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Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER). Researching Absences and Silences in Higher Education Professor Louise Morley University of Sussex, UK sussex.ac.uk/cheer. Desiccation, Distributive Justice and Dystopia. Hypermodernisation and Archaism. Nostalgia Frenzy Inertia.
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Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) Researching Absences and Silences in Higher Education Professor Louise Morley University of Sussex, UK sussex.ac.uk/cheer
Hypermodernisation and Archaism • Nostalgia • Frenzy • Inertia
Whose Transformational Imaginary? • Neo-liberalism/ austerity rather than academic imaginaries or social movements? • Who/what is currently informing policy? (Ball and Exley, 2009)
Do These Discourses Excite and Delight You? • Excellence • Knowledge Economy • Innovation and Enterprise • Knowledge Transfer • Teaching And Learning • Widening Participation • Lifelong Learning • Employability • Globalisation • Internationalisation • Civic Engagement • Digitisation • Economic Impact • Quality Assurance • League Tables
The University of the Future • Is the present the future that was imagined in the past? • Did left/ counter hegemonic advocates predict the scale of neo-liberal driven change? • Did traditionalists predict the industrialisation and massification of higher education? • Is the university of the future the university of the past?
From Knowledge Economy to Knowledge Recession? • Neo-liberalism cast public sector as profligate, sluggish, self-serving, and archaic (1980s). • Transfer/ migration values, power and authority across public/private. • Private sector crashes (2008/9)/ state rescues. • Private sector recovers (2010) / public sector crashes. • Risk and debt now carried by public sector. • Austerity and affective ecologies. • New cast of grotesques. (See Gamble, 2009)
Whose Crisis? Current recession: • embedded in and re-producing political and democratic crises. • crisis of capitalism? • financial crisis reinforcing capitalism/ social and organisational hierarchies?
UK Policy Futures in Turbulent Times: From Expansion to Contraction Denham (2008) • Expansion of technology • Innovation • Research-based wealth creation. Mandelson (2009) • Social justice (poorer students) • Diversity of models of learning • Funding for high level skills • University/business partnerships • Review of postgraduate provision • Strengthening research capacity • Excellence in teaching • Universities/ Communities • Transnational Education • Willetts/ Cable (2010) • Diverse HE provision • Private HE • Excellence and rigour • University autonomy • STEM • Fees/ Graduate Tax • Reduction in HE funding/ places.
Futurology • Are current policy discourses: • Limiting or generating creative thinking about the future of universities? • Commensurate with aspirations/ desires of students/ staff? • Reducing universities to delivery agencies for government-decreed outcomes?(Young, 2004) • What new vocabularies can be marshalled to consider the morphology of the university of the future?
The Edgeless University(Bradwell, 2009) • Open Access Publishing • Flexible learning outside the university • Social media • Progressive Austerity (Reeves, 2009) • Strategic technological investment • New providers • Collaborative research/ open research communities • Universities as partners, not sole providers of learning, research • Engaging stakeholders in course design • New forms of accreditation.
Dystopic Futures and Cultures of Closure • Callousness of prestige • Decline in academic freedom • Employees permanently temporary • Job training, not education • Teacherless classrooms • Increased political, cultural and economic assault • Corporatisation/ academic-capitalist values • Countercultures and opposition crushed. (Bousquet, 2008)
Absences and Silences • Intersectionality of Social Identities (Morley et al, 2010) • Aesthetics/ Spatial Justice/ Learning Landscapes (Lambert, 2010; Neary, 2010) • Affective Domain (Hey, 2009) • Environment and Sustainability (Sterling, 2004) • Micropolitics(Morley, 1999) • Global North/ South Power Geometries (Robinson, 2009)
Desiring Higher Education • Aligning personal aspirations with needs of economy (Appadurai, 2003; Morley et al. 2010; Walkerdine, 2003). Globally: 1960 - 13 million 2005 - 137.8 million UK: 1966 - 44,500 2006 - 4,000,000 • Numbers of UK applicants +23% on last year.
Toxic Correlations/ Access and Social Identities • 7.3% students reported a disability • 18.8% first-degree students were black and minority ethnic (ECU, 2009) • Issues with BME achievement and distribution (Richardson, 2008). • 4% of UK poorer young people enter higher education (David et al, 2009; Hills Report, 2009). • 5% of this group enter UK’s top 7 universities (HESA, 2010).
Reproducing Power and Privilege? Graduates from elite universities control: • the media • politics • the civil service • the arts • the City • law • medicine • big business • the armed forces • think tanks(Monbiot, 2010)
Closing the Gender Gap? • Global Gender Parity Index of 1.08 (UNESCO, 2009). • The number of male students globally quadrupled from 17.7 to 75.1 million between 1970-2007. • The number of female students rose sixfold from 10.8 to 77.4 million. • In UK, 57.1% of students and 42.6% of academic staff are women (2009).
Feminisation Crisis Discourse or Misogyny Posing as Measurement? • A woman’s place is in the minority. • Reconstructs dominant group as victims. • Assumes that women’s success has come about by damaging males. (HEPI, 2009; Leathwood and Read, 2008). • Ignores gender in wider civil society. • UK ranked 15 the Global Gender Gap Index (13 in 2008)(World Economic Forum, 2009).
Women in Power? • 19% of European Union professors are women (She Figures, 2009). • 13% UK Vice Chancellors are women (Deem, 2010; Sutton Trust, 2008). • 70% Commonwealth countries, all universities are led by men (Singh, 2008). • In 2007/08, the median Gender Pay Gap was 18.2%(ECU, 2010). • Gender equality = representational space?
Gender Mainstreaming? • Sexual harassment(NUS, 2010); • Women and leadership(David, 1998; Hearn, 2009; Husu, 2009; Valian, 1999); • Gender insensitive pedagogy(Welch, 2006); • Women and Technology (Clegg, 2001); • Promotion, professional development and tenure(Acker, 2009; Knights and Richards, 2003); • Knowledge production and dissemination(Hughes, 2002); • Curricula and subject choices(Morley et al, 2006).
Gender… • ignored when women suffer discrimination or under-representation. • amplified in crisis form when women start to be ‘over-represented’. • rarely intersected with other structures of inequality. • inequalities resistant to hypermodernisation forces? • disqualified from the Impact Agenda?
Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard Quantitative Equity Scorecards Measuring: • Gender, age, socio-economic status (SES) In Relation to: • Access, retention and achievement. In Relation to: • 4 Programmes of Study in each HEI. • 2 Public and 2 private HEIs. • Qualitative • 200 life history interviews with students from public and private universities (100 Ghana and 100 Tanzania); • 200 interviews with academic staff and policy makers in Ghana and Tanzania. (Morley, Leach and Lugg, 2008; Morley and Lussier, 2009) http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wphegt
Women’s Enrolments Ghana • 1990: 22.5% (UNESCO, 1999a, 1999b). • 2005/6: 35% (UNESCO, 2006) Tanzania • 1991: 15.9% (UNESCO, 1999a, 1999b). • 2005/6: 31.2% (UNESCO, 2006)
Access to Specific Programmes: Tanzania ESC 1: Access to B.Sc. Engineering according to Age, Gender and Socio-Economic Status at a Public University in Tanzania by Levels in 2007/2008 ESC 19: Access to B. Ed. Maths according to Age, Gender and Socio-Economic Status at a Private University in Tanzania by Levels in 2007/2008
Access to Different Programmes: Ghana ESC 3: Access to Level 100 on Four Programmes at a Public University in Ghana according to Age, Gender and Socio-Economic Status ESC 4: Access to Level 100 on Four Programmes at a Private University in Ghana according to Age, Gender and Socio-Economic Status
Messages from the Equity Scorecards: Access • Low SES + mature students under-represented in all subjects except Education. • Under-represented groups in disciplines with low exchange rate in the labour market. • Affirmative action programmes not increasing numbers of low SES women. • When structures of inequality are intersected, poor and older women disappear from majority of programmes. • When under-represented groups are there they tend to be men.
Steep Social Gradients • Opportunity hording by privileged social groups? • Are we now educating ‘doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons’?(Williams/ Eagleton 2008)
Hyper-modernisation of: Liquified globalisation Entrepreneurial, corporate, commercialised universities Privileging of technology, STEM Turbo-charged consuming students. Archaism of: Male dominance of leadership Gender inequalities and feminisation fears Unequal participation rates for different social groups. ‘Now’ Universities Built on Yesterday’s Foundations
The University of the Future Needs to... • Recover critical knowledge and be a think tank and policy driver. • Discover new conceptual grammars to include equalities, identities, affective and aesthetic domains. • Consider power/knowledge, as well as knowledge liquification and optimisation. • Contribute to wealth/ opportunity distribution as well as to wealth creation. • Apply the impact agenda to transferring evidence from equity research into action. • Disrupt social class and gender privileges by interrogating and accounting for the absences.
CHEER ESRC Seminar Series: ‘Imagining the University of the Future’ (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrcseminars).