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June 12, 2009
In A Place To Think? Some Reflections on the Idea of the University in the Age of the Knowledge Economy in New Formations Phil Cohen explores the implications of the neo-liberal modernizing the university. He says the roots of modernization lay in the 1960s student movement objections to the role of the liberal university:
in promoting an elitist version of the national culture as a civilising mission while advocating norms of scientific rationality that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a thinly disguised imperialist agenda. The organisation of these elements into an administered system of knowledge that was at once hierarchical and bureaucratic, ruled over as it was by the infamous ‘pedagogic gerontocracy’ was a special source of outrage. Yet in fact, saving the oedipal idioms of youth culture, the main thrust of the critique lay quite elsewhere. It turned on the ways the liberal university was being transformed into a modern corporate 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 - was at another being implicitly supported as a defence against surrender to market forces.
Hence the ambivalence which shaped the much more recent responses to the transition of the liberal university from an elite quasi autonomous institution of national learning into a fully fledged consumer enterprise driven by corporate branding and marketing strategies. The liberal state managed this transition by gearing the university's 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.
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