Careless Universities and a Pedagogy of Care

If a pedagogy of care is to care about students’ learning, academics often bridge the gap between students’ multiple expectations of tertiary education and institutional demands. The article explores how tertiary funding distributions result in narrowing higher education's potential through subject and staff loss. It suggests that when universities focus on job-ready approaches to learning, they can appear to care less about students’ learning to critically question the present and reimagine possible futures. This article provides an account of three overlapping ways in which universities are becoming and have become careless. First, it considers the recent erosion of the Arts to show, second, how this manifests as the contraction of staff and critical knowledges and third, unsustainable expanding workloads for academic staff. The article concludes by situating a pedagogy of care as an ethical commitment to student learning, and a form of resistance to the instrumentalising higher education.