Abstract
Trust has attracted the attention of higher education scholars in a number of forms and for a number of purposes. Moreover, this trust is often conceptualised as a form of public trust, a form of social contract resulting from a reasoned expectation and confident of what the privileges conferred on the academy to critically and in informed ways contribute to society and be accountable by society (funding, freedom of speech and other academic freedoms) are providing for society in many and various ways: employment, income to local communities, holding power to account and increasing knowledge and entrepreneurship. The contract implicitly is reliant upon universities, “acting responsibly and for the common good” (Bird, 2013: 25). However, when political authority and the media pronounce negatively to confront this trust, for example, about vice chancellors’ pay, how can the university maintain this trust? Of course, trust is multi-layered and is in the control of institutional administration as well as in the practice of members of the institution. These may not be aligned. The chapter focuses on how the individual academics in their role and way of moral being can protect the public trust they must claim if they are to function well, especially in this epoch of post-truth and fake news.
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Notes
- 1.
Marketization is defined here as the attempt to put the provision of higher education on a market basis, where the demand and supply of student education, academic research and other university activities are determined by the force of a free market place.
- 2.
His opening line of his paper is, “I take education to be a moral business” (1989: 33).
- 3.
Ghosh et al. (2001), Shoho and Smith (2004), Gibbs (2007), Macfarlane (2009), Carvalho and de Oliveira Mota (2010), and Gibbs and Dean (2015) have, for example, provided reviews of the significance of trust within the university and the building of student-institutional relationships. In the study by Smith and Shoho (2007), the authors found, “an inverse relationship between trust and academic rank”. To that end, their data suggests that the level of faculty trust tends to diminish with ascending academic rank (Smith & Shoho, 2007: 133).
- 4.
See Constanti and Gibbs’ (2004) discussion on emotional labour and university teaching.
- 5.
In an interesting passage, MacMurray (1995: 69–70) writes: “Since mutuality is constitutive for the personal, it follows that ‘I’ need ‘you’ in order to be myself. My primary fear is, therefore, that ‘you’ will not respond to my need, and that in consequence my personal existence will be frustrated.” Clearly, to question others, particularly those in authority, is a risky business for the affirmation of oneself.
- 6.
Sartre deals with the nature of lying as a universal in both ‘Being and Nothingness’ (1969: 48–49) and in ‘Existentialism and the Emotion’. There he writes when confronting the liar, “what would happen if everyone looked at things that way? There is no escaping this disturbing thought except by a kind of double-dealing. A man who lies and makes excuses for himself by saying “not everyone does that” is someone with an uneasy conscience, because the act of lying implies that a universal value is conferred upon the lie” (1990: 18–19).
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Gibbs, P. (2021). Self-Deception and the Duty of the Truth-Teller in the University – A Values Perspective. In: Gibbs, P., Maassen, P. (eds) Trusting in Higher Education . Higher Education Dynamics, vol 57. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87037-9_12
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