The university as sanctuary: home and unhomeliness

Abstract

Recent work at the confluence of Philosophy and Higher Education Studies has conceptualized the university as a place for belonging. The university, on this understanding, offers respite and refuge and familiarity; it is a place for insiders and outsiders to come together and to forge meaningful and lasting bonds. One of the interesting aspects about this body of scholarship is that its antithesis also exists. There is an equally compelling body of work in the philosophy of education that conceptualizes the university as singularly alienating, troubling, and disorientating. But are these two ideas of what it means to experience a higher education at odds with each other? We would argue to the contrary, rather maintaining that they are ineluctably related through the idea of sanctuary. We propose the idea of the university as sanctuary to encapsulate both what it means for the university to be a site for safety and familiarity and, paradoxically, a place where such senses are importantly challenged. We are interested in the implications of this idea for scholars' experiences of belonging as well as their encounters with radical otherness.

1. Universities, sanctuary, and homeliness

One of the tragic human consequences of periods of political turmoil and persecution is the rise in refugee populations and the flight to safety through mass movements of peoples. The Syrian civil war, the Iraqi conflict, the war in Afghanistan, and the crisis in Yemen have all resulted in such migration. It is as a response to these devastating and catastrophic circumstances that the idea for a Universities of Sanctuary movement arose. The need for such a movement has been brought even more sharply into focus recently with the crisis in Ukraine following the Russian invasions in February 2022. As a result, universities not only demonstrated their support and standing with the people of Ukraine, through fundraising activities and social media campaigns, but also through practical support through the UK-based Council for At-Risk Academics,¹ and the Universities of Sanctuary movement, providing safe places for academics and scholars to continue their work. This is not a UK nor even a European phenomenon alone. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s planned immigration policy of mass deportations in 2016, a number of North American colleges and universities declared themselves as sanctuary campuses, adopting policies to protect members of the campus community who are undocumented migrants.

As one part of the wider City of Sanctuary movement (which seeks to offer places of safety, where those fleeing are offered welcome into inclusive communities), the idea of the University of Sanctuary began in Sheffield, UK, in 2005. Through its scheme to recognize those universities which welcome people seeking sanctuary into their academic community and which commit to foster a culture of awareness and inclusivity, the award of the status of University of Sanctuary has been developed.² Rooted in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,³ which states that higher education should be available to all, based on merit, Universities of Sanctuary offer access—as well as financial and practical support to enable engagement—to scholars at all levels. Universities of Sanctuary also commit to providing access not only to academic programmes, but also to university facilities such as libraries, arts, and sporting venues. To date, twenty-two UK universities have been formally recognized, as a result of a panel assessment, as Universities of Sanctuary.⁴ Universities of Sanctuary claim benefits not only to those seeking sanctuary, but also to the wider academic community through enriching academic culture by acknowledging different cultural perspectives, and countering discourses of racism and xenophobia. The award recognizes that to be a University of Sanctuary requires an institution-wide approach underpinned by three central commitments: (1) learning together about what it means to seek sanctuary; (2) embedding the principles of welcome, safety, and inclusion across the breadth of the university’s activities and processes, and (3) agreeing to disseminate the vision for sanctuary beyond the institution (Grace and Margolis 2019).

Thinking of the university as a place of sanctuary and welcome is not limited to refugees or asylum seekers fleeing from political unrest and persecution. In another sense, universities have always been places of sanctuary for students who, for many reasons, are studying without the support of their families. In England, the Office for Students (the current regulatory body) recommends that university access and participation plans⁵ give specific attention to the needs of students who are care leavers, or who are estranged from their families (OfS 2020). For these students, the physical space of the university takes on a particular significance; it is their home, their place of safety and security—a sanctuary physically as well as emotionally (Spacey and Sanderson 2021).

During the Covid-19 pandemic which started to raise significant concerns in Wuhan, China in early 2020, universities hit the headlines. The move to teaching online (for many students) raised concerns about missed learning, about how assessments would be conducted, and about perceptions of value for money with the loss of face-to-face tuition, and no reduction in tuition fees (Watermeyer et al. 2021). But while the headlines were full of stories of students in locked-down campuses, with little access to fresh food and basic supplies, there were also accounts—though taking up much less column space—of students who chose to stay in their university accommodation. Fearing asymptomatic transmission of the virus to vulnerable family members at home, they literally sought sanctuary in their university accommodation. As the news channels carried poignant stories of care workers moving into care homes to protect both the residents, and their own families, and of nurses and doctors living in hotels to avoid taking the virus back home, so some students stayed put on campus (Hall and Packham 2020). What these examples show is that for different groups, the university has come to be seen as a physical place of ‘sanctuary’—understood in terms of safety and security. But beyond the university’s location, the bricks and mortar, and the weak senses of belonging articulated in terms of ‘fitting in’ with the dominant culture, the university can afford something else: a sense of place, and of authentic belonging where students are able to act autonomously and purposively in the world as relational, critical beings (Graham and Moir 2022).

The importance of place and belonging in the ‘broader lifeworlds’ of young people has become ever more apparent. Following the closure of campus facilities in 2020 and 2021, universities across the globe were soon to acknowledge that the student experience was much broader than that captured by formal imperatives of teaching and learning. All were immediately concerned to foreground institutional values of group membership and social engagement. Students articulated the value of ‘an embodied and communal experience’ of higher education where ‘communities of belonging are built through embodied interactions’ (Eringfield 2021: 147). As universities themselves articulated strong and renewed aspirations towards community, connection, and belonging (Felten and Lambert 2020; Thomas 2021), their students recognized the very human need to feel part of something greater than the individual alone.

Of course, from the foregrounding of clubs and societies to the signposting of study hubs and student unions, student life has always been conceptualized as a time of togetherness, affiliation, connection, and kinship.⁶ Contemporary iterations of belonging, however, have taken on a new resonance, and urgency, in an era of competition in higher education for students, of widening participation, and of the economic necessity of retaining students (Wisker and Masika 2017; Pedler et al. 2022). A quick glance at any university website underscores the dominance of these new discourses of belonging which are replicated across much of the higher education sector. The homepages of Trinity College and University College Dublin, Ireland, reference ‘a vibrant campus life’ amidst a suite of ‘community-building activities’;⁷ the UK universities of York and Bristol boast ‘a safe and inclusive campus environment’ where diverse student bodies can thrive and ‘belong’;⁸ the University of Leiden aspires to be ‘an inspiring community of students and staff from almost all corners of the world’,⁹ while Harvard University boasts an Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging¹⁰ that shares university-wide events with a focus on social justice, building community, and creating a welcoming culture for historically marginalized identities.

The university in these senses is much more than an abstract ideal. It is a concrete space where the energy of real-life places and rituals is paramount. Indeed, the sense that a person is doing something with others, as part of a broader experience that stretches and unites across time and space, has always been fundamental to the university as institution: from rituals of arrival (matriculation formalities and induction events) to rituals of departure (graduation ceremonies and celebrations). It is long established also that students living on campus thrive both academically and socially. As Forstenzer points out, these are the ‘halcyon days’ of university life (2021: 87). They are rooted in place and in time and in the vital experiences of formative human connection.

The signature importance of place in university life, and for securing belonging, is also explored by Nørgård and Bengtsen in their paper, ‘Academic Citizenship Beyond the Campus: A Call for the Placeful University’ (2016). Here the authors argue that the university should develop not only people but also ‘places that care’—places that offer sanctuary and inclusion and that invite embodied practices of dwelling. Universities should allow for the ‘creativity’ and ‘playfulness’ of their staff and students, they argue, and they should champion this same flexibility in their design of physical space. Ultimately, for Nørgård and Bengtsen, the entire architecture of universities (to include classrooms, lecture theatres, libraries, canteens, lounge areas, and hallways) should be reimagined in ways that reflect the university as a physical force: as a place that might be owned, occupied, and lived in by its current community. In the authors’ own words:

When we speak of the university as a place and not merely a space, we speak of it as a place where people, with Heidegger’s term, ‘dwell’ (Heidegger 2000: 80). It is not an empty container to be filled with the conceptual spirit or concrete flesh of the people occupying these spaces (Aaen and Nørgård 2015). The university itself is a force of being, and by dwelling there we become ‘absorbed’ (Heidegger 2000) into this being. Accordingly, the university is not just a space we occupy in a specific time span during the day, while we teach or attend classes, continue our research projects, and maintain and develop the infrastructure of our department or faculty. Rather, the university becomes part of our broader lifeworld. (Nørgård and Bengtsen 2016: 9)

Nørgård and Bengtsen draw fruitfully from Heidegger in development of their ideas of place-making and dwelling on the university campus. Core ideas foregrounded in their account include those of staying and settling down. These ideas are undoubtedly important when we consider the need for university members to feel meaningfully rooted in their campus settings. However, as we push further on our own idea of the university as sanctuary, we see the need to go beyond this Heideggarian view. Philosophically speaking, we believe that there is something richer at stake in the idea of the university as sanctuary—something not entirely captured by imaginaries of placefulness, dwelling, or rootedness. There is, we would argue, an important temporal dimension to our account, to the extent that a university experience can suspend time in interesting and important ways.

The work of Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons is insightful here. In their seminal work, In Defence of the School, these authors develop a liberal account of education hearkening back to the Greek idea of ‘scholē’. This is an idea of the school where leisure and contemplation are foregrounded and where practical interests (e.g. those relating to career preparation or other utilitarian ends) are held in abeyance. On this understanding, the school has unique temporal features that disrupt the usual time-pressured practices of our social and political lives. The school releases us from the weight of our past as well as the expectations of the future and democratizes the time offered to us by drawing us into the ‘here-and-now’ of the ‘present tense’ (2013: 33). Seán Henry captures this idea well when he writes that in Masschelein and Simons’ concept of suspension, any notion of burdening the student with their cultural contexts is openly and full-heartedly rejected. Instead, the student is freed from any personal and social baggage, is ‘lifted up’ from their current cares, and is meaningfully emancipated ‘to attend to the world as it presents itself to them, an attention that relies only on the student being there as a student, and nothing more’ (Henry 2021: 165).

As Henry points out, Masschelein and Simons’ focus is on the school rather than the university. Undoubtedly, however, and Henry notes this, too, there is a broader critique implicit in their work that is directly relevant to the higher education context. The idea of gaining a reprieve from the relentless march of time can certainly be connected to broader critiques of the instrumentalizing aspects of the neoliberal university. Indeed, this counter idea of the university as a protected or secure space where risks can be meaningfully taken (and where the usual pressures of time and capitalism do not quite apply) is a common one in philosophical accounts of higher education. Michael Oakeshott, for example, has proposed that the university characteristically offers ‘the gift of the interval’ (Oakeshott 1989: 114), a time of genuine refuge where students can make mistakes without fear of censure from the outside world. The university on this understanding is ‘a privileged space in which to venture out, to test the water’, in Jon Nixon’s words (2018: 88). In invoking ‘the halcyon days of university life’, Forstenzer, similarly, imagines the university as a place where students are safe to mature and transform. Forstenzer argues compellingly that it is this same ideal of undergraduate education as a ‘time out of time’—as a space where personal flourishing is brought into conversation with the wider social and political struggles of one’s time—that lies at the heart of what attracted many of us to the vocation of university educator in the first place.

2. The university as an encounter with otherness

In developing the idea of ‘the university as sanctuary’, we have been arguing in this article that higher education can be a place for the safe and the familiar. It can offer respite and refuge and belonging, a place for insiders and outsiders to come together and to forge meaningful and lasting bonds. But in making this argument we concede also that the university can be singularly alienating, troubling, and disorientating. The university can—and should— challenge us, it can introduce us to the unexpected, and it can unsettle all that we thought we knew (Fulford 2015, 2021).

Barnett and Bengsten have written recently of the university experience as one of ‘detachment’. On this understanding, higher education is a testing ground where many of a student’s previously held ‘attachments’ (i.e. their values, concepts, ideas, or theories) are up for discussion and debate. This does not mean that in the university arena all values and ideas have to be surrendered, but it does point to a very deliberate mindset–on the part of the individual student that is—that no single attachment is or should be secure. A comparison might be drawn here with Richard Rorty’s notion of the ‘liberal ironist’. As Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, the ‘liberal ironist’ is a product of democratic education. They sit loose from all normative commitments; they recognize instead that their current language, conscience, and morality are all contingent products or accidentally produced metaphors of a particular time or place (Rorty 1989). Such recognition of contingency, in the argument of Barnett and Bengsten, goes to the heart of education as ‘estrangement’. Prior frameworks are divested and bracketed so that one might adopt fresh frameworks anew. And higher education in its ideal sense is ultimately defined by this life-long commitment to ‘divesting’ or ‘bracketing’; higher education is, ultimately, ‘estrangement’, ‘detachment’, or ‘semi-detachment’. Higher education, in the authors’ own words:

[…] is an acceptance that any attempt to perceive the world, including the perceptual field in front of one—as well as mega-objects that possess an inherent invisibility (such as globalisation or climate change)—has no security: there is always at least a lurking hesitancy, such that one just does not know which concepts, ideas, values or frameworks on which to pin one’s hopes. (Barnett and Bengsten 2021: 153)

Thinking in similar terms of the university experience as an encounter with otherness, Edward Said has suggested that the ultimate model of the scholar is that of the migrant or the traveller. Such a figure is intellectually unencumbered (comparable to Barnett and Bengsten’s ‘detached’ student, perhaps, or Rorty’s ‘liberal’ ironist) and is more than willing to enter different worlds, to embrace novelty, and to cultivate an ongoing sense of emancipation. As scholars we should be free ‘to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure’, writes Said, ‘[…] to use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics’. Indeed, it is this acknowledgement of otherness that defines the lone university scholar. It is this acknowledgement of otherness that challenges the broader university community ‘to transform what might be conflict, or contest, or assertion, into reconciliation, mutuality, recognition, and creative interaction’ (Said, quoted in Higgins 2021).

Is there, then, something of a dichotomy emerging here, in our idea of the university? Is it a (physical) place of sanctuary and safety where belonging and homeliness are prioritized? Even the most cursory of glances at the websites, marketing campaigns, and induction processes of many higher education institutions suggest as much. And this is not unexpected, especially in the increasing number of contexts in which eigher education operates explicitly as a market, keen to recruit and to retain students and so to secure fee income. Universities invest heavily not only in measures to enhance students’ experience of belonging, but also to quantify it, especially in pandemic times when the capacity both to belong, and to experience the university as a place of sanctuary, were profoundly and fundamentally disrupted (Tice et al. 2021).

But against this, as we are arguing, there is a body of scholarship which reimagines the university as a space of radical encounter (where the full force of the etymological roots of ‘encounter’ in the meeting of an adversary are fully realized).¹¹ In such spaces, our most deeply held convictions can be profoundly troubled and disturbed (Fulford 2019). We might experience a kind of exposure—an ex-position, or a movement outside or beyond ourselves which seems to run contrary to the ideas of the sanctuary as extending a welcome to its safety (Fulford 2013). But are these two ideas of what it means to experience a higher education at odds with each other? We would argue to the contrary, rather maintaining that they are ineluctably related through the idea of sanctuary. We propose the idea of the university as sanctuary to encapsulate and exemplify both what it means for the university to be a site for safety and familiarity (a ‘sanctuary’ in a very meaningful sense), and, paradoxically, a place where such senses are importantly challenged. It is a place both to cultivate the self, and to open that travelling self to the other. As Jon Nixon phrases it, in his reading of Hannah Arendt, ‘the university is both a repository of received wisdom and informed opinion and the crucible within which such wisdom and opinion, and rather strangely, is to be challenged and endlessly critiqued’ (Nixon 2018: 92).

In what follows, we develop a line of thinking about the university that moves beyond the idea of the institution as a place of sanctuary (for whichever group(s) need to seek safety and security there), towards a broader idea of the university as sanctuary, and to the implications of this both for the experiences of belonging, and of estrangement, detachment, and encounter with radical otherness.

3. Tracing the roots of ‘sanctuary’

The noun ‘sanctuary’ is etymologically related to what is holy, sacred, or set apart, and where the divine was believed to be especially present (from the Old French saintuaire), and, in its later usage, to a place of refuge or protection.¹²  Codex Theodoianus—a compilation of the laws of the Christian emperors in the Roman empire—first established churches as places of sanctuary. But even earlier, the goddess Diana’s sanctuary at Ephesus—The Temple of Artemis—was a place of asylum (Rabben 2016), and the Egyptians believed the area’s surrounding shrines were locations that offered protection (Siebold 1937). The Hebrew Bible attests to the tradition of establishing entire cities as places of refuge and as sanctuaries: ‘Then the LORD said to Joshua: “Say to the people of Israel, Appoint the cities of refuge, of which I spoke to you through Moses”’ (Joshua 20, 1–2, Revised Standard Version).

Contemporary iterations of sanctuary extend the idea beyond naming and defining sacred spaces, and towards the idea of a common space—one of gathering (Sołjan 2011). We see these new iterations of humanitarian sanctuaries in the community spaces that provide essential services for newly arrived immigrants into a country. We also see embassies becoming places of political asylum, notably for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who, in 2012, sought sanctuary and asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London from 2012 until his arrest in 2019. The idea of sanctuary is also related to nonhuman beneficiaries. We refer to animal sanctuaries as places for domestic and wild animals to live, and be protected for the rest of their lives, and to plant sanctuaries that act as refuges for critically endangered specimens and ecosystems.

Thinking in particular of the sacred sanctuaries of the world’s major religions, we find that there are three common characteristics. In many ways, these same features play out in other nonreligious sanctuaries—especially those established for humanitarian work. First, they are places of gathering; second, they are sites for encounter with otherness; third, they are places in which the rites and rituals open up the possibilities of transformation. We now turn to consider these briefly:

• The sanctuary as a place of gathering

The church, synagogue, temple, or mosque is a place for the faithful to gather, not only for major annual religious festivals, but more regularly for weekly worship, devotion, teaching, prayer, or even for friendship and fellowship. The sanctuary, in this sense, gathers the faithful together, and creates community. González-Rubial and de Torres (2018) note that sites such as markets, graves, watering holes, and sanctuaries, have long been places of gathering (especially for pastoral and nomadic communities). Their importance in terms of the making of alliances, conflict resolution, communication of news, and the cementing of relationships, has been central for millennia. Moreover, sanctuaries were located not only in places of divine revelation, but also at strategic crossing points (of trade routes, or of passes between coastal and interior communities) for the very purpose of facilitating gatherings. This is illustrated in the ancient sanctuary of Iskudar in Somalia, whose name literally means gathering, or ‘aggregation, mixing, or combination’ (González-Rubial and de Torres 2018: 12).

• (ii) The sanctuary as a site of encounter with otherness

While the sanctuary offers a place where we can feel, at least in some senses, belonging and an ‘at-homeness’ with others, it is also—paradoxically—a place of radical unsettling where we encounter otherness. This otherness in the Hebrew Bible is the divine presence, as shown in Exodus 25, 8, where the God says: ‘And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst’ (Revised Standard Version). In the Holy of Holies—the inner sanctuary of the Jewish Tabernacle, God’s presence was thought to dwell. Such was its otherness that access to it was highly restricted and it was entered only once a year by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.

It is not only religious sanctuaries that afford this experience of otherness. To take a secular example, it has become increasingly common to think of the natural world as a sanctuary from the demands of our highly pressured working and social lives. Simon Hailwood, for example, stresses the value of nature’s otherness precisely because it affords a distinction between humanity, and nature ‘valued precisely for its otherness’ (2000: 353). What we take this to mean here, is that nature as sanctuary opens up an experience of something that throws us back onto our own humanity, to consider our own position in the world. In some ways at least, the religious sanctuary does something broadly similar.

• (iii) Rites and rituals of transformation in the sanctuary

Sanctuaries of many kinds have rites and rituals¹³ associated with them (though we might call them ‘traditions’ or ‘established practices’ in more secular places of safety and refuge). Most of the major religions have rites of prayer or devotion, worship, pilgrimage, and charitable work. Many also have particular rituals associated with their religious calendar, or with different stages of life. These rites and rituals are often thought to effect something beyond the mere performance of the act; they are transformative for the individual. The rituals of rites of passage (naming, circumcision, coming of age, taking holy orders, etc.) transform the individual in the sight of the religious community, and some rituals are thought to have a personally transformative effect (the taking of mass; the practice of adult baptism; the making of a confession; or the performance of Hajj, for example).

In arguing that we can think about the university as sanctuary, we are making the claim that these characteristics of the sanctuary (both in the religious and the secular sense) are shared. But this is not to leave the argument in the realm of the ethereal or idealistic; it is rather to anchor it in the daily embodied and material practices of those aspects of university life that make real this idea of being-at-home, while also being-exposed. In doing this, we adopt the kind of affirmative attitude towards the university that Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski refer to as ‘a post-critical orientation to education that gains purchase on our current conditions, and that is founded in a hope for what is to come’ (2017: 15).

There are, therefore, significant consequences of accepting our argument. First, we argue that there are implications at the strategic level for thinking of the university as sanctuary by virtue of its being a site of gathering where there is the possibility for a radical encounter with otherness. For example, if we take seriously the Department for Education in England’s claim that ‘Education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not for the entrenchment of privilege’ (DfES 2003: 67), then the principle of widening participation—what Barnett refers to as a dominant social imaginary of the university (2016: 173)—takes on a renewed urgency. Universities’ access and participation plans¹⁴ must continue to ensure that students who can benefit from higher education can access it, regardless of their socio-economic status or any protected characteristic. There are strategic implications for how universities plan, in a postpandemic environment, to rethink their internationalization strategies, and to attract scholars from across global contexts in order to gather together a rich diversity of cultural perspectives. Second, there are implications at the curricular level for university portfolios. In an age where, as Barnett points out, we are witnessing the ‘apparent diminution of the humanities’ (2016: 88) in favour of courses in the natural sciences, technology, and engineering (as well as those which have an overtly vocational orientation leading graduates into highly skilled employment to support the economy), the need to gather together students to study—through interdisciplinary approaches—the wicked problems facing humanity, has arguably never been greater. Third, it is at the pedagogical level that universities can open up ways for students to experience a radical encounter with otherness. To encounter the otherness of ideas through the form of the lecture, for example, is to be caught up in a form of address that demands a response:

The lecture, then, can be thought of not only as an address, but also as an invitation to consent in criteria—to agree that this is the way things are for us, that we see the world in this way. But equally, it is an invitation that can be refused when students’ response is to express dissent—to refuse to acknowledge that the world is this way for them. (Fulford and Mahon 2020: 369)

It is through the implementation of these kinds of policy, and the practices that open up from them, that the productive tension between an at-homeness (a sense of belonging to an institution in which one can flourish) and an un-homeliness (that disrupts both thinking, and our sense of ourselves in rich and educative ways) can begin to be realized. In proposing this, we now turn to discuss further how the institution of the university is a space for gathering that opens up possibilities for encounters with otherness, and where its rites and rituals are transformative for those who are part of its community.

4. The university as sanctuary

An example from literature beautifully illustrates how the university is sanctuary; this comes from Anna (‘Nan’) Shepherd’s acclaimed novel, The Quarry Wood, published in 1928. In turning to Shepherd’s text at this point, we implicitly make the claim that literary fiction can attune us in a different way to the university experience. We suggest that literary fiction can illuminate this new ontological conceptualization of the university as it can interrupt any fixed or uncritical narratives. More specifically, as we turn to Shepherd’s text in the broader context of a philosophical discussion on the university as sanctuary, we make the more general claim that a literary reading can very usefully sit alongside related theoretical or empirical approaches. We turn to Shepherd’s novel not merely by way of illustration. We are rather drawing on her work through a close attention to the text: a ‘consideration of words as a characteristic of the ways in which we [might read] a text in educational philosophy’ (Fulford and Hodgson 2016: 147). What emerges from such an engagement is what Joris Vlieghe calls ‘a conversation … . It is perhaps more appropriate to say that this kind of work eventually consists in a conversation with oneself: looking at words and conceptual clarifications others have developed one tests whether they make sense for oneself’ (Vlieghe in Fulford and Hodgson 2016: 63).

In The Quarry Wood, Shepherd tells the story of Martha Ironside, who with the support of her Aunt Josephine Leggatt (yet to the bemusement and incomprehension of her family), accepts a place at university to study to become a teacher. This is an account of her emotional and intellectual struggles, and her coming of age as she escapes the drab domestic family life with her psychologically unwell mother, Emmeline, and her down-to-earth father, Geordie. Her world is tightly contained, for: ‘She had not yet discovered that men and women are of importance in the scheme of things’ (Shepherd 2018: 51). For Martha, university was a place of gathering. It was universitas (literally, a ‘gathering’ or ‘aggregate’)—a community of masters and scholars.¹⁵ Here were assembled people the likes of whom she had never met: Professor Gregory, whose opening lecture she describes as a ‘moment of apocalypse’ (p. 51); Luke Cromar (for whom she holds unrequited love), Dussie, Luke’s wife, whom she describes as ‘tiny, radiant, absurdly finished and mature’ (p. 42), and Daxter, the Sacrist, who ‘made her world alive for her in new directions’ (p. 53).

The university was sanctuary for Martha—not only as a place of refuge from the drudgery of her domestic and caring responsibilities—but also as a place of radical encounter with otherness. Being in the university renders her acutely aware of what is beyond her to know:

Convulsed, in a jealous agony, she raced for knowledge, panting. Supposing … she should not be able to gather all the knowledge that there was … she had a moment of profound disillusion. ‘Is this all I know? I thought I should know everything’. (Shepherd 2018: 50)

But her encounter with otherness is also more radically ontological. Shepherd writes that: ‘Her world was in confusion a sublime disordered plenty’ (p. 51), and that the ‘confines of her world raced out beyond her grasp’ (p. 52). It was as if ‘her universe was … widening both in time and space’ (p. 54). Such encounters with otherness, and the transformations that ensued, were often rooted not only in the subjects she was studying, but also in the pedagogical experiences she encountered, especially in Daxter’s lectures:

His theme was English literature, but to Martha it seemed as if he was speaking the language of some immortal and happy isle, some fabulous tongue that she was enabled by miracle for once to comprehend; and that he spoke of mysteries. (Shepherd 2018: 52)

That the university was a site of transformation for Martha is captured in the idea Shepherd presents to us as her being on the ‘crux of a spiritual adventure’ (the title of Chapter 13). Martha, Shepherd recounts, ‘walked enchanted’ (p. 111). Of course, she is infatuated with Luke, but Shepherd hints at something more in the profound transformation of her central character: ‘She (Martha) could not know that a cataclysm four years in preparing does not spend its forces so easily. The waters were loosened and not to be gathered back’ (p. 123).

Shepherd’s The Quarry Wood is fiction, of course, yet these same characteristics of the contemporary university—as a site for gathering which opens up spaces for encounters with otherness, and that, through the rituals of study and of immersion in one’s subject that are associated with university life, are transformative—are well documented (Fulford 2016; Saito and Hodgson 2017; Ashwin 2020). These richly evocative examples from literature serve to illustrate how we might think of the contemporary university as sanctuary.

But this is not mere word play, or indeed a fanciful addition to the growing body of scholarship on the university; rather, it does two things. First, to consider the university as sanctuary in these ways advances our understanding of the aims of Higher Education in a new way. While much has been written on this, from Newman’s seminal (1852) Idea of a University to more recent philosophical work (Standish 1991; White 1997; Barnett and Peters 2018), this article takes the often critical debate (over marketization, the regulation of the higher sector, and its subservience to government employability agendas) in a new direction. This new direction is in the sense of resisting the rhizomatic individualism that has come to mark the Higher Education sector with its focus on the personal attributes of the graduate or on their achieving highly skilled employment (Hewitt 2020). Such employment is seen both to be evidence of high-quality teaching, and hence of the value for money of a given degree programme that advances the conception of the student-as-customer (Forstenzer 2018). This focus on individual outcomes is at odds with thinking of the university as sanctuary, where the idea of gathering is central. This notion of gathering (both of people, and also of diverse perspectives and experiences), gives our understanding of the aims of Higher Education a communal sense. It is through our being, talking, thinking, living, and studying together that we are mutually transformed. This gives a renewed sense of the importance of Higher Education as a public, rather than solely as a private, good. In these ways, our argument is in the spirit of Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski’s (2017) Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy that seeks to resist the ‘apparent inescapability of neoliberal rationality’ (p. 16) that marks much work on Higher Education in general, and on the aims of education in particular.

Second, by proposing a seemingly minor shift in preposition—from university of sanctuary to university as sanctuary, something significant is achieved in that we open up a new vein of thinking about what being designated as a sanctuary university might mean for all those who work and study in it. This should shift thinking away from an institutional concern with demonstrating the underpinning principles of learning, embedding, and sharing, to gain initial accreditation as a university of sanctuary, and towards a richer rethinking of what might be accomplished in the university seen in terms of a space for gathering, for encounters with otherness, and for the performance of the rites and rituals of transformation.

The university as sanctuary profoundly disrupts our sense of at-homeness and engenders a new sense of belonging. For Martha, this disruption radically alters her perception of the once safe environs of her rural cottage life with her family: ‘This widening world of ideas grew more and more the true abode of her consciousness. The cottage did not reabsorb her afternoon by afternoon: it received her back. She was in its life but not of it’ (Shepherd 2018: 56). This is not about rejecting home—especially for those forcibly estranged from it—but about living well with a kind of educational unhomeliness that a Higher Education offers. We want to position the idea of the university as sanctuary as enabling just this kind of educational unhomeliness. Perhaps what we are getting at here is best described in Martha’s own words, and it is with these that we close:

The confines of her world were racing out beyond her grasp … . She felt bruised and dizzy, as though from travelling rapidly through air. But she had seen new countries, seen—and it was this that elated her, gave her the sense of newness in life itself that makes our past by moments apocryphal—the magnitude of undiscovered country that awaited her conquest …. At that moment Martha was thinking: ‘And I shall go on travelling like that. There will be more new countries.’ (Shepherd 2018: 52)

5. Coda

Throughout this article we have been developing the idea of the university as sanctuary. For us authors, as practising academics in the UK and Ireland, this idea usefully captures the strange mixture of being-at-home and being-exposed that a university education can uniquely provide. In our ‘university as sanctuary’ model, thinkers and learners gather together in a protected time and space. They risk voicing their tentative ideas; they escape the individualism increasingly taking root in our neoliberal realities; and they enact a mutual transformation that meaningfully substantiates philosophical ideas of Higher Education as a public good.

One practical issue that seems particularly pertinent to our model is that of ‘safe spaces’ in Higher Education. The idea of the safe space, as articulated by Carpenter et al. (2016: 191), ‘connotes inclusivity, acceptance and especially the protection of certain bodies, particularly those of women and LGBTQ students’. Such inclusivity and protection might mean, for example, a university-mandated limit on hateful, discriminatory, or provocative speech or related policies of ‘no-platforming’ or ‘viewpoint-selective censorship’. These policies in turn may be seen to threaten the university’s core commitment to plurality of opinion and expression of free speech (Heinze 2018: 79). A number of philosophical questions consequently arise. Should educational institutions prioritize safe spaces over challenging engagement? Should the commitment to dignity and respect for vulnerable groups trump any broader appeal to the civil liberties of would-be visiting students or speakers? And how can the university seminar leader (to take one very concrete example) meet these twin ethical demands of protecting vulnerability and safeguarding freedom?

There are of course no easy or straightforward answers to these questions. There is only an acknowledgement of the complex nature of the educational encounter. As Parker Palmer outlines in The Courage to Teach, the space of education is always a paradoxical one: it must be bounded yet open; it must be hospitable yet ‘charged’; and it must invite the voice of the individual as well as the voice of the group (Palmer 1998: 75). In thinking of the university as sanctuary, finally, it is important to recognize these paradoxes as well as the dual aspects of familiarity and alienation that we have been holding in tension throughout this article. Yes, the university should offer respite and refuge and belonging; but it should also challenge us. It should unsettle us. It should trouble all that we thought we knew. And it is perhaps in this very conjunction of the strange and the familiar that the unique power of the university lies.

References

Footnotes