Educational Philosophy and Theory ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20 The university in the global age: reconceptualising the humanities and social sciences for the twentyfirst century. Scott Doidge, John Doyle & Trevor Hogan To cite this article: Scott Doidge, John Doyle & Trevor Hogan (2020) The university in the global age: reconceptualising the humanities and social sciences for the twenty-first century., Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:11, 1126-1138, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1752186 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1752186 Published online: 25 May 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 159 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rept20 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 2020, VOL. 52, NO. 11, 1126–1138 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1752186 The university in the global age: reconceptualising the humanities and social sciences for the twenty-first century. Scott Doidge, John Doyle and Trevor Hogan La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY By any metric, the twentieth century university was a successful institution. However, in the twenty-first century, ongoing neoliberal educational reform has been accompanied by a growing epistemological crisis in the meaning and value of the humanities and social sciences (HaSS). Concerns have been expressed in two main forms. The governors of tertiary education systems—governments, private investors, university managers and consultancy firms—have focused on how HaSS can adapt to the perceived research needs of the 21st century. At the same time, a competing set of discourses has been generated by scholars and researchers employed within the critical HaSS themselves. This article considers what these differing perspectives mean for reconceptualising HaSS for the twenty-first century. After surveying the contemporary climate, this article examines the findings of key reports on the future of the humanities from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Alongside those of Western Europe, these university systems are arguably the key drivers for the global university system. It is argued that these reports provide an opportunity for emerging universities to reflect on their research priorities and developmental strategies. The article concludes with some reflections on the wider consequences of the globalising of the university system, the increase of China’s influence in Asia, and ponders the prospect of post-human/ist futures of the humanities. Received 18 December 2019 Revised 24 February 2020 Accepted 11 March 2020 KEYWORDS Humanities; social sciences; university research cultures; research impact; digital disruption Introduction Self-reflexive modernisation requires self-instituting projects of autonomy that connect historical and technological imaginations across the logics of science, social position and political power (Heller, 2005). This is exemplified in one of modernity’s main carriers of self-reflexivity, the instituted set of traditions and practices known collectively as ‘the university’. The university—as the repository of all a society knows of the world as well as the key production site of new knowledge—has by any metric system been a successful modern institution that has grown in its mission as it has globalised in size and replication across the nation-state system. As the university has grown in self-announced importance, so too have the expectations of society regarding the university’s cultural and economic worth. These expectations have been accompanied by growing concerns over the university’s ever-demanding claim on resources. As Belfiore and Upchurch observe, works seeking to ‘analyse, reflect on, and cast aspersions on the *CONTACT Scott Doidge scott.doidge@acu.edu.au La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. ß 2020 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1127 hostile environment in which [the humanities] have to survive constitute one of those publishing genres of evergreen popularity’ (2013, p. 1). Crisis begets its own self-reflexive economy and has led universities to become the sources of their own critique. A growing unease in modern societies about the costs of this massive investment in universities is married to an epistemological crisis in the worth and meaning of the humanities, arts and social sciences (HaSS) themselves (Calhoun, 2006; Marginson, 2016, 2018; Marginson et al., 2008; Murphy, 2016). These concerns have been expressed in two main forums. On the one hand, the governors of tertiary education systems—i.e., governments, private investors, university managers and consultancy firms—have developed strategic plans and reports on how HaSS can adequately respond to the research needs of the 21st century. At the same time, a set of competing discourses on the value of HaSS has been generated by scholars from within the humanities and social sciences themselves. These two dominant forms of self-reflexivity overlap but have distinctive differences in scope and orientation. They are united in a shared apprehension that the modern university has become increasingly divorced from the humanistic model that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At their core, these perspectives are responses to the consequences of government funding cuts, a rise in university-industry partnerships and the university sector increasingly adopting the language and practices of private industry. An emerging ‘tyranny of relevance’ has seen university departments forced to demonstrate their ‘impact’, ‘translation’ and ‘engagement’ outside of the academy. As a result, traditional peer-driven evaluations of what is ‘valuable’ have been superseded by bibliometrics and university league rankings. Universities now find themselves having to compete with one another for prestige and the limited resources that are allocated according to their position in these league tables. This metric-driven model has led to the rise of the ‘global university’ that is now in worldwide replication as the standard of success. As Gert Biesta argues, the result has been an erosion of the substantive values and principles that traditionally informed the idea of the university: indicators of quality have turned into definitions of quality, so that a position in the league table is no longer seen as a judgement about what makes a good university, but has become the definition of what a good university is … at the very same time the global university lacks any sense of direction … . Since everyone is only copying everyone else, the global university is a copy without an original. (Biesta, 2011, p. 38) While reshaping the entire university, these changes have had the greatest effect on the humanities and social sciences. In an environment that increasingly demands demonstrations of impact and utility, the non-utilitarian elements of the humanities have made them an easy target for criticism. They are accused of being elitist and often engaged in research that is only of interest to niche audiences and lacks wider social relevance. These charges have been codified in bibliometric analysis which incentivises what it is able to measure and marginalises what it cannot. This system disproportionately rewards disciplines that operate within limited empirical domains, work in research teams and apply themselves to discrete problems. Such research is usually based on repeatable fieldwork or experiments and therefore prone to produce numerous publications. In contrast, disciplines that have a more individualised research culture and a greater theoretical and historical focus tend to fare poorly. Such a system also discourages original scholarship and encourages researchers to participate in the latest academic fads in order to obtain higher citation rates. All of this undervalues the kind of work that has traditionally taken place in the humanities and social sciences. As John Walton suggests, while ‘these deceptively simple evaluations systems are convenient for managers’, they have a ‘bias against the humanities and some social sciences, where the ‘gold standard’ is the book-length monograph, and chapters in books are an important outlet, but neither publication mode is recognised by league table compilers’ (2011, p. 22). 1128 S. DOIDGE ET AL. In response to the accusation that they lack relevance, the humanities and more theoretically focused fields within the social sciences have traditionally been defended on several grounds. They are held to be integral to our understanding of the human condition, to enrich our personal and collective experience and to develop the moral reasoning and critical thinking skills necessary for democratic citizenship (Collini, 2012; Nussbaum, 2010; Small, 2013). More recently, the defence has increasingly relied on the argument that they foster the soft skills required for successful participation in the 21st century workforce. While all these claims continue to be made, a series of key reports by leading bodies in HaSS is illustrative of the crisis of legitimation faced by HaSS within the global university – or at least, as expressed in the metropolitan centres of anglophone universities. While reiterating traditional defences of HaSS, these reports (frequently subcontracted to transnational ‘finance and human resource’ consultancy firms) in North America, UK, and Australia, seek to recast these arguments in the rhetoric of impact and relevance that reflects contemporary market logics surrounding the allocation of resources for universities. We first summarise their key findings in their own terms before recasting these terms in the context of the globalising university system of this century and critically evaluating their implications for the future of HaSS in a post-human/ist world. Such considerations draw attention to the need for deeper engagement with the emergent university systems of East Asia, South East Asia and South Asia. The rising profile of these university systems has seen them contribute their own perspectives to debates surrounding the future of HaSS (Liu-Farrer et al., 2014). While there is little consensus over the role they will play in the future global landscape, they are currently drawing attention to the importance of localised political, economic and cultural factors in shaping discourse surrounding the ongoing importance of HaSS as well as the social mission of the university more broadly. As such, they will increasingly provoke re-examination of the normative assumptions that underlie the Anglo-American and global university models. The HaSS research landscape The USA In 2017-18, the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) investigated what institutions and/or institutional arrangements in the US could ‘optimally steward long-term, foundational research that services the public good’ (SSRC, 2018, p. ii). It found the US social sciences ‘knowledge system’ to be ‘in flux’ and identified an ‘urgent need for new partnerships and collaborations [among] government, academic institutions, donor organizations, and the private sector’ (SSRC, 2018, p. 5). Previously, these institutions had ‘clear zones of responsibility in producing social knowledge’ and government provided most funding for ‘basic research’ (SSRC, 2018, p. vii). However, the private sector now represents ‘an increasingly large share not just of research and funding, but also the production of data that informs the social sciences, from smart phone usage to social media patterns’ (SSRC, 2018, p. vii). Consequently, the traditional compact between these institutions, which had ‘supported principles at the core of the research enterprise—openness, accessibility, transparency, and quality’—along with ‘the notion that research findings are both authoritative and provisional’, is now uncertain (SSRC, 2018, p. 4). In this context, the SSRC draws attention to the digital revolution, the accountability crisis, and institutional transformations. According to the SSRC, ‘new forms of knowledge production, such as algorithmic searches of huge troves of data [are] remaking research practices such as the controlled experiment, the statistical survey, and archiving’ (SSRC, 2018, p. 5). As a result, there has been an exponential increase in ‘socially relevant data’ being gathered and, crucially, controlled by the private sector (SSRC, 2018, p. 5). For the SSRC, the accountability crisis is marked by three interrelated challenges: short-termism in research; research relevance/impact to and on contemporary socio-economic challenges, and, in the era of ‘fake news’ and post-truth EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1129 epistemology, societal scepticism towards evidence-based research and science in general. The pressure to demonstrate a ‘return on investment’ imposes ‘short-term timeframes on researchers with long-term questions about issues of great complexity’ (SSRC, 2018, p. 6). Short-termism is also a consequence of the ‘public status’ of social sciences research becoming ‘tangled in a broader cultural and political moment’—that is, scepticism of the value of social sciences research, combined with demands for greater accountability, is resulting in pressure to produce ‘short-term results’ (SSRC, 2018, p. 6). The SSRC also highlights the institutional transformation that is changing research roles and agendas for academics themselves. Under previous regimes there was a tripartite system with each party having distinct functions and foci, whereby:    the government provided most research funding and focused on research ‘in the service of the common good’, universities and donor organisations ‘sponsored research on a longer timescale and with a public mission’, and, the private sector ‘conducted applied research’ with a particular interest in exploring ‘consumer understanding, buying behaviour, and product development.’ (SSRC, 2018, p.10) In contrast, the contemporary system is more complex whereby:    government is also involved in ‘social experiments, including ‘nudge units’ that sponsor or conduct behavioural research to improve governance’, non-profit organisations (such as charities and think tanks) are involved with social science/ policy research and advocacy; and are also shifting their focus to ‘project goals with shortterm impact agendas and increased emphasis on observable indicators of impact’, the private sector gathers data ‘which concerns human behaviour’ with individual companies often ‘also control[ling] the tools to gather and analyse that data’ (SSRC, 2018, pp. 7-10) The SSRC concludes its analysis by calling for ‘a new research compact among universities, non-profit institutions, policymakers, and the private sector—to identify a set of shared understandings and expectations that build trust in and support for social research today [This] requires all of us to think beyond the institutional and disciplinary silos in which we typically operate’ (SSRC, 2018, p. ii). The UK The Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) analysis of the UK research landscape identifies broadly similar dynamics and issues to those observed by the SSRC— specifically with respect to key sectoral pressures coming from reductions in public funding, institutional transformations, and the increasing importance of data analysis. It finds that as ‘the “knowledge economy” advances, more organisations—public and private—are part of the creation of knowledge and more people are interested in the outcomes’ (AHRC, 2013, p. 8). In surveying the contemporary research landscape, the AHRC notes that knowledge production will increasingly be focused not only within the university but also in a range of other organisations. As a result, the AHRC focuses on the need for ‘multi-disciplinary and multi-agent responses’ to complex contemporary problems and emphasises that existing disciplinary silos must be broken down (AHRC, 2013, p. 8). 1130 S. DOIDGE ET AL. A joint report by the AHRC and The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) further emphasises the need for collaboration by examining the link between multidisciplinary research and innovation. The report argues that innovation requires ‘networks built on trust, proximity, repeat engagement and “social capital”‘, and that such networks require ‘team-based collaborations, encouraging different disciplines to work together … promoting knowledge transfer with other actors in the innovation system’ (Bakhshi et al., 2008, pp. 1, 3). Arts and humanities research is also shown to play an essential role in generating the language and discourse capable of communicating complexity as well as translating the research findings of the hard sciences into forms accessible to the wider public. In this regard, it plays a leading role in the evolution of social sensibilities and in helping the wider public understand and adapt to social and cultural change. As such, the arts and humanities ‘illuminate the ethical foundations for the innovation system as a whole’ (Bakhshi et al., 2008, p. 29). Australia The joint Australian Academy of the Humanities and Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (AHA-ASSA) report by Graeme Turner and Kylie Brass, Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia (2014), is the first professional academy-level study of Australia’s HaSS research landscape. It is a data-rich account of the decade leading up to 2012. However, it is less strategic than the US and UK reports discussed above. The report’s key focus areas are research funding, outputs and research collaboration. In the ten years to 2012, HaSS produced 34% of Australian university research and represented 44% of the research fields judged worthy of funding. However, it only received 16% of funding (Turner & Brass, 2014, p. 2). In particular, HaSS research funding is heavily reliant on Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects. Accessible by early-career researchers and running for up to five years, Discovery Projects represent 53% of all HaSS competitive grant funding. Turner and Brass identify several negative consequences resulting from this heavy reliance on Discovery schemes. It has resulted in a research funding model that provides little support for long-term or longitudinal research, or for establishing research career paths, and works against cross-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration. Crucially for HaSS, it undermines the development of critical mass necessary for optimum academic research in HaSS disciplines. Research funding is also disproportionately allocated to the Group of Eight Australian universities (Go8). Located in the metropolitan centres, the Go8 received 65% of ARC National Competitive Grants Program funding for HaSS. In comparison, regional universities received only 4% (Turner & Brass, 2014, p. 42). Turner and Brass note that the bulk of the research conducted by the Go8 is conducted within metropolitan centres. This raises questions about the sustainability of rural research capacities. The contraction of rural research funding has also contributed to a decline in the range of HaSS subjects available at regional universities, with most regional institutes now offering ‘limited and highly prescriptive BA programmes’ (Turner & Brass, 2014, p. 31). Turner and Brass argue that if these trends continue, there is a risk that ‘HaSS teaching, over time, would contract to the metropolitan universities, and perhaps even only to the Go8’ (2014, p. 37). Another pivotal challenge identified for HaSS is digital and ‘big data’ developments. The Australian Academy for the Humanities (AAH) argues that these developments will be transformative for HaSS research ‘enabling unprecedented inquiry into our history and heritage, our place in the region, and the way we live now and into the future’ (AAH, 2018). However, echoing the concerns of the SSRC and the AHRC, the AAH notes that Australia’s ‘social and cultural data and the source material for research are largely unconnected and locked away in individual projects, collections and institutions’—whereas ‘researchers require access to dispersed collections EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1131 and qualitative and quantitative data and advanced tools to enable data-intensive research and analysis’ (AAH, 2018). Measuring research value & impact in the audit age This section briefly addresses the ‘value’ debate in HaSS as a context for a discussion on research ‘impact’ and the potential of evaluative frameworks in identifying and articulating the range of benefits produced by HaSS research. The AHRC captures the fundamental challenge for HaSS researchers in the 21st century (2008, 2009). It argues that HaSS knowledge lies at ‘the heart of innovation’ but notes that humanities research ‘is rarely sequential but develops and re-evaluates earlier ideas and sources of evidence, viewing them from new perspectives and new contexts’ (AHRC, 2009, p. 22). In contrast, the hard sciences ‘typically solve a problem and then move on with that experimentally repeatable discovery becoming part of the foundation for further explorations’ (AHRC, 2009, p. 22). As such, humanities research is ‘less easy to communicate formally’ and ‘less amenable to codification’, with the contemporary ‘inclination to codify everything [having] the perverse effect of leading research towards areas that are easy to codify, rather than areas that are crucial’ (AHRC, 2009, p. 22). Similarly, Australia’s former chief scientist, Ian Chubb, has argued that while STEM research is critical to the innovative economy, it continues to benefit from HaSS disciplines ability to provide ‘vital knowledge and understanding of our world, its people and societies’ (Chubb, cited in Turner & Brass, 2014, p. iv). The Macquarie University-commissioned report by Deloitte Access Economics The Value of the Humanities (2018) fortifies this assessment through a study of the value of the humanities with respect to: 1. 2. 3. 4. employers, through having a more productive, innovative and multidisciplinary workforce; the broader community, through better informed citizens and a better understanding of our place in the world’; graduates, through increasing their lifetime earnings by increasing wages and job prospects; and our society, through the contributions of Humanities research to improved social outcomes’. (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 5) Other reports such as PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Lifelong Skills acknowledge HaSS’s contributions more indirectly. They focus on the need for the soft skills including critical thinking, open-mindedness and written and oral communication that are prized by employers and call on universities to embed these interdisciplinary skills across all their degree programs (PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting Australia, 2018, p. 23). A more holistic perspective is provided by the Australian Council of Learned Academies, which, in the context of identifying Australia’s need for an ‘innovative and skilled workforce’ to maintain and enhance its comparative advantage (especially in health, education and financial services), frames HaSS as an economic necessity. It argues for ‘more investment in the STEM fields [and the] need to promote complimentary skills in HaSS fields to develop understanding of systems, cultures and the way society uses and adopts new ideas’ (Withers et al., 2015, p. 82). Evaluating ‘impact’ in HaSS research is fraught but well documented.1 However, several works have made a significant contribution in identifying the non-conventional outputs that should be captured in any reasonable measurement of HaSS research impact. The AHRC identifies exhibitions, websites, databases, conferences, workshops and policy papers, and notes that humanities research outputs ‘are based on significant amounts of archival or library work [and] usually require a major time resource to complete to the highest quality’ (AHRC, 2009, pp. 4-5). 1132 S. DOIDGE ET AL. Figure 1. AHRC’s model of HaSS research impact. (AHRC, 2009, p. 16) Cambridge University’s Centre for Business Research suggests that evaluating arts and humanities research impact should encompass ‘mechanisms which include people-based, problem-solving and community orientated activities’ (Hughes et al., 2011, p. 1). Finally, the RAND Corporation argues that ‘public knowledge creation’ is a key non-academic research impact in the arts and humanities. It cites research books accessible to general readers; research used in professional practice (e.g., histories of public policy and laws); researchers speaking in the media as experts on current events and issues; online resources to broaden access to research and research skills (e.g., digitised manuscripts and images); and involvement in events such as public lectures and ideas festivals (Levitt et al., 2010, pp. xiii-ix). Over recent years, a number of evaluative frameworks of research impact have been designed as tools to assist in systematically identifying and quantifying the full range of research outputs in HaSS—not just those typically captured in conventional impact measures. The AHRC’s model of ‘the UK’s ecosystem’ was designed to assert ‘the economic impact of arts and humanities research’ in the UK to articulate to government why expenditure on the arts and humanities represented ‘an excellent investment for the nation’ (AHRC, 2009, pp. 14-20). It seeks to identify in a comparative way how different arts and humanities fields contribute to economic impact. The four quadrants illustrated above are not meant to pigeon-hole research. Instead, the model is designed to assist analytical discussion— ‘to elucidate and situate data in relation to “economic impact”‘(AHRC, 2009, p. 14). Research areas may be situated in one or multiple quadrants and there may be tensions between them. The model shown was populated on the basis of discipline-specific case-studies/essays commissioned by the AHRC (Figure 1). The AHRC also advocates ‘back-tracking’ as a way to demonstrate the value of public investment in HaSS. The process involves identifying a valued feature of contemporary society and tracing back its development to the research that made it possible. Notable examples mentioned by the AHRC include the role of forensic archaeology and forensic linguistics in the British EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1133 Figure 2. RAND Corporation’s model of HaSS research impact. (Levitt et al., 2010, pp. 37) criminal justice system and the role of information studies in developing the research methodology for evidence-based medicine. Similarly, the RAND Corporation’s ‘payback framework’ is based on a model initially developed for health economics research and adapted for arts and humanities research (Levitt et al., 2010, pp. 35-51). It seeks to identify and articulate academic benefits (knowledge production and research capacity) and wider benefits (policy, cultural practice and economic benefits) (Levitt et al., 2010, pp. 38-43). The framework comprises two interlinked elements: ‘a multidimensional categorisation of benefits from research (the so-called paybacks or impacts)’ and ‘a logic model of the complete research process’ which helps to identify when research impacts can be expected as well as identifying the broader social and cultural impacts of arts and humanities research (Levitt et al., 2010, pp. 36) (Figure 2). The payback framework captures concrete as well as less discernible arts and humanities research outcomes. The left-hand side of the flow chart focuses on academic research outputs, including journal articles, monographs and exhibitions. These ‘primary’ research outcomes contribute to the creation and maintenance of the reservoir of academic knowledge. The right-hand side captures how this knowledge is disseminated beyond academia to the broader public. While less concrete and more difficult to discern, these outcomes include public knowledge creation and broader cultural shifts in attitudes and behaviours. Central to this model is an appreciation of the broad timeframe necessary to effectively evaluate the full impact of HaSS research whether this is the ‘secondary’ outputs produced by third parties building on ‘primary’ research, or the broader social and cultural outcomes that slowly emerge downstream from the academy. Deloitte’s Value of the Humanities, provides an evaluative framework designed to systematically identify the full range of HaSS research impacts. At the core of Deloitte’s model is the attempt to acknowledge the breadth of the economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts of university research. Echoing the reports discussed above, Deloitte emphasises that cross-disciplinary collaboration ‘drives innovation and enhances the impact of research’ (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 44). Deloitte’s ‘research evaluation framework’ is structured around two broad focus areas, ‘Social Impact’ and ‘Economic Impact’ as illustrated below (Figure 3): In introducing its research framework, Deloitte draws on several of the traditional legitimation for HaSS. In particular, it refers to the role of humanities in understanding social complexity and 1134 S. DOIDGE ET AL. Figure 3. Deloitte’s model of Hass research impact. (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 45) change as well as in fostering critical thinking and democratic citizenship. However, Deloitte acknowledges that ‘changing frameworks for understanding social value and the expansion of tertiary education disciplines over time have affected perceptions of the importance of the Humanities.’ (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 5). Deloitte’s research framework is an attempt to correct the overly economic-impact focused frameworks that have led to this perception. Deloitte argues that ‘the contributions of the Humanities are often at the forefront of discussion of social and cultural value … [and] have led to questions about how we could better plan societies that people want to live in’ (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 5). Deloitte suggests that the ‘challenges arising from prominent global trends, such as managing rapid urbanisation and globalisation’ (Deloitte Access Economics, 2018, p. 10) are likely to be solved by multidisciplinary teams capable of combining innovations in science and technology with an understanding of human behaviour. HaSS researchers will play an important role in these ‘teams’. The future of HaSS in the global university system Several key themes emerge from these reports on the current state of HaSS. All identify the impact of institutional transformations, especially regarding funding levels and funding sources. This is reflected in a transformation of the roles and agendas of key institutions (government, universities, non-government bodies and the private sector), in terms of research focus, incentives, constraints and opportunities. These reports also acknowledge the impact of Big Data and the digital revolution, with a specific focus on issues such as data ‘commons’, research infrastructure platforms and data analytics. Due to these challenges, they identify the growing need for multi-disciplinary collaboration within the academy as well as between the academy, government and the private sector. In reconceptualising HaSS in the contemporary research climate, the evaluative frameworks discussed above are useful for systematically identifying, conceptualising and quantifying the ‘full’ range of research outputs in HaSS. Tools such as these offer significant potential in underpinning communication and advocacy with key funding-brokers, such as university management and government and grants bodies. The findings of these reports return us to the value debate alluded to from the outset. The cultural imaginary of the institution we call ‘university’ is a unique socio-historical creation that dates back to medieval Europe but which has blossomed into a world-system over the past EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1135 century. Its core mission of the reproduction of knowledge and its archival responsibilities have been married to a search for new knowledge. Such a mission has also carried with it a self-reflexive set of cultural values that deem it unique. At least since the middle of the nineteenth century, the greater burden of its defence to the society that supports the institution has been argued by scholars of the humanities. This is the heart of the current legitimation crisis of the university: a normative issue of the substantive cultural value of the institution itself. At least since the 1960s, the anglophone university has become the ‘multiversity’ and is now modelled alike on corporate and business logics and systems: it is frequently likened to that of a city but is more accurately that of a bureaucracy that combines core characteristics of the corporatist cultures of the military and the Catholic Church. Moreover, anglophone universities of North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand persist in developing their global views within their own centre-periphery world-system with only occasional glances at the European Union and even less awareness of the rapidly expanded university systems of Asia. This is a missed opportunity. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the human capital paradigm has dominated Anglo-American thinking on education and the role of universities (Becker, 1964; Marginson, 2020). Thinking about universities in terms of private advantage has made it difficult to conceptualise their role in relation to broader issues of democratic citizenship, social tolerance and the public good (Nussbaum, 2010; Small, 2013; Marginson, 2020). Asian configurations of the triple Helix of university-industry-government relations provide an opportunity to rethink and reset the logics of the Anglo-American and global university models (Etzkowitz, 2008). The way that Asian universities are positioning themselves as sources of ‘retention and articulation of those elements within such societies that “make them Asian”‘ also offers a model of resistance towards the metric-led uniformity of the global university model (Hawkins, Mok & Neubauer, 2015, p. 6). Recent scholarship from within Asian universities has identified similar concerns to those outlined in the reports summarised in this article. There is a growing concern over the consequences of industry-university partnerships that focus attention on economic impact at the expense of less quantifiable social outcomes (Mok, 2013; Mok & Nelson, 2013). Other scholars have criticised the limitations of current research metrics and called for the development of research evaluation paradigms capable of articulating the full value of HaSS research (Chou et al., 2013). However, despite these critiques, there remains a lack of detailed evaluation of the role of HaSS in Asian knowledge economies (Dhawan et al., 2015). This article calls for similar reports to those outlined above to be developed for the emergent university systems of East Asia, South East Asia and South Asia. Critical scholarship on the future of the humanities and social sciences would also benefit from greater comparative analysis of the similarities and divergences between regional university systems. This will be increasingly important as Asian universities assume an even greater role on the world stage. As Simon Marginson (2017, 2018) has noted, one of the biggest stories of the new globalised university system of the last two decades has been the rapid rise in world rankings of Chinese universities (and Chinese language diaspora universities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) and in particular, in STEM disciplines. Anglophone universities of Australia take their first cultural cues from the UK and then America. Nevertheless, they have been developing Asiafocused—in particular, China-centric—policies but these are largely integral to the push for students in international education rather than re-setting the fundamental logics of research areas, partnerships, and systems. The result has been a tendency towards myopia that undermines the prospect of a global university imaginary. In a multi-polar world-system, small but rich and dynamic, anglophone but multicultural new world societies like Australia need to develop even more complex stances on what their priorities are—and none less so in the troubled area of humanities. Social sciences will survive and even thrive in a world of quantitative research methods—and does so in other institutional and market settings to that of the university. The future of the critical humanities is more fraught though in this scenario. 1136 S. DOIDGE ET AL. The rise of modern humanities was part of an enculturation mission of British empire. After World War Two, and the rise of a new nation-state system, Australia, like many others, developed a strong commitment to the development of a tertiary educated citizenry, in an open democratic and capitalist society. The project was liberal, national, and dedicated to equal opportunity for all. This project was largely successful in its own terms. Australia has witnessed a rise in the percentage of adults holding tertiary degrees from under 3% to up to 33%. Moreover, as of 2010, at every age cohort from 21 to 70 years, more women than men hold a tertiary qualification (Megalogenis, 2015). Such an achievement is now made more complex by a commitment to the globalisation of the economy since the 1980s. With an opening of population flows, financial and property markets, and free trade, we have seen a concomitant embrace of international education by universities seeking to increase external income. With demand-led education markets, Australian universities are seeking continuous expansion; and as there is a limit to the number of domestic students to meet this drive, the importance of recruiting international students increases accordingly (and this is mainly Chinese and Indian markets). The 21st century global university system might still be dominated by metropolitan universities of Trans-Atlantic economy but its emergent centre is seemingly (inexorably?) shifting to Asia with China in turn at its heart. This is not only a geography of knowledge argument about political power of knowledge production but one complicated by the logic of science-technology and its implications for the historical imagination of the humanities: The supreme value of cognitive efficiency requires that we (academics) participate and labour endlessly, that we give away our data free, and that we integrate ourselves into the soon to be one trillion-dollar data monopolies of surveillance capitalism, a form of ‘digital authoritarianism.’ The ‘dataism’ that creates new ‘platform ontologies’ now threaten the tracking and hacking of the body. The US National Science Foundation has been working on the notion of ‘converging technologies’ for over a decade. The ‘new paradigm’ consists in a deep and progressive convergence of ‘nano-bio-info-cogno’ (NBIC) technologies that signal a revolutionary integration of science at the nano-level. The final phase of this convergence is the application of ‘cogno’ technologies – the least mature – funded through cognitive neuroscience that focuses on cognitive efficiency to harness a ‘bio-informationalism’ of a re-/programmed body. This is the map of the techno-politics of the future university and the battleground of the algorithmic academy in which philosophy and the critical humanities are dying (Peters, 2020, in press). This is the instituted imaginary of the complete system of knowledge that informs one dimension of global modernity—an ideology of Enlightenment as positivist rationality, absolute governance, and the total archive (Jardine and Drage, 2018). Commitment to developing research paths that are high performing in impact and generative of non-government sources of income entails building a bureaucratic army of research managers that drive an audit culture as well as a strategic policy regime that maximises output and directs corporate partnerships. The challenge before us all is w(h)ither humanities and social sciences in such a post-humanist and post-human world? Note 1. For extended discussion of the limitations of bibliometric data in capturing the broader impact of HaSS research, see, for example, (Archambault & Lariviere, 2009; Cahill, 2015; Murphy, 2016, pp. 34-50; Turner & Brass, 2014, pp. 68-73). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1137 Notes on contributors Scott Doidge is a teaching associate at the Australian Catholic University. His research interests are in social theory, cultural sociology, the sociology of education and the history of ideas. His current research focuses on the intersection of the arts and social theory and higher education policy and pedagogy. John Doyle is an honorary research fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, where he coordinates the Victorian Parliamentary Internship program, and an associate of the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University. His current research focuses on the political history of telecommunications reform, and contemporary developments in education policy and practice. Trevor Hogan is a senior lecturer in sociology at La Trobe University and also Director, Thesis Eleven centre for cultural sociology and Philippines Australia Studies Centre respectively. 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