The decay of University
A spectre is haunting not only our beloved school of Economics, yet indeed, the entire sphere Western education: the spectre of the 19th century priest, Cardinal Newman. A prominent thinker of his time and a prolific writer, it was Newman’s notion of the university: an institutional embodiment of the exploration of ‘universal knowledge’, a building site the intellect could turn to for the tools required to ‘perfect’ its very own ‘powers’, upon which the concept of a university was founded (Nichols, 2004: 262). And it is my belief that the real essence of Newman’s idea lies fossilised upon today’s grounds, an ancient ragged, ruptured remnant of the evolution of contemporary higher education. For the university system has abandoned the pursuit of understanding and knowledge, its chief propeller now engineered in the aim of, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux (p. 110) describes, the ‘commodification of knowledge’: students find themselves playing the content role of ‘consumers’, quietly consuming their purchased degrees in a vulgar, blissful passivity. The political scientist Michael McKinley (2004: 154) pictures the desperate claws of the modern university, faced with an ‘increasing dependence’ upon ‘corporate funding’ for sheer survival, punching in lumber towards swinging pouches of capital, while its ‘courses, research output and publications’ are reduced to ‘mere commodities’; the student now considered the buyer, the effective financial demand waiting to be lured, ‘rather’, crucially, ‘than someone who wants to think’. How has the radical extreme of the tuition-fee system, of privatising the university, catered for this traumatic excess: the horrific absence of purposeful education and quality research? And what of student satisfaction; are undergraduates easily acquiesced into consuming, other than thinking?
The introduction of tuition fees into British universities in 1998 has seen the UK’s tertiary education services beset by 15 years of rising student-staff ratios, as the UCU describes, as public funding as public funding for universities disappears and private investment, intent upon a financial return, begins to claw its way into the higher education sector. And in doing so, Britain has raced along the path set by a host of other Western nations. Market philosophy began encroaching upon Australian universities in 1989, dragging the darting eyes of the university boards, having been administered with the help of businessmen since 1880, towards students, rather than the state, in the aim of securing funding. The student then, has since become the object of capital, the creator of coin, rather than the Newmanian thinker. Simon Marginson (2011: 25) notes the resulting conflict between this financial policy, and the quality of a university’s output: a fundamental ‘tension’, he describes, has arisen, pitting the aim of ‘maximising market revenues while minimising costs’ against the noble endeavours of teaching and research, resulting in ‘falling per-student funding’. In the two decades following the introduction of privatisation, Marginson continues, the average ‘student-staff’ ratio, that is, the number of students per member of teaching staff, has risen from ’13 to 20’, across Australia’s universities. As universities scamper to find funds, branding their degrees as life-changing products upon the shop shelf, the focus of education upon the student becomes increasingly diluted. Does this not chime with the economic analysis of the commodity of Karl Marx? Marx described the two values tussling at the essence of the commodity: use-value, in the qualitative meaning and purpose of a product, and exchange-value, in the real, quantitative inherence of a product, against which it is measured against other products. The diluted focus upon education described by Marginson is itself a product of this violent contradiction described by Marx, as the value of exchange, the value garnered by the sale of the degree, takes precedent over the value of use. And what is this latter use, exactly? As John P. Nichols (2004: 270), quoting Newman asserts: it is the inherent value of education, the ability to form ‘critical judgements’, to ‘grasp things as they truly are’; it is furthermore crucially, the ability to function as ‘active citizens’ within a democracy, in acquiring the ‘appropriate sense’ of autonomy in the face of bureaucratic ‘experts’ claiming ‘special knowledge that they are unlikely to truly possess’.
Giroux (2007: p. 115) writes, ‘Everywhere students turn outside the classroom, they are confronted with vendors and commercial sponsors who are hawking credit cards, athletic goods, soft drinks and other commodities one associates with the local shopping mall’. This ruthless, corporate colonisation of the university campus is a sure intensification of the consumerist robe tied forcefully around the student from the moment he or she purchases a degree. Far from the battleground of competing intellectual campaigns between masses of students, or the experiments of a search for understanding, university grounds resemble the symbolic horror of a capitalist Panopticon, the student unable to escape the omnipotent eye of the advertised commodity. Higher education thus becomes an education of the capitalist mindset, the barking voice of the teacher ordering, ‘Consume, consume, consume!’ In the words of Michael Foucault, universities aim at displacing students out of intellectual ‘circulation’ and ‘integrating’ them into the corporate ‘values’ held by wider society (McKinley, 2004: 153).
Subject modules themselves evolve to symbolically reflect the real context of the university degree. McKinley (p. 160) describes the desperate ‘pretence’ of the social sciences to offer historical ‘prediction and control’, producing graduates capable of ‘developing, justify and maintain the exclusivity of capitalism as a political-economic system’; a pretence exactly proved by the calamitous, ‘unembarrassed’ failure of the social sciences to in any way whatsoever, ‘anticipate’ the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Eastern bloc, in the 1980s. This laughable lack of engaging, critical capacity was most recently highlighted by the shocking failure of mainstream economics to predict the global financial meltdown of 2008. Does the work of the Frankfurt School theorists, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in defining the Enlightenment’s fear of the other, not go some way to explaining this: could the avoidance of critique be an example of the Enlightenment’s ‘mythical fear turned radical’, a fear of the inexplicable so great in fact, that even our own pursuit of knowledge attempts to shortcut the troublesome problems critique poses to us (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1999: 7)? Is the relentless quantification of mainstream Economics not a struggled attempt to ignore the worrying, violent contradictions of capitalism exposed by Marxist critique, for instance?
Higher education’s neglect of Newman’s university ideals, of critique and understanding, bares an explosively barbaric capacity: universities all too often become subjugated to the aims of the state. McKinley (2004: 165) notes the CIA’s ‘foothold’ upon American campus’’, and the seemingly bizarre support for the Vietnam War across universities in the States. Yet this support is surely little wonder, considering the lack of a constant avenue of academic critique through which the war could be opposed; napalm, infamously, was discovered by scientists working at Harvard – the Politics department of the same institution denied a position to the sociologist Sigmund Diamond, on the basis of his resistance to the war and to capitalism. The commodification of academic degrees then, through this very neglect of critique, contains a kernel of destructive potential. The point, surely, is to renovate the very structure within which the current university lies: the reconstruction of society as it stands today itself, must be the starting point through which the very engine of contemporary higher education, the profit motive, may thoroughly be discarded from education, and the sparkling ideals of Newman, namely the critical capacity of the social sciences, re-instituted.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1999) The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso.
Giroux, H. (2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Marginson, S. (2011) 'It's a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry ', The Australian Universities Review, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 21-33.
McKinley, M. (2004) 'The Co-Option of the University and the Privileging of Annihilation', International Relations, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 151-172.
Nichols, J.P. (2004) ''What would Dr. Newman say today? (the idea of a.College)'', The Journal of General Education, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 261-274.
The introduction of tuition fees into British universities in 1998 has seen the UK’s tertiary education services beset by 15 years of rising student-staff ratios, as the UCU describes, as public funding as public funding for universities disappears and private investment, intent upon a financial return, begins to claw its way into the higher education sector. And in doing so, Britain has raced along the path set by a host of other Western nations. Market philosophy began encroaching upon Australian universities in 1989, dragging the darting eyes of the university boards, having been administered with the help of businessmen since 1880, towards students, rather than the state, in the aim of securing funding. The student then, has since become the object of capital, the creator of coin, rather than the Newmanian thinker. Simon Marginson (2011: 25) notes the resulting conflict between this financial policy, and the quality of a university’s output: a fundamental ‘tension’, he describes, has arisen, pitting the aim of ‘maximising market revenues while minimising costs’ against the noble endeavours of teaching and research, resulting in ‘falling per-student funding’. In the two decades following the introduction of privatisation, Marginson continues, the average ‘student-staff’ ratio, that is, the number of students per member of teaching staff, has risen from ’13 to 20’, across Australia’s universities. As universities scamper to find funds, branding their degrees as life-changing products upon the shop shelf, the focus of education upon the student becomes increasingly diluted. Does this not chime with the economic analysis of the commodity of Karl Marx? Marx described the two values tussling at the essence of the commodity: use-value, in the qualitative meaning and purpose of a product, and exchange-value, in the real, quantitative inherence of a product, against which it is measured against other products. The diluted focus upon education described by Marginson is itself a product of this violent contradiction described by Marx, as the value of exchange, the value garnered by the sale of the degree, takes precedent over the value of use. And what is this latter use, exactly? As John P. Nichols (2004: 270), quoting Newman asserts: it is the inherent value of education, the ability to form ‘critical judgements’, to ‘grasp things as they truly are’; it is furthermore crucially, the ability to function as ‘active citizens’ within a democracy, in acquiring the ‘appropriate sense’ of autonomy in the face of bureaucratic ‘experts’ claiming ‘special knowledge that they are unlikely to truly possess’.
Giroux (2007: p. 115) writes, ‘Everywhere students turn outside the classroom, they are confronted with vendors and commercial sponsors who are hawking credit cards, athletic goods, soft drinks and other commodities one associates with the local shopping mall’. This ruthless, corporate colonisation of the university campus is a sure intensification of the consumerist robe tied forcefully around the student from the moment he or she purchases a degree. Far from the battleground of competing intellectual campaigns between masses of students, or the experiments of a search for understanding, university grounds resemble the symbolic horror of a capitalist Panopticon, the student unable to escape the omnipotent eye of the advertised commodity. Higher education thus becomes an education of the capitalist mindset, the barking voice of the teacher ordering, ‘Consume, consume, consume!’ In the words of Michael Foucault, universities aim at displacing students out of intellectual ‘circulation’ and ‘integrating’ them into the corporate ‘values’ held by wider society (McKinley, 2004: 153).
Subject modules themselves evolve to symbolically reflect the real context of the university degree. McKinley (p. 160) describes the desperate ‘pretence’ of the social sciences to offer historical ‘prediction and control’, producing graduates capable of ‘developing, justify and maintain the exclusivity of capitalism as a political-economic system’; a pretence exactly proved by the calamitous, ‘unembarrassed’ failure of the social sciences to in any way whatsoever, ‘anticipate’ the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Eastern bloc, in the 1980s. This laughable lack of engaging, critical capacity was most recently highlighted by the shocking failure of mainstream economics to predict the global financial meltdown of 2008. Does the work of the Frankfurt School theorists, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in defining the Enlightenment’s fear of the other, not go some way to explaining this: could the avoidance of critique be an example of the Enlightenment’s ‘mythical fear turned radical’, a fear of the inexplicable so great in fact, that even our own pursuit of knowledge attempts to shortcut the troublesome problems critique poses to us (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1999: 7)? Is the relentless quantification of mainstream Economics not a struggled attempt to ignore the worrying, violent contradictions of capitalism exposed by Marxist critique, for instance?
Higher education’s neglect of Newman’s university ideals, of critique and understanding, bares an explosively barbaric capacity: universities all too often become subjugated to the aims of the state. McKinley (2004: 165) notes the CIA’s ‘foothold’ upon American campus’’, and the seemingly bizarre support for the Vietnam War across universities in the States. Yet this support is surely little wonder, considering the lack of a constant avenue of academic critique through which the war could be opposed; napalm, infamously, was discovered by scientists working at Harvard – the Politics department of the same institution denied a position to the sociologist Sigmund Diamond, on the basis of his resistance to the war and to capitalism. The commodification of academic degrees then, through this very neglect of critique, contains a kernel of destructive potential. The point, surely, is to renovate the very structure within which the current university lies: the reconstruction of society as it stands today itself, must be the starting point through which the very engine of contemporary higher education, the profit motive, may thoroughly be discarded from education, and the sparkling ideals of Newman, namely the critical capacity of the social sciences, re-instituted.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1999) The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso.
Giroux, H. (2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Marginson, S. (2011) 'It's a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry ', The Australian Universities Review, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 21-33.
McKinley, M. (2004) 'The Co-Option of the University and the Privileging of Annihilation', International Relations, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 151-172.
Nichols, J.P. (2004) ''What would Dr. Newman say today? (the idea of a.College)'', The Journal of General Education, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 261-274.
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