by Ronald Barnett
Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London, and is the President of PaTHES. He has written or edited well over 30 books on the philosophy of higher education, is the inaugural recipient of the EAIR Award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice’ and has been an invited keynote speaker in 40 countries.
When a group of us began to discuss the setting-up of PaTHES (before the acronym came about), an early (if not the very first) thought – as I recall – was that we should try to form a society interested in the philosophy of higher education. However, that thought was immediately joined – almost in the same breath – by the parallel thought that any such society should demonstrably also be interested in theorising about higher education.
One reason for the idea of theory forming an explicit part of the new society was that scholars who might be attracted to it might be uneasy about understanding themselves as philosophers but were much more ready to align themselves with the idea of theory in the study of higher education. And so the discussion very quickly was drawn to a society concerned jointly with philosophy and theory of higher education.
(There then arose intricate discussions about and juggling with the order of the terms and the prepositions intimating their relationships – did the theory precede the philosophy or vice versa? Was it in, of or about higher education? And so on!)
For my part, I readily fell in with the idea that the Society – now, capital ‘S’! – should demonstrably be interested in both philosophy and theory and for two reasons. The first, unashamedly, was that putting both ‘philosophy’ and ‘theory’ in the shop window was likely to be attractive to would-be members. Crudely, it was a strategic selling-point.
The second reason for me was deeper and much more significant. It is that, as I see it, there is no definite boundary between philosophy and theory when reflecting seriously on higher education. This may seem an obvious point – ‘of course, it’s the case’ – but, to my knowledge, the matter has never been the topic of reflection anywhere.
Ever since I started on my own intellectual journey, I have been struck by the fact – it is a fact! – that it is impossible to ascribe just one of the labels (‘philosopher’; ‘theorist’) to many of those whose work I was reading and to which I was attracted, and even several of those to which I was not attracted but the significance of whose work I acknowledged. I think of Jurgen Habermas, Ernest Gellner, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Alistair MacIntyre, Hannah Arendt and Slavoj Zizek (from whom I have borrowed in entitling this article). Indeed, one sees such scholars being referred to in equal measure as a ‘social theorist’ and ‘philosopher’.
(By the way, those descriptions are interesting in themselves as to the perspective from which an individual is seen as a ‘philosopher’ or a ‘social theorist’, not least because either description can carry value undertones.)
The point here is that for me, especially when we are focusing on a social institution such as higher education, philosophy should run into social theory and social theory should become philosophical. That said, I think that it is worthwhile trying to have a sense that, even if they run into each other (and even in the same paragraph), philosophy and social theory have rather different centres of gravity and deserve separate recognition.
For instance, take the idea of ‘the public good’. I take philosophy, in the first place, to be a careful examination of concepts, whether to expose their subtle nuances, to trace their archaeological or genealogical substrates, critically to deconstruct or even repudiate them, to transform them (in what is currently being called ‘conceptual engineering’) or entirely to replace them with imaginative new concepts.
Here, for instance, a philosophical task would lie in the careful identification of different senses of ‘public good’ in relation to higher education – a task that is still awaited, I believe. And such a task, whether undertaken descriptively as it were or in more creative vein, could in itself be incredibly important, not only in effecting a clearing of any present conceptual rubbish but in opening up the landscape to glimpse conceptual possibilities.
But then, carrying out that task in the field of higher education, would be bound to lead to an interest as to how the public good was actually being (a) perceived and (b) reflected in social institutions and arrangements, not least across the world. For example, in practice, is it the case that – and how and where and to what extent might – so-called private universities be seen to be carrying out public functions?
Such a question calls for philosophical adroitness but also a subtle ferreting out of actual practices, policies and perceptions in particular settings. Only on that broad intellectual basis is it possible to develop theories as to the shifting sands of the public good in higher education (by demarcating institutional formations and their tensions). In this theorising process, the concept of public good is almost certainly going to be stretched, so the philosophising gains from the theorising. And, on that joint basis, any glimpsing of new possibilities will be all the more sound (whatever soundness might be taken to mean).
So, the deep study of higher education: philosophy or theory? Yes, please! But with the provisos that each is understood to have its own value, even while they must continuously percolate each other. One cannot seriously study higher education unless one engages in both enterprises and is sensitive to the demands and the possibilities that each offers.
It is not a matter of hopping from one to the other but of standing on both grounds – of philosophy and theory – simultaneously. This is not a comfortable place to be – indeed, it is highly unstable – but it is, I suggest, part of what it is to be a serious scholar of higher education.