Victoria De Rijke - Higher Education and Love: Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Trajectories

People say, All we really need is love. If there were universal love, all would go well. But we dont appear to have it. So we have to find a way that works (Bohm, 2004, p. i). The question is, what way is that? It is neither an obvious topic nor an easy task to write about love in higher education (HE); easier perhaps to reflect on the absence of it. For the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert , part of the problem is how humans define it: immortal love is cheapened, the very word parcelled out, thrown aside in favour of mortal love , where (in his belief, God-given) hearts and brains take ownership of it. By the third in his Love series, love has become personified as an entity with its own agency, sees mortals slack or hesitant, knows itself found on the margins, has to ask if its welcome is not enough. Institutional forms of love suffer from similarly straightened conditions. Though love of wisdom may still drive scholarship, love is largely lacking in the institutionally competitive, exclusionary and ego-(d)riven culture of scholarly outputs such as academic reflection in published books. If by 2019, Carol A. Taylor was saddened by the decline and fall of many important values in HE , already by 2011 Tim Ingold had decried

the prostitution of scholarship before the twin idols of innovation and competitiveness have reduced once fine traditions of learning to market brands, the pursuit of excellence to a grubby scramble for funding and prestige, and books such as this to outputs whose value is measured by rating and impact rather than what they might have to contribute to human understanding. (Ingold, 2011, p. xiii)

Ingolds cynical choice to see scholarly love as prostitution deliberately defines it as a coldly commercial transaction as well as (causing) the unworthy or corrupt use of talent, engaged in an undignified grubby scramble for respect or reputation rather than knowledge exchange. Taylor went further by questioning nostalgic forms of loss in the model of the humanist (masculinist) university run on Enlightenment goals of rationality, progress and civilisation that remains riven by exclusivity and has always marginalised certain outsider groups (2018, p. 6). She argues HE needs

more profoundly hopeful modes of knowingincluding affect, sensuousness, relationality, intuition, haphazard experiment and lovewhich seem to offer better epistemological alternatives to the self-centred arrogance of human exceptionalism and the forms of knowingcognitive, individialised, objectivising, specularit requires and promotes . (Taylor, 2018, p. 9)

Hope for humanity, let alone HE , is yet another highly contradictory notion at present. Hollick and Connellys (2011) study of trauma suggests that accepting aggression, violence , hierarchy and the drive for power, status and wealth as normal has done considerable damage to human health and development. It has certainly damaged higher education. We may hope that Love is the answer [to trauma]. Love of ourselves. Love of our families. Love of communities . Love of our society. Love of humanity. Love of the Earth and all living beings . Love made manifest in action, caring for each other physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually (Hollick & Connelly, 2011, p. 370), or take Cornel Wests simple definition of love as steadfast commitment to the well-being of others (2008, p. 156).