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Monday 12 May 2025, at 14:00 - 15:30

Event website

No later than Friday 9 May 2025, at 23:59

By Søren Baltzer Rasmussen

Place: Online on Zoom (a link will be shared after registration has closed)

Speakers:
Professor Eva Bendix Petersen, Independent Researcher, Denmark
Assistant Professor Andrew G. Gibson, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Professor Emeritus Ronald Barnett, Institute of Education, UCL, UK

Co-organisers and co-convenors:
Associate Professor Laura Louise Sarauw, Roskilde University, Denmark
Professor Jakob Feldt, Roskilde University Denmark
Assistant Professor Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Radboud University, Netherlands
Professor Susan Wright, Aarhus University, Denmark

Hosts:
Centre for Higher Education Futures, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University
‘Higher Education Policy and Practice’ SIG, The Danish Network for Educational Development in Higher Education (DUN)

Description:
The event will launch the CHEF Working Group on Universities, Democracy and Citizenship.

Many government and intergovernmental organisations express urgent concern that democracy is under threat and they look especially to universities as key institutions to protect these values and reinforce democratic practices and active citizenship. The meaning of democracy varies in different institutional, national and regional contexts but in broad terms its core features are rational use of and trust in science, valuing diversity and integration through education, civic engagement to enhance active legal, political and social citizenship, and governance systems that practice dialogue and participatory decision making.

Universities today often have a central role in political discourse but this rise in status has been accompanied by universities losing autonomy through greater political interference, an increasingly instrumental approach to education and research and threats to academic freedom and institutional integrity. This crisis challenges ideals such as educating critical thinkers, value-neutral research, and the imperative to tell the truth. Ongoing threats to universities’ integrity include demands that universities adhere to some politicians’ values and ethics, with critical researchers silenced or harassed into submission. Students’ activism has also pushed universities to take a stance on debates ranging from wars and ethnic clashes to heated diversity issues and moral values.

These tensions have exposed how universities themselves often fail to practice dialogue and participatory decision making. Reforms in recent decades have seen the emergence of authoritarian leadership and top-heavy bureaucratic structures that often leave faculty and students at the bottom of a hierarchy without an effective voice in the institution. How can universities be bastions of democracy if they do not practice it themselves? Fortunately there a few examples of higher education institutions that are participatory organisations and that can provide waymarkers for how universities can inspire democratic forms of governance.

Some universities are also developing new ways of interacting with their local society. There have been cases of university expansion that have been notoriously damaging, for example, displacing people from poor neighbourhoods to build new university facilities. Now there are experiments with how universities, along with neighbouring ‘anchor institutions’ can use their resources for local wealth creation and to enhance local people’s opportunities, incomes and security – the basic conditions for engaging in active citizenship. Whereas even well-intentioned research and teaching activities have sometimes been extractive, based on local people, rather than with or for them, now increasing attention is given to mutually beneficial relationships that are transformative of both parties.

The working group aims to create a research momentum by bringing together members of CHEF and DUN’s special interest group Higher Education in Policy and Practice (HEPP) along with others working on the public role, democratic governance and civic mission of universities. We will address the question: What are the political premises for the public role and democratic responsibility of universities, and, perhaps in contrast, what are the universities’ own visions and practices of societal engagement?

The event will start with reflections from contributors to a recent related special issue titled ‘What is academic citizenship?’ published in Journal of Praxis in Higher Education: https://journals.hb.se/jphe/issue/view/29

The presentations will lead to a facilitated group exploration and discussion of the working groups aims and goals, and future project opportunities.

Chair: Associate Professor and CHEF Co-Director Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University Denmark

CHEF Event (online): Universities, Democracy, and Citizenship Launch of CHEF Working Group

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