Only connect: designing university futures

Abstract

The contemporary university has its place amid a world in total motion. The issue arises, then, as to what it is it to try to shape a university in the context of a world that lacks stability. The thesis argued here is twofold: (1) that the university should take seriously its entwinement with the world; indeed, with large eco-systems of the world; (2) that the instrumentality that is so prevalent in universities should be displaced by an ethic of collective care for the world. The logic of this double-thesis is plotted by examining the three matters of transdisciplinarity, leadership and quality. The article concludes by reflecting that university ‘design’ is a misnomer. Rather, universities can only be conjectured, imagined and ventured forth and with some delicacy.

Keywords:

• University
• eco-systems
• care
• transdisciplinarity
• quality
• leadership

Introduction

The contemporary university has its place amid a swirling world, a world in total motion (Nail, 2019). ‘World’ here includes all the entities of and on the Earth (including its oceans and its atmospheric layers), as well as its human inhabitants and their ideas and their many life forms. Many universities around the world are beginning to see themselves in just this way, as an institution held in a dynamic set of relationships with the manifold features of the world, human and non-human, technological and ideational. However, for all that the university has become attached to the world over recent decades, in many ways, the situation exhibits massive signs of disconnect between universities and the world and within the world itself.

What, then, is it to try to shape a university in a context of fragmentation and dislocation, and in a world that lacks stability? After all, it is part of the function of the university to add to this instability, not least in generating new frameworks of understanding and injecting them into the world. In a situation of such instability and, indeed, conflict, the very idea of designing a university is especially fraught (Staley, 2019), and with it, too, the ideas of quality and standards.

The thesis argued for here is at once conceptual, theoretical and recommendatory, and is twofold: (1) that the university should take seriously its entwinement with the world; indeed, with large eco-systems of the world; (2) that the instrumentality that is so prevalent in universities should be displaced by an ethic of collective care for the world in which the university is entangled. The logic of this double-thesis is plotted by delving into the three matters of transdisciplinarity, leadership and quality. So far as quality is concerned, I suggest that the idea of quality should be abandoned and replaced by the idea of the qualities that mark universities in their responses to the world.

The article concludes by reflecting that university ‘design’, accordingly, becomes a misnomer. Universities cannot be designed as such. (That idea is redolent of, and would condemn universities into being, closed systems in a world of open systems.) Rather, universities can only be conjectured, imagined and ventured forth, and with some delicacy.

Only connect

The idea of and, indeed, an urging in the direction of making connections in a world that is fragmenting is far from new. In 1967, in the United Kingdom, Edmund Leach gave a series of lectures on the British Broadcasting Service (the BBC), which he entitled ‘A Runaway World’, a central idea of which was that the world is composed of interconnected and dynamic systems that we fail to comprehend, in our desire to analyse each element. In summarising his argument, Leach drew on a phrase of the novelist E. M. Forster: ‘Only Connect’ (Leach, 1967). However, the sense that we live in a world that is both interconnected and complex and yet is pulling apart has taken on new intensities over recent decades. In its early formations, the view that the world is disintegrating and yet with its parts continuing to contain important inter-relationships was especially present at the dawn of the twentieth century and was then heightened by the subsequent World Wars and by social class differences (made more evident by those World Wars). The theme of disintegration was societal, economic and cultural. Now, however, that sense of separateness has much widened. On the societal side, concerns have developed about disjunctions of race, gender, ethnicity, geo-politics and sheer human identity. More especially, concerns have arisen over forms of separateness between humanity and the natural environment. Humanity is coming to understand that it exudes separateness, both within itself and with the whole Earth.

Higher education and universities are not immune from these concerns. The pejorative term ‘the ivory tower’ is itself indicative of widely held sentiments as to the separateness of the academic community from the world, a separateness that has been evident in the geographical location of universities (often on the outskirts of cities), the arcane languages of their members, the enclosed nature of academic disciplines (engaged with their own epistemological problems rather than those of the world) and their non-communicative separateness from each other, and a view of higher education that gave priority to matters of educational development (marked in the trade by terms such as ‘Bildung’, ‘liberal education’ and ‘self-formation’).

Much, if not all of this, has markedly changed over the past half century or so. Universities have reached into the world and the world has come into universities, not least in the alacrity with which it has embraced the power of new technologies: epistemic endeavours grapple readily with issues borne from problems in the world, disciplines engage with each other in inter-disciplinary activities, programmes of study are deliberately focused on the labour market (the theme of ‘employability’ being marked) and students are faced with problems in real-life settings, university missions are explicitly designed to include those formerly left outside (in social class, ethnicity, and in indigenous communities) and universities have turned even to harness the economic value of their activities by venturing into knowledge markets in forms of ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009) and by seeking to re-invent the idea of the ‘civic university’ (Brink, 2018).

It might seem, therefore, that at least universities and higher education are playing their part in connecting with the wider world, and on several fronts (epistemically, socially, technologically, culturally, economically and even ontologically). However, as indicated, humanity’s separation from the world and within itself have gone on widening, and so too, the university’s separation from the world has now to be understood anew.

Designing a university future

It follows from these initial considerations that the juxtaposition of ‘university’ and ‘design’ takes on a particular problématique. It has always been a problematic notion, that of designing a university: if the world is always changing, as it is, does the idea of designing a university’s future, its priorities, its main strategies, its key goals, make any sense? What was needed, so we are told, is simply a compass to have a sense as to where we are at any moment, rather than a route-map (Shattock, 2003). Now, however, that kind of cartographical imagery is redundant. It is not even that the contours are changing and that the signposts are out of kilter: it is much more that the university has now to locate itself in a different world, a world with a much wider set of inhabitants (to include those of non-human kinds), and with hitherto unrecognised forces at work. Every entity on the Earth now claims attention or, at least, has claimants acting on its behalf.

At the very moment that universities are giving thought to designing their futures and are being assisted in that regard, so the rug is being pulled from under them, and their worlds are being totally disrupted such that it is no longer clear just what is the world to which they are to be responsive. Moreover, we are being told that we are not just responsible (that there are entities in the world to which we should respond) but also that we are also ‘respons-able’ (Haraway, 2016), that we have more powers with which to respond than we realised; but which are the entities to which the university should respond and which are its powers with which it can respond to those entities, whichsoever they are?

Under these conditions, designing a university’s future, any university, is therefore highly problematic. The claimants for its services are ever-widening, and some of them (the animals, the forests, the glaciers and the oceans) speak through interlocuters. Even many of those who can ‘speak’ are not recognised by the university as having legitimate voices for its services: they are silenced and invisible and experience ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2010), whether on account of their gender, ethnicity, religion, nationhood or indigenous identity (Kidd et al., 2019). Moreover, the range of the university’s responsibilities just keeps growing. Now, the university is being tasked, it seems, to play its part, and a large part at that, in saving the Earth from humanity itself. It was not enough to save the world through the university’s powers of knowledge production or to save the souls of students in its processes of pedagogical care and nor is it enough now to save the indigenous communities or the silenced others; now, it is saving the Earth that is on the agenda.

The problem of context

The problem is not ‘merely’ one of university design in a fragmented world (a difficult enough matter) but is also the quasi-metaphysical matter of university design in an ontologically debatable context. Simply stated, the problem is one of context: where, for any event, activity or identity, does the context end? As Ernest Gellner observed in a classic paper (Gellner, 1970), the matter of context is always controversial: in assessing a situation, just how much of a context does one take into account?

Where are the boundaries of the context of any university to be drawn? In designing, or shaping, a university’s future, is the context to be drawn rather narrowly or widely? Is the context of a particular university to be drawn on the basis of its present students and their nations or possible future students and their nations? Of its present array of disciplines, or a possible quite differ configuration of its epistemic landscape, perhaps with a worked-out idea of transdisciplinarity in mind? Of the immediate locale, in the nearby or surrounding city or region, or is its spatial context the whole globe? Of its present conception of a higher education in the twenty-first century or some sense of a higher education for its students, many of whom will be alive in the twenty-second century? Or is the context to be drawn utterly differently, on the basis of the total society in which a university is situated, with the university considering that it has responsibilities in assisting the growth of public understanding of difficult issues? Or is the university to see the whole Earth as its context and seek to develop and deploy its resources in safeguarding and even improving the totality of the planet?

Entanglement: its threats and its opportunities

A key term in social theory has become that of entanglement (Barad, 2007) but its full potential is not always appreciated, especially in its application to institutions. Drawn from quantum mechanics, it refers to situations in which entities are mutually constitutive. It is not just that B imposes itself on A, and that therefore, A is entangled in B. Rather, it is that in A being entangled in B, B is also entangled with A. A university might feel the cold winds of large structures imposing on itself but it also has powers that actually affect the character of those structures. The earlier term here, was that of ‘dialectic’. It might be felt that entanglement is more modern, more of the moment, more ‘scientific’, or even a more mysterious, more weighty concept and has more mutuality written into it. In being entangled, A and B are mutually constitutive of each other. It may be true that one cannot give a description of the modern university without also referring to the economy but the reverse situation also holds: one cannot give a proper description of the economy without referring to a society’s universities. The economy is constitutive of universities, certainly; but universities are also constitutive of the economy.

The logic is that the idea of entanglement, far from implying that the university is enmeshed in and is being suffocated by the tentacles of the great structures of society and even of the world, now, and paradoxically, those structures are also enmeshed in the university. So, in a way, the possibilities for the university, far from being diminished, are now suddenly and very considerably expanded. The university has many more powers available to it than have been generally recognised, especially by the university itself.

How, then, might the university’s entanglements with the world be understood? If the university is entangled with the world it follows that the world is entangled with the university. Every entity in the world is entangled with other entities: there are no island entities.

Ecozones of the university

Entities are clustered, both in the human world and in the natural world (animal, vegetable, mineral). Latour’s name for these clusters is ‘networks’ (Latour et al., 2011); DeLanda’s is ‘assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2013). The strengths of this way of thinking are that it points to a richly interfused ontology: we may not, à la Kant, ever be able clearly to discern the composition of the world but we can surely know that it comes as a package, albeit with clusterings of its features. However, I prefer the term ‘ecozone’: it comes deliberately laced with ecological overtones, namely those of features of the world that hang together, bear the imprint of humanity’s impositions and even manipulations, and yet can yield to actions that are designed to put right their long-standing malformations and even bring about improvements to them. Ecozones are to be found across the world, for hardly any entity has been free of humanity’s imprint. They are fact and value conjointly: they assert as a matter of fact that the clusters of entities in the world are falling short of their potential; and they assert as a matter of value both that these shortfalls amount to malformations that humanity has brought about, and that humanity bears responsibilities in ameliorating those shortfalls.

In relation to universities, I would pick out eight such ecozones, those certainly of the economy and the natural environment but to them we should add knowledge, learning, persons, culture, social institutions and the polity (Barnett, 2018). It is worthwhile quickly emphasising some features of this ecological landscape of universities that I am here pointing to, even at the risk of repetition.

First, these eight ecozones of universities are entangled with each other. In disturbing or contributing to one ecozone, a university disturbs or contributes to others. In seeking to develop itself as a ‘civic university’, a university has an effect on the economy (even if only the local economy) but it is also bound to have an effect on, say, the life changes of local people (the ecozone of persons, in their self-understandings and possibilities), culture (the aesthetic domain and structures of meaning), the evolution of local services, amenities and organisations (the ecozone of social institutions and so forth). Locally, in their interconnections, these ecozones will bump into and transgress each other.

Second, there is two-way traffic between the eight ecozones and any university. The eight ecozones each affects the university and they, in turn, as indicated, have powers to affect these ecozones.

Third, each university will possess both its own ecological profile across the eight ecozones and, too, its own ecological possibilities; and this ecological profile and ecological possibilities will go on changing for a university (it is not at all fixed) as the university flexes and moves in its own way across the eight ecozones.

Fourth, and especially for the institutions that we term ‘universities’, the ecosystems are especially discursive, with all the elusiveness and conflict that accompanies linguistic and symbolic forms; and it is part of the function of being a university, that universities are all the time compounding this aspect of the complex environment in which they move. Not only, for instance, are there conflicting ideas of democracy, rights, wellbeing, citizen, truth, freedom and so forth, but it is part of the role of universities to go on adding to those debates. This welter of conflicting ideas is a domain of supercomplexity (Barnett, 2000), where disputes can never be resolved but only deepened; and deepened in part by the university itself.

University design amid open systems

It follows that the concept of design has to be treated warily. For, in the conception espoused here, a university is always in the making or, as it might be said today, is always becoming. That has long been understood but this continuous and evolving interplay between a university and its vast, variegated and yet intermeshed ecological hinterland, which itself is always on the move and indeterminate, is more complex than has hitherto been recognised. The concept of complexity is especially apt here for it speaks of open systems that are dynamic (Bhaskar, 2008a) and are also presenting unforeseen configurations and epi-phenomena. However, as we have noted, the university has also to cope with its being additionally an active agent in a world of supercomplexity: that swirl of contending discourses and frameworks, which the university makes evermore unstable and yet also alive with the new ideas that the university itself spawns.

Some may say that all this is obvious. It is recognised that the university has its being amid large forces moving around it and that there is no one trajectory ahead of the university. Rather, there are multiple options ahead of the university (any university). Moreover, strategy design has been taking all this on board, with its techniques of foresight analyses, environment scanning, risk computation and scenario modelling. For any one university, a variety of scenarios can and are plotted, setting out options available to it in a changing world. There are two problems here. The lesser problem, and it is actually a very large problem, is that the range of scenarios that are proffered are usually highly limited giving, in particular, a large role to the Internet, artificial intelligence, and now, 4IR, and betray a limited imagination and a restricted range of values.

The larger problem is that this whole way of thinking is totally inadequate for the problématique that the university faces. As the university is faced with a world of open, dynamic and inter-connected ecosystems, scenario modelling is inappropriate for it presumes that the university is situated in closed systems such that it can plot its future along one or other trajectory. Moreover, it retains an instrumentalism that is at the heart of the university’s malaise, secreting an ‘if-then’ orientation and which posits the university as separate from a world able to determine its future. Both of these presumptions are misplaced. The university is in a set of open systems and so has to transform itself into an open system with a value structure that understands itself as being so embedded. This consideration suggests an orientation on the part of the university to live with the world and to have a concern for the world.

The university as a collective agent

Over perhaps one hundred and fifty years, from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the university held a self-image of itself as a community of scholars. Such an image fell rightly into désuétude as the university became competitive, segregated and highly (and even sometimes tightly) managed, even within itself. Now, though, there are glimmerings that a third idea is gaining ground, that of the university as a corporate agent (although that phrase has not yet caught on). However, even as that idea is emerging, if only tacitly, it has to be interrogated and steered if the eco-university being advanced here is to be realised.

The idea of organisations being, or becoming, corporate agents was floated by List and Pettit (2011), in their book Group Agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. Since its publication, the literature on the topic of collective agency has grown and so too we have seen the emergence of a literature on institutional epistemology. Together, these literatures raise nice issues for our purposes here, as to the conditions under which an organisation can be considered to be an agent (as distinct from its members), as to the criteria by which an organisation can actually act agentically and as to the warrant that attaches to any truth-claims made in its name and, thereby, of its epistemic powers. These matters are particularly poignant so far as the university is concerned.

Clearly, the idea of the university as a corporate agent calls for some degree of collectivity on the part of an individual university but are there minimum degrees of collectivity that have to be present? Furthermore, any large and complex organisation is likely to have an element of hierarchy, with a group in which is invested much power. What level of assent, then, is required from the members of a university, not only in relation to the decisions of the management team but even across disciplines and departments, in order that it can be said that a university is acting as a corporate agent? Who is to count as a member for this purpose? Are students to be included? What of staff other than the academic staff?

We cannot go into these matters here. What can and should be noticed, however, is that some idea of the university as a corporate agent is integral to the idea of the eco-university being promoted here. If the world is understood as an inter-connected set of eco-systems, and if the university is understood as an assemblage of rather separate cognitive and practical activities, it follows that the university hooks onto the world in disparate ways. It follows, in turn, that the different elements in the assemblage that constitutes a university should have the powers to form their own discernments of their possibilities in and for the world and their own enactments thereto. It follows, further, that the university is a corporate agent to the extent to which (a) its separate parts are granted the powers to form their own discernments of and enactments of their possibilities in the world; (b) those separate elements (departments, disciplines, centres) invest a measure of trust in each other; and (c) a university possesses a degree of comprehension of those separate discernments and activities and is able to wield them together in a more or less unified institutional self-narrative. Together, these three elements will help to turn the university from being a mere assemblage into a community.

There is, then, a delicate interplay between the elements of the assemblage that constitutes a particular university on the one hand, and the university acting collectively and being a collective on the other hand. The separate elements require powers and space for their own agency and may need to be encouraged to express that agency. There has also to be forms of collectivity, so that practices, decisions and actions conducted in the name of the university can command the assent of a fair proportion of its members, if required to express a view on any particular matter. It follows not that the practice that has developed of there being a tight and small executive group that makes decisions on behalf of a university (a ‘senior management team’) should be outlawed but that there are severe challenges in securing its legitimacy, especially if a university is to be not just a corporate agent but a collective agent.

To summarise at this stage of the argument: the university is caught in shifting sands. It can move to some extent, in many directions and, as it does so, it disturbs the sands around it, which in turn disturbs the surrounding sands still further. There is no stable position; but the university often, though not always, has more powers than it realises. To some extent, it can purposefully move the sands around it and even further afield. It can even attempt to change the imagery, the frameworks, within which it is viewed. Instead of shifting sands, it may see itself as in a child’s kaleidoscope, helping to move the pieces around it into a different configuration, with new patterns of colour, even though it be understood that the new pattern is itself unstable.

Towards an ethic of collective care

In this article, I have touched several times on the matter of values but we may now address the matter head-on. The university, it is surely evident, is a place of conflicting values and this is proper. The university has a responsibility in being not merely a space of reason (Bakhurst, 2011) but a space of reasoning, and conflictual reasoning at that. That is, it is, if it is a university, a space that provides a canopy in which multiple values can be held and upheld simultaneously. It is a pluri-value university. A meta-ethic is that of a respect for a difference of viewpoints. However, arguably, over the past three-quarters of a century, a dominant sub-ethic has emerged consisting of a cluster of value orientations in favour of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, and now morphed into STEMM (Cohen, 2021), (including medicine, and its cognate epistemic clusterings, especially bio-informatics and bio-engineering), securing ever higher positions in world rankings and lowering the unit costs, together with management interests in institutional position, impact and income maximisation. (This is a new form of new public management that we may term a neo-academico-public management.)

The eco-university that I am holding out for here would call for a quite different value orientation. It would be an ethic of collective care. Rather than possessing a dominant interest in orchestrating the university’s resources in favour of the university, that is, springing from the university’s interests or the interests of the state, the university would start from a concern for the interests of the whole Earth. Its ethic would build from the Earth, the totality of all that is in the world (including, to reiterate, non-human entities in the world); and it would have a keen sense of the interconnectivity of the world and understand itself to be in the world and not apart from it. The drive would be a concern with what the university, any university, can do for the world.

Each university would have to interpret this calling by itself. Its resourcing profile, its position in the world and its networks (all its networks, including again those of the non-human world) would yield different possibilities. There is an infinite array of entities and features of the world that might legitimately attract any university’s attention. The eco-university would possess wide horizons and would latch onto large themes that address forms of impairment in the world, again, both human and non-human, that could assist in filling out an ethic of concern for the world. It would look to identify absences in the world and seek to play its part in ‘absenting’ those absences (Bhaskar, 2008b). Such ventures would be discerned as a collective activity, among both staff and students, across any single university. A universal ethic of care for the world will take a non-uniform pattern of enactment across universities. Universality and particularity can happily coincide.

Three cases studies: transdisciplinarity, leadership and quality

Let us, very briefly, follow through the logic of these reflections by looking in turn at the matters of transdisciplinarity, leadership and quality as case studies.

Transdisciplinarity

An implication of the thesis here is that universities, being caught in the world in so many of its dimensions, has to attend to the world in order to be itself. This amounts to an ontological shift in the way in which universities might construe themselves. This attending to the world, however, cannot be a disinterested stance, nor an instrumental stance of bending the world in a mode of control, nor even one of wanting simply to empathise with the world, but has to contain a strong streak of concern for the world and wanting, thereby, to deploy its resources so as to assist in rebalancing the world (in reducing domination and suppression and manipulation of both the natural and the human entities). Its epistemological efforts would spring from the Earth in the first place (Barnett & Bengtsen, 2020). Moreover, with the Earth being one indivisible Earth, and its constituent parts being interfused, the university’s knowledge efforts would have to find ways of being much more collective. Disciplines acting separately will not be up to the task.

In short, the university’s epistemic efforts would take on the mantle of transdisciplinarity. Unlike multidisciplinarity or even interdisciplinarity (which remain inquiries grounded in knowledge interests (Habermas, 1978)), transdisciplinarity begins from the world, from a sense of its being a ‘multi-reality world of complex, dynamic open systems’ (Gibbs & Beavis, 2020, p. 75). Transdisciplinarity is of the world, and even from the world. It is invested with a concern for the totality of the world, has a sense of the inter-connectedness of the world, believes that much of the world, both human and non-human, has been despoiled as a result of humanity imposing itself upon the world (much through the past activities of universities), and considers, accordingly, that the epistemic resources of universities should be turned around, so as to address matters of major concern that arise from a sense of key features of the world. In taking transdisciplinarity seriously, therefore, ontology trumps epistemology.

Note that, on this view, that prefix ‘trans’ carries does much heavy lifting. It can suggest connections between otherwise separate spaces or locations, as in ‘Trans-Siberian Railway’, where it indicates an overarching entity or, indeed, substance in its own right. (While linking disparate regions, the railway is a substantial entity in itself.) It can stand for a change in previously understood phenomena, as in ‘transfiguration’, ‘transposition’, or ‘translation’. (Christ or a piece of text is changed, transfigured, in being moved from one state or configuration to another.) It can imply a liminality, a fluidity in identity (as in transgender). It can point to an action, a deliberate movement, across spaces or bodies (as in ‘transmit’ or ‘transplant’). It can harbour an ethereal and even theological allusion (as in ‘the transcendent’). The term ‘transdisciplinarity’ heralds all of these tacit connotations but central is that it is above and beyond disciplines, linking the epistemological realm to the ontological realm. Indeed, it starts from the ontological realm, beginning with concerns over large features of the ways the world is, whether say, environmentally, economically, societally, globally, culturally and so forth. Transdisciplinarity, therefore, connects the university to the world by noticing features of the world that give cause for concern.

Leadership

It follows that university leadership takes on especially challenging dimensions for any university that is seriously energised by the theme of connectivity. First, leadership has to be sharply distinguished from the idea of management. While both are related, even in the one person or team, the two concepts are different. If management is the art of the possible, leadership is the art of the impossible. If management is a matter of identifying and securing means to ends, leadership is the identification of those ends. However, as noted, the identification of ends cannot be a secure matter, especially in a university, for a university is precisely a space where not only are the ends up for debate but the very frameworks in which those ends make sense are also a matter of debate, if not downright conflict.

The university, therefore, is in the paradoxical position that, wishing to form inter-connections in a world totally in motion, leadership is vital and has to precede management but yet, on the analysis here, leadership has to be hesitant. The managers may supply their risk analyses of proposed actions but, as intimated, that would be to bring to bear the techniques applicable to closed systems, where the effects of actions can be computed, to the understanding of open systems, marked by indeterminacy and contingency, where such techniques have no place. (That is part of the problématique of today’s universities, that they are being rendered more and more into being closed systems when they have moved more and more into the open systems of ecozones that attend on universities.)

Moreover, the task of leadership is that not merely of glimpsing possible ways of connecting the university to clusters of concerning features of the world but to help in forging a language, a discourse, through which such connections can be conjectured anew or, at least, in contradistinction to the instrumental language (of ‘impact’, ‘innovation’, ‘employability’, ‘skill’, ‘enterprise’, ‘world-leading’, ‘learning outcomes’), which has become dominant across the world.

Quality

‘Quality’ is a difficult and, indeed, a contested concept. What is to count as of good or high quality, by what measure or criteria or standards and according to which judges? ‘Standards’, therefore, takes priority over ‘quality’; even the bureaucrats understand that. In other words, ‘quality’ is supervenient on ‘standards’. We can judge the quality of higher education only when we are clear about the standards in question. However, the concept of ‘standards’ is itself controversial: is there a universal set of standards against which the quality of university practices and elements are to be judged or do standards legitimately vary and, if so, according to which context?

This is more than a universality-particularity tension, between an assumed universal application of standards and a sense that standards vary according to context, for there is dispute here even over universals. What, for instance, is it to be a world-class university: is it to secure a high reputation for its research outputs and a prominent position in world-rankings, or to attract a significant proportion of students from low socio-economic backgrounds, or to strike out boldly for an institutional strategy sensitive to the plight of indigenous peoples or the natural environment? Values inhere in conceptual framings. While not losing sight of these basic conceptual points, I want to urge another tack here.

Our quest here is that of trying to understand what it is to design a university within a context of total interconnectivity and indeterminacy in, and of, the world. Quality and standards, in this context, have to take on a kind of poetic character. The university attends to the world knowing that all its does and touches is elusive. It understands that educating students at the level of a higher education cannot be a sure process. Even there, where apparently the university has so much within its grasp, quality cannot be assured. It can only be aimed at, carefully, sensitively but necessarily open-endedly and softly, all the time dancing lightly, as teacher and taught wheel around each other. The pedagogical relationship, however apparently close, is always a matter of action-at-a-distance. That being so, it must also be the case for the myriad of activities that characterise universities in the twenty-first century (whether in knowledge diplomacy, the public or civic spheres, the natural environment, the polity, or in cultural affairs).

Seen in this light, the idea of standards unravels, for what is in question here is a manifold of institutional dispositions and virtues, of grasp, insight, care for the world, sensitivity to others, openness to and protective of difference. There can be no sure standards here, if, by that is meant agreement on measures by which activities can be assessed and preferably with instruments that can yield numerical results. To insist on such measures would, after all, only re-direct the university back to an instrumentalism from which it is now, albeit hesitatingly, beginning to emerge. It would be, too, to compel it to going on deploying technologies appropriate to control and assessment in closed systems when it now has to be acknowledged that the university is moving within and across open systems.

If standards are to have meaning anymore, they have to be joined to a sense of universities attempting, as many are across the world, to play their part in widening the sense of what it is to be a university in open and yet interconnected systems, wanting to play their part in improving the world; in encouraging forth potentials for emergence of beneficial forms. The import here is that the notion of quality as such should be abandoned, for it implies a universalism standing over and against practices. Instead, we can make sense of quality only as a palette of qualities, as value-laden attributes of and within academic practices (Schatzki et al., 2001). In turn, this sense of quality as manifold qualities points to universities discerning their own possibilities, and so not only being responsible but also cultivating the will and the powers to be ‘response-able’ (Haraway, 2016) in a distressed world.

Of any university (or of any of its practices), therefore, we should ask not ‘what is its quality?’ (to be examined against universal standards). Rather, we might ask ‘what are the qualities present in each of its many practices?’, to be discerned discreetly in processes of revelation attending to the particular practices in question. Such processes of careful discernment might well attend to the qualities inherent in the university as a collective institution, it being understood that each university is sui generis.

Conclusions

The university is caught in a world of indeterminacy, entanglement and conflict, both in its systems and in its representations of the world. Moreover, the university, in being a university, can only multiply all three phenomena. It adds to the world’s indeterminacy, it becomes itself evermore entangled with the world and it exacerbates conflict in the world (and not only its discursive conflicts). As indicated in the introduction, university ‘design’, accordingly, becomes a misnomer. Universities cannot be designed as such. They can only be conjectured, imagined, and ventured forth and with some delicacy.

In their bones, wise university leaders intuit all of this and are often leading their universities with astonishing perspicacity, vision and ambition, in shaping the university for a better world. This kind of leadership is the art of the impossible, never sure of its contingencies, with its unforeseen consequences, yet always striving. Yet, this is the nature of what it is to be a university, to expand possibilities in the world and to widen readings of the world. In this sense, university leadership has to be Kantian: it cannot see the world as it is but yet it has to act in the broadest interests, hoping that matters will go well.

This is not, however, an entirely dismal story. Universities are corporate agents (at least potentially so). Usually, they have more powers than is recognised. To say this, however, is not to pump up the instrumentalism that has been so significant in their shaping over the past three-quarters of a century for that has led to a profound reflexive lack, in which universities insufficiently consider their own epistemological framings of the world, which have come to contain a marked streak of instrumentalism. It is not that universities have lost touch with the world but that they have been joined, and they have joined themselves, to the world in a spirit precisely of valuing their ‘impact’ on the world. There is a separateness within this interaction, of knowledges and persons acting on the world.

What is called for in this situation is a set of institutional virtues and dispositions that accords high priority to a new kind of connectedness, which sees inherent value in the world, and the total world at that. In sight here is an ecological university that places itself, and understands itself, in the ecologies of the world and that plays its part in sustaining those ecologies (Barnett, 2018).

Here, the ideas of standards and quality are inverted. Whereas, conventionally, quality is judged on the basis of agreed standards, now it is the qualities (plural) of a university that matter as it attempts to move in and with the world, with a spirit born of values in which the university listens to the world, has a care for the world and works with the world. Each move it makes is conducted to the highest standards but these standards attach to the qualities inherent in the various practices of thought, of construction, of articulation, of learning, of communication and of interaction. The practices are imbued with their own qualities and, thereby, their own standards. Standards are not imposed here upon the activities by external forces but emerge from the practices themselves.

This is a university that has to be imagined but imagined in situ and on a continuing basis. This imaginative work cannot rest, for the university, in becoming itself in open systems with which it is entangled, is faced daily with contingency and indeterminacy that it is all the time imagining. If we are to speak of designing the university, it is never-ending design, for the university’s future is always here and it is always now.

Disclosure statement

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