Higher education & its contradictions Archives • Page 5 of 7 • FreshEd

2019, Chinese Translations, Decolonization, Development, Higher Education Higher education & its contradictions, Marketisation & academic labour, Privatisation, markets & neoliberalism

Raewyn Connell
The Good University

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Today Raewyn Connell returns to FreshEd to talk about her new book, The Good University. In it, Raewyn takes a deep dive into the labor that makes a university possible while also detailing the main troubles the institution currently faces.

She argues that a good university must work for the social good rather than for profit. It must embrace its democratic roots and protect the process of being truthful.

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. She is an active trade unionist and advocate for workers’ rights, student autonomy and educational reform.

Photo by Peter Hall

Citation: Raewyn, Connell, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 157, podcast audio, June 3, 2019. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/raewynconnell2/

Will Brehm 1:30
Raewyn Connell, welcome back to FreshEd.

Raewyn Connell 1:31
I’m very glad to be here.

Will Brehm 1:33
So, congratulations on your new book. And just halfway through this book, when I was reading it, you tell this wonderful story about this famous Jacaranda tree at the University of Sydney. And I want to just ask, what made this tree so famous? And why did you end up writing about it?

Raewyn Connell 1:48
Well, it’s a very beautiful tree. It has lovely purple flowers, and it’s absolutely covered in blossom at a certain time of year, which happens to correspond with when graduations are held. So, for many years, since the invention of color photography, all the graduates would go and stand in front of the tree in their robes and get the photographs at the end of their degree. And it’s all in front of this sort of mock Gothic sandstone building in golden stone. It’s a lovely picture. Well, a few years ago, five or perhaps eight years ago, the University began including in its advertising, a picture of a tutorial group -a discussion group- sitting on the lawn in front of this tree in full bloom. And that was a lovely picture for advertising with the mock Gothic building behind suggesting how ancient and venerable the University was. Unfortunately, it wasn’t true for two reasons: one, no tutorials are allowed to meet on that lawn. Two, the tree actually blossoms after tutorials are over. So, the thing was a fake! And it seemed to me that that somehow represented what was happening in universities as they became more commercialized. There was more fakery and misrepresentation. And just a couple of years after that image was used in the advertising, the tree died. Now, no biologist among my friends would agree that the tree died of shame but one suspected, and that somehow to me symbolized that the university in some sort of crisis. Yeah, universities in general. Well, by corporate standards, there’s no crisis. You know, the higher education industry is booming. There are now more than 200 million university and college students around the world. The flow of fees and money into the system is bigger than ever before. So, from a profit-making and corporate growth perspective, we’re doing wonderfully in universities. But, by other standards, there are terrible problems. I mean the casualization of academic labor force, virtual end of the prospect of a career for very large numbers of university teachers, the growing level of distrust and antagonism between workforce in universities and the managers, the growing level of inequality within universities just in sheer money terms, the level of anger that you see in conflicts in universities now, and of course, the decline of government support for higher education in most parts of the world, not quite all, which escalates in some countries like Hungary -it’s a famous example recently- of outright attacks by government on the university sector -at any rate, parts of it- showing a kind of political antagonism to good higher education, which is very disturbing, indeed. And in that kind of sense, yeah, there is a crisis that’s bubbling/boiling up around us.

Will Brehm 5:25
Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen photos of many years ago, protests in Chile, just recently, protests in Brazil. Even in the UK, there’s been these mass protests of university lecturers fighting for basically better pensions and better wages and trying to resist this sort of corporatization of the university. So where do we begin? If this is this crisis that we see -and in your book, you basically start by looking at the foundations of the university, and really focus on the massive amount of labor that universities do in a way. All the different types of people that make a university possible require huge amounts of labor. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what sort of labor actually happens based on your long career in universities?

Raewyn Connell 6:17
Well, what I do in the first chapters of the book is show how research, the production of knowledge, has to be understood as a form of work -a complex and intricate kind of work, but work nevertheless, with a workforce in certain conditions. And the same for teaching too. Education involves a form of labor by the teachers and by the students for that matter. And we have to understand the circumstances in which this work is done, the relationships that shape the work in order to understand the production of knowledge and the educational process itself. Now as the universities have got more commercialized and commodified, this labor has been changing. And the conditions of this labor has been changing. So, the academic work: Well, there’s a much higher level of casualization and insecurity for academic workers, as more of the face-to-face teaching is done by people in insecure, short-term jobs. The role of academics in longer term jobs has also changed. They’ve become a kind of middle management group responsible for organizing a casualized, insecure workforce. There’s been an intensification of labor. This is not unusual in today’s economy. That’s true in other industries as well. But it’s quite striking in academic work. The growth of a long hours culture, the decline of the sense that you have time to sit and think and look around, read around and come up with fundamental new ideas -this is now harder simply because of the change in the kind of work. And there’s more control over academic labor via audits and measurement, and management surveillance. Even a simple decision, like when you’ve done some research, you’ve written an article about it, where you publish it, that used to be your own decision as to where you should publish it to reach the audience who needed to know. No! That doesn’t apply anymore. There are now management pressures to publish only in high-prestige journals in the most central countries in the world, and so forth. So, that’s a very significant set of changes in academic labor. And for non-academic workers, what I call the operations workers, who are half the workforce of universities, the work also has been changing -sometimes in the same ways. There’s more sort of surveillance and control from above, so fewer people are just trusted to get on with a job, assume that they know what their job is, and they should get on with it -there’s less and less of that. More surveillance, more auditing. But there’s also more outsourcing of work in universities. That is, workers who actually work for the university, but are not employed by the university, rather employed by another company, which has a contract with the university management and that changes relationships in universities too as it would in any place where that kind of thing happened. Because people working in an outsourced basis for another company don’t have rights, don’t have recognition on campus, are not likely to be there long-term so they can’t develop long-term relationships with the teaching or research staff, and there’s just less of the basic, ground-level know-how on which universities have depended in order to work effectively as organizations. So, more control concentrated at the top means less effective work down below. And that has been happening on a large scale in universities.

Will Brehm 10:25
And has there been any consequences or impacts on student learning? I mean, this seems to be a major function of the university. So, with these various reforms, with this corporate-style management, this power residing at the top in these administrations, what effect on the student?

Raewyn Connell 10:42
Two things: One, because corporate management drives for lower wage costs, lower labor costs, they’re terribly interested in technologizing university teaching. So, MOOCs are the classic example of that, the massive online open courses, which have something like a 90% dropout rate, I mean they’re quite stunning. But in other ways too, the learning experience is more computerized, more technologized, therefore, more -and this is the other side of it- in various ways more formalized. So, we have more frequent and technologically controlled testing. There’s less scope for ambitious but out of the way learning practices by the students. They’re more, sort of on a prescribed path all the time. I can remember -this is, you know, I’m now one of the older generation very much. When I was an undergraduate doing a history program, we actually had two years in the middle of the degree with no exams at all. We had an exam at the end of the two, but for two years, we could pursue our own learning interests, we had to attend courses, lectures, tutorials, and so forth. But we weren’t tested. And, you know, modern students, I think -and this applies to schools, as well as universities- are tested to within an inch of their lives sometimes. And I think that really degrades the kind of learning experience that a university should be.

Will Brehm 12:25
So, one of the things you mentioned earlier was that there’s something like 200 million students enrolled in higher education around the world. And in a way, this is very much a massification of higher education. So many more people today are going to university than say 50 years ago. And we talked-

Raewyn Connell 12:45
-and that’s a good thing.

Will Brehm 12:46
Right. That’s a good thing. And universities often talk about this in terms of equity, and diversity, and opportunity, and enlarging that student base. But in your book, you start calling the university sort of “privilege machines”. You talk about how they actually produce inequality. And so, I wanted to know, in your mind, how are universities complicit in the production of inequality?

Raewyn Connell 13:08
Hmm. Well, universities have always been connected with privilege and power throughout their history. So, a phrase like “a college man”, a bit out of date now but it used to be an expression which signaled leisure and money among young people. Well, as the university system has expanded, it’s also become more unequal in itself. So, we’ve now got this massive hierarchy of universities from the very well-funded privileged institutions down to a worldwide mass of higher education institutions, colleges, universities, called different things in different places. And that’s symbolized by the league tables that are now published, you know, with Harvard on top, and MIT and Stanford up there at the top, and your local community college way down at the bottom. Now, the biggest part of the expansion, very recently, has been in privately owned, for-profit universities. That’s now a large sector worldwide. And I would emphasize the for-profit part because what these kinds of colleges sell, basically, is vocational training. They do hardly any research, that’s not their game and they have a very casualized workforce so that you’re not getting a high quality of educational thinking there because people don’t have time and opportunity to do that thinking. But you do have connections with local industries, local businessmen, who are often on the boards, and even involved in developing the curricula of those kinds of colleges. So, what you’re getting then, is an apparent mass expansion but also a change in the character of most higher education as that expansion occurs, which becomes a thinning out of the university or the college experience and a commodification of what it’s taken to be. So, the advertising, the marketing of the for-profit private colleges, is all about what this ticket you’re getting should yield you in terms of future income. Now that benefit often doesn’t happen because labor markets themselves are changing, and the meaning of qualifications in labor markets change. But that’s the way universities, on a mass scale, are now sold. I’m entirely in support of professional education. I think that’s a correct business of universities, and there I differ from some other critics who criticize the idea of professional education. I think that’s a central role of universities. But professional education itself should be an intellectual proposition, it should be involve thinking carefully and at length about the ethics, about the social meaning of the profession that you’re going into, it should involve understanding the clients that your profession is going to meet, so it truly involved social sciences, philosophy, humanities, other technical areas -all of those kinds of knowledges should be involved in good professional education. And I think that is being thinned out now in a very worrying way.

Will Brehm 16:48
So, I guess the obvious question then is, what can be done? What does a university look like that doesn’t embrace this corporate management, doesn’t embrace these sort of for-profit logics that many universities are around the world today? Like, what’s the alternative in a way?

Raewyn Connell 17:05
Well, there are multiple alternatives. It’s not a single blueprint that we should be following. That’s part of my critique of the “league table” mentality that assumes we all want to be like Harvard and we don’t frankly. So, one thing then is diversity. Multiplicity of purposes, and styles, and approaches to teaching, and knowledge. There are multiple knowledge systems in the world. We’ve talked about that kind of thing before. It should be part of the universities thinking. Universities now model hierarchy and even propagandize in favor of inequality. All this jargon that comes out about “excellence” really gets up my nose!

Will Brehm 17:58
I don’t know what it even means!

Raewyn Connell 18:00
It’s just a signifier of inequality, basically. And also, the nonsense that comes out about leadership. Leadership, for what for heaven’s sake! in what direction? Well, I think there is a direction which we should be leading and that’s democracy, and public service, and that doesn’t need hierarchies and league tables for heaven’s sake! Talk about self-satirizing university systems, they’re now developing league tables for public service!

Will Brehm 18:39
So how can a university be democratic? How can that ideal be embraced inside a university?

Raewyn Connell 18:45
Well, parts of it is already there. We do know how to run institutions democratically. And that’s what you know, the last 200 years of global history has taught us. There are ways of doing that. So, we have leaderships that are elected, we have forms of responsibility, from top-down and bottom-up, rather than just one way. We diversify the membership of institutions, we take steps to make social inclusion real rather than simply symbolic and selective. We can’t have a democratic education and a democratic knowledge system in an authoritarian institution, it doesn’t work.

Will Brehm 19:34
So, what would that mean? That would mean giving more power to the professors to make decisions to drive the direction of the university, than the central management?

Raewyn Connell 19:43
More power to the whole of the workforce. Remember that half of the workforce of universities are non-academic and they also have know-how and commitment and ideas and should be part of the governing process of the institution. I mean, what I’m talking about is, you know, you can put in the phrase, ‘industrial democracy’, we know how to do that. We’ve done it in cooperatives, in mainstream industries, we do know how to do that kind of thing. It’s not rocket science. But we have been shifting away from those ideas in higher education, as in other industries recently, and there’s a struggle on our hands, I think. The other thing to remember is that at the core of the modern university is a system of knowledge, which I call the ‘research-based knowledge formation’. So, research is central to the knowledge on which we build our curricula, on which we base our professional practices, and which we give to the world at large, is what universities offer. And there’s a democratic core in research, actually. I mean, we don’t necessarily represent it that way because we give Nobel prizes, to a very few top scientists, or the media will drool over the professor with the furthest away galaxy, or the latest cure for cancer. But in fact, research knowledge is a democratic theme in itself. It’s produced by a whole workforce, not just by individual stars. Particular research programs involve research teams, not, in most cases, individual stars. Or the individual stars are standing for teams of 20, 30, 100 people. And they depend on other teams and other researchers. The term publication, which has become a kind of sight of tension and horror for young academics, is actually a sign of that democratic character of knowledge. We put our knowledge out there when we publish. We put it out there for everyone to see, and for other people to build on. That’s the whole point of publication.

Will Brehm 22:08
Yeah, its publication, not ‘priva-cation’.

Raewyn Connell 22:11
Exactly, exactly! And we’re building in the knowledge system, that universities depend on and produce, we’re building a “knowledge commons”. We’re building a common social resource in research-based knowledge. So, there’s a democratic element at the very heart of universities, which is not necessarily immediately obvious, but it’s there. And we can build on it.

Will Brehm 22:39
And it’s particularly not obvious when, you know, Elsevier and Wiley and Sons, and Taylor and Francis are owning that knowledge commons. And it sort of does take that public out of publication.

Raewyn Connell 22:52
Yeah, that’s a classic example of the harm that’s done by privatization, I think. And it is being resisted. There’s quite a strong movement now to reverse that by open access policies on the part of funders, by a kind of movement among academics towards open access for other ways of circulating knowledge that don’t run into those monetary barriers. That’s a hot topic in universities now and I’m very glad to see that kind of struggle going on.

Will Brehm 23:29
So, the beginning of our talk today, you talked about this sort of fake image that the University of Sydney was promoting, and it sort of gets to this idea of truth. And this idea of, what is the role of the universities in being truth?

Raewyn Connell 23:46
Yeah. I should say that I’m not particularly blaming the University of Sydney. I mean, that’s just where I happen to be. And I happened to know that tree from a long time, because I’m also a graduate of this university. But what the University of Sydney was doing was what the University of Melbourne is doing, the University of Queensland is doing, what all the universities in the country in one way or another have been doing, and internationally too. So, I was trying to give an example of something that is, in fact global, as a problem. And why I think that’s significant is that universities do have a cultural role. I mean, they’re not -the corporation famously has, there’s a lovely saying, by Lord Chancellor of England in the 18th century, that “a corporation has no body to be kept, and no soul to be damned therefore it can do as it likes”. And that is pretty much the attitude of the mainstream corporation. And as universities approach the status of money-making corporations which indeed, some of them now are 100% that, they inhabit that kind of situation. And the problem is that universities DO have a soul. And that soul concerns truth. It’s the cultural commitment to telling the truth. And anyone who has done research, you know, I’ve been a researcher for more than 50 years. And I know how difficult it is to establish truth. But that’s what research is, it’s hard work. It’s a struggle. So, you know, it involves interacting with many people and trying to understand situations and speak the truth. It’s difficult, but it’s what we’re about. And if universities start fudging the truth in advertising, pretending to be what they are not, misrepresenting reality, then they are doing terrible damage to their own cultural position as the institutions that embody truth telling. That seems to be a very, very serious problem. And, and that’s why I get, you know, more angry about what seems to many managements to be just good commercial practice. It’s not good university practice.

Will Brehm 26:05
Are you hopeful that the university will soon move away from this corporate-style management? Or are there examples of universities around the world that are actually doing something different? And yes, it could be a multiplicity and a diversity of different ways of managing and organizing the university but sometimes I get very pessimistic about the whole industry that I have spent the last ten years of my life working in. And I don’t know, is it going to change in my lifetime or am I going to be battling this corporate-style management for the rest of my career?

Raewyn Connell 26:41
It’s a good question. And I think everybody involved in these issues at times despairs at the difficulty of moving in a more democratic direction. And I’m sustained, I think -I mean, I’m originally a historian. So, I’m always interested in the history of institutions. And I took some time when I was working on this project to go back into the history of universities and look specifically at the history of alternative universities. And it turns out, there is a wonderful history of alternative and experimental universities all over the world, which is not all that widely known. But things like, for instance, there’s an extraordinary story of the Flying University in Poland, which was developed back in the 1880s, when Poland or most of Poland was part of the Russian Tsarist Empire. And the Russian regime tried to control universities, to ratify them, and to exert regime control over them. So, the Poles went underground and invented a kind of underground university, which became known as the Flying University because its classes would move around from place to place in Warsaw in order to avoid the police. And taught a whole curriculum, natural science, educational sciences, humanities and so forth, all under the radar. And after the 1905 revolution in Russia, that came to the surface, became legal, became a regular university. Then Poland was invaded by the Nazis and they did it again, under incredible repression during the Second World War. Then the Russians threw the Nazis out and established a communist regime in Russia, which restored the universities but also attempted to control them and the Poles did it again! They had a Flying University teaching all the forbidden kinds of social sciences and humanities. Now, that’s one story, there are anti-colonial universities in India, which was set up by people like Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, back in the 1920s as a place for the meeting of civilizations rather than the Eurocentric curriculum in the universities the British had set up in the colonial system. When the pink tide occurred in Latin America 10 or 15 years ago, a series of progressive governments around the continent, they set up reform universities too. Indigenous universities, working class universities, universities in remote parts of the country with rural populations and so forth, publicly funded, bringing in new groups of people who, for years, they’ve been excluded from the university system. In AotearoaNew Zealand, there’s a university which is based on Maori indigenous culture. Similar things in parts of India, all over Central America, in parts of South America, like Bolivia, there are now indigenous universities which have curriculum that try to blend research-based knowledge with indigenous knowledge and develop curricula that are relevant to indigenous communities. So, there’s lots of experimentation in the history when you go looking for it, and that, to me, is a deep source of hope. People have done it in the past, it’s still possible for us to move in these directions now.

Will Brehm 30:34
And that actually is incredibly hopeful that the system that we’re in today is not static, and it can change and there is a history of change over time. And that’s deeply, deeply hopeful.

Raewyn Connell 30:45
I had a bit of involvement in this kind of work back in the 1960s when I was a radical student among the many other radical students. I was involved in setting up what we called Free University in Sydney, which was a student-directed, cooperative learning institution that did a couple of dozen courses on a variety of issues that we felt were missing from the mainstream university curricula. I’ve taught in publicly funded universities that were part of another reform movement, the kind of “Green Fields” universities set up in the 1960s and 70s in countries like Australia, Britain, the United States. The expansion of the University of California was a good example of that, places like UC Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara Davis, were involved. You know, experimentation with curricula, combinations of disciplines, student-centered teaching practices, lots of really interesting educational innovation happening in those institutions over a period of 20-25 years. So even in the mainstream system, it is possible to innovate and democratize in inventive ways.

Will Brehm 32:04
Well, Raewyn Connell, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. You know, I read your book, and it’s like a love letter to the university itself. And it’s critical but supportive and offers so much beautiful history. So, I mean, I can’t recommend it enough. And I just want to say thank you for writing the book and getting these ideas out there. And, as a young academic, I must say that I am actually very hopeful of being in this industry and in this career and hopefully getting involved in some of these new movements to diversify the university. So, thank you very much for joining FreshEd and you’re always welcome back on in the future.

Raewyn Connell 32:40
That’s great to hear. Thank you.

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June 3, 2019/by Will Brehm

2019, Chinese Translations, Higher Education, Law, Max Antony-Newman Higher education & its contradictions, Marketisation & academic labour

Neal H. Hutchens
Free speech and academic freedom on campus

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Are there limits to what can be said on college campuses? When a far-right-wing speaker is disinvited to speak on campus, is it an issue of Free Speech?

My guest today, Neal Hutchens, explores these issues in his research and writing. Ultimately, his look at the legal issues facing universities when it comes to free speech and academic freedom goes to the heart of the purpose of higher education. What are colleges for?

Neal H. Hutchens serves as Professor and Chair in the University of Mississippi School of Education’s Department of Higher Education. His latest opinion piece on campus free speech laws was published in The Conversation in April.

Today’s episode was put together in collaboration with the Education Law Association.

Citation: Hutchens, Neal H., interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 156, podcast audio, May 27, 2019. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/hutchens/

Will Brehm 2:04
Neal Hutchens, welcome to FreshEd.

Neal Hutchens 2:05
Thank you very much, Will. I’m very happy to be here.

Will Brehm 2:08
So, about two years ago Ann Coulter, her appearance at the University of California, Berkeley was cancelled. Why was this event canceled?

Neal Hutchens 2:17
So, Ann Coulter, who is very much a conservative pundit -likes to play that role of conservative lightning rod- was invited by a student group at University of California, Berkeley to appear on campus. Berkeley is of course historically a center of free speech and expression in protests -that goes back to the student rights movement of the 1960s. Essentially what happened, with Coulter appearing on campus -and it was at a time that has continued of a lot of tension on campuses about certain kinds of speakers. Especially, I would say even speakers that push the envelope more than Coulter but certainly people like Coulter who want to advance a certain agenda. They want to really hit people’s buttons, they want to incite, they want to be provocative. So essentially what happened, there was a disagreement over where to have the event. The University was worried about -not just supporters of Coulter- but individuals who are opposed to her, so counter-protesters. And that’s happened at UC Berkeley several times in the last couple of years, certainly, and it’s something we could talk about later what happened at the University of Virginia and in Charlottesville, where we had riots that became deadly. So, you had Neo-Confederate white nationalist protesters and counter-protesters. So, it’s something that we have seen in the last several years that at certain times colleges and universities have speakers on campus, not just controversial, but institutions really have to worry about issues of safety for their students and for others attending. And so, with Ann Coulter, it really became a dispute over when to have the event, where to have the event. You had disagreements over whether she was being denied access but essentially pulled out. Later there was some litigation involving the student groups and others that had supported her being there with the university that was settled in 2018. Where the university agreed to pay some attorney fees but said essentially, we’re not having to change anything. We’re just entering into this settlement to avoid paying a larger amount. But you also had groups that are supporters that said this is a great victory for free speech rights. So that got a lot of headlines also at Berkeley and at other places you’ve had Milo Yiannopoulos. You’ve had Richard Spencer, sometimes. Charles Murray, who is another speaker that has gained headlines and you’ve had individuals protesting their appearance on campus. But this is kind of a dynamic -it gains a lot of headlines- but that we’ve seen played out on college campuses, especially in recent years. It’s not necessarily new issues of speech and expression and protest. They’ve been going on for decades at college campuses, but it’s really taken on a new profile and a new level of attention in recent years. And I think some of that is probably because we have certain kinds of organizations that are really pushing certain kinds of speakers on campus. I think they have a political agenda behind it. But that’s a way I think, to kind of contextualize what was happening with Ann Coulter’s appearance that did not happen at UC Berkeley.

Will Brehm 5:36
So, for UC Berkeley, the University, the administration was concerned about student safety and that was the sort of reasoning for canceling the event, not the issue of trying to limit free speech. Is that how they interpret what happened?

Neal Hutchens 5:55
I think that if you talk with the leadership of the institution, that would very much be their view is that instead of trying to regulate the content of the speech or the viewpoints expressed, the institution has an interest in safety. It also has an interest in keeping on the everyday functioning of the institution going even while you have speaking events going on. Now, Coulter and her supporters would have challenged that, “No, the institution is trying to shut down views because it doesn’t like us”. Again, I think a point could be made that I think sometimes for speakers like Coulter, or the organizations, especially some of the national ones that support her, they also get a lot of mileage out of being allowed on campuses. In other words, they’re pushing to be provocative so that really is part of the agenda. I think, if you peel back a little bit and examine it. But for institutions, by and large, and especially for public institutions, something that we’ll probably chat about soon is that they do have special legal responsibilities under the First Amendment, where they’re limited in being able to pick and choose speakers based on liking or disliking the message that they’re delivering. For instance, when Penn State University decided to not allow Richard Spencer who’s a white nationalist on campus: in its announcement, the University made very clear that its concern over safety was the guiding rationale for not allowing Spencer on campus. It said in the statement, the University did, that the university and its leadership were totally against all of his views. They were in opposition to any kind of values of the university, but it said, we’re not seeking to not have him on campus because of the views but because of the safety issues. And that’s something that gets muddled in a lot of these debates, is that institutions, you’ll have fingers pointed at them with the accusation that they’re really trying to stifle speech. But that can get muddled into the fact that they’re also really trying to regulate speech on campus in a way to, again, ensure safety and also all the other kinds of things that are happening on a college campus from classes to other events. And that’s not to say that institutions don’t violate these standards. I do think that institutions sometimes will overstep or overreach when it comes to regulating speech on campus but that’s certainly not always the case. And I think there are a lot of college administrators that they want to uphold the law and they want to make sure they’re following their policies and practices.

Will Brehm 8:41
Do you think that when some of these institutions do overstep the regulation of speech as you say, is there sort of a bias against right wing, conservative discourse and ideologues who come onto campus? Because you know, you hear about the Spencer’s and the Coulter’s, but you rarely hear about big events on campus that cause the same sort of political storm of more left-leaning or progressive thinkers that are also being invited on campus.

Neal Hutchens 9:15
I think that, one: that would be a really interesting area of empirical study. So, for instance, we have some research that would indicate that most college professors or a lot of college professors are left-leaning politically. But I think that’s a very distinct issue from whether or not institutions are more apt to shut down conservative speakers. I think something that would have to go into consideration of that issue, and I will admit, my view on this is I think that there are certain groups that have really seized up on the idea of free speech as political camouflage for other issues. I think Turning Point USA is a great example for that. Really using the idea of speech to push forward a political agenda. I think that in the current presidential administration we’ve seen that. For instance, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, when he was in the part of the Trump administration came out very forcefully for free speech. I’m a native of Alabama. I remember that when Jeff Sessions was a political leader in Alabama, he tried to block LGBTQ student organizations and events. And so, I think that there’s been a narrative put forth that colleges and universities are seeking to block conservative speakers, because I really think it benefits a larger political agenda. And I do think there are some counter examples we can consider. So, for instance, we certainly have private colleges and universities that do regulate student speech very heavily. One example would be Liberty University. So, the president of Liberty University is a very strong supporter of President Trump. Liberty University has been noted on several occasions for censoring student journalists. There have also been issues in the past about the student democrats on campus, so that would be one example. For our religious colleges and universities that often do get left out of the conversation from certain groups, there’s been a lot of debate and struggle over LGBTQ student organizations and not allowing those on campus. I’ll give you another example of how this can often play out. So, Tennessee is a state like several other states that has enacted a campus speech law. So, the idea was -and if you look at the supporters in Tennessee- the legislature said, “We need this law because colleges and universities are often censoring conservative speakers”. So, we have a law in place in Tennessee. Roughly at the same time that this law has been passed and enacted, you’ll find that legislators and others in Tennessee have really been against an event called “Sex Week” at the University of Tennessee, which is sponsored by a student organization. And so that would be an example of -and you find you find these examples again and again of where, you know, and you can find them on the political left or the political right. But certainly, the idea that only conservative ideas can be a threat in relation to free speech. Another example would be that we had former Senator Kerry, who was invited to give a commencement speech at Creighton University. And the Republican leadership in that state said, “No, no, no, he shouldn’t be allowed to give the commencement speech”, and he actually pulled out. And so, that’s an example of how really these threats to speech can come from either side of the political spectrum. PEN America -which among its roles as an advocacy organization promotes freedom of speech and expression -it issued a report recently that I think is really informative. And it talks about there’s really not a free speech crisis on America’s college campuses but there are threats that exist. And these threats can come from either side of the political aisle. And also, the fact that I think that certain organizations have really pushed this idea of a free speech threat to advance an agenda that really has other political components to it. That’s much different than say, for instance, the American Civil Liberties Union, which I think if you look at their stance on free speech ideas, tends to be more neutral. Whatever the nature of the speech is, there are certain protections that should adhere to it. Another example of, I think a more neutral party in a lot of the campus free speech debates, would be the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE as it’s often called -it’s become a really pivotal player in campus speech debates. So, FIRE will tend to take heat, I notice from both the political left and the political right, because they tend to advocate kind of for either side. You know, an interesting thing, for instance, would be if you go to a site like Turning Point USA and see the kind of litigation they’re supporting. You’ll see it coming from one side of the political spectrum. It tends to be if you take an organization like FIRE, or even the ACLU, you’ll see that they’ll become involved in speech cases that might be labeled the political left or the right or really, that don’t fit any, in our conventional notions of the political spectrum in the United States.

Will Brehm 14:44
So, you know, a lot of this obviously has to deal with the First Amendment, the freedom of speech. But we also know that American higher education is filled with public universities and private universities, and religiously affiliated universities. What are some of the legal issues that are circulating within these different types of institutions when it comes to speech and protecting speech?

Neal Hutchens 15:12
So that’s a really important distinction that can get lost in a lot of these conversations. For public colleges and universities, the First Amendment, which is often talked about -what that means is that they’re part of the government. When I teach a class on education law, and I have people that work at public colleges and universities, I’ll say, “Raise your hand if you work for the government”. And sometimes people don’t really raise their hands and I’ll say, “Raise your hand if you work for so and so institution which is a public institution”, and I’ll say, “You work for the government, you’re part of the government”. And so, to work at a public college or university means that you are part of the government. And under the First Amendment, there are limits on what the government can do in relation to the speech rights of individuals. And that holds true at public colleges and universities. So, a lot of the speech debates that have grabbed the headlines for instance, they’ve involved where student groups or others have invited a speaker onto campus. And in those kinds of situations where a college or university has created what’s often called a forum, a space for a particular kind of speech, usually under the First Amendment, outside of some pretty narrow exceptions, the government doesn’t get to pick and choose messages. And so, for instance, let’s say that I’m an administrator at a public college or university and we have a policy that student groups can invite speakers to campus. We’ve said any recognized student group is allowed to reserve certain space on campus for speakers. Now they have to be a recognized student group. They have to make sure that they do the application to reserve the space, they have to follow other kinds of rules. If they have done that, and I see Ann Coulter is scheduled to speak on campus, I, as an administrator at a public college or university cannot decide, “I don’t like the views of Ann Coulter. So, I’m just not going to let Ann Coulter speak.” Those are the kinds of things that are just very much textbook, elementary examples of violations of the First Amendment. Now, in the case of Richard Spencer, or the events that we saw at the University of Virginia, those start to be harder questions because I actually think that that’s where institutions have to look at the fact that these speakers are not really engaged in speech as much as they’re engaged in threats. And so, what are called “true threats”, or sometimes you’ll hear the term “direct threats”, those aren’t protected by the First Amendment. And so, I think where institutions are wrestling, when you have various groups that are wanting to bring speakers onto campus that -not just controversial- but that are really crossing over into threats. At my own institution, the University of Mississippi, we really recently wrestled with that issue. We’re of course in Mississippi, which is in the deep south, this is an institution that really has a historical legacy to deal with in terms of segregation. Our institution, in the last several years, has removed the state flag from campus. But for instance, we have Confederate monuments on campus, which we’re in the process of probably relocating. We had Neo-Confederates come to campus. People really didn’t want them here, but the institution was left with, how do you regulate that in the First Amendment? And these Neo-Confederate groups, I think, really, the institution had to really look closely at them and engage in a lot of outreach to see was the rhetoric really speech that the university couldn’t regulate on content grounds, or was it crossing over into threat -and that’s some of what institutions are having to deal with. And after Virginia where we had a counter-protestor who was killed in the events that happened at the University of Virginia, it shows that institutions have to take that very seriously. When Richard Spencer, several years ago, Richard Spencer, again a white nationalist, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University, and the University wanted to not allow him to speak. A court said, “No. The University has to allow him to speak”. But there was actually some violence that erupted after that. No one luckily was killed, like what happened at Virginia. But in light of that, institutions have had to look at their policies for when outside speakers can come to campus. And so, there’s been some talk about, and for instance, Texas A&M University after Spencer was there changed their policy. I think Auburn University if they hadn’t changed it, they were looking at it. But in all these contexts, if a forum has been existed for speakers -either for invited speakers or even if the university has opened up a forum to outside speakers- generally under the First Amendment, outside of some particular exceptions, like true threats, the university cannot engage in the business of picking and choosing what views that it likes.

Will Brehm 20:18
So, I mean, one of the questions I have that comes up is that the distinction between a “true threat” and speech -like that line, I would imagine, is quite blurry.

Neal Hutchens 20:30
It can be blurry in the sense that -again, when rhetoric has crossed that line, and I do think that’s something that institutions as they’ve kind of become the societal focal point for a lot of these speech disputes. I mean, think about it. There are a lot of public places that these groups could decide that they want to go and show up and have events. No one is saying, “We’re going to head to the DMV. The DMV parking lot is where we want to have our major protest.” It shows the importance of higher education in society to colleges and universities. So, colleges and universities have been targeted for particular reasons and we’ve seen an escalation in the last several years by certain groups that are doing that. And I do think that after what happened at the University of Virginia, institutions have had to quickly ramp up how sophisticated they are about that. Now, I think one could say, one of the components has been in that is actually I think, for instance, campus law enforcement, or even campus security, coordinating with local and state law enforcement officials to actually get background on these individuals. One of the things that you’ll hear about when you have speakers like this coming to campus is actually engaging with them and reaching out to understand what their motives are. To understand events that may have happened. But one of the things I think that can cause consternation is that the idea of a true threat is something that could be restricted under the First Amendment is not that actually the individual has, maybe they don’t even have an intention of carrying out the threat. But if they are targeting particular individuals or groups, and is an actual credible threat of harm, or physical violence, then I think institutions absolutely can and should take action. And I don’t think that you would have advocacy groups like the ACLU or FIRE, certainly, they’re not going to argue with that. Where things get a little hazier tends to be often, for instance, under the disruption standard. And so, for instance, recently at the University of Arizona, you had a group of students that were referred to as the “Arizona 3”. There were a group of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers that were speaking on campus. The students wanted to engage in some kind of protest or disruption, that somewhat, although it looks like the presentation by the ICE officers was allowed to continue. The protesters followed the officers, at least somewhat to their car, and the students were arrested. And initially, there were criminal charges filed against the protesters. As I understand it, those charges have now been dropped. But that has also tended to be -there’s the threat issue, but I think the disruption issue, especially is where a lot of colleges and universities are trying to decide, at what point should we, for instance, have individuals arrested? Or at what point is this really in the educational realm, and at most we’re really looking at maybe the Student Conduct process, or also the fact that this is again, educational. We have students who are very engaged in what they’re doing. Maybe we should take a step back and before we say, our first option is to engage in some kind of discipline, maybe this is an educational moment. I remember not too many years ago, there was a lot of angst over the fact that college students were not engaged. They were passive, they didn’t care. And so now guess what, we have a lot of college students who care.

Will Brehm 24:16
Maybe very engaged. Too engaged for some people’s likings I would imagine.

Neal Hutchens 24:20
Yeah, I mean, I that’s it. It’s like, we want you to be active and engaged. But don’t do it so much that it makes us uncomfortable or disruptive. Colleges and universities are really, they’re mimicking, or they’re mirroring what’s happening in society. There’s just a lot of tension. There is a lot of disagreement. And so, for institutions, I think it’s very hard when students have this passion. And I’m now really speaking of students. I’m not speaking of external speakers. But for our student population, I think we have to be careful to be too legalistic, or to react too harshly to the fact that students are engaged in this process of activism and discovery. And so, for instance, that’s why I advocate if students were to take over an administrative building, I don’t think the first option is that you call the police and have people arrested for trespassing. I think your first option is, you talk, you engage. And hopefully through that process, in addition to listening to the students and the issues they’re bringing out, it’s also a chance for the students to consider what are the appropriate forms of activism? How, when should we take certain action? When should we not? Now I also think that we’re just in a period of where there’s a reexamination of what speech standards should be. The United States, under our federal constitution, and a lot of private institutions have adopted very robust free speech principles. This isn’t exactly the same that all countries do. So, for instance, in France and Germany, you can[not] have certain kinds of speech in France, anti-Semitic speech. Certainly, in Germany, images or speech related to Nazism can be restricted. You have libel laws in the UK that are much more friendly for individual suing under those laws. And so, it’s not that I’m saying that the United States automatically needs to change what it’s doing. But you certainly have a group of students and scholars and others who are saying, also, we maybe need to reexamine some of our free speech standards. Prioritizing our free speech standards, and ignoring other kinds of standards, such as a commitment to diversity inclusivity. And so, I think that is a divide that’s happening. And it’s something that’s playing out intellectually. But I would also say as someone who is an advocate of free speech. Well, that’s what we advocate all the time, exploring and testing ideas. And that’s also happening with what should speech standards be. So, for instance, it was really interesting. In the last year or so you’ve had two really prominent constitutional law scholars, Robert Post at Yale, and then Erwin Chemerinsky and they both wrote these op-eds where they really took different views of how free speech should play out on campus. So, these are two very distinguished scholars who are offering different viewpoints for this. So, I do think that these ideas are also being contested in a way that we’ll see -some of the students who don’t want certain kinds of speakers on campus, one day, they’re going to be the judges and the attorneys. And they may challenge how these standards should work.

Will Brehm 27:35
So, we’ve been talking a lot about public schools. And I know you mentioned that some private universities have taken very broad interpretations of what free speech looks like on campus. But are private universities held to a different standard when it comes to free speech in a legal manner?

Neal Hutchens 27:52
In general, they very much are held to a different standard. So, I talked about the public colleges and universities, their governmental actors, state actors. So that puts a responsibility on them to follow first amendment rules in regulating speech, and especially student speech or other speech on campus. Private colleges and universities don’t have to do that. And we see that, for instance, with religious private institutions. They can have a mission that will state that, you know, individuals enrolled in that institution or teach in that institution have to sign statements of faith. And so, they’re actually as private entities, they also have First Amendment protections related to speech and religion, that allow them to carry out their mission. The only real exception we have in California, they have a law called the Leonard Law, that it applies to private, secular institutions and requires that private, secular institutions have to give the same speech rights to students, as do public institutions under the First Amendment. But in general, private colleges and universities have much more legal leeway. And some institutions give much less discretion to students and their speech rights. But there are a lot of private colleges and universities that view freedom of expression and speech as really integral to part of what the institution is supposed to be about. And so, in their policies and other guiding principles, they give free speech, freedom of speech that’s very akin to the First Amendment. You’ll sometimes hear about the University of Chicago principles on free speech a lot recently. So, University of Chicago is a great institution, it’s also private. And so private colleges and universities, where a legal responsibility would come in for them is, if in their standards, for instance, in policies pertaining to students, if there’s a statement, we believe in free speech rights, we don’t regulate speech on the basis of viewpoint. But then they would, in fact, do that a student could have a contract-based claim. In general colleges and universities for all types of institutions but it’s especially important for private institutions, when they look at the student and the university and maybe they’re in a bit of dispute, they’ll apply contract-like principles. And so, if you think about student handbooks, or other things like that, that’s part of the contract. So, institutions have a legal responsibility to follow the terms they’ve set out the contracts and student disciplinary codes, student handbooks and other places.

Will Brehm 30:30
It’s such a fascinating topic, because it seems like what we’re debating is actually the purpose of higher education. Whether it’s an area where a diversity of speech can exist, whether there’s threats, and how they’re articulated, things like student activism. I mean, it really seems like these debates are so vital and important to the very foundations of what we mean by higher education.

Neal Hutchens 31:01
I think that’s right. And that’s why, I noted earlier that when you have groups and protesters, they don’t head down to the DMV in large, most of the time -I’m sure there are protests that happen at the DMV, probably spontaneously, at times.

Will Brehm 31:15
Just anger, just absolute anger.

Neal Hutchens 31:17
But Turning Point USA has not pushed for the President to issue an Executive Order about the DMV and freedom of speech. So, these are special places and institutions. I really think they’re a battle place for ideas and values. And so just as our society right now is very polarized, these ideas and values are playing out on our college campuses. I also think one thing to note about a lot of these speech debates that are happening is they’re really only one kind of the speech that happens on college campuses. So, for instance, I’m a faculty member, I had to go through a process called tenure. And I had to publish as part of that. And in that process, while I may think that I view that there were some important speech rights included under the First Amendment, it wasn’t unfettered. So, one of the things in general on free speech for the government is that it doesn’t engage in evaluating ideas. But if I’m a chemistry professor, my colleagues who are evaluating me for tenure and promotion, they absolutely evaluate my ideas. If they think they’re rubbish, I may not get tenured. If they think that what I’m teaching is incorrect, I can be in trouble. Likewise, in the classroom, free speech doesn’t exist in the same way as it does outside of the classroom. If I’m a student who does not believe in evolution, and I want to be a biology major, and I’m taking a class that is dealing with a section with biology, and I’m asked about evolution, and my response is, “Everything was created in six days”. My free speech rights protect me for saying that. No, that’s not how it works. And courts have been very consistent, that in certain circumstances, colleges and universities and professors and administrators, we can actually heavily regulate speech. And so, I think one of the things in this universe of free speech debates on campus is to realize that actually a lot of speech that does take place in higher education is supposed to be of a certain kind, of a certain quality. That’s why we have concepts like peer review, so things can be vetted, they can be tested. And so, I think that that sometimes doesn’t necessarily get recognized the nuance of all the different kinds of speech that happens on our college campuses. And a lot of the protests and other things -and I think this is part of the debate of college campuses. Is to what extent should our college campuses, just be kind of the general public forum for debate? In other words, you show up, you get to say whatever you want, there’s no evaluation of quality of that. And I think you certainly have some groups and entities that would say, at least part of the college campus, that’s absolutely what it needs to be. I think where we’re seeing somewhat of a pushback is that you have other advocates for certain kinds of values, including the educational mission to say these things don’t align with the educational mission. And if we look at that educational mission, we evaluate the quality of speech and ideas every day, students don’t earn certain grades because of the quality of the speech, because the ideas are deemed bad or shoddy. People go to conferences, academic conferences, or they present on campus, I know that when I’ve presented in front of peers, including at campus talks, people disagree with me, and they tell me, “Those are really bad ideas that you have Hutchens.” And that’s part of what we do. And we actually don’t treat all ideas as exactly equivalent. I mean, that’s part of this -in the scientific process, for instance, you’re testing things, you’re looking for those answers. And so, I do think though then it becomes an interesting question that really has been pushed to the fore that in this environment of higher education, in which ideas are actually often heavily contested, and people actually are evaluated for their speech and ideas. They maybe don’t earn the highest grade in the class. Maybe they submit a dissertation or another paper that has to be revised, or maybe someone doesn’t get tenure, or they don’t get a job. Well, then how much are we just the general public sphere where there is no evaluation of the ideas? And so, Robert Post who I talked about earlier, who is at Yale Law School, a leading person writing on academic freedom and constitutional law, he really thinks institutions have gone too far in just saying part of our job is to just be this general place for free speech and expression. We need to push back against that. We need to question with student groups and others, what’s your educational purpose for having this speech on campus? And so, I do think that’s a countervailing push that we’ve seen against some of the Free Speech Movement. And you know, what will be interesting to see in 5 or 10 years, do we see some change in how some of the rules work? Or do we actually just open it up more in terms of what we see for instance, under certain state laws that have been passed?

Will Brehm 36:43
Well, I for one am going to keep following your work over the next 5 to 10 years to see what ends up happening. Neal Hutchens, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It really was a pleasure to talk today.

Neal Hutchens 36:53
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com

May 27, 2019/by Will Brehm

2018, Debt, Higher Education, Law, Unions Access & equity, Higher education & its contradictions

Randi Weingarten
Hyland et al v. Navient: The fight over student debt

Nine public service employees are suing Navient, the student debt service provider, for providing misleading and inaccurate information. They allege that Navient engaged in predatory lending, more interested in turning a profit than finding them the best repayment plan.

My guest today is Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. ATF has been helping their members navigate the student loan industry. What they found is shocking.

For Randi, there is a legal and electoral path to find justice for student loan borrowers.

Citation: Weingarten, Randi, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 133, podcast audio, November 5, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/weingarten/

Transcript, translation, and resources: Read more

November 5, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Decolonization, Higher Education, Michele Schweisfurth Higher education & its contradictions, Internationalisation & student mobility

Angela Last
The trouble of internationalization and interdisciplinarity

Many universities worldwide hope to internationalize and push faculty to produce knowledge across disciplines. That’s easier said than done.

My guest today, Angela Last, looks at these university fads and finds difficult ethical dilemmas that scholars must overcome.

Angela Last is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Leicester. Angela is an interdisciplinary researcher in the field of political ecology, drawing on her background in art & design and science communication to investigate environmental controversies and geographical knowledge production. She has been writing the blog Mutable Matter since 2007.

The chapter discussed in today’s podcast was published in Decolonizing the University (2018, Pluto Press).

Citation: Last, Angela, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 130, podcast audio, October 15, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/last/

Transcript, Translation, Resources:

October 15, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Debt, Economics, Higher Education, Human Capital, Privatization Access & equity, Higher education & its contradictions

Ben Miller
Defaulting on student loans in America

American students are in debt. Some forty-four million Americans collectively hold over $1.4 trillion worth of debt. Those numbers have increased since the Global Financial Crisis from 10 years ago.

Today I speak with Ben Miller, a senior director for Postsecondary Education at the Center for American Progress. Ben specializes in higher-education accountability, affordability, and financial aid, as well as for-profit colleges. His most recent op-ed – “The Student Debt Problem is Worse than we Imagined” – appeared in the New York Times in August.

Citation: Miller, Ben, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 126, podcast audio, September 17, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/benmiller/

Transcript, Translation, and Resources:

September 17, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Chinese Translations, Comparative Education, Post-Socialism Higher education & its contradictions, Knowledge production

Alla Korzh & Noah Sobe
Reimagining social science and post-socialist utopias

OverviewTranscriptTranslationResources

Does social science as it is commonly understood and practiced work in post-socialist settings? That may sound like an absurd question, even a bit crude.

My guests today, Alla Korzh and Noah Sobe, see limits to the very social imaginaries underpinning social science.

They argue that the diversity of post-socialist transformations challenges the existing paradigms and frameworks of theory and method used in much social science today.

Together with Iveta Silova and Serhiy Kovalchuk, Alla and Noah co-edited a 17-chapter volume entitled “Reimagining Utopias: Theory and method for education research in post-socialist context.” The book explores from many perspectives the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science.

Alla Korzh is an assistant professor of international education at the School for International Training Graduate Institute, World Learning.

Noah Sobe is a professor of cultural and educational policy studies at Loyola University Chicago and past president of the Comparative and International Education Society.

Citation: Korzh, Alla and Sobe, Noah, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 122, Podcast audio, July 9, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/korzhsobe/

Will Brehm 2:34
Alla Korzh and Noah Sobe, welcome to FreshEd.

Alla Korzh 2:38
Thanks for having us, Will.

Noah Sobe 2:39
Thanks a lot, Will, it’s great to be here.

Will Brehm 2:41
So I want to just start by asking, what do you mean by the word utopia?

Noah Sobe 2:47
Part of choosing that title was to recognize that alongside the political and economic project that was state socialism, there was also a particular social vision. So ideas of equality were important, even dignity, democracy were important names, of course, sometimes honored in the breach. So basically like invoking utopias, we’re trying to elevate the importance of social imaginary. 20th century socialisms had their social imaginaries and part of post-socialism is the encounter of different utopian visions for what makes a good society, the good human being, the good future.

Will Brehm 3:29
And whose utopia is are these?

Noah Sobe 3:33
That’s a good question Will. Just in terms of thinking about utopias, I think in a lot of ways we were inspired by an eminent Polish historian and philosopher named Bronislaw Baczko, who worked for many years in Switzerland and France. And kind of like Benedict Anderson did with his work on national imaginaries, in books like Utopian Lights Baczko put the importance of social imaginaries on the research horizon. Utopia is no place, right? I mean, it has its origins and Thomas More’s 16th century political fiction, of course, that was inspired by Plato. But the notion of utopia quickly escaped more, and I would propose, kind of has become the paradigmatic form of the social imaginary across Europe and North America. Of course, more often than not we encounter utopias in ruins. But the idea is that examining utopias is one strategy for engaging with possible futures, right, possible futures of human societies.

Will Brehm 4:44
What are socialist utopias?

Noah Sobe 4:48
There multiple socialist utopias, and there are multiple socialisms. I think, you know, key pieces involve ideas about human equality, human dignity, even commitments to democracy as sort of difficult as it is sometimes to wrap our mind around that, given the totalitarian political forms that many socialisms took. But they were also, you know, a lot of, sort of, quite laudable social goals — gender equality, a fair economic system — that are quite different than the utopias of capitalism, for example. So I think what’s particularly fascinating about the post social spaces that those don’t vanish, you know, they continue, they get reconfigured, and they interact with other social imaginaries is that people bring in and that are brought in.

Will Brehm 5:52
Does the post socialist utopia or imaginaries not only connect to these socialist utopias views of the past, but does it also embrace some more of the capitalist utopias that you were also talking about? Do they sort of merged together?

Noah Sobe 6:09
Yeah, I mean, I think so we chose the title reimagining utopias because it describes sort of what’s happening on the ground. I mean, it describes what’s been happening in post socialist settings, other settings as well. But the post social settings are the one we focus on over the last 20 to 30 years. So we’re describing a process of sort of coexistence and conflict, a negotiation that’s taking place in the world, in classrooms, right, in offices and homes, basically, as people navigating, you know, navigate changing global situations. But there’s another, there’s a sort of second important dimension to reimagining utopias that we’re trying to develop or play within the book. And that relates to the notion of social science. I think it’s quite possible to consider a lot of European North American social sciences as a utopian project in and of itself, as riven with social imaginary. And so the scientists, the researcher of society, generally is committed to the idea that better, sort of firmer, fairer, more just knowledge of society is valuable for aiding a transition from what is now to what will be next. There’s a lot of utopian thinking and social visions that are embedded in processes of social science research. And certainly, we saw a lot of the research that was done on post socialist, particularly Eurasia and other parts of the world as well, you know, powerfully shaped by those imaginaries. And so one of the things we’re trying to do in the book is to rethink some of that. To actually reimagine the social imaginaries, the utopias that are embedded in social science, that are embedded in comparative education.

Will Brehm 8:13
Before we jump into that larger topic, I do want to ask a little bit about what sort of contexts were you looking at. Post socialism I would imagine covers many parts of the world, so what contexts were of interest to you?

Alla Korzh 8:29
This is a really good question, Will. By post socialism, we really mean any country that has experienced some form of socialism and has been on this pathway, or transition to neoliberal capitalism. So initially, when we started this project, we really looked at the former Soviet Union as that post socialist space. But then we realized that there are other countries that have had similar transformations within different contexts within different cultural contexts. And those are countries in Asia and Africa. And we’ve included those in our edited volume, we have contributors who have focused on Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, so it’s pretty comprehensive.

Will Brehm 9:21
And would this also include countries that are still socialist, but also embracing lots of neoliberal capitalism? Like, they’re not post socialist, not outside of socialism.

Alla Korzh 9:33
Yes, definitely.

Will Brehm 9:35
So, Vietnam and, say, China.

Alla Korzh 9:38
Exactly. Because every country, even on this post socialist trajectory, is still grappling with, you know, the vestiges of socialism as it sort of embracing in at its own pace, embracing these forms of neoliberal capitalism.

Noah Sobe 10:00
Will, I think you’re question is a great one, because it also raises sort of what we and others mean by the concept of “post.” So it’s really not a break and a departure from but a turn, you know, as Alla was saying, it’s about grappling with the legacies and your example of Vietnam is a perfect example of that. In theory, a socialist state, but one in which socialism has certainly taken a turn and taking on new forms and been combined with other things. So, I would say in that sense, it is, you know, accurately post socialist and like the other settings examined in the book.

Will Brehm 10:38
Noah, you said that earlier that there were many different socialisms. So, I would imagine there are many different post socialisms.

Noah Sobe 10:44
I would agree with that. Alla?

Alla Korzh 10:46
Yes, most definitely. And I think we’re probably part of the group of scholars who critique the transitology approach to post socialism who view it as a sort of this linear or temporal transition, like a quick break away from socialism into a post socialism and really recognize the diversity of post socialist experiences and transformations and therefore every context will have perhaps some similarities, but also very much diverse intricacies of those transformations. So, yes, see, it would entail multiple post socialisms.

Will Brehm 11:27
If we connect this to this idea of social science, and these, you know, the utopian thinking in social science, how are some of these different posts, socialisms, sort of producing social science — what are the different ways in which we can think of what social science is? You know, social science as way of producing certain certain knowledges and that they’re actually quite different from this transitology approach, or this linear thinking of what post socialism is. But if there’s this diversity that you’re talking about, then, you know, what does that diversity look like in terms of what is valid knowledge? How do we produce knowledge in these different contexts?

Alla Korzh 12:22
So through our book, we have seen obviously, that an over reliance on Western dominant knowledges often results in the displacement of non-Western knowledges, experiences, rendering them as insufficiently scientific for example. And our contributors have demonstrated a number of ways to produce and validate knowledge in post socialist contexts. And one of them is the use of local traditions of knowledge production. And what we mean by that is the rediscovery of the forgotten or discarded meanings of certain concepts and practices as a way of creating spaces for multiple knowledges to coexist. African scholars, like Woldeyes and Melisa, in our volume, interrogate, for example, the notion of good education and the indigenous meaning and understanding of what good education means in juxtaposition with Western imposed concepts and values. So again, one way is the use of local traditions of knowledge production. Another way is — it’s more of a methodological approach — is to stay flexible, a sort of flexibility and creativity with culturally appropriate methods. What we’ve seen is that a lot of research tends to rely on traditionally established data collection methods, qualitative data collection methods, such as surveys, or interviews, and focus groups observations or document analysis to produce valid knowledge of post socialist contexts. And they might be, you know, the sort of rigorously conceived studies, but they might not necessarily be capturing the nuanced realities of the post socialist lived experiences. Namely, if we look at the method of surveys, for example. When employing surveys, we can generate a ton of data, but it might not be the most credible data, especially when surveys are run in contexts with political historical and cultural legacies of Soviet state control and surveillance over public knowledge and performance. Another method that comes to mind is formal interviews and focus groups. Those methods might actually evoke memories of interrogation which in Soviet contexts, resulted in public arrest or detention, which further complicates the data gathering and the credibility of data. And therefore, as some of our contributors shared, it’s important to reimagine the culture with appropriate methods and replace formal interviews with conversational interviews, for example. This conversational methods should not be discarded as invalid or less scientific or less rigorous. They might be a more culturally appropriate in certain contexts where a participant might feel more comfortable being surrounded by family members and community members to be sharing that knowledge with the researcher. And finally, what’s important to highlight as in order to navigate this theoretical and methodological dilemmas, one must remain critically reflexive throughout the entire research process, questioning their own subjectivities, and carefully rethinking the representation of the other and recognizing the multiple forms of knowledges of our participants and treating them as equal collaborators and co-constructors of that knowledge.

Will Brehm 16:36
Would that mean — this last point of being reflective and making sure you’re accurately representing others, and bringing them in as co-collaborators, some of what we might call in, in western science, quote unquote, research participants — does this actually mean sharing with people that you’ve had these sort of conversational engagements with things that you’ve written or basically, quote, unquote, analyzing data, but data has, of course, being reimagined as well here? How do you actually create this reflective moment in these post socialist contexts?

Alla Korzh 17:16
It’s important to stay critically reflexive throughout the entire process and to engage the participants not only in, you know, in the data collection, but also, you know, traditional in the West, you know, we would call the strategy of member checking when we engage participants in checking for accuracy of rendering that data in the transcripts, but also interpretation. It’s not enough just to check in with a participant and say, am I you know, did I capture it correctly and accurately. But it’s important to really engage them in the interpretation of their knowledge in that local context. And I think this would be a really important point for a researcher to stay critically reflective about the adoption of this Western frameworks, Western interpretations of the local phenomena and checking in with the participant if what we think is happening, indeed, whether that resonates with their own understanding of their own lived experience.

Noah Sobe 18:30
You mentioned research participants. Another term that gets used quite a bit in western social science is the informant. I mean, so you can imagine just sort of how, how problematic that term is, I mean, also collaborator. These are problematic terms in parts of the world. Or even take the, you know, the process of human subjects, you know, informed consent, Oh, don’t worry, this thought, just sign your signature, and it’s just going to go in a drawer. And no one’s ever gonna look at it. You know, I just need your consent. I mean, these are some practices that in certain circles, people sort of take as natural as the best way and as unchallengeable. But in other parts of the world, they raise serious problems and relational problems, but also problems around how knowledge is generated and how people frankly, are respected.

Will Brehm 19:21
I want to ask a very practical question. So if not, research participant or informant or collaborator then what?

Noah Sobe 19:29
Well, I think participant isn’t completely corrupt. Allah, what do you think?

Alla Korzh 19:35
I’ve embraced the term participant throughout my research and also teaching.

Noah Sobe 19:55
But I think the fact that there is no one best answer is telling. So this book was designed as a research methods text, and it’s very different than most research methods texts. It’s not a sort of how to bake a cake type of recipe. Instead, one of the things that all our authors engage with across the book, and there was a really nice, multi year collaborative process that led to this, but one of the things that pretty much everyone engages with is this notion of the dilemma. I mean, researchers in the field face dilemmas, and one of them, we’ve just been talking about how you think about conceptualize and interact with the people that you’re studying people, assuming you’re studying people. And to think of it as a dilemma sort of frames it as something that around which we do have to make choices. And we have to hope that we’re going to make better choices. And next time, we’ll make even better choices. I mean, so there are better and poorer ways to do this. But at the same time, there’s no, like, there’s no magic solution, and you sort of what you do in Kyrgyzstan is going to be very different than what you do in Vietnam and Poland. So to frame it as a dilemma, you know, so not only you know, how you identify researchers, but how you collect data, how you analyze data, all those dimensions, I think are really critical,

Will Brehm 21:19
There’s no necessarily universal answer here. It’s context specific. It’s historically specific. That’s quite interesting sort of way to reimagine the way in which social sciences even done in a sense. I’d like to ask were you influenced by Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory in this work on reimagining post socialisms?

Noah Sobe 21:45
Yeah, Connell’s work, other people’s work on Southern Theory has been really influential. You know, I also think of Asia as Method as an inspiration. There are a lot of connections between doing work and post socialist settings and in post colonial settings. So, one of the things Alla was just going over with, in terms of some of the research methods like, you know, the questionability of a survey or formal interviews, you know, really turn on some of the same questions about the bases on which we generate knowledge, the sort of conditions of possibility that make it possible to know things in the world, which is something that people working in a post colonial tradition are very much challenging. And so that’s one of the clear connections with what the editors and the contributors to this book are doing, and working with working in a post socialist setting to really challenge, work with, and challenge ourselves around, you know, how it is we think about this whole knowledge producing project.

Will Brehm 22:57
How does this then impact the way we think about about the social world? So, I mean, for example, let’s say this big topic of globalization and theories of globalization — does this reimagining post socialisms sort of create new meanings and new insights into this sort of phenomenon of globalization?

Noah Sobe 23:20
So it’s a great question, Will. I think that, you know, one of the things that exploring the variety and variability within post socialist context shows us is that, for one, we need to rethink how we think about context in the first place. It’s something that we shouldn’t just take as a given fact. But we should understand how contexts are produced. And clearly, global processes and global phenomenon are one piece of that as our indigenous local and the other sort of many layers kind of influences, techniques, practices, and so forth, that go into creating the embeddedness of any educational interaction. You know, the other thing that I think when you read across the book becomes very clear in relation to globalization is that globalization is as much a reaching in as it is reaching out. That, you know, while we should be long past the point where we conceive of local as a place in the global as a force, although we still see features of that in a lot of comparative education scholarship. The globalist constructed in remote parts of central Asia in ways that are very similar to how its constructed in Brussels or New York, and we need to, I think, examine sort of the production, reaching out to the global as much as the global reaching in and I think you see both across the book.

Alla Korzh 24:58
I think what our volume contributes to is, you know, the existing body of scholarship and knowledge in globalization studies on the divergence of local experiences and transformations. I think this is one of the key arguments that we’re trying to make is that it is important to pay attention to the diversity of post socialist educational reforms and processes, as much as there’s this not wholesale but there’s definitely a Western reform adoption process happening across the region, but the way they are being re-adopted and re-contextualized or indigenized in local contexts have very different and those nuances really need to be uncovered and theorized and reflected on. And along the lines of what Noah mentioned earlier about the highlight of the book being the dilemmas of field work as much as we’re seeing the commonalities across so many of our contributors in terms of what dilemmas they faced, there’s so many nuances also about those dilemmas, as they are contextualize in those cultural landscapes.

Will Brehm 26:22
Is there an example of some of these dilemmas that you could point to, to show this diversity of differences in fieldwork in these post socialist contexts?

Alla Korzh 26:34
I would say one of them is grappling with methods. Again, thinking back to surveys or focus groups or interviews or even, you know, diaries, for example. And one of the dilemmas is that we go into the field expecting those methods to work because, you know, they’ve been tested in so many contexts, but they might not necessarily be culturally appropriate. For example, when conducting research in my own work, with institutionalized orphans, where their behaviors have been sanctioned by the school authority. And any signed survey will result in some sort of repercussion for that. And I think this is one of the dilemmas that is also being shared by some of the contributors of this book. Another ethical dilemma is IRB. I feel like this is one of the probably widely cited concerns and field work dilemmas across the contributors of this book is how to navigate it in the contexts, in post authoritarian contexts where a signed informed consent results in sense of fear, suspicion and discomfort because individuals are situated in this cultural historical legacies of Soviet state control over public knowledge and performance. So, the way a researcher navigates it is perhaps you know doing away with informed consent forms and instead of replacing it with oral consent which still justifies voluntary participation but at the same time it reduces that potential risk and it alleviates that pressure from having to physically sign a form and then fearing for their lives. Noah Sobe 28:55 I think one thing that’s important about the book is that

Noah Sobe 29:01
the contributors are all researchers who for the most part got PhDs in North American and European universities; many of them grew up under socialism or post socialism — not all — but they are all acutely aware of the power differentials involved in research.In times it’s a researcher returning to community that she or he belongs to but in a different role and at times it’s a researcher entering a community that he or she does not belong to. But in each of these instances you have some of the playing out of these global local interactions that we’re studying and I think what one of the strengths of the book is that everyone’s paying attention to that positionality and not just treating positionality as something that you dispatch with at the beginning of a research project you sort of mitigate it but actually analytically using it. I mean there’s a lot to be gained from engaging with positionality and sort of reflexively engaging with the knowledge that you’re working on trying to develop.

Will Brehm 30:12
We’ve obviously talked a lot about sort of individual research practice — what happens when a researcher goes to these different contexts or returns to the context from where one is from — and we’ve also obviously talked a little bit about this institutional review board, the IRB, how there’s some sort of institutional structures from particularly Western universities but of course that structure has moved to other universities as well around the world and that also causes problems. But I want to end our conversation look at a different area and that is the field of comparative and international education. What does some of the insights you’ve gained from this book tell us about the field of comparative and international education?

Noah Sobe 30:59
Well, one of the things, Will, we looked a lot about the production of research and I would say — Okay, if not one of the weaknesses, one of the one of the subjects for the next book, let’s say, okay — is that I don’t think we engaged enough with the afterlife of research. What happens with and to research after it’s produced, both to the producer of the research and to those who are researched and to those who use it. And I think that’s very important for thinking about European North American knowledge that’s produced about post socialist spaces, even if it’s produced in some of the ways that we’re working within the book. To me, that’s something that the whole field of comparative education would do well, to spend more, you know, to give more attention to the afterlife of research, what happens once we get that publication out or make that conference presentation? What happens to that knowledge? But that’s kind of not really answering your question. That’s the answer your question by saying, you know, here’s one thing that book doesn’t do. I don’t know, Alla, I would be tempted to say, you know, one of the things that it does is, you know, give us new tools for new methods tools, new ways of thinking about methods.

Alla Korzh 32:23
Yeah, absolutely. I think what really led us to this book is the lack of critical reflection on how to mobilize theory and methodology and methods in post socialist educational research contexts. In particular, there’s been plentiful research done in the fields of anthropology and sociology that had examined the field work dilemmas and the adoption and re-contextualization of theories in post socialist spaces. But we hadn’t seen anything in the fields of education, especially in the field of comparative and international education. So we hope that this is a meaningful contribution that allows us to critically think about how to mobilize theory in a critical way, not just adopt in Western theoretical frameworks, but thinking about how those frameworks really relate to that context and what meaning they carry for our participants as we are engaging them in the co-construction of knowledge, in addition to how we mobilize methodologies and methods in a culturally responsive, culturally sensitive ways that really allow us to tap into the lived experiences of individuals and generate credible and meaningful data that accurately portrays the non Western realities.

Will Brehm 33:58
Alla Korzh and Noah Sobe, thank you so much for joining FreshEd today.

Noah Sobe 34:02
It was a pleasure, Will. Thank you.

Alla Korzh 34:03
Thank you so much.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com

July 9, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Higher Education, Ian M. Cook, Privatization Academic knowledge, podcasting & research methods, Higher education & its contradictions, Knowledge dissemination, Knowledge production

Wilhelm Widmark
Why did Sweden cancel its agreement with Elsevier?

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #118 – Why did Sweden cancel its agreement with Elsevier? (Wilhelm Widmark)

June 11, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Economics, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Higher Education, Human Capital, Policy, Social Movements, Sociology, Teachers, Unions Higher education & its contradictions, Marketisation & academic labour, Privatisation, markets & neoliberalism

Ioannis Costas Batlle & Aurelien Mondon
University Strikes in the UK: Re-Imagining Higher Education

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #107 - University Strikes in the UK (Ioannis Costas Batlle and Aurelien Mondon)

March 12, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Debt, Economics, Higher Education, Human Capital, Special Shows Access & equity, Higher education & its contradictions

Student Debt

For over two years, this podcast has aimed to disseminate academic ideas through the medium of audio. This year FreshEd will continue to air interviews with scholars from around the world, but we are also going to experiment. Over the holidays, I got to thinking about new ways I could use audio.

Listeners are now familiar with me in the role of interviewer where the focus is on other people’s ideas. I thought maybe you would also interested in hearing about some of my ideas and how they have been influenced by some of the interviews I’ve conducted.

But it’s not as if I’m going to interview myself.

Instead, today’s show captures what it sounds like inside my head as I piece together different ideas and attempt to form a coherent academic argument. It’s like an academic article for your ears.

But not exactly.

Through the soundscape, I’ve tried to convey how seemingly random ideas come together, the moments of synchronicity, and the thesis that comes out of the mix.

This episode is the first installment of The Idea, and is about the indebted student in American higher education.

February 26, 2018/by Will Brehm

2017, Comparative Education, Development, Global Citizenship, Globalization, Higher Education Higher education & its contradictions, Internationalisation & student mobility

Joan Dassin & Aryn Baxter
International scholarships in higher education

Many students move across national borders to attend university. Although the number of these globally mobile students is small compared to the total number of students enrolled in higher education, there numbers are increasing.

But the patterns are changing, with more regional and south-south mobility.

The role of scholarships in promoting these new patterns of student mobility is gaining attention by researchers and development aid alike. My guests today, Joan Dassin and Aryn Baxter, have recently contributed to a new edited collection entitled International Scholarships in Higher Education: Pathways to Social Change, which was edited by Joan Dassin, Robin March, and Matt Mawer.

Joan Dassin is a Professor of International Education and Development and Director of the Masters Program in Sustainable International Development at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Aryn Baxter is an Assistant Professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Director of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at Arizona State University (ASU).

Citation: Dassin, Joan & Baxter, Aryn, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 99, podcast audio, December 11, 2017. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/dassinbaxter/

Transcript, Translation, and Resources:

December 11, 2017/by Will Brehm

Raewyn Connell
The Good University

Neal H. Hutchens
Free speech and academic freedom on campus

Randi Weingarten
Hyland et al v. Navient: The fight over student debt

Angela Last
The trouble of internationalization and interdisciplinarity

Ben Miller
Defaulting on student loans in America

Alla Korzh & Noah Sobe
Reimagining social science and post-socialist utopias

Wilhelm Widmark
Why did Sweden cancel its agreement with Elsevier?

Student Debt

Joan Dassin & Aryn Baxter
International scholarships in higher education

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