There is a comforting tale that heads of higher education
institutions (HEIs) like to tell each other. "Go around your
university or college," they say, "and ask the first ten people who
you meet how their morale is. The response will always be
'rock-bottom.' Then ask them what they are working on. The
responses will be full of life, of optimism and of enthusiasm for
the task in hand." The moral of the story is that the two sets of
responses don't compute; that the first is somehow unthinking and
ideological, and the second unguarded and sincere.
The thesis of this book is that the contradictory answers may
well compute more effectively than is acknowledged: that the
culture of higher education and the mesh of psychological
contracts, or "deals," that make it up make much of the current
discourse about happiness and unhappiness in contemporary life look
simplistic and banal.
In particular, the much-vaunted "science of happiness" may not
have much to say to us. There is also a potential link between the
Manichean discourse about morale and our wider culture's approach
to happiness. Both normally deal in extremes, and much more rarely
in graduations.
Why is so much discourse about contemporary higher education
structured around (real and imagined) unhappiness? How does this
connect with the realities of life within (and just outside) the
institutions? Does it matter, and, if so, what should we be doing
about it? Based on historical, sociological and philosophical
analysis, this book offers some answers to these questions.
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