Download the full version of the ebook at ebookfinal.

com

The Future University Ideas and Possibilities 1st

Edition Ronald Barnett (Ed.)

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-future-university-ideas-
and-possibilities-1st-edition-ronald-barnett-ed/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Download more ebook instantly today at https://ebookfinal.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Knowledge and the University Re claiming Life 1st Edition

Ronald Barnett

https://ebookfinal.com/download/knowledge-and-the-university-re-
claiming-life-1st-edition-ronald-barnett/

ebookfinal.com

Photographic Possibilities The Expressive Use of Ideas

Materials and Processes 2nd Edition Robert Hirsch

https://ebookfinal.com/download/photographic-possibilities-the-
expressive-use-of-ideas-materials-and-processes-2nd-edition-robert-
hirsch/
ebookfinal.com

Changing Identities in Higher Education Voicing

Perspectives 1st Edition Ronald Barnett

https://ebookfinal.com/download/changing-identities-in-higher-
education-voicing-perspectives-1st-edition-ronald-barnett/

ebookfinal.com

Photographic Possibilities The Expressive Use of Ideas

Materials and Processes 2 ed 2nd Edition Hirsch Robert

https://ebookfinal.com/download/photographic-possibilities-the-
expressive-use-of-ideas-materials-and-processes-2-ed-2nd-edition-
hirsch-robert/
ebookfinal.com
Vagabond Vol 29 29 Inoue

https://ebookfinal.com/download/vagabond-vol-29-29-inoue/

ebookfinal.com

The Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy From

Pre history to Future Possibilities 1st Edition Benjamin
Isakhan (Editor)
https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-edinburgh-companion-to-the-
history-of-democracy-from-pre-history-to-future-possibilities-1st-
edition-benjamin-isakhan-editor/
ebookfinal.com

Tomorrow s Table Organic Farming Genetics and the Future

of Food Pamela C. Ronald

https://ebookfinal.com/download/tomorrow-s-table-organic-farming-
genetics-and-the-future-of-food-pamela-c-ronald/

ebookfinal.com

The Land Between the Lakes A Geography of the Forgotten

Future 1st Edition Ronald A. Foresta

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-land-between-the-lakes-a-
geography-of-the-forgotten-future-1st-edition-ronald-a-foresta/

ebookfinal.com

The Emancipatory City Paradoxes and Possibilities 1st

Edition Loretta Lees

https://ebookfinal.com/download/the-emancipatory-city-paradoxes-and-
possibilities-1st-edition-loretta-lees/

ebookfinal.com
THE FUTURE UNIVERSITY

As universities increasingly engage with the world beyond the classroom and
the campus, those who work within higher education are left to examine how
the university’s mission has changed. Official reviews and debates often forget to
inquire into the purposes and responsibilities of universities, and how they are
changing. Where these matters are addressed, they are rarely pursued in depth,
and rarely go beyond current circumstances. Those who care about the univer-
sity’s role in society are left looking for a renewed sense of purpose regarding its
goals and aspirations.
The Future University explores new avenues opening up to universities and
tackles fundamental issues facing their development. Contributors with interdis-
ciplinary and international perspectives imagine ways to frame the university’s
future. They consider the history of the university, its current status as an active
player in local governments, cultures, and markets, and where these trajectories
may lead.
What does it mean to be a university in the twenty-first century? What could
the university become? What limitations do they face, and what opportunities
might lie ahead? This volume in the International Studies in Higher Education
series offers bold and imaginative possibilities.

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, Institute of

Education, London.
International Studies in Higher Education
Series Editors:
David Palfreyman, OxCHEPS
Ted Tapper, OxCHEPS
Scott Thomas, Claremont Graduate University

The central purpose of this series is to see how different national and regional systems of
higher education are responding to widely shared pressures for change. The most significant
of these are: rapid expansion; reducing public funding; the increasing influence of market and
global forces; and the widespread political desire to integrate higher education more closely
into the wider needs of society and, more especially, the demands of the economic structure.
The series will commence with an international overview of structural change in systems of
higher education. It will then proceed to examine on a global front the change process in
terms of topics that are both traditional (for example, institutional management and system
governance) and emerging (for example, the growing influence of international organizations
and the blending of academic and professional roles). At its conclusion the series will have pre-
sented, through an international perspective, both a composite overview of contemporary sys-
tems of higher education, along with the competing interpretations of the process of change.

Published titles:

Structuring Mass Higher Education

The Role of Elite Institutions
Edited by David Palfreyman and Ted Tapper
International Perspectives on the Governance of Higher Education
Steering, Policy Processes, and Outcomes
Edited by Jeroen Huisman
International Organizations and Higher Education Policy
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally?
Edited by Roberta Malee Bassett and Alma Maldonado
Academic and Professional Identities in Higher Education
The Challenges of a Diversifying Workforce
Edited by Celia Whitchurch and George Gordon
International Research Collaborations
Much to be gained, many ways to get in trouble
Melissa S. Anderson and Nicholas H. Steneck
Cross-border Partnerships in Higher Education
Strategies and Issues
Robin Sakamoto and David Chapman
Accountability in Higher Education
Global Perspectives on Trust and Power
Bjorn Stensaker and Lee Harvey
The Engaged University
International Perspectives on Civic Engagement
David Watson, Susan E. Stroud, Robert Hollister, and Elizabeth Babcock
Universities and the Public Sphere
Knowledge Creation and State Building in the Era of Globalization
Edited by Brian Pusser, Ken Kempner, Simon Marginson, and Imanol Ordorika
THE FUTURE
UNIVERSITY
Ideas and Possibilities

Edited by Ronald Barnett

First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The future university : ideas and possibilities / edited by Ronald Barnett.
p. cm.—(International studies in higher education)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Education, Higher—Aims and objectives—Cross-cultural studies.
2. Universities and colleges—Cross-cultural studies.
3. Education and globalization—Cross-cultural studies.
I. Barnett, Ronald, 1947–
LB2322.2.F88 2011
378—dc22
2011003860

ISBN: 978–0–415–43391–4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978–0–203–94560–5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon

Printed and bound in the United States of America
CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Introduction viii

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1
Ronald Barnett

PART I
Emerging Futures 13

1 The Future isn’t Waiting 15

Sheldon Rothblatt

2 Imagining the University of the Future 26

Louise Morley

PART II
Global Possibilities 37

3 Accessing Knowledge in the University of the Future:

Lessons from Australia 39
Leesa Wheelahan
vi Contents

4 The Trajectory and Future of the Idea of the University

in China 50
Shuang-Ye Chen and Leslie N.K. Lo

5 The Idea of the University in Latin America in the

Twenty-First Century 59
Mario Díaz Villa

6 The Decline of the University in South Africa:

Reconstituting the Place of Reason 71
Yusef Waghid

PART III
Ideas of the University 85

7 Towards a Networked University 87

Nicolas Standaert

8 The University as Fool 101

Donncha Kavanagh

9 Re-imagining the University: Developing a Capacity to Care 112

Gloria Dall’Alba

10 Creating a Better World: Towards the University of Wisdom 123

Nicholas Maxwell

PART IV
A University for Society 139

11 Universities and the Common Good 141

Jon Nixon

12 Teaching in the University the Day After Tomorrow 152

Paul Standish

13 The University: A Public Issue 165

Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons
 Contents vii

14 The Future of University Research in Africa 178

Berte van Wyk and Philip Higgs

15 Knowledge Socialism: Intellectual Commons and Openness

in the University 187
Michael A. Peters, Garett Gietzen, and David J. Ondercin

Coda 201
Ronald Barnett

List of Contributors 205

Bibliography 208
Subject Index 225
Name Index 230
SERIES EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

International Studies in Higher Education

This series is constructed around the premise that higher education systems are
experiencing common pressures for fundamental change, reinforced by differing
national and regional circumstances that also impact upon established institutional
structures and procedures. There are four major dynamics for change that are of
international significance:

1. Mass higher education is a universal phenomenon.

2. National systems find themselves located in an increasingly global market-
place that has particular significance for their more prestigious institutions.
3. Higher education institutions have acquired (or been obliged to acquire) a
wider range of obligations, often under pressure from governments prepared
to use state power to secure their policy goals.
4. The balance between the public and private financing of higher education
has shifted—markedly in some cases—in favour of the latter.

Although higher education systems in all regions and nation states face their own
particular pressures for change, these are especially severe in some cases: the col-
lapse of the established economic and political structures of the former Soviet
Union along with Central and Eastern Europe, the political revolution in South
Africa, the pressures for economic development in India and China, and demo-
graphic pressure in Latin America.
Each volume in the series will examine how systems of higher education are
responding to this new and demanding political and socio-economic environ-
ment. Although it is easy to overstate the uniqueness of the present situation, it is
 Series Editors’ Introduction ix

not an exaggeration to say that higher education is undergoing a fundamental shift

in its character, and one that is truly international in scope. We are witnessing a
major transition in the relationship of higher education to state and society. What
makes the present circumstances particularly interesting is to see how different
systems—a product of social, cultural, economic and political contexts that have
interacted and evolved over time—respond in their own peculiar ways to the
changing environment. There is no assumption that the pressures for change have
set in motion the trend towards a converging model of higher education, but we
do believe that in the present circumstances no understanding of “the idea of the
university” remains sacrosanct.
Although this is a series with an international focus it is not expected that each
individual volume should cover every national system of higher education. This
would be an impossible task. Whilst aiming for a broad range of case studies,
with each volume addressing a particular theme, the focus will be upon the most
important and interesting examples of responses to the pressures for change. Most
of the individual volumes will bring together a range of comparative quantitative
and qualitative information, but the primary aim of each volume will be to pres-
ent differing interpretations of critical developments in key aspects of the experi-
ence of higher education. The dominant overarching objective is to explore the
conflict of ideas and the political struggles that inevitably surround any significant
policy development in higher education.
It can be expected that volume editors and their authors will adopt their own
interpretations to explain the emerging patterns of development. There will be
conflicting theoretical positions drawn from the multi-disciplinary, and increas-
ingly inter-disciplinary, field of higher education research. Thus we can expect in
most volumes to find an inter-marriage of approaches drawn from sociology, eco-
nomics, history, political science, cultural studies, and the administrative sciences.
However, whilst there will be different approaches to understanding the process
of change in higher education, each volume editor(s) will impose a framework
upon the volume inasmuch as chapter authors will be required to address com-
mon issues and concerns.
This volume in the series, edited by Ronald Barnett, focuses upon how universi-
ties across the world are examining their “missions” and are looking to develop a
renewed sense of their purposes. What then is it to be a university in the twenty-first
century? What possibilities lie in front of it? What ideas might help to frame the
University of the Future? How, in the best of all likely worlds might and should the
university unfold? It is questions such as these that form the territory of this volume.
Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from across the world, The
Future University: Ideas and Possibilities explores these matters and offers bold and
imaginative proposals. With the contributors offering differing disciplinary view-
points and perspectives from many regions of the world, the volume is a resource
both for further scholarship and also for university policy and practice, at national
and international levels.
x Series Editors’ Introduction

Among the issues explored are:

The idea of the university in the twenty-first century

The networked university
Universities and the common good
Universities and wisdom

Many proclaim the end of the university but this volume is a volume of hope and
beneficial possibilities. The idea of the university can live on vibrantly through
the twenty-first century.
David Palfreyman
Director of OxCHEPS, New College, University of Oxford
Ted Tapper
OxCHEPS, New College, University of Oxford
Scott Thomas
Professor of Educational Studies, Claremont Graduate University, California
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to express my warm thanks to the series editor, Professor Ted
Tapper, for inviting me to plan and edit this volume and for all the encourage-
ment, support and guidance he has given me throughout its compilation. This
volume could not and would not have seen the light of day without that support
from him.
Thanks are due for the following permissions:

Donncha Kavanagh’s Chapter 8, “The University as Fool” draws on his (2009)

paper, “Institutional Heterogeneity and Change: The University as Fool”,
Organization, 16 (4) 575–595, Sage Publications.
Nicholas Maxwell’s Chapter 10, “Creating a Better World: Towards the
University of Wisdom,” is contiguous with some parts of Nicholas Maxwell
(2008) “From Knowledge to Wisdom: the need for an academic revolution”,
chapter 1 in Ronald Barnett and Nicholas Maxwell (eds.) Wisdom in the University.
Abingdon: Routledge (and previously published in the London Review of Education
(Taylor and Francis Journals)).
Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ Chapter 13, “The University: A Public
Issue,” draws upon Masschelein, J. and Simons, M. (2010) Jenseits der Excellenz:
Eine kleine Morphologie der Welt-Universität. Zurich: Diaphenes.
Nicolas Standaert’s Chapter 7, “Towards a Networked University” draws upon
his chapter “Pyramid, Pillar and Web: Questions for Academic Life Raised by
the Network Society,” in R. Barnett, J.-C. Guedon, J. Masschelein, M. Simons,
S. Robertson and N. Standaert (2009). Rethinking the University after Bologna,
pp 39–53.
INTRODUCTION
Ronald Barnett

Believing in the University

What is it to be a University in the Twenty-First Century? What might the
university become? What limitations are pressing upon the university? And what
possibilities might lie in front of the university?
These questions lie at the heart of this volume and they in turn open up a large
territory. In order to tackle them seriously, we shall need to develop a sense as to
the past and present conceptions of the university, in order that conceptions of
the university’s future possibilities might be well grounded. In turn, we shall need
to identify and explore conceptions of the university from different regions of the
globe, for assuredly there will be different traditions and perspectives in different
countries. In many countries and even regions of the world—for example, South
America—debates are being conducted over the purposes of the university and
it may be that different views are emerging on the matter bearing a national or a
regional imprint.
The reference to “the University” rather than to “higher education” in the
proposed title of this volume is significant on three grounds. First, this volume
focuses on the university as a social institution. This is an institution that has
extraordinary longevity, being around a thousand years old since its mediaeval
inception, but yet arguably is on the cusp of a new phase opening to it in the
twenty-first century. This volume will attempt to explore the options that are
opening to the university. Second, higher education is here understood to be a
significant part of the functioning of the university, but only a part: the
contemporary university has ever-expanding functions, not only in knowledge
production and knowledge transfer but in a manifold of relationships with the
state and society (in class formation and in intellectual culture). It is, therefore,
2 Ronald Barnett

the university in its totality that is in question here, rather than any particular
aspect of it. Third, there is a long-standing literature that continues to grow on
the idea of the university but rarely has an attempt been made to bring together
scholars from across the world imaginatively to explore the future possibilities for
the university.
Three ideas in that last sentence deserve, perhaps, a little emphasis—those of
imagination, exploration and possibilities. Across the world, the space occupied
by the university apparently seems to be increasingly defined for it as the univer-
sity comes to be subject more and more to the market. The university is being
incorporated, it is said, into “knowledge capitalism” (Murphy, 2009) and is being
enjoined to play an ever fuller part in expanding this new form of capitalism. It
may be said that this new function of the university now opens possibilities for the
university that it has not enjoyed before. Now, the university is free to identify
and exploit possibilities for its position in society and the global knowledge econ-
omy. There is an expanding universe of opportunities available to it. But these
opportunities, such as they are, have severe constraints written into them. Now,
knowledge inquiry and learning processes have to prove their worth through
their economic impact. It is not enough that these activities are “applicable”; now
they have to generate demonstrably an economic return in some form.
Against this background, it becomes a matter of both significance and urgency
as to whether there are other possibilities for the university in the twenty-first
century and as to what such possibilities might look like. “Possibilities,” “imagi-
nation” and “exploration” become, therefore, key terms in addressing the current
state of play; or, at least, they form key ideas for this volume. The contributors to
this volume are not content simply to assess or even to critique the contemporary
university but, as the title suggests, to identify and explore “ideas and possibili-
ties” for the future university. Such a venture requires, in turn, the exercise of the
imagination: only through the imagination is it possible to try to step outside the
given order of things and to bring forward future possibilities for the university.
The exercise of the imagination, however, can only be a necessary condition
of leaping beyond the current order of things; it cannot be a sufficient condition.
Two additional conditions have to be met. Firstly, the exercise of the imagination
has ultimately to be tempered by a certain realism. Hard-nosed efforts have to be
made in order to assess the actual possibilities inherent in the current state of play
of the university. Seriously identifying ideas and possibilities for the university is a
nice example, as we might put it, of “critical realism” in action (cf. Bhaskar, 2011:
ch9). Universities are real social institutions, caught amid social forces, networks
of other institutions and ideologies. That complex of real factors, often hidden
from immediate view, has to be teased out if the exercise of the imagination is
not to have a castles-in-the-air quality. Secondly, the exercise of the imagination
needs to be accompanied by a belief in the university. The university remains an
extraordinary social institution, replete with possibilities. The identification and
exploration of those possibilities has to be infused by a double belief, both that the
 Introduction 3

university is worth struggling for and that the there are still possibilities open to
the university that enable it to do some justice to its traditional value background,
connected with reason, understanding and personal and social improvement.
Believing in the university, therefore, is a crucial part of the inquiry represented
by this volume.
In the rest of this introduction, I shall refer more explicitly to the chapters in
this volume.

Emerging Futures (Part I)

As Sheldon Rothblatt puts it (chapter one), “the future isn’t waiting.” It is already
with us. This, too, is a message in much of Louise Morley’s chapter (chapter two).
New institutional forms involving cross-institutional collaboration, a blurring of
the public and the private, new learning modes (especially favouring e-learning
and practice-based learning), forms of knowledge pursued for their “impact” on
the knowledge economy, the rise of the “global” in higher education and the
emergence of “nomadic” identities among academics: all these and more con-
tribute to the “hyper-modernisation” of the university (cf. Lipovetsky, 2005).
We can surely safely predict, with Rothblatt and Morley, that these trends will
continue into the future. They will do so because they are the outturn of massive
underlying forces of the incorporation of the university into the dominant struc-
tures of a post-capitalist society.
This set of considerations raises two fundamental issues. Firstly, there is a ques-
tion raised by Rothblatt: under these circumstances—in which the university is
being broken open, and its boundaries are not so much becoming porous as rather
entirely dissolving—does the very idea of “the idea of the university” retain any
substance? If, as both Rothblatt and Morley observe, a heightened competitive-
ness among universities is likely to develop, we can predict that universities will
increasingly seek each to identify a niche for itself in the academic marketplace.
In such a situation, talk of “the idea of the university” may seem to be redundant
at best and pretentiousness at worst. The “idea of the university” seems to have
had meaning in an age in which universities were largely undifferentiated and
serving a small (actually an “elite”) section of society. In an age in which the
meaning of “university” simply cannot be either stable or uniform, engaging in an
inquiry into the future idea of the university becomes redundant. It can have no
purchase. It is also pretentious in that it pretends to a unity that is now lost from
view. And it pretends that there could be ways of talking of the university that
have a universal connotation, above and beyond the particularities of institutional
forms and fluidities.
Rothblatt’s answer to his own question is that the idea of the university can
now serve as a conceptual umbrella—albeit with “untidy boundaries”—for “a
collection of niches, for disciplines, for individuals.” Here, in this volume, this
reflection raises in turn the following question: Just what niches, conceptual and
4 Ronald Barnett

practical, are available to the university? Just what are the possibilities for the
university in the twenty-first century, in ways that still retain some substance of
the term “university”? Morley observes that “it is unclear whether . . . recent and
current policy discourses are generating creative thinking about the future of uni-
versities, or whether they are limiting it.” At least, then, we might hold out the
hope that the idioms and currents of the present age are generating spaces for new
kinds of thinking about and practices in and around the university.
A second issue here is this: to what extent should the recovery of any idea
of the university borrow from or seek to retain remnants of earlier ideas of the
university? Or are any ideas of the university from earlier ages inevitably so much
conceptual baggage? Rothblatt himself notices that the “absence from discussions
of globalization” of the idea of the liberal education is “particularly evident.” In
this weighing of the “University of the Past” with the “University of the Present”
(as Morley puts it), there are two subsidiary issues. On the one hand, there is
the empirical story: as governments around the world move to introduce more
market elements into their higher education systems, the possibilities for the uni-
versity to expand social mobility and social equity seem even to be reversing. This
is, as Morley puts it, a “rapidly dessicating sector.” The University of the Future
seems to be becoming, in part, the University of the Past as its locus as a centre of
power, prestige and inequality grows again.
But, on the other hand, there is—as we might put it—the discursive story. Can
we still sensibly hold onto elements of the former ideas that characterised the Uni-
versity of the Past? For Morley, “the University of the Future needs to recover
critical knowledge and be a think tank and policy driver.” In other words, parts of
the traditional idea of the university can still be called up, providing that they are
re-interpreted in the context of the University of the Future. As Morley puts it,
“We need new conceptual vocabularies and reinvigorated courage to challenge
the archaism and hyperactivity that frame the sector.”

Global Possibilities (Part II)

Each university system in each country has its own history, traditions and con-
temporary circumstances. Ideas of and the possibilities for the university always
have their place in a context. Increasingly, too, within a university system, each
university will have its own setting and positioning. This necessary contextualisa-
tion of the ideas and possibilities is just one of the points to be drawn from the
contributors in this section. And yet, strikingly in these four contributions and
across the countries and regions represented here—Australia, China, South Africa
and Latin America—we see recurring themes, such as those of a shift towards
“performativity” (in which efficiency and output become crucial), a driving up
of knowledge that has direct applicability in society (and in which that impact
can be demonstrated) and a slide away from “liberal education” towards voca-
tionalisation and the increasing influence of governments and inter-governmental
 Introduction 5

agencies in encouraging these shifts. These commonalities—albeit with a greater

or lesser presence in each case—in the country-specific narratives point to a glo-
bal context for an inquiry into the ideas and possibilities for the university in the
twenty-first century.
This dual set of reflections—as to the presence of the local and the global
contexts that surround universities—surely invites the following line of thought.
The university has for a very long time—arguably even since its medieval ori-
gins—stood for universal categories. It came to have a close association with an
inquiry into truth and whatever that might mean (even in its pragmatic orienta-
tions), truth was never simply my truth, or my group’s truth or even my society’s
truth. The university’s truth claims were to be subjected to validity tests for truth
as such. The question “but is it true?” has always been a key question for the
university. It is here, in this concern for truth, that we find the university’s alle-
giance to reason, of which Yusef Waghid speaks. Yet the university does have to
live in particular contexts many of which are closing the spaces for untrammelled
reason. We surely catch glimpses of this movement in each of the chapters: Leesa
Wheelahan draws attention to the promotion of vocationalism in Australia and
the separation from the systematic conversations of society about itself for those
who take that learning route; Shuang-Ye Chen and Leslie Lo draw attention to
the struggle in China—now apparently infused with renewed vigour—to re-
vivify university practices with ideas of the university fit for the twenty-first cen-
tury; Mario Díaz Villa, amid the heterogeneous sets of spaces that now constitutes
Latin America, points to the dominance of the economic field and of economic
reason; and Yusef Waghid, borrowing from Derrida, points to the heightened
production in South Africa of “technicians of learning.”
And yet, despite situations that could lead to quite dismal readings, each of the
four contributors is able to identify ideas and potential practices that just might
lend themselves to enactment that helps to move the university forward in the
twenty-first century. Wheelahan looks to “the notion of professionalism [to pro-
vide] a bridge back to . . . disciplinary knowledge (and thereby a form of liberal
education)”; Chen and Lo look to a visionary institutional leadership leading, for
example, radical curriculum reform; Díaz Villa boldly sets out a raft of principles
framed around critical dialogue and openness through which the university might
combat the “performativity” and “postmodernism” that confront it; and Waghid,
by way of example, refers to the cultivation of “democratic iterations” that may
be embodies in a student-supervisor relationship in which each learns from the
other.
In a way, the actual weight that may be placed on each of these proposals
is not, I think, to the point. The key point is that, however fast the currents
in which the university finds itself may be running, the search for progressive
possibilities that extend reason across society remains a worthwhile activity. It
just might lead to the identification of realisable possibilities. Such possibilities we
may term “feasible utopias” (Barnett, 2011): they may not be realised but there
6 Ronald Barnett

is sufficient available to us—both in reasoning about the character of man’s place

in the world and empirical evidence—to suggest that they could be realised. They
are not fanciful suggestions.
We can draw, I think, three broad conclusions from these four case studies.
Firstly, the very globalisation of the university is opening up global spaces in
which the idea of the university as a space of reason in society may be reclaimed.
Secondly, the identification of feasible ideas and practices that may carry the uni-
versity forward requires hard and imaginative thinking, especially if they are suc-
cessfully to contend against the main currents of the age. Thirdly, the very inser-
tion of the university into global society—as we may term it—opens and even
calls for new ideas and practices that open up possibilities for the university for
society. There is no sliding back available: the university cannot ratchet itself back
to a situation in which it is separate from society. Very well: let us see, then, if we
can identify ideas and possibilities for the university both in and for society. The
enactment of ideas here becomes just as important as the identification of the ideas
themselves; they should yield feasible possibilities for the university, in fulfilling
its new potential as a global institution able to promote learning, inquiry and even
social development across the globe.

Ideas of the University (Part III)

Possibilities for the University, then, are already present. Spaces are opening for
new practices. Those spaces present themselves differently across the world and
across universities even within a single system. Yet, if full advantage is to be
taken of the spaces now opening for universities in the twenty-first century, new
ideas are surely needed. Certainly, the extent to which any new ideas might or
should still draw upon earlier ideas of the university—of reason, truth, academic
freedom and so forth—is a matter for further consideration. But the university in
the twenty-first century has challenges afresh. It occupies new spaces in society.
Accordingly, new ideas are needed if the university is to realise its possibilities.
The four chapters in Part III seek to help precisely in this task. For each of the four
contributors, there is a dominant concept and with it comes a cluster of attendant
concepts.
Nicolas Standaert (chapter seven) develops the idea of the university as a set
of networks within wider societal networks. Associated concepts here include
those of web, places, nodes, spaces, displacement and the “in-between.” For the
networked university, there is no centre as such. Consequently, “in a time of
fragmentation there is need of rediscovering the whole.” For Standaert, a major
challenge for the university understood through such concepts becomes the fol-
lowing: Can ways be found so that different disciplines can meet each other?
“How can one create new nodes in the web of sciences?” A particular problem is
that of the relationship between “the so-called measurable and hermeneutic sci-
ences” (or, as might be said in the UK, between science and the humanities): just
 Introduction 7

“how can the two meet each other?” It follows that “the space of a networked
university still has to be invented.” We need, therefore, a new architecture that
has “in-between” spaces that in turn generate the “uncertain, vulnerable, uncon-
trollable or incomprehensible.”
Donncha Kavanagh (chapter eight) invites us to think of the university as fool,
the idea of fool taken from the mediaeval courts and elsewhere in which the fool
had a crucial role to play. The role of the fool, after all, is to present ambiguity to
the powerful, wittily engaging his audience but perhaps to disturb a little as well.
“The fool is an irritant, a provocateur, whose modus operandi is to provoke new
wisdom in others.” Within the fool’s foolishness, then, lies wisdom. Understood
as fool, the university has had several masters or “sovereign institutions” over its
near-one thousand years of history, including the crown, the nation, the state, the
professions and the world of work. The idea of fool, however, implies a certain
“liminality” from the main structures of power and so an issue (for Kavanagh) is
the extent to which this liminal role has been or is being abandoned. If, qua fool,
the university is both to institutionalise and to de-institutionalise, the univer-
sity cannot become subservient to any authority. “The fool must . . . be careful
not to transgress this (liminal) role.” Accordingly, “there is an . . . onus on the
university . . . to actively foster intellectuals that question and play with society’s
institutions.”
In her chapter (chapter nine), Gloria Dall’Alba—drawing especially on Martin
Heidegger—explores the concepts of care, being, responsibility and attunement.
To care is to have a deep concern for something beyond oneself, both “others
and things in our world.” Calling on the concept of care is thus a rejoinder to
a higher education that has become narrowly a matter of the intellect and of
skills in the world. To have a concern with care is to take up a view as to one’s
being in the world. An interest in care and in being on the part of the university
would carry over into all of its key practices, namely teaching, research and social
engagement.
Care shows itself in being responsible, in responding appropriately, whether
in pedagogical relationships or in the choice of research and in the manner of
its conduct or in the possibilities that open for social engagement. Responsibil-
ity entails choice which in turn has further implications: “when possibilities are
opened, we press ahead into an emergent possibility, thereby negating and fore-
closing other possibilities.” Part of the functioning of the space occupied by the
university, therefore, is that of encouraging “the discernment of possibilities” and
the wherewithal to follow through on certain possibilities: “the university can
encourage thoughtful—and, at times, courageous—responses to the call to care.”
We discern possibilities through “attunement,” through close and careful atten-
tion to matters at hand. Such an education—and such a university—for being
entail commitment and risk and require courage and leadership.
In chapter ten, Nicholas Maxwell develops an argument around the idea
of wisdom. Connected concepts include those of knowledge-inquiry and
8 Ronald Barnett

wisdom-inquiry, and problem-solving rationality and aim-oriented rationality.

Maxwell believes that the university has long favoured “knowledge inquiry,”
a form of inquiry that is “grossly and damagingly irrational.” This is a form of
inquiry that is dissociated from a more fundamental concern with problems of
living and which, as a result, violates certain rules of rational problem-solving.
What is needed, therefore, is to develop universities around a form of inquiry
that promotes wisdom—“wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in
life, for oneself and others . . .” In this “wisdom inquiry,” “social inquiry is intel-
lectually more fundamental than the natural and technological sciences,” helping
“to develop and assess rival philosophies of life.” “Whereas knowledge-inquiry
demands that emotions and desires, values, human ideals and aspiration, philoso-
phies of life be excluded from the intellectual domain of inquiry, wisdom-inquiry
requires that they be included.” Wisdom inquiry, therefore, would offer an inter-
play of sceptical rationality and emotion, an interplay of mind and heart so that
we may develop “mindful hearts and heartfelt minds.”
On the face of it, these four chapters constitute four quite different viewpoints,
articulating and developing separate sets of concepts in helping to develop ideas
and possibilities for the university in the twenty-first century. And the chapters
have some substantive differences in the detail of their arguments. However,
there are certain features that are to be found across them to a greater or lesser
extent. Firstly, they are centrally concerned to identify and to develop imagina-
tive concepts not currently part of the mainstream of contemporary thinking
about the university. Secondly, each contains indications as to ways in which the
concepts for which their authors are contending could be put into place. Thirdly,
they are suggesting in their different ways that a conception of the university built
around knowledge per se is inadequate. Fourthly, they are arguing—again to a
greater or lesser extent—for the intellect and other aspects of human being to be
brought into a proper and closer relationship with each other. Fifthly, we see here
too a view—especially in Standaert and Maxwell—that a new understanding of
the humanities needs to be developed and a new articulation of the relationship
found between the physical sciences and the various forms of social and human
inquiry.
There is a further issue raised by these four conceptions: if the university of
the twenty-first century is to realise fully its possibilities, should it be construed as
lying within the main body of society or somewhat separate from it? Kavanagh’s
conception of the fool is itself a point of ambiguity on the matter: the fool is both
within the court but keeps his distance from it; and hence is a “liminal” character.
For Maxwell, the University of Wisdom is presumably to be within society in
that it is deliberately structured as a site that identifies key issues in society and
rigorously brings together its total resources in addressing those issues; but it is
clear that the university here too has to be permitted its own space if it is rigor-
ously to assess all the competing viewpoints and evidence on issues. Perhaps the
metaphor of the web suggested by Standaert is potent here: the university can be
 Introduction 9

seen as occupying a region within a larger web of webs, with its own nodes and
networks, but yet having sufficient force that it is able to exert an influence of its
own on the totality of the webs that constitute the world.

A University for Society (Part IV)

Suppose, as part of our imagining the university in the twenty-first century, we
conceived of a university not just in society but actually for society? What would
that mean? I take it that it would mean a number of things. It would mean that
the university was interested not simply in reflecting society but in helping society
forward; towards a better society. It would mean, in turn, that universities would
be compelled to forge some sense as to what might constitute “a good society”
(to steal a phrase from the aphorism of Tony Judt with which Jon Nixon opens
chapter 11). It would mean that the university had formed some sense of its own
collective virtues, in helping society to realise better and more profoundly the
capacities of its members to come to have a care for each other and to live more
harmoniously and respectfully together. And it would mean that the university
was seized of its potential in developing the public realm, especially the realm of
public reason, of the giving and rendering of reasons in a public space.
This is a formidable list of conditions and yet the five chapters in this section
not only, I think, imply such conditions but go even beyond them. For Nixon,
the matter is essentially one of an “aspiration towards a fairer and more just soci-
ety; a society shaped and motivated, that is, by a sense of the common good.”
For Paul Standish (chapter 12), one way of achieving such an end lies in the
recovery of teaching as constitutive of the good life in itself and as, therefore, at
the heart of the university. Here, the “subject matter” would come alive “in the
interaction between teacher and student, . . . in dialogue or conversation . . .” Jan
Masschelein and Maarten Simons (chapter 13) urge the rediscovery of the lecture
as a conversation between professor and students in a public space, a space of free-
thinking, unalloyed by considerations of performance, economy or informational
resources or even specific interests of any kind. Berte van Wyk and Philip Higgs
(chapter 14) plead for “a form of African community based research which takes
cognisance of values present in the community, for purposes of fostering the
communal beliefs of that community.” It would be a “kind of research that is
conducted by, with and for the community.” Michael Peters, Garett Gietzen and
David Ondercin (chapter 15) examine the possibility that new communication
technologies may usher in a university that is much more open than its predeces-
sors, structured around many-to-many interactions and knowledge creation. We
may even, they suggest, be on the verge of the formation of a university that is
playing its part in the birth of “knowledge socialism.”
Together, these five essays provide a powerful rebuke to depictions of the
university as a matter of private good, or personal interest, or as a set of market-
able products (where the capacity to access those products is inevitably severely
10 Ronald Barnett

curtailed in a capitalist society). It was long part of the self-understanding of the

university that, alongside teaching and research, it offered “service” to society. (This
view of the university was perhaps markedly so in the US.) But these five essays
suggest that a new conception of the university is both possible and necessary, a
university that actually helps the remaking of civil society in a fragmented age.
Of course, there are many issues that these five chapters implicitly raise that
should be tackled on another occasion. One is that of concepts. What, for exam-
ple, are the meanings of, and the relationships between, the following concepts:
common good, civic good, public good, public sphere, public reason, social
good, communality, commons and public engagement? This is not the place to
essay such conceptual analyses. I will, in closing, instead confine myself to making
three points.
Firstly, as these chapters make plain, the university is well-placed to contribute
directly to the widening of the public sphere by thinking through its own internal
practices. For example, as Standish sees it, the dominant conception of teaching
that “afflicts the university . . . stultifies the public realm”; so that “the threat
to teaching is a threat to democracy.” But if and when “the best possibilities of
teaching are recovered,” the university—“of the day after tomorrow”—would
come to have a “public place in the democracy to come.” In parallel, for Mass-
chelein and Simons, properly conceived and practised, the lecture is precisely a
collective endeavour, a gathering together (of a plurality of students and pro-
fessors) giving themselves to the provocations of an issue that stands outside of
themselves. “It shows something about what living and living together is about
. . .” (Masschelein & Simons). The lecture is not to a public but itself conjures
forth a “public.” “Public lectures thus are associated with the emergence of a new
consciousness, or an overtaking of the self that extends one’s own, private affairs
by making things into a public affair.” As such, it “inaugurates a question about
how we are going to live together.” Analogously, a university for the public
good would ensure that it offered spaces for learning that “might also become
deliberative spaces” (Nixon) in which students might engage with “uncertainty,
indeterminacy and irreducible complexity.” A fundamental consideration here is
that “it is precisely the capacity for living and working together in uncertainty,
indeterminacy and irreducible complexity that the students of today will require
[in the twenty-first century].”
Secondly, the university is well placed because of its already embeddedness in
society to affect transformations in the wider society. In making its research more
community based, focused on community social problems and needs, “grassroots
democracy” could be strengthened while, at the same time, through “the opening
of educational doors to community knowledge,” the academy itself could grow
in socially worthwhile ways (van Wyk & Higgs). The possibility is even emerging
that the university could inaugurate a new era of collective knowledge creation
and become “a locus of true inclusion and social and economic activity” (Peters,
Gietzen & Ondercin).
 Introduction 11

Thirdly, there is an important distinction to be made here between the social

(good) and the public (good). I take the category of the social here to refer to
the capacity for human beings to take account of each other. In an individualised
and economically competitive world, that natural inclination towards a care or
concern for the other may be being jeopardised; and the university is well placed
to help play its part in recovering the social dimension of society. The University
of the twenty-first century should surely see it as a responsibility that it work
towards enabling discordant voices to live together, in a world lacking sureness
and certainty. In addition, the university is well placed also to develop anew the
public sphere, a sphere of collective and public reasoning. This latter role in par-
ticular calls for the university itself to become much more public in its activities,
not only in displaying its intellectual wares but in facilitating public reflection and
understanding so that society might be more enlightened, even amid discord; and
might just be better able to develop some collective and rational control over its
affairs even amid differences of perspective and values.
PART I

Emerging Futures
1
THE FUTURE ISN’T WAITING
Sheldon Rothblatt

The University of the Future Is the University of Today

The historian’s obligation is to the recorded past and its crooked paths to the
present. Despite every temptation, I am less concerned with what a university
ought to be than describing its present character and identifying the internal and
external forces that have shaped its past and are shaping its future. The approach
should not be taken to mean that universities while beholden to their surround-
ings and obedient to history, are only reactive or passive. They have never been
mirror images of some other entity. Such is only true under tyrants and dictators.
Otherwise the intersections with churches, the state, social classes or a particular
economic system are many and complex.
The current literature on the subject is actually huge and daunting, so that
what is attempted here is often a summary of arguments and observations. The
principal examples are drawn from the history of Anglophone universities, but
similar changes appear in other nations’ universities.
The University of the Future, at least the near future, is already visible, not
only in outline but in its organization, its interior values, its external relationships,
its disturbing aspects but also its strengths. The university of today, whatever its
origin or funding base, is a hybrid, composed of both top-down and bottom-
up styles of decision-making, varying according to the type of institution or to
idiosyncratic circumstances. A half century ago, Clark Kerr of the University
of California coined the word “multiversity” to describe composite institutions
challenged by multiple external pressures (Kerr, 1963, 2001).
The challenges most often cited today, such as the coming of the “postmod-
ern university” relying less on social democratic government policies, to include
national security and defense, and more on “networks” and diverse markets,
16 Sheldon Rothblatt

national and global, have been a reality for decades. “Privatization” has followed
closely, another vexed word that does not exactly mean “private” but relates to
freer institutional initiatives operating under more flexible governmental policies.
Nevertheless, governments, the principal revenue source for most universities,
have by no means yielded their tendency to “guide” or “steer” or direct univer-
sity activity.
Multiple external commitments have contributed to the absence of institu-
tional clarity, which, exacerbated by funding pressures, have led to complaints
about academic career prospects, working conditions and related frustrations, but
the discontents are not universal. As universities vary greatly in their income and
prestige, some prosper while others struggle. Universities springing up as “centers
of excellence” in Asia and the Middle East (and Israel is considering them) are
understandably more optimistic about the future than those preoccupied with
thoughts of decline, especially those without the scientific and technological
strengths most favored by politicians, civil servants and corporations.
For higher education, the last century was so revolutionary for many coun-
tries that further radical departures may well appear tame. What we can expect,
however, are weightings and intensities that will affect the inner culture of spe-
cific colleges, universities or technical institutes, with undergraduate education,
apart from certain places, adjusting itself to research missions, already a reality as
undergraduates are increasingly exposed to research experiences. Oxbridge, the
great symbol of undergraduate teaching, is now increasing its intake of graduate
students. Current proposals in Britain to rationalize research missions by creating
two academic classes, separating teachers from investigators, hitherto more typical
of France and Germany, are likely to cause distress since status is based on research
and even plays a major part in the assessment of liberal arts college professors in
the United States.

The Effects of Rapid Change

A century ago, no nation met Martin Trow’s criterion for mass access higher
education. All were “elite,” that is, admitting about 1% of the available student
cohort, America a bit more at 2–4% (Trow, 2010). Secondary education was
limited. Few occupations required a university education. For all western nations,
America first, mass higher education was primarily a post-1945 phenomenon.
For Europe, expansion of the higher education system, both the proliferation
of institutions that were universities in name or would become such by the end
of the century, was swift and compressed. Policies were adopted in response to
political beliefs that post-compulsory education was a right and not a privilege.
The intentions were admirable. However, policies were undertaken without any
perspective on how rapid change might affect quality and funding. The result,
carrying through to the present, has been frequent policy shifts on the part of
governments. The accompanying reform of secondary education, especially in
 The Future isn’t Waiting 17

Britain since countries such as France largely adhered to a stringent curriculum

leading to the baccalauréat, introduced even more confusion into the articulation
between secondary and tertiary education.
Once again the intentions were noble. The object was to provide alternative
routes into higher education by abolishing existing barriers to upward educa-
tional and social mobility. But in all countries the results have been disappoint-
ing. Remedial instruction at universities and colleges, long a feature of American
higher education, is now characteristic of many European institutions. No one
appears happy with the levels of skills and proficiencies that students bring to first-
year studies. At one point, Britain even had a ministry with “skills” in its name.
While the emphasis may have been understandable, academics were dismayed by
what appeared to be a distortion of the purposes of a university education and a
drain on funding.
No matter what schools reforms have been undertaken, a familiar pattern pre-
vails. The high achievers come mainly from homes that are relatively affluent and
neighborhoods that are reasonably stable. Parents are either educated or, in the
case of particular ethnic and religious groups, foster a culture of achievement.
Poverty, broken homes and dangerous schools have created what is now called
an “underclass” in the US. Parents with means, or children in disadvantaged
circumstances who show promise, patronize private schools or “independents,”
the prestige sector of schooling in both Britain and America. Experiments with
alternative forms of schooling—“charter” schools or “academies,” voucher pro-
grammes, home schooling—have proliferated. Bypassing existing educational
establishments, to include teacher unions, and accused of inflating their academic
success, they are presently vastly controversial.

A Withdrawal of Trust
Although government support of an expanding higher education system natu-
rally appealed to academics, a few wondered whether a Trojan horse had been
wheeled onto the premises. This proved to be the case with the burgeoning
of quality assurance, audit and assessment agencies. It is said that Asian coun-
tries favor evaluation, while Western nations lean towards audit. No one model
prevails, and in some nations the participation of central government has been
milder than in others. Historically, universities were accustomed to setting their
own curricular and degree standards, with external examining in Britain assuring
that standards across a particular segment of higher education were reasonably
uniform. The system worked well when universities were few in number and
polytechnics were linked to a central validating body, the Council for National
Academic Awards.
However, a combination of changes produced new issues regarding quality
assurance. One, already discussed, is the problem of remediation pushing up from
below, or fears that grade inflation is rampant at all levels of the educational
18 Sheldon Rothblatt

system. Another is the wide, if not universal, adoption of teaching modules in

some cases replacing the single-subject honors degree that has been a mainstay
of the undergraduate curriculum in the UK. Maintaining some kind of uniform
academic standard across a system of modules is virtually impossible. A third is the
extraordinary increase in the numbers of institutions denominated “universities”
based on the model of the expensive research-led university. Whatever their ini-
tial intention, government policies ostensibly aimed at quality maintenance have
become a way of rationing resources in a sector that has grown overnight.
Efforts at maintaining a common element of quality has been more European
than American. The American view is consistent with what has long been a
highly differentiated system of higher education composed of select institutions
with high standards of entry and achievement and other institutions responding to
different academic norms. One sociologist once noted that American universities
and colleges could not exactly “charter” graduates, that is to say, they could not
guarantee the quality of a degree, leaving the decision on subsequent employment
to markets. However, the persistent problems of schooling, the current stress on
institutional ranking and the prominence in public life of the graduates of elite
colleges and universities, along with fears that America has lost its innovative edge,
may signal a new attitude. Admission to the famous colleges and universities of
the nation has never before been so demanding, competitive and nerve-wracking,
further dampening the chances of entry for those without adequate schooling.

Circumstances Favor Elite Colleges and Universities

The University of the Future must cope with the contradictions (barely indicated
here) carried over from the radical transformations in education that marked the
second half of the twentieth century. In this task, it is evident that institutions that
have the resources and national and global reputations not only will fare better
than the others. They are already hugely successful, attracting the ablest under-
graduates and outstanding postgraduates. They recruit from the world’s pool of
academic talent. They have alumni support and prestigious graduates occupy-
ing prominent positions in government, industry, think tanks and philanthropies.
They have history on their side. In short, the configuration of higher education
institutions in many nations is a sort of gigantic bimodal distribution of favored
and less favored institutions. The favored universities in the United States are
mainly private, but they include state institutions such as Virginia, Michigan,
Illinois and campuses of the University of California. Michigan has long been
privatized, deriving only about 7% of its operating expenses from the state; but
gloom has settled in elsewhere, particularly in once-wealthy California, where
talk of a “crisis of the publics” is continuous.
The universal adoption of some kind of research mission, basic or applied
science, and the phenomenon of incubator policies, start-ups, spin-offs and sci-
ence parks have positioned higher education more firmly within national and
 The Future isn’t Waiting 19

world economies than in the industrial age, although we cannot forget that two
world wars enlisted academic-based science and technology in the fight against
militarism and totalitarianism. Within single universities, the resources flow-
ing to particular fields and subjects have also created wider income disparities
between knowledge domains and between professional and liberal education. No
study that we have absolutely indicates the extent to which such disparities affect
institutional morale. Americans are fairly well accustomed to the existing reward
structure, but satisfaction depends upon overall working conditions as well as
income. Recently concerns have emerged over retirement and health benefits as
universities find themselves unable to meet accustomed obligations. Grumbling is
widespread, but the elite sector has the means of mitigating discontent to a greater
degree than other kinds of institutions, especially those dependent upon low-paid
part-time instruction, unhappily more and more the rule.
Futurologists might speculate that the elite university already born will be
even more loosely designed, with more professorial movement in and out to
industry, government, philanthropies and even private life than presently exists.
Multi-campus systems in the US, justified on the grounds of cost-effectiveness,
may in future actually prove less attractive, too bureaucratic and more difficult for
states to support. At any rate, the case has so been argued. However, alternative
schemes envisage branch colleges, possibly two-year community colleges, associ-
ated more closely with the research universities in order to improve the oppor-
tunities for receiving first degrees. The looser organization of a “postmodern”
university enhances the options for individual academics, depending upon field.
In other words, contrary to the managerial model of institutional governance
currently a topic of irritable discussion, the disaggregated type of university is
neither purely managerial nor collegiate. Another way to summarize the situation
is to say that adjustments between top, bottom and outside will be continuous
and unstable. Education has historically relied upon a certain element of predict-
ability regarding governance, the appointments process, curricula, examining and
scheduling. But like other institutions within contemporary society, uncertainty
has become a norm.

Towards a Global University

To what extent can we also expect student transfer a là Bologna to contribute to
the looser organization of the university? Is it possible to expect a return of the
Wandervogel phenomenon of the nineteenth-century German university, with stu-
dents seeking professors rather than specific universities? This would be a major
readjustment for many institutions. A bedrock aspect of vertical mobility in the
American university, transfer is less pronounced in the select private sector where
alumni support is vital. Undergraduates are particularly loyal to their institutions
since attendance is so closely associated with coming of age, making friends and
finding spouses. Because transfer students spend only half their time at flagship state
20 Sheldon Rothblatt

universities, postgraduate instruction became particularly important. Today institu-

tions in search of enhanced revenue streams are conspicuously recruiting students
from abroad, and particular American universities are increasing places for out-of-
state undergraduates for similar reasons (Douglas & Edelstein, 2009).
As the national university moves offshore, so to speak, concerns are expressed
that the connection between universities and national cultures established in the
later nineteenth century will be disrupted. That connection featured models
of undergraduate liberal education based on assumptions about citizenship and
nation-state identity. There are many reasons why liberal education scarcely exists
in any recognizable form, but its absence from discussions of globalization is par-
ticularly evident.
We can surmise that as linkages between universities, especially research-led
universities, become more global, the relations between specific institutes, depart-
ments, programs, laboratories and area studies within single campuses and their
counterparts elsewhere become stronger. One can reflect upon a kind of Univer-
sity of France composed of disciplines informally organized on a regional, national
or even global pattern, more possible within the European Union than elsewhere.
Degrees can be awarded conjointly (I recently had experience of a doctorate
shared between Bergen and Sciences Po). “The College Invisible,” today’s net-
work, then becomes more visible. Embryonic colleges, if limited in scope, are
presently formed around great international laboratories for example, the research
facilities at Cern and Fermi and around the linear accelerator at Stanford.
Another if related scenario is more direct cooperation between separate insti-
tutions. The notion still persists that a genuine university is one that is complete
and can offer every subject whatever student demand. That has never been abso-
lutely true. It may well be less true than ever. We can expect mergers in an effort
to improve economies of scale, or, short of mergers, cooperative efforts between
neighboring institutions to encourage library sharing or improve purchasing
like those being utilized by the colleges of Oxford. We can also envision more
schemes like the Five Colleges of the Amherst, Northampton, South Hadley area in
Massachusetts composed of four liberal arts colleges and the flagship campus of the
University of Massachusetts, or the three Quaker colleges of Main Line Philadelphia.
Shuttle buses take students from one campus to another. Carleton College south of
Minneapolis offers no instruction in Italian, but Carleton students can take classes
at cross town rival St. Olaf’s. Given the unfortunate propensity for hard-pressed
institutions to close down humanities subjects, especially languages in response to
bottom-line targets, the sharing of courses across campus boundaries is one way of
recalling that universities are conservers as well as generators of knowledge.

Drivers of Internal Change

The driver of all strategies and departures is multifaceted. Knowledge genera-
tion in particular has been primary in the evolution of systems and structures.
 The Future isn’t Waiting 21

Knowledge acquisition and dissemination are imperial, continuous and move

sideways to embrace adjacent disciplines. This is most often an “autonomous”
process, subtle and even imperceptible, a step-by-step accumulation of ideas
and methods. Organizational reforms may strengthen the advance of disciplines
(Clark, 2004), but they can also be trendy, designed for publicity, suggesting
profound changes where none exist. Whether structural reforms are generally
more “efficient” in some measurable way, or enhance institutional prestige or
improve teaching and research is debatable. Today’s high-ranking universities are
for the most part conventionally organized, incorporating familiar disciplines and
professional studies. Yet campus administrations can support and abet networking
initiatives, which then find linkages to regions, communities, cities and industries.
The city planner, Sir Peter Hall, has explained how “creative milieu” arise when
this happens, citing Silicon Valley as one example (Hall, 1997).
Knowledge expansion will unquestionably continue to drive all essen-
tial aspects of the university, but financial drivers are at present not far behind.
Research, research dependent upon the latest technologies, and fixed costs
are vastly expensive. More of the costs of attendance are being offloaded onto
students; and although many institutions attempt to increase tuition discounting
and provide various forms of financial aid through their own and government
sources, debt levels have risen and create genuine hardships. The present White
House has attacked irregularities in the private administration of loans, but it is
hard to see how the general situation can be altered.

The Broadband Revolution

The search for cheaper forms of higher education is by necessity on the rise, a by-
product of the movement from mass to universal higher education. Advocates of
on-line instruction, a relative of predecessors such as distance learning and open
universities (some with drop-in centers), speak prophetically of the demise of
the “broadcast” or “industrial model” of instruction. For-profit institutions are
well into the game, reaching hundreds of thousands of users. However, financial
improprieties have increased existing suspicions about the commodification of
knowledge. Completion rates are low, and the costs to students mount up. Yet
controlling costs will continue to drive providers towards less expensive ways of
delivering education, even though, in the US, students enrolling in for-profit
institutions have access to government-derived financial aid.
Some academics deplore efforts to bypass or denigrate the inherited classroom,
regarding them as yet another dumbing down of education and another con-
tribution to a denatured university environment. Proponents can, if they wish,
counter by pointing to the huge impersonal lecture halls in France and Italy or
the large classes in many American universities and the widespread use of graduate
teaching assistants. They welcome on-line instruction as in keeping with today’s
student computer-based, any-time cultures. A further argument is that insofar as
22 Sheldon Rothblatt

today’s undergraduates are easily bored and attendance at lectures has fallen, on-
line instruction makes perfect sense. Freed from the need to cover a routine sylla-
bus, lecturers can use the time for a more creative approach to learning, including
personal attention in a few instances. This is a large claim where some angels may
well fear to tread (Guri-Rosenblit, 2009; Harley, 2009).
The decline in state funding has made it impossible for the University of
California system to meet its demographic obligations framed in the famous State
of California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 (Geiser, 2010). Con-
sequently a debate has just started—certain to be acrimonious—over whether
courses offered in the freshman and sophomore years ought to depend upon on-
line instruction. Trials have begun. How much of an education will be forgone if
digital teaching is the main instrument of education will doubtless occupy endless
hours of discussion and renew interest in the educational benefits of peer-group
interaction. Controversies over the use of internet teaching will unquestionably
carry on well into the present century. Although select institutions use and will
continue to make use of newer digital tools, sometimes systematically, more often
piecemeal, according to classroom styles, the degree to which this occurs will
sharply separate elite from other types of institutions, with implications, as yet
unclear, for employment and career prospects. This is a vexed subject in any case.
Most studies fail to distinguish between initial employment following the award
of a degree and lifelong career chances. Elite institutions appear to continue to
have an advantage in the first, and they may also possess an advantage in the sec-
ond, but at that point many other variables enter relating to occupation, leader-
ship qualities, personality, emotional stability and actual job performance.

Securing an Advantage
Competitive pressures, global rankings, the pursuit of status, student anxieties
over being left behind in a race for the top are fueling an academic propensity to
cheat. Cheating is not in itself a consequence of the digital revolution. As long as
there have been written examinations, cheating has prevailed. Attempts to game
examinations even existed at eighteenth-century Cambridge when examinations
were oral, although the evidence is largely anecdotal. One reason why intelli-
gence testing was so widely adopted in America in the first decades of the twen-
tieth century is that its supporters could claim that cheating was impossible on a
correctly-designed “objective” IQ test that measured natural aptitude.
Still, the advance of on-line education, accompanied by the revolution in
gadgets that defines the world of young people, has exacerbated what is almost a
natural tendency to gain an advantage wherever the stakes are high. In the rich
democracies, cheating appears to be strongly correlated with lower achievers,
those who are desperate to succeed. Student cheating has become so prevalent that
the University of Central Florida, the nation’s third largest campus as measured
by enrolment, has created a testing center stocked with technology designed to
 The Future isn’t Waiting 23

catch reprobates. In a battle of wits, gum chewing is forbidden during examina-

tions because it can mask use of a hands-free cell phone linked to a collaborator.
Computer screens are recessed so that they cannot be photographed and infor-
mation transmitted outside. Scratch paper is dated and turned in. Proctors use
overhead cameras to spy on potentially suspicious activity. One student tattooed
possible answers onto his body. Elsewhere professors design software intended to
catch students who are plagiarizing or somehow copying papers and answers. Or
they can employ the services of industries with huge data bases designed to catch
plagiarists (New York Times, 2010; Boston Globe online, 2010).
An Orwellian educational environment of surveillance is frighteningly distant
from the kind of idealism about learning that is presumably every teacher’s wish.
Academics are understandably uncomfortable. Where is the trust that ought to
exist between teacher and taught? But the most disturbing casualty of wide-scale
cheating is moral; a refusal to admit that a cut and paste style of composition stolen
from the internet is wrong.
For researchers, the desire for recognition has produced scandals from Korea
to the United States that are even more disturbing than student fiddles to obtain
degrees. A world of celebrity cultures has brought increased attention to numer-
ous violations of professional ethics such as the falsification of evidence or fake
degrees. Concerns about whether the actual, hidden or subtle pressures exerted
by huge pharmaceutical or bioengineering conglomerates will compromise
objective research standards have long been expressed. Since outside support will
continue to be sought, the matter demands extreme vigilance. For the humanities
and social sciences, objectivity has already been compromised by the intrusion of
political partisanship into teaching and publication. The degree to which this has
occurred is difficult to measure. Numbers do not always a controversy make.
But there are also new neighbors on the block, and their influence is yet to be
felt. Academics still rely on peer review to catch malpractices and correct bias, but
just as the internet has provided a major challenge to honesty, so is it beginning
to affect broadband assessments of research results. The division between special-
ists and non-specialists is breaking down. On the internet, anyone can have an
opinion, and anyone can express it. What are the implications of this pastime for
academic autonomy, peer review and individual reputations? How is it possible
to separate mere opinion, rumor and innuendo from genuine critical expression
when hundreds or thousands of internet users come out of cyberspace? How is it
even possible to summarize this mountain of commentary as if deciding upon the
purchase of an automobile?
Finally, it is necessary to make a point about institutional leadership in contrib-
uting to the national and global race for an advantage. So prevalent is the search
for standing, and the rewards associated with rank, that campus leaders market
their institutions as products superior to others in some specified way, often in a
way that has little do with core missions. Modesty is not a present-day attribute.
The worry is that noise is required in order to attract attention.
24 Sheldon Rothblatt

Conclusion: Does a University Require an “Idea”?

The value of an “idea,” its function, is to gather the disparate disciplines around
a core, to unify the academic professions and to provide a university with a clear
commitment that can be defended in plural environments. These objectives are
unobtainable. Two traditions of the nineteenth century created the idealist litera-
ture that has substantially grown since Cardinal Newman in England and philoso-
phers in Germany posited the view that a university either embodied a specific
mission or that knowledge had a specific purpose. Not all of many commentators
find the arguments compelling (Maskell & Robinson, 2001). Newman and the
Germans are not always clear and precise. Nor did they agree.
Newman did not find research an appropriate function for a university. His
model was the Oxford of his youth, with colleges devoted to undergraduate
teaching and character formation. The German view of knowledge was rather
more ethereal, less applied, although the “high culture” of self-cultivation—Bil-
dung and its Scandinavian variants such as bildning and danelse—was expected to
result in a desirable personality change. Historians have written about the intel-
lectual difficulty of penetrating such conceptions. However noble, they were
sometimes exclusive, easily distorted and encouraged unpleasant prejudices. Yet
the hope of some intellectuals was that the high culture once associated with class
privilege would in time become democratized, the possession of all. The univer-
sity, it was supposed, would lead the way towards a more elevated conception of
moral conduct: less crass, less vulgar, less absorbed by the bottom-line (Rothblatt
& Wittrock, 1993; Rothblatt, 2008).
Individuals may meet this obligation, and doubtless some do. We can-
not know the numbers. But the multiversity of the twenty-first century, by
definition, is a house of many mansions. No single idea prevails, but many exist.
The extent to which they are actually operable, so to speak, is impossible to
determine apart from their rhetorical use. Some see the essence of a university in
Newman’s terms, or better yet, the essence of knowledge, as excellence; others
as discovery, others as the life of the mind. Still others speak of the university as
an agency for problem-solving. Politicians want a commitment to economic
development. Political activists seek the transformation of society on partisan
grounds. Conservatives prefer to speak of tradition. Ronald Barnett states the
ideal as open discussion, the free exchange of views and respect for them. The
effect of this is emancipatory, he says, a necessary stage for self-understanding
and self-improvement, values that support proud and free democracies I would
add (Barnett, 1990). Can all of these exist simultaneously as a single and uni-
fied commitment? No, because they lead in different directions depending upon
circumstances. Can they exist if knowledge domains are disaggregated and free
to establish their own priorities and connections within untidy boundaries?
Yes. A fortiori, the multiversity is a collection of niches, for disciplines, for
individuals.
 The Future isn’t Waiting 25

While the university has not altogether lost some of its historical characteris-
tics, it is nevertheless a far different kind of place from what was known even a
half century ago. Positive elements exist. The university’s fluid boundaries and
networking possibilities are suited to problem-solving. Arguably, it is a more
generous-minded place than its predecessors, particularly those whose history is
sadly marked by ready acquiescence to the bigotries and injustices of states and
society. But this is a reminder that universities are only as tolerant as their societies
and governments allow. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy can only
thrive when generally respected.
The university of today is part of a national system of “higher education”
composed of many types of institutions subject to contradictory tendencies. One
promotes greater cooperation between colleges and universities, a fuller sharing
of resources and commitments in the interests of the greater good. The other
encourages competition, rankings, hyperbola and the exploitation of multifarious
markets.
Yet taken as a whole and with all of its perceived drawbacks, this world holds
great possibilities for intellectual discovery, for social betterment and—to return
to Newman—for teaching. Students still want to learn, and adult education is
thriving. Weaving and bobbing through the “terribly tangled skein of modern
life” (homage to Tolstoy), and within porous borders, the university is more
important and more vulnerable than it has ever been in a breathtakingly long and
continuous history.
2
IMAGINING THE UNIVERSITY
OF THE FUTURE
Louise Morley

Desire, Desiccation and Distributive Justice

This chapter will raise questions about the morphology of the University of the
Future and whether creative visioning has been eclipsed by pressing concerns and
tensions in the present. It will also consider whether the University of the Future
might also be seen as the University of the Past. The global economic recession
means that higher education could move from expansion to contraction, with a
reinforcement of social hierarchies and privilege. Opportunities for participation
could become spaces of closure in the emerging austerity economy and creeping
privatisation.
We live in times of policy turbulence, and change has been rapid and extreme.
Transformation has largely been driven by the perceived needs of the economy
rather than by academic imaginaries or social movements. The academic imagi-
nary has tended to be harnessed to critique, protection and defence rather than
an engagement in futurology. Counter hegemonic advocates did not necessarily
predict the scale of neo-liberal driven change. Traditionalists did not foresee the
industrialisation and massification. Higher education currently abounds with a
sense of crisis. Movements and political demonstrations in many countries have
been mobilised to attempt to protect what we had in the past, and interrupt the
rapidly desiccating sector. The shock therapy of disaster capitalism means that the
future of higher education is under threat in a range of national locations. For
example, in the UK Comprehensive Spending Review of the public services,
higher education funding is being cut—ostensibly in relation to the global fiscal
crisis. However, these cuts are also ideologically driven and the financial crisis is
embedded in and re-producing political and democratic crises. Economic crises
“soften the ground” for radical political changes (Klein, 2008). Austerity measures
 Imagining the University of the Future 27

can also be seen as ideology posing as technology, with higher education re-
positioned as a private positional good and luxury product. It is important to
question what is worth protecting, and what type of higher education would
be of value in the future. Desire, that is, for what the different stakeholders and
constituencies actually want for the future of higher education that goes beyond
immediate concerns with economics, as well as loss, needs to be considered.
Higher education is caught between hypermodernism (Lipovetsky, 2005) and
archaism. It is characterised by the development of global, entrepreneurial and
corporate universities and speeded up nomadic public intellectuals. There are
new student constituencies, literacies and modalities of communication. Bor-
ders are dissolving and academic (hyper)mobility is promoted (Kenway, Bul-
len & Rob, 2004). However, the hyper-modernisation of liquified globalisation
(Bauman, 2000), and edgeless universities (Bradwell, 2009) are often underpinned
by the stasis, archaism and desiccation of poor quality employment and learning
environments, unequal employment regimes, elitist participation practices and
globalised gender inequalities (Morley et al., 2008; Morley & Lugg, 2009). These
factors are set to deteriorate further in times of economic crisis. The recent UK
Browne Review of higher education funding suggests that increased tuition fees
will raise quality and standards as students will demand value for money for their
investment (Browne, 2010). This is an interesting logic—cutting the government
teaching grant by up to 80% implies loss of permanent staff, closure of many
specialist departments and an instability caused by the fluctuations in demand
of a market economy. It is questionable how the reconstruction of students as
customers in this impoverished climate will drive up quality.
The University of the Past was associated with elitism, exclusion and ine-
qualities (Morley, 2010a). The University of Today is diversified, expanded,
globalised, borderless/edgeless, marketised, technologised, neo-liberalised and
potentially privatised. Dominant discourses and imagined policy futures focus on
excellence, innovation, digitisation, globalisation, teaching and learning, employ-
ability and economic impact (BIS, 2009). It is unclear whether these recent and
current policy discourses are generating creative thinking about the future of
universities, or whether they are limiting it. Policy priorities are not always com-
mensurate with aspirations and desires of students and staff, and there have been
fears over the past decade that universities are being reduced to delivery agencies
for government-decreed outcomes (Young, 2004). The delivery has demanded a
degree of compliance and performativity that can stifle creative thinking. This has
been particularly the case with audit cultures that have devoured and diverted vast
temporal, material and intellectual resources (Morley, 2003).
The emphasis now is on the economics of higher education. In a recessionary
market economy, the questions of the value of higher education, and the rate of
return and who should pay become even more relevant. Higher education is posi-
tioned as a private, rather than a public good (Singh, 2001). Current UK policy
debates on fees, graduate tax and the graduate premium focus on what the capital
28 Louise Morley

is worth in terms of the exchange rate of qualifications (Curtis, 2009). There

are also discussions about how universities are valued. In the austerity economy,
higher education has been recast as profligate and extravagant. However, higher
education itself has been a profitable product. For every one million pounds the
treasury invests in universities, the return is £1.3 million in other parts of the
UK economy (UUK, 2010). Underpinning all these debates on the economics
of higher education is the question of whether universities should exist to create
knowledge for wealth, for social and public good, or for its own sake. Knowledge
is now coded for its optimisation and exchange value in the labour market, rather
than for its pleasure, power, democratic or critical possibilities.
The commodification of knowledge is apparent in the growth of the private
sector. Private universities have expanded massively in some geopolitical regions
e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, South East Asia and Latin America (Alt-
bach & Levy, 2005: Bjarnason et al., 2009). Now there is the suggestion that the
UK should follow suit (Shepherd & Vasagar, 2010). As demand is now exceeding
supply in the UK, the state is looking to the private sector to fill the gap. This
strategy has been a feature of low-income countries, for example in sub-Saharan
Africa (Varghese, 2004). Many high-income countries are now examining the
role of the state in the provision of higher education. Boundaries between the
public and private are blurring. The private sector has been infiltrating state provi-
sion for some time (Ball & Youdell, 2008), and looks set to benefit further from
the state’s policy to raise aspirations. Privatisation is often posed in the vocabulary
of modernisation and disguises the potential major changes in the ethos, curricu-
lum and values of higher education.

Widening Participation: Opportunity or Coercion?

Archaism is observable in patterns of participation, and more recently in relation
to policies on participation in higher education. Social variables raised their head
in some of the recent debates on widening participation (BIS, 2009), but largely
in relation to poor students. Their inclusion into higher education could be clas-
sified as a form of democratisation. It could also be interpreted as an act of incor-
poration and an attempt to make the working classes more like the middle classes
(Archer et al., 2003). In the UK, there has been a movement from expansion
and widening participation under the former Labour Government to policies of
retrenchment and contraction under the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat
coalition. Whereas previously the policy momentum was to widen participa-
tion for social justice (and human capital), now the emphasis is on cost-cutting,
privatisation and how to finance higher education. Difference is contradictorily
conceptualised both in terms of disparagement and desire. For example, widening
participation policies and social movements suggest that universities should want
to be more socially inclusive. Yet, new constituencies of students are still regarded
as a high risk by many elite organisations.
 Imagining the University of the Future 29

I do not wish to set up a binary between the golden ageism of the recent
past and the economies of the austerity culture. There have been some notable
global successes in increasing participation under diverse governments in the past
half century, but some uneven distribution across regions, suggesting that there
are still powerful geographies of knowledge. There are now almost 153 million
tertiary students in the world, a 53% increase since the year 2000 and a fivefold
increase in less than 40 years. It is predicted that the demand for higher educa-
tion worldwide will expand from 97 million students in 2000 to over 262 mil-
lion students by 2025 (UNESCO, 2009). Much of this growth has been in East
Asia—in China, enrolment is now 20%. In South Asia, India has the world’s third
largest system and plans to raise enrolment from 11% to 15% by 2012, while in
Bangladesh, enrolment rates are just 6%. Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced the
highest average regional growth rate. For more than three decades, enrolments
have expanded by 8.7% annually, compared to 5.1% for the world as a whole, and
have tripled since 1990, to almost four million students. However, in sub-Saha-
ran Africa, regional enrolment rates are 5%, the lowest in the world. Nigeria and
South Africa enrol 10% and 15% respectively but Uganda and Ethiopia just 3%
and Tanzania 1% (DFID, 2008). At the other end of the axis, Iceland and Austria
lead the world with the highest graduation ratios of 65.6% and 60.7% respectively
(UNESCO, 2009).
It is important to ask who these new constituencies are, and whether quan-
titative change has challenged middle class capture of higher education. Recent
research and reports in the UK suggest that it has not. There is still a toxic cor-
relation between poverty and access. Only 4% of the UK’s poorer young people
enter higher education (David et al., 2009; Hills Report, 2009), and only 5% of
this group enter the top seven universities in UK league tables (HESA, 2010).
Morley et al. (2010) also found that poor students in Ghana and Tanzania were
absent from almost all the programmes included in the research sample in two
public and two private universities—in spite of quota systems for disadvantaged
students and affirmative action programmes for women in science. It is relevant to
ask why it matters that elitist participation patterns prevail under diverse govern-
ments, and in different locations. The university is a major site of cultural practice,
identity formation, knowledge formation, capital and dissemination and symbolic
control. Graduates from elite universities in the UK dominate the media, politics,
the civil service, the judiciary, the arts, the City, law, medicine, big business, the
armed forces and think tanks (Monbiot, 2010). In short, participation is about
power, and higher education continues to play a dominant role in reproducing
social privilege.
Widening participation targets of 50% in 2010 in the UK are in the process of
being repealed. It was always a highly contentious policy intervention, even though
the target has almost been met with a current 45% participation rate (BIS, 2010).
Widening participation policies unproblematically construct higher education as a
social good, and become a formulaic or techno-rational prescription for economic
30 Louise Morley

and social development, and for adding capital to members of marginalised groups.
Participation gets constructed as much as a duty as a right (Biesta, 2006). Widening
participation can be a force for democratisation. It can also map onto elite practices
and contribute to further differentiation of social groups. Research has demon-
strated that those with social capital are able to decode and access new educational
opportunities (Crozier et al., 2008; Heath et al., 2008; Morley et al., 2010; Reay et
al., 2005). Those without it remain largely untouched by initiatives to facilitate their
entry into the privileges that higher education can offer. There can be an affinity
between capital and the capacity to aspire to higher education (Appadurai, 2004;
David, 2009). What is interesting, however, is that recessionary driven graduate
un/under employment has not satisfied the hunger for higher education. Aspira-
tions have been raised and applications in the UK rose by 23% in 2009 (HESA,
2010). This could be a recession-proofing strategy, the return of the scarcity-value
of higher education or perverse resistance that is desiring access after the state has
stopped trying to coerce you into raised aspirations.

Closing the Gender Gap

Gender inequalities are another example of archaic practices. The Global Gender
Parity Index of 1.08, means that there are now slightly more women undergradu-
ates than men (UNESCO, 2009). It could be argued that relays of power are being
disrupted by the changing gender profile of undergraduate higher education. The
number of male students globally quadrupled from 17.7 to 75.1 million between
1970–2007. However, the number of female students rose sixfold from 10.8 to
77.4 million (UNESCO, 2009). Instead of celebrating the gains for gender equal-
ity, some constituencies have created a feminisation crisis discourse, with fears
that women are taking over the academy to the detriment and exclusion of men
(HEPI, 2009). This suggests that women’s successes have come about by damag-
ing men. It also implies that a woman’s place is in the minority, and reconstructs
the dominant group as victims. There are fears of imbalance, contamination and
domination by socially disadvantaged groups, suggesting that there should be a
ceiling on their participation, and that their place is in the minority. When the
symbolic order appears destabilised, policy debates utilise normative vocabular-
ies and commonsense, binaried understandings of gender to justify reposition-
ing dominant groups as victims (HEPI, 2009). Fortunately, this crisis discourse
has been eloquently deconstructed by feminist scholars who have unmasked the
misogyny that lurks beneath the engulfment fears (Leathwood & Read, 2008).
A further feature of the feminisation discourse is that it ignores gender in wider
civil society. While women’s participation in higher education might be increas-
ing, gender equality is falling in wider UK civil society. The UK was ranked
13 in the 2008 Global Gender Gap Index and 15 in 2009 (World Economic
Forum, 2009). The index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, politi-
cal, education and health-based criteria, and provides country rankings that allow
 Imagining the University of the Future 31

comparisons across regions and income groups, and over time. Each year, the UK
has been sliding down this scale. While Nordic countries tend to dominate the
top three positions (Iceland was top in 2009), population size and wealth do not
always influence the scores. Ghana is higher (ranked 80) than Japan (ranked 101),
and Lesotho is now in the top 10. Women might be entering higher education,
but are they accessing wider benefits?
Women are still under-represented as knowledge producers and leaders in
higher education, with their academic capital seeming to have a lower value in
the labour market. Only 19% of European Union professors are women (She
Figures, 2009). 13% of UK Vice Chancellors are women (Deem, 2010). In 70%
of Commonwealth countries, all universities are led by men (Singh, 2008). In
2007/08, the median gender pay gap in universities in the UK higher educa-
tion sector was 18.2% (ECU, 2010). Current policy concerns about impact seem
to evaporate in relation to research evidence about gender inequalities. Gender
tends to get ignored when women suffer discrimination or under-representation,
but amplified in crisis form when women start to be “over-represented.” Gender
inequalities appear to be resistant to hypermodernisation forces, in spite of legisla-
tion in different locations.
The UK now has the Gender Equality Duty (2007), which moves gender out
of individual grievance modalities and into recognition of the need for a radical
new approach to equality—one which places more responsibility with service
providers to think strategically about gender equality, rather than leaving it to
individuals to challenge discriminatory practices. This framework suggests that
gender should be taken out of crisis mode and into proactive, resourced, strategic
interventions e.g. gender mainstreaming (Morley, 2010b). Gender mainstream-
ing involves the creation or strengthening of national machineries and other
governmental bodies for the advancement of women; the integration of gender
perspectives into legislation, public policies, programmes and projects; and the
generation and dissemination of gender-disaggregated data and information for
planning and evaluation (United Nations, 1995). Instead of simply noting gender
inequalities, institutions should develop strategic plans and procedures for moni-
toring and evaluation. The University of the Future needs to be accountable for
gender in quantitative and qualitative terms, with its leaders making clear where
they stand on gender, and what strategic re-distributive action they propose
to take.

Multiple Knowledges
Higher education typically involves accredited learning, which assumes that com-
plex processes, activities and knowledges can be measured objectively (Pryor &
Crossouard, 2010). However, assessment is bound up with normative judgements
and power relations that can involve misrecognition. New ecologies of knowl-
edge are developing in technologically driven societies. The University’s DNA
32 Louise Morley

is still largely literary in structure—especially in relation to modes of assessment,

whilst new generations of students have been attributed with and inducted in
technological literacy. One tension that appears to be developing is between the
diverse social identities of knowers and orthodoxies about what counts as knowl-
edge and what counts as appropriate assessment of knowledge. If new constitu-
encies are bringing new literacies and modalities of communication into higher
education, this might be accompanied by new sites of conflict.
While this might sound like technological determinism (Clegg, 2010), research
is informing us that younger undergraduate students can often spend longer inter-
acting with social networking sites than with their university set texts (Morris,
2010; Robson, 2009). Morris (2010) points out that these social practices and
digitisation are producing new identifiers including: Millennials, Digital Natives,
Digital Generation, Google Generation, Generation Y, MySpace Generation, Nintendo
Generation, Net Generation and YouTube Generation. The sacred/profane binary
of knowledge could be challenged by new “just-in-time,” “wiki” knowledge
producers. Brabazon’s (2007) study examines how this can sometimes result in
cut and paste practices for many students. Students too have been speeded up,
so why read a whole book, when summaries of grand theories are available on
Wikipedia?
New research is suggesting that many of us no longer have the concentration
or time to read texts to their conclusion (Carr, 2010). Carr believes that hyper-
active online habits mean that we are in perpetual locomotion, and losing our
ability to process and understand lengthy textual information. A new movement
has been created to introduce slow reading, just as it was for slow food (Miedema,
2009). New generational power relationships could be producing a tectonic
relationship between ideal/imagined students and actual new constituencies in
terms of knowledge codes, assessment and learning practices. In other words,
the University of Today could be constructing students using the reference points
and values of the University of the Past. The University of the Future needs
to strike a delicate balance by speaking to diverse generational and geographi-
cal power geometries while simultaneously safeguarding academic values and
standards.

Nomadic Subjects
A site of hypermodernisation is the globalised knowledge worker. Just as digitisa-
tion has speeded up knowledge work, so too has the generative power of the glo-
bal. Academic success is evaluated for its location in the international community.
Parochialism equals cognitive dispossession. An indicator of success is academic
hyper-mobility and animation—being always on the move (Kenway, 2004). The
life of the mind assumes a robust, normative and able body. It is also requires a
diffusion of bodily and textual selves into multiple locations. Cosmopolitanism,
nomadism and spaces of transition are features of academic production. Yet the
 Imagining the University of the Future 33

construction of the nomadic academic assumes, as Lynch (2009) argues, a doxa—

a common belief or popular opinion—of “carelessness” that is, that academics
are “carefree”—without care responsibilities—for themselves or for others. She
maintains that this nomadism is underpinned by a highly individualised entrepre-
neurialism that is at the heart of the academy. This has allowed a particular “care-
less” form of competitive individualism to flourish, and this careless character of
higher education culture is entirely driven by new managerial values and norms.
We might surmise that the austerity economy, with its emphasis on over-work,
and progressive austerity (Reeves, 2009)—doing more (creatively) with less—is
exacerbating these unhealthy work practices.
Re-location without dislocation is a professional imperative. Expectations
of performativity involve an unsustainable neglect of one’s health, well-being
and relationships. Having worked on five continents for the past fifteen years,
I am aware of the pressures that the global imperative places on bodies, con-
nectivities and the environment itself. I have a global network, but lack time to
see friends who live a few miles away from me. Whereas universities are often
leading scientific research on climate change, it could be argued that they are
also making major contributions to global warming via international mobility
of students and staff. The University of the Future needs to balance de-
pariochialisation and global velocities with environmental and personal sustain-
ability.

Futurology
There are competing and multiple visions of the University of the Future. Expan-
sion to multiversities is predicted by some that is mega, multi-campus institu-
tions (Fallis, 2007). Others have more nakedly dystopic visions. Bousquet (2008)
predicts a callousness of prestige—a type of Darwinism that means that well-
endowed, elitist research intensive universities will happily see the closure, rather
than the incorporation of teaching-led universities. This prediction has recently
come true, with the Vice Chancellor of University College London, advising
that the UK Government should slash student places at “pile it high, sell it cheap”
universities—even if it means some being forced to close—to protect Britain’s
“world class” research institutions (Vasagar, 2010). Instead of university heads
joining forces to oppose economic cuts, some are competing and identifying
other candidates for closure. Bousquet (2008) foresaw this when he suggested
that countercultures and opposition would be crushed. His other predictions
are, unhappily, materialising; he prophesised a decline in academic freedom and
increased political, cultural and economic assault.
One way in which the decline in academic freedom is being enacted is via
policy interventions such as the research impact agenda. In the austerity economy,
the use of public money is under even more rigorous scrutiny. Research has value
if it contributes to the economy. Funders need more evidence of certainty about
34 Louise Morley

what counts as a positive, sustainable change, or a sound return on research invest-

ments. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in the UK
has published its criteria for assessing research quality (2009), which includes 25%
for impact. McKibbin (2009) believes that this implies a colonisation of uni-
versities by business and the private sector. This echoes Bousquet’s (2008) fears
about creeping corporatisation and academic-capitalist values. Saunders (2010)
highlights the problem of attribution or the difficulty in identifying the extent to
which a particular intervention, or set of research findings, have created a specific
outcome. Complex social research findings now have to be presented in techno-
rational packages of certainty of outcomes and impact.
The certainties of the impact agenda are set beside uncertainties of funding for
higher education. Insecurity is the dominant ontological position in many parts of
the sector. The state rescuing of the banks in the UK has resulted in severe cuts in
the public sector. Disinvestment and the transfer of debt and risk from the private
to the public sector means that employees are permanently temporary—another
of Bousquet’s (2008) Cassandraesque visions. This is the landscape of closure,
decline and domination.
Ball and Exley (2009) question who is influencing policy futures. They sug-
gest that unelected, non-academic think tanks might be having more “impact”
than academic research findings. Furthermore, these think-tanks are strongly net-
worked and staffed by the elite. Bradwell (2009) embodies a think-tank approach
to policy. Taking the metaphor of the edgeless university, he discusses ideas
that have been in circulation in academic domains for some time. In contrast
to Bousquet (2008), he uses metaphors of openness—somehow implying that
the University of the Past was closed to external influences. He predicts open
access publishing, flexible learning outside the university, the increased use of
social media for teaching and learning, strategic technological investment, new
providers, collaborative research and open research communities, universities as
partners, and not sole providers of learning and research, engaging stakeholders in
course design and new forms of accreditation.

Conclusion
Globally, the higher education sector has become associated with the hypermod-
ernisation of the knowledge economy. Yet there are some archaic practices that
continue to prevail, such as gender inequalities, feminisation fears and the exclu-
sion of poorer communities. Modernisation has been via a form of unsustainable
hypermobility that poses threats to bodies and the environment. The narrative
of the austerity economy has now been layered on to these frenzied cultural
practices. We need new conceptual vocabularies and reinvigorated courage to
challenge the archaism and hyperactivity that frame the sector. I believe that the
University of the Future needs to recover critical knowledge and be a think-tank
and policy driver. We need to discover new conceptual grammars to include
 Imagining the University of the Future 35

equalities, identities, environmental and affective domains. Knowledge should

not be reduced to its optimisation value. We need to find a way to speak to
diverse generational and geographical power geometries, while preserving some
enduring values e.g. democratisation. There is a lot of talk about how higher
education can contribute to wealth creation. The University of the Future should
also consider opportunity and wealth distribution.
PART II

Global Possibilities
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of No Sons Left
to Die!
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: No Sons Left to Die!

Author: Hal Annas

Release date: August 27, 2021 [eBook #66155]

Most recently updated: October 16, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NO SONS LEFT TO

DIE! ***
 Could mankind hope to survive a galactic
war that left boys aged cripples in a few short
years? Who would replace them when there were—

NO SONS LEFT TO DIE!

 By Hal Annas

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1953
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Susan Wildress knew that what she was about to do might mean
death.
She stopped eating and stared at the ration of ground cedar bark,
rabbit, and a hydroponic which tasted like eggplant. She pushed back
her plate and glanced around at the tense girl faces in the huge
dining hall. She lifted a small strong hand and ran it inside her
sweater. She brought out a locket, snapped it open.
The flesh grew tight around her dark brown eyes and in her olive
cheeks. The memory was still as clear as the day it happened. Three
years. She was just fourteen, sitting in the groundcar and watching
the preparations which were always dramatic.
Darth Brady had lied about his age. He was supposed to be nineteen
but was just past seventeen. She had known and so had everyone
else, but the Centers needed boys, needed them desperately.
She remembered how her face got wet as she watched him go out to
the ship. He looked very tall and broad and strong, a man. His jaw
was firm and his features grim. He looked toward her but didn't
wave, for, since she could first remember, there had been a stringent
rule against making close ties with boys at the Centers.
Replacing the locket, she rose and walked casually to the exit. She
glanced right and left, hurried to the entrance to the factory, reached
down her time card and punched in. Then she hurried back across
the space to the dining hall, around behind it and on out to the rows
of cedar trees.
The penalty, she knew, might be endless restriction, even death, but
she didn't hesitate. With trees concealing her movements, she
hurried along to the dormitory groundcar ramps. She went more
cautiously now.
A moment later she heard masculine voices and a shiver ran down
her spine. It was not the voices themselves, but the words they used.
Zeehites. She had heard the term many times, never without a
shudder. Men could be put to death for discussing the Zeehites
around women or children.
Moving quickly, she slipped between two cars, slid into the control
seat of one. With infinite care she backed it out, rolled it as quietly as
possible a hundred yards before setting in motion the vanes that
would lift it. She brought it down again in a clearing in the wood at
the edge of the heat-blackened plain.
For a time she remained undecided. A score of ships were out on the
plain. She had seen from the air scores of others on other plains.
Nowhere had she seen one bristling with full armament and scars of
battle to indicate it to be the Ida Bella, Nucleus, Trilogy or Firelance.

She thought of binding her dark wavy hair tight against her head.
The thought, she knew, was idle. Nowhere on the planet could she
pass as a man, dressed as she was in denims and sweater. Young
men wore purple uniforms; those in logistics wore brown.
Dismissing caution, she walked rapidly toward the buildings of the
Center. And now she became very careful of her thoughts. She knew
that youths developed remarkably at the Centers. They had to if they
were to survive out among the stars in that long chain of ships
stretched across the course of the Zeehites. The boys were said to be
telepathic. She didn't know for sure. She knew only that girls had to
be careful of their thoughts around boys.
Pausing between two buildings, she glanced apprehensively at the
open compound. Nothing stirred there but she had the eerie feeling
that eyes were on her. It was too late to turn back. She started
across to the main building.
Young men in purple uniforms materialized from every direction.
They neither laughed nor talked; moved with hardly a sound. They
completely surrounded her, pressed close. They were tall and broad
and she could not see beyond them.
Susan trembled. She started to run, to break out of the circle, but
powerful and yet gentle hands restrained her.
"It's a girl from the factory," one said. "Make it casual. Don't crowd.
We'll have to get her out of here."
A brief order was snapped. The men moved as one. At the center of
the group she was carried along. She knew when they entered a
building, but uttered no sound. The men fell back. She waited,
trembling.
"Girl," said one, "do you know you could be put to death for coming
here?"
Susan stopped trembling, held herself rigid. Long ago she had
learned not to cry. There was no excuse for breaking a rule. Her
mother had once told her that things had not always been this way;
that if everyone worked hard enough things would soon be again as
they were in that bright and free past. To break a single rule was to
commit a crime against everyone on the planet and delay that bright
future. She waited.
"You're working dayshift in the factory?"
She nodded.
"How many hours??"
"Twelve."
"If you want to make a complaint you have to take it to the Council."
A man who looked older than the others advanced. On his shoulder
was the emblem of the crossed pens, indicating he was an instructor.
He glared around at the others. "You know better," he said, "than to
sneak a girl in here."
Somebody chuckled. "She was on the compound. Did you want her
to be discovered and maybe get permanent restriction? We'll get her
out safe somehow."
The instructor turned back to Susan. "You'll have to keep mum at the
factory," he warned. "A single word and you'll have the Council on
our necks."
"But I have to find someone," she said. "From Firelance."
"Oh!" Glum looks spread.
"His name is Darth Brady," she went on quickly. "He trained here. He
went out three years ago."
"Darth Brady!" somebody said. "That gibbering cripple—"
"Quiet!" ordered the instructor. "The next man that mentions a
forbidden subject will go before the Council." He turned back to
Susan. "We must get you back to your place."
"But I have to find Darth Brady."
The men turned away, shook their heads. Susan felt a cold numbness
growing in her body and limbs.
"You, Carson," the instructor ordered, "get passes for yourself, Merritt
and Saxon. I'll issue the order via wrist communicator. Get two
groundcars. Wait in them outside the compound. You others form a
ring about this girl. What's your name, girl?"
"Susan Wildress. My identification number is on the back of my
sweater."
"I'm Alfred Wilson. The boys will walk out to the groundcars. You
walk in the midst of them and try to look like a boy. Get in the first
car and stay out of sight."

On the way Sue had an opportunity to study the boys. Most of them
were younger than her seventeen years. For their age they were
unusually tall and broad. Few were under six feet. Their purple
uniforms were emblazoned with a single splash of white in the center
of the back, in the shape of a burning sun.
She slid into the car, remained quiet. Alfred Wilson got in beside her.
A moment later the car rose gently, accompanied by another off to
port.
Sue pointed to the wood and explained that her car was there.
Wilson spoke into his communicator and the other car descended in
that direction.
"They'll return it to the dormitory," he said. "My job is to get you back
without creating an emergency."
"Why are you doing it?" Sue asked. "Why don't you turn me over to
the Council?"
Wilson set the robot controls and turned to face her. "Nobody wants
to punish you girls," he said softly. "Members of the Council least of
all. But they have to maintain discipline. It's the only way we can get
the big job done."
She understood. She had heard it all a thousand times before. No
one's feelings, nothing, neither life nor death, must be allowed to halt
or hinder the big job, the job that was to bring that bright future.
"Can you tell me anything about Darth Brady?" she said.
"I can tell you only that he wears two ribbons and three stars."
"Two ribbons?" Sue gasped. "Is he dead?"
"No." Wilson's voice was deep, controlled with effort. "No. Darth
Brady isn't dead. But, Sue, you must not think about him. You know
the rules."
The tight knot in Sue's breast worked up into her throat. She blinked
rapidly and squeezed the flesh around her eyes to keep the moisture
back. "I know the rules," she said.
Wilson tuned the communicator to the factory. "Tube department
foreman," he said, but didn't cut in the viewplate. "Al Wilson, from
the Center," he went on. "Sure, Mom, I'm fine. I've borrowed one of
your girls. Don't let it get talked about. Will have her back soon."
"Your mother?" Sue asked.
"Yep! A fine girl. She works fifteen hours a day and still finds time to
keep records for the Council."
"I thought Mrs. Wilson's boy had gone out. When I was eleven I
heard her say he'd already entered the Center. That's six years ago."
Wilson's features clouded. "They won't let me go. Made me an
instructor. If the chain breaks—But that isn't a subject to discuss with
a girl. Look below. That lake! Know what made it?"
"A strike. My mother said it came before I was born. She said we'd
been lucky; that the planet has been struck thousands of times; that
the moon and Mars have taken an awful beating."
"We set up decoys," Wilson explained. "They draw the strikes when a
break-through comes. But sometimes a factory gets knocked out."
"I know." Sue nodded. "We know what to do. We've drilled over and
over. And most of the factory is under ground."
"Part of it, the brick part, was once a school. I went to school there
eight terms before I entered the Center."
"And I went three terms. That's when they converted it and we had
to study in the dorm. Kids study in the nurseries now."
"How long have you been working in the factory?"
"Since I was nine. Only had to work four hours a day then. Now
children begin work at eight."
"How many hours does your mother work?"
"Fifteen."
"And when you're eighteen years old you'll go on a fifteen-hour
shift?"
"Of course. But I'll have three days vacation when I get married."
"Did you know the Center is taking boys thirteen now and next year
will begin calling them at the age of twelve?"
"All the girls know about it. The boys are glad to get out of the
factories. They talk about nothing else. And they say the age to go
out is going to be lowered to eighteen and maybe seventeen."
"Yes. We're learning better and faster ways to make men out of kids.
And the numbers in the crews are being cut down. The ships are
better. One man now can perform all the operations three did a few
years ago."
"The training? Is it very hard?"
"No. It's just necessary. We know we have to learn and develop in
order to survive. It's just like growing up."

Sue hesitated. "Is it true—" She paused again, cheeks coloring. "It is
true that you can read a girl's thoughts?"
Wilson grinned. "Don't worry about it. Those things have been
exaggerated. We get flashes under certain conditions. If your
emotions were in perfect accord with your thoughts, as ours are
supposed to be, we'd know what you're thinking. It's our one
superiority over the—" He halted, clamped his lips tight. Sue knew he
had been about to say, "Zeehites."
"We don't really read your thoughts," he went on. "If it was
necessary, and we concentrated very hard, we probably could do it."
"Try just once to get the picture I've got in my mind."
"That's easy, but you shouldn't have thoughts like that."
She blushed crimson. Now she was positive. She had held an image
in mind of his features, and he had known, known especially that her
thoughts were of him. Confusion and discomfort settled over her. She
tried to get her mind on work, but the thought wouldn't come. Darth
Brady's image, as in the locket, appeared before her. And she was
certain that that, too, was known to Wilson. She was hardly aware of
what he said from then until the car landed.
Other girls watched her enviously, and yet with trepidation, as she
returned to her machine. At every pause in the work they asked
questions. "How did you get out?" "Where did you go?" "Will you
have to appear before the Council?"
She hated to be cattish, but she couldn't confide in them. She
invented a story which was reluctantly accepted. She said she had
suddenly become ill and gone to the dorm.
The day wore on. After supper she visited her mother in the older
women's dorm. She didn't stay long because Mrs. Wilson studied her
with too much interest.
But she had asked, "What do two ribbons and three stars mean," and
her mother had replied, "The first ribbon is for courage and conduct
beyond the call of duty. The second is generally a posthumous award.
If the wearer is alive, it means he has done something wonderful
indeed. The stars, of course, denote the number of years he has
spent in the void."
"Any word from Dad?"
"No. Communication channels are overloaded. He wouldn't ask for a
priority unless it was an emergency. I think he's setting up a plant
near those new mines on the Gold Coast. Then he'll have to go to
Mars. They're crying for logistic experts. I'm hoping he can spend a
few hours with us, though."
"How about uncle Bob and uncle George?"
"Sue, I was hoping you wouldn't ask that. George has been moved
out of the Fourth Sector. You know what that means? His ship will be
in the midst of the fighting. And Bob's ship hasn't been reported in
months. They were operating in Sector One. It's out near the rim of
the galaxy, but has been drawn back billions of miles in months. The
losses in the withdrawal were terrible. All I can learn is that the full
extent of the losses won't be known for weeks."
"Why do our ships keep on pulling back? We always lose so heavily at
those times. Cousin Breckenridge gone; Cousin Allison came back a
wrecked old man at the age of twenty; dozens of boys I used to
know, broken or dead. And now uncle Bob."
"Hush, Sue. The final word hasn't come yet."
"But it will. And then it will be uncle George. And the Supreme
Council keeps calling for more ships, better armament, and, above
all, more men. Did you know they're lowering the age at the Center?"
"Those things are necessary, Sue. They mean survival. We're not
supposed to talk about them. And we're supposed to go to bed
earlier because food rations are to be cut again and we must
conserve our strength."

Returning to her section of the dorm, she passed a knot of girls

whispering in the corridor. She caught the words "Ida Bella" and
"Trilogy." Then "Old men. They look ninety and most are crippled.
And not a one is over twenty-two."
Hurrying, to keep pace with her heart, she went on to her room. As
she slipped out of sweater, denims and briefs, she thought, "Darth
Brady was on Firelance. Maybe! Maybe—" She knew she was not
supposed to hope, neither despair. Nothing that happened must halt
or hinder.
The stars beyond the window were bright and close. She thought she
could see the rings of blue with white dots in their centers which
were said to be visible through a powerful telescope when the
fighting was intense.
Next day she applied for an issue of clothes. The elderly woman
smiled and shook her head. "You're very pretty. You wouldn't be
beautiful but you'd certainly be lovely and feminine in a dress. Wish I
could issue you an outfit."
"But I haven't drawn any clothes in over eight months," Sue said.
"We used to get clothes four times a year, then twice. Now—"
"It can't be helped," the woman explained. "They've cut production to
put more labor and machinery in the heavy industries. Even the boys
at the Centers aren't getting as many uniforms as they were. And
they'll get fewer next year."
"Oh!"
"If your denims and sweaters have been damaged—"
"No. I've three of each. They are just worn."
"Then you'll have to make out. The less we have here the more the
men can have when they go out. You understand?"

Sunday she took advantage of the shorter working-day to go with her

mother to the vale between the cultivated rows of cedar and the
woodland. She had come here at every opportunity since she could
remember. It was here she had been taught that there was
something beyond the transient physical life.
Today they walked on through the wood to a point where they could
see the lake which had been made by the strike so many years ago.
It was more than five miles across and was said to be half a mile
deep.
Coming back, they saw a number of uniformed men in the vale. They
were gray and wrinkled and some were crippled. She felt her
mother's fingers close tight on her arm, but curiosity wouldn't allow
her to stop.
She stared. He was stooped, his face a mass of wrinkles, his hair
snow-white. And he was gibbering. He seemed to recognize no one.
She was suddenly seized with a tremor. A wild raging impulse surged
through her. Blindly and without thought, she ran, heedless of
bushes, briars and stones. She didn't stop until she reached the
dormitory. She fell face down on her bed and dug her nails into her
cheeks and into the flesh about her eyes to make it contract.
Darth Brady was just past twenty, she knew....
Night brought a full silvery moon. She could see it from the window
as it came above the wood, bright and giving no hint of the ships and
activity on its scorched airless surface. Sleep was out of the question.
Slipping into her clothes and with shoes in hand, she swung across
the windowsill and lowered herself to the ground. Like a wraith she
moved among the cedars and on across the vale and into the wood.
The sound of the machinery in the factory behind her faded. The
night was quiet but lustrous with tinted moonlight. It seemed that
peace had come, that nowhere in the universe could there be strife.
But as she looked at the stars and imagined the rings of blue and
white dots, she knew.
Beyond the wood the water in the lake was amber in color, and as
she approached, it flashed an image of the heavens and took on a
darker hue, almost blood red.
She stood on an outcropping and listened to the sounds of crickets
and frogs and thought she heard long sighs like breathing. She
thought she saw something white flash on the surface, then
dismissed it, tilted her head back and breathed deep of the clean
night air.
It seemed that she was alone on a tiny planet which brushed against
a bejeweled velvet curtain. She indulged the dream, and when reality
began to force itself upon her again she quickly slipped out of her
clothes and judged the distance to the water below.
For a moment she stood there, arms raised, body poised, the moon
painting her figure a rose pink. Then she dived.
The water was warm, caressing. She came up, tossed her head back
to get the shoulder-length dark hair out of her eyes. And then she
was certain she heard an exclamation.
Panic ran through her as it had earlier in the vale. She twisted and
turned to look in every direction. Then a head bobbed up in front of
her.
"A beautiful dive," he said. It was Al Wilson. "I was about to warn
you and then I couldn't bear to spoil it."
She was treading water, confused, not knowing what to do.
"Do you come here often?" he asked.
"No. But you knew I would come soon. I was thinking about it when
we flew over, and you knew."
"Is it so bad?"
"No. But having you read my thoughts—" She turned swiftly and
swam hard and strong. The panic was in her again. She felt that he
was looking right inside her, noting the quickening of her heart that
he himself brought.
It was impossible to escape. Like all men trained at the Center, he
was superbly muscled and seemed tireless. With ease he kept pace
with her, ignored her confusion, talked on.
In desperation she clung to a rough stone protruding from the bank,
started to climb out, dropped back into the water and fought to hold
back the tears.
He said, "There's an easier place to climb a few yards ahead. I'll go
back the way I came and meet you up on the bank."
Relief came as she watched him swim away, watched the long
muscles ripple on his back and shoulders. But it did not last. In
feverish hurry she climbed out and twisted and squirmed to get into
her clothes. She had hardly got the sweater over her head and her
hair brushed back when he appeared.
"Those clothes don't do you justice," he said.
Confusion came again.
"But the time will soon come," he added, "when our girls can have all
the fine things written about in the old books."
"How can you say that," she asked, "when every report brings news
of another withdrawal, another terrible defeat? We've lost so many
stations among the stars, there can hardly be any left."
He looked down at the weed-grown earth, and she instantly became
contrite. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know I'm never supposed to lose
hope."
He studied her eyes until she looked away. His hands found her
shoulders. "Sue, there are forces at work about which you've never
even dreamed. We need time. We need more manpower. We have to
go on working. The only thing that can defeat us ultimately is here
on this planet. It is our morale. As long as it is high we'll keep on
sending ships out. The moment it breaks we are lost."
Sue had noticed the tension and constraint in his voice that she had
come to associate with the talking of men among themselves when
they thought no woman or child was within hearing.
Always they stopped talking when a girl approached, and put on a
cheerful front. She wondered if they knew of some dark terror yet to
be faced, so horrible that it couldn't be confided to their women and
children. Would a knowledge of that dreadful thing, she asked
herself, break the morale on the home planet?
Wilson had changed the subject. He told her about the fine things he
had read in books and heard from older men of that past before the
beginning of the struggle. It reminded her of the fairy tales she had
read as a child. It seemed impossible that a girl could have fine
clothes and a house and a husband and children all her own. She
couldn't grasp it. She felt that she wouldn't know how to live if there
weren't rules to go by. She remembered vaguely when she was very
small, that her mother prepared meals in a big white kitchen, but
there was little reality in the memory.
He accompanied her back to the dorm and on the way talked of
things that stirred forlorn unrest in her body. It was a sense of
tingling, suppressed under memory of Darth Brady.
Lifting her to the windowsill, he pressed his lips against her ear and
whispered, "I've made another request of the Council to send me
out." His arms held her tight enough to stop her trembling. Then he
released her and was gone.

Food became scarcer as summer became fall and fall became winter.
Monkey meat was served twice a week. Hydroponics were the main
diet and the bulk had to be made up of edible leaves and woodfibre.
First news of the big break-through came on Christmas Eve. The
bulletin was not supposed to go up until all in the factory had had an
hour to sing carols or do whatever they wished. But somebody made
a mistake. Under the wreaths of holly on the bulletin board it told in a
few words how Sector One had been breached. It told of
withdrawals, reorganization and shortening of defenses.
On Christmas Day the story was worse. It was not definite as
bulletins usually were, but it gave the information that Sector Two
was crumbling.
Two days after Christmas she overheard men talking at the groundcar
ramps. Their voices were tense, restrained. They said that the links of
the chains were snapping and that a strike was sure to come. They
talked hopefully of new weapons, better ships that would swing the
balance of power in favor of Earthmen.
Sue had heard talk of new weapons and ships many times before.
They always seemed to be in the future. She slipped away from the
ramps and volunteered an extra hour's work in the factory.
Next day there was a general increase in hours. Girls under eighteen
went on a fourteen-hour shift. Eighteen to thirty-five, they worked
sixteen hours. Under the age of fourteen, none was allowed to work
more than ten hours, but girls and boys of eight and nine could
volunteer to work seven hours. Their shifts called for six.
The age for admittance at the Centers was lowered to ten. The age
to go out was seventeen, but, as the new classes came along, would
be lowered to sixteen and fifteen.
The strike came on New Year's Eve. There was ample warning. Word
reached Earth before daylight that a major break-through had
occurred. The Fourth Sector couldn't halt it, but forces were being
drawn back from Three and Two to close the break.
The news was tempered with assurances issued on a global scale by
the Supreme Council. It said that their labors and sacrifices had not
been in vain; that thousands upon thousands of Earth warships still
stood between the planet and the onrushing enemy. It said that the
stations on Mars and the Moons of Jupiter were still intact, as well as
on Earth's Moon, and that hundreds of man-made stations were
beyond the orbit of Saturn.
The day was one of feverish excitement and at every opportunity
fearful eyes turned toward the blue and seemingly placid heavens.
Calculations of when the first blow would come were checked and
rechecked. It was expected soon after evening twilight.
News of expressions of confidence among the Upper Councils of the
peoples of the planet were bulletined to still unrest. The Orientals
could put aloft better than ten thousand ships in the last hours. The
Europeans could do about the same. The Africans had a new ship not
intended for service until further tests had been made, but which
would be used to meet the emergency. North and South America had
more ships than crews, and Arabian boys were being sent to man
them.
Sue couldn't understand how her mother could take the news so
calmly.
"I've lived through strikes before," she explained. "Besides, your
father always comes home to make sure I'm all right afterwards."
As the sun went down and the first twilight appeared, streamers of
fire became visible in the sky above. They crossed and re-crossed,
endlessly, numbering tens of thousands, and resembled falling
meteors.
"I've never seen so many at one time," Sue's mother said.
"What are they?" Sue asked.
"Our ships, of course. From every part of the globe. They'll circle the
planet constantly. They are the final inner ring. Under them is nothing
but the ground defenses."
"Are there more ships farther out?"
"Certainly. Those up there are comparable to the Fourth Sector on a
cosmograph. Sectors Three, Two and One will extend out beyond
Pluto's orbit. They are probably fighting now. Listen! There's the
warning. We must go to the shafts."
At that moment Alfred Wilson appeared. She understood that he had
come to say goodby to his mother. He came straight toward her, and
then Sue realized she was alone. Her mother, with an understanding
smile, was already on the way to the shaft.
Sue thought that he had never looked so tall, so strong, so confident.
She was certain he had his orders to go out.
He stood before her. His jaw was set, his expression grim. Then his
lips parted and he spoke very softly:
"Don't take any worries with you down in the ground," he said. "We'll
never let them get a foothold on Earth." He paused. "Sue, don't think
about me, don't think about love, don't think about anything—but
just one kiss."
She clung to him, giving of her lips, of every thought, of every
heartbeat. It seemed to her that it was the least she could do. In
another hour he would be out there between her and the Zeehites.
The second warning sounded. She ignored it, still willing to give, to
sacrifice herself if necessary, but he unclasped her hands and brought
her arms from about him.
He looked once more into her eyes and then hurried toward the
groundcar, walking very straight. He didn't look back and at last she
turned and ran to the shaft.

The trip down required nearly ten minutes. The deceleration began
long before the car stopped. She knew that her mother, and other
older women, wouldn't be sent down this far, but that children would
go much farther.
She hoped she would be put off at a level where there was
machinery, where she could work, where there would be something
to do to keep her mind off the coming terror.
As she came out of the car in a huge padded vault she was given a
container of liquid and told to drink it quickly. Somebody whispered
that it was to make them immune to what would otherwise be
unbearable pain.
A speaker amplified a voice from the surface. "Girls above the
hundred and fiftieth level should lie down or sit down," the voice
said. "At lower levels it is safe to stand or walk about as you choose.
Those on the upper levels will please get into their shock suits. And
please be calm. We'll keep you informed of events as long as
possible.
"The Supreme Council has authorized me to say this: that the strike
is going to be unimaginably heavy, but never has Earth been better
prepared to withstand one. Each of you has given of your labors to
make this preparation. You are each one a part of our combined
effort at this crucial moment. Take heart. Remain calm."
Broken sobs came from behind her. Sue turned and saw that they
were coming from a girl who couldn't possibly be more than fifteen
and didn't belong on this level. An older girl led her away.
Sue thought of Darth Brady, but his image wouldn't stay in her mind.
The blue eyes and blond hair of Alfred Wilson were there before her.
She imagined him manning a ray-weapon in a ship above Earth's
atmosphere. And then memory of the returned men of Ida Bella,
Nucleus, Trilogy and Firelance sent a tremoring wave of nausea
through her.
The speaker blared, "You have a few minutes. Choose your places
and lie down or sit down. Remain calm."
A girl nearby muttered. "How do they know for certain? They figured
early today exactly when the strike would come. And yet our ships
were out there to stop it. How did they know our ships wouldn't stop
it?"
A calmer voice said, "Maybe our ships purposely let them through. It
may be part of one vast operation. I've heard older people say that
something like it happened years ago. They let a whole fleet through
and then trapped it between Sectors Three and Two. It was Earth's
first big victory."
"But this time they've broken through Sector Four. They can't reach
Earth until they're past Sector Four."
"It may be part of an even bigger operation."
"But why let them strike Earth? Don't they care about us?"
"Oh, hush! I have two brothers out there. I'd hate for them to learn
girls didn't have confidence in them."
"Attention!" the speaker called. "In forty-five seconds the ground
defense will be zeroed in. Please do not get panicky when the earth
begins to shake. Lie down or sit down and draw your knees up
against your chest. There may be pressure waves. Use your ear-
protectors and keep your mouths open. Remain calm."
Silence settled, to be broken by deep breathing, then Sue heard the
restrained voices: "God, grant that we shall continue to possess life."
The earth shuddered first one way and then the other. It rocked back
and forth; it rose and fell.
Sue felt the blood hammering through her temples. The muscles in
her body strained to hold her knees against her chest. She heard
screaming, knew that some of it was coming from her own lungs.
The earth rocked.
Sue felt that she could not possibly endure it longer. She was flung
this way and that, bounced as a rubber ball. It went on and on. The
girls about her seemed dazed, stricken.
The speaker ordered, "Prepare for pressure within ten seconds."
The earth rocked and then came a jolt that made all the preceding
seem as nothing. It came again and again. And then the pressure.
She couldn't breathe. She knew this couldn't go on. It was more than
a mortal could endure. Vaguely she wondered how anyone on the
surface could possibly be alive. It was unimaginably horrible down
here; it could be nothing less than an inferno of death above.
Merciful darkness came down.

The sheets on the bed were white and crisp and cool. Several
moments passed before she understood. She had never been here
before. Through the huge windows came bright sunlight. Far out
beyond, the ground was covered with snow.
Sue sat up abruptly. A nurse came, lifted back the sheet, checked the
identification number tattooed on her hip. "Susan Wildress? Factory
Eight Hundred Ninety-six?"
Sue nodded. "My mother?"
"Just a moment." The nurse went away and came back with a
memorandum. "Betty Wildress is listed as age thirty-six. That would
put her on the eightieth level. None survived above the hundred and
seventeenth."
Sue buried her face in the pillow. She had held back the tears so long
that now they would not come. She thought of her father and turned
again to the nurse.
"Craig Wildress?" the nurse said. "Logistics? Just a moment." She
checked through records. "He was here two days ago, stayed by your
side. He received a high priority message, had to leave. He left word
for you that he would be on Mars for some time."
"Alfred Wilson?"
"Your betrothed or kin?"
Sue shook her head. "An instructor at the Center. He went out the
night of the strike."
"There are many Centers. Many went out that night and not so many
came back. You will have to inquire of the Council."
"This place? Where am I?"
"Recovery Fourteen Hundred One."
"Is it near—?"
"Site of Factory Eight Ninety-six? Yes. About a hundred and twenty
miles east. You must rest now. Girls from devastated areas are to go
to factories in the East. You must regain your strength quickly."
From the local Council she learned only that the full extent of the
losses would not be known for weeks. Fighting had been intense
between Earth and the orbit of Mars and there was still some
confusion. It appeared that Mars, the Moons of Jupiter and the
stations beyond Saturn's orbit had suffered heavily. The brunt of the
strike, she was told, had been absorbed inside the orbit of Mars, and
Earth and its satellite escaped what might have been fatal blows.
That was as much as the Council could tell her. No one should expect
them, they explained, not without sympathy, to halt assessments and
try to learn what had happened to one man in a cosmic operation.
They denied her permission to return to the site of former Factory
Eight Ninety-six. They pointed out that such excursions were morale-
shattering and that she was needed immediately in the East.
Production had to be increased in preparation for further strikes.
They did permit her to view the site on a screen. And then she was
sorry. Where the factory, the dormitory, the cedars, the vale, the
wood had been was now a crater twice as large as the lake.
As she studied the scene, an uncontrollable surging rose in her
breast. At last tears came. She hardly remembered going out to the
atmosphere craft that was to take her to the eastern factory.
The craft was jampacked with girls and older women. Their talk was
puzzling.
"Do they lose their spirit out in the void?"
"Maybe it's that stuff shot into them at the Centers."
"But that stuff makes them stronger. Besides, it isn't their strength.
Maybe it's us. Maybe we have some hidden psychological reason not
to bring more children into existence."
"When I was growing up," said an older woman, "boys and girls were
expected to fall in love. Now they discourage it. You can't expect the
laws of nature—"
"But that," another pointed out, "is to prevent heartbreak. When a
girl is madly in love and the boy goes out and doesn't come back or
comes back gray and wrinkled and broken—"
"It isn't our problem," somebody said peevishly.
"If bearing children isn't our problem, whose is it?"
"I meant fertility."
Sue hoped that it was just girl talk, and tried to dismiss it, but half-
formed thoughts stirred restlessly and plucked at the strings of some
dormant longing inherent in her sex. With the others she wondered.
The new factory differed from the old, and it was several days before
she became adept at operating the improved machines. The Center
was closer and work was going on to merge the two dining halls.
Word spread that romance might no longer be discouraged. This
made her wonder more.

On the first day of spring a thin blonde girl at the next machine fell
unconscious. As Sue rushed to help her, she saw the two ribbons
clutched in the thin hand. A chunky brunette whispered, "Her
husband's posthumous award. She got them last night, probably
didn't sleep."
Work on the dining halls was finally finished. When young men milled
into the vast room the girls were silent and shy. The boys likewise. It
was the first time many of them had ever eaten in the presence of
the other sex.