The University in Translation : Internationalizing Higher Education [1 ed.] 9781441123114, 9781441195326

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THE UNIVERSITY IN TRANSLATION

Also available from Continuum The Governance of Education, Suzy Harris Pedagogy and the University, Monica McLean

The University in Translation Internationalizing Higher Education

Suzy Harris

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com © Suzy Harris 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Suzy Harris has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

978-1-8470-6227-7 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The university in translation: internationalizing higher education / Suzy Harris p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84706-227-7 (hardcover) 1. Students, Foreign. 2. Education, Higher--Aims and objectives. 3. Language and education. 4. Education and globalization. I. Title. LB2375.H37 2011 378’.01--dc22 2010027819 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in Great Britain

In memory of my father

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword

xi

A Prefatory Note

xii

Part One Policy

1

1

A Tower of Achievement

2

The Transformation of Higher Education

Part Two Language

3 18 37

3

Students’ Experiences in Translation

39

4

An International Lexicon

55

Part Three Translation

79

5

The Crisis of Judgement

81

6

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99

Bibliography

119

Index

125

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Acknowledgements It has been a great pleasure and privilege to teach and supervise students from the UK and around the world over the last 20 years. It has influenced me in profound ways, and was the inspiration for this book. I want to thank Paul Standish and Eric Jacobson for the opportunity to discuss with them some of the ideas that formed the basis of the book; their comments and insights on the text were extremely valuable. Peter Gilroy read a draft manuscript and provided pertinent observations for which I thank him. I am grateful also to Alastair Allan for his patience and stamina in proofreading the manuscript. A special thanks is reserved for my nephew, Lewis Wicksted, for his depiction of the Tower of Babel that appears over the page. It was extremely interesting to discuss this story and its relevance to the book with him and to wonder what his interpretation might be. Lewis’ technique is meticulous and time-consuming, and the result quite powerful. I am also grateful to Routledge for permission to use material from a previously published article, ‘Translation, internationalisation and the university’. London Review of Education, 7, (3), 223–33, and to Faber and Faber for permission to use an excerpt from Brian Friel’s play, Translations, published in 1981.

Foreword The University in Translation is a rare and, in the best sense, disturbing book. Its honesty and obvious integrity requires the reader to be honest as best as they can. It begins with the author’s experience of higher education, which leads into a thoughtful account of how, as universities have expanded in recent decades, the experience for both teachers and students has become something that would have been quite unrecognizable to Humboldt, Kant or Newman – or even their successors half a century ago. Suzy Harris then pursues her theme of the complex meanings of ‘translation’, transformation and internationalization through the experience of foreign (specifically Chinese) students in English universities and by describing recent EU policies, which see their role as the key to promoting ‘citizens’ mobility and employability. Throughout the early chapters, the reader is constantly reminded of the crucial role of language in everything that bears on higher education. It is this concern that provides Suzy Harris with a way of challenging recent policies and reminding us of the true purposes of higher education. It is her concern with language and meaning that takes her into the work of Heidegger and his student, the social philosopher Hannah Arendt, as well as post-modernist thinkers such as Derrida. Not unlike Arendt herself, Suzy Harris does not avoid Heidegger’s Nazi connections. She confronts them head on and, with considerable courage, makes her case for separating his ‘repellent’ politics from his reputation as a charismatic teacher and his originality as a teacher and philosopher. For me, Heidegger’s anti-modernism offers us no way out of the current crisis of European higher education’s obsession with ‘performativity’, except nostalgia. However, it is impossible not to respect her argument and the questions she raises concerning what is ‘higher’ about higher education are surely the right ones. The University in Translation raises questions about the purposes of higher education that in the current climate we all too easily forget. I commend it as a notable and original contribution to Higher Education studies, a field that is seriously bereft of such serious scholarship. Michael Young, Emeritus Professor, University of London, Institute of Education

A Prefatory Note Shortly after the completion of the manuscript, a General Election was held in the UK. Labour lost convincingly but the Conservative party failed to win an outright majority and a coalition government was formed with the Liberal Democrats, led by David Cameron as Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, as Deputy Prime Minister. The new government has made clear its priority to reduce the budget deficit as quickly as possible: this will mean severe cuts across the public sector and will raise extremely difficult questions concerning the funding of universities and the future of individual institutions. It is, at the time of writing, too early to gauge the impact of the policy. The change of government, however, does not diminish the critique set out in the book; on the contrary, its force is sharpened.

PART ONE

Policy

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Chapter 1

A Tower of Achievement What is most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking. Martin Heidegger (1986, p. 48)

I. Beyond ‘what works’ The idea for this book arose from a set of questions that have troubled me as an academic working in a university. In a global knowledge economy where the economic function of higher education is privileged, what is ‘higher’ about higher education? What is the purpose of the university? What role is an academic supposed to play? These questions require a more careful consideration of the language of higher education and how that language is used in higher education; and this means turning attention from the more usual empirical questions – in response to which there is a substantial and growing literature – to ones that are more philosophical and that tend to get overlooked in a climate that seeks answers and solutions, more and more evidence of ‘what works’. Performativity is a problem; the culture of accountability is a problem. There is research literature on higher education that tells us this – research literature that has burgeoned and that fills library shelves and appears on university reading lists. Ultimately that literature is in danger of playing itself out, defeating itself by the now somewhat tedious burden of its own rhetoric. There is a need to disrupt this discourse; there is a need to change the idiom; there is a need to wake ourselves up. Where shall we turn to do this? If these preliminary thoughts are right, they are thought-provoking indeed. Hence, in this introduction, I propose to test these out in terms of three paths of thought, all of which will draw attention to questions of language. First, I turn to the context of policy-making, and I shall recount something of my own experience to amplify this. Second, and in order to introduce one of the central themes identified in my title, I give attention to a well-known and remarkable play by the Northern Irish writer Brian Friel, which has the title Translations. Third, I shall relate this to what might be regarded as an iconic original point in any consideration of questions of translation: the story of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis.

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What these paths of thought will help to show, I believe, is that the strange idea that we are still not thinking is one that we need to take seriously. Such a thought, quoted from Heidegger in the epigraph to this chapter, will be disturbing to many of those who seek, no doubt with good intentions, to carry on higher education business as usual. And there is reason to be troubled by Heidegger in other ways. Nevertheless, his voice and philosophy will intrude into the present text as it develops, and I shall see the challenge he provides as at least requiring a response and perhaps opening a way forward via that response.

II. Two ideals of the university The debate about the university, and its purpose in society, is of course as old as the university itself. How this debate is broached and what the point of a university is taken to be are questions that say something about that society itself, a point keenly observed about the Anglophone world by Alasdair MacIntyre two decades ago when he wrote that the ‘emptiness and triviality of so much of the rhetoric of official academia is a symptom of a much deeper disorder’ (MacIntyre 1990, p. 227). There is a similar concern with the impoverishment of intellectual debate in Bill Readings’ account of the contemporary North American university in The University in Ruins (Readings 1996). Here he identifies two ideals that have been influential in the development of the university in the modern period and this is a useful starting point because it takes us immediately into issues of language. One ideal is represented by Immanuel Kant for whom the guiding concept is reason, which was quite different from the medieval view where the hierarchy of the disciplines reflected the orders of knowledge and theology provided the unifying principle. Kant is regarded as the founder of the modern university, where a notion of rationality based on neutrality replaces the importance attached to religious or moral values. For Kant, reason is universal and therefore universal truths are irrespective of cultural or linguistic difference. The university should be protected by the state in order to ensure the rule of reason in public life; within the university the principle of the autonomy of the rational subject should be paramount. The framework set out by Kant was later challenged by Wilhelm von Humboldt, not because he did not agree with the importance of reason for intellectual enquiry, but because the attention on reason detracted from other important principles, such as culture. For Humboldt thought is necessarily tied to culture, such that any kind of translation of a poem, for example, must involve a distortion or at the least some changing of its meaning. In the Humboldtian model, which came to influence the university

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in Western Europe, the emphasis is not on the individual rational subject but rather on progress and unity and is about cultivating Bildung, which is often translated in English as formation (see also Chapter Four). Readings describes it in the following way: ‘the University . . . gives the people an idea of the nation-state to live up to and the nation-state a people capable of living up to that idea’ (Readings 1996, p. 65). Education is about learning the rules of thought rather than a content of positive knowledge; it is not about teaching facts but about judgement and learning to discuss critically. It is this that cultivates Bildung. The University must embody thought as action, as striving for an ideal. This is its bond with the state, for state and University are the two sides of a single coin. The University seeks to embody thought as action toward an ideal; the state must seek to realize action as thought, the idea of the nation. The state protects the action of the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state. And each strives to realize the idea of national culture. (Ibid, p. 69) We can see some parallels between Humboldt and John Henry Newman’s highly influential The Idea of a University. Newman considered literature rather than philosophy to be central to the development of an ‘intellectual culture’. Both thinkers envisioned the university as a community of learned men dedicated to the internal pursuit of intellectual culture. According to Newman, liberal education is appropriate to the university ‘as a place of education [rather] than of instruction’; knowledge was not a means to an end, it was not external to the university, but is rather ‘the immanent principle of intellectual culture’ (cited in Readings 1996, p. 75).1 If for Kant the key discipline of the university must be the abstraction of philosophy, for Humboldt this must be the cultural specificity of literature. Both these conceptions of the university aspire to the pursuit of truth and to an ideal, embedded respectively in logic and language. In its concern with literature the latter alludes to the linguistic, cultural and national difference of texts. There has remained an irresolvable tension between these positions and as we shall see later, traces of this are present in current educational and political discourse. For scholars, whether influenced by the Kantian or the Humboldtian ideal, the modern university was presumed to function as a model for the wider community at large, in contrast to the medieval university where the focus was within the university and the community of scholars and the study of knowledge. The idea that the university gives direction to wider society has been challenged in recent times, as we shall see in the next chapter. There has also been a change in the way we think about knowledge and

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the value we attach to knowledge. Basil Bernstein (2000) captures this in his distinction between what he calls the intrinsic and extrinsic value of knowledge; today we tend not to acknowledge the intrinsic value of knowledge – the inherent value in the pursuit of knowledge and the world of ideas as Michael Oakeshott would see it. For Oakeshott, higher education needs no purpose or function; it is a conversation between generations (Oakeshott 1962). There is an increasing preoccupation with the extrinsic value of knowledge, with its instrumental value. We can see how far this has gone where discussion about the curriculum and subject content has been skewed by the preoccupation with ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ and in so doing knowledge and learning are reduced to things that can be easily measured and calculated. This is not, however, to suggest that knowledge is no longer regarded as central to education; it remains extremely important. There are constant references to the fact that we live in a ‘knowledge society’ where ‘knowledge transfer’ is essential for the economy.2 What we need to note is the tendency to use knowledge as an adjective, as I myself have done when referring to the ‘knowledge economy’ in the opening lines. It is, however, no longer very clear what we are to understand ‘knowledge’ as meaning, a point that will be pursued in later chapters. The literature points to major shifts in society that raise questions about the aims of education not only broadly speaking, but also more specifically, for the purpose and future of the university. As the previous paragraph suggests, knowledge and reason, which have been central to the university, are now far more problematic. They remain important concepts but the university can no longer be assumed to be the safeguard of either; the modern world has lost the certainties and truths of the past, and postmodernity is characterized as a world in which uncertainty and unpredictability abound (see also Harris 2007b). Another factor is the globalization of capital and the changing nature of the nation state in a globalized world. The university played an important part in the emergence of the nation state in Europe, but this relationship is not static; today the university is positioned in terms of advancing the interests of the global economy. Government policy in many countries, as well as background pressures from globalization, requires the contemporary university to meet a wide range of demands, far more than at any other time, as we shall see in the next chapter.

III. Multiple translations These factors put into question the purpose of the university. This is far from being a straightforward or simple matter and it is one that I shall argue cannot be addressed in the language of current political and educational

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discourse because this language is essentially impoverished and informed by a narrow conception of education. In this book, questions of language are central and they are examined and given a sharper accent by considering the specific question of the internationalization of higher education, which is now a central feature of education policy across the world. This question is reflected in the book’s subtitle, Internationalizing higher education. There is a connection between internationalization and translation, but the relation is not straightforward, as we shall see. The main title, The University in Translation, is likely to conjure up different things in the reader’s mind. We can think of translation as transformation and consider how different the contemporary university is from its medieval European predecessor already hinted at above, an elite institution influenced by religious doctrine and where the language spoken was Latin. That elite institution has become a mass institution influenced by political and economic needs of the modern state in Europe and beyond. Although the language of the university is no longer Latin, its influence is still immense. Once the lingua franca for all scholarly pursuits, it lingered as one of the prerequisites for UK university (or faculty entrance), until the Universities Central Council on Admissions (UCCA) procedures from 1970 asserted a more open market for admissions. Indeed Latin was important in my own educational career in Scotland. My elderly Latin teacher, who was also the guidance teacher, discussed with me the merits of various universities, assuming that this is what I would do on leaving school. In Scotland, at that time, university was only an option for those who had a school qualification in a language other than English. This was the late 1970s when Latin had ceased to be the language of the Catholic Church in Western Europe.3 We can also think of the more recent transformation in education associated with the radical reforms ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and the New Right governments of the 1980s. My own higher education coincided with these reforms, and while these did not impact significantly on my undergraduate studies, they did by the time I began my academic career. Discussion in the Sociology Department where I was working moved increasingly from substantive issues to do with politics, religion and society – the staple fare of the discipline – to very practical concerns about the survival of the department: there were only eight staff, no international students, and very little external funding. All around, however, there were signs of a fledgling entrepreneurialism in the new MBA courses that were appearing just down the corridor from Sociology, along with a small but growing kernel of wealthy international postgraduate students. In short, the university I had experienced as a student and that I anticipated working in as an academic – a place for study, reflection and debate – was very different from the university in which I found myself. Of course, many may consider my

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view misplaced, outdated, or worse utopian and elitist (all charges I would strenuously deny), but it was a view that informed my thinking about what it was to be an academic.4 There are other ways in which translation can be understood, the most common of which is the translation from one language to another. The intention of this book, however, is to move beyond the tendency to view translation in relatively simple terms, as the transfer of meaning from one language to another. When considered in such terms, language is seen primarily as a technical matter. It is understandable why we can become preoccupied with technical issues – technology and globalization allow communication between people and often this is carried out in the language of English. For example, take a business deal between a Greek and a German executive; this negotiation is most likely to be carried out in English than either Greek or German, neither of which is a world language. For Englishspeaking countries, the internationalization of higher education is an incredibly valuable industry that contributes substantially to the national economy; and it is no coincidence that English-speaking countries have benefited significantly from this. Nor is it insignificant that the English language has accrued many foreign words – more so than any other language – and we use them without necessarily being aware of their origin and etymology. Translation then is complex. Translation occurs within a language as well as across languages; words have a history of meanings that change and evolve and, as Paul Ricoeur (2006) puts it, as soon as there is language, there is translation. It is much more than a technical matter of communication, as we shall see in the course of the book.

IV. Three paths of thought As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, there are three main paths of thought that I intend to explore. They will be sketched out below and then I shall return to them in Parts Two and Three. The first is from professional experience, the second from literature, and the third is taken from scripture. These three juxtapose rather different kinds of discourse and realms of thought; however, there is also something that connects them, as we shall see later. It is important to point out that my comments will be confined to the humanities and social sciences and not the natural sciences, in particular drawing on my experiences of university departments of education.

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i. Down a professional track The first example comes from my experience of working in two quite different environments, the first being on secondment to the Scottish government; the other teaching university students in Bolivia. Both were instructive, but my reasons for having high hopes of the secondment must be instanced before I explain the nature of disillusionment there – and compare it with the experience of teaching abroad. The secondment took place shortly after the introduction of Devolution. I especially wanted to have a better understanding of policy-making as it affected education and to see whether or not research would gain a higher profile in the policy process given New Labour’s agenda for ‘modernising government’ and ensuring ‘joined-up’ policies. It was an historic moment, and for many in Scotland there was a lot of excitement about the Scottish parliament. Winnie Ewing, the oldest Scottish MP, chaired the first session of parliament in May 1999, and she captured the mood with her opening remarks: ‘I want to begin with the words that I have always wanted either to say or to hear someone else say: the Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on 25 March 1707, is hereby reconvened.’ My experience in government service was disappointing; researchers were not visible in the organization, neither did they appear to have much influence in the research programme for the government despite some outward signs of change, such as the appointment of the Chief Research Officer in Scotland to the Policy Unit in 2001 (Harris 2007a). They purported to ‘service’ policy departments. My understanding of research was at odds with my other ‘research’ colleagues who were first and foremost civil servants and not researchers per se; as civil servants they had little or no experience of educational research or teaching. There was little opportunity to discuss and debate the nature of research or the relationship between research and policy. In many respects the experience was alienating, which contrasted sharply with my experience of teaching in Bolivia. The organization I was working for in going to teach abroad stressed that I should avoid getting into discussions about politics and religion in my teaching. I could easily imagine that there was good reason to steer clear of these matters, but it was not easy to see how this was to be done if I was teaching about education. It is impossible to do so without getting into politics: likewise, in Latin America and Spain, without talking also about the Church. The students were not among the highest academically achieving, and they were studying a range of subjects; the facilities were poor – the teaching room was bare with no materials or books or equipment, other than a whiteboard and one pen, and the chairs were extremely old and uncomfortable. All this did not actually matter that much. But the relationship I had with those students was excellent: it was lively and exhilarating. They wanted to

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learn, and I was keen to learn from them – not only to improve my Spanish but to find out about their very different lives and experiences. It was not long before the students got around to explaining to me in great detail the political system and the role of the Church in education – scarcely topics that I’d had to introduce, and there was no sense that this was ever going to be out of bounds. In the end, any alienation I experienced in Bolivia was nothing to the year I had spent working in government. And one reason for this was that in Bolivia there was a real desire to talk, to engage and to understand. I want to draw attention here to the multiple ways in which language can be problematic, and that these are not exhausted by tidy distinctions between the native and the foreign. Of course language problems were there before us when I worked with the students in Bolivia, but they became the means for us to open up and explore differences in meaning and the subtly different – sometimes starkly different – gradations in value that they carried with them. In the government setting, by contrast, any differences in language were to be erased or denied, with the result that any desire to talk, to engage and to understand was stifled by a discourse that was neutralizing and bland.

ii. A literary turn The second example recalls Brian Friel’s Translations. Set in 1833 in an Irish town called Baile Beag (meaning ‘little town’) the play explores social change through the eyes of a small group of inhabitants who come together in a school classroom. A group of British soldiers has arrived to carry out an ordnance survey of the town, to make a map of the area, which involves the soldiers translating local place names from ancient Irish Gaelic to English. The play deals with a number of complex issues to do with politics, history and culture; language and meaning are central. There are nine characters, seven locals and two English soldiers, and the play takes place over a few days. Much of the dialogue occurs in the local hedge school; these schools had been set up by the locals because they did not want to be taught in the English-sponsored schools. The schoolmaster, Hugh, knows Greek and Latin and a little English, and is drunk a lot of the time. The pupils are a mixture of young and old such as Jimmy Jack Cassie, an old man who is lost in his own world of Greek and Latin tragedy, and Sarah, a young girl who can hardly speak at all, who is desperate to leave Ireland for a better life somewhere else. The schoolmaster has two sons. Manus takes the lessons when his father is too drunk to do so. He is a nationalist and is angered when his brother, Owen, returns home from Dublin as a hired assistant to the British soldiers in their map-making and helps the

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men translate the Gaelic into English. Owen is not sceptical like his brother, and believes that the British can help the locals improve their lives. Captain Lancey is in charge of the British soldiers, and he is a professional soldier, there to carry out orders without question. His second in command, Yolland, is a quite different character; he is not sure why he joined the army and he takes an interest in the locals and wants to learn more about their way of life. Yolland falls in love with Sarah but they do not understand each other, neither in terms of language nor in their desires and hopes – Yolland wants to stay and make a life in Baile Beag, while Sarah is desperate to leave it. The following excerpt is taken from Act 1. Manus: Owen: Manus: Owen: Manus: Owen:

Manus: Owen: Manus: Owen:

. . . What’s ‘incorrect’ about the place names we have here? Nothing at all. They’re just going to be standardised. You mean changed into English? Where there’s ambiguity, they’ll be Anglicised. And they call you Roland! They both call you Roland! Shhhh. Isn’t it ridiculous? They seem to get it wrong from the very beginning – or else they can’t pronounce Owen. I was afraid some of you bastards would laugh. Aren’t you going to tell them? Yes – yes – soon – soon. But they . . . Easy, man, easy. Owen – Roland – what the hell. It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Brian Friel’s Translations (1981, pp. 36–7)

There are two points that are worth drawing out, the first of which, perhaps the most obvious way of reading this passage, is that it is to do with colonialism. The context for the play is that of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Today, and as an analogy, the colonialism depicted can be transposed to the context of contemporary neo-liberalism, which is hegemonic and connected to the globalization of capital. This has profound implications for the ways in which we live and for how we think about higher education. The second point is to do with the English language; English as a second language is now the global language. The dominance of English today is tied up with globalization and with technology. The English language is full of words that derive from Latin, the language of Imperial Rome. The most powerful words in English have Latin roots. The word ‘communication’, which I have used already on various occasions, is one such word. Communicate is derived from the Latin, comunicare, whereas ‘talk’ is a North European word. Communicate is longer and more sophisticated just as manipulate, manipulare, is a more powerful word than

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handle, another North European word. The Roman Imperial element is there in the English language. The Romans, who were more powerful than the Greeks, dominated through sophisticated organization and planning; we just have to think of the long straight Roman roads across Britain that link one town with another. This highly systematic organization is reflected in the grid maps drawn up by the English as they moved across Ireland. Heidegger, for whom classical Greek thought was far superior to Roman and modern Western thought, drew a distinction between place and space that is particularly relevant here and which helps to convey something of the subtlety and significance of language. ‘Space’ refers to a grid or something measurable as found on grid maps; whereas ‘place’ refers to a locale and suggests something that emerges through meaningful narrative connections. The excerpt from the play is a mapping exercise. The Gaelic names did not just mark a physical entity but a community with a history and culture that was to be denied, suppressed, effectively destroyed by the acts of translation into English and a grid reference on a map. The play also draws out the connections between Gaelic and ancient Greece in the persona of one of the students who spends his time reading the Greek classics, symbolizing the cultural richness of language and distinguishing the richness in Gaelic and Greek in contrast to the culturally inferior but politically more powerful Latin of the Roman Empire and English of the British Empire. The hegemony of English means that it is easy for us to forget the importance of language as we have just seen. We can also lose sight of the way in which some things cannot be said in English and some things can be said in English that cannot be said in other languages. The languages of South East Asia are very different from European languages especially with regard to the use of pronouns. In Japanese, you can talk about something generally – without specifying the person; the subject/object divide is not there as it is in the West. In Spanish or French, if a pronoun is not used then the verb ending tells you who the subject is. In this way Japanese is less specific than English, but in other ways it is more specific than English because there is a whole etiquette of what and how something is said depending on the particular context, for example talking to an elderly person or a person ranked higher socially. What this reminds us is that we are intertwined with the world and cannot think about life without language; words are inseparable from life.

iii. In the shadow of a tower This takes us to the third example, which comes from the Old Testament and the Book of Genesis, where we read the story of the Tower of Babel. This can be seen as a paradigm of translation; it is also a complicated story

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because it can be read in different ways depending on which verse of Genesis is read as we shall see in the final chapter. Throughout the earth men spoke the same language, with the same vocabulary. Now as they moved eastwards they found a plain in the land of Shinar where they settled. They said to one another, ‘Come let us make bricks and bake them in the fire’. For stone they used bricks, and for mortar they used bitumen. ‘Come’, they said, ‘let us build ourselves a town and a tower with its top reaching heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the whole earth.’ Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built. ‘So they are a single people with a single language!’ said Yahweh. ‘This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.’ Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the earth, and they stopped building the town. It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth. Gen. 11.1–9 The tribe of the Shems (shem meaning name) wanted to build a tower to reach the heavens, ‘let us make a name for ourselves’. God was angry with the people and he imposed confusion on them by giving them different tongues so that they could not understand each other. God also imposed his name on the tower – Babel – which means ‘gate of the deity’; Babylon can be translated as the name of the father’s city. The story of Babel has tended to be interpreted as a punishment, a loss and the confusion caused by many tongues (e.g. Eco 1995) The desire for a dominant language by the tribe of Shem can be transposed to the contemporary world and the dominance of a particular mode of rationality that is closely associated with modern science, which prioritizes objectivity and detachment. This is the only way that things can be looked at and understood. This will be explored further in Part Three.

V. Changing terrain The ideas and questions raised in the three examples outlined above will be explored in this book, but before beginning it is useful to say something of its structure. The book is divided into three parts, each taking a particular theme: policy, language and translation. Part One introduces the central

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concerns of the book and sets out the policy context. Chapter One discusses the idea of translation and some issues concerning language in, and about, higher education and the university. Chapter Two considers how the higher education landscape has changed since the origins of the university in the Middle Ages and the new challenges and demands facing higher education institutions across the world, but focusing on Europe. Higher education has become an increasingly important aspect of national governments’ agendas as a means of contributing to economic growth. In the UK, for example, education has become an incredibly lucrative export industry and one that is regarded as vital to maintaining the country’s position in global markets. And we can see a similar trend in European policy where knowledge creation and knowledge transfer is regarded as a central role of universities in helping to improve European competitiveness in a global economy and the challenges posed by the economic power of the USA, China and India. Part Two explores different issues to do with language and questions of translation that are pertinent to the contemporary situation in higher education. Translation is normally understood in relatively simple terms – as the transfer of meaning from one language to another – and to see it primarily as a technical matter, albeit one that can raise considerable difficulties. It is argued that this way of thinking is limited and does not allow us to see other important things about language and translation. In order to do so we need to consider the student experience and the language of international policy in order to explore more profound aspects of translation. Chapter Three considers language in relation to students. The first example is of non-English speaking students and their experiences of translation in UK universities. Take the case of Chinese students, for example, who come to a British university to study in the social sciences or the humanities. They will be required to discuss the ideas and arguments of academic texts written in English and relate them to the context of their native country. The experience of a Chinese student in this respect is so unlike that of their Spanish or Italian counterparts. With regard to language there will be not only the obvious difficulty of the lack of a shared European etymology or of common features of language structure and syntax, but also an absence of the cultural heritage that students in the West, in many respects, share. Both the student and their tutor are likely to experience difficulty in finding common ground from which to begin to discuss problems of interpretation, meaning and translation. The second part of the chapter considers the experience of students whose native language is English and whose position is obviously quite different from that of non-native but English-speaking international students. They too, however, experience translation. In UK universities and those where English is the first language, a large number of texts that are used are translations. For example, in undergraduate

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philosophy, students are unlikely to read Heidegger or Wittgenstein in German, nor are sociology students likely to read the founding fathers of the discipline – Marx, Weber and Durkheim – in the original. And here I have to admit that I have only read English translations of the German authors whom I draw on in this book. The experience of the native English speaker is also an experience of translation, but one that is quite different from the non-English speaking student. Chapter Four continues to consider language in terms of the language of international policy as expressed in European Commission documents and in particular in the internationalization of higher education, which has become an extremely important aspect of European and national policy. It is argued that the discourse of internationalization is driven primarily by economic factors; this preoccupation with the economic benefits has shifted attention away from considering the aims, values and the purpose of higher education. The chapter looks at the international language of policy and the way in which terms are used and understood in different national contexts. Terms such as ‘internationalization’, ‘harmonization’, ‘standards’, ‘quality’, ‘performativity’ and ‘science’ are read and understood by people encountering them in different languages. There are different connotations associated with such terms and when they are used in the international language of English strange things can happen. Words cannot be simply translated – they do not mean the same thing. The chapter closes with an introduction to the insights that Martin Heidegger brings to questions of language; the relevance of these to higher education will become apparent in Part Three. While Part Two draws attention to the differences between the native and non-native language speaker as a way of focusing on language, there is a danger that in doing so, the essential quality of language itself is hidden or obscured. Part Three suggests a different way of thinking about translation. Chapter Five considers translation as a metaphor in the sense that higher education is often described as a transforming experience in which a student is exposed to new ideas, people and experiences; and such a transformation (or the possibility of transformation) alludes to something that is difficult to measure and quantify, something less tangible but which gets to the essence of education. The mysteriousness and complex nature of the relationship between teacher and student is considered in light of George Steiner’s (2003) thought-provoking book, Lessons of the Masters. One of the relationships he refers to is that of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a complex and difficult one, but a relationship with teaching and learning at its heart, and where the transformative and traumatic aspects of education are realized in quite disturbing ways. The chapter considers Arendt’s work in the context of this relationship, focusing on her ideas on thinking and judgement, which are of central importance to higher education.

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Translation can, of course, be taken as a metaphor for transformation, but to see it in this way only is to fall short of what is ultimately at issue here. In Chapter Six, the final chapter, translation is considered in terms of its bearing upon relations both between the self and the world external to oneself (which one simultaneously observes, lives in and relates to), and more specifically between oneself and what is strange to oneself. These are matters that are central to the very point and character of the university. An instrumentalist and technical language – of ‘impacts’, ‘outcomes’, and ‘targets’ – has come to pervade political and educational discourse. Apparently more reliable than ordinary language, this technical discourse seems to promise a new objectivity in which everything that we need to know can be measured, calculated and pinned down. Quality assurance systems relying on such ‘hard’ objective data carry an aura of security and rigour. It is in the belief that the kind of language we use is critical to the kind of education we have, and that the instrumentalist language dominant today is deeply damaging, that this book challenges and disrupts these ways of thinking. We need to find a different kind of language in order to think well about the purpose of higher education. And we need to recognize that it is part of the requirements of such thinking that we recognize that in higher education, as in life itself, there are questions that cannot be answered once and for all. Our readiness to engage with them, to take part in the kinds of conversations they engender, must continue to be part of our higher education.

Endnotes 1 One important difference was that Newman saw truth as theological, whereas Humboldt did not. According to Newman: ‘A University, I should lay down, by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge: Theology is surely a branch of knowledge: how then is it possible for it to profess all branches of knowledge, and yet exclude from the subjects of its teaching one which, to say the least, is as important and as large as any of them?’ (Turner 1996, p.25). 2 In his keynote lecture to the Society for Research in Higher Education Conference, Newport, Wales, 2009, Garry Rhoades discussed knowledge transfer, observing that the kind of knowledge that is most valued today is that which has immediate ‘pay off’. 3 Two themes of the 2nd Vatican Council (1962–65) were church renewal and opening a dialogue with the modern world. The Council authorized the vernacularization of the Liturgy – a change in church teaching that directly affected the laity across the world; they would be

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able to celebrate the Mass in their own language and understand and participate more fully. 4 One other recollection is that as an undergraduate student it was commonplace for lecturers to wear gowns. In the UK, the gown has a symbolism similar to that of the lawyer or cleric’s robes; they suggest authority and status as well as representing tradition. Today gowns are rarely to be seen, reserved for ceremonial duties, such as graduation ceremonies and inaugural lectures. In some universities, the gown is not worn by a professor on the occasion of their inaugural lecture.

Chapter 2

The Transformation of Higher Education The university is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is, on the one hand, intellectual not moral; and on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement. John Henry Newman (cited in Turner 1996, p. 4) Universities [are] powerhouses of knowledge generation . . . that will need to adapt to the demands of a global knowledge-based economy, just as other sectors of society and economy have to adapt. Janez Potoenik (2006)

I. All change Higher education today is a very different enterprise from earlier centuries, as alluded to in the opening chapter and again here in the two epigraphs. In the medieval university, religious thought was dominant, whereas the modern university has been associated with the Enlightenment project and nation building, especially in Germany; science and science-based education have become central to enlightening the individual and society. From its medieval origins the university has become a global industry; the language of academia has moved from Latin to the vernacular – and, more recently, to English, the global language. Although elitist – until the mid twentieth century the university was a finishing school for the elite, primarily young men – modern universities have performed a public function and a public good in their contribution to the cultural richness of society. Many contemporary universities have no real link to their medieval predecessors and the relationship between the state and the university is more problematic than in the past (e.g. Scott 2000). The higher education sector is not only far bigger, it is more complex, and the demands and challenges that vice-chancellors and senior members of the university face are enormous. In the case of the UK, for example, they have to: (i) ensure their institution’s survival in a highly competitive market environment; (ii) attract more students, with the result that there is now a far

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broader and more diverse population than ever before, with first generation students and large numbers of international students from across the world; (iii) devise new courses for new student markets; (iv) generate more income; (v) demonstrate and increase the international reputation of individuals and the institution through research and teaching; (vi) establish partnerships and collaborations with a wide range of bodies and organizations across the world; and (vii) engage in knowledge transfer. This is, by all accounts, a rather intimidating list and the sheer scale of the task facing university managers brings to mind an article I read recently about Birkbeck College in which it was reported that when faced with a difficult issue senior staff ask themselves, ‘What would George Birkbeck think?’ This is an intriguing question and one that we could extend to Kant, Humboldt and Newman: what would they think about the pressing problems and dilemmas that face their modern peers? As we saw in Chapter One and hinted at again in the first epigraph to this chapter, for Newman, following a Kantian ideal of the university, knowledge is an end in itself; he did not see the pursuit of knowledge as external to the university. A liberal education was preferred to a practical education; and it was this model that was taken up within British higher education. For Humboldt the university was a research institution; research had a central function because it produced knowledge of culture. The university was a place where research and teaching came together and, through both, culture was passed on to the next generation. Neither model can be seen to privilege the extrinsic value of knowledge at the expense of the intrinsic, or to privilege the economic value over the cultural value of knowledge. It is probable that Newman or Humboldt would be surprised at the rather narrow terms in which higher education is today conceived of and discussed. As we shall see below, society’s needs, conceived primarily in economic terms, orientate the contemporary university; the university no longer provides an orientation for society. It is this shift, and the implications for the work of those in higher education, that is the focus of this chapter. Section II considers the major changes to higher education in the UK, before moving on, in section III, to examine more carefully what happens within the institution, and in particular how the teacher–student relationship has been transformed. In sections IV and V, our attention switches to Europe and the role of the European Union and European Commission in higher education policy. Two points need to be made here: I do not wish to imply that society’s needs are not an important consideration in the work of the university, but rather to suggest that the narrow terms in which its role is understood is problematic for the reasons that will become clearer in the course of the discussion; the second and related point is that this will not involve a systematic review of higher education policy – there are other

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books that have done this extremely well. Instead, examples of underlying trends will be considered.

II. University business The expansion of universities is a modern creation associated with the emergence of the European nation state. Research was essential for economic modernization, while teaching contributed to a more educated and trained labour force (Halsey 2006). It is also the case that the vast majority of universities were established in the mid twentieth century and so, as Peter Scott (2000) points out, any connection to a European medieval predecessor is very tenuous indeed. Few institutions can trace their roots to medieval predecessors; those that can include Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the Sorbonne in France and Salamanca in Spain.1 Many countries have seen an expansion in higher education provision in the latter part of the twentieth century.2 For example, Germany and France have more than 80 universities, while the UK has more than 100. In Spain, expansion is more recent; the number of universities increased sharply after Franco, from about seven to more than 70. Higher education is far more visible today than at any other time in the sense that there is far more of it; it exists in far more countries, and its political and economic profile is far higher. This expansion reflects how important higher education is for most governments across the world; it is perceived as vital to the economy, as suggested in the second epigraph. Knowledge is now the main force of production in the world and is central to national economies, alongside that of technology, and it is regarded as essential to producing skilled and competent citizens. An important part of universities’ business is what is called ‘knowledge transfer’, not in the sense that education has always been about the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, but rather in terms of a transfer of an economic good.3 Such a transformation in size and strategic economic importance has brought about changes within the institution that have involved shifts in academic discourse and practice. These changes, in turn, have altered the roles that staff fulfil, and the relationship between teachers and students. We shall look at this more closely a little later. Some examples may help to illustrate the changes that have taken place; these are taken from the UK context for two main reasons: first, it is here that neo-liberal policies have been pursued most aggressively and have changed profoundly the public sector and the relation between the state, the public and the private;4 and second, the higher education sector in the UK is more differentiated and fragmented than in other European countries. Before looking at some

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examples it is useful to provide a very brief overview of higher education policy in the UK, concentrating on England where the vast majority of universities are to be found. Until the 1970s, UK universities were largely autonomous and independent of the state although funded by the government, but this situation changed radically under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and later John Major – a process that has continued under New Labour.5 In the latter stages of the New Right period in office, the binary divide in higher education between universities and further education was ended with the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992. This led to a rise in the number of universities, and former polytechnics were allowed to award their own degrees.6 New forms of managerialism that had been operating in the polytechnics swept rapidly into the university sector, while research, which had been the preserve of the universities, was taken up by the ex-polytechnics (e.g. see Trowler 1998; Deem 2006; Deem et al. 2007) Another consequence of the Act has been to increase the competition between institutions for limited research funding. The sector has had to diversify further in order to seek funding and alternative income streams to that provided by government through the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The highly competitive environment of the education market in the UK has led to the emergence of various groupings around particular interests – the ‘Russell Group’, which comprises the larger research-intensive universities; the ‘Post-1994 Group’; the ‘Million + Group’, which represents the ex-polytechnics; and ‘London Higher’, which is a group of predominantly post-1992 universities situated in London. In the USA there is a similarly highly competitive education market, unlike other parts of Europe where there is less competition between institutions. When New Labour came to power in 1997 the emphasis on greater university efficiency and more accountability, promoted by the Conservatives, continued. To this was added its own initiative to widen participation among 18 to 30-year-olds from under-represented social groups. Widening participation was taken up most enthusiastically by the new universities (e.g. see Burke 2002) and fed into the government’s lifelong learning agenda. To this policy mix was added the internationalization agenda to encourage more international students to study in UK universities, as we shall see in Chapter Four. The second characteristic of higher education in the UK is the extent to which public and private distinctions have been blurred. The closeness of the university to the state today means that it is difficult for the university to question the role of the state. While the university provides public education,

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it is probably more accurate to describe universities as private corporations or enterprises that are funded partly from government and partly from private funding; as state funding falls, universities need to generate increasing amounts of income, through, for example, tuition fees.7 Universities are expected to run themselves as businesses and to manage the prevailing economic climate rather than rely on the state to protect them even though they provide a public service. This view can be traced back to the 1980s and the Jarratt Report of 1985. This looked into the efficiency of universities and how they used public funding; it led to devolving budgets from the centre down to individual departments (now known as unit costs) and vice-chancellors became chief executives accountable for the economic viability of their institution to governing bodies that were reconstituted to include more lay governors. A useful account of this period can be found in Deem et al.’s (2007) Knowledge, Higher Education, and the New Managerialism. This shift from an education to economic discourse is mirrored within government departments. It is useful to trace the changing nomenclature, starting from the 1930s when the government department responsible for education was the Ministry of Education; with the growth in the size of the government more departments were required, and in the 1950s the Ministry of Education became the Department of Education. In the 1970s it became the Department for Education and Science, reflecting the growing importance of science to society. In the 1970s, with the global oil crisis and rising unemployment, the name changed again to become the Department for Education and Employment. The closer relationship between employment and education continued in the 1980s with the change to the Department for Education and Skills. Until this point, higher education was under the same department as schools. In 2007 there were more changes in government departments when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister. The Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Trade and Industry were abolished and two new departments set up: the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DfCSF) and the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). In June 2009, as a result of a cabinet reshuffle, DIUS was abolished and replaced with a ‘super ministry’ – the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), led by Lord Mandelson. This change was a direct response to a political crisis facing Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government after a tumultuous period in which several factors came together – the near collapse of the banking system, a global recession, and public anger over MPs expenses, which led to several cabinet resignations. It was, however, entirely in keeping with the government’s desire to align, even more closely, universities with business and enterprise.

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Removing ‘education’ from the title of the government department responsible for education, and then breaking the link between the universities and compulsory education is significant. The latest positioning of universities (sandwiched in between innovation and skills) illustrates the importance of the university’s role in wealth creation. The terms ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ have entered the political lexicon, and, as with skills and competences, are defined in instrumentalist terms that are linked directly to employability (see Chapter Four).8 This can be seen from the Department’s webpage: As centres of research excellence, universities are key drivers of economic growth. They lay the foundations for innovation, which is central to improved growth, productivity and quality of life. The department wants to create a leading knowledge economy. By supporting an excellent science and research base, and by encouraging innovation in all sectors, we will improve quality of life in this country through new technologies and improved public services. The Government’s aim is to make the UK the leading place in the world in which to be an innovative business, public service or third sector organization. We aim to build an Innovation Nation in which innovation thrives at all levels – individuals, communities and regions. UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, 2009 (italics added) The term innovation is never fully explained or elaborated upon; it is taken as self-evident and a good thing that will improve the quality of life, but again, in what way life will be improved is not articulated, although given the concern with economic competitiveness across government, innovation is likely to be understood primarily in terms of economic outcome.9 Universities are to be seen almost exclusively in terms of their relationship to business, and to think of themselves as just another kind of enterprise governed by the same rules as other enterprises, as suggested by the European Commissioner in the second epigraph. We can see this in the UK, where enterprise is now considered an important role of the university alongside its traditional roles of teaching and research; enterprise is not just seen in terms of an income stream but also in terms of developing students’ skills to become enterprising and entrepreneurial citizens. This concern is not confined to higher education but to education generally, as is clear in these words from the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown in 2003: I want teachers able to communicate virtues of entrepreneurship and wealth creation. And just as business tycoons have become the pop idols

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of the business world, I want our local business leaders to become role models for today’s young. Chancellor, Gordon Brown, speech at the University of Greenwich, (2003)10 Another recent addition to the language of the university is that of ‘businessfacing’ – coming shortly after the publication of the Leitch Report of 2006, which looked into the kinds of skills that would be required in the global economy in 2020. The term ‘business-facing’ is now frequently used in universities, albeit in slightly different ways; universities concerned primarily with widening participation tend to use the term to demonstrate their readiness to produce employable graduates and to respond to local employers, whereas research intensive universities tend to use the term to describe their collaboration with big business, and with research and development initiatives. It can be linked quite neatly into the marketing strategy of the institution. ‘Impact’ is yet another term that has appeared in political discourse. It is now also a criterion in Research Council funding; applicants must outline in advance the outcomes or impact of the proposed research where impact is interpreted primarily in economic terms rather than other less quantifiable measures of social impact, and in relation to current policy initiatives. Impact has also been identified as one of three key indicators of research excellence in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the successor to the Research Assessment Exercise – which was planned initially for 2013 but, as a result of a consultation exercise carried out in late 2009, will be delayed. One problem with using impact as a measure is that it makes values purely extrinsic – as in the case of outcomes-based approaches generally, but, logically, something has to have intrinsic value – it cannot only have extrinsic value (see also Times Higher Education 2010, p. 36). What is worth noting is the way that language is changing within the university. Language has always been particularly complex here in the sense that disciplines have their own specialized forms of language and these are quite different from the language of business or other institutions. The growing closeness of the university and its business neighbours, steered as it has been by successive governments is, not surprisingly, transforming traditional academic discourse within the university, particularly in terms of governance and management, but also in relation to the curriculum. The language of performativity and marketing is pervasive. The relationship between the university and business is of course important and I do not want to deny this; there is a practical and technical need for employees to possess good language skills in order to carry out their job. Employers naturally expect university graduates to have acquired these skills

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before they leave university. The danger is in privileging an acquisition of a portfolio of skills and competences over an engagement with ideas and ways of thinking connected with a disciplinary tradition. The latter, historically, has been a central purpose of the university. We have now looked at the institution and some of the ways in which it has changed. It is now time to consider in more detail life inside the university.

III. Life inside Neo-liberal policy promotes partnerships and collaboration between the private and public sector as a means of generating income and paying for expensive public goods such as higher education. At the same time, paradoxically, higher education itself has become a major export industry especially for English-speaking countries, as we shall see in Chapter Four when we look at the internationalization of higher education. The vice-chancellor/chief executive is accountable to the board of governors and responsible for the strategic direction and financial stability of the institution. As the importance of knowledge production to the economy has grown so too have management systems and structures in higher education institutions. For example, the role of pro vice-chancellor has expanded in recent years so that in many institutions there are several pro vice-chancellors, each with a different area of responsibility such as teaching, research, enterprise and internationalization. The management task is more complex and greater not only, as we saw in the introduction to the chapter, as a result of the number of students, but also because the university is involved in a wider range of activities than in the past. This expansion of university activity has been accompanied by new accountability systems aided also by new technologies that make possible the gathering of a wide range of data that can be used to determine the health of the institution; and, of course, it can be used for marketing purposes as well. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has become increasingly important for universities and is used in various ways; for example, in ‘business-facing’ activities, mentioned above, which are geared towards the public and to the business world, as distinct from ‘inward-facing’ activities, which are designed to share information within the institution. The internet and the institution’s website have become extremely important and provide a means to promote the institution’s image; also it allows flexibility in updating or revising its public image. This is crucial today as a university must be ready to reinvent itself, find its own brand, and capture the student and consumer market.

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Prospective students, parents and sponsors have access to institutional data presented in the form of league tables based on various surveys that record the performance of each institution according to a range of criteria, including examination results, retention and drop-out rates, student satisfaction and graduate employability. The national undergraduate student satisfaction survey in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has become yet another source of information to be translated into a league table by which institutions can be measured and compared. Such information is particularly important for international students and their sponsors, who want easy access to the information that identifies the top ranked universities. The league table of the top universities in the world continues to be refined and improved as its influence grows. For example, the UK weekly magazine Times Higher Education is working closely with Thompson Reuters to improve its database for judging the leading universities. (Times Higher Education, 7 January 2010, p.10). The new database, it is reported, will offer a more sophisticated and balanced picture of the top 200 institutions worldwide.11 It is not only in financial regulation and institutional governance that change has occurred. A striking feature of the university today is the sheer busyness found within it, and this takes many forms. For example, in the increased volume of teaching and administration that accompanies larger numbers of students. The new quality assurance systems, and the assessment and monitoring of student performance and attendance, mentioned above, are time-consuming.12 Alongside academics’ teaching-related activities are research activities, such as writing research applications, preparing conference papers, organizing internal and external seminars, external examining, reviewing for academic journals and research councils. In addition to this, there are numerous departmental and university committees that take up a great deal of time, not to mention email correspondence, which burgeons by the day. Again if we look at the UK context we can see that in both areas of teaching and research the academic role has altered. Let us first look at teaching and the higher education curriculum has changed. Since the incorporation of further education with higher education in 1992, the university curriculum has expanded and diversified and, in some ways, now resembles the kind of progressive education offered in some further education colleges in the 1980s – student-focused, recognition of prior learning, and modularized courses. New information technology also makes possible a more efficient use of resources. Teaching is carried out in a well-ordered fashion with neatly structured programmes of study that allow students to choose their own pathways through university, picking and choosing modules to make up their degree. This is facilitated by the use of technology to allow independent learning through providing course materials

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on dedicated websites that students can access. Some teachers are using ‘blogs’ as part of their virtual teaching and learning community in quite novel ways. Those universities that have embraced the discourse of widening participation and are focused on establishing a more inclusive and representative institution tend to be the former polytechnics where students came from a more diverse socio-economic background than their counterparts in university, and where a wider range of courses were taught, including vocational and skills-based rather than purely academic, and more progressive teaching approaches were adopted than in the university sector. Post-1992 universities have had to redesign courses to accommodate difference and diversity and to be more innovative and flexible so that students can construct their own programmes of study that meet their needs, whether they are a mature adult returning to education after many years, or a young single parent. There is an emphasis on empowering the student through the acquisition of learning skills to help them become more independent and empowered and more able to participate in society and make the most of the opportunities that present themselves. Sophisticated student services have evolved to cater for students’ needs, including, for example, welfare and financial advice (see also Chapter Three). One danger with the progressive element in the university curriculum is that texts considered ‘out of date’ or inappropriate to a diverse student body have been replaced with new texts that are chosen not on the basis of intellectual challenge but because they are considered representative of students’ experiences or backgrounds.13 We shall come back to this in Part Three. Another matter of concern is that modularization and the ‘pick and mix’ approach tends to distort the academic relationship between student and teacher, which traditionally has been central. The teacher has a relationship to her subject and at the heart of the relationship between teacher and student is membership of a subject community, whether academic or vocational. One of the implications of the changes in curriculum and learning methods is that the teacher’s role has become that of a facilitator of learning and this weakens the identification of the teacher with her subject. The importance of this relationship will be considered further in Part Three. The supervisor–doctoral student relationship is a special type of teacher–student relationship. In some ways this is more intense than with undergraduate study because it is usually over a far longer period of time and is centred on the student’s own research. The supervisory relationship has also undergone significant change in the last ten years, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.14 In the past, a PhD student would work independently supervised by one supervisor; often the student, especially those in the social sciences, would not come into much contact with other

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doctoral students, unlike the sciences in which there are often larger numbers. It is now a requirement that doctoral students pursue a formal research training programme, which is compulsory and that, normally, must be completed satisfactorily before they embark on their actual research. This change was the result of various concerns over the previous decade regarding the relevance of the PhD, the kinds of transferable skills that doctoral students acquired, and concerns over the quality of supervision that students received and completion rates.15 One of the outcomes of concern over quality of supervision and completion rates is the more rigorous monitoring of progress, which has brought with it a more regulatory climate, which, in turn, is changing the nature of the relationship between supervisor and student; the supervisor assumes a more managerial role in managing the student and the production of the PhD thesis. This has included a move to supervisory teams instead of a single supervisor.16 While a supervisory team can be beneficial for the student, it does raise a number of questions – not least of which is the need to match supervisors’ expertise with the student’s research interests. There is also the potential problem of clashes of personality or different approaches to the research within the supervisory team.17 It is now time to turn our attention from the UK to similar trends in European higher education.

IV. Being European Neo-liberal policies have migrated across Western and Eastern Europe as well as to other parts of the world, and so the transformation of higher education seen in the UK is not unique, although the nature of it is different across countries depending on the particular traditions and political and social contexts. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider the broader European context and in particular the role of the European Union and the European Commission in higher education. Cultural, economic and political concerns have informed European interest in higher education since the mid-twentieth century. Culturally, there has been a desire to construct a European identity and sense of citizenship; economically, the concern has been to make Europe competitive in relation to other regions; and politically, to exercise more influence in regional and global affairs – an increasingly challenging goal given the ever-growing Union, with over 40 countries and more wishing to join. Interest can be traced back to the 1950s when, as Susan Robertson (2009) notes, senior ministers from the European Coal and Steel Community (which later became the European Economic Community) put forward a proposal for a European university as a means of extending European integration. The proposal was not

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approved because heads of state believed that education was a matter for national governments.18 In the early 1970s when membership of the EEC increased to nine there was an agreement that more co-operation in the field of education would be advantageous to all community members.19 The Commission adopted a ‘soft governance’ approach – it did not see its role as a regulator but simply as a provider of resources – however, indirectly it was able to introduce some direction to higher education policy (Dale and Robertson, 2009) It was in the 1980s that European universities began establishing relationships with one another – helped by funding from the European Commission under various framework programmes, including probably the most well known: Erasmus. Then in 1991 the Commission of the European Community (CEC) published the Memorandum on Higher Education in the European Community (CEC 1991) in which it outlined its aim of creating a ‘European education’. It was intended to promote reflection and debate about higher education in the context of significant political and economic change in Europe (Robertson 2009). We shall look more closely at this in Chapter Four. The indirect role in education that the Community had in the 1970s and 1980s altered in 1992 with the signing of the Treaty of the European Union, otherwise known as the Maastricht Treaty. Article 126 of the Treaty gave the European Commission a legal competency within the field of education and training; since then the remit has broadened to include higher education and its influence has become much greater (Brine 2008; Bonal and Rambla 2009).20 One explanation for education’s growing importance to the European Commission is most likely due to the recession and the rising number of unemployed graduates that many of the large economies were facing at the time. Robertson suggests that this broader political context had implications for the European Union and also affected its restructuring. Europe adopted free trade and free market policies, which, in turn, affected education policy; higher education was seen in terms of human capital as a means of economic growth, a position in line with that of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); that is, that post-industrial societies would be knowledge-based societies. Four years after Maastricht the European Commission quite boldly stated that the aims of education need no longer be debated: the purpose of higher education, it said, was to serve the needs of the economy. This, it was implied, was self-evident; moreover, the distinction between education and training was considered redundant (European Commission White Paper 1996). The Lisbon Strategy of 2000, which has been the key policy of the European Union since Maastricht, further strengthened this view. The Lisbon Strategy, signed by the Heads of State or Government, has a goal to

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make Europe the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world and universities are key players in the ‘knowledge world league’ (Dale 2007). The by now well-known defining statement of the Strategy is found on the first page: the European Union must become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion. EC (2001, p. 1) A central concern of the European Union and European Commission is to be able to respond to the challenges and threats of a knowledge economy, especially in relation to the economic power of the USA, China and India in the global marketplace (e.g. see Altbach et al. 2009; Luijten-Lub 2007; Scott 2000). This concern is based on a view of higher education as primarily performing a crucial economic role; knowledge is considered to be important in giving citizens competences that are required in order to face the challenges of a globalized economy. Knowledge is reconfigured as a private good, and higher education programmes are regarded as part of the service economy (Lauder et al., 2006). A wider set of concerns, however, was set out by Jacques Delors in 1996 in which he argued that education should address the ‘painful birth of a global society’ and address not only knowledge and skills but also learning how to live together in a global village (Delors 1996). This initiative was followed up by the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) project; here knowledge is considered as a public good that increases in value the more it is shared. Thus the objectives became focused on the transferral of knowledge in a knowledge society (OECD 2000). Both these, not entirely commensurable, models of a knowledge economy and a knowledge society are to be found in the Bologna Declaration, signed by 29 European Ministers responsible for higher education in 1999 (see Chapter Five). A Europe of Knowledge is now widely recognized as an irreplaceable factor for social and human growth and as an indispensable component to consolidate and enrich the European citizenship, capable of giving its citizens the necessary competencies to face the challenges of the new millennium Bologna Declaration (1999, p. 1)

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V. The measure of Bologna The Bologna Process, as it has come to be known since the Declaration, is ‘an independent, intergovernmental process outside the framework of the EU’. Although it did not start out as a European Union initiative, the Bologna Process has become extremely important to its project (Europe Unit 2010, p. 5).21 The signatories to the Declaration, which aimed at establishing a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010, agreed the following objectives: adopt a system of easily readable and comparable degrees; adopt a system with two main cycles (undergraduate/graduate); establish a system of transferable credits (such as the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System); promote mobility by overcoming obstacles; promote European co-operation in quality assurance; and promote European dimensions in higher education.22 Since Bologna, there has been a meeting of European ministers of higher education every two years, and generally more objectives have been added. So, for example, in Prague in 2001, three more were added that related to the European Higher Education Area: lifelong learning; involvement of students; and enhancing the attractiveness and competitiveness of the EHEA in other parts of the world (including the aspect of transnational education). Increased competition, combined with more mobility and further concentration of resources, should enable universities and their partners in industry to offer a more open and challenging working environment to the most talented students and researchers, thereby making them more attractive to Europeans and non-Europeans alike. CEC (2005, p. 10) Since the original signing of the Declaration, the number of countries that have signed up to Bologna has risen to 46 – for some newer European Union members and small countries in Eastern Europe it brings with it a sense of ‘membership’ – nobody wants to be outside it.23 Each country, its academic institutions, professional bodies and student organizations are responsible for implementing the Bologna goals. Fourteen ‘Bologna Experts’ were appointed to help inform and advise institutions on developments, funded by the European Commission with help from the British Council. Each stage of the process has been overseen by the Bologna Follow-Up Group, made up of representatives of the Member States, the Council of Europe, the National Union of Students in Europe, the European Association of Institutions of Higher Education, and, most significantly since 2003, the European Commission. Representation on the Bologna Follow-Up Group has allowed the European Commission direct influence on the Bologna

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Process. As Jacky Brine (2008) points out, the European Commission is the only continuous member of the Bologna Board and this strengthens its position. Although initially described as being a process outside the framework of the European Union, and not intending to move along a path towards standardization and harmonization, this is the direction that Bologna has taken (Brine 2008). The Bologna process actually goes beyond Europe, extending into Russia, indeed Australia and the USA have reacted strongly to the EHEA because it is seen as a threat to their institutions through the loss of international students and academics. The Erasmus Mundus programme, for example, seeks to attract the best brains from all over the world – not just Europe. Bologna can also be seen as expansionist in the sense that it has moved into research; the Berlin Summit in 2003 introduced a third cycle, or doctoral cycle, into the process in an attempt to meet the Lisbon objectives. It has extended also its accountability systems (Bergen Summit 2005) in the establishment of national quality frameworks and a European Qualifications Framework (EQF). It is significant that a similar process has begun in Latin America to establish a Latin American Area of Higher Education.24 And, as we shall see in Part Two, the European Commission regards ICT as crucial to educational development and to creating an ‘eSociety’ and ‘eLearning’.

VI. Where to now? We began the chapter by considering how the university has changed since its medieval origins, and looked at recent trends in higher education policy both in the UK and in Europe. We have seen just how complex the institution has become and the wide-ranging demands and challenges that face it. The second part of the chapter traced the European Union and the European Commission’s involvement in higher education, focusing in particular on the Bologna Process, which represents a central feature of this. I have alluded to the dominance of the economic imperative that informs much of higher education policy in ways that are damaging to education; and these will be elaborated on in Parts Two and Three. It also appears that there has been some shift in power and influence, from the national to the supranational policy arena, and this is due, in large measure, to globalization. Xavier Bonal and Xavier Rambla (2009) refer to globalization as the catalyst for the emergence of new discourses and ways of thinking about education; it is globalization and the challenges that it throws up that justify the new policies and transformation in education. We can see this in the second epigraph that opened this chapter, from the then Commissioner

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for Research, Janez Potoènik, describing universities as the ‘powerhouses of knowledge generation’. Knowledge is regarded as important in giving citizens competences that are required to face the challenges of a globalized economy. One feature of the new discourse is that national policies are regarded as inefficient and ineffective and, as we shall see in Part Two, this has allowed the European Commission to exert a great deal of influence over the political agenda. We shall return to this in Chapter Four, where our attention will focus on the internationalization of higher education, in order to examine more closely the language of education and education policy and its implications for the meaning of education.

Endnotes 1 In the UK the higher education sector is especially complex: there are the ‘old’ elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge and then the ‘civic universities’, those founded by Royal Charter at the turn of the twentieth century; the new universities founded in the 1950s and 1960s in the major cities; and post-1992 universities, which were the former polytechnic colleges (Watson 2009). 2 In terms of the kind of institution of higher education, this varies within countries and between countries – the term school, college, academy, university, can be used in different contexts to denote an institution of higher education. 3 The managing director of Kings College London Business made history by being the first person to be awarded for ‘services to knowledge transfer’. She is reported as having said that this was recognition of knowledge transfer as a ‘mature discipline’ (Times Higher Education 7 January 2010, p. 8). 4 There has been a fundamental rethinking of the public sector which involves private and not-for-profit companies, non-government organizations (NGOs), and voluntary organisations collaborating in income-generation activities within the public sector (e.g. see Ball 2007; Harris 2007b). 5 The Robbins Report of 1968 recommended expansion of the sector and an increase in student numbers, but by the time this was implemented the economic and political circumstances had changed. 6 The Act abolished the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), which had been established in 1964, and approved a wide range of academic courses that were offered by institutions outside the university sector. The awards were comparable to those of universities and were recognized by professional associations and employers.

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7 One policy sociologist, Stephen Ball, uses the term ‘education plc’ in the title of his 2007 book to convey the extent to which the private sector has become involved in public education (Ball 2007). 8 One aspect of the mystique surrounding the competence movement, which developed in the 1980s, was an equivocation over the use of ‘competence’ and ‘competency’. While a case can be made for using the latter in a more abstract, general way, this is probably being unduly legislative. In fact, the slipperiness of the terms has surely contributed to the mystique. In what follows I shall not aim at consistency. 9 2009 was the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. See http:// www.create2009.europa.eu/about_the_year.html 10 It is interesting to note that Greenwich has been the location for other important speeches by government ministers. In 1965, Tony Crossland, Education Secretary, opened the Thames Polytechnic Computer Centre and its associated buildings (Thames Polytechnic became the University of Greenwich). Crossland also announced the setting up of polytechnics to provide a stronger connection between academia and the world of employment. In 2000, the then Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, gave a speech in which he referred to the ending of the binary divide. He argued that the removal of the binary system did not mean that all universities should offer the same type of education or pursue the same goals. 11 The article also states that the new database will become a global resource of ‘unprecedented sophistication’, which will create ‘datadriven portraits of globally significant research institutions’. What is needed, the article continues, is for ‘robust, dynamic and, above all, transparent and verifiable data on scholarly performance’. There are two other world university rankings – the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings and the Webometrics. 12 In Spring 2009, new immigration rules were introduced that placed greater responsibility on universities and colleges for their international students; institutions can face a ban on recruiting international students if they fail to follow the new procedures. These include: keeping copies of passports; updating student records and contact details; reporting unauthorized absences to the UK Border Agency; informing the Border Agency if students do not enrol in their courses. International students must sign a register for every taught session they attend and failure to do so will be taken seriously; the university could be deemed in breach of Home Office guidelines (Kuo 2010.) 13 The use of texts from a diverse range may seem appealing and relevant to the student body, but they may not have any academic coherence or

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18 19 20

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rationale, in which case there is a danger that such a democratization of the curriculum may only be a gesture, and one that is at the expense of opening up different ways of thinking through the exploration of texts which are part of a disciplinary canon (see Chapter Five). In the USA, Gary Rhoades (2009) notes a big change in postdoctoral research, where in the past it was seen as a kind of apprenticeship with full tenure at the end of it. In the UK, there have been calls by the 1994 Group to restrict state-funded PhDs to research-intensive universities rather than across the sector (Times Higher Education 7 January 2010, p. 9). There are, unfortunately, some horror stories of poor supervision where supervisors scarcely met their students, poor records of students’ progress, high rates of drop out, and poor quality theses. The Quality Assurance Agency’s revised code of 2004 suggested that each student has one main supervisor who is part of a supervisory team; its 2007 review of practice noted that most universities now have supervisory teams. Alan Cribb and Sharon Gewirtz’s (2006) interview with a supervisor illustrates some of the concerns that can arise under a more regulatory culture (see also Leonard et al. 2005; Johnson et al. 2000). The then six Member States were Belgium, West Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Britain, Ireland and Denmark joined in 1973. The method adopted by the European Union to improve the quality of higher education is known as the Open Method of Co-operation – it is not through legislation but through benchmarking linked to collective goals (Dale and Robertson 2009). We shall return to this in Chapter Four, but here it is worth noting the mixed response to Bologna across countries and institutions. For example, in parts of Spain there have been anti-Bologna protests (Harris and Melcion 2009). To celebrate the establishment in March 2010 of the European Area of Higher Education, the UK Higher Education Europe Unit published a document outlining what has been achieved so far and illustrating the UK contribution to the Bologna Process. Voldemar Tomusk (2004) suggests that politics play an important role in governments wanting to join Bologna, viewing it as an aid to entry into the EU. The Tuning project was set up in response to the challenges set down by the objectives of Bologna in Europe and it has, to date, involved over 100 European universities. The aim of this project is quite specific: to identify and create the subject-specific knowledge and transferable

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PART TWO

Language

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Chapter 3

Students’ Experiences in Translation Flows of international students bring not only financial reward but are also an asset to universities, staff and home students in learning to work and live as global citizens in an increasingly globalized world. UKCISA TALIS Initiative, position paper, (December 2008) Even in the case that I will have to go back, I won’t be that Slovak. I’ll be always changed by what I experienced here and by other cultures I saw here.1 International student studying in England

I. Making sense of things In Part One we noted the various kinds of transformations that have taken place in the university since its medieval origins and we looked at current trends in policy both nationally and internationally. In Part Two the focus narrows to look more closely at questions of language and translation and we begin by considering students’ experiences of these. The epigraphs indicate the wide-ranging benefits that can accrue from the presence of international students. It was suggested earlier that translation is normally understood in relatively simple terms, as the transfer of meaning from one language to another. Translation and language are regarded essentially as technical matters that sometimes can create considerable difficulties, for example, a conversation between a non-native and native English speaker where both find it difficult to follow what the other is saying. In this chapter we shall see that this way of thinking is limited and does not allow us to see other important things about language. This will become clearer in this chapter, when we consider students’ experiences in higher education, both for non-native English-speaking students and native English-speaking students in UK universities. It is, of course, impossible to discuss in general terms the experience of international students – the student population is incredibly diverse and there are many UK-born bilingual students. I shall confine most comments to Chinese students and the reason is threefold: first, Chinese students

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represent the largest group of international students in UK institutions of higher education across most levels of study;2 second, the Chinese language is not part of the Indo-European language system, which shares many characteristics; there is no shared European etymology for the Chinese student, unlike that of many other international students; and third, China is the most populous country in the world, with an economy whose fortunes are now critical for the world as a whole – the international trade in students is particularly important for China. In many respects then China is a special case. The discussion will be concerned primarily with the written word rather than the spoken word; in the past it was customary to speak of going to university to ‘read’ history or to ‘read physics’, in acknowledgement of the importance of the text in the disciplinary canon. It is also the case that writing gives you something back that you might not have perceived in the spoken form. Section II looks briefly at the transition to higher education for all students irrespective of whether they are national or international. Section III looks at the research that has been carried out on international students and then in section IV we consider the experience of Chinese students in particular. In section V our attention moves to native Englishspeaking students; although their position is obviously quite different to Chinese students, we shall see how questions of language and translation are present here as well. This section also takes an historical look at the way in which English has been shaped in the Western world. The final section will introduce Heidegger’s insights on language, which will prepare the way for a more detailed consideration of these in Chapter Four, which ends Part Two, and to which we shall return again in Part Three.

II. Mobile homes For many students the transition from school to university is exciting, because of the greater freedom and anticipation of new experiences, and daunting, especially in the first few weeks when everything is new and confusing as you find your way around the campus and meet your tutors and fellow students for the first time. Registration and course administration procedures are complicated and particularly confusing for international students whose first language is not English and who have to familiarize themselves quickly with different bureaucratic systems, as well as different social and cultural practices. For more mature young people and adults who are returning to education after a long absence it can be especially daunting because they may feel as if they are outsiders or that they do not belong. The diversity of the student population makes it increasingly difficult to talk about ‘the student experience’ as in previous generations when

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the student profile was characterized most likely by full-time middle-class 18 to 21-year-olds, usually living away from their family home. As noted in Chapter Two, there are more part-time and mature students from a wider range of socio-economic backgrounds as well as ethnicities and nationalities. There are also students who study at a distance or by ‘e-learning’ whose main contact with tutors and the university is via the internet and intranet rather than face-to-face. All students, however, have to get accustomed to the workings of the institution including, for example, the different academic and disciplinary cultures which are unlike those of other organizations. The larger and more diverse the institution becomes the more elaborate the student support services need to be, and such services have grown significantly over the last two decades. They include counselling services, provision for different religious faiths, careers services, accommodation and financial advice, and an international office that deals with issues relating specifically to international students.3 Support for international students includes induction and orientation courses and this is often followed up later with other social activities to encourage cultural sensitivity and understanding across the student population so, for example, there may be a cultural week, an international women’s week, and an inter-faith week.4 The Students’ Union, run by and for students, is another important service, and student societies also play a useful role in the socialization and familiarization process; this is also the case with international societies which have emerged in response to the needs of different cultural and ethnic groups. There is also more training provided for academic and non-academic staff working closely with the student body including courses on, for example, ‘diversity awareness’. The various transformations undergone by the university (including widening participation and internationalization strategies) affect the nature of teaching and learning, and we discussed some of these in the previous chapter. For some students, it is difficult to adjust to the demands of academic study at university level. For others, in particular international students from the Middle East and South East Asia, there may be difficulties because they are used to didactic teaching methods and may feel uncomfortable with the teaching style in UK universities where taking the initiative, critiquing course texts, or putting forward their point of view in a group discussion or in a one-to-one tutorial with their tutor is the norm. Tutors cannot take things for granted concerning prior educational experience, as they may have done in the past, and have to be more aware of the diversity of students’ backgrounds, and with regard to students whose first language is not English, the different ways of using language, both spoken and written. One example of this (and without trying to generalize or over-simplify) would be the tendency for native Spanish-speaking students to write in long sentences where the central idea may not be clear at the outset but may unfold more

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slowly, in contrast to the shorter sharper sentence construction generally found in modern English, where the main idea is succinctly presented and then elaborated upon. This difference in style may make it more difficult for some students to conform to the style of writing expected in their course of study. There is a lot of scope for misunderstanding and disagreement over what is considered appropriate; and it is important to discuss these matters if the tutor is to support and nurture their students’ academic progress as well as to encourage them to draw on their experiences and knowledge. This is a fruitful and important area for discussion but it can get overlooked because of pressures of time or because of the tendency to consider language as a technical matter and peculiar to a person’s competence or otherwise in a language. There is a difficult balance between this and meeting the particular requirements of an English academic course that necessarily expects students to learn the appropriate academic and linguistic conventions to complete their study successfully. This is an issue that I am well aware of from my own experience of working with international students. There is too little space and time for developing an understanding of the diverse political and cultural contexts that have helped influence students thinking about the world before they come to study in the UK. In the past, when the majority of students were ‘home’ students, perhaps there were grounds for arguing that this would be known intuitively. Having looked more generally at the diversity of the student population and the nature of the institution, it is time to consider in a little more detail particular aspects of language and translation experienced by Chinese international students. Before doing so, it may be helpful to look at the research that has been carried out in this area.

III. Research findings show . . . The first thing to note is the paucity of research. It is significant perhaps that despite the importance of international education to the government there has been little funded research on international students’ views and experiences about their study while in a UK institution. Moreover, a review of the research by Viv Caruna and Nicola Spurling (2007) found that of the research that exists, little is published. Generally it takes the form of MEd dissertations or PhD theses, and while these are insightful and valuable, they provide individual accounts of particular experiences. The authors also note that the research tends to see international students as a homogeneous group and fails to take a holistic approach that contextualizes students’ experiences within both the home and host cultures. The research does not consider students’ problems in relation to institutional structures and

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practices, thereby reinforcing a common view that the problem lies with the student; this is compounded by an absence of longitudinal studies that look at students’ future lives and careers. The UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA), does fund small research projects, but they are essentially quantitative surveys that provide a snapshot of what is happening and again this tends to be concerned with student satisfaction with institutional practices, such as views about the quality and usefulness of course information provided, help and support with accommodation, financial advice and support with English academic skills. The government, as part of its internationalization strategy, also commissions small studies carried out by institutions’ international office, but this does not involve in-depth exploration of what it means to be an international student studying in a UK university. A more substantive piece of research combining qualitative and quantitative approaches and funded by the ESRC is a two-year study (2006–8) exploring international students’ experiences in four universities in the UK. The focus of this research is on students’ intercultural experiences.5 The research seeks to contribute to developing the quality of UK higher education provision and to develop a theoretical model of the factors that impact on the international adaptation of international students. One interesting finding is the extent to which international students overestimate how easy they think certain things will be, such as feeling relaxed in speaking in group discussions and working with British students. In both cases, their views changed a few months after arrival. While this research offers a useful analysis and offers constructive answers to the objectives set out, it does not address the questions that are of most concern here, namely how we are changed by internationalization. This is not a criticism, because this question was outside the scope of the study; however, it does illustrate a problem that researchers face today, and that is the way in which research increasingly is driven by policy. For example, the emphasis on ‘quality’ and ‘good practice’ reflects the culture of performativity, and various terms are not properly defined, as though there was consensus about their meaning – for example, ‘internationalization’, ‘intercultural experience’ and ‘interculturality’. These terms are left to do the work on their own. A second and related concern is to do with an assumption about consensus and harmony as necessarily important to what are regarded as good educational practices. This seems to suggest that there is no place for engaging with difficulty, conflict and contestation. This happens often in political discourse where terms are used unproblematically and in a simplistic kind of way about quite complex matters. It is worth considering an example here which is from a speech given by the Government Minister, David Lammy, to the Royal Society, entitled ‘The value of higher education in the arts and

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humanities’ (Lammy 2009). He starts the speech by saying that he wants to move beyond the ‘sterility of the two cultures’, and to present an argument that is not about the economic benefit of a university degree (although he finds time to mention this and quote figures on export earnings that derive from higher education), in order to affirm the importance of the arts and humanities because this is one of the main factors that defines British culture and British identity in the 21st Century. That it is an indispensable component of the glue that holds the country together and without which we cannot truly flourish. He refers to the richness of the medieval tradition of the university and of a liberal education but does not elaborate on what these offer contemporary society, and moves on to his main point, which is about the contribution of an arts education to social cohesion. The importance of a degree is not only because it can provide ‘a gateway to a different kind of life and a new perspective on the world around us’, or because graduates get better jobs, but because the arts and humanities foster community cohesion, and this is perhaps the most interesting justification. Some people claim, in my view rightly, that the ethos and skills of scholarly enquiry and debate, the belief that intellectual curiosity as well as the exposure of difference that university studies brings allow for what I sometimes call an ‘encounter culture’; it has values and is absolutely counterweight to violent extremism or other forms of bigotry. Some indeed go further and point to the role of the arts in creating a sense of common culture, of a British culture that shifts and adapts over time but which nevertheless binds us all together . . . the arts and humanities in higher education are a powerful force for assimilating a disparate and often contradictory set of influences into that ever-changing thing that we call Britishness. There is a rather simplistic link here between academic study and community cohesion; the political undercurrent here is more to do with fears about terrorism than the cultural value of education. It is also interesting to note that his comments do not refer to international students who are likely to leave the UK after their study: what of the value of arts and humanities to them? The value surely does not lie in engendering a sense of Britishness! Let us now look at international students from China and their experiences of higher education in the UK.

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IV. English culture shock The majority of students who come to the UK from China to study are likely to have had some experience of Western and English culture through the literature they have been exposed to while at school, and other forms of media. Their experience in the UK, however, is quite different from other international students from Europe in a number of respects. There is a shared cultural heritage in the West that European students can draw upon; Chinese students have a very different cultural heritage – and one that for much of the twentieth century was more closed and inward-looking than others. The open-door policy of the 1970s, the globalization of capital and developments in information technology have all increased access to and engagement with European culture.6 Such movements, in turn, have extended the kind of literature and other resources available in the original and for translation into Chinese for use in school. The vastly different historical, political and cultural influences that have shaped China present a number of factors that need to be considered, but one of the most significant is the nature of language. Unlike Indo-European languages, which share common features in terms of grammar, Chinese is very different. Verbs do not conjugate like those such as English or Spanish, and there are no tenses or voices. There are fewer pronouns and they are used less often than in the Romance languages such as English, Spanish or Italian. There are at least four languages spoken in contemporary China, although some people refer to different dialects rather than languages: Mandarin is spoken by around 850 million people; Wu by around 90 million; and Min and Cantonese are spoken by roughly the same number, 70 million. The official language is Mandarin (Crystal 2009).7 From the early twentieth century onwards official and legal documents, as well as books and newspapers, have been written in vernacular Chinese rather than the classical Chinese that was used in earlier centuries, including the writings of Confucius. A minority of the population will have full reading comprehension of Classical Chinese; most school or university students, unless studying classical Chinese, will not have a good understanding (ibid). Chinese is tonal – the pitch or tone affects the meaning. The writing system is meaning-based, therefore people with different dialects can understand each other when they write – unlike in other languages where different dialects have different words. Written Chinese, the oldest system of writing in continuous use, is based on characters; it is unlike an alphabet which represents only sounds, in that each Chinese character has a unique meaning. Words are made up of combinations of characters, for example, the characters for ‘electric’ and ‘vision’ when combined become ‘television’, and ‘electric’ and ‘brain’ become ‘computer’. The French sinologist,

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François Jullien, thinks that Chinese is absolutely different from Greek and that Chinese verbs do not have tenses because there is not the same concept of time as there is in the Western world, a concept originally set out by Aristotle and later reworked by Kant (Ricoeur 2006). Most Chinese international students will have spent their school education learning English, usually taught by a Chinese teacher of English, but they will not have spent much time in an English-speaking country to practise their English language skills. It is unlikely that many will have read Western texts either in translation or in the original. One can imagine that the ‘culture shock’ is perhaps most keenly felt by Chinese students who are studying in the social sciences or humanities because here a central concern is with the critical reading of texts, with debate and discussion. Students will be required to discuss the ideas and arguments of the academic texts in English, and in order to complete the course successfully they will need to be able to demonstrate in their written work that they have reached the required academic level. Take, for example, students in an education department enrolled in a one year masters programme focusing on education and globalization. They will be required to read literature covering theoretical, political, philosophical and historical perspectives on education and education policy and the majority of this literature will be written by Western academics. In addition, students will be required to consider these issues in relation to their own particular national and institutional contexts and discuss similarities and differences in them. The student must be able not only to understand the academic and subject-specific language and terminology used by the authors they are expected to read, but also to summarize and critique, in English, the arguments they have read and consider their implications for practice. This is particularly difficult for Chinese students because their language, as noted earlier, does not share European etymology or common features of language structure and therefore they are at a disadvantage to other international students from Europe. It is probably the case that their tutors will have more experience of Europe – apart from those for whom it is their specialist interest – than China. Such familiarity makes it easier to find commonalities from which to begin a discussion to consider differences and particularities of thinking about education and about educational practices, and to begin to discuss problems of interpretation, meaning and translation. This is likely to be far more difficult for the Chinese student and their tutor because of the lack of common ground from which to begin. There is also more of a problem with concepts and terminology for Chinese students than European students and English-speaking international students, for example the notion of democracy – which for European students may not be a concept they would associate with the Chinese state, whereas Chinese students would

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not recognize Europeans’ definition of democracy in Western capitalist liberal societies. There are then, unquestionably, practical problems that face students whose first language is not English. Universities take this extremely seriously and spend a great deal of time and resources in supporting their students through, for example, English Language Centres. There are, however, other questions that are not technical and which cannot be resolved easily through devising practical solutions. This is something that is not confined to internationalization specifically but to education more generally. In the UK, for example, much of the political debate about higher education in recent years has revolved around financial concerns. Very little time has been spent discussing the point of higher education. As Richard Smith and Paul Standish (2001, p. 120) point out, ‘what kind of world we need a competitive economy for ’ is not talked about (italics in original). An anecdote might help here. It concerns a conversation with a Chinese student who was in the third year of her PhD, having successfully completed a one-year masters programme in an English university. She spoke of the difficulties she had experienced during her year on the masters and described these in terms of an identity crisis, explaining that she had begun by trying to adopt the appropriate style of an English student – which had led her to ignore or reject her earlier educational experiences in China. These were so different that now, studying in such a foreign context, she could not reconcile the ways in which she was now thinking about herself and her life, compared with how she had customarily thought before. It was too troubling and unsettling, and it felt as though she had to make a choice between one or the other. Although she had, from the very beginning, appeared quietly confident and comfortable with academic study and life in England, she did not feel able to share her anxieties and doubts with any of her tutors, despite having good surface relationships with the course team and students. She thought the problem was hers – that there was something wrong with her – rather than seeing it as a legitimate area for intellectual discussion. Her response, unfortunately, is not at all surprising given the deficit model that tends to be applied by institutions. It was only while working on her PhD that she recognized and was able to articulate and speak about her experience. As numbers of international students continue to rise, there is a danger that problems will continue to be construed as technical requiring technical solutions; this will perpetuate the tendency to think in dichotomous ways. Language tends to be seen in terms of binaries – ‘first language’ and ‘second language’; ‘native tongue’ and ‘foreign tongue’. The above anecdote suggests that it is more complex than this. The distinction between native and non-native speaker is also more complicated in that many people are bilingual. In the UK, for example, nearly 15 per cent of primary school

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students speak a different language at home, and in several British universities a large proportion of students are effectively bi-lingual (Watson 2007). It is now time to turn to the native English-speaking student.

V. Is this English? The experience of the native English speaker is also an experience of translation but one that is quite different from the non-English-speaking student. For English speakers, there is a danger that language is seen as incidental. There is an arrogance and blindness that comes with the dominance of English in the world – we are accustomed to others having to use English. It is obvious, but worth stating at this juncture that this book, written in English, would not have come about without my exposure to the writings and ideas of German and French scholars whose works I have read in translation: Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. It is not only international students for whom translation is an everyday experience. The following section takes an historical look to draw attention to the way in which our own language, that of native English speakers in the Western world, has been shaped. Language is central to our lives as human beings. We live our lives in language and as a result it may be easy to take it for granted. This is particularly the case with English, the global language of our time, and because so many people speak it we are less aware of the particularity of English as one of many languages. Its dominance is based on the former political and military power of Empire, British and American. Dominance does not, however, mean inherent superiority or essential purity. David Crystal (2009) considers the fact that English is the language that has ‘borrowed’ most from other languages – over 350 languages. Over three-quarters of the English lexicon originate from Classical or Romance; it is interesting to contrast this with French, which has tried to protect itself from other languages. In France, apparently, it is illegal, in official contexts, to use an English word where a French word already exists (ibid). Language is used to communicate in a social context. The language of human beings is quite different from the sign systems of the animal world; it has a reflexive capacity. We need language to talk about language. We can talk about what is not real as well as what is real; we can talk about the possible, the hypothetical and the utopian. We can use different words to convey the same meaning; there are endless ways in which a story can be told. The same word can have different meanings and be interpreted in different ways depending on the context; I have no control over how my words in this book will be read and interpreted. Language always requires

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a dialogue, whether it is between the self and another within the same language group, or whether it is with a stranger or foreigner who speaks a different language. In the written text there is an author and a reader; how the author’s words will be read and understood is not fixed but will depend in part on the context in which the text was written and the context in which the reader reads it. With language then there is also interpretation. There is no simple or straightforward transference of meaning between the text/author and reader; linguistic context is not enough. You need to know something about the context in which the writing was written because translation involves a relationship not between two languages but between two cultures. In a text such as the scriptures it is very difficult to understand completely its archaic language because life has changed so much, and if the words used then were transferred to a contemporary context their meaning would be different. Words used in one period of history can take on another meaning in a different period; for example, in the early twentieth century in Britain the word ‘gay’ meant lively, or bright or merry.8 There is an important relationship between language, culture and power. We can think about this in relation to the Western world and the contribution of Greek, Latin and Hebrew in different periods and the importance of these for constructing cultural and national identities. When Christianity became the state religion in the Roman Empire in the early centuries, Greek was still dominant in the Mediterranean but Latin was dominant in the West. In the fourth century, Pope Damasus appointed Jerome to make an authoritative translation of the Bible into Latin, for which task Jerome regarded only Hebrew source texts as definitive. (Denton 1993) Umberto Eco makes an interesting observation in The Search for the Perfect Language that St Augustine, a central figure of the Christian Church contemporary with Jerome, did not know Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, although he believed that Hebrew was the primordial language, the language spoken before Babel, and he had little understanding of Greek, the language of the New Testament. His reading was taken from the Latin version. After the Bible had been translated into Latin, the need to know Hebrew declined. From the dominance of Latin emerged the Romance languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Rumanian), each of which developed out of popular Latin. In the medieval period there was a distinction between religious language and the vernaculars of the ordinary people; in Christianity the language of Latin, and in Judaism the sacred language of Hebrew. We shall discuss this further in Chapter Five. The sacred languages of Christianity and of Judaism are not the same. Latin does not hold the same significance for Christians as ancient Hebrew does for Jews (by whom the latter is regarded as the language of God). Unlike Hebrew, Latin is also associated with political domination, first with the Roman Empire and afterwards under later rulers.

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Today, English is the hegemonic language, facilitated by the globalization of capital and technological innovation – the basis of the language of computers and electronic communication is English. The political and military power of Britain’s imperial past contributed to the spread of English across the world; the fact that the most economically powerful country, the USA, is English-speaking also helps explain its position of dominance today, alongside technological and scientific developments that have required English. Crystal (2009) explains why English is a global language and how it has achieved this status. Not only has English been taken up by significant numbers of people in non-English speaking countries, but also it has been given special status across the world, either as ‘official status’ or as priority discipline within a country’s foreign-language teaching. English is the language that is most widely taught – in over 100 countries – as a foreign language. In 1996, English replaced French as the chief foreign language in schools in the former French colony, Algeria. About one-quarter of the world’s population is fluent or competent in English, and this figure is growing. Traces of the dead languages, such as classical Greek and Latin, continue to mark various languages today – we saw in Chapter One how this was represented in Brian Friel’s play, Translations. Languages also borrow words from others, often leaving them in the original rather than translating them, for example, from the French: renaissance, café, parasol, joie de vivre. In this sense there is no purity in language. As indicated earlier, there are a substantial number of texts that make up the disciplinary canon in UK universities that are translations. In Education there will be the key texts of Vygotsky and Rousseau; in Sociology the texts will be from Marx, Weber and Durkheim; in Philosophy those of Plato and Aristotle will be essential reading; and in English Literature classic and modern texts will be studied. It is likely, especially at undergraduate level, that such texts will not be read in the original by students, and perhaps many teachers will not have read the canonical texts of their subject in the original. The same is true in schools, where many texts that are commonly used are translations of one sort or another; the exceptions would be contemporary novels and current textbooks written specifically for use in school. Native English speakers can take language for granted because we are so familiar with it and because most texts are available in English. Of course by saying this, two immediate criticisms can be made: (i) you cannot really understand an author unless you read their original work; and (ii) you cannot really understand, for example, Plato or Nietzsche, unless you are Greek or German. While this is in some ways true, it is important to make a distinction between linguistic context and the broader context in which the text is written. As George Steiner (1998) notes, each human language maps the world differently, and different societies

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have different ways of describing the world. As noted earlier, every reading of a text is an act of translation where the reader is trying to interpret the words and meaning for herself – whether one is reading the text in its original or translated version. In the case of the latter, to translate a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, for example, word by word would not capture the imagery and rhythms of his phrasing; nor is it a straightforward task to transpose the original Latin-American Spanish to German or Chinese. There are good and bad translations; a good translation requires an understanding of the context and view of the world that informs the original text. The translated text is in some ways an interpretation of the original. And, we can find something new each time we read a text. Texts such as the Bible and works of classical literature are not read in the original, but come to us through translations of which particular versions are deemed the most authentic or accurate, for example, the King James version of the Bible in England and the Lutheran translation in Germany. Umberto Eco (2003) discusses Martin Luther’s use of two verbs synonymously – übersetzen (to translate) and verdeutschen (to Germanize) which suggests how translation can function as cultural assimilation. The Lutheran translation could feed in to the German Romantics’ view that literature and language are important in strengthening the sense of national identity – something that was very important in Germany after the experiences of the Thirty Years War. There is a difference, therefore, between modernizing a text and keeping it archaic; a difference between ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ a text. Luther is an example of the latter. It is also worth returning to the story of Babel, which was mentioned in the opening chapter. The idea that there is an originary language, a perfect language, or that one is possible – a pre-Babel moment – was strong during the Enlightenment when scientific method emerged as the dominant method of enquiry – and a particular conception of rationality, one that can be described as encyclopaedic, in which reason is viewed as impersonal, universal and disinterested. This, however, was not confined to the period of the Enlightenment as Umberto Eco exquisitely portrays in his The Search for the Perfect Language.9 The myth of Babel has been interpreted throughout history (and in most cultures, not just European) generally in one of two ways – either as a horrible catastrophe that led to confusion and a scattering of peoples and languages across the world, or as the way things were – there were multiple languages before Babel as suggested in Genesis 10, which refers to Noah and his sons who speak different tongues (see also Chapter Six). The latter interpretation suggests there was no catastrophe but rather ‘this is how it is’; it is part of the human condition.

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VI. Greek dynamics What the discussion above draws our attention to is that different languages open up different worlds. It is different conceptions of the world that are at stake here. We are inclined to see the world in terms of a subject/object divide, and because of this we see language as mere communication. For the Greeks, however, it was quite different; the world was already dynamic, and this dynamism found in the world depended on a sense of logos – of the word, of language – that is virtually obscured in modern thought. Such a sense of logos is not to be understood merely as a tool of communication: we need to take seriously the possibility that in a real sense it calls the world into being. Take, for example, Van Gogh’s cornfields: what is most vivid is the sense of energy that runs through the whole picture. Heidegger offers us some particularly useful insights which are relevant here. He claims that we need to understand that something about language was lost in the move from the Greek world to the Roman world and the translation of Greek words into Latin. The Greek terms physis and hyle become natura and materia. The translation into Latin alters the meaning of these words in a subtle but significant way. For Aristotle, physis was ‘the essence of things that have a source of movement within themselves’. The world for Aristotle is a world of self-developing things, and physis is the principle of growth and change. Hyle is the ‘stuff of material things’ which Aristotle thought of as ‘needing a form to make up a thing’. It can also mean ‘that out of which something has been made’ (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 1999).Viewing the world in terms of physis and hyle suggests the world is dynamic and that human beings bring things to light through logos, reason. The Latin words natura and materia suggest something quite different: they suggest a world that is static rather than dynamic, consisting of lifeless objects and human subjects, which, as we shall discuss in the next chapter, derives from Western philosophical tradition with its rigid subject/object dichotomy. In the Greek world physis and hyle are connected to logos; they cannot be simply detached.10 In the Roman world this holistic view breaks down, and we can see, in turn, how this happens in the Latin translations of these Greek terms, and then becomes sharpened yet further in the modern world through distinctions between subject and object. In this chapter we have looked more closely into students’ experiences of language and translation. We have begun to see that translation is more complicated than moving from one language to another, being supposedly primarily a technical matter. We have seen also how questions of language and translation are present for native English-speaking students as well as non-native English-speaking students. Because we live our lives in language it is easy to take language for granted, particularly in the case of English; it

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is easy for native English speakers to forget that it is one of many languages, or to be aware of the ways in which languages borrow words from others. We looked briefly at Heidegger’s insights on language and we shall return to these again in Part Three. First, however, we need to return to the international policy referred to in the previous chapter; in light of what we have discussed above, the international language of policy requires a more careful reading.

Endnotes 1 This quotation is from an international student cited in Michele Schweisfurth and Qing Gu’s (2009) Exploring the experiences of international students in UK Higher Education: possibilities and limits of interculturality in university life. This research was funded by the ESRC. See also footnote 5. 2 See the eighth report on patterns of Higher Education Institutions in the UK. 3 A recent development is the Money Doctors, an initiative first piloted by the Financial Services Agency, designed to help students learn how to manage their finances and avoid getting into debt. 4 UKCISA has various guides to support universities in dealing with international students, for example, Mentoring Schemes for International Students: a practical guide, and International Students in Crisis: a guide for institutions. 5 The ESRC-funded research, A Comparative Study of International Students’ Intercultural Experiences, had three aims: (i) to identify and explain the impact of intercultural experiences on international students’ sense of engagement in UK higher education; (ii) to contribute to the development of the quality of UK higher education provision for international students by investigating variations in the needs and challenges these students face during their stay in the UK; and (iii) to develop a theoretical model of the key positive and negative moderating and mediating factors that impact on the intercultural adaptation of international higher education students over time. Four institutions were involved – two pre-1992 universities and two post-1992 universities, and the researchers included international and home students in their sample. The study is relatively small – 228 students returned the questionnaire that was sent out to all international first year undergraduate students in the four universities. 6 The Beijing Olympic Games of 2008 was another important event for China. In the Prime Minister’s New Year message to the Chinese

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The University in Translation people, he referred to the Games and to the growing interdependence of China and Britain, stating that both believe in the benefits of globalization, with the UK as the ‘hub for global services’, and China ‘the powerhouse for manufacturing’. Cantonese was the main language used in Hong Kong during British colonial rule, when there was a large migrant population and a large number of Cantonese. In Britain, the word ‘gay’ is often used by teenagers to refer to something that is not good in a similar way that the word ‘wicked’ is used to refer to something that is good. In the Middle Ages, Hebrew was thought to be the divine language and was, therefore, also the originary language. This view was also held by Augustine. Logos has been used in various ways, but one meaning is ‘way’. In Chinese translations of the Bible tao is the written form for ‘word’. The Chinese also use tao in translations of the Greek logos, which is also used for ‘word’.

Chapter 4

An International Lexicon Vibrant communities of the best international students and academics keep the UK at the cutting edge and foster vital global partnerships and research collaborations. We must work hard to maintain our status as one of the foremost partners in international higher education. This, after all, is a major export industry . . . It could be worth £20 billion to the UK economy by 2020. Professor Drummond Bone, President of Universities UK, (April, 2006) [We] are optimistic that the European Higher Education Area will be a framework within which large numbers of students and staff will be partners in quality higher education and research for which their own geographic or social origin or the geographic location of their higher education will be considerably less important than it is today. We are also convinced that improving the recognition of qualifications is a key factor in its success or failure . . . Council of Europe higher education series No. 4, (reprinted 2008)

I. Going international In Chapter Two we looked at the role of the European Commission in shaping higher education policy and noted the growing importance of the supranational policy arena over the national. The rationale for this shift is globalization and the challenges and threats this is thought to pose to Europe; there is also a belief that national policies are incapable of dealing with these challenges and that a more coordinated and systematic strategy is required if Europe is to compete successfully in a global economy. In sections I and II of this chapter, we return to the theme of Europe and examine more closely the policy discourse and documents from the European Commission. We will then move on, in section III, to consider the internationalization of higher education, which is an extremely important aspect of European and national policy. As we can see from the first epigraph above,

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education has become the UK’s biggest export; and given that English has become the international language this is perhaps not surprising, nor the fact that education is an extremely important commodity for other Englishspeaking countries – most notably the USA and Australia.1 Also, in relation to the European Union, the creation of a single Higher Education Area, referred to in the second epigraph, is central to its policy of increasing both the quality and competitiveness of higher education. In sections IV and V we return to Bologna to examine more closely the language used to describe the role of the university in Europe, and to note how this changes over time and the problems that this gives rise to. In the final section, some of the insights that Heidegger brings to questions about technology and language will be introduced and considered in light of their relevance to higher education and the questions that are of central concern in this book. The chapter is not concerned with providing an account of policy, rather it is about teasing out matters to do with language and how language is used and understood in policy documents in different national contexts. First, however, it is important to say something more about Europe and what policymakers mean when they refer to the ‘European economy’ and ‘European competitiveness’; as Robertson points out, these are not selfevident entities but rather can be seen as ways of constructing space and territory at a supranational level (Robertson 2009). All sorts of interesting and complex questions are raised to do with language and meaning in the current political context, in which appeals are made to European identity and the importance of realizing the potential of European values and practices in a global world. Noticeable features are the recurrent themes of community, citizenship, cohesion, and commensurability in the policy discourse. It will not be possible to do justice to exploring the notion of Europe or European identity here, but those aspects most pertinent to our concerns will be sketched out.

II. Essentially Europe Europe can be seen as a geographical, cultural and political space, one that has been associated with Christianity and its dominance in medieval times, when Church and state were closely tied.2 The poet T. S. Eliot wrote evocatively on this subject: It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have – until recently – been rooted . . . I do not believe

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that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Eliot (1948, p. 122) There are many who would not have shared Eliot’s view of the essence of European culture when he wrote this and less so today, especially with the entry of non-Christian countries into the European Union. Another view of Europe is one associated with the Enlightenment and values of humanism and secularism; a key feature of the Enlightenment was the promotion of humanist ideals that favoured secular over religious rationality. As we saw in the first chapter with the rise of modern science, religious and moral values that once informed the university were replaced with secular rational thought. In Chapter Two we saw in European Union and European Commission documents an emphasis on the European dimension of higher education and the desire for developing a European higher education system. Here I want to return to the Memorandum of 1991 (one of the documents discussed) because it was, as Terence McLaughlin (2000) observes, a pivotal document in the development of European higher education. The Memorandum and the responses that it provoked are weakened, McLaughlin suggests, by their inattention to various questions concerning matters of principle and value which, he rightly argues, are essential for any reflection or debate, and these are to do with the notion of European distinctiveness. Several examples are given, including the following two. First, the claim that higher education systems should play an ‘active part’ in helping to achieve the goals of ‘European integration’; this was taken as a given but it is not clear how the term integration was being used. Second, the claim that the ‘European dimension’ is an important means of confirming ‘European identity’ and that higher education should cultivate a ‘European affiliation’ in students was also taken as a given or unproblematic. It could be seen to clash with another view of the European Commission that higher education should foster independent judgement and critical thought. McLaughlin suggests that the claims were used for rhetorical purpose in the discourse of the ‘European dimension’. The Memorandum attaches a great deal of importance to economic and employment considerations in relation to higher education. The Commission regarded increased participation in higher education as necessary in order to raise the level of knowledge and skills required by the European workforce in order to be competitive (Commission of the European Communities 1991).3 While the document noted the importance of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and that economic considerations alone should not govern policy, the emphasis in the document was

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clearly with the latter, and remains so. As Kevin Williams (2000) observes, the goal of the European project is a united and unitary ‘New Europe’ which is underpinned by a narrowly conceived notion of European citizenship in which human beings are self-interested consumers. This point is also brought out in Pádraig Hogan’s analysis of European documents in which he draws our attention to the absence of moral purpose behind education policy; the main concern is about performance in a market culture and the promotion of excellence (Hogan 1998). In a publication written by the UK Higher Education Europe Unit celebrating the establishment of the EHEA in March 2010, it states that the participating countries have ‘a shared mission, which is to promote the excellence of European higher education’. The pursuit of excellence seems to be an end in itself that does not require moral reasoning. While there is a discourse of ‘social Europe’ in European Union documents this tends to be subsumed by the economic imperative and competitiveness discourse that drives much of education policy as we shall see below. The role of education is seen in terms of creating ‘economic agents’ able to contribute to the development of an entrepreneurial society. We shall return to this later. Another important observation about the Memorandum is to do with assumptions about culture and what it means. Susan Mendus usefully distinguishes between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ notions of culture and the Memorandum reflects the former; it is secular and follows the humanist tradition of higher education in Europe. It is also forwardlooking in that it ‘presents us with a particular understanding of the shape and direction which a human life should take and, in so doing, it precludes other conceptions’ (Mendus 2000, p. 73). She contrasts this with a thick vision, which can be found in T. S. Eliot’s understanding of culture, which is backward-looking and, as the earlier quotation from him suggests, draws on a European tradition which is invariably Christian. These remarks about Europe and notions of European culture and identity are important because they remind us how complex such concepts are, and yet, when reading policy documents, such complexity is lost in the desire to affirm solidarity, uniformity and conformity about a sense of being European. The globalization of capital and the technological sophistication that touches every aspect of our lives are factors that are seen as unstoppable. Of course there is some truth in this; we cannot do without technology, but this does not mean that we cannot question our relationship to technology. Current policy does not tend to reflect this more critical or circumspect view, but rather is based on certainty and taken-for-granted assumptions about what the problems are and how these should be addressed. The emergence of the supranational space and the existence of transnational companies involved in

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ICT, and those able to exploit the available technology, combine powerfully to influence policy and thinking. For example, the European Commission’s view is that Europe needs to make the transition to a digital, knowledge-based economy and society (e.g. Lisbon 2000; European Commission 2001a and 2001b).4 Its view is that in order to have a viable education strategy, business must be involved and, as a result, the Commission has encouraged public/ private partnerships as a way to enhance public education.5 Such partnerships are seen as a key mechanism to develop an eLearning/eSociety, which, as Robertson (2009) points out, has extremely important consequences because the role of educational practitioners will be redefined within the framework of these public and private partnerships. It has allowed the European Commission more influence over political and economic strategy. The principal of subsidiarity means that the European Union cannot do what it wants but must have the support of national governments, however, industries, especially those dealing in technology, operate outside national borders, making it more difficult for governments to control. A related point that is useful to bring in here is the importance in international policymaking of organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the OECD, United Nations organizations, and others such as the European Investment Bank. To take the World Bank as a case in point, this has its own very large research department and systems for publicizing its analysis and recommendations, for example, through its ‘Knowledge Bank’. Not only does it play an important role in identifying the problems facing the global economy and solutions, it also influences the ways in which information should be analysed and measured; not surprisingly in such international research the model academic discipline is Economics (Morrow and Torres 2000). The results of international surveys such as the OECD’s, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) or Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMS) are taken extremely seriously by governments. There is also pressure on countries to take part because membership of international surveys (and international regulatory frameworks) is necessary in order to be a ‘serious’ player.6 We shall return to this in the next chapter. Bonal and Rambla (2009) point to the importance of the Maastricht Treaty in introducing the language of quality to the political discourse: ‘the Community shall contribute to the development of quality education by encouraging co-operation between Member States and, if necessary, by supporting and supplementing their action’ (European Union 1992, cited in Bonal and Rambla 2009 p.153).7 Each member country agreed to foster a European dimension which, in turn, would necessitate measurement in order to judge the results of national governments’ efforts to develop this dimension into their education systems. By the same token the European Commission’s receptiveness to business

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has allowed companies such as Apple, IBM, Nokia and Cisco to influence European strategy. For example, these and other big brand names were involved in an eLearning Summit Taskforce to consider the challenges for Europe in meeting the goals of the Lisbon Strategy, 2000. In its report, this group proposed that in order to meet its goals, ‘Europe needs to expand its educational opportunity’ (European eLearning Summit Taskforce 2001). This educational opportunity was conceived in terms of each individual having access to ICT and a means of developing digital literacy in order for them to keep up with technological, economic and social change. Each person, it was thought, would be able to secure their own future through lifelong learning. What was wanted was a transformation of ‘learning institutions’. We need to note that the word ‘education’ was not used, a point to which I will return later. The report talked of needing to provide ‘a step change in the implementation of innovative models of eLearning, the transformation of learning institutions, and the social perception of the role and status of educational practitioners’ (p. 3). Teachers were part of the problem because they were not moving fast enough, nor were they keeping up with changing technology. The European Commission believed that the role of the teacher needed to be developed in order to allow pedagogical innovation to be spread widely so that it would become ‘a systemic part of the education system’ (p. 2). The teacher must become a facilitator whose technological skills and competences rather than professional knowledge and expertise should be seen as central to their role. What is also clear in reading the document is that eLearning was not just seen in terms of improving education across Europe but also crucially about becoming a world leader in ‘learning products and services’ (Robertson 2009). As Robertson points out, the investments in ICT infrastructure, education and training are directed at transforming the forces and means of production. One serious implication of this is that education is losing its public good function at the expense of its importance as a private good in the European space. This brings into question other goals of the European Union concerned with social cohesion and justice. What this, albeit brief, look at the European project shows us is the need to consider carefully questions of language and meaning and to tease out some of the difficulties that arise from the restricted and narrow language of political and educational discourse. We shall now turn to the internationalization agenda.

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III. Setting the agenda The term ‘internationalization’ is used in a variety of ways today in association with the university, for example, the importance attached to the international reputation of an institution as a measure of excellence. Internationalization is also used in relation to globalization and the emergence of a competitive education marketplace.8 The term can refer to curricular issues and the need for an intercultural and/or global dimension to the curriculum (e.g. see Knight 2004). There is also a distinction in the literature between ‘symbolic’ and ‘transformative’ internationalization; the former relates to institutions concerned with generating income from international students while the latter is more concerned with knowledge sharing and with curricular issues (Turner and Robson 2008). In the UK, internationalization is often discussed in relation to the recruitment of international students to UK universities.9 As we can see from the first epigraph, the UK government has vigorously promoted international education. The Prime Minister’s Initiative (PMI) was launched in 1999 in a bid to establish a UK ‘brand’ of international education and to increase the recruitment of international students to higher education institutions. In 2006, a second phase of the PMI was introduced, setting out a five-year strategy to improve the national brand abroad, to secure the position of the UK as a leader in international education, and to improve the student experience (Toyoshima 2007).10 In a report of a UKCISA TALIS Initiative, funded by the Prime Minister’s Initiative, there is a quotation from the Evening Standard, a London-based newspaper, that international students make their choice based on reputation of the course and the lecturers rather than the country, lifestyle or climate (December, 2008). This suggests just how pervasive the international indicators of quality and excellence presented in the format of league tables are. Such objective and seemingly irrefutable evidence is considered all the information that is required to make judgements about the most suitable course of study without reference to broader social, cultural and political contexts and traditions of those institutions mentioned in the tables. Despite the ambiguity of the term, there does seem to be a consensus that internationalization, however defined, is both good and necessary for higher education, as we saw in a previous chapter. The benefits of internationalization tend to be viewed in economic terms; the economic is privileged while educational and cultural dimensions are not addressed.11 There is, however, something odd about the idea of ‘internationalization’ in a globalized world because the term cannot mean the same today as it did at a time prior to the emergence of a global economy. There can be no international relations without nations, but globalization has changed the nature of the nation state (see also Harris 2008).

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Internationalization is an important part of the European Union discourse for higher education.12 The origins of this are complex but Simon Marginson identifies three different strands. The first is the growth of international mobility of people and ideas; the second is international co-operation between member countries in social, cultural and economic activities; and the third is the desire for a single European area of higher education, as we can see in the second epigraph. In addition to these strands is the hope that international collaboration in higher education will increase the global competitiveness of Europe (Marginson 2007a). The way in which policy migrates from the European level to the national is also complex. Take Finland, for example. Like other European Union countries it wants to increase the number of foreign students studying in Finnish higher education institutions, and in order to do this they must offer more courses in English. By contrast, in Sweden where English is more widespread, the emphasis is on non-English modern languages, while in Portugal there appear to be two strategies – one to offer courses in languages other than Portuguese, and the other to offer joint degrees with foreign universities.13 This brings us to the Bologna Process, which we looked at in Chapter Two. This has preoccupied institutions for the last decade with most attention focused on designing new quality-assurance mechanisms and other measures to increase transparency and comparability in order to improve the quality of European higher education.

IV. The true vocation As we saw in Chapter Two, what has come to be known as ‘Bologna’ was not an initiative of the European Union, but since the Lisbon Strategy of 2000, has become an important part of European higher education policy. Bologna can be seen as a response to globalization, and it is a particularly European response. It draws on the idea of cultural richness in Europe, and the role of the university within this. Bologna is designed to manage difference, for example, in devising a system to be able to compare the quality of university qualifications (both academic and professional) and to devise structures that allow mobility among universities in Europe; it does this through endorsing standardized procedures, a form of performativity. There is an assumption that differences can be successfully encompassed within homogenized systems – a point to which we shall come back. Before that we need to return to take a closer look at the language of Bologna. The goals of the Bologna Declaration were given in Chapter Two, and it was noted how the original ones were added to over the years. But this is not the whole story and we need to go back to two earlier documents,

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the first of which was written by a group of European university rectors eleven years before the signing of the Bologna Declaration, and the second by four European ministers of education. In 1988, rectors from 388 European universities gathered to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the oldest university in Europe, the University of Bologna. The rectors expressed the view that universities had a greater part to play in a changing and increasingly international society, and they supported the idea of greater co-operation between European nations. The Magna Charta of European Universities of September 1988 set out a number of principles which the rectors stated ‘must now and always support the vocation of universities’.14 1 The university is an autonomous institution at the heart of societies differently organised because of geography and historical heritage; it produces, examines, appraises, and hands down culture by research and teaching. To meet the needs of the world around it, its research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power. 2 Teaching and research in universities must be inseparable if their tuition is not to lag behind changing needs, the demands of society, and advances in scientific knowledge. 3 Freedom in research and training is the fundamental principle of university life, and governments and universities, each as far as in them lies, must ensure respect for this fundamental requirement. Rejecting intolerance and always open to dialogue, a university is an ideal meeting ground for teachers capable of imparting their knowledge and well equipped to develop it by research and innovation and students entitled, able and willing to enrich their minds with that knowledge. 4 A university is the trustee of the European humanist tradition; its constant care is to attain universal knowledge; to fulfil its vocation, it transcends geographical and political frontiers, and affirms the vital need for different cultures to know and [to] influence each other. The Charta ends with the following: The undersigned rectors, on behalf of their Universities, undertake to do everything in their power to encourage each State, as well as the supranational organizations concerned, to mould their policy sedulously on this Magna Charta, which expresses the universities’ unanimous desire freely determined and declared.

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Ten years after the Magna Charta, ministers from the UK, France, Germany and Italy, signed a ‘joint declaration on harmonization of the architecture of the European higher education system’, in the Sorbonne, 25 May 1998, the anniversary of the University of Paris. The Declaration included the following: The European process has very recently moved some extremely important steps ahead. Relevant as they are, they should not make one forget that Europe is not only that of the Euro, of the banks and the economy: it must be a Europe of knowledge as well. We must strengthen and build upon the intellectual, cultural, social and technical dimensions of our continent. These have to a large extent been shaped by its universities, which continue to play a pivotal role for their development . . . An open European area for higher learning carries a wealth of positive perspectives, of course respecting our diversities, but requires on the other hand continuous efforts to remove barriers and to develop a framework for teaching and learning, which would enhance mobility and an ever closer co-operation. There is a recognition here of the intellectual and cultural benefits for society of the university, which reflects the view of the rectors, but there is also a reference to the need to remove barriers to mobility through developing a framework for teaching and learning. The ‘of course’ in the last sentence suggests that the gesture to diversity may just be that – a gesture; the real concern is with establishing a common and uniform framework which reduces difference to what can be easily managed and measured within the constraints of the framework. The tone shifts again in the Joint Declaration of the European Ministers of Education signed the following year, June 1999: We are witnessing a growing awareness in large parts of the political and academic world and in public opinion of the need to establish a more complete and far-reaching Europe, in particular building upon and strengthening its intellectual, cultural, social and scientific and technological dimensions. A Europe of Knowledge is now widely recognized as an irreplaceable factor for social and human growth and as an indispensable component to consolidate and enrich the European citizenship, capable of giving its citizens the necessary competences to face the challenges of the new millennium, together with an awareness of shared values and belonging to a common social and cultural space. The Sorbonne declaration of 25 May 1998, which was underpinned by these considerations, stressed the universities’ central role in developing European cultural dimensions. It emphasized the creation of the

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European area of higher education as a key way to promote citizens’ mobility and employability and the Continent’s overall development. European higher education institutions, for their part, have accepted the challenge and taken up a main role in constructing the European area of higher education, also in the wake of the fundamental principles laid down in the Bologna Magna Charta Universitatum of 1988. This is of the highest importance, given that universities’ independence and autonomy ensure that higher education and research systems continuously adapt to changing needs, society’s demands and advances in scientific knowledge. There is a shift in tone and language in these three documents and this shift widens with successive European Commission Communications. In the Magna Charta there is an emphasis on the traditional values of the modern liberal university. In the other two documents there is a change in tone, although reference is made to the importance of the values expressed by the university rectors. But what we see emerging also is the idea of a single common ideal – a Europe of Knowledge – and we need to note the capitalization of the word knowledge in the third document. Roger Dale (2008) makes an important observation when he notes the shift from a focus on the responsibilities of European universities or the university in Europe, to the responsibilities of and for ‘Europe’. The emphasis is on unity, commonality and common social space even though the European Union encompasses such a diverse group of Member States and one that continues to grow. In the policy documents this diversity is played down in favour of consensus and shared vision, one that is ultimately informed by the perceived challenges of the global economy. We can see just how far the shift has gone when we consider the 2005 European Commission Communication, Mobilizing the Brainpower of Europe: Enabling Universities to Make Their Full Contribution to the Lisbon Strategy. This states that university programmes need to be structured to enhance directly the employability of graduates. We shall come back to this particular document in the next chapter.15 If we look at the first and third statement of the rectors that refers to autonomy and freedom then we need to think about what these terms might mean because, as we have seen, European Union policy encourages partnerships and collaborations between universities and business. This raises the question of just how autonomous universities can be – do they have the autonomy to resist such partnerships and if they do will they survive? This also raises moral and ethical questions. The second point the rectors mention is to do with teaching and research – which their Charta regards as inseparable. Again this is put in doubt by current European Union policy in which there is an acknowledgement that there will need to be diversity of provision. In the UK, teaching-only universities

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have been discussed; which is made more likely, given the way that research funding has been allocated over the last two decades, based on successive research assessment exercises.16 It is quite likely that in the future there will be a relatively small number of UK universities recognized for their research expertise. Inside the European Union we can see this. Take, for example, Jan Figel, European Union Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism, who uses football terms to refer to those institutions that will do well in the competitive higher education marketplace: In the US, the huge levels of research funding are overwhelming[ly] concentrated on around 100 research intensive universities and fewer than 250 institutions award postgraduate degrees . . . Europe’s universities should be allowed to diversify and specialise: some must be able to play in the major league, but others should concentrate on regional or local needs and perhaps more on teaching. 2006, (p. 4, cited in Mayo 2009, p. 92) The rectors’ fourth point is a reminder of the values that underpinned the modern liberal university. Reference is made to the importance of different cultures knowing and influencing each other. The language and vision expressed here is similar to Michael Oakeshott’s (1962) ‘conversation of mankind’ where ideas can come forth. In contrast, the policy discourse is of commonality, a single identity that is objective and fixed, that closes down rather than opens things up. This is particularly so with the national and European regulatory frameworks and quality assurance systems that reduce learning to competences that can be easily measured and quantified. This is touched on in the extract from the Bologna Declaration and we shall return to this again in the next chapter. What is also important to note is the importance of terms such as entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation in European Union documents, which form part of a particular discourse around the notion of the European citizen. According to a 2006 communication from the European Commission, entrepreneurship refers to an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action. It includes creativity, innovation and risk taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives. This supports everyone in day-to-day life at home and in society, makes employees more aware of the context of their work and better able to seize opportunities, and provides a foundation for entrepreneurs establishing a social or commercial activity. CEC 2006, Implementing the Community Lisbon Programme: Fostering . . ., (p. 4, cited in Mayo 2009, p. 93)

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The European Commission sees creativity as the driver for entrepreneurial and social competencies. These competencies include ‘mathematical competence’, ‘learning to learn’, ‘social and civic competencies’, ‘sense of initiative and entrepreneurship’ and ‘cultural awareness and expression’ (CEC 2008, p. 2; see also Mayo 2009). These competencies, however, appear separated from curriculum content, a point to which we shall return in the next chapter. It is worth noting here the importance attached to research by the European Commission and its desire to establish a European Research Area to complement the EHEA. Indeed, one of the objectives of the former is to develop synergies with the latter. The European Commission refers to the ‘knowledge triangle’ which comprises education, research and innovation. In the European Commission’s communication, The role of the universities in the Europe of knowledge (2003), universities are viewed as having a key role in both the knowledge society and knowledge economy through the production of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge. It is stated also that university education must be embedded in research and here it is interesting because we see how research as conceived by the European Commission connects to its primary concerns about economic competitiveness and the need for entrepreneurial, innovative and mobile citizens. The competencies required in a knowledge society, we are told, resemble those found in research; furthermore, these competencies are very similar to employability competencies. This overlap is convenient, however we need to look more closely because the European Commission invokes the Humboldtian tradition but speciously to support the connection it sees between education and research; it distorts completely Humboldt’s idea of the university as a research institution. As Maarten Simons (2006 p.37) reminds us, for Humboldt ‘education through research’ has an ‘edifying potential because research is guided by an idea that transcends society’. In the Humboldtian university, research is not there for the sake of the student: research and the student are there for the sake of scholarship (Ibid). This is, however, quite clearly not the position of the European Commission. Its reason for arguing the importance of the close relationship between education and research is the need for employability in the knowledge economy. As thus demonstrated, it is the extrinsic and instrumentalist values of research that are being privileged.

V. Harmonics of homogenization What we have seen then is that in the European or supranational political space a language is generated that is full of abstract nouns such as ‘quality’, ‘excellence’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘creativity’ and ‘competencies’. These

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terms, however, are read and understood by people who encounter them from a wide range of linguistic, cultural and institutional contexts; different connotations are associated with terms when they are used in the international language of English. Some examples may be of use here. Take, for example, a term I use throughout the book: performativity, which is an English translation of a term first used by Jean-François Lyotard. Among native English speakers this term has been taken up by many in education, sometimes without acknowledging the origins of the term or clearly expressing the extent to which their use of it captures the subtleties of Lyotard’s original understanding. When this term is used, for example in Spanish contexts, the term is usually left untranslated, but sometimes it appears as rendimiento. Whichever version is used, the meaning is not quite the same. There are negative connotations to the word in French and English usages that are not always as strong in Spanish. Another would be the German word Bildung, which was mentioned in Chapter One; it is a word that has been said by some to be untranslatable. According to Simons (2006), a feature of Bildung is an attitude or duty to truth. This is not captured in the English term ‘formation’ which is often substituted.17 And a third example would be that of ‘science’. The word comes from the Latin scio – I know. In English the word has come to have a strong association with natural science and for many people would conjure an image of a scientist in a laboratory carrying out an experiment; the term scientist would not be associated with an historian or philosopher. The equivalent of the word ‘science’ in German implies something different. In German Wissenschaft means science and Geisteswissenschaft means human science; these terms imply an ongoing process, ‘to capture reality as a totality in concepts’ (Ibid, p. 37). When a German academic is using the term ‘science’ in English – for example at an international conference – they probably mean something broader than a native English-speaking person. They mean knowledge in the round and reference to a scientist would include not just a physicist but an historian or philosopher as well. One danger that arises from globalization is the homogenization of the theory and practice of higher education; one critical factor in this homogenization is language. The global use of English, or English as a second language, suggests that everyone can understand each other and that language is primarily about communication, to be understood in a technical or vehicular sense rather than in terms of meaning. But meaning is not independent of the words we utter. We can see this in the international surveys that use standardized measures to measure education systems, evaluate student performance, or international research quality indicators to determine research excellence. These practices reflect a monolingualism of current dominant liberal political discourse that obscures questions

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of meaning. In a globalized world neo-liberalism desires sameness and commensurability; it is blind to difference or does not acknowledge what is different or other (Saito and Standish, 2008). It is a regime that demands standardization and uniformity. The diversity of national education systems, which historically has been seen as important, becomes problematic when the imperative is commensurability. There seems to be an assumption that any problems or difficulties that emerge can be ironed out and resolved; this is based on the view that language problems are purely technical and arise from some linguistic difference or deficit – not having a good enough grasp of the language or not being able to make oneself understood; if someone does not have a good grasp of language it is presumed that they need technical help to improve their language skills (Harris 2007b). As we have seen, international policy is underpinned by the view that higher education facilitates consensus and harmony and can create a common social and cultural European space. What this does not acknowledge is difference and diversity and the need to confront and face up to such difficulty not as a problem but as an inevitable part of community. This is not to suggest that what is required is a politics of recognition, because this can be satisfied in terms of a common scale of rights. What I am suggesting here is a deeper sense of difference that refers to ways of thinking for which there is no common scale. We need to think about difference in terms of something that goes beyond. The internationalization agenda, informed as it is by a one-track kind of thinking, has shifted attention away from considering internationalization in relation to the aims, values and the purpose of higher education; or to be more precise the consideration of aims has been subjugated to economic and technological imperatives. Rather than ask how we might internationalize the university, a more important question is, how does higher education internationalize us? How are we changed by internationalization as individuals and in our relation to others? This takes us into the final part of this chapter and into Part Three.

VI. Stuck on track There is a further aspect to this one-track thinking. Earlier in this chapter we saw how ICT interests were gaining more influence in the supranational policy arena through the role of public/private partnerships, and we saw the kinds of arguments used by the European Commission in its promotion of digital learning for an eSociety. Technology not only affects the way that institutions function, it affects also the way in which knowledge and understanding are conceived. New technologies reveal things that we did not see before and in so doing change the way we think about things.

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A technological way of thinking is entering into all areas of life; it is not just confined to technological areas as we noted earlier. These matters should provoke thought. But do they not raise the possibility that we are not thinking? And this thought gives us reason to look more directly at Heidegger. The most obvious point of reference, insofar as we are thinking about technology, is Heidegger’s essay of 1954, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. It may be helpful, however, before discussing this directly, to draw attention to three aspects of Heidegger’s thought that will serve to contextualize this. The first is to do with the subject/object relation, which we came across in the last chapter and which we shall come back to in the next chapter. Heidegger was critical of the Western philosophical tradition, which thought in terms of a dichotomisation of body and mind, and which set up a rigid subject and object opposition; a clear separation is made between knowing subjects and the objects they know, with the latter typically conceived as amenable to scientific measurement. He thought this misunderstood the relationship between human beings and their world, misconceiving both in the process. One expression of this is found in Heidegger’s remark that the ‘epistemological Subject does not express the most meaningful sense of Spirit, much less its full content’ (cited in Krell 1993, p. 11). There is a mutual reciprocity between what we do and say, on the one hand, and the way that the world is, on the other. The second aspect, which relates to the first, is what might be called the problem of the human. Heidegger thought that the conception of the human that had emerged in Western thinking, especially in the modern period (that is, with Descartes and the rise of modern science), was burdened with a metaphysics that was problematic. In the hardened subject/ object distinction that this generates, we are seen as disengaged spectators of the world. Heidegger tried to show that such a conception of human being, although it had indeed changed human experience, was fundamentally false to our being-in-the-world, and the construction of compound expressions such as this was one of the ways in which he sought to disturb assumptions and modes of thinking that had become habitual. He turned to ancient Greek scholastic philosophy, which took as its starting point the question of being, rather than the more modern preoccupation with the question of knowledge. The latter is concerned with the attributes of things – precisely the kind of knowledge to which modern science is committed and that it seeks to refine. Invaluable and, indeed, unavoidable though this is, its predominance risks hiding the sheer fact that things have being and the nature of that being – that is, their ontology. In a similar way it covers over the distinctive kind of being that is human being. Thus, he seeks to uncover those basic structures in terms of which human beings and things

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can be. And to do this he avoids the term ‘human being’ or ‘man’ on the grounds that it is fatefully burdened by the metaphysics in question – the point made above. Instead, in order to refer to the kind of beings that we are, he chooses the term Dasein, a term that means literally ‘being there’. One of the characteristics of Dasein, unlike other entities, is that it is aware of its own being: the nature of its being arises for it as a question. This means that the way in which Dasein is aware of and familiar with the world is different from the kinds of awareness that (other) animals have: it is aware of other things in the world and of itself, and hence the things it perceives and understands are thematized in consequence of the structuring effects of its own being. This may sound abstract and obscure, but in fact it is not: just think of the ways that, in contrast to the stimulus-response pattern of the interactions of animals with things in their habitats, things in the world are typically understood (by Dasein) in relation to a variety of larger purposes and patterns of meaning. This is precisely what we mean by ‘world’. The third aspect again relates to the other two and is to do with the distinction between what Heidegger refers to as the ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) and ‘ready-at-hand’ (Zuhandenheit). The former expression is intended to characterize the way in which we relate to something when it is the conscious object of our spectatorial attention. The latter refers to our relation to something when we use it, without consciously focusing on it. This is not a classification of objects, for one and the same thing can be at times ready-to-hand and at times present-at-hand. I reach for the light switch when I enter my study without giving it a thought – until, that is, I switch it on one day and the light fails to go on (the bulb has gone). At that moment the switch ceases to be ready-to-hand and becomes presentat-hand: it becomes an object of my conscious attention at the very point where it ceases to function in the seamless background flow of experience. That background is not something that simply happens independently of me: it is characterized by my practised operation with things, the various involvements I have. Heidegger also wants to break down that aspect of the traditional metaphysics that looks at objects as though initially they were meaningless. Thus, by contrast, in the work of the cabinet-maker working with his materials Heidegger finds a co-responsibility and mutual indebtedness: the material is not just a resource to be used, but something with which the craftsman is engaged in a responsive relation. When absorbed in his work the craftsman does not see himself as the subject and the material as an object. The relationship is holistic. Moreover, this responsiveness is extended where the apprentice is drawn into this relation, the ‘pedagogy’ plainly involving a mutual attunement of teacher, learner and the object of attention, the wood itself. Today, however, the involvement between teacher

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and student and their relation to what is taught and learned is one where the material, the subject-matter, is taken as indifferent, a resource to be used to develop certain skills in the student. One consequence, as Paul Standish puts it, is that ‘spontaneity, imagination, and the encounter with the unknown are suppressed for both teacher and learner’ (1997, p. 453). The involvements and attunements in question here extend from those that constitute our everyday relation to such things as light switches to the progressive acquisition of expertise in a discipline. To be initiated into a discipline such as history or physics, and especially to pursue these at a higher level, requires a progressive familiarity with a range of techniques, approaches, theories and, above all, texts, and this is a familiarity that becomes embedded in the student’s thinking. Like the light switch in everyday life, these become part of the seamless background to enquiry – a background to the more specific objects of attention that are brought into critical consciousness. While such acquisition will at times involve the specification of target competences, it is not well understood if it is seen exclusively or even primarily in these terms. The growing familiarity in question is better understood in terms of initiation into communities of enquiry18 or, in Oakeshott’s phrase, particular kinds of conversation. As I said above, a key account of technology is that offered by Heidegger. He sees technology as one among many ways of revealing – that is, ways in which the world comes to light for us. But it is a characteristic of technology that it colonizes those others. Technological thinking leads to a kind of one-track thinking that imposes itself on other ways of thinking and being; technological thinking colonizes us. Heidegger was writing about the modern world, but we can see how, in a postmodern society dedicated to performativity, this one-track thinking has gone further: what is most important or most real is to be as efficient as possible. Heidegger thought that technological thinking reduced the being of entities to a calculative order. So, if we look at a tree we do not see a tree in its fullness but rather wood for making furniture or paper to write on. In the last chapter we discussed Heidegger’s view that language can call things into being, that it is not just an instrument or a tool. If, as we have seen in this chapter, the human being is faced with her life as a question, and if this happens in what is now a world dominated by the particular operation of technology that is performativity, it may be that the question of being escapes us in unprecedented ways: we do not face life as a question but hide from this in the supposed securities of efficient performance and risk-management. Yet such a question and the questions it generates are in the end unavoidable. If we pursue the questions posed by the practical problems in education that confront us, we are eventually drawn into those ethical and metaphysical questions that are at the heart of philosophy. These are the kinds of questions that higher

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education should be concerned with, for every subject, especially insofar as it is properly pursued at a higher level, has its philosophical dimension; these are the kinds of questions towards which higher education must gravitate. The problem with technological thinking that Heidegger draws attention to takes us into questions of language more generally. Heidegger considered the change from Greek to Latin (and from the world of ancient Greece to the world of Rome) involved a loss in meaning. Another crucial change that occurs: logos is displaced by ratio, which is to say that a holistic conception of reason, allied to the power of speech and the expressiveness of human beings, gives way to something more abstract and calculative. The calculative force of ratio, as understood by Heidegger, involves a kind of reckoning, which, as Standish suggests, ‘shapes the modern sense of risk-assessment and accounting’ (Standish 2010). If we think of the ways in which a computer orders information into spreadsheets and databases for calculation, these affect also the ways in which human beings structure their work and lives. For Standish this can be seen as a contemporary manifestation of ratio: there is a severance of the process of reasoning from the content of reasoning. We shall return to this in Part Three. Brief though this acknowledgement of Heidegger’s thinking on technology is, it serves to reveal the larger patterns of change that are manifested in those developments in higher education that are the concern of this book. We have seen in this and the previous chapter that there is a uniformity of discourse in higher education, a new lexicon in effect. When we look carefully at the language of policy documents we can see how this ties up with Heidegger’s account of technology because a certain kind of language, a way of speaking, has taken over – a vocabulary of targets, outcomes, bibliometrics . . . – and it has become increasingly difficult for us to think outside its terms. Embedded in this is a misunderstanding of the nature of language itself. Heidegger gives us two examples of the mistakes we make with language. The first is that we see language primarily as a means of communication, and the second is that we think that we, as human beings, speak language, whereas in fact, in Heidegger’s phrase, ‘language speaks man’. Language is not a kind of instrument, to be manipulated and managed; nor is it a kind of calculus, a view he thought was held by some philosophers. This way of thinking, where language is purely instrumental, can be seen as an extension of technical thinking. In contrast, language needs to be understood as the well-spring of our thought. Hence, in higher education especially, where the development of a subject is so closely connected, if it is not synonymous, with the development and refinement of a vocabulary, to miss this risks blocking those channels of enquiry where thought should be allowed to flow.

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As I said in the opening chapter, Heidegger’s comment that ‘we are still not thinking’ is disturbing for those in higher education who are content to continue with the status quo. It is also disturbing for other reasons. The territory that we are entering into is not only surprising; it is also dangerous territory. Heidegger is one of the most controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, and the reasons for this are by now well known. Heidegger wrote Being and Time, his masterwork, in the years that led up to the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1932 the Weimar Republic collapsed, and within a year Hitler was appointed German Chancellor. The formal rule of law and freedom of expression were suspended, and the first concentration camps were established and publicly announced (Rockmore 1999). It was also in 1933 that Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and became Rector of Freiburg University in his home town of Baden.19 In his rectorial address, the Rektoratsrede, Heidegger talks not of the university but of the German university and its spiritual mission. There is, he claims, a spiritual relationship between Greeks and Germans: the Germans are the new Greeks, and it is in them the most noble possibilities of human beings are to be found. In 1930 there was a worldwide economic depression, but for Heidegger this was not the full extent of the crisis; he thought there was a far deeper decay and neediness in Germany. The real distress he thought was the absence of deep distress; or as he would see it, there was a degeneration of being. In his thought-provoking book, Demythologizing Heidegger, John Caputo suggests that it was in his rectorial address that ‘the myth of Being’ appears (1993, p. 4); it reflects Heidegger’s abandonment of the Aristotelian and Pauline thinking that influenced his earlier work, where both these sources were seen as a means of renewing philosophy and of renewing the university. Caputo argues persuasively that these two strands running through Heidegger were well conceived and fruitful, but his later rejection of them was fatal. In the 1930s his thinking moved to an imagined single originary source found in Greece that predated Plato and Aristotle. Caputo refers to this as the ‘Great Greek Beginning’, which Heidegger thought needed to be kept pure and uncontaminated. His 1933 address is the first time he speaks specifically of the spiritual destiny of the German people. The passion of Heidegger’s address is directed towards the realization of the world-historical destiny of the authentic German Volk, in service of which there is a need for a Führer who is not merely a political but a philosophical and spiritual leader. It is not that Heidegger explicitly attributes these qualities to Hitler – he does not need to, for the indirect allusions are sufficiently clear: The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership of this institution of higher learning. The following of teachers and

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students awakens and grows strong only from a true and joint rootedness in the essence of the German university. This essence, however, gains clarity, rank and power only when first of all and at all times the leaders are themselves led – led by that unyielding spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people to bear the stamp of its history. Cited in Rockmore (1999, p.19) Heidegger was critical of the ideologues in the Party, who he thought did not understand or appreciate the philosophical character of the revolution in thought that was required. For its part, the Party was concerned that Heidegger seemed to be arguing for permanent revolution, which they could see might turn against the leaders of the Nazi Party themselves. Unlike them, Heidegger believed that this change that was needed, being philosophical in character, would come through the university itself. Caputo’s reading is helpful here. He emphasizes the proximity in Heidegger of spirit and danger. Modern Germans were spiritless because they wanted safety and security, but the purpose of the revolution was to change that. The calling of the university professor was to revolutionize and radicalize the teaching faculty. Later in the speech Heidegger talks of the responsibility upon students: they needed to obey the duties given to them by philosophers, raising the question of autonomy and academic freedom. For Heidegger autonomy is about following the call of one’s being, becoming ‘what we ought to be’ (p. 86). The symbolism of the triangle recurs with reference to the three services – the labour service, the armed service and the knowledge service – that must become one. As Rector, Heidegger colluded with a regime in which the banning of Jews from working in government service, including the university, was implemented, and this despite his close professional and personal association with Jewish colleagues and students, as we shall see in the next chapter. His actions in this respect were compounded notoriously by the fact that he was never in later years ready fully to acknowledge or to account for his involvement. We might be inclined simply to dismiss the thought of someone who was, in many respects, a contemptible man. But there is reason not to do this. His work has remained of crucial importance to post-structuralism and to many developments in late twentieth century thought. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard have all said things to the effect that without Heidegger they could not have produced the work they did, and this is the case even if it is the strong critiques that each has developed in response to Heidegger that have opened the way to new thought. The perhaps unparalleled reaction that is found in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas have opened up a very

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different and rich approach, moving from the ontological question to an emphasis on the priority of a relation to the other that is ethical before anything else. There is then good reason to hold in abeyance the question of Heidegger’s scandalous political involvements, for there is in the dangers he brings near, in his disruption of what he took to be the prevailing bland and depleted discourse of his times, something of fundamental importance. This may even be essential to what we are to think of as the university or higher education. This will become more apparent in the next chapter, which begins Part Three of this book, where we consider more closely the relationship between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a student of his who, in her own career as a political theorist, went on to develop some of Heidegger’s ideas in quite different and thought-provoking ways.

Endnotes 1 According to OECD figures, Australia has the highest proportion of international enrolment in OECD nations (Marginson 2009). 2 According to Umberto Eco (1995), before the ninth and tenth centuries there was no European culture or Europe. 3 Page one of the executive summary states: ‘The population of the European community is ageing and declining and the labour market is demanding more people with higher levels of knowledge and skill in order to support an expanding knowledge-based economy.’ 4 In the UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills outlined its framework for English universities in its report, Higher Ambitions, and in this Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for this Department, set out ‘the future of universities in a digital economy’. 5 M. Allen and colleagues suggest that the ideology is moving towards the ‘businessfication’ of higher education. This is captured in the title of their book that is a play on New Labour’s slogan in its first term in office, ‘education, education, education’. M. Allen et al., (1999) Business, Business, Business: New Labour’s Education Policy. London: The Tufnell Press. 6 Michael Young (2009) has argued that the more recent frameworks designed for countries in the developing world draws them into a system that is already iniquitous and based on neo-liberal market principles. We can see something similar as well with developments in Latin America where Bologna has influenced policy and the desire to create a single area of higher education in Latin America, as we saw in Chapter Two.

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7 Since the 1980s, however, the OECD had been talking about the importance of quality in directing and evaluating education policy, but what the 1992 treaty did, according to the authors, was to change it from being a recommendation to a notion incorporated into the international treaty. 8 See for example, de Wit’s work in this area. 9 In the UK there is a distinction between international students from Europe and those from outside Europe. European students are treated as ‘home students’ and pay the same fees whilst non-EU are treated as international or overseas and have to pay full-cost fees, which are extremely high. The definition of ‘international student’ is interesting. In the USA Rhoades (2009) has suggested that Latin American students are not considered ‘international’ by north American universities; this is significant because universities are keen to target international students who will attract higher fees. He argues that ‘academic capitalism’ is interested in selective markets and particular students from particular countries. Countries with vibrant economies, rather than those of Latin America or Africa, are targeted. 10 The first Prime Minister’s Initiative set a target of 750,000 extra international students to the UK by 2005. A three year global marketing campaign starting in January 2000 was begun, with £5 million funding; the marketing strategy was to brand UK education as the first for quality and choice. Prime Minister’s Initiative 2 set out to attract an extra 70,000 international students into higher education and 30,000 into Further Education in the UK by 2011. It also set out to achieve demonstrable improvement in student satisfaction, and to achieve significant growth in the number of partnerships between the UK and other countries (Stiasny 2008) 11 The instrumentalist thinking suggested here is also reflected in an article entitled ‘20 key factors in internationalising higher education’, in the newsletter of the Higher Education Academy. It reads like a kind of handbook on how to internationalize an institution. It begins by noting the importance of having a clear vision or mission for the institution. Point 9 refers to the importance of having ‘internationalisation champions’ who are supported across the institution. And the final point, 20, refers to linguistic, cultural and academic matters, couched in terms of appropriate support – of assisting with communication issues such as support with academic writing in English. 12 See for example, Altbach et al. 2009; Luijten-Lub 2007; Scott 1998, 2000; Mayo 2009. 13 See also the work of Troiano et al. 2010, which looks at developments in Spain and in particular Cataluyna.

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14 Since 1988 more university rectors have signed the Magna Charta. There is now a Magna Charta Observatory of Fundamental University Values and Rights, which is described as a non-profit organization based in Bologna and founded by the University of Bologna and the European University Association. 15 This could also be seen in the priorities of HEFCE. For example, in February 2009 the higher education funding body agreed to encourage ‘transformational change’ in the sector so that meeting employers’ needs for skilled workers became a ‘core institutional strategic objective [that] impacts on at least half of English . . . institutions by 2011’, (Times Higher Education 2 April, 2009, p. 12). The rather cumbersome title of the HEFCE’s report on the success of this funding is Evaluation of the Effectiveness and Role of Hefce/OSI Third Stream Funding: Culture Change and Embedding in the Higher Education Sector Toward Greater Economic Impact. 16 The Russell Group has argued that research should be concentrated in fewer institutions, which it believes would improve the quality and efficiency of what is done; this would in effect favour this group of universities. 17 Bildung is also connected to the German Romantics and their concern with strengthening a sense of national identity and pride. 18 The phrase ‘community of enquiry’ is sometimes used in a more technical way in connection with the philosophy for children movement, but I intend no such connotations here. 19 According to Tom Rockmore (1992), there were over a thousand professors who publicly acknowledged their support for Hitler which, he suggests, reflects the conservative tendencies that existed after WW1 and the Versailles settlement.

PART THREE

Translation

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Chapter 5

The Crisis of Judgement Masters have destroyed their disciples both psychologically and, in rarer cases, physically. They have broken their spirits, consumed their hopes, exploited their dependence and individuality. The domain of the soul has its vampires. In counterpoint, disciples, pupils, apprentices have subverted, betrayed, and ruined their Masters . . . By a process of interaction, of osmosis, the Master learns from his disciple as he teaches him. The intensity of the dialogue generates friendship in the highest sense. It can enlist both the clear-sightedness and unreason of love. Consider Alcibiades and Socrates, Héloise and Abelard, Arendt and Heidegger. George Steiner (2003, p. 2)

I. Calculating the changes In Chapter Two we looked at transformation in terms of how the idea and role of the university and its relation to society has changed since its medieval beginnings. In this chapter we revisit the notion of transformation but from a different perspective, one that will bring us to the heart of teaching and learning. This will involve consideration of the difficult and complex relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, as indicated in the epigraph from George Steiner’s thought-provoking Lessons of the Masters, and to which we shall return later. In sections II and III we shall look at Arendt and her life before moving on to consider more closely her ideas on thinking and judgement in sections IV and V; these raise important questions for current practices in higher education. The final section considers Arendt’s own story in terms of the transforming nature of education. First, however, we need to take a bit of a detour because in current political discourse the term ‘transformation’ is used frequently but it is rather debased; the mysterious element invoked so powerfully in Steiner is absent. We are left with a technical and instrumentalist view of transformation. In 2009, for example, HEFCE declared its intention to encourage ‘transformational change’ with the effect that meeting employers’ needs for skilled workers became a ‘core institutional strategic objective’ of English

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higher education institutions. HEFCE’s announcement followed the 2005 European Commission’s Communication (2005) Mobilizing the Brainpower of Europe: Enabling Universities to Make Their Full Contribution to the Lisbon Strategy, a document which we came across in Chapter Four. This and other European policies also give a prominent position to ‘citizens’ mobility’ and the need to equip European citizens with the right competences to enter the European economy in order to help generate wealth through their creativity and entrepreneurship. Citizens’ mobility is discussed in a quite mechanistic and functional way, as if it were a military operation. On reading the Mobilising the Brainpower of Europe document, one is prompted to imagine a map on the wall of an office in Brussels with flags denoting ‘brainpower’ and arrows pointing to where this needs to be moved. The role of the universities is to facilitate this mobilization of brainpower. They must make their ‘full contribution’ to this strategy, meaning that university programmes need to be structured in such a way as to enhance directly the employability of students. It is not clear how universities are to achieve this goal; what is clear is that if they do not enhance directly the employability of their students, then they will not be contributing in full to the Lisbon Strategy, which set out these and other goals. Transformation as understood here alludes to something that is measurable and calculable, and this is quite different from those broader understandings of transformation that are more commonly associated with education. Ironically, a certain mobilization has occurred throughout history when individuals have travelled to other countries and continents to experience different societies, cultures and ways of living. Scholars also have travelled to universities in different parts of the world to follow their interests and enquiries and to access university libraries, and there was a time when the ‘grand tour’ was the finishing school for the rich and wealthy European. But, travelling per se is no guarantee of transformation, nor is it essential. Studying literature, history, or languages is another way in which thought can be mobilized through the encounter with what is different; it is often said that a person’s life has been transformed by their university experience, perhaps in the humanities above all. A good teacher can have a transformative effect on their students, through inspiring them, sometimes shocking them, challenging them in various ways. The mobilization that is envisaged in recent policy documents, by contrast, needs to be understood in terms of its collusion with performativity. This collusion indicates just how far the language of performativity has gone. The global recession of 2009, however, may suggest the beginning of the end of neo-liberalism. So what comes next? This is the question that the historian, Eric Hobsbawm, posed in The Guardian newspaper article earlier that year (Hobsbawm 2009). Both socialism and capitalism have

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failed. A different kind of policy is needed – one that breaks with the economic and moral assumptions of the last 30 years. The new policy must be based on the belief that economic growth and the affluence that follows are a means and not an end. It is significant that at the 2009 Labour Party Conference, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, distanced himself from neo-liberalism: .

[W]hat let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology. What failed was the Conservative idea that markets always self-correct but never self-destruct. What failed was the right wing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market and says that free markets should not just be free but values-free. Brown seems to acknowledge the problems that have arisen from neo-liberal ideology, an ideology which New Labour embraced so energetically from its first days in office. It is difficult to tell whether this does reflect Brown’s views or whether it was said out of political expediency; the government’s popularity at the time was extremely low. Throughout much of 2009 there was a great deal of public and media criticism directed at the financial world and at banks but also at the government for its lack of strong regulation of the system. Brown’s comments echo the concerns expressed by Michael Sandel, who gave the Reith Lectures earlier the same year. Sandel (2009) spoke of the problems that arise when both moral and ethical questions are reduced to economic questions and also when there is a move from a market economy to a market society.

II. Dangerous liaisons The global economic – and environmental – crisis we are in today can be seen as an opportunity to think in different ways or, to invoke the kind of epochal questioning that concerned Heidegger, to think well. As we have seen his early work was concerned with the nature of being; human beings unlike other beings are faced with their life as a question. The question Heidegger poses in, Was Heisst Denken? – which in English may be translated as ‘What is Called Thinking?’, ‘What Calls Forth Thinking?’, or ‘What Calls for Thinking?’ – is a difficult question. We are forced to stop and wonder what the question is. We are put in question; we need to respond to the call. In the words of David Farrell Krell, ‘we must assert less, listen more. Here we do less problem solving and pay more attention to the way the problem poses itself. Our logical and technological training does not prepare us

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well for such . . . thinking’ (Krell 1993, p. 366). For Heidegger, thinking is a response to a call that comes forth from Dasein. By thinking he is not referring to opinion or to any kind of conceptual or systematic analysis; thinking is not an action but rather a way of being or a way of living. Thinking is a way of seeing the world as it is. While Heidegger’s reputation is as a philosopher, he was first and foremost a teacher, and almost all his published work was based on lectures or seminars he had given. He considered the spoken word superior to the written – in recognition perhaps, of his great interest in ancient Greek. On his first meeting with Heidegger, Husserl described his style of speaking as mesmerizing; his own students apparently shared his view and began attending Heidegger’s lectures rather than his own; students even came from all over Europe to listen to him. What is of particular interest to note here is that Heidegger’s reputation was based not on his publications but his oratory; he had not published anything at the time – a sharp contrast to today when an academic’s reputation is measured by their ‘output’.1 Hannah Arendt was similarly impressed with his oratory, describing him as ‘the secret king of thought’ (Steiner 2003, p. 82). On his 80th birthday she wrote the following reflection on his classes: The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think . . . Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, (p. 51, cited in Krell 1993, p. 15) Arendt’s affectionate remarks may seem to us extraordinary, written as they were not as a young student in awe of her teacher, but as an adult who had witnessed his involvement with the Nazis. Moreover, she, like other former students of Heidegger such as Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse, who went on to become renowned thinkers in their own fields, were German Jews, and suffered greatly under Nazism. What is striking is that while they found Heidegger’s political views and actions repellent, they were in different ways drawn to his philosophy and found new things in his thought that took them in quite different directions.2 In view of this, we can perhaps begin to understand the epigraph from Steiner’s vivid and evocative account of the traumatic nature of the master–disciple relationship. He identifies three modes of relation: where masters destroy their disciples; where disciples have betrayed or ruined their masters; and where the relation is one of exchange. Steiner describes this exchange as involving ‘an eros

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of reciprocal trust and, indeed, love’ (2003, p. 2). It is this third relation that best captures the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger. It is to their relationship that we need now to turn in order to consider further the transformative nature of education.

III. An uncomfortable presence Arendt’s political writings are born out of the horror of living through Nazism; she was not only writing in the abstract, about a lost Europe, but also personally. She was arrested and interrogated, and when released from prison she fled to France, only to be taken to an internment camp from which she escaped when Paris fell to the Germans in 1940, eventually making her way to America.3 For 18 years she was stateless and described herself as heimatlos, without a home; she also used the term Fremdheit, meaning strangeness or foreignness, to describe her condition. In 1950 she became an American citizen. Arendt was active in helping young Jews prepare for a life in Palestine, and she also advocated the setting up of a Jewish Army to fight the Nazis. In the late 1940s she became Director for the Conference on Jewish Relations and then Executive Director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization when it was established in 1948. Although Arendt came from a well-off Jewish family from East Prussia, her early life was very difficult; her father died when she was very young and then not long after, her maternal grandfather to whom she was very close also died. Neither of her parents was religious, nor was she, but like most of her contemporaries, such as Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, she was concerned about the consequences of the First World War for Western European Jewry. She was critical of Zionists who emphasized the uniqueness of Jewish political conditions or of the Jewish people because this would, she thought, alienate Jews from other Europeans (Young-Bruehl 1982). Arendt’s political thought was influenced by Dreyfusard Bernard Lazare, a French Jew who had written about the history of anti-semitism and who had used the terms pariah and parvenu to distinguish between passive and active resistance. For Arendt the pariah Jew is an outcast, stateless, and as such can be an agent for change. Unlike the parvenu, a Jewish person who tried to fit in to society, the pariah is without national aspirations and should be regarded as a role model for a utopian cosmopolitan world, not based on national identity. Arendt was interested in a non-nationalist political theory which was universalist and not particularist, an interesting position to adopt given that Judaism is a particularist religion.4 Arendt’s political writing was radical, controversial, and disturbing. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965) was received badly among colleagues

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and friends who felt betrayed and found disturbing her harsh assessment of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis and her lack of sympathy for the victims of anti-Semitism and the atrocities. She portrayed Eichmann as just one person in a large bureaucratic Nazi machine. Arendt did not see Nazism as a specifically German problem, but rather as a symptom of political modernity, of a pathology that could have manifested itself elsewhere. The relevance of considering Arendt’s personal story in this way becomes clearer in light of her relationship with Heidegger, a defining aspect of her life. She was overwhelmed by Heidegger as a teacher and philosopher. In 1924 she went to Marburg University where she became a student of Heidegger, and soon after they became lovers until 1928 when he ended the affair. After Marburg she went to study under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg; around the same time Heidegger was offered and accepted a position at his former university, Freiburg. Their friendship continued until her death in 1975. As I indicated earlier, understanding Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger and her response to his behaviour is extremely difficult. She wrote to him expressing her anger and sense of betrayal, and broke off contact with him for a number of years, and once she had left Germany she did not see him again until 1950. After the war she renewed contact with him, unlike many other of his former Jewish colleagues – with the exception of her friend Karl Jaspers who had also been a friend of Heidegger’s. In his case, Jaspers did not see Heidegger again, but they did continue to correspond. He never denounced Heidegger publicly although he was bitterly hurt by his former colleague’s behaviour – Jaspers lost his chair in 1937 and his works were not allowed to be published in Germany. Heidegger did nothing to intervene or help. It is surprising perhaps to read in Elzbieta Ettinger’s (1995) account that Arendt and Jaspers were Heidegger’s ‘best friends’ despite his behaviour towards them; they never thought of him as antisemitic.5 Ettinger maintains that Heidegger needed these friendships, albeit for different reasons; Jaspers regarded Heidegger as his only peer in philosophy, while for Arendt it was more complicated. Despite her feeling betrayed by him, Arendt was influential, 30 years later, in getting Heidegger’s work published in English and, hence, for opening his work to a broader audience. She saw him as a great philosopher whose judgement came into question and who acted badly. Her own judgement, however, was also called into question – over her actions concerning Heidegger and over her book on Eichmann. It is not surprising then that, as Richard Wolin has put it, quite ominously, Heidegger left his shadow on her work (2001). The relationship between Heidegger and Arendt is difficult to comprehend and disturbing, illustrating in a particularly powerful way the sense of the mysteriousness of the teacher–student relationship and the interplay between trust and vulnerability that Steiner talks of.6

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Heidegger remains an uncomfortable presence for us, just as he had been for his students and colleagues. It is true that what has been said may seem remote from questions concerning higher education, but what we have here is a relationship with teaching and learning at its heart, albeit one in which the common transformative, sometimes traumatic aspects of education were realized in highly disturbing ways. In the next section we shall look at Arendt’s exploration of thinking and judgement in order to consider more carefully the transformative nature of higher education. This will require us to consider knowledge and its relation to education. The first thing to note, however, is how knowledge is used and understood in current political discourse.

IV. Knowledge under scrutiny As we saw in Chapter Two and Chapter Four, knowledge in its adjectival form populates European documents and political and educational discourse – ‘knowledge transfer’; the ‘knowledge triangle’; the ‘knowledge economy’; and the ‘knowledge society’. Knowledge is seen as crucial and yet it is no longer clear what is meant by knowledge and how it is supposed to relate to education.7 Any connection that knowledge has to wisdom is obscured, and questions of value are acknowledged not at the heart of enquiry but as a kind of concession. As Michael Young (2008) observes, knowledge is used almost always rhetorically, emptying it of any meaning. There is a difference, at least in the rhetoric, between these different terms, most obviously in ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’. The former focuses on the economic implications of globalization while the latter covers a wider set of concerns set out by Jacques Delors (see Chapter Four). Knowledge, as Young argues, retains its authority through its association with certainty, objectivity and reliability, but not the basis of its claims. Arendt takes us back to the classical conception of education where knowledge and the search for knowledge were central. In ancient Greek to know is eidenai, which comes from the word to see, idein, but seeing not in a physical sense of seeing something but rather of coming to an understanding, which we are familiar with in our contemporary ‘I see what you mean’. Plato’s ‘divided line’ distinguishes between four states of mind: intelligence or knowledge (noesis or episteme) and thinking (dianoia), which relate to the intelligible realm; and belief or opinion (pistis or doxa) and imagination (eikasia), which relate to the visible realm. Doxa and noesis suggest two different kinds of knowledge: the former is based on sensory experience of phenomena in the world and is the basis of scientific enquiry. Things change in the world, and because of this, the knowledge that one can have of such

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things is not the same as is possible in, for example, geometry, which is timeless. Doxa has its object, its focus of enquiry, in this changeability. Noesis is different: it is based on intuition, a direct awareness of objects or truths; and hence Plato regarded intuition as a superior faculty. Plato’s distinction seems surprising today, especially given the unquestionable achievements of scientific enquiry. As Arendt explains this, the basic goal of science is ‘to see and to know the world as it is given to the senses – and its concept of truth is derived from the common-sense experience of irrefutable evidence, which dispels error and illusion’ (1978, p. 58). But the dominance of science means that it is difficult to think in other ways about our relationship to the world. Arendt thinks that we have lost that high point which relates to the Platonic forms and the realm of ideas, noesis. She considers how contemplation, once thought of as the highest state of mind in Western philosophy, has lost its privileged position in the modern world and has been replaced by the scientific method. A conception of knowledge as wisdom has given way to a concept of knowledge conceived scientifically – of knowing the world as given by the senses. The privileged status given to knowledge is based on its claim to rationality, and the dominant mode of rationality is related to modern science, which prioritizes objectivity and detachment. In a world dominated by science, we are like spectators, observing a world of objects and facts.

V. The birth of the new Arendt argues that the emphasis on knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge has meant that the faculties of thinking and judgement have been undermined, or forgotten about. The demise of thinking and judgement is reflected in the importance attached to the modern version of epistemology, with its detached knowing subject, which had become dominant in Western philosophy and had risen alongside modern science. We can see Heidegger’s influence in Arendt’s thinking in which ‘being-in-the-world’ is a condition of our existence; we are not disengaged subjects in a world. Arendt was talking about modernity, but her comments remain pertinent today, when knowledge is reduced to facts, information and data. Jean-François Lyotard writes provocatively of the data-banks as the ‘the encyclopaedias of tomorrow . . . they are “nature” for postmodern man’ (1984, p. 51). There is a preoccupation with improving systems for gathering more and more knowledge, and this can be seen most clearly in the systems of accountability based on transparency. Knowledge is objectified and becomes an object for possession. Equally important are the presentation of that data along with the use of ‘spin’ and the sound bite.

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Earlier we spoke of a global crisis. Arendt described the modern world as being in a state of crisis and that this was due to the fact that it was no longer structured around authority or held together by tradition. She maintained that a crisis offers the possibility for thinking again, and she believed that the essence of education reveals itself most clearly in times of crisis. The essence of education is both the protection of the child who represents the new – against the world which is already old when the child enters it, and also the protection of the world from the child. The educator has a dual responsibility: to the child and to the world. For Arendt, education must preserve and conserve, thoughts which may seem rather conservative, but on closer reading are not. First, however, we need to look at her notion of natality because this is central to her thoughts about education. Whereas death and mortality were central issues for Heidegger in Being and Time, Arendt focused on life and natality. Arendt uses the term ‘natality’ to describe Augustine’s philosophy in which he makes a distinction between the creation of the world and the creation of man. The purpose of the creation of man, he is characterized as arguing, is to make possible a beginning. Natality is worldly and temporal rather than eternal. The ‘very capacity for beginning’ she writes, ‘is rooted in natality . . . in the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth’ (Arendt 1978, p. 217). Each human being is born into a pre-existing world, an old world, as a new beginning; the world is constantly renewed through birth. Natality is the basis of the child’s singularity – all are new beings, each unique. The world we are born into is a world of appearances; there is no subject that is not also an object. Nothing exists in the singular; human beings are plural: nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator. In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody . . . plurality is the law of the earth. Ibid. (p. 19) . . . whatever can see wants to be seen, whatever can hear calls out to be heard, whatever can touch presents itself to be touched. Ibid. (p. 29, italics in original) The purpose then of education is not to prepare the new generation to participate in a pre-existing order. The task is to preserve the newness brought about by birth; it is about rebirth and the renewing of a common world:

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Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world. Arendt (1968, pp. 192–3) It is through education that awareness of each person’s singularity and of humanity’s plurality develops. Education conserves and preserves the singularity of each person and at the same time provides a space where each person can acknowledge their singularity through their exposure to the world, a world of others. Each is exposed as an individual to that world, but also exposed to the possibility of the new and unknown. The essence of education is natality; education is an invitation to find meaning and an invitation to respond to a world. The response is unknown; it is not prescribed by what has gone before. Our response, as individuals, is not solitary; it is an ongoing response that we have to renew every day in our relation to our neighbour. To the extent that we can associate education with educere, as it is sometimes claimed, this helps to bring to light Arendt’s theme of leading out into the open. Natality brings with it freedom, but Arendt does not mean the freedom to choose from a range of possibilities, or in terms of autonomy as it is often used in contemporary educational discourse. Freedom is the capacity to begin, to start something new. Natality also draws attention to the faculty of thinking, the focus of her last major work, The Life of the Mind, which she had not completed before her death. Here she suggests that not enough attention is given to thinking, as opposed to knowledge, as a condition for acting and judging, and yet no other human activity is as vulnerable as thinking. Unsurprisingly perhaps she opens her book with an epigraph from Heidegger on the nature of thinking: Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act. Preface to the Introduction, Arendt (1978)

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When these words are considered in the context of current political discourse, which we have looked at in Parts One and Two, the first thing that strikes us is just how alien Heidegger’s thinking is to that which informs education policy. And yet, the Heidegger/Arendt story that is sketched out here is of two people who spent their lives working in universities and for whom the nature of higher education was always a concern. Arendt begins by drawing attention to a distinction made by Kant between reason, Vernunft, and intellect, Verstand, because it has important consequences for how we conceptualize thinking. The faculty of reason, by her account, has to do with thinking and meaning, whereas the faculty of intellect has to do with knowing and cognition. The intellect wants to grasp what is given to the senses, but this is not the case with the faculty of thought. Thought does not ask if something exists at all because its existence is taken for granted; thought asks what it means for it to be. Arendt’s concern with thinking and judgement is born out of her view that plurality defines the human condition – we are unique individuals in a world of others. In the world of appearances there is difference and otherness, a plurality of things. For Arendt this is also the case with the thinking process: . . . the specifically human actualisation of consciousness in the thinking dialogue between me and myself suggests that the difference and otherness, which are such outstanding characteristics of the world of appearances as it is given to man for his habitat among a plurality of things, are the very conditions for the existence of man’s mental ego as well, for this ego actually exists only in duality. (1968, p. 187) Unlike knowledge, the act of thinking cannot be learnt or inherited from the past or handed down like customs; it can only be indicated; ‘each new generation, indeed every new human being . . . must discover and ploddingly pave it anew’. While thinking is a solitary activity, it is not an isolated activity; solitude, ‘is a situation in which I keep myself company’ (Arendt 1968, p. 13).8 There is an important relation between thinking and judgement and this has two aspects. First, a by-product of the thinking process is conscience, con science, to know with and by myself. Conscience does not tell us what to do but what not to do. Second, the silent dialogue between me and myself is not constrained by following accepted rules of conduct or ways of thinking; it allows for the activity of judging particulars rather than looking to universals. In times of crisis, thinking is critical in that it allows the individual to judge for themselves rather than following the majority opinion; we are singularized in judgement. The term ‘singularity’ brings to the fore notions of responsibility: we cannot swap places with somebody else;

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we cannot get off the hook. We have to act even if that means choosing to let somebody else make a decision for us. In a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper, Nancy Vansieleghem suggests that birth, on Arendt’s account, is not just about becoming present to the world or presenting oneself to the world; it is also an experience of our presence in the world. It is in the ‘presencing that a person turns to expose themselves to others’ (Vansieleghem 2009, p.114) Arendt, she says, invites us ‘to put our (educational) thoughts at stake’. To look for solutions would be to miss the point, it would be to not think. Thinking has little to do with knowledge or with the appropriation of anything, whether skills or competences or facts, those things that are given priority in a performative culture, where life itself becomes ‘the object of knowledge, a matter of interventions and inventions, of products one must invest in’ (Vansieleghem 2009, p. 110). Arendt’s view of learning is quite different from current political thinking, where developing autonomous learners and learning-to-learn (skills) become an end in themselves; the individual is constructed in a particular way which omits any idea of the pursuit of the common good, only the exercise of individual freedom and choice.9 This way of thinking is at odds with Arendt’s view, which is premised on a sense of ‘being-with-others’ in the world and of plurality. The dominant view today is that the individual’s life is a project to perform well as an individual, acquiring the necessary personalized skills and competences; the relationship to others is not acknowledged. The individual is constructed as a lifelong learner continuously employed in the pursuit of this project, or as Jan Masschelein puts it bluntly, ‘learning is living’ (Masschelein 2001, p. 5). This is a form of life that is closer to zoe than to bios; in the former, life has no other aim than self-preservation, whereas in the latter, life is meaningful – to be human it has to be more than about survival. It also means that life is intrinsically relational rather than individualistic (see also Harris 2008). Like Arendt, Maarten Simons is also concerned with the degeneration of the public space. In a recent work he observes astutely that the ‘public’ is reduced to spaces and procedures that enable or facilitate the capitalization of life. He invokes religious imagery of baptism to convey what is taking place – we are baptized as learners not citizens (Simons 2009). What is learned is redefined in terms of competences and skills which can be collected. The student is seen as a consumer who has a choice of educational products to suit their individual needs or preferences. This brings us back to Michael Sandel’s observations, mentioned earlier in the chapter concerning the confusion that can arise when a market economy becomes a market society and market values move into all other areas of life that traditionally have been governed by non-market norms: ethical or moral questions are construed as

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economic questions. The problems that are raised in the market society are exacerbated in a performative society with its systems of accountability and transparency that admit no place for judgement or trust based on shared understandings of practice; these have been replaced by hard objective data or evidence. If we are persuaded by Arendt’s line of thought, then a new kind of thinking about education is required – one that is concerned with a particular kind of thinking and judgement, one that involves turning away from knowledge that has degenerated into information, where the relation between knowledge and content has been broken, where learning has been reduced to the acquisition of transferable skills. As Standish argues it also requires a moving away from the technical language that has seeped into education; this language seems more reliable and makes us feel more confident than ordinary language (Standish 2010). Take, for example, ‘criteria’; this word has taken on a special technical sense among teachers and students and means a list of points that refer to behavioural outcomes that can be identified without interpretation, or with minimal interpretation, and without teacher judgement because judgement is seen as subjective; to be avoided. The teacher becomes more like a technical operator. The mystery and enigma of the teacher or master, captured so powerfully in Steiner’s historical study of the master–disciple relationship is, today, almost unrecognizable, indeed undesirable. And yet it gets to the heart of education. There is perhaps something mildly disturbing in the fact that both Heidegger and the European Commission mobilize the deep cultural symbolism of the triangle – the former in bringing together the labour service, the armed service and the knowledge service, and the latter conjoining education, research and innovation in its formulation of the role of higher education. Both are in a sense policy statements; both are public pronouncements. The altogether more subtle examination of the idea of teaching in Steiner evokes a sense of the importance of the connections of teacher, learner and content, in a manner reminiscent of the power of eros in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium. We shall return to this triangle in the final chapter. In this concluding section I want to return to the themes of crisis – mentioned at the beginning of the chapter – and to questions of judgement. This involves a discursive shift from the very human narrative of the crisis concerning Heidegger and Arendt to the bureaucratic register of higher education and what is at stake.

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VI. Challenging thought Both Heidegger and Arendt can be seen, in some ways, as philosophers of crisis. Heidegger was critical of liberalism, especially in its English manifestation, and of the values that underpinned modernity in the Western world. He was woefully naïve in thinking that he could give philosophical direction to the Nazi movement, while the resentment he displayed at being supposedly let down by it was plainly self-serving: in public at least Heidegger’s self-questioning, such as it was, combined arrogance with disingenuousness. Although Arendt shared some concerns about the loss of meaning that had accompanied the modern world, she was writing in the post-war period and the aftermath of totalitarianism. Her response to the crisis was quite different. She reconceptualized the notion of world, drawing our attention to plurality as the condition of humanity, and to the importance of thinking and judgement. The account of Heidegger and Arendt may seem melodramatic and far removed from the everyday concerns of higher education, but it is not. A crisis calls for a critical response and, as Arendt demonstrates powerfully in her writing, born as it was in large measure out of her relationship with Heidegger, and in the historical context in which she found herself, thinking and judgement are crucial. Judgement is present not only in moments of high drama or crisis on the scale that concerned Heidegger and Arendt, but in the everyday and the ordinary. This becomes clearer if we think about language: there is, on the one hand, the apparent ordinariness of language seen essentially as a means of communication; but then, on the other, there is the strangeness of language, as a wellspring of thought. This will be discussed further in the final chapter. Let us return to consider two activities which, traditionally, have been at the centre of university life. Teaching and research are based on communities of practice; thinking and judgement are essential in educational practices. Here judgements are made not according to endless lists of criteria, but by those involved in the practice itself; there are no ultimate foundations where standards are sustained in the light of precedent, comparison and projection. Mostly we can rely on those in the community of practice to make good or sound judgements. Take, for example, academic peer review, an important practice in higher education and one where judgement is crucial. An article is read and judged in relation to other articles in the same field. There is a shared understanding of what constitutes good practice derived from membership of a disciplinary tradition; it is not derived from hard and fast criteria that can be ticked off. As we saw in Chapter Four regarding the background of knowledge and familiarity that must lie behind any focused enquiry, students enter into a

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community of learners engaged in a conversation. This is based on a tradition, but one that is open to critique and change; learning and the object of study present a challenge. Although disciplinary traditions are founded on orderly thinking, this should not be understood as totalizing. We just need to look at Heidegger and Arendt to see how radical their thoughts are, despite their admiration for the classical world. The content of a subject opens up, unfolds, as students and teachers engage with the subject matter; this involves the skills of thinking and judgement, but not in the sense of skills as autonomous and individualized lists of competences. The emphasis on general and transferable skills, which we see in higher education policy, suggests that study can be reduced to simple facts decontextualized and compartmentalized. A discipline releases thinking to an orientation towards a beyond. The centrality of judgement has been blurred significantly in the assessment and quality assurance systems that today exist across the education sector. Attention is drawn to, and held captive by, endless procedures and systems that are, so it is supposed, constantly being improved and made more efficient. These smooth systems and structures distort conceptions of professional practice; we need to be suspicious of transparency because the emphasis on this distorts practice – which is our proper concern. The nature of study is also distorted because our attention is drawn to feeding the system with data and evidence of performance. In both teaching and research, knowledge is naturalized, reduced to what can be measured and standardized. There is a preoccupation with the accumulation of knowledge in terms of the data banks plundered for evidence of ‘what works’. Knowledge gets trapped in parallel tracks where it becomes reified and commodified. This way of thinking, which informs current political discourse, is destructive; words are emptied of their content and become fashionable signifiers in projects of performativity. The university is a place of learning and of knowledge. The word place rather than space is used because the latter suggests something that can be measured, denoting a physical space as found, for example, on an ordnance survey map, which is measurable and calculable. The word ‘place’, on the other hand, denotes a locale, somewhere that emerges through meaningful connections, such as a village, whose significance comes from the lives and histories of those living in that space – such as those of the characters in the play Translations, which we looked at in the opening chapter. The meaning of a place cannot be measured in ways that underpin instrumentalist thinking. If we think of the language of European higher education policy we have a European Space/Area of Higher Education – and it is in the singular rather than plural – that is highly regulated and prescribed through the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.10

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Teaching and learning in higher education involve being challenged and confronted by uncomfortable or difficult ideas, and this involves different kinds of enquiry, including the academic and the vocational. What is defining about higher education is its openness onto the unknown and unfathomable. Students need to be aware of limits to a way of thinking and of what cannot be contained in a discipline; they need to learn what it is to think. If higher education is to take its role seriously, this will involve taking our words seriously; each word is an occasion for judgement. The university must be a place in which thinking can occur, where education is recognized as meaningful and endless. Our thoughts and ideas must be held up to scrutiny and we need to be made to feel uncomfortable, to be challenged as individuals, and to see the strange in the familiar. In this chapter we have considered translation as a metaphor for transformation; we have seen how transformation alludes to something that is difficult to measure and quantify, that resists the calculability that underpins current political thinking. The transforming nature of education is seen quite powerfully in Arendt’s story going far beyond that possible in the kind of transformation imagined in current political discourse. But we need to go further, to go beyond translation as a metaphor – because to see it in this way only is to fall short of what is ultimately at issue here. We have seen, in the work of Heidegger and Arendt, how disturbing and challenging the nature of enquiry can be and that their ideas continue to provoke us to think and to ask questions that matter. We can easily lapse at this task. In the final chapter translation is considered in terms of its bearing on relations between the self and other, the strange and the stranger, and it is this understanding of translation that opens up matters of central importance to the very point and character of the university. To do this we shall consider the possibilities that a more religious lexicon might reveal, language which, in our secular age, has become taboo.

Endnotes 1 In a critical article on the demise of research in UK universities, Ross McKibbin notes the way in which research is now referred to as ‘output’ or ‘outcome’. London Review of Books, February 2010. 2 None were practising Jews, and did not regard themselves as Jewish, but as German. This changed, however, with the introduction of the Law for the Reconstitution of the German Civil Service, which banned Jews from civil service positions including the university. As Rector, Heidegger enforced the ban.

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3 Her later writings were concerned with political judgements in American politics; she thought that too often decisions were made on the basis of calculation rather than judgement. The broader argument she makes is of the importance of making judgements ourselves rather than falling back on rules and procedures, behaviours which she thought were misplaced confidence and a refusal to act. 4 In the 1930s, Arendt wrote a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, who Arendt considered embodied the pariah – in contrast to Disraeli whom she regarded as a parvenu. She considered Lazare as a pariah. 5 Jaspers did write a letter to the Freiburg Denazification Committee describing Heidegger’s philosophy as dictatorial and that it would be very unwise to allow him to return to the lecture theatre to teach students (Young-Bruehl 1982). 6 Steiner also talks of authentic teaching as a calling or a vocation, invoking religious imagery, which is interesting when considering Heidegger, the teacher. Heidegger had been brought up as a Catholic and had, from an early age, planned to study theology, which he did; he went to Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg but in 1911 was seriously ill. It has been suggested that this illness may have been caused by his anxiety over the doubts he’d had over his chosen vocation (see Ettinger 1995). There are traces of his earlier interest in theology in On Time and Being (1969) where it is possible to see connections with the thinking of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval thinkers (this is explored in Harris 2009). 7 Michael Young (2009) examines the consequences of the blurring of the distinction that can be found in education policy across the world between knowledge and skills on the one hand, and the production of knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge on the other. 8 Arendt quotes one of Socrates’ dictums: ‘Being one it would be worse for me to be at odds with myself than in disagreement with multitudes of men’ (Arendt 1978, p. 181). Socrates talks of being one and not being able to risk being out of harmony with himself but Arendt argues that nothing is truly one; you need two tones to produce a harmonious sound; ‘when I appear and am seen by others, I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognisable . . . I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Otherness.’ (Ibid, p. 183). 9 This is not a simple contrast between liberal and communitarian; Arendt does not like the idea of individuals working together on a project and this is not what she means by a public space. She sees the public space as a place for conversation where it is through the conversation that ideas about what projects might look like appear.

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10 The European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education was established in 2000 in order to promote European co-operation in the field of quality assurance. It is financed through the European Commission.

Chapter 6

The University in Translation Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages to one another. Walter Benjamin (1996a, p. 255)

God breathes his breath into man; this is at once life and mind and language. Walter Benjamin (1996b, p. 67)

I. The sense of things The questions that the book has explored concern the purpose of the university and the role of the academic in a global world where knowledge has become prized for its economic value above all else. In Part One, the focus of attention was on policy, beginning with an overview of some of the main changes that have taken place in higher education, including the growing importance of the supranational policy space in shaping education systems. As we saw, the internationalization of higher education is a central feature of higher education policy across the world. It was suggested that internationalization deserves particular attention because it is here that questions of language – and translation – come to the fore most strongly. We discovered, however, in Part Two that internationalization tends to be understood in terms of the economic benefits it is assumed to offer; it is also underpinned by an instrumentalist kind of thinking based on measurability and calculability in which translation is seen primarily as a technical matter, of moving from one language to another. It was argued that what is required is a richer understanding that brings us closer to questions of meaning, questions that are central to higher education. Alongside this, I introduced the story of Arendt and Heidegger, and this for two reasons: first because their work is both provocative and disturbing, and relevant to the matters of concern in this book; and second, because teaching and learning is central to their relationship. That relationship is a particularly

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striking example of the powerful, uncomfortable and destabilizing nature of enquiry itself, and the relationship that exists between the teacher, the student and the subject of study. In this final chapter I will suggest that other ways of thinking about both internationalization and also the role of the university are crucial in two respects, first, in articulating the questions that matter; and second, in contributing to a more meaningful way of thinking about our lives and relationships to others and to the world. One question that is not well articulated in current political and educational discourse is how to connect different nations and cultures in a globalized world at a level that goes beyond the instrumental. When we consider the nature of translation here, this is a much deeper question than that of how to accommodate linguistic difference within a system of higher education. Translation is about the nature of meaning, and this is, and must be, a central concern to higher education. The epigraphs from Walter Benjamin signal the shift in idiom that is helpful in considering, in more subtle ways, the idea of translation, and to which we shall return shortly. As the previous chapter suggests we need a different way of thinking about language and translation, and a useful starting point is to return to the three paths of thought discussed in Chapter One, where language is a common theme. I began by suggesting that these paths of thought help show us that Heidegger’s idea that we are still not thinking is to be taken seriously. In the first path of thought, the blandness and emptiness of the language of policy was contrasted with the richness and diversity of language in everyday life; we saw how the banal language of performativity, accountability and transparency transforms education. Education is drained of life; its unpredictability and mysteriousness extinguished. We can see then that the kind of language we use matters greatly – it is critical for the kind of education that we have. The excerpt from Brian Friel’s play Translations, in the second path of thought, reminded us of the power and pervasiveness of language and that native English speakers especially can easily forget this. Language can be taken for granted, seen only as a vehicle for communication. In the play, one of the things that is being done to the Irish is that their land is being mapped. Now, mapping in many respects is a valuable thing, but the costs of it in the context of the play are profoundly culturally damaging: ‘place’ is translated into ‘space’ so that the history and life that the name of a place invokes is lost or, perhaps more accurately, effaced – a place becomes a grid point on an ordnance survey map. Any culturally specific meaning, other than that imposed by the British, is, in a sense, neutralized. There is an analogy here with contemporary education practice; the form it takes is like the imposition of a grid on practice, which removes from the picture both the

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teacher, and also the relationship between teacher, content and student. In the accounting systems, there is a sense of security and of foundations, whose parallel in the mapping exercise is the supposed precision of the coordinates. And again, the supposed objectivity and rigour of ‘objective’ testing regimes mimics the measuring instruments the soldiers use, obscuring in the process those different channels of meaning-making that otherwise give shape to the geography of people’s lives and education. In both cases there is a neutralization – of feeling, of meaning, of the exercise of judgement – and a reliance on incontrovertible ‘evidence’. The third path of thought considered the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, where the vanity of the tribe of Shem is expressed in their craving for the command of a single language over all things. (‘Let us make a name for ourselves so that we may not be scattered about the whole earth . . .’ Gen. 11.4.) This story can be transposed to the contemporary world and the dominance of a particular kind of rationality, based on a rigid distinction between subject and object, and which precludes other ways of thinking and making sense of the world. The attempt by the tribe to build the tower is doomed to fail; the people do not realize what they are trying to do. The multiplicity of languages is part of the human condition and this means that there can be no fixed meaning; there is always translation. But this is not an empirical point to the effect that the fact that there is a diversity of languages requires the practical solution of translation. It is the more profound point about the nature of language, which Derrida has done so much to reveal: that an otherness is necessarily there at the heart of meaning. Translatability is a condition of meaning. In this final chapter, I want to consider more carefully how these different paths of thought-invoking language and translation are pertinent to higher education. This will involve moving away from seeing translation simply as a metaphor for transformation to suggest that this is not enough, that there is something more profound at stake in our relation to language, as suggested in the epigraphs to this chapter. The experience of transformation has the quality of translation because it involves a new kind of relationship to language. We touched on this when we considered the valuable insights brought to the question of language in Heidegger’s work. He reminds us that in a world dominated by science and technology the significance of the world does not come from either of these but from human beings themselves; language names things, calling them into being. Technology is a way that the world is revealed to us that leads to particular ways of categorizing and measuring. As we saw above, benchmarking, targets, spreadsheets and databases are now central to education; these influence the way we think about education. We noted in Chapter Four that Heidegger spoke of the displacement

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of logos (reason) by ratio (calculation). It is time now to develop this point further, for one of the things that Heidegger powerfully shows is the way that this displacement lays the way for a slide from logos to logistics. He writes: In the West, thought about thinking has flourished as ‘logic’. Logic has gathered special knowledge concerning a special kind of thinking. This knowledge concerning logic has been made scientifically fruitful only quite recently, in a special science that calls itself ‘logistics’. It is the most specialised of all specialised sciences. In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. Heidegger (1968, p. 21) Heidegger thought that modern Western society – including education – had degenerated and we see this in his writings on Plato. For example, he argued that some of the most profound aspects implicit in the allegory of the cave had been forgotten about, in particular the significance of the return to the cave in the original myth. Plato imagines a cave where there is a group of people who live there in chains, facing the wall of the cave. They can see shadows on the wall as things pass by them in front of a fire, but they cannot turn around to see what the things are, only their shadows. Plato says that the people only ever see the shadows and not the real things themselves, reality. It is only when you leave the cave and make your way into the sunlight that you can see reality. The teacher cannot pass on this knowledge to her student, only direct her mind towards what is real and important. Heidegger argues that the return to the cave raises dangers because the person could be ridiculed by those still in the cave and would not be able to see in the darkness of the cave after being accustomed to the light outside. Here is Heidegger: Hence the telling of the story does not end, as is often supposed, with the description of the highest level attained in the ascent out of the cave. On the contrary, the ‘allegory’ includes the story of the descent of the freed person back into the cave, back to those who are still in chains. The one who has been freed is supposed to lead these people too away from what is unhidden for them and to bring them face to face with the most unhidden. But the would-be liberator no longer knows his or her way around the cave and risks the danger of succumbing to the overwhelming power of the kind of truth that is normative there, the danger of being overcome by the claim of the common ‘reality’ to be the only reality. The liberator

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is threatened with the possibility of being put to death, a possibility that becomes a reality in the fate of Socrates, who was Plato’s ‘teacher’. Heidegger (1998, p. 171) Heidegger is concerned with what he takes to be a shift in the idea of truth itself, from the revealing or unconcealment of al ďtheia – literally the bringing of things out of forgetfulness – to the notion of correspondence, known technically as adequatio – that is, the correspondence of a proposition with the state of affairs it describes. The shift from a Greek to a Latin term is pointed in Heidegger’s account because it gestures towards what he takes to be the decline in thought that he identifies as coming with the decline of ancient Greece. The now dominant notion of representation is a reflection of a degeneration that has occurred in the modern world. Even when the people turn round to see what is causing the shadows, the objects themselves are artificial in the sense that they are artefacts, and therefore the possibilities of knowledge that they offer are only partial. As we noted above, technology, on Heidegger’s account, leads us to see things in particular ways; things as well as people come to be seen as resources. In his later work, which focuses much more on language, he thought that the poetic offered a resistance to the enframing logic of technology (see Standish 2002). This was because the poetic brings things into being, and brings into being new possibilities for human beings and for the world. Heidegger’s reading of the allegory of the cave and his thoughts on the poetic are highly pertinent to education, especially higher education, because they speak of bringing to life new possibilities; the teacher has to return again and again finding new words and new ways of thinking and understanding the world; there is no rest for the teacher or the student in this endeavour. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is also captured powerfully in Arendt’s thinking, where life and natality – the constant renewal of the world through birth – are central, and where education is an invitation to find meaning and to respond to a world.

II. Inspiring thoughts The idea of bringing things into being takes us back to the language of the sacred texts. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Book. God creates the world through his words and the naming of the world and Adam; his words bring us to life. God’s language is divine, whereas the language of human beings is not, although it derives from the sacred language. In Jewish theology the distinction between the sacred and the profane is extremely important, and we can see this most vividly in the work of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (Jacobson 2003). Like Arendt, both were

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German Jews who fled Germany. Benjamin and Scholem were good friends, and they became two of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, writing in the aftermath of the First World War and confronting the crisis of democracy experienced in the face of fascism and Nazism. Their thoughts reveal something of the tensions within Western Christianity and within the rational and instrumentalist thinking of the Enlightenment, both of which misinterpret Jewish thought. It is perhaps surprising then to find that there are common themes between Benjamin and Scholem, on the one hand, and Heidegger, on the other – especially regarding language and the abyssal nature of thought and human being, but also in their sense of loss. Yet this takes them along radically different paths. For Benjamin and Scholem their sense of loss was of a European civilization within which there was a place for Jews and Jewish thought; in Heidegger’s case the sense of loss is a kind of nostalgia for that loss suffered with the demise of ancient Greece. As we saw in Chapter Four, in Heidegger’s writings of the 1920s, his concern is with the need to renew philosophy and the university in response to the decay of the institutions of the Weimar Republic. This could be done, he initially thought, by retrieving Aristotelian and Christian sources. By the 1930s, however, he abandons this in favour of an originary source that has to be kept pure, uncontaminated by anything that is not originary Greek or biblical, in the belief that there was a spiritual relation between the Greek and German languages and cultures. Benjamin takes the name of God to represent the centre of all linguistic being; the communicative act of God constitutes the ‘basis of every language’.1 In creation, the language of God is transferred to Adam, and this is to be understood not in metaphorical but in linguistic terms: ‘In the beginning was the Word; the Word was with God and the Word was God’ (Jn 1.1). Language and meaning and the human are connected, and their interconnection cannot be undone. It is, however, precisely because of this interconnectedness that there is fluidity: we give words to the world and we receive them. As we see from the second epigraph to this chapter, which is taken from the essay ‘On language as such and on the language of man’, Benjamin considers the way in which this is expressed in the Bible. Benjamin uses the creation story, in effect, to construct a philosophy of language, in the light of which the content of a thing is not expressed through language but in language. Benjamin’s ‘through’ and ‘in’ subtly distinguish what is at stake here: the distinction serves to resist the idea of language as mere bearer of meaning, and hence as technical or instrumental. It is, rather, constitutive of what we are as human beings. God calls into being Adam, and this creating word is also a naming word, Adam (adamah, meaning earth). When we come in to the world we are named, and this naming is also a call; we are called, invited to respond. This being-in-the-world is then an expression of God’s

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inner substance, an expression in which the human being, world and things are generated through language. Yet God remains incommunicable and inscrutable, and, that is, untranslatable. In ancient Hebrew, the language of the Torah, God’s name appears as YHWH; it is literally unpronounceable. For Benjamin, every language, apart from divine ‘language’, which would be pure, can be thought of as a translation of all others. Language depends upon differentiation, and a differential that is not, as it were, top-down – say, as a taxonomy – but is the stuff of translation.2 But a divine ‘language’ would be a language without differentiation, a language seeing all at once without differentiation, and hence without identification, and hence no language at all. If such is the mind of God, this does indeed make God incomprehensible to us. This impossible language nevertheless remains as a kind of ideal of perspicuity to which all too-human thought aspires. The idea of the perfect language is both fascinating and important, and it again recalls the story of the Tower of Babel, referred to in Chapter One; it is also the subject of Umberto Eco’s masterly The Search for the Perfect Language, where he traces different lines of thought from the medieval to modern world. As we saw in Chapter Three, the myth of Babel has generally been interpreted throughout history in one of two ways: either as a catastrophe that led to a scattering of peoples and languages across the world, as suggested in Genesis 11; or, that there were multiple languages before Babel, as suggested in Genesis 10. The latter interpretation suggests there was no catastrophe but rather that it is a part of the human condition, and therefore something to be acknowledged. Irrespective of which interpretation – punishment or natural process – was preferred, the interest in the idea of an originary, or the possibility of inventing a perfect language, remained. It was particularly strong during the Enlightenment when the scientific method emerged as the dominant mode of enquiry alongside a particular conception of rationality, one that can be described as encyclopaedic, in which reason is viewed as impersonal, universal and disinterested (MacIntyre 1990). Its very name, ‘the Enlightenment’, suggests moving from darkness to the light, from confusion to order, using the religious metaphor but overturning it – appropriating religious imagery for secular thought. The perfect language may appear similar to the idea of a pure language, but a more careful reading will show this to be inappropriate. A divine, pure language – a language idealized as the language of God – would, as we have seen, be impossible, however much it might figure as orientating our making of meaning; it would emphatically be unlike the universal secular language of rational thought, as found in Enlightenment thinking. We shall return to this later, but first I want to say something more about translation and the strangeness of language, in which meaning is always in

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movement. The strangeness of language can be seen in a particularly striking way in the work of translation from one language to another. Wilhelm von Humboldt makes a distinction between Fremdheit and Das Fremde in relation to the translation of texts (Eco 2003). Fremdheit (which can be translated as foreignness or strangeness), on the one hand is the term he used to describe the sense a reader has when the translator seems to have chosen words that sound strange or odd, as though a mistake has been made in the translation. Das Fremde (translated as the strange or the unfamiliar), on the other hand, is the term used to describe a reader’s sense of reading something that is recognizable, that has been translated appropriately, but that is being read as if for the first time – the familiar has been rendered strange or foreign. Humboldt shows that a proper understanding of language in its original form is not transparent or unproblematic. It is always strange, always open to disturb the reader. The strangeness of language is thematized in Benjamin’s writing, as suggested from the epigraphs to this chapter. For him the essential quality of a translation is not communication or the imparting of knowledge; a translation that intends to perform a transmitting function is, in his eyes, a bad translation. It is rather the mysterious and unfathomable (that is there in the original) that is essential to a good translation. The importance of the mysterious also suggests that translatability implies untranslatability, an idea that is central in Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’. The notion suggests both the impossible and the necessary; we could not live or make sense of our lives without translation of all sorts, but at the same time it is impossible because it can never be absolute. There is no perfect translation. While the goal of translation is ‘undeniably a final, conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation’, at the same time ‘an instant and final . . . solution to this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind’ (Benjamin 1996a, p. 257). This acknowledgment is central because it suggests also that it is the role of the translator rather than the translation that is central: It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language. Ibid. (p. 261) A translation is not an ending but a beginning, a transformation and a ‘renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change’ (Ibid., p. 256). The translator must allow her own language to be affected by the foreign language. There is always an element in the translation that refuses

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further translation, which is to acknowledge what is foreign, what is different, and to acknowledge that which is incommensurable. For Benjamin the idea of untranslatability is not something negative; there is a richness that is important to recognize and acknowledge. The impossibility of translation suggests a loss: there is no perfect translation, no complete, ultimate understanding or perfect communication, the presumption of which seems to underpin so much of current liberal political discourse. The emphasis upon impossibility is not a counsel of despair, for what we are considering here are the very conditions of meaning. In a thoughtful paper pursuing these matters, Lovisa Bergdahl has suggested that this loss ‘condemns us to never give up trying’ (2009, p. 40). This is to recognize that we are always moving towards something rather than reaching an end point; it is an orientation rather than a route. To lose is also to find in the sense that it is also a release that invites or allows a response. It acknowledges the remainder that cannot be pinned down or reduced to something familiar and rendered safe. The richness in the idea of the untranslatable is that, as Bergdahl points out, it makes absolute understanding impossible: there are limits to what we can understand of the other and of ourselves. The suggestion of a humility here, the need for this, is not far removed from the kind of humility that is found in the proper pursuit of a subject, especially a subject in higher education, where even the research professor will ideally be someone whose sense of the limits of her knowledge deepens the more she pursues it. This is a condition of meaning, but it is one that is realized most fully by those who are truly in higher education. But rather than being a purely negative thing, a limitation, this impossibility is the very condition of meaning, bringing with it the ethical imperative that we should not give up trying.3 We need to pause, however, to examine the claims that are being made here, specifically this claim regarding the condition of meaning. One of the achievements of Derrida is to have shown the way that the sign functions in virtue of its exposure to an otherness that it can never contain. Words spoken are open to interpretation by those who hear them, and, that is, to repetition, citation and relocation that necessarily go beyond the speaker’s control. To add more words ‘for clarification’ will merely expand the possibilities of such unanticipated association. And this being heard and interpreted is precisely what the speaker must depend upon: it is the condition for her making sense at all. So too, in her forming of her words, it is a fallacy to suppose that she somehow has ready-made ideas that she then encodes in words, for the purpose of communication – with her words subsequently to be decoded by those who receive them who will arrive at her original thoughts. Her thoughts come from the circulation of words to which she is introduced in the culture in which she grows up. And those

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words come to her already with histories of association that extend back into their former uses in ways she can never exhaustively know. Hence, her words already contain an exposure to what is other: this is the very condition not only of meaning but of her human being. Bergdahl’s reading of Benjamin is powerful and draws attention to the ethical response that translation summons. She considers Benjamin’s position in relation to that of Habermas, for whom translation is understood in terms of a possibility that is realizable through co-operation and negotiation. One weakness of Habermas’ argument that she identifies is that many of its assumptions presuppose a kind of consensus, the achievement of which is not convincingly explained. This denies the very thing that is present and contested – difference and incommensurability. For Benjamin there is a mysteriousness in the untranslatability (what is beyond the translation is the mysterious), in between the lines of the text, which is particularly so in the reading of the scriptures. It is not about communication:4 it is about a response provoked by what is beyond the self but that occasions the self’s reaching out; it is an ethical responsibility first and foremost to which I am called. I am singularized; I have to respond, nobody else can make a response for me. For Benjamin the concept of translation is central to our existence as human beings – the relationship that exists between all objects and things: we are always in translation. Jacques Derrida’s way of putting this is that translation is both possible and impossible: it is impossible in that it is something that can never be fully or purely realized; it is possible in that it is, of course, what we achieve on a daily basis – achieve in our flawed, human way. The assumption that the literal translation of language involves a translation from a ‘pure’ meaning of the native language into another language is mistaken. Translation can . . . get everything across except this: the fact that there are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages or tongues. Sometimes – I would even say always – several tongues. There is impurity in every language. Derrida (1982, p. 100)

Derrida makes this point deftly in ‘What is a “relevant” translation?’ The inverted commas around the word ‘relevant’ are used to draw attention to a specific point about untranslatability. In any text there is a question about the source language in relation to which the words used are to be understood. Words are always in the process of translation; the word ‘carries in its body an on-going process of translation’ (2005, p. 425). There is also a broader point that he is making and that is the connection between the word

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‘relevant’ and the French verb relever, which invokes the idea of a bringing to life – and this meaning of relever is heard in the French usage of relevant, whereas it is almost completely hidden in the English word. It is this idea of bringing to life again that is key. The above draws heavily on poststructuralist accounts of translation and of meaning. It is then intriguing to find that similar ideas were also advanced, about a century earlier, in the work of Henry David Thoreau. Consider, for example, his extraordinary and complex statement, in Walden: The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. Thoreau (1986, p. 289, italics in the original) What does Thoreau mean by these words, and what leads him to make such a claim? Anything we say is partial, never the final word or the complete story. The best words demand something like faith and piety in that they do not try to say it all. Some things cannot be said directly and need to be subtle like fragrances that linger and provoke images; or, better, when we say things ‘directly’, we may have the illusion of robust practicality, but in fact do a kind of violence. He is saying also that we have a responsibility not to keep words as monuments, that what is needed is to have a sensitivity to language, and this he expresses powerfully in terms of the mother tongue and the father tongue. At times this is expressed as a kind of ethics of reading, with reading taken to epitomize the relation to language that is at issue: Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. Ibid. (1986, pp. 92–3) The mother tongue is the language we are born into and cannot step outside of. It is seen as natural. The father tongue involves a relation to language different from that of the mother tongue, where the illusion of the

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latter’s transparency and seamless functionality is disturbed. The religious connotations here, which have already been evident in the reference to frankincense, extend to an evocation of the words of the prophets, whose warnings to the people Thoreau is in some ways seeking to emulate. The father tongue and mother tongue do not complement each other, but we do need both. As suggested earlier, human languages can only ever be partial, and different societies and cultures have different ways of making sense of the world and hence the multiplicity of languages. There will always be difference, but the problem is that we tend to accept the differences that our language gives to us as though these were fixed. The responsibility not to keep words as monuments is exemplified in the father tongue, whereas the mother tongue has no such responsibility. Our own words are new objects that we bring into the world; what you give back is not what you received. As Thoreau says, you can borrow an axe but return it sharper than you received it. Whereas the father tongue acknowledges and understands this, performativity and technicism understand only the mother tongue and everything is reduced to ‘a translatability without remainder’ (Standish 1999, p. 11). Words such as ‘quality’, ‘standards’ and ‘effectiveness’ have become mere monuments, meaningless. The father tongue is what is required of what Stanley Cavell has called an ‘education for grownups’ (Cavell 1979, p. 125) because it offers a mature relationship to language that can challenge the common and the taken for granted – it is about uncommon schooling (Thoreau 1986). Thoreau is not proposing an institutional form of schooling but rather a schooling that goes on through life, a kind of continuous learning into adulthood and crucially very different from the lifelong learning of current political and educational discourse. We can see how the father tongue also resonates strongly with ‘higher’ education; in any subject students need to be sensitized to language and this is possible through the father tongue, which is needed to disturb the unproblematic view of language. No subject can be independent of the words in which its ideas are generated, and it is in the higher pursuit of a subject that those words are most to be tested. As noted in the first chapter it is perhaps not without significance that in the past a person went to university to read philosophy or read chemistry. Nowadays the verb most often used, outside Oxbridge, is to ‘do’ a subject – ‘I’m doing history’. We can see then that Thoreau’s concern is also with the question of meaning and understanding the world. Walden is about the possibility of living and can be seen as a kind of perfectionist writing, whose topic is apparently the building of a hut and the planting of beans, but whose aspirations are epic in scale. In this the very idea of America is at stake, and in a world where globalization is in certain respects synonymous with Americanization, we might reflect on the larger implications of this. Thoreau was disappointed

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in America – the first modern democracy, the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, with its echoes of the idea of a new Garden of Eden or a Promised Land. The American dream had not been realized, and though globally we have continued to live in expectations of this, we may experience a disappointment that is not so remote from Thoreau’s. His book is not an easy read; there is ambiguity and it is difficult to work out what he means or how to interpret a particular word or phrase. His writing sensitizes the reader to the father tongue. We have to learn to read, and this not just literally: we have to learn to read the world. In a chapter entitled ‘Reading’ he draws the reader’s attention to an important feature of the written word: ‘it is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips’ (Thoreau 1986, p. 94). Writing and reading are quite different from the spoken word. It is easier to be shocked or wrong-footed by the written word. While this is possible when you listen to a good orator, the difference is that usually the orator wants to win you over rather than to shock.

III. On the edge of the abyss The idea of untranslatability in the work of Thoreau, Benjamin and Derrida suggests that there are limits to what we can understand not only of the foreign but also of ourselves; it opens up a question about the relationship between the foreign and the native. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, globalization throws up the question of how to connect with other cultures, and of intercultural understanding. In Chapter Three we discussed two things – first the homogenization of language brought about by the use of English as a global language; and second, the emergence of a technical and calculative language. As we saw in Chapter Five, there is a relationship between such language and the emergence of new forms of accountability and regulatory frameworks to ensure standards and quality in education nationally and internationally. This language is underpinned by a monolingual way of thinking in which a dichotomy is set up between the native and the foreign culture. There is also an emphasis on inclusion and harmony, as we saw in European policy documents and in the speech by David Lammy, cited in Chapter Four. In the latter, there is a clear undercurrent of thought to the effect that difference and incommensurability are neither good nor desirable. Lammy refers to an ‘encounter culture’, but this is not defined, and it seems to be couched in terms of a multiculturalism predicated on a dichotomy between the home culture and others; this is a false securing of identity through simplistic comparison and contrast with other cultures. What is absent from this way of thinking is any sense of seeing

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the strange in the familiar, as we saw in Humboldt’s Das Fremde, or in the category of the mysterious in Benjamin. This suggests that we need to move towards a position that starts from the recognition of the foreign or strange in the familiar and native, and in so doing begin to break down the hard boundaries between the native and the foreign to see that instability and tension exist within the native or home culture. Rather than seeing culture as stable and harmonious, we need to acknowledge the instability and the disorder that exist. Neither culture nor language is stable; there is no purity or foundation that one can hold on to. The fashionable emphasis on the self and the need for self-reflection, self-expression – and of finding oneself as though eventually one will find the ‘real me’ or the ‘authentic self’ – that one finds in contemporary culture generally has found its way into higher education in various respects. If the above paragraphs are right, however, such practices need to be challenged. Moreover, the arguments advanced here call into question related assumptions in the discourse of learner autonomy and independent learning, where, as we saw in the previous chapter, a vocabulary of ‘learning’ and ‘learning environments’ is preferred to speaking of ‘education’, and where processes of learning are understood in reductivist and falsely technical terms. With regard to the university often the cultural richness found there is viewed primarily in terms of the diversity of the student population, with references made to ‘home students’ and ‘international students’, ‘traditional students’ and ‘non-traditional students’, and so on. It is important also to consider cultural diversity differently in terms of the diverse ways of thinking about the world and our place in that world that comes to us through, for example, our engagement with the written word – the texts or canon of a subject. Texts need to be read and re-read, argued over and re-interpreted, for every generation. In so doing new ways are opened up to explore the question of how we are internationalized by an education that is higher, rather than how higher education is internationalized; this is a question to be engaged with not only in a teaching context, but also throughout the cultural life of the university. It is also a question that draws attention to ourselves not so much as independent, fully autonomous and independent entities, but as always in relation, or, in Arendtian terms, in ‘being-with-others’. The internationalized university must be a place where it is possible to acknowledge the richness that comes from different languages and cultures coming together. It must allow for moments of conversion upon which our cultural life depends. But it would be a mistake to see this in terms of a need that is generated as a result of the fact that the contemporary student population is diverse. The deeper point being made here is that any higher education must be conditioned by this international dimension.5 What the above suggests is that we need to move towards seeing ourselves

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in language and in this sense we are always in translation in how we relate to each other. As we saw in the previous chapter, Arendt reminds us that thinking and judgement are crucial, not only in times of crisis but also in everyday life. This becomes clear when we think, on the one hand, of the ordinariness of language and, on the other, of its strangeness. In his paper, ‘Education’s Outside’, Paul Standish considers questions about the nature of meaning and language itself, and about the importance of such questions for how we think of education and teaching (Standish 2009). This touches on what we have been considering as it takes us back to the distinction between sacred and profane languages. Standish discusses a letter written by Scholem in the mid 1920s in which he describes his experience of and reaction to the way that, in Palestine (to which he had moved shortly before from Germany), the sacred language of Hebrew was being used as the common language, not one reserved for the synagogue and for religious discourse. Scholem found himself shocked by the way that this everyday use seemed to reduce Hebrew to a language of communication and, hence, to secularize it.6 When language is reduced to communication the sacred meaning of language is lost. What is also lost, in a religious sense, is an acknowledgment that words are sustained by faith. Judgement is present in all of our words. Our words are always open to corruption. For Scholem, the people in Palestine were unaware of what was happening and were insensitive to the way that words were being emptied of their meaning, and he referred to this in terms of their being on the edge of ‘an abyss’. The term is particularly powerful and one that is invoked in scripture. In Genesis, for example, it can be seen as the original chaos before the creation of the world when the earth is described as a formless void, covered in a deep darkness; it is also referred to in the apocalyptic interpretations of the end of the world.7 The abyss appears as well in the New Testament in the parable of Lazarus; here the sickness will not end in death but in everlasting life – suggesting that, from a Christian interpretation, the abyss can be overcome but only in the afterlife that God offers. In his own reading of Scholem’s letter, Derrida explores the ambiguity he finds in Scholem’s reference to the abyss; he also moves beyond a religious interpretation. On the one hand, the letter gives the impression of a division between true believers, aware of danger and secure in their faith, and the blind, unaware of the abyss over which they live their lives. On the other hand, there is the sense that, susceptible though we all are to blindness, the right way to live is in awareness of the foundationlessness of our practices and language. The abyss functions then as an archetypal image of foundationlessness; as necessary to the human condition, it is not to be regretted but to be acknowledged (Derrida 2002). Derrida probes and deconstructs the tensions between the sacred and the profane, exploring the

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reverberations of this through language as a whole. For Derrida, language is troubled always by crisis: we all live above an abyss; our lives are without foundation. Yet rather than making our life and thought impossible, this is their very condition. The sense of danger that the abyss conveys is present also in Heidegger. To question the nature of being is to find oneself before the abyss, groundless; to question, he says, is to open oneself to ‘unguarded exposure’ – it is to live dangerously (Caputo 1993, p.88). In his later work, Heidegger emphasizes the historicality of languages. Our languages, he says, ‘speak historically’, which means that all languages including Greek, Latin, German and English rest not only on linguistico-grammatical structures but also upon historical ones. This, in effect, pulls the ground from under Heidegger, whose celebration of the originary nature of Greek thought is eulogistic in the extreme. In his demythologizing of Heidegger, Caputo persuasively suggests that we can ‘push Heidegger beyond Heidegger, overhear in Heidegger what Heidegger himself does not hear’ (Ibid, p. 99). One consequence of this line of Heidegger’s thought, as Caputo shows, is that ‘the greatness of the question of Being turns around into questioning greatness’ and he goes on, the ‘leap of thought lands in an abyss, in historical groundlessness’. This leap of thought, however, is also a leap of freedom because it lands in an ‘open-ended historical-linguistic pluralism’; the world is multilingual and multicultural, without the unity of a single language. The historical tradition can be seen as a ‘translation without an original’ (Ibid, p. 96). If there is no single clear beginning, no original, then what, Caputo asks, is there to be responsible to? He suggests that Derrida would call it a responsiveness to the other of every principle; ‘it tunes the ear to the excluded of every community, to the plurality of ways to be, to the different, to the Babelian multiplication of tongues’ (Ibid, p. 99). There are two kinds of responsibility, one that is quick and responds immediately, and the other that is more discerning and wants to listen more attentively to what is calling: ‘we should worry more about where the call is coming from and what it wants us to do . . . [W]e have to take responsibility for what we are responding to.’ As we have seen then, the abyss is present in different ways in Scholem, Derrida and Heidegger, but in each case there is a preoccupation with language. There is no neat correspondence between words and world; language is never just a set of tools. We can say the wrong thing (‘That is not what I meant, at all’), we can struggle to find the right words, and we can say one thing but mean another. We are never in complete control of our words, but we must take responsibility for our words, and not become desensitized to them.

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IV. Judgement calls Does this excursion into the abyss seem strange, even perhaps irrelevant? If we accept Derrida’s view that there is something abyssal about the human condition and that we need to live in acknowledgement of this, then its relevance for us must become apparent. If we look at the accountability and quality assurance regimes that operate in higher education today, it is not difficult to find parallels. Consider this in the following terms. There are the True Believers: foundationalists secure against the threat of the abyss, and, that is, those within education who unswervingly uphold standards in relation to practice and assessment as if these were somewhere carved in stone. Then there are the Blind: the unbelievers, unaware of the dangers beneath them, happily complicit in keeping the system going, unconcerned about what its basis might be. And finally, there are the Advocates of Judgement, who, as Derrida and Arendt urge, live in the responsibility of judgement, and whose counterparts in educational practice and assessment will understand the ultimate inescapability of judgement and who will be committed to the continuities of practice that sustain this. The proper exercise of judgement and standards, and the continuities of critical practice that sustain the standards generated, are threatened by both the True Believers and the Blind. Thinking about professional judgement and practice brings us back to the teacher. And this is important because it is easy to lose sight of the teacher and of the important relationship that exists between teacher and student in today’s performative society and amid the technological revolution that is changing teaching and learning in radical ways. As we noted in an earlier chapter, the teacher is more akin to a technical operator than being someone who has the responsibility for initiating the learner into paths of enquiry. And yet, in the last decade or so, there has been a growth in all sorts of charismatic teachers, such as experts in life coaching and personal development gurus. These teachers of one sort or another seem to be responding to a need among many who live in Western advanced capitalist societies. This is a corruption of the idea of authority. No doubt, this is an interesting phenomenon, and while we can question the genuineness of the authority of such individuals, the fact that they are in demand suggests that the motifs of mastery and discipleship remain important. For Steiner it is vitally important that these motifs are not lost: [A] lust for knowledge, an ache for understanding is incised in the best of men and women. As is the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make

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of one’s inward present their future: this is a threefold adventure like no other. Steiner (2003, pp. 183–4) This reminds us of the symbolism of the triangle, prior to any Christian resonances that this figure carries, which we discussed in the previous chapter. The triangle corresponds to the teacher, the student and the content. All three are essential to the pursuit of wisdom: a teacher should want to work with a student to share the experience and to build on what has gone before; the teacher and student require a content to examine and discuss; and the student needs a teacher in order that she can be initiated into and familiarized with the disciplinary tradition in question. While the European Commission’s ‘knowledge triangle’ invokes the symbolism of the triangle, it is a rather empty gesture because it is blind to the profound relationship between teacher and student and content that has been at the heart of teaching and learning. Heidegger was a charismatic teacher, and students flocked to listen to him, but he was also completely engaged and passionate about his subject. If he had not been, then charisma alone would not have been enough. Charisma is not what is important. If a teacher is shy or quiet but loves her subject and this comes through in her teaching, then this should be enough to engage the interest of the student. This raises a question concerning the idea of transmission and the role of the teacher in transmitting knowledge (or in current discourse, the university’s role in ‘knowledge transfer’). What does transmission mean? It is never clear or transparent what is being handed down – which goes against current orthodoxy of the transparent quality systems that pervade education today, and against the outcomes-based approach to teaching where the only kind of performance that is valued is the material outcomes that education yields. Steiner connects transmission with the Latin tradendere, which calls to mind ideas of handing down, as in handing down for posterity. We can see a link between transmission and tradition. Steiner suggests that it is probably not accidental that the semantics of ‘treason’ and ‘traduction’ are not unconnected to those of ‘tradition’. This leads him to ponder the question whether teaching can be seen in terms of translation: In turn, these vibrations of sense and of intention are strongly operative in the concept, itself constantly challenging, of ‘translation’ . . . Is teaching, in some fundamental sense, a mode of translation, an exercise between the lines as Walter Benjamin would have it when he assigns eminent virtues of fidelity and transfer to the interlinear? Ibid. (p. 3)

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We have seen from our discussion of translation that this is not just a technical matter but rather a working through of the relationship between human beings and the world. Translation of the word and translation of ourselves involve destabilization, and it can take us in very different directions, as we have seen with Heidegger and Arendt. As I suggested before, their relationship had teaching and learning at its heart. In terms of Steiner’s threefold master–disciple relation, which we looked at in the previous chapter, theirs was a relation of exchange that involved trust and love. To repeat again one line from the Steiner quotation cited earlier, there was an ‘eros of reciprocal trust and, indeed, love’. Beyond its connotations of sexual desire, Steiner is invoking the richer sense that is carried by the Greek term of the mysteriousness of attraction, of the inexplicable that draws one towards something, as with a longing that is never satisfied. This is very similar to the kinds of response and desire aroused in studying a subject, perhaps in the humanities more than others, but in the end in any enquiry worth the name ‘higher’. Questions are raised and answered, but these answers in turn raise new questions, new possibilities of thought, with new energy and dynamism. This is what is higher, and our chances of realizing this will depend upon our exposure to ways of thinking that are not merely extensions of our own. This can be difficult and painful, and for some – students, teachers, administrators – it will no doubt raise anxiety. But this is what must remain essential to higher education and to the university.

Endnotes 1 For Kabbalists the written word is the true representation of the secrets of true language; God’s language created the universe. Scholem wrote: ‘What speaks to us in creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely interpretable and reflects itself in our own language. Its rays [Strahlen] or sounds, which we receive, are not so much communications as calls [Anrufe]. That which has meaning, sense, and form is not this word itself but the tradition behind this word, its mediation and reflection in time. This tradition, which has its own dialectic, transforms itself and eventually becomes a quiet, breathing whisper. There may be times, like our own, in which tradition can no longer be handed down [überliefert] and grows silent. This is the great crisis of language in which we find ourselves, in which the last summit of the mystery that once dwelt within language is no longer comprehensible to us’ (cited in Jacobson 2003, p. 152). 2 The paradox of language is that it is universal: language is common to all human beings, and there is a multiplicity, a diversity, of languages.

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The University in Translation According to Steiner (2003), a conservative estimate of the number of languages spoken is between 4,000 and 5,000 – far fewer than in the past. Although I do not discuss Paul Ricoeur’s work on translation, he follows a similar path to Benjamin in seeing translation as more than a theoretical or practical problem; it is an ethical problem (see Ricoeur 2006). ‘Communication’ is the term Bergdahl uses; in my translation of Benjamin’s essay the term used is ‘information’. By way of anecdote, it is tempting to recall the title of a book on multiculturalism: Not a Problem Here. The phrase was prompted by a response to a questionnaire sent to headteachers. One had responded with the phrase ‘not a problem here’, and the rest of the questionnaire was left uncompleted, on the grounds that there was no diversity in the school. It would be a grave mistake for a university without a diverse student population to remain complacent in this way. Scholem was talking about a very particular context and an exceptional situation. His concerns were religious and part of a wider debate within Zionism; some German Jews believed that Zionism was itself a secularization of Messianism and deeply disturbing to them. Scholem, like other Jews who had moved to Jerusalem, believed that because they would be living in the Holy State it was right that the holy language of Hebrew should become the language of everyday life. He was an advocate of the use of Hebrew, but not long after felt troubled because, paradoxically, the sacredness of the language was being lost in its everyday usage. Hence, the religious is dependent on its not being the secular for its sense. Scholem’s letter to Rosenzweig was a lament for the elimination of the content of the sacred language (see also Jacobson 2003; Mosès 2009). Yet what this shows, from a Derridean point of view, is, once again, our dependence on difference. ‘Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water’ (Gen. 1.2). ‘This sickness will end not in death but in God’s glory, and through it the Son of God will be glorified’ (Jn 11.4).

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Index

abyss 111, 113–15 accountability 3, 21, 88, 93, 100, 111, 115 Arendt, Hannah on crisis 94 on education 87, 89–90, 96, 103 personal story of 85–6 relationship with Heidegger 15, 76, 81, 84–6, 99 on thinking 90–2, 113 translations of 48 Aristotle 46, 50, 52, 74 assessment 26, 95, 115 authority 17, 63, 87, 89, 115 autonomy 4, 65, 75, 90, 112 Babel, Tower of 3, 12–13, 49, 51, 101, 105 benchmarking 35, 101 Benjamin, Walter 48, 85, 100, 103, 105–8, 111–12, 116 Bildung 5, 68, 78n. 17 bilingualism 47–8 Bolivia 9–10 Bologna Declaration 30, 62–4, 66 Bologna Process 31–2, 35n. 20, 56, 62 British culture 44–5 calculability 96, 99 capital, human 29 capitalism academic 77n. 9 failure of 82 Caputo, John 74–5, 114

Catholic Church 9–10, 56 CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) 30 Chinese language 40, 45–6 Chinese students 14, 39–40, 45–7 Christianity 49, 56–8, 103 citizens’ mobility 82 colonialism 11 commensurability 56, 69 commonality 46, 65–6 communities of practice 94 competences, see competencies competencies 30, 67, 72, 82, 92 use of term 34n. 8 Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) 33n. 6 creativity 23, 66–7 crisis 83, 89, 91, 93–4 culture in Humboldt 4, 19 instability of 112 thick and thin 58 culture shock 46 Dasein 71, 84 databases 26, 34n. 11, 73, 101 democracy 46–7, 104 Derrida, Jacques 48, 75, 101, 107–8, 111, 113–15 difference 69, 108 discourse, kinds of 8 doctoral study 27, 47 doxa 87–8

126 e-learning 32, 41, 59–60, 69 Eco, Umberto 49, 51, 105 economics, as model discipline 59 education Church role in 10 current discourse of 93 diversity of systems 69 essence of 15, 89–90 as export industry 14 language of 3, 67–9, 73, 100, 110, 112 liberal 5, 19, 44 progressive 26 transformative nature of 81, 85, 87, 96 use of term 60 education market 21, 61, 66 education policy 7, 29, 33, 46, 58, 91 EHEA (European Higher Education Area) 31–2, 56–8, 62, 65, 67, 95 Eliot, T. S. 56, 58 employability 23, 65, 67, 82 encounter culture 44, 111 English culture, see British culture English language as global language 111 native speakers of 48 teaching of 50 as world language 8, 11–12, 15, 48, 50, 56, 68 Enlightenment 18, 51, 57, 104–5 entrepreneurship 66–7, 82 eros 84, 93, 117 Europe of Knowledge 30, 64–5, 67 European Area of Higher Education, see EHEA European Commission attitude to business 59 documents of 15, 65, 82 and education policy 28–32, 55, 57 influence of 59

Index European culture 45, 56–8, 76n. 2 European identity 28, 56–7 European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education 95, 98n. 10 European Union goals of 30, 56, 60 and subsidiarity 59 excellence 58, 61, 67 father tongue, see language, father and mother Figel, Jan 66 Finland 62 Foucault, Michel 75 foundationlessness 113 Friel, Brian 3, 10, 50, 100 further education 26 global recession of 2009 22, 83 globalization and education policy 32, 55 and English language 8, 11 and intercultural understanding 111 pressures on universities 6 government departments 22–3 Greek language 8, 10, 12, 46, 49, 52, 73–4, 103–4, 114 Habermas, Jürgen 108 Hebrew language 49, 54n. 9, 105, 113, 118n. 6 Heidegger, Martin on crisis 94 on education 101, 103 on language 15, 40, 52–3, 72–3, 101, 104, 114 and Nazi regime 74–6, 84 place and space in 12 on technology 70–3, 103 and theology 97n. 6

Index on thinking 4, 83–4, 100 translations of 48 higher education curriculum of 65 and economic growth 14 in Europe 28, 30–2, 57, 62 European dimension of 31, 57, 59 and father tongue 110 homogenization of 68–9 internationalization of 7–8, 15, 25, 33, 99, 112 language of, see education, language of purpose of 6, 15–16, 29, 57–8, 69 the self in 112 Thatcherite reforms in 7 transformation of 18 transition to 40 translation in 101 in UK 20–1, 33n. 1 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 21, 78n. 15, 81 Hobsbawm, Eric 82 human concept of the 70 problem of the 71 humanities 8, 14, 44, 46, 82, 94, 117 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 4, 19, 67, 106, 112 ICT (Information and Communications Technology) 25–6, 32, 45, 59–60, 69 incommensurability 108, 111 information technology, see ICT innovation 22–3, 63, 66–7, 93 intellectual culture 5 intercultural experience 43, 53n. 5 interculturality 43 international policy, language of 14–15 international students diversity of 39–40

127

and immigration rules 34n. 11 increasing numbers of 19 learning English 46 non-EU 77n. 9 recruitment of 61 research on 42 support for 41 international surveys 59 internationalization economic drivers of 15, 99 effects of 43 and higher education 69 and translation 7 use of term 61 Islam 103 Jaspers, Karl 86, 97n. 5 Jews 49, 75, 85, 96n. 2, 104 Joint Declaration of the European Ministers of Education 64 Judaism 49, 85, 103 judgement 5, 15, 81, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 115 Kant, Immanuel 4–5, 19, 46, 91 knowledge in current educational discourse 87–8, 95, 97n. 7 and economic growth 20 in Newman’s philosophy 19 transmission of 20, 67, 116 use of term 65 value of 5, 19 knowledge-based economy 3, 6, 23, 29–30, 59, 67, 87 knowledge production 25 knowledge society 6, 30, 67, 87 knowledge transfer 6, 14, 16n. 2, 19, 33n. 3, 87, 116 knowledge triangle 67, 87 Lammy, David 43, 111 language

128

Index

borrowing of words between 50, 53 differences between 12 dual nature of 94 father and mother 109–11 historicality of 114 importance of 48–9 multiplicity of 51, 101, 105, 110, 117n. 2 and otherness 107–8 perfect 49, 51, 54, 105 in policy documents 56 and religion 49, 103–4, 113, 117n. 1 strangeness of 94, 105–6 students’ styles of 41 in supranational political space 67–8 technical 16, 93, 111 in universities 24 Latin 7, 10–12, 18, 49–50, 52, 73, 103, 114, 116 Latin America 32, 36n. 23, 76n. 6 league tables 26, 61 learning digital, see e-learning independent 26, 112 in political discourse 92 learning institutions 60 Levinas, Emmanuel 75 Lisbon Strategy 29, 60, 62, 65, 82 literacy, digital 60 literature 5 logos 52, 54n. 10, 102 Lyotard, Jean-François 68, 75, 88 Maastricht Treaty 29, 59 MacIntyre, Alasdair 4 Magna Charta of European Universities 63–5, 78n. 14 managerialism 21–2 master–disciple relation, see teacher– student relationship Memorandum on Higher Education in the European Community 29, 57–8

metaphysics 70–2 modularization 26–7 mother tongue, see language, father and mother natality 89–90 national identity 49, 51, 85 neo-liberalism 11, 20, 25, 28, 69, 82–3 Newman, John Henry 5, 16n. 1, 19 noesis 87–8 Oakeshott, Michael 6, 66, 72 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 29–30, 59 Open Method of Co-operation 35n. 19 performativity 3, 15, 24, 43, 62, 68, 72, 82, 100 PhDs, see doctoral study philosophy 5 Plato 50, 74, 87–8, 93, 102–3 plurality 89–92, 94, 114 polytechnics 21, 27, 34n. 10 Portugal 62 postmodernity 6 poststructuralism 109 Prime Minister’s Initiative (PMI) 61 pro vice-chancellors 25 public sector 20, 25, 33n. 4 public space 92, 97n. 9 quality, language of 59 quality assurance 16, 26, 31, 66, 95, 98, 115 quality of life 23 ratio 73, 102 rationality 4, 13, 51, 88, 101, 105 reading, as translation 49, 51, 73 REF (Research Excellence Framework) 24

Index research funding of 21 and teaching 19, 65–7 training for 28 Rosenzweig, Franz 85, 118n. 6, 122 Sandel, Michael 83, 92 Scholem, Gershom 85, 103, 113–14, 118n. 6 science goals of 88 use of term 68 Scotland 7, 9 Second Vatican Council 16–17n. 3 Simons, Maarten 67 skills, transferable 28, 93, 95 Socrates 97n. 8 Sorbonne declaration 64 Spanish language 41 spreadsheets 73, 101 Standish, Paul 47, 72–3, 113 state, role of 21 Steiner, George 15, 50, 81, 84, 86, 93, 97n. 6, 115 student population, diversity of 40 student support services 27, 41 subsidiarity 59 supranational policy space 32, 55, 67, 69, 99 Sweden 62 teacher–student relationship 15, 19, 27, 84, 86, 93, 115–17 teachers, role of 60 teaching, as vocation 97n. 6 technological thinking 72–3 technology 8, 11, 20, 26, 56, 58–9,69–70 Thoreau, Henry David 109 time, Chinese conception of 46 Times Higher Education 26 tradition 17, 89, 95 transformation, use of term 81–2

translatability 101, 106, 110 translation and culture 49 and meaning 100, 105–6, 108 meaning of term 7–8, 14 as metaphor 15, 96, 101 relevant 108 teaching as 116–17 understanding of 39 and university texts 14–15, 48, 50 without an original 114 Translations (play) 10–12, 50 transnational companies 58 transparency 62, 88, 95, 100, 110 triangle, symbolism of 75, 93, 116 Tuning project 35n. 23 UKCISA (UK Council for International Student Affairs) 43, 53n. 4 universities autonomy of 65 challenges for 18 communities of practice in 94–5 cultural role of 62, 64, 66 curriculum of 26–7 diversity in 112 economic role of 23–4 expansion of 20–1 ideals of 4, 63 and knowledge 67 language of, see language, in universities management of 25 medieval 5, 18 as private enterprises 21–2 purpose of 6, 19 ranking of 34n. 11 untranslatability 106–8, 111 wisdom 87–8, 90, 116 World Bank 59

129