The University as Idea
Over the past year or so, I have found myself spending a lot of time reflecting on what it means to pursue an academic vocation in an age of uncertainty. Those reflections have now led me to establish a coaching and mentoring practice, to run alongside my work at Keele University, in order to support academics and students seeking to find their own way through a rapidly changing higher education landscape.
In many ways this practice is an extension of my current research. I have been working on the topic of growth and development in an age of seemingly endless crisis (or what various writers have called poly-crisis) for the past two or three years. Although this work started out being about social and economic issues, my interest in existential philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy soon led me to think about the way these social and economic conditions impact upon personal development. Given my professional background, and related interest in the politics of higher education, I realised that I could make use of my work in order to support students and academics looking to find their way in an increasingly resource constrained environment.
Many believe that the stressed and strained nature of contemporary higher education is a consequence of ever-increasing marketisation, concern about value for money, and the translation of knowledge into a commodity (information) that has become increasingly devalued by its over-supply. Regardless of the origins of the problem, this situation has made life more and more challenging for those working in the sector. In the UK context at least, after over 30 years of expansion, HE has entered a contraction phase. This is a very difficult place to inhabit, never mind succeed and thrive, and people are struggling. In the expansion phase of HE, when the knowledge economy seemed to represent the future for everybody, it was easy to make plans and think in terms of career development, but these days survival is the name of the game. Based upon what I see every day, it is clear that it is much more difficult to make sense when it feels as if the value and purpose of higher education is constantly questioned by those in power who have come to doubt the idea of an inclusive knowledge economy.
After watching so many of my senior colleagues leave a profession they loved, but could no longer recognise, I have spent the last few years thinking about the role of experienced academics in this situation. Having become a professor in this state of crisis, this was a very personal process of ‘working through’, and coming to terms with the meaning of my own vocation. What is the role of professors and senior academics in the age of contraction? Is it enough to teach, produce research, and defend our subjects or should we take a broader role concerned with supporting students and more junior colleagues to make sense of what it means to pursue their own vocation in an age of crisis? In this period when it is more and more difficult to create meaning in the space between on the one hand, ever-increasing marketisation and commodification and on the other hand, seemingly relentless contraction and devaluation, I reached the conclusion that I should try to do more to enable younger scholars to succeed in HE.
Based upon my own struggles to sustain purpose in a period of crisis, I realised that pursuing my own objectives (more publications, better teaching outcomes), how ever much these might contribute to the health of my subject, is simply not enough because higher education, the university, and academic vocation is a collective endeavour that will only survive if it has a viable future. That future is represented by new academics.
Following this insight, running alongside my academic work of Keele University, I began offering coaching and mentoring for my subject’s national association (the BSA, British Sociological Association). At the same time, I reflected upon my own experience of mentorship working under my PhD supervisor and teacher, the Canadian sociologist John O’Neill, in the 1990s. While O’Neill taught me my subject, and also a range of other subjects, he also provided a model of what it means to be an academic. In this way he taught me the meaning of the university and my vocation and this has structured my thinking and behaviour through thick and thin working in the HE sector. But reflecting upon my own personal history, it strikes me that it has become increasingly difficult to sustain this way of thinking in the contemporary university, which is marketised, commodified, and very, very stressed. Yet, at the same time, I cannot escape the conviction that it is absolutely essential to continue to think in terms of vocation if the university is to mean something more than the direct monetary cost and benefit of this, that, or the other qualification.
If O’Neill taught me one thing more than any other it is that the university is an idea, an idea that can be traced back through history, an idea that cannot be contained by the buildings and walls of any particular institution, and that it is this that should structure the meaning of being an academic and being a student if we are to succeed and make a difference. Moreover, he taught me that it is this idea that we, academics committed to higher education, should pass on to others through our research, teaching, and mentorship to enable them to succeed in their own practice and develop meaningful careers.
Now I can imagine that many working in contemporary HE will baulk at the idealism of much of what I have set out above (the realist or perhaps cynic in me feels exactly the same way), but I have a strong sense that what is missing from today’s university is this kind of value system based upon vocation. In many ways, I think that the current mental health crisis engulfing HE and impacting many academics and students might be attributed to a combination of the falling rate of the value of information in a state of over-supply and the lack of a deeper sense of the meaning (vocation) in higher education. It is for this reason, and based upon my own experiences of mentorship, that I have developed my own coaching practice to try to support others to find their own way in the HE sector in a period of crisis. By running this practice alongside my full time work at Keele University, I hope that I can do for others what my mentors did for me, and provide support to those seeking to find purpose in higher education which, I have found, can be truly transformative in ways that far exceed credentialization.
If any part of this resonates with you, and you are looking for the time and space to reflect on your own academic journey, please do drop me a line. I would be happy to hear from you and have a conversation about your work.
Mark Featherstone, 28th July, 2026