Going local: the time and place of higher education institutions

Abstract

How can we better understand the when and where of higher education, and why should we? How can we connect and differentiate between institutions beyond the obvious characteristics of national setting, size, age, and status, while still being mindful of these elements? Two books released this year offer insights into these questions, Utopian Universities edited by Jill Pellew and Miles Taylor, and Non-University Higher Education by Holly Henderson. What emerges from both individually, but particularly when they are read together, is how time and place are not only important but that they perpetually intertwined.It is well documented that where you study or work, geographically, organisationally, and reputationally, combined with who you are, is materially important in terms of study or working conditions and educational and social trajectories (e.g. Spurling 2015; Bennett 2018). There has been, though, a relative neglect of place in higher education in the sense of institutions as sites that constitute a simultaneous combination of historical, social, and physical elements (Temple 2019). Some of this may be associated with organizational anonymity around ethical and/or reputational concerns, but a great deal can be learnt without identifying exactly what the locations of enquiry were. Without unpacking individual institutions in depth, though, we can be left with the implication that what transpires within universities of similar profiles -what Whyte (2021) calls 'family resemblances' -is somewhat uniform. It is, of course, important to understand how wider macro trends play out, but not at the cost of the local or micro.This review first provides an overview of these two books. It then pays particular attention to the distinctive but overlapping ways that temporality and geography play out in them, before considering what their contributions to the literature might be and what they might have done differently.