What one item represents higher education to you?
Gale Macleod*
What one item represents higher education to you? This deceptively simple question is one the members of the Higher Education Research Group at the University of Edinburgh have been considering recently. In June we hosted an event where invited speakers shared their suggestions, and argued for the inclusion of their ‘object’ in our imaginary Museum of Higher Education. You can read about some of the donations here.
The idea is based on too much listening to Radio 4 – a combination of John Lloyd’s Museum of Curiosity and the History of the World in 100 objects. In our monthly meetings we chatted about what objects sum up Higher Education for us. Suggestions ranged from the tangible – a globe, or a laptop; through the more symbolic – a cup of coffee to represent the vanishingly small space and time for collegiality; to the abstract concepts of wisdom and pursuit of excellence.
A museum is both a place for the preservation of artefacts from bygone ages and a space for objects which represent the present and those which nod to the future. A well-curated museum is one in which the invisible threads between these are made visible and available for examination. Careful consideration is needed of the architecture of our museum. Should it be arranged on different floors, and if so what occupies the top level and what is relegated to the basement? If our imaginary museum were made real, how might it be curated? Is it more coherent to chart HE through different historical periods? Or perhaps different rooms are needed, one for each part of the sector, or each interested group. Should the ‘Young Universities’ have a room of their own, and if so would it be next door to the medieval European institutions or at the far end of the corridor, or even in a different building entirely?
Museums are increasingly under pressure to represent the diversity of viewpoints within the society they seek to reflect, but space is limited and difficult decisions need to be made about which groups or viewpoints get their own defined space. For example, dividing the student perspective by undergraduate or postgraduate, type of university attended, part-time or full-time, on campus or on line, all seem like reasonable approaches. But do we need separate rooms for students of colour, or for male and female students? And if race and sex have rooms of their own surely too a room for students from widening participation backgrounds is required. Each of these spaces would then need a series of connecting tunnels in which the perspective of those who fit multiple categories could be displayed. The imaginary museum is quickly becoming a maze. Perhaps over time we could measure visitor ‘footfall’ along these corridors to make sense of what the important characteristics of students are for understanding their experiences of Higher Education.
Other floors of the museum will be similarly complex. It is unlikely that we could reach agreement on objects to display in one ‘university staff’ room and so multiple spaces will be required. Do those in recruitment and marketing see the university in the same way as colleagues responsible for student welfare? It seems likely that those in senior university management will want to donate different objects than those employed as tutors and demonstrators. Once again it is not immediately obvious how best to arrange this level – by category of employment, seniority, area of business or by some personal characteristic of employee. In the museum as in everyday life we need to consider what is made invisible by the decisions we make about what distinguishing features to foreground. The beauty of a museum is that curation is an on-going process in which exhibitions are constantly constructed and de-constructed in different ways.
This past year has seen unprecedented levels of change with Higher Education. While newly-coined phrases in the outside world included ‘social distancing’ and ‘flattening the curve’, within universities the word of the year for many was ‘pivot’: a 360o turn around a fixed point. It is still too early to know which of the changes we have seen will last and which will be consigned to history and quickly become amusing reminders of a long-gone age, housed in a special room for innovations which didn’t live beyond their infancy – the Google glass or Sinclair C5 of Higher Education if you will. But it isn’t just the global pandemic that is behind changes in our universities. Higher Education has always been a divided sector from medieval times when the universities of Bologna and Paris adopted very different approaches to their structures. In recent times it feels as if divisions are sharpening again: Jonathan Haidt argues convincingly that institutions have to choose between serving Truth or Social Justice, and that it is not possible to do both. Within institutions science and technology departments connect with industry and focus on innovation while social sciences and humanities still have work to do connecting to the past and holding a mirror up to society to critique it. Our museum would welcome donations signalling all of these forms of Higher Education. We can only imagine what visitors will make of these objects in decades to come. Might some, such as libraries, or philosophy departments, the Lambert Toolkit, or pronoun badges seem like distant memories? And which, if any, will be recognised as the origins of Higher Education in the mid to late 21st Century?
*Gale Macleod is Senior Lecturer at Moray House School of Education and Sport, The University of Edinburgh
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