Higher Education: Purposes and Roles

Stephen Rowland

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Leeds, 13-15 September 2001

Higher education is a search for knowledge and wisdom. This is an ideal that has been widely accepted since the ancient Greeks first instituted the academy. From this perspective, the university, its staff and its students would be evaluated in terms of these purposes. Furthermore, the kind of learning – and indeed the very process itself – would be understood in terms of these aims.

In reality, however, universities have served a range of purposes, not always representing this ideal. Over the last 40 years, in particular, there have been radical changes. In the light of these changes, we need to ask again what is, and what should be, the purpose of a higher education. Unless we can get some grasp on this question, any concern for how people learn will be unrooted in a proper sense of purpose. And perhaps one of the few things, about which there is a general agreement, is that learning can only be successful when it is purposeful.

My daughter recently completed her final year on a course that is the apotheosis of the post-modern condition: BA (Hons) in Communication and Package Design at a new university. Telling me about her friend who studies Philosophy at the neighbouring more prestigious civic university she said: "My friend says that the philosophy teaching at the old university is rubbish. I'm glad I'm doing a course that is just a training for a job. I already knew that the education system is useless at education. I'd rather just get trained and you can leave the education to me." She was somewhat less positive, however, about the effectiveness of her university training.

Her view that a higher education is a preparation for the job market is a familiar one, not confined to the UK, but reflected in conversations with academics and students as far afield as South Africa and Russia. The terms ‘marketisation’, ‘globalisation’, ‘Americanisation’ and ‘the Coca-Cola society’ have been used to describe a higher education in which lecturers perceive their students to be ‘instrumental’, ‘consumerist’, ‘competitive’, ‘calculating’, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘job-oriented’ (Rowland 2001).

This reflects an assumption, which is held by students and academics about the purpose of higher education, rather than disenchantment with the value of education itself.

It is an assumption that is shaped by government policy. The UK Minister of State for Higher Education has described higher education completely in terms of the needs of the global economy, stating that it would need to train graduates “who will develop skills in response to the global markets” (Blackstone 2001). Such a sense of purpose was taken for granted, viewed as incontestable, but never argued for. There is no sense that higher education will shape global economies, but rather that global economies will shape higher education: a complete reversal of the Platonic ideal for education.

While the classical ideal of a higher education is largely abandoned in favour of viewing higher education in terms of preparation for the workplace, the autonomy of researchers to pursue their own lines of enquiry has been brought into question. In the UK, for example, researchers funded by The Department for Education and Employment are now acclimatised to the idea that their research focus and findings will be vetted by the Department and rejected where they might cause embarrassment to government. Recent government initiatives view educational research largely as a matter of identifying and filling ‘gaps in knowledge’ (NERF 2000: 6) rather than developing critical perspectives.

In the sciences, companies have sued researchers to prevent their publishing material that is advantageous to competitors or critical of company practices (Zia-Zarifi 2001). Such increased commercial involvement and an unwillingness or inability to take account of the ethical and social implications of research has led to public anxieties in a range of scientific subjects, from genetic modification to animal experimentation. And in medicine, the President of the General Medical Council recently accused his own profession of expressing a culture based upon a narrowly scientific outlook to patient care (Irvine 2001). The medical schools and HE must take some responsibility for this.

Even in the field of computer technology, where university teaching has an avowedly clear relation to commercial needs, graduate students soon learn that Microsoft's own training programmes provide for richer rewards in the market place than a university degree.

A loss of confidence in higher education has been accompanied by diminishing per capita resources, falling academic morale, and a growing view that the purposes of higher education are no longer to be understood in terms of the search for knowledge and wisdom. It has been argued that this constitutes a ‘dumbing down’ of higher education (LM Magazine 1999). To what extent is this the inevitable result of opening universities to a wider and more diverse range of students, and how has it impacted on student learning?

Five times as many young people now go on to Higher Education than they did 40 years ago. An élite system of higher education has been replaced by one that gives wider access. But in the meantime, in society at large, the inequalities between the rich and the poor have grown. In 1998, the gap between them in the UK was found to be greater than at any time over that 40 year period (Hills 1998) and there is little sign that a change in government in 1997 improved the situation. While higher education has increasingly come to serve the needs of the global economy, that very economy is structured so as to increase the divide between the wealthy and the poor. In education, the prime minister’s special adviser has plausibly argued that barriers of social class are as entrenched as ever at the heart of British society (Adonis 1998) and that policy over the last 40 years has exacerbated rather than ameliorated these barriers.

It would seem, therefore, that if higher education has indeed been ‘dumbed down’ and moved further away from it purposes in terms of knowledge and wisdom, then there is no reason to believe that this has been the result of a policy directed towards creating a fairer society. It is not for the sake of the supposedly dumb masses that the higher education experience has transformed. The present forms of higher education, and the so-called standards that are used to assess its value, serve, as they always have done, the interests of those whose voice is most powerful. This may no longer be the voice of an old élite. But nor is it the voice of the masses. Neither is it the voice of reason and truth.

Tragically, it is the voice of the market place that has led to a cumbersome bureaucracy being imposed upon higher education. It persuades us that the value of education, like that of any consumer product, can be standardised and measured. It speaks of quality, but cynically reduces all judgements to quantitative measures. It knows not how to celebrate love, enthusiasm, or passion: such terms have little place in the language of quality assurance and consumer satisfaction. And in determining the price of everything appreciates the value of nothing. We should therefore be suspicious of any question of whether standards have risen or fallen. Whose standards are we talking about? The bureaucracy’s? The élite’s? Yours?

The obsession with so-called standards has transformed the products of higher education and the lives of those who work in it as learners, teachers and researchers.

Repeated attempts to measure and grade university research have led to a vast increase in the time spent by academics on measuring, accounting and telling self serving stories about themselves: time which should be spent researching or teaching. Stories of research excellence or teaching excellence are barely believed even by those who tell them. The search for knowledge and its celebration through teaching are reduced to marketable skills, and a wedge is driven between teaching and research as institutions strive to find their niche in the competitive marketplace. The struggle to achieve a high rating and make successful bids for funds is replacing the excitement of discovery, which should be the motivation for research and learning. Increasingly it is being recognised that higher education, like breakfast cereal, spends more on its packaging than on its contents. A recent study of European academics concluded that ‘enthusiasm cannot survive in a sea of policies that, however worthy, do not at bottom have an understanding of what Lord Annan called the struggle to know something, “to produce out of the chaos of the human experience some grain of order won by the intellect”’ (Rothblatt 2001).

This bureaucracy, led by the market, has also trivialised the role of students. As customers in the supermarket of higher education, they often have freedom to choose between discrete modules of learning. But the cost of this freedom of choice is a loss of critical engagement, continuity, coherence or guidance. The educational process is reduced to a delivery of curriculum packages by managed human resources, with the dubious promise that these can be exchanged for jobs in the market.

The rhetoric that students have been empowered by their new role as clients is a deception. Their opportunity - or rather obligation - to report on the quality of their lecturers through student feedback questionnaires is viewed by them, as well as by their teachers, with the utmost suspicion, according to recent research (Johnson 2000). Such reporting devices trivialise the teaching and learning process by reducing its evaluation to ticks in boxes. They undermine, rather than enhance, the dialogue between teachers and learners, in their attempt to control both.

The prominence of this bureaucratic ideology, within a wider market place, leads to fragmentation as academics are divided from students, teachers from learners, new universities from old ones, scholars from managers. The university can no longer speak with one voice. Competition and the quick fix have replaced collegiality and rigorous debate.

This is not a call to return to an imagined Golden Age. The élite university system privileged ruling classes and promoted a culture that served their interests. The ideal of the Greek academe was itself premised upon an acceptance of slavery, which Aristotle supported. We cannot find our purpose by looking backwards. In reflecting upon how our students learn – and indeed how we learn – we need to ask again what is the purpose of that learning. Does higher education have any purpose beyond training students for work? And can it do that effectively anyway? Can the university bring back to life the idea of education as a search for truth and learning? Or is education something that takes place elsewhere?

The increased interest in classical music, or books on science, or impressionist painting is not the response of a public who have been educated by their schooling to appreciate such things. It is the result of the desire for learning that expresses itself outside our institutions of training. Education, perhaps, has becomes a private matter: a leisure activity.

But can we leave the education of the next generation to the leisure industry, the industry which, above all others, is prone to fads, fashions and the vested interests of profit? No, the challenge is to struggle for a higher education of the 21st century in which it is freed from the domestication of the market. This will be no less a struggle than the earlier one of freeing universities from the domination of the church. It may then become a conscience for us all rather than a privilege for the élite. How we are to understand learning, the forms it will take and the content it will address will depend upon how we conceive of this purpose.

References

ADONIS, A. (1998 edition) A Class Act. London: Penguin.

BLACKSTONE, T. (2001) Why learn? Higher Education in a learning society,

Birley Lecture, City University, 24 January.

HILLS, J. (1998) Income and Wealth: the latest evidence. London: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

IRVINE, Sir D. (2001) Speech to the Royal Society of Medicine, reported in The Independent, 16 January, p.1.

JOHNSON, R. (1998) Student Feedback as Technical Control. Student Feedback as Technology of Communication. Paper presented to Learning Technology Network Conference of the Staff Educational Development Association, Southampton. 6-8 April.

LM MAGAZINE (1999) Culture Wars: Dumbing Down, Wising Up. Conference, London 5-7 March.

NATIONAL EDUCATION RESEARCH FORUM (NERF) (2000) Research and Development for Education. London: NERF.

ROTHBLATT, S. (2001) Of babies and bathwater, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January, p9.

ROWLAND, S. (2001 in press) Teaching for Democracy in Higher Education.

ZIA-ZAIRIFI, S. (2001) In the information wars, we are on the front line, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January, p.14.