Student Activism in Higher Education: The politics of students’ role in hegemonic university change

Abstract

Students are actively denied access to the tools of cultural change under hegemony. In recent history, student participation has risen at Flinders University, coupled with an increasing imperative for global democratic governance revisioning. This thesis makes several significant original contributions to knowledge in light of this change: it examines the largely unexplored landscape of student participation in governance through ethnography; it deploys an increasingly displaced methodological frame of Gramscian social science and philosophy of praxis; and, through its acknowledgement of the ongoing cultural significance of activism and hegemony, it summons the possibility for fundamentally repurposing higher education. Ultimately, the thesis highlights the necessity of repositioning democratic values at the heart of teaching and learning. It argues that universities must enable genuine participatory educative and researching potential for students, through partnership approaches, grassroots action and student governance representation. The thesis has profound ramifications for the future and purpose of higher education.

Capitalist Reproduction and Student Politics in Higher Education: Pete Seeger Meets the Young Liberals, Hegemonic Stasis, and the Contemporary University

“…teachers and supervisors) were radicals inspiring action. Rather, students brought the cultural ferment of civil society with them to the higher education classroom and demanded a seat at the table (Cornelius-Bell, 2021a). Academic staff of this era were frequently criticised for their stasis in the face of social change post-1960, and while the institutional spaces themselves were often home to radical happenings, the institutional leadership remained staunchly conservative (Forsyth, 2020;Murphy, 2015).…”

“…Universities around the anglosphere have differentially fallen prey to direct marketisation and managerialism of academic work and recently students' roles in higher education (Cornelius-Bell & Bell, 2021;Gottschall & Saltmarsh, 2017;Molesworth et al, 2009;Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Collectively, the era preceding this direct infiltration is misremembered as higher education's "golden age" (Connell, 2019;Cornelius-Bell, 2021a). In this collective delusion, those who were either very young, or indeed not yet born, idealise the university of the 1960s and 1970s as a booming 'public', a site of radical social transformation, and a democratic sphere.…”

“…However, to accept this prima facie is to ignore the cost of our "ivory towers" and the exclusionary, classed, raced and gendered nature of the academy from its inception across the Britishcolonised world. Across the anglosphere, the 1960s and 1970s are marked in history as times of continued exclusion, division, racism and sexism and the academy was as much victim, as reproducer, of these attitudes and approaches (Cornelius-Bell, 2021a). Indeed, in Australia, while governments sought to open higher education to the working class in the 1960s, and subsequently to enabling women and some ethnic diversity to access a higher education in the early 1970s, it was commensurate with proto-neoliberalism and managerialism.…”

“…In this article, I will advance a Gramscian understanding of higher education as a site of capitalist reproduction, explore how recursive divisions of society (i.e., civil society and political society) are performed in student(s) politics, and assert a move towards an activist praxis for intersectionally inclusive educational transformation. By drawing on Marxist theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci as a basis for conceptualising hegemony, the structure and order of society under capitalism, and building on extant foundations in views of education in these complex political relations, I will move towards a transformative praxis (Cornelius-Bell, 2021a;Gramsci, 2007). Moreover, I draw on empirical work to illustrate the appropriation of proletarian culture in the emergent bourgeois political ascendency in Australian student politics.…”

Beyond ‘Aware and Paralysed’: Governance, Research and Leadership at the Nexus of Academic Development and Corporate Universities

“…These acts, across Australia, structure universities as public institutions which are for the advancement of educational ends, and frequently describe the core purpose of universities as the home of research and/or education which advances civil society. From the 1900s Australian universities, which were founded on unceded Aboriginal lands, have been the home to reproduction of western episteme but have largely acted for the public good and, while subject to transformation, typically opened up to more students and created more educated, analytical and activist citizenry (Cornelius-Bell, 2021b). Since the late 1990s, these public institutions have been taken by rhetoric which centres the 'business' of being an institution as being a business (Aronowitz, 2004;Bessant, 1995;Shermer, 2021) and continues to be a source of consternation and active debate in academic circles.…”