Higher Education, States of Precarity and Conflict in the 'Global North' and 'Global South': UK, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey

An unprecedented combination of transnational political pressures, conflicts, and policy reforms are today weighing on higher education (HE) institutions, threatening their shared promise to support the public good. Recent research shows that HE is under threats from public sector cuts and the breakup of supra-national governance structures, imperilling HE public missions, academic freedom, and professional integrity.

Simultaneously, resurgent nationalisms, populist movements, and forced human displacement impinge on HE's capacity to ameliorate political instability. These developments have coincided with rising political pressures on HE from structurally disadvantaged minorities, particularly over lack of HE access or the curtailing of the social mobility that drove post-war HE aspirations.

This constellation of pressures has created a sense of crisis for higher education around the world. Yet little is known empirically about how threats to HE's autonomy and its public mission are manifested cross-nationally in HE contexts across the globe.

There is now an urgent need for systematic comparative investigation of how these pressures and their potentially unpredictable outcomes are affecting higher education institutions and their capacity to fulfil their public missions and civic responsibilities. A recent call by the British Academy has identified education and learning in crises as one of its new strategic aims in response to the rapidly changing political character of nation-states.

Our project responds directly to such strategic aims, taking HE and conflict as a primary focus, thereby clarifying threats and risks, both present and future, to HE's mission integrity, its autonomy, its capacity for reducing conflict, enhancing learning and building public trust.This three-year ESRC study will assess these pressures and outcomes for HE public missions through a comparative investigation across four national contexts: the UK, Hungary, South Africa and Turkey. These four states are nominally 'democratic', but each is also undergoing different 'crises of the state', recasting public missions in different ways.

The study will explore, across time, the articulations of such crises with changes in the 'public mission' and institutional autonomy of HE.

The project will: 1) identify historical and contemporary political, cultural and transnational HE pressures; 2) investigate how such pressures impact understandings of university missions; and, 3) illuminate the experiences of, and responses to, these pressures on the part of HE actors and civic groups. Methodologically, we will undertake comparative case studies that bring together rich sets of empirical data, including: historical and archival policy documents; quantitative profiles of institutional demographics; records of academic dismissals and other threats to academic freedom; a netnography tracing the presentation of universities in news sources and social media; and interviews and focus groups at two universities in each of the formal case study sites.

Through comparative analysis, this project will generate new policy insights to inform stakeholders in defending the university's role in promoting democratic pluralism, pursuing independent knowledge production, and contributing to social mobility. To achieve this, the project will develop a comparative knowledge base to identify global and local threats to HE integrity as an educational space contributing to: conflict reduction; civic stability and development; the assurance of social mobility; new methodological and conceptual models addressing the risks that such conflicts pose for the integrity of HE.

Key beneficiaries include actors involved with public mission activities, such as academic managers, student unions, public mission professionals, and civic actors. Beneficiaries will have access to an evidentiary base to advance policy reforms to mitigate negative pressures on HE, including the exigencies of war.