Abstract
How and where do university staff – academics and professionals – learn about, and encounter, the interdisciplinary and critical scholarship about the idea of the university? What mechanisms are currently available for them to engage with that scholarship? And why might they want to do so? Drawing on Jeffrey J. Williams’s appeal to “teach the university” and Ronald Barnett’s theorising about how we come at understanding the university, this chapter describes and interrogates an emergent initiative we have been involved in establishing – a Reading Group – which aims to resuscitate the pleasures involved in university colleagues reading together. By doing so, we are not only schooling ourselves in the scholarly literature, we are learning how to make the university a place we want to labour in.
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Notes
- 1.
Valerie Hey, “Perverse Pleasures: Identity Work and the Paradoxes of Greedy Institutions,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 5,3 (2004); Andrew Sparkes, “Embodiment, academics and the audit culture: A story seeking consideration,” Qualitative Research 4,7 (2007); Rosalind Gill, “Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia,” in Secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections in Roisin Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill (Abingdon and New York: Routledge 2010).
- 2.
Lynne McAlpine and Esma Emmioglu, “Navigating careers: perceptions of sciences doctoral students, post-PhD students and pre-tenured academics,” Studies in Higher Education 40,10 (2015).
- 3.
Sue Middleton, “Disciplining the subject: the impact of PBRF on education academics,” New Zealand Journal of Education Studies 40, 1–2 (2005); Barbara M. Grant and Vivienne Elizabeth, “Unpredictable feelings: academic women under research audit,” British Educational Research Journal 41, 2 (2015).
- 4.
Richard Smith, “Unfinished Business: education without necessity,” Teaching in Higher Education 8, 4 (2003); Richard Smith, “Dancing on the feet of chance: the Uncertain University,” Educational Theory 55, 2 (2005); Paul Standish, “Toward an economy of higher education,” Critical Quarterly 47, 1–2 (2005).
- 5.
Leonie Rowan, “What price success? The impact of the quest for student satisfaction on university academics,” International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning 8, 2 (2013).
- 6.
Paul Blackmore and Camille Kandiko, “Motivation in academic life: a prestige economy,” Research in Post-compulsory Education 16, 4 (2011).
- 7.
Kate Bowles, Agnes Bosanquet and Karina Luzia, “Letter from Guest editors,” Australian Universities’ Review 59, 2 (2017). [Special Issue on Activism in the Academy].
- 8.
Jeffrey J.Williams, “Teach the University,” Pedagogy: Critical approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 8, 1 (2007), 25.
- 9.
Williams, “Teach the University,” 25.
- 10.
Williams, “Teach the University,” 26.
- 11.
Ronald Barnett, Understanding the university: institution, idea and possibilities (Oxon and New York: Routledge).
- 12.
Ronald Barnett, Imagining the university: institution, idea and possibilities (New York: Routledge).
- 13.
Ruth Barcan, Academic life and labour in the new university: hope and other choices (Burlington, VT Ashgate, 2013), 34.
- 14.
Liam Grealy and Tim Laurie, “Higher degree research by numbers: beyond the critiques of neo-liberalism,” Higher Education Research and Development 36, 3 (2017), 462.
- 15.
Tai Peseta, Simon Barrie and Jan McLean, “Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics,” Higher Education Research and Development 36, 3 (2017).
- 16.
Grealy and Laurie, “Higher degree research by numbers,” 465.
- 17.
Grealy and Laurie, “Higher degree research by numbers,” 464.
- 18.
Les Back, Academic Diary or Why Higher Education Still Matters (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2016).
- 19.
Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
- 20.
Barcan, Academic Life, 122.
- 21.
Diane Railton and Paul Watson, “Teaching autonomy: reading groups and the development of autonomous learning practices.” Active Learning in Higher Education 6, 3 (2005).
- 22.
Marianne Luby, Joann K. Riley and Gail Towne, “Nursing Research Journal Clubs: Bridging the Gap between Practice and Research,” MEDSURG Nursing 15, 2 (2006); Megan Fitzgibbons, Lorie Kloda and Andrea Miller-Nesbit, “Exploring the value of academic librarians’ participation in journal clubs,” College and Research Libraries 78, 6 (2017).
- 23.
Joanne Duffy et al., “Evidence-based Nursing Leadership: evaluation of a joint academic-service journal club,” Journal of Nursing Administration 41, 10 (2011).
- 24.
Barbara Grant and Sally Knowles, “Flights of imagination: academic women be(com)ing writers,” International Journal for Academic Development 5, 1 (2000), 10.
- 25.
Barnett “Understanding the university,” 55.
- 26.
Barnett “Understanding the university,” and “Imagining the university”.
- 27.
Williams, “Teach the University”.
- 28.
Cris Shore, “Beyond the multiversity: neoliberalism and the rise of the schizophrenic university,” Social Anthropology 18, 1 (2010) 26.
- 29.
David Peplow et al., “Reading Groups and Institutional Discourse” in The Discourse of Reading Groups: integrating cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives, eds., David Peplow et al., (London and New York: Routledge 2015).
- 30.
Dale Holt, Stuart Palmer and Di Challis, “Changing perspectives: teaching and learning centres’ strategic contributions to academic development in Australian higher education,” International Journal for Academic Development 16, 1 (2011).
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Appendix: Reading List (August 2016–September 2017)
Appendix: Reading List (August 2016–September 2017)
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Peseta, T., Fyffe, J., Salisbury, F. (2019). Interrogating the “Idea of the University” Through the Pleasures of Reading Together. In: Manathunga, C., Bottrell, D. (eds) Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95834-7_10
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