Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives

This book offers philosophical readings of the contemporary university and is motivated by a series of pressing challenges in the global context of Higher Education. It argues that the university is a place for community, for refuge, for enlightenment and the careful questioning of knowledge, but it is also a place for visceral ambition and for intellectual cowardice, for blinkered individualism and professional competitiveness. 

In the context of a highly competitive post-crash global economy, contemporary students are placed under increasing pressure to distinguish themselves from their peers via a portfolio of learning excellence and extracurricular achievement. Growing numbers undertake part or full-time employment in order to cover registration fees and the basic costs of living. University staff take on very different forms of pressure that operate across the life-course of an academic career – from early-career anxieties to the worries of more privileged and permanent faculty who fear they do not meet ever-changing structures, assumptions and demands of the university itself.

This book argues that these interlinked agendas demand consideration from philosophers of education in Ireland, Europe and further afield. It proposes that we must embody a very careful balancing act: one where we remember the romantic ideals and promises of the university while still acknowledging the very real and pressing challenges faced by our staff and students. The book will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and advanced-level undergraduates in Philosophy, Education, Mental Health, and Organizational Psychology in both North America and Europe.

This book brings into contestation the idea of academic citizenship as a homogenous and inclusive space. It delves into who academics are and how they come to embody their academic citizenship, if at all. Even when academics hold similar professional standings, their citizenship and implied notions of participation, inclusion, recognition, and belonging are largely pre-determined by their personal identity markers, rather than what they do professionally. As such, it is hard to ignore not only the contested and vulnerable terrain of academic citizenship, but the necessity of unpacking the agonistic space of the university which both sustains and benefits from these contestations and vulnerabilities.

The book is influenced by a postcolonial vantage point, interested in unblocking and opening spaces, thoughts, and voices not only of reimagined embodiments and expressions of academic citizenship but of hitherto silenced and discounted forms of knowledge and being. It draws on academics' stories at various universities located in South Africa, USA, UK, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. It steps into the unexplored constructions of how knowledge is used in the deployment of valuing some forms of academic citizenship, while devaluing others. The book argues that different kinds of knowledge are necessary for both the building and questioning of theory: the more expansive our immersion into knowledge, the greater the capacities and opportunities for unlearning and relearning.