Category: role of universities

  • Will US science survive and thrive, or fade away?

    Will US science survive and thrive, or fade away?

    by Paul Temple

    When Robert Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, young American scientists wanting to work with the world’s best researchers crossed the Atlantic as a matter of course. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer’s choice was between Germany, particularly Göttingen and Leipzig, and England, particularly Cambridge. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that Cambridge didn’t work out for him, so in 1926 he went to work with Max Born, one of the leading figures in quantum mechanics, at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate there just a year later. His timing was good: within a few years from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, attacks on academics, Jewish and otherwise, and then of course the Second World War, had destroyed what was perhaps the world’s most important university system. Let us note that academic structures, depending on relatively small numbers of intellectual leaders, usually able to move elsewhere, are fragile creations.

    I used to give a lecture about the role of universities in driving economic development, with particular reference to scientific and technological advances. Part of this lecture covered the role of US universities in supporting national economic progress, starting with the Land Grant Acts (beginning in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War for heaven’s sake!), through which the federal government funded the creation of universities in the new states of the west; going on to examine support for university research in the Second World War, of which the Manhattan Project was only a part; followed by the 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, Science – the endless frontier, which provided the rationale for continued government support for university research. The Cold War was then the context for further large-scale federal funding, not just in science and technology but in social science also, spin-offs from which produced the internet, biotech, Silicon Valley, and a whole range of other advanced industries. So, my lecture concluded, look at what a century-and-a-half of government investment in university-derived knowledge gets you: if not quite a new society, then one changed out of all recognition – and, mostly, for the better.

    The currently-ongoing attack by the Trump administration on American universities seems to have overlooked the historical background just sketched out. My “didn’t it work out just fine?” lecture now needs a certain amount of revision: it is almost describing a lost world.

    President Trump and his MAGA movement, says Nathan Heller writing in The New Yorker this March, sees American universities as his main enemies in the culture wars on which his political survival depends. Before he became Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance in a 2021 speech entitled “The Universities are the enemy” set out a plan to “aggressively attack the universities in this country” (New York Times, 3 June 2025). University leaderships seem to have been unprepared for this unprecedented assault, despite ample warning. (A case where Trump and his allies needed to be taken both literally and seriously.) Early 2025 campus pro-Palestinian protests then conveniently handed the Trump administration the casus belli to justify acting against leading universities, further helped by clumsy footwork on the part of university leaderships who seem largely not to have rested their cases on the very high freedom of speech bar set by the First Amendment, meaning that, for example, anti-Semitic speech (naturally, physical attacks would be a different matter) would be lawful under Supreme Court rulings, however much they personally may have deplored it. Instead, university presidents allowed themselves to be presented as apologists for Hamas. (Needless to say, demands that free speech should be protected at all costs does not apply in the Trump/Vance world to speech supporting causes of which they disapprove.)

    American universities have never faced a situation remotely like this. As one Harvard law professor quoted in the New Yorker piece remarks, the Trump attacks are about the future of “higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive, or fade away”. If you consider that parallels with Germany in 1933 are far-fetched, please explain why.

    SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

    Source link

  • The disruptive idea of the university

    The disruptive idea of the university

    by Rob Cuthbert

    “Ideas of the university in the public domain are hopelessly impoverished. ‘Impoverished’ because they are unduly confined to a small range of possible conceptions of the university; and ‘hopelessly’ because they are too often without hope, taking the form of either a hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defence of the emerging nature of ‘the entrepreneurial university’.”

    Fifty years on from the Robbins Report, that was how Ron Barnett began Imagining the University in 2013, and it seems that nothing much has changed since then. Stefan Collini had written a much-cited book, What are universities for?, in 2012, which as the Guardian review said (Conrad, 2012) was “heavy on hand-wringing and light on real answers”. Tom Sperlinger, Josie McLellan and Richard Pettigrew wrote Who are universities for? Remaking higher education in 2018, which despite its respectable intentions was more akin to what Barnett called a ‘defence of the emerging nature of the entrepreneurial university’, aiming in the authors’ words to “make UK universities more accessible and responsive to a changing economy.”

    By 2019 Raewyn Connell was taking a rather different tack in The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change:

    “… what should a ‘good university’ look like? … Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.”

    Simon Marginson and his colleagues in the Centre for Global Higher Education have pursued a broad programme to conceptualise and promote the idea of the public good of higher education, but in his interviews with English university leaders:

    “Nearly all advocated a broad public good role … and provided examples of public outcomes in higher education. However, these concepts lacked clarity, while at the same time the shaping effects of the market were sharply understood.”

    His sad conclusion was that:

    “English policy on the public good outcomes of higher education has been hi-jacked, reworked, and emptied out in Treasury’s long successful drive to implement a fee-based market.”

    This means that everyday pressures too often drive us back to either handwringing or apologetic entrepreneurialism, or some mixture of the two. Even Colin Riordan, one of the most thoughtful of VCs during his tenure at Cardiff, could not break the mould:

    “What are universities for? Everybody knows that universities exist to educate students and help to create a highly educated workforce. Most people know they’re also the place where research is done that ends up in technologies like smartphones, fuel-efficient cars and advanced medical care. That means universities are a critical part of the innovation process.”

    These ideas sell the university short, and leave their leaders and managers ill-equipped to live the values they need to protect.

    We are entering an era when Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem determined to ‘move fast and break things’, as the Facebook motto once had it. Mark Zuckerberg tried to move on ten years ago to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, but it seems that Elon Musk didn’t get the memo, as the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ cuts huge swathes through and – as it presumably hopes – out of US government. Whether or not DOGE succeeds we will soon discover, but the disregard for stable infrastructure may well prove fatal to its own efforts.

    People would not normally accuse a university of moving fast, but what some might see as an excessive concern for stable infrastructure perhaps conceals the speed at which universities move to break existing ideas and understandings. The pursuit of truth may be an imperfect way to describe the aim of the university, but as an academic motivation it suffices to explain how one way of understanding will sometimes rapidly give way to another. Yes, we know that some paradigms hang on doggedly, often supported long past their sell-by date by academics with too much invested in them. But usually and eventually, often more suddenly, the truth will out.

    How can universities best protect their distinctive quality, of encouraging open-minded teaching and research which will create the most favourable conditions for learning, individually and collectively? Strategies and academic values have their place, they might even constitute the stable infrastructure that is needed for a university to flourish. But the infrastructure needs to be built on a simple idea which everyone can comprehend. And that simple idea has to be infinitely flexible while staying perpetually relevant – here is one I prepared earlier:

    “Many people can’t shake off the idea that management in higher education is or at least it should be about having clear objectives, and working out what to do through systematic analysis and ‘cascading’ objectives down through the organisation. They want to see the university as a rational machine, and the manager as a production controller, because Western scientistic culture has encouraged them to think that way.

    The best way to deal with that way of thinking is to agree with it. You say: yes, we must focus on our key objective. In teaching our key objective is personal learning, development and growth for students, a process which cannot be well specified in advance. In research our key objective is the generation of new knowledge. So in higher education the key objective in each of our two main activities is the generation of unpredictable outcomes. Now please tell me what your key performance indicators will be.”[1]

    The fundamental test of performance for a university is that it generates unpredictable outcomes. An infinitely flexible, endlessly relevant idea that everyone can understand – and always disruptive. That is why higher education matters – not just training students for the economy, not just innovation in research for economic growth. Universities need to keep generating unpredictable outcomes because that is their unique function as open public institutions, and that is what their wider society needs and deserves.

    Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email [email protected]. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.

    [1] Text taken from inaugural professorial lecture; Rob Cuthbert, 7 November 2007

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

    Source link

  • Open universities: between radical promise and market reality

    Open universities: between radical promise and market reality

    by Ourania Filippakou

    Open universities have long symbolised a radical departure from the exclusivity of conventional universities. Conceived as institutions of access, intellectual emancipation, and social transformation, they promised to disrupt rigid academic hierarchies and democratise knowledge. Yet, as higher education is increasingly reshaped by market logics, can open universities still claim to be engines of social progress, or have they become institutions that now reproduce the very inequalities they sought to dismantle?

    This question is not merely academic; it is profoundly political. Across the globe, democratic institutions are under siege, and the erosion of democracy is no longer an abstraction – it is unfolding in real time (cf EIU, 2024; Jones, 2025). The rise of far-right ideologies, resurgent racism, intensified attacks on women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and the erosion of protections for migrants and marginalised communities all point to a crisis of democracy that cannot be separated from the crisis of education (Giroux, 2025). As Giroux (1984) argues, education is never neutral; it can operate as both a potential site for fostering critical consciousness and resistance and a mechanism for reproducing systems of social control and domination. Similarly, Butler (2005) reminds us that the very categories of who counts as human, who is deemed grievable, and whose knowledge is legitimised are deeply political struggles.

    Open universities, once heralded as radical interventions in knowledge production, now find themselves entangled in these struggles. Increasingly, they are forced to reconcile their egalitarian aspirations with the ruthless pressures of neoliberalism and market-driven reforms. The challenge they face is no less than existential: to what extent can they uphold their role as spaces of intellectual and social transformation, or will they become further absorbed into the logics of commodification and control?

    My article (Filippakou, 2025) in Policy Reviews in Higher Education, ‘Two ideologies of openness: a comparative analysis of the Open Universities in the UK and Greece’, foregrounds a crucial but often overlooked dimension: the ideological battles that have shaped open universities over time. The UK Open University (OU) and the Hellenic Open University (HOU) exemplify two distinct yet converging trajectories. The UK OU, founded in the 1960s as part of a broader post-war commitment to social mobility, was a political project – an experiment in making university education available to those long excluded from elite institutions. The HOU, by contrast, emerged in the late 1990s within the European Union’s push for a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning was increasingly framed primarily in terms of workforce development. While both institutions embraced ‘openness’ as a defining principle, the meaning of that openness has shifted – from an egalitarian vision of education as a public good to a model struggling to reconcile social inclusion with neoliberal imperatives.

    A key insight of this analysis is that open universities do not merely widen participation; they reflect deeper contestations over the purpose of higher education itself. The UK OU’s early success inspired similar models worldwide, but today, relentless marketisation – rising tuition fees, budget cuts, and the growing encroachment of corporate interests – threatens to erode its founding ethos.

    Meanwhile, the HOU was shaped by a European policy landscape that framed openness not merely as intellectual emancipation but as economic necessity. Both cases illustrate the paradox of open universities: they continue to expand access, yet their structural constraints increasingly align them with the logic of precarity, credentialism, and market-driven efficiency.

    This struggle over education is central to the survival of democracy. Arendt (1961, 2005) warned that democracy is not self-sustaining; it depends on an informed citizenry capable of judgment, debate, and resistance. Higher education, in this sense, is not simply about skills or employability – it is about cultivating the capacity to think critically, to challenge authority, and to hold power to account (Giroux, 2019). Open universities were once at the forefront of this democratic mission. But as universities in general, and open universities in particular, become increasingly instrumentalised – shaped by political forces intent on suppressing dissent, commodifying learning, and hollowing out universities’ transformative potential – their role in sustaining democratic publics is under threat.

    The real question, then, is not simply whether open universities remain ‘open’ but how they define and enact this openness. To what extent do they serve as institutions of intellectual and civic transformation, or have they primarily been reduced to flexible degree factories, catering to market demands under the guise of accessibility? By comparing the UK and Greek experiences, this article aims to challenge readers to rethink the ideological stakes of openness in higher education today. The implications extend far beyond open universities themselves. The broader appeal of this analysis lies in its relevance to anyone interested in universities as sites of social change. Open universities are not just alternatives to conventional universities – they represent larger struggles over knowledge, democracy, and economic power. The creeping normalisation of authoritarian politics, the suppression of academic freedom, and the assault on marginalised voices in public discourse demand that we reclaim higher education as a site of resistance.

    Can open universities reclaim their radical promise? If higher education is to resist the encroachment of neoliberalism and reactionary politics, we must actively defend institutions that prioritise intellectual freedom, civic literacy, and higher education for the public good. The future of open universities – and higher education itself – depends not only on institutional policies but on whether scholars, educators, and students collectively resist these forces. The battle for openness is not just about access; it is about the kind of society we choose to build – for ourselves and the generations to come.

    Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

    Source link