The idea and purpose of the contemporary university is key for policymakers, university leaders and researchers. For some, widening university access to the ‘masses’ has created a social divide of graduates and non-graduates, creating social division and fostering populist politics (Goodhart, 2017; Barnett, 2019). This is all playing out amid a culture war across politics, campuses and wider society, alongside policy questions of regulation versus free market access.
Raymond Williams (2011 [1961]) wrote of a ‘long revolution’ to a participatory democracy in the 1960s, facilitated by increased access to education and knowledge aided by information technologies. Martin Trow (1973), following Williams, described a (not necessarily neat linear transition) move from elite, to mass, to potential universal access to the university. Technologies were key for Williams and Trow. Indeed, technology in a post-pandemic environment dominates headlines, conferences and marketing copy as the big disrupter of the future idea of a university and its role in society. I argue that there is a much more complex network of actors and discourses at play in the emerging ‘networked university’.
