Artistic Research in the Future Academy 9781783207909, 9781783207916, 9781783207923

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Transformation of the University
Chapter 2: The Art School
Chapter 3: Artistic Research: Defining the Field
Chapter 4: Science and Critical Suppression
Chapter 5: Critique, Artistic and Aesthetic
Conclusion: Exiting Artistic Research
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

Danny Butt

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2017 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2017 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Alex Szalbot Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Richard Kerr Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-790-9 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-791-6 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-792-3 Printed and bound by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow.

Contents Acknowledgementsvii Introduction1 Chapter 1: The Transformation of the University 

17

Chapter 2: The Art School

45

Chapter 3: Artistic Research: Defining the Field 

69

Chapter 4: Science and Critical Suppression

93

Chapter 5: Critique, Artistic and Aesthetic

123

Conclusion: Exiting Artistic Research

141

Bibliography159 Index175

Acknowledgements Researching this book over the last decade has solidified its grounding principle: knowledge only transpires in communities of support, and behind the authorial signature of every creative effort lies a specific and extensive social world. In this case, I too owe many people a range of debts that cannot be repaid or fully acknowledged. The research underpinning the early chapters of the book was undertaken as doctoral study at the University of Melbourne, under the supervision of Sean Cubitt and Scott McQuire, who have been sensitive readers and fine examples of the lineage of interdisciplinary critical work I hope to continue. The book was finished with the assistance of an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne, under the direction of Nikos Papastergiadis. All three have inspired with their support for younger scholars and their commitment to institutional battles that allow such care to be made meaningful. Suneel Jethani, Audrey Yue, Alison Young, Peter Rush, Meredith Martin, Robert Hassan, Robbie Fordyce, Tom Apperley, Dan Edwards and Daniella Trimboli have all provided important support at the university in different ways. The Centre for Cultural Partnerships (CCP) at Victorian College of the Arts, and The Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland provided venues where research into the university-based art school has been grounded in my own teaching and supervision. At CCP I enjoyed the leadership and collegiality of Lachlan MacDowall, James Oliver, Marnie Badham and Dean Merlino, all of whom galvanised the political commitments of this book. In the broader VCA the support of Su Baker, Barb Bolt and Richard Frankland has made the institution seem humanisable and thinkable. At Elam, Jon Bywater has led a critical studies programme of vision and integrity. Departmental heads Derrick Cherrie, Nuala Gregory, and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki at Elam and Jon Cattapan at VCA provided valuable support. At both venues, Tania Cañas, Léuli Eshraghi, Jen Rae, Amy Spiers, Taarati Taiaroa, Anna Gardner, Shannon Te Ao, Karena Way, John Ward-Knox, and Cat Auburn have been fantastic co-teachers and fine artist-academics in their own right from whom I learned a lot. Conversations with all the faculty and students have been important for this project. Time teaching in the Department of Media Arts at Waikato Institute of Technology, and a residency at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster organised by Ned Rossiter were also important to the genesis of this project.

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

An ongoing collaboration with Rachel O’Reilly has specifically shaped the argument in the latter chapters, and from her engagement I am continually challenged to reassess my own thinking and writing. Abbra Kotlarczyk worked with me on the developmental editing of the text, and her sharp eye for what makes the historical relevant in the contemporary was critical to the book achieving its final form. Thanks are also due to Jessica Mitchell and Richard Kerr at Intellect for their care and support for the book. Robert Hutchinson, my partner at Suma Media Consulting, and Claude-Yves Charron, former Secretary-General of ORBICOM, have been central to my understanding of institutional dynamics in ways that cannot be academically cited, but have been central to the project. Too many collaborators to mention here have shaped the intellectual work of this book. Particular thanks are due to my MA thesis supervisors 2000–2005, McKenzie Wark and Graham Meikle. The Fibreculture group provided my first home for critical writing as an academic, and a schooling in collaborative work during this period. The members of the Intranation residency at Banff Centre for the Arts, especially collaborators Hemi McGregor and Natalie Robertson and advisors Ashok Mathur and Shirley Bear, provided an initial insight into the potential for creative enquiry within the colonial frame. Leora Farber at the University of Johannesburg invited me to Africa for the first time, where many threads in this research were clarified. Conversations with Huhana Smith, Luke Willis Thompson, David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Sarah Waterson, Charlie Sofo and David Hatcher sharpened my sense of the issues at stake later in the project. Along with fellow organisers Jon Bywater and Nova Paul, participants in the Cultural Futures symposium (2005) at Hoani Waititi deepened my understanding of and connection to the specific currents underlying artistic practices in the Asia Pacific region: thanks go to Albert Refiti and Lemi Ponifasio; Amanda McDonald Crowley; Cheryl L’Hirondelle; Charles Koroneho; Creative Combat; Fatima Lasay; Jenny Fraser; Lisa Reihana; Rachael Rakena; and Raqs Media Collective. Raqs, along with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have provided both generous hospitality and inspirational models for practice. Acknowledgements are also due to Lauren Berlant, Robert Nelson and David Garcia for their generosity and example. A number of people provided their homes and venues for writing – particular thanks are due to Xavier and Carolyna Hart-Meade; Edwin and Ivy DeSouza; Bev and Ian Robertson; Jim and Velda Berghan; and Mick and Coco Butt, who also introduced me to Pulau Banyak, Aceh where much of this work was completed. Acknowledgements are also due to the Boon Wurrung, Wurundjeri, Ngāti Whātua and Tainui peoples on whose lands I have lived while undertaking this project. My parents, Les, Rhonda, Val, and Peter, have always provided love, encouragement, and support. The other members of the Local Time collective (Jon Bywater, Alex Monteith, Natalie Robertson) have taught me that work is both more rewarding and more exacting with longterm collaborators. The book is dedicated to them and the whole Omaewa whānau, in support of a kaupapa that makes all institutional constraints seem available for transformation. Finally, for Ruth DeSouza, without condition or reserve. viii

Acknowledgements

Parts of the Introduction have appeared in “The Art of the Exegesis”, Mute (2012) and “Theses on Art and Knowledge”, un Magazine 7.1 (2013). Other sections of the book have appeared in “Whose knowledge? Practice-led research after colonial science” in On Making: Integrating Approaches to Practice-Led Research in Art and Design (2010) edited by Leora Farber, and “Neo-liberal and future universities”, in the zine “We are the University”, published to accompany the Nationwide Day of Student Action, University of Auckland, 26 September 2011.

ix

Introduction

A

t the end of the eighteenth century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart Academy, noting that “there is too much misery in art already; I do not want to increase it.”1 Wachter uttered his sullen epigram on art education well before the development of postgraduate programmes in studio art, but the weariness of his tone would have only increased if he had to read research proposals, ethics applications, exegeses and all the other written requirements of the university-based art school. Duchamp did his best to dissuade us from pursuing research as a mode of artistic thinking, noting that “there is no solution, because there is no problem.”2 Yet, since the integration of art schools into the university sector and the rise of creative practice Ph.D.’s and other research degrees, the need to define problems to satisfy a demand for academic rigour has become a problem of its own. Art students often evade supervision of written research reports – perhaps hoping that the requirement might slip away unnoticed. Not because they can’t write: visual artists can be formally gifted and inventive writers. But we expect contemporary artists to be reflexive critics of form in the most expanded sense, and they are often unhappy with any institutional dictation of genre from above. As Dieter Lesage has argued, to require an artist to adopt a particular form of writing is precisely to fail to recognize their status as an artist.3 Students also seem to recognize that scholarly writing yields little aesthetic or professional reward: the market seeks the artist as a producer of mystery, rather than as an explainer of it. In Foucauldian terms, art points to the emergence and decline of stable discourses, zones where the seeable moves into or out of the realm of the sayable. After all, if a concept can be captured clearly in academic writing as a research question, what would be the point of making art with it? While scholarly writing undoubtedly assists the art education process, the actual written products associated with artistic research seem to have limited force both in the university and in the art world, existing primarily to allow a bureaucratic calculation of the student’s acceptability for an awarded degree. Works of art always escape such constraints – whether set by curators, dealers, historians, academicians or, most critically, the artist themselves – in a future encounter with an audience. Artworks have a certain “operationality.” They work in the domain of J. L. Austin’s “performative acts” – they make something happen directly in the meeting between work and viewer. The materiality of the aesthetic work invites our interest as a “boundary object,” combining sensations, concepts and affects that are both generically familiar and singularly unknowable. As a form of hybridization, artistic works draw us outside ourselves and into it, while we, in turn, ingest the aesthetic experience of the work. The “secret” in the work

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is that which cannot be fully incorporated into ourselves or transmitted to another: the work is an index to the multiplicity of realities that become a motor for further discovery – more looking, more listening, more learning, more work. Art is always, in David Joselit’s memorable phrasing, “beside itself,” decomposing stable identity into possibility.4 It is true that in light of institutional critique the audience is not some fully permeable and neutral entity, ready to respond to whatever the work creates. There are banal sociological and political-economic parameters that construct an audience for which the work can work. However, the work itself is never quite readable from these constraints. There is something childlike or childish about the relation of contemporary artists to rules, but this is not a lack of seriousness – adults learn to forget that for the child play is completely serious, a way of crossing lines between the known and the unknown. The deconstructive critiques of literary criticism and the question of artistic research here share a fundamental truth: knowing the rules of the game is not the same as being able to play.5 Since Alberti in the fifteenth century, this instability in visual arts production has been erratically theorized as a form of world-making that can be classed as writing, in the broad sense. After Derrida, we understand reading and writing as terms that can be used for the operation of sign and trace across all media: oral, alphabetic, audio-visual, biological  – production and reproduction. Spivak defines writing as “a place where the absence of the weaver from the web is structurally necessary.”6 The work is created for a reader who will take it up and make it their own, remaking themselves with the work. Therefore, in departure from the tradition of scientification that makes an individual responsible for their own knowledge, a writer is inevitably dependent on a suitably prepared reader, and it is this other reader, not the writer, who can account for the knowledge-effects generated. Respect for the reader or viewer’s role in creating the scene of knowledge requires that the work be available for independent critical interpretation – a freedom and independence that since Kant has been essential to the operation of the aesthetic. Exegetical writings that seek to explain or account for the artist’s activity in the scientific paradigm run counter to knowledge-production in the work except as far as they enhance or constitute the freedom and independence of the work. If we took the actual role of the artist in relation to knowledge seriously, we could suggest that the artist who wants to obtain a doctorate should not only have the academic freedom to choose their own medium, but be evaluated on the contribution to aesthetic knowledge that this choice entails. Even then, it would still be possible that they choose text or even academic genres of text as the most appropriate medium for their artistic purposes.7 The relationship between the textual and the visual has a long, complex history in the arts that could be considered more carefully in the forms of university-based inquiry that bureaucratically constitute artistic research. This book does not attempt to cover the vast literature on this subject, but rather to identify the institutional histories that constitute this conjuncture in the English-speaking university setting and the conceptual frames and ideologies that have underpinned those histories. The broad narrative is that the emergence of modernist European capitalism led to the usurping of the theological 4

Introduction

university by the technoscientific one, and produced the possibility of disciplinary autonomy, which allows the integration of the fine arts into the university. However, since the 1960s, in accord with the tenets of neo-liberalism, the “idea” of the university has been replaced with the bureaucratic model of one. The philosophical or technoscientific university replaced the theological university with a sharpened concept of disciplinarity, yet chemistry and anthropology, for example, have little in common in their genre of writing, despite both conceiving of themselves as “sciences.” The justification for transformation in university disciplines today is primarily financial in nature. This is not simply due to national government policies lamented by many critiques of higher education cuts, but is more fundamentally due to a changed role for the state, the market and the conception of public benefit. This means that the debate about artistic research is no longer primarily about whether art does or does not constitute a university discipline – in the age of “leisure studies” and “mining engineering” programs this question is moot: a discipline is a market segment. Instead it is possible to understand artistic research as a form of inquiry that may fundamentally question the university’s role. Explanatory writing by the artist in the traditional “critical” traditions of the academy may still be useful in resisting the synchronization of the artwork to the art sales market, but this perhaps comes at the expense of synchronizing the artistic practice with the university market through the research degree as industry. This book suggests that the radical growth and rationalization of university teaching in the creative disciplines now allows the global art education market to exert a larger torque on artistic production than the traditional art sales market. In order to resist these constraints, a new locus of critique is required that sees capital’s operations not outside but within the university. This book proposes that the most important knowledge-making in the visual arts is precisely – ironically – a performative institutional critique of these new constraints of artistic production: the research university’s knowledge-making practices. The archive of university knowledge is figured in the technoscientific paradigm as a smooth globe of knowledge to be “contributed to” by an appropriately defined research enquiry: an open-access database in the cloud. We know, however, that the idea of “knowledge in the world” gained through an expanded European university system is a contradictory historical tangle, resting on the material and political assumptions of colonial capitalism. Universities were established in the colonies to bring a missionary “light” to the dark corners of the earth and make them safe for occupation and exploitation. These institutions of secular enlightenment have a Christian-heritage not too far in their past, even as the state-sanctioned market displaces the nation state as the primary university-sponsoring institution. It is a culturally specific mode of knowledge that is being sustained as the reach of university knowledge is globalized. Yet, there are many ways of knowing that exceed the narrow parameters of techno-scientific knowledge in a globally validated form that dominate the university sector under capitalism. The visual arts perhaps collectively senses these constraints in the university, because the most influential criteria that delineate its own disciplinary boundaries have until very recently been held outside the university, in a quite different (though no less constraining) 5

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

version of official culture expanded into a neo-liberal market. This book attempts to trace a history of the shared “culture” of these two markets – art world and university – to better understand the forces shaping art education today. Research and Secularization In traditional theological practice, the exegesis carried God’s word to the world, a mission reflected in the term’s Greek etymology (ex – outward; hegeisthai – to lead or guide). God’s final word could not be directly accessed by humans, and so biblical lessons required interpretation so they could be applied to everyday life. During the medieval birth of the university, the scholastic methods of disputation and interpretation developed this analytical method of the critic, eventually extending from the holy book to other works, including works of art. The small, fixed stock of artistic examples copied in the academy reflected God’s design for the world, and these also required interpretive commentary to reach an imperfect broader society. Interpretation in the critical tradition relies on dialogue and debate – even today it is not customary for a contemporary artist to secure the interpretation of their own work. Such attempts – increasingly demanded by research and educational institutions – position the artist’s discourse in an authoritative mode it has not traditionally sought in writing, and imposes upon the viewer’s freedom of appreciation that Kantian aestheticians have understood to be at the centre of the art experience. This is not to say that the artist lacks critical knowledge of their work, but theirs is merely the first in a chain of interpretations that run from artist, to curator, to audience and beyond. Once the work reaches a public, the correct interpretation can no longer be the artist’s property if the audience is to find their own experience of the work. Science is an obvious culprit for the proprietization and individualization of interpretation in the university art school. Foucault described how the Renaissance era brought about the conditions for the spread of scientific thinking, where relations between name and order – how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy – became the preoccupation of the day.8 As we see in Chapter 2, for Giorgio Vasari, at the birth of the Italian visual arts academy, disegno would formalize classical proportion as a ratio of judgement that functioned independently of content in God’s design of the world. The fact that disegno could be an intellectual activity performed by men demonstrates the emergence of new technical processes for discovering truth. By the time we reach the modern universities from Berlin in 1810, secular science began to replace theological scholasticism as the dominant European means of stabilizing the natural world for analysis and calculation. In this era, access to truth was democratized, or more correctly transposed from the institution of the church to the bourgeois gentleman through the scientific and artistic academies. Today, we think of science as opposed to religion, but for historian of science Robert Merton the transition from scientia as knowledge of God to scientia as knowledge of nature was not a revolutionary shift. Instead, under the Protestant ethic, scientific 6

Introduction

experimentation developed as a method for the pious discovery of God’s world, while the religious conception of nature’s “truth” moved from public to private language.9 In the nineteenth century, for example, it was impossible for the average scientist to suggest that scientific knowledge was incompatible with Christian thought. Natural philosophy was seen as a pious (if not religious) activity, proper for a gentleman precisely because it avoided the bitter arguments of scholasticism. Avoiding the interminable arguments about life and death, good and evil; the forward looking sciences bracketed such questions while pursuing ever more highly specialized modes of investigation, whose resulting knowledge of “what is” would be held with the “expert” individual. As discussed in Chapter 4, historians of science such as Shapin have shown that the written account of experiments in the Republic of Letters became an exercise in the rhetoric of truth, which could be asserted by the writer without the transcendentaltheoretical problems of theological argument.10 The scientific report would not be a set of instructions to be replicated or a set of arguments to be deconstructed, but a claim to significance by what Donna Haraway calls a “modest witness,” who must firmly position themselves in what Traweek calls a “culture of no culture.”11 Lorraine Daston vividly describes this culture as reliant upon a moral economy of “gentlemanly honor, Protestant introspection, [and] bourgeois punctiliousness.”12 In this mode, the written report must be seen to “guarantee” the validity and transferability of knowledge as a unit of truth. Ironically, this “transferability” would be obtained through the suppression of both the written rhetorical skills of the creator and their tacit experimental knowledge. Science would philosophically appropriate writing as a supposedly neutral container for knowledge in general. To achieve credibility the scientist must suppress the subjective conditions of production to construct a blank neutral facticity, guarding against the dread errors of “idolatry, seduction, and projection” that might compromise objectivity and breach decorum.13 What Galison calls the “conditions of possible comportment” for the scientific researcher were emblematic of colonial patriarchy, with its well-documented fears of the feminine body.14 The scientific appropriation and regulation of the self takes on a moral flavour that is reflected today in science’s hierarchical modes of industrial organization. One proposition in this book is that scientific forms of knowledge, including the more scientific classifying tendencies of modern art history, do not help us much when it comes to considering the contributions of artistic research. The stable conceptual frames that scientific innovation seeks to propose, stabilize, renovate, extend and consensually advance are largely absent: even historical taxonomies of the avant-garde seem only made by the art historian to be broken by the artist. Works of contemporary art can only be engaged in the moment, where one gives oneself over to the work or moves with the work to some other perspective. To adopt a formulation from Irit Rogoff, the goal of the critical viewer is to singularize the work through the experience of the work.15 The scientific model of knowledge, by contrast, rests on an author who is ideally fully in control of their own work and its reception, adopting the immunity of objectivity. Dissemination will be a largely 7

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technical matter of reputation management, but the research itself is done and its purpose is never in doubt. In the creative arts such authors are boring, and therefore useless, except for academic justification. Art in the legacy of the avant-garde seeks instead invention, a Romantic desire to escape the pre-programming of the artist and their artistic outputs. This is the scandalous means by which the creative artist makes their mark, and therefore the way their own contribution to knowledge – if we call this “knowledge” – is shared with others. Importation of scientific or social scientific methods (shared and agreed propositional questions, consensually defined methods, falsifiable results) offers little to the artistic knowledge-creator except so far as it generates interest as opposed to disinterest. But any interest can only be invited, not compelled. A lineage of conceptual artistic practice could take these questions of endemic forms of knowing to be the very basis of their contribution to university knowledge. This may be an area where art can potentially identify what epistemological presuppositions are at work within the kinds of knowledge validated in the scientific research paradigm more effectively than science can itself. At the birth of the modern scientific university in the early nineteenth century, the goal of knowledge was to expand and encompass the world, a powerful transformation of the theological call to forget our material limits in favour of universal principles. However, Heidegger recovered from Greek philosophy the idea that the “work of art” initiated a world by creating a presence working in an oppositional direction to positivist knowledge. The experience of encountering work was not to take us into the future, but to prompt an experience of unconcealment or emplacement – to become more where one already was. Art can then help us remember a world outside ourselves, which capitalism would much rather have us forget in our chase to more efficiently improve what we already know. As artistic production is incorporated uneasily into the constraints of university knowledge, perhaps artistic research becomes capable of pushing the future university to understand more deeply how to live on the planet we inhabit, rather than one we produce in our own image. The goal of this book is to make this possibility thinkable, and to provide intellectual support to those practitioners making this critique through their works. It also, frankly, aims to identify the forces inhibiting this critique, which aim to limit the ability of artistic research to adopt what Derrida claims is the essence of the university – the right to ask unconditional questions, to even question the form of “the question” as the default ideal of knowledge. Neo-Liberalism and the Culture of the Global Economy The two chapters that follow trace the historical institutional development of the art school and the university, showing how these forms have evolved in relation to broader changes in society and its modes of knowledge. These accounts suggest that as the world changes its forms of education also change, albeit often in a residual and uneven manner. For example, 8

Introduction

as we see in Chapter 2, the growth of art education in the nineteenth century is impossible to separate from the changes in industrial manufacturing in Europe that make drawing a newly desirable skill. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, I argue, the development of global electronic capitalism (sometimes shorthanded as “globalization”) has transformed the nature of socio-economic reproduction and thus our expectations for education. Any account of the potential of artistic research should, I suggest, begin with an account of this new conjuncture. One term that appears to have contemporary valence in both scholarly and non-scholarly accounts of the global economy is “neo-liberalism.” Neo-liberalism has a tendency to be used as a catch-all term for capitalism, and most critiques of neo-liberalism concentrate on globalization and international monetary policy. However, Foucault’s historical analysis of neo-liberalism is specifically useful in analysing a governmentality that shapes practices on two levels, that McNay summarizes as (i) “regulatory or massification techniques” to manage populations, and (ii) co-constituting “individualizing, disciplinary mechanisms” that regulate behaviour.16 Foucault’s late 1970s lectures at the Collège de France situate the specific philosophy of twentieth-century German and US neo-liberalism in relation to liberal European thought, and it provides a prescient view of the relationship between institutions and subjectivity that characterizes the contemporary global economy.17 The philosophies of classical liberalism underpinned the development of the modern European empires that inaugurate globalization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They relied on a capitalist concept of freedom, embodied in a civil society who could trade outside the confines of the state. A Protestant logic of secularization moves the structure of civic values from religious institutions into the private sphere, yet there will still be some final reason or cause that will hold off an intolerable chaos. God’s hand would become Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” of the market. For economic liberalism in Smith’s tradition, the idea that the state can or should attempt to achieve particular market outcomes would be as counter-productive as trying to divert God’s natural design. Instead, good government should maintain a blindness and neutrality to the actual objectives of economic governing, and support the underpinnings of the market economy that will “inevitably” lead to the most efficient distribution of resources. Ironically, such inevitability must be taken on faith.18 This is the context in which the modern technoscientific university developed. As we will see in Chapter 1, the modern “liberal” version of the university brought about the “professional” academic who inhabited the university bureaucracy with expertise; neo-liberal ideology has shifted from more bureaucratic state-led managerialism to what Olssen and Peters call a “consumer-managerial” model of accountability, based on quantifiable output measures for the university’s new task of human capital development. The German ordoliberals (Böhm, Eucken, Grossmann-Doerth) of the 1930s to 1950s and the neo-liberals of the United States (Simons, Schultz, Becker, Hayek, Friedman et al.) were not content with the freedom of markets in the liberal tradition. The experiences of the German state under National Socialism had shown that merely letting capitalism 9

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

do its work would not necessarily result in an increasingly free market: the market game of exchange could come to wither under state control. Therefore, to these thinkers, the principles of competition underpinning effective markets must be advanced in a “positive” way; markets must be produced through active policy, rather than simply allowed or facilitated. It would become the responsibility of government to produce the truth of the market, and at the same time the market will constitute “the general index in which one must place the rule for defining all governmental action.”19 The formal rigor of competition should be supported by an appropriate regulatory framework: one which does not act on any direct economic facts or towards social outcomes (“interference” that would lead to “imbalance”), but instead to support the “environmental factors” that allow competition to flourish. In neo-liberal doctrine, market logic itself must not be directly altered, but must be taken on faith in light of the many documented failings of state intervention (meanwhile, the documented failings of capitalism are merely opportunities for improvement). Most of all, interventions should work to keep players “in the market game,” a sentiment reflected vividly in the recent government bailouts of financial enterprises internationally. Neo-liberal interventions no longer see the economic world as a distinct zone of activity separate from social or religious activities: economics comes to be defined in the 1930s as “the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.”20 Foucault notes that economics is no longer the logic of these processes that are taken as given, but analysis of the “strategic programming of individuals’ activity” within this world-view. The concept-metaphor of the market then comes to dominate previously separate areas of “social” policy such as education and health. Market logic is extended to not only the domestic sphere, but even the interior of the human subject. Neo-liberal rationality thus corrodes classical Romantic justifications for avantgarde artistic practices, which have historically sought to escape the stifling constraints of cultural management through the open-ended staging of material invention. In the neoliberal framework, our very impulses to create are induced by a new culture of permanent consumption and circulation. There is an anthropology at work in neo-liberal politics, an identifiably Christianheritage, individualist view of the human that Foucault sees emerging in the behaviourism of psychologists such as Skinner, and which would be later reflected in the extension of economics by Becker to even non-rational or sub-rational activity. Economics would then become the über-social science: the sole means and measure of humanity. Neo-liberal homo œconomicus is not a partner in exchange with another individual when visiting a neutral public market. As Foucault notes, “the stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo œconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”21 In this way his education is transformed from a social benefit to a personal investment. He (and it is a “he” that is theorized) becomes

10

Introduction

ceaselessly productive, rather than consumptive: in consumption, according to Becker, he simply “produces his own satisfaction.” With Becker comes the extension of market logic to all spheres of human activity: the market becomes a “grid of intelligibility,” decomposing the traditional governmental concepts of virtue, ethics, morality or any kind of public benefit or public domain. Instead, the principle of maximum economy will require the development of human capital (biopower) for the “greater good.” The enterprising self should “naturally” maximize its own production for its own purposes. But because the self responds to the environment, the participation of populations in the market game can and should be stimulated for maximum output. Yet conforming to this version of individuality will involve “adoption of a ‘a lifestyle,’ a ‘way of being,’ a moral choice, a ‘mode of relating to oneself, to time, to one’s environment, to the future, the group, the family.’”22 As Wendy Brown describes the neo-liberal paradigm, individuals’ market freedom is produced as a mechanism of government rather than in resistance to it, and the consequences of this freedom are morally valorized.23 In this book I use these historical trajectories towards neo-liberalism – which mark the transition from the European nation state to electronic global capitalism as the dominant “formatting” of contemporary life – as a useful framework through which to analyse the current conjuncture of contemporary art education. Part of this diagnosis is directed at residual conceptions of contemporary art’s innate indeterminacy, suggesting that the individualist freedoms in its legacy have become a barrier to new forms of collective freedom that must be thought outside the neo-liberal conception of the collective as a sum of individuals. This line of inquiry aims to elaborate the institutional constraints on the formation of such collective freedoms that have been identified from within critical artistic practices from the late 1960s, such as those associated with feminist, queer and anti-colonial movements. For these traditions, the institutional constraints on freedom are not to be disavowed through a practice of personal freedom, but through the broadening of a collective understanding of those constraints through a disruption of art’s default organizing mechanisms. Conclusion The incorporation of the art school into the university sector continues to give rise to productive tensions between scientific and artistic production that hold additional valence after the rise of the university as a dominant institution in artistic production and education. This rise brings the previously institutionally distinct forces of university knowledge and artistic production into a shared logic and a shared economy. The most prominent discussion in this transformation has been on the rise of the Ph.D.’s in studio art, and the debates about whether the art object can hold knowledge or produce knowledge in the scientific model. However, the forces producing this epistemological convergence run deeper than this

11

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

relation between artistic production and the Ph.D.’s knowledge form described solely by the word count of a thesis, and include: • A radical expansion and dereferentialization of the mass university, which has shifted from being a gatekeeper of culture’s historical disciplines to an educational industry conceived as a training ground for every field of contemporary production; • An explosion in image production and circulation, and the extension of artistic practice outside a modernist concern with its own medium and institutional context into a broader world of the politicized affect; • A transformation in the organization of the academic sciences, from a technocratic, state-/military-sponsored elite class of knowledge production to an expanded field of economic and narrative force in contemporary life; • The development of the Internet as a globe-girding and multi-format archive of production, disrupting the university and its libraries/journals as the privileged site of scholarly knowledge; and • The valorization of creativity as immaterial labour and production, where the entrepreneurial neo-liberal individual is impelled to creatively author their own life narrative. The work required to handle such questions in effective relation clearly exceeds the scope of a single book. As I revise and update the material in 2016 from a project that began some ten years ago, it appears that some of the questions that felt more urgent in artistic research’s instantiation in the 1990s to 2000s are no longer as consequential. Yet, the premise of the book is that a conversation with history allows us to see the present in a new way. While at times political exigencies change the university landscape quickly, other dynamics remain far more persistent, as one would expect for an institution whose mission is to retain knowledge from the past. As the research for this book has developed, the debates about whether or not art is able to make a contribution to university knowledge appear to have been perhaps rendered moot by the neo-liberal culture of finance which only requires that any university activity be profitable. While the corporatization of the university must continue to be fought, its reality as a fully financialized entity must also be assumed. The question in the wake of this new form for the university is: how can artistic research intervene in this reality to allow marginalized peoples and modes of production to emerge? In her book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak returns to Karl Marx as a scholar who helpfully allows us to perform the kind of rethinking. At the time of writing Capital, western Europe was in the emergence of the new economic system of industrialism, as consequential in its reformatting of production then as global electronic capitalism is today. Marx seeks to recode the factory worker from the victim of capitalism to the “agent of production”; that is, to encourage the workers to see that their own labour can be conceived in the form that capitalism calls “value.” Spivak is insistent 12

Introduction

that for Marx the value-form is a formal concept, something “contentless and simple” that cannot be arrived at through tallying such and such amount of exchange-value.24 As form, value asks for figuration and disfiguration rather than empirical documentation. It is an aesthetic question. For Marx the value-form of labour is a specific form of validation of labour by capital that could be levered by workers to organize production for social ends rather than towards capitalist accumulation. The scale of institutional and structural transformations outlined in Chapters 1 and 2 has led to a university system in crisis, and this has provoked a renewed interest in the history of the university and what that history can tell us about how we have reached this point. Even limiting our enquiry to the recent history of the twentieth century, the rationale for public investment in universities has shifted from cultural development; through the redeployment of soldiers and production of an elite managerial class; to enhanced economic production and reduction in youth unemployment; to education itself becoming a dominant industry and driver of other economic sectors such as real estate.25 This expansion of the university has also resulted in a delegitimation in the eyes of the public. While the useless nature of humanities scholarship has been critiqued for as long as the university has existed, the past two decades have seen substantial and widespread revolt against both the value of university teaching and scientific knowledge, perhaps most remarkably on the issue of climate change. The specialist expertise of the scientist is no longer seen as the authoritative source of the inexorable advancement of knowledge; or perhaps it might be more truthful to say that once scientific enquiry did not function with the rhetorical promise of limitless economic and technological advancement, many no longer sought its authority. Of course, as we shall see in Chapter 4, there are many for whom it was never a convincing saviour in the first place. The circulation of information in the postcolonial era made visible cracks in the inevitable telos of western knowledge’s superiority over “less advanced” others; and where such neocolonial dynamics are still in play they appear to be secured less by discursive moral force generated by scientific resolution of the secrets of the world in the university. Rather, they are secured through the brute force of financialization and capital accumulation, backed up with military and ideological support where necessary. While the European model of the university continues to spread, few new institutions would give the ideals of a Cardinal Newman or Kant or Humboldt precedence over the development of human capital and intellectual property promised by neo-liberal technoscience. While this book is in concert with the turn to historical reflection on the university’s crisis, it seeks to escape any nostalgia for the recent past by (i) emphasizing the history of the university as a history of discontinuity, and (ii) suggesting that the institutionalization of the artistic avant-garde into the university proposes a new mode of university operations. Discussing Marx’s concept of crisis, Hay notes that “[C]risis is derived from the Greek, Kríno, Krísis (to decide) and refers to a moment of decisive intervention, a moment of transformation, a moment of rupture, […of] objective contradiction yet subjective intervention.”26 In previous versions of the university’s existence, crises have yielded new institutional forms: Black Mountain College in the mid-twentieth century, or the University 13

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of Berlin in the nineteenth century, to give two examples, did not appear as an offshoot of an existing successful enterprise; they were founded to establish a new approach to the issues of intellectual reproduction that were not well-served by institutional arrangements. The crisis in knowledge precipitated by the art school’s poor fit with technoscientific forms gives reason to reflect on what the university is fundamentally about, and to ask what the creative arts can do in such a structure if it continues to inhabit it. But first, we should understand how the university has become what it is today. Notes   1 Quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 200.   2 “The Iconoclastic Opinions of M. Marcel Duchamps Concerning Art in America,” Current Opinion 59 (November 1915): 346–347. While I don’t fully endorse Duchamp’s renunciation of responsibility for problems, it is a statement that captures something fundamental about the attitudes of the avant-garde. For a more responsible but still usefully unscientific epigram on the status of art as problem solving, I thank Ken Hay for pointing me to Frank Stella’s statement: “There are two problems in painting: one is to find out what a painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting.” In Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 1:57.   3 Dieter Lesage, “On Supplementality,” in Agonistic Academies, eds. Jan Cools and Henk Slager (Brussels: Sint-Lukas Books, 2011), 78. For a related argument on the auto-criticality of works using media theory, see Howard Slater, “Post-Media Operators: ‘Sovereign & Vague,’” Datacide, no. 7 (2000), http://datacide.c8.com/post-media-operators-‘sovereign-vague’. The general lack of fit between the fine arts and research frameworks is discussed most extensively and entertainingly by Robert Nelson in The Jealousy of Ideas: Research Methods in the Creative Arts (Fitzroy, Australia and London: Ellikon, 2009).   4 David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130 (October 2009): 125–34.   5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 331.   6 Ibid., 58.   7 Lesage, “On Supplementality,” 78.   8 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 208.   9 Robert K. Merton, “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris 4 (1938): 360–632. See also Steven J. Harris, “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773,” Isis 96, no. 1 (2005): 71–79. 10 See for example Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness\@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_ Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Steven Shapin, “Understanding the Merton Thesis,” Isis 79, no. 4 (1988): 594–605; Steven Shapin, “A Scholar and a Gentleman: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early 14

Introduction

Modern England,” History of Science; an Annual Review of Literature, Research and Teaching 29, no. 85 (1991): 279–327. 11 Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 162. 12 Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 24. 13 Lorraine Daston, “Scientific Error and the Ethos of Belief,” Social Research 72, no. 1 (2005): 1–28. 14 Peter Galison, “Judgement Against Objectivity,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds. Caroline A. Jones, Peter Louis Galison, and Amy E. Slaton (New York: Routledge, 1998), 327–59. Galison makes his most speculative and interesting argument along these lines in Peter Galison, “Objectivity Is Romantic,” in The Humanities and the Sciences, ed. Billy E. Frye (Philadelphia: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999), 15–43. 15 Irit Rogoff, “Practicing Research/Singularising Knowledge,” in Agonistic Academies, eds. Jan Cools and Henk Slager (Brussels: Sint-Lukas Books, 2011), 69–74. Rogoff adopts the language of Suely Rolnik who describes “processes of singularisation – a way of rejecting all these modes of pre-established encoding, all these modes of manipulation and remote control: rejecting them in order to construct modes of sensibility, modes of relation with the other, modes of production, modes of creativity that produce a singular subjectivity.” See Félix Guattari, and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 23. 16 Lois McNay, “Self as Enterprise: Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 57. 17 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 18 Ibid., 16, 32. 19 Ibid., 121. 20 Ibid., 222. 21 Ibid., 226. 22 Lazzarato, Maurizio, “Neoliberalism in Action,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (November 2009): 121. 23 Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory & Event 7, no. 1 (2003). 24 Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 59. 25 See, for example, Thorsten Nybom, “A Rule-Governed Community of Scholars: The Humboldt Vision in the History of the European University,” in University Dynamics and European Integration, eds. Peter Maassen and Johan P. Olsen (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2007), 75. 26 Cited in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 323.

15

Chapter 1 The Transformation of the University

E

ric Ashby described the modern idea of the Anglophone university as a hybrid, with a “heredity derived from Germany, Britain, and America.”1 The assumption of a stable form among all universities is a recent phenomenon and a suppression of the many varieties of institution past and present; however, the Anglo-US model for the university is – through the forces of colonialism and globalization – now the default model for the university worldwide outside of Europe. While every culture has had its forms of knowledge and higher learning – the twelfth-century European recovery of Greek philosophy took place through translations from Arabic kept by Islamic scholars2 – it is the European university form that has either displaced, incorporated or settled atop other traditions of learning through the capitalist mode of exchange.3 To make an analogy, the European nation state is now the globalized form of the nation: its borders and external interfaces are relatively harmonized globally along the European model, but this masks sometimes radical heterogeneity in arrangements within any particular state. Similarly, how universities understand themselves and how they are organized is diverse within a shared logic and structure. Far from a utopian unbroken lineage stretching back to the twelfth century, universities can be seen as what Foucault calls “heterotopias,” distinguishable as an exceptional zone from a broader society, yet an assemblage of institutional forms that overlay and interpenetrate each other historically and geographically.4 The emergence of the singular university platform was always a partial enterprise, based from the start on competing agendas between various institutional and political interests; often awkwardly appending new initiatives to historical institutional formations with uneven effects, and for less than laudable motives. Derrida describes the paradox of the university as precisely that it has been founded, always by political forces external to the university, and the foundings of the universities reflect the political and intellectual situations of their time and situation.5 “Defining the university is a difficult task,” notes Riddle, making the mandatory qualification of every historian of the university.6 As such, this chapter does not seek to account for a totalizing definition of the university, but instead reviews figures, syntheses, resonances in some of the well-known and lesser-known histories of the development of universities.7 Its purpose is to establish the historical lineage in which the institutional forces opening the university towards artistic practices can be discerned, with the suggestion that the emergence of research-based studio art programmes may turn out to be one more of the historical points where new forms of the university emerge as older ones slip away. Artists worry that the normalizing force of the university will suppress creative practices; and on the other side of the coin, traditionalists are concerned that the unruly forces of the creative

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arts will disrupt the university’s academic integrity. In tracking the university’s mongrel heritage, we can move with Foucault towards understanding artistic research as a dynamic disruption that points towards both possibility and repression. History of the European University In his History of Universities, Perkin claims that the history of the European university can be told in five stages: 1. the rise of the cosmopolitan European university and its role in the destruction of the medieval world order at the Reformation (twelfth century–1530s); 2. the “nationalization” of the university by the emerging nation states of the Religious Wars, and its decline during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (1530s–1789); 3. the revival of the university after the French Revolution and its belated but increasing role in Industrial Society (1789–1939); 4. the migration of the university to the non-European world and its adaptation to the needs of developing societies and the anticolonial reaction (1538–1960s); and 5. the transition from elite to mass higher education and the role of the university and its offshoots in post-industrial society (1945–present).8 Perkin describes the opportunistic and multidimensional character of the origin of the university in schematic terms: In the mutually destructive strife between empire and papacy, power was “up for grabs” and fractionated out in a hierarchy of competing authorities: king and archbishop, duke and abbot, free county and free city, manorial lord and parish priest. In the interstices of power, the university could find a modestly secure niche, and play off one authority against another. Unintentionally, it evolved into an immensely flexible institution.9 Universities emerged from the western European urban schools (studia) of the twelfth century. They formed in response to the demand for an educated elite and to serve the complex needs of church and state in the economically thriving cities after the end of the German and Viking invasions. Such training for the emerging professions of the clergy, medicine and law would be the basis of the European university for many years.10 The seven liberal arts of university teaching consisted of the trivium (Latin grammar, rhetoric and dialectic); and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy) – success in these arts qualified one as a magister, “a master qualified to teach others and to proceed to the higher faculties of theology, law, or medicine.”11 The largest and most influential studia received imperial or papal charters to become studia generalia, which trained the masters in the higher faculties and were open to all in Christendom. Such charter institutions could also receive jus ubique docendi, the right of its masters (in guilds) to teach anywhere in the 20

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Christian world; and permission for those teaching and learning to retain their church income. The first major universities of Paris and Bologna were established schools that grew without close direction from public authorities, and in the twelfth century they became influential models for other universities to follow. A decisive moment is the establishment of a Parisian school by Peter Abelard, a Breton canon whose followers used the recently recovered Greek philosophy to establish scholasticism as a tool for “understanding the visible world of men and things and the invisible worlds of Christian revelation and Platonic ideas.”12 Derrida places the birth of the professor at the symbolic moment where the charismatic Abelard turns his back on military glory to develop the new “army” of scholars. These universities would become the intellectual centre of Christianity, receiving scholars from all over northern Europe.13 In the thirteenth century, the Parisian “House of Sorbonne” would provide the model of the residential college that would later be copied by Oxford and Cambridge and eventually become the foundation for the liberal undergraduate education of today.14 Meanwhile, the founding of the University of Bologna established a unique funding model where for over two centuries groups of students organized to pay teachers on the basis of their performance. This legacy of autonomy is still reflected in the Italian system to this day. While a full account of global university development would need to account for the influence of French and Italian systems throughout their respective colonies, it is the development of the English and German models that I concentrate on within this chapter, due to their eventual fusion in the US graduate school that has become the dominant model for university research. Once public authorities saw the power held by the universities, they wasted little time in actively taking on powers to regulate privileges to teach and learn. The University of Naples was established by Emperor Frederick II in 1224, and in 1229 Pope Gregory IX founded the first papal university at Toulouse, “at the request of the secular government” to “assist in the eradication of heresy.”15 These were the first public universities, with Naples considered the first “state” university: Frederick II barred his own subjects from studying elsewhere, while retaining a healthy industry of foreign students, all the while denying them equal rights. State intervention into the previously cosmopolitan form would be repeated elsewhere, with even the University of Paris losing its autonomy as it came under the control of the French Parliament: Louis XI demanded an oath of allegiance in 1470, resulting in the expulsion of over 400 scholars, and the crown confiscated their possessions. The university became particularly critical in reproducing the Protestant social order. Queen Elizabeth, for example, enabled the founding of Trinity College in Dublin (1592) in part to stop her subjects traveling to continental Europe where they would become “infected with Popery.”16 While the spread of the Protestant ethic and secular power in the absolutist territorial states in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century certainly produced an ever-growing demand for university-educated lawyers, the religious nature of the University was still central to its mission. Indeed, the Reformation prompted a new demand for clergy, and the religious wars required ideological support on both sides. 21

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The English Universities The development of the English university form is instructive when understanding the contemporary university. Oxford emerged around 1167 in the classical European pattern, out of an arts studium, after English students were expelled from France. After riots in 1209, Cambridge was born from a splinter group migrating to a new location. Backed by king and pope, these two universities would squash the founding of any competition through to the nineteenth century.17 This politically-backed duopoly accrued large endowments in their colleges, which remained the source of academic authority and power on the French model; and “Oxbridge” became the main distributors of the Parisian residential college model to the rest of the English-speaking world, as well as becoming two of the most powerful brands in academic life. The ethos at Oxbridge provided liberal education as the production of cultivated men to serve church and state, rather than intellectuals advancing knowledge or the economy. As Ashby succinctly describes it, “it was assumed that it was more important for university graduates to be civilised than learned; not thinkers but doers, not theologians but bishops, not philosophers but statesmen, not scholars but schoolmasters.”18 The students were taught in general by poorly paid recent graduates as tutors rather than professors, tasked with reproducing men rather than reproducing knowledge. The Tudor Revolution in the sixteenth century exposed the English gentry to a potential loss of political power to “ambitious and humbly-born clerks,” fed with understandings gained from the wide-ranging “courtesy literature” on how to become an effective gentleman, which included appropriate forms of study. This threat revived the gentry’s interest in university education at Oxbridge, which until the mid-sixteenth century had been largely a seminary for education of servants of the church.19 The universities themselves shifted their offerings in response, introducing more modern subjects. The next two centuries saw repeated gentlemanly attacks on the scholarly pedantry of the universities, in order to secure the importance of “appropriate” learning that would be the hallmark of the political class’ hopes for the English university. The French scholar Montaigne agreed “that the pursuit of learning makes men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.”20 For Thomas Hobbes, “school philosophers” were essentially treasonous: “the Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.” Yet “men may be brought to a love of obedience by preachers and gentlemen that imbibe good principles in their youth at the Universities […] [W]e shall never have a lasting peace, till the Universities themselves be […] reformed.”21 As Phamotse and Kissack note, “the gist of the humanists’ critique of scholasticism was that it was too abstract and detached from the concerns of the common individual, failing to guide him/her through the moral challenges of daily life towards the goal of personal salvation, which was the distinctive promise and telos of the Christian faith.”22 There were few political mechanisms for the desired reform however, and as the religious wars faded during the mid-seventeenth century, universities in Europe entered a period 22

The Transformation of the University

of decline. At 1400, there were 40 universities in Europe, of up to one or two thousand students. Two centuries later, it was 170 institutions. But by the 1680s Oxford had “fewer students than at any time before the Civil War.”23 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of universities actually declined.24 Generally, university students had been “members of the elite, and directed to these careers by familial rather than personal choice, few were interested in study for its own sake.”25 By the mid-eighteenth century, universities were no longer the preferred educators of the wealthy elites, having been supplanted by private tutors and the popular “grand tour” of the European Continent. Most universities, unlike the monasteries, were not supported by an endowment, and they had few resources to adapt to the changing market. They were private institutions, where masters hired their own classrooms, and students found their own lodgings in the city, or at the houses of enterprising masters offering a house-study package.26 Once the elites took their education elsewhere, the financial footing of the university suffered. However, the decline had little impact on the overall structure of social reproduction in the powerful Oxbridge colleges, and it would not be until the nineteenth century that the introduction of new universities – often led by Edinburgh graduates – would allow the full incorporation of scientific knowledge into the English university system. Scottish Universities To the north of England would emerge one of the dynamic centres of scientific learning in the eighteenth century and an important precursor to the modern university. In an early example of local authority input into university education, the 1582 charter of James VI vested management of the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Town Council, who had the right of appointment to all posts.27 The new university became characterized as an opportunity to leave behind religious disputes that were credited to Aristotelean scholasticism, dogmatism, disputation and pedantry. It would educate in the name of Lockean gentlemanly civic virtue, polite conversation and broad training in natural philosophy and the useful sciences. Thomas Reid’s reforming committee at King’s College thus claimed that instead of dwelling on “the Logic and Metaphysic of the Schoolmen, which seem chiefly contrived to make Men subtle Disputants, a Profession justly of less Value in the present age”, the college would in future devote itself to “teaching those parts of [natural] Philosophy, which may qualify Men for the more useful and important Offices of Society.”28 The moral rectitude of practical knowledge would become a key theme in the UK’s university development. As Perkin points out, the developing industrial society required specialists and would eventually enforce specialization on higher education, but the form of the 23

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specialist professor took hold in Scotland in advance of widespread industrial capitalism, eventually becoming the model for the new English universities of the nineteenth century.29 Edinburgh was the first to switch to individual specialist chairs in 1707, followed by Glasgow in 1727. This fragmentation of knowledge also allowed the formation of independent sciences such as chemistry.30 The Scottish universities held some of the most cosmopolitan campuses in Europe in the eighteenth century. While professors took an oath of allegiance to the Church of Scotland, most classes outside the theological faculty were taught by laymen, making them appealing to religious dissenters from throughout the British Isles and colonies.31 Edinburgh’s decision to foster specialist knowledge in medicine and philosophy/natural philosophy also provided an agreeably broad suite of courses compared to Oxford and Cambridge. This secular cosmopolitan atmosphere contributed to a large international student population: almost 45% of Edinburgh’s distinguished eighteenth-century alumni were English.32 Scottish professors such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Millar became the most famous practitioners of sceptical philosophy and social science in the Protestant world. Henry Brougham, Thomas Campbell and other Edinburgh graduates went on to form University College in London in 1826.33 Scottish university professors often participated in the more public realm of voluntary societies of science and natural knowledge, probably because they were paid a pittance.34 The most extreme example is Edinburgh’s famous medical school, a scientific powerhouse so influential that in 1789 Thomas Jefferson declared that as far as science was concerned “no place in the world can pretend to a competition with Edinburgh”: five of the medical professors received no salary whatsoever.35 Professors were merely licensed by the state to have a legal monopoly to teach their specialist subject, collecting two or three guineas at the start of their classes from students who happened to be in attendance. A strong and entertaining performance – for which an experimental science demonstration outshone the most gifted teacher – would be critical. Similarly, the system required the removal of entry qualifications: townspeople were an important source of income, not just for their class fees, but for spreading the word of professors’ standing that would result in opportunities for consultancy, private practice and publishing market success, especially for science textbooks.36 Edinburgh professors taught for six months of the year and used the rest of the time to prepare their lectures and undertake other work. An economic structure based on student fees diminished the university’s emphasis on granting of qualifications. The students could adopt any course of study they wished, providing they had the money or connections. Most students were not following a full degree programme – the MD was almost exclusively the degree awarded in the eighteenth century, and few bothered to pay the £20 fee necessary to graduate, even if they could afford it: no more than 12% of students in any year took the degree.37 Of course, the fee system also mitigated against the imposition of examinations or tests. For most students, their mere attendance at the classes, even without graduating, allowed them to successfully practice medicine outside the major centres. The paternal pastoral 24

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care and exam preparation that formed the basis of Oxford and Cambridge college life was largely absent. The Modern University in Germany In the traditional university, one became a professor due to the vote of some committee, electoral college or other authority, and the appointed person would be responsible for upholding tradition. As William Clark has demonstrated, the traditional universities “resisted the charismatic individual for the sake of a charismatic collective,” embodied in academic titles, traditions, dress and custom.38 In the ancien regime, degrees were awarded to a juridical subject rather than a meritorious subject, highlighted in numerous stories of Baroque scholars of poor quality receiving degrees for such mitigating factors as marrying a Catholic widow to bring her back to the Protestant faith.39 For the purpose of this book the most important historical point is that the modern university came from new institutions in new locations with new conceptual underpinnings, rather than the renovation of the old institutions. They would develop in a few large cities that did not have universities, e.g. the paradigmatic University of Berlin (1810), the University of Madrid (1822) and the University of London (1836).40 These new institutions could no longer rely on a stable doctrine set by the church, as theology had become a problematic basis for learning, and the Cartesian cogito and the new Enlightenment subject were ascendant. Before these university developments at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a tremendous amount of intellectual inquiry in science and industry took place in associations or scientific academies that were more or less independent from the universities. The science and technology education developed to serve industrial growth would later take place in new institutions outside the public university system: mechanics’ institutes in Britain, Technische Hochschulen in Germany and grandes écoles in France. The universities retained largely medieval curricula in arts, theology, law and medicine, and acted as “seminaries for the clergy and a few lawyers and administrators of the nation state.”41 The German and Scottish universities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would lay claim to the applied scientific research housed in the academies (which, in Scotland, were often already populated by university men). Scientific knowledge would secure a link between teaching and research, as Humboldt advocates: If one assigns to the university the tasks of teaching and dissemination of the results of science and scholarship, and assigns to the academy the task of its extension and advancement, an injustice is obviously done to the university. Science and scholarship have been advanced as much – and in Germany, even more – by university teachers as by members of academies. University teachers have made these contributions to the progress of their disciplines by virtue of their teaching appointments. For unconstrained oral communication to an audience, which includes a significant number of intelligences 25

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thinking in unison with the lecturer, inspires those who have become used to this mode of study just as surely as does the peaceful solitude of a writer or the less institutionalised activities of the members of an academy. The progress of science and scholarship is obviously more rapid and livelier in a university, where their problems are discussed back and forth by a large number of forceful, vigorous, youthful intelligences. Science and scholarship cannot be presented in a genuinely scientific or scholarly manner without constantly generating independent thought and stimulation; it is inconceivable that discoveries should not be frequently made in such a situation.42 In the school plan for Königsberger and Lithuania (1809), Humboldt then wrote his famous words on the research university: The university instructor is no longer the teacher, and the student no longer the taught; the latter rather researches, and the professor guides it […] Education at the university puts one in a position to grasp the unity of academic knowledge (Wissenschaft), and to bring it forth, thus demands creative powers […] For an insight into academic knowledge as such is a creation, even if a subordinate one […] To the university is reserved that which one can discover in and through oneself: insight into pure academic knowledge. For this act of self, freedom is necessary, and solitude helpful.43 This focus on the individual’s development (rather than salvation) is a distinctive and decisive rupture. Ferreirós asserts that the reforming impulse of the Napoleonic era merged with the aspirations of the German Enlightenment to develop a neo-humanism that aspired to an integral formation (Bildung) of an individual not guided by utilitarian aims.44 Historians and philologists such as F. A. Wolf, founder of the university seminar, wanted to construct philology into the “science of antiquity”: not just reproducing knowledge but extending it through criticism and research. The idea was that as students watched professors working on the frontiers of knowledge, and learned to do research themselves in the seminar, they would come to understand new ways of thinking. Thus the rapprochement between specialization and liberal or general education – the question would remain, what institutional form would be able to bring these specialist forms together to achieve these educational ideals? The aim was to develop the highest form of knowledge, Wissenschaft. Broader than practical science, it was an approach to learning “aimed at active intellect, sound judgment, and moral feeling.”45 An important intellectual underpinning for this ideology is Kant’s satirical pamphlet “The Contest of the Disciplines” (Streit der Fakultäten) in 1798. Kant notes that if disciplines are considered on the basis of their relevance to the state’s objectives, then their rank order would be: (1) theology, (2) law, (3) medicine (4) philosophy (including humanities and natural sciences). However, if considered for their contributions to intellectual discourse, the order would be reversed. This would be the justification for positioning the “lower” disciplines of philosophy and the humanities at the centre of the modern German university, 26

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in a break with theology as the organizing principle. The forces of secularization were gaining increasing traction in philosophical and scientific discourse at the time, but of course, the church was not about to have the university form it invented proceed without being part of it. Even though theology was no longer the default model of unification, the development of the University of Berlin was riven with negotiations about how to accommodate theology, and eventually the formerly highest discipline of theology relinquished its claim to an organizing role in order to survive as one specialist discipline among others at the birth of the modern university.46 An important feature of this political contest is that philosophy claimed not only an intellectual mandate for the organization of the university, but also a practical and political one, with the philosophy department at Berlin being charged with school examinations, giving them a critical role in gatekeeping for university entry. The acceptance of theology as one of a number of multiple “competing universals” in the one institution inaugurates the disciplinary form of the secular university that would later come to dominate the English-speaking world. The modern German university was inaugurated as an “Ivory Tower,” a fully endowed and state-protected institution expanding scientific knowledge through the freedom to teach and learn. There were two main arguments why the sovereign was expected to support such a model seemingly explicitly against their interests: firstly, Humboldt’s well-known argument that new knowledge could only be produced in Einsamkeit und Freiheit (solitude and freedom); and more importantly for the state, the production of such knowledge would lead to intellectual and economic prosperity for the modern Kulturstaat.47 This dual, imprecise justification served the modern university well, as it moved from one argument to the other in the face of pressures from within and without. This argument was employed by Humboldt to secure state support to protect the University of Berlin from the censoring interests of the church on the one hand; and the pragmatist demands of the middle classes on the other.48 An immediate trade-off made by the university in their demand for state-sanctioned autonomy was to relinquish any attempt to gain political power or to make its knowledge public, which would eventually have far-reaching consequences. Humboldt suggested that the new University of Berlin should be funded not through state budgets but rather through donations from the German nation and endowments to ensure the university’s financial autonomy. However, education as a cultural institution had been a responsibility of the state, and schools and universities required the approval of the governments of the Länder in the name of cultural sovereignty, and the university would be no exception.49 The freedom of research in the German state university was secured through the state’s right to appoint and fund the individual chair-holder, the Ordinarius, the professor as civil servant. This professor was flanked by less privileged and usually unpaid “extraordinary” professors (who lectured on specialist topics) and private docents.50 The independence from the state envisaged by Humboldt never appeared, and regular “visitations” from ministers increasingly ensured compliance with state demands. The visitation as a traditional theological practice to ensure compliance with a central authority was eventually replaced 27

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by a form of disciplining through bureaucracy.51 The inaugurating tension at the heart of the research university is that the creation of “academic freedom” is a direct consequence of state interference and bureaucratic rationalization. It was in the interests of “the people” that traditional academic authority was broken by the state. Up until the mid-nineteenth century German academic appointments were often a local affair, with family appointments being common. In the late nineteenth century, a competitive national labour market emerged with government ministers as administrative heads making appointments to chair positions while taking advice from available specialists, while the university Rektor remained more of a figurehead.52 The aim of state support was no longer to reproduce of a cultural group of scholars, but the deployment of a system that attempted to escape the nepotism of the traditional university. As Clark puts it, “the idea that a meritocracy governed academic appointments and advancements did not originate within academia itself. German ministries imposed the new notion.”53 The self-managed endowment was replaced with a budget that would rationalize the practice of teaching and scholarship. The irony was that this meritocratic mechanism required the development of dossiers on individual academics. The new system for “the people” thus gives birth to the curriculum vitae-driven academic, who enhances their charisma by directing institutes or centres to run academic projects, and must attend to their own professional development at the expense of institutional aims. In the later nineteenth century, the Berlin University was at the height of its international fame as a scientific centre, and the number of university students in Germany doubled between 1871–76 and 1892–93 from 16,124 to 32,834,54 with many of those coming from overseas. This increase was a result of investment in scientific seminars and institutes over ordinary salaries.55 From the late 1860s until 1914 thousands of young men from England and the United States studied at German universities. Ashby estimated that “9,000 Americans studied in Germany during the nineteenth century, and the number of Englishmen there must have been at least as large.” The Doctorate The doctorate qualification dates back to the University of Paris in the twelfth century, and its emergence has been ably tracked by Clark, whose account I draw upon here.56 The degrees of master and doctor were the only degrees offered in the medieval university, though they bear little relationship to the research qualification we know today. They could generally be described as professional doctorates in medicine and law, which also functioned as a licence to teach.57 While the terms “master” and “doctor” were interchangeable in the early days of the university, the emergence of the doctorate in theology as a higher degree relegated the arts and sciences to lower status at the university. From the middle of the sixteenth century, theologians made a claim to the title of “doctors,” and quickly became the most 28

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prestigious doctors, outranking the doctors in medicine and law, and this nomenclature would spread through Europe. Despite advocacy from the discipline, the field of arts (which included philosophy and the natural sciences) would remain with the highest degree of Master. Masters of arts would often also obtain a doctorate in theology, medicine or law to supplement their earning capacity. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries various mechanisms emerged for bringing the term “doctor” into personal titles even though the qualifications of these academics remained officially Masters degrees – “Master of arts and doctor of philosophy” became commonplace.58 The theologians in particular were fully aware of the threats posed by the arts, and used all their divine authority to retain their professional status. Clark notes that as early as 1571 a writer by the name of Amerbach advocated for a doctorate in the arts, yet it would be a full 250 years before such claims would find traction in Berlin.59 This advocacy was no small risk: various punishments for the impersonation of doctors included torture or death. In 1641 jurist Georg Walther formulated the following syllogism (in language perhaps reminiscent of the College Art Association’s twentieth-century prohibition on studio art doctorates): The master’s is the highest degree in philosophy. The doctor’s degree is superior to the master’s. Ergo, the doctor of philosophy does not exist.60 It would eventually be the University of Berlin statutes in 1810 that would not only allow the Doctor of Philosophy credibility, but would separate it from and place it above the Master of Arts degree. The modern doctor of philosophy would no longer give an oath of legitimate birth, but of “legitimate authorship” of a defended dissertation61 – even if that defence was sometimes undertaken by the supervisor rather than the student. The Berlin statutes by 1840 would come to reflect the distinction we understand today: The master’s degree is awarded to whoever can skilfully renew and well order what has been learnt, and thus promises to be a useful link in knowledge between the generations. The doctor’s degree is awarded to whoever shows Eigenthümlichkeit [personality, peculiarity, originality] and Erfindungsvermögen [creativity] in the treatment of academic knowledge (Wissenschaft).62 While the underpinnings of the German research university may have been bureaucratic rationalization and functional specialization, the early Ph.D. is not framed around authenticating a parsimonious “contribution to knowledge” in the way we have come to assume today. Instead, the Ph.D. in its beginning is distinguished by a creative, original approach to knowledge. While the Master of Arts needed only to be able to engage in disputation as well as everyone else with the title, the modern Ph.D. would “cultivate a modern academic persona, a Romantic authorial persona, exhibited through the masterpiece of the doctoral dissertation in which a spark of charisma or genius, however small, must 29

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inhere.”63 It thus can reward not just a piecemeal contribution to a specific discipline, but ideally, a new approach to knowledge that we could term “aesthetic.” As Clark explains, the nature of the emerging modern research ethic at this time – of doing simple, well-defined things thoroughly rather than taking on complex problems to display virtuosity – is an unusual and distinctive development. It is a “practice of the modern politico-economic order,” opposed to the traditional concern with the relation between subject and knowledge in erudition.64 The US University and the Diffusion of the Ph.D. Having surveyed the German, Scottish and English models that inform it, the United States university awaits. It would become the dominant model in the now-global academic enterprise, with a highly specialized and diversified system of German and Scottishdescended graduate schools atop loosely articulated Oxbridge-style undergraduate programmes with diverse funding models. The nine US colleges founded before the Revolution (beginning with Harvard in 1636 through to Dartmouth in 1769) followed the lead of the historical English and Scottish universities, as seminaries primarily producing pastors, eventually expanding into liberal education for the business and plantation classes.65 They shared the Oxbridge pedagogical model, with young recent graduates shepherding a single class through the broad fouryear curriculum, even though average tenures for these tutors were two to three years at most colleges.66 The professorial ranks – who usually held outside positions in the ministry, medicine or law at the same time – grew from ten in 1750 to one hundred by 1800. Jefferson, an admirer of Edinburgh science, introduced scientific courses at Virginia in 1779 (including the study of fine arts), leading to a period of contest marked by the production of the Yale Report in 1827, which encouraged universities to retain theological traditions in the face of “scientific barbarism.”67 A full-time student at Yale in 1875 – a century after the importation of the more secular university forms of applied and scientific knowledge in Virginia – would be limited to Greek, Latin and mathematics in their first four semesters.68 Even the establishment of an elective system at Harvard in 1868 caused an uproar.69 As with Oxbridge in England, the Ivy League institutions were not at the forefront of nineteenthcentury university innovation. The rapid development and diversity of institutions is a hallmark of the US system: with a constitutional restriction on federal involvement in the university system, a wide range of models abounded with varying levels of state input under a corporate settler ethos. After the US Supreme Court denied New Hampshire’s attempt to impose state control on Dartmouth College in 1819, “any individual, group, church, city, state, or private firm could found a college and open its doors to anyone willing to pay the tuition fees.”70 Higher education would be a commodity. Inter-institutional benchmarking and quality control was and is diverse at best. Institutional governance evolved to a tripartite arrangement between 30

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trustees, faculty and president, with more or less broad regulation of programme offerings by individual states or specialized accrediting agencies.71 Perkin notes three post-Revolution developments that characterize the US university system: the first is the state university, beginning with North Carolina (1795) and Georgia (1801) as secular institutions protected by government in the Scottish manner. These would eventually be reproduced throughout the nation. The extent to which these early state universities were aware of Prussian developments; or whether Humboldt took note of these institutions for his own state-protected governance model a few years later is unclear. The second development was the bequest of federal lands to the states to create “land-grant colleges,” under the Morrill Act of 1862, with a specific emphasis on applied sciences useful to an industrializing society. The third development was the creation of the graduate school, starting with Johns Hopkins in 1876. This latter development has become globalized as the dominant model for postgraduate education. As noted earlier, German universities attracted numerous Ph.D. students from the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century. When they returned to their countries of origin, the German research model and the Ph.D. form would return with them. The United States would be the first country to take up the model, with Yale (1861) being the first to offer the Ph.D., ironically after being the most conservative resistor to Lernfreiheit in its undergraduate programme. Harvard, Michigan and Pennsylvania would follow. The Yale Ph.D. “required students to complete specialised courses, enrol for three years, demonstrate reading knowledge of at least one foreign language, pass a comprehensive examination, submit a dissertation [thesis], and pass an oral examination [viva],” reflecting the taught components that still characterize the US doctorate today, compared to the British and German emphasis on the thesis.72 The US graduate school is often described as being constructed “on the German model,” even though there was technically no such thing as a graduate school in Germany.73 However, the idea of highly specialized tertiary study was largely due to German influence. German was the normal second language for private school instruction in the United States and visiting scholars even lectured in German at US colleges (“French was the language of decadence. Spanish and Italian had no attraction for the WASP Establishment,” claims Clader).74 The appropriation of the German model brought the infrastructure we expect in a research university today: lectures, seminars, departments, research libraries, graduate studies, doctorates. Johns Hopkins was even nicknamed “Göttingen-in-Baltimore” because so many professors were trained in Germany.75 A German-style programme of specialized study at graduate level was plonked pragmatically above the Oxbridge undergraduate collegiate model, resulting in a new kind of scholar, who “writes a dissertation on a subject of interest to five people in the world but teaches his first semester a course on Greek Civilization from Minos to Constantine.”76 This is the system that is recognizable as the standard home of the Ph.D. today. Increased transatlantic travel would lead to inevitable transfer, hybridization and harmonization of qualifications. Wilson notes that the First World War would force a change 31

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in geographical patterns of academic exchange, when the British Foreign Office encouraged its universities to develop Ph.D. programmes as an alternative destination to Germany for US students.77 The Ph.D. was first introduced to England at Oxford in 1917 – a mere 100 years after Berlin – and a few years later would be established in most departments and universities in the country with almost identical regulations.78 In the middle of the twentieth century this would be extended to the colonies – the first Australian Ph.D. was awarded at the University of Melbourne in 1948, over twenty years after it was first proposed.79 Doctoral programmes grew rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century: the annual production of doctorates in the United States increased fivefold from 620 in 1920 to nearly 3300 in 1940.80 But they were still a small part of the university system, as was discipline-based graduate study in general.81 “Higher doctorates” of the medieval type in medicine, law, music and science were still in effect throughout the British empire in the late nineteenth century. A diverse range of research degrees (MA, BA, MLitt, BLitt) were also in place at undergraduate and postgraduate levels of arts study.82 “Professional doctorates” in education were in place in North America in the late nineteenth century and rapidly expanded in the early twentieth century. Therefore, when the Ph.D. was established, it would often take a form that adapted to the existing institutional landscape, and as in the diverse US system there were many very different educational models sheltering under this three-letter qualification. As Jolley puts it, “the world of academic doctorates possesses a confused and confusing nomenclature and great care needs to be taken to avoid assuming that, because two degrees have the same name, they have much if anything in common.”83 Writing on the development of the Ph.D. in the field of history, Novick suggests that in the late nineteenth century requirements of the Ph.D. thesis were lax in both the United States and Germany, usually delivered within two years for “hardly more than what would later count for a seminar paper.” In many cases, these universities were little more than “service stations for legitimation.”84 The UK Universities – Ancients to Civics Back in the United Kingdom, by the early nineteenth century the Oxford-Cambridge duopoly was beginning to crumble, and the attempts by the English political order to reform the ancient universities demonstrate the difficult relationship between university and state. The reform of universities, as many politicians have found out before and since, is no easy task. By the mid-eighteenth century Oxbridge was far from the leading international centre of knowledge desired by political leaders, men of science, industrialists, and an emerging middle class. Students at Oxbridge were taught by tutors of variable quality rather than professors, and the sons of nobility and landed gentry made only a small minority of those students – any who could afford it were tutored privately. Most students at Oxbridge sought a career supported by the Church of England.85 The Scottish model had a profound influence on the new English universities of the nineteenth century that would become the “civics.” They had the same political interest in 32

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industrial development that launched the mechanics’ institutes.86 Their colleges initially attempted to provide regional versions of the kind of liberal education delivered in the Oxbridge ideal and the US university colleges. Later, seeking financial support from their local communities, they were established as universities on a regional economic development model self-consciously drawing from the German/Scottish histories to provide scientific research, professional training and regional service. After a short period of success fuelled by civic pride, the honeymoon wore off on both academic and industrial sides, leaving the government with a problem: the civic universities were seen as having drifted from their founding intent, neither fulfilling their mission of supporting industry or of giving an Oxbridge-style education.87 The Euro-American development of scientific disciplines as the most important credentialing body for academics, combined with the new professionalization of academia at Oxbridge, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century the best way for an academic chemist to secure better employment would be to make his mark as a theoretical chemist, rather than provide useful knowledge to a local plant manager. Oxbridge were adept at cherry-picking those scholars at the top of the Scottish system and the civics, such as Manchester scientists Perkin in organic chemistry and Rutherford in physics. As Sarah Barnes describes it, rather than dynamic contributors to the regional economy, civic universities had become “first class waiting rooms” on the career-train south, in a dynamic that still exists today.88 On the other hand, the civics remained a poor cousin to Oxbridge in their professional provision of a liberal education to undergraduates, precisely because of their location in the provincial industrial areas. Students understood that no matter how excellent the pedagogy or how hard they worked, the best employment positions would go to Oxbridge graduates, and campus life was marked by complaints of inferiority and anxiety. Oxbridge transformed into the modern university format by the end of the nineteenth century not through change in curriculum (notoriously difficult in the ancients) but by growing new scientific programmes that had previously trailed Manchester et al. by a large margin. Eventually, Oxford and Cambridge came to a new version of the secular university gently overlaid over the top of the old, largely built on talent poached from the lower-order institutions, all the while guarding their elite reputation. University Massification in the Twentieth Century The United Kingdom The ideological transformations in higher education policy coupled with substantial economic growth have resulted in the creation of new institutions and extensive growth throughout the sector in the twentieth century. According to Brockliss, three-quarters of all universities in most national systems have been founded in the twentieth century, 75% of those since 1945. In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, there were 40 universities; in 2000 33

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Brockliss puts the figure at about one hundred.89 From 1966 a new polytechnic education sector was established in the United Kingdom by the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) with a local economic development mandate.90 Most English-speaking higher education systems upgraded polytechnic and professional colleges to degree-granting status during the 1980s, partially to meet the needs of increasingly information-intensive applied research and education, and partially from professionalizing trades seeking the same status accorded to university-based fields. Nursing’s shift from a functional task-based education to the development of “reflective practitioners” would be paradigmatic of the shift that would also see institutions housing formerly “applied” disciplines given university status in the 1992 UK reforms. Along with this growth of institutions came a massive increase in the number of students. Martin Trow defined national higher education systems as having an “elite,” “mass” or “universal” character based on participation rates of