The activist university and university activism – an editorial

There is a note of activism hanging in the air in many universities, a sense that studying, teaching, and researching is not enough – or, that such traditional academic activities should contribute to the wider society and wider world beyond the educational programmes, university campuses, scholarly journals, and academic circles. New forms of agency become visible amongst junior researchers forming unions locally and nationally and engaging into critical discussions with institutional leadership levels about precarity, employment, wellbeing, and social justice issues (Bengtsen, 2021). Or amongst students and teachers forming more value-based and non-hierarchical participatory academic communities (Aaen and Nørgård, 2015). Around the world concerns arise about a threatened academic freedom tying the choices of research and teaching focus ever more tightly together to policy-driven agendas of professionalisation and marketisation of higher education, diminishing also student freedom and the criticality of student voices (Macfarlane, 2016) and tying universities still closer to state-driven politics (Wright et al., 2020). The growing dissatisfaction with performance indicators, micro-management, league tables, and ranking systems is becoming ever more visible in public debate, union politics, and as part of the research itself. Resistance strategies are also emerging in an effort to activate a re-configuring of the university against anti-intellectual and anti-democratic currents in global politics. We see academic communities starting up grass-roots initiatives around the sharing of understandings and experiences of academic activism in different institutional and national contexts (Dakka and Morini, 2020). But also, we see more tiny revolts in the form of (in)activism, positive ‘irresponsibility’, and everyday muddled activism in an effort to regain an academic life worth living.

As Barnacle and Cuthbert (2021) inspiringly argue, research itself, together with the training of new researchers, should concern itself directly with immediately grand challenges such as the global climate and health crises. Research should not stand aside and comment on societal and cultural matters but develop an informed and critical engagement with global issues through research and academic practice – research and education have to be understood as the very ‘entanglement with life’ (Barnett and Bengtsen, 2020: 8). To engage societally and culturally also means to engage in a continued critical activity of truth-telling (Gibbs, 2019). Truth-telling may include disagreeing with public opinion, or policy measures, when institutional strategies or ideas in the public debate need to be challenged or even corrected. Engaging in truth-telling entails that one must ‘speak out when the consequences may be unfavourable to oneself’, and this ‘requires courage and a re-constitution of what higher education has become’ (Gibbs, 2019: 7). In their recently published book Academic Activism in Higher Education, Davids and Waghid (2021) point out that discussions around academic freedom within institutions are, always, inextricably linked to wider societal and cultural discussions around social and epistemic (in)justice. The openness of universities and the surrounding societies are bound together in a common cultural fate. Criticality, diversity, and freedom academically can only be real, true, and meaningful if such are reflected and made manifest in the societies that the universities are part of. Societal and academic activism can only succeed when united.

A university’s unconditionality implies a space and ethos in which nothing is beyond question – neither the current and determined figure of democracy nor the traditional idea of critique. The university must always and without reservation be a locus for interrogation, a place where cultural values, intellectual positions and the practices of society are held open to questioning. (…) Hence, it is the activism of academics – their thoughts, arguments, teaching, supervision, mentoring and scholarship – which ensures the active sustainability of academic freedom. Where their silence, complacency, subdued and uncontroversial scholarship and the acceptance of existing hegemonies, academic activism has ceased, and at risk is not only academic freedom but the very basis of the purpose of the university. (Davids and Waghid, 2021:7)

The critical intersections and entanglements between academic agency and societal action have been subtly unpacked by Barnett (1997), who warns of academic activism suddenly appearing with the ‘face of totalitarianism’ (Barnett, 1997: 25). As Barnett argues, on the one side academic activism needs to be politically aware and active but also, and always, be something other and more than politics in order to avoid an ‘ideological takeover’ (ibid.) of academic practice. As Barnett warns, there is always a thin, but distinct, line between academic activism and blind activist ideology and the ‘celebration of immediate projects, self-made identities and modes of communication renders the self-vulnerable to an unnoticed dominion by the dominant powers’ (ibid.). Slowly, but certainly, a democratic project may slide, bit by bit, into the pits of ideology and become the very oppressive force initially sought out to undo and overcome.

Academic activism rests on an ethical base and springs from an ethical demand (Nørgård et al., 2020). Academic practice becomes activist when we lend our thoughts, words, and voices to others and let them speak through us – when allowing what is different and weird and kept in the margins of our consciousness and language to enter into institutional and societal awareness and debate and to become culturally real and a part of our societies. Academic practice becomes activist when the university realises ‘its deeper ethical role and responsibility as going beyond its character, as ethical acts towards the other’ (Nørgård et al., 2020: 58). In our earlier collaboration, we have promoted the idea of the ‘worldhood university’ (Nørgård and Bengtsen, 2016; 2018) and the ‘networking and networked university’ (Nørgård et al., 2019), which we within the context here realise are explorations of academic activism. The interrelations and ethical (not merely political or economic) embeddedness of universities and society plays a crucial role, as ‘the worldhood university thinks and acts not only in the world, but from the world’ and should strive for the ‘submersion into society and the greater good’ (Nørgård and Bengtsen, 2018: 181). The activist university couples intellectual, political, and ethical efforts, and the resulting synergies may be termed academic activism. In the sinews of the activist university also lies the potential of a caring and compassionate university that functions as a refuge or haven for free thinking, vulnerable positions, uncomfortable truths, or unwelcomed research.

The contributions in the special tackle head on academic activism in diverse, but complementary, ways. From a perspective on individual teacher agency and activism within an institution difficult to recognize and identify with, to an activist digital surf breaking down rigid technological infrastructures towards new digital futures built on collectivity, participation, and hope. From warning and critical hesitation of academic activism becoming instrumental in corporate logic and the institutional embeddedness of branding and academic marketing, towards academic revolt, common activist universities, and the ongoing imperative to re-imagine what activism could and should mean and be. From linkage of academic activism to epistemic justice and agency towards studies of the ontological depths and institutional cracks revealing a range of possible futures (and not a fixed few).

In the article ‘The Activist University: Identities, Profiles, Conditions’, Ronald Barnett engages the very notion of the activist university and its different meanings. While students may be activists in movements of radical politics and can be seen resisting or even attacking the forces of the state, what does it mean for a university to be an activist university? Barnett describes the concept of the activist university as a space in which alternative interpretations, stances, and ideas jostle with each other. He contributes with a conception of academic activism as a universal category that gains its fullest realisation when it is exhibited in a situation of epistemic injustice and as an expression of institutional epistemic agency.

In Sonja Arndt’s article ‘Revolt, Activism and the Posthuman University Assemblage’, the notion of revolt is applied to re-imagine activism through a human-posthuman framing that projects the university as a living assemblage of policies and practices that are closely and inextricably entangled and interlinked. Arndt argues that in a time of crisis (like the Covid-19 global situation), the disruptions caused open the way for ‘tiny revolts’ across university and higher education contexts, making possible new forms of academic activism.

Barbara M. Grant, in ‘Becoming-Teacher as (In)Activist: Feeling and Refusing the Force of University Policy’, uses stories of lived experience and critical commentary to engage the intensified policy making and quality assurance of university teaching. Drawing on the conceptual resources of assemblage theory and autoethnography, Grant offers stories of muddled, or failing, forms of activism in relation to teaching policy and its drive towards ‘normalisation’. In the article she highlights policy’s penetration of our subjectivities as university teachers and works to unsettle prevailing stereotypes of activism. Grant contributes with a perspective on the varied ground and nature of everyday academic activism and offers an argument for small, fuzzy, and ambiguous activisms and (in)activisms as a resource for recouping an academic life worth living.

Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krezki approach the issue of the activist university and university activism through the concepts of constituent power, instituent praxis, and the common. In the article ‘The Future is Always-Already Now: Instituent Praxis and Activist University’, Szadkowski and Krezki develop a set of conceptual tools that enables a prismatic understanding of the activist university to inquire into the extent to which established ideas of university activism are resilient to the dangers of co-optation. They contribute with a reading of the activist university as a form of institutionalisation that combines the democratic forces of the common with the logic of instituent praxis to meet activism on a newly formed institutional ground and establish common activist universities.

In ‘Democratising South African Universities: From Activism to Advocacy’, Nuraan Davids describes how academic activism in a South African context has traditionally been linked to reactions against the segregation enforced during apartheid, where activism is linked to historical discourses of racial disenfranchisement and marginalisation. Davids argues that while the political climate has shifted, universities have yet to reconceptualise their institutional, academic, and spatial environments into contexts conducive to open and mutual deliberation. Davids calls for universities to reposition themselves from being sites of activism to being advocates of social, economic, and ethical reform.

Ryan Gildersleeve and Brenda Sifuentez depict in ‘Border U’ how a motion-centred theory of the border helps illustrate how higher education policy acts through bordering technologies used to expand state power and expel historically marginalised groups from participation. The authors draw from their own anthropological engagements with Latinx (im)migrant students’ resistance practices in opposition to the contemporary university’s efforts to expel them. The authors aim to disclose dominant status-quo, anti-intellectual, and anti-democratic currents in global politics, as well as the resistance strategies that might help activate a reconfiguring of the university.

In ‘The Conceit of Activism in the Illiberal University’, Bruce Macfarlane accounts for how agendas of academic activism originally initiated to promote social justice and generate resistance towards neoliberal management regimes have been subtly corporatised through the migration of corporate social responsibility from the private sector into the university. Paradoxically, the enactment of academic activism may be seen as endeavours to meet the expectations of research-intensive universities in chasing the prestige and resources associated with large grant capture. To avoid such ‘conceit’, as Macfarlane terms it, universities may best preserve their independence through forms of positive ‘irresponsibility’.

In ‘Near Future Teaching: Practice, Policy and Digital Education Futures’, Siân Bayne and Michael Gallagher present the Near Future Teaching project as a political attempt to envision better ways of doing things and see digital higher education futures as community-based, open, and articulated through a set of shared values. Bayne and Gallagher draw on recent thinking in anticipation studies in education to develop a methodology for participative futures work within universities. They argue that futures characterised by inevitability and powerlessness can be resisted if university communities develop methods for pushing back on them from a strongly articulated values base of their own. The article contributes with a presentation of the Near Future Teaching project as a case for how collectively defined, preferable futures might be built and described with confidence by university communities.

Through the development of the present special issue, it has been an enormous honour and privilege to work with some of the strongest researchers into academic activism today, who we admire because of their academic work and research, which always has an activist note. Also, we respect them deeply because they are activist in their academic being and becoming, now and into the future, in every task they do and every obligation they take on. Thank you for inspiring us and creating such a prismatic and inspirational issue on the activist university and university activism!