Received: 13 July 2017 | Revised: 28 September 2017 | Accepted: 4 October 2017

DOI: 10.1111/hequ.12153

CLASSICS ARTICLE
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Supercomplexity and the university:

Ronald Barnett and the social philosophy
of Higher Education

Søren S. E. Bengtsen

Centre for Teaching Development and

Digital Media, Centre for Higher Education
Futures, Aarhus University, Aarhus,
Denmark
Abstract
Ronald Barnett’s modern classic Realizing the University in an Age of
Supercomplexity (published December 1999), has had a crucial impact
internationally on the field of Higher Education research and develop-
ment since the book was published now nearly 20 years ago. Bridging
an academic oeuvre across almost 30 years with close to 30 published
volumes, Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity plays an
important role in the development and transformation of Barnett’s
social theory of Higher Education into a social philosophy of Higher
Education. In the book Barnett performs an important move from a
focus on knowledge and epistemology to a focus on being and ontol-
ogy in relation to Higher Education practices. Barnett shifts his
fundamental perspective and view on the relation between univer-
sities and the wider society from one of caution and worry to a
perspective of hope and vision that fully embraces the future of
Higher Education. This way, Realizing the University in an Age of
Supercomplexity has not only paved the way for Barnett’s own devel-
opment of a social philosophy of Higher Education, but also
contributed invaluably to the rise and maturing of philosophy of
Higher Education as a research field in its own right.

1 | INTRODUCTION

In many ways, Ronald Barnett’s (2000a) book Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, Highly Recom-
mended by the Society for Educational Studies (see Barnett, 2015b) and translated into Spanish and Portuguese, is a
modern classic within the field of Higher Education research. The book was a key factor in Barnett’s own development
from a social theory perspective on Higher Education to the establishing of the subfield of the philosophy of Higher
Education. From mainly being a critical observer and analyst of the changing conditions for Higher Education, Barnett
initiated a new approach of engagement, optimism and social agency in relation to Higher Education research. The
move from a social theory to a social philosophy of Higher Education is particularly visible to trace in Realizing the Uni-
versity in an Age of Supercomplexity as the book literally consists in being itself a transformation of social theory into

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social philosophy; a shift from critical observance to the imagining of Higher Education futures. Thus, the book has
paved the way for a large host of philosophers of education (Bengtsen & Barnett, in press) who have taken on the
more specific aim of conducting philosophy of Higher Education—an aim Barnett has indeed been the main driver of
promoting and qualifying during his authorship in the two decades following the publication of the book. Today, the
book keeps inspiring new readers (e.g., Leadbeatter & Peck, 2017; Niekerk, 2016; Yuen, 2017) with its stylistic power
and conceptual rigour. My own chief aim with this article is to revitalise and reinvigorate the philosophical and social
discussions on the university by drawing out Barnett’s call for more focus on Higher Education teaching and learning
practices as spaces for existential transformation and social agency. This boldness in imaginative thinking continues
forming and qualifying the debates (Barnett, 2015a; Gibbs & Barnett, 2014) about the purposes and responsibilities of
the future university.

2 | CONNECTING THE MODERN CLASSIC TO BARNETT’S OEUVRE

Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity is central in Barnett’s authorship as it bridges the works of the 1990s
with the works of the 2000s, and even heralds the coming of yet another turn in his thought with the books published in
the 2010s. Even though exploring and analysing notions of knowledge and criticality, Barnett’s work in the 1990s may
overall be described as a preoccupation with the relation between the policy shaping Higher Education in the UK during
the critical years of the early and mid-1990s. Also, this part of Barnett’s work critically discusses the institutional and
curricular changes that entailed these changes and gave rise to much discussion and renewed debate concerning the
role, status and purpose of universities and Higher Education in the maturing neo-liberal strategies and discourses, maybe
most clearly seen in the books The Idea of Higher Education (Barnett, 1990), The Limits of Competence (Barnett, 1994) and
Higher Education: A Critical Business (Barnett, 1997). Barnett’s voice in these works is embedded within the policy discus-
sions of the marketisation and instrumentalisation of Higher Education. Here, Barnett critically discussed the reduction of
students to consumers and knowledge workers. These writings have a stronger national focus and relate closely to what
was going on in the UK-countries at the time. In this phase of Barnett’s oeuvre, the offered critiqued and suggested
alternatives are based in an anglophone theoretical and philosophical tradition, with a focus on a Kantian-inspired critical
rationality and reason, and with an underlying Aristotelian framework of social virtues and political engagement. Even
though interpreting the concepts in his own way, Barnett (1997) picks up on the ‘Kantian sense of critiqued’, which ‘can
include the reflection on the limits of and constitution of understanding’ (p. 165), together with the Aristotelian under-
standing that knowledge and education are always embedded within cultural and political contexts (Barnett, 1990, 1997).
The first half (Parts I and II) of Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity continues this discussion with questions
concerning the future value of academic knowledge and Higher Education.
However, in the second half of the book (Parts III and IV) a change happens in Barnett’s thinking, and a shift in
focus from knowing to being, or from epistemology to ontology, occurs. This leads to a decade of work exploring and
defining an existential ontology of teaching and learning practices in Higher Education, which is most clearly demon-
strated with the influential paper ‘Learning for an Unknown Future’ (Barnett, 2004), the central book co-authored with
Kelly Coate Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education (Barnett & Coate, 2005) and culminating with one of his most
influential and powerful books A Will to Learn. Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (Barnett, 2007). In these works
we find a turn in Barnett’s theoretical and philosophical orientation, which becomes still deeper rooted in continental
philosophy with a special focus on, and inspiration from, thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend and Jean-Francois Lyotard
and their debates about if science is ‘a force for increased rationality and control’ or ‘an ideology serving particular
interests’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 75). This change also includes a move from a political and national focus to a more abstract
and universal focus, which becomes strengthened by the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heideg-
ger. With his analyses of Higher Education practice through Nietzsche, especially Nietzsche’s later writings, and Heideg-
ger, more or less the entire oeuvre, Barnett here lays the foundation for his own philosophy of Higher Education.
Even still, Barnett’s social philosophy of Higher Education continues to develop and transform, which has been
made manifest with his recent trilogy Being a University (Barnett, 2011a), Imagining the University (Barnett, 2013) and
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Understanding the University (Barnett, 2016). The trilogy examines and critically discusses universities as socio-political
institutions, as sets of ideas and as imaginative possibilities. Where part one of the trilogy (Barnett, 2011a) describes
and discusses the great variety of university ideas and forms of institutions, part two (Barnett, 2013) focuses on ways
of gaining new and better ideas of the university, while the third part (Barnett, 2015b) creates a comprehensive model
for the intersecting sociological and philosophical dimensions in play when imagining new university futures.
Highly interestingly, in the trilogy the ontological perspective shifts from an individual level back to an institutional
level and even beyond as the books exploring the being, not of students and teachers as such, but of universities them-
selves. Barnett’s understanding of being, in his later writings, is (re-)connected from an existential to a social realm and
forms the social ontology of the university and Higher Education that continues to occupy him today. Here, Barnett’s
€ rgen Habermas, the critical
approach to Higher Education rests on the merger of ontology with the social theory of Ju
 zek. From Habermas and
realism of Roy Bhaskar, and the poststructural philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Zi
Bhaskar, Barnett takes on the notion of criticality in social agency (Habermas) and stratified ontology (Bhaskar), and
 zek the idea about entangled and folded realities and the opening of new, speculative and imagi-
from Deleuze and Zi
nary worlds (see, e.g., Barnett, 2015b, p. 62ff.). However, instead of using his philosophical approach to critically
denude and expose the paradoxes of Higher Education policy, Barnett continues his ontological project of conceptually
building the future arenas for Higher Education thinking. Where the political domain and policymaking were the main
focus, and adversary, of Barnett’s earlier writings, he today sees it as merely one besides several important arenas that
influence and are influenced by Higher Education; for example, public institutions such as libraries and art museums,
civic spaces and debate forums, non-governmental organisations, intellectual societies, professional schools, etc.
What seems to be the catalyst of this continued transformation in Barnett’s thought is the notion of supercom-
plexity explored explicitly and systematically in Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. With this concept
Barnett encapsulates for a generation of scholars, leaders and practitioners the conditions, challenges, frustrations,
uncertainties, possibilities and hopes for Higher Education policy and practice. The term supercomplexity addresses
head-on the multifarious, and sometimes conflicting, ideas of a Higher Education system for the knowledge economy,
deep disciplinary knowledge creation and student-centred pedagogies, all realisable at the same time. This article starts
by unpacking the meaning and implications of the concept of supercomplexity and traces it backwards and onwards in
time across Barnett’s oeuvre. The following section sheds light on the important shift in focus from critical thinking to
critical being and thus points to the emergence of a full-blown ontology of Higher Education in Barnett’s work. In the
final section of the article I discuss the hints and glimpses of a social and ecological philosophy of Higher Education
already present in Barnett’s work almost 20 years ago, in an embryonic form in his descriptions of the interrelations of
political, professional, disciplinary, institutional and personal lifeworld contexts all co-constituting the reality of Higher
Education together.

3 | THE CONCEPT OF SUPERCOMPLEXITY

The concept of supercomplexity is the Archimedean point in Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity and
related journal papers written by Barnett around the time of the publication of the book (Barnett, 2000b, 2000c). The
term has since been taken up within a variety of research contexts, for example, in relation to research on academic
developmental work (McAlpine, 2006), research into the humanities (Parker, 2008), research into classroom teaching
and learning (Lea & Callaghan, 2008), and more recently the globalisation of the Higher Education sector (Block &
Estes, 2011). The concept continues to inspire and haunt researchers and developers into Higher Education policy and
practice. We see this in Yuen’s (2017) use of Barnett’s concept of supercomplexity in the discussion of how to enhance
childhood teacher programmes in Hong Kong, and in Leadbeatter and Peck (2017) and their study of the concept of
supercomplexity provides a contextual understanding and a platform for exploring curriculum practices that prepare
dental students for professional practice—and closer to home in Niekerk’s (2016) work on the changing ethos of the
university.
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The term supercomplexity addresses the postmodern condition for universities and Higher Education. A situation
of complexity, Barnett (2000a) describes, exists ‘where one is faced with a surfeit of data, knowledge or theoretical
frame within one’s immediate situation’ (p. 6). Here, the knowledge framework or paradigm is stable, and even though
it is not immediately clear how to solve a given problem, the problem can be clearly and fundamentally identified. Con-
trary, the situation of Higher Education today, according to Barnett, has become supercomplex as it is ‘not just a matter
of handling overwhelming data and theories within a given frame of reference (a situation of complexity) but also a
matter of handling multiple frames of understanding, of action and of self-identity’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 6). Here, super-
complexity points out the permeability of the boundaries between the institutional context, professional and societal
arenas, and the personal lifeworlds of students and teachers. Barnett (2000a) nuances the distinction even further by
writing that supercomplexity is ‘not just hyper-complexity [. . .]; it is not just an extended or expanded form of complex-
ity. It is a higher order form of complexity’ (p. 76). This means that ‘[t]he association of the university with Knowledge
—with a capital “K”—has to be abandoned’, and instead, Barnett argues:

we should think of the university as engaged in knowledge processes in different knowledge settings,
exploiting knowledge possibilities. Some of these processes and some of these settings will, it is hoped,
yield capital of some kind: to the attractiveness of intellectual capital has been added financial and sym-
bolic capital. (p. 21)

The term supercomplexity is closely tied to a poststructural epistemology (Barnett, 2000a, p. 115ff.) that sees knowl-
edge not as an end in itself but as inextricably embedded within social, political and cultural contexts. A bit gloomily
put, Barnett stresses that a brave new world beckons for the university, which is not one for the faint-hearted, as the
value and relevance of knowledge and Higher Education are no longer pre-given but in a constant flux. In a time of
supercomplexity the university ‘may have no clear legitimizing purpose, no definite role, no obvious responsibilities and
no secure values’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 22). Here we see a reminiscence from two thinkers that have influenced Barnett’s
work, maybe especially in the 1990s, Maxwell (1984) and Readings (1997). In a very timely way, Barnett describes the
existential crisis experienced by many universities starting, in many cases, during the 1990s, culminating around the
2000s. The themes about the social value and legitimisation of knowledge and academic work continue in Barnett’s
later writings too, for example, in the recently published paper by Barnett and Bengtsen (2017), which draws up time-
lines of perspectives on knowledge and Higher Education similar to the ones mentioned in relation to Barnett’s earlier
work.
With the notion of supercomplexity, Barnett reconnects to a central structure in his thought visible in his earlier
works too. The point about the permeable boundaries between universities, political institutions and the broader soci-
ety was very much present as a fundamental theme in The Idea of Higher Education, where Barnett (1990) points to the
‘infiltration [of Higher Education] by the wider society’ (p. 69) and terms this a ‘paradoxical situation’ (p. 71) for univer-
sities to be in. Barnett describes this as a ‘tension in the production of ideologies’ (Barnett, 1990, p. 71) as Higher Edu-
cation ‘produces technicist, managerial and economic ideologies for society; and it produces critical ideologies—for
example, ecological, feminist, deconstructivist and humanistic ideologies—consciously counterpoised against the former
set’ (p. 71). The role of the university as a part of society and at the same time a critical voice of the very same, is a dif-
ficult act. A similar discourse is detected in the later book The Limits of Competence. Knowledge, Higher Education and
Society, where Barnett (1994) states that ‘[h]igher education is in the knowledge game, but the learning society in gen-
eral is in the knowledge game too’ (p. 39). Here, Barnett (1997) addresses the fear that Higher Education becomes
trapped in the supercomplexity in an ‘unsettling’ way, where ‘the former critical space between the university’s read-
ings of concepts and society’s readings is on the point of disappearing’ (p. 51). Critically, Barnett at some points seems
to insist on the tension and incomprehension between universities and the broader political and societal developments
during his work in the 1990s. Where Maxwell some years before that started to go in a different direction, Barnett,
together with Readings in the United States, wrote with a mixture of disillusion and a strong energy, resignation and
renewed hope, that strived for a new footing that was not there yet. This is illustrated with Barnett’s critical point
that Maxwell, according to Barnett, underestimates the deep entanglement of science and society (Barnett, 1997,
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pp. 144–145), and his acknowledgement of Readings taking up the idea of Bildung (Barnett, 2000a, p. 175), which
brings society and universities closer together.
However, in Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity this unsettling aspect of Higher Education
has more the glare of an unexploited potential than of decline and downfall. The notion of the game, an expression
used mainly in Barnett’s earlier work for social and political arenas beyond the university context, is still opera-
tional in Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. And we hear of modern universities being ‘behind the
game’ together with the claims that ‘the world will always be beyond our full grasp’ and that ‘all our frameworks
for being, understanding and acting will always be challengeable’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 63)—the tone is, now, daunt-
ing and even bold. Even though the notion of supercomplexity points out that Higher Education practice takes
place on the backdrop of uncertainty, unpredictability, challengeability and contestability, Barnett nevertheless
argues that ‘the modern university [should] not be dismayed by this realization and not see in it an affront to its
dignity; let it instead revel in the uncertainty that surrounds us and to which the university contributes in substan-
tial measure’ (p. 63). We see here the dawning of a new hope in Barnett’s work and the increasing robustness of
his own new philosophy of Higher Education emerging. Seen in this way, the concept of supercomplexity realises
a conceptual potential already pointed to in The Limits of Competence (Barnett, 1994, p. 178ff.), where a new
theory for understanding Higher Education learning and teaching practices is briefly being touched upon. We read
that ‘societies embody an ontology’ (Barnett, 1997, p. 83), and future Higher Education should recognise ‘the pro-
cess of human development oriented towards some conception of human being’ (p. 189). In Realizing the Univer-
sity, Barnett (2000a) goes further and outlines a new form of epistemology that moves away from a focus on
specific knowledge content to a focus on the way knowledge is being constructed in modern universities, and to
the educational responsibility this entails:

We can say, therefore, that the university is—or should be—adept at handling metacomplexity. It
contains within itself the capacities for responding with vigour to supercomplexity. [. . .] Supercom-
plexity is a universal but it is not the universe. It has to be contained. We have to find the concep-
tual resources to get beyond it, to limit it, and to guide our efforts to situate ourselves in its midst.
[. . .] The university has to live through supercomplexity; it cannot afford just to live with supercom-
plexity. (pp. 80–83)

The concept of supercomplexity, thus, becomes a point for transformation in Barnett’s authorship, signalled in his
credo ‘[t]he university is dead; long live the university’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 22). Barnett no longer feels he should save
the university, but rather he wishes to see it rise from the ashes as a phoenix. Through Realizing the University in an
Age of Supercomplexity the idea of the university takes an important twist, which I argue is fundamental to his later and
more optimistic works on the university and Higher Education. This shift becomes more visible in his prize-winning
(Barnett, 2015b) edited book The Future University. Ideas and Possibilities, where Barnett (2012) ‘calls for the university
itself to become much more public in its activities, not only in displaying its intellectual wares but in facilitating public
reflection and understanding so that society might be more enlightened, even amid discord’ (p. 11). Through the notion
of imagination as ‘the power to see into things, to feel into things, to be at one with things anew’ (Barnett, 2013, p. 25)
he transforms the notion of supercomplexity into a vision of optimism and even, in his recent work, states that ‘an opti-
mistic university is a university-in-the-world and thinks the future from the world’ (Barnett & Bengtsen, 2017, p. 8). My
concluding point here is that the notion of supercomplexity has an important place in Barnett’s oeuvre as it becomes a
point of zero and a crossroads between different university futures to pursue. For Barnett, as we have seen over the
last two decades, the road has become one of imagination (Barnett, 2013), wisdom (Barnett & Maxwell, 2009), ori-
ented towards humanity in contrast to technocracy, and ecological thinking (Barnett, 2017b), oriented towards deeply
entangled social realities of Higher Education. Thus, at this junction in his authorship Barnett chooses the road where
he leaves the role of the observer and critic, and steps forth as the leader and guide for researchers into Higher Educa-
tion to new places and new futures not yet fully known, but still, with his own preferred wording, feasible (Barnett,
2013, 2017b).
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4 | FROM CRITICAL THINKING TO CRITICAL BEING

Midway into Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity another shift occurs, which is not only central to Bar-
nett’s own oeuvre but to the development of Higher Education theory in the following decade(s). Barnett shifts the
focus from epistemological uncertainty, to be unsure whether or not knowledge and knowing are indeed possible to
claim, to ontological uncertainty, to be unsure of who you are and what you may be (as an individual and an institu-
tion). That Higher Education has to do with existential aspects of identity formation has been a hallmark of Barnett’s
work (e.g., Barnett, 2007; Barnett & Coate, 2005). Even though this theme also has been briefly touched upon in The
Limits of Competence, with the emergence of a focus on ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ at the very end of the book (Barnett,
1994, p. 189ff.), Barnett starts to explore it more in-depth from now on. As he writes in the beginning of Part III there
are ‘[t]wo forms of uncertainty [that] press upon the post-modern university: epistemological uncertainty and ontologi-
cal uncertainty. [. . .] The university no longer knows what it is to be a university’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 99). Barnett
(2000a) redefines the entire notion of Higher Education practice by stating that academics as researches and teachers,
and students as learners ‘have to become practicing epistemologists and practicing ontologists. They have to widen
the frames of knowing and they have to engage with the widest range of audiences; they have to become different
beings’ (p. 151). The ontological change is here connected to an existential dimension for individuals as well as for the
university as an institution.
In this way Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity literally sparks the development of an entire sub-
field within the research into Higher Education, which is taken up and further developed as the ontological turn for
Higher Education (Dall’Alba, 2009; Dall’Alba & Barnacle, 2007). The ontological approach to Higher Education, and
directly connected to Barnett’s work, is found in research into student voice (Batchelor, 2008), wonder and wisdom in
teaching and learning (Hansen, 2010), supervision and mentoring (Bengtsen, 2011), digital learning and virtual worlds
(Bayne, 2008), and the Higher Education curriculum, by Barnett himself (Barnett, 2004, 2009). In these approaches we
see an interesting turn and adaptation to the formation-oriented, or Bildung-oriented, pedagogies of continental
Europe to a British context and terminology. Overlapping philosophical approaches are found in works by Standish,
Blake, Smith, and Smeyers (2000), Peters and Bulut (2011) and Biesta (2006), where Barnett stands out as a philoso-
pher of Higher Education, where the other works focus typically on education more broadly or at the lower levels of
the educational system. Seen in this way, Barnett’s work inspires in new ways scholars around the world to tackle the
divide between the curriculum tradition and the Bildung tradition, much debated around the year 2000. This can
be seen especially in Batchelor’s (2008) discussion of practical, epistemological and ontological voices in the Higher
Education curriculum, and in Dall’Alba’s (2009) discussion of the relation between professional contexts and Higher
Education teaching and learning.
As Barnett states, not only is our knowledge of the world challenged, but our very being in the world is challenged
too. In the postmodern world we are challenged in ‘every utterance, every frame of understanding, every action, every
value system and every state of human being’ (Barnett, 2000a, p. 153). Nowhere and no one is safe, and everything at
every time is uncertain, and ‘[u]ltimately, the supercomplex world presents not challenges of knowing but of being’ (p.
157). In Higher Education this is felt by the demands of ‘[m]ultiprofessionalism’ that we educate for, which are chang-
ing relationships between students and teachers, the standards we educate for, and in this way ‘dislodge any felt secu-
rity over one’s inner frameworks. This is the supercomplex world that confronts graduates as they develop their
careers’ (p. 157). In the supercomplex world it is not enough to rest assured in the knowledge and competences devel-
oped through Higher Education programmes as these may be irrelevant and useless soon after being acquired. The
supercomplexity of Higher Education demands change in formats for teaching and learning too. A curriculum for
uncertainty cannot reproduce traditional teaching and learning formats such as for example the lecture, which Barnett
(2000a) criticises for being a ‘refuge for the faint-hearted’ as it keeps ‘the channels of communication closed, freezes
hierarchy between lecturer and students and removes any responsibility on the student to respond’ (p. 159). A peda-
gogy for supercomplexity in Higher Education needs to disturb students and teachers alike and remove them from
their comfort zone. Barnett argues that formats are needed that do not constitute a safe environment, but oblige
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students to engage, respond and take ownership of their own learning and academic and personal growth. In a super-
complex world students have to have a space to develop their own voice, their own sense of themselves and their
own being. This calls for learning spaces and encouragement for students to be audacious, daring and creative, where
students experience that their ideas, formulations, insights and creations matter—and where they understand and feel
that they matter too:

The challenge of a pedagogy for supercomplexity, accordingly, is to place students in situations in which
they are required to handle conflicting ideas and perspectives and uncertain situations [. . .]. There must
be no escape. Challenges that yield alternative legitimate responses must be obligatory. The responses,
too, should be personal and interpersonal for that is the character both of academic life amid supercom-
plexity and of the wider world: both call up the personal and interpersonal. (Barnett, 2000a, p. 160)

The connection between ontology and learning and teaching is taken up by Barnett several times in his later writ-
ings. In his book co-written with Kelly Coate, the ontological dimension of the Higher Education curriculum is being
further developed, where there is an explicit mentioning of an ‘ontological turn’ of Higher Education (Barnett & Coate,
2005, p. 108), and the fundamental question from Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity still resonates
and calls out to be answered: ‘how might human being as such be developed so that it is adequate to a changing and
uncertain world?’ (p. 108). Furthermore, as he writes in A Will to Learn. Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty, it
requires ‘a preparedness on the part of the student to enter otherness; new understandings, new positions in the
world’, and the teacher must help students to form these qualities of ‘courage, wonderment and willingness towards
strangeness that are part of the disposition of critical being’ (Barnett, 2007, p. 157). In many ways we still experience
the echo of supercomplexity, which is visible in his recent paper co-written with Bengtsen (Bengtsen & Barnett,
2017a), where the authors explore the darker sides of critical being. As the authors write, for some students

the change that happens to them [in Higher Education] is perhaps a change they do not want and had
not bargained for. Some students find that they are less able to return to their former professional prac-
tice and to remerge with these frameworks after they have completed their studies. (Bengtsen & Bar-
nett, 2017a, p. 124)

In Barnett’s present writings we see that the theme of transformation endures. This feature makes Barnett’s work rele-
vant, useful and inspiring in many different contexts and to many different actors within the Higher Education sector
such as academics, students, policymakers and other external stakeholders.

5 | A SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF HIGHER EDUCATION:

THE ECOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

Ecology, here, means the mutual dependence and influence of different ecosystems that Higher Education institutions
are part of: the political discourses, civic society, the private sector and financial structures, cultural value and heritage,
social norms, personal lifeworlds, etc. This concept is related to the third important theme that can be detected in Real-
izing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity, which is also the move from a social theory of Higher Education to a
social philosophy of Higher Education. The move from theory, with its focus on knowledge and epistemology, to phi-
losophy, with its focus on being and ontology, has been made visible in the first two sections of the article. It is the
term social that I wish to dwell on now. The social dimension of Higher Education is present in both sections and is an
underlying current in Barnett’s entire oeuvre. However, in Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity there is
a germ for the ecological university that Barnett especially pursues in his later writings (Barnett, 2011b, 2017b; Barnett
& Bengtsen, 2017). In Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity the notion of ecology is present though in an
unrefined form. Barnett (2000a) writes that students of Higher Education should contribute to the wider society by
their ‘capacity to embrace multiple and conflicting frameworks and to offer their own positive interventions in that
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milieu’ (p. 167). Universities should assume ‘their responsibilities in helping the world to address the conditions of
supercomplexity that beset it’ (p. 169).
In an age of supercomplexity, knowledge and research can no longer rest with an internal audience, and Barnett
(2000a) stresses that the ‘university has a civic role to play, both in expanding the frames of understanding in the wider
world and in assisting their assimilation’ (p. 170). Universities must embrace their role with regard to ‘public intellectual
and the transdisciplinary interactions’ just as they are ‘having to latch on to wider public aspirations’ (p. 172). Such for-
mulations of a social and societal dimension pervade the latter part of Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplex-
ity, and are taken up systematically and extensively in Barnett’s authorship in the 2010s. The pursuit of societal
interrelations gains further momentum with kindred Higher Education scholars such as Nixon (2008), Macfarlane
(2007) and Watson (2013) and their explorations of academic citizenship and virtues and ethics within the Higher
Education curriculum. Despite overlaps in themes and focus, Barnett is unique in his pursuit of a comprehensive
ontological framework for the civic aspects of Higher Education.
The meaning of the term social is unpacked even more in Barnett’s later writings. Here, we learn that the ecologi-
cal university has a ‘care and concern [. . .] for the world’, and it has a profound sense ‘of the whole world (both within
itself and beyond itself), having large claims on it, and is intent on contributing to the world in ethically justifiable ways’
(Barnett, 2013, p. 137). What can be seen as a conflict-ridden and worrying relationship in Barnett’s earlier writings,
especially during the 1990s, the relationship between the university and the wider society, including the political
domain, has become one of possibility and even one of feasible utopia (Barnett, 2017b). In Barnett’s later writings
Higher Education is being cast more in utopian than dystopian robes and the notions of sincerity and authenticity,
where the student or teacher’s ‘educational being becomes itself, wins itself, partly through critical dialogue’ (Barnett,
2007, p. 43), that earlier on were primarily seen as possible on an individual level only (Barnett, 2004, 2007), are now
associated with the very being of the university itself. Seen in this way there is in Barnett’s work a process of institu-
tional transformation and emancipation as the university as an institution for Higher Education seems to have under-
gone a change and has remerged from the cleansing fire of ontological transformation so powerfully associated with
individuals in his earlier work (Barnett, 2007). In contrast to his earlier writings, Barnett is today preoccupied with the
ontological nature of the relation between universities and the various other institutional, societal, political, cultural
and individual realities. Where Barnett before has studied Higher Education institutions and its inhabitants of students
and teachers, his focus today is on their relation to the broader social reality.
The notion of the ecological university seems to combine the three domains of criticality in Barnett’s work, the
ones of knowledge, being and acting, hereby uniting the many different strands and threads from the earlier phases of
his authorship. As Barnett (2013) writes the ecological university

will put its knowledges into play, it will help to advance the public sphere and will act purposively—in all
knowledge fields—to help to develop civic society (directly in health, education, medicine, and so on,
and indirectly, in helping to advance public understandings of such). (p. 137)

However, the ecological university will continuously ‘retain a pool of autonomy for itself, so as to sustain a critical func-
tion for itself, and so as to be able to evaluate and critique the dominant discourses of the age’ (p. 137). For Barnett
(2017a), the term critique links his concepts of imagination and utopia to what he calls the ‘real world’ (p. 78), the life-
world of individual people, institutions and societies. The concept of ontology, hereby, also moves from an individual
level (Barnett, 2004, 2007; Barnett & Coate, 2005) to an institutional level, and in his recent work he is exploring the
very realness of the university itself (Bengtsen & Barnett, 2017b).
Critically one could discuss if Barnett stretches the understanding of Higher Education too far and includes
too much diversity in it for the concept to maintain its cohesive semantics. Also, some of the questions from his
earlier works still stand unresolved, which include how the university balances its roles of community and society
builder and critical discussant. Ultimately, however, it is the social and engaging that stands out in Barnett’s social
philosophy of the university and Higher Education. Barnett incessantly reminds us that the central challenge for
the university and Higher Education today is never to become passive and hesitant, but to critically and actively
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engage with knowledge matters in a societally embedded way as real forces and constituents of our future social
and political reality.

OR CI D

Søren S. E. Bengtsen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4349-4958

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How to cite this article: Bengtsen SSE. Supercomplexity and the university: Ronald Barnett and the social phi-
losophy of Higher Education. Higher Educ Q. 2018;72:65–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12153
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