Abstract
Higher education researchers, in common with other social scientists, make extensive use of the words ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ but tend to apply these terms in an imprecise or un-examined way. Drawing on an extensive database of all papers published in Studies in Higher Education between 1976 and 2021 a case study will be presented which demonstrates how researchers have (mis)used the word ‘tradition’ and its derivatives over the last 40 years. Informed by the theory of tradition (eg Shils, 1981: Alexander, 2016), this study will present evidence to show that despite the intensification of empirical work since the 1970s and 80s, many researchers’ continue to use the word ‘tradition’ as a lazy rhetorical device about students, teaching methods, universities and academic work more broadly. This scholarly sloppiness creates and perpetuates myths and mantras about higher education.
