Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

This Special Issue emerged as a reaction to changes in the organisation of academic work that authors variously refer to as the managerial university (e.g., Laiho et al. 2022; Lea 2011), the McUniversity (e.g., Nadolny and Ryan 2015; Parker and Jary 1995), the neoliberal university (e.g., Davies et al. 2006), the corporate university (e.g., Angus 2007) or the entrepreneurial university (e.g., Marginson and Considine 2000; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Following the neoliberal idea of a smaller state and more market in conjunction with New Public Management ideology, universities are increasingly managed along the lines of marketisation, hierarchising, measurement, auditing and control. In that regard it is powerful external stakeholders (e.g., politicians, industry, media, general public) and internal stakeholders (e.g., management and administration) rather than academics that debate and decide the legitimacy of higher education or make various claims about the purposes and the preferred outcomes of academic work (Weik et al. 2022). At the same time, the perspective on academic work has shifted from a validation and certification by peers (Huff 2000) towards a validation focusing on the practical usability of academic knowledge production (Grey 2001; Gulati 2007; Learmonth et al. 2012).

My concern in this article is how the university might become more distributed, less concentrated in particular places and times, and more permeable to different sorts of interests. In order to do this, I have written a partly autobiographical reflection on an attempt to practice the work of the university differently. It is the early story of a sort of ‘research institute’ which is attempting to take the problems of its city region seriously and find ways to connect the resources of a large elite university to many other organisations in its locality. In theoretical terms, the article uses the idea of ‘social infrastructure’ as a way of thinking about how an institution operates beyond its imagined temporal and spatial boundaries and co-produces with people who have different identities and capacities.

This article explores Meyerson and Scully's concept of ‘tempered radicalism’ (1995) in the context of contemporary academic practice and identity. We report on a collaborative autoethnographic study which addressed the question: ‘What does the concept of tempered radicalism mean to us as academics in contemporary higher education?’. We explore how the concept of tempered radicalism allows us to consider our own actions and abilities to drive change within an increasingly challenging higher education environment moulded by the policies, values and practices of neoliberal economics. In this context, we share differing perspectives on what it means to bring a values-based criticality to our work. It is the breadth of Meyerson and Scully's concept which allows us to approach this exploration in a way which emphasises commonality rather than difference and facilitates collaboration. This article therefore showcases the utility of tempered radicalism to academics with a range of perspectives.

Transaction, competition and opposition have become imperative in higher education. In this article, I will explore where to go from here building on critical pedagogy and ideas from students-as-partners and undergraduate research. Using the course ‘Environments for learning in higher education’ as an empirical starting point and approaching students’ work through qualitative document analysis, I will explore: (1) what students focus on when given the opportunity to design their own research questions around learning environments; and (2) how they re-imagine and frame future learning environments in the higher education. With this as a backdrop, I will discuss how a critical dialogic teaching praxis can help to think about the university as a place for collaboration between students and academics with the common purpose to co-create knowledge and meaning.

Public universities in the United States confront drastic changes as labour relations continue to evolve towards neoliberal managerial practices. Increasingly, faculty feel excluded from decision-making processes influencing their lives. This article provides a case study of Public Midwestern University (PMU, a pseudonym), where a faculty union went from protest to participation with administration to formulate a new model for shared governance. While PMU produced such a model, interviews with participants depict a larger economic context that cultivates mistrust and a great sense of uncertainty. The article discusses conflicting attitudes around unionisation, managerial practices and the future of higher education.

Despite the growing size of the academic precariat in the tertiary sector, this exploited group of workers lacks a voice in either their universities or their national union. In this article we draw on our experiences of transitioning from a small activist group to a broader research collective with influence and voice, while forging networks of solidarity. Through reflecting on developing the Precarious Academic Work Survey (PAWS), we explore how action research is a viable way of structurally and politically (re)organising academic work. We argue that partnering with changemakers such as unions as co-researchers disrupts their embedded processes so that they may be (re)politicised towards pressing issues such as precarity. Further, we highlight how research can be used as a call to action and a tool to recruit powerful allies to collaborate on transforming universities into educational utopias.

Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder (2022), The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 225 pp., ISBN: 978-0-226-68427-7

Julia Molinari (2022), What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 224 pp., ISBN: 978-1-3502-4392-7