The Idea of the Public University: Discovering and Teaching Knowledge in a Confused World 9781032160368, 9781032160375, 9781003246831

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Is the end nigh for the public university?
2. Universities as knowledge sanctuaries: A brief historical overview
3. John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University
4. Newman’s Idea: Contra and Pro
5. Wilhelm von Humboldt: Education reformer
6. Humboldt’s ideal university
7. The public university in a conflicted twentieth century
8. The ideological university
9. Conclusion: Reimagining the public university
Index

Citation preview

THE IDEA OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY DISCOVERING AND TEACHING KNOWLEDGE IN A CONFUSED WORLD Allan Patience

The Idea of the Public University

This book sheds light on the risk of losing the authoritative knowledge discovered and taught by public universities. It argues that public universities are as indispensable now, as never before, for providing governments and citizens with reliable knowledge crucial for confronting the looming environmental, cultural, economic, and political challenges now threatening humanity’s very existence. Acknowledging the history of universities around the world, the book highlights the role they have played in creating and curating knowledge. It examines John Henry Newman’s liberal idea of the university and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s conception of the institution and argues this is all under threat at the hands of fake prophets and biased media preaching “alternative facts” and populist falsehoods. Shedding light on neoliberalism and the tensions between research, education, and training, the author demonstrates that the best pedagogical and economic outcomes are achieved when these interests are dynamically informing each other. This book will be of interest to academics, university managers, and higher education policymakers questioning the role, value, and purpose of the contemporary public university. Allan Patience was educated at Monash University and the London School of Economics (LSE). He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held chairs in universities in Australia and overseas and visiting academic appointments in the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

“This erudite and provocative book calls for not only governments, but everyone who cares about the future, to appreciate universities afresh. As Allan Patience carefully contends, public universities are too important to be starved and crushed. They are not corporations, or an industry. Students are not clients or a commodity. Today’s universities have their roots in ancient traditions and institutions stretched across Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe; communities of bold and creative minds, thinking deeply about big questions, pushing known boundaries. Universities house the academics who solve critical problems and civilize the world. The future health of both democracy and the planet relies on researchers and thinkers, not just being supported, but respected, valued and enabled”. Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History, The Australian National University “Are universities headed for extinction? No, this book argues; but after the damage done by massification, commercialization and heavyhanded state control, their role urgently needs re-thinking. Treating the self-managing university as a vital public good, Allan Patience gives an eloquent defence of a humanist vision for higher education”. Raewyn Connell, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney; author of The Good University “As this lucid and accessible book shows, the great liberal principles of Newman and Humboldt that once animated higher education – often more honoured in the breach than the observance – are now at risk of being lost entirely. Drawing on his experiences of a lifetime supporting and teaching in universities, Allan Patience urges us to return to these ideas, before it is too late”. Lee Jones, Professor of International Relations and Politics, Queen Mary University of London; co-author of  Saving Britain’s Universities: Academic Freedom, Democracy and Renewal (2020)

The Idea of the Public University

Discovering and Teaching Knowledge in a Confused World Allan Patience

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Allan Patience The right of Allan Patience to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-16036-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-16037-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-24683-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831 Typeset in Galliard by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

In memory of Helen McNeil and for Simon and Clare

Contents

Prefaceviii Acknowledgementsx 1 Introduction: Is the end nigh for the public university? 2 Universities as knowledge sanctuaries: A brief historical overview

1 16

3 John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University32 4 Newman’s Idea: Contra and Pro

43

5 Wilhelm von Humboldt: Education reformer

56

6 Humboldt’s ideal university

69

7 The public university in a conflicted twentieth century

86

8 The ideological university

104

9 Conclusion: Reimagining the public university

119

Index

134

Preface

The impetus for writing this book came from my participation in an in-service programme for academic staff in a large metropolitan university. The aim of the programme was to provide faculty members with ideas and strategies to improve their teaching practices. Commitment to the programme was voluntary. A small number of my fellow participants were tenured staff; most were on what are termed “casual” (that is, short-term) contracts, and most of those were women. (“Casual” in this context is symptomatic of the disrespect with which university managers categorize academic staff on such contracts.) Unfortunately, there is little published evidence demonstrating the efficacy of in-service teacher training programmes like the one that I attended. This perhaps reflects the complexities involved in defining what “good teaching” actually entails. (There are probably at least as many versions of good teaching as there are good teachers.) This dilemma is compounded by the more complex issue of how good teaching can be credibly evaluated. What are the reliable criteria against which “good teaching” can be measured? Is it “measurable” in any meaningful sense at all? What are the purposes of such evaluations? Who does the evaluating? Are the evaluators also subject to evaluation? My main disquiet about the programme was its failure to provide an opportunity to reflect on what a university is, or what it should be. Nor did the programme offer a philosophical or historical account of the contributions universities have made to their societies over very many generations. It was as if the extensive literature on these important matters simply did not exist. This book draws attention to as much of that literature as possible, to show how it can contribute to the survival, and to the thriving, of public universities today. To dismiss the literature as disingenuous or irrelevant suggests that a pall of cynicism is dulling our thinking about public universities. This may be a consequence of the anti-intellectual tenor of our times. It might also be symptomatic of a harmful mindset in which cynicism posing as cleverness is intellectual laziness. Few cultural institutions can rival universities and their forerunner institutions for their continuity over many centuries and the educational roles they have performed over a very long time. One of their most commendable features has been the provision of places of refuge for people for whom the life of the mind is their vocation. It is surely indisputable that the myriad contributions of

Preface ix universities – to individuals, to societies, and to the world – have been beneficial overall. Nonetheless, some critics today believe that, like dinosaurs in the distant past, public universities are heading for extinction. This book seeks to counter that pessimistic viewpoint. It outlines some guidelines for the future of the public university, drawing on ideals once considered integral to the conduct of good universities, adapting them to the present and to the medium- and longer-term future of higher education. The book invites faculty members, administrators, and policymakers to acknowledge – and to value – the rich intellectual and cultural capital that exists within universities, and the pivotal research they must be resourced with to counter threats to the very survival of humanity itself – threats that include climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, civil conflicts, terrorism, human rights violations, and violent populist social movements. Clearly, there are enormous challenges facing the contemporary public university. It is equally clear that, despite many books and numerous articles identifying those challenges, there is not a great deal of creative thought or policy action being put into addressing them. This is especially the case when it comes to recalcitrant governments presently in thrall to anti-intellectual ideologies of all kinds – in particular to neoliberalism with its fake promises and counterproductive policy outcomes. It is now imperative for faculty members, university managers, and policymakers everywhere to recall that the primary duty of the public university is to discover and to teach knowledge in a confused world – a world that needs to know rather than to be merely informed.

Structure of the book The first chapter surveys the dilemma in which contemporary public universities find themselves, highlighting their political, psycho-social, and economic challenges as they struggle with diminishing resources to educate and train increasing numbers of students. The second chapter surveys the origins of higher education highlighting how, over many centuries, diverse historical and cultural traditions have accommodated and nurtured communities of thinkers, scholars, and teachers. Chapters 3 and 4 propose a reconsideration of John Henry Newman’s nineteenth-century work, The Idea of a University, particularly in light of recent critiques of the Newman thesis. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the great Prussian civil servant and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt and his contributions to the evolution of the modern research university. Chapter 7 discusses the plight of public universities through the first half of the twentieth century and the dramatic increase in their numbers as the Cold War cast its ominous shadow across the globe. Chapter 8 offers a critique of ideological interpretations of neoliberalism, postmodernism, and identity politics that are negatively impacting on many public universities today. Finally, Chapter 9 proposes some tentative ideas for charting a way forward for public higher education institutions as they address both the challenges and the opportunities involved in adapting to the realities facing higher education in a globalizing world.

Acknowledgements

Readers who are familiar with the literature on the history and philosophy of higher education will notice that I have been heavily influenced by the nineteenth-century writings of John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt. While both of these scholars have been comprehensively criticized in recent times – sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for spurious reasons – they remain philosophical giants in the modern history of higher education. I have gratefully clambered on their shoulders in search for a way forward for the public university of today. I have also benefitted from the writings about universities by a number of contemporary scholars, including Stefan Collini, Raewyn Connell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Simon Marginson, Martha Nussbaum, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Sheila Slaughter. Their work has greatly facilitated my thinking about what constitutes (or should constitute) a good public university in the world today. I salute them all. Emeritus Professor Robert Gray’s readings of draft chapters of the book have been an immeasurable help. He was the most meticulous, patient, and perceptive of critics, while offering generous encouragement throughout the writing of this book. Richard Pannell’s comments on successive drafts of the chapters on Newman and Humboldt greatly helped me to clarify what I was trying to say. Mitsuyo Sakamoto’s keen eye for errors and her suggestions for improving the text have been invaluable. Exchanges with Lionel Orchard, about this book and about related issues over the years, have helped my disorganized mind to be less so. Steven Tan’s technical expertise and assistance during the writing of the book were indispensable. Several friends read parts of draft chapters, providing wise advice along the way: Ron Browning, Niall McLaren, and Chiraag Roy. The librarians in the University of Melbourne were heroically efficient in mailing books and articles while I was working at home during successive COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. I thank all these wonderful people. Responsibility for any remaining errors and infelicities in the book is entirely mine. Allan Patience, Melbourne March 2022

1

Introduction Is the end nigh for the public university?

Introduction In recent years, public higher education institutions in the advanced Western economies have fallen out of favour with governments, the media, and with the public. “Increasingly”, write Côté and Allahar, “the public is calling for ‘relevance’ and ‘accountability’, and the modernist scholar is being asked to provide compelling material justifications for his or her scholarship, especially in times of severe economic downturn” (2011: 17). Universities’ responses to these demands have been unconvincing for much of the public, often inflaming accusations that they are an unwarranted burden on taxpayers and should be standing on their own feet. Some critics suggest that they’ve even become unjustifiably inequitable institutions – latter-day finishing schools – for the largely white and affluent middle classes. For example, as Hamilton and Nielson observe: [R]acially and economically privileged students have been concentrated in universities that amass an increasing amount of private resources to support their students. In contrast, historically underrepresented racially marginalized students […] seeking economic mobility have been heavily represented in the least-resourced universities. These inequalities give the false appearance that elite predominantly white universities and the students they serve are higher “quality” – justifying continued resource disparities (2021: 17) At the same time, students are expressing dissatisfaction with their university experiences; they complain that faculty members (especially senior faculty) are aloof and incommunicative and that teaching standards are in decline (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2009: ch. 11). Meanwhile, governments and employers accuse public universities of failing to produce “work-ready” graduates (Collini, 2018: Part 1). All this has convinced philosopher Sinead Murphy to conclude that “the university is not simply declining, not simply fading off the scene. It is crumbling” (2017: 51). While some piecemeal reforms in universities have been implemented in recent years, many of the problems presently confronting them have not been addressed. Morale among faculty members (especially junior and untenured faculty) is at a DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-1

2  Introduction low ebb. As Professor Connell has noted: “The character of university work seems to have changed with coercion, surveillance, distrust, self-promotion and image-making becoming more and more familiar” (2021: 21). These unwelcome changes are accompanied by high student:staff ratios; gross imbalances between the resourcing of research and teaching; and intense pressures from fiscal pragmatists demanding that higher education institutions submit to the short-term demands of labour markets.

The contemporary university transformed Over the past four decades or so, governments have been imposing strict austerity budgets on the funding of a wide range of public institutions, while handing over public assets and power to free market forces (see, for example, Connell, 2016; Cordelli, 2020; Harvey, 2007). As part of this policy strategy, public universities have been changed from limited-entry (“elite”) institutions to masseducation institutions. In the two decades after 1972, enrolments worldwide in tertiary education had achieved a level of about 14%. However, by 2012 they had reached 32%. Today a third of young people across the globe are receiving some form of higher education (Marginson, 2016). The resourcing, range of curricula, academic standards, and research records of the world’s universities vary greatly, with some achieving international kudos for their achievements, while others are positioned on middle or lower levels in international rankings systems, or they are ignored altogether.1 Opinions vary on whether the kudos achieved by highly ranked institutions are soundly based or whether it constitutes a spurious marketing strategy. While the aim of opening higher education to greater numbers of people is certainly a worthy goal, too often it is being callously under-resourced by the very governments imposing the changes in the first place. Moreover, it tends to operate on a one-size-fits-all basis, rather than acknowledging the wide range of interests and abilities of students seeking a post-secondary school education. As a result, the potential economic and social benefits of a pluralist approach to mass higher education are being stymied. Another unfortunate irony is that those very governments that have been reversing the opening of older, high-status public universities to “the masses” by imposing exorbitant tuition fees, while making the repayment of student loans ever more stringent, even punitive. This means that only the wealthy can afford to enrol in high-status institutions. As Thomas Picketty has pointed out: throughout the world one finds a wide gap between official rhetoric about equality of opportunity, the “meritocratic” idea, and the reality of unequal access to education for different social groups. No country is in a position to give lessons on the subject. Indeed, the advent of the era of higher education has posed a structural challenge to the very idea of educational equality everywhere (2020: 540)

Introduction 3 Equally ironic is the fact that not a few of the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for imposing the new rules and regulations are public university graduates who benefitted from a time when their university education was heavily subsidized, if not entirely free. Today, academic faculty members are under relentless pressure to publish their research in “world-class” academic journals while demonstrating its “impact” on society and the economy (preferably the latter). They are required to perform sundry administrative tasks and “engage” with communities outside the university (Gooch, 2019). This results in what David Jones et al. identify as “the fragility, precarity and even brutality […] of managing with the unquestioned instrumental managerial approach of minimising academic labour costs (through, for example, casualisation) and maximising income through the competitive clamour for meeting ‘Targets’, such as around attracting international students and being the sycophantic servants to multinational business” (2020: 365). All this, while academic staff are also obliged to shoulder ever higher teaching loads, clumsily designed and often methodologically invalid evaluations of their teaching and associated administrative duties (Leisyte et al., 2009: 619–35). At the same time, a very large majority of today’s university students work in one or more part-time (or even full-time) jobs, jamming classes into their crammed schedules while accruing long-term debts from loan schemes they must access to pay their fees (Gair, 2018). Many important senior administrative arrangements in universities have been managerialized, with an executive class appropriating policy and decisionmaking functions that were once the right and proper preserve of faculty members (Ginsberg, 2011). With more appointees from business and management backgrounds appointed to their governing councils, public universities are being conducted as quasi-business corporations, constituting (as argued in the concluding chapter) a major category error. In a study of the governing councils of public universities in the state of Western Australia, for example, Gerd Schröder-Turk reveals that “decision making power is concentrated in a group of Senate [governing council] members who have little connection with the university system other than through their council membership” (2021: 42). Meanwhile, until the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions were competing energetically to recruit full fee-paying domestic and international students (Wildavasky, 2012). It is likely this will pick up again once international borders become more accessible, either after the pandemic declines or as the world learns to live with it. When it comes to recruiting faculty members, the preference is for leading research scholars whose primary (perhaps only) attribute is the ability to attract lucrative research funding regardless of its sources or the conditions granting organizations impose on their research outcomes (see also Komesaroff and Harvey, 2015). These developments represent a radical rupture to the ways in which public higher education institutions were once conventionally imagined around the world. So much so in fact that a former University of Melbourne Vice Chancellor, Glyn Davis, has argued that contemporary public universities are embroiled in a moment of “creative destruction” (2017: 10). This over-used trope seeks to

4  Introduction legitimize developments that on many fronts are as unpredictable as the term implies. Professor Davis points to a range of blow-in institutions (in the United States, for example: Quest, Minerva, Phoenix) offering cheap online courses which their advocates predict will result in the death of the conventional university. Professor Davis reminds us that in 2011 two Stanford University academics began offering an online course on artificial intelligence that swiftly attracted more than 160,000 students. This led to proposals to establish “universities without walls”, institutions focusing on training for careers in places like Silicon Valley. These online programmes mainly credential people worldwide with advanced skills training but do not confer formal degrees. Davis also highlights the rise of the MOOCs – massive open online courses – that offer students opportunities to “study any topic that interested an academic somewhere on the planet willing to produce content and support the vast numbers who might enroll” (2017: 19). Enrolments in MOOC courses are unprecedented, causing anxiety in not a few academic staff rooms around the world. This is despite MOOCs’ high dropout rates, their often tediously programmatic curricula, and more serious problems such as student isolation and inadequate teacher-student interactions (see, for example, Jacoby, 2014; Kennedy, 2014; Park and Choi, 2009; Rolfe, 2015; Vakoufari et al., 2014). MOOCs, it is worth observing, are not the same as courses of study for conventional degrees provided, for example, by the Open University in the United Kingdom. However, despite all the end-of-the-university-is-nigh mantras, online blowins, and MOOCs, Davis acknowledges that the doomsday prophets predicting the public university’s imminent demise could be getting it wrong – at least for now. Public universities continue to enrol students in large numbers. Not a few are represented in the top 100 or 200 global university ranking systems, for what those systems are worth. Most of their students gain their degrees, while growing numbers are proceeding to graduate studies. But he does warn that if universities fail to face up to the challenges of the times, “the familiar model of the public university falls beneath the wheels of creative destruction”. With abrupt cutbacks in the lucrative international student market because of border closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, destruction (hardly “creative”) could become a devastating reality for not a few higher education institutions. Among the many economic, political, and cultural disruptions marring the early twenty-first century – some creative, others mindlessly catastrophic – public universities are today facing a crisis. At one extreme they are compelled to comply with governments’ micro-economic policies. At another there is a recalcitrant longing (especially evident in older prestigious institutions) to remain aloofly detached from the taxpayers who have largely financed them. The result is an emerging and confused hierarchy of institutions that reinforce inequalities in the wider society, intensifying the injustices that attend them, while undermining the economic benefits they are supposedly generating. At the same time, disagreements have erupted over the fundamental educational purposes of higher education. There is confusion about the very foundations of the knowledge they are meant to be discovering, publicizing, curating,

Introduction 5 and teaching. Should their focus be on essentialist, relativist, pluralist, or culturally specific versions of knowledge? Should public universities be confined to what is acknowledged (by whom, and on what authority?) to be universal knowledge? Should universities limit their role to being servants of micro-economic policy determined by governments? Should angry protests by “woke” students and faculty be allowed to determine who can engage in speaking and teaching in the contemporary university, or what is to be “correctly” taught in curricula? Is there a way out of this muddled and destructive anguishing about what is knowable and what is teachable? In the concluding chapter, a road map is sketched to show that there are possible ways forward. But first we need to consider what is happening to public universities amid the cascading problems they are now facing.

The information revolution Chief among the challenges facing universities today is the so-called “information revolution”. Anarchical access to the Internet’s massive information sources has contributed to a rejection of the authoritative voice in the airing of scholarly discourses and public affairs. Associated with this development is a resurgence of what was once referred to as the “lonely crowd” – highly individuated persons increasingly isolated from meaningful relationships resulting in the undermining of established institutions on a variety of fronts (Reisman et al., 2001). Some of those institutions are beginning to crumble. Does this mean that the end is nigh for the public university? Never before have so many scholars and students had so much information so readily available to them at the touch of a computer button. Old patterns of relating, thinking, and communicating – and even consciousness itself – are being radically reshaped because of the remarkable access that myriad individuals have to the worldwide web and its insufferable sidekick, the mobile phone (Reed, 2011). From “selfies” to the latest apps for “hooking up”; from (frequently) spreading gossip to (rarely) telling the truth; from sharing intimacies to being subjected to revenge porn; from outing people to being “liked” – these are the new realities, most of them unspeakably banal and often harmful for vast numbers of people across the Internet-connected world (Greenfield, 2018: ch. 1). Charles Taylor has aptly described the emergence of a new generation of techno-obsessed people as “a host of monads [who] hover on the boundary between solipsism and communication” (2002: 86). Despite the negative effects of the Internet and social media (Andreassen et al., 2016; see also Frenkel and King, 2021), not a few misguided pedagogues want to give a preeminent place to the revolution in information technology, believing that it provides radically innovative ways to train people (Atkinson and Castro, 2008). Many universities are rushing to the coalface of this development (Selwyn, 2007). It is of course the case that a balanced use of educational technologies in the lecture hall or classroom can enhance teaching methods, provided the ethical and pedagogical implications of their uses are clearly understood by administrators, teachers, and students (Slade and Slade, 2014). However, there is a mixture

6  Introduction of unrequited excitement about the benefits, on the one hand, and mindless complacency about the pitfalls associated with the way information technology is shaping pedagogical cultures and the inner lives of people across the globe. Sebastian Smee is critical of this development: [I]t can seem as if searchlights are raking back and forth across the surface of our separate lives, bleaching and blurring everything they illuminate, turning the idea of the soul itself – which was always perhaps to some extent a fiction, but at its best a dark, extravagant, spellbinding one – into a fungible entity, a binary construct of ones and zeros. It is humiliating to think how complicit we have been in letting this rich but difficult inheritance – the mystery of being alive, of being mortal, of being alone and open to love – be traduced by such limited worldviews (2018: 55) The fact is that we are in the earliest throes of a revolution that is at least as far-reaching and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution, and which still has a very long way to run.

Information versus knowledge While the exponential development of the World Wide Web may, on the surface, appear to be liberating many of us from a shrunken state of being, at the same time there is also something peculiarly off-putting about it all. The chaotic assemblage of information via the Internet (endless stores of facts, opinions, theories, contrary points of view, prejudice venting, sexting, sloganizing, asserting, bullying) has led to the convoluting of knowledge, resulting crises within modernity’s various cultures. They are crises simplistically heralded by postmodernists as the deconstruction of social, cultural, and political grand narratives serving the interests of nefarious power elites. It sometimes seems that we are entering a world that is increasingly individuated, anomic, self-contradictory, and confused – a world of wild conspiracies, confected disinformation, barefaced lies, dark suspicions, fake news, and “alternative facts” (Kakutani, 2018).

The rejection of scholarly authority The deniers of the science of global warming, climate change, and the origins and extent of the COVID-19 pandemic are examples of the cynicism threatening to undermine researchers and scholarly communities across the globe – and possibly the future of the physical globe itself (Elsasser and Dunlap, 2013). There are plenty of other repugnant examples: religious fundamentalists, ideologues of every kind, flat earth theorists, self-styled prophets anticipating the ending of days, neo-Nazis and associated white supremacists, the National Rifle Association (NR A) in America, anti-vaxxers. The collapse of the authoritative voice in the context of the information revolution has provided a space for these creatures

Introduction 7 to crawl out of the cultural woodwork to wreak their havoc. Is this because of intellectual arrogance? Tom Nichols has observed that “Where public intellectuals (often in tandem with journalists) once strove to make important issues understandable to laypeople, educated elites increasingly speak to each other” (2017: 11). At the same time, it seems that authoritative scholarship is losing its self-confidence in the face of belligerent attacks from fake populists like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, or Nigel Farage. Wolfgang Streeck’s observation of the paradoxical contrast between what he describes as “the progressive decay of the politics and economy of the United States and the star-studded social science departments from Harvard to Stanford” is especially apposite: What was all this obvious brilliance good for? Sometimes I asked some of my American colleagues, privately and after work over dinner, how they made themselves heard on, say, the nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan – whether this was not something on which to bring social science to bear? The answer was always a resigned silence: why bother, nobody ever listens (2016: 237) Simultaneously we have seen the rise of what is now widely referred to as “identity politics”. Mark Lilla argues that this is impacting heavily on universities: With the rise of identity consciousness, engagements in issue-based movements began to diminish somewhat and the conviction got rooted that the movements most meaningful to the self are, unsurprisingly, about the self […] The study of identity groups now seemed the most urgent scholarly/ political task, and soon there was an extraordinary proliferation of departments, research centers, and professorial chairs devoted to it (2017: 84–8) Anne Manne (2014) has shown how this coincides with the rise of “the culture of the new narcissism”. Identity politics as a form of narcissism is a sadly diminished and hyper-defensive understanding of the self in a world urgently in need of a cosmopolitan understanding of its future. Does all this matter? It most certainly does. Among the institutions in danger of falling victim to the current disruptions are the ideals and forms of democratic governance and the knowledge institutions that are their indispensable foundations: schools, universities, and a principled and free media. Knowledge institutions researching and teaching the diversity of different knowledge systems around the world are the very lifeblood of democratic citizenship. The worrying fact is that, because the traditional functioning of public universities is under such intense pressure today, democracy itself is facing a very real and present danger. As Martha Nussbaum has noted: “How is education for democratic citizenship doing in the world today?” Her answer is alarmingly relevant: “Very poorly, I fear” (2010: 121).

8  Introduction

The lonely self in the “lonely century” In her monumental account of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identified perhaps the most pathological characteristic of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. It entailed: [T]he slumbering majorities behind all parties [becoming] one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the [ruling elites] were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent (Arendt, 1967: 315) Arendt refers to this negative phenomenon as “social atomization”. This is the deadly result of a politically engineered disconnecting of people from meaningful, trusting relationships, accompanied by the systemic destruction of civil society. It is the result of the strategies employed by state propagandists, embedded informers (spies) and secret police, and the use of terror tactics (arrests in the night; targeted assassinations, the torturing and “disappearing” of suspects; concentration camps, prison gulags). The result is the dispersing of the mass of the population into a frightened and alienated world of strangers in which even family members become suspicious of each other. As Arendt explained: “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not his brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships” (1967: 317). This, she warns, is the precondition of totalitarianism. Roy Tsao points out that “what tends to drive these socially isolated individuals toward totalitarian movements is not a desire to satisfy any real or perceived interest of their own, but rather a wish to escape from a human reality that their atomized condition tends to render unbearably senseless for them” (2002: 594–5; see also Hertz, 2020). The difference between Russia and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and what is happening in the world today, is that the former involved deranged dictators and their cowed and craven supporters plotting the grim path leading to social atomization. They would not find it quite so easy to impose such totalitarian measures in today’s inter-connected world. Despite its negative consequences, social media can circumvent the total control that Hitler and Stalin were able to impose on their fellow citizens. Nonetheless, the phobia that far too many young people experience today, of being ignored by their social media counterparts, or trolled, or exposed, or being victimized for all sorts of real and imagined misdemeanours, is condemning them to a form of virtually induced social atomization, with associated pathological consequences, including addictions, sociopathy, and suicide.

Introduction 9 Moreover, today governments and private authorities can exploit the anarchy of the Internet in order to monitor and control people’s lives. As Adam Greenfield explains: we’re surrounded by invisible but powerful forces, monitoring us from devices scattered throughout our homes, even placed on our bodies, and those forces are busily compiling detailed dossiers on every last one of us. They pass the contents of those dossiers onto shadowy, unaccountable intermediaries, who use everything they learn to determine the structure of the opportunities extended to us – or, what may be worse, not extended. We’ll be offered jobs, or not; loans, or not; loves, or not; cures, or not. And the worst of it is that until the day we die, we’ll never know which action or inaction of our own led to any of these outcomes (2018: 243–4) A side-product of this development is the power it hands over to governments and related authorities to impose social atomization on customers, clients, subjects, and citizens. In China, for example, “big data” is collected and centralized as a mode of assigning “social credit” to each citizen. As Simon Denyer notes: “The ambition is to collect every scrap of information available online about China’s companies and citizens in a single place – and then assign each of them a score based on their political, commercial, social and legal ‘credit’” (2016; see also Zeng, 2018). It is not only in China where this is happening. Heike Jahberg worries that “Germany is sleepwalking in the same direction” (2018). And, as Davenport points out: “Americans don’t realize how much of their everyday life is being tracked and analyzed. Right now, data collection companies’ main goal is selling you things. But it isn’t hard to envision how a few changes in the market could produce something like our Chinese friends’ Big Brother experience” (2018). As solipsist monads, fixated on our computer screens, or glued to our cell phones, we think we know everything, but we know very little. We are information-addicted, yet knowledge-starved. We can perform well in the local pub at Trivia or Q and A sessions; we can recite all the relevant statistics about our favourite sports stars; we can enthusiastically recite tabloid gossip about the extra-marital frolics and/or sexual peccadilloes of the current herd of celebrities and young royals. However, deep down we know less and less about things of significance, things that are meaningful, things to help us live well and flourish intellectually, things that will make us good citizens and decent individuals. Apart from the Internet’s information-fuelled trivializing and/or fragmenting of knowledge, research is pointing to the potential that the solipsist-like preoccupation with it, and with the smartphone, has for inducing pathologically addictive personality disorders. Research psychologists Kim and associates advised that “individuals with a problematic smartphone use should be closely monitored for mental health problems, highlighting the need to establish prevention and management policies aimed at the pre-clinical level of SA

10  Introduction [smartphone addiction]” (2018). An earlier study by Andreassen and associates concluded that “symptoms of underlying psychiatric disorders are associated with addictive social networking and video gaming” (2016: 262). These developments are associated with an increase in the phenomenon of avoidance personality disordering. For example, in contemporary Japanese society, a class of young males labelled hikikomori has emerged. These are mainly men in their 20s (on some estimates, at least half a million of them) who have withdrawn from conventional career-related, family, and wider social activities, often secluding themselves in their room at home for extended periods (Andreassen et al., 2016: 262). Simultaneously, there are growing numbers of late teenagers and men in their 20s known as the soushoku[kei] danshi: males who identify as asexual (not necessarily gay), who are non-competitive, they shun corporate life, while focusing on their personal grooming. They prefer to lead an isolated existence and are very shy in public (Brabon, 2021; Teo and Gaw, 2016; Zielenziger, 2006: ch. 2). Both groups tend to obsessive playing of video games for many hours at a time while shunning contacts with their peers and families. Among those suffering from avoidance personality disorder is the borderline xenophobic recluse, or social isolate, whose consciousness is flooded with fantasies about becoming a hero in a higher cause, while wreaking revenge on perceived “enemies” – for example, by detonating a vest bomb in a crowded train, driving a truck at high speed on to a busy pedestrian pavement, or shooting classmates and teachers or attendees at a mosque or a church. These anguished isolates suffer from being marginalized or locked out of meaningful social relationships. They feel unloved and, consequently, often they hate (Chen, 2012). While these tortured souls are at the extreme end of social atomization, there are less malevolently motivated individuals who share some of the extreme loners’ anti-social traits (Cacioppo and Cacioppo, 2014; Flet et al., 2016; Lis and Bohus, 2013). They make for ripe pickings for cynical demagogues lurking in the interstices of political systems who will readily recruit them into their “base” using them unconscionably as voting fodder, and grandstanding (at rallies, in violent demonstrations), falsely promising to make their meagre and narcissistic worlds “great again” (Pettigrew, 2017). At the same time some of those who feel excluded and devalued can at times find each other and form into exclusive communities based on ideological and/ or religious belief systems, constituting another form of narcissistic identity politics. We can call this the communitarian reaction against the accepted orthodoxies of conventional societies. For example, in the United States, Christian fundamentalists’ reactions to what they perceive as the dangerous liberalization of state and federal laws on issues like abortion or same-sex marriage make them feel that they have been forced them to the margins of society and the political system. As Reza Aslan explains, their “leaders preached a radical return to the fundamentals of the Christian faith” (2010: 91). A related development is Islamist fundamentalism, coalescing into communities like al-Qaida and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that adopt grievously distorted interpretations of the Koran, while in the process turning to extreme cruelty and violence. In both cases, they do so, claiming to defend their “pure” versions of what they claim to

Introduction 11 be religious truth, when the underlying reason for their extremism is their very human craving for social connections and a sense of belonging. Horrific consequences can result from this pathological reaction to loneliness.

Repeating history? From the sixth- to the tenth-century CE, Western Europe struggled through an era of deteriorating literary and cultural attainments, population decline, the breakdown of trade and commerce, ravaging smallpox pandemics, large-scale refugee migrations, food shortages, millenarian revolts, and related social rebellions (Cohn, 1990; Freeman, 2002; Hopkins, 2003). Is it too far-fetched to ask if we are on the threshold of a similar era? The social atomization that is inducing populist revolts in many parts of the world, much of it technologically generated, is worrying enough. The fact that it is coupled with a growing contempt for authoritative knowledge, scientific expertise, and the vandalizing of public higher education institutions makes the outlook even bleaker. In the context of the information revolution, it is important to be aware of the yawning intellectual gap between the availability of information and the presence of knowledge. Knowledge is not a miscellaneous listing of unorganized and a-theorized data, ideas, anecdotes, and impressions. It entails a far deeper process than simply checking a Google site or selectively reciting from a book of quotations. It emerges from the values of scholars that lead them to select issues to investigate, to discover hitherto unknown ways of understanding things, and finding causal and associative relations between things (Stretton, 1969: 407). It includes serious contemplation, discoursing, debating, critical rigor, and reasoning. Above all, it means being free to safely explore ideas and concepts without fear or favour. As Karl Popper argued in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the conclusions that knowledge seekers construct must always be conditional, no matter how empirically sustained they might appear to be: They must always be regarded with scepticism; they must always be opened to challenge (1965: 44–8). As explained in the next chapter, today’s public universities can learn valuable lessons from their ancient and medieval antecedents. Moreover, as Chapter 3 explains, they need to recall John Henry Newman’s nineteenth-century plea that their priority should be to nurture scholars who love knowledge for knowledge’s sake. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt demonstrated (see Chapters 5 and 6), they need to be, and can be, far more than that. They must shoulder the responsibility to extend the boundaries of knowledge through research while simultaneously servicing the professions and the state’s micro-economic policies. How they may achieve all of this is a very large and complex question whose answer will require some deep thinking about the idea of a public university, in the twenty-first century and beyond. That kind of thinking is shockingly absent in many of the policy-making and administrative spheres whose responsibility it is to uphold public universities today. While Glyn Davis’ observation that, so far, public universities seem to be weathering the challenges from blow-in, online providers of mainly training

12  Introduction programmes, from MOOCs and the like, the fact is that unless public universities recall their histories and accept their responsibilities as sanctuaries for courageous intellectuals, creative thinkers and curious and committed students, their end may well be nigh. Those histories have their roots in Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern traditions. In the West they owe much to the Christian monastical tradition and to the thinking of great educational philosophers like Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. As Simon Marginson has observed: [T]he contemporary University maintains unbroken the thin thread that it has inherited from Newman and above all from Kant. That thread will break someday. The lesson of natural and human history is that nothing lasts for ever. We can hope that the thread will not break soon. For at this time we have nothing better with which to replace it (2019: 70) Understanding that Professor Marginson’s “unbroken thread” in fact extends way beyond Kant, Newman, and Humboldt provides grounds for anticipating that the idea of the public university has a future well into the twenty-first century and beyond. This is an idea that has yet to be imagined into life. In the meantime, a great deal of creative thought is needed about how the public university can marshal the resources to enable it to withstand the negativism of the technological, economic, political, and cultural challenges that are now pressing in upon it from all sides with disruptive force.

Note 1. Consider, for example, the plight of the severely under-resourced universities of the South Pacific: University of Papua New Guinea, Divine Word University, Fiji National University, University of the South Pacific, National University of Samoa, Pacific Adventist University, University of Fiji, University of French Polynesia, University of New Caledonia. Most of these do not appear on any international ranking system. The one or two that occasionally appear are ranked at or near the bottom.

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Introduction 13 Brabon, K. (2021), The Shut Ins (Sydney: Allen and Unwin). Cacioppo, J. and Cacioppo, S. (2014), “Social relationships and health: The toxic effects of social isolation,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8 (2): 58–72. Chen, S. (2012), “The rise of the [Soushoku[kei] danshi]: Masculinity and consumption in contemporary Japan,” in Otnes, C. and Zayer, L. (eds.), Gender, Culture and Consumption (New York, NY: Routledge): 285–310. Cohn, N. (1990), The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, revised and expanded edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Collini, S. (2018), Speaking of Universities (London: Verso). Connell, R. (2016), “What are good universities?” Australian Universities Review, 58 (2): 67–73. Connell, R. (2021), “Making good universities,” Advocate, 28 (2): 20–21. Cordelli, C. (2020), The Privatized State (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press). Côté, J. and Allahar, A. (2011), Lowering Higher Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Davenport, A. (2018), “America isn’t far from China’s ‘Social Credit Score’.” Observer, 19 February, at: https://observer.com/2018/02/america-isnt-far-off-from-chinas-socialcredit-score/ (accessed 3 June 2021). Davis, G. (2017), The Australia Idea of a University (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). Denyer, S. (2016), “China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone,” Washington Post, 22 October, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ asia_pacific/chinas-plan-to-organize-its-whole-society-around-big-data-a-rating-foreveryone/2016/10/20/1cd0dd9c-9516-11e6-ae9d-0030ac1899cd_story.html?utm_ term=.468658fde8d5 (accessed 1 June 2018). Elsasser, S. and Dunlap, R. (2013), “Leading voices in the conservative choir: Conservative columnists’ dismissal of global, warming and denigration of climate science,” American Behavioral Scientist, 57 (6): 754–776. Flet, G., Goldstein, A., Penchenkov, I., Nepon, T. and Wekerie, C. (2016), “Antecedents, correlates, and consequences of feeling like you don’t matter: Associations with maltreatment, loneliness, social anxiety, and the five-factor model,” Personality and Individual Differences, 92: 52–56. Freeman, C. (2002), The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (London: Heinemann). Frenkel, S. and King, C. (2021), An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination (New York, NY: Harper). Gair, S. (2018), “It’s not just you. Balancing work and study is getting harder in Australia,” The Conversation, 17 January, at: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/ juggling-study-and-work-harder-than-5-years-ago/9335716 (accessed 18 January 2019). Ginsberg, B. (2011), The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Gooch, P. (2019), Course Correct: A Map for the Distracted University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Greenfield, A. (2018), Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London: Verso). Hamilton, L. and Nielson, K. (2021), Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Harvey, D. (2007), Neoliberalism: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hertz, N. (2020), The Lonely Century: A Call to Reconnect (London: Sceptre).

14  Introduction Hopkins, D. (2003), The Great Killer: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Jacoby, J. (2014), “The disruptive potential of massive open on-line courses,” Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 18 (1): 73–85. Jahberg, H. (2018), “Germany edges toward Chinese-style rating of citizens,” Futures Centre, 12 March, at: https://www.thefuturescentre.org/germany-edges-toward-chinesestyle-rating-of-citizens/ (accessed 31 January 2021). Jones, D. R., Visser, M., Stokes, P., Örtenblad, A., Deem, R., Rodgers, P. and Tarba, S. Y. (2020), “The performative university: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in academia,” Management Learning, 51 (4): 363–377. Kakutani, M. (2018), The Death of Truth (London: William Collins). Kennedy, J. (2014), “Characteristics of massive open online courses (MOOCs): A research review, 2009–2012,” Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 13 (1): 1–15. Kim, J., Jang, H., Lee, Y., Lee, D. and Kim, D. (2018), “Effects of internet and smart phone addiction on depression and anxiety based on propensity matching analysis,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15 (5): 1–10. Komesaroff, P. and Harvey, K. (2015), “Should universities accept funding from industry?” The Conversation, 27 May, at: https://theconversation.com/viewpoints-should-universitiesaccept-funding-from-industry-42348 (accessed 12 December 2021). Leisyte, L., Enders, J. and de Boer, H. (2009), “The balance between teaching and research in Dutch and English universities in the context of governance reform,” Higher Education, 58 (5): 619–635. Lilla, M. (2017), The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York, NY: Harper). Lis, S. and Bohus, M. (2013), “Social interaction in borderline personality disorder,” Current Psychiatry Reports, 15 (2): 338–344. Manne, A. (2014), The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). Marginson, S. (2016), Higher Education and the Common Good (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). Marginson, S. (2019), “The Kantian university: Worldwide triumph and growing insecurity,” Australian Universities Review, 61 (1): 59–70. Murphy, S. (2017), Zombie University: Thinking Under Control (London: Watkins Media). Nichols, T. (2017), The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Nussbaum, M. (2010), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Park, J. and Choi, H. (2009), “Factors influencing adult learners’ decision to drop out or persist in online learning,” Journal of Educational Technology and Society, 12 (4): 207–217. Pettigrew, T. (2017), “Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 5 (1): 107–116. Picketty, T. (2020), Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Popper, K. (1965), The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson). Reed, M. (2011), “The influence of mobile phones on teenagers,” Australian Science. Available at: www.australianscience.com.au/technology/the-influence-of-mobilephones-on-teenagers/ (accessed 23 April 2018). Reisman, D., Glazer, N. and Denney, R. (2001), The Lonely Crowd: The Changing American Character, abridged and revised edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Introduction 15 Rolfe, V. (2015), “A systematic review of the socio-ethical aspects of massive open on-line courses,” European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 18 (1): DOI: 10.1515/ eurodl-2015-0004 (accessed 3 April 2018). Schröder-Turk, G. (2021), “A self-selection mechanism for appointed external members of WA University Councils,” Australian Universities Review, 63: 23–32. Selwyn, N. (2007), “The use of computer technology in university teaching and learning: A critical perspective,” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23 (2): 83–94. Slade, S. and Slade, P. (2014), “Student perspectives on the use of their data: Between intrusion, surveillance and care,” Challenges for Research into Open and Distance Learning: Doing Things Better – Doing Better Things, Proceedings of the European Distance and E-Learning Network 2014 Research Workshop Oxford, 27–28 October, at: https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/267567484_Student_perspectives_on_the_use_of_ their_data_between_Intrusion_Surveillance_and_Care (accessed 10 April 2018). Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2009), Academic Capitalism, and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Smee, S. (2018), “Net loss: The inner life in the digital age,” Quarterly Essay, 72. Streeck, W. (2016), How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso). Stretton, H. (1969), The Political Sciences: General Principles of Selection in Social Science and History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Taylor, C. (2002), Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Teo, A. and Gaw, A. (2016), “Hikikimori: A Japanese culture-bound syndrome of social withdrawal? A proposal for DSM-V,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 198 (6): 444–449. Tsao, R. (2002), “The three phases of Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism,” Social Research, 69 (2): 579–619. Vakoufari, M., Angeliki, C. and Mavroidis, I. (2014), “Self-esteem and loneliness as factors affecting distance learning students,” European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 17 (2): 99–115. Wildavasky, B. (2012), The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Changing the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Zeng, M. (2018), “China’s social credit system puts its people under pressure to be model citizens,” The Conversation, 24 January, at: https://theconversation.com/chinas-socialcredit-system-puts-its-people-under-pressure-to-be-model-citizens-89963 (accessed 30 January 2018). Zielenziger, M. (2006), Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (New York, NY: Vintage).

2

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries A brief historical overview

Introduction The gnarled roots of the modern public university are deeply entwined in ancient history. An understanding of that history offers valuable lessons for defending the public university in an age of great disruption. It is regrettable that attempts to focus on the past, providential or otherwise, are too easily shrugged off as nostalgia by today’s politicians, business leaders, and administrators who seem bent on reinventing the university as an instrument to serve an ideologically driven economic agenda. As demonstrated in Chapter 8, these retrograde developments have come at the cost of permitting ideological imperatives that threaten to close down important scholarly enquiries. If we want to have a productive conversation about how the contemporary public university can be, and remain, a place in which knowledge in all its forms is openly discussed, debated, and taught, we need to learn from its history.

Pre-Western higher learning There is a widespread Western conceit (unfortunately shared in many nonWestern contexts too) that the origins of the public university are uniquely European. For example, George Makdisi once stoutly concluded: Thus, the university, as a form of social organization, was peculiar to medieval Europe. Later, it was exported to all parts of the world, including the Muslim East; and it has remained with us down to the present day. But back in the Middle Ages, outside of Europe, there was nothing anything quite like it anywhere. (1970: 264) In the same ahistorical (or anti-historical) vein, Kenneth Minogue highlighted two early centres of learning, Paris, and Bologna, “which became by virtue of their considerable distinction the models of later foundations […] but they were rapidly succeeded by many other centres, so that a network of such institutions soon stretched in Europe from Spain at one end to Poland and Bohemia at the DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-2

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries 17 other” (1973: 11–2). More recently, the Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College in the University of London repeated Minogue’s error when she asserted that the University of Bologna is the oldest university in the world (Wolf, 2019). She was wrong. The claims by Makdisi, Minogue, and Wolf are symptomatic of the way many modern observers appear to be supremely confident that the West’s intellectual achievements represent the beginning of advanced rational thought, scientific advancement, and scholarly achievement. But this is not the case. While laudable on many knowledge-discovery fronts, Western civilization’s scholarly achievements are deeply indebted to prior intellectual achievements of earlier civilizational traditions. Casting the historical net beyond Europe reveals that there were robust traditions of higher learning in India, China, the Middle East, and Northern Africa long before the emergence of institutions of higher learning in Europe. While the line between these centres of learning and those that began evolving in medieval Europe might be blurred and indirect, it is important to acknowledge the fact that higher education traditions and institutions have been crucial in the development of all human civilizations. Moreover, the cultures of many non-European traditions of higher learning have percolated down through history, helping to shape the modern public university and the evolution of Western science and philosophy. Indeed, Western civilization is unimaginable without its non-Western inputs. The renowned scholar of the history of comparative knowledge systems Karen Armstrong has written: “From about 900 to 200 BCE, in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece” (2006: xii; see also Bellah, 2011). It is within that extraordinarily fertile period in human history – the Axial Age – that the origins of institutions of formal higher learning may be found. The traditions about which Armstrong has written provided the world with special places in which people committed to the life of the mind could come together and to find like-minded company and sanctuary. Brief surveys follow of the cultural kaleidoscope of intellectual traditions that make up the heterodox historical background to universities as we understand them today. The outstanding feature that all those traditions have in common is their commitment to people for whom the life of the mind is their most compelling vocation. In the contemporary world, that high responsibility is becoming more difficult to honour than in any previous era, as illustrated for example by populist scepticism (even rejection) met by experts warning about climate change today or how to scientifically treat people afflicted by pandemics such as COVID-19.

The Hindu tradition Within the rich pluralism of what is often misleadingly lumped under the singular label “Hinduism” (implying an orthodox unity of doctrine and religious practice that has never existed) a dazzling variety of scholarly Hindu traditions is evident

18  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries in ancient teachings handed down orally from circa 1500 BCE (Mishra, 2009: 205–30; Tharoor, 2018; Viswanathan, 2003: 23–44). Central to the early development of Hindu scholarship was the pivotal role played by Hindu temples as meeting places for rituals and ceremonies – and for scholarship and learning – not only for the Hindu faithful, but for anyone pondering scientific and mathematical conundrums and questions about the meaning of life (Smart, 1989). It is especially noteworthy that the sacred temple space bestowed reverence upon men and women committed to a life of contemplation and scholarship. Scholars were regarded as holy men and women who were capable of discerning deep truths and imparting wisdom to others. Temple complexes across the sub-continent became major centres of pilgrimage and scholarship. These include: Badrïnäth, the Himalayan shrine reputed to be associated with the Hindu god Vishnu; Purï, the vast temple complex on the Bay of Bengal associated with Shiva; Rämeshvara, in the south dedicated to Räma; and Dväkarakädhïsha, in the west associated with Krishna (Eck, 2012). Characterized mainly by a culture of religious tolerance, these centres enabled scholars from across the subcontinent to transcribe and study sacred texts and safely interrogate comparative philosophical and theological insights. This nurtured the rise of a strong Indian scientific tradition. It is a tradition that stretches back centuries, the result of a prolonged and beneficial collaboration between Jains, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. In his engaging memoir, Amartya Sen recalls that “at the age of twelve, I first read, with my proudly acquired Sanskrit, the theory of the chemical basis of life according to the Indian materialist school, the Lokayata, which had flourished in India from the sixth century BC” (2021: 5). Syncretism and scholarship went hand in hand as gurus and intellectuals elaborated ideas about the complex universality of the human experience, physically and spiritually. This was demonstrated brilliantly in the fifth-century CE, when King Kumaragupta established Nalanda Mahavihara University near Bihar in north-eastern India in 427 CE. Although principally a Buddhist institution, “Nalanda broke completely new ground and established itself as a distinguished institution offering advanced education in a great many fields, not only in Buddhist studies, but also in languages and literature, astronomy and observational sciences, architecture and sculpture, and medicine and public health care” (Sen, 2021: 105–6). This remarkable institution pre-dated institutions like Oxford and Cambridge by several centuries. It attracted scholars from all over India, and from Korea, Tibet, and Japan. It was the only higher education institution outside China to attract Chinese students. While it flourished for some 700 years, the University was over-run by Afghan plunderers and Turkish raiders, falling into oblivion in the twelfth-century CE. In 2010, the Indian parliament sought to revive Nalanda as an international university with backing from higher education institutions across East and Southeast Asia. Harvard’s Professor Amartya Sen was appointed its Chancellor to lead the revival of the university. However, difficulties with the Modi government have seen the attempted revival stymied. As Professor Sen explained: “the priorities of Hindutva1 and political Hinduism became dominant [resulting in] significant lapses in the plans for reviving Nalanda and its Buddhist world vision”

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries 19 (2021: 107). The former Singaporean foreign minister George Yeo was appointed to succeed Professor Sen, but he too had an importunate relationship with the Modi government and resigned in 2016, demonstrating that interfering governments are always a problem for good universities. “However”, as Sen notes, “the need for the classical Nalanda remains” (2021: 107; see also Sen, 2015). In the eight-century CE, the acclaimed Hindu scholar Adi Shankara (or Sankara) (788–820 CE) founded the Advaita Vedata school of Hindu philosophy which reached out to non-Hindu scholars (Menon, 2011: 9). Professor Basham explains that “Sankara was a brilliant dialectician, and his teaching soon became the standard philosophy of intellectual Hinduism […] his work has been compared to that of St Thomas Aquinas in Catholicism” (1971: 233–4). In his short lifetime (he died at the age of 32) Shankara is claimed to have established five mathas – centres of scholarship, prayerfulness, and scholarship – across India, promulgating his teachings about the intrinsic oneness of humankind. As Shashi Tharoor notes: “Shankara’s liberated individual understands and practices the ethics of non-discrimination” (2018: 93). It may even be said that he was an early cosmopolitan. This advocacy of human equality and rights by a major Hindu philosopher significantly predates Western liberalism’s preferred assumption that discourses on liberty and human rights originated during Western Europe’s eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. While the complex pluralism of Hindu sectarianism and metaphysics may seem to be at odds with the so-called rationalism of the contemporary Western mind, it is noteworthy for its acknowledgement that there are people in every society whose individual qualities and experiences and their intellectual preoccupations set them apart from everyday concerns. By providing them with the means to detach themselves from conventional social obligations in Hindu temple communities, they were able to deeply question the complex meanings of human existence and the chaotic enormity of the cosmos. This intellectual and spiritual commitment was of central importance to them, even if it meant living lives of rigorous asceticism and discipline. Hindu pluralism has influenced many subsequent cultural, educational, and philosophical traditions. The liturgies and worship centring on temples saw them providing space and sanctuary for people wanting to explore issues of social justice as well as issues in mathematics, medicine, ethics, politics, and how to live a just and good life. Over the centuries, the temple complexes expanded, providing spaces for the curation of scholarly texts, the transformation of oral traditions into written form, and developing new interpretations of those texts. They won recognition and respect as places in which scholarship and religious activities were embraced equally.

The Buddhist tradition Commencing in the third-century BCE through to 500 CE, Buddhist scholars in today’s Sri Lanka began formulating the strict principles of Theravada Buddhism at the Mahavihara (or Grand Monastery) in Sri Lanka’s ancient capital, Anuradhapura. This became a major centre of Buddhist scholarship in

20  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries Southeast Asia, providing sanctuary for communities of bhikkus (monks) and bhikkuni (nuns) who had renounced their worldly connections in order to seek enlightenment through prayer, contemplation, and scholarship. The teachings of the Buddha were copied into Pali texts, and monk-scholars began to write commentaries on the original texts. This tradition of scholarship greatly facilitated the spread of Buddhism throughout Southeast Asia. The monks and nuns within the Buddhist monasteries were set apart from the obligations of serfdom, subsistence agriculture, and military servitude, as well as marriage and family life, enabling them to dedicate their lives to philosophical thought and scholarship. Meanwhile, a parallel version of Buddhism spread into China, the Korean Peninsula and into Japan. This was the Mahãyãna tradition which embraces a broader approach to Buddhist philosophy while syncretizing with Hinduism and other indigenous sects, especially in Western China and in Japan. The result was that across East Asia, Buddhism’s various sects “had their full flower” (Smart, 1992: 82). In China, Buddhism and Confucianism mostly cohabited without conflict, while they also cohabited with indigenous cults, absorbing many local religious beliefs and practices. For example, in Japan, the Mahãyãna tradition absorbed aspects of Shinto animism. From early in the Japanese Tokugawa Era (1608–1868), aspects of Confucianism were also embraced by Buddhist scholars, creating the intense ethical discipline of Zen Buddhism which combined a strong emphasis on learning and education, on the one hand, and the martial arts and physical self-control on the other. In the words of a contemporary Zen scholar: “Zen in its essence is seeing into the nature of one’s own being and it points the way from bondage to freedom” (Suzuki, 1996: 64). In Tibet, Buddhism flourished in the monasteries that cultivated a robust tradition of disciplined religious observance and learning, including detailed exercises in textual exegesis and commentary. Prior to the establishment of a centralized Buddhist authority in the country, important monasteries exercised power in their regions based on the leadership of charismatic scholar-monks. By the seventeenth century, largely as the result of classical Chinese Buddhist influence, the fifth Dalai Lama was recognized as both the spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet (Schwartz, 1991: 229). Young boys were sent to monasteries to be educated prior to re-entering everyday life, with a few remaining, devoting themselves to a religious life as mendicant monks and scholars and teachers. Contemporary Tibetan Buddhism remains a complex set of beliefs and practices centring on the current (fourteenth) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who lives in exile in Dharamshala in northern India. Schwartz notes that “he is certainly responsible for the development of a socially progressive and undogmatic understanding of Buddhism” (1991: 242). As with Hindu temple complexes, Buddhist monasteries developed into vibrant centres of learning, nurturing a scholarly culture as well as conserving the ethical teaching of the Buddha and his successors. It is the sanctuary that the monasteries provided for those scholar monks and nuns who sought to explore the richness of the religious, ethical, and philosophical aspects of their beliefs that needs to be acknowledged in the history of universities.

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Ancient China Observing the turbulent politics of the Warring States era in ancient China (circa 475–221 BCE), the great sage Kungfuzi (circa 551–479 BCE) (more familiarly known in the West as Confucius) began advocating what he identified as the foundational principles necessary for governing an orderly and just society. He founded an impressive educational tradition that has endured in East Asia ever since (Yao, 2000: 26). During the Warring States period, it became fashionable for rulers or high administrators in larger states to bring scholars steeped in Confucian scholarship into their courts as a mark of their cultural superiority (Bellah, 2011). Mencius (372–289 BCE), described by Professor Tu Wei-Ming as “the paradigmatic Confucian intellectual”, was responsible for “cultivating a class of scholar officials who were not directly involved in agriculture, industry, and commerce but were vital to the proper functioning of the state and, more importantly, to the well-being of the people” (2010: 226; see also Tu, 1993). Mencius’ influence spread throughout China and into the Korean Peninsula and Japan. In 360 BCE the Jixia Academy was established in Qi State. Under the influence of Confucianist thinking, its aim was to educate young men according to a curriculum in ethics, the classics, and history, to serve the emperor and his government. One of its most significant innovations was a competitive examination system designed to identify merit based on scholarly capacity rather than on birth. During the Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE to 23 CE) an institution of scholarship termed the T’ai-hsüeh was established in Ch’ang-an (modern day Shaanxi). This term can be translated as “Grand School” or “Imperial University”. Thomas Lee explains: “The Imperial University […] had its own campus and buildings. This was a significant step toward an officially supported higher education institution” (2000: 48). It was within these centres of learning that some of ancient China’s greatest technological and governance achievements were realized, well before what was being achieved in Europe at that time. As “the man who loved China”, Joseph Needham observed: The more you know of Chinese technology in the medieval period, the more you realize that, not only in the case of certain things very well known, such as the invention of gun-powder, the invention of paper, printing, and the magnetic compass, but in many other cases, inventions and technological discoveries were made in China which changed the course of Western civilization, and indeed that of the whole world (2005: 154; see also Winchester, 2008) Simon Leys (the pen name of the China scholar Pierre Ryckmans) pointed to the “one common feature that characterizes the various ‘Confucian’ societies […] it is the extraordinary importance these societies all attach to education” (1997: xxviii). In short, Confucianism fused together some great philosophical

22  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries ideas about justice, social order, and compassion, on the one hand, and the practical activities of government, on the other. Good governance, it proclaimed, could only occur where there is an educated population from which astute advisers and ethically informed policymakers could be drawn, not by virtue of their birth but through their intellectual achievements through education. The idea that good government required an educated class of advisers and civil servants to be effective is one of Confucianism’s great contributions to the modern world. Meanwhile in the Middle East and Central Europe, other traditions of scholarship began to establish sanctuaries for people driven to ask controversial questions while imagining controversial answers. But above all else these scholar sanctuaries were committed to collecting and curating ancient texts and scrolls. The monks and scholars who were provided with shelter and sustenance within their walls were committed to transcribing obscurely documented narratives, many of which has hitherto been handed down via oral traditions.

The Judaic tradition Judaism is the oldest of the trio of the Abrahamic religions, along with Christianity and Islam. Each of these religious traditions has sacred texts at its heart – for Judaism it is the Tanakh (a combination of the Torah, the Nevi’im and the Ketuvim); for Christianity, the Holy Bible (a combination of the Old Testament and the New Testament); for Islam, the Koran pre-eminently and also the Hadith. As Heribert Busse explains: “Adherents of the older revealed religions that have Holy Scriptures are mentioned in the Koran under the general heading of ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-kitab)” (Busse, 1998: 29). This points to traditions of scholarship within each of these religious faith systems based on literary exegesis, commentary, and criticism. From the eighth-century to the fifth-century BCE, a “prophetic age” spread across Israel, Persia, and India, with simultaneous developments occurring in China (Bellah, 2011: 271). Throughout this period, Judaism cultivated a learned tradition that has resonated down the ages. Max Weber argued that this development was associated with the emergence of a class of lay people who were able to discourse unfettered by the strictures of orthodox religious control. He explained: “The more religion became book-religion and doctrine, the more literary it became and the more efficacious it was in provoking rational lay-thinking, freed of priestly control” (1997: 351). In historical Judaism the prophetic age took on a special significance. Detached from the orthodox priestly cast, and often at the margins of society, there were some 48 acknowledged prophets in the Judaic canon and, as Ninian Smart notes: “the great Prophets […] were more individualistic in their utterances” (1992: 210). Among their ranks were sages like Isaiah, one of the most revered among the acknowledged prophets, and Amos, one of the so-called minor prophets. They proclaimed what were often unwelcome criticisms and unpopular prognostications which were usually prefaced with a stinging critique

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries 23 of the existing power elites. Amos, for example, a passionate advocate of social justice, savaged the rich for failing to care for the poor: Hear this, you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end […] The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob: “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds […] I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day” (Book of Amos, 1957: 8: 4, 7, 10) Israel’s prophets often spoke truth to power, fearlessly, attracting followers who sought to discuss their ideas and prophesies with them. Judaism’s time-honoured traditions of original scholarship and intellectual excellence have their roots in the teaching of the prophets collected in the Torah. As Steven Rosman has noted: “[A]ll men, no matter what their station in life, were supposed to maintain fixed periods of study throughout their lives” (1985: 33). The rabbinical culture nurturing this great tradition is, first and foremost, one of educating. The syncretism involved in this development is also noteworthy. In his History of Judaism, Martin Goodman points to a relevant example: “The vigour of Islamic philosophy, which incorporated much from the philosophy and natural sciences of the Greeks, especially Aristotle, was adopted by many Jewish thinkers writing in Arabic in the Muslim world, not least in Muslim Spain” (2017: 259).

The classical Greek tradition From the fifth- to the fourth-century BCE, classical Greece established itself as a great fountain of philosophical innovation. At the centre of this historical development was the city of Athens with its magnificent architecture and busy cultural life. As the archaeologist John Camp observes: “The Parthenon, the Erechtheian, the Nike temple, and the Propylaea were built when Athens was at the height of its power–economic and military–and able to afford the best craftsmen, artists and materials available” (2003: 70). Classical Athens was equally famous for its invention of what is widely claimed to be a democratic form of governance, “anchored firmly”, as John Keane notes “in a community of deities who infused democracy with a strong sense of sacred standards for life on earth” (2009: 15). The sacred activity of civic decision-making impacted on the way policy deliberations took place. The very idea of citizenship was sacrosanct, implying reverence for the civic duties that had to be fulfilled by each citizen. Meetings of all eligible citizens in the Agora would converse, dispute, discuss, and debate matters of public concern. Thus, policies were made, and laws were enacted. What undermines the view that this constitutes a form of democracy is that the category “citizen” was restricted to adult males only. Women, children, and slaves (the majority of the population) were excluded from the Athenian decision-making processes.

24  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries Athenian democracy benefitted from a profound tradition of philosophical discussion and disputation. The most famous of the philosophers from this time was Socrates, a man of exceptional intellectual integrity who spoke truth to power with unflinching courage. He gathered a group of young men around him, urging them to question conventional opinions and to think for themselves. Zeyl and his colleagues have noted how Socrates believed passionately that he was compelled to interrogate people unremittingly, in order to reveal to them just how little they really knew (1997: 501). He exhorted them to be always opened to examining every aspect of their lives because “the unexamined life is not worth living” (Johnson, 2011: 149–50). This eventually led to him being publicly mocked by Meletus, a pawn of the powerful elites enraged by Socrates’ sustained questioning of their political habits of subterfuge and corruption. Meletus was a religious fanatic, habitually accusing others of “impiety”, especially those whom he believed lacked religious zeal (Zeyl, 1997: 405). With Meletus leading the mob, Socrates’ integrity was grotesquely impugned at a public trial in which he stated, deploying his characteristic irony, that because he was likely the only Athenian alive who knew that he knew nothing, he was therefore the wisest man in the polis. His irony won him few friends and the Assembly voted to condemn him to death. However, his philosophical and educational ideas have influenced scholars ever since. Plato had been a pupil of Socrates and recorded what he claimed were many of his dialogues with Socrates and his followers. After Socrates’ execution, Plato established his own Academy in an Athenian grove dedicated to Akademos, an attic hero is Greek mythology. His essay The Republic advocates a form of government by an elite of philosopher-kings. However, he places great emphasis on the importance of education in preparing the philosopher-kings for political office. Originally a pupil of Plato, Aristotle established his own academy (the Lyceum) on the outskirts of Athens where he strolled among the olive trees engaging in debates with his followers, earning the group the title “Peripatetics”. The Lyceum had similarities to Plato’s Academy of which Aristotle had been a member for twenty years (Lynch, 1972). What is noteworthy about the classical philosophers was their reputation for eccentricity, for being on the margins of respectability, for their scepticism about the gods and religious beliefs, for their desire to bring order into the chaos of conventional prejudices, for dismissing prevailing superstitions, and for questioning everyday views about the world in which they lived. This made for what could be a socially and socially hazardous existence, as Socrates’ execution illustrates. But it is clear that people were interested in what they had to say, and many young men were ready to debate and discuss matters of public concern with them. They staked out an area in society in which the life of the mind was (and remains) critical in the development of human civilizations. And the tradition of philosophical rationalism that they pioneered profoundly influenced the emergence of modern educational institutions and practices.

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The Islamic tradition That the modern West owes a massive intellectual debt to ancient Islam is too rarely understood, much less acknowledged. As historian Norman Cantor notes: “Arabic scholars of the tenth and eleventh centuries [were] the greatest philosophers and scientists of their age, from whom the Europeans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were to derive a very considerable part of their knowledge in these fields” (1964: 174). Moreover, Islam provided Western Europe with material products and technological discoveries hitherto undreamed of, while providing openings to new fields of science and philosophy. In the first millennium CE Islamic centres of learning in the Middle East and northern Africa were responsible for preserving a great deal of classical Greek philosophical and scientific thought. Institutions like Bayt al-Hikma – a major library and centre of learning in Baghdad in the eighth century CE – predate the Western idea of a university. It was at Bayt al-Hikma that some of the earliest translations of Aristotle’s logical treatises and the works of Gaelen and Hippocrates were undertaken (Lapidus, 2002). In Morocco in 859 CE, the University of Al-Karouine was established in a mosque founded by Fatima al-Fihiri (more auspicious because Fatima was a progressive female intellectual in a relentlessly patriarchal culture). In 970 CE the University of Al-Azhar was established in Egypt and in 1065 CE, Al-Nizamiya University was founded in Baghdad (Deriwala, 2004). The scholarly traditions that evolved with the spread of Islam into Europe remain a pivotal historical moment in the development of modern universities.

European monasticism The late second- and third-century CE saw the emergence of “wandering, begging monks”, subsequently labelled the “Desert Fathers”, many who lived as hermits across remote wildernesses in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. Peripatetic and prayerful, their purpose was to live a life of self-denial and poverty, in search of nurturing a mystical intimacy with the life of Christ (Caner, 2002). In due course, for some, and eventually for many, the privations of the ascetic life became too isolating, encouraging them to band together into small communities (Burton, 1996). Within these early gatherings of holy souls, we may discern the origins of European monasticism (Lawrence, 2001). It was very likely circa 361 CE when the first monastic community in Western Europe was established at Ligugé, near what today is the city of Poitiers, in France. The community gathered together under the leadership of Martin, a former soldier who had abandoned his military career in order to commit to a life of piety and scholarship. Professor MacCulloch explains that “Martin’s evident ability to fascinate young aristocrats from important Gallo-Roman families, which resulted in his drawing them into religious life […] cannot have done Martin’s campaign any harm” (2009: 313). Other monastic communities began to be established across Western Europe, echoing aspects of those that had been

26  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries flourishing across the East many years earlier. They offered sanctuary to men and women desiring to withdraw from worldly distractions, ostensibly to imitate the life of Jesus. Over time the European monasteries established libraries and cultivated studies of biblical and theological works, conserving ancient texts while providing resources for scholars to write commentaries and tracts of their own. The literatures they collected and curated recorded what were then conventional philosophical, scientific, and theological explanations of the world. Some were nuanced and evolving, others were dogmatically orthodox and static. The authority attributed to these writings was established through sustained questioning and development by reputable scholars down the years. In Europe, depending on their orthodoxy, some even won ecclesiastical or papal approval. Monastery inhabitants were driven by the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge transcended the distractions of everyday life. Most of the monks and nuns, for example, turned their backs on the world to live austere lives in accordance with strict rules, dedicating themselves to daily routines ordered by liturgical practices while discoursing about abstract propositions, praying, composing hymns and liturgical music, copying and illuminating vast tomes from the past, and writing their own tracts and books. One of the most prominent and influential figures of this time is the abbess Hildegard of Bingen. As Barbara Newman notes: Among the “firsts” and “onlies” to her credit, Hildegard was the only woman of her age to be accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine; the first woman who received express permission from a pope to write theological books; the only medieval woman who preached openly, before mixed audiences of clergy and laity, with the full approval of church authorities; the author of the first known morality play and the only twelfth-century playwright who is not anonymous; the only composer of her era (not to mention the only medieval woman) known both by name and by a large corpus of surviving music; the first scientific writer to discuss sexuality and gynecology from a female perspective; and the first saint whose official biography includes a first-person memoir (1998: 1) Another great medieval thinker who rocked the leaky boat of orthodox scholastic opinion was Peter Abelard (circa 1079–1142). He was mercilessly persecuted by covetous church authorities for his radical teachings and for his passionate love of Eloise. The persecution included castrating him (Mews, 2005). His original contributions to theology and philosophy were mainly as a logician and ethicist; much of his writing and teaching opened new ways of thinking among scholars across Europe (Clanchy, 1997). From about the eleventh century, the influence of great figures like Hildegard and Abelard was complemented by quasi-secular scholars portrayed in the character of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Clerk of Oxenford” who represented a class of mendicant students largely eschewing the usual daily grind, preferring the life of the mind, often penuriously.2 

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The renaissance and reformation From circa 1300 to circa 1600, in the wake of the plague pandemics that swept across Europe (brought by soldiers returning from the Crusades), the region experienced an intellectual revival as scholars and teachers began to emerge from the strictures of the scholasticism of the Dark Ages. As the years passed, the temporal power of the popes, backed by medieval scholasticism, began to wane when theologians like Martin Luther began challenging the foundations of the scholastic tradition. Alister McGrath points out that “The Lutheran reformation was initially an academic movement, concerned primarily with reforming the teaching of theology at the University of Wittenberg” (2011: 46). But Luther’s ideas and those of scholars and rulers associated with him soon evolved, spreading across Western Europe. Old texts previously languishing in cathedral and monastery libraries were rediscovered as humanist ideas and ideals began to encourage a renewed interest in interrogating the orthodoxies of the past. MacCulloch explains that humanism “brought a new respect for sections of traditional scholarship of secondary importance in medieval universities: the non-theological parts of the arts curriculum, especially poetry, oratory and rhetoric” (2009: 580). As university-like institutions began to emerge in Europe, scholars were increasingly emboldened to challenge the dogmatism of medievalism’s scholasticism. Monks, nuns, and lay scholars began directing their attention to the lived experiences of human individuals and their societies – to humanism. The writings of one of the greatest of the early humanists, Erasmus (circa 1466–1536), set in train profound changes as thinkers under his influence conveyed his teachings to the new centres of learning across Europe (Bietenholz, 1966). Moreover, these nascent universities were crucibles in which the conditions were ripe for the intellectual nurturing of many of the social and political transformations unfolding in Renaissance Europe (Grendler, 2004). These pre-modern higher education institutions laid the foundations of modern thought, of modern mathematics and science – of modernity itself. And within this remarkable tradition lies the kernel of the idea of the modern public university. Because they were often perceived to be standing apart from the madding crowd, not a few of these medieval centres of contemplation and learning were sacked and burnt by enraged mobs, warring armies, or suspicious rulers intent on suppressing them. Fortunately, some survived, bequeathing to successive generations what they had been able to conserve of the wisdom of the ages. And while they represented different traditions of belief, many were noteworthy for their syncretic valuing of the scholarship in their care. The first community of scholars in Europe to assume the title universitas was very likely Bologna in 1088 (although some scholars argue that Paris achieved the title slightly earlier). In Britain just over a decade later a motley collection of monastic institutions and Studia Generale (groupings of learned “Masters” and their student-disciples) in Oxford became the foundational institutions of the modern colleges of the University of Oxford (Rait, 1912). The University

28  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries of Paris had been granted a charter by King Phillip in 1200, pre-dating all the British universities except for Oxford (Leff, 1968). In 1209 Cambridge University evolved from the monastic institutions mirroring those in Oxford. The University of St Andrews followed in 1413, the University of Glasgow in 1451, and the University of Edinburgh in 1582 (Green, 1969). In 1643 what was to become Harvard University was founded in the United States, initially as a theological college (Quincy, 1860). These and other early centres of higher education helped pave the way for the advent of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, an intellectual revolution that gave rise to the establishment of more universities. In Europe, these included: The University of Berlin in 1810; the University of Oslo in 1811; Leuven State University in Belgium in 1817; Victoria University of Manchester in 1880; the Catholic University of Dublin in 1854; the University of Leeds in 1874; and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1889 (Rüegg, 2004). In Asia, they included: The Imperial University of Tokyo founded in 1877 (Dore, 1965); Peking University in 1898 (Liu, 2005); and in colonial India the Universities of Mumbai, Madras, and Calcutta each founded in 1857 (Jayapalan, 2005).

Conclusion This growth of universities around the world in the nineteenth centuries drew from long history of sanctuaries of scholarship that had sheltered men and women of contemplation, thoughtfulness and intellectual curiosity all down the ages and across much of the globe. As Marcia Colish concludes in her excellent study of the Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition: “[T]he central lesson every field conveyed to later ages is that it is possible, and desirable, to invent and to reinvent ideas and aesthetic forms of expression, maintaining an organic connection with tradition while using it to fuel a continuous process of intellectual self-fashioning” (1997: 359). Well before medieval times, in Asia and Africa and across Europe, thinkers had been questioning conventional beliefs and orthodox dogmas about their societies and their place in the world – wondering about how they came into being, and why. Communities were formed providing sanctuary for these people, allowing them time, resources, and space for nurturing their questioning and imagining. The earliest idea of a university, then, is of a place of sanctuary, a place where it is safe to think deeply and seriously, reverentially, and critically, a place where original thought could flourish. It was also a place where truth – however subtly expressed – could be spoken to power. In Oxford, in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman was one of the beneficiaries of this great scholarly tradition. Building on ideas that had already been fermenting in the eighteenth century through the writings of thinkers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, he began re-imagining the idea of a university in ways that would influence the development of the modern liberal university into the twentieth century. Though increasingly under critical scrutiny, his thinking is still relevant for defending a culture of liberal learning in the university of today.

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries 29

Notes 1. Hindutva is a fundamentalist form of Hinduism that has become a nationalistic political ideology favoured, for example, by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in India today. 2. “An Oxford Cleric, still a student though, / One who had taken logic long ago, / Was there, his horse was thinner than a rake, / And he was not too fat, I undertake, / But had a hollow look, a sober stare; / The thread upon his overcoat was bare; / He had found no preferment in the church / And he was too unworldly to make search / For secular employment. By his bed / He preferred having twenty books in red / And black, of Aristotle’s philosophy, / Than costly clothes, fiddle or psaltery, / Though a philosopher, as I have told, / He had not found the stone for making gold. / Whatever money from his friends he took / He spent on learning or another book / And prayed for them most earnestly returning / Thanks to them for paying for his learning. / His only care was study, and indeed / He never spoke a word more than was need, / Formal at that, respectful in the extreme, / Short, to the point, and lofty in his theme. / A tone of moral virtue filled his speech / And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach” (Chaucer, 2003 edition: pp. 26–7). This is a translation into modern English from Chaucer’s Middle English which can be read at: https://sites.google.com/site/alcuinthoth/alcuin-s-favorite-poetry/theclerk-of-oxenford. See also Jones (1912).

References Armstrong, K. (2006), The Great Transformation: The World in the Time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah (London: Atlantic Books). Basham, A. (1971), “Hinduism,” in Zaehner, R. (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths (London: Hutchinson): 217–254. Bellah, R. (2011), Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Bietenholz, P. (1966), History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Paris: DROZ). Book of Amos (1957), The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version (London: Nelson): 712–718. Burton, J. (1996), Medieval Monasticism (Witney, UK: Headstart History). Busse, H. (1998), Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Theological and Historical Affiliations (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner). Camp, J. (2003), The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Caner, D. (2002), Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Cantor, N. (1964), Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization (New York, NY: Macmillan). Chaucer, G. (2003 edition), The Canterbury Tales, translated by Nevill Coghill (London: Penguin Classic). Clanchy, M. (1997), Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell). Colish, M. (1997), Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Deriwala, M. (2004), ‘First university in the world,’ The Muslim Observer, 4 February, at: http://muslimobserver.com/first-university-in-the-world/ (accessed 11 May 2018). Dore, R. (1965), Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Eck, D. (2012), India: A Sacred Geography (New York, NY: Harmony Books/Random House).

30  Universities as knowledge sanctuaries Goodman, M. (2017), A History of Judaism (London: Allen Lane). Green, V. (1969), The Universities (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Grendler, P. (2004), “The universities of the renaissance and reformation,” Renaissance Quarterly, 57: 1–42. Jayapalan, N. (2005), History of Education in India (New Delhi: Atlantic Publications). Johnson, P. (2011), Socrates: A Man for Our Times (London: Penguin). Jones, H. (1912), “The Clerk of Oxenford,” PLMA [Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association of America], 21 (1): 106–115. Keane, J. (2009), The Life and Death of Democracy (New York, NY: Norton). Lapidus, I. (2002), A History of Islamic Societies, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lawrence, C. (2001), Medieval Monasticism (Harlow, UK: Longmans). Lee, T. (2000), Education in Traditional China: A History (Leiden: Brill). Leff, G. (1968), Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New York, NY: Wiley). Leys, S. (1997), Introduction to The Analects of Confucius (New York, NY: Norton): xiii–xxxii. Liu, X. (2005), Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1989–1937 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Lynch, J. (1972), Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). MacCulloch, D. (2009), Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (London: Viking). Makdisi, G. (1970), “Madrasa and university in the middle ages,” Studia Islamica, 32: 255–264. McGrath, A. (2011), Christian Theology: An Introduction, fifth edition (Chichester: WileyBlackwell). Menon, Y. (2011 edition), The Mind of Adi Shankaracharya (Ahmedabad: Jaico). Mews, C. (2005), Abelard and Eloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Minogue, K. (1973), The Concept of a University (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Mishra, S. (2009), “Religious coexistence in Gujarat,” in Singh, U. and Lahiri, N. (eds.), Ancient India: New Research (New Delhi: Oxford University Press): 205–230. Needham, J. (2005 edition), The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Routledge). Newman, B. (1998), “‘Sibyl of the Rhine’: Hildegard’s life and times,” in Newman, B. (ed.), Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press): 1–29. Quincy, J. (1860), The History of Harvard University (Boston, MA: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Co.), available online at: https://archive.org/details/historyharvardu00quingoog/ page/n5/mode/2up (accessed 12 June 2019). Rait, R. (1912), Life in the Medieval Universities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rosman, S. (1985), “Classical Jewish pedagogy,” Journal of Jewish Education, 53 (2): 27–35. Rüegg, W. (ed.) (2004), A history of the university in Europe, Vol III: Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schwartz, R. (1991), “Renewal and resistance: Tibetan Buddhism in the modern era,” in Harris, I. (ed.), Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth Century Asia (London: Bloomsbury).

Universities as knowledge sanctuaries 31 Sen, A. (2015), “India: The stormy revival of an international university,” The New York Review, 15 August, available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/08/13/ india-stormy-revival-nalanda-university/ (accessed 19 November 2020). Sen, A. (2021), Home in the World: A Memoir (London: Allen Lane). Smart, N. (1992), The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Suzuki, D. (1996), in Barrett, William (ed.), Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki (New York, NY: Three Leaves Press/Doubleday). Tharoor, S. (2018), Why I Am a Hindu (Melbourne: Scribe). Tu, W. (1993), Way, Learning and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Tu, W. (2010), Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Viswanathan, G. (2003), “Colonialism and the construction of Hinduism,” in Flood, G. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford: Blackwell): 23–44. Weber, M. (1977), “Religious rejections of the world and their directions,” in Gerth, H. and Mills, C. (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul): 323–359. Winchester, S. (2008), The Man Who Loved China (New York, NY: Harper). Wolf, A. (2019), “Blue chips and bubbles: Why were universities the 20th century’s most successful institutions?” A public lecture delivered at King’s College, University of London, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/universities%E2%80%93-most-successful-institutions-of-all-times/11181960 Yao, X. (2000), An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Zeyl, D. et al. (1997), Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).

3

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University

Introduction First published in 1852, John Henry Newman’s work, The Idea of a University (henceforth The Idea) has been lauded down the years as a signal defence of what constitutes (or should constitute) a modern liberal university education. It is still in print today.1 However, in recent years, it has come under increased critical scrutiny. Newman is admonished for his English provincialism and his dogged commitment to his Catholic faith. His views about the necessity to include theology in university curricula are written off as anachronistic and anti-liberal. His high-Victorian prose style and misogynistic defence of universities as bastions of male entitlement are easy targets for parody. The general judgment of his critics today is that Newman’s “idea” is all about a privileged patriarchal ivory tower, aloof from the harsh realities confronting universities in the twenty-first century. His indifference to research in universities is seen as especially problematic. However, these criticisms misunderstand the nineteenth-century cultural and academic constraints within which Newman was defending what, in his time, was a radical view of a university, preparing the ground for future reforms. Moreover, his Catholicism is more subtle than many of his critics understand.

John Henry Newman, the person John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801. He was educated at a small private school near his home before entering Trinity College in the University of Oxford at the tender age of 16. He was an assiduous student throughout the three years of his degree but achieved an indifferent result in his final examinations. In February of 1822, despite lacking a first-class BA, he was permitted to sit for a gruelling set of examinations for a Fellowship at Oriel College. The first exam lasted for eight hours; the rest following on consecutive days for the rest of the week. Newman performed well in the exams and in April was duly elected to the Oriel Senior Common Room. In 1825 he was ordained priest in the Church of England, joining the ranks of his fellow dons. (Until 1871 Oxford required its all-male faculty to be in holy orders in the Church of England.) In March DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-3

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University  33 of 1828 he was appointed Vicar of Oxford’s Church of St Mary the Virgin, an adjunct appointment to his Oriel Fellowship. He became a renowned preacher, attracting large congregations to his Sunday afternoon sermons. His contemporary Matthew Arnold wrote of Newman’s preaching: “Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music–subtle, sweet, mournful” (Arnold, 1885: 139–40). In the 1830s, Newman achieved both fame and notoriety as a leading polemicist in the reformist Oxford Movement within the Church of England (Cornwell, 2010: ch. 6; Ker, 1988: ch. 7). From 1833 to 1841 the Movement published a series of 90 Tracts for the Times emphasizing the Catholic origins of Anglicanism and the need for a better educated, more pastorally oriented clergy, while encouraging the founding of Anglican monasteries and convents (Chadwick, 1992). As Hilary Fraser points out: “The Oxford Tractarians […] were, as a matter of principle, committed to opposing any threat to the sacred authority of the Church” (Fraser, 1986: 229). Newman was a prominent author of 24 of the Tracts. He had long been wrestling with his conscience about his allegiance to the Church of England, fearing its deviation from Rome. In particular, he believed that the doctrine of apostolic succession gained its authenticity specifically from its historical connection with the Church of Rome. On 9 October 1845 he was received into the Catholic Church. The move triggered a major controversy across nineteenth-century Anglican England. He was roundly condemned by many in the Church of England hierarchy and by former fellow clerics, while many English Catholics regarded his conversion with suspicion. The move obliged him to forego his Oriel Fellowship. The following year Newman was ordained a Catholic priest. He moved to Birmingham and began the arduous task of establishing a monastic community of men, most of whom had also converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. In 1851, Newman was invited by the Catholic bishops of Ireland to be the founding Rector (President) of a Catholic University in Dublin. Despite his advocacy of a liberal academic culture for the university – which became the basis of The Idea – his proposals were largely rebuffed by the Irish bishops. After several years of trying to persuade the unpersuadable bishops, he returned to the Birmingham Oratory which provided him with the sanctuary he needed to get on with his writing and reading, his pastoral work, and his preaching. He became a prolific author of theological, hymnal, and poetical works, and a profuse and attentive letter-writer. In December of 1877, Newman received an invitation from the President of Trinity College to become an Honorary Fellow of the College, an invitation he was delighted to accept. At long last, Oxford was welcoming its Catholicconvert son back into its academic fold. The following year he was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope Leo XIII. At first, he was reluctant to agree to the latter appointment. However, when finally accepting the Pope’s invitation, he stated that it would be grounds for proving to those “ignorant or

34  John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University hot-headed Catholics” who were suspicious of him as a “convert” that he was a bona fide Catholic; and to those Protestants who accused him of being “only half a Catholic” that they were simply wrong (Ker, 1988: 716–7). In Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey evokes the intellectual tenor of England in the nineteenth century: “[T]he very seed-time of modern progress” emboldened by “… the first onrush of Liberalism” and “the victories of Science and Democracy” (2012: 5). As the nineteenth century unfolded, Oxford was increasingly out of step with these developments. Until late in the century its curricula focused on classics, mathematics and Latin and Greek. In the second half of the century reforms were only grudgingly agreed to after long delay, by the Hebdomadal Council (Oxford’s governing body from the 1850s to 2000, the equivalent of today’s University Council or Board of Governors). Until 1880, women were precluded from enrolling in the University. Social class was a major determinant of who was who among the student body, with the “wellborn” accorded preferential treatment. For many (but certainly not all) of the student body throughout much of the nineteenth century, Oxford was a place in which to sow one’s wild oats before taking on hereditary family duties, or (if not the beneficiary of a title and an inheritance, preferably both) a career, in the military, politics, or the civil service (Brockliss, 2016: Part II). While Newman was resistant to female students being allowed to enrol in the University, and while he zealously advocated celibacy for churchmen and University dons, he nonetheless maintained close friendships with several women with whom he communicated about his ideas, his state of mind, and his writings. He believed that the justification for Oxford’s existence was essentially twofold. First, it was to be a place for cultivating the minds of young men destined to become the leaders of Great Britain and its Empire, as politicians, as military officers, as civil servants, or (if none of the above) as members of the professions. Secondly, it had to nurture pious young men to become well-educated priests, bishops, and theologians in the Church of England, with some becoming dons in the University in due course. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Church of England’s stranglehold on academic appointments in Oxford came under challenge. The narrow scholasticism of its BA degree was under pressure. Newman was clear-eyed about the need for change. He was not one for pining nostalgically for the return of a golden past. While he certainly sought to carefully conserve what was valuable from the past, he wanted to integrate it intelligently into the perceived cultural and spiritual needs of the present. Overall, his disposition was that of a thoughtful, principled conservative whose thinking was leavened by a measure of liberal optimism. Newman fell ill in the early hours of 10 August 1890 and died of pneumonia the following day. He had previously written: “I wish with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will” (Cornwell, 2010: 220). St John, who died in 1875, had been a devoted friend and indispensable assistant to Newman throughout the difficult early years of the Birmingham Oratory. Newman’s directions about his burial

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University  35 were followed to the letter. At a ceremony in the Vatican on 13 October 2019, Pope Francis declared John Henry Newman a saint. It is likely that Newman’s characteristic humility would have been offended by that recondite declaration.

Prior to The Idea Like any influential idea in history, Newman’s The Idea did not burst into the world de novo. His thinking echoes calls for the reform of universities that had been gathering pace across Europe from the latter half of the eighteenth century. For example, while Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1752 until 1764, Adam Smith raised concerns about the dangers of external “meddling” in the work of universities. The “meddlers” he was singling out included “the bishop of the diocese […] the governor of the province; or perhaps, […] some minister of state”. He explained: An extraneous jurisdiction of this kind besides is liable to be exercised both ignorantly and capriciously. In its nature it is arbitrary and discretionary, and the persons who exercise it, neither attending upon the lectures of the teacher themselves, nor understanding the sciences which it is his business to teach, are seldom capable of exercising it with judgement. From the insolence of office too they are frequently indifferent how they exercise it, and are very apt to censure or deprive him of his office wantonly, and without any just cause (Smith, 2001: 1016) Meanwhile, in eighteenth-century Germany, a progressive movement for university reform was under way. While a Professor in the University of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) drew a sharp demarcation between what he labelled the “higher faculties” (applied, or professional and technical faculties – or graduate schools) and the “lower faculty” in Germany’s universities. A better understanding of “lower faculty” would be to regard it as the core or foundational faculty. As the Kantian scholar David Evans explains: “[H]is lower faculty comprised not only philosophy, as we now narrowly understand it, but also history, geography, literary and social studies, and also natural science – indeed everything which in more recent contexts might be included in the Faculties (variously named) of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Economics, and Science” (2008: 485). Kant believed that the “lower” faculty should be the very heart of the university in which the freedom – indeed the obligation – to question and criticize the ethical, epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical principles and practices of the “higher faculties” was its fundamental raison d’être. Kant wrote: It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the governments’ command with regard to its teaching; one that, having no commands to give, is free to

36  John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University evaluate everything and concerns itself with the interests of the sciences, that is, with truth; one in which reason is authorised to speak out publicly. For without a faculty of this kind, the truth would not come to light. (1794: 2) His defence of academic freedom was particularly courageous given that he was publicly advocating it in eighteenth-century authoritarian Prussia where dissent was rarely tolerated. He insisted that both the philosophy faculty’s remit and its autonomy must be inviolable: So the philosophy faculty – because it must answer for the truth of its teachings it is to adopt or even allow, must be free and subject only to laws given by reason, not by the government […] Its function in relation to the three higher faculties is to control them and, in this way, be useful to them, since truth (the essential and first condition of learning in general) is the main thing, whereas the utility the higher faculties promise the government is of secondary importance (1794: 6–7) In this passage, Kant is prefiguring the distinction that Newman made between “Liberal knowledge” (which Newman firmly believed was the exclusive educational domain of the university) and “Useful knowledge” (which in Newman’s view was the responsibility of external bodies such as professional colleges, inns of court, and independent research institutes) (Coady and Miller, 1993). Both Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant were giving voice to what, at the time, was a radical view: viz., that the intellectual work of universities – the activity of genuine academic scholarship – could only thrive in a scholarly culture in which faculty members are free to explore whatever and wherever their pursuit of knowledge would lead them, without censorship, bureaucratic interference, or political direction. They were highlighting the importance a place – an academic sanctuary – in which teachers and researchers would be secure and valued while they critically interrogating the outer limits of conventional thought and speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, The Idea needs also to be understood as part of the rich tradition of English conservative thought, most famously articulated by the Anglo-Irish Member of the British Parliament, Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Burke believed that human lives are part of the rich tapestry of social relationships, of society’s historical and cultural achievements and of its time-honoured institutions, all inextricably interwoven into an organically inter-related society.2 Like Newman subsequently, Burke has been the victim of a negative press over the years. In addition to being unjustly branded a defender of an antiquated hierarchical society, he has been associated – even more unjustly – with the rise of populist neoconservatism in the West today. As Richard Bourke notes: “histories, anthologies and polemics since the 1950s have tended to repeat the basic thesis that he

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University  37 should be viewed as in effect an ‘arch-antagonist’ of the rights of humans, and consequently, the progenitor of modern conservatism” (2018: 63). In fact, Burke never spelt out his conservative ideas in a systematic treatise. Jan-Werner Müller points out that even his most polemical work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) “is impossible to reduce to anything like a systematic set of political propositions” (2006: 360). Moreover, as his biographer Conor Cruise O’Brien noted: “On three or four themes, Burke’s stand has ceased, or almost ceased, to be controversial for our times”. Burke strenuously opposed political discrimination on religious grounds in his native Ireland. He was opponent of the ultimately futile attempt by King George III’s government to impose taxes on the American colonists. And he was controversially critical of British imperialism in India (O’Brien, 1992: 595; see also Dalrymple, 2019: 308–12; Sen, 2021: 165–6). In a manner closely similar to Burke’s, Newman had a profound regard for the traditional wisdoms we inherit from our past, believing them to be as a guide for how we may live better in the present, while looking to the future. Newman’s affinities with Burke (who apparently concealed his Catholicism while an MP) are most evident in his commitment to explorations of ancient wisdoms encapsulated in the writings of classical philosophers and the Church Fathers whom he believed were “… authentic interpreters of scripture […] and witnesses to the church’s understanding of herself and her offices” (Lang, 2011: 144).

The Idea In drafting his Dublin lectures (formally titled “Discourses”) which are the basis of The Idea, Newman had two distinct targets in his sights. The first, as Ker notes was his “Utilitarian criticism of liberal education within a confessional framework”. The second was his distaste for “the narrow dogmatism of a defensive clerical Catholicism” (1988: 383–3). The second aspect of his argument was his warning shot across the bows of the Irish bishops and the Catholic Church more broadly. Newman’s polite “Discourses” turned out to be ineffectual; the Irish bishops were not for turning.

The pastoral care of students There is a third element in Newman’s imagining of a good university which has to do with the pastoral care of students. This element is unforgivably absent in recent critiques of The Idea. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College at Oxford, Newman took the responsibility of caring for his students very seriously, galling his fellow Fellows who had little time for undergraduates. Newman engaged closely with students, encouraging them in their studies, while getting to understand them as individual persons. He saw his role not simply as a teacher but also as a pastoral carer, in loco parentis as it were, concerned for the well-being of each student.

38  John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University The relationships he developed with his students contrasted with the indifference and distancing that mark many of the relationships between many faculty and their lonely students in public universities today (Hagenauer and Volet, 2014). This is especially the case at the contemporary undergraduate level where large classes and heavy teaching loads have ploughed a deep furrow separating teachers and students. The pastoral intimacy that Newman sought to develop with his students is encapsulated in Michael Oakeshott’s description of what he labelled as “dramatic friendship”: A friend is not somebody we trust to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain agreeable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into. […] The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic not utilitarian (1991: 417) The friendship that Newman aimed to cultivate with his students was “dramatic” in Oakeshott’s sense and was based on what has been described elsewhere as “affective pedagogy” (Patience, 2008). The so-called “teaching-research nexus” characterizing public universities today is more a divide than a nexus, with teaching becoming the poor cousin in contemporary academic life (Brew, 2006; see also Karagiannis, 2009). This would have horrified Newman. That this is so neglected in most, if not all, the contemporary critiques of The Idea should signal that something is very wrong, not with Newman but with his critics.

Against utilitarianism The overriding thesis in The Idea is that the pursuit of knowledge stands at the highest and most sacred apex in the university firmament. Newman stated: “Knowledge is […] an end sufficient to rest in and to pursue for its own sake” (The Idea: 84). As noted earlier, he made a clear distinction between what he called “Useful knowledge” and “Liberal knowledge. He explained: “You see, then, here are two methods of Education; the end of one is to be philosophical, of the other to be mechanical; the one rises towards general ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and external” (The Idea: 85). For Newman, “mechanical” training programs – that is, courses designed to produce professionally or technically qualified graduates – were the very antithesis of what a university should be teaching. While Kant would have relegated such programmes to his “higher faculties”, Newman wanted them to play a minimal role on the margins (at best) of his university. His vision is most apparent today in the leading liberal arts and sciences colleges in the United States. When he speaks of “Liberal knowledge” Newman is referring to the narratives of the classical Western literary and philosophical canon, much of it originally passed on orally at first from antiquity, then in writing. In the medieval era

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University  39 they were copied fastidiously into folios (themselves often works of exquisite calligraphy) by monk-scholars when monasteries were at their height. As Ian Ker clarifies, Newman’s preferred curriculum was based on the “liberal arts of the medieval university which […] comprised grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics, which was subdivided into geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music” (2011: 22). This “Liberal knowledge”, then, must be at the heart of the university which Newman describes as: An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. […] [creating] a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes […] He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called “Liberal”. A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom (The Idea: 76) Meanwhile, the industrial revolution was under way in Britain accompanied by radically transformational ideas about evolution and science and demands for social justice and the equality of peoples (Black and Macraild, 2003). These developments evoked a negative reaction from nineteenth-century English Catholicism which was intellectually unprepared for them, so it retreated into medieval scholasticism with, as Brian Legg has pointed out: “a few modifications now known as Neo-Scholasticism” (2020: 211). This represented the most defensive and reactionary position that the Church could possibly have taken at the time (and in some quarters still takes today). But Newman was adamant that it was not the way forward. He was sure that retreating into scholastic dogmatism would hand over an easy victory to the secularists. He was highly critical of “… the resistance, made on the part of religious men, especially Catholics, to the separation of Secular Education from Religion” (The Idea: 53). His view was that: Instead of having recourse to the religious teaching of the Catholic Church, it has been the philosophy of the modern school to attempt to determine the doctrine’s Theology by means of Holy Scripture, or of ecclesiastical antiquity, or of physical phenomena. And the question arises, why, after all, should not such information, scriptural, historical, or physical, be used? and if used, why should they not lead to true results? (The Idea: 337) In this part of The Idea Newman is seeking to calm the Irish religious authorities – men who were adamant about their grizzled neo-scholasticism as the absolute truth – that a liberal university would not be hostile to the academic study of

40  John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University Catholicism (and, by logical extension, to other faiths). He was challenging them to be intellectually open to the kinds of critical interrogation that any system of knowledge should have to face in a “liberal” university because he was confident that his religious beliefs were eminently defensible – and convincing. He hoped to persuade the recalcitrant bishops to change their views, but he might just as well have been preaching to a brick wall.

Against a “defensive clerical Catholicism” Within Newman’s argument there is also a profound critique of clericalism in an age when clericalism was de rigueur in Catholic culture.3 Just as he felt about scholasticism, neo- or otherwise, Newman was convinced that clericalism was a debilitating hangover from the past; he was advocating a radical change. Historian John O’Malley notes that in Newman’s 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine he “put the problem of change on the theological stage to a degree unknown before (2008: 77). In effect, he was advocating a root and branch transformation in the Church’s clericalist culture. In doing so, he set in motion some far-reaching ideas that have woven a persistent if perilous course into present-day Catholic ecclesiology and theology. This aspect of his thinking led to him being dubbed “the absent father of Vatican II” in the 1960s. As Ker concludes: “There can be no question but that Newman would have strongly supported the reformist party at Vatican II” (2016: 159). His criticism of the stultifying consequences of clericalism still echoes in more thoughtful quarters of the Church today. For example, Pope Francis appeared to be channelling Newman when he stated that those in the grip of clericalism “feel they are superior, they are far from the people; they have no time to hear the poor, the suffering, prisoners, the sick” (Brockhaus, 2016). Nonetheless, throughout Newman’s “Discourses”, there is a discernible tension between his confessional allegiance to the Catholic Church on the one hand, and his intellectual commitment to his philosophy of liberal education, on the other. The same tension can be found in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) in which he defends himself against claims by his antagonist Charles Kingsley that his religious stances, both before and after his conversion to Catholicism, constituted a subterfuge. Beneath a mild exterior, a restless intellect and tendency to scepticism were engaged in a struggle with Newman’s religious faith, responding to (or reacting against) what Daniel Brown describes as “the sense of uncertainty and upheaval felt during the latter half of the nineteenth century when the dominant metaphysical tradition of European thought was giving way to our own age in which science is regarded as the paradigmatic form of knowledge” (1997: 1). Outwardly, Newman appears confident that adopting a sceptical approach to one’s most cherished beliefs can enrich rather than negate them. But the fact remains that his view of the Church in the early years of his conversion was rather too optimistic and even submissive. However, his attitude changed over time as he began to see more clearly the darker sides of clerical authority and institutional distortion of what he discerned to be the sacred core of the Christian message.

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University  41 Therefore, Newman’s Catholicism must not be held against him when assessing what he was attempting to achieve in a university exclusively focused on “Liberal knowledge”. He stands out as a fierce critic of the ossified scholasticism and constipated clericalism that characterized the nineteenth-century Catholic Church and the way it sought to educate its followers, especially in its seminaries and universities across Europe. But The Idea has always attracted critics, particularly in recent times. The next chapter focuses on Stefan Collini’s notable criticism of Newman’s idea of a university.

Notes 1. The book was originally titled Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin. This chapter and the next cite The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin in Occasional Lectures and Essays addressed to the Members of the Catholic University, edited and with an introduction and notes by Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982). Based on the 1899 impression of the book, the 1982 text is regarded as the definitive version of The Idea of a University. 2. Hence, the Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no such thing as society” is not only anti-Burkean but also egregiously anti-conservative. See “Margaret Thatcher: A Life in Quotes,” The Guardian, 8 April 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-quotes. 3. Clericalism is the view that bishops and priests are spiritually and temporally superior – “closer to God” – than mere lay people (Senz, 2018).

References Arnold, M. (1885), Discourses in America (London: Macmillan). Black, J. and Macraild, D. (2003), Nineteenth Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Bourke, R. (2018), “What is conservatism? History, ideology and party,” European Journal of Political Theory, 17 (4): 449–475. Brew, A. (2006), Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Brockhaus, H. (2016), “In stressing error of clericalism, Francis calls for humble priests,” Catholic News Agency: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/in-stressing-errorof-clericalism-francis-calls-for-humble-priests-32780 (accessed 12 June 2020). Brockliss, L. (2016), The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Brown, D. (1997), Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon). Chadwick, O. (1992), The Spirit of the Oxford Movement: Tractarian Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Coady, T. and Miller, S. (1993), “Australian higher education and the relevance of Newman,” Australian Universities Review, 36 (2): 40–44. Cornwell, J. (2010), Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum). Dalrymple, W. (2019), The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury). Evans, D. (2008), “The conflict of the faculties and the knowledge industry: Kant’s diagnosis, in his time and ours,” Philosophy, 83 (4): 483–495.

42  John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University Fraser, H. (1986), Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hagenauer, G. and Volet, S. (2014), “Teacher-student relationships at university: An important yet under-researched field,” Oxford Review of Education, 40 (3): 370–388. Kant, I. (1794), The Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Theology Faculty, available online at: http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEKantConflictFacNarrow.pdf (accessed 3 March 2020). Karagiannis, S. (2009), “The conflict between science research and teaching in higher education: An academic’s perspective,” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 21 (1): 75–83. Ker, I. (1988), John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press). Ker, I. (2011), “Newman’s idea of a university and its relevance in the 21st century,” Australian eJournal of Theology, 18 (1): 19–31, available at: https://www.unav.edu/ documents/8871060/8964433/Newman%27s+Idea+of+a+university+and+its+ Relevance+for+the+21+st+Century.pdf/bc19eafd-509b-4813-9f1d-f233184371af (accessed 12 July 2020). Ker, I. (2016), Newman and Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lang, U. (2011), “Newman and the fathers of the church,” New Blackfriars, 92 (1038): 144–156. Legg, B. (2020), “Seeking the whole person approach to education: Revisiting nineteenth century neo-scholasticism,” Christian Higher Education, 19 (3): 210–220. Müller, J. (2006), “Comprehending conservatism: A new framework for analysis,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 11 (3): 359–365. O’Brien, C. (1992), The Great Melody. A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). O’Malley, J. (2008), What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Oakeshott, M. (1991), Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press). Patience, A. (2008), “The art of loving in the classroom: A defense of affective pedagogy,” Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 33 (2): 55–67. Sen, A. (2021), Home in the World: A Memoir (London: Allen Lane). Senz, N. (2018), ‘What is clericalism?’ Aleteia, 23 August: https://aleteia.org/2018/08/ 23/what-is-clericalism/ (accessed 9 October 2020). Smith, A. (2001 edition), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Electronic Books Co). Strachey, L. (2012 edition), Eminent Victorians (Dumfries: Anodos Books).

4

Newman’s Idea Contra and Pro

Contra Newman Alasdair MacIntyre has wittily summarized growing discontent with John Henry Newman’s Idea: “To criticise contemporary universities from Newman’s standpoint would be, on [his critics’] view, like blaming a jet engine for not having the excellences of a windmill” (2009a: 347). However, windmills are not to be sniffed at. Their “excellences” as the precursors of the wind turbines that are generating much of today’s clean energy should not be over-looked. Furthermore, the discipline of the history of ideas teaches us old ideas, like old technologies, can be the precursors of new ones. Nonetheless, calls for relegating The Idea to a footnote in the history of modern universities have been steadily increasing. In 1990, for example, J.M. Roberts stated: “As I reread the Idea it seemed to me that its doctrines were narrow, exaggerated, and likely to be sterile as sources of institutional reform” (1990: 219). Subsequently, Bill Readings declared: “[F]or Newman the teaching of secular culture is a palliative preparation for a sinful world, a world whose redemption is a matter of religious faith rather than scientific knowledge” (1996: 90). Sheldon Rothblatt warned of Newman’s “dark and dangerous side” (1997: 42). The former President of the University of Chicago, Hannah Holburn Gray, stated: It is quite surprising to find how often Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University is still invoked in writing about higher education. The belief that such an idea should guide the forms and reforms of universities remains seductive even as it would appear challenged by the reality of today’s intensely multitasking university (2012: 31) The context in which these criticisms of Newman have arisen is relevant. In recent years higher education institutions in the advanced Western economies have fallen out of favour with governments, the media, and with the general public (Côté and Allahar, 2011). They are accused of being a gratuitous burden on taxpayers. Governments and employers claim that they are failing to prepare graduates who are “work-ready”. Some argue that they are privileged DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-4

44  Newman’s Idea institutions for the already privileged (Hamilton and Nielson, 2021). Reports show that students are dissatisfied with their university experiences and highlight a worrying power imbalance between staff and students (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2010: ch. 4). Teaching standards, it is claimed, are in decline (Connell, 2019). While some piecemeal reforms have been implemented in recent years, the real problems universities now face are not being addressed. These include unacceptably high student/staff ratios; serious imbalances between research and teaching; and demands by fiscal pragmatists that higher education cut its cloth to suit the short-term demands of labour markets.1

Collini’s critique of The Idea In two important books – What Are Universities For? (2012) and Speaking of Universities (2018) – Professor Stefan Collini 2 provides a wide-ranging survey of literature on the plight of universities today. He asks: How did the pressures universities now face come about? In Chapter 3 of his 2012 book, he focuses on Newman’s The Idea. He is especially critical of Newman’s belief that the university must be an institution that is necessarily remote from politics, economics, and everyday life. Collini states: “[I]t is very far from obvious how or why Newman’s mannered and deliberately archaic treatise has achieved and preserved [its] status, and it is equally unclear how it speaks to our present condition” (2012: 41). While noting that he “would not want to give the impression that [he is] deaf to [The Idea’s] charms or amazed that it has obtained so many admirers in later generations” (2012: 45), Collini concludes: “[W]e should not delude ourselves into thinking that The Idea of a University describes an institution that at all closely resembles the universities we have today or that it provides us with arguments which are likely to be readily effective in their defence” (2012: 59). There are four immediate areas where Collini’s interrogation of The Idea is open to challenge. First, Newman’s “mannered” prose style is not to Collini’s taste. He is not alone. As Hilary Fraser observes in her book English Prose of the Nineteenth Century: When we think of nineteenth-century non-fiction prose it is probably the row upon row of heavy volumes that make up the collected works of writers such as Coleridge, Ruskin, Carlyle, Newman and Matthew Arnold, or of the multi-volume lives and letters of Victorian worthies […] The overwhelming impression most people have of the prose of the [nineteenth] century is that it was weighty and expansive (2017: 3) On the other hand, the late Edward Said felt that other than Jonathan Swift, “[Newman is] the greatest of English prose stylists” (2012: 400). He, too, is not alone. It is true that style is a matter of personal taste, but not an entirely insignificant element in Collini’s case against Newman and should not rest on

Newman’s Idea 45 the fact that the latter’s elliptical nineteenth-century prose style is unlike that of a plain-speaking twenty-first century Cambridge don. Secondly, and more substantially, Collini is concerned that the book’s unapologetically Catholic tone means that Newman is “justifying a Catholic institution to Catholics, and not only is the truth of the Catholic religion an unquestioned dictum, but the centrality of theology and correct religious doctrine to the institution he was directing is emphatically insisted upon”. Collini highlights two quotations from Newman: “Religious truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge”; and “Right Reason, that is Reason rightly exercised, leads the mind to the Catholic faith”. Collini remarks: “The strict implication of such claims might be that only in a Catholic university constituted along these lines could such general knowledge be properly cultivated”. Leaving himself open to the charge that he is quoting Newman out of context, Collini concludes that The Idea is advocating an institution whose curricula must include faith-based religious dogmas which in today’s understanding of what a liberal university is all about would be anything but “liberal” (Newman quoted in Collini, 2012: 44). It is important to remember that Newman was obliged to go to great lengths to make his vision of a liberal university as credible as possible to bishops who had been schooled in a particularly narrow scholasticism and who were the very personification of nineteenth-century Irish Catholic clericalism. They were the critical (in every sense) members of his audience, and Newman was acutely aware that he was reliant on their support to resource the university he was trying to bring into being. This led him to elaborate his argument cautiously, patiently, and politely. In his “Discourses” he was alluding – sometimes with extravagant tact – to ideas that transcended Catholic idioms and understandings of his time. So was he insisting on placing Catholic dogma at the centre of his university idea? It was certainly the case that in the course of his lectures, Newman proposed that “University Teaching without Theology is simply un-philosophical” The Idea: 31–2). This view, in fact, was unexceptional among leading thinkers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, not a few leading Enlightenment thinkers were advocates of reforms of religious institutions and ways of rationalizing conventional ethics grounded in religious thought (Barnett, 2004). Newman was certainly one of them. He pointed to what ought to be obvious, even to the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist, that historical Christian influences have been crucially influential in the making of the modern mind. This is the reasoning behind Tom Holland’s quest to explain “what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain – for good and ill – thoroughly Christian?” (2019: xxix). It also reflects what the philosopher Charles Taylor points to as Christianity’s “affirmation of the value of life, of succouring life and sustaining it, healing and feeding” (2007: 369–70). Holland’s historiography resonates with Newman’s advocacy for a “Theology” curriculum in the university; Taylor’s observation confirms it.

46  Newman’s Idea The point that Newman was making was not that his “Theology” should be a confessional curriculum presuming the acceptance of any particular religious dogma, although he expected the confessional aspect of religious belief to be treated respectfully. Commenting on Newman’s approach, Ker notes: “[H]e allows that the study of theology may form part of a liberal education provided it rises above the level of knowledge in the sense of mere information needed for preaching or catechists” (2011: 22). Or as MacIntyre explained: “The theology of which Newman spoke was not specifically Catholic theology, but a theology shared with all theists” (2009b: 356). Unpalatable though it may be for some people in universities today, the fact is that the modern world – and this includes modern universities, public and private – has never been without theists in its midst. This is as true now as it has been down the ages. Alvin Plantinga and Tooley have shown that there are “three fundamental perspectives or ways of thinking about what the world is like”: theism, philosophical naturalism (or positivism), and what he calls “creative anti-realism” (or humanism) (2008: 14–5). Whatever contemporary atheists (ancient and modern), rationalists, and humanists believe (and their beliefs rest upon assumptions as metaphysical as any other belief system), it would be an act of supreme arrogance, of the same order that drives the caged minds of religious fundamentalists, to dismiss all theism as intellectually inconsequential. What Newman was pointing out was that Christianity and the theism it implies – including Catholicism in particular – should not be ignored in any truly scholarly interrogation of the cultural history of the Western world. To ignore this fact (whether out of prejudice or ignorance) would be deeply unscholarly, even anti-intellectual. He certainly has a point. Collini’s critique implies that Newman’s “Theology” has been negated by the modern West’s positivist (empiricist or physicalist) intellectual culture. As historian of science Jon Agar notes, this assumes the epistemological superiority of the empirical sciences, placing “physics as the most ‘fundamental’ of the sciences, followed by chemistry, biology and the human sciences” (2012: 466). Physics is seen as leading the way to solving nearly all – if not all ultimately – of the questions we can ask about the universe and our place in it. In his book The Theory of Everything, the positivist fundamentalist Stephen Hawking argues that all the remarkable advances in modern theory-making that characterize the scientific knowledge hierarchy that Agar describes mean that “we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature” (1996: 105). This, he concludes, “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason. For then we would know the mind of God” (1996: 116). The unexamined metaphysics behind this conclusion is mind-boggling. From a positivist standpoint, theology, however defined and defended, is plainly not a positivist discipline and therefore should be kept out of universities. As MacIntyre observed: “We might be tempted to say that, for the vast majority of our academic contemporaries, it is their belief that universities are secular institutions that leads them to reject Newman’s thesis about the place of theology in the curriculum” (2009a: 349). Theology, in short, is unapologetically metaphysical; it is the bane of positivism. For, as Sir Karl Popper wrote in his famous

Newman’s Idea 47 account of The Logic of Scientific Discovery: “Positivists […] believe they have to discover a difference between empirical science on the one hand and metaphysics on the other. They are constantly trying to prove that metaphysics by its very nature is nothing but nonsensical twaddle” (1965: 35). Moreover, as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained: “[P]ositivism constantly directs its criticisms against […] religious interpretations of the world […] and tries to work out an empirical position entirely free of metaphysical assumptions” (1972: 19). How successful has the positivist project been in its belief (which has become an entrenched dogma) that it has transcended metaphysics? In fact it is not as epistemologically innocent as many of its protagonists would like to believe. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn pointed out: Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time (1970: 4) He later noted that: “[Normal science] is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology” (1970: 166). The point is that by prohibiting (Kolakowski’s word for it) all knowledge communities (or belief systems) that do not conform to the methods of empirical inquiry, positivism is taking as gigantic an epistemological leap of faith as do all other knowledge systems claiming to hold the key to knowing everything knowable, religious or otherwise. As MacIntyre explains: It is just because any conception of the ultimate disunity of the sciences is so much at odds with the kind of understanding that we take the sciences to provide that so many philosophers, […] taking the truth of atheism for granted, have insisted on the truth of some version of naturalism, according to which the fundamental and unifying science is physics and the truths discovered by the other sciences are what they are only because the truths of physics are what they are. […] No one has yet shown or even come near to showing that […] the relationships of the other sciences to physics are what the naturalists take them to be. Naturalism is, therefore, as clear-sighted naturalists sometimes admit, a matter of dogmatic faith. But in admitting this they confirm Newman’s contention that unbelief requires faith just as much as belief in God does (2009b: 147; italics added) Thirdly, Collini overlooks Newman’s radical opposition to the suffocating clericalism that hung like a murdered albatross around the neck of nineteenth-century Catholicism. As noted earlier, this set him apart from the Irish Catholic bishops who were steeped in their provincial clericalist certainties. Newman’s advocacy of

48  Newman’s Idea the openly post-scholastic Catholicism he was proposing in The Idea, then, has to be understood as a form of strategic persuasion (or even diplomatic seduction) rather than an exercise in promoting Catholic dogma. Nonetheless, the bishops rejected what they viewed as Newman’s extremist liberal ideas and sent him packing back to Birmingham. His proposals were mothballed and the institution he had tried to establish was eventually absorbed into the National University of Ireland which later became University College Dublin (Barr, 2001). Fourthly, it needs to be kept in mind that, as a convert to Catholicism, Newman was considered suspect by not a few influential “cradle Catholics” (those born into Catholic families) at the time, especially among the hierarchy. The convert was always under pressure to prove his orthodoxy. Yet Newman was unswayed by attempts to ensure he was “measuring up”, as illustrated by his adherence to the doctrine of the primacy of individual conscience. The doctrine states that an individual’s heart-felt belief about what is right or wrong takes precedence over the claims of any external authority, including the Church. He famously once stated: “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts […] I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still to Conscience first, and the Pope afterwards” (Newman quoted in Cornwell, 2010: 200). Newman’s autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) highlights the tension in his thinking between the authority of the Church and the importance of individual conscience. This is what motivated his outspoken response to the doctrine of papal infallibility proclaimed by the ultra-montane Pope Pius IX at the first Vatican Council in 1868. The doctrine states: The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when, exercising the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised to him in Saint Peter, is possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His church to be endowed and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church (Denzinger and Schönmetzer, 1997: 364) Newman’s contemporary (also a convert to Catholicism) Archbishop Manning, a man every bit as ultra-montane as Pius IX, publicly pressured Newman to accede to the doctrine. As Professor von Arx explains: “there were deep and conscious disagreements between the two men […] [which came to a head over the issue of papal infallibility” (2019: 108). A deeply concerned Newman argued: It is a new and most serious precedent in the Church that a dogma […] should be passed without definite and urgent cause. This to my mind is the serious part of the matter. You put enormous power into the hands of one man, without check, and at the very time, by your act, you declare that he may use it without special occasion (Newman quoted in Ker, 1988: 656)

Newman’s Idea 49 We can conclude that Collini’s critique of Newman is damaged by its insensitivity to the nineteenth-century theological and ecclesiastical culture in which Newman was thinking and writing. He underestimates the intellectual boundaries within which Newman was forming The Idea. Yet, in judging Newman from a characteristically twenty-first century viewpoint, there is an ambiguity running through Collini’s critique. In Speaking of Universities, Collini notes that, “the ‘ideal’ and the ‘instrumental’ have been the two main rival understandings of universities over at least the past couple of centuries” (2018: 61). By evoking “ideal”, he is echoing (in a qualified way, of course) Newman’s belief that the university is a place where knowledge is not to be pursued for short-term commercial or strategic purposes, whether defined by government or private sector interests (or what Adam Smith derided as “extraneous jurisdictions”). By “instrumental” Collini is alluding to precisely those same “extraneous jurisdictions” today that regard universities as utilities whose sole purpose is to address short-term political and commercial goals. His valid criticism of the “instrumental” that has overtaken the “ideal” in the minds of policymakers and senior managers in public universities today contains echoes of Newman’s advocacy of “Liberal knowledge” as a defining feature of a modern university. That said, it is important to note that by critically analysing The Idea in the manner in which he has, Professor Collini provides a useful corrective to those who cite Newman selectively in defence of their ideal of a university that does not, and cannot, exist today. Many of those who quote selectively from The Idea complain loudly about how universities are being forced to abandon time-honoured traditions in order to comply with the harsh realities of a rapidly changing global economic order – an order that Newman could never possibly have anticipated. Collini correctly judges their complaints to be unbalanced and unrealistic. Even so, it is important not to throw Newman’s baby out with the bath water. Collin’s distaste for the religiosity of The Idea should not be the end of the argument. As noted in the conclusion to this chapter, The Idea still contains creative ideas and proposals that can be deployed to defend and reform the contemporary public university. Collini is right to note that in the way that he presented it, Newman’s idea of a university can never be how public universities are conducted today. Nor should they be. But that doesn’t mean that Newman’s nineteenth-century thoughts are irrelevant in defending and improving the public university in the twenty-first century.

Newman’s liberal legacy Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species was published in 1859, sparking a controversy between religious authorities on the one hand and evolutionary biologists like T.H. Huxley on the other (Jensen, 1993). In arguing that only curricula grounded in “Liberal knowledge” should be taught in his idea of a university, Newman appears to be open to accusations of constricting the curriculum to hegemonic narratives confected by a long line of dead white males. However, The Idea is more sophisticated than that. This becomes evident when

50  Newman’s Idea considering the views of some progressive philosophers of education over the years who, consciously or not, have elaborated on Newman’s “idea”. As Isaac Newton might have said, they stand on Newman’s giant shoulders. Here are some examples. During his inaugural address as Chancellor of the University of St. Andrews in 1867, the father of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, was on the same page as Kant and Newman when outlining his vision of a university: It is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. […] What professional men should carry away with them from an University is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct their use of their professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit (2009: 149) In 1917, in a lecture in the University of Munich (subsequently published as Science as a Vocation), the great German scholar Max Weber (1864–1920) expressed views closely aligned with those of Newman and Mill. He was stingingly critical of the utilitarianism infecting the German universities of his time: “Behind all the present discussions of the foundations of the educational system, the struggle of the ‘specialist type of man’ against the older type of ‘cultivated man’ is hidden at some decisive point”. “The fight”, he concluded, “intrudes into all intimate cultural questions” (1977: 243). He would have been disturbed by the growing number of extraneously imposed curricula and pressures on students to choose degree programmes narrowly focused on producing “job ready” graduates. A similar theme is evident in the thinking of the American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). In his influential 1918 book, The Higher Learning in America, Veblen complained: “A quest of knowledge has overtly been rated as meritorious, or even blameless, only in so far as it has appeared to serve the ends of one or another of the practical interests that have from time to time occupied men’s attention” (2015: 43). He is critical of what he describes as the “secularisation” of the management of America’s universities: “So that the discretionary control in matters of university policy now rests finally in the hands of businessmen” (2015: 8). He accuses “businessmen” of interfering “[…] with the academic management in matters that are not of the nature of business, and that lie outside their competence and outside the range of their habitual interest” (2015: 80). He concludes: “The final discretion in the affairs of the seats of learning is entrusted to men who have proved their capacity for work that has nothing in common with the higher learning” (2015: 82).

Newman’s Idea 51 Britain’s Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) has similar views to Newman when noting that “[S]ome of the worst features of the modern world could be improved by a less ruthless pursuit of mere professional competence” (2004: 23). Newman and Russell would have agreed that cultivating in students’ minds the habits of disinterested (not uninterested), critical thought and encouraging them to be imaginative and creative should be the priority of a sound university education. The conservative English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) similarly argued that by prioritising what he described as “the voice of liberal learning” in their curricula, schools and universities can contribute to humanity’s flourishing. He explained in language that is redolent of Newman’s defence of “Liberal knowledge”: As it emerged in Western Europe, liberal learning was understood to be a concern to explore the invitations of the culture of antiquity, to hold before learners the mirror of this culture so that, seeing themselves reflected in it, they might extend the range and the depth of their understanding of themselves (1989: 36) Like Newman, Oakeshott was critical of the ways in which universities were increasingly focused on providing undergraduates with training programmes for narrowly conceived “professions”, rather than educating them. In her 1997 book, Cultivating Humanity, the American liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum echoes the core of Newman’s defence of “Liberal knowledge” and brings it into the contemporary world (1997; see also Nussbaum, 2006). Surveying some innovative humanities and social sciences interdisciplinary curricula in several American liberal arts colleges and universities, she argues that these curricula provide students with valuable insights into their own cultures and into other cultures. She writes: People from diverse backgrounds sometimes have difficulty recognizing one another as fellow citizens in the community of reason. This is so, frequently, because actions and motives require, and do not always receive, a patient effort of interpretation. […] Education at all ages should cultivate the capacity for such interpreting. […] This education must be […] one that acquaints students with some fundamentals about the histories and cultures of different groups [including] the major religious and cultural groups of each part of the world, and also ethnic and racial, social, and sexual minorities within their own nation (1997: 63, 68) While Newman’s nineteenth-century provincialism would have been puzzled by Nussbaum’s advocacy of a “multicultural education”, her argument is in effect a logical extension of Newman’s defence of the teaching of “Liberal knowledge”. In Not for Profit, she shows how well-designed liberal studies

52  Newman’s Idea curricula are critical, not simply for the value inherent in those curricula themselves (which is considerable, for the very reasons Newman had discussed in The Idea), but also for the fact that they “[…] enable democracies to deal responsibly with the problems we currently face as members of an interdependent world”. Nussbaum concludes that higher education institutions “cannot convey the type of learning that produces global citizens unless they have a liberal arts structure: that is, a set of general education courses for all students outside the requirements of the major subject” (2010: 10 and 93). Newman’s “idea” is thus lifted out of inward-looking mid-nineteenth-century Dublin and Oxford into the light of a twenty-first century globalizing world. The liberal reforms Nussbaum has been advocating over recent decades have built on Newman’s advocacy of “Liberal knowledge”. In contemporary terms Newman could be dismissed as a male chauvinist; but in that respect he was culturally beholden to his times. On the other hand, through Professor Nussbaum’s writings, his nuanced liberalism lives on.

Conclusion Over recent decades a chorus of complaints has arisen about how universities are being transformed into appendages of various versions of the febrile neoliberalism presently gripping the global economy. As Chiara Cordelli warns: As an ideology, neoliberalism promises a free world where individuals, all entrepreneurs of their own lives, can fully realise and express their independent selves through free and competitive markets, organised but not directed by smaller, lighter and more efficient government. As a practice of governance, however, what neoliberalism delivers is exactly the opposite: a privatized government that is often bigger, if somewhat invisible […] [R] ather than individual independence, the result is the creation of a new system of institutionalized dependence (2020: 298–9) The dramatic shift in the perceived purpose of public universities that has accompanied the neoliberal era of “reform” means that many of them are now conducted as businesses; they ape commercial enterprises. In addition to the “dumbing down” of the public university’s educational purposes, a particularly negative consequence of this shift has been its aggravation of socio-economic inequalities. As the economist Thomas Picketty (2020: 540) has pointed out: [T]hroughout the world one finds a wide gap between official rhetoric about equality of opportunity, the “meritocratic” ideal, and […] the reality of unequal access to education for different social groups. No country is in a position to give lessons on the subject. Indeed, the advent of the [present]

Newman’s Idea 53 era of higher education has posed a structural challenge to the very idea of educational equality everywhere (2020: 540; italics added) Among many other negative consequences, the resulting neoliberal managerialization of public universities has created an unholy scramble for international “brand” kudos by institutions competing for recognition in the top 100 universities in one or more of various global university ranking systems – for example, the Times Higher Education Index, the QS World University Rankings, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (the Shanghai World Rankings). It has been well established by experts that there are deep-seated methodological and conceptual problems that render these rankings otiose (see, for example, Pavel, 2015). If you want to know what “fake news” really looks like, have a look at international university rankings systems. As Collini notes: “Where their supposed findings are convenient, these are readily cited for publicity and propaganda purposes, yet the truth is they are practically worthless” (2012: 17). The President (Vice Chancellor) of the Australian National University has been reported as stating that “the companies behind global rankings arbitrarily chose to reward science and engineering but overlook teaching quality, [and] humanities research […] It’s a shame they really aren’t very good” (Schmidt quoted in Baler, 2020). It is surely ironic – if not perverse – that what are often elaborately resourced PR departments in today’s universities persist in loudly advertising their placings on various league tables, even though their academic colleagues could convincingly explain to them how those tables are mostly bogus. This highlights the egregious divide between managers in universities today and the scholars they are supposedly supporting. We are in danger of losing a vital element of what a first-class university can be if we ignore Newman’s “idea”, permitting a neoliberal-driven managerialism to take over. Adapt to present realities they must, but universities in the past have resisted pressures that could have destroyed their fundamental character. Newman’s “Discourses” are a constant reminder that, in the first instance, educating must be their pre-eminent purpose, balancing this against all the other demands crowding in upon it. Aristotle’s famous distinction between techne and episteme (between practice and theory) reminds us that that an over-reliance on one over the other will lead us nowhere. Failure to understand, or cynically to dismiss, this fundamental fact in the philosophy of education could mean that the end is nigh for the public university. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake must be as highly valued as its professional training functions. Meanwhile, as Prussia led the way towards the unification of the German states in the nineteenth century, some leading intellectuals began actively to support major reforms to the Prussian higher education system. One figure stands out in this remarkable development: Wilhelm von Humboldt. As Thorsten Nybom points out: “Humboldt was probably the very first person to realize the full importance of the university and of science in the modern world and for the development of the emerging industrialized nation state” (2003: 153).

54  Newman’s Idea

Notes 1. There is a large and growing literature documenting the issues highlighted here. See, for example: Marginson and Considine (2000); Sawer et al. (2009) 10–28; Connell (2019); Douglas et al. (2009); Jones and Cunliffe (2020); Wildavsky (2010). Collini (2012) and Collini (2018) are in the vanguard of this literature. 2. Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature in the University of Cambridge.

References Agar, J. (2012), Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press). Barnett, S. (2004), The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Barr, C. (2001), “The failure of Newman’s Catholic university of Ireland,” Archivium Hibernicum, 55: 126–139. Collini, S. (2012), What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin). Collini, S. (2018), Speaking of Universities (London: Verso). Connell, R. (2019), The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (London: Zed Books). Cordelli, C. (2020), The Privatized State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Cornwell, J. (2010), Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum). Côté, J. and Allahar, A. (2011), Lowering Higher Education (Toronto, ONT: University of Toronto Press). Denzinger, H. and Schönmetzer, A. (1997), Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (Freiburg: Herder). Douglas, J. et al. (eds.) (2009), Globalization’s Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World (Berkeley, CA: Berkley Public Policy Press). Fraser, H. (2017), English Prose of the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge). Gray, H. (2012), Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Hamilton, L. and Nielson, K. (2021), Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Hawking, S. (1996), The Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe (Beverley Halls, CA: Phoenix Books). Holland, T. (2019), Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little Brown). Jensen, J. (1993), “Thomas Henry Huxley’s address at the opening of Johns Hopkins University,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 47 (2): 257–269. Jones, L. and Cunliffe, P. (2020), Saving Britain’s Universities (London: CIEO). Ker, I. (1988), John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press). Ker, I. (2011), “Newman’s idea of a university and its relevance in the 21st century,” Australian eJournal of Theology, 18 (1): 19–31, available at: https://www.unav.edu/ documents/8871060/8964433/Newman%27s+Idea+of+a+university+and+its+ Relevance+for+the+21+st+Century.pdf/bc19eafd-509b-4813-9f1d-f233184371af (accessed 12 July 2020). Kolakowski, L. (1972), Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle (Harmondsworth: Pelican). Kuhn, T. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Newman’s Idea 55 MacIntyre, A. (2009a), “The very idea of a university,” British Journal of Educational Studies, 57 (4): 347–362. MacIntyre, A. (2009b), God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward). Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (2000), The Enterprise University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mill, J. (2009), “Inaugural address delivered to the university of St. Andrews (1867),” in O’Hear, A. and Sidwell, M. (eds.), The School of Freedom: A Liberal Education from Plato to the Present Day (Exeter UK: Imprint Academic): 149–156. Nussbaum, M. (1997), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Nussbaum, M. (2006), “In defence of global liberalism,” Development and Change, 37 (6): 1313–1328. Nussbaum, M. (2010), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Nybom, T. (2003), “The Humboldt Legacy: Reflections on the past, present, and future of the European university,” Higher Education Policy, 16: 141–159. Oakeshott, M. (1989), The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Pavel, A. (2015), ‘Global ratings–A comparative analysis’, Procedia Economics and Finance, 26: 54–63. Picketty, T. (2020), Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Plantinga, A. and Tooley, M. (2008), Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell). Popper, K. (1965), The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson). Readings, B. (1996), The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Roberts, J. (1990), “The idea of a university revisited,” in Ker, I. and Hill, A. (eds.), Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon): 193–246. Rothblatt, S. (1997), “Clark Kerr: Two voices,” in Rothblatt, S. (ed.), The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 1–42. Russell, B. (2004), In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London: Routledge). Said, E. (2012), Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sawer, K. et al. (2009), “Decline in Academe,” International Journal for Educational Integrity, 5, no. 2: 10–28. Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2010), Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Veblen, T. (2015), The Higher Learning in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Von Arx, J. (2019), “Two cardinals: Conflict and controversy in the Victorian Catholic Church,” Newman Studies Journal, 16 (1): 99–112. Weber, M. (1977), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited with an introduction by Gerth, H.H. and Wright Mills, C. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Wildavsky, B. (2010), The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

5

Wilhelm von Humboldt Education reformer

Introduction As Prussia was coming to grips with its defeat by Napoléon’s army in 1806, members of an emerging generation of leaders were calling for an end to the state’s lingering feudalism. They were especially critical of the feeble attempts by the king and his officials to curb the ill-treatment of the Prussian people by marauding French troops. Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt was among those urging the king to embrace a comprehensive reform programme. Humboldt’s educational philosophy, which emphasized the major contribution that language in all its mysteries and complexities plays in informing human consciousness, contains relevant lessons for today’s public schools and universities.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, the person Following an impressive career in the Prussian civil service, Humboldt established a reputation for himself as a renowned scholar. His empirical and theoretical studies in linguistics were debated within the leading academies in late-nineteenth century Europe and America. Many scholars in linguistics today acknowledge him as a pioneer in their discipline. John Joseph, for example, points out that Noam Chomsky has been deeply influenced by Humboldt’s “conception of a language as a potential and a process, rather than a product, a store of words; and he took inspiration from Humboldt’s recognition of how a language uses finite means to infinite ends” (Joseph, 2017: 15; see also Chomsky, 1965, 2007). The philosopher Charles Taylor also aligns himself with the linguistic theorizing of Humboldt, noting approvingly: “The concern of this tradition has always been to understand how language opens up new ways of articulating our grasp of reality” (2016: 174). Wilhelm von Humboldt was born in Potsdam on 22 June 1767. During his adolescence he developed a keen interest in ancient Greek history and philosophy. By age 18 he was well read in the Greek classics and had become fluent in German, Latin, French, and English. He never graduated formally from a university, but he read systematically across a wide range of literatures during his studies in Frankfurt and Göttingen, while maintaining close contact with leading German scholars of the day, a practice he maintained throughout his life. DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-5

Wilhelm von Humboldt 57 Following Napoléon’s occupation of much of Prussia in 1806, Humboldt was recruited by a weak and frightened King Friedrich Wilhelm III into what remained of Prussia’s demoralized civil service. He joined a small group of likeminded reformers charged by the king to develop a programme of reforms with the aim of restoring Prussia to its pre-eminence among the German states. With Napoléon’s defeat by the British, Russian, and Prussian armies at Waterloo in 1815, the time was ripe for implementing the political reforms championed by Humboldt and his fellow progressives. These included the abolition of serfdom, the granting of full citizenship to Prussia’s Jewish population, and curbing the entitlements of the aristocracy. Most importantly, Humboldt’s personal reform agenda proposed sweeping changes to the Prussian education system (Koch, 1978: ch. 10). It was in his capacity as Head of the Bureau of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction (1809–1810), a position the king insisted that he should take, that Wilhelm von Humboldt played a distinguished, even if shortlived career as a reforming civil servant. Humboldt’s enthusiasm for an ambitious agenda meant that he soon earned the distrust of reactionary peers at the king’s court. His plans for reform focused on removing many of the entitlements enjoyed by the aristocracy whom he regarded as a class that had “dug its own grave”, that was characterized by its “indolence, frivolous making of debts and selling of property, and deviation from the simplicity and clean habits of their forebears” (Richter, 1935: 362). Upon leaving the Bureau of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction, Humboldt was appointed Prussian ambassador, first to Vienna, then to London, and then back to Vienna. However, there was mounting concerns about Humboldt at foreign courts, especially in France and Austria, because of his strong denunciation of the ill-treatment of the Prussian people and their properties by French soldiers during Napoléon’s occupation. These concerns were conveyed to the easily alarmed king. In 1820, Humboldt’s enemies at the court eventually succeeded in having him ousted from government service, despite his acknowledged skills as a policy innovator and diplomat. Undeterred, Humboldt threw himself into a programme of research into the native languages of North America, the Basque language in Spain (which he established was unique among all the European languages), as well as Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese. He spent the next four decades immersed in the study of linguistics, only venturing out to manage his family’s business affairs, or to attend seminars in the University of Berlin. He died in 1835 and was buried in the grounds of his family estate at Tegel, south of Berlin.

Bildung The public policy reforms that Humboldt advocated were deeply influenced by his intellectual immersion in the German philosophical tradition of Bildung. Irene Heidt points out that: “Bildung […] is a German notion which […] has no direct translation into English” (2015: 3). Broadly, the Bildung tradition refers

58  Wilhelm von Humboldt to the cultivation of each person’s inherent potential to become fully rounded individual and worthy citizen. Unfortunately, the effect of Nazi anti-intellectualism in the first half of the twentieth century has limited the integration of the Bildung tradition into the broad church of modern liberal philosophizing. As a result, a great deal of latter-day liberal thinking is conducted within narrowly defined positivist-empiricist constraints, rendering it vulnerable to aberrant mutations like neoliberalism. Humboldt’s writings on linguistics highlight the crucial relationship he discerned between the conscious self and its sociocultural, economic, and historical context. As James Underhill points out: “Since it is only through language that concepts come into existence for consciousness, language comes to be conceived by Humboldt as the mind’s exploration of the conceptual freedom which it has itself created” (2009: 84). Humboldt saw humanity’s inimitable capacity for creating complex and nuanced languages as the key to understanding human consciousness. He wrote: The bringing-forth of language is an inner need of man, not merely as an external necessity for maintaining communal intercourse, but a thing embedded in its own nature, indispensable for the development of his mental powers and the attainment of a world-view, to which man can attain only by bringing his thinking to clarity and precision through communal thinking with others (1988 edition: 27)

Weltansicht Humboldt used the term Weltansicht – generally interpreted as “linguistic world view” – to draw attention to the ways in which the individual’s consciousness of the world is shaped by (or constrained by) the linguistic culture into which they are born. As Marko Pajevic explains: “Thinking language in the Humboldtian tradition considers language not only as communication but also as cognition, in its historical and subjective situation” (2017: 2). Weltansicht should not be confused with a related term, Weltanschauung – literally, “world view” – referring to understandings of the world shaped (or determined) by philosophical, religious, political, or ideological systems. Humboldt’s connecting of language consciousness and its historical-cultural context anticipated some important present-day debates among philosophers of mind and neurophysiologists. These debates focus on whether the mind is entirely reducible to electro-chemical interactions (or reactions) within the brain and central nervous system (Dennett, 1991). This is the monist position in this debate. Its limitations include the fact that it cannot comprehend mind as an “emergent property”, that it has agency above and beyond the physiology of the brain (Macdonald and Macdonald, 2010). As Niall McLaren has noted: “The notion that the mind is identical with the brain, or can be reduced to the brain, or will be explained away by the march of science […], in all its

Wilhelm von Humboldt 59 permutations and combinations, has gone nowhere” (2012: 7). Accordingly, McLaren invokes a dualist understanding of mind: If we define the mind as an emergent informational system in a “space” generated by the brain, one which is totally dependent on healthy brain function for its existence, but which can act back on the brain to achieve ends that would not otherwise occur, then we are defining a classical dualist system of mind and brain (2012: 17, 2021; Chalmers, 1997, 2019) That is, dualists maintain that the mind, so to speak, is a mind of its own; it is a disembodied entity attached to physiology of the brain but with degrees of freedom from that physiology. The debate (or rather the stand-off) between monists and dualists points to a vast philosophical chasm dividing those who regard human beings as little more than computers encased in skeletons and body tissue from those who see humans as more complex creatures. Given his understanding of the causal relationship between language and consciousness, Humboldt would very likely lean towards the dualist position in this still unresolved (and probably unresolvable) debate. As Professor Chalmers notes, the lack of progress in resolving the debate “leaves the question of conscious experience untouched” (1997: 25). Arguably, the closest English liberalism comes to Humboldt’s rich and complex synthesis of psychology and sociology is to be found in John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty, in which he distinguishes between “self-regarding actions” and “other-regarding actions” (2006 edition). For Mill, self-regarding actions are nearly always the business of the individual performing them, even if those actions might appear repugnant to others. Constraints on self-regarding actions (that is, on the individual’s liberty), Mill argued, are only justifiable when those actions impinge on the liberties of other individuals. Unlike the theory of Bildung, English liberalism is less preoccupied with the sources of the individual’s self-regarding actions – that is, of the origins of the self (or of mind or consciousness). It is also less preoccupied with the ethical dimensions of those actions, except to defend the liberty that must attend their performance. The philosopher Charles Taylor has aptly criticized this as “a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow sense, as well as a whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life” (1989: 3). In mainstream liberalism, the self-regarding or atomized individual stands alone, acting eccentrically maybe, even admirably possibly, but their self-regarding actions are stripped of explanations about the psychodynamics motivating them. In contrast, as Løvelie and Standish point out: “In the world of Bildung the self is never a lonely wanderer, but always already involved, such that the opposition between self and the world is not a contingent one but expresses a necessary relation” (2002: 319). Aspects of Mill’s personal life epitomized the tensions between rationalist or reductive accounts of human nature and consciousness and what are too glibly

60  Wilhelm von Humboldt dismissed as “romantic” accounts of what it means to be human. As Professor Taylor explains: Mill suffered deeply in his own life from the conflict between the demands of the most austere disengaged reason and the need for a richer sense of meaning, which he ultimately found through the Romantic poets. […] [H]e put together a synthesis which combines a disengaged, scientistic utilitarianism with an expressivist conception of human growth and fulfilment, and which owes a lot to German Romanticism, through Coleridge and Humboldt (1989: 458) It can be seen therefore that Humboldt’s approach challenges much orthodox thinking in mainstream liberalism today. His liberalism is unequivocally communitarian, certainly not libertarian. From his point of view, if a necessarily fine balance is going to be achieved between the individual and their historical-cultural circumstances, that individual must, on the one hand, be free from undue external constraints. On the other hand, they must have access to the necessary and sufficient conditions required to mature into their fullest self-understanding and inherent potential, intellectually, physically, and emotionally. Humboldt’s liberalism would not comprehend, for example, Isaiah Berlin’s sharp binary conceptualizing of “positive freedom” and “negative freedom” (1958). Berlin argued that “positive liberty” is characterized by things like a progressive (or redistributive) taxation policy, and a comprehensive social development policy, which may require imposing variable burdens on specific individuals or groups (for example, taxing the rich). Nonetheless such programmes should be of benefit to the whole of society (for example, through finely tuned welfare programmes and the provision of public services like the National Health Scheme in Britain). Berlin’s “negative liberty” (which he appears to prefer) entails freedom from constraints on the individual imposed by governments (for example, taxing the wealthy at higher rates, or the imposition of land and sales taxes and death duties), or through social sanctions, or through other means. Therein lies the downward spiral to neoliberalism today. Freedom, for Humboldt, is a unitary concept. The psychological depths of what Løvelie and Standish identified as the “necessary relation” between the self and its historical-cultural dynamics, may be nurtured, he argued, through the kind of education that he struggled so hard to implement in Prussia’s education system, focusing on nurturing each and every student’s self-development within their cultural history. For this to be achieved, individuals must be free from undue external constraints while simultaneously having access to all the resources necessary to achieve their potential as self-aware, socially focused individuals. Bildung’s valuing of the complexity, depth, and vulnerability of the individual’s psyche – in the very depths of their conscious being – and how this needed to be affirmed and nurtured, but definitely not patronized – was at the very heart of Humboldt’s

Wilhelm von Humboldt 61 educational philosophy. His biographer Paul Sweet believes that Humboldt’s interpretation of Bildung: reflected one dominant idea – namely, that at every stage of education the primary purpose should be to provide the conditions in which each student could develop to the maximum, and as harmoniously as possible, his various capacities, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic. The aim was to open up to every individual the opportunity for a humane existence. Every school from the most elementary to the university should be concerned above all with promoting the ideal of Bildung among students of all ages and all social origins (1984: 36) Sweet argues that this was the guiding principle of Humboldt’s ambitious reforming agenda for the Prussian education system. He was determined that all students, whatever their socio-economic backgrounds, should have equal and reasonable access to the resources necessary to enable them to become selfaware, constructive, and communal citizens. This was in stark contrast to what was actually happening in the Prussian education system at that time when, as Fritz Ringer notes, only a tiny minority of students “ever reached a fully accredited secondary school or university” (1967: 128). Humboldt was unequivocal about wanting this to be changed. He wrote: … this whole education system therefore rests on one and the same foundation. The commonest jobbing worker and the finest graduate must at the outset be given the same mental training, unless human dignity is to be disregarded in the former and the latter allowed to fall victim to unworthy sentimentality and chimera (1906: 278) Humboldt’s aim in interpretating the theory of Bildung was to see young Prussians become culturally literate, as well as literate in their own language, and numerate, while nurturing their growth as independent, self-motivating learners, freed from the dead hand of regressive traditions, from socio-economic deficiencies, and from censorious authorities. The Prussian education system was transformed to become fully secular and compulsory for three years. This was a controversial development for which he had to fight. He wanted elementary and secondary education to last longer than the three years that his opponents succeeded in forcing on him. Nonetheless, as Andy Green notes, his reform programme “represented, for its time, a unique achievement, […] its extensiveness and forms of organization elicited widespread admiration from western educational reformers” (2013: 123). Humboldt’s radicalism went further. He made clear in The Limits of State Action that the state must not be allowed to interfere in the education of its citizens and in their personal lives. He wrote: “[T]he State must wholly refrain from every attempt to operate directly or indirectly on the morals and character of the

62  Wilhelm von Humboldt nation. […] Everything calculated to promote such design, and particularly all special supervision of education, religion, supplementary laws etc. […] lies wholly outside the limits of its legitimate activity” (Humboldt, 1969: 81). He was particularly firm that there was to be no interference in the way schools were run, or what they taught. He insisted that these matters must remain the preserve of the teachers. However, he maintained that the state has an inviolable responsibility to resource the education system, ensuring that it would be free, secular, compulsory, and accessible to the entire school-age population. This presents us with a view of the state as an institution whose singularly most important responsibility is to enable its citizens, not subordinate them. Even in today’s so-called neoliberal economies this might be seen a radical, even dangerous, proposition. Humboldt’s education reforms policies were motivated by his unflinching opposition to the autocratic politics of the Prussia of his day. As noted previously, he despised the sense of entitlement that characterized the profligate peers at court who were the locus of Prussian political power under the king. They, in turn, derided him and his ideas. They indignantly demanded to know how they could possibly recruit labourers to work in their fields if the children of the peasantry were kept in school. The timorous king was easily converted to their point of view, driven by their sense of self-entitlement. At the same time, reactionary church authorities were up in arms at what they judged to be the errant school curricula that Humboldt wanted to introduce, on the grounds that such curricula would encourage students to be critical of their society and its governance. This, they argued, was a dangerously radical plan for cultivating a secular culture and society that would undermine ecclesiastical influence and power. As Heidt notes: “The conservative [church authorities], fearing anarchy, were convinced that the individual needed religious guidance, and thus act according to God’s will and not according to personal convictions. They emphasized obedience and the respect of authority” (2015: 6). And then there was opposition from another, perhaps unexpected quarter. Fearful that they would not be able to provide for their families, many peasant and working-class families were reluctant to allow their children to attend school because their labour was needed at home, or as agricultural labourers earning meagre but necessary wages on the estates of the nobility, or as exploited workers in the factories that were beginning to emerge amid the early industrialization of the Prussian economy. Despite the soundness of Humboldt’s education reforms they were successfully pared back by his opponents in the bureaucracy and at the court.

Humboldt’s relevance today Perhaps it was because his reforms were so fleeting, that today Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of education tends to be disregarded as lofty idealism, or it is accused of reflecting the haute bourgeois cultural values of nineteenthcentury Prussia. As Pajevic notes: “Even though his work is often referred to on a superficial level, the reception of his writings in the Anglophone world is at best partial and certainly problematic” (2017: 1). While there are a few scholars who

Wilhelm von Humboldt 63 disagree with the way his work is unjustifiably neglected, probably a majority of those are who are even vaguely aware of his contributions argue that Humboldt’s educational ideas have little if any relevance to the challenges facing educators in the twenty-first century. Therefore, Humboldt’s belief that the school room should be the crucible in which a liberal culture (Bildung) could be cultivated tends to be cynically passed over as unrealistic hocus pocus. This seeming disregard for Humboldt’s thought is echoed in the work of a number of contemporary sociologists of education. For example, in his muchcited work Class, Codes and Control, Basil Bernstein sought to investigate the contribution he believed (on pretty good evidence) that schools were making to the persistence of inequitable class structuring in contemporary capitalist societies like the United Kingdom. How is it, he asked, that there are such marked differences in educational attainment between middle-class and working-class children in British schools? His answer to this question focused on the negative impact of the code (or sub-text) embedded in the language of conventional school curricula: [T]he measurable interstatus differences in language facility result from entirely different modes of speech found within the middle class and the lower working class. It is proposed that the two distinct forms of language use arise because the organization of the two social strata is such that different emphases are placed on language potential. Once the emphasis or stress is placed, then the resulting forms of language-use progressively orient the speakers to distinct and different types of relationships to objects and persons, irrespective of the level of measured intelligence (Bernstein, 2003: 46; see also Littlejohn and Foss, 2005) According to Bernstein, this means that working-class children attending public schools1 are effectively being set up to perform poorly, or even fail, because of inappropriate language structured into school curricula. Diane Reay has since elaborated on why this may be the case: [T]he working classes both historically and currently are discursively constituted as an unknowing, uncritical, tasteless mass from which the middle classes draw their distinctions […] The lack of positive images of the working classes contributes to their being educationally disqualified and inadequately supported academically […] At the beginning of the twenty-first century we still do not have a valued place for the working classes (2001: 335) Professor Reay’s research draws on the experiences of young people “whose only educational option is low status, inner city comprehensives seen by themselves and by others as demonised and pathologized educational places” (2017: 75). She points to “the constant spectre of failure and the elusiveness of success that the [working classes] encounter daily in schooling. They also increasingly have to deal with a lack of recognition, both as successful learners and as valuable

64  Wilhelm von Humboldt individuals”. Moreover, this injustice is carried through into higher education. Professor Reay highlights how working-class students find transitioning to “elite higher education” is often problematic for them: “[T]hey remain on the edge of university social life, largely excluded from, in particular, high-status activities and societies” (2018: 537). Meanwhile, exclusive private schools that cater to the middle and upper classes can also be seen to restrict students’ consciousness within a particular class-oriented mindset. In The State in Capitalist Society, Ralph Miliband noted: “Today, as in the past, elite schools consciously seek to instil into their charges a conservative philosophy whose themes remain tradition, religion, nationalism, authority, hierarchy and an exceedingly narrow view of the meaning of democracy, not to speak of a marked hostility to socialist ideas and purposes” (1969: 240). This framing of an ideological school culture is a form of brainwashing which, at one extreme, can cause psychological damage. In her book Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy Shaverien describes a number of “learned behaviours and clusters of emotional states” demonstrated by some former students from “privileged” boarding schools that “revolve around problems with intimacy” (2015: 2). Richard Beard adds weight to this claim by describing his own experience in an exclusive prep school followed by his secondary schooling in an elite private school in England: We could be ourselves – homesick, vulnerable, lovelorn and frightened – or, with practice at putting up a front, we could pretend to embody the idealised national character. We could perform being loyal and robust and selfreliant. Wearing a commendable brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the “hardness of heart of the educated”, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class (2021a; see also Beard, 2021b) In a sociological study of six elite private schools in Melbourne, I.V. Hansen highlights the entrenched social divisiveness of those schools: Headmasters and staff alike claim that the schools are not socially divisive and tend to quote individual cases of boys who come from less privileged backgrounds. This tends to conform to a pattern. One day a headmaster with some pride introduced one such boy to me. […] The boy’s manner of speech and general lack of savoir faire marked him off immediately from his peers, and the cultural background of his home was deprived, to say the least. […] Admission of such a pupil is mere lip-service to the idea of recruitment from a broad base of society (1971: 257) Humboldt’s explication of his theory of Weltansicht, his interpretation of Bildung, and his reasoning in The Limits of State Action all constitute a formidable attack on precisely this kind of structured social injustice. His educational

Wilhelm von Humboldt 65 theory implies a flattening of class structures in order to liberate people from what Marx referred to as the “realm of necessity” into the “realm of freedom” (Klagge, 1986: 769–78). It is possible that Humboldt was naïve about the structural power of class differences. Transcending the “mind manacles” that class can, and usually does, impose on the individual is unfortunately a rare occurrence. As Hugh Stretton observed: “Most class conflict springs from material class interest, and education does as much to serve it as to create it” (1987: 173). Nonetheless, Humboldt firmly believed that, provided they have proper access to appropriate opportunities and resources, most if not all human individuals, whatever their station in life, will be capable of transcending the limitations of restrictive social structures and limiting language codes. He was aware that structured class inequalities not only impoverish the material lives of the poor, but also their consciousness of being – their minds. Moreover, he was all too familiar with the stifling constraints under which children of the privileged classes were being mis-educated to believe that their material entitlements and social status reflected the natural order of things. This has led to realist accusations that he ignored the fundamental egotism of human nature – our everyday selfishness, pettiness, and self-pitying – and that his recommended reforms are too fanciful and impractical. However, the practical possibilities within his ideals are lost to this kind of realist attack. It misses the point that without ideals the world is a grim place indeed. Every great reformer in history has started out with their ideals at the forefront of their reform endeavours. And even if they fail to achieve all that their ideals aim for, that doesn’t invalidate the ideals themselves. As previously noted, within Humboldt’s understanding of Bildung, there is a deep appreciation of the potential uniqueness of each individual person. Given the required socio-economic and educational environments, educating the uniqueness to its fullness will over-ride most individuals’ anti-social instincts, thus enabling them to contribute positively, creatively, and productively to the common good. John Stuart Mill was of a similar mind arguing that the role of education was “not simply to regulate [anti-social passions] but to extirpate, or rather […] to starve them by disuse” (1885: 56). Like Humboldt, Mill believed that, given the right educational circumstances, human nature generally could be nurtured in such a way to contribute to a just and creative harmony in society. To achieve these ends, Mill placed a great emphasis on education. As Graeme Duncan explains: [Mill treated education] as an instrument and, more broadly, a body of influences, […] capable of undermining the related evils of ignorance, indolence, and class conflict […] As a consequence he strongly supported the establishment of a national system of education. The matter was so important, the people so stunted and private agencies so inadequate, that education seemed a necessary sphere of state action (1973: 250–1) This was a view with which Humboldt would have no quarrel.

66  Wilhelm von Humboldt

Conclusion Given the culture of populist anti-intellectualism that pervades much of the modern world today, it is hardly surprising that Humboldt’s educational philosophy has tended to be overlooked. But this is not reasonable. First, it should not be forgotten that that he was planning for what, in his time, were radical reforms in a political environment that was unpromising (to say the least) for almost every one of the educational changes he was proposing. Secondly, his reforms were embedded in philosophically articulated, progressive ideas about education policy drawn from his revisionist interpretation of Bildung. Unlike many competing theories his ideas reflect what David Hansen describes as “the unfathomable variability in human beings and their communities” (2010: 24). It was a great misfortune that Humboldt was never granted the time and the resources to fulfil his proposals for improving the Prussian education system. Alistair Miller points out that: “Humboldt was, by nature and by temperament, high-minded, intellectual, introspective and creative. It was natural that for him that the purpose of life – and therefore of education – should be described in terms of what for him constituted the summit of personal development, meaning and fulfilment” (2021: 343). An educational model that prioritizes Bildung may seem far removed from the dominant positivist paradigm that characterizes nearly all educational policymaking today – much of it focused on “measurable outcomes” driven by short-term micro-economic “management”. But this should not deter us from thinking more deeply, more philosophically, about what education should be all about. As Marko Pajevic has noted, Humboldt’s thinking “has a particular contemporary relevance, outside the academy. Questions of identity and otherness, of individualism and universalism, are central to how we deal with the most pressing social issues, such as mass migration, multiculturalism and multilingualism” (2017: 3). *** In his recent memoir, Professor Amartya Sen describes the education that he received at the Santiniketan School in Bengal, founded in 1901 by the great Indian philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore. (Sen attended the school in the 1940s.) Santiniketan, he writes, “[C]ombined learning about India’s own traditions with many opportunities to learn about other countries too and their cultures right across the world. The emphasis at Santiniketan School was on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence; indeed interest in grades and examination performance was severely discouraged” (2021: 17–8). Sen and his contemporaries at Santiniketan were encouraged to read widely and converse seriously and passionately about what they were learning in class and what they were absorbing from their reading. In a lecture that Tagore delivered in the Auditorium Maximum in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Universität (today the Humboldt University of Berlin) in May of 1921, Tagore highlighted the connections between language, consciousness, and culture – themes at the very heart of Humboldt’s thinking about education (Lange, 2011: 10). Santiniketan School

Wilhelm von Humboldt 67 (at least during the time Sen was a pupil there) exemplifies how Humboldt’s educational idealism can become a vibrant practical reality.

Note

1. “Public schools” in this context refer to schools resourced and regulated by governments. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the term is often used confusingly to refer to privileged private schools such as Eton in London or the King’s School in Sydney.

References Beard, R. (2021a), “Why public school boys like me and Boris Johnson are not fit to run the country,” The Guardian, 8 August: https://www.theguardian.com/education/ 2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard (accessed 9 August 2021). Beard, R. (2021b), Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England (London: Random House). Berlin, I. (1958), Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon). Bernstein, B. (2003 edition), Class, Codes and Control. Vol. 1: Towards a Sociology of Language (London: Routledge). Chalmers, D. (1997), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Chalmers, D. (2019), “Idealism and the mind-body problem,” in Seager, W. (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism (London: Routledge): 28. Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Chomsky, N. (2007), “Approaching UG from below Approaching UG from below,” in Gärtner, H. and Sauerland, U. (eds.), Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky’s Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter): 1–30. Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little Brown). Duncan, G. (1973), Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Green, A. (2013), Education and State Formation: Europe, East Asia, and the USA, second edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Hansen, D. (2010), “Cosmopolitanism and education: A view from the ground,” Teachers College Record, 112 (1): 1–30. Hansen, I. (1971), Nor Free Nor Secular: Six Independent Schools in Victoria – A First Sample (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). Heidt, I. (2015), “Exploring the historical dimensions of Bildung and its metamorphosis in the context of globalization,” L.2 Journal, 7 (4): 3–14. Humboldt, W. (1906), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III (Berlin: Ausgabe Der Preussischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften). Humboldt, W. (1969 edition), The Limits of State Action, translated and edited with an introduction by J.R. Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Humboldt, W. (1988 edition), On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Joseph, J. (2017), “The reception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings in the Anglosphere,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53 (1): 7–20.

68  Wilhelm von Humboldt Klagge, J. (1986), “Marx’s realms of freedom and necessity,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (4): 769–778. Koch, H. W. (1978), A History of Prussia (London: Longman). Lange, B. (2011), “A classic eclipsed,” Südasien-Seminar des Orientalischen Instituts der Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg: http://crossasia-repository.ub.uniheidelberg.de/2430/1/Lange.pdf (accessed 16 June 2021). Littlejohn, S. and Foss, K. (2005), Theories of Human Communication, eighth edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth). Løvelie, L. and Standish, P. (2002), “Bildung and the idea of a liberal education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36 (3): 317–340. Macdonald, C. and Macdonald, G. (2010), “Introduction,” in Macdonald, C. and Macdonald, G. (eds.), Emergence in Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 1–21. McLaren (2012), The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry (Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press). McLaren, N. (2021), Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The Biocognitive Model in Psychiatry (London: Routledge). Miliband, R. (1969), The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Mill, J. (1885), Three Essays on Religion (London: Longman). Mill, J. (2006 edition), On Liberty (London: Penguin). Miller, A. (2021), “The promise of Bildung – or ‘a world of one’s own’,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 55 (2): 334–346. Pajevic, M. (2017), “Thinking language: Wilhelm von Humboldt now,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53 (1): 1–6. Reay, D. (2001), “Finding or losing yourself? Working-class relationships in education,” Journal of Education Policy, 16 (4): 333–346. Reay, D. (2017), Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes (Bristol: Policy Press). Reay, D. (2018), “Working class educational transitions,” European Journal of Education, 53: 528–540. Richter, W. (ed.) (1935), Wilhelm von Humboldt: Politiche briefe, Vol. 2 (Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag). Ringer, F. (1967), “Higher education in Germany in the nineteenth century,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2 (3): 123–138. Sen, A. (2021), Home in the World: A Memoir (London: Allen Lane). Shaverien, J. (2015), Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘privileged’ Child (London: Routledge). Stretton, H. (1987) “Political effects of positive social science,” in Political Essays (Melbourne: Georgian House): 167–174. Sweet, P. (1984), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, Vol. 2 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Taylor, C. (2016), The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Underhill, J. (2009), Humboldt, Worldview and Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

6

Humboldt’s ideal university

Introduction In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, and as cultural aftershocks from the French Revolution were being felt across Europe, calls for higher education reforms were beginning to be heard in the German states. Previous calls for reform had fallen on deaf ears. Initially, the idea that universities should play a supportive role in Prussia’s plans to modernize was beyond the comprehension of King Friedrich Wilhelm III and his reactionary advisers at court. However, there was a growing awareness of the degraded conditions that had long haunted the Teutonic halls of academe. As historian James Sheehan notes: “Drinking, duelling, and rowdiness were the rule in many places; students were legendary for their eccentric dress, loose morals, and irresponsible behavior” (1993: 137). The professoriates in many of the universities were rife with nepotism. The exclusively male students that universities were admitting were mostly from privileged backgrounds; the universities had long failed to recruit students based on academic merit.1 As historian Charles McClelland explains: “Taken as a whole, German universities were losing students, facing chronic financial problems, coming under increased attack from public opinion, and showing limited willingness to change” (1980: 93). These weaknesses were high on the agendas of reform minded critics who were well aware that what the universities had been offering throughout the eighteenth-century bore little relation to the modernizing challenges confronting the German states at that time (Östling, 2018). An appetite for reform was growing. By the turn of the century, an exasperated Prussian finance minister had finally lost patience with the universities under his jurisdiction. Reforms, he concluded, had become an urgent priority. The changes he had in mind echoed many of the reforms in the universities that had previously been called for by such luminaries as Kant, Goethe, Herder, Hegel, Fichte, and by a small group of progressive officials in the Prussian civil service. At the centre of their thinking was an idea of what an innovative university should be – an idea altogether different from the existing universities still labouring under the bureaucratic constraints of reactionary government officials and the dead hand of a defunct medieval tradition of scholasticism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-6

70  Humboldt’s ideal university The philosopher and liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher was an especially outspoken critics of the existing universities. He complained about how they were only interested in enrolling privileged young men whom he described contemptuously as “bread and butter students”. By “bread and butter students” he meant self-entitled young men who believed that by being credentialed by a university they would guarantee them preferment to a lucrative career in the Prussian civil service. Some were convinced that their aristocratic breeding complemented by a university education made them a natural fit for senior officer rank in the military. Some were piously seeking ordination in the church. And some were unashamedly ambitious for professional advancement as lawyers or businessmen. Their sole qualification for enrolling into the universities, he declared, was that their families were able to afford to pay their sons’ tuition fees (Sweet, 1984: 55). Schleiermacher’s desire was to see the universities opened to students genuinely interested in what he described as “true learning”. In the midst of this reform ferment, the newly appointed Director of Education Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt began to turn his attention to developing a clear understanding of what “true learning” could actually mean in a modern university. The title “Director” would approximate a permanent head of a public service department in today’s nomenclature. In Prussia in the nineteenth century it meant that he had to work under a Minister appointed by the king from among his mostly reactionary advisers at court. Inevitably this was going to lead to clashes between Humboldt and the Minister. One thing was certain in Humboldt’s mind: Schleiermacher’s desire for “true learning” could never be achieved in the universities as they were then constituted. The reforms Humboldt had begun to think about could only be realized within a newly configured university founded on progressive philosophical and scientific principles reflecting the rationalism and humanism of the German Enlightenment (Niekerk, 2018). Moreover, in harmony with his reformist colleagues, he was convinced that education – and specifically higher education – should be playing a major role in the Prussia state’s plans for transforming itself into a modern economy and society. As Paul Sweet notes: an academic ethos that set highest educational value on the disinterested and creative pursuit of knowledge had taken hold over a new generation of scholars; no one was more associated with this idea than Humboldt. In this sense, the founding of the University of Berlin was, in a quiet way, a revolutionary deed in the history of higher education (1984: 71)

Humboldt’s ideal university As previously intimated, Humboldt was not alone in endeavouring to create a new, progressive university in Berlin. His collaborators included Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, and a small group of moderates in King Friedrich Wilhelm III’s court and in the civil service (Morozov, 2016). Nonetheless,

Humboldt’s ideal university 71 Humboldt shouldered the lion’s share of articulating the principles to guide the university’s development. There were five basic principles at the core of Humboldt’s vision. At the time, that vision (or ideal) was regarded as an innovative, even radical, contribution to what was then the conventional understanding of how a truly modern higher education institution should be constituted. Its originality remains relevant to thinking about universities today. The first principle was an expression of Humboldt’s dedication to the necessity of freedom in teaching and learning. This was a view that he had formed against the backdrop of his exegesis of Bildung – namely, that freedom was the foundation of self-development. Humboldt was firmly of the view that students should be absolutely free to choose the subjects they wanted to study and to choose the teachers whom they believed could best teach them. At the same time, he argued, professors should be free to teach their preferred (specialist) subjects and not be confined by the conservative and inflexible pedagogical content that had been one of the many causes of the decline of the German universities throughout the previous century. Humboldt’s innovative approach to academic freedom constituted a major shift away from the stringently predetermined curricula of the old universities. The second principle related to Humboldt’s conviction that teaching and research should go hand in hand. From this perspective, professors and students were to be seen as collaborators in the search for truth, not as masters and disciples. The roles of teachers and learners would frequently cross over each other with the classroom becoming a convivial centre of intellectual discovery. Therefore, research, he argued, should inform teaching, just as teaching should inform research. Coherently explaining one’s research findings, and have them subjected to student scrutiny, would benefit everyone, while contributing to a vibrant university culture of discovery and learning. Professors and students, he insisted, should be regarded as fellow investigators in the search for scientific and scholarly advances in their chosen fields of interest and specialization. The third principle underscored Humboldt’s understanding of Wissenschaft, emphasizing the pedagogical unity of the humanities and the natural sciences. Wissenschaft is often translated into English to mean “the physical or natural sciences”. However, for Humboldt it signified something broader: namely, the disciplined and systematic pursuit of knowledge in general in the natural sciences and the humanities. He expected that natural science and the humanities would complement each other. Humboldt characterized professors and their students collectively as Wissenshaftler (systematic pursuers of true knowledge), which, as Professor McClelland notes: depended more on an innate curiosity and virtually unteachable drive to discover and explore new intellectual territory. While methods could be passed on to students and habits of good discipline were (if absorbed) surely a bonus, good professors had to be willing to tolerate and even encourage their students to pursue leads that might be seen to be unorthodox (2017: 39)

72  Humboldt’s ideal university Humboldt’s fourth principle was closely aligned with the third principle. It was his view that to regard the natural sciences and the humanities as separate, or opposed, areas of scholarship constituted a serious category error. This error was famously (and, as some have argued, infamously) promulgated by C.P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture in Cambridge. An expanded version of the lecture was subsequently published as The Two Cultures (Snow, 2012).2 Unlike Snow, Humboldt was sure that the humanities could fruitfully inform the natural sciences about the kind of knowledge (for example, positivism, or empiricism) that defined (or confined) their subdisciplines, while the physical sciences could inform the humanities about the relevant influences of the physical environments on the issues they traditionally pursue. In regard to the fifth principle, Humboldt was adamant that a modern (ideal) university must be autonomous in regard to all academic matters. This must include the design of the curricula and the degree programmes it taught, as well as how students should be examined. It extended to whatever research programmes that academic staff wanted to pursue. He wrote: “In general the state must not demand anything from the universities simply for their own needs, but should adhere to the profound conviction that if the universities are to achieve their highest purposes, they will also fulfill the purposes of the state” (Sweet, 1984: 64). Keeping the state out of university affairs was therefore an essential condition for a university to achieve its highest aims. The need for university autonomy (or what today we may regard as maintaining academic freedom) was based on his conviction that universities were capable of providing resources which the state was either reluctant to provide or was incapable of providing, such as basic research leading to medical advances, as well as knowledgeable graduates ready to contribute creatively to institutions in the public and private sectors of the economy and in the wider society. As noted earlier, this reflects his deep commitment to his interpretation of Bildung which he identified as the fundamental philosophical condition for facilitating self-development. As David Sorkin points out: “Humboldt argues that persons educated to be free persons will ultimately be better citizens than men educated to be citizens, just as science left to its own devices will be more fruitful than science supervised by the state” (1984: 64). Humboldt was adamant that research programmes within the university should focus on pure research. Accordingly, no education minister or civil servant should ever have the power to direct how research funds should be allocated, no matter how esoteric the research may appear to them. Nor should the results of academic research be in any way constrained by contracts with external funding authorities (for example, there should be no limitation on publishing research results) (Ringer, 1967).3 It was therefore no coincidence that by the second half of the nineteenth century, Prussia was leading the world in developing a number of acclaimed scientific research institutes within its universities. The University of Berlin was a particularly fortunate beneficiary of government investments in those pure research institutes – investments that initially came with no strings attached

Humboldt’s ideal university 73 while they were at their height (McClelland, 2017). This was the beginning of the idea of the modern research university, ending forever the conventions of medieval higher education that had determined how a university should conduct itself. More importantly, it mapped a way forward for the university to play a critical and creative role in the discovery of new knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Humboldt was committed to the development of curricula that today would approximate programmes in some of the leading liberal arts and sciences colleges in the United States – for example, Williams, Amherst, Swathmore, Pomona, Wellesley, and Bowdoin (US News, 2021). As Baker et al. note, the defining attributes of these colleges have included a curriculum based primarily in arts and science fields; small classes and close student-faculty relationships; full-time study and student residence on campus; and little emphasis on vocational preparation or study in professional fields. At its best, the liberal arts college has provided a distinct and highly valued model of undergraduate education (2012: 48) Largely through private benefactions, most of these institutions have been able to maintain their programmes despite pressures to become vocational training entities (Baker and Baldwin, 2015; Breneman, 1994). Long may they not merely survive but prosper. Humboldt argued that the first duty of the modern university was to encourage students to engage in the disinterested pursuit of pure learning for its own sake. This aligns closely with John Henry Newman’s idea of the university as a place committed to the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Neither Humboldt nor Newman were interested in curricula that could be described as “applied” – that is, curricula that would feed directly into training programmes for people wanting to transition, after graduating, into professional careers such as law or medicine. Sorkin points out that “the curriculum’s goal was to provide a general education (algemeine Menschenbildung) which would respect the individual development of each student. Only after a general education would students proceed to specialized training” (1984: 63; italics added). Humboldt believed that a thorough grounding in studies in what echoed features of Kant’s “lower faculty” would prepare students for meeting the challenges and responsibilities that they would face after they left the university and began preparations for their careers. Similarly, in Newman’s terms, curricula should focus teaching knowledge for knowledge’s sake, providing the necessary foundation for life in the post-university world where the necessary practical skills could then be acquired. The Kantian “lower faculty”4 concept certainly influenced Humboldt’s thinking about how the University of Berlin should be developed educationally. As Paul Sweet points out: “By direct implication this meant making the philosophical faculty, as opposed to the faculties of theology, law, and medicine, the centrepiece of the university – a striking reversal; for

74  Humboldt’s ideal university heretofore this faculty had been more the handmaiden than the queen among faculties” (1984: 57). Unlike Newman, however, Humboldt strongly argued that systematic studies of pure science must be included in the curricula of the ideal university. This was a significant departure from Newman’s focus on what, in effect, was almost entirely a philosophical and theological curriculum (although he also advocated for a mathematics curriculum). As Mitchell Ash, one of Humboldt’s harshest contemporary critics, concedes: “The brilliance of Humboldt’s idea was that the claim that basic [pure] science was itself practical in humanistic teaching” (2006: 247). Gaining insights into the natural world, Humboldt argued, would open students to the stimulating challenges of discovering new knowledge as well as absorbing the wisdom of established knowledge. In arguing for the natural sciences to be included in the curriculum in his ideal university, Humboldt was very likely influenced by the scientific research and writings of his younger brother Alexander, an acclaimed geographer, biologist, and anthropologist (Wolf, 2016). Thus, Bildung and Wissenschaft were the twin pedagogical pillars on which Humboldt’s thinking about the ideal university was based and for which he was seeking royal patronage. As noted in the previous chapter, Bildung, he believed, was an absolutely necessary condition for the flourishing of self-development among the students, while Wissenschaft would facilitate students’ systematic learning, including the study of the natural sciences. Humboldt was convinced that a university founded on these principles would properly prepare students for their lives after university by cultivating their minds, enabling them to think critically and creatively. This was the core of Humboldt’s educational vision. In Lenore O’Boyle’s words, it would nurture students with “a deeply felt need for wholeness, grace and plenitude of being” (1983: 9). From the shambolic state of the old eighteenth-century German universities, Humboldt proposed, a modern university should be allowed to arise, one which could reflect Prussia’s cultural achievements to the whole world. The king tasked Humboldt with the detailed planning that would be necessary for the new university to be brought into being.

The politics of the founding of the University of Berlin On any measure, the establishment of the University of Berlin was in no small measure due to the creative thinking and administrative energy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. His had always been the leading voice among those in the government championing the university. As Paul Sweet observes: “[A]lthough Humboldt was not alone in his general conception of what a university of Berlin should be, it is difficult to imagine that any of the like-minded men who supported him could have supplied the kind of leadership necessary to bring this kind of university into existence” (1984: 65). In a series of judiciously reasoned memoranda prepared for the king, he argued that the university was destined to become a major symbol of the Prussian state’s cultural achievements, progressive policy making, and its advanced scientific and economic development.

Humboldt’s ideal university 75 Humboldt’s influence in winning the king’s approval, as well as that of the most influential officials at the court, demonstrated his power as a “policy entrepreneur” (Mackenzie, 2004; Silander, 2016). His capacity to weave highly abstract thinking and practical public administration together into an achievable programme of educational reform is unmatched in the history of modern higher education. He personified a special kind of leader who is able to “achieve major reforms in a short time, more rapidly than could accrue through a series of minor incremental adjustments” (Crowley et al., 2021: 168). By the end of 1810, Humboldt’s work appeared to be done; the University of Berlin had become a reality. The crowning feature of Humboldt’s role in the founding of the University of Berlin was his adroitness in persuading the king to bequeath the grandly appointed Prince Henry Palace (Prinz-Heinrich-Palais) as the home of the new university. The palace was built between 1748 and 1753. It was originally intended for the king’s younger brother, Prince Henry, who had a distinguished career as a general in the Prussian military. He was once even touted as a potential king for the United States of America. He died in 1802, before he could take up residence in the palace and before he could ever have been seriously considered as an appropriate American monarch (a proposal that no doubt bemused the passionately anti-monarchical founders of the American Constitution). The palace was located in one of the most picturesque parts of historic Berlin, on Unter den Linden Boulevard, the grand thoroughfare popularly known as the “royal mile”, between the Brandenburg Gate and the Royal Palace. It remains the administrative heart of the University to this day. In 1828 it was renamed the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, after its royal patron, appropriately described as “one of Prussia’s least memorable rulers” (McClelland, 2017: 3). It retained this unwarranted designation until the early years of the Cold War. The Unter den Linden campus of the original Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität was situated in what was to become East Berlin, while another campus was located in West Berlin. In 1948, the latter campus became the Free University of Berlin (Frei Universität Berlin), with substantial backing from the United States in support of the ideological wars waged against each other by the superpowers during the Cold War (Berghahn, 2001). In East Berlin, a decision was made to rename the original campus as the Humboldt University of Berlin (HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin), in honour of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother Alexander. As McClelland notes, the new name was proposed “allegedly to head off its being renamed by the East German communist (SED) regime for its alumnus Karl Marx, or worse for Lenin or Stalin” (2017: xiii). Despite the tortuous history of its formal designation, the Humboldt University of Berlin is currently ranked among the top 100 universities in the world. Its list of former professors includes the philosophers Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ernst Cassirer, as well as the eminent physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck. In addition to Karl Marx, former alumni include Frederick Engels, Otto von Bismarck, Felix Mendelsohn, and more than 20 Nobel Prize winners.

76  Humboldt’s ideal university With the development of new higher education institutions across Europe and America, Humboldt’s ideal university “became the most prestigious model for universities throughout the western world in the nineteenth century” (Sweet, 1984: 66). However, with the outbreak of the Cold War in 1945, FriedrichWilhelm-Universität was temporarily closed by order of the communist government of East Germany which distrusted it to toe the party line. It was reopened in 1949 as the Humboldt University of Berlin and was able persevere throughout the Cold War years. However, its survival in the face of what Adam Smith would have described as a “meddling” external authority (in this case, the East German government) is an indication of the resilience of the institution. In his memoranda to the king, Humboldt proposed that the existing Royal Academy of Sciences (Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften) and the Berlin Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) be incorporated into the university. The former institution had originated as an initiative of the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in 1700 (Roinila, 2009). The latter institution was founded by Friedrich, the Elector (later king) of Prussia in 1696. Both institutions in Berlin were held in high regard, although like the old universities, they had not kept up with the times. Humboldt argued persuasively that their incorporation into the university would revitalize them, while bringing their research resources into the heart of the university. His recommendations proved to be correct. Transferring the institutes into the university was both a strategic move at that time and a foresighted innovation that would eventually lead to the acceptance that research should be a central function of the university, on a par with its teaching function. In one of his memoranda, Humboldt explained that the Royal Academy of Science, for example, was emphatically not a teaching institution. He wrote: “The academy […] is concerned only with science and scholarship [that is, research]. Because of this function of an academy, its idea must be maintained as the highest and ultimate sanctuary of Wissenschaft [pure scientific research] and as the corporation which is freest of the control of the state” (Sweet, 1984: 61). On the other hand, the duty of the state, he argued, was simply to ensure that the necessary resources for research were available; it was not to dictate what should or should not be researched. Humboldt also persuaded the king to allow the university to admit qualified students from the other German states, as well as those from within Prussia. He was anticipating a united Germany, demonstrating again the man’s great prescience. He also argued that the university should also be opened to students from abroad, pioneering the idea that international education should be an essential part of a genuinely modern university’s sphere of activity. He boldly recommended the downgrading or cancelling of several provincial higher education institutions in Prussia because, as he argued, they were patently failing to educate students to the high standard expected of a university. It is better, he argued, to have a small number of excellent higher education institutions rather than to stretch resources thinly across a large number of third-rate institutions. He reassured the king many times that the new university would become a renowned centre of Prussian intellectual life and cultural sophistication. Eventually the

Humboldt’s ideal university 77 king was persuaded, especially after Humboldt flattered his ego by proposing that the university be renamed in the king’s honour. However, from the outset, things did not go as smoothly as Humboldt had hoped. He was soon frustrated by the contrariness and self-centredness of some of the faculty members whom he had recommended for appointment, especially some of the senior professors. Humboldt wrote to his wife complaining about the professors: “Their jealousy, their envy, their desire to run things, their prejudices, are beyond belief” (Sweet, 1984: 56). The result was that the full realization of Humboldt’s vision of the guiding principles of the ideal university was never developed in Prussia, or anywhere else, even though the ideal was widely admired across Europe as well as in the United States. Nonetheless, the establishment of the University of Berlin was perhaps Humboldt’s greatest achievement, despite its reality being less than the ideal that he had imagined it should be. As Paul Sweet notes, Humboldt’s ideal “became the most prestigious model for universities throughout the western world in the nineteenth century” (1984: 66). The question therefore arises: How did the drift away from the Humboldtian ideal to reality of the actual University of Berlin come to pass? Humboldt’s increasing marginalization at the court and in byzantine reaches of the Prussian civil service meant that his influence in establishing the new university was being pushed aside by forces whose reactionary thinking allowed little room for the idealism and creativity that had inspired him. He was increasingly obliged to step aside from much of the university’s day-to-day conduct; at other times he was simply by-passed. As far as the authorities were concerned, he had become a distant grey eminence whose public reputation as a respected founder of the university could be advantageous for legitimizing or embellishing their decision-making. Otherwise, he was left in the background. The details of his ideal university were left to languish, all but forgotten. Meanwhile, administrative timidity and lack of imagination, professorial in-fighting, and bureaucratic meddling resulted in the watering down of curricula to realign them with the demands of business and government. The situation was made worse by the appointment of a number of second-rate faculty. Pressures were increasing from within the government for the university’s research facilities and personnel to be required to complement the state’s relentless march to modernization. As the nineteenth century drifted towards its end, the demands of the emerging capitalism that would characterize the twentieth century had little time for the humanism and rationalism of the German enlightenment. Pragmatism triumphed over idealism – an unfortunate reality that has haunted modern public higher educational developments across the world ever since.

The contemporary critique of Humboldt Just as Newman has come under critical attention in recent times for his idea of a university (see Chapter 4), so too Humboldt’s vision of the ideal modern university has come under fire. As intimated earlier, one of the most outspoken figures

78  Humboldt’s ideal university among Humboldt’s contemporary critics has been Mitchell G. Ash, Professor Emeritus of History in the University of Vienna. Professor Ash is dismissive of what he refers to as the “Humboldt Myth”, wondering “why it remains so powerful, despite the fact that it has very little relation to realities on the ground, especially in German-speaking Europe” (2006: 245). He highlights what he identifies as four fundamental flaws in the Humboldtian tradition. These, he asserts, are the reason why that tradition has never been actualized in any of the modern higher education institutions that have been established since, even though some lay claim to being legitimate heirs to Humboldt’s vision. First, he notes: “The conception of the university symbolised by Humboldt’s name had many authors and was not even linked with the person of Humboldt until the turn of the twentieth century”. The “many authors”, he notes, included “names like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, Johann Gottlob (sic)5 Fichte and others” (2006: 246). Second, he argues that Humboldt’s idea of a “research university” was not new: There had already been research institutes prior to the creation of the University of Berlin, and others were established much later without reference to Humboldt’s proposals for developing research universities. Third, Humboldt’s advocacy of pure science (Wissenschaft) “was never uniformly established as a governing policy principle throughout the German-speaking universities” (2006: 247). Fourth, he claims that Humboldt’s writings on higher education were not widely known until late in the nineteenth century, coinciding “with a perceived crisis of the very system he was later supposed to have created” (2006: 248). Finally, Ash declares: “The tension between the mythical ‘Humboldtian’ ideal and the reality of modern higher education […] and the mythical discourse around ‘Humboldt’ have continuously shaped and in many ways continue to distort higher education debates in Germanspeaking universities” (2006: 248). While Professor Ash is correct to highlight the relevance of those collaborators who worked with Humboldt in conceptualizing the new University of Berlin, it is simply wrong to discount the critically important role that Humboldt played in guiding the idea of the university through the bureaucracy and at the court. Winning the king’s support was a major achievement that historians should never underestimate. In this regard Humboldt’s distinction, both as a philosopher of education and as a policy entrepreneur, must not be overlooked – although that is what Ash appears to be doing. Nor should the memoranda Humboldt prepared to gain Friedrich Wilhelm III’s approval for the university be glossed over, as Ash is inclined to do. Paul Sweet rightly notes, that they (the memoranda) were “fundamental to his position” in winning the agreement of the king (1984: 57). To this has to be added his role in persuading the king to endow Prince Henry’s Palace to the university as its central campus. These were all Humboldt’s singular achievements. All of them were essential to the establishment of the University of Berlin. Without his active inputs, as well as his philosophical conceptualizing of the university, it would probably never have seen the light of day. Quite simply, his contributions were indispensable to its founding.

Humboldt’s ideal university 79 Furthermore, Humboldt readily acknowledged the significance of the established research academies. More significantly, his argument that research should inform teaching in the ideal university, and vice versa, was then a highly original proposal which has been observed more in the breach than in the observance in many higher education developments across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States ever since. While his strong commitment to the idea of Wissenschaft might not have been accepted by all policymakers and administrators, then, or subsequently, it is wrong to suggest that it has been insignificant. It remains at the centre of many of the mostly unresolved debates about the imbalances in contemporary universities between teaching and research. That teaching tends to be regarded as the poor cousin in many university contexts today would have shocked Humboldt. The pedagogical and philosophical integrity of his proposal is not made redundant by subsequent failures to implement it; the failures lie in the failure of too many higher education authorities to recognize the integrity of Humboldt’s argument about how research and teaching can richly inform each other. Analysing what he labels Humboldtian rhetoric (his italics), implying something insubstantial or unreal, Konrad Jarausch notes: [A] century and a half after its inception, this once inspiring vision had rigidified into a ruling discourse that glossed over basic contradictions with pat formulas: the incantations of academic freedom and autonomy […] conflicted with the need for state support; the stress on the universalism of subjects and philosophical perspective clashed with scientific specialization; the emphasis on individual aesthetic cultivation. Called Bildung, contrasted with the needs of systematic scholarship, as Wissenschaft is best rendered; and the imperative of linking teaching and research […] was proving more difficult to realize (1997: 36) This critique is particularly relevant to the present state of public universities. Humboldt’s very strong commitment to the value of academic freedom – especially freedom from interventions by the state – certainly conflicts with many latter-day responses by governments to universities’ need for financial support. The “power of the purse strings” means that universities can be manipulated by their governments who can withdraw funds if they believe the universities are not bowing to their demands. An example of the use of governmental power over universities occurred in contemporary Australia in 2020, during lockdown restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Businesses were able to claim government subsidies to tide their workers over during the lockdown period, rather than having to dismiss them while those businesses’ trading was suspended because of the lockdown restrictions (the policy was titled “JobKeeper” and payments were managed by the Australian Tax Office on behalf of the federal government). Public universities across Australia were specifically excluded from this

80  Humboldt’s ideal university arrangement because of perceived hostilities between the conservative Coalition government and those universities. Senior figures in the government were alleged to be sensitive to criticisms from university scientists about the government’s recalcitrance about the issue of climate change and other faculty members who were also critical of some of the government’s leaders on a range of other progressive issues such as same-sex marriage. Private universities, on the other hand, were able to benefit from the subsidy arrangement. The result was that 40,000 academic staff in public universities were made redundant. The same federal government changed the structuring of fees that students have to pay for their studies, on the basis that the Australian economy needed more graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM subjects). Fees for these subjects were lowered while humanities and social sciences subjects were nearly doubled. It is not yet clear whether this change will have the results which the government expected. Meanwhile, distortion in student:staff ratios, large classes, and staff labouring under heavy workloads have seen the cultivation of personal growth of students disregarded in order to push more students through the higher education system in the shortest possible time. The idea of the academy as a nurturing institution, as both Newman and Humboldt expected it to be, has all but disappeared in Australia. Meanwhile, the gap between teaching and research yawns ever wider, with proposals in some quarters to identify a category of academics to be designated solely as teachers, without having to demonstrate a successful research record as measured by publications in “world class” academic journals. The question is: Do such retrograde developments that we see in contemporary Australia (and which are evident elsewhere in many public universities around the world) reflect poorly on Humboldt’s educational ideal? Is the “Humboldt Myth” irrelevant today? The answer to that is a resounding no. What these developments do reflect is a contemporary educational culture that is focused on short-term, pragmatic outcomes rather than on the cultivation of students’ creative and critical thinking. It is a culture generated almost entirely by ideological imperatives, one which is devoid of a sound philosophical rationale or which is grounded in the facts of student learning. It’s time to bring Humboldt back into the debates about higher education.

In defence of Humboldt’s idealism Professor Ash is derisive of what he believes is the “tension between the mythical ‘Humboldtian’ ideal and the reality of modern higher education”. This needs to be carefully scrutinized, because it is symptomatic of a misunderstanding about the role that the “ideal” should play in motivating educational systems to be inventive and educationally alive. Humboldt was unquestionably a child of the “Age of German Idealism” (1770–1840). This was an era in which the philosophers Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were at the forefront of Prussia’s intellectual life. Hegel, in particular, stands out in this regard (Taylor, 1975).

Humboldt’s ideal university 81 Hegel had advocated a richly metaphysical theory of the world and how it may be understood in metaphysical terms (Findlay, 2013). Like his fellow idealists, he was emphatic that the mind is the crucible of all of our understandings of reality, not vice versa as many theorists in modern (naturalist or positivist) science would argue today. As Karl Ameriks has observed, German idealism “fills an obvious gap generated by traditional expectations of philosophy and problems caused by the rise of the unquestioned authority of modern science” (2000: 4). To assume that that “gap” has been filled by the “unquestioned authority of modern science” is not only epistemologically naive, but it is also symptomatic of an ideological commitment to positivist fundamentalism. Nonetheless, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century, German idealism was being supplanted by materialist theories of knowledge which, as Frederick Beiser notes, are “generally understood to be the doctrine that only matter exists and that everything in nature obeys only mechanical laws” (2014: 53; see also Beiser, 2002). Karl Marx is perhaps the best-known proponent of this position in the nineteenth century and his influence extends well into the twentieth century (Althusser, 1996). Self-proclaimed Marxist materialists deduce from Marx’s claim that he had “turned Hegel on his head”, that he had rejected Hegel’s idealism, arguing instead that it is material realities, the material or economic “substructure”, that shape (or determine) the societies and economies in which people become conscious beings (Marx, 1969). While Marx’s materialism is more complex than some commentators acknowledge – particularly latter-day commentators and ideologues – it did help to nurture the development of the discipline of the sociology of knowledge which highlights the social, historical-political, and economic forces that shape the form and content of our understandings of our worlds (Berger and Luckmann, 1971; Keller, 2018). Taken to its materialist extreme, this subdiscipline in mainstream sociology and the history of ideas can (indeed must) be rejected for its reductionist ambition to replace epistemology as a central area of specialization in philosophy. On the other hand, when employed with a light touch, it can help to clarify the ideological intent of a wide range of past and present theoretical discourses, including Marxist materialism. A sociology of knowledge approach is relevant to Professor Ash’s critique of Humboldt. His critique reflects the predominance of materialist world views and secularist influences characteristic of what we can label as the age of positivism. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski notes, this is constituted by: a collection of rules and evaluative criteria referring to human knowledge: it tells us what kind of contents in our statements about the world deserve the name of knowledge and supplies us with norms that make it possible to distinguish between that which may and that which may not be reasonably asked. Thus positivism is a normative attitude, regulating how we are to use such terms as “knowledge”, “science”, “cognition”, and “information” (1972: 11; see also Stretton, 1987)

82  Humboldt’s ideal university However, the “normative attitude” identified by Professor Kolakowski – one that implies selectivity in our knowledge choices, and which reflects the values we bring to bear in making those selections (Stretton, 1969) – is largely taken for granted: Its epistemological foundations and the cultural and scholarly cultures it produces remain mostly unexamined. Reflecting on this serious omission, the sociologist John Carroll draws attention to Max Weber’s famous 1918 lecture, later published as Science as a Vocation (Weber, 1977). Carroll writes: “The subject was the contemporary university. Weber accepts Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modern culture as nihilistic – having killed God, it finds itself believing in nothing. He asks, how can the university function in such a disenchanted world?” (2004: 231–2). That question is highlighted by Professor Ash’s critique of the “Humboldt Myth”. Humboldt’s ideal university was supplanted by the economic developments and pragmatic mindsets that characterize the twentieth-century capitalism and which are closely associated with the neoliberal version of capitalism that is still evolving in the twenty-first century (see Chapter 8). The world today in which public universities are struggling to survive is deeply influenced by what can be described as the realist ideological culture that is legitimizing neoliberalism. Exploring the relationship between realism and neoliberalism in detail would require a project well beyond the scope of this book. However, it important to note that that an ideological imperative is vividly evident in the version of realism on which Professor Ash’s critique of the “Humboldt Myth” is constructed. Just as neoliberalism is an ideology presenting as an economic theory, contemporary realism is an ideological tendency presenting as a philosophical system. As Carl Forkner notes: “[I]t is one of the oldest philosophies in education, providing an opposing end to idealism for the continuum of philosophical thought” (2013: 43). It emphasizes the empirical or material limits – the physical here and now, the world we perceive through our senses – within which the vast majority of contemporary policymakers and administrators (and scholars) are accustomed to work. Its proponents’ understanding of what constitutes “knowledge” starts and ends with what materially exists and that which is accessible by empirical methodologies mandated by what Thomas Kuhn has labelled “normal science” (1972: 10–42). (Karl Popper refers to this as the hypothetical deductive methodology of science, 1965.) Mitchell Ash’s dismissal of Humboldt’s ideal university is a typically realist approach to higher education in the context of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has noted that this stage in the contemporary history of capitalism “[…] is stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy” (2016: 72). It is in this context that the intrinsic educational value that public universities represent has come under very real threat today. Realist cynicism (which its proponents often mistake for scepticism) has facilitated a narrowly pragmatic rejection of the ideal university that Wilhelm von Humboldt (and in a different way, John Henry Newman) had bequeathed to the world. The consequences of that unfortunate development are surveyed in the next two chapters.

Humboldt’s ideal university 83

Notes 1. Female students were not allowed to enrol in Prussia’s universities until 1908. 2. See Stefan Collini’s introduction to the 2012 edition of The Two Cultures. On another occasion, Snow had observed: “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. […] I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language”. Quoted in Nature Physics (2009: 309). 3. Humboldt would have condemned, for example, the actions of former Minister of Education in Australia, Simon Birmingham, who vetoed the award of funding by the relevant expert panels of the Australian Research Council to 11 humanities research projects (Grady, 2018). 4. As noted in Chapter 3, Kant’s “lower faculty” embraced not only philosophy, but also the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences. 5. Gottlieb.

References Althusser, L. (1996), Pour Marx (Paris: La Découverte). Ameriks, K., (2000), “Interpreting German idealism,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 1–17. Ash, M. (2006), “Bachelor of what, master of whom? The Humboldt myth and historical transformations of higher education in German-speaking Europe and the US,” European Journal of Education, 41 (2): 245–267. Baker, V. and Baldwin, R. (2015), “A case study of liberal arts colleges in the twenty-first century: Understanding organisational change and evolution in higher education,” Innovative Education, 40 (3): 247–261. Baker, V., Baldwin, R. and Makker, S. (2012), “Where are they now? Revisiting Breneman’s study of liberal arts colleges,” Liberal Education, 98 (3), available at: https://www.aacu. org/publications-research/periodicals/where-are-they-now-revisiting-brenemansstudy-liberal-arts (accessed 3 June 2021). Beiser, F. (2002), German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1791–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Beiser, F. (2014), After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Berlin: De Gruyter). Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1971), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Berghahn, V. (2001), America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Breneman, D. (1994), Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute). Carroll, J. (2004), The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited (Melbourne: Scribe). Crowley, K., Stewart, J., Kay, A. and Head, B. (2021), Reconsidering Policy: Complexity, Governance and the State (Bristol: Policy Press). Findlay, J. (2013), Hegel: A Re-Examination (London: Routledge).

84  Humboldt’s ideal university Forkner, C. (2013), “The influence of materialism in modern education: An historical review,” Global Education Journal, 2013 (1): 30–43. Grady, B. (2018), “Australian academics fear political interference following vetoed projects,” Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/australianacademics-fear-political-interference-following-vetoed-projects/ (accessed 13 February, 2021). Jarausch, K. (1997), Students, Society and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press). Keller, R. (2018), “The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse: An introduction,” in Keller, R., Hornidge, A. and Schünemann, W. (eds.), The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse: Investigating the Politics of Knowledge and Meaning-Making (London: Routledge): 16–47. Kolakowski, L. (1972), Positivist Philosophy: From Hume to the Vienna Circle (Harmondsworth: Pelican). Kuhn, T. (1972), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Mackenzie, C. (2004), “Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: A conceptual review and application,” Australian Journal of Political Science, 39 (2): 367–386. Marx, K. (1969 edition). “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx, K. and Engels, F. (eds.), Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers): 13–15. McClelland, G. (1980), State, Society, and University in Germany. 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McClelland, G. (2017), Berlin, the Mother of All Research Universities: 1860–1918 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). Morozov, O. (2016), Wilhelm von Humboldt and Berlin University: A new look at the origin of the Humboldt myth, Working Papers, Basic Research Program, Higher School of Economics (Moscow: National Research University): 1–17. Nature Physics (2009), Editorial, 5: 309. Niekerk, C. (2018), “How radical was the German enlightenment?,” in Nikerk, C. (ed.), The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective (Leiden: Brill): 1–45. O’Boyle, L. (1983), “Learning for its own sake: The German university as nineteenth century model,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (1): 3–25. Östling, J. (2018), Humboldt and the Modern German University: An Intellectual History (Lund: Lund University Press). Popper, K. (1965), The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson). Ringer, F. (1967), “Higher education in Germany in the nineteenth century,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2 (3): 123–138. Roinila, M. (2009), “G.W. Leibnitz and scientific societies,” International Journal of Technology Management, 46 (1–2): 165–179. Sheehan, J. (1993), German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Silander, D. (2016), “The political entrepreneur,” in Karlson, C., Silander, C. and Silander, D. (eds.), Political Entrepreneurship: Regional Growth and Entrepreneurial Diversity in Sweden (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar): 7–20. Snow, C. (2012 edition), The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sorkin, D. (1984), “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The theory and practice of self-formation (Bildung),” Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1): 55–73. Streeck, W. (2016), How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso). Stretton, H. (1969), The Political Sciences: General Principles of Selection in Social Science and History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Humboldt’s ideal university 85 Stretton, H. (1987), Political Essays (Melbourne: Georgian House). Sweet, P. (1984), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, Vol. 2 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). Taylor, C. (1975), Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). US News (2021), “National liberal arts colleges ranking,” available at: https://www.usnews. com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges (accessed 3 October 2021) Weber, M. (1977), “Science as a vocation,” in Gerth, H. and Mills, C. (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul): 129–156. Wolf, A. (2016), The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York, NY: Vintage).

7

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century

Introduction A new international order was emerging just as the nineteenth century was coming to its close. Germany, Russia, the United States, and Meiji Japan were all modernizing their economies as robustly and swiftly as possible in order to catch up with Britain. As David Landes explains, Britain was “a pace-setter to be copied and surpassed; for others a superior economic power whose achievements rested on the special bounty of an uneven Providence, hence a rival to be envied and feared. But all watched and visited and tried to learn” (2003: 124). However, these developments had a darker side. Jingoistic politicians and ambitious military leaders were realizing the potential of the new methods of steel production that had been developed in 1856 by the English engineer Sir Henry Bessemer (Jeans, 2010). Steel, they began to realize, could revolutionize the technologies of war (Allen, 1979). At the same time, a militaristic form of patriotism began to gain traction across Germany and Britain, glorifying masculinist virtues, military honour codes, valour in battle, and strict discipline (Hagemann, 1997; Jones, 2008). Adding to the potency of this development was the fact that the looming war between Britain and Germany would be seen “not merely as a war between civilizations, but also as a war between races” (Zaretsky, 2018). Rigid genderism and violent racism in combination with those toxic patriotic sentiments served the ambitions of war-mongering elites all too well. Thus were laid the foundations of what would become a terribly conflicted twentieth century. During its first half of the century, public universities had to deal with the challenges of two World Wars and the 1930s Great Depression. Budget cuts and the exiting of staff and students to fight in the wars saw enrolments decline and academic teaching and research programmes disrupted. In Germany, the Idealism that had been so central to the philosophy of higher education in the previous century was silenced amid the rush to modernization. Indeed, nineteenth-century Idealism was the antithesis of the hard-headed strategizing attending the birth of the twentieth century’s version of industrial capitalism. Seen through this prism, Max Weber’s critique of the “rationalisation” of social, economic, and political life resulting from the demands of capitalism makes for somber reading. Talcott DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-7

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 87 Parsons’ translation into English of Weber’s momentous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, renders Weber’s account of this “rationalisation” agenda as the imposition of an “iron cage of rationality” imprisoning philosophical thought and its residual nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities within the dictates of a grim techno-capitalist ideology (Weber, 2003 edition). At the same time, the tide of secularism was rising quickly, resulting in what Weber referred to as the “disenchantment of the world” where theological and Idealist philosophical discourses were being radically displaced by instrumentalized scientific and rationalist discourses. As Richard Jenkins has observed: “When Weber borrowed the expression ‘the disenchantment of the world’ from Schiller, he was offering a sociological – perhaps even ethical or moral – provocation which continues to resonate today” (2000: 11). In fact, Weber’s revelation about the kind of capitalism that was unfolding at the outset of the twentieth century was a clear warning that the future of the modern world was ominous, even dire.

The two World Wars Following the unification of the German states in 1871, the leaders of the new Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I had high expectations that they could transform their country into a great power on the world stage (Blackbourn, 2003). This was an era in which “it was usual to assume that the European peoples would continue to play a dominating role in world affairs for as far ahead of time as the mind’s eye could see” (Fromkin, 1989: 24). The British Empire, which saw Britain appear on world maps like an octopus with tentacles encircling the globe, epitomized the imperial arrogance, not only of the British leadership at this time, but nearly all the leaders of modernizing Europe (Johnson, 2007). The very idea that the colonized peoples under European imperialism’s sway could have justifiable claims to independence, and to reparations, was beyond the stunted imaginings of the domesticated King George V or the tactless Kaiser Wilhelm II and their government advisers. However, cracks were already beginning to appear in the façade of Europe’s imperialist convictions. The United Kingdom as the sole imperial power was being challenged by an emerging great power – a united Germany – on the world stage. The prelude to what John Mearsheimer (2001) has called “the tragedy of great power politics” was about to be played out across all of Europe, prior to extending its terrible consequences around the world. Germany’s ambitions to become a great imperial power were confronted by Britain’s culturally deep-rooted nationalistic belief in its own imperial greatness. The omens of war began to loom across Europe, with xenophobia and chauvinism raising their menacing heads across the continent. Racist ideologies intensified, reinforcing the purblind patriotisms that had taken firm root in the nations across Europe. At the commencement of the second decade of the century, Germany and Britain were “sleepwalking” into the catastrophe that was to become the First World War. The historian Christopher Clark summarizes the appalling consequences of what was about to explode upon the European

88  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century stage: “The conflict that began that summer [August 1914] mobilized 65 million troops, claimed three empires, 20 million military and civilian deaths, and 21 million wounded. The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe” (2012: xxi). The brutal years between 1914 and 1918 resulted in the loss of large numbers of the brightest and best university students and faculty members. As Tomàs Irish notes: “From the outbreak of the conflict the war was palpable on university campuses as functions changed, social relations became strained, and academic communities encountered death on a hitherto unknown scale” (2015: 61). The proportion of war deaths among British university faculty members and students was significantly higher than the fatality rate for all the armed forces of the United Kingdom (Brewis et al., 2020). Similarly, in Germany, about a fifth of faculty and students who has become soldiers died in the trenches – “a higher proportion than of any other social group” (Jarausch, 1984: 318). One unwitting but fortuitous aspect of wartime, however, was the marked increase in the number of women enrolling as students and women becoming faculty members. Moreover, universities became important resources for the governments of both Britain and Germany, providing crucial support for each country’s war efforts. University research institutes also collaborated with government war departments on weapons developments and intelligence gathering and analysis. Meanwhile, ageing faculty members were left to make do as best they could to keep their universities going. In the decade or so after the Great War, the numbers of students enrolling in British universities began to increase steadily, a result in large part to the provision of scholarships for ex-servicemen giving them access to university courses which previously would not have been affordable. However, the ravages of the 1930s Great Depression reversed this trend. Many able young people were unemployed, denying them the capacity to fund anything like university studies (Kitchen, 2000). Of the relatively small number of students who were able to attend university during the inter-war years, most were focused on pursuing careers in the professions after graduation, especially law, engineering, and medicine. Others had set their sights on appointments to the civil service. In Cambridge, the mathematics-trained don John Maynard Keynes succeeded in making the study of economics a respectable academic specialization (Skidelsky, 1994). Moreover, as Slaughter and Rhoades note: “Many of these new fields of knowledge were concerned with the development and management of science-based mass production industries and the establishment of states’ ground rules for capitalism” (2010: 14). Those university research programmes that did manage to survive the economic constraints of war and the Great Depression were relatively modest in scope. However, governments began turning to universities as war once again loomed, first across Europe, then throughout the world. Weapons and medical research especially benefitted at this moment in the century. During World War I, some university campuses were appropriated by the authorities to become hospitals, laboratories, and munitions production centres.

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 89 Governments directed their budgets almost exclusively to the war effort, leaving little government finance available for public universities, leading to a decrease in student enrolments because young people were volunteering or being conscripted to fight in the army, navy, or air forces of each country. For the duration of the war, public universities were left to manage as best they could under trying circumstances. Moreover, this was to remain the case for much of the decade after the Great War had ended. Because of the Great Depression in the 1930s, student numbers in universities across Europe hardly grew at all, especially in Germany. For public universities, the Second World War was a replay of many of the same problems endured during the First World War, albeit in greater numbers and with greater intensity. Nonetheless, in his account of Oxford during World War II, Paul Addison (1994) highlights the adaptability of the University, allowing it to maintain the core elements of its curricula. Most British universities followed suite while adapting to the stringencies of wartime regulations and budgetary constraints. In Germany the situation was different, with all education institutions expected to conform to Nazism’s dictates. As Lisa Pine notes: “[Education] institutions represented a microcosm of the Nazi Weltanschauung by fostering the leadership principle, promoting competitiveness and emphasizing life as a struggle and survival of the ‘fittest’. They encouraged physical prowess. They excoriated the ‘enemies of the Reich’, in particular the Jews, Communists and Socialists. They emphasized racial purity, glorified war and fostered militarism” (2010: 72; see also Giles, 1984). The Rector of the University of Frankfurt advised his students that “it was more important to study the parts of a machine gun than read chemistry textbooks” (Bryant, 2020: 139). As a result, German universities became degraded institutions throughout the war. Their curricula were redesigned to reflect Nazi propaganda about the superiority of the Aryan race, anti-Semitism, and the inevitable global ascendancy of Germany. Jewish professors and students were expelled and library books that were judged to be subversive of Nazi “truth” were burned. As Rolf Fülbier notes, German universities at this time were influenced by “a totalitarian and anti-intellectual mentality […] that deeply distrusted [the] free spirit and knowledge, young people were not motivated to study at all […], especially not [in] the arts nor humanities since they were part of the ‘frivolous studies’ that seemed to be of little help in warfare” (2021: 378). However, when peace was finally declared in 1945, change seemed to be on the way. New developments were occurring in social sciences and humanities in response to what Hans-Georg Gadamer described as “the terrible shock that the slaughters of World War I brought to the cultural consciousness and to the faith in progress of the liberal era” (1977: 213). Conventional understandings of politics, history, and society came under deep philosophical scrutiny. This development was further aroused by revelations about the horrors of World War II, especially the Holocaust. Philosophers like Hannah Arendt began to challenge conventional thinking about the nature of good and evil in history and society (Mack, 2009). Scholars began to question conventional moral philosophy and its social sciences adjuncts, criticizing their complacency and even their complicity

90  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century in the face of the two World Wars and what these catastrophes meant for humanity in such a conflicted world. They began concluding that something important was missing in conventional moral philosophy and the social sciences about the human condition in its modern cultural environment. One of the most influential post-war critics of conventional moral philosophy and the social sciences in the late 1950s was the eminent Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. In his 1964 book, The Explanation of Behaviour, Taylor systematically interrogated those disciplines’ methodological assumptions – assumptions which he described as “scientism”: that is, the belief that the study of the human condition could only be progressed by adopting the epistemological and methodological practices of the physical sciences. Taylor emphasized that moral philosophy and the social sciences are the scholarly investigations of “self-interpreting animals”. By this he meant “that [a human being] simply cannot be understood as an object among objects […] because the self that is to be interpreted is essentially that of a being who self-interprets” (Taylor, 1999: 75). The work of Taylor and others (including, for example, leading twentieth century scholars such as Gadamer, Habermas, Geertz, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum) has influenced the work of scholars who resist the reductionism of positivist approaches to the study of ethics, societies, politics, and economies. This has led to a greater emphasis on qualitative research methods and interpretative or hermeneutical theorizing, in order to bring the academic study of philosophy and the human sciences closer together (Tuchman, 1994). This has had a significant impact on academic developments in post-war liberal universities throughout the world, challenging materialist, empiricist, and narrowly rationalized accounts of the human condition. The result has seen a flowering of many different schools of moral or ethical thought – some philosophical, some ideological, some both: Nietzschean nihilism, existentialism, neo-Marxisms of many kinds, the New Left, industrial democracy, social justice, anti-racism, civil rights, women’s liberation, gay liberation. Students flocked to these exciting developments on their campuses eager to soak up the ideas and the strategies they suggested for action to change the world. University campuses began to be transformed from sleepy enclaves into hotbeds of debate, defiance, and political activism. As the 1960s progressed, many thought that a so-called “golden age” was about to descend upon universities. But this did not relate to a resurrection of the Idealism of Newman or Humboldt. A Cold War was in the offing whose machinations would demand that “useful knowledge” and state intervention, by direct and indirect means, would become commonplace across public universities in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Cold War, 1945–circa 1989 The atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August of 1945 were the horrific forerunners of the Cold War, an era that persisted for over four grim decades (Gaddis, 2005; Leffler and Westad, 2012). The United States and the Soviet Union deployed a variety of “hard”

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 91 measures (military threats, stockpiling of nuclear and other weaponry) and “soft” measures (psychological, cultural and propaganda) to execute the war (Tsvetkova, 2021). The ending of the Cold War, or at least its transformation into something rather different, was dramatically symbolized by the tearing down of the Berlin wall in 1989 (Schatz and Fiske, 1992). During the Cold War, the grim shadow of nuclear war breaking out between the United States and the USSR was an ever-present threat. As Tony Judt noted, the superpowers were “arming themselves to the hilt and preparing for the eventuality of a thermonuclear war” (2006: 247). The ensuing arms race saw both superpowers stockpiling nuclear weapons while researching and building state-of-the-art warfare technologies such as nuclear propelled and armed aircraft carriers and warships, supersonic stealth bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, nuclear-powered and weaponized ships, technologically sophisticated surveillance strategies, nuclear submarines, and drones. Intelligence gathering (spying) became a major player in the conduct of the Cold War, with covert operations being carried out by both the superpowers. For the United States, as John Prados notes: These covert operations have involved tens of thousands of dead and wounded, thousands of native fighters, significant numbers of American clandestine agents, and even regular U.S. military forces. U.S. involvement has run the gamut from advice to arms, from support for invasions of independent nations to secret bombings in clandestine military operations: to the subsidizing of political parties, associations, or individuals: to the planning of misinformation by clandestine means” (2006: 29) Meanwhile, the USSR was also guilty of similar behaviour. As Michael Sulick reports: “The Soviets guarded their secrets by pervasive monitoring of foreigners in the USSR, restricting foreign contact with its citizens, especially those with access to secrets, and recruiting spies in western intelligence services” (2015: 47). Both the superpowers began to direct vast resources into building their military organizations and spy agencies. University researchers became a target for the superpower governments intent on recruiting them for their expertise. In the United States, university research projects favoured by the state during the Cold War focused largely on technology and engineering, areas which best complemented the demands of what President Eisenhower identified in 1961 as “the military-industrial complex” – that is, private sector conglomerates responsible for building the war materiel required by the American military. The President provided a warning about the potentially apocalyptic consequences of this development: This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house,

92  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society” (Eisenhower, 1961) The power and influence of the military-industrial complex was an immense presence in the American economy and in all US federal budgets during the Cold War. It remains so today (Johnson, 2004; Kuth, 1999). Andrew Cockburn notes that 53 cents in every dollar appropriated by Congress go into the defence budget, which in turn is largely expended on contracts with conglomerates within the military-industrial complex (2019). Russia’s equivalent of America’s militaryindustrial complex mirrored the latter’s power. (CSIS, 2020). The war preparations in both countries – and increasingly in other countries, example, China, North Korea, Japan, and the member states of NATO – are similarly focused on the stockpiling of military weapons and war materiel, largely by convincing politicians and the public that their enemies are threatening invasion or all-out war.

The Cold War and universities In 1957, the government of the United States along with its Western allies were shocked by the announcement from the Soviet Union that its scientists had succeeded in launching a satellite (“Sputnik 1”) into orbit around the earth. For weeks, millions of people around the globe peered into the heavens at night to observe the tiny pinpoint of light reflecting off the satellite as it voyaged across the sky. The “space race” between the two superpowers had begun (Cadbury, 2005). Twelve years later, the Americans launched “Apollo 11” which landed two astronauts on the moon and returned them safely to earth (Launius, 2019). The remarkable technological achievements symbolized by these two historical events were the result of large-scale investments in scientific research by the superpowers. Both the United States and the USSR had turned to their universities and associated research centres, to help drive the fierce scientific and technological competition that shaped each of their economic and security strategies throughout much of the Cold War. In Britain, too, as Harriet Jones has observed, “historians of science and technology have […] noted the extent to which the Cold War dominated Britain’s research and development in this period” (2005: 23).

The knowledge economy Meanwhile the so-called “third industrial revolution” was in train, heralding what has been described as “the coming of post-industrial society” (Bell, 1973; Rundshagen, 2013). It has also been labelled as the rise of the “knowledge economy” (Unger, 2019). Progress in computing and the spread of the worldwide web hastened major transformations in the advanced economies as they moved

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 93 from an almost exclusively industrial base to a knowledge base. These transformations required highly skilled personnel and knowledge workers capable of abstract conceptualizing and creative thought. Instead of being aloof from the complexities of mainstream domestic and global politics, universities emerged as major players in this transition. As Clark Kerr noted in the 1970s: “We are now perceiving the university’s most invisible product, knowledge, may be the most powerful single element in our culture, affecting the rise and fall of professions and even of social classes, of regions and of nations” (2001: xii). This was the beginning of what many believed (or hoped) would be a “golden age” for universities. Clark Kerr even refers to this time as “the great transformation in higher education” (1991). New universities mushroomed in the advanced economies, funded by governments rushing to prepare successive generations of knowledge workers for the knowledge economy. While the United States was at the forefront of this development, other countries around the world began reforming their higher education sectors. Particularly during the 1960s, new universities were established to cater for the swelling numbers of young people (the post-war “baby boom” generation) demanding a university education. Universities were transformed from being enclaves for students from wealthy families destined for privileged professional careers. The universities were now required by governments and the pressures of public opinion to cast their student recruitments nets more widely across the population. Elite education was making way for higher education opportunities for a far wider student population. At the same time, governments began encouraging researchers in universities to compete for large research grants to undertake projects that meshed with their strategic and economic policies. Roger Geiger explains: “To be a successful research university and academic leader now required universities to compete for these funds and engage in Big Science” (2009: 289). From the 1950s, “Big Science” in particular focused on weapons research and space flight technology for government agencies like NASA. This resulted in universities being drawn, directly or indirectly, into the military-industrial complex in America (Robin, 2001). For example, Noam Chomsky has revealed that by 1969: “[T]he MIT budget was something like $200 million a year, half of it straight to big military labs that MIT ran, Lincoln Laboratories and the Instrumentation Lab […] Of the other half, the academic budget, my recollection is that 90 percent was Pentagon based” (1998: 182). The result was that many university researchers became, wittingly or unwittingly, collaborators in the conduct of the Cold War (Engerman, 2003). Similar developments were also occurring in the USSR (Tsvetkova, 2021).1 However, it was not just in the fields of technology research and development that the Cold War’s influence held significant sway in universities. In the Soviet Union, artists, writers, and scholars were expected to elaborate and celebrate the propaganda of the government. Failure to do so invited serious repercussions, including imprisonment and censorship, as experienced by the writers Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among many others (Hornsby, 2013;

94  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century Rudova, 1997). In Western countries, especially in the United States, the use or misuse of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences was generally more nuanced than in the Soviet Union, but nonetheless as real. As Kenneth Osgood notes, as far as the Americans were concerned, it was as much a battle to win the “hearts and minds of the enemy as […] blood shed on the battlefield” (2002: 86). This involved deploying sophisticated psychological warfare techniques and political propaganda. Researchers in universities proved to be a fertile source for advancing these black arts. In her book Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the cultural Cold War in the United States, Francis Stoner Saunders (2000) reveals how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through a series of clandestine backchannels manipulated writers and intellectuals in helping to elaborate and to extol the strategies and cultural and political values said to characterize America and its democratic allies. It did so largely through clandestine funding arrangements directed to literary journals and magazine and humanities and social sciences research centres in universities. Lawrence Soley describes how these developments saw the social sciences drawn into secretive collaboration with the Cold War strategies of the United States so that “federal grants and subsidies kept universities prosperous and expanding into the 1970s” (1998: 230). This was part of what Simon Reid-Henry describes as “the struggle to build a more robust democratic order on the ashes of the furnace of war” (2019: 27). But it can also be seen as a deliberate, even cynical ploy to appropriate the intellectual work of faculty members in the conduct of the Cold War. It was certainly a departure from John Henry Newman’s commitment to the idea of a university in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake, not for the purposes of governments engaging in conflicts, “hot” or “cold”, with competing governments. And it was certainly a departure from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea that universities should engage in pure research, not research designed to serve the real-time pragmatism of governments or anyone else for that matter. The Cold War fostered the idea that universities were economic and strategic adjuncts to the state. In America, this development was consolidated under the National Defence Education Act passed by the US Congress in 1958. Very much a Cold War initiative, the Act made clear that universities could be required to become the intellectual handmaidens of governments, conducting research deemed to be “useful” by the state (Wallerstein, 1997). Newman would probably have questioned this intervention on the grounds that it was restricting universities to the production of “useful knowledge” at the cost of “liberal knowledge”. It also constitutes a major departure from the idea of the university being beyond the limits of state control, an idea which Humboldt believed was quintessential for the university’s pursuit and teaching of pure knowledge while engaging in pure research. The Cold War, in short, can be read as the era of the appropriation of the research achievements of universities by the state, an appropriation that has been maintained ever since. No longer are universities regarded primarily as academically and intellectually neutral sources of knowledge. Instead, they have

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 95 come to be viewed by governments and commentators as instruments of shortterm micro-economic policies. This poses considerable dangers for the scholarly integrity of universities. In such a climate of uncertainty, it would be helpful to revisit Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The Limits of State Action which sets out clear boundaries within which both universities and the state can operate for the benefit of both parties.

The “long 1960s” In the years immediately following the end of World War II, most developed economies experienced a baby boom and a surge in economic growth, partly in response to post-war reconstruction policies. The increases in birth rates saw growing numbers of students working their way through the education systems of those economies. In Australia, for example, “the postwar baby boom hit the state’s primary schools with the force of a tsunami. […] New primary schools and high schools […] sprouted from muddy paddocks on the fringes of new suburbs. […] Soon the wave hit the university” (Davison and Murphy, 2012: 3). Meanwhile, labour market demands for highly skilled technology graduates and policy experts increased pressure on governments to expand higher education. The demand for more graduates in the developed economies was also a response to the pressures of the Cold War. By the end of the 1950s it had become clear that the old established public universities could no longer be exclusively reserved for the education of the privileged few; the era of mass higher education institutions had become both necessary and irreversible. Many students enrolling in universities by the 1960s were the first in their families to be able to access higher education. The result, as Simon Marginson observed in his book Higher Education and the Common Good, was that “Higher education is becoming socially inclusive at a rapid rate and on a worldwide scale” (2016: 24). Unsurprisingly, the socio-economic status, cultural experiences, and expectations of perhaps the majority of these first-generation university students differed markedly from those who had graduated during the pre-mass higher education decades. They were less influenced by traditional academic hierarchies and traditions, and they were interested in studying curricula to help them find careers that would lift their living standards beyond those of their parents’ generation – and for not a few they wanted to understand the increasingly complex world in which they were living. Nonetheless, in Australia, for example, as Professor Connell has noted: Universities in the 1950s and 1960s were not comfortable places. They were run by an oligarchy of male professors who were linked, especially in faculties of law, medicine and engineering, with professional establishments outside. The odour of the British Empire still hung around academic life. Curricula were monocultural, despite the mass immigration of Australia’s post-war decades and the presence of Indigenous cultures (2022)

96  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe, universities were much the same. In the newer institutions, where many first-generation students were enrolled, protests and “sit-ins” became the order of the day. Similar actions spread to the older campuses too. For example, early in March 1968, in the ultra-conservative University of Tokyo (originally the Imperial University of Tokyo), radical students took hostages and occupied Yasuda Hall in the centre of the University Campus. They maintained their occupation until January of the following year when “eight-five hundred riot squad police armed to the teeth stormed the building and drove the students out” (Nathan, 1974: 248). At Harvard in April 1969, radical students presented the University President with a list of demands which included ending Harvard’s cooperation with the military and the removal of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from the campus. Subsequently, hundreds of students occupied University Hall, forcing out eight deans and administrators in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, upending furniture, painting slogans on walls, and rifling through confidential files. At the President’s request, at dawn the next day state troopers and police broke into the Hall, clubbing and manhandling students while evicting them. Over 200 students were arrested. These actions by the authorities provoked further protests, strikes, and more mass meetings on campus (Harvard Magazine, 2019). Unlike their peers in the older universities, many of the first-generation students were not complacently socialized into a culture of entitlement and privilege. On a number of campuses, radical student movements began to challenge accepted social norms and conventions while advocating a wide array of political issues: civil rights, democracy, anti-war, free speech, sexual liberation, anticapitalism. As the historians of Monash University (which opened to students in 1961) explained: “Radicalized students saw the university not as a ‘place apart’ but as a tool of capitalism which disguised its repressive nature through the myth of free thought and inquiry” (Davison and Murphy, 2012: 118). In the United States, student radicalism began to emerge across many campuses. In 1962 a conference of radical student movements met at Port Huron in Michigan to form an organization that became known as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Under its first president Tom Hayden, it produced the Port Huron Statement. As Mark Boren explains, this prophesied a “New Left” movement in which [S]tudents would lead a social movement that, in contrast to the old left’s class-based attack on capitalism through the mobilization of workers, [that] would endeavor to attack poverty, racism and imperialism through nonviolent protest, education and the uniting of various student activist organizations and outside communities. The statement claimed that the role of the intellectual activist was central to social change (2019: 120; italics added) In 1964, the theme of students being the last vanguard of progressive politics was elaborated by the Marxist revisionist scholar Herbert Marcuse. In his book

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 97 One-Dimensional Man (1991 edition), Marcuse argued that capitalism in the United States and communism in the Soviet Union had successfully destroyed any potential revolutionary opposition to their regimes by absorbing the proletariat and middle classes into their disempowering systems of production and consumption, while reproducing a culture of “repressive tolerance”. He proposed that students would provide the last opportunity for a potentially revolutionary answer to the socio-economic and cultural straightjackets that had captured the middle and working classes in the West and in the Soviet Union. His rationale was that students were effectively – if temporarily – suspended from the political and economic structures (liberal capitalism in the United States, state capitalism in the USSR) that had ensnared everyone one else. Marcuse’s argument was imbued with a great deal of imaginative romanticism largely unhindered by factual analysis. Nonetheless it certainly excited considerable interest among student activists whose numbers were growing across many university campuses. After all, Marcuse had flatteringly anointed them as the leaders in the revolutionary vanguard of a new area of liberation, free from the old moralizing conventions and oppressive cultural institutions of their parents. It was certainly the case, as Peter Edwards has noted, that “By 1968 the young were questioning the values and attitudes of government, society and their own parents more deeply than previous generations” (Edwards, 1997: 179). A signal development erupted on the Berkeley campus of the University of California during the 1964–65 academic year. This became known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Thousands of students were involved, day and night, in acts of civil disobedience inspired in part by the Civil Rights Movement, and the growing Anti-Vietnam War Movement. The students were demanding that political advocacy supporting civil rights activism generally and anti-war protests be permitted on campus. They were especially vociferous in demanding that free speech (including the right to blasphemous and offensive speech) should be allowed and that academic freedoms be enhanced (Goines, 1993; Rorabaugh, 1989). While there was much in the Free Speech Movement that was arguably defensible, its often-shallow invocation of the concept of “freedom” is perhaps best expressed by John Milton’s observation: “License they mean when they cry liberty” (2014 edition). Meanwhile, in Paris in 1968, university campuses exploded in uproar as students occupied administration building, marched through city streets, while bringing their home institutions and urban neighbourhoods to a standstill. Their complaints were many, and many of them were justified: overcrowded campuses and classrooms, sub-standard amenities, aloof and arrogant professors, outdated curricula, poor teaching and assessment processes, inadequate libraries, and antiquated laboratories. However, their demands for change soon extended well beyond the academic sphere. The ideas that were motivating the French students were later encapsulated in a book by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his brother Gabriel, Obsolete Communist: The left-wing alternative (1968). In fact, the book revealed that the movement’s ideological basis was a loose amalgam of naïve idealism, crude libertarianism, and wild romantism. Nonetheless,

98  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century the protests spread across France. In some places they were joined by workers and members of the general public, resulting in the closing of shops and businesses, the shutting down of the regular working of local, prefectural, and national governments, and in due course instigating a general strike. While the students came very close to toppling the government of the day, and at one stage they forced President Charles de Gaulle to flee to Germany in fear of his life, the loose alliance with workers movements soon fell apart. Students, too, began drifting back to their campuses. As Michael Seidman concludes, 1968 in Paris proved to be “an imaginary revolution” (2004; see also Harman, 1988). The issues being canvassed on campuses around the world at this time were more often than not a confused – and confusing – mixture of local grievances, ideological fantasies, and international concerns. The English novelist and historian David Caute has described this as an “international fever” which he saw spreading around the world, with university students as its main exemplars. He asked: What were they – courageous visionaries or romantic utopians? Genuine revolutionaries or posturing spoiled brats? An authentic resistance movement or a carnival by kids who had never known poverty and the fear of unemployment? An idealistic challenge to imperialism or a pantomime of rhetorical gestures? A rebirth of the critical intelligence or a long, drugged “trip” into fashionable incoherence? (1988: xi) They were probably all of these things and more. However, one issue in particular focused the interests and energies of many students on many campuses from the mid-1960s: this was the Vietnam War. In Australia, for example, male students aged 18 and above were liable to be conscripted to the country’s military to fight in Vietnam. (At that time, they were not eligible to vote until they turned 21.) A similar “draft” policy was recycled in the United States. Anti-war protests broke out on campuses, “characterised by violence and law-breaking” (Edwards, 1997: 183). In the United States, the draft became a rallying point for the growing opposition to America’s commitment to the war in Vietnam. Some 60% of American servicemen in Vietnam had been drafted (there were no female draftees) by the Selective Service System in the Pentagon. Draftees who were being sent to the war zone began to face a deteriorating situation in strategic terms. Morale in the US military began to rapidly decline as domestic opposition to the war mounted. This became a major issue largely because of the inequities of the draft which saw far more working class and members of ethnic minorities being sent to the war than white middle class young men. Moreover, as John Prados explains: “Implicated in these inequities were the institutions – notably colleges and universities, but also police departments and courts, plus municipalities across the nation – that cooperated with the Selective Service” (Prados, 2009: 200). Subsequently, the anti-war movement become a major disruption on campuses across America. Protests and moratoriums became regular features of campus life. By the 1970s the American labour movement and the general public were also

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 99 becoming impatient because of the attenuated nature of the war. Voter opinion began to swing heavily against the war effort, not only in America but in countries allied with the United States. Increasingly, calls were being heard to bring about the war’s immediate end. In the late 1960s, in Australia – one of America’s closest allies in the war – public opinion also began coalescing strongly against maintaining Australia’s troop commitments to the war, leaving the conservative pro-American government of the day out on a limb (Lee and Dee, 2001). In the United States, student anti-war activists began mobilizing protests on campus, challenging university administrations, and disrupting classes. From early, April at Kent State University in Ohio, students had been engaging in a series of sometimes violent anti-war demonstrations on and off campus which led to a stand-off on campus with the National Guard. With little warning, at about 12:30 pm on the 4 May, the Guardsmen opened fire on the students. Four students were killed instantly. Nine were seriously wounded. Many were deeply traumatized (Grace, 2016). The Kent State tragedy saw student protests and demonstrations, not a few becoming extremely violent, erupt on campuses across the United States. By 1975, the war had become so unpopular in the United States that it resulted in American troops being brought home and the end to the war itself. The important point, however, was that student activism against the war in Vietnam, in America and elsewhere across the world, had been a significant factor contributing to the ignominious withdrawal of the United States and its allies from Vietnam. The unbridled enthusiasms, idealism, hedonism, and romanticism that marked so much of the activism of students on university campuses around the world during the “long 1960s” began to dissolve soon after the end of the Vietnam War. The coming of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s saw a reaction against the sexual permissiveness that had characterized the 1960s. Students began adopting a utilitarian outlook in regard to their studies. What degree programme or programmes will get me a job? How can I fit study into my part-time work regime? What is the use of academic study? Meanwhile, the world was on the cusp of a communications revolution as the worldwide web began to extend its reach around the world. Social media started to impact on people’s lives. There was much talk of “globalization” and its promises of an interlinked economy right around the globe, unhindered by national borders. The economic benefits of free trade in goods and services became the new public policy culture, a view that began to be echoed on many campuses. Student interest in political issues declined and campuses became less animated intellectually and culturally, but probably more orderly than they had been in the 1960s. A disillusioned generation of students began to emerge just as the conflicted twentieth century was coming to an end.

Note

1. It is noteworthy that there is a more accessible literature on American universities during the Cold War than almost any other country, especially the USSR.

100  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century

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The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 101 Gaddis, J. (2005), The Cold War: A New History (New York, NY: Penguin). Geiger, R. (2009), “The ivy league,” in Palfreyman, D. and Tapper, T. (eds.), Structuring Mass Higher Education: The Role of Elite Institutions (London: Routledge): 281–301. Giles, G. (1984), “German students and higher education policy in the Second World War,” Central European History, 17 (4): 330–354. Goines, D. (1993), The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press). Grace, T. (2016), Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press). Hagemann, K. (1997), “Of ‘manly valor’ and ‘German Honor’: Nation, war, and masculinity in the age of the Prussian uprising against Napoleon,” Central European History, 30 (2): 187–220. Harman, C. (1988), The Fire Last Time: 1968 and after (London: Bookman). Harvard Magazine (2019), “Echoes of 1969,” https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2019/ 03/1969-student-protests-vietnam (accessed 12 December 2021). Hornsby, R. (2013), Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Irish, T. (2015), The University at War, 1914–1925: Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Jarausch, K. (1984), “German students in the First World War,” Central European History, 17 (4): 310–329. Jeans, W. (2010), Sir Henry Bessemer (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing). Jenkins, R. (2000), “Disenchantment, enchantment and re-enchantment: Max Weber at the millennium,” Max Weber Studies, 1 (1): 11–32. Johnson, C. (2004), The Sorrows of Empire: Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books). Johnson, R. (2007), The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism (Penrith, CA: Humanities-eBooks). Jones, H. (2005), “The impact of the Cold War,” in Addison, P. and Jones, H. (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell): 23. Jones, L. (2008), “Gender and conscientious objection in the First World War,” Nordic Journal of Masculinity Studies, 3 (2): 99–113. Judt, T. (2006), Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico). Kerr, C. (1991), The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960–1980 (New York, NY: SUNY Press). Kerr, C. (2001), The Uses of the University, fifth edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer­ sity Press). Kitchen, M. (2000), Europe Between the Wars (New York, NY: Longman). Kuth, J. (1999), “Military-industrial complex,” in Whiteclay, J. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Landes, D. (2003), The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe, 1750 to the Present, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Launius, R. (2019), Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Lee, D. and Dee, M. (2001), “Southeast Asian conflicts,” in Goldsworthy, D. (ed.), Facing North: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press): 262–309.

102  The public university in a conflicted twentieth century Leffler, M. and Westad, O. (eds.) (2012) The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vols. 1–3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mack, M. (2009), “The holocaust and Hannah Arendt’s critique of philosophy,” New German Critique, 36 (1): 35–60. Marcuse, H. (1991 edition), One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge). Marginson, S. (2016), Higher Education and the Common Good (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). Mearsheimer, J. (2001), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: Norton). Milton, J. (2014 edition), Paradise Lost (Minneapolis, MN: First Editions). Nathan, J. (1974), Mishima: A Biography (Tokyo: Tuttle). Osgood, K. (2002), “Hearts and minds: The unconventional Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 4 (2): 85–107. Pine, L. (2010), Education in Nazi Germany (New York, NY: Berg). Prados, J. (2006), Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago, IL: Dee). Prados, J. (2009), Vietnam: The History of the Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press). Reid-Henry, S. (2019), Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War (London: John Murray). Robin, R. (2001), Making the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the MilitaryIndustrial Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Rorabaugh, R. (1989), Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Rudova, L. (1997), Understanding Boris Pasternak (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press). Rundshagen, V. (2013), “Post Industrial Society,” in Idowu, S., Capaldi, N., Zu L. and Gupta A. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility (Berlin: Springer). Schatz, R. and Fiske, S. (1992), “International reactions to the threat of nuclear war: The rise and fall of concern in the eighties,” Political Psychology, 13 (1): 1–29. Seidman, M. (2004), The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (Providence, RI: Berghahn). Skidelsky, R. (1994), John Maynard Keynes, Vol. II: The Economist as Saviour (London: Viking). Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2010), Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, States and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Soley, L. (1998), “The new corporate yen for scholarship,” in Simpson, C. (ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York, NY: The New Press): 229–249. Stoner, F. (2000), Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books). Sulick, M. (2015), “Intelligence in the Cold War,” The Intelligencer, 21 (1): 47–52. Taylor, C. (1964), The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge). Taylor, C. (1999), “Self-interpreting animals,” in Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 45–76. Tsvetkova, N. (2021), The Cold War in Universities: U.S. and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–1990 (Leiden: Brill). Tuchman, G. (1994), “Historical social science: Methodology, methods and meanings,” in Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: Sage): 306–323.

The public university in a conflicted twentieth century 103 Unger, R. (2019), The Knowledge Economy (London: Verso). Wallerstein, I. (1997), “The unintended consequences of Cold War area studies,” in Schiffrin, A. (ed.), The Cold War and the University (New York, NY: the New Press): 195–232. Weber, M. (2003 edition), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by T. Parsons, with an Introduction by R.H. Tawney (New York, NY: Dover Publications). Zaretsky, R. (2018), “Never forget that World War I was also racist,” Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/12/never-forget-that-world-war-i-was-alsoracist/ (accessed 3 June 2021).

8

The ideological university

Introduction As the twenty-first century unfolds, the ideals of free and open scholarship in universities that were pioneered so eloquently and insistently by John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the nineteenth century seem all but forgotten. The Harvard scholar Pippa Norris has highlighted this academic amnesia, noting that: “Heated battles about the so-called “cancel culture” in Western societies and on college campuses have intensified in recent years following allegations of morally offensive words and deeds, many involving claims of racism and ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, sexual harassment and abuse, misogyny and ageism, and homophobia and transphobia” (2021). Many public universities appear indifferent to the idea that their primary role should be to provide intellectual sanctuaries in which scholars are free to agree to disagree with each other – robustly, if necessary, but always tolerantly – while pursuing their specialist areas of knowledge. Ideological defensiveness is on the rise, eclipsing open-minded scholarly traditions of investigating orthodox, conventional, and fashionable opinions and popular beliefs. Four ideologies stand out in strident competition with the fading conventions of open enquiry on many of today’s university campuses: (i) neoliberalism, (ii) postmodernism, (iii) identity politics, and (iv) woke politics. As discussed below, these ideologies stand in contrast to the modes of enquiry that would normally be associated with the idea (or ideal) that all contending knowledge claims are open to rigorous and sceptical investigation and critical analysis in universities worthy of that name. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, this means engaging “into controversy with other rival standpoints, doing so both in order to exhibit what is mistaken in the rival standpoint […] and in order to test and retest […] one’s own point of view against the strongest possible objections” (1990: 231). The ideological mind disdains that kind of intellectual freedom, in contradiction to the insistence of Newman and Humboldt that the lenses through which scholars should be viewing the world must be widely focused. As Wallerstein and his colleagues note: “When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological” (2013: 188). DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-8

The ideological university 105 While there are numerous ideological beliefs swirling around within and outside today’s university campuses, the ideologies highlighted above stand out as powerful rallying points for scholars who are increasingly characterized by their intolerance of fellow faculty members whose knowledge interests are articulated outside the closed belief systems associated with one or more of the four paradigms highlighted above. Judicious scepticism is not an ingrained feature of the ideological mind, particularly when it comes to examining its own value assumptions, its selective use of data, and its epistemological limitations. Most certainly, this is not to suggest that the four ideologies in question are unworthy of scholarly analysis and criticism. There are critical elements within each of them that reflect real problems in mainstream knowledge systems. The four ideologies deserve to be investigated, not simply on their own terms, but as propositions that can be openly debated and critically analysed, just as all other scholarly issues. A problem arises when they intervene in university curricula and academic conversations on university campuses as ideological imperatives rather than as philosophical enquiry. It is important to emphasize that a comprehensive critique of the four ideologies is not being offered here. A brief overview of each is provided in order to highlight how their ideological presence in many university curricula and on many campuses has become increasingly problematic, even disruptive. Collectively, the ideologies are more symbiotic than causal. What needs to be critical scrutinized is the tendency of these four ideologies to close down debates in universities. This is the very opposite of the university as an “open society”. As Karl Popper once observed (despite often lapsing into an ideological mindset himself): “[I]f we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom” (1994: 189). Marxists have long argued that ideology, in whatever form it is expressed, is false consciousness, leading people to the misleading conviction that the values by which they live, the truths which they hold dear, and the social and economic conditions under which they live – no matter how perverse, contradictory, or oppressive they are – they are the best that can be reasonably expected under the existing circumstances. Referring to Louis Althusser’s account of ideology, Craig Browne explains that an ideological understanding of the world is “the imaginary relation of individuals to the real conditions of existence” (2010: 81). Or as Terry Eagleton notes, ideologies “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts both for the ideologies’ highly figurative nature and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held” (2013: 288). Any proposed alternatives to the ideology of the moment, or any objections to it, are dismissed or attacked by their proponents as being economically unsound, socially damaging, perverse, immoral, politically incorrect, maybe even blasphemous. As noted by Eugene Goodheart, the ideological mind rejects “ideas of disinterestedness, objectivity, and universality, for they now turn out

106  The ideological university to be mystifications that conceal motives of domination” (1994: 415). This is despite the fact that most, if not all, ideologies are themselves attempts to conceal motives of domination. While there have been numerous critiques of the four ideologies influencing the academic cultures on many contemporary university campuses, the fact that they reinforce each other, and the fact that they often share common ground, has attracted much less critical attention. More importantly, their collective impact on the contemporary public university needs to be countered. That collective impact constitutes a rejection of the very idea of the modern liberal university by seeking to determine what can be debated, by whom, and on what terms. Of the four ideologies highlighted above, neoliberalism is the most dominant and most damaging to the ideals of the modern liberal university. As an ideology, neoliberalism has opened up opportunities for its three associated (symbiotic) ideologies to encroach into academic discourses. It is the ideological character of these belief systems that needs to be critically interrogated and eliminated if today’s public universities are going to be able to positively contribute to their cultures, societies, and their economies. In short, the rise of the ideological university must be stopped in its tracks because it is not a university in any meaningful sense at all.

A brief account of ideological neoliberalism David Harvey notes that the years from 1978 to 1980 proved to be “a revolutionary turning point in the world’s social and economic history” (2005: 1). In 1978 Deng Xiaoping had set in train a programme of economic reforms in China which culminated over subsequent decades in spectacular economic growth in that country, with wide-ranging consequences for the rest of the world (Kissinger, 2011). On becoming Prime Minister in the Britain in 1979, Margaret Thatcher unleashed sweeping economic reforms that have impacted on the British economy and society ever since (Albertson and Stepney, 2020). In 1980 President Ronald Reagan initiated economic policies that had much in common with Margaret Thatcher’s, especially her determination to curb the power of trade unions. As Nicholas Wapshott explained: “Reagan’s bold stand against the arbitrary power of the trade unions transformed the way Americans viewed him and his presidency. Similarly, Thatcher’s battle against organized labour would alter the way that Britain was governed and the way it was viewed around the world” (2008: 212–3). It was not simply curbing the powers of trades unions that typified the economic policies of Thatcher and Reagan. Thatcherite economics and Reaganomics, as they were known, were driven by a political ideology variously labelled as neoclassical economics, economic rationalism, and post-Keynesian economics. It is perhaps most widely known by non-specialist economists as being the dominant ideology of neoliberalism. The primary rationale of this approach to economic policy making is to minimize the power of the state to intervene in and to regulate the private sector of the economy, shunning the leading role

The ideological university 107 the state has played historically in the development of all the capitalist economies. As Mariana Mazzucato explains: “[M]ost of the radical, revolutionary innovations that have fuelled the dynamics of capitalism – from railroads to the Internet, to modern-day nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals – trace the most courageous, early and capital intensive ‘entrepreneurial’ investments back to the State” (2015: 45). The ideology of neoliberalism further claims that in freeing the private sector from the regulatory power of the state, everyone would benefit from increased economic growth producing a “trickle down” wealth distribution effect, directed by “the invisible hand” of the free market. Perry Anderson has described neoliberalism as “the most successful ideology in world history” (2000: 17). He is disturbed by this development, noting how neoliberalism has taken a vice-like grip on the minds of policymakers around the world. In a similar vein, George Monbiot has noted that: “So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognize it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution” (2016). It disarmingly represents itself as a positivist (that is, a scientific or rationalist) understanding of economics. According to the neoliberalism’s most frequently cited dogma, wealth accrued at the top of the economy will naturally be redistributed (“trickled down”) via the mechanisms of the free market, providing every deserving (note this qualification) individual with the means to be fully responsible for their own wellbeing. Thus, the need for all state welfare programmes will be brought to an end. Public institutions such as hospitals, schools, public housing, pension systems and efforts to ameliorate the negative consequences of unemployment, prisons, public utilities (electricity, water, roads, public transport), even policing and the courts, will be handed over to the private sector which neoliberals believe will run them more efficiently and at lower cost. For people falling through the cracks (and neoliberals see these people as a mostly undeserving minority), it is assumed that private charities or their commercial offshoots will be able and willing to care for them. Despite all of neoliberalism’s promises and prophesies, “trickle down” economics has turned out to be a hoax, and a cruel one at that. As Monbiot notes: “Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are [dismissed as] both counterproductive and morally corrosive” (2016). A signal consequence of the ideology of “trickle down” economics has been a dramatic surge in corrosive socio-economic inequalities, nationally and globally (Picketty, 2020: ch. 13; see also Case and Deaton, 2020; Picketty, 2014: Part Three; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2011: Part Two). Rather than trickling down, wealth has been flowing upwards into the hands of a few rich elites. That rich few have become richer, and the vast majority of the rest have become both relatively and absolutely poorer. Meanwhile, not a few of the privatized public goods and services (especially in regard to essential utilities like public transport, electricity, and water supplies) have turned out to be more expensive and less

108  The ideological university efficient than when they were administered by the state (Stretton and Orchard, 1994). One especially negative consequence has been a growing anger directed at governments and the authority of the state – consider, for example, the implications of the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Congress (Luke, 2021). Ironically, the ideology of neoliberalism echoes Marxist materialist ideologies which assert that developments in the material substructure are the sole drivers of social change and economic change. Any understanding that creative thought and human imagining are vital elements in all historical development (a point that Marx recognized to be true) is clearly beyond the neoliberal imagination. In particular, neoliberalism is either ignorant or dismissive of the fact that these attributes have been a driving force in scholarly progress in universities and university-like institutions over many hundreds of years. However, neoliberalism’s underlying assumptions are being called into question, mainly because of the evident failure to live up to their promises. Rajesh Venugopal has noted that “[N]eoliberalism is now widely acknowledged in the literature as a controversial, incoherent and crisis-ridden term, even by many of its most influential deployers” (2015: 166; see also Vlachou, 2016). Its promises for untold growth, innovation, and socio-economic progress have mostly fallen flat. From its introduction during the 1970s and 1980s, economic growth (neoliberalism’s holy grail) has been slower than in the decades prior to its introduction. As Martin Jacques explains: “The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 1970s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present” (2016). Its hostile attacks on trade unions have left millions of workers vulnerable to rapacious employers with wage levels and working conditions deteriorating as a consequence. There have been worrying increases in unemployment, inequality, and poverty, nationally and globally. The main beneficiaries of neoliberal policies have been big business, the big banks, and big media conglomerates (Pearse, 2021). Perhaps its most serious consequence to date has been the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2008 of which there are very likely more to come (Önis and Grüven, 2009). However, neoliberal capitalism’s future is not looking bright. As David Kotz has warned: “[C]apitalism is not only in a period of structural crisis at this time but in a structural crisis that has no easy path to a desirable resolution” (2015: 218). Once it gained a stranglehold on mainstream government policymaking, ideological neoliberalism imposed a regulatory regime on higher education institutions mimicking the operations of the so-called free market. As Lawrence Busch notes: “[M]arketplace terminology is now commonplace in higher education and research. Talk of return on investment, “incentivizing” faculty and students, value added, and other terms once reserved for the business community have become part of the daily discussions in higher education and research” (2017: xviii). This has resulted in negative consequences at many levels in universities. Four in particular stand out. First, it has radically degraded the pedagogical relationship between staff and students, in which the latter are classed as clients of the former, while professors and lecturers are categorized as service-providers.

The ideological university 109 The relationship between teachers and students, in short, is typified as a transactional affair. The idea that there is a duty of care (or a duty of pastoral concern) that faculty owe their students – which John Henry Newman argued should be a distinguishing feature of a liberal university – is alien to the commercialized neoliberal view of the teacher-student relationship. Secondly, it has obliged students to pay exorbitant fees for their studies, forcing them to run up large debts that need to be paid after they graduate. Thirdly, it has imposed an imbalance in the way academic curricula are designed and delivered, requiring universities to place greatest emphasis on their training functions at the expense of their educating functions. Fourthly, one of neoliberalism’s most contemptuous attacks on public universities has been its ideologically driven cuts to their public funding. The neoliberal view is that public higher education institutions (and education institutions generally) constitute an unjustified cost burden on the state. This contrasts sharply with The Limits of State Action in which Wilhelm von Humboldt was adamant in arguing that schools and universities are an investment by the state in preparing young people to engage in activities that not only benefit the economy, but society as a whole. Dispensing with this standpoint, neoliberalism preaches that universities should become autonomous institutions, funding themselves through fees for service, drawing on endowments, selling their applied research expertise to the private sector, recruiting full fee-paying students (especially international students), wooing philanthropists, and seeking investors. Neoliberal ideology is contemptuous of the concept of tenure for academics, placing as many faculty members on short-term (“casual”) contracts as possible. This is primarily a fiscal strategy aimed at lowering costs. It has nothing to do with achieving academic excellence. It is also a way of controlling eccentric, critical, or “difficult” scholars. This latter limitation ensures that faculty members’ duty to speak truth to power can be severely curtailed. The ideology driving neoliberalism has little time for the abstract knowledge and the complexities of theoretical and experimental diversity. It is insolently dismissive of the fact that most good scholarship takes time – sometimes years, even lifetimes – to arrive at carefully considered, well-argued conclusions. To achieve its ideological makeover of public universities, neoliberalism has intervened radically in their management. As noted in Chapter 1, its advocates in government have enacted laws that minimize or even abrogate the membership of elected faculty membership of the governing councils of universities, replacing them with mainly business personnel. The result, as Raewyn Connell notes, is that “Universities in this environment [are] acting more like corporations” (2019: 83). This development is associated with a striking imbalance between officials in universities who have administrative or managerial functions and their academic colleagues who are responsible for the teaching and research normally associated with what the philosophical apologists of the liberal university note should be the primary purpose of a university. Moreover, a cavernous gap has opened up between the two groups, with managerial staff gaining access to benefits and working conditions that are not available to their academic colleagues (Ginsberg, 2011). Management of the institution increasingly takes precedence over the

110  The ideological university academic functions of the neoliberalized university, amounting to a case of the managerial tail wagging the academic dog. As Gaye Tuchman has observed, a particularly negative outcome of this development is that “administrators who have been hired from the national [or international] labor pool rather than “promoted” from the faculty imply their superiority to the faculty” (2009: 72). So, there are two outstandingly dysfunctional aspects of the neoliberal takeover of contemporary public universities. First, it has facilitated the imposition of the anti-intellectual culture that now looms over many of them. Secondly, it has transformed universities into institutions that are largely “managed” by non-academic managerialists rather than by communities of self-governing scholars. The justifications for these developments are articulated in a language that is highly ideological, allowing little or no recourse criticism, opposition, or alternative viewpoints – language that is insistent that the university is a business selling a commodity. This is despite the fact, as Raewyn Connell explains: “Education in itself is not a commodity. Education happens in human encounters that depend on care, trust, responsibility and truth, and such encounters cannot be packaged and sold” (2019: 119). Stefan Collini sums up the dilemma that this represents for universities: “Universities are suspected of being at best irrelevant, at worst obstructive, to this [neoliberal] agenda, and there is strong pressure for them to reshape their own activities so as better to further these economic purposes” (2018: 232).

Ideological postmodernism What has been referred to as “the postmodern turn” in contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and the social sciences largely emanated from French universities in the 1960s (Hassan, 1987). As one critic has noted, it “has regularly been understood as a mode of thought that rejected many of the central tenets of modern western rationality” (Browne, 2010: 79). It focuses critically on what are termed “grand narratives” whose contents have traditionally been accorded privileged standing in conventional academic discourses. The “grand narrative” concept, alternatively referred to as “metanarrative”, refers to conventional discourses (for example, in ancient and modern texts, novels, poetry, in music and art, drama and films, and in scientific, philosophical, and theological writings) that are identified by postmodernists as sanctioning cultural, economic, and political institutions that are inherently oppressive through their implied or explicit justifications for issues such as patriarchy, racism, sexual subjugation, colonial exploitation, war, and capitalism (see, for example, Lyotard, 1984). It is true that postmodernism’s various critiques of the “grand narratives” in conventional scholarships highlight issues that may be questioned and from which important lessons can be learned. However, as an ideology, two immediate problems haunt much postmodern literature. First, many of its most influential texts are frequently expressed in complicated prose that makes meanings difficult to untangle, or they are unhelpfully ambiguous, their recondite verbalizations lending them a specious authority.1 Secondly, in their more ideological

The ideological university 111 modes, they are severely judgmental in their linking of so-called canonical texts with practices of sexism, linguistic formalism, and social and cultural deprivation, thus perilously devaluing the literary, philosophical, and cultural authority for which those texts traditionally have been valued over many generations. Their tendency is to focus narrowly on the negative aspects of canonical texts – for example, what they allege are their seductive uses of language and conceptual devices to disguise malevolent or misleading meanings within the texts (Derrida, 1984), or their buttressing or legitimizing of cruel and oppressive forms of power (Foucault, 2020 edition). In the process they dismiss the contributions that those texts have also made to the positive development of literature and philosophy – indeed, of civilization itself. This has led to the conservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb to lament: In literature, postmodernism amounts to a denial of the fixity of any “text,” of the authority of the author over the interpreter, of any “canon” that privileges great books over lesser ones. In philosophy, it is a denial of the fixity of language, of any correspondence between language and reality – indeed, of any “essential” reality and thus of any proximate truth about reality. In law, […] it is a denial […] of the legitimacy of the law itself, which is regarded as nothing more than an instrument of power. In history, it is a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past (1994: 133; see also Eagleton, 1996) At the same time, postmodernism’s attacks on authoritative scholarship (“grand narratives”) can be interpreted, if not as an apologia for the neoliberal attacks on universities, then certainly as an accessory to those attacks. Both ideologies gratuitously impugn time-honoured traditions of scholarship. And while those traditions might need critical attention, to be contemptuous of them is to be profoundly anti-intellectual, and that should have no place in a university. Equally worrying is the fact that those attacks contribute to a culture of contempt for expertise and high scholarship that implicitly encourages populist attacks on science, rational thought, and expert scholarship. These attacks are vividly evidenced in the recent anti-vaccination protest movements that have been spreading across Western Europe, in Canada and the United States, and in Australia and New Zealand, for example. As noted in the first chapter, this culture of contempt for scholarly authority has been growing on and off campuses in recent years, adding to their devaluing by politicians and the public.

Identity politics as ideology Generally attributed to the Delphic Oracle and repeated in the teachings of Plato and Socrates, the classical maxim “Know thyself” has echoed down the centuries. By the sixteenth century in Europe this moral injunction had developed into a doctrine extolling the integrity of the inner self. As Francis Fukuyama notes: “The

112  The ideological university Protestant Reformation located the source of social control within the individual, rather than in external social institutions like the Church and its rituals” (2017). Over recent decades this has taken on a poignant urgency as more and more people experience an alienating disjunction between their sense of who they know they really are, deeply and seriously, and how they are perceived by others, especially others in authority. This is the source of the latter-day politics of identity which Charles Taylor explains “is partly shaped by the recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (1994: 25). Identity politics also speaks of an authentic inner self that demands recognition and respect from a society that has often been recalcitrant in recognizing and respecting the inner self. As Fukuyama notes: “It focuses our natural demand for recognition of our dignity and gives us a language for expressing the resentments that arise when such recognition is not forthcoming” (2018: 163). However, a difficulty with all this is that in many of its contemporary iterations, there is a tendency to reify the sense of identity by singling out or reductively over-emphasizing just one aspect of one’s infinitely more complex identity and reacting negatively, even aggressively to its perceived misrecognition by particular social and political authorities or by society more generally. In the contemporary world in which social media and related forms of communicating are flourishing, persons or groups who are ignored, marginalized, insulted, vilified, scorned, persecuted, verbally or physically abused, tortured, or imprisoned are likely, if given the opportunity, to articulate their resentments in ideological and political forums. Fukuyama points to two contemporary examples: “Both nationalism and Islamism–that is, political Islam–can be seen to be two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of a hidden or supressed group identity that seeks public recognition” (2018: 58; see also ch. 7). There are numerous individuals and groups who experience, at a number of different levels, a lack of recognition impugning their deepest sense of personhood, or of what the philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich calls the “depth of [their] existence” (1963: ch. 7). At its profoundest level, the politics of identity is present in our most intimate and mindful experiencing of our inner lives – an experiencing that deeply informs us, not only of who we are, but to whom may we relate affectively, cooperatively, emotionally, and productively. In his book, I and Thou, the renowned twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1963) notes that the richest experiencing of one’s identity is to be found in compassionate encounters with other individuals and groups, pointing to a cosmopolitan theory of identity politics that recognizes and celebrates a wide variety of individual and cultural differences while simultaneously recognizing the common humanity of all. However, the politics of identity has been narrowing from what should be a wide-ranging set of discourses to an ideological imperative, reducing identity to a set of singularities or binaries, when it should be understood as a very pluralist and fluid reality. The reified version of the politics of identity is encroaching

The ideological university 113 on a number of university campuses where, for example, debates about gender complexity and fluidity are being met with what Talia Bettcher singles out as “a history of feminist hostility towards trans people and, in particular, trans women” (2017). Professor Bettcher is concerned that this is evidence of an ideological shift away from philosophically informed debates about feminism with the result that “trans women are at grave risk of becoming a purely theoretical enterprise that has very little to do with understanding and combatting transphobic oppression” (2017). The “purely theoretical enterprise” Bettcher is referring to entails an ideological distortion of feminism that is morally questionable and anti-intellectual. The same may be said for other identity issues including the racializing of a peoples’ ethnic backgrounds and the marginalization of LGBQTI+ peoples. The ideological tenor of debates about the politics of identity on university campuses is deeply worrying. It is marked by a dehumanizing self-righteousness that seeks to narrowly define the terms of debates about the rich pluralism of the human experience – experience that should be welcomed and discussed openly and freely in the agora of ideas in the liberal university. As Fukuyama makes clear: [I]f the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into ever smaller, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative. One does not have to deny the possibilities and lived experiences of individuals to recognize that they can share values and aspirations with much broader circles of citizens (2018: 165–6; see also Sen, 2007) Too many debates about identity politics on university campuses today are framed in ideological terms that are either narcissistic or which support certain groups seeking power over others, seemingly in order to oppress them.

Woke politics as ideology In 2015, the writer Christopher Hope had returned for a visit to his native South Africa. Driving one day near the University of Cape Town, he noticed a crowd of students surging up a hill on which the campus of the university was placed. The focus of the crowd was a statue of the late, stupendously wealthy “Victorian imperialist” and rigidly prejudiced racist, Cecil Rhodes. The crowd of largely black students gathered around the statue shouting insults and jeering. A student leader stepped forward and smeared the statue with human excrement. The statue’s face was masked, a noose was placed around its neck, and a crane was brought in to lift the statue off its pedestal. Hope described the situation as it unfolded: “As the crane hoisted Rhodes slowly into the sky, the audience raised their phones or held up opened iPads, like prayer books, in front of the faces, and photographed, firstly the masked and dangling man, then each other, then themselves” (2018: 10). The fallen statue was bashed with batons, kicked,

114  The ideological university derided, and spat upon. Hope notes: “I asked myself why Rhodes, and why now? […] What was the point of digging up the past like this?” (2018: 7). Arguably, the answer to Christopher Hope’s questions is to be found in yet another developing ideological trend on university campuses that has been labelled “woke politics”.2 This reflects the fact that in recent years, there has been a new awakening of interest, particularly among university students and staff, in controversial interpretations of the politics of historical and cultural events that counter established or conventional interpretations. This awakening has obvious links to postmodernist debunkings (“deconstructions”) of grand narratives that are accused of glossing over misdemeanours and crimes of the past. This has given rise to what has been labelled as a “cancel culture” on many campuses which Pippa Norris defines as “collective strategies by activists using social pressures to achieve cultural ostracism of targets (someone or something) accused of offensive words or deeds” (2021; original italics). The woke politics of the cancel culture has led to the withdrawal of invitations to controversial commentators, authors, and scholars to speak on campuses. In instances where they were not withdrawn protests (sometimes violent) have erupted, preventing speakers from having their say – and, it must be noted, preventing their critics from having their say too. In the United States, and in other parts of the world, professors have been shouted down and even chased off campus (Soave, 2021). This is the very opposite to the ideals normally associated with the modern liberal university, and it is dangerous. As Andrew Sullivan has written: When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large (2018) The ideologizing of the university has been the result of this development.

The ideological university The emergence of the ideological university is not about students and faculty members waking up to injustices and oppressions and wanting to remedy them. The thread linking what are currently the four dominant ideological movements briefly surveyed above is about power – about who can dominate the scholarly space in universities to demonstrate how their disadvantaged situation or experience needs to be taken more seriously than the experiences of other groups and individuals (Aly, 2020). Allowing ideological power struggles to displace impartial scholarly discourses on university campuses is a major step towards the destruction of the contemporary public university. This, of

The ideological university 115 course, is one of neoliberalism’s aims. The anti-state restructuring of the economy that it has been advocating for many decades simply cannot afford to be challenged by academic research into the veracity of its claims, many of which are spurious, while also questioning its ethical integrity. With postmodernism’s persistent undermining of scholarly authority, and with identity politics enflaming ideological power plays on campuses, the effectiveness of the public university is being seriously undermined while neoliberalism is being buttressed along the way. And so the ideological university is becoming a battle ground for people with real and imagined grudges, for people who feel disempowered, for people who resent their lack of social and political recognition, for people who feel marginalized and devalued, and for those who are angry with what they perceive to be a stagnant academic culture. As Waleed Aly has noted: “T]hese groups are united in their disempowerment, their experience of oppression” (2020). Without question, there are valid reasons for many of their complaints and they merit consideration at every level in the university. However, by undermining, or even rejecting, the idea of a university in which both liberal knowledge and useful knowledge are feely and openly pursued, along with pure and applied research, the grounds for their complaints are unlikely to be addressed, socially, politically, and economically. Moreover, as Tom Nichols has observed: When resentful people demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be levelled, and equalized in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘fairness’, there is no hope for either democracy or fairness. Everything becomes a matter of opinion, with all views dragged to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality (2017: 233) Reimagining the contemporary public university is what is needed at this time, not its ideologizing.

Notes 1. For example, Julian Wolfreys and colleagues explain how Derrida adapts Heidegger’s concept of dekonstrution “[I]n order to demonstrate that which exists within or inhabits in a certain fashion any structure or the idea of any structure by which the articulation of that structure is made possible, and yet which is heterogeneous to the self-identity of the structure, whether one is talking of a conceptual, logical, discursive, institutional or philosophical formulation. Because that which is deconstructive is thus internal to the very idea of structure, and yet not definable within the logic of the self-same by which ideas, concepts and beliefs maintain their ‘truth’ or significance, it is therefore not generalisable as a ‘theory’ of structure, or structure’s internal contradictions” (2006: 29). 2. “Woke” is said to be derived from vernacular African American speech, originally referring to consciousness of racial prejudice. Over the past decade or so its usage has widened to embrace a growing awareness of social injustices, including the negative consequences of socio-economic inequalities and gender prejudices (Hunt, 2020).

116  The ideological university

References Albertson, K. and Stepney, P. (2020), “1979 and all that: A 40-year reassessment of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy on her own terms,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 44 (2): 319–342. Aly, W. (2020), “How liberalism’s blind spot let cancel culture bloom,” The Monthly, November, https://www.themonthly.com.au/2020/november/16041498200/waleedaly/woke-politics-and-power?mtr (accessed 3 December 2020). Anderson, P. (2000), “Renewals,” New Left Review, 1 (January): 5–24. Bettcher, T. (2017), “Transfeminism: Recent philosophical developments,” Philosophy Compass, 12 (11): https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12438 (accessed 3 January 2022). Browne, C. (2010), “Postmodernism, ideology, rationality,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 251: 79–99. Buber, M. (1963), I and Thou, second edition (New York, NY: Scribner). Busch, L. (2017), Knowledge for Sale: The Neoliberal Takeover of Higher Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Case, A. and Deaton, A. (2020), Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Collini, S. (2018), Speaking of Universities (London: Verso). Connell, R. (2019), The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing). Derrida, J. (1984), “Deconstruction and the other,” in Kearney, R. (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: University of Manchester Press): 107–126. Eagleton, T. (1996), The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing). Eagleton, T. (2013), Ideology (New York, NY: Routledge). Foucault, M. (2020 edition), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin). Fukuyama, F. (2017), “Martin Luther and the origin of identity politics,” The American Interest, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/11/02/political-consequencesprotestant-reformation-part-ii/ (accessed 15 December 2021). Fukuyama, F. (2018), Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Profile Books). Ginsberg, B. (2011), The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Goodheart, E. (1994), “Arnold, critic of ideology,” New Literary History, 25 (2): 415–428. Harvey, D. (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hassan, I. (1987), The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press). Himmelfarb, G. (1994), On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (New York, NY: Knopf). Hope, C. (2018), The Café de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa (London: Atlantic Books). Hunt, K. (2020), “How ‘woke’ became the word of our era,” The Guardian, 21 November, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/21/how-woke-became-the-wordof-our-era (accessed 21 November 2021). Jacques, M. (2016), “The death of neoliberalism and the crisis of western politics,” The Guardian, 21 August, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/ aug/21/death-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics (accessed 3 December 2021).

The ideological university 117 Kissinger, H. (2011), On China (London: Allen Lane). Kotz, D. (2015), The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Luke, T. (2021). “Democracy under threat after 2020 national elections in the USA: ‘Stop the steal’ or ‘Give more to the grifter?’” Educational Philosophy and Theory, https://doi. org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1889327 (accessed 3 December 2021). Lyotard, J.-F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press). MacIntyre, A. (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, Tradition (Notre Dame IND: University of Notre Dame Press). Mazzucato, M. (2015), Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risks and Innovation (London: Athem Press). Monbiot, G. (2016), “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, 15 April, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalismideology-problem-george-monbiot (accessed 3 January 2022). Nichols, T. (2017), The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Norris, P. (2021), “Cancel culture: Myth or reality?” Political Studies, 11 August, https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211037023 (accessed 12 September 2021). Önis, Z. and Grüven, A. (2009), “The global financial crisis and the future of neoliberal globalization: Rupture and continuity,” Global Governance, 17 (4): 469–488. Pearse, W. (2021), “A critique of neoliberalism,” Inomics, 16 March, https://inomics. com/blog/a-critique-of-neoliberalism-1379580 (accessed 3 April 2021). Picketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Picketty, T. (2020), Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press). Popper, K. (1994), The Open Society and Its Enemies, one volume edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Sen, A. (2007), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin). Soave, R. (2021), “Welcome to woke university: Is illiberal campus activism redefining American values,” Deseret, 30 August, https://www.deseret.com/2021/8/30/ 22643455/welcome-to-woke-university-cancel-culture-campus-speakers-shouteddown-political-protest-college (accessed 9 October 2021). Stretton, H. and Orchard, L. (1994), Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice: Theoretical Foundations on the Contemporary Attack on Government (London: Macmillan). Sullivan, A. (2018), “We all live on campus now,” Intelligencer, 9 February, https://nymag. com/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html (accessed 9 October 2021). Taylor, C. (1994), “The politics of recognition,” in Gutmann, A. (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press): 25–73. Tillich, P. (1963), The Shaking of the Foundations (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Tuchman, G. (2009), Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). Venugopal, R. (2015), “Neoliberalism as a concept,” Economy and Society, 44 (2): 165–187. Vlachou, R. (ed.) (2016), Contemporary Economic Theory: Radical Critiques of Neoliberalism (Berlin: Springer). Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derlugian, G. and Calhoun, C. (2013), Does Capitalism Have a Future? (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).

118  The ideological university Wapshott, N. (2008), Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (New York, NY: Sentinel). Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2011), The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (London: Bloomsbury). Wolfreys, J., Robbins, R. and Womack, K. (2006), Key Concepts in Literary Theory, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

9

Conclusion Reimagining the public university

Introduction Jürgen Habermas once lamented: “Must the university, on its way towards functional specialization within an ever more swiftly differentiating system of knowledges, discard like an empty shell what once had been called its “idea”?” (1987: 5). His lament is even more relevant today. This chapter concludes that reimagining the efficacy of the “idea” in the minds of governments and the public, and working out how this can be achieved, have become the two most important challenges facing the contemporary public university. Reimagining of the “idea” of the public university is absolutely viral if we are to counter the contorted thinking and misleading ideologies confusing a world that is glutted with information but starved of knowledge. Four strategies are briefly outlined in this final chapter in the hope of stimulating a widespread conversation about the reimagining of the public university. (1) The fact that the public university is a vital public good has to be clarified and defended. (2) The crisis of the mass (or unitary) higher education system means that it needs to be disaggregated, with two aligned and equal components carved out from its bloated body: polytechnics and liberal arts and sciences colleges. (3) The contemporary public university urgently needs to be de-managerialized. (4) The importance of the pure research focus of the university needs to be reestablished as its primary research responsibility. A great deal of more thought, and many discussions on campuses and in public, will be needed if we are to arrive at comprehensive and creative plans for reimagining and restoring the contemporary public university to its educating role in society.

The public university as a public good In the Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt was very clear about the “hands off” approach the State must adopt in regard to the university. The state’s sole task, he insisted, was to provide the university with the necessary resources to teach brilliantly and engage creatively in pure research. He argued that through its teaching, the university will prepare young people to engage intelligently with their societies and productively in their economies. He also DOI: 10.4324/9781003246831-9

120  Conclusion showed how pure research is essential because it lays the groundwork for essential, practical applications to follow. Once the resourcing of the public university is assured, preferably by a body that is completely independent from political interference, the state must step away, allowing the university to function autonomously, to be its own master. There must be no “meddling” (to recall Adam Smith’s term for it) by the state in the university’s governance, in its appointments of professors, lecturers, tutors, and research staff. It must have no say in the design and delivery of its curricula. It must have no influence over its research agendas. In Humboldt’s view, the university must always aim to be respected as a public entity. He saw it as a vital and necessary public investment in education and research that would be of great benefit to all of society. Humboldt argued that only with strict limits placed on the state’s interventionist powers would the university be free to develop the most balanced, objective, transparent, and ultimately the best natural sciences, technologies, social sciences, humanities, and philosophical knowledge possible. In short, Humboldt’s argument is all about the public university as a public good. A public good is a government-funded service, agency, or institution that is regarded as essential for social well-being but which the free market is either incapable or unwilling to provide (Reiss, 2021). In his book Higher Education and the Common Good, Simon Marginson observes as follows: Although they are under-recognised in social science, especially policy economics, public goods – [that is] goods that emerge in the zones of selfdetermined and non-market production – are produced in all societies. Public goods include collective goods that are consumed jointly rather than individually, and are often produced on a cooperative basis. In turn many of these collective goods take the form of common goods – [that is] goods that are conditioned by, and augment, social solidarity and equality. In some countries, but not all, schooling and higher education take this form (2016: 266; italics added) As an autonomous, properly resourced, and socially valued higher education institution, the public university is a standout example of a public good. Its significance lies in its creation of the kind of intellectual capital that the neoliberalized economy seriously underestimates and completely misunderstands. This is because it is the very antithesis of neoliberalism’s ideological determination to create a free-market economy that operates within an individualized, hyper-competitive anti-community. In this version of a free-market economy, the public university is to be relegated to a purely instrumental role prior to its privatization. Humboldt’s wisdom about the restrained relationship between the state and the public university is lost in this nightmare of anti-intellectual competitiveness and free-market humbug within the machinations of the neoliberal economy. As noted in Chapter 8, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the “idea” of the university that Newman and Humboldt had each advocated

Conclusion 121 in the nineteenth century was ignored or dismissed by short-sighted governments seeking to harness practical outcomes from academic research – in engineering and technology in particular – mainly to wage war. During the Cold War, governments were determined to appropriate many of the functions of universities, while also drawing them into their intelligence operations and “soft power” strategies. In stark contrast to Humboldt’s argument, that there must be clear limits to state control of universities, from the Cold War onwards, public universities were effectively appropriated by the state. As the era of neoliberal policymaking has gathered pace, public universities have come to be viewed as an unwarranted cost burden on the taxpayer. This dogma provides a false justification for serially under-funding public universities with the intention eventually to privatize them. In short, public universities are being vandalized by neolibertarians rushing in where philosophical authorities like Humboldt would never tread. Humboldt’s defence of the university against state intrusiveness came from a deep understanding of the university’s importance as a public good. In the face of neoliberal attacks, what needs to be recalled is that the public university is a both a public good and a public asset. Its teaching and research functions are investments, not costs. It will surely be obvious to all but the neoliberal mind that by providing young people with a world-class education that is informed by world-class research has profound medium- and long-term benefits for the whole of society and for the economy. Investing in the public university means investing in the futures of the young people and in the futures of their societies and economies. Moreover, the benefits that flow from the original investments in universities by governments will not only repay those investments in full, but also provide significantly increased benefits as well-educated graduates enter the workforce to participate productively in the economy and engage democratically in society. Hence it needs to be widely understood that the public university is unmistakably a public good. In line with this thinking is the fact that students should not be burdened by fees to study at university. In most public universities around the world, students are now obliged to pay high, even exorbitant fees. As noted in Chapter 1, many have to take out loans to pay these fees while many work part-time, often in more than one job, in order to support themselves while they study. There are two egregious consequences related to students having to pay high fees. First, university campuses are becoming increasingly devoid of a lively culture in which students can meet fellow students, including students from around the world to explore ideas and socialize amicably. Only a privileged few are able to enjoy their time at university, while the rest (the majority) have to cram classes and assignments into their timetables before rushing off to their part-time jobs. Successful educating takes time. It needs to be conducted in an uncluttered and calm atmosphere in which students are encouraged to read widely, to digest and discuss ideas extensively, enabling them to develop critical insights into their worlds and to celebrate its achievements. None of this should be rushed. Despite this fundamental pedagogical truth, as Bennett and Burke, remind us: “Within

122  Conclusion the competitive and increasingly neo-liberalised field of higher education […] having enough ‘time’ has become one of the most stressful aspects of learning” (2018: 913). The second consequence related to the high level of stress experienced by many students means that they have to juggle crowded timetables in order to accommodate their work and study obligations. This can have negative repercussions on their academic performance while it is also a factor contributing to mounting levels of mental illness among students (Robotham and Julian, 2006). Instead of charging fees, students should be provided with stipends by their governments to enable them to gain the most out of their university education. This is what investing in students means. It would also help to obviate financial discrepancies and structural disadvantages between wealthier students and poorer students, the latter being the hardest hit by the present fees and loans systems (Adams, 2022). Over the last decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of this century, public universities have been severely resource-depleted by interfering governments seeking to transform them into business enterprises with disastrous consequences, resulting in, as Lee Jones and Philip Cunliffe note in their important report on British higher education: “Poor quality courses and institutions [expanding] while high quality institutions have been degraded. Resource misallocation, bureaucracy and managerialism are rampant. British universities now combine the worst aspects of the market with the worst aspects of state control” (2020: 5; italics added). Much the same observations can be made about public universities almost everywhere. Reimagining the public university must start with freeing it from the clutches of unnecessary and counterproductive state controls. Placing limits on the State to interfere in the affairs of the public university, a case that Humboldt defended consistently, has to be a central element in its reimagining. Neoliberals will not of course comprehend Humboldt’s reasoning about why the state must fully resource the university while stepping back and allowing it to proceed with what it does best: that is, educating and researching. As he argued so passionately, successful universities will only flourish within a benevolent and respectful state, not an appropriating or interfering state.

Disaggregating the mass higher education system Since the 1980s, in many Western economies, higher education systems have been aggregated into a mass unitary system, bringing what were formerly mainly vocational and technical training institutions into the university system. The rationale for this development was partly to address a perceived inequality between universities and vocational institutions and partly to make the financing of higher education more compliant with neoliberal policy imperatives. In most instances, the result has been a case study of mismatching and confusion. Older and well-off universities have emerged at the top of a hierarchy of the mass or aggregated system of universities, with newer and less well-off institutions

Conclusion 123 struggling to maintain the semblance of being a university in any meaningful sense at all. As Gavan Butler has noted: [R]esources are concentrated on the higher education of a small proportion of all post-secondary students, leaving the remainder to more straightforward occupations […] and to education of lower cost and less complexity. To the students consigned (ostensibly on merit) to the second rank of institutions it is said that they do not have to bear the responsibilities that come with an education of the first rank, that agenda-setting and decisions can be left to ordained leaders, and that of course there is access to the opportunity of a first-rank education but that prospective students must be able to indicate that they can take advantage of it (2007: 47) The aggregated system has ended up as a heterogenous range of tertiary education training institutes being transformed into new universities, or being merged with existing institutions, including former polytechnics, technical and further education (vocational) colleges, teachers’ colleges, colleges of nursing, and paramedical training institutes. Little thought has been put into anticipating the negative fallout from the aggregating process, much less in having measures in place to ameliorate it. Much of it was imposed from above by interfering governments. Some of the more powerful universities were able to cherry-pick institutions whose assets they saw as serving their interests, including infrastructure and in some cases personnel (especially administrative personnel). The clumsy aggregating of tertiary education systems abruptly ended what had been a relatively benign and sometimes very successful post-secondary binary education system that had developed from the late 1950s. It has left graduates of secondary education systems with only one pathway towards a career – that is, by enrolling in a university. This one-size-fits-all strategy has been a disastrous failure, resulting in high dropout and failure rates, especially at first year university level in public universities across the neoliberalized economies (Gare, 2006). It has also seen a proliferation of narrowly specialized professional and vocational degree programmes in universities that have little or no liberal educating curricula in them. This is the very antithesis of what Newman advocated as the idea of a university. Its greatest weakness is that it fails to recognize that many students require a completely different post-secondary education path to that offered to them by traditional university pathways. Nor does it understand that another substantial cohort of students needs more time, and more knowledge, before deciding on what career they want to follow and therefore what academic qualifications are needed to take them towards it. What is to be done? The answer will be found in intelligently disaggregating the current dysfunctional mass university system. In response to these failures in the British higher education system, Jones and Cunliffe argue for “a comprehensive vision of national renewal […] [in which] tertiary education should

124  Conclusion be rebalanced away from universities, creating the highest quality non-academic education while allowing a diminished university sector to restore academic standards” (italics added). They explain: The guiding principle of this restructuring should be (1) that no academically capable young person should be denied the opportunity of degree-level study; but also (2) academically incapable or unmotivated people should not be pushed into university to meet arbitrary and destructive widening participation targets, or denied alternative routes of education and advancement (2020: 27) Their plan for restructuring is threefold: (1) They call for the creation of what they refer to as “New Colleges of Technology” (in this chapter they are referred to as polytechnics). (2) They propose a system of liberal arts colleges (in this chapter they are referred to as liberal arts and sciences colleges). (3) They argue for the creation of what they call “super universities” (2020: 30–1). In proposing the disaggregation of the mass university system, this chapter elaborates on the ideas provided by Jones and Cunliffe.

Reviving the polytechnic system Prior to the aggregating of higher education systems, the polytechnic higher education tradition in Europe and Britain was noteworthy for its curricula focusing particularly on engineering, technology, and the applied sciences, emphasizing skills training and offering vocationally oriented certificate, diploma, and degree programmes. Polytechnics were always meant to be different from, but equal to public universities (Pratt, 1997). They made necessary, useful, and innovative contributions to higher education – for example, the Ecole Polytechnique Universitaire de Lausanne (EPUL) which still teaches highly sought-after programs in civil, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering as well as architecture (Escher, 2018). Disaggregating their functions from the mass university and reviving polytechnics – and establishing new ones as required – should be expedited in order to develop world-class certificate, diploma, and bachelor of technology courses, with master’s and doctoral levels to be developed accordingly. (This should include a doctor of technology degree equivalent to the doctor of philosophy degree.) In their report, Jones and Cunliffe note that what they want to label New Colleges of Technology “should retain a broad liberal ethos and curriculum that requires and enables students to take humanities and social science subjects alongside their core technical training” (2020: 30–1). This would require the transfer of a wide range of professional or vocational degree programmes from the public university into the polytechnic system. For example, engineering and allied and applied technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, art and design courses, town planning and landscape architecture, accounting and business studies, nursing, and paramedic courses. These and similar vocationally

Conclusion 125 oriented programmes could be developed freely and creatively, uninhibited by the academic formalism and regulatory strictures of the university system. They are all programmes that Newman would describe as teaching “Useful knowledge”. He was at pains to point out that these programmes simply cannot be adequately presented within the academic culture of the liberal university. Liberating polytechnics from the constraints of the public university would enable them to flourish creatively and productively, far more so than they are able within the aggregated or mass university system.

Liberal arts and sciences colleges For much of the post-war history of the public university, there has been a damaging imbalance between academic staff on the one hand who are researchers able to flaunt lucrative research grants and lists of publications, and on the other hand academic staff who see themselves first and foremost as teachers. As Maryellen Weimer once observed: “A wide variety of well documented and measurable inequities exist between those who excel in the classroom and those who do likewise in their research” (1997: 52). Her observation remains relevant today. The imbalance between teaching and research has often resulted in a devaluing of good teaching and of the good people who deliver it. There have been various attempts to redress this imbalance by offering annual awards for “good teaching” which claim to be able to identify academic staff who are innovative in their delivery of curricula and who are assessed by their peers, and through student evaluation questionnaires, to be worthy of whatever “teaching excellence” award is being offered by their university (Kember et al., 2002). However, as Chism and Szabó have pointed out: “Despite the widespread use of awards to recognize excellence in teaching, little attention has been given to evaluating their impact” (1997: 186). Moreover, a detailed report on research into student questionnaires allegedly designed to evaluate lecturers’ teaching performances notes that little consideration is given to “the [mis]use of online student evaluation as a platform to harass, offend and, at times, threaten teachers in higher education” (Lakerman et al., 2021). Recognizing and valuing good teachers is not a well-established feature of the contemporary mass public university. As noted in Chapter 1, unless academic staff can also point to success in competing for research grants while publishing in authoritative academic journals, their progress in promotions rounds is likely to stall and they may even be subject to regular reviews that can result in the non-renewal of their contracts. This fetishizing of research is a serious disadvantage to those talented teachers who love their chosen fields and who are able to convey both that love and the significance of their subjects to their students. In an empirical study that asked how higher education can deal well with good teachers, Gad Yair concluded: “Passionate professors who constitute personal relations with their students cannot be routinely administered” (2008: 459). Yair’s study highlights the fact that teachers who do love their chosen fields, who inspire their students, and whose interest in what and who they are teaching

126  Conclusion means that they are likely to be remembered and valued by their students for years after they graduate. Teaching, in short, is a relationship, what elsewhere has been described as “affective pedagogy” (Patience, 2008). It entails relatings between the teacher and student, often at very deep levels. Hence, the notion that teaching online can successfully replace most, if not all, face-to-face teaching in our universities is absurd as saying you can parent successfully online. This is why a system of liberal arts and sciences colleges needs to be established, in which excellence in teaching is its most salient characteristic and which provides students with a broad, liberal grounding in the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences. The convention that professional degree programmes can be taught at undergraduate levels has to be rethought. Martha Nussbaum has pointed out: “The world around us is inescapably international. Issues from business to agriculture, from human rights to the relief of famine, call out imaginations to venture beyond narrow group loyalties and to consider the reality of distant lives” (1997: 10). Liberal arts and sciences colleges should provide young people with understandings of cultures, histories, languages, and economies other than their own, as well as the physical sciences. This is what Newman meant by “disinterested intellectual creativity and enquiry”. Only after they have attained a sound grounding in the liberal curriculum should students proceed to professional degrees – for example, in law, medicine, and teaching. This is where the liberal arts and sciences colleges can play a major role, as they have done in the US higher education system in the past.1

De-managerializing the public university Closely aligned with limiting state control of public universities is the need to de-managerialize them. This could proceed via three steps: (a) removing the university board of governors (or council, or senate (henceforth boards); (b) reconfiguring academic boards to make them the highest level of university governance, thus ensuring that public universities become self-governing academic communities; and (c) downsizing the proliferation of administrative departments in public universities.

Removing the university board of trustees or governing council University boards of governors or trustees (henceforth boards) have a long history (Rothblatt, 1997). However, over the past 30 years or so, governance regimes have been imposed on the public university by governments. This has seen university boards imitating corporate administrative arrangements in the private sector. Accordingly, the members of university governing boards or councils are now largely drawn from among leaders in industry, finance, and business. Few have had post-graduate research experience in universities. Even fewer have higher degrees, especially doctorates. Their experience in designing and delivering curricula is minimal. Few are familiar with the activities of teaching, learning, and research that faculty members on the ground are engaged

Conclusion 127 with on every working day. Their influence rests mainly in their capacity to appoint the president (the CEO) of the university. Mostly they rubber stamp policies presented to it by senior managers and the academic board.2 This means that there is a wide cultural gap between board members and academic staff. The former has very little experience of the everyday challenges that faculty members face in their classrooms and laboratories. Most faculty members know very little about the faceless men and women who sit around their university’s board table. While appointments to the board are usually honorary, attendance expenses may be paid (for example, where a member resides in another city or country).3 Other expenses include catering for after-meeting socializing, formal dinners, and annual retreats (usually in salubrious resorts or hotels). Additionally, there are the administrative costs associated with running the board or council – for example, arranging meeting timetables (board members are busy people and so are senior university managers; coordinating meetings can be like herding cats), maintaining contact with board members, recording decisions made by the board.4 It seems that the existence of university boards or councils is simply taken for granted. Rarely does anyone question what the actual functions of the boards are, or what they are doing. It is time to question this thinking. Do university boards of governors justify the time and effort to maintain them? Do they provide value for the resources required for them to function? Are there better ways of dealing with the duties they perform? Are they really necessary? In Australia, for example, the template for today’s public university boards was originally conceived during the nineteenth century when upper chambers of parliament were limited to a property-owning franchise (which also excluded the female vote), in order to keep potentially radical lower house members of parliament in check (Griffith and Srinivasan, 2001). This thinking seems to have carried over to the legislation that established public universities at that time, ensuring that a board of lay governors would be able to deal with outspoken and progressive academics daring to challenge the status quo and who might mock or shock the moral sensibilities of respectable society (Forsyth, 2014). As noted earlier, it is the convention that presidents or CEOs of public universities are appointed by the board of governors. Candidates for the president’s role are generally recruited through the services of professional search agencies, services which do not come cheaply. Whether the officials in those agencies are sympathetic to the “idea” of the university is rarely raised. Usually, the search for a new president is conducted nationally and internationally, with the recruiting agencies identifying potential candidates and inviting them to submit a formal application. Once a short list is decided (usually on the advice of the recruiting agencies) candidates are interviewed and may be expected to make presentations to the selection committee, their employment records are scrutinized, referees are consulted, and opinions may be sought from senior people who are in a position to provide candid assessments of the character and capabilities of the candidates. The agencies then make recommendations to the university board’s selection committee. While conventional academic qualifications, especially a doctorate and a strong record in winning research grants and publication, are high on the list of

128  Conclusion key attributes, more recently people from outside academia, but with experience in managing a large organization (for example, a government department or a business corporation), have also been appointed, conforming to the neoliberal idea that universities should be run as businesses or government agencies. As noted in a report on the selection of Vice Chancellors (presidents) in Australian universities: “[T]he profile of [Vice Chancellors] is changing, towards becoming a CEO of a complex modern university in an increasingly competitive environment. In such an environment, new skills, such as strategic management ability and fund-raising ability may outweigh the traditional skills previously seen as important” (O’Meara and Petzall, 2005: 26–7). In the majority of cases this process results in an outsider being brought as president of the public university. It has become almost mandatory that once installed in office, the appointee sets in train a restructuring strategy in which whole departments, research centres, faculties, and administrative units are merged, reorganized, reinvented, or closed down, with new ones being established that often replicate or negate the pre-restructured institution. Change for change’s sake seems to be the only rationale for many of the restructuring exercises that have been imposed on public universities in recent decades by outsider presidents or CEOs. This can be a devastating experience for existing staff and may even be counterproductive for the teaching and research achievements of the university. Failure to achieve wide consensus in the university about proposed restricting negatively impacts morale while promoting a “divide and rule” mentality in which the president and their chosen deputies cultivate alliances with favoured groups within the university that are likely to side with them. As Gumport and Pusser note: “Achieving consensus on purpose in a complex university, a mature organization with a variety of stakeholders, is extremely problematic. Strategic adaptation based on incomplete consensus or adversarial relations is far less likely to take hold or become institutionalized” (nd: 22). Such a lack of consensus undermines the sense of community that should be a primary feature of the modern university. It is the very opposite of what John Henry Newman hoped for the members of his ideal university community where “They learn to respect, to consult, and to aid each other” (1982: 76). This will never be achieved where presidents and their deputies impose structures that create disconnections, rivalries, disaffection, and demoralization from above, a process that reinforces the alienation of senior management from teaching and research faculty. This also affects undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom could never identify any of the senior management team – as is the case for not a few academic staff members. Newman and Humboldt both advocated that universities should be selfgoverning communities of scholars. It is time to recall what this ideal could mean today. A major step in this direction would be ensuring that the president be voted into office for a fixed term (say for five years), from among the academic staff of the university. As a general rule, the president should not be brought in from the outside, except in the most unusual of circumstances. The president’s deputies should also be voted into office from among the faculty members, also on fixed terms, but the portfolios they administer should preferably be allocated by the

Conclusion 129 president. The salaries of presidents and senior academic staff should never be no more than 20 percent higher than the senior professors in the university, ending what is often a vast and unjustifiable discrepancy between presidents’ and other senior managers’ salaries and the salaries of the academic staff in the university. The election of the senior administrators from among the ranks of the academic staff will ensure that they are familiar with the situation “on the ground” in the university and help to legitimize policies and decisions that the senior administrators propose for their institutions. The aim must be to reimagine the university as a vibrant and collegial institution, no longer the unhappy, fractious, and mutually distrustful institutions that too many public universities are today.

Reconfiguring academic boards Normally, the second most senior governance level in the public university is the academic board (in times past, this was often known as the professorial board).5 Its responsibilities are to ensure that the academic standards of the university in regard to degree courses at undergraduate and graduate levels, the design and delivery of curricula, assessment procedures, and research are maintained at the highest possible level. However, in theory at least, the academic board is subject to the authority of the board of governors. While it would be unlikely that the board of governors would reject recommendations from the academic board, the possibility is always there. Given the limitation of the board of governors mentioned above, this is anathema to the idea of academic autonomy and the maintenance of a mutually supportive academic community. The academic board should be the ultimate authority and highest court of appeal in the contemporary public university. Its membership should be democratically elected from among the teaching and research staff in the university, along with some student and administrative staff representation. It should be chaired by the university president or a nominated deputy. It should be allowed to operate freely from any outside meddling by governments, media conglomerates, or the wider public, thereby giving real substance to the vitally important ideas of academic autonomy and academic freedom (Russell, 1993).

Restructuring universities (yet again) There is no doubt that there is a severe case of restructuring fatigue among academic staff in today’s public universities. Newly appointed presidents who have limited knowledge of what has been successfully being performing in the university they have come to lead, and what has been performing poorly, nonetheless have a habit of imposing their restructuring plans on the university. This has often resulted in rewarding the poor performers while undermining the successful performers (Gumport and Sporn, 1999). It is one of the major causes of low morale among academic staff. The enthusiasm for restructuring was initially a response to the merging of tertiary level institutions into a unitary mass higher education system. But even as the grounds for that rationale retreat, the zeal for

130  Conclusion ideologically- or eccentrically-driven planning for restructuring the contemporary university largely remains unabated. Nonetheless, disaggregating the mass university system will require further restructuring, to reimagine the public university. The first challenge will be to deal with the proliferation of institutions that acquired the title University but are struggling to meet the requirements that this involves. There are simply too many of them. Some can only offer a small number of academic programmes. Some have very poor research records. Some seem unable to decide whether they would be better off as polytechnic institutions rather than struggling to copy the established universities. Mergers between smaller, struggling universities could help to solve the problem, obviating duplications of services and other functions (particularly of top-heavy administrations). Some may need to be closed, with their resources (including staff and students) absorbed into other institutions. Some could transform themselves into vibrant liberal arts and sciences colleges. None of this will be without pain. However, continuing with the existing order has its own severe pains while constituting almost all of the problems now affecting the entire higher education sector.

Reinstating pure or basic research in the public university World Wars, the Cold War, and the reshaping of public universities under neoliberal policies has resulted in a substantial shift away from public funding of pure or basic research to commercially or strategically financed research programmes. In their study of basic and applied research in universities today, Bentley and colleagues noted: “Applied research dominated in most countries, particularly in Australia where academics were roughly twice as likely to specialize or lean towards applied research compared to basic research” (2015: 708). Of concern is the fact that the funding of much basic research comes with caveats requiring commercial-in-confidence clauses being written into the funding contracts. This places limits on the open publication of the research findings, which is anathema to the idea of the university as an open knowledge society. At the same time, pure research is increasingly under-funded, particularly by government, and left to languish because researchers have little choice other than to accept the terms and conditions being offered by their commercial sponsors. As one of the pioneers of the modern research university, Humboldt was adamant that the research in universities should never be influenced by commercial or political constraints. He argued that applied research should be conducted outside the universities, leaving them to provide the empirical and theoretical foundations for applied research to progress. Obliging universities to undertake applied research, he believed, would see them losing their primary function to discover new knowledge, while letting corporations, businesses, and government off the hook by taking on their applied research responsibilities. In short, Humboldt was a puritan when it comes to pure research in the public university. In the twenty-first century, Humboldt’s puritanism is unlikely to seem to be persuasive, let alone practical, either as far as university researchers are concerned

Conclusion 131 or their outside contractors and funders. However, ensuring that a carefully and sensitively regulated balance between the pure and applied research functions of the reimagined public university should be both respected and valued if the university is to be of most benefit to the economy and to society, and to education more generally. As Bentley and colleagues explain: “This does not imply that the balance between basic and applied research is equal, or that basic research has not lost its pre-eminence, but it does imply that basic research retains a core position within the research mind sets of most academics” (2015: 709). Engaging in disinterested research on the basis that pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake has been in the past, and can continue in the future, to be one of the most valuable roles that the public university can play in the world today. What urgently needs to be recalled is that without pure research there can be no applied research. The latter would simply cease to exist without the former.

Conclusion The philosophical idealism infusing the writings of John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the nineteenth century provides a strong foundation for cultivating the reimagining of the “idea” of the public university today. This means fostering a deep appreciation, both within and outside the university, of the sense of awe generated by great academic teaching and world-class research – a combination of profoundly inspirational pedagogy and brilliant creativity at the very frontiers of pure research. Disinterested and creative intellectual enquiry and pure research are needed now as never before to counter the stifling political and ideological pressures closing in on public universities around the world. Consider just a few of the huge challenges facing the world today: climate change, massive species extinctions, large-scale land and water pollution, environmental destruction on an unimaginable scale (for example, the disastrous deforestation of the Amazon), global pandemics, the horrific threat of nuclear war, civil conflicts and genocides, famines and global poverty, the anguish of refugees, terrorist threats, and related fundamentalist and populist ideologies. These are only a few of the current problems confronting the planet, all of which demand massive advances in mainstream educational and research systems that can address them successfully. However, that success is being obstructed by interfering governments and business corporations trying to take over public universities for blinkered ideological purposes. Therefore, the reimagining of the idea of the public university today is even more vital than when John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt pioneered its philosophical roots. It is time to recall, and then to rebuild on the foundations they have provided for us. Reimagining the public university is certainly not for the faint-hearted. It will require a high degree of intellectual courage to abandon the prejudices that mislead politicians, bureaucrats, the public, the media – and, for that matter, many university managers and faculty members – into devaluing the importance of public higher education. A re-reading that is neither naively uncritical nor cynically dismissive on the “idea” of the university as proposed by John Henry Newman and

132  Conclusion Wilhelm von Humboldt would be a fertile starting point for the reimagining of the public university for today – a reimagining that is both imperative and urgent.

Notes 1. It is true that some, perhaps many, academic staff in the liberal arts and sciences system, while specializing in teaching, also may want to pursue research interests of their own. The liberal arts and sciences college system could allow for this if the universities would agree to academic staff in the colleges being awarded a research affiliation (say as adjunct research fellows) with them in cases where such an arrangement is to the mutual benefit of the institutions and the individuals involved. 2. In British, New Zealand, Canadian, and Australian universities, the CEO is usually referred to as the Vice Chancellor. The Chancellor is the chair of the University board or council whose role is not dissimilar to the British monarch: largely symbolic with the right to advise and warn the CEO but with very little power. In recent years many of those universities have added the words “and President” to the Vice Chancellor’s title. 3. In most public universities, some board members are appointed by governments, some are appointed (“co-opted”) by the board itself, some are ex officio (for example, the university president and their deputies), there may be one or two academic and administrative staff elected by their colleagues, plus one or two undergraduate and graduate student representatives. 4. Some years ago, the writer was a member of a university council, as the elected representative of academic staff, over a period of 18 months. His interventions at council were not appreciated by senior managers, at least one of whom was later jailed for corruption. 5. The membership of academic boards is usually elected from a cross section of tenured academic staff, usually with a preponderance of full professors and with the university CEO and their deputy as ex officio members, plus undergraduate and graduate student elected representatives (usually one of each).

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Index

Abelard, Peter 26 Academic freedom 61 AIDS 99 Akademos 24 Al-Fihiri, Fatima 25 Al-Nizamiya University 25 al-Qaida 10 Althusser, Louis 83, 105 Amos, Book of 23 Anderson, Perry 107, 116 anti-war movement 98–99 Arendt, Hannah 8, 12, 89 Aristotle 23–24 Armstrong, Karen 17, 29 Arnold, Matthew 33, 41 Ash, Michael 74, 78, 80, 81–82

Cold War 90; and universities 92, 94 Colish, Marcia 28 Collini, Stefan 44–53; critique of The Idea of a University 44–49 Confucius 21 Connell, Raewyn 2, 13, 54, 95, 100, 109, 110 Cordelli, Chiara 52 COVID pandemic 3 Cunliffe, Philip 122

Basham, Arthur 19 Bayt al-Hikma 25 Bellah, Robert 17, 21–22, 29 Berlin, Isaiah 60; positive and negative freedom (liberty) 60 Bernstein, Basil 63 Bessemer, Sir Henry 86 Bildung 57–58, 60–61, 65, 66, 74 Buddhism 17, 18, 19–20; Theravada 19; Mahãyãna 20 Burke, Edmund 36–37, 121

Eagleton, Terry 105 Egypt 25 Einstein, Albert 75 Engels, Frederick 75 Erasmus 27 ethnocentrism 104 European monasticism 25–26

Cambridge University 28 Cantor, Norman 25 Catholicism 19, 31–33, 37, 39, 40–41, 46–48 Chaucer, Geoffrey 26 China: Ancient 21–22; big data 8; Imperial University 21 Chomsky, Noam 92 Christian fundamentalism 10 Civil Right Movement 97 Classical Greece 23–24 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 97

Dalai Lama 20 Davis, Glyn 3, 4, 11 Deng, Xiaoping 106 Desert Fathers 25 Duncan, Graeme 65

Fichte, Johan Gottlieb 69 France 1968, 98 Free Speech Movement 97 Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität 75 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 89 genderism 86 German universities: decline in the eighteenth century 69; under Nazism 89 Germany 86–89 Globalisation 99 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 69 Goodman, Martin 23 Great Depression 88–89 Great War 88

Index 135 Habermas, Jürgen 119 Hansen, David 66 Hansen, I.V. 64 Harvard 96 Harvey, David 106 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 69 hikikomori 10 Hinduism 17–19 Hildegard of Bingen 26 Holocaust 89 Humanities 94 Humboldt, Alexander von 74 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 11–12, 109, 119–121, 131–132; on academic autonomy 60; on Bildung 57–58; critique of structural inequality 64–65; on dislike of self-entitled academics 77; on freedom in teaching and learning 71; as education official 69–70; education reforms 62; the person 56– 57; as policy entrepreneur 75, 78; on relationship between humanities and science 71–71; relevance today 62; The Limits of State Action 61, 64, 119–120; on teaching and research 71; university curricula 73; on Weltansicht 55; on Wissenschaft 74, 78–79 identity politics 7; as ideology 111–113 ideological university, the 114–115 ideology 52, 82, 87, 105, 105–106 information addiction 9 information revolution 5 information versus knowledge 6 Isaiah, Book of 22 ISIS 10 Islam 22–23 Islamic Tradition 25; centres of learning 25 Jarausch, Konrad 79; Humboldtian rhetoric 79–80 Jixia Academy 21 Jones, Lee 122 Judaic Tradition 22–23; Tanakh 22; prophetic age 22 Judt, Tony 91 Kant, Immanuel 29, 35, 69 Kent State University 99 Keynes, John Maynard 88 King Friedrich Wilhelm III 69 knowledge economy 92 Kolakowski, Leszek 8 Koran, The 22 Kuhn, Thomas 47

Leibnitz, Gottfried 76 Leys, Simon (Pierre Ryckmans) 21 liberal arts and sciences colleges 73, 125–126 Lilla, Mark 7 lonely self, the 8 Luther, Martin 27 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 25, 27 MacIntyre, Alasdair 43, 46, 48, 104 managerialism 3 Marcuse, Herbert 96 Marginson, Simon 2, 12, 95, 120 Martin of Ligugé 25 Marx, Karl 75, 81 mass education 2 Mencius 21 Mendelsohn, Felix 75 Miliband, Ralph 64 Mill, John Stuart 59–60, 65 Milton, John 97 Minerva 4 Minogue, Kenneth 16 MIT 93 Monbiot, George 106–107 MOOCs 4, 12 Nalanda Mahavihara University 18–19 Nazism 89 Needham, Joseph 21 Neoliberalism 52, 82, 104, 120–121; as ideology 106–110; compared to Marxist materialism 108; as trickledown economics 107 New Left 96 Newman, Barbara 26 Newman, John Henry 10, 12, 28, 94, 120, 131–132; Catholicism 33, 41, 48; on conscience 48–49; against “defensive clerical Catholicism” 40–41; knowledge for knowledge’s sake 73; liberal legacy 49–52; pastoral care of students 37–38; the person 32–35; The Idea of a University 32, 35–41; Tracterian Movement 33; university curricula 73; against utilitarianism 38–40 Nussbaum, Martha C. 7, 51–52 Oakeshott, Michael 51 Oxford Movement 33 Oxford University 18 27–28, 32–34, 37, 52, 89 Parsons, Talcott 86–87 Phoenix 4

136  Index Picketty, Thomas 2, 52–53 Planck, Max 75 Plato 24; The Republic 24 Popper, Karl 10 populism 10 Port Huon Statement 96 positive freedom (liberty) 60 positivism 90 post-modernism 104; as ideology 110–111 Prussia 53, 56, 62, 69–70, 72, 74, 76 Quest 4 rabbinical culture 23 radical student movements 96 Reagonomics 106 realism 82 Reay, Diane 63–64 Reforming the higher education system 119–132; de-managerialising 129, 126; disaggregating the system 122–124; pure research 119, 120, 130, 131; reviving a polytechnic system 124–125; reviving liberal arts and sciences colleges 125–126; restructuring 124, 128, 129, 130 renaissance and reformation 27–28 ROTC 96 Russell, Bertrand 51 Said, Edward 44 same-sex marriage 10 Santiniketan School 66 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 70 scientism 89 Sen, Amartya 19, 66–67 Shankara, Adi 19 Shinto 20 Smart, Ninian 22 smart phone addiction 9, 10 Smee, Sebastian 6 Smith, Adam 26, 35 social atomization 8, 10, 11 social isolates 10 social media 5 Socrates 24

soushoku[kai] danshi 10 Streeck, Wolfgang 82 Stretton, Hugh 11, 65, 82 Tagore, Rabindranath 66 Taylor, Charles 5, 45, 90 Tharoor, Shashi 18 Thatcher, Margaret 106 Theology 45–47 Tokugawa Era 20 totalitarianism 8 Tracts for the Times 33 universities as public goods 119–122 “universities without walls” 4 University of Al-Azhar 25 University of Al-Karouine 25 University of Berlin 74–75; foundation 73–74; Humboldt University of Berlin 75; Kaiser Wilhelm Universität 66 University of Bologna 27 University of Edinburgh 28 University of Paris 28 University of St Andrews 28 University of Tokyo 96 University of Wittenberg 27 Veblen, Thorsten 50 vice-chancellors 98 Vietnam War 128 Vishnu 18 von Bismarck, Otto 75 Wallerstein, Immanuel 104 Weber, Max 22, 86–87; “Science as a Vocation” 82 Weltansicht 58–59 Wissenschaft 74 woke politics 104; as ideology 113–114 Wolfe, Baroness 17 World War I 88–89 World War II 89, 95 Yeo, George 19 Zeng, M. 9