“Last orders,please!”: The disappearance of communicative spaces at universities

Introduction: Closing time for a cherished institution

It is the main thesis of this paper that the informal character and unique position of a common room, occupying a hybrid position on the continuum between the public and the private spheres, facilitated a form of communication one would find hard to encounter in the more formal and ‘official’ settings of universities. Bypassing formal rules and regulations and official speech codes, it contributed to what is known as the ‘invisible university’, that informal network, ‘soul’ or spirit, which breathes life into any institution of higher education. As I will argue in this paper, under specific circumstances, such informality can become a vital retreat, enabling the emergence of oppositional voices and purposes, directed against the onslaught of managerialism and autocratic tendencies that have made inroads to universities. ¹

For 43 years, since its inception in 1975 until its enforced closure in 2018, the Common Room of the largest university in Ireland, University College Dublin (UCD), facilitated inter- and cross-disciplinary encounters and served as a space where academic and non-academic conversations could be conducted, in which frank and free, and occasionally passionate, arguments were exchanged, and many a story told. All of this happened relatively unimpacted by the more formal aspects of traditional university business symbolised by protocol, rules and regulations, status, rank, title or dress – at least to a certain extent, as we will see.

The overwhelming majority of its roughly 900 members cherished the UCD Common Room and wanted it to last. However, members were in for a big shock when former University President Andrew Deeks announced towards the end of 2017 that work for a new extension to the University's large conferring space, O’Reilly Hall, had been given the official go-ahead, and that a new University Club – modelled allegedly on the university club in Perth (Deeks's alma mater) – would eventually replace the staff's Common Room.

Additionally, it emerged that the new club would no longer be administered by elected representatives of the club's members but by the University management, which in turn would farm the day-to-day running of the club out to an established catering company. The new club's governance model would also be different: envisioned mainly as part and parcel of the new corporate infrastructure, the new club aimed at a very differently constituted public when compared to the old Common Room. So-called stakeholders, made up of potential and already giving philanthropists, promising start-up entrepreneurs, as well as selected invitees from outside such as celebrities and politicians, would mingle and interact – so it was thought – with the decision-makers and higher echelons of the university. For the normal day-to-day operations, the new club would still have to rely on the custom of regular faculty and administrative staff, former and present alumni, members from the gym and sports centre and visiting academics – all of them either new members or invitees of members. ²

The announcement of UCD's new club and home in the planned annex to O’Reilly Hall with an estimated budget of €14 million did not come as a complete surprise. In the weeks leading up to the final decision, Deeks and representatives of the existing Common Room Club had frank discussions about the University management's plans for the new club and what would happen to the Common Room. In those meetings, the President seemed particularly keen on tapping into the human capital represented by the membership of the existing club. From his point of view, this was a generous proposal since it offered the Common Room and its members a new ‘home from home’, unthreatened by any future teaching or administrative space requirements that might emerge in relation to the John Henry Newman Building (which until that moment had provided the space for the Common Room Club). ³ By contrast, for many observers, Deeks's offer sounded rather like a threat. Quite a few Common Room members complained that they felt they had been exiled from their own institution.

At a well-attended emergency meeting, Common Room Club members agreed that they would try to continue to engage with Deeks despite his openly voiced intentions to close the Common Room in the Newman Building once the new university club was up and running. Leading up to the emergency meeting, early concerns had been raised by Common Room Club members about the dirigiste attitude of the President during the consultation, which appeared to have been mainly a pro forma, face-saving exercise. Just a short time after the crucial emergency meeting, the worst suspicions were confirmed. Common Room members and their representatives were in for the unthinkable: no compromise was on offer, only total disbandment of the old Common Room.

The will to push through with the new project and the unwillingness to discuss any alternative plans signalled that UCD's planners and decision-makers lacked any deeper understanding of the general benefits of how the ‘invisible university’ worked at their own institution and how the Common Room contributed significantly to its overall function and maintenance. The University relies to a large extent on what is, on first sight, the invisible part of any larger institution, perhaps especially any institution of higher education. In Habermasian terms, we encounter glimpses of a lifeworld that sustains the running of the university system, yet is not officially part of its functioning because it involves such things as self-regulation, self-control, informality, social networks and contacts, not to mention the good will of faculty and staff members. Furthermore, there seemed to have been no real appreciation of how institutional knowledge works and is passed on nor how collective remembrance works in a university like UCD. In short, the closure of the Common Room against the wish of most of its members was a sign that manufactured sociability would take precedence over the actually existing informal culture of faculty and staff.

Increasingly, the whole affair began to look like a giant social engineering project. The Common Room members protested – formally to President Deeks and his management team, and publicly by organising a series of events and protests. The aim was to flag up to its members and the larger public not only the impending demise of a cherished institution but, additionally now, the imminent threat of closure without any real alternatives in place. As it turned out, all protest and reasonable argument was to no avail. ⁴ Just before Christmas of 2018, the Common Room Club shut its doors forever. The interior and bar were demolished to make space for yet not clearly specified purposes. ⁵ It seemed a bitter irony that UCD, the same institution that had awarded honours to such internationally renowned figures as social theorists Jürgen Habermas and Jeffrey C. Alexander, both of whom have written extensively about the transformation of the public-civil sphere and its importance for the possibility of communicative and civic action, actively pursued the demise of the treasured semipublic institution and communicative space that was the Common Room. ⁶ Less ironically and perhaps more poignantly, one could simply call the actions of the President and UCD's Management Team ‘a casual act of vandalism’. ⁷

In what follows, I will first try to dig a little bit deeper and attempt to explain why the UCD Common Room and its communicative space had become so important in recent years and what its new functions and symbolic importance had to do with the reluctance to top-down modernisation in higher education. I will then work my way further back in time and recount the normal functions of the Common Room (i.e. before the onset of the crisis that let to its closure) before returning to the additional and new functions in a challenging new environment. The descriptive part of this paper will end by pointing to some of the Common Room's most salient sociological features, features that any institution that purports to live up to the values and formative experiences of higher education should encourage and maintain instead of abolishing. I will close with some observations as to whether the demise of institutions like the Common Room is indicative of the rapidly changing landscape, that is, higher education, and the tendency therein to favour autocratic rule and demand uncritical loyalty. Overall, this paper attempts to be a hybrid between a thick description in the Geertzean sense and a sociological case study that digs deeper in order to find out whether there are elements in this story that reveal a larger tendency or truth about the institutional decline of communicative spaces at universities – not just in Ireland but elsewhere as well. ⁸ While the author tries to be as objective as possible in terms of describing the course of events, this attempt at making sense of a senseless closure of a valued institution contains necessarily some subjective elements. After all, the author who tries to establish the meaning behind the closure has been one of its members.

Higher education between managerial newspeak and institutional reality

What could explain the radical measures and the uncompromising stance taken by the President and UCD's management team referred to in the introduction? One could speculate and point to all kinds of reasons, from the Common Room having largely outlived its purpose in a modern university where most employees work from 8.00 to 17.00 to the desert that the UCD campus is after 20.00 (and despite having been promoted as a ‘24/7’ university under Deeks's predecessor Brady), to staff having to commute larger distances to an ever-sprawling Dublin suburbia and to the satellite settlements and towns that now cater to the city.

No doubt, these arguments all have some explanatory force; however, there was (and still is) arguably a more convincing motive available that might explain ever tighter control and the authoritarian tendencies in the upper echelons of higher education. Over the last 20 years, UCD has been pushing an extreme form of impression management to present itself to the outside world and its potential stakeholders as a constantly innovating and reform-hungry institution that strives for excellence and worldwide recognition. As with other ideologies of radical renewal, this often has not played out in a straightforward manner and as originally envisioned. The gap between promising rhetoric and actual reality became increasingly noticeable. It is this gap that hints at a shift in relation to such institutions as the Common Room. As UCD economist Moore McDowell has observed:

In the university an effective Common Room remained the only equivalent to the concept of civil society in a national political context… In any university there is an inevitable incidence of tension and disagreement between academics and administration, but a common room that contains both is a bridge builder (McDowell in Brady and Marx, 2019: 74 and 76).

The Common Room's normal way of operating came under pressure first when President Hugh Brady introduced radical changes in the way the University operated, and then his successor Andrew Deeks attempted to accelerate that process to wake up the allegedly ‘sleepy giant’ UCD. They attempted to do so mainly by beating the drum for what McDowell has called ‘professionalisation’. In effect, this meant introducing a new top-down managerial skeleton, which was accompanied by ideological newspeak invented for exactly such purposes (‘achieving objective 7b to fulfil plan A’). The anticipated purpose was not just to replace the old, more collegial, some would say laissez-faire order (including some of its alleged academic patronage) step by step but instead in one giant assault. This included the eradication of anything that smelled of reluctance, scepticism or critique and took aim at the new gospel of radical renewal.

With the reconstruction clock ticking and given the enormous time pressures for such undertakings, the University administration's rhetoric appeared increasingly ideologically loaded and seemingly inappropriate for higher education purposes: the more questions and unforeseen complications emerged, and the more unintended consequences presented themselves, the more extreme the language became. The administration's communication became full of references that illustrated the latest fads and foibles in higher education and what Stefan Collini has famously called ‘HiEdBiz’. ⁹ The doubts, scepticism and uneasiness that arose in the UCD context, but perhaps also for Irish institutions of higher learning in general, all led to this question: why increase the volume of the rhetoric of renewal to noise levels if not for the purpose of making up for the gap in a largely and principally unmeasurable progress?

Enter a change in function of the traditional Common Room, one that was not envisioned originally and for it functioning in ‘normal’ times. Not designed as such and certainly without any original intention – never mind planning – the Common Room Club had become, almost by default due to the lack of other such spaces, a kind of refuge in an increasingly hostile managerial environment. ¹⁰

To put it more forcefully, the Common Room's main purpose had been originally to serve all the informal purposes that normally pertain to such institutions and the ‘invisible university’. However, in the last few years of its existence, the Common Room had, under pressure from above, clearly added another element or aspect to its normal functioning and that concerned how to react to and resist, individually and collectively, the agenda setting forces of ‘HiEdBiz’ and its ideologues. In other words, the Common Room had, involuntarily and almost by stealth, become part of a new political, social and cultural dynamic. It provided, perhaps against original intention and purpose, a space for and of opinion-making that allowed its members to discuss the impact of the increasing gap between the University's ‘ever-forward’ rhetoric and a reality that simply didn’t match those official aspirations. In short, the University Management Team's choice of language seemed less and less convincing to those who had to operationalise it and make it work on the ground. To form and, more importantly, to voice, a critical opinion or to express doubt became impossible since much of the University's official gatherings and fora didn’t allow for critical voices to emerge. Any such attempts, and there were a few, were drowned either in group dynamics or in hasty decision-making, the latter often being linked to pressures from some imagined international agenda (‘stiff global competition’, visibility and perception issues, etc.).

In short, UCD was facing a governance problem of gigantic proportions. ¹¹ Most official channels had been turned into collective exercises in which outcome and tone were clearly set from above and in which deliberation and consultation rarely happened, or if so, only pro forma. The general unreflectiveness turned from being latent (under Brady) to becoming manifest (under Deeks): in any case, under both regimes, there seemed never to be any alternative to any of the proposed changes from above. Worse, it had become impossible collectively to raise a voice or be critical of the emptiness, one could even say craziness, of some of the new regime's suggested fads and foibles (including the renaming of social and professional practices by issuing official speech codes and so on).

The accelerated agenda setting and constant reform mongering from above tired people out – even those who had, at first, put great hopes into the University's agenda for change. For a considerable number of faculty and staff, the rhetoric appeared increasingly hollow, and while it is hard to come up with an estimate for the number of either ‘dissidents’ or ‘sympathisers’, it became clear that not everyone was convinced about or was ready to follow the new managerialist speech codes or the gospel of everlasting improvement with its key performance indicators.

What the enforced Common Room closure clearly signalled in the light of the developments and credibility gaps described was that UCD's top brass began to lean ever more towards, and perhaps even opted consciously for, the mode of ‘doing for’ instead of ‘doing with’. After an early, perhaps even promising, start UCD President Andrew Deeks came to surpass his predecessor to detrimental effect: there were zero naysayers and critical voices left in Deeks's management team (if they existed, their dissent was never made public, probably due to some misunderstood collective cabinet responsibility or allegiance that seemed to have prevailed within the University's management team). In the later period of his reign, Deeks let all pretentions go. Gone were the days of some initial speed dating with staff and faculty. Without any meaningful opposition and dismissing all local critical voices that could have come from within his own institution, Deeks and his team turned even more to the OECD's and other international HE consultancy organisations. Over time, this form of reliance on outside evaluation and reports became more and more entwined with a detectable arrogance due largely to power unchecked. That unholy alliance became the hallmarks of UCD's new democratic centralism. ¹²

The new President always seemed to know what was best for ‘his’ constituency and its social life and affairs. Thorstein Veblen's worst anticipations, first voiced in a predominantly American context at the beginning of the 20th century, ¹³ had become a reality in Ireland a century later: a new type of leader – the autocratic captain of higher learning – had emerged whose agenda and purpose would no longer rhyme with the agreed traditional aims and purposes of liberal higher education.

To recall briefly, the university's function and purpose – and that includes not only UCD and other universities in the Republic of Ireland but all universities that still cater to or live up to the institution's title – was not just to serve system imperatives, i.e. the business community or market demands for qualified labour and services, but also to provide and allow for formative experiences that have as their main aim and purpose some form of what Habermas has called communicative reasoning and action. The latter two are associated largely with the lifeworld, a term that Habermas borrowed from the philosophical–phenomenological tradition (Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz) and that he saw operating in both relation and in opposition to the instrumental means–end logic of the system and its steering mechanisms (see Habermas, 1981, especially Vol II, 171–293).

But to return to our main argument, the critical examination of a more meaningful life, the sharing of ideas between teaching staff and students, to discover the riches of free research and voicing, sharing and exchanging ideas, it is still universities that provide the unique space and environment for such purposes (and that are therefore often used by Habermas as illustrations for what communicative interaction can achieve). And while some cynicism can occasionally be encountered (‘faculty members pretend to teach and students pretend to learn’), it is still values like these communicative aims and practices that many, if not the majority, of educationalists and academic staff hold dear. That these values are in equal measure also supported and welcomed by the majority of students – again, despite some instrumentalist notions as to the need for certification and ‘making the grade’ – seems undeniable.

No institution of any size is of course perfect. Universities are no different in this regard; they need to emulate best practices and introduce reforms where necessary. However, the new pursuit appeared to many to be a constant, consisting of never-ending overhaul and ‘improvements’ – some of which were clearly unnecessary or without any purpose, apart perhaps from creating more management and administrative jobs and an ever-increasing number of outside advisers within what seems to have turned into an entire higher education service industry. To be sure, organised scepticism, discovery by accident, democratic inclinations, studying unintended consequences and, dare one say, humility and self-doubt have rarely been what characterised the chief architects of modern managerialism – or, in Veblen's words, the modern captains of higher learning. That is the sad and perhaps unintended outcome of modern attitudes and practices to higher education in Ireland and elsewhere. A republic that was once famous for having produced writers and scholars had turned into a playing field and human experiment of huge proportions. ¹⁴

It is worthwhile recalling at this stage in my argument why some traditional communicative spaces were ‘invented’ in the first place and why universities should protect them and maintain them and not replace them with educational bureaucrats, managerialism, hollow substitute publics and occasional academic flash mobs.

Operation remembrance: Old and new functions of the UCD Common Room

The idea of the Common Room predates its opening in 1975. Having moved most of UCD's operations from the centre of Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace, close to St Stephen's Green, to the new suburban Belfield campus in South Dublin, it soon emerged that the dispersing of departments and staff, all of whom had been in close proximity with each other at the former location, led to a sense of loss of community and communication after having moved to the south of the city. Additionally, in the suburban island that was the new Belfield campus, there was a lack of suitable social infrastructure for staff who were on a break from teaching, administrative tasks or research, never mind the possibility to meet after work.

Since a consensus had emerged within a relatively short time that there was indeed a lack of infrastructure and a need for a common space, the University acted. The initiative to create some sort of facility was welcomed and formally moved along by the College Secretary with the approval of then President Tom Murphy. In tandem, the notion of a club that could breathe life into a new common facility gained momentum. ¹⁵ Other aspects were more formal in character but soon resolved, such as a club licence which was one of the requirements to introduce a bar and sell alcohol.

At the end of this process, the most suitable place that was agreeable to both employees and the administration needed to be identified. B104, a larger room on the first floor in the John Henry Newman complex, then the largest building on campus, which housed mainly but not only humanities and social science subjects, seemed the most suitable option. It also helped that the new room was just a short passage (and tunnel) away from the Tierney Building, which then housed most of the administration; equally, the library and its staff were just a tunnel bridge away.

Over the course of more than four decades since its inception, numerous changes were introduced to B104. These ranged from changing decorations by laying down decent carpets, introducing warmer and partly indirect lighting, having wooden floorboards in front of the bar, mounting new pictures and paintings, setting up some busts of respected academics and bringing in more comfortable seating arrangements. Journal shelves for subscriptions, later a TV with its own separate seating corner and curtains as room dividers improved the aesthetics and turned the room into a more appealing, warm and welcoming space. Some significant structural changes occurred as well: the bar room was enlarged, and the bar area itself was to take on a distinct S-shaped form to provide more space for customer traffic at peak times; this suited not only the ‘front bench’ of members but also gave more elbow room for those who wanted to place larger rounds for other members seating in other areas of the Common Room, especially when the place filled up. Additionally – for peak hours in the morning and at lunch – a new coffee dock and a new seating area across the floor from B104 opened.

Visitors to the Common Room could chose a light lunch (soup and a small variety of toasts and sandwiches were provided) and coffee, tea or other drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic). Newspapers and periodicals were available, and one could engage with colleagues in conversation or be, by choice, left alone while still physically sharing a common space with other people. There were also larger purposeful social meetings at regular intervals, ranging from the bridge club to traditional Irish music sessions, anniversaries and book launches, regular quiz nights in support of good causes and wine and beer tastings to welcoming and hosting visitors from overseas. Other events such as anniversaries, promotions, the celebration of academic and administrative appointments, the election of presidents or the appointment to other high offices and send-offs for those who had reached pensionable age took place in the Common Room as well.

There were also two annual and always well frequented larger events: summer and Christmas parties. To add to this colourful picture, in its long existence, the Common Room saw also a significant number of taoisigh, tánaistí and government ministers, quite a few diplomats from various Dublin embassies and a good number of prominent academic luminaries not just from the isle of Ireland but from around the world.

Over the years, the membership of the Common Room increased steadily, and so did the numbers of visitors. A few years after its founding in 1982, the official number of members stood as 431; at the time of its closure in 2018, this number had grown to around 900. Over time, the rules were relaxed as to who could become a member. By 1987, this included potentially all full- and part-time staff who were on the University's payroll. Fees remained modest; yes, they increased over the years from £20 to €75 p.a. and were dutifully deducted from one's pay, but the membership fee was considerably lower when compared to other university clubs. Once signed up, members would receive a key. It is perhaps worthwhile mentioning in this context that not all users of the Common Room were members. Members had always been allowed to bring guests, and that often extended to faculty introducing the next generation of scholars, i.e. PhDs, and on very rare occasions also mature and other postgraduate students (i.e. if invited and accompanied by members). Often that younger cohort of visitors would eventually become members themselves (in the cases where UCD employment turned out to be their chosen career path).

The Common Room Club's major decision-making bodies consisted of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) and, between the annual meetings, the main Common Room Committee. The latter was constituted by way of election at the annual meeting, usually after some earlier deliberations and informal consultations leading up to the AGM. The elected committee functioned as the executive and dealt with such important matters as finances, employment of bar and coffee dock staff, licensing issues for food and drink and house rules. It should be added here that, with reference to the official employment history, it was initially the Student Union that supplied the bar staff for the Common Room. This arrangement was later replaced by opting for a more regularised and professional form of employment. The decision seemed to have been a wise one; several long-serving barmen became legendary figures in their own right, mixing, as one member has described it, personality and ‘courtesy with efficiency’. ¹⁶

The by-and-large self-governing and democratic way the Common Room was run stood in clear contrast to the way the University overall was being governed. ¹⁷ Having said that, there was some considerable debate about how inclusive the club and its membership really were. Kathleen Lynch noted that despite its community rhetoric, some substantive inequalities remained at universities, and UCD's Common Room Club was no exception to this. ¹⁸ The Common Room reflected academic hierarchies, and it took some deliberation – actually two AGMs in 1986 and 1987 – to open the club and its membership (until then mainly faculty staff and senior administrators) to all who were on the UCD payroll. But while the UCD Common Room Club democratised itself and became more inclusive, the same could not be said about the way UCD was governed.

Particularly from the new millennium onwards, UCD had increasingly metamorphosed from a somewhat ‘benign’ oligarchic structure with a reluctant attitude towards modernisation to a hyper-modernising autocratic bureaucracy: the ‘democratic centralism’ referred to earlier. As with other historical models of that sort of running larger institutions, democracy remained something to be achieved and centralism increasingly becoming the prevailing feature. Reconstruction of the Governing Authority, rule by specialist committees or boards, the inflationary number of Vice Presidents and Vice Principals for this, that and the other real or imagined purpose, the persistent undermining and radical transformation of Faculty Board meetings which lacked proper deliberations, the sterile and largely procedurally organised Academic Council, the responsibility-without-power approach applied to the role of Heads of Schools, the increased power of Programme Boards, and, last but not least, a widening ‘nudge culture’ increasingly marked the new millennial administrations, first that of UCD President Hugh Brady (2004–2013) and then that of Andrew Deeks (2013–2022). ¹⁹ Tensions between money-spinning sciences, applied sciences, medicine and especially STEM subjects on one side and the humanities and social sciences on the other side became more manifest and turned a ‘three cultures’ perception into real networks. These often translated into power relations, which in turn shaped and influenced University policies, new capital-raising initiatives and some problematic funding regimes. All these developments exacerbated already latent tensions at the multiversity that UCD had become, yet without understanding its radical implications or even the larger process itself. It seemed like a misunderstood emulation of the old labour slogan ‘forward ever, backward never’ but without the lived experience of the plebeian classes. Excellence was now sought everywhere, an almost impossible undertaking at a misunderstood multiversity. ²⁰

As pointed out before, the changes that occurred eventually impacted directly on institutions like the UCD's Common Room. Due to the lack of any effective and organised opposition that could challenge the official regime and the ‘brave new world’ of higher education with its omnipresent managerial neologisms fads, foibles and pro-forma consultations, the Common Room functioned increasingly as a sanctuary. In essence, it became one of the few spaces at the University where frank exchange could be had, opinions exchanged and where even academic and policy initiatives sometimes originated. How successful such initiatives were is impossible to determine and beyond the account that can be given here. Just so much: informal contact and conversations of course continued beyond what might have started as a kind of sounding exercise in the informal and more relaxed atmosphere of the Common Room; but that also means its actual impact is hard if not impossible to determine or expressed quantitatively. It is beyond doubt though that the Common Room provided a useful, if not crucial space for communication and non-instrumental reasoning in the way Habermas has described both. ²¹

The most important fact to acknowledge is that as a unique space and facility somewhere located on the continuum between the public and the private, the Common Room had become an institution where ideas could be tested out informally, where deliberations happened and where sometimes more formalised communication and policies that were voiced in other university fora had their roots. This is perhaps where the Common Room appeared most likely to have been a direct threat to the system, that is, official and institutionalised university politics. As described by Habermas, in modern capitalist societies, it is the system that is more likely to colonize the lifeworld, i.e. in modern societies, instrumental means–ends rationality prevails against communicative reason and rationality (Habermas, 1981: Vol. II, 171–293). But the instrumental and means-toward-ends-centred system cannot do away entirely with communicative reason and the realm or sphere of the lifeworld. This, it seems, was where the Common Room was most successful: it reversed the normal order and subverted the system's instrumental reason and rationality by creating some form of informal opposition along the lines and logic of lifeworld features such as communicative reasoning. This reversal could sometimes express itself in unusual forms. Michael Laffan has pointed out that in the Common Room ‘many conversations involved word-play’ and that ‘intellectual discussions were often accompanied – and enhanced – by laughter’ (Laffan in Brady and Marx, 2019: 60).

One surprise outcome of such conversations resulted in a regular samizdat publication, Belfield AM, a monthly leaflet which first became available in the Common Room and then came to be circulated beyond its premises, sometimes to such an extent that some notices were read out aloud in various offices and gatherings in the University. As the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) has pointed out, laughter often has a subversive dimension and effect, especially for those who use humour to represent and intend to push the ‘plebeian’ cause or side of the argument. Never was this insight truer than at UCD. ²²

To sum up, regulars and visitors alike have hailed the Common Room as an intellectual haven, a cultural treasure, the heart and soul of UCD, a sign that while relentless bureaucratic modernisation has killed the spirit of many a university, there still exists a sane place where sociability, communality and open exchange could be taken seriously.

Not only did important academic initiatives originate in the Club. Over the years, UCD's Common Room provided a space that served all the functions and pleasures mentioned before; it also contributed seriously to the forging of friendships and new collegial relations, which in turn led to immeasurable academic exchanges and outputs. Numerous are the books and journal articles either first conceived there or whose arguments were first tried and tested out there in discussion (that applies perhaps primarily, but by no means exclusively, to humanities scholars and social scientists). Such output might not least be explained by the unique community spirit of the UCD Common Room, one certainly unmatched by TCD's club ‘down the road’, where visitors have noted the old furniture and the exclusive groups that enjoy the classy interior, but where newcomers or visitors were rarely encouraged to join the brass rail and the conversation in the way that happened openly and more democratically, in Belfield. ²³

The Common Room as a distinct communicative sphere: Some sociological observations and reflections

The crucial distinction and the history of the dynamics between the private and the public go back a long way. This cannot be the place to discuss all aspects of this relationship, ²⁴ suffice to say that an institution like the Common Room can be located somewhere halfway on the continuum between the public on one end and the private on the other. It is important to stress in this context that we are talking about a continuum, which means that institutions often and veer between, and receive impulses from, both ends of that continuum. It would thus be a mistake to suggest that the analytic system–lifeworld distinction introduced earlier is based on exclusive notions and is associated with specific settings only. Rather, the argument made here is that in reality, system and lifeworld are entwined and often operate in ways hard to decipher, even for a trained sociologists. Some central features that mark the dynamics between the public and the private spheres and the impact this oscillation has had politically, socially and culturally in modern societies have been studied by social theorists Jürgen Habermas and Jeffrey C. Alexander. ²⁵ Considerably less attention has been paid to the complex dialectic in which the system–lifeworld distinction plays out in microenvironments that have public and private features such as common rooms within larger institutional entities. It is the sociologist Erving Goffman who deserves the credit for having focused more on the micro and meso levels of behaviour in public places; it is to his insights that I would like to turn to briefly now. ²⁶

Goffman distinguishes between different levels of what it means to be in the public sphere, ranging from simply being physically present to being more attentive and involving focused interaction with others in clearly demarcated spaces (Goffman, 1963: 16–25). In most cases, the concrete ‘framing’ of the environment determines the purpose and what kind of behaviour applies. This can vary from regular recreational use and ‘consummate pleasure’ as an end in itself to more specific occasions such as situated activities and planned gatherings (ibid. 19–22).

In his phenomenology of action and interaction patterns in public places, Goffman reveals the existence of a whole range of forms or modes of expression and role playing. These include (and the list that follows here is by no means exhaustive) bodily idioms, main and side involvement and ‘involvement shields’ but also patterns of non-attention, non-person treatment and the differences between civil inattention and face engagement. Goffman stresses that the possibility of encounters is largely determined by accessibility but can also depend on and be modified by the arrival of third parties, the rights of smooth and polite departure or sudden withdrawal or exit of others. The recognition of acquaintanceships, the rules of exposure and conditions of mutual openness can be of relevance, too (for a full catalogue, see Goffman, 1963, especially 67–77, 83–84, 89–91, 110, 112–114, 124, 132).

Communication boundaries are usually framed and defined by how open a given public space is. Here we can think of places that range from museums or concert halls to more ‘controlled’ places like bars and restaurants and to even more restricted environments like private membership clubs. All these institutions are in principle on a private–public continuum, but for Goffman, some clearly lean more to either one or the other side of the spectrum. Thus, it is not unheard of that tensions can occur in relation to what Goffman calls ‘engagement disloyalty’, i.e. the moment when proprieties or engagement principles are violated. Sometimes this can happen through sheer ignorance (not knowing the rules), through confusion (of the rules of engagement) or, as it may sometimes also occur, on purpose. Other tensions or irritations might arise about the appropriateness of conversation and interaction, or, as it may happen as well, by not paying due respect to situational regulations (ibid. 199–200), or by not reading the signs as to what is possible or still acceptable in terms of ‘arrogance, disdain and deep hostility’ (218).

The behavioural ecology that Goffman describes for public spaces and the expectations associated with its social life and interaction appear indeed to be both varied and complex. However, ‘complex’ here does not mean that ‘anything goes’. Rather, the sociologist's phenomenology of possible behaviour tells us a different story. While the framing of certain formative experiences in institutions such as university common rooms is bound by the very location and somewhat limited by the fact that some features will always remain contingent, some experiences made in such an environment have become lessons for life and thus become a ‘mobile feast’ that any educational institution should be proud of and might want to maintain and build upon. I have already mentioned some central features of the ‘moral economy’ of the Common Room before (such as its solidarity and communicative aspects, its ‘having fun’, the humour and the joint laughter). I want to offer at this point some final reflections of members, visitors and employees that illustrate positively some of Goffman's observations. They remain expressions of meaningful formative experiences at universities – experiences that appear of course not in any official curriculum or system requirement yet not only contribute, in almost dialectical fashion, to the system maintenance of the very institution of which they are part but also promote and enable lifeworld lessons for the individuals who visit such places (all quotes in Brady and Marx, 2019 and as indicated):

It is, through the example of the Common Room members about me regularly affording me insight into their own working lives, knowing that there are more facets to university life than lectures, essays and exams… It is my learning ground. (90) (C. M., student and former part time assistant at the Common Room bar)

Conclusion: Last orders?

As I have indicated in this paper, the example of the UCD Common Room and its enforced closure can be seen as a symbol of something much larger, perhaps even as an expression of a global trend. ²⁷ Not just in Ireland higher education has become a playing field, a kind of laboratory, in which power hungry, control-obsessed, and unreflective captains of learning lead bureaucratisation and rationalisation efforts that have led to a significant shift both in governance and in what was once a prime field for socialisation and meaningful life experiences that other institutions in modern society are simply not able to provide.

At present, the needs and wishes of a considerable number of existing faculty, administrative staff and students are either largely ignored, sidelined or divided and conquered in favour of some alleged much needed reform advocated by the new ideologues of HiEdBiz. The rhetoric used often amounts to sheer noise: some hard-to-define and under-conceptualised ‘market demand’, some magic strategic plan to overhaul all that was solid in higher education (and now melts into thin air) and last but not least the ‘urgency’ for constant reinvention which always promises improvement – if only the right steps were taken instantly by management and followed through, usually without much deliberation, by fancifully worded implementation programs. Such managerialist utopias have mostly been followed by a purposeful if not to say managed decline of public and communicative spaces like common rooms, triggered by the fear of free space and uncontrollable sociability including free exchange and opinion – in short, what political economist Albert O. Hirschman has called ‘voice’. ²⁸

As it turns out, such ideological rhetoric has its limits. The gap between good intentions – the promise of excellence everywhere – and actual performance, marked by a rather elitist and autocratic attitude (‘the leadership always knows what's best for you’) has become increasingly noticeable.

The UCD Common Room example shows that for many faculty and staff members, their own university doesn’t fully resonate with them anymore; a feeling of disconnect, loss and alienation has come to replace a once deeper connection, perhaps even a sense of belonging to a community of purpose such as the formation of minds used to be. It seems as if the soul of the university has been ripped out, to be replaced by a managerialism that was, and still continues to be, prepared to turn on the ‘agile’ agenda and the ‘culture and engagement’ switch whenever it seems opportune, something that will make the university look good to those who oversee its operations and extramural stakeholders (by definition faculty no longer fall under that category). However, the whole operation appears rather meaningless to those whose task it is to make sense of what formative experiences could still mean today. This negative impression is not limited to Dublin or Ireland but is shared by many faculties and staff at universities worldwide.

As the wizard economist Albert O. Hirschman has pointed out, successful institutions are usually those where loyalty allows for voice to be heard and thus exit is kept at bay. Applied to our Common Room example and to that of similar institutions in other parts of the world, this means once voice has been discouraged or has been institutionally quelled, and exit encouraged or even enforced, a mimed and obedient form of loyalty inevitably presents itself to fill the gap. Loyalty hates a vacuum.

If this is so, we need perhaps to rethink the purpose of the university and higher education in general. In terms of decision-making in a rapidly changing environment, it would then be less the ‘heuristics of imitation’ grounded in assumptions of mere objectivity and guided by officialdom that we should look out for but the ‘heuristics of correction’ that looks out for inconsistencies and relies on deliberation in public(s) (Yildiz, 2022, especially 230).