Towards a parrhesiastic engagement with graduate employability

Graduate employability and the vulnerability of the university

Graduate employability has become a central element of policy discourse around higher education in Europe in the past two decades. One of the stated objectives of the 1999 Bologna Declaration was to establish a system of comparable qualifications to promote employability and the competitiveness of European higher education (European Higher Education Area, 2016). Some national reforms have aimed at market-based approaches to improving graduate employability. The United Kingdom government has signalled a determination to stimulate competition between higher education providers, including new entrants to the sector, with a view to addressing perceived national skills gaps (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2016). Other national dialogues have emphasised the efficiency of the higher education system in responding to economic needs. In the Netherlands, shortages of graduates in some sectors of the economy have been identified along with a need for a system more attuned to the demands placed on graduates by society (Adviesraad voor Wetenschap, Technologie en Innovatie, 2019).

As a result of such tendencies, attention is placed on the content and outcomes of higher study. Universities are thus placed in a precarious position, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of market demands or the nebulous court of public opinion. The rise of managerialism, as Cardoso et al. (2011) identify in the Portuguese context, offers a powerful incentive to institutions to offer students what they appear to want; to do otherwise is to risk them taking themselves (and thus the income they attract) elsewhere. In the Netherlands, Jongbloed (2003) has argued that the reconfiguration of the governance of higher education has left universities caught between the responsibility associated with institutional autonomy and nationally driven policy objectives. In the Republic of Ireland, Lolich and Lynch (2016) argue that an emphasis on managing the risk of uncertain futures incentivises approaches to graduate outcomes that place economic security as the highest priority. Such policy dynamics encourage the adoption of institutional practices directed towards responding to economic demands (Tomlinson, 2013).

These dynamics serve to construct a sense of vulnerability among institutions, anxious to ensure that their offerings possess sufficient market appeal to secure student patronage. This leads institutions to adopt narrow, reductionist approaches to employability such as those grounded in transmission of human capital (Keeley, 2007), satisfying employer wish-lists (Hinchliffe and Jolly, 2011), or pure labour market success (Hillage and Pollard, 1998). Reductionist accounts speak to what Peters (2005) has called actuarial rationality, in which individual students are deemed responsible for managing their own social welfare through calculating ‘the risks of their own self-investments’ (Peters, 2005: 27). Such approaches have clear appeal through the simplicity of their messages; one can easily imagine a succinct social media campaign aimed at prospective students that emphasises past graduates’ success at securing access to lucrative careers, for example. In a competitive environment for higher education, where student consumer choice has a significant bearing on the viability of programmes, departments or entire institutions, the logic of such approaches to employability appears compelling.

Yet reductionist accounts also risk narrowing the scope of what counts as a valuable outcome of higher education. Some reductionist accounts of employability, particularly those that focus exclusively in imparting work-relevant skills and knowledge, fail to speak to the complexity of ends of HE and multiple motivations to study. In themselves they risk narrowing the purposes of higher education to the efficient servicing of economic need, notably by emphasising the value of higher education as a private good (Tomlinson, 2013). Thus they render the multiple other values of higher education as distinctly ‘other’ or secondary. Students see economic security as a facilitator of affective life goals (Lolich and Lynch, 2016), thus it would be a mistake to position the debate over the value of higher education as a straight choice between economic and humanistic ends.

However, it is the very vulnerability of institutions in a market environment that presents a unique opportunity for higher education to resist the reduction of its role to the mere satisfaction of contingent demands (Oakeshott, 2001) through a serious and principled engagement with the idea of employability. For this reason, this article turns to Foucault’s (2001) conception of parrhesia to propose the basis of such an engagement. For Foucault, parrhesia represents a form of principled truth-telling that is undertaken from a sense of compulsion or duty, even in the face of existential peril. One who uses parrhesia speaks truth not because they feel some external compulsion to do so, nor because they feel that to do so would advance their own interests. Rather, their truth-telling is a disinterested one, motivated by a commitment to the problem of living a true life (Tamboukou, 2012). Conceiving of teaching as a form of parrhesia can, writes Gibbs (2018), enable education to resist simplistic understandings of being. Such an approach would serve to emphasise the ethical dimension of the pursuit of knowledge (Papadimos and Murray, 2008), an approach which can incorporate the variety of ends that students pursue through education.

Higher education may thus consider itself to play an active part in the production of the concept of employability. For Foucault (1988a), power is not a possession but a relation – or a strategy, as Deleuze (1999) puts it. We must therefore not think in terms of the powerful and the powerless, but think of ourselves as being always in a relation of power with others. Thus, universities are never powerless in the face of the market-driven demands of students-as-consumers; we are not faced with a straight choice between compliance (and thus survival) and rejection (and therefore subordination). This marks the rejection of a law-and-sovereign notion of power in favour of ‘a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of forms of subjugation and schemas of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1978: 98). The university, then, is always engaged in a contest over the truth of employability. It is always in a position to engage through a commitment to truth, and is never doomed to the unquestioning enactment of others’ conceptions of what is valuable. In this sense, graduate employability represents a discourse in Foucault’s (1978) terms. The concept of employability is itself produced through the interplay of knowledge and power, and as such is capable of being recreated. To be clear, this is not an argument against knowledge and skills per se; to do so would be to make the rather absurd denial that the subject matter of degree programmes has any relation at all to the world of work. Rather, it is an invitation to consider a broader conception of graduate employability in its complexity and mutability.

Foucault’s conception of parrhesia is significant in that it brings to his distinctive conception of power the significance of accord between how we conceive of truth and how we live our lives – or ‘a harmonious coexistence between logos and bios, discourse and life’ (Tamboukou, 2012: 855). Thus, the chief concern of parrhesia is how to live a true life (Tamboukou, 2012). Approaching the debate over graduate employability from this perspective presents it as a contest to establish the truth of ‘good’ graduate outcomes. For universities, to conceive of their conversations over their students’ employability as a kind of parrhesia is a way of actively and purposely resisting the temptation to succumb to market-driven motivations that reduce the purpose of education to pure economic utility. It offers a way of engaging with graduate outcomes that enables them to play a distinctive role in supporting students’ constitution as employable graduates in ways that are grounded in something other than mere utility.

Parrhesia and the practices of the university

In his lectures at Berkeley in 1983 (Foucault, 2001), Foucault identifies a number of characteristics of the use of parrhesia. These characteristics signal some important consequences for its deployment as a strategy for engaging with graduate employability. First is frankness, in the sense of giving ‘a complete and exact account of what [the speaker] has in mind’ (Foucault, 2001: 12) in a way that ‘makes it manifestly clear and obvious’ (Foucault, 2001: 12) that it is the speaker’s own opinion. Those who use parrhesia are therefore speaking on their own account, expressing perspectives or positions that are genuinely held; it establishes a relation between the speaker and what is said. Thus, to adopt a parrhesiastic stance towards graduate employability therefore requires an approach that is genuinely authentic rather than derived from external demands.

Parrhesia establishes a relation between belief and truth. Foucault states:

the parrhesiastes says what is true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it really is true. The parrhesiastes is not only sincere and says what is his opinion, but his opinion is also the truth. He says what he knows to be true. (Foucault, 2001: 14; emphasis in original)

Parrhesia further marks out a relation between truth-telling and danger. To use parrhesia is to take a risk. This speaks to the inverted power relations between the university and the student, as Foucault argues: ‘It is because the parrhesiastes must take a risk in speaking the truth that the king or tyrant generally cannot use parrhesia; for he risks nothing’ (Foucault, 2001: 16). If we are to argue that the student is an informed and active chooser of routes through higher education, then the university – being vulnerable to the choices of students – must engage with employability not from a position of dominance but from a position of vulnerability to the interests of students and wider society. The university therefore takes a risk in occupying a distinctive position on graduate employability, and must take this risk in order to speak truthfully and on its own account. This risk-taking is evidence of the moral courage, and thus the sincerity, of the parrhesiastes (Peters, 2003).

However, parrhesia is not just a demonstration of truth, but functions as criticism of either the interlocutor or the speaker themselves (Foucault, 2001). The objective of the parrhesiastes is therefore not to flatter or to convince the other but to induce a conversation with oneself (Vansieleghem, 2011). The critical opportunity for the university, then, is to adopt a stance towards graduate employability that rejects reductionist knowledge-and-skills approaches, in which universities are responsible for imparting the qualities of employability and exercising judgement over the employability of their students. Instead of disclosing the truth about students to students, the opportunity exists to adopt a transformed relationship in which ‘the disciple takes on this responsibility as a duty towards himself’ (Peters, 2003: 216).

Graduate employability as the reconstitution of the self

It is therefore argued that graduate employability can be conceptualised as a form of reconstitution of the self. This is in contrast to the idea of employability as human capital or the acquisition of ‘the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes embodied in individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and economic well-being’ (Keeley, 2007: 29). To begin with the idea of self-transformation is to locate students not as sovereign selves acting freely and independently but as social selves located within a set of social relations (Holmes, 2001). Becoming employable, then, is not merely a question of acquiring the right qualities; it is a process of social self-construction that is grounded in the intersection of knowledge(s) of what it is to be employable and the interplay of power relations.

A transformation of the self can be effected through the effecting of certain actions upon oneself in pursuit of some idealised end. Foucault (1988b) traces the development of what he calls technologies of the self ‘which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ (18). The goal of applying such techniques is to bring about self-transformation in pursuit of better ways of living. Such technologies imply particular forms of training and modification in order to acquire certain skills and attitudes (Foucault, 1988b). The transformation of the self into an employable graduate, then, would occur by means of particular forms of modification of behaviours and attitudes in order to pursue those attributes associated with being an employable graduate.

Such self-transformation takes place under the direction of some external force. Hinchliffe and Jolly (2011) argue that, post-graduation, the employer becomes the major driving influence over the shaping of graduates’ identities. However, this is arguably not merely a process of attempting to find the right ‘fit’ for our authentic selves; as Ball (2013) argues, there is no ‘self’ that is ontologically prior to a power relation, so that the process of the formation of the self is entirely situated within the relations of power within which we find ourselves. The pursuit of graduate employability is therefore the pursuit of new forms of the self, in which we let go of our identities as students and begin to think of ourselves as, for example, viable members of certain professions. The expectations of employers thus become the standards by which we begin to say who we are.

Thus, to know oneself, and to know whether and how one is employable in the contexts in which we find ourselves, is critical in effecting the transformation into an employable graduate. To know oneself is therefore the fundamental principle (Foucault, 1988b). Yet, when employability is conceived of in terms of mere utility, to know oneself can easily be reduced to the measurement of oneself. A parrhesiastic engagement with oneself, by contrast, requires as its reference point something greater than mere utility. In the work of Cassian, Foucault identifies an analogy of a money changer:

Conscience is the money changer of the self. It must examine coins, their effigy, their metal, where they came from. It must weigh them to see if they have been ill used. As there is the image of the emperor on money, so must the image of God be on our thoughts. We must verify the quality of the thought: This effigy of God, is it real? What is its degree of purity? Is it mixed with desire or concupiscence? (Foucault, 1988b: 47)

This process of self-examination is not simply an act of introspection conducted in the quiet privacy of one’s own mind. Renouncing our former selves and constituting our new employable selves requires that this self-examination be verbalised. Foucault (1988b) emphasises the importance of self-renunciation in such a process. As individuals, rather than merely disclosing who we are, we verbalise who we are in order to dispose of who we used to be. In this way we are not merely claiming a particular identity for ourselves, but actively reformulating our very selves. This is a process of bringing to consciousness our hidden thoughts (Foucault, 1988b), such as might be done through the writing of a job application or a portfolio of evidence against a set of professional standards. Through such activities we are, step by step, relinquishing a prior identity and deliberately taking on a new one. Again, this creates the opportunity for one who can speak truth to us and engage us in such a dialogue.

To constitute a new self, then, is an active process, one that requires the active participation of the individual undergoing reconstitution. This is therefore never a process of total constraint or forcible moulding by the other. Instead it would necessitate a form of agentive engagement in the verbalisation of the self in relation to the wider world. To think of employability purely as the possession of demonstrable human capital is to ignore the significance of the social dimension in which one’s employability is affirmed or otherwise in relation to others (Holmes, 2001). To demonstrate one’s employability may thus be considered as a kind of negotiation, part of which requires that graduates ‘should seek to articulate what they claim to do in terms that relate to the practices relevant to the occupational settings they wish to enter’ (Holmes, 2001: 117). Such an articulation cannot occur unthinkingly, and must necessarily entail a form of reasoned consideration of oneself in relation to others.

To form such an active relationship with oneself and others requires the deliberate exercise of reason. Foucault (2008), following Kant, distinguishes between a state of immaturity that represents ‘a vitiated relationship between the government of self and the government of others’ (32) and maturity, in which we devote ‘our resolve, strength and courage to having the relationship of autonomy with ourselves which enables us to make use of our reason and morality’ (33). If graduate employability were to be defined purely in terms of skills, knowledge and demonstrable behaviours, there would scarcely be any need for the graduate to exercise more than rudimentary judgement of what techniques to apply at any given moment. Yet employability in terms of active relation to the world around us requires a more critical orientation both to others and to ourselves. This requires attention to the ways in which we might emerge as subjects in particular forms. Thus we might come to understand employability as a way in which graduates are constituted as subjects in particular ways. Here again we see the opportunity for the university as a user of parrhesia to promote the use of reason in relation in order to problematise the truth of employability, thus inducing a critical engagement with the self.

Universities as fostering the reconstitution of the self

It follows that such a constitution of the self cannot occur in splendid isolation and cannot be conducted as a paper exercise. Nor can it occur as a mere transaction between employer and graduate in which the employer defines the need and the graduate provides the solution. Emergence as an employable graduate must therefore be a social process with multiple opportunities for engagement and dialogue, particularly with those who can speak the truth of employability to us from a disinterested position. It is here that we might consider how Foucault’s (2008) conception of parrhesia presents an opportunity to reconceptualise the role of the university as this disinterested other who can speak truthfully to graduates through a commitment to truth-telling in itself.

Firstly, we may consider parrhesia to be a form of governance of the other, one which is motivated by the pursuit of a good life. Foucault writes:

Truth-telling by the other, as an essential component of how he governs us, is one of the essential conditions for us to be able to form the right kind of relationship to ourselves that will give us virtue and happiness. (Foucault, 2008: 45)

This role of guidance, of directing others in their relatedness to themselves, is a critical role for education. Biesta (2016) argues for a form of teaching that ‘cannot be entirely immanent to the educational situation but requires a notion of “transcendence”’ (Biesta, 2016: 44). The teacher is one who brings something new to the educational situation that was not already there. Drawing on Foucault, Biesta suggests that the emancipatory potential of education is grounded not in the opposition of a pure knowledge against the mechanisms of power (such that the individual is liberated from the workings of power). Rather, emancipation through education is transformed into transgression, a means of showing ‘that things can be different and that the way things are is not the way things necessarily should be’ (Biesta, 2016: 74). Transgression thus pushes at the assumed boundaries of the possibilities for our relations to ourselves. Like Foucault’s (1988b) technologies of the self, this implies the renunciation of one configuration of the self in favour of another; to transgress who one has been is to pursue some other way of being. This is not to be achieved solely through learning, through the acquisition of knowledge and skills – there can be no question that one can be entirely taught how to be employable. Rather, the role of higher education as guide is not to engage in some grand gesture of liberation (Vansieleghem, 2011) but to engage in the pluralisation of truth, rejecting ‘the idea that there is one single true human existence’ (Biesta, 2016: 75) – even though not every form of human existence is of the same worth. Thus it is what Ball (2016) calls a negative ethics, based on negation or renunciation as opposed to the pursuit of pre-formed ideals. The necessity of the teacher as one who brings something new to the situation (Biesta, 2016) is encapsulated in the teacher bringing to consciousness the possibility of transgression. To make possible the transgression of the self is not to liberate the other from some form of imposed constraint; rather, it is to illustrate for the other the possible ways in which they might renounce their old selves in pursuit of the new.

Here we meet parrhesia’s capacity to disrupt what might be thought of as the inevitability of higher education’s relation to employability. For Foucault (2008), the use of parrhesia is not a way of bringing effect to something through making a statement. Rather, it is ‘an irruptive truth-telling which creates a fracture and opens up the risk; a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality’ (Foucault, 2008: 63). This opening to undefined possibility is a crucial quality of parrhesia in that it represents not a form of compulsion, control or coercion – the one who speaks frank truth to us does not seek to shape us in their own image – but a refusal, and thus a problematisation of power relations (Vansieleghem, 2011) that opens up myriad possibilities. To frame an engagement with graduate employability in terms of parrhesia, then, is to abandon any pretence that a university could make its graduates more employable directly. To engage with employability in a truth-telling mode is to refuse reductionist approaches that equate employability with human capital, discrete skills and so forth. Thus, to conceive of the employability of graduates in the form of the relationship of self to self and others is to open up the possibility for education that pushes at the boundaries of the self via ‘a process of self-formation through engagement’ (Ball, 2016: 1135). It is to recognise that subjectivity is ‘the starting point for a politics of refusal’ (Ball, 2016: 1143). This points to the possibility of a truth-telling that opens up opportunities for the reconstitution of the self in novel ways. This enables, for example, the refusal of identities such as the lifelong learner which might otherwise be assumed to be an inevitable and necessary characteristic of the human condition (Biesta, 2016). Instead, in engaging with plural possibilities of the employable graduate, higher education is able to bring critical effect to the role of guide that Foucault (2008) identifies in the writings of Galen.

Operationalising a parrhesiastic approach towards graduate employability

To conclude, this article considers how a parrhesiastic approach to graduate employability might play out in practice. Firstly, and fundamentally, a parrhesiastic approach calls for universities to engage frankly with students’ futures. This requires institutions to engage in a kind of pact with students, an ethical pact between interlocutors to speak and to listen that Tamboukou (2012) argues to be central to Foucault’s conception of parrhesia. This commitment on the part of the institution to speak and the student to be open to such frankness makes possible the act of guided self-transformation described earlier. In the context of higher education this is likely to be reflected in the way that course content and assessment methods are designed, and in the way in which individual institutions position and promote themselves. Crucially, this precludes institutions from speaking and acting in ways simply because they are common practice within the market(s) in which they exist. A frank engagement with employability requires institutions to position themselves authentically, and thus creates the space to challenge totalising discourses of graduate employability that are imposed from without. Instead, institutional practice towards employability becomes a deliberate act of encouraging what Ball (2016: 1135) calls agonism, or the attempt to make ourselves intelligible in different terms.

Secondly, an engagement with the ‘truth’ of graduate employability requires institutions to engage with their students in the contexts of their individual lives and in the social and cultural circumstances in which they exist. Institutions can no longer be satisfied with adopting grand narratives of employability that are disconnected from the realities of their students’ lives, nor can they be satisfied with viewing their students as members of demographic groups. Statistical measures of employability can thus only be indicators of further work to be done, and not end goals in themselves. By challenging the simplistic connection between the acquisition of qualifications and success in the labour market, universities have the opportunity to engage with students on the basis of their values, ambitions and aspirations. In this way, a new dialogue about the value of higher education can be opened up, one that transcends national and institutional interests and speaks to prospective students as humans-in-becoming in a shared world. This enables higher education institutions to avoid both the total submission to the forces of the market and the total retreat from the very real practical concerns of students.

Thirdly, a parrhesiastic engagement with graduate employability means institutions being prepared to risk losing out in the competition for students. This is achieved by standing up for their authentic, distinct approaches to the value of their education and its connection with students’ lives. Rather than following the market, institutions thus invoke the courage to say ‘this is what we offer, and this is why we think it is valuable’. Such an approach necessitates not permitting growth in student recruitment to preclude the distinctive offer of the institution. It may even call for a counter-intuitive approach to marketing, relying less on trends in uptake as guides to action. This reflects the sense of institutional vulnerability identified by Cardoso et al. (2011), yet this vulnerability is simultaneously a call to action and an indication of right action. A parrhesiastic engagement with employability inevitably requires institutions to make themselves vulnerable, albeit in ways that are thoughtful and anticipated rather than random and haphazard. It is to go deliberately out on a limb while fully aware of how far one might fall. What is of concern, therefore, is the stake for the institution and the ethical value of such practices (Ball, 2016).

Fourthly, an approach to employability grounded in parrhesia as criticism means institutions being able to challenge or question popularly held positions of what graduate employability means. Institutions need to view themselves not as suppliers of educational goods that are demanded by students, employers and governments, but as co-creators of the very notion of graduate employability. That means, on one level, universities making the case to businesses and others about what an employable graduate ought to look like. It also points to a role for universities in identifying and challenging structural barriers to the employability of graduates, in the tradition of universities as critics and consciences of society (e.g. Harland et al., 2010).

Finally, a parrhesiastic engagement with graduate employability invokes a notion of the duty of the institution. It would be an exaggeration for universities to imply, in a market environment of mass higher education, that a degree represents a passport to a certain position in the labour market. Yet neither can universities respond to the perceived threats of marketisation through ‘withdrawal from public academic spaces into archives, libraries and private studies’ (Tamboukou, 2012: 860). Instead, a parrhesiastic engagement with the employability of their students necessitates that these core components of parrhesia be embedded within the very life and mission of the institution – to become a part of the DNA of higher education, so to speak. This speaks to the existence of a moral relation between the university and its students, with the university acting as counsel and guide to lives-in-transition. Such an approach locates the pursuit of education as transgression (Biesta, 2016) as a central part of the moral mission of the university.