Page Nr Research Articles

1. “Bringing to Presence That Which Is Other”: Religious Discourses, Public Pedagogy, and the University Classroom

<?page nr="11"?>Abstract The relationship between religion and higher education is often characterized by anxieties around religion in the university classroom. These concerns frequently leverage around the assumption that religion is necessarily contentious for the public university, either because of the need to resist the exclusionary privileging of religions in public spaces, or because of sensitivities around the preservation of traditional religious orthodoxies in increasingly pluralist times. Interestingly, both approaches to the relationship between religion and university education rest on the assumption that religion is fundamentally immutable, incapable of contestation, re-interpretation, or change. With the view to moving past the limits of such perspectives, I suggest that religious language and symbol (as two features of religious discourse) are far more poetic, fluid, and open-ended than is often assumed, and that it is precisely this open-endedness that underscores the possibility of engaging pedagogically with religion in the context of the university classroom. In this regard, I trace the affinities between the open-endedness of religious discourses and the “publicness” of pedagogy, suggesting that both registers open up possibilities for new ways of existing and relating in the world that are at once activist, experimental, and demonstrative. I conclude by reflecting on how these affinities offer resources for recalibrating what we mean by student “becoming” at the interface between religion and the university <?page nr="12"?>classroom. I forward the view that the poetry of religious discourses offers students the chance to “become” in ways that unpredictably expand and disrupt the limits of religious identity and tradition, and in this way undermine the inevitable alignment of religion with either exclusion or preservation in the context of university life. Student becoming, understood in these terms, becomes less a matter of forming students into a streamlined understanding of religious identity in the context of the university, and more a matter of providing spaces for students to relate to such identities in potentially interruptive and public-facing ways.

2. Convening Publics? Co-Produced Research in the Entrepreneurial University

<?page nr="19"?>Abstract The public role of the university is today subject to intense debate, with significant concern that the contemporary university in its entrepreneurial form comes into structural conflict with the wider interests of both students and publics beyond its walls.1 New ideas of the public university, both normative and dystopian, are being articulated in the research literature2 but there is a need for empirical inquiry into the novel forms of the university that may be being built through the everyday practices of academics.3 Drawing on theories of publics as dynamic and assembled around matters of concern/care,4 this paper asks whether the growing practice of collaborative <?page nr="20"?>and co-produced research is contributing to the development of a new form of public university. The paper is based on a six-year participant observation of a major UK program of collaborative research that aimed to “connect communities with research.” Based on 100 interviews and a survey of 309 participants, the paper argues that the publics that are being convened by this program have the potential both to immunize the university against more disruptive and sustained reflection on its public and societal role, and at the same time, to nurture new hybrid forms of public university that are embodied in academic and civil society identities rather than institutions. It concludes by arguing that the new public university might be understood as a place where multiple publics are convened and where the radical latent potential of the institution lies in putting these different publics into dialogue.

2. Toward a Pedagogy of Responsive Attunement for Higher Education

<?page nr="21"?>Abstract In a context of “fake news” and associated disillusionment, this article explores what it means to nurture a capacity to concern ourselves with what matters for our living, among both students and teachers in higher education. In addressing this issue, I highlight responding through attunement to particularities of importance. A contribution of this article* lies in proposing that we direct student learning toward responsive attuning to what matters in the fields or professions to which they aspire, providing renewed direction for pedagogy and curricula. Enhancing such a capacity, moreover, has the potential to broaden the scope of possible ways of being in, and directed to, the communities to which these aspiring professionals belong. An additional contribution of the article is in exploring what responsive attunement can mean for higher education settings, both as a focus for learning by students and a modus operandi for teachers.

6. The Communicative Pragmatics of Data-Use for Equity: A Theoretical and Methodological Framework

<?page nr="117"?>Abstract Calls for higher education institutions to implement improvements guided by “data-driven” processes are prevalent and widespread. Despite the pervasiveness of this turn toward data, research on how data-use works on the ground in postsecondary institutions—that is, how individuals within institutions make sense of education data and use it to inform practice—is still developing.Drawing on Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), critical-race theory, and methodological guidance on critical-qualitative research methods, this paper synthesizes methodological and substantive insights from P–12 data-use research, with an eye to applying these insights to critical questions on postsecondary educational equity. The result of the review and analysis is a theoretical framework and a set of methodological recommendations for future research on the perceptions and experiences of college faculty, administrators, and practitioners, regarding their data-use and its implications for equity.

4. That Which Is Worthy of Love: A Philosophical Framework for Reflection on Staff-Student Partnerships for the Future University

<?page nr="71"?>Abstract In this article we develop a philosophical understanding of student-staff partnership through a novel interpretation and development of Aristotle’s friendship arguments. In contributing to an emerging critical field of study of student-staff partnership, we begin by explaining the current state of being a student in the neoliberal university. In light of the polylithic changes neo-liberalism impresses on student being and becoming, and how partnerships are proposed paradoxically as both a counterculture and serving this agenda, we develop a typology of partnership that helps those working in, and proposing to work in partnership, to discuss their ethical basis. For Aristotle, “What is worthy of love?” in the relationship, is a salient question. Is it utility? Is it pleasure? Is it virtue and flourishing? In the typology we propose an additional form of partnership—where creativity is a central activity worthy of time, energy, and love. It is reasonable to suggest that student-staff partnerships are likely to remain, if not grow, in the future university, and are likely to have a significant impact on the being and becoming of the student. It is for this reason we develop the typology in order for participants, particularly students, to have clarity in understanding the ethical motivation and purpose of the partnership in the university. We see this clarity as enabling students to see how the partnership will contribute to their notion of the flourishing life.

4. Eroding Academic Freedom through the Assessment of Academic Practice

<?page nr="67"?>Abstract The article addresses the practice of program and learning outcomes assessment adopted by many American universities. Arguing that the justification of administrative intervention into faculty’s teaching is based upon the separation of the content of a course or program from the form of that material, the article demonstrates that the form/content distinction is a false opposition. Further, the article demonstrates that administrative efforts to assess learning outcomes based on the idea that they will not affect the content follows an older and outmoded transmission theory of learning. To impose outcomes assessment upon faculty is to also impose the transmission theory of learning. This would constitute a threat to academic freedom. The article concludes with a call for faculty full participation into the assessment process including the design of assessments. Only when faculty are in the forefront of the process can academic freedom be preserved.

1. Becoming Global Knowledge Workers: How U.S. Study Abroad Programs Act in Service to a Hidden Curriculum of Consumer Capitalism and National Security

<?page nr="1"?>Abstract This paper details how a neoliberal agenda pervades study abroad and provides critical readings and counter narratives that illuminate how this practice often acts in service to a hidden curriculum of consumer capitalism and national security. It argues that rather than being part of an effort toward the creation of global citizens in service to increased cross-cultural understanding, students are largely pushed to study abroad for the end goal of being developed as knowledge workers in service of a neoliberal agenda that perpetuates U.S. dominance in the global economy. This analysis applies theoretical frameworks not commonly applied in normative study abroad discourse including neoliberalism and academic capitalism. By applying these critical theories, we can move the current discourses surrounding study abroad to more productive new lines of inquiry that ask how we can combat the neoliberal tendencies that continue to influence the Academy.

5. Toward an Ethics of Opacity in Higher Education Internationalization

<?page nr="91"?>Abstract This conceptual essay employs the intersecting lenses of critical university studies (CUS) and decolonial theory to make a critical intervention into the terrain of ethics in higher education internationalization. It is argued that a combined framework of ideas from CUS and decolonial theory will bring a sharper social justice and decolonizing edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education internationalization. In particular, the author develops Corey Walker’s (2011) notion of the “ethics of opacity” as an approach that interrogates the logics of neoliberalism and coloniality/modernity in internationalization practices and policies of higher education. It is suggested that the ethics of opacity provides ethical and political recognition to the opaque sites and repressed knowledges of marginalized and colonized peoples. The paper discusses the implications of the ethics of opacity for a renewed agenda in internationalization practices and policies of higher education.

5. Be(com)ing Antifascist: On Students’ Most Sacred Mission

<?page nr="97"?>Abstract What should students be, and be becoming, in the university of the future? In this paper, I take my cue from the 1946 Charter of Grenoble in exploring the possibility of conceptualizing students as both workers and workers-in-training called to engage in a very particular kind of work: that of defending freedom from oppression. First, I address the relationship between oppression, freedom, and violence, and consider what it might mean to understand involvement in anti-oppression work as a central component of student identity rather than merely an extra-curricular activity, or something that some students choose to do in addition to studying. Second, I discuss a particular configuration of desire that works to further oppression, namely fascism, which I argue that students have a duty to oppose. Finally, I examine the political philosophy of antifascism as the historically most effective antidote to fascism, and consider the specific role that students might be called to play in antifascist work. I conclude with a brief exploration of the place of place in determining how students should be—and be becoming—antifascist, especially in terms of commitments to Indigenous knowledges and worldviews for those of us in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

3. On Building a University for the Common Good1

<?page nr="45"?>Abstract Around the world, universities have been converted into agents of globalization, competing for business in the markets of the knowledge economy. To an ever-increasing extent, they are managed like corporations. The result has been a massive betrayal of the underlying principles of higher education. In both teaching and research, universities have reneged on their founding commitment to the pursuit of truth, and to the service of the common good. With their combination of overpaid managers, staff in precarious employment and indebted students, they are manifestly unsustainable. Rather than waiting for them to collapse, however, we need to start now to build the universities of the future, and to restore their civic purpose as necessary components of the constitution of a democratic society. This article first sets out the four principles—of freedom, trust, education and community—on which any university must be built, if it is to meet the challenges of our time. It will then go on to consider the meaning of the common good, and how universities of the future can be of service to it.

5. Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through a Fractal Assemblage Theory

<?page nr="89"?>Abstract College impact studies have formed the common sense of understanding institutional relationships to student growth and change for decades. In this time, they have become entangled with the production of the neoliberal university. This paper1 presents an alternative theorization of student change on campus, a fractal assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is discussed through a single common language of major assemblage theory concepts across four authors. After exploring these concepts in depth, this paper returns to the stakes of assemblage theory: higher education research not to channel student to predetermined outcomes, but to create student futures in excess of our imaginations.

3. The Anti-Ecological University: Competitive Higher Education as Ecological Catastrophe

<?page nr="45"?>Abstract The article aims at critiquing the current competitive framing which is shaping higher education policies and discourse at an international level. The argument initially takes an historical and genealogical approach to trace the roots of this framing to ideological misinterpretations of evolutionary theory and ecology, and to the influence of eugenics in the framing of educational policy. The article then uses a systems theory lens to articulate the negative impact of competitive dynamics in global education on an ecosystemic level, focusing on a “deecologization” of the two dimensions of time and space in the lives of university students and staff. Finally, the article concludes suggesting the necessity of an imaginative reecologization of thought as a precondition for any sustainable change in Higher Education philosophy and policy.

2. Finding Moments of Studying: Being a Studier in the University

<?page nr="31"?>Abstract Though different ideas about study have been proposed recently, there is still some ambiguity in denoting what it means “to be a studier” and its importance for the university. This article proposes to address the relation among times, spaces, matters of concern and studying in the university. Initially, it aims to reconsider the temporality and spatiality of study, focusing on concrete experiences of studying with others. After articulating specific forms and expectations of activities and spaces in the university, it proposes to disturb—at least momentarily—the rhythm and direction of educational designs to find moments for studying. This introduces three important and interrelated themes that will be helpful in thinking about studying: the nature of studying as a relation with others; the necessity of an attitude of studying; and the issue of love in studying. These issues offer a way to understand the qualities of the activities of studying and reveal the importance of thinking about the university as a space and time that might offer possibilities for moments of studying.

4. Healing the Ethical Cleft: Phronesis and University Ethical Leadership

<?page nr="69"?>Abstract A misalignment exists between the institutional management of individual student behavior and the stated ethical principles undergirding modern higher education practices in the United States, ultimately creating an ethical failure serving no one. We discuss this misalignment from the site of student affairs, due to its charge to represent both university and student. A technocratic ethical discourse creates the illusion of decision-making autonomy that promises certain outcomes if “common sense” leadership practices are employed. The lens of technical rationality homogenizes and reduces perceived problems to simple either/ors that fail to address the inequitable effects of such ethical logic. We counter “common sense” leadership with a notion of ethical leadership called phronetic leadership, which is informed by an Aristotelian understanding of phronesis (practical wisdom), virtue ethics, and a Foucauldian awareness of governmentality. We argue that phronetic leaders can mend the cleft crippling institutional ethical foundations and practices.

1. The Neoliberal Logic of Service-Learning

<?page nr="1"?>Abstract This article investigates the ways in which service-learning manifests within our neoliberal clime, suggesting that service-learning amounts to a foil for neoliberalism, allowing neoliberal political and economic changes while masking their damaging effects. Neoliberalism shifts the relationship between the public and the private, structures higher education, and promotes a façade of community-based university partnerships while facilitating a pervasive regime of control. This article demonstrates that service-learning amounts to an enigma of neoliberalism, making possible the privatization of the public and the individualizing of social problems while masking evidence of market-based societal control. Neoliberal service-learning distances service from teaching and learning, allows market forces to shape university-community partnerships, and privatizes the public through dispossession by accumulation.

3. Toward a Theory of Social Innovation in Higher Education

<?page nr="49"?>Abstract A necessary response to addressing complex global problems rests in the theoretic and practice of social innovation: approaches to solving intractable social issues on a local and global scale. The logic, language, and practices of social innovation can, in turn, motivate energies toward conceptualizing college students as social innovators: individuals capable of meaningfully and cooperatively responding to persistent and transdisciplinary problems including social inequities, environmental change, and public health crises. To provide a philosophical anchor needed to ultimately sustain these propositions, we unite social innovation with Honneth’s concept of social freedom. We then introduce an expanded definition of the prototype as a mechanism that can be utilized to embed social innovation and social freedom throughout the contemporary collegiate academic curriculum. The subsequent section considers students in two interdependent forms of relation—student-student and student-faculty—within the dynamic context of postsecondary learning. We conclude by incorporating our ideas around an imagined possibility for securing social freedom amidst present ecological fragility and provide long-range considerations of our theory for the higher education enterprise.

Madeline H. Caviness and Charles G. Nelson†, Women and Jews in the Sachsenspiegel Picture-Books. Turnhout: Brepols/Harvey Miller Publishers, 2018, 472 pp., a vast number of colored and b/w ill.

One of the most important medieval law books, the Sachsenspiegel (The Saxon Mirror), composed by Eike von Repgow around 1220/1230, represents a stunning bibliophile masterpiece in its various <?page nr="463"?>manuscript versions. Much discussed already by German, but also American and other scholars, it has now received once again extensive attention and careful analysis by the art historian Madeline H. Caveness and her Germanist colleague, Charles G. Nelson, who passed away in 2008. This was certainly a great team, though it might have been very useful if also a legal historian had joined them. The major manuscripts were all beautifully illuminated in order to explain the various criminal acts and the necessary punishments. Thus, scholars have a fantastic instrument available to study a wide range of topics relevant for thirteenth-century German society, but also other neighboring people because the Sachsenspiegel became highly influential as a role model for other law books throughout the later Middle Ages.

Communication of Linguistic Idioms in Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini’s Letters

<?page nr="213"?>Abstract Eneas Silvius Piccolomini was a prolific writer in all phases of his life. His writing, influenced by the devotion to classical style of Renaissance humanism, has nevertheless been described as “falling below the highest humanistic standards” and even as “frequently incorrect.” Piccolomini’s style, moreover, includes lexical and syntactical practices of the medieval scholastics that have at times been thought to be the collective object of banishment by the humanists. Those negative assessments acquire more validity when Piccolomini’s style is judged strictly by the exaggerated standards of classical purity which many humanists claimed. Piccolomini’s hybrid style, however, was effective and at times even necessary; and nowhere better can the effectiveness of his merging of Latin idioms be seen than in the letters he wrote between his early secular career and brief reign as Pope Pius II. This essay examines the Latinity of Piccolomini’s detailed epistolary reports on the Council of Basel composed in 1450, and on his mission to Bohemia in 1451. Just as his actual mission that year blended secular and religious agendas, the style of his letters that reflect on the Council and its aftermath skillfully achieves not only a combination but a communication between classical and ecclesiastical Latin vocabulary, sentence structures, and concepts.

David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl-Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2018, 220 pp.

David K. Coley (Associate Professor of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) has produced an intriguing new book examining the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript, Cotton Nero A.x. – Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – in the context of late-medieval English and European plague treatises, texts, and discourses. Coley considers the Black Plague as a cultural trauma, which deeply affected the poet, who, motivated either by subconscious post-traumatic feeling or conscious artistry, used the same language and exempla used in plague texts in key passages of his poems. Coley indicates that his goal in the book <?page nr="470"?>is “to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval literature” (5) and, more specifically, to examine:

Diane J. Reilly, The Cistercian Reform and the Art of the Book in Twelfth-Century France. Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, 230; 16 color plates.

This volume contributes to our understanding of the liturgical and mental world of the early Cistercian monks and to the oral and aural community associated <?page nr="398"?>with early Cîteaux. Its title may be a misnomer for it is not about “Reform” per se or really about the art of the book (in the sense used by most specialists on the medieval book), but about the early liturgical practices at the new monastery that came to be called Cîteaux and about illustrations or illuminations of a limited number of manuscript volumes produced at Citeaux and preserved in the Dijon municipal library.