This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact – in the rewards game of the UK’s performance-based research funding system, the Research Excellence Framework – influences their self-concept as ‘engaged researchers’. While a designation of being REF impactful may be considered constitutive to a researcher’s sense of self-worth and advantageous to (...) their professional and institutional profile, a consultation of researchers included within REF2014 impact case studies challenges these assumptions. Instead, respondents are found to complain of identity dispossession and exploitation by their universities where their public contributions are appropriated for positional gain. Their testimony confirms the prevalence of a culture of ‘competitive accountability’ across UK universities which is with a systemic insatiability for ‘scholarly distinction’, causing the privileging of appearance in rationalisations of publicly funded research. Using the theoretical insights of Guy Debord and Erving Goffman it is argued that REF impact elucidates the UK higher education sector as a ‘society of the Spectacle’ that subjugates ‘authentic’ versions of the academic Self. However, REF-impact is also seen to provide an opportunity for cultural detournément and a means to elicit and concurrently invert ‘simulations’ of research praxis’, thus enabling the assertion or ‘front-staging’ of perceived and idealised academic identities. (shrink)

Intellectual leadership indicates the informal leadership of professors based on aspects such as knowledge production and dissemination, institutional services, and public engagement. Academic freedom is considered as the overarching condition for individual academics to develop intellectual leadership. Against the backdrop of internationalisation and globalisation of higher education, academics face enormous pressures to produce measurable research outputs, deliver high-quality teaching and meet all kinds of institutional requirements. In modern universities, women scholars, as the non-traditional participants in academia, must tackle with multiple (...) obstacles and bias brought by gender intertwined with academic discipline features, higher education institutions, and sociocultural characteristics. How do women professors protect, negotiate, or strive for academic freedom? Situated in higher education in Hong Kong, this article aims to explore how epistemological norms, institutional management, and gender influence women scholars’ academic freedom. The author has analysed how sixteen established women professors in humanities and social sciences augmented freedom using the cumulative advantage theory. The study finds that women scholars in different sub-groups within HSS had mixed views about freedom and developed diverse patterns to seek freedom for intellectual leadership. (shrink)

The legacy of totalitarianism thwarts discourse and practice of academic freedom in post-Soviet universities. For legacy-holders, “academic freedom” causes disorientation, irresponsibility, demoralization and inequity. They see more threats than benefits from empowering decision-makers who are non-compliant with local bureaucracy. For innovators, freedoms enhance flexibility and creativity. However, granting such freedom also reinforces value clashes on campuses and tends to intensify feelings of guilt and shame in regard to actions which show a disrespect of authority and tradition. While both legacy-holders and (...) innovators endeavour to redefine their practices and norms in their teaching, they appear to still struggle to shed their predispositions to a paternalistic and colonial philosophy of education. Presumably curative, their engagement with international networks of scholarship exposes their particular positions of vulnerabilities to that end. Both groups continue to push patriotism and cultural idiosyncrasy in order to hedge their power and status in the global marketplace of ideas. As in the past, a discourse of anti-westernization prevails, shoring up legacies of regulative thinking, indoctrination, and insularity. Progressive academics succeed primarily by taking bold steps to go above and beyond the dominant discourses and norms within their universities and policy-building communities. This article explicates why, in turn, a “surrogate academic freedom” tends to emerge as a conundrum across the post-Soviet higher education space. (shrink)

Research integrity is fundamental to the validity and reliability of scientific findings, and for ethical conduct of research. As part of PRINTEGER (Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research), this study explores the views of researchers, research managers, administrators, and governance advisors in Estonia, Italy, Norway and UK, focusing specifically on their understanding of institutional and organisational influences on research integrity.A total of 16 focus groups were conducted. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that competition is pervasive (...) and appeared in most themes relating to integrity. The structural frameworks for research such as funding, evaluation and publication were thought to both protect and, more commonly, undermine integrity. In addition, institutional systems, including workload and research governance, shaped participants’ day-to-day work environment, also affecting research integrity. Participants also provided ideas for promoting research integrity, including training, and creating conditions that would be supportive of research integrity.These findings support a shift away from individual blame and towards the need for structural and institutional changes, including organisations in the wider research environment, for example funding bodies and publishing companies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT With a particular focus on the experience of young people in higher education, this paper turns to the philosophical work of Cora Diamond to open up new ways of conceptualising mental health. We claim that Diamond offers a compelling insight into that experience of human difficulty so often subsumed by a medicalised vocabulary. We propose that she offers philosophically astute perceptions of the related human attempts at deflection. And we situate this reading of Diamond against a broader understanding of (...) the contemporary university as a place of institutional darkness. In developing this general discussion, we place ourselves within a very particular context. We draw on the narratives of a number of third-level students in Ireland, who shared their experiences as part of a hermeneutic phenomenological study into the lived experience of mental health difficulties. (shrink)