Inhabiting border country : academic auto/biographies from a post-1992 university

Abstract

All British universities have undergone rapid expansion and change in the period 1988 - 2008. There are a range of studies of how such expansion and change has affected universities and academic lives in general. However, there are few that have looked at individual academic identities in this context. This study looks at one post-1992 University in terms of at least 20 years of lived experience in that university. The sample is of five male academics in different roles and discipline areas. The focus is on the ways in which their academic identities have been constructed and reconstructed in the process of change. The research design is a qualitative case study. It employs a phenomenological approach, exploring the meaning five academics placed on their experiences. Auto/biographical methods were used to gather data. The five academic life stories were recorded in a series of interviews. The resultant narratives were then analysed by constructing a plot portraying the academic life. Themes emerged from each individual academic life and these were used to make sense of that life in its university context. Despite reactive, sometimes contradictory, standardising and controlling pressures inherent within U.K. higher education polices over the past 25 years, and continuing lack of clarity about the purpose of U.K higher education, the five academics illustrated lives and identities that were distinct and diverse, illustrating the power of human agency. The individual academics were able to construct and reconstruct unique identities in a variety of ways within their communities of practice, making meaning out of their lived experience. However, they have inhabited a border country; living through the transformation of British higher education from elite to mass that is not yet complete. The study therefore contributes to the historical record of living through, and making sense of, changing forms of academic work in the shift from elite to mass higher education.

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