Higher Education, Paradox and Transnational Political Crises: New Political Imaginaries, Knowledge Making and the Case of HE

Abstract

An unprecedented combination of transnational political pressures, conflicts, and policy reforms are today weighing on higher education (HE) institutions, threatening their shared promise to support the ‘public good’. Recent research shows that HE is under threat from public sector cuts and the breakup of supra-national governance structures, imperilling HE public missions, academic freedom, and its political and professional integrity. Simultaneously, resurgent nationalisms and populist movements are impinging on HE's capacity to ameliorate political instability yet HE actors may be complicit within them or divided over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ politics and resurging rationales of government interference or ‘statecraft’ into HE mandates. These developments have coincided with rising political pressures on HE from structurally disadvantaged minorities, particularly over lack of HE access or the curtailing of the social mobility that drove post-war HE aspirations. This constellation of pressures has created a sense of crisis for HE in many parts of the world. Yet little is known comparatively about how political threats to HE's autonomy and its missions are manifested cross-nationally in HE contexts. This panel responds directly to this gap, taking HE, ‘crises’ and conflict as its primary focus, thereby clarifying ‘threats and risks’, both present and future, to the knowledge making project in HE, its autonomy, and its capacity for reducing conflict across three national contexts: the UK, Hungary, and Turkey.

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