The idea of the intellectual and after.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Sharp, Geoff
• Date: 22 March 2002

Overview

This essay outlines an unfamiliar approach to the crisis of the modern university and its changing relation to society. It refers to representative scholars who assume a key role for the humanities in framing the overall life of society. Although the notion of the intellectual as public activist is in some contrast with this approach, it too concentrates upon the content of ideas in forming the minds of the nation.

I will accent the unfamiliar form of life defining intellectually related practices. Their extended social ties are common to the humanities and the sciences, and this shared ground facilitates a radical transition. The techno-sciences, with their own built-in assumptions, contribute to the bypassing of an active role for the humanities in cultural framing. A fusion of the techno-sciences with capital creates an unprecedented expansion of the life-forms of abstracted practice; it sets in motion a radical reconstruction of all social life. That process carries its own contradictions. As these come into focus they may contribute to the re-emergence of the actively interpretive university.

Part I. The University and Cultural Framing

Scholars and intellectuals

This essay sees the history of the university as integrally associated with the changing role of the intellectually related practices. It argues that their effects upon social life are now so pervasive that any conventional way of discussing the relation of the university to society must itself be re-examined. Within such conventions one familiar response is outrage and dismay in the face of the casting aside of the traditions of the modern university. Bill Readings' The University in Ruins is one example, with an international focus. (1) When Tony Coady and his colleagues feel the need to explain 'why universities matter', in a general sense most of them respond as Readings does. (2) To them, the value of the university tradition for the whole of society is self-evident. While Coady's concerns in his contribution to Why Universities Matter, have a more local Australian focus, the central issue, as it is for Readings, is the downgrading of the humanities and the imposition of corporate-style internal management which radically restricts the collegiate structures of university government.

In their own ways, both of these authors attach themselves to the 'idea of a university' in line with the Enlightenment connotations of that phrase. Readings does so as a radical humanist, dwelling in the ruins of the original 'idea'; Coady does so as one who endorses Cardinal Newman's distinctly more equivocal relation to Enlightenment traditions. Although they discuss the intellectual as a scholar attached to a university, both Readings and Coady might well be responsive to Zygmunt Bauman's very different definition. In his Legislators and Interpreters, he notes that the very term 'intellectual' is of recent origin. (3) It denotes 'a motley collection of novelists, poets, artists, journalists, scientists and other public figures who felt it their moral responsibility, and their collective right, to interfere directly with the political process through influencing the minds of the nation and moulding the actions of its political leaders'. (4) Both Readings and Coady have much narrower concerns than those of Bauman. Their focus is upon the humanities, and even more, upon philosophy in particular. Hence, as Coady emphasizes, the university intellectual has a special preoccupation with the 'ideals of inquiry'.

Even one as devoted to classical ideals of inquiry as Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, can share much common ground with figures like Readings and Coady. (5) Whatever their differences, they share the attitude that the university as a cultural institution has a central role to play in influencing the minds of the nation. None of them ask just how it comes about that, as a distinguishable category of persons and sometimes a specific stratum, scholars are able to play this role. Instead the force of framing ideas is taken for granted. Rationality and freedom of opinion are taken to be necessary conditions for that force of ideas, but for the most part these conditions are assumed rather than argued.

None of these figures suggest that framing ideas normally influence 'the minds of the nation' directly. No doubt all would agree that from time to time direct influence is clear cut, as in the great nineteenth-century conflict between evolutionist and religious ideas, or the impact of Freud's approach to sexuality. But the usual role of these ideas is to serve as mooring points. They frame the far more fluid interchange of the public realm. It is in that deeper sense that scholars contribute to forming the minds of the nation. For the most part they do so incrementally by way of small contributions within the traditions and approaches tied to the mooring points of the prevailing sense of social reality.

The traditional university has been an institution which protects and makes possible the 'ideals of inquiry'. The scholars in their incremental work within disciplines and traditions direct their contributions towards the archive of the printed word. No clear boundary defines the universe of interested others.

By and large the formative role of scholarly contributions is obscured by the way they leach into the public realm. More occasionally, when contributions redefine the basic terms of value and understanding, and the scholarly realm converges with the realm of public discussion, the very comprehensiveness of the shift in understanding seems to emanate from reality as such. In both instances the overall role of scholarly inquiry tends to be masked. Yet for those with insight into its significance, the apparent readiness to discount it borders on the incomprehensible. For Readings and Coady this attitude finds expression in a polemical posture. Because they feel deeply about a commitment to the ideals of inquiry they do not pause to ask just why, at this particular time, the cash nexus or the corporate mode of university government should appeal to governments of states, as well as to most vice-chancellors, as framing values for a university. If the economy, along with much of the media as its annexe, now plays a far more directly central role in cultural framing, is this because it has found the means of being something more than an economy? Has it become a cultural as well as an economic institution? That is to say, one which breaks out of its erstwhile institutional constraints and assumes the role of a universal arbiter of ideals and morals? Neither Coady nor Readings addresses such questions. Coady does hint that the managerial push has a special quality and force when he refers to the 'cult of management'. (6) However, the main implication of his critique is that the attack upon the idea of the university has led to 'The Triumph of the Myopics'. (7) His further comment, that he adopts this description 'with studied neutrality', (8) obscures the need to re-examine the whole relation of the university to society.

As a defence of 'the idea of the university', Allan Bloom's standpoint, at least in general terms, is similar to Coady's and Readings'. Yet in particular ways it is very different. His sense of the university is less tied to modernity. His sense of tradition is set within an appreciation of the mission of the university which, while it was renewed by the Enlightenment, was by no means framed exclusively by that period. Its classical roots in ancient Greece are at the forefront of Bloom's mind. The result is that the sense of the university as a universal institution within civilizations is far stronger. This being so, the emphasis upon reason as a transhistorical core value also comes through more persistently. Being less exclusively associated with the Enlightenment as a particular historical transition, his view of reason feeds into a distinction between quite generally based, over against more historically specific legitimations, of the cultural role of universities.

For the purposes of this article I will take Readings, Coady and Bloom as representative of divergent trends within what nevertheless remains one general approach to cultural framing. Each of them sees the university as the carrier of values of freedom and justice, which persist across changes in social systems. They take it to be self-evident that these values deserve to be protected for the common good and that the structures and arrangements of university life which are integral with them should not be radically disturbed in the course of social change. From their standpoints, the self-interested and material interests associated typically with economies run counter to the ideals that a university should uphold. The current turn towards the cash nexus may be seen as yet another variation of pressures the university has encountered in the past.

Over against the 'idea of a university' as a point of departure for the renewal of cultural values, this essay has a more broadly based approach. While acknowledging the profound significance of the university as a cultural institution, it goes on to ask how the intellectual practices are grounded within forms of social life. Hence it questions the way in which such figures as Readings, Coady and Bloom lend a self-evident status to the values they associate so exclusively with the university.

To speak of a 'form of life' characteristic of the intellectual practices, and inseparable from the university, calls to mind the notion of the 'community of scholars', while also stirring a recollection of Wittgenstein. However neither of these associations are quite relevant here. My emphasis upon form is intended to highlight the way in which different structures of socio-materiality set limits to the generality, and hence the level of abstraction, of the representations which arise within their terms. The...