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Paul Temple


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Oppenheimer

by Paul Temple

A movie about the life and work of J Robert Oppenheimer, called simply Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in the title role, is due to be released in the UK this summer. It looks as if the movie will deal mainly with the three years of Oppenheimer’s life when he led the Manhattan Project’s scientific team which produced the first atomic bomb in 1945, but his life story holds many other points of interest for those of us studying higher education. Oppenheimer was primarily a university teacher, researcher, and administrator, before the war mostly at Berkeley and after the war as the Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where his staff included Einstein, Bohr and Dirac.

A particular point of historical interest is that Oppenheimer’s academic career spanned the period during which Europe, as a result of self-inflicted wounds, ceded world scientific leadership to the United States. When Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard in 1925, young American scientists wanting to work with the world’s best researchers crossed the Atlantic as a matter of course. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer’s choice was between Germany, particularly Göttingen and Leipzig, and England, particularly Cambridge. Cambridge didn’t work out well, so in 1926 he went to work with Max Born, one of the leading figures in quantum mechanics, at Göttingen, receiving his doctorate there just a year later. There were presumably no wasted words in his 25-page thesis.

Several factors came together to allow America to build an atomic bomb in a stunningly short period. The crucial phase of the Manhattan Project, from when the first scientists arrived at the newly-created Los Alamos laboratory (a collection of army huts) to the “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, lasted a mere 28 months. But the Manhattan Project built on the best available physics and engineering research, created in American universities in the 1930s – Berkeley and Chicago in particular – largely with public funding for the purest of research. Through the 1930s, for example, Berkeley seemed to have no particular difficulty in obtaining funding to build ever more powerful cyclotrons (the first particle accelerators, allowing the production of radioactive isotopes), but with no practical aim in view: nobody seems to have asked them for an impact statement.

America also took full advantage of talent sucked in from Europe, particularly Jewish refugees from Germany, Hungary and Italy. Britain also took in foreigners: Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, both German-Jewish refugees, worked at Birmingham University in the 1940s and made a vital contribution to building the bomb by showing that the amount of uranium-235 needed to sustain a chain reaction was a matter of kilograms, not tons as had been thought – thus making the bomb a practical proposition.

A lot of things supported the Manhattan Project’s success, but large-scale, long-term funding for blue-skies research, together with a policy of grabbing talent from wherever it could be found, and a sophisticated manufacturing economy, were all crucial. Hard to decide which of these factors is the least likely to apply in Britain today.

Oppenheimer’s loss of his security clearance in 1954 was devastating for a man with a strong sense of national duty. There are several ironies here. One is that, while Oppenheimer’s politics were certainly left-wing, he was notably clear-eyed about the Soviet Union, concluding as early as 1947 that negotiations with Stalin over the control of nuclear weapons would be a waste of time. And, just as past service to the Soviet state was no guarantee of one’s future safety, so the fact that Oppenheimer had given America the bomb (“What more do you want, mermaids?”, a friend asked at his Security Board hearing) did not protect him from the FBI’s unshakeable obsession about his political unreliability (of course, they missed the actual Soviet spies). There is a depressing contrast between this cold war paranoia and the open, international culture which Oppenheimer had known before the war. Princeton’s refusal to bow to pressure from Washington to sack him must have been a consolation of sorts.

There was a reflective silence in the control bunker immediately following the “Trinity” explosion. Oppenheimer later said that he thought of the line from Hindu scripture (he read Sanskrit),”Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. It seems not to be entirely clear whether he actually uttered the words; someone present recalls him saying, “Well, I guess it worked”.Let’s see how the movie handles this era-defining moment.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.


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Mobilities and the ‘international academic’ in higher education

by Vera Spangler, Lene Møller Madsen, and Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

December marks the month of the International SRHE Research Conference. It was an interesting week full of presentations and discussions around the theme of Mobilities in Higher Education. In the opening plenary talk, Emily Henderson invited us to reflect critically on the different ways in which mobilities of academics and students in higher education are discursively constructed. She debated how discursive constructions of mobility may influence who can access academia/higher education, who can gain recognition, and who can establish a feeling of belonging. Emily’s presentation set an interesting and highly relevant ground for the week to come, opening space for critical thought about  academic mobility and experiences of mobility, subjectivities, and power. Our presentation about who is considered ‘the international academic’ addressed similar ideas and observations, which we would like to share in this blog post in order to open the conversation with a larger audience.

Never has the higher education sector been so mobile, particularly as internationalisation occupies a central position on the global agenda of policymakers. Over the past decade we can observe a significant increase in academic mobility. This is partly due to the fact that the academic profession is becoming exceedingly internationalised and globalised, often involving some sort of travel on the part of the academic throughout their career. In the academic sector, having international staff is often seen as integral to the institution’s reputation and recognition. Likewise, international mobility is perceived as inherently beneficial for the individual and as a valuable asset for academic research careers. Professional stays abroad can function as a mark of distinction or valuable international capital.

Mobility and, notably, internationalisation are often used with many positive connotations, presented as neutral and unconditionally good. Internationalisation is often deemed instrumental in enhancing the quality of research and education. Universities put increasing effort into attracting international academics, seeking their contribution in establishing an international research and teaching environment to promote the status of the faculty and their position internationally. Particularly for universities outside Anglo-America, international scholars constitute an important element in creating a so-called ‘international university’. However we often see a uniform, unidirectional, and unproblematic description of how to attract and retain international academics in higher education strategies and mainstream policy documents. There is a dominant prominence in university strategies of attracting ‘global talent’ and ‘the best and the brightest’, promoting a specific idea of the ‘international academic’. Yet questions remain about how academics of different national and social backgrounds understand the role of being an ‘international academic’ and how their understandings are consonant with those sought, promoted and shaped by higher education institutions.

Our paper for the SRHE conference tried to unpack ‘the international’ in international academic mobility based on interviews with international academics (varying in age, nationality, and academic position) living and working in Denmark. The data stem from the larger research project Geographies of Internationalisation, which explores how internationalisation affects the perception of quality, relevance and learning in higher education and how these perceptions travel with mobile academics. Our conference presentation examined what it means to be an international academic, who the ‘international’ is, and how the academics’ ‘international-ness’ is being used and/or neglected by institutions.

During the interviews, interesting conversations emerged as to when one is considered international – do you have to be recruited as ‘an international’ or can you just be a ‘love migrant’ who then gets employment at a university? Others pondered how long one could live in Denmark and still be considered ‘an international’. Our analysis shows that ‘the international’ is not a neutral concept, but often ‘international-ness’ is associated with those from the centre (the Anglo-American academy), while academics from the (semi-)periphery are viewed as less international, perhaps just ‘foreign’ as one interviewee stated. Language is an important factor in this context. As we have shown elsewhere, English is often conflated with the international, for instance internationalisation may simply mean English Medium Instruction. This may explain why academics from the Anglo-American academy can appear to possess more of that universal character that is international. In this way, we point to the uneven geographies of internationalisation, and how universities in the (semi-)periphery can end up mimicking the Anglo-American academy in their attempt to internationalise.

While internationalisation can bring many social, material and professional benefits concerning, for instance, intercultural competencies and employability, there is a diversity in geographical patterns, constraints, demands, privileges and motivations that are to a large extent silenced in prominent policy documents and discourses. Hidden behind its neutralising and universalising discourse, internationalisation is a multi-dimensional, highly uneven process; a plural landscape of possibilities for some, and disadvantages for others. For some years now, critical scholarship on internationalisation has been growing. There is increasing concern that internationalisation practices and mainstream policies reproduce global inequalities and already uneven relations and geographies. There are a number of different ways to avoid this. Along with other scholars of critical internationalisation studies, we encourage efforts to rethink and critically explore consequences, practices and discourses of internationalisation both in scholarship and in academic conversations to open up questions for a renewed focus and to find ways forward.

Vera Spangler is a PhD student at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England. Her research project is a comparative study between England, Denmark and Germany with focus on knowledge legitimacy and the role of student mobility in the re/production of global hierarchies.

Lene Møller Madsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. She is part of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation, responsible for the WP on academic mobility. She holds a PhD in human geography, and have worked with pedagogical training of staff for many years including international academics.  

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen is Associate Professor and academic international coordinator at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark. Originally trained as a human geographer, her research concerns mobility, space, and education. Since 2019 PI of the research project Geographies of Internationalisation with 14 affiliated international scholars and master students.


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The Doorknob and the Door(s): Why Bayes Matters Now

By Paul Alper

When I was young, there was a sort of funny story about someone who invented the doorknob but died young and poor because the door had yet to be invented. And, perhaps the imagery is backwards in that the door existed but was useless until the doorknob came into being but I will stick with the doorknob coming first in time. Bear with me as I attempt to show the relevance of this to the current meteoric rise of Bayesianism, a philosophy and concept several centuries old. 

In a previous posting, “Statistical Illogic: the fallacy of Jacob Bernoulli and others,” I reviewed the book, Bernoulli’s Fallacy by Aubrey Clayton.  He shows in great detail how easy it is to confuse what we really should want

Prob(Hypothesis| Evidence)                                       Bayesianism

with

Prob(Evidence | Hypothesis)                                       Frequentism

A classic instance of Bayesian revision in higher education would be the famous example at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. In the 1970s, it was alleged that there was discrimination against females applying to graduate school.  Indeed, male admission rate overall was higher than female admission rate.  But, according to https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2016-05-08-simpsons-paradox-berkeley.html, the simple explanation

“is that women tended to apply to the departments that are the hardest to get into, and men tended to apply to departments that were easier to get into. (Humanities departments tended to have less research funding to support graduate students, while science and engineer departments were awash with money.) So women were rejected more than men. Presumably, the bias wasn’t at Berkeley but earlier in women’s education, when other biases led them to different fields of study than men.”

Clayton’s examples, such as the Prosecutor’s Fallacy and medical testing confusion, give no hint of how analytically difficult it was to perform the calculations of Bayes Theorem in complicated situations. Except for a paragraph or two on pages 297 and 298 he makes no reference to how and why Bayesianism calculations can now be done numerically on very complicated, important, real-life problems in physics, statistics, machine learning, and in many other fields, thus the proliferation of Bayesianism.

For the record, the one and only picture of the reverend Thomas Bayes is generally considered apocryphal; ditto regarding the one and only picture of Shakespeare.   Bayes died in 1761 and his eponymous theorem was presented to The Royal Society in 1763 by Richard Price, an interesting character on his own.

What has changed since the inception of Bayes Theorem more than two centuries ago, the door knob if you will, is the advent of the door: World War II and the computer. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the place that gave us the atom bomb, five people were confronted with a complicated problem in physics and they came up with a numerical way of solving Bayes Theorem via an approach known as MCMC, which stands for Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Their particular numerical way of doing things is referred to as the “Metropolis Algorithm” named after Nicholas Metropolis, the individual whose name was alphabetically first.

To give the flavour but not the details of the Metropolis algorithm, I will use a well-done, simple example I found on the web which does not use or need the Metropolis algorithm but can be solved simply using straightforward Bayes Theorem; then I show an inferior numerical technique before indicating how Metropolis would do it. The simple illustrative example is taken from the excellent web video, Bayes theorem, the geometry of changing beliefs (which in turn is taken from work by Nobel prize-winning psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky).

The example starts with ‘Steve’, a shy retiring individual. We are asked to say which is more likely – that he is a librarian, or a farmer? Many people will say ‘librarian’, but that is to ignore how many librarians and how many farmers there are in the general population. The example suggests there are 20 times as many farmers as librarians, so we start with 10 librarians and 200 farmers and no one else.  Consequently,

Prob(Librarian) is 10/(10 +200) = 1/21.

Prob(Farmer) is 200/(10 +200) = 20/21

The video has 4 of the 10 Librarians being shy and 20 of the 200 farmers being shy; a calculation shows how the evidence revises our thinking:

Prob(Librarian| shyness) = 4/(4+20) = 4/24 = 1/6

Prob(Farmer| shyness) = 20/(4+20) = 5/6

‘Steve’ is NOT more likely to be a librarian. The probability that ‘Steve’ is a librarian is actually one in six. Bayesian revision has been calculated and note that the results are normalised.  That is, the 5 to 1 ratio, 20/4, trivially leads to 5/6 and 1/6.  Normalisation is important in order to calculate mean, variance, etc. In more complicated scenarios in many dimensions normalisation remains vital but difficult to obtain.

The problem of normalisation can be solved numerically but not yet in the Metropolis way.  Picture a 24-sided die.  At each roll of the die, record whether the side that comes up is a number 1,2,3 or 4 and call it Librarian. If any other number, 5 to 24, comes up, call it Farmer.  Do this (very) many thousands of times and roughly 1/6 of those tosses will be librarian and 5/6 will be farmer.  This sampling procedure is deemed independent in that a given current toss of the die does not depend on what tosses took place before.  Unfortunately, this straight-forward independent sampling procedure does not work well on more involved problems in higher dimensions.

Metropolis does a specific dependent sampling procedure, in which the choice of where to go next does depend on where you are now but not how you got there, ie  the previous places you visited play no role.  Such a situation is called a Markov process, a concept which  dates from the early 20th century. If we know how to transition from one state to another, we typically seek the long-run probability of being in that state. In the Librarian/Farmer problem, there are only two states, Librarian and Farmer. The Metropolis algorithm says begin in one of the states, Librarian or Farmer, toss a two-sided die which proposes a move.  Accept this move as long as  you do not go down. So, moving from Librarian to Librarian, Farmer to Farmer or Librarian to Farmer are accepted. Moving from Farmer to Librarian may be accepted or not; the choice depends on the relative heights – the bigger the drop, the less likely the move is to be accepted.  Metropolis says: take the ratio, 4/20, and compare to a random number between zero and one. If the random number is less than 4/20, move from Farmer to Librarian; if not, stay at Farmer. Repeat the procedure (very) many, many times.

Typically, there is a burn-in period so the first bunch are ignored and we count from then on the fraction of the runs that we are in the Librarian state or in the Farmer state, to yield the 1/6 and 5/6.

Multiple thousands of iterations today take no time at all; back in World War II, computing was in its infancy and one wonders how many weeks it took to get a run which today, would be done in seconds.  But, so to speak, a door was being constructed. 

In 1970, Hastings introduced an additional term so that for complex cases, the proposals and acceptances would better capture more complex, involved “terrain” than this simple example. In keeping with the doorknob and door imagery, Metropolis Hastings is a better door, allowing us to visit more complicated, elaborate terrain more assuredly and more quickly.  An even newer door, inspired by problems in physics, is known as the  Hamiltonian MCMC.  It is even more complicated, but it is still a door,related to previous MCMC doors.  There are many web sites and videos attempting to explain the details of these algorithms but it is not easy going to follow the logic of every step.  Suffice to say, however, the impact  is enormous and justifies the resurgence of Bayesianism.

Paul Alper is an emeritus professor at the University of St. Thomas, having retired in 1998. For several decades, he regularly contributed Notes from North America to Higher Education Review. He is almost the exact age of Woody Allen and the Dalai Lama and thus, was fortunate to be too young for some wars and too old for other ones. In the 1990s, he was awarded a Nike sneaker endorsement which resulted in his paper, Imposing Views, Imposing Shoes: A Statistician as a Sole Model; it can be found at The American Statistician, August 1995, Vol 49, No. 3, pages 317 to 319.


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Statistical illogic: the fallacy of Jacob Bernoulli and others

by Paul Alper

Bernoulli’s Fallacy, Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science by Aubrey Clayton.  

“My goal with this book is not to broker a peace treaty; my goal is to win the war.”    (Preface p xv)

“We should no more be teaching p-values in statistics courses than we should be teaching phrenology in medical schools.” (p239)

It is possible or even probable that many a PhD or journal article in the softer sciences has got by through misunderstanding probability and statistics. Clayton’s book aims to expose the shortcomings of a fallacy first attributed to the 17th century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, but relied on repeatedly for centuries afterwards, despite the 18th century work of statistician Thomas Bayes, and exemplified in the work of RA Fisher, the staple of so many social science primers on probability and statistics.

In the midst of the frightening Cold War, I attended a special lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on 12 February 1960 by Fisher, the most prominent statistician of the 20th century; he was touring the United States and other countries. I had never heard of him and indeed, despite being in grad school, my undergraduate experience was entirely deterministic: apply a voltage then measure a current, apply a force then measure acceleration, etc. Not a hint, not a mention of variability, noise, or random disturbance. The general public’s common currency in 1960 did not then include such terms as random sample, statistical significance, and margin of error. 

However, Fisher was speaking on the hot topic of that day: was smoking a cause of cancer?  Younger readers may wonder how in the world was this a debatable subject when in hindsight, it is so strikingly obvious. Well, it was not obvious in 1960 and the history of inflight smoking indicates how difficult it was to turn the tide, and how many years it took. Fisher’s tour of the United States was sponsored by the tobacco industry, but it would be wrong to conjecture that he was being hypocritical. And not just because he was a smoker himself.  

Fisher believed that mere observations were insufficient for concluding that A causes B; it could be that B causes A or that C is responsible for both A and B. He insisted upon experimental and not mere observational evidence. According to Fisher, it could be that people who have some underlying physical problem led them to smoke rather than smoking caused the underlying problem; or that some other cause such as pollution was to blame. According to Fisher, in order to experimentally link smoking as the cause of cancer, at random some children would be required to smoke and some would be required not to smoke and then as time goes by note the incidence of cancer in each of the two groups.

However, according to Clayton, Fisher himself, just like Jacob Bernoulli, had it backwards when it came to analysing experiments.  If Fisher and Bernoulli can make this mistake, it is easy for others to fall into this trap because ordinary language keeps tripping us up.  Clayton expends much effort into showing examples, such as the famous Prosecutor’s Fallacy. The fallacy was exemplified in the UK by the infamous Meadows case and is discussed at length by Clayton; a prosecution expert witness made unsustainable assertions about the probability of innocence being “one in 73 million”.

The Bayesian way of looking at things is to consider the probability a person is guilty, given the evidence. This is not the same as the probability of the evidence, given the person is guilty, which is the ‘frequentist’ approach adopted by Fisher, with results which can be wildly different numerically. Another example, from the medical world: there is confusion between the probability of having a disease, given a positive test for the disease:

                        Prob (Disease | Test Positive) ; the Bayesian way of looking at things

and

                         Prob (Test Positive | Disease) ; the frequentist approach

The patient is interested in the former but is often quoted the latter, known as the sensitivity of the test, which might be markedly different depending on the base rate of the disease. If the base rate is, say, one in 1,000 and the test sensitivity is, say, 90%, then for every 1000 tests, 100 will be false positives. A Bayesian would therefore conclude correctly that the chances of a false positive test are 100 times greater than the chances of actually having the disease. In other words, the hypothesis that the person has the disease is not supported by the data/evidence. However a frequentist might mistakenly say that if you test positive there is a 90% chance that you have the disease.

The quotation from page xv of Clayton’s preface which begins this essay, shows how much Clayton, a Bayesian, is determined to counter Bernoulli’s fallacy and set things straight. Fisher’s frequentist approach still finds favor among social scientists because his setup, no matter how flawed, was an easy recipe to follow. Assume a straw-man hypothesis such as ‘no effect’, take data to obtain a so-called p-value and, in the mechanical manner suggested by Fisher, if the p-value is low enough, reject the straw man. Therefore, the winner was the opposite of the straw man, namely the effect/hypothesis/contention/claim is real.

Fisher, a founder, and not just a follower of the eugenics movement, was as I once wrote, “a genius, and difficult to get along with.”  Upon reflection, I consequently changed the conjunction to an implication, “a genius, therefore difficult to get along with.”  His then son-in-law back on 12 February 1960 was George Box, also a famous statistician – among other things the author of the famous phrase in statistics, “all models are wrong, some are useful” – who had just been appointed to be the head of the University of Wisconsin’s statistics department. Unlike Fisher, Box was a very agreeable and kindly person and, as evidence of those qualities, I note that he was on the committee that approved my PhD thesis, a writing endeavour of mine which I hope is never unearthed for future public consumption.  

All of that was a long time ago, well before the Soviet Union collapsed, only to see today’s military rise of Russia. Tobacco use and sales throughout the world are much reduced while cannabis acceptance is on the rise. Statisticians have since moved on to consider and solve much weightier computational problems via the rubric of so-called Data Science. I was in my mid-twenties and I doubt that there were many people younger than I was at that Fisher presentation, so I am on track to be the last one alive who heard a lecture by Fisher disputing smoking as a cause of cancer.  He died in Australia in 1962, a month after my 26th birthday but his legacy, reputation and contribution live on and hence, the fallacy of Bernoulli as well.    

Paul Alper is an emeritus professor at the University of St. Thomas, having retired in 1998. For several decades, he regularly contributed Notes from North America to Higher Education Review. He is almost the exact age of Woody Allen and the Dalai Lama and thus, was fortunate to be too young for some wars and too old for other ones. In the 1990s, he was awarded a Nike sneaker endorsement which resulted in his paper, Imposing Views, Imposing Shoes: A Statistician as a Sole Model; it can be found at The American Statistician, August 1995, Vol 49, No. 3, pages 317 to 319.


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Reimagining academic conferences: toward a federated model of conferencing

by Dror Etzion, Joel Gehman and Gerald F Davis

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, most academic conferences have shifted to online formats. This disruption to our routines presents a unique opportunity to consider alternative conference configurations. One possibility is that the momentum behind the shift to online conferencing is leading to a future in which gatherings are entirely virtual. At the same time, old habits die hard, and many in the academic community are assuming that a travel-free world is a temporary anomaly, and that very soon researchers will resume convening in person.

Several scenarios for the future of conferencing are possible, and most seem to have benefits but also drawbacks. We begin by identifying some pros and cons of in-person and online conferences. To maximize the positives, we propose a federated model of conferencing that thoughtfully integrates both in-person and online events. This model may help scholars not only to share academic knowledge but also to pursue values of inclusion, diversity, community, and environmental stewardship.

In-person conferences

For those attending, in-person conferences have four basic functions. First, they provide opportunities for intellectual development. Presenters are able to receive feedback on works in progress and are exposed to nascent ideas being pursued by other scholars. Early-career scholars are able to solicit advice, and more established ones are able to test the waters with riskier ideas before investing significant time and effort in preparing journal articles. Second, in-person conferences provide career development opportunities and constitute an important part of the academic job market. Conference presentations add heft to a CV, and provide valuable networking opportunities. Third, in-person conferences provide ample opportunities for ancillary professional activities such as editorial board meetings, professional association gatherings, and in-person collaboration. Fourth, in-person conferences provide opportunities for non-professional activities, such as socializing and sightseeing.   

At the field level, conferences can focus scholarly attention on specific topics, theories, or ideas. They can serve a coordinating function and facilitate collective sensemaking. Sometimes, powerful conference experiences can become field-configuring events that trigger meaningful academic advances. In addition, conference revenues are often the main source of funding for sponsoring associations, providing them the means to pursue other worthy initiatives.

Despite these benefits, in-person conferences do have some notable downsides. Large conferences can be overwhelming and take a significant physical toll due to disrupted biorhythms and jet lag, not to mention long and tightly packed days. Instances of sexual harassment and assault are all too common. Beyond these criminal activities, gender inequality continues to affect conference participation. Conferences also strengthen the status hierarchy, and many lower status participants find themselves on the receiving end of microaggressions and slights. Accessibility also continues to be an issue. Many venues are not easy for disabled academics to navigate. Travel bans prevent many scholars from attending conferences, and travel costs limit attendance to well-resourced scholars, primarily from the Global North. In-person conferences also produce a massive carbon footprint.

Online conferences

The forced shift to online platforms during COVID has addressed some of these downsides of conferences. Online formats promote accessibility by removing barriers associated with travel costs and physical impairment. They also help remove social barriers to participation, as some of the traditional markers of status do not translate well to the online format. Online platforms also promote inclusivity and content-richness. On platforms such as Zoom, it is easier to implement practices to ensure that conversations are not dominated by a few high-status people. For example, text-based chat functions enable participants to formulate questions at their own pace and provide links to helpful materials. They also serve as an archive that can be revisited when participants have more time to engage with the material.

Moreover, because online conferences are not constrained by time and place, they have the potential to promote ongoing engagement. Rather than several intense days, a series of shorter events, spread out over time, might facilitate greater reflection. Online conferences also promote diversity of session formats. Rather than 90-minute panel sessions, it is possible to have sessions as short or as long as people desire. Presentations could be live streamed from research settings, and practitioners who normally do not attend academic conferences could login to sessions that interest them. Online conferences also have timeliness benefits, as researchers do not have to wait to present their work. Likewise, meetings can be convened immediately to address urgent topics (eg COVID).

Yet, online conferences are not without their downsides. Due to low transaction costs, the number of online conferences is proliferating, creating the potential for overload. Online conferences have also led to anomie in the academy. Many yearn for a return to at least some in-person conferences, as the social interaction and random experiences they afford can be energizing. Moreover, the shift to online conferences has exacerbated the digital divide, constraining scholars who live in areas with less well-developed technological infrastructure. Surveillance capitalism is another potential pitfall, as online interactions leave traces that could have repercussions. Gaffes can go viral, and online interactions may be watched and listened to (and misinterpreted) by unintended audiences. Less malicious, but perhaps more insidious, would be a scenario whereby the dreaded teaching evaluation model is applied to conference presentations. Additionally, online conferences may reinforce tribalism in the academy. With a plethora of conferences to choose from, scholars may splinter off into self-reinforcing cliques entrenched around specific research programs, thereby eliminating opportunities for cross-fertilization and creating echo chambers. Gaming the system is another potential problem with the online conference format. Evaluating scholarly impact is a key focus in the academy, and tactics used to boost citation counts or journal ratings could easily translate to online conferences. Winner-takes-all dynamics are likely to ensue.

A federated model of conferencing

Having analysed the pros and cons of both in-person and online conferences, we propose a federated model of conferencing that constitutes the best of both worlds and produces a lighter environmental footprint while promoting equity and inclusion. As an organising principle, federation recognizes the utility of some central authority, but delegates most responsibilities to partially self-governing units which set priorities based on local preferences. Compared to unitary governance, federation embraces experimentation and fosters learning across units, thereby striking an optimal balance between scale and autonomy.

In a federated conferencing model, organising, decision-making, and participation would be pushed to the regional level while maintaining global coherence. Regional conferences that are centrally located and accessible by public transport would be easier on both attendees (by reducing jet lag and travel costs) and the planet (by reducing the carbon footprint of travel). Smaller regional conferences could provide opportunities for human contact that reduce anomie without being overwhelming. They would still enable senior scholars to participate on panels and pursue ambitious research programs while providing junior scholars and PhD students with valuable networking and career opportunities. Regional affiliation that stops short of tribalism also could support the development and adaptation of solutions to local circumstances. For instance, a regional conference in the North American Rust Belt would likely yield scholarship with different underpinnings, datasets, and points of emphasis than one in Central America. Regional conferences also may promote greater engagement across different academic fields and with non-academic participants.

With foresight and planning, such a federated model could strengthen the global academic community. For example, global meetings could be held synchronously across several regional hubs, thereby enabling access to both region-specific and global content. Hybridization within (ie questions submitted in-person and via text) and between (ie global and regional) presentations would enable participants to customise the extent of their physical and virtual participation and support an equitable global community. A federated model also could facilitate the establishment of local communities around research interests or other facets of identity, thereby providing valuable sources of support, particularly for scholars who feel isolated. Robust online platforms could support ongoing engagement among like-minded peers and strengthen their voices within the academy. Finally, a federated model could encourage relatively low-risk experimentation with other formats (eg unconferences, PechaKuchas), and a variety of other online and offline gatherings.

Conclusion

COVID has provided a unique opportunity to reflect on and potentially reshape the current conferencing model to better reflect values of inclusion, diversity, community, and environmental stewardship. As a tangible manifestation of the spirit of the academic community, conferences serve as a bellwether of our profession. A federated conferencing model has the potential to maximize the benefits of the in-person and online formats, thereby strengthening the academy, now and into the future.

Reference: Etzion, D, Gehman, J, Davis, GF (2021) ‘Reimagining academic conferences: Toward a federated model of conferencing’ Management Learning, 41: 429–442 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13505076211019529

Dror Etzion is an associate professor of strategy and organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, and an associate member of the Bieler School of Environment. His research program focuses on grand challenges: the unyielding, intractable problems that characterize the Anthropocene.

Joel Gehman is Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management and Alberta School of Business Chair in Free Enterprise at the University of Alberta. His research examines strategic, technological, and institutional responses to grand challenges related to sustainability and values concerns.

Jerry Davis is the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Management and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. His latest work is on reining in corporate power and alternatives to shareholder capitalism.

Paul Temple


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“Look, Viktor, what I meant was…”

by Paul Temple

Viktor Orban is the only autocratic national leader I’ve faced across a meeting table. In those days of course, back in the ‘90s, he wasn’t the Hungarian Prime Minister: he and his Fidesz party had barely emerged from post-communist student politics (the name is an abbreviation of Alliance of Young Democrats – now a deeply misleading title). But the British Council in Budapest had already marked him out as a coming man in Hungarian politics and wanted him to hear, amongst other things, our thoughts on university reform in the country.

Looking back, several things occur. One is to note the impressive talent-spotting abilities of the British Council’s Country Director, who correctly identified Orban’s leadership potential when there wasn’t much to go on. True, the expectation was that his future would be as a progressive politician in a liberal society, rather than as the populist boss of what is close to being a one-party state. Still, you can’t win them all. A second point is that perhaps Orban was paying more attention than we realised as we rabbited on about universities needing autonomy to support both academic effectiveness and their roles in a pluralist society (that kind of thing, anyway). A third point is to be careful what you wish for (or, in this case, propose).

A major restructuring of Hungarian universities is now being planned by the Orban government, with the supposed aim of removing them from direct state control by establishing foundations which will own each university’s resources, to be controlled by independent supervisory boards. This is clever: Hungarian government spokespeople present it as a move to make Hungarian universities resemble leading research universities elsewhere, with greater independence promoted through institutional self-government. In other words, more or less what we were suggesting in that British Council meeting all those years ago.

But in university governance, as in most of life, context is all. What many Hungarian academics expect is that these supervisory boards won’t be independent at all: they will, argues Professor Jozsef Palinkas, former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, be agents for the “ideological control” of universities by the ruling party. Orban has already made it clear that those with what he calls “internationalist” or “globalist” views will not become board members: only those with “nationalist” views will be eligible, which I think we can take to mean views indistinguishable from Orban’s own. (If you want to know what Orban means by “internationalist”, look up his conspiracy theory-laden feud with George Soros.)

Once established, these boards will become self-perpetuating, appointing future members in the same mould, excluding any possible dissenting voices. This structure has been written into the Hungarian constitution (you can’t say that university governance isn’t taken seriously in Hungary) which means that a two-thirds parliamentary majority will be needed to change it. This is possible of course, but given Fidesz’s control of much of the economy, national media, and the judiciary, unlikely. Expect an outflow of independent-minded Hungarian academics.

Most governments claim to prize university autonomy – who knows, some may actually mean it – but, around the world, there are many recent examples of intervention when this autonomy doesn’t seem to be delivering what the politicians in power consider to be the right answers. Universities might perhaps take increased governmental pressures as a backhanded compliment: governments allowed universities to go their own ways when they thought they didn’t really matter, but now they think they do matter (or at least, can be targeted in a confected culture war), they seek to control them. I expect that Orban does think that Hungarian universities are too important to be left to operate outside his web of state/party control: another piece of civil society’s structure has to be destroyed.

I was going to end with a weak joke about wanting to take back what I said all those years ago about university autonomy – but, truly, there’s nothing amusing in seeing how democracies die.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, London. His new book on university space and place will appear next year. Possibly. His blog appears at https://srheblog.com/category/srhe-news-blog/

Marcia Devlin


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Making space for compassion

by Marcia Devlin

As is the case in many countries, the COVID pandemic continues to wreak havoc in Australian universities. While many universities are now beginning to experiment with ‘hybrid’ models that combine online and face-to-face teaching and learning, efforts are tentative. Executives and staff are nervous about committing to what many students are increasingly telling us they want – a ‘normal’ university student experience with on-campus components.

This nervousness is well-founded. Our vaccine rollout is not rolling, the federal and state governments are blaming each other, and we have had to have another snap lockdown just this week. Ensuring ‘COVID-safe’ campuses in these circumstances is tricky and, not to put too fine a point on it, connected to potential life and death scenarios.

International borders remain closed. International students – so important to Australian universities and their finances – are not allowed into the country. The current Education Minister gave a speech about the future of international students this week. It was invitation only but from what can be gleaned from social media commentary from those fortunate enough to secure an invitation, it didn’t leave audience members brimming with confidence about the immediate future.

In this set of circumstances, it is challenging to focus on the core university ‘businesses’ of teaching and research. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that those providing the education and research are human beings who are themselves living in and through the pandemic. The work of academics and professionals in universities is complex, messy, deeply human and relies on individual passion and goodwill as well as qualifications, knowledge, skills and experience.

I attended a seminar recently at one of my alma maters, Macquarie University, led by a well-known Australian author, Hugh McKay: the importance of compassion was central. Arguing that the most significant thing about us as people is that we share a common humanity, that we humans all belong to a social species, that we are “hopeless” in isolation and that we need others to nurture and sustain us, McKay underscored the importance of compassion, kindness and simply being nice to one another in our current shared pandemic context.

I’m not sure about other SRHE readers, but compassion and kindness aren’t topics I’ve often heard discussed in universities in my 30 years in the sector. McKay suggested the pandemic has been a mass experiment around what happens to people when they are isolated. The results have included more anxiety, more suicidal ideation, more domestic violence, among many other negative outcomes. But also more time for introspection and for deep consideration of what is important to us. Many of us have more clearly understood how crucial our social and personal connections are.

McKay proposes that many of us have previously found useful hiding places in ambition, IT devices and consumerism, which have promoted individualism and competitiveness and a greater focus on ourselves than on our role in families, communities and society. As I reflected on university life, and life more generally, I couldn’t help but think he had a point.

As we co-create the ‘COVID-normal’ university, I wonder if we might all find a bigger space for our humanity, our compassion and our kindness to each other. Not only might that bring a better experience of work in universities for ourselves and those around us, the quality and impact of our education and research might also improve as a result.

Former Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor Marcia Devlin is a Fellow of SRHE and an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

Ian Mc Nay


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Ian McNay writes…

An interesting follow-up to the item last time on research into not doing something. The German government put out a TV message featuring two couch potatoes…doing nothing, and advocating staying on the couch as a contribution to not spreading the Covid-19 infection. Somebody has a sense of humour.

On the pandemic, one group that has emerged with credit is the research community, the speed of decision making and the extent of international co-operation in sequencing the genetic code of the virus, using the code to design a vaccine and then developing it in record time. I suggest that by the end of 2021 the number of lives saved by the actions of researchers will be greater than the number lost through the actions and inactions of politicians. Experts have gained in respect. On the other hand, in this country…

On a (perhaps) less contentious issue, closer to members’ interests, I recommend the book edited by Stephen Gorard and published by Routledge: Getting Evidence into Education. Evaluating the routes to policy and practice. He has a salutary listing in the final chapter of barriers to the widespread use of high quality evidence. First is the regrettable lack of quality in research, with the growth of work he identifies as ‘small-scale, uninventive, journalistic or [only] purportedly theoretical work’ lacking scientific replicability. Second is the low ability or willingness to communicate findings to users, which is now improving, possibly because of the impact factor in REF funding. On the other side, he questions whether users really appreciate and want to use good evidence, particularly when it runs counter to values that underpin ideology. Finally, ‘teachers are still largely unaware of the availability of good evidence’ or lack the authority or resources to make changes in practice, and ‘school leaders often appear content to plan school improvement without referring to robust evidence. In my experience, much of that is also true in higher education, as well as in government policy making for the sector.

The latest data on membership of REF panels, issued in December, show that, despite government commitment to diversity and levelling up, the academic capitalists among the elite universities still control the commanding heights of the research economy. On the main panels, pre-92 universities have 46 full members, post-92 institutions have one – Kingston on Panel D. International universities have 15, which shows where competition in Lisa Lucas’s research game is focussed. On the sub-panels the figures are 636 to 87, with assessor members at 112 and 24. This affects grading. I make no accusation of crony capitalism, but there may be an unconscious bias of common cultural identity, as in the Eurovision Song Contest, where votes go to ‘people like us’, so the same old same old may be rewarded ahead of new approaches and findings challenging the established corpus of work done by members. That in turn affects funding. A parliamentary reply on 17 November listed overall government research funding (much of it QR funding from REF) to the 13 universities in the West Midlands. Between 2015 and 2019, Birmingham and Warwick (33 members) got an increase of 21% to £256m, mainly attributable to Warwick gaining an immediate £16 after the 2014 REF and a similar amount over the period; Aston and Keele (8 members) had no increase on £30m – Aston gained £1m, Keele had a matching reduction; Coventry gained £3m to £9m after a good REF. The other 8 institutions had £12 m among them. So two universities, dominating regional representation, got 83% of the funds distributed in 2018/9.

Amanda Solloway, Minister for HE in England, at a recent HEPI webinar, committed to reviewing the nature of excellence in research, acknowledged the need for diversity on interpretations and a need to link to ‘levelling up’. There may be a lesson from the Covid pandemic, where approaches by elite western countries failed; under-regarded countries did better. In 2019 the Johns Hopkins Global Health Security Index ranking capacity to deal with outbreaks of infectious disease ranked the USA first and the UK second; New Zealand came in at 35th and South Korea at 9th. The article in the Guardian from which I took those figures (Laura Spinney on 30 December) quotes Sarah Dalglies in the Lancet – ‘The pandemic has given the lie to the notion that expertise is concentrated in, or at least best channelled by, legacy powers and historically rich states’. Maybe that applies to research, too. REF panels, and Amanda Solloway, please note.

SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich.

For answers to Ian’s SRHE News Quiz 2020, they are now online here.


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Visualizing the COVID-19 pandemic response in Canadian higher education: An extended photo essay

by Amy Scott Metcalfe

This blog is a short summary of the author’s paper for a special issue of Studies in Higher Education published online in January 2021. This issue is currently free to access and includes a range of commissioned articles from academics worldwide about their experiences of Covid19 restrictions in 2020. Many of the authors featured in the Special Issue spoke about their contributions at the SRHE Webinar held on 27 January 2021. The paper presented the author’s account of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Canadian perspective, utilising an extended photo essay method and narrative response to document changes seen in the local university environment during the months of April through September 2020. Emerging literature and survey results concerning the Canadian academic condition during the pandemic are discussed in the article alongside research diary entries and policy excerpts. The images included here in this blog post are additional views from the extended photo essay, and were not reproduced in the author’s piece for the Special Issue.

Attempting to make sense of the 2020 pandemic can be understood, meta-cognitively speaking, as academia’s quintessential response to the unknown, coupled with a sector-wide existential crisis. For Studies in Higher Education’s special issue on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives, personally and professionally, I took a conscious approach toward self-expression and ‘research creation’ as a way to channel my mind/body reactions into something productive during this particularly stressful time. In selecting a photo essay format, augmented by ethnographic data collection and my research diary, my contribution to the special issue on “The impact of a pandemic – a global perspective” focuses on the changes the pandemic has brought to my work-life, my institution, and the Canadian university sector as a whole.

The impact of the pandemic on Canada’s higher education sector is yet to be extensively measured, but early indicators of the largely negative effects for students and faculty are coming to light (Firang, 2020; CAUT, 2020a). Fiscally, the mainly public Canadian higher education sector may encounter a cycle of retrenchment, as provincial governments face pandemic-related deficits and as previously anticipated tuition revenues might not be forthcoming (CAUT, 2020b). The negative effects of the pandemic on individual Canadian academics may endure for some time, potentially increasing inequality within a sector already beleaguered by gender disparities and racialization (Johnson and Howsam, 2020; Oleschuk, 2020).

In the article, I presented three consecutive photo essays that describe the conditions within the campus environment at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver between April and September 2020. Sequenced according to our local seasons (spring, summer, fall) and our institutional academic calendar (Winter 2, Summer, Winter 1), the images simultaneously portray moments in time/place and my somatic experiences. Each photo essay contains ten images, although due to space constraints just three per essay were reproduced in the article (nine overall). The complete photographic essays are available online (http://www.amyscottmetcalfe.com/). Within each section I offered temporal contextualisation in the form of narrative description, contemporaneous policy texts, dated excerpts from my research diary, and recently released preliminary findings from institutional and national surveys of faculty with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on academic life and work in Canada. The intent was to create a multimodal diary that collates my experiences as a Canadian academic during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.

In this blog post I share three photos that were not reproduced in the article, but which are included in the online photo essays. These images are from the essay titled “Prepping,” which documented some of the visible changes to the campus that occurred over the summer months of 2020, as various campus units prepared for an uncertain fall semester. The larger photo essay includes images of signage and visual cues like floor stickers that were installed that summer to direct our movements throughout the campus to promote physical distancing. With some international and domestic students residing on campus, essential services such as food outlets were open, albeit in a limited fashion. To direct a one-way flow through these open buildings, some doors were locked, with “Do Not Enter” signs affixed to the exterior (Figure 1), to direct students and staff to other entrances. The cumulative effect of these large signs prohibiting entry is that of a campus environment that is both provisional and conditional—not the expected openness or enduring continuity we typically find in our public academic institutions.

Figure 1. Do Not Enter. Photo: Author.

The centre of student life on many North American campuses is the student services building, where young people gather for recreation, entertainment, mealtimes, and student club meetings. At my employing institution, the UBC Life building is a newly renovated space for student services, including International Student Advising and UBC’s Go Global program for study abroad opportunities. At present, the UBC Life building is partially open to provide limited food services and restricted use of a weight room and gym. From the exterior, the building exclaims “UBC Life” in large lettering (Figure 2), in sharp contrast to the largely vacant interior.

Figure 2. UBC Life. Photo: Author.

Figure 3. The Best Thing in Life is Life. Photo: Author.

Walking amongst the unused tables and chairs within the UBC Life building, adjacent to the dark windows of closed advising offices, a mural reminds us that “the best thing in life is life” (Figure 3). In the shadowy background, behind the overturned chairs, we can see the marquee of the now-closed student movie theatre still announcing film showings from March 2020, including a Vancouver International Film Festival viewing of “The World is Bright” (March 9, 6PM), a documentary that describes the grief of an elderly Chinese couple who travel to Canada to try to understand the death of their son, an immigrant who died on foreign soil. The showing of this film at UBC in March 2020 would soon be followed by the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic. Taken together, we might read the phrases from this institutional still life as a prefiguration of the hope and despair brought by COVID-19 in the 2020-2021 academic year. Even now, in early 2021 with vaccine delivery underway, Canadian universities are in a holding pattern, having put in place the mechanisms by which we might operate in suspended animation online into the (un)foreseeable future.

Dr Amy Scott Metcalfe is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on higher education in Canada and the North American region, including (post)critical approaches to internationalisation, academic labour and mobility, and critical policy studies in education. Dr Metcalfe has a particular interest in visual research methods in education, with an emphasis on photographic methodologies, art historical approaches, and visual analysis.

Works Cited

Firang, D (2020) ‘The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on International Students in Canada’ International Social Work, 1-5 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0020872820940030

CAUT  (2020a) Post-Secondary Staff Concerned about Remote Teaching, Research, Health and Safety and Jobs  Ottawa: Canadian Association of University Teachers. 20 August 2020 https://www.caut.ca/latest/2020/08/post-secondary-staff-concerned-about-remote-teaching-research-health-and-safety-and.

CAUT (2020b) Post-Secondary Educators Issue Urgent Call for Support to Offset Impacts of COVID-19 Ottawa: Canadian Association of University Teachers 1 May 2020 https://www.caut.ca/latest/2020/05/post-secondary-educators-issue-urgent-call-support-offset-impacts-covid-19.

Johnson, GF and R Howsam (2020) ‘Whiteness, Power and the Politics of Demographics in the Governance of the Canadian Academy’ Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 1–19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/whiteness-power-and-the-politics-of-demographics-in-the-governance-of-the-canadian-academy/E203CC4FD2A80D1B9E5E4B21D2989600

Oleschuk, M (2020) ‘Gender Equity Considerations for Tenure and Promotion During COVID-19’ Canadian Review of Sociology 57 (3): 502–515. 


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The post-coronial future of higher education: Utopian hopes and dystopian fears at Cambridge University

by Simone Eringfeld

This blog is based on the author’s contribution to a special issue of Studies in Higher Education published online in January 2021. The special issue includes a range of commissioned articles from academics worldwide about their  experiences of Covid19 restrictions in 2020.   Many of the authors featured in the Special issue will be speaking about their contributions at the SRHE Webinar being held on 27 January 2021.

You’re asking about my perfect post-Covid dystopian University? Imagine everyone’s got really nice VR headsets and virtual reality has exponentially gotten better and better. We can now host the entire experience online, so you wake up in the morning, you put your headset on and then you ‘go to’ university, you go to lectures … You sort of simulate what life is. I think that’s the worst-case scenario. I think if it was like how it is now but online – because you could just do it cheaply online – the University of Cambridge would be like a network, or a file. It wouldn’t even be a place anymore. That seems hellish to me. I think that’s my perfect dystopia.

– Peter, Cambridge undergraduate student

If I asked you to describe your ‘perfect dystopia’ of a post-pandemic university, what kind of scenario would emerge? And which images arise when you try to picture the opposite, an ideal utopian outcome? When I interviewed students and academics at Cambridge’s Faculty of Education about hopes and fears for the future of HE, responses included scenes that could inspire even the gloomiest science fiction scripts. It is clear that Covid-19 has raised critical questions addressing the existential core of HE institutions and their futures. By imagining best and worst-case scenarios, this time of crisis becomes an opportunity to pause and reflect: what kind of university do we ultimately want, and what is it we absolutely don’t want?

This research project focuses on the following thought experiment: how can we reimagine the post-coronial university? I introduce the term ‘post-coronial’ here as

“… a temporally evocative notion indicating both the university after Covid-19 and its evolvement as a consequence of Covid-19 in the here and now, during the pandemic. In addition, the term speculatively indicates the emergence of a new school of thought that might result from the impact of Covid-19 on societies and educational systems; that is, the possibility of future ‘post-coronial theory’ or ‘post-coronial education’ in a more conceptual and less time-bound sense” (Eringfeld, 2021).

Prior to conducting private interviews with students and faculty members, I started the podcast ‘Cambridge Quaranchats’, where I invited members of the Cambridge community – from undergraduates to senior professors – to share their own experiences of education in the time of Covid-19 and to discuss the impact of the pandemic on the University. This podcast became an important component of my research methodology, with interviewees listening in advance to selected fragments of podcast conversations in order to sonically elicit their own imagination. I wrote about my podcasting methodology in another blog post here.

The most prominent fear that emerged from the research interviews is that of a complete and indefinite shift to online education. Such a dystopian university would become a ‘placeless’ institution, with the university now being ‘located’ inside desktop files and Zoom rooms. Such a university would be a disembodied institution, where screens and virtual reality replace the ‘real world’. Participants described a dystopia in which education would no longer be a social experience, where communal learning would be lost and where loneliness and isolation would exponentially be on the rise. A third theme that resurfaced across dystopian accounts given by students and faculty members is the fear that education would become ‘dehumanised’, with increased marketisation and bureaucratisation leading to a drastic reduction of precisely that which gives meaning to educational practices for many: interpersonal, human contact.

Yet when asked about their utopian visions for the future, not a single participant suggested a full return to pre-pandemic HE. Instead, many described a utopian post-coronial university with at least some elements of online education as part of the new normal. As one academic reflects:

I do want to go back to some of the college dinners and conversations, the late-night sessions and seminars, the music … But I would also want some of my supervisions to be able to happen online and I would want to be able to integrate what I’ve benefited from through this period of lockdown and isolation to become part of my ‘new normal’, because I can see there are huge benefits for me and I think for the students as well.

Advantages of online education that participants reported include a sense of enhanced freedom and agency, less performance pressure, more quality time with family, improved ability to focus on studying due to reduced FOMO (‘fear of missing out’) and more space for creativity and artistic expression. Others noted the potential for online education to expand access to a larger audience by reducing the costs of HE, offering more open access resources, designing more MOOCs and including other multi-media formats of education such as video recordings, audio podcasts and improved virtual learning environments. Such flexibility would allow university experiences to be tailored to the varying needs of students and staff. One graduate student pointed out that the availability of distance learning options would enable students based in different countries, or in different life phases, to still attend Cambridge.

At the same time, developing blended learning approaches that combine in-person with virtual education will bring about new challenges. One academic points to dystopian dangers connected to large-scale massification, the loss of personalized interaction and strengthened ‘echo chambers’ when students remain at home. Another student shared his fear that extreme commodification of education could turn even the most casual everyday aspects of student life into ‘sellable bite-sized experiences’, like student society meetings or visits to the college buttery. Many of these hopes and fears do not exclusively exist in the imagination; instead, they build on pre-existing issues in HE such as marketisation, individualisation and exclusivity. While some of the dystopian scenarios may seem far removed from reality, they connect to HE tendencies already visible today.

What emerges from these interviews is in no way a singularly defined vision for the future, but rather a widely shared view that neither a fully online university nor a complete return to pre-pandemic HE is desirable. For “while a fully online format is seen as dystopian due to the loss of education as an embodied and communal experience connected to the ‘real world’, moving some teaching activities online may increase flexibility and improve access to HE for an expanded community in ways that a purely face-to-face university would not be able to” (Eringfeld, 2021). Universities will need to embrace flexibility and adaptability by fostering a blended approach to education that safely involves both online and face-to-face education. Importantly, this blended post-coronial university will need to think creatively about new ways to construct and maintain a sense of belonging for both students and staff, so as to ensure that HE remains a communal, humanized and embodied experience.

This blog is based on my article for Studies in Higher Education:

Eringfeld, S. (2021): Higher education and its post-coronial future: Utopian hopes and dystopian fears at Cambridge University during Covid-19. Studies in Higher Education, 46:1, 146-157, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681Simone Eringfeld is a recent Education MPhil graduate from the University of Cambridge. She is the co-Chair of the Cambridge Peace and Education Research Group (CPERG) and hosts the podcast Cambridge Quaranchats, which explores possible futures of post-Covid HE. She tweets: @SimoneEringfeld