Jon Nixon

From the Medieval Latin ‘scholaris,’ the word ‘scholar’ has its etymology in school. The broader meaning of ‘learned person’ has been in usage since the late thirteenth century; the further meaning of erudition, character and qualities of a scholar or source of funds for scholarship from the sixteenth century. This chapter examines the exemplary life of one scholar who in some ways resisted all these definitions: the art critic and historian, artist and writer John Berger. He was a person of many parts and in this chapter we highlight some of the aspects of his many achievements that may help us understand what scholarship means within the broader context of cultural and social production: the storyteller, the worker, the critical realist, the seer … Exploring through biography, imagery and texts, the chapter offers a few windows through which to view Berger’s wonderfully varied body of work—and relates them to a broader and more inclusive notion of scholarship.

What distinguishes those who hope from those who merely indulge in wishful thinking is their willingness to confront and challenge the apparent hopelessness of the situation in which they find themselves. Therein lies the paradox of hope. The situation in which we—located in the first quarter of the twenty-first century—find ourselves in is one of increasing instability and insecurity. We are living in a divided and divisive world in which the need for global interconnectivity clashes with a renewed emphasis on cultural and national boundary maintenance. Hope requires us to acknowledge—in our own lives and the lives of others—the consequences of this contradiction, and to find within it the necessary resources to seek to resolve it. Some at least of these resources lie in the public institutions of civil society: institutions that—by their very existence—acknowledge the importance of civil association and the recognition of equal worth. As one such institution, the university has two invaluable resources of hope to bring to our divided world: its passion for truth and its insistence on the necessity of reasoning together. By providing a space in which these resources can be developed and used for the common good, universities provide—in the face of a deeply divided world—hope of a common world: not an ideal world, but a better world in which the cravings of competition and the striving for cooperation and collaboration find a kinder balance. But, of course, this, too, is an expression of hope—hope that the liberal university, bedevilled as it is by privatisation, marketization and managerialism, can live up to its historic mission.

What constitutes the public good in a highly individualistic, consumerist and privatized society? The global financial crisis of 2008 revealed the extent to which the public realm had been eroded over the last thirty years and the inroads that privatization and commercialization have made into the higher education sector. This book explores the institutional and sector-wide implications of the financial crisis for higher education; and the lessons to be learnt from that crisis and its aftermath for the university sector as a whole. Jon Nixon argues that the university now has to be re-imagined as a social, civic and cosmopolitan good that is central to the well-being of civil society and its citizens. Key chapters focus on capability, reasoning and purposefulness as the common resources of higher education. The book highlights the urgent need for sector-wide planning and collaboration, the development of a public culture across institutions, and a broadening of the higher education curriculum. Higher Education and the Public Good points a way forward to the new and emergent civic and cosmopolitan spaces of learning.

In this chapter I refer to ideal collegial relationships as relationships of virtue and draw on the Aristotelian notion of virtuous friendship to clarify and ground the argument. I also presuppose a heterogeneous category of what I term ‘educational professionals’ that comprises a wide range of occupational groupings. We live in a society that is not only increasingly professionalised, but increasingly pedagogicised: a society, that is, in which professionals in different walks of life and different institutional settings define their professionalism, and mediate their professional practice, in increasingly pedagogical terms. Professionals are now expected to explain, persuade, mediate, consult, negotiate, and learn from, and with, their clients. That is all for the good, but it suggests new forms of collegiality across professional boundaries and new forms of public-professional engagement. It also suggests a renewed sense of intellectual solidarity: the ‘we’ and the ‘us’ that Said had in mind when he refers to ‘scholar-teachers’, carrying forward what he saw as a radical tradition of ‘critical humanism’, or the notion of ‘we scholars’ that Damrosch evoked in his brave attempt to envisage ‘the next intellectuals’.

This paper challenges the view that academic professionalism resides in the professional 'autonomy ' of the academic, the 'self-regulation' of academics as an occupational group, and the differential 'status' of academic workers. This still influential notion of academic professionalism, it is argued, leads to institutional stasis. What is required is greater reflexivity by academics in respect of their underlying professional values. In particular the piece challenges the academic community to re-think academic freedom - the bedrock of professional identity within that community - in terms of increased inclusivity: 'freedom for all' rather than 'freedom for academics'. The paper touches on issues relating to practice and organisational structure, but focuses primarily on the need for academics to shift the moral bases of their claim to professionalism. In so doing, it also challenges the post-Dearing consensus that the debate on academic professionalism can be adequately conducted in terms of 'standards' and 'outcomes'. A prime purpose of the paper is to promote debate and discussion by setting a different kind of agenda and by couching that agenda within a different kind of discourse.

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ?virtuous friendship?. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ?functional capabilities?, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address. ?Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended? (Hall, 1995, p. 27)