Higher Education and Hope

Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Possibilities

Paul Gibbs, Andrew Peterson, Paul Gibbs, Andrew Peterson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030135669
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Around the world, the landscape of Higher Education is increasingly shaped by discourses of employability, rankings, and student satisfaction. Under these conditions, the role of universities in preparing students for all facets of life, and to contribute to the public good, is reshaped in significant ways: ways which are often negative and pessimistic. This book raises important and pressing questions about the nature and role of universities as formative educational institutions, drawing together contributors from both Western and non-Western perspectives. While the editors and contributors critique the current situation, the chapters evince a more humane and compassionate framing of the work of and in universities, based on positive and valued relationships and notions of the good. Drawing together a wide range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks to illuminate the issues discussed, this volume changes the debate to one of hopefulness and inspiration about the role of higher education for the public good: ultimately looking towards a potentially exciting and rewarding future through which humanity and the planet can flourish.

Part IInstitutional Possibilities

© The Author(s) 2019

Paul Gibbs and Andrew Peterson (eds.)Higher Education and Hopehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Resources of Hope: Truth and Reason

Jon Nixon^{1, 2}

(1)

School of Health and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK

(2)

Centre for Lifelong Learning Research and Development, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

Jon Nixon

Email: [email protected]

Throughout this chapter, I refer to each cited author by her or his full name on first citation and thereafter by the surname alone. The only exception to this self-imposed rule is in the case of authors who share the same surname and where confusions could therefore arise as to which particular author is being cited.

End Abstract

Introduction

We are living in a period of immense geopolitical instability and insecurity. Once again the spectre of nuclear war—as Jeffrey Lewis (2018) so brilliantly and terrifyingly highlights in his virtual history of 2020—haunts the globe, contributing to a general sense of powerlessness in the face of unpredictable and volatile forces beyond the control of any single individual or institution. It is true, of course, that some of the fear and insecurity is manufactured for commercial and political gain: in a deeply unequal society consumerism profits from insecurity, while in an increasingly divided society non-democratic and anti-democratic political forces thrive on fear. But it is also true that whatever peace exists is precarious and highly vulnerable. Not all our fears and insecurities are unfounded. It is at such times that hope gains traction, but only if it is imbued with social content; only, that is, if—in full recognition of the seeming hopelessness of the situation—it points a clear way forward.

In this chapter, I argue that institutions of higher education have a crucial role to play in creating a context in which people acquire the dispositions necessary for peaceful cohabitation in an increasingly divided world. Universities, colleges and conservatoires may not be able to change the course of history, but they can provide people with the resources of hope necessary to reason together in a spirit of truthfulness and trust. Following a brief discussion of the nature of the divided world in which we live, I argue that the institutions that comprise civil society are an expression of the human hope in civil association as a bulwark against social division and political strife. Having outlined in general terms how institutions of higher education can contribute to that journey of hope, I argue that the quest for truth and the practice of reasoning together are fundamental to higher education. They provide the resources necessary for living together in an increasingly divided world—and thereby laying the foundation of a common world based on truth, trust and reason.

Institutions cannot compensate for the geopolitical realities of a deeply divided world. But they can enable us as citizens of the world to gather the resources necessary for building a more secure and peaceful world. These resources—the resources of hope—include the human capacity for truthfulness fulfilled through the age-old practice of reasoning together. The university—in its various manifestations—provides a space for the preservation, sustainability and development of these resources. Without the university—for all its faults and failures—where would there be a space dedicated specifically to the quest for truth through the practice of reasoning together?

A Divided World

Hope is premised both on an understanding of the world as indeterminate and uncertain and on a belief in the human capacity to confront and cope with that indeterminacy and uncertainty. ‘Hope alone’, wrote Jürgen Moltmann (1967), ‘is to be called “realistic”, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change’. It is precisely because our experience of the world continually brings home to us the sheer contingency and unpredictability of human affairs that hope is essential: ‘Only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense in earthly hopes’ (p. 25). Those who hope, suggests Moltmann, stare fraught reality in the face, while perceiving whatever slim and seemingly impossible opportunities it affords.

Nowhere is this notion of hope more evident than in the age-old struggle to achieve lasting peace in a world partitioned and defined by war and its geopolitical consequences. Even those waging war invariably justify their actions on the grounds that war is the only hope of achieving—at some indeterminate point in the future—a final resolution that will bring about peace. There are, of course, exceptions, to this rule: tyrants who glory in war for its own sake; psychopaths for whom violence is an end in itself; sadists who take a perverse pleasure in the infliction of pain. But these are generally considered to exist on the outer fringes of humanity. They are exceptions to the general rule. We humans like to think of ourselves as unequivocally on the side of peace.

Whether we are right or wrong in this somewhat self-congratulatory perception of our own humanity is open to question. (Freud, Marx and Nietzsche—the great triumvirate of modernism—were more than a little sceptical regarding our innate propensity for peaceful cohabitation.) What is less open to question is that, while most people would prefer to avoid war, few actively seek to promote peace. In the main we settle for negative peace: the absence of overt conflict. Positive peace—creating the conditions necessary for sustainable co-existence—is another matter. The tragedy of our species may prove to be its willingness to settle for the provisional safety of negative peace while failing to contribute to the constitution of a lasting peace sustainable across generations.

The barbarity of what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) termed ‘the short 20th Century’ shocked Europe and much of the rest of the world into a realisation that the conditions necessary for lasting peace had to be re-constituted: rebuilt from the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fire-bombed cities of the Ruhr, the townships and ports laid waste across Europe.¹ Of course that was in a previous century. Now—in the first quarter of the twenty-first century—we have seen the same destruction of cities, communities, peoples, kinships and histories. Millions of humans are now wandering stateless—without citizenship or any of the rights that citizenship confers—across North Africa and the margins of the Mediterranean to regain a foothold on peace (see Kingsley 2016). For the upholders of negative peace, they pose a question: can your peace contain our fragility?

The answer to that question—as echoed across Europe and the USA—is a resounding ‘no’. Pull up the drawbridge, build the wall, ban people of difference, re-trench into nationalism and retreat into cultural isolationism: these are the ways in which negative peace is preserved and protected. Conflict is avoided through a process of self-isolation, whereby the insularity of the self-affirming community is celebrated in the name of some or other form of exceptionalism: national sovereignty, the primacy of one religious or racial group over others, cultural hegemony, etc. Plurality and heterogeneity are thereby denied in the interest of a self-preserving peace which refuses to engage with whatever lies beyond its own boundaries—or, if it does so, engages in either self-defensive recoil or aggressive posturing. This self-preserving peace is a variant of the age-old victor’s peace: a peace owned and maintained in the interests of the more powerful and at the expense of the less powerful.

The reassertion of national borders, argues the political theorist Manlio Graziano (2018), is a recent and dangerous feature of the contemporary geopolitical scene. Following the opening of the first border crossing between the two parts of Berlin on November 9, 1989, and at least until the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later, there was a brief period during which the hope expressed in the famous graffiti on the wall—‘No more wars, no more walls. A united world’—seemed as if it might be realised. That hope was short-lived. In the eighteen years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the European continent and its Eurasian margins added about 16,600 miles of official, internationally recognised borders. (If one were to add informal and unrecognised borders the number would increase considerably.) ‘In sum,’ writes Grazioni, ‘for every mile of dismantled borders (the Berlin Wall), 107 miles of new (official in 2007) borders have been built in Europe’ (p. 29).

With the increase in borders has come a resurgence of nationalism and a return to protectionist economic policies, both of which present a serious threat to an economic and political order that relies on market integration. Under such circumstances, claims Grazioni, ‘protectionism and the closing of borders are the inescapable prelude to a generalized war’ (p. 32); a claim less hyperbolical than it might otherwise seem given the wilful waging of a ‘trade war’ by the current USA administration and the willingness of the UK government to even consider severing its historic and hard-won trade deals with Europe. Given the unprecedented levels of interconnection required by the global economic market, ‘[t]rying to interrupt the intersecting flows of raw material, demi-finished products, and labor would’, insists Grazioni, ‘be the equivalent of cutting the veins of the world economic body’ (pp. 84–85).

Of course, ‘the world economic body’ is far from healthy, with, in particular, its blatant and callous disregard of inequality within and across national boundaries. Nevertheless, those who peddle a potential remedy for neoliberal disorder in the form of border maintenance and proliferation are, as Grazioni writes, hopelessly misguided: ‘Their compulsive rage for borders places them at the vanguard of a growing and widespread movement that demands isolation, protectionism, and autarchy at a time when isolation, protectionism, and autarchy are no longer possible’ (p. 79). This is a recipe not even for negative peace—and certainly not positive peace—but for a precarious peace reliant on threat and counter-threat, proxy wars, the demagogic posturing of world leaders, and an increasingly fragile world order.

If, as Moltmann suggests, the prime task of those who hope is to recognise both the fraught reality in which we find ourselves and the opportunities afforded to us by virtue of our participation in that reality, then the question arises: what resources of hope can the academy, as an association of artists, researchers, scholars and teachers, contribute to the sustainability of a divided world in a time of—at best—precarious peace? Before addressing that question directly—with specific reference to the notions of truth and reason—I shall outline what I consider to be the significance of the institutions of civil society generally and the wider role of the university as a crucial space of civil association.

Civil Association

The public institutions of civil society stand between the state and the individual. They uphold the rights of both, while preserving their own right to challenge and question those rights as and when appropriate. Of course, institutions frequently fail to live up to these high expectations. All too often they ossify, become inward looking and surrender to the allurements of managerialism and corporatism. But their democratic potential for ensuring our social freedoms remains of paramount importance. Those which seek to realise that potential—or even, under unpropitious circumstances, hold onto the hope of doing so—are what the social philosopher Axel Honneth (2014) terms ‘institutions of recognition’.

Only on the basis of ‘intersubjectively binding rules and symbols’, argues Honneth, ‘can individuals agree to identify with each other as members of a general community and to realise their aims and intentions reciprocally’. Thus, ‘[i]nstitutions of recognition are … not mere addenda or an external condition of intersubjective freedom’. On the contrary, ‘[b]ecause subjects cannot become aware of their mutual dependency without such institutions, the latter are at once the basis and the space of realization for this kind of freedom’ (p. 49). ‘Institutions of recognition’ are the realisation of our potential as free agents to recognise our inter-dependence and—in so doing—learn to live together in a shared world of difference.

Universities have historically aspired to be ‘institutions of recognition’. In practice, of course, they have colluded with privatisation, overseen a period of appalling professional atomisation, and entered a neoliberal market place in which competition and consumerism reign supreme. They have bowed over and over again to what the acclaimed author and theatre director Richard Eyre (2003) characterised as ‘the three horsemen of the new apocalypse—management, money and marketing’. But, historically, institutions of higher education—whether formally defined as universities, polytechnics or colleges—have always aspired a little h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Institutional Possibilities
• Part II. Pedagogical Possibilities
• Part III. Inter-/Intra-Personal Possibilities
• Back Matter