There are plenty of big HE ideas. Why aren’t v-cs listening?

In a recent edition of Times Higher Education, former University of Warwick vice-chancellor Sir Nigel Thrift suggested that “UK universities have lost their way” and that, unless they are careful, “the way ahead will be narrow and constricted” – mainly because of an “extraordinary” lack of “big ideas” about what “universities might do instead produced from within their own ranks”.

At one level, Thrift’s article (“Why do UK universities fail to have a vision for their own future?”, 24 November) makes a valid charge. In the 1960s, UK vice-chancellors were central players in heated debates over the purposes and values of universities and higher education. However, over the past 50 years or so, the idea of academic leadership has been largely reduced to management, and leadership as the art of generating large ideas of the university has been downplayed.

At another level, however, Thrift’s claim is itself extraordinary, and in two ways. First, across the world, the past two decades or more have witnessed an explosion of ideas of the university and its development in the 21st century. And through this debate, the vocabulary around higher education has been massively extended. A tiny sample of it would include ideas of the global public good, sustainability, justice (and injustice), coloniality, engagement, the creative university, the virtual university, a renewed attention to “the civic university” and attentiveness to indigenous peoples and their cultures. This debate has been joined not only across academia and the polity but in the public sphere as well.

Where Thrift might have a point is that it can at least plausibly be suggested that UK universities have not been especially prominent in this debate, much of which has been conducted in transnational forums, such as Unesco’s. This ideational creativity – at the institutional and policy levels – has mostly emerged from continental Europe (especially northern Europe), Africa and South America.

The other remarkable feature of Thrift’s contention is that it appears to be oblivious of the presence of the large formal literature about the purposes and responsibilities of universities. This is a literature that was instituted in Germany in the late 18th century by Kant and his immediate successors (especially Schleiermacher and Schelling) and has continued through to the present day.

Indeed, the past 30 years or so have seen it injected with renewed impetus. Books and papers advancing ideas of the university have multiplied, expounding concepts on particular aspects of higher education and the academic world – “posthumanism”, “epistemic justice”, an “ecology of knowledges” – and originating large ideas about the university. Examples of the latter include the idea of the university of wisdom (Nick Maxwell), the virtuous university (Jon Nixon), the worldhood university (Bengtsen and Nørgård) and the thinking university (Waghid and Davids).

During this time, the philosophy of higher education has emerged as a new field of study. An international society – the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society – has been established, and there are also now at least three journals in the field, as well as several book series. The discipline has become a space for thinking deeply about universities and higher education, with many large questions emerging.

Is higher education a universal good, or does it offer contrasting kinds of value in different contexts? In a skills-oriented age, what is it to be a student? How does transdisciplinarity differ from interdisciplinarity? In a genuinely “higher” education, does curriculum (what is to be taught) trump pedagogy (how it is to be taught) or vice versa? And is there much difference between the idea of the university (as an institution) and the idea of higher education (as a set of educational processes)?

I have myself swum in these waters for 40 years and have tried to make my own contributions, having created concepts such as criticality, supercomplexity and the ecological university, each of which has been taken up in the wider public debate.

Perhaps especially the last of those offers just the kind of vision for the future of universities, not only in the UK but for the world as a whole, that Nigel Thrift is looking for. In my book The Ecological University, I press the idea of “ecology” in its widest sense, seeing the university as entwined with eight mega-ecosystems: knowledge, learning, persons, social institutions, culture, the economy, the polity and Nature. Each of these ecosystems is impaired as a result – if only in part – of the work of universities over the past two centuries. The ecological university takes this predicament seriously and intentionally seeks to play its part in repairing those ecosystems, while looking to repair itself in the process, partly by transforming itself on a transdisciplinary basis.

In fact, many universities around the world have made a start in this direction – as testified to by THE’s Impact Rankings, focused on implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The ecological university is a utopian vision of the university, but it is a feasible utopia. If any serving vice-chancellor would like take on the challenge of reaching for it, that could make for a genuinely world-leading venture.

Ronald Barnett is emeritus professor of higher education at UCL and president of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society. He is currently working on a new book on the ecological university.