Knowledge and the University: Re-claiming Life [1 ed.] 1138330892, 9781138330894

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KNOWLEDGE AND THE UNIVERSITY

For hundreds of years, knowledge has been central in understanding the university. Over recent decades, however, it is the economic value of knowledge that has come to the fore. Now, in a post-truth world, knowledge is also treated with suspicion and has become a vehicle for ideologies. Knowledge and the University combats all these ways of thinking. Its central claim is that knowledge is of value because of its connection with life. Knowledge is of life, from life, in life and for life. With an engaging philosophical discussion, and with a consideration of the evolution of higher education institutions, this book: • • • •

Examines ways in which research, teaching and learning are bound up with life; Looks to breathe new life into the university itself; Widens the idea of the knowledge ecology to embrace the whole world; Suggests new roles for the university towards culture and the public sphere.

Knowledge and the University is a radical text that looks to engender nothing less than a new spirit of the university. It offers a fascinating read for policy makers, institutional leaders, academics and all interested in the future of universities. Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, Institute of Education, University College London, UK. Søren S.E. Bengtsen is Associate Professor at the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media and Deputy Director of the Centre for Higher Education Futures, Aarhus University, Denmark.

KNOWLEDGE AND THE UNIVERSITY Re-claiming Life

Ronald Barnett and Søren S.E. Bengtsen

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ronald Barnett and Søren S.E. Bengtsen The right of Ronald Barnett and Søren S.E. Bengtsen to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 catalogue record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-33089-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-33099-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44750-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

For Joy Carter, who much inspires

The entire conscious life, the spirit along with the soul, the heart, goodness, and virtue – in whose service do they labor? In the service of the greatest possible perfection of [all] the basic … functions: above all, the enhancement of life. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968) Darest thou now O soul, Walk out with me toward the unknown region, Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow? No map there, nor guide, Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand, Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, and in that land. Walt Whitman, ‘Darest Thou Now, O Soul’

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: the life-enhancing university

viii 1

PART I

The university and life

15

1 Life in truth and truth in life

17

2 The real thing

29

3 Re-placing the humanities

41

4 Where’s the life in academic knowledge?

53

Interlude: on life

65

PART II

The spirit of academic knowledge

69

5 More than mere debate

71

6 A will to know

83

7 Living with darkness

95

8 Edifying knowledge

107

9 A culture of lively discourse

119

PART III

Cultivating knowledge in the university

131

10 Living reason

133

11 Widening the knowledge ecology

145

12 Reaching out

157

Coda: re-enchanting the university with a new cognitive spirit Bibliography Subject index Name index

169 172 188 194

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are most grateful to Sonja Arndt, Ryan Gildersleeve, Bruce Macfarlane, Rikke Toft Nørgård and Sharon Rider, each of whom took the time in their hugely busy and committed lives to read our manuscript and offer us helpful feedback on it. We are conscious that we haven’t been able to do justice to all their suggestions and observations, which provide us with much food for thought for further work. We also thank the publishers, Routledge, especially Sarah Tuckwell, Commissioning Editor, and Lisa Font, for all the support we have received for this venture, and the anonymous referees of our earlier proposal, whose comments we much valued as this book took shape. Ronald Barnett and Søren Bengtsen

INTRODUCTION The life-enhancing university

The basic issue For hundreds – if not thousands – of years, knowledge has been the central concept in understanding the university. The university is an institution concerned to advance knowledge and help students gain it, and (more recently) to share with the wider society the knowledge that it has garnered. But, strangely, there have been few attempts to look at this matter, the relationship between the university and knowledge. With rare exceptions, the scholarly works that do exist are now rather longstanding1 and, on that ground alone, it is time for a contribution that places the matter firmly in the context of the twenty-first century. However, there is a much more significant matter, namely that the near-absence of scholarly work on the relationship between the university and knowledge is symptomatic of a general feature of the present time. Over the last three–four decades, the very matter of knowledge has been pretty well lost from view as a matter of public interest. Certainly, there was – in the more specialist literature – a playing up of the idea of ‘the knowledge society’. But that phrase, coined by Nico Stehr (1994), is some decades old and gave way to talk of ‘the knowledge economy’ and an overwhelming interest in ‘skills’ and, more recently, to a concern with ways in which knowledge might ‘transfer’ into the wider society and its ‘impact’ through ‘knowledge exchange’, especially so as to assist ‘innovation’. Knowledge is now characteristically situated in its economic contexts. A shorthand for this situation that has emerged is that of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Boutang, 2011). It is evident, then, that an unadulterated interest in knowledge has disappeared.2 In the past, it was said that administrators in higher education were guided by ‘the principle of ripe time’ (Cornford, 1922) but the situation here seems rather to be one of unripe time. After all, the general absence of thought being given to knowledge and the university reflects a widespread loss of interest in

2

Introduction

knowledge as such. It is by no means clear, therefore, that the current moment is at all propitious for the present inquiry. Prima facie, the ground seems rather stony. However, despite the unpromising situation in which we find ourselves, the present inquiry is urgent and necessary; and, if we look with sufficient intent, we can find signs bearing seeds of some promise.

Our thesis: university, knowledge and life Ever since the Greeks, knowledge has been understood as a way for humanity to come into an increasingly satisfactory relationship with the world.3 This understanding has yielded considerable benefits, for example, in giving humanity an increasing control over its environment. However, that understanding held a tacit sense of separation between knowledge and world. There is the world and there is knowledge. The central term in one of the important stages in the story of knowledge, the Enlightenment, implied a coming out of darkness and into the light. This is a more sophisticated view, for it recognized that knowledge can help to bring about a transformation of humanity in its relationship to the world4 but it still harboured a separateness, with the knowledge being carried from one situation, of darkness and closure, into another, of life and the world. Of course, this sense of separateness – of knowledge and the world – is merely a strand in thought about the matter. Many philosophers, such as Jaspers, Ortega, Heidegger, Arendt, Deleuze and Irigaray, have held that our understanding of the world is bound up with our being in the world; and we shall encounter all of those figures in the argument here. We simply observe a particularly strong line in the matter, which has amounted to a kind of ‘imaginary’ (Taylor, 2007) in thought itself, namely that knowledge is an inspection of, or an attempt to hold a mirror up to (cf Rorty, 2017), a world standing separately from those knowing efforts. This sense of a separateness between knowledge and the world has become embedded in universities, both in their research efforts and their teaching practices and it has been given impetus in the ubiquitous valuing of knowledge for its potential carry-over into the world. The vocabulary already noted – of ‘skills’, ‘knowledge transfer’, ‘knowledge exchange’, and ‘impact’ – provides indications of this tacit conception of knowledge. Knowledge is discounted unless it can be shown to have a value in its effects on the world. The implication is still that, left to its own devices, knowledge is separate from the world. By extension, too, the university characteristically encourages that separation: knowledge characteristically resides there with little contact with the world (unless policy frameworks and managerial systems readjust matters so as to bring about much greater interchange between the world and knowledge). Moreover, this separateness imparts an inert character to knowledge: either it is a body of thought in itself or it is carried over intact from one setting to another. We want to distance ourselves from this way of looking at the relationship between knowledge, the university and the world, and the inert sense of

Introduction

3

knowledge that it bequeaths. The world saturates our knowing efforts and does so both in those who inquire into the world, and in organized knowledge practices (of the kind sustained by universities). Moreover, the world imparts life to knowledge and to knowing and, in turn, knowledge imparts vigour to the whole world. Knowledge is never inert. Knowledge is of life, from life, in life and for life. It follows that, far from knowledge and the world standing in a polarised relationship, knowledge is part of the world and knowledge is imbued with the world. This thesis goes well beyond the matter of the contemporary interest in the ‘embodiment’ of knowledge, important as that perspective is.5 Yes, knowledge practices require human beings who bring their whole selves into play. But we wish to point to much larger matters in which, for example, struggles to gain knowledge can impart energy, life indeed, to the knowing process and ultimately can help to enhance the life of the world. Whether at the personal level – in an individual characterising herself as ‘a physicist’ or ‘a philosopher’ – or at the larger scale of the international team, and its efforts, being energised by a research project or even at the level of international research agency, inquiry can breathe new life both into inquirers and the matters before them. The struggle to bring forth new understandings or to gain – as a student – an initial understanding calls for life and imparts new life. This is why the idea of knowing is important since, in conjuring a sense of knowledge processes, it tacitly reminds us that knowledge inquiry is infused with life.

Life

Knowledge

FIG 0.1

Knowledge, life and university

University

4

Introduction

In certain countries, there are concerns about the ‘no-platforming’ of speakers on university campuses (and of speakers being shouted down) and of students looking for ‘trigger warnings’ of unsettling ideas and issues with which they are about to be confronted. Whatever the extent of such occurrences, they are testimony to ways in which knowledge can reach deeply into life and disturb life. This life is the life of the whole world, even the whole universe, for knowledge has no limits. Knowledge in the university is not in vacuo, is not hermetically sealed from the world, but is intimately connected with life. This is, in a way, a simple thesis but it is, we contend, a radical thesis, which could revolutionise knowledge efforts in universities. This matter, the intimate and intricate set of relationships between the university, knowledge and life (Fig 0.1), has been submerged for far too long. Bringing the relationships between these three to the surface – knowledge, university and life – is long overdue. Knowledge deserves and even needs to be re-claimed, and its full character and its significance for life recognized, not least for universities.

Two rival accounts of the university, knowledge, and the world Thirty years ago, one of us (Barnett, 1990) pointed to a double undermining that the university had undergone. That thesis could be now expressed in the following way. Ever since its establishment in the Middle Ages, in antiquity in Egypt or India or China – all are contenders as the site of its origins – the university has been intimately associated with an inquiry after knowledge. Recently, however, that foundation of the university has been undermined from two directions, separately by postmodernity and by postmodernism. Firstly, over the past half century or more, the university has been obliged to turn its gaze from an interest in knowledge as such (knowledge having ‘its own end’, as Newman (2015) put it in the mid-nineteenth century) to an interest in the value that could be extracted from knowledge being put to work in the world. Primarily, this was an economic value but this worldly value came in other forms as well, in generating the university’s positional and reputational capital. Accompanying this orientation on the part of the university was a new global reach and a sense that the university – any university – was, through its networks, distributed right across the world. Impulses at work included globalisation and neoliberalism, the emergence of ‘quasi-markets’, the knowledge economy and the digital age. In these movements, the university has become a central agent of a shrunken world, dominated by digital flows of finance and information and their combination in ‘algorithmic capitalism’ (Peters, 2013: 120–121). A shorthand for this whole situation remains that of postmodernity. Secondly, again over the past half century or so (although with roots stretching back far beyond), the university has witnessed numerous attempts within itself to downvalue knowledge. Successive waves of critical self-diagnosis have been witnessed, including relativism, theory-ladenness (the view, inspired by Thomas Kuhn (2012), that all perceptions, even within science, could not be pure but

Introduction

5

came heavily laden with prior theories of the world), deconstructionism, constructivism and a loss of legitimacy to be accorded to large ideas (or ‘metanarratives’, as Lyotard (1984) called them). All these waves of thought amounted to forms of intellectual self-doubt, in which the university in effect debunked itself. Now, all the work of universities was to be treated with suspicion.6 Far from possessing a self-understanding that it was providing the world with secure knowledge, the academy now framed itself as an emperor wearing rather few clothes. There was very little substance in its offerings, after all. Such was the general message of postmodernism.7 These two underminings of the academy have their differences. On the one hand, postmodernity had given rise to a heightening of knowledge. It was just that now, knowledge was to be valued only insofar as it had instrumental roles to play in the world. On the other hand, postmodernism has been felt in some quarters to rob the very category of knowledge of any substance. Knowledge of the world was now repudiated. However, both revolutions – for that is what they have been – share major features. Firstly, both movements harbour a dissolution of knowledge into the world. In one – postmodernity – knowledge is incorporated into the world. Like a black hole, the world of cognitive capitalism consumes all knowledge. The knowledge economy is a world in which knowledge is a creature of the economic order and is understood only in those terms. In the other – postmodernism – knowledge of the world is now debunked as a mirage. All knowledge is contaminated in some way – by presupposed theories, by being part of a taken-for-granted worldview, by being a part of an unexamined culture, by being the reflection of a social class or gender or ethnicity or global power. Knowledge can no longer be trusted as giving us pure insights into the world. This is a philosophy that can have no answer to – and therefore buttresses – populism and its accompanying politicisation of higher education, since there is here no way seriously of distinguishing one set of claims from another. Secondly, both accounts continue to place knowledge and the world in a polarised relationship, though differing markedly. In postmodernity, the polarisation underplays what counts as knowledge; in postmodernism, the polarisation underplays the world. Thirdly, both accounts secrete an understanding of the world that is askew: both of their ontologies are deficient. Within postmodernity, the world has come to consist of objects understood just in their economic value and further only economic objects are sighted. Objects are recast so as to place them as economic objects. Even universities (as institutions) and higher education (as educational processes) come to be understood as economic objects. This is an insidious ontology: only economic objects are noticeable in the world. Even worse, the world consists only of economic objects. Within postmodernism, the world evaporated simply into a multiplicity of accounts of the world, in which the perceptions of some can no longer be judged against the perceptions of others. It was an epistemology without an

6

Introduction

ontology. It could make no judgements about the world, for the world as such had disappeared. All we had were our accounts of the world. We had no access to the world itself. A major challenge, therefore, is to offer an account that sets the university, knowledge and the world onto a sound set of relationships. Without this, the university will lose – and is already losing – its way, and the world will be the worse for that. Our solution is to place the university in a philosophy of life, albeit life understood in the most general terms.

Crisis, what crisis? Of late, the term ‘crisis’ has been rather overplayed in commentaries on the university but there is a crisis in the double undermining of the university that we have just sketched. The relationships between the three parties – (i) the university, (ii) knowledge and (iii) the world – have come to be understood in excessively narrow ways, so much so that all three parties are in jeopardy. Knowledge is understood either instrumentally or as lacking substance, the world is understood as a set of economic objects or disregarded and the university is understood either as focused on instrumental reason or as a site for the circulation of mere opinions, where validity lies in those with the loudest voices. Our response to this situation takes two interconnected paths. In the first place, we explicitly reunite an understanding of the university with knowledge and with the world and so accord the world a central place in the study of the university. Here, we find philosophical resources in some of the realist writings of the last twenty years or so. There,8 we see a generous way of construing the world to include all manner of ‘objects’, including black holes and human actions, political movements and fictional characters, a Beethoven sonata and a Picasso painting and powers and situations. In other words, we want to bring the totality of the world into the university’s purview. It is the whole world, the whole universe indeed, that provides the canvas for the university’s concerns.9 However, we want to go further than this path would allow. For even in the broad terms just indicated, an important aspect would still be missing. The questions – Why? How? And to what end is knowledge to be pursued? – would remain. And to those questions we have – as indicated – a single answer: life. Just why would knowing activities ever get going in a serious way? Crudely, they get going in response to the world and to the life within it. The Earth is but a speck in the universe, on which human beings have emerged with a propensity to inquire into all facets of the world around them, including themselves. How are such inquiries mounted? They are pursued by certain forms of life, at once disciplined and argumentative, and disciplined inquiry is full of life. To what end? To imbue life with understanding, and to bring into the world new forms of life. So, knowledge is bound up with life in many ways. It emanates from life, it is imbued with life and it gives to life.

Introduction

7

This whole theme of life is absent, and woefully so, from contemporary accounts both of knowledge and the university. It follows that reclaiming connections with life, through its knowledge activities, can provide a new legitimacy to the university.

The spirit of the university Deep in all of this is the matter of spirit. This is not a matter that has much troubled commentators on the university and higher education – if at all. An exception is Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist philosopher (1883–1969). His (1960) book, The Idea of the University, could be said to be marked by a strong sense of the university as being pervaded by spirit, even if it makes its explicit entrance only fleetingly. In one condensed passage, we find the following suggestions: Spirit is the potentiality and power of ideas … Spirit lives and moves wherever our striving for clarity is a striving for fullness of insight … Spirit is the power of creative intuition. [Indeed] Spirit, human existence and reason are the foundation of the scientific outlook. (pp. 44–45) Of course, the customary health warnings are appropriate here. ‘Spirit’ has to be understood in the context of an outlook in Germanic (especially Hegelian) philosophy of a sense of universal reason at work within the unfolding history of humanity and ‘science’ has to be understood as organised and systematic knowledge across all disciplines. Notwithstanding such qualifications, we see here a strong belief in the juxtaposition of knowledge, life and spirit, especially in the university. It is precisely this triple-fold juxtaposition – knowledge, life and spirit – that we wish to revive but understood in the context of the twenty-first-century university (Fig 0.2). However, contemporary resources are thin on the ground. One resource lies in the work of the more recent French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). In one of his books, Pure Immanence, Deleuze (2012) points to the idea of ‘the unity of life and thought’ and suggests that, in this unity, ‘Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life’. This is much in keeping with our view although, given that we are interested also in the university, our thesis goes a bit further, and in two important respects. First, our thesis places the university as its heart: we take it that the university is an institution for thought (to use one of those terms in that quote from Deleuze). This thought is not random but, over centuries, has come to be organised in disciplines and fields of inquiry and has become subject to ever-refined tacit rules of reasoning and communication. Secondly, and crucially, the university is an institution in which certain kinds of activity enjoy longevity, even while they change. Its knowledge processes are precisely processes sustained over time. That very term ‘thought’ is testimony to

8

Introduction

Life

Spirit

Knowledge

FIG 0.2

University

Spirit infuses life, university and knowledge

the point. More important than knowledge as a product or outcome is thought as a continuing and systematic process. Thought is not an event but a process over time. This simple point is crucial for our argument and enables us vividly to extend the point made by Deleuze. Thought, of the kind characteristic of the university, is prompted by life, is itself full of life, and gives back to and enhances life. Thought is a process of entanglement with life. And here lies a further step in our argument. By ‘life’ we mean everything that is in the world. Its meaning here is not limited to the biological domain of living organisms, even including both human and non-human forms. Rather, by ‘life’, we embrace the whole world, and its vitality and energy, in individuals, groups, organizations and societies and the physical world itself, including nanoparticles and galaxies. Life includes all that is past and all that lies ahead. And it includes all forms of human life, in the political, economic, cultural, social and ethical domains. It is this total pulsating world that inspires a will to understand the world. Ever since Neolithic times, life has been conducted through an expanding knowledge of the world; and the university has emerged as the institution par excellence to pursue this set of human interests in life, knowledge and the world. It follows from this depiction of life and its place in ‘activating’ inquiry (to pick up another of those Deleuzian terms), that any understanding of the university as cut off from life has to be rejected. Knowledge is rather to be understood as a vibrant and rather extraordinary set of human processes

Introduction

9

emanating from flows of life between universities and the totality of the world. Universities are but an institutionalised expression of this intimate binding of knowledge and the life of the world. Knowledge draws on, and gains energy from, the life of the world, the universe, and is itself full of life, and goes on giving to life in all its forms. It is evident that, in drawing out this thesis, we shall have to have recourse to a battery of terms not usually present in the higher education literature. ‘Vitality’, ‘energy’, ‘will’, ‘flow’, ‘spirit’, ‘edification’, ‘darkness’ (and ‘light’) and ‘life’ itself are but some of the terms that will figure here. Such a vocabulary and set of concepts will help us to advance the ideas that knowledge is alive, has a certain spirit, is itself inspired and may even help to inspire others, both within and beyond the academy; and it can therefore add life to the world. The thesis here, accordingly, provides a way of understanding not just the relationship between the university and knowledge but the place of the university in the whole world. Now, the university can be understood as an institution that has an interest in life, takes its bearings from life, is full of life and, in turn, even enlivens life.

Music and the life-enhancing university On several occasions, we have used the construction ‘in life, from life, of life and for life’, or something similar. This is deliberate. There is, at work here, a four-way set of relationships between the university and life; and each of these relationships hinges on the university’s association with knowledge (Fig 0.3). By way of an analogy, let us look at classical music. It is evident that the work of many great composers draws its inspiration from its national setting. Composers such as Chopin (Poland), Sibelius (Finland), Elgar (England), Gershwin (USA), Shostakovich (Russia), Janacek (Czechoslovakia) and Bartok (Hungary) come to mind. Their works are national and cultural statements and yet possess a universality. These are works that self-evidently come from life, manifest an interest in life, are full of life and not merely give back to life but enhance life in general and are very much for life. Such works, therefore, manifestly exhibit the four-way connection that we are positing between the university and life. But what has this to do with the university? The links between classical music composition and work in the universities are considerable. In both settings, work draws on existing work – idioms, genres, ideas, framings – and builds from that base. Both draw from life. And in both cases, the (often life-long) effort signals an interest in life (even if a particular part of it). But, too, there is some novel contribution made where something is created from the imagination. Both bring life into the project at hand: each project is full of life. And then, the resulting work, in whatever domain (the concert hall, the journal paper, the conference or interaction with those in the wider society), is communicated to the world: the work not merely gives back to life, but enhances life; it is for life. We have seen this on innumerable occasions in classical music, at times of war and of national reconstruction,

10

Introduction

Life K from life K of life

Interest in life

Interest in life

K for life

Knowledge (Life in K)

FIG 0.3

puts life into knowledge

University (life in the university)

University knowledge - in, from, of and for life

where classical music has been called upon to supply restorative powers to situations.10 And so, in both classical music and in work within the university, we see this four-fold, and very intimate, set of connections between cognitive work and life: an interest in life, provoked by life, being full of life and intended for life. But just as classical music composition is embedded in cultural forms that go back hundreds of years, so too with academic knowledge; and this cultural background of academic knowledge may contain distortions of life. For example, especially in the hands of de Sousa Santos (2016) but also others, a thesis has arisen lately of ‘epistemicide’, namely the tendency of the North to dominate the South in the shaping of knowledge. The knowledges of the South are being made invisible in this process of ‘cognitive injustice’. It follows that life processes may distort knowledge just as they may open it out, and vice versa. This, indeed, is cardinal to our thesis here. In the twenty-first century, we see knowing efforts in the academy being bent, diminished or even closed, both wittingly and unwittingly; and even by the academic itself. A striking case in point is that of hoax papers; that is, attempts within the academic world to demonstrate the presence of both ideologies and questionable practices in the publishing of academic journals.11

Introduction

11

It follows from our thesis, too, that the academic has to be an eavesdropper on life and to be attuned to life. For example, an academic, or even a group of academics, may be inspired by work or by an academic or research group whom – in a digital world – they may never actually meet in person. And then the new work may inspire others. As this is being drafted, the death of the cosmologist and physicist, Stephen Hawking, has been announced. It is evident that Hawking inspired many others in the wider society and, indeed, helped to promote the public sphere in helping to grow a deeper understanding of the place of the Earth as a speck in the universe.12 And, to nail the point, this is not a matter of great individuals for the work of large teams can also have corresponding effects in the world (for example, in oncology, nuclear physics, cosmology and ecological sciences). Academic work draws from life, is itself full of life and can and does enhance life. It follows that the kind of university that we wish to encourage is a life-enhancing university.

Structure of this book Our book is in three parts. Part One, ‘The university and life’, delves into the relationship between knowledge and the world. Here, we notice that the academic world has drifted into an acceptance that knowledge is valuable only insofar as it has uses in the world. Certainly, there have been skirmishes in social theory and philosophy that have sought to cast suspicion on the very category of knowledge but, by and large, the academic world has fallen in with the role accorded to it of pursuing instrumental reason. We do not need to go as far as the contemporary French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler (2015), who refers to this general situation as one of ‘stupidity’. It is enough to observe that the university has accepted an impoverished sense of knowledge and its relation to the world. This has diminished the university’s sense of both its responsibilities and its possibilities in the world. Chapter one, ‘Life in truth and truth in life’, confronts the widely circulating supposition that truth is barely more than different points of view, and argues that it is an implicit part of the university to uphold itself as a space of lively argumentative truthfulness. Chapter two, ‘The real thing’, examines the widespread belief that knowledge is just ‘socially constructed’ and observes forms of perniciousness in this view, not least that it allows for the ‘real world’ to impose itself upon academic knowledge. Chapter three, ‘Re-placing the humanities’, asks what is to become of the humanities. We observe that, while there are real problems facing the humanities, that situation is part of a much wider context in which thought in general is being distorted. A way forward may lie in all disciplines becoming more intimately part of the shaping of life. Chapter four, ‘Where’s the life in academic knowledge?’, takes the form of an examination of four influential texts, which allows us to place our argument over the relationship between the academy and knowledge. We suggest, in particular, that the matter of life is being underplayed. In Part Two, ‘The spirit of academic knowledge’, we advance our thesis as to the links between the university, knowledge and the world. Academic knowledge is a set

12

Introduction

of struggles to understand the world, and these processes are infused with life that prompts intellectual effort and struggle. It is seen in academic rewards and prizes, in remonstrations – when academics feel that they have been unfairly treated by reviewers or editors – and in students being inspired (a word that they use themselves). But these energies have their place in wider flows between the university and the wider world with a to-ing and fro-ing of epistemic, social, cultural and economic currents. These flows provide impetus to the life and the spirit of knowing efforts in the university and they spill out into the wider world. Large forces are shaping the ‘impact’ of these efforts on the life of the world. However, opportunities are opening, too, for new kinds of flow between universities and the wider world. Chapter five, ‘More than mere debate’, attends to the character of academic exchanges and argues that those exchanges have life in them but that life may be diminished or more fully energised. In chapter six, ‘A will to know’, we suggest that knowing efforts are sustained by a will to know, but this will is fragile: it can be quietened or even expunged. In chapter seven, ‘Living with darkness’, we identify and praise the more hidden aspects of inquiry that may infuse knowing efforts with life but which are in peril, with the contemporary drive to see all things made explicit. In chapter eight, ‘Edifying knowledge’, we build on an idea of the ancient Greeks, that knowledge has edifying qualities. Knowledge has a vitality in it, in the power of higher education to change a student’s life and in the university promoting the public sphere. In chapter nine, ‘A culture of lively discourse’, we play up elements of argument – even heated argument – present in academic life, elements that take on added spirit when allied to the idea of critical thought. In Part Three, ‘Cultivating knowledge in the university’, we consider implications of our thesis for the university. In our argument is a recognition that the life of the university is being diminished. The university’s knowing efforts are being encouraged to draw their energies narrowly, just from the economic sphere, and other spheres – culture, persons, society, communities – are given short shrift. Further, within the university, energy levels are being depleted in response to tighter managerial regimes, audit procedures (both external and internal) and expectations that tie epistemic effort to income flows. Busyness is accompanied by weariness. But well-run universities can still act as sources of new energy. Wise leadership can encourage, open doors, affirm and bring colleagues together across the disciplines and provide important symbolic rewards. It can also think through new relationships with the wider world, and so offer new sources of life and energy. Chapter ten, ‘Living reason’, attempts to draw out the university as a collective space of reasoning, alive and living. Chapter eleven, ‘Widening the knowledge ecology’, observes that our argument has contained an ecological sense of the interconnections between the university and the world but then questions can be asked as to how such interconnections are to be sustained and to be made vibrant. In Chapter twelve, ‘Reaching out’, we argue that the university has a responsibility to do what it can to reach out to multiple publics and to engage with them argumentatively, and in that way, bring new sources of life to the world.

Introduction

13

In a brief Coda, we return to the matter of spirit and suggest that a reenchantment of the university may lie in an ecology of care and, moreover, that the time of such a re-enchantment may be even coming, and coming quite rapidly.

Notes 1 See Robert Nisbet’s The Degradation of the Academic Dogma (1971), Tony Becher and Paul Trowler’s Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (2001), Gerard Delanty’s Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society (2001), Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), and Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (1997). 2 A strong plea explicitly to ‘bring knowledge back in’ has been mounted by Michael Young (2008), who developed a social realist account of knowledge, not least in its networks and connections to power structures in society. The present book could be said to pick up from where Young left off in his observation that ‘it is (or should be) the world that education is about’ (218). It is the whole world, the universe indeed, understood through the idea of life, and its relationship to the university, that concerns us here. 3 For example, as seen dialectically in the intellectual movement from knowledge as ‘doxa’ to knowledge as ‘episteme’ in the work of Plato (2002). Doxa is closer to the immediate truth that springs from everyday life and intellectual pursuits of a lower order, while episteme is related to a higher form of knowledge and truth only reachable by serious study and philosophical contemplation. 4 For example, as seen in the works of Immanuel Kant (1997, 2015) where knowledge and knowing efforts are seen as emancipatory. As the individual person increases her knowledge, she is also increasing her autonomy and her emancipatory powers as a human being. Knowledge is intimately linked to personal development and spiritual growth. 5 That knowledge is embodied within practices and cannot be reduced to intellectual activity alone has a long-standing tradition, from Aristotle (1999) and his descriptions of the various forms of practical, moral, and philosophical knowledge to modern variants, as found in Michael Polanyi (1978/1958), and his idea of tacit and personal knowledge, and Donald Schön (1991) and the idea of knowledge as reflection-in-action. This matter of embodiment (of knowledge) has been especially examined and promoted by Dall’Alba (2009a, 2009b), Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2005), and Hopwood and Paulson (2012). 6 Ricoeur (1970) especially pointed to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion …’ Another more popular version of the same point is to be found in Tallis (1999). 7 For an elaboration of the thesis that academic theories have contributed to the undermining of the university as an institution, see Barnett and Bengtsen (2017). 8 For example, Harman (2005, 2018), DeLanda (2006, 2016), Morton (2013, 2016). 9 For an analysis of the university through a realist ontology, see chapter 9 by the authors (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2017a). 10 One thinks, for example, at the time of World War II, of the Jews playing music in the death camps, of Myra Hess playing piano recitals during the bombing of London and of the performance of Britten’s War Requiem in the new Coventry Cathedral after the War’s ending, with soloists drawn from the combative countries. Certainly, too, in keeping with the argument here, classical music has had more dubious parts to play. For example, ‘The conflation of Wagner and Hitler has always posed difficulties for any principled listener, Jewish or otherwise’ (Burton-Hill, 2014 – see under Websites in bibliography). 11 The original hoax was perpetrated by Alan Sokal in 1996: see the Wikepedia entry on The Sokal Affair, but there are other very recent reports of analogous efforts. The thinking behind the original hoax was elaborated in Sokal and Bricmont (1998). 12 Sales of Hawkings’ (1989) book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, which contains much quite technical information, sold over ten million copies.

PART I

The university and life

1 LIFE IN TRUTH AND TRUTH IN LIFE

Introduction In this, the twenty-first century, we are being told that we live in a post-truth age. How might the signals here be read? Is it that there is a lack of care about truth? Is it that a background belief in truth has been shed? The very concept of truth has fallen out of the opinion-forming culture. If someone uses the phrase ‘the truth is that … ’, it now seems to indicate that a dialogue is closing down and not opening up. It is a paradox that ‘truth’ has come to signal something that is untrue (Rider, 2018). So, is this a truth-less age? These are matters of concern in this inquiry. It has long been assumed that the university could be counted as an institution that took truth seriously. Its principal activities, in research and teaching, were motivated by a desire to get at truth. Certainly, what counted as truth might change and there would be disputes over it. The medieval university, through its scholastic culture of teaching and learning, had a curriculum fused with understandings of argumentation, reason and deduction and logic. Scholarly techniques developed that allowed scholars opportunities to interrogate the texts of the Greeks and the reliable knowledge that ensued gave the mediaeval universities status in affairs of the state and its administration. Over time, even though there developed something of a ‘conflict of the faculties’ (Kant, 1979), and even though there emerged a sense that the truths of one discipline were worthy of a higher status than the truths of another, still it was understood that the life of the university was bound up with truth. However, now, not least against a background in which truth as a category is a target of suspicion in the wider world, it is not at all clear that the university can anymore be assumed to be intimately associated with truth. The term itself is notably absent from university websites and rectors’ addresses; and even from

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statements about methodology in academic papers and theses. A concern with truth as such seems to be fading in higher education, if it has not altogether vanished. If there remains such a connection (‘university’–‘truth’), it is in need of a re-interpretation and re-statement. There is, however, an even deeper concern here. That the university is a truth-oriented institution is indicative of a certain way of life held to be valuable in the university. And this way of life hinges on a fundamental belief that truth matters in life generally. Without this tacit value background in favour of truth,1 inquiry becomes a mere technical endeavour, at best concerned with arcane matters of methodology and, at worst, a matter of academic might. The matter of truth, accordingly, is bound up with the kind of life that the university represents.2 These, then, are the theses of this opening chapter.

Hunting for truth Wrapped up here are the matters of power and authority and, indeed, life itself. We may think of Socrates being condemned to death for corrupting the minds of the young of Athens or Galileo pointing, on the basis of new observations, to the sun lying at the centre of the Earth’s motions but with his way being barred by the ecclesiastical authorities. Truth has had a history of trying to negotiate with power. And in suppressing truth, power has implicitly suppressed life. However, contemporary positions have taken on an even more radical edge in suggesting that truth as such is questionable. Such a public scepticism towards truth has found backing in philosophy and social theory. Here are three examples. Firstly, in analytical philosophy, for some time it was commonly agreed that what counted as ‘knowledge’ was ‘justified true belief’. All three conditions – justification, truth and belief – had to be met for knowledge to be present. However, Edmund Gettier pointed out – in a three-page paper (1963) – that there were situations in which the three conditions could all be said to be met but where we would normally decline to confer the status of knowledge on a person’s situation. A huge supplementary literature has arisen, examining many different kinds of example, both for and against Gettier’s position. Characteristic of examples in support of Gettier – including those provided by Gettier himself – are situations in which a person (p) justifiably believes x and x is true, and it turns out that x is indeed true but not for the reasons that p believes, but for some other quite spurious and even accidental reason. All three conditions – justification, truth and belief – may be present but their co-presence does not seem to amount to ‘knowledge’. The point here is that truth is central to knowledge but that locating its place in relation to knowledge is difficult. Does it need to be backed up by belief? Does it need to be backed up by justification? Such matters take on practical point, and connect directly with academic life in the contemporary internet age. In a large research team (consisting perhaps of scores or even hundreds of

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participants across the globe), does every member of the team need to subscribe to (to ‘believe in’) the team’s truth claims, or is it sufficient that only a large proportion of the group assent? Would it be justifiable – as with parliamentary committee reports – for a sub-set of such a team to issue a minority report? But, in any event, in an internet age, in which not every member of the team can be intimately involved in every aspect of the research process, what of justification? In what aspects of the research process does justification lie, if at no time has every member of the team been involved? In short, it is far from clear that truth can be given a precise location in academic activities. Take a second example. Over the past forty years, spreading out from work in the sociology of science, academic work has come to be understood by virtue of the networks that constitute the research process (Kuhn, 2012). In turn, the category of truth appears to dissolve into those networks or relationships. Indeed, back in the 1970s, the ‘Edinburgh School’ of the sociology of science was associated with the ‘strong programme’ that explicitly nailed its colours to this truth-dissolving mast (Edge, 1976). More recently, that approach has been endorsed in the actor, inspired by Bruno Latour (2007). In this perspective, networks have been substantially widened so as to capture the micro-detail of the networks – not just scientific but also social and political – in which scientists come at their readings of the world. This philosophy – for that is what it has become – opens to a large number of ‘worlds’, with few explicit concerns about truth. And if it has an ontology (if it has a sense of the world as such), it is a rather thin ontology, since it denies to itself any chance of being able to assess the veracity of understandings in terms of their relationships to the world. So the category of truth has tended to fade away, in these frameworks within social theory. We have life – in these epistemic networks – but it is life without the category of truth. And it is life without a proper account of what is to count as the world. It is an impoverished life. Our last example is that of Foucault (1980, 2002). Truth occupies an ambiguous place in his work, which has played an influential role in showing how knowledge and power have been intimately associated in the evolution of disciplines. By and large, Foucault evades the matter of truth. For him, knowledge has to be understood as regimes of power, an insight that he backs up with voluminous historical studies into the ‘archaeology’ of knowledge in its emergence of disciplines and their associated practices. Notably, Foucault revealed the regimes of ‘biopower’ that social and psychological disciplines have apparently legitimised. The problem here is that in pressing the association between knowledge and power – and, implicitly, with life – the category of truth is dissolved. It is pertinent that Foucault (1980: 118) was uncomfortable with the concept of ideology, being happier to stick to his theoretical guns of regimes and discourses. Ideology, after all, gains its traction precisely from its association with truth. In observing that a discourse is ideological, we are implicitly pointing to its

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partiality, to its being economical with the truth (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). It is not the case that ideologies are untrue but rather that they gain their force from being highly selective. They pick up on matters of inequality, or freedom or collectivity but then spin matters to their own ends. Ideologies have bits of reason and the world on their side. It’s just that their accounts ultimately don’t pass muster. They have only glimmers of truth in them. This kind of analysis is denied to Foucault, who has nothing to say about truth as such. There are, then, examples in philosophy and social theory that have helped to undermine the very idea of truth. Truth appears to have little going for it, even within the academic profession. It no longer seems to be part of the selfunderstandings of the academic community, which seems to want to get along without reference to truth, and even has developed a phobia toward it (Bailey, 2001). Variously, truth is either difficult to pin down, or it is difficult to give a robust account of truth, or it is unnecessary for the purposes of giving a fair understanding of the world or, on examination, it just dissolves. This is not a needle-in-the-haystack problem for it is not even clear that there is any such needle (of truth). This is a matter that the university ignores at its peril, not least amid accusations within the academic community of texts as having unwarranted veracity, of researchers recanting their own data even after publication, of a wider public accusing the academy of being ideologically driven and of a contemporary discourse of ‘post-truth’. The matter of truth bears directly on what is it to be a university and of the form of life that supports truth-oriented inquiry (cf Benson and Stangroom (2006: 140)). And if suspicions grow that truth doesn´t matter, even in the academy, then it is not clear that it matters at all.

Expanding the standard accounts There are three standard accounts of truth – truth as correspondence, as coherence and as use. Each has value but other accounts are surely needed for the university of the twenty-first century. Truth-as-argument; truth-as-conflict; truth-as-venturing; truth-as-aesthetic-experience – all these need to come into play. Truth has to be worked at, and conflicts negotiated. Truth, accordingly, is bound up with life. But we are running ahead of ourselves. For a long time, Western philosophy understood truth as a relationship between propositions and the world. Propositions were felt to be truthful providing that they corresponded to the world. However, this correspondence idea of truth ran into several difficulties. Firstly, it implied that it was possible to gain access to the world, such that propositions could be judged as to the degree to which they corresponded to the world. But just such a direct access to the world had long been doubted, not least in Kant’s philosophy (Kant, 1999). All that is available is a hope in some kind of correspondence with the world (Meillassoux, 2014). Secondly, the correspondence theory of truth harboured a mirror view of truth, a view

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debunked by the American philosopher Rorty (2017). This mirror image was unduly static, implied an unrealistic isomorphism between truth claims and the world and failed to reflect the way in which the category of truth is deeply embedded in life. And thirdly, it conveyed a sense that truth expressed a separateness between human beings and an external world of hard physical objects. This presupposition seemed to rule out of court the idea of truth in matters of personal and social value and in practical matters of life. It also implicitly ruled offside the possibility of truth coming into play in indigenous and traditional cultures, in which humanity is understood as being part of the world and not as separate from it. In short, the correspondence account of truth was life-less. The coherence theory of truth took an altogether different tack. It said that if we cannot have direct access to an external world, at least we can assess the degree to which true propositions support (‘cohere with’) each other. This is a view that has been endorsed by the German philosopher and theorist, Jurgen Habermas (1984). Habermas has sought to lay bare the basis of reason, especially as it lies within modernity. For Habermas, human collective speech is rational insofar as it complies with certain ‘validity claims’ inherent in the give and take of a serious discourse. On this view, reason lies within dialogue, and not beyond it.3, 4 Support for such a view lies in a sense that this is in fact how, to a large extent, we assess claims to truth. We wonder to what extent a claim makes sense in relation to other contiguous claims. This idea of truth-as-coherence finds warrant in Thomas Kuhn’s (2012) idea of ‘normal science’, characterised by often long periods where academic work takes place within largely-taken-for-granted frameworks. Individual mavericks, who try to run counter to the conventional pictures, run the risk of excommunication from the research community. Imre Lakatos’ (1999) idea of a research programme correspondingly too underwrote a sense of research work hanging together and which gave a programme coherence over time. There was life here, of a sort. Unfortunately, the real world has a habit of breaking in, and disrupting proceedings. The truth of taken-for-granted frameworks characteristically breaks down in the end, as features of the world press themselves forward, requiring new kinds of truth claim. The usefulness of the old truth claims expires and new ones are needed. Hence arose a more pragmatic sense of truth. In the hands of its architects, such as John Stuart Mill (2001), Charles Sanders Peirce (2011) and William James (2000), this was less to do with the practical usefulness of a truth claim but was much more bound up with its value in doing justice to all the evidence and experience that the world offers. Certainly, there was an offshoot at work here, namely that a test of a theory is its performance in the world. Does it live in the real world? In the end, however, this theory of truth has been traduced into a sense that usefulness is understood as practical use in the world. And this has seemed to provide a legitimation of contemporary valuations of research findings in terms of their ‘impact’ upon the world. This usefulness harbours but a stunted sense of life.

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The university and life

What might we gain from this doubtless over-quick canter through the major views of truth when put into the context of this present inquiry? Our view is straightforward: even if brought together in some magical jigsaw picture so as to do justice to their very different orientations, their combination is insufficient to do justice to the idea of truth as embodied in the life of the university. For that, especially the university of the twenty-first century, we need yet other accounts of truth.

The life of truth and the life in truth For the most part, universities just get on about their work. As one might say these days and without any tinge of embarrassment, they get on about their business, and without perplexing themselves over ‘truth’. Truth is not a matter that trips up most academics. This is not to say, however, that truth is absent in the life of the university or even that it is lost on the university. (Parenthetically, it is institutional leaders that are most explicitly wrestling with matters of truth as they deal with near-intractable challenges of the no-platforming of speakers and the like.) The university still has a care for truth. To use a term of the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor (2007), truth provides a background ‘imaginary’ of the university. This is not to imply that it exists only in the imagination but rather that truth lies deeply in the traditions, rules, practices and tacit understandings of the university. To put it simply, the life of the university is characterised in part by a truth-culture.5 This matter – of the place of truth within the university – has seldom, if even, been the subject of serious reflection. And yet it is crucial for an understanding of the life of the university. We have just been observing that the standard accounts of truth advanced by philosophers are of little help. That, perhaps, is one explanation of truth going unremarked in considerations of what it is to be a university. The cupboard is bare. There are no products that we can immediately pull off the shelf in giving an account of truth-in-the-university. We have just intimated our approach to this problem. Truth lies in the culture of the university. But that does not get us very far. Is it a unitary culture? Is all plain sailing, such that academics – at least in their research groups or disciplinary communities – recognise truth when they see it? These are largely matters for the sociologists, especially those who concern themselves with the micro-aspects of knowledge-gathering activities. What we are interested in here are more conceptual matters: just what, in general terms, might truth-oriented activities look like if a university is to warrant such a title (of ‘university’)? What might it mean for truth to be embedded in the culture of the university? And how might the university take its place within society and culture in a truthful way? Let us plunge in. We contend that truth in the university is a matter of the very life of the university. Truth is present in the to-ing and fro-ing of academic life, in the exchanges in seminars and conferences, in the commentaries of reviewers on papers, in the guidance that tutors give to students and in the

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creative artefacts that emerge from universities. Such activities are guided by tacit notions as to how to proceed in a particular field of study, so as to produce accounts of the world that have a high degree of warrant. Note that, on this view, truth is not a matter of reaching a particular endpoint (‘the Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ as it were) but is a way of proceeding. Truth, of the kind sustained by the university, is much more embedded in the collective being of the university; or – to put it in Heidegerian language – in the collective Dasein of the university (Nørgård and Bengtsen, 2016). This is very peculiar, that an institution should have have longevity over centuries, in which its members work in a disciplined and careful way towards an end that cannot be pinned down. Indeed, it is improper even to suggest that the members of a university might work towards truth as an end, since there is no such end in sight. And yet, by and large, the members of the university are still guided by truth. The life of the university is precisely a particular form of life – namely a life of truth. In universities, students and teachers are not working on truth, they are in truth. The university is a truth culture, because truth envelops its practices. The university is embedded within truth. Truth-cultures in turn are defined by their embeddedness within the world, a world that exceeds and goes beyond the culture itself. A truth culture is, therefore, never independent and self-reliant; it relies on its surroundings and it may even be understood to constitute an ecology, interacting with its total environment (Unwin, 2007). A truth-culture is a commitment to the understanding of a world that lies beyond, and with its own powers. It follows that it is not helpful to suggest – as Karl Popper (1979) implied in his idea of ‘verisimilitude’ – that inquiries and activities in the university are all the while approaching truth, even if they do not reach it. For such a formulation implies that one would have direct access to the true state of affairs with which academics’ accounts of the world can be assessed. But, of course, that happy situation is not available. It would imply that academics hold within them a picture of the world as it really is – in whatever domain that they are working. It would imply, too, that such sagacious academics had already reached an understanding of the true state of affairs, which would render superfluous the inquiry at hand. In turn, such God-like wisdom would bring to a halt the university, for all its intellectual problems would have been solved. What, then, is required here is an account of truth that is embedded in the life of the university. Mysterious as it may be, truth is a necessary fiction of and in the university. Never fully reached, it remains as a guiding light of the life of the university. Without the idea of truth held within it, the university itself would be at an end. Truth is at the heart of academic life, and it is the driving force, or its will to power (to borrow from Nietzsche (1968)). Truth is what keeps universities together, both internally and collectively, and in their external associations with the world. Truth is the homeland (Heidegger, 2011) of universities, and

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bequeaths a life force from which they take their bearings and energies. A concern for truth resides in academics as they set-up their research programmes and assess their students. Truth is the terroir of the university. But, then, a whole series of further problems leap up. What does it mean to talk of the being of the university? How might we recognise its having a care for truth? In short, we suggest that the idea of truth inherent in the university is that of truth-as-argument. Furthermore, in truth as argument, we see truth as constituting a major plank in the life of the university.6 By argument, we mean the giving and taking of reasons. But what we have in mind here is not a cool-headed rational discourse – implied, for instance, either in Habermas’ work on ‘communicative reason’ (1984) or in Bakhurst’s (2011) idea of education as ‘a space of reason’. Rather, we have in mind that the university is a site of reasoning, that ‘ing’ suffix being crucial here. The term ‘reasoning’ points not only to interchanges that may be cool and even icy processes of reasoning but they may also be hot, and even passionate. Within the idea of a ‘search for truth’, therefore, are emotional states that include frustration, patience, intemperateness, empathy, generosity, intolerance, inspiration and sheer hotheadedness.

Passionate truth An infamous occasion arose in the 1950s in a Cambridge room in which a group of philosophers held their regular seminar. On that occasion, Karl Popper was a guest speaker and, during the seminar, it is alleged that Ludwig Wittgenstein somewhat lost patience with Popper’s argument, sprang up, grabbed hold of a poker in the fire and brandished it in Popper’s direction (Edmonds and Eidinow, 2001). The incident demonstrates the intensity with which, at times, members of a university go about their activities in their search for truth. Note, however, that surviving members of that incident were interviewed by one of those present – Norman Malcolm – and each one had a different story to tell of it. We may say that their views were in part infected by the extent to which each person present sided with Wittgenstein or Popper. Or we may say that perceptions are theoryladen. Or we may say, much less portentously, that life is deeply present in truth. Truth is felt and so it is inflected by life, personally and collectively. In gaining a hold, then, on truth in a university setting, we should leave behind formal definitions and instead embrace truth as bound up in the lives of academics and in the life of the university. Søren Kierkegaard’s (2009) notion of passion comes to mind here. Thinking, for Kierkegaard, is always a mixture of reasoning, feeling and meaning creation; it is a passionate endeavour. To truth-as-argument, therefore, we should add truth-as-conflict but also truth-as-cooperation, truth-as-venturing, truth-as-commitment and truth-as-passion. In the academic world, truth has to be worked at collectively and its conflicts negotiated (whether between individuals or large research teams) – there can be no Robinson Crusoes on board in a university. In short, truth in a university is necessarily infused with life.

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There is doubly life in truth. There is life in inquirers in the university. That much, hopefully, we have made apparent. But it is also the case that inquiry itself has life. We may speak of the waxing and waning, for example of a theory or a perspective or even of a whole school of thought. We do not need to entertain any kind of Hegelian conception of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ here. Kuhn (2012) has pointed to haphazard cycles of normality and revolution; Feyerabend (2010) has urged almost complete anarchism. For Nietzsche (1968), life is a constant process of self-overcoming, and ideas, thoughts, theories, actions and ultimately even universities themselves must fall away to be replaced by new ones. There is, and has to be, truth in the life of the university and there is life in truth itself It is evident that truth-oriented processes are necessarily always in a process of evolution and, in this survival of the fittest, truthful accounts sooner or later die. The American philosopher Alphonso Lingis (1998) says that life is the spending of energy, and seeks to be used up. If there is life in truth, there is also death. But this death is part of life.

A culture of truthfulness All of this points not so much to the concept of truth as being important but also to the concept of truthfulness. Those working in a university can never be satisfied that they have attained a state of truth and nor do they wake up each day consciously thinking about securing Truth in any of their activities. However, they understand that the striving for truth will continue and they have an inner belief that there is value in such an enterprise. A major argument in favour of truthfulness has been advanced by Bernard Williams (2002). In his account, Williams places weight on virtues – such as sincerity, authenticity and accuracy – that are embedded in this way of life. We don’t demur but we want to press that viewpoint. For us, when taken on collectively and sustained in an institution such as a university, this truthfulness comes to constitute a culture, indeed a culture of truthfulness. Truthfulness so pervades the university that it becomes an essential value of the university. Truthfulness so characterises the academy that, for example, a sense of failure accompanies the manipulation of data to secure a certain result; and such a suggestion can mar an academic’s standing, even beyond the grave (such as that of the psychologist, Cyril Burt (Tredoux 2015)). What is at issue is not that a particular claim is judged to be truthful or not but that truthfulness is integral to the collective academic life. A key part of this culture of truthfulness is that the relevant processes should be open to scrutiny. ‘Dissensus’ was a key term in Bill Readings’ (1997) justly influential book, The University in Ruins. This dissensus is Janus-like: it points both to internal argument but also a collective argument contending against the external world. But note that Readings brought the term into play in a context in which the university was judged to be in ruins. ‘Dissensus’ was a ploy by which the

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university might carve out a minimal space for itself, even despite the calamitous position to which it had been reduced (its surround of the nation-state and culture having been lost from view). However, this dissent is not to be encouraged just at moments when the university is under siege but is a perennial and necessary part of what it is to be a university. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages knew this in their disputations, which played an important part in university life. There, there was a structured giving and taking, in full public view, as arcane matters of theology and philosophy were hotly debated by two individuals, set up against each other. There is not just life in this culture of truthfulness but, as noted, often impassioned life. In this strange culture, there is frustration, determination, skulduggery, wit and raw emotion. It is a culture in which its members attach supreme importance in being the first to make truth claims on particular topics, and in which accordingly priority disputes arise; and this explains why some contemporary journals print the date that papers were received. Reputations hang on and are bound up truth claims. This is a very strange culture indeed, this culture of truthfulness. Its members can be so seduced by ideas that they are kept awake at night, in trying to fathom a way of deciphering some ancient text, or of making sense of some untoward data, or discerning an abstract concept, or in bringing off some kind of practical endeavour, or drafting a book chapter. Such angst has its place within the accompanying culture of allowable dissent. In this collective life, it is expected that dissent be weighed and duly acknowledged. If the dissenter has made what turns out to be a fair point, then that should be publicly accepted. A truth claim is always invitational. Implicitly, it holds in itself the tacit pedagogical question identified by F R Leavis (a Cambridge scholar of English literature and public dissenter, who stood out for a rigorous attention to the particularities of texts): ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ (Leavis, 1969: 48) And this question is implicit in the words of tutors and students. It invites the further response: ‘How do you know that?’ or ‘Tell me more about that’. So truthfulness calls for life, the life of a collective group of people who have a mutual interest in gnawing at the bones of a problem.7 Truthfulness, accordingly, is nothing short of a collective struggle seriously to understand the world and, thereby, to understand life. As such, truthfulness is itself a form of life: it requires (collective) life and it energises life.

Conclusions: life in truth and truth in life Truth is essential to the life of the university. Without an interest in truth, the university will be moribund. Moreover, without this strange academic life, the life of the world would be impoverished. This is so not just because the university furnishes new understandings of the world that have value in the world but also on account of a deeper matter. More important than any particular understandings is a culture of truthfulness that, qua institution, a university is bound to uphold. A cardinal value of the university is that it is an institution that promotes dissent and conflict, and that such conflict is conducted in a reasonably

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decorous manner. Truth counts but more so does truthfulness, a collective striving for legitimate understandings, made legitimate as a result of their being subject to a critical gaze. Allowable dissent is the watchword. There is doubly life here. Life inheres within these truth-oriented processes in the university. Views are held with conviction because they are believed in – which may, of course, be collective beliefs of, say, an emerging specialist academic group. And those views take on a life of their own. Mostly, they flutter and fall quickly to the ground and die, but sometimes they take off and hold their place in the sun, for a while at least. They hold up against their challengers. And they need to have challengers. No conflict, no university! But then, as well as life being in truth, truth is in life. For such a culture of truthfulness and of allowed dissent bequeaths life. It provides life to the university. Perhaps the university will defy the universal law of a cycle of life and death: perhaps this culture of truthfulness will ensure perpetual longevity to the university qua institution, even while its singular truths fall to the ground and even if individual universities wither and die. And this culture of truthfulness points to the larger significance that the university offers the world. For if a culture of truthfulness can sustain the university, it can help to sustain the wider world, and even breathe new life into the world. Truth is valuable for life as such. If any of this holds water, it may be wise for the university to understand these matters, not least as it is assailed by the wider world, and for it to proclaim this way of life. Such a public stance would help to promote universities’ contribution to the world as a space of truthfulness. In taking such a stance, any university would be declaring itself in favour of a life of systematic argument built around critical reasoning. In much of the world, such a form of life will be sensed as dangerous. Recalling Socrates’ teachings and Galileo’s findings as being anathema to the authorities, this life of truth may prove dangerous even to the university itself. It is all the more important that the university hold fast to this life and be not afraid of defending it.

Notes 1 The idea of a value background to human life and human identity has permeated the work of Charles Taylor for decades. See one of his major works, Sources of the Self (1992). 2 ‘ … the relation of thought to … the original aperture of truth … is in no sense … a cognizance, a theoretical acquisition. Rather, it is what Wittgenstein would call the sharing of a “form of life”’. (Vattimo, 2011: xxxi). 3 Graham Harman (2018: 178) observes that not only was Gettier’s article only three pages long but that Gettier ‘never published anything else’. 4 It was on this ground that Roy Bhaskar, the founder of Critical Realism, remarked to one of us [RB] that ‘Habermas has no ontology’. 5 Today, however, the ontological foundation of the university’s truth-culture seems to be seriously threatened. It is the very being of truth that is at stake, not just the meaning of truth.

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6 In its deepest sense, critical argument comprises not merely a rhetorical dimension and an epistemic current, but it also contains an ontological foundation. Bound up in criticality is being as such. See Barnett’s book chapter ‘A Curriculum for Critical Being’, reprinted in Davies, M and Barnett, R (2015). 7 ‘Life’ was a central matter in the oeuvre of F R Leavis (Cranfield, 2016: 17–19) for whom the creative writer was fuelled by a ‘sense of life’, with the work of such writers itself exuding life, not least in the use of language in the creation of the novel or, indeed, in the creation of new knowledge in the university. (Leavis, 1969: 51–53.)

2 THE REAL THING

Introduction Over the last half-century or more, waves of scholarly thought have carried the implication that the world is ‘socially constructed’ by human beings. Movements associated with this way of looking at humanity’s relationship with the world include phenomenology, relativism, structuralism, deconstructionism, the ‘strong programme’ of the sociology of knowledge, constructivism and postmodernism. Particular beliefs here are that all of our concepts are ‘theory-laden’, that we live within forms of life that we cannot escape, that the large concepts through which we anchor ourselves to the world have dissolved, that we cannot get outside of our frames of thought, and that we are, inescapably, under the sway of ideologies, not least in relation to public services, including higher education. In our understandings of the world, so it has repeatedly been urged, we have only constructions of the world with which to contend, with little if anything to decide between them. However, recently, in the wake of this relativist tsunami, realism has been making a come-back. Much like the buses, one waits for some time – for over fifty years in this case – for a realist philosophy to come along and then several arrive together. All have in common a sense that there is a world that lies independently of our sense of it and our judgements of it but they take different tacks.1 One particularly influential realist philosophy, that of Critical Realism, points to subterranean layers of the world (Bhaskar, 2008), not immediately on view but which may be exerting some force nevertheless. Not only is there a real world on this philosophy separate from our knowledge of it but it offers strata, each with its attractions. This issue as to the status of knowledge of the world is crucial for the present inquiry. Indeed, it cannot be avoided if we are to give any serious answer to

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key questions: why does inquiry, of the kind associated with the university, matter? What gives it bite? Why should academics’ activities be of interest or concern to the wider society? Are their conversations no more than currents of air blowing among themselves or are they efforts towards modifying the world? A serious response to these question calls for a stance on knowledge and its relationship with the world. Does knowledge have value in advancing understandings of the world, or is it just an exchange of viewpoints that are barely more than opinions? We believe the former position to be the case but, then, what is the value that knowledge possesses? Our thesis is that the main value of knowledge, not least in the university, is that it is bound up with life in all life forms (organic and inorganic). Knowledge creation may be provoked not only by ourselves and our cultures (an implication of relativism and postmodernism), but also by the natural, social, biological and human phenomena that embrace us (an implication of realism). Knowledge matters because it is prompted by the world and it tells us something about the life of the Earth and, in so doing, it expands life itself.

Having one’s cake For hundreds of years, a particular problem of knowledge has presented itself. It has been recognised that the world is not willing to disclose itself without a struggle. Academic effort is precisely a collective effort to get beneath immediate appearances and off-the-shelf stock understandings, and to lay bare the world as it really is. As indicated, the ‘world’ here includes not only fiction, poetry, abstract ideas and concepts together with objects and forces in the natural and social worlds, but also dazzling artefacts involving extraordinary interchanges of engineering, the performing arts, design, and computer graphics and digital models, and much else besides. However, try as human beings might, the world is never prepared fully to disclose itself. It always stands behind a veil, no matter how sophisticated our knowing efforts to peel that veil aside. Whether it is because we cannot rid ourselves of the fundamental categories through which we come at the world (essentially Kant’s view) or because we cannot distinguish the causal sheep from the correlational goats (essentially Hume’s view) or because we are continually susceptible to bewitchment by a malevolent power (essentially Descartes’ view), or because, no matter how refined our ideas become, the world always seems to be receding from us (essentially Popper’s view), we stand perpetually in a state of ignorance. We can never get behind the veil and see the world as it really is. But, even if we were to see the world as it really is, we could never be sure that we were in that blissful state. On such a dismal account of humanity’s knowledge efforts, it is not at all clear what universities might be for. At best, it seems to reduce academic talk to ideas that just jostle in a conversational merry-go-round of ‘multiplicities’ and ‘relations’ (essentially Latour’s view). At worst, it seems to condemn university

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life to being little more than waves of often rather heated currents of air, but lacking any substance. And just this forlorn sense seems to have grabbed hold of many in the social sciences and philosophy of late. Inquiry about what there is in the world – formally speaking, about ontology – is not so much as ruled out of bounds as that it becomes spurious. Since we cannot get at the world as it really is, let us just concern ourselves with exchanging our opinions about the world or with uncovering other’s opinions about the world. In effect, this viewpoint amounts to a sense that the text is all that there is and we cannot get beyond it (Derrida, 2001), or that political discourses are all there are and we cannot really get beyond them (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). On such a view, the world itself is entirely beyond our ken – or, at least, beyond the ken of sophisticated social theorists and philosophers. We repudiate this understanding of academic knowledge. Academic knowledge is more than merely a conversation, however rule-governed and however sophisticated its disciplinary ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999, 2013), with their codes and languages. And it is more, therefore, than a set of rituals, the meanings of which are intuited only by those on the inside of its ‘tribes and territories’ (Becher and Trowler, 2001). Ultimately, academic knowledge is an attempt to reveal something of the life of the world, the whole world, the whole Earth. In losing sight of this fundamental capacity within knowledge, universities are starting to forget what they are conversing about. Moreover, amidst the global audit to which universities are subject, they are coming to frame their efforts as ways of having impact on the world rather than as ways of revealing life in its fullness. This latter stance would harbour a sense of knowledge as being struck and even unsettled by the world, but also inspired by the world. It would be a stance that takes its bearings from the world. We want to have our cake and eat it. We want to hold onto a sense not only of academic knowledge being an exchange of ideas about the world, but also a sense that the phrase ‘the world’ continues to hold water. Academic knowledge is an attempt to bring impressions and the world into a relationship, even if we cannot give an exhaustive account of ‘the world’. Whether the efforts of the Nobel prize winner or the first-year undergraduate, it is a matter of trying to say something about the world. There is a cardinal point to be made here on behalf of the university. The university matters because it is an institution geared to trying to understand that which can never be satisfactorily understood. If the world stood ready to disclose its secrets to the first inquirer, there would be no need for the university. It is because the world keeps itself to itself and holds mysteries that can never fully be fathomed that an institution such as the university has point. A realist approach implies that despite these difficulties, we can at least touch the world and be touched by the world (cf Lingis, 1998). The university offers us a space to realise this hope in systematic ways that have evolved over centuries.

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The essence of the university, then, is that it is for life – it springs from life and inquires into life. It is perplexed by life but that very perplexity only compels it to want to understand the world better, aware that its understandings can never be complete. Indeed, it recognises very well that its efforts to understand the world will only suggest new paths down which to travel and to explore. Labyrinths continue to open. And so we see at the end of more or less every research report that ‘more research is needed … ’. New vistas of the world have been glimpsed that deserve further efforts and a continuing response from the university. Two interconnected riders attach to this way of understanding the university. Firstly, the university is an institution that lives with an enduring perplexity in comprehending the life of the world. And so, in turn, its own life, the life of the university is marked by a quality of unknownness, which provokes further life in the university. Secondly, this state of play is not well understood by a world that seeks from its universities solutions to its problems, and preferably within the next three months, however intractable problems may be. For its part, the university is quite happy to partner the world in confronting technical, societal and environmental problems that arise. But that the essential stance of the university is one of irredeemable perplexity is seldom fathomed by the wider world, which then – perhaps unwittingly – constrains the university in those very endeavours in comprehending the life of the universe that have such appeal to the world.

Rehabilitating objectivity The university has its own implicit philosophy. To put it more formally, the university possesses its own implicit epistemology and its own implicit ontology; and both stem from a strong realism at the centre of the university. The university harbours a sense that there is a world beyond its inquiries, that that world has an independence from academics’ inquiries (its ontology) and it is this intuited independence of the world that provides value in attempting to inquire into the world. Moreover, the university can evolve and has evolved procedures for helping us reliably to comprehend the world (Bengtsen, 2014). Such is the university’s tacit epistemology: it assumes that there is a world independent of its knowing efforts and that it possesses fairly robust knowledge systems and methods for producing authoritative understandings of that world. This epistemology has ontological consequences. In short, and without embarrassment, we can speak of ‘the real world’. And, as stated, ‘the world’ includes galaxies and paintings, human texts and quarks and animals and abstract concepts. The objects that make up this world are often fuzzy, with indistinct boundaries. Furthermore, the world is layered, its depths difficult to illuminate in their murkiness. It is a world, too, that goes on interacting and evolving, quite independently of humanity. It has a life, or rather it has life, of its own.

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Indeed, our thoughts and thinking are not just about the world, they are part of the fabric of the world. Such is the university’s tacit ontology. If we bring these two sets of observations together, about the university’s implicit epistemology and ontology, the following considerations suggest themselves. The university is not separate from the world, it is part of the ‘skin’ of the world (to borrow a term from Merleau-Ponty (2002)). Universities are embedded within the world, and thinking in universities is a prolongation of the world. To some extent, these points have been implied by the new realist philosophies. In a way, they should never have needed to have been made but – as observed – we have come through a long phase in which we were given to understand that there is nothing outside of or beyond ‘the text’ and that there is nothing but discourses, and so there arises a need to make some rather obvious points. There is a world, however difficult it may be to give a sense as to what is meant by ‘world’, and it makes sense to inquire into it. And it is a primary purpose of the university as an institution to sustain just such an inquiry into the world. An indication of the situation in front of us is that the term ‘objectivity’ has fallen not only into desuetude but into disrepute. Ignominy befalls anyone claiming objectivity for their point of view. It would seem to amount to a case of brazen pretentiousness, a hubris of the highest order. How, these days, can any point of view be objective? Isn’t it obvious that, for every feature of the world, there are going to be a multiplicity – a favoured word2 – of viewpoints, and rival viewpoints at that? The old canard about there being different perceptions of the world on either side of the Pyrenees still plays its part. Just how are disputes to be settled? Surely, there is no such settlement available, for there is no objective reading of the world. There are, instead, only views that are relative to each other. Relativism, not objectivity, has to be the order of the day. This conflict between objectivity and relativism has simmered for decades. For a long time, the American philosopher, John Searle (1999, 2001) has mounted a spirited project around ‘social facts’, which are real and have a substance of their own. There is a double aspect here to the idea of objectivity: money notes, for instance (to take one of his key examples), are a creation of the human mind but have acquired the status of a social institution with a presence in the world and can be studied objectively.3 Others – for example, Popper (1979) and more recently Andrew Collier (2007) – have argued explicitly in favour of ‘objectivity’.4 This is not the place to enter those lists directly. What we do want to suggest is that a new space is opening for the idea of objectivity through the work of contemporary realist philosophers. Traditionally, the idea of objectivity represented an intertwining of both epistemology and ontology. It said of a set of truth claims (epistemology) that they offered an untainted view of the world as it really is (ontology). That was always a tall story, and begged too many questions, for it was an objectivity that possessed a pseudo-material status. How could

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the claimant be sure that the world was being revealed in all its glory? That claim seemed to presume a God-like position, able to get behind the veil of ignorance. But modern realism opens to a particular sense of objectivity, namely as an aspirational concept. Our views of the world may never be, will never be, fully objective, but that consideration does not confine views to a relativist morass, in which judgement is outlawed. Claims about the world can be judged and evaluated. Admittedly, the criteria that may be called upon are many and controversial. What depth does a view of the world contain? What defences does it possess to minimise its partiality? How open is it to critique and even refutation? What range of phenomena does it embrace? How nuanced and subtle is it in giving insight into the nature of entities in the world? Note that all these questions are on the epistemological side of the coin. There is no pretence here that the world can be shown to be as it fully is, whatever that might mean. But nor is the possibility of judgement abandoned. Rather, questions such as these take seriously that there is an external world that is independent of thought about it – including poetry and abstract concepts – and what is in question here is the integrity with which those inquiries are pursued. To put it in another way, these questions are concerned with the character of a truth-oriented life (chapter one). Does it have an integrity in trying objectively to reveal the character of the object in front of it? Is it steered by a spirit of truthfulness? Being objective, therefore, is to have an abiding interest in the world-in-itself. Despite the personal interests and even passions involved, there is a displacement of the enquirer in understanding and in revealing the world as it is in-itself; and doing so by utilising the methods felt to be the most effective in revealing any object before the gaze. It follows that the term ‘objectivity’ should be seen less as an ontological marker, saying something about the status of the object in question, and much more as an indication of a certain kind of culture in which the inquirers displace themselves into the background and focus on particular objects as they are in-themselves. It is, in this particular sense, a disinterested form of life. That a life can be both disinterested and full of commitment is a peculiarity seldom understood. This is a demanding form of life, this interest in objectivity, even if it cannot ever be fully redeemed (cf Bernstein, 1983). It marks, for example, a major difficulty that new students face, in displacing their selves to a significant extent and in giving themselves up to the matters at hand. This loss of self demanded by the academic life is, we may note, giving rise to a certain amount of frisson especially within the social sciences, where there have been moves to allow the student’s personal narrative to be heard. It will be evident that we are wary of such provisions: to use some old-fashioned phrasing, both the context of discovery and the context of justification may be impaired.5 Insight into the life of the world may be weakened when the personal dimension intrudes unduly.

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Life and understanding Over the last two decades, considerable intellectual effort has focused on the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’.6 Originally, it stood for a set of ideas that sprang from the natural sciences – especially geology, chemistry and the environmental sciences – to the effect that humanity had come to form a new physical stratum on the Earth, through its impact on the natural environment (Steffen, 2018). That idea has been taken up with gusto by social theorists and philosophers, who have used it critically to comment on the way in which humanity’s outlook on the world has placed humanity at its centre. The world was the world as it seemed to humanity. The Anthropocene signifies a stage of supreme collective self-centredness on the part of humanity. This has been a plank of the new realisms, in their critique of social constructivism, which has failed to understand that the world would proceed in its own way without the gaze of human beings being directed towards it (Bhaskar, 2008; Harman, 2005; Morton, 2016). The world does not depend on humanity. We agree with the new realists but there is a baby-and-bathwater angle here. That we recognise the presence of a world lying independently of perceptions formed about it and its resistance to human comprehension in no way diminishes the value that resides in human efforts to understand the world. To the contrary, if it is the case that humanity has had profound effects upon the environment, often deleterious effects at that, then it becomes incumbent upon humanity to address what is now a dual matter, both the state of affairs that the world is in and the character of its deformed forms of knowledge that have helped to bring about this state of affairs. Recognition of the Anthropocene – if it exists – can only place additional responsibilities on humanity, but now to understand the whole world and not surreptitiously to accord humanity any privileged place in it. There is a parallel discussion within the ecology debate. Originally, ecologists were those who not only took the world seriously but who poured scorn on humanity in failing to pay the world due account; and so humanity was criticised for the shortcomings in its stances – epistemological and practical – towards the world. However, the idea of a deep ecology then arose. The deep ecologists observed that the (first generation of) ecologists had unwittingly smuggled in a sense of humanity and the world as separate, and implicitly placed humanity in a superior position. However, humanity – it was now observed – was part of the world and not a very distinguished part at that. More recently, however, it has been recognised, from within the deep ecology movement, that that position is disingenuous and diminishes humanity’s responsibilities on Earth. It diminishes too a concern with the part that humanity has played in despoiling the planet, not least through its dominant knowledges, built as they are around instrumental reason. Knowledge can enhance life but it can all too easily act to impair life; and it has done so, working in malign ways on both the natural and the human environments.

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And so debates both over the Anthropocene and ecology have come to show not only that there is a world beyond humanity and that humanity can have effects upon the world while being also part of the world, but also that humanity can go some way in understanding the world and the effects it has had upon the world. Further, on this view, humanity now has particular responsibilities to do what it can to address the world, not least the impairments of the world that humanity has contributed in bringing about (Barnett, 2018; Wright, 2016). To say, therefore, that the university, through its knowing activities, has a concern for life, is to say that it has a concern for life tout court. It is the life of the whole world, the whole universe indeed, that has to fall within its compass; and this includes the very academic knowledge processes that have helped to bring the Earth to the parlous state it now exhibits.7 There are some complexities here. It was always the case that the world acted upon human beings, ever since human beings evolved on this Earth. However, in the last three hundred years or so (since the industrial revolution), humanity has come to act in significant ways upon the Earth. Some even consider that, as a result of human activity, life has become ‘synthetic’ (Venkatesan and Peters, 2010). A recognition of both relationships is crucial: the world and humanity are intertwined. In human affairs, it may be that human beings come to think and act in the ways that they do partly in virtue of the world – physical, social, ideological – acting upon them unbeknown to themselves. Correspondingly, it may be that humanity is both having effects on the world that it does not comprehend fully (and not only in environmental degradation but also in the manufacture and manipulation of life in general) and could yet have beneficial effects on the world that it has not yet discerned. Babies are born deformed; the growth of young children is impaired as a result of environmental pollution; and sea creatures ingest plastics and ocean structures erode unduly; but knowledge also opens beneficial possibilities for life on this planet. It follows that the injunction that the university be concerned with life has added bite. Humanity, including its social institutions such as the university, is entangled in the world, with traffic going both ways in highly dynamic and rather poorly understood ways. The world in all its natural and non-natural manifestations imposes itself on humanity, including the university; and humanity, not least in its university’s knowing efforts, imposes itself upon the world. This latter set of impositions have recently taken heightened form. ‘Academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2009) – the garnering of economic largesse from the knowledge resources of the university – is being accompanied by, and made possible by, ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Boutang, 2011) in which the global economy is built around the marketing of cognitive resources. In turn, the university has become caught up in the world and its knowledge responsibilities are compounded, so as to understand and address those entanglements. The life of the world is now within the university.

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The life of the world and the university As noted, several realist philosophies have recently arrived. Different as they are, they provide an account to the effect that there is a world – or worlds – that stand independently of our views about the world, while also wanting to point up particular features of that world. Bhaskar (2008) points to ‘generative mechanisms’ that have influence on the world; Bennett (2010) points to ‘vibrant matter’; Harman (2018) urges ‘a new philosophy of objects’ and Morton (2013b) points to very large ‘hyperobjects’; while for DeLanda (2016), assemblage is a favoured concept, with its sense of dynamic structures residing independently in the world. In Bhaskar’s critical realism (2008, 2011), the world is ontologically stratified. Human beings encounter a layered reality, where human experience and thought have access only to some of the layers of each thing, person or event. Encountering what humans would see as a natural phenomenon like a stone or lightening, can be accessed and described through immediate sensual perception or a scientific vocabulary and theories that probe deeply into the real and actual presences hidden from view. Correspondingly, a social event or activity may be accessed through a personal, societal and even global perspective, which Lingis (1996) calls the ‘levels’ of the world. Each of these representations touch upon different Earthly strata. Similarly, universities may be perceived through a language of higher education policy and practice, or through theories and different research paradigms. At deeper levels still, and even less open to research techniques, we may dimly espy global forces that act upon universities and to which are given such terms as globalisation, neo-liberalism, cognitive capitalism and a digital age. Such abstractions may produce a sense of powerlessness. However, within his critical realism, Bhaskar links ontology to a socio-political emancipatory trajectory. Through what he calls ‘depth rationality’ (Bhaskar, 2011), the world is portrayed as an endless, and kaleidoscopic, layered reality, which may help release us from the political and ideological frameworks that we come too easily to inhabit.8 In Grant Harman’s speculative realism (2005, 2010a), the world opens into an infinity of individual substances, each with its ‘lifeworld’ and inner essence. This realism celebrates ontological diversity, and it offers an aesthetic aspect, where the relation between the human lifeworld and entities in the world is one of enjoyment, wonder and fascination. Harman is especially known for his ‘flat ontology’ where all things and events are on the same ontological level – where a lemon has the same ontological status as a super nova, and where a handshake between friends has the same ontological status as the French Revolution. In this ‘object-oriented ontology’ (Harman, 2018), universities are accordingly no more or no less real and important than castles in the sand built by children playing by the sea. On this view, universities would have to be understood as possessing their own inner life, where the pageant between institution and the world is one of intricacy and poetry.9

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These realisms open an interest in the university’s connections with, and even their rooting in, the world. However, acknowledging these links between the university, knowledge and the life of the world bestows large responsibilities upon the university. Any university has options in attending to the world. But this now becomes an injunction that the university cannot evade, at risk of putting in jeopardy its standing as ‘university’. For if it is accepted that academic knowledge is intimately and intricately bound up in the life of the world, the responsibilities upon the university to add to the life of the world are thereby magnified. It is true that, especially in recent decades, the university has turned more to the wider society. However, in the new interconnections that have been formed, it is the university’s economic contribution that has been privileged. It can certainly be said, therefore, that the university has become newly oriented to life, but this is a very narrow sense of life, being almost entirely confined to the economic life of humanity. As a result, universities contribute to a diminution, and even to a deformation, of life. The realist perspective opens a much richer perspective. It reminds us of the presence of the whole world, the whole universe indeed; and, insofar as it brings humanity into play, opens the way to a sense of manifold interconnections with the whole Earth. Through its knowing efforts, the university is implicated in life in all of its aspects, in the natural and the human worlds, and so far as human life is concerned, in culture, society, the wellbeing of persons and learning and human understanding in general. The economy would come into play but it would not be privileged in any way. Consideration would also be given to persons, social institutions, culture, learning, the natural environment, the imagination and knowledge itself irrespective of their economic return. So understood, a wide set of responsibilities now befalls the university in each of its three main functions of research, teaching and worldly outreach. Two questions stand out: to what extent is the university (any university) seeking to discern the effects of the wider world, not least – though not only – on humanity? And, just as importantly, to what extent is it seeking to explore the possibilities for ways in which humanity can advance the life of the whole Earth? In Parts Two and Three, we intimate some of the possibilities that such realist insights open but, here, a nice case study may be found in the character of doctorate work. Over recent decades in many countries, in PhD theses in the social sciences, candidates strongly assert, almost with pride, that they are adopting a constructivist methodology. That a candidate might assert equally strongly that they are working within a realist perspective is much less, if ever, encountered. Anti-realism has become an academic ideology, within the academy (at least in the social sciences). It is true that, perhaps gratifyingly, candidates rarely uphold their own ideologies and, if only in the last few pages of their theses, depart from their constructivist scripts to offer insights into the way in which discourses form an ‘assemblage’ or form a complex discourse, and which open possibilities

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in the real world; but such sightings of real world possibilities tend to be largely an afterthought. Socio-materialism, a favoured approach, is a blend of the social and of the material. In practice, though, the social is given the greater weight, with the material downplayed. Much better, it is felt, to hear and to understand the voice of the interviewees, whose voices are often marginalised. But the inner antirealism that is at work here implicitly discourages the pondering of an interviewee’s perceptions: ‘Are they really true?’ And ‘How is this set of views of this participant to be squared with those of the participant on the previous page who voiced opposing perceptions’? ‘Can they both be right?’ ‘Perhaps one is mistaken’? Such matters of truth and rightness are outlawed in this methodology in its uplifting (‘valorising’) of participants’ perceptions, and in the process, the actual character of the world and its impositions and possibilities are underplayed. Truth values are present here but they are severely truncated. This is a methodology that is never going to rock any boats. Impairments of and in life are liable to remain largely impaired.

Conclusions Over recent decades, a tsunami of intellectual movements have attempted to debunk knowledge in supplying a hold on the world, outlawing concepts of objectivity, truth and knowledge itself. However, there has been a return of realism, albeit in a clutch of new realisms. We are in sympathy with these new realisms, which are – in all their heterogeneity – nuanced, generous and open to the world in all its variety. This story has to play a crucial part in the argument here, which is about the possibilities for, and responsibilities on, knowledge in the university. Knowledge in the university springs from a concern from and an interest in the total life of the world. Its inquiries are full of (human) life. And those inquiries can give back to and enhance the life of the world in so many ways. Without embarrassment, we can speak of the real world in the context of academic knowledge. This conjunction of knowledge and a realist sense of an independent world makes possible judgements about the world, both about the actual world in all its deformations and malign forces and about the dominant representations of the world (its epistemologies) that have buttressed those deformations. But this conjunction, too, opens to possibilities of wonder in the world in itself and to responsibilities, not least on universities, in advancing the life of the whole Earth.

Notes 1 In the twenty-first century, different forms of realisms have united under the banner of what Steven Shaviro (2014) calls, ‘the universe of things’. An important figure in this movement has been the American philosopher Graham Harman (2005, 2018)

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with his revolt againt anthropocentrism in the philosophy that followed Immanuel Kant. Accompanying forms of realism have emerged such as ‘continental realism’ (Ennis, 2011), ‘new realism’ (Ferraris, 2014), ‘positive realism’ (Ferraris, 2015) and even ‘realist magic’ (Morton, 2013a). Harman himself proposed ‘aspeculative realism’ (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman, 2011; Gratton, 2014; Harman, 2010). From this wave of realism, entire philosophies have been spawned, including Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology – or What it is Like to Be a Thing (2012), and Levy Bryant’s books The Democracy of Objects (2011a) and Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (2014). In a book chapter (Barnett and Bengtsen, 2017), implications of philosophical realism for higher education and the university have been sketched. See Bryant, L (2011) for an explanation of the concept of ‘multiplicities’, drawing especially on Deleuze, and bringing out its relational and ‘flat ontology’ aspects. We draw more fully on Searle’s work in chapter nine. Although Popper use the term ‘objective knowledge’ (e.g. Popper, 1979), he might have been better served if he has used the term ‘disinterested knowledge’ or even ‘independent knowledge’, since he had in mind knowledge that stands independently of minds of the kind that reside in journals and libraries, and which laid itself open to scrutiny and criticism – ‘knowledge without a knowing mind’, as he himself called it (1979). Collier’s work can be seen as complementary to Popper’s (Cruickshank, 2007), in focusing on lay knowledge as understood within existential phenomenology. First introduced by Hans Reichenburg in 1938, the distinction between and the relationship between the context of discovery and the context of justification has been a long-standing controversy in the philosophy of science. The matter was given prominence in Popper’s philosophy (2002a). See the (2018) special issue of the journal Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, ‘Higher Education and the Anthropocene’, eds R Gildersleeve and K Kleinhesselink, in which the present authors have a paper (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2018). Barnett (2018) has provided a fuller treatment of these matters, placing the university in an ecological perspective and an ‘Earth philosophy’, drawing links both with the idea of ecosopy in Deleuze and Guattari (1994) and the ecology of life in Ingold (2000). For a fuller treatment of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and higher education see Barnett (2017) and Barnett and Bengtsen (2017). Rømer (2011) has applied a Harmanean perspective on education, and Bengtsen (2011) has drawn on Harman in a discussion of supervision practices in higher education. Harman uses the metaphor of the circus (2005, 2010b) to describe his ontology, and that metaphor has been used to illuminate the university by Bengtsen (2018).

3 RE-PLACING THE HUMANITIES

Introduction In 2015 (Kakuchi, 2016), the Japanese government threatened to withdraw funding for the humanities. In 2003, the UK’s minister responsible for education wondered why taxpayers’ money should be spent on the study of ancient civilisations (Vasager and Smithers, 2003). And in 2018, in Australia, the Minister of Higher Education blocked certain research proposals in the humanities (Piccini and Moses, 2018). Across the world, the place of the humanities in universities is being questioned, and across the world, too, arguments in defence of the humanities have been mounted.1 Although some of the defences put up in support of the humanities leave something to be desired – and we shall look at them – our main concern here is not the defence of the humanities as such. Rather, we flag the matter of the humanities as a means of raising more fundamental issues as to how knowledge is being valued in the university in the twenty-first century. That the humanities are in difficulty is indicative of a much deeper malaise concerning knowledge, thought and culture; and of the ways in which universities have been drawn into an impoverished cognitive culture of the wider world. An understanding of the plight of the humanities, therefore, cannot be properly be gained except by placing them in the context of knowledge and culture in the contemporary world.

Culture and the university In the UK in the 1960s, one of the most significant of national inquiries into higher education, the so-called Robbins Report (Cmnd, 1963: 7), suggested that one of four aims of higher education was that of ‘the transmission of

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a common culture’. Such an aim could have traction only on assumptions that the idea of a common culture itself made sense, that this common culture had a form such that it could be ‘transmitted’ and that it was a purpose of the university to transmit it. All of these assumptions were quickly to be put in question and even came to be judged to be entirely misguided. A generation later, in the late 1980s, Allan Bloom (1988) argued, in what was to become a succès de scandale, The Closing of the American Mind, that American universities and their students were failing each other, neither having a concern for culture. In a marketised system of higher education, with a curriculum built around elective modules, there was inclination neither from the students nor from their academic teachers to have an eye to the culture of the wider world. ‘The Great Books’ approach, which had formed the staple of attempts in the USA to enculture students directly, was being rendered a relic of a by-gone age. And, anyway, on what basis was the selection of the canon to be made? That surely begged questions as to its legitimacy and of the interests of those making the selection. In his (1997) book on The University in Ruins, Bill Readings went even further and claimed that the university had become a culture-free zone. In the suggestion of a severing of a link between culture and the university, Readings’ thesis, prima facie, had similarities to that of Bloom’s but it contained a much more nuanced analysis, turning on a further argument about the decline of the nation-state and, with it, the withering of culture intricately connected with the nation-state. It implied that the humanities were subject to a bureaucratic striving for ‘excellence’ and were likely to come off rather poorly. More apposite still is Ernest Gellner’s (1992) observation that in the Western world, reason and culture have been separated. On Descartes’ view, in order to be, it was enough that one just thought; and just thought by oneself at that. ‘Cogito ergo sum’. (‘I think, therefore I am’.) Seemingly, one didn’t have to bother about the nature of that thought, or its purposes or the collective life in which it was embedded. This was ‘a culture-defying rationalism’ (p. 4). Thought could not only exist but would prosper if it was left to its own devices. There is a separate set of pertinent observations of Gellner’s. He observed (1964) that the humanities gained their lustre in the mediaeval age. Then, being literate and having an interest in books was confined to a clerkly class. The clerk was a special kind of human being, of whom Chaucer observed that ‘gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche’.,1 Even the clerk’s books were largely confined to the limits of their chains in a monastery library. All of this changed with the coming of mass education. Now, in a society in which everyone – well, the majority of people – are literate and are, in effect, all clerks, what does it mean to be literate? Even high culture is universally available, even if not always affordable. In principle, it is possible for individuals to learn languages, have access to the classics of all cultures across the world, and to enculture themselves; and even via the internet to watch operas and gain access to critical assessments of them. One can now – if only at a distance – participate in the highest of

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culture(s). Under these circumstances, it is no longer clear that the humanities – as a university discipline – have a remaining purpose.2 There is here a large and even disturbing thesis: that culture is being shorn from the world and relegated to a position of mere decoration, and is not part of the serious business of life. If so, it is hardly surprising if the humanities feel themselves to be in a state of crisis, since they were manifestly part of Culture, with a capital ‘C’, as it were. Our response – as to the matter of the humanities having particular value – is ‘yes and no’. Yes, they speak directly, to use Arendt’s (1998) phrase, to the human condition3 but no, in that all knowledge has the quality of imbuing life with life. The life-imbuing properties of knowledge are not confined to the humanities. The physicist, Richard Feynman, exemplified this, brimming over with life and being passionate about teaching.4

The warping of reason The crisis of the humanities is, therefore, symptomatic of a crisis of thought as such in which the category of culture has become problematic. Back in the 1930s, Edmund Husserl (1970) was warning of a double crisis, both in philosophy and in the ‘European sciences’ but, having identified a real problem, then went down three false paths: an over-concentration on Europe, on phenomenology and on philosophy. Coincidentally, that (inter-war) period, too, saw in the founding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory a set of ideas that are helpful in understanding the situation of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Indeed, those ideas have added bite today. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was built around a small group of German intellectuals, who moved to the USA to escape the increasing malevolence of Hitler and Nazism. That background is significant, since the group was concerned to understand how Nazism was possible. At its centre were Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1986) who, both separately and in their joint writings, developed an explanation rooted in a critique of Western ‘reason’. The quote marks are necessary because they, in effect, put on trial what had come to count as reason and found it wanting. The relevant ideas are these. The story that Western reason liked to tell of itself was of it having been borne out of the Enlightenment and the end of a reliance on myth and religion. This reason was able to see the world as it really is, but this reason contained its own constraints and even errors. By ridding inquiry of myth and religion, it assumed that the world was just as it appeared, open for inspection by empirical methods. It assumed, further, that objects and concepts coincided (Adorno, 2008, 2014). Concepts could only help to pin-point the world as it appeared and could not sensibly offer radical thoughts about possible worlds. And the empirical methods by which this world was to be uncovered were those of mathematics and science. Not only were these assumptions faulty but the dominant form of inquiry was a species of subjective reason (Horkheimer, 2004), orchestrated to fulfil the subjective goals of

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the inquirer. Only means were significant here, not ends. This was not reason per se but instrumental reason. This set of ideas had profound implications. In this instrumental reason, in which matters of ends were rendered otiose, inquiries that concerned themselves with matters of value were bound to come off badly. Indeed, they were now seen either to be purposeless or to be meaningless.5 It was inevitable that, given this epistemology and the machinistic (‘One Dimensional’) culture that it buttressed, the humanities were going to be downvalued, if not actually disfavoured. This reason did not abandon the idea of value but rather value was restricted to the exchange value of the object, a feature that reflected the way in which instrumental reason had become the form of reason favoured by capitalist society. Objects had no inherent value, no use (no use-value) in their own right. Furthermore, it became impossible to ask about the possibility of an object being otherwise. An understanding of this instrumental reason helps, therefore, to explain the marginal position in which the humanities now find themselves. Part of their function is to offer evaluations of life and to glimpse alternatives; and both of these tasks are ruled offside. No longer wanted on board, the fate of the humanities has, therefore, to be seen against an even larger canvas of the co-development of the university, knowledge and the wider world. The impoverishment of the humanities in the university – literally so, in many instances around the world – reflects a larger impoverishment of thought and reason and of life itself. Science has been taken up by states not for its capacity to lay bare the intrinsic wonders of the world, and of life in general, but for the capacities it opens for control and manipulation of the world. This is not to say that a concern for values cannot be added to the enterprise of science – there are many groups of scientists that testify to that possibility – but it is to observe that a concern with values is not part of science as such. Even more gravely, and as Nicholas Maxwell (1987: 65, 2009: 2, 2014: 24) has observed, serious inquiry is implicitly forbidden to concern itself with ‘what is of value in life’. Given such an epistemological history and culture, it is hardly suprising that an abiding technicism has come to characterise universities’ knowing efforts. It is as if their dominant stance is to offer a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1989). To put the matter formally, science does not include self-reflexive capacities within its own epistemology.

An impoverishment of thought and even of culture? It is apparent that, for all the angst that the predicament of the humanities has been generating (and quite justifiably so), it is but a small local difficulty when its provenance is understood. The crisis of the humanities is nothing other than a reflection of a deep-seated impoverishment of thought that has grown – and continues to gather apace – since the Enlightenment. To put the matter sharply, the crisis of the humanities is an inevitable outcome of the epistemology and sense of reason adopted since that time. Once it

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emerged – especially over the past three-quarters of a century or so – that a technicist way of understanding the world offered not just power over the world but economic power at that, it became almost impossible to sidestep such a mode of reason. Knowledge has been subject to a subtle but profound and pernicious shift. What is in the dock, therefore, is not just reason (and the university) but culture (and the university). In this dispensation, life itself is imperilled in the university’s efforts in forming understandings of the world. This may seem to be a dismal picture and, indeed, not only Adorno and Horkheimer but others in that camp – notably Marcuse who was famously or infamously associated with the idea of ‘repressive tolerance’ (Wolff, Moore Jnr, and Marcuse, 1969) – were criticised for an apparent illogicality in their position.6 If the mode of reason that they were attacking was all-encompassing, as they claimed, then how was it possible that they were able to mount their critique of it? That they had been able to do so seemed to contradict the universality built into the instrumental reason that they now claimed to be saturating the world. One of their disciples, Jurgen Habermas, supplied no less than two answers. One was that there were three modes of ‘knowledge interest’, of which instrumental reason was only one form, alongside reason oriented towards human understanding and reason oriented towards critique (Habermas, 1978).7 His other and subsequent thesis, which developed into a full-scale programme of scholarly inquiry on his part, was that rationality was built into human communication (Habermas, 1979, 1984). Serious effort to understand the world involved conversation that contained and respected certain norms of a rational discourse. Human beings were bound to be both ethical and rational, since their exchanges bore signs of a discourse ethics and a rational speech situation, even if the latter was an ‘ideal’ aspiration (Habermas, 1992). There were spaces for, and hope for, reason yet.8 Adorno, Horkheimer and their pupil Marcuse were not just cultural critics but were academics. This is important. That they were able to evolve their theories as they did suggests at least that the university and like institutions had not – at least in the 1930s–1960s – been overrun by instrumental reason. There remained pockets, at least in and around the university, where alternative – critical, reflective, humane – modes of reason could be followed. The periodic crises felt within the humanities are testimony to concerns that those pockets of alternative forms of academic reason are being squeezed but those cries are also, in themselves, testimony to the continuation of pockets of intellectual spaciousness. The time to start really worrying is when the cries of ‘crisis’ stop! And perhaps that point is now being reached as the twenty-first century advances. As, globally, the academic world is enveloped in a metricised world of rankings and learning analytics, and strong state steering and sheer flows of digital data, so the space for imaginative reason is being squeezed. Our second point, paradoxically, takes an opposite tack. That there remain pockets of oppositional and even imaginative reason is explicable. It is in the interests of the state and even of cognitive capitalism (Boutang, 2011) to allow

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the academic world to retain and even develop resources for its own critique. For only then will the university be able to maintain its intellectual vitality and so assist in state-sponsored projects of ‘innovation’.9 Here, we find practices of reason that engage with the wider societal lifeworld, not only by commenting but also by absorbing the societal mood and imaginative power into the academic pursuit. This is a form of reason that is embedded within societal contexts and takes life into itself. This academic work tries to secure a footing, however slippery, in social media, in national broadcasting, in the news and newspapers and in public debates, not by turning into journalism or ‘media speak’, but by being there amidst the life of society. The academic with her or his digital blogs and social media outpourings and even their own TV programme occupies an ambivalent role, being projected as a sage with a public aura. The digital commons is at work (Peters, 2013). Academics in the humanities are publicly present, and interact with professionals and other members of society on more or less equal footing. Knowledge comes alive, if awkwardly, in such situations. Two conclusions follow. Firstly, provided that the theses of Critical Theory are nuanced and are understood to offer a reading into just the dominant modes of inquiry, rather than constituting a universal and totalising analysis, then those theses have much to offer us today; and not only in understanding the plight of the humanities but also in understanding the character of knowledge inquiry and the role being played by the university. The university may be a rational institution but its rationality is skewed such that its tacit understandings and promotions of life are in turn also skewed. Secondly, those theses can be cashed out empirically, and the situation that they point to is continuing to develop in the twenty-first century. However, what we now witness are rival epistemologies. Instrumental reason continues to press and to deepen its hold amid a digital blankness but, simultaneously and even surprisingly, humane forms of reason are gaining a heightened presence, both in the wider society and the university. Partly, this epistemological abundance (Feyerabend, 1999) is due to a combination of new media, new technologies and interdisciplinarities that span the theoretical and practical domains. Partly, too, it reflects instrumental encouragements for ‘innovation’ and, indeed, the position of universities within cognitive capitalism. There is a new epistemic liveliness in the university.

A long time a-dying We have been placing the crisis in the humanities in the much wider context of a general crisis in thought. It is time to pay some attention directly to the humanities. The impending death of the humanities has been frequently glimpsed over the past half century or more (Plumb, 1964; Bérubé and Nelson, 1995; Nussbaum, 2010). Indeed, in the contemporary trope of the ‘post-human’, some in the

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humanities seem actually to be willing its demise from within. (Braidotti, 2013; Herbrechter, 2013) But the humanities are a long time a-dying. How is this perennial death to be explained? There are three explanations. (i) There is no crisis and the parlous situation of the humanities is much exaggerated (after all, the numbers of academics, students and academic outpourings and the public visibility of humanities scholars are higher than ever). (ii) The humanities are dying. It just happens that their death is rather prolonged and it will happen sooner or later. (iii) The humanities are in a relatively weak position but this situation of relative weakness of the humanities is the default state of university knowledge in the twenty-first century and, therefore, the humanities will continue to have a presence. We favour this third option. Reasons in support of that third option have already been foreshadowed. The thesis of ‘cognitive capitalism’ has recently appeared as both a description and explanation of the significance that academic knowledge in particular now plays in the world (Boutang, 2011; Roggero, 2011). It is a world in which both knowledge and economies flow across borders in a heightened fast-paced global order; and key agents here are both universities and digitisation, which are intricately intertwined in a cognitive age. In this ‘cybernetic capitalism’ (Peters, 2013),10 knowledge is reduced to flows of mere data, flows that are far from possessing equal force. Huge weight and pressure accompanies science, technology, engineering and mathematics – hence the much-vaunted abbreviation STEM. Even more recently, it has been observed that the arts have also been caught up in these movements and networks, having economic, digitised and academic dimensions, so leading some to propose a derivation of the abbreviation, namely STEAM (with an ‘A’ for the arts). It should be noted, however, that ‘the arts’ here is confined to those arts that are likely to have economic return. What we are witnessing here is a particular kind of cultural capitalism, promoted and of interest insofar as it is connected with the other dominant networks of digitisation, economy and knowledge. However, the term ‘culture’ is characteristically not on view here, unless in the formation ‘culture industries’. There is, therefore, a kind of cultural cognitivism at work, in which space is provided to the arts. They are tolerated insofar as they can demonstrate their economic value and hold their own in those wider academic and digitised zones. But if this was all there was to the story, the fate of the humanities as such would be sealed. Certainly, it is easy to point to examples of history, literature and the arts and even philosophy finding their way into the media. Sagas of ‘the Greeks’ and of ‘civilisation’ continue to find outlets, even in mass markets, but the place of the arts in the global knowledge economy cannot be the full story here. There seems still to be even something of a place, if no longer an honoured place, assigned to the humanities in the academy. For a fuller story, we have to return to the humanities as part of the total intellectual resources of a changing world and the role of the university thereto. It is in the interests of this knowledge economy to provide within itself its own capacities for renewal. Even if terms such as ‘critical thinking’, ‘thought’ and

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‘thinking’ slip out of the lexicon of higher education, still the university is liable to provide them a space, if only on a restricted basis. The humanities may be seen in just this way, as spaces for reflection, the generation of images, metaphors, and insights that prompt tolerable disturbances and new-ness in the intellectual resources within cognitive capitalism. The humanities are ‘spaces for thought’ (Levenson, 2017) and they play a particular part, therefore, in the cognitive energy that the university supplies to the wider society. Just as research into physics and biology provides a framework for understanding forms of physical energy in the natural world, the humanities assist in the cultural energy of the Earth. In a post-colonial world, the humanities create deep knowledge of the life of cultures of the world, their symbolic and collective cognitive resources and belief systems. The humanities provide a widening of cultural life. This thesis prompts a further, and more particular, thesis as to the necessity – albeit an instrumental necessity – for the presence of critical and iconoclastic intellectuals in academe. Their ‘culture of critical discourse’ (Gouldner, 1979) is paradoxically essential to the vitality of the knowledge ecology as it is unfolding amid cognitive capitalism. The likes of Chomsky, Giroux and Zizek may be both proclaimed and dismissed as being ‘dangerous’ but those very dangers can be understood as highly valuable to instrumental reason. It’s just that instrumental reason can’t tolerate too many Chomskys, Zizeks or Girouxs. A bit of turbulence helps keeps the crew alert but too much just might sink the ship. That we are witnessing new interdisciplinary formations emerge is testimony to the value now accorded to the humanities. A nice example occurred in the UK in 2012, in which a set of bones were uncovered in a car park in the city of Leicester. The bulldozers and archaeologists had been led to the spot by local historians working with the University of Leicester and then began a huge multidisciplinary inquiry – involving anatomists and bone specialists as well as social and military historians – leading to the announcement, in front of the media cameras of the world, that these were the bones of the mediaeval king of England, Richard III. That Richard III had lived a liminal life full of all kinds of skulduggery, misdemeanour and treachery (though doubtless exaggerated by Shakespeare), and had had his life ended on the mediaeval battlefield, only added to the public interest, signalled not least by the presence of a mile-long queue of people to view the subsequent exhibition. The humanities continue, therefore, to play a part in the wider culture of society with their evocative and tantalising powers. Indeed, as Harman (2005) argues, such strong cultural powers may lead to strange and even dark places, because we sometimes find knowledge that we did not even want to know. Humanistic knowledge emerges often in a disturbing form, shaking what passes for culture. Understandings of sociality and culture and existential fibres of our being do not drop down in nicely comprehensible and immediately applicable concepts. The humanities are a ‘wild growth’, and humanistic knowledge emerges like weeds through the cracks and in the peripheries of our habitual

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understandings and explanations of ourselves, our society and our cultural values. Far from being weak, the humanities dislodge and disturb, pulling society out of taken-for-graned frameworks. It is hardly suprising that the powerful look upon them with suspicion. There is, though, a further point to be made in favour of the humanities, which is their association with elite culture. The humanities above all offer a route to ‘cultural capital’ (in Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) phrasing). But note that the humanities also bestow cultural capital both on universities as institutions and on a higher education system in toto. This is why, even if some universities are seen to take philosophy or languages out of their curricula offering, and even if the minister of higher education or of finance contemplates withdrawing public support for the humanities, we are most unlikely to see the humanities completely abandoned in any higher education system where they are currently to be found. To put it crudely, the humanities bestow a veneer of lustre on both a single university and on a higher education system, even if that lustre is a bit tarnished these days. In sum, then, while it is important to understand the crisis in the humanities, it is also important to understand their apparent indestructability. They are ourselves, our culture. Destroying the humanities would amount to cultural suicide. And the explanation is the same, in both cases. The perpetual crises of the humanities and their continuation are to be understood in the context of the character of the global cognitive economy, which stands towards the humanities in a position of some ambivalence. On the one hand, it finds little immediate cause to support them, for their economic value seems rather nugatory, but on the other hand, deep within its recesses, it considers rightly that the humanities have important reflexive, energising and cultural values. The humanities offer us a mirror into ourselves and are likely to be continually with us, even if – amid a scientistic, technological and digital culture – they will go on nervously sensing their fragility.

Are the humanities so special? But are the humanities special? Do they speak particularly to life? The assumption of many of its defenders has been that, yes, the humanities are especially valuable and the intellectual task is that of finding arguments in their favour. One of the most prominent of the advocates of the humanities in recent years has been the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum (2010) builds a case that draws on a scholarly understanding of the Greeks as providing the basis of democracy and reasoned critical argument and, for Nussbaum, the humanities thereby offer double duty. They offer paths into an understanding of other cultures and forms of life, and so extend the human virtues, especially those of the imagination and empathy; and they offer particular educational qualities, in providing students with critical reasoning capabilities, and so help to form the basis of a functioning democracy. This kind of special-treatment defence of the humanities should be treated with considerable caution. It amounts to saying that the humanities deserve special

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treatment because they are special and it implies that the humanities uniquely offer the possibility of the exercise of critical judgement, democracy and the extension of humane qualities. If there is a case of special-pleading, this has to be it. It forms an implicitly over-tight connection between the ‘humanities’ and being ‘human’ and/or being ‘humane’. And it implies that the humanities should be left to their own devices, and that all is right in the world of the humanities. There is, therefore, surprisingly weak reasoning here from a philosophical quarter. But the reasoning is weak in yet two other senses. Firstly, no empirical evidence lies to hand to support Nussbaum’s thesis. If it were the case, we would expect to see at least a strong co-presence of strong democracies and strength in the humanities in a nation’s universities. Nussbaum offers no such evidence and nor is any to hand that we know of. There is a further way in which Nussbaum’s argumentative gambit is much less than it might have been. The argument plays into the hands of the cognitive capitalists (to give a name to Nussbaum’s adversaries). If the plight of the humanities lies in the lack of their economic power, it may not make a lot of argumentative sense to play up particular characteristics that they possess that lie in quite a different domain, even if it is the case. The argument serves only to underscore their peculiar nature and to confirm, as many consider, that the humanities are not serious disciplines in grappling with the real world. The key question here is this: are there features of the humanities that tie them to the academic enterprise as such while still allowing them some particular qualities of their own? This is surely the kind of tack that is likely to carry weight, in which a universalist plea is put up, rather than the particularistic pleas currently being mounted. Just such an argument suggests itself, giving the argument here. The value of the humanities lies in the contribution that they make to the broad enterprise of academic knowledge as an inquiry into life. This is the General Theory of the humanities, as it were. The Special Theory would be that the humanities do indeed make a particular contribution to this general enterprise, which lies in the objects of their attention, for their ‘objects’ are no less than human life itself. The full exposition of this twin set of theses on behalf of the humanities must await another day since it will be recalled that our target here is not a defence of the humanities as such but rather to understand their situation in the much broader context of academic knowledge. And any appreciation of that broader context must point towards something other than special pleading for the humanities. At least let the special pleading be put in the general context of an argument for university knowledge as such.

Conclusions: return to life There is a crisis in the humanities BUT … , and there are two buts. Firstly, empirically, the crisis is overstated. Worldwide, the humanities in the universities

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are probably in ruder health than ever. That the humanities are in particular difficulty in certain higher education systems – whether heavily marketised or heavily state-controlled – tells us something about the value systems in those jurisdictions. After all, many countries have an over-dependence on the humanities – which there bestow much cultural capital – and are wishing to see a rebalancing towards disciplines with more obvious societal and economic return. But secondly, any fragility in the position of the humanities has to be understood in the context of an inbuilt interest in instrumental reason and a consequent neglect of life as such, now reinforced with the emergence of global digital capitalism. Worldwide, the university is one element in the coming of digital ‘reason’ and artificial ‘intelligence’, and quite new economic potentials that science and technology combined now offer. This is a parlous situation for it represents an impoverishment of culture,11 but note one set of the strands unfurled here: the presence of the humanities in the university is necessary for cognitive capitalism and, if only in limited measure, the university will continue to offer spaces for thought that are concerned with life. That a renewed interest in matters of life is to be seen in academic work, and not just in philosophy and social theory but in many practical fields, in architecture, in the arts, in ecological disciplines and in engineering and medicine and so on, is testimony to such potential. An implication of this analysis is that the humanities are likely to gain a more secure place to the extent that they can be seen to be grappling with matters of life; and life in its fullness. In prospect is that of moving the humanities into a new place; a re-placing of the humanities. More generally, it just may be that the contemporary limited space afforded to academic work with a knowledge-interest in life may yet grow, even alongside instrumental reason. The university has long been a site of epistemic multiplicity. The university’s knowledge ecology contains disparate and even antagonistic elements, and therein lies its strength, vitality and even unrealised potential for life.

Notes 1 See the Harvard translation of the ‘General Prologue’ to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from the section on the Clerk of Oxenford, line 308. 2 ‘… the literate man … has lost much of his standing now as a source of knowledge about the world [since] the humanist culture itself, the life of the word … is threatened.’ (Ernest Gellner, 1964: 72–73). 3 Towards the end of her (1958) book, The Human Condition, Arendt comments on the modern age, and sees in it a ‘reversal … between thinking and doing - such that, from then on, thinking was the handmaiden of doing – [and in which] contemplation, in the original sense of beholding the truth, was altogether eliminated’ (pp. 291–292). The university could well be said to exemplify just such a pattern. 4 Feynman was highly sensitive to all of life. He tells the story of how, rather than killing ants that were invading his Princeton larder, he trained them to use another route from their entry point into the room, which involved him in physically carrying recalcitrant ants from the old to the new route until they were suitably trained. (Feynman, 1992: 97).

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5 This latter position was the position taken by the Logical Positivists in the 1930s, in their verificationist principle. At most, statements about non-scientific matters were simply expressions of feelings or emotions: ‘Ethical judgements have no validity.’ (Ayer, 1962). 6 On this ground and others, Marcuse in particular was subjected to a savage attack at the hands of Alisdair MacIntyre (1976). 7 The idea of a ‘knowledge-constitutive interest’ being foundational to forms of knowledge was that of Jurgen Habermas (1978), who identified three such interests. We draw on that thesis later in the chapter. 8 A wilder defence of life within science was championed by Habermas’ contemporary Paul Feyerabend (2010). Published in 1975, his infamous book Against Method: Outline for an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge put science into the whirlpool of culture. Pricking the self-belief of science in its own purity, the book showed the significance of science-as-culture, and life’s primacy over knowledge. However, despite its vibrancy in bringing science into life, and life into science, the book – and Feyerabend’s life’s work – left us with a problem: is knowledge part of culture or does it have an independence from culture? Fortunately, that matter lies outside the scope of this inquiry. 9 Rather than allowing spaces of critique to be ubiquitous, states tend to manage their higher education via systems of stratification (regulatory, financial, status) such that powers of critique are confined to a sub-set of higher education institutions. 10 Michael Peters has hinted at the presence of genealogical differences between ‘knowledge capitalism’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ (2013: 8–9) but seems to prefer ‘cybernetic capitalism’ as an overarching term under which shelter a host of other contemporary forms of capitalism, including information capitalism and biocapitalism (ibid., ch. 1). 11 ‘The contemporary university … has abandoned almost entirely the teaching or transmission of culture’. (Ortega y Gasset, 1946: 44).

4 WHERE’S THE LIFE IN ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE?

Introduction Where is the life in academic knowledge? Perhaps its life is dwindling. Perhaps it is even life-less. Or perhaps it is full of life but in unnoticed ways. We shall pursue these matters in this chapter, and we start by engaging with four seminal texts that have dealt with academic knowledge.1 This gambit will serve as a foil for us to advance our general position as to the necessary link both between knowledge and life and, thereby, between the university and life.

Beyond postmodernism With The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) heralded and played up postmodernism; indeed, he can even be said to have launched postmodernism as an intellectual movement. Its focus is knowledge in the university and the situation that the two – knowledge and the university – face together. The book introduced a particular and influential reading of the term ‘performativity’ (though not inventing the term) and the book was also prescient, prophesying innovations in and challenges arising from the digital age, which was just getting underway at its publication. Lyotard’s argument is the following. There have been two large justifications (‘legitimations’) of knowledge in the university: firstly, a philosophical idea of knowledge as being its own end and, secondly, a more socially oriented idea of knowledge as providing freedom (‘emancipation’) for society and its members. However, recently (in the ‘postmodern’ era), those understandings had run into difficulties. Firstly, those two understandings derive from separate discourses (or ‘language games’2) and now there was no satisfactory way of deciding between them. Secondly, amid postmodernity, all large ideas are suspect and, consequently, both of the two ideas of the

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university were passé. All that was left was the pragmatic question: ‘What use is it?’ (p. 51). And this question – the matter of ‘performativity’ – comes to be applied both to research and to teaching. If this is all there was to Lyotard’s analysis, it would still be powerful in the present age. That the contemporary situation is one in which one can barely raise searching and deep questions is made intelligible on this analysis.3 It is an age in which reflective inquiries into the university can all too often be branded as purely ‘philosophical’ and, on that basis alone, be seen as superfluous to requirements. Now set down are certain kinds of specification: in relation to teaching, a specification of the human capital in the form of ‘skills’ to be acquired and the means by which they are to be acquired; and in relation to research, a specification of the economic and social ‘impact’ of the knowledge that has been produced. Questions about the value of either the skills or the kinds of impact on view are now rendered otiose. However, much less brought into the picture in the customary analyses of Lyotard’s text is a passage that is particularly significant for our purposes. Our central thesis, it will be recalled, is that knowledge is bound up with life, and the theme of life appears at the very heart of Lyotard’s book. In a section on ‘Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge’, Lyotard presses the distinction between the ‘two major narratives’ that we have just observed, and does so by delving into the historic origins of the German philosophical idea. This latter idea is actually – in the hands of Wilhelm von Humboldt at least – a running together (a ‘unification’) of two ideas: that knowledge ‘lives and continually renews itself’ and also offers a basis for the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation’. (p. 32) ‘Humboldt therefore invokes a Spirit (what Fichte calls Life) … ensuring that the … search for [truth] … coincides with the pursuit of just ends in moral and political life’. (p. 33) In the next few paragraphs, Lyotard brings repeatedly into view the themes of life, spirit and what he terms ‘the speculative university’. By this last phrase, Lyotard wishes to recall the idea in German Idealism that knowledge had legitimacy in itself and was not confined to its usefulness. This speculative or ‘philosophical’ university links the specialist knowledges together ‘in the becoming of spirit’. In this way, the university acts to develop ‘Life’ as such, and so ‘bring[s] the people to expression through the mediation of speculative knowledge’ (p. 34). This knowledge is full of life: ‘there is no creative [knowledge] capacity without the speculative spirit’ (p. 33).4 At this point, Lyotard brings that part of his story to a close, noting that such ‘language games’ have little validity today: ‘the grand narrative has lost its credibility’. Now, knowledge has no end in itself but can at best supply only means – in the form of information – to ends. Despite nuances that he provides, this is an unnecessarily pessimistic conclusion that Lyotard supplies arising, in part, from his choosing to focus on contemporary socio-economic changes in the wider societal approach to higher education and knowledge. However, some forty years after the book’s publication, the situation can be perceived

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differently – the link between knowledge and life has never been severed, and the ‘speculative spirit’ in universities is gaining new strength.5 How, then, might Lyotard’s thesis especially help the argument here? The theme of life is to be seen – in Lyotard’s representation of the university – in four ways. Firstly, the production of ideas is full of life. Ideas are invested with life, life is needed if new ideas are to be imagined and articulated, and ideas do not occur by themselves but have to be brought into life by the life of their creator. Secondly, this knowledge can enhance the life of the student, who becomes stimulated by this lively environment. Thirdly, this lively knowledge takes on a life of its own, independently of the minds of individuals. And fourthly, this knowledge can help to add to the life of the nation through the enlargement it offers the wider society. And yet, for all of this life and, indeed, spirit in this analysis of Lyotard’s, there is a silence, which is readily understandable given its idealist background. Missing is a recognition of the world having life in itself. In forming his response, to the situation that he brilliantly dissected – the loss of legitimacy of ‘grand narratives’ – all that Lyotard can do is to hint at a prospect of discourses or ‘language games’ competing against each other in disruptive ‘agonistics’. But if we bring into view a goodly dose of realism, and take on board the consideration that a world exists before and independently of human language games, then the prospect opens of a fifth way in which knowledge is connected to life. Most fundamentally, knowledge is imbued with life because it attends to the life of the world. The world is teeming with life and it is the basic intention behind knowledge that it seek to understand that life, the life of the world and of the universe, no less. Where Lyotard saw universities and knowledge as being captured by sociopolitical discourses, knowledge and the university may be seen as being deeply interconnected with the very real lifeworlds of individuals, groups, societies, cultures and even beyond, stretching into environmental and cosmic ecologies. Life simply cannot be reduced to (post)structural political semantics, but is also in the flesh of academics and citizens, and in the work and toil of meaning in everyday professional and artistic work. Lyotard’s discourses seem strangely disconnected from life, from history and from future possibilities. Lyotard overlooked the life of universities: they cannot be judged merely on their socio-digital position, but must be seen in their past, their present and their future, and in their fundamental concerns with life.

Is there life in wisdom? For forty years, Nicholas Maxwell has been indefatigable in pressing a conception of the university founded on ‘wisdom’ and rational life more generally. In his view, universities have developed on the basis of a mistaken understanding of knowledge inquiry, wanting instead that inquiry should be guided by an interest in wisdom. By ‘wisdom’, Maxwell (1987, 2009, 2014) has in mind that universities should concern themselves with what is of value in life. He is especially

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concerned that the world is faced with grave problems and that universities are insufficiently equipped to tackle them. Maxwell has two arguments. His first concerns principles of reason underpinning knowledge inquiry, especially those as practised by universities. He suggests that there are ‘four elementary, wholly uncontroversial rules of reason’, namely: (1) Articulate, and try to improve the articulation of, the problem to be solved; (2) Propose and critically assess possible solutions; (3) If the problem to be solved is especially difficult, break it up into … specialised … problems … (4) But in this case ensure that basic and specialised problem-solving inquiries interact. For Maxwell, ‘knowledge-inquiry’ – as he calls it – is brilliant at (3) but has signally failed at (1), (2) and (4). And it is this conception of knowledge-inquiry that lies behind universities and their approach to inquiry. There is, therefore, for Maxwell, a ‘gross structural irrationality’ built into universities. In contrast to ‘knowledge-inquiry’, Maxwell wants to see instituted ‘wisdominquiry’. This would be a form of inquiry that respected all four rules of reason. Here, ‘the social sciences need to change … fundamentally so that they give intellectual priority to (1) articulating problems of living and (2) proposing and critically assessing possible solutions’. Maxwell also proposes that the basic methods of science need to be better understood so as to advance a more rational means of ‘creating a wiser world’. The humanities and social inquiry would become more important, since science would be guided by their efforts in ‘articulat[ing] our problems of living’ (2009: 16). Maxwell’s second argument is this. He claims that a major problem was generated at the dawn of the Enlightenment, 300 years ago. There was then a turn to reason rather than to religious or other dogmas but, especially at the hands of French Philosophes, fundamental mistakes were made over how inquiry was to be built upon reason. The (very real) progress-achieving methods of natural science were misunderstood, and there was a further misunderstanding as to how the methods of natural science were to be generalised to humanity. As a result, the adoption of rational methods to social life went awry. Maxwell’s central idea is that the standard assumption of science as purely empirical is mistaken, science being founded on a hierarchical set of assumptions. Translating this ‘aim-oriented empiricism’ to the social world would generate an ‘aim-oriented rationality’, composed of an increasingly abstract and hierarchical structure of social and worldly aims and beliefs. Very recently, Maxwell has offered (2018: 551–554) a set of twenty-three intellectual and institutional changes to be made if knowledgeinquiry in academia is to be changed into wisdom-inquiry. Maxwell deserves two cheers. His work puts academic knowledge under the microscope, ranges across science, the social sciences and the humanities (and looks to a totally different balance between them), finds knowledge inquiry as

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practised in universities wanting, and offers a practical and theoretical basis for putting inquiry in universities onto a footing more likely to help towards a better world, a better life indeed. Even more germane here, Maxwell puts into the shop window the very theme of life and wants to see knowledge in the university oriented to life. This is all welcome, but there are some caveats to be registered. In the first place, while the term ‘life’ appears in the Maxwell oeuvre, it does so sparingly. More frequently, it is the phrase ‘problems of living’ that appears. Crucial for Maxwell is that the university, through its knowledge efforts, should be focused on the problems faced by humanity. The life in question here is the life of ‘humanity as a whole’ (p. 552). This may sound a generous and exacting concern but it actually short-changes both knowledge and the university. For the university, and for academic inquiry, ‘life’ has to stand for all of life, not just human life. Indeed, the supposition that academic inquiry is primarily concerned with human life and its problems is precisely the kind of epistemology – chapter three here – that has led humanity astray in privileging its own interests in the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ (Gildersleeve and Kleinhesselink, 2018). For the university, knowledge inquiry has to be concerned with the life of the universe, of which humanity is but a rather minor player. Secondly, Maxwell understands wisdom as ‘being the active endeavour and capacity to realize what is of value in life’. This statement is much reiterated in his works. But wisdom is itself a large concept and deserves to be taken seriously. And here we travel with philosophers from the Greeks to those of more recent vintage – such as Bertrand Russell (1967), Mary Midgley (1989) and Roy Bhaskar (2011b) – who have wanted to distinguish wisdom from knowledge. Wisdom denotes a mode of being different from that of knowledge. One has knowledge of the world but one is wise about the world. In being wise, one stands off from the world, contemplates it and peers into its depths and its possibilities. While knowledge never stops engaging with the world and being active and pulsating, wisdom may counsel or advise about the world. While knowledge never sleeps, wisdom may be consulted by knowledge from time to time as a sage. While knowledge is vigilant and roaming the streets of life day and night, wisdom rests in its own peace. It follows that Maxwell’s position contains an inbuilt instrumentalism and an undue concern with human interests. This knowledge is too close to the world, and to the human world at that. The life it opens is a limited life, namely human life. This would sell the university short, for the university has to open to the life of the entire world. It has to dwell in the world, and let the world speak to it, and not to impose its human interests on the world. Knowledge is not a product that the university produces to give to the world but is rather the very connection between universities and the life of the universe, which includes the life that teems on the Earth. When knowledge approaches wisdom, it stands before the world in humility, as it struggles to comprehend the world. Formerly speaking, Maxwell’s approach could be said to contain a rather thin ontology. In Bhaskar’s (2008) terminology, it commits the ‘epistemological

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fallacy’ (p.16), overly focusing on knowledge and doing scant justice to the deep and hidden layers of the world. And, in being caught up in a narrative about knowledge, his account turns out to be unduly cerebral, missing out ways in which inquiry is charged with emotion and life itself. The first step in forming a proper link between knowledge and life lies in recognising that knowledge is saturated with life. Maxwell is to be applauded for attempting to discern the implications of his philosophy for the university. However, his fixation with the calamitous story that he tells – the fall of humanity and the university bequeathed by the Enlightenment – produces a strange neglect of the changes that have characteristically beset the university over the past fifty years. Many fields – such as medicine, ecology, bioengineering (in some respects), as well as the social sciences and parts of the humanities – bear witness to an explicit interest in bringing about a better world and many academics and groups are working to that end. They are deeply concerned with life and so are most unlikely to accept the subsidiary position that Maxwell envisages for them. And there is an unduly simplified view of the social sciences and the humanities: there, there cannot be agreement as to the nature of fundamental problems to be tackled. After all, those fields are overflowing with life. In their interests in life, it is life in the whole Earth and universe that opens to universities. Moreover, their efforts to comprehend the world are imbued with life. That, in so many ways, the life of universities is now in jeopardy in no way repudiates these observations. There are spaces yet for the life of universities and of their knowing efforts to be claimed.

Transgressions of knowledge In two books, Michael Gibbons with different groups of associates advanced a thesis about academic knowledge that suitably unnerved many (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow, 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001). ‘Suitably’ because it may be suspected that that effect was part of the intention. The core of the thesis was that while the university had been regarded as the central institution through which knowledge was advanced, knowledge was now being produced widely across society. Moreover, this knowledge was being produced in new ways and directed towards new ends. Onto this new form of knowledge was bestowed a label, that of ‘Mode 2’, in contradistinction to that of stuffy ‘Mode 1’ academic knowledge. It was not just that knowledge was changing but that a new and significant epistemology was emerging. Specific features of this Mode 2 knowledge were that it was not only oriented to solving problems but also that it was generated in situ in the milieu of practical situations at hand; that it was characteristically interdisciplinary, bringing together expertise from different domains; and that it was ephemeral, with teams being brought together to focus attention on a particular matter, which then disbanded, on completion of a project. Such was the main burden of the first book, The New

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Production of Knowledge (Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow, 1994). A second book, Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001), took up the Mode 2 thesis and offered a more penetrating, synoptic and almost philosophical set of reflections on science in its relationships with the wider society amid uncertainty. Four processes were identified: the co-evolution of science and society in a Mode 2 direction, contextualisation, the production of socially robust knowledge and the construction of narratives of expertise. Naturally, these four processes flowed in and out of each other. Three concepts advanced by the authors are especially telling. Firstly, Mode 2 knowledge has to be understood as ‘contextualised’, taking its bearings from its locations (plural) in society. Secondly, the new knowledge processes are characterised by a high level of ‘transgressivity’, to wit a marked degree of boundary crossing and fluidity. And thirdly, under these conditions, science – especially in its shiny new Mode 2 variety – was informing the world much more than hitherto and had yet unfulfilled potential in that regard; and so the authors envisaged an ‘agora’, a space for thinking about and for grappling with complexity and uncertainty. How does all this help here? Perhaps rather strangely, the theme of life is absent from the Mode 2 narrative. Yes, there is mention of changing life-styles and rising expectations in society, to which science might or might not be able to respond; and there is mention of the ‘life-world’, not least because a fluid Mode 2 university would want to take account of the life-world of its own members, including its students. However, life as such does not play a part in these proceedings, it seems, and human society, culture and its institutions seem to be in a sort of vacuum without any deeper rooting or wider perspective. Yet the Mode 2 thesis, whether in relation to Mode 2 knowledge (book one) or in relation to a Mode 2 society (book two) is – or, rather, should have been – full of life. It is present in Mode 2 knowledge as it responds to situations in life; it is present in the lives of inquirers, not least as they (‘transgressively’) traverse uncharted epistemological territories, and are obliged to keep their eye on their epistemological feet as they somewhat awkwardly straddle knowledge boundaries; it is present in the fluid world that these knowing efforts are trying to fathom; it is present in the (Mode 2) university, as it tries valiantly to hold disparate forms of life-world together; and it is manifestly present in the ‘agora’ that is hesitantly forming as the university is entangled in the world and as the university-worldly understandings co-mingle. The Mode 2 university, therefore, takes up the life of the world and is, in the process, saturated with life. The very terms of fluidity, complexity, transgressivity and agora betoken knowledge that is caught up in life. Note too, the equivocation in the very idea of transgressivity, for the term has a cognate in ‘transgression’. This is appropriate. The Mode 2 university will be stepping on people’s institutional and worldly toes: in its boundary hopping, it will ‘transgress’. The natives will be disturbed. The Mode 2 university will not make for an easy life, either for its

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inhabitants or for those who have contact with it. But this is only to confirm that, through its knowing efforts, the Mode 2 university is a university of and for life. A Mode 3 university, we can conjecture, would explicitly endorse life as such.6

Signs of life For the philosophically inclined, Bill Readings’ (1997) book is a key text (even if Readings was not a paid-up member of the philosophy fraternity). For Readings, the university is ‘a ruined institution’ (p. 129) on account of a concatenation of elements, including the decline of the nation-state and the withering of the former normative relationship between the state and the university; the loosening of the association between ‘university’ and ‘culture’; and the positioning of the university within an excessively bureaucratic and conceptually bankrupt environment (in which, and as Reading brilliantly observed, the notion of excellence is rendered devoid of meaning). Readings himself summarises the argument: ‘the modern university has had three ideas: the Kantian concept of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture and now the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence’ (p. 14). And perhaps now, in the twenty-first century, we should note that this triple-stage theory of the university has witnessed a further stage, with the coming of the university of operational impact. Readings’ prognosis is not a happy one. Now that the idea of the university has lost all content, having become a ‘bureaucratic system’ (p. 41), no substantial idea of the university can be claimed. Instead, all that can be hoped for is the establishment of a university of ‘dissensus’ as a space of critical engagement. We cannot, as members of the university, find ourselves any longer: the university can no longer supply a self-understanding, either based on reason or on culture. All that is left is that the university might become a space in which views of the world, incommensurable as they are, may be voiced and, at most, merely contend against the world. This post-historical university would be characterised by a ‘radical and uncomfortable dissensus’ (p. 127) in which notions of value and meaning are kept in view and in dispute. For this stance, communication is (still) important but it is recognised that ‘communication is not transparent’. After all, the university of today is faced with a ‘heteronomous’ community (p. 187); indeed, we may observe that, in a post-internet age (Mosco, 2017), it is faced with heteronomous communities. The university of dissensus remains a university of thought, but it is understood that ‘thinking together is a dissensual process’ (p. 192). Presumably, in this university, it is not even clear as to the rules of debate, if indeed there are any. What might we make of these arguments? We are in sympathy with Readings’ analysis. The university of reason is an idea that has little immediate legitimacy today; culture and the university can no longer be put easily together in the same phrase; it is difficult to locate an ideological project for the university; the relationship between the university and nationhood is now tenuous; and the university is

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assuredly saturated with empty mantras such as those of ‘excellence’, being ‘world-class’, ‘skills’ and ‘innovation’. With slight nuances, then, we can happily ally ourselves to many of Readings’ central propositions. But Readings’ more normative proposals are unnecessarily pessimistic. The idea of it being in ruins suggests that there is little life left in the university. But the problem is not that it possesses little life, but that its life is a warped life, entrapped by powerful forces – of bureaucracy, tight managerialism, cognitive capitalism and an academic competitiveness fuelled by world rankings. There is much life within the university but it is a distorted life; and its life is draining from it. Readings provides a gothic perspective: the university is sensed as a haunting shadow of its past and becomes a spectre of a lost realm of knowledge and its standing in the world. However, in the hidden labyrinths of its ruins, a life of generosity, of virtues and of collectivity struggles on. Indeed, that the university can still offer reflexive accounts such as that Readings provides is indicative of there being spaces not just for thought in the university but for critical thought and action within it. The idea that we have before us a ‘post-historical’ university has, therefore, to be jettisoned. We have indicated that, while the bureaucratic university is much in evidence, it is being layered with other patterns. To use a modish term, the modern university is an assemblage of elements, of corporate and cognitive capitalism, of technological innovation, of global reputation, of pure epistemic interests, of cultivation (of persons), of regional entanglement and of worldly effort. The history of the university is not at an end. The university is a vibrant site of an ever-more complex intermingling of elements and propulsion.7 The issue is rather what spaces are present to provide options for the university’s future. That it is being propelled in questionable – but explicable – directions suggests both that there is still life in the university and that alternative directions of travel can legitimately and plausibly be identified. Its contemporary life forms may not be to everyone’s taste, and may even be said to be distorted or misshapen, but there remain signs of life in the university. A new university of life and of spirit, and with concern for the world, may yet emerge.

Threads of academic life This chapter has exposed several threads running before us. They include matters of reason as a form of life; knowledge as sheer performativity; higher education as cultivation (among the lives of students); the university as a vehicle for assisting the full expression of the life (and spirit) of a people; knowledge as speculative (as a yearning for that life expression); knowledge as innovation and production in situ in the world; knowledge as addressing what is of value in life; knowledge inquiry as transgressive and flowing across boundaries; and the university as a space of lively dissensus. Yet other matters have been apparent in preceding chapters, of a culture of truthfulness being spirited; knowledge inquiry having a deep-seated interest in life

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in its totality, and seized of a sense that the whole world – the whole universe – is teeming with life, including the entities that constitute the material of the world (‘vibrant matter’ in Jane Bennett’s (2010) phrase); and that life inheres not especially in the humanities but in all disciplines, in being sources of human identity and of sustainable and collective processes of human endeavour. Life, therefore, saturates knowledge and the university. However, these threads of life have not been especially evident in the stories of the university, even in the stories that the university tells of itself. The theme of life has rarely been seen, its appearances having been fleeting and desultory. In some quarters, as a means of discursive resistance to neoliberalism and so forth, there is much falling back on the Germanic idea of higher education as Bildung. This is a notoriously elusive concept but it contains a sense that a university education stands for a general cultivation not only of the mind but of the wider being of the student. However, we look largely in vain for any explicit understanding that life as such is implicated, either the life of the university or the wider life of the world. In short, the theme of life has been largely absent from the story of the university, at least for the last two hundred years. Secondly, the threads run in different and even in opposed directions. We have glimpsed an interest in life as such and we have also glimpsed an interest in wishing – through knowledge – to manipulate life to human ends. We have glimpsed a sense of the life of the universe across the eons of time and we have witnessed an interest in the here and now. And we have glimpsed a fascination with the idea that universities can change the life of individuals and can encourage processes that are inherently collaborative. To see these presences of life as threads prompts the idea of warp and weft: the threads run across each other. But the metaphor is misleading. Yes, the modern university has its thousand year history partly in virtue of the strength imparted by all of its threads of life, but there is no order here; there is neither warp nor weft. These threads of life run across each other in crazy patterns, and in patternless formations, often awkwardly, with loose ends and tendencies to unravel. Knowledge is not descriptive of life, but is part of life’s fabric weaved with intermingling powers of time, space and cultures. Impositional threads lie only just under the surface, and frequently show themselves; the more subtle and delicate threads are more or less entirely lost from view, requiring effort for sightings of them. There is a third feature of this patchwork. Some of the threads have become frayed and others have disappeared from view. Some of these weakenings have been caused by a lessening of interest and some by sheer lack of attention. Laments of various kinds are often voiced: the faulty forms of what passes for reason; the rise of ‘performativity’ and the managerial and bureaucratic brutality within performance management; and the diminution of the humanities. Before us, then, lies a patchwork that is alive, but which is characterised by power (and powerlessness) and conflict. The threads run even against each other, so lessening the potential life of the whole fabric.

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Conclusion The life of the university is in jeopardy. Wise and sympathetic university leadership can enhance the energy level of a university and so enliven it; but, where it takes on strong managerial and bureaucratic aspects, leadership can diminish the life that is in a university. Staff and students can feel demotivated and even commit suicide. An institutional tiredness creeps in. But university life is threatened in more subtle and even more insidious ways. With a diminution of a culture of truthfulness, and with it a disappearance of an interest in critique, a new kind of university appears. It is full of activity – the metrics reveal that very well – and it may be rising in the global rankings but it is becoming lifeless in a way. The spirit is going out of the university. This is not a university fired up with ideas or a concern with the world. This is not a university with an interest in ‘being possible’ – as Heidegger might have put it – in searching for, and even in glimpsing in a utopian spirit, a better world. Here, another of Heidegger’s (2011: 159) ideas, that of the ‘shepherd of Being’ may also be helpful. It points to a watchful university that sees and feels into things. The university has it in itself to be a ‘world-watcher’, ready to use knowledge as a language for communication and world-voicing. In Part Two, we shall build on these preliminary considerations. If the life of the university is endangered, where might resources be found for its re-energising? Are there any to hand? Perhaps there are some threads that are present but which have yet to be discerned.

Notes 1 We choose these four texts because we judge that each has been particularly influential, albeit in different communities. There are certainly other contenders, including Michael Young’s (2008) Bringing Knowledge Back In; Steven Ward’s (2014) Neoliberalism and the Global Restructuring of Knowledge and Education; Jan McArthur’s (2013) Rethinking Knowledge with Higher Education: Adorno and Social Justice; Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2016) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide; Michael D Kennedy’s (2015) Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation; and particularly the work of Jon Nixon, especially (Nixon, 2008) Towards the Virtuous University and Higher Education and the Public Good; of Michael Peters, especially (Peters, 2013) Education, Science and Knowledge Capitalism; and of Bernard Stiegler’s work on the political economy and the state of the university and knowledge (e.g., Stiegler, 2014a, 2014b, 2015). 2 ‘Language games’ was a term that Lyotard picked up from Wittgenstein’s (1978) Philosophical Investigations, albeit building on it a sense of games as combative, as ‘agonistic’ (Lyotard, 1984: 10). 3 ‘The contemporary research university is, therefore, by and large a place in which certain questions go unasked or rather, if they are asked, it is only by individuals and in settings such that as few as possible hear them being asked.’ (MacIntyre, 2009:174). 4 A more recent version of this thesis – declaring for a ‘new spiritual milieux’ in the face of ignorance – can be seen in the works of Bernard Stiegler, e.g. his (2014a) book on The Re-Enchantment of the World. 5 A ‘speculative spirit’ of the university has recently surged. A new international society has emerged – the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES) – and

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a new journal, Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education has been established (edited by John Petrovic, University of Alabama, and published by Peter Lang). This speculative turn towards constructive approaches to the university is represented by, among others, the works of (i) Ronald Barnett with his triology on comprehending the university, its imaginative potential, and the intersections between the university and the world (Barnett, 2012, 2017, 2018), (ii) Bruce Macfarlane’s work on the academic citizen (Macfarlane, 2007) and freedom in the university (Macfarlane, 2017), (iii) Jon Nixon’s work on the virtuous university (Nixon, 2008) and higher education and the public good (Nixon, 2012), (iv) David Watson’s work on the engaged university (Watson, Hollister, Stroud and Babcock, 2011), (v) Michael Peters and Tina Besley’s work on the creative university (Peters and Besley, 2013), and Paul Gibbs’ work on happiness in universities (Gibbs, 2017). 6 For treatments of the Mode 3 university, and how it relates to the Mode 1 and Mode 2 university, see the paper ‘Learning for an Unknown Future’ (Barnett, 1997), Hansen’s work on wonder in higher education (Hansen, 2010) and Nørgård and Bengtsen’s work on the worldhood university (Nørgård & Bengtsen, 2018). 7 Since Readings, a flurry of optimistic sightings of the future university have occurred, of a university societally engaged through its academic virtues (Nixon, 2008) and academic citizenship (Macfarlane, 2007), and taking its responsibilities seriously as an ecological university (Barnett, 2018). Knowledge in the university contributes to the public and common good (Filippakou and Williams, 2015; Marginson, 2016). For the necessity of an optimistic approach to the idea of the university see Barnett and Bengtsen’s paper on optimism and the emergence of a new thinking university (Barnett and Bengtsen, 2017).

INTERLUDE On life

In these days of precision and explicitness – a matter on which we comment in this book – we will be liable to be asked for our definition of ‘life’. After all, our argument turns on the theme of life and constitutes a plea for a philosophy of life to enter our understanding of the connection between ‘university’ and ‘knowledge’. Life is the mortar between the university and knowledge, cementing the two in a permanent relationship. That very term – ‘relationship’ – hints at our response to any demand for a definition. Just as a relationship cannot be defined, so too what is meant by life in this book: to proffer a definition would be tightly to pull a curtain around the matter when the quest here is one of opening the curtains and seeing quite new vistas. Our approach has taken two directions: to notice paths along which life can be glimpsed in the university–knowledge relationship and to use language – words, idioms, metaphors – that are deliberately strange in studies of the university. The paths here point in a multitude of directions, inwards, into the university, and outwards, in the connections between the university and the totality of the world. Inwardly, we speak of academics, of students and of institutional leaders and managers, with all of their forms of life. Outwardly, we speak of the institutions of society and the means by which society understands itself and makes decisions, but much more, of the natural world and all of the phenomena in it; and of the many forms of life that are in these human and non-human worlds. Life is to be seen and felt in all these horizontal directions – inwards and outwards. But life is also to be felt vertically, so to speak. It is apparent in the depths of the world, in understandings hardly voiced, in the global forces propelling knowledge in a digital world, and in ideologies imposing epistemic value on knowing efforts (Fig 4.1). Later, we shall even speak of darkness. It is apparent immediately, in communication systems, in social relationships and knowledge structures. And it is apparent, vertically, in concepts and ideas that seek to glimpse

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possibilities for the university in its efforts to know the world, to bring a metareality into view. We are reminded of Adorno’s observation that concepts exceed their instantiation in the world. Precisely so too here: we are trying to glimpse possibilities of life for the relationships between the university, knowledge and life that are hardly apparent; but relationships that still have a fair chance of being realised. These possibilities could even be termed feasible utopias (Barnett, 2018). No definition – or even set of definitions – can be adequate to the multitude of flows before us, in the university, in its knowledge work, in its interconnections with the world and with the systems at work. Only a vocabulary of life – of fluidity, flows, passion, energy, conflict, spirit, vitality, liveliness and so forth – can even begin to do justice to the situation before us. It is an effervescent setting; but still with possibilities of quietness, deliberateness and care. Definitions only serve to capture a position, whereas we want to encourage life to expand and flourish in the university and in its knowledge work. This is all the more important since, in so many ways, encounters with knowledge are increasingly constrained in the university – in teaching and research but in several other areas – and beyond. The connections between knowledge and life are all too often being diminished, both in the university and beyond. We have dared to use the phrase ‘a philosophy of life’. Such a phrase can only be justified if it is carried through into a sense of the totality of life, organic

Life in & of the world (ontological life)

Life (from the world) (infuses)

Life in & of universities (institutional life)

(infuses)

(infuses)

Life of disciplines

Knowledge

(epistemic life) (infuses)

(infuses)

Life of persons in universities, including students (academic life)

FIG 4.1

Knowledge infuses life

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and non-organic, material and non-material, real and meta-real, human and non-human, apparent and fictional. In question here is precisely the matter of the relationship of the university to life and the range of life that comes within its purview. Part of our intention of this book is to draw attention to the university having acquired – certainly with much encouragement – an unduly limited sense of life, in which human beings are placed at its centre. Human beings remain important, for they have life in their lives, and universities can do much to enhance that life, whether of students or staff. But life there is only a tiny part of life in toto. It is the life of the whole universe that is, or should be, the concern of the university. Our thesis, that there are irradicable and innumerable connections – many neglected or diminished – between the university, knowledge and life, therefore builds from a philosophy of life. Knowledge pulses with life partly in virtue of its being energised by the life of those who try – in vain – to understand it and to carry it on in some way (in their minds, their actions, their own inquiries). And it has the potential of enhancing life in all its many forms, well beyond humanity. Unfortunately, this life-enhancing potential is too often negated as knowledge impairs the systems of the world, partly because the dominant conceptions of what is to count as bona fide knowledge are curtailed. However, life permeates the university and its knowledge interests, in propelling them forward, in those involved in those activities and in their wider relationships with the world in all of its teeming variety. These life-enhancing flows are being diminished, both within the academy and by forces beyond it. At times, it may seem as if the life of knowledge is being expunged. But the flows, the pulses, the energy and the spirit of which we speak will not easily be quelled. And, strangely, it may be not only that there are still signs of those flows, even if diminished, but there may be grounds to suggest that we may be in sight of more propitious times. In the relationships between the university, knowledge and life, the principle of ripe time may yet be upheld.

PART II

The spirit of academic knowledge

5 MORE THAN MERE DEBATE

Introduction In many parts of the world, there have arisen concerns over the ‘no-platforming’ of speakers, in which – by one means or another – an invited speaker is barred from speaking. A suggestion made is that the university is – or should be – a space in which all viewpoints are heard and their arguments tested in an open arena. Then, the weaker argument will be exposed. Behind such a set of views lies a presupposition of the university as a debating chamber with ideas in conflict and that the university’s responsibilities amount to an orchestration of (the) debate. And this idea has a grand philosophical pedigree. In their different ways, no less than MacIntyre (1990), Habermas (1984), Derrida (2001) and Readings (1997) have all espoused or implied such a thesis. We don’t disagree but some considerations are warranted.

Remembering an event In the UK, in the University of Durham in the 1960s, John Rex was the Professor of Sociology. Rex had come to England from South Africa, where he had been and continued to be a fierce opponent of the Apartheid regime. On one evening in Durham, an event was held, in a large lecture theatre, which consisted of Rex in debate with a professor, visiting from South Africa, whose position was essentially that of an apologist for the Apartheid regime. That event has stayed in the memory for two reasons. Firstly, Rex’s controlled passion was evident, as he sought both to engage with his opponent’s arguments and to advance his own position. But secondly, and of particular pertinence here, was the manner in which that debate was conducted. Both combatants jousted with each other with respect. For example, during the course of the debate, Rex

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remarked that his opponent’s position contained ‘a sophistication within a sophistication’. The tone was measured and considerate, as each speaker carefully and respectfully engaged with the position of the other. It will be evident that this event – over half a century past – had a profound effect on at least one person in the audience (RB). In fact, there were two kinds of effect, moral and educational; and ultimately, these effects dovetailed. That debate was testimony to what it is seriously to engage with the views of others with whom one disagrees; as to the manner in which debates might be conducted, such that they be characterised by mutual respect between contending parties; as to the legitimate presence of passion and the value of exercising discipline over such passion; and as to the giving and taking of reasons, even in situations giving rise to profound political, social and moral concerns. That event prompts these questions: would the Professor whose position was that of an apologist for Apartheid be now subject to a ‘no-platform’ policy? Or, if the event be permitted, would that apologist be subject to a hostile reception, such that the event would have to be abandoned? (cf McMahan, 2019) In either case, the arguments of that Professor would not have been exposed to Rex’s controlled forensic analysis and their weaknesses revealed. In the process, the educational benefits of such an event would have been forfeited and the potential of the university as a space of reasoning would have been diminished.

Just a marketplace of ideas? The justification for such a heavily loaded debate lies in the idea of the university as a marketplace of ideas, competing against each other. Let the most successful win out and let the weakest be vanquished. But what is to count as a weak idea? Perhaps, this marketplace is rigged in favour of the powerful and the weak idea may just be a revolutionary idea that could dramatically improve life. Perhaps market competition is not a good basis for a culture of truthfulness. Academic markets, after all, are witness to a toxic combination of epistemic power and financial clout such that the epistemically less powerful find it difficult to gain a hearing. It is against considerations of this kind that the thesis of cognitive injustice, which has been especially advanced by de Sousa Santos (2016), has gained traction. Epistemic injustice is now a feature of the geopolitics of the academic world. Disputes may still be witnessed but (a) the combatants may have more in common than they realise, not least since (b) the combatants could be said to be languishing under a common way of understanding the world – for example – that the universe is uniform or that social class is a necessary feature of society, and that (c) that common framework could be said to be misguided or even pernicious, given its harbouring ideologies that sustain an unjust form of society or unwittingly suppress alternative frameworks from having a hearing. Furthermore, (d) the presence of a dominant dispute sucks the air out of the surrounding milieu. One has to enter the lists in front of one and join the ongoing

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jousting. Efforts to bring other frameworks into view are likely to have a thin time of it. Just like markets in general, then, the marketplace of ideas may be distorted or partial or even rigged (to favour certain interests). The circulation of information – in the form here of truth claims – may be highly circumscribed. What seems prima facie to be an open free-for-all turns out to be a rather constrained argumentative space (whether constrained by state, by the corporate sector, by students or powerful universities or even by the academic class itself). The work of Paul Feyerabend is instructive here. For Feyerabend, science is an unduly constrained process that offers only selective insights into the world and his oeuvre was aimed at showing how science operated within limited presuppositions. Provocatively, he advocated (2010) a principle for science of ‘anything goes’. The extent to which he seriously meant it is debatable but it is clear that he stood for a more open-ended approach in science and a looser sense as to what is to count as ‘the world’. He did not much use the term ‘life’ but he did talk of ‘being’ quite a bit. For instance, ‘Being as it is, independently of any kind of approach, can never be known, which means that really fundamental theories don’t exist’ (Feyerabend, 1999: 205). Far from constraining our options, knowledge responds to a world of ‘abundance’ for our conceptions of it. Knowledge, therefore, should have ‘ontological delicacy’ (1999: 8 & 13) and possess a sensitivity to the deeper strata of the world. This is a defining feature of knowledge in the university: knowledge is created by academics because they do not fully grasp a world that opens itself for inquiry: ‘It is because the world is open that science, whether or not (and for how long) it actually occurs, is possible.’ (Bhaskar, 2008: 116). Knowledge is not a world-opening activity but, the reverse, a world-opened activity. Academic argument, therefore, deludes itself if it imagines that it is telling us something fundamental about the world. Life, whether in the natural or human worlds, is too hidden from our grasp. All that academic inquiry can give us is, at best, pinpricks into the life of the world. The metaphor of a marketplace of ideas is telling. Markets are characterised by unequal power and distorted information that advance particular interests. Just so with the marketplace of academic ideas. In this neoliberal marketplace, concerns may justifiably be voiced as to the interest structure at work. Not least in the context of the marketisation of higher education (Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon, 2011; Brown, 2011, 2013; McGettigan, 2013), views may be held and advanced that are likely to have value, and even cash value. And yet this marketplace may have epistemic virtues. In this marketplace, ideas and theories may be tested and strengthened. However, all too often one looks in vain for a clash of views: for the most part, the differing views pass without engaging each other. Ever-smaller epistemic communities arise with their own interests and forms of academic life in which the academic birds flock together. Epistemic sub-groups emerge, and their members talk largely to

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themselves. At times, one feels that a little antagonistic energy would be a good thing. It follows that the academic discourse of the marketplace is not ‘weird’ enough (to steal a word of Harman’s, 2005) for this is an arena that should be characterised by ‘dissident thought’ and a ‘critical form of inner revolt’ (Arndt and Mika, 2018: 47). Knowledge is created when thought leaves its safe spaces to enter into ‘exile, dissidence and delirium’ (ibid) but, for the most part, academic thought has become a lifeless space. Academic decorum and an inclination not to displease are all very well but sometimes oppositions need to be brought out into the open, even at the cost of some vexatiousness.1 The marketplace of ideas, therefore, may be a misnomer. The liveliness that it promises seldom materialises. It is a marketplace that is surprisingly quiescent and dull. Attention is focused on securing the next paper in a ‘world-class’ journal rather than explicitly entering the lists for a public joust. And even when dispute does get going, it may be revealing rather little about the life of the world and rather more about the antagonisms between individuals and their disciplinary sub-groups. There is an uneasy antinomy here: on the one hand, an unbridled and competitive survival of the fittest, with constant clashes of the titans, in which academic hierarchy, power and resources are likely to win the day; or, on the other hand, a wilder, imaginative and creative exploration of possibilities, unconcerned with personal advancement or sustaining an established intellectual field. To put it in Nietzschean (1999) terms, we seem to be faced with an Apollonian order and rule-following within contained forms of understanding; or a Dionysian lack of order - even chaotic - with the parties following their formless inquiries. Both paths have virtues and vices. They exhibit alternative forms of academic life and operate with contrasting ideas of the life of the world - a single universal life on the one hand and an ever-burgeoning multiplicity of worlds on the other hand. The second will reveal more worlds and open to a richer sense of life, but will its ideas be sufficient put to the test? Perhaps in a world of open ‘synthetic reason’ (DeLanda, 2015), this is the general direction of travel.

Anything goes – or anyone goes? To the question ‘how will ideas be put to the test?’, the academic world has formed two responses. On the one hand, it has taken an interest in the question ‘What is to count as a valid view?’ On the other hand, it has taken an interest in the question: ‘Who is to be felt to possess a valid view?’ To put the matter crudely, is the suggestion that ‘Anything goes’ or ‘Let all-comers have a voice’? These two matters quickly run into each other. At the heart of these two matters – What? and Who? – is the thorny issue (which has troubled ‘liberal’ thinking for two hundred years) as to whether there are limits over who might be permitted to join the conversation. Are those who would outlaw open and critical speech to be allowed to participate?

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Are those to be admitted who would use their positions verbally to attack – and perhaps to incite physical attack on – peoples or communities on account of their religion, colour of skin or gender or other characteristic? This is the liberal’s dilemma. Our view is that that such would-be participants disbar themselves because they do not understand the rules of the discursive game in which they would be participants. Habermas’ (1984) (three) validity claims – of truthfulness, sincerity and appropriateness – are pertinent here. These are conditions of a rational discourse that all participants would need to respect. However, and disconcertingly, it is not certain that the would-be terrorist or would-be racist would be discomforted by those three (Habermassian) validity claims. He or she could claim to be guided by considerations of truthfulness, sincerity and appropriateness. In extremis, the terrorist or racist could claim to be speaking truthfully or could at least claim to be guided by considerations of truth (pointing to relevant evidence about global power structures and so forth); could claim to be sincere; and could claim to be appropriate to the situation. So Habermas’ validity claims require some additions. Firstly, the meaning of ‘rational’ here should be extended beyond Habermas’ rather narrow idea of rationality as rooted in human communication. Bhaskar’s (2011) notion of ‘depth rationality’ is much to the point. The ‘object of depth rationality is emancipation’ (2011: 113). However, emancipation in Bhaskar’s sense is realised not only in social communication, but also in burrowing through to strata of the world that are not yet within human reach and understanding. Secondly, there needs also to be included a principle of respect for other persons in the discourse. This is implicit in Habermas’ account but it needs to be explicit.2 Such respectfulness is connected with notions of turn-taking, of a reticence in pressing one’s own viewpoint and of an empathy towards other participants. And this condition – of respectfulness – would have the same status as Habermas’ validity claims. Respectfulness, however, is a matter of style or comportment rather than a matter of rule-following, and yet the collective life of the academic community is dependent on just such a condition being honoured in its interactions. There are, then, formal conditions of a well-regulated discourse in a university setting but for a university’s conversations to work, epistemic qualities – virtues, indeed – of courage, persistence and vigilance are required. The virtue of criticality is also required,3 that is a disposition to ‘see-through’ and to ‘see-under’ what is on offer. Such academic virtues are at the heart of critical rationality and of a ‘virtuous university’ (Nixon, 2008). The virtues in this mode of thinking neither suffocate thought nor do they diminish movement in thought (as with dogmatic or fundamentalist ideas). In contrast to the marketplace, this open and vibrant thought forms ‘the community of those who have nothing in common’, and connects humanity through that which produces difference, namely thought itself (Lingis, 1994).

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The question remains: in principle, can anything be said on campus? The exchange of ideas is central to the life of the university. However, the university is not just a kind of ‘speakers’ corner’, where speakers are subject to raucous heckling. Ideas can be proffered only if they are open to serious critical debate. This is not to construe the university as a public space4 but rather as an argumentative, and even conflictual, space. Habermas is both helpful and unhelpful here. Helpful because his ideas as to what counts as a rational discourse indicates that there are conditions that attach to such a discourse. It is not a free-for-all in the manner in which ideas are offered. Unhelpful because Habermas considered that a rational discourse was guided by a search for ‘the better argument’ (Habermas, 1996) and that, implicit in it, is a search for a consensus. But the idea of consensus should not be given too much elbow-room, for a university is a space of argument and conflict.5 No conflict, no university. Yet, still the racist and even the terrorist can stand their ground. Should their views not have their day? The difficulty here is that two principles are clashing: the principle that a university should be a discursively open space and the principle that the university should do no harm. The first principle looks to universities being open institutions, while the second looks to limit that openness. Further difficulties arise over what is to count as harm (for views will vary sharply) and how harm is to be judged (whether, for example, in terms of either of the consequential or moral harm felt to be inherent in a particular point of view). Our view is that the expression of viewpoints and open debate are vital to the life of the university. To the degree that any viewpoint is closed off, to that degree the life of the university is diminished; and, to that degree, the university falls short of its role as a space for the airing and testing of ideas. (Recall the recollected event that opened this chapter.) In practice, too, what is likely to happen is that such awkward viewpoints will find expression in the wider society where they will not be subject to rigorous examination. It follows that, on the two warring principles, the principle of openness should trump that of a concern with harm. And this consideration holds both for research and for teaching. It is the university qua institution that suffers if an interest in students being granted curricula safe spaces diminishes the extent to which ideas are exposed to critical interrogation in their presence.

The life of conversation Conversation is central to the life of the university. The university’s conversations have life and those conversations are the life of the university. But the life of the university is a rather peculiar life. To the extent that the principle of openness trumps that of a concern with harm, to that extent the life of the university is marked by an open discursive space. It is a space that primarily exhibits a positive freedom6 to come forward with new, daring and even disturbing ideas, providing that those ideas can become part of an evaluative dialogue. At the heart of academic conversation lies a vulnerability, in opening oneself up to critiques and to the

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world. Academic dialogue is the very act of ‘leaving a shelter, exposing oneself to outrage, to insults and wounding’ (Levinas, 2000: 49). Three phenomena help to explain the diminution of direct conversation in the university: (i) the managerial practices that have evolved over the past half century or so, (ii) an increasingly competitive environment and (iii) the internet. We may take them in turn. Managerial practices that are pertinent here flow from a heightening interest in monitoring and governing activities within a university. This tendency reaches deeply into academic life. It has a particular concern with inputs and outputs – flows of income (for teaching, research and knowledge ‘exchange’), ‘throughput’ and completion rates of students, and academic publications (especially in journals listed in the major indexes, such as the Web of Science).7 Universities’ monitoring techniques are becoming more intrusive and are evolving into a regime of surveillance. For this managerialism, what counts is that which can readily be counted.8 Conversation does not easily yield to calculation and nor does it obviously generate an income flow, and so it becomes invisible and then falters. Linked to this pattern within institutions is an external competitiveness, both nationally and globally. Competitiveness has long been a feature of universities but what is new is the way that this competitiveness has been formalised in national and world rankings. This global competitiveness presses academics forward. It brings a pace and a busyness to academic life. Calculations are made by the academics themselves: time is assessed with a metric that computes the contribution to personal academic capital. Individuals keep their eyes on their h-index and conversation receives nil point on this calculus. Hence the not unfamiliar sequel, wherein an email is sent to the colleague in the next room on the corridor rather than engage directly in conversation. After all, it may not be easy to break off the conversation. The third phenomenon is the ambiguity of the internet. This is linked to the previous two phenomena, with the internet providing a vehicle for managerial surveillance measures, and supplying a means of maintaining one’s own competitiveness (not least in keeping-up-to-date one’s profile on open-access research databases). But the internet has its own features. Prima facie, it widens conversation, with academics being immediately and globally networked. It provides a new conversational space, affording technologies of academic conversation across space and time (Fossland, Mathiasen and Solberg, 2015). And, through the internet, academics and research teams can reach out to multiple publics, both informally on social media and more formally, putting their texts and data into the public domain. However, the multi-media character of communication changes conversation. Its digital processing, its asyncracy, its iconic nature and its sheer multitudinous and impositional aspects alter what it is to encounter a text or an idea (Hassan, 2003; Bengtsen, Mathiasen and Dalsgaard, 2015). And this technology intrudes into face-toface conversation. Academic gatherings are not untypically disrupted as messages on

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smart phones (perhaps over a research application or job application and perhaps from the other side of the world) call for responses. Some are anticipating a new internet of things – in a way, a ‘post-internet’ society, in which human-human internet interaction is by-passed (Mosco, 2017; Gottlieb, 2018). Academic conversation is not at an end but is taking new forms and is even closing in. Whereas it was key to academic sociality, now it is an object of calculation and its value-for-time-expended calculated. Academic conversation has to have an end; an ‘agenda’ indeed. Under these conditions, academic community is in jeopardy. In a community, after all, contributions are made by members that without inducement help to sustain the community. So it is with the ‘academic community’. Even the vocabulary changes. The very term ‘academic community’ withers (now seldom if ever to be seen in university web-sites), but also terms such as ‘colleagues’, ‘conversation’ and ‘having a word’ fade. Such a vocabulary is resonant of an era in which there was time for collegial interchange. There is a loss of the face-to-face encounter. It is symptomatic that, when the time comes for a building to be refurbished, not uncommonly, the departmental kitchen is removed, it taking up valuable space: the collegiality and conversation that it signifies have no value in a metric-driven management regime. Even more significant, under such conditions, too, ‘academic citizenship’ falls away (Macfarlane, 2007). In an academic community, individuals see its members as having legitimate claims upon them and they give freely of themselves (serving on university committees, examining postgraduate work elsewhere, attending departmental meetings and so forth). Immediate face-to-face conversation lies at the heart of such a community, and it is now faltering and, in the process, life flows from the university.

A conversational ecology How might the kind of conversation that should characterise the university be understood? Several accounts are on offer. In Habermas (1984), we find the idea of an implicit effort on the part of participants to work towards a consensus; in contrast, Readings (1997), places weight on the idea of a dissensus. Ranciere (1999) seems to sympathise with this concept but advances his own idea of ‘disagreement’. Masschelein and Simons (2009) play up the ideas of a ‘gathering’ and a public. Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) touch on the Greek ‘agora’. Each of these ideas prima facie offers resources upon which a constructive set of communicative practices might be fashioned. If conversation in the university could be orchestrated so as to resemble a Habermassian ‘ideal speech situation’ in which all participants had equal weight, that would go far towards countering the inequalities in a managerial environment. If the university had freedom to form itself into a space of dissensus, where the ‘strangeness of the neighbour’ (Levinas, 2000: 91) could be felt, the academic community would be enlivened and the world would benefit. If

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the university and the wider society could constitute an agora, in which parties came together to trade ideas, rather than to be bewitched by the allure of money, new sources of air would emerge. And if the university could be understood as a gathering, in which peoples come freely and publicly together, such transparency would confer much advantage. However, those ideas pull in different directions. ‘Disagreement’ vies with the orientation towards agreement, and the university as a site of dissensus in the world vies with the idea of the university and the world as creating an agora together. Moreover, these ideas may appear to possess universality but each turns out to constitute a rather limited conception of academic conversation. In the twenty-first century, the way has opened for the university to be involved in multiple conversations among different parties. Consider just these: reaching out to a new partner outside the university; understanding students as co-producers; not critiquing a theory but placing it in a yet wider theory; bringing on the hesitant student; presenting one’s work to a new audience; orchestrating dialogue across disciplines; surmounting hurdles in mutual understanding across languages; working in the clinical situation; acting as a consultant; and participating in conversations in which displays of power are evident (both within and beyond the academy). No single account can do justice to the array of conversations – with their varying backgrounds, timbres and genres – that are to be found in academic life. It follows that the university has to be governed by a principle of conversational fecundity. It should be so open discursively that it is ready not merely to participate in new kinds of conversation – in their participants, in their locale, in their purpose, in the media through which they are conducted and in their demeanour – but also to imagine and to create new kinds of conversation. The conversations of the university are and should be increasingly heterogeneous, held across different epistemic territories. Knowledge would then not rest assured in its own self-contained autonomy, but in an ethical ‘heteronomy’ (Levinas, 2017). Some will be disputatious but others will be bridge-building. Some will be conflictual while others will be marked by empathy and support. Some will be reflective and will offer commentaries on the world and yet others will be concerned to have effects in the world. In many of its conversations, even within the university, the participants will not be known to each other and little can be assumed. For the conversational wheels to turn, the ground may have to be carefully laid and maintained. It is evident, then, that new conversational spaces are opening, which include the university as a boundary-crossing space in which the university engages with the wider society and economy, academics and students working together in a pedagogical space, conversations that are conducted between participants who are separated both in time and space, texts in different technological formats and materials and resources of many kinds. Life leaps forward through these conversations which, in turn, breathes air into life.

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The new conversationalists These matters have practical and political import. The conversational ecology is inherently filled out with life, and holds on to life, stretching it and illuminating it, as it uncovers life. It stretches out across the globe, making use of new technologies; and it widens to include new conversationalists. Its conversations widen, too, in their character, exhibiting mutual explorations, bold and rhetorical displays, generosity across cultures and impositions and suppressions of voices. There are several multiplicities here,9 of entities, geographies, media, populations (some conversations attract a handful of participants while others attract several thousand, even on a single academic paper) and organisations (as these conversations reach out increasingly to the business world and the wider society). There are multiple ecologies of conversation present here, spread across nations, cultures and epistemic and practical domains. And, as intimated, these conversational ecologies are linked through their interest in a truth-oriented inquiry into life. Whether intent on sheer understanding or in bringing inquiry into play in practical projects, the spirit of truthfulness is, and has to be, present. Beyond the marketplace stands the university as an ‘institution of truth’ (Rider, 2018). In this situation, universities inject continuing life, by bringing forth ‘all sorts of facts and ideas the future use of which is entirely unpredictable, as new facts and new arguments arise and revise what we already think we know’(Rider, 2018: 28). There is a paradox here. These conversational ecologies are showing signs of impairment and are showing signs of new life. These conversations are no longer purely academic conversations but spread out into new territories, involving partners in all sections of society. To draw on some terms of Deleuze and Guattari (2007), this is not a simple case of ‘deterritorialization’ for ground is lost in some parts but is claimed anew elsewhere. Much to their own surprise, the humanities spread out into the wider world, helping to put on exhibitions or to make documentary films. But nor is it a matter of ‘reterritorialization’: the university is not in a process simply of decanting itself into the corporate world. And while it has ‘rhizome’-like features, as it spreads here and there, responding to new conversational opportunities and new conversational partners as they present themselves, this liveliness is energised by its concern for truthfulness, even as what counts as truth expands (as new hybrid forms of knowledge emerge). It may be said that this conversational nomadism is motivated by a cognitive entrepreneurialism. New conversations are embarked upon where there is a sighting of some gain, whether economic or positional. Not untypically, such conversations are saturated with multiple and even competing values. Conversations form with non-profit organisations and the corporate sector. A research team reaches out to a group in a university in the developing world and a university student class may be put in touch with a corresponding class in a quite different culture. The shy participant, who might have much to contribute, just might be noticed and encouraged to develop her voice (Batchelor, 2008; Macfarlane, 2017).

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We are now in the presence of the multi-vocal university. It speaks with varied voices to different audiences. Its members hold multiple conversations simultaneously, with the participants continuously leaving and joining groups. There are both depths and openness in these conversational dynamics. In these movements, the university and the academic world continuously re-form themselves. Academic conversation, then, is inherently ontological in its nature. It is through its conversations, shifting as they are, that the university constitutes and re-constitutes itself.

Conclusion It is evident that conversation is of the essence of the university.10 Certainly, the university’s conversations wax and wane, and take on differing forms across academic sites, and are subject to both inducements and subjugations. But wherever there is a university, so there is conversation. This is as much a conceptual as it is an empirical observation – conversation in and around the university is part of the meaning of ‘university’. However, a paradoxical situation is evident. Although, there is much talk in university circles – the conferences mushroom, the internet academic traffic rises exponentially and the journals multiply – the amount of real debate is limited. For all their evident busyness, universities are becoming rather quiescent. It is an expanding universe of activity and word-plays but, with groups going in their own directions, there is relatively little serious exchange between them and even across sub-groupings within a discipline. This restricted state of play is marked by self-censure, managerial power and digital technologies that shift conversation into a global space. This quiescence is explicable: precisely because the university is being enjoined to engage more with the world, it has responded to this urging from the world. As a result, it has less time for, and even less interest in, internal conversations. Now, the focus is on utterances – papers, reports, media engagements – that show in the world. In the process, open and even heated debate within the academic community dwindles: ‘thought’s complacent agreement with itself ’ (Adorno, quoted in McArthur, 2018) is apparent. Such a pessimistic picture of limited debate and university quiescence, however, cannot be the full story. Empirically, the expansion of the university system world-wide and the lessening of its borders with the wider society open spaces for new kinds of conversation; universities have an interest in matters of community, democracy and social justice; and many universities manifestly have taken on programmes that confirm their own civic citizenship. Theoretically, universities can be said to possess agency, not only within national borders but cross-nationally. They may be corporations, but they possess ‘corporate agency’ (List and Pettit, 2011). And philosophically, the university possesses openness in its very being and that being is characterised by possibility. The university’s conversations, then, not just widen but become a space of possibilities. Who might be partners in these conversations? To what extent can discipline speak unto discipline? Which tone might be adopted as the university

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speaks beyond its walls? In which media might the conversations of the university be conducted? What might be the global reach of its conversations? Questions such as these barely hint at the university’s conversational spaces and their possibilities. But they also indicate that the university’s conversations should not be construed as mere conversations. The conversations of the contemporary university are now required to have point. For many, this is an indication of the extent to which the university is now characterised by instrumental reason. But the university has a large degree of openness in determining the aims of its conversations. It can always ask itself the question: just what are the aims implicit in this conversation? It is a question that should not be shirked.

Notes 1 After all, ‘[t]hinking relationally is mission-critical for a university wothy of the name’ (Beckett and Hager, 2018: 151). 2 A more explicit description of the core link between thinking and respect is to be seen in the work of Jan McArthur (2013, 2018). 3 On the general matter of epistemic virtues, see Brady and Pritchard (2003) and Crisp and Slote (2000). Perhaps the first modern exposition of the centrality of critical thought was that of Barnett (1990) followed by his creation of the concept of critcality (1997). 4 cf Masschelein and Simons (2012). 5 Lyotard (1984: 82) saw postmodernism as waging ‘a war on totality’: did he not have in mind the kind of consensus to which Habermas was attached? 6 The phrase ‘positive freedom’ is one of Isaiah Berlin’s (1979) ‘two concepts of liberty’, and ‘derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master’ (p. 131). Although Berlin saw difficulties in this idea of freedom – for dictators could use it to their own ends in compelling their subjects to be free in particular ways – still it seems necessary to us here. Crucial though it is, academic freedom, as negative freedom – that is, freedom from constraint – is insufficient to generate and sustain the vitality of the university and the potential that lies within the academic life. 7 In some jurisdictions worldwide, incentives to boost a university’s publications’ performance are offered to academics in the form of a personal monetary reward. 8 Although the use of metrics in research evaluations and in global rankings has attracted much attention – see Peters (2017) for an excellent resumé and see Fuller (2018) for a polemical essay – the use of metrics in higher education is actually both more pervasive and ever-widening, being used in performance management, learning analytics, workload planning, institutional planning, teaching evaluations and so on (and both at national and at institutional levels). 9 ‘Multiplicities’ has become a favoured word in and around contemporary social theory and philosophy – for instance Deleuze and Guattari (2007), Latour (2007) and DeLanda (2006); see too Harman’s (2010a: 176) comparison of ‘multiplicities’ in the hands of Latour and Delanda. Our view is that the term can be overdone, all too easily adopted to deflect the responsibility of judgement. The question is here: how are universities to be and to act in the face of multiplicities? It is in that spirit, in opening a space for the university’s responsibilities and possibilities, that we deploy the term here. 10 Even if in a fluid and sceptical world, it is felt heretical to speak of essences.

6 A WILL TO KNOW

Introduction Knowing efforts require a will to wrestle with difficult and unsettling material; a will to change and to be changed. In knowing, one is called forward. Indeed, often, one cannot help oneself: one is carried forward by murmurings that nag. Without this will pressing at knowledge, tending to knowledge and moving knowledge, knowledge is inert and withers. This will imparts life to the knower, who becomes a carrier of this will. This will to know does not reside only in individuals but becomes infused in academic life as a general will to know. It takes on a collective spirit and, through this spirit, what would be inert knowledge comes alive. The libraries, the journals, the books and the internet resources form living knowledge, put to work every day by students, teachers and researchers as they strive to know the world ever better. Universities are not just vaguely interested in the world, or mildly concerned with creatures, minerals, cultures, economies, political actions and ideas. The university wants to know the world – not casually but systematically. Its knowing efforts are marked by a zest for, and even an obsession with, knowing. This obsession is linked to wanting to know what is other and what lies beyond current understandings (Levinas, 2000). Life is inherent in this collective will to know, but this life is fragile. This will to know cannot be assumed to be ever-present.

A new will emerges There is a new will in the university; or, rather, a new set of wills. It is a will to succeed, a will to achieve, a will to be seen, and a will to power. This set of wills has not entirely vanquished old wills to understand, to share and to uplift.

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These old wills still lurk, in some universities at least. But they are subdued and quietened, hardly daring to show themselves. And what of the will to know? It is still present but now it is tilted in new directions. The will to know in order to know remains evident. Academics remain fired by issues arising in their own disciplinary and professional field. But new causes have emerged, to know so as to generate effects in the world or even control over some portion of it; to gain higher status and to secure greater influence; or even just to survive in a turbulent world. The university, then, harbours an array of wills to know, and these wills produce massive epistemic energy. Universities are full of busyness, as the wills to know propel academics – singly and in large groups (and in epistemic communities) – forward. This milieu has little time for introverts. Rather, it possesses a marked extraversion, as it projects ventures and their venturers into the public gaze, their outputs to be charted and lodged in the ledger; or at least in the email signature. After all, the rankings have to be fuelled. Can this busyness be considered to be life? Surely, we have here signs of the automatic university, a university running on spontaneous responses to external expectations. Heidegger (1968: 13), in a throwaway remark, posed the question as to whether the university seriously thinks about thinking: ‘In universities especially, the danger is still very great that we misunderstand what we hear of thinking …’. Now, we have to ask the really disturbing question: does the university, in its busyness, in these wills to know, actually think?

Knowledge as the ripening of life Knowledge creativity requires life. It builds from life and gives back to life. Such efforts have to be characterised by a principle of fecundity. But this principle – one of epistemic risk-taking and diversity (Feyerabend, 1999) and the plurality of existence (Levinas, 2003) – is not always evident. Indeed, many aspects of the corporate university and its global setting – performance management, national and global rankings, learning analytics, internal and external bureaucratic procedures and audit regimes – are producing a desiccation of knowing efforts. A dull conformity creeps in, in what becomes a risk-averse environment; and with good reason, for the risks of combativeness or even silent resistance are considerable right across the world (albeit to varying degrees in different nations). A venturing forward with zeal and openness and an imaginative spirit are in jeopardy. It was a lifetime’s entreaty of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1851–1941) that there is an intimate connection between knowledge and life; an ‘elan vital’ indeed. Through our knowing efforts we intuit that reality is creative, which induces creativity into our knowing efforts and academic activities. The will to know is a creative response to, and is part of, the creativity of life itself. To study at the university is to intensify an already existing relationship with the world and life itself, since the knowing effort is a way ‘to let something

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pass that matter is holding back’ (Bergson, 1998: 183). Knowledge assumes a releasing effect by enhancing, not only through deepening our knowledge of life and what we may give back to life, but also through the processes of knowing. Knowledge is a ‘vital process’ [a process of life, therefore] and thinking is a ‘ripening’ of life (Bergson, 1998: 342). However, this almost mystic intimacy between knowledge and life is not typically what is promoted in the higher education curriculum today, and universities are rarely understood in this way. Studying, teaching and learning at the university cannot be considered to have reached a state of ‘proletarianisation’ (Halsey, 1992) but it assuredly contains significant elements of anomie, as students and academics act out the tasks allotted to them. Frequently, reports identify matters of anxiety, stress and even exhaustion in academic life, examined, for example, in a comparative study of Danish and Finnish doctoral education programmes (Cornér, Pyhältö, Peltonen and Bengtsen, 2018). Pleasure and enjoyment are diminished as personal meaning within the university falters. Seeing that their efforts have only instrumental value, students and academics become bound up in attending to their own immediate challenges, and become estranged from their work. The inner will to know falters. In this milieu, energy levels are depleted, at the level of the university as an institution as well as that of its individuals. The energy of the university as such is diminished; its life is gradually squeezed out. The university comes to exhibit an estrangement from life. Alienation is an apt term here, since there is a marked tendency for both students and academics to be disconnected from their own labours, as their works are subject to uses and evaluations beyond their control. The matter in front of us, therefore, is the possibility – and the necessity – of reestablishing, through the university, a deep connection with life. After all, knowledge is not just an epistemic endeavour, but is also an aesthetic one. There is a delight inherent in knowledge: to know is to savour the world and embrace it. To know is to feel satisfaction in gaining some insight into the world. The ‘pleasure of the text’ (Barthes, 1975) lies both in its crafting and its offering to its author(s) new contact with the world. There is pleasure in going deeply into the world, in reaching out to and achieving contact with something beyond. For Levinas (2003), the pleasure of knowledge turns into a true desire for what escapes our understanding. Just such a view was promoted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who describes our conceptual frameworks and understandings of the world as imprints of the forces that one is trying to grasp. Our knowledge vocabulary ‘propels us toward the things it signifies’ (1973: 10), and through our studies we come into a deep contact with the phenomenon being studied: it ‘catches like a fire’ (1973: 11). We respond to challenges of the contemporary world with theories of complex systems, we respond to the diversity and pluralism of the natural (and social) world with concepts of entanglement and multiplicity and we respond to encounters with strange powers with ideas about elegance and beauty. All these are markers of our epistemic struggles and bewilderment.

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Knowledge is not the outcome of a simple encounter with the world. When we try to understand a person as a member of society, we strive to ‘pick up the tone, the vocabulary, the grammar, the rhetoric she uses’ (Lingis, 1998: 139). Knowledge is a relationship with what is other and outside us. In our knowing efforts, we let the world in all its strangeness and complexity affect us and weigh on us. In the university, perhaps singularly so, knowledge is opened to a degree where we can no longer control it. The understanding turns into rapture and self-erasure, and as Lingis observes ‘[t]he smallest things can obsess us’ – how ‘the lonely circles the condor flies in the wake of the storm touch us’, and how ‘the humble endurance of the fossil mollusk absorbs us’ (1998: 121). Knowledge takes us there. However, there can be no hankering after final connections. In engaging in knowing efforts, there is a risk (Biesta, 2014), not only of being led astray, but of losing parts of one’s own self in the wake of efforts to know and to understand. The risks in life-infused knowing endeavours are plentiful. The American philosopher, Graham Harman, points to a possible overdose of life, where knowledge becomes a ‘drunken alchemy’ (2005: 170). In this entrancement, all too easily we become over-eager and carried away through our intellectual problems and frameworks, and so fail to develop a nuanced and subtle access to strange entities in the world. Instead, we end in ‘distorting them, caricaturing them, bringing them into play only partially’ (p. 172). Knowledge at its fullest, therefore, is a living of the life being investigated. Whether in mathematics, astronomy, business studies or archaeology, knowledge opens the life in those worlds. Acquiring knowledge is to form a language with which to speak about a topic, and to inhabit the topic through imparting one’s own voice. Knowledge lets us step inside dimensions of reality and experience afresh different aspects of the world. Through knowledge, we may see with the eyes of the tiger, or the space-traveller, or the prisoner of war, or listen with the ears of the diplomat or feel with the hands of the mountaineer. Knowledge is traversing life. Untrammelled by malign forces of surveillance and measurement, we may not only step inside the world but may even be entranced by it.

The power of knowledge Nietzsche argues that we are driven by a will to power in our intellectual strivings; for example, ‘the “sense for truth” will have to legitimize itself before [a certain] tribunal … as will to power’ (1968: 272). The will to power here means a will to catalyse and release an ever-increasing diversity of life forms. Wanting to know the world defines the will to power of universities. Knowledge efforts are, in this view, linked to power. Foucault (1980) and Habermas (1978) both implied something not too dissimilar, albeit from a socio-ontological perspective. On this view, the will to know is a corollary of a will to power – knowledge is not merely a life-reflecting and life-simulating phenomenon but a life-shaping effort and even the very prolongation of life itself.

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We see this in universities, which take on cultural, political and social forms of this will to power. They have become centres of huge epistemic power – and thereby today, considerable economic and political power. But this link – between a will to know and a will to power – can be misunderstood. The matter is this: just what kinds of power does (academic) knowledge make possible? Is it a power oriented towards control or understanding or freedom? Doubtless, it is some collocation of epistemic powers; but they are skewed. For Nietzsche, indeed, the emancipatory powers of institutions – such as the university – have waned: Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained … One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power … Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (2003: 103–104) We have failed the university, and do not feel the will to power of the university as strongly as we might. The power inherent in the will to know is considerable. Nietzsche (1968) suggests that knowledge works as a tool of power, and that knowledge increases with every increase of power. The measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species [and] a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into its service. (Nietzsche, 1968: 267) This idea deserves to be pressed into service here: the will to know of universities depends on their capability to absorb and respond to the greater will of life in all its temporal, spatial, cultural, physical and organic forms. Admittedly, the university has to exercise care: its will to know can be used to favour illicit or self-serving goals.

Knowledge for the sake of life Nietzsche claims that ‘[a]fter we lose all the instincts that give rise to institutions, we lose the institutions themselves because we are not suited to them anymore.’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 214). The instinct that Nietzsche is referring to is our knowledge-seeking drive that extends beyond what knowledge is useful and immediately applicable in professional contexts. However, this is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, still less for the sake of the economy or even the wider society and its travails, but knowledge for the sake of life. Knowledge for the sake of life becomes visible in our knowing efforts that exceed the conventional curricular boundaries and predefined learning goals. For

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example, it would be visible in curricula in which a programme of studies in a particular discipline is put in touch with a like programme of studies in another country. Imagine that two programmes in civil engineering were connected, perhaps even to effect a North–South link. Imagine further that the students concerned were invited not only to work on joint projects but were required collaboratively to explore the role of the civil engineer across the two societies. Such an initiative would begin to do serious justice to the idea of the student-as-global-citizen. It would at once draw the students out of their taken-for-granted frames of understanding, and expose them to culture and social settings of another land. This curriculum, with its associated pedagogies, would certainly involve an exposure to ‘troublesome concepts’ (Parker, 2005; Land, Meyer and Smith, 2008; Kiley and Wisker, 2009) but of a quite different order from the discipline-bound troublesome concepts normally encountered. In its wake, major issues of professionalism, of the professional–client relationship, of ecology and of community would arise. The students would be called onto a new level of insights into the world, their lives possibly transformed. In such a higher education, life itself would become troublesome. Such a curriculum for life would encourage a will to know that willingly ventured into strangeness. Unfathomable dimensions of human being and societal being would be encountered. Learning outcomes would be shown up for the dangerous nonsense that they are in hindering the life of the student and its unfolding, since ‘learning experiences’ that were seriously intended to confront the student with life – with difficulty, complexity and openness – would be bound to sponsor fuzzy experiences, diffuse sentiments, awkwardnesses, halfformed thoughts and unanticipated but highly educational encounters. But wonder (Midgley, 19891) might also accompany this bewilderment. Such half-formed sentiments may be difficult to explain outside the university and even to justify within academic programming space. We may feel haunted by a secret hunch, and months may be sacrificed to hunt down some ‘golden unicorn glimpsed one day in the library, even though it may never enter our grasp and no one else may even believe that we ever saw it’ (Harman, 2005: 141). Such fleeting forms of knowledge may linger on within ourselves, or between the few students and colleagues who have a fascination with serendipitous inquiry and with entering life in its messiness. It is implicit here that the will to know is not confined to individuals. It can affect huge cross-continental teams in research, working in collaboration. But it is also global, with a generalised will to know now seeping into universities across the world. This will to know can come to constitute the culture of a university. Will, therefore, is both specific and generalised. And whether as a generalised will, or as an individualised will, this epistemic will can sweep one up; and sweep up a university. Just such a will to know, however, is being displaced by a will to succeed, and to do so within narrow and predictable frames.

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The will to know is connected to desire. There is push and pull here. This will breathes life into knowing efforts, but it can open those efforts to life. The will to know has qualities of an aesthetic, epistemic and ethical nature. When we speak with others about the results of our research, our examination or our group project, our voice – whether in speech or in writing – becomes entangled with that of other people we have studied or that we have drawn from. So, too, it may become intertwined with the sounds, smells and observations in the laboratory of the cells or fibres studied (and the instrumentation that now – in some disciplines – can enfold the inquirer). The will to know is not merely my will to know. It is the will of the research team I collaborate with, just as it is the will of what we research. The will to know shows itself as coming simultaneously from many directions, as individuals and groups become caught in this whirlpool of the will to know. This will to know is ecological in its essence. Through its epistemic spread, it activates life systems and creates synergies between people, cultures and species. Inquiry is ultimately not chained to the university as a particular socio-material and socio-economic institution. Through knowledge, we take on a heightened sensitivity to others and the place of others. Contra Lingis (1998: 136), we cannot presume to ‘say what others would say if they were not absent, elsewhere, or dead’ but, through our efforts to grapple with the world, we carry ourselves deeply into the world. For example, in science, we lend our minds and voices to species extinct millions of years ago, and to aeons of geological time, when the universe was very young, beyond human grasp. The ethical imperative in university knowledge encourages us to have a care for those who have no one to defend them. Without being bidden, we may give voice to the elements of the world not yet heard or even noticed.

The world wants to be known There are two sides to this story. On the one hand, the university wants to know the world. On the other, the world wants to be known. As Heidegger (1968) and Bhaskar (2008) argue, the knowing effort is not merely a form of action, it is also at the same time a re-action; a response. The world has knowable properties. Not to all at the same time, and not in all periods of history. But it does have a knowable quality. The world is reaching out to us, and to open itself to us, and we respond by trying to know it, grasp it, and embrace it. Today there seems to be little faith in the ability of universities fully to open themselves to the world, with knowledge being reduced to symbolic and economic capital. Universities have come to be guided too much by their particular will to know and, in the process, have neglected the will of the world to become known. The responsibility lies before universities, therefore, to try to rebalance their epistemic footing and adopt a receptive position as world-listeners. There is an ethical imperative at the heart of academic knowledge to listen to all viewpoints and voices.

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In order ‘to perceive a clue, we must first be listening ahead into the sphere from which the clue comes.’ (Heidegger, 1968: 138) To listen ahead demands a deep listening to our history, to earlier civilisations and to pre-human eras, to contemporary societies and cultures and to a myriad of natural phenomena and other life forms beyond immediate human comprehension.2 However, even though our knowledge of the world extends in many directions, to receive a clue is ‘difficult, and rare – rarer the more we know, and more difficult the more we merely want to know’. (ibid.). This listening is inherent in the most advanced learning conversations at the university. On the doctoral level, students and their supervisors claim to listen firstly not to each other but to the subject matter they are studying. They listen to each other through the phenomena being researched. Studies of such worldlistening have been conducted across the globe.3 The PhD, the highest form of education, is the deepest form of world-listening, whether listening into the fibres of societies, into the hearts and minds of people in earlier times, into the deep structures of the smallest energy quanta and into the carbon structures of minutely small structures of the body. Knowledge becomes a ‘speaking [that] is at the same time also listening.’ (Heidegger, 1982: 123). Listening of the kinds being suggested here is no mere passive contemplation. Knowledge creation is an active engagement with layers of reality that demand a keen and focused eye and ear. It amounts no less than assisting in the ‘creative evolution’ of the whole world (to draw on a phrase of Bergson’s (1998)). The university, especially through its knowledge endeavours, becomes a gateway to such layers. Through knowledge, we can travel into a certain ‘country, walking the ways of that country’ (Heidegger, 1982: 74). Here, knowledge is a way we become ‘part of the country and [belong] to it’ (ibid.: 75). Through our knowing efforts we ‘are even walking in that region, the realm that concerns us.’ (ibid.). This belonging, accordingly, is not immediate but is acquired. Through our knowing efforts, we arrive at a place where we are deeply held in the firmament of the world. If we look at universities in this way, a new sense may open of the relationship of universities and life. Universities and academic circles are still commonly felt to constitute vaults where knowledge is produced and kept closed from a wider public and society. But universities may be seen as great nests with thousands of fireflies lighting up incredible layers of reality that we have barely started to recognise. Think of all the students and researchers around the globe every day creating links with levels of social identities, cultural value and belief systems, tiny and weird microbes, blood circulation algorithms and strange properties of minerals found in parts of the geological strata where no person has ever been. Through such knowledge endeavours our reality expands and our life expands.

A lack of faith – and faith restored The will to know extends beyond the university, and its potency and success depends on its bearings with the wider society. Sustaining the will to know depends

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on support from a public that may not be familiar with the workings of the university, but still believes in the value of the institution. Currently, this belief may be waning with a growing mistrust of universities, but perhaps not irrevocably so. The matter of the relation between the university and the wider public, and how universities may contribute to the public good, has been much taken up of late in discussion about universities and their bearings on the public and common good of our societies (Nixon, 2012; Filippakou and Williams, 2015; Marginson, 2016). We see a rise in national and regional examples of how this relationship between universities and the wider public, societal and political agendas may play out, for example in the ‘African University’ (Waghid and Davids, 2018b), in Vietnamese higher education agendas (Tran and Marginson, 2018), in the politics of Latin America (Villa, 2011), in the future trajectory of the university in China (Chen and Lo, 2011) and how to access knowledge in future universities in Australia (Wheelahan, 2011). Knowledge is infusing life itself in novel ways. Believing in the will to know means to trust that this form of knowledge is worthwhile and will help to change the world for the better. Believing in the will to know of universities does not mean necessarily to understand them, still less to have ever participated in academic knowing efforts (although in many fields – such as astronomy, archaeology, social history and ecology – members of the public are actively engaging with university researchers). However, this is not a matter of trust in an ethereal idea of the university. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel points out that belief and faith ‘cannot be thought as a form, it must be thought as bound up with reality’ (1952: 39) but being bound up with reality does not imply an immediate cash value in the public support to universities – faith is never instrumental. Faith is a matter of believing in something that is both real and mysterious – something engaged with and committed to, but not fully grasped; maybe only glimpsed. We have faith in someone when we feel that they speak and act for us when we are not able to do so ourselves, and even if we do not entirely understand the language being used or the methods they are employing. Faith is established by bearing witness to situations and actions, where we can trust the other person and are willing to accord legitimacy to that person’s actions. Faith is formed by ‘inspiration’ rather than conviction (Marcel, 1952: 268). The diminution of faith in universities today may be due to such a lack of inspiration within the university. While we see academics being referred to as sources of ‘evidence’ and of legitimate knowledge, in newspapers and the media, we rarely see academics identified as sources of societal and cultural inspiration.4 If this space can be reclaimed by academics and their universities, a wider belief and faith in the institution can be restored.

The will of the people Does a people have a will? Is it a single will – or wills? Can it – or they – be developed? Might the university have a part to play here? Might there be a yet

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further question: might the idea of the will of the people and the idea of a will to know be brought together? Perhaps the will of the people can be advanced precisely through a people’s developing a will to know. The idea of a people’s will to know links to the idea of the ‘citizen scholars’ – an idea that has recently been given an uplift (Arvanitakis and Hornsby, 2016) and with good reason. Being a citizen scholar means taking direct and active societal and cultural responsibility through one’s academic work. Just one example is improving a neglected social area within a city through engaging actively with the city council and developmental organisations in the area, in order to offer relevant academic knowledge about the area, its inhabitants and knowledge of corresponding work – anywhere in the world – in city-scapes and social environments. A large range of disciplines and academic fields can come into play, including architecture, planning, decision-making, engineering, energy provision, urban sociology, cultural geography, developmental psychology and so on. While the concept of citizen scholar has a long history, not least in its connection with that of the public intellectual,5 today – with media and global reach at their disposal – academics are better placed than ever to generate societal and cultural value (Shumar and Robinson, 2018). Perhaps the way is opening for them even to establish a societal-wide pedagogic role. The citizen scholar extends the will to know to others, and thus activates the aesthetical and ethical imperative within it. Activists in ecological movements, cancer groups and those involved in protest movements draw readily upon the voices of academics and their offerings. Think tanks, parliamentary committees and independent commissions invite academics to provide authoritative evidence. Reason spreads. This is not a speaking for others but a sharing with others and, in the process, citizen scholars multiply. In this new epistemic order, alongside citizen scholars we are witnessing the rise of citizen scholars. That is to say, while, academics are more and more understanding that they possess both possibilities and responsibilities to speak to wide publics and become citizens on the basis of their scholarship, now it is within reach for citizens in the wider society to become scholars. There emerges, therefore, the potential of a powerful set of alliances of scholar citizens both within and beyond the academy. There are, of course, qualifications to this set of observations. Academics as citizen scholars have been evident at least since the mid-nineteenth century, when academics saw it as part of their role to exhibit a public presence and give public lectures. This role and sense of responsibility has, however, waxed and waned over time, not least as the power of the academics has changed within the academy. While they possessed much power, their interest in performing on the external stage withered. Now, however, as their internal power has been reduced, so their propensity to seek external support and interest has begun to take off again. However, matters are far from straightforward. In prospect is that the academic world might now advance the public sphere (to draw on an idea played up both by Habermas (2005) and by MacIntyre (1990)). But, in the twenty-first century,

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we should surely rather speak of public spheres (plural). Society has fragmented into a growing multitude of groups and communities, each with its own agendas and particular interests in gaining knowledge. The epistemic needs of a group protesting against fracking are quite different from those of the corporations who seek to quieten such groups and who attempt to identify the social provenance of the protesters. There is a further nuance here. The new digital technologies are opening the way for hitherto unanticipated degrees of reach. Many see, in these technologies, a democratisation of epistemic voice. Now, most in the world can speak to most others. In sight, for some at least, is a kind of ‘knowledge socialism’ (Peters and Besley, 2006: 59). But concerns are also raised (Mosco, 2017) as to the concentration of media power in the hands of a few multinational companies which, aided and abetted by certain powerful states, are in a position to effect massive levels of surveillance over and digital manipulation of users. ‘The will of the people’ is, accordingly, facing multiple forks simultaneously and the university is heavily implicated. In principle, the university can now reach out to multiple publics and so assist in the development of the rational society (Habermas, 1970). It can inject into the public domain ideas, knowledge and understandings so that the wider world has enhanced options for its its actions. The university can enrich the life of the world. To paraphrase Bergson (1998), knowledge can help to effect a ripening of the world. It can add to life and even renew life. Through the speaking with others, there may arise a faith in universities and the citizen scholar. Hearing people who know what it is like to feel the frustration of not-knowing, and who know how to listen and respond to stories of self-doubt, abuse and ecstacy, may create a vibrant bond between academics and the wider public. The citizen scholar would understand and respond to the identity forged in liminal spaces between gender, ethnicity and culture – and would know moral dilemmas and conflicting rationales in understanding the world. The anthropologist has been in liminal spaces and given voice to lives lived in the margins. The student of medicine has witnessed, and perhaps even taken part in, difficult choices made by experienced doctors and nurses in the emergency rooms. The philosopher has spent years tumbling down the rabbit holes of different moral systems and reasonings in order to grasp the thinking behind what may appear as incomprehensible standpoints or moral codes. The will to know is a kindred will.

Conclusion The will to know is fragile. It may dissipate both through its own internal burdens and through its wider societal conditions. Its flame is easily extinguished. If its endeavours are not appreciated and sustained by colleagues, fellow students, institutional managers and citizens, the will to know may become blunt and confused, and fade away. An intellectual field may become moribund. A researcher or group of researchers may lose this will (to know) if they are

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required to submit research applications that – perhaps because of the low status of their university – continually receives rejections. A whole university can lose heart when its future is threatened by an overbearing state. On the other hand, this will can be enlivened by good fortune, by the endorsements of others (symbolic or material) and by an encouraging institutional and societal environment. A task, therefore, for the university is to nurture this will to know, to enliven it even. Today, we see signs of academics being implicitly encouraged to play safe in trying to meet the demands of bureaucracies, state impositions and audit regimes. But we also see examples of universities and their academics and even their students reaching out to widen understandings in the general polity. The university, therefore, has epistemic choices before it. The will to know is powerful. It may reveal new worlds and strata within our natural, social and cultural reality. It may inspire academics across nations and research fields, and it may inspire too a cultural and societal will. But the will to know cannot, by itself, sustain its life: it needs a vital and fertile societal and political soil. It needs fellow growers who have faith in it, even if they cannot foresee what plant shall appear from their hands and hearts. The will to know is founded on a mutual faith between the university and its co-inquirers in the wider society.

Notes 1 ‘If thinking is our professional concern, then wisdom and wonder are our business’ (Midgley, 1989: 253). After all, the scientist ‘wants to enter into relation wth [the world], to wonder at it …’ (ibid.: 41). 2 Although he doesn’t use the phrase ‘listening to the world’, the idea seems central to Feyerabend’s book (2016), Philosophy of Nature. In his book, Feyerabend spends much time on the structure and function of myths in traditional societies and myths are a very nice example of humanity listening to the world and revealing humanity as a ‘component of nature’. However, modernity can be understood as a ‘separation of humans and their environment … no longer was the world simply there; rather, it became something alien that had to be conquered anew, both conceptually and practically’ (p. 93). 3 For instance, in Australia (Kiley and Wisker, 2009), United Kingdom (Wisker and Robinson, 2009), United States (Golde and Walker, 2006), Norway (Skagen, 2017), Sweden (Brodin, 2017) and Denmark (Bengtsen, 2011, 2016). 4 An exception would be, for instance, the UK cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, who followed a full academic, public and personal life despite being severely handicapped. 5 There is a space here to bring together three concepts, namely ‘public intellectual’, ‘public sphere’ and ‘citizen-scholars’. See, for instance, Ackerman and Coogan (2013), which does some of this work, at least for the latter two concepts.

7 LIVING WITH DARKNESS

Introduction The university and its knowing efforts have long been understood through metaphors both ocular and of light: ‘enlightenment’, ‘seeing’ the truth (or even the light), being ‘transparent’, being ‘clear’ and so on. Light and clarity are prized. But it just may be that some darkness is unavoidable and is even to be prized as well. After all, life is to be found in darkness. Darkness may even bring forth life, even if its own kind of life, restless and agitated, but perhaps with a value of its own. Something emerges out of the darkness that was impossible in the light. Of course, darkness can be overwhelming and can totally expunge life. Darkness cannot be avoided in any serious effort to understand the world. So there is no question of darkness being shunned. Rather, it has to be lived with. Accepted. Embraced even. This epistemological darkness is not only a phenomenological matter. It does not just inhere in persons. It is to be found collectively, too. A research team may fall into a darkness; it may lose its way. That is evident. But this collective darkness may be even wider. A whole discipline could be said to be in darkness; indeed, may even be placed into darkness by the forces – of the state, of other disciplines – acting on it. Yet, profundity may be harboured, and even nurtured, in darkness (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2017b). This is an important matter. The whole tenor of higher education policy and practice is that all should be transparent. Curricula should be fully specified at the outset, assessment criteria should be explicit, learning outcomes should be stated in advance (and should those not be therefore ‘learning forecasts’?), research should have demonstrable impact, students’ likely earnings and life chances are to be foretold and the actions of students should be revealed through

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learning analytics. Unless a university practice can be visible and immediately transparent, its value must be doubted if not repudiated. In this milieu, there is no allowance for darkness. And yet darkness may be a necessary condition of the life of the university.

Shrouded in darkness Knowing the world is not easy. Through study and research, the simplest plant reveals an immense complexity; becomes a universe in itself. And new insights into the world are all the time becoming possible. Through modern instrumentation, research methodologies and computing power, what was hidden may become apparent. Nevertheless, understanding the basic structure of even simple organisms may take years, even decades. Understanding wider ecologies, whether biological or social and cultural, may take centuries. Much of the world is unfathomable. Indeed, the very establishment of knowledge may paradoxically expand our ignorance, as new paths of inquiry are opened (Lukasiewicz, 1994; Dall’Alba and Bengtsen, 2019). The volume of data is such that much will forever lie unexamined, and in the dark. Epistemic struggles just have to live with darkness. Serious efforts to understand the world are situated on a threshold, between knowledge and (present-day) ignorance (Hawthorne, Rothschild and Spectre, 2016). On one side, light; and on the other side, darkness. One does not know – a large research team does not know – what may be uncovered. Research and scholarly efforts necessarily stumble in darkness before light and clarity emerge. Here, there is a venturing into strangeness, beyond transparency and predictability. A descent into unknown dimensions of a phenomenon being studied will be shrouded in darkness (Levinas, 1987, 2001). Deep understanding is a form of groping, and sometimes a clumsy and bewildering venture. Our research methods may prove fruitless, our ideas may run out and we may get stuck in the research process – and we may give in to fatigue (Levinas, 2001) or boredom (Heidegger, 2011). Further, the expectation of clarity and insight – that we often connect to knowledge – may be substituted by awe, unease and even anxiety. As Lingis (1998) observes, the darkness separating us from the unknown has its own powers and mysteries. The darkness is not just the void of knowing, but is an active, though possibly menacing, power in its own right. Universities are not merely institutions for intellectual ascent, they can also be places for torn ideas and broken thought. Universities are not fully lit up spaces for thought and thinking, and knowing in universities takes on a kind of potholing.1 One finds oneself in the dark, in a constricted space, struggling for air, feeling the sides of the passage pressing in, but one keeps going, and then, if one is lucky, one emerges into a cavernous space, even with light shining in on it, with a considerable sense of achievement.2 We want here to probe this darkness, both in the university and in its (higher) educational processes. Darkness is commonly felt to be pernicious but it may be educationally beneficial. Witness the move to learning analytics with its

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properties of surveillance in which facets of a student’s learning that are otherwise hidden from view are brought into the light. This effort in favour of transparency may have the effect, even if unintended, of deflecting students into aping presupposed conceptions of the ideal student (with regular visits to the library, interactions with other students on-line and on-time submissions of assignments). In turn, private undisclosed space for thinking may ultimately be suppressed. And with the increase of surveillance technologies, this intrusion will be likely only to expand (Smyth, 2018). The student will come to be denied his/her legitimately dark spaces. Universities and their people (managers, academics, students and others) have to live with darkness. Not all can or even should be made transparent. That all should be made explicit – the tacit understandings of a matter, the nature of the pedagogical relationship, the rules for journal publication, the conditions of an audit judgment – ultimately becomes a pernicious ideology that could suffocate the life of universities. There is value in clarity and in bringing matters into the light but there is also value in darkness. There is much life in the darkness.

Three kinds of darkness and more besides There are different forms of darkness, and three stand out. They are increasingly interlinked but each deserves its own considerations. There is, firstly, a phenomenological darkness, a darkness that envelops the inquirer, struggling to know the world, even a minute portion of it. The data just don’t make sense, either in themselves or because they are totally unexpected; and it is completely unclear how to proceed. The concepts and the theories cascade upon one, and there seems to be no way of eliciting any pattern in them. The controlling or funding body won’t agree to the publication of the report because of its sensitivity and it is unclear that any form of words will secure publication. The reviewers of a paper have come back with comments so damaging that there appears to be no way of saving the situation, even though the work is a culmination of several years of research endeavour. Multiple deadlines threaten workloads that can’t be accomplished in the time and with the resources available. In situations such as these, it is not surprising if a darkness descends. This is no mere psychological gloominess, though there may be that present. It is more a phenomenological state of affairs, in which a blockage appears. There is substance here, the matter is real. The matter is not to be dissolved by a psychological account of personal wellbeing (or lack of it). The darkness here is that of finding oneself in a cul-de-sac, with next to no lighting; and the sense of there being no way out is grounded in fact, in the way the world is. The reviews, the state’s control, the morass of theories and concepts, the presence of inexplicable data and the impossible deadlines: each has a real presence. The thinker, the inquirer, stands in a liminal place, and the darkness is a consequence of its real nature.

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There is a separate phenomenological state that is not just possible but is always present. Whether as persons in everyday living, or as university academics and students, everyone carries background presuppositions of the world. Academics and students sometimes bring this background understanding to consciousness and attend very closely to a portion of it and struggle to bring it into the light but mainly they live with an unexplored background of understandings (for example, in research methodologies or writing techniques). The presence of a taken-for-granted background has long intrigued philosophers. Polanyi (2009) pointed to the ‘tacit knowledge’ that is more than can be told; Heidegger (2000) observed the ‘ready-to-hand’ aspect of human being in which the material of the world becomes part of the furniture of one’s existence; Popper (1997) readily accepted the presence of underlying ‘frameworks’ behind our more explicit scientific understandings of the world and Taylor (1992) has continued to draw out the significance of a ‘value background’ in shaping human identity. As human beings, therefore, there is necessarily a large part of our understandings of the world that is hidden at any moment. Moreover, this darkness is itself part of our knowledge of the world and enables us to get by in this world. Of course, this background and inner darkness can be subjected to systematic inquiry – and so form what Heidegger (2000) called the ‘present-at-hand’ and this is precisely one of the functions of the university, to provide an institutional space for that kind of inquiry. Here, there is typically a floundering, a particular darkness that is associated with a total concentration on what is at hand. There comes a drawing in, a near-closure, as the attention of the inquirer focuses, struggling to draw what is hidden into the light. This struggle may even bring about ‘bodily pain’ as John Henry Newman once referred to his efforts to write, in bringing out with some discomfort what lay deeply and hidden within. Secondly, there is an institutional darkness, and this darkness lies in different places. Increasingly, universities seek to uncover their inner workings, as their activities are subject to penetrating monitoring processes. Surveillance mechanisms call for teaching and research and other activities to be made public, at least within the institution. But much remains hidden from this gaze and is thereby implicitly repudiated as of little value. Heidegger (1968) wondered if the university thinks about thinking. Does the university even have a care for thinking? That the student thinks – or might think – is outside the tacit interests that lie behind the onward march of learning analytics. That academics work many hours off-campus, with an distorted work–life ‘balance’, is invisible and therefore beyond the scope of work-monitoring exercises. That which is unimportant remains in the dark, hidden from managerial view and concern. But such darkness presents opportunities for agency. In these invisible zones, subversive thoughts and even actions (Rolfe, 2013) may emerge. And, lastly, there is a darkness in the state–university relationship. Each nation has its own orientation towards its universities but, characteristically, universities are framed within certain boundaries. These boundaries are especially tight and are tightening in some countries, as the state wields its powers. In some

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jurisdictions, both institutional autonomy and academic freedom are drawn in and dissent or even just outspokenness is suppressed. In such milieux, darkness descends. Academics are put on trial or publicly arraigned and so thoughts are not voiced, and action is hidden. Social media and the internet generally become both a path of freedom but at the same time expose one to risk. Academic life takes on a clandestine character. These three forms of darkness intermingle, as the forces of universities as institutions and of the state have their effects on academic life. The ratio between light and dark in academic life is always changing. Chile, for example, witnessed an extraordinary coming into the light at all levels, when the dictatorship fell away in 1990, and where its universities have played a significant part in the construction of its democracy (Guzmán-Valenzuela and Barnett, 2013). But other juxtapositions can be seen beyond that of lightness and darkness. Darkness in academic life is simultaneously both fact and value. Real darkness may be present, when undue reliance is placed on management data that cannot (yet) reveal inner thoughts and feelings (and thankfully so); and it is present when academics and students are incarcerated in the wake of their dissent. But there is also a significant value element here. Situations are felt to be dark in the context of certain kinds of values that, for instance, favour freedom and nonconformity. To value the humanities and to see one’s intellectual home there in a university that sees little – if any – value in the humanities can legitimately be felt to be a situation of darkness. It may be difficult even to be seen reading a book in such a milieu: having no definite outcome or impact, the act becomes one of hidden subversion. And so the matter of darkness is an extraordinary conjunction of real events and forces, of values, of hopes, of felt injustices and imagined possibilities; and all working at different levels of academic life. There is both state suppression and an individual’s will towards her or his own inner darkness. To try to know the world is sometimes to be plunged into darkness but it is also paradoxically to see matters more clearly. The writings from prison of academics such as Gramsci and Bonhoeffer3 are testimony to the human spirit to yearn and to strive for understandings, however much darkness and however little chance there may be of those efforts seeing the light of day.

Working through the darkness The life of darkness does not align well with the systemic logic of the administrative infrastructure at universities and the implied rational and linear student learning approaches. The darkness stands for a wilder and more chaotic side of a will to know and how our knowing efforts are tangled with strong forces not only of an intellectual and conceptual nature but with emotions and personal dependency. Knowledge and learning processes at the university are in constant interaction with feelings and even desires (Cotterall, 2013). We tend to ignore these and pretend such responses are not part of our academic lives and work. When we

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suppress desires, it creates a darkness around them – a field of dark power – where they risk becoming disruptive and even dangerous to our academic communities and work alliances. The implications include bullying and abuse, toxic silences, absence, cruelty and marginalising in a group project experience (Wisker, Robinson and Bengtsen, 2017). Knowledge creation processes become twisted and suddenly break down due to humiliations, hierarchical experiences and isolation. But, for the most part, such presences go not merely unremarked but unnoticed. They lie hidden. At the heart of our academic activities, and in the very process of thinking, speaking and writing, the darkness is inherent – it is the space into which we move in a hope of finding new light. Sometimes we enter into this darkness willingly, and through it we traverse the conceptual landscape of language. Research is often directed by this process of ‘writing in the dark’ (van Manen, 2016). One does not know how to proceed but one somehow proceeds nonetheless. At times, one simply does not how to go on. There is just a dark void in front. Within the darkness we find an ‘Other life’, perhaps even ‘life’s Other’. Far from eroding knowledge, the darkness that researchers and students encounter in the crevices of knowledge may be more what holds it together. There is a dark binding force within knowledge, a form of life that is a central part of knowledge creation, but unknown. There is a darkness on the other side of knowledge, as knowledge’s Other (Levinas, 1987, 2001).4 This darkness is not an opposition to light, where things vanish from sight, but refers to an existence that possesses a positive aspect. This darkness constitutes a ‘nocturnal space’, which is not empty, but is a presence ‘full of the nothingness of everything’ (Vasseleu, 2005: 84). It is the darkness of a deep absence, where existence imposes itself on those moments where nothing seems to be working. Just this state is encountered when we feel that we have reached a dead end and there is no point of pursuing an inquiry any further. Also, this happens on the institutional level when a department is closed and an associated research programme is dissolved. Then, the air is extinguished from that work, its researchers being left with pure negation. However, such dead ends may lead to entirely new beginnings, breakthroughs and opportunities never imagined. The negation may herald a rebirth. The darkness of knowledge arrives at a moment not so much of thoughtlessness but rather of incomprehension. At such a moment, one is nonplussed. One does not know what to think, but one also does not know how to think. Darkness overwhelms the would-be thinker. Knowledge becomes insufficient and one cannot progress beyond a void. One is left with no cognitive resources; with nothing as a base on which to proceed.

The fatigue of darkness The darkness that presents itself in efforts seriously to understand a matter may lead to a fatigue, which presents itself in thought and being as a ‘stiffening,

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a numbness, a way of curling up into oneself’ (Levinas, 2001: 18). Such fatigue occurs when knowledge becomes paralysed and frozen. At such a moment, our knowing efforts may start to lessen and even to give up. Adrenalin runs out and we have no more energy to try to understand; and, at such a point, the would-be thinker may feel worn out and turn to thoughts of another way of life. The temporary loss of momentum is a well-known experience to many students and researchers. Suddenly, the research project or student assignment no longer makes sense – and the interest and academic drive fall away. Heidegger drew attention to the presence of boredom, where we slide off the loop of active reasoning and activity and become faced with ‘the presence of the nothing’ (Heidegger, 2011: 51). Heidegger describes boredom as a drifting here and there, restless and homeless, in the ‘abysses of our existence like a muffling fog’ (ibid.: 50) and leaves us with a remarkable indifference such that nothing matters and no thought is worthwhile. This is an unsettling experience, where there is nothing to hold on to. The boredom is utter darkness. It is not simply a state of not-knowing, as in not knowing yet, but it is rather a state of unknowing, of the dissolution of knowledge altogether. However, darkness is a prerequisite for knowledge creation. It is a necessary void for knowledge even to fall into, and from which to remerge transformed. As Nietzsche (2003) observes, with his notion of the ‘pathos of distance’, there must be a space between our present state of thought and what we may grow into. Dall’Alba and Bengtsen (2019) link the darkness of learning and dark knowledge to the notion of dark matter in astrophysics, where dark energy can be seen as binding the universe together. So it is with knowledge – there is a living darkness stirring our knowing efforts. Knowledge is a response to darkness.

Thresholds It is alien and strange not to know one’s own thoughts, and not to know oneself. However, utter darkness goes even deeper and includes not knowing what knowledge is. To stand at this threshold is not merely about struggling to see through a difficult and challenging problem. It even goes beyond the inability to locate the particular difficulty. Knowledge itself becomes unsettling. Knowledge assumes its own dark life and becomes other to the knower. Knower and knowledge are torn apart. At such a threshold, one cannot see over the edge. One does not know what awaits. This is a common situation in the university. The researcher does not know what she or he might find at the outset of a project, and what emerges may be unsettling. The student hesitates to throw herself forward into a new learning situation. The doctoral student fears conducting the first consultation, with its unknown challenges. There is understandable fear here even if, just like the bungee jumper, one is normally held to some extent by disciplinary traditions and by the pedagogical situation. It will not be risk-free but there is little danger

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of cataclysmic danger. But still there is trepidation at reaching beyond any such threshold. Reaching beyond an epistemic threshold requires great effort, not least because there can be no ratcheting back to the previous epistemic and ontological space that the knower inhabited. The knower is her or himself changed in the process. This is a more fundamental change than R S Peters (1970) implied in speaking of a changed ‘cognitive perspective’, for the would-be knower’s actual being is at stake. Crossing a threshold requires knowledge itself to transform human being as such. Deep and transformative learning occurs when key conceptual thresholds are being crossed (Kiley and Wisker, 2009). Roaming in the darkness and searching so as to be able to cross the threshold makes one feel stuck, realising there is ‘something’ that we need to understand but cannot quite grasp. The concept of threshold points to opening a new and previously inaccessible way of understanding. As a consequence of ‘comprehending a threshold concept there may be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view’ (Land, Meyer, and Smith, 2008: 66–67). Here, knowledge is understood in both an epistemic and ontological sense: it becomes not merely a way of interpreting life and the world, but a bringer – or staller – of life and living. Not being able to cross the conceptual threshold is to be in a liminal space (Savin-Baden, 2008). Liminal spaces are suspended states and serve a transformative function, as someone moves from one knowing state or position to another. When knowledge engages with such liminal spaces it may ‘involve choice but in the case of troublesome spaces they are often more likely to be “stuck places”’ (Savin-Baden, 2008: 81). Such liminal knowledge spaces may feel ‘alien and counter intuitive’ and often connected to ‘a feeling of confusion’, ‘disjunction’ and ‘feeling fragmented’ (ibid.). Indeed, the academic may not only experience confusion in her knowing efforts, but a deeper sense of discomfort and unsettlement. Crossing a ‘threshold for thought’ is linked to releasing ‘the creative and critical thinking energies of our students’, so empowering them to ‘transform their own lives and reshape society’ (Arvanitakis and Hornsby, 2018: 89–90). While the idea of threshold crossing has mainly focused on the individual’s learning journey, Arvanitakis and Hornsby extend the threshold crossing to include citizenship and societal transformation. The threshold is in the world. Not only the individual’s world, but the wider world, our shared world: the threshold is of the world. The new insight gained through academic work is always bound up with a certain outlook on our social, political and spiritual reality. Knowledge-provoked change does not stick to the individual only but acts as socio-ontological glue. The idea of a threshold conjures a sense of an in-between. To understand is to ‘traverse a middle’ (Heidegger, 2001: 199) where thought and world become intimately connected. A threshold in knowledge is not something that should be crossed or dissolved, but rather dwelt upon. For Heidegger, at a threshold, world and knowledge open to each other:

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The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. (Heidegger, 2001: 201) Just as there is life in the darkness, there is life at the threshold, between darkness and light. Understanding, in its effort to know, has the power to disclose and penetrate other and more nuanced forms of life while being at the threshold. At the threshold of understanding, knowledge assumes a certain state of tension and attention, which makes it possible to enter hidden layers of the world and to achieve forms of knowledge that are themselves halfway-thoughts and inbetween-thinking. This is seen in student assignments, or research papers, which are at the same time highly original but without the ability to connect the original thoughts to a vocabulary for outsiders (the general reader). And it is seen when academics work in the in-between spaces across disciplines and become caught up in more, or even several, paradigms of understanding at the same time. By thinking from the threshold, an awareness may heighten of matters not fitting into the dominant categories within the disciplines. Here, one starts to grasp how the not-fitting illuminates underlying societal issues and struggles. From the threshold, new attunements may emerge, say, of refugees caught in-the-middle of political geographies and in the grey zones of different, conflicting, legal systems. Having several, and simultaneously active, cultural identities may be sensed from the in-between-ness of knowledge.

Surge of light Knowledge responds to and builds on previous knowledge, just as much academic work takes the form of editing and reworking earlier work. At conferences, offerings may be critically examined from differently angles so as to produce new knowledge by integrating and synthesising the multiplicity of complementing perspectives. There is an important internal dimension at work here, whereby knowledge refers to knowledge. Knowledge claims are characteristically ripostes to existing knowledge. There is, therefore, a light within knowledge but there is also a light that comes from outside knowledge. What is, then, this external light? The world is that light. Knowledge is lit by the world. Knowledge offers not a lighting of the world, but is itself lit by the world. Here, the world presses itself upon us and calls for a response. Like a surge of light, we are called upon to respond through knowledge. Drawing on Heidegger (2000: 171), knowledge is ‘illuminated’ by its ‘worldhood’ nature. Through knowledge our very existing (perhaps even existence) is ‘cleared’. Knowledge does not rise above the world, or detach itself

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from the world, but becomes itself the very clearing of the world (ibid.). To know is to be embraced by the light of the world. However, letting oneself become embraced by the world, and to stare into a void beyond one’s present understanding can be overwhelming. Gazing deeply into events, structures, phenomena and organisms may be daunting, not least because the pull of the dominant ways of seeing the world (in a discipline, in a research group, in one’s own family) is usually strong. We hear about this in Plato’s allegory of the darkness in the cave (in his Republic), where we learn how difficult it can be to emerge into lit spaces never before encountered. Here, being en-lightened entails an encountering of new forms of light unexpected and unprepared for. In Plato, the light is not a soothing and redeeming light, but a light that may inflict ‘pain’ upon us ‘because of the dazzle and glitter of the light’ (Plato, 2002: 748). Some, fearful of the light – of a new paradigm, a new theory, a new professional practice – may choose to remain in darkness. Knowledge is not in control of the light: instead of taking it in in a measured way, the light overflows us and our eyes become ‘filled with its beams’ (Plato, 2002: 748). It can burst upon the would-be knower. The Platonic light does not symbolise the triumph of rational thought and man’s control over his knowing endeavours. Instead, it brings the presence of ‘exteriority’ (Levinas, 1998: 23); a life force completely different, or even alien, and it may be an encounter we never sought or desired before we were pulled into its presence. Academic knowledge may become too clean, untainted and even uncorrupted by the world it tries to engage with. Despite our best efforts, we may still be too much in the distance to really know the world. With audits, rankings and citation indices hovering, and an overburdened day, we are nudged towards risk-free endeavours in our knowing efforts. Knowledge becomes not merely performative but takes on a strangely glassy quality. Academic life in general skims over the surfaces of cognitive encounters. (Here, surely, is an inkling in fathoming the quiescence of academic life in which, like ships passing each other by, academic positions decline to engage with each other – chapter five.) Should we have stayed longer with the frustrated and depressed student we interviewed as part of our research project? Perhaps there was a deeper knowledge to be gained, and a stronger bond to be established. Did we spend enough time by the mountain slope, not only to bring back the geological samples needed, but also to understand their home in the mountains, and the tectonic pressure unto them down through the eons? Have we exposed our argument enough to our colleagues and to other stakeholders part of the study? Have we let others explore our knowledge or did we try to shield it from them? Was there sufficient life in these encounters? We are taken hostage (Levinas, 1998) by the world through knowledge. The issue, the data, the new pattern just won’t let us go. Knowledge is the state of being a hostage. The obsession with knowledge is like ‘a battering-ram, it is the power to break through the limits of culture, body, and race.’ (p. 122). Knowledge is the ‘gravity in being’, and the ‘impossibility of evading [it] becomes a power’ where,

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through knowledge, the academic ‘bears the gravity of the world … .’ (Levinas, 1998: 123). After centuries of academic work and institutional growth, we may be still underestimating knowledge. We ignore a deep truth – that knowledge is an obsession (Levinas, 2000), and that, through it, we may become obsessed with the world till the point that we cannot let it go. Knowledge is obsession and being obsessed by and with life. And then we are pulled into a necessarily dark space. We stumble, not sure whether to go this way or that. The journal papers are works of fiction, pretending that a study moved steadily in an orderly and progressive fashion. More likely is it that the research group ran into dead ends, and was obliged to retract its steps, to try the procedure again, to look again, to revisit the data, to rewrite the methodological section of the paper. And if one is lucky, one finds a rich seam that can be mined with some confidence, if with much patience, even in the dark. A whole research programme (Lakatos, 1999) may emerge or a sequence of books, going ever-more deeply into the matter at hand. But one presses on, stumbles on even, committed to the project and with a multiple sense of responsibility – to oneself, to the material, to definite others (perhaps in the research team or the research council) and even to the wider society.

Conclusion: knowledge as the mystery of life Living with darkness in our knowing efforts is a necessary condition in fathoming the mystery of the life of the world. Knowledge does not emerge in neat packages but is, to a significant extent, a matter of difficult human processes. It involves, too, the epistemic dynamism characteristic of the individual learner, the institutional and curricular context and the societal and cultural setting. But, then, knowledge is surrounded with a penumbra of darknesses, which separate the known from the mysterious. Mystery is not an abstract and distant reality, but is present in knowledge creation. Knowledge creation makes the mystery tangible and gives it form, shape and a voice. Sometimes our knowledge creations surprise us and even frighten us. Here, the darkness of knowing is a reminder that knowledge and truth can ‘dazzle and wound us as a bright light does when we turn our eyes full on it’ (Marcel, 2001: 63). The darkness offers the prospect of a light opening, even though it be an unfamiliar and strange light. Our account here of epistemological darkness has been somewhat abstract but, as we have intimated on several occasions in this chapter, the phenomenon has severe implications for teaching and learning, and for research. Learning through hazy and dim perplexity and to be able to endure intellectual uncertainty are crucial in growing towards wisdom. Grappling with difficult questions and problems, whether they be of theoretical or practical nature, is an ability that is central in knowledge creation. The intellectual groping may continue over time and doesn’t end just when an assignment is handed in, or a paper

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deadline falls. Working in dimly lit intellectual spaces is necessary in listening to and probing deeply into the unknown, and in bringing forth what may be lurking there. And there must remain in darkness much that is of value in institutional life, beyond the realm of audit and surveillance. We have used darkness to describe where academic understanding reaches its boundaries and simply runs out of intellectual signposts. Darkness reigns at the borders of the disciplines and beyond the familiar and customary furrows in thinking and understanding. Trying to know, but without any immediate success, is to gaze into a darkness of the unknown. To move into a threshold between the known and the unknown requires courage, endurance and an open mind and heart. Welcoming and living at ease with what is unfamiliar and sometimes unsettling is not only a response to an ever-present darkness but may also open to a new life, even for humanity and the whole world.

Notes 1 The metaphor of potholing also appears in the paper ‘Confronting the dark side of higher education’ (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2017b). There, potholing is used to explain ways of thinking and learning in higher education challenged by darkness. 2 The metaphors of light and darkness (day and night) are as old as the foundations of philosophy as a discipline. Not only do we find the metaphor of light in the central allegory of the cave applied by Plato (2002) in his description of knowledge and truth but we also find the metaphors in the opening passages of Parmenides’ (2000) poem ‘On Nature’, arguably the first written text to be categorised as a work of philosophy. 3 See e.g. Gramsci (2005); Bonhoeffer (2017). 4 The darkness of knowledge has been vividly termed a ‘groping’ (Levinas, 2003), a blindfolded play of existence, which plays ‘itself out even if there were nothing’ (Levinas, 2001: 59). This darkness can be akin to the darkness of the night where nothing is real (Lingis, 1998), and it is a presence without boundaries, frontiers or limits – it is a ‘nocturnal vigilance’ (Lingis, 1998: 11).

8 EDIFYING KNOWLEDGE

Introduction Coming into a satisfactory relationship with knowledge in a university offers – or should offer – a process of personal improvement. This is an enduring idea. For the Greeks, the encounter with ‘theoria’ or wisdom was crucial to the formation of a person’s character (Aristotle, 2014). And in a long-standing tradition in continental Europe, from Kant (2015) through Humboldt and the idea of Bildung, the sense emerged that knowledge creation is inextricably linked to cultural and personal growth (Karlsohn, 2018). In England, from the mid-nineteenth century, the idea emerged too – and inspired especially by John Henry Newman (2015) – that a liberal education imparted a ‘philosophical outlook’ that would carry a person through life. More recently, it has been suggested that efforts to understand the world can help to develop epistemic ‘virtues’ (MacIntyre, 1985), to open a personal and societal path to ‘emancipation’ (Habermas, 1978: 371) and be enhanced through an orientation of ‘care’, sensitive to interdependence in the world (Noddings, 2018: 230–237). There should be nothing remarkable about these ideas about the power of knowledge to have transforming effects on individuals, but under certain conditions. In personal life, through vigour and rigour in our knowing efforts, experiences of wonder towards the world may result, and in any field of endeavour. A university, accordingly, is a space not only to accumulate knowledge and even from which to apply knowledge. It is, too, a space in which the inquirer can come into a new relationship with the world. And now this is possible for wider communities, as the university reaches out to them. The university has it in its reach to be universally edifying.

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What is ‘higher’ about higher education? The very term ‘higher education’ has come to possess two sets of meanings. On the one hand, the term ‘higher education’ – or its equivalent in other languages – refers to a national system (of higher education). We might speak, for instance, of ‘higher education in the USA’ or of ‘higher education in China’. We might even talk of students in the world of higher education, having in mind the two hundred million or so of students in higher education institutions. ‘Higher education’ has an institutional meaning and conjures matters of large-scale policy making and financing and possibly stratification across institutions. On the other hand, the phrase ‘higher education’ can be used to refer to the educational processes that students undergo. Here, attention is on the kind of education on offer in universities and colleges. What forms of knowledge and what skills is it imparting and are they helpful, to the students and to the larger world? What is higher about this form of education? This way of coming at the matter of ‘higher education’ opens quickly to considerations of the student experience and to issues of teaching, curricula and learning. Characteristically, these two interpretations of higher education are held separately, marking two territories, with the first characteristically occupied by managers, policy framers, politicians and economists who speak of higher education systems, and the second occupied by those with more directly educational interests, for whom higher education is a matter of the educational development of individual students. A question that arises here, therefore, is this: can there be any contiguity between these two discursive fields? The idea of knowledge-as-edifying might just begin to provide such a link. Within the educational sense of ‘higher education’, two traditions have stood out for more than one hundred and fifty years: the continental European of Bildung and the Anglo-Saxon idea of liberal education. In both traditions, a number of conditions attach to what counts as ‘higher education’.1 Such educational processes should: (i) Be played out against a horizon of research and scholarship. (This does not mean that every teacher has to be a researcher.) (ii) Recognise that every knowledge claim is contestable and could be otherwise. All claims are in dispute and may undergo transformation. The student is obliged to recognise the double implication, both that the knowledge claims she encounters should be held in some abeyance and her own claims as well: ‘I could well be wrong’. Higher education is a matter of utter provisionality. (iii) Afford students considerable academic freedom, to come at matters in their own way and come to their own judgements; to be authentic. (iv) Contain high levels of criticality, in which students are expected to display their powers of critical thought, judgement and evaluation, to take on appropriate dispositions (of vigilance, courage and will and so forth).

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(v) Enable students to reach high levels of insight into the modes of thought and practice in which they are interested. This is not a matter of mere ‘metacognitive’ processes at work but is an entry into a different mode of being. The student not only comes to stand differently to the world but is enabled to stand off from the world and so acquire a wisdom towards the world. This higher education comes to be embodied in the student as a person. This is why, when matters have gone well, students can be heard to say as they leave their university (say, after a degree ceremony, as tutor and parents are introduced to each other): ‘being here has changed my life’. (vi) Possess a liveliness. There can be no taken-for-grantedness in higher education and, therefore, no inert understandings among students. The student is lifted onto a plane of self-authorship.2 This can fairly be described as a form of emancipation, in that the student is freed from dependency on frameworks that come her way. An education of this kind is more than a spelling out of the meaning of ‘higher education’ for it will be bound to be edifying. Through such an education, a student is likely to develop virtues such as tolerance, carefulness, balance, respect for persons and for the world, proper self-regard and so forth. Crudely, this kind of higher education will help to develop a student’s character. All of this may be the fruits of a proper encounter with knowledge, with efforts to get on the inside of a form of thought or complex practice (medicine or engineering). Such an education literally extends life itself (there is evidence to the effect that graduates live longer, not least since they are likely to have a concern and a care for their own health); for some, it will seem as if life itself changes.

Multiply edifying To follow Bergson (1998) there is a vitality embedded within knowing efforts. Bergson speaks of the ‘ripeness’ of knowledge as the product of fermentation of ideas and studies. In this way, knowledge may be seen as the yeast of higher education. It catalyses processes of learning, development and personal growth that we see in students, opening up an organic dimension of a higher education. On the social level, this ripeness of knowledge is connected to the vitality of societies and cultures. Aristotle (2014) claims that knowledge, virtue and judgment are part of the same intellectual-social fibre, which he terms ‘justice’. Universities are like hothouses, where wild thoughts and entangled forms of knowledge fertilise the higher-education soil. Universities are the terroir of knowledge; its homeland. And so emerges a sense that universities as institutions may be educationally edifying. Their openness, intellectual freedom, spirit of criticality, cosmopolitanism and discursive liveliness offer a space that is both bounded and open. The university imparts educational value, above and beyond the student’s programme of study. We (still) await research that disentangles the educational benefits of

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a student’s programme of study on the one hand and the wider environment offered by the host university on the other hand.3 It can sensibly be hypothesised that both spaces – the institutional and the programme of studies – come into play in the student’s flourishing. But then, given that universities are more or less inter-connected – in theory, at least, there is free trade between them intellectually and culturally – universities as systems may also be understood to have edifying effects.4 It is hardly surprising, then, that populist regimes and dictators characteristically seek substantially to clip the wings of universities and often much more besides. Whole higher education systems, then, can be edifying for society. The edifying properties of higher education spread out, from programme of study to the host institution to a system of higher education and to the whole world. This higher education produces a collective spirit with a global identity. Flows of academics and students may be charted and, even though these movements produce challenges of personal identity, there are the makings here of a global community that has a separateness from any state. No wonder that those of a totalitarian persuasion eye their universities with a wary and even a vengeful eye.

Knowledge as personal and cultural growth It is impossible fully to understand the purpose of the university without including the matter of personal growth. Knowledge is the catalyst of this growth; this edification. There is an irreversibility in this edification, there being no ratcheting back once a new hold on the world has been attained. This is no jejune point, but on the contrary alludes to what is being forgotten in the commodification and politicisation of knowledge. The knowing effort has an inherent openness to the world, a critical awareness of one’s own stand and a common reach. This understanding of the subtle power of higher education is being lost today. Universities today are challenged on their conception of knowledge if it cannot be shown to have any immediate effect or impact in a wider context. An occlusion is emerging, in which the connections between knowledge, culture and personal development are being lost from sight. In the process, universities are discarding their knowledge heritage, built over a millennium. Newman (2015) suggested that the purpose of the university is to provide a kind of encounter with knowledge that offers an ‘ascent’ for the mind, to lift it above and beyond the dealings of everyday society. For him, knowledge should be an inspiration (p. 100) to the society and lead to a state of mind ‘which takes a view of things’. This was a driving impetus of the university, to ensure that knowledge would become ‘impregnated by reason’, with reason being seen as ‘the principle of that intrinsic fecundity of knowledge’ (Newman, 2015: 83). There is, thus, a bond between knowledge and thinking (or reason): they open themselves to each other and, together, they affirm the principle of life.5 Newman underlined that knowledge at the university was no mere practical or technological tool: there is a ‘dignity in knowledge’ (Newman, 2015: 84).

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This dignity affects both knowers and their knowing efforts, and even the entire institution. It may be tempting to believe that the institution and its higher education programmes define and determine the shape and character of knowledge. Newman, however, saw it differently: it is knowledge that has the power to affect learning programmes, curricula, teachers and students. The power comes from knowledge and one’s knowing efforts, not the other way around. This view contrasts with the contemporary sense of knowledge as something to be shaped and formed, instead of seeing it as shaping and forming. The point here is that knowledge ‘ever leads to something beyond itself, which therefore is its end, and the cause why it is desirable’ (Newman, 2015: 85). Knowledge spills over. There is more knowledge than we need for instrumental and pragmatic purposes for there is an ‘abundancy’ in knowledge (Feyerabend, 1999). Knowledge is not merely a power we draw on when we wish to solve a specific problem or seek an answer to a difficult question. Rather, it brings the whole world close to us and in ways that we did not necessarily even wish for. Sometimes, knowledge descends upon us unbidden and it may overtake us with its worrying effect or its beauty and bring us into unwilling knowing. Newman dubbed education at the university to be a ‘higher word’ (p. 84) and he considered that universities should strive at achieving ‘knowledge as being education’ without there being any difference between the two (Newman, 2015: 84 – our italics). Where, today, we often expect to see knowledge as a product of a certain higher education programme or degree, with Newman it is quite the other way around – that a truly higher education would be the outcome of a certain way of engaging with knowledge. This understanding challenges the present state of affairs in which, when planning a higher education course, there is a tacit injunction to start by reflecting on the learning goals and intended outcomes and then deciding on what is to be learned. This other perspective starts by asking a fundamental question: what is it, in the world, that students should especially gain from? This approach possesses humility before the world, since it assumes that the educative process will be catalysed by an engagement with the world, instead of merely seeing education as a means of furthering the growth of capital of some kind. On Newman’s view, a university encounter with knowledge reflects a deep interest in the world – epistemically certainly, but also societally and ethically. There is life enhancement in giving in to the world.

Knowledge as moral sentiment On the Humboldtian and Kantian perspective, knowledge possesses a power that induces people to gravitate towards each other and binds together societies in a shared understanding. It provides a basis for a world citizenship built on a life of reason. Immanuel Kant (2015) argued that knowledge is the result of a practical reason inextricably linked to morality, and that a ‘moral sentiment’ springs from our

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practical reason (or thinking). To Kant, reason and knowledge are moral drivers connecting people as a societal glue. For him, practical reason extended far beyond interpersonal connections and includes wider organic and even cosmic connections. Practical reason extends our connection ‘into an unbounded magnitude with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems’ and moreover into ‘the unbounded times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their duration’. (Kant, 2015: 129). It is by trying to know the world, ourselves and each other that we open up and welcome any strangeness and otherness we encounter. In a contemporary interpretation of the Humboldtian conception of knowledge, Shumar and Robinson (2018) have suggested that knowledge as personal and social formation and edification includes a crucial imaginary aspect. There can be no solitary knowers: knowledge as imagination connects cultures and people. We try to understand another culture in order to connect with it, and vice-versa, and to let the values of that culture merge with our own. To inquire after knowledge, accordingly, is a gift-giving, an exchanging of cultural identity. Knowledge is the connection. In a similar vein, Thomas Karlsohn (2018) points out that university thinking as formation (Bildung) ties us together not only with other societies and cultures, but also, historically, with earlier times. Knowledge carries within it a temporal imagination connecting us to our trans-temporal humanity. In question here is the fundamental matter of the relationship between reason and sheer being in the world. This was a matter that especially concerned Heidegger, for whom the ‘principle of reason’ turned precisely on being as such: ‘The principle of reason is … not a statement about reason, but about beings … ’ (1998: 44). Why so? Because ‘to being there belongs something like ground/reason. Being is akin to grounds, it is ground-like’ (p. 49). For Heidegger, therefore, we can sensibly talk of being only when we also allow in reason. In the contemporary era, and in relation to education, David Bakhurst (2011) has continued in this vein in suggesting that education be understood as a space of reason. We are in sympathy with this line of thought but it could go further. Two extensions are required, at least so far as knowledge and the university are concerned. Firstly, there are no single reasons, no single grounds. A reason has its place, its own grounds – its own legitimacy indeed – in the company of other reasons. And any such cluster of reasons finds their legitimacy not just through a process of reasoning but more especially through a process of argument. Arguments lie within a text but also, and crucially, between texts. Academic reason is actually a process of reasoning that involves the supplying and the critiquing of arguments and the proffering of further arguments. Accordingly, in the context of the university, the principle of reason has to be understood as the principle of argument. And argument is the foundation of what it is to be part of a university: it is central to what it is to be a university. What is in question here, therefore, is the very life of the university. The second point here is that universities are major institutions caught in the interplay of states, trans-national bodies, governmental agencies, ideologies and

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so forth. Such agencies bend truth. Note that ideologies do not depart from truth; to the contrary, they depend on truth. They are tacit sets of truth claims; it’s just that they are a little economical with the truth. Accordingly, there are nice interplays between different kinds of reasoning, within and beyond the university. Reasoning does not speak for itself. There is a further matter here about universities as institutions of truth. When they absorb and integrate political agendas, they ‘reproduce not only specific ideologies, but also the habit of considering all truth-seeking and truth-speaking activity as arbitrary and partisan’ (Rider, 2018: 28). This is not to suggest that universities should withdraw from the world, fearful of becoming tainted with outside ideas and agendas. Instead, it is about keeping knowledge critically open and dialogically engaged with the world. Struggle and power make for a heady combination, not least when the university becomes a social actor. Student power has been evident, from the Middle Ages – in town and gown riots – through the formation of the Cordoba protocol6 in early-twentieth-century Argentina, in which student action led to an early manifesto for academic autonomy. To Habermas, such struggles should be seen as a form of democratic and public action: ‘[r]adical students have become the backbone of an extra-parliamentary opposition’, who seek ‘new forms of organization in clubs and informal centres and a social basis wider than the university.’ (Habermas, 1987: 18) We see just this across much of the world, where – as in Chile – student radicalism has become an agentic force for social and political reform, even if it occasionally provokes the state to show itself in violent counter-measures.

Problems with democracy In linking knowledge to edification through political action within universities, there ‘is a need to return to universities’ democratic roots’, and that this ‘is both a moral and practical imperative that points up the responsibility of academics to protect and promote not just their own freedom but that of their students too.’ (Macfarlane, 2017: 115). If universities are to help in promoting democracy in the wider society, the democracy within a university, between its members, should be promoted too. The problem is that, despite increasing pleas to connect higher education with democracy,7 it is unclear just how this link is to be made. Might democracy come into play in equal measure across all disciplines and professional fields? Is it that there are links to be made with the wider polity or is the concept of democracy being drawn on in a restricted sense? The matter is often presented in rather thin ways, the idea of democracy being largely called upon to provide a veneer of significance. There is here a matter that is seldom confronted head-on. Claims to know and to provide warrant for such claims can never be fully democratic. Claims to know and warrants to know – and to critique those claims and warrants – require a certain degree of competence. The Nobel prize winner in physics does

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not have the competence to judge undergraduate work in history. So drawing on the concept of democracy in the context of the university has to be treated with caution. Epistemic communities are bound up with legitimacy: in practice, legitimacy in being a member of such a community is bestowed sparingly. A problem here is that of a conflation of agendas. They include a keenness to ensure that knowledge is distributed widely across society; to grant respect to all claims to knowledge; to provide equal freedoms and rights to university members (both staff and students); to make access to higher education as wide as possible and so increase life chances across society; to avoid undue power in knowledge settings and to see students as ‘co-producers’; to suggest that universities as organisations should be democratic; to see universities being much more open to the public (whether in person or at a distance); and to see a well-functioning higher education system as fundamental to a healthy democracy. The term ‘democracy’, accordingly, is being used to do duty for many possibilities in and around higher education and is being overstretched. We cannot go into these matters here, save to observe that there is a tension between higher education and its edifying properties on the one hand and democracy on the other hand. Knowledge as such deserves respect, and this basic consideration can cut across some otherwise legitimate interests in democracy. Even within the academy, we see knowledge being treated without respect, without dignity. Student assignments may be only skimmed through before being accorded a mark that may affect life chances, and journal papers are sometimes written and published without even being read and without being acknowledged. Extra-curricular initiatives with external partners fall flat, through not receiving formal institutional support, which means that the strong connections to the social, cultural and even political world created in such work lose their power and momentum.

Knowledge as critical engagement The roots of knowledge go deep, not only historically but societally and culturally. At the heart of education lies a belief that each student may develop her or his character. The philosophical way of putting the matter is to suggest that there is, or should be, a tight connection between a person’s education and the formation of virtue or (more commonly now) of virtues. As far back as Aristotle (2014), virtues were understood to be ‘of two kinds: that of the intellect and that of character.’ (Aristotle, 2014: 23). ‘For Aristotle, ‘virtue’ ... is a state involving rational choice, consisting in a mean relative to us and determined by reason’ (2014: 31). The terms – knowledge, knowing and reason – are linked not merely to a mental or cognitive space, and not only to individuals. To Aristotle, knowledge is virtuous because it sustains societies for our ‘fellow-citizen[s]’ (Aristotle, 2014: 81 – our italics). Knowledge is never pursued for its own end. Even if its professional, practical or societal use is not immediately clear, the striving for knowledge constitutes

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bonds between humanity and the world. Deeply embedded within the pursuit of knowledge is the ‘virtue of engagement’, which is fundamentally ‘about a disposition to share, or seek the application of, discipline-based or professional knowledge for wider public education or benefit.’ (Macfarlane, 2007: 114). This engagement constitutes ‘the vitality of academic life’ (ibid.: 161) without which universities would wither and become stale. The university is unique in its sense of civic space. Certainly, other institutions can fairly claim to be part of the civic sphere. Local authorities and charities provide civic services to peoples in communities. Historical and national museums convey and protect certain narratives of events, persons and places that ensure a collective identity. Galleries and museums display works that interpret existential conditions and collective emotions. Religious institutions guide their members towards spiritual balance and growth. However, the university is the only institution that systematically engages its members in critical reflection and action concerning their relation to citizens, cultures and lifeforms. Jon Nixon believes that we might address these matters head-on by revisiting the idea of universities as contributing to the formation of civic spaces. For a civic space to exist, ‘those who inhabit them [should] possess certain moral dispositions and share a sense of moral purposefulness’ (Nixon, 2008: 8). In this way, universities can become institutions that organise purposeful associations with the world and fellow citizens, and so come to ‘constitute a kind of buffer zone between the crude forces of personal self-interest and the impersonal interests of the state.’ (p. 129) It is evident, then, that at the heart of knowledge, there lies a critical engagement on both the personal and societal levels. ‘Am I in the right here?’ ‘Do I really know what I am talking about?’ ‘Should our higher education institutions follow the lead of political parties?’ To engage with and through knowledge is to place one’s pursuits against a self-critique of one’s own preconceptions and habits of minds. That knowledge is not just open and critical but is self-critical is central, and even unique, to universities. Within the university, knowledge activities have a necessarily reflexive aspect, turning back on and affecting the university and its knowledges themselves. Knowledge is intimately connected with social, civic, cultural and cosmopolitan imaginaries.8 One’s understanding of the world profoundly affects one’s actions within it. Knowledge is ‘not something “out there” to be gathered and then utilized. Its potential utility is the reason and motivation for seeking it.’ (Nixon, 2012: 30). This points to an inherent drive towards change within knowledge. One pursues knowledge through a wish to change something, whether one’s own understanding of a specific topic or phenomenon, or how the understanding of a problem might play in professional, societal and cultural contexts. Knowledge is pursued in order to become engaged with natural phenomena, social issues or cultural dislocations. But this embracing of what is other may be dangerous and risky. Gaining new knowledge might challenge the conception one has of oneself or one’s community or society or the world itself.

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Knowledge of climate change is leading to mass civic and economic disturbance, quite apart from environmental degradation. Moral norms may be challenged, and political views may be unsettled. One never knows with knowledge; and if one did, it wouldn’t be knowledge. It always contains an eradicable openendedness.

Knowledge as attention to life To a large extent, our interest in the world is provoked by knowledge. Through knowledge, we become more sensitive to marginalised groups and their distance from the mainstream of the wider society. Through knowledge, we become aware of the treatment of the elderly in care homes. Through knowledge, we are taken back across thousands of years and come into contact with the feelings and ideas of our ancestors. And through knowledge, we become aware not just of the complexity of the natural environment but also of its bespoiling by humanity. Knowledge determines ‘the degree of our attention to life’ (Bergson, 2002: 14). But it does more: it extends the range of our possibilities in and towards life. Across the disciplines, the forms of knowledge and their methodologies suggest that we should not speak of ‘knowledge’ (singular) but ‘knowledges’ (plural); and we have a particular sense in mind here. Through knowledge we do not grasp one central perspective on things but rather stumble into them from multiple angles. Knowing is a pushing of force into endless strata and hues of the world and by means of innumerable avenues. To paraphrase Bergson, we need an array of approaches fully to embrace and meet the world since there ‘is not one rhythm of duration’, and it is impossible with just one perspective to ‘measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being.’ (Bergson, 2002: 207). To put the matter formally, the differences between the disciplines and their approaches to the world are not reducible to matters of epistemology, but should be seen from an ontological perspective.9 The difference between the disciplines is a result of a deep attention to and respect towards the multiplicities of cultural, natural, geographical, philosophical and historical ‘rhythms’ by which the world moves and vibrates (Bennett, 2010). Through knowledge and in knowledge, the world resonates and vibrates within students, teachers and researchers. It is the pulse of life throbbing within the university body, with a calling to personal engagement, cultural action and citizenship. Its dissemination constitutes arteries that connect the university with the wider world, so adding to ‘the numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.’ (Bergson, 2002: 208). In a globalised age, where the quality and strength of the connections between people, societies and cultures, and even between cultures and eco-systems, take on an ever greater significance, the knowledge sustaining these links takes on pivotal importance. In this way, knowledge acquires an ethical meaning and

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forms the basis of ‘the close solidarity’ (Bergson, 2002: 209) that binds cultural and natural systems together. However, knowledge exhibits fundamental fragilities. Knowledge may be lost for centuries as with the works of Aristotle in ancient Greece until they were rediscovered in the Middle Ages. Books may be burned, as in the book burning by the Nazis in the early 1930s, where over 25,000 books that were considered a threat to the Third Reich were consigned to the flames. Politicised and warped knowledge may be used for purposes of marginalisation and stigmatisation, as evident in the ideology of religious dogmatism and political totalitarianism aimed at the persecution of people on account of their gender or ethnic group, or sexual or political orientation. Fake knowledge (fake news) may be designed deliberately to obfuscate, provoke or anger, or to protect powerful individuals or organisations from legal consequences of their destructive dealings with the environment of a region or local area. Knowledge associated with the university stands normally in contrast to destructive uses of knowledge, and evens resists it, not least through its quality of criticality. Criticality in higher education – critical thinking, critical dispositions and critical engagement – is now being receiving new attention so as to bring it even more firmly into the curriculum.10 However, criticality waxes and wanes and so any resuscitation of criticality is likely to be fragile. Criticality is not limited to the acquisition of certain thinking skills that might have value in business enterprises. Rather, the idea of criticality stands for the formation of fundamental dispositions in human beings to contend with what is other and even strange or pernicious. Criticality is not reducible to a particular set of academic skills, but ultimately is the foundation of an academic culture. This criticality is the very stuff of a collective life that constitutes knowledge as a vibrant connection between universities and their hinterland. Through criticality, not only do we do meet the world with ideas about it, but we allow the world to come to us, to play its part in shaping knowledge and knowledge practices. Through knowledge, the world leaves on the university ‘the mark of its tooth’, and we do not think real knowledge, ‘we live it’ (Bergson, 1998: 46). If knowledge can be linked to university as its defining culture, criticality can be said to constitute the soil of that culture. Through criticality, knowledge ‘ripens gradually into acts’ (ibid.: 47), and this ripening process is the ‘vital evolution ( … ) [of] reality itself.’ (p. 312).

Conclusion Knowledge at the university is edifying, and in a dual sense. The root of the term is that of building up (hence the ‘edifice’ of a building). University knowledge cannot help but possess this character. The university is, par excellence, the social institution for the building up of knowledge and, in the process, the building up of those who come into its compass. This latter process runs deeply: why so? Because this knowledge is ‘under the optic of life’, where ‘life itself forces us to

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posit values’ and where life itself works through knowledge ‘when we posit values’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 175). Knowledge at the university is not distant from the bustle of everyday life, be it the social or natural worlds and eco-systems but, on the contrary, is guided by ‘the most profound instincts of life, directed towards the future of life’ and is the very ‘pathway to life’ (ibid.: 228). Knowledge affects us in three ways. Wanting to know, in the deep sense presented here, is the same as directing one’s attention towards life. Trying to know is letting one’s methods and practices of knowledge creation become shaped and infected by the vibrancy of the phenomenon studied. Knowing itself is being touched by life and sustaining this vitality within oneself and one’s engagement with others and the wider society. In this way, knowledge comes into the centre of a societal vitalism and cultural and historical vibrancy. Knowledge is life resonating within us and in the ways we try to improve universities. Knowledge is edifying for life itself.

Notes 1 Both the continental tradition of Bildung and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberal education were concerned with the integrative and emancipatory relation between the individual and society. However, the Bildung tradition tended to focus on that relation from a historical and cultural point of view – seeing the individual within society and culture – whereas, while still having an eye on society and culture, the liberal education tradition tended to focus on the trajectory of the individual as such. (Autonomy and authenticity are, therefore, much played up in the latter philosophy.) 2 The idea of self-authorship has been extensively advanced by Baxter Magdola (2014). 3 At least, under the leadership of John Brennan, the former Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, Open University, UK, began to look at the ‘organisational mediation’ of student learning, producing a number of reports (SOMUL, 2005). 4 The idea that systems as can help edifying effects is surely implicit in Guattari’s (2016) analysis of ‘collective assemblages’ as helping to produce ‘desire’ (e.g. 74–75). 5 That careful inquiry – and a sensitivity to language – helped to create life itself was a principle of the English critic and literary scholar, F R Leavis (1969). It was his sense that, in his time, the University of Cambridge had fallen away from this position: ‘Cambridge is no longer a centre of life and hope’ (ibid.: 24). 6 Reforms at the University of Córdoba in 1918 were inspired by the students and were influential across Latin America (Walter, 1969). 7 Such as is provided, for example, by Martha Nussbaum (2010). 8 For perhaps the fullest modern argument in favour of the conjunction of higher education and cosmopolitanism, see Gerard Delanty (2001). See also Michael Peters’ (2018) comparative analysis of cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism. 9 This general supposition, ‘that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms’, Bhaskar (2008: 36–38) labelled ‘the epistemological fallacy’. 10 e.g., Manarin, Carey, Rathburn and Ryland (2015); Johnston, Mitchell, Myles and Ford (2011), Davies and Barnett (2015).

9 A CULTURE OF LIVELY DISCOURSE

Introduction The university is an institution of life. Perhaps that may be said of all institutions. In order for it to be sustained over time any institution has to be imbued with life. No adequate account of what it is to be an institution can be given through, say, an enumeration of its resources, its activities, its personnel or of its position in its network of other institutions. Unless an institution is infused with life, all of those elements will be moribund. Some institutions, however, have particular attachments and orientations to life. A hospital is directly concerned with the lives of human beings: there, life and death take on direct and vivid qualities. The orientations towards life characteristic of the university are more subtle and yet wider and even deeper. Our thesis here has been that the university, qua institution, has an interest in life as such; that is to say, in the life of the whole universe and everything that is in it. But in order to bring off this interest in any satisfactory way, a university has to be imbued with life; it has to teem with life, not least in all the difficult endeavours that constitute inquiries in learning about the world. This inquiring life of the university has to be sustained. The sheer drive of individuals – both academics and students and all those associated with their knowing efforts – is crucial; there has to be liveliness within those individuals, as they grapple with difficult matters. But those efforts in turn need to be sustained through collaborative efforts, and sustained through lively discourse. And where that inner liveliness is impaired, so too the culture of a university is impaired. Such is the subject of this chapter: the character of this lively discourse, its conditions, its sustaining, its impediments and its possibilities.

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A matter of culture The current state of play in the academic world could be described as one of multi-culturalism. Each discipline and each epistemic community has its own ways of going on, its own approach to academic life and its own connectivities across the globe. These are cultures in a large sense, with each possessing its own manner of address (and even dress), forms and places of communication, language, practices, methods, craft styles and orientation for collective action (Becher and Trowler, 2001). A single university is now a collection of micro communities, more or less connected to its own global, national and local communities, both academic and in the wider society. Academics range across these territories with natural ease. They are ‘itinerant’ (Whitchurch, 2018) even if, with digital technologies, they barely venture far from home. One might invoke the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari (2007) and suggest the presence here of a ‘rhizomatic’ situation, with epistemic cultures spreading haphazardly as they criss-cross, and steal concepts from each other for their own development. We have even to allow for ‘epistemicide’ as some knowledge cultures seek to eviscerate others. With this term, de Sousa Santos (2016) has in mind the subjugation of the epistemic cultures of the South, in becoming invisible in the wake of the cognitive power of the North, but the matter is far more complex. Epistemicidal trends are evident, too, within the knowledge cultures of the North, where, for example, science and rates of return threaten the humanities, scholarly modes are suppressed by empirical modes, quantitative methods marginalise qualitative ones, operational fields have more immediate impact that those that are contemplative and even as academic books are down-valued as performance indicators and search engines favour the publication of papers in journals. In other words, while knowledge is intimately bound up with life (our thesis), it can also be unwittingly associated with epistemic death, as disciplinary sub-cultures fight for their lives. Some arguments are more equal than others. Against this background, the question arises: could there be a way of specifying a universal academic culture as such? In posing this question, we are not concerned with the organisational cultures that characterise universities’ stance in the world and their corporate style (Bergquist and Pawlak, 2008). Rather, we raise the matter as to whether there could be a way of identifying the knowledge culture of universities as a unity of the academic life. A first gambit lies in turning to Alvin Gouldner’s (1979) characterisation of academic discourse as a ‘culture of critical discourse’ (CCD). ‘The culture of critical discourse (CCD) … is centred on a specific speech act: justification. It is a culture … in which there is nothing that speakers will … permanently refuse to discuss or make problematic.’ (ibid: 28). While especially associating CCD with ‘the New Class’ of ‘intellectuals and intelligentsia’, as he termed it, Gouldner seemed to equivocate over whether CCD was characteristic of all of academic discourse or just some of it or some of it on just some occasions. (The ‘technical intelligentsia

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sometimes keep it in latency’. (p. 29)) But, still, let us see it as a standard generally to be realised. A difficulty, in keeping with the argument here, is that on Gouldner’s account, academic life is surprisingly lifeless. It is an ascetic culture, wherein its orientation in being critical and all that goes with that serves as a set of rules to be diligently obeyed. There is no mention in Gouldner’s account of joy, engagement, humanity, empathy and sheer will to engage. If it is to survive against the many malign forces that bear in on it – from both within and beyond the university – the culture of critical discourse has to be lived. This, not least because this is a critical discourse. The critical life is an engaged life as academics are called upon to evaluate each other’s work. Academic persons enter the lists to clash with each other, however gently and discretely. Increasingly, however, in an age of global competition (between both universities and academics), this combativeness is noisy and attention-seeking. This CCD, accordingly, is full of life, engaged life, and with an eye beyond itself to the wider world. Its criticality includes its being critical of the world, yet possessing a concern for the world. And in characterising academic life universally, it speaks to a unity across the disciplines. In this unity, the CCD is fully a knowledge culture in infusing academic life.

A culture of speech acts – of a certain kind At the heart of the university are groups or communities of persons engaging with each other over often arcane matters, trying to understand certain phenomena or ideas. Those interactions are constituted in large part by speech acts, through which academics and others seek to communicate with each other. In the theory of speech acts, a cardinal distinction has been made, first by J L Austin (2005) and then much developed by John Searle (1999).1 The distinction in question is that between ‘illocutionary’ speech acts and ‘perlocutionary’ speech acts. Illocutionary speech acts are those in which a person seeks to inform others or bring something to another’s attention. Perlocutionary speech acts are those that have an effect upon the recipient. In practice, both forms may be present in a single act, but it is important to keep in mind the analytical distinction. As Searle puts it (1999: 137), ‘By arguing with you, I might persuade you’: ‘(t)he first verb mentions an illocutionary act …, but the second verb phrase mentions the effect that the illocutionary act has on a hearer.’ Both aspects of speech acts are crucial here. The academic discourse is one of giving to the world (an argument) and of seeking an effect in the world (persuasion). Searle adds that ‘Typically, illocutionary acts have to be performed intentionally. But perlocutionary acts do not have to be formed intentionally’ (ibid). For example, in making a statement, an academic has to intend that her or his statement has a certain meaning. It is, though, a further matter as to whether that statement will have any effect on another person (whether within the academic community or beyond it) and, if so, what that effect might be. The carefully

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written paper may lay unread in an academic journal and have no effect whatsoever; but even where an academic offering does have an effect, it may be unintended. The reader or hearer may entirely misconstrue what is being said but may still be influenced. Searle draws out another important distinction, that between two kinds of intention: saying and meaning. In saying something, a speaker has to conform to basic linguistic rules of expression. In meaning something, a speaker ‘makes a commitment to tell the truth’ and this holds for the liar; it is just that the liar doesn’t keep to his commitment (p. 143). Actually, the liar is sensitive to truth and, indeed, trades upon it, making the calculation that his utterance may be perceived as truthful. So, meaning, truthfulness and sincerity are all key ingredients of effective communication and are intertwined in speech acts. How does all of this help in understanding the culture characteristic of a university? The university is self-evidently a space for speech acts – whether in speaking or in writing. And it is a space of both illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. The members of the university speak with meaning, with tacit allegiances to truth-telling. Their utterances are various species of illocutionary acts: when they speak, they are – for example – claiming or telling or proposing or deducing. These speakers also look for assent from their hearers. Indeed, their utterances have little value unless they are seeking assent from others, at least in their own epistemic community. Their utterances, then, are also perlocutionary acts, potentially at least. (As noted, academic papers may languish unread and unloved in the journals or as books on the library shelves.) And there is a presumption that those speech acts are imbued with sincerity; it is not just that academic utterances are impregnated with meaning but that the default position is that the speakers attach their allegiance to their own utterances. Of course, on occasions, an academic may play the devil’s advocate and proffer an idea or deliberately venture an incredible hypothesis or put up an argumentative gambit in order to test the water – what if so and so? – but such a gambit can only work in a context of truth-telling, meaning and sincerity. And it on these bases that these speech acts may have effects on their listeners or readers.

The CORSA situation The points just made arise naturally from Austin’s and Searle’s work on speech acts. But the speech acts characteristic of a university’s academics and the academic world have three further elements. Academic speech acts are obliged to conform to and be bounded by conditions of rationality, reasonableness and evaluation. To take these conditions in turn, academic speech acts do not just issue forth as ad hoc utterances but have their place in a context of special rules and forms of communication. They are rational responses to an existing panoply of utterances, and evidence and understandings (caught in the bibliographies of papers and books, and even in indexes). Such utterances play their part in a taking and a giving of reasons that constitute a conversation over time (and in

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which the dead may be consulted for their views on a topic and the views of those to come might be anticipated). Those utterances, therefore, exhibit the quality of reasonableness. However, universities have changed over the last half century and are continuing to change. New epistemic communities form; new modes of communication evolve. And so the Kantian university of reason continues to evolve. It is difficult to see how it could be other. Qua university, institutions are bound to be spaces of reasonableness. Unless we have that before us, we cannot be in the presence of a ‘university’. But the structure of reason and what it is to be reasonable must evolve, not least in a globalised and internet age. What it is to be reasonable is always on the move. This leaves us with the matter of evaluation. It is a cardinal requirement of all academic utterances that they be proffered in an evaluative spirit. And in two ways. Utterances in the university have to be open to evaluation by others. Nothing can be taken as given and as beyond dispute. But, in knowing that their utterances are open to dispute and, indeed, may form the basis of a wider dissensus, academics come naturally to interrogate their own utterances. They become self-critical. The speaker monitors her or himself. And so there is a dual criticality inherent in the academic life. Every speech act opens itself to criticism both from the recipient and from the speaker. This co-presence of dissensus and self-criticality holds also for students (Biesta, 2017); and it is properly the task of the pedagogical situation in a university to sustain dissensus and bring collaborative reason to bear. To the extent that such reasoned conflict is diminishing in universities – in the classroom, on campus and in the scholarly literature – to that extent the university itself starts to wither. It is evident, then, that the speech acts characteristic of what it means to be a university have many facets. In the process, the connections between knowledge and life – the general concern of this book – are severally implicated. In making statements, truth claims, observations, deductions, evaluations and the like, academics and students are engaged in speech acts, albeit of restricted kinds. They are investing themselves in what they are saying. In a sense, therefore, they place themselves at risk – of not complying with the disciplinary conventions, of being adjudged to be wrong and even of outright rejection, even though complying with the editorial guidelines (this last increasingly so given that many journals can publish only a small fraction of the manuscripts that they receive). Academic lives are at stake. And ultimately, too, the life of their academic community, for it can tolerate only a limited level of infractions. It follows that these links between basic speech acts and life hold in even greater measure where academics seek to press their claims upon a listener or reader. The illocutionary act (of making a statement) opens to the perlocutionary act (of persuasion). Academics may say something like ‘I suggest that …’ or ‘My thesis is …’ or ‘We claim that …’ or ‘It is the case that …’ or ‘given x, y follows’. In all these instances, and in yet others, the speaker seeks a connection with the recipient and in the process actually performs a particular kind of act (of

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claiming, or proposing, or critiquing or stating or whatever it may be). In such acts, the speaker throws herself forward into the fray, as it were; and must be uncertain as to the response, if any at all. Silence on the part of the listener or reader, if that is the response, may be telling in itself. Again, life is at stake here. A person’s academic being is placed at risk. The academic – or the student – puts herself forward with trepidation. There may be a justified wariness in performing such speech acts. Academic speech acts, therefore, express life, are heavily imbued with life and draw life in. They expand life, even as they heed many conditions, which are both specific to the discipline or field and which hold more generally across the academic community. They place life on the edge, always liable to tip this way or that. And they also, on occasions, diminish life, depress life and even expunge life. The cognitive life necessarily has a (largely hidden) emotional life.2 The force of these points may best be brought out by noting where academic speech acts go awry. An insensitive tutor may write in the margin of a student essay – whether in hard-copy or online as margin comment – the single word ‘rubbish’. (One of us has seen just this.) This single word has the illocutionary force of conferring a certain status on the essay – or, at least, an element within it – and it is likely to have the perlocutionary force of producing a highly damaging effect on the student. Not only is the tutor bringing his life into play in an unwarranted way – in expressing an unduly value-laden and negative personal response – but does so in a way that has a pernicious effect on the student. Moreover, that admonition spills out in multiple directions, with effects upon the pedagogical situation and even the life (literally in some instances) of the student. We see analogous situations when researchers make claims on the basis of data that they have manipulated, or when students plagiarise work present in the literature, or when visiting speakers are personally critiqued rather than the views that they are proffering, or when reviewers guess the author(s) of a paper and exert an implacable opposition to the text even though the paper has been put through an extensive process of revision in response to earlier comments. Each example has its own characteristics, in which the academic encounter is impaired through unsubstantiated claims being made or through insincerity or through personal diminution. In these, and in many comparable ways, the academic life – both of academics and students and of academic life collectively – may be injured. In summary, then, the culture of academic life takes on, as it were, a CORSA form since, at its heart, it is a culture of rational speech acts. Unfortunately, academic life does not always live up to this billing. It is an ambivalent situation.

The spirit of academic discourse Culture and speech acts – the two matters on which we have dwelt in this chapter – can only function in the presence of spirit. However, spirit is notoriously hard to conceptualise and comes with much baggage. It cannot, though, be ducked.

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Spirit comes in many guises but, at its heart lies a sense of forces of energy being inherent in life. Famously – or infamously – the idea formed a central plank in the philosophy of Henri Bergson in the early twentieth century (and we have been drawing on his work here). In his hands, the idea came surrounded by rather mystical notions of ‘creative evolution’ (1998), ‘vital impulse’ (p. 126) and ‘vital processes’ (p. 166), and of life bursting ‘into fragments’ (p. 98). There are also to be found, in Bergson’s philosophy, additional ideas that are especially helpful. For example, ‘the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. … ie unforeseeable, are the forms it creates … More and more indeterminate also, more and more free …’ (p. 126). The academic life shares just such sentiments for it is a way of life that is predisposed to ‘insert some indetermination’ into its inquiries and its conversations. Without indetermination, academic life dies. Not only is it a continuing dispute between contending accounts of the world, but it has a constitutive interest in promoting indetermination. Further, the multiplying accounts of academic life stand to generate a mode of life that is ‘more and more free’. And, insofar as governments, disciplines, audits, corporations and academic publishing practices circumscribe the space for indetermination, or promote a risk-free climate, so they also limit freedom. Then, in whatever guise – whether rules, conditions or incarceration – ‘the letter kills the spirit’. (p. 127) What is the relationship between spirit, body and intellect? Bergson addresses the matter head-on but seems to equivocate. For Bergson, intuition – a faculty of the spirit – ‘is almost completely sacrificed to intellect.’ (p. 267) Is this not what we see today in the university, where talk of ‘life’, ‘intuition’, and ‘spirit’ have been vanquished in favour of ‘research’, ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘intellectual property’? In other words, knowledge as such is supreme but now with an added edge of having to win its spurs amid cognitive capitalism. But, for Bergson, ‘Intuition is [still] there, however vague and above all discontinuous’ (p. 267). So far as the relationship between spirit and body is concerned, The great error of the doctrines on spirit has been the idea [of] isolating the spiritual life from all the rest … but the intellect is there [and] science is there, which shows the interdependence of conscious life and cerebral activity. (p. 268) And so a philosophy of intuition … will sooner or later be swept away by science, if it does not resolve to see the life of the body just where it really is, on the road that leads to the life of the spirit. (p. 269) Academic life is precisely of this kind, possessing a spirit that draws one forward, that impels with energy and that infuses the to-ings and fro-ings of academic

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interchange. Its spirit and its life are mutually implicated. However, in parallel to Bergson’s observations, today, this spirit is often burdened, downcast and depleted. Indeed, the spirit in academic life has not been so much neglected as it has been repudiated and even blocked. In his sympathetic reading of spirit in Heidegger’s oeuvre, Derrida (1991: 96) notes that ‘the degradation of the spiritual in the “rational”, “intellectual”, “ideological”’ was of concern to Heidegger, even in his infamous address as the newly installed Rector of Freiburg University. After all, spirit can neither easily be quantified, nor measured nor assigned an economic value. It can, though, be controlled and subjugated – through managerial disciplines, through judgemental audit processes and through state action and so forth. And it is also, from time to time, subverted by malign practices within the academic community. Its powers of ‘indetermination’ may be severely reduced. But what is this spirit in academic life? It is not a mystical agent but is a vitality inherent in academic life, and it has five sources, those of (i) inquisitiveness, (ii) self-disclosure, (iii) discourse, (iv) fraternity and (v) desire. Inquisitiveness propels a drawing forward into the world; self-disclosure produces a will to pay attention and draw out what lies within the self; discourse produces an impulse towards argument and collective variation; fraternity inspires a will to contribute to collective endeavour despite differences; and desire, both internal and external, generates a projection of self into the world. An element that runs across these five sources of academic spirit is that of divergence. The structure of academic life is that it naturally tends towards difference, a multiplicity of views, of argument and counter-argument, as the five sources of spirit splay out. There is a unity here beneath the differentiation. ‘Differentiation is always the actualization of a virtuality that persists across its divergent lines’ (Deleuze, 2006: 95). At one time, there were two philosophy departments in the University of Sydney because the rival camps of those favouring Continental European philosophy and those favouring Anglo-Saxon philosophy were unable to find sufficient common ground on which to form a coherent single entity. Even more vividly, the story – that we noted earlier – of Wittgenstein’s Poker (Edmonds and Eidinow, 2001), when two famous philosophers were involved in an acrimonious exchange, is testimony to the spirit in academic life. During a seminar, Wittgenstein is alleged to have jumped up and waved a red-hot poker in the direction of Popper, the guest speaker. Academic discourse can be literally heated at times. It follows that the spirit of academic discourse is characteristically lively and animated. It expresses the life of the participants who invest themselves in debates and it produces a collective life that is energised. This spirit is unquenchable for humanity itself is essentially inquisitive, needing to peer into the life that surrounds it. And this inquisitiveness generates a will and an energy to know the world. In turn, life attaches to the accounts of the world that form out of this inquisitiveness. The imaginative discovery of the double helix in molecular biology exhibited all of this, leading not only to Nobel prizes for certain of the men involved – driven on by their passions for their inquiries – but a withholding of a Nobel prize for the leading

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woman (Rosalind Franklyn) whose work lay at the heart of, and was critical to, the whole process with its personal investments.3 Academic life is sometimes far from fair.4

Where’s the argument? Crucially, the academic life turns on argument, but the very term – ‘argument’ – has been underplayed in understanding the university. It has several meanings – and here are three: (i) the steps made in proffering a theory, idea or set of evidencebased claims, as in ‘she is making a sound argument’; (ii) the claiming and counterclaiming between researchers and scholars in relation to a particular issue, as in ‘the argument on this topic turns on the interpretation of topic x’; (iii) the wider process of academic debate, exemplified by the presence of systems of communication and engagement, as in ‘the academic community is founded on argument’. These three meanings form a hierarchy of argumentative presences. Level (i) is a matter of argument as displayed in a single academic paper or book or dissertation; level (ii) is the sense of argument as present in an interchange within an academic group or discipline; and level (iii) is the matter of argument as foundational to the academic life as a whole. The three levels are interconnected. However, level (iii), the culture of academic life, has a foundational character in understanding the matter of argument, because – in extenso – it is the level from which the other two levels derive their point. Argument at the (i) personal and (ii) inter-personal levels have value in virtue of their having their place in a culture of argument that characterises the academic life. This is a conceptual and not an empirical point. Here, let us build bottom-up. A single paper in the literature (or an academic book for that matter), to the extent that it has academic worth, makes an argument. The nature of the argument could be empirical (offering significant new facts about the world), theoretical (providing an account as to way the world is, in some particular domain) or conceptual (offering insights into particular concepts through which the world might be understood). Arguments will have a temporal character, having an interest in the way the world has been, or is now or might be in the future. And they will have a spatial dimension, being an interweaving of spaces (plural). Nanotechnology provides insights into minute spatial domains but yet has a fair claim to have literally universal application. All manner of other inflections might be in evidence, arguments having variously policy, aesthetic, human, practical, prescriptive and transdisciplinary flavourings. What, then, is it to construct and proffer an academic argument? There are four elements. (a) An argument makes some kind of claim about the world. (b) The claim is backed up by reasons that supply the conditions through which the claim gains justification and those conditions supply ‘warrant’ for the claim (Toulmin, 2012). (c) The claim is communicated in an acceptable format. This condition has to be open-ended, since what is to count as an acceptable format

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will vary across disciplines, across the world and over time. (d) The claim has some kind of context, which characteristically includes the presence of other claims, such that the argument may be seen as cognate to them. The claim sticks to existing understandings in the world, whether by confirming them, undermining them, providing an explicit rebuttal of them or, more likely, offering a nuancing or an embellishment of them. (These are four ‘Cs’ of argument – claim, conditions, communication and context.) Arguments can be hard or soft. Hard arguments wear their heart on their sleeves, so to speak, and explicitly boldly identify the arguments against which they are contending or among which they have their home, and state the argument(s) for which they are contending. They may even seek to land knock-out blows on their opponents. Softer arguments are much less combative and less forceful. The abstracts of such papers in the literature may be populated with verbs such as ‘discuss’ (‘In this paper, we/I discuss such and such’) or ‘explore’ (‘In this paper, we/I explore x and y’). They are pre-eminently dialogical in nature. Both hard and soft arguments have their adherents and both have value. With strong arguments, we know where the author(s) stand, but perhaps matters are rather closed off prematurely. With softer arguments, matters are opened up, perhaps even tentatively, and there is even more of an implicit exchange with the readers; but one may struggle to discern a definite thesis in the explorations. (‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ are not, therefore, value terms but simply portray differing varieties of argument. Perhaps gender comes into play in opting for one or the other argumentative style.) It follows that an argument at the personal level (i) has to be dialogical and necessarily contribute to argument at the interpersonal level (ii). This interaction works both ways. The argument at the personal level (i) gains strength and validity from being understood as a contribution to an existing conversation, and so becomes part of a set of arguments at the interpersonal level (ii). But, in turn, the arguments at the interpersonal level (ii) derive their strengths from the arguments provided at the personal level (i). Disciplines that have several hundreds of years of history gain strength and legitimacy through there being a fairly solid structure of arguments through which the conversations of the discipline have advanced over the centuries. The interpersonal level of argument (ii) draws its strength from resting on the contributions of researchers and scholars over long periods of time and across the world. Life is implicated at all three levels of argument. In the making of an argument (level i), a single text exudes life; puts life into the world; expresses life of and demands life from the author(s). No text ever wrote itself; no argument was ever formulated without life; and usually not without some struggle. In argumentative exchanges (level ii), life flows between those in the dialogue. The dialogues sustain life in their participants, and draw them in. Such argumentative dialogues can exert a heavy toll, as participants seek to promote their knowledge wares and polish their arguments and then find themselves withstanding counter-arguments and ripostes and even rebuke; or silence or even ex-communication. As intimated,

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at times, these exchanges can turn into heated arguments and involve personal animosity. Lives can be put on the line.5 And then, over time, these dialogues sustain the argumentative life of academia (level iii). Over time, at level (i), individuals can be changed utterly in giving themselves to this argumentative life. After all, this life calls individuals forward into the world – whether they work characteristically in a solitary or a collaborate style; they are required to give of themselves, to declare themselves, and implicitly to say ‘this is where I stand, for now at least’. At level (ii), this argumentative life comes to form a discipline or a new sub-discipline, such that it stands in the world, with causal properties of its own. Added together, across the endeavours of those in and around the universities of the world, these argumentative processes come to form – at level (iii) – the academic life as such. That this last is significant is demonstrated over and over again in the way that powerful states across the world seek to diminish this academic and argumentative life.

Conclusions Academic discourse is necessarily imbued with life; it is a lively culture. The proffering of, and the responding to, arguments calls for life on the part of the participants – whether in research or in teaching. However, nowadays, these argumentative processes are frequently distorted by external forces and those more internal, arising from the university-as-corporation and the academic ‘community’ itself. Such happenings exert a malign influence and diminish life. Academics and students lose motivation, the rebukes over their work can become overwhelming,6 the audits and the performance-management regimes become ever intrusive and intellectual energy flounders, both at the personal and interpersonal levels. Ultimately, academic discourse retains a liveliness for it is a resilient culture. It has to possess an appropriate spirit, a spirit characterised by energy but also by displays of grace, forbearance, tolerance and empathy. Where this spirit is lost – where undue power exhibits itself, either from without or from within the academic world – the fragility of this discourse is revealed. This liveliness, this culture, should not be assumed to be ever-present. This culture of lively discourse is seen in the speech acts of academic life and we have built on Searle’s distinctions between illocutionary (informative) and perlocutionary (persuasive) speech acts. As universities are drawn more into the world, so we may observe – as it might be put – implicatory speech acts. In many domains, the speech acts of academics – in genetics, the natural environment, the physical and medical sciences, in social matters and in psychological domains and many other areas – have implications for the life of the world. Academic life matters to life in its entirety. It follows that universities and especially their senior leaders and the senior managers have a heavy burden, that of energising – of giving additional life to – the academic community in all of its aspects, in research, scholarship, teaching and learning and outwards into the wider economy and society. Qua institutions,

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universities are liable – although unwittingly – to diminish such liveliness. But universities also retain capacities for injecting new energies, and new sources of liveliness.

Notes 1 It is extraordinary and embarrassing that research into higher education has hardly ever drawn upon the work on speech acts, which has been alive for approaching three-quarters of a century. That literature speaks directly to academic life but has never – to our knowledge – been systematically mined, critiqued and built up in understanding universities (as institutions), and higher education (as a set of educational processes). This section of the present book (‘A culture of speech acts – of a certain kind’), together with the next section (‘The CORSA situation’), is an offering towards just such a venture. 2 The formal way of putting these points is to speak of ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) or ‘academic cultures’ (Becher and Trowler, 2001) or ‘knowledge cultures’ (Peters and Besley, 2006) or ‘cultures of the academy’ (Bergquist and Pawlak, 2008). However, that literature tends rather to neglect the emotional side of academic life as a cultural matter. More concernedly still, we judge that that interest in universities as places of culture, thin as it has been, has been fading such that the idea of knowledge cultures is being reduced to talk of mere ‘knowledge practices’. 3 Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a research fellow at King’s College London in the early 1950s and ‘is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly Photo 51 … which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.’ (Wikipedia entry, which contains an extensive record of Franklin’s short but complex career and which intimates the considerable emotional and inter-personal aspects of that work, not least in a male-dominated environment.) 4 A corresponding injustice befell Jocelyn Bell (since Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell), who – as a postgraduate student – first observed pulsars, which led to Anthony Hewish (her supervisor) and Martin Ryle receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics. 5 The life of F R Leavis at Cambridge is a case in point. See ch. 2 of Cranfield’s (2016) book on Leavis. After decades at (Downing College) Cambridge, Leavis – having been denied a professorship – lived out his academic years as a professor at the University of York. 6 It has been reported that, in the UK, a student commits suicide at the rate of two per week (see ‘Student suicides’ under Websites in the Bibliography).

PART III

Cultivating knowledge in the university

10 LIVING REASON

Introduction As this is being written, a news item can be heard on a national broadcast. The item concerns a government policy in which badgers are being culled because it is felt that they are contributory cause of a particular disease in cattle. The story is that a group of veterinary surgeons (vets) have written to the relevant authorities claiming that the policy is not working and are asking that the government department retracts ‘insupportable claims that its badger cull policy is working’. The group’s spokesperson, a practising vet, states that the government’s claims – that the badger cull was working – ‘were not supported by scientific evidence. Indeed, the current situation … [is] an increased prevalence [of disease]’. The vet adds: ‘Badger culling has not worked. [The government is] issuing barefaced lies in this matter.’ The news item observes, too, that the government contests the vets’ reading of the matter, claiming that all its own statements on the matter had been ‘absolutely correct’.1 That the government disputes the vets’ claims is immaterial here. What is important is the set of values that underly both the vets’ claims and the government’s response to those claims. There are actually two sets of values in train, one concerning reason and one concerning professional life, and they overlap. Behind the claim (from the vets) and the response (from the government) lies a belief (on the part of the vets) in the value of evidence, reason and truth in the formation of public policy and an acceptance (by the government) in the legitimacy of that value background. Reason matters and it is also part of professional life that reason be sustained in the public sphere. In short, reason bequeaths a life of reason. Reason is accompanied by a value background (Taylor, 1992) that is powerful for life itself. Ultimately, reason calls

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people forward to declare themselves in public, to have the courage as well as the wit to do so. It calls for life and has a concern for the whole of life. In question here is the matter of the life of reason – both in itself and as it might play out in the wider world. There are also the further matters as to whether universities collectively might have a contribution to play in widening not only the public understanding of issues and, more intractably, the public coming to an acceptance that reason matters. In short, in prospect is the possibility of universities exercising a role in cultural leadership.

A space of reasoning In his book the Formation of Reason, David Bakhurst (2011) sees an educational institution as a space of reason. It follows from our opening example that this is rather inert. To speak of a space of reason is to reify reason, to see it as a thing, independent of persons and epistemic communities. Much better is it to see a university as a space of reasoning. The change in emphasis brings out the need for universities actively to promote themselves as a space that sustains processes of reasoning; as a space of disputatiousness. Is disputatiousness fading from universities? Now, in their busyness and in their reluctance to offend, overt conflict is outlawed. The disciplines go their own way and splinter into self-affirming micro-groups. And, in the process, reasoning dwindles. This dwindling of engaged reason within the university is but an instance of a general insufficiency of reasoning in and across society, across the world. In an age of robotics, data flows, digital surveillance and the metricisation of life – including academic life – collaborative reasoning is imperilled. To the extent that this matter is unrecognised and un-addressed, life will fade from the university. Open and interactive reasoning is crucial to what it is to be a university. To reason is to engage with others, to enter a space of active reasoning. One cannot reason by and for oneself. Ultimately, to reason is to hear the voices of others, even in an internal conversation; and even the voices of the dead. The physical proximity of being together in a university as a place can assist such collaborative reason, even if today other forms of collaborative reasoning are possible, in international conferences, via the internet and so on. But it is also essential that the university hears the voices of the wider world and reasons with them. To reason one must be able to breathe and to feel at home in the university where one teaches and researches. Spaces for reasoning must become places for reasoning. A place, in contrast to a space, is woven into the fabric of the lifeworld and the specific social and cultural contexts of the university (Temple, 2014; Boys, 2015). As a place for reasoning the university becomes a home, and reasoning becomes a ‘homecoming’ (Heidegger, 2011). The role model for university places, however, does not have to be that of institutions closed off from the surrounding society. Places for reasoning could very well emerge from the societal context. However, a place for reasoning is not necessarily dependent on actual physical buildings, even though it may be.

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The most important thing is that the reasoning is connected and woven into the lifeworld of students and teachers and the fabric of society. To reason is to say: ‘I am here!’. Not just the ‘I’ (subject) and the ‘am’ (being) are important, but so is the ‘here’ (the actual space). We reason from somewhere, from a certain time, a certain societal atmosphere and a certain place (Ellis and Goodyear, 2018). Reasoning is alive, but it also lives somewhere. It belongs somewhere, and with someone. Reasoning at universities may indeed have universal, or general, aspects to it. But, at the same time, it also speaks to someone in particular, and it speaks from a certain conversation, in a certain place, around a certain activity. Reasoning has a home. What might the university look like if it was to be a place of this kind? It would be a space in which disciplines and frames of thought collide, in which voices (internal and external) come together and are welcomed, in which there is riskiness but yet safety in venturing forward in conflictual reasoning. It would be a space in which its members were encouraged imaginatively to venture into unknown regions in order to see the world anew. It would be a space that encourages students to engage in pedagogical debate about difficult issues. And it would be a space in which the public can happily enter, so form part of the public sphere. It would also be a space in which university leaders open themselves and their university policies to reasonable scrutiny and show themselves capable of reasoning in public about their own university. For example, while it was undertaking a drafting of its strategic plan, this kind of university would test its draft plan in public fora and gain wide feedback on it, so as to ensure that the university might maximise its contribution to the life of its communities. This university, accordingly, is not simply in favour of life but life that fulfils certain criteria, of its flourishing and of its wider universal value. We shall follow three different institutional life-forms of the university, which in turn form the foundation of living reason. Firstly, we shall look at the institution as a building, which connects to its local socio-intellectual geography and academic milieu. Secondly, we shall look at the university as an institution in forming a cultural world within its wider societal context. This idea relates to the institution being a modern version of the mediaeval guild. Finally, we shall look at the institution as a global structure and network, which plays out within digital academic communities, research conferences and academic societies and associations. Here, we find knowledge to be a form of global reasoning and cosmopolitanism.

Living together – a place for reasoning It seems as if a high proportion of students do not feel at home in their institutions and they may not even feel welcome. They would prefer to be commuter students, returning quickly to their local friends and families. This may be a consequence of the institutional culture, but it may very well also be a matter of the architecture and design of the buildings and open areas of the university. The modern atrium may, at first glance – perhaps to a parent or visitor – be impressive

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but it may feel cold, and not offering congenial spaces for convivial conversation. On the contrary, its sheer scale may conjure a setting inimical to intimate exchanges. The sheer physical design of a university may, indeed, exacerbate any alienation simmering within the modern student (an anomie that leads to occasional suicide). In some modern universities, where space efficiency is prioritised, there may be no spare room readily available within the university estate for meeting informally to reflect on knowledge issues in their programmes of study, and students (and staff alike) are obliged to go a nearby café or park area, where they may enjoy a space more of their own (Waite, 2014). Having an institutional and intellectual home is foundational for knowledge creation. Historically, it was essential to have a spatial and architectural anchor, a common home turf, with, compared to contemporary standards, very basic facilities such as ‘lecture rooms, assembly rooms, a chapel, one or more libraries, lodgings for students and teachers’ (Gieysztor, 2003: 139). Having a place of their own meant that universities were a social power to be reckoned with, and such geographical and architectural anchorings were a proof that ‘the masters in the late-mediaeval university were no longer footloose’ (ibid.). However, it also meant that the knowledge creation process was not haphazard and scattered across private and public domains, but was a shared effort within an academic community. The importance of the design and pattern of learning spaces in higher education has been acknowledged to be key to knowledge creation processes (Savin-Baden, 2008). Perhaps Paul Temple (2009, 2014, 2018a) has done most to tease out the educational and social virtues of the university as a place. In his work, we find an important distinction between a neutral and detached meaning of ‘space’ and the normative and value-invested meaning of ‘place’. ‘[T]he creation of a community and its culture turns … the university space into a place’, and as a result ‘locational capital becomes transformed, through the mediation of an institutional culture, into social capital.’ (Temple, 2014: 11). Founded on a collective knowledge interest, a university’s architecture imparts its own flavouring of academic life. Temple stresses that in the notion of place, a university acquires a meaning as an institutional somewhere being special to its members. It gives an added identity to the social and epistemic efforts embodied within in it. Those efforts are of this or of that university in this or that setting. As a place, the university comes to anchor students’ and teachers’ shared academic identity. These powers of the university, in being a definite place, bring both challenges and responsibilities. ‘[T]rying to understand the alchemy of turning space into place – because place is where the best university work is done – should be a key task in university management.’ (Temple, 2018a: 4). In addition to talk of ‘teaching spaces’ and ‘learning spaces’, it would be helpful if there could be added talk of ‘discussion spaces’ and the desirability of estate planning in that direction. There is a deep ontological dimension to place. A place, after all, has its own ‘certain power’ (Aristotle, 2008: 78), which draws in particular people, activities

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and events associated with, and belonging to, that place. In former times, an individual might have been known as Julian of Norwich or even Jesus of Nazareth. Places are marked off by boundaries in relation to other places such that ‘their powers as well as their positions make these places different’ (Aristotle, 2008: 79). Knowledge creation is subtly steered in the institutional milieu. Are students invited to stay on at the library or to freely use classrooms and other work areas through the evening? Is there a lively and thriving community in the common rooms before and after lectures, or is the university just a building in which students spend limited time intent simply on services in return for their fees? As Temple (2018b) observes, as universities continue to grow, both organisationally and physically, it becomes harder for anyone to claim ownership of such places – and they risk becoming nomads in institutional deserts. Bachelard (1994) describes places as ‘nests’ and argues that belonging and dwelling in places is intimately connected to feeling at home. To be able to learn, teach, work, relax and think properly, many need this homeliness and sense of deep belonging. For Christian Norberg-Schulz, the Norwegian, and Heidegger-inspired, scholar of architecture, a place needs to gain existential foothold and be invested with meaning and the ‘spirit of the place’. The architecture and physical amenities of an institution are never independent of its learning and teaching activities. Any building has ‘existential meanings’ constitute a ‘form of life’, and offers ‘spatial footholds’ that ‘improve our understanding of the relationship between man and his environment’ (Norberg-Schulz, 1977: 432–434). Particular buildings, passageways and spaces of a university may be recalled throughout a life. Knowledge creation is deeply connected to existential footholds (Batchelor, 2006, 2008). Do the campus architecture, the research environments, the rooms and halls for teaching and learning, the libraries, the common rooms and more informal learning spaces support that? Are there spaces for students to work together outside the classrooms, and for teachers and students to meet more casually in halls, café-areas, corridors and gardens? Reflection and thinking need togetherness, to form an intellectual home and take root somewhere. Learning spaces have to become learning places. There has been an increasing interest in understanding the deep links between knowledge and belonging, not least drawing on Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ (Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007).2 To dwell in the university is to care for the institution, its purposes and aims and the curriculum with which one is associated, whether as student or as teacher. Dwelling contains a strong sense of belonging, and to dwell means also to ‘cherish’, ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ what the university stands for (Heidegger, 2001: 145). Evidently, therefore, the university is not just a space for knowledge creation. The causality even goes the other way around – knowledge creation can help us take even stronger root in our institutional practices as we ‘think for the sake of dwelling’ (Heidegger, 2001: 159). The quality and power of knowledge is inextricably bound to the institutional life-world of the individual university and its departments and groups.

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With Heidegger, we get perhaps the deepest sense of belonging interwoven with thinking and knowledge creation in the ideas of homecoming and of the homeland. Being at home does not mean to return to an earlier separateness, or to neglect contemporary societal issues. It does not mean leaving the world, but living in the world, albeit in liminal spaces. The university may yet again become a home, though it requires that its members want to dwell there, not only for work and study programme reasons, but for living together in reason and with reason. To have an interest in knowledge is ultimately to live together in living reason. What is new about the present situation is that this community of reason can now be considerably widened by the university to include interested others in the wider polity and society.

Societal guilding Moving beyond the individual institution, the university is living reason in the wider society. As an institution, the university is always positioned within a social, cultural, political, professional and geographical setting. The university belongs to an Earth philosophy, as it grows and thrives with other institutions, social and cultural contexts, individual citizens and the totality of the wider environment. To understand how academic knowledge is fundamentally intertwined with, and deeply dependent on, those wider domains, the old notion of the guild can be drawn upon (Nørgård and Bengtsen, 2018). Just as the guild or workshop is the home of the craftsman, the university is a home for collective thinking and action founded on knowledge creation. The university is a space for ‘thinking through craft’ (Adamson, 2007). Understood as a guild, the university is inextricably embedded within its societal and cultural surroundings, and the ‘successful workshop will establish legitimate authority in the flesh, not in the rights or duties set down on paper’ (Sennett, 2008: 54). To speak of ‘university’ and ‘guild’ in the one breath suggests that there is an ethical dimension to the university campus, being attuned to its societal and cultural environments. This environmental awareness heralds an ‘ethical connection’ between the university and other societal domains, which ‘lies in practising a certain kind of modesty: living one among many, engaged by a world, which does not mirror oneself’ (Sennett, 2018: 302). Living among many enables ‘richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning’, which is ‘the ethics of an open city’ (ibid.) and, we might add, the ethics of an open university. Currently, the university characteristically lacks an understanding of its societal ethics. At universities, their members are readily to be seen busily at work – students, teachers, researchers, administrators, technicians, institutional leaders and so on. However, citizens of the wider society who do not have any designated function at the university are rarely spotted. At other institutions, on the other hand, we see not only the people who work there, but also citizens are to be seen with an individual or shared purpose. People not only attend a church for directly religious purposes, but they also look there for solace, and hope. People

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visit an art museum or a concert hall to participate in the cultures of the world being evoked and displayed. Others go to a library to seek information and literatures that might broaden their horizons and enable them more fully to pursue their interests, hobbies or professional endeavours. Yet others contact their local municipality office to report a social wrong that they have experienced or witnessed. At the university, however, the position is different. Despite public lectures and so forth, it is still rather rare for people in the wider polity to be seen in universities in pursuing their own interests without being bound to instrumental pursuits, whether a study programme or work schedule. Classrooms and foyers lie empty outside of hours, and in the evenings and the weekends many universities are like forsaken production sites, only awaiting Monday morning, where its members return to their posts. This is not to say that universities should become mere sites of public debating forums or spaces for media events but both have their place in the twenty-first-century university. The university is being drawn more into the wider world but the question is: on which terms? Or even: on whose terms? The university has the potential to become much more than society’s key supplier of cognitive capital. Now it can become the democratic centre of learning and inquiry par excellence. It can become the first port of call for those who wish to seek out knowledge, to exchange ideas, to create academic work together as citizens. Where other institutions have claimed roles and purpose within aesthetic, political, cultural and religious domains, universities can exemplify an epistemic and knowledge ethos oriented to the wider world. There is, though, a collective shyness in society towards the university: the latter is not an inviting place. It does not do much inviting at all. The metaphor of the guild can be pressed in what Gabriel Marcel would call a ‘metasociological’ way (2001: 197). The university as a guild would then be seen not just as an object in society (something exterior and detached), but as a presence within society – a power that is felt and which, ideally, invigorates other domains in the wider world. Marcel’s concept of ‘charm’ is helpful here. For Marcel, charm would not be a quality to be considered in abstraction, and separate from the character of an individual university. Charm is not ‘a physical quality, like red hair; nor a moral quality, like self-control; nor an intellectual quality, like the gift for mathematics.’ (Marcel, 2001: 206) Rather, charm is more like a living power, a ‘kind of margin to a personality’ and similar to ‘the presence of a person spreading out beyond what he actually says and what he actually does … . It is an overplus, a beyond.’ (ibid.). Drawing on Marcel’s own words, we might say that a university ‘has charm if [it] sprawls out easily beyond [its immediate functional] virtues, [not least where] these seem to spring from some distant unknown source.’ (ibid.). Correspondingly, universities may be said to be charmless when they are experienced as distant and even cold institutions and so are not well understood, sympathised with and supported by the wider public; and this is a state into which universities are slipping. They lack this ‘charm’ but the matter lies significantly in universities’ own court.

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The potential for universities to take on a stronger knowledge role can be realised only by universities themselves. Universities are not bound passively to play only the narrow parts being assigned to them by the state, the public, the private sector, the knowledge economy and others, but can mobilise their own leadership powers. As a guild, the university is not a production site but a knowledge site, and an ethically loaded site at that. It has an epistemic mandate not only to inform other agents (individuals or institutions) in knowledge matters, but also to inspire and even to empower them. The challenge here is two-sided: the university must welcome and be welcomed by the wider society and its citizens. The university has to reach out beyond its borders and offer not only critique but knowledgeable action. Such a university shows that its thinking is not merely ideational, but is a form of action valuable to the wider society. It shows, too, that thinking is also a socio-material form of engagement. Thinking is societally actual and culturally real. Universities should be places, and academics should be people, that the public will seek out when in doubt over significant matters, when confronted and confused by the partiality of politicians, media or any interest group. In turn, universities and academics are now placed to offer informed understandings into the public sphere and so play a leading role in the growth of public understanding. It follows that a responsibility is opening for the university and its members to assume a presence at the heart of society, nationally and globally, in widening the conversations and, indeed, the reasoning of humanity.

Cosmopolitanism and global reasoning Living reason is not limited to individual institutions or campuses, or even to universities in their immediate regions. Academic reasoning takes place daily in collaborations that literally straddle the globe. (This book was written through a cross-national collaboration.). We see a heightened internationalisation in flows of data shared among multi-national teams, in universities’ recruitment of students and academic staff, in international mobility programmes and in scholarships and research grants provided on a cross-national basis. The last decades have witnessed an increased growth in the number and scope of international academic conferences that have focused on internationalisation or globalisation. These conferences are often anchored within and hosted by large international research associations and academic societies that also create invisible academic communities that include researchers from every corner of the world. There is a large and rather unexplored matter of academic spread. It is evident, for instance, in the number and scope of international journals that span disciplines and sub-disciplines, some very specific and almost idiosyncratic in focus. The international and global nature of academic reasoning is being reinforced, too, by the increased digitalisation of universities and higher education. Academics contact each other and maintain a strong and close contact through digital communities, skype meetings, online forums and websites and webinars through video-

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conference systems and collaboration in shared online documents and net-based work spaces. These global spaces of academic exchange work across each other in bewildering patterns, which would outstretch the most sophisticated forms of (digital) concept and network mapping. The life of reason, accordingly, is ever unfolding globally. Of course, there has always been strong mobility across academic communities, even since the first universities appeared in Europe (Ridder-Symoens, 2003). This scholarly wandering was due partly to the lack of expertise in one’s home region or country, which meant that academics often had to travel great distances to reach their favoured luminaries. This mobility, or ‘[a]cademic pilgrimage’ (p. 281), among early academics ‘eroded the European monastic ideal of stabilitas loci [stable residence]’ (p. 282), and so formed the birth of an academic reason that, ever since, has been waxing and waning across regional, national, societal and cultural borders. Today, academics respond to the same dialogic energy between universities – now worldwide. Academic reason is now a global phenomenon. But what does it mean that knowledge and knowing efforts are global? In the wake of poststructuralism, knowledge pursuits possess a fragile state, they having been portrayed as the outcome of social, cultural, gendered, ethnic or political perspectives without a universal character. This relativism is often exacerbated by academic practices. Even the PhD degree is closely bound to national and local contexts, so that it is difficult to say exactly what, if anything, makes it a universal degree. In a recent study, Lesley Andres and her research team argue that even though originating ‘as a universal degree with universal credentials, the increasing focus on internationalization and mobility paradoxically makes visible how diverse, complex, and in some cases incomparable, the PhD degree has become’. (Andres, Bengtsen, Crossouard, Gallego, Keefer and Pyhältö, 2015: 11) In conducting their fieldwork in faraway places, doctorate students may run into grave difficulties in negotiating local perceptions of their work; they may even be accused of espionage and thrown into jail. The sheer act of interviewing and putting questions to officials can be seen as dangerous to the political order. Reasonably enough in such a context, Andres et al. ‘call for further discussion about whether the PhD degree is, still, really a universal degree or if it has transformed into a culturally and regionally contextual educational phenomenon’ (ibid.) devoid of global cohesion.

Cultural leadership Few universities today dare to imagine their role as global cultural leaders and advocates for human rights and cosmopolitanism. Here, Immanuel Kant’s idea of the ‘cosmopolitan right’ (Kant, 1983: 121 – sometimes translated as ‘law of world citizenship’) is helpful, as expressed in his late work Towards Perpetual Peace (1983). Kant, and Rousseau before him, imagined a truly global and cosmopolitan world, where reason was centrally linked to mutual respect, recognition and esteem between nations, cultures and people. As early as the late eighteenth century,

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Kant considered that the world had become global in the sense that no event of gross social neglect and injustice, or economic and political breakdown, could occur in a nation without affecting its neighbouring countries and even distantly related nations and cultures. Kant argued that our reason and knowledge would be crucial matters in strengthening bonds between nations and cultures and would be linked to the growth of a ‘cosmopolitan spirit’ (Wood, 1999: 336). For Kant, reason and knowledge pursuits build greater contact between nations and help to ‘establish a nation of peoples … that … will finally include all people of the earth.’ (Kant, 1983: 119). This global reasoning was never a uniform, homogenous and streamlined reasoning. Reasoning, thinking and knowing about one another would not lead to the assimilation of cultural differences into a ‘universal monarchy’ (Kant, 1983: 127) but, to the contrary, would be built on respecting of the autonomy of individual states and cultures. Cosmopolitanism, in Kant, is precisely a matter of the preservation of differences among the life conditions and cultural forms of peoples of the Earth. Universities together constitute one of very few institutions that can invigorate and inspire such a life of knowledge and reasoning on a global level. That reasoning harbours a hope in the future of humanity (Finkielkraut, 2001), and perhaps even helps to establish peace between nations and peoples, for both reason and a care for reason are potentially universal. This is not to say that there will be agreement as to what counts as reason but that reason supplies a conceptual and practical umbrella under which participatory truth-oriented conversation can take place. And nor is it to say that consensus is the aim of such a conversation but rather that a concern for reason implies the opening of a space for contained disagreement. Universities help to supply just such a space. This space, opened by universities, is both universal and global. It is a universal space, potentially comprising all human beings and having a concern with the whole of life, organic and inorganic, in the universe. But it is also a global space. The seventeen thousand or so universities across the world are connected directly and indirectly, through their immediate networks and their allegiance to conditions of truth-oriented and rational inquiry. Universities should not underestimate their global powers and their culture of systematic reason.3 No longer is it expected that academics will live out their careers largely ensconced within the academic life itself, even if that life is now global and moves in internet fluidity. Now, academics may gain a wider and more vibrant voice on a global level. This does not mean that universities should only accept and play within the dominant political and economic discourses, with their talk of ‘world-class’, ‘excellence’, ‘skills’ and ‘innovation’. In the twenty-first century, universities can generate and sustain powerful and humane discourses that respond not only to economic or political drivers, but also that engage with a deeper and more profound sense of mutual understanding and respect. For example, some universities are examining ways in which, given their own resources, they can respond to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development

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Goals, perhaps through partnerships that link universities in the Global North and the Global South. Such a venture is nothing less than a response to the ethical imperative inherent in the global care that reasoning ultimately prompts. In a time in which political and religious institutions are not able to bring the world together under shared values and belief systems, universities may be acquiring just such a possibility. This would constitute no less than a role of cultural leadership. This is possible because the value framework within academic life does not readily lend itself to co-option into ideology or political propaganda, and because academic work will only find enduring momentum through diversity and openness. Cultural leadership of universities does not take the form of producing moral codes, or building universal frameworks for legislation (although it is striking how, at moments of national reconstruction, academics are invited to assist in the formation of constitutions, legal frameworks, ethical principles and so on). The cultural leadership exercised by universities is exhibited much more through their reasonableness (chapter nine) coupled with quite new kinds of opportunities for epistemic outreach. Universities, if societally and culturally active and engaging, may help societies to put the familiar under question, and thereby open up towards what is unfamiliar and even strange. This epistemic outreach would ultimately constitute doubly a form of epistemic leadership; firstly, in widening cognitive options and frameworks for interpreting the world and, secondly, in imparting a culture of constrained criticality. Such a suggestion of cultural leadership will be anathema to many, and will be portrayed, not least in an age of populism, as an example of the presumptuousness of elites. For all that, it is a role whose time has come and which, however uneasily, should be shirked by the university.

Conclusions Knowledge has life in itself and in the world and has to be kept alive and given continuous epistemic energy. It is sustained through living reason, at the heart of which resides a value background in which related human practices and beliefs – of the giving and taking of reasons, of truthfulness and of a relentless drive towards human understanding – are given allegiance. Universities are central to the formation and sustaining of this living reason on three levels. Firstly, the life of reason and knowledge is lived through the culture of an individual university and its physical setting. Even though the university may be scattered all across a city, or even in other countries, the activities and energies of a university’s physical setting hold a special import. To thrive, the life of reason has to constitute a home, where its inhabitants feel at home. Knowledge is rooted in the architecture, design and spatial culture of the individual university. Whatever its digital activity may be, there has to be some sense – however remote – of being at the university. Without some such a physical presence – however minimal – the life of a university itself is likely to be meagre and fragile.

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Secondly, living reason is projected by the university in the wider societal context and with other institutional, organisational and professional domains. Here, the university and its knowledge activities will be subject to the perceptions of its local and regional community, the citizens of which will be often unfamiliar with the academic culture and its own values. Living reason, living the life of reason, is challenging in the twenty-first century and there will be risks to any university that seeks to uphold this culture in the wider world. Thirdly, the life of academic knowledge and reason takes place within a global horizon, at the macro-level of the world, as the academic community engages with both international organisations (such as UNESCO and the United Nations) and with citizens – who are also increasingly global citizens. The world may be fragmented in many ways but universities have it within them collectively to play a small part as a force for global integration. In its concern for the life of reason, then, the university works on three levels: the singular institution, its surrounding environment and the universality of the life of reason. It possesses an inherent global and universal outlook, while also possessing – to some degree at least – an internal integrity. The life of reason is bound up with fundamental matters of the future of the life of the whole Earth and, in an open and interconnected world, the possibility is opening for universities collectively to assume a role in cultural leadership.

Notes 1 Ghosh, P. (2018) ‘Badger cull: Vets accuse ministers of “barefaced lies”’, BBC News, 12 November. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46150548 [accessed 8 May 2019]. 2 For more work on the concept of dwelling in relation to the university as a physical place, see Nørgård and Bengtsen (2016, 2018). For work on the notion of dwelling in relation to the ‘optimistic university’ and implications for new thinking, see Barnett and Bengtsen (2017). 3 Guattari’s (2016: 74) book, Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities, offers resources for glimpsing universities as possibly forming a ‘collective assemblage’ with their ‘material, semiotic, economic and social components’, which could help to generate a new ‘collective desire’.

11 WIDENING THE KNOWLEDGE ECOLOGY

Introduction We have been proposing two interconnected theses. Our first thesis has been that an interest in knowledge is bound up with life. This has been our foundational thesis. However, it is our second thesis that forms our primary thesis; namely that the university, as an institution crucially concerned with knowledge, is entangled irredeemably with life. The space that the university provides for systematic inquiry into knowledge – to uncover new knowledge and to bring students into a vibrant encounter with knowledge – is a space for epistemic life. And this epistemic life swirls within the university, among its disciplines, its processes of inquiry and its teaching and students’ learning, and out into the wider society. The university’s knowledge has always been prized by the world, within the mediaeval university and its forbears in distant lands. But now, in a world that has come to structure much of itself on knowledge – so-called cognitive capitalism (Boutang, 2011) – the university is only one institution with a driving interest in knowledge. The university’s knowledge activities are just an element, therefore, in what has come to be a global knowledge ecology. The nature of this knowledge ecology – its features, its shape, its players, its structure, its hierarchies and the distribution of power within it, its interconnections, its proclivities and biases and its associated ideologies – must be for others to uncover. Our concern here is to examine the implications of the university as entangled in this knowledge ecology. This particular ecology – the knowledge ecology – forms just one aspect of the university understood ecologically but it is surely the main aspect. Issues arise as to the possibilities and the responsibilities of the university towards the knowledge ecology. This is no technical matter. The ecological university takes its inspiration from life, understands that it is in life and works for life. And while the knowledge ecology is impaired and is constraining the university,

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there may yet be opportunities opening anew for the university in relation to its ecological interests. It may be possible for the university to enhance and even to widen the knowledge ecology.

Epistemic energy An interest in knowledge supplies a vitality to the university and to the wider world. Knowledge expands life by opening insights into the world and by widening options in the world. It can finesse understandings, increasing humanity’s sensitivities in and towards the world, not least because empathy and tolerance are not separate from knowledge but are implicated in it. Of course, awkward questions can be posed of universities: strains of eugenics, racism, state complicity, social class exclusion, colonisation and sheer undue power can be observed (over centuries, and across the world). This ‘dysfunctional’ side of universities (Smyth, 2018: 7) may lead to a poisonous and ‘diseased reasoning’ (ibid.) instead of personal and societal openness. But, yet, inquiry harbours a dual concernedness for the world for inquiry: it is inquiry into the world and it allows the world to come to it. (Bengtsen and Barnett, 2017b) Kernel here is the level of energy possessed by universities, for knowledge work is hard work, requiring unremitting levels of energy and commitment. This is easily diminished by undue internal managerial disciplines or external forces (whether of the market or of the state) or academics in their interactions with each other (in unduly negative comments as they review each other’s papers) or in pedagogical situations (as when a casual word can freeze a student and deplete his or her energy levels). Impairments of epistemic energy are evident both as a result of malign external forces and of internal actions, even of the academic community in-itself. On the other hand, a solicitous university leadership team can do much to raise energy levels. This calls for an enlivened leadership team that has a vigorous care towards the life of the university and of its whole academic community. This care is imbued with life, a life that reaches towards others so as to inspire, and carries with it an energy that generates further energy. It offers space in which to breathe and share in that air-ful spaciousness. The rector or vice-chancellor prompts an open-ended meeting or workshop – say, over a university’s emerging corporate strategy – in which she or he participates simply as a participant, with no other rank, and engages in the discussion and enthuses those others present at the same time, giving a licence to others at all levels of the university to be imaginative and outspoken in willing the institution onwards. This is literally inspirational; the university community is inspired, having new air breathed into it. The epistemic energy of a university, accordingly, can be depleted but it can also be enlarged. The knowledge ecology of the university is turbulent and always on the move. It can widen or narrow, it can constrain or open, it can reach into the wider world or withdraw into itself. It darts this way and that. A university’s

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networks can enlarge, and the wider society can come into its purview. Not only can its researchers and scholars engage in conversations with the citizens beyond its walls (Finnegan, 2005) and not only can it respond to different publics of citizen scientists and citizen scholars but, moreover, it can help to form publics in the wider society. Does it have the energy and the will to do this, perhaps by utilising new technologies in widening the public understanding of complex social and political issues? This requires much epistemic energy from universities and they commonly possess many resources of the necessary kind, in their knowledges, research, academics and students. What is characteristically lacking is the imagination and the will to discern possibilities that lie to hand. Nor are these matters solely of academics finding ways of putting their work into the public domain and forming wider publics. Students and their programmes of study can come into play in many ways. Via the internet, students on, say, a course in civil engineering in a developed country could be put into contact with students on a corresponding course in a developing country. Think of all of the cultural, social and personal ‘learning gains’ that would be likely to ensue. But, too, in a spirit of ‘engagement’, students could be brought into play in helping a university to project the work of its researchers and scholars to wider publics, by building databases, by gaining feedback from potential users in the wider society, and by drafting the texts to be placed on new interactive websites. Irigaray spoke of ‘air’ (and considered that there was rather little of it in the work of Martin Heidegger) and was keen to point to the presence of air in human being: ‘To air he owes his life’s beginning, his birth and his death; on air, he nourishes himself; in air, he is housed; thanks to air, he can move about, can exercise a faculty for action, can manifest himself, can see and speak.’ (1999: 12). But, all this can – and must – be said of the university. Through air it has its being; its life; its powers of speech; its indefatigable inquiries; its patient pedagogies; and its acts in and for the world. ‘Deprived of air, the thinker would have only … to die.’ (p. 27). So too, the university. And we see just such tendencies today, the university being deprived of air; and even as more air comes into the university. Air isn’t valuable in itself for there are different kinds of air: some kinds of air will open the university (bringing new ways of looking at familiar phenomena) and yet others (for example, an air that places suspicion on truth and on experts) will diminish the university. It follows that the university’s relationship with the knowledge ecology is a matter not only of formal connections between universities, but is also a matter of air. What is in view here is a kind of expanding global net of knowledge nodes with increasing air between and within the nodes. More knowledge, especially of different kinds, allows the world more easily to breathe. Empathic, enquiring, aesthetic, indigenous, embodied, kinaesthetic, humanistic, processual, poetic and many other forms of knowledge bring new air to the world, allowing the world to see itself afresh. This ecological university breaks through the thinness of the contemporary knowledge forms – dominated by scientism, mathematics, control, technicism,

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metrics, narrow impact and even cognition itself – to experiment with new ways of comprehending the world. It breathes air into the self-understanding of the world. And these epistemic airs may helpfully intermingle. In creating new artificial limbs, perhaps for athletes, a new interdisciplinary air is formed (across the sciences, social sciences and the humanities including ethics) and imbued with empathy and inspired by a will to enhance life. However, as noted, knowledge can reduce and even extinguish air. Ideologies, dogmas, superstitions and so forth are names given to corrupt or deficient knowledges. And it is a largely unremarked role of the university not merely to demarcate robust from faulty claimants to knowledge but to bring any such claimant into its purview and subject it to ‘the principle of reason’ (Heidegger, 1998). As we saw in chapter ten, for Heidegger, the principle of reason was a principle for and of being. Being had come to be identified with reason. Just this has to be said of the university. The university, as a space of reasoning, brings air to an otherwise airless set of readings of the world. Most claimants to knowledge cannot survive this airing and are vanquished over time. Phlogiston, alchemy, witches, eugenics, depictions of traditional societies as ‘savage’ and the steady-state theory of the origin of the universe – and a myriad of forgotten ideas – have fallen by the wayside, in the expanding air of the world of knowledge. The energy levels of this epistemic universe are, however, on a cusp. The knowledge ecology that the university inhabits could go on growing, and bring more epistemic air to the world, and helping it better to comprehend itself. The signs, however, are not propitious. Several states across the world bring only a diminution of air to the academic community, closing their universities, and incarcerating – or worse – their academics. From time to time, governments threaten to withdraw funding from the humanities, and scholarly work with books and archives (and reading) is viewed with disdain. More generally still, states align themselves tightly with knowledge forms that yield economic capital of some kind (whether as material or human). A ‘post-truth’ world serves, prima facie, to allow all-comers to have their say and allow in more air, but this is the air of the fanatic, of the loud-mouthed and of the intolerant. As a matter of fact, critical perspectives are often outlawed, both by external forces and even within the academy.1 Ultimately, this is a recipe for a closing of air, and a dissipating of energy, and a flattening of reason.

More air Willy-nilly, universities are networked. However, the ecological university concerns itself with its networks. It is watchful as it finds itself embroiled in networks of state policy and networks with private corporations, for these powerful networks extract high obligations in return for the funding or the ‘gifts’ that they characteristically provide. At the same time, it seeks to widen its networks with non-governmental organisations and civil society, and with professions, in advancing its interests in knowledge, understanding and reason. And these

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networks include discourses: as noted, a single university may attempt to build bridges between its own unfolding trajectory and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or it may, for instance, develop a public profile around the theme of ‘social responsibility’ or of ‘wisdom’. In deliberately concerning itself in multiple networks, both national and global, universities possess a degree of ‘corporate agency’ (List and Pettit, 2011).2 Realising this academic agency in the world is far from easy and accommodations and judgements are required at every step. To what extent can the university, as an ecological university, maintain its allegiance to advancing the wellbeing of the whole Earth? Will this or that alliance require it to compromise or even to abandon its fundamental interests? The ecological university, therefore, does not shrink from networking. To the contrary, networking is vital to it as an ecological university. The ecological university purposefully engages with the wider world and with the domains of human being, communication (externally and within itself). But it has an interest in those links only insofar as they enable the university to enliven the world, through the greater understandings that it imparts. The knowledge ecology is central to this ‘mission’. The university plays its part in taming the wilder excesses of the half-truths and prejudices that are striving for legitimacy within the knowledge ecology of the wider society but it seeks also to brings its own reasoning and knowledges into play, and so helps to build a more rational society (Habermas, 1970). The new media can help: the university can network directly both with organisations and with individuals in quite new ways. Such networking becomes a means by which the university can impart an air of reason and understanding into the world.

What’s to become of the university library? So as to put some flesh on these schematic bones, let us look at the university library as a case study. Just how is the academic library to be construed in the twenty-first century? It is on a cusp, as it succumbs to a combination of phenomena, including the emergence of the student as an active learner and as a self-payer, whose wants are to be satisfied; the costs of housing books in valuable real-estate; the low return on scholarship as compared with the return on empirical research; and the increasing significance of the digital environment. Moreover, the digital era has enabled many academic resources to be available ‘on-line’. Vast amounts of academic and related work are now readily available. Travel to distant (and possibly dangerous) lands to conduct scholarly research in relatively inaccessible archives can even be avoided, as the texts in question can be consulted from one’s own desk and interviews can be conducted remotely. Even the rooms full of computer banks are disappearing as the library’s users come armed with their portable pieces of technology. To use a favoured word, there is an intersectional situation here, the academic library being positioned by multiple forces. It now has to work out its place

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within several contexts, of the digital environment, of portable devices, of the student’s preferences assuming a heightened significance, of changing patterns of scholarship and research, of the emergence of the global university and of the increasing power of some publishing companies. Nor is it just that knowledge is now distributed rather than being contained in a single place. It has been remarked on more than one occasion that the category of knowledge is being reduced to ‘information-processing’ and thence to mere ‘data management’: the category of knowledge is confined to a particular kind of knowing-how, namely knowing how to obtain information and manage data. Understanding, and still less wisdom, is rendered near-invisible in the discourses and practices of the academic world. Under these conditions, the question arises: just what is the role of the academic library? Might it come to mirror the high street, with its shops experiencing a lessening footfall and eventual closure? After all, many of its services now appear to be available at one’s desk or anywhere in the world, through digital networks. Unsurprisingly, some university libraries are emptying of their books and journals, as they turn themselves into sets of learning spaces. Now academic libraries become spaces for group work, project work, individual work, research discussions, quiet places and comfortable spaces, and they can seem rather forlorn, if occasionally noisy places, apparently awaiting their re-invention. A question raised by Martin Heidegger (1968) – and which we have previously encountered here – is this: does the university think? Moreover, does it think about thinking? The questions have carry-over into the library. Does the library invite thought and even provoke thought? These are matters of import, not least as the library divests itself of its books and even its journals. This is a loss for the sheer presence of books on the shelf provoked thought and multiply so. The different textures, sizes and appearances of the books, even just their spines, assaulted the visual senses. Titles could be read along a shelf and spark thoughts serendipitously, and perhaps in a new direction. In pulling a book off the shelf, one’s eye might be drawn to another, contiguous in its epistemic position but unknown. Certain shelves could become a home and portals to a new world. But the library, with its books and its journals, had deeper sets of value. Their sheer presence was an immediate reminder of one’s ignorance. This is matter of profound cultural importance, as the world witnesses the rise of hubris on a large scale. Moreover, the library provided a visual thread, linking one to a long history. They were a reminder that one’s thinking is built on the shoulders of others, mostly long gone. Thought, after all, is but a conversation not only with the living and those yet to come but also with the dead. And without a sense of that link to intellectual pasts – past thinkers, past scholars, past research, past understandings, past traditions – we live only in the present or even we attempt to live in the future. The past is rendered irrelevant and an intellectual amnesia results. In this cutting ourselves off from the past, we pretend to be supermen and superwomen, striking out on our own. Owing nothing to the past, we pretend to be gods; and we give rise to ‘a runaway world’.3

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But what might it be for the academic library to provoke thought, and to bring knowledge alive and help it to live in the present and for the future? Here are some suggestions. A university library could open itself to the public and could mount exhibitions on key issues of the day (drawing on the work of its own academics and students); it could become a place of debate, with its academics engaging with the community; it could display, perhaps around particular themes, the latest books and papers by its staff and student dissertations; it could deploy the resources of the library to engage with global and national issues; it could host cross-disciplinary conversations, bringing colleagues together across the disciplines, perhaps focusing on a particular theme such as ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘the city’, ‘drugs’, ‘the digital age’, ‘human rights’; and it could host discussions – say with local writers – even on topics such as ‘writing’ and ‘reading’. In short, the library can become the central university space for provoking thought in a community. After all, it is often centrally sited on campuses and it has to hand most if not all of the resources needed for such initiatives. But the library can go further. It can display works of art, and it can host recitals, and so assault the senses in new ways, and explore directly what it is to know and to understand. In some universities, peoples of indigenous communities might be invited in to display and to discuss their cultural artefacts. In the UK, in 1963, a report from what was perhaps the largest ever national inquiry into higher education spoke of the ‘transmission of a common culture’ as one of four aims of higher education’ (Cmnd, 2154). That sentiment has been extinguished but replaced, so far as the academic library is concerned, by a rational cognitive culture of the North, so producing an invisibility of other cultures. A university library could help to make visible a host of cultures. The academic library could become a space and a place even of cultures. The opening thesis of this section can now be restated. The academic library is on a cusp. It can either go on reducing its understanding of itself as a set of information services and physical learning spaces or it can widen its sense of itself to bring knowledge alive for the wider community and society. It can become again a place that provokes thought, albeit in new and imaginative ways, cognitively, culturally, socially and personally; and, in the process, can expand human being. By capitalising on its position as a pivot in society’s total knowledge ecology, it can help the university to realise its possibilities across the many ecosystems in which the university is entangled, including those of knowledge itself, and of culture, persons, social institutions and learning. Accordingly, the thesis that knowledge is for life – to enhance life, to extend life, to aid wellbeing – suggests that the future of the library might be fundamentally re-imagined. This would be a library from life, of life and for life.

Ecological interests Ecological interests are constitutive of each of the main activities of the university, whether in teaching and learning, in research and in engaging with the wider

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society. And these interests have their port of departure in the university’s concerns with knowledge. This is a university that seeks to hold as many forms of knowledge together as possible (going beyond the cant of ‘interdisciplinarity’). It seeks to reveal new worlds through knowledge and to bring its students into new cognitive and personal perspectives and gain a more secure sense of themselves. And, through its outreach ventures, it seeks to enable the wider society to understand the world anew and critically so. This is a university characterised by a vital concern for epistemic life. To speak of the university having ecological interests is not a matter of observing that the university has certain interests that, for example, it should heed in enhancing its financial situation. This would amount to a means-end account of the university’s interests. Given this university’s setting, its resources, its networks, its position vis-à-vis the state, its market situation and its quite legitimate concerns towards its financial wellbeing, its reputation and so forth, it has interests in pursuing certain kinds of goals. This is a ‘subjective reason’ (Horkheimer, 2004) that flows naturally from its readings of its ontology, of its place in the world and its future. And the interests at work are cognitive interests, aided and abetted (these days) by computer modelling, management information, calculations of risk in weighing options and technical decision-making. None of this is to be downplayed. However, a university’s ecological interests are of a quite different order and sponsor a different orientation to the world. These are interests that spring from an individual university’s value position, namely its concerns for the world, indeed for the whole Earth. Whereas instrumental interests favour a SWOT analysis – identifying threats to the university and working out its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in combatting them – any ecological interests on the part of the university will prompt it to start from its concerns for the world and its valuing of the wellbeing of the world. Or, whereas instrumental rationality starts from the university-in-itself, ecological interests start from a university’s readings of the plight of the world and the possibilities that open for it. The ecological university begins from sheer being, the being of the whole Earth. Certainly, cognition comes into play here, as do information and evidence. The ecological university will conduct its own environmental scanning. But this is a university fired up with a dual spirit of worldliness and concern. These values of concern for the world, and this lively spirit, can be seen throughout the university. It is present in the student stalls as a new year gets underway, and as students seek to raise funds and other resources on the occasion of a human disaster (perhaps in their own country even in a distant part of the world). It is present in the concern shown by medical researchers, who work long hours into the night as they struggle to find ways of ameliorating rates of cancer. And it is present in the drive and determination of a senior management team led by its rector to orchestrate – through a consultation process across the university and beyond – a totally new corporate strategy on ecological principles. These are not the actions born of a wariness about the risks posed but are born out of an

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energetic spirit, even a passion deep in knowing efforts (Kierkegaard, 2009), which flows from concerns for the world.

On spirit Spirit pervades the whole university (chapter nine). There are, though, two kinds of spirit. The first, the rational means-end calculative spirit, is contained within boundaries marked out by the cost-benefit and risk analyses. Seized of such a spirit, a university is on the look-out for the main chance, to improve its rankings in the league tables, to grow in size, to extend its powers in the world and build an even stronger totality of knowledge (Levinas, 2003). Once a decision has been made, the main burden lies in working out the means, and preferably the most economic and efficient means, of securing the ends. It is a mean spirit, an impoverished spirit. However, the second form of spirit, the ecological spirit, is unconfined, limited only by the imagination, personal and collective, in the university. And whereas the first is ontic in character, dependent on readings of the immediate facts of the matters in discerning efficient methods to realise the chosen goals or in producing stated ‘deliverables’, the second is precisely a matter of spirit, of glimpsing and feeling a oneness in the world, and a drive towards exteriority and openness (Levinas, 2003). It is not an aimless spirit but is steered by a definite value position in relation to what matters in and for the world. And different universities will legitimately form different value priorities. Readings of the university come into play here, too. But they come into play in the service of the university’s ecological spirit. There is ontology here, as this university works out its ecological positioning. Which are the zones in which the university is placed? And what are the forces at work? And there is epistemology, as this university seeks to bring its disciplines to bear in its worldly situation. Which are to be the favoured forms of knowledge? Are they to be guided primarily by an interest in control of the total environment or of understanding or of criticality? These are not unimportant matters. But the university’s ecological interests reveal themselves most particularly in its spirit, in its lively concerns for the whole world, for it is they that impart the will to give itself to the world, and imaginatively to discern its options in the world.

Ecological power The university for which we have been contending has an abiding interest in life, not merely human life but life as such, the life of the whole planet and indeed, the universe (to which its cosmologists explicitly pay testimony). Of course, this university has an interest in human affairs; but this interest is put into the context of an interest in life in toto and is lived out fully. This university is engaged, disputatious, brave, insolent, critical, caring, solicitous, careful, brash,

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head-strong, diligent, astute, prudent, open, generous and yet pugnacious all at once; and much more besides. To put the matter more formally, this university is ontology and epistemology run together. Ontologically, it takes effort both to work out its place in the world, and to form a view of the character of the world. It understands that human beings have been on this Earth for a fraction of its history and, especially over the past two hundred years or so, have come to have profound and deleterious effects on the Earth, including on human beings themselves. And it understands that it has particular responsibilities in the matter. Epistemologically, this university is sensitive to its being an institution with an interest in understanding the whole world. Right from the start, even before its establishment in Europe, the university was forming disciplines around astronomy, theology, philosophy and mathematics; and so it formed an intimate association with knowledge. Ontology and epistemology were separate but held together: epistemology – its understandings of knowledge – were put into the service of comprehending the character and the life of, and within, the whole universe. But the university of the twenty-first century (and perhaps even beyond) does more than hold ontology and epistemology together; indeed, it surpasses them. It brings its imaginative powers to bear on the (total) world around it and scrupulously attempts creatively to discern its possibilities. There is an intermingling here, of imagination, understanding, the world and communication: ‘Imagination, which creates the worlds of waiting and willing, feeds on knowledge and speech that also capture and allow it to be represented again.’ (Varto, 2008: 59). Mindful of the multiple ways it is already entangled with the world – through knowledge, learning, culture, social institutions, the economy, persons and the natural environment – this university seeks ways in which its resources can be put into the service of its interests in life; and does its best to communicate the fruits of that intellectual and practical labour. Note that while the university is entangled with many ecosystems of the world, it is in and through the knowledge ecology that it invests its primary efforts. This deep entanglement comes from a will to life that far exceeds any immediate instrumental value (Nietzsche, 1968). Through its knowledges (plural), it endeavours to glimpse the world in all its variety and to inspire the world. It is through its knowing efforts that the university secures its legitimacy. This is far from easy, for the university has considerable powers, not only epistemological but also human, social, economic, cultural and pedagogical. Those powers mirror the major ecosystems in which it finds itself. And so considerable imaginative powers are called for as it juggles its resources across all those ecosystems so as to redeem its implicit promise to the world to aid its improvement. We see, then, that this university surpasses the conjunction of ontology and epistemology, of what is in the world and of its efforts to understand itself and the world in which it lives and moves. This university adds the domain of the imagination to those of ontology and epistemology. It may be said that the concept of the imagination is implied in the matter of epistemology: in order to comprehend

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the world, it has to be imagined. Quite so. But, now, imagination comes into its own and supersedes the university’s knowing efforts. It allows the university, for example, to critique its own knowing efforts – as forms of instrumental reason (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1986) or as the knowledge of the powerful (cf Young, 2014) and even of colonisers (de Sousa Santos, 2016) – and then to go on imaginatively to glimpse and evolve more epistemologically generous ways of comprehending the world. This imagination gives new life to the university’s efforts to know the world. Now, the university’s knowing efforts are not just critiqued but are widened and transformed. In its efforts to give to the world all that it can, it evolves new ways of understanding the world. Its knowing efforts are guided by its imaginative powers. Again, to put the matter more formally, and to bring it within the work of the founder of Critical Realism, Roy Bhaskar, in pointing up the role of the imagination, we move from concerns of ontology and epistemology (and judgemental rationality), which marked Bhaskar’s initial philosophy to an interest in critique and to meta-reality (Bhaskar, 2012) (which characterised his later philosophy). The imagination enables the university to step aside from its presenting situation and discern quite new paths for itself. Again, to draw on Bhaskar’s terminology and put it into the context of our present concerns, this would be a transcendental university, that brings a transcendental imagination to bear on its situation but in a hard-headed way, to live out in very practical ways – in its pedagogies, research, engagements with the wider world and own internal arrangements – glimpsings of its possibilities. For example, it observes the knowledge poverty that characterises many of the peoples of the world, and it uses its resources to place its understandings into the world and to help move the world into a better place.

Conclusions The university for which we have been contending is full of life, spirit and energy. It is oriented to the world in several directions (including itself), and its moves are met by forces – often hostile forces – that would bend it in other directions. As remarked (chapter ten), it is a space of open and often conflictual debate. And it glimpses before it a rolling array of unlimited challenges. Its energy levels sustain it and propel it. Its spirit is its non-material aspect, which breathes life into it. (These aspects of institutional life, spirit and energy are grossly neglected in organisational studies of the university.) This ecological university has a concern for all of the major ecosystems of the world but is especially sensitive to the ecology of knowledge. Knowledge – and its associated connotations of reason, inquiry, critique, truthfulness and so on – has always been central to its historical self-understanding but, now, knowledge can be understood as a means of transport across the many ecosystems with which the university is inevitably entangled. And here opens an unending panoply of ecological interests for the university.

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We saw this interlinking, and the infinite character, of these ecological interests in looking at the university library. There, too, we glimpsed possibilities for the university to take to itself new levels of agency and so raise its levels of energy, as it widens its comprehension of the world and expands its relationships with the world. The university’s ecological interests present it with ever-unfolding possibilities for its imaginings, its networking and its care for the world; indeed, for the life of the whole Earth.

Notes 1 Although later changed, the draft of the Texas Republican Party policy statement in 2012 included this passage: ‘We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that … have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.’ 2 List and Pettit’s book is a work of political philosophy and does not concern itself with universities, although it has direct implications for universities as organisations. For our taste, however, it focuses rather overmuch on the internal nature of organisations. Rather missing is much consideration of the possibilities for organisations, not least such as universities, to realise their powers as corporate agents in the twenty-first century. 3 Although taken up by Anthony Giddens (2002), the phrase ‘a runaway world’ was first used and with much effect by Edmund Leach (1968), the anthropologist, in his BBC Reith Lectures of 1967, in his shrewd observations on the modern world, observations that still carry weight today. The term has more recently been applied by Melanie Walker and Jon Nixon in their book on universities in a runaway world (Walker and Nixon, 2004).

12 REACHING OUT

Introduction If – as we have been contending – knowledge is of life, from life, for life and imbued with life, it must be the case that the university has a responsibility to reach out into the world. The university is called to reach out into the world precisely in wanting to enhance life in all of its aspects. It is this reaching out that forms the concerns of this closing chapter. The logic to this being our closing chapter will, hopefully, have become evident. In this book, we have followed more or less a certain path. We have explored the general character of knowledge so far as it bears upon life (Part 1); we have examined in some detail the matter of life in and around academic knowledge and the university and identified areas that universities might address in adhering to their responsibilities for life, in all of its reaches, both beyond and within universities (Part 2); and we have sketched implications of our thesis, not least to glimpse new possibilities for the university in enhancing life (Part 3). Now, we turn specifically to avenues in which the university can reach out into the world, in furthering – through its knowledge endeavours – its interests in life. This reaching out brings into view many of the issues on which we have touched in this book and it poses, even at this juncture, some new problems. What is it for the university, through its intimate connection with knowledge, to have ‘reach’ and to ‘reach out’? Does this reaching out have boundaries? And in reaching out, might the university have a reasonable expectation that that reaching out will be greeted by another outstretched hand – as in the Vatican ceiling – or is it the fate of the university to find no such hand extended towards it? Life may not wish to be disturbed by the university.

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Public reach For the economist, Samuelson, knowledge is non-rivalrous (it can be assimilated by an infinite number of people without diminishing its value), and nonexcludable (its benefits cannot be confined to individual purchasers) (Marginson, 2007: 33–34). It is evident, however, that increasingly knowledge is being appropriated on a selective basis (characteristically by those who can purchase it), and many are excluded from having access to its benefits. Increasingly, knowledge is shutting off life and is shut off from life. ‘Knowledge’ here is, of course, a shorthand. It includes academic conversations and practices oriented towards truth, both in written and in oral forms. It includes work in the laboratory, in the field (literally so in geology, anthropology and archaeology), in the seminar, in the clinical situation and at the computer. For the university in the twenty-first century, a key question is: just how are such practices to be open to the wider world? But further questions lie beneath: to what end? Just why should it be thought that there might be value in bringing the university’s epistemic activities into the wider social arena? For many, an immediate response to these questions lies in the economic and instrumental added-value that might accrue. Is this not, after all, why – since World War II, over the past seventy years or so – states have invested in higher education and have underwritten large expansions of their research budgets and then widened that to a ‘research and development’ programme; and then more recently sprinkled their policy statements with references to ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge exchange’? But such a response scuppers any hope of academic knowledge fully reaching out to the wider society, for this economic agenda is tied to corporate interests, which are not typically guided by considerations of worldly benefit; they are not concerned with life as such (cf Roggero, 2011). We wish, accordingly, to turn in a different direction and towards the concept of the public sphere.1 We sharply distinguish the concept of the public sphere from that of public goods or ‘the public good’ or the social good of the university: either directly, or by implication, each of these latter terms has taken on an economic flavour, to do with the circulation or distribution of goods in society.2 However, in the twenty-first century, we even have to leave behind the concept of the public sphere and replace it with that of public spheres (plural). In the twenty-first century, there are multiplying and overlapping publics; and they vie with each other. To conjure up the idea of the public sphere, therefore, is to pose the question: just how might the university reach out to multiple publics? Two kinds of practical response suggest themselves. Firstly, the different disciplines and knowledge fields of the university each has its own public (publics even), and they can form linkages with those publics that have an interest in their knowledge wares. Amateur astronomers may be interested in the websites of university cosmology departments or the programmes on astronomy in the mass media with their interviews with university astronomers; archaeologists will turn to the news emanating from university archaeological departments or will even work alongside

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academic archaeologists on digs. These cognitive interest groups will be particular and will have their own languages. Secondly, a multitude of modes of communication presents itself, many with interactive capacities. It could even be said that a new age of ‘knowledge socialism’ (Peters and Besley, 2006: 59) is opening to the university, which is being encouraged seriously to engage with wider communities. These reflections deserve scrutiny. A public fully comes into existence when its members become citizens. The terms ‘citizen scientists’ (Simpson, 2013) and ‘citizen scholars’ (Arvanitakis and Hornsby, 2016) have recently emerged but we do not find them fully satisfactory. They smack too much of shadow academics in the public sphere, learning from academics and being dependent on academics. They are also too individualist in tone, with the idea of citizenship being seen as a matter of lone enquirers. The public realm is more than a collection of individuals, however well-informed. What is called for is something approaching the kind of ‘public realm’ that Hannah Arendt (1958: 55) had in mind, of citizens being involved in a public discourse that transcends the lives of mortal human beings. The university is in a quite new situation, of having the means to work towards just such an informed citizenry in a public space, and constituting – in Habermas’ (1970) terminology – a rational society. But the Habermassian idea of rationality is highly cerebral. Accordingly, a more lively idea of the university in and for the public sphere is needed, one that is full of life and which seeks to add to life in all its manifestations.

Reaching the limits It may seem as if there is no limit to the university’s aspirations, with the university being concerned with nothing less than the whole of life. But, of course, there are limits. The university cannot reach into every corner of society, it cannot reach into every mind, it cannot reach every organism in the world, and it cannot reach every culture, or every language or every ideology. But it can legitimately aspire to reach out in all of those directions. It pursues an unrestricted interest in life. And it does so through its knowledge interests. For the university, there can be no a priori limit to the matters into which it might inquire, and to the matters that it might put before its students – the university has, so to speak, an open ontology (Bhaskar, 2008). Doubtless, choices have to be made, in research topics, in ventures with the wider economy and the world and in components of course programmes. But nothing can be ruled off limits. The university has to feel that the universe is its oyster. All of life lies before it. This is no pure epistemic interest on the part of the university, but reflects its contemporary position on this Earth. The university is entangled, whether it wishes it or not, in multiple ecosystems, not just of knowledge but also of many other ecosystems, of culture, learning, persons, social institutions, the economy, politics and – certainly – the natural environment; and being so entangled, the university is obliged to address those entanglements. For example, the university is obliged to concern itself with the cultures of the world since, in any case, the

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cultures of the world will speak to the university. The university is obliged to concern itself with the natural environment, not least since it is a large player in the natural environment. The university is obliged to concern itself with persons, not only those within its physical spaces but also all who might benefit from it in the wider society. The university is obliged to concern itself with the powers of the state and the room for manoeuvre allotted to it by the state. And so on and so forth. The university cannot shirk its entanglements with those ecosystems. Placing the university in its rich and complicated ecological setting – across the whole of life – brings severe challenges. The infinite character of its reach is now multiplied, for new possibilities open over the directions in which the university might reach out. Seeing the university in this way – as having obligations to reach out across the ecosystems with which it is entangled – derives especially from its intimate connections with reliable knowledge. Built up over a thousand years – if not more – the university has acquired a reputation for sound knowledge. That this reputation is currently faltering3 can only act as a spur to project the university’s cognitive interests and extend its cognitive reach across the world. To have reach, at least this reach, means to have power and consequence. The reach of a falcon or an eagle in full flight may be daunting and the reach of a tidal wave may even terrify. Some institutions have great reach even though they have no material power, and institutions with great socio-material power may have very limited reach. It may be felt that different universities exhibit both patterns. Reach, then, is a power to stir and move others, to make a difference in the world. Knowledge, potentially, has tremendous reach. The pen (or the word-processor) remains mightier than the sword; and so dictators – and would-be dictators – often pour scorn on the university. The reach of academic knowledge is vastly underestimated. It is too often seen as being limited to a given professional context, an abstruse academic paper or student assignment. However, the knowledge encapsulated, even in such limited actions and endeavours, may, like diamonds, shine forever. Now, this reach is much expanded. The university can reach out to the world in multiple ways, whether in putting its scholarship and research into the public domain, in listening to the voices of society in the framing of projects, in encouraging its students to forage in local communities and businesses (either as part of their course of study or as part of their own lifewide learning), or in speaking to the wider world (either on regular broadcasting channels or in social media). There is virtually no limit to the extent that the university can reach out. And this reaching can fan out across cultures, the natural environment, social institutions and persons, as well as learning and the economy. And these paths criss-cross. As intimated, the university is entangled in the learning ecosystem of society. However, society’s learning systems are falling short of their possible situation, and are impaired. Communication systems are steered and even manipulated by the powerful. In turn, society fails sufficiently to learn about itself and its

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complex challenges and it makes collective decisions while being largely in a state of ignorance. Willy-nilly, the university is implicated here. Its work – say in economics, the environment, medicine, robotics, history, constitutional affairs and so on – may be misunderstood or misrepresented in the media or it may be that it has produced work relevant to a matter of public interest that isn’t noticed. The point is that the university has particular responsibilities to contribute to public debate and widen the public understanding of complex issues and, so, in turn, widen the public sphere. In this way, too, it would be advancing society’s learning systems (Habermas, 1987), not least those in which and through which society learns about itself.

Advancing the learning ecology Here, the learning ecology of society both emerges and becomes complex. The university is now just one player in a multitude of actors – institutions and persons – involved in society’s learning powers. These include broadcasting companies, social media, research and reporting capabilities of private institutions, think tanks, community internet forums, newspapers (again, increasingly with an internet presence), parliamentary committees, trades unions, professional bodies, adult learning centres and so on. And this learning ecology – this intermingling of institutions that form the learning systems of society – also (as noted) includes individuals as citizen scholars and as citizen researchers. This is a complex in the serious senses of the term. It is an entangled web of entities that goes on becoming more intertwined, with streams of societal understanding – and misunderstanding. Emergence is a key aspect of complex systems and so too for this societal learning ecology. Its dynamics, its formations, its actual learning moments and currents cannot be foreseen. It has properties of emergence in that unpredictable properties emerge from this learning assemblage, as its components jostle for supremacy. The newspapers vie with each other and the mass media view with universities. There are learning conflicts here. The possibilities opening to the university for reaching out to the world in this learning ecology are both infinite and expanding. Seemingly, there is no limit to this reaching out. The university has multiple domains in which it can reach out, multiplying activities through which it can reach out and multiple media by means of which it can reach out. And it has an infinity of genres, languages and sheer discourses that it might employ. The university can reach out to and help to advance life in all its manifestations. But, paradoxically, there are limits to this reaching out, even within its infinities. There are practical and technological limits. Each university has a finite set of resources that limit its reach across the domains in which it is entangled. A large world-famous institution is positioned to raise finance in the money markets and to extend its reach across the many disciplines and fields in which it works. It will have hundreds, if not thousands, of organisations in its networks and it will

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have ready access to centres of power, both political and bureaucratic. A small specialist university does not possess such resources. There are other limits to this reach. A university may feel obliged to tack with the ideologies of the age and to heed influential tendencies in the framing of world pictures. Rarely will it dare to bite the hand that feeds it. And the ground on which the university reaches out is all the time unstable. The themes, the tropes, the nuances, the policy frames, the concepts and so forth that encircle it are in constant turmoil. There are unwritten codes at work. There is a mist around the university, a conceptual density that it can peer at and not see through. This matter of reach is but a cameo of the general situation of the university in the twenty-first century, at once a matter of infinite aspirations and yet of firm boundaries, both practical and ideological. And these two terrains of reach spill over onto each other. Picking up a cue from Heidegger (2013), technology is both enframed and enframes life. The university aids and abets these tendencies, in being a primary user of technologies.4

Ways of reaching out It is apparent that the university has a wide repertoire of ways for reaching out and they warrant attention. A university can reach out ontologically. It can seek to displace itself into a different place. It can seek to become another kind of institution, and move into a new position in the panoply of institutions in and around the (global) world of higher education. In the network society, so brilliantly portrayed by Castells (1996),5 here, a university would be looking to constitute a new node in the total network of universities and to open new lines of communication even beyond the world of higher education. In this digital age, the university can and will reach out at different speeds to various communities in its use of many forms of media. In the process – as its many audiences engage with it across the world (even if reading its blogs or just consulting its web pages) – this multimodal university will add to the ‘spaces of flows’ and to the ‘flows of spaces’ of cognitive life. A university can reach out epistemologically. Of course, it can look to extend the disciplines in which it works. Its own intellectual fields – to steal a concept of Pierre Bourdieu (1969) – could widen. It can look to find ways of extending students’ acquaintance with the humanities, especially for those students who have programmes of study within the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. But the idea of epistemological reach goes further, even beyond forms of trans-disciplinarity. A university can explore the potential of multimedia as a vehicle for conducting inquiry, whether by students or by their professors. How might different ways of representing the world be brought into a fruitful set of relationships with each other? A university can reach out pedagogically. It can find a way of reaching into the soul of its students, of energising them, of giving them a new sense of their own

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worth, of lifting them up, of providing them with a confidence in themselves (Batchelor, 2014). A pedagogy that is suitably stretching – cognitively, experientially, ethically, discursively – calls a student forward, inviting her or him into a new space. At the centre of this higher education lies the student’s encounter with knowledge and the space accorded to the student in which to respond. Some students will hesitate, fearful of the commitment being called for; and so there are considerations over the shaping of that encounter, so as to bring the student forward. One model that might be drawn upon is that of ‘The Public Philosopher’6 in which students, perhaps even from across nations, are brought together in a virtual and real-time space to confront intractable problems of the day in a guided discussion. A university can reach out ecologically. It can do so by evincing a concern for its interconnectedness with the natural world. It can take an interest in the way in which it has impact on its immediate hinterland, through its energy use, its use of materials and in any of its propensities to harm the natural environment (whether in urban or in more natural settings). It can strive to be an exemplar of a ‘sustainable university’ (Sterling, Maxey and Luna, 2013). But, in being ecologically oriented, the university will have a concern that transcends its green credentials, for it has a concern for the whole world. It is concerned about persons, society and its ethical character, learning in all of its manifestations (personal and collective), and culture, as well as the economy. For example, it is aware that cultures impose themselves on the university, but it is also aware that it has possibilities in bringing its own forms of culture into the wider world, whether through its pedagogies, research and scholarly activities or its outreach. Any university will be a melange of cultures but it is more than a multicultural site. A university has to have at its centre a culture not so much of reason but of reasonableness, all the time striving to exemplify reasonableness. Whereas reason is a matter of logic and of logical moves, reasonableness is characteristic of a culture of collective voice, of listening and of give and take, of carefulness and discursive probity. The university can reach out discursively. A feature of the globalised world that has emerged over the past half century or so is a shrinking of the ways in which it comprehends the world. A dramatic instance is that of the dwindling of the languages spoken on this Earth (Yun and Standish, 2018). But this discursive impoverishment has more subtle forms. Insidiously, it is present in the inner character of language, its concepts, idioms, sentiments, phrasings and so forth. As a by-product of their effects, the dominant ideologies of the age work to constrain the terms in which being understands itself. It is not so much that instrumentalism, economicism and mathematical modes of comprehension are set on vanquishing alternative modes of understanding and communication but it is rather that their power has that cumulative tendency nonetheless. In its wide cognitive interests, and its openness, the university can combat such confinements. Its steadiness, its receptiveness to the world and its interest in expression can help to promote a discursive fecundity in society. And this is not

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just a responsibility that befalls the humanities. The whole university has it in its powers to keep reaching out discursively. The coming of the internet has a Janus-like character here. Its ubiquity, and the dominance of a limited number of corporations involved in social media, generate discursive closure. But the liquid nature of its communications, their multi-media form (as messages run several media together, in sound, word, graphics and picture) and the porousness of fields of comprehension spell a discursive miasma, in which anything might happen (Mosco, 2017). This, perhaps, is one of the largest challenges in front of the university in the twenty-first century. How might it comport itself discursively? Which framings of the world will it sustain and even originate? There are languages within languages. Is universality now at an end? The university cannot ignore these matters. It is obliged to reach out discursively, but to which audiences and for what range of purposes? It has been used to speaking specialist languages and now it is faced with the challenge of evolving and deploying discourses that reach out to multiple publics. A process of public reasoning might emerge, and possessing a character different from academic reason but in which the university plays its part.

Fear of reaching Knowledge reaches for what is other than itself. Knowledge turns away from its mirror image and shuns any copying of itself. Repeating a conclusion already reached in a debate (whether by others or oneself or one’s team) has little, if any, point. The tacit requirement is to add to the world in some way, to compound existing thought. Thinking has a concern for what ‘overflows thought’ (Levinas, 2003: 25). Copying – like plagiarism – does not amount to knowledge. Such an inauthentic reaching may be a symptom of an undue fearfulness of finding what it reaches for. In any knowledge pursuit there may be a certain amount of anxiety or even anguish7 in getting hold of something, or of connecting with an audience. What if the vista which the university is opening is not to the liking of the wider world? What if there are rebukes from within? Better sometimes to play safe and retread familiar ground. Just this is evident in the world, as the university is met with mistrust and disturbance. The world may pour scorn on the university (or worse). It places its hands over its ears, being disinclined to listen to the university and its offerings. The university’s climatologists may be repudiated and the safe spaces that it extends to external speakers may be abused. The university’s reaching out may not always find a hand of understanding reaching towards it.8 It is hardly surprising if there is a trembling here on the part of the university.9 The academic’s smartphone rings, to be met by a reporter following up a press release on an academic paper or report that has found its way into the public domain; and the academic is invited to elaborate on those research findings. But the academic hesitates, concerned that what she or he says may be taken ‘out

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of context’ and that their presentation in the mass media will amount to a distortion of the academic’s position. Thus, the reaching out is from the beginning haunted by its own endeavour. However, this is what knowledge – and the contemporary university – must overcome: its own uncertainty and anxiety. The university feels compelled to venture into the world but is fearful and, on occasions, is paralysed into inaction. It is more comfortable to stay at home, in academic to-ings and fro-ings. In one breath, it has to speak to multiple audiences and knows that its utterances will be treated to counterposed stances. It is not even sure how to entitle its own documents. It knows that, as it strives for ‘impact’, the very terms ‘corporate strategy’ and ‘executive summary’ will unsettle many. Here is an institution that seems willing to couple management-speak to itself and yet, in that same document, wants to speak of its concerns for its students and its own staff. It struggles to find a unitary voice that is acceptable to the many interest groups that encircle it. There is a collective fear here, not so much a fear of freedom10 but a fear of action. The university knows it has a degree of freedom but it hesitates to venture forth. It even hesitates in its stance towards its own staff. Are they ‘human resources’ or are they ‘members of staff’ or are they ‘academics’ or ‘people’? It has discursive options and communicative options but it is unsure which move to make. To make any move is to enter into a situation of risk, and it is fearful of disturbing its shareholders.

How then reach out? How then should the university reach out? With some care and thoughtfulness and even trepidation, certainly; but not unduly so. Its venturing forward calls for courage and authenticity. This is not so much a matter of a will to power for it has power but so often fails to exercise those powers (plural). Rather, it lacks a will to engage. ‘Engagement’ has become a weasel-word of our time. Originating in the sport of fencing, it harbours militaristic overtones, of armies engaging, of engaging the enemy and of mortal combat. But it also harbours connotations of the seminar room, of participants in the conversation locking horns in the to and fro of the argument; the participants engage not only with the argument but with each other. And it secretes a sense of a harmonious relationship, opening to a long-lasting union, as the parties become ‘engaged’ to each other. And it comes into play, when a gear of a vehicle is engaged – perhaps noisily – so as to form the appropriate transmission of power. Engagement here is all of these, and yet none. The modal stance is neither that of seeing enemies around the university nor of assuming a harmonious set of relationships with the wider world. It is not even that of the seminar, for that would assume a situation of discursive equality. What is in sight here is a particular form of engagement, in which the university ventures into unknown spaces. The university extends a probe, not knowing what response it will

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engender. Amoeba-like, the university stretches its shape this way and that. In the process, it may touch objects (institutions, the natural world, persons, or structures) that may impart a shock and discomfort. Its computer systems are hacked, a minister for higher education takes umbrage at a research finding or even a research proposal from the humanities, students collectively mount a protest over the presence of a particular visitor and public concern results from the university having accepted a gift from a dictator’s family11 and so on. But the university cannot stop at venturing out, at putting itself ever further into the world, except at risk now of its own legitimacy. Its legitimacy derives partly through its knowing efforts, and those knowing efforts are a necessary condition of its legitimacy. Its legitimation requires also a reaching out for a particular kind of engagement. The university shares its insights and its reasoning and tries – to some extent – to mesh with the practical concerns of the world. In turn, the world tries to effect some kind of translation of what it hears into its own understandings and interests. This engagement can be neither solely on the terms of the wider world nor of the university for both are parties to the tacit contract.12 The university has lost the right to be the sole arbiter of the terms on which it engages with the world but it remains a powerful party in the negotiations nevertheless. It may even be the junior partner but its situation is not yet one of ‘proletarianisation’ (Halsey, 1992). Through the degree of control that it possesses in initiating thoughts and ideas and in establishing well-founded understandings of the world, the university retains significant autonomy. It is difficult not to feel that this will remain the case. In its own interests of ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’, the wider world, even against its instincts, is obliged to accord significant degrees of liberty to universities. Our thesis has been that, through its knowledge interests and activities, the university can enliven life. Through its powers of emancipation, it can even sponsor life anew. And it is now enjoying a position in which it can reach out, into minds, into society and into the natural environment, quite unheralded. The advocates of the digital revolution will steadfastly proclaim the unrivalled powers bequeathed by the digital age. After all, the computer need not sleep and it never becomes weary or impatient. But the university is a human and social institution, with networking capacities to be advanced at both levels. Universities tacitly form a global network and possess powers of national and even global agency. Reach can be a global and collective, but also a particular personal, matter.

Conclusions The university has always reached out to the world. Ever since the Middle Ages, its social and economic foundations placed it such that it possessed little choice to do otherwise. However, the energy and deliberateness with which it has reached out has ebbed and flowed. The twentieth century was something of an aberration, witnessing a gulf between the university and society. In the

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twenty-first century, and right across the world, the tide is flowing back to encourage the university to extend itself once more into the world. The old epithet of ‘the ivory tower’ is now rarely heard. The apartness that that phrase signalled reflected a now past age in which the university enjoyed an ahistorical level of autonomy. The matter to be addressed, therefore, is not that of the university reaching out but concerns the conditions of the new possibilities for reaching out. What is the range of the university’s potential for reaching out? And wherein lies the legitimation for this reaching out? That legitimation must lie in the spirit of the university, in its will to spill itself into, and to share itself with, the world. However, spirit is not an absolute good (Stiegler, 2014a). Universities can be seen to be full of spirit in reaching out to the world but, too often, extract what they can from the world to advance their own interests; and their ‘impact’ may not always be to the good. What is required is that universities hold to their ecological possibilities in the world, and seek to address the impairments of their ecosystems. Through its epistemic interests, the university can give new life to the whole world. In particular, the university can act to deepen and to widen the multiple public spheres (plural) of a fractured world. And this calls for spirit, for the university’s own spirit. If the university is to give life to the world, it needs to be full of life itself, a life that cares about the world. This is a daunting possibility, but it is not totally out of the question.

Notes 1 As promoted, for instance, by Habermas (2005), Arendt (1958) and MacIntyre (1990). There is, of course, a huge more recent literature on the matter – of the public sphere. See, for instance, the collection by Calhoun (1994), which incorporates work by many of the leading theorists. 2 See among the recent work of Marginson (2018) a conceptual analysis of some of this territory, which distinguishes civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market and commercial market influences on universities and knowledge production. 3 See for instance Boutang (2011), Roggero (2011), M A Peters (2013), Maxwell (2014), Feyerabend (2018). 4 For critiques of the digitised world, see David Berry (2014); Vincent Mosco (2017); Stiegler (2014a). 5 In his recent work, Castells (2018) has turned his attention directly to the matter of knowledge production, not least the intricate set of relationships now evident with state power, the two being often in conflict. 6 ‘The Public Philosopher’ is a contemporary version of public philosophy and is a TV (and radio) programme presented by Professor Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, in which he is faced with a huge bank (perhaps 50) of computer screens, each one of which shows the face of a student from across the world. Sandel not only steers these students through a complex problem of the age but does so (a) by posing questions with a philosophical character and (b) getting the students, who don´t know one another, to engage with each other, and (c) subtly to confront issues in philosophy. If there was ever an example of the growth of global citizenship, this is it.

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7 The Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1980) distinguishes between fear and anxiety (or anguish). We fear what we already know and understand, while we feel anxiety in the face of the unknown and the otherness of ourselves and the world. Universities may fear not being able to succeed in the societal state they immediately understand and respond to, but they may feel anxiety in actualising their deeper drive to live with and aid the (truth of the) world. 8 Universities should not expect to be ‘bailed out’ should they find themselves in a financial crisis (The Guardian, November, 2018). Universities are here being counselled to showcase their financial leadership and not being a ‘failing provider’. Such reductive language may stress university leaders, the teachers and students. 9 Kierkegaard separates fear and trembling (compare his separation of fear and anxiety, in note 7 above). We fear what we understand, and the consequences of our actions that we may foresee, but we tremble in the face of a deeper concern, often hidden to ourselves. Trembling resonates in the core of our being, and it terrifies us because we do not feel able to grasp its point of origin and its purpose. 10 In Fromm’s (2001) analysis, ‘The Fear of Freedom’ pointed to two freedoms that might induce fear – fear of constraint on freedom and fear of the positive freedom to be oneself. Today, universities surely much demonstrate their concerns with constraints on their freedom but generally fall short of evincing a concern as to what any kind of positive freedom might look like on their parts. 11 As set out in the Wolf Inquiry report into links between the London School of Economics and Libya (see under web-sites in bibliography). 12 See Gokulsing and DaCosta (2000) – including the opening chapter by Barnett – on the idea of a ‘compact’ between universities and the state, as promoted by the 1997 Dearing Report in the UK.

CODA Re-enchanting the university with a new cognitive spirit

We have fallen out of love with our universities. That ‘we’ is a generalised we. It is the world that has fallen out of love with its universities, not merely those who inhabit universities or who are closely associated with them. Even at best, they are workaday places, working steadily and with all the levels of weariness and disillusion that regularly accompanies workplaces. At worst, suspicions are harboured that they care not for the public weal or even seek to overturn it. There is, therefore, a dis-enchantment towards the university, both within and well beyond it. But we should not be surprised at this, for a state of disenchantment is characteristic of the world today, not least towards its major institutions. So far as the university is concerned, this disillusion is connected to the problem of spirit. In the twenty-first century, the university has become – in some ways – incredibly powerful in the world (scientifically, technologically, militarily, pharmaceutically, biologically) but its spirit is in question. It is not without spirit, but its spirit is ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined’ and, in turn, narrowed and reduced. This reduction of spirit is symptomatic of a ‘drop in the value of spirit’, as Stiegler (2014a: 68) has put it. It may seem that we are in a TINA situation, that there is no alternative, but we have sought throughout this inquiry to be open to possibilities for a revival of spirit and to glimpse ways in which the spirit of and in the university might be recovered. At least, it is worth trying for, struggling for: ‘we must systematically organise the battle for the increase in the value of spirit’ (ibid.: 69), which really amounts to a ‘rebirth’ of spirit (p. 73). Spirit is a notoriously tricky concept. Derrida is unusual in addressing it, taking as his point of departure its presence – and non-presence – in the work of Heidegger (not least in Heidegger’s infamous inaugural speech as rector of Freiburg University). Derrida explicitly acknowledges that spirit has

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dangerous potential: it conjures the possibility of an ‘evil spirit’ (Derrida, 1991: 102), so we need to be wary of spirit. But how can a university that is thriving, that is seized of its possibilities and its responsibilities and is sensitive to its position in the world and its necessary manoeuvring in the world, not be an institution that has a certain spirit, an energy, that is even inspired and has a totally open conversational flow? For it to thrive, as we have seen, knowing activities have to be fuelled by desire, passion and indefatigability. But these are not mere individual traits. They emerge out of an institutional and societal setting: ‘the functioning or dysfunctioning of society are never the affair of individuals as such, they arise from complex assemblages … ’ (Guattari, 2016: 13) Is the university in the twenty-first century, then, simply to allow itself to be enfolded within the digital and cognitive economies that are bounding onwards, pulling universities and higher education into their nets? Or is there space for a new spirit, a new kind of cognitive spirit that might yet lead to a reenchantment both within the university and in the wider world, as it espies the university. Can a new compact be formed, energised by mutual desire and recognition of the virtues of the university and a sense of the new possibilities now opening before it? ‘Can the function of collective equipment move towards the liberating function of a collective assemblage or is it fundamentally antagonistic to this by its very nature?’ (ibid.: 36) Guattari felt that, despite the generally ‘repressive character of the equipmental function’ of the machine-like institutions of the state, there was still space for newness. And he seemed to think that the university had a particular part to play in putting new structures of meaning into the world. Precisely because of the tendencies of knowledge always to go on splaying out, so there were possibilities for new structures and new connections to be made with the wider world. ‘Desire’ has not yet been entirely vanquished and moreover, ‘the new technologies of social alienation … render possible radically new modes of restructuring of revolutionary struggles’. (ibid.: 47) Is this mere ‘anarchist daydreaming’? (ibid.:51) The extraordinary thing about a university is that it has possibilities for a new impetus, new sources of desire, new passions, to show themselves at every level, not only from the immediate pedagogical setting (for instance, in the setting up of a classroom debate) to the level of the senior leadership team (in its participation without rank in university activities and in its reaching out to local publics) but beyond. However dimly felt, universities of the world enjoy a unity, even if put into question in some jurisdictions (where the state imposes itself unduly). New assemblages are already forming among universities across the world and not only in the interests of global cognitive power. In Guattari’s language, universities harbour potential at both the ‘molecular’ (small-scale and intimate) level and the ‘molar’ (large-scale) level: ‘it will always remain possible … that new assemblages … can start to proliferate’ (ibid.: 93). Of course, such new assemblages may harbour oppressive tendencies – or even worse – but ‘one can

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never say about a particular situation of oppression that it offers no possibility for struggle’ (ibid.: 104). There are ecologies of spirit of the university, warring against each other. Admittedly, it appears that the ecology of ‘technologies of control’ (Stiegler, 2014a: 73) is likely to be dominant in the foreseeable future. But there are good grounds for thinking that the time of the ecology of care – as we may term it – is coming, and coming quite rapidly. Of course, it will have always to fight its corner, since the power of the ecology of control will go on increasing, not least in an increasingly digitised world. Even in such an inauspicious situation, the university may yet re-enchant itself, possessed of a new spirit with a concern for the world, and so gain a new enchantment in the world.

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SUBJECT INDEX

This book turns on an interweaving of ‘university’, ‘life’, ‘knowledge’, ‘spirit’ and ‘world’ – which appear throughout the text – and so not all occurrences are noted below. Key entries in the index are shown using bold page numbers. Terms in quote marks are associated with particular scholars. Entries appearing in chapter endnotes are shown using italic page numbers. Bold italicised terms are terms that are ventured in this book. Absence 100 ‘Academic capitalism’ 36 ‘Academic citizenship’ 78 Academic community 20, 78, 81, 124, 129, 135 Academic conversation 78 Academic discourse, spirit of 124, 129 Academic freedom 108 Academic life 23, 34, 77, 83, 99, 104, 115, 120, 124, 129; See also Knowledge, academic; Culture of Academic profession 20 Academics 85, 92, 98, 110 Academic thought 74 Access 114 Agency, corporate 149, 156 Agency, global 166 Agora 59, 78–79 Air 100, 147 Anarchism 25 Antagonisms 74 Anthropocene 35–36, 40, 57 Anthropology 93, 158 Ants 51 Anxiety 96, 165, 168 ‘Anything goes’ 73–74 Apartheid 71–72

Archaeology 86, 91, 158–59 Architecture 51, 92 Argentina 113 Argument 12, 20, 23, 25, 27–28, 112, 121, 127–129 Argumentation 17 Argumentative presence 127 Artificial intelligence 51 Arts, the 47, 51, 151 Assemblages 37, 61, 118, 170; Learning see Learning assemblage Assessment 95 Astronomy 86, 91, 144, 154, 158 Astro-physics 101 Audits 104, 125, 129 Authenticity 25, 108, 165 Authority 18 Autonomy 13, 166–67 Being 109 Bildung 62, 108, 112, 118 Bioengineering 58 Biology 48 Biopower 19 Books 99, 117, 122, 150 Boredom 101 Business studies 86

Subject index

Cake 30–31 Capitalism: Algorithmic 4; Cultural 47; Cybernetic 47, 52; See also Cognitive capitalism Care 13, 17, 107, 146, 153, 171 Charm 139 Chile 113 China 4, 108 Citizens 55, 115, 138-40, 144 147 Citizen scholars 92, 94, 147 Citizen scientists 147 Citizenship 116 Civic sphere 115, 167 Civil engineering 86, 147 Climate change 116 ‘Cognitive capitalism’ 1, 5, 36–37, 45–48, 51–52, 61, 125, 139, 145 ‘Cognitive entrepreneurialism’ 80 Cognitive reach 160 Cognitive spirt 170 Colonisation 10, 146 Commodification 110 Communication 7, 9, 45, 60, 63, 65, 122, 160, 162 Communities 107, 144, 160, 162 Compact 168, 170 Competitiveness 77 Complexity 59, 85 Concepts 43 Conflict 17, 20, 24, 26–27, 71, 76, 134–35 Constructivism 5, 29, 38 Conversation 76–82, 136, 142, 150, 170 Corporate strategy 152, 165 Cosmology 11, 94 Cosmopolitanism 109, 118, 135, 141–42 Courage 165 Craft 138 Creativity 84, 166 Critical being 28 Critical engagement 114 Criticality 75, 82, 108–09, 117, 143, 153 Critical judgement 50 Critical Realism 27, 29, 37, 155; See also Bhaskar, R Critical reason 27, 49 Critical theory see Frankfurt School Critical thinking 102 Critical thought 12, 47, 61 Critique 46, 115, 155 Cultural capital 49–50 Cultural cognitivism 47 Cultural energy 48 Cultural leadership see Leadership, cultural Cultural reality 94

189

Culture 5, 10, 12, 17, 41–43, 44, 47–50, 52, 59–60, 110, 112, 118, 119–130, 143, 159; Academic 144; Cognitive 41; Common 43, 151; High 42; Institutional 135–36; Multi- 120; Truth-culture 22, 25 Culture of academic life 127, 129–30 ‘Culture of Critical Discourse’ 48, 120–21 Culture of rational speech acts (CORSA) 124, 130 Cultures 21, 90, 115–16, 151, 159–60, 163 Curriculum 17, 28, 85, 87, 95, 111 Darkness 2, 9, 12, 95–106; Institutional 98; Phenomenological 97 Death 25 Debate 12, 71, 76 Deconstructionism 5, 29 Democracy 50, 81, 113–14 Desire 118, 126, 170 Dialogue 21, 77, 128 Digital age 37, 45–46, 49, 53, 65, 93, 140, 149–50, 171 Dignity 111, 114 Disciplines 7, 11, 17, 19, 81, 95, 103–04, 106, 116, 121, 124, 128, 153 Discourse 33, 119; See also Academic discourse Dispositions 108, 117 Dispute 74, 79 Dissensus 25, 60–61, 78–79 Dissent 26–28, 99 Dwelling 137 Earth 6, 11, 18, 30–31, 35–39, 48, 57–58, 138, 142, 144, 149, 152, 154, 159, 163 Ecological sciences 11, 35, 51 Ecologies: of care 171; of conversation 80; of spirit 171 Ecology 23, 35–36, 58, 91, 160, 167; Deep 35; Knowledge 12, 51, 145–46, 149, 154; Learning 161 Economics 161 Economy 36, 49, 79, 87, 158–59 Eco-systems 116, 151, 154, 159, 167 Edification 9, 12, 107, 117–18 Emancipation 13, 53, 75, 87 Embodiment 3 Empathy 49, 79, 129, 146 Enchantment: Re- 13, 63, 169–71 Energy 8–9, 12, 25, 48, 63, 67, 85, 101, 126, 129, 146, 148, 155–56, 170; See also Epistemic energy

190

Subject index

Engagement 115–16, 118; See also Critical engagement Engineering 30, 47, 51, 92, 109, 162; See also Civil engineering English literature 26 Enlightenment 43, 56, 95 Entanglement 8, 36, 85, 109, 155, 159–61 Epistemic choices 94 Epistemic communities 73, 114 ‘Epistemic cultures’ 31, 130 Epistemic death 120 Epistemic energy 84, 146–47 ‘Epistemicide’ 10, 120 Epistemic injustice 72 Epistemic life 145, 148, 152 Epistemic outreach 143 Epistemic universe 148 Epistemic will 88 Epistemology 5, 32–33, 39, 44, 46, 57, 116, 153–55 Ethics 45, 52, 138 Evaluation 122–23 Excellence 60–61 Faith 90–91 Fatigue 100 Feasible utopias see Utopias, feasible Flows 9, 12 Fluidity 59 Fragility 117 Frameworks 21, 37, 98, 143 Frankfurt School 43, 46 Freedom 20, 76, 82, 99, 114, 165, 168 Geology 158 Globalisation 4, 37, 140, 163 God 23 Greeks 2, 17, 47, 49 78, 107 Higher education 29, 40, 41, 54, 85, 109, 111, 158, 166 Higher education policy 37 Higher education systems 49, 110 History 161 Home 143 Homeland 23 Human beings 29, 45, 67, 154 Human capital 54 Humanities 11, 41–52, 56, 58, 62, 80, 99, 120, 148, 164, 166; Crisis of 44, 46–47, 49–50 Humanity 2, 7, 21, 29, 32, 35–36, 38, 56–58, 75, 94, 106, 115

Human rights 151 Humility 57, 111 ‘Ideal speech situation’ 78 Ideas 72–73, 83; Marketplace of 73–74 Ideologies 10, 20, 29, 72, 112–13, 148, 162–63 Ideology 19, 38, 60, 97, 117, 143, 159 Ignorance 96, 150 Imaginary 22 Imagination 9, 38, 49, 147, 153–55 Impact 2, 12, 21, 31 India 4 Inequality 20 Information, distorted 73 Inquiry 139, 155; See also Knowledge inquiry Innovation 1, 46, 61, 158, 166 Insincerity 124 Inspiration 24, 91, 146 Instrumentalism see Reason, instrumental Interdisciplinarity 58, 148, 152 Interests: Cognitive 152, 159, 163; Ecological 151–52; Human 8 Internet age 18–19, 60, 77–78, 99, 134 Journals 10, 26, 83, 122, 150 Judgement 34, 82, 108 Justice 81, 109 Knowing 12–13, 99, 142 Knowledge 1–5, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 18–19, 28, 29–30, 35, 39, 41, 44–45, 51–52, 55, 57, 62, 83–91, 93, 104–05, 107, 110, 114, 116–17, 125, 138–39, 143, 145–48, 150–52, 155, 164; Academic 10–11, 31, 49, 53–64, 157, 160; Dark 100–01; Deformed 10, 35; Forms of 147; Humanistic 48; Instrumental 6; ‘Mode 2’ 58–60, 64; New 103; Re-claiming 4; Reliable 17; Tacit 98; Transgressive 59 Knowledge capitalism 52 Knowledge creation 30, 74, 90, 100, 105, 137–38, 167 Knowledge ecology see Ecology, knowledge Knowledge economy 1, 4, 47 Knowledge exchange 1–2, 77, 158 Knowledge inquiry 46 Knowledge interests 45 Knowledge poverty 155 Knowledge processes 7, 9, 12, 36 Knowledges 116 ‘Knowledge socialism’ 159

Subject index

Knowledge society 1 Knowledge transfer 1–2 Knowledge work 66 Language games 55 Languages 49, 159, 164 Latin America 91, 118 Leadership 12, 63, 65, 129; Cultural leadership 134, 143–44 League tables see Rankings Learning 17, 38, 88, 97, 101, 105, 106, 139, 151; Dark 101 Learning analytics 45, 82, 84, 96, 98 Learning assemblage 161 Learning ecologies 161 Learning outcomes 88, 95 Learning powers 161 Learning processes 99 Learning situation 101 Learning systems 160 Lectures 137, 139 Liberal education 107–08, 118 Library 42, 83, 88, 122, 137, 139, 149–151, 156 Life 3–4, 6–9, 10, 11–12, 18, 20, 24–28, 32, 35, 39–40, 46, 49–51, 53, 55, 61, 65–67, 73, 79, 83–85, 87, 90, 118, 123–25, 128, 134, 146, 148, 151, 154–55, 157–59; Collective 26, 117; Concern for 36; Critical 121; Distortions of 10; Engaged 121; Flows of 9, 128; Interest in 159; Living of 86; Mystery of 105; New 106; Philosophy of 6, 66–67; Principle of 110; Pulse of 116; Troublesome 88; Truth-oriented 34; Way of 18; See also World, life of Life chances 114 Life enhancement 111 Life of university see University, life of Reason, life of Life processes 10 Lifeworld 37, 55, 59, 137 Light 2, 95, 103–05 Liminal spaces 102 Liveliness 66, 129–30 Marketisation of higher education 73 Marketplace 80; See also Ideas, marketplace of Markets 73, 75, 146, 161; Academic 72; Quasi- 4l Materialism see Socio-materialism Mathematics 43, 47, 86, 154, 163 Metanarratives 5

191

Meta-reality 155 Medicine 51, 58, 93, 109, 161 Metrics 45, 77 Middle Ages 4, 26, 113, 117, 145, 166 Modernity 94 Multiplicities 30, 33, 80, 82, 85, 103, 117, 126 Music 9–10 Mystery 23, 31, 96, 105 Myths 94 Nanotechnology 127 Natural environment 38, 117, 160, 166 Nature 106 Nazism 43, 117 Neo-liberalism 4, 37 Networks 19, 77, 148–49, 161–62, 166 Nobel prizes 31, 113, 126 No-platforming 4, 71 Objectivity 32–34, 39 ‘Ontological delicacy’ 73 Ontology 5, 13, 19, 27, 28, 31–34, 57, 81, 116–17, 136, 152–55; ‘Object-oriented’ 37 Openness 76, 81 Papers, academic 10, 81, 103, 114, 122, 127 Passion 24, 66, 72 Pedagogical relationship 97 Pedagogy 162–63 Performance 21 Performance management 129 Performativity 53–54, 61–62 Performing arts 30 PhD 38, 90, 141 Phenomenology 29, 43; See also Darkness, phenomenological Philosophy 11, 18, 20, 26, 31, 35, 43, 49, 93, 106, 154; The public 167 Philosophy of life see Life, philosophy of Physics 11, 48 Plagiarism 124, 164 Poetry 30, 34, 37 Poker 24, 126 Populism 5 Possibilities 11, 38, 55, 116, 170 Post-human, the 46 Postmodernism 4–5, 29–30, 82 Postmodernity 4–5, 53 Post-truth 17, 20, 148; See also Truth Potholing 96

192

Subject index

Power 18–19, 62, 73, 83, 87, 96, 103–04, 111, 113, 129, 139, 146, 150, 160–61; Dark 100; See also Will to power Powers 48, 98, 142, 147, 153–54 Professional life 133 Psychology 92 Public 91, 139, 151 Public debate 161 Public domain 77 Public good 64, 91, 158 Public intellectuals 92, 94 Public reach 158–59 Public realm 159 Publics 12, 77, 147, 158 Public space 76, 159 Public sphere 11–12, 92–94, 134, 158, 167 Public understanding 140, 147 Rankings 77, 84, 104, 153 Rationality 21, 37, 46, 75, 122, 159 Realism 6, 13, 29, 32, 35–36, 38–39 Reason 6, 20–21, 43–46, 50, 56, 60–61, 92, 133, 138, 142, 148, 152, 155; Academic 45, 141, 164; Communicative 24; Community of 138; Imaginative 45; Instrumental 6, 11, 35, 44–46, 48, 50–51, 57, 82, 152, 155; Life of 134, 141, 144; Living 12, 138, 140, 143–44; Practical 111–12; ‘Principle of’ 112, 148; Space of 24, 112; Systematic 142; Universal 7 Reasonableness 122–23, 143 Reasoning 27, 72, 113, 134–35, 140, 149, 164 Relativism 4, 29–30, 33, 141 Research 3, 17, 32, 38, 66, 76–77, 89–90, 93–94, 95–96, 105, 108, 129, 158, 160 Research community 21 Researchers 128, 147, 152 Research process 19 ‘Research programme’ 21, 105 Research teams 18, 22, 77, 80, 95–96, 104 Respect 75 Responsibilities 11, 36, 38, 64, 89, 92, 113, 140, 149, 157, 160 ‘Rhizome’ 80, 120 Rhythms 116 Risk 104, 115, 123–25, 137, 152, 165 Robbins Report 41 Robotics 161

Ruins see ‘University in Ruins’ Scholars 92, 128, 147; See also Citizen scholars Scholarship 108, 129, 160 Science 7, 43–44, 52, 56, 89, 162; ‘Normal’ 21 Self-authorship 118 Silence 124, 128 Sincerity 25, 75, 122; See also Insincerity Skills 61, 117, 142 Social class 72 Social history 91 Social sciences 31, 34, 56 Social theory 11, 18, 35 Society 30, 65, 76, 79, 115–16, 118, 118, 140, 159–60, 166; Rational 149 Sociology 22, 92 Socio-materialism 39, 160 South Africa 71 Space 107, 122, 134, 136, 142, 151 see Public space Reason, space of Spaces 115, 136, 160 Speech acts 121–124, 129, 130 Speech situation 45 Spirit 7–9, 12–13, 54–55, 61, 63, 66–67, 80, 83–84, 110, 124–26, 137, 142, 152, 153, 155, 169–171; See also Academic discourse, spirit of; University, spirit of; cognitive State, the 42, 45, 60; State-university relationship 98, 146, 148 STEM disciplines 47, 162 Structuralism 29 Student experience 108 Student radicalism 113 Students 1, 65, 76, 79, 85, 88, 90, 98, 102, 107–118, 135–37, 162–63, 166; Doctoral 101; See also PhD Students as co-producers 114 Students as global citizens 88 Students’ life chances 95 Subversion 98 Suicide 63, 130, 136 Surveillance 93, 97–98, 106 Sustainability 163 Teachers 111 Teaching 17, 38, 66, 76–77, 105, 129, 136–37, 151 Technology 162, 171 Theology 26, 154 Theory-ladenness 4, 24, 29 Thinking 48, 140, 142

Subject index

Thought 7–8, 29, 41, 48, 60–61, 81, 134, 151; Broken 96; See also Academic thought; Critical thought Thresholds 101–03 Time 151; Ripe 1, 109, 117 Trigger warnings 4 Truth 11, 17–28, 39, 80, 95, 105, 113, 122, 158; Being of 27; Life of 23, 27 Truthfulness 25–27, 34, 61, 63, 75, 80, 122, 143, 155 Truth values 39 Uncertainty 59, 165 Understanding 32, 93, 149–50 United Nations 142, 144, 149 Universality 9, 50, 79, 107l Universe 4, 6, 11, 13, 58, 62, 153 Universities 2, 5, 9, 12, 22, 31, 37, 41, 44, 49, 56, 87, 89, 91, 97, 107, 110–11, 115, 129, 134, 148, 157, 166; Alabama 64; Cambridge 24, 26, 118, 130; Córdoba 118; Durham 71; Freiburg 126, 169; London School of Economics 168; Open 118, 138; Princeton 51; Sydney 126; York, UK 130 University 1, 3–4, 7–9, 10, 12, 22, 26–27, 31–33, 35, 44, 63, 67, 79, 84, 94, 101, 107, 110–11, 115, 117, 119, 123, 134, 143, 147, 152, 154, 157, 160–63, 165; African 91; Being at 143; Being of 23–24; Crisis of 6; Culture of 22, 88; Ecological 147, 149, 152; Global 150; Life-enhancing 9; Life of 12, 17, 21–26, 31–32, 58, 61–62, 76, 112; Medieval 17, 136, 145; Multi-vocal 81; Powers of 87; Spirit of 167; Transcendental 155; Truth in 22–23

193

University as institution 17, 45, 119, 145 ‘University in Ruins’ 60–61 USA 42–43, 108 Usefulness 21 Utopias 66 Validity claims 75 Value 2, 4–5, 21, 26, 32, 55, 60–61, 73, 99, 109, 158, 169; Economic 5–6, 47; Epistemic 65 ‘Value background’ 1, 27, 51, 98, 133 Values 44, 80, 99, 143; See also Truth values Verisimilitude 23 Vibrancy 12 Virtues 114 Vitality 8, 12, 46, 51, 66, 85, 109, 114, 118 Voice 80, 89, 163 Voices 134, 160 Way of life 27 Wellbeing 38, 97 Will 9, 91, 147–48, 154 Will of the people 91–93 Will to engage 165 Will to know 12, 83–94, 126 ‘Will to power’ 86–87 Wisdom 23, 55–58, 107, 109, 149–50 World 2–3, 5–6, 9, 12–13, 19–23, 27, 29–36, 38–39, 55, 57, 62, 65, 83, 89–90, 102–03, 114, 160, 164; Life of 36–38, 55, 59, 74, 129, 167; Real 29, 32; Whole 106; ‘Runaway’ 150 World-class, being 61 Worlds 19, 74 Writing 100

NAME INDEX

Key entries in the index are shown using bold page numbers. Entries appearing in chapter endnotes are shown using italic page numbers. Ackerman, J M 94 Adamson, G 138 Andres, L 141 Adorno, T 43, 45, 66, 81, 155 Arendt, H 2, 43, 51, 159, 167 Aristotle 13, 107, 114, 13637 Arndt, S 74 Arvanitakis, J 92, 102, 159 Austin, J L 121 Ayer, A J 52 Babcock, E 64 Bachelard, G 137 Bailey, R 20 Bakhurst, D 2, 134 Barnacle, R 13, 137 Barnett, R 4, 13, 28, 36, 40, 64, 66, 82, 99, 106, 118, 144, 146, 168 Barthes, R 85 Batchelor, D 80, 137, 163 Baxter Magdola, M B 118 Becher, T 13, 31, 130 Beckett, D 82 Bell Burnell, J 130 Bengtsen, S 13, 23, 40, 64, 77, 85, 94, 96, 100–01, 106, 138, 141, 144, 146 Bennett, J 37, 40, 62, 116 Benson, O 20 Bergquist, W H 120 Bergson, H 84–85, 90, 93, 116–17, 125

Berlin, I 82 Bernstein, R 34 Berry, D 167 Bérubé, M 46, 159 Besley, T 64, 93, 130 Biesta, G 86 Bhaskar, R 27, 29, 35, 37, 40, 57, 73, 75, 89, 118, 155, 159 Bloom, A 42 Bogost, I 40 Bonhoeffer, D 99, 106 Bourdieu, P 49, 162 Boutang, Y-M 1, 36, 45, 47, 145 Boys, J 134 Brady, M 82 Braidotti, R 47 Bricmont, J 13 Brenna, J 118 Brodin, E M 94 Brown, R 73 Bryant, L R 40 Burt, C 25 Burton-Hill, C 13 Calhoun, C 167 Carey, M 118 Castells, M 162, 167 Chaucer, G 42, 51 Chen, S-Y 91 Chomsky, N 48

Name index

Collier, A 33, 40 Coogan, D J 94 Cornér, S 85 Cornford, F M 1 Cotterall, S 99 Cranfield, S 28 Crick, F 130 Crisp, R 82 Croussard, B 141 Cruickshank, J 40 DaCosta, C 168 Dall’Alba, G 13, 96, 101, 137 Dalsberg, C 77 Davids, N 91 Davies, M 28, 118 Dearing, R, Sir 168 Delanda, M 13, 74, 82 Delanty, G 13, 118 Deleuze, G 2, 7–8, 40, 80, 82, 126 Derrida, J 31, 71, 125–26, 169–70 Descartes, R 30, 42 de Sousa Santos, B 10, 63, 72, 155 Edge, D 19 Edmonds, D 24, 126 Eidinow, J 24, 126 Ellis, R E 135 Ennis, P J 40 Ferraris, M 40 Feyerabend, P 25, 46, 52, 84, 94, 167 Feynman, R 43, 51 Fichte, J G 54 Filippakou, O 64, 91 Finkielkraut, A 142 Finnegan, R 147 Ford, P 118 Fossland, T 77 Foucault, M 19–20, 86 Franklin, R 130 Fromm, E 168 Fuller, S 82 Galileo 18, 27 Gallego, L 141 Gellner, E 42, 51 Gettier, E 18, 27 Ghosh, P 144 Gibbons, M 58–60, 78 Gibbs, P 64 Giddens, A 156 Gieysztor, A 136

195

Gildersleeve, R 40, 57 Giroux, H 48 Gokulsing, K M 168 Golde, C M 94 Goodyear, P 135 Gottlieb, B 78 Gouldner, A 48, 120–21 Gramsci, A 99, 106 Gratton, P 40 Guattari, F 40, 80, 82, 118, 144, 170 Guzmán-Valenzuela, C 99 Habermas, J 21, 24, 27, 45, 52, 71, 74–76, 78, 82, 86, 92–93, 107, 113, 159, 167 Hager, P 82 Halsey, A H 85 Hansen, F T 64 Harman, G 13, 27, 35, 37, 39–40, 48, 74, 82, 86, 88 Hassan, R 7 Hawking, S 11, 13, 94 Hawthorne, J 96 Hegel, G W F 7, 25 Heidegger, M 2, 23, 84, 89–90, 96, 98, 101–03, 126, 134, 137–38, 148, 162, 169 Herbrechter, S 47 Hess, M 13 Hewish, A 130 Hollister, R M 64 Hopwood, N 13 Horkheimer, M 43, 45, 155 Hornsby, D J 92, 102, 159 Humboldt, W von 54, 111–12 Hume, D 30 Husserl, E 43 Ingold, T 40 Irigaray 2, 147 Jaspers, K 2, 7 James, W 21 Jesus of Nazareth 137 Johnston, B 118 Julian of Norwich 137 Kakuchi, S 41 Kant, I 13, 17, 20, 30, 40, 107, 111–12, 141–42 Karlsohn, T 107, 112 Keefer, J 141 Kennedy, M D 63 Kierkegaard, S 24, 168 Kiley, M 88, 94, 101

196

Name index

Kleinhesselink, K 40, 57 Knorr-Cetina, K D 31, 130 Kuhn, T 4, 19, 21, 25 Laclau, E 20, 31 Lakatos, I 21, 105 Land, R 88, 102 Latour, B 19, 30, 82 Leach, E 156 Leavis, F R 26, 28, 118, 130 Levinas, E 77–79, 83, 85, 96, 100–01, 104, 106, 153, 164 Limoges, C 58–59 Lingis, A 25, 31, 37, 75, 86, 89, 96, 106 List, C 81, 149, 156 Lo, L N K 91 Lukasiewicz, J 96 Luna, H 163 Lyotard, J-F 5, 13, 53–55, 63, 82 Macfarlane, B 64, 78, 80, 113, 115 MacIntyre, A 52, 63, 71, 92, 107, 167 Malcolm, N 24 Manarin, K 118 Marcel, G 91, 105, 139 Marcuse, H 45, 52 Marginson, S 64, 91, 167 Masschelein, J 78, 82 Massey, L 163 Mathieson, H 77 Maxwell, N 44, 55–58, 167 McArthur, J 63, 81, 82 McGettigan, A 73 McMahan, J 72 Meillassoux, Q 20 Merleau-Ponty, M 33, 85 Meyer, J H F 88, 102 Midgley, M 57, 88, 94 Mika, C 74 Mill, J S 21 Mitchell, R 118 Molesworth, M 73 Moore, Jnr B 186 Morton, T 13, 35, 37, 40 Mosco, V 78, 93, 164, 167 Moses, J 41 Mouffe, C 19, 31 Myles, F 118 Nagel,T 44 Nelson, C 46 Newman, J H 4, 98, 107, 110

Nietzsche, F 23, 25, 74, 86, 101, 154 Nisbet, R 13 Nixon, E 73 Nixon, J 63–64, 75, 91, 115, 156 Noddings, N 107 Norberg-Schulz, C 137 Nørgard, R 23, 64, 138, 144 Nowotny, H 58–59, 78 Nussbaum, M 46, 49–50, 118 Ortega y Gasset, J 2, 52 Parker, J 88 Paulson, J 13 Parmenides 106 Pawlak, K 120, 130 Peirce, C S 21 Peltonen, J 85 Peters, M A 4, 36, 52, 63–64, 82, 93, 118, 130, 159, 167 Peters, R S 101 Petrovic, J 64 Pettit, P 81, 149, 156 Piccini, D 41 Plato 13, 104, 106 Polanyi, M 13, 98 Popper, K 23–24, 30, 34, 40, 98, 126 Pritchard, D 82 Pyhältö, K 85, 141 Ranciere, J 78 Rathburn, M 118 Readings, B 13, 25, 42, 60–61, 64, 71, 78 Reichenburg, H 40 Rex, J 71–72 Rhoades, G 36 Ricoeur, B 13 Rider, S 17, 80, 113 Ridder-Symoens, H D 141 Robinson, G 94 Robinson, S 92, 100, 112 Roggero, G 47, 158, 167 Rolfe, G 98 Rømer, T A 40 Rorty, R 2, 21 Rothschild, D 96 Rousseau, J-J 141 Russell, B 57 Ryland, G 118 Ryle, M 130 Sandel, M 167 Savin-Baden, M 102, 136

Name index

Schon, D 13 Schwartzman, S 58–59 Scott, P 58–59, 78 Scullion, R 73 Searle, J 33, 40, 121 Sennett, R 138 Shakespeare, W 48 Shaviro, S 39 Shumar, W 92, 112 Simons, M 78, 82 Simpson, R 159 Skagen, K 94 Slaughter, S 36 Slote, M 82 Smith, J 88, 102 Smithers, R 41 Smyth, J 97, 146 Socrates 18, 27 Sokal, A 13 Solberg, M 177 Spectre, L 96 Srnicek, N 40 Standish, P 163 Stangroom, J 20 Stehr, N 1 Sterling, S 163 Stiegler, B 11, 63, 167, 171 Stroud, S E 64 Tallis, R 13 Taylor, C 2, 22, 27, 98, 133 Temple, P 134, 136–37 Toulmin, S 127 Tran, L T 91

Trow, M 58–59 Trowler, P 13, 31, 130 van Manen 100 Varto, J 154 Vasager, J 41 Vasseleu, C 100 Vattimo, G 27 Venkatesan, P 36 Wacquant, L J D 49 Waghid, Y 91 Walker, G E 94 Walker, M 156 Walter, R 118 Ward, S 63 Watkins, M 130 Watson, D 64 Watson, J 130 Wheelahan, L 91 Wilkins, M 130 Williams, B 25 Williams, G 64, 91 Wisker, G 88, 94, 100, 101 Wittgenstein, L 24, 27, 63, 126 Wolff, R P 45 Wood, A 142 Wright, S 36 Young, M 13, 63, 155 Yun, S 163 Zizek, S 48

197