Trust as an ecology: relational, institutional, and systemic conditions in precarious higher education

Overlapping crises increasingly shape trust in higher education (HE): metric-driven governance, funding volatility, and pervasive precarity among staff and students. This article asks what it means to trust and to be trustworthy within the precarious ecosystem of English HE. Drawing on Baier’s ethics of accepted vulnerability, O’Neill’s conception of institutional trustworthiness, Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, and Biesta’s world-centred education, this article develops an ecological framework of trust that operates across relational, institutional, and systemic levels. Short vignettes show how trust is enacted or eroded in everyday academic practice, revealing the moral and epistemic labour the university depends on. The analysis shows that breaches of trust at any level reverberate across the wider ecology, exposing the fragility of HE’s moral infrastructure under neoliberal conditions. Reclaiming trust, I argue, requires a reflexive, world-centred commitment to recognition, responsibility, and moral courage. This article ultimately advances a philosophical account of trust as an ethical and educational practice rather than an instrumental or managerial resource.