Five years on from its launch, Lee-Ann Sequeira reflects on what makes the LSE HE Blog unique in the higher education sector

Universities are in the news again and, depending on your viewpoint, it’s for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. As events in US higher education dominate the news cycle and spread to other countries, the purpose and value of higher education (HE) are thrust into focus: what is the role of the university in society and the economy? What values, knowledge, and skills do we want to inculcate? What does it mean to be an academic or a student today? On the fifth anniversary of the LSE Higher Education Blog, we reflect on why and how we have made it our raison d’etre to examine these questions whether these issues are in the news and not, whether it’s safe or not.

When Claire Gordon, the Director of the LSE Eden Centre, and I re-launched this blog (formerly the LSE Education Blog) in 2019, we were very clear that it was not going to be only about the LSE and teaching and learning practice. With the blessing of the then Pro-Vice Chancellor, Dilly Fung, we shared our vision – an outward-facing blog that presented a bold, multi-perspectival view of higher education in the UK and globally. This was a departure from the norm and beyond the remit of most educational development centres, but in sync with Claire’s and my outlook and well aligned with the LSE’s social science ethos. Greenlit and armed with a shoestring budget, we set out to make a difference. In those early years, it was just me commissioning, editing, and uploading blogposts – in addition to my day job as an academic developer.

Over the last five years, we have stayed true to our founding aim. We have weathered seismic shifts such as the pandemic, where we went on hiatus for a while, and resource crunches. Fortunately, the quality rather than quantity of our posts made an impact, and we received funding for a part-time assistant editor and a small budget. With a tiny but committed editorial team, we have tried to ensure that three qualities underpin HE Blog content: criticality, diversity/difference, and community.

Thought-provoking, not provocative

In higher education circles, ‘critical’ is a loaded word and can divide a room very quickly. At the HE Blog, we employ it to challenge the status quo rather than appeal to only one end of the political spectrum. Instead of following the flavour of the month, we feature ideas and arguments that examine norms and trends in HE – for instance, blogposts that critique and advocate decolonising, or strike action, or free speech.

But finding contributors who are willing to go on the record and justify certain stances is not always easy. We have been turned down on several occasions – sometimes because there are repercussions for prospective authors’ careers. On rare occasions, we have published pieces anonymously to protect the author’s identity. This increases my respect for contributors who write about contentious topics despite the risks, who go beyond a common-room chat or a tweet and write thoughtful, well-evidenced posts that require a degree of insight and introspection.

It’s not about fuelling a polemical debate, but encouraging open enquiry – how can we create a constructive space for contestation? We work closely with authors to support them in presenting (sometimes) controversial views and experiences in a thought-provoking rather than provocative style.

Doing it differently

In HE parlance today, several words and terms have to be swerved or used judiciously because of their polarising connotations. This presents a challenge for editors in the education space, especially if we want to avoid falling into a trap or only speaking to certain groups in an increasingly polarised audience. At the HE Blog, this is where the multiplicity or diversity of perspective comes into play. When we cover an issue, we want to present it from different perspectives, whether that’s disciplinary, cultural, geographic, political, epistemic, etc. Our blogpost on teaching about the war in Ukraine involved lecturers and professors in different disciplines and parts of the world, with varying experiences of war, reflecting on how they taught and teach about this conflict. In our podcast on teaching contested topics, which included a student among the guests, the views put forward ranged from celebrating contestation in the classroom to viewing it as a performance.

We have tried to embed this approach in the LSE HE Blog not just through our content, but also through our style and approach. They are small things, but we hope they set a tone. In our contributor profiles, we avoid using titles such as ‘Professor’ and keep our contributor profiles brief to reduce authority bias. We also now list all universities with their country of location (for example, Princeton University, US), to avoid the impression that some institutions are so well-known that they require no location information, while other less known institutions need to be introduced by city and country. This is to avoid falling into the trap, Paroj Banerjee, one of our contributors, highlighted in her blogpost.

Involving and engaging the academic community

A key feature of the LSE HE Blog has been to create opportunities for dialogue and interaction with our readership and the wider academic community. To this end we’ve run readers’ choice awards, essay contests, and social media polls. Last year, we launched the LSE HE Blog Fellowship programme as a way of engaging more widely with the academic community by providing editorial mentoring and a platform for the Fellows to disseminate their ideas and perspectives.

As a result of our unique approach to education blogging, we’ve been able to capture key trends and ideas as they emerge – AI in higher ed, the student uprisings in Hong Kong, and passport privilege, to name a few. We are also proud of the work we do with early- and mid-career academics (and well-known academics) to surface their interesting ideas and perspectives that may not otherwise get the airtime they deserve. As a small, niche blog operating in a space with well-established heavy-hitters, that’s our calling card – a fresh take on academia in the UK and globally.

In addition to reflecting on our successes, I’d like to use this fifth anniversary milestone to interrogate the direction of travel and set ourselves new challenges. How can we attract more contributors from a greater range of disciplines (especially quantitative), and from across the political spectrum, so that we can tackle the questions I posed at the beginning in thoughtful, reasoned, diverse ways? How can we support contributors to express complex or nuanced ideas more efficiently? And very importantly, how can we attract support and funding to grow the blog over the next five years?

As I switch from anniversary mode into business-as-usual mode – commenting on drafts, reviewing budgets, re-jigging publication schedules  – I am reminded of our contributor Anders Schinkel’s words about fostering a spirit of curiosity and wonder, “Typical of wonder … is its receptive nature, its openness towards the world, its readiness to encounter the ‘other’ in a non-reductive way” and I am more committed than ever to making the LSE HE Blog a wonder-ful space.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.    _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Main image: Greg Rakozy on Unsplash