The university’s separateness has been a legal and political feature but also a widely shared imaginary that is implicated in questions about university autonomy, academic freedom, and the very goals and possibility of higher education.
4.1 Introduction
This chapter develops the arguments of Chapter 3, examining discourses of the perceived role of the university and how this relates to constructions of knowledge and its implications for pedagogy, research, and academic freedom. The previous chapter elucidated various constructions of knowledge and the ensuing implications for academic freedom. Discourses on the value of education, the temporal and geographical positionality of knowledge, and the institutionalisation of knowledge through the disciplines attest to the need to contextualise the understandings of academic freedom. This chapter institutionally contextualises the understanding of the production of knowledge in relation to the role of the university.
There is an intellectual history of higher education (HE) playing a role in the promotion of democratic societies (Dewey, Reference Dewey1916; Wright Mills, Reference Mills1959), and the development of informed, critical citizens, in relation to the emergence of the modern nation state, and now evident in discourses on global citizenship (Kiwan and Evans, Reference Kiwan and Evans2015). In some discourses on the ‘civic university’, a liberal education is seen as central in the production of ‘a particular kind of critical citizen’, whilst other discourses call for a more radical ‘transformation of higher education itself’ (Biesta, Reference Biesta2007, p. 470). It has been argued that HE is one of the few remaining public spaces where unpopular ideas can be explored, and students can learn how to challenge authority (Giroux, Reference Giroux2002). In the Arab world, few universities constitute a public sphere for critical debate, although notable exceptions include the American University of Beirut (AUB), in particular, before the 1970s, where public intellectuals, reformists, and nationalists engaged with the public on social and political issues of the day (Hanafi, Reference Hanafi2011) and have a continued role today (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan2017b). Historically, in the colonial context, education was a means of rule, and these traditions continue to exist today in post-colonial states. In many Arab countries, there is a tradition of public universities, developed predominantly after the Second World War, when the national university typically became the symbol of new national identity, development, and autonomy (Abi-Mershed, Reference Abi-Mershed2010). However, in Lebanon, the majority of universities are private as the civil war context (1975–1991) undermined the state’s ability to promulgate a state-controlled HE system (Buckner, Reference Buckner2011). The UAE illustrates the Gulf region’s prioritisation of establishing a ‘knowledge economy’ as evidenced with Dubai’s Knowledge Village. Increasingly, Western universities are opening branch campuses driven by financial interests, including concerns relating to improving rankings through internationalisation.
The literature on the role of the university in producing critical citizens informs the intellectual history of academic freedom and its contemporary and contested constructions. Yet, it is important to recognise that this theoretical framing assumes a democratic and national context. There is also an emerging field of critical university studies, developing since the 1990s, interrogating the university as an institution (Bottrell and Manathunga, Reference Bottrell and Manathunga2019; Collini, Reference Collini2012, Reference Collini2017; Furedi, Reference Furedi2017; Manathunga and Bottrell, Reference Bottrell and Manathunga2019; Newfield, Reference Newfield2008, Reference Newfield2016; Noble and Ross, Reference Noble and Ross2019; O’Sullivan, Reference O’Sullivan2016; Thomas, Reference Thomas2018; Williams, Reference Williams2012, Reference Williams2016) with its historically embedded processes and structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalisation, reflected in critical pedagogical movements (e.g. Freire and Giroux).
This chapter interrogates the role of the university transnationally beyond the familiar Western democratic contexts, situated within the post-colonial legacies and nation-building projects in Beirut and Dubai (Abi-Mershed, Reference Abi-Mershed2010; Anderson, Reference Anderson2011; Buckner, Reference Buckner2011; Khalaf, Reference Khalaf2012; Kiwan, 2017), as well as the global neoliberal initiatives of internationalisation and branch campus projects (Davies and Bansel, Reference Davies and Bansel2007; Miller-Idriss and Banauer, Reference Miller-Idriss and Banauer2011; Olds, Reference Olds2007; Olssen and Peters, Reference Olssen and Peters2005; Vora, Reference Vora2019; Wasserman, Reference Wasserman2017; Waters, Reference Waters2016; Waters and Leung, Reference Waters, Leung, Jons, Meusburger and Hefferman2017) and the sociopolitical implications for academic freedom and the production of knowledge. Interviewees identified three key themes linking the role of the university to the production of knowledge and academic freedom: firstly, contestation over the mission of the university and its relationship to its situated context, secondly, the internationalisation of HE, and thirdly, the role of governance and funding.
4.2 Mission of the University
4.2.1 ‘Truth’ and ‘Public Good’
Universities exist for the pursuit of information and the pursuit of truth.
As noted in the introduction, there is an intellectual history of the role of the ‘civic university’ in society and the nature of its public mission. This continues to be a contested role, ranging from the idea that universities must produce ‘true’ knowledge to the idea that universities’ central mission is constructed in terms of creating economic growth and the idea that the university is a means for change in an increasingly globalised world facing numerous challenges (Bogelund, Reference Bogelund2015). These different constructions of the role of the university are underpinned by different constructions of knowledge as discussed in the previous chapter. The construction of the university as a producer of ‘pure knowledge’ conceives of knowledge production and knowledge as truth as central to this mission, whilst the application of knowledge for social and economic purposes underpins university missions centred around creating economic growth. The third model of the university as a change agent is informed by an emphasis on social and political contextualisation of knowledge. The independence and academic freedom of the university takes the separation of knowledge and power as a premise (Scott, Reference Scott2019) and, as such, comes the rationale that the university is a protected space for critical thinking.
The notion of ‘public’ good in particular is raised in relation to whether a university is privately or publicly funded. These distinctions can become blurred due to historical legacy and sociopolitical circumstances, as in the case of the AUB, ranked as one of the top institutions in the region:
You know in Arabic, university is a ‘jamiea’: you know, it’s something that gathers people together. It is not about having a business enterprise run by business people. And even if we are a private university, this is the oldest one in the Middle East. And I argued with them once in the Senate that AUB has become a public good. It’s not any more a private university. It belongs to the region, it belongs to the graduates, it belongs to everybody who spends time here. They had an argument that they did not want to publish the budget because the government will come and scrutinise their taxes, something very stupid as an argument and I told them you know ‘Everything you do in AUB should be public. You’re almost a public university. You’re not a typical private university’.
Here, ‘public good’ trumps private ownership, due to the standing of the institution in the region and its stated educational mission of being of the region and serving the region. ‘Jamiea’, the word for university, links to the root meaning group or ‘cooperative’, invoking the idea of shared ownership.
Contestations over the nature of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, the focus of the previous chapter, are situated in relation to debates about ‘the canon’, interdisciplinarity’, and positionality with respect to the production of knowledge. Knowledge is recognised as inherently political, and partial, with the university ideally providing a space for enabling inclusive knowledge production. It has been further argued that ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ in the humanities and social sciences are particularly prone to contestation and, thus, the most in need of the protection of academic freedom (Scott, Reference Scott2019); therefore, it is the university that is the ‘indispensable organ … to hold an independent place’ (American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 1915, p. 27). Institutional support and funding for the humanities and social sciences is globally under pressure, with the associated status of humanities and social sciences particularly low in the context of the Arab world:
There is a misconception in our part of the world, equating research with ‘scientific’ research and measuring research outputs and metrics, you know, using metrics that have been developed for the health sciences, so I think there is definitely need for social science and humanities research. If you think about for example the deployment of religion and religious claims that are made, these are areas that should be researched and there should be serious soul searching and thoughtful reflection on these areas, because they are affecting everything, they are affecting the present and the future.
The importance of the social sciences and humanities in informing ethical considerations in the fields of science and technology is also raised. Debates relating to epistemologies and methodologies of newer disciplines in the social sciences and humanities attest to this contestation, as well as critiques of new interdisciplinary fields of study, underpinned by activist agendas:
I guess what’s different now is this complete divestment from education as a public good and once education becomes as thoroughly privatised as it has in the United States. We’re in deep trouble because we are now beholden – you know I teach at a public University which is, in theory, a public good but we get exactly 6% of our budget from the State and the rest comes from students who are now being construed as consumers, not as citizens in the making but as consumers who have the right to say what they do not like to hear or what they’d prefer to hear or what they’d prefer to learn and not prefer to learn and the State for all of its whopping 6% of our budget that they give us is continually trying to pass laws cracking down on, I do not know if this phrase has come up over there, but the phrase over here is now grievance studies.
The denigrating term ‘grievance studies’ attributed to interdisciplinary fields of study of disability, gender, race, and sexuality is a contestation around the educational mission of the university – firstly, in terms of what ‘knowledge’ is literally of value in a skill-oriented and entrepreneurial knowledge economy, and secondly, in terms of debates around the lack of objective truth due to the political positionality of activist knowledge producers. The institutionalisation of such fields of study within the university in terms of departments and programmes of study are thus perceived to threaten the objective production of ‘true knowledge’ and is seen to undermine academic freedom.
4.2.2 Liberal Arts and the ‘Knowledge Economy’
A traditional US liberal arts education is typically championed as supporting the university’s mission in supporting democracy and producing well-rounded critically informed citizens. The celebration of the liberal arts education, at AUB in Lebanon, is also strongly evident. AUB is a private university, established in 1866 by American missionaries formerly known as the Syrian Protestant College, with a charter from the State of New York; in 1920, it changed its name to AUB. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, AUB has been imagined as a site of ‘intersections’, where American aims for liberal education have been juxtaposed onto the particularities of sociopolitical events and public discourses on nationhood, citizenship, personhood, and gender in the Middle East (Kiwan, 2017). In 2016, AUB celebrated its 150th anniversary since it was founded, where it has proudly presented itself as ‘authentically’ embedded in its local communities and the region with a civic mission, a ‘liberal’ ethos and a commitment to ‘liberal education’, whilst also of international significance as a knowledge producer with a wide range of international teaching, research, and business partnerships (Khouri, Reference Khouri2016).
However, a liberal education approach is not the dominant approach of university education in the Arab region. According to a former Professor of History at the AUB, Lebanon, a greater value is attached to a liberal education in the United States compared to the Arab region:
At least in the US there is still some value attached [to a liberal education]. So even if you are pursuing a profession and most, the best universities usually, although there are professional universities, but the best universities, they require a year or two of general education, there is this requirement. And there is also the expectation that the best degrees are produced by such universities which such approach. This is not the case in the vast majority of the Arab world. The vast majority of the Arab world, most have professional degrees and the professional degrees are not based on a liberal education approach. So the situation is much more critical I think in the Arab world. In terms of funding, in terms of the actual structure of institutions and the tendency now is to create more and more professional specialised institutions, not institutions for education, with some exceptions.
In the branch campus universities of the Gulf, a liberal education is branded as a hallmark of a ‘high-quality’ American education. Yet, whilst there are universities in the region following a liberal arts curriculum with social sciences and humanities course requirements, this is:
different from having a social science degree and a humanities degree. So in a university like NYU Abu Dhabi, I mean, there are a few … there are social sciences and humanities of course but it’s engineering and science and so on and if you drill and if you look closer, even within the social sciences, the social sciences areas of specialisation I think tend to be safe.
This suggests that the humanities and social sciences in the region face two challenges, the first being, as in the UK and US contexts, a tension with the global discourse of meeting the needs of the economy with a focus on professional skills and competencies:
But the notion of the corporate university is now a very tricky thing because it really does go to the question of what is its purpose and what is the nature of knowledge production at this moment you know. So you have got this very corporate, you know, shell there that’s working quite, like it’s on steroids really. And it’s an instrumental thing in itself. And the production of knowledge through that is in a sense to extend that wealth production. There’s a kind of schizophrenia going on.
In the Arab region, there are high levels of youth alienation and despair, given the poor educational opportunities and high levels of unemployment, with youth unemployment being the highest in the world (on average, 25 percent) (IMF, 2012). It has been argued that the revolts in the region (Arab Spring) were a result of the combination of severe economic conditions under authoritarian regimes, where people have suffered from high unemployment, poor quality of life, and denial of political and civil rights (Teti and Gervasio, Reference Teti and Gervasio2011). Not only is there high unemployment, but education too does not meet the needs of the economy to which political instability is in part attributed (Campante and Chor, Reference Campante and Chor2013). Whilst there has been public investment in education, in those countries that do not provide for labour market opportunities, there has been political instability (e.g. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Jordan, and Morocco), in contrast to the more stable Arab Gulf countries of the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar with their strong economies (Campante and Chor, Reference Campante and Chor2013).
However, the second challenge is that the humanities and social sciences are also seen to be potentially ‘dangerous’. Surveying social science courses on offer in the branch campuses in the UAE suggests a concern with ‘playing it safe’. Interviewees note that some course names have been changed or ‘neutralised’, and course offerings are often controlled centrally with a concern not to challenge perceived sensitivities, despite interviewees attesting to the experience of the freedom to teach ‘whatever I wanted’. The issue of academic freedom, therefore, is most tested in the domains of the humanities and social sciences as indeed noted by Dewey a century ago, when comparing academic freedom in the sciences with the social sciences (Dewey, Reference Dewey1916).
Yet, the UAE is not exceptional in this regard either:
I mean, there’s no such thing as absolute academic freedom, it’s just within particular kinds of constraints everywhere we go, whether they are forthright or whether they are, you know, nationalist, whether they are part of the tenure system, which is incredibly hierarchal. So I feel like people learn the codes of the place that they are at, whether those are corrupt or not and then regulate themselves in particular kinds of ways and then it’s interesting to me because it becomes censorship in certain contexts and other contexts it just becomes business as usual, you know.
The perspective that the UAE is not exceptional, and the importance of taking account of comparative positionality, is similarly echoed in this account:
So I really do not think Dubai is an exception, especially in the way diversity is managed. So I’m very much against like the portrayal of the city as an exception because it very much sort of feeds into the hostile immigration policies of the UK, and that is obviously my experience as a [non-UK] national living in both of these places, UK and in Dubai. And I mean as a [non-UK] national I feel much more precarious here in the UK in terms of my immigration status than in Dubai. I’m also like you know, my research going forward is going to de-exceptionalise this region and its immigration policies too based on my lived experience as a [non-UK] national in the UK.
Debates in Western contexts over the Canon, new forms of interdisciplinary studies – including gender, race, disability studies – all attest to a concern with a challenge to the status quo and the risk of social transformation through education:
Between 1999 and 2014, there were internal pressures upon the nature of what we taught. So to get a gender, sexuality and culture unit up was very difficult. I did manage that in the end, but there were also great tensions with the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic who objected to a core unit in our Bachelor of Arts which was called ‘Unruly Subjects of Citizenship’. It was a Citizenship Unit really but it was a Cultural Studies oriented unit that looked at various issues around power relations, as you might imagine, identity, but they did not like the title ‘Unruly’ so there was a great deal of pressure to change the title to something much more standard, even though that unit had been going for a long time, and it was a very popular unit.
As such, it is argued that Western critiques of branch campuses are historically decontextualised and lack self-criticality and moral self-awareness:
I’m very sceptical of the way that the criticisms of these projects have played out, I feel like they are incredibly orientalist and they reproduce this idea that somehow American higher education in America is like this pure space where we are actually achieving the values of liberalism and stuff when it’s completely not!
Such decontextualised critiques are positioned outside history and do not recognise the long history of education and scholarship in the Muslim world, with the first university, the University of Al Quaraouiyine, in Morocco, established in 859 AD, and the Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, established in 970 AD, predating the establishment of the European medieval universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Bologna. The transnational production and circulation of knowledge also long predate contemporary internationalisation initiatives with archived accounts attesting to the fluidity of exchanges and relationships between regions and scholars. Furthermore, such critiques do not acknowledge the role of the university in the West as an institution embedded in histories of slavery, eugenics, and ongoing contemporary institutionalised racism, sexism, and complicity with controversial government policies such as the Prevent policy in the UK context. Campaigns such as Rhodes Must Fall and a number of universities in the United States, and, more recently, the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, are starting to acknowledge the involvement of these institutions in slavery. According to a UK Professor of History, commenting on the history of a leading university in the United Kingdom: ‘The [university] of course has been the repository of a long tradition of eugenics and pseudoscience on race for a long time and is only now beginning I think to come round to rethink and face up to that history and background’ (p. 7). Similarly, one interviewee notes the publicised case of Goldsmiths College, University of London, United Kingdom, and the campaign against the ‘alleged’ ‘endemic problem’ of sexual harassment which has been ‘persistent and consistent over years and years’, whilst another US-based professor describes the situation on US campuses, where ‘sexual assault is outrageously prevalent on campuses over here and it’s true that frequently students have tried to make this known and it’s been covered up’. (Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, US, p. 11).
4.2.3 (De-)Constructing the Nation
The intellectual history of the university represents a discourse of a nation’s imagined futures. There is a substantive literature on education, citizenship, and nation state formation, examining how the nation state uses educational policies in constructing and propagating a vision of national citizenship through education (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan, Davies, Ho, Kiwan, Peck, Peterson, Sant and Waghid2018). As previously mentioned, the university’s mission in the US context has been framed within a discourse of promoting democracy and creating well-informed critical citizens. Yet, this discourse is contested and is in tension with more explicitly instrumental discourses of the ‘knowledge economy’ and meeting a society’s employment needs, increasingly a dominant global discourse. Decolonisation discourses in the US, UK, and African university contexts have taken the form of ‘colouring’ leadership of these institutions. One UK Professor of Sociology on visiting a South African university observed what she refers to as ‘mimicking’:
The institutions there, the buildings, the structures, the apartheid system is already spatially and geographically and architecturally imposed. And now, twenty five years after the liberation of South Africa and the fall of apartheid, we have these incredible black scholars and activists now slotting into those institutions. But those institutions are still white. They are brown bodies in white institutions and they are still, the power – so they might have a black VC or a woman VC or whatever, they are still white male institutions.
The description of a ‘white male patriarchy but with brown bodies’ (p. 8) is similarly attributed to the UK university as an institution:
I, as an outsider, I could feel the monolithic-ness. And I think I can feel it because I experience it here every day of my life. I’ve been a brown body allowed into mega-ly white institutions here and that crashing sense in which you have to conform to get on, and all that you give up for that.
Colonial rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Arab region used education as a means of rule, introducing American and European schools and universities in the region with these competing traditions continuing as a legacy in post-colonial states (Sbaiti, Reference Sbaiti and Abi-Nershed2010). In the Arab region, education has been centrally important in states’ nation-building missions, and the national university is typically seen as a symbol of national identity, national development, and autonomy in post-colonial contexts after the Second World War. In 1939, there were a total of ten universities in the Arab world, increasing to twenty universities in 1961, forty-seven universities in 1975, and over 200 universities in 2000. This ‘massification’ (as well as privatisation) in HE – a worldwide trend – is evident in the Arab world, with 398 universities in the Arab world by 2011 (Jaramillo and Melonio, Reference Jaramillo and Melonio2011).
However, this framing in terms of ‘nationalising’ projects needs to be historically contextualised to recognise that the production of knowledge and schools in the Arab region have a long history, long predating modernity and the nation state (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan, Davies, Ho, Kiwan, Peck, Peterson, Sant and Waghid2018). As such, schools and higher educational institutions in the region can be conceived of as sites of ‘intersections’ between Western (colonial/neo-colonial/post-colonial) and national sociopolitical particularities and discourses on citizenship in the Arab world (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan2017b).
The AUB in Lebanon has played an important role in educating the Arab elite and middle class of the region, as well as educating teachers and bureaucrats serving under the colonial mandate governments in the region at that time. As an institution, it holds a significant place in the regional imagination, with literatures on its role in the region not only as a highly ranked educational institution with alumni of regional and international significance (AUB, 1979; AUB Centennial Lectures, 1967; Bliss, 1994) but also for its role in Arab nationalism (Anderson, Reference Anderson2011), student politics, and women as citizens and learners in the early twentieth–century Beirut (Cortas, Reference Cortas2009; Makdisi, Reference Makdisi2006).
Contestations of education as a nation state bounded project in the region emerge in response to large non-citizen populations – both refugees in the Levant region and ‘guest-workers’ in the Arabian Gulf region. There is a literature that considers supranational initiatives, and, for example, how ‘quasi-state institutions’ such as the Palestinian Authority deal with notions of citizenship through education policy. The position of Palestinian and Syrian refugees across the Arab region, notably in Lebanon and Jordan, raises policy dilemmas in the absence of any foreseeable route to legal citizenship in these host countries. The positionality of the everyday lived experiences of non-citizens in the nation-building discourses of the UAE and Qatar also nuance dominant ‘ethno-nationalist’ models of citizenship (Koch, Reference Koch2016; Vora, Reference Vora2019).
4.3 Internationalisation of Higher Education
Over the last half century, we have witnessed changes in HE globally that are as significant as the developments in the nineteenth-century Germany when the research university first emerged. ‘Massification’ is now seen as inevitable, with global averages of those participating in HE having risen sharply from 19 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2007, and it is projected to continue to rise to 40 percent by 2030 (Altbach et al., Reference Altbach, Riesley and Rumbley2009). It is expected that more women and more diversified student populations (older, part-time, etc.) will feature prominently in debates about access for disadvantaged groups. Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest participation rates at 5 percent (Altbach et al., Reference Altbach, Riesley and Rumbley2009) with the Arab region at around 36.42 percent in 2014 (Our World in Data, 2018), 48 percent of 25–34-year-olds in the United States in 2017 (OECD, 2018), and 49.8 percent in the United Kingdom in 2017 (Department for Education, 2018). HE enrolment rates in the Arab world more than doubled between 2000 and 2016 (UNESCO, 2018).
Despite international and national policies to widen participation, there are increasing social and economic inequalities globally. Widening participation is often contested and juxtaposed against a discourse of concerns about quality and lowering of standards. Global neoliberalism is transforming the discourse from social justice to economic development and its associated discourses of quality, competitiveness, and individual ‘choice’ (Burke, Reference Burke2013). However, there are inequalities in access, despite a trend of increased numbers entering HE – in effect, an increase in access, rather than a widening of access. The privileged have retained their advantages globally, with socioeconomic status being the greatest predictor of exclusion, given that HE costs are a huge barrier to access. This is the case even when tuition is free because of the hidden costs of transport, living expenses, loss of income, and psychological fear of debt.
Private HE is rapidly expanding, with a shift from HE being seen as a public good to a private good driven by funding shortages (Altbach et al., Reference Altbach, Riesley and Rumbley2009). HE is increasingly envisioned as a means to provide access to the global economy, leading to increased enrolment. In addition, quality assurance is central to many nations’ policy agendas and is also driven by ‘consumer’ demands for certification, student mobility, and ‘outcomes’ of education. As such, the global model of the ‘successful’ university is one that is ‘disconnected from the nation state and constituent cities and regions’ (Goddard et al., Reference Goddard, Hazelkorn, Kempton and Vallance2016, p. 3), instead focusing on diversifying its sources of funding and being globally competitive (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan2017b), with the sought-after brand of the ‘global university’.
The Arab region has also seen what Buckner (Reference Buckner2011) terms ‘imported internationalisation’, with the establishment of numerous partnerships with US and UK universities, especially in the Gulf Arab states, keen on establishing a ‘knowledge economy’: examples include Doha’s Education City (Qatar) and Dubai’s Knowledge Park (UAE), which house a large concentration of branch campuses of prestigious US and UK universities. There are a range of different models of these partnerships, with over half being ‘branch campuses’. One-third of all branch campuses globally are located in the Arab region and have opened since 2000 (Miller-Idriss and Banauer, Reference Miller-Idriss and Banauer2011). These branch campuses typically specialise in a few academic fields, usually professional fields, such as business, accountancy, technology, education, and engineering; hire foreign faculty from the affiliate institution; and grant degrees from this affiliate institution (Miller-Idriss and Banauer, Reference Miller-Idriss and Banauer2011). This is in contrast to institutions established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as AUB and the American University in Cairo, which were established by foreign missionaries, are based on a US liberal arts model of education, and have US charters. Other forms of internationalisation include ‘offshore/transnational programmes’, where a programme is offered in a host institution, typically using curricula from the foreign affiliate institution and taught by its faculty: ‘replica campuses’ such as New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, which are research universities offering liberal arts and sciences to undergraduate and postgraduate students using curricula from NYU in the United States and typically delivered by its faculty and virtual branch campuses with a limited presence in the host country (Miller-Idriss and Banauer, Reference Miller-Idriss and Banauer2011).
There is a critique of the mission of the university being eroded both by neoliberal pressures and financial interests as well as internationalisation ventures in the form of branch campuses in non-liberal contexts outside the West. Commenting on the Australian branch campus of Curtin University in Dubai:
What is it about being a global university for Curtin and how does it actually go and have campuses, how does it set up shop in countries in which it is criminal to be an LGBTIQ person? How can we do that? And that was a very challenging and difficult discussion for the Vice Chancellor who prides himself on inclusion and so on.
In addition, these critiques also take the form of characterising the phenomenon of branch campuses as neo-colonial/imperialist ventures. Commenting on branch campuses in the UAE, one UK UCU Branch officer argues that this amounts to an ‘imperial project where we are exploiting slave labour in Dubai and we are extracting a lot of money from Dubai. So it’s very similar to some of the historically imperialist companies that operated in the Middle East actually’ (p. 9).
Similarly, Professor Andrew Ross of NYU details his concerns with the establishment of NYU Abu Dhabi:
There was a lot of concern about violations of labour standards and human rights. There’s really well documented patterns of exploitations. So we wanted to try to ensure that the building of the campus would be – you know, would be an operation that observes fair labour standards. And we formed a coalition on campus, called the Fair Labour Coalition, which the administration found very hard to adopt labour values. And on paper they did agree to do so – and they are the strongest labour standards in the region as it happens. But implementation is very, very difficult, and a lot of our efforts were focused on trying to get third party monitoring of labour conditions. We were not very successful in doing that, and so there were, you know, repeated accounts of violations.
These positions are presented normatively, justified in terms of human rights abuses. Yet, constructs such as ‘imperialist’ mischaracterise the relational transnational power dynamics and also efface agency and responsibility of UAE actors. Normative arguments become decontextualised from the sociopolitical and economic agentic missions of the region. The UAE, and Dubai in particular, is the most important economic centre in the Middle East, with thriving sectors of foreign trade, tourism, and banking. Education is a key priority in the UAE as reflected in their 2017–2021 strategic education plan and the Higher Education Strategy 2030; in addition, the UAE’s internationalisation strategy has been successful in transforming it to one of the leading transnational education hubs in the world. It has high outbound student mobility, which increased by 31 percent between 2012 and 2016, with the United Kingdom and the United States being the most popular destinations. However, significantly inbound student mobility is huge and rising exponentially, with the highest rate in the world at 48.6 percent (World Education News and Reviews, 2018). According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2023), the UAE, with a population of 9 million, hosted 220,000 international students, proportionally more compared with both the United Kingdom, with its population of 67 million hosting just over half a million international students, and the United States, with a population of 333 million hosting 1 million international students.
Concerns were expressed, however, with the normative implications of the ‘illiberal’ branch campus, where a biological metaphor of ‘embodiment’ characterises the relationship of the branch campus as a constituent body part, under the control of the main campus body, such as the limb is under the control of the brain:
So I’ve put it very clearly to them that having campuses, embodied campuses, so you know, there’s a lot of nuance that has to be had with these discussions because international – a university by itself in some ways ought to be engaging and going through encountering other cultures, and countering different systems of knowing and encountering otherness. So I do not think, that’s never an issue for me whatsoever. But when we start to have embodied campuses, that is extensions of our own campus here, in places in which the laws of that place actually apply on the campus – it’s not like an embassy for example. An embassy can put a rainbow flag up in Dubai you know, in the Australian Embassy without any punitive problems, but you cannot do that with the campuses.
The metaphorical image is one of a limb no longer synchronised with the workings of the brain. Rather than conceptualising education in terms of its bodily ‘boundedness’ and ethical coherence, the more recent interdisciplinary turn in the mobilities literature reconceptualises education and space focusing not only on the mobilities of people and educational policies but also on the mobility of academic institutions, such as the growth in transnational education and the growth of branch campuses and the mobility of ideas (Waters, Reference Waters2016). As such, this enables a recognition of the relationality and fluidity of power within the transnational relationships of branch campuses and the main US- or UK-based campuses. This is illustrated in the account below of the positionality of research in the Gulf region at its branch campuses:
We’re thinking already in a self-conscious way of ways in which we can take advantage for our location and sort of … and develop ways of research interests and also, you know, leverage certain perspectives which are not available to us from Washington or somewhere. People tend naturally towards certain areas because of the location, so for example there’s a big focus here on Indian Ocean studies, you know, cultural and political and so on. There is more focus here on developments in the East, you know, whether it’s in terms of state formation but also at the cultural level, a critical assessment of regional studies, so there are certain areas. Another area of interest is Islamic bioethics.
Similarly, the university positionality of AUB enables a unique construction of American Studies that is not directed from a US construction of the field, as discussed in Chapter 3. Despite intended US foreign policy intentions, the discipline has been transformed in its exportation to the Middle East. Professor Alex Lubin, former Director of Centre for AUB Beirut’s Center for American Studies and Research, contrasts his experience in the different higher educational institutional contexts of the United States and Beirut, Lebanon:
In the United States it was impossible, at least when I went to Beirut in 2011, it was still very difficult in the US to engage those conversations without being accused of being antisemitic frankly. And Beirut and AUB was for me – and I specify that it was specifically for me because I know it’s not for everybody – it was a very open place to engage in the kinds of research that I was doing.
He describes how ‘CASAR became an oasis for those of us who are interested in a critique of US empire that focused on US policy in the Middle East. And that’s because it opened up an avenue for discourse that was difficult in the United States’ (p. 6).
The concern with human rights abuses and difference in values is presented as a result of the dominant neoliberal enterprise:
But in terms of whether, is Dubai a mistake? Yes I think it is. And I think that in terms of why it’s a mistake is because I think that the very basis of going to Dubai was built upon a very corporate idea of what Curtin is. It’s a very instrumentally based thing.
This judgement is based from the perspective of the home institution in Australia; in contrast, a US-based Anthropologist argues that:
in criticising another place and presuming that that other place is authoritarian, illiberal, you know, like all the tropes that then get smuggled in with saying ‘oh, you know, this is a neoliberal enterprise’, like, they still rely on these highly racialised ways of thinking about how the world is split up and these moral ideas about who’s superior and who’s inferior.
4.4 Governance and Funding: Who Owns the University?
We also have this conception, which I’m assuming you do over there as well, we have a conception of faculty governance, right, or we used to have a conception of faculty governance which in theory – I mean this is the poison of New Liberalism right, that it’s being taken away from us on a daily basis.
4.4.1 Management and Audit Culture
There is a global discourse of the ‘knowledge’ economy shaping structures, processes, and practices in HE. In addition, reduced government funding for HE has resulted in the growth of the private university sector, as well as a managerial and accountability discourse with practices of incentives in teaching and research. For example, in the UK context, the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise in the 1980s and academic appraisals have been described as ‘managerial technologies’ and have become examples of many such technologies introduced into HE, borrowed from the private sector (Cribb and Gewirtz, Reference Cribb and Gewirtz2013). More recent technologies in the UK context include the Workload Recognition Model, the Research Excellence Framework, and the Teaching Excellence Framework. Increases in student numbers and programme offerings have been framed in terms of meeting the economic needs of the knowledge economy. The rise of initiatives relating to knowledge exchange, quality assurance, and other forms of university management similarly illustrate the changes in organisational culture reflected in language as well as practices:
I mean, there’s some really bullshit management speak, like multiplex delivery needed and stuff like this. And it just sounds like a total auto-satire because, for me, the level of language is so ridiculous and often it’s not even managers that are the worst but academics who are striving to be in management and almost trying to outperform management and are actually much worse.
Cribb and Gewirtz (Reference Cribb and Gewirtz2013) characterise the university as the ‘hollowed out’ university, where the university is a place providing a service as opposed to an academic self-governing community:
There are no strategies for Departments themselves can determine, you know, they have to have their strategy agreed but, in a sense, the focus of that strategy is defined outside the Department, even to the extent of what the research plans, you know, the focus of the research of the Department should be.
The effect of managerial technologies in HE on academic freedom is enabled through the neoliberal culture of the student as customer which is perceived to curb academic freedom:
There have been so many discussions about people feeling that their censorship is coming from the students because they are now customers and all the rankings and stuff and, at the moment, I’m at a university which is not a Russell Group university and has maybe also an aspiration to join that group, I do not know so much about that here because I’ve just joined and I do not know basically anything about the politics here other than we have a problematic management with every university.
The system of tenure in the US context is also frequently commented on where greater academic freedom is accorded with tenure:
Well, you know that institutional frameworks are pushing us to publish as fast as we can, right, in as great a quantity as we can. So I mean I guess this is easy for me to say, right, because I have tenure and I’ve been promoted to full Professor, so I have much more academic freedom than I did before tenure. So that’s another thing about academic freedom, that it’s very contingent upon one’s rank and one’s institutional position and privilege, so I’ve got a lot of institutional privilege.
A number of senior academics with tenure and job security reflected on the sense of responsibility that comes with this towards more vulnerable colleagues:
So I kind of alternate between thinking I cannot take this anymore, I’m not going to say anything else about it, I’m just going to shut up, and thinking the opposite actually. I’m really, really furious about what’s going on. And the other thing is that I feel I have a responsibility to speak out, so I’m lucky enough to be in a fairly senior position on a permanent contract. I feel like a lot of more junior colleagues would not take that risk because these things can have really serious consequences. And I understand that and I would not expect everybody to speak out, because people are more vulnerable. So I feel people like me who can afford to take certain risks because of our secure position within our institutions have a duty to speak out in defence of young colleagues.
The gendered and racialised nature of this vulnerability was commented on:
I see it as a kind of feminist principle as well, because it is mostly women. It’s overwhelmingly women who are being targeted and it’s also of course, I mean another thing that really upsets me about this is I’ve done quite a lot of work with critical philosophy of race and I’ve made efforts within my discipline to bring young researchers, people of colour, you know young researchers, new academics into mainstream and … publishing and so on. They’re really dealing with, there’s quite a lot of evidence, of the obstacles that black women face in academia and the UK in terms of promotion and so on. And so they are more likely to be in the more insecure, lower down positions. And so they are also the ones least likely to be able to speak out. So I think there’s a way in which it becomes a self-perpetuating thing in which it’s the same senior white middle aged women who are always speaking out.
This positionality with respect to gender and race within the institutional structure of the university is further explicitly noted: ‘No, I do not think being white and male has ever been a disadvantage to anyone in a university setting. I do not believe that’. (Professor of Education, University of Birmingham, UK, p. 5)
In addition to the change in university culture and perceived lack of academic community, there is a concomitant discourse of lack of well-being and mental health of both staff and students. Within this sample of interviewees, there was a gendered and racialised pattern to comfort with the level of attribution of data, striking in the context of a study on academic freedom. Interviewees referred to a culture of stress, fear, and powerlessness. Social media is a spatial extension of this space:
And I’m quite amazed actually at the people I know who are very active on social media who engage in these kind of debates and discussions all the time. I do not know how they deal with, you know they obviously have a very thick skin or nerves of steel, because I do find it emotionally extremely stressful, the bit of exposure I’ve had. And that’s why I’ve sort of taken a decision not to be on social media. I know that I could not cope with that kind of thing. I’m not emotionally strong enough to deal with it I do not think. And I completely understand that some people just cannot take that level of stress.
Another interviewee reflects on the conditions leading to the decision to taking early retirement:
You invest in the system, you invest in the structures, and when you get to the top of the mountain, you look down, you see the lie that it is and you see the way that you have been used in the system and you just feel depressed you know. And it’s part of the reason that I took early retirement.
This act can be understood not as an individual act of defeat or disempowerment but as a performance of agency and disruption. Emotional responses can be understood not just as an individual psychological reaction to stress but also as a political practice (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2014). Yet, the display of emotion can be used by university managers and university processes to undermine the critique of the institutional status quo:
Then I’m the difficult, angry person. But they kind of like you to be difficult and angry because that means that they can pathologise you and put you in a box and allow you to spout off in your corner. Like I said at the beginning, the safety valve, our bodies become, and who we are and what we do become the safety valve.
Gregg and Seigworth (Reference Gregg and Seigworth2010) similarly conceive of theorisation of affect as the ‘politically engaged work’ of such groups marginalised in terms of gender, sexuality, disability, and those in the Global South. Understanding emotion as a social and political practice thus enables us to explore how affect is utilised in the production or silencing of knowledge:
You will not get money, no, because of the system. It’s an illusion. You’ll be allowed to publish but it’s off your own back, it’s off your own experience. It’s emotionally draining. It’s exhausting. You’re not able to compete with your peers and other scholars who are not doing race work. You know exactly what I’m talking about.
The illusion of bringing about change is also referred to with regard to higher education’s managerialisation of diversity:
So you give someone like me a position like that so that I can be the safety valve for the establishment. And I’m aware of that every single day. So I’m allowed to spout off whatever I like. And they do not come, they never come to my sessions but they are happy I’m doing them. ‘Oh [Interviewee name] doing that. We’ve ticked that box, it’s fine’. And in fact it’s actually worse in some – not worse than you know, losing your life, but it allows the status quo to just be you know.
The bodily sense of the emotional burden is further elucidated with reference to the metaphor of ‘sin eater’:
And we are invited to speak and to do – that’s my agreement really, that we are invited to speak and do and say, because of our bodies. They want our bodies to carry that weight for them. It’s like we are this – I saw this movie many years ago called The Sin Eater where this person comes and eats, they can eat all the food when somebody dies and they take on the sins of that person. It’s like we take on the – they do not have to deal with racism because we are the vents. We are the depositories of all their sins and they do not have to deal with it and they go their merry way you know.
4.4.2 Funding
Scott (Reference Scott2019) traces the origins of academic freedom in the US context over the last century, stating that its aim was to address ‘conflicts about the relationships between power and knowledge’ (p. 39). The 1915 ‘Declaration of Principles’ of the AAUP in the context of the new research university was aimed at protecting the autonomy of academic faculty from the corporate structures that support it. Yet, embedded in this articulation is an unresolved tension between being independent from the sources of financial power supporting the university and indirectly serving these sources through the production of knowledge over a contested ‘public good’ (Scott, Reference Scott2019).
The lack of funding in certain areas, in particular, the field of race, is evident in the funding priorities of research councils:
If I did randomised control trials of educational innovations in school effectiveness I could make millions of pounds, but the research that I do tends to be, most of my research is not externally funded at all. Every now and again I get external funding for a dedicated project. But it’s always when race will have been raised as an issue somewhere else. The State and research funders really aren’t that interested in anti-racist research.
Institutionalised structures for research in the university are also critiqued. Commenting on the establishment of the Centre for Research on Race in Education at the University of Birmingham, UK, Professor Gillborn wryly notes:
I do not think it’s a coincidence that when we set the race centre up at Birmingham, it was the only University-based centre at an English University looking at racism in education and it’s founding Director was a white man. I do not think that’s coincidental, it tells you a lot about the Academy.
The role of university affiliation in securing external funding, and university support for certain forms of research, is discussed in the well-publicised and contested case of Noah Carl, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge:
I was one of the people who signed the public letter saying that the Fellowship at Cambridge was a disgrace. I’m also one of the people that Noah Carl in his work kind of identifies as one of the bad guys. So in his paper about so called Stifling Debate about Race and IQ … looking for links between race and systematic and/or genetically based differences in ability, they ought to just come clean and say ‘well, this is racist research’ because that’s what it is.
Transnational funding arrangements between the main campus and its branch campus were commented on by two NYU Professors with experience in the NYU Abu Dhabi branch campus. It was noted that for NYU Abu Dhabi, in particular, the drive for the branch campus is presented as the UAE purchasing soft power:
So these institutions made these deals with states that were looking to use their soft power and looking to use I guess some of the excess wealth they had in these ways to improve their image, than maybe increase their internal capacity and do something for their people.
Funding for NYU Abu Dhabi comes from the UAE, in addition to financial incentives given to NYU, New York: ‘So the salaries, so it’s not just building the campus for NYU, the salaries are all paid’. (Professor, NYU, p. 13). The transnational flow of money between the NYU branch campus in Abu Dhabi back to NYU New York is further commented on:
the amount of money that is released from Abu Dhabi funds that flows into the system – the entire operation is bank rolled by Abu Dhabi authorities. That money does not just stay in Abu Dhabi, it comes sloshing over into New York, and it fills the coffers of academic departments here, because if you send faculty to NYU Abu Dhabi, then you are very richly rewarded. You know, the department suddenly has a lot of funds [laughs]. Individuals who go and teach there get very lavishly remunerated. The department also gets rewarded. And so, yes, the department does have Abu Dhabi funds, and it uses them at its discretion.
4.4.3 Unions
Academic freedom is seen to be protected through the strength of a university’s union, referred to by interviewees in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Lebanon:
Because I am active in my Union and I’m very lucky to be on a Campus that has a Union and a collective bargaining agreement, I feel really strongly that as a tenured Professor it’s part of my job to speak out about inequities that I see in the institution, that the junior faculty who do not feel as empowered to speak, it’s my job to advocate for them and speak out for them.
Another interviewee comments on the important role of the union, in relation not only to the university but to external pressures and restrictions on academic freedom, such as ‘Canary Mission’, a website established in 2014, documenting cases of pro-Palestinian scholarship in US universities, which is deemed to be ‘anti-Semitic’:
I really feel very lucky to be at [] for that reason, we have a very strong union and the union has called me to tell me that they are on top of things and that I should not worry and that they are keeping abreast of this issue. I’m also in a Department where across the entire university the only people who are on these lists are in my Department.
‘Faculty United’, a non-profit association serving as the AUB Chapter of the AAUP, operates effectively as a union at AUB. Its mission is outlined as ‘to promote substantive faculty participation in AUB’s institutional governance, to defend academic freedom, to improve the economic status and terms and conditions of employment of faculty members at the university, and to advance the standards, ideals, and welfare of the academic profession’ (AUB Faculty United, 2019). Faculty United developed as a response to unfavourable developments with the Faculty contracts and the impetus to take a collective stand: ‘And this is how Faculty United came to be in the first place as a reaction by some Faculty, by a number of small group of Faculty towards administrative decisions that were taking place that were unilateral without consultation with Faculty members and did not engage us’ (Professor of Psychology, AUB, Beirut, p. 2).
Professor Jad Chaaban (Economics, AUB, Beirut) describes its development starting with his writing of a secret document in 2011, which was only shared with a few close colleagues. Taking consultation from lawyers:
We immediately did it as a chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which is the oldest, as you know, association in the US and it organises a lot. And then we just announced it, when it was all done, that now we have an association that is a chapter of the AAUP Association. It was a major surprise here especially for the administration that we could actually pull this off.
Over the following few years, Faculty United developed a strong and sizeable membership and achieved considerable success. However, the change in administration in 2015 has posed challenges to Faculty United:
Unlike the previous administration, the current administration is very short on dissent and there is unfortunately a culture of fear that has come to the campus that did not exist even at the strongest of opposition times with the previous administration. And that is felt by both Faculty United executives and leadership as well as the Faculty in general. Do you see what I’m trying to say? So the culture of fear, people are afraid to speak up, people are afraid to talk, people are afraid to voice dissent, there are many brown nosers about trying to curry favour and so on and so forth and the others are not feeling comfortable or confident enough to challenge certain decisions that are happening. And that is new. That did not exist before.
Yet, Faculty United was recognised as having considerable power, which the Founder of Faculty United sees as the guiding rationale for co-opting its senior members into positions of managerial power within the institution: ‘He put, so Deans, Associate Deans were appointed from Faculty United or were invited to run then were selected. And this was from the founding group. So this was the first kind of move to kind of buy the group in or lure them in’ (Professor Jad Chaaban, AUB, Beirut, p. 7).
The institution of the university union is also seen to play an important role in relation to raising issues arising from the context of branch campuses. The role operates primarily through interrogating central university management and public discourses within the UK and US contexts, although practically constrained by and in tension with local national law in the UAE context. According to a UCU branch officer, academics have raised a range of concerns pertaining to the operation of UK university branch campuses in the Gulf. Furthermore, the union takes the role of raising the university’s legal obligations:
There’s reports from Human Rights Watch that they are part of this ongoing practice of forced labour. So we know it’s happening, we know that puts the university in all kinds of trouble in terms of they are, as a charity, they have duties under EU law not to allow forced labour or modern slavery in their supply chain. So we think they are in breach of that.
In addition, the UNESCO definition of academic freedom is frequently cited in university statements on academic freedom referring to both the academic’s autonomy and freedom from state repression. As such, unions have played a role ensuring academics are aware of their rights with respect to any university requests to contribute to or work at branch campuses.
4.5 Exceptionalism and Context
Historically, the university was conceived as a space separate from its political and social surroundings. This separation was embodied both as a physically separate space, with universities walled off from the city, and as an intellectual space, where the pursuit of knowledge is imagined as transcending the political, social, economic, and legal constraints of society. Critiques of the erosion of the university’s exceptional separateness arising from neoliberal imperatives of the market (Giroux, Reference Giroux2002) are, therefore, made on two assumptions: firstly, that the university can, in fact, function as if separate from its context, and secondly, that this separateness is normatively a desirable ideal, framed in terms of discourses of academic freedom.
Arguments that the university should not be conceived of as separate from its surroundings are evidenced in the form of discourses promoting the idea that the rationale of university’s mission is to serve the economic and political needs of key ‘stakeholders’ in society, and also as evidenced in the dominance of discourses, policies, and practices promoting ‘impactful’ research. This conception is also framed in relation to discourses of the civic university and co-producing communities of knowledge and practice. In the colonial context, the discourse of being embedded within the local community and region is a discourse of authenticity. For example, in 2016, AUB celebrated its 150th anniversary since it was founded, where it has proudly presented itself as ‘authentically’ embedded in its local communities and the region with a civic mission, a ‘liberal’ ethos, and a commitment to ‘liberal education’, whilst also of international significance as a knowledge producer with a wide range of international teaching, research, and business partnerships (Khouri, Reference Khouri2016). The former AUB President described the university: ‘AUB is of the region and for the region’ (Dorman, Reference Dorman2011), and AUB’s ‘Neighborhood Initiative’, established in 2007, locates ‘the histories of AUB and Ras Beirut [as] … intertwined, shaping each other’s identity and place within the city’, emphasising its particular geographical location (AUB Neighborhood Initiative, 2015). Its civic mission is explicit in that the rationale of the Initiative which is presented in a discourse of ‘giving back to its neighborhood, by mobilising the university’s resources for the public good, beginning just outside the campus walls’ (Kiwan, 2017b). As such, AUB imagines itself as ‘authentic’ and embedded in contrast to the branch campus universities in the Gulf.
In contrast, the traditional ivory tower model is proposed as necessary for the pursuit of knowledge unfettered by dynamics of power through political, religious, and economic relationships embedded in society. McGreevy (Reference McGreevy2018) also argues that non-democratic countries favour such a model of separation to geographically and intellectually limit effects on the surrounding societal context, which may hold different social, political, and religious views.
Yet, McGreevy (Reference McGreevy2018) argues that universities are in a ‘paradoxical’ position, as they are simultaneously ‘places of closure’ and ‘places of openness’. The term ‘places of closure’ refers to the disciplined structure of knowledge, whilst at the same time being open to innovative, critical, and new ways of thinking. He further argues that such ‘neo-monasticism’ will not preserve and nurture the production of knowledge, but rather the university becomes ‘caged and defanged by greater separation’ (McGreevy, Reference McGreevy2018, p. 6):
Universities have been conceived up as separate from the world around them. And I think that that is part of their DNA and the way they have always been conceived. But I think that that is problematic. And one of the ways it’s problematic is in regards to freedom. Does the university need special freedom? Many people have made this argument that it should be kind of a sanctuary for freedom and for free enquiry and open enquiry. But I sort of feel like this does not work you know. We create these pristine places you know, like Yosemite. We put a fence around them and we say ‘Look, we preserved nature’. That’s not the problem at all. The problem is living with nature. It seems to me we have a similar problem in universities. You can wall them off and say ‘Look we allow these people to have all this freedom and all this, to pursue any topic they want.’
The question of whether the university or its academics should have special freedoms is raised by the following interviewee:
about academics is that they exist in a unique positionality where they have access to a much wider range of platforms through which to speak and also a much broader, a much larger audience. And in addition to those two things, a greater degree of authority within the society in which they live. And what that means is that – or this is what I’ve kind of proposed in my work – is that academics actually pose greater dangers than non-academics who do not have those kind of additional factors relating to their speech, except in the case of course of politicians and celebrities for example.
The concern expressed here is that academics not only have greater public profile and opportunities to reach a larger audience, but they also hold a greater degree of authority that is not necessarily warranted when commented on areas outside their areas of expertise, and this could be conceived as an abuse of power. What is proposed is for constraints on academics in order to protect the public, as well as students.
4.6 Conclusion
This chapter has critically examined discourses of the perceived role of the university and how this relates to constructions of knowledge and its implications for pedagogy, research, and academic freedom. Various constructions of the mission of the university, including ‘pursuit of truth’, ‘public good’, ‘knowledge economy’, and ‘image of the nation’ are interrogated in transnational perspective. Developments of the mission of the university are also examined in the context of the massification and internationalisation of HE globally. Changes in university governance, funding, and pervasiveness of an audit culture are considered in relation to the theory and practice of academic freedom. The following chapter develops this theme through a focus on the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ restrictions on the production of knowledge.
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