Adam Matthews:A genealogy of the idea of a university, from Kant to the unbundled digital university

okay so welcome to this webinar hosted by the center for higher education research and evaluation at lancaster university uh it is great to see such big turnout this uh this time we are hosting our speaker adam matthews from birmingham university he is a postdoctoral researcher in the process of completing his phd uh with the title a genealogy of the idea of university past present and future so adam has already published a lot as his phd is in the alternative format and his focus is on corpus assisted discourse analysis of the uk institutional documents such as regulatory statements prospectuses mission statements and so on i can assure you very good reading and excellent research it is an honor to host you today adam um it's a really interesting topic and quite an impressive endeavor of going through history in half an hour just to say that my name is yanya kominovic i am a co-director of the center and i'm sharing co-chairing this session with my colleague richard budd who is also somewhere here i see his videos switched off for the moment but he will come in after adam's presentation so i will have to leave a bit before the end but then richard will take over to conclude the webinar richard has also posted something in the chat area so adam's twitter handle and our center's twitter handle if you want to tweet during the event feel free to do so so without further ado i think adam we can give you the flaw and you will speak about half an hour and then we'll open the floor for discussion as i already said please feel free to post questions and comments in the chat area throughout the webinar thank you anya thank you for such a kind introduction uh i will i will share my screen and make a start because as yanu says we've got um we've got 250 years to get through so let's get started so yeah can i ask you for a nod of the head if you can see my powerpoint slides excellent so um hi everyone so yeah thanks thanks again physicist such a great introduction yes so uh genius covered a lot of my introduction in terms of my research so i'm interested in higher education obviously that's that's why i'm here um i'm kind of introduced interested in the kind of philosophy of higher education the whole idea of what it's for uh but also coming at that from that from a from a technology perspective but not from a traditional technology perspective i draw upon philosophy of technology and science and technology studies to do that um so i'll be touching on some of that today and also some of my other researchers geniuses which which draws upon um discourse analysis which uses corpuses of text or corporate text to um to analyze kind of the discourse of uk institutions so um we'll we'll get straight into it so what i'm going to do today is run through kind of um the history of the university really but that's that's going to be framed within a within a genealogy and using uh foucault's genealogical method um for those of you in the uk you're probably familiar with a tv show called uh who do you think you are um and that's that's a genealogy where celebrities um are on the show and they look at their family trees um and that can be confusing in terms of the way uh foucault kind of talks about a genealogy there are similarities uh but focus would not like that com comparison of family trees uh due to the fact that his view is that many institutions and social phenomena are not natural and inevitable and that's key for the analysis that i'm going to attempt to go through today so my method for for this particular chapter of my phd thesis is is a genealogy and i think um this quote really kind of sums that up so um foco a lot of people attribute to critical discourse analysis and genealogy does link to that but it kind of looks at how discourses have built up with a with a historical perspective so just briefly reading that that quote genealogy is attempting to go further by tracing possible ways of thinking differently instead of accepting and legitimating what are already truths of our world the aim is to provide a counter memory that will help subjects recreate the historical and practical edition conditions of their present existence and that's a really important point for what i'm going to do today and i'm going to talk about that in terms of the history of the present the genealogical method um can can be fairly contested and there was a lot of literature around it and even for co kind of decided he didn't like it at one point and went back to it so so it can be used for many different things and that's kind of my attraction towards the method really it's a fairly creative process um where you can kind of use use it as a tool and that's how foucault would kind of turn this it's a tool to be used it's not it's not a method it's definitely a methodology three principles of a genealogical analysis uh definitely incorporates the role of history as i've alluded to so far it says discourses knowledge so discourse in in that widest sense but we come to see it as a as knowledge that is out there and that's a that's an important point and we also look at a broader analysis so what i am going to try and do in in tracing these 250 years is to look outside of the university and what was going on in the wider world as well which has an impact on the university of course and these discourses are productive and they they create they create the knowledge um we ask who has a voice in those systems of truth and analysis are often taken for granted so we're going to look at that institution whether a university has an essence or are there alternatives so i'll be um going through this in terms of the history of the presence and this quote very much talks to that so setting out a problem uh expressed in today's terms and looking back at some of the history around it and and whether we can learn from them whether we can open that up to look at things not being so essentialized and the way i'm going to do that is use a provocation so i'm going to revisit this throughout the talk but my provocation is going to be the university degree is knowledge transmission for instrumental future student outcomes removed from research so that's a very bold statement and um some might say a very sweeping statement but i'm going to use that as a kind of a place to position myself throughout the talk why have i chosen to choose those two things uh the first one um linked into one of my pieces of research as yanya said um where i look at the teaching excellence framework um as a uk policy instrument that has attempted to kind of bring teaching excellence to the forefront um my analysis of that found that um the key words that came out of the teaching excellence framework were employment employability outcomes and research which is where the instrumental perspective of my provocation comes from and a second piece of work which i am i'm currently working on looks at using a similar process but to look at research excellence framework submission statements and and a key finding that i'm finding there is his research is is prioritized over teaching still you know we that's changing i think a little bit but the research excellence framework often talks about um alleviating researchers from teaching so they can get on and do their research whilst talking about teaching we often talk about research working together with teaching to to improve that and i've just got a screenshot there which i thought was really interesting i don't know if anyone else saw this but times higher education a few days ago uh published this article of mark griffis who is a professor who publishes a paper every two days which is a pretty impressive feat uh read the article if you want to write read out more about it um but i think that the kind of last the last few words of that sentence are really important there where he says um not being required to do all that much teaching was important so i'll just quickly revisit that provocation the university degrees knowledge transmission for instrumental future student outcomes removed from research and the the work i'm going to concentrate on historically is going to be that of john henry newman and the idea of the university emmanuel kant and the conflict of the faculties and clark kerr's uses of the university however it doesn't stop there and more and more books are written more and more research about higher education are being written which is fantastic um so so this this is a live debate and it's a debate that kind of gets bigger and bigger it's um it's not going away which is great for us as researchers but hopefully today i can open up some of those ideas and kind of explore a little bit more about what we see as a kind of a essentialized truth of what a university is in contrast to what's gone before so in terms of our historical perspective i'm going to start in 1784 um and the period of the enlightenment and of course the enlightenment has many different interpretations but this for me is a useful encapsulation because it captures much of the thinking and disruption that was not just entering the university but all walks of life as i said i want to kind of look outside of the university and the social um phenomena that was going on at the time and this this this quote from from kant who who was looking at answering the question of what is the enlightenment um we can kind of see that um we're being asked to know so the context of this is in knowledge is somewhere transferred without criticality before this enlightenment thinking and and then a key point to make about this is this quote from counts now kind of looks fairly you know fairly straightforward or kind of accepted but he was taking quite a few risks towards the end of his career in saying this in that um religious and um and sovereign monarchies were kind of controlling universities quite heavily so so in terms of daring to know and daring to kind of reveal truths was what was important at the time and uh newman was the same when i can come on to him so moving from from that initial work uh which kant was was was providing a commentary of the enlightenment he also wrote a book in 1798 which took again this this was one of his last books i think it was his last but one book that uh emmanuel kant the um the famous philosopher wrote so so reading it kind of feels as though he's kind of ending his academic career and he's kind of reflecting on the university which which makes it a quite interesting read i think um importantly um he highlights a few things and as i said um university governance is one thing university governance and government there was a tension there but what what he clearly sort of outli outlies is that there's a conflict which is positive but he describes a higher and a lower faculty within a university and the higher faculty uh looks at instruments of government for civil servant training so the higher faculty was concerned with theology law and medicine which maps directly to the roles of clergymen magistrates and physicians with teaching from authorized and agreed sources which came from the bible the law of the land and medical regulations so here we can kind of see that link to employment and employability but importantly for he said that there should be a lower faculty as well and that lower faculty has freedom to pursue truth without government control dare to know as he said in his enlightenment [Music] speech uh kangas and say that the depar that that department of this kind must be established at every university to control and guide the higher faculty of utility so conflict for camp was good uh in that the two faculties could work together in healthy debate and a respectful distance they feed off in each other in a way that we may call today theory and practice so i think we can kind of start to see this kind of idea of critical thinking kind of bringing itself about but um can also in the book kind of he talks a lot about universities managing this conflict ensuring stays healthy and that one doesn't overtake the other so i'm going to return to my provocation and although not explicit in cancer conflicts of the faculties here we can see that the emergence of discovery of new knowledge to be disseminated alongside specific professional knowledge for roles within the government are very important but can't talks at length about the narrow nature of education for a specific professional role but does not deny it the higher and lower faculty in conflict he saw as new ideas and enlightenment thinking feeding into professional training if we sever the two of these in this contemporary university or are we at risk of losing the benefits of those healthy attention and conflicts which we make or critical thinking so i think we can start to see his idea coming across there and very much similarities as to what we're seeing today and certainly in the uk what we're seeing is a kind of a a government push towards a university degree mapping um directly to an employment and a job where in terms of this enlightenment thinking kant would say and others that if we if we learn about the world primally then we will go on go on to flourish in future life moving on to 1852 in our whistle stop tour of these years um um many people will be familiar with cardinal john henry newman's ideal and his idea of the university so uh enlightenment thinking was was really key in for newman as well so newman was writing this book at a time um similar to charles darwin and to start to think about his his um his theories and ideas which which were anti-religion in many ways um but cardinal newman was was part of the church and he wanted to bring enlightenment thinking in into that religious view and he saw um enlightenment thinking to subvert knowledge as transmission between generations so that idea of knowledge was passed down from generation to generation and didn't change newman was looking to create a university to do that and he was tasked with designing a new university in ireland um and this was the book that came out which which is based on a set of lectures he saw cultivation of mind and a liberal education of universal education and interestingly uh newman was was was anti-research within the university he said that it should be no research and just teaching education came first professionalization second and citizenship and good society his point on research he says that that should happen in other institutions the university should be teaching and he's in he often says that um the word university is universal so there's no disciplines either there was it was a search for truth so i want to um come back to the provocation in terms of what newman would say to that and i think newman would say in terms of employability and instrumental future student outcomes he would say um this becomes mechanical and the mechanical says newman is useful and life could not go on without this but this form of instruction is not the place of a university the opposite of this instruction is education for newman education is not mere reading of books and passing down of knowledge but a habit a personal possession of inward endowments instruction then for newman was for manual skills and those manual skills again he thought should be somewhere else um he thought that again if the student entered the university cultivate cultivation of mind and a way of thinking they would go on to to to flourish in any career so we can see that this idea is kind of flipped around that we're not denying that a university uh degree will help in in terms of your your future but first comes the education and then the those skills that you that you gain what will take you into the world of work so again very very relevant and the argument of severing the teaching in research of course which is is relevant and i'll come up to that further later so we move we move forward to 1810 and many of you will be familiar with uh with humboldt innovation of 1810 um so again under that enlightenment umbrella of that that new thinking that was coming around which kind of subverted um domination of knowledge um the the german 18th century um is described here as being in a pretty bad state in terms of intellectualism and i think it's quite interesting that it's described as encyclopedic so that's quite a good term for that passing down of knowledge but it's passing on knowledge that doesn't change from generation to generation and and with um was able to change that and van gaal was in a different position to and and and newman in that he was in a government position so he was able to enact this this ideal in the um in the university of berlin in 1810 so he established at the university of berlin in 1810 and he bundled those two things together so in contrast to newman he bundled research and teaching together and the principles of that university of berlin was higher learning it was a state institution but it was a state institution which protected academic freedom so he said he set the institution up but said government should stay away from this universities should act as a conscience for the government so there should be research but they shouldn't influence what happens within the university which we now know to be academic freedom and bildung is a is a concept which is often attributed to humboldt of that self-formation cultivation and freedom and interestingly you know teacher as researcher and researchers teacher humboldt saw that one role uh lecturer researcher and working with students to form new knowledge under that enlightenment umbrella so um we're going to kind of speak to that provocation in terms of um what what humboldt would say about uh the transmission of knowledge for instrumental future student outcomes removed from research i think you can probably guess that he would be quite against that um that the university of berlin's ideals put teaching and research hand in hand for him that they could not be they could not be removed that the student works with an academic to pursue pursue their knowledge um often uh the term academic apprenticeship is used to talk about students in this context and that and that was what that that that looked like so we're going to we're going to move forward to 1963 so those the three the three the three um thinkers that i've spoken about so far very much under an enlightenment umbrella but we're kind of pushing forward now kind of post-war into an industrial era um where we have uh clark kerr's multiversity uh and in his book the usage of the university from 1963. uh it's a really highly cited quote but i think it's it's a really it's a really good quote to kind of get across what uh kerr thought about the university in 1963 especially in california where he was where he was he was having a vision for a university uh where he said i've sometimes thought it is a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking um so what what he's saying here and then the second quote kind of kind of shows that is the university's growing into in into something that can't be kind of described as teaching in research or one thing it's the multiversity um here one of these quotes that i'm going to read out now um kind of portrays that as well and he uses the term strands of history quite a lot so he talks about the strands of history that build up on what a university is and those built from all of those strands that i've spoken about for before and many more and that that's the kind of genealogical method that that foucault would talk about in terms of we're building up this knowledge of what something is in the presence and in 1963 um kerr said the beautiful world was being shattered forever even if it as it was being so beautifully portrayed by 1852 when newman wrote the germany that german universities were becoming the new model the democratic and industrial and scientific revolutions were well underway in the western world the gentleman at home in any society was soon to be at home in none science was beginning to take the place of moral philosophy research the place of teaching and that kind of shows that that kerr was foreseeing this new idea of a university that was building uh upon the industrial revolution and universities starting to partner in the us with agriculture and with science and kind of pushing that forward in in terms of what i will come on to in terms of the knowledge economy and um and beyond so i've i've taken kerr's multi university here as an idea in terms of the university of birmingham campus so kerr would say that um the campus is no more an ivory tower so i'm sure we've heard all heard the term ivory tower talks disparagingly about universities he was really trying to dismiss that the university now is part of a city and he talked to of the city has been the city of intellect so if we would take the university of birmingham where i work as an example we've got a campus map there but we're seeing that that's exploding across the city so there'll be new students joining so in terms of some of the thinkers that i've spoken about in the enlightenment there wasn't many people going to university so there would be new students joining so the university had to accommodate that the merging of universities in industry working alongside governments for care connected all parts of society and not separated into those ivory towers so a key issue for kerr was that universities were cons were conservative institutions based on what came in the past but they were entering this dynamic environment and he encouraged a more business type approach and where ker was talking about in california um we can see kind of that the emergence of partnerships with business and i think in 1963 the more ker talks about the university you can see in his writing that he started to to foresee really the emergence of the knowledge economy and we may call that the neo-liberal knowledge economy um where when knowledge is a commodification so kerr then sets to work on outline the area of change that universities will face in the 1960s and beyond and he names three those are growth shifting academic emphasis and the involvement in the life of the society so this all aligns then to the knowledge economy in the post-industrial landscape um and universities in some ways were thrust into center stage i think because as i said before if we look beyond the university if knowledge is becoming a commodity the university was kind of looked to as as as providers of knowledge to to kind of provide that so i think that's interesting uh and we may say did universities have a choice in entering that or not that's maybe something we can we can talk about um kerr was very very keen on his idea of a multiversity in that universities can be and should be anything they want to be and he talks about lots of tensions that go on within universities um and some of those tensions can include teaching and research student satisfaction industry partnerships many roles and organizations that are involved and we'll talk about unbundling very briefly shortly but he he talks a lot about leadership and how leadership of universities is vital to keep this ever-growing ever bigger group of people kind of aligned and having those mission values but also having that conflict so the conflict that can't talk about is healthy in terms of a debate and academic debate and and and kind of producing knowledge in such a in such a critical manner manner so that that provocation in terms of clark kerr and the multiversity um ker raised concerns as the first university drew the academics were more interested in research than teaching and this is something he mentions a few times as research becomes become the primary commodity in the knowledge economy that that was where emphasis was going um technology as well for care was was was important so he starts to talk about technology being key not only for the dissemination of knowledge but also technology as a as a as a force in industry which universities should be involved with uh and occur quotes um in 1963 the san francisco bay area developing such institutions in that bay area now as a huge technology base and responsible for many technologies used globally in institutions such as stanford and berkeley which created an environment and a workforce for technology companies in silicon valley such as apple and google so he would have very much i think been for the idea of working in partnership with um with industry but also universities kind of taking a partnership approach in that um and and definitely research being part of that we're getting towards the future now so i'm very wary of time so we're going to kind of just bring us up to the present day now and and the unbundled digital university of the future so the idea of an unbundled university is a growing research area if people haven't come across it very very briefly and the way i often explain it is it's um how you may see a holiday so in the past a holiday you may walk into your travel agent and pay for a holiday which includes everything and bundling that may say that you buy your flight separately your accommodations are put your transfers so it's a business model that looks to do that um this can make take many forms um but in the university i think we're seeing it grow and a very interesting research area to put into a little bit of context again looking from a historical perspective there's a really interesting paper from wang 1975 that was was talking about the unbundled university and wang talking from a legal perspective uh said that there's four aspects to a university education and that is the impartation of information which is teaching accreditation which is assessment coercion which makes you as a student kind of get you through your degree and club membership which is social capital connections and alumni and he said that um what why aren't those three four things separate why why don't we break that up and have separate institutions doing those so we can kind of see a familiar outlet familiar familiarity here sorry um with with clark's multiversity this growing university which is having more and more people involved and why not break all those bits up and get specialists to do that unbundling and bundling it comes uh with professional identity as well so this this speaks to that growing university um if if you do work in a university i'm sure you'll know that there's a huge amount of roles as now which go towards part of a university um and there's a literature review which i cite here which looks at this idea of unbundling and there's kind of two extremes really there's the um there's the uncritical good uh um which which kind of says it's a good thing because professionals will work together to to provide university services but also wholesale bad which says um we're looking at a deep professionalization of the teacher and researcher external profit of companies coming in those might be digital companies they may be other service providers um and professional specialist skills in collaboration and also efficiencies so we can kind of see that there's there's a kind of a good and a good and bad to this idea of unbundling but very similar to what kerr talked about so um let's return to that kind of present provocation the university degrees knowledge transmission for instrumental future student outcomes removed from research so digital technologies by their very nature are transmission so if we're talking about unbundling um services to digital companies for example in this perspective i think there's a metaphor there which digital are kind of bits and bytes that they are they are a transmission so we could fall into that trap potentially of making it an instrumental knowledge transmission of putting everything online and if we're unbundling different different roles within the university teaching and research certainly could be one of those but also i'd like to make that a little bit broader in that around around the university we have many many careers and many professional professional careers with different perspectives so just noting down a few earlier i came up with i.t we've got careers we've got marketing we've got educational development departments we've got alumni relations we've got business collaboration and they all kind of work together with academics which change kind of some of the some of the the the priorities potentially but also working together how does that work that is very different to humboldt's vision of that teacher researcher working independently with students so just before i finish um taking the idea of technology which often is often attributed to unbundling i think i don't think it is technology per se i think technology is is one aspect of it and i think a good way of looking at that andrew feinberg who's a philosopher of technology has written a book called the techno system where he says it's not necessarily technology as an acting thing on its own and he uses the internet as an example where he talks about the internet as consumption where we may see that as a transmission of knowledge we may watch a bunch of videos and say we've learned stuff or internet as a community where it's more of a collaborative collaboration between academics students and others within the university i think that quote that on screen kind of speaks to that so keeping an open mind about the internet is not a naive and critical stance but on the country makes possible political engagement with its future and he talks of the techno system as technology but also administrations in terms of governance and leadership just like her did within the university but also markets as well there's markets out there that are kind of defining this so market making in terms of terms of digital companies certainly during the pandemic who can provide digital services for the university how does that fit in with the vision of what the university is and an example of that that that feinberg uses is we could use technology to have a cohort of students on a module which are 500 students with a lot of transmission of knowledge or we could have 10 people from all over the globe which use the internet as as a community and the the teaching experience is very different so i think centralizing technology in the unbundled digital university is a problem um and we should and we should kind of critically look at that so that was the 250 years i just wanted to flip back to the kind of why i did that so the genealogy aspect so just saying that genealogy is attempting to further trace possible ways of thinking differently instead of accepting and legitimate legitimating what are already truths of our world so what we may think of as the university is one particular thing we can kind of challenge that and hopefully by talking about the past and digging some of those things up we can kind of talk about that history of the present to maybe look to the future so in conclusion uh of those 250 years we had the enlightenment as a disruption to society enlightenment thinking came in and kant newman and humboldt really ran with that and brought those into universities clark kerr looked at the multiversity in the us building upon those foundations from those thinkers and the enlightenment but kind of brought that in brought that into um to industry and how the university in the us developed um knowledge socially becomes a commodity and universities are thrust into that marketplace and they've almost got no option but to grow they're part of that um and then neoliberal policy is further commodified knowledge and you and the university education and now as we are at the moment where we've got digital technologies influencing further but not really acting independently as we may see i think a quote that will often hear is technology will will change the university and i think that talks of technology as a as a thing and not and not academic students university leaders so i think that's an interesting provocation going forward and finally some tools to kind of look at the university of the future i think um the post post anything maybe we're in at the poster university but i think post digital and post humanism are opportunities to look at what's gone on in the past and how can we improve that critical theory and critical pedagogy are really important and also from my own area of research and design theory so design theory looks at taking something and creating something from nothing and so my idea there is how can we think how designers think in terms of what we want the universities to look like and how can we accommodate all of those different perspectives whether they're from inside the university or whether they're from outside the university so the question remains what are the alternatives um that's the tricky bit i don't have the answers um unfortunately but hopefully that has kind of opened up some of the debate for us to kind of take that forward all right oh sorry thank you very much adam uh for this fascinating time travel uh it was very impressive i must say uh there's also clubs from the audience um so there has been some chatter in the chat area but just to say again that because there are less participants than registered we will be able to allow people to actually speak very briefly if you want to please either raise your hand or somehow otherwise indicate you would like to speak if not you can post your comments and questions in the chat area and then richard and i will read them out loud so there was there was a discussion adam in the chat area around basically the sources that you use um let me just i think that a lot of them are quite connected so let me just try to kind of summarize them all so um it was said it is interesting that we've had a more than a hundred year gap between khan humble human and ker and people are wondering what kinds of writing about higher education was going on during these times there was also another question from how you selected these texts that you selected why these and why these is people also suggested other possible authors such as those in bevlin or durkheim and you know the french models of the university so so it's really an interest around you know how you selected these thinkers and why yeah thank you yeah obviously there's a there's a huge amount out there i kind of went with reviewing a lot of literature but i think those those three kind of social movements kind of stood out for me so the enlightenment the the kind of industrial revolution and then that post-industrial move to kind of a knowledge economy those were the three that i sort of focused on of course there were a huge amount of writers and thinkers that i could have chosen um but those are the ones that kind of felt like they told the story but also kind of that history of the present as well so when i've when i've been reading through different literature when something kind of sticks out kind of really speaking to some of the kind of present issues that we're facing those those were the ones that stood out so there wasn't necessarily any kind of scientific reason behind that but there are definitely lots more and then they are quite sort of uk us focused of course as well and european focused so i'm sure there's lots of other opportunities to explore other thinkers as well and i'll be making a note of the people in chat so thank you for everyone who put the other thinkers in there yeah yeah just most recently people also proposed robert martin and michael yeah yeah um okay so um i was just wondering um in terms of i appreciate your you know endeavor going through thinkers in thinking about the university from the current provocation but i'm also wondering about the general kind of um economic political and social order of the of the time you know you're you're thinking about so uh would it would this be a different approach genealogical approach if you were to study the provocation you know through this kind of analysis of the economy or economic order and social order in the political political order of the time or would you know i mean obviously you know thinkers are embedded in their context environments anyway but i still think it would be quite a different approach yeah i think they definitely embedded i think one mistake that we may make if we're looking at to the university of the future is to just pick up an idea and run with it in the present context so i think analyzing that context is really important and i think um it's really important i think to to to look at and i think foucault would say this to look at that that kind of archaeology of knowledge rather than genealogy of the time in terms of some of the risks that that people like newman and humboldt and were taking at the time in terms of the political and social environment it wasn't it wasn't a position where governments could be criticized so much um and i think by looking at the historical perspective i think we need to kind of tell the story of the university because i think in the present time it's certainly in the uk the government is not positive about the the university as an institution so it's not quite as extreme as the past but i think looking at what we can do now from learning from the past it's telling the story beyond the university degrees for a job what can we what can we say about the university more broadly as a social enterprise as a social function and i think when you look at the times these thinkers were talking i think the context is hugely important and yeah i think that there's definitely more opportunities to delve into that um yeah sorry i've got a question from um from matthew said his sounds dodgy so he's asked me to um to ask for him he said i was interested in your view finding that research is being prioritized over teaching i've carried out lots of reviews of institutions where teaching remission funding and other forms of support are underdeveloped and it's hard for staff to find the time to carry out that scholarly activity so is the prioritization of research on paper rather than in practice the the whole area of the research teaching nexus is a huge area of study in a really fascinating area so there's that argument is there a is there a direct correlation between the two i think i think this speaks to the unbundling of the university in some ways so i think if we work in universities we'll know that there's teaching focused roles there's research focus roles but of course in those teaching roles staying staying up to date with what's happening and and scholarship is important so i think if we look at the mission statements of some universities we we will hear that description of a research intensive university where research is the priority um and and teaching benefits from that i think i think the practice of that might be a little bit different and yeah there's a huge amount of research being done around that there's a paper from uh malcolm tight from who's from lancaster as well from 2016 that does a literature review around that and it's a hugely complex area but i think i think more research needs to be done in in in terms of the way the universities can describe that and i think going back to the previous point i think it's talking about what universities are for and talking about diversity of different institutions which i think which i think is really important so i've started to do some of that research in terms of a discourse analysis of university um university documents i think there's probably a triangulation opportunity there where we take some of that that public discourse to find out well actually what what is happening on the ground do those two things match up or how do those tensions work within the university and going back to tensions i think clark talks about this at length and i think again it's really important as universities become bigger i think that leadership and that kind of mission is really important and of course they're getting bigger not not just as as campuses but those kind of companies that i was talking about that are coming in to provide services that there's a kind of influence and attention there so that academic role is changing but sometimes maybe the institution doesn't change with it and maybe we don't even react to that so yeah i think it's a really interesting okay area so oh sorry yeah we have a question from uh peter who is just going to step in um peter where are you hi peter oh are you there um okay i'll i'll ask for it um so i mean there's been a kind of a discussion around the hierarchy of subjects in the universities um and you talk that came back to the higher and lower faculties and kind of the instrumental thing um we've had kind of there's been a sort of a little bit of a chat around hierarchies of subject disciplines in modern universities in terms of status and influence and then also the particularly the position of the arts and humanities which at the moment um seem to be severely kind of at risk particularly in certain kinds of institutions if there's something you could say about that how that fits into this into this broader context because you as you mentioned before the social context around the university is crucial in all of this definitely and i think so again going back to other writers and thinkers martha newsbeam and those kind of people really kind of proponents for for for the arts and the humanities and i think there's almost becoming a battle unfortunately where stem is kind of that that prominent discipline but i think if we look back to those thinkers certainly the higher and lower faculty that can't talk about that we've got the different disciplines working together intention i think that tension is fine um newman talked about the the idea of of universal knowledge and i think interdisciplinary class disciplinary i think are really positive things but i think they're difficult to achieve i think if we take some of the issues that that society is facing that they can't be tackled i don't think by by one discipline unfortunately universities are set up that way i see myself as a fairly interdisciplinary um i'd see myself as a social scientist but i work with a lot of computer scientists as well so sometimes i have that tension is there and i think you have to create the environment for that so i think firstly from a macro perspective from a university leadership perspective i think there needs to be the support for those arts and humanities and social sciences and also some of the newer disciplines that are coming in there's there's often new disciplines that come in and uh brady from a post-human perspective talks about that in terms of the post-human university what are the new disciplines coming or how do the disciplines work together but there's that leadership and macro perspective but i think also it's kind of structurally how do those things work if the school of computer science is one side of campus and i'm in the school of education on the other side of campus i've made quite a bit of effort to go and speak to those people and when i do speak to them we we often have disciplinary languages that need to be gotten over and sometimes those clashes happen first and we never speak again so i think it's it's trying to pull those together so i think there's a there's a lot of work to be done but um but yeah i think i find it really really interesting to work across disciplines but it can be hard work but we also need the funding to do it as well hi can i chip in i think you can hear me now can you not we can hi peter um that thing about subject disciplines which i raised earlier in the chat again thinking back about uh computer study was the example i had because i do remember a conversation about whether that was a worthy subject for for higher education i don't know whether it's any research on how disciplines different subject areas have moved in and out of universities over the last kind of 30 40 years because there has been quite a lot of traffic yeah computer science is an interesting one i was seeing an artist in an article um last week i think it was someone posted on twitter talking about computer science should be a social science because of the ubiquity of computing it shouldn't sit in one particular place i also work with a lot of engineers and you sit down like someone's getting a little bit intimidated to work with engineers in the university but you sit down and they're tackling a lot of the same problems that they're kind of that they're working with fields of psychology social sciences to do that so it is interesting when disciplines the history of disciplines i think is an interesting area um i don't know too much about the leadership i'm sure i'm sure there are writers that are out there talking about that and how they've come in how they've crossed as well so psychology is quite an interesting subject because in some universities it will be very clinical and then in some universities you'll find that it's a very social psychology almost moving into into sociology and a little bit of philosophy as well so sometimes these barriers are problematic i think um but it's it's quite quite a challenge i think to try and try and cross those barriers but yeah interesting thanks peter um i've got a question that's come in from uh nazia let me scroll up to find it um which was asking about decolonizing in relation to unbundling so of course it's you know as you mentioned before the three big names in kind of higher education history at least from the enlightenment onwards are all um all well white men right of of high status and so on um and the question is how decolonizing fits in with the notion of unbundling the university and how that then looks if you've got a sense of that yeah i think the unbundled university has got an opportunity to to be decolonized but also that there's almost a risk there as well because it depends which players get to have that voice so foucault would be would be would be a good person to go to in terms of who has the power to speak what a university is and that analysis shows you know the analysis of the genealogy of where we are today has been dominated by by western attitudes of as you say white elite males so i think that's a that's a real task for us going forward to try and bring those different perspectives in um may i think i probably could go out and search for alternatives that may be a nice project to go for next some some some some of the names that we don't always hear so where are some of those fringe ideas coming from that we could throw out as alternatives and i think that would be a definitely a fukodian type of approach just like he didn't discipline and punish who has got the voice to say what a prison is so i think yeah a really good project and hopefully if i don't have the time to do it someone else could take that on that sounds really interesting okay great thanks uh dan over to you next question please hi adam thanks for a fantastic uh presentation really really enjoyable um i'm i'm wondering where you know what what the risks and benefits are around enlightenment values it seems it seems that as you progress through your different thinkers we get to a kind of widening of the impact of the university and that kind of broadening of the constituency that the university uh has you know positive benefit or value for and i'm just wondering do do you regard unbundling as a threat to those in enlightenment values or uh could it be the next kind of radical widening of mission and impact is it fundamentally positive or how do you see it i think the the enlightenment being such a huge thing but there are people that would say you know postmodernists would say that we should we should sort of reject some of those ideas and i think i think that's where post-humanism is quite an interesting project where we can say well what are the benefits that that that what have we done which is good but how can how can we kind of take that forward i think unbundling i think i think as i said in the talk that the literature reviews are kind of very very binary opposites there's wholesale good versus wholesale bad and i think there is an opportunity to kind of reset that and i think i was trying to think of some examples of good unbundling today so i think obviously so i think we can probably all think of examples of bad unbundling where we have uh for-profit organizations coming to university to sell technology to solve all of our problems i think that is probably one of the risks but also unbundling in terms of an academic teaching and researching role in terms of collaborating so um i was thinking of some projects that i've seen where academics have collaborated with artists to to tell the story of their research i've done some really good work that i've really enjoyed working with graphic designers and and videographers and those kind of to to talk about sort of disseminating research knowledge so when we talk about developing online courses i think rather than having this technological ai fix i think there's this opportunity to to bring in professions and if you work with a really great designer an artist i think there's a real opportunity there so that for me would be kind of unbundling that role a little and and there's certainly a positive there okay that's great we've got just about time for um for one more question and this one's coming from uh hannah so hi yes um i work at a student's union so i'm obsessively concerned with the student experience so i was just wondering whether there's been any uh research or findings on the impact of unbundling on student satisfaction the student experience um potentially in relation to communities well-being identity things that are that we know are so integral to students opinions of their university experience so i didn't know if there was anything a kind of comment on that there's not that i know of hannah but i think it's a really good point and i think the the two sides of the argument there would would flick i think between that kind of professionalizing and and segmenting different perspectives of the university versus kind of that broader one academic role does does one thing and i think uh ben williamson upper edinburgh does a lot of work around the digital technology companies that come into universities and partner with universities and some of the effects that that may have i think from a student experience perspective i think the university have got a real role if we bring in experts from outside to take a particular bringing products and services i think as clocker would say i think the leadership is really important um in terms of bringing that together into kind of a seamless experience i used um i used the term design theory in terms of what we could use going forward and i think a designer would look at a whole process of a student experience and look at how that worked and i think the risk is that we have a student engaging with a university to make an application through going through their degree and all of the diff the huge amount of diverse amount of people that will come into contact with versus when they become an alumni and how that works and there's a lot of discourse now around lifelong learning and what what products and services universities can provide for alumni so i think having that kind of mapped out as a university is really really important and i think a danger of unbundling is that that can become disjointed yeah thanks for that adam i mean the the fact that we've had such wide-ranging questions is kind of a reflection that you've really given us some food for thought i mean it's always really important to kind of think about what universities are for and that there are these competing visions and how they all balance together or rub against each other is kind of it's just kind of one of the ongoing questions around he and what it's for so um thanks a million for that um feel free everyone to take the conversation further on twitter or to drop um to drop adam online but thank you all very much for coming up with the questions and it was a really really good session so lots of great stuff um in the chat and in the question so thank you everyone and this will be recorded so the recording will be available so thanks very much and take care thank you thanks everyone cheers adam

2021-01-12 06:59

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