Nick began his career with Nottingham Trent University in the UK working in international student recruitment, before going on to a wide range of leadership and consultancy roles in the private sector. He joined The PIE in 2021 and is a key commentator on the current trends in the global higher education industry. He curates content for our PIE Live conferences and is the co-host of the Tales from the Departure Lounge podcast. Get in touch with Nick at [email protected]
Mass surveillance is no longer a marginal concern in American life. It is the silent architecture of a society managed from above and distrusted from below. The cameras aimed at students, workers, and the precarious class reflect a deeper spiritual, political, and moral crisis among the elites who designed the systems now monitoring the rest of us.
Universities, corporations, city governments, and federal agencies increasingly rely on surveillance tools to manage populations whose economic security has been gutted by the same leaders who now demand behavioral compliance. Cameras proliferate, keystrokes are tracked, movement is logged, and predictive algorithms follow people across campuses, workplaces, and public spaces. Yet those responsible for creating the conditions that justify surveillance—politicians, corporate boards, university trustees, executive donors, and policy consultants—operate in near total opacity. Their meetings take place behind closed doors, their decisions shielded from public scrutiny, their influence networks essentially invisible.
This is not a coincidence. It is the logical extension of a neoliberal elite culture that elevates market logic above moral obligation. As the Higher Education Inquirer documented in “How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis,” the architects of modern austerity—professionalized, credentialed, and trained in elite universities—constructed social systems that demand accountability from the poor while providing impunity for the powerful. Their policy models treat human beings as units to be managed, scored, nudged, and surveilled. Surveillance fits seamlessly into this worldview. It is the managerial substitute for solidarity.
The moral void of this elite class is perhaps most visible in the realm of healthcare. The Affordable Care Act, whatever its limitations, represented a modest attempt to affirm that healthcare is a public good and that access should not depend entirely on wealth. But the undermining of Obamacare under Donald Trump laid bare how deeply the nation’s policy culture had descended into nihilism. Trump’s efforts to gut the ACA were not about ideology or fiscal prudence; they were an expression of power for its own sake. Funding for enrollment outreach was slashed. Navigator programs were dismantled. Work requirements for Medicaid were encouraged, despite overwhelming evidence that they punished the sick and disabled. The administration promoted junk insurance plans that offered no real protection, while lawsuits were advanced to overturn the ACA entirely, even if doing so meant millions would lose coverage.
This assault revealed the moral collapse of a political and economic elite that had grown comfortable with cruelty. It was cruelty performed as policy, sanctioned by corporate donors, embraced by right-wing media, and tolerated by the broader professional class that rarely speaks out unless its own interests are threatened. Even many of the centrist neoliberal policymakers who originally shaped the ACA’s cost-sharing structure responded with timidity, reluctant to confront the underlying truth: that the American healthcare system had become an arena where profit mattered more than survival, and where surveillance of the poor replaced accountability for the rich.
As traditional moral frameworks lose their authority—whether organized religion, civic duty, or shared ethical narratives—many Americans have drifted into agnosticism or atheism not enriched by humanist values, but hollowed out by a sense of futility. Without a shared moral anchor, people retreat into private meaning or abandon meaning altogether. In this void, conspiracy theories flourish. People know they are lied to. They sense power operating behind closed doors. They see elite institutions fail repeatedly without consequence. When institutions offer no transparency, alternatives emerge in the shadows.
The elite response is predictable: condemn conspiracies, scold the public for irrationality, invoke the language of “misinformation.” But this reaction deepens the divide. The same elites who created opaque systems—financial, academic, political, and technological—now fault ordinary people for trying to make sense of the opacity. In a society where truth is managed, measured, branded, and optimized, conspiracy becomes a form of folk epistemology. It is not always correct, but it is often understandable.
Mass surveillance is therefore not the root of the crisis but its mirror. It reflects a ruling class that no longer commands moral authority and a public that no longer trusts the institutions governing it. It reflects a society that treats the vulnerable as suspects and the powerful as untouchable. It reflects a political order in which the dismantling of healthcare protections is permissible while the monitoring of poor people’s bodies, behaviors, and spending is normalized.
If the United States is to escape this downward spiral, the cameras must eventually be turned upward. Transparency must apply not only to individuals but to corporations, boards, agencies, foundations, and the political donors who shape public life. Higher education must cease functioning as a credentialing arm of elite impunity and reclaim its role as a defender of democratic inquiry and human dignity. Public institutions must anchor themselves in ethical commitments that do not depend on religious dogma but arise from the basic principle that every human being deserves respect, security, and care.
Until that reconstruction begins, the nation will remain trapped. The elites will continue to rule through metrics and surveillance rather than legitimacy. The public will continue to oscillate between nihilism and suspicion. And the moral void at the center of American life will continue to widen, one camera at a time.
Sources
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
David Lyon, Surveillance Studies
Higher Education Inquirer, How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites
Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil
Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness
Join HEPI for a webinar on Thursday 11 December 2025 from 10am to 11am to discuss how universities can strengthen the student voice in governance to mark the launch of our upcoming report, Rethinking the Student Voice. Sign up now to hear our speakers explore the key questions.
This guest blog was kindly authored by Imran Mir, Campus Head and Programme Lead at Apex College Leicester.
The embedding of the further education and higher education sectors has been a longstanding policy goal, but recent reforms have caused an urgent need than ever. The UK government has set the ambitious goal of having at least two-thirds of young people go on to higher-level learning by age 25, with at least 10% of them pursuing higher technical education or apprenticeships. While such targets can be seen as overly ambitious, they will only come to fruition if the gap between further education and higher education is efficiently bridged. Without this, there is a risk of losing students during the transition from one educational stage to the next. These government ambitions highlight why bridging further education and higher education is so important. Aligning both sectors is essential to turning these national policy goals into real progress for learners.
Although there has been some growth in participation in higher education, disparities remain. Students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are four times less likely to have access to high-tariff universities. Whilst UCAS data for 2024 has shown growth in learner acceptances, this is largely down to an increase in the number of 18-year-olds, rather than a reduction in gaps between the most and least advantaged students. Further education is vital for social mobility; however, too many learners face major barriers when trying to transition into the higher education institutions of their choice.
Reflecting on the recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper (DfE, 2025), there is clear intent to have a more connected tertiary system through plans such as the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and stronger employer-education partnerships. The proposal clearly acknowledges many of the issues outlined above, especially the need for smoother progression routes and credit transfer between further and higher education. However, questions will remain on how effectively these ambitions are going to be implemented. Without unified collaboration from both sides, clear accountability, and investment in teaching capacity and resources across both sectors, the reforms risk reinforcing the existing divides rather than bridging the gap.
For the government to achieve its goal of equity, further education students must not just enter higher education but also succeed once there. The reforms present an opportunity; they must be matched with the practical changes in how we align assessment, recognise technical routes in admissions, share data, work together where possible, and make the LLE more navigable. By taking these actions, policy ambitions can be translated into real-world success for students.
Greetings from Cambridge! Today we’re looking at a college so old it doesn’t even need to be called “college”.
Let’s go back to 1280. Edward I, aka Edward Longshanks, was on the throne. England was calm after a period of internal turmoil; part of the reason for this was wars waged against the Welsh and the Scots. And in Ely, Bishop Hugh de Balsham was petitioning the King.
Successfully, as it turns out. His petition sought permission to evict secular brethren from the Hospital of St John at Cambridge and replace them with “studious scholars”, who would live in accordance with the rules of Merton College in Oxford (hospital meant something different in 1280 – not a medical facility, but guesthouse or almshouse, the hos being the same as in host).
Clearly this was not entirely satisfactory, as in 1284 Bishop Hugh gained another charter which differentiated these scholars from the other residents of the hospital. Reading between the lines, perhaps the hospital wasn’t entirely happy at having the students in it. In any event, Bishop Hugh obviated whatever problems there were by purchasing two houses and providing for a master and fourteen fellows who must be “worthy but impoverished”. The fellows would worship at the Church of St Peter Without Trumpington Gate, and the college thus became Peterhouse. Not Peterhouse College, by the way – just Peterhouse.
And it was thus, founded in 1284, the first formal college in Cambridge, although the university had been going for a few years, and with official status since 1231. It had to wait until 1326 for another college to be founded (Clare College, then known as University Hall), and then by 1352 there were six colleges – enough to organise a league table!
Peterhouse then plodded along. In the maelstrom of Tudor England, its master, Andrew Perne, was skilled at working with the prevailing political and religious opinions. It was said that the letters on the weathervane at St Peters’ Church stood for “Andrew Perne, Protestant”, or “Andrew Perne, Papist”, depending on which way the wind blew. When he was vice chancellor of the university, Perne had the bones of Martin Bucer, prominent protestant theologian and organiser, and later Regius Professor of Divinity, exhumed and burnt in the market square.
Peterhouse was the second building in England to be lit by electric lighting. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was a Peterhouse alumnus, and had them installed in 1884, to celebrate the college’s sexcentenary (the building that had them before was the House of Lords, in 1883).
Peterhouse admitted women undergraduates in 1984, seven hundred years after its foundation. (Women were admitted to postgraduate study in 1983, but the poetry of the anniversary required me to focus on undergraduates here. Sorry!) It is fair to say that this places it towards the conservative end of Oxbridge colleges. And in this case it is a literal truth.
Peterhouse became the breeding ground for a generation of right-wing conservative politicians, including the Michaels Howard and Portillo. This is connected to the appointment of Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton as fellows of the college. The former’s student followers included one who, allegedly, wore a black armband on the anniversary of General Franco’s death.
Peterhouse’s catalogue of alumni includes some very impressive names. Thomas Grey, poet and country-churchyard elegist is one. And then scientists: we’ve seen Lord Kelvin, physicist and mathematician; you can also have James Clark Maxwell, father of electromagnetism. And then add Frank Whittle of the jet engine, and James Mason, of more great films than you can shake a stick at. Five Nobel laureates are associated with Peterhouse, all of them in Chemistry, in 1952, 1962, 1962, 1982 and 2013. Which must be some sort of a record. And maybe scope for a song: “it’s lucky for Peterhouse when the year ends in two.”
We should also note that Peterhouse is potentially an inspiration for the college in Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s fairly scabrous look at Cambridge life and politics.
And finally, a snippet from the Illustrated London News on 25 May 1968, announcing the appointment of a new master at Peterhouse.
In this context, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about Dr Burkill – I just think it is striking that the appointment of a head of college was then considered newsworthy.
Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard. It was posted in Ipswich on 15 September 1905 to Miss E Parfit of Handford Road, Ipswich:
Dear Ethel, Hope you will like this. With love from V.R.
The ambush shooting of two National Guardsmen near the White House on November 27, 2025, by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, is the latest in a growing wave of politically motivated violence that has engulfed the United States since 2024. Lakanwal opened fire on uniformed service members stationed for heightened security, wounding both. Federal authorities are investigating whether ideological motives drove the attack, which comes against a backdrop of escalating domestic and international tensions. This ambush cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of a larger pattern of domestic political violence that has claimed lives across ideological lines.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University during a campus event in September 2025. Minnesota state representative Mary Carlson and her husband were murdered in their home by a man impersonating law enforcement, while a state senator and spouse were injured in the same spree. Governor Josh Shapiro survived an arson attack on his residence earlier this year. Even Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in July 2024. Added to this grim tally are incidents such as the 2025 Manhattan mass shooting, in which young professionals, including two Jewish women, Julia Hyman and Wesley LePatner, were killed, and the Luigi Mangione case, in which a former student allegedly killed a corporate executive in New York. Together, these incidents reveal a nation in which lethal violence increasingly intersects with politics, identity, and ideology.
The domestic escalation of violence cannot be separated from broader structures of oppression. Migrants and asylum seekers face detention, family separation, and deportation under the authority of ICE, often in conditions described as inhumane, creating fear and vulnerability among refugee communities. Routine encounters with law enforcement disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. Excessive force and lethal policing add to communal distrust, reinforcing perceptions that violence is a sanctioned tool of the state. Political rhetoric compounds the problem. President Trump and other political leaders have repeatedly framed immigrants, political opponents, and even students as threats to national security, implicitly legitimizing aggressive responses and providing fodder for extremist actors.
The domestic situation is further complicated by U.S. foreign policy, which has often contributed to global instability while modeling the use of violence as an instrument of governance. In Palestine, military aid to Israel coincides with attacks on civilians and infrastructure that human-rights organizations describe as ethnic cleansing or genocide. In Venezuela, U.S. sanctions, threats, and proxy operations have intensified humanitarian crises and political instability. Complicity with the governments of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia enables human-rights abuses abroad while emboldening domestic actors who mimic state-sanctioned violence. These global policies reverberate at home, influencing public discourse, shaping extremist narratives, and creating a climate in which political and ideological violence is increasingly normalized.
Higher education sits at the nexus of these domestic and global pressures. Universities and colleges are not merely observers; they are active participants and, in some cases, victims. The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a campus underscores that institutions of learning are no longer insulated from lethal political conflict. Alumni, recent graduates, and professionals—such as the victims of the Manhattan shooting—are affected even after leaving school, revealing how closely academic networks intersect with broader societal risks. International and refugee students, particularly from Afghan and Middle Eastern communities, face heightened anxiety due to restrictive immigration policies, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the real threat of violence. Faculty teaching topics related to immigration, race, U.S. foreign policy, or genocide are increasingly targeted by harassment, threats, and institutional pressures that suppress academic freedom. The cumulative stress of political violence, systemic oppression, and global conflicts creates trauma that universities must address comprehensively, both for students and faculty.
Higher education cannot prevent every act of violence, nor can it resolve the nation’s deep political fractures. But it can model ethical and civic engagement, defending inquiry and speech without succumbing to fear or political pressure. It can extend support to vulnerable communities, promote critical thinking about the domestic roots of political violence and the consequences of U.S. foreign policy, and foster ethical reflection that counters the normalization of aggression. Silence or passivity risks complicity. Universities must recognize that the threats affecting campuses, alumni, and students are interconnected with broader systems of power and oppression, both domestic and global.
From the White House ambush to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, from the Minnesota legislators’ murders to the Manhattan mass shooting, from Luigi Mangione’s high-profile killing to systemic violence enforced through ICE and police overreach, and amid the influence of incendiary political rhetoric and U.S. complicity in violence abroad, the United States is experiencing an unprecedented convergence of domestic and international pressures. Higher education sits at the center of these converging forces, and how it responds will shape not only campus safety and academic freedom but also the broader civic health of the nation. The challenge is immense: to uphold democratic values, protect communities, and educate students in a society increasingly defined by fear, extremism, and violence.
Reuters. “FBI probes gunman’s motives in ambush shooting of Guardsmen near White House.” The Guardian. Coverage on suspect identification and political reaction. AP News. Statements by national leaders following attacks. Washington Post. Analysis of domestic violent extremism and political violence trends. People Magazine. Reporting on Minnesota legislator assassination. NBC/AP. Statements by Gov. Josh Shapiro after Charlie Kirk’s killing. Utah Valley University and local ABC/Fox affiliates on the Kirk shooting. Jewish Journal, ABC7NY. Coverage of Manhattan mass shooting and Jewish victims. Reuters. Luigi Mangione case and court proceedings. Human Rights Watch / Amnesty International reports on Palestine, Venezuela, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Brookings Institute. Analysis of political violence and domestic extremism. CSIS. “Domestic Extremism and Political Violence in the United States.”
[Editor’s note: United American Indians of New England host the National Day of Mourning. Their website is at United American Indians of New England – UAINE.]
Each November, while much of the United States celebrates Thanksgiving, Indigenous communities and their allies gather in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and across the country for the National Day of Mourning. It is a day that confronts the mythology of national innocence and replaces it with historical clarity. For Higher Education Inquirer, the significance of this day extends directly into the heart of American higher education—a system built, in no small part, on the expropriation of Indigenous land, the exploitation of Native Peoples, and the continued structural racism that shapes their educational opportunities today.
From the earliest colonial colleges to the flagship research institutions of the twenty-first century, U.S. higher education has never been separate from the project of settler colonialism. It has been one of its instruments.
America’s oldest colleges—Harvard, Yale, William & Mary, Dartmouth—were founded within the colonial order that dispossessed Indigenous communities. While missionary language framed some of these institutions’ early purposes, they operated through an extractive logic: the seizure of land, the conversion of cultural worlds, and, eventually, the accumulation of immense academic wealth.
The Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 expanded this pattern on a national scale. Recent research documented by the “Land-Grab Universities” project shows that nearly eleven million acres of Indigenous land—taken through coercive treaties, forced removal, or outright theft—were funneled into endowments for public universities. Students today walk across campuses financed by displacements their own institutions have yet to fully acknowledge, let alone remedy.
The United States also used education as a tool for forced assimilation. The Indian boarding school system, with the Carlisle Industrial School as its model, operated in partnership with federal officials, church agencies, and academic institutions. Native children were taken from their families, stripped of their languages, and subjected to relentless cultural destruction.
Universities contributed research, training, and personnel to this system, embedding the logic of “civilizing” Indigenous Peoples into the academy’s structure. That legacy endures in curricula that minimize Indigenous knowledge systems and in institutional cultures that prize Eurocentric epistemologies as default.
Scientific Racism, Anthropology, and the Theft of Ancestors
American universities played a central role in producing scientific racism. Anthropologists and medical researchers collected Indigenous remains, objects, and sacred items without consent. Museums and university labs became repositories for thousands of ancestors—often obtained through grave robberies, military campaigns, or opportunistic scholarship.
The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was designed to force institutions to return ancestors and cultural patrimony. Yet decades later, many universities are still out of compliance, delaying repatriation while continuing to benefit from the research collections they amassed through violence.
The oppression is not confined to history. Structural racism continues to constrain Native Peoples in higher education today.
Native students remain among the most underrepresented and under-supported groups on American campuses. Chronic underfunding of Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) reflects a broader political disregard for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Meanwhile, elite institutions recruit Native students for marketing purposes while failing to invest in retention, community support, or Indigenous faculty hiring.
Some universities have begun implementing land acknowledgments, but these symbolic gestures have little impact when institutions refuse to confront their material obligations: returning land, committing long-term funding to Indigenous programs, or restructuring governance to include tribal representatives.
A genuine response to the National Day of Mourning would require far more than statements of solidarity. It would involve confronting the ways American higher education continues to profit from dispossession and the ways Native students continue to bear disproportionate burdens—from tuition to cultural isolation to the racist violence that still occurs on and around campuses.
Real accountability would include:
• Full compliance with NAGPRA and expedited repatriation.
• Transparent reporting of land-grant wealth and the return or shared governance of those lands.
• Stable, meaningful funding for TCUs.
• Hiring, tenure, and research policies that center Indigenous scholarship and sovereignty.
• Long-term institutional commitments—financial, curricular, and political—to Indigenous communities.
These steps require institutions to shift from performative recognition to structural transformation.
The National Day of Mourning is not merely a counter-holiday. It is a reminder that the United States was founded on violence against Native Peoples—and that its colleges and universities were not passive beneficiaries but active participants in that violence.
For higher education leaders, faculty, and students, the question is no longer whether these histories are real or whether they matter. They are documented. They are ongoing. They matter profoundly.
The real question is what institutions are willing to give up—land, power, wealth, or narrative control—to support Indigenous liberation.
On this National Day of Mourning, HEI honors the truth that Indigenous survival is an act of resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty is not a symbolic aspiration but an overdue demand. The future of higher education must move through that truth, not around it.
Sources
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
The Land-Grab Universities Project (High Country News & Land-Grab Universities database).
David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.
Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World.
NAGPRA regulations and compliance reports.
As part of participating in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, we were given lessons and activities three times a week for six weeks. I had been blogging perhaps once or twice a year for a while now, never feeling like I had found my voice with those posts. Doing that much sharing via the written form seemed daunting, yet I had a strong suspicion that the discipline would pay off. I was not wrong at all on that front.
Here are the various posts I wrote, along with an overview of the concepts explored in each one.
Great insight lies in visualizing and analyzing the relationships that surround our work and learning. Networks are fundamental lenses for how we connect, influence, and grow.
Key themes:
Quote:
“Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” — Mark S. Granovetter (1973)
Both strong and weak ties are vital to our learning.
Allowing ourselves to wonder opens up our capacity to learn, connect, and co-create more deeply.
Key themes:
Quote:
“The skills required to live in a world dominated by complex and non-routine work requires — creativity, imagination, empathy, and curiosity.” — Harold Jarche
Stay curious, widen our lenses, and lean into the discomfort of not-knowing as the gateway to meaningful growth.
Grief, networks, and belonging are deeply intertwined in shaping the places where we learn, grow, and support one another.
Key themes:
Quote:
“If we put our metaphorical eggs in one basket and something happens to that basket, there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” — Bonni Stachowiak
Invest in communities that embrace complexity, invite connection across networks, and hold space for both loss and belonging.
As I reflected on intentionality this week, I realized that showing up with purpose—not just going through the motions—significantly shapes what I notice, how I respond, and who I become in the process.
Key themes:
Quote:
“Show up for the work.” — Bonni Stachowiak
Jarche also gave some examples of the practices on which PKM is built upon, such as narrating our work and sharing half-baked ideas.
Moving through life’s messy, liminal spaces requires curiosity, humility, and movement.
Key themes:
Quote:
“In a crisis it is important to act but even more important to learn as we take action.” — Harold Jarche
This Learning in the Complex Domain post by Jarche is likely the most important one for me to revisit from all that I read throughout these six weeks, as I’m still struggling to understand the Cynefin framework.
It’s still wild to me that RSS isn’t as common as navigating websites.
Key themes:
Quote:
However, I’m picky about my reading experience and have gotten particular about being able to read via Unread on my iPad and navigate everything with just one thumb. — Bonni Stachowiak
I was also glad to learn from Jarche about subscribing to Mastodon feeds and hashtags via RSS, though I haven’t experimented with that much, yet, since the Tapestry app does a lot of that for me.
Understanding the frameworks behind our media tools unlocks far deeper insights than simply reacting to what comes our way.
Key themes:
Quote:
“The reversals are already evident — corporate surveillance, online orthodoxy, life as reality TV, constant outrage to sell advertising. The tetrads give us a common framework to start addressing the effects of social media pushed to their limits. Once you see these effects, you cannot un-see them.” — Harold Jarche
Analyzing these media tools heps us choose how to engage with them, rather than passively being shaped by them.
It is critical to engage in ways to increase the likelihood of us being able to identify fake news. .
Key themes:
Quote:
Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. – Renée DiResta, as quoted in El País
Our identities get so wrapped up in what we believe, it can be so challenging to consider how we might be part of combating fake news in our various contexts.
It can be so generative to share thoughts before they’re polished and this openness fuels learning, creativity, and connection.
Key themes:
Quote:
If you don’t make sense of the world for yourself, then you’re stuck with someone else’s world view. — Harold Jarche
Let ideas be emergent rather than complete so that learning can unfold collaboratively.
Jarche introduces us to various PKM roles for this topic.
Key themes:
Quote:
“Writing every day is less about becoming someone who writes, and more about becoming someone who thinks.” — JA Westenberg
The value of PKM is in curating many voices, cultivating a “neighborhood” of experts to follow, listen, question, and to build a rich, networked sensemaking practice rather than rely on single voices alone.
Turning toward connection can be one of our strongest antidotes to imposter syndrome.
Key themes:
Quote:
A triangle exists between three people in a social network. An “open triangle” exists where one person knows two other people who are not yet connected to each other — X knows Y and X knows Z, but Y and Z do not know each other. A network weaver (X) may see an opportunity or possibility from making a connection between two currently unconnected people (Y and Z). A “closed triangle” exists when all three people know each other: X-Y, X-Z, Y-Z. – Valdis Krebs
This reminder feels like fuel for the next leg of my PKMastery journey — leaning into weaving networks as practice not just for growth, but for belonging and shared strength.
Growth often comes not from jumping to answers but from staying curious, experimenting, and traveling alongside fellow learners.
Key themes:
Quote:
Your fellow seekers can help you on a journey to become a Knowledge Catalyst, which takes parts of the Expert and the Connector and combines them to be a highly contributing node in a knowledge network. We can become knowledge catalysts — filtering, curating, thinking, and doing — in conjunction with others. Only in collaboration with others will we understand complex issues and create new ways of addressing them. As expertise is getting eroded in many fields, innovation across disciplines is increasing. We need to reach across these disciplines. — Harold Jarche
Seeking is not a sign of weakness, but as a source of collective curiosity, connection, and growth.
There is strength in making invisible processes and decisions visible.
Key themes:
Quote:
The key is to narrate your work so it is shareable, but to use discernment in sharing with others. Also, to be good at narrating your work, you have to practice. — Harold Jarche
Narrating our work offers a window into our process of learning.
As I reflected on systems thinking, I found myself returning to how challenging (and how necessary) it is to see beyond events and into the structures that shape them. Revisiting Senge’s The Fifth Discipline reminded me just how often we can slip into reacting instead of zooming out to notice patterns.
Key themes:
Quote:
You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern. – Peter Senge
Sitting with this reminded me that lest we fall victim to skilled incompetence, we need to continually nurture the humility and curiosity to keep looking wider, deeper, and more generously at the forces shaping our organizations and our work.
The potential for adding value through PKM helps make our contributions much richer when paired with curiosity, generosity, and intentional sharing.
Key themes:
Quotes:
Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you. — Maria Popova
It was great getting to see this all in action, through a dinnertime conversation with Bryan Alexander.
Fear and self-doubt often keeps us from beginning and from recognizing how much value we hold even before we “arrive.”
Key themes:
Quote:
“The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.” — Tim Kastelle
Commit to practice, to sharing, and to staying open to becoming someone who learns out loud.
Stepping away from busyness — even just to wander — creates the space for real insight and creative thinking.
Key themes:
Quote:
Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness. — Harold Jarche
PKM is part discipline, part letting go of the busyness, and part listening to whatever emerges.
“Mastery” is not an endpoint, but a habitual practice of learning, sharing, and growing.
Key themes:
Quote:
It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other. — Ronald Burt
The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.
This final PKMastery workshop post is what I’m referring to as the last step toward the first step, meaning that while I’m through with the formal/structured activities and curated lessons from Harold Jarche, there’s such tremendous potential for even deeper learning, with a renewed commitment toward PKM.
Jarche shares a report from many years ago about the most valued Future Work Skills. He writes of how: “The report identified six drivers of change.
Ten future [present] work skills were derived from these drivers and these were seen to be critical for success in the emerging network era workplace. In 2014 a relatively simple infographic was published to show the relationship between these drivers and skills. Of these 10 skills, four compose the essence of personal knowledge mastery:
Participants in the workshop are then invited to focus on which competency we would most like to develop in, as part of our overall PKM practice. I’m torn between sense-making and cognitive load management. While further understanding of systems thinking and sense-making practices would certainly help me in my ongoing learning, I recognize my lack of sufficient discipline for what a focus on cognitive load management might bring me.
Throughout this process of blogging my way through Harold Jarche’s Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop, I essentially wrote the equivalent of half of a book. When I tell myself that I don’t have time for certain pursuits in my life, these past six weeks would seem to counter those self-limiting beliefs. While I’m not actually interested, necessarily, in writing a book for other people at this exact moment, my shift in focus to a more reflective and open writing style for all these posts has felt liberating. As Ronald Burt shares:
It is not being in the know, but rather having to translate between different groups so that you develop gifts of analogy, metaphor, and communicating between people who have difficulty communicating to each other.
Having no idea who will ever read these words, but knowing that the writing practice this workshop has instilled in me has been tremendously helpful in my own sense-making. James Lang would say I’m getting lots of practice writing to an imaginary audience and that has felt good. By Jarche asking us to engage on Mastodon and to use the #PKMastery hashtag, I’ve been able to share my work with a niche audience, reconnecting with people I hadn’t been in regular touch with for a long while, in addition to meeting a couple of new people along the way.
by Yusuf Oldac and Francisco Olivas
We recently embarked upon a project to explore the development of higher education research topics over the last decades. The results were published in Review of Education. Our aim was to thematically map the field of research on higher education and to analyse how the field has evolved over time between 2000 and 2021. This blog post summarises our findings and reflects on the implications for HE research.
HE research continues to grow. HE researchers are located in globally diverse geographical locations and publish on diversifying topics. Studies focusing on the development of HE with a global-level analysis are increasingly emerging. However, most of these studies are limited to scientometric network analyses that do not include a content-related focus. In addition, they are deductive, indicating that they tried to fit their new findings into existing categories. Recently, Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) were able to capture the scholarly literature on higher education through an analysis of latent themes by utilising topic modelling. This approach got attention in the literature, and the study’s contribution was highlighted in an earlier SRHE blog post. We also found their study useful and built on it in our novel analysis. However, their analysis focused only on generating topics from a wide range of higher education journals and did not identify explanatory factors, such as change over the years or the location of publication. After identifying this gap, we worked towards moving one step further.
A central contribution of our study is the inclusion of a set of research content explanatory factors, namely: time, region, funding, collaboration type, and journals, to investigate the topics of HE research. In methodological terms, our study moves ahead of the description of the topic prevalence to the explanation of the prevalence utilizing structural topic modelling (Roberts et al, 2013).
Structural topic modelling is a machine learning technique that examines the content of provided text to learn patterns in word usage without human supervision in a replicable and transparent way (Mohr & Bogdanov, 2013). This powerful technique expands the methodological repertoire of higher education research. On one hand, computational methods make it possible to extract meaning from large datasets; on the other, they allow the prediction of emerging topics by integrating the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Nevertheless, many scholars in HE remain reluctant to engage with such methods, reflecting a degree of methodological conservatism or tunnel vision (see Huisman and Daenekindt’s SRHE blog post).
In this blog post, our intention is not to go deep into the minute details of this methodological technique, but to share a glimpse of our main findings through the use of such a technique. With the corpus of all papers published between 2000 and 2021 in the top six generalist journals of higher education, as listed by Cantwell et al (2022) and Kwiek (2021) both, we analysed a dataset of 6,562 papers. As a result, we identified 15 emergent research topics and several major patterns that highlight the thematic changes over the last decades. Below, we share some of our findings, accompanied by relevant visualisations.
The emergent 15 higher education topics and three visibly rising ones
Our topic modelling analysis revealed 15 distinct topics, which are largely in line with the topics discussed in previous studies on this line (eg Teichler, 1996; Tight, 2003; Horta & Jung, 2014). However, there are added nuances in our analysis. For example, the most prevalent topics are policy and teaching/learning, which are widely acknowledged in the field, but new themes have emerged and strengthened over time. These themes include identity politics and discrimination, access, and employability. These areas, conceptually linked to social justice, have become central to higher education research, especially in US-based journals but not limited to them. The visual below demonstrates the changes over the years for all 15 topics.
Research funding plays a crucial role in shaping certain topics, particularly gender inequality, access, and doctoral education. Studies that received funding exhibited a higher prevalence of these socially significant topics, underscoring the importance of targeted funding to support research with social impact. The data visualisation below summarises the influence of reported funding for each topic. The novelty of this pattern needs to be highlighted because we have not come across a previous study looking into the influence of funding existence on research topics in the higher education field.
Collaborative publications are more prevalent in topics such as teaching and learning, and diversity and social relations. By contrast, theoretical discussions, identity politics, policy, employability, and institutional management are more common in solo-authored papers. This pattern aligns with the nature of these topics and the data requirements for research. Please see the visualised data below.
We highlight that although the relationship between collaboration and citation impact or researcher productivity is well studied, we are not aware of any evidence of the effect of collaboration patterns on topic prevalence, particularly in studies focusing on higher education. So, this finding is a novel contribution to higher education research.
Although the six leading journals claim to be generalist, our analysis shows they have differing publication preferences. For example, Higher Education focuses on policy and university governance, while Higher Education Research and Development stands out for teaching/learning and indigenous knowledge. Journal of Higher Education and Review of Higher Education, two US-based journals, have the highest prevalence of identity politics and discrimination topics. Last, Studies in Higher Education has a significantly higher prevalence in teaching and learning, theoretical discussions, doctoral education, and emotions, burnout and coping than most of the journals.
Topic focus varies significantly by the region of the first author. First, studies from Asia exhibit the highest prevalence of academic work and institutional management. Studies from Africa show a higher prevalence of identity politics and discrimination. Moreover, studies published by first authors from Eastern European countries stand out with the higher prevalence of employability. Lastly, the policy topic has a high prevalence across all regions. However, studies with first authors from Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean showed a higher prevalence of policy research in higher education than those from North America and Western Europe. By contrast, indigenous knowledge is most prominent in Western Europe (including Australia and New Zealand). The figure below demonstrates these in visual format.
Concluding remarks
Higher education research has grown and diversified dramatically over the past two decades. The field is now established globally, with an ever-expanding array of topics and contributors. In this blog post, we shared the results of our analysis in relation to the influence of targeted funding, collaborative practices, regional differences, and journal preferences on higher education research topics. We have also indicated that certain topics have risen in prevalence in the last two decades. More patterns are included in the main research study published in Review of Education.
It is important to note that we could only include the higher education papers published up to 2021, the latest available data year when we started the analyses. The impact of generative artificial intelligence and recent major shifts in the global geopolitics, including the new DEI policies in the US and overall securitisation of science tendencies, may not be reflected fully in this dataset. These themes are very recent, and future studies, including replications with similar approaches, may help provide newly emerging patterns.
Dr Yusuf Oldac is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at The Education University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Oxford, where he received a full scholarship. Dr Oldac’s research spans international and comparative higher education, with a current focus on global science and knowledge production in university settings.
Dr Francisco Olivas obtained his PhD in Sociology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He joined Lingnan University in August 2021. His research lies in the intersections between cultural sociology, social stratification, and subjective well-being, using quantitative and computational methods.
