The University in the knowledge economy.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Peters, Michael
• Date: 22 March 2002

We live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge presents a fundamental problem. If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so. Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of this knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analysed. (1)

Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx.

Introduction

The 'structural adjustment' policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, international 'free trade' agreements, the development of new communications and information technologies, and so-called 'growth theory', have helped precipitate a restructuring of higher education systems by Western governments. (2) This restructuring, carried out to enhance national competitiveness in the global economy, is not limited to the advanced economies. There has been a shift in national economic policies to focus on the relations between higher education, human capital and knowledge production, as the favoured nexus for encouraging greater growth and productivity, and thus a stronger basis for participating in the global 'knowledge economy'. It could be argued that under these new conditions the founding discourses of the modern university have been ruptured by the emergent discourse of 'excellence' which reflects this logic of performativity (to use Lyotard's phrase).

Bill Readings argues that the idea of the modern university owes much to the Kantian idea of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and the techno-bureaucratic idea of excellence. (3) It is identified with a set of founding discourses--initiated by Kant, the Humboldt brothers, John Newman and others. Yet, while the University of Excellence is still modern--in the sense that it is both regulated and unified through the force of a single idea--it breaks significantly with the set of founding historical discourses of the university.

I differ from Readings in that I think the founding discourses of the modern university have been ruptured by the discourse of excellence. The combined pressures of globalization, managerialism and marketization have stripped the university of its historical reference points and threaten to change its mission permanently. The academic freedoms and institutional autonomy characteristic of the traditional modern liberal university are also in danger of being jettisoned. This historical break is perhaps even more evident in relation to the emergent discourse of the knowledge economy. In this article I will first trace Readings' argument concerning the three dominant ideas or grand narratives of the university, then examine the notion of the knowledge economy and the role of the university within it. I will then conclude with a brief consideration of two neo-liberal or corporate forms of what Readings calls the 'post-historical' university. These forms have been defined recently in reviews of higher education in the United Kingdom (the Dearing Report) and Australia (the West Report).

The Modern ('Historical') University

Timothy Bahti discusses the historiography of the modern university in terms which not only emphasize its historical break with the mediaeval university but also echo the theme of the 'post-historical':

Standard histories of the university distinguish the 'older' and modern versions according to a chronology that is familiar from other such histories as the history of literature, the history of industrialization and modernization (urbanization, rationalization, etc.), and the history of warfare. Somewhere between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, the model at hand changes: whether the opposition is (neo-)classical/romantic, early capitalist/high capitalist, or manual/mechanized, the switch is made, the revolution occurs, and we are all henceforth 'post-'--post-romantic, post-revolutionary, post-feudal--which is to say modern. With respect to the university, the opposition is medieval/modern, the place is Germany and the time is the end of the eighteenth century. (4) Bahti indicates that whereas the seventeenth century had been a heyday for the European academies of sciences, the eighteenth was the low-point for German universities, with student rioting and drunkenness, dropping enrolments, and little relationship between subjects taught and vocations. In the last decade of the eighteenth century there was talk of abolishing the university altogether, allowing the academies of sciences and the new practical vocational schools to take its place, but in 1810 the University of Berlin was founded. In the intervening years, following the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon, the reorganization of the Prussian bureaucracy was carried out and, as Bahti points out, the discourse of German idealism became established with 'the philosophical writings on and for the university, from Kant and Schelling and then from Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt'. (5)

For Kant it was the idea of reason that provided an organizing principle for the disciplines. Reason is the founding principle of the Kantian university. It confers universality upon the institution and, thereby, ushers in modernity. As the immanent unifying principle of the Kantian university, reason displaces the Aristotelian (6) order of disciplines of the mediaeval university based on the seven liberal arts, and substitutes a quasi-industrial arrangement of the faculties. In The Conflict of the Faculties Kant writes:

It was not a bad idea, whoever first conceived and proposed a public means for treating the sum of knowledge (and properly the heads who devote themselves to it), in a quasi-industrial manner, with a division of labour where, for so many fields as there may be of knowledge, so many public teachers would be allotted, professors being trustees, forming together a kind of common scientific inquiry, called a university (or high school) and having autonomy (for only scholars can pass judgement on scholars as such); and, thanks to its faculties (various small societies where university teachers are ranged, in keeping with the variety of the main branches of knowledge), the university would be authorized to admit, on the one hand, student-apprentices from the lower schools aspiring to its level, and to grant, on the other hand--after prior examination, and on its own authority--to teachers who are 'free' (not drawn from members themselves) called 'Doctors', a universally recognized rank (conferring upon them a degree)--in short creating them. (7) The free exercise of a self-critical and self-legislating reason controls the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine, establishing autonomy for the university as a whole.

Readings argues that there is a problem or paradox in Kantian thought that haunts the constitution of the modern university: the question of how to institutionalize reason's autonomy, or how to unify reason and the state, institution and autonomy. (8) Kant attempts to reconcile this conflict through the republican subject, the universal subject of humanity, who incarnates this conflict. Thus, while it is one of the functions of the university to produce technicians or men of affairs for the state, the state must protect the university to ensure the rule of reason in public life. Philosophy, as the tribunal or home of reason, must protect the university from the state's abuse of power and must act to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate conflict, that is, the arbitrary exercise of authority.

Humboldt's project for the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 is decisive for the modern university up until the present day. Once the idea of reason is replaced by the idea of a national culture, the university becomes pressed into the service of the state. For the German idealists, the unity of knowledge and culture has been lost and needs to be reintegrated into a unified cultural science (Bildung). The university is assigned the task of producing and inculcating national self-knowledge and as...