Crisis and Care in Higher Education

I have been reading Chad Wellmon’s book After the University. I had assumed I would have finished it by now, but I made it through one and a half chapters before my emails, marking, and meetings got the better of my intentions. This incomplete exploration of the book made a greater impression on me than could have been expected for the time I gave to it. Wellmon’s description of the university as “beautiful and wretched, stitched together by both historical accident and ambition” resonated with, and unsettled, me. I have been sitting with this image, identifying the places of beauty and wretchedness in my day-to-day life as an academic. I have worked hard for the moments of beauty, but I am also lucky. I have a permanent position in a well-regarded and well-resourced department. I suspect I see the beauty and the wretchedness very differently to many of my colleagues and students.

The crisis of the university has been widely reported and discussed, with academics critiquing the pernicious effects of neoliberalism, and charting its financial, ethical, and pedagogical decline. Reporting on the potential causal relationship between choice of degree course and future earnings feeds further into a concerning narrative that the university is a place of transaction. The work of Chris Newfield, who I had the pleasure of hearing speak recently, argues strongly for recognition of the non-pecuniary effects of higher education. These include supporting democratic public spaces and thinking, with associated capacity building for social debate and deliberation. With political polarisation on the rise, learning how to disagree and to navigate varied viewpoints is more important than ever.

There are many ways in which we could imagine, advocate for, and support these non-pecuniary effects of universities. What interests me is the role of a care ethic for higher education. One which is not confined to exploring how staff may demonstrate more care for students, or how staff and students with caring responsibilities may be better supported. These are important and should be part of it. But I am also concerned with how we can first acknowledge uneven care, the history of who gets cared for and why, and that universities need to dismantle structures of inequality before we can fully realise what they have to offer wider society. This is what Michelle Murphy has called ‘unsettling care’ and what Wendy Harcourt has described as “a politics of refusing historical, gendered and racialised hierarchies by making time to build trust and communities of learning in and outside the classroom.”

If we were to undertake this collective work, we would do well to start with seeing students and staff as part of a network of interdependent relations with moral significance. These relations may well be entangled in the political economy of student debt, but they are not transactional and should not be regarded as such. We might plan our activities and outputs based on what is possible within the constraints of individual and collective wellbeing, and foster space instead of efficiency. If well-regarded universities can withdraw from providing data for international rankings then it is possible to imagine a future which is as much about process as about outcome. About the process of building relationships of mutual trust and learning with students, of making notes as we engage in marginalia while sipping tea or looking out of the window as we think, of getting to know our colleagues and what motivates and discourages them. Small acts of solidarity – being able to swap classes with colleagues who fall ill or have unexpected caring responsibilities, not sending emails around the clock, sustaining communal spaces for rest – can make a large difference.

I think what I find difficult is the dominance of a crisis narrative which says this is not possible. The worry that we might all be at risk of redundancies if we do not score or rank well, if we do not take on more than we can cope with, if we do not see ourselves as competing with the person next door or the institution down the road. As I said at the start, I’m lucky. My day-to-day is filled with more beauty than wretchedness and my experiences are more of support and care than the opposite. But I am positioned with privilege – I am white British and was raised in a middle-class family – and this determines whether I need care or can extend care to others.

If higher education is to survive and to thrive as a place of learning, reflection, deliberation, thoughtful and yes sometimes slow study, care will have to be part of its future. Not as a romanticised or transactional notion, but as a reckoning with who is able to flourish in the system and why. As with my blog on the development sector we all need to care about universities. Not because they make us richer, which they might do for some individuals, but because they are a public good and should be funded and appreciated as such.

June 2026