Raewyn Connell is a world-famous sociologist who holds a University Chair at the University of Sydney. Extraordinarily prolific and influential in several fields, Connell recently focused her attention on the research university. In The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change, Connell provides a critical and empirical look at the business of universities. What do they produce? How do they function? Who does what work and why? She finds much to critique and ample space, too, for some provocative improvements.
Writing as a researcher and as a faculty member with a long and successful career, Connell affirms the tremendous good that universities do. They are, indeed, great social assets. She is clear, too, that universities are instruments of control, exclusion and privilege. Connell wonders if a different, more ethical and democratic, university or university system is possible. She grounds her questions in an examination of universities as sites of research work, teaching and learning, and credentialing. In other words, Connell emphasizes that universities are places of labor.
What gives The Good University a particularly interesting perspective is Connell’s sensitivity to the global reach and relationships of universities. She’s Australian and has also taught in the United States (eight institutions overall in a career of over fifty years). The book is keenly attuned to the variety of universities around the world and the ways that they create power and privilege. Connell’s attention is about more than the corporatization of higher education; she is after an understanding of the university in a neoliberal context around the world. With that comprehension established, Connell moves to examine alternative models of experimentation, governance and scope. Importantly, she is clear that “creating good universities implies a broad agenda of democratic change.”
Connell is not nostalgic for an imagined past without administration or organizational structures. Noting that intellectual workers are difficult to control, she looks at indirect ways that universities work to impose order. She also makes it clear that much of the messiness of contemporary higher education stems from the ways that universities have been forced to adapt and stumble into new models to deal with changing external factors, such as decreased funding and greater corporate attention. Again, her perspective and case studies are global. We can learn from what has and has not been successful in India, Brazil and Australia.
What does constitute a good university in Connell’s argument? It is democratic, in its organization and how it affects society. She makes clear that democracy includes all of the institution, too, not just the faculty. A good university is a good place to work, it is engaged in its community, and is truthful. A good university is creative, committed to teaching, and sustainable. It is also part of a larger good system. Sharing and collaboration, Connell writes, are essential to sustainable and healthy academic work.
How these good institutions and systems can be created is a challenge that Connell addresses in a surprising manner: she imagines three universities in the future. One is in Java ten years from now; another is in Chile fifty years hence; a third is 200 years in the future and may not have a physical site at all. More fanciful than factual, the imagined universities compel the reader to think outside the box when it comes to how a research institution of higher education might function. How they might emerge is not part of this volume.
More critique than utopia, The Good University is a thoughtful investigation of how research universities have responded to the challenges of neoliberalism and interesting speculation about how they might imagine a different future path.
David Potash