The Role of Universities
I left Workshop 1 wondering what the purpose of education is. What is the role of the teacher? What is the role of the university? What is their purpose?
The group task that prompted these questions was Derive a definition for social justice and list some components of a higher education system.
This immediately triggered a conversation around socio-economic injustices with a focus on hourly-paid lecturer contracts that don’t provide social security with the university as a suspected beneficiary. Of course, universities have to manage their spending costs carefully. In the UK, they are competing against each other, attracting students with their fame.The conversation highlighted the need of the university to be financially viable and self-sufficient. I shared my concern for universities being subject to economic competition in the education market, unlike the ones I went to.
In contrast, German public universities are government-funded and supported by taxes, a luxury I took for granted when studying at a university in Hamburg in 2003.
What are the current struggles in higher education institutions? Cronin and Czerniewicz (2023) identified neoliberalism as one of the systemic struggles of global education. The affects of neoliberalism being not only economical “through continuous state underfunding” but also political and cultural “through the transfer of free market thinking into educational practices and language.”
I found some more answers to my initial questions in the course literature: As for the purpose, universities could be “serving society as a change agent and empowering people across different sections of society” (Misra & Mishra, Ch. 25)
By understanding the challenges prevalent in the higher education sector much better now, the “pursuit of fairness, equity and inclusivity within the education system” (UAL, 2025) makes much more sense to me, particularly after having read about more specific examples. And by association, so does the term social justice.
References
Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin (eds), Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023,
