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Capability for higher education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The developers of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value.

Capability for education is the freedom to choose a curriculum or a course one has reason to value, that will support students to develop their emerging conceptions of how they want to live their lives, and provide them with the educational foundation that is necessary to do so. This offers higher education an alternative rationale to human capital theory that has dominated post-secondary education since the Robbins Report of 1963, but which has been losing its appeal as the return on investment in higher education has been plateauing.

Moreover, the value of and confidence in qualifications, particularly higher education qualifications, has been diminishing because they are perceived to no longer deliver on the promise of a good job with good career prospects. If the value of higher education qualifications (and indeed, all educational qualifications) are evaluated only by the extent to which they ‘deliver’ on labour market outcomes, then their value will be questioned. However, qualifications have multiple purposes which, of course, include, but cannot be limited to, labour market outcomes.

Students’ capabilities are advanced by higher education with multiple complementary values, and this helps us to consider the enduring value of and importance of qualifications. Qualifications have intrinsic value for students to realise their self to ‘be’ in the world and to live a life they have reason to value. Qualifications have educational value for accessing the knowledge needed for students to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their field of practice and to proceed to higher levels of education.

Qualifications have use value as a necessary foundation for an occupation and an occupational identity, and exchange value to access the labour market and contribute to an occupational identity. Qualifications also have social value for democratic, socially inclusive communities and society. These different forms of value lead us to posit that qualifications for the capability approach have four purposes, while recognising that different types of qualifications will fulfil these purposes in different ways:

  1. Individual, to develop individuals’ agency to live lives they have reason to value, and to contribute to their families, communities, society, and occupation;
  2. Educational, to develop graduates’ and society’s understanding of theoretical, abstract knowledge;
  3. Occupational, to develop graduates’ individual and work groups’ collective productive capacity; and
  4. Social, to advance society, and social justice and inclusion.

Education should include students’ capability for voice – the capacity to express their wishes, expectations, desires, and concerns, and to have them count when decisions concerning themselves are made. Bonvin related the capability for voice to Appadurai’s ‘capacity to aspire’ or ‘to project oneself in the future’. A capacity to aspire is important because people adapt their preferences according to what they perceive to be achievable. In contrast, education should take account of students’ different capacities and aim to develop their capacity to transform themselves, to increase their agency, to expand their choices about how they wish to live. Thus, ‘the development of capabilities requires the ability to construct one’s preferences (capacity to aspire), to voice them and make them count (capability for voice)’.

Post-secondary education should seek to develop students’ voice in their education, work and wider society. Education should extend its application of these principles to the workplaces where students undertake work integrated or work-based learning. However, trainees may have less scope to exercise their voice at work than on campus.

Collective capabilities

Sen argued that ‘[T]he basic building blocks’ of the capabilities approach is ‘the freedoms of individuals’. Sen is interested in expanding individual liberties and he called his book developing his capabilities approach Development as freedom. But individuals’ freedoms and capabilities are constituted not just by their individual circumstances, but by their membership of social institutions which themselves have varying capabilities. Most basically, the social institution of the family greatly affects members’ capabilities, and reproduces not only people, but differentiated capabilities of successive generations of family members.

Yet families have their own capabilities depending, for example, on their literacy and levels of education, which in turn provides different resources upon which family members can draw. Families have unequal levels of economic, social and cultural capital, which is shaped by relations of class, gender and race and other dimensions of power. Education is collective in three ways, through peers, occupations, and social change. The peer effect is a social multiplier, whereby adults share knowledge with their neighbours and those with whom they interact, developing their peers’ knowledge. This educative role is also collective in building social institutions such as schooling, participating in post-secondary education, and credentialing, although some have argued credentialing has been excessively institutionalised. Education’s educative role is also collective in developing educational organisations such as libraries, educative websites, public lectures, and community education, all of which play a particularly important role in education for adult working learners and other members of the community.

Universities are strongly institutionalised – the idea of a university, of an undergraduate, a lecturer, and a degree are widely understood and reinforced by norms and expectations, despite local variations and changes over time. Universities have strong roles in building and extending social institutions of education and related institutions for the advancement of knowledge and promotion of rational inquiry. Postsecondary education organisations and their staff and students also contribute to the educational, social and cultural leadership of their communities by participating formally and informally in local associations, committees and boards. This develops ‘networks of civic engagement’, which develops communities’ capacity for collective action. Through this post-secondary education institutions anchor their communities by developing knowledge and skills within their region; establishing links and exchanges outside the region; contributing to civic, political, cultural, and social activities and networks in their region; developing facilities and amenities used by the community; and, contributing to their region’s economic activity. Gertler and Vinodrai add that universities foster tolerance, openness and social inclusion:

“First, the university plays an important role in shaping the quality of place and fostering openness and tolerance in the community. Crucial to this process is the ability of the university to create a social environment that is open to dialogue and debate, tolerant of different viewpoints, and accessible to many different social, ethnic, and cultural groups (locally, nationally, and internationally). In other words, the university has a role in reducing ‘barriers to entry’ and working towards social inclusion.”

Capability for higher education at three levels

Thus, higher education develops capabilities at three levels: 1) the individual, 2) social and work groups, and 3) society. Most attention has been given to higher education’s contributions to individuals, and to society. More recently higher education has given attention to teamwork but much of this has been about individuals’ capacity to work in teams rather than the development of the capabilities of groups. The capabilities approach is also strongly applicable to adult, further, and special education, which is the subject of the next in our SRHE Blog series, and of our open access book.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Introducing the capabilities approach

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

In 2015 in a blog for SRHE, Rajani Naidoo mentioned, almost in passing, the potential of the capability or capabilities approach to complement the wellbeing framework, which was the approach she advocated.  However, she did not elaborate the approach. Yet the capabilities approach is important for educational and general public policy, and has the potential to transform peoples’ agency. It has become increasingly important in the scholarly literature in all sectors of education.

The capabilities approach was developed by the economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and by the distinguished USA philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Sen argued that the aim of public policy should be ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of persons to lead the kind of lives they value—and have reason to value’. Sen’s argument is that human capability is an alternative to utilitarianism, rights theories of justice, and to human capital theory. While the aim of human capital theory is to increase economic output which may benefit humans, the aim of capabilities is to increase peoples’ freedom, which requires economic resources, but importantly also other arrangements –

“At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the literature on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability — the substantive freedom — of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. The two perspectives cannot be but related, since both are concerned with the role of human beings, and in particular with the actual abilities that they achieve and acquire.

But the yardstick of assessment concentrates on different achievements.”

As Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns explained, the capability approach is a broad normative framework for evaluating and assessing individuals’ well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. The capabilities approach is therefore not a list of desirable attributes that people may have, as is suggested by reductive and distorted presentations of the approach. It is not another term for competencies or for skills. It refers to the real freedom individuals have to pursue the things that matter to them, and to live a life they have reason to value, and to the social, economic, political, and the environmental resources and conditions that are needed to realise these opportunities. It is at its core, a relational approach that links individuals, their families and communities, with their society and asks about the social arrangements that are needed to support individuals to realise their aspirations.

Capabilities and functionings

The capabilities approach distinguishes between capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are people’s capacity to act, while functionings are the outcomes from people using their capabilities to achieve a particular goal. A complex set of capabilities provides individuals with the basis for making choices in their lives, whereas functionings are the outcomes they achieve when they exercise choice. A particular set of capabilities can produce any number of outcomes. Walker and Unterhalter explained that: “The difference between a capability and  functioning is one between an opportunity to achieve and the actual achievement, between potential and outcome”. Two people with similar capability sets may make choices that result in different functionings or outcomes. Capabilities cannot be regarded as isolated attributes or resources. Rather, they need to be understood as a ‘set’ or ensemble of interlocking capacities or potentials for action that allows people to make choices.

Agency

In addition to capabilities and functionings, a third key concept in the capabilities approach is agency. Agency is a person’s ability to pursue and realise goals that they value and have reason to value. People need agency to identify, value, and prioritise capabilities. For this Sen emphasised transparent scrutiny, general social discussion, and continued public reasoning. For Sen, capabilities are contingent on circumstances specific to their context and the purpose for which they are identified, and reflect the particular reality that any particular society faces.

The capabilities approach emphasises the importance of agency and distinguishes between different forms of agency, particularly between ensuring people have the freedom to choose how they will pursue their goals (process freedom) and the opportunities that are needed to realise their goals (opportunity freedom). However, it does not develop a full conception of the human agent, leaving this to different ‘capability theories’ and the uses towards which it is being put in different contexts.

We use the work of capability theorists, Bonvin and Laruffa, to think about human agency. They  draw on anthropology to argue that at the core of the capability approach is a conception of people as receivers (of support for vulnerable people, as we all are at different times of our lives), as doers (who are actors able to contribute to society), and as judges (who are political beings with aspirations, values and desires). Living a life that one has reason to value needs to incorporate all these aspects of our being, and allow us to fulfil multiple aspirations.

We also draw on the work of the late British sociologist and leading critical realist scholar Margaret Archer, who distinguished between individuals and social structures, arguing that each is different and irreducible to the other. She explained, for example, that individuals have the capacity for reflection and introspection, whereas societies have social structures and institutions. Archer argued that the self must simultaneously exist in the natural world, the practical world (for example, engaging in activities at work or at home) and the social world.

Archer argued that the way we mediate and navigate our way in each world is through our ‘internal conversation’, wherein we reflect, consider, make decisions, change our minds and so forth. She argued that the self is defined by the things that matter to us, including who and how we choose to love, and issues, problems or concerns such as these cannot always be reduced to self-interest. We build a social identity through our relational engagement with others and not just because of individual effort, even though our agency helps to shape the nature of this engagement.

This provides a foundation for considering human rights, the obligation that all of us have to each other and the social conditions that underpin civil and political life, which includes work, occupations, and the labour market. It also provides a basis for thinking about the purposes of education and the ways in which it can support human agency.

Conversion factors

Robeyns pointed out that a person’s capacity to convert resources into capabilities and thence functionings depends on three types of conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental.

Personal conversion factors may be relatively unchangeable such as being blind, or they may be more changeable such as not being able to read. Both of these conversion factors affect a person’s capability to read unless they are mediated in some way, such as braille or a text to voice conversion application for the person who is visually impaired, or literacy classes for the person who is not yet literate.

Thus, we see that personal conversion factors may be mediated by social conversion factors. These examples also illustrate that social policies should reflect people’s diversity to ensure that everyone has access to the social resources they need to participate fully in society and to achieve their aspirations. People’s capabilities are also influenced by other social conversion factors such as ‘public policies, social norms, discriminating practises, gender roles, societal hierarchies, power relations’.

The third type of conversion factors is environmental, such as geography, infrastructure, and climate. While most discussion is of the capabilities of individuals, we argue that it is also necessary to consider the capabilities of groups and the collective capability of society.

Broader resources

Capabilities therefore rest upon broader social, economic, cultural and technological resources. For example, people need to have the language, literacy and mathematical skills for engaging and progressing in study and work. They need to have access to the social and economic resources that facilitate their participation in study and work, such as the necessary housing, healthcare, transport and childcare, and enable their participation in civic society and in their communities.

People also need to have the knowledge, skills and attributes required to navigate, negotiate and engage in these aspects of life and in work as the capacity to be skillful in both emerges from broader knowledge, skills and attributes.

Application to education

As Sen and Nussbaum elaborated, clearly education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value. The capabilities approach has therefore been applied to education, and more recently to vocational education, as we elaborated in our open access book and as is explored briefly in our subsequent SRHE Blogs.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Consumer rights and complaints in English higher education: a new form of student agency?

by Rille Raaper

A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.

Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.

While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.

This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?

In my broader work, I adopt a wide lens on political agency, drawing on works from Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, and Jouni Häkli & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio. From this perspective, political agency encompasses ‘a variety of individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and non-human ways of acting, affecting and impacting politically’. Complaints, while largely individual, can be both rational and affective, making them a compelling example for expanding our understanding of political agency. When considering complaints as political agency, I propose we start by reflecting on the following:

Institutional inequalities

Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.

Courage

Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.

Social spillovers

Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.

While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. rille.raaper@durham.ac.uk


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Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Big tech, AI, and the future of epistemic agency in higher education

by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manuel F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum

Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.

At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.

From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers

Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.

Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.

This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.

Big tech and the politics of knowing

The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.

This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.

The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant

The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.

That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.

The drift toward organised immaturity

Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.

In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.

Reclaiming epistemic agency

So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.

In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’

In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.

Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.

Why this matters to you

Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.

Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.

Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.

Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.


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What does it mean to be political for today’s students?

by Rille Raaper

When we think about student politics, it is inevitable that the images of student protest and rebellion come to mind. These views of what counts as student politics have been shaped by rather romantic ideals of what it meant to be a student and do politics in 1960s, or perhaps even in 2010-2011 when we witnessed the last large scale student rebellion in England, but also more globally. When we stretch our imagination, perhaps we can also see students engaging with electoral politics, and them being stereotypically more left leaning compared to the general population – or ‘woke’ as portrayed by many right-wing media outlets today. In cases where students do not meet these expectations of political activity, they are often derogatively called ‘snowflakes’: a fragile generation of apolitical students. While there may be some truth in students becoming less politically active, it is important to question why this might be the case, but also to consider the extent to which our own understandings of student politics are perhaps outdated and need changing.

The cost of student protest

In contexts where higher education is marketed as an investment into one’s future, the student-as-consumer positioning becomes unavoidable. Consumerism in our universities may be brutally explicit as in the UK where students are protected by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, or more subtle in systems where laws and regulations do not treat students as consumers, but the transactional idea of higher education and human capital development still imply similar understandings. As students are constantly reminded to prioritise ‘value for money’ and question their investment into successful graduate employment, deviating from such a mindset and standing out as a disruptive or disobedient student cannot be a preferred or safe option. This was evident with the recent pro-Palestinian encampments which on British campuses were rather short-lived, often adopted around the exam periods and ending with the closure of the academic year 2023/2024. The cost of non-compliance is very high for our students: how could a student who has accumulated an average of £45k student debt with already insecure graduate employment trajectory drop everything and revolt? My recent book Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights deals with these dilemmas and argues that the modes of student politics have had to change alongside the generational pressures that contemporary students face. In other words, the form that student politics takes is intertwined with what it means to be a student today.

Alternative forms of political agency

To counteract the view that students have become apolitical or snowflakes, we need to imagine student politics as more fluid and situational: something that gets embedded within the everyday practices of being a student.

First, this revisioning invites us to be more open-minded about what counts as student protest. For example, it is evident that when today’s students do protest, their actions tend to be more short-lived while triggered by identity-based issues that matter to them personally. We should also look at the new and alternative spaces that activism takes place within, eg digital platforms. The latter could of course relate to generational shifts and students being more digitally adept, but also to the fact that the university campuses have become heavily regulated by timetabling pressures and health and safety rules, making it difficult for students to socialise, let alone organise on campus.

Second, our universities have never emphasised student voice as much as they do today. In addition to students’ unions, there is a wide range of new representative roles on university committees and working groups. While there are questions about tokenism and the effectiveness of these roles – and perhaps fairly so – one cannot deny that there is an incredible infrastructure emerging for students to (peacefully) exercise their interest. This could also be politically motivated, and we should not underestimate the power that students as collectives hold through such representative roles.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, I invite us to consider the power that the student-as-consumer holds. In the age of marketised universities, we need to ask some uncomfortable questions related to the extent to which student-as-consumer positioning itself empowers students with new types of political agency. We know that an increasing number of students are exercising their right to complain, and they often do this to call out universities for their wrongdoings. These wrongdoings may relate to consumer rights and personal grievances, but often they also reflect wider structural inequalities. It could therefore be argued that consumer rights have granted students new tools to exercise their interest. There is a tendency for the sector to view student complaints as something negative and unreasonable, and none of us would want to be the subject of one. However, it is likely that if students are increasingly treated as consumers, it is also this consumer positioning that offers new opportunities for political agency to be exercised. In today’s highly pressurised university environments, consumer complaints might be a more effective way to make oneself heard: making complaints is a legal right for our students, and the potential reputational damage to universities makes complaints high stakes.

In summary, I argue that the market forces and consumerist discourses that brutally shape students are also what trigger, enable and disable certain new and altered forms of political agency. Such understanding invites us to shift away from the prevailing assumption that contemporary students are becoming apolitical and instead to rethink our normative understanding of what counts as political agency.

For more details, please see my book published as part of the SRHE and Routledge book series Research into Higher Education:

Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge

Rille Raaper is Associate Professor at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism.


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Generous scholarship: a vision for academic life

by Ruth McQuirter Scott, Dragana Martinovic, Snežana Obradović-Ratković and Michelle K McGinn

The life of a scholar is often portrayed in popular culture as one of lonely struggle and pressure. It starts at the postgraduate level, when students work to meet the expectations of their programs and supervisors, jumping one hurdle after another until they complete their studies. If they are fortunate enough to land an increasingly rare full-time academic position, they discover a new set of expectations to fulfill. In application and renewal processes, most universities favour single-authored publications in tier-one journals, along with a research record that shows how the scholar is carving out a unique niche in their respective field. This portrayal of academic life is supported by studies that report pressure to publish, competition, isolation, and managerial influences on academic work (eg Castro-Ceacero and Ion, 2018; Dakka and Wade, 2019; Kyvik and Aksnes, 2015; McCarthy and Dragouni, 2020).

We believe there is a better way of living as academics, one that nurtures the strengths of colleagues and leads to mutual growth for novice and seasoned scholars.

Our group of four academics from two Canadian universities has been collaborating as writers for over 10 years. We represent a variety of roles in academia: professors, a research officer, and a university senior administrator. Since 2007 (until interrupted by the pandemic), we have facilitated residential academic writing retreats, bringing together new and experienced academics, postgraduate students, and outside experts for a week-long writing experience in a rural setting.

At our first writing retreat, we were introduced to the term “generous scholarship” as proposed by Constance Russell (2006). We were intrigued and excited by this term, which we felt captured a central component of the writing retreat and resonated with our approach to scholarly life. Sally Stewart Knowles, a retreat co-facilitator from Australia, was also inspired by the conversation at that 2007 retreat to argue that residential writing retreats foster generous scholarship (Knowles, 2017). Although neither Russell (2006) nor Knowles (2017) provides a clear definition of generous scholarship, we continued to be enticed by the term’s potential. This emerging concept seemed to suggest an intentional, collegial approach to scholarly endeavours that departs from the market-driven, individualistic view of scholarship so commonly present in academia.

To understand what generous scholarship could mean, we systematically examined these and other publications in which “generosity” was mentioned in the context of academia and elicited five key principles that characterize generous scholarship: social praxis, reciprocity, generous mindedness, generous heartedness, and agency.

To illustrate these five principles of generous scholarship, we use the example of our residential academic writing retreats. We provide a short overview of our writing retreat structure, define the five principles, and discuss the ways in which retreat participants enact these principles.

Writing Retreat Structure

Inspired by Barbara Grant’s (2008) model of residential academic writing retreats, our retreats consist of five days dedicated to individual writing projects, workshops, work-in-progress groups, and one-on-one consultations with shared meals and informal gatherings in a natural environment. Although most of the days are spent writing, we carve out time for discussions, reviewing each other’s work, and socializing. Accountability and on-site collegial support are embedded in the retreat structure, which promotes writing process and productivity, fosters learning with and from others, and builds a community (McGinn et al, 2019; Ratković et al, 2019).

Principles of Generous Scholarship

The five working principles frame generous scholarship as intentional, reflective, and collegial academic praxis.

Social praxis. Generous scholarship emerges within collaborative and collegial communities of scholarly practice. Our writing retreats enable participants to live and work together in a shared space. A sense of community is built through scheduled work-in-progress groups and workshops as well as meals, informal conversations, and walks in nature. Many new connections, relationships, and collaborative research and writing teams are established as people meet colleagues at various career stages and from different disciplines, departments, and institutions.

Reciprocity. Interrelations within generous scholarship are based on reciprocity through peer-to-peer learning and non-hierarchical mentoring. A key component of our writing retreats is the work-in-progress groups that meet each evening to present and respond to written work. The groups are mixed in terms of fields of expertise, academic roles, and career stages to provide multiple perspectives and rich discussions. When a writer’s work is being featured, another participant acts as a note taker, enabling the writer to focus on comments and suggestions from the others. Participants take turns over subsequent evenings, with each participant serving as writer, contributor, and note taker. The participatory and interactive workshops provide further evidence of reciprocity in action as participants exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences.

Generous mindedness. Generous scholarship involves acknowledging other people’s situations or perspectives and committing cognitive resources to advance those individuals and their scholarly work. The workshops during our writing retreats foster generous mindedness as workshop facilitators and participants draw from their varied backgrounds and disciplines to inspire and inform each other’s academic practice. During work-in progress groups, writers are asked what type of feedback they wish to receive. Readers are asked to focus on specific aspects of the draft, or to respond to the overall piece. This practice helps readers to focus their responses and to make their feedback meaningful.

Generous heartedness. Generous scholarship requires empathy and emotional support for others. Generous heartedness has been a key feature of our writing retreats. We are open to adapting workshop content and the retreat structure to the needs of participants, and are flexible in expectations (eg participants spend parts of each day in ways that they deem most useful: reading, resting, or taking walks in nature). Emphasis is placed upon the importance of careful listening and attending to the emotional needs of writers as they share unfinished work during work-in-progress groups. A generous spirit is also fostered among participants through communal meals, informal walks, and evening activities.

Agency. Generous scholarship involves deliberately choosing and taking action to contribute to the scholarly community, the field, and society. It demands consciously embracing and modelling all the principles of generous scholarship. As organisers, we use our agency to structure and facilitate the writing retreats. We also engage as writers and participate in all workshops and work-in-progress groups. Many retreat participants demonstrate their commitment to generous scholarship by returning year after year to this community of scholars. Participants often report creating their own writing groups and retreats. Some have published scholarly work about writing retreats (Winters et al, 2019).

Conclusion

We acknowledge that following the principles of generous scholarship may challenge institutional structures that reward individualistic, competitive approaches; it can be difficult to navigate the logistical and human factors inherent in building a community of scholars. Our own writing retreats face an annual financial challenge, as we must repeatedly convince internal funding providers of their value. However, we are determined to overcome such barriers to enact and enable generous scholarship, and we look forward to returning to our residential writing retreats when pandemic restrictions allow. We have also found that following the principles of generous scholarship enhances, rather than undermines, academic productivity and personal satisfaction (Ratković et al, 2019). Furthermore, we are encouraged by the structures recently built into academia that might provide opportunities and spaces for enacting generous scholarship, such as open-access publishing and knowledge mobilization.

We invite you to consider generous scholarship in your own academic life and to share with SRHE blog readers examples of generous scholarship already present in your practice.

Ruth McQuirter Scott is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, where she is Assistant Director of Teacher Education and teaches Junior/Intermediate Language Arts. Ruth’s research interests are in the effective infusion of technology in education. Connect via rmcquirter@brocku.ca or on Twitter @wordstudy

Dragana Martinovic is a Professor at University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and a Fields Institute Fellow. In her research, Dragana explores knowledge for teaching mathematics, ways in which technology can assist in teaching and learning of mathematics, and epistemologies of STEM disciplines in relation to teacher and K–12 education. Connect via dragana@uwindsor.ca

Snežana Obradović-Ratković is Research Officer and Instructor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include migration, indigeneity, and reconciliation; transnational teacher education; research education; decolonizing arts-based methodologies; mindfulness and well-being in higher education; academic writing and publishing; and generous scholarship. Connect via sratkovic@brocku.ca

Michelle K McGinn is Associate Vice-President Research and Professor of Education at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her primary interests include research collaboration, researcher development, scholarly writing, and ethics in academic practice. She is a co-investigator for Academic Researchers in Challenging Times. Connect via Twitter @dr_mkmcginn or mmcginn@brocku.ca

References

Grant, B (2008) Academic writing retreats: A facilitator’s guide. Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia

Knowles, SS (2017) ‘Communities practising generous scholarship: Cultures of collegiality in academic writing retreats’ in McDonald, J and Cater-Steel, A (eds), Implementing communities of practice in higher education (pp 53–80) Springer

McGinn, MK, Ratković, S, Martinovic, D, and McQuirter Scott, R (2019) ‘Creating and sustaining a community of academic writing practice: The multi-university residential academic writing retreat model’ in Simmons, N and Singh, A (eds) Critical collaborative communities: Academic writing partnerships, groups, and retreats (pp 136–148) Brill/Sense

Winters, K-L, Wiebe, N, and Saudelli, MG (2019) ‘Writing about writing: Collaborative writing and photographic analyses from an academic writing retreat’ in Simmons, N and Singh, A (eds), Critical collaborative communities: Academic writing partnerships, groups, and retreats (pp 149–168) Brill/Sense.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Jeanne Adèle Kentel for first introducing us to Russell’s (2006) use of the term “generous scholarship.” We extend our thanks to the many colleagues who have practised generous scholarship alongside us during the writing retreats and in other academic spaces. Details about our analysis process and an elaborated discussion of the principles of generous scholarship are presented in a paper currently under review for publication. Authorship of this blog and the associated paper has been shared equally.