The university: is it finished?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Gaita, Raimond
• Date: 22 March 2002

'The University: Is it Finished?' Is this an hysterical question? Quite a few people, I suspect, will think it is, and I am sure that many will think it hyperbole, intentionally provocative. To show that it is not, I will describe two quite different institutions--he University of Melbourne and the Australian Catholic University. (1)

The University of Melbourne is a member of a group of eight Australian universities which seek to distinguish themselves from others by standards of the kind that are now measured by the Department of Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA). It is embarked upon a project to improve its performance as measured by those standards, hopeful that it will join the ranks of the great international universities. There can be argument, of course, about whether it measures itself realistically according to local standards, and also about whether it can hope realistically to achieve the international standing to which it aspires. For the sake of the argument I will assume it is right in its assessment of itself and realistic in its ambitions, and that much the same is true for the other seven. I'll assume too, again for the sake of argument, that the example of the eight will invigorate other institutions and inspire them to higher performances measured by much the same standards. That being so, how can one seriously ask whether the university is finished? Are universities not set for a new renaissance?

The form of the answer is, I think, obvious. The group of eight are set to flourish as institutions of a particular kind of what is often called higher education. Whether they are thereby set to flourish as universities depends on whether they flourish according to a serious conception of the university, one that requires more than success as a high-flying institute of higher education and research. It is also the case that many people who have spent their lives in universities believe the practices and ideals that regulate even the group of eight are inconsistent with and actively erode such a conception of the university.

An analogy might make the conceptual point more vivid. Imagine a nation that had over a long period lost its identity, a loss that was partly the cause and partly the effect of demoralization and cultural atrophy. After a time it is colonized by a foreign power that promises it renewed vigour and wealth. To achieve this it is told by the colonizers and their local administrators that it must overcome nostalgia for the past and learn to speak a new language, one more suited to the new enterprise culture. Naturally enough, many people in the nation welcome this, dismayed by the rot of the old culture. Younger citizens especially have little living idea of the values of the old culture. Both old and young become administrators of the new colony. Soon the old language disappears, except in pockets where it fails utterly to engage with the new one. The values to which it gave life seem anachronistic.

That is more or less how I see universities today. Long before the Dawkins 'reforms' of the 1980s they had lost their way, lost any serious sense of what distinguished them from other institutions of higher education. Now they have been colonized by what I have called elsewhere "managerial newspeak', and it is almost impossible to articulate the deeper values that are essential to the idea of the university. I call it managerial newspeak--intending all its derogations--because it obliterates important distinctions, treating almost all the ways in which human beings organize themselves as forms of management. It is a form of barbarism, because, as G. K. Chesterton put it, civilization is suspended by a spider's web of fine distinctions.

Defence of the regime that colonized the universities is often marked by illiteracy concerning the concept of the university, even amongst the older administrators who claim they understand it and say that it has had its day. Younger people have little idea of it and are therefore inclined to believe that appeal to it is elitist nostalgia.

In a recent article in Policy, Lauchlan Chipman says, 'Although as scholars and researchers we may squirm at the suggestion, knowledge is a commodity in the classic economics textbook sense'. (2) He would be right if he meant only that knowledge can be described this way for the purposes of slotting such descriptions into economic theories, or managerial talk, of one kind or another. What he neglects to say is that there are other descriptions of knowledge and the search for it that are in tension, and may be inconsistent, with their description as commodities. There are all sorts of tensions, for example, between seeing people as students and seeing them as customers, and between seeing them as teachers and seeing them as providers of commodities. The ideals and responsibilities internal to a conception of teaching as a vocation, for example, are deeper than, and at critical points inconsistent with, responsibilities that are owed to customers. Students are described as customers because customers know how to demand value for money, and customers typically know what they want and what counts as getting it. The trouble, however, is that students are often initiated into things they do not understand and which take time to grasp, things they often had not even dreamed existed. How often does one hear it said that the value of a particular teacher was not appreciated until years after the student left school or university? If we describe students as customers we will not create a suitable form of accountability. We will only make teachers servile, pandering to students rather than rising to their responsibilities to their students and disciplines.

Once, when I despaired of teaching, a fine teacher told me that there are two ways to think about it. One is to dream of pulling a switch that will make a thousand lights come on. Another is nourished by the image of passing a candle from one person to another, or of planting seeds not knowing when or where they might grow. It was the wisest advice about teaching I ever received. Afraid to be unpopular amongst students demanding their consumer rights, how many teachers will risk planting seeds?

Michael Oakeshott lamented that the concept of government had given way to the notion of running a country, which nowadays means managing it as though it were a business. University managers no longer conceive of their responsibilities in ways that require them to be inward with the ideals of a university, or with academics' responsibilities to their disciplines. This is one reason why they have lost sight of their role as servants to the university and its ideals. Everywhere academics complain that the relationship between management and the ideals university government should serve has been turned on its head. Fidelity to these ideals is an irritant to management. They tend to believe they possess skills that can be mastered independently of any intimate knowledge of what they manage. This irritation can develop into outright authoritarianism, as it did in Victoria recently, provoking the formation of the Association for a Public University. Academic freedom was not the most fundamental issue, however. More basic still was the understanding of the academic's loyalty to his or her vocation, which makes it almost a tautology to say that academics may at times be obliged to criticize the institution which employs them.

Take now the Australian Catholic University. Like many--most--institutions granted the title 'university' by Minister Dawkins, it has not been able to rise to the demands of that description. Most, if not all, of the Dawkins universities are universities in name only. But this is not, for the most part, their fault. Prior to Dawkins they were practically oriented institutions, in the case of the Australian Catholic University, to teaching and nursing.

Pre-Dawkins, these colleges and institutes often did the things that constituted their identity very well indeed. Now they find themselves judged according to standards appropriate to universities and often, therefore, at the bottom of the various lists determined by those standards, much to the chagrin and humiliation of students and staff. Understandably, many now feel that if they are to be judged by these standards, they will press to have included in the concept of the university the areas in which they previously excelled. Sometimes this is justified, but mostly it is not. Recently I provoked outrage by suggesting that because universities are homes to forms of the life of the mind, nursing is not a university discipline, no matter how much intelligence is necessary for it nor how much science a nurse now needs even to be competent. I thought this to be relatively uncontroversial. But I was naive not to expect considerable hurt and anger, for where have nurses to go now that the institutions that once honoured them are all called universities? What I said seemed to suggest they were second class citizens, and this in institutions that only a few years ago celebrated their achievements.

That nursing is not a form of the life of the mind is not of itself a reason for excluding it from universities, for universities have always included the professions. People used to argue about whether engineering, and even medicine or law, were properly university disciplines. Those who warm to the expression 'elitist nostalgia' point this out again and again. But never before have professional courses determined the idiom, set so much of the tone, and transformed the language or set the goals of the university's essential identity. In the shift I am describing the essential disciplines of the humanities and sciences--philosophy and physics, for example--have become mendicants for a respected place in institutions which should honour them.

It was predictable from the outset that divisions of the kind Dawkins...