Autonomy in Social Science Research, Volume 4: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities (International Perspectives on Higher Education ... Perspectives on Higher Education Research)

AUTONOMY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: THE VIEW FROM UNITED KINGDOM AND AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTI...

Author: Malcolm Tight | Carole Kayrooz | Gerlese Akerlind

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AUTONOMY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: THE VIEW FROM UNITED KINGDOM AND AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCH Series Editor: Malcolm Tight Volume 1: Academic Work and Life: What it is to be an Academic, and How This is Changing – Edited by Malcolm Tight Volume 2: Access and Exclusion – Edited by Malcolm Tight Volume 3: International Relations – Edited by Malcolm Tight

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON HIGHER EDUCATION RESEARCH VOLUME 4

AUTONOMY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH: THE VIEW FROM UNITED KINGDOM AND AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES EDITED BY

CAROLE KAYROOZ GERLESE S. A˚KERLIND MALCOLM TIGHT

Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier

JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA First edition 2007 Copyright r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email: [email protected]. Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-0-7623-1405-8 ISBN-10: 0-7623-1405-2 ISSN: 1479-3628 For information on all JAI Press publications visit our website at books.elsevier.com Printed and bound in The Netherlands 07 08 09 10 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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INTRODUCTION AUTONOMY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH Carole Kayrooz, Gerlese S. A˚kerlind and Malcolm Tight

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SECTION I: AUTONOMY AND THE INDIVIDUAL RESEARCHER ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: THE FREEDOM TO SERVE SOCIETY Gerlese S. A˚kerlind

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ACADEMIC AUTONOMY AND RESEARCH DECISION-MAKING: THE RESEARCHER’S VIEW Angela Brew

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CONTENTS

SECTION II: AUTONOMY AND THE CULTURES AND STRUCTURES OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH FREEDOM AS CONTROL AND THE CONTROL OF FREEDOM: F. A. HAYEK AND THE ACADEMIC IMAGINATION Simon Marginson

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THE IDEA OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN LATE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY OXFORD: THE CASE OF JOHN WYCLIF G. R. Evans

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AUTONOMY, ENTREPRENEURIALISM AND AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY POLICY FRAMEWORKS: A DIFFICULT BALANCING ACT Carole Kayrooz

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SECTION III: AUTONOMY AND THE MOTIVATION FOR RESEARCH AUTONOMY, ACQUIESCENCE OR ANOMIE? REFLECTIONS ON A CONSTRUCTED RESEARCH CAREER Malcolm Tight

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ON RESEARCHING OURSELVES: THE DIFFICULT CASE OF AUTONOMY IN RESEARCHING HIGHER EDUCATION John Brennan

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RESEARCH ASSESSMENT; RESEARCHER AUTONOMY Ian McNay

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Contents

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CONCLUSION REVIEW AND CONCLUSIONS Malcolm Tight, Carole Kayrooz and Gerlese S. A˚kerlind

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people we would like to thank for bringing this book to fruition. First, we should thank those anonymous reviewers who offered encouragement that the book was a worthwhile project and one that could make a contribution to social science debate. Their collegial and constructive commentary caused us to rethink several parts of our manuscript. Thanks also to the many others who made editorial commentary on the manuscript. Anna Price, Robert and Ceilidh Dalton, Ania Lian, Karen Dymock and Maureen Collins offered input, careful editing and secretarial support along the way and each was important to the final product. Finally, thanks to our contributors for their thoughtful reflections on social science research in the university sector. Only some of us met face to face in the writing of the book. A visit to the UK by one of the contributors was thwarted by another’s case of mumps. It is an affirmation of our collegiality that we managed to bring the project to completion in such circumstances. What other occupation could allow such individual but united effort?

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Gerlese S. A˚kerlind

CEDAM, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

John Brennan

Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, The Open University, London, UK

Angela Brew

Institute for Learning and Teaching, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

G.R. Evans

Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Carole Kayrooz

Faculty of Education, Health & Science, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Simon Marginson

Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Ian McNay

Department of Post-Compulsory Education and Training, University of Greenwich, London, UK

Malcolm Tight

Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

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INTRODUCTION


AUTONOMY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH Carole Kayrooz, Gerlese S. A˚kerlind and Malcolm Tight BACKGROUND: WHY ARE WE WRITING THIS BOOK? Changes in the freedoms of individual academics and universities have been gathering apace across the western world since World War II (e.g., Altbach, 2001; Karmel, 2003, p. 2). Such changes have compelled the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to alert the world community to the link between freedoms experienced in the university sector and those in wider democratic systems. In 1998, UNESCO held a World Conference on Higher Education with a specific focus on academic freedom and university autonomy. An international charter resulted, detailing mutual rights, obligations and monitoring mechanisms. The International Association of Universities (IAU), the group responsible for convening the UNESCO debate, emphasised that academic freedom and university autonomy were essential to be able to transmit and advance knowledge: For Universities to serve a world society requires that Academic Freedom and University Autonomy form the bedrock to a new Social Contract – a contract to uphold values common to Humanity and to meet the expectations of a world where frontiers are rapidly dissolving. (cited in Ginkel, 2002, p. 347)

Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Volume 4, 3–27 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3628/doi:10.1016/S1479-3628(06)04001-9

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CAROLE KAYROOZ ET AL.

This book, concerning academic freedom and university autonomy in social science research, builds on these concerns. It brings together key contributors on the changing role of autonomy in university research in the United Kingdom and Australia (A˚kerlind & Kayrooz, 2003; Brennan, Fedrowitz, Huber, & Shah, 1999; Brew, 2001; Evans, 2002; Kayrooz, Kinnear, & Preston, 2001; Kayrooz & Preston, 2002; Marginson & Considine, 2000; McNay, 2000; Tight, 1988a), with the aim of exploring the much neglected area of freedom and autonomy in the social sciences in particular. While the changing nature of autonomy in the natural and physical sciences has received some attention in recent times, there has been far less concern with what is happening in the social sciences. Yet, the need for such attention has become urgent given the pivotal role that the social sciences play in social critique. Indeed, commentators have called for a regular examination of the impact of changes in the understanding of autonomy, the experience of researchers, the role of autonomy at research sites and the nature of research motivation (e.g., Schuller, 1995; Smyth, 1995). In addition to the lack of attention to autonomy in the social sciences, there has also been relatively little written on academic freedom and autonomy since Tight’s edited book on Academic Freedom and Responsibility was published in 1988 (Tight, 1988a). While there have been books focusing more broadly on the development and commercialisation of university research (e.g., Coady, 2000; Cooper, Hinkson, & Sharp, 2002; Marginson & Considine, 2000; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), none have had a specific focus on academic freedom and autonomy. Given the pace of change in the university sector over the past two decades, it is time for another such review. As Anderson (2001) has noted, there is some urgency to this because a different social contract is emerging, one that contrasts with the UNESCO vision outlined above, where large-scale governmental, business and community support continues for social science research only so far as this research is seen as contributing to the new economy.

FOCUS ON THE SOCIAL SCIENCES In this book we focus exclusively on the social sciences, as there is little literature that explores the role of autonomy in university research with this focus. Debate has focused more upon the natural sciences and technology, with their greater emphasis on academy–industry relations, industry support and commercial patents. However, based on his landmark survey of American academics, Clark (1987) argued that ‘the sharper problems of

Autonomy in Social Science Research

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academic freedom are to be found in the social sciences and the humanities’ (p. 138). He describes significant disciplinary differences in concerns over academic autonomy, with natural scientists experiencing greater security in their sense that the scientific knowledge that they produce is less open to varying interpretations – ‘In physics, Newton’s laws are Newton’s laws’ (p. 137) – whereas the subject matter of social sciences and humanities is seen as more variable in nature, and, therefore, more open to political interference. Social scientists constitute about one-third of university staff in the UK and Australia. They typically comprise economics, psychology, anthropology, education, history, political science, sociology, urban studies, linguistics, accounting, business, media and journalism, law, demography and geography. Social scientists can highlight distinct problems in society or participate in some way in their solution. They have often prompted the public to question the status quo by picking apart conventional wisdom and received opinion, and they regularly add to the sum of knowledge in public life. The substantial contribution of social scientists has been documented in Mann’s (2002) review of their contributions to policy analysis, advice and evaluation, assisting in the design, use and adaptation of new technologies, explaining how knowledge is generated and understanding the impact of technology and the economy. Social scientists are crucial to the formulation of public opinion in areas such as education, politics, society, health, welfare and ageing, to name but a few. Anderson and Eaton (1982b, p. 116) cite the work of Dewey, Freud, Pavlov and Piaget, who have changed the nature of the way that we think about things, and whose enquiry was motivated by curiosity about the nature of things with no practical benefit intended. In her recent book, The Nature of Research: Inquiry in Academic Contexts, Brew emphasises the explanatory role of social scientists, though she also queries their ability to actually solve problems: y social scientists in particular have explained complex interactions of physical phenomena and social events, and a literate, articulate public has, through the media, learnt of complex and difficult problems for which there are, as yet, no solutions. (2001, 181– 182)

Those working and researching in the social sciences typically appeal to the ‘social or public good’ as justification for resisting interference in their right to speak out in areas of their expertise. Yet, in the current climate, there is a danger that even the concept of public good is increasingly being construed in terms of social or political utility; that is, as capable of commercial or political exploitation. Clarification of the basis for autonomy in the social sciences is important because, within a democratic and pluralist society, the

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construction of the ‘social good’ is intimately related to the quality of public debate and, thus, social and governmental decision-making. What have been the effects on, and response of, social scientists to the changes taking place across the university sector? Social scientists seem to have responded to these changes in various ways. In 2001, Kayrooz and colleagues conducted a survey of Australian social scientists, commissioned by an independent think tank, to explore social scientists’ perceptions and experiences of the effects on academic freedom of the current climate of commercialisation in Australian universities. The preliminary release of the survey findings and the subsequent publication of the results (Kayrooz et al., 2001; Kayrooz & Preston, 2002) sparked considerable controversy, both in Australia and abroad. Through talk shows, newspaper editorials and letters, the general public responded to the issues raised and, immediately following the release of the survey report, a broad ranging Australian Senate Inquiry into Higher Education further examined these issues. In that survey, like other studies across the western university sector, some responses were favourable and others not. Some academics in these studies have reported greater exploration and integration with the external community, and, paradoxically, an experience of greater freedom (Harman, 1999, 2001). In contrast, others describe constraints towards ‘safe research’ and ‘declining quality’ (Marginson & Considine, 2000; Vidovich & Currie, 1998). Choice of research topic has been affected, leading some academics to avoid contentious or speculative research. Some have spoken of ‘the inaccessibility of money to ask awkward and unsettling questions’. They have also expressed concern that the system of research incentives and rewards has shifted in focus from quality publications to volume output: numbers of publications, research grants, patents or licenses. Some academics claim that commercial exploitation of social research has resulted in self-censorship. In a small number of cases, academics even describe outright interference in the publication of contentious results. While the impacts upon academic freedom described by these social scientists are reminiscent of those described by physical and natural scientists, impacts more specific to the social sciences are also reported (Kayrooz et al., 2001). These include the active avoidance of externally funded research, in order to maintain academic freedom, and, for those who do participate in grantgetting, reduced time to engage in social debate, for example, through the preparation of newspaper articles. It seems, though, that the various social science disciplines do not experience pressures upon academic freedom uniformly. This is possibly because there are variations between disciplines in terms of degree of specialisation,


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leaning towards either a scientific or a humanities orientation and selection of research methodology. Some also think that social scientists are more concerned with internal rather than external threats. In an interesting commentary on the ‘social science wars’, Hothschild (2004) argues that the nastier fights in the social sciences are more a result of internal squabbles than external threats. According to Hothschild, in political science, anthropology and education most arguments tend to be over methodological frameworks, not competing values or desirable hierarchies of power. Sociologists, by contrast, largely avoid methods wars, tending to argue more about the roles of race and gender in determining professional standing, whereas economists fight over the legitimacy of critiques of neo-classical orthodoxy.

HISTORICAL AND LEGISLATIVE BASIS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY The notion of intellectual freedom has a long and illustrious history. The idea of scholarly freedom probably derived from the intellectual traditions of the ancient Greeks in the 5th century BC (Patterson, 1997). The university was thought of as an autonomous community of masters and students who used the Socratic questioning system of thought. The Greek intellectual tradition, embodied particularly in Aristotelian logic, was then to become the essence of medieval university education. In 1213, Pope Gregory IX issued a papal edict, Parens Scientiarium (Mother of Sciences), which made the University of Paris a fully chartered corporate entity under papal protection; that is, an organisational and legal entity (Mathews & Cheng, 1992). Importantly, the university was to be free from interference by the local church authorities or civil government (but the masters and students were expected to conform to the rules laid down from the Pope). By 1231, the University of Paris was an educational institution for the advancement and training of scholars, with its own corporate legal existence, elected officers and a common seal. The University of Paris became the model for the Northern European universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. The notion of freedom as a requirement for ‘truth-telling and honest knowledge-making’ extends at least as far back as the rise of the gentleman experimental philosopher in 17th-century England (Shapir, 1994). However, at this point in history, university academics were included in the group of

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‘unfree’ agents, as they were paid for their work. Only landed gentry were considered to be in a position to be trusted with truth-telling (at least by the Royal Society of London), on the basis that disinterestedness in the outcomes of their research was not constrained by the need to earn a living, as it was with academics: ‘From this perspective, deeply ingrained in Australian and British society, it assumed that those dependent upon funding from others are also then dependent upon the will of others and should be afraid to displease them’ (p. 405). The foundations of academic tenure as a requirement for academic freedom, with associated institutional financial support unconditional upon the topics or outcomes of academics’ research, is apparent in this view. Shapir suggests that the source of trust in truthtelling has now shifted to being founded on knowledge expertise and institutional surveillance. Hence, the current need for quality assurance, and government attempts to constrain the actions of institutions and the academics within them. In Chapter 5 of this collection, Evans explores the interplay between academic freedom and university autonomy in a medieval case study from Oxbridge, showing some of the historical derivations and nuances of these notions. She also shows that the need for autonomy in research and teaching was recognised and dealt with by the university community in complex ways at that time. It is clear that there was never a ‘golden age’ of academic freedom. The modern idea of the university evolved in 19th century Germany: the Humboldtian model (Simpson, 1983). The most important feature of this model was that it emphasised independent enquiry and research, in contrast to the emphasis on religious and moral teaching and character building characteristic of the Anglo-medieval tradition. Pivotal concepts in this new university were lernfreiheit, the student’s freedom to choose their own subjects and university, and lehrfreiheit, freedom of the professor to choose teaching and research topics, and to pursue them without governmental interference in their particular field of competence (Neave, 1988). We suspect it is these ideas and traditions that we have inherited in today’s universities, and that cause us some disquiet in relation to infringements of autonomy in research.

VARIED VIEWS ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND UNIVERSITY AUTONOMY We have to recognise, from the outset, that there is currently little consensus on what academic freedom and university autonomy actually mean. Often,


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the terms are conflated together (as by UNESCO), although others argue that they are separate but related, with university autonomy typically seen as a precondition for academic freedom (Anderson & Johnson, 1998; Harman, 1999; Tight, 1988b). In this edited collection, we use the term autonomy to cover both individual and institutional freedoms, and we view them as interrelated. More precise definitions and relationships between them will be explored further by our chapter contributors. Our hope is that these discussions will begin to outline the parameters of academic freedoms, both individual and institutional. In the following paragraphs, we explore variations in the meanings of academic freedom in particular, by showing just how varied interpretations can be. There is little consensus as to the meanings of academic freedom. For example, in a special issue of the journal, Higher Education Policy, senior university officials, policy-makers and academics presented quite sharp differences of opinion internationally. An Egyptian contributor emphasised students’ rather than academics’ freedom ‘to study, learn and gain relevant experience under similar conditions’ (Abdel-Motaal, 2002, p. 366). A Mexican contributor (Mungaray-Lagarda, 2002) stressed mutual involvement and responsibilities between academics and institutions, and intellectual property and royalties. The academic representing Iran viewed academic freedom as requiring a central overhaul in his nation, in order to encourage a spread of information technology and electronic communications media (Jassbi, 2002, pp. 371–373), while the Russian representative (Verbitskaya, 2002) suggested that academic freedom is determined by the degree of university autonomy, arguing that the government had no moral right to consider itself a stakeholder since it had provided so little support to Russian universities. Such variation in views and emphases becomes an issue of particular concern when the variation is left implicit rather than made explicit. As Neave, in his editorial in the special issue states: One of the great taken for granteds that surrounds the term Academic Freedom turns around the conviction that we are all engaged in upholding the same cause; that this cause tends in the same direction; that it has the same purposes, draws on the same sources of authority and applies to the same individuals and constituencies. (Neave, 2002, pp. 331–335)

Informed debate requires challenging this assumption and making the range of views more explicit. Substantial variation in views of academic freedom occur not just across different countries and different disciplines, but also within them. A˚kerlind and Kayrooz (2003), in their empirical study based

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on the national survey of Australian social scientists referred to earlier (Kayrooz et al., 2001), identified a number of different foci and emphases in social science academics’ understanding of the nature of academic freedom. While all of the academics surveyed emphasised academic freedom as requiring freedom from interference, there was variation in views as to the degree of interference that was regarded as still constituting a state of academic freedom. This varied from a view that no constraints could be consistent with academic freedom, to a view that the imposition of certain external collegial, institutional and/or societal standards was appropriate. In addition, some academics felt that more was required to constitute academic freedom than simple absence from interference. The view that academic freedom would not exist without active institutional support for academics’ activities was emphasised by some, while others emphasised that, inherent to the notion of academic freedom, was an academic responsibility or obligation to actually exercise that freedom, and to do so wisely. In total, five different ways of understanding academic freedom were found among Australian social scientists, constituting: freedom from interference, without any constraints; freedom from interference that is appropriately regulated by the academic her/himself; freedom from interference that is appropriately externally regulated, in terms of collegial, institutional and societal standards; freedom from interference that requires active institutional and societal support to maintain; and freedom from interference that is justified by active responsibility on the part of academics to exercise their academic freedom towards social good, and to do so wisely and appropriately. A˚kerlind’s chapter in this volume assists us to further clarify the variation in meaning of academic freedom and autonomy from the perspective of individual academics, while Brew’s chapter examines the role that academic freedom plays in individual’s research decision-making. There is seemingly less diversity in views in the literature on the definition of university autonomy. University autonomy is typically viewed as the right to self-determination in the appointment of academic staff, student admission, teaching content and methods, standards control, priority setting and future development (Neave, 2001, pp. 1–5; Tapper & Salter, 1995; Tight, 1992). It is defined in Part V of the UNESCO document, Clause 17, as ‘that degree of self-governance necessary for effective decision-making by institutions of higher education regarding their academic work, standards,


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management and related activities consistent with systems of public accountability, especially in respect of funding provided by the state, and respect for academic freedom and human rights’. Clause 21 also notes that ‘self-governance, collegiality and appropriate academic leadership are essential components of meaningful autonomy for institutions of higher education’. The UNESCO document continues to state that institutional autonomy is essential to the fulfilment of responsibilities and enjoyment of rights by higher education institutions and individual staff, to the extent, effectively, that institutional ‘autonomy is the institutional form of academic freedom’. In modern societies, university autonomy is seen as primarily involving the relationships between universities and their respective governments, although, of course, other bodies may also be involved, such as professional bodies with a stake in accreditation requirements. In past times, church, bar and papal as well as court officials may also have been involved. Currently, governmental influence may consist of, but not be limited by, legislative authority or executive persuasion related to financial power. This is the concept of ‘steering from a distance’, with government controlling the university sector indirectly, through a series of financial levers (Marginson, 1997).

SATISFACTION WITH CURRENT LEVELS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY Differences in reports of the degree of current satisfaction with academic freedom among individual academics are also prevalent. Surveys show both positive and negative opinions (for more positive reports, see Kayrooz et al., 2001; McInnis, 1999; Vidovich & Currie, 1998; for more negative, see Enders, 1999; Harman, 1999, 2001). Positive accounts tend to claim that freedoms are actually increasing, with negative accounts claiming opposite trends. Marginson (1997) attempts to resolve this contradiction by relating academic freedom to developments within the neo-liberal economy. High satisfaction with academic freedom probably exists for those well endowed with the right entrepreneurial ‘skill set’ to capitalise on market-based activity in the university sector. Slaughter and Leslie (1997) call this climate of commercialisation ‘academic capitalism’, and the academics involved ‘academic entrepreneurs’, whose market activity, ironically, is protected from market forces by the institutions that nurture them. Marginson, in his chapter in this volume, discusses the neo-liberal economic basis of the

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primacy of markets and market reform of recent times, and some of the consequences for scholarly autonomy. At the institutional level there are also varied reports. Researchers have monitored indicators of institutional autonomy in various countries across the world (e.g., Altbach, 2001; Anderson & Johnson, 1998), with interpretations ranging from quite positive to mixed and quite negative (for more positive reports, see Gibbons et al., 1994; for more negative, see Altbach, 2001; Anderson & Johnson, 1998). An explanation for this variation is currently not forthcoming in the literature, although one suspects that differences in the indicators used to determine autonomy may account for at least some of this variation. This may be illustrated by Anderson and Johnson’s (1998) survey of university autonomy in 20 countries. Their report shows variations in perceived levels of autonomy even within the one country, depending on the indicators used. In this comparative analysis, the UK and Australia were rated, along with other Anglo-American governed countries, as having the least legal authority to intervene in the university sector. However, when it came to ratings of the degree to which this legal authority is actually exerted in practice, in relation to research priorities and research topics, Australia was positioned in the middle of the range. The UK, by contrast, was placed in the least ‘actual interference’ category, although the researchers indicated that this situation would probably alter. Our UK colleagues would confirm that this is the case, with their experience of the research assessment exercises in recent years, addressed in particular in this volume by McNay.

IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM A RIGHT? Many justifications for academic freedom and university autonomy centre on the notion of rights. As will be seen in the chapter by Kayrooz in this book, the depiction of university autonomy as a right is now enshrined in UNESCO policy, state legislation and institutional agreements as well as in legislative frameworks across the western world. Yet, why should academics in particular claim such freedoms as rights? There are many parties to the production and dissemination of knowledge. Whose rights should prevail? Before considering these questions, it is necessary to consider the jurisprudence surrounding the justification of a right. What is a right and how is it relevant to the university sector? Rights are usually referred to as advantageous positions conferred on the possessor by law, morals, rules or other norms (Audi, 1995, p. 695). There are many views on which rights are


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advantageous. ‘Will theories’ in jurisprudence hold that rights favour the will of the possessor over the conflicting will of some other party, while ‘interest theories’ maintain that rights serve to protect or promote the interests of the right-holder. In the context of university autonomy, it is this latter view of rights that is more fitting. Academic freedom as a right protects the interests of social scientists to produce independent commentary on matters of societal interest, and confers a responsibility to maintain structures to uphold that freedom. But whose interests should be protected where there is a conflict of interest? Often academics, in the Kantian liberalist tradition, appeal to the higher moral ground, particularly when individual academic interests collide with institutional pecuniary interests. While it may seem self-evident that such academic interests should be preferred because, ideally, they have the higher interest of the society in mind, such an appeal is difficult in jurisprudence as, with the decline of religious morality, legal precedent is the basis of judgement. Rights-based liberalists assert that individual claims should override institutional needs (Sandel, 1987). Conservatives think that the liberalist position does not allow us to consider communitarian, societal or, in this case, university interests (Glendon, 1991). Rights-based liberalism may even cause us to descend into a kind of moral relativism, and to disallow consideration of the broader context in which the individual is located. Once again, whose rights should prevail and how can academic freedom as a right be justified in the context of these criticisms? The search for a defensible legal basis of rights is ongoing, and one of its greatest proponents in the Kantian liberalist tradition is Rawls, who believes in the supremacy of individual human right. Even if academic freedom may be detrimental to the university or the society in some circumstances, Rawls (1971) has argued that: y justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others y the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. (pp. 3–4)

This is generally taken to mean a certain irreducibility of individual rights, that we are separate moral agents with our own aims and visions, consistent with a similar liberty for others. However, many communitarian critics of modern liberalism in the tradition of Aristotle and Hegel would disagree. Rights discourse has proliferated to the extent that it is unworkable from a societal perspective, they argue. Rights discourse favours particular interests over the common good and promotes individuals’ assertion of rights rather than giving reasons for gaining rights. Rights discourse also fosters

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unrealistic expectations and a climate that is silent on individual responsibilities towards civic obligations (Glendon, 1991; Hutchison & Monahan, 1987). The resolution of this dilemma is less difficult in the university sector than perhaps in social welfare matters, because university interest is often clearly budgetary and academic interest ostensibly occurs for the ‘social good’. Despite these arguments, the liberalist view of rights is justifiable on communitarian terms that allow academics in a pluralistic democracy to address the needs and interests of diverse groups of people. Rights discourse is one of the few mechanisms in society that maintains attention on the pluralistic interests of society, and, as such, cannot be seen in isolation from other social and legal institutional mechanisms that ensure the common and social good. The notion of a right as applied to academic freedom is currently still contested in social welfare areas, but less so in the university sector. Still, it can be countered that, in the university sector, social good is increasingly being construed in terms of utilitarian objectives, and, further, university interest provides the reliable structures in which academic freedom can exist. One way to address these difficulties is to view individual autonomy in terms of a ‘social contract’, and we suspect that this would offer better traction for defending autonomy in the university sector. Interestingly, the UNESCO documentation on academic freedom and university autonomy contained specific clauses on the rights of academics and institutions, yet often referred to these aspects as a social contract. A social contract is a tacit agreement, either between the people and their ruler, or among the people in a community. It describes the nature of political obligation (Audi, 1995, pp. 745–746). In its application to the university sector, society gives intellectual freedom to academics so that they can produce expertise for the social good. The notion of a social contract implies reciprocal responsibility, an ultimate purpose beyond the individual academic and reference to the wider society. This concept of a social contract will be further explored in the chapter by Kayrooz on institutional regulatory frameworks.

FOCUS ON THE UK AND AUSTRALIA While investigation of the role of academic freedom and autonomy in social science research is still in its infancy, there are conflicting reports on differential effects across countries, universities and disciplines (Albert, 2003;


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Bleiklie & Byrkjeflot, 2003). In dealing with this diversity, we decided to focus this book not only on the social science disciplines, but also on the situation in the UK and Australia in particular, considering varying types of universities in both countries. We selected these two countries as they provide higher education systems that are similar enough to allow for convergent themes to emerge, yet distinct enough to draw salutary lessons from each other of relevance to other higher education systems. According to Harman and Ollif (2004), links between recent UK and Australian higher education policies shed light on developments in both countries. Comparisons also give clues to where key policy ideas have come from. These linkages go back to the founding of the first Australian universities in the 1850s. While Australian universities tried to address local needs, they also drew substantially on British academic models and British trained academics. Only since the 1950s has Australia drawn more on its own traditions and those of other nations, most notably the USA. Still, over the past 20 years, the flow of ideas, models and personnel between Australia and the UK has continued to be high. Ministers and senior officials in the two countries talk regularly, exchange documentation and monitor new initiatives and their implementation. Both countries regularly borrow policy ideas from one another. For example, the Australian quality assurance scheme is largely modelled on the UK experience, and England’s income-contingent tuition fees plan was modelled in part on the Australian Higher Education Contributions Scheme. Current mechanisms for the allocation of research training funds in Australia show the influence of British experience with competitive allocations, and the Australian Research Quality Framework, due to be introduced in 2007, was informed by an advisory group chaired by Professor Gareth Roberts, who oversaw revisions to the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise. Harman (2004) concludes that UK and Australian parallels will continue to be worth following, particularly as they may give useful clues about possible new lines of policy directions in both countries. It is worth reflecting on the comparative recent histories of the United Kingdom and Australian higher education systems to indicate similarities and differences. These histories may in part explain developmental responses, and they allow readers from other countries to assess relevance to their own situation. In the United Kingdom, the boundary between the state and the universities was changed in 1919, when the government established the University Grants Committee (UGC) to administer recurrent grants to the universities (Tapper & Salter, 1995). The UGC, as an arm of the state, subsequently

16


guided the development of the existing universities and the creation of new ones. There was a tacit agreement that, in return for the recurrent governmental grant, the universities would evolve in a manner aligned with national goals. After 1964, the government made the UGC responsible to the Department of Education and Science, whereas previously it had come under the auspices of the Treasury, and policy direction began to tighten. The expansion of the university system in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the major economic crisis of the mid-1970s, led to a breakdown of the existing consensus on higher education policy among the government, the UGC and the universities. Serious cutbacks in institutional funding were introduced in 1981, with the UGC deciding to distribute declining real resources on a formula-funding model. Tapper and Salter claim that this decision was the beginning of the UGC’s demise, as it signalled to the government, intent on supporting institutional diversity, that it would not administer blanket cutbacks across the sector. The UGC became little more than a buffer body for governmental policy for the universities, including the introduction of more selective funding programmes in engineering, technology and information sciences. The Thatcher government replaced the UGC with the Universities Funding Council in 1988, which itself was replaced by the Higher Education Funding Council in 1993. This latter replacement was due to the creation of a unified national university system through the inclusion of the former teaching-focused polytechnics and colleges. The various councils, which were conduits of government policy became less representative of university interests, and more and more a clear vehicle for governmental belief in the central purpose of universities as being to fulfil national needs. Tapper and Salter suggest that these events have made universities more autonomous, in the sense that they have the leeway to determine directions within governmental controls, but less free in that academics are less able to determine their own working lives. In 1998, tenure was abolished for academics, although a clause on academic freedom was inserted into the legislation governing universities. In this way, the link between institutional and individual autonomy was broken. In Australia, research became an established component of academic activity in the universities in the period of reconstruction and expansion immediately following World War II (Anderson & Eaton, 1982a). Perhaps the first specific and significant vehicle for increased governmental control, the Murray report in 1957 prompted the Commonwealth (i.e., national) Government to increase its share of financial responsibility relative to the States. Although the universities in Australia were legally constituted by


17

regional (State and Territory) governments, the Commonwealth became the major financial contributor (Mollis & Marginson, 2002). The effect was increasingly centralised governmental control, policy development and paternalistic protection of universities. In the late 1970s, during a period of increasing accountability for universities, the trend towards centralisation accelerated, culminating in 1974, when the universities relinquished the charging of fees for tuition, which was their only source of independence from government funding. The Commonwealth established independent commissions to coordinate the ‘balanced development of higher education’ (Anderson & Eaton, 1982b; Mollis & Marginson, 2002). The outcome of these changes and the closer scrutiny by the Commonwealth was that, even as early as 1978, researchers were warning that academics would be dissuaded from giving ‘voice to antiestablishment opinions’ (Powell, 1978, pp. 150–151), and that substantial threats to institutional autonomy would result from governmental ‘steering from a distance’. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with neo-liberal economic fervour, John Dawkins, the then Commonwealth Minister for Education, radically transformed funding arrangements and the design and culture of institutions, replacing the independent commissions (which were deemed to be too sympathetic to institutional independence) with direct ministerial control (Mollis & Marginson, 2002). In 1988, government funding was tied to forced amalgamations between universities, teaching-focused colleges of advanced education, and technical and further education colleges. Demands for accountability and reductions in public funding led to reduced staff numbers, the phasing out of tenure and the search for new funding sources. During the period 1988–2001, the government created a unified university system, ending the binary divide between universities and colleges of advanced education. The number of publicly funded institutions fell from 72 to 40, due to institutional mergers, and average institutional size tripled. With cutbacks in staffing, overwork became a regular finding in both governmental and private reports. The government centralised research funding based on performance indicators and national priorities, and standardised data collection and reporting. They established one-on-one negotiations with individual institutions over funding and policy, and administered research funding on a competitive bidding basis (prior to this period, monies had been distributed in an egalitarian manner according to student numbers). Government-initiated industrial changes have come to play an increasing role in the Australian higher education system since the 1980s. Traditionally, academic employees had been viewed as a unique category in terms of

18


employee–employer relationships. From 1973, academic salaries had been set through the Academic Salaries Tribunal, established by the Commonwealth. All decisions on salary rises made by the Tribunal were then paid by the Government. However, in 1983, a High Court decision extended the interpretation of ‘an industry’ to include higher education. National wage decisions, linking pay increases to structural efficiency, now applied to academic positions, as did the 1991 Industrial Relations Commission’s decision to support greater emphasis on enterprise or workplace bargaining, linking pay increases to productivity. The industrial changes of the 1980s and 1990s, with their resulting requirement that academic salary increases be based on productivity gains, rather than funded by Government, have been another source of increasing financial pressures on universities and workload pressures on academics. In addition, despite the best efforts of unions, the industrial requirement for institutionally based enterprise bargaining has led to differential salary rates in different Australian universities. Recently, the Australian Government has introduced individual Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs), and made funding within universities dependent upon their implementation. AWAs require bargaining at an individual-employee level rather than a collective-institutional level, further strengthening linkages with productivity as defined by the university and the government.

INTERNATIONAL RELEVANCE Global contextual forces impacting on academic freedom and institutional autonomy in the UK and Australia, that readers from other countries may also recognise, include the expanding proportion of the population participating in the university sector. In the second half of the 20th century, university enrolments expanded exponentially, in part to accommodate the waves of returning service men and women from World War II, and, in part, to fill the growing need for skilled labour in professional areas. This increased participation was followed by the oil crises that, in turn, prompted the economic downturn of the 1970s, leading governments to rethink their capacity to fund an expanding higher education sector, and universities to seek alternative sources of funding. While there have been some variations in growth in participation between countries, growth generally continued in the 1990s and 2000s, resulting in the mass systems of higher education we now have in Australia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.


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The trend towards globalisation has represented a new and distinct shift in the economic and social relationship between the nation state and supranational forces. Worldwide technology and markets have changed governmental control mechanisms, and facilitated mobility of capital and people to an extent not experienced before. The subsequent rise of privatisation in many western countries, and the further decline of public funding for universities, have led to intense institutional competition, increased engagement with industry partners and the commercialisation of university research. Universities across the western world, in particular, have become more market-oriented. At the same time, there have been societal and governmental calls for accountability in an era where managerialism has achieved a status not previously encountered in the university sector. These additional forces have placed new ‘performative’ stresses and escalating administrative demands on universities and their members (e.g., Deem & Johnson, 2000; Marginson, 1997, 2002; Marginson & Considine, 2000; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Vidovich & Currie, 1998). What has been the effect of these changes on research in the university sector? While all areas of university work have arguably been effected, there has been quite a dramatic transition in the overall research regimes of most universities in western countries (e.g., Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Ylijoki, 2003). This transition has been characterised as involving an increasing focus on the intellectual property contained in research rather than a collegial emphasis on the sharing of results. Research has moved towards local problem solving and away from the tradition of universalism or generalisation of results. Community, political and societal interests are also gradually superseding the long-standing research tradition of disinterestedness, while highly competitive multidisciplinary entrepreneurial teams and institutional interests are replacing individual disciplinary work. In addition, an increase in academic workloads has reduced academics’ opportunity to exercise their critical capacity (Kayrooz et al., 2001; Tight, 2000), a crucial component of academic freedom. The need for regular reporting on research performance has produced a research culture more geared to quantity rather than quality. Further, governmental research funding has steered research endeavour explicitly in line with national economic objectives (Marginson, 2000), and implicitly away from social critique in the social sciences. Given the direction and pace of these changes, the debate about autonomy is both timely and serious, forming part of a larger debate on the nature of academic work today, and the future of the university sector in serving

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a ‘knowledge society’ (Coaldrake & Stedman, 1999; Cuthbert, 1996; Marginson, 2000; Martin, 1999; Taylor, 1999).

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This book uses an organisational schema drawn from one of the editors’ recent examinations of how context affects research (Kayrooz & Trevitt, 2005). This schema was compiled from various studies’ definitions of the research context (for a review, see Morse, 1992). Context was variously described in these studies as ‘the environment or setting’, the ‘ambience’, the ‘larger domain’, the ‘web of experience’ and the ‘general frame of reference’. Different analytic frameworks have been used to explore aspects of the context in organisational cultures (e.g., Hofstede, 1980; McNay, 1995; Mintzberg, 1983; Parsons, 1996). While it is probably evident that such contextual influences can shape the purpose, design, results and impact of research, as Punch (2005) points out, there is often collusion in keeping silent about them. In her recently completed book (Kayrooz & Trevitt, 2005), Kayrooz used these notions as a starting point to develop a framework for the context within which the research process takes place. This framework focuses on three crucial aspects of the research context – the researcher, the site of research and the research motivation and sponsors. This framework appears equally relevant to a consideration of the role of autonomy in the research process. Each aspect consists of a number of subaspects, with respect to potential influences on autonomy. We think that focusing contributions to the book around these three contextual aspects provides a strong organisational framework: The researcher(s): this includes the individual’s experience of autonomy, accountability, rights and responsibilities, the research system as a whole, and the influence of academic role, position, identity and workload in relation to autonomy, etc. The site of research: this includes the cultures, values and structures of academic research, and of the organisations in which it takes place, such as the peer review system, institutional and disciplinary structures, history, future aspirations, impact of technology, intellectual property, etc. The research motivation and sponsors: this includes a consideration of motives and values in previous and contemporary research; the effects on motivation of funding mechanisms, availability of funding and other


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resources, institutional backing, research infrastructure, power and prestige of sponsor(s) relative to researcher(s), possible hidden agendas, nature of the research, governmental research agendas, etc. This book is organised in three main sections, following the organisational schema just outlined. The first section contains essays and case studies exploring the role of autonomy for the individual researcher, while the second focuses on the cultures and structures of academic research, and the third on the motivation for research. The three sections are further contextualised by this introductory chapter and a final, concluding chapter. Section 1, focusing on autonomy and the individual researcher, opens with a chapter by Gerlese S. A˚kerlind. She explores the meanings and lived experience of autonomy in social science research, developing further a framework for understanding variation in social scientists’ understanding of academic freedom (A˚kerlind & Kayrooz, 2003). As described earlier, A˚kerlind and Kayrooz found substantial variation among social science academics in their views of what academic autonomy meant to them. For some, autonomy was experienced as an absence of constraints on academic activities, while for others certain external or self-regulated constraints were seen as appropriate. In addition, some regarded academic responsibility and active support from their institutions as an integral part of academic freedom. A˚kerlind brings these different ways of understanding autonomy in research to life by illustrating how they play out in individual academic contexts and experiences. In the same section, Angela Brew takes the researcher’s view on academic autonomy and research decision-making. Brew writes from the perspective of the researcher who is in the process of making decisions about her research. The purpose of her chapter is to reveal the ways in which current understandings of the nature of research, together with institutional and national requirements and agendas, influence the autonomy of the individual researcher’s decision-making. Researchers’ views of research can include seeing it as an economic commodity, with its performative culture and requirements for research measurement. Other views can include seeing it as a process of trading commodities, or as a piece of property. Brew is interested in the disjunctions between economic performative views of research and ideas that arise from changing understandings of the nature of knowledge. In this respect, she highlights the dilemmas faced by a researcher with a predisposition to carry out ‘blue skies’ research. In Section 2, focusing on autonomy in the context of university cultures and structures, Simon Marginson provides a philosophical critique of

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Hayekian notions of freedom and the primacy of markets, with particular reference to Australia. He focuses on the application of those notions to the creation of a managed market in university education post-1985. Marginson tackles the roots of the problems created by Hayekian reforms, which underlie ‘advanced liberal’ reforms of higher education. Marginson argues that Hayek’s construction of freedom, autonomy, individuality and market competition rests on assumptions that impose a number of closures on academic creativity, propelling academic labour down narrowed paths. This tendency reflects the core contradiction in Hayek, the need to impose a regime to create freedom, manifest within liberalism as the primacy of a constructed market order over a laissez-faire approach. In the following chapter, G.R. Evans writes on the idea of academic freedom in late 14th century Oxford, with particular reference to the case of John Wyclif. Evans presents an historical view of the protective mechanisms at play in the university sector for resisting external interference. This lively historical case study explores the interplay between academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Although the term ‘academic freedom’ was not then current, the case of John Wyclif, an academic taxation specialist, illustrates the combination of political sophistication and pusillanimity characteristic of universities of this time. Evans shows the way in which the university dealt with both church and state interference. The 14th century and the present day have some remarkable similarities, placing the concept of academic autonomy within an historical context. Carole Kayrooz then analyses documents drawn from three institutional case studies within Australia to explore the policy basis for academic freedom and autonomy. Focusing on research policy, she examines the various enterprise bargaining agreements, strategic plans and other relevant policies for both their degree of integration and alignment with external codes on autonomy. Kayrooz also investigates the interplay between institutional policy and individual freedoms as experienced by academics through the recent survey of social science academics described earlier (Kayrooz et al., 2001). Kayrooz’s contribution provides a snapshot of the current state of, and response to, protective mechanisms for academic freedom across various institutional types in Australia. Section 3 explores autonomy and the motivation for research. Malcolm Tight outlines and then analyses the research career of one academic, himself, working in higher education in the United Kingdom during the last three decades. Analysis focuses on the extent to which this career can be seen as either autonomous, that is, guided by the decisions of the individual concerned, or acquiescent, fitting in with the requirements of the institution


23

and other actors. Tight also explores the relationship between the research career and the other careers – parallel or overlapping – experienced by the individual concerned, in terms of teaching, management and life. John Brennan investigates research on research itself, offering a special case study of research into higher education and the impact of research agendas on academic freedom. Research in higher education is subject to biases from ‘within’ and ‘without’ the research community. Research agendas are set and mediated through politicians and stakeholder groups, managers at both institutional and system levels, practitioner interests, and the disciplinary backgrounds of researchers. These interests tend to dominate and, he argues, are partly responsible for two key features of higher education research: (i) a relative lack of theory; and (ii) a relative absence of cumulative work. In consequence, it is argued that higher education research fails to generate its own agenda while responding to the interests and agendas of others. The chapter describes the different contexts for research in higher education and the types of researchers who engage in the field. Ian McNay investigates the impact of the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) on autonomy in social science research. The RAE was introduced to the universities in 1986, and has been conducted periodically ever since. Its initial purpose was to inform the funding of research, particularly to ensure that academics who were not research active were not funded on a formula aligned with numbers of students, which is a teaching measure. After the development of the unified system, it was seen to be used to justify the concentration of research funding on a limited number of departments, mainly in older universities. There were other, perhaps unintended, consequences. McNay explores a number of issues related to the RAE: the impact of agenda setting from outside (or on high) on autonomy in social science research, the effect of pressures to group work and collaboration, and, similarly, the effect of pressures to ‘edit’ from particular angles. Through this book we hope the reader will more fully appreciate the qrole of autonomy in social science research and, by extension, the value of an independent academic sector to the external community. The comparisons and contrasts drawn between the UK and Australia should also assist university administrators, academics, government employees, the media and the general public alike. We hope to create a better understanding of the interplay between individual and university autonomy, and a clearer view of the issues arising from this interplay. We aim to have achieved a greater clarification of the meaning of academic freedom, and the key role of institutional regulatory and managerial environments in supporting autonomy.

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REFERENCES Abdel-Motaal, M. B. (2002). Academic freedom and civil society: Some personal reflections. Higher Education Policy, 15, 365–370. A˚kerlind, G., & Kayrooz, C. (2003). Understanding academic freedom: The views of social scientists. Higher Education Research and Development, 22(3), 327–344. Albert, M. (2003). Universities and the market economy: The differential impact on knowledge production in sociology and economics. Higher Education, 45, 147–182. Altbach, P. (2001). Academic freedom: International realities and challenges. Higher Education, 41, 205–219. Anderson, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). University autonomy in twenty countries. Canberra: Evaluations and Investigations Program, Higher Education Division, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs. Anderson, D. S., & Eaton, E. (1982a). Australian higher education research and society Part 1. Reconstruction and expansion 1940–1965. Higher Education Research and Development, 1(1), 5–32. Anderson, D. S., & Eaton, E. (1982b). Australian higher education research and society Part 11. Equality of opportunity and accountability 1966–1982. Higher Education Research and Development, 1(2), 89–128. Anderson, M. S. (2001). The complex relations between the academy and industry. The Journal of Higher Education, 72(2), 226–246. Audi, R. (1995). The Cambridge dictionary of philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bleiklie, I., & Byrkjeflot, H. (2003). Changing knowledge regimes: Universities in a new research environment. Higher Education, 44, 519–532. Brennan, J., Fedrowitz, J., Huber, M. T., & Shah, T. (Eds). (1999). What kind of University? International perspectives on knowledge, participation and governance. Buckingham: Open University Press. Brew, A. (2001). What is research? The nature of inquiry in academic contexts. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Clark, B. (1987). The academic life: Small worlds, different worlds. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Coady, T. (2000). Why universities matter: A conversation about values, means and directions. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Coaldrake, P., & Stedman, L. (1999). Academic work in the twenty-first century. Canberra: Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Higher Education Division, Occasional Paper series. Cooper, S., Hinkson, J., & Sharp, G. (2002). Scholars and entrepreneurs: The universities in crisis. North Carlton: Arena Publications Association. Cuthbert, R. (Ed.). (1996). Working in higher education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Deem, R., & Johnson, R. (2000). Managerialism and university managers: Building new academic communities or disrupting old ones? In: I. McNay (Ed.), Higher education and its communities. Buckingham: Open University Press. Enders, J. (1999). Crisis? What crisis? The academic professions in the knowledge society. Higher Education, 38, 71–81. Evans, G. R. (2002). Academics and the real world. Buckingham: Open University Press.


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Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Ginkel, H. (2002). Academic freedom and social responsibility: The role of university organisations. Higher Education Policy, 15, 347–351. Glendon, M. A. (1991). Rights talk: The impoverishment of political discourse. New York: The Free Press. Harman, G. (1999). Australian science and technology academics and university-industry research links. Higher Education, 38, 83–103. Harman, G. (2001). University-industry research partnerships in Australia: Extent, benefits and risks. Higher Education Research and Development, 20(3), 245–264. Harman, G. (2004). Australians busy leading UK by example. Campus Review, 14(16), 8. Harman, G., & Ollif, C. (2004). Universities and government-sponsored contract research: An Australian case study. Prometheus, 22(4), 439–455. Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture’s consequences: International differences in work related values. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Hothschild, J. (2004). On the social science wars. Daedalus, 133(1), 91–94. Hutchison, A. C., Monahan, P. (Eds). (1987). Rule of law: Ideal or ideology. Toronto: Carswell. Jassbi, A. J. (2002). Academic freedom and civilized society. Higher Education Policy, 15, 371–373. Karmel, P. (2003). Higher education at the crossroads. Higher Education, 45, 1–18. Kayrooz, C., Kinnear, P., & Preston, P. (2001). Academic freedom and commercialisation in Australian universities: A study of social scientists. Australia Institute Discussion Paper no. 37. Canberra. Kayrooz, C., & Preston, P. (2002). Academic freedom: Impressions of Australian social scientists. Minerva, 40, 341–358. Kayrooz, C., & Trevitt, C. (2005). Research in organisations and communities: Tales from the real world. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Mann, L. (2002). Introduction: Four plus one contributions of the social sciences to the new, knowledge economy. In: M. Gillies, M. Carroll, & J. Dash (Eds), Humanities and social sciences futures. Papers from the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit held in July 2001. The Australian National University, Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Marginson, S. (1997). How free is academic freedom? Higher Education Research and Development, 16(3), 409–428. Marginson, S. (2000). Rethinking academic work in the global era. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 22(1), 23–35. Marginson, S. (2002). Nation-building universities in a global environment. Higher Education, 43, 23–35. Marginson, S., & Considine, M. (2000). The entrepreneurial university: Power, governance and reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, E. (1999). Changing academic work. Buckingham: Open University Press. Mathews, P., & Cheng, C. (1992). An historical perspective of the development of the university system: Implications for the present and future. Riverina Papers in Commerce no. 20. Charles Sturt University. McInnis, C. (1999). The work roles of academics in Australian universities. Evaluations and investigations programme. Australia: Higher Education Division, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs.

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McNay, M. (1995). From the collegial academy to corporate enterprise: The changing cultures of universities. In: T. Schuller (Ed.), The changing university? Buckingham: Open University Press. McNay, I. (2000). Higher education and its communities. Buckingham: Open University Press. Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in fives: Designing effective organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Mollis, M., & Marginson, S. (2002). The assessment of universities in Argentina and Australia: Between autonomy and heteronomy. Higher Education, 43, 311–330. Morse, J. M. (1992). Qualitative health research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Mungaray-Lagarda, A. (2002). Re-engineering Mexican higher education toward economic development and quality: The XXI century challenge. Higher Education Policy, 15, 391– 399. Neave, G. (1988). The changing frontiers of autonomy and accountability. In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility. Buckingham: Open University Press. Neave, G. (2001). On being economical with university autonomy: Being an account of the retrospective joys of a written constitution. Higher Education Policy, 14, 1–5. Neave, G. (2002). Academic freedom in an age of globalization. Higher Education Policy, 15, 331–335. Parsons, R. (1996). The skilled consultant: A systematic approach to the theory and practice of consultation. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Patterson, G. (1997). The university: From ancient Greece to the 20th century. Annandale, Sydney, NSW: Federation Press. Powell, J. P. (1978). Universities as sources of social criticism: Hot beds or cold feet? In: T. Hore, R. D. Linke & L. H. T. West (Eds), The future of higher education in Australia. Melbourne: Macmillan. Punch, K. F. (2005). Introduction to social research: Quantitative and qualitative approaches (2nd ed.). London: Sage. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sandel, M. (1987). The political theory of the procedural republic. In: A. C. Hutchison & P. Monahan (Eds), Rule of law: Ideal or ideology. Toronto: Carswell. Schuller, T. (1995). The changing university? Buckingham: Open University Press. Shapir, S. (1994). A social history of truth. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, R. (1983). How the PhD came to Britain: A century of struggle for postgraduate education. Guildford, UK: SRHE. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism; politics, policies and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Smyth, J. (1995). Academic work: The changing labour process in higher education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tapper, E. R., & Salter, B. G. (1995). The changing idea of university autonomy. Studies in Higher Education, 20(1), 59–71. Taylor, P. (1999). Making sense of academic life. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1988a). Academic freedom and responsibility. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1988b). So what is academic freedom? In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1992). Institutional autonomy. In: B. Clark & G. Neave (Eds), The encyclopedia of higher education, volume 2: Analytical perspectives (pp. 1384–1390). Oxford: Pergamon Press.


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Tight, M. (Ed.). (2000). Academic work and life: What it is to be an academic, and how this is changing. New York:Elsevier Science. Verbitskaya, L. (2002). Academic freedom and current public policy. Higher Education Policy, 14, 341–346. Vidovich, L., & Currie, J. (1998). Changing accountability and autonomy at the ‘coalface’ of academic work in Australia. In: J. Currie & J. Newson (Eds), Universities and globalisation: Critical perspectives (pp. 193–211). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ylijoki, O. (2003). Entangled in academic capitalism? A case study on changing ideals and practices of university research. Higher Education, 45, 307–335.


SECTION 1: AUTONOMY AND THE INDIVIDUAL RESEARCHER


ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: THE FREEDOM TO SERVE SOCIETY Gerlese S. A˚kerlind Academic freedom means the ability and integrity to conduct research for the public good without fear or favour. Academic freedom is the obligation of academics to make social and political commentary. (anonymous social scientist)

This chapter is based on an empirical investigation of the range of ways of understanding the concept of academic freedom among social scientists in Australian universities. The significance of exploring different understandings of academic freedom lies in a widespread lack of awareness that the term may be understood differently by different groups. At one level, the scholarly literature shows that the concept is open to a range of interpretations and has been used in different ways at different times (Kaplan & Schrecker, 1983; Tight, 1988; Worgul, 1992). At another level, in current public debate, each party’s definition of academic freedom is rarely described and the existence of varying views hardly acknowledged. Furthermore, even in the scholarly literature, the full range of variation in views of academic freedom has not been explored in a comprehensive way, nor the relationships between different views elaborated. The literature is also marked by a lack of empirical data on the issue. In this sense, this chapter forms an interesting contrast with Marginson’s chapter in Section 2 Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Volume 4, 31–46 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3628/doi:10.1016/S1479-3628(06)04002-0

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GERLESE S. A˚KERLIND

of this book. Both chapters focus on different aspects and interpretations of academic freedom, but Marginson’s arguments derive from a strongly philosophical perspective, based on an analysis of patterns of social thought, whereas this chapter derives from a more experiential perspective, based on an analysis of empirical data. This chapter builds on the outcomes of a previous study (A˚kerlind & Kayrooz, 2003), based on an analysis of written descriptions of the meaning of academic freedom for 165 social scientists from 12 universities in Australia. Five qualitatively different ways of understanding academic freedom emerged from the original study. In brief, academic freedom was variously understood as: (1) (2) (3) (4)

an absence of constraints on academics’ activities; an absence of constraints, within certain self-regulated limits; an absence of constraints, within certain externally regulated limits; an absence of constraints, combined with active institutional support; and (5) an absence of constraints, combined with responsibilities on the part of academics. As the data were analysed from a phenomenographic perspective (Marton, 1981; Marton & Booth, 1997; A˚kerlind, 2005a), the five different ways of understanding academic freedom were not independently constituted, but linked in a hierarchical relationship based on inclusivity (see Table 1). That is, the understanding of academic freedom represented by later categories was seen as including awareness of the key aspects of academic freedom represented by earlier categories, but not vice versa. This outcome is in accordance with the phenomenographic assumption that one can expect the different ways in which people understand a phenomenon to be internally related, due to the inherently related nature of human experience. This assumption leads to an empirical search in phenomenographic research for inclusive relationships between different ways of understanding the same phenomenon, typically resulting in an ordering of what can be regarded as representing more and less complex or comprehensive understandings of the phenomenon rather than different and unrelated understandings. These different ways of understanding are not seen as representing different beliefs and values about the phenomenon, but rather the presence and absence in individual awareness of different aspects of the phenomenon. Hence, the more inclusive understandings represent more complex awareness of the various aspects of academic freedom, while the less inclusive

Academic Freedom in the Social Sciences

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Table 1. Key Aspects of the Range of Variation in Ways of Understanding Academic Freedom (from A˚kerlind & Kayrooz, 2003, p. 337). Different Ways of Understanding Academic Freedom Foci of the different ways

Freedom from interference Freedom from interference and freedom to engage in appropriate activities Freedom from interference and responsibility to engage in appropriate activities

Freedom without constraints 1

Freedom with selfregulated constraints 2

Freedom with external constraints

Freedom, constraints and supports

Freedom, constraints and responsibilities

3 4

5

understandings represent a more limited perspective, missing awareness of key aspects of the phenomenon apparent in the more complex understandings. It should also be noted that the aspects of the phenomenon which emerge as critical in distinguishing one way of understanding from another are derived from the data, not decided a priori. The understandings represented by Categories 1–3 share a primary focus on academic freedom experienced as an absence of constraints and interference, in line with a ‘freedom from’ interpretation (see below). In Category 4, the need for non-interference is also emphasised, but there is an additional focus on the need for appropriate institutional, government and societal support, in line with a ‘freedom to’ interpretation (see below). The fifth and final category emphasises the need for both non-interference and support, but also shows an additional focus on the concomitant responsibilities that freedom places upon academics, in line with an understanding of academic freedom as involving certain obligations and accountability. These different foci can also be seen in the broader literature on academic freedom. For instance, one definition of academic freedom is represented in the following quote by Arthur Lovejoy: y the freedom of the teacher or research worker in higher institutions of learning to investigate and discuss the problems of his [sic] science [sic] and to express his conclusions, whether through publication or in the instruction of students, without interference from political or ecclesiastical authority or from the administrative officials of the institution in which he is employed, unless his methods are found by qualified bodies of his

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GERLESE S. A˚KERLIND own profession to be clearly incompetent or contrary to professional ethics (cited in Worgul, 1992, p. 4).

This type of definition emphasises the concept of academic freedom as a freedom from, i.e., freedom from interference. This positions academic freedom as a negative right of individual academics: that is, the right to noninterference in their activities. This may be contrasted with the positioning of academic freedom as a positive right of academics, that is, the freedom to, i.e., the freedom to engage in appropriate academic activities. This interpretation goes beyond the simple absence of interference implied by the ‘freedom from’ interpretation, with associated implications for the role of society, government and higher education institutions in providing the support for academic activities required to enable academic freedom (O’Hear, 1988). Other definitions of academic freedom focus on its underlying social purposes, positioning these as an inherent component of the meaning of academic freedom. This type of interpretation positions academic freedom as a means to an end, not as an end in itself (Hawkesworth, 1988; O’Hear, 1988), bringing with it certain responsibilities as well as rights: Academic freedom is granted in the belief that it enhances the pursuit and application of worthwhile knowledge, and as such is supported by society through the funding of academics and their institutions. Academic freedom embodies an acceptance by academics of the need to encourage openness and flexibility in academic work, and of their accountability to each other and to society in general (Tight, 1988, p. 132).

While the occurrence of these themes in the literature may be seen as indicating that there is nothing new in the variation in understandings of academic freedom that emerged from the A˚kerlind and Kayrooz study, what the study provides that is clearly new is the way in which these themes have been brought into relationship with each other as well as the empirical establishment of the themes. The inclusive nature of the relationships between different ways of viewing academic freedom also facilitates a developmental approach to extending individual understanding of academic freedom, by clarifying, for instance, that awareness of non-interference as a key aspect of academic freedom may occur without simultaneous awareness of social responsibility as a key aspect. However, awareness of social responsibility does not appear to occur without simultaneous awareness of the importance of non-interference. In order to identify inclusive relationships, phenomenography takes a somewhat reductionist focus in searching for key elements of individuals’


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understanding, de-emphasising subtle nuances and uniqueness in understanding. Consequently, a limitation of phenomenographic research is that it does not highlight the richness of individual experience. To counteract this limitation, the study of varying understandings of academic freedom so far described will be augmented here by case study vignettes of academics expressing different understandings of academic freedom, based on in-depth interviews with a subset of the original sample of social science academics.

METHODOLOGY The data on which this essay is based were originally collected as part of a larger study investigating Academic Freedom and Commercialisation in Australian Universities (see Kayrooz, Kinnear, & Preston, 2001). A webbased questionnaire survey of social scientists across 12 universities in Australia was completed by 165 respondents (representing a 20% response rate). At the end of the questionnaire, respondents were asked to indicate whether they would be willing to engage in a follow-up telephone interview. Ten of those who indicated their willingness to be interviewed were contacted, and all agreed to the interview. The sample of 10 was selected according to demographic criteria expected to facilitate as much variation in views of academic freedom as possible (within the parameters of being social scientists in Australian universities). Respondents were selected from varied disciplines within the social sciences, with varying levels of experience as an academic, on varying classifications and types of appointment and engaged in different degrees of entrepreneurial activity and types of research. They were also selected to ensure a range of institutional types, primarily based on the age, disciplinary foci and research-intensive nature of the universities in which respondents were located. The interviews typically lasted for 30 min and were conducted by two interviewers, the author and a research aide. Interviews were semi-structured and focused primarily on participants’ experiences and understandings of academic freedom, initially in the context of commercialisation. They were asked what academic freedom meant to them personally, and to provide a personal example of when their academic freedom had been hindered and also when it had been exercised. Initial responses to these questions were then explored in some depth, in line with the semi-structured nature of the interview. Subsidiary questions, that is, those explored in less depth, included asking participants what they saw as their accountability and


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responsibilities within the context of academic freedom, how they understood the interplay between individual, collegial and institutional freedoms, and how they would distinguish a minor from a major deterioration in academic freedom. These more targeted, subsidiary questions were asked towards the end of the interview, after participants’ responses to the more open-ended questions on academic freedom had been fully explored. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. The interviews were then categorised according to the five different ways of understanding academic freedom that emerged from the earlier study, but with the three least sophisticated categories (Categories 1–3) combined into one group, as they all focus on a ‘freedom from’ interpretation. This resulted in three sets of interviews, varyingly focused on academic freedom as ‘freedom from’, ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom with responsibility’.

VIGNETTES One illustrative interview from each of the three sets is represented below as a case study vignette, leading to three vignettes in total. The first vignette illustrates someone experiencing the most complex understanding of academic freedom that emerged from the interviews, as ‘freedom with responsibility’ to direct academic activities towards the social good. This is followed by an illustration of a less complex understanding of academic freedom, as ‘freedom to’ engage in appropriate academic activities, then an illustration of the least complex understanding, as ‘freedom from’ interference in academic activities. Given the reducing complexity of the understandings represented by the three vignettes, it is important to notice what is not said, as well as what is said in each interview, remembering that each interviewee was explicitly asked to elaborate on what they saw as their accountability and responsibilities with respect to academic freedom.

Academic Freedom as ‘Freedom with Responsibility’ to Benefit Society Susan (pseudonym – respondent 67) is a senior lecturer in Education in a university of technology. She has 17 years experience as an academic, and her current self-reported distribution of time on different academic activities is 30% on research, 40% on teaching, 10% on postgraduate supervision and 20% on community service. Over the previous four years she has received


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$10–20,000 in external funding (self-reported), 90% from private industry and 10% from government funding. Approximately 10% of her research is unfunded, in that, while conducting research is part of her academic contract, she receives no additional financial support for the costs of doing so. She is concerned to a ‘minor extent’ about the state of academic freedom in her university. Her interview is reflective of the most comprehensive view of academic freedom that emerged from the original study, expressing the need for an absence of constraints, active support and a responsibility to contribute to social improvement. Susan describes academic freedom in terms of freedom of speech, freedom to explore, and as contributing to intellectual and social capital through being an ambassador for the truth: What it means for me is freedom to explore ideas and to research in areas that I have a personal interest in. But I also believe, again it is getting back to this intellectual and social capital, the intellectual and social capital of knowledge in Australia and the world. y I believe that for most of us academic life means being able to speak out on a range of issues, to have the freedom to explore our own fields of inquiry, to feel that we can be ambassadors for the truth. And that sounds corny, but I think that is the reason why a lot of us are academics.

In addition to the emphasis on freedom of speech, i.e. freedom from interference, she places an equivalent emphasis on the purpose of this freedom of speech: This kind of knowledge is going to advance society. It’s why I am in it y I think what I am trying to emphasise is that I honestly believe what most academic freedom is about is expressing knowledge, skills and understanding that many people in society either feel unable to be able to express those things or don’t have the skills to express them, or they in fact need us to express those things so that then ideas can grow. y The fact that we engage in debate at conferences and journals, even increasingly in the media, all act to the public good from my point of view.

This view of the purpose of academic research and academic freedom is reflected in her own research projects: This year I ran a trial [community program for disadvantaged youths] y Now we see that kind of research as and that kind of project as adding to the social, moral and intellectual capital of society.

This research also illustrates why Susan feels that a simple lack of interference is not enough to enable academic freedom, and active support is


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required: There is no money in it [the trial community program] for the university. It’s probably going to cost them money. y [Academics are] people who’ve been advancing society, adding to it. And they have the freedom to do this because y what academic freedom I think has mainly been about has been universities have given us time and freedom to explore ideas, to do pure and applied research, to express ourselves, to meet, to go to conferences.

From Susan’s perspective, such loss of active support, even without any interference in academics’ freedom of speech, has consequences for academics’ freedom to research and ability to contribute to society: There’s one enormous thing that we are letting go of, or being made to let go of, and that is time. y I used to have time to explore ideas fully and deeply and richly, meaning in depth and in breadth. y In the past, up until probably 5 to 6 years ago I seemed to have reading time each week. I would actually put aside Friday afternoons and nights in bed and things like that. I’d read through them [journals], develop ideas, often do an article in response. y That time is completely gone, I mean the time when there was a collegial environment of enquiry and discussions and argument is just fast disappearing.

The understanding of academic freedom illustrated by Susan emphasises both freedom and responsibility as essential components of academic freedom. A key part of academic freedom is seen as the search for knowledge or ‘truth’ through academic research and enquiry, but it is a search with a purpose, to benefit society. The freedoms granted to academics are seen as fulfiling a larger societal purpose, carrying with them a responsibility for the research and enquiry conducted by academics to be in the service of improving society. Thus, academic freedom is seen to be of direct benefit to the society in which academics are located. Simple lack of interference in academic activities is not seen as adequate to maintain academic freedom. The academic research and intellectual enquiry that justifies academic freedom requires both financial support to maintain and an active valuing of the time that academics put into these activities. Lack of funding and lack of time can be equal barriers to engaging in such research and enquiry, in addition to interference. Hence, active support for academic freedom by the academics’ society and institution is required to maintain academic freedom and the societal benefits it enables. Academic Freedom as ‘Freedom to’ Engage in Appropriate Academic Activities Andrew (pseudonym – respondent 9) is a senior lecturer and has previously been an associate Dean in economics/commerce in a research-intensive


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university. He has over 20 years experience as an academic, and his current, self-reported distribution of time on different academic activities is 25% on research, 40% on teaching, 5% on postgraduate supervision, 20% on administration and 10% on community service. Over the previous four years he has received $50–100,000 in external funding (self-reported), all from competitive university funding sources. None of his research is unfunded. He is concerned to a ‘minor extent’ about the state of academic freedom in his university. As with Susan, Andrew focuses on academic freedom as enabling knowledge-seeking and truth-telling. However, in contrast to Susan, the underlying purpose for Andrew of the research and enquiry enabled by academic freedom is not to benefit society, but to satisfy his individual curiosity and desire to seek and tell truth. While Andrew sees academic freedom as appropriately constrained by the larger institutional and societal context in which academics are located, it is not inherently intended for their benefit, but for the benefit of academics themselves: I definitely don’t think it [academic freedom] means do whatever you want, when you want, however you want. I think it means that academics should be able to pursue whatever research they wish within the bounds of the law y In other words I think that academic freedom is largely y to prevent outright political interference. In other words it should be the opportunity for you to tell the truth as you see it. Beyond that, you know, we are employees, we have supervisors, we have obligations to our students and to the wider community. I don’t think academic freedom means do whatever you want.

The concept of academic freedom is presented primarily as an inherent condition or benefit of the academic job rather than as a responsibility to society. From this perspective, reductions in academic freedom primarily represent a reduction in working conditions and, thus, in job satisfaction, in a similar way to reductions in salary or other employment conditions. I became an academic because I was interested in finding things out and speaking my mind about those things. It’s very sort of central to why I do what I do. If I couldn’t do that I would look for a job that actually paid me a real income y. I mean individual autonomy is basic. I think there is no point being an academic if you don’t have the autonomy to do your research in a way that you believe to be fit and to teach your subject in a way that you believe to be suitable. Again, within the broadly, you know very broadly understood parameters of your field.

In line with his more limited perspective on academic freedom, Andrew sees the responsibilities associated with academic freedom solely in terms of not abusing those freedoms rather than as an active responsibility to serve


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society: What are my responsibilities? Let me see? Well it might be best to put them in a stakeholder context y I think I owe it to my colleagues to carry my weight within the Department in all areas, that is, teaching, research as well as administration. And I think that I have a responsibility to the University, you know, to undertake my core duties, you know, in a diligent and conscientious fashion. Again, I don’t think that academic freedom means do what I want, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean close up the shutters and take a very long vacation.

As with Susan, Andrew emphasises the need for active support, in addition to lack of interference, in order to maintain academic freedom. Interviewer: y a number of academics in the questionnaire emphasised individual autonomy as opposed to institutional or collegial autonomy. y frankly that is actually bad sociology. That simply fails to recognise that we are social beings, we live within institutionalised frameworks. Pull out the institutionalised supports and you can’t possibly sustain individual autonomy.

On the surface, Andrew’s view of academic freedom looks similar to Susan’s. They both emphasise academic freedom as important to the pursuit of ‘truth’; and they both see this pursuit as part of what attracts academics to academia, and part of what makes being an academic worthwhile. Consequently, they both see academic freedom as being essential for academics to be able to enjoy their work. Constraints on academic freedom are seen as including not just interference or restrictions on academics’ self-direction in research and publication, but the withdrawal of broader supports. However, there is an underlying difference in their perception of the basic purposes of academic freedom. For Andrew, academic freedom is positioned as benefiting the individual academic. He does not focus on potential benefits to society in the way that Susan does. While Andrew talks about academic responsibility, he uses these words in a different way to Susan. His focus on responsibility relates to not abusing the system, rather than to an obligation to act for the social good. Andrew indicates that academic freedom is so important to him that he is willing to endure other unsatisfactory employment conditions, such as poor salary, as long as his academic freedom is maintained. However, in line with his focus on the individual benefits of academic freedom, Andrew implies that the loss of academic freedom may be compensated for by an improvement in other working conditions. In this sense, he positions academic freedom, in a way that Susan does not, as equivalent to an employment condition, such as salary, that may be used to make academic employment more or less attractive to academics, and to compensate for other poor employment conditions.


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Academic Freedom as ‘Freedom from’ Interference in Academic Activities Stephen (pseudonym – respondent 125) is a lecturer in economics/commerce in a new university. He has over 20 years experience as an academic, and his current distribution of time on different academic activities is 10% on research, 25% on teaching, 15% on postgraduate supervision and 50% on journal editing (self-reported). All of his research is unfunded. He is concerned to a ‘minor extent’ about the state of academic freedom in his university. As with Andrew, Stephen focuses on academic freedom as enabling freedom for individual academics: I think I said [on the questionnaire] that a part of academic freedom for me was being able to choose the nature of the research ideas and the way I went about that research. But I think I also said that academic freedom did not mean that I have the right to decline to do research.

While Stephen sees societal benefits from academic freedom as a possibility, this is really a side-benefit rather than the primary purpose of academic freedom, which is focused on the individual academic: Well, I suppose that most advances in knowledge come from curious people following their interest and any constraint on an inquiring mind is a big disincentive to people to follow their curiosity. It is pretty stupid really to direct people to exercise their curiosity in a direction that some other person or group thinks appropriate rather than to follow their own natural sense. It just violates every tenet about the free act of individuals giving life to progress of all sorts.

As with Andrew, Stephen sees any responsibilities associated with academic freedom primarily in terms of not abusing the system rather than in terms of providing a service or actively contributing to society: I see myself having a responsibility to take my research seriously, to take my teaching seriously. That comes back to my suggestion that I don’t have the option of saying I won’t do any research. I think that if my peers say that I am publishing a reasonable amount of papers and of sound quality, I consider I am meeting my responsibility on the research side.

However, unlike Andrew, there is not the same appreciation by Stephen of the need for active support and valuing of academic freedom in order to maintain academic freedom. Potential external impacts on academic freedom are seen in more simplistic, linear terms: As I see it, if the government removes some of my institution’s autonomy to do its own thing then that is going to impact on me because our senior managers will feel they have


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to direct us individual academics more than when the government gave the institution freer reign.

Like Andrew, Stephen focuses on academic freedom as being for the benefit of individual academics. This does not preclude societal benefits, but these are seen as potential side-benefits, not as part of the core purpose of academic freedom. Note that neither Andrew nor Stephen express disagreement with the idea of academic freedom as inherently for social improvement, they simply do not address the issue. It appears to be outside their way of thinking about academic freedom. The potential for social improvement, as such, is not outside their way of thinking, just the idea that this might be an inherent component of academic freedom rather than an indirect outcome. This is in contrast to Susan’s perspective. While Susan shares Andrew’s and Stephen’s emphasis on academic freedom as of benefit to academics themselves, she simultaneously emphasises broader benefits to society, and positions this as being more important than the benefits to individual academics. Stephen shares Susan’s and Andrew’s focus on academic freedom as the search for knowledge through academic research and enquiry. However, for Andrew and Stephen, this is a search that is satisfying in its own right, without the need for the societal benefits that Susan emphasises. Consequently, the academic role is seen as one which will appeal to individuals with a keen curiosity for discovering knowledge, but not necessarily with a desire to serve.

DISCUSSION These vignettes illustrate different understandings of academic freedom among social science academics. However, let me remind the reader at this point that the argument for the validity of these different understandings does not come from the data presented in this chapter, but from an earlier survey of 165 social science academics in Australia. The aim of this chapter is not to justify the categorisation of understandings – this was done in the previous paper – but to add depth and meaning to the original categorisation, through the development of case study vignettes to illustrate how individuals may experience these different ways of understanding academic freedom.


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Clarifying these differences in understandings is important because such differences are typically implicit and unacknowledged. Particularly in public debate, people often assume that when they are using the term, academic freedom, they are referring to the same concept. Furthermore, the degree of overlap in the different understandings illustrated by Susan, Andrew and Stephen can act to mask the significant differences, helping to support the illusion of shared understandings. For instance, the shared focus on academic freedom as the right of academics to research, publish and speak out on areas of expertise without constraint or interference can hide what is not shared – the need for active support in addition to the absence of constraints, and the responsibility of academics to contribute to social improvement. These are not subtle differences, they are substantial. We can see from the vignettes that these different understandings of the nature of academic freedom are inherently related to the perceived purpose of academic freedom – as a right of academics for their personal satisfaction and enjoyment or as a responsibility of academics for the benefit of society, a responsibility which carries associated rights and enjoyments. We can also see why the issue of academic freedom affects academics so deeply. The vignettes clearly illustrate the ways in which academics’ understandings of academic freedom are integrally related to their sense of academic identity, their reasons for being an academic and their perceptions of the underlying purposes of academia and academic work. At the same time as highlighting the substantial differences between different ways of understanding academic freedom, I want to highlight the overlapping and inclusive nature of the different understandings. This inclusivity means that the different understandings represent a gradation from more limited to more complex ways of experiencing academic freedom. That is, while Andrew shows awareness of the same aspects of academic freedom as Stephen, he also shows awareness of an additional aspect, the need for active external support (as well as an absence of constraints and interference) in order to maintain academic freedom. Similarly, while Susan shows awareness of the same aspects of academic freedom as Andrew, she simultaneously highlights the underlying purpose of individual academic freedom as enabling academics to contribute to the social good, and the associated obligation of academics to ensure this contribution. In this way, the understanding of academic freedom illustrated by Susan’s vignette is more complex than, but inclusive of, the way of understanding illustrated by Andrew’s vignette. The same is true of the way of understanding academic freedom illustrated by Andrew’s vignette, with respect to Stephen’s vignette.

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These different understandings of academic freedom are not likely to be limited to academics alone, but are likely to be reflected in a similar variation in views among external stakeholders. In this way, these differences provide insight into current conflicts in public debates about the appropriateness of academic freedom in universities. For instance, external stakeholders who view academic freedom from a more complex perspective, as being primarily about service to benefit society, would be more likely to regard it as a valuable component of academic work than would external stakeholders who view it from a less complex perspective, as being primarily about job satisfaction and research enjoyment for academics. Furthermore, those experiencing a less complex understanding are likely to regard academic freedom as being upheld as long as there is no active interference in academic research and publications. In contrast, those experiencing a more complex understanding are likely to regard reductions in active support for freely chosen research as reducing academic freedom, even while direct interference is avoided (Marginson’s chapter in this book becomes very relevant here). Illustrating this, it is common in public debate for the increasing commercialisation and external funding of research to be referred to as threatening academic freedom, because they constrain academics’ potential topics of research. However, it is far less common for the rising workloads and accountability requirements of academics to be mentioned as threatening academic freedom, because they reduce support for academic freedom. They are more likely to be mentioned in the context of decreasing work satisfaction for academics, not decreasing academic freedom. Yet reducing support for unconstrained research represents the area of perhaps greatest reduction in academic freedom in recent times. The literature on academic work is replete with data indicating increasing academic workloads (e.g., Altbach, 1996; McInnis, 2000; Harman, 2005), and Kayrooz et al. (2001) show that many more social science academics are experiencing reductions in academic freedom through indirect constraints associated with loss of time and loss of financial support for research than through direct constraints on their research. Added to this is the rise in short-term contract appointments and academic job insecurity (A˚kerlind, 2005b; Tytherleigh, Webb, Cooper, & Ricketts, 2005) with associated limitations on research options. As stated above, the different assumptions about what constitutes academic freedom are typically implicit, and may not even be noticed by all parties in a debate. Furthermore, the impact of any argument is dependent


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upon the perspective of the hearer, and all arguments are likely to be (re)interpreted within the framework of the hearer’s existing understanding. In other words, stakeholders may not even notice significant differences between the arguments being presented if they are considering them from a more limited understanding of the nature of academic freedom. This raises the issue of the potential value of expanding stakeholder understandings of what academic freedom can mean. From a phenomenographic perspective, expansion in understanding is most likely to occur under conditions that favour individuals becoming aware of variation in an aspect of a phenomenon, in this case academic freedom, that they had not previously been aware of (Marton & Booth, 1997; Bowden & Marton, 1998; Marton & Tsui, 2004). This chapter represents one such attempt. Further, the nested hierarchy of increasingly complex ways of understanding academic freedom presented here provides a guideline for where to concentrate our energies in extending stakeholder understandings. For instance, a focus on non-interference in academic activities runs through each way of understanding academic freedom presented here. Consequently, there is no value in focusing on this aspect of academic freedom in any attempt to extend others’ understanding of the concept. On the other hand, the idea of active support as a requirement for academic freedom, and of an obligation on academics to use their freedom for social improvement is not uniformly shared. Consequently, these are more fruitful areas for extending stakeholder awareness. However, attempts to extend awareness of the role of academics’ social responsibility, for instance, cannot simply consist of pointing to examples of social benefits arising from academic freedom, as these can be interpreted as merely an unreliable side-benefit, not an inherent component of such freedom – as illustrated by Andrew and Stephen. A more radical approach might be to modify the term ‘academic freedom’. The term is limiting in itself as a way of representing the complex nature of academic freedom, tending as it does to focus attention on the freedom-related aspects of the concept. So, one direction for future action might be to work towards replacing the term ‘academic freedom’ with ‘academic responsibility’, which would make it easier to draw people’s attention to the social service-related aspects of academic freedom, at least among social scientists. The power of this argument may be illustrated by imagining how much easier it seems to argue that society, government or institutions should no longer support ‘academic freedom’ in universities than it is to argue that they should no longer support ‘academic responsibility’ in universities.


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The data on which this chapter is based were originally collected as part of a larger study investigating ‘Academic Freedom and Commercialisation in Australian Universities’ funded by the Australia Institute, Canberra, ACT. I would like to thank Paul Preston, who worked with me in conducting the interviews.

REFERENCES A˚kerlind, G. S. (2005a). Variation and commonality in phenomenographic research methods. Higher Education Research and Development, 24, 321–334. A˚kerlind, G. S. (2005b). Postdoctoral researchers: Roles, functions and career prospects. Higher Education Research and Development, 24, 21–40. A˚kerlind, G. S., & Kayrooz, C. (2003). Understanding academic freedom: The views of social scientists. Higher Education Research and Development, 22, 327–344. Altbach, P. (1996). The international academic profession. New Jersey: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Bowden, J., & Marton, F. (1998). The university of learning. London: Kogan Page. Harman, G. (2005). Australian social scientists and transition to a more commercial university environment. Higher Education Research and Development, 24, 79–94. Hawkesworth, M. (1988). Human rights and academic freedom. In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility (pp. 17–30). Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press. Kaplan, C., & Schrecker, E. (Eds) (1983). Regulating the intellectuals: Perspectives on academic freedom in the 1980s. New York: Praeger. Kayrooz, C., Kinnear, P., & Preston, P. (2001). Academic freedom and commercialisation in Australian universities: A study of social scientists. Australia Institute Discussion Paper no. 37. Australia Institute, Canberra. Marton, F. (1981). Phenomenography – describing conceptions of the world around us. Instructional Science, 10, 177–200. Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Marton, F., & Tsui, A. (2004). Classroom discourse and the space of learning. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. McInnis, C. (2000). The work roles of academics in Australian universities. Canberra, Australia: Evaluations and Investigations Programme, Higher Education Division, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs. O’Hear, A. (1988). Academic freedom and the university. In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility (pp. 6–16). Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1988). So what is academic freedom? In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility (pp. 114–132). Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press. Tytherleigh, M. Y., Webb, C., Cooper, L., & Ricketts, C. (2005). Occupational stress in UK higher education institutions: A comparative study of all staff categories. Higher Education Research and Development, 24, 41–62. Worgul, G. S. (Ed.) (1992). Issues in academic freedom. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

ACADEMIC AUTONOMY AND RESEARCH DECISION-MAKING: THE RESEARCHER’S VIEW Angela Brew INTRODUCTION The freedom to choose research topics and approaches lies at the heart of questions about academic freedom and autonomy (Russell, 1993). When academics are making decisions about research, they have choices about how they act, choices about how they communicate research and choices about how they relate to the processes of research. In order to elucidate the kinds of autonomy exercised by academics in 21st century research, my concern is to explore how an academic might negotiate their way through different choices. There are personal, political, historical, cultural, financial and institutional factors that influence the choice of research area and methodology. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate the ways in which current understandings of the nature of research, and present-day institutional and national research requirements and agendas, impact upon researchers’ autonomy. Contemporary dilemmas about who has the authority or the right to decide on the appropriateness of particular topics and approaches, and who decides what kinds of knowledge are appropriate, as well as critical


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questioning of the nature of research truth and what kinds of methods are deemed worthy of academic credibility, all create uncertainties for the researcher. I want to explore the effects of such issues on the autonomy in decisionmaking of academics as they begin to develop an area of research. I shall argue that the choices researchers are required to make are complex and multifaceted. There are many confusions and paradoxes to be negotiated, and no simple ways forward for the individual. We shall see how perceptions of the nature of research and what the researcher is trying to do when pursuing it, together with ideas that they have about what is acceptable to the university in which they operate, and to the research community of which they are a part, dictate the boundaries and constraints of research decision-making. I shall suggest that it is not that academics have lost their autonomy, but that there are personal and intellectual consequences in choosing or not choosing to grasp it.

DECIDING HOW TO ACT In today’s university context, perhaps the most obvious action to occur to a middle career academic would be to apply for an externally funded competitive research grant. In Australia, within an educational context, this would mean applying for an Australian Research Council (ARC) or a National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) grant. These research councils rely on the expert opinion of senior researchers to judge the worth of applications, but ultimately decisions about what to fund rest with the minister, who has been known to refuse to fund projects in areas they considered unsuitable (see the chapter by Marginson, where details of one such notorious event are discussed). Such grants have about a 22% success rate. So, if the application were successful, this would certainly progress the researcher’s career. It would give them kudos within their university and within the Australian context. It would also provide funding to carry out some empirical work. To decide to apply for a competitive ARC grant is to commit to defining a ‘project’. Moreover it has to be a project with a defined life span (two to three years is normal). It has to have a discovery element (whatever that may mean), and it has to be possible to define research outcomes in advance of doing the research. It also has to contribute to the Australian economy in some way, and the researcher has to be able to describe it in terms that will appeal to a general educational audience; not just an audience of their

Academic Autonomy and Research Decision-Making

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colleagues who are likely to know the subject. The application has to include a summary that will be capable of being understood, not just by academics but also by bureaucrats. In other words, researchers are buying into a whole culture of ideas about what research is, and how to define it. This way of doing research has come about through government intervention in defining research agendas. This does not only exist in Australia, but is widespread. It arises from a context in favour of countability and accountability and where research has become a commodity. In Chapter 4, Simon Marginson locates such strategies within the neo-liberal tradition. Within Australia, such views exist within what has been termed an economic rationalist argument. My concern here, however, is not with the theoretical origins of social actions, but rather with the ways in which they manifest themselves to researchers in making choices about research. There is no doubt that current research frameworks present restricted views of the nature of research. While research refers variously to activities with an investigative component, it may also, and particularly in some disciplinary areas, include consultancy, performances, creative works, exhibitions, industrial and professional secondments and clinical practice. Defining projects seems to suit some disciplinary areas better than others. Indeed, most areas of investigation are complex and multifaceted, and do not lend themselves to being cut off from the context of ideas that generated them. Clearly defined objectives within clearly bounded ‘projects’ are not only viewed as ‘marketable’, but they appear to be a way of controlling an uncontrollable system. Government control of research agendas through research councils with government appointed directors, through mechanisms for assessing research quality and quantity, through defining priority areas for research, backed by output-driven funding regimes often considered punitive, skews decision-making in research and poses particular challenges for certain kinds of research that do not easily lend themselves to such measures. Examples of such are research that involves research participants in decision-making, such as participatory action research or collaborative enquiry; social scientific or education research that uses new methodologies such as autoethnography; and qualitative interdisciplinary research. The question for each academic is, how far are they willing or able to engage in an agenda which so insidiously affects the nature of their research? That funding is driven by this model squeezes researchers’ choices about what research to do in favour of particular views of research. It is as if governments are attempting to grow out imperfections in the research process, like a farmer who grows out imperfections in seeds, so that a larger number germinate and a higher yield can be expected. For example,

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by employing the competing academic researcher’s ‘track record’ in research as a significant factor influencing decisions concerning funding, the Australian government funding councils can minimise the effects of ‘errant’ decision-making. Of such a situation Becher says: A market garden is successful in so far as it cultivates a variety of produce to meet its clients’ disparate needs. To drive a bulldozer through it in the interests of greater efficiency and higher productivity makes sense only if one wishes to transform it into a cornfield. Corn grows easily, but too assiduous a concentration of producing it will – as we now know to our cost – create a massive and useless surplus of one particular commodity, and a corresponding scarcity of those whose cultivation, though beneficial in its own right, happens to be more demanding, more labour-intensive and generally less easy to govern. (Becher, 1989, p. 166)

Such scenarios have turned many academics away from thinking about what they would really like to know about, or even which are the most important questions to research. Fulfiling external accountability requirements has shifted the focus of research away from thinking about the topics and issues that need to be explored in the field, to thinking about how the researcher, and their institution, might get some research credit or funding, or how they can work effectively with others who may have ideas about the research and money to back their wishes. For, with the high teaching workloads associated with an inadequately funded mass higher education, unfunded research projects are not only difficult to complete, but they do not attract the prestige of funded ones. It is a context where each faculty has to define their areas of research strength. There is anecdotal evidence that in some universities there are now topics that individuals are not permitted to research. This is having an unfortunate effect, for example, on the pursuit of pedagogical research, or what has become known as the scholarship of teaching and learning (see, e.g., Hutchings & Shulman, 1999; Kreber & Cranton, 2000; Trigwell, Martin, Benjamin, & Prosser, 2000), particularly in research-intensive environments. In the UK, for example, there have been ongoing but only moderately successful attempts by interested groups and academics to encourage such research to be included within national research assessment. A similar situation is developing in Australia, where there is considerable evidence that academics who are engaged in pedagogical research are actively being discouraged from carrying out such research on the grounds that it is not going to count in the proposed Research Quality Framework. Whether this is problematic will depend in part upon the academic’s ideas about the nature of research and what it is focused on. In a study of how academic researchers experienced and understood research (Brew, 2001b),


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one of the dimensions of variation in views that was identified was that some researchers foreground external products when they talk about research, while others focus on the internal workings of research. Engaging in research is perceived by those with an external focus as primarily to produce an outcome, for example, a publication, a grant proposal, a new drug or a robotic arm. So, for example, for some researchers research is focused externally on a kind of social marketplace where there is a lot of interaction between people, and where the exchange of products (research papers, grant applications, reputations, etc.) takes place. I call this a trading view of research. In another view where research is focused on external products, the process is viewed as synthesising a number of separate elements (tools, techniques, experiments, readings, etc.) to solve problems, to answer or to open up questions or to create an object. I call this the domino view (see Brew, 2001b for a fuller description). I have previously argued that the trading view gives expression to elements which are consistent with the accountability requirements of the economic rationalist view of research (Brew, 2001a). There are other elements in this view that are not part of the economic view, such as the importance of the social networks through which researchers operate, but these are characteristic of the generation of knowledge within what Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001, p. 144) call particular ‘transaction spaces’, which exist when academics, government officials, politicians and other experts in society come together to explore an idea. A new concept or way of seeing things may arise from discussions and negotiations that take place in such contexts, and these lead to the development of research programmes. There is thus little conflict for researchers with this perception in pursuing economic rationalist agendas, for this view foregrounds the process of publishing clearly bounded projects, and this is what governments and universities now value. However, for other researchers the primary focus of attention is internal processes of understanding: making sense of a new phenomenon, some new data or some new or different experimental results. So, for example, what I call the layer view describes a view of research in which the researcher focuses on the internal processes of discovering, uncovering or creating underlying meanings from data. In what I call the journey view, research is again positioned as looking inward, but to the ideas of the person. Research is considered as if it were a personal journey of discovery that could, and frequently does, lead to personal transformation (see Table 1). That study was conducted with researchers who had received grant funding through clearly delineated and defined projects. These different

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Table 1.

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Dimensions of Different Conceptions of Research (from Brew, 2001b, p. 280).

Domino conception

Layer conception

Trading conception

Journey conception

What is in the Foreground

Research is Interpreted as

Sets (lists) of atomistic things: techniques, problems, etc. These separate elements are viewed as linking together in a linear fashion Data containing ideas together with (linked to) hidden meanings Products, endpoints, publications, grants and social networks. These are linked together in relationships of personal recognition and reward Personal existential issues and dilemmas. They are linked through an awareness of the career of the researcher and viewed as having been explored for a long time

A process of synthesising separate elements so that problems are solved, questions answered or opened up A process of discovering, uncovering or creating underlying meanings A kind of social marketplace where the exchange of products takes place

A personal journey of discovery, possibly leading to transformation

orientations do not define the rate or extent to which individual academics publish their work, nor do they readily align with disciplinary differences. However, where researchers foreground personal transformation as important elements of their views of research, or where the uncovering of meaning is the main raison d’eˆtre, there may be a conflict in publishing such work before it is perhaps ready. So the actions a researcher takes may conflict with a view focused on end points and outputs. Some work takes a long time to come to fruition. I recently heard of a colleague who had spent 17 years working on a key text in the subject. Such an academic would not be defined as research active by any university’s criteria, yet the work resulted in a definitive book on the subject. Moreover, it is notable that the journey view of research, where the researcher is the focus of awareness, is entirely absent from research policy. However, how a researcher views research is not the only influence on how they act. Also important are relationships of power and patronage. We can understand why people choose to follow the economic rationalist view of research in terms of Bourdieu’s notion of the academic ‘habitus’, by


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which he refers to the distinctions we make about what is appropriate and what is to be valued in the academic world. In discussing the way in which an academic career proceeds, Bourdieu (1988, pp. 88–89) argues that the academic is required to wait until those with academic power permit them to go on to the next stage. This exercise of patronage means that those without the power are required to engage in ‘submissive waiting’. Researchers will follow a particular way of doing things if they are dependent upon the patronage of those with power who are likely to make decisions about them and about their future progress. Power operates to define the nature of research and what is valued. Academic autonomy is always circumscribed by power relationships, because power always dictates how the academy operates. Nowotny et al. (2001) argue that individual creativity is being undermined by the growth of crossdisciplinary collaborative projects, which are directed and evaluated not by scientific peers but by experts chosen by governments or research councils. Unfortunately, in a situation where academics are selling their services, profits benefit discrete sections of academia, namely, those that are closely allied to the powerful outside groups (Slaughter, 1993). Such a view of the capacity of powerful groups to exploit research opportunities paints a picture of academics as relatively powerless, whose only option is to grin and bear it, and give up traditional notions of critique and academic autonomy. But, of course, it is not like that. This scenario merely presents a set of dilemmas for each academic. There is a good deal of evidence that academic life has managed over many decades, with or without intervention from outside the academy, to balance the dual requirements of pragmatic responses to societal needs on the one hand with changing notions of knowledge and truth on the other. There are classic statements, usually autobiographical, of the triumphs and trials of the individual academic researcher; the self-advertising account of Arnold Toynbee in his book-lined study, James Watson’s Double Helix saga (1968), C P Snow’s The Search (1958). But all are cast within the traditional frame of academic working in which deference to Academic Plans, performance measurement and cost centres had no place. Researchers were admitted to the academic freehold in order to move to their own rhythms. (Kogan & Henkel, 1992, p. 112)

A university system that permits some of the most able people within society to pursue ideas for their own sake has resulted in profound benefits for society in terms of the generation of knowledge through research and through teaching: for example, the discovery of plate tectonics which has given useful knowledge of earthquakes and volcanoes, the development of the World Wide Web, the discovery of the importance of investment in early

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childhood education and so on. There is evidence that the exercise of the pursuit of truth in a multitude of domains of knowledge by academics, researching issues which interest them personally, is in many cases allied with extreme altruism. The quest for academic truth is an altruistic pursuit in that it has an underlying intention to benefit society, but ironically it has more often than not been attained through the self-interested study by individuals and groups who identify an area that requires investigation (Kogan & Henkel, 1992). Many have failed to understand this, including policy-makers and politicians. In balancing the requirements of truth and pragmatism, and self-interest and altruism, academic autonomy in ways of working sits alongside academic responsibility; a point which is discussed more fully in Gerlese S. A˚kerlind’s chapter. Kennedy (1997) argues that there has been a great deal of concern in society about the exercise of academic autonomy, but that academic duty has not been taken into account. This has led, he suggests, to ‘the suspicion that there is simply too much freedom and too little direction’ (p. 3). He suggests that there is a kind of dissonance between, on the one hand, the acceptance of the need for freedom in the way that academics work, and, on the other, a confusion about what the academic owes to society. Research contributes greatly to society, but there appears to be a suspicion about the way in which academics work. Having the capacity to define for oneself how and when one will work appears to be translated by people with no connection with universities into a sense that the academic does not work; witnessed, for example, in the number of times academics are asked if they are ‘on holiday’ when the students have vacations (see, e.g., Lodge, 1988). What makes this so problematic now is that in an era of mass higher education (see, e.g., Scott, 1995), time has become so precious and accountability requirements mean that academics have to give an account of their time. Many universities have taken away the opportunity for academics to take sabbaticals, or they require study leave to be planned in terms of projects with predetermined outcomes and subsequent reports of achievements. Research grants are needed for funding because funding is needed to provide time; time which academics with smaller teaching loads, fewer students and accountability requirements might have had in earlier eras. In many disciplines, funding is also needed to pay for costly equipment, which was not available in former times. Further, accountability requirements are often implemented in a punitive way with a disregard for the nature of the academic profession and the ways in which academics work: for example, through the introduction of workload formulas that require every hour to be accounted for.


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DEFINING KNOWLEDGE Nowotny et al. (2001) argue that not only are there so many more ‘actors’ or forces (political, social, economic) having a say in how research should be organised and conducted, but greater contextualisation within society is affecting ideas about what constitutes objective knowledge and the ways in which the reliability of research knowledge is assessed. Indeed, the very definition of research is affected by such things as the increasing number of contexts in which it is carried out, the proliferation of demands for knowledge in specific contexts, and the mix of practices, methods and beliefs, which now constitute it. Within this context, Nowotny et al. (2001) argue, the rules of engagement are fuzzy and being made up as we go along. ‘There is a high degree of uncertainty, there is no clear-cut direction but many competing ideas, theories and methods, and no one is in overall charge’ (p. 115). The economic rationalist view of research advocated by government research assessment and accountability requirements implies views of the nature of knowledge, and how knowledge is constructed, that assume that knowledge can be truncated, for example, by defining projects with clearly set out objectives. There is a difference between research carried out to fulfil such requirements, and coming to know through a more organic process of enquiry, which does not presume the outcomes. Economic rationalist ideas rest on a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that do not readily fit notions of research as a creative, organic process with a life of its own. Sometimes research surprises us, and it is useful to be able to explore an avenue that was not anticipated; not to wait for the definition of a ‘project’ or the firming up of an idea for the next research grant, but spontaneously investigating something that seems worth investigating in and for itself. Kogan and Henkel (1992) suggest that in the social sciences the danger is that, in an exercise of power, practitioners and policy-makers may then apply their own criteria to assess research, with the danger that different criteria for ‘truth’ may be applied. There are thus particular dilemmas faced by a researcher with a predisposition to carry out what has become known as ‘blue skies’ research and there are disjunctions between economic performative views of research and ideas which arise from changing understandings of the nature of knowledge. In the context of performativity, ‘blue skies’ is often presented as almost equivalent to ‘off with the fairies’: i.e. hopelessly idealistic. In scientific areas it is becoming almost impossible to engage in such research because of the high cost of scientific equipment, but this sense of idealism tends to be

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associated with humanities or social scientific research. It might mean exploring some ideas through writing, or pursuing the ideas of some theorist, not necessarily carrying out empirical work. What is most worrying perhaps is that the economic rationalist view of research presents a view which makes ‘blue skies’, speculative or new forms of research difficult to justify and even more difficult to publish. It is not that academics are precluded from doing such work within the current higher education context; but rather that there are personal costs in doing so. It is to risk never receiving funding and to forgo the consequent prestige associated with that. Researching something interesting to know about, following where the research leads at the time at which it leads, without the need to wait until a particular project was ended before going on to the next project, is much more organic than the research grant treadmill would allow. Exploring the background literature to research is, in the research grant view of research, supposed to have happened before the granting process starts, but of course much research is not like that. We do not always adhere to the same theoretical framework throughout a project. Something that we find out may cause us to change the way we view the original theory that drove the work in the first place. More particularly, we may come to realise that we lack a theoretical framework at an appropriate level, and that may demand that we think anew about the basis for the project in the first place.

DECIDING HOW TO COMMUNICATE Also of importance to discussions of academic autonomy is the variety of opportunities for disseminating research findings brought about by the increased interest in research by an educated public (Nowotny et al., 2001). Researchers are constantly heard on the radio, and viewed on television and in electronic and print media. So academics have a range of choices in how to communicate research, and again these are bounded by expectations and perceptions of expectations. Yet academic writing, for the purposes of peer review in scholarly journals, for the most part follows conventional impersonal conventions, where writing looks as if it were untouched by human hands (Feyerabend, 1978). The practice of preparing grant applications, for example, also demands that the researcher take on particular styles of writing. The language used has to be specific, punchy and sharp: for example, avoiding words with a soft sound such as ‘which’ and ‘findings’, and using words such as ‘that’ and


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‘results’ instead. In other words, the language has to be ‘scientific’. Government agencies and funding bodies, feed on such rules of detachment and non-involvement. This is not surprising, for the language that is used in policy contexts often comes straight from the science laboratory. For example, in a UK document on the Research Assessment Exercise (Higher Education Funding Council for England, 1999) there is note of the ‘volume’ of research, where research ‘active’ staff are ‘weighted’ to ‘determine quanta’. There is talk of research ‘cultures’ and of defining research ‘strengths’ where there are ‘concentrations’ of researchers. Research decision-making is constrained by the language that is used to describe research. The highly competitive nature of the grant applications process, shortage of research funding and restrictions in the numbers of high-level university positions means that the process of research has become extremely competitive. The intensity of this competition is heightened by the use of sporting and sometimes war-like metaphors in research policy: Australia needs to focus on its international strengths in teaching and research and build its competitiveness through strategic collaboration. The reforms to research and research training flowing from Knowledge and Innovation and Backing Australia’s Ability are acting to concentrate the public investment in research and promote critical mass in research capability. (Department of Education, Science and Training, 2002, p. 24, emphasis added)

Competition and cooperation in teams are consistent with images of battle, where combat, teamwork and camaraderie also co-exist. Argument is viewed as an integral component of research. Research writing has frequently been carried out like an academic jousting match where first you critically ‘attack’ and ‘destroy’ the opponent’s argument, before claiming ‘victory’ and ‘mapping out your territory’. Feyerabend (1978) called it the ‘civilised strangulation of the opponent’. I have heard people talk of getting ‘slaughtered’ in seminars. Lakatos and Musgrave (1970) referred to the ‘battleground’ between rival research programmes. ‘Standards’ are held up for people in a ‘field of study’ to mass behind. Indeed, feminists have drawn attention to images of rape within research discourse (see, e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Harding, 1991; Spanier, 1995). Researchers have to ‘pick themselves up’ after an ‘attack’ on their ideas, or after being ‘knocked back’ with a grant proposal or article submitted for publication. To exercise academic autonomy is to consciously choose to enter this scenario or to consciously choose to avoid it. In my study of the views of researchers referred to earlier, some researchers (those expressing a domino or layer view) presented research as if the researcher was absent from, or incidental to, their awareness. In other

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words, the researcher as a person was not a focus of attention. For other researchers (those expressing a journey or trading view) the person of the researcher, their ideas and way of being, was the main focus of attention when presenting ideas about the nature of research or talking about their research (Brew, 2001b). The person of the researcher occupies a central place in the trading and the journey views of research, but the focus in each is different. In the trading view it is the career of the researcher, their reputation and how it is growing that is the focus of attention. In the journey view, in the centre of a researcher’s awareness are the personal issues and dilemmas that perplex them, and how these concerns relate to the disciplinary issues that are the subject of their research. In the layer and domino views of research, the person of the researcher is not at all a focus of attention; the researcher’s presence is simply assumed. When researchers treat the person of the researcher as if absent from awareness, deciding to write about their research in a detached, impersonal way presents few problems. However, for those for whom the person of the researcher is an integral part of the research, this style of writing may appear artificial and pretentious. Fortunately, in many areas there is a noticeable trend towards viewing research as a participative process; a conversation where each person makes sense of the research findings for themselves. This heralds a move away from detached, impersonal writing, towards communication which takes account of the ideas of others; that recognises that different people will have different perspectives, and that these different perspectives need to be respected and listened to. Scholarly journals that allow greater freedom in writing styles are on the increase (see the journals Discourse, Qualitative Inquiry and Science Now as examples). This suggests that there is an increase in the autonomy with which an academic can choose to communicate research findings, while at the same time feeling the pressure of funding regimes and research assessment frameworks that require particular forms of expression and publication outlets which take a more conventional stance.

DECIDING HOW TO RELATE When people set out to do research they have a wide range of ideas in their heads about how they should relate to their research; what they should do and what they should avoid. These ideas dictate the directions that they believe


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they should follow. Sometimes these ideas are realistic; they correspond to specific demands, perhaps related to a person’s position in an institution, such as, for example, when they are engaged in research on a funded project with defined outcomes. However, sometimes people’s perceptions are a distortion of reality, as for example when someone thinks that using a qualitative methodology would be frowned upon by a supervisor or their peers, even though the supervisor or peers may be quite open to such an approach. In order to understand to what extent academics have freedom to choose what and how they research, it is important to identify perceived constraints and to separate these out from actual constraints. So, identifying the different voices in researchers’ heads, and recognising where these ideas come from, help in understanding the process of research decision-making. For example, some perceptions of what is and is not acceptable are functions of specific university agendas, policies or procedures. They represent the voices of the university. So, for example, a doctoral candidate may have in mind that they have to be original; that they have to do something worthwhile; and that they have to complete on time. An academic’s choice of what research to pursue may rest on a perception that they must publish in refereed journals to be ‘research active’; that they should obtain a competitive research grant. Or it may rest on the need to obtain approval from an ethics committee, and so on. These ideas relate to ideas about university regulations. They define perceptions of research directions, which may or may not align with particular university practices. A number of ideas that influence the choice and direction of research are about how to progress the research: for example, that the researcher must start with a research question or there must be a hypothesis; that the research must be systematic; and that the researcher has to know the field and position themselves in relation to that. These ideas represent the voice of supervisors, or the department or faculty in which the research is being conducted. Some of these ideas about how research should proceed reflect ideas about the nature of truth and knowledge, such as, for example: the researcher must be impartial, they must be detached and objective, that the aim of research is to find the ‘truth’, and that the researcher must use acceptable methodology. Other voices reflect those of myths in the academic community. They are the assumed voices of peers, fellow students and academics, for example, that there must be lots of references and that they must not generalise. These may be more or less true in different circumstances. In doctoral work they may be stated with little regard for their appropriateness in particular contexts.

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There is no shortage of ideas about what the researcher must and must not do, and some of these are actual and some supposed or imagined. Yet some of these ideas conflict and may crowd out the researcher’s own voice; i.e. what they would really like to do. Some of them are more appropriate in some contexts than in others. How does the researcher decide how to choose what and whom to listen to? What is negotiable and what is not? We have moved, Scott (1991) argues, from the Grand Hotel of the Enlightenment thinking into a kind of intellectual shopping mall, where notions of knowledge and truth give way to choice and the vagaries of the ‘market’. The tradition of enquiry which has been characteristic of Western thought for several centuries, and which contains a self-consistent view of the nature of reality (ontology) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology), assumptions about the logical and empirical requirements for studying it and the relationship of theories to one another, as well as ideas about the relationship of research findings to reality (Brew, 2001a, p. 53), has given way to a new focus. This is brought about by a recognition of the value of the processes of research, critical questioning of the relationship of the research to society, definition of rules for research within each research project, ethical behaviour and the nature of knowledge becoming part of research discourse within each local context: recognising that research has hitherto investigated in limited ways a limited range of phenomena and should be more open to new problems and new questions. Intellectual critiques, which have brought with them new ideas about the nature of knowledge and questioned traditional conceptions of truth, have opened up the terrain, questioning many of the assumptions that are endemic in the academic community and bringing with them a crisis of authority in who decides what is and is not appropriate (for a fuller discussion of this point see Brew, 2001a). The established researcher is likely to have a clear idea about what approaches they wish to adopt, but for the neophyte researcher, making decisions about which research directions to pursue is hidebound not only by their internal dilemmas, but also by the views and pressure put on them by those who have more academic power, authority or credibility: i.e. senior researchers. I work with junior academics who have recently joined the university, and it is not uncommon for them to be in conflict in wanting to utilise, for example, a participatory or action research methodology, but to be told by their head of department that they have to choose a more traditional approach. I do not think that this is a new situation; there has always been the capacity of experienced researchers to dictate the nature of a field, but what has changed is that the options for a wider range of methodological approaches have expanded, and junior


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academics may be uncomfortable in simply accepting the authority of their seniors. Life in the 21st century is characterised by uncertainty, ambivalence and, Barnett (2000) argues, ‘supercomplexity’. It is in this context that choosing to exercise autonomy sits. Nowotny et al. (2001) argue that powerful individuals, groups and institutions present ways through this ambivalence. However, they cannot articulate its full complexity, nor can they present the best or even the most appropriate ways forward in many contexts. Indeed, they simply add to the ambiguity; they are part of the complexity. In this scenario the individual academic or research team is forced to exercise academic autonomy, because they have to choose between a multitude of ways of thinking and acting in relating to their research, its participants, its data and the audience for its findings.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE? Ball (2000) talks about the way in which, in the face of the demands for what Lyotard (1984) calls performativity (performance directed at economic ends), academics fabricate what they do in order to ‘avoid the gaze’. They may want to do something that they deem to be worthwhile, but, as we have seen, they are in a culture that requires a succession of endpoints: publications, research grant outcomes, etc. Academics produce the goods; get the publications out, try to get a research grant in order to demonstrate that they are research active. What they are doing in research, he argues, becomes less important than what they are seen to be doing. You cannot be authentic within such a scenario. But why should academic researchers engage in inauthentic behaviour? ‘There is a sense here that academics know exactly what they are doing when they take on these agendas, but they choose to follow them. Ball suggests that what they have lost is a kind of liberty’ (Brew, 2001a, p. 111). But have they? Is the liberty lost or do academics consciously choose not to exercise it? There is a curious irony in life that so often a course of action taken by governments turns out to result in its opposite. Attempts to measure and control academic research always have to be seen in the context of the steady march of ways of knowing, which come from much more intricate and multifaceted thought. The generation of knowledge will not be controlled in the way that governments believe it will. So, for example, at the same time as we are seeing an increase in strategies put about by governments to measure research, to define research priority areas and agendas, so

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too we are seeing a proliferation of different ways of doing and communicating research. The language of war now has to be viewed alongside the language of community and participation, with an emphasis on the sharing of ideas, the idea of listening to and participating with others (rather than treating them as ‘subjects’). The language of the journey, including the interrelationship between the development of personal knowledge and academic knowledge, and knowledge of practice and of wholeness and connectedness, is arising from new ideas about how we come to know in particular contexts. There is improved respect for expertise outside the academy and a desire to build on, not to denigrate, what has been learnt before. Research is a journey of discovery and as such it has its own momentum. It is not aiming to build up a store of knowledge. It is a process, a journey. Many academics are now developing new language, new metaphors for research; ones which are more caring and peaceful. This new emphasis is not on the distance travelled but on the quality of the travelling. This draws attention to another facet of academic life that has tended to be forgotten or ignored. In investigating how academics understand the concept of scholarship, I identified the idea that scholarship is a quality of professionalism. To be scholarly is not just about the activities of academics. Rather it refers to the professionalism with which academics approach their work (Brew, 1999). There are two elements to this. The first is about possessing the technical knowledge to be able to research in a particular domain. The second is about the ethic of meticulousness and rigour associated with the way in which academic work is done. The process of peer review ensures that academics continue to be scholarly in their work in these ways. It is a self-sustaining enterprise. Attempts by those outside the academy to ensure that academics make choices which they would like them to make miss the point. Academic autonomy relies on individuals pursuing academic work in a professional manner; in a scholarly manner. This remains no matter what measures a particular government or outside body may put in place to try to direct academic work. In this chapter, I have explored decision-making in research in terms of its challenges for the exercise of academic autonomy. That new ways of thinking about knowledge, new ways of investigating, new theories and new ideas are so vibrant is a testament to the exercise of academic autonomy in the face of efforts to control the uncontrollable. It is this that gives hope for the future. Academics will no doubt continue to live and work with the paradoxes and dilemmas presented by attempts to impose agendas, secure in


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the knowledge that universities tend to live longer than either governments or particular ideologies.

REFERENCES Ball, S. (2000). Performativities and fabrications in the education economy: Towards the performative society? Australian Educational Researcher, 27(2), 1–23. Barnett, R. (2000). Realizing the university in an age of super-complexity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women’s ways of knowing: The development of self, voice and mind. New York: Basic Books. Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Brew, A. (1999). The value of scholarship. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, University of Melbourne. Brew, A. (2001a). The nature of research: Inquiry in academic contexts. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Brew, A. (2001b). Conceptions of research: A phenomenographic study. Studies in Higher Education, 26(2), 271–285. Department of Education, Science and Training. (2002). Developing national research priorities: An issues paper. Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training. Feyerabend, P. (1978). Science in a free society. London: Verso. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge: Thinking from women’s lives. Buckingham: Open University Press. Higher Education Funding Council for England. (1999). Research assessment exercise 2001: Assessment panels’ criteria and working methods. Report no. RAE 5/99. Higher Education Funding Council of England, Bristol. Hutchings, P., & Shulman, L. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change, 31(5), 10–15. Kennedy, D. (1997). Academic duty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kogan, M., & Henkel, M. (1992). Constraints on the individual researcher. In: T. G. Whiston & R. L. Geiger (Eds), Research and higher education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kreber, C., & Cranton, P. A. (2000). Exploring the scholarship of teaching. The Journal of Higher Education, 71(4), 476. Lakatos, I., & Musgrave, A. (Eds). (1970). Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Lodge, D. (1988). Nice work. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2001). Re-thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Russell, C. (1993). Academic freedom. London: Routledge. Scott, P. (1991). The postmodern challenge. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

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Scott, P. (1995). The meanings of mass higher education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Slaughter, S. (1993). Beyond basic science: Research university presidents; narratives of science policy. Science, Technology & Human Values, 18(3), 278–302. Spanier, B. B. (1995). Im/partial science: Gender ideology in molecular biology. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Trigwell, K., Martin, E., Benjamin, J., & Prosser, M. (2000). Scholarship of teaching: A model. Higher Education Research & Development, 19(2), 155–168.

SECTION 2: AUTONOMY AND THE CULTURES AND STRUCTURES OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH


FREEDOM AS CONTROL AND THE CONTROL OF FREEDOM: F. A. HAYEK AND THE ACADEMIC IMAGINATION Simon Marginson INTRODUCTION Ideas matter. Thought matters. Thought is a form of doing. Theorisation shapes our sensibilities and determines what we see with incalculable effects on our actions. When ideas are embodied in the often prosaic practices of organisation and management, they determine the personality of institutions and the condition of our lives within them. Social norms have a gritty materiality that belies the classical split between materialism and idealism. For the last two decades in universities as organisations, particularly in Anglo-American countries, the ideas that have most mattered have been neoliberal ideas, with starting points in F. A. Hayek (especially) and Milton Friedman (Marginson, 1997b, 2004).1 These neo-liberal ideas are in turn met with a now conventional critique. It is commonplace to assert that techniques of corporate management and market competition associated with neo-liberal forms of government, such as competitive bidding, commercialisation, output measures and audit, are undermining scholarly autonomy. The intention of


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the conventional critique of neo-liberalism is to preserve free spaces for academic work and for critical social projects. This intention is respected. In focusing on neo-liberal techniques of social organisation the critique talks about important transformative practices. Yet the fact must be faced that for the most part this conventional critique of neo-liberalism has failed. It has been unsuccessful in framing a counter-movement that could challenge the discursive sway of neo-liberalism in university modernisation. Why do neo-liberal practices retain a broad plausibility on and off campus, in systems of organisation that depend on consent? The answer begins by acknowledging that neo-liberal practices constitute something more than the suppression of persons or opportunities. The neo-liberal positioning of human subjects not only offers benefits to those subjects privileged by it (successful entrepreneurs, senior managers), but it provides all subjects with forms of positive action. Here the conventional critiques of neo-liberal government are overly sweeping in their diagnosis and unduly pessimistic in their prognosis. For example, it is implied that neo-liberal organisation is simply incompatible with academic freedom, as if the combined efforts of state administration and executive management are snuffing out academic autonomy in every university one by one. Of course it is not so. The problem of neo-liberalism and academic autonomy is a problem but it is more complex than that, and more hopeful. In the conventional critique of neo-liberalism academic work is imagined simply as a free space of research and scholarship, with virtues that are selfevident, being derived from and akin to those of professional autonomy itself. It would do no great good to quote selective examples of this kind of critique. The style of argument will be familiar, though the limitations might be less apparent. The conventional critique is trained on practices seen to proceed from outside of academic work. But ‘academic autonomy’ takes many forms, and in some of them the enemy is within. Neo-liberal government (Foucault calls it ‘advanced liberalism’) rests not on the negation of individual autonomy, but on its transformation and redeployment as a principal mechanism of power (Rose, 1999). Freedom is not a constant quality and an individual possession; it is a variable and relational practice. In the neo-liberal era academic freedom has not been abolished, it has been remade, and harnessed not always comfortably to building that characteristically neo-liberal institution designated as the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Clark, 1998) or the ‘enterprise university’ (Marginson & Considine, 2000). A critique that implies that there is no academic autonomy in a pure neoliberal university lacks plausibility, and thus lacks purchase on the realities it wants to change. In lacking purchase, it fails to defend what it wants to

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defend. By burying itself within its own abstract universals, the conventional critique of neo-liberalism leaves academic work to stand only as a hollow ideal. This chapter starts from the premise that to understand the effects of neoliberalism in relation to academic autonomy, we need to isolate the potential of those ideas in academic practices. The conventional critique of neoliberalism has confined itself (or has been so confined) to the ‘middle’ level of the problem; that of university government, politics and polemics, where neo-liberal techniques of organisation and the resistance to them become obvious. It has failed to address two other levels. One is the ‘lower’ level, that of the core neo-liberal ideas shaping governmental and academic practices. The other is the ‘upper’ level of academic work where neo-liberal ideas and associated techniques become manifest in the academic imagination and will, which is what matters.

CONTENTS OF THE CHAPTER The chapter pursues a more specific critique of neo-liberalism, going back to first principles so as to more effectively bring these ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ levels into view. The first section focuses on one aspect of academic freedom, in which independence is unambiguous and questions of power and control are combined: self-determination, with particular reference to the conditions facilitating the free play of a critical imagination in the social sciences that incorporates the potential for unconventional radical-critical ‘leaps’ or ‘breaks’. This take on academic self-determination2 is informed by the discussions of freedom, autonomy and alterity in Amartya Sen (1985, 1999, 2000) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1987). The second section of the chapter considers the key neo-liberal ideas that bear on academic work, by investigating the writings of the political philosopher who more than others shaped the neo-liberal project in politics and government: F. A. Hayek.3 The chapter critiques Hayek’s arguments concerning negative freedom, self-determination and the social order; his distinctive psychology, in which he imagines human subjects governed by learned impulses buried in the unconscious; and his statements about intellectual work and the social sciences. Hayekian thought turns on an antinomy between: (1) individualised freedom as control, and (2) a social order premised on the control of freedom; an antinomy that continues to determine neo-liberal government and management. The implications of higher education for Hayekian social order are as significant, or more

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significant, as the implications of higher education for Hayekian freedom. The third section discusses the application of Hayek’s ideas via the techniques of neo-liberal administration and government of higher education4; and the implications for academic self-determination and for the capacity for radical-critical breaks in the social sciences.5 From time to time Hayekian order takes absolute precedence over Hayekian freedom as control, as is manifest in acts of suppression. The concluding remarks consider the limits of the Hayekian project in higher education.

CONSTITUENTS OF ACADEMIC SELF-DETERMINATION The historical being goes beyond the simply living being because it can provide new responses to the ‘same’ situations or create new situations. (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 44)

Self-determination takes in three elements. It requires an independent agent with an identity and a will to act on her/his own behalf (agency freedom). The agent must have the capacity and power to act ( freedom as power). In the processes of academic research and scholarship, self-determination takes on a particular importance. It is integral to criticism, reconstruction of the field of knowledge and the creation of new work, especially when that work involves a radical break with existing knowledge and perspectives ( freedom as the radical-critical break). Arguably, in the absence of self-directed agency freedom the scope for criticism is significantly reduced; and the scope for the critical intellectual reconstruction of the field, and the imagining of creations that fall ‘outside the square,’ is eliminated. Each of these three constituents of academic self-determination will now be considered in turn.

Agency Freedom The first element of self-determination that will be discussed is agency freedom. In well-being, agency and freedom, Sen (1985) remarks that the perspectives of ‘well-being’ and ‘agency’ each yield distinct notions of freedom (p. 169). The notion of well-being suggests a choice-making individual, but does not necessarily imply an active or interactive individual. In contrast, the agency notion suggests an intrinsically active and proactive human will.


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Sen notes that the well-being and agency notions of freedom also have different implications for our goals and valuations: y the well-being aspect and the agency aspect of persons have dissimilar roles in moral accounting. They invite attention in disparate ways. At the risk of oversimplification, it can be said that the well-being aspect of a person is important in assessing a person’s advantage, whereas the agency aspect is important in assessing what a person can do in line with his or her conception of the good. The ability to do more good need not be to the person’s advantage. (Sen, 1985, p. 206, emphasis in original)

In fact ‘an expansion of agency freedom can go with a reduction in actual well-being, through your own choice, even though you are not, by any means, indifferent to your own well-being’ (Sen, 1985, p. 207). Sen gives the example of a person who chooses to save the life of another though this is inconvenient to herself/himself. Likewise, an academic may choose a poorly paid temporary research job in preference to more secure and better paid employment elsewhere, in order to pursue a particular academic vocation. Again, agency freedom takes priority over well-being. Sen also emphasises the heterogeneity of well-being and agency: Although the agency aspect and the well-being aspect both are important, they are important for quite different reasons. In one perspective, a person is seen as a doer and a judge, whereas in the other the same person is seen as a beneficiary whose interests and advantages have to be considered. There is no way of reducing this plural-information base into a monist one without losing something of importance. (Sen, 1985, p. 208)

In the last 150 years the perspective of well-being has occupied more attention than that of agency, signifying the impact of utilitarianism and of neo-classical economics which rest on calculations of individual well-being. But well-being alone is insufficient to serve as the foundation of identity: The conception of ‘‘persons’’ in moral analysis cannot be so reduced as to attach no intrinsic importance to this agency role, seeing them ultimately only in terms of their well-being. This is a particular sphere in which such an agency role is especially important, and that is the person’s own life. Various concepts of ‘‘autonomy’’ and ‘‘personal liberty’’ relate to this special role of agency in personal life, going well beyond considerations of well-being. (Sen, 1985, p. 186)

Further, ‘for an integrated person it is likely – possibly even inevitable – that the person’s well-being will be influenced by his or her agency role’ (p. 187). This point about the dependency of well-being on agency has particular resonance in academic life. The active pursuit of research and scholarship within a scholarly community are not necessarily driven by the desire for private accumulation. This can be one of the motives at play, but it is not

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essential. Research and scholarship are also ends in themselves, and constituents of a sense of self that is another end in itself. In other words, academics do what they do not solely to obtain an ‘advantage’ in an absolute or relative sense, but also because the exercise of agency freedom within the field of knowledge in which they work is attractive and satisfying to them. Henkel’s (2005) study of academic attitudes in bioscience, in the context of recent higher education reforms in the UK, finds that ‘in many cases’ this is the source of ‘meaning and self-esteem’ as well as being what is ‘most valued’ (Henkel, 2005, p. 166). Academic ‘identities are, first and foremost, shaped and reinforced in and by stable communities and the social processes generated within them y Through such conversations individuals learn not only a language but a way of understanding the world, through the ideas, cognitive structures and experience expressed in that language’ (pp. 156–157). The construction of individual and collective identity is a continuous and reflexive process, ‘a synthesis of (internal) self-definition and the (external) definitions of oneself offered by others’ (p. 157). Henkel emphasises ‘the primacy of the discipline in academic working lives and academic autonomy’ (p. 155), followed in importance by the higher education institution (p. 158), and remarks on the centrality of agency freedom: Apart from the importance of the discipline, the most frequently discussed value in our study of higher education reform was academic freedom but it was given a variety of meanings, individual and collective. They included being individually free to choose and pursue one’s own research agenda and being trusted to manage the pattern of one’s own working life and priorities. For some, it was a matter of quality of life and perhaps the main reward of an academic career. However, it had a collective significance, too. Underlying many of the interviews were more basic assumptions, that individual freedom was a function of academic control of the professional arena of teaching and research, that these were necessary conditions for academic work and therefore the conditions in which their academic identity was grounded. (Henkel, 2005, pp. 169–170)

Along similar lines, Bernstein (2000) notes that traditional academic identities are centred on what he calls ‘inwardness’ and ‘inner dedication’ (p. 184); particularly in the domains of knowledge he describes as ‘singulars’, which are the bounded disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities that do not derive their authority from an occupation. Singulars ‘generate strong inner commitments centred in the perceived intrinsic value of their specific knowledge domains’ via socialisation into subject loyalty. The subject becomes the lynchpin of identity (Beck & Young, 2005, p. 185). Habermas’s (1989) characterisation of the 18th century ‘public sphere’ also has a certain resonance in university contexts (Pusser, 2004). In the Habermasian public sphere criticism played a central function and decisions


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were reached on the basis of rational argument. The public sphere, as Habermas imagined it, rested on ‘a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether’ (Habermas, 1989, p. 36). The argument was carried by the merits of the case rather than the status or power of the arguer. It was the ideas themselves that were important. Social relations were grounded in a non-violent form of integration based on discourse rather than power or money (see also Calhoun, 1992). It must be added that agency freedom of this egalitarian scholarly kind is by no means consistently found in universities; and is never the only element, being jostled by executive strategies and economic enterprise, hierarchies and statuses of an academic and non-academic kind, and the pursuit of utility and personal advantage in various domains. All are part of the mix. Freedom as Power Henkel (2005) suggests also that academic freedom can be understood as control over one’s work and as power ‘to pursue one’s own research agenda’. There is more than one kind of freedom here. Sen (1985, p. 208) notes that there is an ‘internal plurality’ in the idea of freedom. He distinguishes power from control, ‘a distinction of special relevance to particular issues of freedom, such as liberty and autonomy’: A person’s freedom may well be assessed in terms of the power to achieve chosen results: whether the person is free to achieve one outcome or another; whether his or her choices will be respected and the corresponding things will happen. This element of freedom, which I shall call effective power, or power (for short), is not really concerned with the mechanisms and procedures of control. It does not matter for effective power precisely how the choices are ‘‘executed’’ y In contrast, a person’s freedom may be assessed in terms of whether the person is himself exercising control over the process of choice. Is he actively doing the choosing in the procedure of decision or execution? This element of freedom may be called procedural control, or control (for short). It does not matter for freedom as control whether the person succeeds at all in achieving what he would choose’. (Sen, 1985, pp. 208–209, emphasis in original)

In the literature on liberty and freedom in political philosophy, the control element has received the majority of attention. Yet while control ‘is indeed important in many contexts’, it is ‘not the only important element of freedom. The power element cannot be neglected in any adequate formulation of freedom or liberty’ (Sen, 1985, p. 212). The development and exercise of agency freedom requires conditions that permit and support it. In Development as Freedom, Sen (2000, pp. xi–xii) remarks that ‘the freedom of

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agency that we individually have is inescapably qualified and constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities available to us. There is a deep complementarity between individual agency and social arrangements’. In universities these ‘social arrangements’ include the necessary time, money and personal ‘capabilities’ (pp. 74–75). The distinction between freedom as power and freedom as control is often aligned with ‘the related but distinct question of whether freedom should be seen in positive or negative terms, and whether one’s obligations should take the form of not interfering with other people’s control over spheres of their lives rather than the form of duties to help positively’. But when freedom as control is joined to negative freedom, as in Hayek, it ‘tends to produce an unacceptably narrow conceptualisation of liberty and freedom’ (Sen, 1985, p. 209). Sen’s preferred approach is to include the power to use specific controls as an aspect of the power to achieve specific states of affairs. ‘The evaluation of the power to achieve different states of affairs may be controlsensitive, and the power view of freedom can, inter alia, accommodate whatever is important in the control view [of freedom]’ (p. 212). In other words, agency freedom coupled with freedom as power incorporates the control view of freedom. But the converse does not apply. When agency freedom is coupled with freedom as control, it does not follow that freedom as power will be included. As we shall see, neo-liberal thought defines freedom as control, while specifically excluding freedom as power. This in turn places limits on the potential of agency freedom in a neo-liberal regime.

The Radical-Critical Break Self-determining critical work in the social sciences and other disciplines needs more than agency freedom and freedom as power. There is also the question of the scope for the radical-critical epistemological break. Fields of knowledge are heterogeneous, and from time-to-time subject to tensions, ruptures and instances of radical ‘newness’ (Foucault, 1972). An important question about the academic imagination is the potential for ‘newness’.6 Castoriadis (1987) is insightful here. In ‘conventional thought’ succession (causality, finality, implication) can be understood only from the point of view of identity. Differences are merely apparent. A deep underlying unity is always to be found, one that is already known. Conventional thought cannot imagine such a thing as a radical break. But ‘history cannot be thought of within any of the traditional frameworks of succession. For what is given in and through history is not the determined sequence of the determined but


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the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty’. This shows in ‘the incessant transformation of each society’ and the emergence of ‘radical otherness or creation’, in which ‘something other than what exists is bringing itself into being, and bringing itself into being as new or as other and not simply as a consequence or as a different exemplar of the same’ (Castoriadis, 1987, pp. 184–185). The process is not driven by random accident, however. Human subjects must imagine the radical-critical break. Castoriadis conceives of the individual as self-determining, self-conscious and self-producing; able to produce herself/himself as different: ‘History is just as much a conscious creation as it is an unconscious repetition’ (p. 21). In the mind of the agent or subject, the imaginary is not a reflection of reality; it is the unceasing and undetermined creation of forms/figures/images on the basis of which we can make ‘reality’ (p. 3). Self-awareness enables us to produce new, unpredetermined and unpredictable elements of thought by and for ourselves: The non-causal y appears as behaviours that are not merely ‘‘unpredictable’’ but creative (on the level of individuals, groups, classes or entire societies). It appears not as a simple deviation in relation to an existing type but as the positing of a new type of behaviour, as the institution of a new social rule, as the invention of a new object or a new art form – in short, as an emergence of a production which cannot be deduced on the basis of a previous situation, as a conclusion that goes beyond the premises or as the positing of new premises. It has already been observed that the living being goes beyond a simple mechanism because it can provide new responses to new situations. But the historical being goes beyond the simply living being because it can provide new responses to the ‘‘same’’ situations or create new situations. (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 44, emphasis in original)

Thus the capacity for radical-critical break rests on agency freedom; and one of the objectives and outcomes of autonomous agency is the development of its own autonomy/identity (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 75). Autonomy/identity is ‘never finished’. The subject ‘is constantly transformed on the basis of the experience in which it is engaged, which the subject does or makes, but which also makes the subject’ (p. 77). Castoriadis emphasises that however much an individual or an institution might claim a fixed identity as one of its own strategies of survival, the individual, like society, ‘can exist only by altering itself, and alters itself through doing, and social representing/saying’ (p. 371). Radical-critical breaks may originate in the mind without the apparent stimulus of external structures or agents. But Castoriadis also remarks that the capacity for the radical-critical break is socially defined. The creative process and the new elements of thought are never independent of the situation in which they occur (p. 27). This is not ‘the pure freedom of a

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fictive subject’, ‘the narcissism of consciousness fascinated by its own naked forms’ (p. 106). Creation is not detached from the world and from the contents of the encounters between self, other and the world. We live only in a relational setting, in the social. In other words, life is a continuing process of self-directed alteration of oneself, in which the imaginative horizon frames the capacity for the radicalcritical break (and vice versa). ‘We do not know what we are capable of, but we do know that humans have acquired the capacity to will and to act y Our history has produced a creature with the capacity to act upon its limits’ (Rose, 1999, p. 96). We can be critical and creative. We can open ourselves to newness and the epistemological break. Or we can deliberately restrict our potential for conscious alterity, as Hayek wants us to do; though it could hardly ever be eliminated.

F. A. HAYEK: FREEDOM AS CONTROL The broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act is that the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done; when the content of the interest in which one is absorbed is drawn out of its immediate unity with oneself and becomes an independent object of one’s thinking, then it is that the spirit begins to be free, whereas when thinking is an instinctive activity, spirit is enmeshed in the bonds of its categories and is broken up into an infinitely varied material. (Hegel, 1989, p. 37)

F. A. Hayek’s notion of freedom and autonomy consists of two unequally weighted elements. The primary element is freedom as control. The secondary element is agency freedom. Hayek is opposed to all notions of freedom that incorporate power, including self-determination. But Hayek’s position on freedom and self-determination can only be understood within the larger body of his thought, which combines a liberal notion of negative freedom as the absence of constraint with a conservative notion of social order. Hayek understands freedom as the driver of modernisation but regards the conservative social order as the condition of Hayekian freedom.7 He stitches together these familiar but heterogeneous notions with: (1) an evolutionism taken from Mandeville, Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, that naturalises competitive economic markets; (2) where actual markets falter, the Hayekian politics of state-driven markets that has shaped neoliberalism policies and techniques; and (3) his psychology, where he imagines that agents respond to external signals on the basis of mental elements buried deep below the conscious mind. Hayek understands human subjects


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as guided more by habit than reflection, and bound by the patterns of past events imprinted in their minds, which ensures social order. Hayek believes that we have little scope for self-knowledge and are unable to perceive or imagine anything new. There is a great difference between the responsive human automaton of Hayek and the self-altering subject of Sen, Castoriadis and Rose. Hayek does not discuss the epistemological break though he talks down its potential. Hayekian thought is framed by the antinomies of freedom as control, and the control of freedom. His position on sectors such as higher education varies according to the balance of individual freedoms and social controls he regards as strategically appropriate in that sector. Sometimes freedom as control takes priority, as in his policy on the business sector; sometimes the emphasis falls on the control of freedom, as when he discusses democracy (Hayek, 1960, 1979). Hayek does not spell out a complete position on academic freedom in the social sciences. But his objective is to universalise his conceptions of freedom and order across history, with implications for universities as for other sectors; and he makes certain comments about intellectual work. These sources allow us to infer the mix of freedom as control, and control of freedom, that a Hayekian position on academic work entails; a position that is prescient of neo-liberal policy. This critique draws on an earlier study of Hayek (Marginson, 1993, 1997a, 1997b), and a further review of his psychology (Hayek, 1952) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and other work on the individual, the market and social order.

Against Self-Determination Hayek imagines the individual as a maker of choices rather than as a maker of history, which positions him on the well-being side of Sen’s well-being/ agency distinction. He opposes all notions of positive freedom as the capacity or capability to act on one’s own behalf, which would imply a more interventionist state than he wants. The grounds for this opposition are those of cognitive ignorance: that neither individual nor government can know enough about the consequences of an action to guide that action. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argues that ‘the only infringement’ of freedom is coercion by one person against another: ‘The ranges of physical possibilities from which a person can choose at a given moment have no direct relevance to freedom’ (Hayek, 1960, p. 12). The question of how many choices are open to a person ‘is a different question from that of how far in acting he can follow his own plans and intentions, to what extent the pattern

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of his conduct is his own design, directed towards ends for which he has been persistently striving’ (p. 13). A person is unfree when ‘somebody else has the power to so manipulate the conditions as to make him act according to that person’s will rather than his own’ (p. 13). Hayek opposes coercion because a coerced person ‘is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims and beliefs’ (p. 21): Freedom thus presupposes that the individual has some assured private sphere, that there is some set of circumstances in his environment with which others cannot interfere (Hayek, 1960, p. 13)

A choice-making subject practising identity and intentionality within a protected space provides support for the notion of agency freedom. Hayek calls it ‘inner freedom’: The same conditions which to some constitute coercion will be to others merely ordinary difficulties which have to be overcome, depending on the strength of will of the people involved. To that extent, ‘inner freedom’ and ‘freedom’ in the sense of absence from coercion will together determine how much use a person can make of his knowledge of opportunities (Hayek, 1960, p. 15)

Here Hayek invokes agency freedom in order to talk down claims for governmental intervention on social grounds. The reason why it is important to distinguish ‘inner freedom’ from freedom from coercion, he states, is ‘the philosophical confusion about ... the ‘‘freedom of the will’’. Few beliefs have done more to discredit the ideal of freedom than the erroneous one that [social] scientific determination has destroyed the basis for individual responsibility’ (Hayek, 1960, pp. 15–16). Having said that, Hayek immediately blocks the route to a more fully developed self-determination. He states that he would like to understand freedom in terms of both constraint, being made to do something; and restraint, being prevented from doing something. However, the term ‘restraint’ has slipped from control – the irony passes without comment – and an unbridled positive freedom has been released, opening the way to economic redistribution, which is another Hayekian bete-noire. Here freedom is ‘equivalent to y effective power to do whatever we want’, an argument advanced by Dewey and others for whom the demand for liberty is the demand for power, and the absence of coercion is only one means to freedom as power (p. 17; Sen of course makes just this argument). Thus, Hayek heads off both open-ended democratic agency and threats to the economic status quo. Despite his modest flirtation with ‘inner freedom’ the social order is preserved. Translating this argument into the academic setting, in a Hayekian universe the thinker is free as long as she/he is not explicitly directed what to


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think: ‘Coercion y eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person’ (Hayek, 1960, p. 21). The question of whether she/he is prevented from thinking about something is one of lesser priority; otherwise claims about freedom from intellectual restraint may degenerate into claims for intellectual rights. Questions of whether the potential intellectual projects are few or many, and who decides, are of no account. It is also significant that Hayek’s philosophy of liberty and opposition to self-determination rests not on human intellectual potential, but on the notion of the cognitive limits of human capability. The prohibition on self-determination parallels the prohibition on coercion. Both derive from lack of a plausible rationality: ‘Being ignorant, nobody has an acceptable reason to impose his or her will on anyone else’ (Galeotti, 1987, p. 167). Cognitive ignorance imposes one Hayekian limit on the potential of radical-critical social science. At the same time, coercion for Hayek can refer only to human actions: ‘Neither natural constraints nor social institutions, developed spontaneously outside of human design, pose a threat to liberty’ (Galeotti, 1987, p. 167). By definition, neither institutions nor market forces can constitute an unacceptable violation of academic autonomy or freedom, providing that they are naturally evolved. Much then turns on the question of whether government-simulated markets can be construed as ‘natural’.

Hayek’s Psychology: Habit Rather Than Reflection Hayek’s notion of agency with an attenuated potential for the proactive intellect, is supported by his essay in psychology in The Sensory Order (1952). This is discussed here, not in relation to its contents as psychology, but for its implications in his political philosophy of freedom. Arguably, Hayek’s psychology not only refuses the capacity for the radical-critical break, but it is pitched against any notion of a conscious self-determining reflexive intellectual agenda. Hayek downplays the difference between ‘conscious and unconscious mental events’, which is described as one of degree rather than kind (Hayek, 1952, p. 134). At the same time, he understands the conscious as subordinated to the unconscious. According to Hayek, we do not perceive the external world, we classify it. What we see is shaped by a set of mental abstractions, a system of classification already lodged in our minds that is derived from the life experience of each individual, ‘and in some measure also the experience of his race’ passed on as cultural inheritance (Hayek, 1952, p. 135). ‘All we can perceive of external events are therefore only such

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properties of these events as they possess as members of classes’ formed in our minds by past experiences. ‘All we know about the world is of the nature of theories and all ‘‘experience’’ can do is change these theories’ (p. 143, emphasis in original). These mental abstractions are situated in the unconscious. The individual remains largely unaware of them but they determine her/his thought and action: Conscious experience thus rests on a much more extensive basis of less fully conscious or subconscious images of the rest of the surroundings, which nevertheless y give to the conscious representations their place and value. Conscious experiences have in this respect justly been compared to mountain tops rising above the clouds which, while alone visible, yet presuppose an invisible substructure determining their position relative to each other. (Hayek, 1952, p. 139)

Familiar objects or events call up an automatic bodily response, especially if fear or desire is invoked: ‘A person may be interested in finding some object or in noticing a particular event, and although not thinking about it, will at once observe it when it presents itself to his senses, merely because his mind has been prepared for it’ (Hayek, 1952, p. 140). The concept is that of the conditioned reflex based on a learned response to repetitive stimuli. For example, in an economic market people’s ends are achieved, not by questioning the terms of choice or by reconstructing the system of allocation, but by efficient responses to market signals. The political promise of Hayekian psychology is that it promises to ensure social order and to guarantee that it will take the form of a market society. To the extent that the mental apparatus lodged in the unconscious is common to all members of ‘the race’, people will respond in much the same predictable way as each other to external events. Thus, once people are experienced in the workings of markets these become self-perpetuating. The ‘sensory order’ also perpetuates itself by constraining the potential for innovation, blocking the possibility that other social arrangements might appear. Experiences of the types most familiar to us are more fully discriminated and perceived in greater detail: ‘We notice more in them and are more fully prepared to respond adequately to their occurrence’. Other experiences remain on the fringes of consciousness. New experiences cannot be effectively perceived at all: ‘However attentive we may endeavour to be, an altogether unexpected event will take us as much by surprise and escape as much our detailed notice as if we had not been attentive at all’ (Hayek, 1952, pp. 139–140). If sensory perception must be regarded as an act of classification, what we perceive can never be unique properties of individual objects but always only properties which the objects have in common with other objects. Perception is thus always an interpretation,


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the placing of something into one or several classes of objects. An event of an entirely new kind which has never occurred before, and which sets up impulses which arrive in the brain for the first time, could not be perceived at all (Hayek, 1952, p. 142)

How then do novel phenomena become lodged in our experience and enable the adaptive responses that Hayek sees as integral to social evolution? By repetition that eliminates the newness: ‘Further experience will show that parts of different situations which our senses represent as being alike will, according to the different accompanying circumstances, have to be treated as different’. Thus we revise the system of classification governing perception: ‘These new classes formed by a rearrangement of the objects of the sensory world are what are usually described as abstract concepts’ (Hayek, 1952, p. 145). The conscious mind is aware of the new concepts but their deeper purpose is to guide the unconscious. Civilisation advances the more when people do important things without thinking about them (Hayek, 1945, p. 528). Hayek’s psychology does not resolve the nature of the imagination and leads to paradox. Does he include in his vision of the mind the workings of his own? From which abstractions, instincts and race memories did his creations come? His argument also opens the way to the breach of freedom as control. As he put it in The Constitution of Liberty, a person is unfree when ‘somebody else has the power to so manipulate the conditions as to make him act according to that person’s will rather than his own’ (Hayek, 1960, p. 13). The Sensory Order sustains autonomy, but does not guarantee control over the contents of choice. It allows market agents to interpolate their messages into our minds, turning us into autonoma who are in thrall to repetitive stimuli, but know it not because the mental apparatus of classification shaped by market signals is buried too deep. As we have seen, Hayek evades the contradiction by arguing that while people can be coercive, market forces are natural and cannot. But this starts to fray when those markets are constructed by government, or individual market agents enjoy oligopolistic power. Here Castoriadis (1987) provides a better defence of freedom than Hayek. Castoriadis agrees with Hayek that total knowledge is impossible, but disagrees that determination of the conscious by the unconscious is either inevitable or desirable: ‘What is essential in human activities can be grasped neither as reflex nor as technique. No human being is non-conscious’ (p. 73). The essence of autonomy in the form of ‘self-legislation’ or ‘self-regulation’ is the supremacy of the consciousness or will or, in Freudian terms, the ‘ego’ (pp. 102–103). Heteronomy, the opposite of autonomy, is legislation or regulation by the Other which colonises our imaginations. The unconscious too can function as an Other, one that is located within the self. In turn the

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unconscious can be manipulated by an ‘autonomized imaginary’ from outside, but we cannot see it. Under heteronomy we imagine ourselves to be something we are not, and ‘others and the external world undergo a corresponding misinterpretation’: The subject does not express himself or herself but is expressed by someone, and therefore exists as part of another’s world (certainly misrepresented in its turn). The subject is ruled by an imaginary, lived as even more real than the real, yet not known as such, precisely because it is not known as such. What is essential to heteronomy – or to alienation in the general sense of the term – on the level of the individual, is the domination of an autonomized imaginary which has assumed the function of defining for the subject both reality and desire’. (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 103)

Hayek’s psychology opens the autonomy of the subject to its capture as heteronomy, while blocking the potential of the subject to remake herself/ himself according to conscious design. The lessons of self-determination remain unlearned. They can never be experienced as such. There is nothing in The Sensory Order specifically about projects designed to imagine something new, but the above argument confirms that Hayek’s notion of the potential for intellectual work – and especially his notion of the potential for the epistemological break – is essentially pessimistic.

The Control of Freedom In his essay on ‘Principles of a liberal social order’, Hayek distinguishes between two different kinds of liberal political philosophy. The first ‘is based on an evolutionary interpretation of all phenomena of culture and mind and on an insight into the limits of the powers of the human reason’. Hayek identifies himself with this position, arguing that ‘under the enforcement of universal rules of just conduct, protecting a recognizable private domain of individuals, a spontaneous order of human activities of much greater complexity will form itself than could ever be produced by deliberate arrangement’. The second liberal philosophy ‘rests on ‘‘constructivist’’ rationalism’, and assumes that cultural and social phenomena are the outcome of human designs and plans (Hayek, 1967c, pp. 161–162, 1967a). But, states Hayek, this position fails to account for the limits of cognitive capacity and imperfect knowledge. Hayek’s critique of constructivism is basic to his case against socialism and Keynesian economic management. The dichotomy between evolutionism and constructivism runs through all of his thought. Hayek’s naturalisation of a conservative social order as a liberal market order rests on two premises. First, he argues that the liberal market has


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emerged naturally through an evolutionary process whereby competing traditions undergo a process of natural selection (Hayek, 1967b, 1967d).8 There is a characteristic is/ought ambiguity here. For Hayek the liberal market is both the natural outcome of social evolution and an ideal state to be achieved.9 Second, Hayekian psychology and the Hayekian social order constitute each other. Over time individuals acquire as uncodified social rules buried in the unconscious the forms of behaviour, which sustain the social order. They learn to respond instinctively to market signals and to refrain from subversive behaviours that would challenge tradition: ‘Social cohesiveness is y guaranteed by the network of rules of conduct embodied in the tradition’ (Galeotti, 1987, p. 172). The social rules that have developed in this long historical process cannot be improved by design. Social tradition and its rules should be defended from intervention by governments and social reformers: ‘The coercive activities of government should be limited to the enforcement of such rules’ (Hayek, 1967c [principles], pp. 161–162). Yet Hayek also remarks that freedom from coercion depends on social consensus; and where consensus is lacking, the social order might have to be preserved by coercive means: y rules of conduct y are both a product and a condition of freedom. Of these conventions and customs of human intercourse, the moral rules are the most important but by no means the only significant ones. We understand one another and get along with one another, and are able to act successfully on our plans, because, most of the time, members of our civilisation conform to unconscious patterns of conduct, show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion, often not even of any conscious adherence to known rules, but of firmly established habits and traditions. The general observance of these conventions is a necessary condition of the orderliness of the world in which we live, of our being able to find our way in it, though we do not know their significance and may not even be consciously aware of their existence. In some instances it would be necessary, for the smooth running of society, to secure a similar uniformity by coercion, if such conventions or rules were not observed often enough. Coercion, then, may sometimes be avoidable only because a high degree of voluntary conformity exists, which means that voluntary conformity may be a condition of a beneficial working of freedom. It is indeed a truth, which all the great apostles of freedom outside the rationalist school have never tired of emphasizing, that freedom has never worked without deeply ingrained moral beliefs and that coercion can be reduced to a minimum only where individuals can be expected as a rule to conform voluntarily to certain principles’. (Hayek, 1960, p. 62)

Thus freedom from coercion might be violated in the interest of social order. For Hayek the control of freedom is a higher value than freedom as control. This constitutes a second Hayekian limit on the potential of radical-critical social science. The danger of radical-critical thought for the social order takes priority over the freedoms of its practitioners.

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Hayek’s Constructivism Hayek’s argument against constructivism is normative rather than descriptive or explanatory. It cannot hold for every case. After all, social phenomena are both deliberately constructed and evolve spontaneously; we know some things and cannot know everything; human actions have both foreseen and unforeseen consequences. Having dug a normative gulf between evolutionism and constructivism, Hayek finds that his argument has been overdrawn and he has to bridge the gulf he has created. The crunch comes when the evolutionary process fails to lead to a naturally occurring liberal market order, marked by social quiescence and Hayekian psychology; and it becomes apparent that the only method of achieving these outcomes is by government intervention. At this point the ‘ought’ side of the Hayekian is/ought ambiguity comes into play. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973, 1976, 1979), Hayek moves beyond the defence of negative freedom and opposition to state coercion to state-led policies for creating the conditions and mechanisms of a market order.10 ‘It is not a matter of ‘‘freeing’’ an existing set of market relations from their social shackles, but of organizing all features of one’s national policy to enable a market to exist, and to provide what it needs to function’ (Rose, 1999, p. 141). Hayek emerges as an evolutionist in theory but a constructivist in practice: as a constructivist who imagines a return to a selfevolving nature; as an evolutionist who wants to help nature along by means of policy. Like all neo-liberals who follow the same pathway after him, Hayek never acknowledges his own constructivism as such. He maintains freedom as control and its defence against government coercion as the centrepiece of his political philosophy. The distinctive achievement of Hayekian neo-liberalism is to twist and blend these contrary elements into a single strategy, in which the figure of the free individual becomes the means of governmental technique and the guarantor of social control, but without vacating its legitimating power as the symbol of liberty. But how can the free individual retain control over her/his own choices yet remain within the bounds Hayek has set? As he puts it, ‘how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 527). More bluntly, how will subjects become manipulated and self-manipulating while retaining a form of freedom? The answer in sectors such as education is a partial rather than a full-scale deregulation of state functions.11 Commercial markets are to be created in selected areas, but the main policy strategy is to install government-created


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market simulacra, in which the public service is replaced by subsidised competition under continued state control. This allows government to restrict the range of choice (freedom as power) while strengthening the role of choice making itself (freedom as control). At the same time market competition will shape the mentalities that Hayek wants. As he puts it: ‘Competition is as much a method for breeding certain types of mind as anything else’ (Hayek, 1979, p. 76). In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek spells out his reform programme across the broad range of economic, political and social institutions. The constructivist programme cements his position as the leading neo-liberal thinker, while also exacerbating the tensions within his thought.12 By imagining people as market subjects in every facet of life, whether they choose to be or not, Hayek elevates the maintenance of social order above agency freedom and limits freedom as control to something less than selfdetermined identity. Further, as Gray points out, the extension of economic markets tends to undermine tradition, unspoken rules and natural evolution. Yet Hayek does not acknowledge that ‘unfettered markets can weaken social cohesion in liberal cultures’ (Gray, 1998, p. 147). To the extent that the social order must be shored up in the wake of market development, another round of state intervention is in prospect, creating potential problems not just for agency freedom but for freedom as control. Hayekian subjects can choose what to buy but they cannot choose what to be, except within the narrow limits laid down by tradition and convention. They cannot remake themselves as something new. By promising to mould their minds within environments of his own devising, as if he himself is a force of nature, Hayek shows his ultimate indifference to agency freedom as an end in itself.

Hayek and Radical-Critical Social Science Hayek is uncomfortable about the university-based social sciences. He regards all social institutions as bearers of tacit knowledge, and understands competition as itself ‘discovery procedures’ (Gray, 1998, p. 41) distinct from university research. He also considers that there is something wrong about ‘a society in which all the intellectual, moral and artistic leaders belong to the employed class, especially if most of them are employed by government’. Hayek would like to strengthen the intellectual role of ‘the independent owner of property y in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs’ (Hayek, 1960, p. 128). This would draw the agendas of the social sciences closer to the social order.

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But as we have seen, Hayek’s argument against radical-critical social science is not just that it is undesirable, but that it is impossible. He repeatedly emphasises the cognitive limits of human capacity in relation to social phenomena. As he sees it there are ‘basic practices, forms of life or metaconscious rules at which criticism comes to a stop’ (Gray, 1998, pp. 114–115). Such rules can/should not be questioned13: ‘In social theory we come to a stop with the basic constitutive traditions of social life’, which is ‘the region of unknowable ultimate rules’ (p. 25). Our intellectual life too is governed by ‘inarticulable rules’ (p. 114) that limit the scope for reflexivity and criticism, making complete intellectual self-understanding impossible (pp. 22–24). This reduces the potential of both agency freedom and the radical-critical break; and limits the scope of theorisation itself. As Hayek sees it, theory building is the reconstruction of prior practical knowledge. Necessarily, this project is radically incomplete. Theory is the tip of an iceberg of tacit knowledge, ‘much of which is entirely beyond our powers of articulation’ (p. 15). New knowledge imagined in theorising is ruled out. Newness itself is dangerous14: Man does not so much choose between alternative actions according to their known consequences as prefer those [actions] the consequences of which are predictable over those the consequences of which are unknown. What he most fears, and what puts him in a state of terror when it has happened, is to lose his bearings and no longer know what to do y The resulting feeling that something dreadful is going to happen because one has infringed rules of conduct is but one form of the panic produced when one realizes that one has entered an unknown world y The world is fairly predictable only so long as one adheres to the established procedures, but it becomes frightening when one deviates from them. (Hayek, 1967b, pp. 80–81)

For both Hayek the market liberal and Hayek the conservative, a selfdetermining radical-critical social science carries dangers. Both as liberal and as conservative, he is opposed to academic freedom as power. The liberal opts for freedom as control, the conservative prefers the intellectual aristocrat. The positions are contrary in relation to each other, but present a united front in the face of the common threat. Both would eliminate choice-making that moves outside the terms of the social order. Both would countenance a breach of academic freedom as control if the social order required it (the difference is that for Hayek the liberal, such coercion is seen as the lesser of two evils, whereas for Hayek the conservative, it would not be an evil at all). In this setting the unfunding of projects critical of the status quo, the dismissal of dissidents, and the closure of their lines of enquiry, are all seen as desirable ends. But if these happy outcomes can be achieved by ‘automatic’ market process that would be better.


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HAYEK IN HIGHER EDUCATION Everything is freedom that’s what they say Everything I’ve ever done gotta give it away y. – Gillian Welch, ‘Song of freedom’, from Time (the revelator), (2001)

Neo-Liberal Autonomy In the neo-liberal era, government turns on freedom as control within a liberal market order as Hayek outlined it. Social programmes are reimagined as economic production. Planning is replaced by choices between alternative investments based on cost–benefit calculations. Institutions are re-imagined as self-serving enterprises competing with each other. Bureaucratic decisions and expert judgements are superseded by choice-making individuals. In neo-liberal systems ‘we are governed as much through subjectification as through objectification’, states Rose (1999, p. 95): ‘To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives’ (p. 4). Neo-liberal techniques of government shape ‘human beings as subjects of freedom’: Freedom is seen as autonomy, the capacity to realize one’s desires in one’s secular life, to fulfil one’s potential through one’s own endeavours, to determine the course of one’s own existence through acts of choice’. (Rose, 1999, p. 84)

To repeat the point, here agency freedom is coupled not with freedom as power, enabling the subject to pursue a path of independent selfdetermination, but with freedom as control. Autonomy is the end in itself, not agency freedom. The radical-critical break becomes more elusive. Choice-making, market competition and government formulas constitute automatic systems that naturalise the environmental framing of the limits within which free subjects exist. These subjects are controlled by others and by themselves in a manner which speaks to their own interest. At the same time, this regime of freedom as control is not the only possible strategy. For those who fail to follow the required codes of behaviour, or cannot manage their choices in the manner required, it is the other side of the Hayekian antinomy, the control of freedom, that becomes the master discourse: ‘The undoubted persistence and salience of coercive tactics – in the policing of the

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inner cities and the urban poor, in the surveillance and control of political dissidence, and of course in the various international adventures of advanced liberal nations – must also, today, be justified as the price necessary for the maintenance of freedom’ (Rose, 1999, p. 10). Even so, in most cases direct coercion is unnecessary. Hayekian incentives can be left to govern behaviour. The threat of exclusion from the dignities conferred on the self in the zone of freedom is control enough. Nevertheless, in the university sector the problem is a little more complex. Neo-liberal government confronts an older form of autonomy, which of professional expertise governed by the disciplinary communities. Here the long standard academic tradition was reinscribed and regoverned by the welfare state. In the three decades after World War II, in which the welfare states and the modern university systems were constructed, within each sector of public provision with its own ‘logics, criteria of judgment, professional codes and values, notions of autonomy and specialism’, ‘enclosures of expert power were formed which were largely insulated from political control, from market logics and from the pressures exerted by their subjects’ (Rose, 1999, p. 133). Such experts were able to ‘to ‘‘enclose’’ themselves and their judgments, to render themselves almost ungovernable’ (p. 149). The neo-liberal solution is to establish techniques of government in which agency freedom is more clearly subordinated to freedom as control. As Hayek and Friedman (1962) both advised in relation to education, the key move is economisation. Rose (1999) puts it thus: ‘modes of financial calculation’ are imposed ‘upon areas which were previously governed according to bureaucratic, professional or other norms’. Within institutions, ‘‘‘public’’ objectives such as value-for-money, efficiency, transparency, competitiveness, responsiveness to the customer’ are translated into ‘‘‘private’’ norms, judgments, calculations and aspirations. The university department, the hospital specialty, the ‘‘not-for-profit’’ organization delivering home care to the elderly’ are ‘each obliged to organize their activities as if they were little businesses’ (Rose, 1999, pp. 151–152).

The Reform Agenda in Higher Education The conventional critique of neo-liberalism argues that its purpose in higher education is to install commercial capital in place of public services and turn knowledge into commodities. But this is only one neo-liberal strategy, and not the most important. Capitalist production develops only where it is profitable; as in commercial research, which is a small proportion of total


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research activity, and the sale of places to foreign students. Scholarship and research largely consists of outputs that are public goods in the economic sense. Public goods are goods that are non-rivalrous and/or non-excludable (Samuelson, 1954). Goods are non-rivalrous when they can be consumed by any number of people without being depleted, for example knowledge of a mathematical theorem. They are non-excludable when the benefits cannot be confined to individual buyers, such as research findings that are distributed in the public domain. Though the fruits of research and academic publication as free public goods are widely utilised in industry, business and government; if they were placed on the market, they would be under-produced.15 The task of neo-liberal policy is not to immerse the whole of knowledgeproduction into capitalist markets, but wrest what are predominantly public goods out of the control of independent disciplinary groups, and into a heteronymous space in which business and government can access and influence them. Neo-liberal government uses several strategies to achieve this. It provides incentives for selective commercialisation that tie research closer to industry; it shapes the reorganisation of the university as a quasi-corporate institution; it creates market simulacra, and frameworks of external accountability and audit, which quicken the responsiveness of academic work to a crafted external environment; and it propagates ideologies that secure the normative attachment of research to the economy. One example of the last is the Mode 1/Mode 2 discourse (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001). Here it is argued that research activity is shifting/should be shifted (note the Hayekian is/ought ambiguity) from Mode 1 to Mode 2. Mode 1 research is academic controlled basic research, driven by curiosity and knowledge-building as an end in itself, working within bounded disciplinary communities with no necessity to take in ‘social’ (which here means economic) needs and interests. Mode 2 research is responsive, utility-driven and negotiated between academics and the different external communities according to their requirements. It is typically interdisciplinary, and it is fragmenting the traditional disciplinary communities and academic units (Nowotny et al., 2001, pp. 88–90). It is also much quicker off the mark than Mode 1. The Mode 2 notion has an instant appeal to policy makers. Empirically the argument is unsustainable. Research systems, and often also the research programs of individuals, typically embody both Mode 1 and Mode 2 activity. Far from being antagonistic they support each other. But the intention here is not explanatory but normative. Mode 2 is an ideal model for nesting academic autonomy in a larger framework of Hayekian control, in which science will respond to environmental signals. Thus Nowotny et al.

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(2001) urge that peer determined science must be ‘transformed’ because of ‘the failure of scientific elites (Mode 1 elites) to accommodate societal demands for accountability and priority setting, and to accept additional criteria of judging the quality and relevance of scientific work’, the ‘new demands’ that ‘transcend’ scientific standards. The science system ‘has no alternative’ but to embrace this new ‘kind of societal reflexivity’ (Nowotny et al., 2001, p. 47). In their supporting argument, Nowotny et al. (2001) follow Hayek in adopting ‘an evolutionary framework, largely driven by self-organizing processes’ (p. 31).16 The academic research agenda has ‘spontaneously’ merged with that of ‘society’, by which they mean business: ‘The traditional distinction between ‘‘external’’ influences on science and its ‘‘internal’’, selfpropelling dynamics y (is) abolished y The market is extolled as a legitimate arena in which scientists have little to fear and much to gain’ (pp. 18, 109). Nevertheless, for academics Mode 2 entails the surrender of part of their agency freedom. They must share control of both the purpose of research and its practical work. The authors argue that in the new regime ‘scientific autonomy will have to be justified in each (local) case and for each research project’ (p. 232). They frankly describe the manner in which neoliberalism valorises freedom as control, but at the price of independent intellectual self-determination: Social control, exerted through traditional hierarchies, works less and less well. In the absence of the active participation of those who are to be audited, and without an internalized institutional self-discipline, social control is ineffective. It can even be argued that, in the shift towards an audit and accountability culture (which can be regarded as forms of institutional reflexivity) an element of authenticity enters. The self, or the organization, is expected to conspire in its own surveillance. Social control is internalized and so transformed into self-control. At the same time it also becomes possible to shift from process to outcome. On the one hand the self is freer to define how specified objectives should be achieved; on the other the specification of performance is tightened. In a de-regulated and de-centralized world, the self becomes his/her own entrepreneur, free to choose means of how to accomplish goals, but less free to define the goals themselves (Nowotny et al., 2001, pp, 45–46)

Neo-Liberal Techniques Let us look more closely at the implications of neo-liberal techniques for forms of freedom in the universities. The meta-strategy is Hayek’s notion of creating selected competitive markets and forming state-controlled market simulacra. The specific techniques, largely invented subsequent to The Constitution of Liberty (1960), and mostly developed in the 1980s, include funding-based


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economic incentives, user-driven activity, the pricing and sale of outputs and selected domains of entrepreneurial capitalist production; output monitoring and measurement, performance management and performance pay; contracts with and incentives to partner with industry and commercialise research motivations and research products (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004); and systems of accountability and audit, including contracts with government, that bed down external controls. In sum, as Rose (1999) notes, there are two principal transformations via technical means. The first draws on techniques of accounting so as to economise the university site and change the academic subject within. The second draws on techniques of accountability and audit so as to more effectively nest that subject as responsive to an external environment framed by those externalising techniques themselves. Through accounting, organisations are transformed into aggregations of calculable spaces, ‘cost centres’, and so ‘rendered calculable in financial terms’ (Rose, 1999, p. 152). This punctures the old insulation from political control in the name of professional autonomy. What Sen calls the ‘conception of the good’ is taken out of academic self-determination, measured in dollar terms and set in the rationales of economically driven managers: ‘Financial vocabularies, grammars and judgments have infiltrated the very terms in which experts calculate and enact their expertise’ (Rose, 1999, p. 153). Accounting and audit establishes mechanisms for governing at a distance. Audit is the control of control: ‘Its power derives from its capacity to act upon systems of control themselves’ (Rose, 1999, p. 154). Of the two sets of reforms, auditing and externalised accountability are on the whole more restrictive of agency freedom: y government by audit transforms that which is to be governed. Rendering something auditable transforms the process that is to be audited: setting objectives, proliferating standardized forms y The logics and technical requirements of audit displace the internal logics of expertise y They create accountability to one set of norms – transparency, observability, standardization and the like – at the expense of accountability to other sets of norms. Indeed, accountability in itself becomes a criterion of organizational health. These arrangements retain the formal independence of the professional while utilizing new techniques to render their decisions visible and amenable to evaluation. They are entirely consonant with one key vector of the strategic diagram of advanced liberal styles of governing: automization plus responsibilization y (Yet) Whilst audits have become key fidelity techniques in the new strategies of government, they generate an expanding spiral of distrust of professional competence, one that feeds the demand for more radical measures which will hold experts to account’. (Rose, 1999, pp. 154–155)

Tables 1 and 2 summarise the implications of each neo-liberal technique for the Hayekian project, and for academic self-determination. The findings are provisional and tentative; based not on exhaustive empirical investigation

Table 1. The Implications of Neo-Liberal Techniques of Government for: (1) Hayekian Freedom, and (2) Hayekian Social Order. Technique of Government

Implications of this Technique for Hayekian freedom (a) agency freedom: person acts willingly in terms of her/his notion of the good

Hayekian freedom (b) freedom as control: person located in safe zone with autonomy in choice-making

Hayekian social order: automatic processes, unconscious responses and social quiescence

Competition for funding

Reduced, hostage to funding/competition

No necessary change

Enhanced

University rankings

Eliminated, unless ‘good’ is competition

Varies, reduces if choice externalised

Enhanced

User-driven production

Reduced, hostage to user

Reduced

Enhanced, unless leads to politicisation

Performance pay

Negative change for egalitarians only

No necessary change

Enhanced

Aid university entrepreneurs

Enhanced only for entrepreneurs

May be enhanced for entrepreneurs

Mixed effects, may create politicisation of funding

Aid commercial research

Reduced, ‘good’ is outside-determined

No necessary change

Enhanced

Output measures of research

Reduced, ‘good’ is manager-determined

No necessary change

Enhanced

Performance management


No necessary change

Enhanced

Budget-driven priorities


No necessary change

Enhanced

Contracts with government


No necessary change

Reduced by politicisation, nonautomatic allocation

Output-driven funding


No necessary change

Enhanced

Self-quality assurance

Only reduced if good manager-determined

No necessary change

Reduced by conscious academic processes

External audit

Eliminated

Reduced

Reduced by politicisation and arbitrary judgement

Marketisation and accounting

Marketisation and audit


Table 2.

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The Implications of Neo-Liberal Techniques of Government for Academic Self-Determination. Agency freedom: person acts willingly in terms of her/his notion of the good

Freedom as power: person has the potential to achieve own outcomes

Radical-critical freedom: person has potential for creating epistemological breaks in knowledge

Academic selfdetermination: combines agency freedom, freedom as power and radical-critical freedom

Competition for funding

Reduced, hostage to funding/ competition

Reduced, hostage to funding/ competition

Reduced, convention is better rewarded

Selfdetermination reduced

University rankings

Eliminated, unless competitive ‘good’

Eliminated, unless goal is competition


Reduced, except for competitive strategising

User-driven production

Reduced, hostage to user

Sharply reduced, hostage to user

Eliminated

Selfdetermination severely reduced

Performance pay

Negative change for egalitarians only

Enhanced for some, reduced for others


Little change except weakens radical-critical

Aid university entrepreneurs



Reduced, break is hostage to market

Reduced, entrepreneurial break hostage to market

Aid commercial research

Reduced, ‘good’ is outsidedetermined

Enhanced if research is entrepreneurial


Reduced, entrepreneurial break hostage to market

Output measures of research

Reduced, ‘good’ is managerdetermined

Reduced except for some high achievers


Reduced, high achievers gain power not break

Performance management


Reduced except for some high achievers


Reduced, high achievers gain power not break

Marketisation and accounting

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Table 2. (Continued ) Agency freedom: person acts willingly in terms of her/his notion of the good

Freedom as power: person has the potential to achieve own outcomes

Radical-critical freedom: person has potential for creating epistemological breaks in knowledge

Academic selfdetermination: combines agency freedom, freedom as power and radical-critical freedom


Enhanced for some reduced for others


Reduced, income earners gain power not break

Contracts with government


Reduced by external determination


Reduced by external determination, convention

Output-driven funding


Reduced by external determination


Reduced by external determination, convention

Self-quality assurance

Reduced if ‘good’ is managerdetermined

Reduced only if managerdetermined

Often convention is better rewarded

Enhanced only if academic control rewards break

External audit

Eliminated

Eliminated

Eliminated in most cases

Selfdetermination eliminated all round

Budget-driven priorities

Marketisation and audit

but on an accumulation of scholarship, observations and personal historical engagements, of the kind that underlies synthetic intellectual judgements. Others may disagree with the conclusions. It is a fruitful area for research.

Implications for the Hayekian Project Henkel (2005, p. 159) finds that with higher education and science becoming important instruments of national policy, changes in the environment of academic work constitute ‘a major threat to academic identity’, understood in the traditional terms of disciplinary identity and agency freedom. ‘Higher


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education institutions and their members’ have been subjected to ‘unprecedented government steerage and scrutiny’, and have ‘had to locate themselves and compete in various forms of market’. Holders of academic power are increasingly required ‘to adopt managerial structures, mechanisms and values’. Research funding is more dependent on defining the research as ‘strategic’; research carried out ‘in the context of application’ is the norm, the pathway to innovation often begins in industry (p. 160). ‘Scientists can no longer be said to maintain a bounded space in which they make autonomous decisions about the allocation of public funding and the development of science’ (p. 161). ‘Most institutions have been transformed since the early 1980s. Only some of the most prestigious’ have sustained ‘an image approximating to a collegium’ (pp. 161–162). Henkel notes that for some interviewees ‘the ideal mode of research is still to create a niche or bounded space, in which, free of external interference, it is possible to sustain an individual epistemic identity and a distinctive agenda’. But ‘most regard such ‘‘negative freedom’’ as a thing of the past’. ‘Increasingly, choice and control of academic agendas are not so much a matter of freedom from external interference as of the power to manage multiple relationships’ (p. 170). ‘Scientists must negotiate between social and institutional pressures and preservation of identity’ (p. 171). Neo-liberal reform shifts academic work into a more active and externalised environment. In this busier space, with its mix of internal and external drivers, academic autonomy is relativised. This does not necessarily mean that it is diminished, though the potential is there. For the most part, freedom of control is sustained and in some respects (academic entrepreneurship, performance contracting) it might be enhanced for selected beneficiaries. On the other hand, techniques that externalise the locus of choice-making tend to reduce academic freedom as control, such as government audit and user-driven production. The use of university rankings to order funding and differentiation may also undermine academic choicemaking, though the implications are more ambiguous. As Henkel suggests, neo-liberal reforms have less happy consequences for agency freedom, where Hayek’s commitment was weaker. Most neo-liberal techniques reduce academic authority over the definition of the ‘good’, transferring this in part to managers and external authorities and interests, while channelling academic judgements about the work into a narrower set of pathways. External auditing and output-based, competitively and commercially driven, funding are inconsistent with the fuller exercise of agency freedom. These trends are associated with the weakening of Bernstein’s ‘singulars’ – which those such as Nowotny et al. (2001) would see as a

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desirable development – amid inter-disciplinary projects shaped by external funding; the growth of academic ‘regions’ such as business studies which draw on clusters of disciplines, and the growth of modularisation (Beck & Young, 2005). On the other hand, the neo-liberal project is mostly beneficial for social order as Hayek imagined it. Automatic and semi-automatic processes – markets, market simulacra, output-driven management and formula-driven allocations – all else being equal, reduce the scope for arbitrary judgement and politicisation in internal university governance and in the state– university relationship. The exception is accountability and audit functions, which have a stronger potential for politicisation. Quality assurance under academic control is probably the least attractive solution from a Hayekian viewpoint. It encourages collaborative planning rather than managed automatic mechanisms. In sum, neo-liberal reform largely fulfils the Hayekian requirements in relation to freedom as control/negative freedom, and social order, at the price of weakening agency freedom. Because in traditional academic life agency freedoms were advanced, at least for senior scholars and researchers, a regime of choice-making and individualised ‘responsibilization’ constitutes a regression. In addition, critical work in the social sciences has a special additional vulnerability in a Hayekian social order. That neo-liberal governments can restrict agency freedom while sustaining freedom as control provides them with a tactical flexibility in addressing this problem.

Implications for Academic Self-Determination In higher education, traditional practices confer on senior academic (though less so their juniors) a significant measure of agency freedom and freedom as power, and also some capacity for the radical-critical epistemological break (though this is restrained by professional isomorphism). As Table 2 indicates, overall neo-liberal reform constitutes a reduction in academic selfdetermination. Systems based on competitive ranking, performance and output management turn on necessities created by others. They are designed to shape academic conduct according to conventional logics, not enhance its capacity for self-determination and radical-critical innovation. We can note, however, that the test of freedom is rendered ambiguous by neo-liberal systems themselves. In those systems expectations are variable and the control of expectations is a primary aspect of rule. The ambiguity derives from


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freedom as control itself. As long as there is some autonomous space for academic personality, the pressures bearing down on self-determination can be represented as external environmental signals, or natural markets rather than a loss of freedom per se. The implications for agency freedom have already been discussed. The implications for freedom as power are also more negative than positive, though it is less clear-cut than in relation to agency freedom. This is because one characteristic of neo-liberal systems is to differentiate levels of freedom as power between different agents within a common set. Competition, markets, commercialisation and performance-driven funding create a win/lose distribution, in which the winners end up with more freedom as power than do the losers. The effects vary by individual, and to an extent also by field of study and by institution. Entrepreneurial academics gain but only if they succeed; and, as Henkel (2005) notes , amid neo-liberal reform, academics in elite universities experience greater continuity than do other academics in academic cultures (enhancing their agency freedom), and more and wider strategic and resource-based options (enhancing their freedom as power): ‘The degrees of choice and control available to researchers differ widely, particularly in a stratified university system like that of Britain’ (Henkel, 2005, p. 171). Reductions in freedom of power are more clear-cut in the case of techniques that externalise the determination of activity, such as external audit and output, and contract-determined funding from governments, and also user-driven production and enhanced competition between institutions. All of these reduce the capacity of academics both to define the desired ends and to pursue those ends, unless their desires are centred (as Hayek would have it) on competitive success as an end in itself. The implications for radical-critical freedom, for the potential of academics to make the epistemological break, are more problematic than for the other forms of freedom. It is difficult to see how any of the established neo-liberal techniques and mechanisms could tend to enhance radicalcritical freedom. Though market-oriented systems encourage economic innovations, they are more conservative in epistemological terms. Commercial science is more bound to follow established pathways than is funded science, for which the public good is an end as well as a means. Within the neoliberal frame, entrepreneurs, the competitively successful and the highest achievers in research, gain freedom as power. But their success and their freedom as power do not necessarily bring with them a greater intellectual license to range beyond the established tracks. If their next movie bombs at the box office they will lose their market edge, and they know it. Likewise university rankings favour extrapolations and imitations of existing success,

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not counter-intuitive innovations. Accountability-driven and user-driven systems are probably more epistemologically conservative than markets. In sum, neo-liberalism shapes an individual autonomy that offers little to academic staff in extra freedoms, except for those for whom choice-making is more effectively expressed in markets. Hayekian individuality as choicemaking autonomy is a recognisable element in the managed, quasi-market performance systems that now characterise universities. It has been ‘gained’ at the price of losing a more advanced level of agency freedom, a broader distribution of freedom as power and above all loss of the potential for the radical-critical epistemological break. This is academic autonomy without full-blown academic independence, and without academic self-determination including that potential to imagine it all turned upside down. While most projects remain under academic control, the nature of the projects, and the modes of work in which they are pursued, are often, though not always, decided somewhere else. The argument that radical-critical work can be seen to constitute a threat to the social order, and that a Hayekian government will act to suppress it arbitrarily, is not a hypothetical one. In Australia in 2004 and 2005, a dozen projects selected for funding by the Australian Research Council (ARC), on the basis of academic excellence as identified by peer review, were vetoed by the Minister of Education, Science and Training. The fields of study were history, political theory and cultural and gender studies. Gender-related projects were the main victims. Details of the affair are murky, but it appears that the charge against those projects was precisely that they appeared to be radical-critical of existing norms. In 2005, the Federal Minister appointed three ‘community’ representatives to the ARC Board to identify possible projects for veto. The over-turning of academic excellence as the determining criterion in research funding is an unambiguous reduction in academic self-determination. It should be emphasised that this is not a solely conservative government. It is a Hayekian government. It mixes social conservatism with a marketisation agenda. It has introduced both tighter controls over content and a partial deregulation of fee-charging into Australian higher education.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Neo-liberal systems in the universities constitute more than commodification, and less than full commodification (let alone full deregulation) despite the attendant rhetoric. The more fundamental objective is to join the


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universities to a larger system of power, while remaking the forms of freedom of those within. In this process forms of academic autonomy survive, but the independence of academic expertise is partly broken, and the scope for and scale of self-determined intellectual adventuring is reduced. The question is who controls the contents of the work, who frames the intellectual agenda and how academic identity is constituted in a Hayekian regime. This is not a lost academic cause. Henkel’s study notes that ‘basic or ‘‘blue skies’’ research, generated within the scientific disciplines, continued to be regarded as the primary defining activity of academic scientists’ (Henkel, 2005, pp. 164–165). Further ‘the normative significance of the boundary between the firm and the university as contexts of research remained quite clear and a source of identity reinforcement’ (p. 165). Her study also shows the agenda is multiple and contested. Continued autonomy is maintained as much by nimble movement between different imperatives and commitments as by the self-reproduction of fields of knowledge. Nevertheless, there must come a tipping point when the external manipulation of neo-liberal autonomy slips over into a level of coercion that negates freedom as control. As Hayek himself puts it, a subject is coerced when she/he ‘is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims and beliefs’ (Hayek, 1960, p. 21). This suggests that Mode 2 research as defined by Nowotny et al. (2001) constitutes coercion. This again is a serious internal contradiction for a neo-liberal research regime and is bound to generate continuing controversies. At the same time, because neo-liberal techniques continue to rest on an element of freedom as control, and because freedom as control (as Hayek notes) necessarily requires also an element of agency freedom, the neo-liberal control of academic identity must remain incomplete and is characteristically fraught in implementation. Neo-liberal mechanisms ‘are less stable and durable than often suggested y tenuous, reversible, heterogeneous, dependant upon a range of ‘‘relatively autonomous’’ knowledges, knowledgeable persons and technical possibilities’ (Rose, 1999, p. 18), because Individuals y must come to recognise and act upon themselves as both free and responsible, both beings of liberty and members of society, if liberal government is to be possible. And the openness and riskiness of liberal modes of government, both at the level of their rationalities and in the technologies that liberalism has invented in order to govern, lie in the inescapable quid pro quo that what individuals are required to give, they may also refuse’. (Rose, 1999, pp. 68–69)

Rose also remarks on ‘the uncertain status, inescapably partial vision, lack of evidential support, history of failure, vulnerability to changes in

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fashion and convention and much more – of the new forms of expertise granted the power to objectify: that of accountants and managers’ (Rose, 1999, p. 153). To this we can add that the promise of Hayekian psychology will not be realised. Too many university personnel have become expert in the fashioning of their own radical-critical imaginations to install the unconscious in the driver’s seat. Neo-liberal systems themselves have become too dependent on the reflexive fashioning of the self. Hayekian thought imagines its agents as automatically quiescent: ‘A closed theoretical system must of necessity posit people as passive objects of its theoretical truth’ (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 69). But being trained to work on themselves, neoliberal subjects – and all of us employed as academics are in some sense neo-liberal subjects, at least by institutional affiliation – have a continuing potential to transform themselves into the new and unexpected and to connect to a collaborative historical project of their own devising. As Castoriadis remarks, autonomy does not eliminate discourse of the other. It elaborates it. It is this that enables intersubjectivity, and allows us to comprehend ‘a politics of freedom’ (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 107).

NOTES 1. Buchanan and the public choice school have also been influential, in framing myths that opened the way to the neo-liberal reform programme (Marginson, 1997a, 1997b). 2. The chapter does not explore all possible dimensions of academic self-determination, autonomy and freedom; e.g. while it focuses on conditions underlying the capacity to exercise a critical imagination in academic contexts, it gives little consideration to critical thinking per se or to the nature and conditions of scepticism, matters with substantial literatures. 3. The chapter does not focus on Hayek’s economics, except to the extent this has implications for his political philosophy. 4. The fuller teasing out of the different strands and developments of neoliberalism post-Hayek, including the extent to which the various techniques of neoliberal government are ‘Hayekian’, invoke a host of interesting questions, but these issues constitute another paper and are reluctantly set aside here. 5. In relation to each neo-liberal technique there is an extensive literature spanning the normative, the positive and the critical. Though globally transmitted, these techniques vary from nation to nation. Despite this the fuller literature is not reviewed here; and the discussion is confined to the generic plane: this is a conceptual study not a research-based enquiry; though it is informed by empirical research in universities in Australia (e.g. Marginson & Considine, 2000) and elsewhere (Marginson, & Sawir, 2005).


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6. In this respect the discontinuities punctuating the evolution of knowledge are akin to those affecting species evolution in the natural world (Parker, 2003). 7. Gray calls it ‘the innermost contradiction in Hayek’s system of ideas’ (Gray, 1998, pp. 153–154). Hayek combines ‘two outlooks, that of classical liberalism in which the individual is sovereign and conceived as the bearer of weighty moral claims against society, and that of traditional conservatism, for which human individuality is itself a cultural achievement and in which individuals are subject to the claims of their society’s moral practices’ (Gray, 1998, p. 129). On one side there is the implication that we should revere not criticise tradition. ‘Except perhaps at the margin, we should not try to reform traditions so they meet our needs better, for we cannot know what are the real functions of traditions in society’. On the other side of his thought Hayek is a theorist of progress (p. 154). 8. Reciprocally, Hayek attempts to naturalise his social order as the spontaneous outcome of the exercise of liberal freedoms. This argument has been much criticised, e.g. by Galeotti (1987), Kukathas (1989) and Gray (1998). Hayek’s position is vulnerable on several grounds. First, not all spontaneously evolving societies are Anglo-American liberal markets societies. Second, those liberal market societies have derived from much more than spontaneous evolution. Among other things they have been subject to more or less continuous government intervention, or in Hayek’s term ‘constructivism’. Writing at the same time as Hayek, Polanyi remarks that free markets are not spontaneous developments but are artefacts of state power. The British 19th century market was established by state power in the form of ‘parliamentary absolutism’ (Gray, 1998, p. 151). Galeotti (1987, pp. 174–177) mounts a convincing refutation of Hayekian evolutionism in which ‘tradition’ is ‘somehow identified with the liberal order’ (p. 175). Gray raises the possibility that social tradition might oppose the emergence of a liberal market; and another possibility that it might be necessary to restrict market freedoms in the interests of social cohesion (pp. 153–154). In other words, the alleged interdependency between free economic markets and personal liberty does not survive a closer reading: ‘Hayek’s social philosophy founders on the awkward fact that deregulated markets do not require most of the liberties he values as a liberal and work to weaken the traditions he cherishes as a conservative’. Worse, ‘free markets sometimes work to enhance personal freedom by weakening traditional hierarchies and mores. More often the free market corrodes social cohesion with no corresponding enhancement of personal freedom’ (Gray, 1998, pp. 158–160). Galeotti (1987) makes the same point: ‘Quite often traditions are spontaneously destroyed by the process of social growth, and this is particularly true in the case of the market economy’ (p. 176). There is no answer to this within Hayek. 9. As if to reinforce this characteristic is/ought ambiguity, Hayek states that ‘the factual belief that such and such is the only way in which a certain result can be brought about, and the normative belief that this is the only way in which it ought to be pursued, are y closely associated’ (Hayek, 1967b notes on p. 80). 10. This parallels the arguments of the West German Ordoliberalem group (Gordon, 1991, pp. 42–43). 11. Some deregulation is proposed. For example, Hayek supports an end to compulsory schooling. Even this kind of policy has a constructivist intent: as the more consistent conservative Oakshott famously put it when criticising Hayek’s

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Road to Serfdom (1944), ‘a plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics’ (see Kukathas, 1989, p. 186). 12. Note that the reform programme also violates his own strictures about the cognitive limits of human capability at the base of his argument for freedom as control (is his capacity exceptional?). 13. Hayek sharply criticised Keynes for his refusal to abide by general rules and his claim ‘to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully’. However, his case against Keynes rests on a ‘straw man’ argument, the claim that Keynes’s position depended on perfect knowledge, which is not evidenced in Keynes (Gray, 1998, p. 101). 14. Hayek also disagreed with Mill’s notion that ‘experiments in living’ were affairs of the individual, who thereby asserted an inborn individuality against the constraints of social convention. He rejects this as romantic individualism: ‘Experiments in living’ should be left to ‘distinctive traditions or ways of life which compete for practitioners’ (Gray, 1998, p. 101). 15. It is unprofitable to produce goods commercially that the consumer can acquire free as the result of someone else’s decision to produce or purchase. Stiglitz (1999, p. 308) remarks that knowledge is about as close as possible to a ‘natural’ public good. 16. They also note rather cynically that ‘if the evolution of society is defined in terms of benign continuity, the difference and therefore the threat are less’ (p. 2); which does not sit easily with their rhetorical emphasis on ‘innovation’.

REFERENCES Beck, J., & Young, M. (2005). The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities: A Bernsteinian analysis. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(2), 183–197. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique (revised ed.). Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield. Calhoun, C. (1992). Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere’. In: C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987). The imaginary institution of society (K. Blamey, Trans. Originally 1975). Cambridge: Polity Press. Clark, B. R. (1998). Creating entrepreneurial universities: Organizational pathways of transformation. New York: Pergamon Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan-Smith, Trans.). London: Tavistock. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Galeotti, A. E. (1987). Individualism, social rules and tradition: The case of Fredrich A. Hayek. Political Theory, 15(2), 163–181. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In: G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gray, J. (1998). Hayek on liberty (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.


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Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Translated by T. Burger with the assistance of F. Lawrence). MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Hayek, F. A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530. Hayek, F. A. (1952). The sensory order: An inquiry into the foundations of theoretical psychology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1960). The constitution of liberty. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hayek, F. A. (Ed.). (1967a). Kinds of rationalism. In: Studies in philosophy, politics and economics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (Ed.). (1967b). Notes on the evolution of systems of rules of conduct. In: Studies in philosophy, politics and economics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (Ed.). (1967c). The principles of a liberal social order. In: Studies in philosophy, politics and economics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (Ed.). (1967d). The results of human action but not of human design. In: Studies in philosophy, politics and economics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1973). Rules and order. Volume 1 of law, legislation and liberty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1976). The mirage of social justice. Volume 2 of law, legislation and liberty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. (1979). The political order of a free people. Volume 3 of law, legislation and liberty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (Ed.). (1989). Preface to the second edition. In: Hegel’s science of logic (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International. Henkel, M. (2005). Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment. Higher Education, 49, 155–176. Kukathas, C. (1989). Hayek and modern liberalism. Oxford: Clarendon. Marginson, S. (1993). Education and public policy in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marginson, S. (1997a). Educating Australia: Government, economy and citizen since 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marginson, S. (1997b). Markets in education. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Marginson, S. (2004). They make a desolation and they call it F. A. Hayek: Australian universities on the brink of the Nelson reforms. Australian Book Review, 260, 28–35. Marginson, S., & Sawir, E. (2005). Interrogating global flows in higher education, Globalisation, Societies and education, 3(3), 281–309. Marginson, S., & Considine, M. (2000). The enterprise university: Power, governance and reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2001). Rethinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Parker, A. (2003). In the blink of an eye. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Pusser, B. (2004) Reconsidering higher education and the public good: The role of public spheres. Unpublished paper. Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samuelson, P. (1954). The pure theory of public expenditure. Review of Economics and Statistics, 36(4), 387–389.

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Sen, A. (1985). Well-being, agency and freedom: The Dewey lectures 1984. The Journal of Philosophy, 82(4), 169–221. Sen, A. (1999). Global justice: Beyond international equity. In: I. Kaul, I. Grunberg & M. Stern (Eds), Global public goods: International cooperation in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (2000). Development as freedom. New York: Anchor Books. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state and higher education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stiglitz, J. (1999). Knowledge as a global public good. In: I. Kaul, I. Grunberg & M. Stern (Eds), Global public goods: International cooperation in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press.

THE IDEA OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN LATE FOURTEENTHCENTURY OXFORD: THE CASE OF JOHN WYCLIF G. R. Evans ‘Professors complained bitterly when [Hood, the then Vice-Chancellor-designate of the University of Oxford] declared that anyone who criticised the intellectual fitness of his colleagues for government funding would be ‘‘summarily fired’’. Unrepentant, Hood responded that his ‘‘unequivocal support’’ for academic freedom didn’t apply to those ‘‘who choose arbitrarily and gratuitously to disparage their colleagues’’. That message couldn’t be tolerated at Oxford, where disparagement is served alongside the sherry’.1

This anecdote exemplifies the tension which is causing pressure in the modern world of funding by governments and global corporations. This includes the assumptions attached to the ideal of ‘academic freedom of speech’. Until the last few decades there was a presumption of ‘collegiality’. Academics were ‘colleagues’ and equals; they spoke as they chose and ideas survived or ‘went down’ in the fair fight of free debate. The move to line management of academics has produced, in the modern university system in many parts of the world, the kind of management practices evinced in the threat above. It is an important question whether this change threatens something which is of essence to academic endeavour. Academic freedoms, and threats to academic freedoms, existed from the invention of universities, but they were Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Volume 4, 105–120 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3628/doi:10.1016/S1479-3628(06)04005-6

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not always understood in the same way or allowed for the same reasons as has been the case in recent generations. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the differences, and to try to establish fundamental principles of the concept of academic freedom at least in this historical context. When universities came into existence at the end of the twelfth century, they were of two main kinds. The ‘graduate’ university, exemplified by Bologna, and concentrating on vocational courses, was ‘run’ by the graduate students themselves with a rector whom they chose. The ‘gild’ type of university, more usual in northern Europe, was modelled upon the medieval craft gild. The two leading early examples of this form of university were Oxford and Paris. Its members were the masters of their craft, and they formed a legal corporation which determined its own rules and decided whom to admit, and thus maintained the standard of the craft and prevented the unqualified or unworthy from practising it in that place. The students were the ‘apprentices’ and the Bachelors were equivalent of the ‘journeymen’, partially qualified but not yet admitted to the gild as members. The Masters of a medieval university had a strong sense of ownership. They treated one another as equals and were robust in their rivalries, with the consequence that the internal politics of academic societies were often fierce. Much depended on their having an institutional structure to which autonomy and collegiality were integral. This structure encouraged a method of teaching and examining which made heavy use of the formal disputation. A ‘question’ (quaestio), or opinion or judgement (conclusio), was proposed for formal public debate. There were institutional safeguards when this happened within the university, established rules allowing the safe discussion of disputed questions, in a context where no one needed to be led astray by hearing the ‘wrong’ view aired. Disputations, which formed part of the training and degree-course requirements, were presided over and ‘determined’ by a Master in his teaching capacity. Students were trained to argue for and against any question, and their Masters not only presided over such practice sessions, ‘determining’ the outcome, but also put on display disputations of their own. It was the way to make a reputation. The disputations afforded opportunities to speak out in a vigorous manner. Almost anything could be said experimentally, because the pattern of the disputation enabled unsafe opinions to be countered and formally rejected by the Master in his determination. It was, in this sense, a ‘safe place’ for academic freedom of speech. That does not mean that the value of academic freedom of speech was a recognised thing. On the contrary, there was a presumption that the truth, in

The Idea of Academic Freedom in Late Fourteenth-Century Oxford

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whose pursuit scholars and students were engaged, would turn out to accord with Christian orthodoxy. When serious controversies arose, the formal intellectual dance of the disputation and the sharp personal rivalries of academe turned into something capable of arousing the interest of the world, at large, and tempting it to interfere. The autonomy of the university and the freedom of the individual academic could then be threatened. The career of John Wyclif is an example of circumstances in which the boundaries of academic speech were tested. John Wyclif2 was a graduate in Arts at Oxford by the end of the 1350s, and he became a Master of Theology and university teacher in the subject just over a decade later. He was taken up by John of Gaunt, a patron active in royal circles, and brought in by the government as a consultant on a diplomatic mission to find a way to avoid England having to pay the taxes historically because of the papacy. He seems to have been an active debater in the university. Master William Barton was one of those who had engaged in disputations and ‘determined’ outcomes which were opposed to the opinions Wyclif preferred. He had ‘energetically’ (strenue) ‘determined against Master Wyclif’ in the schools (determinavit contra magistrum Johannem Wycclyff) (Shirley, 1958, p. 318). Wyclif was frequently involved in such encounters in his work.3 Topics were under discussion from at least the 1360s,4 which were to reach heights of controversy, with the witchhunting of Wyclif, and Wyclif himself had not been idle in keeping them at a pitch of excitement. So the mention of their former encounter may merely indicate that Wyclif and Barton had formerly had a lively debate, or that some formal disputation had been particularly memorable when Barton held that Wyclif was in error. But it may betoken real personal animosity. Perhaps, Barton got the worst of it when they were face to face as equals. The malice commonplace in academic life may be visible once more. The rotation of the senior offices of the university meant that sooner or later, one of Wyclif’s opponents might find himself in a position of power, as William Barton duly did. Barton was the Chancellor from 1379. By Wyclif’s time, Oxford’s chancellor had extensive disciplinary and supervisory powers. He could arrest and imprison in the local king’s prison. He was given jurisdiction in any litigation involving Oxford’s scholars, both students and teachers. He supervised the schools. He could deprive a teacher of his licence to teach. The chancellor of Oxford could certify directly to the chancellor of England the names of persons who have been excommunicated for offences they had committed in Oxford, in order that they may seize to be punished by the secular authorities (Burrows, 1896). The chancellor presided at meetings of congregation, for he was the head (literally ‘Head Master’). It

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was an office in which a complex balance of power had to be kept, for the congregation or formal meeting of the Masters remained the ultimate authority in the university. In 1327, a Statute decreed that the chancellor had powers to order the Masters to stop lecturing, but only when they had held a meeting and voted through an ordinance to that effect (Gibson, 1931). When it was his turn to be the chancellor elected by the Masters, Barton seems to have seized his moment to settle old scores. Claiming that Wyclif was threatening the faith of the faithful and the reputation of the university, Barton got the support of the faculty of theology and the faculty of canon law to proceed against Wyclif. He sent out a ‘mandate’, ‘to all those called sons of the university and to whom our present mandate shall come’. He greets them and requires their total obedience (firmiter obeoedire).5 ‘It has come to my ears, not without considerable displeasure’,6 he says, that certain heretics, bent on rending the garment of the church, already solemnly condemned by the church (solemniter condemnatas), are at it again, with new claims.7 ‘‘And they are publicly ‘dogmatising’ within the university and outside it’’.8 The accusation of dogmatising could embrace preaching as well as formal teaching within the schools. There had not been a systematic ‘official’ attempt to condemn the actual ideas taught in the schools of Oxford since 1315, though several scholars had been criticised and the whole regular process of disputation and determination routinely condemned one set of opinions in declaring another correct. This new episode was to raise a number of questions both of principle and of politics. Wyclif’s ideas had already been the subject of a series of condemnatory papal bulls in 1377, one sent to Oxford itself and arousing in the academic community there some indignation that the pope should presume to interfere in their affairs. Their response was in the spirit of the academic novels of C.P. Snow set in the mid-twentieth century. In the course of the court’s deliberations, none of us has for one moment entertained the thought that any fellow of this college could possibly have acted except with good intentions and according to the code of men devoted to science or other branches of learning.9 This move of Barton as Chancellor was perceived inside the university to be a very different matter from the university’s response to external attempts to have the opinions of a member of the university condemned. While that might get scholars closing ranks, and presenting a united front and a clever temporizing reply, this internal attack by one scholar, currently chancellor, upon the views of another, formerly his equal opponent in academic debate, needed to be dressed in at least an appearance of authoritativeness. So he called together well-known experts in theology and law (plures sacrae


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theologiae doctores) and professors of canon law (quos peritiores credidimus), so that they could form a collective view. It is this committee or working party which was to condemn Wyclif’s teachings on these points as erroneas, not merely the chancellor (Shirley, 1958). There are ‘scholars’ in Philip Pullman’s fictional other-worldly Oxford (Pullman, 1996). Lyra, his heroine, grows up with a sense that ‘scholars’ are different from other people – knowledgeable, expert, willing to answer questions and explain things for the love of clarifying the truth. These are personal characteristics, but they are also in a sense institutional. For most of the centuries of its continuance, the culture which began in the ancient Middle East, Egypt, Greece and in the Roman Empire was sustained by individuals without the protection and the discipline of an institutional framework. Since the end of the twelfth century, such a ‘framework’ has been provided by universities. The ‘freedom’ of the individual academic may depend in practice on the ‘autonomy’ of the university in which he worked. Wyclif was, perhaps inadvertently, testing the relationship of the scholar’s task or purpose to that of the university itself. Was Wyclif, teaching as an academic in the University of Oxford, free to say anything lawful in the pursuit of the truth he made into a personified ‘character’ in his Trialogus (Lechler, 1869), and would the university protect his freedom to do so? If it chose to regard what he was saying as unacceptable, what could it do about it? It may be helpful to try to set in their modern context the issues at stake here. There is in modern English law a statutory recognition of the principle that the university ‘campus’ is a ‘free-speech’ area, in which anyone who happens to be there – not just members of staff or students – is permitted to say anything lawful.10 The English experience here has been different from that of the United States of America, where ‘campus speech codes’ have tended in the opposite direction, towards the restriction of freedom of speech where it might offend the members of some interest-group. Having a legal protection argues that there is a public interest, which has prompted the legislation. A legal protection of the ‘academic freedom’ of individual academics was enshrined in English law only in 1988, and it was then envisaged as an employment protection. The Education Reform Act 1988, s.202, provides that the academic staff of universities may ‘question and test received wisdom’ without being in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges at their institutions. The clause was fought over quite hard in the drafting, in both Houses of Parliament. It was foreseen that once the tenure was abolished, academics who were saying things the institutional managers did not like might easily find themselves made redundant. This special

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‘personal’ freedom of speech for academics went beyond the ordinary freedom of a citizen to say anything lawful, the British constitution having no true equivalent to the right of freedom of speech, which is embedded in the law of the United States of America. Since then the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998 has added a protection against victimisation for employees who raise concerns in the public interest (concerns listed in the legislation). Again there is only a loose parallel with the American ideal that the conscientious whistleblower-employee, far from merely being protected against reprisal, should be regarded as something of a hero and as acting in accordance with a loyalty to the higher good of the employer. The tensions tugging to and fro in all this are now expressed in the legal categories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But underlying them are some of the questions Wyclif’s Oxford was now facing. In the modern world, at least in England, the line is drawn at what is unlawful. If an academic conducts research into racial differences and seeks to publish it, there may be newspaper headlines asking whether what they write is in breach of legal restrictions on racial discrimination or incitement to racial hatred. A case in the University of Edinburgh in the 1990s, involving academic research on racial differences, provided a useful example of the difficulties of definition that could entail, and there have been similar instances since. Wyclif’s Oxford was not a world of academic freedom of speech in any modern sense. The limitations of freedom of speech and opinion were – in intention – those of Christian orthodoxy, though it proved again and again to be not at all easy to pin that down in a way which would end the arguments about any given point once and for all. At the heart of the expectations of both medieval and modern academic ‘speech’ is an assumption that scholars will be in pursuit of the truth in whatever they say. The medieval world has an embedded assumption that ‘the truth’ is Christian orthodoxy. To depart from it is deemed to be driven by the devil. Modern concerns tend to be voiced about different reasons for suppression of the truth, especially the danger that the funder of research – for example, a biotech or pharmaceutical company – may try to suppress the results if it does not like them. Wyclif made exactly that claim. In the Middle Ages as now, there were academics who would say it is right to give false opinions for a ‘good end’. Some moderni doctores, say Wyclif reprovingly, ‘approving a lie and saying that such truths of Scripture are not to be stated because they trouble the Church’, are in fact the church’s enemies in their arrogance (Loserth, 1913). But the individual who claims for truth views that ‘authorities’ dislike courts trouble. Wyclif had been doing that as he


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‘wrote up’ and published his lectures and responded to the challenges of others. Wyclif even seems to have acknowledged something close to a whistleblower’s duty. He says that if moderni ecclesiastici did not sin by being too modest to speak, the church would not be so much under the tyranny of the devil (Loserth, 1913), which he considered to be driving the remarks of those who opposed him. The modern assumption has been that the protection of personal academic freedom and institutional autonomy for universities is ‘in the public interest’. The public interest has been defined in terms of the value of protecting the independence of research and expert opinion, so that governments can be challenged and policy-formation restrained by objective and disinterested research and analysis. This has been seen as a useful protection against the arbitrary or ill-considered exercise of the power of the State. Alarm bells ring when politicians are seen to attempt to suborn the academics and undermine their independence by making the funding of their research dependent on their arriving at conclusions acceptable to the government of the day. Academic freedom under the protection of the institution has never been identical with a freedom for an academic to do what he or she pleases ‘in the university’s name’, and the question of ‘not bringing the university into disrepute’ was a lively one long before it became routine to include it in modern contracts of employment for academics. William Barton, as Chancellor of Oxford, said Wyclif had in no small way damaged the university’s reputation (haec universitas mater nostra non mediocriter diffamatur), because he was perceived to have said what he had in its name.11 Nor was it acceptable in the Middle Ages to criticise the university itself. Johannes, an Austin friar, was disciplined in 1358, because he called the university a gymnasium of heretics. In 1360, he retracted along with others who had criticised the university.12 Modern academic ‘experts’ have a reputation which rests partly upon their own work and achievements and – often – partly upon the perceived standing of the university to which they are attached. Speaking in their own name, they may also be perceived to be speaking as a representative of the university, and its reputation may also be in the frame. The line may not be at all clear. John Wyclif began his speech to Parliament – or at least the version of it he gives in his On the Church – by asserting that he is acting independently and in the public interest: ‘we have come together at the command of the Lord King to say what seems to us to be true in the matter laid before us’ (secundum videre nostrum veritatem in casu nobis exposito). It is only too

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clear that the ‘independence’ of the expertise it was bringing in was not much in the minds of the government when it brought in Wyclif as an academic expert. We have already seen Wyclif acting as an academic consultant to government, and how he had recently been invited to ‘advise’ once more, in the expectation that he would uphold the propriety of a dramatic breach of the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. Wyclif himself did not consider – or did not acknowledge – that there might be a perceived conflict of interest arising from his debt to his patron John of Gaunt and his extreme current need for heavy-weight approval. There were claims about public interest in this episode. Wyclif lists the ‘public’ interests he has in mind: the honour of God, the benefit of the church (ad honorem Dei; ad profectum ecclesie) and also the stability of the realm (ad stabilimentum prosperum regni nostri). He assembled Old Testament precedents so as to underline the importance of this principle of danger to the realm. He says – in a manner reminiscent of the arguments of President Bush of the United States of America and the British prime minister when they took Britain and the United States of America into war in Iraq in 2003 – that it was no good waiting until the danger to the realm had happened (quousque probata fuerit regni perturbatio sive prodicio).13 Wyclif also appealed to the ‘real world’ context in which politicians like to operate, claiming that the Law of God did not intend sanctuary to be used to protect criminals14; one cannot break the law and then expect the law’s protection (frustra invocat legis auxilium qui offendit in eam).15 Nearly a quarter of a century after Wyclif’s death, the most senior figures in the church were still intent on extirpating ideas associated with his name. The ‘test of academic freedom’ involved moved from the challenge to an individual to an attempt to check the infectiousness of the ideas. The authorities were prepared to take far more extreme measures. When Arundel, as Archbishop of Canterbury, moved against those now regarded as Wyclif’s followers in 1407, he first put forth constitutions,16 initiating an ‘inquiry’. The question was how far and on what matters he had authority to interfere in the university’s business. The constitutions order all clergy of the province of Canterbury, wherever they are (implicitly including the universities), to keep to the orthodox faith. Constitution I forbids anyone to preach without a licence. Episcopal authority over the granting of licences to preach (as distinct from licences to teach) was relatively uncontroversial. Scholars were clerics, some secular priests, some in monastic or mendicant orders, and it could be a vexed question who had authority over them in which matters.


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Constitution V, however, stipulates that a Master of Arts shall not neglect to instruct the boys [correctly] about the sacraments.17 That seems to be a direct interference with the university’s control of the teaching that went on within it and in its name. No one is to read any work of Wyclif before it has been examined (antequam examinetur) by a committee of twelve drawn from both universities (Constitution VI), which the two universities are to choose. The choice of members was not necessarily the same thing as control of the committee. This committee was to examine the books and must agree unanimously that they are orthodox before they may be read.18 No one is to translate the Bible into English or any other language (Constitution VII).19 No one is to dispute about questions which have been ‘determined’, that is, already ‘decided’ upon by the church, except for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of them (nisi ad verum intellectum habendum) (Constitution IX). This was drafted with a subtlety which shows an understanding of the way the university worked, for it recognises that in the course of lecturing or training students in disputation, the ‘wrong’ opinion would need to be mentioned in order to be shown to be wrong (Salter, 1924). But Arundel also knew enough to be suspicious and he insisted on a thorough search to find out whether a scholar or someone living in a college or a hall or an academic university lodging of this kind had asserted, held or defended any conclusion or proposition or opinion about the catholic faith or good behaviour which gave the wrong impression or went against the decision of the church in a way which goes beyond what is required by the teaching of his faculty. This raises important questions about what constitutes campus speech, and how far into the ordinary social discourse of those who happen to be scholars, the supervision of bishop or university should extend. As it was first conceived, the committee was to be made up of representatives from both Oxford and Cambridge (Hudson, 2003). The universities dragged their feet. In 1409, Arundel applied pressure to see that the matter was attended to. It was decided that the committee was after all to be of Oxford men only, who were to prepare a list of errors which were to be submitted to the archbishop.20 The members eventually chosen were not the ‘top men’ of the university, but perhaps the most pliant to the archbishop’s will. Thomas Walden and other significant names were missing: Prestbury, Soulbury, Medford, Beckingham, Bannar. Indeed, only 4 of the 12 were Doctors of Theology. One of the committee-members, Richard Flemming, had been outstanding as an undergraduate, a top scholar in his performance in the Arts course. In a verse testimonial, a Carthusian called him a great grammarian and a

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good and proven poet; a shining orator and ready to speak or to write, a subtle logician, the subject in which he graduated first: Magnus grammaticus, bonus et metrista probatus Fulgens rethoricus, scribendo loquendo paratus, Subtilis logicus, et ibi primo graduatus.

He probably became a Master of Arts in about 1402, for by 1407, he was a proctor, one of the two university officers who acted on behalf of the university in legal proceedings and disciplinary matters. He took the position seriously enough to have a new copy of the university’s statutes made, which he paid for himself, leaving the volume for other proctors to use after him.21 Once he had served his year in office he began to study to be a theologian. As it had for Wyclif, that meant ceasing to be a regent Master of Arts and becoming a student again, and a non-regent. The encomium is equally congratulatory about his outstanding performance in the schools as a theologian: Quomodo se gessit sermonizando, legendo. Rarus successit similes vel nemo studendo.22

In March 1414, he was still only a Bachelor of Divinity, though he could have become Doctor of Divinity soon after. In the autumn of 1409, Flemming found himself accused of Wycliffite opinions over a proposition he had been debating in a disputation. The proposition was referred to the committee of 12 of which he was himself a member. They were reluctant to condemn what he had said, for Flemming remained a member of the committee. Six of the twelve said his proposition was false. Six said it was false only if it was taken in a certain sense and that the committee merely wished to save Flemming from himself and not to condemn him (in servandum honestam predicti Ricardi).23 The deliberations of the committee at this point have a distinct air of the Microcosmographia Academica, for Flemming was one of the duly-appointed ‘judges’ of right teaching. And because he was on the very committee which was weighing up what he had said, it would be embarrassing indeed if he was found to be uttering false opinions. It was suggested that the university’s congregation could not properly decide such a matter. Flemming was too young in university politics to let it go. He went to see the king. He demanded a right of appeal. The king sent instructions that a congregation should be held within three days to hear the appeal. Oxford’s commissary and the committee of 12 wrote to ask the king to excuse the university from summoning the congregation. The committee, they pointed


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out, had not been appointed by the university but by the Convocation of Canterbury. It was an ecclesiastical not an academic body. There could be no appeal from its decisions to the university’s authorities. The chairman of the committee himself apparently carried this letter to the king. Recourse was also had to the archbishop. The king modified his instructions and suggested a committee of 8, of whom Fleming was to nominate half, and those who had originally condemned his proposition would nominate the other half.24 Flemming and his reputation evidently survived, since he remained on the committee and went to the Council of Constance in 1415, and continued to be a respected figure. The list of decisions of the committee set up to decide the acceptability of Wyclif’s opinions was eventually ready only in March 1411, when, in another fudgy compromise, it was put before the convocation of the university before being sent on to Arundel.25 It contained 267 items. The letter26 which was eventually sent with the committee report to the Convocation of Canterbury on 17 March 1411, modestly held out that the 12 had done their research and based their conclusions on the best patristic authorities and were now sending the results to the archbishop and Convocation of Canterbury.27 All this threw up a number of questions about the methodology of this inquiry by the committee. What was the difference between a judicial process, the trial of a man for heresy and the holding of a free debate? It was not clear whether the university was to determine the unorthodoxy of the opinions complained of and merely inform the archbishop of its decision. And if it was to do so, there would have to be a method, and the method most natural to medieval academe was the holding of a public disputation. If there was to be a disputation, someone would have to preside, and the presiding Master would make the determination, so who, or what kind of officer was this to be? And if the idea in Arundel’s mind was that the university’s committee was merely to prepare a report for him and he would decide, where did that leave the university’s academic autonomy or the freedom of its individual academics to speak their minds? The modern reader will readily pick up the echoes of such considerations in contemporary episodes of government attempts to intervene in universities’ decisions on admissions and the syllabus. If we look in the opposite direction, towards the sanctions, a university could itself impose on miscreant members who said things they should not; we find a range of options. Pseudo scolares et suspecti, and those who are caught out in misbehaviour shall be denied the enjoyment of the privileges of scholars (scolarium privilegio non gaudebunt) (Gibson, 1931), threaten the

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early statutes of the University of Oxford. An academic could also be prevented from carrying out ‘scholastic exercises’. ‘And if he is a bachelor or a doctor,’ says Arundel in his constitutions, the man who is found of Wycliffite opinions is, by virtue of adherence to these very opinions, suspended from scholarly acts. Et si doctor (magister) aut bacalarius fuerit, eo ipso ab omni actu scholastico fit suspensus. That would mean that he could not lecture or take part in formal disputations and would in effect be professionally crippled. There seems to have been something of a rash of suspensions from the performing of scholastic acts during the period from 1370 to 1380. The Fellows of Exeter College were suspended in 1372 from performing scholastic acts for three years. The Cistercian William Rymington was Chancellor (1372–1373), while this was going on, and it is apparent from what Barton did to Wyclif that he was not the only chancellor who made use of his term of office to conduct a purge. An offender could be deprived of his degree altogether. In 1372, there was an appeal to the Court of the Arches by two Masters of Arts against a decision to suspend them from their degrees as well as from ‘scholastic acts’, and to strip them of their regency or authority to teach and take part in decision making (regimen magistralis). Their appeal against this decision was that they had lectured in the usual way, honestly and in a manner which won praise; and that they had done so according to the constitutions of the university as they ought and that, if allowed, they would bring forth more fruit in the future.28 An offender’s books could be burned, as happened to Wyclif, when his books were burned in the centre of Oxford at Carfax in 1410, according to Thomas Gascoigne, the Chancellor Thomas Presbury supervising.29 When in 1415, the Council of Constance condemned errors from Wyclif’s works 30, and ordered Wyclif’s works to be burned and his bones to be dug up (which was done in 1428), a type of ‘sanction’ with a long ancestry was being applied. The early councils of the church are surprisingly infrequently concerned with doctrine, but they certainly considered themselves competent to pronounce upon it. It was the Councils of Nicaea of 325 and the Council of Constantinople of 381 which produced what is still known and used as the ‘Nicene Creed’. The Council of Constance’s Session 15 pronounced that ‘in our times the old Enemy has stirred up new battles, of which the ringleader is a certain pseudo-Christian, John Wyclif.’31 While he lived, Wyclif asserted various articles, forty-five of which are listed. He also wrote books, which are condemned by the council, the Dialogus and Trialogus ‘and many other treatises, books and short works’.32 These books he made available for the


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public to read (publicationem publice legendos exposuit) and many ills have followed, ‘especially in the kingdoms of England and Bohemia’ (Tanner, 1990). The council made a point of the fact that the Masters and Doctors of the Universities of Oxford and Prague had long disapproved of his work.33 It notes that 260 articles of Wyclif have been further condemned by Oxford (Tanner, 1990). The council accordingly forbids the reading (lectio), study (doctrina), exposition or citing (allegatio) of Wyclif’s books, except for the purpose of refuting what they contain, some of which is heretical, some merely erroneous, some simply offensive to right-minded ears (Tanner, 1990). The burning of books, their banning or suppression, is in one key respect no different from the prevention or delay of publication under the contract often drawn up today between university or academic and public or commercial funder in the interests of commercial exploitation of the discoveries the funder deems itself to be ‘paying’ for. Fourteenth-century Oxford had a fixed idea as to what the truth would turn out to be. When it thought it saw untruths being uttered, it sought to stop them in their tracks by draconian means if necessary. In defence of the truth it was equally fierce. But it did allow both sides of the case to be argued in public disputation in the university, and in that core sense, at least, it protected freedom of academic speech.

NOTES 1. Kirp, D. L. (2004). Management 101 at the ‘‘New Oxford’’, International Higher Education, 35, 12. A version of some of this material appears in Evans, G. R. (2005). Wyclif, myth and reality. London. 2. The standard biography on Wyclif is still Workman, H. B. (1926). John Wyclif, A study of the English medieval Church (2 volumes.). Oxford. But see my biography, John Wyclif (forthcoming). 3. In the list of Masters who disputed or determined against Wyclif are mentioned a monk of Durham and a monk of St. Albans, Fasc.Ziz., p. 241. 4. See Catto, J. I. & Evans, R. (Eds). (1992). The history of the university of Oxford, Vol. II, In: Late Medieval Oxford (p. 184). Oxford. ( ¼ Oxhist II), for an unpublished notebook describing topics in the air in the 1360s in Oxford, now Worcester Cathedral MS F.65, and the Oxford B.Litt thesis on this by S. L. Forte, 1947. See Scase, W. (1989). Piers plowman and the new anticlericalism, Cambridge. 5. Omnibus dictae Universitatis filiis ad quos praesens nostrum mandatum pervenerit: salutem, et mandates nostris firmiter obedire. 6. Ad nostrum, non sine grandi displicentia, pervenit auditum 7. His diebus, pro dolor, innovant 8. Et tam in ista universitate, quam extra, publice dogmatizant.

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9. The Affair, play based on Snow, C. P. (1964). The Masters (p. 115). London. 10. Education No.2 Act (1986), s.43. 11. FascZiz, p. 111. Cf. et universitas Oxoniensis non mediocriter diffamata, FascZiz, p. 108–109. 12. See Munimenta Academica Vol.1.220–224.207–212, 189–190. for the proctors’ book recording this and giving a picture of the disciplinary process. 13. De Ecclesia, p. 145. 14. De Ecclesia, p. 147. 15. De Ecclesia, p. 149. 16. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (4 volumes, London, 1737), Vol. III., pp. 314–319. Crompton, J. (1961). Fasciculi Zizaniorum. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12, 35–45 and 155–166. P. 159 discusses the committee of twelve. 17. Ne magistri in artibus vel grammatica intromittant se de sacramentis pueros suos instruendo. 18. Scholis, aulis, hospitiis, seu aliis locis quibuscunque intra nostram provinciam antedictam, sive secundum ipsum doceatur, nisi per universitatem Oxonii aut Cantabrigiae, seu saltem duodecim personas ex eisdem. 19. Statuimus igitur et ordinamus, ut nemo deinceps aliquem textum sacrae scripturae auctoritate sua in linguam Anglicanam, vel aliam transferat. 20. Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 96–99, pp. 117–120. 21. Snappe’s Formulary, 18, p. 95. This is now Registrum C. 22. Snappe’s Formulary,18, pp. 138–139. 23. Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 95–100. 24. Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 97–98 for this part of the story. 25. Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 128–130 and 156–158. Those who faced the task of compiling, it could have begun with the 19 propositions from 1377. There were 18 which Arundel had ordered to be drawn out of the Trialogus of Wyclif in 1395–1396, refuted by Woodford, De causis condemnationis xviii articulorum damnatorum Iohannis Wyclif, ed. E. Brown, Fasciculus rerum expetendarum (London, 1690) and see Hudson, A. (2003). Notes of an early fifteenth-century research assistant, and the emergence of the 267 articles against Wyclif, English Historical Review, cviii , 685– 697. The junior proctor’s book has 61 conclusions and a short account of Wyclif’s condemnation in 1381 (by which is meant 1382) on 24 counts. There are also notes of 21 more, Snappe’s Formulary, p. 100. There was a set of 45 articles, not used in the 1411 list, which survives in FascZiz, fols. 107v–108v, in the part of the manuscript not printed in Shirley’s edition, James Crompton, ‘Fasciculi Zizaniorum’, op. cit., Journal of Ecclesiastical History, p. 159, notes the 266 in FascZiz, and compares the 267 in Wilkins, Concilia, III. 314–319. 26. Snappe’s Formulary, No.13, pp. 128–130. 27. Per duodecim electissimos viros, magistros et doctores, multos libros et libellos aliosque tractatus et opuscula multa prelibati Iohannis [W] longa deliberacione perspeximus, et multas conclusiones in eis, et que nobis videntur erronee et heretice et sanctorum patrum determinationi contrarie, studiose signavimus, signatas excerpsimus, excerptas morose digessimus, et digestas censuimus sacre doctrine contrarias, et per consequens reas igne sed cum apud plurimos nostra satis parva censeatur auctoritas.


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28. Per aliqua tempora legerunt, ut moris est, et rexerunt in eadem laudabiliter et honeste, ac legere iuxta statutua et constitutiones dicte Universitatis debuerunt in eadem, Snappe’s Formulary, 5, pp. 7–8. 29. See Gascoigne (1881) and Hudson (2003). 30. Hudson, A. (2003). Notes of an early fifteenth-century research assistant, and the emergence of the 267 articles against Wyclif. English Historical Review, cviii, 685– 697. The 267 which formed a part of the dossier against Wyclif were those compiled by the Oxford committee at Arundel’s instigation, though a short list of 45 probably provided a better focus for the council. These were the 24 condemned at Blackfriars in 1382, and 21 more put together in 1403 during the disputes in Prague between the Czech Masters and the German Master, and there was also a short list of 58, drawn up by Bartholdus of Wildunden. At Constance, topic was as important as text in drawing up these lists. 31. Nostris vero temporibus vetus ille et invidus hostis has stirred up nova certamina, quorum dux et princeps exstitit quondam Ionannes Wicleff pseudochristianus. 32. Et plures alios tractatus, volumina et opuscula. 33. Tanner, N. P. (Ed.) (1990). Magistri et doctores universitatum et studiorum Oxoniensis et pragensis articulos praedictos scolastice diu post reprobaverunt. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (2 volumes, II, p. 414). Georgetown. See Hudson, Premature reformation, pp. 430–431 on the academic opposition.

REFERENCES Burrows, M. (Ed.). (1896). Collectanea, III, Oxford Historical Society, 32, 121. Gascoigne, T. (1881). Loci e libro veritatum (p. 116). In: J. E. T. Rogers (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, S. (Ed.). (1931). Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis (p. 108 before 1275). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gibson, S. (Ed.). (1931). Ex deliberato consilio magistrorum tam regencium quam non regentium, ac concordi ipsorum consensus y a suius leccionibus ordinaries ac aliis teneanture cessare, statutes aliis ac consuetudinibus non obstantiubs, quibus artari solent magistri aliqui ad continuam lecturam, Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, (Vol. 193, p. 129). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hudson, A. (2003). Notes of an early fifteenth-century research assistant, and the emergence of the 267 articles against Wyclif’. English Historical Review, cviii, 685–697. Lechler, G. (Ed.) (1869). Trialogus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Loserth, J. (Ed.) (1913). Approbantes mendacium et dicentes quod veritates tales scripture non sunt dicende tum propter perturbacione ecclesie, tum eciam propter scelera que hoste ecclesie ex eorum audacia perpetrarent, De ecclesia. (Vol. 188, p. 159). London: Wyclif Society. Loserth, J. (Ed.) (1913). Non fuisset ecclesia sub tyrannide dyaboli sic substrata, Reponsiones ad argumenta Radulfi Strode, Opera Minora (pp. 196–197). London: Wyclif Society. Pullman, P. (1996). Northern lights. London: Scholastic Press. Salter, H. E. (Ed.). (1924). An aliquis scolaris, sive inhabitans in collegio, aula, sive introitu huiusmodi, aliquam conclusionem, sive propositionem, aut opinionem in fide catholica, aut

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bonis moribus male sonantem, aut contra determinationem ecclesiae, praeter necessariam doctrinam facultatis suae, asseruerit, tenuerit, defensaverit, seu aliquo modo proposuerit. Snappe’s Formulary. Oxford Historical Society, 80, 90–137. Shirley, W. W. (Ed.) (1958). Fasciculi Zizaniorum (p. 318). London: Rolls Series ( ¼ Fascziz). Tanner, N. P. (Ed.). (1990). Decrees of the ecumenical councils (2 Vols, II, pp. 411–414). Georgetown: Sheed and Ward.

AUTONOMY, ENTREPRENEURIALISM AND AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY POLICY FRAMEWORKS: A DIFFICULT BALANCING ACT Carole Kayrooz Kings will be tyrants from principle when subjects are rebels from principle (Edmund Burke, 1790).

INTRODUCTION At best, university research policies on autonomy can support an open legal, contractual and social environment for research collaboration and publication. For the individual, they can protect the publication of unpopular, contentious or speculative findings from undue interference. For the university, the policy framework sets the direction and guards the production of knowledge as a resource for its own reputation and income. As Trowler (2001) argues, the set of intentions codified in university policies generate their own reality and values that the university usually pursues with requisite authority. For the university system, the policy framework reflects the extent Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Volume 4, 121–146 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3628/doi:10.1016/S1479-3628(06)04006-8

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to which the university is able to set its own ground rules. University policy is not created in a vacuum but, rather, reflects governmental and other constraints, and is further bounded by international, national and regional priorities (Kleeman, 2003). This chapter explores explicit policy statements on research autonomy taken from a selection of Australian universities in order to examine the effect of recent governmental changes on research. In recent times, a market oriented Australian government has indirectly shaped the nature, conduct and practice of university research. Dwindling public funds, administered by means of an Institutional Grants Scheme (IGS) and a Research Infrastructure Block Grants Scheme (RIBG) have been used to steer knowledge production in the direction of national socioeconomic goals. In order to increase research funding levels, universities have encouraged academics to cluster into areas of research strength, to reshape research agendas to suit national economic priorities and to compete for targeted governmental funding. These developments are likely to be further reinforced by the proposed introduction of a national research assessment, the Research Quality Framework (RQF), an exercise similar to that adopted by the UK (the outcomes of which are described so clearly by Ian McNay in his chapter in this book). In response, many commentators on research generally report a growing imbalance between scholarly values, on the one hand, and entrepreneurial values on the other (e.g. Cooper, Hinkson, & Sharp, 2002; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), a situation that may be affecting the experience of autonomy at many levels. To date, many Australian social scientists in the university sector appear unenthusiastic about these changes in the research environment (e.g. Campbell & Slaughter, 1999; Kayrooz, Kinnear, & Preston, 2001; McInnis, 1999; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Vidovich & Currie, 1998; Wood, 1992).1 Criticisms include that universities are showing an increasing disparity: between basic and applied areas of research; and between the quality and quantity of research; profitable areas of research are favoured over innovative but unmarketable areas; there are increasing instances of secretive commercial in confidence arrangements and delayed publications as against open public disclosure and publication. Some also comment that institutional intellectual property is superseding individual ownership of original ideas, processes and products (e.g. Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Ylijoki, 2003). The main aim of this chapter is to explore the effect of these changing parameters of autonomy in research by providing a snapshot of some universities’ responses to governmental research drives, as reflected in their policy frameworks. In doing so, we should gain some insights as to the indirect effects of governmental steering on university autonomy. In other

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words, the aim is to show the current state of immediate protective mechanisms for research autonomy across selected universities in Australia. In highlighting the immediate institutional policy basis for autonomy, it is not intended to undercut the significance of the wider governmental policy framework for autonomy (see Chapter 4 by Marginson), but rather to explore the degrees of freedom that universities have at their disposal in the current context. Four sets of orienting questions guided the analysis of the policy statements from the selected universities. The Degree of Institutional Autonomy The first set of orienting questions to the research-related policies of various Australian universities concerns the degree of institutional self-determination. How does the university define autonomy? How readily have Australian universities embraced governmental research objectives as evidenced by their research policy documentation? If they have fully embraced governmental dictates, how are these reconciled with the institutional pursuit of their own research agenda and traditional scholarly values? Are there mechanisms for protecting and maintaining university autonomy that are reflected in institutional processes? Institutional autonomy is reflected by the extent to which the university explicitly recognises and acknowledges governmental economic goals in institutional planning. Alignment with Ideal Codes of Practice The second set of questions concerns alignment with ideal standards of academic freedom in the university sector. How do policy writers understand academic freedom in the relevant documents? How do particular university’s policies align with external codes of practice in relation to autonomy? Do they fall short of acceptable codes of practice? Do they emphasise certain aspects at the expense of others? Is there any statement, for example, on the implementation of any ideals on academic freedom? Is there direct reference to governmental and nation building objectives and the use of universalised objectives? What are the power relations between actors in the related networks? Coherence of University Policy The third set of questions concerns the internal alignment of university policies. Do institutional policies align to produce a coherent environment for academic freedom or do they reflect the tensions and dilemmas arising

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from the perceived imbalance between scholarly and entrepreneurial values? What explicit and implicit statements actually exist about academic freedom in the policies? What assumptions are there in these statements and whose perspective are they written from-the individual’s, the collegiate’s or the institution’s? What statements are completely missing in the policies and whose perspective would these statements best represent?

The Policy Implementation Gap Finally, to gain an understanding of how social scientists were responding to the increasing trend towards entrepreneurial values, the results of the policy analysis were compared with responses from a recent survey of these same institutions exploring academic satisfaction with their experience of autonomy (Kayrooz et al., 2001). Thus, the final set of questions asks what does the policy framework mean for the social scientist concerned? What are their responses to these policies and procedures in relation to autonomy? Are they experiencing clear communication of support, a complete vacuum or a confusion of responses to prevailing conditions?

APPROACH TO ANALYSING THE POLICIES In recognition of the varying perspectives on research autonomy, I have synthesised classical and interactional approaches to analysing policies (Colebatch, 2002). Classical models involve identifying problems, comparing solutions, checking implementation and achievement of results. These kinds of models tend to give the impression that policy decision-making proceeds in a neat, linear, sequential fashion without consideration of any contextual factors. Interactional analysis acknowledges the network of relationships in which policy is created and the reiterative, spasmodic and sometimes fortuitous nature of the policy process (e.g. Edwards, 2000; Shore & Wright, 1997, pp. 3–35; Trowler, 2001; Weller, 2001). Classical models are combined with interactional models to legitimise contextual considerations, such as the range of stakeholders, the diversity of their agendas, the activities of negotiation, coalition building and the ratification of agreed outcomes. I particularly focused on the power relations between actors in the network, the voice of decision makers, the use of universalised objectives and the instruments of governance. Although the scholarly literature critiquing policy creation and implementation has


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emphasised many policy issues, four were particularly relevant to this study: the clarity or vagueness of goals, the degree of external reference and consultation in policy creation, the internal cohesiveness of the various policies and the potential for discrepancy between policy and implementation (for an excellent review of this literature in the higher education sector, see Gornitzka, Kyvik, & Stensaker, 2002). This study utilised web-based documents drawn from three universities within Australia to explore the immediate institutional policy framework for autonomy. Research-related documents created during the period 1998–2002 included enterprise bargaining agreements on academic employment conditions,2 institutional strategic plans, intellectual property policies, research management and other relevant research policies. Also included in the documentary survey were any responses from the Australian University Quality Audit, a government-initiated institutional review of university functioning as against an institution’s own objectives. Overall, 23 documents were examined for overall themes and institutional variation in relation to definitions and goals, consultation and alignment with external standards, internal coherence, and degree of match with responses from a recent survey of social scientists in these institutions (Kayrooz et al., 2001; Kayrooz & Preston, 2002). Research-related documents were drawn from three universities as examples of a range of commonly accepted institutional types (Marginson, 1997; Marginson & Considine, 2000). ‘Sandstones’ are pre-1970 research-intensive universities, with a relatively long history of research-related activity and output, some of whom perform reasonably well on the world stage. ‘New universities’, alternatively called gumtrees, include post-1960 universities, often with strong industrial, professional and regional research connections, and ‘Universities of Technology’, with a longer history, are those universities focused on technology. I did not include in the sample any university established after the big amalgamations of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as these were thought to share many of the same characteristics of the new universities, and the selected sample more readily matched UK institutional groupings. While the focus of the analysis was on university policies as a whole, inclusion of some different types of universities was useful as there have been reports that universities are different (Harman, 2001a), and have been differentially affected by governmental research regimes (Morgan, 2004). Respondents for the survey component of this study had been previously selected from disciplines within the social sciences, with varying levels of experience, academic classifications and types of appointment, and engaged in different degrees of entrepreneurial activity and types of research (see Kayrooz et al., 2001).

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The Degree of Institutional Autonomy The guiding criteria for analysing institutional self determination as reflected in the documents were both explicit and implicit statements on the institution’s relationship with the state and other bodies. Specifically, I examined the way in which the pursuit of national economic goals was reconciled within the documents as expressed in the institution’s own research agenda and traditional scholarly values. Thus, there was a specific focus on the mechanisms that protect university autonomy. Alignment with Ideal Codes of Practice I amalgamated several existing frameworks and model clauses to assess autonomy in universities. The UNESCO (1997) Recommendation on the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel defines the rights and responsibilities of higher education institutions and their staff and students. The criteria in this document were combined with other commentators and researchers’ frameworks in the field that broadly accord with, and add to, these guidelines (Allport, 2000; Evans, 2002; Wood, 1992). The result is a draft set of criteria (Table 1) for assessing the state of academic freedom in a university. To my knowledge, this is the first time a collated set of checkpoints or guidelines has been developed. Coherence of University Policy The internal coherence of the documents was examined by contrasting any explicit statements on autonomy, and their underlying assumptions and perspectives. Attention was also given to implicit or missing statements, and the degree of match or mismatch between statements and other policies. Dilemmas and issues arising from the analysis were assessed and a judgement made on the favourability of the environment for autonomy. Guiding criteria for defining academic freedom were based on the Akerlind and Kayrooz (2003) study, described in the introductory chapter of this book. This study constitutes the only empirical analysis of the meaning of academic freedom of which I am aware. In this research, while different academics viewed academic freedom differently, all of the definitions could be related in a hierarchy of increasing complexity and inclusiveness. Thus, the most comprehensive view simultaneously incorporated, but went beyond, the other definitions. The most comprehensive definition used in this study was one


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where academic freedom is seen as an interacting combination of freedom: from interference for individual academics; that may be appropriately constrained by collegial, institutional and societal standards; that requires institutional and societal support to maintain; and is justified by active responsibility on the part of academics to exercise their academic freedom for the social good, and to do so wisely and appropriately.

The Policy Implementation Gap The academic response to policy was derived from a survey of social science academics in the same institutions selected for this policy analysis, and the survey was conducted during the same policy period (Kayrooz et al., 2001). Academics were asked about their satisfaction with aspects of academic freedom and their answers were recorded in both quantitative and qualitative format. The numerically significant impediments to academic freedom in this study and another (McInnis, 1999) were not related to direct interference in publishing or dissemination of research findings, but to indirect interference and workload issues. This is not to undermine the significance of isolated cases of direct interference in research, but rather to comment on the more numerically significant issues of workloads. Academics reported not being able to find the mental space to think critically about their research topics in the face of so much teaching and administration. It is for this reason that I paid particular attention to policy clauses concerning workload issues in the following analysis.

ANALYSIS OF THE POLICIES The Degree of Institutional Autonomy The initial analysis focused on the degree of university self determination in research-related policies, but interestingly there was no explicit statement on university self-determination in any of the documents across the three universities. Perhaps universities perceived that parameters for university autonomy are already determined in relevant commonwealth or state legislation. Certainly, Anderson and Johnson (1998) showed that institutional authorities believe the Australian government to have relatively less authority to intervene than other countries in Asia, South America and Africa. Yet, given the marked changes in higher education since the Anderson and Johnson study, it

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is curious that no university in this admittedly small sample thought the matter sufficiently important to make an explicit statement on its status in this regard. Nor did any university find that it was necessary to have a watching brief in the form of policy statements and/or committees on excesses or incursions into university autonomy. The relationship between state and institution was tacit, undeclared and seemingly unexamined. The emphasis was on monitoring staff activities downwards, not monitoring state-university relations upwards. While there were no explicit statements on institutional self-determination, there was some institutional variation in statements on self-determination at an implicit level. The research university provided the strongest implicit statement on self-determination, and the university of technology, by contrast, was the most transparently aligned with national economic goals. The research university’s Vice Chancellor appealed to the highest of academic values in the strategic plan. This was expressed in instrumental language as ‘the creation and transmission of knowledge’, the ‘passionate and disinterested pursuit of truth’, the ‘maintenance of the highest standards of research and scholarship’ and the ‘enhancement of society’s core values’. The university of technology, by contrast, was explicitly directed towards national economic goals. The policy writer clearly stated that the university was shaped by the emerging research and research education policy environment, and, in particular, the policy reform agenda introduced by the Australian Federal Government in 2001. The main focus of its strategic plan concerned encouragement and rewards for staff and research centres in attracting external research funding, particularly for collaborative research. In line with the government policy to channel university research into national economic goals, these were intended to focus on outcomes-oriented research in a small number of areas of strategic importance for Australia. The new university’s policies were caught between two sets of values, unsure whether the university allied with scholarly goals or with entrepreneurial goals. Although the new university was influenced by governmental guidelines, its Vice Chancellor stressed the need for scholars to extend, critically question, and reinterpret received knowledge. Adjacent in the text were the common truisms about achieving excellence and being responsive to the environment in which the university found itself. The direction and nature of the knowledge to be extended, questioned and reinforced was not stated, although an uneasy juxtaposition between scholarly and entrepreneurial discourse in this document suggested that this university, like other new universities, was well aware of its fiscal survival being dependent upon achievement of entrepreneurial goals in accord with governmental economic


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objectives. There was also no specific mention of national goals. Scholarly ideals of research were framed firmly within economically responsible terms.

Alignment with Ideal Codes of Practice Each university policy writer alluded to a definition and some features of academic freedom, although none referred to any external authority nor comprehensively listed the range of features found in Table 1. Missing generally was any reference to the right of academics to speak out about the university and to participate freely in decision-making. Also missing was the use of an internal monitoring committee and external watchdogs. As with institutional autonomy, the research university was by far the most comprehensive of the three universities in its description of academic freedom, one that recognised the university’s responsibilities to provide a supportive environment. Yet, even the research university listed only 5 of the 11 criteria specified in Table 1. Interestingly, the research university was the only one to specify academic responsibilities to the institution and the state, a necessary aspect of a more complex and inclusive definition of academic freedom (as argued in Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume). The university of technology, once again, provided a contrast with the research university in its position on academic freedom. It was least conversant with the criteria outlined in Table 1, only addressing one of them. Although there was acknowledgement in the enterprise bargaining documentation that all the parties to the agreement were committed to protect and promote intellectual freedom, there was only a cursory listing of its features and no statement on university or academic responsibilities occurred in relation to it. Rather, university responsibility was interpreted in more entrepreneurial terms in another document concerning intellectual property. This document stressed that the university wanted to provide an innovative environment that fostered the creation of intellectual property and provided a framework for considering its commercial potential. Similarly, the new university paid scant attention to academic freedom. The new university’s draft enterprise bargaining agreement was inconsistent with the guidelines on the protection of autonomy in the university sector. Only two of the criteria specified in Table 1 were addressed, although the document contained a specific clause stating that the parties to the agreement were committed to act in a manner consistent with the protection and promotion of intellectual freedom within the university. This was construed

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Table 1.

Appropriate Checkpoints/Guidelines on Autonomy in Universities.

a

Evans (2002)

Allport (2000)

x

x

x

x

x

x x x x x x x x x

Wood (1992) includes sharehold arrangements with university spin-off companies; amounts of money received from private companies; monies paid by sponsoring companies for scientific presentations; peer review when the reviewer has a financial interest in the research; and corporate affiliations when giving advice to the public.

CAROLE KAYROOZ

Freedom to pursue, discuss and disseminate in public debates any line of research Freedom to participate in institutional decision making and to speak out about institution Freedom to participate in professional associations and networks Alliance with industry compatible with university’s core business Open disagreement about findings by industry Appropriate limits on commercial in confidence arrangements Full disclosure of any conflicts of interesta Institutional and collegial support in cases of harassment Internal committee to review current policies and practices in relation to autonomy Independent intermediary for dissemination of research funding Appeal to external watchdog in standards on commercial exploitation Clear guidelines on financial involvement with industry – e.g. equity positions, industry sponsorships for conferences, seminars, use of venture capital

UNESCO (1997)


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as open and critical inquiry into academic matters, participation in public debates, and the freedom to express unpopular views in a professional capacity. Interestingly, the draft enterprise bargaining agreement for the following four years adds the rights of all staff to participate in debate relating to decision-making processes, including the right to express opinions about the operations of the university and higher education policy more generally, bringing the new university a step closer to international benchmarks. However, there was an uneasy juxtaposition of scholarly and entrepreneurial values throughout both this document and the strategic plan. The new university in other respects seemed more alert to governmental dictate, albeit through the mechanism of a collegial review process. This university had recently undergone an Australian University Quality Audit (AUQA), instigated by the Australian government yet undertaken by appointees from the university system, both in Australia and abroad. An analysis of the discourse arising from this exercise reveals the Australian government’s hand in attempting to improve management practice within the university sector. AUQA reinforced the focus on corporate procedure, rather than research value. One of the university’s Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) was commended for its well constructed strategic plan, analysis of industry, the external environment, stakeholders and internal competencies and capabilities. The audit panel also commented on a ‘useful’ SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis conducted by the CRC, and their instigation of strategies and outcomes performance indicators, as well as regular internal reviews for each major project. The panel completed its assessment by holding the CRC as a model for the rest of the university. Although the espoused approach of AUQA was to evaluate the university against its own objectives, quality was mainly determined, in this instance, by governmental objectives-adequacy of the planning and monitoring documentation, the amount of research funding attracted and the frequency of reviews. There was silence on the quality of the research itself – its capacity to question and critique received wisdom and its contribution to the field, its ability to extend knowledge, and its socio-economic significance – all stated or implied in the new university’s strategic plan. The review of research encapsulated by this audit focused exclusively on economic and managerial aspects, without reference to academic and scholarly aspects of research activity. Workload Policies Policies on workload and single researchers were also examined because of their association with research autonomy and the current government

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emphasis on developing research teams in Australia. The research university’s workload policy emphasised the University’s right to position itself as an internationally respected quality institution of research and graduate education. The discourse in the research university’s policies emphasised excellent undergraduate education and links with industry and the community in research and development. The university positioned itself as a contributor to intellectual and cultural enhancement. The document stated that academics may be required to contribute to teaching and research programs during summer sessions, weekend seminars, inter-semester periods; and to contribute to programs or projects designed to increase the number of full fee paying overseas students. There was simply no mention of workload at all in the university of technology’s documentation, while the new university’s enterprise bargaining agreement devoted a large section to workloads that accorded with the principles of mix, equity, flexibility, responsiveness and transparency. This was a positive aspect, although perhaps not surprising in view of this university’s quest to be both scholarly and entrepreneurial in equal measure. Yet, it is important from the academics’ perspective, given the key role of workloads in potentially impeding expression of academic freedom. The university agreed to reasonable steps to ensure that employees did not work excessive or unreasonable hours. There were also protections for researchonly staff in terms of equivalent salaries with teaching staff, gaps in continuity of employment, superannuation shortfalls, and government-funded research grant shortfalls. Interestingly, the new university was the only university to refer to single researchers, and this in its document on the establishment, approval, administration and review of institutes, centres and groups. This document suggests that centres are not intended to detract from the work of single researchers or that of small groups that might choose to work informally within schools.

Coherence of University Policy The third analysis focused on the alignment of university policy to create a coherent framework for academic freedom. The research university was explicitly oriented to a research culture that, as espoused in its intellectual property document, fostered commercialisation, technology transfer and entrepreneurial endeavours. It emphasised the creation of wealth, but not specifically social benefits, as an outcome of research. Notably, staff were


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exhorted to protect intellectual property by avoiding public disclosure through publication or academic conferences. In contrast, in the research ethics policy, researchers were encouraged to publish results as soon as practicable ‘‘because peer review remains one of the main means of assessing the validity of research’’. There was little attempt at resolving these two value statements except where the researcher(s) and the university decide that they, either singly or together, have a financial and pecuniary vested interest in seeing the idea grow to full potential (note there was no mention of scholarly worth). Once again, the new university expressed the uneasiest relationship between scholarly and entrepreneurial values. There seemed only an embryonic awareness in the various documents examined of the potential competition between these values, both within each document and between the various documents. Statements on academic freedom were juxtaposed clumsily within various research-related documents, such as the strategic plan and draft enterprise bargaining agreements, and these fractures widened substantially when compared with associated research policies. As examples of incongruity within the documents, there was an explicit statement in the code of conduct for research on the self-correcting nature of research, that concerned communicating between collaborators, maintenance of and reference to records, presentation and discussion of work at scholarly meetings, publication of results, including the important element of peer refereeing and the possibility that investigations will be extended by other researchers. In effect, the policy writer suggested that research results and methods should be open to scrutiny by colleagues within the university, and by means of appropriate publication by the profession at large. The disconnection occurred again later in the same document, in a qualification that secrecy was occasionally necessary in the case of contracted research, or of non-contractual research that is under consideration for patent protection. In the same qualificatory vein, the document went on to state that research findings should not be reported in the public media before they have been reported to a research audience of experts in the field of research, except where there is a contractual arrangement. This latter scenario could be seen as an infringement of, or a support for, academic freedom, perhaps illustrating the ambiguity of precise definitions or, indeed, the new university’s expanded brief to be both scholarly and entrepreneurial in the current context. The new university’s research investment plan was silent on the ideals as expressed in their strategic plan and enterprise bargaining agreement. This plan aimed to increase funding from external sources and to realign funding

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internally to further support research. Similarly, in the document on intellectual property, there was no statement on competing values or tensions: the document refers only to the need to protect valuable intellectual property, including moral rights and the reputation of the university, its staff and students. However, in one clause, the policy states that commercial in confidence arrangements are binding, but that appropriate consideration should be given to academic production, publication and exchange of ideas and information as well as the commercial interests of the university. An embargo ‘normally not exceeding twelve months’ can be placed on access to a thesis or dissertation by parties other than examiners and relevant university committees. The university of technology provided the clearest contrast with, and similarity to, the new university, in that, unlike the new university, its institutional policies cohere but, like the new university, they seemed not to produce a particularly supportive environment for institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Although all parties to the university of technology’s enterprise bargaining document agreed to protect and promote intellectual freedom within the university, there appeared a strong unitary institutional voice within and between the documents, and, in this sense, they were consistent. One gets the sense that academics within this university know where their institution stands, as evidenced by various statements throughout the documentation. For example, in the policy concerning intellectual property, the policy writer states, ‘‘Where both the University’s publication and commercialisation objectives coincide, publications will proceed, through the Research and Development Office, in a managed way that allows both the objective of publication to be achieved and the objective of commercialisation to be realised’’. And again, ‘‘the university reserves the right to prohibit commercialisation of intellectual property that in the reasonable judgement of the university is incompatible with the best interests of the university community’’. Across the three universities, scholarly values (e.g. academic integrity and independence), rather than entrepreneurial values, were emphasised in policies that referred to more traditional academic issues existing prior to the increasing entrepreneurialism of the 1980s and 1990s. Research ethics codes and other traditional codes of conduct were clearly skewed towards scholarly values. Not surprisingly, policies that typically existed after these changes, such as those concerning intellectual property, favoured an entrepreneurial approach. Scholarly values in these policies were expressed in a series of half reluctant qualifications. Overall, in this study, entrepreneurial concerns outweighed scholarly concerns in University policy documents,


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perhaps due to the recent proliferation of policy related to research management and intellectual property.

Policy and Practice – The Potential for an Implementation Gap To gain an understanding of how social scientists were responding to these research related policies, the policy analysis was compared with a survey of social science academics in these same universities, exploring satisfaction with, and experience of, autonomy (Kayrooz et al., 2001). Thus, the final set of questions addressed in this chapter ask: what does the policy framework mean for the social scientist concerned? What were their responses to these policies and procedures in relation to autonomy? Were they experiencing clear communication of support, a complete vacuum or a confusion of responses to prevailing conditions? In all, there were 28 responses to the survey questions, distributed equally between the three institutions considered. While this was a very small sample of the academics within those universities, overall it was interesting that, when questioned about satisfaction with autonomy, there was a tendency for those in the research university to rate their sense of satisfaction with academic freedom less favourably than the new university or the university of technology. As evidenced by their response to specific aspects of academic freedom, only one-third to one-half of the research university’s academics (as opposed to two-thirds in the new university and university of technology) experienced high levels of maintenance of intellectual property rights in research, freedom to publish without fear of censorship, choice of colleagues for research collaboration and the right to seek peer review on findings (see Tables 2 and 3). Academics in both the university of technology and the research university felt less freedom to define research topics and methods than in the new university, and experienced more of a sense of accountability to varying sources (e.g. professional bodies, ethical guidelines). Relatively low numbers across the three universities experienced positive benefits from a more entrepreneurial environment. Academics from the research university experienced markedly more reluctance to criticise institutions that provided large research grants or other forms of support than the other universities. A small number of the university of technology and research university academics had experienced being prevented from publishing contentious material. This experience was validated by both items concerning discomfort with publishing contentious research results and inhibition about sharing ideas with colleagues for reasons of commercial-in-confidence information. A

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Table 2.

Institutional Variation in Academics’ Experience of Academic Freedoma. New University

University of Technology

High Moderate Low Maintenance of intellectual property rights in research Freedom to publish without fear of censorship The right to choose colleagues for research collaboration The right to seek peer review on findings Freedom to define research topics and methods Freedom from accountability to any source a

5 5 4 4 5 5

3 1 2 2 2 1

0 1 1 0 0 2

High

Moderate

Low

7 6 7 6 4 3

2 3 3 2 5 5

0 0 0 0 0 2

Research University High Moderate Low 4 4 6 5 5 3

6 6 2 2 5 3

1 1 2 3 1 4

Not applicable responses were removed. Any remaining missing values mean that a respondent did not answer that item.

CAROLE KAYROOZ

Institutional Variation in Academics’ Experience of Academic Freedom. New University

Reluctance to criticise institutions that provide large research grants or other forms of support Cross-fertilisation of ideas through interaction with industry and government sectors Discomfort with publishing contentious research results Enhancement of the quality of research through interaction with external funding bodies Being prevented from publishing contentious results An increasing atmosphere of competition among colleagues


Research University

Minor

Not at all

Major

Minor

Not at all

Major

Minor

Not at all

0

3

5

1

6

4

3

4

4

1

3

4

2

6

3

2

6

3

0

3

5

1

3

7

1

3

7

1

1

5

2

4

5

1

5

4

0

0

8

1

1

8

1

2

8

4

1

3

5

5

1

6

1

4

4

2

2

6

4

1

8

1

1

137

Major


Table 3.

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Table 3. (Continued ) New University

Writing grant applications and tenders that reduce research time Emphasis on funded research over unfunded research within university Inhibition about sharing ideas with colleagues for reasons of commercial-inconfidence information Changes to research focus because of possible lack of funding


Research University

Major

Minor

Not at all

Major

Minor

Not at all

Major

Minor

Not at all

4

1

2

5

5

1

10

0

0

1

1

6

1

4

6

1

2

7

2

2

4

3

4

4

2

5

3

CAROLE KAYROOZ


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sizeable proportion across all three universities had experienced an increasing atmosphere of competition among colleagues, reduction in research time through writing grant applications and tenders, changes to research focus because of possible lack of funding and an emphasis on funded research over unfunded research. Similarly surprising were academics’ responses to the qualitative survey questions on their experience of academic freedom. When asked to elaborate on their sense of satisfaction with academic freedom, by far the most frequent and most intensely negative responses emanated from the research university. Comments from research-intensive academics indicated that entrepreneurial values were ascendant in research, with increased workloads, accountability and managerialism compounding negative perceptions. It is not the lack of freedom that I am dissatisfied with, but it is the level of onerous workload we have that robs us off the freedom to engage in academic activities in which we would like to involve. Poor. Cronyism. Empire Building seems to be at a premium. Cheque book promotion, rather than promotion based on academic achievement, seems to have taken over. All this is demoralising and undermines the research environment. A little too much pressure to go after funding, which is not that important in carrying out research in management. There is pressure also to focus on quantity of publications rather than quality. At the heart of our work is challenge to the status quo but doing so means you will be punished. This university hates that kind of thing, it is market driven and we can offend people with crazy ideas. It is now very firmly the university of the bland, safe, marketable, low risk research. The university only pays lip service to the idea of academic freedom. My resort, in research, is to self-fund and to not think too much about promotion.

One less strident respondent highlighted the way in which research was constrained by focused research directions for those in the social sciences: The university would rarely, if ever, impose any explicit directions for research, teaching or publication. However, there are structural factors, such as the financial need (imposed on us by federal government funding regimes) to undertake certain types of industry collaborative research, which obviously limit the range of theoretical, ideological and methodological approaches with which all parties to the collaboration would be comfortable.

Although the new university incurred a less wrathful response from its academics, the confusion noted above in their policy documentation was validated by its academics:

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Recent enterprise bargaining has given me the insight that university management is either significantly bereft of any understanding of academic freedom (‘‘we don’t understand what your problem is’’) or is totally disingenuous about the concept. I had a problem with research on two major supermarket chains on which I received a letter with implied legal threats and the university management suggested that I stick to only ‘Annual Reports’.

Another stated: The institution has, over the last three to five years, been overly concerned with imposing commercial initiatives on to the academy y. The extra teaching workload brought on by these commercial agreements places restrictions on the academy in terms of their research activities. The increasing tendency towards grouping academics’ research interests into specific ‘research centres’ with narrower objectives also cramps academic freedom. The university has taken advantage of the fact that these academics have been willing and keen to get a marketing & management school going at this university but they are not willing to give these academics any time to do their research, it’s scandalous. Obviously, the morale of academics is very low and the turnover rate is high.

The responses of academics from the university of technology were least problematic, in accord with the policy analysis. Perhaps not surprisingly, given this particular institutional type’s longstanding engagement with commercial research, academics experienced a lesser sense of defining research topics and methods, and of freedom from accountability. Generally, respondents thought that the major problems were indirect: No-one tells you not to research particular areas but, unless you are part of the ‘in crowd’, you will not attract internal support. Promotions support for internal and external funding and other forms of research assistance all go to those areas identified as ‘key strengths’ in your faculty. In my view there is a markedly increased awareness of the need for funding from external sources that has a blanket, muffling effect on the willingness to be outspoken or critical of potential or actual university partners.

It was academics from this university that provided the most constructive way forward. Many thought the solution would be in building a supportive group of colleagues: y developing relationships and support both inside and outside my university are important. By acting together with immediate colleagues to make joint funding proposals, undertake joint research. Also, by developing good relations with NGOs [non-governmental organisations] and publishers who actually have more interest in my area of research than most of the people I work with.


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DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY MAKERS Many academics think that autonomy is desirable for the culture of the institution in which academics work, the nature of the research that is conducted within universities, and the collective and diverse interests of the society in which the university is located. If so, there are some sobering points for universities and individuals contained within this chapter’s findings. The first concerns the simple acknowledgement that universities possess a relationship with the state and other funding sources. However, this admittedly small sample of universities did not express any explicit statement on autonomy with respect to governmental or other interference. Yet the explicit expression of this relationship within policy documentation could elevate it in academic consciousness, and foster a healthy watching brief on the current condition of this relationship, not only for senior management, but for all staff and interested parties. Policy statements can be used by all stakeholders to provide insight into how the institution views its own autonomy. They can be used as a means for directing employee awareness as to how its representatives, its peak bodies or lobbyists, will monitor excesses or incursions into institutional autonomy. Universities did differ in their implicit acknowledgement of institutional autonomy. The research university displayed the most independent stance, showing clear awareness and emphasis on both academic freedom and institutional autonomy. The university of technology’s policy framework showed the most consistency in its research-related policies, although these were clearly aligned with the achievement of national economic objectives, rather than traditional scholarly values. In other words, the university of technology was the least responsive to autonomy in research-related matters in comparison with the other institutional types. The new university was the least resolved in its policy documentation, showing the most confused response to purpose and modus operandi in relation to autonomy. This is not a particularly surprising finding, given the research university’s historically longstanding engagement with the tradition of research autonomy and the university of technology’s traditional engagement with industry in research. The new university, in its aspirations towards the elite and, yet, needing to remain financially viable, was caught in the middle between scholarly and entrepreneurial values and, thus, displayed the most ambiguous response to university autonomy. The second point concerns best practice and benchmarking. Not one of the documents in the three universities referred to any ideal codes on autonomy in research practice, although the codes of other standards bodies

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were cited, in reference to ethics for example. This is curious given the espousal of academic freedom and university autonomy as key values in academia. Nor did any university comprehensively address the criteria outlined in Table 1. The research university, by far the most comprehensive, addressed only half of them, and the effect was often counteracted by other statements. Since this study, further iterations of enterprise bargaining agreements have seen the addition of other clauses in all of the universities, notably the right to speak out against one’s university. Certainly, across the sample there were statements on research autonomy in various policies but, although there has been incremental improvement in the awareness of issues and dilemmas concerning autonomy, a more concerted and comprehensive approach is required to embed all facets of autonomy into policy codes. The changing role of universities, in general, provides the context in which these reflections could take place and, as such, conferences, think tanks and seminars are needed to further understand the new role of the university in society. The third point arising from an examination of the policy documents showed that there was a general lack of coherence in orientation to autonomy within and across policy documents. Some policy statements seemed to contradict statements made in the same document, and some documents themselves seemed at cross purposes with others, even within the same university. Time seemed a factor here, in that the type of policy, typically found prior to the general shift to entrepreneurialism in Australian universities, emphasised scholarly values, while those produced after emphasised entrepreneurial values. Comparing the universities, the new university showed the most uneasy relationship, generally having to be both scholarly and entrepreneurial in orientation, perhaps in order to shore up a sense of university identity. Despite these observations, social scientists’ comments in the new university showed the most satisfaction. While the research university and the university of technology had more internally coherent policies than the new university, their social science researchers were the most dissatisfied. This was a surprising finding, and, although results are indicative only given the size of the sample, it is worth speculating as to why they occurred. There is some evidence to suggest that ambiguous goals may be unavoidable and, in some cases, desirable. In various studies, researchers have shown that vague and somewhat conflicting goals may facilitate adjustment to changing circumstances during implementation (see Gornitzka et al., 2002, p. 389). The lack of clear and consistent goals is due to the number of players in the policy process wanting many things, not just one, and conflicting because


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many players want different things. While disjointed policies can lead to confusion for those attempting to implement policy, the resultant lack of clarity may also lead to productive consultation, which is a highly desirable goal in a context of frequent change. The critical point may be that the objectives of the consultation process should be clear. This point, ironically, may require a more collegial approach to policy creation on the topic of autonomy. As stated above, the research university was the most independent. It provided the most coherent and comprehensive account of research autonomy, and its expressed values were the most aligned to traditional scholarly values. Yet, its staff were quite dissatisfied with the university’s efforts in relation to research autonomy. We may expect that academics within a research university think that they have greater freedoms, yet, in actuality, experience tremendous pressures to cluster and compete, pressures imposed by themselves, their peers and the institution. Social scientists in a research university may experience competition for funding quite sharply. We may acknowledge a certain sense of disaffection arising from ‘grant envy’, whereby those in the natural and physical sciences receive the greatest funding and accolades in the new research regime. The social sciences and humanities are perceived to be the poor cousins in research grant getting. We may also concede a tradition of the lone operator in social science research that can run counter to government emphasis on developing research teams. The single researcher may be seen as pursuing an unmarketable topic to the detriment of the individual, the department and the university. However, perhaps the most plausible explanation for the discrepancy between policy and academic satisfaction in the research university lies in differences between the academics themselves. Social scientists in the research universities may have higher expectations of collegiality and autonomy, a greater tradition of research autonomy, and, because of their sharp experience of competition for resources, the greatest perceived constraints. In the survey, they particularly experienced constraints on their sense of freedom to seek peer review on findings and their freedom to publish without fear of favour. Some were even prevented from publishing contentious research. What can be done about this discrepancy between policy and satisfaction? Trowler’s (2001) concept of the implementation staircase offers the best hope. The policy implementation staircase means that one’s position in the policy hierarchy can shape one’s response to particular policies. Constraints on one’s role in the hierarchy will radically affect perceptions and experiences in relation to policy. Trowler suggests that this staircase model helps to explain why intention and outcome do not always align – ‘‘‘the

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implementation gap’ as it is sometimes called y as policy is refracted during its trajectory down, and up, the staircase’’ (p. 3). Within the explanatory staircase model, the gap between policy and response is understandable, possibly even expected. Policy implementation is a dynamic process of negotiation, compromise and conflict, rather than of rational decisions and technical solutions, of complex social and political processes rather than careful planning and the incremental realisation of coherent strategy. Topdown goals become increasingly divergent when transposed onto different levels, that is, the complexity of life on the ground. ‘‘A response to policy must y be put together, constructed in context, offset against other expectations’’ (ibid., p. 3). As Ball (1994) states, all this involves creative social action, not robotic activity. In this respect, social scientists have a particular responsibility to engage meaningfully in university policy and its implementation. While no single discipline has sole purchase on the study and design of policy, the social sciences can make a special contribution in their techniques of historical and comparative analysis, and in the design and functioning of processes in institutions. Within institutions, social scientists can understand and build procedural integrity and the separation of political and policy roles into the policy development process. Social scientists at all levels can take responsibility for coordinating policy responses within the university. They can take a key role in developing appropriate information, consultation, partnership, delegation or control strategies. They can also allow sufficient scope for meaningful input and consideration in the consultation timetable. The imbalance found in this study between scholarly values, on the one hand, and entrepreneurial values, on the other, could foster healthy dialogue and participation for social scientists. In conclusion, the policy framework can be seen as a force in the daily enactment of autonomy in research-related matters if it encourages explicit statements on institutional autonomy, attempts to accord with ideals and remains consultative. Achieving these characteristics should avoid the accusation by an eminent statesman that ‘‘policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions’’.

NOTES 1. It should be noted, though, that there are a small number of reports that an entrepreneurial emphasis, on the whole, is positive for the university sector (e.g. Harman, 2001b, 2004; Zhou, 2004), and one report that not much has changed in the


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social sciences, in particular (Albert, 2003). Some report that an entrepreneurial emphasis has led to increasing cross-fertilisation of ideas with industry and an enhancement of the quality of research. 2. Readers from the United Kingdom and elsewhere may require a brief explanation of enterprise bargaining agreements in Australia. After a long period of a largely centralised approach to determining wages and conditions, the Australian government restructured the Award system to improve industry efficiency. The Enterprise Bargaining principle was introduced in a National Wage Case of October 1991 as a guide to negotiating individual institutional agreements. Enterprise Bargaining can be defined as the process of negotiation between employees, and their representatives (union), on one side, and institutional employers and their representatives on the other. The resulting enterprise bargain agreement is a collective agreement made under the Workplace Relations Act 1996, that provides for both certified agreements between employers and unions representing employees and individual workplace agreements between the employers and the employee that replace the award.

REFERENCES Akerlind, G., & Kayrooz, C. (2003). Understanding academic freedom: The views of social scientists. Higher Education Research and Development, 22(3), 327–344. Albert, M. (2003). Universalities and the market economy: The differential impact on knowledge production in sociology and economics. Higher Education, 45, 147–182. Allport, C. (2000). Intellectual workers and essential freedoms: Journalists and academics in the twenty-first century. National Tertiary Education Union. Conference proceedings American Association of University Professors and Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America. Washington, DC. Anderson, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). University autonomy in twenty countries. Evaluations and Investigations Program, Higher Education Division, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra. Ball, S. J. (1994). Education reform: A critical and Post-structural approach. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Campbell, T., & Slaughter, S. (1999). Faculty and administrator’s attitudes towards potential conflicts of interest, commitment and equity in university–industry relationships. The Journal of Higher Education, 70(3), 309–352. Colebatch, H. K. (2002). Policy (2nd ed.). Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Cooper, S., Hinkson, J., & Sharp, G. (2002). Scholars and entrepreneurs: The universities in crisis. North Carlton: Arena Publications. Edwards, M. (2000). Social policy, public policy: From problem to practice. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Evans, G. R. (2002). Academics and the real world. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Gornitzka, A., Kyvik, S., & Stensaker, B. (2002). Implementation analysis in higher education. In: J. C. Smart & W. G. Tierney (Eds), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 381–423). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Harman, G. (2001a). Academics and institutional differentiation in Australian higher education. Higher Education Policy, 14, 325–342.

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Harman, G. (2001b). University–industry research partnerships in Australia: Extent, benefits and risks. Higher Education Research and Development, 20(3), 245–264. Harman, G. (2004). Australian busy leading UK by example. Campus Review, 14, 16. Kayrooz, C., Kinnear, P., & Preston, P. (2001). Academic freedom and the commercialisation of Australian universities: Perceptions and experiences of social scientists. Discussion Paper no. 47, The Australia Institute, Canberra. Kayrooz, C., & Preston, P. (2002). Academic freedom: Impressions of social scientists. Minerva, 40, 341–358. Kleeman, J. (2003). Steerage of research in universities by national policy instruments. Higher Education Management and Policy, 15(2), 25–41. Marginson, S. (1997). Steering from a distance. Higher Education, 34, 63–80. Marginson, S., & Considine, M. (2000). The entrepreneurial university: Power, governance and reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McInnis, C. (1999). The work roles of academics in Australian universities. Evaluations and Investigations Programme Higher Education Division, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Australian Government. Morgan, K. J. (2004). The research assessment exercise in English universities, 2001. Higher Education, 48, 461–482. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (1997). Policy: A new field of anthropology. In: C. Shore & S. Wright (Eds), Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives in governance and power (pp. 3–35). London: Routledge. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Trowler, P. R. (Ed.) (2001). Higher education policy and institutional change. Intentions and outcomes in turbulent environments. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. UNESCO (1997). Recommendation concerning the status of higher education teaching personnel. Adopted by the general conference of the UNESCO meeting in Paris, 1997, 29th session. http://www.eiie.org/ressourc/english/eedhiedrec.html. Vidovich, L., & Currie, J. (1998). Changing accountability and autonomy at the ‘coalface’ of academic work in Australia. In: J. Currie & J. Newson (Eds), Universities and globalisation: Critical perspectives (pp. 193–211). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Weller, P. (2001). Policy and governance. In: M. Gillies, M. Carroll & J. Dash (Eds), Humanities and social sciences futures. Papers from the national humanities and social sciences summit. Commonwealth of Australia: Centre for Continuing Education, The Australian National University. Wood, F. (1992). The commercialisation of university research in Australia: Issues and problems. Comparative Education, 28(3), 1–19. Ylijoki, O.-H. (2003). Entangled in academic capitalism? A case study on changing ideals and practices of university research. Higher Education, 45, 307–335. Zhou, F. (2004). Commercialisation of research: A case study. Higher Education Research and Development, 23(2), 223–236.

SECTION III: AUTONOMY AND THE MOTIVATION FOR RESEARCH


AUTONOMY, ACQUIESCENCE OR ANOMIE? REFLECTIONS ON A CONSTRUCTED RESEARCH CAREER Malcolm Tight INTRODUCTION The great majority of contemporary research into higher education follows well-established social science norms, making extensive use of interviews, questionnaires and documentary sources, and carrying out careful and standardised analyses of the data collected thereby. System policy, course design and related topics attract the widest interest, with most research pitched at the course, institutional or system level. By contrast, there is relatively little published research on higher education that takes a more critical stance, examines the details of the academic experience and focuses on the individual or group (Tight, 2003a, 2004). Auto/biographical accounts and analyses, unless they are by senior and experienced (and usually retiring or retired) figures, are relatively uncommon. There are a number of obvious reasons for this, of course, including, on the one hand, the risk and ethical issues involved, and, on the other, the lack of credibility accorded to the individual case when compared to

Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Volume 4, 149–165 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3628/doi:10.1016/S1479-3628(06)04007-X

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broader, representative studies. That said, there are a number of compilations of academics’ experiences available (see e.g., Allan, 1996; Griffiths, 1996; Frost & Taylor, 1996; Stablein & Frost, 2004), and one does occasionally come across individual published examples (e.g., Deem, 1996; Middleton, 1995; Parker, 2004; Weiner, 1996). This chapter aims to make a small contribution to that developing literature in the particular context of the topic of this book, exploring the issue of autonomy in social science research. It is organised in five main sections. First, a framework for the study is outlined. An account of an individual’s research career (my own), working in higher education in the United Kingdom during the last 30 years, is then provided. This is analysed in terms of whether it could be said to exhibit autonomy or acquiescence, and for how it relates to the individual’s other ongoing careers in teaching, management and the rest of the life. Finally, some conclusions are offered. My intention and hope is that this account, and its analysis, will chime with many – though clearly not all-readers’ experiences.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK There are two aspects to the framing of the analysis presented in this chapter, one having to do with the kind of critical reflection I am engaged in here, and its value, the other concerning what this account has to say about academic freedom and autonomy. First, what of the practice of critical reflection? Arguably, this is well on its way to becoming an accepted part of academic development ‘dogma’ (Clegg, Tan, & Saedi, 2002; Ecclestone, 1996). As academics, we are encouraged, more and more, to reflect upon, learn from and then hopefully improve on, our day-to-day practices and experiences. Interestingly, this practice is currently most particularly stressed in the context of teaching, rather than research, which is the focus of this chapter. And it does presume, of course, that we as academics have time for such serious reflection (and can then act upon it). But what sort of critical reflection am I engaging in here, and might it be useful to others? In one of the more influential accounts of critical reflection, Brookfield identifies ‘four lenses through which we can view our teaching’: (1) our autobiographies as teachers and learners, (2) our students’ eyes, (3) our colleagues’ experiences, and (4) theoretical literature. Viewing what we do through these lenses alerts us to distorted or incomplete aspects of our assumptions that need further investigation. (Brookfield, 1995, p. 29)

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The account I am about to present, rests primarily on the first of these lenses, re-configured to encompass in particular my autobiography as a researcher, but also my whole identity as an academic. This autobiographical account has been bolstered to some degree by relating it to relevant academic literature, Brookfield’s fourth lens. Students’ views are, arguably, much less relevant when the focus is on my research rather than on my teaching role, and, while it might have been enlightening to take on board colleagues’ perspectives and experiences, I have chosen not to do so. While the account remains personal and biased – I would, like Brookfield (p. 31), dismiss the term ‘merely anecdotal’ as an insulting descriptor often applied to such accounts: what, after all, are interview transcripts? – as are all accounts, it is, therefore, partially and critically triangulated by other sources of evidence. A much more important triangulation, however, is – as already indicated – whether and to what degree this account resonates with readers’ experiences. Second, where does this account and analysis take us in our discussion of freedom and autonomy, in this book and elsewhere? Its main contribution is that it offers a micro-level account, whereas the other chapters in this volume focus primarily on the macro or meso levels of higher education systems or institutions. Yet, it is through micro-level accounts, I would argue, that we, as individuals, really or mainly understand experience and practice. Then we can see, indeed feel, what academic freedom and autonomy mean to us. My co-editors, in their phenomenographic study of Australian social scientists’ views of academic freedom (A˚kerlind & Kayrooz, 2003) – discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book – identified five ‘qualitatively different ways of understanding academic freedom’: (1) an absence of constraints on academics’ activities; (2) an absence of constraints, within certain self-regulated limits; (3) an absence of constraints, within certain externally-regulated limits; (4) an absence of constraints, combined with active institutional support; and (5) an absence of constraints, combined with responsibilities on the part of academics (ibid., p. 332)

Having dutifully reflected on what I am about to say, my initial conclusion – rather akin to the finding that people tend to get more right-wing in their political views as they get older – would be that my own view of academic freedom (Tight, 1988) has shifted away from (1) towards (5) as my career has continued. I will return to these points in the conclusion once I have presented and considered my career.

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A CONSTRUCTED CAREER Organisations are not pyramids, they are scattered encampments on a wide terrain of hills and valleys, and careers are not ladders, but stories about journeys and routes through and between these encampments y Careers, as stories of these journeys, often get better with the telling y . They provide cognitive structures on to which our social identities can be anchored. (Nicholson & West, 1988, p. 94)

When I completed my first degree at University College London, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and, to be honest, I still had a fair bit of growing up to do. So I did something I’d always wanted to do as a child: I became a bus conductor. After two years of helping to navigate big red buses through London town, and having a knife pulled on me once too often, the charm faded, so I went back to University College London to do a PhD on – surprise, surprise! – public transport. By the time my PhD was completed, I had come to the recognition that the academic life suited me, so I looked around for jobs locally. As now, so then, many initial academic jobs were short term in nature, and many were research jobs. Thus, it was that I took a one-year contract as a research officer at Birkbeck College, examining the provision of part-time study opportunities in higher education in the United Kingdom. This was a job that a consortium of universities and other organisations with interests in the topic wanted done, and they had clubbed together to provide the necessary funds. I was given a one-page summary of the task, and essentially left to get on with it – through the use of surveys, interviews and documentary analysis of course – with periodical oversight provided by, what then seemed to me, a rather austere steering committee. Though local connections helped, it was essentially happenstance that I got this particular job. I had adopted the scattergun approach to finding academic work, and was firing off applications for any job I heard about that appealed and which I thought I might have a chance of getting, whether they were in the discipline I had trained in (geography) or not. This job was not in my discipline, and I knew next to nothing about the topic when I started. I must have done the job reasonably well, however, because at the end of the contract my report was published (Tight, 1982 – I have placed the selected publications of my own which I refer to in this section into a separate appendix, rather than the normal references list, in order not to over-inflate my self-citation rate); though, looking back at it now, I can see some areas where I thought I knew rather more than I did.


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The contract finished, it was suggested to me by a member of the steering committee (connections again) that I apply for a two-year post at the Open University. They wanted a research fellow to work on the development of a course on adult education (another field I then knew next to nothing about). In this way, having come from a different disciplinary background, I was very soon set on a career researching and working in different areas of postcompulsory education. This evident flexibility in academic employment possibilities says something about the generic nature of social science, but probably more about the availability of trained researchers in post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom at that time. The job at the Open University was much clearer and more collaborative than that at Birkbeck College. The planned course provided a pretty firm structure to work within, and the work was being done by a large course team that contained a variety of specialists. My role was not that closely specified, however: indeed, I was very soon told – in no uncertain terms – by a senior professor in another department that I could not be a research fellow and do the work I was doing. But, then, I’ve never been too worried about job or role boundaries. Essentially, my job was to identify and/or commission course materials and readings, and help other members of the team put the whole thing together. Again – perhaps through youthful keenness, but more likely because no other members of the course team particularly wanted the responsibilities – I must have done fairly well, because I ended up chairing the course team and editing the two course readers (Tight, 1983a, 1983b). From there – and just in time, because my contract was about to end and did not look like being renewed (though, in the way of things, it was renewed after I had left) – I experienced, for the first and only time in my life, the unabashed pleasure of being ‘head-hunted’ for a job elsewhere. Back then to Birkbeck College to set up a research and development centre focusing on part-time higher education, again on short-term funding. Here things began to unravel a bit, and in truth the college had probably over-estimated my abilities as an essentially untrained and under-supported, relatively young and inexperienced member of staff. The job – bolstered by short-term government funds designed to make universities and academics more enterprising – became more administrative and developmental, rather than strictly researchbased. Nevertheless, driving my own agenda to some extent, I managed to produce a series of publications, ranging from guidebooks (Tight, 1986) to historical (Bell & Tight, 1993) and contemporary (Tight, 1990) monographs on part-time higher education. And then I got the first permanent job I’d ever had, in the Midlands at Warwick University. This was a different experience in a number of ways:

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for one thing, for the first time in my life – never having taught or been trained to teach, though at my previous institution I had actually been responsible for helping to teach other academics how to teach (Ah, those were the days!) – I had to teach. For another, I became aware of and was entered into the regular national research assessment exercises. Warwick was a research-led and entrepreneurial university. It had been entrepreneurial, at least if you believed the official accounts, before Thatcher even conceived of the policy (Warner & Palfreyman, 2001). There I became aware, through steady osmosis, of the need to have numbers of research students, get research grants and consultancy contracts and publish, publish, publish! I navigated those demands for a decade and a half, trying to balance my research interests in higher education and adult/continuing/lifelong education (or whatever the latest policy initiative chose to call it: a definite disadvantage of working in an under-developed but developing area – the ground keeps moving under your feet). After my then department started a course on learning in organisations – spotting a money-making opportunity before the business school – I even undertook, though with some reluctance, research in that area to maintain my credibility and comfort (e.g., Tight, 1995). And I also began to write textbooks (Blaxter et al., 1996; Tight, 1996), which not only proved useful for teaching quality assessment but also brought in some additional funds (for me). More recently, though, having achieved my personal chair (and analysed that: Tight, 2002), and with it all of the promotion I could expect or want, I’ve become more focused and assured, or perhaps just selfish, in my research interests. So I’ve been concentrating, for the last few years, on trying to understand the academic life (Tight, 2000), and, in particular, the nature of research into higher education (Tight, 2003a, 2004). And I’m planning to follow that up with an examination of the post-war history of higher education in the United Kingdom. Having, almost literally, felt the ground move under me (an increasingly common academic experience I know, but one little researched) at Warwick – when the university decided to split up the Department of Continuing Education I was in, and relocate me in the school-focused (a field I have never been comfortable with, largely because of childhood experience) Institute of Education – I’ve recently moved on to Lancaster University, into an environment which better allows me to pursue my own research agenda. At Lancaster, unusually for the United Kingdom, there are several full-time academics in the same department with research interests in the field of higher education.


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ANALYSING A CONSTRUCTED CAREER ythe researcher is also a narrator and an active producer of ‘knowledge’ in researchy the researcher is also involved in writing his or her life, reflecting on experiences both within and outside the research context – both are also related. Here, there is the ‘intellectual biography’ of the researcher who not only ‘translates’ the experience of others but also writes and interprets their own life. (Roberts, 2002, pp. 85–86)

The account I have given of my academic career to date is, of course, both partial – I’m assuming that readers will have only a limited interest in learning about me – and subjective. How could it be otherwise? And so must my analysis of it here be. I can assure you that I’ve tried to be reasonably honest: I clearly can’t, and don’t want to, tell you everything (and I have, in particular, deliberately left unsaid aspects involving other people: the guilty – at least in my eyes – as well as the innocent). All I’m really asking, however, is that you take this account more or less at face value, so that it can be used as a sample academic career (particularly as concerns its research aspect) for analysis. That said, I am expecting that there are elements in my account which will seem relatively familiar to some, possibly many, readers. The first thing we might say about this career is that, of its type – and it is of a particular type – it could be said to be fairly unremarkable. Lots of academics, male academics in particular, start their career in short-term research contract employment, move about from university to university, take on a varying mix of research, teaching and management responsibilities, find a permanent post, get promoted and eventually end up as a professor. Some do it quicker, some slower, some never make it to professor, while others go further into institutional management. Plenty of academics also move about a fair degree in terms of their disciplinary focus, and are subject to bouts of departmental restructuring. Other aspects of the account I have given are probably also familiar to many. The role of contacts in helping the early career along is clear. Though I have never had a mentor – something which seems to be becoming a more common practice for new academics now – I have mentored. So is the importance of trying to take whatever opportunities come your way (serendipity can be a wonderful thing, though it can also lead you in directions you might not wish to go). And so is the benign amateurism – I do not mean to imply that this was necessarily bad – which has underlain much academic development and management in the not too distant past.

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The second thing I would say about this career is that, in the way it has been presented here, it is very definitely constructed. Again, how could it be otherwise? All academics – like many professionals in the public and private sectors – have to produce and regularly update their curriculum vitae (CV), which in a way is what I am doing here: The academicy has to tread a narrow path between over-presentation of an academic self in the CV and failing to bring off an adequate performance in the preparation and presentation of this document. The ideal CV, one might suggest, would be close to the ‘readerly’ text whereby the readers and evaluators are persuaded to move relatively easily from the written word to the academic self and career thus displayed. Apparent absences, mis-representations and overstatements will impede this easy passage and may call into question the authenticity of this performance. (Miller & Morgan, 1993, p. 141)

We need CVs to get new jobs, to get promoted and, in these days of increasing quality control, to get appraised and to keep our existing jobs (as, of course, do our departments and institutions). So my story of my career, like my curriculum vitae, is one that is underlain by a structure of progression and success – academics rarely talk about failure in their public utterances. In terms of, and in spite of, the quotation I used to open the previous section, it involves both a story and a ladder; though it is a story that I have, as the quotation that opened this section might suggest, changed and developed as my career has gone on. Third, and turning now to my title, to what extent could this career be said to exhibit aspects of autonomy or acquiescence? Have I had academic freedom in determining what I researched, how I researched it and how the findings were reported? Well, perhaps not surprisingly, my answer would have to be ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, and at times ‘maybe’ as well. In terms of what I researched, a fair degree of acquiescence is evident, particularly (and, again, not surprisingly) in the earlier part of the career. In trying to get my foot on the academic ladder, or in the academic door (pick your metaphor – I’m not sure either of these is that apt), I undertook to research particular aspects of higher and adult education, and later even learning in organisations. My acquiescence was relatively willing, in that I needed employment, I enjoyed research, and higher and adult education (though not so much learning in organisations) seemed as interesting to me to research as many other topics. Only when I gained permanent employment, which was not tied to a specific project, did I really begin to assert greater control over what I researched. By then, of course, I had become a more established researcher of higher and adult education, so that is what I continued to research. So in a way I was not asserting control, but opting for the safe route of more of


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the same: I don’t think I ever seriously considered a radical change of direction at this point. There was then, and still is now, plenty of scope for developing a career in researching post-compulsory education: the difficulty is finding someone to employ you to do it. I did, of course, have to continue to research, and particularly to publish in order to maintain my continuing employability and meet the requirements of the research assessment exercise. So continuing to research, and to research within a particular discipline or subject area, had become effectively compulsory, but I had a high degree of autonomy over which particular topics I chose to research. In terms of how I researched, at least in so far as I was aware of and competent in different social research methodologies – research training for PhD students was not as formalised then as it has become now, so (benign amateurism again) you tended to pick it up as you went along – I did have considerable autonomy right from the start of my career. Project briefs, at least in those days and in my experience, were literally brief, and, so long as you appeared to be getting on with what you were supposed to be doing with a reasonable degree of success, you would be left largely alone to get on with it. So, with growing experience and familiarity, I’ve been able to pretty much suit myself. I’ve never been a methodological purist, but have flirted with both quantitative and qualitative forms of data collection and analysis. More recently, I’ve come to particularly appreciate the pleasures of analysing data that already exists, and of exploring what has been termed the auto/biographical turn, as in this chapter (Chamberlayne, Bornat, & Wengraf, 2000). The latter approach is, of course, a safer one to take once your career is established. In terms of reporting my findings, the story is again more one of autonomy. I’ve only had limited experience of contract research, and this has not tended to specify particular outputs in great detail, so I’ve never been that tied to the grant-getting/report-writing treadmill that is so important in some academics’ careers (Hockey, 2004). If I had been, my story would probably have been very different, and more depressing: I am conscious of the relatively privileged position I have enjoyed as an academic, on a permanent contract, working in research-led universities. I do, however, remember one occasion when I gave a paper at a conference, and, on return to my own university, was surprised, annoyed and then amused to find a closely argued, two-page rebuttal, from my then head of department, of the way in which I had presented my institution’s policy (though, curiously, none of my colleagues had been at this conference – connections again no doubt!). That presentation was part of the introductory context for the paper; or, in other words, not that significant, either for me, or

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so as I had presumed, my audience. But the rebuttal made no sense to me either, so I ignored it, the paper got published in its existing form and I heard no more about it. Of course, there has been increasing pressure over the period covered to ensure that I did report my findings: there was a publication treadmill, and it was inexorably ratchetting up. But I’ve always rather enjoyed the publication process – despite the things reviewers sometimes say about what you have written (Tight, 2003b) – and have not had much difficulty in satisfying these pressures. While the emphasis has been mainly on refereed journal articles and academic monographs, I’ve also kept a modestly lucrative sideline going on in other kinds of publications.

RESEARCH AND OTHER CAREERS All human beings continuously monitor the circumstances of their activities as a feature of doing what they do, and such monitoring always has discursive features. In other words, agents are normally able, if asked, to provide discursive interpretations of the nature of, and the reasons for, the behaviour in which they engage. (Giddens, 1991, p. 35)

Research, of course, has only been a part of my career, and that – though this does seem to be less and less the case – has only been a part of my life. In career terms, as already indicated, there has been a balance between research, teaching and administrative or managerial responsibilities to negotiate. And, in terms of my broader life, there have been the struggles – as with most others in employment (does anyone remember all of those review articles in the popular press a couple of decades ago, where the big problem was seen as automation giving us so much leisure time we wouldn’t know what to do with it?) – to maintain space for some kind of family and social life. At this point, though, it seems relevant to draw attention to another part of my career – which is not strictly research, teaching or administration, though it contains elements of all three – which has been of unusual importance (at least to me). I’m referring to my role as an editor of journals and book series, first with Teaching at a Distance, which turned into Open Learning, at the Open University, then with Higher Education Quarterly at Warwick University, and most recently with Studies in Higher Education and the International Perspectives on Higher Education Research series (of which this volume forms a part). Journal editing, at least in my view, is an under-rated activity, and not something that most academics are either suited for or are prepared to engage


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with, but it has absorbed a significant proportion of my time throughout my career. It has, amongst other things, given me a considerable insight into other academics’ careers, and thus stimulated research interests in the nature of academic life and higher education research (Tight, 2000, 2003a). And it is something, because of the enjoyment it has provided, that I have been prepared to cut back on other activities for. It is a very demanding activity; and my recent move to Lancaster was partially dependent upon their recognition of this and its value. However, the primary issue in my academic career has been the balance between my research and teaching responsibilities, both in terms of keeping each of these manageable and in seeking to maintain a relationship, and thus some synergy, between them (a topic on which I have also written: Hughes and Tight, 1995). As indicated, I have spent my whole career in research-led universities, so there has always been an understanding of the need to devote a substantial amount of time to research, supported by a reasonably generous institutional strategy towards sabbaticals. While the relationship between research and teaching is hotly debated (see, e.g., Jenkins, Breen, Lindsay, & Brew, 2003), at least at an official level within the United Kingdom, on a practical and individual level it is something I have always tried to develop: and, you might say, have had the time to do so. I have found that being engaged in current or recent research in at least some of the topics you are teaching helps to ensure credibility with students, gives you more to say and saves overall time. It has helped that most of my teaching responsibilities have been at postgraduate level, and my research interests have included social research methods and methodologies. And I have tried to play this relationship both ways, by also turning course materials into textbooks and articles. The attempt to maintain, on at least a personal level, some linkage between research and teaching has, of course, meant that whatever autonomy, or lack of autonomy, I have experienced in terms of teaching has impacted on my autonomy in my research role (and vice-versa). My experience has been that teaching autonomy, at least in terms of content, has generally been less than research autonomy. There is a curriculum to be taught, and the issue has been carving this up in a more or less equitable way with one’s colleagues. A consequence has been that, in order to maintain my own research/teaching linkage, there have been occasions when, having had to teach a topic – such as in the area of learning in organisations – which I initially had no particular interest in, and having then began to generate a research interest in that topic as well, my autonomy as a researcher has effectively been compromised (or at least qualified).

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Similar compromises also crop up when the relationship between research and administrative or managerial responsibilities is considered. Thus, while my experience of managing research grants, and hence research assistants, is limited, my assessment would be that these responsibilities have probably detracted more from my personal research experience, and hence my autonomy, than they have added in terms of overall research value (for me at least). I simply get more from either working on my own, or with one or more colleagues who share a similar level of experience and autonomy. In a more general sense, administrative and/or managerial responsibilities – for particular courses, functions, groups or departments – necessary as they might well be, have largely got in the way of research. I’ve probably done more than my fair share of running departments, courses and programmes, and of sitting on or chairing faculty, university and national committees (the critical mistake is to demonstrate anything more than a basic competence). While these roles have sometimes been interesting in their own right – and have informed, to an extent, my research and writing – this is not something I’m actively seeking to do any more. It’s in this arena that we begin to encounter the anomie part of the ‘autonomy, acquiescence or anomie?’ trio in my title. And this sense becomes even stronger when my academic career(s) is/are placed in the context of my life career as a whole. Sharing a life with a partner who also works in academe – initially in the same university, latterly in two different universities more than one hundred miles apart – has meant that the increased stresses felt by most academics, as workloads and expectations have mounted, have been more acutely felt. I recognise, of course, that this is a common experience in both academic life and other professions, but it is one that has to be carefully managed and negotiated. In practice, for me, as for many others, this has meant working for six days a week, pretty much every week, with time for only one week’s holiday in the summer and a week spent slumped at home around Crimbo. The daily grind involved, combined with the relative lack of recognition and remuneration accorded to academics – and, it has to be said, increasing age – does, more and more frequently, lead to thoughts of ‘why am I bothering’? Wouldn’t it be much easier just to be a postman, or, remaining within academic life, get a teaching-only job? This might, of course, explain the attraction of senior academic administration posts to many in the profession, if not to me, though I hardly think that it would lead to reductions in workload or associated stress. Focusing particularly on the research career, there are also doubts about the purpose of the research itself. While I long ago abandoned the idea that


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the purpose of social research was primarily to improve things – though this is not to say that this has not, and does not, happen – and have emphasized instead personal interest and understanding, this doesn’t entirely disperse those feelings, from time to time, that it’s all a fairly pointless game ‘at the end of the day’. Medical researchers may be able to develop new drugs or procedures to keep people healthy longer, and engineers may be able to design better or cheaper products, but most of us working in the social sciences rarely have much sense of an impact from our research (partly because policy makers so seldom listen to our advice, such as it is). Of course, not many people are fortunate enough to be remembered for very long after their retirement and death by anybody other than their close friends and family, but it would be nice to be able to think that you have achieved something of more than purely personal, trivial or passing significance. Realistically, though, like life itself, most research is only ever likely to be of transient value.

CONCLUSION ythe imposition of an ‘audit culture’, requirements to meet externally imposed performance criteria, demands to demonstrate the relevance of their work in relation to new institutional mission statements, and the like, are generating a mixture of anomie and alienation – at least for some of those caught up in these changes. Both within the universities and in many of the professions, a generation of practitioners has experienced what is, to some, a sense of crisis and loss. Cherished identities and commitments have been undermined and, for some, this has been experienced as an assault on their professionalism. (Beck & Young, 2005, p. 184)

The account and analysis that I have presented in this chapter have, I hope, prompted a degree of self-recognition and reflection in you – the reader. What conclusions would I draw from it? I will offer three. First, let us return to the five ‘qualitatively different ways of understanding academic freedom’ identified by A˚kerlind and Kayrooz (2003), quoted at the start of this chapter. Elements of each of these may be identified in my account and analysis: Some of my academic activities have been, effectively, unconstrained: e.g., what I choose to research now that I have a permanent position. Others have had self-regulated limits, including what I have been prepared to discuss in this chapter. Others have been subject to externally regulated limits. Here, the continuing need to research and to publish, in order to satisfy research assessment

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procedures, is most evident. As noted, the rather harder limitations imposed by contract research have been less evident in my career. I have had active institutional support, through sabbatical schemes and small-scale institutional research funding for example. And I have taken on responsibilities commensurate with the freedoms I have enjoyed, most notably perhaps through my continuing editorial work. Or, to put it the other way, I’ve probably had – compared to most of my contemporaries working within similar higher education systems – a relatively unfettered academic career, largely self-created within existing structures, taking advantage of the opportunities that came my way. External interference has been indirect, and internal interference measured. There has been sacrifice, and personal uncertainty, but mostly it’s been fairly comfortable. I can’t really complain. Second, what of the triumvirate of autonomy, acquiescence and anomie I named in my title? Is it to be expected that academics – particularly perhaps academics working in a relatively under-developed subject area like higher education – will experience each of these, in different combinations and at different stages, during their careers? I think you can probably guess, if you have read this far, that my answer is yes. Critical reflection should come with a health warning: sometimes it’s better just to get on with it. Third, and finally, my main conclusion would be that – unsurprisingly and justifiably – the best that most individual academics and higher education institutions (Neave, 1988, Tight, 1992) can hope for is a kind of ‘conditional autonomy’. In other words, you can experience and enjoy a degree of autonomy so long as, and only as long as, you meet the expectations that your employers or funders have of you, and carry out effectively the responsibilities or policies they impose upon you. This is, in essence, equivalent to the fifth, and arguably most mature, of the five understandings of academic freedom identified by A˚kerlind and Kayrooz (2003, p. 332), and quoted earlier: ‘an absence of constraints, combined with responsibilities’.

REFERENCES A˚kerlind, G., & Kayrooz, C. (2003). Understanding academic freedom: the views of social scientists. Higher Education Research and Development, 22(3), 327–344. Allan, D. (Ed.) (1996). In at the deep end: first experiences of university teaching. Lancaster: Lancaster University Unit for Innovation in Higher Education.


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Beck, J., & Young, M. (2005). The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities: A Bernsteinian analysis. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(2), 183–197. Bell, R., & Tight, M. (1993). Open Universities: A British tradition? Buckingham: Open University Press. Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Chamberlayne, P., Bornat, J., & Wengraf, T. (Eds) (2000). The turn to biographical methods in social sciences: Comparative issues and examples. London: Routledge. Clegg, S., Tan, J., & Saedi, S. (2002). Reflecting or acting? Reflective practice and continuing professional development in higher education. Reflective Practice, 3(1), 131–146. Deem, R. (1996). Border territories: A journey through sociology, education and women’s studies. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 17(1), 5–19. Ecclestone, K. (1996). The reflective practitioner: Mantra or a model for emancipation? Studies in the Education of Adults, 28(2), 146–161. Frost, P., & Taylor, S. (Eds) (1996). Rhythms of academic life: Personal accounts of careers in academia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Griffiths, S. (Ed.) (1996). Beyond the glass ceiling: Forty women whose ideas shape the modern world. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hockey, J. (2004). Working to return to employment: The case of UK social science contract researchers. Studies in Higher Education, 29(5), 559–574. Jenkins, A., Breen, R., Lindsay, R., & Brew, A. (2003). Reshaping teaching in higher education: Linking teaching with research. London: Kogan Page. Middleton, S. (1995). Doing feminist educational theory: A postmodern perspective. Gender and Education, 7(1), 87–100. Miller, N., & Morgan, D. (1993). Called to account: The cv as an autobiographical practice. Sociology, 27(1), 133–143. Neave, G. (1988). On being economical with university autonomy: Being an account of the retrospective joys of a written constitution. In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility (pp. 31–48). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Nicholson, M., & West, M. (1988). Managerial job change: Men and women in transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, M. (2004). Becoming manager: Or the werewolf looks in the mirror, checking for signs of unusual facial hair. Management Learning, 35(1), 45–59. Roberts, B. (2002). Biographical research. Buckingham: Open University Press. Stablein, R., & Frost, P. (Eds) (2004). Renewing research practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books. Tight, M. (1988). So what is academic freedom? In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic freedom and responsibility (pp. 114–132). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1992). Institutional autonomy. In: B. Clark & G. Neave (Eds), The encyclopedia of higher education, (Vol. 2, pp. 1384–1390). Oxford: Pergamon. Tight, M. (Ed.) (2000). Academic work and life: What it is to be an academic, and how this is changing. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Tight, M. (2003a). Researching higher education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Tight, M. (2003b). Reviewing the reviewers. Quality in Higher Education, 9(3), 295–303.

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Tight, M. (Ed.) (2004). The RoutledgeFalmer reader in higher education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Warner, D., & Palfreyman, D. (Eds) (2001). The state of UK higher education: Managing change and diversity. Buckingham: Open University Press. Weiner, G. (1996). Which of us has a brilliant career? Notes from a higher education survivor. In: R. Cuthbert (Ed.), Working in higher education (pp. 58–68). Buckingham: Open University Press.

APPENDIX: PERSONAL PUBLICATIONS REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT Bell, R., & Tight, M. (1993). Open universities: A British tradition? Buckingham: Open University Press. Blaxter, L., Hughes, C., & Tight, M. (1996). How to research (1st ed.). Buckingham: Open University Press. Hughes, C., & Tight, M. (1995). Linking university teaching and research. Higher Education Review, 28(1), 51–65. Tight, M. (1982). Part-time degree level study in the United Kingdom. Leicester: Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education. Tight, M. (Ed.). (1983a). Educational opportunities for adults. London: Croom Helm. Tight, M. (Ed.). (1983b). Adult learning and education. London: Croom Helm. Tight, M. (1986). Part-time degrees, diplomas and certificates. Cambridge: Hobson’s Press. Tight, M. (1988). So what is academic freedom? In: M. Tight (Ed.), Academic Freedom and responsibility (pp. 114–32). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1990). Higher education: A part-time perspective. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tight, M. (1995). Education, work and adult life: A literature review. Research Papers in Education, 10(3), 381–398. Tight, M. (1996). Key concepts in adult education and training (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Tight, M. (Ed.). (2000). Academic work and life: What it is to be an academic, and how this is changing. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Tight, M. (2002). What does it mean to be a professor? Higher Education Review, 34(2), 39–56.


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Tight, M. (2003a). Researching higher education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Tight, M. (2003b). Reviewing the reviewers. Quality in Higher Education, 9(3), 295–303. Tight, M. (Ed.). (2004). The RoutledgeFalmer reader in higher education. London: RoutledgeFalmer.


ON RESEARCHING OURSELVES: THE DIFFICULT CASE OF AUTONOMY IN RESEARCHING HIGHER EDUCATION John Brennan INTRODUCTION Higher education as a field of study has been relatively ignored by social scientists. Yet it is a growing area of research, especially applied research, as higher education itself becomes more visible and important within advanced ‘knowledge economies’. Higher education is seen by some to hold the key, at least in part, to the achievement of both greater wealth and greater social equity; the former through the creation of new knowledge and the production of new ‘knowledge workers’, and the latter through the provision of opportunities for all to develop, contribute to and benefit from the greater wealth. For others, however, the role of higher education is seen to lie more in the reproduction of existing social inequalities. All social science faces a tension between its qualities as ‘science’ and its requirements to be ‘relevant’. In the case of research into higher education, the emphasis tends to be firmly on the latter. In recent years, higher education as a field of enquiry has tended to be of greater concern to policy


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bodies than to social scientists themselves. As a new project commissioned by the European Science Foundation notes, research into higher education tends to be policy-driven rather than knowledge-driven.1 It is a field to which few social scientists devote their careers, rather more dabble occasionally, but all are affected in the sense that the field’s object of study embraces their own academic lives. Therein lies its distinctiveness and its problems. The higher education researcher has a particular ‘stake’ in the object of his or her study, has an involvement in it as an interested participant. Research agendas may be formed as much from these ‘interests’ as from theory or previous research. Furthermore, most of the larger empirical studies, funded as part of the policy process, are intended to have ‘impact’. And the researcher may be on the receiving end of this impact. For all these reasons, disinterested enquiry may be difficult to achieve. Research in higher education is carried out in many places: in government departments, in national agencies, in think tanks, in market research companies and in universities. In universities, it is carried out by administrators, by educational developers, by marketing units, by teachers wishing to improve their courses as well as by career researchers and their doctoral students. All bring relevant experiences and expertise to bear on the object of their study. As Ulrich Teichler has remarked, there is hardly any other area in research ‘in which both the ordinary person actively observing the field and the decision makers possibly interested in the results of the research, have such a complex knowledge of the field itself and such a high intellectual competence’ (Teichler, 1996, p. 436). Questions about research autonomy in the field of higher education research must, therefore, confront a fragmented and highly differentiated research community. In looking at the characteristics of this community and the research carried out by it, this chapter will consider the ways in which research agendas get set, in whose interests research is conducted, what tends to be done with the results of research, and whether autonomy can be achieved or is even relevant to the production of good quality research in the field. The distinctiveness of research into higher education within Australia and the United Kingdom reflects something of the more general marketised features of those societies and, more specifically, their higher education systems. Thus, an element of entrepreneurialism is a feature of the research effort. One does not find the state-funded research institutes that exist in some European countries. One should, perhaps, also note the absence of an older and richer tradition of research, as can be found in the United States,

On Researching Ourselves

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where the production of doctorates and the existence of career opportunities in the field alters the balance between the ‘scientific’ and ‘policy’ drivers. In Australia and the United Kingdom, some relatively small specialist (in international terms) research centres exist along with a handful of internationally recognised scholars in the field. That said, much of what follows transcends the particular contexts provided by individual national higher education systems and societies.

A FRAGMENTED RESEARCH COMMUNITY Four broad types of research into higher education can be distinguished. Institutional research – local enquiries related to perceived institutional problems, e.g. non-completion rates and employability. Educational development research – part of staff development activities to enhance pedagogic practice, either locally, institutionally or nationally. Policy research – projects commissioned by national bodies (usually short term and quite often undertaken by private-sector consultants). Academic research – largely interest-led studies, sometimes supported by research council or foundation grants, but also individual research by academics from a wide range of subject fields. It is important to recognise that these different types of research reflect different interests and may produce different research questions in relation to apparently similar issues. The first two categories above tend to produce research which is local and largely context-bound. Much of higher education research could be characterised as ‘mode 2 research’2 – interdisciplinary, practice and policy linked and undertaken by a loosely bounded research community. Ulrich Teichler has provided a helpful typology of higher education researchers based on their links to academic theory, field of knowledge and policy and practice. In Table 1 below, the number of pluses and minuses are intended to indicate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the six research types in terms of these features. In it, Teichler takes a rather inclusive conception of ‘researcher’, including consultants and practitioners who might not even think of themselves as researchers. But the point is that there is often no clear boundary between their activities and those of the other types of researcher. Teichler is not claiming that some types of researcher are ‘superior’ to others and it is not being suggested here that some types are less ‘autonomous’ than others. However, it might be anticipated that threats to

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Table 1.

Types of Higher Education Expert (Teichler, 2000, p. 19).

Types

Basis of Expertise Theory/ methodology

Discipline-based, occasional higher education researcher Discipline-based continuous higher education researcher Theme-based academic higher education researcher Applied higher education researcher (policy researcher, institutional researcher) Consultant Reflective practitioner

Field knowledge

Application development

++

++

+

+

+

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