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March 5, 2008
New Formations has a digital archive in which we find Phil Cohen's A Place To Think? He says that before we dismiss the idea of the university as having something to
do with a community of scholarly practice as a cynical cover story:
perhaps we should try to understand how this notion plays in the wider political context. Is it possible to see the university as the site of an old fashioned Marxist contradiction, between the (increasingly socialised) forces and (ever more individualised) relations of knowledge production? Can the ‘crisis of the university’ be traced to a growing tension between, on the one hand, the creation of a mass higher education system, charged with the training up of collective knowledge workers and on the other, the persistence of highly localised and hierarchical structures of academic self governance, competitive scholarship and symbolic narcissism, associated with the formation of an independent intelligentsia? Or are there important contradictions within this contradiction which cannot be dismissed as ‘secondary’ just because they do not fit into the Marxist schema? Not to mention a whole lot of other mediations going on?
He highlights the way that the liberal university was being transformed in the 1960s into a modern orporate enterprise, sacrificing its intellectual autonomy to the research needs of the military industrial complex. So what was being attacked at one moment - the persistence of ‘Ivory Tower’ attitudes - by student radicals was at another being implicitly supported as a defence against surrender to market forces. As we will see this same ambivalence was to shape much more recent responses to the ‘crisis of the university’.
He asks whether there is another way to reformulate the idea of the university in a way that neither harked back to the Ivory Tower elitism of he old Liberal academy nor espoused the crude commercialism of its neoliberal successor. Is there a third way and, if so, then what might it look like?
Cohen addresses the crisis of the liberal university as the society, the university becoming ever more marginal
as a locus for its production and dissemination of knowledge. He says:
The aim in Britain was to resolve the crisis of the university by gearing its different functions much more tightly into specialised niches in the knowledge economy. According to this dispensation the top ranked
‘research universities’ (that is to say, where there were existing major inhouse research facilities supported by a critical mass of internationally rated scholars) will continue to educate the future governing elites of the network society according to the latest inter-disciplinary protocols; meanwhile the task of the less well endowed institutions is to train up routine ‘knowledge workers’ by means of a thoroughly vocationalised curriculum while undertaking some applied research or as it is now called ‘ knowledge transfer activity’ to help balance the budget.
The student radicals, who had now graduated to positions of power within the Academy in the 1980s viewed these developments with considerable alarm. Especially if they are located in the ‘polyversities’, as many are, they argued for a return to the academic gold standard as a means of resisting the dilution of their disciplines, the de-skilling of their teaching and the devaluing of their research knowledge.
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