UNIKE Project: Keynote speech by Professor Nick Lewis

Keynote speech by Professor Nick Lewis. Keynote speech given at the UNIKE Conference at the University of Auckland.

Okay, thank you, Sue and Susan, the other principles of the UNIKE project, and Chris for inviting me to get this talk three years ago. Members of this audience debated the death of the public university. We took positions from the university in ruins to the university at various points on different trajectories to ruins. The university is zombie, the university is hollowed out of its progressive and emancipatory potential, if not its will and capacity to critique and the university is still vital, a platform for critical scholarship and projects of positive social change.

Much of the discussion centered on the category of the university. Last October, in a public lecture here on campus, Stephan Collini gave a defense of the university by forensically deconstructing rankings and their work, while referring to different universities and basing much of his argument on the inbuilt and self-reinforcing biases towards elite universities in the way that rankings are constructed, interpreted, and used. The university to be protected seemed very much like Oxbridge, and the conceptualizing and contextualizing debates seemed very British. Despite these various distances, I enjoyed the crisper intellectualism of the talk. However, one listening graduate student reflected afterwards that she was over the category of the university. I took this to be an expression of both frustration and fatigue from a student who had previously been a passionate advocate. Frustration at distanced and highbrow defenses of an institution that affords great privilege to a few, and a deep fatigue from waging unwinnable contests against student fee increases and commercializing logics, as well as from deconstructed critique as a mode of being as much as a mode of doing.

The comment ought to be seen less as a throwaway, I think, and more as a deep challenge to the delegates at this conference to grapple with contradictions, unpacked arguments, and perhaps shift to a more variegated understanding of the university. The images of my own university are more variegated and hopeful than the ivory tower and the insipid brand. But must we, as English does in his favorable review of Colonies' book, mobilize the figure of the dinner ladies, and must we conclude that all we can do is warn? That's the challenge I wish to unpack a little today, without appearing as a dreadful Quisling.

Delegates at this conference need no reminding of the changes that are gripping our universities, and what's at stake. Abstracted from the abstracts of this week's conference, the list is very long. It runs from funding priorities to commercialization, bibliometrics, branding, MOOCs, internal cost accounting, new governance arrangements, the collapse of collegial governance, and much else besides. We are experiencing an avalanche of change, to borrow a metaphor from Michael Barber, to whom I will return shortly. These changes are of course linked upwards to and constitutive of the great neoliberalizing and globalizing processes and geopolitical shifts of the late 20th century, to new public managerial concentration of the exercise of state powers, and to crises of accumulation and / or accumulation, as well as to find growing technologies of control that entrepreneurial eyes and responsible eyes academics they are by and large regressive and regrettable, and most in this audience have railed against them.

Geographer Nigel Thrift, prominent blogger on the future of higher education, and recently knighted Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University, has summed up the challenges facing the university as our government's unwillingness to fund university education, growing problems of social exclusion, growing inequalities between universities, constricted possibilities for research careers, the rise of a third sector, impact assessments, and the diminishing capacity of universities to address world problems for academics and students living through them. These pressures and changes have gripped at the level of the body and subjectivity as well as practice. Academics face increasing pressures on time and resources that threaten to deflect attention from teaching, public good research, and public engagement. They resent the way these changes have driven a particular form of heightened competitiveness so deeply and probably unnecessarily into our knowledge production practices and daily routines.

But they have changed what we do and what we are, undermined our potential, and made us wittingly or otherwise the agents of the changes themselves. Our students protest annually against the increasing fees that they must pay and the loans that they must take out. Further afield, debates about student fees and rising debt levels rage on in the UK, Europe, and the United States, along with concerns about social inequities of access and debt and the rise of multi-tier university hierarchies. A student debt in the US has passed one trillion dollars. These concerns, along with a broader analysis of the demise of the US higher education system, have been picked up in the 2014 film "Ivory Tower," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is in mainstream distribution.

You can watch it on a New Zealand flight home for New Zealand delegates. These challenges are posed in a landscape short on alternative policy imagination. In the months following Colonies' talk, the Vice-Chancellors of our two largest universities have defended the universities in the dialogues pages of the New Zealand Herald, defending them by advocating a market-led drive for excellence, targeted at global measures of quality, and underpinned by either higher student fees or a reduction in the number of institutions. The vision rests on mobile and rational students and academics clearing a quality market. Ironically, perhaps, for most interesting in recent post-Collini commentary was carried in the notoriously neoliberal business weekly, the National Business Review.

Professor Paul Mohan, a food scientist, director of a Reda Institute Centre of Research Excellence, and winner of the 2012 Prime Minister's Science Prize for contributions to exporting food, suggests that along with the predictable establishing closer connections with business, universities must attend to broad-based educational experiences, really understanding what is meant by the research-teaching nexus, and focus on the broader total educational experience and strategically knowing what they stand for. While academics again must do the imagining of what this means in practice.

My first substantive point is that this kind of prescription creates some room in which to vitalize the university. But before getting too far ahead of myself, my aim today is to seek relief from this fog by reflecting on how we might continue to practice critical scholarship both within the university and from the university, and how we might find ways to do university differently as a platform for critical research, all while still rallying against disabling change, being attentive to and critical of its rationalities, and acting to oppose further erosions of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. This is what I mean by making a call for a more than oppositional politic, critical politics.

If there is a short answer to these questions, it is, I think, that we are already doing this, but really, think or talk about what it is that we're doing. I begin by suggesting two necessary intellectual moves: first, rethinking critical practice, and then thinking beneath the category of the university. It's not now, it's not now enough, if it ever has been, to reveal, deconstruct, and critique without responsibility, that is, to indulge as Boland suggests in the discourse which transforms and unmasks other truth claims and replaces them with what he says as a stock a vision of reality.

This is a form of critique he suggests that is permanent, promiscuously, and these are his words, connected with cynicism, and risks becoming a sort of permanent and variegated opposition to different forms of constraint. It risks taking for granted the critic and conscience clause enshrined in New Zealand's Education Act as a defense of academic freedom or treating it or treating it as a right to practice only a passively disengaged and deconstructive critique.

It might be more interesting to ask what kind of critical practice is now possible or meaningful. Matheson Russell yesterday suggested that the court that the cause of critic and conscience authorizes universities and its academics to be active political participants and gives them the freedom to question and test received wisdom, advance different ideas, criticize public powers, and to hold them to account. These are his words from another cover from a publication.

We might go further to suggest that the clause imposes an individual and collective responsibility to do this at a time when the state no longer sits so obviously as the actor that might respond to criticism and make material any alternative thinking, with or without explicitly articulated recommendations from researchers, for example. And public choice Theory presents alternative thinking as narrowly self-interested, but recommendation to policy is no longer a simple option here.

As a geographer in a science faculty, I occasionally have this conversation with the ecologists and other environmental scientists who cannot understand often why the government does not act on their science. Arguably, as social scientists, we should know better. The state does not make policy and command resources and investments decisions as it once did. While in the new state, we are researchers, deliverers of evidence by instrumental means, not keepers of a deeper knowledge.

We are of a sector often lumped together with Crown Research Institutes in the New Zealand context, we are a group defined up with definable common consistent and rational, rationally articulated stakes. We are to be consulted rather than to be trusted with the capacity or moral authority to define alternative national or community goods or to argue from anything other than from sectarian positions.

This suggests, I suspect, that we need to find new actors with whom to engage and new ways of engaging with the state, while still building concepts and still critiquing at a distance. Thinking deeper within the university, in much of my own scholarship, I used the work of Timothy Mitchell, Michelle, and even Nigel Thrift to deconstruct the category of the economy, economies are messy, and I have begun to use metaphors such as that of assemblage to draw attention to their partiality and temporariness, as well as to the act of assembling of actors, objects, relations, practices, regulation, investment trajectories, objects, and so on, that constitute them.

Through such a lens, a university might be seen as less the fully autonomous, singular, preordained, and somewhat paradoxical configuration of disciplines and unconstrained academics and students who are safely located away on the hill above the town and above the state, often in practice, they are looser and more multiverse assemblages of different types of students and academics, knowledge productions, missions, political projects of enlightenment, disciplinary configurations, and so on.

Even before we throw in the student loans, research institutes, interdisciplinary networks, research offices, commercializing units, HR, PR, and staff service centers of today's universities, along with the performative, along with its performative and calculated objects, X FTEs, KPIs, rankings, H-indices, rates of return, and so on, and of course, universities are located in different places with different histories, statuses, and student catchments, and with different funding and regulatory regimes.

Any university is a complex of variegated institution, and all actualized universities are different assemblages of often different elements. The roar of the avalanche of change contains discordant and/or context-specific notes arising from different actualized neoliberalism's differences in the way that the pressures play out among them within different universities.

The equity gains from mass education, new targeted equity programs, and the enduring absences, silences, and class, gendered, and other privileges of the Academy, along with various romanticization that swirl around those in the arts and humanities, need to be wary of seeing universities only from where they inhabit them and from the type of university that they inhabit, without actively researching what goes on in medical schools, science labs, law libraries, ICT suites, and so on, and engaging with the different projects of social good that are often launched and developed in those spaces.

We risk privilege in the role of the university as critique of power in domains of economy and social politics only in my part of the university, I see laboratories, modeling programs, field machines, and the budgets that my students fund to sustain them. I also encounter some of the many projects of the Enlightenment still at work in different parts of different of different in different parts of the university.

Despite the assault on institutional autonomy and researcher-initiated research that threatened the capacity to exercise academic freedom, by identifying the questions with asking for academics in the 2013 document, "The Avalanche is Coming," a joint publication by Higher Education Corporation, Pearson, the Institute for Public Policy Research, and Universities UK, Michael Barber put the question of unbundling of university practices firmly in the middle of the avalanche.

Although clearly designed as an intervention to bring into being that of which it speaks and to act as a betrayal for the privatization of universities, the document points to the breaking up, contracting out, privatization, and globalization of research, teaching, curriculum, funding, conferring degrees, all of those dimensions that constitute the university.

Unbundling is the language of the asset strippers of the 1980s who sought to create money, profits from socially created rents and release values for commercial realization. Unbundling will intensify many of the pressures on the university. However, in his conclusion to the forward, Lawrence Summers observed that the future of the university belongs to those who rebuttal creatively, for they will find that they had reinvented higher education for the 21st century.

Very biblical kind of language, the bundling then is a curiously derived hopeful metaphor, at least in my take on this, for the university, and leads me to ask whether it is possible to find and learn from expert examples of creative rebounding or alternative ways of performing critique or simply living with these changes on at least partially different terms.

The third mission is a term used in EU policy to refer to a broadly interpreted raft of university engagements with various public in research on its rise in New Zealand, about which you will hear more later today, Chris Shore, Nigel, John Morgan, and myself, we've encountered a dominant variant of the third mission, although unnamed as such, it reduces towards the pursuit of external revenue through commercializing and marketizing relations.

This mission resides in a new language for knowing and performing the university, commercialization units, and research institutes, new research offices, practices, and expertise, and their proliferation, and a host of new subjectivity. We hypothesize that it may be supplanting more or less subtly the first and second missions of the university, teaching and public with research.

However, we also encountered diversity in the way it is articulated with the other two missions across the universities of New Zealand, and some interesting deployments of it. These included commitments to more engaged in dialogical pedagogy in science education and business schools associated with the Centres of Research Excellence and new programs of science and enterprise respectively.

Whilst lacking critical reflexivity and demanding the sort of critique levelled yesterday by Karina Balaban at the performative figure of the knowledge worker in this teaching, these programmes take seriously both preparing their students for an altered world and experimenting with learning.

We also encountered multiple cross-faculty and cross-institutional initiatives among scientists deeply committed to identifying opportunities to do fundamental science as well as a determination to engage publicly albeit in a communication sort of way.

We encountered see safe, the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Food, Energy, and Environment, where I spent a day three weeks ago as a casual visitor, press-ganged into being quiz master in the compulsory collectively completed daily morning tea quiz from the Otago Daily Times that they all set to do on a daily basis.

I witnessed the welcome to the group of a new Fulbright MA scholar, one of three currently working at the centre, where there are also currently 14 PhD students and four postdocs, all working on questions of socio-environmental politics in the words of its founder, Hugh Campbell, at was launched informally in 2001 on a conjunction of possibilities to pursue politically motivated research on things green and things social.

He notes that there are complex institutional's there was complex institutional stuff going on and with the research group in the media, sorry, and with the research group in the media, they formed a virtual Centre. He adds that if we hadn't been quite so successful, we would have got into trouble, as this was not approved, formalized in 2006.

See safe has dedicated itself to a particular socio-environmental and food politics and to engaging that politics with economic actors, engaging that politics with economic actors in agri-food, whilst building a genuine global leadership in rural sociology and agri-food studies.

At the core of its approach has been a community ethic, commitments to students, and a real politic of engaging critically and creatively with economic and policy actors and New Zealand's cloying economic nationalism as foundation, as its foundation, I think, to building intellectual foundations for supporting rural communities, so that politics is directed to that.

The quiz and a regular column in the newspaper along with alumni networks but it's student focus have created are as you suggest pivotal to the center's success. He directs, he in interview, he directed our attention to the value of these alumni networks in generating and new contracts to keep the center running.

So there is a game being played here by an entrepreneurial academic but again played connected to a particular politics. It has not always been easy to survive the pressures of competitive soft funding for C-safe and half a dozen other similar centers across New Zealand's universities.

It is not easy to have staff on short-term contracts every leader of one of these centers to whom I've talked has spoken of being awakened in the early hours of the morning worrying about their staff and whether they will have jobs. It's not easy then for staff on short-term contracts to negotiate complex arrangements with departments over acts and FTEs.

These centers are always skillfully and cleverly crafted into the established structure of the university and to be continually writing funding brids and all the while under increasing pressures from universities to get contracts and squeezed by new managerial technologies and the encroachment of various forms of what might be called exhortation expertise and go and get us new contracts and we will show you how and we will tie your hands and we will possibly tell you which contracts to bid for.

Now, paya tomorrow, the Center for of research excellence to which Tracy McIntosh introduced us yesterday is another example of a political project of knowledge production thriving in and across universities. It has initiated, funded, and stuarti the range of critical scholarship, research, and community engagement and built a very different form of third mission in practice and a very different ethos of critical practice.

It has found transformative ways to tick the boxes and to speak the language of new public management when required, while its capability to do all of that all this is born of a complex politics and related resources that are New Zealand specific. It demonstrates that academic freedom and critical engagement can be exercised differently in my own work.

I've been encouraged by Law and Aria and Gibson-Graham to practice a more muted politics in my case, it's more muted of potentiality by engaging with others to know otherwise, together with my research collaborators, we've sought to build what we're calling an active in active research. One of the features of this work is to run workshops and Chatham House engagements with different policy community and economic actors, not to lecture or to question them, but to discuss questions in our terms rather than those of stakeholder consultation or dissemination.

To discuss our concepts, the terms, these terms, our terms, our experimentation, non-sectarianism, and engagement, and a willingness to engage with unfamiliar ideas and unfamiliar others, often under Chatham House Rules. Our project is pointedly political, to learn, influence, co-create, to learn influenced, and co-produced knowledge, and to foster call activity and collective institutions, that is, to make a relevance for our political work and create conceptual, quote, and create conceptual collective goods to which we can commit.

We developed this approach from work on the Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences initiative, generously funded more than ten years ago now, to build networks across disciplines, institutions, and generations at the national level, to foster new research agendas, and to enhance an institutional profile for social science. A combination of accident and creative leadership resulted in a trajectory for this initiative, in which it took its own direction, guided by those committed enough to engage those in those involved, over delivered on deliverables and reporting requirements, and used the freedom that that created to focus attention on encouraging and supporting specific national networks of scholars, Maori researchers, early-career researchers, Pacifica researchers, nu-setta researchers, and graduate students.

It spawned a later initiative, ISSSE, for his intern, given birth to a set of about 22 active and thematic research networks that assemble researchers from across the country and across the disciplines for regular cyber meetings and occasional conferences. No longer funded, these networks are generally led by early to mid-career researchers and are beginning to pay dividends in the form of journal specialist issues and new research agendas. They also involve academics in conversations with ministry officials, activists, and independent community and NGO researchers.

A steering committee maintains the website and continues to engage with government ministries on issues of research funding and social science capability, as well as particular questions. We are here today as a result of two successive EU-funded multinational research projects that have examined the future of universities, URG and UNIQUE, both have involved significant forms of funding and has been made possible by the mobilization of heavy CDS of prominent critical scholars, careful analysis, and strategic, creative interpretation of the EU's aims and new managerial language and skillful grantship.

URG was co-funded by the Morse, they are Ministry of Research, Science, and Technology, in its old name, under its science exchange program, and our new Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment has supported this conference. I'm not sure that critical theorizing of the knowledge economy and industry training in universities were ever part of the funders' visions, but the projects have over delivered on their promises to engage with the economic actors involved, to produce research, and to present opportunities for PhD students.

These projects and these projects are not narrowly subversive or some sneaky sleight of hand, rather, careful attention to the details of the contract and over-delivering have facilitated further critical knowledge production, as well as an engagement via critical ideas with economic policy within and beyond the universities.

The Global Higher Ed Web blog, edited by Chris Olds and Susan Robertson, was established in 2007, it claims to receive approximately ten to fourteen thousand visits a month from people associated with consulting firms, credit rating agencies, these are its words, foundations, and funding councils, higher education associations, the media, ministries, and associated development agencies, multilateral agencies, and universities, including students, administrators, and faculty, and these from all around the world.

But blog Kerry's entries from many of these sources and has defined a research field and a space for engagement, founded on critical thinking, it is paved the way for Chris and Susan to access figures rooms and presentation platforms to which critical academics are rarely ever given access. In their latest engagement, the Lordship launch of the MOOC, Globalizing Higher Education and Research for the Knowledge Economy, there again deploying a mass technology to blur in a positive way the boundaries between critical scholarship and public knowledge.

In my own school, academics are involved in a project to revitalize New Zealand's rivers, called Tara Raw, it is built on community ties and funded by the Next Foundation, a philanthropic funder of projects that aims to create in its terms a legacy of environmental and educational excellence for future generations of New Zealanders. The project is socio-environmental, and the knowledge production process pushes boundaries of accepted interdisciplinary science, it is explicitly political, aiming to clean up environments, redesign regulation, and empower communities through distributive democracy.

Now, I've got those things in a wrong order, never mind. Conclusion, then, if there is a direct target for this talk, it is the argument that would identify Barber's avalanche plot, it's likely track through institutional autonomy, assume all is lost, and proclaimed the death of the University by neoliberalism, it would squeeze out of the story University-based critical projects, such as those that I have listed.

Fortunately, this may be a straw target, three years on from the death of the public university symposium, we have enjoyed a debate over institutional autonomy as an historically and geographically contingent field of struggle, rather than a right, and the papers in this conference are asking more fine-grained questions of the constituent elements of the category of the University.

This is an encouraging context in which to make an argument for a more than oppositional politics that works with whatever institutional autonomy is available to exercise academic freedom, engage with publics, and secure the university as a platform for academics to frame their own critical questions, to demonstrate the value of their work, and renew or improve for contract the social contract between University and its publics, yet, while keeping the more pointed criticality very truly alive.

Perhaps it offers an answer to the narrower question of what the public gets for its money, but we're always that's always posed to us, and perhaps it offers a means to take back the university, using gifts and grounds terms. I will finish by pointing to a few tentative strategies that we might be able to draw from these examples.

Practicing critique in and from the University requires continued forensic analysis of University practices and continued critique of its repurposing, this pillar of practice should be matched by continued attention to teaching and to shaping environments and opportunities for valuing, infusing, and learning with students and colleagues.

I'm not sure about Hugh Campbell's reference to social capital, but the morning tea with the Otago Daily Times quiz, our identity for me, and deeply affirming, at the risk of replacing one form of critical conceit, that of offering a sharper analysis of reality, with another, that of imagining academics is actually making a difference.

The examples I cite invite engagement with publics, what I term an inactive critical scholarship, this requires a different critical disposition, and perhaps even an unfamiliar form of academic entrepreneurialism, in regard to mobilizing resources to make but possible here.

Each of the examples are believers, enlightening, there is something about New Zealand here, also indeed, there is always a situatedness of a political potential and practice of critical thought in New Zealand, this lies in the very institutional thinness and smallness that on the one hand produces our limited intellectual culture, and the capacity for governments to change stuff, we heard a bit about yesterday, but on the other hand gives us the sort of access, underpinning my workshop, worked by thinking about criticality more politically.

We might work this as a field of potentiality, we should act as Mathison Russell suggested three years ago, as if the University and state were committed to Education Act two, and to add to its own visions, missions, and plans, this might include emboldening in our thee seas, by celebrating our mutual interests in the quality of critique, which is the university's competitive advantage in rankings, and is the rent that Barbara and colleagues would seek to unbundle and flog.

This seems ground for an emboldened alliance, after all, there is still agency, and VC's, a critical of the loss of institutional autonomy, and genuinely committed, I believe, to research excellence, they get to make decisions, and can, and do so differently, in different universities, they can choose to accept or reject the recommendations of management consultants, to centralize administrative services, just as Dean's can choose to support or caution publicly against such decisions.

It's not impossible that they may frame these commitments in terms different to external research revenue, there are many in this room who perform this politics within the Union, and beyond, all this might be understood using Gibson Graham's terminology, as part of a long-term project to take back the university, for her, taking back involved standing largely outside of the corporate world, and creating something different, perhaps in the university case, imagining, like right Greenwood and Bowden, our trust University, modeled on Mondragon.

In my work, it means inhabiting, and using the new spaces, and exploiting the critical potentiality of the University, differently, as Tracy McIntosh suggested yesterday, for some, this might involve a more direct engagement with others, in different communities, as well as state, and capitalist actors, it might mean a creative politics, that can be practiced alongside, or even in strategic alignment with critical theorizing.

The example suggests that we are doing this, but don't talk enough about it, or indeed, theorize it, for others, politics is more overtly, for others, politics is more overtly resistant, or may remain, a library, or a laboratory-based exercise, running from painstaking forensic deconstruction, all the way to scientific measurement.

The core of the university might be seen as the capability to continue to ask the questions, I suspect, that is the core, gripped by forces that would direct our expectation, expertise, to questions posed by others, this may require more, and more, of a creativity, displayed by those cited in the examples, the university is not dead, until its academics, no longer frame for questions, that they asked.

Perhaps, in the meantime, it's a good thing, I guess, to rattle some of its privileges, and some of its exclusive practices, to betray myself, finally, as Angelina Jolie, rather than Quisling, I'll leave you with the Raymond Williams line, but to be truly radical, is to make hope possible, rather than despair, convincing, thank you.

That was the wonderful, thank you so much, and in France, the last session of the day, today, very nice, indeed, because we have people from the Ministry, and the funding lot, is in New Zealand, for daughters, and you've set out a particular politics, which I know, you've been very active, in developing, with others, in New Zealand, and which is an export, that gives you, and also, make more clear, to the rest of us, in the world, so, thank you, very much, for doing, that.

One way to creatively bundle at one level, a cheap metaphorical trick, sounds good, you kind of have a title, but another, I think, that many of us, the examples that I cited, are actually bundling up particular dimensions of being, of what a university is, in new ways, into a network, the kind of particularly, collegiality, and this is an answer to question over there, as well, they're bundling up, and performing collegiality, differently, giving academics an opportunity to discuss, to get outside of their administrative frames, which are often now no longer disciplinary, in this part of the world, so there re-bundling, discipline, their rebounding, the student academic relationship, because many of these it networks, are held together, by student participation, as well, grad students, so there is a redundant, so I think, it does stand scrutiny, from that perspective, but I also like the notion, because of the way, it plays round, with and never lunch, is coming, opening up, completely, different way, of thinking, about the politics, of home, within universities, so thank you very much, and we move, straight into the next session, so thank you.