THE PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: IN PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE AND OF EQUITY

THE PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: IN PURSUIT OFEXCELLENCE AND OF EQUITY

David Bridges

Chair, Von Hugel Institute, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge

Professorial Fellow, University of East Anglia

ABSTRACT. In this essay, David Bridges explores the notion of practice with particular application to thepractice of higher education. He considers whether some of the changes in practices linked to the massifi-cation of higher education have in fact resulted in the breakdown of higher education as a practice, atleast on Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of the term. Specifically, Bridges examines whether higher educa-tion has lost its sense of the forms of human excellence around which its life is constructed. Finally, hepoints to issues of equity raised by the huge variety of forms that higher education now takes and askswhether this variety might mean that students are winning entry to some very different qualities of expe-rience when judged against the requirement that they should contribute to the development of humanexcellence.

WHAT MIGHT COUNT AS THE PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION?

Unsurprisingly for what is such a common word, ‘‘practice’’ is used in a num-

ber of different ways. It is perhaps most often applied in sporting or musical or

other similar contexts to designate the repeated performance of certain skills with

a view to their improvement. Although this use is some way away from the kinds

of applications with which I am concerned here — specifically, social practices and

communities of practice — those two ingredients of sustained performance and of

activity aimed at improvement are, nevertheless, significant features of practice in

this sense. I shall probably not be the only contributor to this volume to quote

Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of practice as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity throughwhich goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achievethose standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form ofactivity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions ofthe ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.1

In terms of more traditional conceptual analysis, MacIntyre sets three main

clusters of conditions for something to count as a practice:

1. The requirement for human activity that is socially established, cooper-

ative, coherent, and complex. Thus far practice is seemingly morally neu-

tral. Organized crime, street gangs, or call centers might claim to be

practices in these terms.

2. The requirement for there to be goods internal to that form of activity

which are realized through standards of excellence that are partially defini-

tive of that activity. This invokes the notion of internally referenced values

or goals, but not any wider moral standards. This might rule out organized

crime as a practice (or, indeed, as MacIntyre has argued controversially,

1. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985), 187.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 56 j Number 4 j 2006� 2006 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois

371

teaching) on the grounds that these were simply means to ends that lay out-

side the activity rather than to the realization of intrinsic goods.

3. The requirement that human powers to achieve excellence, and human

conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

This clearly takes the notion of practice into different territory in which, if

we are to follow MacIntyre, coherent, complex, cooperative, and estab-

lished human activity would not count as practice unless it also contri-

buted to the development of human goodness or virtue.

I have a problem about recognizing, in particular, this third requirement in

terms of the common use of the concept of practice, but MacIntyre himself ac-

knowledges that he is ‘‘using the word ‘practice’ in a specially defined way which

does not completely agree with current ordinary usage.’’2 Terence McLaughlin

helpfully distinguished two approaches to the notion of practice.3 The first is the

full-blown, morally endowed, and honorific concept (my characterization, not

McLaughlin’s) that MacIntyre offers us. The second is much more empirically ap-

proachable, not surprisingly, because it is associated with the work of the eth-

nographer Etienne Wenger. Wenger’s project in examining ‘‘communities of

practice’’ is not so much to prescribe or to stipulate definitions of such practices

but to investigate them empirically with a view toward illuminating how they

actually operate, in particular, to foster learning.4

It seems to me that an ethnographic approach to the practice of higher educa-

tion would investigate institutions with a certain designation, let’s say ‘‘higher ed-

ucation institutions,’’ attempting to identify the ‘‘coherent and complex form [or

forms] of socially established cooperative human activity’’ that seem to character-

ize their behavior, as well as, perhaps, the ‘‘goods internal to that form of activity’’

that are realized through it. It would describe what was going on (and perhaps peo-

ple’s perceptions and understandings of what was going on), but would provide no

basis for judgments regarding whether these activities were or were not ‘‘properly’’

the functions of higher education. It might, however, provide a basis for evaluating

people’s experience of the practice against the standards contained in the institu-

tional rhetoric or (following Wenger) for illuminating what features of those practi-

ces do or do not contribute to the realization of the goods internal to them.

Of course, even such an open-ended ethnographic approach is not without its

definitional problems. If the ethnographer of ‘‘the practice of higher education’’

DAVID BRIDGES is Professor in the Von Hugel Institute at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge CB3 0BN,and Professorial Fellow at the University of East Anglia; e-mail [email protected]. His primary area ofscholarship is philosophy of education and higher education.

2. Ibid., 187.

3. Terence H. McLaughlin, ‘‘Teaching as a Practice and Community of Practice: The Limits of Common-ality and the Demands of Diversity,’’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 37, no. 2 (2003): 339–352.

4. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998).

E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y VOLUME 56 j NUMBER 4 j 2006372

observes a woman walking a dog through the grounds of the university, is he or

she to describe this as part of ‘‘the practice of higher education’’ or, upon inves-

tigating, to decide that this is part of a different set of practices that happen to

occupy a space that intersects with that occupied by ‘‘the practice of higher

education’’? The thoroughgoing ethnographer might keep an open mind on the

matter and invite research participants to advise regarding the significance of what

had been observed. But suppose the same woman was walking her dog seventy

miles away from the nearest educational institution, would the ethnographer still

need to investigate this practice in order to find out whether it formed part of ‘‘the

practice of higher education’’? My point is that even an open-minded ethnographic

approach to what might constitute such practice has to operate within some,

albeit provisional, prior conceptual framework that delimits what he or she is

looking at, albeit one that does not prematurely foreclose on, for example, the

significance for the practice of higher education of a group of students deep in con-

versation at the bar in the student union or the election of a new secretary of the

drama club.

The broad distinction between an honorific and an ethnographic notion of

practice is one to which I shall return in this essay. I am, however, not so much in-

terested here in entering the debate over the meaning of practice as in employing

some of the established uses of the term to examine contemporary developments

in higher education and issues related to excellence and equity that these seem

to raise. I shall begin by giving a short overview of some of the changes that have

taken place in higher education with a view toward observing the diverse forms

that it now takes — its practices viewed, as it were, descriptively if not strictly

ethnographically. This will provide a basis for then exploring (1) whether higher edu-

cation itself can any longer be viewed as a practice in the honorific sense, (2)

whether there is a risk of losing sight of the ‘‘excellence’’ that perhaps provided the

focus for the traditional practice of higher education, and (3) what issues of equity

are raised by the variety of contemporary expressions of the practice(s) of higher

education.

THE CHANGING PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

While the picture I present here is mainly drawn from experience in the

United Kingdom, the association of the pursuit of wider participation in higher

education with its development in diverse forms can be observed in such varied

settings as the United States, where it is a long-established feature of the higher

education scene; Poland, which has achieved a remarkable ‘‘massification’’ of

higher education in a short period of time; and contemporary Ethiopia, which is

currently experiencing one of the fastest rates of growth in higher education in the

world, albeit from a very small base. The changes are in many respects global and

may reflect the global appetite for higher level skills to supply the postindustrial

economy — or at least the widespread political perception of this requirement.5

5. Even in Ethiopia, for instance, ministers talk about making the leap from an agrarian to a knowledgeeconomy.

BRIDGES The Practice of Higher Education 373

Across many different countries we can see (1) the merging of traditionally sepa-

rate educational and training institutions, including teacher training colleges,

agricultural colleges, colleges of art and design, and the like, into conglomerate

universities; (2) along with this process, the transformation of professional train-

ing into an academic endeavor; (3) the convergence of face-to-face instruction

with distributed modes of learning; and (4) a variety of forms of outreach (into

the workplace, into franchised or accredited institutions, into the home) and

modes of delivery (via the post, radio, or the Web) aimed at making higher educa-

tion accessible to people otherwise prevented from pursuing it. These are the

primary drivers for the changes in the practice of higher education that I shall

discuss.

Until quite recently higher education operated pretty generally under the fol-

lowing conditions:

d residence in the physical environment of a university, in the company of

a large number of other students of a broadly similar age (roughly 18 to 21),

with a vigorous social and (broadly) cultural life, for three consecutive

terms over the course of three years;

d some combination of reading, writing, listening to lectures, participation

in seminars and tutorials, and, where appropriate, laboratory work;

d engagement with ‘‘academic’’ knowledge in which, on the whole, ab-

stract concepts were esteemed above concrete practices, and critical and

creative capacity above routinized skills; and

d studying with teaching staff who were similarly resident in proximity to

the university and who had qualified for their positions through successful

scholarly work.

Even today universities like Cambridge operate under broadly these conditions, al-

beit under increasing pressure for change. However, one only needs to look to two

other universities also located in Cambridge to see how diverse the higher educa-

tion sector has become. Anglia Ruskin University has one of its main campuses in

Cambridge, as well as another forty-five miles away in Chelmsford, and some fif-

teen additional education colleges in the east of England ‘‘delivering’’ its degrees as

part of its Regional Federation. A high proportion of its students are part-time and

nontraditional. Many of them take advantage of schemes for the accreditation of

prior learning and prior experiential learning that are almost nonexistent in Cam-

bridge University. Within a few hundred yards of Anglia Ruskin’s Cambridge cam-

pus, there is the Regional Office of the Open University, catering exclusively to

distance learners, a large number of which are scattered through the rural and

coastal areas of East Anglia where there is very little opportunity to access conven-

tional universities.

These examples illustrate what I want to treat a little more systematically —

the changing forms of practice of higher education that have begun to challenge all

of the characterizing, perhaps defining, features of traditional higher education.


THE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

The massification of higher education (as the UK approaches fifty percent par-

ticipation rates) has accompanied and partly been achieved through bringing into

the academy sectors of professional or quasi-professional education and training

that previously fell outside it. In the 1970s and 1980s separate teacher training in-

stitutions, or, more accurately, Colleges of Education, were incorporated into the

polytechnics and in some cases universities. At the same time new degree-level

qualifications were introduced (the Bachelor of Education), which added an aca-

demic gloss to the base of professional training. When in 1992 the polytechnics

were themselves redesignated as universities, this completed the process of turn-

ing teacher education into a university matter. These ‘‘1992 universities’’ (in

particular) quickly incorporated other educational and training institutions:

horticultural and agricultural colleges, colleges of art and design, and, then, as a re-

sult of further policy decisions, colleges of nursing, occupational and physiother-

apy, radiography, pharmacology, and the like. The integration of these institutions,

their professional practitioners, and their professional and educational practices

into universities had far-reaching implications.

THE PRACTITIONERS

One consequence was that university had to embrace people who brought to

their teaching not so much the fruits of scholarly learning and research but rather

the fruits of their experience in working environments. For all the benefits (or

otherwise) of the scholarly study of philosophy, sociology, and psychology of educa-

tion, would-be teachers needed to learn how to plan lessons and control noisy class-

rooms, and, though academics might in some cases be able to provide such know-

how, it was not easy to combine both requirements and it was quickly clear that

practicing teachers needed to be brought into partnership with university staff in or-

der to provide effective training. Similarly, training for professions related to medi-

cine (which in some cases expanded to around twenty percent of the undergraduate

teaching of the university), social work, and business management required people

with recent and continuing experience in the workplace as a resource for students.

Universities often laid on these staff the traditional expectations for research and re-

search publication that they had of other academics in the university, but the ten-

sion between these demands has often been acute, and many universities have

recognized that these research requirements are unrealistic. Thus, the contemporary

academy includes a large number of faculty and staff whose expertise lies in the area

of professional practice rather than scholarship and whose teaching is based on that

expertise and its associated practice (albeit popularly glossed with what Donald

Schon conveniently offered in terms of ‘‘reflective practice’’) rather than the more

traditional practices of scholarly enquiry and research.6

With this diversity of practitioners in higher education has come diversity in

the conditions of service. Many of those who contribute on the basis of their

6. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Turn: Case Studies In and On Educational Practice (New York:Teachers College Press, 1991).


professional expertise do so from and in their workplaces and with very little di-

rect contact with the university that they are serving. Many are employed part-

time and on short-term contracts. Similarly, their counterparts in research-only

posts, who live from one externally funded research project to the next, can spend

years not knowing whether they have a future in a particular institution. It is not

uncommon for up to a third of academic posts in universities to be of this kind.

One of the consequences is, of course, a high level of mobility among institutions

and a reluctance of staff to put down roots and invest in property when their future

is so unsure — so they commute, often long distances across the country, and in-

stead of an academic community contained within a tight geographic and social

space, you have one whose members are widely dispersed and only infrequently

encounter each other.

THE TEMPORALITY OF PRACTICE

The expansion of part-time courses (taught during evenings, on weekends, and

at summer schools) and the asynchronous periods of teaching and learning re-

quired by different forms of professional education and training (not to mention

distance learning programs, for which this is a boasted virtue) compound the prob-

lem of holding the staff of a higher education institution together as a face-to-face

interactive intellectual community, though it is important to recognize that mod-

ern technology provides altogether more fluent and voluminous opportunities for

other sorts of interactions, notably by e-mail.

But time gets disrupted in other ways, too. Traditional higher education re-

quired sustained study and attention, even in England where the normal three-year

undergraduate course was substantially shorter than that at some of its continental

counterparts. But at most universities in the United Kingdom, programs con-

structed largely within single-subject departments and with students progressing

under the direction of a relatively stable group of staff have been significantly frag-

mented by the introduction of modular programs designed to give students more

opportunities to pick and choose their studies and of credit frameworks intended to

facilitate breaks in the continuity of those studies. Many of these modules were in-

itially based on semester-long commitments, but service-driven universities quick-

ly realized that even this was too heavy a commitment for some students, unsure

perhaps about their ability to cope, and others engaged in busy working lives. Thus

the retail discourse and practice of ‘‘bite-sized chunks of learning’’ and ‘‘just in

time learning’’ has come to be applied to the practice of higher education in what

has been dubbed ‘‘the theatre of fast knowledge.’’7

THE SITES OF PRACTICE

These developments, driven by the inclusion of wider spheres of professional

training within the curriculum of the university, have also required movement of

7. Tina Besley and Michael Peters, ‘‘Performative Epistemologies: The Theatre of Fast Knowledge’’ (pa-per presented at the annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, Oxford,April 2004). See also George Ritzer, The MacDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, California: PineForge Press, 2000).


the sites of practice of higher education outside the physical environment of the

university. Learning to teach required practice in teaching in schools. The profes-

sions allied to medicine required training in hospital wards, and social work train-

ing required placements in public service and voluntary organizations. Indeed, in

recent years professional bodies and national quasi-autonomous nongovernmental

organizations have required higher proportions of professional training in all these

sectors to be practically based in the workplace.

There are other important policy imperatives that are pushing the sites of

practice of higher education further and further from the cloistered, redbrick or

concrete-and-glass precincts of the university, which some students may never at-

tend at all. Perhaps the most significant of these from the point of view of issues I

shall discuss later is the widening participation agenda aimed at making higher ed-

ucation more accessible to, especially, nontraditional students. One of the ways

that universities are responding to this imperative is through outreach programs

— often, as in the example already given, through partnership with colleges of fur-

ther education (which have hitherto focused almost entirely on subdegree and vo-

cational training programs) but also in the workplace in cooperation with the

human resource development functions of businesses or public sector organiza-

tions. More radically, of course, distance learning enables both specialist univer-

sities like the Open University but also more traditional universities that are

embracing e-learning to bring an experience of higher education into your own

home (or so it is claimed).

THE STUFF OF THE PRACTICE

This is a rather inelegant attempt to refer to the learning, the kind of knowledge

with which those involved in the university as students, researchers, or teachers are

engaging. It is not for nothing that the student is traditionally said to be ‘‘reading’’ for

a degree, for the library, the book, and the journal were, and inmany contexts remain,

the primary resources for a university, its staff, and its students. For students, ‘‘Direc-

tors of Studies’’ and ‘‘Supervisors’’ (to borrow from the contemporary Cambridge ter-

minology) are of secondary assistance. Moreover, the kind of knowledge that these

resources dealt in is of a rather specialized kind in which meticulous detail recouped

over an extended period of scholarly endeavor competes with and sometimes pro-

vides the foundation for sweeping analysis and theory — all of it conducted in the

form of disputatious criticism and debate. Whether you are researching and writing

or studying, reporting, and attempting your own critical analysis, this was, and in

many parts of the academy is today, the stuff of the practice of higher education.

However, contemporary universities embrace a much more varied body of

learning. First, as we have seen, the incorporation of professional education and

training within the university means that students have to learn to manipulate

limbs as well as to study their anatomy; to keep order in classrooms as well as to

understand the psychological or moral bases of discipline in an educational setting;

to provide a sympathetic ear to psychologically and physically battered clients as

well as to understand the social roots of such experience; to absorb cultural and


subcultural expectations and develop intuition at a tacit level as well as to be able

to write essays that render such understandings explicit. Thus a whole repertoire

of practical and applied skills, of interpersonal understanding and empathy, of con-

textual awareness and sensitivity, and of tacit and intuitive understanding has be-

come the stuff of higher education.

This is not just the case in the context of professional education and training. New

two-year ‘‘foundation degrees’’ in the United Kingdom are extending the vocational

range of higher education and locating it firmly in the demands of the workplace and

in the skills required for often very narrowly defined areas of employment like ‘‘trans-

port logistics’’ or ‘‘e-commerce.’’ Curricula are planned with employers, delivered in

partnership with employers with a substantial element of work-based learning, and

designed to meet the needs of employers. Many of the students are indeed currently

employed and their study may never take them anywhere near a university campus.8

In other areas, too, ‘‘experiential learning’’ may constitute up to two-thirds of

the credits for a degree. At Anglia Ruskin University, for example, such accreditation

has been given for experience of drug rehabilitation as part of a degree in social sci-

ence and for working as a holiday lifeguard toward a degree in sports science.9

DIFFERENT PRACTICES

I have described briefly some of the ways in which the practice of higher edu-

cation has changed, specifically in the United Kingdom, over the past twenty

years. Though these changes have probably touched all higher education institu-

tions, they have certainly not done so evenly, with the result that the practice of

higher education now takes increasingly diverse forms in different institutions as

well as within any single institution. Indeed, the Higher Education Funding Coun-

cil has positively encouraged ‘‘mission differentiation.’’ We have as a result what

Anthony Smith and Frank Webster describe as

different academics pursuing different knowledges, different teams of researchers combiningand recombining to investigate shifting topics, different sorts of students following differentcourses, with different modes of study and different concerns among themselves, differentemployment arrangements for different types of staff — difference everywhere in thispostmodern, flexible, accommodating university.10

DIVERSITY AND EXCELLENCE

The vast diversity of what in ethnographic or descriptive terms one might re-

gard as the practice of higher education, and hence of the experience that different

students have of higher education, raises many issues for policy makers and practi-

tioners. I want to consider just two of these in this context. The first, which is per-

haps somewhat conceptual, is the question of whether all that goes on in or under

8. Margaret Seiffert and Roger Mills, The Development of Foundation Degrees in the East of England(Cambridge: Association of Universities in the East of England, 2004).

9. Phil Batty, ‘‘QAA Warning over Degree Shortcuts,’’ Times Higher Educational Supplement, August29, 2003, 1.

10. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster, ‘‘Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,’’ in Contested Visions ofHigher Education in Society, eds. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster (London: Open University Press,1997), 104.


the auspices of a modern university is ‘‘properly’’ regarded as the practice of higher

education in the honorific sense. The second and more substantive question is

whether such diversity of practice meets or undermines the principle of social jus-

tice that is often claimed as the basis for this diversification. I shall explain and

consider these two issues in this section and the next.

There are at least two different ways in which we can look at higher education

through the lens of ‘‘practice.’’ First, we can consider whether higher education is

itself a practice in, let’s say, the honorific sense that MacIntyre proposes. The tra-

ditional university, at least, might plausibly be argued to offer a ‘‘coherent and

complex form of socially established cooperative human activity’’ (where that

coherence was formed around the academic life); with ‘‘goods internal to that form

of activity’’ (in the form of knowledge and understanding pursued for its own sake);

and in which ‘‘human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of

the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended’’ (for example, in terms

of intellectual and scholarly capacity and virtue).

Second, however, we can view higher education today not so much as a prac-

tice in its own right but as an institution in which people are initiated into a var-

iety of other practices, including study, scholarly enquiry and research (each in a

variety of forms), but also professional practices11 associated with, for example,

medicine, law, teaching, and social work — each with its own coherence and com-

plexity, its goods internal to the activity, and its focus on different (but perhaps

overlapping) forms of human excellence.

One response to the sort of account I have given of changes in higher educa-

tion is that higher education as a practice in its own right has broken down. The

‘‘postmodern’’ university has lost both the coherence of values and the ‘‘socially

established cooperative human activity’’ that are the hallmarks of practice. Nor

could one sensibly look in a postmodern university for any real sense of the excel-

lence or intrinsic goods around which the institution as a whole has traditionally

been organized. Nearly forty years ago Theodore Roszak observed with respect to

the American university that

the multi-university progressively comes to resemble nothing so much as the highly refined,all-purpose brothel Jean Genet describes in his play The Balcony..‘‘Service,’’ by becoming ablanket willingness to do whatever society will pay for, has led the university to surrender theindispensable characteristic of wisdom: moral discrimination.12

This sort of judgment on higher education institutions as whole ‘‘communities of

practice’’ might well lead one to conclude that they no longer meet the criteria

MacIntyre offers for higher education to qualify as a practice in the honorific

sense — and this in turn might raise questions about the loss of institutional focus

11. At least, I am content to call them that. For contrasting views, see Alasdair MacIntyre and JosephDunne, ‘‘Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne,’’ Journal of Philosophy ofEducation 36, no. 1 (2002): 1–19; and Nel Noddings, ‘‘Is Teaching a Practice?’’ Journal of Philosophy ofEducation 37, no. 2 (2003): 241–251.

12. Theodore Roszak, ‘‘On Academic Delinquency,’’ in The Dissenting Academy, ed. Theodore Roszak(Toronto: Random House, 1968), 12.


on the core of values and the forms of human excellence, for example, what Roszak

refers to as ‘‘the deeper ideal of intellect’’ around which that practice might tradi-

tionally have been constructed.13

But perhaps the mistake is in looking to higher educational institutions to ex-

press a single form of practice or to be oriented around the cultivation of a single

form of human excellence. Rather, as Smith and Webster’s description of the post-

modern university makes clear, we have to acknowledge difference both between

contemporary universities and inside the contemporary university.

Within the contemporary academy there remain programs that are still pretty

clearly linked to traditional notions of scholarship and to certain kinds of human

excellence describable in terms of both intellectual virtue and academic capabil-

ities. The same could probably not be said of, for example, a part-time program in

social work or technical engineering with a substantial experience-based compo-

nent. It would be more common for the developmental goals of such programs to

be couched in terms of higher-level skills in childcare or automotive repair along

with building teamwork skills, interpersonal relations, communication skills, and

relevant information technology skills. But might these not legitimately be repre-

sented as ‘‘human conceptions of the ends and goods involved’’ that are ‘‘system-

atically extended’’?

There is, however, another condition MacIntyre sets that should be applied

here. This is especially relevant insofar as some forms of contemporary higher edu-

cation are defined and interpreted simply in terms of developing skills required,

from a student’s point of view, in order to compete successfully for employment

and, from an employer’s point of view, to improve their business competitiveness.

For MacIntyre any such form of higher education would run afoul of his principle

that practice requires the pursuit of ‘‘goods internal to the activity,’’ that is,

of something that is perceived as intrinsically worthwhile and not just of instru-

mental value.

The criterion of ‘‘goods internal to the activity’’ may be difficult to satisfy in

the case of programs of professional education (or, worse, ‘‘training’’), which are

naturally focused on equipping people for work outside the university. Joseph

Dunne has argued persuasively, however, that what he calls ‘‘purposive practices,’’

those which have an end beyond themselves, may nevertheless be practices. They

may indeed contrast favorably with ‘‘self-contained practices’’ like chess or foot-

ball, which may be self-indulgent and trivial.14

It would, however, also run afoul of a second principle:

A practice, in the sense intended, is never just a set of technical skills, even when directed to-wards some unified purpose and even if the exercise of those skills can on occasion be valuedor enjoyed for their own sake. What is distinctive about practice is in part the way in whichconceptions of the relevant goods and ends which the technical skills serve — and every

13. Ibid., 27.

14. Joseph Dunne, ‘‘Arguing for Teaching as Practice: A Reply to Alasdair MacIntyre,’’ Journal of Philoso-phy of Education 37, no. 2 (2003): 353–370.


practice does require the exercise of technical skills — are transformed and enriched by theseextensions of human powers and by that regard for its own internal goods which are partiallydefinitive of each particular practice or type of practice.15

MacIntyre goes on, of course, to make a connection between practice defined in

this way and the cultivation of virtue, and it seems to me that this is where his

analysis offers something important to our consideration of higher education in its

diverse forms. Is higher education just about the development of instrumentally

useful skills, or is it about initiating people into forms of activity that have intrin-

sic value and forms of excellence? Is it merely about the development of skills, or

is it also about the cultivation of forms of human excellence related to the goods

that are at the heart of the practice? The conceptual question of whether higher ed-

ucation does or does not satisfy the necessary conditions for it to count as a prac-

tice is less important than the substantive question to which it has led us about

the kind of activities and the kind of human qualities that it is the proper business

of a higher education institution to promote.

I do not want to suggest that diversified forms of contemporary higher educa-

tion cannot meet these sorts of requirements. It is relevant to observe the empha-

sis placed in many programs of professional education (in the training of social

workers or nurses, for example) on the ethos of the profession and the ethical foun-

dations of their practice. These go beyond a purely instrumental value — and, in-

deed, in the contemporary world their defenders often find themselves having to

reaffirm these principles against a much narrower kind of performativity. What I

do want to suggest, however, is that these ought to be one test of their legitimacy

as part of the practice of higher education. Without some notion of human ex-

cellence that it wishes to serve and to develop, contemporary higher education in-

stitutions or their fragmented components not only fail to meet the conceptual

demands of ‘‘practice’’ but, more significantly, surrender dignified moral purpose in

favor of ‘‘indiscriminate adaptation.to every demand that monied interests and

the general public could imagine making.’’16

There is at least one other major substantive issue that is raised by the devel-

opments I have described here, and this relates not so much to questions of excel-

lence as to questions of equity.

EQUITY IN THE PRACTICE(S) OF HIGHER EDUCATION

I have described how the practices of higher education now take on a variety

of forms. This diversity invites the question, Are the variety of practices that are

now included under the umbrella of higher education of equal value?

It is relevant to observe that at least one of the driving motives underlying

the creation of this diversity has been a principle of equity and social inclusion.

For example, the UK Government White Paper on The Future of Higher Education

argues:

15. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 193.

16. Roszak, ‘‘On Academic Delinquency,’’ 8.


Education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not for the entrenchment of privi-lege. We must make certain that the opportunities that higher education brings are availableto all those who have the potential to benefit from them, regardless of their background. Thisis not just about preventing active discrimination; it is about working actively to make surethat potential is recognised and fostered wherever it is found.17

Many of the changes in higher education that I have described have been driv-

en by a desire to make what might be regarded as the traditional content of higher

education accessible to people who, for one reason or another, have not been able

to access one of the traditional sites of higher education. The creation of the Open

University (OU) in the United Kingdom was a clear example of this ambition. The

OU took great pains to ensure that the academic character and quality of its cur-

riculum stood comparison with that of any long-established university, even if in

its approach to entry requirements and to its teaching it was highly innovative.

Similarly, the validation and accreditation requirements that established univer-

sities imposed on partner further education colleges involved in the delivery of

their curriculum were intended to demonstrate that a degree awarded by the uni-

versity represented the same level of achievement, whether study had been part-

time in a further education college or full-time on a university campus. Thus, one

interpretation of the requirements of equity within the widening participation

agenda is that the intellectual practice(s) into which students are initiated are of

the same kind, even if the social and pedagogical practices through which this ini-

tiation takes place are different.

This aspiration raises its own questions. Can one really separate the two? The

retail metaphors of ‘‘delivery’’ and ‘‘product’’ that abound in contemporary higher

education make such separation sound easy. Clearly ‘‘products’’ can find the cus-

tomer to whom they are destined by post, by electronic communication, or in the

back of a van. Your new washing machine is not transformed by the form of its de-

livery (except perhaps for a few dents and scratches!). But is the same true of the

practices with which higher education institutions seek to engage their students?

How important is face-to-face interaction with fellow students and with people

who have dedicated their whole lives to particular areas of scholarship to initiation

into the practice(s) of higher education? How important to higher learning is the

social presence in an academic community? How is intellectual virtue represented

and cultivated through ‘‘bite-sized chunks of learning’’? How much of what is im-

portant about a traditional campus-based university is passed on through the infor-

mal curriculum rather than the official one — and how much of this is lost or

sustained through, for example, the course intranet cafe? What do differences in

ethos between, for instance, a university and a further education college make to

the experience of study in these different environments? All of these questions

seem to me to invite empirical investigation. For the moment I simply want to

make the point that it may not be possible to change the practice of teaching and

learning in higher education — the sites, the temporality, the communities of

practice — without also having some impact on the quality of the intellectual

17. Department for Education and Science [England], The Future of Higher Education (Norwich: HMSO,2003), 67.


practices (of science, medicine, philosophy, literary criticism, and the like) into

which students are being initiated. It is possible that the changes in teaching and

learning are beneficial ones in terms of the kind of educational experience pro-

vided. I have heard it plausibly argued that further education colleges can provide

a more secure and supportive learning environment for some students than can

universities, which were, for example, particularly slow to adapt to the needs of

disabled students. Whatever the benefits or detriments of different learning envi-

ronments, the probability is that they will be different in some important respects.

So, one aspiration underlying the diversification of higher education provides for

different practices in teaching and learning (suited to the different requirements of dif-

ferent learners) linked with access to the traditional academic and professional practi-

ces of the university. It is, nevertheless, not surprising that a second part of the equity

agenda with respect to higher education in the United Kingdom is to ensure that stu-

dents from all backgrounds have access to sites and communities of higher education

practice — notably to Oxbridge and the elite universities — that are widely perceived

as offering particular benefit to students through both the formal and informal learn-

ing experience and not just in terms of the learning outcomes of the curriculum.

There is, however, a third and more radical project underlying the changing

practice of higher education that has to do with the stuff — the knowledge, skills,

personal qualities, and their embeddedness in social practice — that lies at the

very heart of the institution and is essential to giving equal value in institutions of

higher education to practices which previously had little or no place in that envi-

ronment: the practices of teaching, social work, and professions allied to medicine

and the modes of knowing — often tacit, contextually sensitive, and local — that

Gibbons and others have labeled mode 2 knowledge and that are perhaps more typ-

ically acquired through experiential or, more narrowly, work-based learning than

in the academy.18 So what has happened is that kinds of knowledge that are valued,

in particular, in working lives have been brought into the sphere of higher educa-

tion, accredited, validated, and honored with the award of a degree, albeit usually

in combination with an element of more traditional academic learning.

The issue raised by this development is, again, whether these different kinds

of knowledge and the associated practices that have now found their ways into

higher education are really of equal value. Has justice at last been done to the

young person who is studying Sports and Leisure, with two-thirds of her credits

being awarded for prior experience working in a sports and leisure center, and a

program designed with and substantially taught by local employers — or to an-

other doing a two year Foundation Degree on Child Care while working as a class-

room assistant in a local primary school, with a large component of the course

based on assessment of practical competence in the classroom? Or has the princi-

ple of equity been betrayed?

18. Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and MartinTrow, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary So-cieties (London: Sage, 1994).


How does one begin to answer this question (and in this context I can do no

more than begin)? One response is to run with the subjective choices of the stu-

dents. These are, after all, adult people or very nearly so. Most of them have eleven

to thirteen years of educational experience behind them. They have their own

views on the goods that they wish to pursue in their lives and the routes that will

enable them to do so. The choice may be surrounded by ‘‘advice and guidance’’ is-

sues: Is this really what they are interested in? Are they being realistic about their

own abilities? Are they being under-ambitious? Will what they have chosen to

study really enable them to do what they want to do afterwards? If they them-

selves choose the ‘‘mode 2’’ practices for their experience of higher education, then

perhaps that indicates their value — and the principle of equity is saved. There is,

of course, the underlying risk of adaptive preference being at work,19 but for cur-

rent purposes I will discount this and go along with the principle of preference au-

tonomy succinctly expressed by John Harsanyi as ‘‘in deciding what is good and

bad for a given individual, the ultimate criterion can only be his own wants and his

own preferences.’’20 On this principle, the fact that higher education institutions

provide students with opportunities to engage in different kinds of practice as part

of their higher education experience could be a proper response to the students’

own different priorities and demands and thus shows that they are being treated

with equal regard.

But is there any more objective standpoint from which we might argue and

conclude differently? Suppose, for example, that we could demonstrate that the

‘‘mode 1’’ practices of higher education are actually more personally empowering

than the mode 2; that the articulate, critical, analytic, synoptic, and synthetic ca-

pacities (supposedly) associated with traditional academic learning actually enable

people to think for themselves, to spot public deceit and spin and reveal it for what

it is, to understand things in their wider context, to absorb large amounts of infor-

mation and make sense of it for themselves and others, to see pathways through

complex decisions and debates — and to do all of this in ways that mode 2 knowl-

edge does not make possible. Might we not then start to wonder whether sub-

stituting mode 2 for mode 1 in the practice of higher education really offers

something that is not only different but of significantly unequal value? A debate

around the higher education curriculum in the United States found the left-wing

Stanley Aronowitz and the right-wing Allan Bloom in a remarkable consensus

around the importance of the ‘‘Great Books’’ tradition in higher education. But

while for Bloom these were to be admired for their Truth and Beauty, what Arono-

witz saw in the Western canon was ‘‘a legacy of power, both epistemologically and

ontologically.’’21 ‘‘My approach,’’ writes Aronowitz, ‘‘does not assume the

19. I discuss this more fully in David Bridges, ‘‘Adaptive Preference, Justice and Identity in the Contextof Widening Participation in Higher Education,’’ Ethics and Education 1, no. 1 (2006): 15–29.

20. John C. Harsanyi, ‘‘Morality and Theory of Rational Behaviour,’’ in Utilitarianism and Beyond, eds.Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 55.

21. Eric J. Weiner, ‘‘Concretizing Possibility Through a Pedagogy/Politics of Critical Engagement: A Rad-ical Alternative for the Future of Higher Education,’’ Educational Researcher 30, no. 2 (2001): 37–39.


superiority of the conventional over the alternative or oppositional canon, only its

power.’’22 Though, in the case of ‘‘work-based learning,’’ there is of course hardly an

alternative canon, let alone one that will provide the ‘‘basis for any critique and

transvaluation’’ that Aronowitz is looking for. So do we have an objective basis for

esteeming some knowledge and its relation to practice above other kinds of knowl-

edge on grounds of its greater power?

One of the problems with this argument is that the notions of power and the

fashionable ‘‘empowerment’’ do not have much purchase in the abstract. People

are not just generally ‘‘empowered’’: they are empowered to do certain kinds of

things and to pursue certain kinds of lives. Therefore, what kind of knowledge

counts as empowering depends on what kinds of things people want to be able to

do. There are numerous examples of university programs designed to enable people

to teach, or to practice medicine, nursing, engineering, or other professional work,

that have been regarded as insufficiently empowering (in terms of enabling them

to lead the lives they wanted to live) precisely because these programs have fo-

cused too narrowly on academic knowledge at the expense of practical knowledge

and skills, contextual awareness, and interpersonal understanding. But for others,

the traditional academic practices of a university may indeed be exactly what they

wish to engage in, either as a life sufficient unto itself or because of what they see

these practices as enabling them to do, to be, or to become.

We are brought back, then, to the point that different people choose different

forms of life and therefore, sensibly, forms of education that will prepare them for

these forms of life and to the difficulty of providing objective grounds for giving

higher value to one over another. As John White pointed out in discussing this

very issue:

One may, of course, reject the pluralism in all this, i.e., the view that different individuals mayhave different ways of life and are none the worse for that. One may hold that there is a partic-ular way of life which everyone should follow, thus translating a personal ideal into a moralimperative. This seems wholly arbitrary. Gulfs have existed since the beginning of civilisationbetween one preferred way of life and another: no-one has succeeded in producing a ‘‘knockdown’’ argument that eliminates all rivals.23

If we have no basis for demonstrating that (at least among the sort of options we

are discussing here) one is superior to another, then, presumably, there are no

grounds either for suggesting that forms of higher education practice that provide

an effective preparation for or initiation into these different forms of life are of dif-

ferent value, even if they are of different character. Nor are there, therefore, any

grounds for suggesting that higher education practices constructed around this va-

riety of ways of life offend against the principle of equity, provided that (taking into

account relevant differences) they are all equally accessible to people wishing to

engage in them.

22. Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and CreatingTrue Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 169.

23. John P. White, Towards a Compulsory Curriculum (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 44–45.


I am conscious that this is a peremptory treatment of a huge debate. My real

concern, however, is not so much to present a conclusion to the debate as to bring

the debate into the discussion of contemporary higher education policy. The diver-

sification of practice that characterizes contemporary higher education is justified

at least in part by considerations of inclusiveness, equity, and equal valuing. But

are we being persuaded to treat as equal practices and, more particularly, forms of

knowledge that are actually unequal — in power, in value, in terms of the forms of

life in which they enable us to participate, and in terms of the forms of human ex-

cellence they allow us to develop? Are we observing a genuinely emancipatory

project or, as I still uneasily suspect, simply another subtle exercise of those pro-

cesses that ensure the reproduction of social inequalities under the guise of their

eradication?

The notion of practice stands accused of being essentially conservative: associ-

ated with stability rather than change, with community rather than individuation,

with established forms of human excellence rather than human adaptability to a

rapidly changing environment.24 Thus, in examining the practice and practices of

higher education against the kind of honorific criteria of practice that MacIntyre

has put forward, we risk obscuring and even obstructing the emancipatory agenda

of those who see in the new variety of expression of higher education and in its

greater inclusivity opportunities for the richer fulfillment and development of

more and more people. The emancipatory nature of the agenda might be more con-

vincing, however, if it were not so routinely and powerfully expressed in terms of

the requirements of the labor market, of business, and of economic competitive-

ness. Whatever the benefits of business success and ‘‘our’’ (whose exactly?) com-

petitiveness in the global market (through such practices as forcing down the prices

of primary resources in the nations of the Southern Hemisphere and driving com-

panies in technologically less advanced countries to the wall), there is little reason

to believe that herein lies the secret to either a just or an emancipatory society.

We might, therefore, still benefit from examining both the practice of higher

education and the practices into which higher education institutions initiate their

students against the sort of standards that MacIntyre inserts into the notion of

practice and ask, in particular, precisely what forms of human excellence does this

‘‘practice’’ serve? We may concede to the diversification of higher education that

there is not necessarily a single acceptable answer to this question, but we should

be alarmed in terms of both the principles of excellence and equity if the answer

to this question is none.

24. For more on this point, see the discussion in Paul Smeyers and Nicholas C. Burbules, ‘‘Practice: aCentral Concept in Education’’ (paper presented to annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Soci-ety, San Francisco, March 2005).


Documents

THE PRACTICE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: IN PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE AND OF EQUITY