Exposing the Resistance in Higher Education

Objectives: This presentation starts with the loss of traditional liberal values in the education of students in the Western university. These values are concerned with ideas such as critical engagement with knowledge, reciprocal obligations in learning and intellectual self-empowerment. Methods: There are many reasons that might explain such losses. These include: the move to systems of mass-higher education, the ‘marketisation' of the university experience and attempts to bring universities under closer government control. Results: Yet despite what seems like overwhelming pressures on academics to cope with these changes, liberal teaching survives in pockets of resistance in most university departments. It is here that questions of interest to the liberal educator are genuinely addressed. Outside, these questions are turned into the hollow rhetoric of mission statements. The individuals and small teams that have strong liberal values paradoxically tend to operate in isolation, and the fragmented nature of university work makes it difficult for them to come together. Conclusions: Until they do this and form a Resistance, then re-establishing the liberal ideal at the core of the ‘new university' will not happen.