A UNIKE experience with Sue
Pavel Zgaga
Sue and I came into contact in December 2010 when we were discussing with a group of colleagues from different European countries the possibility of applying for a Marie Curie Initial Training Network grant. I liked the basic idea from the beginning: a PhD training programme for a strong group of international students (and inviting anyone else who would like to participate) over four years focussing on the globalisation and regionalisation of higher education, a topic I've been working on a lot during this time. In addition to supervising graduate students, which is always an exciting challenge, the project also promised close collaboration with colleagues involved in higher education studies who came from different parts of the world. Some of them I knew from before, others not yet. Sue took a coordinating role in the preparation of the project and very quickly proved to be an excellent leader of the group, which we unanimously accepted. The preparatory work ended with the project proposal under the title ‘Universities in the Knowledge Economy’, with the acronym UNIKE. The proposal was very positively evaluated (our score was 96.4 per cent); in May 2012, it was accepted and funded by the European Commission, which meant that we could start implementing our plans.
So it was in this context that Sue and I met. From our first contacts, which were initially only at a distance, our collaboration was always excellent and offered me a unique UNIKE experience. The preparation, management and implementation of such projects always involve great, sometimes very demanding, challenges. No matter how careful the preparations, it is never possible to avoid problems, including changes (one member leaves, a new one joins, etc.) in the composition of the consortium. Even if the selection of candidates for emerging researcher positions is so deliberate, it is impossible to avoid problems of one kind or another, including the departure of one of the doctoral students from the group. The reasons for this may be completely objective, but such changes are felt like small earthquakes in the implementation of a project. On the other hand, all this entails complex negotiations with the Commission to amend certain provisions of the project contract accordingly. In addition to the administrative work, the dynamic that exists in such a group also requires a lot of attention to be given to each individual, as well as continuous team-building. Sue met all of these challenges with great success, while at the same time managing to keep each of us involved in solving individual problems, so that together we took responsibility for the project and took care of its implementation. I came into the UNIKE project with considerable personal experience, but working with Sue gave me a completely new experience in this regard.
The members of the UNIKE project group came from different countries with different prior experiences and disciplinary orientations but with a common research interest: how the processes of creating regional and global knowledge economies are redefining the nature and scope of universities. The horizon within which this question was posed was, of course, very broad, which is why we limited ourselves to a comparison between Europe and the Asia-Pacific region even in the initial stages. The European experience with the Bologna Process raised the question of what was actually going on in seemingly similar higher education reform processes in other parts of the world. At the time, there was a strong belief that the processes to create a European Higher Education Area were not only preparing Europe for global competition, but also serving as a model and driver for globalisation in other regions. Of course, there were dilemmas and scepticism in this regard. I had been working on these issues for at least a decade before joining the UNIKE group, but in this new context my perspective has broadened and deepened considerably. For this, I am grateful first and foremost to Sue and then to all of my other colleagues in the group, including the doctoral students, whose curiosity and ease raised questions that I had not asked myself before. Last but not least, the project group was enriched in its various actions by other colleagues, both experienced and emerging researchers, who came occasionally from all over the world and shared UNIKE research interests, ensuring a very extensive research network.
Besides the exciting intellectual content of the project, there was something else that attracted me to working with Sue. It was about new methods of working with doctoral students – emerging researchers. The first decade of this century saw the development of new concepts and strategies for doctoral education. In the wake of the creation of the European Higher Education Area, in which I myself was involved, these efforts culminated in what became known as the Salzburg Principles (European University Association 2005). What particularly motivated me to get involved in the European process of higher education reform was the dichotomy between the formulation of the common European principles and their implementation in practice at the level of the individual higher education institution. The Salzburg Principles provided the impetus for the establishment of doctoral schools; by the end of the first decade of the new century, we had begun to do this at my university as well. Moving away from the traditional ‘master–apprentice’ model and replacing it with interactive, group-based and interdisciplinary work in a mixed group of senior and emerging researchers was a major challenge, both from the organisational side and, probably even more so, from the standpoint of (traditional) academic culture. I suspect that all of us at universities involved in the modernisation of doctoral education have encountered these tensions. But what has been particularly exciting and challenging about this process has been not so much the creation of new structures and practices at the home institution, but rather the creation of an international ‘doctoral school’ that is thoroughly characterised by an international composition, intense mobility and cross-border collaboration.
To the open problems we all faced at our home institutions, new ones were added in the creation of an international ‘doctoral school’: different structures, different practices, different norms and different academic cultures, all of which must be ‘harmonised’, otherwise fruitful cooperation is not possible. General, principled European guidelines can be a good guide, but at the ‘grassroots’ level one encounters quite different, mostly unpredictable problems that have to be solved on a daily basis in order to achieve the set goals. The UNIKE project was a kind of ‘doctoral school’; not only was it a school for emerging researchers, it was also a school for experienced researchers – a school about how to start working within new conceptual frameworks. Both at the beginning and later on, it was necessary to create new tools and promote new practices. From previous international projects, we all knew collaboration between a supervisor and a co-supervisor from two different countries as a proven recipe for success, including the important opportunities that such collaboration offers for the mobility and academic progress of the doctoral student. Amongst other suggestions, Sue introduced the idea, new to me at least, that in addition to supervisors the doctoral student should have a mentor – that is, someone with whom she or he can also talk about possible thorny problems not necessarily related to the research questions but to the comprehensive environment in which the dissertation is being written. Having such mentorships in our group gave me an additional, valuable UNIKE experience. No less important was creating opportunities for secondments – that is, opportunities for our doctoral students to be sent to institutions outside our network. The UNIKE experience was most enriched by the intensive work on summer and winter schools, which took place both in plenary sessions and in small groups or in very individual discussions. At these events, Sue proved again and again that she could also conduct a philharmonic orchestra. Finally, under her ‘conductor's baton’, we also systematically reflected on the innovative work at our ‘doctoral school’, which resulted in a series of articles and publications that I remember with particular fondness.
The UNIKE project ended in 2016, but the connection with Sue and most of the other group members has been maintained to this day. Of course, the old adage panta rhei applies here: our roles and capabilities have indeed changed and so have many external circumstances. In the past two years, international academic collaboration has been severely impacted and limited by the pandemic; existing contacts have been maintained mainly through videoconferencing. What we have experienced in front of our laptops in the last two years are unique and important experiences – but not UNIKE experiences. During the lockdown, we all wanted to return to real, unique experiences. Perhaps it is no coincidence that my first post-COVID in-person conference was again connected to Sue: The Keystone Conference: European Universities – Critical Futures was held in Copenhagen in mid-December 2021. It was different from any other conference I been to in the past. We were tested for viruses at registration, wore masks in the conference rooms, and poured coffee with gloves on during coffee breaks. But for me, this conference was still a bit like a UNIKE experience: it happened thanks to Sue's efforts and her guidance and encouragement. I am truly grateful to Sue for all the past experiences we have shared. And I look forward to new ones.
Working with Sue on the UNIKE project
Corina Balaban
Sue and I met on the EU-funded UNIKE project (Universities in the Knowledge Economy). UNIKE was a four-year collaborative research project investigating the relationships between universities and knowledge economies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim. The project was funded by the European Commission, and the research was conducted by early career researchers (12 PhD fellows and three postdoctoral fellows) working in six different European universities. I was one of the early career researchers working at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Sue was my supervisor.
The UNIKE project was a ‘meta’ project from the start: we researched higher education while working in higher education; we analysed university reforms, only to find ourselves deeply immersed in them. The boundaries between our object of study and our experiences were so fluid that our work became a way to reflect on our own professional lives. It led us to question our values, our actions, as well as our positionality as researchers.
For Sue, this analogy went even further: she had ambitious ideas about what future doctoral education should be like, and UNIKE was one way of putting her thoughts into action. As the principal investigator of the project, she had put together an innovative doctoral programme where concepts like interdisciplinarity and mobility could be tested and observed across five different national contexts. Even more, she set up one of the PhD projects – mine – as an investigation into innovative PhD models, thus creating a chance for us all to reflect on our own practices as we progressed through the programme.
My PhD project explored flagship models of doctoral education in the European Union and the United States. What Sue and I wanted to understand was what the visions for doctoral education emerging in the world's most research-intensive regions were, how they came into being, and what implications they will have for knowledge production and the roles of early career researchers. It was in this context that I have had many long conversations with Sue about governance, policy, higher education reform and the roles of universities in societies. We would meet in her office – a capsule in time, full of books and labelled folders – where we would talk, eat Sue's favourite dark chocolate and write down our thoughts.
The reason I have such fond memories of these conversations is because they have taught me how to look at the world differently: how to understand power structures, how to interrogate the meaning of (key)words, and ultimately how to challenge someone's interpretation of reality. For these, I am indebted to Sue; and no matter what the value of a PhD is on the labour market – still a heated discussion in the field – I know what the personal value of a PhD is when you have got a supervisor like Sue.
The (W)Right ‘performance’ policy
Critical awareness of audit tools, dialogue with managers and hope for change
Miguel Antonio Lim
Sue Wright wrote early on about the rise of audit culture in higher education. As a critical anthropologist and higher education policy researcher, she drew upon and contributed to the critique of managerialism. Her work with Cris Shore (1999), ‘Audit culture and anthropology: Neo-liberalism in British higher education’, has had a far-reaching influence well beyond the academic discipline of anthropology, crossing many geographical and sectoral boundaries. Sue's work with her (and my) longstanding colleague, Jakob Williams Ørberg, further highlighted the importance of studying the wider processes of international coordination to understand the ‘interfaces’ (Wright and Ørberg 2011) between policy processes, policy actors and national contexts. Her observations of British, and later Danish, higher education allowed her to be an early critic of the higher education policy turn to performativity.
Sue and Cris contributed to the widening of the field's understanding of the role of management and its relationship to audit technologies and rankings (Nedeva et al. 2012; Welch 2016). Sue also linked these contributions to wider policy processes (Magalhães et al. 2013; Shore and Wright 2017), particularly with what Michael Peters (1996) describes as forms of ‘government at a distance’.
Sue and Cris's use of Foucauldian frameworks also helped researchers beyond the field of anthropology to engage with wider societal processes. This cross-disciplinary approach, drawing from anthropology, sociology and public policy studies, amongst others, helped to integrate different critiques of neoliberal governance (Shore and Wright 1999). In particular, Sue and Cris explored how individuals were co-opted into powerful audit regimes they had identified ‘within higher education’ (1999: 557; emphasis added) that had by then seeped in from wider forces in society and, particularly, the economy (Davies and Bansel 2007).
The enrolment of technical instruments to collect indicators and metrics and integrating them into wider public policy processes are points of departure for the study of instruments in other policy fields (Scott 1998). In education, there are many instruments that could be placed under the same scrutiny. These include those produced by private actors, such as ranking agencies, consultants, auditors and many others, which also come to have their own life in the realm of public governance (Lim and Ørberg 2017).
Computational bibliometric tools – such as Google Scholar – are just one of a series of technologies that enabled the audit culture that Sue and Cris examined. Tools like these have rendered the performance of academics in a ‘new’, numerical, way, and new terms such as the ‘h-index’ have now entered the vocabulary of research managers. Somewhat ironically, these new metrics have provided another way to understand the reach and influence of Sue's work, which is to look at the number of citations it has garnered over the years in various disciplinary and geographically dispersed journals.
My own response to Sue's call to heighten political reflexivity in higher education was to argue for further and sustained attention to understanding the increasing number of technologies that are continually broadening their scope and scale in higher education governance (Lim 2021). My own doctoral work, guided by Sue, revolved particularly around university rankings. Sue's advice to draw upon methods in anthropology, such as ethnography and ‘thick descriptions’, shaped elements of my data gathering when it came to ranking organisations and ranking conferences and ‘summits’. Yet rankings were just one amongst a range of increasingly computational and data-driven technologies. Each of these technologies, in turn, were linked to some form of data collection and management system.
Working closely with Sue from 2013 to 2016 at the Danish Pedagogical University, (DPU), now the Copenhagen Campus of Aarhus University, granted me several unique affordances. Danish IT workers together with the Danish public library system developed a research data and bibliometric platform called PURE. It came to have greater importance in Denmark as bibliometric analysis became part of the funding algorithm that the Danish government used to allocate resources to universities. PURE has since been acquired by Elsevier. It is now at the very centre of a suite of tools that drive data management and research policy processes across a large number of universities. Elsevier is also the data partner of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings.
Studying higher education policies with a critical lens while being immersed in it oneself was a challenge and an opportunity. To speak truth to power, so to speak, in effective ways required care and insight, which Sue always possessed. It was with this hope that I wrote a reflection on, or perhaps a warning about, the construction of the ‘bibliometric self’ (Lim 2021).
Sue provoked a debate regarding how to respond to this growing (audit) culture. Some acknowledged the validity of the arguments but thought that Sue and Cris were too pessimistic and that they had entrenched the victimhood of anthropologists and, by extension, other academics (Mills et al. 2000). Their response was clear: their work did very much the opposite. Their call to political reflexivity would be a step forward because audit culture requires academics to take part and to reimagine and reconfigure themselves.
Sue's longstanding call to critique and resist managerial tools was a key reason why her work was valuable to academics across higher education. But her fight was with processes and tools and not with people. Sue believed that working with managers, leaders, policy-makers and, together with me, with university rankings highlighted an openness to dialogue and partnership. Her goal was the emancipation of scholars and scholarship rather than victory over managerial villains. My understanding of Sue's long-time argument is that: when those who work in higher education have a ‘critical awareness’ of audit culture then there is the potential for resistance and, more importantly, change.
Three neoliberal agents come to a party
Janja Komljenovic
Outline
This reflexive commentary is written as a short fiction story to honour the remarkable contribution of Sue Wright's work to the fields of anthropology, higher education studies and beyond. It is perhaps an unusual format for an academic contribution. But Sue's work is unusual. It is so in many ways. She has always pushed the boundaries of not only knowledge but of disciplines. She has worked tirelessly towards making the world a better place. And she has gathered people around her to help her do so. None of this is a norm in academia, so neither is this contribution.
Introduction
Three agents have gathered at a party. The first says: ‘I am the best in higher education. I inform people. By bringing transparency, I bring light to the dark and order to the chaos’. The second says: ‘I am the best. You would be nothing without me. I brought you to life’. The third says: ‘You both are wrong. I am the best. I make people believe you matter’. To settle this dispute, the agents look around the party room and find Sue Wright. They convince her to be the judge in this playful competition of who is the best in higher education. They agree that each will first present their story and that, after they finish, Sue will announce the winner.
First goes University Rankings
I was created to help people make informed decisions by bringing transparency into the global higher education sector. It is so hard out there in the wild world. I was told it used to be easier back in the day. There were only a few universities worldwide and only a small number of students attending them. Everyone knew who was worthy of going to the university, and those that were worthy knew which university they would attend. But then, I was told, strange things started happening. Uprisings. Revolutions. Demands. People wanted rights. People wanted equality. People wanted an education. Who would have thought? More and more universities were created, and more and more people went to study at these institutions. It was only natural that universities had to make themselves useful. It is only logical that they started competing globally. Consequently, students got confused about where it would be best for them to study. Governments got confused about how well their universities were doing compared to others. And the media got confused about how to get public attention so as to earn money via advertising. When they finally created me, I helped everyone in their confusion. And my help was instant. I provided answers for students and governments and ensured that the media got the attention and the funding they deserved. Everyone wins because of me. My name is University Ranking. At this point, Sue rolls her eyes and moves her attention to the second agent.
Second goes Key Performance Indicator
I was created to help people get better at what they do. I was so proud of myself when I heard that for the first time. I was thrilled. Who has a more noble purpose than me? I was told that before me university people were lazy. They were locked into their comfortable ivory towers, doing little all day and enjoying the gifts bought for them by the public. So it must have been pure luck and chance that science progressed and academics made any contribution to the world before me. But then, the leaders of the public had enough. They wanted results. They wanted change. And they wanted it immediately. Apparently, I existed in the private sector before, and I helped make companies’ employees work more efficiently. So, of course, it only made sense to transfer me to the university setting. I am defined as ‘Publish three papers per year in the best academic journals of the discipline’, and I am called ‘Publishing’. I am told I help my university reach a higher place in university rankings. I am proud of that, since rankings matter so much nowadays. I always come with friends. There are a few of us brought together for each person. Some of my best friends are called ‘Research Funding’ and ‘Student Satisfaction’. They are defined by numbers too, and this is what matters most. Our purpose is to make life tangible and to be concrete. How else would you know if someone is successful? To the second agent's surprise, Sue looks horrified. She now moves her attention to the third agent.
Third goes Performance Funding
I make a society more just. I work with public money. Hard-working people pay taxes for the benefit of their society. A part of this public money is spent on universities. I was told that historically, universities would get money simply because they existed. Can you imagine that? Get money just to exist, teach and research? Surely you can see this does not make sense. Universities need to prove they are valuable and make clear their societal contribution. The public should have a tangible understanding of the value for money they spend on universities. And to make this answer tangible, the government created me, Performance Funding. I consist of a few demands and indicators, and each university in the country gets a proportion of public funding depending on how well they do on these indicators. The government is able to check that everything is in order. And the public gets their answer that universities are doing their job right. Everyone can sleep peacefully knowing things are monitored and checked. My indicators include a position in university rankings and the number of publications per individual academic. Every university in the country works hard to produce as many articles as possible and be as high as possible in university rankings to receive more public funding. See? I make sure rankings matter and publications matter.
Sue makes a judgement
All three agents look at Sue with great excitement. Each expects to win this competition of being the best agent in higher education. They say: ‘Sue, who wins? Who is the best among us?’
Sue says: ‘I have focussed my life's work on social transformations. University spaces are one of the key sites where social transformation happens. First, because they are public spaces. And second, because they educate citizens and future workers. I studied how the culture of audit society entered universities and the consequences’.
Sue continues: ‘Each of you has indeed had a massive impact on the university, its staff and its students. You are performative tools, technologies and devices. But each of you caused effects that were not intended, at least not by what you said. University Rankings, because of you universities compete instead of collaborate. They focus on ranking places instead of their contribution to the local environment and society. Key Performance Indicator, academic and support staff need to rush, overproduce, work nights and weekends because of you. No one has time to think carefully. Performance Funding, because of you, universities focus on competition and metrics.
Sue concludes: ‘I would want higher education systems and universities to be kind, respectful, supportive, diverse, academically challenging, transformative spaces that have the time and legitimate right to push the boundaries of knowledge and speak the truth to authority without consequences. I do not believe that you constructively contribute to that vision. In fact, I think you have moved universities away from that vision, unfortunately. So none of you win’.
But Sue will never give up. Instead, she leaves the party, convenes critical researchers around her, leads an intellectual and public debate on the future of higher education and our societies, wins research funding and nourishes PhD students to be future leaders. Her collaborators, friends and early career academics will continue her work on the new visions of higher education. And they will make these visions a reality. Sue's legacy will live on.
Postscript
With this fictional story, I intended to humorously outline some of the key devices and tools introduced in higher education over the past decades that have profoundly impacted the sector. Sue Wright was at the forefront of research into the impact of these devices and into higher education reforms more broadly. Her research shows that universities are not perfect institutions and, indeed, need to show their accountability. However, reforms based on neoliberalism and New Public Management bring many challenges for students, staff and societies. She invites us to ask whether universities can exercise their social role in the contemporary marketised higher education systems. Equally, she invites us to be and stay critical and independent thinkers, reflecting on our work environments.
European integration, alternative futures and critical engagement
Amélia Veiga
I had been studying various aspects of European integration of education policies before I encountered Sue Wright and Cris Shore's (2017) Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy. As a collection of chapters about global trends and discourses about university reform, the book highlighted the need to reflect on alternative visions for the role, organisation and mission of higher education institutions as related to research, teaching and public service activities. By taking an ethnographic perspective, they brought forward how academics and students resisted the death of the public university while bringing in their own visions of what the futures of public universities might look like. The challenge is to create alternative futures for universities whose purposes and outcomes are geared towards societal rather than economic ends.
The European higher education ecosystem faces significant challenges raised by Brexit (Courtois 2018), global population movements, global warming and populist, nationalist and illiberal politics. In the global context, the rise of China and India as influential higher education systems and the decline of the United States influence the developments of the global knowledge economy. In the midst of radically transforming European and global contexts, Sue Wright's work underlined the institutional actors’ relationship and reflexivity as key to promoting alternative futures (Wright 2016). The project European Universities – Critical Futures (2019–2023), coordinated by Sue Wright, aimed at pursuing the objectives of reshaping the agenda of European university research and generating ideas for engaging with national and European policy-makers on future higher education and research strategies. At the core of this research endeavour was the idea that higher education institutions are critical for European development regarding social and political integration and for providing an institutional framework through which Europe acts in the world.
In her work, Sue Wright has emphasised the need to identify and question the underlying assumptions driving the critical role that higher education institutions are expected to perform (Wright and Shore 2017). These assumptions refer to the creation of a ‘knowledge economy’ and a ‘Europe of knowledge’ mediating the knowledge triangle – education, research and innovation – with impacts on the ‘modernisation’ of the governance and management of higher education institutions.
Sue Wright's analysis of European reforms, especially those in the Danish context (e.g. Wright and Ørberg 2017), has explored the impacts of university governance reforms on (de)internationalisation trends of higher education (Wright 2022), research integrity (e.g. Douglas-Jones and Wright 2020), the effects of an audit culture based on performance (Wright 2014), the effects of research effects on research practice (e.g. Rowlands and Wright 2020) and the idea of academic freedom as an overarching condition for knowledge creation (e.g. Wright and Deng 2020). These research activities have been leading to the conclusion that the aim of a politically accountable and intensely managed system has been achieved, but the purpose of the university has been narrowed and the broader social mandate and academic autonomy of the university eroded (e.g. Wright 2016, 2017; Wright and Shore 2017). On a personal level, in my career and life trajectory Sue Wright's influence is visible in my attempts to develop new forms of education, research and organisation by involving students, colleagues and support staff to generate ideas for making universities part of ‘liveable landscapes’. As such, I am deeply involved in exploring with my students the combination of different kinds of scientific, technical and practical knowledge to address the research/intervention issues at the core of the field of education.
In critical times for the Europe of knowledge, Sue Wright's promising ways forward highlight the role of ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘Europe of knowledge’ as ideographs combining the knowledge and experience of institutional actors acting to build European imaginaries. A key aspect of building these imaginaries includes the development of intergenerational learning communities in which PhDs and early career researchers are integrated into all of the European Universities – Critical Futures project's agenda-setting activities and involved in dialogues between researchers, policy-makers and other stakeholders about alternative futures.
Sue Wright's endeavours underlined that the redefinition of the integration of European higher education systems shaped by principles of competition, efficiency, competency-based education and responsiveness to industry-based requirements for skills are in tension with principles of social justice and cohesion and are contrary to the meaning of ‘education’ in ‘higher education’. Understanding this tension is crucial to addressing the question of what the alternative future roles of universities are in challenging the governance system coordinating European education policies. Identifying the assumptions construing and constituting the meaning of European integration in higher education and research and discussing alternatives of what is valued in enacting European education policies bring forward critical engagement. Institutional actors’ knowledge and experience bear on the future development of higher education as an institution and are pivotal in turning critique into individual and collective action.
While aware of the way ‘reflexive learning’ and ‘reflexive practitioners’ are vital to construing alternative futures of European integration in higher education and research, Sue Wright, in her focus on the concept of ‘politically reflexive practitioners’ (Wright 2004), brings forward not only the relevance of combining research and teaching and learning, but also the weight of developing my scholarship based on the conception of an academic as a reflexive practitioner. This represents a significant learning outcome for me in engaging with the critical futures of universities. An example is that collective processes of learning are expected to manage uncertainty. The avenues opened by the European Universities – Critical Futures project also underline the need to create and expand the time and spaces of a process of reflection where the consequences of the changes introduced and the possible (un)desired effects can be analysed, and where a joint evaluation of (European) policies can be developed.
Hence, intergenerational learning communities activated by Sue Wright's encouragement presumably planted the seeds of a renewed impetus for universities as ‘expert’ systems. My own scholarship on European integration is, thus, being challenged by Sue Wright's research as she highlights the workings of the drawbacks of European integration processes while bringing in the reflexive actions of the actors involved.
The anthropological lens, higher education policy, ‘sites’ and ‘people’ . . .
António M. Magalhães
I grew up knowing and caring for many kinds of trees.
—Susan Wright, ‘I've lost the smell of elm dust’1
Sue Wright has been researching higher education and higher education policies using the lens of anthropology and has brought an original and challenging perspective to this field. The studies on higher education concentrated their attention mainly on organisational transformations, on the governance and management of systems and institutions and to a lesser extent on how ‘people’ are involved in processes and structures of the political transformation of higher education systems and institutions. While underlining that this field is a social and political space made of dynamic power relations and systems of governance (Shore and Wright 1997) that enact political technologies, her work highlights that the reconfiguration of higher education involves the actions and inactions of national and institutional leaders, students, academics and stakeholders. Moreover, Sue Wright's anthropological approach puts at the centre stage ‘how students, academics, managers, policy-makers and stakeholders embrace, resist, contest or try to ignore processes of transforming their own subjectivity, their organiation and state steering – or try to project alternatives’ (Wright 2016: 60).
In her work, Sue Wright has been analysing the effects of the reconfiguration of universities as central players in the discourses of ‘the global knowledge economy’ prompted by transnational organisations such as the OECD, World Bank and European Union. The policies that are reconfiguring the university's purposes are often based on economic models and on the demands of the global knowledge economy that are changing the external positioning of the institutions and their internal life as well. In her analyses of these political frames, she has identified a dynamic shift from universities as ‘supports’ of the economy, to ‘drivers’ of the (knowledge) economy and, finally, to ‘key actors’ in the economy (Wright 2016). While identifying the features of the dominant political grammar for the sector, and oriented by her anthropological perspective, she has endeavoured to follow policy enactment across ‘sites’. On the one hand, this represents the idea that policy processes are far from being merely top-down, let alone linear, and can be followed across the ‘sites’ where the policies are accepted or contested; on the other hand, by going through the multiple ‘sites’ where policies are enacted the researcher can study how ‘people’ are involved in the processes of political change (Shore and Wright 2011) and the workings of the political grammar that is ascribing specific meanings to higher education and transforming the role of the university. As part of a study on Danish university reforms, Sue Wright clarified that from her perspective universities are ‘politically contested spaces, continually re-enacted by a range of actors, with no single vision emerging intact. Although students, academics, managers and policy makers did not have equal power to shape the institution, each was actively contributing to the re-imagining and enacting of the university’ (Wright et al. 2019: 12).
Sue Wright's focus on ‘sites’ and ‘people’ not only challenges the ‘top-down’ perspectives and the ‘authoritative-instrumentalist’ analytical approach, it also clears a path for a ‘democratic’ approach’ (Shore and Wright 2011) to policy and policy-making. This view is simultaneously epistemic and political, as it assumes policy ‘as a process in which people from many different sites in society are engaged in contesting and transforming systems of governance’ (Wright 2016: 3). Rather than abstractly opposing the dominant influence of the neoliberal narrative on the ongoing changes in higher education, Sue Wright identifies ‘sites’ and ‘people’ that are actually engaged in contesting and changing the institutional structures and processes. Ronald Barnett comes to mind, as he, commenting on the discourses on the dissolution of the modern university, assumes that it is possible to reclaim the university in various respects, pointing out that ‘what is emerging [. . .], perhaps, is a glimpse of an “authentic university”. Authenticity becomes possible precisely where authenticity is threatened. [. . .] The gaining of the authenticity too [. . .] is a set of creative acts, in which new pedagogies, new academic practices and new research approaches are painstakingly and painfully developed’ (Barnett 2004: 206).
The research and positioning of Sue Wright in the field of higher education studies open avenues for future research and bring hope for the future of the university. Her epistemic, ontological and political assumptions encourage a renewed perspective to deal with the crossroads and dilemmas that higher education is dealing with. She emphasises the need for a philosophical platform that allows us to move beyond the theoretical imperialism which ultimately reduces what is ‘other’ to the already known, and to locate the university in a liveable landscape (Wright 2017). Sue Wright uses her anthropological lens on ‘people’ and ‘sites’ to analyse the contemporary contexts within which the university is evolving: ‘It takes systematic and comprehensive ethnography and a very self-critical, reflexive approach on the part of the people involved – managers, academics, students – for them to understand the ways in which they are implicated in each other's welfare through their participation in different circuits of exchange of patterns of organizational integration in the university’ (2017: 29).
Rather than ‘longing for a smooth harmonious world’ (2017: 33), Sue Wright brings together the need to understand the transformations universities are living through and the need to change, both by identifying actual alternative models to the current neoliberal policies reconfiguring higher education (e.g. Wright and Shore 2017) and by putting forward critical questions that urge reflexive action on the part of the ‘people’ involved: ‘How does the university negotiate its relations with the diverse organisations and interests that surround it to turn a “knowledge economy” [. . .] into a liveable landscape? [. . .] how do the members of a university work to achieve and maintain a balance between the different circuits of exchange [between the university and its external environment]? And how do the staff and students organise themselves to achieve this in what is likely to be a tough and heavily contested process?’ (Wright 2017: 29).
Sue Wright's work has been very important both in consolidating the theoretical assumptions of my own research in the field of education policy analysis and in constructing research strategies for the study of higher education policies. While it was already clear to me that the analytic approaches based on ‘top-down’ and policy-implementation-stage approaches had little hermeneutical or explanatory power, I was often faced with the question of how to empirically address the role of social actors in the policy process and how their views and actions produced effects there. From Sue Wright, I learnt to put greater emphasis on the ontological status of narratives and the action (or inaction) of actors involved in political processes. Indeed, the ways in which ‘people’ in different ‘places’ engage with, accept, challenge or resist a particular policy is a powerful lens of interpretation and analysis. This standpoint, epistemic and political at the same time, has strengthened my research perspective on historical contingency, the open-ended character of the political processes and, therefore, the effective possibility of developing a ‘democratic approach’ to their analysis (Shore and Wright 2011).
Last but far from least, along with Sue's contributions to research and academic scholarship in the social sciences, I would like to pay tribute to her capacity for ‘knowing and caring for many kinds of trees’.
A legacy of patience and care
Jakob Williams Ørberg
Dedication
The way Sue always elevated her late partner Carol's views and opinions in front of me was a sweet dynamic between the two that I cherish the memory of. In this short comment on Sue's influence and contribution as a colleague, researcher, teacher and mentor, I would like to keep her deep, active admiration for Carol as the opening thought.
In my opinion, this ability of Sue to dedicate herself to the thought, perspective and project of others is key to the consequential influence her work has. This dedication is the engine that drives Sue's enormous productivity and her ceaseless thinking and writing. Sue's dedication to work is in itself an engagement with her immediate others, including students such as myself.
Archive
Anyone who has eaten with Sue will have noticed her notebook. Even during loud discussions in conference after-hours, she is constantly scribbling. Sue always listens and records. She can be very clear about her opinions, but she is a listener, a writer and an archiver first.
In her office at Aarhus University in Emdrup, Sue used to keep the full corpus of fieldwork notes from her late colleague David Brooks. She wanted to ensure it was organised and written up, and she continuously defended its presence in her office against space-conscious administrators. At one point, Sue even used the size and weight of the archive as an argument against a major space allocation reform. Her intervention was so effective that the reform had to be abandoned.
We all kept our offices, and ‘archiving’ – and Sue's dedication to the projects of others – showed itself as a basis for reflexive action. I think Sue would perhaps suggest it theorised something like ‘an articulation between her archive and the room allocation policy leading to an alternative enactment of the spatial organization of the university than suggested by university administration’. In my mind, Sue's dedication to, and recording of, the work and perspective of others created a space for negotiation.2
Cohort
Sue has co-led the creation of several overlapping fields: the anthropology of organisations, the anthropology of policy and, more recently, the multidisciplinary reflexive investigation of higher education and the university that I belong to. All of these are communities of research and teaching meant to support reflexive practice. By way of large-scale projects, academic networks, publications and even schools, Sue's work as a professor supports colleagues’ ability to systematically research and confidently engage with the conditions they study and work under.
A less-patient person than Sue would have hoped for a movement to arise from this effort. I think the right word for Sue is ‘cohort’. This is the fitting term used to describe us students in the UNIKE project. She never demanded the discipline and coherence of ‘movement’ or ‘school’ from me or any other of her students. Instead, she encouraged a collective exploration of each of our individual voices, positions, perspectives and abilities to act on our policy context.
For this reason, as we passed out from her guidance, we were never lost to Sue. I know she sees our individual career journeys through the institutions and varied roles of higher education and university policy somewhat as extensions of our research projects with her. I always feel bad that I am not taking and keeping notes! But I can point to legal provisions and funding initiatives that I am responsible for, which directly seek to engender the reflexive action that Sue's work calls for. I know other cohort members can too.
Reflexive practitioners (enactment)
In May 2023, I participated in a webinar on university financing meant for practitioners and organised by one of the researchers Sue has been instrumental in promoting. It was organised by the special interest group Higher Education Policy and Practice co-founded by Sue under the Danish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (DUN). The event was very well attended, and all were having great fun wondering about and conceptualising the art of budgeting and costing teaching activities in the Danish system.
During the discussion, Sue appeared on the screen with a short comment and kept her camera switched on for the remainder of the discussion. There was an expression of satisfaction on her face as she witnessed and (in my mind) supervised the discussion and the community it articulated. The patient act of fostering, recording and supporting reflexive practitioners in our field was paying off. Based on the research work presented in the webinar, all were busy listening, questioning and ultimately articulating new ways of ‘enacting the university’ for each other.
Notes
https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/ive-lost-the-smell-of-elm-dust (accessed 2 October 2023).
Sue's patience and dedication finally resulted in the incorporation of the David Brooks archive and Sue's own material on Iran as a special collection in Durham University Library. See https://davidbrooksarchive.webspace.durham.ac.uk/iranian-archives/ (accessed 2 October 2023).
References
Barnett, R. (2004), ‘Epilogue: Reclaiming universities from a runaway world’, in M. Walker and J. Nixon (eds), Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World (Buckingham, UK: The Society for Research into Higher Education).
Courtois, A. (ed.) (2018), Higher Education and Brexit: Current European Perspectives, Papers on University Reform no. 28 (Copenhagen: Aarhus University), http://edu.au.dk/fileadmin/edu/Forskning/Working_papers/Working_Paper_28_Higher_Education_and_Brexit_Current_European_Perspectives.pdf.
Davies, B. and P. Bansel (2007), ‘Neoliberalism and education’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20, no. 3: 247–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390701281751.
Douglas-Jones, R. and S. Wright (eds) (2020), Practising Integrity: Exploring Research Integrity in Denmark (Copenhagen: Aarhus University), https://dpu.au.dk/fileadmin/edu/Forskning/CHEF/Projects/Practicing_Integrity/Practicing_Integrity_Booklet.pdf.
European University Association (2005), ‘Doctoral Programmes for the European Knowledge Society: Conclusions and Recommendations’, Bologna Seminar, 3–5 February, Salzburg, https://eua.eu/resources/publications/626:salzburg-2005-–-conclusions-and-recommendations.html.
Lim, M.A. (2021), ‘Governing higher education: The PURE data system and the management of the bibliometric self’, Higher Education Policy 34, no. 1: 238–253. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-018-00130-0.
Lim, M.A. and J.W. Ørberg (2017), ‘Active instruments: On the use of university rankings in developing national systems of higher education’, Policy Reviews in Higher Education 1, no. 1: 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2016.1236351.
Magalhães, A., A. Veiga, F. Ribeiro and A. Amaral (2013), ‘Governance and institutional autonomy: Governing and governance in Portuguese higher education’, Higher Education Policy 26, no. 2: 243–262. https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2012.31.
Mills, M.A., C. Shore and S. Wright (2000), ‘Audit culture and anthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 3: 521–526. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2661089.
Nedeva, M., R. Boden and Y. Nugroho (2012), ‘Rank and file: Managing individual performance in university research’, Higher Education Policy 25, no. 3: 335–360. https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2012.12.
Peters, M. (1996), Poststructuralism, Politics, and Education (Westport, CT: J.F. Bergin and Garvey).
Rowlands, J. and S. Wright (2020), ‘The role of bibliometric research assessment in a global order of epistemic injustice: A case study of humanities research in Denmark’, Critical Studies in Education 63, no. 5: 572–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1792523.
Scott, J.C. (1998), Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Shore, C. and S. Wright (1997), ‘Policy: A new field of anthropology’, in C. Shore and S. Wright (eds), Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (London: Routledge), 3–39.
Shore, C. and S. Wright (1999), ‘Audit culture and anthropology: Neo-liberalism in British higher education’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, no. 4: 557–575. https://doi.org/10.2307/2661148.
Shore, C. and S. Wright (2011), ‘Introduction. Conceptualising policy: Technologies of governance and the politics of visibility’, in C. Shore, S. Wright and D. Peró (eds), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Anatomy of Contemporary Power (Oxford: Berghahn), 86–104.
Welch, A. (2016), ‘Audit culture and academic production: Re-shaping Australian social science research output 1993–2013’, Higher Education Policy 29, no. 4: 511–538. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-016-0022-8.
Wright, S. (2004), ‘Politically reflexive practitioners’, in D. Drackle and I. Edgar (eds), Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education (Oxford: Berghahn), 34–52.
Wright, S. (2014). ‘Knowledge that counts: Points systems and the governance of Danish universities’, in D. Smith and A. Griffith (eds), Under New Public Management: Institutional Ethnographies of Changing Front-Line Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 294–337.
Wright, S. (2016). ‘Universities in a knowledge economy or ecology? Policy, contestation and abjection’, Critical Policy Studies 10, no. 1: 59–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2016.1142457.
Wright, S. (2017). ‘Can the university be a liveable institution in the Anthropocene?’ in R. Deem and H. Eggins (eds), The University as a Critical Institution (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), 17–38.
Wright, S. (2022), ‘Danish university governance reforms: Internationalisation and de-internationalisation’, European Journal of Education 57, no. 1: 96–108. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12487.
Wright, S., S. Carney, J. B. Krejsler, G. B. Nielsen and J. W. Ørberg (2019), Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective (Dordrecht: Springer).
Wright, S. and L. Deng (2020), ‘Research integrity and research freedom: What is the difference and why does it matter?’, Keynote address delivered at the conference Research Integrity and Research Freedom – What Is the Difference and Why Does It Matter? Aarhus University, Copenhagen, 13 November.
Wright, S. and C. Shore (eds) (2017), Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy (Oxford: Berghahn).
Wright, S. and J.W. Ørberg (2011), ‘The double shuffle of university reform – the OECD/Denmark policy interface’, in A. Nyhagen and T. Halvorsen (eds), Academic Identities – Academic Challenges? American and European Experience of the Transformation of Higher Education and Research (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 269–293.
Wright, S. and J.W. Ørberg (2017), ‘Universities in the competition state: Lessons from Denmark’, in S. Wright and C. Shore (eds), Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy (New York: Berghahn), 69–89.