Intellectual Care: The Practice of Care Ethics in Higher Education

by Ida Marie Munck

Photo: artwork by the youth of Serafico, a place of extraordinary care in Assisi.

While care practices have historically been overlooked and devalued, there has been a gradual recognition – driven in large part by feminist literature – that care plays a central role in many spheres of life. [1] Works like Jennifer Nedelsky and Tom Malleson’s Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto emphasise that care plays a key role for our economic, political, social, and personal lives. [2] Care can therefore not be relegated to the home and the private sphere, nor to specific groups of people; care can and ought to be practiced by all, in many different areas of life – also those areas that we do not conventionally associate with care, such as university institutions. With this in mind, the aim of this study has been to answer the question of how we can recognise and understand the practice of care at university institutions.

Care and Higher Education

Higher education is not an arena that we conventionally associate with care. Universities emphasise quantifiable research outputs and involve a highly competitive and elitist culture that, historically, has been created by and for men. [3] More often than not, universities are not structured to support care practices, as they are difficult to measure and detract time from producing research output. [4, 5, 6, 7] It therefore seems that care practices are not just overlooked at universities, but also penalised.

What is true for the relegation of care in other spheres is also the case at universities: care remains an invisible and often uncompensated labour relegated to marginalised and vulnerable groups. Studies show that care at universities is primarily practiced by faculty without tenure, women, and racialised staff members. [8] These marginalised faculty members experience a greater pressure to care for their students. [8, 9] They also tend to experience more stress, work-life balance conflicts, receive lower pay, and obtain tenure with greater difficulty. [5] Despite studies showing that care plays a key role for students’ learning in higher education, [10, 5, 11, 12] the practice of care is still unevenly distributed among faculty members, with those who practice care often doing so at the cost of their health and career advancements. It is therefore vital to better understand care in higher education so that it can be recognised and understood for both its inherent value and its measurable impact. This study is a step in the direction of better recognising the practice of care in higher education.

The “Feminisation” Versus the “De-Gendering” of Care

Feminist literature has long underscored the false association between “femininity” and care. With the historical relegation of care to women, care has often been framed in stereotypically coded “feminine” traits such as nurture, empathy, self-lessness, etc. [1, 13] Care is often understood as the “maintenance” of others, and wrongly assumed to require self-sacrifice and limitless intrinsic motivation. [14, 15, 16] Researchers in care have argued that as long as care is feminised in a world that devalues the feminine, care will continue to be denigrated and relegated to women. [17] Accepting this premise means recognising, therefore, the need for more conceptualisations of care in de-gendered terms. That is, a conceptualisation of care as an activity practiced across genders, racialisations, and faculty ranks. [17] By attempting to develop such a conceptualisation, this study addresses two problems deriving from the feminisation of care: first, that women and marginalised people disproportionately practice care; second, that the care that men do practice is overlooked. Both of those problems can be understood as exacerbated by the gendering of care that wrongly assumes women to be “naturally” better at, and more inclined to, care, while men are wrongly assumed to be inherently less caring. [17] In addressing these problems, this study is an explicit contribution to the project of de-gendering care.

Virginia Held and Care Ethics in Practice: The Case of Intellectual Care

The study is based on 24 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with teachers of philosophy at five universities in Denmark. The interviews were 40-80 minutes in length and were carried out over the course of 2023 and 2024. The interviews were transcribed verbatim using NVivo and subsequently analysed using thematic coding.

At a first reading, the interviews confirmed that what the literature on care in higher education indicates in other countries is also true in Denmark. That is, that women and faculty without tenure feel more pressure to practice care for their students; that this care often requires teachers to work over time; and that care is often overlooked and undervalued both culturally and institutionally. [8, 4, 5, 9]

However, many of the interviewees also described a kind of activity that was not neatly subsumed under conventional definitions of care practice. To better outline and recognise this activity, I used feminist philosopher Virginia Held’s characterisation of care ethics [18] as an analytical frame through which to analyse the interview transcripts. In her synthesis of numerous theories of care ethics, Held presents five common characteristics of care ethics. Since theories of care ethics are informed by practices of care, care ethics as a frame might allow a broader understanding of care practice and uncover overlooked kinds of care practice. Using this mode of analysis, I uncovered an activity that I view as care ethics in practice in higher education, and that I call intellectual care. When reading the interviews through the frame of the five characteristics of care ethics, intellectual care emerges as a distinct kind of care practiced in higher education by teachers paying attention to students’ intellectual well-being and flourishing. It will not be possible to provide a full explanation of intellectual care here, but through the analysis of the interviews, I define intellectual care as follows:

intellectual care: the activities involved in directly or indirectly helping others to unfold their intellectual potential with attention to their specific needs and circumstances.

More details and elaborations on intellectual care can be found in the full paper once it is published.

Conclusion: Care Revisited

The purpose of this study has been to figure out how we can better understand and recognise care practices in higher education. By analysing the twenty-four interviews through the framework of Held’s five characteristics of care ethics, I have shown that there is a kind of care that has been hitherto overlooked. This intellectual care demarcates itself from conventional physical or emotional care by giving explicit attention to the recipient’s intellectual well-being. The study indicates that intellectual care is an intrinsic and fundamental part to teaching in higher education. The central point presented in the study is that intellectual care is an undervalued practice that is significant to teaching in higher education. The study contributes to the project of de-gendering care by uncovering a care practice that is not easily “feminised” in neither its characterisation nor in who practices it. The interviews indicated that intellectual care is practiced across gender and faculty differences. Moving forward, more research is needed to uncover the distribution in who practices intellectual care as well as which students are more likely to receive it. It is also necessary for researchers to continue exploring care practices in sites of work not conventionally understood as caring. Like this study, such projects would contribute to the on-going project of recognising the true value of care.

—

References

1. Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, 1st ed. Routledge, [1993] 2020.
2. Nedelsky, Jennifer and Tom Malleson. Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto. Oxford University Press, 2023.
3. Järvinen, Margaretha and Nanna Mik-Meyer. Køn og Karriere i Akademia: Bag Facaden. Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2024.
4. Dowie‐Chin, Tianna and Stephanie Schroeder. “Critical, Calculated, Neoliberal: Differing Conceptions of Care in Higher Education.” Teaching in Higher Education 27 (2020): 859–73, doi:10.1080/13562517.2020.1749588
5. Gaudet, Stéphanie, Isabelle Marchand, Merridee Bujaki, and Ivy Lynn Bourgeault. “Women and Gender Equity in Academia through the Conceptual Lens of Care.” Journal of Gender Studies 31 (2021): 74–86. doi:10.1080/09589236.2021.1944848.
6. Lynch, Kathleen. “Carelessness: A Hidden Doxa of Higher Education.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9, no. 1 (2010): 54–67, doi:10.1177/1474022209350104.
7. Walker, Caroline, Alan Gleaves, and John Grey. “A Study of the Difficulties of Care and Support in New University Teachers’ Work.” Teachers and Teaching 12, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 347–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/13450600500467688, 349.
8. Cardozo, Karen M. ”Academic Labor: Who Cares?” Critical Sociology 43, no. 3 (2017): 405–28, doi:10.1177/0896920516641733.
9. O’Brien, Maeve. “Mothers’ Emotional Care Work in Education and Its Moral Imperative.” Gender and Education 19, no. 2 (March 1, 2007): 159–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250601165938.
10. Anderson, Vivienne et al. “Good Teaching as Care in Higher Education.” Higher Education 79, no. 1 (May 1, 2019): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00392-6.
11. Meyers, Steven A. “Do Your Students Care Whether You Care About Them?” College Teaching, vol. 57, no. 4, 2009, pp. 205-10, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25763396.
12. Hamington, Maurice. “A Performative Approach to Teaching Care Ethics: A Case Study.” Feminist Teacher 23, no. 1 (2012): 31, https://doi.org/10.5406/femteacher.23.1.0031.
13. Nelson, Julie. “Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Ecological and Feminist Economics in Policy Debates.” Ecological Economics 69, no. 1 (2009): 1-8. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.08.021.
14. Heyes, Anthony. “The Economics of Vocation or ‘Why Is a Badly Paid Nurse a Good Nurse’?” Journal of Health Economics 24, no. 3 (December 9, 2004): 561–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2004.09.002
15. Nelson, Julie A. “Of Markets and Martyrs: Is It OK to Pay Well for Care?” Feminist Economics 5, no. 3 (January 1, 1999): 43–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/135457099337806
16. Folbre, Nancy and Julie A Nelson. “For Love or Money—Or Both?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (November 1, 2000): 123–40, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.14.4.123.
17. Mariskind, Clare. “Teachers’ Care in Higher Education: Contesting Gendered Constructions.” Gender and Education 26, no. 3 (April 16, 2014): 306–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.901736, 318.
18. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press, 2006, doi:10.1093/0195180992.001.0001.