This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker: Steven Jones, University of Manchester

Under-confident in its public role and kept afloat by a funding model widely accepted to be unsustainable, the English university finds itself in a vulnerable position. The sector’s capitulation to ill-fitting market principles leaves it exposed to increasingly hostile discourses from politicians and media commentators. Distracted by spurious metrics and league tables, institutional managers have become adept at competing with one another for diminishing resources, but struggle to unite behind a shared narrative of public good, as Covid-19 demonstrated. This paper suggests ways in which the university might find ways to tell different stories, and to reclaim its status as trusted public institution. But it also warns that without urgent change, the sector is susceptible to even darker forces, as academic expertise and methods are devalued, ‘culture wars’ take hold on campus, and authoritarian governments seek to repurpose the university platform to legitimatise the most regressive of views.

Steven Jones is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester, UK, and currently head of Manchester Institute of Education. His academic background is in English Linguistics, and he brings the tools of critical discourse analysis to the university sector. He has written op-ed pieces for The Guardian and presented research evidence to policy-makers and government ministers.

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