By Lukey Lu

“What is a university?”

This may seem like a simple question, but I believe everyone has their own answer — these answers may be diverse and different among individuals. However, if we deeply reflect on this word, we may realize the difficulty in defining it. The ‘university’ can connote many things: the higher education institution, the students, the academic system… We conduct ethnography of the university throughout the semester but talking about the very basic concept we are engaging with, the ‘university’, there seems to be unexpected epistemological ambiguity embedded inside.

Thus, the following post will use two of my ethnographic examples from individuals in different positions in the ‘university’ to express their implicit views of ‘what is a university?’. These two views are contradictory on multiple levels: they are inconsistent and unstable concepts within each view, and they are contradictory when connecting them together. This reflection, while exposing an interesting puzzle to think about, also serves urgently to reveal the ‘reality’ of this ethnographically rich concept: it is a messy concept that can be examined from multiple perspectives and always entails ambiguity. Thus, in this blog post, I also invite all researchers and readers to rethink and defamiliarize this concept – the ‘university’.

In my conversations with some student-staff from the Student Life departments’ student advisory committee, the university for them seems equivalent to the ‘university students’. When I asked their motivation to join, their responses pointed to the concept of ‘reciprocity’. They all expressed a strong willingness to ‘give back’ to the university because they received scholarships and opportunities from it. This made them feel thankful, which further led to their sense of ‘obligation’ to reciprocate to the university.

Intriguingly, for these students, ‘university’ here gains a certain subjectivity and ‘personality’ — it becomes a subject that they are affectively and morally connected with and can establish a reciprocal relationship with. The improvement of the university becomes ‘naively’ equated to the improvement of all university students’ experiences. Thus, at the same time, ‘university’ here also simultaneously becomes the object with a clear ‘referent’ — the students. Consequently, even just in the student-staff’s view, the concept of ‘university’ gains multiple implications with contradictions and, thus, entails ambiguity.

Shifting to a Student Life staff’s view, the ‘university’, gains more nuance. When one staff member revealed to me that there is only one Website Specialist in the entire UofT, she complained that the ‘university’ in her view is just a system that puts all departments, which usually barely have interconnections, together. Student Life staff view themselves as closer to students and other members within the department, but beyond this level, there seems to be a weaker ‘imagination’ of togetherness with the ‘university’. Furthermore, staff seem to share the understanding of their position within the ‘university’ as the provider of ‘services’ (sometimes even expressed with a disappointed tone): they neither belong to the ‘academic’ part nor to the ‘upper parts’ with power. Rather, they understand their position as ‘stuck in the middle’: they want to be closer to students, but they also need student-related audit results to secure funding and legitimize their work to the upper parts of the ‘university’.

Thus, as the ‘service sector’ in the ‘university’, they are the individuals bringing students together and reducing their isolation. But they, perhaps, also feel a weaker sense of belonging to the ‘university’. They are in such a paradoxical position: they depend on powers (the part with more power in the ‘university’) and ‘students’ needs’ to exist, but such ‘dependence’ (those ways they use to justify their existence) further constructs a sense of ‘isolation’ and ‘unfitness’ within the institution. In their practice, the word ‘university’ usually contains a sense of frustration — they use it in scenarios to express their disappointment towards their own ‘inability’ to have ‘power’ and push changes.

Thus, for the Student Life’s staff, perhaps, ‘the university’ is more like an enemy or opponent. It is the upper sector inside the university — those non-academic departments with the power to make changes happen but ‘not caring about students’ enough. Such a view, on the most explicit level, is different and contradictory to student-staffs’ thankful attitude towards the ‘university’. However, on a more meta level, what is covertly shared between these two views are also the ambiguity and paradoxes within the ‘university’ concept itself.