Keywords

Paul Ricœur understood that he was a man of words: ‘The word is my kingdom, and I am not ashamed of it’. Yet he also qualified this due to the societal shame he experienced: ‘to the extent that my speaking shares in the guilt of an unjust society which exploits work’ (Ricœur 1965, 5).

With this burden, he created his own autobiographical style that features a trifocal lens: exploration of his own identity ran parallel with both a universal narrative and a historical analysis. He wrote of the incompletion of our experiences, the corruption of governments, the violence of the state and the bruised cogito that characterises the modern human’s existence. By an accident of birth, he had the privilege of the white male, an advantage that is invisible to those who have it.

His work is deeply moral. And it has a powerful immediacy too, relevant to the twenty-first century: Ricoeur stood against colonialism and fascism, and for a common European identity. He strove for educational practices that were inclusive and worked towards identity based on acceptance of the contradictory destructive and self-destructive aspects of every individual. We can take inspiration from this approach, helping us to understand his response to the Algerian crisis of the 1950s and early 1960s, and why this inspired the university students he stood alongside.

His insistence upon our ethical responsibility to use language powerfully yet compassionately is invaluable for using language to work together. His insistence upon balancing debate is invaluable for deconstructing the extremisms of populist binaries. Over time however, his normative approach to a philosophy of values became more distant from his youthful attempts to meet students’ demands for self-determination. This conflicted with the identity struggles of underprivileged groups in the 1980s in the USA, which he found unreasonable. We need a different approach if we want to rebalance historical wrongs that currently still distort the rights and dignity of all, regardless of skin colour.

In terms of free speech, having entrenched ourselves into negative ways of thinking, our ability to communicate well has been inhibited: ‘You can’t say that’ is a common refrain and taking offence is now a characteristic response to the comments and actions of others. In Ricœur’s kingdom of the word this is unacceptable (Ricœur 1965, 5), and through Ricœurian analysis of the structure and content of language and of philosophy we can relearn how to communicate well; we can deconstruct the binaries that we are presented with and manipulated by, and we can approach our use of language as an ethical wager that we make with ourselves and others in order to be fair to each other.

Yet this wager requires more than Ricœur envisaged, as trends such as culture wars, the woke debate and opposition to the decolonising agenda (to name just three) are much more exaggerated in their use of emotion and untruths than anything he experienced, even in his Chicago days. His desire to differentiate between action and passion, which he called opposites, cannot be maintained in this current climate of structural racism and legitimized bigotry (Ricœur 2007). We need to engage emotionally as well as cerebrally.

The three urgent moves he proposed in 1968 in his preface to Conceptions de l’université (Designing the University) are still urgent for reformulating the idea of the university. He wanted somehow to create a permeable membrane between the university and society. First, he proposed to help students understand better higher education’s utilitarian impulses to prepare them for the job marketplace—then they can make job and other choices; secondly to insist upon full student participation in policymaking in the running of the university; and thirdly, to help students challenge modern consumerist culture and communicate effectively with the outside world by engaging directly (Ricœur 1968). He found this difficult on the Chicago campus.

Both Jane Addams and Danielle Allen provide a rich, more capacious and pragmatic vision of Chicago than Ricœur’s. Jane Addams (little known until comparatively recently) gives us an early and invaluable version of standpoint thinking: knowledge creation and the practice of working in groups are context based, gender related and subjective. The Communities of Inquiry approach, by creating a group that formulates procedural ethics, allows us to develop group solidarity, to have agency as individuals and to work together to make practical decisions that can be implemented for the benefit of the wider community—as Addams did by bringing refugees, researchers and politicians together.

In our attempts to work together we must be conscious of the language we use: Aristotle listed cases of abusive language as examples of wrongs committed. I find this fits our current societal dilemmas: in the cultural imagination of our modern liberal democracy, we have recently come to believe that others will use abusive language to be offensive to us. This fear of causing the anticipated offence, amplified by social media, is one major factor in people’s tendency to speak less about complex topics—seen in the common current tendency to react negatively to comments as if they are meant as insults. To counter this we must attempt equity: ‘Equity is friendship’s core’ and is determined by ethical reciprocity (Allen 2004, 129). In Communities of Inquiry this can be achieved by using the approaches discussed in Chap. 3 which show how friendship and group bonds can be the model for conversation in pairs and groups, and which address and displace offence and suspicion.

In the 2020s, the higher education sector in the UK has become enmeshed in complex, aggressive arguments about identity, nationality and race. These arguments have become intensely negative and politicised, when government places the university under attack for its perceived adherence to liberal secular ideas. These ideas are believed by certain voices in the government to be antipathetic to the more libertarian secular values represented by government. This seems like a non-debate that could easily be cleared up; yet instead, it has escalated into persecution of universities under the ideological guise of so-called culture wars that invoke ethnonationalism and xenophobia. Recent attempts by the Home Office to reduce numbers of foreign students is part of the xenophobic desire to reduce immigration, which will also deprive universities of the intellects and the money they need (Ward-Glenton 2022). While the university sector fails to defend itself or make the case for debate, instead seeking to accommodate the arguments brought against it by government, the education secretary Gillian Keegan is locked in a sort of culture war with the Home Office in her quest to bring in more foreign students (Taylor 2023). This book captures a moment in time that is a shameful demonstration of bad binary rhetoric.

The university sector seems paralysed in the pincer grip from right-wing libertarians off campus and left-wing no-platformers on campus: each side influences the other to press harder and be more extreme. In order to counter these immediate pressures, we need to begin by visualizing the university as a space where the power of speech must hold its ground, whilst responsibly and effectively managing the most objectionable forms of speech. Furthermore, to also resist the neoliberal demands of government to monetize higher education, the university system needs to govern itself by participatory democratic methods and be overseen by an independent regulator. Most importantly, students and staff need to decline urgently the ‘divide and rule’ culture wars that enmesh them in inactivity, and consider how to emulate the flawed yet necessary Chicago activists’ commitment both to campus matters and to the wider community.

Through the Influencing Corridors of Power project, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group, we have stepped aside from the spider’s web of free speech discourse that entraps and distracts, to create a fresh space and a more informed activism and to bring expert opinion to bear on events in Westminster that affect us all (see Chap. 7). Academic university experts, legal and medical experts beyond academia, and activist groups and think tanks are providing us with information. The networks we have collectively built with parliamentarians are reducing the democratic deficit, the ignorance of many students, academics and even parliamentarians about democratic processes by giving access to these processes. Indeed, this is happening already, but the free speech narratives have quieted the university sector’s confidence and we need to speak again. The ICOP journey began with an acceptance that we knew very little about Westminster and would make progress only by being comfortable with mistakes, trial and error and failure. And at all levels—parliamentary, university, society, family—we have to overcome the tension created by the free speech and culture wars and make a conscious effort to negotiate our different truths, sitting together, co-present in fragile trust and with the openly shared risk of offending each other, for which we will apologise, seeking to understand that ways of thinking may work in some situations and not in others. Ricoeur’s dialectical model is invaluable for challenging the extreme populist binaries that seek to divide us. However, we need to also accept the urgent need to redistribute privilege in ways that unbalance Ricoeur’s dialectics by addressing the bias blind spot that allows discrimination.

In terms of the issues I have analysed in this book, I urge all involved in the university sector to:

  1. 1.

    contextualise and clarify current campus developments by comparison and contrast with other systems or historical versions (see Chaps. 4 and 5)

  2. 2.

    use different disciplines (in my case, philosophy) to better understand state interventions in higher education (see Chaps. 1–7)

  3. 3.

    learn how to recognize and challenge systemic ‘structural racism’, especially in its recent disguises as counter terrorism, anti-wokeness, culture wars and free speech wars (see Chaps. 1, 2 and 4)

  4. 4.

    labour to replace it with positive policies for social change, including accountability for racial and cultural inclusion (see Chaps. 6 and 7)

  5. 5.

    focus upon access and attainment disparities, programmatic and curricular reviews, and thereby transform programmes into multidisciplinary, decolonized, culturally sensitive learning and teaching (see the work of Dr. Awino Okech at SOAS, University of London, Dr. Paul Campbell at the University of Leicester, and Dr. Barbara Adewumi and Rachel Gefferie at the University of Kent)

  6. 6.

    develop an institutional atmosphere that facilitates good, open debate and avoids no-platforming (see Chaps. 3 and 7)

  7. 7.

    ensure that terms such as ‘institutional racism’ are used frequently and have productive discussions to eliminate Islamophobia and racial discrimination against black staff and students, and those of colour (see Chaps. 1, 2 and 6)

  8. 8.

    create opportunities for Communities of Inquiry, politics of pedagogy and polity praxis, so that the university can fulfil its societal commitment to its own staff and students and to the wider world, including government (see Chap. 7)

  9. 9.

    in our current state of cultural confusion, online manipulation and environmental disaster, the university sector must more bravely capitalize on its unique capacity to be pragmatist, to speak out and engage more assertively with the populist binaries that divide us (see Chaps. 3, 7 and 8)

  10. 10.

    deploy all the above to address discrimination of all kinds.

In the end, as current Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Adam Habib shows in his book Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall, ‘we are the agents of our own liberation’ (Habib 2019: 115).