The document discusses the tension between the idea of the university and its actual institutional form in a culture of performativity. It addresses the shrinking space for professional education as universities prioritize market-oriented goals. The author argues that professional educators can claim ethical spaces by holding universities accountable to their espoused values of inclusion and public knowledge. Specific suggestions include challenging curriculum outsourcing and privatization, adopting open education practices, and organizing interdisciplinary expertise to counter external influence on curriculum. The overall aim is to revive the idea of the university through negotiating the form and practices of professional education.

1. 1
Claiming an ethical space for professional educa
of academics in a culture of performativity:
Reviving the idea of the university
1EDU4HER Sem 1, 2013
John Hannon, La Trobe Univers
ProPEL Conference
Sydney, 9-11 Decembe

2. Landmark, 2004
Charles Robb
1. The shrinking space of
professional education - crisis
3. What kinds of ethical spaces?
Professional Education in a neoliberal university?
2. The actual university and the
idea of the university (IoU)
4. What is the university that
we inhabit, sustain & bring into
being?
5. Reviving the IOU: Taking
ethical action in professional
education
Between
compliance
and resistance

3.  A hybrid, ‘unhomely’, ambiguous space of practice
 extensive commentary on tensions, contradictions, and conflicts in
practices of academic work (Sutton 2015, 2017; Grant 2019)
 Gibbs (2013): a utilitarianism shift in educational development
 Yet: little resistance or overt critique when performative framing
configures professional education (Kalfa, Wilkinson & Gollan, 2018).
 a crisis of critique: knowledge about a university’s regimes of governance
does not offer a strategy for political or ethical action (Bacevic, 2019)
 How can professional/academic developers engage cogently with a logic
of performativity?
1. The shrinking space of professional education

4. Where is the university?
La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS), Melbourne Australia CC BY-SA 4
Out of © University of Melbourne, circa 1932. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/62557

5.  the idea of the university a trope in the literature on higher education: from
Newman’s An Idea of a University (1852)
 Reflections on the growth & development of the university (Clark Kerr 1963;
Delanty 1998; Jeffrey Williams 2005; Collini 2012).
 Barnett (2016) Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities:
2. The actual university and the idea of the university
1. Newman’s ‘cultivation of the
mind’ –against ‘Utility’
2. Humboldtian Bildung durch
Wissenschaft – education for new
knowledge
3. the multiversity: an adaptive
assembly of divergent interests
(Clark Kerr)
its institutional, ‘particular form’ in
time & space
A historically emergent ‘idea’The ‘actual’ university

6.  the idea of the university a trope in the literature on higher education: from
Newman’s An Idea of a University (1852)
 Reflections on the growth & development of the university (Clark Kerr 1963;
Delanty 1998; Jeffrey Williams 2005; Collini 2012).
 Barnett (2016) Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities:
2. The actual university and the idea of the university
Current university vision statements:
Values of knowledge for all, inclusive
education,social justice
Performative: market oriented,
utilitarian, (Newman’s nemesis)
Its historically emergent ‘idea’Your ‘actual’ university
 Professional education enters the gap between institution and idea

7.  Meeting targets: 25% of units to be blended
by 20xx
 Professional Education as develop a career
plan, not develop scholarly teaching
 Professional Education reclassified as BAU
(Business as Usual)
 Teaching as designing a smooth digital user
experience
 Unbundling knowledge: separation of
curriculum( = content) & teaching (= delivery)
Competing agendas or logics
raise ethical choices in
professional education
settings
Practices
3. What kinds of ethical spaces? (in professional ed)
Professional education:

8.  Meeting targets: 25% of units to be blended
by 20xx
 Professional Education as develop a career
plan, not develop scholarly teaching
 Professional Education reclassified as BAU
(Business as Usual)
 Teaching as designing a smooth digital user
experience
 Unbundling knowledge: separation of
curriculum( = content) & teaching (= delivery)
The settings for professional
education remapped to
institutional agendas in
which performative logics
were embedded
How can educators act?
Ethical spaces:
Method: tracing how PD is assembled
Professional education:

9. Method: tracing how professional education is assembled
Professional development: a
configuration of materials,
institutional and pedagogical
strategies, spatial arrangements
and activities that tenuously hold
together yet endure in a logic of
practice
Sociomaterial:
Professional development: a
production of authoritative individuals
that is transferred down the
institutional hierarchy only to be
‘implemented’” (Riveros & Viczko
2015, p. 545).
Institutional:
Each IOU entails an idea, discourse, logic, paradigm, network, around which
practices are assembled
A sociomaterial approach: “trace where the ideas and beliefs that were
circulating in the site had come from and to regard them as locally mediated
and at the same time globally related” (Jill Colton (2019, p. 3).

10. 4. What is the university that we inhabit, sustain & ...
The university is an extraordinary institution; a history of the world
could not be properly written without some mention of it … It has been
and continues to be a crucial institution in the social, economic and
cultural affairs of nations, and indeed of the whole world (for
universities are global institutions). But, as an idea, the university
exceeds its actual character as an institution. (Barnett 2016, p. 4)
Pearson PLC: “the unbundling of its
various research, teaching and degree
awarding functions into separate
profit making activities...”
(Barber et al., 2013, p.12)
Neoliberal IOU
a “genuine university” which was “an
organism, characterized by highness
and definiteness of aim, unity of spirit,
and purpose” (p. 5).
Traditional IOU: Clark Kerr
Historical IOU: Barnett
bring into being?

11. 5. Reviving the idea of the university
The Humboldtian idea of the
university:
to follow the call to ‘marketization’
or revive a contemporaneous idea
of itself that asserts values of
‘democratization’ and knowledge
as a public good (Anderson, 2010)
Current crisis
… a ‘global institution’ with a long
history of integration into the
development of society & culture
that can be traced to over 2000 years
of Greek, Arab, Indian, and European
transfers of knowledge and learning
(Connell 2019)
The university
The IOU as a historically deep cultural resource
The response: “academic developers are already well placed to support
communities of open practice and notions of extended collegiality across
institutions. (Johnston et al., 2018, p. 230)

12. Tai Peseta’s project on how staff engage with Jeffrey Williams ‘Teach the University’, 21st
Century Project (21C, Learning Transformations, UWS. https://sites.google.com/view/wsu21c-saps/teach
university
5. Reviving the idea of the university
Claiming an ethical space: Curriculum partnership Teach the university

13. Barnett
(2013)
Collini (2012)
Newman
(1899)
Williams
(2002)
Readings
(1996)
Delanty
(1998)
Gillies
(2016)
Borgdorff
(2012)
Neary (2016)
Forsyth (2014)
Dept of
Education and
Training (2017)
Felski &
Fraiman
(2012)
Goodman
(1969)
Watson (2007,
2015)
Whitchurch
(2013)
Rowlands
(2017)
Williams
(2008)
Collini (2017)
Readings
(2017)
Watson (2012)
Wellmon &
Piper (2017)
Barcan (2016)
Barnett (2005)
Frank & Meyer
(2017)
Lyons (2016)
Davis
(2016)
Davis (2017)
Barker (2008) Kerr (2001)
Edwards &
Roy (2017)
Hamlyn (1996)
Shore &
Wright (2017)
Hare, Grant,
Locke &
Sturm (2017)
Khoo (2018)
Bourdieu
(1884)
Swartz,
Ivancheva,
Czerniewicz &
Norris (2018)
Massey (2016)
Kelly (2015)
Bacevic
(2018)
Nakata (2013)
Connell (2018)
MacMillan
Cottom (2018)
5. Reviving the idea of the university
Claiming an ethical space: The IOU Reading Group (UTS, UWS, LaTrobe, Deakin

14. 5. Reviving the IOU: From form to possibilities
 Hold the institutional university to its espoused values – the mission and
values of your university are an ‘idea’ – eg. democratic, inclusive and committed to
public knowledge
 Challenge unbundling: challenge outsourcing of student support to curriculum
– how do privatised services support teaching and learning? (see Czerniewicz, L. &
Walji, S. 2019)
 Open up curriculum - adopt open education practices: scholarly practice
means open inquiry and knowledge: open curricula for peer critique, unlock the
LMS, partner with students; share disciplinary curriculum knowledge across
universities (Bossu, 2016)
 Challenge covert learning analytics - ‘new and opaque technologies’
(Buckingham Shum & Luckin, 2019), insist they transparently advance teaching &
learning
 Organise interdisciplinary expertise that can counter curriculum reform by
external private companies: Challenge institutional separations that marginalise
collegial and scholarly forms of governance
Claiming an ethical space: Negotiate professional education

15. 15
Q n A
Hannon, J. (2019) Claiming an ethical space
for professional education of academics in a
culture of performativity: reviving the idea
of the university. In progress
E: J.Hannon@latrobe,edu.au
W: https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/display/jhannon
What is the university that you
inhabit, sustain and bring forth?
You are the university

16. References
Anderson, R. (2010) The ‘Idea of a University’ today. Policy Papers. Retrieved 29 Sept 2019 from
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-idea-of-a-university-today
Barnett, R. (2016). Understanding the University: Institution, Idea, Possibilities. London: Routledge
Bossu, C. (2016). Open Educational Practices in Australia. In: Miao, Fengchun; Mishra, Sanjaya
andMcGreal, Rory eds. Open Educational Resources: Policy, Costs and Transformation. Canada:
UNESCO, pp. 13–25
Buckingham Shum, S.J. & Luckin, R. (2019). Learning Analytics and AI: Politics, Pedagogy and
Practices. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(6).
Collini, S. (2012) What are Universities for? London: Penguin
Colton (2019) Breaking out, finding and using information: theorising learner identities in assemblages of
teaching and learning with technology, Technology, Pedagogy and Education, DOI:
10.1080/1475939X.2019.1640784
Connell, R. (2019) The Good University: What universities actually do and why its time for radical change.
London: Zed Books.
Czerniewicz, L. & Walji, S. (2019). Issues for universities using private companies for online education.
Cape Town: University of Cape Town. Retrieved from https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/29813
Kerr, C. (2001, 1963) The Uses of the University, (5th ed) Harvard University Press
Hannon, J. (2016) Change and obduracy in university teaching practices: Tracing agency in professional
development. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 4(1
Fyffe (2018) Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable: a narrative account of becoming an
academic developer, International Journal for Academic Development, 23:4, 355-366
Riveros, A. & Viczko, M. (2015) The enactment of professional learning policies: performativity and
multiple ontologies, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36:4, 533-547
Williams, J. (2005) History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University. Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and
Politics 25 (1), pp. 55–74