CHI TIẾT NGHIÊN CỨU …
Tiêu đề
Does the university have a future?
Tác giả
Delanty G.
Năm xuất bản
2004
Source title
Globalization and Higher Education
Số trích dẫn
6
DOI
Liên kết
Tóm tắt
The debate about the university today is very different from some of the major debates on the university over the past century and a half. The grandiose and programmatic visions of the modern university in the seminal works of Cardinal John Henry Newman, Karl Jaspers, Talcott Parsons, Jürgen Habermas, Alvin Gouldner, and Pierre Bour-dieu reflected the self-confidence of the university as an institution with a moral and cultural mission. Today the debate has shifted to a defensive stance on the one side and on the other to a largely negative view of the university as an anachronistic institution clinging to a modernity in ruins. On the whole the current debate is dominated by the liberal view of the university as a bastion of high modernity and the postmodern thesis of the obsolescence of the university along with the institutions of modernity in the allegedly global age of informational capitalism. It is the aim of this chapter to offer an alternative view to these positions that look either to culture or to technology. The liberal conception of the university goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, having its roots in the idea of the university proposed in Cardinal John Henry Newman's famous book, The Idea of the University (1852). More of a conservative idea than a liberal one, the aim of a liberal education, according to Newman and many who were to follow him, is to transmit the received wisdom of the past into the minds of youth in order to secure the passing on of tradition. The liberal view of the university thus held to a conception of the university that was essentially reproductive rather than creative of new knowledge. In this view, with its origins in English pastoral care and liberal Irish Catholicism, science and the world of research was subordinated to teaching. This vision of the university was resurrected in the 1980s culture wars by conservative and radical liberals alike. Traditional liberals such as Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind (1987) saw the high and universalistic culture of the university under attack by the low and rel-ativistic culture coming from politics and popular cultures. Others, such as Russell Jacoby, saw the universalistic intellectual being overshadowed by the expert, leading to intellectual paralysis of the university. Despite the defensive and varied nature of the liberal response, there was never any doubt that the university could withstand the intrusion of the low culture. As exemplified in the classic work of Pierre Bourdieu, the university houses "state nobility," in which forms of cultural capital are perpetuated. In the 1990s, as the culture wars abated, another and more potent debate took place that was less defensive than offensive in tone. This has generally been part of the postmodern attack on modernity. The postmodern critique - as in Bill Readings' well-known book, The University in Ruins (1996), which was reiterated in Lyotard's Postmodern Condition (1997) - argued that as an institution of modernity the university would suffer the same fate as the nation-state. Globalization, it was argued, is eroding the presuppositions of the university as an institution that serves the state. The result is the end of knowledge along with the end of modernity and the end of the nation-state. Typically some of the arguments that were given were that the university is becoming dominated by market values instead of academic values; partnerships with industry are replacing the pact with the state that was forged in the modern period; science is fleeing the university and being conducted more and more outside the university in laboratories in major corporations. The assumptions behind these positions were that globalization was bringing about the end of the nation-state and that the university always rested on a universal form as defined by a particular understanding of modernity. Even in those accounts that did not use postmodern theories - such as the argument about "mode 2 knowledge production" and the rise of academic capitalism in gen-eral - a wide spectrum of writers announced the marginalization of the university. Against these two scenarios my contention is that a sober look at the university in the longer perspective of history reveals a slightly different picture. The university today is indeed in transition but not in a terminal phase. The assessment in this chapter will be neither one of modernist self-confidence nor one of postmodern crisis. Globalization in fact offers the university the possibility of fulfilling what is perhaps its key role, namely, to provide institutional spaces where cognitive models for society to learn can emerge. In this respect the role of the university cannot be reduced to the specific forms that knowledge takes. Rather, it is the role of the university to connect these cognitive forms. The chapter is organized into four parts. In the first part I present three concepts of knowledge, arguing that a definition of the university must address each of these. In the second part I describe how a historical and philosophical approach to the question of the university in transition reveals that the university is in a constant process of evolution and that this reflects some of the major epistemic shifts in modern society. In the third part I examine critically some of the assumptions of the globalization thesis that the university is being fundamentally challenged. In the final part I argue that the current shift is one in which new possibilities for the university are emerging. © 2004 University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Nơi xuất bản
University of Hawai'i Press
Hình thức xuất bản
Book chapter
Open Access
Nguồn
Scopus