Higher education and the myth of neutrality: Rethinking the cultural politics of research in the age of instrumental rationality

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the current state of higher education with particular—although not exclusive—reference to the issue of neutrality in research, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. My main concern is less with the complex details of the politics of higher education than with the milieu of the dominant higher education neoliberal paradigm. I set out not just to expose the myth of neutrality but to argue for the vision of a just society and a refusal to acquiesce in the barbarism of the contemporary world.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• neoliberalism
• policymaking
• neutrality
• social justice

The fundamental question of what role education should play in a democracy has taken a dangerous turn in the current historical moment. The current right-wing attacks on higher education in the United States is evident in attempts by Republican Party state legislatures to end tenure, ban social justice issues from being taught in classrooms, and demand that faculty teach what conservatives label as “patriotic education” (cf. Anderson & Svrluga, 2022; Joyce, 2022). These demands are usually made under the cover of claiming that there is no room for politics in the classroom and that educators should adhere pedagogically to a practice of neutrality and balance (cf. Rosenberg, 2016; TES, 2022). This multifaceted attack on higher education makes clear that it has become crucial site of battle in what appears to be a new phase in the right-wing counter-revolution against the democratization of higher education that gained a strong momentum in the sixties (Giroux, 2022).

I want to enter this conversation by addressing the crucial connection between a politics of education and the demands of what Giroux (2004, 2016) calls a “substantive democracy.” Central to my ongoing concerns is how higher education with respect to policy, politics, hope, and pedagogy can be both at the forefront in exploring democracy’s possibilities while further creating existing and future generations who can deepen and expand such possibilities. I am particularly concerned with how these questions play out around the issue of educational research as a particular ideological formation, pedagogical practice, and politics. I also what to address the question of neutrality posed by conservatives as a crucial issue that offers critical educators the opportunity to both address higher education as a crucial political site and what their role might be as public intellectuals willing to connect their scholarship and pedagogy with larger social issues.

In doing so, I ask the questions: Is higher education research and its diverse pedagogical practices simply the expression of different kinds of disciplinary interests or does it have a unifying center? Is it primarily a technical activity, addressing policy questions, or should it have critical functions, raising questions about social problems that beset the larger society? In addition, if higher education is to be understood as a moral and political project, what is the role of higher education in a democracy or, more specifically, in a time of tyranny (Giroux, 2019a, 2019b)? Equally crucial is the issue of the role of academics can play as public intellectuals. If the collective future we hope for young people is a function of the education we give them, how might higher education function as a site of hope and protected space that strengthens democratic values and relations? A critical education always presupposes some notion of the future based upon what it might mean to live in a society in which the notions of the social and common good expand the social contract rather than limit it to the purely economic realm. All of these issues presuppose addressing both the purpose and meaning of higher education, pedagogy and research. Subsequently, I will turn to considering the nature of higher education in light of these concerns.

Researching higher education

Ever since its birth, the study of higher education speaks to a wider audience, but particularly more recently, progressive higher education communities have emphasized an approach to higher educational research that they intended to be broad and inclusive and has impact on the real world. How might that expand the definition of higher education research and its social and political function? How might we reimagine the production of knowledge, agency, and social relations and the search for inclusiveness within an ideal of the university as a vital public good? Instead of viewing higher education and the policy, research, and pedagogy through terms of a revamped job cantered practice of instrumentalization and engine for economic growth, it seems imperative to view it through more critical and democratic values and ideals. Rather than an extension of the business world, higher education might be imagined, as Tanner R. Layton (2021) suggests, as a beacon for the public good. He writes,

The university, that is, could instead be imagined as a practice in both democratic and critical consciousness—a beacon for the common good and cultures of compassion, collective responsibility, and cooperation. It could be a place to challenge institutional power and explore ways of living other than those cantered around self-mastery and consumerism rather than a place to exploit and shape students into happy and obedient workers. It could inspire social justice, ask questions, and empower students to create, rather than a place to conform to the demands of the market.

This is a necessary turn in a time of endless crises, much of which impacts on both higher education and the wider society. At the very least, it offers more than redefinition of the role of higher education. It also provides a rationale for a different mode of governance, one that is not based on market principles. It also suggests a different and more critical role for students and a more empowering role for faculty. The latter is especially since in the age of the pandemic, a number of institutions have terminated appoints of full-time tenure line faculty, lowered faculty salaries, denied contract renewals to full-time non-tenure track faculty, and increased the percentage of the faculty on contingent contracts (Jachik, 2021; Mitchell, 2022).

Since the ongoing changes in higher education since the 1970s, when people today speak about universities, they are not referring to an institution controlled by or synonymous with faculty, they are referring to institutions run on a business model and controlled by administrators (cf. Berkowitz, 2022). The language, culture, knowledge, and social relations that dominate higher education in the current historical moment, accelerated under the grip of the pandemic, mimics workings of the corporate world with its fossilized hierarchies, reductive emphasis on commercial values, and its obsession with administrative task and pedagogies defined by their instrumentalism—methods dressed up as high-priority knowledge (cf. Ginsberg, 2011; Heller, 2016).

What is new about the university is not only the loss of its critical function in civic culture and its distancing from democratic values, but also its unapologetic embrace for all to see of its “ideological function as an instrument for economic growth” (Layton, 2021). One indication of this ideological obsession with finance, profits, and markets is evident in how faculty are now rewarded given both nature of their academic work and their research. Tenure has always come with a price, but for a number of universities in Europe, the price is not quality and relevance scholarship concerned with creating a better world, but the acquisition of grants. In the United States the issue is not a change in criteria for faculty to be tenured, but the elimination of tenure itself along with the principle of academic freedom that gives it a secure place for dissent, addressing social issues, and defining student not as consumers but potentially as informed and critically engaged citizens.

Yet, it is crucial to acknowledge that in spite of if not against the culture of market fundamentalism and its control over higher education, there have been notable gains in fighting back against the corporatization of the university. Over time there is greater emphasis in humanities and social sciences on the need for more “positional” academic writing—for example, the construction of new accounts of gendered or Black or indigenous experience, including in relation to the construction of educational narratives, projects, and effects. In other words, higher education researchers are increasingly alert to their own role in the construction of knowledge and use as well as the relation of that new knowledge to the improvement of life chances is taken as a central concern. Groups that have been absent from such scholarship in terms of their framing their own experience are now challenging educational research to be more inclusive and aware of the ideological forces that have shaped such research historically.

The other side of the story is, as C. Wright Mills points out in the Sociological Imagination, that “[i]ncreasingly, research is used, and social scientists are used, for bureaucratic and ideological purposes” that largely serve dominant interests, whether they be the state, military, or commercial interests (2000, pp. 177–178). Mill continues, “[t]his being so, as individuals and as professionals, students of man and society face such questions as: whether they are aware of the uses and values of their work, whether these may be subject to their own control, whether they want to seek to control them.” Paraphrasing Mills, educational researchers cannot avoid responsibility for the choices they make, the values that inform their work, and the interests served by such work.

The politics of neutrality

“Yes,” “no,” “it depends” are all possible answers to the question, “Is higher education research neutral?” At first sight the question might seem surprising: asking whether higher education is neutral, implies that a loss has occurred.

Then several questions arise: To what extent the study of higher education might be more argumentative and fully embrace their theoretical and political values? Could higher education scholars subsequently be expected to incorporate different discourses of policy analysts and practitioners? Might notions such as evidence-based research and the direction of a purely functional definition of the task of educational research be made more problematic, so that the qualities of the text become more central? How might we view the latter assumptions within a more radical understanding of the meaning and purpose of higher education as a center of critique and democratization? What does policy mean when it empties language of its meaning by replacing democratic ideas, values, and hopes for the future with the discourse of instrumental rationality and hyped-up efficiency? What happens when thinking subjects are reduced to consumers, when corporate logic becomes the default language for academic governance, and tenure track positions are gutted to expand administrations? What might it mean when higher education is wedded to denying rather than supporting the universe as a public good and democratic public sphere? What happens to higher education when its mission is defined by economic growth and increasing profits and capital accumulation? The answers firstly depend on the definition of higher education. Secondly the answers depend on the value assigned to the interpretation of higher education.

An issue which lurks behind these reflections is that of the politics of neutrality in higher education research. Higher education represents many interests and ideologies and in turn, the study of higher education reflects those expectations. This is particularly true with regards to higher education research, a topic barely included over the debates about neutrality. Different interests project different agendas in research. Consequently, the study of higher education is a mixture of different discourses and ideologies. Higher education researchers are representative of, and are constituted by, the discourse and ideologies that they inhabit. By discourse here, I mean the interests which they reflect and embody in terms of their inner intentions. In most research studies, several different intentions are evident, although perhaps each has a dominant orientation. Interests at work here are knowledge as enquiry, knowledge to inform professional practice, understanding for professional self-development (carrying both a hermeneutic interest and an emancipatory interest), and understanding with a critical intent. This list by no means limits the range of interests present over time in papers published in higher education journals.

Howard Zinn’s memoir (2018), You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, speaks in an illuminating way to the enduring power of his metaphor, particularly for higher educational faculty. On the critical issues of our time, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic, the politics of neutrality take on a new significance as the virus lays bare how matters of inequality, power, and values operate to privilege some groups and discriminate in often deadly ways against others. The pandemic highlights the struggles to grapple with underfunded public health care systems, the lack of resources for testing, the surge toward downward mobility, expanding unemployment and the ongoing efforts to provide protective essentials for front line and emergency workers. In this case, the Covid-19 pandemic confirmed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which selective populations marginalized by class and race are now considered expendable (cf. Giroux, 2021). At the same time, it also revealed what Angela Davis (2005) insists “are very clear signs of … impending fascist policies and practices,” which not only construct an imaginary social environment for all those populations rendered disposable but also exemplify a site and space “where democracy has lost its claims” (pp. 122, 124).

At the heart of this tragedy is an understated political struggle to reverse decades of the neoliberal war on public goods such as health and education, the welfare state, and the social contract. Neutrality, thus, becomes itself a political choice and is one that supports, if not strengthens, the status quo. “This defence of neutrality” makes invisible its own codes and values and in doing so prevents readers from understanding “the role that education plays ideologically, in producing particular forms of knowledge, power, social values, modes of agency, and narratives about the world” (Giroux, 2019a, 2019b). It also refuses to acknowledge how it legitimates and normalizes through its claim to neutrality particular social relations and human behavior, representing a powerful register and arena for defining how education is shaped in political and ethical terms. When reduced to a technical activity, educational research often becomes the enemy of discussion and thoughtfulness and undermines the ability to function critically.

It is worth repeating that any viable defense of higher education as a democratic public sphere has to make clear that education is always political because it is always a struggle over what knowledge, values, and social relations will be used in the classroom to define particular notions of agency, identity, values, and the future itself. In his critique of this depoliticizing notion of education dressed up in the discourse of neutrality, Giroux argues there is always an ideology defending power relations that its advocates want to remain hidden. He is worth quoting at length on this issue. He writes,

The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of relations of power, values, and politics. Ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a “politics of possibility” through a continual critical engagement with texts, images, events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom. Pedagogy is never innocent, and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, cultural workers have the opportunity not only to critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach in and out of schools, but also to resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. (Giroux, 2020, p. 210)

Further questions can and should be asked about other sets of relationships between the defense of neutrality and the politics of research in higher education. For instance, what is the relationship between higher education and the public sphere? Does higher education research tend to take on both the problems and even the practical ideologies of higher education practice uncritically? To what extent can the public sphere of policymaking allow itself to be sensitive to ideas in higher education research? Similar questions can also arise over the relation between applied higher education research and the purer disciplinary domains upon which it draws.

If educational research surrenders itself to an instrumental view of the university, it becomes complicit with a view of higher education as mode of training and source of labor for the market. There is more at work here than an acute reduction of the broader social and democratic goals of higher education, there is also a willingness to expand rather than end a generation of students for whom the future is canceled out. While the instrumental language of higher education forges a tight relationship between knowledge, skills, and market needs, it not only offers no guarantee of cushy jobs for its graduates, but in an age that increasingly lacks meaningful employment reinforces for them a precarious future of debt and what David Graeber once called “bullshit jobs.” Students are increasingly told that training for the workplace offers a pragmatic choice for the future, but in reality, it both limits their imaginations by turning them into customers and the scope of knowledge they need to be informed critical citizens. At the same time, it is both silent and complicit about paving their way into a world of debt, precarity, and limited chances for social and economic mobility.

The future of higher education and the policies it produces have become synonymous with a world of “eternal precarity and instability, a world that commodifies everything, privatizes public goods, and concentrates wealth, income, and power into the hands of a small financial elite. Educating young people for a career no longer carries the promise of a meaningful job. Under the shadow of neoliberal capitalism, it offers jobs with no or limited pensions, lack of job security, few benefits, and the undoing of any viable dream of retirement. Higher education is no longer about educating students to think about the future they want as much as it is educating them to accept that they will have no say in thinking about their economic, political, and social future.

The future of higher education lies with the struggles between higher education as a public space with the capacity to question what Jacques Derrida (2000) calls the powers that limit “a democracy to come” and a technocratic culture interweaved with the principles of consumerism which produce a regressive sense of social agency (cf. Bauman & Mazzeo, 2012). When linked to issues of power, identity, ideology, and politics, educational research can be an important social construct for orientating education toward a vision of the future in which critical learning becomes central to increasing the scope of human rights, individual freedom, and the operations of a substantive democracy (cf. Giroux, 2021).

Reclaiming higher education as a public sphere begins with the important project of challenging the defence of neutrality and its associated notions of research, which conceal the crisis of the social by disconnecting all discussions about the purpose of higher education from the realm of democracy and the political, economic, and cultural elements that define the larger society. At the same time, higher education is not only about issues of economics and the labor market, but also about questions of social justice, freedom, and the capacity for agency, action, and change as well as issues of power, exclusion, and citizenship. Such a struggle demands, as Arunhdhati Roy (2001: p. 3), points out, that as intellectuals we ask ourselves some very “uncomfortable questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our ‘democratic institutions,’ the role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community.”

C. Wright Mills rightly (1959, p. 193) observes,

Attempts to avoid such troublesome issues as I have been discussing are nowadays widely defended by the slogan that social science is ‘not out to save the world […] I do not believe that social science will ‘save the world’, although I see nothing at all wrong with ‘trying to save the world’—a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason. Such knowledge as I have leads me to embrace rather pessimistic estimates of the chances. But even if that is where we now stand, still we must ask: if there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them?

Social scientists have a special role to play in higher education. Through their research and policy considerations they can make connections, situate the meaning and state of higher education within a broader set of politics, and challenge the view that students be viewed as human capital, courses be defined by consumer demand, and faculty have no right to control over the conditions of their labor. They need to ask fundamental questions about how the attack on higher education, especially in the age of the pandemic, is related to the attack on social provisions, the welfare state, unions, public goods, and public servants. How might social science research and policy not only impact education and the larger society, but also the mental health of students who increasingly suffer from high amounts of anxiety over their debts, which has become a form of servitude made all the more intolerable since it is defined in purely individualistic terms? Policy matters and the work of academics are crucial to making it matter.

A final word on hope

I want to conclude by returning to the crucial connection between education and the politics of hope, which has been developed extensive by theorists such as Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. I view education and hope as mutually determining forces in the struggle for producing critical citizens capable of both defending and struggling to create a world in which the search for justice never ends. In an age of rising right-wing populist movements, fascist politics, and authoritarian governments, it is difficult to think beyond an era of foreclosed hope. I think it is fitting to insist that by recognizing that one of the great dangers of the contemporary moment is that the power of hope becomes illusory and privatized. Under such circumstances, it becomes difficult for individuals to translate private troubles into public issues and systemic considerations. Hope is a deeply pedagogical and political sentiment. It not only demands sharp analytical powers of translation—a deeply pedagogical task—it also becomes a window that allows us to think about the present, to imaging a future that does not replicate a historical moment forged in the false narrative that there is no other alternative.

Hope as a political force and pedagogical doctrine is based on the belief that the dream of a just and equitable society must challenge neoliberalism’s ability to use corporate controlled cultural apparatuses and state violence as weapons to impose what the novelist Toni Morrison states is “a coma on the population,” producing misery and traumas so deep and cruel that they “purge democracy of all of its ideals” (Morrison, 2019, pp. vii–ix).

Hope is the bedrock of struggle. Its power has been visible in the millions around the globe protesting against police violence, the criminalization of Black people, and systemic racism in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. Growing resistance around the world, especially among young people, is also due to their recognition that they are living in an age in which the threat of ecological disaster and nuclear war, and the ongoing assault on democracy by a savage neoliberalism are too urgent to ignore. Such dissatisfaction is growing globally, as indicated by a poll conducted by the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer that indicates 56% of people in 28 countries believe “that capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world.” (Edelman, 2020).

Central to my optimism about the next decade is the recognition that hope cannot take place without a struggle. I believe that such struggles are the outgrowth of radical social visions, expanding critical consciousness, and social movements that draw on the rich histories and legacies of resistance movements fighting for the defense of popular sovereignty and equality. Such struggles also make clear that education is a fundamental element of politics, hope, and resistance. Evidence of such struggles can be found in the growing resistance to neoliberalism in Chile, France, Peru, and Ecuador, among other countries.

Another reason for my optimism is based on a developing consciousness among a majority of people in the United States who support a range of progressive values such as Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, free tuition, abortion rights, human immigration policies, legislation that sustains the environment, a living minimum wage, and taxing the ultra-rich and big corporations. An embrace of similar values is sparking revolts in a range of other countries. The failure of neoliberal societies such as the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, and India, among others have revealed the failure of market-based politics to address urgent social problems such as the Covid-19 plague, resulting in the needless and tragic deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Neoliberalism as both an economic system and an ideology has become a death machine choking off the oxygen gives breathe to human rights, the welfare state, democracy, and human life.

I want to insist on addressing the issue of what the role of higher education is in a time of tyranny that the threat to the planet and humankind is so urgent that there is no space in between from which to occupy an alleged space of neutrality or adhere to the banal call for balance. The machinery of death unleashed by the avatars of neoliberal greed, disposability, and exploitation wears its horrors like a badge of honor. Yet, power is not only about domination but also resistance, which is now worldwide, mobilized by millions, and the call here is not just to win justice through phony elections but to shut down the militarized institutions, cultures, disimagination machines, and ideologies of racism, exploitation, and human suffering through direct action.

Without hope there is no possibility for producing radical democratic mass movements that can both hold power accountable and implement transformative structural changes. As Henry Giroux has argued, agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and recognizes in the words of the novelist, Lukas Bärfuss, that “cynicism and resignation are simply other words for cowardice” (Bärfuss, 2020) and that the possibility of a more just and humane world rests on the assumption that no society is ever just enough. Hope as a political concept must embrace a militant optimism which suggests a deep understanding of history, the importance of individual and collective agency, the fundamental necessity of connecting education to social change, and a sense that in a time of tyranny, education must intensify its goals and mission as an emancipatory and transforming force.

Conclusion

The time has come in the midst of a wide range of crisis, especially as they give rise to what it means to learn from history, fight for justice and economic equality, and prevent the further attack on the planet that we rethink what role educational research can play not a tool of neutrality but as a rigorous, engaged resource for expanding ideas, knowledge, values, and social relations as part of a project of democratization. The great novelist, Toni Morrison, provides a note of urgency in the need to take higher education seriously as a fundamental cornerstone of democracy. She writes:

If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us. (Morrison, 2001, p. 278)

Until recently the main concern was for many countries and international agencies how to succeed, economically. The Covid-19 pandemic crisis is not about “catching up,” being modern, and reforming higher education systems. The question that seems paramount here is what type of world we want to live in and what type of future do we want for the present and next generation of young people. In the wake of Russia’s barbaric and brutal invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing expansion of militarization through NATO, and the threat of a nuclear war, it is even more crucial that the university take a stand on the side of peace, justice, and hope.

In a post-pandemic world, higher education faces a different set of challenges ranging from its increasing corporatization to being overrun with a technological and instrumental fetishism. It also faces the challenge of being complicit with a war machine that feeds on the various elements that make up the military-industrial-academic complex (Giroux, 2007). In the end, higher education should be about more than training, creating work skills for students. Higher education has a duty to educate student to be civic-minded and critically engaged citizens who can engage in dialogue, debate, address social problems, and use their imaginative capacities to the fullest as both individuals and as engaged and responsible. It has a duty to be on the side of truth, the practice of freedom, and to define itself as a barrier to the emerging authoritarianism that is gripping so much off the world today.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ourania Filippakou

Ourania Filippakou is Reader in Education and Director of Teaching and Learning at Brunel University London. Her research focuses the politics of higher education, critical pedagogy, and cultural politics with particular reference to comparative historical analysis, university entrepreneurialism, and marketization. She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals. In 2007 she was elected as a council member of the Society for Research into Higher Education and served as co-editor for the British Educational Research Journal from 2018–2021. Currently she is a co-editor for the Routledge book series Critical Interventions: Politics, Culture and the Promise of Democracy.