Locating the philosophy of higher education – and the conditions of a philosophy of higher education

The emergence of a field

In his role as Editor-in-Chief of EPAT, and with characteristic generosity, Michael Peters has invited me to offer an editorial on the occasion of the publication of my latest book, ‘The Philosophy of Higher Education: A Critical Introduction’ (Barnett, 2021). Perhaps I might be forgiven if I inject a few personal and anecdotal elements in these reflections.

In one respect, this new book has a 30-year old precursor in my first book, The Idea of Higher Education (Barnett, 1990), which sought also to lay out the field of the philosophical study of higher education. There is, though, a fundamental difference in the intellectual landscape of the two books. It will be quite difficult for many today to appreciate that the very phrase, ‘the philosophy of higher education’, was hardly to be seen a generation ago and the sense that there might be a whole field bearing that name was then entirely absent. Indeed, those in the mainstream of the philosophy of education were liable to be somewhat scornful of higher education deserving of particular philosophical attention. And so there lay a double impetus for that 1990 book, not only to gain legitimacy for the idea of ‘the philosophy of higher education’ but also to sketch out an agenda for just such a project. (Over the past thirty-plus years, I have been working through that agenda – topic by topic as set out in that 1990 book – and, moreover expanding it, but be that as it may.)

Both books – the 1990 and 2021 offerings – are therefore efforts to lay out the field but, there, their commonality ends. The task in 1990 was that of imagining and conjuring a non-existent field and sketching something of its possible shape: in a way, it was a work of rhetoric, enticing potential readers into a new way of understanding higher education. Now, the task has to be that of charting an already existent and complicated region.

As an indication of the absence of the field in 1990, my proposal for that book was turned down by about eight publishers, the most common reason given that there was no readership and nor would there be any interest in such a book. Those sceptical publishers had reason on their side, for there was no book in the catalogue like it, let along anything approaching a literature. The ‘bibliography’ in the 1990s book, accordingly, was in a way entirely fictional: it had to be manufactured, in that it drew upon extra-mural resources for there were no resources to hand. (Immodestly, I might mention that the book won a first prize, and remains in the catalogue, the point being that there was a nascent market for such a book, the book giving voice to unmet yearnings to reflect on important matters in higher education.)

Today, as intimated, the situation is markedly different. Whereas the field in 1990 was not just uncharted but had to be created, now the field is chockfull with topics and approaches, and even with warring conflicts (which is all to the good as signs of its range and vitality). And, therefore, whereas the 1990 book had to be somewhat daring and even courageous, making a pitch for an absent field, any contemporary effort to chart the field is faced with an array of literatures, plural. Now, in producing a book on the philosophy of higher education, one is faced with near overpowering sets of materials, both in the immediate literatures on a huge diversity of topics, and in cognate philosophical and social-theoretical fields. Today, the discomfort is that of hubris in attempting to survey such a wide and disparate field.

Over the last 30 years, therefore, the philosophy of higher education has emerged as a field of study. Some may still cavil: it may be said that the philosophy of higher education should be construed as a sub-field of the philosophy of education: the philosophical study of higher education is but a branch of the philosophy of education. I disagree: the philosophy of higher education is a field, albeit still relatively small and yet fast enlarging, in its own right.

I want to say a little more about the relationship between the two fields – the philosophy of higher education and of education – in a moment but, first, let me identify two issues that should be addressed in my quarry here, the field of the philosophy of higher education.

‘Higher education’ and ‘university’

The first issue is that of the relationship between the concepts of ‘higher education’ and ‘university’. Both are crucial but they differ and neither is reducible to the other. However, the two concepts are often run together and even treated as synonyms: in the process, neither is given its due attention and key critical questions go unaddressed. What is to count as an educational process worthy of the name ‘higher education’? What is to count as a social institution deserving of the name ‘university’? These are quite separate questions. It is true that, empirically, most – but by no means all – educational processes that claim the name of ‘higher education’ are to be found in institutions that are termed ‘university’. Contingently, therefore, there is overlap between the two. But conceptually, the two ideas – of higher education and of the university – are separate.

Moreover, any serious treatment of the two matters – ‘higher education’ and ‘university’ – would lead into different literatures, the one concerned with matters of human being and educational processes conducive to a particular kind of human development; and the other sensitive to the 200-year literature on the idea of the university but which is now also concerned with the university as a corporate agent in the twenty-first century. So, philosophically speaking, while there is overlap between the ideas of higher education and university (say, in the matters of societal and world development), effort should be made to keep clear water between them, even though the waters merge from time to time.

Universities and higher education as an ecosystem

The other point at the outset – in trying to fathom the philosophy of higher education – is that the field has a particular messiness. It is a multiplicity, being both in the world and in the world of ideas. Both higher education and universities sit in a sea of forces: to draw on Schopenhauer (1997/1819), they are expressions of both will and idea. It can be objected that education in general has this character; there is nothing special about higher education in this regard. But this would be to ignore the brute fact that universities are social institutions in the world that cluster in and around a family of characteristics, which mark out the space of higher education and universities. Here are ten such features:

1. Higher education has a definite source in the Europe of the Middle Ages (although existing well before that in many lands) and a trajectory that has spilled out across the world. This trajectory has witnessed a dominant institutional form – the university – and, for over 200 years, what it is to be a university has spawned a large, and often philosophical, literature.

2. Even now, higher education is undertaken only by a portion, albeit an expanding portion, of a people, its students attending (more or less) voluntarily. This gives rise to philosophical and ethical issues about the right to higher education, and fairness and justice, even cross-nationally.

3. Characteristically, across nations, there is no prescribed national curriculum in higher education and teachers have leeway in enacting their responsibilities. Philosophical issues arise, thereby, over what – in the context of higher education – is meant by ‘curriculum’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘learning’ and the place of disciplines and (now) over not just interdisciplinarity but transdisciplinarity. Moreover, the educational relationship has to grapple with the maturity of students, who may even be older and more experienced than their teachers. Just what is it for adults to learn and to be in the context of higher education?

4. Higher education is closely associated with research and scholarship, such that even universities that are teaching-oriented would still acknowledge the significance of research. Conceptual questions arise not only as to what is to count as research (a matter that attracts political and governmental interest) but also as to the (conceptual) relationship between research and teaching.

5. Universities are massive institutions consuming huge resources, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars or their equivalent annually (or more), and may have tens of thousands of members of staff and students (or even more): not infrequently, a university is the largest employer in a town, and towns vie to be a ‘university town’. Issues emerge over the place of the university, not least in civic society.

6. Universities are bound up with knowledge and truth. There is a rawness about these matters, since they are matters of inquiry within universities. Questions arise, therefore, over the university as an epistemological space.

7. Students are characteristically in a liminal state, enjoying ‘the gift of the interval’ (Oakeshott, 1989:101). They usually have a social freedom to participate in political and social movements, such that they often take on an oppositional stance (and may even contribute to political transformation, as happened in Chile in 2012-13). Student ‘activism’ becomes a philosophical matter.

8. The size, complexity and power of universities have given rise to issues of the relationship between universities and the state. The concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy are testimony to challenges in that relationship. Issues arise as to the responsibilities of universities in enhancing the public sphere and societal reflexivity.

9. Universities are not just major players in the digital revolution but have been active in its development and are part of global communications networks. Universities are especially implicated in time-space complexes – spaces of flows and flows of spaces (Castells, 1997) – giving rise to both pessimistic (Virilio, 2010) and more optimistic (Stiegler, 2015) discernings.

10. Universities play a direct part in the production of ‘cognitive capital’ (Boutang, 2011) around the world. They are ‘corporate agents’ (List & Pettit, 2011) and exercise global influence. Again, awkward issues arise as to any responsibilities befalling universities in this context.

Collectively, these ten features suggest that universities have come to form an ecosystem of their own. Accordingly, while acknowledging a fuzziness in institutional and conceptual boundaries, these features mark out higher education as a particular segment of education that warrants philosophical attention. The ontology of higher education is distinctive.

From the philosophy of higher education to a philosophy of higher education

Over the past 30 years or so, an extraordinary array of topics have come up for inquiry, including knowledge, truth (and post-truth), criticality, academic freedom, higher education as a set of public goods, higher education and indigenous communities, feminism and gender, higher education and epistemic (in)justice, universities in a digital era, and ecology and higher education in the Anthropocene. A field has arisen, doubtless inchoate, but yet yielding a community of scholars, new journals and societies and propelled not least by the parallel emergence of academic development as a field of practice. Surveying this large territory and examining the relationships and lop-sidedness between its entities would amount to a laying out of the field such that we may now speak of ‘the philosophy of higher education’ without embarrassment, and in a way that simply was not possible just over 30 years ago.

However, the question then arises as to whether there is a particular path across the field that might be especially helpful. If one was bold enough to take a lead and point to such a path, what would in sight here would be a philosophy of higher education. The jump from the philosophy of higher education to a philosophy of higher education is profound.

Two moves are being made in that change of article, to ‘a’ philosophy of higher education. Firstly, we come into the presence of a kind of meta-philosophy of higher education, for a view would be being taken of the field as a whole: it has been reconnoitred, and a way forward is being proposed. Secondly, and by extension, particular choices – tacitly at least – are being suggested, and a stance is being taken up. It might be a Marxist, or a Wittgensteinian, or a Deleuzian stance or some other stance. So the question that arises is whether there might be a stance that has particular merit. I believe that at least some planks can be assembled that provide some foundations and orientation for a philosophy of higher education, and which amount to a clutch of conditions that any particular putative philosophy of higher education should be expected to meet.

Conditions of a philosophy of higher education

Higher education is real, possessing an independence from human thought, marked out by some twenty-two thousand universities across the world. Higher education has come to be not merely a set of assemblages but a ‘hyper-object’, to use a term of Morton’s (2013). Collectively, it is a vast social institution characterised by a wide range of social practices. Any philosophy of higher education has, therefore, to be a social philosophy, attentive to the ever-evolving character of higher education and its university forms across the nations, the nuances of their practices, and their interconnections with other social institutions.

However, much of higher education is not immediately available for inspection: the Real of higher education lies in largely unfathomable depths. And here, the depth philosophy of Critical Realism as worked out in successive stages by Roy Bhaskar is especially fruitful, especially in its later stages, as it morphed into a plea for non-duality in a world marked by duality (Bhaskar, 2002). (That philosophy came ever-increasingly to live up to its billing as a ‘critical’ realism.) A philosophy of higher education has, therefore, to be social, realist and critical.

However, the desiderata of a serious philosophy of higher education are not yet exhausted. For a philosophy of higher education has three further criteria to fulfil, those of being imaginative, ethical and – it needs to be said – conceptual. A philosophy of higher education has to have some courage, imaginatively to espy possibilities that do justice to the Real of higher education and the potential of its concepts in the twenty-first century – in, say, academic freedom, learning, research, knowledge, communication and the public sphere. In the process, any and even all such concepts may need to be abandoned but with new concepts being proffered, and new practices envisaged, in their place. ‘Head in the clouds and feet on the ground’: this has to be a motto of any philosophy of higher education worthy of the name.

The espying and sketching out of principles for transformed institutions and practices calls for an explicitly ethical component. A philosophy of higher education does not have to be explicitly recommendatory – although it may be – but to be worth its salt, it has to lay out the boundaries and sketch the context within which choices have to be made, whether these be over the curriculum, pedagogy, aims of research, links to the community or the shaping of a trajectory for a university or even a higher education policy framework. But this is ultimately to intimate an ethical stance, concerning the wellbeing of those in and around higher education, including entities – animal, mineral or vegetable – in the natural environment. A philosophy of higher education has to be fully democratic in the sense that, ultimately, it has to speak for the glaciers and rhinos (Latour, 2004).

The last necessary feature of a philosophy of higher education has to be that of a concern for concepts. This should not need to be said but there are several points here. A concern for concepts, scrupulous care in their handling, their nuances, their inflections, their possible but unnoticed links with sheer words, their historical allusions, their delicacy, and their poetic qualities: all this used to be par for the course in philosophy but it is falling by the wayside. A philosophy of higher education has to rekindle a delight with concepts – and even with words – in order to catch the butterflies of the micro-practices of higher education. It has to be a philosophy with empirical warrant (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013), and sensitive to the infinity within daily encounters (Levinas, 1969); a philosophy – as we may daresay – of both woods and trees.

Moreover, it is through this careful inspection and handling of concepts that a dual insight of Adorno can be heeded. For Adorno (2008), it was central to philosophy that it seek to lay bare gaps between the promise of concepts on the one hand and the real of the world on the other. There are two movements here. First, that philosophy should redeem its critical ambitions, discerning the extent to which and the ways in which the world falls short of the concepts with which it arms itself. Second, in that interrogation, that new possibilities can be espied, new ways of realising key concepts in the exigencies of the world as it presents.

We have, then, six conditions that a philosophy of higher education – any philosophy of higher education – has to satisfy if it is to realise its responsibilities in and for the world: it has to be, at once, social, realist, critical, ethical, deeply and sensitively conceptual (and near-poetic), and imbued with a practical intent imaginatively to discern principles for the future of higher education. This is a very large set of expectations to place on any putative philosophy of higher education, on any attempt to provide a coherent corpus that is of value to the world. But, if the philosophy of higher education is to be more than a jejune activity of interest only to the cognoscenti, this is how matters surely stand.

Ronald Barnett
University College London Institute of Education, London, UK
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6850-7639