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...