Student satisfaction measures serve to provide a measure of ‘quality’ in the current audit culture of universities. This paper argues that the form of satisfaction valued within contemporary Higher Education amounts to a form of settling, where the primary aim is to settle the students’ expectations, and meet their needs. Drawing initially on the etymology of ‘satisfaction’, the paper then turns to the work of Martin Heidegger and his notion of the ‘uncanny’, to discuss how we are ontologically unsettled. The (...) uncanny will be discussed in relation to the Greek play Antigone, and illustrated with examples from the novel Stoner. In provoking angst or anxiety by leaving students ‘unsettled’ in terms of their thinking, this may open students up to a consideration of more ontological concerns – within their Higher Education but also in their lives more generally. (shrink)

Recent European policy has seen a shift from a concern with lifelong learning in the Lisbon Strategy to research and innovation in the Horizon 2020 programme. Accordingly, there has been an increased policy focus on the researcher who, like the lifelong learner must be entrepreneurial, adaptable, mobile, but who must also find new ways in which to develop and deploy her skills and competences and smart solutions to current problems in order to ensure sustainability. The subject position of the researcher, (...) therefore, is not a figure distinctive to the university today, but rather one required of us all. For the excellent researcher in the university, resources exist to enable her to identify those aspects of herself that are in need of development in order to keep all aspects of her personal and professional well-being in balance, often drawn from the field of psychology. Here, rather than analysing directly the ways in which the researcher is addressed by such devices, we focus on the common experience of being in the university today. In everyday conversation, we do not describe ourselves as entrepreneurial, innovative, leading, etc., but more often as tired, stressed and not feeling at home there. Rather than taking these as impediments to productivity and aspects of ourselves requiring psychological strategies, the educational aspects of these are explored in relation to the figure of the studier, as developed from Giorgio Agamben by Tyson Lewis. The shift of discourse from lifelong learning to innovation and research in recent policy is seen to effect a further desubjectivation, a division of ourselves from ourselves. (shrink)

This paper returns to the theme of the academic turn to cosmopolitanism as a response to the challenges of globalisation, conflict, inequality and diversity discussed here previously. The discussion of cosmopolitanism here refers to the context of current policy relating to research and what it means to be a researcher in the European Union today or, as current policy frames it, ‘the Innovation Union’. The understanding of the researcher found in current policy relates closely to the particular understanding of citizenship (...) promoted in Europe today, consisting in active participation, mobility, adaptability and innovation, that is permanent learning for permanent adaptation to our current conditions. This understanding of citizenship and of research works in the name of democracy, community and their sustainability; and respect for diversity and equality and intercultural dialogue are important facets. (shrink)

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher education. We trace the policy developments of this shift over recent years and rehearse some of the criticisms against it. Accepting that there is good reason to (...) support improving the student experience, we then consider ways in which this might be achieved that foreground the relation of university teachers with their subject matter and students’ engagement in this. A higher education, we argue, should expose its students to disciplines whose standards are rightly contested and to a form of learning that intensifies or unsettles desires rather than simply aspiring to satisfy them. (shrink)

In this paper, we build on recent work on the role of the ‘utopian pedagogue’ to explore how utopian thinking can be developed within contemporary higher education institutions. In defending a utopian orientation on the part of HE lecturers, we develop the notion of ‘minimal utopianism’; a notion which, we suggest, expresses the difficult position of critical educators concerned to offer their students the tools with which to imagine and explore alternatives to current social and political reality, while acknowledging the (...) contingent ethical constraints of the system within which they and their students are working. While agreeing with utopian theorists such as Darren Webb who have defended the need for ‘blueprint utopias’ in education in the face of the reduction of the idea of utopia to a purely process-oriented pedagogy, our focus here is on the prior educational task of providing the conceptual and communicative tools for utopian thinking to emerge. The collaborative nature of this paper is ref... (shrink)