Universities and postmodernism: the green paper and some responses.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Huppauf, Bernd
• Date: 22 March 2002

It has been noted in the recent debate about the Green Paper on Higher Education that it enjoys a surprising degree of support by vice-chancellors of Australian universities despite its failure to address issues of principle: it is characterized by the striking absence of a concept for the present university and its envisaged future, the current state of knowledge and the sciences, and current and future needs of Australian society. * (1) The only rationale for reforming the universities given by the Minister, John Dawkins, is one of vulgar economism: the Australian economy is suffering from disturbing structural deficiencies, and as the universities are capable of producing knowledge applicable to industry and commerce, they should be restructured in such a way as to make them instrumental in the process of economic therapy.

Vice-chancellors not only appear to accept such a crude approach to their institutions but are prepared to act as the Minister's auxiliary calculators, who know exactly by how many percentage points the universities will and should grow or how many more degrees can be issued by the year 2010. They appear entirely uninterested in questions as to what and how these students will be taught, what their later opportunities in life and their job prospects will be, or what the reformed university will look like. As they find themselves in full agreement with representatives of Australian industry and commerce, the conservative government in London and the Opposition in Canberra, (2) there seems little to worry about. Few attempts are made to conceptualize the current and future function of Australian universities in a world that finds it extremely difficult to cope with the effects of the post-industrial electronic age; appears unable to generate enough work to give everyone in its adult population a job; increases average life-expectancy and time available for leisure without enabling the beneficiaries to make meaningful use of it; faces the alarming consequences of continuous destruction of its environment; experiences a growing inequality in the distribution of opportunities and rising levels of frustration and open violence; and is insecure as to its identity and position in rapidly changing constellations in Asia and the Western world. Such questions seem of little importance for the Minister and his supporters so long as both major prerequisites for a successful political operation are being met: (a) the political power must be there to implement changes without strong and organized resistance from the electorate; and (b) the planning figures of the Green Paper--once they have been adjusted to the undoubtedly meticulous figures produced by the champions of calculation, the vice-chancellors and their administrative crews--must guarantee the success of the reform, success being identified with admission of larger numbers of students, more degrees, and greater opportunities for industry and business to exercise control over curricula ('public accountability'). Vis-a-vis such a program for success, there seems no need and, indeed, no room for philosophical and conceptual debate.

It seems appropriate then that those administrators who--it was observed in the current debate--perceive universities as fields for their power games, (3) are also receiving support from a philosophical debate the latest concepts and social theories of which make the structural changes ahead of Australian universities appear as the logical continuation of trends already intrinsic to universities. In this view, the deconstruction of Australian universities was well under way when the Minister designed his policy. Questions of power and whose interest the changes will serve lose their importance, according to this view. The Minister and his vice-chancellors are only making visible and creating the administrative structures for developments which hitherto operated unnoticed. Subsequently, the envisaged reshaping of universities is seen as part of the intrinsic momentum of structures to which all--actors, onlookers and victims--are equally subjected.

The field now seems complete. Support for economically and politically motivated steps toward a dismantling of Australian universities does not only come from administrators, the business community and a few trade unions, but emerges also in terms of an abstract theory disguised as critical philosophy. The Minister's narrow utilitarian approach to the complex problems of redefining the modern university and its social role, which fails to develop any theoretical framework for its justification, can be accommodated in a highly esoteric theory of 'deconstruction' with apparent ease. Concrete and threatening implications of the envisaged changes evaporate into a sphere of structures and their dynamics, beyond specific interests and outside of control. The political power of the Minister and his supporters appears as a variation of a well-known invisible hand, this time not of rational and capitalist, but of a postmodern and non-rational origin.

The view that universities are institutions of 'massive inertia' and need a basic modernization, (4) is shared by both narrow utilitarian pragmatists and highly reflective poststructuralists. Plans to reconstitute the modern university in such a way as to ensure that it becomes instrumental to economic interests are being backed by a theory in which the term 'deconstruction' serves the purpose of redefining a concrete political situation, and equally concrete economic interests, in terms of disinterested anonymous structures. Such deconstructive tendencies, it is argued, have been integral elements of the university ever since its first model, in twelfth-century Paris, came into being, and led to the emergence of the modern university in Berlin shortly after 1800. It is these same tendencies which are now leading to the end of this model and the emergence of yet another. The deconstructionists' separation of universities from their social-political environment, the artificial creation of an 'inside and outside of the institution' and the determination of the ultimate objective as 'learning to read' the structure of the university, result from an abstract and a historical approach. At a time when a liaison of politicians and economists threatens the universities with changes designed to erode their foundations, an uncritical theory of deconstruction has the potential to obscure the situation and aestheticize the political, social and economic implications of the planned changes. Against the background of serious dangers to the autonomy of the universities, the following view gains its contours:' ... the deconstruction of the university is not to be regarded as an attack against the university. The university does not come under deconstructive analysis from outside: rather deconstruction is a process always already at work within its structures'. (5) As a result, the Green Paper appears to be a materialization and translation into political action of trends of self-adapting, intrinsic structures of universities. According to this view, 'concepts and programmes which today seem an indissoluble part of the university' now simply become 'critical objects of any deconstruction; but the notion of a deconstruction partly implies a negative moment of critique yet perhaps more importantly, a positive moment of transformation'. (6)

To be sure, a range of recent theories have fostered analyses of the status of knowledge, the role of intellectuals and scientific experts, and the position of the universities in postmodern society, all of which can be interpreted as theoretical preparations of the ground for the proposed restructuring of Australian universities. The assumption, however, that the current restructuring of universities is an organic process that follows an inner logic of deconstructing discourses is ill-conceived. It needs to be stressed that there are far-reaching issues of power and economic interests involved, and an attempt to confront the situation in a rational way would make it necessary to lay them open. I shall now attempt to discuss the position of the university in the current debate in as far as it is determined by three interrelated factors: language, autonomy and economic--political power.

The Language of Dispossession

The fact that the Green Paper and related policy statements remain silent about the concept of the university and the aims and objectives of education cannot be interpreted as if there were no underlying philosophy. It is left to the recipients of the policies to extract the hidden philosophy from the technocratic language of these documents. It is not easy to make the silence of the papers speak. The language implicit in the utilitarian approach can be made audible only through placing it in the specific Australian context, and the language implicit in quantifying projections and planning figures will be released from its cage only when connections with the international debate about the future of knowledge and civilization are made.

It is at least surprising to note that the papers are addressing the economy of education, when in fact education is their issue. It raises suspicion as to the motivation of a speaker when in conversation the real topic is suppressed and replaced by a substitute. Dealing with universities and education in the language of economists and administrators inevitably implies that the issues can be reduced appropriately to those of economy and administration, an assumption which can only be made once the concepts of 'university' and 'education' have lost their centres of meaning. When research and education are being dealt with in terms of input and output, what used to be peripheral has become the centre, and the centre has disappeared. The equation of students with quantities of degrees issued in certain time sequences is a reflection of a degradation of the image of...