In a paper that I read recently on the im-materiality of religion, the author chose to use the word ‘aspiration’ as one of those elements that she described as an immaterial aspect of religion. The authors, Marian Burkhart and Maria Westendorp, were arguing that scholars of urban religion had become too fixated on the material manifestations of religion within the urban environment. By looking at the lives of two Christian women involved in the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, they suggested that it is also important to look at immaterial elements, and among those they chose to identify ‘aspirations’. Religion, it appears gives these women aspirations, both for their own lives, but perhaps more importantly for the city itself.
I think I was most struck by the choice of word. I would talk of ‘hopes’, or of ‘ambitions’, I am not sure that ‘aspirations’ is a word that I would have thought of in the context. However, having used the word, this paper set me thinking. Is there something that ‘aspirations’ might offer that some of the other words that we could use do not?
In particular, I began to think about students going to university and the various discourses that currently exist around the expectations, hopes and ambitions that students have as they start on their journey. The government, for example, and many others within our society, tend to assume that the purpose of going to university is to get a good job and to earn money. The assumption is that students are ambitious, they want the very best for themselves and they can calculate the value of attending university, setting this against the debts that they will incur, and, taking all that into account, plan for their future, their ambition.
At another level there is also a growing sense of entitlement. This derives from the idea that we have commercialised university so much, set a price on the privilege of learning, that students come to university with expectations of success. They feel entitled, not just to outstanding teaching and world leading student support, but to the result that they expect to achieve. I have written elsewhere about the way in which expectations have changed, from my own day, way back in the 1980s, when I felt I was lucky just to get the chance to attend university, to today when students turn up expecting to achieve a first class degree, or at least a 2:1, because that is what they are paying for.
And to turn this around once again, there are also narratives which tell us how unprepared students are for university. The pandemic, the disruption to education, the levels of concern about mental health among young people, all mean that students come to university not believing that they can achieve, not knowing how to turn things around, to gain resilience, or even to survive. Such students need all the support we can offer simply to remain and to focus on their learning, let alone worrying about their expectations for the future, if any such future even exists as the world overheats and all the jobs are taken by AI chatbots.
There are so many conflicting messages out there, different narratives that not only those in universities need to manage, but that students also need to negotiate and find their way around. It is obvious that many students may well switch between these narratives, and many more, only settling on any one within the specific context in which they must identify what it is that they expect, assume, or desire from university.
Is this a context in which to talk about ‘aspirations’ might help us to cut through all the noise? Somehow the word itself seems softer than either ‘expectations’ or ‘ambitions’. We may be ambitious for a good job, high earnings, fame and fortune. We might expect, either everything on a plate, or complete disaster. There is something in the words themselves that lead us to associate them with a particular kind of outcome, and in each case something very precise and very concrete. ‘Aspiration’ raises other kinds of opportunity. The fact that the authors in the original paper use it in a religious context gives some hint to this. We might want to say, for example, that we are ambitious for a good job and high salary, but we aspire to a good life, to helping others, to giving something back to the world or to society. Aspiration almost demands something positive, something more abstract, something that we can, perhaps, all share.
This is perhaps pushing the argument too far. We can all aspire to a good job and a high salary, but even saying that suggests to me that the way we might go about achieving that would be different from the methods we would use if we simply said we were ambitious. Ambitions are selfish? Aspirations are charitable? Perhaps, or perhaps not. This may just be my own associations. However, I do think there is something in what I am trying to get at here.
The real question, therefore, is to ask what starts to happen if we begin to talk to students about their aspirations, whether in applying to university, in coming to university, or for what it is that they want out of university and for the rest of their lives. If we can only ask students to think carefully about what it is that they aspire to, and why, then we might be able to have a very different kind of conversation. We might be able to change the narrative, to focus on more than simply getting a good grade, or even surviving three years. It has something to do with confidence, something much more personal than expectations or ambitions, something that talks of values as well as instrumentality. It is probably something that all good employability units do already, as will many academic tutors, without ever naming it as a particular approach. I may be being romantic. It is just that reading that paper, about something entirely different, suddenly got me thinking, and, you never know, there may just be something in it.
Martin Stringer Quartet 