Muslims and Higher Education in Europe

Surveying the vast body of scholarship on Muslims in Europe published over the last two decades, a small group of interrelated questions reappears again and again. What steps, if any, should states take to incorporate Muslim minorities into European societies and public institutions (Vertovec 1996; Koenig 2007; Modood 2009)? How do such steps, when made in response to the emergence of public Muslim identities, challenge existing settlements between religious organisations and the state (Joppke 2000; Cesari and McLoughlin 2005; Meer 2010)? Who speaks for Muslim communities and for the Islamic tradition in Europe (Jones et al. 2015)? As a European Muslim presence becomes increasingly established across the continent, what forms of Islamic knowledge are being produced and popularised (Bruinessen and Allievi 2007)? Do European states need new centres of Islamic authority to address the distinctive challenges that European Muslims face and to counterbalance the influence of overseas patronage (Lewis 2007)? What space is there, if any, in centres of Islamic authority for the voices of Muslim women, and how should the availability of this space influence the way the state engages with Islamic institutions (Brown 2006; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2015; Rashid 2016)? How should European states address the challenge of Islamist extremism, and how have policies designed to prevent extremism impacted on social integration, public institutions and Muslim communities (Cesari 2009; Sunier 2014; O’Toole et al. 2016)? Have such policies contributed to Islamophobia in Europe, and how have Muslims resisted this and other forms of Islamophobia (Brown 2010; Pantazis and Pemberton 2013)? How has this resistance connected with other anti-racist and de- or post-colonial writers and movements (Sayyid and Vakil 2010; Rizvi 2020)?

There is, I want to suggest, no institutional setting that brings all these questions together in quite the way that Islamic studies in European higher education does. For this reason, discussion of contemporary Islamic studies in European states is of far greater significance than the modest numbers of students taking the subject might initially suggest. In a number of countries across Europe, governments have taken steps to expand and formalise Islamic studies at higher level, with these steps ranging from the full creation of Islamic theological faculties (Agai and Engelhardt, Chapter 5, this volume) to the facilitation of links between universities and private Islamic seminaries (Geaves 2012; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2015; Nielsen, Chapter 2, this volume).

Like the subtitle of Scott Hartley's (2017) recent book, The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, the quotation in this chapter's epigraph encapsulates some of the promises that are made for a liberal arts education at the more hyperbolic end. In some quarters, the liberal arts are taken to be the key to solving all manner of apparently wicked problems, from rising sea levels to knife crime. In particular, the ‘real-world’ character of such degrees is often connected to their interdisciplinary nature: the approach is able to solve problems in the real world because it is not held back by the artificial divisions (and therefore restrictions) of the disciplines.

In this chapter, I argue that a tendency towards hyper-interdisciplinarity (Moore, 2011) contributes to this sense of the liberal arts as the solution to the future's problems. Hyper-interdisciplinarity is the belief that disciplines create problematic siloes for knowledge and must be broken down in order to facilitate access to the world as it really is. Such hyper-interdisciplinarity takes for granted the idea that disciplines are regressive because they take us away from ‘real’ knowledge, which is thought to be situated unproblematically in the ‘real’ world. Here, looking at specific, concrete problems in an interdisciplinary way is thought to give access to this real world and, in turn, to bypass the fustiness and unreality of the old-fashioned disciplines.

In this chapter, I show that, as opposed to this hyper-interdisciplinary register coming from both promotional websites and some senior managers, students, in different ways and often very subtly, launched critique. They questioned the idea that disciplines are inherently progressive or regressive, offering a less positivist and more pragmatic account of the real world and its relationship to disciplines. Certainly, as we will see, some students expressed hyper-interdisciplinary ideas, but they tended to do so less often and less simplistically.

New liberal arts degrees are particularly sold on the generic skills they impart (as we saw in Chapter 3) and, in particular, the idea that through them, one ‘learns to learn’. The idea is that, as opposed to the specific content imparted through disciplinary degrees, what is needed today is the ability to move quickly between projects and apply existing knowledge in new settings: adaptability, flexibility and a capacity for lateral thinking. Liberal arts are, then, thought of as an especially good training for the current job market, and liberal arts graduates are thought of as particularly employable.

It is difficult to amass meaningful evidence to show that liberal arts graduates have strong employment outcomes because so few students take them in any one national system, exacerbating the problems of controlling for institution and class effects, among other factors (Godwin, 2015a). In the English context, liberal arts degrees tend to be grouped under ‘combined honours’ for national statistical purposes. This is a very broad umbrella category that includes most degrees taken at the Open University, the largest higher education provider in the UK by number of students, with a strong remit for widening participation. As such, it is difficult to get a picture of graduate outcomes for the liberal arts at a national level, though the introduction of a ‘liberal arts’ code under the new Higher Education Classification of Subjects should make these easier to track, as well as indicating the term's increasing recognisability. While it is possible to compare outcomes for each individual degree against the average for that institution, the small numbers as well as the lack of demographic data at that level would make such comparisons unhelpful.

Therefore, instead of focusing on whether liberal arts graduates ‘are’ particularly employable, here, I explore narratives of employability as they are told on universities’ promotional webpages, as well as how such stories are complicated by some students and staff – especially those at modern universities, or who are in some ways less privileged than others. They are critical of attempts to present just one sort of educational value (for instance, an industrial one about skills or a market one about visibility on the job market) as the truth of the liberal arts. Nor do they conflate them; rather, they seek to interrogate the appropriateness of this or that value in specific educational settings.

In this chapter, we will examine three different ways that liberal arts students’ identities are constructed on institutions’ promotional websites, by academics of different stripes and by students themselves. The first is as good citizens: the idea that the liberal arts approach to education creates politically engaged and critical (but respectful) individuals with a concern for social justice. The second, connected student identity is the cosmopolitan: the well-travelled, and therefore open-minded, citizen of the world. Finally, we turn to the idea of the consumer student. This refrain, which can often be heard in relation to England's fee regime, suggests that modern students consider themselves to have bought a degree and that they appeal to their consumer rights whenever they are dissatisfied with their product.

You might notice that these are quite different sorts of student identity, for while citizenship and cosmopolitanism are generally thought of as positive attributes, a consumerist mentality is not. The purpose of bringing them together in this way is to show how a hierarchy of ambivalence operates differently in different contexts.

I have argued throughout the book that there is an inverse relationship between power and insight, so that, for instance, modern institutions’ promotional websites tend to seek to disentangle complex value systems in ways that the websites of old and post-war universities do not. Similarly, students in interviews offer insights about what is the most appropriate educational value to bring to bear in particular contexts, which academics may instead glide over. Even further than this, those students who are at some remove from the supposedly traditional higher education student (by virtue of class, ethnicity or nationality, for instance) work harder to pull apart different values in order to make claims about what is important in a particular context and what is not, in comparison to more privileged students; the same can be said for junior academics as opposed to those who are more senior. The three aspects of liberal arts students’ identities discussed in turn in this chapter (citizenship, cosmopolitanism and consumerism) build from one another in such a way that we are able to see these processes of disentanglement move from the gentler to the more significant.

This chapter offers some further context on the liberal arts in England and, in particular, foregrounds how senior academics describe their efforts to get a liberal arts degree on the books (and, in some cases, off the books). The broader context of English higher education's marketisation is important here: clearly, with a national funding model where the money follows the student, curricular innovators must make a business case to their institutions. This will generally hang on the twin hooks of student recruitment and cost effectiveness. These academic-to-institution justifications are important, including to those academics doing the justifying, and are generally not experienced as only hoops through which one must jump. The responsibility to recruit and to contribute to a sustainable institution is taken seriously by academics.

Yet, it is clear that this is not all that's going on. Mantras of either efficiency or giving students what they want do not account for the fact that at many institutions, student recruitment is not actually expected to be particularly high (though poor student recruitment is certainly the main reason given for the closure of liberal arts degrees). At some institutions, relatively small student intakes are positively desired (though this remains in tension with the need to recruit), and both the introduction of new core modules for small cohorts and the increased need for academic advising are hardly efficiencies. Instead, we should think about market concerns as entangled with a plurality of further values, including: a conservative domestic register of trust in the past; ideas about fame, repute and likeness with competitors; and an inspirational mode that prizes innovation and change. A complete picture of higher education today must contend with all this.

Therefore, just as the market for students should not be understood as the fundamental truth of the liberal arts, nor should we treat the proclaimed innovation of these degrees as a mere cover for elitism. It would be easy, for instance, to understand the turn to the liberal arts in English higher education as a mere re-traditionalising impulse: a longing look backward to some gilded past before application, vocationalism or even disciplinary specialisation contaminated the hallowed halls of higher education. The aristocratic undertones of liberal arts advocacy are a central concern of this book and should not be discounted as coincidental. Nonetheless, to stop at this observation is to simplify a much knottier picture.

On the one hand, and as its advocates often claim, there seems to be a particular timeliness to the liberal arts approach that would explain its increasing popularity, both in England and globally. On the other hand, we might just as well expect to see a move towards more technical and specialist education (Boyle, 2019), and indeed we do see that move at the same time; for instance, in the long-touted T level technical qualifications. I have tried to argue that the liberal arts do not present some inevitable direction of travel for English higher education, but rather constitute a much more complex mess of values that, by virtue of its very messiness, is able to appear as an inevitability and thus as the best imaginable form of education, rather than one among others.

Since the liberal arts approach is advocated as simultaneously the best preparation for modern work, as the most prized sort of education for the intellectual, as a personally curated degree for the world's individuals, as training in character, mind and soul – that is, because it is presented as the best preparation for work, leisure and life in general – it is the entanglement of these values that makes it possible to make hyperbolic yet vague claims for this as the best form of education in every context. It is also a brief hop from the idea that this is the best imaginable sort of education to the belief that it attracts the best sort of applicants and produces the best sort of graduates.

This conclusion begins with a discussion of plural values as at the heart of higher education today. Seeking to move beyond notions of unveiling within the critical sociology of education, which posit a fundamental truth (the reproduction of inequality) at the centre of educational encounters, masked by a cloak of legitimacy, this account stresses instead the idea of opening and closing one's eyes to different sorts of values, depending on what one is trying to do. Importantly, the students and academics I interviewed were themselves in the business of trying to unpack, and critique, what was happening in different educational contexts. This is a very significant difference between what individuals think about the liberal arts and how they are presented on institutions’ promotional websites.

Here are two tales you may have heard about what's happening in higher education in countries like England at the moment. Excuse the lack of references, but I am concerned here to give a general gloss on these accounts in their simplest forms.

The first tale concerns the marketisation of higher education. The introduction and steady (and not-so-steady) increase of tuition fees has created a volatile environment where no quantity of students is enough and no student– staff ratio is too high. Treating higher education institutions as businesses has corrupted the system, resulting in a glut of overpaid, corporate managers and ill-prepared, instrumentalist students. Box-ticking exercises have replaced a genuine concern with students’ welfare, and basic research is rarely pursued due to the clamour of impact. Writing in this vein is sometimes described (though not always by the writers themselves) as ‘critical university studies’.

The second tale is, among other things, a critique of this critique. While in agreement that there are serious problems in higher education today, this second story takes aim at the diagnosis supplied by the first. It claims that to focus on the ever-growing, ever-hastening university as the problem is to indulge in nostalgia for a past before mass higher education. The first diagnosis tends not to dwell for too long on remedies for the ailment, but it seems to imply that everything was better in some specific time in the past. Thus, according to the second tale, the first tale hankers after an elitist and highly selective higher education system, and is, at best, ignorant of and, at worst, indifferent to that system's history of entanglement with empire, worker exploitation, racism and sexism. Writing of this sort is sometimes described as ‘abolitionist university studies’.

Both bodies of work (to which this hurried sketch does no justice whatsoever) show us important truths about higher education. Rarely does either tale claim to be the whole story. Yet, how do we account for the fact that so many who work or study in universities are so critical of both marketisation and elitism? Or, to flip over to the more cynical side of this coin, how can we account for the fact that so many of these critics (myself, for instance) continue to invest their lives in the pleasures and the pains (as well, of course, as the pay cheques) of higher education?

In this chapter, I address myself to the educational knot of the general and the particular for those who promote, teach on and study the liberal arts. Liberal arts degrees are presented on institutions’ promotional websites as fostering highly generic skills irrespective of the disciplines taken (as we saw in Chapter 2); yet, there is simultaneously a constant stress that liberal arts students are unique by virtue of the specific degree they study.

The desire to forge one's own path through education, work and, more broadly, interests and style can take on a decidedly moral character. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 504) note, there is a growing moral imperative to seek ‘autonomy, spontaneity, authenticity, self-fulfilment, creativity, life’ through work and other means, and one consequence in education is a moral stance against off-the-peg degrees. As Burke and McManus (2011) found in their study of art school admission interviews, some ill-defined ‘quirkiness’ easily becomes prized in this context.

Yet, this individualisation of learning choices happens alongside a homogenisation of the desired outcomes for all learners, irrespective of degree content. Generic personal competences are what should be fostered, such as lateral thinking, communication skills and the universally required capacity to ‘work well alone or as part of a team’. These are industrial values for the well-functioning workplace and quite distinct from inspirational ones about following one's personal passions.

Values that appear at first sight to be in contradiction, however, may in fact relate to similar processes: because the competences are generic and education as a generalised process (learning to learn) is being unmoored from disciplinary specificity, choices about what to learn are considered less important. Thus, they can fairly harmlessly be made by students themselves. This highly individualising approach is learner centred (European Commission, 2008) – part of what Gert Biesta (2010) calls ‘learnification’ – yet, it paradoxically diminishes the importance of the learner's choices. It might be summarised as ‘many routes to one destination’.

This relatively recent notion of generic competences, concerned with an efficient workplace, seems entirely divorced again from a much older set of values about general education: the English educational tradition of breadth, generalism and even suspicion of expertise (Young, 2008).

These two conceptualisations of the value of the liberal arts put forward by student Konstantina and academic Hélène suggest very different ways of thinking about who the liberal arts are for. For Konstantina, everyone should maintain a breadth of subjects. Helene, on the other hand, expresses two sorts of reservation about this. First, she notes that the pedagogical and pastoral style best suited to the liberal arts favours a low student–staff ratio. Second, she suggests some kind of pay-off between the quality and quantity of students, such that the value of the specific type of students attracted to the liberal arts is thought to outweigh the value of a large number of students in general. She describes it as a “very specific niche degree”, precisely not one likely to appeal to, or perhaps be suitable for, the majority of students.

This tension when it comes to advocacy for the liberal arts – considering it, often, to be an ideal type of education for all and yet somehow also only appropriate for a specific type of student – gets to the heart of a set of debates about elitism in a mass higher education system that will be the focus of this chapter. Here, the concept of massification is understood not only to mean a particular proportion of young people (say 40 per cent) accessing higher education, but also, more expansively, to refer to a general narrative of aspiration towards higher education for the majority (Scott, 2012) in a context where 97 per cent of new mothers want their children to attend university (Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 2010, cited in Scott, 2021). This context of massification creates tensions for institutions, which must weigh up competing pressures to recruit large numbers of students while trying to maintain league table positions.

Social Justice Education (SJE) has become the defining orientation of many educators and educational researchers, but is not without its detractors. Because of its overt political investments, SJE has been accused of brainwashing students and violating the terms of democratic legitimacy. In this chapter, I offer a philosophical defense of some SJE. Using Canada as an example and comprehensive liberalism as a framework, I argue that many practices that we wish to protect under the banner of SJE can be defended by appeal to the foundational values that are common to liberal democracies and find expression in contemporary legislation. I suggest five criteria for distinguishing between defensible and indefensible forms of political education, allowing that not all self-proclaimed SJE will be defensible, and some less progressive education will be. I conclude by anticipating two objections to this strategy.

This chapter offers an overview of some of the more important approaches to these questions in contemporary, mostly anglophone, conceptions of educational justice in primary and secondary education. Section 16.2 starts with some provisions of some important goals of education. Section 16.3 turns to educational justice in general. Section 16.4 asks about the spheres of educational justice: is it education and socialization in general, or the school system in particular? Section 16.5 distinguishes three different levels of education: basic education for all; the cultivation of individual talents and capacities; and selection for higher education and the job market. Section 16.6 outlines the differences between five principles of justice and equality in the field of education: strict equality; a conception of fair equality of opportunity, iii) a conception of luck-egalitarian equality of opportunity; iv) a prioritarian conception of educational justice; and democratic adequacy as a conception of educational justice.

The fact of religious pluralism is one of the most challenging questions for contemporary liberal democracies. Political theorists variously argue that religious belief and practice can be a support for prosocial morality, can cause social division, may prevent citizens from adopting important civic norms, or should simply be an area of civic competence. All of these positions carry significant consequences for democratic education. This chapter surveys a range of positions present in political theory and democratic education literature, drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Western democracies, particularly the American context. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibility that modern liberal democratic regimes are properly considered religious themselves, and by considering the implications of this notion for debates regarding democratic education.

Democratic education is central to the functioning and flourishing of modern multicultural democracies, and yet it is subject to increasing public controversy and political pressure. Waning public trust in government institutions, sustained attacks on democratic values and customs from populist politicians and organizations, political sectarianism, and increasing trends toward privatization and chartering in the educational landscape have placed immense strain on the existing structures of public education and generally worked to undermine public confidence in democratic education. In light of these developments, it seems to us to be of central importance to return to the essential concepts, theories and values of democratic education, both as a social ideal and a political institution. This Handbook aims to offer an expansive view of the formation of individuals for democratic life and includes a diversity of theoretical traditions, topics, and thinkers that are relevant to the theory and practice of democratic education.