Journal of Philosophy of Education

INTRODUCTION

Focus today is on the visible, evident and ‘bright’ dimensions of higher education. Attention is given to theories on visible learning and evidence‐based studies (Hattie, 2011). In this discourse, we find a tendency towards linear understandings of learning processes which can be made explicit and articulated in alignment‐strategies and learning taxonomies (Biggs and Tang, 2007; Fink, 2013; Ramsden, 2008). This understanding of learning processes focuses on coherent logical progression, consistency and criteria‐based options for assessment and evaluation of student competences and learning outcomes. There is nothing wrong with such understandings in themselves. However, such views must be complemented by language and concepts for the other side of the coin, namely the darker sides of higher education in everyday practice, which are less easy to catch in the spotlight and define in functional and explicit terminology.

We use the term ‘dark’ to comprehend challenges, situations, reactions, aims and goals, which cannot easily be understood and solved by agendas of quality assurance and professionalisation of higher education. This is not an argument for an educational dystopia, and the term ‘dark’ does not connote badness or corruption. The aim of this article is not to create a dichotomy between light and dark, but to present darkness as something otherwise than, and not contrary to, light; and even with its own virtues. ‘Darkness’ is used to focus on sides of higher education, which may be dim, obscure or caught in a blind angle. We need more elaborate language and subtle concepts for grasping students’ experience of failure and letdown, when struggling with and withdrawing from difficult courses never completed; for half‐formed ideas and crippled thoughts, full of passion and heart, but unfit for the academic genre of writing; and for interior imaginative wanderings that seldom see the light of day.

We need to understand better why gender issues or ethnic conflicts emerge and why students take up arms within an institution which is thought to be inclusive, inviting and open to all kinds of people and cultures. And we need to study the conceptual potential of days of boredom or isolation, caught up in daily routines of teaching or studying which do not lead anywhere or give way to any productive work. These matters have not been sufficiently researched and conceptualised as meaningful in themselves, which means they have not yet been open to further empirical research. We aim here to open a space for insights through the concept of darkness presented in this paper.

In order to make educational darkness palpable we draw on the philosophies of darkness found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (2006; 2008) and Emmanuel Levinas (1987; 2000a; 2000b; 2001). We would stress however that we are applying Nietzsche and Levinas to form an argument about higher education, a concern that neither of them expressed explicitly in their own philosophies. However, we believe our reading and use of their concepts and imagery to be consistent with their own philosophical projects. Further, by drawing on contemporary philosophers much influenced by Nietzsche and Levinas, such as Tom Sparrow (2013), Cathryn Vasseleu (2005), Alphonso Lingis (1998) and Graham Harman (2005), we draw out meanings of ‘educational darkness’ with regard to four different dimensions of higher education:

1. Institutional darkness;

2. The darkness of teaching;

3. The darkness of learning; and

4. Imaginative darkness.

These four dimensions of educational darkness cover organisational levels (institutional darkness), pedagogical and didactical levels (the darkness of teaching and learning), and visionary or idealistic levels (imaginative darkness) of the university.

As more and more light and scrutinising attention is shed on the university as a public institution, and as research into different forms of learning and teaching in higher education becomes ever more abundant, we argue that at the same time dark spots and blind angles grow too. As we struggle to make visible and to evaluate, assess, manage and organise higher education, the darkness of the institution actually expands. This growing darkness is not a symptom we should fear and avoid, because it is potent and very much alive even if the university as institution fails to integrate it into its own system of understanding. However, we suggest that the dark side of higher education should be kept in mind, remembered and attended to—because in the darkness strange powers and wild forces hold their sway, for good or for worse. Having the ability and courage to face these darker educational aspects of everyday higher education practice will enable students and teachers to find renewed hope in the university as an institution for personal as well as professional imagination and growth.

WHAT IS DARKNESS?

In this paper we apply three different, but interwoven, meanings to the term ‘darkness’. These meanings underlie all of the different dimensions of educational darkness presented above, and can be said to influence all of them semantically in different ways. Firstly, darkness designates an alternative (though not an opposition) to light, where light is connected to the rationality of the intellect; the assimilative powers of reason and vision—or as Levinas’ describes ‘light’: ‘Light makes objects into a world, that is, makes them belong to us. … Through the light the world is given and apprehended’ (Levinas, 2001, p. 40). According to an interpreter of Levinas, Tom Sparrow, the notion of darkness derives from a ‘counter‐philosophical tendency’ that can be found in Levinas (Sparrow, 2013, p. 9), which means an opposition to trying to understand the other person or situation by sheer intellectual operation. In Levinas’ own writings we learn of a presence that is non‐rational and non‐conceptual and ‘without the mediation of any principle, any ideality’ (Levinas, 2000a, p. 100). Levinas, however, is not against reason or rationality as such, but opposes the form of rationality that reduces difference to sameness and closes off the otherness of the other person, for example, when I see the other person as an individual similar to myself instead of being open to her differences and the ways she is ‘otherwise than me’. As Levinas puts it, what we need is ‘a new rationality, or perhaps we should say the most ancient one … that consequently does not lead back to ontology [the sameness of being]’ (Levinas, 2000b, p. 72). We argue that Levinas’ notion of ‘a new rationality beyond being’ (Levinas, 2000b, p. 228) points to a blind angle in being, as the instrumental powers of reason cannot grasp all central aspects of a given matter. As suggested by Sparrow, Levinas builds instead an ‘ontology of the night’ (Sparrow, 2013, p. 11), whereby Sparrow uses the term ‘ontology’ a bit differently than Levinas himself . This idea:

… serves as a reminder that to live is not simply to be conscious, but to find oneself caught in the grip of an alterity that not only approaches from the outside, but which wells up inside of us to disrupt and menace the smooth operation of the intellect and the cultivation of a solipsistic identity (Sparrow, 2013, p. 12).

By re‐using the Levinasian term ‘alterity’, or otherness, we are reminded that so much more happens around us in the university than we are aware of, when we are caught up in our daily routines. We forget that things could be done differently, and that our own perspective on things is only part of the story. Different solutions on allocation of time and resources recede into the background and become absorbed in the darkness of our tacit workings of our daily habits. As will be evident later, we wish to point to the blind angles of, and the challenges we face, in higher education today, which normally lead a ‘nocturnal existence’ (Sparrow, 2013, p. 13), keeping somewhat in the shadows of our awareness. Levinas describes liminal phenomena as ‘spectors’ and ‘ghosts’ that ‘move constantly toward this limit between being and nothingness where being insinuates itself even in nothingness, like bubbles of the earth’ (Levinas, 2001, p. 57).

We argue that this Levinasian attention to liminality can help us point to the events that actually happen but few people witness and try to improve: signs in students of potential dropout, or administrative systems slowly moving off road may haunt us, but are still easier to ignore than to act on. The first meaning points to the existence of persons and events, which are often overlooked or ignored in everyday higher education work. We call this a form of narrative darkness—life stories in higher education practice taking place and unfolding in obscurity to the many, but not to the few.

Secondly, as Vasseleu suggests, Levinas is not occupied with darkness simply as opposition to light as light's negative, when things vanish from sight (Vasseleu, 2005, p. 83), but refers instead to an existence that is otherwise than light and which has a positive being. Vasseleu explains that this second meaning of darkness is a ‘nocturnal space, which is not empty, but a presence “full of the nothingness of everything”’ (Vasseleu, 2005, p. 84). It is an active form of nothingness, a blind spot fully populated, maybe even crammed to the brink with alien capability. Vasseleu refers to what Levinas calls the ‘il y a’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 46) namely a state of existence where ‘[t]he absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the void, or the murmur of silence’ (ibid.). We ask if what Levinas describes as the ‘il y a’ could be transferred to an analysis of the state of things in higher education: as when the weight of all the things unsaid are felt in evaluations of a course programme, or when tensions between members of staff in a department can smear and blacken the everyday atmosphere? Or when an academic withdraws into the buffering safety of organisational structures in order to avoid further trouble with groups of students complaining about their coursework, or stops using the office on campus and sits at home all the time as a way of escaping institutional demands?

Even though the ‘il y a’ is a dimension outside our habitual attention, and sometimes comprehension, it is not beyond existing. The ‘il y a’ designates a rift in understanding, a secret passage or trapdoor, or with Abi Doukhan's words it leads to ‘an exile’ (Doukhan, 2014) and, as Drabinski suggests, ‘another sort of presence’ (Drabinski, 2001, p. 89). Levinas describes the ‘il y a’ as a form of ‘[d]arkness’ defined by ‘the presence of absence’ (Levinas, 2001, p. 59), where ‘the fact of existing imposes itself when there is no longer anything’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 47). With a reference to Heidegger, Levinas tells us that in this state of existing ‘“nothingness nothings”. It does not keep still. It affirms itself in this production of nothingness’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 49). We apply this second meaning of darkness in Levinas to point to the fact that lives of people gone wrong, meetings forgotten, and examinations never taken or completed do not vanish from existing, but keep stirring and finding their own outlet and seep into other cracks of being in higher education. We call this a form of ontological darkness, which designates a potential of being as more full and abundant than the layout of reality grasped by persons and organisations.

Thirdly, as Nietzsche draws out, when we confront ourselves with the abyss, the abyss looks back (Nietzsche, 2008, p. 578). Behind any mask there lurks a deeper, and more monstrous, form of being, something that does not play by the rules, but something that lives ‘“un‐philosophically” and “unwisely”, above all, imprudently, and feels the obligation and burden of a hundred attempts and temptations of life’ (Nietzsche, 2008, p. 606). Transferred into our argumentation, this is a force playing the ‘bad game’ (ibid.), a game that disturbs organised thinking and controlled layouts of meaning. This aspect of darkness can be said to radicalise the active nothingness in Levinas’ thought, where, as Levinas writes, ‘[d]arkness is the very play of existence which would play itself out even if there were nothing’ (Levinas, 2001, p. 59). In Nietzsche the things that stir on the other side of reason erupt in ‘sudden sparks and marvels’ (Nietzsche, 2008, p. 690) bursting forth with ‘evil thoughts!’ (ibid.), and in this line of argument: troublesome and unwanted ideas or skills not often, and easily, recognised in higher education.

Students learn in ways difficult to measure on the scales of Bloom's taxonomy, and they may discover a flaw or dogma in their own thinking that leads to self‐doubt or shame. This is a form of darkness tinged with ‘shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos’ that is ‘captious, insidious, sharp’, and which ‘rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future—let us go with all our “devils”’ (Nietzsche, 2008, pp. 629–630). This form of darkness is an understanding that is not an understanding, or a form of unreasonable reason, as it does not abide by the same laws and criteria for meaningfulness otherwise applied in higher education. We call this a form of epistemological darkness, inspired by Nietzsche's description of:

… the use of a rare and singular measuring‐rod, almost a frenzy: the feeling of heat in things which feel cold to all other persons: a divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented: a sacrificing on altars which are consecrated to an unknown God …. (Nietzsche, 2006, pp. 49–50).

By applying Nietzsche, we gain a more tangible form of darkness, which can also be found in Lévinas (Sparrow, 2013, p. 17). In our sense, this tangible darkness demands its own measuring rods and its own scales, or taxonomies, for evaluating learning outcomes. We need ways of evaluating learning processes and not merely products, and we need to consider if different and new taxonomies for assessment should be applied more contextually to the individual student's work. This third aspect of darkness calls for not only an enhanced attention to all the corners, interstices and crevices in the higher education life‐world, but a new way of organising and thinking about higher education as well.

INSTITUTIONAL DARKNESS

During one of our travels abroad to visit a foreign university we learn by chance that one of the students at that university has just committed suicide by throwing himself from a tall building. No one can attest to why he did it, his fellow students thought they knew him quite well, and no one from the department had noticed any problems in his study process, as he was showing up for lessons and had participated in the group assignments. Elsewhere we hear that a group of marginalised students have taken up arms in protest against what they feel as suppression and harassment from the institution and fellow students. Clashes between different parties of the university, student and staff committees, had escalated and led to violence and physical abuse. Somehow differences of opinion had changed and become fused with political aspects of right and wrong. At a university even nearer to home we learn that a still higher percentage of a departmental budget is used to help students to acquire the right study skills and support them in their learning processes and participatory work. At the same time, we are informed that student non‐completion rates are increasing, and that doctoral students go through periods of depression and anxiety, which for a large group of these students mean that they abandon their PhD and go through a difficult time afterwards reconfiguring their aims and options in life.

Universities today worldwide are to a higher degree than ever before occupied by managing departmental economical‐political strategies, organising staff teams and cross‐disciplinary networks, and heightening the supervision rate of students from graduate to postgraduate level (Land, 2004; Rowland, 2006). After all, ‘[t]his is an age of explicitness. Matters have to be susceptible of measurement, of precise descriptions, and of rules, performance against which can be ascertained with objectivity’ (Barnett, 2011, p. 15). Universities aim for transparency, and foreground an ideal in which ‘[t]he whole world, the whole universe indeed, can be accounted for’ (ibid.). We do not criticise this endeavour as such, and in many ways it is needed in order to handle the challenges in matters of administration, teaching and assessment regarding the still more heterogeneous segments and diverse groups of students enrolling at the university each year.

However useful and functional such management is, it is insufficient: it does not help in those cases where students, teachers, tasks and organisational work fall into a grey zone, an area of institutional twilight, in which the normal laws, rules and codes of conduct do not apply and do not seem to work. These between‐spaces where students fall off the radar, and where differences of opinion lead to anger and protests, can be termed institutional darkness. Institutional darkness manifests itself when students or staff slip out of view and become distant, maybe even strangers to the institution, as when heads of departments are caught between different organisational levels and have to face upwards and downwards at the same time. This is when the pull from different organisational directions becomes too strong and starts to shake and weaken other parts of the organisational structure.

With Levinas’ language, we argue that such institutional darkness emerges when a ‘rip in the … endless fabric of existing’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 52) occurs and darkness pours out and floods the system. As Levinas points out, such ‘rips’ happen when ‘a pluralism … does not merge into unity’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 42). The institution viewed as a ‘totality’, or a unity, cannot hold the pluralism it is faced with in the mass university of today. This is not a criticism of student diversity and enrollment rates. On the contrary, we find the heterogeneous character of the student population necessary for the university actually to become pluralistic and creative in nature. The challenge is, however, to make institutional space and give attention to the vast forms of student engagement and multifarious learning and studying approaches—and for institutions in this way to strive for a pluralism that does not merge into a unity. The consequence, however, for an institution of casting aside the idea of unity may be, paraphrasing Levinas, to ‘plunge into a kind of darkness, where it would at least remain as an operation … of that darkness’ (Levinas, 2001, p. 59). In Levinas’ terms, darkness is not the end of being or the implosion of structure, but the possibility of seeking different places and worlds often hiding or in exile in the crevices of everyday institutional practice. But how do institutions operate in the dark? New language and navigation technologies must be developed by the institutions themselves in order to include, even embrace, the ambivalent and slippery nature of everyday institutional practice.

To meet and operate in this institutional darkness, we argue that more solidarity in higher education institutional practice is called for (Bengtsen, 2014). As an institution that strives for plurality without unity the ‘solidary university picks up the ones who stumble and fall, with the risk of stumbling and falling itself’ (Bengtsen, 2014, p. 90, our translation). This should not be seen as a call for a nostalgic and naïve understanding of the university, and solidarity in this context should not be understood as the realisation of a romantic ethical ideal. On the contrary, it is a plea for an institutional attitude that acknowledges that education and educational institutions sometimes hurt people and break things (ibid.), demanding still renewed thinking about how institutional practice must continually seek out and engage its own darkest spots. We need pedagogies and institutional frameworks that are able to deal with the fact the higher education sometimes wounds people, makes them doubt themselves and disrupts their plans for life as it may change people's needs and ambitions in life. We need more elaborate pedagogies that build on the premise that institutions will lose sight of certain students, and that students should not merely be managed—they should also have room for getting lost and to lose their way in order for them to be able to come back as different persons.

THE DARKNESS OF TEACHING

You have supervised the student all semester for one of his final projects leading to a Bachelor degree. The student is inventive and original, and his passion for his subject impresses you. However, it is difficult for him to fit into the expected genre of academic writing, and his arguments are often rather obscure and difficult to follow by others who do not know him as well as you. During your assessment talk with the co‐examiner it becomes evident that a rather low degree must be given, and the student receives the grade with uneasiness and disappointment. You know the student struggles with personal issues, and that his studies are one of the few places of solace in his life at the moment. After the semester, the student contacts you to inquire into the reasons for his grade, and you have difficulty in explaining exactly why his grade was so low, when you, as his supervisor, had shown much enthusiasm during the supervision process. The email correspondence that follows continues for a while and then fades out, never completely settled, and you never hear from the student again. Later you find out that he has dropped out and not obtained his degree.

The darkness of teaching designates such experiences that for years afterwards continue to haunt you and mar your consciousness, making you doubt yourself as a teacher. You keep analysing the events over and over again, sure that there must be an answer or a solution that could, at that time, have changed the situation to the benefit of the student. Stefan Hopmann (2007) describes this as one of the core challenges in teaching. Hopmann uses the term ‘restrained teaching’ (Hopmann, 2007, p. 112) to denote the ambivalence of having the urge to overtake the student's project and advise him to do it as you know will be applauded by the future examiner, and the will to step back and let the student find his own way into the subject matter, finding his own voice and attaining resilience and skill through this process. The darkness of teaching also contains the ‘unbridled’ nature of learning processes, and an ‘unbridled openness of the pedagogical frame’ (Barnett, 2004, p. 258), the aspect of loss of control by which actual and student centred learning can take place. The condition of ‘unbridleness’ often leads to what Bengtsen and Qvortrup (2013) and Batchelor and Bengtsen (2013) have called ‘a pedagogy of doubt’; the openness and open ended character of learning potential, which cannot be controlled, but on the other hand somehow must be managed and facilitated by the teacher. The darkness of teaching denotes a condition of ‘teaching in the dark’—feeling you are at the limits of your own powers and seeing the results of your own competences and experience, but also of your inconsequence, routines and inflexibility.

The darkness of teaching foregrounds the aspects of situational teaching that cannot be planned and predicted, and which consequences of our actions cannot be known. Using Nietzsche's terms this shows the ‘motley‐coloured’ condition of teaching in higher education, and that ‘there are often cases, also, in which our actions are motley‐coloured’ (Nietzsche, 2008, p. 622). No matter how ‘visible’ and ‘evident’ learning processes become, and no matter how many books on successful supervision and effective teaching get written, we are still, as university teachers, often left in the dark. Nietzsche points out this form of educational darkness by underlining the heavy influence that chance has on our actions. Many unknown and unforeseen events may colour our decisions, for example an …

… excitation of our imagination brought about at the decisive moment by some immediate, very trivial event; quite incalculable physical influences come into play; … some emotion or other happens quite by chance to leap forth … which we can never take account of beforehand (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 129).

In any teaching context, no matter how aligned to learning outcomes, and no matter how much evidence there is for certain methods, teaching in higher education could always be different, other choices could have been made, which maintain the possibility of a different form of student growth or hindrance for growth. A core element of teaching is its character of non‐closure, or as Gert Biesta terms it, the ever present possibility for natality, the birth of new ideas and modes of being (Biesta, 2006, p. 48), which Biesta argues is a ‘“troubling” space, but this is necessary troubling, a troubling that only makes our coming into the world possible’ (Biesta, 2006, p. 53). Hannah Arendt's notion of natality that Biesta draws on is also visible in Levinas’ understanding of presence. The presence of natality rips (Levinas, 1987, p. 52) holes in the teaching practice, thus making it prone to possibility, spontaneity and chance. However, this hole in the being of the teaching practice is also where the darkness gets in, forcing you as a teacher to deal and cope with chance, luck, bad luck and sometimes what seem like, in the situation at least, impossible choices.

One way to react to the challenge of the darkness of teaching would be, as the approach in vogue, to expect more flexibility and adaptability in yourself as a teacher—in the hope that you in the future can better meet the needs of the students. Another, and probably more provoking, approach is to pay less attention to how you become the perfect teacher for any type of student and to pay more attention to the essence of the teacher that you are. As observed elsewhere and in our own work (Barnett and Coate, 2006; Bengtsen, 2011, 2012), teachers should have the courage both to learn from others, but also to follow their own individual paths and become teachers in their own particular way. The idiosyncratic nature of teaching has a scope rarely acknowledged and trumpeted (Bengtsen, 2012). It is tempting to react to the darkness of teaching with doubt and sometimes guilt. It seems like the easiest way out, and fits with the contemporary mainstream understanding of teaching as a liquid form of technology adaptable to all situations if done properly. Another, and much tougher, way would be to react with resilience and recalcitrance and to step up to the next challenge, not with uncertainty and insecurity, but with an eagerness to show that you can endure the darkness of teaching as a condition for your endeavours and an aspect of fate.

THE DARKNESS OF LEARNING

For some time you have noticed a group of students in your class keeping to themselves and talking together in an animated way during breaks and after class. This rouses your attention as they are all of them rather quiet during class sessions and seem to avoid notice when possible. One day after class you catch them on their way out and ask them if they are enjoying the course. Quickly they admit that they have a hard time figuring out what you as a teacher ‘want from them’ and ‘want them to know for the exam’ as they say. You are familiar with that type of question and you know that there is no easy answer that will satisfy what they wish to know. You tell them about the expected learning outcomes described in the curriculum, the formalities regarding examination as detailed in their study programme, and you mention that one of the challenges in the exam is for them to show that they are independently able to handle and focus on the large amount of reading material from which they are invited to select the texts of major interest to them to delve into further. They listen conscientiously and nod at the right places, but after you have finished your speech they leave with no less confused faces and the animated talk among them begins again before they are out of earshot.

Learning processes in higher education can be a challenge for many students. Even though several actions are taken to support students and to enhance their study skills, it does not necessarily diminish the challenge for the particular student to define what higher education means for her, and what focus and topics she chooses to dive into in her written assignments. This designates the darkness of learning. Therefore, as Handal and Lauvås (1987) stress, many students at the university are playing the ‘chameleon game’. They resign and give up trying to figure out their own way through the educational darkness and instead try to give the teachers what they want. Sometimes higher education does not live up to its name and does not seem to provide the hoped for insight or skills that the students thought they signed up for. Legitimately, learning processes might be unpleasant and cause ‘discomfort’ (Barnett, 2007, p. 76) and make the students feel estranged and displaced. Learning processes in higher education may sometimes feel like bungee jumping (Barnett, 2007, p. 159), to take a leap forward not knowing the risks on the way or the final destination.

Denise Batchelor makes clear that finding one's own voice as a student is sometimes experienced as being ‘exploratory, uncertain, not always in control, and [to suffer] periods of obscurity in thought that seem like failure’ (Batchelor, 2008, p. 54). For some students, the change that happens to them 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 practices and to remerge with these frameworks after they have completed their studies. And some find that they have obtained lots of knowledge, though possibly not the kind of knowledge that is easy to measure and assess by the academic paradigm. What they are left with is ‘troublesome knowledge’ (Land et al., 2008; Parker, 2005), which is difficult to fit into the expected learning outcomes and difficult to assess based on the taxonomies and criteria applied. And, as Graham Harman points out, months may be sacrificed to hunt down some ‘golden unicorn glimpsed one day in the library, even though it may never enter our grasp and no one else may even believe that we ever saw it’ (Harman, 2005, p. 141). The darkness of learning contains such uncertainty of what it is that students feel they should learn, and it contains all the failed attempts, forced detours and dead ends that make up a great deal of everyday higher education learning processes.

To meet this darkness of learning in a new way, more thought and language must be given to the ambivalence, tension and conflict many students experience in their learning processes. Firstly, we should offer stories of learning processes that do not merely speak of progression and personal development, but acknowledge that learning processes may also leave us confused and unsatisfied with many ‘half‐formed thoughts’ (Barnett, 2007, p. 122) and unfinished arguments and ideas. Not all knowledge that captivates us necessarily leads to a better place, but may ‘charm us even if [it] deliver[s] us to bondage in repulsive places, whether these be libertine dungeons, Nibelung underworlds, … or outright slaughterhouses’ (Harman, 2005, p. 141). What is meant by this rather poetic phrase is that there are no guarantees that higher education will lead out of the cave. Possibly higher education could, unintentionally, get students sidetracked into an existential or epistemological darker place.

Secondly, the cord between progression in understanding and progression in character or virtue should be severed. An implication of Harman is that finding your own voice does not necessarily mean to grow and mature as a person in an ethical sense. To progress in understanding makes it equally possible to grow ‘as the valiant leader or the tough‐as‐nails bastard that others always knew me to be’ (ibid.). The darkness of learning applies to all kinds of persons, and learning in higher education is not more well suited and proper for the ‘model students’ than for the eccentrics. Higher education is also a place to be a bastard; to be unfair, egoistic and cruel. Learning is not reserved for the saintly in spirit, but also for the deviant, for the weak and for the imposter. Learning is human. Good learners are not necessarily pleasant people, or people like yourself. There is a long tradition in the philosophy of education that links virtue and knowledge together, forging a pedagogical premise that good learners naturally are self‐controlled and confident persons. This fosters a narrow ideal of good learning processes as clean and rational, when for many students they are highly messy, deeply confusing and exhausting, and at times downright unpleasant. Also, in some cases, learning is an interior process, not possible to detect and assess by others, whereby it becomes unrecognised and unnoticed—utterly caught up within the darkness of learning.

IMAGINATIVE DARKNESS

One late afternoon you sit and reflect on your colleagues at the department you work in. You feel lucky because they are really good people, and many of them have strong and dazzling visions about how to make the university a better place for learning and teaching. They struggle, share ideas, develop courses, and research diverse student groups and educational designs. Somehow you do not feel this amount of vision and struggle is widely connected with the university in its core today. Public discourses concerning the university mostly try to integrate it into the market economy, or to use the university as a raft that more and more young people are encouraged to seek in the midst of rising uncertainty about future societal growth and welfare. When thinking about it you find it difficult to probe the underlying essence of the university today and to understand what the primary vision and goal for the future university should be. You assure yourself that this is just a momentary condition, and that the university will again find its footing in the globalised world in a couple of years time. However, as you lock up your office and walk down the empty corridor, you do not feel entirely convinced.

Our aim is not to link imaginative darkness to a negative or dystopian understanding of a dried out imagination. Barnett warns about a ‘dystopian imagination’ (Barnett, 2013, p. 63) infecting academia from within, and David Watson stresses that ‘there are too many books about contemporary higher education that are either polemically dystopian (“the world we have lost”) or naively utopian (“HE will solve our problems”)’ (Watson, 2014, p. 107). In line with Barnett and Watson, we underscore that it is not that kind of imaginative darkness that we wish to draw out in this paper. On the contrary, what we aim at with the term imaginative darkness relates to vision, but not as ‘lighted up’ in a clear and conscious manner, but more an imaginative sensitivity to the smoldering core of collective and joint imaginative spaces within everyday higher education practice. Here we find inspiration in Alphonso Lingis’ interpretation of the Levinasian il y a, being in its anonymous and potential form, which can be linked to what he calls ‘nightwatch’ (Lingis, 1998, p. 9ff.). Lingis puns on the double meaning of nightwatch, that is a person watching over a camp or a group of people during the long and empty night, where ‘[t]hough there is no longer anything to see, we see and do not see nothingness. We see darkness. … The night is not a substance but an event’ (ibid.). Also in this form of darkness not only people, but ‘the night watches’ (Lingis, 1998, p. 11) as well. The night is ‘not nothing, it is real, it is a presence without boundaries, frontiers, or limits’ (Lingis, 1998, p. 10). The darkness of the night is not blindness and death, but a ‘nocturnal vigilance’ (Lingis, 1998, p. 11) as Lingis calls it, and a ‘[v]igilance without end’ (Levinas, 1987, p. 48) as Levinas himself puts it.

The imaginative night of the university should not be understood as a dry spell or lack of power, but a latent and awaiting power of the future university, which is not yet realised. As Lingis writes, imaginative darkness points to a ‘wakefulness of sensibility in the inner night of one's [the university's] organism, one can sense the summons of the night itself’ (Lingis, 1998, p. 11). To answer the summons of the night, visual perception is not enough, and one must ‘make contact with that inner fantasy space in which you turn the kaleidoscope of images and omens of good and bad luck around the word of honor you have implanted in you’ (Lingis, 2005, p. 452). To move forth in the imaginative darkness of the university demands vision (Barnett, 2013, p. 44). Not regular visual perception, but visions in the sense where the power of the imagination navigates our course.

But what does it mean to move forth? How do we respond to the stirring and wakeful imaginative darkness of the future university? It is crucial that such ‘imaginative thinking has to be counter‐ideological thinking’ (Barnett, 2013, p. 23). To respond to imaginative darkness does not mean envisioning the university as a fortress or a power structure. On the contrary to see and feel into the future university means that ‘the imagination has a power to see into things, to feel into things, to be at one with things anew, so as to produce a new understanding of the object of the imagination’ (Barnett, 2013, p. 25). To see and feel into the imaginative darkness of tomorrow's university we must embark on ‘a search for a new conceptual grammar’ (Morley, 2012, p. 34), which must be drawn not from some hazy philosophical hinterland, but out of the pulsating, messy and mongrel forms of everyday imaginations and visions of teachers and students from within the university itself. As Bengtsen and Nørgård (2014) stress, new metaphorical images must be brought forth to capture and nurture such visionary blind spots in everyday higher education practice. To be sensitive to imaginative darkness in higher education is to realise that the future university cannot be forged voluntarily, but must be awaited and endured, as when on the nightwatch one endures the night, never really knowing what might emerge from the darkness of the future.

NEW METAPHORS FOR EMERGENCE AND LIGHT: POTHOLING AND MYOPIA

One day, not so long ago, one of our common colleagues told us that he had met his team leader, John, in the hallway coming out of his office. He and John have worked together for some years, and he has always respected him for his integrity and tenacity as a team leader, trying to build and maintain a feeling of community and solidarity in our quite large and varied group of researchers in the department. During the substantive organisational changes at their university, the department had at times felt more like an archipelago, with little islands floating away from each other, than a unified research department. In the organisational mishmash, John had had a tough time picking up the pieces, and at times some of us have thought that he was himself in a sort of deep crisis. As he came out of his office he looked like someone who had been in a sort of torpor, and was now coming out of a deep, but yet troubled, sleep. It was like he was not seeing straight, but still he seemed occupied by a strong thought. Unexpectedly he gave a peculiar but warm and peaceful smile, which many had not seen on his face for a long time. He hurriedly murmured something about finally having found the way forward, before he strolled along. Our common colleague could not really put his finger on it but he said that John almost literally glowed with a new light. Something inside him, which we later discovered also came to mean within the department, was emerging, and forcefully so. We could not yet understand where it came from, but it changed everything.

When confronting darkness, new metaphors of light must be crafted as well. One can argue that it is somewhat necessary that students are plunged into darkness during their time at the university, and that teachers and leaders experience the dark sides of the institutional structure. However, education cannot live in darkness, despite its potential for new becomings. As it is often darkness that holds the possibility of new approaches, we do not think that education understood as illumination and en‐lightening is fully adequate. We must be able to conceptually to match the grey zones and the twilight between fully enlightened spaces and spaces utterly in the dark. As metaphors for such spaces where light is emerging, and still on the brink of withdrawal, we suggest two new metaphors for light in higher education: potholing and myopia. Potholing, also called caving, is the activity of exploring wild cave systems. One of the main features of potholing consists in the total absence of light when first moving past the entrance of the cave. Here the other metaphor of myopia, or shortsightedness, becomes clear. As you move around in the dark underground cave systems, you must make do with whatever light you have. Independent of the source of light used, your vision is always very limited and only partial, never obtaining a full sight or overview because of the labyrinthine tunnel systems. Nevertheless, the meaning of potholing is to arrive in new and unexpected platforms of light, maybe never encountered by anyone before. In the cave, different places will be present where light manages to penetrate through the crevices of the rock, which may bathe a large part of the cave in grey and white light while keeping the tunnels that you entered through utterly in the dark. These metaphors of light are about emerging from the dark, never knowing where you will find the next pool of light.

We argue that such metaphors about emerging into the twilight, and not about light itself, can be strengthened by concepts of light from Plato, Levinas and Nietzsche. In Plato's allegory of the cave in Republic, we learn how difficult it can be to emerge into new lighted spaces never encountered before. This part of the allegory is not so much about the symbol of en‐lightening, but about encountering new forms of light unexpected and unprepared for. Plato tells us that such encounters of light may inflict ‘pain’ upon us ‘because of the dazzle and glitter of the light’, and Plato writes about the person emerging from the cave that ‘when he came out into the light, … his eyes would be filled with its beams’ (Plato, 2002, p. 748). Based on a reading of Plato's Republic, Levinas (1998, p. 15ff.) argues that the platonic light does not symbolise the coming of rational thought and the tyranny of the logos sometimes erroneously connected with it. Instead the platonic light, which Levinas links to the face of the other person, heralds the arrival of ‘exteriority’ (Levinas, 1998, p. 23); something completely otherwise or alien, the arrival of a light we never knew we sought for, and never felt the need for before we emerged into its presence. Vasseleu terms this form of light a ‘scintillating lightening’ (Vasseleu, 2005, p. 78), a form of light that does not illuminate, but glows like embers in a dying fire that can be rekindled and flame up.

The metaphor of potholing can be said to actually belong to Nietzsche in his description in Daybreak of the philosopher as a ‘subterranean man’ and a ‘solitary mole’, ‘who tunnels and mines and undermines’ and who is ‘working there in the dark’ (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 1). Nietzsche's philosophy is full of descriptions of emerging into wild and uncalled for spaces of thought, which are often derogated and banned by common society and common sense. The mole is a very shortsighted animal, almost blind, and uses other senses than sight to find its way around in the dark tunnels. In The Anti‐Christ, Nietzsche states that for such a case of myopia we must have ‘courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. … New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained dumb’ (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 125). Thus, Nietzsche's images of the ‘subterranean man’ and the ‘anti‐Christ’ hold within them both metaphors of potholing and myopia. Is there enough room and space for ‘Anti‐Christian’ students and teachers in higher education practice today? Do we as educational developers create learning and teaching environments in which we let our students ‘tunnel’ their way out of the known organisational territory? As Biggs and Tang have given us their Roberts (the typecast surface learners) and Susans (the typecast deep learners), we offer the ‘mole’ and the ‘Anti‐Christ’ as types of students around which to mould future pedagogy.

When working, teaching and learning in higher education we should not dispel the darkness, as it is often because of darkness that emergence into new light is possible at all. Darkness is not a destructive phenomenon as such, but a neutral force or potential that may have constructive or destructive outlets. It is important to be mindful of students’ potential not realised, or potentials for reframing teamwork or course work. However, this demands that we acknowledge and support students, staff and leaders sometimes tunneling down into the cave system merely equipped, symbolically speaking, with a half burnt down torch or an old flashlight with low batteries. Sometimes we cannot follow them into the cave, but that does not mean that we should forget all about them until they emerge again, whether that is as broken or inflamed persons. Many of us are constantly moving into caves whether that be when we do research, take part in departmental and institutional work, or in our private lives. We must acknowledge that we may be spending most of our time at the university as students and teachers in caves, partly without vision (literally and metaphorically) because of the darkness that surrounds us, but also sometimes emerging in scintillating lighted up spaces. It is not so much about how we map the cave systems that we move around in on a daily basis, but how we support and facilitate growth and learning within such spaces. And how we maintain the courage to keep entering into the dark tunnels opening up before us.

INTO THE WILD – CONCLUDING REMARKS

By circling in and presenting the concept of educational darkness, we have pointed out liminal states, ambivalence, tension, hiddenness, unknowingness and even incomprehension and failure in higher education practice as phenomena worthy of further attention and research. We have argued that such phenomena should be acknowledged not only as equally real and true as any other event or challenge in higher education, but as holding within them opportunities to reflect anew on the potentials and pitfalls of higher education learning and teaching practices. Approaching educational darkness in thought and practice sometimes means that thresholds must be crossed, which one would otherwise have tried to avoid, as they disrupt and destabilise the routine, flow and balance of everyday departmental schedule and work life. However, if we are bold enough to cross such thresholds, it becomes possible to turn darkness as a phenomenon from obscurity and blindness to potent and wild spaces; maybe even a new form of vision with which to engage with future challenges in institutional structures and a possibility to enhance the loudness and penetration of the student voice in everyday learning situations.

However, crossing such thresholds of educational darkness into new spaces of educational twilight is not an easy thing. Engaging with the strained and murky situations, as described in this paper, often causes professional uncertainty and demands deep personal commitment and toil across all institutional levels. Crossing into such educational darkness may feel like departing into the wild—producing an uncertainty about the terrain, inhabitants and environments being encountered. This must surely be part of the vision for the future university, that it once and for all leaves behind its pseudo‐identity as a superhuman or super‐societal institution and engages with issues in learning and teaching not to solve them or necessarily to grasp them, but to endure them and stay with them.

We should strive for more personal and ‘lifelike’ learning and teaching environments in which we are to some degree forced to be more together and to drain each other and exhaust each other more—but also, hopefully, to be able to support and guide each other better. A flat and trivial social philosophy that alone will solve future educational challenges is not being suggested, but rather the importance of lowering one's guard and facing the dark side of educational institutions; the fear, the isolation, but also the learning potential of giving of oneself instead of merely receiving. In this sense the future university is already here among us. In the darkness lies the potential that we might find courage and endurance to make the university a place not only for specific purposes such as study, research, development, teaching, administration, leadership, and so on—but also a place for non‐purposive activities and forms of being and becoming. In this way, the university becomes a more integrated part of our life‐world, and all the dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears, triumphs and failures that go along with it. Maybe, then, the future university might emerge as a more humane place for learning—fallible and rugged, but with possibilities for open‐ended learning and growth.