Higher education as self-formation

Dwi'n yw yw'r yw'r gweithio yw yw'r yww'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw Mae'n un argymraeth i'n margen sy'n yng Nghymruau'r Yng Nghymruauau'r Yng Nghymruauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauauau yng Nghymru'r Llywodraeth i'r Llywodraeth I. Mae'r Llywodraeth I. Mae'r Llywodraeth I. Mae'r Llywodraeth I. Mae'r Llywodraeth I. Mae'r Llywodraeth I. East Asia, South East Asia, and South Asia, all in degree length programmes. Extended semi-structured interviews are a conversation in which the object of the research, the interview E, has some scope to introduce new concepts and unexpected topics and becomes one of the subjects of the research. This methodological framing helped us to think differently about students and their education. Social science normally sees international students as marginal subjects, struggling to cope. In contrast, we found, as did Catherine Montgomery in a book which was prepared at about the same time in the UK, we found strong agents that were piloting the course of their own lives, though under circumstances they did not really control. These students were engaged not in formation by others so much as self-formation. And some of them spoke brilliantly, reflexively, about the joys and terrors of self-formation as a practice of self-determining human freedom. The research also suggested to me that the notion of students as reflexive self-determining persons using higher education to augment their selves, their lives and advance their freedoms might apply to all students, not just international students. And it's this insight that I want to develop this evening. The simple, far-reaching idea of higher education as self-formation and the expansion of freedom. I believe that the idea of self-formation as freedom contains all that we might want from the higher education process and that this orientation to students and to learning in society is potentially superior to the alternatives. Higher education as self-formation rests on the irreducible fact that while learning is conditioned by external factors, by the learners background and resources, by the institution, by the teaching, by the opportunities and other circumstances available to the individual, only the learner does the learning. It is also consistent with modernity itself, which for several intersecting reasons, including universal markets, political democracy and mass education, foregrounds identity and agency. Autonomous agency has been called the key concept of modernity. For Anthony Giddens, modern life is a never-ending, reflexive project of the self. Consider career, consumption, conversation and social networks, fashion, body management, cultural labels, the identity politics of left and now of the right, even the self-matching self that occurs in dating websites. Senior mainstream educational psychology and economics are not especially modern or democratic about higher education. They model the student as an empty vessel for others to fill and state that the value of the vessel once filled is shaped by market exchange and not by the graduates own objectives. The remainder of the lecture will attempt to ground the idea of higher education as self-formation in freedom. It works largely in educational philosophy while drawing also on empirical social science examples. First, I discuss self-forming freedom in a march as Sen and Michelle Foucault. Second, I review Confucian self-cultivation through learning, the Bildung tradition in Germany and the American pragmatists touching also on the immersion in knowledge that's fundamental to higher education. Third, I consider the most difficult piece of the puzzle, which is the relationship between individual self-formation and social formation, what I call socially nested self-formation. Finally, I compare higher education as self-formation to other constructions of the student trajectory such as investment in human capital or social position and the student as consumer. Self-formation does what the consumption paradigm pretends to do but does not do. It puts the student at the centre of the frame. What idea is more potent for us than freedom? In institutions devoted to education, we also care about equality and solidarity, yet mostly because we want all to access freedom and its conditions and means. Freedom is the heart of the political cultures shaped by the French Revolution that triumphed over feudalism, including those of the Anglo-American world. This drives the never-holy resolved tension between the individual and the social that is inherent in our political cultures. There are many accounts of freedom, but I find a much ascense account of self-determination to be especially helpful. If identity is what a person understands themselves or others to be, an agent states, then, is someone who acts and brings about change. The achievements of the agent can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well. Responsible adults must be in charge of their own well-being, says Sen. It is for them to decide how to use their capabilities. The first step in understanding self-formation in higher education is to assume that students are self-responsible adults and not children. Beyond that, Sen's notion of freedom has three elements. First, the freedom of the individual, from external threat, coercion or constraint. Sen calls this control freedom, and it roughly corresponds to negative freedom in his eye Berlin. Second, freedom is the capacity of the individual to act, which depends on capabilities and resources, and on the social arrangements that enable people to put their choices into practice. Sen calls this freedom as power, and in later work, effective freedom, others call it positive freedom. Third, agency freedom. The reflexive active human will, the seat of self-directed conscious action, which guides reflexive self-formation and the self-negotiations of identity. Agency is about being master of my fate and captain of my soul, as in Invictus, the poem by William Ernest Henley, that sustained Nelson Mandela during his 27 years in South African prison, an impressive example of agency freedom. Agency freedom moves beyond a utilitarian calculus of net economic advantage to take in virtue, including status, dignity, family, friends, making things, satisfying work, the scope to realise forms of life, and shared collective goods as well as individual goods. Sen's three elements of freedom are interdependent. Control freedom and effective freedom are the defensive and proactive moments of agency. Sen also states that a person's capabilities depend on the nature of the social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedom. In equality, poverty and discrimination stratify the agency of individuals and groups. Yet in the agency perspective, structural determination is never absolute. It is disrupted continually by contingency and by agency itself. Structures are always partly open. Close systems sit within larger open systems. Agency is not just a modernist trope, it is the way through for disadvantaged populations as Sue Clegg has pointed out. Michelle Foucault notes to the self is the only object that one can freely will without having to take into consideration external determinations. He locates agency in the constant interplay between strategies of power and resistance. Reflexivity mediates between structure and agency. Higher education enhances the capacity for reflexivity. It grows the space for freedom. In fact, all three senior aspects of freedom are advanced by higher education, especially effective freedom, the capacity of the individual to act and agency of the will. The OECD publishes data on the contribution of higher education to graduate agency. There is a close association between degree holding and having skills in information and communications technology, connecting effectively to government, trusting people, managing money effectively and so on. Let's turn from sin to another way into higher education, self-formation and freedom. The last three years of Foucault's lectures to the College of France, 1981 to 1984. For Foucault, Stephen Boyle puts it, "Freedom is the capacity and opportunity to participate in one's self-formation." Foucault knows about the openness of the present and he tells people that they are much freer than they feel. But he is at pains to emphasise that freedom is a process of struggle and often arduous work of the self on the self and elaboration of the self by the self, a progressive transformation of the self by the self. In the last lectures, Foucault shifts his project from the history of the docile subject of domination, whose individuality is regulated by the normalising practices of the state. Through the history of the active subject and the potential for freedom in which one can become something that one was not. Foucault is most concerned with control freedom, in sense, freedom from determination by the state. Here, an ethic of the self is indispensable, he states. There is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than the relationship that one has with oneself. Foucault reviews the great culture of self that evolved in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds between Plato's 4th century BCE in Athens and 4th century CE in Rome. The autonomous self became seen as its own end, without the constraints of mediating institutions or objectives. This contrasted with the Christian period that followed, with its theme of the renunciation of the self. Individuals had to subordinate themselves to God and his ministers to know and to care for themselves. They were less free than they had been. However, Hellenic Roman autonomy was achieved only by hard work of the self on the self. Foucault discusses practices of the autonomous self, including meditation, self-examination, rules of ethical conduct, truth-telling, prasier, and the other life, practiced by the stoics and the cynics. He notes that while the theme of return to the self recurs in modern culture, as yet, we have nothing to be proud of in our current efforts to reconstitute an ethic of the self. In that criticism and self-criticism, the Greeks and Roman practices of the self were more consistent and more advanced. The Platonists held out the other world as the point of reference against which this world could be judged and criticised. For the cynics, if life was truly to be a life of truth, must it not be an other life, a life which is radically and paradoxically other. In self-formation, we place ourselves in doubt, and in this lies new possibilities. And this leads Foucault to his terminal insight, the very last sentence in the last lecture on 28th March 1984. But what I would like to stress in conclusion is this, there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of ovenus. The truth is never the same. There can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life. Well, what's the relevance of this to higher education? First, self-formation. Ball notes that while education is a key site in which the processes of normalisation are enacted, it can also become a locus of struggle for productive processes of self-formation and freedom. Second, Foucault's final challenging idea, taking us to the outer reaches of agency and freedom, agency and creativity. In self-formation, we can become something other than we are and find the truth that is other, different. Third, Foucault's self-transformation resonates with the building idea in education, as he notes, while his specific focus on self-transformation through the painstaking work of self-on-self resonates with Confucian self-cultivation, which he does not mention. As in Greece and Rome, self-formation in higher education is modelled in specific practices. It's time now to look at these. Self-formation in education is taken up in varying ways in different cultures. The older practice is Confucian self-cultivation. Zhao and Dang state that the idea of person-making is at the heart of the Confucian heritage of educational thought. It is the precondition for developing the critical and creative potential of the individual and enabling him or her to fulfil social functions. In a comparison of self-formation, East and West, Zhao and Biesta remarked that the Confucian self is never finished, but engaged in continuous self-perfection. There's an echo of the Hellenistic world in that. Education cannot be separated from becoming an ideal and genuine human person. Confucianism presents a view of the self that is explicitly informed by a moral and ethical dimension. Classic Confucian education embodies a commitment to the common good. It also serves the state. It emphasises effective freedom and agency freedom more than freedom of, as control, independence from the state, which is the main focus in Anglo-American countries. Now, Dong Zhongshu, who established Confucianism as the theoretical foundation of the Hun state, proposed the First Imperial Academy in 124 BCE. Traditional higher education in China did not take the form of semi-autonomous universities as in Europe, but channeled self-cultivation into training and selection for the state bureaucracy. Yet, the Confucian idea of ren, humanity in its broadest sense, is also at the heart of Chinese self-formation. Waming two states that the great strength of modern East Asia is its self-definition as a learning civilization, which may be the most precious legacy of Confucian humanism and shapes Chinese modernism. Others like Zhao and Ding, question where the higher education has retained the classic commitment to holistic person-forming or is collapsed in China into economic utility and are focused on credentials rather than learning content. Well, that coincides with the critique of instrumentalism in the West. At the same time, East West Convergence should not be overstated. Jin Lee uses Learner Word Association to compare beliefs about learning among students in China and the United States. The Americans will more reflexive about the learner's mental function and inquiry and imagination, and often cited external conditions affecting learning, usually to say that those external conditions retarded learning. The Chinese focused less on external conditions and emphasized how learners actively seek learning on their own, underlining intrinsic motivation and learner agency. They were always also more normative, talking about learning in terms of attitudes and action, and hardship, and virtues such as diligence and steadfastness, terms that never surfaced in the American talk. The Chinese saw the practical purposes of higher education as important, yet learning and knowledge are also indispensable to their personal lives, and the path to becoming a better person. This suggests that there has been no broad-based evacuation of traditional Confucian practices, and Shostya compares business students in New York and Shanghai. Outside class, the Chinese students spent an average 9.6 hours per week in reading, and 22.3 hours in study compared to American students, 4.4 hours of reading and 9.1 hours of study. Chinese students are more focused than their American counterparts on the work of self-on-self, albeit partly mediated by educational institutions, curricula, and examinations. Now to Bill Dung, one translation of the German word is self-formation, along with development and inter-cultivation. It's larger than each of these, and includes them all. Bill Dung is rooted in the Enlightenment thought of Emmanuel Kant, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and others. Kant's definition of the Enlightenment is, excuse the gender, man's release from his self-incured tutelage through the exercise of his own understanding. The role of education is to cultivate the inner self in intellectual and ethical terms to form citizens in public rationality for the emerging civil society. Bill Dung said Kant will not happen by itself. Reason will not emerge spontaneously. It rests on training and teaching. Education is the crucial element for evolving humanity and sustaining progress, not just in every individual, but also on the collective level. Bill Dung resembled Confucian self-cultivation as a holistic project with a strong moral dimension, and systematic learning practices. Bill Dung placed greater emphasis on the autonomous will on agency freedom and freedom as control, and focused on civil society not the state. Kant emphasised the need for people to learn to think independently without guidance from the authorities. The universal curriculum also offered a potential escape from the limiting effects of social background. Nevertheless, like Confucianism under the Han, Bill Dung was turned to nation-building. For example, Wilhelm von Humboldt's University of Berlin, which he placed at the service of the state, for Humboldt served to preserve the original idea of education free of external constraints by prescribing full university autonomy and the freedom to learn and teach. Academic still defend their self-determination by invoking the global culture of the Himboldtian University, but they focus on the control freedom of academics, not the self-formation of autonomous students. Bill Dung employs an educational process dedicated to being and becoming, to open-ended human potential, not static measures of skill and knowledge. Its notion of perfectibility resembles Confucian self-cultivation and that the goal is never achieved. Rather, self-formation opens new horizons as it proceeds, and the edge of the ability of the self-forming learner expands continually. Teaching and learning cannot be exhaustively defined in terms of cause and effect. For there's always an open independent space, independent of the teacher for self-formation by the student. This is only a partial space, teaching educational structures and the larger socio-cultural world still matter. The core notion of Bill Dung of educational subjects that shape themselves through their own actions retains its vitality, though its contemporary advocates place more emphasis than their forebears on practices that recognize difference and diversity. The American pragmatists were influenced by Bill Dung and they also saw the formation of free autonomous persons as central. Jewish democracy and education could be described as a theory of Bill Dung, especially where he writes about self-discipline and a curriculum of humanistic and naturalistic studies. The pragmatists also gave self-formation their own twist. Their central principle was growth. Mental formation occurred via activity and experience in natural and cultural environments through shared language and learned reflexivity. More recent versions of pragmatism have partly shifted the balance from teaching to the self-regulating self-forming learner. Two factors distinguished self-formation in higher education from other sites of self-formation, academic teaching and immersion in knowledgees can't notice the paradox inherent in teaching self-formation. How is it possible to cultivate freedom by coercion? The dilemma is less pressing in higher education, where the teacher is the facilitator of already autonomous learners. Immersion in knowledge is the more important signifier of higher education, even though knowledge is underplayed in policy. Referencing Basel Bernstein, Paul Ashwin, focuses on transitions between knowledge as research, knowledge as curriculum and knowledge as student understanding. Tracking these transitions empirically is a powerful way, says Paul Ashwin, of gaining a sense of the transformative power of higher education. Because it brings into focus the ways in which higher education transforms students understanding and identities, all the way that students transform themselves. Working within particular bodies of knowledge, students acquire different gazes and lenses required to access that knowledge. And often acquired distinctive values associated with the discipline. Each body of knowledge leaves distinctive traces in self-formation. In a study of Sociology students' accounts of their discipline, Paul Ashwin, Andrea Abbas and Monica McClain demonstrated that most students move to a relational understanding over time. They cite Dubert's comment that students form themselves through the meaning they attribute to knowledge. The researchers also find engaging with knowledge alone is not sufficient to secure transformed student perspectives. There also needs to be an alignment, they say, between students' personal projects and the focus on disciplinary knowledge, which highlights the role of agency freedom. Ashwin and McVity note that while knowledge transforms students as they engage with it, students also transform knowledge as they make sense of it. The mutual transformations of subjects and knowledge are a rich domain for research inquiry. The student self is continually created in a shifting combination of A given material conditions, B social relations in which the student is embedded and a partner in making, and C the agency freedom or active will of the student. All students' self-formation is historically grounded and subject to relations of power and like all localised practices is specific to context. What then can be said in general, although the idea of self-formation is not hegemonic, it is well understood in different parts of the world. The more difficult issue is socially nested self-formation, the relations between self-formation in higher education and the social setting and the higher education's role in social formation. This is often seen as a normative question, what kind of social relations or values should enter educational self-formation, yet I would argue that it's also an empirical question, what social relations optimise self-formation and what forms of self-formation optimise social relations. In Live Vigotsky's social psychology, the individual child develops self and social relations as the same process. Strikingly, the infant exercises agency sufficient to draw adults into an early speech exchange. Early speech in turn builds the child's social identity and enhances capability, further augmenting agency. The mediation between individual and social is language, a medium both shared and individualisable in which social identity is established. In speech community, the mentality of the child is patterned and she or he learns to work on her or his own mind, enabling reflexivity. The true development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, it's from the social to the individual says Vigotsky, an interpersonal process is transformed into an intra-personal one. Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice, first on the social level and later on the individual level. The social, historically prior to the individual, provides the material essential for individual self-formation. Likewise for CP Mead, Vigotsky's American near contemporary, individual growth or self-formation takes place through mutual exchange in social settings through language. Individuals create shared meanings or solve problems, triggering reflection. Margaret Kettle illustrates the crucial role of language-mediated social relations. Her interviews subject in an ethnographic study, a Thai student studying in Australia, believed that his affective agency simply did not exist until he learned to communicate and interact effectively with local persons in the second language environment. Building and Confucian self-cultivation both emphasise the interdependency of individual and social, but each in a distinctive way. According to Ari Kovella, in the Kantian version of building, the aim of education is the active autonomous person within the framework of social life. A rational subject who uses reason in a public way and lives in the public sphere among other individual beings. For Ficht, as for Vigotsky, Mead and Jewie later, self-consciousness and interpersonal relations emerge simultaneously. However, while the social is built onto the individual in building, perhaps the scaffolding could be dismantled. Civil society appears more abstract and more normative perhaps than the person. Some contemporary advocates of building want to see a greater emphasis on interdependent social relations. Well, there's no doubt that self-formation in the general culture and in education is often trapped in high individualism. Individuals and groups are nested in a much larger lattice of social exchange in which the resources and capabilities of self-formation are unevenly distributed. Yet the move to the social should not be overstated. Learning is individually appropriated and some imagining individuals exceed their contexts. Individual agency is always both socially separated and socially embedded. This double coding of the self, one of the distinctive achievements of Anglo-American European thought, widens the scope for creative agency that translates itself into otherness into seeing and doing differently and then brings that back into the social realm. On the whole, however, the social dimension is more central to confusion thought than in bull building. In Chinese language, the word 'ren' combines the word for two and the word for human being. Confucian ideas were always both normative and consistently relational. According to Zhao and Biesta, Confucius cared about a person's individual development but strongly maintained that it should take place in the context of human relationships. For Sun, the Confucian view of self has three aspects, the 'I' undivided with the universe, the 'I' in unity with other human beings, and the wholeness of 'I' with self that enables the reflexive work of self on self. Confucianism in education means cultivating all three types of relationships. Hence, we find on one hand a direct, unmediated reflexivity of self on self as in the stoics of a Hellenic period as described by Foucault. On the other hand, there's also mediated forms of reflexivity of two kinds in personal relationships and through engagement in the world as a whole, Tianshiar, all under heaven, the global public good. Self-formation can be continually monitored by all three forms of reflexivity. Adapting the Confucian text, the Great Learning, Song Dynasty near Confucianism identified eight stages to the realization of self-cultivation, investigating things, extending one's knowledge, making one's intentions in Sia, rectifying one's mind, cultivating one's personal life, regulating one's family, governing one's state, and setting the world at peace and harmony. At the same time, in a normative approach to the social, there are potential dilemmas for self-formation. It's one matter for education to move beyond methodological individualism to foreground the relational, the contextual, and the ecological, as it should do. It is another matter for education to fulfill the content of the social with its preferred version of social relations. Agency freedom requires that students map the social for themselves, driving a single social philosophy through higher education violates all three, send freedoms. Higher education and self-formation has a long pedigree, and enables rich educational practice, but as you know, it's not the only or the dominant idea of higher education. Ashrin Aberson McLean examined ways that high-quality higher education is represented in the policy-related documents of UK government and other actors. There are two broad types of representations. First, the dominant market-oriented generic discourse, where quality is secured through the consumer power of students in a competitive market of producer institutions. Second, a more fragmented set of discourses that acknowledge its transformations in higher education. Discipline-reknowledge and critical thinking are mentioned that the main emphasis is on teaching on higher education as other formation. It's striking that overall, in all the material, knowledge and student formation are downplayed, and agency-driven self-formation is absent despite the rhetoric about student-centeredness. Even the alternate discourses do not give, as researchers say, do not give a sense of what is special about the knowledge that students are engaging with, or give a sense of the identities that they develop through this engagement. Perhaps these findings say more about the ideological nature of policy discussion than the potential of higher education. The market consumer paradigm drastically shrinks what higher education has to offer, is valued to individuals and societies when compared to build on or duey or a confusion-self-cultivation. It narrows the practical agenda to immediate student satisfaction, short-term graduate salaries, and speculative judgments about long-term economic position. The consumer paradigm is not psychologically sophisticated. It assumes that students celebrate at market signals, like Pavlov's sabaka, with just one thing on its mind, food. As Ashwin and McViddy remark, it asks students to commodify their own intellectual and personal transformation, with little real agency on offer. "Main how much power do mass consumers ever exercise?" Fortunately, students do have a less-consumptionist take than policy. A recent survey of 9,000 students at 123 institutions found that 34% believed universities should be accountable for poor graduate employment figures, but 68% saw them as accountable for poor teaching. When asked which factors demonstrate that a university has excellent teaching, graduate employment came last out of seven options. Most students have not brought into the idea of the nexus between teaching quality, satisfaction, employment outcomes, and choice of university. They don't self-form while shopping at Tesco or not much. They do in higher education. And yet, the idea of higher education as an investment in future graduate productivity in human capital and the idea that completing a degree enhances employability are not wholly wrong. Some students, some of the time, make decisions about higher education according to the human capital calculations of future earnings. Most students hope that their degree will enhance their economic prospects and some behaviours consumers. Under a consumption-based policy, such behaviours will increase. Likewise, the idea of society as a field of investment in positional goods is salient. Most families see in higher education the potential to maintain or uplift their social position. And no doubt, some students want to board you in social and cultural capitals. There are also other ways in which students expand themselves their resources and their projects. Some love the subjects they study and find knowledge as an end in itself. Some are looking for a mate. Some are intensively engaged in cultural or political activism. Some want to work on global problems. Many are finding themselves while moving into adult life. Some want to please their families, self-forming in other determined ways. And students nurture more than one of these different projects simultaneously and position themselves variously as immediate gratification, as investment, as identity. Many who study mentally expanding disciplines like philosophy have solved the thorny question of where will it take them but they still want a job after graduation. I say some, many, much, most, not all. None of these paradigms apply to all students all of the time everywhere. None is a universal or even hegemonic explanation of higher education. Yet that is how human capital theory, the consumer paradigm, the theory of positional goods, board use capitals, even liberal education, present themselves to us. As contending claims for the status of a single transcendent truth, each claim is holistic in form yet it is grounded in a partial slice of the educational world. The framing of higher education should encompass all of these phenomena without elevating any one to dominance. Higher education of self-formation and self-formation as the expansion of freedom, that is the inclusive framing. Self-formation includes all of the different ways that students build agency and extend their effective freedoms by augmenting themselves. Higher education, as socially nested self-formation, takes the investigation to the augmentation of others and the common good. Well, this paper has argued that higher education, education that is not the university or not research, I'm just talking about teaching and learning here, is comprised of processes of student self-formation and that student self-formation can be understood as a practice of freedom. Student self-formation has a long history in education and it is widely understood, especially in East Asia, where education often goes deeper than elsewhere. Self-formation is our best explanation and practice of higher education. I think that the way forward is to build on it. Like all large ideas in education, such as equality of opportunity, self-formation is both a norm that is pursued and a living empirical reality some of the time. It's open-ended, it's about potential more than outcomes and its practices are always incomplete. However, self-formation is both necessary and sufficient to understand higher education. It takes in all the ways that students augment themselves. As socially nested self-formation, it can take in all the ways that self-forming students contribute to ongoing social formation. However, it's easier to secure agreement on individual self-formation than on social formation. Once self-formation is at the heart, student-centered learning can develop more fully and students become a primary unit of analysis. Disciplines, sets of knowledge also may become as important as institutions, which we customarily focus on. What practices can expand self-formation? Fostering the agency freedom of students and its scope to act is the key for moving forward, expanding the space in which students are free of constraint and coercion. For example, less authoritarian administration or discriminatory practices can grow freedom as control. Resources and opportunities such as information of affordable housing and mobility opportunities augment effective freedom. Note also that higher education is only one domain in which students form themselves and its effectiveness is optimised in synchrony with the other domains such as home or work, social communication. In empirical research can investigate the mix and match of each student's different projects of self-formation and variations in self-formation in its resources and strategies by country, class, culture, gender and over time. There is scope to explore how immersion and knowledge, evolving competences, growing self-efficacy and changing values, feed agency freedom and develop the portfolio of personal projects. And there is also inquiry into those techniques in higher education that already now open the way to truths of the other world and the other life as FUCO puts it. Truths that enable us to become radically other. How is it that by working on ourselves in higher education, by pushing ourselves at the limit, we can make a new self and a new world? Thank you for listening. Thank you Simon for that hugely stimulating reflection on the purpose of higher education, by an enormously impressive sweep of ideas from across education, philosophy, the social science, different cultural heritage. It has been enormously challenging to listen to, really going to the heart of what it is we do in higher education and what sort of self-formation we're supporting in our students. I'm sure that we'll all be thinking that through on the trains home and in bed tonight, so thank you very much for that. I'd now like to invite Professor Stephen Bull to give his response to the lecture. Stephen is Distinguished Service Professor at the IOE, having been the Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education here from 2001 to 2015. He's made an enormous contribution to the Sociology of Education internationally and an enormous contribution here at the IOE. He's also a key architect of this inaugural lecture series and I'm personally very grateful to him for that as well. Stephen's main area of academic interest is in sociologically informed education policy analysis, especially concerning the role of the state and the market in education and social inequalities in education. Most recently his work's addressed changing modes of governance and education as well as offering a comprehensive application of the work of Michelle Foucault to education as in Foucault as educator his work in 1917, 2017. A leading sociologist of education we're really pleased to hear Stephen's reflections now on Simon's lecture. Thank you, Stephen. I'm both honoured and pleased to be able to respond to Simon Marginson's lecture and I'm also pleased that the IOE professor or inaugural lectures are up and running again and that we can share some of the outstanding thinking that goes on here at the IOE among ourselves and with others. Some of the best ideas are sometimes unseen or unheard by those outside of the specialist field in which they're articulated and events like this offer opportunities for a wider audience and a broader group to have some access to those thoughts and ideas. Simon has offered the inaugural lecture par excellence looking back to some extent over a career of work done a path marks out significant contributions made but also and more importantly today looking forward trying out new ideas and possibilities opening up new avenues of inquiry, new directions for analysis and for thinking and for the conceptualisation of higher education new ways of thinking higher education. Higher education is very much these days an arena of sliding signifiers where often unclear what is what and who is who but scholarship I think still means something and Simon Marginson is a scholar and that has been made very clear this evening. And Simon's work is global his work is the globe and he is a global scholar he is recognised acknowledged and attended to in countries around the world he speaks to and about global higher education eastern west north and south. And Simon is an academic scholar whose work is both expansive and introgative and we've seen a virtue also display of that introgative skill in his presentation this evening. Simon works on political economy and sociology drawing also on social and cultural theory history political philosophy as we've heard. His work also rests and he has cited some examples of this this evening on empirical observation based qualitative research semi-structured interviews contextualised case studies. But it also involves and is based upon and the research feeds into conceptual inquiry. What he is about is attempting to grasp what the university is and to think about what the university might be and indeed what it should not be. He's both speaks to and challenges policy he is in a sense multilingual he makes sense to policy makers and he seeks to make sense of policy makers. He speaks in and beyond the limits of current conceptualisations of higher education and in particular he constantly reminds us that higher education is a space of education. It's not simply a collection of institutions. He also addresses in his research and again we've we've seen some of this this evening in the lecture the three key issues of contemporary global higher education. In equality in relation to things like access and outcomes, marketisation in relation to the commercialisation and financialisation of higher education and the implications of that for the student experience. And indeed what we mean by higher education what it means to be higher educated and then thirdly the governance of higher education who decides what higher education is for and whom it is for and how such decisions are made and where. And Simon's work indicates changes in respect of all of those issues. What he maps out in his broader body of work is the re-spatialisation of the social economic and political of higher education. He's also a comparativist in the classical sense. He's very interested as we've heard this evening in the comparison between higher education in the eastern west and he's written and spoken this evening about what he calls the post-confucian model of higher education to explain the dynamism of higher education and science in East Asia. And he's also a theorist, a man of letters, equally at home with international financial reports on higher education and the analysis of the competitive behaviour of higher education institutions as with the ideas of Foucault, Bordier, Bernstein, San, Newman, Vigotsky and others. Too often these days in relation to the problems of education policy theory is neglected or dismissed as theoretical as though that was something bad in itself as impractical as unnecessary. What Simon has shown here and in his broader body of work is the power and value of theory as a means for thinking about real-world issues in different ways. Theory as violent and as disruptive, yes, but also as a source of innovation and creativity. Theory as in the work of Michel Foucault, on which Simon draws, enables us to think about the ways in which current social arrangements and practices produce and constrain and at the same time enable our possible modes of action and being. But theoretical critique also offers the potential for a repoliticisation of everyday life, of our lives, of who we are. The reopening to question of taken for granted naturalised concepts through which we make sense of ourselves, the practices and social relations and social arrangements within which we are formed and constructed and take responsibility for ourselves. It also means denatualising the categories that organise and define our experience and make us what we are and it takes us into a worrying and indeed sometimes frightening space in which we must unthink our common sense and recognise as fragile and contingent many of our modernist certainties and come to accept that all knowledge is uncertain. The point is, as Foucault put it, Simon quoted, to show us that we are freer than we think we are. What Foucault outlines is a negative ethics, not a matter of asserting ideals but rather an aestheticism, an imaginative creativity. This is an ethics as a practice rather than a plan. It is the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself. That is a question of how we govern our own conduct, both our behaviour and our purposes and the possibility of an ending change, both of ourselves and to the arrangements in which we contingently find ourselves. This is the care of the self and of others, as Foucault puts it, and as Simon has discussed as self-formation. It seems to me that both in substance and practice, ethically and politically, this is exactly what a university should be about. Not handmade into the economy, but scourge and hinderer to processes of economism. The point of scholarship is to create a space in which it is possible to think differently, here to think differently about higher education. And that is what Simon Marginson does. That is why he is necessary. He requires us to think. He makes us appropriately uncomfortable. He is a scholar, and as such, he brings great credit to the IOE and to the sociology of higher education, and I am thankful for him. Thank you very much. Thank you both. Well, it falls to me to close, and to really thank both Simon and Stephen for that terrifically educative and thought-provoking lecture, Simon, and your equally thought-provoking response, Stephen, as well. It has been a fantastic evening. Simon's lecture will be published as a booklet, and it will be available from the 31st of January. So, if you are interested, guests should take a flyer from the UCL IOE press stand outside the lecture hall. It is just a fiver for pre-order, and including postage, so that is a really good offer for you. I would really love to finish by, as well as thanking our speakers again, by welcoming you all for a drink where we can catch up and mutually digest everything we have heard this evening. So, let's thank Simon and Stephen.