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

今天，前所未有的跨国政治压力、冲突和政策改革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瓦解的威胁，危及高等教育的公共使命、学术自由和职业诚信。与此同时，死灰复燃的民族主义、民粹主义运动和被迫的人类流离失所冲击着高等教育改善政治不稳定的能力。这些事态发展恰逢结构上处于不利地位的少数群体对高等教育施加越来越大的政治压力，特别是由于缺乏高等教育机会或限制了推动战后高等教育愿望的社会流动性。这一系列压力给世界各地的高等教育带来了一种危机感。然而，对高等教育自主及其公共使命的威胁是如何在全球高等教育背景下跨国表现出来的，经验上知之甚少。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。英国皇家科学院最近的一项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。我们的项目直接响应这些战略目标，将高等教育和冲突作为主要焦点，从而澄清当前和未来对高等教育使命完整性、自主性、减少冲突、加强学习和建立公共信任的能力的威胁和风险。这项为期三年的ESRC研究将通过四个国家背景的比较调查来评估高等教育公共使命的这些压力和结果：英国、匈牙利、南非和土耳其。这四个州名义上是“民主的”，但每个州也在经历不同的“国家危机”，以不同的方式重塑公共使命。这项研究将随着高等教育的“公共使命”和机构自主性的变化，探索这些危机随着时间的推移而发生的变化。该项目将：1)确定历史和当代的政治、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民间团体对这些压力的经验和应对措施。在方法上，我们将进行比较案例研究，收集丰富的经验数据，包括：历史和档案政策文件；机构人口统计的量化概况；学术解雇和其他对学术自由的威胁的记录；新闻来源和社交媒体对大学的介绍；以及在每个正式案例研究网站上对两所大学的采访和焦点小组。通过比较分析，该项目将产生新的政策见解，为利益攸关方提供信息，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。为实现这一目标，该项目将开发一个比较知识库，以确定作为教育空间的高等教育完整性所面临的全球和局部威胁，有助于：减少冲突；公民稳定和发展；保证社会流动性；处理此类冲突对高等教育完整性构成的风险的新的方法和概念模型。主要受益者包括参与公共传教活动的行为者，如学术管理人员、学生会、公共传教专业人员和公民行为者。受益者将有机会获得一个证据基础，以推进政策改革，以减轻高等教育面临的负面压力，包括战争的紧迫性。

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.