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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Academia & State: the Great Divide « Previous | |Next »
March 5, 2003

Liz Lawley's negative response to my off-the-cuff remarks made whilst viewing academia through the eyes of the political reminded me of the great divide between the academia and the state. It is difficult divide to cross and many don't.

Sure there are corporate and administrative bridges across the divide here and there, but the relationship is marked by distance, wariness and suspicion. This is especially the case in Australia, and especially since the economic reforms of the 1980s.

Why the wariness? Simply put reason and politics don't mix. The free exercise of a self-critical and self-legislating reason is the opposite of the passions, number crunching, toeing the party line, subservience etc. This is a loaded way of characterizing the relationship I know but thats how it is usually seen from the perspective of academia, even though the name of Kant is rarely mentioned. What we get is all the stuff about the autonomy of the university, the nobility of its civilizing mission, scholarship, individual creativity, pursuit of the truth, unworldliness and disinterestedness.

We can characterise the relationship differently though. If we look at it through the eyes of the state then reason is reinvented as national culture and the research university becomes pressed into the service of the state in a world of nations. The university becomes the institution in civil society that is charged with watching over (in a pastoral sort of way) the cultural life of a people. The university encultured national citizens.

You can sense the tension between state and university already. And the tensions increases as modernity unfolds.

The tension becomes an opposition when the state decides in the name of economic reason that to increase the wealth of the nation the university should be corporatized, and gear itself for producing technoscience and skilled workers for the developing knowledge economy. That opposition was classically expressed by C. P. Snow as the opposition between the two cultures of literature and science, and it was embodied in the architecture of many newly built universities. Whilst the debate raged off and down through the 20th century the university was increasingly managed by the state for national economic purposes.

Its a quick and dirty grand narrative I know. And many will take exception to it. But it is the Enlightenment tradition (nationalised of course) that many have been thrown into. It forms the background to the identity and understanding of many academics for what they are meant to be doing from 9-5. They negotiate this tradition to argue why the university is different from McDonalds, the students are not just customers and the teachers not just providing customer service. Academics, of course, understand the current restructuring of the university as the politicians pushing the customer/market relations/factory model on them.

But I've put it down like this to indicate that the great divide is alive and well with lots of arrows being fired across the divide. There is a lot of sullen hosility and bitterness to the restructuring ---and a lot of silence by demoralised academics in Australia.

If philosophy in the academy is undergoing an identity crisis then so is the university in an information society. Nobody is really sure what a university is, if it is not a MacDonalds (which it clearly isn't). But it is equally clear that open inquiry has been chained to the market. And it is equally clear that the university has been displaced from its traditional role as the source and generator of knowledge. Big identity problems take centre stage.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:43 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

It seems what you're talking about is Foucault's 'governmentality.' Once a state starts to engage in 'population thinking,' it begins to shape the understanding of the individual's obligations to the state. Now the individual becomes accountable--to live, to work, to produce, to consume, to die--for the wealth/health of the state. The university is just one aspect of this wider movement.

I want to know what happens in a post-Westphalian world where the nation-state ain't so hot anymore...

Hi Chutney,
yes I am. It is a particular mode of governance that shapes our conduct by working through liberal freedoms. We can see the particular instruments of the neo-liberal mode of governance being constructed by the state in Australia. They are market instruments based on user pays, universities as corporations and academic capitalism.

What happens in a post-Westphalian world where the nation-state ain't so hot anymore? Well, the Australian policy makers are pretty worried at one level. The realize that the global market is going to increasingly govern things and that Australia does not have a university in the top 100. That is not good for national prestige.

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter in a practical sense. The Australian elite can pop off to the US for grad school. The rest of us have to make do with an inferior product. That is the proper ordering of things. The market does a good job at sorting out rank.

I guess the US government will put its weight behind big global universities when it is required in the national interest just as it does with its other corporations.