The Good University

What Universities Actually Do and Why Its Time for Radical Change

Raewyn Connell

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786995438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

The higher education industry might seem like it's booming, with over 200 million students in universities and colleges worldwide and funds flowing in like never before. But the truth is that these institutions have never been unhappier places to work. Corporate-style management, cost-cutting governments, mobilisations by angry students and strikes by a disgruntled workforce have taken their toll - in almost every country around the world. It's no wonder that there is talk of 'universities in crisis.' But what should a 'good university' look like? In this inspiring new work, Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.

Chapter 1

Making the knowledge: research

Universities’ prestige in the world depends heavily on the work of researchers. Their discoveries are supposed to spark new technologies, deepen our understanding of the world, and guide the work of professions. Graduation addresses proclaim the dignity of science, and the media thrill to the professor with the latest cure for cancer or the most distant galaxy yet found. The World Bank, no less, has proclaimed that we are living in, or at least constructing, Knowledge Societies.

As a matter of fact the knowledge used in everyday practice by clinicians, engineers, and other professions only slightly overlaps with cutting-edge research. Mostly the professions use well-established findings mixed with on-the-job know-how. I have a friend in the medical profession who laments how difficult it is to get doctors to change their prescribing habits when new research comes through. Armand Mattelart and Mats Alvesson have looked coolly into ideas like the ‘information society’ and the ‘knowledge society’ and have found a mass of marketing hype and grandiose speculation on top of some real economic changes. Yet even these changes, and the professions’ use of well-established findings, show that research-based knowledge matters in the long run.¹

To understand universities we need to cut through the rhetoric and examine how research-based knowledge is actually made and circulated. Our popular images of intellectuals are isolated geniuses – Dr Faustus with his pentagram, Dr Freud with his cigar, Professor Einstein with his hair. But with few exceptions, modern research involves the interlocking efforts of a whole workforce: not just the star professors but more importantly the research team, graduate students, technical staff, the other research teams, journals, institutes, funding agencies, and more.

Research is a social process, a collective undertaking that produces, not just individual sparks of genius, but an expanding, many-sided, and above all shared body of knowledge. I call this product the research-based knowledge formation, and later in the chapter I will outline its main features. They give us a way of approaching the difficult but unavoidable question of truth. In an environment of ‘post-truth’ politics, with trolling, distortion and fakery rampant on the internet, what standing can universities’ research-based knowledge have?

Before these questions, we need to understand the work that produces knowledge: the labour process of research. And before that, we need to meet the people who do the work: the researchers themselves, in the global periphery as well as in the famous research centres of the global North.

Being a researcher

I have been a researcher all my working life – mostly part-time, since my jobs have involved teaching too. On some projects I was a lone researcher, including my PhD thesis on how children learn about politics, a sometimes disturbing, sometimes hilarious research topic. But even while writing a one-researcher thesis I was learning about the customs of a larger workforce. At the same time I was involved in team projects, one about class patterns in Australian society and another about teenagers’ lives and education. I have been involved in collaborative work ever since, giving some of the most thrilling, as well as the most difficult, moments in my research life.

Collaborative research totally undermines the calm, ivory-tower image of universities. An active research team may have half a dozen projects running at the same time, meanwhile searching for funds for the next half-dozen. Even within one project, as Chief Investigator I find myself doing personnel work with the right hand, data-gathering with the left, scratching my head about theory (with the third hand, of course), then dancing around to fix a hole in the budget. Every grant proposal is an exercise in speculative fiction that closes its eyes to the chaos that is sure to arrive. And only a fraction of the chaos is the creative part. In a survey of 500 Australian intellectual workers in the year 2000, we asked academics, professionals and others to estimate the time they spent on different tasks. On average, ‘doing creative work’ accounted for less than a quarter of their time.²

Budgets are tougher in other regions. The economist Thandika Mkandawire describes researchers in post-independence Africa beset by marginality, under-resourcing and insecurity. Their work depends on erratic funding support from the local state or from international aid agencies. These funders do not want theoretical studies. They want applied research on immediate problems; and what they fund is mostly small-scale, and far from cutting-edge. Mkandawire tartly remarks that donors assumed that ‘poor research was good enough for the poor’.³

In any region, being a researcher means steering through an institutional environment in a way that allows the logic of knowledge creation to emerge. More than pure intellect is involved: no researcher is just a brain in a glass jar. Researchers have emotions, bodies and relationships.

Consider the fact that researchers have bodies. Some of their labour is fine, healthy work in the open air, such as scrambling up and down hillsides to collect botanical specimens. Some involves travel through lively and varied social environments: for instance ethnographic research in schools. But in any environment, repetitious data-gathering becomes tiring, and ultimately boring. And a lot of research is done in worse surroundings: a laboratory smelling of chemicals, a dust-laden archive, an unsewered field site. Since the 1950s, when computers began to spread through rich countries’ universities, more and more of researchers’ time has been spent with these machines. At first we wrote on coding sheets, made punch-cards and lugged them across campus to the main-frame computer; now we just sit in front of screens. A long day staring at a screen is seriously unhealthy.

But a lot of researchers spend long days doing just that. They have to. They are subject to deadlines, funding trouble, the irregular rhythms of project-based work, delays and frustrations in the research itself, and the tensions of reviewing and auditing. A considerable part of today’s research workforce, probably a majority, are in insecure employment. They are graduate students, grant-funded research assistants, outsourced technical workers, fixed-term research fellows, and untenured academics.⁴

Why put up with these pressures? Earning a living and trying to build a career is an important part of it, and I will discuss the workforce issues in Chapter 3. Beyond this, many researchers believe that their work is intrinsically important. They may not expect to win a Nobel Prize, but they understand that making a contribution to knowledge is a public service, creating an asset for the whole society. Most researchers in universities have a broad commitment to the ‘knowledge commons’, to use a term from current debates about the internet.

Then there is the fascination of enquiry itself. It is a privilege to spend a working life simply trying to make discoveries. In his charming book Seed to Seed, tracing a year in the life of a plant biologist, Nicholas Harberd regrets that you cannot describe this fascination in a journal article: ‘Whilst wonder is what really drives us, and wonder is what we feel, we cannot admit of it.’⁵ Yet the wonder is real, and sometimes it does break through. Here is a passage from a high-impact research report:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

I cannot resist quoting that, with its graceful bow to Isaac Newton and its fond picture of the everyday richness of life. It is from the final paragraph of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.⁶

Research has its moments when a bold experiment works, a theory crystallizes, or a solution to the problem is found. Eugene, a senior academic, described such moments in his research in pure mathematics:

If you’ve been working on something for a time, you can see things falling into place. And you see this is the right way of doing it. A bit of instinct goes into these things, but you get to know the situation pretty well. And if you have a sudden glimpse of illumination as to how things go, then you’re pretty sure it’s going to work. Sometimes that doesn’t work out of course. But quite often it does.⁷

The glimpse of illumination may turn into the buzz of a hot field. For most knowledge workers the everyday experience is not at that pitch of intensity. But it can involve deep satisfaction, stepping into a researchable zone and finding a path forward in it.

Continuing commitment from a whole workforce makes the research-based knowledge formation possible. This workforce is the collective intellectual: a real group of people, spread across the world, whose work depends on sustained cooperation. The emotional dimension is crucial in enabling that. Many researchers work long hours, despite insecurity and frustration. Research groups and networks provide friendship, mentoring, collaboration, advice, and help in crises.

In a pioneering analysis of intellectual workers, Geoff Sharp observed that their work required autonomy, and tended to organize itself as a horizontal network of people linked by cooperation rather than command. These ideas have become common, and do have some empirical support. In our survey of 500 Australian intellectual workers, we asked for responses to the statement Most people in my workplace treat each other as equals. No less than 81 per cent agreed and only 14 per cent disagreed.⁸

But there was systematic variation. It is very thought-provoking that the university workers in this survey, compared with other sectors, scored low on a scale measuring autonomy in the workplace. At the bottom of the research economy, the work is more likely to be routine, the autonomy minimal and the pay poor. The famous experiments on air pressure and chemicals in the seventeenth century, which we attribute to the Honourable Robert Boyle and his friends, were actually carried out by the philosophical gentlemen’s servants, not named as authors. Bonnie, a contemporary Australian industrial chemist, worked for a while as a laboratory research assistant at her university. She bitterly remarked of her experience:

Look, a well-trained monkey can do this work.

Bonnie left her field and left the university, despite getting her PhD and winning a post-doctoral fellowship. I have spoken with researchers in the global South who felt with similar anger that, in certain international projects, they had been little more than recruitment agents for global-North researchers.⁹

There are, indeed, steep global hierarchies. Europe and North America hold most of the celebrity researchers, leading journals and research funds. I will discuss global inequalities in a later chapter, but want to register from the start that the research-based knowledge formation floats on a highly unequal and politically unstable world economy. It has no guarantee of security.

The work of research

In 1892 Karl Pearson, a founder of modern statistics (who later vanished into the crank science of eugenics), published a widely-read book called The Grammar of Science. This laid out an empiricist vision:

We have defined the scientific method to consist in the orderly classification of facts followed by the recognition of their relationship and recurring sequences. The scientific judgment is the judgment based upon this recognition and free from personal bias.¹⁰

The key word here is ‘orderly’, and Pearson’s book is just one of a whole genre that tries to define science’s traffic rules. Some like Pearson emphasize the facts or data, others like the Vienna Ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Making the knowledge: research
• 2 Learning and teaching
• 3 The collective intellectual: university workers
• 4 The global economy of knowledge
• 5 Privilege machines
• 6 The university business
• 7 Universities of hope
• 8 The good university
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index