First-in-Family Enabling Students and the idea of the Australian University

What is it about?

This article examines the idea of the university from the first-in-family enabling students’ perspective. It provides an overview of the current crisis of meaning in scholarly commentary that points to a spectrum of meanings about the university. This spectrum ranges from the ancient imaginary of the monastic university as ‘ivory tower’ to the instrumental idea of the entrepreneurial university. The analysis then reports on the idea of the university in over forty interviews and surveys of first-in-family enabling students who attended two large regional Australian universities in 2014. Their metaphorical understandings of the university constitute a powerful imaginary about what a university is and can do for individuals and the wider society. For many, the resolution of the individualistic passion for knowledge of ‘Ivory Tower’ studies and the commitment to the social and economic usefulness of the fully engaged entrepreneurial university can be found in the pursuit of the passionate career.

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Why is it important?

Although it is a truism that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, in reality it is also true that any journey involves a multitude of steps preceded and powered by the activation of cultural imaginaries. Although Scott (2006, p. xiv) argued that expectations of university had to be better managed ‘right from the moment of their first contact with a university’, it is argued here that, by the time first-in-family enabling students arrive on campus, a great deal of experience, understandings and decision-making has brought them to this point of entry. In seeking to enter university, about which they have little direct familial cultural capital, the students possess a series of ideas about the university garnered from here and there in the wider society that can simultaneously enable and/or impede their engagement. As outlined above, two main imaginaries that form the poles of the current ‘crisis’ in the idea of the university, namely the ‘ivory tower’ and the ‘degree factory’, emerged strongly in the data. However what also emerged in the first-in-family enabling students stories was a potential resolution of this seeming dichotomy in the idea of the ‘passionate career’.