Educational programs have been transformed from progressive, discipline-based approaches to learning to the acquisition of competences through modules. Programs have been developed to provide industry with knowledge to convert into for-profit innovations. Above all, the aim has been to reshape the student as a self-starter, flexible, lifelong learner and mobile ‘knowledge worker’ (Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017; Wright and Ørberg 2018). The nature of research and funding has been transformed through NPM reforms as well. From the mid-1990s onwards, the Ministry of Education has attempted to make HEIs accept a system in which part of the university research budget would be redistributed between institutions on the basis of regular quality assessments (Rasmussen 2009). Since 2003, Denmark has had a competitive two-tier, output based system for resource allocation for research. The first tier is made up of basic grants from the Financial Act allocated directly to HEIs. Additional grants are also distributed based on researcher recruitment and the ability to attract external funding. The second tier of funding is allocated in part by the research councils, strategic research programmes, the EU, ministry research and development funds and private foundations, and partly in the form of operating income obtained in return for services HEIs have sold in the market place. In 2004, the research councils were restructured into bodies corresponding to the inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary nature of research (Schmidt 2009). Moreover, in 2009 the Danish audit system—BFI, Den Bibliometriske Forskningsindikator was introduced to create bibliographic indicators for calculating publication output and determine basic funding for universities. The system is based on so-called “authority lists” that rank journals as either Level 1

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     77

or Level 2, with journals not on the list not counting in the calculation of annual BFI points (Berg et al. 2016). Frølich et al. (2010) conclude that these reforms have made the Danish research funding system more competitive, performance and market-oriented. Such accountability and performance-based reforms were aligned with Denmark’s goal to use international rankings to produce worldclass universities (WCUs). From 2006, the Danish government policy aim was to create WCUs as Danish universities should measure up to the best in the world in order to better sustain the development of Danish society in the context of a globalizing world (Danish Government 2006). Global rankings came to prominence in Denmark in 2009, and between 2010 and 2011 became the most important set of international indicators of university performance. As Lim and Williams Øerberg (2017) explain, “the mention of rankings in government overall policy aims forged a benchmarking methodology based on rankings and thereby pushed rankings to the center of Denmark’s understanding of its international competitiveness” (p. 96). Together these NPR reforms in higher education reflected a set of entangled rationales related to individualization, the economy and global competition. The main rationale in the individualization strand is that education gives the individual more independence and freedom of choice, through the acquisition of greater knowledge. Education is seen as a way for the individual to climb the social ladder. The focus of NPM policy is therefore on the individual and the competences acquired by the individual in order to serve the global knowledge economy (Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017). The rationale in the economic strand of these policies is that education can have a positive effect on the Danish economy. Within the global economic landscape, so the thinking goes, there is an urgent need for increased professional competence. To get that, Denmark needs a ‘top-class’ educational system that provides an educated workforce able to compete in a global economy. Students are considered resources (i.e. human capital) that enable future economic growth. Higher education institutions are tasked with producing this human capital (Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017).

78     M. A. Larsen

The global competition strand adopts the same logic as the economic strand but focuses more specifically on the economic role of the nation in an increasingly competitive global economy (Vingaard Johansen et al. 2017). NPM reforms in higher education were predicated on the idea that Danish universities would act strategically in the competitive global market economy, which would both enhance their competitiveness, efficiency and the best use of public and private money (Degn and Sørensen 2015). Indeed, following passage of 2003 University Act, the Danish Minister of Education claimed that the reforms aimed to reposition and reshape universities in the context of the global knowledge economy (Wright and Ørberg 2018). As a result, argue Wright and Ørberg (2018), Danish universities have “shifted from being institutions ring-fenced from economic and political interests, to institutions ‘driving’ the global knowledge economy by providing knowledge for innovation and highly skilled knowledge workers, and being part of that global economy themselves” (p. 76). Overall, what we see with these reforms are the ways in which the economy and education have become tightly interconnected in Danish educational politics.

Neoliberalism and Higher Education: Impact on Faculty Over the last 15 years, I have personally witnessed the transformation of the university into a neoliberal regime based on performance appraisals, performance pay and promotions that are accountability driven by standardized metrics, audit and ranking systems. My university in Canada is now an institution where revenue generation guides program and student admission decisions and professors are urged to apply for external grants to make up for declining government funding of higher education. I work in an educational setting where learning and program outcomes are standardized and driven by external evaluation and accreditation processes. Welcome to my world of higher education, which currently exists in Canada, but can be found virtually almost anywhere else today.

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     79

In the Guardian column, Academics Anonymous, a professor writes about her experience teaching in a UK higher education institution: “it feels like educational experience is being steadily reduced to a standardised output. In the process of commodification, learning as a goal in and of itself has been eroded, pedagogical innovation has been discouraged, and opportunities to establish meaningful connections with our students have been lost” (Anonymous Academic 2018). This is a high-pressure, punitive world guided by political technologies of governmentality. I have over the course of my career been admonished for not supporting such reforms in my own institution, warned that I will lose my job, and punished for not generating substantial external research grants (even though my research is not the kind that necessitates large-scale funding). I have experienced and witnessed the demoralizing effects of working in higher education institutions where individuals are urged to compete by publishing in higher-impact journals and increasing their citation rates and h-index scores. It is in such an environment that I have learned how to perform my role as professor, making daily decisions about what I spend my time doing in terms of research, teaching and service based on how others will perceive my contributions on my CV, in my annual performance appraisal report and through my promotion portfolio. What consumes more and more of my time is not so much researching, teaching and serving my university and academic community well, but obsessing over what my outputs will look like to others and how I will be able to demonstrate the measurable impact of what I do. The pressures to diligently document our teaching, research and service contributions re-shape who we are as academics and what we spend our time doing. Far too many hours are spent strategically reshaping my CV, my Academic.edu, ResearchGate and university webpages to create the correct image. In the processes of presenting and fabricating myself, I actually begin to forget who I really am, becoming “transparent but empty, unrecognisable” (Ball 2015, p. 6). Additionally (and this is the primary focus here), neoliberal reforms in higher education reinforce competition between academic individuals, departments, and institutions. In my own case, community and

80     M. A. Larsen

collective relations between me and my colleagues have been malformed into competitive relations where fear and uncertainty characterize our workplace climate, rather than openness, trust and collegiality. As Ball (2015) writes: “We cease to be a community of scholars and rather we relate to one another in a complex, overlapping set of competitions, often expressed as rankings ‘whereby educational institutions and agents are viewed as isolated and distinct elements’” (p. 259). Indeed, comparing ourselves to each other and competing with one another have been normalized practices in the neoliberal university (Whelan 2015; Berg et al. 2016). Such reforms have devastating impacts on the emotional well-being and mental health of academics. Many have written about the unprecedented levels of anxiety, mental-illness and stress among university staff stemming from NPM reforms, even documenting faculty suicides that have been provoked by the pressures associated with accountability demands in a market-oriented higher education system (e.g. Berg et al. 2016). Stephen J. Ball (2015), in his short, but prosaic piece entitled “Living the neoliberal university” denounces the impact of the neoliberal technologies of power that have reshaped higher education over the past 25 years, explaining how these reforms completely destabilize and reshape who we are: The techniques of enumeration do not simply report our practice; they inform, construct and drive it. The dry, soul-less grids and techniques of reporting elicit a range of often unhealthy emotions. Our emotions are linked to the economy through our anxieties and desires and our concomitant efforts of self-management and self-improvement…There is for many of us in education a growing sense of ontological insecurity; both a loss of a sense of meaning in what we do and of what is important in what we do. Are we doing things for the ‘right’ reasons — and how can we know? Constant change and constant visibility produce concomitant anxieties and insecurities …. Within all of this, as an academic subject, I am made unstable, ill at ease, out of place. (pp. 258–260)

Indeed, through NPM reforms what it means to be an academic in higher education is fundamentally changed. Through these reforms,

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     81

we become self-regulating academics, performing in ways that change our educational work, knowledge we produce and our very selves. As Barbour (2018) in her auto-ethnographical account of working in the neoliberal university explains, “[t]o stay in the academic world, there seemed no escape from performativity and I have been dutifully ‘compliant and appropriately responsive’ …Thinking of myself as performing as a good academic, I have simply become part of the process of implementing difficult changes” (pp. 164–165). Negative impacts of NPM reforms on Danish faculty have also been documented in the research literature. For example, Berg et al. (2016) comparative study documents the anxiety among academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe produced by neoliberal audit and ranking systems. In all 5 jurisdictions in their study, including Denmark, academic audit and performance assessment systems have led to competition among academic staff, and increased levels of anxiety and stress. However, in the scholarly literature there is much less evidence of stress, insecurity and anxiety among Danish academics compared to the wide body of literature (some of which is cited above) on the negative impacts of NPM reforms on higher education students, staff and faculty. While it could be that there are simply fewer studies done on this topic, it may be that there are other reasons to explain why these reforms have not had the same damaging consequences for academics. The next section introduces the Danish concept of hygge and how it may be considered a protection and retreat from the impact of neoliberalism on higher education.

Hygge in Denmark Hygge, it has been argued, is a part of the Danish national identity (Bille 2015) and constitutes the “national feeling” of the country (Howell and Sundberg 2015). Although not a direct translation, the closest English words to hygge would be coziness, homey, warm, close, snug and welcoming (Linnet 2011). Hygge is idealized and ubiquitous in Denmark and as such it is used as a noun, a verb (e.g. at hygge sig = to be cozy,

82     M. A. Larsen

relaxed) and an adjective (e.g. hyggelig tid = cozy time). Having a hyggelig time means spending intimate time with family, friends and/or one’s close partner. Hygge involves sharing coffee, tea, or alcohol and food (especially sweets), and engaging in activities such as chatting, telling stories and jokes, playing a board game or watching a movie together. A hyggelig place would most likely have candles or warm lighting to enhance feelings of warmth, intimacy and coziness. Above all, the components that create hygge evoke intimate feelings of companionship, togetherness and belonging (Howell and Sundberg 2015), and in this respect it is a relational approach to life. The word hygge derives from the Norwegian language and dates further back in time to Old Norse. The Old Norse roots of the word are related to fire, whose heat and light offer protection from the dangers outside the home. In this respect, hygge necessitates (and creates) safety in small, protected ‘cozy’ settings. Indeed, the eighteenth century Norwegian use of the term focused on the domesticity of a safe home. As Linnett (2011) explains: References to its meaning in eighteenth-century Norwegian center on such connotations as the safe habitat; the experience of comfort and joy, especially in one’s home and family; a caring orientation, for example, toward children; a civilized mode of behavior that other people find easy to get along with, one that soothes them and builds their trust; a house that, while not splendid or overly stylish, is respectably clean and wellkept. (pp. 23–24)

From the Norwegian origins, the contemporary notion of hygge is connected to safety, security or secureness, togetherness (physical and emotional closeness), relaxation, informality and intimacy (Bille 2015). Finally, there is a temporal dimension to hygge as well. It is oriented to the present moment, in being ready “to commit oneself to the experience of the moment” (Hansen 1980, p. 36). As one participant in Bille’s (2015) study of light to stage hyggelit atmospheres in Copenhagen explained, hygge meant losing a sense of time, being seized by the moment and the sense that time flies.

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     83

Hygge in a Danish University: A Hopeful Alternative to the Challenges of Neoliberalism In 2017, I spent five months in Denmark at the Danish School of Education/Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitet (DPU), University of Aarhus on my sabbatical from my position at a Faculty of Education in Canada. By the time I left Canada, I was feeling burnt out and very much in need of a sabbatical to rest, recharge and revitalize myself. Here I recount my experiences at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and how hygge influenced social relations there and operated in ways to create, for me, a safe and secure environment based on close and warm relations among staff, students and faculty. Thus, although it is widely accepted that the most common setting for hygge is in the home, it can also be found in other locations such as the university. From the start, I was made to feel most welcome at the DPU. Upon my arrival, I was invited to a welcome reception with faculty, staff and graduate students where we shared coffee, tea and bread together. The atmosphere was joyful and welcoming. Indeed, as I was to discover, this friendly gathering happened every Friday. There were many ­opportunities to share food and drink together. Each floor of the new DPU building had a small kitchenette where colleagues stopped by to have a small chat while grabbing a coffee, tea or piece of fruit, freely available for all. Every day at noon, faculty, staff and students ate lunch together in a common room. Although my limited Danish prevented me from being able to participate in all discussion, those present made the effort to make me feel included. Regularly, faculty members stopped by my office to chat, share their research with me and ask me about my own. I was invited to share my own research at the DPU’s Copenhagen campus and while there also made to feel welcome and a part of the ­academic community. I also noticed that within the building where the DPU was located there were many informal spaces for students (and others) to gather together and chat. These pleasant gathering spaces were conducive to social encounters where individuals met up and engaged with one another. Tables and seating could be (re)arranged to suit the number

84     M. A. Larsen

and purpose of the gathering. Plants and soft lighting created a warm and inviting atmosphere. Food and drink always seemed to be present or accessible nearby. In the library, for example, there were group rooms that students could book to engage in dialogue and discuss their assignments and presentations. All were very hyggelit places. Above all, I was struck by the aesthetic and calming beauty of physical spaces the DPU, especially the offices within which faculty and students worked. First, I shared a room with other visiting scholars and doctoral students. On the window-sill sat a beautiful, silver George Jensen candlestick holder. The lighting in the office was soft and warm. Pictures on the wall contributed to the hygge. My office colleagues were often engaged in friendly discussion about their work and their lives outside of the university. I later moved to another office, which I shared with a doctoral student who had transformed the small space into a cozy room, with pictures on the wall, potted plants on the window sill, a shelf with books and little knick-knacks and, in the corner, a comfy chair covered with a textured ‘throw’, and a woven rug and standing lamp on the floor. This was a visual representation of the idea that hygge “is achieved by means of beautiful materials, attractive curtain, and upholstery colors, good furniture proportions, the positioning of furniture in the room, plants and good pictures on the walls” (quoted in Lytken 2013). Warm, dimmed lighting are also often considered essential aspects of hygge. As Bille (2015) in his study on the use of light to create a sense of community, solitude and security in a Danish neighbourhood explains, “[t]ogetherness and the emotional effects of light are a central part of the staging of domestic spaces…The term hyggelys (cosy-light) is used to denote this particular kind of light orchestration” (Bille 2015, p. 59). Indeed, the spaces where individuals worked at the university were infused with hygge. Warm lighting was dispersed through hallways, offices and common areas creating the conditions for students and employees to feel more relaxed, ‘at home’ and close to one another. As Gullestad (1992) notes, hygge implies that “ideas of beauty, warmth, emotional closeness, feelings of solidarity, and relaxation from work” (p. 80). Even though hygge aims to provide respite and relaxation from work, it was an important part of the workplace culture at DPU.

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     85

Safety and well-being are closely intertwined and along with hygge represent what Schwartz (1985) calls the ‘‘three graces of Danish culture and socialization’’ (p. 123). It is in this respect that hygge represents an alternative and hopeful ethos to the individualism, competition, market stratification and other challenges associated with neoliberalism. Linnet (2011) in writing about hygge among Danish middle-class families who claim that ‘money can’t buy me hygge ’ notes that hygge expresses the general opposition that pits family relations against the meanings of the market. Indeed, hygge is viewed as a critique of the upper classes who have lost hygge by focusing on “cold, market-like relations” and “excessive consumption” (Linnet 2011, p. 29). Hygge then marks out the boundaries between the cold and heartless market-place and the warm and cozy home. It is in the context that hygge resists the alienation and competition of the neoliberal modern world, by valuing collegiality, consensus and community over individualism; simple foods, drink and settings over ostentatious forms of consumption; and the safe, pleasant present over the uncontrollable, bleak future. There is another side to this story though that is important to ­recognize. Critics claim that an unintended effect is that the notion of hygge relies on the construction of exclusionary binaries such as home and not-home, intimate and unfamiliar, and inside and outside. Inside hygge spaces are privileged and the outside feared and viewed as inferior. Hygge created within the home is contrasted with what is outside of the home. ‘‘Faces look towards a common ga˚rd (yard), or a table with candles and bottles on it. Hygge always has its backs turned on the others. Hygge is for the members, not the strangers” (Schwartz 1985, p. 124). Thus, the concept extends to the national context in which outsiders or those who “exhibit signs of being different” are excluded (Beltagui and Schmidt 2017, p. 407). As Gullestad (1992) explains, by “avoiding contact with people about whom one has insufficient information, by an interactional style emphasizing sameness and undercommunicating difference and by avoiding people who are considered ‘too different’ … hierarchy is also created and maintained. In other words, the idea of equality as sameness is not incompatible with hierarchy” (p. 174). This illustrates the unintended hierarchical and exclusionary aspects of hygge.

86     M. A. Larsen

Moreover, to continue with this critique, being inward looking, hygge creates what Hansen (1980) calls “interactional bubbles”, which are dependent on participants’ “cooperative efforts to avoid thorny topics or divisive issues” (p. 42). As Linnet (2011) explains, hygge means evading conflict and issues that need to be confronted, and in the case of the Danish nation, being “a naively sleeping child who does not face up to the world” (p. 33). Perhaps then at this point it may be useful to return to the oldest form of the term, hygge, which referred to intelligence, contemplation, and the mastery of an intellectual issue. Indeed, the Old Norse form hyggja (thought, mind, courage) is cognate with Old English hycgan and Old High German huggen (to think) (Linnet 2011). My experience with hygge in Danish higher education, while limited to one institution and only for a very short time, would suggest that within such settings there are at least possibilities for hygge to be used to promote well-reasoned thought, rather than close off discussion and exclude others, within an inclusionary and collegial environment that is supportive of difference.

Conclusion The word hygge denotes a way of being together, a warm and cozy state of relaxation, a concept that expresses what it means to be Danish. However, words that are close parallels to hygge exist in other countries (e.gs. craic in Ireland, hominess in Canada, irie in the Caribbean, mysigt in Sweden, gezelligheid in Holland, gemütlichkeit in Germany, pohoda in the Czech Republic, ujuut in Russia, and koselig in Norway) (Linnet 2011; Beltagui and Schmidt 2017). This suggests that the concept of hygge, while specific to Denmark, has manifestations outside of that country. Thus, it is worth considering the hopeful possibilities that hygge and other related, relational concepts provide for our work in higher education settings. Hygge offers hopeful possibilities for interactions within the context of the university based on trust and collegiality, which take place in cozy, safe and secure spaces. Hygge provides us with hope to reframe the ways in which we carry out our research, teaching

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     87

and service work in a world that more often than not privileges competition over collaboration, the individual over the community, and future economic gains over present pleasant simplicities of life.

References Anonymous Academic. (2018, April 27). I Thought US Universities Were Driven by Profit—Until I Moved to the UK (Higher Education Network). Available at https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/ apr/27/i-thought-us-universities-were-driven-by-profit-until-i-moved-tothe-uk?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Ball, S. J. (2015). Living the Neo-liberal University. European Journal of Education, 50, 258–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12132. Barbour, K. N. (2018). Dark Clouds on the Horizon: Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 18, 163–167. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1532708616669526. Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books. Beltagui, A., & Schmidt, T. (2017). Why Can’t We All Get Along? A Study of Hygge and Janteloven in a Danish Social-Casual Games Community. Games Cult, 12, 403–425. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015590062. Berg, L. D., Huijbens, E. H., & Larsen, H. G. (2016). Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 60, 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261. Bille, M. (2015). Lighting Up Cosy Atmospheres in Denmark. Emotion Space and Society, 15, 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2013.12.008. Cerny, P. G. (1997). Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization. Government & Opposition, 32, 251–274. Danish Government. (2006). Progress, Innovation and Cohesion Strategy for Denmark in the Global Economy. Copenhagen: The Danish Government. Degn, L., & Sørensen, M. P. (2015). From Collegial Governance to Conduct of Conduct: Danish Universities Set Free in the Service of the State. Higher Education, 69, 931–946. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9814-1. Frølich, N., Kalpazidou Schmidt, E., & Rosa, M. J. (2010). Funding Systems for Higher Education and Their Impacts on Institutional Strategies and Academia: A Comparative Perspective. International Journal of Educational Management, 24, 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513541011013015.

88     M. A. Larsen

Greve, C., & Hodge, G. (2007). Public–Private Partnerships: A Comparative Perspective on Victoria and Denmark. In T. Christensen & P. Lægried (Eds.), Transcending New Public Management: The Transformation of Public Sector Relations (pp. 179–201). Aldershot: Ashgate. Gullestad, M. (1992). The Art of Social Relations: Essays on Culture, Social Action and Everyday Life in Modern Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Hansen, J. F. (1980). We Are a Little Land: Cultural Assumptions in Danish Everyday Life. New York: Arno Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell, J. P., & Sundberg, T. (2015). Towards an Affective Geopolitics. Environ Space, Place, 7, 97–120. https://doi.org/10.5840/esplace20157213. Lim, M. A., & Williams Øerberg, J. (2017). Active Instruments: On the Use of University Rankings in Developing National Systems of Higher Education. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1, 91–108. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/23322969.2016.1236351. Linnet, J. T. (2011). Money Can’t Buy Me Hygge: Danish Middle-Class Consumption, Egalitarianism, and the Sanctity of Inner Space. Social Analysis, 55, 21–44. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2011.550202. Lytken, M. (2013). The Danish School of Interior Architecture: A Visionary Functionalist, a Visionary Aesthete, and Their Women Students. Journal of Interior Design, 38, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/joid.12012. Neave, G. (2012). The Evaluative State: A Formative Concept and an Overview. In G. Neave (Ed.), The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-engineering Higher Education in Western Europe (pp. 36–47). London and New York: Palgrave. Olssen, M., & Peters, M. A. (2005). Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism. Journal of Educational Policy, 20, 313–345. https://doi. org/10.1080/02680930500108718. Rasmussen, P. (2009). Towards Flexible Differentiation in Higher Education? Recent Changes in Danish Higher Education. In I. Fägerlind & G. Strömqvist (Eds.), Reforming Higher Education in Nordic Countries: Studies of Change in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (pp. 55–87). Paris: UNESCO.

4  Hygge, Hope and Higher Education: A Case Study of Denmark     89

Schmidt, E. K. (2009). Nordic Higher Education Systems in a Comparative Perspective—Recent Reforms and Impacts. The Journal of Finance and Management in Colleges and Universities, 6, 271–298. Schwartz, J. M. (1985). Letter to a Danish Historian. Den Jyske Historiker, 33, 123–124. Vingaard Johansen, U., Knudsen, F. B., Engelbrecht Kristoffersen, C., Stellfeld Rasmussen, J., Saaby Steffen, E., & Sund, K. J. (2017). Political Discourse on Higher Education in Denmark: From Enlightened Citizen to Homo Economicus. Studies in High Education, 42, 264–277. https://doi.org/10.10 80/03075079.2015.1045477. Whelan, A. (2015). Academic Critique of Neoliberal Academia. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 12, 130–152. https:// doi.org/10.11157/sites-vol12iss1id258. Wright, S, & Ørberg, J. W. (2018). Universities in the Competition State Lessons from Denmark. In S. Wright & C. Shore (Eds.), Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy (pp. 69–89). New York, NY: Berghahn Books.

Part II Pedagogical Possibilities

5 Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? Exploring the Conceptual and Practical Impediments to Operationalizing Care in Higher Education Caroline Walker-Gleaves

Introduction Nel Noddings (1986, 2003) asserts that care and caring have deep roots in education since they form the basis of all pedagogic relationships. But, she has argued, the increasing imbalance between self interest and concern for the ‘other’ poses deeply troubling question for education, exacerbated by the frequently repeated mantra that education’s main and indeed global aim is no longer to satisfy individual need or to improve the human experience, but to maintain a nation’s economic health. Such an assertion is amply illustrated by the increasing numbers of qualifications having explicit skills and work-related outcomes, and the growth in employability as a key metric for measuring the success and efficacy of the educational experience (Tran 2015). However, Noddings (2003) goes on to assert ‘there is more to individual life and the life of a nation than economic superiority’ (p. 84), and later on, ‘to C. Walker-Gleaves (*)  Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_5

93

94     C. Walker-Gleaves

be happy, children must learn to exercise virtues in ways that help to maintain positive relations with others, especially with those others who share the aim of establishing caring relations’ (p. 160). Noddings cites teachers as playing a major role, perhaps the major role, in doing this. The concept of the caring teacher presents a critically important instance of inquiry in pedagogic research therefore, but determining who caring teachers are and what caring teachers do presents considerable methodological challenges, due to the perceived ‘virtuous’ nature of caring teaching and the consequent lack of conceptual validity of self-reporting caring teachers: no one likes to be thought of as uncaring, whether in their private or their professional lives. However, there is another domain of teaching within higher education that aligns itself with caring teaching, and this is the issue of what is defined as ‘excellent’ teaching. Studies concerning ‘excellent teachers’ in higher education are beset by contention and controversy, and defining ‘excellence’ in teaching is difficult enough, but the plethora of roles under the umbrella of ‘academic’ makes a definition intensely problematic. Nevertheless, the documentation of excellent and exceptional teaching, especially through the increasing publicity given to teaching awards such as the UK Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowships and the US Carnegie Scholars Programme together with the growth in awareness of movements such as The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, suggests that a key attribute of such academics is the ability to care and enact their practice of a caring pedagogy. As such, the importance attached to differently conceived pedagogies that encompass affect as well as traditionally cognitive approaches to teaching and learning has grown, and research has emerged over the last two decades that explores the links between these and the needs of students, all within the broad notions of ‘learning enhancement’ and ‘learner engagement’. The concept of both of these have risen imperceptibly within the higher education agenda in the UK over the last 20 years, with the introduction variously of the UK Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning in Higher Education in 2003, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in 1997 and in 2005, The National Student Survey. These developments run in parallel with the rise of public ethics and the civic

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     95

role of the university, and the concomitant expanding commercialization of education. But the majority of studies of care pedagogy and caring teacher– student relations are from compulsory education (Walker and Gleaves 2016). Such studies as they exist within university settings demonstrate on the one hand academics’ scepticism around caring, with the formation of interpersonal relationships only as an incidental adjunct to the business of learning, whilst on the other hand, yet other academics consider personal responsiveness and interpersonal knowledge to be the critical factors in constructing engaged and engaging learning environments (Walker-Gleaves 2010; Kreber and Klampfleitner 2013). Central to these studies appear to be three factors that are currently exceptionally under-researched in the field and which will form the basis of this chapter: first, an examination of the extent to which institutions and academics regard the construction of the relational learning climate as their responsibility, second, in instances where academics and institutions do construct such environments, how do students experience these climates in relation to their learning experiences? And third, should all academics espouse such relational climates and what are the costs and consequences of doing so within current higher education settings? This chapter deals with each issue in turn and concludes by examining the implications for caring progressively within twenty first century higher education. In this concluding section it is suggested that while caring teaching is a clear pedagogy of hope it does not seem to be currently possible to provide a neat account about how that manifests in the reality of every day teaching in higher education.

Care and Caring Teachers and Their Teaching Higher Education: Philosophies, Policies and Practices There is much research on what students want and expect from higher education tutors and academics (Kandiko and Kinchin 2013) in support, emotion, and academic terms. In parallel, the literature is replete

96     C. Walker-Gleaves

with studies arguing the cautiousness of listening too earnestly to students when it comes to individual support demands and requirements. Many institutions have developed strategies predicated explicitly on the construction of ‘relational capital’ and the management of the ‘student experience’ (Yorke et al. 2014). Globally, academics are increasingly expected to both initiate and respond to a bewildering array of activities and actions to satisfy students’ demands. Seen through such diverse and complex lenses, the concept of caring relationships is receiving increasing attention within universities (Hagenauer and Volet 2014a; Mariskind 2014). But before we look specifically at care in universities, we first need to explore how ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are defined. According to Fine (2007), the origins of the word ‘care’ illustrate its complex and contested use in modern society. In Greek, the etymological root of the word ‘care’, ‘charis’, was used to signify grace or favour. The Greek work ‘charitas’ signified that someone or something was of grace or kindness. The Latin term ‘caritas’ is a derivation of the Greek word ‘charitas’ and is commonly translated as love or charity. The conflation of the word ‘care’ to the Latin ‘caritas’ was probably due to the Roman Catholic Church (Reich 1995) who fostered the relationship between faith, hope and charity and privileged them as the tenets of the Christian faith. According to Reich, the Latin word for care is ‘cura’, and it was used in literature in opposing ways, but ones that give a clue to the dichotomy that care presents in modern society. For example, cura was used as an adjective to denote the weight of a mission or activity; it was used as a noun to describe a responsibility that weighed heavily on people; and finally, it was used as a noun to mean a liberating force that enabled people to be empowered to their fullest possibility, a use of the word particularly common in the writings of Seneca. In other words, it presented many of the contradictions that are so evident in current debates on its place in education and society. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2009) meaning sheds further light on care’s etymology. The OED attributes care’s origins to Old English words—the noun ‘caru’ meaning ‘a worry or a care’; and a verb ‘carian’ that meant to trouble oneself. In sum, to care meant ‘to worry over or about’. Even these meanings have not remained static however, and as with almost all linguistic conventions, have changed to reflect

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     97

society’s concerns and norms. Consequently, the trajectory of meaning assigned to ‘care’ altered in Victorian times, in which ‘care’ referred to the constant monitoring of the sick to prevent the spread of disease to the general population. In this sense, the personal meaning of caring as being troubled was expanded to cover a universal solicitousness. Contemporary literature in higher education reveals all these meanings and underlying messages within the realms of both relational and caring teaching within higher education. University strategies from universities in the UK, and indeed in much of global educational institutions, reveal almost an obsession with ‘care’ and ‘caring’. University missions are replete with statements endorsing care for students, responsiveness and caring faculty, and caring philosophies oriented toward inclusion and empowerment. Such missions might once have been confined to Service and Support Departments (for example Nurseries, or Staff Development), Vocational Preparation Programmes (for example Teacher Education, Social Work Training), or more generally, institutions with overt spiritual frameworks and affiliations, such as colleges maintained by particular faiths. As such, these examples expose meanings of care that are overtly religious, specifically exhortations to charity and responsibility, and in addition, with obligation to those who are on the margins. This last area has assumed great significance in higher education in particular over the last quarter century, with literature attesting to the impact of ‘caring pedagogies’ on students of difference, whether through poverty, alienation or ‘non-traditionality’ (Hauver James 2012). But in the last decade in particular, such meanings have moved centre stage in relation to the caring work in universities, and arguably the impetus to ‘care’ has shifted from institutional ethos and individual responsibility, toward structural imperative and transaction and individual inclination. But two movements in particular stand at odds with such ‘caring’ pedagogy: educational markets on the one hand, and risk management on the other. For example, according to Bunce et al. (2017), students studying at universities in England have been defined as customers by the government since the introduction of student tuition fees. As they point out however, despite well-publicized opposition to fees from much of the educational establishment, there is a lack of empirical evidence

98     C. Walker-Gleaves

about the extent to which students have expressed a consumer orientation together with an understanding of how such a stance impacts upon student learning behaviour and academic performance. Since research in market behaviour suggests that provision of services is altered by the behaviour of customers, then one might expect a burgeoning literature on how academics are expected to deal with increasing amounts of ‘caring’ work to help keep students satisfied and to placate increasingly vocal customers. One might especially expect this given the parallel rise in importance of very visible student feedback mechanisms, including the National Student Survey (NSS) in which aspects of teaching quality, academic support and learning development play a very significant role. In other words, the pressure on academics to increasingly visibly ‘care’ and to perform ‘caring work’ should be evident in both student learning research and higher education pedagogy research. And in turn, that such literature would expose a gradual student learning behaviour in which expectations of particular types of teaching were increasingly evident. But arguably, that is not the case. Certainly, there are many studies that demonstrate that students are increasingly vocal about ‘contact time’, and rapid response rates in assessment feedback. But such studies emphasise quite narrow pedagogic actions and reveal an emphasis on time-related contingent pedagogy. Very few studies explore in detail the more global-impact of either ‘relationships’ or ‘care’ in higher education, and those that do, reveal complex mechanisms at work in both the ways the students conceptualize and experience caring teaching. For example, the work of Bunce et al. (2017) on students’ academic progress, revealed that as expected, consumer orientation mediated traditional relationships between learner identity, grade goal and academic performance, but crucially, that a higher consumer orientation was associated with lower academic performance. Conversely, in the context of espoused ‘caring’ teachers within higher education, the work of Walker and Gleaves (2016) asserted that it was the more wide-ranging, ecology building and intimacy of caring teaching, that in their teachers’ accounts, made the most difference to students’ learning. Despite the aforementioned relative paucity of pedagogic care studies in higher education, studies in the fields of transformational and dialogic learning (Shim 2008) have repeatedly shown

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     99

that creating purposeful relationships within higher education is critical to student learning and that empathic and responsive relationships in particular are of great salience to students. Critically, and standing behind such testimony, is the fact that all individuals, whether students or teachers, have innate needs to ‘belong’, and to incite ‘mattering’ or ‘relational significance’ to other people (Riley 2009). So why is there such a seeming disconnect between what many academics seem to believe about caring, what they do about it, and crucially, what students believe about the experience and impact of caring teaching?

Supportive Learning or Purposive Teaching: Understanding Why Relationships Matter to Learners Within Higher Education Contexts Many studies attesting to the ‘power’ of caring teachers seem to highlight the very personal and often idiosyncratic nature of such teaching, rather than seeking to ask how it can be theorized and transferred. However, the idea that such exceptionality should be accepted only as a function of individual values or beliefs seems to point to a lack of systematicity to the research base and would therefore suggest that we should build data and generate theory to support the claims for relational and caring approaches to higher education pedagogy, and seek to elucidate the mechanisms by which each contributes to student progression and achievement. Any such theory building must first start however, with exploring definitions of care, what caring teaching might look like in general, and how it might be conceptualized to be specifically a purposive and productive higher education pedagogic practice. And that must surely start with an examination of what students experience, and what we imagine they experience, by way of caring. Repeated analyses of student feedback at institutional, national and international level cite both the critical importance of personal contact in the facilitation of effective student academic support, and the consistent personal investment in students’ progress and ultimate achievements

100     C. Walker-Gleaves

as predicates to very high-quality learning environments (DocanMorgan 2011). In addition, empirical studies (Zepke and Leach 2010) reveal that particular teaching practices based on purposeful and mutually productive relationships between academics and students, and standing behind this, the creation of learning environments that promote active understanding of the role of emotion and well as cognition on student behaviours such as resilience, persistence and confidence, are antecedents to high levels of student progression and achievement as well as high levels of perceived satisfaction with their programmes of study. But relational teaching is significant for other reasons too, related to the diversity of the student body and the need to be inclusive to all students and therefore to maximize the possibility of student achievement across all student demographics and experiences. Motivation research shows repeatedly that student achievement and experience is related to expectations and that these are framed by perceived academics’ expectations and their demonstrable engagement (Hagenauer and Volet 2014b). If such expectations are low or absent (for example if there is no engagement between staff and students, there is little or no investment in achievement, or no explicit acknowledgement of an academic’s role in the learning process) then it is the students’ own expectations (or their peers’) that shape their eventual progress and outcomes. For many students this is unproblematic, since they have well-developed ­self-theories and effective learning behaviours. But there are a significant number of students for whom such lack of a meaningful and purposeful relationship and lack of ‘mattering’ is a key antecedent either to under-performance, or to academic failure (Docan-Morgan 2011). Such students thrive in academic environments where relational approaches to teaching and learning are explicit and supported at all levels. This is not to say that students should be inculcated into a therapeutic culture, or that nurturing is more important than rigorous intellectual activity: drawing on the evidence from other sectors of education would suggest strongly that such relationships ‘scaffold’ autonomy more effectively that other adjunct approaches (such as learning skills interventions) and longer term, are more sustainable since they foster the growth of social and cultural capital in such students.

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     101

Teachers have a unique opportunity to support students’ academic and social development at all levels of schooling and education through the construction of these effective and impactful pedagogic relationships privileging the values and behaviours that include trust, diligence, responsiveness, and attentiveness (Goldstein 1999; Thayer-Bacon and Bacon 1996). The active fostering and maintenance of bonds predicated upon these values and the behaviours of teachers and academics who enact them are consistently associated in the existing educational literature with the concept of pedagogic care and may be termed ‘caring exemplifiers’ (Larson 2006; Walker and Gleaves 2016; Zembylas et al. 2014). Teachers and academics that enact these exemplifiers: • • • • • • •

Listen to students Show empathy for students Support students in diverse ways Are active in the processes of learning in class Give appropriate and encouraging feedback and praise Have high expectations in standards of work and behaviour Show an active concern in students’ personal lives.

But studies such as Komarraju et al. (2010) have shown that students responding to surveys featuring the learning experience and the quality of support and intellectual engagement repeatedly express the opinion that although there is amongst many student bodies, the expectation that deep intellectually transforming bonds will be made during their studies is not operationalized at many institutions, and furthermore, that for many students, there is frequently little sense of academics expressing or enacting any sense of personal investment in students’ progress or achievement. Research also suggests that students who do not perceive any form of attachment to lecturers are more likely to withdraw from programmes of study (see, for example, Brinkworth et al. 2009) and also much more likely to express dissatisfaction with other elements of their programmes of study as well. Conversely, academics who support students actively and explicitly in their learning much more positively impact both their academic and personal outcomes.

102     C. Walker-Gleaves

Although many institutions and individual programmes of study have developed particular innovations at disciplinary or general support level to improve perceptions of support, such innovations, whilst welcome by students, often do not impact upon fundamental issues of a personal relational nature that students appear to value most. Furthermore, other research seems to suggest that the biggest impact on students’ progression and achievement is encapsulated in the idea of particular teachers and academics as being ‘exceptional’, their ‘caring’ being ‘outstanding’ or especially memorable or impactful in some way, as suggested in the elucidation of the earlier caring exemplifiers. However, this area is conceptually complex, since relationships in existing studies are frequently operationalized by the frequency of their occurrence, on the basis that time and access are limiting factors to learning and teaching impact. In some qualitative and narrative studies however, it is individual salience that is the critical factor, and so any research must be responsive enough to articulate and interpret students’ lived experiences of pedagogic caring and relationships. So, is there such evidence and how does it demonstrate the urgency of adopting caring pedagogies within higher education? The answer to this, and the explanation as to why Caring Pedagogy is both not really so progressive after all, yet is paradoxically both potentially and inherently disruptive, lies in the beliefs that both academics and institutions have about relationships in general and care in particular. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps especially, given the growth of acknowledgement and realisation of abuse and harassment in society, as exemplified by the testimony in the ‘#MeToo’ movement, relational activity between teachers and students at university is higher profile than ever before. Litigation ranging from alleged sexual assault, to exposure of serial predatory behaviour, through to reports of academics seducing their students, demonstrate very widespread concern in our culture about how particular types of relationship maybe manifest in lecturers’ motivations about and for their students. Such concerns are multi-layered though—they may reflect the understanding that power inequalities between students and academics increase the risks of coercion, and they may also reflect the beliefs that students are inherently objects of difference and deficit, that therefore ingrain the structural

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     103

inequalities of particular types of student. Above all, these changes expose the unique vulnerabilities of learners and learning. As such, it is therefore unsurprising that discussions of relationships, and of caring and deep attachments, provoke anxiety within institutions and in academic staff. Indeed, senior managers, concerned with risk management, publicity, and highly visible impacts on league tables and national ratings, wince at the mention of closeness, intimacy, attachment, since everything must be channelled through the conduit of proper academic progress and achievement, and be empirically demonstrated as to the veracity of intent and impact. In such a context, it is difficult and unorthodox to consider the role that care and caring plays in classrooms and learning; and deeply problematic to envisage an intimate and attachmentbased view of relationships that might still have legitimate effects on learners and learning. Certainly, as I have already argued, the evidence is there in relation to testimony and narrative; but the evidence is currently missing in quantifiable terms, and this is a problem for caring in higher education, and why as a pedagogic philosophy and practice, it remains therefore both progressive and even dangerous.

Progressive Caring Pedagogy: Concerns and Contestations in  Twenty First Century Higher Education Over the last decade, pedagogic research in higher education has begun to explore the significance of ‘mattering’ on learners’ behaviours, with studies emerging to illustrate that such processes as motivational displacement, attunement and the formation of deep bonds act as the predicates of human behaviour that is able to be both self-regulating and reflexive. But according to some researchers, caring about students, as the basis of constructing pedagogic bonds, may also lead to the formation of less desirable relationships, and the fostering of potentially damaging educational climates. For example, Ecclestone’s work over the last decade (see her paper of 2012 for example) has repeatedly suggested that students may become accustomed to ‘therapeutic’

104     C. Walker-Gleaves

pedagogies, which infantilize students and make them less resilient, whilst Koskina (2013) points to the possibility of creating damaging ‘psychological contracts’ between staff and students, leading ultimately to unsustainable academic expectations. Related directly to this, studies such as they exist, point to caring teaching as being difficult and fraught: for students, it may mean that they are required to engage with behaviours and personal qualities such as self-efficacy issues and shyness for example that are uncomfortable for them. In turn, for teachers it may mean that once they engage with student-led responsiveness at a deep level, they may have to make sense of issues of learning entwining both intellect and affect that only emerge through the formation of particular types of academic-student relationships (Hagenauer and Volet 2014a, b). The caring teaching and learning environments that I have discussed so far, attest to the ‘power’ of caring teachers for example, but seem to highlight the very personal and often idiosyncratic nature of such teaching, rather than seeking to ask how it can be theorized and transferred. Furthermore, many studies implicitly endorse the notion that exceptionality should be accepted only as a function of individual values or beliefs without properly attempting to disentangle the meanings and practices of both relational and caring approaches to teaching within higher education. Because although teaching and learning is undoubtedly a relationship, that doesn’t make it a necessarily caring one. To elevate it to that is both to reconceptualise it as a responsibility, and also to be explicit about lecturers’ obligations to students not as consumers, or customers, but as people. Effective teaching and effective learning relies on the creation, fostering and maintenance of emotional bonds to promote development (Goldstein 1999). Learning is a subjective experience in which the personal meaning of students and lecturers intersect to bring life to a curriculum, all the while bringing to bear on the experience, each other’s pasts and feelings about these. When done well, the continual and renewed emotional growth of both the student and teacher is intrinsic to the student’s intellectual development. Whilst literature acknowledges this, there is an almost overwhelming emphasis on the cognitive components of learning at the expense of

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     105

understanding its emotional elements, and so any future inquiry must at once be explicit about this current disconnect, whilst seeking to legitimize caring through the demonstration of a sounds vehicle base that it somehow makes a difference. But to do that would require a progressive re-reading of teaching and learning, as an active construction of meaning, what Biesta (2008) termed the ‘in between space’. Of course, very many lecturers do acknowledge this, and already practice teaching in this way, but it is frequently associated with limits—specifically time and space—as in the opportunities for unlimited dialogue and discussion and as in the proximity of lecturer–student hood, rather than by emotion, and not to say spiritual concerns. This collision between values and material concerns is characterised in the apotheosis of the caring relationship, the Oxbridge tutorial system, in which the continued exposure to and experience of learner–teacher close relationships fosters both critical and independent analysis as well as personal growth Palfreyman (2008). The difficulty for academics in the twenty first century is that in almost all other institutional cases, such close intellectual and emotional relationships are deeply problematic, with large student numbers, large lecture spaces, pressures in relation to contact time, assessment turnaround times and so on. Together with the structural impediments to understanding caring as outlined previously, such a scenario requires that we re-phrase the question. The question then, that caring teaching seems to present, is not whether it is desirable, but that how can it be enshrined in higher education pedagogy in such a way that it both accepts the human value of pedagogic relationships, whilst validly and legitimately acknowledging their pedagogic value and impact, however that may be felt and however that may look. As a virtue, caring’s value in teaching is undisputed, if implicit. Within educational institutions, whether as a teacher, lecturer or academic, caring is an important attribute in terms of demonstrable actions, in that professionals in these spheres would almost certainly be offended and concerned if there was a perception that they were uncaring, toward their work or their students (O’Connor 2008). Nevertheless, it is possible, as Goldstein and Lake (2003) point out,

106     C. Walker-Gleaves

to attest to caring behaviours whilst rarely demonstrating them, a dissonance that Noddings (1986) terms ‘relational fidelity’. Likewise, teachers and academics may well behave consistently in such a way and carry out their work with what appears to be a form of particular social relations so being perceived by others to be caring, yet holding no particular system of beliefs that identifies relational pedagogy as being significant to themselves as individuals. Consequently, a major issue for any inquiry attempting to capture the inner lives of caring teachers concerns fidelity and validity: what something looks like, pedagogically speaking, may not be what its motivation is, and indeed therefore, what the desired and actual effects on students themselves. Such matters are not hypothetical, since they concern the intersection between pedagogic practice and the agendas of individual academics: within the realms of pedagogic relationships, there are many examples of where personal teaching approaches may well reflect personal lifestyle agendas and not be in the best interests of teaching. This is a key concern for the practice of pedagogic care since it questions the meaning and status of care as a mechanism to effect change, not just in pedagogic, but also social terms. Whilst caring has for a very long time been associated with a form of character education for particular forms of society (Nowak-Fabrykowski 2012), research is increasingly concerned with the impact of teacher care on student outcomes and particularly pro-social related ones. Whilst the reasons are in many cases instrumental, and impact upon school and district measures of institutional performance, they are no less important for that, particularly from the perspective of the pupils themselves. For example, students are increasingly under pressure from forms of social activity that place them at risk, such as cyberbullying, gang membership and drug use. At the same time, students are pressurized to perform more resiliently, to higher academic standards and with better progression outcomes. The literature on caring teaching suggests that teachers who care are able to impart change touching students personally, socially and academically, affecting students’ learning in both cognitive and affective domains, and as such is therefore a potentially critical area of future pedagogic research.

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     107

Concluding Thoughts Over the last decade, the meaning of ‘relational’ in higher education pedagogy in many countries worldwide has subtly but clearly changed, toward more simultaneously culturally responsive and transactional meanings and arguably away from humanistic and empowering ones (Zembylas et al. 2014). For example, major changes in the nature of particular European higher education systems over the last decade, such as the introduction of high-level fees, the adoption of intensive ‘internationalization’ programmes, and the construction of global campuses, have exposed critical facets in the construction of educative experiences, and led many institutions to ‘codify’ their obligations to students, not least in terms of academic-student relationships (Walker and Gleaves 2016). The work of Barnett (2008) is critical here: on the concept of ‘solicitude’, Barnett’s vision of teaching in higher education is of such a kind that it values above all the focus on the student as ‘being’, the deepest form of transformation. However, this vision resonates with the notion of institutional codification of caring academic-student relationships: as Blackie et al. (2010) point out, ‘…the whole idea of valuing the person of student seems unmanageable. The sense of personal responsibility implicit in the notion of care when one is dealing with classes of over 100 students is just beyond the imagination of most of us’ (p. 642). Nevertheless, caring teachers, perhaps against all odds, do reconcile personal motivation with professional rationalization when it comes to pedagogic care in higher education: certainly, the work of Walker and Gleaves (2016) illustrates the potency of its potential to distress and disturb, yet ultimately deepen and transform. For many teachers, the salient question is not ‘why teach?’ but ‘why is the practice of teaching worth putting at the center of one’s life?’. For those teachers are convinced of the educational value of caring relationships as ways to expand the fullest possible outcomes of the act of teaching, even when there is limited evidence to claim that pedagogic caring is especially efficacious in relation to visible and tangible academic outcomes such as grades and progression.

108     C. Walker-Gleaves

This notion of a compulsion to care even in the face of difficult higher education terrain as well as there currently being limited evidence for caring’s potency is precisely where care intersects with hope and all pedagogies of possibility. As a trainee teacher over two decades ago, one of my tutors used to say repeatedly that “hope is a passion for the possible, and your job as teachers of the future, is to teach children so that the possible is inevitable”. At the time, and trying to teach physics to classes of over 30 mostly very badly behaved 16 year olds, and being so consumed with the desperation and difficulty of class management, the possible was an abstraction and the inevitable was certain misery. Outcomes for my pupils were targets that I knew on one level that I had to hit regardless, but on my more (and far fewer) cogent days, they were imbued with a sense of urgency and almost overwhelming purpose. It was on these days, that somehow, the possible became the necessary and my hopes became compulsions to make every child that I taught, changed in the process. Through doing everything possible to achieve this, I became what some school-centred literature calls a ‘turnaround teacher’, but that is actually a caring teacher as exposed through the pedagogic research, and such teachers ‘turnaround’ children, classes, achievement, schools, indeed, human lives (Sanders and Rivers 1996). They do this through hope—but hope not as a static, distant vision, hope as a dynamic project in reforming each day and each person at a time, in my terms, being actively caring. But does that mean that such teachers, and they exist in schools, universities, colleges, only ever live in the present and thus see care and thus hope as a daily struggle, a yearning that things will get better, especially if we do all that is possible to make them happen, to make them inevitable as I tried to do as a teacher? What about that deep imagining of hope, that passion that makes it worth going on for? To find an answer for this, we should turn to scripture, just as we did earlier in defining Care to begin with. Jewish Liturgy recognizes two kinds of hope: one a feeling that things will get better, even when we accept the possibility that this may not happen in the way that we might want it to. Called Tikvah in Hebrew, this is a natural urge in us all to want and to anticipate a better future, whether in half an hour, tomorrow or the next year. The other kind of hope sits in contrast—termed Tocheles in

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     109

Hebrew, this is hope as a vision that is certain in its eventuality—writ large as caring teaching, turnaround teaching, my vision of making the possible inevitable. It is in this vein, that caring teaching is a clear pedagogy of hope, but it defies a neat account about how that manifests in the reality of every day teaching in higher education. One part of caring is very human and very consequential, as natural and integral to human functioning as any biological process. The other part of caring is a vision that demands effort to attain, and that research shows is not the possession or inclination of everyone. But crucially, in a higher education where evidence bases and systematic studies are dominant, is also a vision that is need of an argument to justify its very existence. Reflecting on the codification of relationships in teaching and learning, and in the myriad ways in which each one of us experience care, the obligation of teachers, whether they are school, college or university teachers, is to offer a possibility that even when ideas, thoughts, concepts—all these elements of learning—are difficult, that students will prevail. Hope is that certainty of prevalence. As such, caring pedagogy, need not be either visible or measurable. But even so, in learning contexts where educators are exhorted constantly to be passionate, and to inspire, how is that possible when educators are also expected to silence their care, or to discipline it so that it is sanitized and institutionally legitimized. Such care and such passion is selective and ambiguous: it is no wonder that students and academics alike are confused by relational expectations of them. But this is not to say that academics who care can let relationships and attachments get in the way of proper academic inquiry, because, as Barale (1994, p. 23) asserts in relation to the visibility and expression of feelings and passions in the classroom, ‘it is precisely our sensitivity to the discomforts we cause and as a result, also experience, that can make classroom erotics a tempting solution to academic alienation’. But it does mean that as academics who are also human beings, we should consider breaking the bounds of silence concerning caring and its place within university teaching and learning, and acknowledge the possibilities that it may create.

110     C. Walker-Gleaves

References Barale, M. A. (1994). The Romance of Class and Queers: Academic Erotic Zones. In L. Garber (Ed.), Tilting the Tower (pp. 16–24). New York: Routledge. Barnett, R. (2008). A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2008). Beyond Learning. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Blackie, M. A. L., Case, J. M., & Jawitz, J. (2010). Student-Centredness: The Link Between Transforming Students and Transforming Ourselves. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(6), 637–646. Brinkworth, R., McCann, B., Matthews, C., & Nordström, K. (2009). First Year Expectations and Experiences: Student and Teacher Perspectives. Higher Education, 58, 157–173. Bunce, L., Baird, A., & Jones, S. E. (2017). The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and Its Effects on Academic Performance. Studies in Higher Education, 42(11), 1958–1978. Docan-Morgan, T. (2011). ‘Everything Changed’: Relational Turning Point Events in College Teacher–Student Relationships from Teachers’ Perspectives. Communication Education, 60, 20–50. Ecclestone, K. (2012). From Emotional and Psychological Well-Being to Character Education: Challenging Policy Discourses of Behavioural Science and ‘Vulnerability’. Research Papers in Education, 27(4), 463–480. Fine, M. D. (2007). A Caring Society? London: Palgrave. Goldstein, L. (1999). The Relational Zone: The Role of Caring in the Co-construction of Mind. American Educational Research Journal, 36(3), 647–673. Goldstein, L. S., & Lake, V. E. (2003). The Impact of Field Experience on Preservice Teachers’ Understandings of Caring. Teacher Education Quarterly, 30(3), 115–132. Hagenauer, G., & Volet, S. E. (2014a). Teacher–Student Relationship at University: An Important Yet Under-Researched Field. Oxford Review of Education, 40(3), 370–388. Hagenauer, G., & Volet, S. E. (2014b). ‘I Don’t Think I Could, You Know, Just Teach Without Any Emotion’: Exploring the Nature and Origin of University Teachers’ Emotions. Research Papers in Education, 29, 240–262. Hauver James, J. (2012). Caring for “Others”: Examining the Interplay of Mothering and Deficit Discourses in Teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28(2), 165–173.

5  Is Caring Pedagogy Really So Progressive? …     111

Kandiko, C. B., & Kinchin, I. M. (2013). Developing Discourses of Knowledge and Understanding: Longitudinal Studies of PhD Supervision. London Review of Education, 11(1), 46–58. Komarraju, M., Musulkin, S., & Bhattacharya, G. (2010). Role of Student-Faculty Interactions in Developing College Students’ Academic Self-Concept, Motivation, and Achievement. Journal of College Student Development, 51, 332–342. Koskina, A. (2013). What Does the Student Psychological Contract Mean? Evidence from a UK Business School. Studies in Higher Education, 38(7), 1020, 1036. Kreber, C., & Klampfleitner, M. (2013). Lecturers’ and Students’ Conceptions of Authenticity in Teaching and Actual Teacher Actions and Attributes Students Perceive as Helpful. Higher Education, 66, 463–487. Larson, A. (2006). Student Perception of Caring Teaching in Physical Education. Sport, Education and Society, 11(4), 337–352. Mariskind, C. (2014). Teachers’ Care in Higher Education: Contesting Gendered Constructions. Gender and Education, 26(3), 306–320. Noddings, N. (1986). Fidelity in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research for Teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 56(4), 496–510. Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowak-Fabrykowski, T. K. (2012). An Analysis of Caring Behaviour among Early Childhood Teachers and Children. Early Child Development and Care, 182(9), 1185–1192. O’Connor, K. E. (2008). ‘You Choose to Care’: Teachers, Emotions and Professional Identity. Teaching And Teacher Education, 24(1), 117–126. OED. (2009). Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palfreyman, D. (Ed.). (2008). The Oxford Tutorial: Thanks, You Taught Me How to Think (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies. Reich, W. T. (1995). ‘History of the Notion of Care’. In W. T. Reich (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Bioethics (Rev. ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster, 319–331. Riley, P. (2009). An Adult Attachment Perspective on the Student–Teacher Relationship and Classroom Management Difficulties. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(5), 626–635. Sanders, W., & Rivers, J. (1996). Cumulative and Residual Effects of Teachers on Future Student Academic Achievement. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center.

112     C. Walker-Gleaves

Shim, S. H. (2008). A Philosophical Investigation of the role of Teachers: A Synthesis of Plato. Confucius, Buber and Freire, Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(3), 515–535. Thayer-Bacon, B., & Bacon, C. S. (1996). Caring Professors: A Model. The Journal of General Education, 45(4), 255–256. Tran, T. T. (2015). Is Graduate Employability the ‘Whole of HigherEducation-Issue?’ Journal of Education and Work, 28(3), 207–227. Walker-Gleaves, C. (2010). Invisible Threads of Pedagogic Care: A Study of ‘Caring’ Academics and Their Work Within a UK University. Saarbrucken: LAP-Verlag. Walker, C., & Gleaves, A. (2016). Constructing the Caring Higher Education Teacher: A Theoretical Framework. Teaching and Teacher Education, 54, 65–76. Yorke, M., Orr, S., & Blair, B. (2014). Hit by a Perfect Storm? Studies in Higher Education, 39(10), 1877–1810. Zembylas, M., Bozalek, V., & Shefer, T. (2014). Tronto’s Notion of “Privileged Irresponsibility” and the Reconceptualisation of Care: Implications for Critical Pedagogies of Emotion in Higher Education. Gender and Education, 26(3), 200–214. Zepke, N., & Leach, L. (2010). Beyond Hard Outcomes: ‘Soft’ Outcomes and Engagement as Student Success. Teaching in Higher Education, 15, 661–673.

6 The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope: Repurposing the University Through the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda Paul Warwick, Alun Morgan and Wendy Miller

Introduction This chapter looks at hope from the perspective of a positive anticipation that civic life in the future will improve. It considers the role of Higher Education in developing compassionate hope within the context of unprecedented global environmental, social and economic points of crisis. These planetary wellbeing challenges implicate humanity and bring into question common sense notions of prosperity, progress and

P. Warwick (*) · A. Morgan · W. Miller  University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Morgan e-mail: [email protected] W. Miller e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 P. Gibbs and A. Peterson (eds.), Higher Education and Hope, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_6

113

114     P. Warwick et al.

the very nature, form and purpose of the world’s dominant formal education systems. As David Orr (1992) warned; are formal education institutions such as Universities merely equipping graduates to be proficient in pillaging the planet? In response, here we consider how, through its pedagogy, a primary role of universities can be returned to the civic vision of making a positive contribution to the common good. This is framed with specific reference to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and global agendas for societal transformation such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are a set of 17 global environmental and social justice priorities for worldwide implementation during 2016–2030 (United Nations 2015). It is argued that the purpose of preparing graduates for contributing to these goals within their own civic and professional lives requires a significant rethinking of Higher Education, as set out by the UNESCO Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (UNESCO 2014a). Of particular interest in this chapter is how students can be engaged with the SDGs by contributing to the common good within a localised community context whilst also maintaining a sense of hope. This is because of our concern that without careful consideration, educational immersion in the complexity and scale of these global sustainability challenges and their manifold threats to well-being carries the risk of generating in our students the opposite of hope, and instead a sense of pessimism about their world and its future. What the chapter argues is that it is vitally important for Sustainability in Higher Education to be of a form that is both applied and participatory in engaging learners as ‘agents of change’ personally making a positive contribution to addressing these challenges within their own locality. Using the case of the University of Plymouth in the UK, this chapter highlights the potential of the place-based pedagogical approach of service-learning to support civic engagement by the academy. In all of this, our purpose is to move towards repurposing Higher Education to empower students with the hope of a positive anticipation that more sustainable futures are possible.

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     115

The Compassionate Hope Mandate: Addressing Global Threats to Well-Being In recent years attention has returned at an international level to Higher Education’s contribution to the ‘Common Good’, particularly in relation to concepts such as ‘development’, ‘global citizenship’ and ‘sustainability’ (Bourn and Morgan 2010). Thus, universities have begun to address their role and relationship to the wider world beyond merely the recruitment of students and the sharing of academic debates. This change has come in part from the influence of globalisation, the impact of new technology and increased economic mobility. But it has also emerged from some recognition of issues concerning sustainable development partly catalysed by student interest in world issues. (Ibid., p. 268)

The backdrop to this burgeoning interest is increasing scientific evidence and civic concern over the current state of the world and unprecedented global threats to well-being. Our graduates today are growing up in the cacophony of a globalised media output and educational curricula that speaks of interconnected points of crisis such as poverty, starvation, violence, inequality, prejudice, xenophobia, climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, species extinction, pollution, and plastic waste. Implicated in all these problems are human beings. It is us; our lifestyle and civic choices, our professions within industry, technology, production and services that is behind these planetary issues. Consequently, it is us who are increasingly being asked to lead change in order to be part of a net positive response rather than merely doing less badly. Universities are increasingly framed as having a key role to play in this process of societal transformation and civic renewal (Sterling et al. 2013). UNESCO’s 2015 report, Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good? reflects this vision of education as an essential common good, recognising the need for it to contribute to both environmental sustainability and social justice. As Irina Bokova claims in its Forward:

116     P. Warwick et al.

The world is changing – education must also change. Societies everywhere are undergoing deep transformation and this calls for new forms of education to foster the competencies that societies and economies need … Education must be about learning to live on a planet under pressure … [and help to] weave together the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. (UNESCO 2015, p.3)

The executive summary goes on to state: The notion of common good allows us to go beyond the influence of an individualistic socioeconomic theory inherent to the notion of ‘public good’. It emphasizes a participatory process in defining what is a common good, which takes into account a diversity of contexts, concepts of well-being and knowledge ecosystems. Knowledge is an inherent part of the common heritage of humanity. Given the need for sustainable development in an increasingly interdependent world, education and knowledge should, therefore, be considered global common goods. (Ibid., p. 11)

So this all points towards not merely the need for ‘more’ education but fundamentally asks the question what ‘kind’ of education is required. It proposes that of vital importance at this time is a form of civic education that draws out from us all a sense of hope and compassion. An education that engages learners in actively considering how they can make a positive contribution to the well-being of other people and the natural environment. However, this notion of higher education as sustainable civic engagement needs greater clarification if it is to be both realisable and practically actionable.

Mapping Out the Hope for Sustainable Development A sense of hope that we can each improve the future well-being of ourselves, each other and the environment is what underpins the concept of sustainable development. The movement towards sustainable development has grown in scale and pace over the last 30 years. It is a term that arguably rose to global political prominence in 1987 with

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     117

the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). This proposed a global agenda for change, and defined the desired sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Ibid., p. 41). This concept of development that involves a transformation of society to satisfy humanity’s needs and heal its relationship to the environment has more recently led the United Nations to adopt its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations 2015). This outlines 17 integrated SDGs, as summarised in Table 6.1. Table 6.1  The UN sustainable development goals (United Nations 2015) Goal 1 Goal 2 Goal 3 Goal 4 Goal 5 Goal 6 Goal 7 Goal 8 Goal 9 Goal 10 Goal 11 Goal 12 Goal 13 Goal 14 Goal 15

Goal 16

Goal 17

End extreme poverty in all forms by 2030 End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation Reduce inequality within and among countries Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development

118     P. Warwick et al.

The SDGs set out the hope for humanity to systemically address the manifold global threats to well-being within a generation. Whilst few can disagree with its vision, many will rightly question how realistic this level of societal change really is. Sterling et al. (2017) argue that in order to achieve this blueprint for a more sustainable future for all we require a revolution within educational provision that nurtures a global citizenry with a common set of change-leadership competencies. For example, UNESCO (2017) assert eight cross-cutting key competencies for sustainability as being: • Systems thinking • Anticipatory • Normative • Strategic • Collaboration • Critical thinking • Self-awareness • Integrated problem-solving. Nurturing these competencies and attributes has become the key focus of Education for Sustainable Development as asserted within the UN SDG 4 for the provision of a quality education that includes the specific target: 4.7. By 2030 ensure all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship, and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development. (United Nations 2015)

In support of achieving this ESD target, UNESCO has published its Roadmap for Implementing a Global Action Plan (GAP), with the overarching goal to “generate and scale up action in all levels and areas of education and learning to accelerate progress towards sustainable development” (UNESCO 2014a, p. 14). The GAP has two objectives:

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     119

1. To reorient education and learning so that everyone has the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that empower them to contribute to sustainable development; and 2. To strengthen education and learning in all agendas, programmes and activities that promote sustainable development (UNESCO 2014a, p. 14). The strategies to achieve these objectives are to: build new momentum through voluntary commitments by stakeholders; form networks of key partners; provide a platform for debate through a global forum of stakeholders; and showcase good practice. In addition, in May 2015, the Education 2030 Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action, was adopted at the World Education Forum by over 1600 participants from 160 countries, representing the commitment of the education community to SDG4. This framework stated strong support for implementation of the GAP, and that: Quality education fosters creativity and knowledge, and ensures the acquisition of the foundational skills of literacy and numeracy as well as analytical, problem-solving and other high-level cognitive, interpersonal and social skills. It also develops the skills, values and attitudes that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives, make informed decisions, and respond to local and global challenges through education for sustainable development (ESD) and global citizenship education. (UNESCO 2016, p. 9)

Support for the GAP and ESD is broadened by the understanding that education is an important tool to support the achievement of all the other SDGs (ICSU, ISSC 2015). In this way it can be seen that globally there is a plethora of mandates, blueprints and declarations to highlight the need for societal change and that these all at least imply, if not explicitly state, the need for compassion for others and for nature. Educational institutions including universities are repeatedly seen to hold a key role to play in preparing people to participate in this transformational process.

120     P. Warwick et al.

Higher Education for the Common Good? Much has been written about the role of higher education specifically in attaining more sustainable futures (Sterling et al. 2013; Jones et al. 2010; Blewitt and Cullingford 2004). Higher Education institutions (HEIs) have increasingly sought to declare support for sustainability in their curricula, research, campus and operations. Global initiatives have included a World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-first Century (UNESCO 1998), the Talloires Declaration on the Civic Roles and Social Responsibilities of Higher Education (Talloires Network 2005), and the SDG Accord, led by the EAUC and ACTS on behalf of a global alliance of tertiary and higher education sustainability and student networks (Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges 2017). Since its launch in 2017, the SDG Accord has been signed up to by 94 HEIs. These are very welcome developments in many respects. However, we feel that there is a potential danger with integrating sustainability in the curriculum if it is mere didactic transmission of knowledge about the sheer global scale and urgent nature of the environmental and social justice problematique. Students might understandably respond to such an approach with the hopelessness of being ‘overwhelmed’, leading to counterproductive affective responses of either denial and disconnect; or pessimism leading to despair, apathy and a sense of powerlessness. These represent negative, and arguably avoidable, consequences of the current discourses that might actually exacerbate an emerging mental health crisis amongst young people, which is increasingly apparent in HE (YouGov 2016). With this in mind, it is surely incumbent on those engaged in Higher Education to look for strategies to ameliorate this situation. Consequently, we are concerned to direct these sustainable and civic ambitions for HE to contribute to the Common Good in a more positive direction; towards the hope of optimism and agency. Furthermore, we feel that there are important pedagogical reasons for reorienting learning about sustainability towards a more active, ‘localised’ focus, which nurtures the cognitive and procedural knowledge and skills

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     121

necessary for engaging as active participants in sustainable change (Peterson and Warwick 2015). We propose that it is possible to address synergistically the ‘good of the student’ and the ‘common good’ in a mutually compatible manner by shifting attention towards a ‘realworld’ and participatory orientation in which students are able to exercise their agency in a meaningful context. Taking up this challenge, the remainder of this chapter critically considers the implications of such a re-purposing of education with regard to pedagogy and institutional learning.

The Pedagogy of Community Engagement There is currently a noticeable paradigm shift within Higher Education towards ‘learning-centered [sic.] higher education’ and the ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ (Fink 2013). Mirroring the societal shift in emphases towards sustainable development, this educational reform has been prompted by concerns expressed by faculty, wider society, and, importantly, students themselves as to the appropriate form that teaching and learning should take in Higher Education (Drayson 2015). This is giving rise to a recognition that current practices in higher education are not succeeding in generating the kind of learning among graduates that societal leaders believe are important for individuals and for society in the twenty-first century. (Fink 2013, p. 3)

Fink proposes that the solution is to offer ‘Significant Learning’ opportunities which are ‘active and experiential’ and “that makes a difference in how people live - and the kind of life they are capable of living” by • • • •

enhancing our individual lives, enhancing our social interaction with others, becoming more informed and thoughtful citizens, preparing us for the world of work.

122     P. Warwick et al.

This mirrors the findings of research stemming from the UN Decade of ESD (DESD; 2005–2014) that points towards the need for ESD that is experiential, applied, active, participatory, collaborative and creative (Tilbury 2011; UNESCO 2014b). Repurposing higher education to meet the challenges of sustainability very much supports the notion of pedagogical approaches that are change oriented and in place; occurring beyond the classroom and in the wider community. This introduces the emerging pedagogy of PlaceBased Education (PBE) which orients learning towards the locality within which the students are living and towards the good of the local community and/or environment. Place-based education: advocates ‘hands-on’, collaborative, participatory and project-based inquiry approaches exploring locally relevant ‘real-world’ issues with a view to understanding and taking action and thereby contributing to the improvement of the home locality. Furthermore, they will almost certainly advocate cross-curricular and inter- and even trans-disciplinary approaches to learning. (Morgan 2010, p. 86)

There is a large literature on PBE, especially in relation to sustainability education (e.g. Powers 2004; Sipos et al. 2008; Semken and Freeman 2008; McInerney et al. 2011; Wiek et al. 2014; Power et al. 2016). As Sipos et al. (2008, p. 70) state: “students’ localized places of study, work and recreation are the centers [sic.] of their experiences that help teach them how the world works and how they fit into that world.” Gruenewald embraces the normative aspect of PBE to enhance social and ecological wellbeing (2003): Place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the wellbeing of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit. (p3) … [and] … A critical pedagogy of place aims to contribute to the production of educational discourses and practices that explicitly examine the place-specific nexus between environment, culture, and education. It is a pedagogy linked to cultural and ecological politics, a pedagogy informed by an ethic of eco-justice (Bowers, 2001), and other socio-ecological traditions that interrogate the intersection between cultures and ecosystems. (p. 10)

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     123

Thus, we feel that PBE represents a fruitful approach or strategy for realising the civic education goal of engendering empowered, compassionate students capable of being real ‘agents of change’ in their places of study and beyond. This relates strongly to the pedagogical practice of service-learning discussed below.

The Sustainability of Service-Learning Service-learning refers to a form of PBE in which students engage in the praxis of compassionate community action and reflexive contemplation within the curriculum. More specifically the US National and Community Service Act (1990) defines service-learning as: a learning experience where students actively participate in service experiences that meet a real community need; the service enhances what is taught in the classroom and is integrated into the students’ academic curricula; and the program provides structured time for a student to think, talk, or write about what the student did and saw during the actual service activity. (Cited in Yorio and Ye 2012, p. 10)

Service-learning is distinct from other forms of extra- or co-curricular service such as volunteer work, in that it links directly with the learning outcomes of curricula and there is mutuality and reciprocity between campus and community. Service-learning has long been established within the North American Higher Education model and is being increasingly incorporated into curricular activities in many other countries such as the UK, Australia and China. Amongst the claims for service-learning are that student learning will be enhanced and that the graduate skills required in the twenty-first century will be more likely achieved through community engagement rather than through a solely-classroom-based education. These graduate skills include critical thinking, creative problem solving and working collaboratively with others. Langstraat and Bowdon (2011, p. 9) argue that in addition:

124     P. Warwick et al.

It is safe to say that issues of empathy and compassion arise in every ­service-learning course where experiential learning and human relationships are valued.

The theoretical underpinning of service-learning is often situated within Dewey’s philosophy of education (see Giles and Eyler 1994; Herman and Pinard 2015), with it being seen as a key means of producing this experiential education, i.e. the interaction of knowledge and skills with experience. A key aspect of our notion of civic hope is students developing through these educative experiences a greater sense of personal agency and the capacity to contribute to the more positive civic futures that they are in anticipation of. This is very much connected to notions of self-efficacy. The enhanced student engagement demonstrated by service-learning initiatives can be situated within Bandura’s social cognitive theory (1989, 2006), which foregrounds self-efficacy, a key characteristic within sustainability education competency development. This views humans as producers and products of their social systems, enabled by intentionality, forethought, self-regulation and self-reflection. In turn, self-efficacy beliefs affect motivation, achievement, learning and career choices and refer to capabilities “within a given context and to accomplish a specific, related goal” (Leong 2007, p. 29). Evidence suggests that service-learning is perceived to be efficacious and beneficial from both the student perspective (Caspersz and Olaru 2017), and in terms of cognitive and affective benefits (Davis 2013). Another core element of compassionate hope is the space to be contemplative and to reflexively consider what is being gained from the experience of civic engagement. This phase of contemplation and deliberation, or reflection on experience, as described in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (1984), is also recognised by educational theorists as being a vital element within transformative learning approaches (Mezirow 1997). In a study of a US teacher education service-learning programme, Lake et al. (2015, p. 108) report how the students involved: noted a variety of social-moral skills taught or reinforced during the service-learning projects, such as working together cooperatively, helping others, encouraging, sharing, listening, empathising, communicating, and responding appropriately to others.

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     125

It is also suggested that service-learning can advance the civic mission of universities at an institutional level, through developing partnerships with local and regional communities. However, as Yorio and Ye (2012) highlight, the opportunities and challenges for embedding this approach include key issues familiar to those involved in any change implementation within HE, such as time pressures, incentive structures, and perceived risks of curriculum innovation (Korfmacher 1999). This orientation around the local context also has benefits in terms of developing in students a stronger sense of ‘place-identity’ and ‘place attachment’ (Manzo and Devine-Wright 2013). Engaging students in positive local community action where they are studying can in turn go a long way towards breaking down any ‘town versus gown’ divisions and animosities that might exist. Furthermore, an emphasis on the local need not result in parochialism and a disregard for issues in other locations and across other scales, far from it. Indeed, advocates of PBE approaches such as service-learning emphasise how the global is often in evidence in the local which can, therefore, easily represent a stepping stone to, and indeed necessitates, examining global issues (Sobania 2015; Thomashow 1999, 2002). With all these potential benefits identified, we now move on to outline an example of a higher education institution that has sought to integrate service-learning within the curriculum, and in so doing highlight some of the barriers and challenges of pursuing such reform.

The Case of the University of Plymouth, UK The University of Plymouth in the UK, is a post-1992 institution with over 21,000 students. Its strategic vision includes a commitment to provide an education that “makes a difference, improving local, national and global communities” (University of Plymouth 2018). With a growing reputation for expertise in Sustainability Education, in 2016 a curriculum development project set out to explore the potential for a new student learning opportunity via a service-learning pedagogical approach. This action research project aimed to:

126     P. Warwick et al.

• Assess the feasibility of the use of service-learning within a UK higher education environment; identifying limitations and benefits of this approach specifically within the context of Plymouth, and • Identify the potential for service-learning to provide a new placebased learning opportunity for students across the city and local region with a particular focus upon Sustainability Education. Pilot service-learning curriculum programmes investigated the learning impact and effective practice processes for student place based community action. These were implemented across three degree programmes: BA Education Studies, BA Illustration and BA Theatre and Performing Arts. Each programme used participatory and collabo­ rative workshops for staff, students and community partners to codesign community action opportunities linked to specific SDGs, and dialogic approaches to engage students in reflective and reflexive learning. A qualitative approach was used to research participants’ experiences, with 20 students recruited to participate in semi-structured group interviews, to keep a reflective journal and complete a learning gain evaluation matrix. The data from this curriculum innovation project underlines many of the positive themes highlighted in existing service-learning literature. Students commonly expressed a sense of empowerment from their service-learning experience as illustrated here: when we are in lectures I love learning about what we have to do as educators, but also I feel really small amongst everyone else, I don’t feel like I’m a teacher, but in that [service learning] moment I felt like I was an adult, I was teaching, I was doing well and the children looked up to me.

The evaluation matrices and reflective pieces contained a number of self-reported benefits with regard to personal development such as gaining confidence and self-efficacy through collaborating with peers and also developing social capital through working with new groups of people. The sense of community benefit also came out strongly, as illustrated in the following example:

6  The Pursuit of Compassionate Hope …     127

they didn’t do much stuff to do with [sustainability] in the school beforehand, and then when they left they seemed to take quite a lot away with them, and they seemed like they were going to actively tell their friends and things like that, so that was quite nice, that we’d made a difference to that one school.

There was a sense of enjoyment of the service-learning experiences; for the autonomy and sense of agency that they afforded. As one student reflected: it was really, really fun and just different from sitting in a lecture and learning, it was really engaging, and also I loved having to make up our own lesson, that was also really fun, I liked that freedom and trust as well.

The benefit of a local, place-based approach was also appreciated by students when seeking to address a sustainable development goal that was global in scale: I think because it is so overwhelming and the problems are made to look so massive, you start to think there’s absolutely no point. But I think once you make it more localised to people. So maybe what you can do within Plymouth while you’re at university is to make a difference to the way you’re living your life, and how then that might impact that one area. So rather than thinking I can’t change the world with this one thing I’m going to do……. people need to think locally to be able to think well maybe I could start making a difference. Because it’s too big for one person to think about a whole massive world of change. So if you can see how you can take little steps to change locally then maybe it becomes more of a reality that we could make a difference.

These student voice statements underline and give support to the contention that service-learning can contribute to positive attributes of self-efficacy and civic optimism, helping students to avoid the sense of being overwhelmed, despairing and alienated by the enormity of global sustainability challenges. However, this action research project has also highlighted a number of challenges and points of resistance when attempting to implement sustainable service-learning, as summarised in Fig. 6.1. The desired

128     P. Warwick et al.

ŽŵŵƵŶŝƚLJKƌŐĂŶŝƐĂƟŽŶ ĞǀĞůŽƉŵĞŶƚEĞĞĚ

^ĞƌǀŝĐĞ >ĞĂƌŶŝŶŐ ƵƌĂƚŽƌ

ĐĂĚĞŵŝĐ/ŶƐƟƚƵƟŽŶ ĞǀĞůŽƉŵĞŶƚEĞĞĚ

ĞĂƌŶŝŶŐĂŶĚƐƚƵĚLJƐŬŝůůƐ

ϭ͘ Ϯ͘ ϯ͘

^ĞůĨͲŽƌŐĂŶŝƐĂƟŽŶΘŵĂŶĂŐĞŵĞŶƚ dĞĂŵͲǁŽƌŬΘĐŽůůĂďŽƌĂƟŽŶ WƌŽĨĞƐƐŝŽŶĂůΘĞƚŚŝĐĂůŵĂŶŶĞƌ EĞŐŽƟĂƟŽŶΘƉĞƌƐƵĂƐŝŽŶ īĞĐƟǀĞǀĞƌďĂůΘǁƌŝƩĞŶ ĐŽŵŵƵŶŝĐĂƟŽŶ

ϰ͘ ϱ͘

ϭ͘ Ϯ͘ ϯ͘ ϰ͘ ϱ͘

^ƵƐƚĂŝŶĂďŝůŝƚLJǁĂƌĞŶĞƐƐ ^LJƐƚĞŵƐƚŚŝŶŬŝŶŐ KƉĞŶŶĞƐƐƚŽĐƵůƚƵƌĂůĞŶĐŽƵŶƚĞƌƐ ZĞƐƉŽŶƐŝďŝůŝƚLJ ŚĂŶŐĞͲ>ĞĂĚĞƌƐŚŝƉ

Fig. 6.2  The University of Plymouth Graduate Compass

ŽŶŶĞĐƚǁŝƚŚŽƚŚĞƌƐ ĞĂĐƟǀĞ ĞĞŵƉŽǁĞƌĞĚʹLJŽƵĐĂŶŵĂŬĞĂ ĚŝīĞƌĞŶĐĞ