Perspectives on the crisis of the university.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hinkson, John
• Date: 22 March 2002

Why Academics Don't Resist

The folklore of the academy as an institution of independent values that, where challenged, can generate significant political resistance is no doubt overstated. In key respects it is also misleading. Yet it is true that in times of crisis the academy has stood symbolically and practically against certain powerful forces of the social structure. While hardly the whole story, the institution has often enough had to cope with political pressure and significant physical threats. These periods of crisis have become an important element of how the institution understands itself. Whether it was a matter of political corruption, wholesale civil strife or revolt of the generations, the university somehow stood outside the flow of mundane everyday life and the social structure. As such it became the organizing focus of forces seeking to confront and renew social life.

Yet for a decade and a half since the mid-1980s there has been a systematic onslaught by political and social forces against the conditions of staff and students of universities as well as the institution as such. This has almost exclusively been met by, at best, personalized hostility. By and large the response has been one of passive resentment by both staff and students, apart, that is, from that considerable minority who saw the changes as an opportunity for personal advancement.

While it is true that there have been attempts to organize against the restructuring processes within the academy, it is also clear that so far they have failed miserably. More to the point such attempts have gained no centre or momentum. What is it about this new situation that has such immobilizing effects on both staff and students?

It is worth keeping in mind that restructuring processes a generation ago were met with a rebellious fury that shook the world. The so-called Berkeley Student Movement of the 1960s responded to many of the developments that face the university today. Corporatization and the emergence of the technosciences, both of which changed the character of the academy, were of special significance. Here is an excerpt from a comment of Mario Savio, who first came into prominence by virtue of a defiant speech made on the steps of Berkeley against the 'take-over' of the university:

One conception of the university, suggested by a classical Christian formulation, is that it be in the world but not of the world. The conception of Clark Kerr (1) by contrast is that the university is part and parcel of this particular stage in the history of American society; it stands to serve the need of American industry; it is a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or government. Because speech does often have consequences that might alter this perversion of higher education, the university must put itself in a position of censorship. (2) The movement organized against this development in a variety of ways that challenged both the directions of the academy and the wider society. This was not merely a localized rebellion. In the first place this was ensured by a climate of moral unease and repulsion towards the policies and practices in poverty-stricken Vietnam by the US government. But also the Berkeley Free Speech movement was a triggering event closely associated with May 1968 events in Paris, where for some weeks students and workers took over the streets and President DeGaulle was forced to free the capital. The ramifications were riveting in many parts of the world. The emergence of the counter-culture on a world scale may seem of no great significance today, given its subsequent incorporation into society, but initially this too was a challenge of considerable force. At the most general level it was a challenge to the technologization of society and the academy. It was a response to an early expression of the information revolution. A ferment of ideas and actions accompanied the emergence of the multi-versity of the 1960s.

This educated defiance of forty years ago could have no stronger contrast than the mute and demoralized acceptance of the reality of university re-structuring today. No doubt this is partly related to the lack of social and political contestation generally today, a stirring of ideas and ideals often being triggered by crises in the world of social and political institutions. This demoralization may, of course, be suddenly reversed. That there are signs currently of a re-emergence of social ferment around the processes of globalization is significant. Given time these might percolate across to the restructuring processes of the university. But the fact remains that for fifteen years those processes have transformed the university with hardly a whimper of protest. What is it about the situation in this period that has so undermined the ability to organize on the basis of an educated defiance, compared to a generation ago?

To take hold of this question we need to develop an understanding of what Mario Savio is referring to when he makes a distinction between the university being 'in the world but not of the world'. If Savio was able to see forty years ago that this distinction was breaking down, today it is hard to find any defence of such a notion. The university is now, increasingly, on a scale far beyond that imagined by Clark Kerr, of the world. To be in the world and not of the world requires a form of separation or distancing that increasingly seems unavailable to people and institutions. What has produced this state of affairs?

The institution of the university that was in the world but not of it preceded the emergence of what was called the multi-versity of the 1960s. By that time, the university that is of the world had already emerged in significant respects. This is why so much could be made by protestors of corporate links with the university.

But the demonstration of practical associations between economic corporations and the university does not give much insight into the novelty of the process that was first evident in the 1960s. By and large the Berkeley Free Speech Movement accepted these associations empirically and neglected the question of causation. By implication, causes related simply to political choice rather than to deep structural change. Ironically, this short-term political emphasis became a clear limit on the cultural possibilities of the movements of the 1960s.

One can go further than these attempts to understand the emerging situation and show how these empirical links were possible culturally. This is a major task that requires much more than pointing out empirical contingencies. Amongst other things there is a need for an inquiry into how an institution that for an epoch has been associated with unworldliness--and disinterestedness--towards technical and economic practicality, has moved to the centre of processes of renovation of both society and economy. The institution that was predominantly interpretive is now predominantly instrumental. Indeed any rationale for interpretive intellectual practice is now almost an embarrassment within the institution--not unlike the reception today of the idea of the university being in the world but not of it.

It is my thesis that the immobilization of staff, students and the university as an institution when faced with the re-structuring process, is intertwined with this shift in emphasis from interpretative to instrumental work in the nature of intellectual practice itself. Immobilization arises out of practical confusions. The capacity to form strategies and to act is overwhelmed by the transformation of an institution in the world but not of the world into one which is very much of the world. But, contrary to Mario Savio, it is not merely a matter of being of the world. For the university is now located within the contemporary social structure in a completely novel way, one that, I will argue, transforms the social structure broadly on the terms of the university.

Certainly an institution preoccupied with its emergent role within the everyday world cannot easily draw on its historic cultural resources to critique that world, let alone make sense of its own unique role in that world. The institution itself is in contradiction and it has no discourse that can adequately inform action. Most probably the institution today should not be called a university. Nor is the changing nature of the social structure easily understood or acted upon. Immobilization arises out of both sources: on the one hand the unfamiliar and unprecedented role of the university, and on the other the unfamiliar and unprecedented character of the emergent society.

There is more than one way to approach the task of investigating the changed relation of the university to society and its attendant ramifications. One could, for example, apply phenomenological method comparatively over time to inquire into the day-by-day practices of intellectual workers. This could, if done imaginatively, evoke the relevant contrasts and at least some of their implications. Or one could analyse the changed nature of the institution as institution, as is done by Michael Peters on the knowledge economy or Simon Marginson on the enterprise university in this collection.

This article will make use of such comparisons but at a step removed, via the concept of the social. Given the history of attempting to grasp the nature of the university through a concept of the social has largely failed, because of crude reductionism, this may not seem a promising place to start. Ideas, knowledge, the creative process more generally: these have always eluded a convincing association with a social relational perspective, as indeed have the practices of religion. Yet if we are to be able to speak informatively, with a view to both perspective and policy, of what it means to have a knowledge economy--or more generally, an information society--it is crucial that a social account be...