Words by Professor Ronald Barnett
Across the world, universities have been captured by two forces – the economy and the state – and so much so that we now naturally think of higher education in these terms, as parts of the economy and as subject to political policies and interests. This is an astonishing state of affairs, that the general understanding of a group of highly complex institutions, which are connected with the world in a myriad of ways, has been reduced so severely.
Narrowing the perception of universities in this way is having very serious consequences. Just one symptom of this situation is that we no longer seriously consider in what sense higher education is educational. We also often fail to acknowledge many important contributions that universities might make towards the wider world and to the public good. In turn, policy frameworks intended to develop universities and higher education are impoverished and so end up by diminishing the potential that these remarkable institutions can offer the world.
One way of capturing these reflections is through the idea of ecology. Worldwide, universities are entering the age of ecology. Actually, to a large degree, universities are stumbling into it, although a few are entering it with some deliberation. By ‘ecology’ here, I mean to point to the total interconnectivity that characterises the university. ‘Ecology’ is not confined to matters of the natural environment but has a much larger meaning which is – at its essence – that of interconnectedness.
We may observe that universities are connected with multiple ecosystems, and I suggest that there are eight mega-ecosystems with which universities are especially connected. Clearly, they include (as noted) the ecosystems of the economy and the polity. However, these two ecosystems are accompanied by several others, and I would identify eight ecosystems and in this order: knowledge, learning, individuals, culture, society (in the form of social institutions), the economy, the polity and Nature. Placed in this order, the ecosystems spread out from those that are intimately part of the university to ever wider systems. This order, too, allows us also to notice that the first four are especially internal ecosystems of the university while the latter four are more external.
Two points stand out. First, the economy and the polity are here but no longer are they privileged above the other ecosystems of universities and higher education. Second, Nature is here certainly and, while many might wish to see it placed first, it is last in the list, and for a good reason (which I’ll come onto immediately).
Why give these eight zones that work in and around universities the name of ‘ecosystems’? Ecosystems are clusters of connected entities, which are of inherent value, and which are inter-connected with other ecosystems. Characteristically, they have become impaired, largely through the actions of humanity. Indeed, Nature is last in the series of ecosystems just picked out since Nature is no longer natural, its deformations arising from the distortions in all the other seven ecosystems, distortions which themselves have arisen through the actions of humanity.
Universities are heavily implicated in the ways in which the eight ecosystems have been distorted and so universities have responsibilities in repairing ecosystem impairments. However, lessening this ecosystem malfunctioning is far from straightforward, not least because the university is heavily entangled with the eight ecosystems and there are huge disputes about what a well-functioning ecosystem would look like. What might it mean, for instance, for the global knowledge ecosystem to be restored to a more healthy situation? Or for Nature to be restored, for that matter?
There is a further difficulty, which is that the university is implicated in the eight ecosystems being each impaired. The university bears a heavy responsibility for the malfunctioning of the world. But that reflection indicates that the university has seriously to look at itself and critique itself.
Understanding the university through this ecosystem perspective, therefore, is fraught with difficulties but it is vital if universities are to play their proper part in addressing the challenges of a turbulent and antagonistic world. Universities are going to have to understand themselves anew, as being inter-connected with those eight ecosystems and not just the economy and the polity.
Universities are now in the world and the world is in the university. A university strategy, therefore, has to explicitly to encompass all eight ecosystems and to work out the ways in which it is entangled with them and they in it. Each university will have its own ecological profile, of its situation across the eight ecosystems and its resources in adopting this ecological perspective. It then has the task of identifying its responsibilities and of imaginatively glimpsing its possibilities which, in large measure, will be specific to it.
The ecological perspective, therefore, is worldly (it opens to the whole world), critical (it identifies and critiques both the major ecosystems and the university’s part in their distortions), imaginative (it looks concretely to imagine a better world), practical (it designs ways for the university to play its part in moving to that better world) and revolutionary (since all is turned on its head, not least the economy being turned around to serve the world, and instead of Nature being a reserve from which its resources are extracted, it now becomes a site of imagined planetary health).
Being all of these things, the ecological university – as we may term it – is utopian, but it is a feasible utopia. What, after all, is to stop the university from trying to realize such a vision? And if it does not at least attempt to do so, in what way can it understand itself as a university, with all the universal pretentions implicit in that extraordinary concept?
Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, University College London. This blog captures part of the argument of his latest book, Realizing the Ecological University: Eight Ecosystems, Their Antagonisms and a Manifesto (published by Bloomsbury, September 2024),