Equality and Resistance in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper is an account of how higher education can become a site of resistance in the pursuit of equality while also identifying the dangers and limitations involved in this process. The development of a new intellectual perspective, namely Equality Studies, is examined and its potential for the understanding of egalitarian practice is explored. The paper examines the reasons why sociology, in particular critical and neo-Marxist sociology, became inadequate as a way of understanding inequality and exploring egalitarian goals. It explores the limitations of the work of equality empiricists which has failed to move outside the liberal paradigm, and of critical theory and neo-Marxism which has not gone beyond critique to identify mechanisms and institutions to develop a new egalitarian order. Prom the author's perspective, the seeming inability of sociology to marry empirical and normative discourses was a key factor in contributing to the development of Equality Studies. The latter part of the paper outlines some of the central issues in Equality Studies and the positive influences on its development, both nationally and internationally. It argues for a new and more politically involved role for radical academics while recognising the very real constraints within which they now work.

Equality and social justice: The university as a site of struggle

“…While there have been critical voices in higher education, challenging its pedagogy and its exclusivity, it is also true that they have been minority voices, often working against the tide even in the pre-neo-liberal days. This has also been our own experience in trying to establish Equality Studies in UCD (Lynch, 1995).…”

“…In establishing Equality Studies, we were mindful of these debates and of the binaries embedded in social scientific analysis between the empirical and the normative. We did not see the two as separate spheres and made a conscious decision to marry positivist research traditions with normative analysis in both the teaching and research of the Centre (Lynch, 1995;Baker et al, 2004).…”

“…In this paper we will summarise the reasons why we came to establish Equality Studies in UCD almost 20 years ago as one way of responding to injustices (for a more detailed discussion see Lynch, 1995), and why in 2005, we further institutionalised an academic space for this work by forming a School of Social Justice, and a network of scholars from across the University who are committed to research and teaching in social justice to form the Egalitarian World Initiative (EWI) network www.ewi.ie . We begin by explaining why universities have a particular remit to challenge injustice and why it is important for them to retain that responsibility in a market-led era in higher education.…”

Lessons for higher education: the university as a site of activism

“…The wide range of people involved in contributing chapters to the many books that he edited also reflected his breadth of understanding of how the politics of knowledge worked and how to set agendas by recognising dissident voices (Barton and Tomlinson, 1981, Arnot and Barton, 1992, Armstrong, Armstrong and Barton, 2000 Len played a quiet but important role in both encouraging and supporting us to set up and maintain the UCD Equality Studies Centre in 1990, and to establish the UCD School of Social Justice in 2005. While he was not our sole supporter i , his belief in the mission we had set ourselves, to educate social justice and egalitarian-led activists from all walks of life, was profoundly reassuring over years of struggle for survival (Lynch, 1995;Lynch, et al, 2009).…”