The (re)invention of tradition in higher education research: 1976–2021

ABSTRACT

Reflection on the meaning of the word ‘tradition’, and related terms such as ‘traditional’, is conceptually complex but has been subject to limited critical scrutiny within academic discourse. The evidence of this study, drawing on the theory of tradition and a database of all 6947 papers published in Studies in Higher Education between 1976 and 2021, is that higher education researchers make extensive use of these words in a routinised and often un-scholarly way. The language of tradition is frequently invoked as an emotive means to both resist and argue for change in higher education often framed as a dualism where the words tradition or traditional are deployed as positives or pejoratives. Despite the intensification of empirical work since the 1970s and 1980s, and the increasingly international authorship of Studies of Higher Education, use of tradition as a rhetorical device continues to play a significant role in the literature. As the paper illustrates, this has contributed to the creation and perpetuation of myths about students, universities and academic work.

KEYWORDS:

• Tradition
• universities
• students
• myths
• non-traditional
• traditional universities

Introduction

The pageantry surrounding the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was represented in the popular news media as a British ‘tradition’ dating back hundreds of years (e.g. Blizzard 2022). While elements of this ritual, such as crowning, go back over a thousand years no British monarch was given a lying-in-state or had their coffin pulled by gun carriages until the twentieth century (Cannadine 1983). This is all part of the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Yet the monarchy is not the only ancient institution that likes to re-invent itself. Universities have long sought to subtly exaggerate or fabricate their historical lineage by adopting an architectural style known as collegiate gothic. This style was especially popular with institutions founded during the late Victorian and Edwardian period (e.g. the universities of Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester), to suggest ‘antiquity and prestige’ (Lowe and Knight 1982, 81). Collegiate gothic is still echoed in contemporary university architecture, such as Whitman College at Princeton University completed as recently as 2007. As Finnegan (1991, 112) noted, with more than a hint of irony, ‘some reputed “traditions” turn out to have been established quite recently’. What other traditions have been invented in higher education, and to what extent have academic researchers knowingly or unknowingly colluded in projecting these false impressions?

The words tradition and traditional are part of the lexicon of everyday life and academic conversation but there are many reasons why these words should be used with extreme caution. There are a number of well-established examples of invented tradition notably the extent to which research, rather than teaching, is sometimes falsely represented as the historic business of a ‘traditional’ university. In truth, research was a comparative late comer to the work of many higher education institutions, notably in Britain and its former empire. This is why Matthew Arnold described English universities as little more than glorified schools in the nineteenth century (Arnold 1964) and their lack of research, in the broader German sense, was still a source of criticism in the mid twentieth century (Truscot 1943). Most British academics did not possess a PhD in the 1950s and 1960s and their primary interest was in teaching (Collison 1956; Halsey and Trow 1971). Even as late as 2014/2015, the highest qualification of academic staff working in 35 British higher education institutions, of which 26 were then classified as universities, was a masters’ degree (HESA 2022). Britain, along with its former colonies, was not alone in having a very limited research tradition. In the US the research universities only really developed after the Second World War as a result of a major upscaling in federal policy and funding (Graham and Diamond 2004). This exemplar serves to illustrate that there is a potential problem in using the word tradition in writing about higher education as it may be deployed as a rhetorical device in an unexamined way. Tradition is not a permanent, immutable given but subject to reinvention and change over time.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how tradition and its related terms are used by higher education researchers. In so doing we will draw on an analysis of a complete data set of all 6947 papers published between 1976 and 2021 in Studies in Higher Education. Our analysis will be informed by the theory of tradition, as outlined by Alexander (2016), Boyer (1990), Shils (1981), and Scheffler (2010) among others. It will demonstrate that, despite the intensification of empirical work since the 1970s and 80s, many researchers continue to invoke the word tradition in a largely rhetorical way contributing to myth-making in the process. The findings are significant to the field of higher education because they illustrate that knowledge claims are often based on taken-for-granted assumptions even in empirically-driven research.

The perceived past

Shils (1981:12) defines tradition as ‘anything that is handed down from the past to the present’ both orally and in writing. This includes secular as well as religious beliefs, regardless of the means by which a tradition is sustained, through rationality and deduction, or alternately via divine belief. The power of tradition cannot, Shils argues, be under-estimated and even accounts for the creation of the country of Pakistan, based on an imagined collective past identity (Shils 1981, 209). According to Alexander (2016) there are three elements that make it possible to understand the meaning of tradition – continuity, canon and core. The most fundamental of these is continuity as all traditions must have durability but may not necessarily possess a (written) canon or core of beliefs representing an ‘unchanging truth’ (Alexander 2016, 18). A canon is a set of divine or sacred beliefs that are written down contained in a text or a set of texts, such as the Bible or the Koran, but there are also secular canons too, of course. Primitive societies had traditions with continuity but these were sustained largely without any written texts. Instead they were handed down orally as a means of providing continuity. Without a canon or a core a tradition is essentially a ritual.

Reflection about the meaning of tradition in academic terms is considerably outweighed by the tendency to use the word in a taken-for-granted manner. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that any investigation into the meaning of tradition is highly complex requiring an ability to weave a story from a wide range of disciplines and fields of study including, inter alia, sociology, anthropology, religion, art, literature and history. The meaning of tradition goes largely unexamined in the world of academe, even by historians and anthropologists who ought to be more aware of the importance of taking great care in their use of this term (Alexander 2016; Boyer 1990; Shils 1981). It is not fashionable among intellectuals to defend tradition either as such an attitude can be labelled as ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ (Shils 1981, 1/2), a post-enlightenment attitude which started with the rejection of divine authority and religious superstitions (Niblett 1983). Social scientists continue to see traditions as indicators of dogmatism with a minimal empirical basis. At the same time, they are themselves often wedded to their own post-enlightenment forms of traditions through sociological and philosophical analysis, such as Descartes’ deductive reasoning or Popper’s critical rationalism. In other words, the original radical nature of rationality itself has become an intellectual tradition. Tradition may be understood as about both process and product, its use deliberately conveying considerable emotional import, and there are elements that are not necessarily agreed upon (Finnegan 1991). This latter point resonates with Alexander’s (2016) distinction between an agreed written canon and a wider, and therefore perhaps less settled, set of core beliefs. Differences in textual interpretations and ‘versions’ of canons, such as the Bible (e.g. King James version), lead to long standing disputes about the ‘correct’ elements of the core.

There are processes in higher education that might be labelled traditions (e.g. self-governance, the lecture, etc.) and products in terms of its overall purposes (e.g. research, a student’s ability to think critically, etc.) too. Alexander’s (2016) framework may also be widely applied in respect to organisational traditions. In higher education there is continuity in terms of the university as an institutional form from medieval times and its related traditions, such as the graduation ceremony or the lecture. Certain ancient universities are among the most traditional of institutions of Western civilisation and only the universities of Bologna and Paris predate the Roman Catholic church (Shils 1981). Having acknowledged this, though, the spread of mass higher education systems during the late twentieth century means that many, if not most, universities have been founded relatively recently. There is a disparate canon about the philosophical idea of the university in both the English liberal and German research tradition, shaped by thinkers such as Newman, von Humboldt, and Jaspers among other. These are just two of a number of university ‘traditions’ that might be identified. However, it is important to avoid essentialism in the use of the word tradition. The temporality and context in which a tradition exists is critical to any meaningful interpretation. This highlights the relevance of institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977) to higher education since a variety of contextual features related to the state, national society, culture and global environment have a direct bearing. Hence, even the lecture, so often spoken of in generic terms, is a cultural construction based on the discipline as well as other factors where meanings, definitions and interpretations can vary.

Another way of understanding traditions in higher education is by reference to what is seen as being endangered or being undermined. The tendency of authors to refer to higher education as being ‘in crisis’, ‘under threat’, ‘at risk’, and so on has been criticised as a rhetorical device to ‘sex up’ book titles (Tight 1994) but nevertheless provides a helpful insight into which traditions are regarded as being imperilled. The word crisis conveys an emotional appeal in the way in which Finnegan (1991) recognises that the use of the word tradition does too. The crisis literature has a long history stretching back at least the 1940s if not earlier. There is a sixty-year gap between the publication of The Crisis in the University by Walter Moberly (1949) and Jefferson Frank and colleagues’ book English Universities in Crisis (2019). What is important here in considering the many hundreds of books and papers that use this type of language are the main crisis themes and the way in which the perceived threat has shifted over time. Many of the traditions being defended in the crisis literature tend to centre on what might be loosely described as the liberal university tradition (e.g. Collini 2012; Frank, Gowar, and Naef 2019; Halsey 1992; Wallerstein and Starr 1971) such as the perceived threats posed by managerialism, marketisation and neoliberal government policies. This crisis literature also provides insights as to the core of higher education tradition such as institutional autonomy, academic freedom and, perhaps more recently, the importance of universal student access since the 1970s. However, this emerged after a long debate between the so-called ‘elitists’ and the ‘expansionists’ especially in the UK (Halsey and Trow 1971). This was a dominant feature between the 1950s and 1970s but the perceived threat to academic standards posed by expanding student access to higher education has now largely disappeared from the literature illustrating a shift in tradition. This is indicative of the way in which traditions evolve through the re-interpretation of the core. The waning of this ‘elitist tradition’ (Perkin 1976, 11) serves as an example.

Methodology

This study identifies and analyses uses of the four closely related words tradition/traditional/traditionalism/traditionalist (subsequently referred to simply as ‘tradition’) in all 6947 papers published in the journal Studies in Higher Education between 1976 and 2021. It will focus principally on the words tradition and traditional since references to traditionalism and traditionalist are comparatively rare. While other systematic review studies commonly gather articles from various journals and databases to investigate what has been published on specific topics within shorter time frames, this paper presents Studies in Higher Education as a case study to demonstrate how HE researchers have (mis)used tradition and related terms for over 40 years. Studies in Higher Education is a leading, international journal that is an influential part of academic discourse within the field. Its distinctive focus on higher education and long publication history highlights how tradition in higher education has been represented in a leading, peer-reviewed journal in the field.

This paper surveys all 6947 research papers published in Studies in Higher Education between 1976 (the inception of the journal) and 2021. This number excludes editorials, book reviews, research notes and other irregular contributions. Articles were initially scanned and all occurrences of the four related words – tradition/traditional/traditionally/traditionalism – were noted. We counted only original mentions, in the main body of the article and less usual places like graph captions and legends, titles and columns of tables and end notes, and disregarded instances that merely ‘borrowed’ the search terms from direct quotations, interview transcripts or references. To examine how tradition is understood and used, we then performed thematic analysis on the mentions, coded them iteratively and finally grouped them into four distinctive categories of usage.

The use and abuse of tradition

On the first page of the opening editorial of the inaugural issue of Studies in Higher Education, published in 1976, the word ‘tradition’ was used by the founding editor, Tony Becher. Subsequently, the word tradition (and related terms) have been used on average three times per paper published between 1976 and 2021. 67% of all papers published between 1976 and 2021 use the word tradition (or related terms) at least once. Across five decades the use of the word tradition has remained consistently high but with some variation (see Figure 1) demonstrating that, despite the increasingly international nature of the journal, the word tradition is used regularly by authors from around the world. Some authors are especially reliant on the use of tradition using the term more than 100 times in a single paper (see Table 1).

Figure 1. Mentions of tradition by period.

Table 1. Most use of the term ‘tradition’ in a single paper.

Author	Mentions	Most frequent mention
Brändle (2017)	153	Traditional/non-traditional students
Carreira and Lopes (2021)	133	Traditional/non-traditional students
Palmer, de Kervenoael, and Jacob (2018)	124	University traditions
Woodfield (2011)	65	Traditional-entry students
De Silva (2016)	60	Traditional academic duties

There appear to be four main reasons why authors use the term tradition or traditional: to neutrally, or descriptively, frame an explanation of the historical and/or contemporary background related to a topic (tradition-as-description), as a term that implicitly criticises a practice as outmoded and/or in need of reform (tradition-as-pejorative), as a term defending a practice as based on values that deserve to be defended (tradition-as-positive), and, finally, as part of a dualism juxtaposing a traditional practice with a modern or more innovative one (tradition-as-dualism) (see Table 2). Such dualisms can either be used for rhetorical effect where tradition appears in contrast with a new practice or innovation advocated by the author(s) or in a purely descriptive manner. There were 6951 instances of the use of tradition (or related terms). 63.4% (i.e. 4405) were tradition-as-description and 33.9% (i.e. 2355) tradition-as-dualism. The vast majority of pejorative and positive uses of tradition appear in dualisms. It is unusual for the word tradition to be used singularly as a pejorative (127 times or 1.8%) and even rarer as a positive (64 times or 0.9%).

Table 2. Classifying the use of tradition (and related terms).

Tradition-as-description	Anything that is asserted as a tradition in descriptive terms without critical judgement
Tradition-as-positive	Anything that is regarded as a positive or progressive tradition
Tradition-as-pejorative	Any tradition seen as based on conservative attitudes, resistance to change, prejudice or out-moded thinking or values.
Tradition-as-dualism	The juxtaposition of two opposite perspectives: (i) descriptive polarities; (ii) positive-pejorative polarities

Examples of tradition-as-description include phrases such as ‘teaching traditions’, ‘university traditions’, ‘traditions of filial piety’. Many if not most uses of the terms tradition and traditional are applied descriptively, whether accurately or not, based on an assumption of a shared understanding between author and reader. For example, Eustace (1987, 18) states that the Jarratt report (1985) recommended the ‘re-instatement of Heads of Department of the traditional sort and with large administrative functions, appointed – in effect and not formally – by Council’. The report was a highly influential investigation into the efficient running of English universities that made various recommendations for their improvement including the idea that Vice Chancellors should be recognised ‘not only as academic leader but also as chief executive of the university’ (Jarratt 1985, 33). However, although Jarratt used the words tradition and traditional a total of six times it did not do so in the context of the role of Heads of Department. Jarratt recommends, as Eustace suggests, that Heads of Department should be appointed by Council, as opposed to by rotation within departments. It also states, however, that Heads should ideally be both an academic leader and a manager but goes on to suggest that ‘where these two qualities cannot be found in a single person, management competence should take precedence in making an appointment’ (Jarratt Report 1985, 25). By any measure, this statement represents a view that is far removed from a ‘traditional’ view of an academic Head of Department when it was written in 1985. Moreover, a reader of Eustace’s paper unfamiliar with the Jarratt report might reasonably assume that he means something entirely different by the expression ‘Heads of Department of the traditional sort’ (Eustace 1987, 18) including the appointment of a senior professor, or more especially a senior male professor, and/or an appointment based on an internal system of rotation rather than via external appointment, and so on. The phrase may also potentially refer to a leadership style or approach to the management of an academic department. Here, Eustace leaves too much for the reader to interpret.

Tradition is more commonly applied as a pejorative rather than as a positive term. Popular targets in applying tradition-as-pejorative include lectures, unseen/written examinations, managerialism and elitism. The tradition-as-pejorative reflects Shils’ (1981) argument that the term is often used to emotively characterise anything considered unfashionable, conservative or reactionary (Shil 1981, 1/2). By contrast, tradition-as-positive affirmations include academic freedom, liberal education, academic autonomy, problem-based learning, reflection and collegiality. Tradition-as-positive represents an attempt to do the opposite by asserting that a practice or an habitual way of working is worth preserving and needs to be defended in some way from some form of unwelcome change. As Scheffler (2010) has argued the continuing popularity of a tradition may be because the values that underlie it remain more attractive than a so-called progressive position or idea. Many types of tradition-as-positive can invoke golden-age liberal values at a time when universities were autonomous and had yet to be heavily influenced by market or management principles. Collegiality, for example, needs to be defended from managerialism, academic autonomy from the perils of neo-liberalism, and academic freedom from anything that might threaten it including political state interference, and so on.

Tradition-as-dualism takes two forms, either a descriptive dualism such as traditional as opposed to non-traditional students or a positive-pejorative dualism such as dichotomising traditional teaching methods and so-called innovative teaching methods. The latter form of dichotomising is especially common in respect to scholarship about teaching and learning where ‘traditional teaching methods’ are regularly dismissed as ineffective or out-of-date compared with supposedly ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ approaches. There are a range of popular phrases conjoined with tradition or traditional such as ‘non-traditional student’ (e.g. Trow 1989, 20), ‘traditional subjects’ (e.g. Boud 1990, 110), ‘traditional teaching methods’ (Wang Zhang, and Yao 2019, 1316), ‘traditional curriculum’ (Niblett 1981, 7), ‘traditional standards’ (Lueddeke 2003, 223), and ‘traditional university’ (van Schalkwyk 2021, 46). A further example, ‘traditional academic’ (Moodie (1976, 134) has 249 exact mentions. Most assertions of this phrase do not offer any definition, relying on an assumption of a shared understanding between author and reader. Where they do occur explanations tend to cluster around the importance of autonomy (e.g. Altbach 1995; Trowler 1997), collegiality (e.g. Harries-Jenkins 1979), academic good manners, such as ‘politeness in criticism’ among historians (Becher 1989, 274), or the legendary reluctance of academics to willingly follow managerial authority although whether this belief represents a myth or an empirical reality by reference to other professions has never really been proven.

academics have traditionally been difficult to manage. (Kolsaker 2008, 515; Huang, Liu, and Huang 2021, 2486)

The most popular dualism in the literature is the ‘traditional/non-traditional student’. With 330 exact mentions. ‘Traditional students’ is separately referred to 184 times and ‘non-traditional’ student has a further 357 exact mentions. While authors will often seek to define what they mean by a ‘non-traditional student’ it is rarer to find attempts to define what is meant by a ‘traditional’ student indicating the taken-for-grantedness of researcher assumptions. It is also difficult to find a settled definition of the term ‘non-traditional student’ with authors offering a wide variety of interpretations that have expanded over time including students who are ‘mature’ or 25 years old or older (Weil 1986, 220), those that ‘combine work and study or family and study’ (Meeuwisse, Severiens and Born 2010, 95), foreign students (Rossi 2010), those from poor families and low-participation neighbourhoods who are the first generation from their family to attend university (Christie 2013; Hatt 2005), those living off campus (Balloo, Pauli, and Worrell 2017), ethnic minority students (Zepke, Leach, and Butler 2011) or students of colour (Aleman and Salkever 2004), and even women as opposed to ‘the traditional norm of a young, White, Western, male student’ (Moreau and Leathwood 2006:33). Given that women have represented the majority of students in global higher education since 2002 (UNESCO 2019), this is no longer an accurate portrayal of the new ‘traditional’ norm over the last twenty years or more. A more general definition of non-traditional such as ‘individuals traditionally under-represented in higher education’ (Murray 2013, 299) is, therefore, perhaps safer but not necessarily as precisely illuminating as others.

The so-called ‘traditional university’ has 139 exact mentions. It is a popular tradition-as-description with at least six different interpretations of this term. The most common is a university that is ‘old’ and has a longer history than some others often leading to the use of a dualism, as in:

type of university (i.e. whether old/traditional or new/modern). (Taulke-Johnson 2010, 247)

old (traditional) and new (entrepreneurial) archetypes of university. (Sutphen, Solbrekke, and Sugrue 2019, 1402)

The second interpretation of the ‘traditional university’ is a type of national or regional institution such as ‘the traditional German university’ (Trow 1976, 16) or ‘the university in the European tradition’ (Elton and Laurillard 1979, 100). A third understanding is that a traditional university is one that is public, civic or not-for-profit (Palmer, de Kervenoael, and Jacob 2018; Wentworth, Behson, and Kelley 2020). A fourth reading is that the traditional university stands in sharp contrast to one that is technologically oriented (Lilles and Rõigas 2017, 68) while a fifth construction juxtaposes the traditional with that of an institution founded on distance education (Newlands and McLean 1996, 285), an organisational form that, in an English context, goes back to the late 1960s with the founding of the Open University. The sixth, and final interpretation, is that a traditional university embodies a certain philosophy or set of values derived from liberal education.

A liberal university is one that is free to live out the traditional values of intellectual integrity and freedom of expression. (Tasker and Packham 1993, 131)

There are at least six different interpretations of the phrase ‘traditional university’ making it an unsafe phrase to use without detailed explanation and justification. The use of the word ‘old’, as in the distinction between old and new universities, is a convenient distinction in much the same way as ‘traditional/non-traditional’ but its use carries similar risks. Moreover, the historical facts concerning the slow and comparatively recent evolution of research in many national contexts, especially in the Anglosphere, do not stop researchers, from lightly conflating the phrase ‘traditional university/ies’ with the word ‘research’ in respect to Australia (Johnston 1995), Norway (Kyvik and Aksnes 2015), South Africa (van Schalkwyk 2021) and England (Gravett and Winstone 2021). For example, while the term ‘traditional’ universities is an official category of older publicly funded universities used in South Africa, it is questionable whether their historic association with research is particularly well founded. As recently as 2005 fewer than half of the permanent academic staff at Pretoria, Western Cape, South Africa, and KawaZulu-Natal – four of the ‘traditional’ universities in South Africa – held a doctoral degree (British Council/DAAD 2018).

The use of the word tradition can shift significantly over time. Claims to the ‘new’ and the ‘innovative’ can look quickly dated too. The so-called flipped classroom has been discussed in the higher education literature for well over twenty years, originally referred to as a ‘classroom flip’ by Baker (2000) whilst, arguably, the principles that this term advances have been practiced without such a self-conscious label by teachers in higher education for many decades, or perhaps centuries, through approaches based on a Socratic dialogue with the aim of freeing up time in class for discussion by setting pre-reading and other tasks. Yet, more than twenty years on the flipped classroom is still being represented as something new and innovative by contrast with ‘traditional’ teaching approaches (Price and Walker 2021). Many other assertions about what is new and innovative need to be understood in their historical context such as a statement in the late 1970s about ‘the potential of video cassette technology for curricular innovation’ (Pronay 1979, 27) or Harding’s (1980, 111) use of the phrase ‘traditional technologies’ in 1980. The use of email was contrasted with ‘traditional teaching’ in the late 1990s (Tynjälä 1998, 175) but perhaps understandably by 2021 email was being labelled a ‘traditional’ tool (Agasisti and Soncin 2021, 94). The rush to online provision as a result of Covid-19 means that face-to-face teaching is now being classified by researchers as ‘traditional’ as well (Yang and Huang 2021, 129).

Here, some forms of tradition have clearly waned over time as evidenced by the declining usage of certain phrases. A good example is provided by references to the so-called ‘tradition of “liberal education”’ (Simons and Elen 2007, 623). This was a particularly popular source of discussion in papers in Studies in the 1970s. Gradually, though, attention to a ‘liberal education tradition’ has dwindled and is now no longer evident in the papers from the 2010s and 2020s despite the exponential growth in the number of issues per volume during this period. This excludes mentions of ‘traditional liberal arts’ and ‘traditional liberal arts education’. The notion of a liberal education, famously developed by R. S. Peters, has itself multiple interpretations including development of the whole person, provision of an all-round, non-specialised education, and one founded on certain values, such as tolerance. Anything up to seven different interpretations have been offered for a ‘liberal education’ (Thiessen 1989). This complexity makes assertions about a ‘liberal education tradition’ even more problematic to unpick unless authors are highly explicit, a rare example of which is provided in an early issue of Studies by Rip (1979, 22).

 … I also have a traditional liberal-humanistic aim: scientists, like other individuals, should be able to look more broadly at themselves and their social position, and recognise the limitations of the science with which they identify. (Rip 1979, 22)

Other authors make specialist reference to subject-specific liberal education traditions in their field. Taylor (1977) references the influence of William Blackstone who argued that legal education should be understood as part of a broader discipline rather than as a narrow, vocationally-oriented apprenticeship when he states ‘“liberal” education in the tradition of Blackstone’ (Taylor 1977, 139). Without such a nuanced reference to a particular interpretation or meaning in a disciplinary context ‘liberal education’ can simply become a hurrah phrase, used for effect rather than with any genuine attempt to explain. This point may also be illustrated in the so-called crisis literature on higher education which contains a strong seam devoted to the way in which liberal university values are under sustained pressure or ‘attack’ (e.g. Wallerstein and Starr 1971) with often little or no attempt to define what is meant by liberal.

Although the use of liberal education has fallen away over the last twenty years the word ‘neo-liberal’ has become a modern pejorative with its own ‘neoliberal traditions’ (Collins, Azmat, and Rentschler, 2019, 1484) while the ‘liberal’ is associated with ‘traditional’ values and often used implicitly in a positive-pejorative dualism.

the psychological, the traditional-academic, the techno-scientific and the neo-liberal’ discourses permeating the supervisory practices. (Strengers 2014, 548)

Traditional goals of knowledge acquisition and dissemination clash with neoliberalist pressures to operate as a free market corporation, …  (Nadolny and Ryan 2015, 154)

… the culturally traditional (state-led) and the other more modernist, neoliberal. (Nguyen and Gramberg 2018, 2141)

As other areas of research such as assessment and doctoral education have taken off in popularity since the 2000s and 2010s, so has the concomitant use of the word tradition(al) to describe approaches and practices, such as the prevalence of summative as opposed to formative assessment, widely regarded as lacking in effectiveness for promoting student learning. The phrase ‘traditional teaching methods’ is an especially popular one where forms of practice such as lectures, unseen examinations and summative assessment are labelled as outmoded and not fit for purpose in higher education. Alternatives such as flipped classrooms and student-led seminars are then advocated as more progressive or ‘innovative’ means of learning and teaching. Here, it is evident that the words tradition and traditional are brought into play as a means of justifying the need for some kind of change in practice. Both demonisation of the traditional and the sanctification of the new or ‘innovative’ occur. Many claims to ‘innovative’ learning and teaching approaches look relatively traditional, in the sense that they represent core beliefs and are part of the canon of higher education scholarship, having appeared in the literature for many decades.

Conclusion

We tell ourselves a mythical story of the university in our society: that it has a tradition dating back centuries … (Erickson, Hanna, and Walker 2021, 2134)

This study shows that the word tradition (and related terms) has been used habitually for decades – overwhelmingly without definition – in a largely rhetorical and unscholarly way in the higher education literature. Those deploying the word include researchers across generations including some of the leading figures in the field. The extent to which the word has been used, and perhaps abused, demonstrates that knowledge claims about higher education are still based as much on commonsense assertions rather than empirical evidence. Even though higher education research has become steadily more empirical since the 1970s the use of tradition is still the norm. The shifting nature of traditions makes use of the term potentially mythologising. The words tradition or traditional are frequently invoked negatively as a short-hand means of arguing for some kind of change, especially in respect to teaching methods. Criticising the use of traditional methods, practice or forms in higher education, and self-identifying as an ‘innovator’, allows authors to position themselves as an antiestablishment hero compared with their apparently more conservative, and less innovative colleagues.

The educational innovator is, more or less by definition, inviting a break with tradition and must therefore be viewed with suspicion by his colleagues. Ayscough (1976, 3)

Here, there may be a link between the use of tradition and the organisational role of the author, notably as educational developers, especially those engaged in institutional level attempts to change academic practice. The routine coupling of tradition and traditional with pejoratives such as neoliberal or managerialism is often designed as an appeal for change. The challenge for higher education researchers is to try to rely less on tradition as a rhetorical device unless they have persuasive evidence for making such an assertion. While using the word tradition can sometimes obfuscate more than explain a liberal use of the term may also be regarded as part of the legitimate lexicon of the academic advocating for change through reasoned argument.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback of Dr. Euan Wright on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).