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

今天，跨国政治压力、冲突和政策改革的空前结合正在给高等教育机构带来压力，威胁到它们支持公共利益的共同承诺。最近的研究表明，高等教育正受到公共部门削减和超国家治理结构解体的威胁，危及高等教育的公共使命、学术自由和职业诚信。与此同时，复兴的民族主义、民粹主义运动和被迫的人口迁移影响了高等教育改善政治不稳定的能力。在这些发展的同时，高等教育面临着来自结构上处于劣势的少数民族的越来越大的政治压力，特别是在缺乏高等教育机会或限制战后高等教育抱负的社会流动性方面。这一系列的压力给世界各地的高等教育带来了一种危机感。然而，从经验上看，人们对高等教育自主性及其公共使命受到的威胁是如何在全球高等教育背景下跨国家表现出来的，知之甚少。现在迫切需要对这些压力及其潜在的不可预测的结果如何影响高等教育机构及其履行公共使命和公民责任的能力进行系统的比较调查。英国学院（British Academy）最近呼吁，将危机中的教育和学习确定为其新的战略目标之一，以应对民族国家迅速变化的政治特征。我们的项目直接回应了这些战略目标，将高等教育和冲突作为主要焦点，从而澄清了高等教育使命完整性、自主性、减少冲突、加强学习和建立公众信任的能力所面临的威胁和风险，包括现在和未来。这项为期三年的ESRC研究将通过在英国、匈牙利、南非和土耳其四个国家背景下的比较调查，评估高等教育公共任务的这些压力和结果。这四个国家名义上是“民主的”，但每个国家也都经历了不同的“国家危机”，以不同的方式重塑了公共使命。随着时间的推移，这项研究将探索这些危机与高等教育“公共使命”和机构自治的变化之间的联系。该项目将：1)识别历史和当代的政治、文化和跨国高等教育压力；2)调查这些压力如何影响对大学使命的理解；3)阐明高等教育行动者和公民团体对这些压力的经验和反应。在方法上，我们将进行比较案例研究，汇集丰富的经验数据集，包括：历史和档案政策文件；机构人口统计的数量概况；开除学术职务和其他威胁学术自由的记录；追踪大学在新闻来源和社交媒体中的表现的网络学在两所大学的每个正式案例研究地点进行访谈和焦点小组。通过比较分析，该项目将产生新的政策见解，为利益相关者提供信息，以捍卫大学在促进民主多元化、追求独立知识生产和促进社会流动方面的作用。为了实现这一目标，该项目将开发一个比较知识库，以确定高等教育完整性面临的全球和地方威胁，作为一个教育空间，有助于：减少冲突；公民的稳定与发展；社会流动性的保证；新的方法和概念模型解决了这些冲突对高等教育完整性构成的风险。主要受益者包括参与公共宣教活动的行为者，如学术管理者、学生会、公共宣教专业人员和公民行为者。受益人将有机会获得证据基础，以推进政策改革，减轻对高等教育的负面压力，包括战争紧急情况。

An unprecedented combination of transnational political pressures, conflicts, and policy reforms are today weighing on higher education (HE) institutions, threatening their shared promise to support the public good. Recent research shows that HE is under threats from public sector cuts and the breakup of supra-national governance structures, imperilling HE public missions, academic freedom, and professional integrity. Simultaneously, resurgent nationalisms, populist movements, and forced human displacement impinge on HE's capacity to ameliorate political instability. These developments have coincided with rising political pressures on HE from structurally disadvantaged minorities, particularly over lack of HE access or the curtailing of the social mobility that drove post-war HE aspirations. This constellation of pressures has created a sense of crisis for higher education around the world. Yet little is known empirically about how threats to HE's autonomy and its public mission are manifested cross-nationally in HE contexts across the globe.There is now an urgent need for systematic comparative investigation of how these pressures and their potentially unpredictable outcomes are affecting higher education institutions and their capacity to fulfil their public missions and civic responsibilities. A recent call by the British Academy has identified education and learning in crises as one of its new strategic aims in response to the rapidly changing political character of nation-states. Our project responds directly to such strategic aims, taking HE and conflict as a primary focus, thereby clarifying threats and risks, both present and future, to HE's mission integrity, its autonomy, its capacity for reducing conflict, enhancing learning and building public trust.This three-year ESRC study will assess these pressures and outcomes for HE public missions through a comparative investigation across four national contexts: the UK, Hungary, South Africa and Turkey. These four states are nominally 'democratic', but each is also undergoing different 'crises of the state', recasting public missions in different ways. The study will explore, across time, the articulations of such crises with changes in the 'public mission' and institutional autonomy of HE. The project will: 1) identify historical and contemporary political, cultural and transnational HE pressures; 2) investigate how such pressures impact understandings of university missions; and, 3) illuminate the experiences of, and responses to, these pressures on the part of HE actors and civic groups. Methodologically, we will undertake comparative case studies that bring together rich sets of empirical data, including: historical and archival policy documents; quantitative profiles of institutional demographics; records of academic dismissals and other threats to academic freedom; a netnography tracing the presentation of universities in news sources and social media; and interviews and focus groups at two universities in each of the formal case study sites. Through comparative analysis, this project will generate new policy insights to inform stakeholders in defending the university's role in promoting democratic pluralism, pursuing independent knowledge production, and contributing to social mobility. To achieve this, the project will develop a comparative knowledge base to identify global and local threats to HE integrity as an educational space contributing to: conflict reduction; civic stability and development; the assurance of social mobility; new methodological and conceptual models addressing the risks that such conflicts pose for the integrity of HE. Key beneficiaries include actors involved with public mission activities, such as academic managers, student unions, public mission professionals, and civic actors. Beneficiaries will have access to an evidentiary base to advance policy reforms to mitigate negative pressures on HE, including the exigencies of war.