Higher Education Under Threat: Risks and Resiliency

• In Event: Higher Education in Closing Spaces

Proposal

Increasingly, higher education institutions, learners, and educators are under attack from ideological and political risk factors that undermine academic freedom and institutional autonomy. This limits the capacity for higher education to be a key site for personal and societal development, as envisaged under the Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond this, and particularly under authoritarian regimes and/or in conflict-affected settings, these risks can put livelihoods and lives at stake, as reflected in a 2022 report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, which suggested that in the two years preceding, 580 university students or personnel were injured, abducted, or killed in attacks, with another 1,450 detained, arrested, or convicted (Marston and Tsolaskis, 2022). Increasingly, however, political and ideological interests are influencing the autonomy of higher education institutions as well as academic freedom in contexts across the Global North (Kinzelbach, 2023), including the state of Florida (Mounk, 2023).

Under a collection of global learning networks, and with support of the membership of a higher education learning network, we sought out firstly to explore the range of political and ideological threats impacting core functions of higher education institutions (HEIs), and whom these threats most acutely affect and why, based on other contextual features of specific conflict-affected and/or authoritarian settings. Much of this was done through an extensive and systematic review of existing academic and gray literature spanning the past 20 years but was supplemented by key informant interviews with higher education authorities, policymakers, and agency officials who make up the learning network steering committee.

Alongside this, we used the same set of data to explore examples of how such risks have been responded to, and with what effect, to identify cases where existing networks, supports, resources, and structures (otherwise known as resilience capacities) have acted to mitigate the vulnerabilities such risk factors create. A further stage of our work extended to conducting a series of case studies with higher education stakeholders (including university officials, students, and government officials)—one in Latin America, another in sub-saharan Africa, and a final in Asia—to highlight examples of “positive deviance” where either policies, institutional structures, learning modalities/approaches, and/or student or educator movements have allowed HEIs to adapt and/or transform to these risks.

Based on this work, this presentation will share a conceptual framework drawing on our white paper on education and resilience (Author, 2019) to map out the full range of political and ideological risk factors affecting HEIs, the specific vulnerabilities this creates for HEIs and actors within them, and the varying forms of resilience capacities that can counteract these. In doing so, the aim is to provide guidance to those developing policies, programming, and institutional structures for, working within, and/or funding HEIs to identify how best they can collectively support the important mandate of these institutions to engender robust debate, dialogue, and dissent.

Authors

• Daniel Couch, The University of Sydney

• Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland