Post-Intellectuality? Universities and the knowledge industry.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Cooper, Simon
• Date: 22 March 2002

Introduction

While 'knowledge' is regarded as the twenty-first century commodity and the saviour of economies, nations, and communities alike, universities, once considered the prime institutional sites of knowledge, are in a state of crisis. The increased production and circulation of knowledge via media and information technologies, as well as the creation of knowledge from alternative sources such as commercial R & D centres or private think-tanks has meant that the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the role of the university are increasingly being called into question. As Bill Readings pointed out, '[t]he wider social role of the university is up for grabs. It is no longer clear what the place of the university is within society, nor what the exact nature of that society is'. (1) While traditional defences of the university along the lines of Newman or Humboldt have been passionately mounted, (2) they do not seem to have gained much purchase among the wider community, or even within the university itself. This does not mean that they ought to be dismissed, however. The more traditional 'idea of the university' and the kinds of knowledge it produces still remain a powerful, if somewhat muted, ideal. Indeed it is arguable that a more traditional understanding of knowledge--the idea that knowledge has both an ennobling aspect and a crucial role in the self-interpretation of societies--remains a motivating ideal behind the embrace of the knowledge society. However, much of the current enthusiasm for knowledge fails to go beyond merely invoking the term and considering its benefits as a tradeable commodity. The differing modalities of knowledge--information, cultural and social interpretation, wisdom and so on--are frequently collapsed together within a more instrumental framework, especially in the claims of those who wish to reinvigorate the university by harnessing its potential as 'knowledge producer'. Arguably, it is this relatively unexamined conception of knowledge that has allowed academics to largely accept the corporatization of their own institutions, for at least (in their eyes) they can go on producing knowledge, and thus do what they have always done, albeit under increasingly difficult circumstances.

This may go some way towards answering Masao Miyoshi's question:

Today's corporatized university--which would have been an unspeakable sacrilege for many less than a generation ago--is now being embraced with hardly any complaint or criticism by the faculty, students, or society at large. What is it that has transpired between the university as the mediator and the university as the corporate partner, between the protest of the sixties and the silence of the nineties? (3) The transformation from the university as an institution of critical interpretation (as well as knowledge generation) to the current corporatized university that Miyoshi observes is of course a complex one. While to some extent, the inability of academics to resist these changes comes from a simple fear of losing their jobs, (4) it is also due to many academics' misrecognition of their own conditions of formation as 'intellectuals', and the transformative power of their intellectual work as it is fused with the commodity form. Some academics have retreated into a bunker-like mentality, repeating mantra-like phrases such as 'the pursuit of truth' or the 'life of the mind's (5) as a means of defence against corporatization. Others have adapted to the corporatization process. From this point of view, intellectual work has finally come of age. Today, knowledge is paramount, playing a pivotal role in political, cultural and economic life. In other words, from this perspective intellectuals have climbed down from the ivory tower and become 'relevant'. (6)

Neither approach is particularly insightful into the conditions of possibility or the reconstructive effects of intellectual practice. The first approach, still holding to the notion that intellectual work is uniquely 'creative', fails to perceive the way in which such 'individual' creativity has transcended the bounds of the university to become a increasingly dominant way of seeing the world. That is to say, a world in which everyday social and cultural lives are created precisely, in a creative synthesis of media and information, or more generally--'knowledge'. The second approach contains the same misrecognition, although in a more aggressive form, as knowledge is forced into an entirely instrumental and corporatized framework. The result of this is that the kinds of knowledge produced can actually work in contemporary societies to undermine the role of the university: that the expansion of one aspect of the university, the creation of knowledge (understood in a particularly narrow sense), can under contemporary conditions erode the grounds for the legitimation of the university as a semi-autonomous institution. Furthermore, unless the cultural and social implications of understanding knowledge almost purely through an instrumental framework are explored, it will be impossible to take a critical and reflexive position towards the society that is now, in Reading's words, 'up for grabs'.

This article will explore the changing function and status of knowledge and consider the role the university plays in this transformative process. I want to argue that the corporatization of knowledge signifies a great deal more than the onset of a full-blown version of 'academic capitalism', (7) as significant as such a change is in itself. I wish to argue that the more embracing reconstitutive capacities of the intellectual practices have been obscured behind standard interpretations of this shift, interpretations which either understand the commodification of knowledge from the point of view of political economy, or of more straightforward complaints that the commodification of knowledge leads to the destruction of the traditional university.

Several examples allow us to reflect upon the changing context through which academic knowledge is produced, circulated and received. The first is academic publishing. Recent changes within this field allow us to focus on the ambivalent relationship of new technologies to knowledge, the uncertain role of universities in the knowledge society, the effects of corporatization upon academic work, and finally, the struggle over how knowledge is legitimized. The struggle over the legitimation of knowledge is further explored in relation to how universities now account for their research activity. Increasingly, I argue, these processes compress knowledge into an instrumental framework, a framework which necessarily undermines the capacity for intellectuals to come to grips with the social implications of the knowledge they are called upon to produce. Furthermore, such procedures tend to preclude any analysis of the social implications of intellectual practice.

These arguments are explored in relation to my third example, the Australian Labour Party's 'Knowledge Nation' policy statement, an attempt by government to harness knowledge for its economic value (and revitalize the university in the process). I argue that even within this most instrumental of documents there are tensions and struggles over what actually constitutes knowledge. However, these tensions are subsumed within a more general enthusiasm for knowledge-driven societies. Indeed, the benefits claimed for the Knowledge Nation are unlikely to manifest themselves in any comprehensive sense, and an unreflective commitment to reconstituting the nation via "knowledge' will exacerbate, rather than heal, current social divisions.

The final section of this article considers an alternative to the dominant instrumental understanding of universities and knowledge. This alternative view argues that the university could reconstitute itself by taking a leading role in promoting cultural and technological forms of citizenship. Although this approach has some merit, I point out how it downplays the social implications of life constituted primarily at the abstract level of the knowledge society. The form of knowledge produced and encouraged in the present context is conditional upon the emergence of the techno/ information-sciences. This high-tech framework can destabilize other ways of working and being with others when it allows individuals to transcend their attachment to places or to concrete others, the settings which have always grounded social life and any sense of a co-operative ethic. To what extent we can live cooperatively in the absence of these settings is a question which, at the very least, needs to be considered before we wholeheartedly embrace the knowledge society.

Academic Publishing: Knowledge and Hyper-inflation

The recent controversy in Australia surrounding Melbourne University Press (8) drew attention to a wider transformation, namely, the commercialization of university presses and their changed relation to the university itself. Instead of facilitating the publication and circulation of academic work to a small academic community, university presses increasingly see themselves as commercial operations. This push to commercialization is partly a result of pressure placed on university presses from within the university itself, as university managers increasingly embrace the logic of outsourcing. Instead of publishing scholarly work, part of an understanding of the university's essential function as a contributor of knowledge, this function is subordinated to the commercial imperative. University presses are 'pressed by cost conscious university administrators to make it on their own, without institutional subsidies'. (9) Stanley Fish, former director of Duke University Press, claims that university presses 'no longer think in terms of a 900 to 1500 print run' but instead concentrate on publications likely to 'sell between 5000 and 40, 000 copies'. (10) The need for...