Søren Smedegaard Bengtsen

Confronting the Dark Side of Higher Education

In this paper we philosophically explore the notion of darkness within higher education teaching and learning. Within the present-day discourse of how to make visible and to explicate teaching and learning strategies through alignment procedures and evidence-based intellectual leadership, we argue that dark spots and blind angles grow too. As we struggle to make visible and to evaluate, assess, manage and organise higher education, the darkness of the institution actually expands. We use the term ‘dark’ to comprehend challenges, situations, reactions, aims and goals, which cannot easily be understood and solved by agendas of quality assurance and professionalisation of higher education. We need to understand better why gender issues or ethnic conflicts emerge, and why students take up arms, within an institution which is thought to be inclusive, inviting and open to all kinds of people and cultures. And we need to study the educational potential of days of boredom or isolation, caught up in daily routines of teaching or studying which do not lead anywhere or give way to any productive work. These matters have not been sufficiently researched and conceptualised as meaningful in themselves. We aim here to open a space for insights through the concept of darkness presented in this paper. In order to make educational darkness palpable we draw on the philosophies of darkness found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas. Through those philosophies we argue that the growing darkness within higher education is not a symptom we should fear and avoid. Having the ability and courage to face these darker educational aspects of everyday higher education practice will enable students and teachers to find renewed hope in the university as an institution for personal as well as professional imagination and growth.

Academic citizenship beyond the campus: a call for the placeful university

ABSTRACT Through combining theories of space and place with works on institutional being, virtues and modes of becoming, this article develops and promotes academic citizenship as the formation of dwelling, being and becoming on the placeful university beyond the campus. We argue that this is a prerequisite for the integration of the university in society and society in the university. We discuss the need for a concept of the placeful university to capture academic belonging in the nexus between university and society. As such, the conceptualisation of the placeful university provides an opportunity to re-imagine the possibilities of the university to integrate with people and society through dialogue and placeful-ness. Accordingly, supporting academic citizenship entails designing for the placeful university – a university that invites and promotes openness, dialogue, democracy, mutual integration, care and joint responsibility. Consequently, a comprehension of the placeful university is developed in the article to make the potentiality of academic citizenship for the future university emerge.

Into the Heart of Things: Defrosting Educational Theory

What is the meaning and purpose of education? Why do we educate ourselves? The nature of Bildung and educational development is traditionally linked to understandings of personal, social and cultural maturation and growth.

Penumbra: Doctoral support as drama: From the ‘lightside' to the ‘darkside'. From front of house to trapdoors and recesses

Abstract Much international doctoral learning research focuses on personal, institutional and learning support provided by supervisors, managed relationships,‘nudging’ robust, conceptual, critical, creative work. Other work focuses on stresses experienced in supervisor-student relationships and doctoral journeys. Some considers formal and informal learning communities supporting students on research journeys, and roles played by families, friends and others, sometimes offering encouragement and sometimes added stress. However, little has been explored concerning often unofficial, largely unrecognised meaningful others in students’ ‘life-worlds’, variously supporting doctoral learning journeys in terms of research, writing and editing. Research, based in experience and interviews with doctoral students and supervisors from UK and international contexts, reveals support (‘the penumbra’), university sanctioned (‘lightside’), and less well recognised often unsanctioned (‘darkside’) on doctoral research and writing learning journey, instigating questions about doctoral student needs, and the range of support provided, both legitimate, well known, less legitimate. This work concentrates on the ‘darkside’.

The Worldhood University: Design Signatures & Guild Thinking

Universities and higher education today are sites for entanglement of multiple forms of agency and lifeworlds. Enhanced focus is given to higher education strategies and frameworks that integrate more traditional forms of higher education curriculum with moral and political awareness, social agency, and economic consciousness. Such initiatives and socio-political forms of institutional agency are highlighted in current research on the ecological university and higher education ecologies, the global education industry, the professionalisation of higher education, and the social responsibility of higher education institutions. This chapter is one such example of trying to conceptualise such a ‘worldhood university’ as a way for a university to be integrated in the world in distinctive ways and to be a distinctive world for the people living there; what we term ‘design signatures’ and ‘guild thinking.’ Through the developing of the concept of ‘worldhood’ we intend, on the one hand, to focus on the ways the different designs of university structures and systems create specific signatures for being, doing and knowing in higher education. Something universities can work with intentionally to shape thinking in certain ways and create unique worldhood signatures for themselves. On the other hand, we also wish to draw attention to how particular ways of thinking conjures different worlds. Here, thinking becomes a guild’s craft embedded in and emanating from the sinews of the university.

Introduction: Considering the Thinking University

The university is a thinking institution. Surely, that does not need to be said but it does. In much of the contemporary world, in many kinds of nation, the university finds itself amid a climate of suspicion, a climate in which the very heart of the university, namely its interests in knowledge and thought, has been placed in the dock. In the contemporary climate, we are being told that we live in a world of ‘alternative facts’ and in a post-truth age. In such a world, the university ought to be an institution that has much to offer the world. After all, the university is an institution that is particularly associated with systematic efforts to understand the world. Surely, therefore, it contains resources that can address and even overcome these contemporary challenges. Unfortunately, matters here are far from plain sailing. Instead of residing in the relationship between the knower and the world, now it should be recast as a set of relationships between different kinds of knowers, especially between those in universities and the wider world. Just this is the tack taken in this volume, which constitutes a collective effort to position the university as a place of thought in the world. That is to say, the predominant interest of the scholars on duty here is that of ferreting out connections, both actual and possible, between the university and the wider world that lie precisely in its being understood especially as an institution of thought understood relationally; as a thinking university that, in particular, gains its spurs through its concerns with the world. And the general claim here is that in locating the university in this way, as an institution whose thought has much to offer the world, neglected potentials of the university can be discerned and realised.