Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey

An unprecedented combination of transnational political pressures, conflicts, and policy reforms are today weighing on higher education (HE) institutions, threatening their shared promise to support the public good. Recent research shows that HE is under threats from public sector cuts and the breakup of supra-national governance structures, imperilling HE public missions, academic freedom, and professional integrity. Simultaneously, resurgent nationalisms, populist movements, and forced human displacement impinge on HE's capacity to ameliorate political instability. These developments have coincided with rising political pressures on HE from structurally disadvantaged minorities, particularly over lack of HE access or the curtailing of the social mobility that drove post-war HE aspirations. This constellation of pressures has created a sense of crisis for higher education around the world. Yet little is known empirically about how threats to HE's autonomy and its public mission are manifested cross-nationally in HE contexts across the globe.

There is now an urgent need for systematic comparative investigation of how these pressures and their potentially unpredictable outcomes are affecting higher education institutions and their capacity to fulfil their public missions and civic responsibilities. A recent call by the British Academy has identified education and learning in crises as one of its new strategic aims in response to the rapidly changing political character of nation-states. Our project responds directly to such strategic aims, taking HE and conflict as a primary focus, thereby clarifying threats and risks, both present and future, to HE's mission integrity, its autonomy, its capacity for reducing conflict, enhancing learning and building public trust.This three-year ESRC study will assess these pressures and outcomes for HE public missions through a comparative investigation across four national contexts: the UK, Hungary, South Africa and Turkey. These four states are nominally 'democratic', but each is also undergoing different 'crises of the state', recasting public missions in different ways. The study will explore, across time, the articulations of such crises with changes in the 'public mission' and institutional autonomy of HE.

The project will: 1) identify historical and contemporary political, cultural and transnational HE pressures; 2) investigate how such pressures impact understandings of university missions; and, 3) illuminate the experiences of, and responses to, these pressures on the part of HE actors and civic groups. Methodologically, we will undertake comparative case studies that bring together rich sets of empirical data, including: historical and archival policy documents; quantitative profiles of institutional demographics; records of academic dismissals and other threats to academic freedom; a netnography tracing the presentation of universities in news sources and social media; and interviews and focus groups at two universities in each of the formal case study sites. Through comparative analysis, this project will generate new policy insights to inform stakeholders in defending the university's role in promoting democratic pluralism, pursuing independent knowledge production, and contributing to social mobility. To achieve this, the project will develop a comparative knowledge base to identify global and local threats to HE integrity as an educational space contributing to: conflict reduction; civic stability and development; the assurance of social mobility; new methodological and conceptual models addressing the risks that such conflicts pose for the integrity of HE. Key beneficiaries include actors involved with public mission activities, such as academic managers, student unions, public mission professionals, and civic actors. Beneficiaries will have access to an evidentiary base to advance policy reforms to mitigate negative pressures on HE, including the exigencies of war.

Impact Summary: This project addresses universities' relationships across time with wider political dimensions of the state and the public good in times of rising conflict and political upheaval. It does so within the context of transnational transformations in HE funding and governance, and challenges to the 'global' status of HE and its post-war political identity as an institution with a leading concern for reducing conflict and addressing unpredictable global threats and crises. The project will generate a systematic and comparative evidence base providing beneficiaries with a comprehensive resource both to engage the encroachment of HE privatization and monitoring policies and to illuminate strategic opportunities for national reforms to mitigate a constellation of negative pressures upon HE.
'Engaing Up/Engaging Down': Drawing upon Bacevic's (2017) definition of beneficiary impact, we utilize a dual approach designed to "engage up" by focusing upon wider social actors engaged with HE (e.g., HE policy-makers, HE mission & governance bodies) and to "engage down" through policy impact with NGOs, the social sector and intergovernmental organisations (e.g., CSaP, INEE, GCPEA) involved in university engagement activities and marginal groups seeking to access HE. Key Beneficiaries are:
1. Academic communities and outward-facing NGOs which support HE, particularly the social sciences and humanities, peace and conflict scholars, and those addressing wider political economies of HE. However, because this work investigates political conflict and HE missions, the knowledge outputs will also find purchase in academic governance contexts with senior leaders and management focusing on political risk and needs assessments relative to HE mission practices. Links between NGO beneficiaries and HE beneficiaries are crucial because they are designed to address public/private sector divides and tensions.
2. Labour market partners, particularly in relation to uneven employment risks such as the respective 'youth bulge' particularly in SA and Turkey, and in particular regions of the UK (North-West, including the impact of Brexit on employment opportunities and HE funding), and HE missions and mobility imperatives. The impact outcomes will be drawn upon to engage NGOs, policy think tanks, public and private sector employment interests, and social sector communities which seek focused data on HE inclusion, conflict and missions. The team will generate a series of 'impact' related innovation packages which can be delivered to beneficiaries, outlining the ways in which the differentiated effects of political conflict and mission impinge upon the state, and the role of HE in promoting political stability and widening participation.
3. Policy makers at global, national and local levels by contributing to international efforts by organisations such as UNESCO to further understanding about the role of HE in supporting a democratic citizenry by delineating the political, social and economic issues underpinning HE integrity. At the global level, we aim to influence how HE addresses their commitments to such organizations, ensuring that 'soft power' is utilized to encourage debate in HE over the need for a diversity of HE political perspectives and as a space for peace-building. In light of the current and future potential precarity of HE in the case studies we have identified, the measurement of particular political risks and threats, together with HE's response to them, is a key benefit of the research for cross-national reflection and for a reimagined consideration of governance and mission conceptualisations. Participating HE organisations, participating sector organisations and participants will learn from each other through scheduled cross-cultural networking, jointly produced work, knowledge interchanges and through exposure to the processes of academic research that this entails (e.g., paired research training, peer to peer interviews).