Towards a New Research Era: A Global Comparison of Research Distortions 9789004546035, 9789004544932

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Towards a New Research Era

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 387

Central European Value Studies Edited by Vasil Gluchman (University of Prešov, Slovakia) Affiliate Editors Jaap van Brakel (University of Louvain) Eckhard Herych (University of Mainz) Assistant Editors Arnold Burms (Belgium) –​Herman Parret (Belgium) –​B.A.C. Saunders (Belgium) –​Frans De Wachter (Belgium) –​Anindita Balslev (Denmark) –​ Lars-​Henrik Schmidt (Denmark) –​Dieter Birnbacher (Germany) –​Stephan Grätzel (Germany) –​Thomas Seebohm (Germany) –​Olaf Wiegand (Germany) –​Alex Burri (Switzerland) –​Henri Lauener (Switzerland) The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​vibs and brill.com/​cevs

Towards a New Research Era A Global Comparison of Research Distortions Edited by

Marek Hrubec and Emil Višňovský

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This book was published within the “Global Conflicts and Local Interactions” Research Program, Strategy AV21. The book was written as part of the research activities of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Cover illustration: Photo by Pavlina Brtnikova. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​cata​log​.loc​.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008016

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 4493-​2 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 4603-​5 (e-​book) Copyright 2023 by Marek Hrubec and Emil Višňovský. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Notes on Contributors vii Introduction From Research Distortions to a New Research Era in Global Interactions 1 Marek Hrubec and Emil Višňovský

Part 1 Theoretical and Practical Foundations: Public Research and Its Distortions 1  The Imperative of Creativity 15 Emil Višňovský 2  Research Change within Social Change 29 Marek Hrubec 3  Values and Evaluation: Co-​evolution of Science and Society 45 Jiří Loudín 4  Research in Neoliberal Transformation 59 Oleg Suša 5  Freedom (Not Only) in Research and the Academic Context 72 Martin Brabec 6  The Problems of Research in the Project Era 86 Břetislav Horyna

Part 2 Research and Education in Central Europe and in the West 7  Risks and Opportunities of the Politics of Performance and Evaluation in Academic Culture 117 Stanislav Štech

vi Contents 8  Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 129 Martin Kopecký 9  World Research Produced Here and Now: the Czech Case Study 141 Martin Profant 10  The Relevance of Humanities in Masaryk’s System of Sciences 156 Jan Svoboda

Part 3 Research and Education in the Non-​Western World 11  Social Sciences in Interactions with Latin American Reality 173 Dominika Dinušová 12  The Marginalization of African Epistemologies 187 Albert Kasanda 13  Neoliberalised Research in Contemporary Russia 199 Veronika Sušová-​Salminen 14  Neoliberal Distortions of Higher Education and Research in India 213 Kanchan Sarker 15  The New Research Assessment Reform in China and Its Implementation 239 Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen  Index 253

Notes on Contributors Martin Brabec is a political and social philosopher, a research fellow in the Centre of Global Studies at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and lectures in political philosophy at the Technical University of Liberec. His research interests relate to the theories of social justice, unconditional basic income and the relationship between capitalism, democracy and liberalism. He published many research articles. Among his recent works, he co-​authored the book Basic Income in the World: Arguments, Experiments, History (Epocha 2022), for example. Dominika Dinušová is a researcher in the Centre of Global Studies in the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic, and an assistant professor at the Social Science Department of the Academy of the Police Force in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her research focuses on progressive social tendencies in the development of Latin American social and political philosophy. Among other publications in Slovak, she is the author of Za hlasom revolúcie (For the Voice of the Revolution; Veda 2018) and the editor of José Martí a súčasnosť (José Martí and the Present; Veda 2021). Břetislav Horyna is a professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava. His main interests are the history of German philosophy from the 18th to the 20th century, historical and contemporary social and political philosophy, theory of science, and translation. He focuses on a critical theory of contemporary global issues with a focus on the modernist rationality typology, and the dimensions of social, and cultural, and political themes in a context of environmentalism. He has published sixteen books, about 120 research articles, and translated more than twenty books into Czech. Marek Hrubec is a senior research fellow in the Centre of Global Studies at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Austria. His research focuses on social and political philosophy and theory, and global studies, mainly on social and political injustice and inequality, intercultural dialogue, and macro-​regional and global conflicts and other interactions. He authored

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many research articles, and edited and authored 25 books. Among his recent books in English are: Basic Income in the World: Arguments, Experiments, History (with M. Brabec and M. Minářová; Epocha 2022), Africa in a Multilateral World (ed. with A. Kasanda; Routledge 2021); From Social to Cyber Justice: Critical Views on Justice, Law and Ethics (ed. with N. De Oliveira and E. Sobottka; pucrs 2018). He has undertaken research and lectured in many European countries, the USA, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Mongolia, Iran, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Burundi, Nigeria, etc. Albert Kasanda is senior researcher in the Centre of Global Studies in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, the Czech Republic, and a member of a research project on African philosophy and genre at Bayreuth University, Germany. He deals with African social and political philosophy, intercultural and comparative philosophy, civil society, and genre. He authored of many research articles, and is an editor and of author of several books in English, French and Czech. His recent books are Contemporary African Social and Political Philosophy: Trends, Debates and Challenges (Routledge 2018), and with Marek Hrubec, eds., Africa in a Multilateral World: Afropolitan Dilemmas (Routledge 2021). Martin Kopecký is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Adult Education and Personnel Management at Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic, and Deputy Director of the Department. He teaches courses in philosophy and sociology of (adult) learning and education, education policy of international organizations and citizenship education. In his research, he focuses on the topic of the relationships between social change and adult education. He is Member of European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (esrea) and its presidium (from 2020). Jiří Loudín is a researcher in the Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. His main research focus is sociology of science and technology and innovation studies. He authored many research articles, and is the editor of the book Social and Cultural Dimensions of Innovation in Knowledge Societies (Filosofia 2011), for example. He participated in several EU research projects, e.g. Nanopinion (2012–​14), ResInfra@DR (2017–​19). and has recently published studies on social

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innovation and the concept of scientific and technical revolution presented in Richta’s seminal work Civilization at the Crossroads. Martin Profant is a research fellow in the Centre of Global Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic, and teaches at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of West Bohemia, Pilsen. His research interests relate to the problematic of national and post-​national situation, especially the transformation of education in the global situation. He wrote many articles, and authored several books in Czech: Úděl, úkol, národ (Destiny, Task, Nation; Epocha 2018), for example. Kanchan Sarker after many years at the University of British Columbia, he is a professor at Department of Sociology at Algoma University in Canada. Among his research interests are: social issues in India and the West, including social inequality, indigenous resistance, social and other movements, higher education system, cash transfer for the poor, participatory democracy, cooperatives, and various future social alternatives. He is an author of many research articles and other studies. Gunnar Sivertsen is research professor and special adviser at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (nifu) in Norway. He analyses scholarly publishing and the development and use of bibliometric indicators for statistics, evaluation, funding, and science policy. He published my research articles. Among his recent works, he co-​authored: European Databases and Repositories for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Output. ecoom and enressh (2017), for example. Stanislav Štech is a professor in educational psychology at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. His research interests have developed from sociocultural theory to empirical research of school socialization, teaching-​learning processes, parents–​teachers perspectives and teaching profession. As vice-​rector of Charles University (2003–​2015), he was engaged in research of the institutional management of higher education. He was involved in educational policy at ministry of education and also worked in international bodies like oecd and unesco as representative of the Czech Republic. His research profile includes more than 100 articles, research papers, and books.

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Oleg Suša is a senior research fellow in the Centre of Global Studies in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and also teaches in the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. His research interests relate to the theory of contemporary social change, transformations and global risks, social and environmental. He wrote about 60 research articles in English and Czech. He is the author of the book Globalizace v sociálních souvislostech současnosti. Diagnózy a analýzy. (Globalisation in the recent social contexts. Diagnoses and analyses; Filosofia 2010), and the co-​author of Environmentální devastace a sociální destrukce (Environmental Devastation and Social Destruction; Filosofia 2016), for example. Veronika Sušová-​Salminen is a research fellow at the Centre of Global Studies in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Her main research areas are the interactions between economic system, politics and culture in the context of peripheral capitalism in contemporary Eurasia, and the history of global interactions. She is the author of two books about politics in contemporary Russia, dozens of research articles and policy papers published in English, Czech, Hungarian, Greek, and Romanian. Jan Svoboda is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. His main interests are philosophical and social scientific thoughts in the Czech lands, mainly in the period between 1800 and 1948, and social, cultural, and political issues in a global context. He has published numerous research articles, and is the co-​editor of the books Interkulturní vojna a mír (Intercultural War and Peace; Filosofia 2012) and Česká otázka a dnešní doba (The Czech Question and the Contemporary Age; Filosofia 2017). He authored the book on Masarykův realismus a filosofie pozitivismu (Masaryk’s Realism and the Philosophy of Positivism; Filosofia 2017). Emil Višňovský is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia, and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Communication at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He focuses on systemic philosophy, history of modern philosophy, and philosophical pragmatism. He was a chairman of the Slovak Philosophical Association, a vice-​chairman of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2015–​2017), an editor-​in-​chief of the Human Affairs journal, a vice-​dean of faculty, a head

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of department, a member of the expert group of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic for the project “Learning Slovakia”, and founded the Central European Forum on Pragmatism. He authored many articles, and authored books in Slovak: Človek ako Homo agens (Human Being as Homo Agens; 2009), Štúdie o pragmatizme a neopragmatizme (Studies on Pragmatism and Neo-​pragmatism; 2009), Nové štúdie o pragmatizme & neopragmatizme (New Studies on Pragmatism & Neo-​pragmatism; 2014), Richard Rorty a zrkadlo filozofie (Richard Rorty and the Mirror of Philosophy; 2015), Veda ako sociokultúrna praktika (Research as a Sociocultural Practice; 2019). He also translated articles and books from English into Slovak. Lin Zhang is a professor at Department of Information Management at Wuhan University in China and a guest professor at the Center for R&D Monitoring (ecoom) at the Catholic University at Leuven in Belgium. In her research, she is focused on interdisciplinarity measurements, quantitative research evaluation, scientometrics, bibliometrics, gender differences in aims and impacts of research, multi-​level global, regional and national analysis of reactions of scientific research to health emergencies, etc.

Introduction

From Research Distortions to a New Research Era in Global Interactions Marek Hrubec and Emil Višňovský This book is focused on critique and explanation of bureaucratically and commercially distorted conceptions of research, education and their institutions in recent decades, and on charting of alternative possibilities for a new research era. The authors analyse theoretical and practical foundations of research and education and their distortions with reference to academia in the West as well as in non-​Western world, with a special focus on situation in Central Europe.1 Thus, a global comparison of academic commercialization and bureaucratization is made possible. It should be stressed already here in the introduction that this book is concerned mostly with the humanities and social sciences since natural and technical sciences have their own specifics which require separate treatment. However, there certainly are some common points including the conception of research in general which we address here. The commercial and bureaucratic deformation of academia stems from the neoliberal imperatives developed in the UK and US in late 1970s and early 1980s. The problems analysed have gradually spread to other countries in the North Atlantic area and other parts of the world in recent decades. These distortions did not start to take hold in academic institutions in various countries until around 2000 as neoliberal policies focused first on production and trade, where the greatest profits are to be made. The legal codification of these distortions in academia came a little later, in Central Europe in the Czech Republic, for example, in 2008.2

1 The idea of the present volume and the Introduction have arisen while working on a small book titled Nová vědecká éra?, edited by Marek Hrubec and Martin Kopecký, and published in Czech and Slovak (Praha: Epocha 2021). 2 Partial correction began to come more than a decade later. Thanks to the efforts of many people in the Czech Republic, the new better criteria of the Methodology for the Evaluation of Research Organizations and Programmes for the Purposeful Support of Research, Development and Innovation (M17 +​) were adopted and the new law was enforced, which came into force in February 2020. However, since the pandemic came at shortly, inertia prevailed in academic institutions which more or less reproduce the previous approach to research in various, sometimes even worse, forms especially after the new neoconservative-​ neoliberal government took power here in 2021.

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Despite the fact that these neoliberal tendencies were first associated with privatization efforts to reject government interventions, after the global economic crisis of 2008 the state interventions began to be instead purposely promoted in many countries (bailouts of banks, etc.), in a way for which the term ordo-​neoliberalism is being used.3 Even more complex and disordered situation has emerged due to subsequent rise of populist parties and movement elsewhere. The above-​mentioned distortion of the academic context has created a whole series of problems that have brought individuals and entire institutions into conflict with each other. These interventions have mostly distorted the public academic institutions, both research and educational. Efforts to transform the researcher into an academic entrepreneur or a capitalist manager who has to raise funds through grants and other means has led to a heavy dependence on project (grant) funding, which has ceased to be just a voluntary supplement. This entails a significant limitation of research activity due to the need for normative (including ideological) adaptation of researchers to the review panels which are far from being neutral. It also requires attending to various anti-​research bureaucratic time limits imposed by grant schedules. Another dimension of this issue has been, and to some extent still is in many institutions, the overrated unified quantitative assessment of research results by public institutions according to criteria of journal databases owned in major cases by private companies that primarily seek profit and not socially relevant knowledge and truth. Academics have to face also the so called predatory practices of large foreign publishing houses whoseconsiderable profits are derived from publications produced by academic institutions financed through public funds. This is not the end of the list of the problems but it is necessary to be mentioned by way of introduction. To change the situation instead of implementing many fragmented short-​ term grant projects the emphasis should again be on long-​term funding of public institutions, in particular research academies and universities. In current global era, this requires stronger international and transnational platforms for these institutions. The shift towards research creativity and innovation to be pursued in the public interest requires a redefinition of the concept of research, which is elitistically closed to the needs of the population now. However, it is not enough to make only formal declarative references to the possibilities for citizens and civil society to engage in this process, as has been the case after the collapse of the Eastern Block since the 1990s when citizens’ 3 Ordo =​an order in Latin; ordo-​neoliberalism =​neoliberalism enforced by the state order.

Introduction

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power was fragmented and diminished by more powerful private economic and bureaucratic structures that also distorted the research. In turn, this requires, for example, institutional preconditions for developing local and global competences of researchers and citizens. The present book examines the role of research and university education more generally theoretically, and looks in part at their developmental trajectories. Methodologically, it develops mainly attitudes of critical theory, critical pragmatism and critical global studies. It draws on a critical examination of current and historical phenomena, presents descriptions and explanations of the analysed problems, and offers normative starting points for future arrangements from local to global contexts (Hrubec 2010; 2012). The authors in their analyses follow both internationally renowned researchers (Slaughter, Leslie 1997; Slaughter, Rhoades 2004; Readings 1997; Aronowitz 2000; Giroux 2014; Heller 2016) and as well as important researchers who are relevant in Central European contexts as well, especially the Czech and Slovak (Višňovský 2019; Strouhal, Štech 2016; Kopecký 2013; Balon 2014; Dvořáková, Smrčka 2018; Vostal 2016). The volume reflects on current debates among researchers and university teachers with the aim of opening up these debates more to other participants in the public sphere. The impetus for our discussions was the fact that neoliberal and subsequent ordo-​neoliberal conceptions of research have already been at least partially curbed and then reinforced again in many countries. It seems that the establishment of a new scientific era is very likely a long-​ distance race, since the neoliberal demands are returning after the elections with the rise of new ordo-​neoliberal governments. The way out of this situation will not be feasible only locally in the current era of transnational and global interactions and contradictions, as small and medium-​sized countries are not independent enough to solve their problems on their own. The way out will have to be a macro-​regional or network transnational issue, as the problem is only partially specific to one country.4 It is the subject of many disputes in Europe and many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, the major powers and other large countries and macro-​regions, notably the USA, the European

4 It is hopeful, for instance, that the Labour Party of the United Kingdom has already in 2017 prepared a manifesto (https://​lab​our​.org​.uk​/manife​sto​-2017​/) that plans to establish the National Education Service (nes) which includes a proposal to pull back fully from “marketisation and commodification in higher education” (Maisuria, Helmes 2020, 54). A number of activities have started not only in Great Britain in order to completely overturn the dominance of neoliberal academic paradigm.

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Union, China and Russia, can afford their own self-​sufficient research criteria and institutions that operate largely in sovereign ways. The contributors to this book come from Central Europe, particularly Czech Republic and Slovakia, especially from the Centre of Global Studies in Prague. They offer their Central European perspectives based on their interests and values which are, at the same time, developed in a dialogue with other parts of the world. The book discusses Central European issues in a broader European context and the Western issues in general as well. The authors also offer analyses of research and education problems in other parts of the world to provide a global comparative perspective. Because of the interpretative proximity and cooperation, three authors from other parts of the world beyond Central Europe have also been invited, particularly the authors of the two chapters related to China and India. Thus the volume provides an occasion for fruitful cross-​cultural or cross-​societal exchange.

…

Overall, we present sixteen chapters thematically interrelated and divided into three parts. The first part introduces the topic more generally and defines its scope by explanation of theoretical and practical foundations of public research and its distortions. The second and third parts of the book focus on specifics of the topic in different parts of the world. Particularly, the second part focuses on research and education in Central Europe and the West, while the third part on research and education in the non-​Western world, namely Latin America, China, Russia, Africa, and India. The first part of the book, which focuses on the theoretical and practical foundations of research and its distortions, is opened by two chapters written by the editors. Emil Višňovský is the author of Chapter 1, titled “The imperative of creativity”. His central claim is that intellectual creativity is both the heart and the purpose of academia. Hence any kind of institutional change is but a means to these. At the same time, the current transformations have prompted trends that are turning academic institutions and academic workers into instruments of economic and technological progress. The author argues that this both reduces and deforms the nature of academy. The remedy lies in the complete resurgence of its creative intellectual potential, i.e. re-​creativization. Chapter 2 on “Research change within social change” is written by Marek Hrubec. He deals with the transformation from a local internal critique to supranational institutional change, which would concern the field of research as an integral part of the social system. The chapter starts with a general formulation of the basis of author’s critical social philosophy and theory, particularly

Introduction

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internal social criticism and methodological trichotomy usable in theory and practice. It continues with its application to the specific institutional levels (social institutional structures) related to research. The chapter shows the connections between unsatisfactory conditions, funding and assessment of research on the one hand, and injustice in society on the other. It offers an embedded analysis of this topic with the aim of transnational development of critical humanities and social sciences in the public interest; specifically in close relation to much more intensive exercise of democratic participatory power by the public within social institutions than is currently the case. It shows that change in research must be a part of larger social change. Jiří Loudín wrote Chapter 3 on “Values and evaluation: co-​evolution of society and science”. The chapter describes the historical development of the relationship between society and science as it evolved in the Western countries since World War ii. Societal values and interests were projected into science policy and through it also into the internal norms and practices of scientific institutions. Because of the prominent role played by science in World War ii and subsequently in the Cold War it enjoyed a large autonomy in the post-​war period, and science itself determined the focus of research. In the following period –​the reform-​minded 1960s and 1970s –​the state sought to direct science towards social and environmental goals, while the concept of science as a primarily innovative activity with desired economic effects has been gaining ground since the 1980s. This holds true, to a still larger extent, to the application of the model known as New Public Management (npm) which has dominated –​although to a varying degree in different countries –​to this day: promoting business principles in science –​competition, efficiency, accountability. It is the subject of sounding critical voices. Meanwhile, scientists have been learning how to cope with uncertainty. Chapter 4 by Oleg Suša focuses on “Research in neoliberal transformation”. There are science changes within historical context of national as well as transnational capitalist dynamics. As a result of complex transformations, global capitalism is characterized by an evident conjunction of destructive environmental changes with social, economic and political (governance) crises. The neoliberal transformations of research in the UK and US were developed within the context of these processes, with ever greater interdependence between economic, political, technological, social and environmental processes. Many negative consequences have become increasingly unsustainable and less manageable. An important role is played bz the conflict between environmental justice and risk distribution related to the problems of growing social inequality and socioenvironmental exploitation.

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In Chapter 5, Martin Brabec analyses “Freedom (not only) in research and the academic context”. The chapter focuses on aspects and issues related to the concept of academic freedom. In the first section, the historical development of academic freedom is presented. It shows its institutional establishment, rationale, changes over time and embedding in the overall conception of the role of universities in society. In the second section, various aspects of academic freedom, such as the relationships and conflicts between academic freedom as an institutional right versus academic freedom as a right of individual faculty or academic freedom as special rights accruing to faculty versus academic freedom as a right to general freedom of speech, are discussed. In the third and final section, the ­chapter assesses the discussion to date on the themes and tensions in academic freedom, and its relationship to general freedom of speech. Chapter 6 is penned by Břetislav Horyna who offers his point of view on “The problems of research in the project era”. This contribution is dedicated to the problem of research and intellectual freedom at universities and other academic institutions. The academic community is a part of the social system, having at its disposal rules for self-​organisation and self-​management, including generally recognised rules for moral action. Due to the fact that the academic community is international, based on the global exchange of thoughts, findings, research and their results, staff and material support, it is crucial to ensure international agreement on what is considered as academic misconduct. For quite some time now (since the Bologna declaration in 1999 at least) in academia, there has been an imbalance caused by its growing mass nature, mediocrity, apathy and recommended or even prescribed leniency towards academic and occupational deficiencies. It is becoming clearer that sooner or later one will have to choose between education and a higher, systematic and omnipresent indoctrination. The paper claims that, because academic values are being suppressed today, the task is to once more renew them and return back to academia. The second part of the book deals with research and education in Central Europe and in the West. In Chapter 7 Stanislav Štech analyses “Risks and opportunities of the politics of performance, and evaluation in the academic culture”. This critical study of the neoliberal management of academic institutions is concerned with current consequences of the “regime of performance” with reference to the humanities and social sciences, especially in the Czech Republic. It describes the consequences of the need to show results and to achieve excellent academic performances. The study mentions also positive aspects of the contemporary transformation, such as the reduction of the impact of bibliometrics by introducing peer-​review elements into the evaluation procedure,

Introduction

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the speeding up of the publication process, Open Access platforms, etc. In particular, however, it also points out the persistent of undesirable effects: the proliferation of journals, the emergence of so called predatory journals, coercive citation, time pressure on intellectual activity, and the transformation of the dominant genre for scholarly results in the humanities and social sciences. Martin Kopecký in Chapter 8 explains “Politics, higher and adult education, and the power of research”. The chapter focuses on the relationship between higher and adult education policy and research. It critically demonstrates the ways higher education has been shaped by neoliberal policies. It presents variations of the policy–​research relationship and, in this context, comments on the ways critical research can influence education policy and politics. It shows that critical research of education policy can be connected with various traditions and systems. It allows formulating various alternative proposals and approaches which go beyond the neoliberal policy framework. In this context, windows of opportunity of better conception of education and research can be opened. Critical research of education policy with multiple discourses can make use of those opportunities. In Chapter 9, Martin Profant brings his perspective on “World research produced here and now: the Czech case study”. This chapter focuses on the embedding of specific research into a given historically and culturally defined community. In the Czech example, it shows the tendency to reduce this embedding to competitive ability of a given society of the (national) state. The author briefly reconstructs the Czech concept of the not self-​evident nation as outdated but till today normatively inspiring the responsibility approach of the human-​researcher towards the cultural forms adopted in the specific speech community. On the background of this reconstruction the author discusses the disruptions of the relationship between research and cultural public, education and the weakening position of research in the public sphere. Jan Svoboda closes the second part of the book by Chapter 10 on “The relevance of humanities in Masaryk’s system of sciences”. This contribution is dedicated to the intellectual legacy of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a philosopher and sociologist and the founding president of Czechoslovakia. It focuses on a system of sciences Masaryk developed in the 1880s. Within this classification, the humanities occupy a special position. As the starting point of Masaryk’s system of sciences, psychology has an integral metaphysical dimension, which affects Masaryk’s concept of ethics. The most essential task of sociology is then to support ethics against the background of a narrowly conceived dynamics of social practice into which any person, being a zoon politicon, is inherently integrated. Humanities cannot be reduced to, or even quantitatively compared with, mathematics or sciences that deal with living or non-​living nature.

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According to Masaryk, the main importance of the humanities consists ultimately in their practical consequences, value-​oriented and ethical. The third part of the book goes beyond the West and offers analyses of research and education in non-​Western world, particularly in Latin America, Russia, China, Africa, and India. The author of Chapter 11, Dominika Dinušová illuminates “The social science interactions with Latin American reality”. The study examines reflection on the social sciences and humanities in Latin American environment. It describes selected features of the current situation of academic activity in Latin America. It draws on the historical and philosophical specificities of the status of social sciences in order to outline perspectives for academic work in the future. Research is closely linked to education and the overall image of knowledge as the framework of particular social and political practice. It has been and continues to be an important object of inquiry in Latin America, with debates about the nature of research focusing on the problems of university as an institutional framework for research inquiry. Since the appearance of the University Reform Movement (1918), questions of social sciences have been linked to the examination of their ideological and political functions in capitalist society. Thus, discussions about future perspectives on the shape of academic activity go beyond the university and express the need for broader social change. In Chapter 12, Albert Kasanda offers his insight into “The marginalization of African epistemologies” and pays attention to research mainly in relation to the covid-​19 crisis. The chapter deals with two main issues. First, it explores the theoretical reasons of the Western domination and also the exclusion of the epistemologies of non-​Western people, particularly the African people. Thus, it analyses the mono-​cultural thinking, especially its historical trajectories of the problematically formulated concepts of universalism and equality. Second, the chapter focuses on the campaign of vaccination against the Covid-​19 pandemic in order to illuminate the resistance of African people against the domination and the exclusion applied by the West. This case study allows explanation and critique of marginalization of African epistemologies in the specific context and time which reveals the important distortions of research, education, and their institutions in Africa. Veronika Sušová-​Salminen explains “Neoliberalised research in contemporary Russia” in Chapter 13. The author is interested in the role of research in official efforts to modernise Russia and on approaches towards r&d. The case study of the Russian state programme Project 50/​100 is addressed as an example of neoliberalisation of Russian research according to Western/​neoliberal normative standards despite anti-​Western stance and peripheralised position of Russia. The author suggests that for Russian research, there are challenges

9

Introduction

related to Russia’s peripheralisation globally, neoliberal tendencies at home, and neo-​patrimonial features of Russian political and economic system, which so far creates obstacles for meaningful, complete and domestically owned reforms. In Chapter 14, Kanchan Sarker presents a critical analysis of “Neoliberalism, gats and Higher Education in India: Moving Away From Its Original Objectives”. It explains that privatization of higher education in India has started already a longer time ago. Nevertheless, since neoliberal policies were introduced in India in 1991, the aims of higher education and related research have been transformed similarly like other sectors of economy, particularly in the case of higher education from philanthropy to profit-​maximization. The chapter offers an empirically based analysis which explains critically how higher education in India has been reformed in a neoliberal way. Higher education no longer keeps its original aims of contributing to national development by cultivation of the ideals of equity and quality. The chapter also works out several normative points which show possible alternative ways in the future. The chapter written by Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen focuses on “The New Research Assessment Reform in China and Its Implementation”. They explain a radical transformation of research assessment introduced in China recently, and present normative proposals of further development. The transformation does not want to continue in a focus on Web of Science-​based indicators, and supports a balanced connection of qualitative and quantitative research assessment. It also supports the local relevance of research which, in the case of China, means a macro-​regional relevance because China is a macro-​region with its own long-​term historical civilizational trajectory and the contemporary specific version of modernity. The chapter examines how the implementation of a new policy can be made. It deals with an integrated research information structure and a national journal assessment structure; peer-​review evaluation in relation to the levels of the research structure concerning individuals, institutions, agencies; the balance between local and global relevance in relation to the field of research. These normative approaches address various problems which academics face also in other parts of the world.

…

Our book certainly does not exhaust all regions of the world and all thematic areas that we have recently encountered in the distorted research context under neoliberal and ordo-​neoliberal academic capitalism. Nevertheless, we hope that they will be useful contributions to the public debate that should gradually help redefine the new criteria set for meaningful research, related

10 

Hrubec and Višňovský

education and their assessment in the name of greater justice and standards of living for people in all parts of the world, especially in those areas that have been neglected so far. The intention is to map topics and issues that are linked to the needs of people and of public interest. Together, this could lead to greater crystallisation of various perspectives in a new research era. It is hoped that critical humanities and social sciences will not be marginalised in the next period of time and will become more important in the public sphere, so that future developments do not have to lead to various forms of dissent or exile. Finally, as editors we would like to express our gratitude to all contributors of the book for their cooperation and inspiring debates in the process of writing the book. We would also like to thank, on behalf of ourselves and the authors, our colleagues in our academic centres and departments as well as active people beyond academia who participate in civic and social movements and who are interested in how to overcome contemporary economic, political and social pathologies in order to transform contemporary research and education in favour of a more just society.

Acknowledgement

The book was published within a framework of the “Global Conflicts and Local Interactions” Research Program, Strategy av21.

References

Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press. Balon, Jan. 2014. „Jak se privatizují ideje: Neoliberální režim vědění a jeho přivlastnění postmoderního obrazu světa“. Sociologický časopis 50, 5: 713–​734. Dvořáková, Vladimíra and Smrčka, Jiří. 2018. Lesk a bída vzdělávání: vysoké školství jako zrcadlo české společnosti v časech volného trhu. Praha: Universum. Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Heller, Henry. 2016. The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press. Hrubec, Marek. 2010. “Preconditions of an Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights”. Veritas 55, 1: 183–​205. Hrubec, Marek. 2012. “Authoritarian versus critical theory”. International Critical Thought, 2, 4. 431–​444.

Introduction

11

Kopecký, Martin et al. 2013. Vědění a učení v globalizovaném světě: aktéři a změny. Praha: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy. Maisuria, Alpesh and Helmes, Svenja. 2020. Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University. London and New York: Routledge. Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Slaughter, Sheila and Leslie, Larry L. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial Univerity. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University. Slaughter, Sheila and Rhoades, Gary. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Univeristy. Strouhal, Martin and Štech, Stanislav, eds. 2016. Vzdělání a dnešek. Praha: Karolinum. Višňovský, Emil. 2019. Veda ako sociokultúrna praktika. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského, 2019. Vostal, F. 2016. Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pa rt 1 Theoretical and Practical Foundations: Public Research and Its Distortions

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­c hapter 1

The Imperative of Creativity Emil Višňovský 1

Introduction

The academic world, despite some of its conservative features and well-​known inertia (which has earned it the derogatory name of “ivory tower”), has never been (and cannot be) isolated from other developments in society. Sometimes, perhaps not regularly but certainly occasionally, it has also been a source of change and instigated social innovation from the inside. The character of the ancient Greek academies reflected that of ancient society with its focus on basic research and educating intellectual and political elites. In turn the character of medieval universities reflected that of the medieval state and its institutions, which were focused on educating the clergy, lawyers, medical doctors, and rulers. The renaissance and early modern academies began as an alternative to the medieval universities orientated toward creating a new humanistic culture. These academies became the germ of later academies established by kings and state authorities. The medieval universities were beset by crisis and gradually stagnated. While these early modern academies were flourishing, the universities survived until the beginning of the 19th century, when they underwent a substantial transformation that once more gave them the lead over the academies. This dual academic world –​composed of universities with their research and teaching function, and the separate academies of science and the arts –​continued into the 20th century, and the modern universities and academies developed in line with the character of modern society and its overall industrial orientation. Nonetheless, throughout these transformations,1 the onus was on preserving and nurturing the creative intellectual potential of the academic institutions, for that is the essence of the entire academic enterprise, and without which it cannot survive (for it would simply be a poor simulation of it). 1 Björn Wittrock (1993, 309) has distinguished three critical periods of the transition in the academic history of universities: (1) “The period of the crisis and rebirth of the idea of the university at the turn of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries”, (2) “The emergence of the modern research oriented-​university in the late nineteenth century”, and (3) “The current period of reappraisal”.

16 Višňovský In this Chapter 1 will focus on this relationship between the intellectual and the institutional dimensions of contemporary academic institutions. I consider the former to be the aim and the latter the means. As I understand it, all the changes (transformation, transition, reformation) academic institutions undergo must be a means of maintaining and advancing the creative intellectual workforce within academia. This ought to be understood as the “imperative of creativity,” by all the agents of the recent “avalanche” of changes both inside and outside academia, such as managers, administrators, politicians, entrepreneurs, and the media. If the creative intellectual potential of academics, their work, and the institutions themselves is hampered or even harmed, serious problems will ensue. Their intellectual heart cannot be repressed, and nor can their creative potential be curtailed through economic or social pressures, managerial or political maneuvers, or other means that fail to take into account the subtle (idiosyncratic) nature of intellectual creativity. Equally intellectual creativity cannot be substituted by various methods of “productivity.” Otherwise intellectual creativity may die or be pushed out of academia to become an endangered species, or it may start looking (presumably in vain) for a better “home” than that currently provided by academia. Academics, their institutions, and their managers have had to adapt to social and economic change in order to be able to survive. However, such adaptation has its limits. And the main limit is the nature of academic work itself –​intellectual creativity. If that were to become endangered, then we would have a crisis on our hands. 2

The Storm of Change

In 1945 a new era –​of unprecedented change –​began for academia (Rüegg 2011). No one writing on the topic recently can have failed to notice this. Proponents have called it a “transition,” “reformation,” “transformation,” “remaking,” “re-​ engineering,” and the like (Müller-​Böling, Mayer, MacLachlan, Fedrowitz, 1998; Scott, 2000; Gornitzka, Kogan, Amaral, 2005; Kogan, Bauer, Bleiklie, Henkel, 2006; Zemsky, Wegner, Massy, 2005; Massy, 2016). Whereas opponents have tended to see it as a “crisis,” “collapse,” “death,” “assault,” and even “ruination” (Scott 1984; Donskis, Sabelis, Kamsteeg, Wels 2019; Wilshire 1990; Evans 2004; Bailey, Freedman 2011; Readings 1997). Some have even claimed it a “revolution” (Jencks, Riesman 1968; Barber, Donnelly, Rizvi 2013; DeMillo 2015; Lybeck 2021). Nonetheless, the crucial questions are “What kind of change and why? In the name of what and in what direction?” To understand this change, one must look a bit closer at the character of this great “wind of change” that started to

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blow most strongly from the late 1970s onwards. The wind did not originate from within academia so much as come from outside: from government, business, political and media circles and the like.2 As for the period between 1945–​1975, it laid down the preconditions for development. Western academia found itself in very supportive circumstances and embarked on the route of expansion. The number of institutions mushroomed (Rüegg 2011), financial support increased, and the massification of university studies began (Scott 1995). But the key common denominator of all these processes was the interest displayed by the nation state. Governments came to realize that investing in academia (learning and research, knowledge and education) was crucial both for national development –​ranging from economic and technological development to social and cultural development –​ and international competition. The entire functioning of the academic institutions shifted by degrees to become centers of politics and economics; a process one can call the more or less overt or covert “politicization” and “economization”. There is a host of evidence indicating that the first thing to change was the state’s relationship toward academia (Salter and Tapper 1994; Henkel and Little 1999). Be that as it may, within the first three post-​war decades governments used methods that –​besides the extensive development –​engendered problems such as the disparity between the amount of resources invested in academic institutions (in particular university education) and the quality of their outcomes. Consequently the issue of higher education’s accountability to its external environment and its various sectors from government and business to the public sector emerged. External pressures on the internal governance of universities multiplied (Salter 2002) and the nation state was transformed into an “evaluative state” (Neave 2012) These issues can be considered the starting point for the political turn in the academic world. It came about with the advent of M. Thatcher’s neoliberal government in Britain in 1979. It was claimed that state policy toward academia must become more rational, effective, and responsible. That it must change “the rules of the game”. Academia had to be fundamentally reassessed and subjected, if not to outright privatization (because public institutions were viewed with suspicion and as ineffective), then at least to business norms and standards. And that meant marketization, commodification, and managerialism. In 2 This turmoil has also brought fundamental questions into reconsideration: What are universities for? (Graham, 2008; Collini, 2012; Delbanco, 2012). What is their essence and mission in the new situation? (Engwall, 2020). The reformers were well aware that the reform cannot ignore the foundations of academia and the very idea of the university (Barnett, 1990; Barnett, Peters, 2018).

18 Višňovský short, the academic institutions (universities in particular) had to be viewed in the same way as private businesses were viewed (Jarratt Report 1985). The new paradigm in academic policy started to emerge along with a basic mistrust of academic institutions which, from that moment on, had to be checked and verified to see whether they offered “value for money” invested in them. So far, so good. The intention to introduce and maintain quality in academia may be correct and legitimate. But the problem is that in the process academia has been reduced to a “factory,” to an organization whose task is to produce something for the capital invested, just like any other production entity. It is presumed that there is no difference between material production and intellectual production, and the notion of specificity is entirely absent. The management, financing, and assessment methods applied to the former were to be applied to the latter without any substantial amendment. This “category mistake” would soon have serious consequences. Moreover, it is one thing to create (produce) quality and quite another to monitor and check it, verify and document it, particularly where there is a lack of trust toward the creators (producers). This mistrust stems from the pressure society exerts on academia to serve it and provide “value for money.” The government acts as the representative of such public demands. The neoliberals, from their point of view in which the financial indicators represent the value of the highest rank, started to become unhappy with academia from the late 1970s at least.3 The massive neoliberal storm arrived in the West in the1980s and has been amassing since the 1990s. In former Czechoslovakia we have been listening to the discourse on change and reform for decades, going back to 1989. We understood it in the sense of moving on from the old regime toward a new one. The old was the so called communism of the Soviet era and the Soviet model. But figuring out the new –​ the post-​communist, post-​Soviet –​regime we were to move towards proved much more difficult. The new rhetoric was simply about freedom and democracy, welfare and prosperity, rationality and effectiveness. It quickly transpired that in fact it was about the restoration of capitalism. And later on, and many have yet to understand this, it was about the neoliberal version of capitalism having won the Cold War against the Eastern bloc. What role has academia come to play in this? In Slovakia’s case, full of illusions about the “new regime” and amid the traditional anti-​intellectualism in the country, the key strand 3 In the past society valued education and intellectual contributions as such, not necessarily for what they were, because there have always been applications, but these days academia has been pushed into being valued primarily and ultimately through money (as “value for money”).

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focused almost exclusively on massification (the number of colleges and universities has mushroomed since 1989).4 Only a handful, if that, cared about intellectualization and creativization inside or outside academia. The social and political contexts have shifted substantially everywhere. As a consequence, too many agents started talking about, and even deciding about, academia: the academics and the students themselves, but also governments, businesses, publics, and the media. But at base level, outside academia, “economic necessity” was the main reason put forward in political terms. Economics determines everything, and so academia must serve as its instrument. Another fundamental necessity is technological development. Technology determines everything as well, and so academia must also serve as its instrument. Economic and technological powers are the global determinants that everything else must follow as “iron law”. Only those competitive enough to provide the best quality in contributing to economic prosperity and technological progress will survive.5 Despite the decidedly Marxian general framework, it has been adopted by neoliberals without exception, but with the “privatization” rather than the “socialization” of aims, rules, and outcomes. Neoliberalism is like Marxism mechanistically turned upside down (Wolin 2008). As for academic institutions, they have always served society through their intellectual and educational products, but in their new role as a means of economic and technological progress their institutional autonomy has been put under unprecedented pressure, along with the financial instruments that are key to managing their behavior. Neoliberal governments have adopted the same argument as private businesses: those who provide the finances for academic institutions have the chief right to decide not only what they produce but even how they produce it. Thus it is not for academics to make decisions about their work; these will come from outside academia, from where the goals and standards come.6 4 In addition to this, in Slovakia the Bologna Process was considered the key agent of change, which was not seen as neoliberal in nature. 5 To look for quality, one has to first define it somehow, which is no easy task. But perhaps the easiest way is to adopt the typical neoliberal tool used in mass production in the material sphere, which is to “measure it”. Quality is to be measured in the same way as quantity, and quality is to be stated and proven by the measurement procedures. It has to be a “measurable” item or outcome. No matter that the “product” of academia is intellectual in nature; it has to be measured in the same way as any product in material production. 6 In the past the patrons and sponsors, private or public, provided support without intruding on or seeking to control the internal processes of intellectual creativity. They may have requested the work, set submission dates, asked for more and better products, but the intellectual creation in the form of scientific knowledge and educational results or artistic work was neither their main concern nor any of their business. They were earning fortunes

20 Višňovský 3

Knowledge Society or Academic Capitalism?

With the prominence of the “knowledge society” (Böhme, Stehr 1986),7 academia may well have expectations (if not illusions) that its time has now finally arrived (Delanty 2001). However, the term knowledge society does not mean that knowledge –​the domain of academic institutions –​is from now on to be valued for itself as the highest human achievement, and that those who produce knowledge should become the most important social group per se. Instead, it has taken on the more reductionist meaning of the “knowledge economy” (Stehr 2002; Mokyr 2005). The central concept of which is “knowledge production” (Gibbons, et al. 1994; Whitley, Glaser, Engwall 2010), as opposed to the “material production” of the era of classical modern capitalism and industrial society. The industrial framework, however, and attitudes towards knowledge, learning, and academia have not been altered, but rather strengthened. Technology is not only material, but also intellectual. No doubt, the academic sphere has become the “epicenter” –​the “powerhouse” (Rothblatt, Wittrock 1993) –​of the “knowledge society,” as one of the central sources of the production of social wealth. But knowledge and technology are, besides their role, just means of achieving human goals. Thus, they cannot function outside social (and economic) relations and sociocultural frameworks, patterns, and forms of life. No wonder other conceptions have been put forward, such as “knowledge capitalism” (Burton-​Jones 1999; Stehr 2022), “cognitive capitalism” (Boutang 2012; Rindermann 2018), and “digital capitalism” (Schiller 1999; Zukerfeld 2017). These are all relevant concepts with great potential still to be unveiled, even in relation to academia, but another concept has already been expanded in a number of works –​the concept of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter, Leslie 1997; Slaughter, Rhodes 2004; Münch 2014). The true social condition of contemporary academia is neoliberal academic capitalism (Dardot, Laval 2013), which encompasses all substantial features and problems. With the advances in knowledge and technology we have yet to move into post-​capitalist society as some have claimed (Drucker 1993; Mason 2015), we are just in a different

elsewhere, which they invested in academia for the development of the sciences, arts, and schooling. Today, education and research have become an essential part of business, not only for private entrepreneurs but also for state governments that demand returns and profits on their investment in these businesses. It is, of course, a rational attitude insofar as the payback is concerned, but it is irrational as regards intellectual production. 7 The analogous concepts of “postindustrial” (Bell, 1973) and “information” (Webster, 2002) society have also been suggested.

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phase of capitalist society, centered around an orientation on intellectual work as the key source of profit. Thus it is the academics from the former Soviet bloc who thought they had been emancipated from totalitarianism and other forms of oppression to enjoy academic freedom and “objective neutral science” that have suffered the deepest illusions. The neoliberal academic policy agenda has started to change academic culture (Bender, Schorske 2021) and identity, academic institutions, and academic labor from the standpoint of economization, which is a kind of “instrumentalization.”8 4

Instrumentalization of Academia and Consequences for Academics and Their Work

In stating that instrumentalization is a key feature of neoliberal academic capitalism, I mean the notion that the idea and role of academia is to contribute to economic prosperity and profit. It is merely an instrument for achieving this, and that is its main value. There is plenty of evidence for this, such as the concept of performance that is mechanistically applied to the academic sphere while ignoring its intellectual nature. Neoliberal capitalism sits atop the instrumental connection between knowledge and power, and knowledge and technology, which originated with the scientific revolution of the 17th century and continued through the enlightenment, with positivism as its heir, and the industrial 19th century into today’s “information society.” Knowledge has been taken up by global capital, which generates special institutions for the production and utilization of knowledge. In the same way as in the era of classical industrial capitalism global capital was able to provide for the over-​production of material commodities, in the current postindustrial era it is able to secure the over-​production of diverse intellectual works. Alongside the various non-​academic entities and private or governmental think-​tanks, educational and consulting firms etc., the classical academic institutions remain the primary and most important source of knowledge and learning. Nonetheless, they have been incorporated into the general industrial context, i.e. with mass machinery production as the central segment with all kinds of consequences that have led to the concept of the “knowledge industry” (Machlup 1962). However, the concept of knowledge is 8 One of the decisive international agents pursuing the policy of knowledge capitalism in education has been the Organization for Economic Co-​operation and Development (oecd) since its founding in 1961 in Paris. It produces a host of documents on higher education within the framework of economics and economism (https://​www​.oecd​.org)​.

22 Višňovský not so easily defined, or one could say it is defined in a pluralist way, which is also changing. Within this pluralist framework, the principle of difference might be useful in the sense that all kinds of knowledge have their specifics. But from the managerial point of view, there is an obsession with “simplification,” the search for a “common denominator” or unified indicator (criterion) of all knowledge, such as “output,”, “data,” publication, etc. This has been adopted by the neoliberal approach, although the qualitative differences are irrelevant since knowledge (like all commodities) has to be reduced to “items” if it is to be quantified, measured, marketed, and monetized for profit. Nevertheless, despite all the pressures and requirements from society, governments and businesses, the main challenge is finding the answer to the question “What is knowledge?”. It is their professional duty to know best what their work consists of, and it is their professional task to concentrate on their “cognitive” mission. They must have a clear sense of what their profession is about. Outsiders cannot possibly know this. So what is academic labor? (Barcan 2013). An academician is a scientist who has to do research; an academician is a university professor who has to teach. This is the traditional double-​headed mission and role of the academician (Fanghanel 2012). Let me focus here on the research component. The nature of scientific work is inquiry (Peirce 1955, 5–​41). It is a kind of systematic and institutionalized knowledge practice in which the scientist proceeds from unclear and indefinite issues to relatively clear and more definite issues, and from problematic situations toward resolution. The cycle of scientific work is longitudinal and cannot be managed in the same way as in business. We need to have a clear conception of both the aim and the product of scientific work, since the product is the realized aim (in essence, not in all its detail). The aim may be to solve a problem, discover new phenomena and facts, explain and predict, or develop a new theory, etc., but nonetheless all these different aims are concerned with knowledge, in the pursuit of human understanding of the world so humans can orient themselves within that world. Each inquiry has a specific outcome, e.g. in physics it may be understanding and describing movement (Galilei), in chemistry a taxonomy of elements (Mendeleev), in biology a theory of evolution (Darwin), in technology a mechanism construction (Watt), in psychology an explanation of mental disorders (Freud), in economics an understanding of market mechanisms (Smith), in history an interpretation of events (Thucydides), etc. In applied sciences the outcome is patents, inventions, new materials, drugs, machines, constructions, etc. In humanities it is the creation of writing –​textual, discursive, and linguistic in nature. How could one ever compare or even measure

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all these different scientific outcomes using one and the same measure? Who would even want to and why? Thus for instance, being published –​or cited –​is neither the aim nor the result of scientific labor –​except in the humanities, which are textual disciplines where the task is to create texts, but that does not apply to the natural and technical sciences. These disciplines produce texts as well –​mostly collective works –​but they take the character of reports of empirical and experimental research and results (a minority are theoretical investigations and lead to a special kind of text). Doubtless, such reports are legitimate and a usual part of science procedures, but it is a ridiculous paradox that these “hard” scientists in particular, who do not investigate the nature of science (for that is not their subject matter), fabricate the dominant pressure on all intellectual workers within academia in order to chase after numbers of publications and citations to be assessed and remunerated as they see fit. To compete on quantity of work, especially textual work, such as publications, is a folly that contemporary academics have been driven into quite uncritically. It is an absurdity that must be properly understood and dispensed with. If one wants to assess scientific work and its results –​that is academicians and their activity –​the results must be within the hands of these people. But publications, let alone citations, are not the kind of result toward which scientists ought to be directing their creative powers. Not even in the humanities where the work lies precisely in creating texts, because no one needs hollow texts. The situation could be the direct reverse –​one can have an original scientific result, but the decision of who, when and where it will be published, let alone cited, cannot be the concern of the creative scientific worker. Creating a scientific result, publishing it, and citing it are three independent events. The working duty of scientists is precisely to create. Without this, neither the second nor the third makes much sense. Scientific activities have long been institutionalized, at least since the 19th century, in a standard manner. Scientific institutions are organizations established by society (government or legal entities) specifically for the sake of scientific research. Thus we have to differentiate between an institutional evaluation where the outcome is awarding institutional accreditation as a license for performing research, and evaluating scientific disciplines according to their contribution to the advancement of knowledge. That is a disciplinary evaluation. Institutional evaluations involve other things, in particular the management and equipment of the institution, whereas disciplinary evaluations are crucial as the disciplines lie at the heart of the institution. High quality institutions are based on high quality disciplines because the management and equipment of that institution exists for the advancement of the disciplines.

24 Višňovský The advancement and quality of knowledge cannot be evaluated neither simply, nor primarily according to the number of publications and citations regardless of their nature. This in particular is a neoliberal deformation afflicting academia today. The proper unit –​applicable at the level of the individual scientific worker –​for evaluation purposes is a “scientific work” (an opus). It is the basic duty of each scientific worker to create their own (original) scientific work, which can be measured as well, if needed, from a quantitative point of view and categorized variously including by number of citations. Nonetheless, the nature of scientific work consists in its contribution to the particular discipline(s) and should be evaluated in a specific qualitative way. This evaluation is undoubtedly more demanding and complex, which is on a par with the complexity of creating such an original work, rather than just producing a quantity of publications and counting them. But it is the only proper way to do science and is the foundation on which true science has always stood and moves forward, even though the work may consist of just one idea, for instance “Cogito ergo sum,” or just one formula such as “E =​mc2”. This and this alone is the gist of real scientific performance. The obsession with assessments, evaluations, and accreditations that has recently struck academia like a tsunami and that is massively distracting and pointlessly disorienting for the younger generations of academics in particular, is founded in well-​known reasons such as the general mistrust toward academia in societies and governments, the application of managerial and business methods,9 the intrusion of commodification, etc. into academic institutions. This has to be put right. Before anyone can evaluate anything, the item must first be created or produced. Otherwise there would be nothing to evaluate. Simply put, the creation, not the evaluation, has to be the center point of the academic institution. Nowadays it seems that everybody is caught up in the evaluations, and nobody is bothering about the creations! One can figure out any scheme of evaluation, crediting, or whatever, and some may even compete as to who will devise a better or even the best system of evaluation –​but none of this is the key issue for academic institutions and their managers. The primary and real problem is how to create real outcomes for academic (scientific, educational, and artistic) works. These cannot be publications, for they are just 9 For instance, in Slovakia the institutions pay academics for ranked publications in order to motivate them to produce these because the government pays money to the institutions based on the number of these publications. In fact, on the quasi-​academic market, the government serves as the buyer of these products from the institutions that are the producers. The government decides in advance of these transactions which products it will buy and for what value, and which it will not.

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the instrument and the medium. The real outcomes are the creative contributions to the disciplines, to the knowledge, learning, education, and culture –​ regardless of the form or genre in which they are presented and publicized. It is these that are and should be the creative works. So long as academics and their managers do not concern themselves with the processes of creation –​the processes of the “production” of the outcomes –​, but just with the outcomes themselves, there will be no way forward. There will be no valuable results and products, no matter what models of evaluations may be thought up. The institution has to be organized in such a way as to secure the advancement of the scientific field and its contribution to knowledge and society. 5

Conclusion

Academic institutions as well as academicians occupy a much reduced position in the world in comparison to the past –​when they were able to act independently and influence the lot of humanity as leading f­ igures –​despite all the public declarations about their roles and missions. The academic profession has become almost massified, but the mass of academics as wage laborers has been pushed back into the corners of their offices and laboratories, subordinate to those on many sides. The academic world is by no means unchanging, but neither should it be defenseless against all the pressures from outside, in particular those that deform its precious creative intellectual heart. Creativity is a huge and relevant issue, which, it seems, has been moving more into the center within the context of academia and university (Jackson, Oliver, Shaw, Wisdom 2006; Peters, Marginson, Murphy 2008; Besley, Peters 2013; Lund, Arndt 2018; Barnett 2020; Mamica 2022). New possibilities for creativizing academia are being sought and explored. If there is no return to creativity (re-​creativization), that will be the end of academia. Or something else will be pursued under its guise, as has already happened. The key to the “creative academy” is to reflect upon and transform academic practices in such a way that they yield what they have done traditionally –​intellectual pleasure and the satisfaction of creating processes and the sociocultural gains of creating the good for the sake of humanity. This humanistic mission of academia is another motif which should be further developed philosophically. It should be clear that academies and universities are here to stay, not merely as “engines” of economic and technological progress, but just as much as (if not more) to cultivate and civilize humanity in every possible way.

26 Višňovský

References

Bailey, Michael and Des Freedman, eds. 2011. The Assault on Universities. London: Pluto Press. Barber, Michael, Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi. 2013. An Avalanche is Coming. London: Institute for Public Policy and Research. Barcan, Ruth. 2013. Academic Life and Labour in the New University. Farnham: Ashgate. Barnett, Ronald. 1990. The Idea of Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Barnett, Ronald and Michael A. Peters, eds. 2018. The Idea of the University. Contemporary Perspectives, Volume 2. New York: Peter Lang. Barnett, Ronald. 2020. “Towards the creative university: Five forms of creativity and beyond”. Higher Education Quarterly 74, 5–​18. Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-​Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books. Bender, Thomas and Carl E. Schorske, eds. 2021. American Academic Culture in Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Besley, Tina and Michael A. Peters. 2013. Re-​imagining the Creative University for the 21st Century. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Boutang, Yann Moulier. 2012. Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Böhme, Gernot and Nico Stehr. 1986. The Knowledge Society. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel. Burton-​Jones, Alan. 1999. Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work, and Learning in the New Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collini, Stefan. 2012. What Are Universities For? London: Penguin Books. Dardot, Pierre and Claude Laval. 2013. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso. Delanty, Gerard. 2001. Challenging Knowledge. The University in the Knowledge Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Delbanco, Andrew. 2012. College. What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. DeMillo, Richard A. 2015. Revolution in Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Donskis, Leonidas, Ida Sabelis, Frans Kamsteeg and Harry Wels, eds. 2019. Academia in Crisis. Leiden/​Boston: Brill/​Rodopi. Drucker, Peter. 1993. Post-​Capitalist Society. New York: HarperCollins. Engwall, Lars, ed. 2020. Missions of Universities Past, Present, Future. Cham: Springer. Evans, Mary. 2004. Killing Thinking: The Death of the Universities. London and New York: Continuum. Fanghanel, Joelle. 2012. Being an Academic. London and New York: Routledge. Gibbons, Michael, et al. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage.

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Gornitzka, Åse, Maurice Kogan and Alberto Amaral, eds. 2005. Reform and Change in Higher Education. Dordrecht: Springer. Graham, Gordon. Universities. 2008. The Recovery of an Idea. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic. Henkel, Mary and Brenda M. Little 1999. Changing Relationships between Higher Education and the State London: Jessica Kingsley. Jackson, Norman, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw and James Wisdom, eds. 2006. Developing Creativity in Higher Education. London and New York: Routledge. Jarratt Report, 1985. Online: http://​www​.educa​tion​engl​and​.org​.uk​/docume​nts​/jarr​att1​ 985​/index​.html​. Accessed on May 15, 2022. Jencks, Christopher and David Riesman. 1968. The Academic Revolution. Garden City: Doubleday & Company. Kogan, Maurice, Marianne Bauer, Ivar Bleiklie and Mary Henkel, eds. 2006. Transforming Higher Education. Dordrecht: Springer. Lund, Birthe and Sonja Arndt, eds. 2018. The Creative University. Leiden/​Boston: Brill/​ Sense. Lybeck, Eric. 2021. The University Revolution. London and New York: Routledge. Machlup, Fritz. 1962. The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mamica, Lukasz. 2022. The Co-​Creative University. London and New York: Routledge. Mason, Paul. 2015. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane. Massy, William F. 2016. Reengineering the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mokyr, Joel. 2005. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Müller-​Böling, Detlef, Evelies Mayer, Anne J. MacLachlan and Jutta Fedrowitz, eds. 1998. University in Transition. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Münch, Richard. 2014. Academic Capitalism. New York and London: Routledge. Neave, Guy. 2012. The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-​engineering Higher Education in Western Europe. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. The Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications. Peters, Michael A., Simon Marginson and Peter Murphy. 2008. Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy. New York: Peter Lang. Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Rindermann, Heiner. 2018. Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press. Rüegg, Walter, ed. 2011. A History of the University in Europe. Volume iv: Universities Since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

28 Višňovský Salter, Brian and Ted Tapper. 1994. The State and Higher Education. Ilford: Woburn Press. Salter, Brian. 2002. “The External Pressures on the Internal Governance of Universities.” Higher Education Quarterly, 56, No. 3, 245–​256. Schiller, Dan. 1999. Digital Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Scott, Peter. 1984. The Crisis of the University. London: Croom Helm. Scott, Peter. 1995. The Meanings of Mass Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Scott, Peter, ed. 2000. Higher Education Re-​formed. London and New York: Falmer Press. Slaughter, Sheila and Larry L. Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, Sheila and Garry Rhodes. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stehr, Nico. 2002. Knowledge and Economic Conduct. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stehr, Nico. 2022. Knowledge Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Webster, Frank. 2002. Theories of the Information Society. London and New York: Routledge. Whitley, Richard, Jochen Glaser and Lars Engwall, eds. 2010. Reconfiguring Knowledge Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilshire, Bruce. 1990. The Moral Collapse of the University. New York: State University of New York Press. Wittrock, Björn. 1993. “The modern university: the three transformations”. In The European and American university since 1800. Historical and sociological essays, edited by Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 303–​362. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zemsky, Robert, Gregory R. Wegner and William F. Massy. 2005. Remaking the American University. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Zukerfeld, Mariano. 2017. Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism. London: University of Westminster Press.

­c hapter 2

Research Change within Social Change Marek Hrubec The dissatisfaction of many researchers with the conditions under which it is possible to do research in the humanities and social sciences given the current social system here opens up the topic of the humanities and social sciences researcher as social critic. Now research here in the European Union, and especially in Central European countries as semi-​peripheries of the West, suffers from a distortion in research activities due to the specific ideological kind of commercionalization and bureaucratization. However, this social critique cannot find a way out through a mere isolated and alienated change in the position of the humanities and social sciences. Rather, this could transpire only through change that is an integral part of a transformation in the social (administrative, political, economic, societal) system, following the current and long-​term critique belonging to those citizens and various social groups which should be of primary interest to researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Finding a way out therefore requires linking efforts for social change and efforts to change the model of public research, including: the conditions, evaluation and funding of research without reliance on private company profits and their political representation, mainly concerning their journal indexes and publishing houses; the achievement of sufficient public institutional funding for research without extreme dependence on grants; and, more generally, the implementation of research in order to transform, with citizens, the national, international and supranational power structures in research and in the social system so that they reflect the needs and interests of the citizens significantly more than today, and not those of the alienated political representation. This chapter deals with the transformation from a local internal critique to supranational institutional change, which would concern the field of research as an integral part of the social system. Current critical discussions about research here in Central Europe, linked to a global debates in various countries and macro-​regions, have brought a large number of important critical voices to bear against various aspects of unsatisfactory conditions, funding and evaluation of research (Hrubec 2021; Višňovský 2022; Brunner et al. 2019; Heller

30 Hrubec 2016).1 These critiques overlap in many ways in identifying the main sources of the problem, potentially leading to a joint overall critique. What are the possible joint outcomes? The purpose of this chapter is to offer an embedded analysis of this topic in critically oriented social and political philosophy with the aim of the local, national and transnational development of critical humanities and social sciences in the public interest; specifically in close relation to the much more intensive exercise of democratic participatory power by the public within the more complex social institutions than is currently the case. In this chapter, I have selected two thematic areas that have explicitly or implicitly resonated in the discussions on these issues in our academic institutions in Central Europe in discussions with others in the world in recent times and which allow us to link up a number of individual critiques within a broader framework.2 I will start with a summarizing formulation of the basis of my critical social philosophy and theory and, then, I will continue with its application to the specific institutional levels related to research. First, I will begin by defining the internal social critique that underlies critical research. I define it against external social critique, which cannot initially be rejected, but must be dealt with more comprehensively. The problem of external alienated interventions and the imposition of foreign patterns of behaviour is obvious but the complex characteristics of societies requires us to cope with more complex influences than these. Then, I develop my analyses of internal and external kinds of critique in the basis of my social theory, particularly methodological trichotomy usable in theory and practice. Then, in the second part of my paper, I discuss the relationship between the actions of individuals and social groups, and social institutional structures, both more specifically in relation to research and to society as a whole. First, I will specify it concerning social actors and academic institutions, and then I will deal with it concerning economic a civilizational institutions. This thematic area is based on the problem of overestimating the importance of the actions of separated individuals (researchers, citizens and others) and fragmented civil society traditionally in Western countries, and also in Central European countries, in recent decades. The activities of individual citizens and civil society are very important, but nevertheless require certain just social institutional preconditions, without which they cannot participate successfully in favour of public interest and justice. High-​quality critical research in the public interest requires the disruption of overly-​rigid social structures that 1 As editors, we have already introduced this topic in the Introduction to this book. 2 This chapter is an extended and updated text (Hrubec 2021). The original version of this work was originally published in the Czech language. © Nakladatelství Epocha, Prague 2021.

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block and defer the efforts of researchers to alter the academic arena and of citizens and others in a society in the system of local and global capitalism, which is now manifested in my home country and other European countries –​ following the US trends –​by the kind of ordo-​neoliberalism,3 redefined partly by the particular populist neoconservatism. I hope my analyses will help in formulating the required transformation of research institutions within this social change. 1

From Internal and External Critique to Trichotomic Methodology

Since social critique occurs not only in philosophy and the more specific humanities and social sciences, but often directly in everyday life, it does not need to be discovered or created, but rather, better articulated. The social critic conducts a dialogue with other members of his or her community and contributes to an assessment of the conditions of their joint activities: the community discourse performs an internal critique4 in the form of “a collective reflection upon the conditions of collective life.” (Walzer 1993, 30) Without identifying with certain important needs, interests, and values of a given society, a critic would not be able to determine societal pathologies, nor to focus on the problems of injustice that occur in that society, without imposing its standpoint on society and acting in an authoritarian manner (Rorty 1989). In contrast to an internally rooted social critique stands the creation of a theory separate from a particular society, as promoted, for example, by the main current of contemporary political philosophy.5 The critical approach must reject attempts to shape a kind of (pseudo-​)universal theory that would be isolated from the society (Young 1990, 6). Such an external position would run the risk of succumbing to the elitist authoritarian behaviour of the philosopher and social scientist, or at least the provision –​unencumbered by any responsibility –​of seemingly neutrally formulated expertise to circles of power, which may take authoritarian forms or be indirectly used against members of society.

3 Ordo =​an order in Latin; ordo-​neoliberalism =​neoliberalism enforced by the state order. While neoliberalism refused state interventions, ordo-​neoliberalism intervenes to save the neoliberal model. The ordo-​neoliberal model started in the USA and other Western countries as a state intervention to save “too big to fail” banks since the 2008 economic crisis. 4 Albert Camus, George Orwell and Mahatma Gandhi, for example, began by formulating their approach as internal critics. 5 A paradigmatic example of this problematic trend is John Rawls’s liberal theory.

32 Hrubec Any truly fruitful social critique must be based on an internal critique, but it must be formulated in a way that also reflects a certain non-​relative scale, since relativism would allow any form of injustice to be legitimized (Honneth 2009). The criterion may be the identification of elements of just development in the long term from the past through the present, into the future. The formative element should meanwhile be the critical articulation of the negative elements in history, the capture of social pathologies and injustice in historical development, and in relation to this, the formulation of normative progressive elements (Horkheimer, Adorno 2007; Habermas 1987). In general, all forms of internal critique are linked by the view that the rejection of injustice and the formulation of the demands of justice must be based –​ either directly or indirectly –​on a local community. More specifically, claims for recognition in a given community should be based primarily on the articulation of persons who undergo the experience of impaired recognition, or even refusal of recognition. This means that internal criticism prevents people from outside from being able to interfere in their decisions in an alienating way. Now, however, it is necessary to take the difficult step of the researcher and citizen towards an external kind of critique. Although it is necessary to endeavour to start from internal sources, under certain conditions one must consider an external approach because there can be also societal pressures that block an internal approach. Such a situation arises in the case of a society that succumbs to strong unjust or socially pathological tendencies and turns into a Nazi, Stalinist, McCarthyist or otherwise distorted society in the past and now, especially when the majority of the population shares or tolerates these tendencies, often in a context that obscures the interconnectedness of unjust tendencies with historical development trends which have not been problematic in the past. In these circumstances, which can be supplemented by others, social critique often becomes the weak voice of a small group whose views can only be heard on the margins of the local community. However, the notion of externality becomes complicated when I ask the worrying question of whether an external critic is really someone who is primarily external, or whether this external entity is a majority population that has adopted a pathological and unjust system, such as Nazism. One may ask whether the majority –​or a substantial part –​of the population has not been alienated and did not take an alienated attitude towards itself and its culture, for example under the pressure of domestic or foreign political and media manipulation. Although in such a situation, a social critic might act as an external critic, his or her value framework could correspond to the internal value system of the community in the period before its decline.

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If this were a community in which it is not its own members that primarily suffer lack of recognition, but members of other communities that the first community abuses through imperial, colonial, or global economic expansion, for example to increase the consumption of its narrower or wider population groups, then it would be the members of these conquered communities that would be the subject/​agent of the critique. In this case, too, the social critic should base his critique on the resistance of these people. If the critic’s own society is moving in a fundamentally pathological and unjust direction, the social critic may prefer to uphold the foreign value models of the community of victims in other countries as well as of internal victims: for example, oppressed groups in Nazi Germany who were not actually recognized as German citizens by the majority. However, respect for local culture in the global age presupposes transcultural and global rules of intercultural communication, that is, transcultural agreement on quasi-​universal needs and interests (Dussel 2009; Fornet-​Betancourt 2004; Nolan 2018; Binyam 2022). This also requires dealing with the supranational and global structures of the institutional arrangements (Beck 1999; Harris 2016; Sklair 2002; Robinson 2004). By analysing the long-​term historical tendencies of a critique, the critical researcher and the citizen can remain not only in their starting point but also in certain historical stages of the development of some societies and thus also in the long term in the internal position. At the same time, research critique has long followed practical critique and, in its analysis of its long-​term nature and focus, tries to distinguish truly progressive internal criticism from dead ends. In this sense, the aforementioned kinds of external critique, which are based on internal sources and on long-​term historical tendencies in many of the communities of human civilization, are in their intention internal critiques. Following the basis of my critical social philosophy and theory, now I will remind the methodological trichotomy which is based on three approaches of social agents to a reality, specifically to a problematic reality and to its overcoming (Hrubec 2012; Hrubec 2011).6 The first approach is rejection, the second, contrasting one is affirmation, and the third is creation. This is a combination of critical, explanatory and normative moments using terms that “comprehend not only the given reality, but simultaneously its abolition and the new reality that is to follow” (Marcuse 1968, 145). Rejection represents a critical attitude of the social agent to a problematic reality; affirmation focuses on those elements of the reality which crystallize as positive fragments of it

6 In the rest of this part of the chapter, I use my analysis of the main characteristics of methodological trichotomy (Hrubec 2012).

34 Hrubec in the background of the criticized parts of the reality; and creation concerns a development of the positive fragments of the reality into a set of desired standards and a normative complex of social arrangements. Nevertheless, this sequence of steps is not a one-​shot approach. It is a reiterative process through which individual actions are increasingly specified; it represents the dialectical dynamics of historical development. The trichotomy contains the basic elements which in their mutual connection perform the dynamics of social struggle, starting with negation of an undesirable situation, going on to identify positive fragments of reality, and subsequently developing them into the desired state. With regard to the theme of social criticism, which is both theoretical and practical, I use terms: critique, explanation, and normativity. Focusing first on reductionist approaches conceived separately, separately conceived critique corresponds with Michael Walzer’s theory of social criticism. Independently conceived explanation represents a reductionistic approach which occurs in representative form mainly in (quasi)positivist theories within the social sciences, that is, in the current social science mainstream. Independently conceived normativity is usually a characteristic feature of contemporary normative theories in the sphere of moral and political philosophy today. Various forms of interconnection of these elements can also be found in formulations by various Critical theorists but the roles and interconnection of these elements have not yet been fully developed. We can see that important critical thinkers made relevant contributions but they reduce their efforts also only to some aspects of the whole. Axel Honneth’s partial reduction to normativity and Nancy Fraser’s partial reduction to explanation show that these authors have proceeded in the adequate direction, but that their formulations remain at the midway point, and there are no guarantees that they will not go astray. While Jürgen Habermas in his early critical-​theoretical writings at least tried to combine approaches of all forms, the late liberal Habermas focuses in his theory mainly on normativity, though sometimes also connecting it with the form of explanation. Michel Foucault operated in the modes of critical explanation and explanatory critique, along with Karl Marx and also Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their writings in the thirties. To conclude, while it is necessary to start with critique, reduction to one form of approach (whether critique, explanation, or normativity) or partial restriction to two of the forms is a deficient version of approach that is not able to fully realize the requirements placed upon it.

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Institutional Preconditions of Research

After the formulation of internal social criticism and the trichotomic methodology, it is necessary to link the contemporary problematic research and its alternatives to an articulation of the ambiguous relations between two classical factors that play a significant role in shaping individuals and society, that is, the actions of individuals or social groups, on the one hand, and the real and desirable social, political, economic and civilizational structures of institutions on the other (Pauza 2019; Giddens 1984; Bourdieu 1977).7 There is a need to reflect on the role of the researcher not only within her or his research team or institution, but also within the social, economic, political and other structures that currently find themselves in many global disputes and conflicts. I emphasize this topic, since the illusion often persists that the problematic funding or evaluation of research can be solved in very fragmented technocratic ways. Although the space for citizen participation began to open up in Central Europe in the beginning of the 1990s, the neoliberal overemphasis on the isolated individual citizen consumer also meant an underestimation of its embedding in various real social institutions, which are a precondition for a free and equal position for the citizens and for their democratic participation. The result of this tendency was largely the powerlessness of the citizen within inappropriate social structures, which has resulted in resignation and consumerism. Although slogans about freedom and options for citizens were heard in the media, the specific institutional structural conditions for this freedom, mainly defined by a commercialized version of instrumental reason, made it virtually impossible to enact. There were some citizen attempts to reverse the trend especially since the global economic crisis but then the disillusionment with the current state of affairs prevailed again. The governments in the Czech Republic, similarly like governments in many Western countries, made a transition from neoliberalism to ordo-​neoliberalism. For a more detailed breakdown of our topic (Donskis 2019; Münch 2014; Muller 2018), it is appropriate to identify four main structural institutional levels, although more could be separated out. The first level concerns the actions of group and individual actors who act within certain informal institutional structures and transform them by their activities. This level focuses primarily 7 The relationship between the actions of agents and structures is a classic theme of social theory; it is a complex relationship, the interpretation of which requires going beyond one-​ sided interpretations of both classical structural functionalism and of the theory of action of individual actors developed mainly by liberal and libertarian theories. Social institutional structures can best be understood as processes and not as given static states.

36 Hrubec on the conscious activities of subjects but also affects their emotional behaviour. Currently, most day-​to-​day research activities take place on this first level, where individual humanities researchers and social scientists carry out their specialized activities and associate a relative freedom of research life with the negative freedom of merely having no external interference. Their research activities are distorted by the particular commercial, ideological and bureaucratic interventions which have an impact also on limits of their positive freedom. But since I am primarily interested in more institutionalized structures, I will move to the second and other levels. The second level –​similarly to the levels which follow –​are the institutional structures which have been shaped mainly over the longer-​term by the actions of researchers, on the assumption that we take into account the practicoinert structuring (Young 2001)8 which points to the structural conditionality of the actors’ actions. This level relates to research institutional norms: legal, political, societal, moral and other institutional structures (Honneth 2015; Taylor 1992), which define the real options for the research activities of individual researchers and research teams. It is on this second level where the conceptions of research and its evaluation are defined (Kopecky 2013; Vostal 2016; Heller 2016; Rhoades et al. 2004). First, there is a neoliberal and ordo-​neoliberal conception of research described above. It applies the commercialized conception of research which prefers the rapid technocratic transfer of research knowledge (especially technical knowledge) to production and trade. The fastest possible profit of private firms usually plays a big role here. There are also other sub-​conceptions that focus on linking research with different thematic areas, such as environmental protection. Characteristic of all of these remains the application of an expert analytical approach to the object of research and then its subsequent transformation. Citizens’ democratic participation usually plays only a small role here. This technicist, instrumentalist approach may have positive minor advantages, but –​because of its profit focus –​it lacks a participatory assessment in communicating with the citizens and their needs and interests, and it lacks also embeddedness in broader societal frameworks. This kind of research conception has been transformed last years. For the last five years or so, ordo-​neoliberal capitalism in the USA has been partly transformed partly by populist neoconservative imperatives, reminiscent of 8 People act in a context that is usually the result of long-​term and collectively shaped structuring, with conscious and unconscious, coordinated and random elements. This kind of sociohistorical formation is often referred to as practicoinert structuring (Sartre 2004; Young 2001; Wendt 1987).

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the beginning of McCarthyist ideology, based on the anti-​socialist tendencies and West-​centric containment of China and other countries that have dared to go their own way of modernisation (multiple modernities). This neoconservative tendency brings about also censorship and repression of citizens and also researchers, with ideological limits of freedom of expression and freedom of scholarly research. This trend is now also beginning to spread in the Czech Republic and some other European countries. There are alternatives. Another conception of a research wants to satisfy as exclusively as possible its internal demanding expert criteria, which are independent of external society. At first glance, such a conception seems to promote absolute freedom of scholarly research, but it results in an isolationist, relativistic and arbitrary approach that has lost its social connections and relevance, thus losing its legitimacy for public funding. Another conception, that of Humboldt, combines research and education for the purpose of comprehensive shaping of the personality. Although it opens up the sphere of research, it is still to no small extent a version of the first conception, but which also positively transfers research and its results into education. However, here the ideal is still a considerable degree of enclosedness in order to meet demanding elitist internal criteria. Nevertheless, there may be more ways to open up research. Another conception for research connects research with state administration, which is usually also implemented in the form of education, with the main focus here being on top civil servants, diplomats and politicians. In this model, these may also be pedagogical institutions or departmental research institutes and the use of their expertise, etc. One socially acknowledged conception of research is the conception linked to its application in popularization. While this connection between research and citizens is positive in general, this conception is applied in the vast majority of cases in the mass media as a one-​way flow from experts to the receiving citizens, who are mostly passive. But if we take a step away from this monological conception towards an intersubjective approach, we come to the conception of citizen research participation in sharing deliberation and decision-​making. Although this conception is already occurring to a small extent in practice, the participation of citizens is for the most part reduced to marginal and technical participation, when the majority of the public does not even know of most of the relevant topics being analysed. Increasing the level of public participation concerning the relevant research themes would be a correct step in support of a better conception of public consultation. Moreover, it would not be enough to consider the participation

38 Hrubec of only one particular country’s citizens. Because citizens of one country (in Central Europe and even more so in Western countries) are dependent also on exploited work, products and materials coming from other (mainly developing) countries, the people of the affected countries and the knowledge of these interdependent interactions should also be included in participatory consultative processes. In this book, we focus on the humanities and social sciences but the institutional structure of many platforms, upon which public debates about the types, importance and value of research (public deliberation on conceptions, funding, evaluation, etc.) could take place, also applies partly to the natural and technical sciences. The public should have the right and real access to participate democratically in consultations about the research of various issues: on poverty and living standards of people in local and global contexts, on international and global interactions, on the potential civil and military use of chemical and biological products and weapons or nuclear fusion, for example. This participation would require a fundamental institutional change in the conception of research within social change. The third level is the institutions that predominantly concern economic structures, based on the particular kinds of political economy (Cohen 1989; Scott 1985). These decades, it is academic capitalism which is a product of neoliberal and ordo-​neoliberal trends in Western countries and, by extension, also in Central Europe (Brunner et al. 2019; Readings 1997; Aronowitz 2000). The second and third levels should together form an integral whole of social institutional structures but the reality is their fragmentation and subsequent easy exploitation by power groups. The third level is mostly reflected in our contemporary academic sphere due to inadequate state budget expenditure to finance research activities (i.e., public institutional funds) and the related increasing dependence on funds earmarked from grant sources. There have been efforts to transform the researcher into a research capitalist entrepreneur who has to raise funds via grants and other means in order to pay basic financial research necessities. After the years of neoliberal influences, the Czech government, for example, enforced officially a neoliberal research model in 2008,9 with limited institutional expenditures to the academic institutions and a gradual increase in 9 The neoliberal Act on research model was cancelled in 2020 but its practices continue. Act No. 50/​2020 Coll., amending Act No. 130/​2002 Coll., on support for research, experimental development and innovation from public financial sources and on amendments to certain related acts (Act on support for research, experimental development and innovation) in their amended forms.

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expenditure on grant agencies which led to their growing several-​fold as a result. This earmarked funding through grant projects has a number of serious negative effects. One of the problems is that excessive earmarked grant funding at the expense of institutional funding is an inefficient system that takes up a lot of unnecessarily wasted time for the researchers of research institutions, only a fraction of whom will receive grant funding. The cost of writing up grant projects often exceeds the funds obtained, and when researchers apply for grants in public institutions, it is an uneconomical waste of taxpayers’ money. Grant projects also include anti-​research requirements, such as the need to meet the demands of bureaucratic time limits, which ignore the creative and innovative nature of free research, which cannot years in advance set out administratively an annual schedule of exact dates for research outputs and publications. This authoritarian approach of the grant agencies is based on an audit-​like institutionalization of distrust and ongoing scrutiny; still associated in many institutions with inadequate bibliometric review, mainly via the use of now obsolete quantitative methods. This top-​down managerial business approach is reproduced by being transferred to other institutions. Although researchers are in employment at the research universities and academies, they also are required on an ongoing basis to obtain grants, to prove their “qualities.” This constant screening of them in grant agencies and research institutions acts as an ideological and bureaucratic censorship for critical researchers in the humanities and social sciences, with the evaluation panels guarding the established research and conservative social status quo, which should be criticized and transformed in order to allow for further innovation. The grant system also limits research to projects taking a few years, which are not interlinked, or only partially. This weakens long-​term and comprehensive research able to capture complex relevant societal development trends in both local and global contexts. These contexts should also be reflected on by citizens (who to a large extent pay for research from their taxes), and not just by chance at some popularization meetings. The new starting point should be to minimize the implementation of fragmented grant projects taking only a few years, which should be maximally only a minor complement. Emphasis should once more be placed on adequate long-​term funding of public research institutions in systematically institutionalized structures of research and civic participation, which, in the current global interactions, should take place in cooperation of national and transnational institutions even if larger institutional units can develop their own criteria. The major powers, other large countries, macro-​regions or network co-​operations, some of which are long-​ term historical civilisations, namely the European Union, China, Russia or

40 Hrubec India, can afford their own self-​sufficient research institutions and criteria that would function largely in sovereign frameworks. While so far the researcher has only had the opportunity to take the subordinate view of someone who is seeking a good evaluation and to obtain a grant, researchers should have a much stronger participatory influence in decision-​ making on how much funding grant agencies should have in proportion to institutional funding (in the current pseudo-​representation model, participation is almost non-​existent). If it was not just researchers that were evaluated by agencies, but also agencies by researchers, and also in respect of citizen participation, it is likely that grant agencies would not be evaluated successfully and would not achieve their current level of funding. Another problem at this institutional level is reliance on the major private publishing houses which pursue profit rather than knowledge when publishing books and journals with articles, using free of charge the results of research in the humanities and social sciences often paid for from public funds. Modest profit is legitimate but it should not be dominant when the truth is being sought in research. Similarly, the evaluation of research publications and the subsequent funding of public institutions depend on private Western corporations which own Web of Science, for example, and whose primary goal is to generate profit. However, when the profit of journal owners is mentioned, instead of criticism of these large global private predators, usually only problematic predatory “small fish” in the form of East European or Asian journals is pointed out, which have only insignificant profits by global comparison. These economic dependencies of the academic capitalism are not random and correspond to other institutional structures that follow the same logic (Giroux 2014; Strouhal, Štech 2016; Slaughter, Rhoades 2004; Somers et al. 2018). The alternative conception of research funding should avoid these criticized and explained negative factors. It should offer the public funding of research institutions which do not suffer these deficits and which are linked to the normative conception of public participatory consultations concerning people’s needs and interests in local and global contexts, as indicated above. The fourth level is the institutional structures of different modernities, cultures and civilizations and of human civilization in general, which are the preconditions for other levels of structure and action (Arnason 2003; Eisenstadt 2003). While other levels vary around the actors and their real possibilities for relevant influence on social structures, the fourth level shows very long historical trends and institutional structures of civilizations and human civilization, which although they also result from actors’ actions, their immediate and conscious influence on these trends and structures has been minimal.

Research Change within Social Change

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Taken on a more general level, forcing civilizational patterns from one culture or civilization onto another applies aggressive approaches that are sometimes associated with wars, including illegal wars. In the field of research, it is relevant to avoid academic imperialism and be aware of different practices and models of research and education here in the Czech Republic or more generally in Central Europe and elsewhere –​the countries of Asia, Latin America, Africa, for e­ xample –​in a global framework (Freire 2018; Freire 1976). This level is usually not the main subject of discussion concerning the research model, but we face it when evaluating and not recognizing articles in journals and books from non-​Western publishing houses (Zhang, Sivertsen 2020) or failing to award grant projects based on a number of prejudices about other civilizations. Misrecognition of people from other cultures and civilizations has been often connected to misrecognition of people from countries with different social systems. This ideological non-​tolerance is often linked to racism. However, now we must pursue mutual recognition of people and social systems as well as multilateral global interactions. I might add that the boundaries between the four types of institutional levels are not absolute; they serve rather to clarify different types of institutional structures which are not isolated but interwoven. Because the levels of institutional structures do not match each other completely, they can be to a certain extent developed to a different degree. Each level may also differ relatively in whether it develops progressively or regressively. The progress on one level can coexist with regression on another. On the whole, unfortunately, this means complex development tendencies, which can be a combination of different or unevenly developing trajectories, whether transformative or revolutionary or on the boundary between these. 3

Conclusion

I hope that the two main points of this article, namely the basis of research in internal social critique and the related methodological trichotomy of critique, explanation and normativity as well as the four levels of institutional structural preconditions for research, make it possible to indicate a space in which it is appropriate to consider a more appropriate conception of research and its links to social interactions. It offers a connection between understanding social injustices and an understanding of the critical humanities and social sciences that would be able to respond to these injustices. The current particular version of a social system, that is, ordo-​neoliberal capitalism, has pursued a conception of academic capitalism with an

42 Hrubec ideologically-​specific kind of commercialization and bureaucratization. In recent years, this model has been partly redefined by populist neoconservative trends in the United States which are not tolerant of alternative modernities in other parts of the world. It has its particular offshoots in Central Europe as well, including ideological limits of research. In the field of research, inappropriate, pathological and unjust institutional structures cannot be overcome by researchers isolated from the needs and interests of the citizens and other residents in society. Change in research must be part of a larger social change. This social change has various aspects of justice: social and economic (Hrubec 2016), intercultural (Hrubec 2010), security (Hrubec 2018) and so on. It requires a self-​conception of researchers and research teams in appropriate institutional frameworks and in relation to a more demanding, just social system in which the people and public administration at local, national, macro-​regional and global levels play participatory roles. The way out of this negative trajectory cannot lie in isolated responses in separate countries. Justice must be collectively pursued in multilateral cooperative interactions between people, countries, various social systems and civilizations in order to overcome the unilateral and pseudo-​multilateral remnants.

References

Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press. Arnason, Johann Pall. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Binyam, Mekonnen. 2022. A trans-​modern quest for decolonization in the postcolonial philosophy. In: Kasanda, A., Hrubec, M. Africa in a Multilateral World. New York, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brunner, José Joaquín; Labrana, Julio; Ganga, Francisco and Rodríguez-​Ponce, Emilio. 2019. “Circulación y recepción de la teoría del “capitalismo académico” en América Latina.” Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas 27, 79. Cohen, Gerald Allan. 1989. History, Labour and Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donskis, Leonidas; Sabelis, Ida; Kamsteeg, Frans and Wels, Harry, eds. 2019. Academia in Crisis. Leiden: Brill. Dussel, Enrique. 2009. “A New Age in the History of Philosophy: The World Dialoque Between Philosophical Traditions.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 35, 5: 499–​516.

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Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Fornet-​Betancourt, Raul. 2004. Crítica intercultural de la Filosofía Latinoamericana actual. Madrid: Trotta 2004. Freire, Paulo. 1976. Education, the Practice of Freedom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. Freire, Paulo. 2018. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structura­ tion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giroux, Henry Armand. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In: Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: mit Press, 106–​130. Harris, Jerry. 2016. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Atlanta: Clarity Press. Heller, Henry. 2016. The Capitalist University: The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States since 1945. London: Pluto Press. Honneth, Axel. 2009. Reconstructive social critique with genealogical reservation. In: Honneth, A. Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Honneth, Axel. 2015. Freedom’s Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Horkheimer, Max, Adorno, Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund. 2007. The Dialectics of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press (orig. 1947). Hrubec, Marek. 2010. “Preconditions of an Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights.” Veritas 55, 1: 183–​205. Hrubec, Marek. 2011. Od zneuznani ke spravedlnosti. Kriticka teorie globalni spolecnosti a politiky. Prague: Filosofia. Hrubec, Marek. 2012. “Authoritarian versus critical theory.” International Critical Thought 2, 4: 431–​444. Hrubec, Marek. 2016. “A Comparison of Models of Economic Democracy.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 15, 1/​2: 145–​156. Hrubec, Marek. 2018. Towards Justice in the World War. In: N. De Oliveira; M. Hrubec; E. Sobottka and E. From Social to Cyber Justice. Porto Alegre: pucrs, and Prague: Filosofia, 313–​331. Hrubec, Marek. 2021. Kriticke humanitni a socialni vedy. Od lokalni interni kritiky k transnacionalni strukturalni zmene. In: Hrubec, M., Kopecký, M. Nova vedecka era?. Praha: Epocha, 96 –​110. Kopecký, Martin. a kol. 2013. Vedeni a uceni v globalizavanem svete. Akteri a zmeny: Filozoficka fakulta Univerzity Karlovy.

44 Hrubec Marcuse, Herbert 1968. Philosophy and Critical Theory. In: Marcuse, Herbert. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon Press (orig. 1937), 134–​158. Muller, Jerry Zucker. 2018. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Münch, Richard 2014. Academic Capitalism. London and New York: Routledge. Nolan, Peter 2018. China and the West. New York: Routledge. Pauza, Miroslav. 2019. Idea strukturalni demokracie. Praha: Filosofia. Readings, Bill 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rhoades, Gary; Maldonado-​ Maldonado, Alma; Ordorika, Imanol and Velazquez, Martín. 2004. “Imagining Alternativas to Global, Corporate, New Economy Academic Capitalism.” Policy Futures in Education 2, 2: 316–​329. Robinson, William I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, JeanPaul. 2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. London: Verso (orig. 1960). Scott, James Campbell. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Sklair, Leslie. 2002. Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slaughter, Sheila, Rhoades, Gary 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University. Somers, Patrícia; Davis, Cory; Fry, Jessica; Jasinski, Lisa and Lee, Elida. 2018. “Academic capitalism and the entrepreneurial university: some perspectives from the Americas.” Roteiro Joacaba 43, 1: 21–​43. Strouhal, Martin, Štech, Stanislav. eds. 2016. Vzdelani a dnesek. Praha: Karolinum. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Višňovský, Emil. 2022. The imperative of creativity. The chapter published in this book. Vostal, Filip. 2016. Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Walzer, Michael. 1993. Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wendt, Alexander. 1987. “The AgentStructure Problem in International Theory.” International Organizations 43, 3: 335–​370. Young, Iris Marion. 2001. “Equality of Whom? Social Groups and Judgments of Injustice.” Journal of Political Philosophy 9, 1: 1–​18. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zhang, Lei, Sivertsen, Gunnar. 2020. “The New Research Assessment Reform in China and Its Implementation.” Scholarly Assessment Reports 2, 1.

­c hapter 3

Values and Evaluation: Co-​evolution of Science and Society Jiří Loudín Science and society have evolved in mutual symbiosis, in interaction with each other. Absolutely, science is part and parcel of society. However, the intrinsic nature of science as a generator of new, original knowledge with wide-​ranging potential for application means that science enjoys an exceptional position in society, while being involved in shaping society in a truly fundamental way. Thanks to its exclusive role within society, science avails itself of specific autonomy (the rate and nature of which tend to differ according to the prevailing historical and social framework) while at the same time its guarantor in modern societies is the state or the political structures that derive from it, such as supranational unions or regional associations. Scientific activity—​in other words fundamental research—​is predominantly funded by the government through its state budget. Therefore, the goals and priorities of science are inevitably in accordance with the values, interests and needs of the society and the state involved. However, this harmony is hardly devoid of tensions and controversies generated by the dynamic of both actors. The main goals and priorities of scientific research are formulated in science policy, negotiated between the government and the scientific community. The government of the day (or other political authorities at supranational or subnational level) promotes its own economic interests and social needs (education, health, environment, culture, etc.), offering funding and institutional support, while science itself identifies the research fields and trends that promise the greatest cognitive and innovative added-​value. The outcome of such negotiations is approved and then implemented by the government. 1

The Evolution of Science Policy

From the historical perspective, the fundamental concept of science policy was constituted as a national science policy in the period after World War ii. This arose out of the war experiences—​advanced states had engaged science and research in their war efforts, with both playing a seminal role in such

46 Loudín endeavours. The US Manhattan Project, whose goal was the fastest possible production of an atomic bomb, is known to this day as a pioneering governmental research program. But other large-​scale programs—​in operational research, electronics, radar technology and so on—​came to fruition during the war. J.-​J. Salomon describes the circumstances and incentives of the rise and initial phases of science policy (Salomon 1977). The link between science and power, or rather politics, had been apparent since virtually the beginning of the modern age, and constituted the bulk of the new concept of science that was expected to provide the ability to master and manipulate nature. By the time of the state’s first massive intervention, however—​the shaping of a national science policy and, within its framework, the definition of national scientific priorities—​science had already begun yielding substantial effects to the economic, military and technological development of society, while substantially co-​determining the position of the individual countries in international relations (competition). The events of the war accelerated the pace of this development, proving to be its catalyst. In the period of the Cold War that followed, national security issues grew to be each country’s national priority, with the standards of national security becoming inextricably linked to the scientific and technological maturity of each state. As a result, these national security priorities, together with efforts to achieve the best possible position in the field of international economic competition, were definitely projected into the structure of research priorities (J.-​J. Salomon 1977). During the first decades of the twentieth century the responsibility for science and technology development was fully in the hands of the private sector, and there were even signs of efforts to articulate an entrepreneurial science policy whose institutional backbone lay in industrial laboratories and nascent cooperation between industrial plants and universities. A crucial role was played by various private foundations (particularly in the US) which practically specified research priorities in a number of basic research domains and promoted international cooperation and interdisciplinarity. The period following World War ii was the time of the widespread establishment of various governmental institutions whose task was to define research priorities, allocate funds, establish and implement research programs. Aant Elzinga and Andrew Jamison have produced a well-​arranged periodisation of the post-​war evolution of science policy (Jamison, Elzinga 1995; Elzinga 2012). The era from the end of World War ii to the mid-​1960s in economically advanced Western countries is characterised by economic welfare and

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scientistic optimism. National research priorities were derived from the priorities of national security interests and the necessity of achieving political and economic success in competition with the Soviet system. In the key countries of the Western political alliance, three quarters of public research budgets went to military-​strategic and politically prestigious research—​defence, nuclear energy and space research. The basic structure of Big Science—​capital-​intensive and politically directed team-​research—​was formed. For the first time in history, the stage was set for the intermingling of the political administration with entrepreneurial and academic culture. New organisational structures were set up—​a network of governmental advisory and coordinating councils and committees as well as new professions and roles: scientific managers, advisers and experts. New concepts emerged, such as fundamental (basic) and applied research, while major organisational schemes for administration and funding research also appeared. Generally speaking, a typical feature of this era was the considerable amount of autonomy enjoyed by the science sector (partly due to the success of the Manhattan Project, managed by scientists themselves). The state and businesses left it to the scientific elites to make decisions about research priorities (the period of legitimation in Elzinga). In conceptual terms, this status was described by President Roosevelt’s science advisor Vannevar Bush as “Science, the Endless Frontier” (Bush 1945). Bush spoke in favour of maximum autonomy for scientists vis-​à-​vis political, economic and social interests. Science was not to be directed and controlled by the general public; rather, the latter was expected to try to understand and apply it (the concept of science popularisation). Especially in the 1950s, science proved to be the hegemon in relation to politics, and the science-​push model grew to be a dominating pattern of innovation behaviour. The latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s was a period noted for an emphasis on the social relevance and social goals of science. Throughout the 1960s the entrepreneurial community grew increasingly sceptical of the immediate economic effects of investments in “autonomous” science, while the prevailing attention shifted to transferring research results into practice, and to issues of applied research. A new concept of mission-​oriented research emerged. Funding institutions were to set research priorities in those sectors, and the demand-​pull model was prioritised in the process of explaining innovation activities. The document, more generally known as the oecd “Brooks Report” (Science, Growth and Society—​A New Perspective 1971), accurately captures the zeitgeist of that era—​support for the technological upsurge (trust in the automatic, trouble-​free transfer of scientific findings into technology

48 Loudín was losing credibility) and the need for greater social control of science were declared to be the key goals of science policy. The necessity of keeping science under tighter social control stemmed from the adverse ramifications of science and technology developments—​from the part they played, for instance, in the growing environmental and health risks. New large-​scale “civilian” research programs were drawn up, primarily focused on the priorities ensuing from ecological, energy and health concerns, and new institutional managing and control mechanisms created, such as various environmental agencies and technology assessment institutes (the period of professionalization in Elzinga). A distinct feature of this particular policy was the involvement of civil society, which had an important say in formulating research priorities. The nature of science policy in the 1980s reflects the change of the overall value climate in the Western countries, which among other challenges had to respond to the competitiveness and growth rate of Japan and the newly industrialised countries; the era of economic globalisation was ushered in. Entrepreneurial culture seemed to be gaining the upper hand and science policy was actually growing into innovation policy. In a specific sense, this was a reaction to issues of competitiveness, efficiency and quality control in research during the previous period. At the same time, the chief focus reverted to fundamental research, even though it shifted primarily to innovation demands. The accomplishments of Japan and other Asian countries turned out also to be a source of inspiration for Western nations in the sphere of research policy –​Japanese research policy was strongly economic, industrially focused and marked by the significant and active role of the state in its pro-​export policy, while at the same time research methodology and technological foresight were promoted. The 1980s were also characterised by the start of what were called “national programs” in the research field, launched by advanced countries in a bid to accelerate their development of advanced generic technologies and “high-​ techs” (microelectronics, biotechnology, new materials). It was also a period of all kinds of support for the interface between fundamental research and industry. The steadily growing accent on the efficiency and accountability of scientific activities led in the 1990s to the formulation of a specific concept of science administration, called new public management (npm), which reflects the mode of science management that prevails to this day (in Elzinga, the period of accountability: npm).

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49

New Public Management

Basically, new public management (npm) may be described as an escalation or radical amplification of the innovative concept of science of the 1980s, with the accent on the economic benefits of science becoming more intensive, dominant and universal. This was no longer simply pressure brought to bear on the generation of practical results and economic benefits. The general principles of neoliberal policy—​the role of the market, deregulation, competition, efficiency, austerity—​tend to penetrate into all the types and levels of scientific activities, also being applied as guiding norms for internal scientific life and its management and practices. The neoliberal turn in the governmental policies of the advanced economies came in response to the new competitors who had established themselves as a result of increasing globalisation and as a reaction to economic stagnation and increasing public debts. A new target was set up, that of reducing the state—​ curtailing its wasteful spending and significantly attenuating state regulation in all areas of life and human activity that inhibited the initiative of people and institutions. During the 1980s and 1990s the principles of neoliberal economic policy spread from the private sector to the public sector, partly in the shape of npm. In this format they later also penetrated science policy and science management. However, in applying market-​based methods from the private sector to public services, npm does not, at least in its general model, take much into consideration the distinct, unique character of science. It might appear to be mere technical and administrative intervention to stimulate flexibility and increase the accountability and efficiency of research performance (Elzinga 2012), but in actual fact it constituted a significant turn in science policy. Voices critical of the notion of establishing npm are heard from the scientific community to this day (Woolgar 1991; Schimank 2005; Weingart 2005; Butler 2007, Mirowski and Sent 2008; Shore and Wright 2015). Although competition, efficiency and accountability had been applied in science policy in the past, they did not constitute its focal point as is the case today. However, it should be added that the practical application of npm assumed highly varied degrees and forms in the different national and institutional environments. The keynote of npm has been the decentralisation of decision-​making structures—​state authorities are expected to play a minor role in the decision-​ making process, while researchers enjoy greater steering autonomy. The shift from government to governance occurs in science, too.

50 Loudín Various stakeholders are invited to participate in shaping strategy and decision-​making on specific managerial measures—​the decisions are expected to result from negotiations that also aim to harmonise any conflicting interests. However, some critical views assert that the stronger actor mostly prevails in such situations (Schimank 2005)—​hence economically influential, external non-​knowledge actors gain the upper hand. Together with governance comes the endeavour to ensure the greatest possible flexibility. This involves loosening the prevailing employee and career system: instead of long-​term employment contracts, the number and scope of tenure jobs continue to decline, while the contract mode with short-​term appointments is on the rise. Tenure had always been seen as a guarantee of such fundamental attributes of science as free inquiry, free expression, and open dissent, offering scientists and researchers exciting career prospects on large-​scale and complex projects demanding long-​term concentrated efforts. Short-​term contracts affect primarily young researchers in the initial phase of their academic career, and thus have a decisive impact on the growth of their competences. This, in turn, gives rise to a scientific precariat—​people living with considerable job and life insecurity, resulting in almost incalculable losses for scientific knowledge itself. Uwe Schimank and Torben Schubert (Schimank 2005; Schubert 2009) wrote specifically about the changes in the decision-​making structure in the German university research sector under the npm regime.1 As the government had relinquished a considerable part of its powers in this respect, the position of the hierarchical self-​control authority was strengthened within the framework of the newly acquired autonomy of internal research management—​in the case of German universities this concerned their deans and presidents (rectors), while the actual position of chair holders weakened, if anything. A prominent role in public science—​much greater than ever before—​is also performed by external stakeholders and market control. Science has always been an incredibly competitive field, but now its status finds itself in a different dimension. Competition has become a key instrument in achieving the desired greater efficiency and accountability of research. Competitive evaluation and competitive funding are introduced, while scientists are to be driven by competitive motivation. Some scientists take the intensified accent on market logic as an expression of mistrust, as they are obliged to enter into competition even with their own

1 Schubert’s conclusions are based on the results of an empirical survey performed at 473 German (both university and extra-​university) research units in 2007.

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colleagues and friends, vying for the same resources and offering identical utilities. The scientific community used to be perceived as a community of mutual respect, trust and solidarity. Although there have always been highly successful as well as less successful scientists, this has never hampered their mutual respect and cooperation. Now, however, they have to enter into competition with their colleagues and friends if only for the ultimate purpose of carrying on their research, and they view this as demotivating, even though they are not prepared to succumb to nostalgia and they know only too well that there was never a golden age in the past anyway.2 A justifiable question concerning scientists’ motivation (or its increase) is that of how desirable and efficient is the enhanced pressure exerted on scientists—​higher requirements for accountability and efficiency through competition. It is true that motivation is an essential part of scientists’ personality. Using the example of the principal (society)-​agent (researchers), Torben Schubert replies that it is reasonable to assume that researchers themselves are, indeed, highly motivated to conduct original research, but that this need not be the case with other activities linked to research, such as educating doctoral students, engaging in knowledge transfer or editing journals and reviewing articles. Therefore, Schubert concludes that moral hazard (of insufficient effort) does pose a problem in science, at least in part (Schubert 2009). A distinctive trait of npm is its stress on evaluation—​the traditional practice of scientific life itself has been re-​designed in this case. The entire process has been made dynamic—​evaluation periods have been shortened (usually amounting to one-​year periods), and detailed sets of indicators covering all types of scientific activities have been elaborated. In an effort to raise “objectivity”, evaluation is not infrequently contracted out to external actors and the evaluation results are then used, to varying extents, for setting research goals as well as for various management measures, including issues of funding and personal contracts. The quantification of evaluation and reliance on quantitative indicators used, for example, by scientometrics, still provokes intense discussion. There are objective “evolutionary” reasons for this: out of a domain performed by a narrow group of exclusive individuals, science has now grown into a mass community. Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (Funtowicz and Ravetz 2 This may also be the consequence of a certain generational and cultural divide—​young people are known to be able to adapt to new conditions much better. When, some twenty years ago, scientists from the transitional Central and Eastern European countries (post-​socialist states) were entering EU research programs as newcomers, a frequently discussed issue was to what extent they had managed to acquire an ability to mix cooperation and competition.

52 Loudín 2015) have aptly likened this transition to Tönnies´ Gemeinschaft-​Gesellschaft dichotomy—​de-​personalised interpersonal relations seem to prevail in modern societies over face-​to-​face relationships. For rapid orientation in a (mass) scientific society (Gesellschaft), numbers (indicators) expressing a specific level of expertise and scientific status are easily available to virtually anyone (although their interpretation is not). The instant background materials available to politicians and science administrators for decision-​making are extremely welcome, since numerical data are structured in a desirable manner, making complex and often ambivalent processes clearly arranged and thus enabling decision-​making. However, policy based on numbers—​numerical data is a new buzzword today—​is not evidence-​based policy, as it may be tempting to think and as this particular term has been sometimes applied. Numerical data themselves are not analysis—​not even “hard” data, which are supposed to carry more weight than soft items, as some bias has it. Indeed, data do not manage to capture the causes and context of development that has led to the current state. Bibliometric data facilitate easy comparison but also enable manipulation—​various splits and cloning of publications, the foundation of new magazines and journals, and the establishment of citation fellowships. As a rule, the evaluation procedure in fundamental research encompasses both quantitative and qualitative methods. Qualitative dimension evaluation is exemplified by the peer review, when the quality of research outputs is evaluated by experts from the given research field. A fair peer review is very demanding in terms of competence, effort and time. A particular feature of peer review in science is that one’s work is evaluated by colleagues who, according to npm, should also be one’s competitors. Furthermore—​as noted by Funtowicz and Ravetz (Funtowicz and Ravetz 2015)—​they are in no way trained in review competences, being actually amateurs in this respect. Still, there is no other course possible in view of the high specialisation of science: scientific activity can be evaluated solely by people who are themselves engaged in science and research and who have the ethical prerequisites for such tasks. For the sake of objectivity and impartiality, the guiding principle that has now gained ground is that as many evaluators as possible should be external ones, without any major links to the individuals being evaluated. The question remains whether this effort to achieve “purity” without context—​as is the case with the preference for hard data—​does not pose the problem of homogeneity/​diversity of scientific cultures and different stages of the evolution of (national) science systems, or at least whether evaluators are aware of this.

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Part of this pressure for the efficiency and accountability of science is performance-​based research funding, which is being increasingly adopted in European countries; this particular model implies that the results of evaluation are projected into funding. The actual process of introducing performance-​based research funding in the individual European countries differs considerably. In 2014, stoa (Science and Technology Options Assessment), a panel attached to the European Parliament, published a study examining the linkage of evaluation to institutional funding (Mahieu, Arnold, Kolarz 2014).3 The study also identifies the key weakness of performance-​based funding: evaluation is based on a system of quantitative scientometric indicators. The institutions being evaluated then have a tendency to focus on activities that may be expressed in those indicators, all their work is subjected to auditability, and everything else is reduced. Everything then depends on the actual construction of the evaluation indicators (Mahieu, Arnold, Kolarz 2014). A similar study of performance-​based research funding, this time based on comprehensive analyses of all the EU member states, was published in 2019 (Zacharewicz, Lepori, Reale, Jonkers 2019). This also singles out considerable variety among the member states as regards their share of performance-​based research funding as well as their applied evaluation methods (quantitative metric/​peer-​review). The study concludes that in view of the hitherto still unclear impact of the different types of performance-​based funding systems and given the institutional differences between the higher education and research systems in the EU member states, one type of best practice in performance-​based funding systems cannot be recommended. npm-​like reasoning implies that competitive funding of research ought to be the preferred method of funding. The idea that research performance grows hand in hand with the rise of the share of competitive funding (competitive grant scheme plus performance-​based institutional funding) of research has recently gained genuinely widespread acceptance in science policy. Ulf Sandström and Peter Van den Besselaar (Sandström, Van den Besselaar 2018) counter this “mantra” of science policy with the argument, acquired by comparing data from seventeen countries, that “while more spending produces more high-​quality science, increasing competition for resources does 3 In the selected group of countries, standing at opposite ends of the scale were, on the one hand, Netherlands and Spain (not linked), and the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom (more than 50% inst. funding linked) on the other hand, while moderate groups were represented by France (between 20–​50%) and Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden (less than 20%).

54 Loudín not” (Sandström, Van den Besselaar 2018a). At the same time, the authors, who have concluded that competitiveness and research quality are rather negatively correlated,4 maintain a degree of circumspection concerning the applied method of data collection. They also conclude that either competitiveness does not play the role usually ascribed to it or competitiveness is not adequately measured by the shares of project and institutional funding.5 npm is an open theoretical concept presenting a wide range of diverse methods and practices—​n pm need not be implemented in its entirety. The npm procedures are probably beneficial when applied selectively and sensitively, responding to the nature and context of targeted scientific activity; this applies, for example, to financial management. npm continues to be the subject of lively discussion, including quite a number of critical voices, which paves the way for further modulation of the concept. The main hazards seem to emerge when evaluation is predominantly based on quantitative scientometrics. When linked to performance-​based funding directly—​without in-​depth analysis—​it adversely affects not only the further direction of research but also the career and personal opportunities of researchers themselves. This is why permanent critical analysis and reflection are vital when implementing npm. 3

The Science–​Society Interface: New Issues and Challenges

What transpires between society and science is a constant, mutual, informal, non-​institutionalised “evaluation”, a kind of continuous audit or an exchange of assessments, needs, and hopes. Just as social actors keep acquiring and mastering more and more scientific procedures, making ample use of scientific knowledge, so science concurrently absorbs and adopts new social trends and

4 “Countries that relied more on competitive sources of funding, such as the UK and Finland, show smaller gains in high quality output as they increased overall spending than countries with a high level of non-​competitive, institutional funding, such as the Netherlands and Spain” (Sandström and Van den Besselaar 2018a). 5 Sandström and Van den Besselaar look at bibliometric data, focusing on the relationship between changes in input (spending) and changes in high-​quality outputs (top 10% most cited papers)—​how many additional top papers individual countries get out of each additional unit of spending. Generally speaking, they feel the need for more and better data and recommend incorporating other types of output beyond highly cited papers, and then analysing how “societal productivity” depends on institutional and structural characteristics (Sandström and Van den Besselaar 2018).

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changes. While trends towards marketisation, governance and flexibility are gaining ground in society, they are unlikely to bypass science. It should be added that the relationship between society and science has never been devoid of controversy—​the process of science penetrating society as a whole is so obvious that it has led to the articulation of the concepts of the knowledge society and scientification of society. At the same time, however, confidence in science has been declining in Western societies. These dynamic times bring uncertainty verging on chaos, with many people demanding and expecting that science should provide a compass to give them their bearings in confusing situations. Of course, this is what science sometimes fails deliver, and its quest for true knowledge also involves doubts, critical reflection, at times even ambivalence, resulting in public anticipation being disappointed (Nichols 2017). To some people, contemporary science—​as presented to them and as perceived by them—​appears to be too one-​sided, a perspective disrupting their idea of a holistic and meaningful conception of the world. Other people perceive scientists and science as a personification of elitism that dissociates itself from other people’s cognitive abilities and despises them. Such citizens then feel excluded and marginalised, their self-​esteem having been damaged. The key problem is not so much that the fight waged by populists (and not only by them) against so-​called elites brings many erroneous and false arguments. A wholly undesirable factor is the emerging educational divide that also, and particularly so, constitutes a social/​cultural divide, operating as an instrument of social/​political exclusion. It is an enormous challenge for the communication of science, and primarily for the social sciences, to subject this particular non-​trivial issue to systematic reviews. Since the 1980s and 1990s, science and scientific knowledge have been coping with new requirements and stimuli—​the process of globalisation has been spreading, a new wave of technological upheavals has arrived, while transformation processes have impacted the development of societies. This, in turn, calls for enhanced competence in cooperation with the application sector and in communication with the general public, while the management of science has become ever more comprehensive. These transformations of science have been captured by some general theoretical schemes. Michael Gibbons et al. labelled their concept the New Production of Knowledge (Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. 1995). The principal evolutionary change is seen as being that knowledge production has come to be context-​driven, problem-​focused and interdisciplinary. The societal context of knowledge production has been changed—​a considerable portion of the population achieves university-​type

56 Loudín education, so that many more people than before are not only able to absorb, apply and diffuse scientific (analytical) knowledge but, not infrequently, also to generate it, doing so in non-​research organisations, such as various expert and advisory institutions, business and industrial groups, civic initiatives, and so on. The requirements placed on the social mission and responsibilities of science have also been enhanced. Unlike traditional academic, disciplinary knowledge production (Mode 1) the novel Mode 2 is based on several key characteristics: knowledge produced in the context of application, transdisciplinarity, heterogeneity and organisational diversity, social accountability and reflexivity, and quality control. Post-​normal science (pns) is the concept coined by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Ravetz 1999). pns represents a novel approach to the use of science on issues where “facts [are] uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”. Seen in this light, it may be described as a theoretical reflection of the manifestations of environmental hazards and technological risks that in the last decades of the twentieth century loomed more and more strongly. Conventional solutions to such problems remained entangled in managerial techniques, such as risk management and cost-​benefit analysis. For the purpose of solving specific issues, pns comes up with the idea of the extended peer community, covering not only experts from different fields but also lay people—​mostly local citizens who have lively experience of some issues, and who are also eventually able to initiate research into an issue which is neglected by established science. The turbulent past decade offered an abundance of issues to be examined by scientific expertise—​tensions brought about by the financial crisis and the ongoing deterioration of the environment and climate culminated with the covid-​19 pandemic. Each epidemic entails a certain amount of uncertainty—​ particularly in its initial phases when the essential properties of the virus are not yet known. But the covid-​related uncertainties also seemed to be exacerbated by fierce disputes among medical experts presented in the media. This also holds true of vaccination which, in the particular case of covid-​19, indisputably figured among the major achievements of science; still, inoculation turned out to be the subject of public political clashes, and the doubts of the anti-​vaccination lobby have been reinforced, if anything.6 6 Declining public confidence in vaccination in some countries already proved to be a problem at the end of the past century when reports of some adverse medical effects of inoculation were published, being undoubtedly connected with a falling confidence in science generally. The vaccination coverage of the population has been declining, while epidemics of serious contagious diseases break out—​for instance, a measles epidemic resulting in hundreds of

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Science is also expected to help in dealing with similar calamities in the future by being able to predict them, as well as their possible impacts. However, the emergent, disruptive and complex nature of these crisis processes makes such a task exceedingly difficult to tackle. The newly formed concept of the “politics of uncertainty” (Scoones and Stirling 2020) identifies the creative dimension of uncertainty: this serves to disrupt the mental stereotypes of the global establishment pertaining to modernity and progress, opening itself up to plurality, experiment and dialogue. Visions of how to cope with uncertainty by boosting resilience through solidarity and care can be shaped and implemented within communities of various kinds.

References

Brooks, Harvey. 1971. Science, Growth, and Society: A New perspective. Paris: oecd. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science, the Endless Frontier. A report to the President. Washington: United States Government Printing Office. Butler, Declan. 2007. „Academics strike back at spurious rankings“, Nature, 447: 514–​5. Elzinga, Aant and Jamison, Andrew. 1995. „Changing policy agendas in science and technology“. In: Jasanoff Sheila, Markle Gerald E., Petersen James C. and Pinch Trevor. Eds. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. London: Sage, 572–​597. Elzinga, Aant. 2012. „Features of the current science policy regime: Viewed in historical perspective“, Science and Public Policy, 39/​4: 416–​428. Funtowicz, Silvio and Ravetz, Jerome. 2015. „Peer Review and Quality Control“, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 680–​684. Funtowicz, Silvio and Ravetz, Jerome. 1993. „Science for the Post-​Normal Age“, Futures, 25:735–​755. Gibbons, Michael, Limoges Camille, Nowotny Helga, Schwartzman Simon, Scott Peter and Trow Martin. 1995. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. sage. Mahieu Bea, Arnold Eric and Kolarz Peter, Eds. 2014. Measuring scientific performance for improved policy making. stoa—​European Parliament Research Service. thousands of victims (who). The specific trigger of the decreasing public acceptance of vaccination probably came with the conclusions of some medical experts on the harmful side effects of vaccination—​for example, on the correlation of inoculation against measles with autism. These findings had been published in a respected specialised periodical even though they were later rejected by the scientific community (Saltelli and Boulanger 2020).

58 Loudín Mirowski, Philip and Sent, Esther-​Mirjam. 2008. „The commercialization of science and the response of sts“. In: Hackett Edward J., Amsterdamska Olga, Lynch Michael, and Wajcman Judy. Eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd edn. 635–​89. Cambridge, MA: mit Press. Nichols, Tom. 2017. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press USA. Ravetz, Jerome. 1999. „What is Post-​normal Science“, Futures, 31. Salomon, Jean-​Jacques. 1977. „Science Policy Studies and the Development of Science Policy“, in: Spiegel-​Rösing Ina and de Solla Price Derek. Eds. Science, Technology and Society. A Cross-​Disciplinary Perspective. sage, pp.43–​70. Saltelli, Andrea and Boulanger, Paul-​Marie. 2020. „Technoscience, policy and the new media. Nexus or vortex?“, Futures, 115, Article 102491. Sandström, Uwe and Van den Besselaar, Peter. 2018. “Funding, evaluation, and the performance of national research systems”, Journal of Informetrics, 12/​1: 365–​384. Sandström, Uwe and Van den Besselaar, Peter. 2018a. “Making academics compete for funding does not lead to better science”, https://​scienc​enor​dic​.com​/acade​mia​-forsk​ erzo​nen​-res​earc​her​-zone​/mak​ing​-academ​ics​-comp​ete​-for​-fund​ing​-does​-not​-lead​-to​ -bet​ter​-scie​nce​/1458​549, accessed January 15, 2022. Schimank, Uwe. 2005. „‘New Public Management’ and the academic profession: Reflecting the German situation“, Minerva, 43/​4: 361–​76. Schubert, Torben. 2009. „Empirical observations on New Public Management to increase efficiency in public research—​ Boon or bane?“, Research Policy, 38/​ 8: 1225–​1234. Scoones, Ian and Stirling, Andy, Eds. 2020. The Politics of Uncertainty. Challenges of Transformation. Routledge. Shore, Cris and Wright, Susan. 2015. „Governing by numbers: audit culture, rankings and the new world order“, Social Anthropology/​Anthropologie Sociale, 23/​1: 22–​28. Weingart, Peter. 2005. „Impact of bibliometrics upon the science system: Inadvertent consequences?“, Scientometrics, 62/​1: 117–​131. Woolgar, Steve. 1991. „Beyond the citation debate: towards a sociology of measurement technologies and their use in science policy“, Science and Public Policy, 18/​5: 319–​326. Zacharewicz, Thomas, Lepori Benedetto, Reale Emanuela and Jonkers Koen. 2019. “Performance-​ based research funding in EU Member States—​ a comparative assessment”, Science and Public Policy, 46/​1: 105–​115.

­c hapter 4

Research in Neoliberal Transformation Oleg Suša 1

Introduction

The metamorphoses of research and higher education in the core capitalist Anglo-​American world developed within the historical context of transformations resulting from crises. The “ecological” crisis began in relation to the perceived limits of extensive growth that were highly discussed during the 1970s, for example by the Club of Rome and their opponents. However, there was not only one crisis but also others requiring consideration such as the economic and social crises. The two key words “transformation” and “neoliberalism” are closely connected in the historical context of the ecological, economic and social crises. Changes made to capitalist policies in search of new vital resources for growth involved many adaptive transformations, including knowledge transformations. David Harvey (Harvey 2005) has argued neoliberalism became politically influential as a response to the crises of the 1970s and 1980s. The (global) spread of policies associated with neoliberalism was explained by their perceived effectiveness in solving crises and primarily by their benefit to the economic elites. In this context, social inequalities started to grow more rapidly, with many risks leading to new economic and environmental crises. In this chapter, first, I will specify the key to understanding social change in the global context of transnational capitalism, knowledge and risk; second, I will explain that research on dynamic societal complexity can show how social and environmental consequences follow crisis transformations; third, I will focus on generalised precarisation; fourth, I will stress environmental challenges and their consequences. The production and distribution of knowledge was integrated into the mass production industrial system and capitalist private business (Višňovský 2021). Within the increasingly transnationalised network of corporations, of which many originated in the United States or the United Kingdom, knowledge became a productive force and market commodity. The American variant of neoliberalism placed a strong emphasis on new market creation and entrepreneurialism.

60 Suša In the new political and ideological mainstream of the UK as well as that of the US, normative maxims of deregulation, privatisation and market freedom became dominant. In the sphere of knowledge production and distribution within the context of reduced government funding, enhanced concern with industrial competitiveness, and increased opportunities for revenue streams from technology transfer, administrators emphasised entrepreneurship and the spread of private-​sector practices for university management. Many related changes were explored under the rubric of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Leslie 1997, Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). One of the primary features of academic capitalism is the control of attention to the performance of academic units, often through numerical standards. Enabled by information technologies and external auditing agencies, which are often related to private investors and shareholders, university administrators could track with ease metrics such as faculty/​student ratios, extramural funding, graduate students supported, publications generated, patents and licenses. An “audit culture” (Strathern 2000) came to permeate the university, in which faculty became surveillance objects of managerial discipline and the financial autonomy of departments was undermined. Universities also moved away from cultivating administrative leadership within the academy itself and instead increasingly sought leaders with industrial or government management experience, which led to changes in the organisational system. Furthermore, in some institutions, undergraduate students were reframed as consumers, and faculty performance was measured within a frame of “customer satisfaction” (Kleinman 2001). More generally, universities increasingly drew on “codes of commerce” originally developed in the corporate world. One of the most direct examples of the impact of such codes of commerce in connection with neoliberalism is the cultivation of entrepreneurialism, broadly construed to encompass grantsmanship, program development, and technology transfer (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, Donogue 2008). With faculty, students and even administrators understood as entrepreneurs, the reward systems changed fundamental attitudes toward risk-​taking, program development and research portfolio choices. On the one hand, scholarly and basic research into fundamental questions as well as teachings on such topics, which are prerequisites for the autonomy of the scientific fields, were weakened. Unfunded or underfunded research, even if it generated significant prestige among other knowledge producers, was devalued. On the other hand, some new opportunities for scientists to develop new academic programs opened up. There also originated new partnerships with industries that could lead to a more diversified set of funding prospects and the potential for economic benefits via licensing and start-​up businesses.

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These conditions produced some changes in the role of researchers, placed tremendous pressures on young scientists and influenced their evaluations of career opportunities. The scientist-​entrepreneur can be defined as the ideal-​ type of the neoliberal academy but not for all scientists in all fields. Rather, scientific fields tended to become structured by a tension between a pole that emphasised independence and traditional scholarship and one that emphasised new collaborations and industrial applications. The dominant pole varied across disciplines (Albert 2003). Importantly, when some areas of university research and development become commercialised and subject to an entrepreneurial ethic, the codes and practices of academia simultaneously find their way into industries, especially in the high-​tech sector. This was typically true for the information technology boom. All of the above mentioned changes are connected to global transformations in US and British economies and financial policies under the adage “going global”. 2

The Key to Understanding Social Change: Global Context of Transnational Capitalism, Knowledge and Risk

From the 1970s on, the framework of transnational capitalism and the crisis dynamics of capitalist globalisation influenced by the politico-​economic contexts of the United States and the United Kingdom have been gaining importance. Both categories of transnational global capitalism and capitalist globalisation were clarified by William Robinson, Jerry Harris and Leslie Sklair (Robinson, 2004, 2014, 2017; Harris, 2016; Sklair, 2002). Capitalist globalisation “is an ongoing, unfinished, and open-​ended process, one which is contradictory and conflict-​ridden, driven by social forces in struggle” (Robinson, 2014:2). The dynamics of capitalist globalisation have brought about the new dominant role of transnational capital as one operating globally across geographical, economic, political and social borders while influencing social, economic and political conditions within nation states and the spaces between them. An important role is played by practices of transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist class and global consumerism (Sklair, 2002). Global capitalism produces a social relationship of sharp inequality between capital and labour: capital has transformed itself into money flows in global spaces organised in networks of financial transfers, trade and production, while labour has been partly integrated into global chains of production and partly excluded or marginalised. Global capitalism produces super-​ exploitation, where production and trade are expressions of social relations of exploitation between capital and labour.

62 Suša Outsourcing has been a conscious strategy of capital and a weapon against worker unions, depressing wages and intensifying exploitation. Transnational finance flows and the financial sector intervene powerfully in political systems and government institutions, but also in the everyday dimensions of social reproduction, including the quality of life. The extremely uneven global capitalist relationship between capital and labour has further extended class polarisation and social economic inequalities in both developing and developed societies. From a macro-​sociological point of view, we can operationalise these complex global social relationships as two parallel social worlds: societies organised within nation-​state organisations and global social spaces and networks created by the actions of transnational actors. These social worlds are mutually transforming and exchanging in a complex web of relationships, dependencies and interdependencies. Harris focused on the crisis of democracy in the contemporary system of global capitalism. He stressed the high-​risk consequences: “Contemporary global capitalism creates global poverty, environmental destruction, and political stagnation” (Harris, 2016:16). In the context of contemporary globalisation, there is also a need to redefine the very concept of risk ( Zinn, 2008). The concept of risk is tied to the possibility that the future can be altered by human action. Risk is about expectation; it is the concept of time as a thing. Risk is often understood as being similar to hazard, loss, damage or threat. Here, risk will refer to destructive consequences. From a technical perspective, risk can be a calculation of the probability and extent of certain events.The calculability of risk is regulated by knowledge and further research. Important factors here are the normative assumptions and values behind the real decisions and political context of social power relations. Two characteristics of global risks and threats are important here. Firstly, with its developments, modern civilisation has brought about too many risks that have negative consequences. Secondly, these manufactured risks are collective and involuntary in their effects. The collectivity of risks means they are institutionalised and miscalculated as externalities (economic externality is a product of modern development and the capitalist rationality calculus). Furthermore, modern risks are not the outcome of individual autonomous decisions but rather of collective conflict relationships with destructive consequences (Beck 1999; Beck 2009a). The calculability of risk depends on knowledge or research. When risk is understood as constituted within knowledge, it is implied that the tension between risk and its perception cannot be resolved. However, knowledge of risk and its perception is the basis of our activities. Normative assumptions of profit are set against the prioritisation of future generations’ security and

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the quality of life. The problem is not knowledge or research as such but the decisions involved, which cause the conflict and shape the political context of social power relationships. Global risks should be seen not only as things but rather as social conflicts of power. Risks as things are manifested as an alien force—​an externality paid by those who have no power to take or control the decisions producing risks. However, risks are also traded as commodities and as a future opportunity for those who have access to the key decisions involving risk-​taking and would profit from it (Beck, 2009b). Risk as a social conflict relationship stems from unequal interaction between those who decide voluntarily on an action with dangerous consequences and those who are influenced and confronted involuntarily with the dangers. The first group of actors, which is the minority, aim for profit; the second group, which is the majority, bears the burden of destructive-​risk consequences. More catastrophic outcomes can lead to global dangers for all. Environmental as well as socially destructive consequences are often long-​term cumulative processes and pose risks for future generations. In this sense, we should look at risks and negative consequences as relational social processes produced over a longer historical period in the real world of global capitalist interactions. These risks operate in an anti-​democratic framework of social inequalities—​both economic and political. For example, sociological analysis shows how contemporary environmental and financial risks are intensifying social inequalities resulting from the organised irresponsibility of main institutions. This collective complex of relational processes is reflected as the product of the actions of various agents. Sociological critics should respectively analyse class inequalities influencing the distribution of risks (Curran 2016). Economic, social, political and environmental risks are political explosives, where the “primary” social conflict between unequal social actors produces and causes the many “secondary” (often violent) conflicts we observe today. This key point relates to the mutual interconnection and reinforcement between capitalist expansion, planetary environmental destruction, social and economic inequality, modernisation, development and war. Another important point lies in the realising of the political nature of contemporary global risks and conflicts—​notably, that the basic institutional systems are not able to manage the problems and risks that they help to produce. Institutions are unable to support actual redirection towards sustainable development. Rather, they continue to support a routine based on obsolete and dangerous ideas and economic growth goals which are limited to the richest minority getting richer. The vested interests of the power elites win by knowing and understanding the global interdependent complex of risky consequences. Today, we face a truly global crisis by its magnitude and reach,

64 Suša social destruction, environmental devastation and the scale of the means of violence. 3

Research of Dynamic Societal Complexity Can Show How Social and Environmental Consequences Follow Crisis Transformations

Socio-​environmental consequences are not sudden accidents or dysfunctional deviations. Rather, they stem from historical processes of crisis adaptation. For instance, Harvey shows that crises are not single accidents, but long-​term processes (Harvey 2016). Looking back on the last third of the twentieth century, one can see that since the 1970s, a range of crises has been related to dynamic transformations in the societal, environmental and politico-​ economic conditions. An important role is played by the “ecological crisis”, or global environmental crisis, in which the relationship of society to the environment on a global scale has reached a critical point. This ecological crisis is the long-​term process of changes connected with human activities influencing the environment and other living species. Humans have reshaped the landscapes and habitats of other species in irreversible ways. Therefore, we can define the ecological crisis as “anthropogenic”. It is not only a biophysical but also a socio-​ecological phenomenon (Angus 2016:21). What makes capitalism unique is not that it is in fundamental contradiction with nature, “rather it is the scope and magnitude of this contradiction, such that human activity now threatens the earth system itself” (Robinson 2014: 230). Since the 1970s, the political reaction of powerful capitalist interests has been disassembling the Keynesian system in the name of the “limits to growth”, which necessitated a new economic dynamic based on deregulation, privatisation and globalisation, which also included labour precarisation. In addition, the relocation of industries in the global expansion (trans-​nationalisation) of “free market” capitalism and new directions of technological change played an important role. As a result, crises of social and environmental reproduction are closely related to manifestations of the contemporary configuration of globalised capitalism (Angus 2016). This configuration negatively influences civilisational formation either in the further degradation of humanity and the planet or in the generation of something new (Suša 2016: 80–​81). Contemporary societies are influenced by a global civilisational configuration shaped by transformations that originated during adaptations to the multiple crises from the 1970s. In 1968, a crisis of Western mass consumption capitalism and a crisis of bureaucratic socialism came to the foreground. Both

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systems reacted to their own inner and outer limits, repressed human potential and labour, and were socially and environmentally exploitative. While Soviet socialism collapsed and capitalist globalisation expanded throughout the globe, global problems with conflicts and risks continued and developed further. Crisis-​transformations were reactions, motors for the further accumulation and acceleration of the limits to growth in both the social as well as the environmental dimension. By the term “crisis-​transformations”, I refer to the adaptations which—​while reacting to socio-​economic and ecological crises—​led to a further multiplication and deepening of these crises with cumulative long-​term socially and environmentally destructive consequences and conflicts. These crises and transformations led to the “creative destruction” of the post-​ war organised systems of capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. A new stage of trans-​nationalisation (globalisation) of the accumulation process began. This entailed the globalisation of capitalism, the collapse of bureaucratic socialism, the accelerated process of the differentiation of the “third world” from a variety of developing countries as well as the differentiation between stagnating Western post-​industrial countries and the growing newly industrialised “emerging” ones. There is a global long-​term conflict between the transnational shift in accumulation and societies organised within a framework of single nation-​states. Transnational capitalist power networks started to dominate economically in the majority of states. Often, the sovereignty of global business networks undermines democracy (cf. Robinson, 2004; Sassen, 1998). Capitalist adaptation to the limits to growth brought a shift in the strategy of corporations from long-​term to short-​term profit, from lower risks to higher risks, capital-​accumulation led to extensive competition and to monopolistic structures. Such crisis-​adaptive transformations over the last forty-​five years also included a political revolution from above in the form of the restoration of the class domination of the owners of capital (with free market neoliberalism as the new dominant discourse). Moreover, they involved the re-​organisation of capitalist enterprises (including a growing asymmetric power relationship between capital and labour that created many social conflicts with social, economic as well as cultural forms of social exclusion). Social exclusions also bring about a greater political and social distance between the more polarised minority of the rich, the growing majority of wage labour and the unemployed or underemployed. These changes have led to a greater polarisation of social inequality as a dangerous risk which fuels sharper social conflict and discussions about global social justice. In addition, the information-​technological revolution has made possible the transnational movement of money, information and knowledge as capital

66 Suša so that capital flows and networks of exchange in trade and production have enlarged the flexibility of transnational interactions between economic as well as non-​economic actors. Technology in the sphere of ict helped in disseminating a financialisation process called “the new economy” in the United States. This challenging moment concerns ecological dangers. In the case of the environmental crisis being reduced to an economic calculus of tradable commodities rather than natural resources—​mostly through global financialisation and scarcity-​motivated manipulations of resource and energy prices—​ adaptation to limits led to another crisis: the disinvestment in employment, the productive sectors (e.g. the real economy) and in the public sector including human development, education, health, environmental protections etc. (Bardi and Randers 2014). Governments are also under pressure to continue austerity measures with many social and environmentally destructive consequences. 4

Generalised Precarisation

These transformations and risks of capitalist globalisation have resulted in a deep crisis of the socio-​economic reproduction of societies with a generalised precarisation of human work, which relates also to knowledge workers in universities and research institutions where deprofessionalisation and a general precarious existence precipitate working life (Maisuria and Helmes 2021). Globalised financialisation led to the domination of mergers and acquisitions and to a debt-​based predatory system that led to the decline of industrial capacity in many industrial countries. Financial speculation became the principal means to make profits in the UK, the US, the West and the (former real-​ socialist) East, where socio-​economic decline, privatisations and parasitism were connected with the destruction of real productive forces together with neo-​colonial practices of Western capital foreign investments, the withdrawal of capital out of the countries and the significant reductions in worker’s wages to relatively low levels—​resulting in labour exploitation and extreme social inequalities between the rich and poor. The average duration of unemployment has also gone up, especially in developed economies. This makes job searches harder, with labour skills depreciated. Unemployment comes with considerable personal and social costs, such as decreased life satisfaction and stigmatisation. The unemployed become less healthy on average than the employed, which increases the need for public health expenditure. Stagnation with low investment in the real economy and employment helps to reproduce social inequality with a dangerous split between a minority

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becoming richer and the majority becoming poorer. Empirical evidence of recent critical social and environmental consequences of development that escalate exploitation was discussed by Saskia Sassen. Saskia Sassen explains in her Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy that the contemporary capitalist economic system is shrinking the space of the economy through a brutal restructuring which cuts across a range of economic sectors which helps to create the space of expulsions of social and public services, and people from labour markets or from their native spaces (Sassen, 2014,2016). Sassen argues that today’s socio-​economic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion from one’s professional livelihood, a living space or even from the very biosphere that makes life possible (Sassen, 2014: p.211). This complex social crisis makes the capitalist system dysfunctional, with social limits to growth reproducing a vicious circle of stagnation. Furthermore, growing social inequality and unemployment are subversive to political solutions to the social crisis through governmental interventions funded by progressive taxation, which is still being opposed by the ruling capitalist power elites. The distribution of rewards is fixed by power, not the market. Inequality grows partly because of rent dominating over earnings excavated by powerful privileged groups of owners with political influence. The taxes of corporations were reduced and wages stagnated for several decades. The rest results from the privileges and power connected with private ownership. The neoliberal phase of globalisation has evolved into rentier capitalism, in which more income goes to those possessing physical, financial or so-​called intellectual property. By reducing use value to an exchange value, capitalism reaches its own qualitative social limits, which are fixed in the power-​based social relations between capital and labour. Indeed, primitive accumulation, exploitation and the extraction of financial rent further divide human labour and divorce it from the collective production of common social wealth (Radder 2019). Is research losing its aura of production of the common good in the context of capitalist transformations, including knowledge information commodification? 5

Environmental Challenges and Their Translations

The destruction of society goes hand in hand with environmental destruction and the plundering of resources (Bardi and Randers 2014) in developing as well as developed countries. A recent report to the Club of Rome—​after four decades have passed since 1972—​clearly indicates that none of the

68 Suša numerous mineral resources that are extracted daily by the so called universal mining machine and which are essential to the functioning of our industrial civilisation, will run out in the near future (Bardi and Randers, 2014). Ugo Bardi assumes that the times of cheap mineral resources will be over soon. The existence of large, easily exploitable deposits will be a thing of the past. Their exploitation will be more costly and more energy consuming. It will also produce more waste and have a higher negative environmental impact on the future of civilisation imagined as a mineral eschatology. Without natural resources—​oil being among them—​contemporary industrial global civilisation cannot function, and these resources are quickly being depleted. The growing number of ecological disasters—​cumulative pollution and climate change being among them—​will increase the cost of maintaining infrastructures to unsustainable levels. Furthermore, the impact of a changing climate on food prices will induce riots that will make societies ungovernable. On the other hand, there is an observation concerning capitalism’s ability to adapt and a certain deformed transformative capacity of “creative destruction”: capitalism might well be capable not only of adapting to climate change but also of profiting from it. Capitalism is confronted with multiple crises—​economic, social and ecological. However, one crisis can sometimes serve to solve, at least temporarily, another. Contemporary financialised global capitalism continues to increase the massive consumption of fossil energy and other natural resources, and the accelerated export to the rest of the world of the Western idea of material growth and consumption so typical of global industrial civilisation has brought the planet closer to climate collapse (Koch, 2012: p.129–​130). In the framework of contemporary financialised capitalism, reactions to the challenge of ecological crisis exist mostly through the weapons of financialisation in a framework of “the finance driven accumulation régime” (Koch, 2012: p.89), which shapes a new variety of environmental financial products. Each has its own specific way of functioning, and their purpose is to alleviate or spread the rising costs of climate change and the super-​exploitation of the environment. There are, for example catastrophe bonds, which are not linked to the future, as are standard bonds, but to the possible occurrence of catastrophes (e.g., earthquakes or floods). With a growing number of natural disasters due to climate change, catastrophe insurance management has risen to high levels. The financialisation of nature tries to redefine planet Earth in terms of the language of financial capital: nature is divided into “ecosystem services” that can be quantified, measured and above all, broken into individual units so that profit can be made from selling rights to these units. Ecosystem service

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markets trade the right to pollute or destroy. The financialisation of nature is thus a symbol of a crisis system and not a solution to the global problems of the planet. Such a flexibilised commodifying model is promoted by projecting “green economy” or “green capitalism”. The conception of green capitalism involves reforming global capitalism with an image of a new and ecologically friendly mode of capitalism, reformist lobbying to resolve risks and conflicts concerning resource depletion, technological innovation support and better political and institutional bases for environmental protection. According to the concept of green capitalism development, businesses should produce green techniques and technologies and consumers should use them. With such a framework, however, there is no longer any question of modifying social relations. The priority is that people should take personal responsibility for changing their life style. As in the case of resource depletion and planetary plundering, which have escalated due to market valuation through price and profit-​seeking by the corporate extraction industries and global traders, in the case of catastrophes related to climate change, financial business is passively adapting to these ecological limits and disasters, reproducing in parallel its own profit-​seeking strategy of “the commodification of the atmosphere” (Koch, 2012: p.137) while worsening the environmental condition of the planet. Profit accumulation for some through a disaster for many others is generating unsustainability for our industrial civilisation. At the same time, it is also worsening the social crisis of inequality and concomitant conflicting developments. Here we have another empirical example of the relational notion of risk understood in the sense of social conflict. Both social and environmental destructive changes are consequences of the so-​called process of opening up new markets. The crisis-​adaptive transformations of real capitalism led to a systemic manifestation of deep-​rooted contradictions in the global economy. In the framework of global capitalism within the new global financialisation process, we can speak of a hegemonic transition to “neo-​imperialist monopoly capitalism where surplus is imported from the dependent to financial core or to investor” (Nitzan and Bichler, 2012:69). The core crisis problem relates to the main goal of accumulation in today’s capitalism: to generate financial wealth, where the cycle of returning financial wealth back to the financial markets is the main means. This circulus vitiosus leads to speculation, virtual monetary wealth turning into transnational financial flows and its volatility leading to financial crises. Furthermore, these financial risks are generated by globalised debt. We can expect that these tendencies and resulting transformations started with the neoliberal revolution in the 1970s and 1980s will, if continued, lead to a dead-​end street.

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References

Angus, Ian. 2016. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press. Bardi, Ugo; Randers, Jonathan. 2014. Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2009a. “Critical theory of the world risk society.” Constellations 16, 1: 10–​22. Beck, Ulrich. 2009b. World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Curran, Dean. 2016. Risk, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave-​Macmillan. Donoghue, Frank. 2008. The Last Professors. New York: Fordham University Press. Harris, Jerry. 2016. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Atlanta: Clarity Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2016. Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism. London: Verso Press. Kleinman, Daniel; Vallas, Steven. 2001.“ Science, Capitalism, and the Rise of the Knowledge worker. The Changing Structure of Knowledge Production in the United States.” Theory and Society 30, 4, 451–​492. Koch, Martin. 2012. Capitalism and Climate Change. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maisuria, Alpesh; Helmes, Svenja. 2021. Life for the Academic in the Neoliberal University. London and New York: Routledge. Mathieu, Albert. 2003. “Universities and the Market Economy.” Higher Education 45, 2, 147–​182. Nitzan, Jonathan; Bichler, Shimson. 2012. “Imperialism and Financialization: A Story of a Nexus.” Journal of critical globalization studies 5: 42–​78. Radder, Hans. 2019. From Commodification to the Common Good. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Robinson, William I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism. Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, William I. 2014. Global capitalism and the crisis of humanity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, William I. 2017. “Debate on the New Global Capitalism.” International Critical Thought 7, 2: 171–​182. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: The New Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2016. “A Massive Loss of Habitat. New drivers for migration.” Sociology of Development 2, 2 University of California Press: 204–​233.

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Sklair, Leslie. 2002. Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slaughter, Sheila; Leslie, Larry. 1997 Academic Capitalism. Baltimore and London: the Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, Sheila; Rhodes, Gary. 2004 Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press. Starbuck, William H. 2004. The Production of Knowledge. The Co-​production of Science and Social Order. London and New York: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability Ethics, and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge. Suša, Oleg. 2016. From Civilizational Crisis to Revolutionary Transformation?. In: Arnason, Johan Paul and Hrubec, Marek (eds). Social Transformations and Revolutions. Reflections and Analyses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 76–​98. Višňovský, Emil. 2021. Akademická produkcia poznania a jej hodnotenie. In: Hrubec Marek and Kopecký Martin (eds). Nová vědecká éra? Od byrokratické komerce ke kreativitě ve veřejném zájmu. Praha: Epocha. Zinn, Jens (ed). 2008. Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

­c hapter 5

Freedom (Not Only) in Research and the Academic Context Martin Brabec 1

Introduction

Academic freedom and freedom in general are values to which everyone enthusiastically subscribes. The effort to feed on their emotional appeal is sometimes so obvious as to be ridiculous. But the same thing that Orwell (2018, 17) wrote in his famous essay about similar, emotionally tinged terms unfortunately applies to these as well. “Many political words are similarly abused. The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed upon definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it. Consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim these to be democracies too and fear that they might have to stop using the word were it tied down to any one particular meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. This ease of using these positive value words, which everyone wants to have on their side, is even reflected in the official formulations of the rules by which institutions are to be governed. For example, the Czech Republic’s “Higher Education Act” (1998) includes this conception of academic freedom:



§ 4 Academic Freedoms and Academic Rights The following academic freedoms and rights are guaranteed at higher education institutions: a) freedom of scholarly, scientific, research and artistic activities as well as the publication of the results thereof;

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b) freedom of teaching, in particular with regard to openness to different scientific and scholarly views, scientific and research methods and artistic movements; c) the right of learning, which includes the free choice of specialization within the framework of degree programmes as well as the freedom to express one’s own views during classes; d) the right of members of the academic community to elect representative academic bodies; e) the right to use academic insignia and to hold academic ceremonies.

Very often, however, such broadly defined academic freedom is then unable to live up to its written spirit when implemented and confronted with real cases. In my chapter, on the contrary, I want to present a sober reflection on academic freedom and critical explanation of academic freedom in the Western context, with a focus on Central Europe. In the first part, I will present a brief historical overview of the development of academic freedom; in the second part, I will discuss the various problematic aspects of academic freedom; and in the last, concluding part, I present normative advocacy for freedom of speech and its relationship to academic freedom. 2

Historical Development of Academic Freedom

The history of academic freedom can be traced to Socrates’s defence of himself against the charge that he corrupted the youth. In the strict sense of the word, however, it is not yet appropriate to speak of academic freedom here, because it lacks institutional anchorage. This comes only with the establishment of universities in the Middle Ages.1 At that time, universities were the centres of education. They were largely autonomous institutions, similar to guilds. Their “faculties” elected officials and created rules for the universities. But within them, scientific research was very limited—​it was bound by religion, which restrained the possible thematic scope of the research work. Each new insight or fact had to conform to a uniform system of Christian dogma. The doctrine developed and transmitted at the university had fixed boundaries set by the Church. And since the Church did not tolerate the spread of any doubts and uncertainties concerning the content of Christian doctrine, the doctrine binding the universities in this 1 In this section on history, I draw on Stone (2015).

74 Brabec period was one that had to to be consistent with the system of truths embodied in Christian dogmas. At the same time, it should be noted that the Catholic Church was instrumental in establishing the principle that universities should be free from outside interference, that is, the influence of the state. This protection was further needed when the religious affiliation of the ruling monarchs or nobility changed. Medieval universities thus created a certain space within the social sphere into which the state could not enter. However, the fact that universities were free from state interference did not mean the freedom of academics to criticise the teachings of the Church or its institutions—​the creation and transmission of knowledge was linked to a divine conception of truth. On the other hand, universities required physical protection and financial support from the monarch or the state. Universities were thus partially autonomous from the state—​they were not allowed to challenge the authority of the monarch. At the same time, they were fully under the control of the Church. The latter very often exercised censorship even on behalf of the state. Jiří Chotaš points out, medieval universities were to primarily “cultivate rational doctrines as a defence against heretical movements, to educate new adepts for ecclesiastical authority, and to strengthen the authority of the pope over secular rulers and feudal lords” (Chotaš 2015, 73). The intellectual shift that occurred at the beginning of the Enlightenment therefore posed a serious threat to the authority of the Church. As scholars and teachers became more interested in science and began to question some of the basic tenets of religious doctrine, the conflict between scientific inquiry and religious authority became more acute. Yet in the late eighteenth century there was a brief period of secularisation in American universities. “By opening up new fields of study and by introducing a note of scepticism and inquiry, the trend toward secular learning began gradually to liberate college work. The teacher of science introduced for the first time the discovery, rather than the mere transmission, of knowledge into the classroom” (Stone 2015, 2). But this period was short-​lived and was followed in the early nineteenth century by a regression due to the rise of religious, mainly Protestant fundamentalism, which went against the spirit of the sceptical Enlightenment. Freedom of inquiry was severely limited by the constraints of religious doctrine until late in the century. Early nineteenth-​century universities were not characterised by an emphasis on individual intellectual freedom; they sought instead primarily to preserve rather than criticise old knowledge and contribute to the development of new knowledge. The first explicit articulation of the principle of academic freedom, in the context of the social changes brought about by the German Enlightenment, was by the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who also became the Prussian

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minister of education and was tasked with reforming the state’s outdated education system. Humboldt supported the idea that the university’s purpose is to cultivate general education. Universities should not be “practically” oriented, producing narrowly focused specialists or simply preparing students for future employment but, on the contrary, be dedicated to the search for truth. Academic freedom was meant to provide independence and protection against external economic as well as political pressures (Benda 2020a, Benda 2020b). [The] German model comprised three basic principles: first, that the goal of education was to teach students to think, not simply to master a craft; second, that research would play a role of central importance—​and teaching students how to think would be accomplished through the integration of research and teaching; and third, that the university should be independent and not be in direct service to the state. zimmer 2015, 240

The German university thus was devoted to methodical and independent truth searching, and scholars enjoyed freedom of teaching and freedom of inquiry. Academic freedom was the distinctive right of academics and the key condition of a university. But what should be pointed out is the sharp distinction: “between freedom within and freedom outside the university. Within the walls of academe, a wide latitude of utterance was allowed, even expected …. But outside the university, the same degree of freedom was not condoned” (Metzger 1961, 114–​115). Professors were civil servants, had to be prudent and loyal, and, for example, their participation in politics was seen as something that corrupted their scholarship. What is then further important historically in the development of how universities were viewed is that this German approach strongly influenced the conception of American universities. The modern conception of a university as a research institution was in large part a German influence. Yet, in America, this development had certain, importantly different specifics—​a revised version of the distinction between the “inside” and the “outside” of the university was maintained—​but unlike their German model, the activities of the “outside” were to be governed by the same civil liberties guaranteed to all citizens in a democratic society. A landmark event then was the establishment of the American Association of University Professors (aaup) in 1915. According to its foundational statement, the “Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom” (aaup 1915), academic freedom contains three key features: freedom of inquiry and research, freedom to teach in a university or college and freedom of extracurricular

76 Brabec expression and action. Fundamental to this conception of academic freedom is that it conceives of work in academia as distinct from other forms of employment in the private sector. Further, it argues that academics play a particular social role in relation to knowledge, which confers on them an obligation to communicate the results of their own inquiry and reflection, as well as that of their fellow professionals, to both students and the general public. In 1940, the aaup issued a new declaration (aaup 1940) responding to previous experience and historical developments. Williams (2016, 43) interestingly points out a major transformation in this declaration from that of its 1915 predecessor. The 1940 aaup Statement establishes an instrumental link between academic freedom and particular outcomes or aims of higher education. This was, in the long run, to undermine the foundations of the aaup’s earlier notion of academic freedom that hinged upon a liberal concept of scholarship with no aim other than the pursuit of knowledge. In 1940, the common good of higher education was defined in relation to knowledge; but a perceived need to explain why knowledge is important suggests its role as an “end” rather than a “means” has been called into question. When academic freedom is connected to the “common” or “public” good, its foundational value, to allow for scholars to pursue knowledge as contestable truth, is undermined by the imposition of instrumental objectives. Williams (2016) further worries that the danger of linking academic freedoms to a particular goal in higher education, even something as positive as achieving the public good, is that doing so risks transforming academic freedoms in exchange for arrangements between scholars and the state. In her view, the 1940 statement is more akin to a statement of professional ethics than a straightforward demand for academic freedom. 3

Various Aspects of Academic Freedom

We can generally say that the mainstream principle of academic freedom in the contemporary Western capitalist societies refers to the right of academics to be free from external constraints in teaching and research and, further, to freely criticise their institutions. In more developed and cultivated societies, it refers also to the right to positive freedom related to research conditions

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quaranteed by academic institutions (Hrubec 2021). One of definitions was provided by William Van Alstyne (1972, 146): Academic freedom is … [the] personal liberty to pursue the investigation, research, teaching, and publication of any subject as a matter of professional interest without vocational jeopardy or threat of other sanction, save only upon adequate demonstration of an inexcusable breach of professional ethics in the exercise of that freedom. Specifically, that which sets academic freedom apart as a distinct freedom is its vocational claim of special and limited accountability in respect to all academically related pursuits of the teacher-​scholar: an accountability not to any institutional or societal standard of economic benefit, acceptable interest, right thinking, or socially constructive theory, but solely to a fiduciary standard of professional integrity. Let us now look at the different aspects included in the concept of academic freedom.2 The first of these is the right to determine the way in which one carries out one’s work. Here it is important to note that this claims a right most professions do not have. In this respect, academic freedoms are similar to the freedoms enjoyed by professional autonomous professions such as doctors or lawyers. They also have the right to determine how they carry out their duties and exercise their profession. They also collectively set the standards for their profession and candidates—​if one wants to be admitted, appointed or promoted, one must meet these. It is therefore a professional, collective freedom, not a set of individual rights. In this sense, academic freedom also means the right to representation in the collective bodies of universities, to participate in the making of various academic decisions, such as the evaluation of scientific research. This type of academic freedom cannot be equated with freedom of expression. One of the chief purposes of these policies is to protect professional autonomy. Another important element in the debate on academic freedom, strongly connected with the previous, is the conflict between individual and institutional claims to academic freedom. Historically, the rationale for academic freedom has been linked to the role of universities in providing a space for the pursuit of truth, unencumbered reflection, research, debate and the attainment of impartial knowledge unconstrained by the demands of the state and other institutions, whether religious or secular. This argument for academic 2 In this section, I draw mainly on Barendt (2010).

78 Brabec freedom rested on the fact that it would be contrary to the role of universities to restrict what their academics could teach and research; in fact, it is this freedom that distinguishes a university from the research department of a government agency or commercial company, where the employer is entitled to direct the inquiries of its employees. This freedom is referred to as “academic freedom”, not “intellectual freedom”, precisely because there is a close, perhaps even fundamental, connection between the freedoms of professors and lecturers and the function of the university that employs them. Thus, academic freedom in its institutional form can also mean that the head of a department, who is often also an academic, can invoke academic freedom in the management of the department when telling lecturers and colleagues what topics to teach or even dictating specific course structures. Alternatively, academic freedom in this sense can also belong to the university as a whole; the institution can then invoke academic freedom to cancel the teaching of a subject that attracts too few students or to cancel a department that does not produce sufficient-​quality research. However, it is sometimes ideologically or personally misused. In this sense, academic freedom is thus significantly different from general freedom of speech and has more to do with the “contract” that exists between faculty members and others, including trustees, academic administrators and outside authorities. The concept of the function of a university or a given scientific workplace seems to be crucial for defining the role and scope of academic freedom. Universities are no longer ivory towers dedicated to the impartial pursuit of truth, the exchange of ideas and the teaching of only what is intellectually significant. Today, universities are expected to conduct research that is socially useful in some meaningful way and also to teach in a way that equips students with knowledge they can use in their future jobs. Thus, both the state and employers are placing demands on universities; the state does so, for example, by requiring these institutions to teach a higher number of students, and employers are demanding that universities produce graduates able to meet the requirements of companies. These expectations are also largely prevalent in society. Furthermore, universities are also expected to raise public awareness of complex technical, economic and social issues—​a task that should not be left to the media, politicians and the general public. When the state considers the level of funding for universities in its economic policy, they are then required to demonstrate their economic and social contribution to society as a whole. Universities are also pressured to do this by being more or less entirely dependent on public funding, which is ultimately provided by the government.

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Universities are expected to contribute to the economic well-​being of the country and to be responsive to national needs. Universities cannot teach and research only what they and their academic staff deem worthy of study but must keep in mind the needs of business, industry and the economy as well as the broader and more general interests of society at large from which they are ultimately funded, especially in Europe. This is also reflected in the composition of the governing collective bodies within universities, where non-​academic members—​often people from the economic sphere—​hold positions. Of course, this practice often appears to some traditional universities that resist it, such as Oxford, as incompatible with academic freedom. The fact is though that it is now common, and it is very different from the traditional model in which university professors made all the important decisions themselves. This transformation of the university’s overall function in society is thus reflected in discussions about the core role of the university itself. However, these discussions are not just a modern affair, they can be found in the origins of modern universities. The Slovak philosopher Višňovský (2021, 57) illustrates how the search for truth itself, as the core raison d’être of the university, was transformed in the conversion from medieval to Renaissance university. The main cause of dissatisfaction and the target of criticism of the humanists was scholastic culture. Renaissance humanists, for example, cultivated dialogue and conversation, but not by the method of scholastic disputation. In humanist dialogue, concrete personal experience is valid as an argument, not just abstract logic. The purpose of conversation is not to “win,” as in a “joust,” but to persuade one’s interlocutor. Thus, rhetoric, rather than logic, was increasingly promoted in the classical classroom because it was in demand and valued in civilian life. In connection with this, Cicero was studied and promoted at the expense of Aristotle. The “culture of conversation” and the “Ciceronian dialogue” were established. More recently, the notion of the function of the university as a place for the impartial pursuit of truth and the transmission of knowledge, and the resulting characterisation of academic freedoms, has been challenged by Judith Butler who argues that this concept of academic freedoms was based on “a very specific historical set of assumptions about knowledge, social function, and scientific progress that have been paradoxically revised and refuted over time in different directions and for different reasons, perhaps as a result of the ‘progress’ of knowledge itself” (Butler 2006, 110). She therefore suggests

80 Brabec that the function of academic activities should be consciously subordinated to political interests in order to contribute to the reproduction of desirable political ideals and values in society (Butler 2017). Michael Sandel (2010 191) sees this discussion of the function or telos of the university framed within an eternal ongoing social debate about the function of particular social institutions, which is, moreover, inherently embedded in the discussion of justice in society. What is the purpose, or telos, of a university? As is often the case, the telos is not obvious but contestable. Some say universities are for the sake of promoting scholarly excellence, and that academic promise should be the sole criterion of admission. Others say universities also exist to serve certain civic purposes, and that the ability to become a leader in a diverse society, for example, should be among the criteria of admission. Sorting out the telos of a university seems essential to determining the proper criteria of admission. This brings out the teleological aspect of justice in university admissions. Closely connected to the debate about a university’s purpose is a question about honor: What virtues or excellences do universities properly honor and reward? Those who believe that universities exist to celebrate and reward scholarly excellence alone are likely to reject affirmative action, whereas those who believe universities also exist to promote certain civic ideals may well embrace it. Another aspect of academic freedom is the right of academics to criticise in public the university where they work or even the entire educational policy of the ministry, thus claiming a significantly wider range of freedom than other employees to express themselves without restriction on issues related to their employment. In this sense, they have broader rights than, for example, employees in commerce or industry. And, of course, this kind of right raises the question of whether this right should be part of academic freedom, whether it is not just a privilege. But academics need strong employment protections that are denied to other workers because they may have to challenge the views held by their more senior colleagues within their field or, more generally, the nature of higher education or, indeed, their own institution. While it does not provide protection for lecturers who are somehow incompetent or otherwise in breach of their employment contract, it does guarantee the freedom to speak out and exercise their criticism. Strongly related to the previous concept is another aspect, that is, academic freedom as the specific freedom of academics to engage in public debate on matters outside their expertise, whereas comparable speech by other

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employees is not permitted by their employers. This type of academic freedom would thus mean the unfettered freedom of academics to express themselves on any topic of public interest, no matter how offensive it is to society, and without the academic being restricted in any way by academic institutions. This freedom, called extramural speech, is one of the most pressing but also the most important aspects of academic freedom. We can find two approaches here. According to the extended conception of academic freedom (Andreescu 2009a, Andreescu 2009b, Williams 2016), academic freedom should not only concern strictly professional speech within the walls of the university but also extramural speech, for example, political speech beyond the walls of the university. Conversely, proponents of the restrictive conception argue that academic freedom provides protection only for the professional speech activities of academics within the university (but here it should also be remembered that this freedom takes place within a framework set through the exercise of a professional function). Many voices have been raised against the theory of extensive academic freedom in favour of the restrictive version. (Benda 2020a, Benda 2020b, Fish 2014). They try to justified it on the the grounds that academic freedom is a professional privilege and therefore extramural speeches or activities cannot fall within its scope. Proponents of the restrictive approach advise academics who would be subjected to sanctions for such extramural acts, such as political speech or political activity, to invoke their civil liberties, such as the right to freedom of speech and freedom of association. Andreescu (2009a, 566) explains, as follows, the criticism of the extensive definition of academic freedom: [This is] the result of historical circumstances that are certainly not specific to the United States, but that seem to have made American academics particularly likely to defend the wide-​ranging conception of professorial freedom. Since the advent of the modern university and until well into the twentieth century, university professors in democratic states were occasionally persecuted on ideological grounds for their extramural political speech or affiliation, especially since in some of these states the protection guaranteed under the free-​speech doctrine did not extend equally forcefully, if at all, to citizens as employees. The professional associations of academics therefore understandably attempted to squeeze out of the concept of academic freedom all the protection they could get and that the right of free speech could not secure at the time.

82 Brabec Thus, proponents of the restrictive concept of academic freedom point out that the situation in Western countries has changed rather significantly in two respects over the last few years. First, political speech is not as heavily sanctioned as it used to be in the past, and likewise the rights employees are today comparatively better protected—​the speech of employees is now far better protected from abuses than it used to be when the broad theory was established, so there is no longer any burning need to extend the sphere of academic freedom to cover acts of extramural speech. However, this statement should be fundamentally challenged. Today’s societies are undoubtedly more tolerant in some respects, such as with issues of public morality, religious issues or type of dress. But in other respects, linked today to issues of political ideology, culture war, identity politics and social conformism, new areas of intolerance have opened up. Is today’s social and political situation sufficiently tolerant to render the extensive theory of academic freedom obsolete? And is the protection of employees under labour codes strong enough to grant academics the kind of the freedom that the extensive theory tries to achieve? Decidedly not. We routinely witness that even a high-​ranking employee of, for example, a large car company has no contractual right not to be fired for what he “speaks or writes” as a citizen. And an employment contract does not protect even academics at the moment. But, if academic freedom is to contain some core freedom of speech and allow academics to enrich the public sphere and thus civil freedom of speech, then an academic should, when speaking as a citizen in the extramural sphere, enjoy a freedom from employment restriction that most other citizens do not enjoy. When we look at the aforementioned conceptions of academic freedom, we can conclude with Alstyne (1972) that academics are less constrained than commercial employees by the demands of their employers but more constrained by the professional demands of ethical standards, which are, however, sometimes ideologically or personally misused. 4

Conclusion

We all like to claim freedom of speech and expression here in Central and Western Europe and in the West in general. But for this freedom to be a real freedom, not just an empty proclamation, one must be aware, as US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that freedom must be freedom even for ideas we hate. We like to say that freedom has a price—​but we often forget that its price includes tolerating things we do not like. According to John Stuart Mill (2008), a man cannot justly be compelled to do or not to do a thing merely

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because it will be better for him, because it will make him happier, because it would be wise or perhaps even right in the opinion of others. These are all good reasons for discussing with him or trying to persuade him, but it does not allow us to force him to do something if he does otherwise. In the unpublished preface to Animal Farm, George Orwell writes, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” We are wrong about so many things we believe the only way to know if we are on the right path is to talk to other people. When we forbid the opinions of others, we may deprive ourselves of truth, because those opinions may turn out to be true in the future. In the context of public discussions in general, and scientific research in particular, therefore, let us not assume that we have the truth but that there is free space for research. As Richard Rorty (2006, 58) writes, “Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself.” If we are convinced we are absolutely right and therefore want to ban other views because they are wrong or false, we deprive ourselves of criticism and competition, and our ideas eventually become dogma and prejudice. Thus, we want freedom of speech not only for others but also for thinking through our own position. We need to understand the other side’s arguments to make sure we understand our own as well as the issue as a whole, because the one who does not know well the opinion of his opponent does not know also fully his own position (Mill 2008). And even if we disagree with the speaker, he or she has the right to speak, because otherwise other people are restricted in their right to hear him or her. The freedom to propose the shocking and question the ordinary is important for individual freedom as well as for the development of collective knowledge and understanding of the world and society. “Genius can breathe freely only in an atmosphere of freedom,” Mill (2008) writes. He also warns that the worst crime that can be committed in polemics is to brand the advocates of the opposite opinion as bad or immoral people. Oliver Wendell Holmes compared the free exchange of ideas to the free exchange of goods in a market economy. Just as rational consumers are free to choose the best product based on price, quality and necessity, so too are rational, intellectually independent individuals free to choose from a range of ideas they deem best. The importance of academic freedom, as Mill and Kant were well aware, lies in the fact that it allows scholars to challenge the dominant orthodoxies of our time. In order for a collective understanding of the world to advance in society, knowledge must be contestable and open to being replaced when an intellectual shift occurs (Williams, 2016). However, in addition to broad freedom of speech, academics also need employment protections denied other workers, as they may have to challenge

84 Brabec the views held by their more senior colleagues within their field or, more generally, the nature of higher education or their own institution more directly. It does not provide protection for lecturers who are somehow incompetent or otherwise in breach of their employment contract, but it does guarantee the freedom to speak out and exercise their criticism on issues both within and beyond their discipline.

References

aaup. 1915. Declaration of Principles. http://​www​.aaup​-tnc​onf​.org​/ … cum ents_​PDF /​1915_​Declaration_​of_​Principles.pdf (accessed 5/​04/​15). aaup. 1940. Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. http://​ www​ .aaup​.org​/ … and -​tenure (accessed 5/​04/​15). Alstyne, Van William. 1972. “The Specific Theory of Academic Freedom and the General Issue of Civil Liberties”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 140–​156. Andreescu, Liviu. 2009a. “Individual Academic Freedom and Aprofessional Acts”, Educational Theory 59 (5) (2009), 559–​578. Andreescu, Liviu. 2009b. “Foundations of Academic Freedom: Making New Sense of Some Aging Arguments”, Studies in Philosophy and Education 28 (6) 2009, 499–​515. Barendt, Eric. 2010. Academic Freedom and the Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Benda, Libor. 2020a. Akademická svoboda jako filosofický problém: pravda, spravedlnost a profesionální odpovědnost. Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství (slon). Benda, Libor. 2020b. “Akademie, politika a akademie jako politika: Ke kritice „rozšířeného“ pojetí akademické svobody” Acta Fakulty filozofické Západočeské univerzity v Plzni /​West Bohemian Review of Social Sciences & Humanities. 2020, 12 (2), 19–​43. Butler, Judith. 2006. “Academic Norms, Contemporary Challenges: A Reply to Robert Post on Academic Freedom”. In Academic Freedom after September 11, edited Beshara Doumani, 107–​142. New York: Zone Books. Butler, Judith. 2017. „Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University.“ Globalizations 14 (6), 857–​861. Chotaš, Jiří. 2015. „Idea moderní univerzity: Napoleon a Humboldt.“ In Moderní univerzita: Ideál a realita, edited. Jiří Chotaš, Aleš Prázný, Tomáš Hejduk a kol., 69–​95. Praha: Filosofia. Fish, Stanley. 2014. Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Higher Education Act. 1998. https://​www​.msmt​.cz​/uplo​ads​/Areas​_​of​_w​ork​/highe​r​_ed​ ucat​ion​/Act​_​No​_1​11​_1​998​.pdf​.

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Hrubec, Marek. 2021. “Kritické humanitní a sociální vědy. Od lokální interní kritiky k transnacionální strukturální změně”. In Nová vědecká éra? Od byrokratické komerce ke kreativitě ve vědeckém zájmu, edited Marek Hrubec, Martin Kopecký, 96–​110. Prague: Epocha. Metzger, Walter. 1961. Academic Freedom in the Age of the University. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Mill, S. John. 2008. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George. 2018. Politics and the English Language and Other Essay. Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross & the online. ebook. 20180223-​a5.pdf. Rorty, Richard. 2006. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. Stanford. Stanford University Press. Sandel, Michael. 2010. Justice. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stone, Geoffrey. 2015. „A Brief History of Academic Freedom.“ In Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? edited. Akeel Bilgrami, Jonathan R. Cole, 1–​9. New York: Columbia University Press. Višňovský, Emil. 2021. Akademický svet a jeho tradície. Bratislava: Veda. Williams, Joanna. 2016. Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge. New York: Palgrave. Zimmer, Robert.2015. „What Is Academic Freedom For?“. In Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? edited. Akeel Bilgrami, Jonathan R. Cole, 239–​246. New York: Columbia University Press.

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The Problems of Research in the Project Era Břetislav Horyna Roughly one hundred years ago, John Dewey wrote that in the current economic situation, intellectual freedom and social responsibility are impossible. His thesis concerned freedom of the press and its complete subordination to political, economic and military goals. From his day until the current, after a century of the most precipitous development of human society within recorded history, his statement remains true, with just one problem, the answer to the question: what even is “intellectual freedom”? I’m not concerned with academic freedom here, which derives from regulations enforced at institutions such as universities, colleges, academies of science, etc. It seems inappropriate to consider intellectual freedom merely the ability to choose from a slate of options prepared by institutional bureaucrats, however wiser they are than their predecessors. Instead I have in mind a more real intellectual freedom, in the sense of the free application of human rationality through the intellectual evaluation of a given situation and the subsequent proposal of normative steps towards solving the problems associated with such a situation. Sadly, humanity doesn’t operate under a single rationality –​at the very least we can discern civilisational differences in people’s application of reason –​and aside from that, within a single civilisation, there exist historically and contextually different situational applications of that reason. This allows us to envisage intellectual freedom as the freedom to apply a certain historically current and prevalent type of rationality. The thing that is unsettling about the present day is not, primarily, whether or not we have intellectual freedom. That is a derivative problem, itself implied by the initial question: is today’s European type of rationality such, as to even allow for intellectual freedom? Or is it precisely that type, which in the fulfilment of its theoretical (observational) and practical (normative) functions, becomes a barrier to intellectual freedom? 1

Intellectual Freedom and Academic Freedom

For a number of mostly historical reasons, we have gotten used to equating intellectual freedom with academic freedoms. They are by no means one and the same, but can serve as example due to the closeness of these spheres. They

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overlap in that their subject is knowledge and understanding, but in this point they also differ most starkly: intellectual freedom carries a requirement of complexity, while academic freedom is tied to fields of study and the field-​ specific privilege of knowledge. A move towards complex science necessitates the relaxation of disciplinary barriers: we can deliberate about science and support science, as long as we are able to avoid giving preference to natural science, plant biology, chemistry or instead standing on the side of the social sciences, political science or history. Experts have grown comfortable in their specific disciplines, they can see to the line of trees at the edge of their field, while choosing to ignore the depth of the forest behind. If we didn’t rely on this ignorance of experts, we wouldn’t have scientific tier-​lists, comparisons, illusions of interdisciplinarity, cross-​ disciplinary feuds, interest factions and scientific committees. Science, as we understand it, is not set up to optimize problem-​solving in complex systems, but rather profiling: whoever wishes to move freely within the scientific environment must profile themselves. This is why one requirement in professorial appointment hearings is to “have one’s own school”. I’m not arguing here, for any kind of reductionism or for holistic theories. Instead, I’d like to posit a more general question: why do we feel the need to deconstruct the broad and complex systems we live under into vertically structured columns, to further pick those apart down to the endless minute details, which are then explained by the relevant experts. Our answer will probably directly relate to our type of rationality, which we imbue with a universal validity and from which we derive our concepts of knowledge and understanding. Shouldn’t we be more invested in the ability to distinguish the elements of complex systems that are most important and which are details that, on closer inspection, blur together and can be dismissed? In philosophy (which rather than a science, I consider to be a specific cultural and intellectual construct) we ask the question “Who is a human?”. Its absurdity is clear, because there are no two identical persons, and however detailed our answer gets, it will always result in some sort of “model”, that none of us can fully agree on the minutiae of. What do we gain from this kind of understanding –​apart from dozens of various anthropologies, which exist not as knowledge, but as entries in databases and citation indexes? Take for example what have, over the last few decades, been dubbed “processes of minorization of meaning”. Our disciplinary understanding of science helps create a competitive, meaning conflict-​ridden, environment, where external, non-​scientific interests play the main role. The more science diversifies, the less stable it becomes and the more destabilised its disciplines become, the more they require external support –​opening up to subsidies, grants, projects, foundations; simply put,

88 Horyna consciously reaching for the pot of gold to ensure at least a temporary level of stability. The splintering of science and relegation of complex thought to the mere peripheral theories and methodologies of science was one of the important antecedents to the rise of the “project era”. Temporary stability within a field is apparently the primary factor for the expansion of projects that are –​ at best –​of dubious scientific import. By its very definition, a project with a set disciplinary goal is a targeted measure with a clear beginning and an end. This makes it a necessarily time-​limited endeavour, rising from a single point and beholden to a single purpose. One cannot expect any meaningful social change (science remains a part of society) on this basis. The short-​lived nature of projects limits any longer-​term or permanent effect of knowledge, something clear to all technical project planners, and likely their patrons as well. However, the prerequisites for submitting a project, both to state agencies, but also private foundations and funds, include that it must be highly innovative and simultaneously not already underway at the moment of submission. As long as this “project era” has lasted, I cannot think of a single result that would be of crucial significance to human knowledge: quite the opposite, the only comprehensive point of inquiry seems to be how can we end this era and what will follow it. The way to end the era of projects, is for academics to stop submitting project applications. This means giving up a third source of finance, something impossible under the current state of scientific financing. Back in 2020, the sum total spent by businesses, governments and the EU on research and development (not even exclusively on science), did not exceed the 2% of gdp required by nato for military armament. Of the resources available, apparently some 30% goes to basic research, i.e. the place where we might find actual science. Three times that amount goes to applied research, paving the way for businesses to cash out on their “innovations” in the market –​in other words the capitalization of knowledge. If this estimated amount was transferred, together with all decision-​making powers, to the actual subjects pursuing science, i.e. the universities and academies of science, this would lead to the creation of new bureaucratic structures and power centres, handing them the right to resource allocation based on their own internal criteria. New sources of tension would be expected: universities are hardly oases of mutual appreciation, but instead strongly competitive environments full of competing individuals, with networks of interests whose interwoven threads cannot be easily untangled. Circumstances at these institutions are not always rosy; especially in recent years, we have seen a rising number of employee complaints around bullying and discrimination. Ideologically and politically motivated external attacks on

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experts are on the rise, especially those working differently than a subset of investigative journalism with ties to the secret services would recommend. Apart from this there are ever increasing and maximally formalist –​and therefore limiting to academic freedom –​pressures to break out into so-​called international science (such as the requirement that habilitation theses at faculties of arts be written in English). That things may improve even in such an environment, after gaining distribution powers over resources allotted to science and research, is possible, but we mustn’t forget that our historical awareness grows from the asymmetry between experience gained in the past and our expectations of the future. The relationship between them remains unequal and any attempts at future knowledge, as it were at prognosis in the sphere of science, have shown to be purely situational and politically pragmatic. This asymmetry may perhaps be usefully built into our “university thought”, as conscious political praxis during its construction and management; it could even become one of the factors of its integration. However, from past experience I find it hard to believe in our ability or even willingness to take such steps. 2

What Comes after the Project Era?

The second question is what will follow after our “project era”? Perhaps –​and we can but hope –​this period will involve the removal of systemic errors. Among these I see two most important: 1) the measures used to evaluate science and scientific output, don’t comply with the science and scientific output itself. Removing this mismatch between the measure and the measured is fundamental, if we wish to avoid the complete failure and collapse of the whole system of management and operation of science; 2) the two crucial categories in the development of complex thought and science outside its technocratic market distortion are: patience and perseverance. That’s why we need to re-​evaluate the role of time in the organisation, systematisation and management of science. Time is not important due to the opinion that there are questions we will later find the answer to; this opinion is perhaps wrong, as Wittgenstein supposed, but we clearly do not have the necessary evidence to confirm it. The meaning of sufficient time is elsewhere: once more it was Wittgenstein who in his Culture and Value wrote, that the philosopher’s greeting should be “Take your time!” (Wittgenstein 1980, 498): this is not a call to replace speed with sluggishness, but to dial down our impatience

90 Horyna and hasty conclusions, and instead favour thoroughness, patience and perseverance. Patience and perseverance are crucially important for complex thought –​over the three years of your average grant, it is difficult to achieve the knowledge necessary for a significant shift; science needs the time for scientists to cultivate that patience and perseverance within themselves. It seems that this factor, i.e. having enough time for patient and permanent progress, was sufficiently understood by certain non-​European civilisations, that it prevented them from slicing up their patience into three-​or four-​year periods. Old Confucian scholarship knew that scientific knowledge is not an athletic discipline, requiring one to get as soon as possible from point A to point B. Acquiring scientific knowledge takes place over decades: In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein expressed his assumption that empirical proof of the existence of gravitational waves is possible. This evidence was eventually successfully presented for the first time in 2015, one hundred years after Einstein’s predictions, after a century of persistent investigation, failures, disappointments and incremental progress. Another example: even laypeople know that a certain Immanuel Kant wrote a book which was considered a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Some of them may perhaps also know Kant wrote this book, the Critique of Pure Reason, over eleven years, without the university in Kaliningrad prodding him for regular yearly self-​assessments, evaluations and collation of output statistics. How do these facts comport with the transformation of science into a battlefield, a free-​for-​all between every person, every individual, a fight for the most golden guineas from that pot of gold handed in from outside, who benefits from this transformation of science into an arena for deadly combatants? Traditionally, we’ve tried to remain independent of such “outsiders” who try to use and abuse science for their own ends. Today however, the notion that the scientific, economic and cultural contributions of universities depend on their autonomy, their economic and political independence, has slowly but surely become an empty phrase. The granting of academic degrees to productive researchers was originally meant to protect their independence and isolate them from inappropriate pressures, but has long since lost this function. The idea that academicians will be helped in improving their own mistakes, if sufficient mutual assessments, replications, internal discussions, excellence criteria and further control mechanisms are introduced, has become ridiculous. Prejudice and discrimination are a reality of the academic environment; they exist irrespective of political affiliation, political opinions or influential contacts, it is sufficient to state out loud that the history of physics or chemistry

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lists fewer important women than men. Correctness of this kind has brought with it fear and fear is the greatest enemy of freedom. Instead of complaining about limiting freedom in academic environments however, another deliberation is in place: science and education have rules. If they have rules, they may be managed, although effective economic and ecological management can only come into play if the person entrusted with the management of systems of (evolving or in incremental leaps) innovative knowledge, has the ability to continuously form and change these rules. Under the current situation, the efforts of such a person (let us call them the “manager”) are concentrated on the monitoring of individual results and the submission of “reports” to persons higher up the hierarchy. The management of science based on rules and practices formed through upbringing (i.e. not mere education, but also subjective readiness), has vanished and has been, almost without resistance, replaced by the influence of interest groups created by the structuring and restructuring of shareholders within the power system. Interest groups are mere surrogates in the management of science, whose existence shows that one of the greatest, if not the greatest weakness in the development of education and scientific knowledge, is its management structure. The doors of this power structure allow censorship into various areas of our knowledge, namely the social sciences and philosophy. Any person who, during the course of their research, has stumbled upon questions and issues claimed by the sphere of politics (and in so doing refuses to subject them to open and unprejudiced scientific discourse) will have met at least the manifestations of ideologically motivated outrage. But when this escalates into personal insults, when typically scientific questions are resolved through the media, when people are suspended from positions and the means of expression otherwise protected by the highest law are limited, it becomes clear this repressive, displacing mentality that rejects a plurality of ways of learning has enough momentum to escape the bounds of social and political regimes; does that mean the notion of a political regime without repression of thought and word has for once and for all, become an illusion? Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of Right, (Hegel 1969, 26) that philosophy is a time period expressed through thought; if that were to be true, our current philosophy must be somewhat gloomy on the one hand, sufficiently overcautious on the other. 3

Wisdom and the Fight for Acknowledgement

I wouldn’t want to lay the blame at the feet of either philosophy or scientific knowledge, nor even the interest groups of power themselves: neither are the

92 Horyna source, both are end products. In general terms they are the product of situations brought about by our own thought, by our own type of rationality. These are not the consequences of corporate capitalism, but the living fruits of the tree that is us –​and for that we should accept harsh criticism. It would be a mistake to think there is some kind of irrational war of neoliberalism against scientific freedom, or that the whole current situation can be easily rectified by removing the demonstrably harmful external influences of neoliberal dogma. A more pragmatic view of things shows we would again just be following the modernistic type of rationality, whose basic principle is not getting to the crux of things, to their foundations, but instead multiplication, enlargement, swelling and disambiguation: progress is an ever further rationalisation of rationality, moralisation of morality, scientification of science, communicability of communication, growth of growth. We cling to the same old things, while looking for loopholes allowing us to shape the reigning type of rationality to our own benefit. Whoever finds a more comfortable loophole profits the most, is judged to have been “successful”. Such success is however the result of cleverness: scientists and researchers are asked to be clever enough to outsmart the system of organised science, which is however the handiwork of exactly the kind of modernistic rationality they themselves espouse. Science has lost the basis of knowledge and understanding: wisdom has gone. We have not neglected wisdom –​instead it has been outright rejected, so that now it plays no role either in the official establishing documents of science, but especially none in the minds of intellectuals. Based on my partial experience, I worry that the percentage of people belonging to the educated intellectual social classes, with even an inkling of what a word like wisdom could mean, is very low. Because we don’t concern ourselves with the foundations and basic pillars of science and scientific knowledge, attention is focussed on the superstructure, on more or less chimeric phenomena, on a “fight” against something we feel as the belittling, the disrespect, the abuse of science. At the same time we’re missing the fact that such fights against the deformation of science are taking place within a single type of rationality, meaning the fulfilment of contradictory notions, all of which may be legitimised and optimised in order to satisfy a given moment in time. It’s like trying to cure an illness by strengthening its root causes. Consistent practice in science and science management requires that the individualised desires and intentions of disparate actors intersect, it relies on contingency, randomness, nothing you can base reasonable practice on. It can support only conforming (or rather morally conformist) behaviour that agrees with the prevalent and determinative type of modernistic rationality: put somewhat simply, fighting against the deformations of science can only succeed if we accept that

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it will result in different deformations of science. “Their” deformations will be removed through “our” deformations. The question remains, whether the structural rationality through which we define science as the product of the socio-​political development of modern Western civilisation, allows us to reach any other conclusion. The academic public is jostling for recognition, to be seen as a victim, on the losing side of the political and economic development of corporate capitalism, and alongside loss of social status, individualised losses in the form of the collapse of personal development, more generally a loss of future potential. Despite being endangered this way, they choose a defensive strategy, aimed at prevention, resilience (absorbing any negative effects) and loss mitigation. In this way they are firmly holding the line of the old dualism between culture and economy: considering themselves in the cultural sphere and attempting to convince “the economy” to treat them appropriately, respecting their legitimate cultural demands. This strategy failed even during the days of highly differentiated consumer capitalism, i.e. the liberal capitalism of the late modern period, at a time when consumer goods had primacy. In our current phase, where capital functions corporately, meaning as a result of established relationships between 1) financial capital and 2) digitised technologies producing consumers with distinct need profiles on the basis of an organised and growing asymmetry between winners and losers and finally 3) singularised emerging markets within today’s supply-​side economics, this strategy has no chance at all. The capitalism of our times creates such bundled relationships, or fasces, which are further structured and strengthened as competition grows in these singularised markets, where only one rule applies: winner takes all. The structures of singularised markets are not just controlled by commercial enterprise, but also the social and cultural sphere as a whole, including the fields of science and education. They protect corporate capitalism from discussion, regulation, concessions –​allowing it to be conversely even stricter than liberal capitalism, because it is capable of immanent transformation (creating its own consumer for the singularised markets; an environment of consumerist cultural essentialism is not necessary; the central element of its infrastructure is a formal rationalisation of the fasces, which can lead all the way to totalitarianism) –​and thanks to that, it is able to overcome even greater periods of stagnation (as can be seen from the economic parameters of the pandemic economy, which may have trembled in its very foundations, but led to a surprising lack of political and economic hysteria). What this means for the academic public: I consider this to be a clear sign for people to realise that our current “post-​industrial” capitalism will leave the victim dead in the gutter without batting an eyelid. Politically, this gesture is

94 Horyna called populism: creating an environment willing to accept losses in exchange for innovation. Corporate hypercapitalism has just as calmly sacrificed the liberal and neoliberal theories of itself, all the Washington Consensus, the ordoliberalisms of the Chicago school and other doctrines it considers superfluous. If critical social theories decide to focus on attacking these, they would miss their target: we can tear neoliberal political economy to shreds all we want, while coming not one step closer to changing the social status of science, in other words towards creating appropriate conditions for the actual development of knowledge. Criticism of ideologically motivated influences on scientific research, namely the various forms of pressure placed on nonconformist experts outside of the Gleichschaltung of political mainstream, remains similarly without consequences; it can of course be said that limiting intellectual and academic freedoms is another significant symptom of cultural decay, but we should be under no illusions of this voice’s impact. For many, dictatorship is comfortable and many more are cashing in their earnings. Democratic principles collapse, as soon as government representatives, political leaders and controlling economic structures consider them mere barriers to the imposition of their own interests. Although intellectual and academic freedom should enjoy a vast array of constitutional protections, the late development of the Occident towards totalitarian plutocratic oligarchies based on political and economic corporatism, have rendered it largely theoretical. The disruption of relations between centres of learning (universities), politics and the public, is reflected in its reduced ability, or failure, to anticipate specific social developments and future risks on a global level: the economic crisis woven through the 21st century, the dangers of military conflicts, political upheavals, guerrilla wars, environmental catastrophe and mass migratory movements are but the most visible phenomena, becoming more and more events passively observed without us having the ability to actively “manage” their course. Dictatorship is comfortable, but –​above all –​it is incompetent. 4

Neoliberalism –​a Type of Political Rationality

Within these processes I consider it important to remember what M. Foucault wrote about liberalism and neoliberalism as early as the 1970s. (Foucault 1989).1 According to him, these terms don’t characterise different forms of society, nor 1 Among other places, in his lectures at the Collège de France Il faut défendre la société in 1976.

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are they types of governance themselves, but refer merely to a type of political rationality that in turn forms the basic principles and methods of government. The methods, goals and limits of the actions of governing, have their common root in exactly this type of political rationality; they are inherently polymorphous, make use of various aspects of the social system and may also stand in opposition to them in the form of critical rationality. However, this does little to change the fact that liberalism and neoliberalism remain one specific dimension of the political reasoning of modern societies. Foucault subsequently discussed three ways of regulating, limiting and measuring political power in the state; aside from the various ideas contemplated therein, I would like to highlight the notion that while liberalism and neoliberalism are the constitutive elements of modern political life, they don’t however define the political arena in which they function and act, and definitely do not exhaust the complex political potential (all things “political”) in this arena. The neoliberal type of rationality concentrates only on bringing reasonable governance to economic subjects or, more generally, on economically involved subjects inside the natural historical framework of a society or nation. From here, Foucault’s broad debate begins to turn towards one of the primary goals of his political philosophy, to biopolitics. This had already been the subject of many treatises and is not a chapter we need open up in the context of this text. Instead, I would like to take a step back: to the finding, that the optimum context in which the neoliberal type of political rationality is applied, is economisation. Taking into account this context and the respect with which it is considered from all sides, has led to situation of universal paradox, including the one critically referred to as “deformed science”. It is my opinion that this paradox is inherent in the premises themselves, because under them no important component of the social order could escape being so “deformed”. The reason is simple: what is considered “economical” and what “uneconomical” is not decided based on scientific measurement and verification, but instead is based on the derived intellectual framework that is the economy of neoliberalism. It is the work of political rationality, meaning it is created based on a politically fragmentary view of reality. As a result, one can substitute economical for uneconomical and vice versa, beneficial for detrimental, harmful and dangerous for desirable. No economy is scientific in the classical sense and, looking back on previous decades, we can easily see that no economy has provided significant solutions to our ever more urgent problems. Quantitative analyses are completed and lectured on by media and economic advisors, whose predictions carry as much weight as a soothsayer reading the coffee grounds. However, neoliberal economy has managed to become so intertwined with the political reasoning of society, that it is capable of passing the death sentence on

96 Horyna anything disagreeable to itself, and by extension the political circles relying on its support: it’s enough to call something “uneconomical” to seal its fate. In this way, the deformation of our characterisation, understanding and approach to solving a number of mundane problems takes place, starting with the most important issues of the environment, climate, demographics, property, law, healthcare and education, all the way to the political administration of the individual facets of life and the development of individual societies, including here the management of science and scientific progress. Whatever is “uneconomical” is not entitled to live, even if whatever is “economical” would destroy life at its very foundations. We must keep reminding ourselves: liberalism and neoliberalism aren’t forms of government, but rather refer only to a type of political rationality. This means they are only component parts of the greater order of Western post-​ Enlightenment (modernistic) type rationality that we accept as belonging to our civilisation, and which sets out the bounds within which we search for ways to have our requirements met. Once more I must repeat: this attempt is doomed to failure precisely because it is trapped within a single vicious circle of thought and action. We have not entered the age of the decline of the West as a result of contingencies, but rather due to the painstaking application of the criteria of modern rationality; if we are now looking for ways out, we must begin our research by establishing the causes of phenomena, meaning a return to the question of our civilisationally constituted thought and the possibility of transformation and fresh parametrisation. The goal of the social sciences and philosophy in the upcoming period should be to bring multiple perspectives in to verify the hypothesis that this progressive, fully pro-​growth application of our thought has brought us to a situation where we must now ask ourselves to change that thought. If the current development moves forward undisturbed, it will expose regular humanity to powerful civilisational strife and upheavals, because one system of social life after another will collapse, including science, research, education and schools. We are searching for the most concise and complex answers to two main areas of problem: a) We hitherto lack any comprehensive basis for such an inter-​civilisational or whole-​civilisational epistemology that would on the one hand overcome the limits of the late modern type of rationality and on the other make clear, which areas to apply the new type of thought to, in today’s context of radical change; b) the same applies to the basic justification for regulative value systems (the philosophical foundations of moral, legal, economic, political, social and other norms in the context of radical change) and the development of their specific demands (meaning what is politically, economically, socially, legally and morally appropriate for the era of radical change). Remaining within a linear concept of temporality

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with its one-​dimensional causality puts the current framework of science into conflict with its own modernistic type of rationality: it must consider the future conditions whose necessary existence it is a real danger to, and as such, negates them. It cannot turn back and justify or condemn mistakes –​or any decisions –​taken in the past. And it cannot even provide its discursive routine as an impulse for political action, since within the scope of modern rationality, this always comes second to economic and military interests. The current deficits within science are, even now, sufficiently strong reasons to create new democratic institutions for the management and administration of science; this conclusion is in line with the most important worldwide scientific research on ways to transform our civilisational rationality. Although many figures in politics, the economy and in our leading institutions in general are loath to hear it, making this known in their borderline infantile and stubborn speeches, a transformation of our type of rationality (in other words of philosophically active imaginations of the world) is an observed and both empirically and historically verifiable fact. The outlines can be seen behind the very term “Anthropocene”, although the label itself is inconsequential, so long as our research and the hard data it has collected show, that we are crossing one civilisational threshold and entering into a new hermeneutical context. The precise causes of this involuntary step (impulses creating the necessary social movement strong enough for civilisational correction), its progress (an evolutionary or revolutionary substitution, paradigm shift, imagination of new, previously unknown principles, etc.) and results (one cannot determine the consequences of the change, the subsequent consequences of those, the timing, their specific final constellation, etc.) have so far not been sufficiently investigated. The term “sufficiently” here means with enough careful detail and expertise, as to be able to reliably predict the events that will take place during a massive environmental, demographic, climate, economic and political crisis, in which powerful global subjects will decide between forms of dictatorship or rational solutions. We can hardly expect these contexts to be understood and systematically explained by any other social subject than science; discussion about current attempts at transformation must therefore include a significantly modified context for the existence and functioning of science, otherwise it will only lead to further ill-​advised and pointless deformation. This is a call, but not to activism: a call to those currently representing science, speaking publicly in its name and capable of representing it as an institution. It is a call for them to take greater notice of the state of science as a whole, in this new situation we have not yet matured into: a situation of unknown historical complexity, in which we don’t understand this complexity. Our science (by this I mean Czech

98 Horyna and Slovak) is not only troubled by the iron grip of grants, external circumstances and incompetent or too often puerile science policy enacted by our governments. Much more severe, is how we are not methodologically prepared for the dynamic nature of ongoing, live changes, preventing prophylaxis and requiring any measures be applied after the fact; the situation science is in today appears to be a mass of contingencies, with contingent events accompanied by contingent reactions. It would clearly be beneficial to this aim to clean out the residuals of neoliberalism from the functioning of science, such as project competitions, and to return the evaluation of science into the hands of scientists, pulling it from the clutches of various associations registered on the New York Stock Exchange. These in and of themselves are merely the requirements for the much deeper transformation on the agenda: a remodelling of the type of scientific thought required in order to accept the complexity of changes to our way of life on planet Earth. 5

An Attack on Words

Just as economists don’t decide about economies and politicians don’t decide about politics, similarly scientists don’t have the final say in science. Discussions, polemics and clashes surrounding science and its position, the contexts within which science will operate, including the economic, legal and political, are not held at the level of scientific discourse itself. Instead, they take place as ideological conflicts, where it has been clearly shown that neither ideas nor ideologies are mere thoughts, or concepts formulated in thought, or the expectations of individual subjects freely translated into words and sentences. Harshly put, ideologies have “material existence”, we encounter them as the materialised action of social institutions and the practices of their executive machinery. Within these, ideas and ideologies condense to such a level, that we can observe them as daily differentiated actions spreading out from institutions, often power structures, into the surrounding environment, including the environment of science. The result is the effortless, almost natural penetration of deforming requirements into science from the outside: the speed with which we require success; the market applications of scientific research; socio-​political moral conformity in science and the transformation of the essential critical and sceptical potential of science into mere aesthetics; regulation of scientific movements by normative moral and ideological values; the determination of science’s place in contexts of meaning that are foreign to science. The extraordinary inventiveness of this political and ideological parasite (and this could be neoliberal

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doctrine just like any other idea capable of transformation into a radically externalised ideology) renders science incapable of reacting otherwise than by adopting these originally foreign (economic, political, religious, philosophical, moral) ideas. By accepting them as its own, their external pressure is removed and instead transforms into an internal pressure, just as was the case with and the foreign and unscientific intentions and goals behind systems of grant applications and project competitions, workplace and individual evaluations which replaced the quality of scientific work with the reporting of results in citation indexes and databases. As far as I can tell, the reason the sciences and scientific institutions, including their administrative bodies, have succumbed to the concentrated pressure of materialised ideologies, has been previously and still remains, the inability of science to adequately respond to ideology. This is nothing surprising: science has and continues to develop theories and methodologies of science, but has no functional “theory of ideologies”. At first glance the phrase “theory of ideologies” may seem laughable, but it conceals important components and motives for the development of complex science in environments with heterogenous forms of social behaviour. It is enough to read the works of the British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (Hall 1978, 1988, 1997) or the German author Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Haug 1979, 2003, 2021). Both commenced regular research on types of ideologies and their traits, and their synthesis would allow for the creation of coherent theories of communisation of material interests through ideological values. From the 1970s, when their first key works on the theory of ideologies were formulated, the topic was relatively popular, but was exhausted three decades later without providing the expected precise theory allowing for interventions into political economy. This is much needed today, a fact that can be similarly observed in the relatively successful subjugation of science under the ideological toolkit of neoliberalism, which established a set of ideological instructions unrelated to science, but with control over science management and based on a fixed model: it gained influence by using the ideologisation of the scientific environment to create a top-​down ideological communisation of the scientific context. Those who didn’t feel these efforts were the most appropriate way for science to exist socially from the very start of this so-​called transformation of science, research and innovation, were eventually left with little more than a feeling, that these externalised instructions introduced on behalf of neoliberal ideologies must be subverted through the sabotage of knowledge and understanding. The issue at stake today, is precisely this kind of change in instructions and instructors; however, the expectation that this change will also bring a change in content, is fallacious. For the following reason. Liberalism is a type

100 Horyna of political rationality and as such, it is not exhausted by the social materialisation of the ideal set of formal principles constituting its content. Liberalism arises through a genealogical process, collecting an exhaustively broad range of heterogeneous elements of our thought (also understood as a type of rationality) and civilisational behaviour, but the result is not a given society or form (type) of society, nor a form of governance, but instead just a fragmentary perspectivism. If we focus on the communised ideology of neoliberalism, we have in front of us this genealogy, rather than individual, neatly ordered formal principles, from which we could just as formally deduce the ones it is necessary (what we want, demand) to change: our task is not to deduce errors (either factual or apparent), as would be the task of sufficiently developed political technology; instead it is to understand and halt (or even reverse) this genealogical process of (neo-​) liberalism. We should assume that there will almost surely be parallel attempts to reformulate the neoliberal type of rationality, with a high chance of success due to their genealogy. Neither will science be rid of the hegemonic neoliberal (and neoconservative) tendencies by, for example, removing dysfunctional grant and project financing or the absurd bureaucracy present in evaluations; remember, one set of instructions will be replaced with other instructions, one deformation with another deformation, one reduced form of academic freedom with other (as of yet unknown) limits to freedom. The new measures a majority of today’s scientific community is apparently calling for quite forcefully, will clearly be beneficial in a number of ways, but what is crucially necessary is the creation of a whole new context for the social existence of science, because only such a context can stand in opposition to the genealogy of (neo-​) liberalism and put a stop to its systematic expansion. Many of the processes taking place around us, lead directly to further neoliberal deformations in schools and science alike. A very specific market concept is apparent, removing the market as a “natural” object with its own rules and immanent dynamics. That market no longer exists, and in its place the influence of corporate capital has created a formal object with formal market games (e.g. the market exchange game); the market is an artificial creation of power and politics, existing under deliberate and targeted conditions allowing for the arbitrary timing of “market” effects. Its systemic nature (which is supposed to be managed by the government policy of nation states) has gone and what remains is an abstract model of communised “economic” behaviour; in practice this involves investments trading, something squarely decided, irrespective of external repercussions, by the capital fasces. The disappearance of the market strengthens the further formalisation of the economic environment and includes other areas previously considered

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extra-​economic, which were regularly subject to state interventions into social development. These include schools, education, science and development, which have been successfully reworked in the spirit of the neoliberal type of rationality, into a subsystem of self-​serving rational behaviour. Because they exist as subsystems, they are not autonomous; because they are subject to a self-​serving external rationality, they cannot set up their own goals and choose their own means of achieving them, instead just working to assignment. This assignment is to prepare graduates for the so-​called labour market, whose conditions are once more established externally: the ability to increase productivity; the competencies necessary to expand the technical skills of a worker over the environment; adaptability; the reduction of expressive ability to the minimum necessary to prevent failures of communication, while not allowing mutual comprehensive agreement between workers and their possible formulation of unwanted demands. If we flip through the course information sheets at universities, we’ll find dozens of these “competencies”: not only do these have nothing to do with the realities of study itself, nor will we find the word “think” in them, but first and foremost they establish the position of the graduate on the labour market, in other words an entirely fictional space. The labour market exists exactly as little as the market itself; it is a non-​place with a symbolic meaning, which the universities and colleges mass indoctrinate into their prospective students. Another, comparatively more dangerous process is the deformation of science, which appears to be in full swing and can be labelled an attack on words. It would appear this is nothing new; freedom of thought, opinion, viewpoint and expression has always been limited at universities and there have been quite a number of people forced to “recant their theses” as deluded. This is not just some problem from the grim darkness of the Mediaeval Period; in the early German Enlightenment, Christian Wolff, one of the genius predecessors of Immanuel Kant, was forced to leave the university in Halle under threat of capital punishment by hanging (Horyna 2021). We can consider this a repetition of historical patterns of behaviour, which are preceded by a certain trigger: religious conflict, political stance, membership of a certain community, defence of certain radical ideologies, etc. Their catalytic effect can be seen in the reduced tolerance towards individuals with different thought and behaviour in certain ideological areas, for example at scientific institutions, within intellectual circles, at universities, in churches or generally in various segments of the educational public. There are growing indications that we are once more at a point in history where all these circles, and most importantly the academic community itself, may fall to totalitarianism.

102 Horyna For quite some time now (since the Bologna declaration in 1999 at least) in science, as in academia, there has been an imbalance caused by its growing mass nature, mediocrity, apathy and recommended or even prescribed leniency towards academic and occupational deficiencies. The academic community is changing into an intellectually immature environment, missing motivation, open criticism and self-​criticism, freedom of expression and unlimited enquiry, alongside a radicalism sometimes bordering on extremist views.2 It is becoming clearer that sooner or later one will have to choose between education (or higher education, at least) and a higher, systematic and omnipresent indoctrination. In order to avoid a subsequent further escalation of anti-​intellectualism, agreement must be found concerning several rules of communication within academia. Above all, universities aren’t the place for activists, but rather for education and science. The reason they are, at least on paper, autonomous institutions, is not to become platforms for movements with all kinds of social, religious or political goals, nor to go so far as to promote socially destructive and dehumanising ideologies. Universities are places for learning and research and for autonomy relating to precisely those two functions. Neither universities nor academies are schools merely supervising the transfer of a given knowledge quota, but are instead institutions of independent scientific thought and knowledge; this is the alternative to which the term autonomy applies.3 Every society requires structures to avoid chaos; science, education and schools represent such structures, differentiated according to their purposes. In certain normative doctrines, especially in practical moral philosophy, there used to be a lively debate on the so-​called ethos of science. This is a term that is very easy to say, but very difficult to explain. The scientific ethos generally refers to the patterns of behaviour and implicit rules that were

2 “Futility. Disappointment. Resignation. Arrogance. Disrespect. Slytherin. Knotted stomach. Anxiety. Cramps. Fear. Humiliation. Inferiority. Injustice. Prison. The ‘you don’t! have to endure it’ initiative asked graduates of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (damu) and the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno (jamu) to anonymously describe their experiences of study. Their stories, bringing to the surface various forms of pressure from positions of power, led to a wave of sympathy. But their teachers and the school administration were more surprised than anything”. These were the words budding young artists apparently used to characterise their study experience. Is this extreme position due to their area of study and its presumed hypersensitivity? To talk about higher education in 2021 as a prison and to characterise such a statement as “experience” is perhaps a somewhat marginal position. Cf. Balaštík, M. (2021, 6). 3 The Bologna declaration is characteristically silent concerning this alternative, formally mentioning the term “autonomy” only twice, without specification or content.

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established at the English and French academies of the 17th century, during the early Enlightenment. The Prussian, Austrian and Russian academies subsequently joined in, in order to spontaneously, without any concentrated effort or splitting of hairs, create their own kind of “common law”, whose remarkable continuity has remained present in European science for the past three centuries. This scientific ethos was never canonised, which allowed, and continues to allow, institutional imperatives and norms to permeate it, for ideologies to take the place of science, so that it was never binding and continues to lack an appropriate determination of its function. Only the basic principles of the scientific ethos were solidified in the 17th century: universalism (entitlement to true knowledge emerges irrespective of origin, according to impersonal and progressive criteria, so that personal qualities such as race, nationality, religion, class origins, etc. are irrelevant); common ownership of the material results of knowledge (science is the product of social cooperation, intellectual property is limited to the acknowledgement and appraisal of a scientist by society);4 altruism and a disavowal of opportunism (a broad topic, forming the basis of the earliest institutional element of science, the public and reviewable nature of scientific knowledge); systemic methodological scepticism (the requirement of scientific restraint, until sufficiently convincing facts are available, all arguments are investigated without prejudice and until the formulated beliefs have met sufficient empirical and logical criteria). The current threat of anti-​intellectualism in science and education is marked by its thoughtless treatment of the heritage of the Enlightenment ethos. This can be seen primarily in studies of American researchers, looking at today’s tendencies towards a rather anti-​Enlightenment ethos first hand. The collection of articles published by Tom Slater under the title Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus (Slater 2016), provides a relatively detailed picture of the state of free speech at universities in the USA and Great Britain, i.e. long considered model countries and champions of freedom, especially by East Europeans. We can now read in the very introduction: “The academy is in crisis. Students call for speakers to be banned, books to be slapped with trigger warnings and university to be a Safe Space, free of offensive words or upsetting ideas. But as tempting as it is to write off intolerant students as a generational blip, or a science experiment gone wrong, they’ve been getting their ideas from somewhere. Bringing together leading journalists, academics and agitators 4 At the time, the recognition of science was not understood to be quite so symbolic as is the custom today. Empress Catherine ii, the Great, for example provided important academics in Saint Petersburg with lifelong honorary membership of the academy (an expression of recognition), but also a life-​long yearly annuity (an expression of value).

104 Horyna from the US and UK, Unsafe Space is a wake-​up call. From the war on lad culture to the clampdown on climate sceptics, we need to resist all attempts to curtail free speech on campus. But society also needs to take a long, hard look at itself. Our inability to stick up for our founding, liberal values, to insist that the free exchange of ideas should always be a risky business, has eroded free speech from within”. (Slater 2016, 9). Unless we decide to a priori sweep all such concerns aside as the petty squabbles and feigned outrage of a hypersensitive academic environment, that has little to do with actual scientific work, and instead take it to be an indication of more serious problems, we’re confronted with the question of what is actually going on in this previously freedom-​loving educational environment. One of the many reviewers of this book called for the British newspaper-​ reading public to read the book, think about it and act before it is too late. Apparently therefore, these are not issues to be ignored, because they seriously impact the broader concept of institutionalised higher education and encompass topics of discussion relevant to the studied subjects. Among the many authors who have decided to act before it is too late (i.e. Sean Collins, Joanna Williams, Jon O’Brien, Peter Wood), the work of Gregory Lukianoff stands out (Lukianoff 2012, 2014, 2018b, Lukianoff, Haidt 2018a). In his opinion, for which he provides justifications from multiple viewpoints, today’s massive tendency towards censorship and other constraints on freedom of speech, begins with the curious notion, born of higher education itself, that students and professors have a “right not to be offended”. No exhaustive list was provided concerning the reasons different groups within academia are offended. Instead, in May 2014 an article was published in the New York Times,5 bringing to attention a new idea being promoted by certain universities: that of trigger warnings. As if overnight, a deluge of student requests rained down on the colleges and universities across America, asking educators to warn before presenting any educational content expected to provoke their negative emotional reaction. Apart from the first trigger warning policy drafted by the Oberlin College Ohio, which circulated among universities, the author of the article gave as an example a student article, requiring content warnings for triggering material in the novel The Great Gatsby, because it contains “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence” (Medina 2014). From this moment onwards the number of various things requiring trigger warnings only grew, alongside aggressive pushback against anyone (namely

5 Cf. Medina, J., Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm, New York Times, 17 May 2014.

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professors) who expressed the opinion that this path leads to an erosion of the free speech fought for by entire generations of scientists and educators. The pressure against them has overflowed outside of internet forums and become ever more visible on the ground at universities and scientific institutions, when the reason for letting an employee go is more likely to be misconduct violating the emotional comfort of students than transgressions against science itself. Two basic positions are at odds here: the adherents of the first hold that universities are obliged to protect students from difficult material and that teaching should accommodate the requirements of an emotionally and intellectually pleasant environment. According to this hypothesis, professors must take responsibility for presenting their study materials (including key cultural milestones in human thought), however unsettling, to their students in such a way as to avoid serious emotional distress, feelings of anxiety or panic attacks. The spread of this view of education, science and their development is not insignificant. Trigger warnings point to a remarkable shift in the relation of students towards words and thoughts, explicitly prioritizing caution over investigation, emotional reactions over the application of reason. These are to be the impulse for hyper-​protectiveness on academic soil. The continuing attempts to construct universities as “safe spaces”, which protect academia from not only visible aggression, but also any potential “microaggression” –​ which can be represented by any number from an open set of words, as long as they are interpreted as such. A segment of professors have acquiesced to the content warning practice and object to the notion that institutional acknowledgment of triggers has any anti-​intellectual effect; quite the opposite, as their purpose is to enable the rational engagement of everyone, including people whose participation in the educational process would be precluded by for example, panic attacks in response to world literature. Proponents of the other side view this as a practical erosion of freedom of speech and a growing type of censorship. According to Lukianoff and other critics of these policies,6 the mission of universities lies elsewhere than in “coddling people” and “emotional safetyism”. They appeal to the spirit of liberty

6 Another of the noteworthy aspects of this conflict in American universities, is that these critically targeted individuals have begun to organise within official institutions in order to protect themselves against attacks, censorship and mob justice through the media. Gregory Christopher Lukianoff is the president of one of these, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), which supports publications allowing for opposite opinions to exist, as well as helping out when attempts are made to professionally and personally eliminate any who would object to “political correctness”, either in the media or for example through summons by ethics committees.

106 Horyna that purportedly still reigned supreme in American universities in the 1970s, when for example Yale’s motto was for students to “think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable”.7 They contrast this with the current day, gaining not only supporters, but also pointing out that part of the academic community are acting as something of an academic inquisition, stifling open debate. According to them, safetyism has become a sacred and undisputable norm that prevents students from confronting the obligations stemming from their actual practical and moral interests in life; this would mean the culture of safetyism disrupts the emotional and intellectual development of the youth. In his book Freedom from Speech, Lukianoff points to the quantitative spread of triggers, which have taken on an even stronger political dimension, aside from the academic one: “From there, the phenomenon mushroomed into a staggeringly broad advisory system that, as Jarvie explained, now covers topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-​blaming, alcohol, blood, insects […]”.(Lukianoff 2014, 358). This no longer appears to be a sensible gesture, where students are asking to be warned before reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; it is an advisory system whose goal is to no longer allow professors and students to discuss potentially volatile topics and understand them in a civilised, intellectual and polite fashion. Instead, it aims at neutrality in controversial topics, or to directly silence them, at inoffensiveness and suppression of the power of words. As Lukianoff concludes, American higher education has always had an immeasurable ability to influence people’s thoughts and attitudes towards life, including their political opinions. For entire decades it was the peak of institutional censorship and other illiberal trends, that are once more on the rise. The university as a perfect influencer? The challenge to academics worried about the growing regulation of speech and thought at universities is simple, as well as complicated: the value of free speech, logical thought and critical engagement are long-​term ideals that have already been won once before. Because they are being suppressed today, the task is to once more renew them and return them to educational and scientific environments alike. If academics won’t protect the intellectual mission of their universities, who will?

7 Cf. “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale”, Yale University, 1974. Online: https://​yale​coll​ege​.yale​.edu​/get​-know​-yale​-coll​ege​/off​ice​-dean​/repo​rts​/rep​ort​-commit​tee​-free​dom​-exp​ress​ion​-yale​. Woodward Report (1974) https://​www​.yale​.edu​/sites​/defa​ ult​/files​/files​/free​dom1​975​.pdf​.

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Salvation Comes with Committees: Ominous Perspectives

Why we should discuss the internal transformations of American and British universities, leading towards their remodel into safe and artificially-​lighted graduate incubators, is no mystery. Similar tendencies have begun appearing in Europe8 and with certain idiosyncrasies, also in the Czech academic environment. A description of the specific characteristics of the institutions of academic science and educational processes via the ethos of science fails to account for science’s structural changes and their consequences (as covered for example by the historiography of science), but instead resembles something of a seismogram. Deviations that aren’t defined within the environment of science itself, but rather through normative discourse held externally, are represented as defects of the immanent mechanisms of science, ensuring its adaptation to social and political requirements, purposes and goals. Eliminating them (ensuring the “faultless” operation of science) is expected from the externally managed (by those in power) behaviour and actions of scientists themselves: with self-​management being a significant aspect (self-​ censorship). To deal with these rebels within science, these visionaries who refuse to carry out that task and instead think outside of the mainstream, these malcontents rejecting the status quo, committees have established. Because they are most often labelled ethics committees, it can be expected that the culture of safetyism, hyper-​protectiveness from microaggressions and students’ rights “not to be offended” will give them plenty to do and radically increase their already significant importance. Presumably there will be an overhaul of the entire environment of science and education: just as political neoliberalisation brought the tendency to move the financing of science and research to the “market” (i.e. the territory of undisturbed activity of fully autonomous corporate capital with its profit and power interests), hand in hand with political anti-​intellectualism and restrictions on freedom of speech there comes a “moral obligation” to prevent the academic efforts of those individuals upholding scientific autonomy, protecting the autonomy of scientists to freely choose the directions and goals of their research and defend the notion that science is an activity subject to universal norms, which result in verifiable knowledge achieved as a result of the highly abstract thought of specific individuals. Ethics committees are, at least going by the name, institutions set up by managerial decision, with the task of the moral evaluation of the quality of the

8 There have been very positive reactions to Lukianoff’s work in discussion, notably from attendees of Scandinavian universities, who are clearly noticing the same risks.

108 Horyna actions of some person, sent to the ethics committee by another manager. In practice, this means that the group moral convictions of the body in question become the criteria for the assessment of the morality or immorality of a step taken by some individual during their scientific research. This assessment may then be used to legitimise measures taken by the given scientist’s superior. Just glancing at this broad sketch implies there will be certain difficulties, ambiguities, distortions, prejudices and avenues for abuse or voluntarism, inherent in the institution of ethics committees. Setting aside the obnoxious notion that some appointed body should enforce its own idea of correct morality on another person, without providing the standard to justify such moral comparisons, corresponding to the scientific requirements for criterion justification, there remains the suspicion that the decisions of such committees may have predetermined outcomes. This may not even be the actions of a specific person (director, dean, rector), but rather the impersonal fear emanating from the surrounding context, which may include sexual harassment hysteria, safetyism, student panic when faced with academic requirements, anti-​Putinism, anti-​Chinese political propaganda, new perspectives on one’s own history, gender correctness and many other factors. We have ample examples from history of the effect these contextual threats can bring: when hunting witches, the rules of the Malleus Maleficarum apply and to try to openly investigate whether there are any actual witches, one would have to be a secret warlock. The current academic inquisition can be just as harsh and uncompromising as the old Christian one: is anyone investigating China’s role as a partner for potential cooperation just a secret agent under Chinese influence? Each ethics committee will make sure to be careful what it accuses someone of and what it may be accused of itself. Nobody questions the notion that science, being part of society, cannot be outside of social control and held accountable for the errors of its scientific practitioners, or of any of the members of its universities’ academic communities. The scientific community is a social system, having at its disposal rules for self-​organisation and self-​management, including generally recognised rules for moral behaviour and actions. These tend to be enshrined in ethical codices, whose goal is to ensure that in their work, a scientist should adhere to the principles of relevant scientific methods and certain standards of behaviour both inside and outside of academia, in order to receive the corresponding recognition of fellow academics. Non-​scientific criteria have no role to play here and under no circumstances should they be dragged into the discussion. The status of a scientist is not of course such, that their work should take place outside of the reach of the state and the law, without relation to the rest of society. The state utilises various state institutions to protect and support science,

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contributing to the establishment of its systems of finance and administration (at a managerial level) Because it is a beneficiary of a significant proportion of the results of scientific research, it must protect itself against erroneous or falsified results, which could lead to risky or outright dangerous (e.g. in the field of medical research) political decisions. This entire problem area concerns scientific fraud. Contrary to the notion that fraud is a present-​day issue, this has actually been an issue throughout the long history of science (Broad, Wade 1984; Siegel, Daumiller 2020). It falls almost exclusively within the purview of the natural (physics, geology, biology, palaeontology, geography, chemistry), and medical (medicine, anthropology, clinical psychology) sciences, while the in social sciences we have only cases of falsified historical sources. A list of all these cases would be long and of little merit: Galileo Galilei falsified some of his experiments and their results, Isaac Newton manipulated experimental results measuring the speed of sound so that they harmonised with his mathematical models, and from there we could continue century by century and decade by decade until today. In the humanities and in philosophy, the most common cases concern plagiarism, manipulated reviews and the appropriation of the results of other people’s work (forced co-​authorship). Fraud analogous to that in the natural sciences does not occur; philosophy in 1996 witnessed the so-​called Sokal affair, which rather than scientific fraud per se, discredited the peer-​review system preceding the inclusion of articles in a scientific journal. The physician Alan Sokal provided the social science journal Social Text with an article full of absurdities, nonsense and neologisms, copying the so-​called poetics of postmodernism, in an attempt to show the harmful influences of postmodern philosophy on science. The article passed the peer-​review process (without the evaluation of a physicist) and what would be called a simple hoax today, became the basis for the denunciation of philosophy. In sense, Sokal was just breaking into an open door; any properly qualified philosopher could have shown him a world of philosophical “poetics” beyond his wildest imagination. The breaking point came in 1997, when a scientific fraud of unprecedented scope was uncovered: during the years 1994–​1996 the oncologist Friedhelm Hermann, his partner Marion Brach and two of their assistants, under director Roland Mertelsmann, systematically falsified the laboratory research results, stole other experts’ experimental results and plagiarised other people’s work wholesale. Despite their visiting American assistant Ernie Esquiel pointing out certain discrepancies in 1995, the full extent of the fraud was only uncovered in 1997: Fr. Hermann was among the most “highly respected experts” on cancer treatment, someone nobody dared suspect. It wasn’t until the year 2000, that the investigating committee discovered the aforementioned group had

110 Horyna published a total of 94 purely falsified works in haematology and oncology out of 400 publications, with another 121 appearing suspicious, although falsification could not be confirmed. It was however clear that this fraud, probably the greatest in the history of medicine, directly endangered the health and lives of cancer patients. Hermann and his group received significant financial resource from research foundations. He was required to return it, but German science was faced with an entirely different problem: falsifying data and cheating during research, similar to copying from other sources, are not themselves crimes. Due to the fact that the scientific community is international, based on the global exchange of thoughts, findings, research and their results, staff and material support, it is crucial to ensure international agreement on what is considered scientific misconduct. This is why, at the end of the 20th century, initially simple ethics committees and subsequently more specific research ethics committees began appearing, governed by mutually converging ethical codices. Despite much being clarified, just as many problems remain, of these most concern the role, competencies and general status of these committees within the processes of scientific knowledge (Stegemann-​Boehl, 2010, 21–​24). The basic principle should be, that scientific and ethical disputes should be resolved outside of external (state) control. Whether or not a scientist, researcher, or lecturer has acted unscientifically, is question for scientific ethics. Nobody else should make that call. In order for an ethics committee to be convened, the offence a given researcher is accused of must be sufficiently serious (Stegemann-​Boehl, 2010, 21–​24). The framework for evaluating this seriousness includes a guarantee of freedom of expression and research; as soon as a scientist behaves irresponsibly towards the basic principles of science (i.e. the cultivation of science as the practical development of knowledge), they pass the boundaries protected by academic freedom. Falsifying research, plagiarism or coercive practices (such as bossing, bullying, etc.) may be legitimately considered such acts. Conversely one-​sided or selective research, or insufficient inclusion of opposing views or positions cannot be seen as such. It is nothing out of the ordinary for some third subject (an individual, opposing school, ngo, think-​ tank, petition-​writers, etc.) to consider particular research erroneous, misguided, misleading or provocative, however the circulation of their opinion in any form, i.e. through the media and social networks, is not and cannot be reason to limit a researcher’s basic right to freedom of research. The goal of ethics committees is not to safeguard the mainstream within science and neither can it legitimise preliminary measures (such as the temporary suspension of such a person from a leading role, their temporary assignment to a different position than regularly carried out by the accused individual, public denunciations

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before any authoritative decision has been made, etc.) to that effect. Shouldn’t ethics committees instead spend their time discussing such “measures” taken by scientific administrators? Are they protecting science, or is an incompetent manager just protecting themselves? Ethics committees are governed by the rule stating a negative determination may only be made concerning the accused, if it is shown beyond all reasonable doubt, to have crossed the bounds of scientific research and by their actions damaged the goals of science in acquiring true knowledge. If any doubt remains, the committee cannot pressure the given person in any way and according to the legal principle in dubio pro reo, must decide in their favour. Currently, in order to ensure a certain legal erudition in committee decisions, they are usually chaired by lawyers.9 Due to the growing risks accompanying the rising influence of “campus speech” at universities, such as the silencing of teaching and research staff and the promotion of the notion of a presumption of guilt, similar attention should also be paid to those behind the motions that lead managers to convene ethics committees. It is unthinkable for the first instigators to be various pressure groups, present in each kind of activist environment. It is even less acceptable, for an ethics committee to act on the initial input of journalists, who remain reliant on whoever is paying them. A journalist does not have the right to criticise the scientific output of academic staff; they lack the education, the comprehension and the appropriate understanding of the knowledge base of the field to which the accused expert belongs. That expert, on the other hand, was required to prove their authority to carry out scientific work according to the requirements of science, i.e. by defending their knowledge and positions in front of the scientific community, the habilitation or professorial appointment process, at congresses, conferences and symposia. The journalist is unelected, is not backed by anyone they could claim to represent. As unelected, without the necessary education, they are merely hired to carry out the required job in the required way. To take into account the writings of such mercenary forces when resolving scientific disputes or misconduct is not necessary, however loud the “media scandal” they can raise. A media scandal is a scandal in the media and for the media, if we ignore it, it affects nothing. Protecting science and the notion of freedom of expression is paramount. Sometimes from scientists themselves, more often from science management, always however from external subjects unrelated to science, whose intentions

9 There has been significant progress on this point, for example at Masaryk University in Brno, the previous chair of the ethics committee was a sociologist, now followed by a physicist.

112 Horyna endanger intellectual autonomy and freedom of academic expression. The intention is clear: the greater the ability to think, to consider the context, to live outside the dictates of tabloid “opinion”, the better the education, the understanding of issues, language culture, the better knowledge of the history of human civilisations, the less dull obedience towards the power structures that have claimed ownership of our entire planet. To avoid unwanted attention, coordinated efforts are made to deflect it towards more harmless targets, such as the panicked reactions of students and their psychological distress when reading Mácha’s May (remembering it culminates in an execution, the words “her son’s blood flows upon her” are sure to chill the bones of even the most experienced “fps gamer”). If we don’t let all of this fool us, and instead continue our scientific research into currently unpopular and uncomfortable topics with certain elements of society, we could easily become the target of some hired journalist and suspended. Science faces an onerous future, but this is nothing new: it has always had to assert itself, and we all know against who or what.

Acknowledgement

This contribution is an output of research programme ‘vega 2/​0072/​21 Úlohy politickej filozofie v kontexte antropocénu’.

References

Balaštík, Miroslav. 2021. Proč vzdělání rozděluje společnost? [Why does education divide society?], in Host 8, 21, 6. Broad, William, Wade, Nicholas. (1984). Betrug und Täuschung in der Wissenschaft. Basel: Birkhäuser. Foucault, Michel. 1989. Verteidigung der Gesellschaft: Vorlesung am Collège de France (1975–​1976). Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hall, Stuart. et all. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan Press. Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: sage Publications. Haug, Fritz W. 1979. Theorien über Ideologie, Projekt Ideologietheorie (pit), Argument-​ Sonderband as 40. Berlin: Argument-​Verlag.

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Haug, Fritz W. 2003. High-​Tech-​Kapitalismus. Analysen zu Produktionsweise, Arbeit, Sexualität, Krieg und Hegemonie. Hamburg: Argument-​Verlag. Haug, Fritz W. 2021. Vorschule zur Philosophie der Praxis. Hamburg: Argument-​Verlag. Hegel, Georg W. F., 1969. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts [Elements of the philosophy of right]. Werke in 20 Bd. Frankfurt 1969–​1971, Bd. 7. Horyna, Břetislav. 2021. The Idea of Care for Reason in Chinese Philosophy and Its Influence on German Enlightenment: The Reception of Confucianism in the Moral Philosophy of Christian Wolff, in Knowledge Cultures 9, 2, 7–​43. Lukianoff, Gregory. 2012. Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. New York: Encounter Books. Lukianoff, Gregory. 2014. Freedom from Speech. Encounter Books 39. Kindle Edition. Lukianoff, Gregory, Haidt, Jonathan. 2018a. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Publishing Group. Lukianoff, Gregory. ed. 2018b. Saving the republic: the fate of freedom in the age of the administrative state. New York: Encounter Books. Medina, J. 2014, Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm, New York Times, 17 May 2014. Siegel, Stefan T., Daumiller, Martin H. (Hrsg.). 2020. Wissenschaft und Wahrheit: Ursa­ chen, Folgen und Prävention wissenschaftlichen Fehlverhaltens. Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich. Slater, Tom, ed. 2016. Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stegemann-​Boehl, Stefanie. 2010. Ex commissione salus, in Gegenworte 2. Berlin: Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Pa rt 2 Research and Education in Central Europe and in the West

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­c hapter 7

Risks and Opportunities of the Politics of Performance and Evaluation in Academic Culture Stanislav Štech Towards the end of the first decade of this century, criticism of the neoliberal approach to managing (or controlling) universities and academic research began to appear in the Czech Republic.1 It was a reaction to the government draft White Paper on Tertiary Education (mšmt 2008) and to the Methodology for Evaluating Results of Research and Development (Metodika … 2008), which were in keeping with the government policy of the time for the Reform of the System of Research, Development and Innovation in the Czech Republic2. In the first case, this criticism manifested itself in resistance on the part of the higher education community, for example in the form of an alternative draft White Paper drawn up by Charles University (Perspektivy … 2009). This resistance led to a protest Week of Unrest. At the heart of the proposal for reforming the universities was a closer connection between these public-​ service institutions and the private sector, and a tendency to rebrand university education as a market commodity. Specifically, it was planned that the composition, and in particular the remit, of the Boards of Trustees of the universities should be changed. Representatives of the private sector nominated by politicians and “stakeholders” from the world of practice were to be heavily represented on the Boards of Trustees, and would now decide not only on economic issues but also on the universities’ strategic documents, and even have a greater say, for example, in the election of the rectors. Students would then pay tuition fees for a product which they would obtain (education), and which as an investment would in the future gain in value on the labour market.

1 The original version of this work was originally published in the Czech language: Stanislav Štech. 2021. Jak se proměnil akademický svět pod tlakem na výkon a vykazování. In: Marek Hrubec and Martin Kopecký, eds. Nová vědecká éra? Prague: Epocha, pp. 26–​38. © Nakladatelství Epocha, Prague 2021. 2 It is symptomatic that the Czech term věda (science, scholarship, academic learning) disappeared from the titles of both documents, and also from the title of the Research, Development and Innovation Council. By contrast, the term “innovation” was added.

118 Štech The collegial administration of universities, linked with the Humboldt concept of higher education, was to be superseded by elements of corporate management. The slow-​moving community with complicated deliberation mechanisms and insufficient pressure on performance –​and thus supposedly with a low level of efficiency (including financial efficiency) –​was to be transformed by a dynamic management model with managerial responsibility, which would run it on the basis of “exactly” (quantitatively) monitored outputs. Thus at least three of the seven basic principles elaborated by Christopher Hood as components of his concept of New Public Management (npm) were to be introduced: the power of a personally responsible manager to make decisions (the “free to manage” principle) instead of a collegial authority, the principle of performativity, and an emphasis on comparison and competition between educational institutions (Hood 1991, 1995). In the second case, there was resistance to the quantitative evaluation of the results of scholarship and the funding that was dependent on this; this resistance was epitomised by the initiative Scholarship Is Alive! Criticism was directed at the reduction of evaluation to the quantity of results of scholarly academic work (now known as “outputs”), and in particular at the fact that the funding of (future) research was to be automatically linked to this evaluation. This was one of the reasons why the evaluation methodology acquired the pejorative label “coffee grinder”. From among the npm principles, we started to become familiar with “accountability” (setting performance standards and monitoring them more strictly and more frequently). The difficulties in translating this concept into Czech gave rise to various possibilities, including a linguistically neutral label (vykazování -​showing results), morally binding pressure (odpovědnost –​responsibility), and an alternative concept of the effectiveness of the work of academic staff (vyprávění, příběh -​“account” as a narrative or story). This latter concept of accountability, rejecting a solely economic connotation, was presented by Stöckelová in her criticism of the audit culture (Stöckelová 2009, 2012). It is no surprise that in a period which saw a move towards effectiveness seen as a balance between costs and outputs (efficiency, value for money), there was no sign of any emphasis on effectiveness in the sense of efficacy, being fit for purpose. However, the neoliberal administration of academic institutions has not been applied explicitly as a doctrine. After all, even after 15 years it cannot be said, for example, that the budgets of universities and research institutes have been considerably reduced, nor that they have become substantially dependent on private sources or entrepreneurial activities. One reason why this did not happen was the rather intuitive resistance of the academic community at that time. This, however, was certainly not a “conscious” criticism

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of neoliberalism as a doctrine, and was not even supported by everyone3. The concept of “neoliberalism” in connection with education was by no means clearly understood4. In addition, its principles were euphemised according to the logic of “rhetorical violence” (Hammersley 2001) –​a large number of academics hesitated to protest repeatedly against responsibility, efficiency, competitiveness, or economy. The usual references to the “holy trinity” of critics of neoliberalism (Foucault, Butler, Bourdieu) were seen as too general and not directly reflecting the reality of our academic institutions. Foucault’s most well-​known criticism of neoliberalism is that it attempts to “expand the rationality of the market, the schema of analysis that it proposes, and the criteria for decision-​making that it suggests, to realms that are not exclusively or primarily economic” (Foucault 2008, 323). And in so doing it reduces people to the level of a predictable and, most importantly, easily controllable “homo economicus”. Butler emphasises that power not only controls and subordinates individuals, but also shapes them, as subjects whose identity changes; in the “regime of performativity” she speaks about the “normalised self” (Butler 1997). And Bourdieu points out that neoliberalism is a “programme for destroying collective structures which may impede pure market logic” (Bourdieu 1998, 3). In the Czech Republic, too, when we first became aware of the introduction of neoliberal elements into public administration, Petrusek stated that “the autonomy of education systems in the post-​modern age is purely an illusion (…) –​the educational system is almost completely ‘colonised’ by the political system, and today, in particular, by the economic system and indirectly by the most influential ‘creator of ideas’(…), in other words the media system” (Petrusek 2009, 687). What all these analyses of neoliberalism have in common is that they regard its instruments as a Trojan horse which has penetrated into academic institutions in order to destroy them. They are seen solely in a negative light, as a form of control allowing people no space to deal with these pressures in a dissenting, creative way. And this is why they are subjected to criticism (Morrissey 2015). However, the fact that the new academic subjectivity is today defined by accountability and performance has been interpreted in various ways. Some interpreters clearly see it as subjugation, as described above: “… it seems that 3 Cf. the ethnographical analysis of events surrounding the Week of Unrest in Jana Dvořáčková, Petr Pabian, Simon Smith, Tereza Stöckelová, Karel Šima and Tereza Virtová, 2014. 4 If the term neoliberalism did appear, it was often confused with liberalism in academic circles. Some readers of this author’s article on the transformation of the teaching profession in the time of a neoliberal approach to government (Štech 2007) reacted by saying that it was an unwarranted criticism of the principles of liberal democracy in education.

120 Štech we –​we who are the ‘last academics’ with a vague memory of what that modern university was –​have finished our period of mourning and integrated ourselves into the community of entrepreneurial academic employees” (Simons and Masschelein 2009, 1). This quotation was used by O. Kaščák in an analysis documenting the changes in university culture at a certain Slovak University, based on the example of specific managerial approaches (Kaščák 2016). By contrast, Archer believes that the weakening resistance of the academic community to neoliberal management elements is connected more with a generational change (Archer 2008). In his view, the older generation of academics “still remembers” what an independent, autonomous academic life used to be like and should be like, whereas the generation of those who are today in their thirties and forties have grown up in the new, neoliberal management of academic institutions and no longer know anything else. They are tired of the constant criticism, and the term neoliberalism itself no longer even arouses any indignation in them, nor do they associate it only with negative connotations. Another argument points out that the situation does not completely correspond to a hostile takeover of academic institutions, because publications criticising the neoliberal colonisation of the academic world and the practices of npm continue to appear and function on a paradoxical principle. They are proof that what they are warning about is in fact not entirely true. After all, works such as The Toxic University (Smyth 2017) and The Tyranny of Metrics (Muller 2018) are still being published, even though they evidently do not serve non-​academic aims. They are thus evidence of the fact that the academic environment has not been deprived of its freedom and subjected to an external “enemy” functioning only on the basis of economic logic. And they are quite certainly credited with a few points in the evaluation systems of their authors’ academic workplaces. Does this mean that predictions of the end of an independent, free, autonomous academic culture were mistaken? Have we really finally “finished mourning” the end of the Humboldt dream and become academic entrepreneurs? Or was the managerial transformation of universities and research institutes not so bad after all, and, as so often in the past, has the academic community found alternative ways of developing academic culture and escaping from the “normalised self” created by the economically determined “regime of performativity” (Morrissey 2015)? 1

Unintended Consequences of the Culture of Surveillance

Above all, the fact that people are now growing tired of criticism of the neoliberal management of universities and research institutes does not mean that it is not pertinent. Filip Vostal, for example, in his review of Smyth’s book on

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the “toxic university”, criticises it because, while its diagnosis is perhaps relevant, it is not backed up by sufficiently detailed and specific arguments, and does not offer any alternative ways out of the situation (2019). Similar criticisms that “neoliberalism” has become a cliché and that all the ills of universities are being attributed to it do not mean that it is not necessary to examine more closely the individual elements of neoliberal npm (Hood 1991) and to assess whether and how some of them have been fulfilled, and if so, in what form in which particular national context.5 Similarly, in higher education and academic research it is important to take note of which strategies, tactics, or “niches” are appearing within this transformed management system, and are perhaps producing interesting positive effects. Let us then take a look at two features of the new academic subjectivity defined by accountability and performance. The pressure to provide evidence of outputs, in particular publications, for inclusion in the Czech Register of Information about Results every year has a number of consequences. In view of the fact that scholarly and research “productivity” is one of the key parameters of an academic career taken into account in the procedures for habilitation and appointing professors, accountability in the sense of the quantitative measurement of outputs has become widely accepted in spite of all the criticism. The symbol of high-​quality research output came “authoritatively” from the sphere of the medical, natural-​science, and technical disciplines, because they are much closer to application in practice than the humanities and social sciences. This symbol is an article in an academic journal (usually written by a collective of authors). This development led to a number of new features in the humanities and social sciences as well. One of these was the increase in the number of new journals and the appearance of “predatory journals”. The need to demonstrate constant productivity even during a very short time interval (one year) has also given rise to the phenomenon of “cloning” results. Finally, the last 10 years has seen a completely new phenomenon: the strategy of coercing citations and the creation of citation cartels. In spite of all this, have the changes brought about by the “regime of performativity” also had some positive results? First let us take the new journals. Their proliferation during the last 20 years is an indisputable fact. In my own field, that of the educational sciences, in the first two years alone after the adoption of the Methodology in 2008, the number of journals (including electronic ones) more than doubled in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, although the number of research workers remained the same. Provided they maintained the criteria for high-​quality specialist media, 5 For Czech basic and high schools, cf. Arnošt Veselý, Jan Kohoutek and Stanislav Štech 2016.

122 Štech they provided an opportunity for a larger number of researchers to publish the results of their work, especially younger research workers who until then had been marginalised by the mandarins responsible for academic scholarship. On the other hand, it is obvious that a certain diminution of quality must have occurred. If we accept the rules established by the system, then this diminution is testified to by the fact that none of these new journals figure in the wos database, and only two of them in the Scopus database. In general, however, the tremendous proliferation of scholarly journals in the world has given rise to the need to categorise them and differentiate them in more detail. For example, it is no longer solely the fact that an article is published in an international journal with an impact factor that is positively evaluated; in addition, the status of the journal in comparison with others is also significant. Reference is made to whether it is ranked in the top quartile or decile of all international journals in its field. And naturally researchers often deliberately choose a journal to publish their article, not because of the themes which the journal has concentrated on over many years, but because of its impact factor or its ranking in the top decile. Apart from this essentially instrumental effect, Merton’s well-​known “unintended consequences” have been confirmed in the rise of predatory journals.6 In reaction to this phenomenon, Beall’s list of predatory journals was created, although the inclusion of some journals on this list gave rise to doubts.7 In 2013 there were 126 suspect journals on the list, and by 2016 there were already 882. Over the whole period of existence of the list, the number of suspect journals increased from 18 in 2011 to 923 at the time the list was withdrawn. On the other hand, we must conclude that the rapid development of Open Access journals is beneficial. Even if authors have to pay to have their article published, it is not the same situation as in the case of predatory journals. The charges represent the price for the costs for processing the text, for the speed of publication, and for the accessibility of research results to a much wider circle of readers. And research institutions and grant agencies accept them as part of project expenses. A good example of the advantages of such journals, whether 6 In French, the term “unintended consequences” is translated as “perverse” consequences. This expresses the idea that an object satisfying an instinct or a way of satisfying it is not normal or desirable. In the case of the desire to publish the results of research work, a perverse object would correspond to publishing texts that are worthless in scholarly terms, and a perverse way would be publishing within a time interval that does not allow for a review procedure of normal quality (e.g. within 14 days), and with a large payment being made by the author. 7 Beall’s list was removed from the internet on 15. 1. 2017, and Beall himself, a librarian at Colorado University, was later forced to leave it.

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purely electronic or Open Access, is the prompt publication of the results of research into the consequences of the closing down of society during the coronavirus pandemic. The results of research into distance education and its effects on pupils and their families, carried out in June 2020, were thus already available in September of the same year (Bonal and Gonzáles 2020), while the same studies did not come out in print until four months later. Similar Czech studies did not appear in printed journals until nine months after the research had been completed. Succumbing to quantity as the exchange value is also manifested in “cloning” results (Stöckelová 2009). Because of the need to show as many outputs as possible, there is now a tendency not to publish results all at once. Already 10 years ago, a member of a top-​ranking research team in the natural sciences described to the author an event known as “autumn cloning”. He used the term to refer to the annual stock-​taking of the results of a research project, consisting in dividing them up and planning the publication of the individual parts in several journals during the course of the following year. Naturally with a different primary author or group of authors selected from the entire team for each publication. The information communicated by the research as a whole is thus fragmented and dissipated in various journals, and the collective process of authorship is individualised so that each author gets the appropriate proportion of points. A positive consequence of the methodology relying mainly on the number of results is a realisation of “the direction that should not be taken”. After 10 years, the Czech “Methodology 2017 +​” for evaluating the results of scholarship and research specified further evaluation procedures in addition to bibliometric indicators. For the humanities and social sciences, it strengthened the role of peer reviewing for selected monographs. At the same time, however, in view of the negative trends described above, it increased the importance of citations. With the introduction of an Article Influence Score, citation metrics became an important factor for ranking journals (on the basis of their impact factor), for the evaluation of individual research workers (h-​index), and for ranking research fields and research institutes. It soon became clear, however, that the scholarly community reacted almost immediately. An analysis in the field of the educational sciences provides evidence of two strategies for adapting to the new indicators (Knecht & Tůma 2020). Coercing citations may be a relatively spontaneous way of ensuring that an article is cited by other members of the specialist community in the field. It can, however, also be a deliberate strategy on the part of editorial boards or reviewers of journals, even in prestigious ones with a high metrics ranking (“Your manuscript is of high quality, but you ignore articles published in our

124 Štech journal on a similar theme”, etc.). Citation cartels or fraternities represent a more sophisticated strategy, consisting of a “group of researchers, workplaces, or journals, which consciously, expediently, excessively, and without justification referred to themselves in their published works, thus increasing the number of citations or raising the citation indexes of individuals or journals” (Knecht and Tůma 2020, 201–​202). The problem, of course, lies in the fact that citations have become a commodity and are paid for, something which in economics is known as Goodhart’s Law. An indicator which ceases to be an ancillary tool, but becomes a target, loses its informative value. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that monitoring the reaction to scholarly academic work is a worthless indicator. Citation metrics make it possible to follow significant trends in the relevant scholarly field and changes to them. They can also indirectly influence the development of scholarly disciplines, for example, by deliberately promoting research themes (agenda setting). Furthermore, “reaction” does not have to be restricted simply to the established use of citation metrics. A typical example is the ResearchGate platform, which by means of notified citations creates (but does not coerce) a space for communication and possible cooperation between researchers from throughout the world. 2

The Risks of Imitating Intellectual Work

Scandals, which not even the most prestigious Czech university (Charles University) has been able to avoid, have shown that the temptation to succumb to the key indicator of the quality of academic staff, i.e. quantified performance, can in cases of its uncontrolled narcissism take on absurd forms. An extreme example is the case of a researcher from the Faculty of Social Sciences, who not only churned out dozens of publications annually, but also published with an imaginary person who was supposed to be affiliated to prestigious international universities, adding his own name to that of this fictitious figure as being the joint author of a scholarly article (Rychlík 2016). And here we come to perhaps the most critical effect of subjecting scholarship to external surveillance in the regime of performativity, excellence, and accountability. It stands to reason that globally there is only a small number of excellent researchers. The pressure we have described thus leads to the replacement of full-​value intellectual work carried out by autonomous individuals by its imitation (simulacrum), which has serious mental and moral consequences. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prizewinner for physics, was already talking about the danger of “cargo cult science” in the mid-​1970s (Feynman 1974). His reference to the religious rituals of some indigenous peoples on Pacific islands vividly demonstrates the change in the mental world

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of members of enclosed communities.8 When people internalise the external indicators of a value, it leads to them fooling themselves to some extent, and as a consequence to them fooling others as well. In Feynman’s view, the only defence against pure imitation as part of the new religion of excellence is the moral integrity of researchers, based on a rejection of the illusion that they are carrying out intellectual work of genuine value when they succumb to the conviction that only what can be measured and quantified in the data audit system represents real quality and benefit. Otherwise, we are supporting and disseminating pseudo-​scholarship. Genuine scholarship works with uncertainty and errors, and admits to a feeling of ignorance. It is often slow and “inefficient”. The pressure on the quantity of quickly published results of intellectual work is also changing the style and quality of academic life (and life in general) and the relationships within academic institutions. Lynch has shown that the intensification of intellectual work and its “elasticity” (24/​7 availability, working at night and at weekends) has substantially structured the roles and careers of individual academic workers, depending on the extent to which they are burdened by service and administrative activities. Those who have fewer such activities (care-​free or care-​less academics) –​whether in academic institutions or in everyday life –​have better prospects for their academic career (Lynch 2010). We could continue in this way to analyse the current state of affairs. A number of questions remain unanswered. How should we react to changes in the principal genre for presenting research results in the humanities and social sciences? We can observe a decline in the importance of monographs, especially by a larger team of authors, for the evaluation of the output of its individual members. The timeframe for intellectual activity is also becoming shorter. The time unit for output is the calendar year, with the upper limit usually being three years, which is the standard length of research projects funded by grant agencies. Will we ever again see sufficient space and financial support for works created by synthesis, requiring preparatory work which may last for decades? And what in fact is the impact of this “clip-​like” time structure on the form and depth of learning? Another problem concealed behind what is today taken for granted in the academic world is the fact that during the last 15 years an English linguistic 8 The native inhabitants of some Pacific islands, in their desire for the cargoes brought by aeroplanes during the Second World War, practised strange rituals after the war was over. They imitated radio receivers using bamboo sticks and coconut shells as headphones, and built primitive replicas of aeroplanes or crates for cargo, and so on. In this way, in a state of induced trance, they invoked the state they desired.

126 Štech monoculture has effectively been established. Lorenz, in his criticism of the managerial evaluation of academics and institutions, even talks about an “English language bias” (Lorenz 2007). Those who publish in French or German (especially if they publish monographs) do not figure in the recognised databases, and essentially become “no name” academics. The points awarded for the several years of work they put into a publication will hardly compare with those awarded for a single year’s work published in English in a journal with a high impact factor in the first decile.9 And yet societies in smaller countries, especially in the humanities and social sciences, do not only need “globally excellent” scholarship, but also locally situated learning. They need research and specialist terminology to develop in their national languages. It is particularly in order to defend locally situated scholarship that it is necessary to firmly distinguish between genuine intellectual work and its fraudulent imitation. There can be no doubt that the audit culture has taken root in academic institutions, and that it has consequences which have not been properly thought through and are therefore negative. Not only is it now possible to acquire ever more detailed information about the work of researchers, but this has led to substantial changes in their behaviour. In this respect, Zuboff cites a data expert who used the following simile: “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way … We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance” (Zuboff 2019). At the same time, we cannot help seeing that the instruments of this regime of performativity can support the development of academic disciplines. This is only happening slowly, and so far has mainly taken the form of positive unintended consequences such as the Open Access system or the modification of the Methodology for Evaluating Results of Research and Development, which now respects slightly more the specific features of the various academic disciplines. It is evident, however, that the arguments of the academic community have so far still not been successful in creating confidence among the general

9 We can give as an example the application of the Methodology 2017 +​to the multi-​criterion evaluation of the results of creative activities at one of the faculties of Charles University. For an article published in a journal in the first decile according to wos it is possible to get 25 points (for an article in a journal in the first quartile 18 points, and in the second quartile 14 points). By contrast, a monograph published in Czech is worth three points, or nine points if it is an exceptional monograph with a number of citations or prizes or if “it represents a collective work by a number of authors over a lengthy period of time”. If an author publishes in a world language (so, for example, a specialist publication in Finnish does not count), then a monograph with a large number of citations that can be found in recognised databases of journals, reviews by international specialists, available in open access, etc., can gain as many as 16 points; the highest category for a foreign-​language monograph, worth 25 points, remains effectively out of reach.

Performance and Evaluation in Academic Culture

127

public and the political decision-​makers in a fully autonomous evaluation of that community.

References

Archer, Louise. 2008. “The New Neoliberal Subjects? Young/​er Academics’ Constructions of Professional Identity”. Journal of Education Policy 23, no. 3, 265–​285. Bonal, Xavier; Gonzáles, Sheila. 2020. „The impact of lockdown on the learning gap: family and school divisions in times of crisis“. International Review of Education 66, no. 5–​6, 635–​655. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11​159​-020​-09860​-z​. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. „Lʼessence du néolibéralisme“. Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998, 3, accessed December 29, 2021. https://​www​.monde​-diplo​mati​que​.fr​/1998​/03​ /BOURD​IEU​/3609​. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dvořáčková, Jana, Pabian, Petr, Smith, Simon, Stöckelová, Tereza, Šima, Karel and Virtová, Tereza. 2014. Politika a každodennost na českých vysokých školách: Etnografické pohledy na vzdělávání a výzkum. Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství. Feynman, Richard Phillips. 1974. „Cargo Cult Science. Some remarks on science, pseudoscience and learning how to not fool yourself“. (June 1974): 10–​13, accessed January 8, 2022. CargoCult.pdf (caltech.edu). Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–​ 1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammersley, Martyn. 2001. „Some questions about evidence-​based practice in education“. In Evidence-​based Practice in Education, edited by Richard Pring and Thomas, Gary, 133–​149. Open University Press. Hood, Christopher. 1991. „A Public Management for All Seasons?“. Public Administration 69, no. 1, 3–​19. Hood, Christopher. 1995. „The „New Public Management“ in the 1980ʼs: Variations on a Theme“. Accountig, Organizations and Society 20, no. 2–​3, 93–​109. Kaščák, Ondrej. 2016. „Produkcia a reprodukcia vedenia v neoliberálních univerzitách“. In Vzdělání a dnešek, edited by Martin Strouhal and Stanislav Štech, 106–​123. Praha: Karolinum. Knecht, Petr; Tůma, František. 2020. „Citační etika v pedagogickém výzkumu: K vynucování citací a zakládání citačních kartelů“. Studia Paedagogica 25, no. 3, 187–​212. Lorenz, Chris. 2007. „Lʼéconomie de la connaissance. Le nouveau management public et les politiques de lʼenseignement supérieur dans lʼUnion européenne“. In Les ravages de la „modernisation“ universitaire en Europe, edited by Christophe Charle and Charles Soulié, 33–​52. Paris: Editions Syllepse.

128 Štech Lynch, Kathleen. 2010. „Carelessness: A hidden doxa of higher education“. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9, no. 1, 54–​67. Doi: 10.1177/​1474022209350104. „Metodika hodnocení výsledků výzkumu a vývoje“. 2008. Accessed December 16, 2021, https://​wiki​.ufal​.ms​.mff​.cuni​.cz​/_me​dia​/user:​hajic:​meod​ika​-hodnoc​eni​-vedy​ -2008​.pdf​. Morrissey, John. 2015. „Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal University“. British Journal of Sociology of Education 36, no. 4, 614–​634. mšmt. 2008. „Bílá kniha terciárního vzdělávání“. Accessed December 20, 2021, https: //​www​.msmt​.cz​/refo​rma​-terc​iarn​iho​-vzd​elav​ani​/bila​-kniha​. Muller, Jerry Zucker. 2018. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. „Perspektivy dalšího vývoje českého vysokého školství“. 2009. Praha: Univerzita Karlova, accessed January 5, 2022. https://​cuni​.cz​/UK​-3874​-versi​on1​-Perspe​ktiv​yUKo​becn​ avyc​hodi​ska​.pdf​. Petrusek, Milan. 2009. „Vychováváme člověka vzdělaného, nebo informovaného? Současné vzdělávací systémy v čase postmodernity“. In Jan Amos Komenský. Odkaz kultuře vzdělávání edited by Svatava Chocholová, Markéta Pánková and Martin Steiner, 686–​699. Praha: Academia. Rychlík, Martin. 2016. „Predátorské časopisy ničí vědu“. Česká pozice, December 9. Accessed December 20, 2021. Predátorské časopisy ničí vědu | Téma | Lidovky.cz. Simons, Maarten; Masschelein, Jan. 2009. „Towards the Idea of a World University“. Interchange 40, no. 1, 1–​23. Smyth, John. 2017. The Toxic University. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stöckelová, Tereza. 2009. Akademické poznávání, vykazování a podnikání. Etnografie měnící se české vědy. Praha: slon. Stöckelová, Tereza. 2012. Nebezpečné známosti. O vztahu sociálních věd a společnosti. Praha: slon. Štech, Stanislav. 2007. „Profesionalita učitele v neo-​liberální době. Esej o paradoxní situaci učitelství“. Pedagogika 57, no. 4, 326–​337. Veselý, Arnošt, Kohoutek, Jan and Štech, Stanislav. 2016 “New Public Management in Czech education: from the side road to the highway?”. In New Public Management and the Reform of Education. European Lessons for Policy and Practice edited by Helen M. Gunter, Emiliano Grimaldi, David Hall and Roberto Serpieri, 127–​140. New York: Routledge. Vostal, Filip. 2019. „Review: John Smyth, The Toxic University“. Theory, Culture & Society, February 15, accessed December 21, 2021, https://​www​.theor​ycul​ture​soci​ ety​.org​/blog​/revi​ews​-john​-smyth​-toxic​-uni​vers​ity​. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ has gone rogue. We must curb its excesses“. The Washington Post, January 24, accessed December 20, 2021. https: //​www​.was​hing​tonp​ost​.com​/opini​ons​/surve​illa​nce​-cap​ital​ism​-has​-gone​-rogue​ -we​-must​-curb​-its​-exces​ses​/2019​/01​/24​/be463​f48​-1ffa​-11e9​-9145​-3f7​4070​bbdb​9​_st​ ory​.html

­c hapter 8

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research Martin Kopecký 1

Introduction

Almost thirty years ago, Michael Gibbons and colleagues (1994) published their influential, and oft controversial, The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. The book differentiates between two ways of operation for science and research, Mode 1 and Mode 2. In the older mode, the authors argue, the results of research are primarily utilised in the domain of research itself, whereas research activity in the new mode is assumed to be much more oriented toward utilisation in other domains. Developments of the past three decades tend to confirm this trend, especially when it comes to economics and, to some extent, to policy and various areas of people’s everyday lives. Needless to say, this reorientation of research has been accompanied by a number of misunderstandings and conflicts, including the central issue of whether the changes are beneficial or harmful for not only research itself but for society at large. The final years of the twentieth century saw a wave of renewed policy interest in research and education as drivers of desirable social change. The idea of beneficial change, then, was not (and inherently could not be) politically neutral. Neoliberal practice came with calls for radical transformation in a number of areas. Some called for quick economising, whether it came to concrete management, the very belief that competition was necessary and beneficial or evaluation tools applied in the domains of research and education. The latter include expertise based on comparing selected measurable factors of performance. It is here that a new form of governance emerged, one seen by its proponents as neutral and objective. My chapter focuses on the relationship between policy and research, on the one hand, and education research, on the other.1 This relationship is viewed 1 This chapter is an extended and revised version of the chapter originally published in the Czech language: Martin Kopecký. 2021. Politika, vzdělávání a výzkum –​varianty těsných a napjatých vztahů. In: Marek Hrubec and Martin Kopecký, eds. Nová vědecká éra?

130 Kopecký as two-​sided and variable. More specifically, I am going to deal with the influence of education policy on education research and the influence of education research on education policy as one of the most important public policies. With regard to the latter, I will attempt to demonstrate existing contradictory variants of the relationship, which is marked by tension, inherent distorted politicisation and either symmetrical or (more often) unequal stakeholder relations. While it would be simplistic to talk about the fight between David and Goliath, I intend to present a perspective based on the following diagnosis: to avoid adapting to neoliberal goals, the domains of educational research and practice have the option of fostering alternative approaches and shaping different policy approaches to the domain of education. This is also made possible by the rich tradition in both educational research and the practice of ideas and research tools that facilitate critical research. 2

Neoliberal Education Policy and Other Public Policies

I rely on my long-​term interest in education policy making at the national and international levels, which can be characterised as a fluid and complex field shaped by a number of ongoing social transformations. My experience is one of a college instructor of adult education. Besides this discipline, I am going to delve into higher education studies. In some regards, the convergence of these two domains has accelerated in the past decades. The very use of the term “higher and adult education” attests to their perceived closeness. Higher education and adult education have much more in common than their obvious target age group, that is, students and other learners that are considered adults from the legal and other possible perspectives (social, psychological, etc.). Higher education, including universities, has also consistently focused on different categories of adults, such as full-​time students, participants of various courses (e.g., U3A) or “mere” members of the public involved in community outreach projects. The basic trend of demographic ageing is one of the many factors contributing to that focus; another trend is the growing integration of universities within the domains of business and industry (Field, Schmidt-​Herta, Waxenegger 2016).

Prague: Epocha, pp. 72–​81. © Nakladatelství Epocha, Prague 2021. This work was supported by the Cooperatio Program, research area General Education and Pedagogy.

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 131

Another fact to consider is the prioritisation of the domains of higher and adult education by public policies since the end of the twentieth century. This is the case of not only education policy but also social policy, economic policy and so on. Furthermore, it not only involves particular policies but also the overall orientation of societies, or ideas about their desirable development, at both national and international (e.g., EU) levels. The above ideas became increasingly ambiguous at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, with a mix of concerns and hopes, perceived threats and promises. Both aspects were often depicted in outright dramatic terms by policy documents (Lauder, Young, Daniels, Balarin, Lowe 2012, 1). Hopes and threats were presented with similar levels of urgency. Not taking the opportunity to implement reform towards greater performance in the context of intense competition and collaboration was seen as equivalent to failure (e.g., by becoming uncompetitive or undermining social cohesion), whereas taking that opportunity was equated with a guaranteed success (analogically, wealth or greater cohesion). Education policies often treat higher and adult education as domains that are the most susceptible to fundamental reforms, in comparison with other levels of education. Among the factors of their relative malleability is their (potential or actual) close relation to the economy and the labour market. Higher education and related educational activities have been assessed by policymakers as the most closely linked to such contexts that are immediately and effectively decisive for society’s successful development. In other words, these educational levels have been identified as the greatest direct and relatively rapid contributors to development in terms of maximising opportunities and minimising risks. Such ideas have been primarily framed by the concept of “knowledge society”, which accounts for accelerating change, intensifying competition, and the key role of knowledge in all aspects of life and for all social actors. Since the 1990s, this, along with an emphasis on technology and innovation, has formed a strong alliance with a growing interest in a “knowledge-​driven economy” and universal competition driven by the neoliberal ideology that emphasised education primarily for its economic productive potential. It is in this light that reforming existing education systems appeared necessary. A multitude of books have been written about the impacts of this policy turn towards the marketisation of higher education, including a number of bestsellers-​turned-​classics. Their central messages are often recapped by their very titles: the university in ruins, academic capitalism, knowledge factory and so on (among many others, see Slaughter, Leslie 1997; Readings 1997; Aronowitz 2000).

132 Kopecký The managerial style of running universities, especially (but certainly not only) in the Anglo-​Saxon world, brought a fundamental change to the domain. The transformation went beyond visible affairs such as research funding, organisational structure, the pressure for quantifiable performance, or collaboration with businesses. On the agenda were also public-​private partnerships and the channelling of knowledge from private firms, with their alleged universal effectiveness, to public institutions. The only public aspect of new public management was perhaps its domain of implementation. Nietzsche’s (2005, 43) warning about science and research becoming a factory appears especially prophetic in this context. There has been a major shift in views on the central role and responsibility of colleges and what higher education is good for. It is aptly characterised by the term vocationalism —​the focus on work (or employment) as the only worthwhile underlying goal of all actors involved in education (Grubb, Lazerson 2006, 295). It is with little exaggeration that one can argue that education policy has become an instrument of economic policy. This has contributed to a great paradox. On the one hand, there has been a renewed emphasis on education and research, with proponents of knowledge society often espousing Bell’s metaphor of university as the central social institution. On the other hand, the close relationship between research and development has effectively reduced the range of conceivable expectations of education. Sidelined are, for instance, the classic ideas of the cultivation and growth of inner freedom or of education as a public service for the common good. Moreover, academia as a whole has been put under manifold pressures that have effectively curbed its autonomy (through an increased market orientation along with the standardisation and monitoring of quantifiable performance targets). The pressure to perform has simultaneously become the pressure of control (Power 1997). These observations apply analogically to developments in the domain of adult education during the same era. For many years, adult education remained at the margins of countries’ attention (Pöggeler et al. 1990). From approximately the mid-​1990s, it became an attractive goal of education policy at national and international levels, framed by the concept of lifelong learning. In short, we have seen a shift from the margins to the mainstream (Mohorčič Špolar, Holford 2014). The fundamental changes that have taken place are not only quantitative but also qualitative in nature. The attention adult education has come to enjoy in the global education policy mainstream has little to do with its long-​term contribution to liberal education, the growth of communities or social movements or the solving of social problems. Instead of realising its emancipatory and cultivating potential, policymakers prioritise the capacity for educating and training

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 133

high-​performing individualised workers capable of adaptation in the context of growing competition and sweeping technological change. There is again abundant literature on this issue and its diverse contexts: Field (2006), Jarvis (2007), and Milana (2012) are just three examples of many. 3

Contradictory Forms of the Research–​Education Policy Relationship

In the following section, I rely on international realities and research evidence primarily from the European and North American contexts. The picture presented a few paragraphs above cannot yet be deemed complete. While the tendencies hold, I have presented a more general, well-​known and debated perspective thus far. Now, I want to move on to another important aspect of knowledge society. Rather than as an idea, I am going to treat it as a contradictory reality. Let me first mention the increasing emphasis policymakers have placed on expertise. Some talk about the scientization of policy. As established political ideologies have not kept up with today’s complex world, a demand for novel justifications has grown. For many reasons, policymakers facing complex choices have come to routinely rely on compelling expertise. Concrete examples can be found in policy areas as diverse as pension reform, global climate change or the political implications of social media. Arguably, politicians often exploit research, with its traditional authority and persuasiveness, for bolstering their insular strategies. Yet, I find it hard to accept that this is the only reason behind education policy’s demand for expertise. It is perhaps in the interest of education policy not only to control but also, to some extent, to follow research evidence. As a result, research work is driven both by criteria such as “accountability” or “efficiency” and by requirements of strategic orientation. Here, “strategic” is understood as in line with declared policy priorities. What is referred to as strategic research plays a supportive role, expected to produce results directly applicable in practice. Strategic projects are tied to policy calls, adopting their dictionaries, narratives and defined goals as formulated in various calls for proposals. Metaphorically speaking, researchers pick from an existing menu with a limited number of dishes, yet they do not have the power to define the composition of the menu or the chef’s cooking styles. In this form of soft governance (Lawn, Grek 2012), governments regulate research indirectly but effectively, giving rise to a regime referred to as research for education policy (Desjardins, Rubenson 2009).

134 Kopecký The alternative ideal-​typical regime, the research of education policy, differs in terms of its orientation and organisation of research. It relies on a critical approach, where policy is treated as a problem. The research subject is not predefined, like in the previously presented regime, but defined by the researchers, who are also in control of their concepts and methodologies. They are typically detached from the status quo and existing social relations, including power relations. Research of education policy does not treat education as a more-​or-​less autonomous domain but as a part of society. Therefore, the issues investigated are often viewed in the context of social problems, with emphasis placed on the theme of power. The works of Richard Desjardins (2017, etc.) are remarkable examples of this approach. Some parameters of the regime in which the author is able to work correspond with the neoliberal policy mainstream’s preference for various performance rankings of national cases based on large amounts of quantitative data collected in different countries for (“evidence-​based”) comparison (words “blaming and shaming” are sometimes used here to characterize this neoliberal practice). Desjardins works with large datasets produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (oecd), the main global leader of educational reforms over the past decades, while at the same time elaborating the politico-​economic perspective. This helps him to demonstrate the importance of the political and economic structural conditions of education systems (and people’s lives in general) as key factors influencing people’s real opportunities to participate and succeed in education. Equally remarkable and compelling are the research results of Anke Grotlüschen, Lisanne Heilmann and colleagues (2021). Primarily basing their results on secondary analysis of vast datasets from piacc,2 its predecessors, and other similar projects, the authors point to the limited validity of the oecd’s usual neoliberal interpretations. For instance, they demonstrate a strong link between the existence of social problems and adults’ inability to participate in educational activities. In other words, the absence of socially marginalised groups from education is not due to their lack of interest. It is one of the tangible effects of their disadvantaged position in society. Furthermore, Grotlüschen, Heilmann and colleagues prove that low levels of functional literacy are associated with weak political participation, and it is not unwillingness but rather inadequate social integration that leaves individuals unprepared for

2 oecd’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 135

getting involved (e.g., in voluntary organisations), preventing them from accumulating and successfully tapping social and other capitals. Researchers of education policy can now build on older approaches to and research results on educational systems and organisations. The 1960s and 1970s were an era of expanding access to college education and other parts of educational systems, including adult education. Our assessment of that era should be informed by the economic motivations that were already strongly present as a result of the predominant type of economic policy at the time, Keynesianism. The massive investment in education was accompanied by greater freedom of research, which gave rise, among other discoveries, to a number of critical conceptualisations of the relationship between a society’s educational inequalities and its form of social stratification. The same era underpins the frequently mentioned stance of research speaking truth to power. Formulated by Vildavsky in the late 1970s (based on Desjardins and Rubenson 2009, 17), this principle emanates confident and resolute resistance to those in power. The reflective question is what the oppositional stance should offer beyond the justified rejection of the policy in place. In answering the question about the power of researchers, it is, of course, not necessary to espouse postmodern fatalism, as exemplified by Bauman (1991). There are diverse forms of the relationship between academics and politicians (Griffin 2006). Together with Foucault (2000, 144), we can always identify some opportunities for free agency, as there is no social relationship in which power is distributed to the absolute advantage of one party, leaving another party absolutely paralysed. 4

Normative Proposals of Critical Education Research with Respect to Education Policy

Problematising social reality can be viewed as an important goal in itself but also as an important point of departure for further efforts. One should appreciate the very ability to pinpoint hidden, unreflected, contentious, or outright harmful characteristics of education policy. Yet, in some situations, this approach is simply not enough because it does not help us to answer the traditional question: so what? Critical authors have good reasons for caution when education policy research is tasked to produce elaborate blueprints for better steps than those currently practiced. Nevertheless, they should accept the long-​term reality of being faced with such tasks. Whereas both the public and politicians are clearly entitled to formulate the steps, researchers can reject them and provide

136 Kopecký clear explanations for their rejection. Yet this perpetuates the gap between the approaches and responsibilities taken by different groups of actors and thus the divergence of their ways of thinking. Each group works under a specific regime and accentuates a corresponding set of needs and responsibilities. One of the questions that inspire the work of critical researchers concerns the potential impacts it can make beyond academia. How can we promote the potential of research studies for positive spillover beyond the domain of research? Whom can they serve and how? Both Gibbons et al. (1994) and Burawoy (2011) emphasised the plurality of regimes under which social research should work, including critical approaches speaking not only to the domain of research but beyond, especially to civil society and professionalised politics. It would be prejudiced to assume that politicians cannot be expected to understand a situation and take the right decisions. What follows is the requirement to not only facilitate a dialogue between research and politics but also to be comprehensible. The language of research should not be esoterically inaccessible. To take one step further, social science should formulate research-​based recommendations, even if only partially or by pointing to negative aspects of a policy proposed or already implemented. Worth mentioning is the ability to influence policy indirectly, which occurs in at least two variants. First, influence can be directed at individuals with a say in policymaking (especially fellow academics and government experts, journalists, and other opinion leaders, including civil society organisations). This can be exemplified by various public debates, controversies over key policy drafts, documents or reform bills. In the second, weaker variant of indirect influence, one works with preconceptions (tacit knowledge). Instead of, or at least prior to, persuading others, one points to existing alternative perspectives, supports them with compelling arguments, and thus resists the dominant perspectives on policy issues. Perhaps surprisingly, theoretical research can make a contribution here. What, if not philosophy of education, is qualified to search for the meanings and justifications of words like justice, equal opportunities, performance, competences and so forth? The link between the “word” and empowerment in the “world” is one of the central ideas of Paulo Freire, who considers all educational practice to be political in a positive sense. He considers education as a chance to assume power in the world and make a difference or, in contrast, to give up that power. In short, there is always a natural political aspect to education, whether or not one wants and is able to actively work with it. In the latter case, one (if only inadvertently) affirms the status quo. In the former, researchers focus, for

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 137

instance, on innovative educational practices that are critical of the neoliberal mainstream (Tett and Hamilton 2019), espouse the spirit of “everyday resistance” (Thériault 2019, 15–​16), or follow Paulo Freire’s advice to be tactically within the system and, at the same time, strategically outside it (Mayo, 1993). Another domain worth mentioning is action research with its mission to combine the research of a specific group with the empowerment of its members to tackle the problems they face. Educational needs are often associated with social problems. Strengthening and developing people’s reading skills may directly improve their chances to take control of their lives and effectively shape their environment. My final recommendation may appear trivial at first sight: historical research as a good source of inspiration for identifying alternatives to neoliberal policy. Historical research of thought, practice, or policy (or a combination thereof) can help us to discover useful ideas because, despite all the emphasis currently placed on social change and timeliness, human needs such as dignity and having control over one’s life have been reflected in educators’ ambitions since time immemorial. 5

Instead of a Conclusion

Neoliberalism has exerted and continues to exert intense influence on the domains of research and education. Many of its contributions can be criticised or resisted, but this is not the case of the mere call for collaboration between research and other social actors, including policymakers, even if there are valid reasons to believe that their policy is inadequate. There is one condition for such collaboration, however, namely that research should not merely serve policy. It should be encouraging for our creativity to know that the relations between policy and research are diverse, complex, and always at least somewhat open. Such awareness can help research redefine how they relate to themselves and emerge from their defensiveness. As Biesta, Filippakou, Wainwright and Aldridge (2019) put it, research of education should not only solve problems but also cause them. Critical research of education policy can rely on its numerous traditions in an effort to at least sketch alternatives. It can be conducted under different regimes. This multivocal context is conducive both to head-​on controversy accompanied by formulating alternative proposals and to less explicit approaches, perhaps merely sparking imagination beyond the neoliberal policy frame.

138 Kopecký Being a complex and fluid domain, policy is often a source of paradox and surprise. At times, unexpected windows of opportunity occur, typically rarely and only for a limited duration. Critical research of broadly conceived education policy (from its discourses to its impacts) can help us open and make use of those windows.

References

Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-​Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity Press. Biesta, Gert, Ourania, Filippakou, Emma, Wainwright and David, Aldridge. 2019. “Why Educational Research Should Not Just Solve Problems but Should Cause Them as Well.” British Educational Research Journal 45/​1: 1–​4. Burawoy, Michael. 2011. “Redefining the Public University: Global and National Contexts.” In A Manifesto for the Public University, edited by John Holmwood, 27–​41. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Desjardins, Richard, and Rubenson, Kjell. 2009. “The Tension Between Research of Policy and Research for Policy in an Era of of Transnational Policy-​making: An Introduction.” In Research of vs Research for Education Policy. In an Era of Transnational Policy-​making, edited by Richard Desjardins and Kjell Rubenson, 5–​ 18. Saarbrücken: vdm Verlag Dr. Müller. Desjardins, Richard. 2017. Political Economy of Adult Learning Systems. Comparative Study of Strategies, Policies and Constraints. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Field, John. 2006. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. 2., revised edition. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Book. Field, John, Bernhard Schmidt-​Herta, and Andrea Waxenegger, eds. 2016. Universities and Engagement. International Perspectives on Higher Education and Lifelong Learning. London, New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2000. “Etika starostlivosti o sbe samého ako prax svobody.” [Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom] In Moc, subjekt a sexualita. Články a rozhovory [Power, Subject and Sexuality. Papers and Interviews], edited by Michel Foucault, 132–​154. Bratislava: Kalligram. Gibbons, Michael. et al. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: sage.

Politics, Higher and Adult Education, and the Power of Research 139 Griffin, Colin. 2006. “Research and Policy in Lifelong Learning.” International Journal of Lifelong Education 25/​6: 561–​574. Grotlüschen, Anke and Lisanne Heilmann, eds. 2021. Between piaac and the New Literacy Studies. What Adult Education Learn from Large-​scale Assessment without Adopting the Neoliberal Paradigm. Münster, New York: Waxman. Grubb, W. Norton and Lazerson, Marvin. 2006. “The Globalization of Rhetoric and Practice: The Education Gospel and Vocationalism.” In Education, Globalization and Social Change, edited by Hugh Lauder, Phillip Brown, Jo-​Anne Dillabough and A. H. Halsey, 295–​307. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Jarvis, Peter. 2007. Globalisation, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society: Sociological Perspectives. London, New York: Routledge. Lauder, Hugh, Young, Michael, Daniels, Harry, Balarin, Maria and Lowe, John. 2012. “Introduction: Educating for the Knowledge Economy? Critical Perspectives.” In Educating for the Knowledge Economy? Critical Perspectives, edited by Hugh Lauder, Michael Young, Harry Daniels, Maria Balarin and John Lowe, 1–​24. London, New York: Routledge. Lawn, Martin and Sotiria Grek. 2012. Europeanizing Education. Governing a New Policy Space. Oxford: Symposium Books. Mayo, Petr. 1993. “When Does It Work? Freire´s Pedagogy in Context.” Studies in the Education of Adults, 25/​1: 11–​20. Milana, Marcella. 2012. “Political Globalization and the Shift from Adult Education to Lifelong Learning.” European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 3/​2: 103–​117. Mohorčič Špolar, Vida and Holford, John. 2014. “From the Margins to the Mainstream.” In Adult Education Policy and the European Union. Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, edited by Marcella Milana and John Holford, 35–​52. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. “David Strauss, vyznavač a spisovatel.” [David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer] In Nečasové úvahy [Untimely Meditations], edited by Friedrich Nietzsche, 7–​74. Praha: oikoymenh. Pöggeler, Franz, ed. 1990. The State and Adult Education. Historical and Systematical Aspects. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Power, Michael. 1997. The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Slaughter, Sheila and Larry L. Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University. Tett, Lyn and Mary Hamilton, eds. 2019. Resisting Neoliberalism in Education. Local, National and Transnational Perspectives. Bristol: Policy Press.

140 Kopecký Thériault, Virginie. 2019. “Accountability Literacies and Conflictual Cooperation in Community-​based Organisations for Young People in Québec.” In Resisting Neoliberalism in Education. Local, National and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton, 13–​26. Bristol: Policy Press.

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World Research Produced Here and Now: the Czech Case Study Martin Profant Since at least the Second World War, the growth of the number of university students and the development of research and technological capacities has been identified as a criterion for determining a country’s maturity and one of the most important goals of relevant policy agendas.1 The share of public funding of research and development (r&d) on state expenditure is not negligible and the spending in this sphere amounts to a significant percentage of the gdp,2 in the states of the EU, this expenditure is usually higher than the one for defence. Regardless of the many ways in which we can interpret the link between the scientific development and university education with the welfare of the country, this expenditure cannot be overlooked. Science has become an economical issue. If the state, especially in its fiscal role, must venture into this sphere, it necessarily needs corresponding control and rules. The connection of economic and administrative approaches towards science was found in the concept of the competitive ability of a country. Administrative and economic discourse, however, tends towards the colonisation of scientific research as a cultural form largely because science must be open—​not only in research but also in its tense relationship with society. Therefore, science is essentially administratively inscrutable. For science to be easy to work with, it would have to be without losses translated into r&d.

1 This stance is held across various cultural milieus, regardless of their respective political orientations. For example, the Iranian Shah highlighted science and technologies as the driving irreplaceable force of modernisation and competition in his speech at Harvard University (13. June 1968). According to Westad (Westad 2007, 290), Iranian Shah used almost the same words as the ones we read today in the declarations of the Czech Government: “… research, development and innovation are one of the key investments in our country’s future, prosperity and competitiveness, the quality of life of all its inhabitants and a cohesive and resilient society” (Policy Statement of the Government 2022). 2 EU r&d expenditure in 2020 was as follows: 2.3% of the gdp; in the Czech Republic 2.0% of the gdp; oecd 2019: 2.4% of the gdp (the highest levels belonged to Israel with 4.9% of the gdp and Korea with 4.6% of the gdp) (Eurostat 2021).

142 Profant The colonisation of science clashed against the developed cultural confidence of scientific communities, including significant social authorities of universities and research institutions. Since the 1930s, this resistance has taken on the image of an obstinate, although allegedly almost hopeless, endeavour to retain the remains of culture (cf. Horkheimer and Marcuse 1937) against the control of, for instance, market imperative, capitalism and economic genre (in the 1980s, it was already a widely shared locus communis from Habermas and Foucault to Lyotard). The resistance only got into a truly strong defensive position, however, toward the colonisation drive in the last decades of the twentieth century. If we look at r&d from the point of view of the competitive ability of a given country, the phrase “world science” has a clear meaning. It refers to the scientific research and its products that enter the world competition and are successful. Understandably, only texts that are written in the language of world science—​this does not mean texts in any of the world languages but only those in English—​can enter it. However, despite its analogies with economic competition, the most significant one, namely the automatic regulatory function enforced by success or failure in the [free] market, is missing. Thus, the administrators of r&d had to find a replacement for it. In the mix of criteria that substitute the market function, the criterion that a work of a given author be renown and influential in various national milieus, which represent the decisive arena for the administration and funding of scientific research despite the growing importance of international and transnational institutions, has always been significant. However, what manifests itself as respect and declaration of research continuity in the lifeworld of a research community had to be operationalised and rid of concrete connections for the needs of scientific administration. It would, therefore, be made quantifiable through evidence of an unequivocal demonstrable phenomenon, in this case, the citation rate. In the Czech milieu, only two databases are used for the administration of scientific operations—​the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Since 2017, only the Web of Science has been used in the decisive context (Methodology 2018). The importance of the indicators from this database has had a fully dominant significance during the evaluation of the work of Czech research institutions. It is simultaneously viewed as a natural determinateness and the fact that the database was not designed for the needs of public administration is ignored in full. The indexes of these databases have been almost exclusively deciding such a large part of the research funding that they not only determined the chances for decent work but also often governed the very existence of research institutions or individual researchers. The situation has not changed much, not even after the change in research funding in 2017. Understandably, whenever

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someone tries to impose a doctrine-​based operating scheme on a functioning institution, it will trigger an adaptive response. Just take the unacknowledged absurdity of doctrine seriously and adapt to it. I do not want to describe here the practice of enforced citations and the proliferation of predatory journals as it was already described many times in great depth by others, even with regard to the Czech milieu (Štech 2023; Rijcke and Stöckelová 2020). The following text focuses on the pathologies that are instigated by the concept of “world science” constructed from the perspective of competitive ability when it fully ignores the tension between the situatedness of a particular researcher and his work in the historical community of action on the one hand and the ideal world community of interpretation on the other. More precisely, the text addresses the consequences of considering the situatedness of a historical community to be irrelevant, or at most of translating it from the perspective of a community sharing certain partial competitive advantages without taking into account the abysmal inequality of access to the benefits arising from those advantages. Firstly, I shall remind you of some motifs of the modern concept of “world science”. Since the end of the 18th century, this concept has been establishing itself and has been gradually adapted through learning into modern societies. I will use a late and therefore resuming expression of these motifs from the discussion about the non-​self-​evidence of the Czech nation (1). I will use this currently out-​dated concept to discuss the impact of the administratively introduced world universality in the unclear crisis of the post-​national situation (a) on the relationship between science and the cultural public, (b) on the science and education and (c) on the change in the position of science in the public sphere (2).

…

In the late 1960s, there was a lot of thought in Czechoslovakia about how the Czech nation was not “self-​evident”. Milan Kundera, Jan Patočka, Karel Kosík and Václav Havel—​to name at least the most well-​known of the discussants—​ were keenly aware of the incongruity of the subject of their reflections in the context of the Western thinking at that time, to which they then desperately wanted to culturally belong.3 They had also personally experienced not only national socialism but also the communist ideological invoking of Czech 3 From this stemmed the insistent efforts of Karel Kosík and Jan Patočka to highlight the connection between their own thoughts and German classical philosophy. On the motivation for the pronounced Western-​centrism of the whole discussion see: Kundera, 1984.

144 Profant revivalist nationalism in the 1950s. They, therefore, wanted to contemplate the nation in a non-​nationalist way, knowing how paradoxical and hardly accomplishable such a requirement would be. This strange interest in the problem of the nation corresponded with the then concrete Czechoslovakian situation, in which the Soviet form of bureaucratic socialism appeared more and more clearly and as a repressive restriction of the cultural, industrial and, especially, technological, potential of the small country. Sensitivity for these limitations was afterwards amplified by the Soviet occupation in 1968. Reflections on the said striking conditioning entered the period discussions in the form of the world universality of Czechoslovakia reform (for Czechoslovakia reforms to succeed, they need to create and assert a new form of democratic socialism according to Milan Kundera and Ernst Fischer) or as the metaphor of a convex mirror in which Czechoslovakia’s misery is able to reveal, in instructive caricature, the most dangerous features of the (then) contemporary world’s scientific-​technological civilisation (Havel 1991 and Kosík 1993). The metaphor of a convex mirror requires alert ironic distance. The funfair attraction that shows us our reflection in a row of variously shaped mirrors does not have to contribute to our better self-​knowledge by stressing our flaws. On the contrary, it is highly likely from a psychological perspective that mental anorexics will remember from a number of reflections those that make them look fat. Despite this, I will use the metaphor in the following section when I will use the referred discussion about how the Czech nation is not self-​ evident as a late and, therefore, knowledgeable and refined summary of reflections about the ambivalent function of the modern nation. A nation not being self-​evident is the denial of a nation as some natural or God-​given fact. It is also the denial of the notion that interests supra-​individual “anonymous powers”4 (e.g., a political party or a nation) were allowed to be superior to the interests of the individual and their free decision-​making about them. A nation may also be non-​self-​evident due to its size and geopolitical position. A large nation is “automatically secure due to the mere number of its citizens […] it does not torture [itself] with the question of reason and legitimacy of its existence, a large nation is and lasts with crushing self-​evidence” (Kundera 1968, 5). A small nation, on the other hand, must constantly prove its legitimacy through cultural achievements, especially through literature 4 In the words of the almost forgotten author Hubert Gordon Schauer, who first articulated his thoughts about the Czech nation not being self-​evident in 1886 and from whom the discussants deliberately borrowed them some eighty years later.

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and science. Through this requirement, the distinction between national culture and ethnicity is sharply brought to the head. Either we, Czechs, create a “European culture” or a “European folklore” (Liehm 1990, 56). This distinction does not aim to abuse ethnic cultures.5 However, renouncing national culture represents a legitimate and the often most fitting choice. The distinction concerns the claim to which we oblige ourselves when we decide to pursue a nation. A national culture that is not just folklore has to allow those who live in it to transcend with their work, be it artistic or scientific, into the shared world culture. In fact, Kundera draws upon Goethe’s thoughts about world literature and science as being produced by the active joining of national pieces of work through the world public, which is created by the criticism in international journals, reviews and, in particular, through translations (cf. Birus 1995). Kundera, moreover, highlights for a small “non-​self-​evident” nation the necessity of generous creative freedom as well as the necessity to spend a much larger share of public funding on such participation than larger nations. The transcendence to the world universality is not, in itself, what makes a work world-​renown. It is primarily the culture that opens the world and history to the members of a nation. It must be an area where it is possible from the concrete historical and political constellation (i.e., the here and now of the given historical community) to lead a reasonable dialogue between the past and the present. Thus, the nation’s history would be created and the never-​ ending task of uniting a nation’s history with that of the world would be fulfilled. It must make it possible for us to cross eras, continents and language barriers as well as appropriate the individuality of art and world cultures for our situation (cf. Kosík 1993, 73–​75). Only from the perspective of such openness, does it become apparent what it means that the nation is the speech community. The issue is not that it is in accordance with the famous romantic definition of Jacob Grimm: a nation is the “totality of people speaking the same language” (Verhandlungen der Germanisten 1847, 11).6 If people use their language only to communicate about work, trade, shopping and amusement, they represent just the inhabitants of the historyless area facing colonisation (Kosík 1993) whatever it is, inner or outer. However, having a “high” (i.e., codified, script-​linked, educationally transmitted) language in which the “the high culture” in a given area is 5 According to the alleged statement of Saul Bellow, which Taylor rightfully criticised for its arrogance, “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy we will read him” (Taylor 1992, 42). 6 Compare this with the identical-​sounding contemporary definition of speech community in Duden (Sprachgemeinschaft 2006).

146 Profant expressed does not suffice.7 Speech that creates a national speech community must be able to express all, enable us to speak with others across the social classes, different specialisations and achieved levels of education about anything. Furthermore, it must make it possible for us to create a community of humour. Such a requirement directly provokes sociolinguistic corrections. It seems utopic and is evidently counterfactual. A language in which anything can be expressed cannot refute let alone erase steep social and ethnic divisions and contradictions and the fragmentation of the language of modern societies into technical jargons. However, it is not even supposed to. It lies between them as an intermediary. It cannot—​according to the famous quote of Ernest Renan—​ be improvised and exists only as long as it is accepted as an obligation by the active groups of the national speech community, which is often an exhausting obligation. It is doubtful that any researcher whose mother tongue is Czech and whose focus is chemistry needs the Czech names of the elements for their scientific work. The researcher likely already learned Latin ones at a gymnasium or lyceum. He does not even need the masterpiece of Czech chemical nomenclature, in which suffixes express the valence number and, in the case of some groups of elements, their affiliation to the periodic table. Despite this, scientists have for over one hundred years formulated, tested and modified it in accordance with scientific progress and their work has been richly rewarded with the quality of school teaching and popular journalism. On the other side of the spectrum, every average citizen of Prague was able to functionally use hypercorrect elements of the standard Czech language in Žižkov argot, always to a devastatingly mocking effect. However, why should a culturally active person accept such an obligation? In the 19th century, especially in science, joining the Czech allegiance was a matter of individual choice. František Palacký was publishing his most significant works in German until 1848, when he became famous enough to be invited into the Frankfurt Pre-​Parliament. It was not until the spring of the revolutionary year that he published a Czech work, in which he and the poet Karel Jaromír Erben created the modern language of Czech historiography. Masaryk made his habilitation in German in Vienna and then worked in Leipzig and, later, other cities. Therefore, from the perspective of an individual career, claiming allegiance to the small nation was tantamount to nationally motivated folly.

7 Such a standardised language of high culture (e.g., Mandarin Chinese or Oxford English) is considered by Gellner to be a defining feature of the modern nation (Gellner 1997, 29 ff.).

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There is no good answer, only two good arguments for accepting such an obligation. The first is linked with the defence of provincial delay. In other words, against a situation in which we are always catching up with world trends and are therefore always necessarily behind, stumbling to fulfil yesterday’s world universality and falling into the feeling that beauty, science and even home are elsewhere, we find ourselves in the grip of the incongruity (untimeliness) of our own situation. The provinciality of our situation will not disappear if we stop interpreting it as a national situation. In contrast, national culture gives us a chance to express our historical situation—​or in the words of Jan Patočka, “to find our own historical and unique relation to the universal” (Patočka 2006, 333). As an example, Patočka mentions the Czech new wave of movies in the 1960s and the works of Kundera, Vaculík and Škvorecký.8 In these works, the authors express the specific historical experience of a certain historical community, which they could not have expressed without this intersubjective background shared with the model reader. We will return to the problems of provincial delay but for now, we will look at the second argument for accepting the obligation to the non-​self-​evident random community, into which we have equally accidentally been born. We will call it the argument of a spiritual person in accordance with Patočka’s formulation. Talent, education and the sureness of the eye tied in with the sharp wit of opinion—​in other words, the arbitrariness that allows one to become intellectual (i.e., one who makes a living from culture)—​occur only rarely. This rarity predestines dual options of the way of living of such a person. In the professions that offer themselves where one may use ones talents (e.g., as a scientist, man of letters or teacher) one can, by managing of the formal side of things, live from his talents without putting much creative effort into it. Otherwise, one may accept intellectual work truly as a calling with all its solitariness, hard labour and risks of creative work. The polar differentiation of both options—​in Patočka, the first corresponds with an intellectual and the second with a spiritual person—​comes across as Manichean, and Patočka had to defend himself against this impression. The difference is not based on the spiritual person not looking for joy, love and outside recognition of his work as long as it does not impede ones programme. On the contrary, the stark difference lies in parasitism on the spiritual life, in using the freedom of not paying 8 With the distance of half a century, it is necessary to note that it is not significant that only one of the named authors became world-​renowned. All three—​and if such things are measurable then Škvorecký and Vaculík as much as, if not more than, Kundera—​expressed the specific overlap of Czechoslovakia’s situation in the 1960s to the universal, i.e. human and worldwide.

148 Profant ones debt even when one has enough to pay it (see Patočka 2007). Because the accident of talent represents for the spiritual person a task to take over and, with interest, pay off ones debt, to shoulder the responsibility for mediating ones relation to the Spirit and the world in the concrete historical and geographical constellation—​that includes the continuous effort to win people that live in this situation for this responsibility as for something that concerns them, that is their own chance. The period distinctiveness of the figure of the spiritual person reminds us why from principle the definitive answer for the above-​stated question (why should one accept ones obligation to the nation?) is not possible. If such acceptance should be of free will, the accident of birth does not suffice and neither does the fact of socialisation in exactly this concrete community or the tradition and pride in it. The modern nation is, historically speaking, late arising. Through historical learning, it dug out the form of a united, real communication community with its partial interests and group selfishness with its ideal communication community that transcends—​to put it in the words that today seem more appropriate to us than the antiquated word, “Spirit”—​to the post-​conventional identity of a member of an ideal communication community of humankind (Apel 1998).9

…

In the contemporary post-​national situation, the pathos of obligation of a spiritual person sounds entirely old-​fashioned. However, the problem is that if national culture has weakened and become old-​fashioned as privileged a form—​which was used in a large part of the world to integrate the fragmented population uprooted from immediate traditional forms by the process of industrial and social modernisation into contexts of rational lifeworld through national consciousness (Habermas 1998, 117)—​the integration itself, in contrast, has become not only much harder to achieve but also much more

9 In 1990, Apel gave an interview in which he reflected on the national responsibility in connection with the unifying of Germany. The structure of argumentation in many ways overlaps with the one used by Patočka. From the perspective of our paper, there is a significant difference in the Czech interpreters’ disadvantage. Apel, from the point of view of a large (almost self-​evident) nation, highlights the specific situation that follows from the unequal global distribution of wealth, education and technological development, which provide to the individual (as a member of the historical community of European nation) an arbitrary and thus undeserved advantage that binds him as German, Czech, etc to help on global level. Cf. (Brumlik 2020).

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needed, requiring the integration of multicultural diversity (allowing for gender, age, etc.) and that this diversity not be suppressed by integration. If we do not focus on the most significant moment of the post-​national crisis—​that is, on the shaken relation of the legal status of (national) state citizens and their cultural allegiance to the nation, which makes the abstraction of law bearable through localisation in concrete lifeforms as it did in Habermas’s classical approach to post-​nationality—​then, along with the transcendence of the legitimacy of civil rights to human rights—​as we model know it from both large bourgeois revolutions and which still rings out from the relevant constitutional documents of all modern democratic states as well as the Charter of the United Nations—​the overlaps to the world universality referred in the previous part also emerge. This refers to the transcendence to the world universality of individual cultural forms, especially of the arts and sciences, which is so naked in the Czech concept of a “non-​self-​evident nation”.10 In the following section, I want to point out three moments in which this transcendence collides with the evaluation of scientific research from the perspective of competitive ability. a) Science and the cultural public: Disruption of the relationship between the concrete historical community and scientific research as a result of the conditioning of the funding of science according to a world universality, which was determined through citation databases, seems to have an immediate impact exclusively on the humanities. It would better suit our needs to borrow the currently less-​used Geisteswissenschaften (sciences about spirit) or, even better, Richard Rorty’s term “conversational philosophy” and broaden it to “conversational sciences” (Rorty 2007, esp. 129). These sciences are gifted with the blessing of a dual audience. They speak not only to the corresponding community of scholars but also to the public.11 In the ideal case, their work is developed by interpretations originating not only in conversation with the members of other scientific communities but also with literature and art. We cannot, however, lead a conversation in strictly

10

11

This perspective is motivated by very dismal historical reasons. From 1917 until 1993, this nation had been pursued in five different state structures, from which at least two had a policy of refusing citizenship as a principle of the modern nation in favour of the racial concept of the people. There can, of course, be historians, philosophers or sociologists who write papers throughout their lives understandable only for the members of the given community of scholars. However, the meaning of whole disciplines without communication with the audience would be at least suspect.

150 Profant academic language. Metaphors do enter it (no longer merely as unintentional and unwanted defects of the unequivocalness of scientific statements), as do rhetoric shortcuts. In other words, science is in its conversational role. Although this role is, with certainty, obligatory only for the humanities, it is still eagerly accepted for the benefit of the public by all university subjects. In this role, science is bound into the concrete historical speech community. For the transcendence to the world universality, it must rely on translation. Neither poetry nor good historical or philosophical works can be translated literally (or today with the help of DeepL). Translation will always be a demanding performance of poetry or science.12 We already mentioned the provincial delay. If the material options of research and the researcher’s livelihood depend, as in the Czech case, on the index of citations in a certain set of journals published mainly in Anglo-​Saxon countries, then for one’s survival, it is necessary to weaken or fully cut off ties to one’s own speech community. This, however, means that one cannot draw the stimuli and questions from the vigorous debate over their research. On the contrary, one must try and capture the questions and themes from the conversation in which the required journals are grounded, prefer the fashionable methods adjusted to this conversation and use appropriate clichés. Apart from rare exceptions, this adjustment means trying to catch up to yesterday’s world universal and practically never formulating the one of today—​in the best case, however, being at least in contact with it. b) Science and education: The Czech educational law highlights in its preamble the principle of ceaselessly improving education “based on the results achieved in science, research and innovation” and the “free spreading of the findings following from the results of the contemporary state of the knowledge of the world” (Act 561/​2004, §2, (e) and (f)). These principles are shared and codified by perhaps each and every decent state that seems to be understood of and by itself. However, nowhere is or can it be taught according to the immediate and actual results of research. There is always a necessary delay caused by the diversion of

12

For example, the Czech translation of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes by Jan Patočka (and amended by Milan Sobotka half a century later) established a few new terms in the Czech philosophic terminology. The main merit of the translation, however, lay in the conversational significance of the translation. To a man who works with Hegel as a historian of philosophy will not manage with just the translation, but Czech university students, literary scholars, aestheticians, historians and so on have a work for their disposition that not only retains Hegel’s expert statements but also his poetic, humorous and outstanding essayistic talent.

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labour. Even if the teacher was simultaneously an active researcher, the extent of what he or she is supposed to teach would always exceed the area of his subject where he is on the level with the current scientific knowledge. That is not even considering the complex combining of intricate equilibrium and consecutiveness of various subjects. Last but not least is the civic dimension of education. The relationship between teacher and student is always asymmetric and, therefore, it is necessary to ensure that it will not be used to indoctrinate the children. Historically, this gap between the ideal principle and actual school education was bridged over firstly with the use of sense through the enlightened bureaucracy of the absolutist state. Later, the idea to ground school in national culture asserted itself. We call it Humboldtian because Wilhelm von Humboldt in a brilliant shortcut expressed the difference between scientific work and education. While science and especially one that is pursued together by professors and students at university must be understood as a never-​completable task of exploration, the school must, on the contrary, raise and educate students while leaning on the already finished, the completed harmonic whole. This allows them to “implant into pupils’ minds with the help of the smallest number of facts and subjects all knowledge only in such a way that understanding, knowledge, and intellectual work become attractive not through external circumstances, but through their inner precision, harmony, and beauty. To that end, and for the preparatory training of the mind for pure science, mathematics above all else must be used” (Humboldt 2010, 235). The interest that the university has in the best school possible is given by the need the university has for the school to “prepare for it the pupil so purely that he can be physically, morally, and intellectually left to freedom and independence, and, freed from coercion” and he “will bear within himself a yearning to lift himself to science”. (Ibid.) The university representing science is in relation to a school superior to the state, which should leave it alone and ensure that the university can fulfil its role. There is no need to add that a school that prepares pupils in such a way to be “left to freedom” is not only ideal preparation for studies at university but also and mainly for good citizenship. With the change in the position of universities in the second half of the twentieth century, the Humboldtian model stopped being persuasive. Back then, their elite character disappeared, they were no longer educating just a small fragment of the population and, therefore, could no longer link scientific research with all education. The democratisation of entrance to the universities necessarily meant a shift from the scientific community of professors and students to the pedagogic dimension of their relationship. In this case, that is a more important and respect-​deserving reason for the fall of the Humboldtian

152 Profant model than the partial fact that the evaluation of scientific research at universities being evaluated according to citation indexes cannot afford to shoulder the weight that would signify cooperation with creative students. School, however, still cannot operate without the harmonic whole. Without it, the school faces an unending flow of interventions for the benefit of irreconcilable and immeasurable partial interests (e.g., education at primary school should be the shortest possible so the workforce would be competitively cheap; a driver’s license should belong to the pupil’s profile as well as the ability to bookkeep small business, etc.). Political representation adds another dimension to this. For all the chronic problems that go over politicians’ heads, they push for specialised courses in schools—​sexual education (with its small tolerance for sexual dissimilarities), financial literacy (with its problems with execution), ecological education and so on. Universities, too, take part in this disharmonic attack but not where we would expect them since they do not demand upping the standards for failing math lessons and boosting the knowledge of foreign languages—​that is, raising the prerequisites for successful graduation in any university subject. No, they instead strengthen pointless cramming of often obscure facts by demanding purposeless requirements in their useless entrance exams. Education is simultaneously one of the areas brutally threatened by the change of science’s position in the public sphere. For example, to convincingly answer the question of why biology lessons should be taught using the theory of evolution and not creationism,13 we need to acknowledge the privileged right of science to provide the public sphere with mundane knowledge. We can and must rationalise in political philosophy this privileged right of science but that alone would not suffice if it in the historical process of teaching has not asserted itself firstly in modern Western societies and gradually in global civilisation as a widely shared conviction. The civic public of nation-​states and national culture impregnated the conviction to a significant extent and, thus, hindered today’s spread of the populist idea that opinions must not be discriminated against based on genre. Today, science has been left to rust. This is significant because science cannot defend itself by its own means. Science does, however, provide consequent argumentation, but the prerequisites of this reasoning and its chains are too slow for the fast medial sphere demanding statements in an extent of thirty 13

For more information on the extent of this problem in the countries of continental Europe, where the creationistic attack on school curriculums does not have a tradition from twentieth century, as opposed to the United States, see The Dangers of Creationism in Education, 2007.

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words or the duration of one minute. It cannot and may not offer any dogmatic truths but always only ones meant to be overcome by better cognition (i.e., fallible). Just as well, it may not use emotional expressions and images. We have seen the weakened position of science in the proceedings of confrontations with anti-​vaxxers. Even with state administration support, scientific arguments could not persuade a statistically significant part of the population in most developed countries—​not even in a situation where this argumentation was saving lives, literally. The barrier that anti-​vaxxers built from the caricature of scientific methods held up; they successfully usurped the requirement of scientific caution. In a certain sense, there appears again the problem discussed above as the conversational character of the sciences. However, it shows that the need of embedding into the lifeforms of concrete real society is not by far limited only to humanities and social sciences. The corrosion does not only affect what we could, in relation to anti-​vaxxers, call the weakened authority of science but also the freedom of research. Issues like gender equality and the thorough fight against regimes constantly violating human rights are a necessary part of active citizenship in decent countries around the world. Although, we should trust that today every good lead researcher factors in the gender evenness of his research team,this should not—​with regards to this trust—​be enforced by administrative regulations or media pressure. Furthermore, the reliability of the conclusions of a researcher that focuses on an “outlaw state” is lessened if he adjusted these conclusions according to the expectations of the, by hybrid war, polarised mediasphere. In other words, the institutional filter of academic freedom, which does not separate the researcher from activist discussions (as well as ideological and business interests, etc) like the Chinese Wall but makes it possible for one to work with the distance needed for the autonomy of ones work, is a condition sine qua non of research. The metaphor of the convex mirror always leads to pessimism. In our case, it provided us with—​regarding a concrete example of administratively-​ economic colonisation of science in a small provincial area —​a critical record of the concrete weakening and disrupting of the relationship between science and education and between science and the public sphere. Necessarily, the matter is only saving criticism that makes present the significance of ties between scientific knowledge and the concrete historical community as a condition sine qua non of creating the world science through the bordering of national cultures and as a resource of responsibility for man towards the cultural norms he appropriated. It is not possible, however, to now offer contemplations about how to overcome these disruptions. This pessimism can be

154 Profant provisionally accepted only because the shape of the new joining of the local and world universal cannot yet be recognised in the post-​national crisis.

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Act 561/​2004 Sb., from 24th September 2004. Online: https://​www​.msmt​.cz​/dokume​ nty​/skol​sky​-zakon​-ve​-zneni​-ucin​nem​-ode​-dne​-1​-2​-2022, accessed January 20, 2022. Apel, Karl-​Otto. 1998. “Scientistics, hermeneutics and the critique of ideology: outline of a theory of science from a cognitive-​anthropological standpoint”. In Towards a transformation of philosophy, trans. by Glyn Adey and David Frisby, 46–​76. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Birus, Hendrik. 1995. “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur. Eine historische Vergegen­ wärtigung”. In Weltliteratur heute. Konzepte und Perspektiven. Hg. v. Manfred Schmeling (Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Vergleichenden Literatur-​u. Kulturwissenschaft, Bd. 1), 5–​28. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Brumlik, Mischa and Brunkhorst Hauke, “Kontingente Identität und historische Haftung. Ein Gespräch mit Karl-​Otto Apel 1990—​revisited”, Topologik. Issue No 26/​ 2020, 20–​32. Eurostat: r&d expenditure in the EU at 2.3% of gdp in 2020, 2021, accessed January 20, 2022, https://​ec​.eur​opa​.eu​/euros​tat​/en​/web​/produ​cts​-euros​tat​-news​/-​/ddn​ -20211​129​-2​. Gellner, Ernest. 1997. Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. The inclusion of the other: studies in political theory, edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. [Translation of: Die Einbeziehung des Anderen.], Cambridge, Massachusetts: The mit Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Havel, Václav. 1991. “Politics and Conscience”, In Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–​ 1990, trans. et ed. Paul Wilson, 249–​271. New York: Knopf. Horkheimer, Max and Marcuse, Herbert. 1937. Philosophie und kritische Theorie, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung vi, 625–​647. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 2010. “Über die innere und äussere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin”. In Gründungstexte. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt; Mit einer editorischen Notiz von Rüdiger vom Bruch, Festgabe zum 200-​jährigen Jubiläum der Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin, 229–​241. Berlin: Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin Online:https://e​ doc​.hu​-ber​lin​.de​/bitstr​eam​/han​dle​/18452​/5305​/229​.pdf?seque​nce=​1, accesed February 28, 2022. Kosík, Karel. 1993. “Co je střední Evropa”. In Století Markéty Samsové. Praha: Český spisovatel. Kundera, Milan. “Český úděl”. Listy, No 7–​8, 1968, 1–​5.

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The Relevance of Humanities in Masaryk’s System of Sciences Jan Svoboda 1

Introduction: Masaryk’s Programme of Humanity and Democracy

This contribution focuses on the thoughts of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–​ 1937), the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, a state that was established as a new democratic republic after the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918.1 Masaryk was a philosopher by profession and for nearly thirty years, he worked as a professor at the Prague university. In fact, he thus fulfilled the Platonic ideal of the philosopher and statesman like no one else at the time. His modernist approach to humanism and democracy, which brought together positivist science, strictly rational scientific attitude, and a ‘metanarrative’ of a rationally theistic discourse, can be regarded as an impressive attempt to bridge two highly distinct spheres to which individuals in their lives fundamentally relate as conscious subjects: the spheres of science and faith (Svoboda 2023; Grim Feinberg 2019). And in Masaryk’s view, humanities play in this enduring existential relation between a person and objective reality a key role. 2

The Place of Humanities in Masaryk’s System of Sciences

Humanities occupy within Masaryk’s system of sciences a special place. Masaryk focused on ‘spiritual sciences’ (‘Geisteswissenschaften’, meaning ‘sciences of the mind’), that is, especially sciences belonging to the area of psychology and sociology. He also believed himself to be more competent to offer theoretical explanations of this area than of other groups of sciences. He presented the first outline of his system of sciences already in early 1884 in the 1 As the leading representative of the Czech diplomatic resistance in exile and a staunch opponent of the war that broke out after the assassination in Sarajevo and eventually tore apart the Habsburg Empire, Masaryk organised the foreign legions that fought for an independent Czechoslovak state. In 1918, he became the first president of the new Czechoslovak Republic (Hanak 1989; Schmidt-​Hartmann 1984).

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newly established Athenaeum journal, whose creation he initiated and where he functioned as one of the main editors.2 The wide range of subjects the journal covered and quality of the sections to which he contributed as author or co-​author attest to his high erudition in this area of sciences. Masaryk presented a finalised and detailed system of sciences to the Czech public in 1885 in his book Základové konkretné logiky (Foundations of a Concrete Logic), which he then expanded and published two years later in German as a Versuch einer concreten Logik (Svoboda 2015).3 In his books on ‘concrete logic’, Masaryk follows the system of classification of sciences proposed by Auguste Comte –​with some significant exceptions. He modifies Comte’s system from his ‘realistic’ perspective (Masaryk 2001b, 33). Comte’s greatest error was in Masaryk’s view his phenomenalism, a one-​sided focus on the sphere of objective phenomena. That was why Comte considered all sciences to be basically of the same kind, as if they were parts of a single overarching science. Masaryk points out that for instance mathematics, as an endeavour dealing with quantitative relations, is substantively different from the natural sciences. In a similar way, psychology cannot be directly compared with natural sciences, which is what Comte did when he claimed that psychology is part of physiology. This is what Masaryk criticises, stating that ‘Natural and mental phenomena are separated by an abyss’ (Masaryk 2001b, 63).

2 Atheaneum was modelled on the eponymous London journal as well as a number of other important international journals, such as the Deutche Literarzeitung, Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland, Revue critique, or The Critic, which was published in New York. In early 1884, Masaryk signed a contract with the publisher Jan Otto. The Athenaeum set itself the goal of following all scientific activities via reports, essays, and criticism of the best works. Its aim was to mediate the contents of leading scientific journals and inform about current developments in science. The content was not supposed to be classified in the usual way, i.e., by following the way in which sciences belong to various faculties. Instead, it was to follow a ‘natural classification’ of sciences whose basic principles the journal would present (Masaryk 2004, see also Král 2012, 9–​16). 3 Let us add that Masaryk formulated this outline of a conception of philosophy to Czech readership in his Základové konkretné logiky just three years after joining the newly founded Czech university (Masaryk 2001a). Two years later, in 1887, he presented this philosophical proposal of classification and system of sciences in an expanded German version as the Versuch einer concreten Logik. The book was published by Carl Konegen in Vienna and translated by Hubert Gordon Schauer, a literary critic and essayist (as we learn from Jindřich Srovnal’s editorial note). The German version was translated into Czech much later, at the end of the twentieth century, by Karel Berka and Jindřich Srovnal. I use the term ‘Concrete Logic’ to refer jointly to both these works, i.e., both the Czech and the German edition. In this text, however, I rely mostly on the Czech translation of the expanded German edition (Masaryk 2001b). Cf. also (Flint 1904, 272–​283) and (Bliss 1929, 356–​357).

158 Svoboda Masaryk was convinced that Descartes’ anthropocentric position cannot be circumvented in the way proposed by Comte. Following John Stuart Mill and his own Viennese teacher Franz Brentano, he understood psychology as an autonomous science that deals with a specific type of phenomena. His encyclopaedic order of sciences concludes with sociology as one of the ‘spiritual sciences’. One should not, however, view the two as fully separate: it is more accurate to say that sociology is subsumed under psychology. The two sciences are in effect in an interactive, fluent relationship where sociology from its structural position explains the formation of a sphere of action in which a subject, together with other subjects, can find its social self-​realisation. This need for individual self-​realisation takes place against the background of a natural simultaneous influence of social institutions and their components as structured parts of these wholes, whereby each of those parts is at the same time defined functionally (Pauza 2019). Thanks to this effective process of delimitation, where one component is determined by the other, there emerges as a necessary psychological consequence also the social role or purpose of individual members of such society. If it is possible for individuals to improve themselves based on a rational process of realisation of their social function (or functions), then one must also account, in a sociological sense, for the progressive development of their emotional aspect, their most subjective and intrinsic core, which in Masaryk’s view is the source of all ethics. This principial emphasis on the subject and its crucial role in the creation of a social whole necessarily has an impact on Masaryk’s concept of social consensus, by which he means a ‘psychological term for social mutuality’ (Masaryk 2012, 170). Moreover, this functional incorporation of a subject into a network of structural relations in effect reduces sociology to social dynamics, i.e., to a philosophy of history. Based on these considerations, Masaryk can thus in his Concrete Logic claim that psychology is a ‘fundamental’ science and consciousness is a phenomenon sui generis because ‘of ourselves we are certain’. Therefore psychology, and psychology alone, is in Masaryk’s view the path to ‘absolute knowledge’ (Masaryk 2001b, 101–​115). It is thus becoming apparent that Masaryk’s goal goes beyond an encouragement of specialisation, that is, beyond just helping people become exemplary ‘dilletantes’ in a number of sciences (Masaryk 2001b, 194–​195). In fact, the important role assigned to psychology within the system of sciences turns out to have a formative impact on Masaryk’s concept of scientific philosophy as such.

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Masaryk’s Lectures in Practical Philosophy

When reading Masaryk’s university lectures in practical philosophy,4 especially the parts which deal with its metaphysical aspect (cf. Masaryk 2012, 312ff), we can see that the abovementioned subjectivisation of the general system of sciences proposed by Masaryk has further consequences for his conception of psychology. With respect to the functioning of the concept of scientific philosophy, Masaryk did not regard psychology as a separate scientific discipline. Being a fundamental science in the system of sciences, psychology also has an integral metaphysical dimension, which determined the nature of Masaryk’s conception of ethics and ultimately also of religion. He therefore assigned ethics to the sphere of psychology. And at the same time, another feature of Masaryk’s philosophical conception stands out: his prioritisation of conscious moral decision-​making and action. Metaphysics, which provides a general philosophical perspective on the world, has in Masaryk’s view an essentially dual role.5 On the one hand, it provides a functional framework to all sciences, including those which would in the future organically form as autonomous sciences or merge with others to form a new science on the interface of previously existing ones (Svoboda 2017). On the other hand, the specific metaphysical nature of psychology and its prominent position in the hierarchy of sciences predetermines this fundamental science to a role in focusing on essentially integrated and morally conscious individuals, on their ethical practice. It is significant that at the very beginning of the twentieth century Masaryk had definitively declared that ethics is the quintessence of philosophy (Masaryk 1900, 12, see also Masaryk 1902, 2). On the eve of the First World War, Masaryk radicalised his realist outlook and against theism asserted scientific and philosophical anthropism or anthropologism (cf. Masaryk 1961, 209ff, see also Svoboda 2023, 75–​76). Antropologism was to be a philosophical and scientific testimony about persons, individuals 4 Both lectures were presented in academic year 1898/​1899 and transcriptions of their stenotypes were subsequently published by Josef Aubrecht in Prague in 1899. Nevertheless, Masaryk started lecturing on practical philosophy already in 1884/​1885. Due to the novelty of the subject and lack of adequate reading for the course, Masaryk’s students through their own efforts already in 1885 published the first lithographic booklet based on course notes, the Praktická filosofie na základě sociologie (Practical Philosophy on the Basis of Sociology). From an appendix to a book containing a list of Masaryk’s lectures at the Prague university in 1882–​1914, we learn that he held lectures in practical philosophy in the winter term more or less regularly until 1908. After the winter term of 1910/​1911, he no longer held any lectures at the university (cf. Masaryk 2012, 443ff). 5 ‘Philosophy (=​metaphysics) as a scientia generalis’ (cf. Masaryk 2001b, 35).

160 Svoboda who are the true and ultimate object of scientific research and the measure of all things in science. Such individuals moreover find themselves permanently dialogically challenged to transcend themselves and they consciously participate in this transcendence, which thus becomes a necessary precondition and guarantee of a positive future. The aim of Masaryk’s anthropology is thus a well-​considered and responsible effort towards integration of those timeless human philosophical and scientific aims that find their fulfilment in the innermost sphere of human existence. It aims at establishing a functional relation between the realm of fallibility of science and the certainty of faith. This natural need to responsibly achieve one’s conceptual intentions, which always takes the form of concrete actions, thus itself limits human freedom. It is, however, according to Masaryk a positive limitation because it helps motivate people to action, because it enables the maintenance of a ‘good conscience’ (Masaryk 2012, 254). Masaryk strips away from the concept of conscience all earlier irrational connotations and interprets it in a purely psychological context as ‘the habit of looking at things in the same set way’ (Masaryk 2012, 254). It is not about acquiring a habit to accepts things as data of immediate awareness, as raw or ‘brute givens’ (Masaryk 2012, 255, 329, 348). The ‘constant reminding of the self’ Masaryk has in mind always presupposes the question why things are the way they are, because we need to be aware of why we act. Only that way can one responsibly sanction an external authority (Masaryk 2012, 254–​255). This radically differs from casuistry or blind acceptance of the rules of behaviour. Ethical laws should follow from particular sciences, primarily those that deal with the study of humans, that is, mainly sociology and psychology. Sociology, a science almost unknown in Prague when Masaryk started lecturing there, is expected to provide this notion of self-​realisation within practical philosophy with the requisite conceptual framework. Within the coordinates of a society, subjects can find their bearings and become comprehensible to themselves and other coexisting subjects. Masaryk contrasts the need for positive social reflection with blind adherence to a dogma or tradition and offers to subjects a completely new action potential for more mature forms of self-​realisation and appropriate social coordination. The initial assumption based on which the laws of ethics start being determined is, according to Masaryk, the basic sociological supposition that ‘society has always been, it did not emerge’ because it is part of human nature to be a zoon politicon (Masaryk 2012, 115). Society is not merely some abstract entity. In addition to consisting of a plurality of various concrete factors –​be it of the economic, political, religious, or other kinds –​it must also be conceived of as ‘a certain number of homogenous individuals, dependent on each other’s

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assistance’ (Masaryk 2012, 131–​132). What Masaryk has in mind is coexistence that is always deliberate and purposeful, and above all organised, resting on a natural hierarchy, efficient division of labour, and, fully in the spirit of Masaryk’s meliorism, over time increasingly well-​organised (Masaryk 2012, 137–​138). The other precondition for identification, on a scientific basis, of the laws of ethics which ensure the existence of a moral society is that in society, it must be possible to positively develop not only knowledge (reason) but also ethics (emotions). In fact, emotions are in Masaryk’s view the fundamental driving force of all action. Emotions stir reason from its natural lethargy and set up goals which are needed for rational activity to take place. For this reason, it is essential to strive to overcome the natural inclination to low, selfish instincts by developing a higher social feeling, sympathy. This effort to empathise with the inner life of another person can be, depending on its intensity, experienced on different qualitative levels. Aside from passive sympathy, which is used to impose foreign ideas and emotions on a person (and tends to evoke repulsion), Masaryk appreciates active sympathy, sympathy based on a deliberate improvement and rationally moral education of acting subjects. He says that only in this way, the ‘benevolence that is the source of good deeds’ can have the desired positive power to evoke responsibility for our character, the potential to reinforce ‘good’ conscience (Masaryk 2012, 138–​139). In Aristotelian spirit, Masaryk identifies the ‘true’ form of sympathy, the ‘psychological primum’ that sustains society with friendship, because it is friendship that leads to ‘true equality’. The highest level of sympathy is found in altruism, which Masaryk interprets as actions that can achieve the highest possible social level of depersonalisation, because, so to say, what we do for another is as if we did it for ourselves. According to Masaryk, altruistic is that behaviour which embodies Christ’s love of one’s neighbour. This highest level of love then ‘often’ functions as the foundation of social justice, which can, however, be positively developed only by long-​term moral education (Masaryk 2012, 139). The development and mutual cultivation of these hierarchically organised positive values, which emerge as ethical concepts by an exact analysis of society, thus in Masaryk’s view requires effective moral education, a systematic positive ethics. This initial moral intention, which naturally rests on empirical knowledge of the basic human sciences, must be ultimately regulated by a paramount ethical principle that would be able to ‘bestow its blessing upon’ or establish within the context of ethics of natural emotions the ultimate purpose (Masaryk 2012, 264–​265). This ultimate ethical principle or rule, which according to Masaryk ‘enacts itself’ (Masaryk 2012, 254), is identified with the

162 Svoboda ancient, perhaps even pre-​Christian, maxim ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ (Masaryk 2012, 139). In contrast to Auguste Comte, who was the first to use altruism in a one-​ sidedly objectivist sense of ‘living for others’ (‘vivre pour autrui’), because according to Comte this Christian rule in its full wording endorses selfishness, Masaryk, in order to emphasise the positive autonomy of individuals, uses the wording formulated by Christianity. Given that people are essentially social beings, no actions are according to Masaryk more subjective than those which are aimed at one’s surroundings, that is, at an object. Similarly objective (delimited) must be the foundation that underpins the psychology of natural emotion from which ‘human-​to-​human reciprocity’ positively arises. Human lives (‘fates’) are then substantively (pre)determined by these objective social relations –​and that makes us mutually ‘equal’ beings (Masaryk 2012, 266). It is thus well-​justified and highly desirable that we love our fellow beings, because ‘Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself’! Any socially directed emotion thus assumes respect as a natural conscious presupposition, and thus also a deeply conscious (experienced) respect to human reciprocity. Only under this basic moral condition can one thus call the highest ethical rule ‘altruism’, ‘sympathy’, or ‘social love’. No natural inclination to human reciprocity exists on its own, absolutely. It is always, as Masaryk goes on to specify, a matter of ‘an entire mood’ and is therefore ‘an effusion of the whole self’. Each such complex emotional experience according to Masaryk contains a volitional element, which does not allow for the reduction of our emotions to mere instincts. In contrast to psychological abstraction, in the immediately reflected reality we always experience an associative connection of ‘emotion and reason’, whereby Masaryk views their relation as ‘causal’ (Masaryk 2012, 263). Emotions thus continuously affect the intellect, and the intellect affects emotions. Only in this context can one speak of a ‘mental process’ in which a person is present as a ‘psychological totality’. In this context, it also becomes clear why Masaryk does not treat a person as a rational being but, from the perspective of its nature, rather as a ‘reasonable’ being (Masaryk 2012, 264). No emotion can thus be quite arbitrary, no emotion can in virtue of its putative objective neutrality lack its proper rational reason. Emotion is always determined by a concrete purpose, which in the final practical consequence is the ultimate, highest purpose. Achievement of these goals or purposes is therefore always accompanied by a conscious intention that has a motivating role. Masaryk thus prefers the term ‘wanting’ (Masaryk 2012, 297) to speaking

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about ‘free will’. Wanting implies a meaningful decision for the good as the innermost natural motivation that grounds an individual in his or her proper purpose. According to Masaryk, such wanting ‘based on knowledge’ is also to be considered a volitional ability or natural need (‘or want’) to anticipate. This is with a high degree of certainty supported by various evidence, be it statistical evidence in the form of suicides, or aware rational confirmation regarding the immediate subjective relation to the world we live in, that is, the positive conviction that our decision to aid life is more reasonable than trying to hamper its development. The ability to choose based on knowledge is thus from a sociological perspective always guided by a rational awareness of what is more useful for society, what is more beneficial. This positive attitude implies not only a requisite amount of our personal responsibility but also, as Masaryk goes on to state, the basis of our struggle for freedom, which in his view is tantamount to rational consideration of motivations, in his words, to ‘being of two minds about something’ (Masaryk 2012, 301). According to Masaryk, there is no other meaningful psychological proof of internal determinism. On the other hand, Masaryk also emphasises that questions we pose ourselves regarding the potential and scope of our free will also have an essential metaphysical dimension. There must not be any contradiction between internal and external determinism. Although these general questions after the meaning of our existence may lead to a ‘certain sense of resignation’ (Masaryk 2012, 304), in trying to answer them, Masaryk says we are in effect just slightly deflecting them, changing their direction from the perspective of inner determinism towards their objective meaning which emerges from these closely related metaphysical questions. When Masaryk decides for ‘objectivism’, for a ‘unified overall worldview’ (Masaryk 2012, 315), he does so for purely realistic reasons. His aim is to overcome the scepticism and emotional ambivalence of the modern person6 as well as possible factual criticism consisting of charges of ill-​conceived eclecticism 6 Drawing on sociological analyses in which he engaged while still a student in Vienna and Leipzig, Masaryk came to believe that modern humanity was in a deep existential crisis. A characteristic sign of this crisis were the high rates of suicide. Modern, critically thinking people no longer believed in the revealed religion that had been constructed by theology and asserted in the Church dogma. They were losing faith in the idea that there is something that transcends the finiteness of human existence, an idea that was otherwise an assurance of the universal meaning of life. Owing to this ‘self-​alienation’, modern individuals were sliding into a state of pathological subjectivism, which on the one hand left them internally disoriented and morally unmoored and on the other could lead to titanism, which would manifest itself in society as evil, aggression, and war (cf. Masaryk 1970, see also Svoboda 2023, 59–​60).

164 Svoboda or excessive historicism (Masaryk 2012, 314; see also Musil 1997, 319). To adopt a unified worldview, one must be in principle convinced of it, believe in it –​have a credo. This is why our one-​sided tendency to specialisation, our ‘dilettantism’, must be overcome through faith.7 The aim is not, however, to prove faith. The nature of faith in this context is purely practical: it assumes understanding what is good and what is evil. To Masaryk, both good and evil are real parts of this word. Importantly, he notes that ‘a person who chooses the good in matters of good and evil, has God’ (Masaryk 2012, 322–​323). It is thus not so that religion guarantees morality. In Masaryk’s view, religion and morality are two distinct philosophical categories. Even just our historical experiences and their concrete events attest to this fact: ‘The cannibal has a religion, the inquisitor has a religion –​and they sacrifice the lives of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people’ (Masaryk 2012, 322). To live in accordance with religion means to live morally, which is why any religion must be based on morality. This is integrated into the functional foundations of Masaryk’s synergism: one ought to aid God with one’s work while improving oneself (Masaryk 2012, 305). Although Masaryk does not deny that contemporary atheism develops a positive effort to overcome the old religion by morality –​which is after all what he finds in the thoughts of John Stuart Mill and modern socialists –​he, in the spirit of his objectivism, philosophically relies on rational theism (Masaryk 2012, 323–​324). Unlike various atheist thinkers, he sees the essence of religion as residing in the expression of a sense of piety (Masaryk 2012, 193). Piety is inseparable from religion. Piety is not about loving they neighbour; it is a ‘feeling of being dependent on the world’ (Masaryk 2012, 325). And this, according to Masaryk, is something quite different from morality. Although Masaryk does not feel the need to objectively develop this deeply existential thought any further, perhaps we could finish it by stating that piety is a positive experience of gratefulness for there being something and not being nothing. Gratefulness does not destroy or exploit. It is an inner existential need and potential to developing respect to reality, to that which cannot be taken for granted, and in it rests the very core of a religious relation, the religare or religere (Funda 2017).

7 ‘He who has not understood that the ultimate view of the world and life is faith and not knowledge, has not understand life’ (Masaryk 2012, 320).

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The Influence of Positivist Philosophy

In his lectures on practical philosophy, Masaryk made use of his knowledge of the work of Auguste Comte, especially the analyses typical of what is known as Comte’s first ‘philosophical career’ (Pružinec 2008, 67). Masaryk first became familiar with Comte’s thought through the work of John Stuart Mill (Mill 1957; Mandelbaum 1968); this we know from notes Masaryk wrote in 1880–​1881 (Zumr 2000, 313) and it has also been confirmed by František Fajfr (Fajfr 1925, 88–​89) and Josef Ludvík Fischer (Fischer 2013, 457). It is from Mill’s psychologism that Masaryk’s system of the sciences and his realism as a whole derive their particular subjectivist character, as Masaryk tells us himself in the first chapter of his Concrete Logic (Masaryk 2001b, 33). It is equally important to note the fundamental influence that the ethics of David Hume had on Masaryk. He learned a great deal about Hume’s ethics while working on a German translation8 of Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.9 In Masaryk’s introduction to this translation, we read that Masaryk came to Hume, who at that time was commonly considered the ‘father of positivism’, through Auguste Comte (Lenzer 1998; Simon 1972), the founder of sociology (Hume 1883, iii–​i v).10 Masaryk shared with Hume the rejection of all abstract theories that are not grounded in empirical knowledge of reality.11 All knowledge should be strictly 8 9

10

11

This was the second ever translation of this work into German. The translation was published only later, in 1883, in Carl Konegen’s publishing house, but the introduction, dated to July 1882, clearly attests to the work being done during the Viennese period (Hume 1883). In the introduction to a 2003 German translation of this work by Hume we learn that its author, Manfred Kühn, views Masaryk’s second German translation as ‘still readable’ although it does betray some ‘clear traces of its age’. In contrast to the third German translation by Carl Winckler (Hume 1929), which Kühn considers, aside from other shortcomings, ‘often rather loose and inaccurate’, Gerhard Stemminger in his fourth German translation according to Kühn, relies more on Masaryk’s than on Wincler’s translation (Hume 1984). Streminger believes that Winckler, instead of trying to faithfully mediate Hume’s thoughts, aimed rather at contrasting his work with Masaryk’s translation (Hume 2003, xxxii–​xxxiii). ‘Sociology was introduced as a term and first used by the field’s founder, Auguste Comte, in the fourth volume of his essential work Cours de la philosophie positive in 1837 […] Until that time Comte referred to the field by the older term “social physics”, a term introduced by his teacher, C. H. Saint-​Simon’. Comte also used the terms ‘social philosophy’ and ‘political philosophy’ (Petrusek 1999, 1018–​1026). ‘Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation’. (Hume 1912, 7).

166 Svoboda consistent with our usual reasoning and our everyday decision-​making. In this, Masaryk adopted Hume’s activism which rests on the naturalness of human action, on a conviction that people should act in ways that are natural to them. Like Hume, he believed that from our everyday experiences we get all the prerequisites we need to judge what is good and what is bad. The very nature of our spirit, which is what makes a person an object of respect and love or hatred and contempt, attests to this. It is thus not possible to think of values as in terms of essences or independent (absolute) states of a thing. Values are an inseparable part of our psychological processes, they are always associated with cognitive perception, and, from the society’s perspective, also with a natural feeling for a particular value’s utility or justness. This is the source of not only the complexity of these subjective processes but also of their value. The utilitarian focus on what is useful or beneficial to society –​on our being of use to ourselves and to others –​acts to motivate us through the regular experiential associations it generates, associations that evoke in us feelings of joy or sorrow. These natural feelings, whether positive or negative, which allow us to practically orient ourselves, are what creates our daily experience, and we feel no need to examine the reasons for what we feel at a given moment. All morality therefore depends on the convictions –​on the positive belief –​of the person making a moral judgement (Capaldi 1989; Cohon 2001; Flew 1986). Masaryk, however, sought a more objective criterion on which morality should be established than what could be offered by ethical standards based on emotions shared through the feelings of sympathy (Masaryk 2012, 162; Darwall 1994). In this, Masaryk was like Franz Brentano (Moore 1903), who let his conception of ethics to develop into a specific form of rational theism (Funda 1992). On the other hand, it was David Hume’s ideas that made Masaryk’s students feel a gentlemanly quality in him, that feeling of pleasure evoked by the virtues of an educated, well-​mannered, and morally conscious man. This is no surprise. The students whom he was lecturing on ethics-​based practical philosophy during his early days as a professor were mostly students of law. 5

Conclusion

Against the background of these findings, let us thus ask the question that emerges within the philosophical and sociological context outlined above, the question inherent in the name of this contribution: In what ways are humanities in principle different from exact sciences, be it mathematics, life sciences, or sciences dealing with the realm of non-​living nature? Against the background of Masaryk’s conception of ‘spiritual sciences’, it was indisputably

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proven that sociology cannot be reduced to social statistics and psychology cannot be analysed away to a mere sum of mental events and processes of human life. According to Masaryk, the contribution of the ‘spiritual sciences’ is in principle twofold. The first consists in their non-​alienation, in the close connectedness and principal functional collaboration of these sciences. The second aspect is one we could call teleological. Its purpose is not to lose –​against the background of social dynamics and reflections on it which tend to be of the exact kind –​the sight of the original purpose of ‘spiritual sciences’. This last-​named purpose belongs to practical philosophy. It indicates which rules one ought to follow when dealing with other people and must therefore correspond to the real structure of human coexistence: it is ethical. This has certain consequences both for social and political practice and for the interlinked research (Habermas 1988; Honneth 2015; Honneth 2007), which includes the evaluation of humanities and social sciences (Hrubec 2021, 96–​98; Hrubec 2012, 432–​441). Given the growing diversification and general boom of newly forming areas of science and particular studies, it remains a highly relevant question: To what extent is it possible to render humanities quantitatively neutral and strip away their core meaning, the imperative sanction (Višňovský 2021, 19–​25)? It is this principal moral dimension of the ‘spiritual sciences’ that, according to Masaryk, functions as the glue that justifies social existence and therefore also the meaning of this specific area of sciences about humans. It is the focal point of all efforts which cannot be abstractly separated from their innermost mission. And it is this fact that Masaryk bequeathed as a lasting challenge to the future generations of his followers, this insight that became a valuable part of national conceptual legacy, and as such, it should be in the process of evaluation of humanities fully considered.

Acknowledgement

This contribution is an output of research programme ‘Global Conflicts and Local Contexts’, Strategy av21.

References

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Pa rt 3 Research and Education in the Non-​Western World

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­c hapter 11

Social Sciences in Interactions with Latin American Reality Dominika Dinušová 1

Introduction

Research is an important part of social life in Latin America. It has been and continues to be the subject of philosophical debates, professional controversies and disputes concerning its progress, lack of progress, focus, forms of implementation and use. These issues cannot be separated from the social and political developments in the region, which are characterised by an unprecedented dynamic of social change. This chapter examines selected aspects of past and current struggles over the characteristic of the social sciences in Latin America. In most countries and most research in Latin America, the humanities are subsumed under the term social sciences. The chapter presents selected features of the status of the social sciences in the current context, explaining the situation against the backdrop of the historical regional specificities of social development in order to outline the prospects for the implementation of the social sciences in the future. The social sciences have been shaped predominantly in the university field, which is why debates about the nature of research have not infrequently been linked to controversies about the nature of the institutional framework of knowledge –​the university. The social sciences have fulfilled several functions in society: on the one hand, they have played the role of an instrument for the promotion of distorted political interests, on the other hand, they have also constituted an important sphere of critique of social conditions. For these reasons, in analysing the current state of the social sciences in Latin America, attention must also be paid to the tendencies of the development of research in its historical context within broader social interactions. To speak of a new research era does not presuppose a rejection of the old, but its dialectical overcoming, which cannot neglect some social aspects of the development of social sciences in the region.

174 Dinušová 2

Current Forms of Academic Activity in Latin America

Research is closely linked to education and the overall image of knowledge as a framework for a particular social and distorted political practice. Issues concerning the university –​the institutional framework for research inquiry and the transmission of knowledge to students –​are part of current questions about the nature of research. Currently, these questions are linked to the flurry of debates about the phenomenon that some theorists call “academic capitalism”. What Slaughter and Leslie (1997) and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) have called “academic capitalism” touches on the academic environment in general –​research institutions (academies of science) and universities –​and in Latin America it is discussed to a significant extent through the prism of the problems of academic work, the social status of the university, knowledge and the provision of education by universities. Issues of “academic capitalism” have also become a subject of theoretical inquiry in the region in recent decades, but the very notion of academic capitalism is less prevalent in Latin American debates about the nature and perspectives of research, education and the university than in Anglo-​Saxon scholarship. (Brunner, Labrana, Ganga, and Ponce 2019, 13, 14). More than the concept of academic capitalism, the above themes are associated with the concept of “university reform”. The reason for anchoring the issue in this theoretical framework may be the historical tradition expressed in the university reform movement (since 1918). The notion of “university reform” brings together demands for educational innovation, the status of reasearch and the university in close connection with social demands. Current issues in research are linked to the examination of the implementation of what are generally referred to as so-​called neoliberal policies in Latin America, promoted since the 1980s. To understand the realities of the social sciences in Latin America, it is therefore necessary to situate the social sciences –​in both research and educational structures –​within the broader framework of the socio-​economic situation. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, several theorists have pointed to a new situation in the development of capitalism, which they call global capitalism.1 Global capitalism is among other things characterised by deregulation, informalisation and “flexibilization” of labour and by a new round of extensive and intensive expansion. “Extensively, the system expanded through the 1 Since the 1990s, the current stage of capitalism has been referred to as global capitalism, but the question is whether this is not merely a change in historical configurations, with the essence of socio-​economic relations corresponding to the phase of international imperialism. (Dinušová 2013).

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reincorporation of major areas of the former Third and Second worlds into the world capitalist economy, so that by the 1990s no region remained outside the system. Intensively, public and community spheres that formerly lay outside (or buffered from) the logic of market relations (profit making) were commodified and opened up to accumulation through privatization, state deregulation and reregulation, including the extension of intellectual property rights, and so on” (Robinson 2011, 353). One of the spheres in which we may observe the intensive spread of capitalism is the university. The political and ideological denominator of the economic relations of contemporary capitalism in this interpretation is neoliberalism. In the last decade of the twentieth century, so-​called neoliberal reforms were introduced in Latin America that, despite the differences between countries, shared common features. Although these reforms have been largely discussed as “neoliberal”, in some Latin American countries they have been implemented by left-​wing governments in the field of higher education (Ecuador, Chile). At the higher education and research level, three interrelated policies were promoted: reduced public financing, evaluation and quality assurance, and increased tuition and privatisation as a means for providing access. (Rhoades et al. 2004) During this period, Latin America adopted some features of the US form of research, reflected, for example, in the form of quality assurance and accreditation (Rhoades and Sporn, 2002) and in international university rankings, which value the quantity of publications in English, among other things. “These classification systems, backed by a facade of scientific neutrality, have reinforced the hegemonic model of higher education –​the model of the elite Anglo-​Saxon research university –​on a global scale.” (Ordorika and Lloyd 2015, 385). The evaluation of research according to the North American form of research formula has been linked to the allocation of resources to universities and research institutes. A number of national organisations were created to oversee the quality of research. Among the national evaluation bodies, a number of institutions may be mentioned. In Chile, four councils were established: Consejo Superior de Educación (1990), Comisión Nacional de Acreditación Pregrado (1998), and the Sistema Nacional del Aseguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Superior (2002). In Argentina Comisión Nacional de Evaluación y Acreditación Universitaria was established (1995). In Mexico four bodies have been created sice 1989: Comisión Nacional de Evaluación (1989), Comités Interinstitucionales para la Evaluación de la Educación Superior (1991), Centro Nacional de Evaluación (1994), and the Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación (2002). In parallel with the establishment of evaluation institutions, private research institutions and universities have been supported. As governments

176 Dinušová have restricted the support and growth of public institutions, the demand for greater access has been accomodated by the expansion of private institutions of higher education and by new, non-​university institutions. (Rhoades et al. 2002). However, the rise of new private universities in Latin America’s highly socially–​polarised societies and the new benchmarks of research have not created access to quality education for broader segments of the population. Latin American universities serve less than 10% of the population. (Educando, 2021) The enforcement of the aforementioned aspects in research and universities has widened social divisions and made education accessible to better-​off segments of the population and foreign students –​simply put, those who are able to pay for it. The focus of the disciplines supported has tended towards the technical and natural sciences, as disciplines that represent a source of profit production. The market nature of research, the distribution of resources based on quality assessments in line with the imported formula and the prioritisation of the profits that research and education are supposed to produce have also been reflected in the research and education of public universities. The “neoliberal reforms” have directed the efforts of the institution and its educators and researchers towards acquiring external resources in the manner of a commercial company, a participant in the market for goods and services (González 2001). In response to the needs of the market, public institutions seek to acquire external resources through grants or by working directly with monopoly companies. Examples of such alliances in Mexico are the partnerships between Hylsa and the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Cydsa and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Alpro and the Centro de Investigación de Alimentación y Desarollo, Condumex and the Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, and between Industrias Resistol and unam. Among the private universities that combine their primary business interest with the business of education, the network of universities of the Spanish financial group Santander occupies a dominant position in the Hispanic-​American environment (Siera Socorro 2019). As put forward by J. Ornelas Delgado, the “neoliberal paradigm” is based on three fallacies: (1) Higher education must be subject to the demands of the productive sector, that is, the formation of human capital can only be ensured by privatising the sector and opening it completely to foreign capital without any restrictions or social regulation. (2) Only the market guarantees the highest educational quality for the whole system. (3) In particular, higher education must be a private good, that is, its funding is not in the public interest. It is proposed that public universities should disappear or that their participation should be reduced to a minimum in order that the market for this level of

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study might be given over to domestic and foreign private companies (Ornelas Delgado 2009, 96). It should be noted, however, that the current monopoly stage of capitalism is not characterised by the free market, but by a situation in which market competition is dominated by large monopoly companies. In particular, these trends have been reflected in the status and research of the social sciences. In universities, sciences and disciplines that are more directly linked to the market are privileged at the expense of those that are not as competitive and relevant to economic productivity. The social sciences and humanities appear to be useless sciences and disciplines in terms of competitiveness, productivity, economic growth, in short, efficiency. This idea and practice imply a radical separation between basic research and applied research, with largely the latter being prioritised and the former relegated to secondary positions, turning knowledge itself into a commodity (Maldonado 2016). In this environment of commercialisation, which is beginning to characterise the public university, the professional opportunities offered are designed exclusively with labour market demand in mind, as determined by domestic and foreign private companies. Programmes such as art are redefined, becoming courses in product and website design; at other times, with the argument that there is no labour market demand for them, courses such as philosophy or history are abolished. The market rationale thus becomes the overriding determinant of the development of disciplines that are or are not taught, or of research that is or is not undertaken (Ornelas Delgado 2009). It is the social sciences that are called upon and, in terms of their research focus, are competent to reflect on this situation and to provide analysis and proposals for solutions. Research as an object of inquiry appears in the history of social thought in the region, and it is linked to struggles for ideological hegemony as part of the struggles over the shape of the social order. The contemporary critique of “academic capitalism” in Latin America therefore also raises questions related to the overcoming of the socio-​economic order; it is not only concerned with academia, but can be reflected on as part of a broader structure of social relations that need to be overcome. 3

Historical and Philosophical Specificities of the Social Sciences in Latin America

The emphasis on the nature of research as knowledge, a body of knowledge that is passed on to the next generation, is found in the writings of many theorists, and occupies an important position in the social and political philosophy of Latin America. The reason for the interest in education was clearly related

178 Dinušová to the historical specifics of the region, which adopted patterns of education in parallel with the importation of European culture. It is possible to distinguish three major periods of Latin American universities: 1. the colonial period (16th-​ 18th centuries), 2. the republican period (19th century), and 3. the modern period (20th century). (Rodríguez Cruz, 2006) The first period begins with the founding of the University of Santo Domingo (1538) and ends with the creation of the University of León in Nicaragua in 1812, in the context of the beginning of the independence processes in the region. The education, knowledge and educational institutions of the indigenous civilizations were replaced by the form of knowledge of the European feudal world –​with the violent conquista closely related to the ideological control of the conquered territory. As José C. Mariátegui observes, when Spain stopped sending conquistadors with guns to the Americas, it started sending parish priests (Mariátegui 2007). During the first period of university building, institutional power rested primarily on the political-​administrative role of the Crown and the Catholic Church, but also on various religious orders and local civic authorities. In the case of colonial universities, a bifurcated sense of institutional construction developed: On the one hand, by forming the central axis of the evangelizing tasks of the various religious orders that accompanied the military conquerors (Dominicans, Franciscans, and later Jesuits), the first universities became instruments for legitimizing a discourse aimed at conversion to Catholicism as a process of civilizing the Indians; On the other hand, for practical reasons, the universities became centres of civic, intellectual and political education that, with varying degrees of intensity, constituted a mechanism for the construction and legitimation of the status, prestige and power of the Creoles and Spaniards of the peninsula. (Acosta Silva, 2019) This form of scholastic Catholic dogmatism was implemented in a new geographical environment, disregarding the original sources of knowledge and scholarship –​these were denied on the basis of an ideological doctrine widespread in the region until the end of the nineteenth century and known by the thesis of “civilization against barbarism”. The research of indigenous peoples was highlighted by José Martí, who stressed the authentic character of Latin American culture, shaped by a mixture of diverse cultural elements. The emphasis on emancipation in the nineteenth century included the Enlightenment demand for access to education and the need to focus education on the social benefits immediately linked to the development of society. Critique of the university, the Eurocentric focus of education and the disciplines that did not educate the young people for the needs of the Latin American reality thus took centre stage. “Our youth go out into the world wearing Yankee-​or French-​colored glasses and aspire to rule by guesswork a country they do not know. … In the

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newspapers, lecture halls, and academies, the study of the country’s real factors must be carried forward. … The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America from the Incas to the present must be taught in its smallest detail, even if the Greek Archons go untaught. Our own Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours; we need it more” (Martí 2005, 34). The second period begins with the process of independence (1810–​1812), develops throughout the turbulent 19th century in the region, and lasts until the reform movement in the universities of Cordoba, Argentina, in 1918. After the conquest of formal independence in the nineteenth century, the call for a “people’s” university based on Martí’s ideas did not cease. The dependency features of Latin American countries were responsible for the adoption of the cultural and educational patterns of North America. Latin American universities remained closed to the needs of the public and the general population, facing criticism for elitism, alienation and distance from real scientific research for the benefit of society. Martí’s call for the education of the masses so that university graduates might benefit Latin American society was revived in the twentieth century. The practical outcome was the massive spread of the University Reform Movement, which began in 1918 at the University of Córdoba (Argentina). Students spoke out against the European type of university and highlighted the social issues of changing societies. The third period of universities thus begins with the ‘continental consequences’ of the 1918 university reform and the struggles for university autonomy reforms in the region in the broader context of the consolidation of social conditions, and extends into the late 20th century. From Argentina, the University Reform Movement spread throughout Latin America with the aim of orienting the focus of study towards the needs of Latin American realities, making education accessible to the broad masses of the population and linking the academy to the lives of the masses. Gradually, it took on the contours of a political movement in the emancipatory tradition of the struggles for independence, with Marxist intellectuals (Julio A. Mella, José C. Mariátegui, Emilio Frugoni, etc.) becoming its supporters in several Latin American countries. They pointed in particular to the ideological function of the university. “It is the university, of all educational institutions, where the culture of the ruling class is forged, where its minions come out into the wide field of research which it monopolizes” (Mella 1978, 156). Argentine philosopher Héctor P. Agosti notes the techno-​ideological role played by social scientists in capitalist societies. Using the example of technicians, he demonstrates that, in addition to their primary role in the technological process, they also keep an eye on, and supervise, the labourers’ work. By the same token, most intellectuals –​teachers,

180 Dinušová philosophers, and artists –​are involved in improving the dominant ideology. Agosti illustrates this phenomenon by the productivity of intellectual work. Productivity begins when intellectual labour generates profits, which are then appropriated by the capitalists. As an example, Agosti cites the relationship between a physician and a sanatorium owner or a publisher who buys books by a particular author. Agosti observes that this “productivity” engenders allied movements, which struggle for the immediate demands of intellectuals and take on the role of those who ultimately fight for better living conditions for the common people (Agosti 1956, 16). The academic intellectual is a part of a social group which, apart from economic profits, generates ideological profits for the ruling class. If the aim of research is to gather facts and scientific knowledge, to rid it of subjectivism and speculation and ultimately to strive for the best possible use of the scientific knowledge gained in practice (Murdza 2006), Marxist authors show that these functions are not fulfilled by research in capitalist society, and that it is used for the practical purposes of maintaining the class domination of the bourgeoisie. Increasingly, social science teaching and research (taking into account developments in the twentieth century) also fulfilled political functions. Latin American societies constituted a sphere of influence of interest to the United States, which was reflected in several social aspects. According to Hernández Romero, the US government used sociology, psychology and anthropology as instruments of its expansion and domination in the region. The first impulses for these activities appeared during the First World War, and deepened after the Second World War2 (Hernández Romero 2020, 112). Through social science research, data was collected to measure the impact of US foreign policy, certain policies were adapted for specific social issues, and people in countries of interest to US foreign policy were trained or mentored (Davidson 1971). Research projects were funded by the US Department of Defense, often in partnership with universities and research institutes in the United States. They were also funded by private philanthropic foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Duke Endowment, and others, which had a fundamental

2 In 1947, the US Congress passed the National Security Act, which legalised the use of the social sciences in military institutions. In the same year, the US government organised a research commission to organise a board to coordinate a number of research projects in various scientific fields and created a commission that would be devoted primarily to social science research. The Department of Defense organised three research centres devoted to the social sciences in 1949, and the Department of the Army contracted with universities in Washington. The Department of the Navy conducted its own investigations through the Office of Naval Research and the Office of Naval Personnel (Bowers 1971, 56).

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role in the planning and application of Cold War policy. Of these, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation were particularly active in Latin America. Foundations were characterised by the promotion of policies to maintain social order, and their aim was social, economic and cultural influence in different regions of the world (Domhoff 2003). A group of intellectuals from academia was generated that, from positions of scholarly authority, influenced the advancement of the interests of the North American oligarchy. The collection of data from sociological surveys was used in planning political and military strategies. The Camelot project in Chile (1964), Simpático in Colombia (1965), Estudio de Conflicto y Consenso in Venezuela and other countries (1965–​1967), Colonia in Peru (1965) and Marginalidad in Argentina (1969) served the aforementioned purposes. Thus, in capitalist Latin American societies, we observe two functions of academia and the social sciences in particular: an ideological function (to provide legitimacy to the ruling class, to create its ruling ideology, and to justify and direct social consciousness towards acquiescence in the status quo) and a political function (to use knowledge for political and military strategies to maintain or gain dominance). Still, although the university fulfils the above functions in a capitalist society, the social sciences, cultivated in a university setting, have been a source of criticism of the social order, as is readily evidenced by the many theorists who have written widely on questions of the nature, content and institutional framework of education and, more generally, by the historical significance of the University Reform Movement that emerged out of the university. This articulated the demands for educational reform in a broader social dimension –​as participation in the demands for social change of the whole of society. 4

Visions, Alternatives and Prospects

Over the last two decades, academic debates on neoliberalism in Latin America have shifted from evaluations of the drawbacks and virtues of the application of neoliberal policies for achieving socioeconomic development, towards discussions imagining and implementing alternatives (Rodríguez 2021). Thus, today’s debates on the current state of and need for reform in Latin America, in addition to critiquing the status quo, also contain significant perspectives and suggestions on how to define ourselves in relation to this form of research. Contemporary calls for alternatives are based on historical understandings of the status of the public university and the reform of the academic environment in response to social and political practice. Claudio Rama identifies

182 Dinušová historically three university reforms in the Latin American environment. The first is the University Reform or “Reforma de Córdoba” of 1918, which called for academic autonomy, free access and academic self-​government. The second university reform is the introduction of the “neoliberal model” of research, embodied by the mercantilisation and privatisation of the academic environment. This began in the 1980s and was implemented mainly in the 1990s. The third reform of higher education in Latin America is characterised by the internationalisation and evaluation of research quality, trends that may be dated to the first decade of the 21st century. They are immediately related to computerisation, the digitalisation of education and the globalisation of knowledge (Rama 2006). According to several theorists (Maldonado, Socorro, Ornelas Delgado, Mato etc.), Latin American universities need further university reform. The university reform for the third decade of the 21st century must be seen as a socio-​historical project, in an up-​to-​date context, with citizens at the centre of the debate, with their challenges, knowledge and expectations. Therefore, for the coming reform, it is positioned as a university with open doors, flexible in its educational offer, linked to the new territories of the research, in the logic of transdisciplinarity and solid ethical principles and intensely collegial, collaborative and inclusive and in the horizon posed by the learning society. rosario muñoz, marúm espinosa and alvarado nando 2018, 112

Rhoades et al. identify three alternatives as significant projects. One is focused on democratisation, not only of access to higher education but of governance and politics in society. A second project is independent development, not only economically but socially. Finally, a third project is that of sovereignty and cultural distinctiveness. “In pursuing their own distinctive identities, Latin American universities should consider how they might contribute to building new and sovereign cultural identities in their countries, in ways that draw on the past but also look to the future” (Rhoades et al. 2004, 326). The theoretical objectives outlined were translated into practical impulses, and in Latin America today, there are several examples of these opposite trends. Indigenous or intercultural universities have emerged in the last two decades in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador and elsewhere, although such institutions remain the exception and face considerable obstacles. Some governments are also seeking to

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expand access to higher education for disadvantaged groups of the population3 (Ordorika and Lloyd 2021). The demand for university reform today can also be understood in a general framework: in the context of the tradition of the Córdoba movement, as a broad social transformation. At the micro level of research, we observe phenomena directly related to the contemporary capitalist order –​transnationalisation, privatisation, digitisation, individualisation, and the like. There is thus the question of harnessing the transformative critical power of academia in focusing on the “reform” of itself, but at the same time the “reform”4 of society. A century later, we know that universities and other types of Higher Education Institutions, their ethical, political and epistemic bases, as well as their academics, are marked by colonial and racist legacies. A century later, we know that if these bases and practices are not critically reviewed, they continue to reproduce worldviews, beliefs and future projects that update the colonial and racist matrix. mato 2016, 36

Social critique cannot find its starting point in a mere isolated and alienated change in the position of the humanities and social sciences in a given system, but in a change that would be an integral part of the transformation of the social system (Hrubec 2021). The concept of the historical tradition of university reform, which in the twentieth century led to the articulation of claims of social change embodied in the terms “revolutionary university” or “third world university”, transcends the boundaries of academia and becomes one of the domains of broader social change. At the same time, in the conditions of contemporary capitalism, the demand for reform of research –​its implementation, nature and the mode of knowledge transmission –​is an issue that must respond to the current forms of society. It cannot therefore take place in isolation, but must necessarily take place in a society-​wide context and in global interactions. In doing so, however,

3 In 2015, then Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced plans to provide free higher education to 40% of the poorest students, ending a period in which the country had one of the most expensive higher education systems in the world. Similarly, in Brazil, a federal law was passed in 2012 that set quotas for the admission of Afro-​Indian students and graduates of public high schools. By 2017, 63 federal universities (belonging to the country’s leading universities) were to reserve half of all places for these populations. 4 We use this term in the sense of the ambition of social transformation initiated by the University Reform Movement.

184 Dinušová it should not lose sight of the demands of past generations that have not been met –​the authenticity of Latin American research, with content and results that have the potential for real application to the benefit of the population. 5

Conclusion

The university as a centre of knowledge and learning and social science research can be captured in the Latin American realities on two levels. (1) In terms of form and content, they reflect features of the socio-​economic order. They appear as an integral part of it. In this sense, they are the space for the formation of the ideological dominance of the ruling class. The medieval university, imported under colonialism, reproduced the scholastic form of education and legitimised the feudal social order. Under the capitalist socio-​economic order, education under imperialism becomes a means of profit –​financial, ideological and political. In addition to securing the ideological legitimacy of the ruling class, social science research is used to produce political profit –​social science research is oriented towards the acquisition of knowledge suitable for maintaining the status quo, influencing social processes and eliminating potential resistance to the established social order. (Dinuš, 2014) (2) At the same time, however, universities are spaces for the critique of social conditions; through reflection on society and within it the university environment, the social sciences create a breeding ground for ideological struggles over the character of the university itself as institutionalised knowledge as well as over the character of society as a whole. The university is not a passive consumer of social conditions, but in the field of the development of social sciences it is able to overcome these conditions, to act as an active part of social transformation. It is the Latin American region, with its ambition to overcome social deficiencies, that has an inspiring theoretical tradition and practical experience to build on in the struggles for emancipation in the 21st century.

Acknowledgement

The study was produced as part of the scientific project vega MŠVVaŠ and sav, No. 2/​0152/​20 “Developmental trends in contemporary capitalism –​contradictions and conflicts”.

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­c hapter 12

The Marginalization of African Epistemologies Albert Kasanda 1

Introduction

The eruption of the covid-​19 pandemic revealed, among other things, the permanence of conceptual and political aporias underlying the current world ruling system. Aiming to stopping the deadly offensive of this pandemic, most of the measures enacted by global health and political authorities have proven, to a large extent, to rely on a monocultural worldview that marginalises difference and neglects non-​Western epistemologies. This situation is remarkable as regards Africa, for example, where measures specified by the leadership of the World Health Organization (who) seemed more to handicap rather than protect African populations because, inspired by the predominant Western cultural and political paradigm, they paid very little attention to the real conditions of existence for these people. In other words, these measures embodied a Western standard of living thought to be the same for everybody and thus valid everywhere. The lack of attention to African knowledge production paradigm for the benefit of the Western way of thinking can also testify to this universalist claim. In other words, the global covid-​19 response seems to be structured by a kind of conceptual parallelogram based on categories such as universalism, essentialism, and a competitive mindset. Facing such a deployment, a range of African thinkers have denounced the predominance of the Western paradigm of knowledge production as well as they have called for African resistance. Such is the case of thinkers like Mudimbe (1988); Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986; 1993), and Hountondji (2007), to mention but a few. They demand recognition of other possible epistemologies including, for example, indigenous knowledge and the contribution of African researchers to the world and its common epistemological heritage. For want of solid legitimising institutions and in the absence of a coherent theoretical framework, these voices are listened to very little. In some cases, they are qualified as irrational attitudes. In other words, their dissident and critical voices are thrown into the sphere of non-​being and marked with the seal of non-​knowledge. This chapter is a theoretical exploration of the aporias underlying the attempts of the global health leadership to calm down the current world health

188 Kasanda crisis. The chapter aims at unmasking the inadequacy between the universalist principles guiding the global health leadership attitude and the African people daily struggle for life. While reframing incongruities of the African critique of the world ruling system, this analysis pleads for recognition of the plurality of epistemologies and their inclusion. It sustains the requirement of dialogue between multiple epistemologies that express our humankind diversity and richness. The paper divides into two sections. The first section explores the theoretical background of the predominance of the Western epistemological paradigm to the detriment of non-​Western ways to produce knowledge. It focuses on concepts such as monoculturalism and universalism, as they seem to be the key stone of the predominant knowledge production paradigm. The second section investigates the reasons of the hostility of African people regarding the vaccination campaign against sars-​CoV-​2. This section unveils the fallacy qualifying the African reluctance to vaccine of irrational behaviour. It sustains the idea of African resistance to Western hegemony. 2

Exploring the Knowledge Production Background

2.1 The Predominance of the Western Knowledge’s Production Paradigm The eruption of the covid-​19 pandemic surprised everyone as it destabilised life courses across the world. Through its deadly spread, the pandemic plunged the world into deep anguish and unprecedented disarray. Few knew what to do to improve the situation. Describing this period of distress and uncertainty, the Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy, interrogates herself as follows: [Today] who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on a bus, or sending his (her) child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess the related risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician, and prophet? What scientist or doctor doesn’t secretly pray for a miracle? What priest does not submit—​secretly at least—​to science?. arundhati 2020

Leaving aside the debate (already old but still relevant) between religion and science, I maintain that the latter contributed invaluably to slowing down the lethal growth of the covid-​19 pandemic. The different measures taken on this occasion including the lockdown, for example, contributed to curb the spread of the virus. The remarkable courage of healthcare personnel all around

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the world who on the front lines, engaged in the battle against the pandemic, relieving symptoms and healing those who had fallen ill can also be mentioned. In the same way of thinking, it is worth also evoking the quick reaction of the world scientific community to the pandemic, delivering a panoply of materials to fight the virus including, for example, appropriate masks, disinfectant solutions, and searching endlessly for the appropriate vaccines. These strategies and this heroic attitude do not arise ex nihilo. They are anchored in a world view whose methodological rationality they follow. Concretely, it can be reminded the predominance of the Western epistemological paradigm. This paradigm is known for claiming rigorous methodology and objectivity as leading principles when it comes to knowledge production. In this regard, René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) can be considered as cornerstones. The two treaties laid the foundations of a standard claiming to be universalist as they aim at producing scientific knowledge. However, their initial intuition to demarcate access to knowledge so to guarantee its validity and secure verifiable conclusions continues to haunt the scientific world to the present day. As I have already suggested, the almost exclusive commitment of the scientific community to rely on this paradigm to wipe out the pandemic can be viewed as a real leap of faith. However, it should be noted that this commitment is not free from suspicion. It develops in an asymmetrical context where some have everything to say, including the power to decide on the course of the world, while the others have only the ability to submit themselves, putting their bodies and souls at the service of projects designed from elsewhere. Putting things in a different way, I can say that the issue at stake concerns the Western hegemony and its remarkable capacity to hide, to exclude, as well as to enslave the other. Speaking of the relationship between the West and the African continent, I think appropriate to borrow the concept of the ‘colonial library’ coined by Valentin Y. Mudimbe (1988) to express this state of mind. The idea of colonial library does not refer to any building or neither to any physical space. Even less does it refer to works produced during colonisation. More concretely, for Mudimbe, this term is an analytical category aiming at denouncing the power asymmetry between the colonizer and the colonized as the basis of the colonial context. Furthermore, following Wai’s example I can note that This expression is an abstraction for immense body of texts and system of representations that has over the centuries collectively invented, and continue to invent Africa as a paradigm of difference and alterity. wai 2015, 270

190 Kasanda According to Sophie Bessis (2001), the centrality of the Western mode of knowledge production relies on that, standing on its expansionist drive and its desire to dominate the world, the West had proclaimed itself the sole holder of a valid discourse on God, humankind and the world. Therefore, Europe encouraged a kind of scientific exclusivity, putting its own epistemologies at the forefront to the detriment of knowledge held by other peoples across the world. This attitude has had a dual effect. On the one hand, it has contributed to the misunderstanding, belittlement and invalidation of knowledge that is not of Western origin. On the other hand, this behaviour has paved the way for an essentialist and monocultural approach to knowledge production, and which is exclusively rooted in the cultural humus of the West. As already suggested, this kind of epistemology hardly makes room for other potential forms of knowledge, particularly these from non-​Western origin. The Western paradigm is viewed as the standard to which all other forms of epistemology must submit for their recognition and validation. The struggle against the recent pandemic hardly escaped this postulate (Bellissens 2020). The signs of the privilege of the Western epistemological paradigm are noticeable, for example, through conceptual categories underlying the healthcare policy and measures set by the world health leadership. In this respect, it can be noted that very little attention was paid to the non-​ Western ways of life and contexts. This raises the issue concerning the possibility for multiple cultures and their respective epistemologies to develop and to fight together for the well-​being of the humankind. 2.2 The Colonial Library’s Vestiges From the outset, it is worth reminding that two philosophical trends underly our approach to the current health crisis including universalist and mono-​ culturalist ways of thinking. Protagonists of universalist approach consider that universalism postulates the existence of values, moral judgments and behavioural choices that have absolute value as they apply to all of humanity regardless of factors such as the time, the space, and the culture, to mention but a few. This utopia constitutes one of the philosophical foundations of modernity and it is the major substrate of Western political culture (Mbembe 2017). Following Hannah Arendt (1963), I sustain that from the perspective of Western societies this utopia was brought into reality at some point through a few specific episodes of Western history that include both the French and American revolutions. Its concretisation in current institutions remains more than ever the subject of innumerable debates because of, for example, the irruption of multiculturalist consciousness and its subsequent claims for the recognition of difference, particular identities, and political participation

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(Taylor 1992, 41–​99). In this regard, I can observe that the historical experience of non-​Western people contrasts with the evoked Western historical experience. As already explained on the basis of the concept of colonial library, there was not a single room for colonized people to debate on difference and diversity’s recognition. On the contrary, they were supposed to follow processes decided from a transcendental point of view and imposed to them in virtue of self-​proclaimed Western superiority. I think that the idea of universalism as both the expansion and the imposition of the Western world view and its inherent values is sustainable only in a context of unbalanced power relationship. In such a case, universalism becomes synonymous of the manifestation and the imposition of the will of the strongest individual or society (Fornet-​Betancourt 2011). As already pointed out, the historical experiences of slavery, colonialism, civilizing mission, and racial segregation, for example, are illuminating about this perception of universalism. This series of experiences highlight flaws and contradictions underlying the hegemonic perception of universalism. The colonizer considered his own world view and values as universal, that means they were viewed as applicable to the rest of humankind regardless of time, space, and cultural diversity. The famous colonizing mission relied on this principle, as I noted it myself elsewhere: The civilising mission resulted in a double attitude: on the one hand, the will to enslave non-​European people, thus condemning their cultural heritage to the oblivion of history; and, on the other hand, the imposition of Western values and products on the same people who are considered as barbarians, that means they are viewed as people living outside the boundaries of the humankind. kasanda 2013, 202. My translation

As already suggested, the struggle against the Covid-​19 pandemic stood somehow on the universalist premises emphasizing the Western knowledge paradigm. As a result, it can be observed that some measures drawn from this paradigm ignore the African people context and daily realities, since they are taken not only from the top to the button, but also because they stand on a Kantian perspective or transcendental point of view. This turns them into an illusory and essentialist predicament because the life standard and customs are not the same everywhere. The difficulty to apply in Africa measures related to the lockdown and social distancing, for example, is illuminating in this regard. Living in an informal economy that depends for the most part on street activities, such as selling and reselling all sorts of objects, many people saw

192 Kasanda these restrictions as a stifling rather than a saving grace. Between the plague and cholera, they had to choose. It is likely that many chose to ignore these measures, which were well intended but difficult to implement. The postulate that the struggle against the Covid-​19 pandemic is a common fight and therefore should benefit from the experience and expertise of everyone, makes it difficult to understand the want of visibility of African researchers in the battlefield. The international scientific community seems voiceless regarding African attempts. At best, some attempts are derided, simply brushed aside as irrational and superstitious behaviour. Proportionately, it can be observed that this was the treatment of attempts in Tanzania, Burundi, and Madagascar. It is worth noting that Africa’s long experience in fighting epidemics does not seem to inspire anyone in this battle, neither the fact that Africa counts among the regions of the world that have resisted better than many other regions the Covid-​19 pandemic crisis, despite the proven insufficiency of their medical infrastructures. It should be reminded that this contempt is nothing new, since it is part of the colonial mindset characterised by the criminalisation of traditional medicine, the condemnation of witchcraft and indigenous fetishists (Kasanda 2021), who were the pillars that helped African populations resist the onslaught of malaria, sleeping sickness, and many other health crises. According to Florence Bernault (2020), contrary to the stereotypes generated by this colonial mindset, the African experience of fighting epidemics and pandemics is rooted in the African mastery of biomedicine, its knowledge, and techniques, including its fundamentally community-​based modes of action. The patient is not a lonely monad. He is viewed as a member of an immense network configured by visible and invisible forces at the same time. Despite colonial oppression, African biomedical practice also relied on medical pluralism view or the ability to use multiple resources at once to eradicate a pandemic1 The idea of chronic poverty of Africa, and its subsequent want of adequate scientific infrastructures are often evoked to reinforce the universalist prejudice toward this continent. These postulates highlight the antagonism characterizing the colonising structure of the colonial library, as formulated by Mudimbe (1988). This structure opposes modernity versus tradition, civilized versus savage, developed versus underdeveloped, progress versus stagnation,

1 As concerning recent decades, the struggle against Ebola virus, vih/​Aids, and Covid-​19, can be evoked as an illustration.

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to mention but a few. More than that it turns the difference into a principle of exclusion and marginalization. In other words, identity becomes synonymous of the convergence of the same, the sameness. As I observed myself The fundamental postulate of this attitude consists in the quest for coincidence of the same with the same. This is the idea of a totality that is equal to itself: the oneness. The logical matrix according to which A =​A is preponderant here. Consequently, this totality asserts itself as ignorant (…) of any singular reality or of any reality falling under the sign of non-​ identitic. Everything that is not equal to A, and therefore all otherness or diversity (A, B.C, D) is subject to exclusion because it is not absorbed into A. kasanda 2013, 203. My translation

This way of thinking hardly allows both the recognition and the inclusion of the other since it relies on truncated concept of universalism. Its underlying monocultural world view can be considered as an anachronic philosophy in the current era of globalisation. As such, it represents the risk of essentializing humankind diversity. I argue that the concept of universalism underlying most of the measures to fight the pandemic can be considered as based on an asymmetric power relationship. In addition to that, this concept incarnates a transcendental point of view regarding the struggle for life as well as the humankind cultures. It represents at some point a kind of existential trap promoting both the invisibility and marginalization of non-​Western knowledge production paradigm. The predominance of the Western epistemological paradigm constitutes a sign of an epistemic violence. 3

The African Reluctance

The reception of the covid-​19 vaccine was not nor is it yet readily welcomed in Africa. Despite the modest quantity of vaccine doses available on the continent, most African people have yet to be vaccinated. The reasons behind this are multiple, but two principal categories can be pointed to: First, let us evoke the weak technical capacities of many African states regarding the transport and appropriate storage environment of the vaccines in remote areas. Secondly, there has been an increasing hostility among African people to the idea of getting vaccinated. This second category of reason is worth exploring as this attitude does not appear to be an anecdotal behaviour (Grodzicka, 2021). Rather, it is an

194 Kasanda act of legitimate self-​defence against the ruling order—​national government and international community—​whose practice and philosophy do not seem favourable to the interests of the population. To clarify this statement, I explore some aspects of this challenge, including the Western perception of this reluctancy and the way African people themselves perceive the vaccine campaign. 3.1 The African Resistance or Irrational Behaviour? Given the anguish and uncertainty generated by the covid-​19 pandemic, many people, and particularly those from the Global North, consider rejection of the vaccines as simply an expression of an irrational and irresponsible attitude. At issue then is what precisely is meant by this qualification of vaccine refusal as an irrational and irresponsible behaviour. At first glance, nothing seems clear, as both the qualifiers are complex and elusive. Perceived from a narrow perspective, the idea of being irrational puts emphasis on a lack of logic and a desire for coherence. This view can also imply an absence of meaning, reflection, and consciousness. In other words, it focuses on emptiness and non-​being, as it also results in people behaving this way being made invisible. Speaking of irrational behaviour is in opposition to categories such as “normal”, “reasonable”, “rational” or “scientific”, all of which refers to behaviour viewed as favourable by the vaccination campaigns. The proponents of this vision consider “vaccination as a collective risk to immunise the population against a given disease” (Keck 2017, 61). For proponents of this approach, the choice to receive a vaccine relies on a positive assessment that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks. The question is whether the ratio between the benefits and the risks is strong enough to motivate vaccination. But what about freedom of choice? What should we make of the complexity not only as regards human behaviour but also the cultural, political, and economic components of our societies? In this respect, the consideration of risks and benefits as sufficient motivation for people to get vaccinated and, subsequently, to consider their attitude rational represents a type of reductionist attitude. Moreover, this attitude leads to a deep antagonism between pro-​vaccinators (presented as rational subjects) and recalcitrant individuals (designated as irrational subjects). This antagonism obscures nuance and possible alternatives in battling the pandemic. It consecrates the failure of plural thought in favour of a monocultural discourse which ignores, as I have already mentioned, the diversity of sociocultural, economic, and political contexts in which the pandemic develops. Dualism is a reductionist approach to human experience that eschews the theoretical and existential complexity of the way in which African people negotiate both their existence and relationship to the world. The eruption of

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the covid-​19 pandemic and the distrust of Africans as it concerns the vaccination campaign are part of this process. As such, they also include deep roots and complex development. In other words, I would refrain from using principles of desired “rationality” or a state of irrationality to explain the mistrust and resistance of African populations to these vaccines. Instead, I would suggest that their attitude has nothing to do with unconsciousness, incoherence, underdevelopment or simply the absence of (common) sense. To put things positively, it can be maintained that this attitude expresses a critique of Western hegemony. It reflects a new self-​awareness and a longing to build new social and political relationships based on mutual recognition and respect for difference. However, it should be kept in mind that the arguments for this resistance are drawn from different sources and not all of them have the same relevance. The following section sheds light on the relevance of this statement. 3.2 We Are Not Your Guinea Pigs At the beginning of 2020, during the general panic enveloping the world vis-​ à-​vis the pandemic, two statements were made that generated unexpected controversy that would, in a way, feed the African people’s hostility to vaccination. The first statement came from two French scientists, Jean Paul Mira and Camille Locht, and the second was by Dr Jean-​Jacques Muyembe, the Congolese virologist known for spearheading the struggle against Ebola and who is a national leader in the coronavirus task force. In a televised debate, both French researchers suggested testing the effectiveness of the Bacille Calmette-​Guérin (bcg) vaccine for tuberculosis against sars-​CoV-​2 in Africa. “Shouldn’t this study be done in Africa, where there is no treatment, no masks, no resuscitation? This kind of thing is done for some aids studies” reflected Mira. He continued, adding, “We try things with prostitutes because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.” Locht then commented, “You are right, we are thinking about a parallel study in Africa.” Around this same time, while evaluating the achievements of measures related the anti-​c ovid-​19 struggle in Congo (drc), Muyembe declared, “Big institutions [from the United States, Canada, China] are focused on vaccines […]. I think that by May, we will be able already to start clinical tests, […] and maybe around July/​August, we can start doing clinical trials. We have been chosen to do tests, […] we are candidates for doing tests here at home.” Both statements provoked huge protest all around the world. The concerned authors expressed in vain their apologies. Unfortunately, the Pandora’s box had already been opened. On the one hand, the who considered the French researchers’ statements “unacceptable, and representative of both

196 Kasanda old fashioned and of a colonial mindset”. On the other hand, social activists and anti-​vaccine proponents relied on these statements to promote their own rejection of the clinical tests under the famous idiom: “We are not your guinea pigs.” More than just denouncing the African clinical trial project, this dynamic also included the rejection of the covid-​19 vaccine itself. This reluctance relies on a range of arguments, including a critique of Western domination, conspiracy theories, ethical principles, and religious considerations. The idea of not being “guinea pigs” embodies the African people’s fears and expectations with respect to the struggle for life. It recalls Kant’s fundamental ethical formulation according to which one should ever treat the other as a mean to an end. This principle seems at stake in this context. The evoked reasoning of French researchers as well as that of Dr Muyembe’s proposal to conduct the clinical vaccine tests in the drc without previously informing the people seem to be a betrayal of this ethical norm. In the best of the cases, both the attitudes can be viewed as expressing an excessive one-​way use of power, from top to the button. In this respect, there is nothing more rational than denouncing this project and resisting its implementation. In addition, following the same way of thinking, it would be relevant to raise the ethical issue concerning the relationship between both the means and the ends. Does the end justify the means? In case yes, what are the parameters justifying such a probability? I intentionally leave open this questioning. However, I argue that the good faith of the various actors involved in this issue cannot replace the transparency and methodological rigour expected from them. The rejection of the vaccine by several African activists seems to me to be far from anodyne and irrational behaviour. It is somehow an act of self-​assertion as a subject capable of speech and action. In a world marked by the rejection of the other, this act of protest is of great importance, beyond all the arguments that can be evoked in its defence. 4

Concluding Remarks

This analysis relied on the measures to combat the covid-​19 pandemic to denounce the predominance of the Western knowledge production paradigm as well as the exclusion that has faced the African people for decades. The paper pointed to the Western universalist claim and the subsequent monocultural mindset as the leading principles of this attitude. By virtue of a reductive conception of universalism, for example, the cultures and epistemologies of non-​Western peoples, particularly Africans, have been decried, marginalised,

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and even condemned to oblivion. The paper examined this process through the analytical category of colonial library. The vaccination campaign against the covid-​19 pandemic serves as a case study to highlight the aporias underlying the global knowledge system as well as to articulate the meaning of the resistance of African people against Western hegemony, particularly through the reluctance to the vaccine campaign. The paper stated that far from being irrational, this attitude imposes itself as an expression of a new consciousness and the quest for balance in the relationship between the West and Africa.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution, New York: Viking Press. Faber & Faber, 1964; 2nd ed., rev., 1965; Pelican Books, 1973; 1977; re-​print, Penguin Books, 1990. Arundhati, Roi. 2020. “La pandémie est un portail.” In Financial Times, 03 avril (Albert Kasanda´s translation). Bellissens, Anna. 2020. “Covid Organics, le remède malgache contre le coronavirus qui laisse sceptique le monde médical.” In: rtbf.be, April 21, Online:https://​www​ .rtbf​.be​/arti​cle​/covid​-organ​ics​-le​-rem​ede​-malga​che​-con​tre​-le​-coro​navi​rus​-qui​-lai​ sse​-scepti​que​-le​-monde​-medi​cal​-10486​587​. Bermault, Forence. 2020, Some Lessons form the History of Pandemics in Africa. https://​afric​anar​gume​nts​.org​/2020​/06​/some​-less​ons​-from​-the​-hist​ory​-of​-epidem​ ics​-in​-afr​ica​/​. Bessis, Sophie. 2001. L’Occident et les autres. Histoire d’une suprématie. Paris: La Découverte. Fornet-​Betancourt, Raoul. 2011. La philosophie interculturelle. Penser autrement le monde. Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier. (French translation by Albert Kasanda). Grodzicka, Drążkiewicz Elżbieta. 2021. Taking vaccine regret and hesitancy seriously. The role of truth, conspiracy theories, gender relations and trust in the hpv immunisation programmes in Ireland. In: Journal for Cultural Research, online: https://​doi​ .org​/10​.1080​/14797​585​.2021​.1886​422​. Hountondji, Paulin (ed.). 2007. La rationalité, une ou plurielle ? Dakar: codesria/​ unesco. Kasanda, Albert. 2013. Les figures de l’autre. Prismes et gestion de la différence en Afrique. In Kasanda, Albert (ed.). Dialogue interculturel. Cheminer ensemble vers un autre monde possible. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 197–​243. Kasanda, Albert. 2021. De la philosophie et la sorcellerie : une quete de sens d’une réalité complexe. In Léonard Kasanda Lumembu (Mgr), La sorcellerie chez les Baluba

198 Kasanda du Kasayi (rdc). Essai sur la croyance du Buloji-​Mupongo. Paris : L’Harmattan, pp. 17–​29. Keck, Frédéric. “Critiquer la vaccination: monter en généralité ou en singularité ? Commentaire”. Sciences sociales et santé, 2017/​4 (Vol. 35), 61–​67, online : doi: 10.3917/​ sss.354.0061. URL: https://​www​.cairn​.info​/revue​-scien​ces​-socia​les​-et​-sante​-2017​-4​ -page​-61​.htm​. Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durhan and London: Duke University Press. (Traduit par Laurent Dubois). Mudimbe, Valentin Yves. 1988. The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ngugi wa Thsiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Languages in African Literature. London, Nairobi, Harare: James Currey, Heinemann Kenya and Zimbabwe Puublishing House. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1993. Moving the Centre. The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Nairobi, Oxford and New Hampshire: East African Pblishers, James Currey and Heinmann. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalisme. Différence et démocratie. Paris: Flammarion. (Traduit par Denis Armand Canal). Wai, Zubairi. 2015. On the Predicament of Africanist Knowledge: Mudimbe, Gnosis and the Challenge of the Colonial Library. International Journal of Francophone Studies 18, pp. 263–​290. Doi: 101386/​jjfs.182.

Websites

“Lutte contre Covid-​19 au Burundi: la médecine traditionnelle, une alternative crédible et efficace?” In: Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, August 31, 2021. Online: https: //​www​.afro​.who​.int​/fr​/countr​ies​/buru​ndi​/news​/lutte​-con​tre​-covid​-19​-au​-buru​ndi ​-la​-medec​ine​-tra​diti​onne​lle​-une​-alte​rnat​ive​-credi​ble​-et​-effic​ace​.

­c hapter 13

Neoliberalised Research in Contemporary Russia Veronika Sušová-​Salminen Modern societies rely on research and development in many aspects. Research and science are seen as vehicles for change, progress and modernisation. In the past, scientific revolutions were conceptualised as significant sources in the West’s rise, starting in the 1500s (Kuhn 1962). Nevertheless, science, education and research have been at the core of other civilisation’s successes. The West has never had a historical monopoly on innovativeness and research (Hobson 2004). On the other hand, research, science and education have been hugely Westernised over the past three centuries, bringing in another set of problems such as intellectual imperialism (including an imperial division of labour) and academic dependence (Alatas 2000, Alatas 2003) through a framework of epistemic inequalities and existing global hierarchies (Grosfuegel 2009). These problems are especially tangible for non-​Western societies located on the periphery of the global system. The approach to research and knowledge production has changed dramatically under neoliberalism. Despite the sustained general belief in science as a vehicle of (emancipatory) change, research and development has become embedded in neoliberal realities. Neoliberal science is an effort to govern, measure and evaluate knowledge and knowledge-​production according to principles extracted from the market. Consequently, the neoliberalisation of research and knowledge production has brought with it commercialisation and privatisation, and even publicly funded research has become a source of private profit—​unsurprisingly, the contemporary paradigm of public and private business cooperation in research was established in the 1980s in the United States. This science is also based on increased competition and disciplinary methods oriented towards efficiency, often measured in economic terms without regard to particular local social-​economic contexts of doing research. In short, while the belief in science as an endeavour that should serve society persists, the organisation of science is now subjected to market forces that are rent-​and profit-​seeking (Lander 2008, Hrubec and Kopecký 2021). As Wendy Brown observed about contemporary neoliberalism, ‘All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized’ (Brown 2015, 55). Today, science has turned into a vast bureaucratic regime in which

200 Sušová-Salminen researchers still research and innovate but must also fulfil massive agendas related to grants, funding, applications, submissions and reporting. This disciplinary regime is designed to achieve efficiency in economic terms, whereas it is often ineffective from the perspective of the research process. Moreover, neoliberalism in research has also contributed to the construction of the researcher-​entrepreneur, consistent with homo economicus (a prototype of the neoliberal human which, in Foucault’s words, is ‘an entrepreneur of himself’) and neoliberal subjectivity. It has changed the ethos of academia too. Brown, in writing about radical transformation in European and American universities in recent decades, states that ‘rising tuition rates, declining state support, the rise of for-​profit and online education, the remaking of universities through corporate “best practices,” and a growing business culture of “competences” in place of “certificates” have cast the ivory tower of just thirty years ago as anachronistic, expensive and indulgent’ (Brown 2015, 202). In Britain (but elsewhere too) the remaining state funding ‘was tied to a set of academic productivity metrics that measure knowledge according to “impact”’ (Brown 2015, 202). Metrics are oriented towards a return on investment, and the approach to research and education is viewed as a personal investment, reminds Brown further, reducing both to measures of economic advantage (Brown 2015, 202). The neoliberal regime in science is an obstacle in realising the original mission of science—​to serve society as a progressive and emancipating instrument and reflexive mirror. This text focuses on Russian research into the neoliberal frameworks of contemporary Russia, born out of the shock therapy of the early 1990s (Rutland 2013). In it, I concentrate on the perceived role of science in official efforts to modernise Russia and its approaches towards research and development (r&d). The Russian state programme Project 5–​100 will be addressed as a case study in the neoliberalisation of Russian science according to Western normative standards despite Russia’s anti-​Western stance and peripheralised position. I argue that for Russian science, there is a triple challenge related to authoritarian neoliberalism at home, to Russia’s peripheralisation, and to the neo-​patrimonial features of the Russian political and economic system, which create obstacles for meaningful, complete and domestically owned reforms. 1

Putin’s Russia and Its Modernising Dilemmas

Russia is often approached as a state-​capitalist country where the state plays a predominant role in the economy. However, this does not mean that Russia was left outside the neoliberal framework. And this is true for several reasons: (i)

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Neoliberalism does not mean total negation of the state (Harvey 2005). There are many cases in which neoliberalism needs the state’s regulative (and repressive) competencies to deregulate. (ii) Russian capitalism is a composite part of the global economy. As Morris suggests, Russia should be considered a composite part of ‘conjunctural capitalism’ characterised by transnational ‘neoliberal’ economics. He argues that ‘“conjuncture” describes the joining together (albeit unevenly but still in a recognisable pattern) of global processes in a historical moment that can be overlaid on top of state and political differences’ (Morris 2021a, 194). Finally, (iii) the neo-​patrimonial features of the contemporary Russian political economy are not in conflict with the privatising logic of neoliberalism. On the contrary, privatisation and individualism are compatible with neo-​patrimonialism. Moreover, the current economic system of Russia was also formed via accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003), and its typical feature is rent-​seeking—​both constitutive elements of neoliberal capitalism. Modern Russia has experienced dramatic changes over the last hundred years. Almost exactly thirty years ago, the post-​Soviet transformation began. Russia’s transformation was associated with a complete rebuilding of societal institutions and a new relationship between citizens and the state, as well as the private and the public. The transformation was also manifest in dramatic socio-​economic changes such as privatisation and liberalisation. The political reform was promising and helped to build basic democratic institutions in Russia. Nevertheless, the economic reforms turned into social chaos, putting millions on a path towards pauperisation and existential precarity. In Russia, the triple dilemma of transition conceptualised by Offe (1991) was proven especially contractionary compared to the larger post-​socialist region. Market-​ building became one of the main obstacles to stable democracy-​building and state cohesion. As such, it has also negatively impacted Russian scientific potential. The neoliberal reforms proved to be partial and very contractionary in their effects. They resulted in a deep transformational recession that eventually culminated in the loss of some 43% of Russian economic output (gdp). Moreover, the economic and social hardship accompanied the near-​collapse of the state’s functions, including its monopoly over legitimate violence. In the multi-​ethnic context of Russia, there was also a danger of the further dissolution of the federation. Stabilisation and consolidation became objectively the most critical tasks of Vladimir Putin’s administration after 2000 (Tsygankov 2014). Unfortunately, the economic reforms did not lead to necessary structural changes in the Russian economy. Instead, they underlined inherited features such as dependency on natural resources. Russia’s natural resources

202 Sušová-Salminen soon became the subject of competition for control between the newly formed oligarchic class and the state. The essential role of natural resources for the Russian economy also promoted rent-​seeking practices as an important feature. In many aspects, this period also represented Russia’s peripheralisation after the Soviet effort to build an alternative socio-​economic system. Various indicators illustrate this process, including worsening indicators in human development, the gini index and creeping demodernisation (Kagarlitsky 2000, Minakov 2018). As Morris suggests, contemporary Russia is an authoritarian neoliberal economy ruled by the following principles: ‘Its characteristics are the dominant politics of “austerity” (the phobia of fiscal expansion, a continuously residualizing social state) accompanied by the other disciplining factor of real incomes falling over protracted periods; limited social mobility and the privatising of educational opportunity leading to a small plutocratic class or caste; the expansion of indebtedness and precarity in the population; social reproduction as largely responsibilized and privatized; the expansion of the horizons of the rentier alliance between state and capital interests and a modest cementing of multinational corporations’ clout and the intensification of their role in the economy (a process actually accelerated by sanctions) … All watched over by the nascent digital control society’ (Morris 2021b). These are typical features of a neoliberalised economy and society. However, it is crucial to understand them in the Russian context. According to some authors, the recent Russian politico-​economic model can be called neo-​patrimonial (Robinson 2017, Skigin 2017). Neo-​patrimonialism is a system ‘in which personal claims to power are combined with, and complemented, complicated and conflicted by impersonal institutions’. It represents a personalised system established through ‘conflicting modes of organisation and domination, and their legitimisation’, which has primacy over the institutional, social and economic orders (Robinson, 2017: 349). In short, the critical conflict line in understanding the Russian political and economic model is to understand two dynamic and inconsistent processes: one in which the regime controls the state and one in which the state controls the regime (Robinson, 2017, 352). This conflictful condition at the core of Putin’s regime is the primary source of the potential instability. Sakwa offered a very similar idea in his conceptualisation of the fundamental tension between the constitutional state and the administrative regime in Russia, which he labelled a ‘dual state’ (Sakwa 2011). Furthermore, Sakwa noticed another essential feature in Putin’s system, which he calls ‘the state of exception’. As per Sakwa, ‘In Russia, the permanent state of emergency has become the standard for post-​communist normality, while normality is imbued with a permanent sense of the exceptional where it

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is never clear whether constitutional or regime rules will apply’ (Sakwa 2020, 60). The rule by exception gives Putinism an essentially political character and is related to sovereignty as defined by Carl Schmitt—​sovereignty is the prerogative of authority to decide on an exception (Sakwa 2020, 59). As portraited by Naomi Klein, neoliberal shock therapy is another example of the state of exception used in transforming social and economic relations in the crisis context (Klein 2007). In this sense, as Sakwa noticed, Putinism builds on the neoliberal transformation of Russia and represents a clear continuity from the Yeltsin years and from neoliberal paradigms (Sakwa 2020). Post-​Soviet Russia struggles to establish a stable political system embedded in rules and institutions due to systemic and structural problems. These tensions are a source of potential instability and an essential obstacle for successful and complete reforms and modernisation. Robinson suggested that crisis in this new neo-​patrimonial model came after 2008 and culminated in the return of Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin after Dmitry Medvedev’s intermezzo. The ‘tandemocracy’, as he notes, exposed the difference between formal and informal power in Russia. At the same time, the global financial crisis in 2008 demonstrated a limited functionality of the state to build a modern economy (Robinson 2017, 357), and it has produced shifts in the Russian political debate about modernisation, including political modernisation (or controlled liberalisation) as proposed by Medvedev. Moreover, the tandemocracy and failed efforts to liberalise and modernise led to an intra-​establishment (or fractional) conflict as well as civic protests in winter 2011/​12. Thus, this situation created a political crisis endangering the regime’s stability. Putin’s answer to these challenges was primarily reactive; it provoked a ‘cultural turn’ towards conservativism (Robinson 2017). Despite clear political and social conservativism with Russian features, the modernisation aspiration is a consistent part of Russian political debates and Russian policymaking in both early and advanced Putinism. Medvedev and Putin have been associating modernisation with the country’s great power status and economic reform. Indeed, the early 2000s were typical and included a series of policy reforms that were partially consistent with authoritarian modernisation (Gel’man & Starodubtsev 2016). In brief, authoritarian modernisation can be seen as a set of policies that aim to introduce better socio-​economic conditions without democratisation or political reform. It is modernisation from above and in a controlled and primarily depoliticised space. Russia has a long history of authoritarian modernisation, going back to Peter the Great and its substantial reforms under that autocratic system (Mironov 2018). The composite part of modernisation efforts in Russia was the specific internal tension of these reforms. On the one hand, they were based on imitation of

204 Sušová-Salminen Western models and the radical refusal of local traditions. This was, in fact, in conflict with the great power aspirations of the Russian ruling class because it created intellectual dependence on the Western core by acknowledging Western authority. On the other hand, these reforms were driven by the ambition of Russia as a great power vis-​a-​vis the West, which created the next set of problems. The status of great power was and is often seen to sustain Russian civilisational uniqueness in a global world characterised by increased (civilisational) competition (Tsykankov 2014). The internal tension produced by Russian modernisation, a locked in conflict between imitation and authenticity, is one of the features of Russian peripherality (Kagarlitsky 2008). Yet, the next set of problems stems from the Russian political economy and systemic constraints on formulating and implementing successful and complete reforms. The Russian dilemma consists of a political landscape in which institutional weakness and great power aspiration meet with efforts to challenge Western hegemony by applying Western recipes at home. After all, and this is important, the Western great powers are still perceived as models for Russia in many aspects (apart from the sphere of values). With the growing tension in relations with the West, there is an increasing demand for limiting Russian dependence on strategically important sectors, putting pressure on performance. Moreover, the reform is often seen as a regime vehicle for long-​term stability, which has become a mission per se in recent years. Putinist governance realises the need to reform but simultaneously sees it as an instrument for keeping the very fragile status quo. 2

Project 5–​100

This article has no space to analyse thirty years of educational and academic reforms in Russia. Therefore, I limit myself to some notes related to the most critical changes and challenges. Starting with challenges, Russian research suffered dramatically from the socio-​economic crisis of the 1990s. The lack of financial support meant enormous losses for Russian human potential as an inheritor of relatively advanced and successful Soviet science. The drastic deterioration of social and economic conditions led to a brain drain and changed the role of science in society (Allakhveryan & Agamova 2005, Subbotin & Aref 2021). Figure 1 summarizes the overall picture of Russian science’s loss of human potential between 1990–​1998. It also shows that the brain drain started with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was only amplified by shock therapy reforms.

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Neoliberalised Research in Contemporary Russia Researchers and technicians

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1998

­f igure 1  Brain drain in Russia, 1990–​1998 source: allakhverdyan-​a gamova 2005: 55

State consolidation in Russia produced stabilisation and reforms after 2000, though it did not fully recover the human potential of Russian science. Russia introduced a grant system with competitive features and changed the Soviet division of labour between education and research institutions. Recent reforms accentuated the role of universities for research while the staff in Russian academies was reduced in 2006 (Moed-​Maekusova-​Akoev 2018). After 2000, Russia launched a new research and academic/​educational assessment system based on scientometric criteria. However, these measures were often grafted onto the existing bureaucratic system. As Gorokhov writes concerning the situation in the Russian academy, ‘These days we have to keep track of our indicators all the time and ensure that we are in conformity with the virtual reality created by the international bureaucracy as well as our own bureaucracy’ (Gorokhov 2014, 78). Russia also reformed its financing mechanisms for research, introducing (although more modestly) instruments for private business cooperation in research (Dezhina 2011). In 2018, 30% of research was financed from business resources, up 5% from 2010 (Lokhberg et al. 2021). The reform also meant reorganising research centres, especially the Russian academies of sciences, and linking research, innovation and technology with the state policy of development and great power status. This was made evident through the Skolkovo Innovation Center project, and most recently, with the new reorganisation of research centres in Russia (unesco Science Report 2021). The economisation of research has led to the prioritisation of scientific

206 Sušová-Salminen fields (usually related to military and civil technologies). This is clear from recent statistics: about 70% of research expenses were in technical disciplines and 17% in natural sciences in 2018. Just 1.5% of overall research expenses in Russia were spent on social sciences and humanities (Lokhberg et al., 2021). Despite different framing, Medvedev and Putin repeatedly accentuated the role of research and science for Russia as a great power. For instance, Medvedev in his modernising programme Russia, Forward (2009), writes: We, the modern generations of the Russian people, have received a great inheritance—​deserved, won and earned through the hard efforts of our predecessors. Sometimes at the cost of difficult trials and truly terrible sacrifices. We possess a gigantic territory; immense natural riches; a solid industrial potential; an impressive list of outstanding achievements in science, technology, education and art; the glorious history of the army and navy and nuclear weapons; the authority of a great power that has played a significant, and, in some periods, decisive role in events of historic proportions. medvedev 2009

This can be seen as the aspiration for Russia to become a great modern power. Awarding Russian scientists in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin recently (2020) emphasized the very same thing: It is by joining forces that we have always achieved outstanding victories and remarkable results, practically in all fields: in the military, in science, in the arts, in education. And those here in the Kremlin today are undoubtedly representatives of the various groups that have made it possible for Russia to claim and rightly claim to be called a great power. Putin 2020

The regime sees links between science and prestige and between research and the economy. Despite the existing systemic constraints, development and modernisation (reform) are a natural part of the political lexicon in Russia. In the case of great power status, two aspects influence this aspiration: First is its imitative aspect since Russia looks to its Western peers (but increasingly to China) when defining itself as a great power. Second is its competitive character (similar to Peter the Great), for reforms are understood as a means to keep and expand the great power status of Russia as compared to other great powers. Such an endeavour also means maintaining and expanding Russian autonomy and self-​reliance in essential spheres—​Russia continues to maintain and develop military-​focused research. Finally, research and innovation have increasingly been framed by the securitisation trends in Russia (Bagdasaryan 2018).

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A programme called Project 5–​100 is one of the recent examples of reforms in Russian research initiated by the political centre in the Kremlin. The vocabulary chosen to present the project does not step outside the economising neoliberal lexicon. Keywords include ‘maximisation’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘global market of educational services’, ‘production of world-​class intellectual products’, or ‘growth in educational services exports’ (5top100.ru 2021), all showing the high level of economisation. In 2012, President Putin issued Decree No. 599, which set the following aim: ‘that the Russian share of research output (ro) has to reach 2.44% of the global ro, and five Russian universities have to be among the top hundred universities included in one of three world ranking systems in 2015’ (Moed, Markusova & Akoev 2018). This decree was a composite part of Putin’s plan after his return to the Kremlin, collectively called the May Decrees. This set of measures was based on ideas presented by Putin in a series of articles published during the 2011/​2012 election campaign. For instance, in his article “We need a New Economy”, Putin wrote: The development of the innovative character of our economy should start with universities—​both as the centres of fundamental science and as the personnel basis of innovative development. The international competitiveness of our higher education institutions should become our national objective. By 2020, we must have several world-​class universities across the spectrum of modern material and social technologies. This means ensuring sustainable funding for university research teams and the international character of these teams. putin 2012

Putin also promised that financing research from budget resources will increase to as much as 25 billion rub by 2018, while adding that ‘grants should be comparable to those given to scientists in the West’ (Putin 2012). In 2014, Project 5–​100 was launched, and financial support for selected research centres was allocated (44 billion rub between 2013 and 2016). Meanwhile, the Russian government decided on another wave of controversial reforms for Russian science academies in 2013. The governmental decree (2013) that followed defined new assessment rules for Russian research. Any research organisation’s evaluation had to be based on bibliometric indicators: number of papers, citation score and impact factor by Web of Knowledge or Scopus (Moed, Markusova & Akoev 2018). From these examples, it is clear that Russian authorities were applying Western criteria in the reform. The Western norm was seen as a recipe for the success of Russian research while research was perceived as an essential factor in revitalising the Russian economy. Project 5–​100 allocated additional

208 Sušová-Salminen 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5

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­f igure 2  Research and development expenditure (% of gdp) source: world development indicators (2022)

resources for Russian research to be more competitive in the international sphere. Nevertheless, Russia still dedicated relatively modest resources to research and development. As Figure 2 shows, Russian support for research is still lower than in the most developed countries (including Czechia) as well as in China. Despite the ambitious plans, there has been a clear stagnating trend compared with its peers since 1996. The results of Project 5–​100 were mixed. From an output perspective, the number of Russian origin publications has expanded in Scopus and Web of Science, reaching about 2.44% or less depending on various criteria. Nevertheless, there were several factors at play. For instance, Moed, Markusova and Akoev argue that Scopus has substantially expanded its coverage of Russian language journals during the same time period. About three-​quarters of the Russian language journals covered in Scopus in 2016 were not indexed in 2012. This expansion was the main reason why authors cast doubt over the actual effect of output measures on the internationalisation of Russian science (Moed, Markusova & Akoev 2018). In the case of several world university rankings,1 the goal was not reached in 2015 and not in 2021. In fact, the

1 qs World University Ranking, Academic Ranking of World Universities, Center for World University Ranking and Times Higher Education World University Ranking.

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best performing Russian university, Lomonosov Moscow State University, decreased its ranking between those dates. These rankings use Scopus or World of Science indexes for their overall rankings, meaning that the expansion of output did not lead to better performance in these ratings (Lokhberg 2021). The mixed results of the current reforms are also underlined by the continuous decline of researchers in Russia between 2011 and 2020. In this period, Russia has lost 7.5% of its researchers despite still having one of the largest amount of researchers in comparison to other parts of the globe (such as the United States, China and Japan). unesco experts accentuated that the low research financing in Russia was a critical problem in 2021 (unesco Science Report 2021). Once again, the newest national development programmes for the years 2019–​2024 defined the following aims: for education to enter the global top 10 in quality of education, for science to join the top five countries in research performance, to make Russia attractive to leading and young domestic and foreign scientists, and to accelerate the rise in research intensity (Unesco Science Report 2021, 350). 3

Concluding Remarks

In past decades, Russian research, academia and education have been partially neoliberalised, that is, subjected to economising approaches and neoliberal metrics. At the same time, the scientific potential of Russia was significantly weakened by the post-​Soviet transformation of the economy, state and society. The transformation also created new systemic obstacles for structural changes in the political economy and political system, both critical components for successful reforms. Post-​Soviet Russia has been seriously peripheralised economically and politically, suggesting that contemporary Russia was shaped by neoliberal globalisation and cannot be seen as an isolated island. This peripheralised position of Russia objectively challenges its great power aspirations but, as Kagarlitsky suggests, it is also the reason for its selective departures from Western norms (Kagarlitsky 2000). Indeed, there is a link between authoritarian modernisation and Russian peripherality. Russian experience is contradictory in many ways. Despite Russian conservativism, modernisation or reform is still seen as an essential aim of state policy. It is linked with economic renewal and great power status, but it rarely challenges predominant power structures in Russia. Despite relative statism, market mechanisms are accepted within spheres to which they do not traditionally belong. The West and imported standards from the West, are still seen as models that confirm Western authority despite openly articulated anti-​Westernism and the search

210 Sušová-Salminen for authenticity in Russia. The imitative character of these imported reforms also means they are not domestically owned, and they often do not reflect the context and realities of Russian peripheral capitalism.

References

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­c hapter 14

Neoliberal Distortions of Higher Education and Research in India Kanchan Sarker 1

Introduction

The five goals of higher education in India are greater access, equal access (or equity), quality and excellence, relevance and the promotion of social values (Thorat 2006). Higher education allows people to reflect on critical social, economic, cultural, moral, and spiritual issues facing humanity. It contributes to national development through the dissemination of specialised knowledge and skills. Moreover, it is also considered fundamental for both material and spiritual development and serves to further the goals of socialism, secularism, and democracy as enshrined in the Constitution of India (ncert 1993). However, India’s recent neoliberal privatisation of higher education side-​ steps its original goals. Since India started opening its economy in 1991, the pervasive influence of neoliberalism has been seen in all its sectors, including education. Its most significant effects can be seen in the commodification of higher education and the corporatization of post-​secondary institutions, creating a three-​pronged education system that is elitist, standardised, and market-​ oriented. This paper is an attempt to understand the politics of this process. 2

The Problem

Neoliberalism has been defined in many ways. David Harvey in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) provides a wide-​ranging definition of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-​being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices … Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care,

214 Sarker social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks, the state should not venture. harvey 2005

This definition of neoliberalism indicates that where a market does not already exist, one must be created by the state. The market is created to sell commodities; however, education is not a commodity to be bought and sold. One can buy the means to education but not the hard graft of autonomous learning itself. John McMurtry, among others, has noted that education and unfettered capitalism and globalisation hold opposing goals, motivations, methods, and standards of excellence as well as standards of freedom (Hill 2011). Dave Hill argues that the market suppresses critical thought and education itself. The market does promote skills learning but only those which are appropriate to it (Ibid). According to Wendy Brown, “More than mere economic policy, neoliberalism is a governing social and political rationality that submits all human activities, values, institutions, and practices to market principles. It formulates everything in terms of capital investment and appreciation (including and especially humans themselves), whether a teenager building a resume for college, a twenty-​something seeking a mate, a working mother returning to school, or a corporation buying carbon offsets” (Brown 2011). Not so long ago, education was produced and consumed mostly within national boundaries, and this was the reason economists described it as “non-​ traded” (Nayyar 2007). However, the spread of markets and the momentum of globalisation during the past three decades have transformed the world of higher education almost beyond recognition. Market forces, driven by the threat of competition as well as the lure of profit, have led to the emergence of higher education as a core area of business. This was bolstered the technological revolution, which led to a dramatic transformation in distance education as a mode of delivery. “The internet has truly revolutionized how knowledge is communicated. In the world’s most developed economies, the presence of ict s has expanded exponentially and touched all dimensions of the higher education enterprise” (Altbach et al 2009). For example, in India, 18–​20% of enrolment in higher education is in programmes offered by the Indira Gandhi National Open University (ignou) and State Open Universities (Sharma K 2014). According to the accounting firm kpmg, India has also become the second-​largest market for e-​learning after the United States. The sector is expected to reach $1.96 billion by 2021, with about 9.6 million users. That is up from $247 million and around 1.6 users in 2016 (kpmg 2017).

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However, there is another, more serious problem with the corporatisation of education as Tandon notes: Corporations operate on the principles of cost reduction and profit maximization. These require the introduction of standardization and the packaging of the product in a compact, measurable, byte-​like, configuration. Applied to education, these approaches would possibly negate its basic fabric and purpose. The values associated with education have always included encouraging the spirit of openness that represented inquiry, diversity, research, and limitless learning. The corporatization of education has led to sharp polarization in society by dividing the people in the receiving end based on their capacity to purchase the service. tandon 2005

Besides the problems associated with standardisation and accessibility, another problem is the content of education, as explained here by Nayyar: In the realm of higher education, markets and globalization are beginning to influence universities and shape education, not only in terms of what is taught but also in terms of what is researched. In the sphere of teaching, there is a discernible departure from the liberal intellectual tradition where education was about learning across the entire spectrum of disciplines. In the earlier days, the choices of students were shaped by their interests and/​or by the priority of society. There was never a perfect system. Even so, universities endeavoured to strike a balance across disciplines, whether philosophy, languages, economics, mathematics, physics, or life sciences. But this is changing fast, as students and parents display strongly revealed preferences to demand higher education that makes young people employable. The popularity and the availability of courses are thus being shaped by markets …. Similarly, markets are beginning to exercise influence on the research agenda of universities as resources for research in applied life sciences, medicine, engineering, or economics are abundant while resources for research in philosophy, linguistics, history, or literature are scarce as there is a premium on applied research and a discount on theoretical research. nayyar 2007

Thus, good students are not studying basic sciences, social sciences or literature, creating a huge vacuum in basic research. This is now a very common

216 Sarker phenomenon across the world as well as in India (Bevins et al 2005; Varghese 2008; Lyons et al 2010). According to Varghese, “Higher education, in the context of globalization, has become a market-​driven activity to promote an international and multicultural outlook among graduates to suit the requirements of a global labour market centred on knowledge production. Institutions of higher education have not only become global in their orientation and operation but have also become yet another sector offering investment opportunities for producing and selling a good or service for the global market. Market orientation and profitability are replacing the national concerns and social functions of institutions of higher education” (Varghese 2009). Treating education as a tradable commodity, especially in the international market is detrimental to the social fabric of a nation and a step towards the “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 2003) m as well as “Cocacolonization” (Wagnleitner 1994) of culture. The unesco paper “Higher Education in a Globalized Society” (2003) also warned that the emergence of cross-​border higher education provision and trade in education services bring education within the realm of the market, and this may seriously affect the capacity of the state to regulate higher education from a public policy perspective. The declining policy capacity of the state could affect weaker and poorer nations and benefit the more prosperous ones (unesco 2003). We will now investigate the effects of the global education market and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (gats) on the ability of individual countries to make rules autonomously in their education sector. 3

Global Education Market

Education services have become one of the single largest service sectors in terms of shares and employment in many economies worldwide. The $2 trillion global education industry is the second-​largest industry after healthcare in the service sector. The recent annual growth rate of the education market is more than 6%, and globally some 150.6 million students have enrolled in higher education (Altbach et al 2009). The higher education sector is the most rapidly growing sector in education services, employing about 3.5 million people, and the total addressable global offspring education market is approximately $300 billion (goi 2006). The global higher education market size was $ 1,090.87 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $2,367.51 billion by 2027, exhibiting a cagr of 10.2% during the forecast period (Fortune Business

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Insights 2021). With approximately more than 100 million people in the age bracket of 18 to 23 years, the higher education industry in India is expected to increase to $ 35.03 billion by 2025 (goi 2020). Thus, it is understandable that this is a very attractive market for private investment. 4

World Trade Organization and Education

In this section, we will discuss the World Trade Organization’s (wto) mandate for education services, which will help us to understand member countries’ obligation to open education services to foreign investment and its implications. wto was established in 1995 to make international trade easier. It is a replacement for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), established after the Second World War along with other two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (imf). The wto agreements cover goods, services, and intellectual property. They spell out the principles of liberalisation and the permitted exceptions. They include individual countries’ commitments to lower customs tariffs and other trade barriers and to open and keep open services markets. The underlying intention of the wto is to open the vast market of developing countries to the goods and services of developed countries. The wto has agreements on three broad areas of international trade: the gatt for trade in goods, the gats for trade in services, and the Agreement on Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (trips) for trade and investment in ideas and creativity. The gats covers 12 service sectors, including education. The wto has now 164 members. These member countries could make individual commitments under the gats stating which of their services sectors they are willing to open to foreign competition and how to open those markets. However, trade in the service sector has seen not seen much progress. Higher education services seem to be the least committed sector—​so far, only 64 countries have made commitments to the education sector under the wto. Article I.3 of the gats defines the scope of the agreement as follows: “Services” include “any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority;” and “a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority” means “any service which is supplied neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more service suppliers.”

218 Sarker There is ambiguity as to whether the public post-​secondary sector would be subject to the gats. If the public post-​secondary sector were found to be providing education “on a commercial basis”, or if it were found to be providing education “in competition with one or more service suppliers”, then it is not a “service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority” and would be subject to the full provisions of the gats. The phrase “commercial basis” is not further defined in the gats and would thus be subject to interpretation by a gats dispute panel. The argument has been made that public universities and colleges that charge more than token tuition fees are providing education on a commercial basis. On the question of public institutions operating “in competition with one or more service suppliers”, there are a great many private providers of post-​ secondary education and training in almost all the countries, and thus public institutions would be subject to the gats provisions. The gats defines services trade as occurring via four modes of supply, all of which are relevant to education (Article xxvii): –​ Mode 1: Cross border delivery—​delivery of education services via the internet. –​ Mode 2: Consumption abroad—​movement of students from one country to another for higher education. –​ Mode 3: Commercial presence—​establishment of local branch campuses or subsidiaries by foreign universities in other countries, course offerings by domestic private colleges leading to degrees at foreign universities, twinning arrangements, franchising. –​ Mode 4: Presence of natural persons—​temporary movement of teachers, lecturers and education personnel to provide education services overseas. There are some other particularly important issues like the principles of market access, most favoured nation (mfn) and the notion of national treatment. Market access means the degree to which market access is granted to foreign providers in specific sectors. An individual country determines limitations on market access for each committed sector. The principle of the most favoured nation implies that each member treats all the other members equally as the “most-​favoured” trading partners. If a country improves the benefits it gives to one trading partner, it must give the same “best” treatment to all the other wto members so that they all remain “most favoured”. The notion of national treatment implies an obligation to treat both foreign and domestic service suppliers in the same manner. Thus, it is implied that a foreign education institution can demand subsidies like those received by public universities/​colleges in a country.

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However, “there are two options to protect public post-​secondary education from the full provisions of the gats”, as Clift (1999) suggests. One, he suggests closing the doors to private providers in higher education and declaring higher education a government monopoly. This would not be defensible in international trade law should there be any existence of private institutions in higher education. Thus, the only way to protect public post-​secondary education from gats treatment is to withdraw it entirely from the provisions of the agreement. That is, the national government would have to indicate in trade discussions that the higher education sector was subject to an unbound exemption from the gats. An unbound exemption means that no commitments have been made to include a particular sector in the gats provisions and that the government has maintained its ability to regulate the sector as it sees fit, despite the general principles of the gats. 5

The Indian Scenario

India is the second-​largest higher education system in the world (after China) in terms of the absolute number of enrolments, 38.5 million, and it is the largest in terms of the number of institutions with 55,165 post-​secondary institutions made up of 1,043 universities, 42,343 colleges and 11,779 stand-​alone institutions1 (goi 2020). Close to 40% of the universities and more than three-​fourths of the colleges and stand-​alone institutions are privately managed. Only 10% of the universities and close to 60% of the colleges and stand-​alone institutions are situated in rural India. Seven universities and close 11% of the colleges are exclusively for women, with women constituting 49% of total enrolment (ibid). Approximately 66% of student enrolment in colleges is in private institutions; the remaining 33% are accommodated in institutions that are either publicly funded or receive some aid from the government.1 Private university enrolment meanwhile increased by more than 71% between 2015–​19, whereas public university enrolment increased only by 11% during the same period, a significant trend. Because of this, the enrolment share in private universities increased from 18% in 2015–​16 to 24.5% in 2019–​ 20 (Ibid). Even with such a huge system in place, higher education in India is in a depressed condition. Even after nearly seven and half decades of independence, 1 Stand-​alone institutions are diploma-​level technical or professional institutes.

220 Sarker the gross enrolment ratio (ger) in India is lower (29%) than the world average (40%) and middle-​income countries like China (50%). This poses a severe constraint on the supply of qualified manpower. In addition to the overall low ger, there are significant differences in enrolment ratios across regions, provinces, rural-​urban, male-​female, social groups, occupation groups and the poor and non-​poor populations in India (Thorat 2006; goi 2012). This contradicts one of the goals of higher education in India—​equal access. While the enrolments of girl and Scheduled Castes1 students (49% and 14.7%) match their share in the total population (48% and 16.6%), the enrolments of Scheduled Tribes2 and Muslim students (5.6% and 5.5%) are abysmally low, particularly for the latter, in comparison to their share in the general population (8.6% and 14%) (Ibid). Enrolment does speak to equity, but access to quality institutions also matters significantly: the quality of post-​secondary institutions in India varies widely across the country, especially between urban and rural institutions as well as between public and private institutions. The central and provincial governments share responsibility for financing higher education as education is listed in the concurrent list of the Indian constitution. However, “nearly 50% of the higher education expenditure comes from private sources” (Agarwal 2006)2,3. India has one of the lowest public expenditures on higher education per student and ranks 62nd globally (Financial Express 2019). At $406 per student, the country compares unfavourably even with developing countries like Malaysia ($11,790), China ($2,728), Brazil ($3,986), Indonesia ($666) and the Philippines ($625) (Sharma K 2007). In the period from 1990–​91 to 2004–​05, government expenditure on higher education fell from 0.46% to 0.37% for a total of 3.72% spending on education as a percentage of gdp (Sharma V 2007). In fact, per student, in real terms there was a 28% decline in public expenditure from 1990–​91 to 2002–​03, coinciding with the liberalisation of the Indian economy (Mukherjee 2008). At present, the central government spends 3.1% of India’s gdp on education, and with all the provincial government’s spending, total spending is around 4.6 % of the gdp in 2020, which is still a long way from reaching the 6% spending on education proposed in the first Education Policy of India from 1968. This low spending on higher education is severely affecting the quality of education. A 2011 report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ficci) states that there are huge faculty shortages: 45% of 2 Scheduled Castes (sc) represent the lowest group in the caste hierarchy. 3 Scheduled Tribes (st) traditional tribal people.

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professor positions, 51% of reader positions, and 53% lecturer positions were vacant in Indian universities in 2007–​08; 48% of universities and 69% of colleges have the deficient infrastructure and the system is plagued with outdated curricula and ill-​equipped libraries (average 9 books per student vs. 53 in iit Bombay) (ficci 2011). Universities and colleges are run by part-​time and temporary teachers who are paid only a paltry inr 5–​10,000 against the inr 50,000 per month salary of an assistant professor—​40% of college teachers are temporary in India (toi 2013). This is a persistent situation. In 2018, the total vacancies in new central universities are nearly 48%; the older universities are better off with 33% vacancies (The Wire 2018). This was admitted by the hrd Minister Mr. Prakash Javadekar, who stated in 2019 that there were 40% vacancies in central universities and Indian Institutes of Technology (iit) for faculty members (eduvoice 2019). It is therefore beyond a doubt that India is facing multiple problems in the higher education sector, and the incidences of low public spending and low ger, as well as wide variations across different groups, are signs and symptoms. This is reinforced by the fact that India is also witnessing the harsh reality of growing unemployment among graduates that co-​exist with skill shortages in many areas. According to the Labour Bureau’s Third Annual Employment and Unemployment Survey 2012–​13, unemployment amongst graduates rose from 19.4% in 2011–​2012 to 32% in 2012–​2013 (goi 2013). The situation has not changed much. 15–​20% of Indian graduates were unemployed in 2018, before the pandemic (apu 2019). The emergence of the neoliberal global economy; its increased trade, investment, mobility of people, and more recently, work across borders; have forced nation-​states to adapt their systems of higher education to the changed global realities. Public institutions without adequate funds to hire good faculty, offer scholarships to disadvantaged groups and expand enrolment are finding it harder to meet the growing demand. Thus, there is a steep hill to climb. To fulfill this ambition in accordance with the goals of higher education in India, in the Eleventh Five-​Year Plan (2007–​12), which was described as an “educational plan”, allocation to higher education was scaled up and major expansion was planned. As many as 30 new central universities were to be established, 6 new Indian Institutes of Management, 7 Indian Institutes of Technology, 20 National Institutes of Technology, 4 Indian Institutes of Information Technology, nearly 2,000 engineering and technology colleges, 1,300 polytechnics, 400 undergraduate colleges and many other institutions (Tilak 2012). However, the government aims to realise the promised expansion of higher education with the active participation of the private sector and through various modes of public-​private participation (ppp). According

222 Sarker to India’s Planning Commission, 88% of the funds required for the expansion were to be generated through different modes of ppp. The approach paper to the Twelfth Five–​Year Plan (2012–​17) states, “Private initiatives in higher education, including viable and innovative ppp models, will therefore be actively promoted. The current ‘non-​profit’ prescription in the education sector should be re-​examined in a pragmatic matter” (Ibid). The country’s National Knowledge Commission (nkc) has recommended diversifying financing sources to encourage private participation, philanthropic contributions and industry linkages in addition to increased public spending in higher education (nkc 2010). 6

India and the gats

Since this huge amount cannot be provided by the existing public financing, and under pressure from international trade along with domestic economic compulsions, the Ministry of Commerce has been arguing that the higher education sector in India should be “freed” and the country doors be opened to foreign investment. This prompted the Government of India’s approval in April 2000 of 100% automatic foreign direct investment (fdi) in higher education. Foreign educational service providers can now enter India without any regulation if they do not want recognition from the University Grants Commission (ugc)1 or the All India Council for Higher Education (aicte).2 India also included higher education services in its revised offer to the gats in August 2005. However, it was later withdrawn possibly due to differences between the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Ministry of Commerce. Besides this, the Government of India also introduced the Foreign Education Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operation) Bill in 2010 to the parliament and was very keen to pass it. The bill sought to regulate the entry and operation of foreign institutions intent on establishing centres and offering degrees in India. Despite 100%, automatic fdi permitted in higher education since 2000, as mentioned above, this did not allow degrees to be granted by foreign educational institutions from abroad. The 2010 bill was meant to clear this obstacle. However, the opposition, presumably the leftist parties and other non-​congress parties, repeatedly postponed the bill’s tabling4,5. 4 The University Grants Commission (ugc) is the central government statutory authority, has responsibility for nationwide standard-​setting and coordination for universities and non-​ specialized colleges 5 All India Council for Technical Education (aicte) performs similar functions for technical colleges.

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According to the left parties, allowing fdi and foreign teaching staff into the country would distort the already elitist educational structure in the country. It would make education more commercial, and there would be no regulation or control over such institutions. One important concern about this bill was that the quota (reservations for backward sections of the society) laws would not be applicable to foreign universities setting up campuses in India. The proposal was sent for study to a parliamentary committee and was never revived because the United Progressive Alliance (upa; led by the Indian National Congress), governing at the time, did not have the numbers to get it cleared in the Rajya Sabha (India’s upper house of parliament). Thus, as the former upa government was unsure whether it would be able to pass the bill in parliament, the hrd ministry asked ugc to identify possibilities within the existing laws of regulating and allowing the foreign educational institutions. The two possible ways of going about it are allowing these institutions to enter as “deemed universities” under Section 3 of the ugc Act, 1956, or as private universities under provincial laws. Even with these two ways, there is still one most important barrier to making higher education a for-​profit sector is the court ruling for the not-​for-​profit prescription. To overcome this barrier, it is reported that the Ministry of hrd (Human Resource Department) has sent proposals to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and the Department of Economic Affairs to permit foreign universities to open their campuses in the country as companies as provided under Section 25 of Companies Act. In fact, many institutions have already been set up as private limited entities under this Act although these institutions cannot offer degrees since they are not recognised by aicte or ugc, but they can run professional programmes (Mathew et al 2013). All these factors are linked with developments intrinsic to the process of liberalisation and were accelerated during the 1990s, with the ugc appointed Punnayya Committee (1992–​93) recommending that 25% of recurring expenditure be recovered from students, and the 1997 Ministry of Finance proposal that higher education, including secondary education, be designated a “non-​ merit good” for which subsidies must be drastically cut. In 2000, the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry appointed a committee on higher education, headed by noted industrialists Mukesh Ambani and Kumar Mangalam Birla. In their report A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education, they suggested that the government should confine itself to primary education, leaving higher education to be provided by the private sector, including fdi, except for those areas of education involving “liberal arts and performing arts”.

224 Sarker These are the primary reasons for the crisis in higher education today. State withdrawal has contributed to privatisation and commercialisation while Indian courts have contributed to this trend by giving conflicting and ambiguous judgments (see appendix). The implications of various court rulings, committee recommendations, and government policies have resulted in an upsurge of private educational institutions, first begun in southern India. In the 1980s, there was a phenomenal rise in the number of private engineering (and to a lesser extent medical) colleges that was particular to the southern states. These colleges were set up primarily by landowning middle–​ caste groups that had the capital to internally mobilised the establishment of colleges and universities with significant state support and subsidies (including in the form of assets such as land at the subsidised rate). These caste groups organised themselves into charitable education trusts that provided special scholarships to students from their caste group and charged high fees to students from other caste groups (Kamat 2011). Thereafter, the number of private higher education institutions has increased exponentially, and their presence was seen all over India, particularly in the north and south—​not on the basis of caste, however, but profit. There were 6,651 new colleges established over 40 years from 1950–​51 to 1990–​91. Within 10 years of liberalisation, from 1990–​91 to 2000–​2001, another 5,460 new colleges were added followed by the establishment of a phenomenal number of new colleges (20,217) in the next decade (ugc 2012). Thus, after only 20 years of liberalisation (1990–​91 to 2010–​11), 25,677 new colleges were established. In the last ten years, another 10,000 colleges have been launched. Enrolment in higher education, for its part, has also been increasing, with an almost 3.5-​fold increase from 4.9 million in 1990–​91 to 17 million in 2010–​11; it is now at 38.5 million, a phenomenal 2.25-​fold increase in the last 10 years alone (goi 2020). For understandable reasons, most of these new colleges are unaided private colleges, and almost all those private institutions were established after India started embracing neoliberal economic policies. The latest recommendations for privatisation vis-​a-​vis the corporatisation of higher education came from the report on Corporate Sector Participation in Higher Education by the Narayana Murthy Committee, established by the Planning Commission of India in 2012. The recommendations focused on three core areas: (a) an enabling environment to attract investments, (b) corporate support for research and faculty development, and (c) corporate investment in existing institutions and the creation of new institutions and knowledge clusters (Mathews et al 2013).

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There are certain reasons why the privatisation of higher education is lucrative in India for investors. They are explained below: India’s import interests in education services –​ Mode 1—​prospects for distance education and degrees from foreign academic institutions. –​ Mode 2—​every year 800,000 Indian students go overseas (mainly to the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand) and spend around $28 billion. –​ Mode 3—​foreign institutions entering India through twinning and franchise arrangements (Indian students getting foreign degrees, doing professional courses at local branch campuses of foreign institutions in India). –​ Mode 4—​foreign faculty and scholars teaching in India. In 2005, the Ministry of Commerce came out with a consultative paper, Higher Education in India and gats: An Opportunity (goi 2006). Making a strong case for foreign participation in higher education in India, it says, “gats could provide an opportunity to put together a mechanism whereby private and foreign investment in higher education can be encouraged subject to high-​quality standards and efficient regulation”. In 2019, nearly 20% of all international students in the United States were from India. It, therefore, asserts that there is enormous demand in India for quality higher education which is being met by “foreign campuses”. The Ministry of Commerce thus recommends that “services negotiations [in wto] could be used as an opportunity to invite foreign universities to set up campuses in India, thereby saving billions of dollars for the students traveling abroad”. This paper also advocates for a “balance” between “domestic regulation and providing adequate flexibility to such universities in setting syllabus, hiring teachers, screening students, and setting fee levels”. There are several reasons why so many Indian students go abroad every year for higher education, including and likely most importantly, the scarcity of domestic higher education but also the wide variation in quality as well as better job prospects in developed countries. In India, there are a few top institutions, some are mid-​range, and most are on the bottom when compared to international standards, creating a wide variation in the quality of higher education. The McKinsey-​n asscom report, Talent Shortage Survey (2005), 75% of India’s engineering graduates are unemployable. Another 2013 assocham survey, reported that only 10% of graduates from Indian business schools, excluding those from the top 20 schools, get a job straight after completing their course, compared to 54% in 2008. Moreover, about 160 schools offering Master of Business Administration (mba) courses were expected to close by the end of that year (assocham 2013). A further survey endorsed by the Confederation

226 Sarker of Indian Industry (cii) and the Association of Indian Universities mentioned that “even as the country would produce over five million graduates next year, only 34% of them would be employable as most of them lack necessary skills required for any role in the industry” (dna 2013). stated that less than half of Indian graduates are employable—​45.9%, a decline from 46.21% in 2020 and 47.38% in 2019. Master of Computer Applications graduates are the least in terms of employability, with only 22.42% employable, followed by polytechnic graduates at 25.02%. In contrast to common belief, it is the Bachelor of Technology graduates are most employable with 46.82%, followed closely by mba s at 46.59% (cii 2021). 7

The Mirage of fdi and Privatisation

There are three models through which a foreign education provider can establish its presence in another country: franchise, articulation, and campus. In the franchise model, local institutions provide physical infrastructure and administration, and the foreign institution provides intellectual property like curriculum, teaching materials, examinations, and degrees. The articulation (twining) model is about joint degrees. Students study in the local institution for most of their studies and the rest in the home country of a foreign institution. Here, academic responsibility is shared, and the degrees or diplomas are awarded by foreign institutions. The third model, the campus model, sees the establishment of local campuses by foreign providers. Here, the responsibility of infrastructure, administration, intellectual property, everything, is provided by the foreign institution but using local faculty and others. Despite the Government of India permitting 100% fdi in higher education through the automatic route in 2000, thus providing a huge opportunity for investment, fdi remained at zero for the first three years, increasing to inr 10.33 billion till 2008–​09 after which it began to fall. In the past 11 years, total fdi in higher education has stood at $395 million, the yearly average of $35 million being one-​tenth of 1% of what the central and provincial governments annually spend in this sector. Just one institution in India has received more than half of this investment, and over 75% of the fdi from this period has come from Mauritius, a tax haven country (The Telegraph 2011). Recent data from the Ministry of Finance stated that the total amount of fdi inflow into the education sector in India stood at $2.47 billion from 2000 to 2019. However, as mentioned above Indian students spent nearly $28 billion abroad in 2019 alone

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and set to grow to $80 billion by 2024, the latest 'Higher Education Abroad' report by consulting firm RedSeer estimates. (Business Standard 2021).. There are approximately 631 foreign education providers operating in India. Of these, 440 were functioning from their home countries, 5 opened their own campuses in India, 60 have programmatic collaboration with local institutions, 49 were operating under twinning arrangements and 77 had arrangements other than twinning or programmatic collaboration according to the Association of Indian Universities (The Hindu 2012). Fee levels are uniformly high in all arrangements. Both twinning and programme-​based (franchise model) collaborations corroborate the low-​investment, high-​turnover model of the foreign provision mentioned above, suggesting that the current scenario of foreign participation in the country’s higher education system is still not significant. The following discussion could explain how some of those foreign educational institutions function: There are instances of foreign institutions partnering with unapproved domestic institutions. Degrees awarded under such programmes are not recognized in India. There are also instances of false marketing of foreign programmes, wherein institutions claim to have resources that they don’t really possess or give employment guarantees when there is no international equivalence of degrees. At times, students in twinning programmes fail to obtain visas to study abroad at the foreign partner’s campus. It’s also interesting to note that there has been little or no foreign participation in India’s higher education sector through franchises and subsidiaries. In the last 10 years, though 150 odd programmes are being offered through twinning programmes, none of them invested money in India. A survey found that 44 out of these 150 odd programmes are unaccredited and unrecognized in their own countries. gadekar 2008

However, according to the Ministry of External Affairs’ new education policy, select Universities—​those that are among the “top hundred” universities in the world—​will be facilitated were they to operate in India (India Today 2020). Developing countries do allow foreign educational institutions but usually in accordance with their national interests and priorities. In China, Malaysia, and Singapore, entry of foreign institutions is by invitation only and under conditions put forward by those countries (goi 2006). Studies on education reveal that advanced countries, after achieving an enrolment ratio of 35% and above in higher education via state support, opt

228 Sarker for privatisation (Reddy 2008). This demonstrates the “typical” hypocrisy of the Global North, to push for privatisation (of higher education) in developing countries through the wto so as to expand their own market even though enrolment ratios in developing countries remain very low. The private providers are minimising costs by compromising the quality of education provided in their institutions to maximise their profit. Besides compromising academic standards, misrepresenting courses, hiring low-​quality faculty, and engaging in corrupt admission procedures, they are also increasing their revenues either through extremely high tuition fees and/​or capitation fees. A capitation fee refers to the collection of large amounts by educational bodies not advertised in the prospectus of the institution, usually in exchange for admission to the institution. A medical student intending to graduate from a private medical college must bear a cost of $200,000–​250,000. Some private universities are given “deemed” university status by provincial governments even before admissions are open; thus, institutions with no track record are receiving autonomy. At the beginning of 2010, India’s hrd ministry decided to remove recognition from as many as 44 institutions “deemed” universities, spelling uncertainty for nearly 200,000 students who had enrolled with them. The ministry’s decision amounts to an acknowledgment of irregularities in conferring the “deemed” status to these institutions. Another problem with provincial approval of private universities is that educational institutions recognised in a particular province do not need to limit their operations only to that province. This means that universities approved by the government of one province are not accountable to the governments of other provinces, despite branch campuses located there. “This is increasingly becoming a trend with foreign universities, especially among those who do not want to set up their own shop here but would like to benefit from the degree-​ purchasing power of the upwardly mobile classes of India” (Weerts 2009). A study on the partnerships between Indian and foreign institutions in higher education by Kim Weerts (ibid) states that among the 19 institutions in Delhi under study and which were actively involved in the partnership, most of them are not recognised and have not received any accreditation. In regard to foreign institutions, though she mentions that most institutions are not found on important ranking lists, she assumes they are of good quality, which is doubtful as there is no reason why a good quality foreign institution would collaborate with an unrecognised, unaccredited institution of a developing country. The growth of the private sector also shows a skewed pattern within fields such as engineering. Private engineering institutes mostly offer courses in

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computer science, information technology, communications and electrical and electronics so as to cater to the need of the new urban economy. They do not offer courses without an immediate market. Not only that, almost all of these private institutions were established in urban areas and in the wealthy areas of the provinces. It is obvious that they are investing for profit. However, this has resulted in a serious decline and devaluation of basic knowledge and accessibility for the poorer section of the population. An official report by the Government of India described the vast majority of colleges as merely serving the needs of “academic squatters”, and several other official reports note the adverse impact on quality during the high growth phase of private higher education institutions (Carnoy et al. 2012). If we look at the enrolment background of the students, India’s present success in engineering and information technology, scientific research and medicine should be attributed to its publicly funded higher education system, not to the newly mushroomed private colleges and universities. Of 183 private universities, only nine feature in the top 50 of India Today’s “Survey on Higher Education”. All these private institutions have been in existence for many years (India Today 2013). At present, India Today, in partnership with Marketing and Development Research Associates (mdra), has separate rankings for public and private universities (the “India Today-​m dra Survey”). However, there are two other ranking systems: the Centre for World University Rankings (cawr) and the National Institute Ranking Framework (nirf). In the nirf ranking, there are only 16 private universities among the top 100. With the new policies supporting the commodification of higher education, India’s global rank in publications output has slipped from 8th in 1985 to 14th in 2006 (Kapur 2008). However, in science and technology, India’s global publication rank was 10th in 1996 and has slightly improved to 9th position in 2010; and its global citation impact rank is 18th, lower than that of Brazil (16th) (Gupta 2012). In 2019, India’s global rank in research publications varies between 5–​10 depending on different databases (Singh et al 2021). However, if we see the growth in the proportionate share in research output since 2019, it varies from 3.26% to 5.65% (Ibid), which is not very impressive despite the largest educational system in terms of the number of post-​secondary institutions. It is also important to mention that there are wide variations in research output rankings across subjects. If we look at the Scopus data set, the ranks vary from 3rd in Computer Science to 10th in Health as well as Social Sciences (Ibid). In 2018, India’s global citation impact rank improved to 9 (Tamizhchelvan et al 2020), yet a little slip from its 7th position in 2014 (The Hindu 2014). Thus, it is understandable that the privatisation of higher education does not have a positive impact on India’s research publications.

230 Sarker 8

New Education Policy 2020

In post-​independence India, there were two national educational policies in 1968 and 1986 (modified in 1992) before the New Education Policy (nep) 2020. An educational policy of a country cannot stand on its own from the politics or economics of the respective country—​a country’s educational policy reflects its economic and pollical policies. In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), the right-​wing ruling political party, upon coming to power in 2014 quickly dissolved the Planning Commission of India, which was set up in 1950 to formulate India’s five-​year plans. Instead, it established the National Institution for Transforming India (niti Aayog) to serve as the nation’s top government public policy think tank. Without going into details about the differences between these two bodies, it could be easily concluded that there is a qualitative change. Though the importance of the Planning Commission of India was gradually decreased under the post-​liberalised India and thus the role of the state as well, the establishment of the niti Aayog indicates an increasing dependency on the market. Amitav Kant, the present ceo of the niti Aayog, in a 2017 ficci conference, mentioned that running educational institutions is not profitable for the government, and thus, they should be privatised. This indicates the ideology of the present government—​the nep 2020 is an extension of this ideology. Even before the nep, in 2015 the central government had directed the country’s research institutions to earn externally at least half their funding. Critics and observers say that the education reforms seen under the current government, such as university fee hikes, raising funds from internal accruals, the depoliticisation of campuses, and the establishment of private and foreign universities, are all recommendations of the Birla-​Ambani or Ambani-​Birla report presented in 2000 when another bjp-​led government was in power. As mentioned previously, the privatisation of higher education in India gained momentum after the 1990s; however, there was not much fdi in higher education in India, and its share of the foreign students arriving for higher education remains miserably low, at 0.85% (India Express 2021). According to nep 2020, in the existing education policy, “private higher education institutions (hei s) have not been treated on an equal footing with public institutions […] this approach has discouraged public-​spirited philanthropic hei” (Laxmi Priya 2020). “The use of the term ‘public-​spirited philanthropic hei s’ to refer to private investments seem ironic in an age when education has been commoditised and is part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services” (ibid). The nep 2020 also mentioned that “the previous policies on education have justifiably been preoccupied largely with issues of access and equity, but as a

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result have unfortunately dropped the baton with regard to the quality of education. The implementation of the two previous education policies, especially with regards to quality, remains largely incomplete. The unfinished agenda of the National Policy on Education 1986, modified in 1992 (npe 1986/​92), is appropriately dealt with in this Policy”. It is difficult to understand how the quality of education could be improved without accessibility and equity. The current educational policy proposes to establish one mega post-​ secondary institution with 5,000–​50,000 students in each district. It would need huge resources but, at present, there is no clarity on it. It also mentions that institutions that fail in the National Accreditation Test or are unable to maintain an adequate number of enrolments would either be closed or made autonomous. Who will pay for these autonomous institutions? The nep is silent on this. Since 2014, expenditure on education was reduced from a meagre 1.46% of national income to only 0.5% in 2020. This clearly indicates the trend. 9

Conclusion

Formal modern education in India gained ground only in the nineteenth and the early part of the last century, mainly through non-​governmental efforts. It is therefore not surprising that private institutions comprised a considerable part of the sector upon independence, and more so in higher education. Non-​governmental providers of higher education (mostly in the form of charitable trusts and societies) were arguably compelled by a variety of motivations including religious teaching, but principally these were non-​pecuniary in nature (Srivastava 2008; Sharma K 2014). In a country like India with its population of 1.4 billion and with an emerging and aspiring youth force that is the world’s largest, the needs of the hour are the inclusion, expansion and excellence of education. But the future scenario in the education sector is highly uncertain. In the ficci background paper, The Higher Education Summit: Road Map for the Future (Bhusan 2004), Professor Sudhanshu Bhusan wrote, “Earlier all over the world, education, especially higher education, was available only to a privileged few. In the context of a knowledge society and the goals of sustainable development, higher education needs to percolate to the masses, not only just in terms of quantity but also quality. In the last few years, this shift has been slowly taking place. Still, glaring deficiencies remain in the access to higher education, overall development of the student, sensitivity to human needs and equality in our society.” It is not that all the court verdicts, committee recommendations and political parties in India blatantly support the privatisation of higher education.

232 Sarker There are mixed verdicts, with only some in favour of privatisation. Among the political parties, the left parties, because of their ideological position, is always against the privatisation of anything, be it a public sector enterprise or educational institution. However, the left parties are a minority force in Indian politics—​though they have at times managed to exert qualitative pressure on various issues. Other political parties, rightist and centrist, are more powerful and support liberalisation. Some of these are also confused on issues as to whether the government should subsidise wealthy students considering the huge cost of higher public education; some are not fully aware of the complex rules and regulations of the gats. Withdrawing fully from the gats and refraining from the passage of bills similar to that of the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill can save higher education from direct foreign intervention, but as discussed previously, India needs to increase its public funding significantly to stop the mushrooming of unqualified private institutions, which are not only unable to produce adept workers but also will increase inequality further as only the children of wealthy parents can afford to go to these private institutions. The Kothari Commission (1964–​66) recommended that government should spend 6% of its gdp on education. However, even after 45 years since this recommendation, India spends only around 3.9% of its gdp here, and 80% of this cost is borne by provincial governments. Out of this meagre amount, the portion for higher education expenses is only around 0.6%. The Committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education recommended that a quarter (1.5%) be allocated to higher education (Tilak 2013). Thus, it is beyond any argument that public funding, particularly the central government’s allocation, must be increased. However, instead of increasing, spending on education has been decreased to 3.1% of gdp in recent years by the central government. In its 2011–​12 budget, India increased its public funding in education as well as in higher education. The increase is significant in regard to percentages—​a 24% overall increase in education, with a 34% increase in higher education. However, there are also some other lacunae in the public funding that need to be addressed. Almost two-​thirds of this amount will go to the ugc and Centres for Excellence including iit s, National Institutes of Technologies, and Indian Institutes of Management (ficci 2011; Mishra 2011). The ugc mainly provides grants for central universities and the public colleges in Delhi, leaving responsibility for other public universities and colleges with the provincial governments as education is on the concurrent list. With their paltry resources, most of the provincial governments find it hard to allot adequate funds for education.

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Another aspect is nepotism. If an institution has a strong network in the government, it is likely to receive more funding. Annual funding is based on the amount of funding an institution has received in the previous year (Agarwal 2006). The student scholarship system has its shortcomings as well. At present, funding for scholarships is institution-​based; student-​based funding is much more egalitarian as more poor students can avail themselves to those scholarships irrespective of institutional affiliations. The New Education Policy 2020 aimed at more privatisation of higher education, as we have seen. This higher education market is a multi-​billion-​dollar industry in India. Corporations, in the name of philanthropy, are rushing into this market. And it is not only issues of accessibility, equity and inclusiveness in these universities that are problematic, even eminent professors have had to resign for their criticisms against the present government. It has already been shown that privatisation failed to bring quality to higher education in India. Allowing foreign investment in education is also detrimental to national identity. Thus, a midpoint should be worked out. Increasing fees for affluent students and more scholarships for poor students could be an option. The first part of this option was already in practice through self-​ financed professional courses in many Indian public universities, but poor students do not have access to those courses. It is therefore very important to introduce the second part of this option. Last but not the least, along with the government, banks should come forward to ease the student loan system and should sometimes act as a guarantor for poor students, as less than five percent of students take out an education loan at present. Finally, as always, good governance and strict regulations are needed to implement those policies.

Appendix

Key Supreme Court Judgments on Fees in Private Institutions Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka (1992): Fees charged in private institutions in excess of tuition fees in government colleges is deemed to be capitation fees. Unnikrishnan, J. P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993): Banned capitation fees and devised schemes which allotted 50% of the seats in an unaided professional institution as free seats (fees are the same as a government institution) and 50% as paid seats (fees higher than “free seats” but have to be approved by a state-​level committee). T. M. A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka (2002): The decision regarding the fee to be charged must be left to the private institution that does not depend on any funds from the government. The object of an institution should not

234 Sarker be to make profit. However, it can generate a reasonable revenue surplus for the purpose of developing education and expanding the institution. Islamic Academy v. State of Karnataka (2003): A committee in each state, headed by a retired High Court judge, should approve the fee structure, which shall be binding for three years. P. A. Inamdar v. State of Maharashtra (2005): The committees regulating admission and fee structure shall continue to exist, but only as a temporary measure until the central or state governments are able to devise a suitable mechanism for such regulation. Source: Sharma 2007; Madhaban et al. 2013.

References

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236 Sarker Kamat, Sangeeta G. 2011. “Neoliberal Globalization and Higher Education Policy in India”. Pp 273–​285. in Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, edited by Roger King et al. Cheltenham. Gloss: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kapur, Devesh. 2008. “The Supply Mix”. Seminar. 587: 14–​18. kpmg and Google. 2017. Online Education in India 2021. Madhavan, M.R. and Kaushiki Sanyal. 2013. “Regulation in the Education Sector” in India Infrastructure Report 2012: Private Sector in Education. idfc. New Delhi, Delhi: Routledge. Mathews, Eldho., Biju A Chitturamban, Sharvari Joshi, and Payal Dey. 2013. “Engaging the Corporate Sector: Narayan Murthy Committee Recommendations on Higher Education”. Economic and Political Weekly 67(29): 41–​47. Mishra, Alisha. 2011. “india: Budget hikes spending on higher education”. University World News Global Edition Issue (162). Mukherjee, Rohan. 2008. “Toward a Legitimate Role for Foreign Institutions”. Seminar 587: 33–​38. nasscom-​McKinsey. 2005. Talent shortage survey. National Knowledge Commission. 2010. “Report to the Nation 2006”. New Delhi. Pp.1–​19. Nayyar, Deepak. 2007. “Globalization: What Does It Mean for Higher Education?”. Economic and Political Weekly 41(37): 30–​35. ncert.1993. “National Policy on Higher Education of 1986”. New Delhi. Pp 1–​45. Retrieved May 13, 2013, nsw. Australia. (www​.ncert​.nic​.in​/oth​_an​oun​/npe86​.pdf )​. Priya, Lakshmi. 2020. “How Does the National Education Policy Accelerate the Privatisation of Higher Education?”. Economic and Political Weekly. 55(33). Mumbai. Reddy, Naraginti A. 2008. “Experience of Privatization of Education in India”. Retrieved Nov. 4, 2012 (http://​ezinea​rtic​les​.com​/?Exp​erie​nce​-of​-Privat​izat​ion​-of​-​-Educat​ ion​-in​-India&id=​1398​246)​. Ritzer, George, 2003. The McDonaldization of Society. Pine Forge Press. LA. Sharma, Kavita. A. (2014). Sixty Years of the University Grants Commission: Establish­ ment, Growth, and Evolution. ugc. New Delhi. Sharma, Konark. 2007. “fdi in Higher Education: Aspirations and Reality”. Mainstream. 35(25). Sharma, Vijender. 2007. “Indian Higher Education: Commodification and Foreign Direct Investment”. The Marxist 23(2): Pp.1–​29. New Delhi. Singh, Vivek Kumar; Arora, Parveen; Uddin, Ashraf and Bhattacharya, Sujit. 2021. “India’s Rank and Global Share in Scientific Research: how Publication Counting Method and Subject Selection can Vary the Outcomes?”. Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research 80 January 2021. New Delhi. pp. 42–​50. Srivastava, S.R. 2008. Regulating the private sector. Seminar 587 (July). New Delhi.

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238 Sarker Wagnleitner, Reinhold. 1994. “Introduction”. Coca-​Colonization and the Cold War. The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria After the Second World War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Weerts, Kim. 2009. “India’s Confrontation with Foreign Higher Education Providers”. Education and Development Working Paper 10. University Van Amsterdam. Amsterdam. Pp.16–​19. Amsterdam.

­c hapter 15

The New Research Assessment Reform in China and Its Implementation Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen 1 Introduction1 The Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education in China recently published two policy documents (Ministry of Education 2020; most 2020) that have aroused intense discussion among Chinese academics and gained worldwide interest as well (Editorial in Nature 2020; Mallapaty 2020). The new policy aims to restore “the scientific spirit, innovation quality, and service contribution” of research and to “promote the return of universities to their original academic aims” (most 2020). The point of departure is that, for the last decade, China’s research evaluation and funding policies have had a strong focus on quantitative indicators and publications in journals covered by the Web of Science. Indeed, it was partly this focus that helped China surpass the USA as the largest contributing nation to international scientific journals (Tollefson 2018). However, the government now wishes to balance further internationalization with domestic needs and its traditional quantitative evaluation methods with qualitative peer review. The main messages are: Farewell to “sci worship”. Indicators based on Web of Science will not be applied directly in evaluation and funding at any level. An alternative citation index with Chinese characteristics and international influence will be established. From metrics to peer review. A new focus on novelty, scientific value, research integrity, innovation potential and societal outcomes will replace the “paper only” orientation in panel evaluations. Publications will be presented for review as a limited set of “representative work” with explicit relevance for the evaluation. Number of publications and journal impact factors will not count any more. New priority to local relevance. Publications in high-​quality Chinese journals will be encouraged, and the development of such journals will be supported. 1 This chapter was originally published: Zhang, L. and Sivertsen, G., 2020. The New Research Assessment Reform in China and Its Implementation. Scholarly Assessment Reports, 2(1), p. 3.

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The burning question in China now is how the new policy will be implemented and with what consequences. The universities are urged to implement the policy locally by the end of July at the latest. The government trusts them to find their own solutions in doing so, which is a good sign of respect for autonomy. However, the need for national coordination and services seems to be underestimated. We will relate some problems of implementation and their possible solutions to the three points above. 2

The Background for the New Policy

The two new policy documents did not come out of the blue. In recent years, there have been several calls to change research evaluation and funding protocols from a quantitative to a more qualitative focus in China. In 2016, President Xi Jinping called for reform towards a more comprehensive evaluation system for individual researchers (Xinhua News Agency 2016). Further, in 2018, a document issued by the joint force of three ministries and two national central institutions specifically proposed moving away from the “Four only” phenomenon of “only papers, only titles, only diplomas and only awards” (most 2018). Among these, the “only papers” focus has received the broadest attention, for good reasons. The phenomenon has been called “sci worship” in China for a long time (the original name of Web of Science was the Science Citation Index). Publications indexed in WoS and WoS-​based indicators (e.g., the Journal Impact Factor and esi highly cited papers) have become the core indicators for research evaluation, staff employment, career promotion, awards, university or disciplinary rankings, funding and resource allocation during the past years. Even individual cash incentives for WoS publications are widespread (Quan, Chen & Shu 2017). The effects have been twofold. On the one hand, Chinese researchers have been encouraged to publish according to world standards and communicate more broadly and visibly with international communities. Chinese researchers have benefited from the advice gained from international peer-​review processes and improved their research performance. On the other hand, the heavy reliance on “sci papers” has been much debated as a form of goal displacement. Some individual researchers and institutions have pursued high numbers of publications while disregarding the quality and societal value of their research, even at the cost of research integrity, which has become a major concern for the Chinese government.

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More than half of the world’s scientific articles are published in “international” journals owned by publishers in the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. China is now the largest contributing country to these journals, but only around 200 of the 11,000 indexed journals in Web of Science are published in China. This imbalance has caused attention in China. As one of the leading countries in science and technology, publishing academic journals with international reputation is still an outstanding goal to achieve. A challenge for the growth of domestic journals in China has been to attract high-​quality submissions, partly due to the fact that publications in Chinese journals were not valued much in research evaluations. “sci worship” is perceived as a vicious circle for raising the standards and profile of domestic journals. Despite the rapid development of open-​access publishing all over the world, much of China’s scientific output is still locked behind paywalls. “nsfc funds about 70% of Chinese research articles published in international journals, but China has to buy them back with full and high prices”, said XiaoLin Zhang, chair of the Strategic Planning Committee of the National Science and Technology Library at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Beijing (Schiermeier 2018). Due to paywalls and language barriers, papers published by Chinese researchers in international journals are rarely read by general Chinese audiences. This is interpreted as a lack of benefit of research to the Chinese society and is part of the explanation for the increased focus on domestic publishing in the new evaluation and funding policy. The new direction in China has similarities with initiatives in other parts of the world, such as the dora declaration on research assessment (dora 2013), the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics (Hicks et al. 2015), and the EU policy for Responsible Research and Innovation (European Commission 2020). None of these initiatives have resulted in easy solutions in any country. Instead, there are international collaboration projects among funders, institutions and countries for developing common standards and information sources for holistic evaluations that go beyond publication and citation metrics. The aim is to ensure fairness and predictability as researchers are mobile between collaboration networks, funders, institutions and countries. We believe that the new policy in China will lay the ground for more mutual understanding, learning and collaboration between countries in the domain of research evaluation and funding. Other countries will not only recognize the positive scientific and societal values that the new Chinese policy is based on, but also some problems with implementation that we will discuss here in relation to the three main messages of the policy listed in our introduction.

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Farewell to “sci Worship”

By moving away from Web of Science (or Scopus) as a standard for their national research evaluation and funding system, China is empowering its own academic communities, research institutions and funding organizations in defining the principles, criteria and protocols for evaluation. Essentially, the country is moving from a commercial product-​based system to a self-​determined and self-​organized criteria-​based system (Aksnes & Sivertsen 2019). To fulfil this move, an integrated research information system and a national journal evaluation system is still needed. The new policy is aware of the need for a journal evaluation system to replace the use of journal impact factors and to cover journals beyond Web of Science. However, the ideas about how to implement such a system need to be further developed. The policy speaks of blacklisting journals with questionable purposes and of giving extra weight to “three types of high-​quality papers, including those published in domestic scientific journals with international impact, internationally recognized top-​level or important scientific journals, and papers reported at top academic conferences in China and abroad” (most 2020). The selections are supposed to be narrow and made locally by “the academic committee of the unit” without clearer criteria than in these sentences. Other existing initiatives in the same direction will need to be coordinated. A narrow selection of journals is already launched by the “Chinese Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan”, which was released in 2019 with the aim of improving the quality of a selected number of scientific and technological journals (285 journals in total), as well as to speed up the process of establishing those Chinese journals as world-​class (cast 2019). In addition, China has citation indexing services that cover selections of domestic scientific journals. These services even include the social sciences and humanities. The services are organized differently by different institutions or companies. They are ‘products’ with different criteria for inclusion of journals, and there is no direct influence of the Chinese academic communities on their criteria. Now, the new policy wants to establish an alternative Citation Index with “Chinese characteristics and international influence”, to replace the sci where Chinese journals are underrepresented. How can all these initiatives be coordinated? To set a new legitimate standard with transparent procedures, there is a need to create a comprehensive list of acknowledged journals representing a continuum of all research fields and including both domestic and international journals while taking care of marginal fields and interdisciplinarity. The list must be dynamic to reflect a changing journal market, and it needs to be organized to represent a balanced influence of expert advice by all disciplines

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in China through inter-​institutional representative bodies. The same organization of expert advice is needed if extra weight is to be given to specific selections of journals on the comprehensive list. Examples of such dynamic lists already exist in several non-​English speaking countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin-​America, e.g. the Latindex and the Nordic list. The new policy demands a broader perspective in research assessment on novelty, scientific value, research integrity, innovation potential and societal outcomes. How will panels be informed about and be able to compare such achievements? There is need for more comprehensive sources of information to supplement Web of Science. These sources could be integrated in a national Current Research Information System (cris). We will shortly describe the idea, based on Sivertsen (2019), and the potentials and challenges for its implementation in China. Current research information systems (cris) are databases or other information systems used within and among research organizations to store, manage, and exchange data for documentation, communication, and administration of research activities. cris usually contain information about researchers and research groups, their projects, funding, outputs, and outcomes. In the most advanced versions, cris help produce integrated data for what used to be documents for separate purposes, such as individual applications for funding, institutional annual reports, project reports, cv s, publications lists, profiles of research groups, project reports, information for media and the general public, etc. Searchable bibliographic references may lead to full texts in local repositories. With an integrated cris providing data that are structured and quality assured for statistical purposes, research performing and funding organizations may also use cris for monitoring and evaluating research activities and outputs, allocating funding, supporting decision making on their policies and strategies, tracking researchers’ careers, and describing their systemic role to policy-​makers, stakeholders, and the public. A cris has information about identifiable persons (not only authors). This would solve the author-​name disambiguation problem in China. It has updated institutional affiliations, titles, and positions (not only published addresses), which may support and reflect mobility in a more efficient way. It can have more complete information than is available in funding acknowledgements in publications, such as CVs, projects, networks, and memberships. A cris may also cover publications more comprehensively than existing bibliographic data sources do. A Chinese cris could integrate the international and domestic indexing services mentioned above and go beyond them within a limit set by definitions and criteria (Aksnes & Sivertsen 2019).

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cris are now widespread in the world, but most of them operate at the institutional level only and are closed systems. The existing commercial solutions, e.g. Converis from Clarivate and Pure from Elsevier, are designed for such local use only. It seems to be a challenge, mainly in the larger countries, to agree on an integrated and open national solution. However, a few countries, e.g. Brazil, Czech Republic, Finland, New Zealand, and Norway, have managed to integrate a cris nationally with the help of non-​commercial solutions. In China, most Chinese universities and other research organizations already have their own local systems. An example is Shanghai Tech University with one of the most advanced technical cris solutions worldwide, but only for local use (kms.shanghaitech.edu.cn). At the national level, the Ministry of Education (MoE), the Ministry of Science and Technology (most), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nsfc) have built databases for research and education information (with different focuses, strengths and coverages), but they are mainly used as internal sources. An integrated research information system in China would relieve individual researchers and institutions from providing all the information themselves every time they are evaluated. The national research information system should comprise both international and domestic scientific publications, and other types of research outputs and information such as books for teaching and general audiences, inventions, education, government advice and interaction with culture, society and industry. 4

From Metrics to Peer Review

The new policy targets evaluation and funding at all levels in the Chinese research and innovation system. It seems to us that the ideas in the new policy for evaluation at more aggregated levels (institutions, thematic programs, research sectors) are modeled on the relevant methods for individual-​level research assessment. The background might be that up to now, a predictable “evaluation currency” of indicators based on Web of Science has been used at all levels in the Chinese research system. With the present move from metrics to peer review, a multi-​level application model for roles and procedures in research evaluation is needed (Moed 2020). According to this model, the institutions themselves in their internal assessment and funding processes combine indicators and expert knowledge to evaluate individuals and groups. Externally, national meta-​institutional agencies use aggregate indicators at the level of institutions and thereby assess the evaluation and funding processes inside institutions. Following this model, it would be inappropriate and

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in conflict with institutional autonomy for a meta-​institutional agency to be concerned directly with the assessment of individuals or groups at the institutional level. As an example, the new policy requires a small maximum number of representative publications to be read and evaluated at all levels. We are not sure that individual publications need to be read in evaluations at all levels and for all purposes in the world’s largest research system. In Europe, there are some countries with national evaluation systems where scientific publications are read and evaluated for the third or fourth time by expert committees (before publication, before recruitment or promotion, before external funding, and then again in the national evaluation) even if it has been proved that metrics would give approximately the same evaluation outcome at the aggregated level (Harzing 2019; Traag & Waltman 2019). We think the new policy needs to differentiate more clearly between appropriate methods at different levels of aggregation. Depending on the purpose, metrics can be quite useful at aggregate levels (Sivertsen 2017), and the data and indicators do not need to be limited to WoS. Alternative or supplementary data sources already exist that have a more comprehensive coverage of all fields and of both domestic and international publishing (Engels & Guns 2018; Pölönen 2018; Sivertsen 2018a), and indicators exist that can provide a more balanced representation of the publishing patterns in all fields (Sivertsen, Rousseau & Zhang 2019). Such indicators are usually only applicable at aggregate levels (Aagaard 2015). Different criteria and procedures will also need to be applied according to the type and field of research, and the purpose of the evaluation, e.g., recruitment or promotion versus external project funding versus program evaluation. Evaluation protocols, as well as rules for appointing expert peers, will need to be drawn for these different contexts. The policy seems to imply that the universities themselves should be responsible for developing evaluation protocols with specification criteria and procedures. We support this trust in institutional autonomy but still think inter-​institutional disciplinary collaboration will be important in developing the protocols and putting them into practice. External peer review may be needed. In small countries, ‘external’ usually means inviting experts from other countries. In larger countries, e.g. in the Research Excellence Framework of the United Kingdom, the invited experts must at least come from different institutions. In our view, a combination is preferable. National experts are needed to provide insight into local research conditions and specializations while experts from abroad are needed for external perspectives and independent views. A completely internal institutional peer review system may suffer from

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cronyism and bias due to conflicts of interest. This may be a concern among young researchers in China, particularly, who are now accustomed to the verdicts of international peers when they publish. Furthermore, moving towards peer review allows for formative evaluations. A formative evaluation learns from the past (strengths and weaknesses), looks forward (opportunities, threats) and serves strategic development. A summative evaluation looks at past performance, checks whether goals or expectations have been reached, and serves accountancy, decisions and/​or resource allocation (Scriven 1967; Lepori & Reale 2012; Sivertsen 2017). Summative evaluation has dominated in China. The idea of formative evaluation is not present in the new policy. National coordination could allow for organizational learning at the aggregate level of institutions and for inter-​institutional disciplinary collaboration. Institutions may have different strengths and can improve from collaboration even more than from competition. In addition, some of the criteria that the new policy wants to stress instead of ‘only papers’ are difficult to record and measure, e.g., innovation and collaboration with industry, improving health outcomes, professional education and other forms of societal impact. Depending on the profile and purpose of a university, such potential outcomes of research are often explicitly stated in the aims of the institution. A formative evaluation could be focused on how the institution organizes and performs according to such aims (Sivertsen & Meijer 2019). Moreover, an evaluation of what every researcher does to reach the same aims might not be needed. Individual researchers might have different roles, talents and opportunities to accomplish important societal aims of research. An organizational level evaluation would allow for such differences and still give advice for improvement at the university level. 5

Local Relevance

For some years now, there has been a concern that research funded and performed in China and expected to be useful for Chinese society is published in English in very distant journals. Recently, there was a debate about the fact that one of the first scientific articles carrying an early warning of the Coronavirus was published by Chinese scientists in a Western international journal before the general public in China was informed about the epidemic (cdc 2020). The debate turned into a more general discussion of whether new scientific results from China should be firstly published in international or domestic journals. This was one of the main controversies in Chinese social media in the early stage of the Coronavirus outbreak. Those against international publishing

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argued that it would delay the immediate use of the new knowledge needed to control the epidemic in China (Zhang, Zhao, Sun et al., 2020). This reaction in the general public is understandable, but experts in the field will know that international and local publishing cannot replace each other. Both are needed, and it is a question of balance. Time has also shown that global exchange of information and advice is crucial to stop the Corona epidemic itself as it reaches other countries and continents. The new policy encourages researchers to publish more in domestic journals. It even specifies that “in principle, when researchers provide representative publication lists, papers from domestic journals should account for at least one third of all the publications”. In our view, this criterion might work as a general policy aim but needs to be applied with differentiation according to field and type of research and the purpose of communication. As examples, most studies in law will be published in national law journals in a country’s native language because the research is most often about national law and aims to serve the country’s legal system. On the other hand, most studies in astrophysics are published in English in all countries to ensure global research communication on topics that all countries share. But these publications in English are not preventing astrophysicists all over the world from communicating their knowledge to a general public in their native language. Publications in English are not in themselves making Chinese research less useful to the Chinese society. There is also need to specify what ‘domestic journals’ means in China. There are numerous professional or general journals where researchers publish in Chinese for broader audiences. In addition, all disciplines have several scientific journals where researchers publish in Chinese for domestic research communication. This is a strong tradition in China with a clear hierarchy of prestige among journals in each field. While there is need for more journals to compete for good manuscripts at the top, the less important journals are abundant and in need of improvement of the general quality of their procedures and contents. Finally, an increasing number of scientific journals are edited at, and published by, Chinese research organizations to serve international research communication among authors from all countries. Some of them operate with so-​called ‘diamond’ Open Access, i.e. without article processing charges, and might have international success for this reason. This third group seems to be a meaningful target as the new policy speaks of “three types of high-​quality papers, including those published in domestic scientific journals with international impact” (most 2020). The balance between globalization and local relevance needs to be empirical and dynamic, that is reflecting a statistically informed policy for reasonable

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change (Sivertsen 2018b). Although China is now the largest contributing country to publications indexed in Scopus (Tollefson 2018), most scientific publications are still published in Chinese in China, with variations among fields. Some fields are internationally visible and impactful, others are not. The annual volume of domestic articles indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (cssci) is still around ten times higher than the annual volume of articles from China indexed by the Social Science Citation Index for the Web of Science (Zhang, Shang, Huang et al., 2020). Young researchers are generally more active in publishing internationally than older researchers. Hence, the new policy resonates differently in the academic community. Some researchers are happy to leave behind the policy of globalization. Others are concerned that support for collaborating and publishing abroad will be taken away from them. China needs to find a differentiated and dynamic balance between local relevance and globalization of research. 6

Conclusion

To conclude, the new evaluation and funding policy in China makes an important effort to replace a focus on WoS-​based indicators with a balanced combination of qualitative and quantitative research evaluation, and to strengthen the local relevance of research in China. It trusts the institutions to implement the policy quickly but does not provide the necessary national platforms for coordination, influence and collaboration on developing shared information resources and tools and agreed definitions and protocols. In response to the three main messages of the new policy, this is our summary of possible solutions to the implementation problems: With the move away from Web of Science as a standard, a national research information system and a journal evaluation system will be needed. The journal evaluation system may support the legitimacy and transparency of the general evaluation and funding system and help to promote an empirical and dynamic balance between globalization and local relevance. It will also encourage domestic Chinese journals to perform better. A national research information system would provide research assessment with relevant information according to its new broader scope, not only a more comprehensive coverage of publications, but also information about innovation and collaboration with industry, improving health outcomes, professional education and other forms of societal impact. The function and weight of peer-​review evaluation needs to be differentiated between different levels in the research system. At aggregate levels,

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responsible use of metrics can be relevant. The metrics need not be based on the Web of Science. Alternative indicators already exist that have a more balanced representation of all fields, and of both domestic and international publishing. Instead of reading papers, expert advice can be used in formative organizational-​level evaluations focusing on what is done to support individual researchers in achieving the aims of the organization. The balance between globalization and local relevance needs to be empirical and dynamic, that is reflecting a statistically informed policy for reasonable change, considering that the optimal balance will differ by type and field of research. Researchers should be confident in finding a relevant publishing practice where balanced international and domestic publishing contribute together to research quality and local relevance. Researchers and their organizations should not only be subjected to research evaluation. They should also be involved in deciding the criteria and designing the evaluation protocols. Collaboration between research performing and research funding organizations, and with representative disciplinary bodies at the national level, is needed to develop shared criteria and protocols for use in different contexts at the local level. With these implementations of the new policy, we believe that researchers in all fields and their different organizations will more easily identify with the new criteria and procedures for research evaluation and funding. This might take away some of the burden of the current evaluation system. The burden can also be reduced by general changes in governance. The performance-​ based portion of funding allocation can be reduced as a move from continuous control to trust-​based governance of projects and organizations. By trusting researchers and their organizations to spend their resources efficiently and responsibly, more funding can be spent with long-​term predictability for projects and organizations. This could also contribute to the main aims of the new policy, which is to re-​establish the original scientific and societal values to guide research in China.

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Index Academia 1, 4, 6, 10n, 16–​25, 26, 42, 44, 61, 76, 102, 104n, 108, 128, 132, 136, 177, 181, 183, 200, 209 Bureaucratization 1, 29, 42 Capitalism 59, 92–​94, 128, 142, 174–​177, 183n, 210, 211, 214 academic 9, 11, 20n, 27n, 38, 40n, 42, 44, 60, 71, 131, 139, 185n cognitive 20, 26n global 5, 31, 43n, 61–​69, 70n, 174n, 186 knowledge 21n8, 28 neoliberal 18, 21, 36, 41, 201 Citations 23n, 121, 125n6 impact rank 7, 52, 58, 121, 126, 207, 229, 239–​242 index 87, 99, 123n, 142n, 149n, 152, 208n, 211, 236n, 239–​243, 248 College 19, 26, 74n, 86, 101, 104, 130, 132, 135, 214, 218–​233, 237 Colonialism 33, 66, 178, 183n, 189–​193, 195–​ 197, 198 Commercialization (commercialisation) 1, 29, 42, 58, 177, 199, 224 Community 31–​33, 47, 56n, 117, 119n, 130, 132, 175, 194, 240 academic 6, 101n, 106, 118–​120, 126, 140, 242, 248 communication 148 historical 143, 145, 147, 153 scientific 45, 49, 51, 56, 57n6, 73, 100, 108, 110n, 142, 149, 151, 189, 192 speech 7, 145n, 149–​151 Context 1–​9, 21, 23, 32, 36n8, 52, 54–​56, 68, 95–​100, 108, 112, 120, 126, 131–​134, 142n, 148, 160–​162, 166n, 182n, 189–​191, 196, 199, 201–​203, 210, 231, 245, 249 academic 72–​85 global 38–​40, 58n, 62n, 216 historical 59n, 173n political 61–​63, 194 covid-​19 8, 56, 187n, 191–​197, 198 Creative 39, 57, 119, 126n6, 145, 147, 152 destruction 65, 68

intellectual potential 4, 15n work 23, 25, 26n, 147 Criteria 1n2, 2, 4, 9, 37, 39n, 80, 88, 90, 96, 103, 108, 119, 121, 133, 142, 205, 207n, 242–​246, 249 Critique 1, 8, 34, 44, 90, 154, 157n2, 173, 177n, 188, 195n, 197 external 30–​33 internal 4, 29–​33, 41 social 29–​32, 41, 43, 183n Culture 7n, 10, 15, 25, 33n, 40n, 45, 48, 52, 79, 82, 89, 93, 104, 106n, 112, 113, 119, 128, 142, 155, 178n, 190, 193, 196n, 200, 216, 244 academic 6, 21, 26, 47, 117, 120, 155 audit 58, 60, 71, 126 European 145, 178 high 145n national 145–​148, 151–​153 Current research information systems (cris) 243n, 251 Democracy 18, 28, 43, 62, 65, 70, 72, 119, 156, 201, 203, 212, 213 Development 1, 5n, 10, 15, 17, 19–​21, 30, 32–​ 34, 38n, 41, 43, 46, 48, 52n, 58, 60–​63, 66n, 69, 71, 73–​76, 83, 86, 88n, 91, 93n, 96, 99, 101, 105n, 110, 117, 121–​123, 129, 131n, 134, 141, 148n8, 155, 157n2, 161, 163, 173n, 177n, 180–​182, 185, 195, 199n, 202, 205–​209, 211n, 213, 222–​224, 229, 231, 234n, 237n, 239, 241, 246 Distorted (distortion) 1–​4, 8n, 29, 32, 36, 89, 108, 130, 173n, 213 Education 1–​4, 6–​9, 17–​21, 25, 37, 41, 43n, 45, 55, 56, 66, 91, 93, 101–​107, 111n, 122, 126–​ 128, 132–​138, 138–​140, 143, 146n, 150–​153, 155, 161, 176–​184, 185n, 199n, 202, 204–​ 209, 210, 239, 244, 246, 248, 250 higher 3, 7, 9n, 17, 21n8, 26–​28, 53, 59, 70, 72–​76, 80, 84, 104, 106, 117–​120, 128–​ 132, 135, 141, 174–​176, 179–​182, 213–​234, 234–​238 Epistemology 8, 96, 187–​190, 193, 196, 210

254 Index EU (European Union) 3, 39, 51n2, 154, 241, 139, 208, 234, 241, 250 Central European countries (semi-​ periphery) 4, 29–​31, 37, 51n2 European countries (EU member states) 53, 58, 88, 147n8 Parliament 53, 57 Evaluation 1n2, 5n, 9, 23–​25, 29, 35, 38–​40, 45, 50–​54, 58, 61, 77, 86, 90, 98–​100, 107, 109, 118, 120, 123, 125n, 129, 142, 149, 152, 155, 167, 175, 181n, 207, 239–​242, 244–​ 246, 248n, 250n Explanation 1, 3n, 8, 22, 34, 41, 73, 136, 156, 241 Freedom 6, 18, 35–​37, 42n, 60, 91n, 103, 106, 113, 120, 132, 135, 138, 145, 147, 151, 160, 163, 168, 194, 198, 213n academic 21, 70–​83, 84n, 86n, 89, 94, 100, 110, 153 of expression 37, 102, 106n7, 110–​112 of speech 6, 84, 104n, 107 Function 15, 20, 40, 68, 86, 90, 93, 95, 103, 119n, 142n, 158, 167, 173, 201, 222, 227, 248 ideological 179, 181 of the university 78–​81, 102, 179 political 8, 179–​181 social 79, 161, 216 Humanities 1, 5–​8, 10, 22n, 29, 30n, 36, 38–​ 41, 84, 109, 121, 123, 125n, 127, 149n, 153, 156, 166n, 173, 177, 183, 206, 242 Innovation 1n, 15, 38n, 47n, 69, 88, 94, 99, 117, 131, 141n1, 150, 155, 174, 205n, 239, 241, 243n, 246, 248, 250 Intellectual 6n, 15n, 18–​21, 23, 25, 67, 74, 78, 83, 86n, 92, 94n, 101–​103, 105n, 112, 124–​ 126, 138, 151, 155, 170, 175, 178–​181, 199, 204, 210, 215, 217, 226 creativity 4, 19n6 production 18, 20n6, 207 Institution 1–​6, 27, 41n, 46–​49, 56, 60, 62n, 69, 74, 86, 88, 97–​99, 153, 187, 190, 195, 201–​205 academic 1n, 4, 6, 15–​25, 30, 38, 76–​78, 80n, 86, 117–​119, 125n, 173–​176, 217, 240–​ 246, 250

foreign 222, 224–​228, 236 higher education 72n, 101–​108, 178–​184, 207, 213n, 216, 218–​234, 235 local 9, 226n public 2, 17, 29, 38–​40, 132, 176, 216, 218, 221, 230 research 4, 8, 31, 35–​40, 53n, 66, 75, 122, 142n, 205, 230, 245, 248 Justice 5, 10, 30, 32, 42, 43n, 65, 72, 80, 82, 85, 105n6, 136, 161 Knowledge 2, 8, 10, 17, 20, 22–​25, 26, 28, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 58, 59, 61–​63, 65–​67, 74, 76–​79, 83, 85, 87–​92, 94, 99, 107, 110–​112, 113, 136, 144, 150–​153, 158, 161, 163–​165, 167, 170, 173n, 177n, 180–​184, 186, 191–​193, 198, 207, 213n, 224, 229, 234, 244, 247 economy 20n, 27, 139 production 20, 27, 57, 60, 70n, 129, 138, 187–​190, 196n, 199n, 216 scientific 19n6, 50n, 54–​56, 90–​92, 102n, 110, 151, 153, 180 society 20, 26, 55, 131–​133, 189, 231 Latin America 4, 8, 41, 173–​182, 184, 185n, 210 Methodological trichotomy (trichotomic methodology) 5, 30n, 33–​35, 41 Methods 16–​18, 24, 39, 49, 52–​54, 73, 95, 108, 150, 153, 199, 214, 239, 244n Metrics 6, 44, 51, 53, 58, 60, 120, 123–​124, 128, 155, 199n, 209, 211n, 239, 244n, 249, 250–​252 citation 123, 241 Movement 2, 22, 65, 73n, 94, 98, 102, 183, 218 social 10, 97, 132 University Reform 8, 174, 179–​181, 183 Nation 7, 143–​146, 148n, 168, 216, 218, 236, 239 National Knowledge Commission (nkc) 222, 236 Nation-​state 17, 61, 100 Neoliberalism 2, 9, 10, 19, 31, 35, 43, 59n, 65, 70, 92, 94–​96, 98–​100, 118–​120, 127, 137, 139n, 175, 181, 186, 199–​201, 210n, 213n, 235

255

Index New Education Policy (nep) 2020 227, 230n, 233 Non-​Western 41, 187–​189, 190, 193, 199 people 191, 196 world 1, 4, 8 Normativity 34, 41 Organization for Economic Co-​operation and Development (oecd)  Output 22, 54n5, 90, 112, 118, 120–​122, 125, 167, 201, 235 research 39, 52, 207–​209, 211, 229, 243n scientific 89, 111, 241 Pandemic 1, 8, 56, 93, 123, 187–​197, 221 Paradigm 3n4, 18, 97, 139, 176, 187–​191, 193, 196, 199, 203 Peer review 52, 57, 123, 239, 244–​246, 250–​252 Policy 9, 17, 21n8, 26, 44, 48n, 52, 57n, 78, 100, 104, 117, 128, 129, 136, 141, 149n10, 155, 180n, 190, 203, 205, 209n, 214, 216, 223, 239–​249 academic 18n education 7, 80, 126, 130–​135, 137n, 139, 186, 220, 227, 230n, 233, 235–​237 neoliberal 7, 49, 134, 137, 247 research 48, 58 science 45n, 48n, 53, 57n, 98 Post-​national 149 crisis 149, 154 situations 143, 148 Publication 2, 7, 22–​24, 27, 39n, 52, 60, 72, 77, 105n6, 110, 112, 119n, 122–​126, 175, 208, 229, 235n, 239–​241, 243–​245, 247n, 250 Rank (rankings) 18, 58n, 82, 121–​123, 134, 175, 186, 207–​209, 220, 228n, 235–​237, 240 Research 1–​10, 15, 17, 20n6, 22n, 26, 29–​33, 35–​42, 44, 45–​54, 56, 57n, 59–​67, 70, 72n, 75–​79, 83, 86, 88n, 91n, 94, 96–​99, 102n, 107–​112, 117, 120–​126, 129n, 132–​ 138, 139, 141–​143, 149–​153, 155, 160, 167, 173–​184, 197, 199n, 204–​209, 211n, 213, 215, 224, 229n, 234, 236n, 239–​249, 250–​252 assessment 9, 44, 239, 241, 243n, 248, 250

R&D 8, 61, 88, 117, 126, 132, 141n, 154, 199n, 208 Scopus 122, 142, 207–​209, 211n, 229, 242, 248n Society 5–​8, 10, 15, 18n, 22n, 25, 26, 28, 30–​ 33, 35, 37, 42, 43, 45–​48, 51n, 54n, 57n, 64, 67, 70, 75, 78–​83, 86, 88, 94n, 100, 102–​104, 108, 112, 122, 127n, 129, 134n, 139, 141, 143, 153, 158, 160n, 163, 166, 173, 178–​184, 191, 199n, 202, 204, 209, 210, 215n, 223, 236n, 241, 244, 246n, 251 civil 2, 30, 48, 136 information 21, 28 knowledge 20n, 55, 131–​133, 231 Socialism 64n, 72, 143n, 144, 213 Social sciences 1, 5–​8, 10, 29–​31, 34, 38–​41, 55, 84, 87, 91, 96, 109, 121, 123–​126, 153, 167, 173n, 177, 180n, 183n, 206, 210, 215, 229, 242, 248, 252 System 7, 24, 31, 47, 50, 52n, 58, 59n, 62–​69, 70, 73–​75, 87, 89, 91n, 99, 101, 106, 119–​ 121, 124, 126, 137, 138, 156–​159, 165, 167, 173n, 177, 180n2, 181, 187–​189, 197, 199, 205–​207, 211, 215, 233, 240, 242–​245, 242–​249, 250n economic 9, 200–​203, 209 education 119, 128, 131, 134n, 213, 219, 219–​ 221, 227, 229 research 39, 53, 117 social 4, 6, 29, 41n, 95n, 108n, 183 value 32 unesco 197, 205, 209, 212, 216, 234, 237 University 3, 6, 8, 10n, 15, 17–​19, 22, 25, 26–​28, 39, 42–​44, 46, 50, 55, 58, 60n, 66, 70n, 73–​81, 84n, 86, 88–​90, 94, 101–​108, 111, 113, 117–​120, 122n4, 125n, 127n, 130–​132, 138n, 141n, 149–​152, 154n, 157n, 159, 168n, 173–​184, 186, 197n, 200, 205, 207–​209, 210–​212, 214n, 218–​225, 227–​230, 232n, 234–​238, 239n, 244, 244–​246, 250 Value 4–​6, 8, 18, 21, 24n9, 31–​33, 38, 45, 48, 56, 62, 67, 72, 76, 79n, 89, 96, 98n, 103n, 106, 111, 117, 123–​125, 161, 166, 175, 190n, 204, 213–​215, 239–​241, 243, 249

256 Index Western 4, 8, 17, 27, 40, 55, 64, 66, 68, 73, 76, 93, 96, 143, 152, 187–​194, 196, 199n, 204, 206n, 209, 246 countries 5, 30n, 35, 38, 46–​48, 65, 82 hegemony 188n, 195, 197, 204 who 187, 195, 198 Web of Science 9, 40, 121, 125n6, 142, 208, 211, 239–​245, 248n Work 20, 26, 30n2, 38, 52n, 66, 73n, 80, 99, 105n8, 117n1, 121–​123, 130n1, 132–​134, 136,

139, 141–​143, 153, 157n2 and 3, 165, 189, 221, 239 academic 8, 16, 19, 24, 76n, 118, 174 creative 25, 147n intellectual 21n, 124–​126, 151, 180 scientific 22–​24, 78, 104, 108–​11, 145n, 149–​151 wto 217 gats 217–​219, 22, 225, 232, 234n, 237 gatt 217 trips 217