Education as Promise: Learning from Hannah Arendt

The ‘university becoming’ will need to question not only the increasingly undemocratic and illiberal societies within which it operates but also its own sense of purposefulness. The literature within the field of higher education has been good at challenging neoliberalism: its anti-public sector and pro-private sector policies and the impact of that policy orientation – coupled with post 2008 economic austerity measures leading to escalating levels of inequality – on higher education and society at large. But it has been less good at catching up with analysing and critiquing the post-neoliberal, nationalist and protectionist policies associated with the new authoritarianism establishing itself within old and aspiring democracies across Europe. This new authoritarianism plays fast and loose with the truth, relies on spectacle and nostalgic rhetoric, manipulates the supposed ‘free’ press and is fronted by charismatic (and often hopelessly ineffectual) leadership.