Public Higher Education and the Market;

Please be sure to check the Institute's website for other events and celebration of international education as a critical part

and pillar of the University of California's mission this week. My name is Laurie Kain Hart and I am professor of anthropology and global studies at UCLA and Director of the Center.

I want to warmly thank our invited speaker, professor John Holmwood, and our discussing UCLA professor Anne Gilliland and, of course, our audience for joining us today.

A special thanks as well to Center Executive Director, Liana Grancea, and our newly appointed Director of Outreach and Publicity, Lenka Unge.

This fall, as has been our recent practice, we continue broadcasting by Zoom.

Our talks are therefore available after the events as recorded videos and podcasts on our website and Facebook page, so please be sure to let others know that talks are available for public viewing at anytime.

The Center's primary aim is to encourage, support, and disseminate vital research concerning our regions of interest and transatlantic issues and connections.

And so I am really thrilled today that we are hosting a talk of such relevance to the UK, to Europe, and indeed, to the US on pressing issues facing the public university.

Professor John Holmwood is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham and editor of “A Manifesto for the Public University” up from Bloomsbury in 2010. He was co-founder of that campaign for the public university from 2010 to 2017.

He's active in arguments around colonialism and the curriculum, and author with Gurminder Bhambra of “Colonialism and Modern Social Theory” from Polity in 2021.

He was an expert witness for the defense in professional misconduct cases brought against teachers for Islamicizing a school curriculum and is author with Therese O'Toole of “Countering Extremism in British Schools? The Truth about the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair”, that's from Policy Press in 2018.

He's also co-director of the “People's Review of Prevent”, a grassroots initiative mobilized in reaction to targeting of critics associated with UK governmental antiterrorism policies.

I want also to welcome our discussant, Anne Gilliland. Anne is professor of information studies and Director of the Center for Information as Evidence at UCLA, and teaching… I am sorry.

UCLA School of Information and Education Studies. Her extensive career in research and teaching addresses the history, nature,

human impact and technologies associated with archives, record keeping and memory, particularly in translocal and international contexts.

A fellow of the society of American Archivists and recipient of numerous awards in archival and information studies,

she's held research fellow appointments in Melbourne, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Croatia, among many other international fellowships and visiting appointments. She's also, I'm happy to say, a valued member of our CERS' Faculty Advisory Board.

Please feel free during the talk to put your questions in the Q&A at any time, and we will feed them to professor Holmwood, at the end of the talk.

So with that let's please warmly welcome professor John Holmwood for his talk “Public Higher Education and the Market; Britain, Europe and Resilient Higher Education after the Covid-19 Pandemic”. Thanks.

Well, thank you very much for the invitation to the talk. I can say that I began my graduate career in sociology at UCLA, so it's really nice to be back here as an emeritus professor and I just wish it could have been in person rather than over Zoom.

Now, what I am going to talk about, I will sometimes refer to the UK and sometimes to England.

And the reason for doing this is that education is a responsibility which, since the year 2000, has been devolved to the separate assemblies of Scotland and Wales,

and from an earlier point to the Northern Ireland Parliament. Research funding, however, remains a national UK responsibility

of research councils and there's funding through something called the Research Excellence Framework, which is a monitoring and evaluation exercise, which also distributes funds.

England moved to a fees-based or nearly entirely fees-based funding of undergraduate student programs after 2011, but Scotland did not.

So in thinking in sociological terms about an ideal type of higher education system, England, most closely approximates the extreme of what I will talk about as a neoliberal type, whereas the other systems within the UK are a little further back.

And I think of higher education in terms of what I call “knowledge regimes” to indicate they are partly about teaching, partly about research, and they organize significant cultural entices.

And I think we can think of movements or a transition between knowledge regimes, transitions are not complete.

But I think the transition to a neoliberal knowledge regime has been most marked within the UK and that's partly because the UK has a very centralized

political system, which means that any government policy is affected throughout the country. After 2000 there have been checks in Scotland and Wales. And I think it's possible to talk across the

20th century and up until the present in terms of three knowledge regimes and I'm going to discuss the last two,

the two most recent ones most in this talk. But I think it's useful if we begin with a status reproduction regime of higher education.

This is a sort of system Weber discussed in his essay Science as a Vocation. It's a system based upon, or with strong elements of, private privileged education, the Ivy League in the US and Oxbridge in the UK.

It involves the exclusions that we're familiar with from status systems, initially gender segregation, but also racial segregation in the US.

Racial segregation is not so marked in the UK, but that's only because race in the UK has been externalized as an aspect of an imperial and Commonwealth system of higher education, so if one counts the UK

and its wider territories, then the systems of the US and the UK have been not that different.

But public higher education is what really came to the fore in the post Second World War period. It is associated with two particular names, one in the UK – Robbins and the Robbins Report, which recommended new policies for

public education, and in the US it is associated with Clark Kerr. So if I talk of

the UK and England as an outlier of public higher education, the closest in the US is California itself and the California

Master Plan. And what happened in the UK, as happened in California, was the effective incorporation of universities into a single system, but in the UK that included

the private institutions or what we would have thought of as the Ivy League institutions, so Oxbridge became part of the public higher education system, whereas in California, Stanford and the University of southern California were not part of them.

And the strong feature of the public higher education was common funding. That's not the same as saying it's the same funding for all institutions, but a system of common funding across them

and implicitly the move to reduce status hierarchy across institutions – again a reduction that was not complete. Now, the third system which I'm going to say we're in the midst of a transition from,

public higher education system to a neoliberal marketized knowledge regime, and that takes place earlier in the US, partly as a consequence of the introduction of financialized

higher education and inflation in fees. It is also a system that involves for-profit providers and what I suggest you is it involves a return to the reinforcement of status and hierarchy of institutions that was a feature of earlier systems.

And you know, I think Bob Meister within University of California, as well as Chris Newfield, I think, are the two major

people who've spoken about the changes to higher education in the US and to the Californian system, in particular. I think it's significant that your university system has thrown up those two really major interpreters of what is happening.

But let me just begin with a puzzle, because there is a genuine puzzle in what is happening in this transition from public higher education to

a neoliberal, marketized system. An EU Commission report in 2009 assessed the effectiveness and value of tertiary education systems of Europe

and some other comparable countries within the OECD, including the US. And in terms of that evaluation, what the authors called social democratic systems, Scandinavia and Netherlands did the best in that evaluation.

But actually, the United Kingdom did best of all. And the UK came top in terms of the evaluation of teaching and that's evaluation in terms of outcomes, effectiveness and economic value.

It came top for research and, obviously, it came top overall. Sadly, the US, you know, was not really very well placed at all, so it was right down

the list. Now, when we talk about public policy and study public policy, we are frequently directed towards the discovery of best practice.

Yet here we face a puzzle that England seems to become oriented to the worst practice, that is to follow the path of American higher education,

a path which is itself negative in these terms. And one could say, well, in making that,

come back to why that can happen, why individual universities can be happy with that process, even though the outcome is

negative overall. And if we're thinking about resilience in the context of pandemic, I think if I said to you, well, I would see a parallel between

higher education systems and hospital systems, nobody doubts that there are not some fantastic hospitals in the US. The doubt is whether this

medical system as a whole is efficient, provides effective healthcare outcomes, and produces them for the majority of the population.

And I would say there's a similar argument to be said for higher education and, consequently, since I don't regard

American healthcare as a particularly resilient in the context of pandemic, I don't regard British higher education or, indeed, American higher education as resilient as a system, meeting the needs of the majority of the population

after the pandemic.

But talking about the success of the UK is a puzzle that I came across when first reading Chris Newfield's work, because the things that we in the UK tend to think, or a problem with our

system of higher education, we tend to associate them with the transformation of higher education from a collegial to a managerial system, and we dated way back to 1985 and the introduction

of new public management. But those reforms are the ones that seem to have put us to the top of the league table that

the European Commission took out, so what our education system did well because of reforms that I, in common with many others, thought of as negative,

I now see well, maybe they were positive. And it's reading Chris Newfield and saying, well, I don't see any of them really in the US system,

so what is it that is bringing about the convergence of the UK or England and the US, and it's not in our management systems, it's an incense in the financialization

of higher education and in the introduction of a private, fees-based system. And in order to understand

what this is about, I just want to say a bit more about what a system of public higher education looks like to its architects, Robbins and Clark Kerr,

neither of them particularly radical individuals, and Robins himself associated with the liberal and anti-socialist education. So these are not ideological figures, these are figures who believed they were reflecting something about the transformation of

advanced societies, and in particular the role of education within them. The rise of what they would call the knowledge society and the university, as an institution of the knowledge society with multiple functions. Clark Kerr famously referred to the no longer as a university, but as a multiversity.

So the university was understood to have economic functions, but also to have other functions,

and among the other functions, these were understood in terms of the development of democratic citizenship.

Securing equal opportunities, overcoming status differences, facilitating public debate and democratic citizenship

and also, the development of evidence-based policy, which for sociologists had two aspects: the growth of collegial organization, not only as a feature of universities, but as a feature of wider

organizations. And that was to do with the way in which professions were emerging in society, rooted within the university and having a mediating role between strict bureaucracy, if you like, and the market.

And so there was an idea at this time of an education revolution that had been

the final phase of modern social development, where and I get a quote from Taclott Parsons, who is not somebody that people do quote from very much today, but just to give you

the sense of what the mainstream sociological view of the period. This is written in 1970:

“The principle of equality has broken through to a new level of pervasiveness and generality.

A societal community as basically composed of equals seems to be the end of the line in the long process of undermining the legitimacy of older, more particularistic, ascriptive bases of membership.”

That's the aspects of the role of the university in democracy, the role of the knowledge society and in a sense, the overcoming of the university in its earlier manifestation associated with status

reproduction. And I could say well, in this context, education or higher education is seen as a social right, but it's a peculiar social right

only partially delivered, so one can say compulsory secondary education is delivered to all children, but higher education is delivered only to about half the

age group,

the relevant age group. So what secures the legitimacy of a system, which appears to be providing opportunities for just half of the

age cohort that is going through? And for both, Kerr and for Robbins and, I might add, for Taclott Parsons as well,

the idea was that the knowledge society was characterized by inclusive economic growth, and so we know from

Thomas Piketty that the so-called Kuznets curve showed an idea that inequality was declining. The word dramatic declines in

income inequality across, you know what at the time would have been called the advanced societies, whether the US, UK, Sweden and so on. The US was more of an outlier with higher inequality, but then the last reducing, Britain had relatively

stronger reduction of inequality, and Sweden, Scandinavia, more so Germany between the

US and Britain. And what happens after around 1980 is that understanding of inclusive economic growth breaks down, and I think the breaking down of inclusive economic

growth undermines the social contract that is part of the development of public higher education.

And so

that widening inequality is also associated with neoliberalism, deregulation, so it's not simply that higher education is impacted.

In a way, higher education is the last of many institutions, that is, that are impacted. All kinds of other welfare arrangements get removed from an understanding of being social rights

and education is the last in the line. And that has consequences for how sociologists and others have thought about higher education

because they have been sat within an institution, which has been the last to fall to the advance of neoliberalism. And it's a paradox that the financial crisis of 2008 potentially threatens the neoliberal

idea of the economy should be the tipping point that pushes universities more thoroughly into a neoliberal

direction. And that should also make us feel well, Thomas Piketty when you're looking at his book on capital, of the more

recent one, what is the solution, apart from higher taxes, the solution is, he sees, in the form of education.

But education, higher education in particular, has moved from being understanding itself as the amelioration of inequality to understanding itself as part of the production of inequality.

And principals, vice chancellors, or presidents, as you call them in the US, have in a sense, taken their universities down that road. And that's what the introduction of a fee-based system for higher education in England involved. So let me just give a brief description now of the nature

of that neoliberal knowledge regime, so you can see the contrast and ideal typical terms between

public higher education and what most of our universities now approximate. Education is now presented as an investment in human capital and a private responsibility of individuals. They should

take out loans in order to invest, pay back those loans and so, in effect, universities have shifted

from public funding, whether that's at state level in the US or central government level in the UK, moved to a depth-financed model of

expansion, in which the higher the things, the more the revenue for the university. And it's also involved in the creation of a market that also includes for-profit providers, including especially multinational

corporations and that happens, because in the UK, if you remove the direct funding of teaching you've created a level playing field for for-profit providers to come in. They have no obligation to provide

research activities and, instead, what you have is the mobilization of open access, to provide them access, give them access to curriculum and library materials without either the investment in research or the investment in the library.

It also involves freeing universities themselves to pursue for-profit activities, so for-profit higher education is not only for profit providers, it's also

universities which are not for-profit in their form, but now have profit as one of its activities to seek for-profit partners and also even to change their corporate forms or too, if you like,

to take themselves out of being formally chartered and constituted as universities. Lead some to unbundle, is the phrase that is put, when

Clark Kerr talked about the university as a multiversity,

made up of a number of different functions, he regarded those functions as bundled together to provide a definition of what the university was in its deepest sense. But instead, now you have the idea of the unbundling of activities and the outsourcing of functions that involves,

you know, the outsourcing of staff, which can include in England, the outsourcing of adjunct faculty to a private company that subcontracts

teaching assistants to university. So you have the unbundling of activities. And universities that can maintain the bundle

become elite universities separated from unbundled teaching only universities. And that separation also includes the polarization of funding. That's the reverse direction of the

Robbins development and, of course, in terms of attracting students, parts of the way in which students are attracted is by presenting the university and university education as a possessional good,

one that you're purchasing and you get a, well, it's not that you get a better education,

but you get a better description of your education if you're receiving it from an elite university rather than from anomaly university.

Under Robbins in the UK, that difference was compressed and in fact, the income that supported teaching was the same across universities, whatever their status.

And, of course, the outsourcing of functions includes zero-hour teaching contracts, all kinds of casualization, which has increased dramatically

in this era and is sold on the basis of value for money for students, because they're paying for their degrees and therefore they expect value for it.

And there's also what's called a new impact agenda for research, which is to suggest in the UK that all research should

be directed towards a beneficiary or user of the research. And the idea is to shorten the time from idea

to income. And if you ask, well how is this different from the earlier period, part of the consequence of neoliberalization within the corporate economy was the reduction of research and development budgets within the private sector.

In a deregulated market, the government has few levers. The lever it has is now with universities, and so it seems to use

universities and direct their research efforts towards maintaining the economy, but it's no longer an economy committed to inclusive growth. It's an economy in which

there are winners and losers and the university is directed towards investment in high, you know, in high returns and so on.

So, and the final aspect, what I would say as well, this necessarily the paradoxical aspect of this is that you talk about the move to a market-based system, it involves a shift from collegial governance to managerial hierarchy, but the sources of funding are incredibly

central and so the universities become more subject to political control, rather than less subject to political control, because they're more dependent on government decisions about

funding. And it's that last shift that I think is the one that has taken over new public management and put it into the

format of a financialized and marketized higher education and, as I said at the start that I was less, you know that in the course of going through the period of the introduction of these reforms, became

much more

conscious that we had missed the key nature of the reform. And the reason why we've missed them

was that we, as academics, were the direct beneficiaries of the changes, so just to explain that a bit, when

we shifted from a direct, government-funded system to a fee-based system funded by student debt, we did so at the height of the financial crisis, where the government was seeking to make

something like 30% reductions in finance for each of the Departments of State, so education was expecting a 30% cut. In fact, by shifting to a fee-based system, the cut to the higher education budget from the perspective of government finances was 82%. We were the most severely cut sector.

And yet the income coming into universities went up.

And it went up because the replacement of government funds by student debt finance way exceeded the 82% reduction of funding. So whereas

in 2010 it was easy to find students who were opposed to the introduction of debt finance for universities, it wasn't very easy to find academic colleagues who are opposed to the same,

to the process, because it maintained the development of universities. But what it did in bringing more money was also

increase the distance, you know, so if I talk about the widening inequalities in the wider economy, we also have widening inequalities in the university economy,

higher professorial salaries compared with low, casualized, adjunct salaries, so that polarization, which was a feature of neoliberal markets became a feature of the university itself and academics with themselves passive how that was reproduced.

So the final thing is to say something about Covid-19, because when Covid-19 hit, universities, you know, were in the middle of what I would call is

a bubble expansion. That is, they were chasing additional student numbers, international students, of course, in the UK were an important source of income.

But the previously, the numbers in higher education being regulated, regulated not only overall but regulated between universities, the government deregulated, you know, so universities, were able to take in as many students as they could persuade to come to the university.

And they have to go through strategies of attracting those students. And one of the ways of attracting students, I'm sad to say, and I, you know apologize for this, I'm give you a role in information science.

Just telling the students you've got a fabulous library was not the best way of getting students in, you told them that you had a fantastic gym, that there were all these other facilities,

which like gyms and gym membership anyway, you weren't going to use once you got into the institution,

but there was a massive investment in

facilities as part of the marketization of the institution.

And you couldn't do that out of current revenue, so what you had to do is take out loans and those loans were taken out on terms which are predicated upon the expansion of higher education.

And they went, you know the university I was at, the reason why I'm an emeritus professor rather than a currently employed professor at the University of Nottingham is that the University of Nottingham took out loans with private equity

partnerships in the US, highly wealthy individuals, providing income on good interest rates, provided university maintained a current account

balance. Covid destroyed all that for university. University of Nottingham had to suddenly find 30% savings, we have reduced students income, but we also had loss of revenue associated with all the facilities that we were using to generate student

demand.

So the universities were caught in a position that in order to maintain their financial viability,

they have to continue or maintain their relationship with students, the government was unwilling to take up

costs of closing campuses, and universities were unwilling to reduce fees for online courses, so we did what every academic hates doing, and that is, we lied

in order to say, you know we said, our online courses are just as good as our regular face to face courses, we have put a huge amount of effort into putting on these online course.

Any student could see the best provider of online courses in the UK was the Open University. It had invested very heavily in them over the last 20 or 30 years

and it charged fees, two thirds of what any other university was charging, so we had a crisis of legitimacy.

And a crisis of legitimacy, where students themselves were the victims. Covid shutdown the economy, so students had to come back to, you know, in a sense, had to elect to stay at the university, because there wasn't much alternative.

They didn't have access to jobs in order to support their living costs and so on. And so they had debt and then additional debt associated

with the pandemic. But also universities were providing the research, which was telling governments what it should do

in the face of the

pandemic. A lot of governments were willing to follow the nature of the advice provided by health researchers and so on.

But, more importantly, universities weren't willing to follow the advice of their own academics. And that's because it was strongly in their interest to get students back on campus in order

to have the revenues from rents and so on. And in the UK, where people travel distances, I mean not very long distances, UK is like one small state obviously, but we think of ourselves as moving around to university, the return

to university after the first wave of pandemic was a massive spreader event which brought a surging Covid cases within towns with universities, and so

the university, rather than

facing the pandemic by being something that, you know, buffered the pandemic and provided a way of response, became an accelerator of features of the pandemic itself. And now we have the inequality that

is already built into a neoliberal system, has now brought a generational inequality, where the main losers of,

in relation to the impact of Covid, I mean apart from mortality, you know, separating out mortality, but in financial terms, have been students in terms of their future employment prospects and nature of their

debts and so on. And it's significant. In the US it's proving very difficult to introduce debt relief programs for students.

In the UK, which does have a very positive system of income contingent loans, you only pay your loan back when your income after graduation reaches a certain level, the government is now reducing the income level because of the cost of the loan system to the government, so the very

students that again to be most disadvantaged in terms of future in relation to their jobs because of Covid and so on are also going to find their

repayments on their

university debts are going to be higher, and so on. So I would say what

Covid-19 has shown is universities are part of the problem, when neoliberal universities, financialized universities are part of the problem rather than the solution.

And if one went back to look at the study that was done in 2009 of higher education and other parts of Europe, the problems that higher education in England

and in the US now face as a consequence of Covid are unique to our educational system. Similar problems in Australia with neoliberal system.

The systems of higher education that are most adapted to Covid-19 and have been able to cater effectively to students and without creating,

if you like, a class conflict in the classroom, are the systems of Scandinavia, Netherlands and so on. The system that the UK deliberately left behind, the system that the US never quite attained.

So that's it. Thank you.

Thank you so much, John, for an intense and really thought provoking set of ideas and histories. I'm going to turn now to Anne Gilliland

to offer some comments and questions and we also welcome them from our audience.

Thank you, Laurie. And thank you very much, John, also for your presentation. I think it gives us all a lot to chew on, and I suspect it resonates differently with different listeners today.

I have to be begin with a disclaimer. I am in the School of Education and Information Studies, but I'm on the information studies side, rather than on the education side, and so I thought, perhaps I could just make a couple of

observations from my own perspective and raise a few questions that relate to some of my own interests and in hope that you might be able to

provide some further detail.

First of all, a few general observations. I know there's a new volume by Aarrevaara et al., coming out from Springer, Universities in the Knowledge Society.

And they talk about the multiple challenges of declining public investment in higher education, the new players and stakeholders who are involved in higher education,

a decline in faculty governance or faculty control, the rise of academic management, which is something that you've talked about quite a bit,

new work pressures to be entrepreneurial, and income generating research activity. And

I think this is in line with increasing implementation of the concept of the unbundled university and also supports this growing

distinction and gap between the elite and the non-elite university. And I think that these are dynamics that certainly are occurring in the United States, as well.

I'm also very interested to think about the impact of Covid on the financial models that have been put in place for higher education in the UK, because

here was an unexpected phenomenon that through the universities for a loop. And I work closely also with several Australian universities and the Australian university system was really very severely exposed

financially, particularly by the curtailment of enrollment of international students that hedged a lot of their economic models on that.

And one of the things I'm not clear about yet, I think we're not clear about yet, is whether and how in the US, student perceptions about

or potential student applications to universities and the choices that those applicants are making, whether those have been

reframed or re-prioritized in any way since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, thinking about value for money, thinking about

what they think they want to get out of their education and whether or not elite universities are actually worth money and, of course, this raises question about differences between undergraduate education and graduate or postgraduate education, as well.

And if there have been reframings, are those actually going to be long-term reprioritizatios or short-term ones.

And if they are going to have longer effects, are university economic models actually going to be able to respond quickly enough?

Certainly, the big American universities, they say it's like turning an aircraft carrier to shift their budget structures. So those are just a couple of thoughts, you know, some background thoughts that I had.

I have a few questions, as well.

But the knowledge society is also a concept that is very big in the field of information studies and

the credible production of knowledge has been something, has been said to be a key feature of a knowledge society.

But with so much diminution of trust over the past few years in the US, and I think, probably we could say that's been the case in the UK in recent years, as well,

what do you see the roles of universities in bolstering this area of credible knowledge production in the context of, you know, what you've described as the current neoliberal marketized knowledge regime

in England, in the UK, or indeed, globally, because I think these are phenomena that are spreading around the globe.

And to ask a couple more sort of specific questions, too,

about the UK and England in particular.

You know that we have a sort of new world today and the UK has been facing impact of Covid on the financial models that are now in place in universities.

But they've also been facing immense struggles over race, and religion, and identity, and simultaneously dealing with extricating themselves from the European Union through Brexit, and then continuing Brexit politics internally within the United Kingdom.

And the fact that now, with devolved governments in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, you also have different educational structures and priorities that work in different parts of the United Kingdom.

Can you see any kind of through line for how altercation in the UK should be navigating these sort of interacting and likely ongoing factors?

How higher education, research funding remains the responsibility of the Westminster Government, but do you see education models diverging across the different parts of the United Kingdom?

Do you see particular inequities in the impacts on potential and current students and graduates, both in terms of bearing the costs of education, as well as the quality and the accessibility and the choice of educational opportunities available?

And I would say, finally,

it's a really big question, do you think that the concept of public universities even holds any water today? So maybe I'll just leave it at that, because I've just loaded a whole lot of questions on to you.

Yeah, they are big questions and very difficult questions that I may try to answer, not necessarily

In any particular order. I think the unbundle it's not that universities in the past were the same, and not that some of them were unbundled. I happen

to think that Clark Kerr was a brilliant university administrator and a brilliant thinker about the administration and organization of higher education, so universities were different, the functions were different at the community college versus

a state institution, rather than, you know, the great universities of California. But what he had and what policymakers at that point had is a clear

sense of how the benefit, how the different parts work together, so the parts weren't set against each other, and they were setting contexts that enabled them to be stable overall.

So I think what we've had is a great sort of disruptive

moment and how we're coming out of that disruptive moment, I think, is with whereas

Kerr would have been looking for how you kept the pop-top on the bottom close together, we've got one in which we're allowing the bottom to be cast apart from the top, and also for thee

institutions that are lower within the hierarchy to actually be engaged in quite exploitative relationships with their students, so I think there was nothing exploitative about the relations between the different

types of university that Kerr set out and he had a vision for how students could move between and in a sense have their learning and knowledge validated in the process of that moving. And that's where I think it was in a way against

status. So I think all of that is positive. I think the Britain is on diverting, is breaking apart, and they would have said that it's breaking apart because

it was empire that held it together and gradually as empire disappears, the simple instrumental interest in Scotland lay with being part of the European Union. Just as Ireland overcame its

past of colonial, and I going to put it in these terms, because I think we're now in the interference, so it's okay to say

that Ireland has overcome its colonial inferiority to Britain as a consequence of how the EU has enabled it to develop separately. So from that view, I guess that I'm a great believer in small countries.

And so I would, and I spent 20 years at the University of Edinburgh, I would have voted for Scottish independence had I been there during the referendum. And I was in the States that day,

time on sabbatical, and people were shocked that I was mostly, that I said well, I think Scottish independence will salt Britain out in a way that Scotland, not having not voting for independence,

then we're going to go through some really bad, and people couldn't understand how one could argue for Scottish independence in order to avoid

a nationalist English project, which is Brexit. But you know that was my view and, of course, Scotland could have been easily independent within the European Union, and particularly if the European Union had noticed what was being unleashed within

England was something very negative towards the EU, so they supported Britain and keeping Scotland within Britain and then discovered that Britain then voted to leave on the basis of a vote

in England. But if you figure why universities delegitimate, and essentially universities are bound up with the kinds of instrumental views that are associated in these developments.

So the thing to me that's very positive about small countries is the connection between the public intermediary institutions and

a smaller state. That is what Scotland has. The reason why Scotland and Wales managed curve it better, not so much in the death rate, but in terms of public commitment

and solidarity and so on than England was that Scotland and Wales have developed denser civil society

as a consequence of evolution and since the evolution England has stripped out all its civil society, it's reduced the powers of local authorities, it's

removed, you know, it's followed the Charter Schools Movement and removed scores from local political control, and so on. You know, Britain was always centralized as a consequence of empire. Post-empire with evolution, we now have a phenomenally centralized England,

in which the mechanism for political engagement has become populism, much as it has in the US, so I think that,

and I thought for quite a long time that,

what will happen in England will be a consequence of what happens elsewhere, so we have taken back control to have no control whatsoever, and the parts of the UK that have more control, the very parts that are disregarded by

the center, so we've got a very dangerous political system. And I think we have universities

which think of themselves in glow, you know, so you have the same bombastic attitude to university is on the world stage

as you do from the British, you know the Westminster Government talking about it occupying the world stage, so it's a very

dangerous rhetoric universities have bought into. And I think it's that rhetoric that has delegitimated trust, because also if what the public sees, the nature of the university, I think Covid has actually

reused the universities in Britain because people have seen that expertise has been valuable, the government itself has been flaky but at least

they've been moderated by the science. I think that has been a very positive outcome, but I think universities engaged in revenue maximizing activity,

which shows that instrumentalizing knowledge, at the same time as they wish to talk about truth, and they wish to talk about, you know, engagement, so I just think that we're in a period where we

as academics, we have to learn more humility, as universities, we have to think of our local responsibilities more than our global ambitions. And in the end what, you know, COP26 showed us is that

university recruiting international students for revenue purposes is damaging to the climate. We can provide

curriculum support

over online mechanisms, and we can do it as a public good rather than as a revenue maximizing situation, so it's possible that, that it's not only

Covid that has shown the lack of resilience of our universities, but also

climate change that is showing that lack of

resilience. I think race, religion, identity coming to the fall is incredibly positive. I think that what it's doing is breaking down the sense of somebody who looks like me is what the university is about. You know, I mentioned it before others joined us, you know, it was really

powerful to have the impact of feminism

within universities. And it was a massive, positive thing for me to learn from what that brought. I think race, religion, identity is opening up the same

possibilities, but only if we treat universities as spaces for learning, and from learning from each other, and that includes a willingness to recognize that,

you know, that we can learn from others. It's not that the university is about giving our knowledge to other people. It's about engaging

over common projects of knowledge. And for me that's what the public university was, even if it was

not the best it could have been, we've become worse, as well. So I don't look back to a golden age, I certainly think we're living in a in a period where the model of the university is deeply flawed.

Thank you. As a follow up question to that, I'm thinking about and I know we've had a conversation before about this, but the teaching of values within the university.

It seems to me that by following many of these directions, universities aren't actually modeling the values that they talk about in the classrooms. How do they put those two things better into line with each other?

I can give an example. I was speaking to my Dean at Nottingham.

He said, your first loyalty is to the University of Nottingham. And I said, I see my first loyalty to sociology and

the wider community.

And he said, but that's not who pays you. And I said, you see the odd thing about this is, I resent you making that claim upon me. In the past, I was grateful for every university that employed me.

And I was loyal to every university that employed me because they enabled me to be an academic, they enabled me to be

in contact, you know, they enabled me to be a sociologist, but that's where my identity lies. You're like,

a needy friend who doesn't like me having other friends. I said, at some point you've got to realize that the university stands for the academic community and, frankly, what I was told was I should engage with the university as a brand.

Then

that's not going to, you know.

Do I prefer Pepsi or do I prefer Coke? Do I prefer Harvard or do I prefer… I mean, these are not things, really,

what ideas,

research, and teaching are about.

Thank you! I think I'm going to turn it back over to Laurie,

because I think you've probably got some questions from the audience, too.

Let me just thank you so much for those wonderful questions,

Ane.

And I think this question about the converging crisis, so to speak, or at least the converging forces if we don't want to call them crisis,

is a really interesting one, because it's very hard to sort out the impact of Brexit from the impact of Covid at this point, etc.

But I think I also hear a really interesting

kind of theme in what you've been talking about, a tension between provincialization and globalization. And I'm curious as to whether you have some further thoughts on that.

Your comments about the small country and the intensity of civic engagement as being kind of the foundation for support for a public university, or for the possibility of a public university having a relationship to the public,

that's really interesting. At the same time, I'm also conscious of the effects in Europe generally of the closing of the doors, so to speak,

with Brexit, certain forms of higher education, at least for European constituencies, and the sense that Britain is now going to be sort of, you know, siloed out as a kind of inward looking

phenomenon. So I'm just curious about whether or not you could extend any thoughts about

on one hand what's going on in Europe, as opposed to Britain for the moment, separating the two terms as we, as we often don't in the Center, but so that's one issue, but the other issue is this tension between

kind of serving the immediate public, so to speak, in that kind of small country way, versus the kind of intellectual globalization and globalization of the student body that has in fact brought in so many interesting counter currents, so any thoughts on that.

Yes.

I think small countries should be open countries, and I think most small countries are. My first job was at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

That was a small island off the coast of Australia, so everybody felt they were really provincial. The one characteristic

of the place, that I most remember, was this incredible intensity of intellectual engagement.

Everybody went to seminars because they thought, I'll go to the philosophy seminar, I'll go to the sociology, and I'll go to the politics seminar because that's what you do at a real university, and so we have to try and mirror the activities of a real university.

I left and went to the University of Edinburgh, a real university.

And sociologists didn't go to sociology seminars, but they got on with their own work, and I thought actually, the interesting thing is that the intellectual life was more interesting in Tasmania than it was in Edinburgh.

The prestige and status was higher in Edinburgh than it was in Tasmania, but that's what we've got to recognize that the provincial

isn't necessarily less and it's also about a common engagement.

I am a sort of committed provincialist and I take my committed provincialism actually from the States, very sympathetic to jury and the American pragmatists and that's how

I saw them working. You know, that they engaged with their cities and the university in the city and so on, so it was a very positive

moment in the definition and the meaning of university. What I find a bit depressing now is academics tell me about, well, as professionals, we do science and we

do objectivity, we shouldn't engage with them and well, actually science is about engagement, it's not about disinterest, it's about how you engage with others, communicate with others, and if you aren't willing to do it in your own backyard,

Why do you imagine

the world is a more real place? I can insult economists. Economics, I think, is the most

diverse discipline in terms of the characteristics of the people who are economists.

Economists from the Indian subcontinent, from Latin America and so on, they are a diverse discipline, and they all say the same thing.

So they don't have a way of actually making diversity count in terms of different ways of thinking, different ways of engaging.

I think that sort of presenting the university as somehow separated from its location, you lose a lot and I don't think we can afford to lose it. I think the future, if it's a future engaged with the climate, is going to be a future of universities

in their location and engaged with other locations by, you know, by connecting in that way and not connecting through a sensor,

but lots of lateral sideway connections, would be what I would hope would come from it. I think it's terrible that we left Europe.

I don't think that means Europe has come to terms with what Europe needs to come with, so Europe is a continent of formerly imperial systems, which cannot understand its obligations globally,

in terms of how its wealth has been developed. And again, go back to COP26 and just the fact that Europe's historical consumption

and wealth is based upon a massive contribution to global warming, which visits negative consequences on others, and we do not think we should pay. And that is our crisis and it's a moral crisis, as well as an existential one.

Thank you so much.

We are just about out of time, so I

have to end there with that kind of extraordinary challenge that you pointed out between the

costs and benefits of mobility

in our moment are really interesting, costs and benefits for what we consider to be a global-oriented

university to confront and to maintain that openness and yet that strong civic basis, really, the challenge of the public university. I really want to thank you for this amazing and really provocative talk and professor Gilliland, for your amazing comments.

I also thank our audience for joining us, and please look out for the notice for a co-sponsored lecture with the Department of Anthropology's Culture, Power, Social Change interest groups later this week.

There is, I should mention, some hint of a strike, which connects very much to some of the themes that we were talking about today considering the

gap between the informal, so to speak, sector of the educational labor and the professoriate.

Keep a lookout for those notices for the lecture and possibly reschedule them Thursday. Thanks and good afternoon from all of us. Hope to see you here again.

Well, thank you for hosting me. It's been really nice.

Thank you so much. And thank you, Anne.