Greater width and greater depth: changing higher education in an electronic age

• Ronald Barnett is (www.ronaldbarnett.co.uk), Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education and President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.

Chris Husbands’ latest HEPI blog is fine so far as it goes but, I suggest, it goes neither wide enough nor deep enough.  Yes, the world is changing, and higher education institutions have to change, but the analysis of ‘change’ has to encompass the whole world (have great width) and also to burrow down into the deep structures of a world in turbulent motion (and so have much depth).

The current crisis in UK higher education – and especially in higher education in England – has to be set more fully in the context of massive global shifts that directly affect higher education. These are too many to enumerate entirely here, but they include:

• A hyper-fast world: Theorists speak of cognitive capitalism, but we have already moved into a new stage of electronic capitalism (of which AI is but the most evident feature).
• Volatile labour markets (disrupting the relationship between higher education and the world of work)
• A fragmenting state of student being: now, their higher education is just part of an incredibly complex life and set of challenges with which students are confronted
• Geo-political shifts affecting (and the reduction of) the internationalisation of higher education; and
• An entirely new complex of human needs (physical, cognitive, social, political, environmental, and phenomenological) for learning to be part of life, ‘cradle-to-grave’. 

In short, the world is fast-changing not only around higher education but in the depths of higher education in ways not yet fully appreciated.  It is a world that is going through multiple and unimagined transformations, transformations that are replete with conflicts and antagonisms that are both material and discursive. These changes are already having effects on higher education, especially on what it is to be a student.

Now, students are increasingly part-time (whatever the formal designation of their programmes of study). Moreover, they play out their lives across multiple ecosystems – including the economy, social institutions, culture, the polity, the self, knowledge, learning, the digital environment, and Nature. In the context of these nine ever-moving ecosystems, what it is to be a student is now torn open, fragmented, and bewildering to many. 

More still, many students of today will be alive in the 22nd century and will have to navigate an Earth, a world, that will exhibit many stages of anxiety-provoking and even possibly terrifying change. Sheer being itself is challenged under such circumstances and, more so, the very being of students. And we see all this in spades in (quite understandable) growing student anxiety and even suicide.

In this context, and under these conditions, a model and an idea of higher education bequeathed to the world largely from early 19th century Europe (Germany and England) no longer matches the present and the future age for which students are destined.

Crucially, here, we are confronted by profound changes that are not just institutional and material in that sense, but we are – and students are – confronted with unnoticed changes in the discourse of higher education.  Not just what it means to be a student but the very meaning of student is changing in front of us; yet largely unnoticed. (Is being a student a matter of dutifully acquiring skills for an AI world or is it to set up encampments so as actively to engage with and to be a troublesome presence in world-wide conflicts?)

Fundamental here is the idea of higher education.  Fifty years ago, some remnants of the idea of the university from 19th century Europe could romantically be held onto. Ideas of reason, truth, student development, consciousness-raising, critical thinking and even emancipation were concepts that could be used without too much embarrassment.  But now, that discourse and the pedagogical goals and relationships that it stood for have almost entirely dissolved, overtaken and trivialised by talk of skills, work-readiness, employability, impact and of using but of being ‘critical’ of AI.

It is a commonplace – not least in the higher education consultancies and think-tanks – to hear murmurings to the effect that institutions of higher education must change (and are insufficiently changing). Yes, most certainly.  And some signs of change are apparent. In England alone, we see talk of (but little concerted action on) life-long learning, formation of tertiary education as such, better higher education-further education connections, micro-credentials, ‘alternative providers’, shortened degrees, AI and recovering part-time higher education (disastrously virtually vanquished, regretted now by David Willetts, its progenitor).

These are but some of the adjustments that the large and complex higher education can be seen to be making to the challenges of the age.  But it is piecemeal in a fundamental sense, namely that it is not being advanced on the basis of a broad and deep analysis of the problem situation. 

Some say we need a new Robbins, and there is more to that idea than many realise. Robbins was a free-market economist, but the then general understanding as to what constituted a higher education and the balance of the Robbins committee, with a phalanx of heavy-weight educationalists, resulted in a progressive vision of higher education. Now, though, we need new levels of analysis and imaginative thinking. 

Consider just one of the changes into which English higher education is stumbling, that of life-long learning and its associated idea of credit accumulation. Credit accumulation was first enunciated as an idea in English higher education in the 1980s through the Council for National Academic Awards (and there through the efforts especially of Norman Evans and Peter Toyne). But the idea of universities as a site where the formation of human beings for a life of never-ending inquiry, learning and self-formation has never seriously been pursued, either practically or theoretically. 

Now, life-long learning is more urgent than ever, but the necessary depth and width of the matters it prompts are hardly to be seen or heard.  However, and as intimated, this matter is just one of a raft of interconnected and mega issues around post-school education today.

As is said, there is no magic bullet here in such an interconnected world. Joined-up progress is essential, from UNESCO and suchlike to the teacher and class of students. The key is the individual institution of higher education, which now has a responsibility to become aware of its multiple ecosystem environment and work out a game-plan in each of the nine ecosystems identified above.

At the heart of that ecosystem scanning has to be the individual student. Let this design process start from the bottom-up – the flourishing of the individual student living into the C22.  It would be a design process that tackles head-on what it is to live purposefully in a world of constant change, challenge and conflict and what might we hope for from university graduates against such a horizon.  Addressing and answering this double question within each university – for each university will have its own perspective – will amount to nothing less than a revolution in higher education.