‘Houses of wisdom’ and conflict-affected contexts: higher education for empowerment or the market?

• In Event: Higher Education in a Changing World

Proposal

In 2015, Sultan Barakat and Sansom Milton prepared a report for the Brookings Institute entitled Houses of Wisdom Matter: The Responsibility to Protect and Rebuild Higher Education in the Arab World. In that report, the authors made the case that: a) higher education is of central importance within development work generally, and within conflict-affected spaces specifically; and, b) the breadth of social, political, and economic benefits that higher education offers is of crucial importance in contexts affected by armed conflict. Juliet Millican (2018) agrees in principle on the importance of higher education within conflict-affected contexts. However, she also illustrates the manner in which such enthusiasm for the sector must also be conditionally understood. While universities, she writes, are “able to promote critical thinking and understanding and discourage narrow prejudice, they are equally able to operate as a means of social selection or exclusion, contributing to social inequality and preventing social mobility through processes of discrimination” (Millican, 2018, p. 15). The tertiary sector, clearly, can also occupy the two faces of education better attributed to the compulsory education sector (cf. Bush & Saltarelli, 2000).
Higher education occupies a unique function within national development (Chuang & Fayez, 2004). All too often within conflict-affected contexts the function of higher education is narrowly limited to promoting economic growth (Couch, 2019a; Milton & Barakat, 2016). Along the way, national and international rationales for the very purpose of higher education in countries affected by violent conflict are framed primarily from an economic instrumentalist view, what Gramsci (2000) set out as ‘economism’. This view is built upon the premise that tertiary graduates secure relative economic stability, and afford a nation the chance to join the knowledge economy (World Bank, 2002). But what of those broader social instrumental functions of higher education, such as promoting sustainable peace, or stable governance? In other work, I describe such benefits as non-economic dividends of higher education (Couch, 2019).
As Barakat and Miltion (2015) illustrate, there is an established understanding that houses of wisdom matter for their social, political, and economic contributions to society, and that such contributions are crucial within conflict-affected countries and spaces. Yet how do houses of wisdom matter in such spaces? More specifically, how do higher education policies determine that they matter?
This presentation engages directly with higher education strategic planning and policy from multiple contexts affected by armed conflict. Employing a critical policy analysis (Couch, 2022), data is drawn from higher education policies which are digitally available and English-language (two key limitations to the larger study this presentation is drawn from). Framed by a critical cultural political economy of education (Robertson & Dale, 2015) approach, I share preliminary results from a documentary analysis of higher education policies and reports from Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. This analysis demonstrates multiple (and at times competing) policy purposes for higher education sectors nationally, either preceding or following armed conflict.
In the final part of this presentation, I engage with the question of balance between these various and occasionally competing policy purposes for higher education. In doing so, I examine the manner in which policies frame the purpose of higher education towards notions of societal or individual transformation and empowerment, (i.e. non-economic dividends), and towards notions of societal or individual economic instrumentalism. I argue that, as in the case of Afghanistan’s higher education strategic planning (Couch, 2019a), and higher education quality assurance policies (Couch, 2019b), tipping this balance towards a Gramscian (2000) economism mitigates higher education’s potential to promote both economic and non-economic dividends within the contexts under study.
Such policy work is important in the broader field of development education. Examining the importance of higher education for development in conflict-affected contexts has a much shorter history than research into the compulsory education sector (Lopes Cardozo & Novelli, 2018). As part of a larger study into higher education and its multiple relationships with the State within conflict affected contexts, this presentation lays important groundwork from which the study intends to continue to build.

References:
Barakat, S., & Milton, S. (2015). Houses of Wisdom Matter: The Responsibility to Protect and Rebuild Higher Education in the Arab World. Foreign Policy at Brookings, 46, 1–2. www.brookings.edu/doha
Bush, K. D., & Saltarelli, D. (2000). The two faces of education in ethnic conflict: Towards a peacebuilding education for children.
Chuang, A., & Fayez, S. (2004). If you believe in faith: An interview with Afghanistan’s Minister of Higher Education. Academe, 90(5), 31–33.
Couch, D. (2019a). The policy reassembly of Afghanistan’s higher education system. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17(1), 44–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1523708
Couch, D. (2019b). Conceptualising quality following conflict: Afghanistan’s higher education policy. Asian Education and Development Studies, 9(4), 441–451. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEDS-08-2018-0127
Couch, D. (2022). Critical realism and education policy analysis in conflicts and crises: towards conceptual methodologies. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52(6), 998–1014. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2020.1848519
Gramsci, A. (2000). The Antonio Gramsci reader: Selected writings 1916-1935 (D. Forgacs (ed.)). New York University Press.
Lopes Cardozo, M., & Novelli, M. (2018). Education in emergencies: Tracing the emergence of a field. In A. Verger, M. Novelli, & H. K. Altinyelken (Eds.), Global Education Policy and International Development: New Agendas, issues and policies (2nd Editio, pp. 234–254). Bloomsbury.
Millican, J. (2018). The social role and responsibility of a university in different social and political contexts. In J. Millican (Ed.), Universities and conflict: The role of higher education in peacebuilding and resistance (pp. 13–28). Routledge.
Milton, S., & Barakat, S. (2016). Higher education as the catalyst of recovery in conflict-affected societies. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 14(3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2015.1127749
Robertson, S. L., & Dale, R. (2015). Towards a ‘critical cultural political economy’ account of the globalising of education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 13(1), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2014.967502
World Bank. (2002). Constructing knowledge societies: New challenges for tertiary education.

Author

• Daniel Couch, The University of Sydney