The Next Fifty Years:
Imagining the Feminist
University
of the Future
Professor Valerie Hey
Professor Louise Morley
Centre for Higher Education and
Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
The Story So Far? Pollyanna and
Cassandra Un/Do 3 Rationalities
•1960s liberal humanism/
meritocracy –
renaissance or ‘the glad
game’?
•1980s- present neoliberal realism
•Feminist Futures
•‘We inherit the future, not
just the past’
(Barad, 2010: 257).
Optimism and Openings
• Expression of Welfare
State/Democratic Impulse & Impetus
• Overcoming of 5 evils including
Ignorance
• Role of (LSE) public intellectuals –
for the solidary supportive state e.g.
Titmus
• Evidenced-based policy – parautopian
• The positive spirit of the age
• Affirmed the virtues of a liberal
education
• Context of reform e.g. secondary
education
• Egalitarian – inclusive – women,
working class & ?
Values, Not Value
• The Robbins axiom:
‘ courses of higher education should
be available for all those who are
qualified by ability and attainment
to pursue them and who wish to do
so.’
3 core values
• Public value of higher education in
producing ‘cultivated’ men and
women
• Securing the advancement of
learning through the combination
of teaching and research,
• Providing a common culture and
standards of citizenship.
‘A Realm of Free Enquiry’: Robbins
…the essence of higher education that it
introduces students to a world of
intellectual responsibility and intellectual
discovery in which they are to play their
part … The element of partnership
between teacher and taught in a common
pursuit of knowledge and understanding,
present to some extent in all education,
should become the dominant element as
the pupil matures and as the intellectual
level of work done rises … …he is not
being presented with a mass of
information but initiated into a realm of
free inquiry.
From Social Repair to Cruel
Optimism
Lionel Robbins
•Neoclassical economic theorist
•No admirer of socialism or left-wing ideas more
generally
•A social repairer – no radical
Believed in:
•Post- war competitive state/ reconstruction (at
Bretton Woods)
•Expansion for global human capitalism /
wasted talent.
•International Context- visited universities/
colleges in Britain, France, Germany, the
Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland/ Longer
visits to the United States and the Soviet Union.
•N.B.
•1963 UK had quarter of a million students (free)
•Currently 2.5 million (consumer pays).
•Robbins recommendations implemented by
Wilson’s Labour Govt.- from 1964.
Value, not Values
• Robbins’ pronouncements on the
nation’s ‘needs’ and social benefits =
instrumentalisation of knowledge.
• ‘Equality of opportunity’ and ‘cultivated
men and women’ BUT
• Education required a quantifiable use
value.
• Cast new universities in same mould as
existing elite.
• HE now re-cast as a private investment
in human capital and as contributing to
economic growth (Willetts, 2013).
From Meritocracy to Market
• Robbins Report = mitigated
inherited stratification/
hierarchy among institutions.
• Today higher education reimagined as a driver of
inequality, rather than a vehicle
for social mobility.
• Changes designed to create
hierarchy and reinforce
divisions.
• Expansion = Privatisation.
Rabid Re-Imaginings
• Market competition and the
support of for-profit higher
education, which were not part of
the Robbins agenda (Holmwood, 2013).
• At the moment the waters around
higher education institutions are so
full of eager predators may
suggest, even to the most naive,
that they have been aroused by the
scent of profit (Collini, 2013).
Gender in Robbins?
• Gender as Description =
Demographic Variable
• Women as reserve labour
force
• Women excluded from
process- only 2 women
members of 12-strong
Robbins Committee
(Dame Kitty Anderson, D.B.E. and
Miss H. L. Gardner)
Confounding Cassandra? The Law of the
Unintended Consequence
Access to higher education for
women:
•Spearheaded staking political
claims;
•Demanded new forms of knowledge
and pedagogy;
•Facilitated entry into professions;
•Introduced Curriculum innovation
e.g. women’s studies;
•Strengthened the women’s
liberation movement.
Confirming Cassandra :Women in
Leadership or Being Led?
Widening Access but Deepening
Divisions
• 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).
• Universities = hereditary
domain of financially
advantaged (Gopal, 2010).
• Opportunity hording by
privileged social groups?
(Morley, 2012)
The University of the Future?
Resistance/ Imaging Alternative
Universities
• Tent City University/ Bank of
Ideas, London, Occupy
Movement, UK
(dreaming another world awake)
• Unitierra, Mexico
(de-schooling, community
projects)
• UNILA (University of Latin
American Integration), Brazil.
(state finance for LA issues)
• QUEST University, Canada
(private, inquiry-based, block
teaching, no departments).
Imagine the Feminist University of
the Future?
• Move beyond critique and
into futurology.
• How would a feminist
university be different from
current models in terms of
leadership, curriculum,
pedagogy, values, learning
landscapes?
The Feminist University of the
Future Needs to...
• Value, nurture and respect women
• Stimulate mass autodidactism?
• Provide MOOCS for you!
• Encourage Pop up discourse
• Be remade anew with a habitus that is
non-alienating and generative for all
who work, teach and study there
• Be a safe, culturally and ethnically
diverse, space.
• Generate knowledge fit for a moral
purpose of ‘doing no harm’
• Be gender free. OFFEM with pazzaz!
Follow Up?
• ESRC Seminar Series:
‘Imagining the University of the
Future’
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrcse
minars
• Special issue of Contemporary Social
Science (6:2) 2011: ‘Challenge,
Change or Crisis in Global Higher
Education?’
• Morley, L. (2011) Imagining the
University of the Future. In, Barnett,
R. (ed) The Future University: Ideas
and Possibilities. London: Taylor and
Francis: 26-35.
28 June, 2016