Prestige in Academic Life

Excellence and exclusion

Paul Blackmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317505037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The achievement of academic excellence is inherently competitive. Deliberate government policies, globalisation and changes in communication technologies mean that competitiveness in the academic world is sharper than ever before. At the centre of this is the seeking of prestige, at all levels from the national system to the individual. Prestige in Academic Life aims to increase understanding of motivation in universities by exploring the part that prestige plays, for good and ill. The book's focus on motivation and prestige helps to answer fundamental questions that run through much discussion on universities, such as why some problems are never solved; why change can be so difficult to achieve; and how individuals and groups can enable it to happen.

Issues explored include:

• What role does prestige play in academic life?

• How does prestige play out in the working lives of academics, students, administrators and institutional leaders?

• How can the positive aspects of prestige be encouraged and the negative ones diminished?

University leaders and managers, academics, administrators and students, indeed all who are interested in universities, will find this valuable reading. It will help those in leadership positions to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and wellbeing of their institutions, and will support academic staff in negotiating their career path.

Paul Blackmore is Professor of Higher Education in the International Centre for University Policy Research, Policy Institute at King's, at King's College London.

Chapter 1 Why talk about prestige?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315715780-1

The presence of prestige

University leaders scan league tables anxiously, wanting to know that their institution has the highest possible standing. Some aspire to be world class; others seek a more modest niche. Entire research teams are enticed from one institution to another, with promises of additional rewards and better facilities. Researchers bid feverishly and against the odds for the next crumb of funding, preferring a few thousand pounds from a highly respected source to ten times the amount from one that is less highly ranked. Teachers are encouraged to apply for prizes for excellence in teaching by showing that they are better than the colleagues with whom they often share their work. Some prefer not to single themselves out in this way. Parents and students seek out the best university that they can afford. In all directions the academy is increasingly competitive, and a more traditional rhetoric of collegiality seems threadbare. Academic life itself, it could be argued, was always a competition: nobody wants to produce second-rate research, to have a commonplace idea. For students too there are, in the short term, only so many places available in the institutions that hold the highest prestige. Academic excellence is therefore inherently competitive. However, that competitiveness is more obvious than ever before, encouraged by deliberate government policy in many countries and also by changes in communication technologies and the globalisation of higher education. At the centre of all of this is prestige, at all levels from the national system to the individual.

A historical perspective

Prestige has featured in human life for some considerable time. The pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the Parthenon of Athens, the Colosseum in Rome and Beijing's Forbidden City all had a prestige function. The distribution of power and wealth and ability, and the social positioning related to it, are universal aspects of an organised society. There may be some value in taking a historical perspective, in that differing social and cultural conditions may influence what is held to be prestigious. There are particular sources of change too: technological change provides additional ways in which prestige can be generated and expressed.

Universities have existed in societies from feudal times, through agricultural and industrial revolutions, periods of political and social unrest, world war and globalisation. They have reflected and at times contributed to those changes. Universities have helped to bring new forms of knowledge into being and have had to accommodate them. We can see differing conceptions of the purposes and forms of universities through succeeding waves of their establishment. In Britain, the oldest universities were joined by redbricks and civics in the nineteenth century, plateglass institutions in the 1960s and former polytechnics in the 1990s. Australia has its sandstones, gumtrees and moderns, Scotland its ancients, old and new, the US its doctorate-granting universities, its master's and baccalaureate colleges. Each new wave has entailed a difficult and for some an imperfectly achieved ascent into respectability, to find a contested place in the academic sun. Disciplines too have differing histories of engagement in universities. Where universities once existed principally to study divinity and law, there has been vast growth over a long period in the pure and applied sciences and in the humanities and social sciences. Professions have also found their way into the university, in a process that has both conferred an academic status on the profession and also, it could be argued, increased the influence of the academy.

With this expansion of disciplines, professions and functions have come many more staff of more varied kinds. The role of the academic has grown and changed in focus. In many places the academic role has split apart although in others it was never united. Prestige is at stake here too. The basis of an academic role's claim to professionalism – even whether it has or should have one – has long been a matter of debate and more recently the object of policy in many countries. A professional administration now manages many aspects of universities, drawing in staff with a vast range of skills that are required in any large modern organisation. In any university, professional and administrative staff now outnumber academic staff and the line between is increasingly blurred. The decline of donnish dominion was signalled many years ago, but whilst academic authority overall may have been eroded, universities continue to present a complex picture of power and prestige among their tribes and territories. The role of the student has also changed through time and currently is gaining in prominence.

The value of prestige as an aid to analysis is that it offers insight into the working of organisations, groups and individuals, through an examination of that which has the highest acclaim and how it has been developed and sustained. Many of the prestige concerns that can be identified today have existed for a very long time. The past may often seem a more stable place, with clearer, more widely shared and less contested views of what was prestigious than in what is experienced as the teeming present. An account of prestige becomes more difficult. Prestige exists most comfortably at times of stability rather than change. It could be argued that the conception of prestige includes the idea of stability, so that part of the art of developing prestige today is in projecting a sense of stability whilst remaining contemporary in a time of change. At the same time as serenity is projected, prestige is often won and maintained through fierce struggle, and can be lost as well as gained.

Defining prestige

Prestige is a term in wide and common use, but is not easy to define or to locate. James English, exploring contemporary growth in literary prizes, asks some key questions: ‘Where does prestige reside? In things? In people? In relationships between things and people?’ (2005, 3). Prestige does not reside in a person, although a role or function that a person has or performs may be prestigious. Thus there is prestige inherent in a kingship or a presidency that is separable from the holder of the role. A person may have attributes or possessions or achievements that lend prestige. Similarly, nothing of itself can be prestigious. Prestige is a social phenomenon, conferred by those who hold something in esteem. Prestige requires more than one person to value something. A group of people must agree if it is to acquire that status. That group does not have to be large, and prestigiousness does not require the agreement of everyone in a community. It needs only enough people to form a body who share particular valuations. Indeed, as will be suggested later, one way of estimating the boundaries of a community is by noting where a shared agreement of what is deemed prestigious breaks down. Thus prestige occurs where something is valued highly by a group of people, and association with that thing confers raised status on an individual or group. So an account of prestige deals with: what is prestigious; who is associated with it; who values it; and the various relationships, processes and states of being that are related to it. Prestige is thus both a psychological and a sociological issue. It has to do with how and what people think, as well as what they do and how they relate to others.

A number of other, at least as well-established terms appear to be available. Fame, reputation, status, standing, approbation and credibility have related meanings. Each term draws attention to particular aspects of excellence and social position whilst downplaying others. Listing them points up the difficulty of working with words that are in daily use, each of them carrying a cluster of meanings and implications, and each of them shifting subtly in meaning from one context to another. Some of these apparent synonyms listed above are not suitable. Status and standing emphasise the possessor of prestige, approbation the awarding of approval. Fame is too general: most prestige has a more specific field of application.

Reputation is a possible competitor. The Oxford English Dictionary says that reputation is ‘the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something’. Thus reputation may be good or bad, or simply neutral. The definition contains the idea that reputation exists in beliefs and opinions: it is people who confer reputation. The same source says that prestige refers to ‘widespread respect and admiration felt for someone or something on the basis of a perception of their achievements or quality’, suggesting a difference between reputation and prestige. A feeling of respect or admiration can only be positive. Unlike reputation, there is no such thing as bad prestige. Negative prestige would be expressed in different terms: notoriety or even infamy. This raises questions about how many people have to hold something prestigious, and whether some communities might see something as prestigious whilst others would not. A second difference is that prestige stands somewhere beyond reputation. Something of the highest reputation might achieve a level of regard where it would be termed prestigious, and that high regard would probably be held by many. A third difference is not reflected in the definitions, but can be found in its derivation. A good reputation has an air of solidity and worth. A person who did something, or did not do something, in order to protect or advance their reputation would feel comfortable to do that and to know that others knew what they had done and why. Prestige is a difficult term, with a range of meanings in use. Its origin in the Latin word ‘praestigium’, meaning ‘trick’ or ‘stratagem’, suggests one difficulty with it: we do not always like to admit that we do anything in order to gain or retain prestige. The word carries connotations of caring more for appearance than for substance, of over-valuing the opinions of others. Thus it can be a pejorative term. A person who actively seeks prestige may be thought to be selfish, to be reaching out for things that are better offered than grasped at. Despite that, many uses of the term are not adversely critical – to speak of a prestigious prize is not to demean it, but simply to say that many desire it and hold it in esteem. Even those who deride prestige-seeking tend to be critical not of the thing but of those who regard it as prestigious. In researching prestige, the equivocal nature of people's relationship with the idea of prestige is challenging. Interviewees may be reluctant to describe anything that they do as ‘prestige-seeking’. The connotations of the term threaten to get in the way of an investigation.

So the term prestige expresses the further reaches of reputation, and carries with it the twin notions of competitiveness and equivocality. In summary, then, something has prestige if enough people who are sufficiently connected to know one another's views can all agree that it is prestigious. For that to happen, the thing must be relatively scarce. Something possessed by all cannot be prestigious, unless the possession takes place in a relatively closed community, in which case the absence of that thing beyond the community provides the sense of scarcity. Thus, for example, a group of professors may all have high and equivalent status within that group, because every one of that group has something that others outside the group may not have.

In Pursuit of Prestige (Brewer et al., 2002) is probably the most extensive and coherent attempt to operationalise the idea of prestige in the field of strategy in US higher education, exploring the apparent paradox that US higher education is widely admired around the world and yet is seen within the country as being wasteful and inefficient. The writers do so by claiming that there are key differences in institutions’ strategic intentions and by making a distinction between prestige and reputation. Prestige is said to be: measured in relationship to others; much more influenced by faculty and others inside the institution; slow to depreciate; a ‘rival good’, in that the attainment of it necessarily means that someone else suffers a loss of it; and entailing a search for something that is limited in supply. In comparison, reputation is: an absolute term; much more influenced by what customers want; can be increased quickly but also decreases quickly unless maintained; a ‘non-rival’ good; and can increase in supply at a system level. Therefore, reputation can be gained that is not at the expense of a competitor. The writers go on to propose that institutions are either prestigious, prestige-seeking or concerned with reputation. It is also noted that there are hybrid institutions, in which some parts might aim at prestige and others at reputation.

The writers make a number of valuable points about prestige within an organisation. Firstly, they comment that prestige is very costly and has to be built up over a long period of time, often at the expense of spending that might lead to reputational gain. For example, one might decide to divert resources from student provision and into research. Secondly they suggest that prestige institutions are focused more closely on their own internal values rather than on meeting external standards and needs. Reputation-seeking institutions, on the other hand, will be more concerned to satisfy customers and are likely to be quicker to adapt to customers’ needs. They are also not as engaged with league table rankings and other signs of prestige. The writers note that private institutions are far less likely to engage in prestige-generating activities than public ones. They suggest that this can be explained by the nature of governance arrangements. Since prestige is costly to achieve and entails risk, institutions that are governed by members of faculty are likely to favour spending on prestige items, because those taking the decisions receive the benefits but do not directly bear the costs or the risks.

Reputation held at an individual level contains some assumption or implication about personal qualities that are known because they inform observed behaviour, including attitudes. Indeed reputation may be based entirely on others’ perceptions of an individual's personal qualities. Thus, Othello laments the loss of his reputation, by which he means the way others have seen him behave as a gentleman and an army officer. Prestige is silent on personal qualities. A prestigious person is not necessarily virtuous, punctual or reliable, for example. The components of prestige are external to the individual and consist of association with various forms of capital. This perhaps explains why prestige seems an unattractive concept with which individuals are sometimes reluctant to be associated.

Possible paradigms

Although universities have always been places of contestation, for the institution, for its constituent academic entities and for those who work and study in them, there may be some value in sketching two higher education paradigms, reflecting some of the major changes that have taken place in recent years and that continue today. Broadly, higher education in many countries has moved from a relatively elite and implicitly understood and agreed conception of its nature and purpose to a much more complex and contested one. In a more competitive climate, prestige has become an even more important means of achieving position and distinctiveness (see Table 1.1).

Ron Barnett has suggested that the kinds of knowledge that are valued in a university have shifted. At the centre is a change to a more instrumental view of a university's purpose, from ‘knowing that’ to ‘knowing how’, from pure to applied, from problem-making to problem-solving, from knowledge as process to knowledge as product, and from a disinterested to a pragmatic stance (1994, 49). It can be argued that the status of the most prestigious forms of knowledge, in university terms, is under threat. Peter Scott named another related and socially complex change when he commented that the British higher education system had undergone ‘massification’ but its instincts were still elite and small-scale (1995). From educating only a fraction of a population, most national education systems have expanded substantially over the last thirty years, admitting a larger and more varied range of students. Elitism still exists, strongly in tension with a trend towards inclusivity. With this expansion of universities’ purposes have come a larger number of stakeholders, each of whose wishes has, at some level, to be satisfied. A university has a wider range of possible ways of being: to be research intensive or teaching intensive, academically or professionally orientated, local or national or international, or may attempt to be some or all of these. Thus the development and projection of prestige is an increasingly complex business. A related trend is towards explicitness, in a number of fields. Institutions are expected to have mission statements to express what have in the past been unspoken understandings; curricula are increasingly defined in terms of pre-specified learning outcomes; research has to show that it has achieved impact. Far less is implicit, and this affects the ways in which prestige is communicated and understood, because much that is prestigious is implicit, both in the nature of its supposed excellence, and in the ways that people know it. Greater government interest in the outcomes and outputs of universities, expressed through changes in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Why talk about prestige?
• 2 Prestige and the organisation
• 3 Psychology of prestige
• 4 Globalisation and national systems
• 5 National prestige Global hubs
• 6 League tables and international clubs
• 7 Necessary myths Universities and knowledge
• 8 Necessary myths The university as economic powerhouse
• 9 Heads of institutions and prestige
• 10 Students and prestige
• 11 Prestige in academic life Excellence and exclusion
• Index