“Last orders, please!”: The disappearance of communicative spaces at universities

Abstract

This paper uses the thick description of one recent experience – the closure of the Common Room Club at University College Dublin – to highlight the gap that exists between rhetoric and reality at institutions of higher education in Ireland and beyond. I argue that common rooms have always been part and parcel of the ‘invisible university’. They provide the infrastructure to support what has been called the ‘lifeworld’, sustaining both the communicative experiences of their members and providing vital venues for visitors who are through them more readily drawn into the communicative life of colleagues. As unique spaces within much larger institutions, common rooms form both a protected shield and also a porous social community against the encroachment of the university system's instrumental action and reasoning. However, recent changes in higher education have accelerated the pace of change and the quest for top-down modernisation. As a reaction, and almost by default, the common room has taken on a new function for faculty, staff and visitors and turned into a place of encounter between people and ideas critical and often opposed to managerialism, bureaucratisation and the mindless emulation of higher education's fads and foibles. At University College Dublin, this new role did not remain unnoticed by the University management and triggered an extreme reaction – enforced closure. My paper closes by dwelling on an important question that points into an uncertain future: is it possible for any institution that purports to be a centre of higher learning to either quell or attempt to ‘manage’ lifeworld experiences and sceptical voices for any length of time? In other words, can a university still fulfil its very function and expect loyalty without allowing ‘voice’ (A. O. Hirschman) to be heard?