Cherish academic freedom, diversity of scholarship, and pursuit of truth: Dr Andrew Gibson

Gibson’s career was multidisciplinary from the very beginning: between Trinity and Maynooth he studied German and Italian, Philosophy, English, Latin and Early Modern History. His initial plan to conduct a PhD in English Literature coincided with the 2008 crash and he took on a number of alternative roles instead. “I actually got a position in the research office,” he explains, “where the director was researching the Humanities at the time.” Noticing he had experience in language, philosophy and history, she invited him to work on a project on the Humanities. “So I actually started when I was working as more of an admin person involved on the research side of things. And I discovered education is something I could research.”

He realised that this could be another way of embarking on a PhD: “I was thinking it might be interesting to research what it is to research. Now I'm in Philosophy of Education here in the school, researching higher education. So I’m trying to bring in some of my previous work, as well more experiential stuff.”

One project he is currently focused on is academic integrity in his Quality and Qualifications Ireland project. It has become a significant issue due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the experience of teaching online and students having to shift to an entirely different modality, as well as those trying to support them. “QQI chose a number of areas to look at in higher education and see how we can improve quality. One of them was academic integrity, which was passed along to my colleague Prof Ann Devitt by the Senior Lecturer. It's all very good having new policies. It's great saying we're no longer going to call things cheating, we’re going to call it academic misconduct. But what do students actually think, what do they know?” The focus of their project addresses what academic colleagues know about academic integrity and how to respond to difficulties students may be having. “How do they teach students about academic integrity, and, more widely, does the institution support them to have a clear sense of what it is to have academic integrity, with a view to broadening that out and then speaking to the students themselves and seeing what they think.”

It’s an important project, he highlights, because Ireland may be good at developing policies and writing policy, “but we're not as good at execution, which is often linked to the culture. So do we need to have these large scale policies, or do we need large scale institutional changes?” It is key to understand what this culture is, so there can be a “sense of agency” from those effecting some of this change, such as academic or professional colleagues. One of his PhD candidates, Nina Sen Singh, is looking at restorative justice and restorative practices: “That’s something we can do in higher education because we are pedagogical institutions that have responsibility for students. Our goal shouldn't be to hammer people for infractions.”

Gibson is particularly interested in questions about the Humanities. His other large project, in the area of philosophy of higher education, is about what the Humanities mean to the university today. He is interested in the place of the Humanities in responding to massive challenges, such as the financial crash, global warming, immigration and, fewer jobs because of AI. “How does archaeology or philosophy fit in if everything is going to be geared towards one kind of research. What does studying early Irish poetry offer to us?”

These ideas also relate to his wider interest in academic freedom, particularly in relation to the Humanities. “I focus on the notion of academic citizenship. It's a term that's coming into use, and I'm somewhat suspicious of terms like it. Maybe that's my philosophical view coming through.” He considers the notion that everything has to be geared through a “state lens,” and cautions against the notion of borrowing metaphors from other areas: “I'm referring now to work by people who study how metaphors can show connections. If you're choosing to highlight something in a metaphor, like citizenship, you're also concealing other things going on.” Gibson has written about the problem of concealing the fact that society is not the State. “The university is not the State. We get some money, an ever-decreasing amount of money from ‘the State’, which, if we’re viewing that correctly, is us. The people who pay taxes, all of us. It’s not a gift we’re being given. We’re choosing how we use our collective resources. So we have larger responsibilities in the university beyond simply State goals which change from election cycle to election cycle.”

This was made particularly clear to him during his research in Denmark, where there is no tenure. “Institutions have no accounting powers on their own. They’re given funding from year to year, and if a government passes a law, they have to execute it. They are academic citizens of the state, and they have to do what they’re told, and that means their space for academic freedom is incredibly circumscribed.” PhD researchers, specifically, have been criticised by Danish parliamentarians, for researching things that they think paint Denmark in a negative light, such as researching on gender or researching aspects of religion and race.

“We’re actually quite lucky in Ireland,” Gibson points out, “with the nature of the legislation, which specifies that one of our roles in the university is cultural.” He highlights that when the University Act came into came into law in 1997, there was a lot of discussions that happened between the State and higher education, as well as within higher education.

“Some institutions like Trinity are very good at consultation, we’ve been able to say that we have multiple values, not just the economic values or those desired by the state at a given time. For me, a key aspect of academic freedom is freedom from interference. There’s something specific that we can do. Everyone doesn’t just turn out a product. We turn out students. It’s very different, and attention to that difference is really valuable, I think.”

Alongside his teaching, he’s still involved with his colleagues in Denmark and is working with colleagues in the School of Education on a Horizon bid. As a member of the Board of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society, he is helping to plan their next conference in Norway. The following conference will be held in Dublin, “so I’m taking notes.” He is very enthusiastic about the future of his field: “there's a sense of momentum with the people I'm doing research with, a kind of urgency. They’re getting to a stage where they're planning to work on this for the next 3 or 4 years. I'm getting to see what they're talking about and getting to build on their findings. That's something I'm really enjoying, being in a field like philosophy of higher education, which is coming into its own.”

He doesn’t, he stresses, “have any kind of bootstrap story of individual success.” A career in academia includes “luck and a lot of support.” If you're interested in pursuing a subject, he adds, it’s important to be receptive to what comes along. It happened for him because he was working in a research office and really enjoying that, and “getting a lot out of what people were doing with their research.”

The importance of cherishing academic freedom is clear in Gibson’s career: “there’s something essential about the university that's valuable and needs to be protected. Whether that's researching the arts or our approaches to academic integrity, and what that means. It's an interesting institution it has a history, and it has a culture.” He highlights that research and admin roles are now becoming far more enmeshed. “What we're doing is so much more complex. We're going into a classroom. There's all kinds of policies we need to deal with. Roles don't exist in a static way anymore. We shift across disciplines, we do different things at different points. That collegiality that used to be a real strength of universities, we need to reconnect with that. That is how we manage to do things well, not by copying what is happening in a factory, or a large company.”  Ultimately, he’s interested in “finding ways to draw that out and demonstrating how the Humanities is a valuable way of approaching things.”

- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen