University in Crisis: From the Middle Ages to the University of Excellence (Off the Fence: Morality, Politics and Society) 9781538174999, 9781538175002, 1538174995

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University in Crisis

Off the Fence: Morality, Politics, and Society The series is published in partnership with the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics & Ethics (CAPPE), University of Brighton.

Series Editors: Bob Brecher, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Brighton, Robin Dunford, Senior Lecturer in Globalisation and War, University of Brighton, Michael Neu, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton Off the Fence presents short, sharply argued texts in applied moral and political philosophy, with an interdisciplinary focus. The series constitutes a source of arguments on the substantive problems that applied philosophers are concerned with: contemporary real-world issues relating to violence, human nature, justice, equality and democracy, self and society. The series demonstrates applied philosophy to be at once rigorous, relevant, and accessible—philosophy-in-use. The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty, by Alejandra Mancilla Complicity: Criticism between Collaboration and Commitment, by Thomas Docherty The State and the Self: Identity and Identities, by Maren Behrensen Just Liberal Violence: Sweatshops, Torture, War, by Michael Neu The Troubles with Democracy, by Jeff Noonan Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People, by Alex Sager Digital Working Lives: Worker Autonomy and the Gig Economy, by Time Christiaens The Other Enlightenment: Race, Sexualist and Self-Estrangement, by Matthew Sharpe

University in Crisis From the Middle Ages to the University of Excellence

Michael Schapira

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948097 ISBN: 978-1-5381-7499-9 (cloth) ISBN: 978-1-5381-7500-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 The Past vs. the Future

17

2 The Student vs. the Society

39

3 Discipline vs. Discipline

57

4 The Global vs. the Local

75

5 The Professor vs. the Administration

93

6 The Educational vs. the Economic

109

7 Kant vs. the Managers: Managerialism, Self-Governance and the Burden of Institutional Reproduction

127

Bibliography143 Index153 About the Author

159

v

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bob Brecher for his patient and consistently insightful editorial eye along the way. This is a clear case where a majority of improvements lay with him and remaining faults remain my responsibility. I am also blessed to have a mother-in-law, Rebecca Stuhr, who willingly and with great patience and interest read an early draft of the manuscript. Elaine McGarraugh deserves special mention for the unenviable task of rendering American English prose into British English, and Natalie Mandziuk and Mahesh Meiyazhagan expressed great patience in shepherding the project towards completion. The germ of this topic emerged during my own disastrous and crisis-filled graduate school experience, but I was aided tremendously in giving shape to my frustrations by Robbie McClintock, a criminally underread historian and philosopher of education. This book is dedicated to the ladies of the house Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Çilem, and Vera Schapira.

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Introduction

HOW NOT TO SPEAK, TODAY, OF THE UNIVERSITY? It is not often that one turns to the notoriously obscure Jacques Derrida for clarity on a topic of public confusion, but such is the troubled state of the university today. But before turning to Derrida, it is helpful to get a flavour of this confusion by working backwards through some recent (and not so recent) history of the university. This account will centre largely on the American context, for reasons explained later in the chapter, though a little explanation is useful up front. In short, the differences between national contexts (e.g. the extent to which universities are state institutions or retain levels of independence from the state, the specific organization of courses of study for undergraduate and graduate students, the extent to which tertiary and secondary education are related) could make for an unwieldy account, whereas exploring a specific context in more depth can provide useful points of comparison and contrast. Importantly, given the prominence of the United States in global higher education (to be explored in chapter 4), this will provide insights into universities globally, as will become clear as I make connections to other contexts. To reach firmer conclusions about global trends would of course require follow-up research. As I write this Introduction, the Spring semester of 2023 is drawing to a close, and for the first time in three years we will be finishing a full school year in person, physically gathered together in a classroom, without facemasks. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is fairly easy to date, but consensus on an end date and an accounting of its effects on higher education won’t be forthcoming for some time. What is a matter of relative consensus is that the pandemic has brought to the surface a number of ‘crises’, some of which, according to Columbia University literature scholar and frequent 1

2

Introduction

commenter on higher education, Andrew Delbanco, may mark a ‘breaking point’ for universities.1 Take, for example, the issue of staggering inequality in higher education, which has been growing steadily since the 1980s. Delbanco notes that 95 per cent of American colleges and universities have an endowment valued at less than 1 per cent of Harvard and other Ivies. Being able to draw upon these and other resources has helped elite universities weather any added burdens of operating during the pandemic and likely increased their tenfold expenditure-per-student advantage over community colleges (roughly $100,000 per student at the Ivies to $10,000–15,000 per student at community colleges before the pandemic).2 Moreover, the pandemic may have moved up the coming ‘population bomb’, which originally forecasted a 15 per cent decline in enrolments to arrive in the mid-2020s due to a decrease in the college-age population. However, enrolments at some colleges and universities (again, those below the highly sought-after, resource-rich Ivies) have already seen deficits of up to 20 per cent in the fall of 2022. Coupled with long-term public disinvestment in higher education and a concomitant dependence on tuition and other student fees, these enrolment deficits will likely result in extensive cuts to academic programs, unusual mergers and consolidations between institutions (e.g. Northeastern University in Boston, MA, and Mills College in Oakland, CA, becoming one administrative unit) or outright closures. These endowment figures may be particular to a few private institutions in the United States, but the phenomenon of public disinvestment, growing inequality and the straining of certain programs to a breaking point can be seen elsewhere around the globe. Already over a decade ago, Andrew McGettigan wrote about The Great University Gamble, wherein a string of UK governments (from Tony Blair’s Labour in 1997 to the David Cameron, Nick Clegg Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010) raised the amount students had to borrow to pay tuition fees in the context of budget shortfalls. These caps quickly rose from an initially modest £1,000 in 1997 to £3,000 in 2006, to £9,000 in 2010, at which point they were accompanied by a shift in public financing from a block grant to a subsidized ‘fee and loan regime’.3 This locked higher education into an austerity regime that, amongst other things, has swelled the average amount of debt for a graduating student in 2020 to $58,571.4 Moreover, by yoking funding to tuition fees, UK universities saw themselves staring into a ‘black hole of hundreds of millions of pounds’ as international students cancelled enrolment during the early days of the Covid pandemic, leading to further talk of a crisis.5 At the level of teaching and learning, the post-pandemic outlook seems just as packed with a series of breaking points. The turn to online teaching and the increased use of digital learning technologies necessitated by the pandemic

Introduction

3

have not proven to be the panacea proposed by many higher education innovators, with both students and faculty complaining about a reduction in instructional quality and experiencing elevated levels of burnout and attrition. The isolated nature of such learning has also led to an increase in anxiety and related mental health issues amongst the student body, which is a contributing factor to the declining enrolment numbers cited above.6 Faculty seem to be faring no better, with many reporting marked increases in stress and a deterioration in work-life balance from pre-pandemic levels.7 This is not surprising given the changing character of the faculty, now dominated by non-tenure track instructors who often lack the institutional or financial support, to say nothing of the security of guaranteed continued employment, to invest properly in new teaching methods in exceptional circumstances like the abrupt shift to remote teaching and learning.8 This ‘dismantling of the American professorate . . . [and] casualization of labor in general’, magnificently explored in Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors, follows many other spiralling inequalities in higher education and has dashed any prospect of quality teaching in many universities.9 It has even given rise to a new genre of ‘quit lit’, whether from precariously employed instructors on their blogs10 or in public fora like Marina Warner’s widely read account in the London Review of Books of why she was quitting her professorial position at the University of Essex.11 One could go on to find breaking points in the economics of higher education, whether in the ‘student debt crisis’12 or in the crucial role universities play in the processes of gentrification and the unaffordability of quality housing in many major cities.13 One could note, as Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Neilsen do in an important recent book, that declining public investment in higher education has been a prime factor in exacerbating racial inequalities which continue to roil the United States.14 One could, moving in the opposite, less material direction, worry about the very soul of the university as the liberal arts, once seen as the core of a ‘higher education’, are abandoned for more instrumental subjects such as business, by far the most popular major amongst undergraduates. Or one could route latent cultural resentments through discussions of ‘free speech’ on campus or more general concerns about the resilience of the rising generation wherein the college student becomes the figurehead of numerous malignant developments in the culture. Chances are, if you have found your way to this book, you bring with it some awareness that things are deeply amiss in the university, in more or less specific terms depending on your personal experience, national context or media diet. But how does this hang together in a larger story? Today we find ourselves in a situation where one can axiomatically invoke the ‘crisis’ label when it comes to the university, but whether that claim attaches to a

4

Introduction

holistic assessment of the institution, some particular issue within it or a broader claim about the direction of society is unclear. Moreover, as should be indicated by Delbanco’s invocation of a ‘breaking point’, there is also some ambiguity about the temporal status of such claims: have we arrived at the crisis that imperils the institution once and for all? The urgency of many such claims is complicated by the fact that the university has very often been in ‘crisis’ in the past – whether it be in those nervous years following the 2007–2008 financial crash, during the grinding culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s,15 proclaimed loudly in the streets by the student movements of the 1960s,16 raised as a populist challenge to American higher education in the early twentieth century,17 or heard across the Atlantic in the ‘semantic disease’ whereby everything was described as a crisis in German universities during this same period.18 With this context in mind, let us turn to Derrida, and in particular his 1983 speech, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’, to get our bearings in this proliferating talk of crisis and breaking points. He begins with an oddly phrased question: ‘How not to speak, today, of the university?’19 Derrida phrases his question negatively for two reasons. First, he believed that it had become a practical impossibility ‘to dissociate the work we do [in universities], within one discipline or several, from a reflection on the political and institutional conditions of that work’.20 Quite simply, despite ongoing changes in internal organization or the aesthetics of its outward-facing presentation, the university has achieved a level of institutional solidity in political and educational discourses to enable it to impose a set of practical considerations not only on those who work, teach and learn in a university setting but also on the political community at large, as the foregoing discussion of the multiple ‘crises’ of the university attests. One needn’t just peruse the Chronicle of Higher Education or the Times Higher Education to get a sense of these considerations but can reliably expect to hear about some issue surrounding the university (often a ‘crisis’) on National Public Radio, the BBC or other mainstream news outlets on what seems a weekly basis. The second reason for putting the question negatively is to initiate a discussion about the university that can steer clear of ‘bottomless pits’, ‘protectionist barriers’21 and other paths blocked by conceptual unclarity or adherence to dogmatic modes of thought. In this second sense, Derrida is not simply being censorious but is invoking the critical tradition in philosophy, whether that of the Frankfurt School (e.g. in critiquing an ethos of ‘endoriented research’22 [finalisation] that he saw spreading in universities) or of the Kantian variant and its attachment to the grounding force of reason (as in Derrida asking whether the university, today, has a raison d’être – that is, an account that encompasses both ‘reason’ and ‘being’23). As will be clear in

Introduction

5

what follows, I believe this critical sense (especially in the Kantian tradition) is something that has been lost in recent discussions about the university and its many crises. This book, then, takes up Derrida’s question as a general orientation for contemporary discussions about the ‘crisis of the university’. Because of its somewhat coy negative framing, this question can be more helpful in bringing clarity to our confused times than the more pointed, ‘Can’t you see that we’re at a breaking point and need fix this mess now?’ On the one hand, following Derrida, it is important to think about the conditions under which an institution such as the university so easily finds itself described as in crisis. If we limit ourselves to enumerating the immediate conditions of an acute crisis – be that a global pandemic, financial collapse or political flare-ups over free speech – we miss something essential. I shall attempt to show that ‘crisis’ is a constitutive feature of universities globally, and when we understand it as such we can better appreciate the iterative quality of discussions about the university, embedding it not only in broader shifts in the economy, culture and state, but also in its own history. On the other hand, still following Derrida, it is important to directly address ways of speaking about the university today that are not helpful. It is too easy to invoke crises in ways that have a surface plausibility (e.g. pointing to the manifold inequalities that universities promote) but harbour profoundly problematic assumptions (e.g. laying these at the feet of unwise decisions by individual university leaders, instead of emphasizing the systemic drivers of inequality). Two particularly pernicious strains stand out. The first is a wooly idealism that disembeds the university from its immediate material conditions and processes of historical change. There is indeed an inspiring and rhetorically rich storehouse of ‘ideas of the university’, articulations of an essence from which we can measure our current disorder. Couldn’t the crudeness of our culture be reversed if young people re-committed themselves to studying, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’,24 instead of orienting all their studies towards the future accumulation of wealth? But such an approach erects precisely some of those ‘protectionist barriers’ that Derrida alerts us to, delimiting what can be said and known about the university and ensnaring debates in unhelpful, circular exchanges. One thrust of this book is to interrogate these ideas through the lens of crisis, which as we will see provides a far richer narrative palette and can translate into more effective strategies to address the university’s problems. The second, which is not only deforming our understanding of the university’s history and raison d’être but is also having deleterious material effects on the experience of those touched by it, is the discourse of managerialism, the apotheosis of instrumental reason. If crisis and the mediation of structural

6

Introduction

tensions are indeed central to the being of the university, then managerialism emerges as a direct challenge to the institution. As opposed to accusations about political correctness or financial malfeasance, managerialism cuts to the very core of the university by characterizing conflict as an obstacle to be removed, instead of a defining institutional feature and an enduring mechanism for its institutional reproduction over time and in changing conditions. Unfolding this logic will point very squarely to ways not to speak about the university, especially for those ensnared in the types of issues which opened this section when matters blossom into a ‘crisis’ quite quickly. But all of this is getting ahead of ourselves, and in the spirit of Derridean deferral, a little groundwork needs to be laid for my argument. First, I would like to foreground the theme of ‘crisis’, exploring the deep history of the concept (following the work of intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck) and laying out its function in a variety of contemporary debates. After specifying what is at stake in describing something as a crisis (as opposed, for example, to a challenge, a problem or a catastrophe), I will lay out the general architecture of the overall argument, explaining how the six oppositions that constitute the book’s core chapters offer an opportunity to ground contemporary debates in a longer history of the university and its various crises. Threaded through these chapters will be examples of past crises and how their successful or unsuccessful mediations have helped build important expectations that we now attach to the university. They will also take up more contemporary examples of where these oppositions are most likely to manifest today. I conclude this Introduction by anticipating, in outline, the argument of chapter 7, which takes up the discourse of managerialism directly as a particularly mystifying and pernicious way of speaking about the university. There is no doubt that the university is beset by a proliferating set of challenges, problems and catastrophes, but addressing these as problems of managerialism (seeking the removal of conflict in the most efficient manner possible) spells death for the university. I will therefore, with the help of Immanuel Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, attempt to develop a language that centres crisis and conflict25 so as to advance a sufficiently powerful alternative to the managerial frameworks which have taken root in many university systems like the United States and the United Kingdom and threaten to spread globally.26

CRISIS: WHAT’S IN A WORD? How not to speak, today, of the university without resorting to the language of crisis? The compulsion to reach for crisis, conscious or not, pervades

Introduction

7

discussions within and without the university, in popular to scholarly accounts. Why is the university in crisis, as opposed to facing challenges, losing its way, posing problems to various constituencies, falling ill or just disappointing us, as so many of our institutions seem to do these days? Crisis certainly brings with it a sense of drama and urgency and thus may simply be part of the general intensification of communication in our attention economy. It is also a favoured concept for those with an agenda, as Barack Obama’s chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel let slip when he said that ‘the [2007/8 economic] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before’.27 This intimate link between the diagnosis of crisis and the advocacy of both reform and fundamental change elides a far more complicated set of associations that have been attached to the word ‘crisis’. The term comes from the ancient Greek krisis (κρίσις), from the verb krinein, ‘to choose’, ‘to separate’ or ‘to decide’. Its meaning often depended on the sphere in which it was deployed. For example, in the political sphere crisis signalled the point of a reasoned decision that comes after arguments were put forward for and against a judgement (linking it to the modern use of ‘criticism’). In the theological sphere, crisis was associated with the Last Judgement in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. In medicine, it referred ‘both to the observable condition and to the judgment about the course of the illness. At such a time, it will be determined whether the patient will live or die’.28 Reinhart Koselleck summarizes these early uses thusly: ‘the concept is applied to life-deciding alternatives meant to answer the question about what is just or unjust, what contributes to salvation or damnation, and what furthers health or brings death’.29 As crisis entered national languages in Europe, there were attempts to retain some of these initial linkages – for example in Thomas Hobbes’ application of it to politics in the medical sense of peril in the ‘body politic’ (dramatically represented in his commissioned frontispiece to Leviathan). However, during the age of Enlightenment, uses of crisis began to coalesce around two possible trajectories, both drawn from an understanding of history. Either crisis marked ‘a possible structural recurrence’ (to take an example that would become prominent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the crisis-prone character of capitalism) or an ‘absolutely unique event’ whose consequences marked a point of no return.30 Koselleck claims that at this point crisis becomes ‘the supreme concept of modernity’, for in either case ‘it now provides the possibility of envisioning, and hence planning for the foreseeable future’.31 It is thus not surprising that universities, especially in their modern guise, were going to become sites for much talk of crisis. University students were in fact prime representatives of this latter, more revolutionary understanding of crisis. Arnold Ruge, a young Hegelian who

8

Introduction

studied and would later go on to teach at the University of Halle, observed in 1842: ‘Our time has now become especially critical . . . and the crisis is . . . nothing more than . . . the attempt . . . to break through and discard the shell of the past, a sign that something new has replaced it’.32 For Koselleck, Ruge represents an understanding of crisis that is attempting to consolidate a spent historical trajectory and, in a Hegelian spirit, set some baseline realities on a new/higher level. ‘Because it is able to see the direction of history’, Koselleck writes, ‘this critique is propelling the crisis’.33 As we will see, many actors throughout the history of the university have leaned into this critical mode to propel the ‘crisis’ and the sense that something new must replace current and past forms. This has applied both to the university itself and to how knowledge produced within the university has been mobilized in an understanding of unfolding developments in politics, economics or culture. Knowledge produced within the university has also proven amenable to the former, more reformist, understanding of crisis. Take, for example, Jürgen Habermas’ idea of a ‘legitimation crisis’.34 A legitimation crisis occurs when an institution – say a government or a university – retains its formal position in being asked to provide certain goods to a community but has lost the widespread support and faith of its constituents, either because of an inability to provide these goods or because of some deformation in how this responsibility is understood. For many, the university provides one of the clearest cases of a systematic imbalance between the demands that an institution produces and those for which it can actually provide – for example failing to produce valued outputs such as meaningful and lucrative employment for graduating students, increased representation in social and political institutions for liberal considerations of justice or useful knowledge for society at large. When crisis is invoked in this sense, a mixture of critical reflection (are certain demands appropriate to institutions?) and pragmatic concerns (is it even possible to fulfil such demands?) will guide our thinking, but without the over-determined sense of historical change seen in Ruge.35 The point is rather to apply one’s understanding of the situation to ground proposals that envision a more stable, less crisis-prone future. Unlike a medical diagnosis, a projection into the Final Judgement, or the point where a particular kind of legislative willpower is required, crisis now wavers between these two poles: either a radical break with past practices is required or a more nuanced understanding of the cause of social disruption will suggest roads to reform. Neither path is innocent of deeper commitments, for, as the anthropologist Janet Roitman argues, ‘the point is to observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways in which it regulates narrative constructions, the ways in which it allows certain questions to be asked while others are foreclosed’.36 Hence crisis is a leverage point from which values, priorities and practices that have drifted into the

Introduction

9

background can be revealed and made available for discussion and criticism at specific historical junctures. As Hayden White has argued, paying attention to these narrative constructions re-enlivens the kind of historical thinking that most discussions of the university sorely lack.37 When we dive into the history of the university, which could just as aptly be described as the history of the ‘crisis of the university’, we can see this rich associative palette deployed to work out these key questions. Returning to Derrida’s animating question, one way not to speak of the university is to use crisis in such a way as to evacuate this potential storehouse of framing questions and interpretative schema. As Janet Roitman writes, such deployments most often construe crisis ‘in terms of epistemological or ethical failure’,38 imposing a relatively poor narrative context on historical events by asking only the question, ‘What went wrong?’ However, this is no reason to run from the crisis claim. In fact, if we push these narratives, giving shape to that absent ideal from which this judgement of failure can be made, we can learn much about what is happening in and around the university today – or indeed at particular times in the past. In an environment where the transcendental measure of God, Reason or teleological readings of history no longer obtains for many academics, excavating this absent ideal is helpful in discerning the political priorities and cultural possibilities associated with the university. Moreover, interrogating these absent ideals points towards a renegotiation with those concepts that remain in plain sight (e.g. of student development, production of knowledge, pedagogy, etc.) and thus can point to a refreshed understanding of universities.

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY IN CRISIS There is both something obvious about reasserting the university as a historical institution (we can assign dates to university foundations in Bologna, Paris, Berlin, etc.) and something deeply counter-intuitive. Former University of California president Clark Kerr once remarked that, of seventy-five institutions founded before 1520 ‘which are [still] doing much the same things in much the same places, in much the same ways and under the same names’, nearly sixty are universities.39 The endurance of tradition, the material associations with religious institutions (the gothic architectural accents, the monastery-like cloisters for study), the trafficking in immaterial things like ideas and ‘intellectual development’, give the university an air of existing outside the whirl of historical change. To exist both inside and outside of history is but one of the structuring tensions that sits at the core of the university and allows it so easily to fall into crisis. To resolve this tension definitively, to fall into the trap that opens up

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Introduction

when ‘crisis’ speeds up our thought and has us leap for quick solutions, is to miss much about what makes the university endure. The following chapters linger on the theme of crisis in order to resist the reductive purposes to which it is often deployed. In so doing, I will offer an account of the university’s development as an institution, from its cloistered origins in eleventh-century Bologna to the global campuses of the twenty-first century. Attending crisis, however, is a pattern of creative reconstruction that positions the university as a privileged institution for revealing and potentially resolving broader cleavages in social, political, and economic life. Thus, the book is also concerned with advancing a nested set of arguments justifying this central role for the university, advocating a more historically inflected approach to ‘the university in crisis’ discourse, and naming managerialism and the threat to institutional reproduction as the axes along which current arguments will most productively revolve. The book is divided into six primary sites of the ‘university in crisis’, each represented by a set of oppositional forces, and each bearing its own history. The first three sets of oppositions are concerned with connecting current discussions with the university’s past, showing how conflict and ‘crisis’ are constitutive features of the university. The Past vs. the Future begins with this theme of the timely/untimely nature of universities, paying particular attention to the ways that powerful normative ideals attach themselves to the university at different points in history, and when they fall into a state of crisis. Next, the Student vs. the Society looks at how students, occupying a liminal space between novice and expert, youth and adulthood, or citizen and subject, have produced their own distinct set of crises both within the university and for the political community at large. Third, Discipline vs. Discipline shows how the production, dissemination and organization of knowledge have intimately tied the university to Koselleck’s understanding of crisis as the ‘supreme concept of modernity’, with all the issues of power, agency, and responsibility it entails. These first three chapters will spend a good deal of time reconstructing key points in the development of the university in Europe and the United States, showing how successful and unsuccessful resolutions of past crises have left their inscriptions on our contemporary understanding of the university. To this end, each chapter will include examples from the present to bridge this history with current discussions so as to avoid the distortions of presentism. These are followed by a second set of oppositions that foreground the issues of collective self-governance and institutional reproduction, which – I will argue – are the most germane to current ‘university in crisis’ claims. The first is the Global vs. the Local, seen most spectacularly in the rise of ‘global campuses’ of universities like New York University, Yale and Columbia. As we will see, thinking about one’s global vs. local status provokes not only crises of identity (particularly in the role of the citizen) but also distinct

Introduction

11

legal and economic challenges for universities in an era where questions of sovereignty are deeply contested by the globalizing drive of capitalism. The Professor vs. the Administration foregrounds issues of governance in an institution that has been in some sense steadily complexifying – as Clark Kerr said in the 1960s, moving from a ‘university’ to a ‘multi-versity’.40 This chapter will explore both the ideological and material underpinnings of an argument that claims that certain ideals of academic self-governance no longer make sense in the university’s current guise and will then take up the issue of why such an argument needs to be contested. Finally, the Educational vs. the Economic interrogates one of the key fronts on which normative commitments of the university are fought today. One of the most common invocations of crisis as epistemological or ethical failure concerns the way that universities are letting down graduates, who face record levels of debt, as is the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, or letting down publics who fail to see meaningful returns on public investment in higher education. This chapter will explore the ways in which the subsumption of education under economic ends produces its own crises, which is to say that it demonstrates ways to not speak of the university today. While this is not an exhaustive survey of what the current crisis designation might intend, together these six oppositions pattern the historically inflected mode of argumentation that the book advances while turning attention towards the most salient features of the contemporary conjuncture. The concluding chapter takes up what I am calling managerialism, which encompasses not only a concrete reorganization of the governance structure of universities but also a paramount example of how not to mobilize the crisis claim. Throughout this Introduction, I have been advocating a claim about narrative, namely the epistemic claim about what ‘crisis’ allows us to know about the university, both regarding its raison d’être and its dialectical relationship with the political, economic and cultural context in which it exists. Following Derrida, paths to this kind of knowledge are blocked if we stubbornly and dogmatically measure our current condition against ahistorical, Platonic accounts of the ‘ideal’ university. Similarly, though from the opposite direction, we also lose this epistemic opportunity if we cede crisis to the instrumental, efficiency-obsessed discourse of managerialism, which views the conflicts that ‘crisis’ draws our attention to as obstacles to be removed. But we lose more than just an opportunity for greater knowledge: we lose also a discrete political agenda. The project of this book was conceived against the background of a tremendous amount of political activity coming from within the university – student movements resisting the imposition of new fees in 2010–2012 (from California to London to Quebec to Chile),41 renewed efforts from graduate students and contingent faculty to form unions in the early 2020s, and faculty

12

Introduction

attempting to reassert decision-making authority that has been steadily eroded by the ever-growing band of administrators and managers over the past few decades. Laudatory as many of these activities were, many struggled to find a language that found any critical purchase, often lapsing into the consoling register of complaint that comes with a radically shrunken sense of agency. To put it in colloquial terms, many such movements found themselves on the back foot in the face of this mounting talk of crisis. The final chapter sketches out what a different posture would look like, taking up as a paradigmatic case a movement at the University of Aberdeen to ‘reclaim our university’.42 Like many others, this movement united faculty, students and staff against an administrative claque aiming fundamentally to redefine the university along lines deeply inimical to the self-understanding of those involved. The gap between the movement and the administration was powerfully laid out in a manifesto, and many of the most pernicious changes were (for the moment) avoided, deeming it a success for many. However, I will argue that such an approach leaves something important off the table – namely a more substantial response to a managerial logic that is not just about the identity of the university but also is a threat to its ability to reproduce itself over time. The final chapter mobilizes the architecture of Immanuel Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties to show how a case that centres crisis and conflict can better serve movements like these. Kant not only produces a mechanism through which conflict is not destabilizing for the university itself but also shows how a university that embraces conflict is able also to productively engage broader issues concerning the nature of the state, economy and culture. This process-based approach, as opposed to a definitional struggle, can help deflate some of the intensity surrounding the crisis claim and offer universities a position that does not isolate them from unfolding discussions of sovereignty, responsibility and political economy. Let me conclude this Introduction with a brief apologia for my approach, which is necessarily restricted and of course reflects certain biases of the author. There is a voluminous literature on the university: its history, its identity, its crises and its future, much of which will be conspicuously absent. Moreover, there is a tendency in much of this literature to foreground a particularly Western history, with the host of the spirit of the university moving around Europe until finally arriving in the United States sometime in the twentieth century.43 In many ways, I will be reproducing this restrictive history even though I acknowledge it reflects a certain impoverishment of our understanding of the university, especially in a world that is moving in a direction of multi-polarity. However, there are benefits to rooting analyses in particular contexts to serve as suitable proxies for a more global perspective, and then taking time to draw connections outwards. Universities will operate within a particular

Introduction

13

policy architecture, occupy different positions within global distributions of power and resources, bear different historical and cultural legacies or respond to different demographic realities.44 Addressing these in a comprehensively detailed manner is beyond the purview of any book of reasonable length. However, it is undeniable both that there are commonalities across cultures despite the presence of particular differences and that the United States and a handful of leading universities therein have had a profound shaping influence on normative assumptions and institutional realities of universities across the globe, just as Europe had in the nineteenth century.45 The extent to which similarities can be found in different national contexts demonstrates the nature of this influence and how it shapes contemporary accounts of the ‘crisis of the university’, while the persistence of different models points to alternative renderings of the ‘crisis’ that may prove illustrative by way of contrast. One set of oppositional forces implied throughout these chapters but never taken up specifically is the particular and the universal. Thus, I can only hope that, through the accretion of actors, concepts and examples, the account of the university I am developing, eclectic as it may appear to some, will stimulate debate – and change.

NOTES 1. Andrew Delbanco, ‘The University Crisis: Does the Pandemic Mark a Breaking Point?’ The Nation, February 7, 2022, https://www​.thenation​.com​/article​/society​/ american​-universities​-crisis/, accessed May 6, 2023. 2. A New York Times op-ed by Brown University president Christian Paxson made this abundantly clear. Paxson advocated aggressive tracking and tracing programs and quarantining affected students in hotel rooms, so as to get students ‘back on track’ and, most importantly, not lose the tuition revenue of students frustrated with online learning who were opting to defer enrollment for a year. Brooklyn College professor Cory Robin responded in a New Yorker article demonstrating how unfeasible either of these proposals were for under-resourced public universities, who struggle to maintain the basic infrastructure of campus buildings during nonpandemic, normal times. See Cory Robin, ‘The Pandemic Is the Time to Resurrect the Public University’, The New Yorker, May 7, 2020, https://www​.newyorker​.com​ /culture​/cultural​-comment​/the​-pandemic​-is​-the​-time​-to​-resurrect​-the​-public​-university, Accessed May 6, 2023. 3. Andrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets, and the Future of Higher Education (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 2. 4. OECD, Education at a Glance 2022: OECD Indicators (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2022), 310. 5. Richard Adams and Rachel Hall, ‘UK universities face cash black hole amid coronavirus crisis’, The Guardian, March 6, 2020, https://www​.theguardian​

14

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.com​/education​/2020​/mar​/06​/uk​-universities​-face​-cash​-black​-hole​-coronavirus​-crisis, accessed May 6, 2023. As with the above discussion of Ivies, some universities will feel the pressure of this shift more acutely than others, and while still others will enjoy insulation from these kinds of shock. The motivation for McGettigan writing this book was the closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University, where he had earned his doctorate. University management argued that the motivation for the closure was financial and not specifically based on the teaching and research merits of the program, which both in fact ranked highly. For background on this decision, see the Save Middlesex Philosophy website, https://savemdxphil​.com​/about/, accessed May 6, 2023. 6. See Tony Jehi et al., ‘Effect of COVID‑19 Outbreak on Anxiety among Students of Higher Education; A Review of Literature’, Current Psychology (January 2022): 1–15. 7. See the report by Alina Tugen, ‘On the Verge of Burnout: Covid-19’s Impact on Faculty Well-Being and Career Plans’, Chronicle of Higher Education Research Brief, 2020, https://connect​.chronicle​.com​/rs​/931​-EKA​-218​/images​/Covid​%26F​acul​ tyCa​reerPaths​_Fidelity​_ResearchBrief​_v3​%20​%281​%29​.pdf, accessed May 6, 2023. For a sobering look at the over-promising and under-performing history of educational technologies like distance learning, see Justin Reich, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Cannot Transform Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). 8. The equivalent of this in British Universities is the rise of ‘zero-hours contracts’ and other precarious employment arrangements. At the start of the pandemic it was estimated that nearly half of British universities used such contracts for teaching staff. See Stefan Collini, ‘Covid-19 Shows up UK Universities’ Shameful Employment Practices’, The Guardian, April 28, 2020, https://www​ .theguardian​ .com​ / education​/2020​/apr​/28​/covid​-19​-shows​-up​-uk​-universities​-shameful​-employment​ -practices, accessed May 6, 2023. 9. Frank Donahue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), xiv. Also see Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 10. Lara McKenzie, ‘Unequal Expressions: Emotions and Narratives of Leaving and Remaining in Precarious Academia,’ Social Anthropology 34, no. 3 (2021): 262–279. 11. Marina Warner, ‘Why I Quit,’ The London Review of Books 36, no. 17 (September 2014). 12. According to the US Department of Education, student loan debt topped $1.6 billion in 2022 (https://studentaid​.gov​/data​-center​/student​/portfolio, accessed May 6, 2023). While not at this scale yet, we saw above how the United Kingdom has moved in a direction where student debt has grown on a steady upwards trajectory. 13. Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021). 14. Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Introduction

15

15. See Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 16. The boom in ‘crisis’ books during this time even led to compilations of source material as early as 1971. See The University Crisis Reader, eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr (New York, Vintage Books: 1971). 17. Scott Gelber, The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). 18. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 352–366. 19. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 129. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 141. 23. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 129. 24. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, and Co, 1869), viii. 25. As a reader of a draft of this book perceptively noted, ‘conflict’ perhaps deserves an equally central position as ‘crisis’ in my argument. There is a great deal of truth to this, and conflict will certainly get its due in chapter 7. But at this early stage it is helpful to think about crisis as having more to do with rhetoric about the university that frames and overdetermines matters, whereas conflict points to, as will be explored in the subsequent chapters, where change and agency are possible. 26. The mechanisms for this spread, from Global Ranking systems to branch campuses, will be explored in chapters 3 and 4. 27. Gerald Seib, ‘In Crisis, Opportunity for Obama,’ Wall Street Journal, Nov. 21, 2008, https://www​.wsj​.com​/articles​/SB1​2272​1278​056345271, accessed May 6, 2023. 28. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Crisis,’ trans. Michaela Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 360. 29. Ibid. 30. Koselleck, ‘Crisis,’ 371. 31. Koselleck, ‘Crisis,’ 377. 32. Koselleck, ‘Crisis,’ 384. 33. Ibid. 34. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975). 35. A good example of this kind of critical reflection can be found in Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). Brown examines the proliferation of physical walling projects at the borders of sovereign territories, which occurs at the same moment that such territories have effectively lost the ability to exercise sovereignty due to global flows of capital, information and, as we’ve seen recently, infectious diseases. Such a situation requires both a critical reexamination of the normative assumptions regarding security that we attach to

16

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sovereign entities and a reckoning with the actually existing conditions of sovereignty in a networked, technologically saturated world. Absent this, we see the deforming effects of a legitimacy crisis on political systems within sovereign territories in noxious forms of reactionary right-wing populism. 36. Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 94. 37. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–6. 38. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 9. 39. Clark Kerr, ‘The Internal and External Threats to the University of the TwentyFirst Century (Comments),’ Minerva 30, no. 2 (1992): 150. 40. Clark Kerr, Uses of the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 6. 41. These protests were largely contesting austerity measures in higher education, such as the shift towards a fee and subsidy model in the UK described by Andrew McGettigan. Other protests, for example in Turkey in 2013 or Hong Kong in 2014, were instances of students joining larger coalitions of anti-government protests. See Student Politics and Protests: International Perspectives, ed. Rachel Brooks (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 143–172. 42. https://rec​laim​ingo​urun​iversity​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2016​/10​/reclaiming​-manifestofinal​.pdf, accessed May 6, 2023. 43. This same kind of movement describes many world-systems theory accounts of hegemony. See for example Richard Lachmann’s First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship (New York: Verso, 2020). 44. To give just one example, in the next chapter we will see accounts of the university becoming a mass, as opposed to an elite, institution in the post-war period in the United States and United Kingdom. The scale of such a shift, significant in the context of these countries, is of a fundamentally different order than an institution such as the Indira Gandhi National Open University, which has as one of its mandates to ‘provide access to higher education to all segments of the society’. http://www​ .ignou​.ac​.in​/ignou​/aboutignou​/profile​/2, accessed May 6, 2023. 45. See for example Fabrice Jaumont, Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher Education Development in Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2016), which describes the role of American ‘philanthropy’ in the shaping of African higher education policy to fit the prerogatives of non-profit foundation presidents. Isaac A. Kamola goes further back and describes how the World Bank, under the leadership of former Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara in the late 1960s, saw ‘education – including higher education – as central to national development . . . [and thus] the made funding African universities a priority’. This initiated a long period of engagement with African higher education that shifted with foreign policy priorities: Isaac A. Kamola, Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 20. In Mark S. Ferrara’s Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) even the anticipation of a new global higher education landscape centred on the Far East is worked out dialectically in terms set largely by American institutions.

Chapter 1

The Past vs. the Future

From the strange regalia of the commencement ceremony or the British high table to the gothic or neo-classical accents of nineteenth-century US campus construction and colonial architecture at the heart of many universities in Latin America, the university is powerfully beholden to its history. However, as splashy op-eds and TED Talks confidently proclaim, our current crisis requires a radically new path – lest universities become the proverbial ivory tower completely cut off from the sweeping changes happening outside the campus grounds. In fact, for many Marx’s dictum from The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte best describes our relationship to the university’s past (emphases are my own): Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.1

For many future-oriented university thinkers, various aspects of tradition weigh on our epoch of revolutionary crisis like a nightmare from which we cannot escape, despite our best and boldest efforts. Look, for example, at Minerva University, a San Francisco-based venture founded in 2012 with a $25 million initial investment from Benchmark Capital.2 Purporting to provide that unique combination of critical and creative thinking that complex global problems like climate change, migration and technological 17

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innovation require, Minerva has dispensed not only with traditional academic departments but also the more basic building blocks of what one would expect to find at an American university such as the campus, the physical classroom and a faculty protected in their pursuit of the truth by tenure. Moreover, it can do so at relatively low costs because, as its website proudly proclaims, we only invest in the things needed to provide the best education possible; we don’t invest in expensive real estate, outdated infrastructure, collegiate sports, or unnecessary amenities that don’t directly support your educational experience. This is also why we do not offer faculty tenure; our expert faculty are here because they want to teach.3

Instead of the traditional American campus experience, students take all their classes in online seminars, following an ‘innovative’ pedagogical model based on the four core competencies of ‘critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication and effective interaction’,4 all while ‘immersing’ themselves in one of the seven ‘major cosmopolitan cities’ in which their residence halls are found.5 Yet, despite other features meant to liberate Minerva from the dead weight of its forerunners, we see it reverting to Marx’s ‘time-honored disguise[s] and borrowed language’. For example, it still feels compelled to provide a guiding motto in the dead language of Latin (Sapientia Critica – ‘Critical Knowledge’). As of 2021, it has passed the traditional accreditation process to ensure its Bachelors and Masters degrees are recognized by existing global standards.6 It still takes the prevailing American standard of four years as a reasonable time frame to complete an undergraduate degree. And, most importantly, it still justifies its innovative model by making many references to the holistic development of students, which has found expression from the incorporation of Renaissance Humanism into the university in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to the German ideal of Bildung and John Henry Newman’s focus on the ‘gentleman’, both of which guided university reforms in the nineteenth century.7 Even the most innovative, forward-looking institutions cannot avoid the fact that the university is replete with normative ideals about what a university is, who should be there and what they should be doing. Some of these go back to early origins in al-Qarawiyyin, Bologna and Paris for norms of self-governance (the guild-like ‘stadium generale’ operating autonomously of many local laws and decrees), the organization of academic programs into distinct faculties or standards concerning who is able to teach and who qualifies for different degrees.8 As we experience a whirl of seemingly unprecedented change wrought by technology, migration, climate

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19

emergency and economic disorder, how can we not speak of these powerful ideals from the university’s past as a means of finding stability? This chapter begins by laying out four such ‘ideas of the university’ that have remained prominent in our thinking and have therefore proven popular targets in current debates where a crisis is proclaimed, alternately as passionate objects of defence and attack. These ideas provide a gloss on the history of the university, as they roughly correspond with key points of development (at least in the West) and will often come up in the chapters that follow. They are, following the terminology of Jeffrey J. Williams, the University as Humanistic Enclave, the University as Centre for Civic Training, the University as Centre for Disciplinary Research and the University as Centre for Advanced Vocational Training.9 As with the crisis designation, these ideas serve a powerful narrative function, regulating which questions can be asked and what futures can be imagined. The second part of the chapter picks up the theme of crisis, in particular looking at how crisis claims centred on these ideas can help unfold a more nuanced temporality of how the university exists as an historical institution mediating a variety of tensions. Working against what Williams calls ‘idea discourse’,10 I advance an initial understanding of how crisis is a constitutive feature of the university as an institution – namely how ideas are creatively reconstructed in ever-shifting contexts, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Fully appreciating the import of crisis claims leads us to look outside the university itself and to its historical context – for example, how universities have developed normative patterns relating to the state, economy and culture and what happens when those patterns are disrupted or put under heavy strain. As we will see in the example under consideration in this chapter – the case of German universities in the early twentieth century – the creative reconstruction of ideas, a mediation of past and future, is not always successful. However, eliding this conflict altogether and lashing oneself to the mast of one particular idea is decisively not a way to speak about the contemporary university. A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY IN FOUR IDEAS The University as Humanistic Enclave Organized schooling, where students gather to learn something from wise people, goes back a long time. We can think of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (eighth century), Plato’s Akademia in Greece (fourth century BCE) or yet further back to the ‘Oracle Bones’ in China which mention the existence of what we might recognize as a school as early as the eleventh century BCE. Madrasas existed throughout the Islamic world by the time the

20

Chapter 1

first universities in Europe appeared,11 and in Europe monasteries and cathedral schools provided the opportunities for advanced study, to say nothing of the apprentice learning that occurred in the guild system. What made the ‘university’ distinct from these prior places of organized education? In the early European universities of the Middle Ages, we can point to some distinguishing features that were to become consequential for the development of the institution. The first was in many senses a legal innovation, namely that universities became ‘incorporated bodies’ (more on this in chapter 6). This not only recognized a shared mission of teaching and learning but also enabled students and faculty to act in the world, such as to own property, make policy decisions and claim special privileges relative to prevailing local laws. The second was the establishment of the faculty, which laid out basic qualifications for teachers in a variety of disciplines, ensuring quality standards for a comprehensive education in the liberal arts or whatever specialized subject had drawn one to advanced study at the university. The third, flowing from the establishment of the faculty, was the granting of degrees, which signalled that graduates of a prescribed course of study were educated people whose status should be recognized by others, whether this signalled the general learning entailed in the liberal arts curriculum or whether it meant doing things such as claiming the expertise to interpret law, practice medicine or in fact teach at a university. The fourth, which is for many the distinguishing feature of the university, was to assert independence as a matter of principle. As an educational institution, the university made a strong claim that it should not be micro-managed by the state, the church or local authorities but rather was to be guided by goods internal to its own practice. We can see an early recognition of this in the Authentica Habita of 1155, in which Frederick I, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, granted students and teachers a range of freedoms and immunities. If we turn to the University of Bologna, which in many tellings is the first ‘university’,12 we can see vivid illustrations of these features starting to congeal. Bologna is conventionally seen as a student-driven university, as many of the formal decisions and features reflected the needs and interests of students (in contrast to the University of Paris, which was seen as faculty-driven, or a ‘university of masters’). Bologna saw hundreds of students flocking to study Canon Law with famous teachers such as Irnerius: importantly, many came from outside Italy. Such foreigners (‘Transmontane’, roughly referring to their coming from the other side of the Alps) were organized into guildlike, incorporated bodies for mutual aid and protection (e.g. bargaining as a block for living space against potential profiteering from locals). As such they also negotiated terms with professors, who relied in part on student fees.13 Throughout the universities of the Middle Ages, there was great uniformity in what was taught, namely the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the

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21

Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy).14 Once students had passed this liberal arts curriculum, they could then move on to study in the higher faculties of Law, Theology or Medicine (of which medieval universities may not have had all but would have had at least one). We will return to these higher faculties in a moment, but the first ‘idea’ of the university that we will consider comes from a change in the basic curriculum which reflected an intensification of the focus on students: namely the incorporation of Renaissance Humanism into the university. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) stands as a towering text of the Renaissance, travelled to Bologna to study law as a teenager but did not finish his course of study after finding his literary and spiritual aspirations were not fulfilled by the medieval curriculum. The humanistic, literary/artistic thrust of the Renaissance stood in contradistinction to the scholasticism of the university as well as the professional focus of the higher faculties, and thus the arts and what we would now recognize as the humanities remained largely outside the university. However, as early as the 1300s this was beginning to change, with Bologna hiring artisans as professors and other universities in Italy, Central Europe and England allowing poets and scholars of Greek to reshape parts of the Trivium. The presence of humanistic study became especially pronounced in England in the sixteenth century, where Erasmus, from his perch at Queen’s College Cambridge, pressed the case for going back to the Greek sources of the New Testament and to philosophical classics like Aristotle instead of relying on medieval commentaries. As a good humanist, Erasmus believed that these sources constituted a refinement of style in communication and thought and had the potential to inspire virtue.15 This decisive turn towards a humanistic liberal education, which was to be characteristic of both the Oxbridge model and, much later, the residential liberal arts college of the United States, serves as one powerful ‘idea of the university’, one which Jeffrey J. Williams has characterized as the refugium or humanistic enclave.16 For many this is the purest ‘idea of the university’, because it hews to a constitutive feature of the earliest medieval universities – that is to say, if no students are seeking wisdom and personal transformation, then there is no university. If we dispense with the higher faculties that project one back into the worldly affairs and powerful institutions attached to Law, Medicine and Theology, then we can dispense also with a fixation on direct social utility. The focus instead would shift to goods internal to higher education which had gathered students to the university in the first place. For many, the most eloquent representative of this idea is Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 1852 The Idea of a University. Williams highlights one passage in particular, which summarizes that sense of worldly independence as well the centrality of students in the business of the university:

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Chapter 1

If I had to choose between a so-called University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years . . . if I were asked which of these two methods was the better discipline of the intellect .  .  . the more successful in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted for their secular duties, which produced better public men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that University which did nothing.17

Thus, we have one ‘idea’ which can lay claim to articulating those internal goods of the university while also setting normative patterns of relations with other institutions. Those relations are going to be for the most part indirect, especially if we follow Newman’s expressly anti-utilitarian focus. However, Newman’s students are not doing ‘nothing’, despite his provocative phrasing. They are moulding themselves into ‘gentlemen’, with the attendant virtues of tolerance, compassion and circumspection, following the religion of ‘imagination and sentiment’.18 Moreover, they are cultivating their individual talents, which being freed from worldly concerns allows one to do. And the path to this is a liberal education, such as that descending from the medieval universities, through their Renaissance Humanistic overhaul, to the residential colleges of Oxbridge, New England, and even, if we take them at their word, the virtual seminar rooms of Minerva University. The University for Civic Training In the age of Revolutions, especially those of a democratic variety, we can see a different trajectory. While still centring on students and their capacity for development as the guiding concern of universities, the focus was no longer just the individual moral and intellectual virtue that followed from a liberal education, but one that also recognized obligations to a broader collective – which increasingly meant the state. Though initially sharing some of the cloistered associations of the refugium model, a new idea of the university eventually emerged in a more engaged, secular guise: the university as a centre for civic training. Jeffrey J. Williams summarizes the shift thus: ‘the university is not simply for students to follow their predilections as Newman proposes…but for the sake of citizenship. The university directly serves the goals of a democratic society’.19 From a materialist perspective, this focus on citizenship may seem like an ideological dodge to distract us from the reality that universities primarily educated the children (mainly sons) of elite families. It is this relatively stable power structure which is served and reproduced, not the interests and goals of

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23

a democratic society. Moreover, such children of the elite, if you gauged their behaviour during their university days, did not constitute a natural aristocracy from which future leaders were to be found. At Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, the institution most associated with this civic ideal, students regularly engaged in duels and other violent behaviour, even shooting and killing a professor during a particularly raucous night of student mischief.20 As we will see in the next chapter, a clash between rowdy student culture and civic ideals also characterized the nineteenth-century German and Germaninfluenced universities.21 However, there is much to commend Jefferson’s vision of attaching higher education to civic virtue. On the one hand, it acknowledges (and arguably participates in) the post-Enlightenment shift towards a secular culture. The historian Russel Nye notes that the production of ‘useful, intelligent, patriotic citizens’ gradually displaced the focus on producing ministers in the American residential colleges.22 On the other, it helped to underwrite the expansion of higher education that occurred throughout the nineteenth century in the United States and continued apace in the twentieth century. Unlike the lofty aims and rhetoric of Renaissance Humanism, Jefferson believed higher education should help the student ‘know his rights’, understand ‘the principles and structure of governance, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government’ and ‘give the citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business’.23 Jefferson also spoke about the formation of ‘statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend’,24 but the focus here is much broader, and as Williams notes, is conceived in the service of a stable and functioning democracy. University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper would put matters more bluntly, writing in 1899 that ‘the university is the Messiah of democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer’.25 By yoking higher education to democratic ends, it was easier to speak of universities as providing a broad, public good worthy of public investment. While fitful in the realization of this in practice, the civic mission of the university really picked up during and immediately after World War II. At that time, the US federal government not only invested heavily in the research arm of the university but, in Christopher Loss’s wording, ‘placed higher education at the center of American citizenship’ by incentivizing returning veterans to attend newly expanded public university systems through the G.I. Bill.26 Universities were also understood as centres of reflection on the essential link between democracy and education, for example, in the 1945 General Education in a Free Society. Led by then Harvard president James Bryant Conant and a committee of professors from a range of fields, university leaders increasingly justified greater public outlays for higher education by pointing to its political benefits. A similar story could be told

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Chapter 1

for the expansion of ‘red brick’ and ‘plate glass’ universities in the United Kingdom after the World Wars and then in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report.27 As mentioned earlier, there was always an indirect public benefit to the political community that came with providing eager students with a university education – whether this be in their capacity to populate socially useful occupations or to serve as virtuous leaders, as Newman imagined his cultivated ‘gentlemen’ to be. But as current culture war concerns about intolerance of dissenting opinions on campus indicate, it has become commonplace to think of universities as directly related to the health of a functioning democracy or a protected space within which one can develop virtuous civic habits before entering the fractious world of politics. Even self-styled cutting-edge universities like Minerva have recourse to the language of citizenship (albeit now qualified by ‘global’) to justify their pedagogical model. The University as Home to Disciplinary Research In the early European universities, the idea of creating new knowledge in one’s field (what we would now call disciplinary research) was almost completely absent. As Charles Homer Haskins writes, if ‘truth is something which has already been revealed to us by authority, then it has only to be expounded, and the expositor must be faithful to the authoritative doctrine’.28 Such was the orientation when Natural Law reigned and authorities like Aristotle dominated the curriculum. However, there were elevated expectations of mastery placed on those who wanted to teach in the higher faculties. While most students terminated their studies after the BA (roughly six years), some went on for two additional years to earn a Master’s degree; and if one wanted to teach in the higher faculties a doctorate was pursued, which could take as many as fifteen additional years. Such a degree came with the licentia docendi, the license to teach at universities and to take the Master’s chair, the cathedra from which professors now could speak with the same authority as bishops, who occupied their own protected cathedra. The humanist challenge to scholasticism began to change the role of the professor, but it was fundamentally the Enlightenment and developments in German-speaking universities that led to the next fully fledged ‘idea of the university’. For many the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1809/1810 is more influential than that of Bologna, Paris or Oxford, as it set the university on a new, modern path. In the words of educational reformers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, two ideals guided Berlin and the emerging German model – ‘die objective Wissenschaft mit der subjektiven Bildung’ (roughly ‘objective science with subjective cultivation’).29 We will say

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more about this subjective principle of Bildung in the next chapter, but the objectivity of Wissenschaft – as organized, scientific, scholarly inquiry in a given discipline – set a new norm for universities.30 It also transformed the nature and reputation of the professoriate in society at large. One way to characterize this shift was that scholarship no longer turned around the presentation of a finished product, as was the case with commenting on authoritative sources or passing on settled professional dogmas, but was now process-oriented without pre-given guarantees about where inquiry would lead. This was instantiated in pedagogical innovations such as the seminar, where students participated in the speculative thinking of their professors by engaging in the type of philosophical purification that Kant put at the centre of university life, namely the submission of beliefs before the crucible of reason. For Kant and those inspired by him, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the first rector of the University of Berlin, the implied standards established by rational inquiry would allow knowledge to proliferate without turning into a cacophonous uproar.31 As Charles McClelland writes, ‘Teaching staff came increasingly to be recruited from scholars and scientists who had researched, discovered and made public new interpretations and were expected to continue to do so as a part of their official duties’.32 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially as this model spread from Germany to the United States, scholarly journals and professional organizations in the disciplines provided more opportunities for this public use of reason, which Kant had identified as the duty of the enlightened scholar. It also led to a massive expansion in graduate education, wherein graduate students were initiated into this culture of research.33 In the spirit of earlier universities, the production of knowledge was also meant to unfold in an environment of freedom. Even in the case of the post-war United States, which supercharged the environment of disciplinary research with unprecedented amounts of public and private investment, researchers were still expected to engage in basic research without an eye towards pre-determined ends. In Science, The Endless Frontier, for example, Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, claimed that universities were ‘uniquely qualified’ as centres of research because in them scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity. At their best they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom.34

That such a culture of free inquiry also yielded all kinds of useful knowledge for government and industry didn’t hurt the case for this idea of the university and indeed helped to make it an object of passionate attachment.

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The University as Centre for Vocational Training Many would cite the production of knowledge, the holistic development of virtue in the student and the principle of independence from the grubby everyday affairs of life as ideals which are indispensable to the university. But if you pressed them to locate one function that a university must serve, the prevailing answer these days is an economic one – namely to produce an educated workforce that can compete in a globalized, technologically sophisticated world. Even if we go back to the German notion of Bildung, which is shared in Newman’s non-utilitarian focus on self-cultivation, we can already see this vocational creep, with a university degree quickly becoming attached to a set of middle-class professions, especially the civil service needed for the growing Bildungsbürgertum. As the curriculum expanded in the nineteenth century, especially in the burgeoning social and applied sciences, the medieval exclusion of more vocational subjects nonetheless largely held. In Germany, a new category was created for institutes of higher learning that taught engineering and other sciences that underpinned the development of an industrial, capitalist economy, namely the Technische Hochschule. In the United States, which was heavily influenced by the German model in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the integration of applied fields (especially those associated with agriculture) in the university was an equally fitful process. Populist groups agitated for universities to have more economic relevance to both the local community at large and to students (e.g. farmers considering to send their sons to one of the newly minted Land Grant public universities). This was of course met with those who thought it violated a purer idea of the university. However, as more people entered higher education many recognized an opportunity to more efficiently populate the workforce with competent employees, instead of leaving training to individual firms or those committed enough to earn an advanced degree. President of Harvard Charles Eliot wrote in 1869: If well organized, with a broad scheme of study, [a university education] can convert the boy of fair abilities and intentions into an observant, judicious man, well informed in the sciences which bear upon his profession; so trained, the graduate will rapidly master the principles and details of any actual works, and he will rise rapidly through the grades of employment; moreover he will be worth more to his employers from the start than an untrained man.35

Universities like Minerva promise something similar, with a package of skills, competencies and habits of mind that cash out in the performance of a whole range of jobs.

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It is unlikely that Eliot would approve of the extreme turn towards vocational training, which in some cases undermines his ‘broad scheme of study’. I am constantly surprised, in fact, by the variety of majors related to business and the healthcare industry that pass through my mandatory philosophy class – Supply Chain Management, Entrepreneurship, Entertainment Marketing and Sports Marketing. However, Jeffrey J. Williams notes that this ‘vocational expectation is still prominent in public mandates’ and ‘is more decisively formative for and relevant to the specific development of the American university than the so-called German model’.36 Even in Germany the Technische Hochschule were allowed to call themselves universities and grant similar degrees beginning in the early twentieth century. In the UK, the expansion of Polytechnics in the 1960s was initially intended to separate them from more traditional universities, rather along the lines of the German Hochschule. In 1992, however, this ‘binary divide’ was abolished and Polytechnics were designated as universities – preparing the way for the ‘polytechnicization’ of higher education in the UK, Oxbridge and London apart of course.37 As universities became more inextricably linked with economic development, first in its industrial phase then in the ‘knowledge economy’, the promise of vocational training firmly installed itself in the common sense of policy makers, families and students themselves.38

THE CRISIS OF THE ‘IDEA’ OF THE UNIVERSITY When Minerva laments the cost burdens of maintaining a campus, strips out extra-educational distractions like recreation facilities and invokes a professor’s passion for teaching instead of career stability secured by tenure, they are implicitly asserting certain normative ideals of a university education. As Williams reminds us, the four ‘vistas’ provided by the ideas under consideration are ‘not entirely separable and in fact meld at most universities . . . just as the classics department might have its office down the hall from the business department’.39 The problem, whether with Minerva’s attempt to shed the dead weight of past traditions or with the clamorous discourse of the university in crisis, is that the selective deployment of these normative ideals yield a narratively poor and sometimes incoherent context for thinking about the university. This is especially so when ideals elide the kind of historical reflection that comes with the university’s strange temporality that unfolds, as Hannah Arendt once titled her own reflections on politics, history and education, between past and future.40 Williams highlights at least three ways that this tends to occur in what he calls ‘idea discourse’.41 The first is that such discussions revert to a weak idealism, tending to adopt rhetorical forms such as the elegy, the jeremiad or

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the declension narrative, all of which neatly proffer an absent ideal by which current failings can be registered. This relates to a second problem, which is that idea discourse tends to treat the history of the university as a history of ideas about the university, not a history of actual institutions. For example, Williams cites the fact that in 1890 roughly 2 per cent of the US population attended university, whereas after 1970 it became a mass institution with well over half of the population attending university in some form. In the UK, university attendance grew from about 4 per cent of school leavers in the 1950s to over half in the 2010s.42 Similar dynamics at a much larger scale are in evidence in India and China.43 The complexities introduced by this new scale should temper our unreconstructed adoption of, for example, William Rainey Harper’s conviction that ‘the university is the Messiah of democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer’. A third problem is that idea discourse tends primarily to represent the interests only of humanists (philosophers and literary scholars in particular). Many jeremiads and declension narratives have an underdeveloped appreciation of the research function of modern universities, or its vital links with the economy. This has a second-order consequence, namely that the interests of legislators, parents, students or other interested parties that University of California president Clark Kerr once described as the ‘fuzzy edge’44 of the university get short shrift. Humanists are often playing catch-up when the effects emanating from these other groups flow into their work conditions and radically alter the structure of universities. As a corrective to idea discourse, Williams proposes that we talk of the shifting ‘expectations of the university’.45 What he means by this is that universities have always been constituted by competing and sometimes conflicting interests, and what is important, especially when evaluating claims of the crisis of the university, is to appreciate them in their full complexity. This often entails routing these normative ideas of the university through things external to it, such as the state, culture or the economy. What I want to explore in the final section of this chapter, therefore, is a different way of thinking about the ‘crisis’ claim, using the temporal aspect of the past vs. future conflict to remind us of the relation of ‘crisis’ to an understanding of history. In the thumbnail sketch that I’ve presented of ‘ideas of the university’ we can glimpse how they arose in particular conditions. At times these ideas are so frictionless and obvious as to become ‘common sense’ and can even be reconstructed in new contexts without too much trouble. But when ‘crisis’ talk emerges, the university becomes a particularly interesting lens through which to think about broader changes in the state, culture or economy. This is to say that crises cannot be adequately understood, let alone resolved, by simple recourse to a normative idea from the university’s history, nor by a flight

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to some imagined future – but rather must, for lack of a better word, be worked out dialectally. MANDARINS AND THE MODERN STATE: THE CRISIS OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITY One example, the case of Germany in the early twentieth century, will have to suffice for the moment.46 Following the reforms of the early nineteenth century, German universities became the envy of the world, especially for those who wanted to enter the academy themselves. Until the latter parts of the nineteenth century, it was still customary for American universities to staff their faculty with those educated in Europe, and Germany in particular. In 1856 the University of Michigan president Henry Tappen noted that ‘the graduate of [an American] College is not prepared to become a College Professor’. However, The Universities of Europe [and Germany in particular] are furnishing us with this supply . . . We depend upon the scientific and critical labors of their learned men, who furnish the original works from whence our editions of the Classics of our own scientific works are derived.47

However, two fundamental changes in German society brought this renowned model for the university into profound crisis. The first was the emergence of Germany as a modern nation-state (following unification in 1871), bringing with it parallel developments in economics (rapid industrialization and urbanization) and politics (the strengthening of the state apparatus during Bismarck’s program of rationalization). Thus the philosopher Theodor Litt noted that, in some senses, the University of Berlin ‘could hardly have made its appearance at a more unfavorable moment than when the social world began one of its most powerful changes’.48 Indeed, the normative twin pillars of the university – Bildung and Wissenschaft – remained central to the self-understanding of the university. Agreement on their meaning, however, fractured throughout the rapidly changing century. Such changes, while likely to be dizzying in any society, would not necessarily blossom into a full-blown crisis. What made the case different in Germany was the constitution of the academic class, forged in the wake of the strong normative ideals set by Kant, Humboldt and Fichte. Fritz Ringer calls this group the ‘German Mandarins’ referring to ‘a social or cultural elite which owes its status primarily to educational qualifications, rather than hereditary rights or wealth’.49 For this group Berlin set something of an ideal type for universities, and thus the kinds of change that occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century were often met with derision. Even Max

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Weber, by no means a radical defender of academic privilege, would frame his critique of government or industry-oriented research as a ‘weakening of [academics’] moral authority’.50 The power of academics thus developed in conjunction with the growing power of the state and the economy, leading to what philosophers like Litt saw as an inevitable confrontation. The drama that played out in the run-up to World War I (and continued up until World War II) thus unfolded on several fronts: in strong reactions to the encroachments (real and perceived) of the growing state apparatus into faculty politics, in wading through problems of scale that came with the expansion of the university system, in deciding how vigorously to intervene in political or economic affairs and in reinterpreting the ideals of early reformers in radically changed circumstances. An emblematic crisis of this period was the so-called ‘great debate’, which unfolded between 1919 and 1921. The debate concerned two competing interpretations of Wissenschaft as the raison d’être of mandarins. On the one side were those whom Ringer calls ‘Orthodox Mandarins’, namely those who imputed a moral purity to the objectivity and incorruptibility of scholarly inquiry.51 Common expressions of this view were the condemnation of mass culture, scepticism towards democracy, doctrinaire belief in the intellectual and cultural superiority of the educated class and general criticisms of industrial society. On the other side were those whom Ringer dubbed the ‘Modernist Mandarins’, who tried to develop a new set of resources and dispositions that acknowledged the inevitability of certain changes in the political, cultural and economic landscape of the time. This did not mean a wholesale abandonment of the Mandarin tradition but rather would ‘enable the mandarins and their values to retain a certain influence in the twentieth century’52 by bringing features of modern society into their research and teaching practice, as was the case in the burgeoning social sciences. The great debate, to pick up the thread of this chapter, concerned the mediation of past and future, especially when framed in terms of powerful ‘ideas’ of the university. For Orthodox Mandarins, the crisis point of the early twentieth century was a classic ‘epistemology of failure’, whereby an absent ideal is proffered, and our shortcomings are loudly proclaimed until we tack back on course. For Modernist Mandarins, the value of Wissenschaft was that it provided the key to planning for a changing future. Ideals were not to be abandoned, but a better understanding of the conditions driving the crisis was necessary for any adequate resolution. We have already seen in the Introduction how the ‘crisis’ claim can be mobilized by camps such as these to separate into competing philosophies of history. Let us turn to Max Weber’s ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (‘Science as a Vocation’, 1919) for a modernist interpretation of where the university stood at the time. For Weber, the scholarly research carried out in universities found

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its sense within a long history of what he called ‘the process of intellectualization’53 through which magical interpretations were displaced by sustained acts of human intelligence. In Greece, this process was characterized by the search for pure ideas; in the Renaissance, the focus turned towards understanding art and nature; and in the early modern period (seventeenth century), philosophers isolated laws in attempts to map out the causal nexus which illustrated God’s true nature. Just as these ages displaced many efforts from previous eras, so too there was no guarantee that the current, scientific, highly technical and specialized efforts of academics would generate definitive answers to questions. Rather, Wissenschaft as the vocation of the scholar marked a commitment to posing questions well, using the best tools at one’s disposal, and to aid in the enlargement of understanding for both students and society more broadly. Many ‘Orthodox’ Mandarins saw this as a betrayal of scholarly standards – especially of the striving for unity that emerged out of German Idealism and guided the promise of Wissenschaft. Nowhere in Weber did they find the type of cultural ennoblement that they saw as flowing from their authority as upholders of the great tradition of Bildung and Wissenschaft. Moreover, in Weber’s intellectual positions, especially as evidenced in his sociological enquiries, they saw deference and/or resignation in the face of lamentable modern forces such as democracy or socialism. While the Orthodox position could certainly be described as elitist, it must nevertheless be kept in mind that academics established themselves as prominent and influential members of society through a principled commitment to these ideals. Clearly, there was an aspect of material self-interest at play in all this. As Ringer notes, ‘during much of the nineteenth century, in fact, European educational systems transmitted status conventions and social meanings that were partly incongruent with the emerging high industrial class hierarchy’,54 and the German academic community was loathe to cede this status and influence. This conservative interpretation of Wissenschaft thus called on the scholar to cleave closer to older justifications of scholarship, which were, to quote professor of sociology and economics Arthur Salz, ‘[to have] the guidance of life as a goal, intuition as the method, and universality of scope’.55 Weber, on the other hand, admonished the professor ‘To teach his students to recognize inconvenient facts . . . facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions’.56 He drew a firm line between counsel based on scientific inquiry, which was meant to be value-neutral, and that based on the authority of the professor, which was meant to intervene specifically on the plane of values. His intention was to diminish the heroic conception of the scholar and return scholarship to more moderate ambitions: ‘In the lecture rooms of the university no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity’57 is how he describes the acceptable limits of academic authority. Not engaging present

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conditions with this integrity, lapsing into ‘academic prophecy . . . will create only fanatical sects but never a genuine community’.58 However, in the vacuum left by a weakened set of political and economic institutions in the waning years of World War I and into Weimar, such a position was seen by many as an abdication of scholarly duty. Thus we can clearly see Wissenschaft straining here under competing interpretations generated from academics’ wrestling with large changes in the culture, the economy and the function of the nation-state. As Ringer notes, theories of cultural decadence circulated amongst many scholars who saw their role as bearing witness to the various forms of decline and loss that marked the modern period and providing the ideals capable of motivating a ‘spiritual renewal’. Paradoxically these ideals came from the past, with a renewed emphasis on ‘wholeness’, on ‘synthesis’ and other legacies of the Romantics and German idealists who once dominated the academic community.59 The novelty was that these were now being attached to relatively recent phenomena, such as a powerful nation-state and developing industry. This led to the ‘semantic disease’ of calling every movement against this search for unity a ‘crisis in learning’ and an oscillation between various sources condemned as the cause of cultural fracture – technology, democracy, materialism and positivism.60 As Ringer concludes, and as history sadly attests to, ‘common sense in politics was discredited, along with the merely practical knowledge of positivist learning. Where could an argument against unreason have begun?’.61 Put another way, once the position of the Orthodox Mandarins congealed into a hardened ideology that ran counter to the general direction of society, universities began to indulge in deeply emotional arguments that are better classified as wish fulfilment than scholarship. Ringer points to the work of the novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who, ‘in extraordinarily vague terms’ fixed on the term ‘synthesis’ as implying ‘a reversal of that process of social and cultural “disintegration” which had troubled the mandarins ever since 1890 . . . [it] was indeed to describe a path towards a yet undefined set of social on cultural values and traditions’.62 Such a message found a receptive audience in parts of the university that had been ‘trained to respond to an expanding circle of vaguely antimodernist and antipositivist allusions . . . [which] triggered the habitual and mutually related patterns of negative definition’.63 To put matters yet another way in the language of this chapter, once the crisis claim began to circulate with ease, a narrative frame was cemented around university affairs in which certain questions and positions were authorized, others delegitimized and the closure of a gap between reality and some absent ideal, either from the past or some reformed and stable future, was the call of most academics.

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CONCLUSION Two issues arise from this initial excursus into some powerful ‘ideas’ of the university and their resonance at different points in different histories. The first is that a flight to ideas, whether drawn from the past or from some imagined future unburdened ‘from the tradition of all dead generations’ is unlikely by itself to provide an enduring solution to the crises that bedevil today’s university. Minerva may very well have some important critiques of the current state of higher education and useful models for its future development, but the Covid pandemic has already demonstrated the fragility of the globe-hopping, online, non-campus-based college experience. It is important to think about how the language we use to describe the nature and work of universities is freighted with a history that is well suited to contend with changes in the nature of the state, economy and culture. If ideas are asserted simplistically – and especially if they are asserted independently of their relationship to these other factors, as they were in Germany in the early twentieth century – then we can see how easily they can become subordinate to, and disfigured by, forces antithetical to their meaning. To return to the language of Derrida, such isolated deployments of these ideals can become ‘protectionist barriers’ against facing up to some real contradictions that talk of crisis could otherwise be an important marker. The other matter is that Weber’s position did not take hold, reasonable and admirable as we may find it today. This poses serious questions for the contemporary figures who assert, for example, various virtues drawn from the refugium or civic models as antidotes to the excessive economization and instrumentalization of contemporary higher education.64 Understanding the semantic disorder of the German ‘crisis’, replete with talk of lofty ideas drawn from the university’s past, necessitated a broader frame that incorporated how these attached to processes of legitimation, including ex cathedra defences of cultural and political relevance, and how they leveraged ‘crisis’ into competing philosophies of history. The arrival on the scene of Minerva, projecting lofty ideas drawn from some imagined future in contrast to the university’s past, brings with it a need to interrogate its own processes of legitimation and the broader political, economic and cultural fields in which they are grounded, as well as the broad historical narrative in which it takes itself to be a central participant. In both cases, we see a playing out of the conflict between past and future, one that the university is consistently navigating. With this broad historical frame in mind, we can now go a little deeper into a few more of these structural conflicts.

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NOTES 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Saul K. Padover, https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1852​/18th​-brumaire​/ch01 ​ .htm, accessed May 6, 2023. 2. As outlined in the Introduction, I will be using the American context as an illustrative example of more global issues. In this case the freedom with which organizations like Minerva can operate is distinct from higher education systems that are more directly tied to the state, allowing it to entertain more decisive resolutions of the tension between past and future. 3. https://www​.minerva​.edu​/frequently​-asked​-questions/, accessed May 6, 2023. You can learn more about the philosophy behind Minerva in Building the Intentional University, eds. Stephen M. Kosslyn and Ben Nelson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 4. https://www​.minerva​.edu​/undergraduate​-program​/academics​/philosophy​-pedagogy/, accessed May 6, 2023. 5. After a mandatory initial year in San Francisco, students can bounce between Taipei, Seoul, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, London and Berlin for their remaining three years. 6. See Doug Lederman, ‘Minerva, Higher Ed Outsider, Is Now Fully Accredited,’ Inside Higher Ed, July 21, 2021. https://www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2021​/07​/22​/ minerva​-higher​-education​-outsider​-now​-accredited​-university, accessed May 6, 2023. 7. We will learn more about these ideals later in the chapter, but for an initial definition of Bildung see Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 86. For Newman’s ‘gentleman’ see John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 159. 8. See James Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–42. 9. Jeffrey J. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ JAC 25, no. 1 (2005): 55–74. 10. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 55. 11. UNESCO recognizes the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859, as the oldest continually operating ‘higher education institution’ in the world. There are several other claimants to ‘first’ status, but such debates are hard to adjudicate because of the ambiguity of what counts as a ‘founding’: a charter (but by which authority?); some sort of formal declaration of purpose (but by which constituents?); the erection of a permanent physical facility? 12. It is outside the purview of this book to make any strong claims about an origin story of the university. What is more pertinent to my argument is how, over time, certain normative assumptions came to attach themselves to universities to give rise to distinct ideas. These ideas will have certain institutional instantiations, including these early medieval universities, but they might cut across historical eras (e.g. how modern liberal arts colleges in the United States will take up the ideal of a humanistic enclave that characterized sixteenth-century universities in southern Europe or nineteenth-century universities in Great Britain).

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13. See Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), 8–10. There were also Cismontane student groups, referring to those coming from places closer, linguistically and culturally, to Bologna. 14. Such a curriculum reflected basic medieval commitments to Natural Law, namely that the world was orderly and comprehensible through the systematic exercise of reason, and was mostly taught through authoritative texts from religious or philosophical sources dating from European antiquity. 15. See Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop, 77–82; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 123–141. 16. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 59. 17. Cited in Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 60. 18. Newman, The Idea of a University, 209–211. 19. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 61. 20. See Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos, Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University that Changed America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 119–127. Perhaps the main impediment to Jefferson’s civic vision was that pernicious Southern virtue of honour, which in this and other cases prevented university leaders from discovering who engaged in criminal behaviour. Honour would also become an impediment for German reformers attempting to end the practice of duelling amongst university students. 21. Charles McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany: 1700-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 118. 22. Russel Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation: 1776-1830 (New York: Harper, 1960), 171. 23. Jefferson, ‘Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia.’ https://classroom​.monticello​.org​/media​-item​/report​-of​-the​-commissioners​-for​-the​ -university​-of​-virginia/, accessed May 6, 2023. 24. Ibid. 25. William Rainey Harper, ‘The University and Democracy,’ in The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook, eds. Louis Menand, Chad Wellmon, and Paul Reitter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 215. The commonly accepted idea that higher education as an institution was intimately related to mass democracy does not really come until after World War II, e.g. in Harvard’s 1945 publication General Education in a Free Society. 26. Christopher P. Loss, ‘‘The Most Wonderful Ting Has Happened to Me in the Army’: Psychology, Citizenship, and American Higher Education in World War II,’ The Journal of American History 92, no. 3 (2005): 864–891. 27. In §32 of the Robbins Report the authors write that ‘we do not believe that modern societies can achieve their aims of economic growth and higher cultural standards without making the most of the talents of their citizens. This is obviously necessary if we are to compete with other highly developed countries in an era of rapid technological and social advance. But, even if there were not the spur of international standards, it would still be true that to realise the aspirations of a modern community as regards both wealth and culture a fully educated population is necessary’. See

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http://www​.educationengland​.org​.uk​/documents​/robbins​/robbins1963​.html, accessed May 6, 2023. For an account of expansion in the UK, US and elsewhere as a result of increased public investment, see Utopian Universities A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s, eds. Miles Taylor and Jill Pellew (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 28. Haskins, The Rise of Universities, 51. 29. Cited in Timothy Bahti, ‘Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt,’ MLN 102, no. 3 (1987): 445. For an English translation of the original text, see Willhelm Von Humboldt, ‘On the spirit and organisational framework of intellectual institutions in Berlin,’ trans. E. Shils, Minerva 8 (1970): 242–250. 30. Like Bildung, which retains the sense of culture, self-development, formation or simply ‘education’, without being neatly defined by any of these concepts in English, Wissenschaft poses its own translation problems. For Samuel Weber ‘Wissenschaft is translated in French as “science”, which stands over and against saviors or connaissances, the forms for “knowledges”. In English, science names the ensemble of knowledges in the hard sciences rather than the unifying principle of all knowledge-seeking’ (cited in Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 207). Fritz Ringer sticks more closely to the German and writes that ‘die Wissenschaft must be translated as “scholarship” or “learning”, rarely as “science” and eine Wissenschaft simply means a “discipline”’. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 103. 31. See Chad Wellmon’s Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) for a brilliant account of this push for unity amongst the information explosion that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the proliferation of printed materials. See also Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 145, for Fichte’s interpretation of Kant’s philosophical project. 32. Charles McClelland, ‘The German University and its Influence,’ in Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, eds. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 275. 33. It should be said that this culture of research did not look at all like the ‘publish or perish’ environment that we see today. The dynamics of the intensification of research will be explored in chapter 3. 34. Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 19. 35. Cited in Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 62. 36. Ibid. 37. See, for example, Katherine Emms, ‘30 years on: what do polytechnics teach us about transcending the vocational/academic divide in today’s higher education landscape?’ Higher Education Policy Institute, December 5, 2022: available at https:// www​.hepi​.ac​.uk​/2022​/12​/05​/30​-years​-on​-what​-do​-polytechnics​-teach​-us​-about​-transcending​-the​-vocational​-academic​-divide​-in​-todays​-higher​-education​-landscape/, accessed May 2, 2023.

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38. A classic account of this process in its early phase is Clyde Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 39. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 64. 40. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968). 41. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 55. 42. Lindsay Cook, ‘Rise of the grey-haired graduates,’ Financial Times, March 29, 2018, https://www​.ft​.com​/content​/27343342​-22be​-11e8​-8138​-569c3d7ab0a7, accessed May 6, 2023. 43. See P.J. Lavakare, ‘India and China: Two Major Higher Education Hubs in Asia,’ International Higher Education no. 94 (2018): 12–13. 44. Kerr, Uses of the University, 28. 45. Williams, ‘History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,’ 58. 46. As the foregoing discussion focused primarily on the American context, so it is helpful to shift the frame here to provide a different point of reference. More generally the case of Germany is a telling illustration of a specific dynamic, even if the ‘ideas’ that set expectations for universities are different than those discussed above for various national contexts. As we will see, the mediation of past and future often entails the development of ideas to the point where they command the attention of the university community, but strain when conditions change in significant ways. The semantic disorder that we can see in the German case is indicative not only of when ‘crisis’ talk arises, but how the positive resolution of such talk necessitates creative reconstruction of ‘ideas’ in light of these changed conditions, wherein discourse surrounding the university can be clarifying for broader political, economic and cultural issues. 47. Cited in Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop, 223–224. What separated Germany from the UK and France is that Oxford and Cambridge did not offer doctorates until the early twentieth century, and the French did advanced scientific inquiry in national laboratories (still today in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and not primarily in universities. 48. Cited in Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 79. 49. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 5. 50. Cited in Charles McCelland, State, Society and University in Germany 17001914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 269. 51. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 129. 52. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 130. 53. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds., H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, Oxford University Press, 1946), 138. 54. Fritz Ringer, Towards a Social History of Knowledge: Collected Essays (Oxford and New York: Bergham Books, 2000), 77. 55. Cited in Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 362. 56. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 147.

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57. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 156. 58. Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 155. 59. See Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 393–403 for various articulations of ‘wholeness’, ‘synthesis’ and ‘renewal’ form Orthodox Mandarins. 60. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 402. 61. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 438. 62. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 402. 63. Ibid. 64. For a prominent example of this, see Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Chapter 2

The Student vs. the Society

Much like the mediation of past and future, the role of the student has often initiated invocations of ‘crisis’ that turn on temporal claims. Students occupy an ambiguous place in spectrums of youth and maturity, in novice and expertise, in their status as full members of the political, social and economic community, or more generally in the extent to which they have moved towards the holistic developmental goals implied by ideals such as those of Bildung, Newman’s gentlemanly virtues, or Jefferson’s civic-mindedness. If one has certain normative ideas of a time frame in which this ambiguity is – hopefully – to be resolved, then the ‘crisis of the university’ will be framed ‘in terms of epistemological or ethical failure’,1 and the student will be the primary object of analysis. However, discussions of the student often harken back to another sense of crisis, namely its relationship to criticism and the calling forth of a reasoned judgement on questions of political and social importance. Such is the sense intended by Hannah Arendt, who in the 1950s and 1960s saw talk of a crisis in education becoming ‘a political problem of the first magnitude’.2 For her, this proliferating talk of crisis turned on the basic question of social reproduction, which she saw as the real essence of education: ‘Education’, she wrote, is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token, save it from the ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.3

While her focus was on the secondary level, her framing of the educational crisis as emerging into a political problem of the first magnitude accurately describes the way university students are discussed today. Like her fellow exile Theodor Adorno, Arendt was uneasy about campus radicals who 39

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believed that students could, and should, take decisions about the shape of renewal into their own hands,4 while, in contrast to Arendt’s and Adorno’s unease, we have already seen how ‘crisis’ claims emerge from within student groups to push their critical insights, often in the shape of ‘break[ing] through and discard[ing] the shell of the past’, in the words of young Hegelian student Arnold Ruge. This chapter, then, continues our exploration of the university through the lens of crisis, examining endemic sources of tension generated by students, whether this takes the form of the generational politics abhorred by Adorno and Arendt or that of more mature conflicts between students and other actors in setting the terms for their engagement with political, social and, as we will see, legal realities. The point of this exercise is, again, to develop an argument that situates ‘crisis’ in an enduring process of creatively reconstructing the university around key points of conflict and to draw our attention to the need to avoid ahistorical modes of argumentation that proffer some timeless ideal of the university – in this case ideal of the university student – to which we must return. In this regard, there is something we can still take from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s elevation of Bildung as the ideal around which student activities at the university should turn. In his own merger of humanistic and civic ideals, he wrote of the graduates of newly reformed German universities: the freest development of human nature, directed as little as possible to ulterior civil relations, should always be regarded as paramount in importance with respect to the culture of man in society. He who has been thus freely developed should then attach himself to the State: and the State should test and compare itself, as it were, in him.5

Even if we abandon any singular ideal, whether that of Bildung or some other notion, this impulse to suggest some sort of civic or cultural goals for university graduates remains, so that talk of crisis often enfolds the university into broader political, cultural and economic debates.6 This chapter, then, will begin by briefly retrieving early instances of students triggering talk of crisis when they interacted with the world outside the university, the effect of which was to solidify normative patterns of relation with broader social institutions. But in the case of students’ roles in the crisis of the university, special attention should be paid to the student movements of the 1960s and their revival in the more recent past (e.g. in the anti-austerity movements cited towards the end of the Introduction). In these more recent cases, we can see students attempting to retrieve the crisis/critique cognate, especially when it comes to understanding their own position in emerging state and economic formations. The second part will thus go on to explore similarities and differences between the 1960s and today to illustrate how

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students have understood themselves as players in the resolution of broader legitimation crises. As with the tension between past and future, pausing on crises surrounding the student and their social role can have considerable explanatory power in revealing broader challenges and potentials inhering in unsettled times.

STRIKES, RIOTS AND THE ORIGINS OF ‘TOWN AND GOWN’ Since the early days of the medieval university, students were often at the centre of episodes of violent clashes. We have already seen one potential reason for this in Bologna, which is that students banded together in order to secure certain legal privileges and immunities not available to other segments of the population. This differential regime of authority, for example between ecclesiastical and secular courts in Paris, would prove to be an enduring source of conflict, and indeed crisis.7 Four brief examples illustrate this dynamic. The earliest known notable example of student-initiated political conflict occurred at the University of Paris in 1229. Since its founding, the question of authority had remained contested, as both secular and religious legal institutions existed side by side.8 In the early thirteenth century, students had been exempted from lay legal institutions and put under ecclesiastical authority and its parallel legal structure. This led to inevitable conflicts, especially since students interacted with lay institutions and with those not sharing in the same legal protections all the time. In 1229 a group of students, partaking in too much ‘wine that was good and sweet to drink’ refused to pay their bill, were beaten up by the tavern owner and townspeople and returned the next day armed with swords and clubs. They violently entered the tavern, broke all the wine jars, and poured the wine on the floor. After this they went out on the streets and assaulted every one whom they met, whether man or woman, leaving them half dead from their blows.9

Townspeople wanted some sort of justice but could not appeal to lay courts, and ecclesiastical courts were loath to take up such cases. When the townspeople pressed their case to Blanche of Castille, the queen of France, they found a sympathetic ear, and the university was persuaded to allow the city guard to administer punishment for querulous students. What was not necessarily expected was the nature of this punishment, namely the killing of several students, some of whom may not even have been involved in the incident.

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What followed is what is usually called a strike: but to put it more accurately, many of the students and professors (masters) simply decamped and set up elsewhere, mostly in nearby Angers. As the historian Ian Wei writes, ‘Mobility was one of the most powerful weapons that the students and masters could wield. Once it became clear that they had not made an idle threat, the authorities started to take action’.10 With the support of the king, who did not want to lose the prestige of the university, Pope Gregory IX issued a series of papal bulls in 1231 including the Parens scientiarum, which granted a whole set of immunities to masters and students. Though this brought the university under the more direct control of the pope and articulated its mission in expressly theological terms (e.g. playing up the pastoral mission of training future clergy), it very firmly resolved disputes like that of 1229 in favour of the university. Scholars, whether masters or active students, were to have a whole set of privileges and freedoms in going about their work and were even granted the authority to go on strike if such freedom was infringed upon by local authorities. We now call the divide that opened up between the university population and locals as ‘town and gown’. The next example of this also begins in a tavern, spirals into violence and ends with the university securing a greater level of independence. On 10 February 1355, two Oxford students were drinking in the Swindlestock Tavern and complained about the quality of the wine. An altercation with the owner of the tavern, who was also the mayor of Oxford at the time, ensued and things escalated quickly to a direct clash between townspeople and students, each summoned by the ringing of respective church bells (the city church of St Martins and the university church of St Mary-the-Virgin). Fighting raged for two days, and when thousands of people from the surrounding countryside joined the townspeople, students were forced to barricade themselves in residences and university buildings: over sixty were killed. As in Paris, the king came down on the side of the university. Edward III not only pardoned any scholars who were involved in the riot, levied fines against townspeople and imprisoned the mayor but also greatly elevated – through a royal charter – the power of the university over its own community and over the townspeople. The university was granted the power to levy taxes over food and drink, to compel townspeople to keep their property to specified conditions and to resolve disputes that involved townspeople if they also happened to involve scholars. In neither of these cases could it be said that students were pressing any kind of political or educational issue. But simply by virtue of acting in the world, they were helping to clarify the status of universities, which, as Laurence Brockliss writes, ‘was in town, but not of it’ during this period.11 It is another matter, however, if universities are firmly integrated with the

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political and economic structures of their cities and towns during the development of a strong nation-state or capitalist economy, at which point an assertion of radical independence becomes harder to sustain. Thus, moving forward, we can see crises emerging when students operated in tension with a desired public or civic morality. The third example comes from the University of Berlin, which initiated a new direction in its involvement with that most powerful of modern institutions, the nation-state. In assuming the inaugural rectorship of the newly established University of Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte inaugurated a shift in emphasis whereby the university aligns itself with the political goals of the nation instead of standing apart from such matters. In an 1807 essay outlining his philosophy of higher education (the Deduzeiter Plan), he saw the university as providing ‘not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation’ (my emphasis).12 Drawing as we have seen on the twin pillars of Wissenschaft and Bildung, Fichte sketched out a trajectory for a distinctly German – and thereby a distinctly national – Enlightenment, one that both resisted the positivism of its French and the utilitarianism of its British variants and placed the new university model at its centre.13 Cultural ennoblement would go hand in hand with the search for truth, and students would play an essential part in furthering this new national project. An immediate problem was the distinctive culture of students. The historian Charles McCelland writes, ‘throughout the eighteenth century the word “student” had retained a somewhat dubious flavor; students could be, and often all too often were, loafers, ruffians, and vagabonds living under the protection of the “republic of letters”’.14 Duelling was endemic amongst students, and riots had occurred in prestigious universities such as Halle in the 1790s. ‘One can hardly blame the reformers for wishing to replace this kind of behavior with a student ideal aimed at higher principles’, McClelland writes.15 Fichte took a hard line on these matters, and in some important respects it was his firm stance against duelling that led to his ousting as rector. A century later, Max Weber was also addressing the resistance amongst students to the university’s commitment to value-free scholarly inquiry, with the disastrous consequence of an extreme rightward drift of student groups. In both cases, the higher-minded ideals of reformers found friction when students were called upon to embody such ideals. Something similar was occurring across the Atlantic in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson was attempting to establish his new university at the heart of the fledgling American republic. As we saw in the previous chapter, Jefferson expected a great deal from his Charlottesville campus – a radical experiment in secular, civic education. Amongst the many innovations that the University of Virginia introduced was the system of electives, an expanded curriculum including the study of both cutting-edge science and

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classical culture, and the construction of the ‘Academical Village’, which placed the library, not the chapel, at the centre of the campus, allowing students and professors to live and work side by side in pursuit of knowledge and civic virtue. Like Fichte, he too believed that such ideals could orient young people towards a higher purpose, which integrated the university into an emerging vision of the nation. However, as in Germany, students had their own deeply entrenched cultural values that cut against this project. In Jefferson’s case it was the code of ‘honour’ which stood in the way, especially when it came to instituting a spirit of honest and free inquiry. In a letter to Jefferson, the president of the University of South Carolina lamented this loss of a particularly southern value: Every student in College holds himself bound to conceal any offence against the Laws of the Land as well as the Laws of the College . . . If you doubted their honor . . . [they] would never forgive you.16

Such a code of honour could be extraordinarily detailed in its application. For example, ‘Horsewhipping itself was a violent though acceptable form of insult under the gentleman’s code of honor, but whipping someone who was pinned down was far beyond the limits of gentlemanly conduct’.17 Despite the fact that this sort of behaviour was firmly part of student culture during his lifetime – and persisted for a more than two decades after his death – Jefferson still remained proud of the civic cause embodied in his university. On his tombstone was written, ‘Author of the Declaration of American Independence, Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia’.18 But at the time there was no convincing evidence that this new model of the university for civic training was displacing the civic vices endemic amongst students. As we will see in the next section, how students look upon themselves as members of the broader political community does not always align with the ideals of university and political leaders, leading to claims of a crisis emanating from either side. In these four examples we can see how students, who since Bologna have been absolutely central to any understanding of the university, bring to the surface a set of tensions often described in terms of a crisis. In some cases, these crises helped clarify normative ideals which the university can commit itself to (e.g. the strengthened sense of academic freedom that came with the Parens scientiarum). In others, they demonstrated structural contradictions that the university was unable to reconcile, for example around the potential to inculcate novel forms of civic virtue when other values predominated and were enforced in the culture. This became especially problematic when

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universities, and graduating students in particular, were looked to as essential components in the project of state formation. The foregoing examples may be familiar to some, but when one thinks about crisis and students the most immediate image that comes to mind is the protests of the 1960s and perhaps those following the 2008 economic collapse. I want to take an example from both of these periods to return to Arendt’s focus on generations, or, as she has it, the ‘coming of the new and young’.19 In both cases, we can see students’ entanglement in key transformations occurring in the economy, state and culture, and in the difference between these two periods we can see the shifting terrain on which it is proposed today to settle crisis claims. STUDENT PROTEST IN THE POST-WAR STATE In a revised 1972 edition of Uses of the University, former University of California president Clark Kerr looked back on the tumultuous prior decade: The two great forces of the 1960s were the federal government and the protesting students. The federal government emphasized science and research, equality of opportunity, impartiality of treatment among the races, and the innovative role of the federal agency. Much of what has happened to the campus, both good and evil, can be laid at the door of the federal government.20

In the self-mythology of campus radicals, it was students who pushed the government in these laudatory directions, but in reality the relationship was much more complicated, and students were more often than not simply one of the groups in closest proximity to changes in the nature of the state, reacting to these changes. As we saw in the Introduction, perhaps the biggest of these changes was that – as the result of the intersection of raw demographics (the post-war baby boom), increased public investment and the shift from universities as an elite to a mass institution – there were simply a lot more students than there had ever been before. And this was not just an American phenomenon, but one that was genuinely global.21 Indeed, it is implausible to talk about student protests of the 1960s without taking a global perspective, from Mexico City to Prague, South Africa to Scandinavia, Pakistan to Paris. For many students, this is crucial, the central point of protest was to develop an internationalist perspective against phenomena such as Cold War neo-imperial military ventures.22 Encapsulating this global history and giving rightful due to the local exigencies driving students in different countries and institutions would of course go far beyond the scope of this book and require its own detailed treatment. Here, then, I will focus on a symbolically rich contrast between two documents, both drawn

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from the United States – one from the earlier side of 1960s student protest and one emerging in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial collapse. In the ‘Port Huron Statement’ (1962), the post-war generation of students (or at least those on the Left) attempted to characterize their psychology in this new state and social formation.23 It begins: ‘We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit’.24 It was in fact thanks to people like Kerr and the ‘innovative role of the federal agency’ that so many more young people were now housed by universities. As we have seen, the GI Bill wedded the expansion of the university system to an ideological project of democracy promotion by sending veterans into the classroom and laboratory. In California, Kerr helped to implement the California Master Plan (1960), which made higher education essentially free for state residents, radically expanding the system once more and making it an essential element in growing a more inclusive middle class. Why were these students, materially comfortable and benefiting from a number of federal and state policies, so uncomfortable? The statement lays out a series of moral critiques of the then government, from the ‘permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry’,25 to ‘the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb’.26 Moreover, ‘neither has our experience in the universities brought us moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world’.27 The result of all this is on the one hand a profoundly felt sense of alienation (‘a developed indifference to human affairs’28) and a desire for some new kind of agency (‘a yearning to believe that there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government’29). Much as the Young Hegelians mentioned in the Introduction, these students were attempting to recover the connection between crisis and critique to push history forward in a new direction. Universities were not simply to adjust them to future roles in society. Rather, the moral duty of the student was critically to evaluate the society into which they were going to enter and ideally reconstruct it around more just and humane principles.30 In large measure, these constituted critiques of what Kerr claims were the laudable things the federal government brought to universities, for example the expansions of research and teaching backed by massive increases in public funding. But if it had brought these, they arrived in either an incomplete or disingenuous form according to the students. As Johnathan Schaar and Sheldon Wolin wrote about this period (of which they were participants as UC Berkeley faculty sympathetic to the students), ‘The connections between

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the campus on the one side and the economy, government, and society on the other have grown so close that the boundaries between them are hard to distinguish’.31 The protests that were to unfold over the decade put pressure on the post-war social compact’s promise to build a more tolerant, prosperous and peaceful society. Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, amongst many other challenges to the power structure, questioned whether social democracy could in fact be reconciled with the post-war form of capitalist modernization – one that was now yoked, in the eyes of the students, to imperialism abroad and suppression of certain segments of the population at home. In the 1960s this brought about, in the words of Schaar and Wolin, a ‘crisis both of values and power’, which involved the following paradoxical insight: ‘Having become the richest and most powerful nation in history, we can begin to see our poverty and weakness’.32 The university’s successes were undeniable in the advancement of science, in the general raising of human welfare, and in the construction of America as a superpower. But its failures also became visible in the abdication of any critical function, whether it be to criticize certain features of mass society, of the imperial and military underside of global economic and political pre-eminence, or the failure to spread prosperity and empowerment to minority groups, women or labour as the economy began to move away from its agricultural and industrial base (hence the need to forge a ‘New Left’). From their ‘uncomfortable perspective’, the students were able to demonstrate that, again in the words of Schaar and Wolin, ‘socially useful functions, no matter how competently performed, are no substitute for moral authority’.33 The legacy of the New Left and other 1960s student movements in the United States is complex, and if the goal was to make these masses of university students now housed together something like a class both in and for itself, then it is hard to see overwhelming evidence of triumph in the subsequent decades. There were certainly some ways in which students shared a set of concerns, experiences and understandings of their role in society. But in the drift towards the neoliberal focus on university education as an individual good for one’s economic benefit, the class of ‘student’ lost precisely the critical edge that these students in the 1960s were attempting to sharpen. It may be too strong to blame the students themselves for this shift, or to see it as evidence that students in the 1960s were misguided, ultimately self-interested, or unserious.34 As Kerr himself acknowledged, the university was involved in a wide-ranging change in how it was treated by the federal government, and in turn how this relationship flowed back into the economy. The radically expanded and more heterogeneous group of young people now housed in universities were coming to grips with their own role in these social, political and economic changes. In this regard, it is instructive to

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leap forward to the most recent wave of student protests post-2008 and see how a different kind of state and economic formation found expression in a new generation of students looking uncomfortably on the world they are to inherit. The years 2008–2012 saw a series of student protests around the world, most visibly in occupations and demonstrations in the UK, Chile, France, Quebec, California, Germany and New York.35 In most cases, these protests were in response to tuition-fee increases, the implementation of fees where none had previously existed and/or deep cuts to the humanities and arts. Though these immediate policy reforms were the impetus for many of the protests, students seized upon the occasion to register deeper dissatisfaction with the state of higher education in their countries and in the global context in which universities now operate. Here we can contrast the ‘Port Huron Statement’ with another representative document from the American university that lays out the logic of student critique. ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future’ (2009) came from a group of students occupying an administration building at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz.36 The University of California system was a particularly important site for understanding the ‘crisis of the university’ in 2009 because of its scale (the largest public university system in the United States), its reputation (it has for some time also largely been considered the strongest state university system) and its history, both in student protests and in their absorption in broader politics.37 Like the ‘Port Huron Statement’, the ‘Communiqué’ begins by trying to characterize the psychology of the present generation of students. However, unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, the occupying students at Santa Cruz denied the university any privileged position in constructing a more just and hopeful future. ‘No one knows what the university is for anymore’, they wrote. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.38

In place of any utopian ‘yearning to believe that there is an alternative to the present’, we now had a cynical and in some sense terminal reading of their situation: ‘the university has no history of its own; its history is the history of capital. Its essential function is the reproduction of the relationship between capital and labor’.39 They were sanguine about universities somehow being able to provide a bulwark against problems embedded in the current economic and state formation. For them,

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the crisis of the university today is the crisis of the reproduction of the working class, the crisis of a period in which capital no longer needs us as workers. We cannot free the university from the exigencies of the market by calling for the return of the public education system.40

There was not to be on the horizon any new California Master Plan or any analogous public investment in and commitment to broad, inclusive, higher education. It is worth pausing to unpack the position of these students in some detail, for, on the one hand, it is manifestly false that the history of the university cannot be understood except as some epiphenomenon that springs from the history of capital. As we’ve already seen, university models that retain their influence today, such as the German research university or the Oxbridge college, predate the advent of modern, industrial capitalism. But on the other hand, this deeply cynical view that collapses the history of the university into forces external to itself, especially economic forces, is widely held amongst American students and the general public today, and it is clearly part of a broader legitimation crisis in other systems, especially the UK, which is rapidly taking on many features of the American model – if not the more egalitarian or scholarly ones. We can see this in themes highlighted by these recent protests: educational achievement has become highly correlated with prior socio-economic status (i.e. the university maintains the class structure of widening inequality); the financialization of capital in the new ‘knowledge economy’ has played itself out in the death spiral of increasing tuition and debt;41 and the general shrinkage of the labour force has been clearly reflected in high rates of post-graduate unemployment and in the casualization of academic labour. These are structural problems of the current phase of capitalism to which the university can only introduce students in a more efficient manner than they might have experienced otherwise (e.g. through indebtedness, through the gap between education received and labour prospects after college, through exploitative working conditions during graduate or undergraduate study, or through policies of inclusion and exclusion to elite universities). Such a dire analysis of the university leaves the students with little room with which to propose productive reforms or recover the hopeful side of critique we saw in the 1960s. In fact, they take an explicitly ‘anti-reformist’ position and call for ‘partial and transitory’42 acts, abandoning the idea that the university itself is a potential base for broad social reform.43 Rather, in enumerating the retrenchment of support for public goods, students in the United States, the UK, Quebec, and Chile are, like their predecessors in the 1960s, trying to articulate from their social position a powerful critique of a new state form. To quote Jeffrey J. Williams, ‘the problem is not that the

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university has lost a ground in the state; rather, it is that the state has been reconfigured from a welfare state to a neoliberal state that offers few social services’.44 Though this is more acute in the United States at the moment, the effects of this new state form are clearly apparent to student movements in these other countries. Like students in the 1960s, those of the post-2008 global recession are speaking to broader changes in the state and economy and the way the university is involved in such a shift. And like their predecessors, they are thinking through what this might mean for updating or abandoning expectations that are more appropriate to earlier state-universityeconomy constellations – much like the New Left vis-à-vis the labour movement. But unlike their predecessors, they no longer recognize the university as an obvious base for a serious generational project.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have deliberately avoided issues around the way students often find themselves enmeshed in ‘university in crisis’ narratives in the United States, namely as key figures in a broader culture war.45 Figures on the right will claim that students are in the thrall of political correctness and developing a new form of intolerance in the process, or that they are so narcissistic and philistine that they are neglecting all the intellectual and cultural resources that universities make available. One can again historicize that argument and bring it into contact with a broader analysis of changes in the state, culture and economy, as has been done brilliantly by Christopher Newfield, amongst others.46 Rather, I have attempted to isolate some more enduring patterns of conflict which are constitutive of the university but call for creative reconstruction in different conditions. These involve questions of authority (to whom are students ultimately accountable to), the alignment of educational or civic ideals with the culture of students and the self-understanding of students in their broader political, social and economic contexts. In each of these cases, one cannot restrict their view to student culture or some ideal quality we want to ascribe to students but must put matters in a wider context. Though the focus of the preceding discussion has been on the United States, these broader patterns can be identified throughout the history of the university and will be determined relative to local conditions in different contexts around the world. However, an unresolved question remains when we turn our attention to the post-1960s university student as the locus of crisis. The authors of the ‘Port Huron Statement’ enumerated the many reasons they believed it was university students in particular who could make the kind of sweeping moral critique they were making, and why universities themselves possessed the

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requisite agency to do something positive with this critique. ‘The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason’, they averred.47 ‘The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond’.48 Practically, beyond these epistemic and communicative virtues, the radically expanded, more inclusive post-war American university, like others that sprouted across the globe in the 1960s, had the kind of broad social reach that other institutions did not at the time. ‘A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country’, they wrote. ‘The universities are distributed in such a manner’. Moreover, the university ‘is a relevant place’ to ‘give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles, and organize to change society’.49 Conditions are quite different from the heyday of the 1960s student movements, and perhaps their hold on the cultural imagination will fade as the baby boomer or May 1968 generation finally relinquishes control over many of our institutions, universities foremost amongst them. Whether the confidence and self-seriousness of university activists go with them, or whether it takes a radically different form, is an open question. And as with the earliest examples discussed in this chapter, it must involve a nuanced investigation of the students’ role in the locales in which they study (legally, politically, economically, culturally), what forces shape any distinctive student culture (if any emerges at all) and how they and others conceive of that liminal space between youth and maturity. As Humboldt suggests, stripping out his normative commitments, the university graduate provides a useful measure against which a state ‘should test and compare itself’. In this spirit, the authors of the ‘Communiqué’ abandon the heroic conception of the student and propose a new starting point: ‘As an alternative to being herded by representatives, we call on students and workers to organize themselves across trade lines. We urge undergraduates, teaching assistants, lecturers, faculty, service workers, and staff to begin meeting together to discuss their situation.’50 Such a modest proposal, to start a conversation absent the protectionist barriers that Derrida warned of, perhaps reflects the unsettled situation of the university student today, again looking ‘uncomfortably to the world [they] inherit’.

NOTES 1. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 9. 2. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 173. 3. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 196.

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4. After returning to Germany Adorno wrote the following to Herbert Marcuse in 1969: ‘Insofar as [direct student protest] breeds in itself tendencies which – and here too we must differ – directly converge with fascism. I name as symptomatic of this the technique of calling for a discussion, only to then make one impossible; the barbaric inhumanity of a mode of behaviour that is regressive and even confuses regression with revolution; the blind primacy of action; the formalism which is indifferent to the content and shape of that against which one revolts, namely our theory. Here in Frankfurt, and certainly in Berlin as well, the word “professor” is used condescendingly to dismiss people, or as they so nicely put it “to put them down”, just as the Nazis used the word Jew in their day.’ Reprinted as “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review, no. 223 (Jan/Feb 1999): 123–136. https://newleftreview​.org​/issues​/i233​/articles​/theodor​-adorno​-herbert​-marcuse​-correspondence​-on​-the​-german​-student​-movement, accessed May 6, 2023. 5. Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Sphere and Duties of Government, transl. Joseph Coulthard (London: John Chapman, 1854), 67. 6. See for example Jo Ritzen, “European Universities in the Aftermath of the Economic Crisis,” International Higher Education, no. 87 (2016): 3–4. 7. In some ways this conflict persists into the twenty-first century in the United States, especially when it comes to sexual assault on college campuses often associated with fraternities and athletics. The passage of Title IX in 1972 was meant to address sex-based discrimination in educational and athletic programs on campus, but it was not until a series of high-profile sexual harassment and sexual assault claims against Yale and the University of North Carolina in the early 2010s that Title IX became a mechanism for enforcing uniform legal treatment at the federal level, no longer leaving it to campuses to conduct their own investigations and enforce (or selectively disregard) their own policies. The fact that this standardization of legal procedures has not been wholly successful, either in preventing sexual assault or holding perpetrators to account, has led many to declare a ‘sexual assault crisis’ on college campuses. However, in the Global South student politics have consistently struck a discordant tone that challenges reigning political and legal authorities. This is in part explained by the long-established presence of national student unions, for example the União Nacional de Estudantes in Brazil (founded in 1937), and in part by the role of students in anti-colonial or pro-democracy politics. See When Students Protest: Universities in the Global South, eds. Judith Bessant, Analicia Mejia Mesinas, Sarah Pickard (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 8. The question of definitive origins for these early universities is impossible to resolve, and thus convenient starting points are established for the purposes of commemorations. Charles Homer Haskins points to 1200 as Paris’ conventional origin story. In that year, King Philip Augustus exempted students form lay authority after ‘students had been killed in a town and gown altercation’. This put students under papal law, which would lead to the crisis of 1229. 9. Parallel Source Problems in Medieval History, eds. Frederic Duncalf and August Krey (New York: Harper, 1912), 145–146.

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10. Ian Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 102. 11. Laurence Brockliss, “Gown and Town: The University and the City in Europe, 1200–2000,” Minerva 38, no. 2 (2000): 163. 12. Cited in Maxwell Bennett, The Search for Truth: History and the Future of Universities (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2022). See also McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany 1700-1914, 118. Fichte proposed ideas like requiring uniforms to efface the outward expression of class distinctions amongst students to help instil this collective focus entailed in burgeoning nationalist movements. 13. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Idea of the University – Learning Processes,” trans. John Blazek, New German Critique 41 (1987): 10. 14. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany 1700-1914, 136. 15. Ibid. 16. Cited in Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop, 192. 17. Santos and Bowman, Rot, Riot, Rebellion, 10. 18. Santos and Bowman, Rot, Riot, Rebellion, 52. 19. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 196. 20. Clark Kerr, Uses of the University, 99. 21. Utopian Universities A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s, eds. Miles Taylor and Jill Pellew (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 22. The longest student strike in United States occurred at San Francisco State in 1968–1969 over an attempt to find an Ethnic Studies department. Unlike the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley in 1963, which focussed on domestic conditions, the San Francisco State strike was led by the Third World Liberation Front, which was an umbrella to contain student groups representing different ethnicities and was unflaggingly internationalist in its demands. See Joshua Bloom & Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 269–308. 23. The ‘New Left’, at least in its American guise, was a movement in the 1960s and 1970s that broke away from the ‘Old Left’, housed in the labour movement, more orthodox interpretations of Marx and often an adherence to the Soviet Union. The New Left drew in issues of culture, gender, race and empire and was prominent on American university campuses through organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Oddly enough, the ‘Port Huron Statement’, a founding document in this emerging New Left in the United States, was drafted at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat. The UAW was of course a bedrock institution of the labour-focussed Old Left. 24. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York: Students for a Democratic Society, 1962), 3. Online versions are readily available, including at https://archive​.org​/details​/PortHuronStatement​/Phs00​-211Copy​/mode​ /2up, accessed May 6, 2023. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Students for the Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 5.

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28. Students for the Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 4. 29. Ibid. 30. This is something that one might apply to student movements across the globe: certainly it was at the heart of ‘les événements’ in May 1968 in France. As Kristin Ross writes, the attempt to bridge student and worker reflected ‘a synchronicity or “meeting” between intellectual refusal of the reigning ideology and worker insurrection’. Or, as she also puts it, students ‘acted in such a way as to put into question the conception of the social (the social as functional) on which the state based its authority to govern’. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4, 25. 31. Jonathan Schaar and Sheldon Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond (New York: New York Review of Books, 1970), 9. 32. Schaar and Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond, 10–11. 33. Schaar and Wolin, The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond, 22. 34. As Kristin Ross notes regarding the ‘afterlives’ of May 1968, ‘beginning around 1976 the need to repudiate May fueled a retreat from politics into ethics, a retreat that distorted not only May’s ideology but much of its memory as well’. Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, 12. 35. See fn. 41 in the Introduction. 36. Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life (California: Research and Destroy, 2009). The location is one particularly interesting point of contrast. This was written from the heart of the university, whereas the Port Huron Statement was written from a UAW retreat. 37. See Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Picador, 2013) for an excellent account of the intersection of student politics with broader political trends. 38. Communiqué from an Absent Future, 1. 39. Communiqué from an Absent Future, 9. 40. Communiqué from an Absent Future, 11. 41. A report from University of California Faculty Senate member and UC Santa Cruz professor Bob Meister entitled ‘They Pledged Your Tuition’ provides the clearest example of the point that the authors of the ‘Communiqué’ were gesturing towards. In response to a ‘fiscal emergency’ precipitated by a decrease in state funding, ostensibly as a result of falling tax revenues in the recession, the UC system issued a series of highly rated bonds to make up for budget shortfalls. Meister points out that ‘tuition is UC’s #1 source of revenue to pay back bonds, ahead of new earnings from bond-funded projects’. Moreover, this calculation involved a 32 per cent projected increase in tuition over a three-year period, again proposed as a necessity to make up for budget shortfalls. For tuition to be functioning in this manner in university budgets, a significant amount of financialization must have already taken place. See Bob Meister, “The Pledged Your Tuition,” https://kee​pcal​ifor​nias​promise​.org​/wp​ -content​/uploads​/2009​/10​/They​_Pledged​_Your​_Tuition​.pdf, accessed May 6, 2023. 42. Communiqué from an Absent Future, 19. 43. A very popular articulation of this new position is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor

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Compositions, 2013), which leads with the provocative thesis that ‘The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One’. 44. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” 71. 45. Sigal R. Ben Poreth, Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023). 46. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 47. Students for the Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 61. 48. Ibid. 49. Students for the Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 62. 50. Communiqué from an Absent Future, 19. As we will see in chapters 6, this call has been heeded, and students have assumed a central role in a revitalized labour movement.

Chapter 3

Discipline vs. Discipline

In the previous chapter, we considered Wilhelm von Humboldt’s elevated expectations of the university graduate in the newly reformed German universities of the early nineteenth century. But ever since the University of Berlin constructed the template for the modern research university, the even more decisive and enduring legacy of Humboldt’s vision has been the centrality of the knowledge function to the university’s mission. This has come in the form of disciplinary research within a structure that has been very slow to change. For example, the division between the higher faculties of Law, Theology and Medicine and the lower faculty of Philosophy was still accepted by Kant as the basic structure of the university nearly seven centuries after its founding, even if he interpreted it in a heterodox manner. However, talk of crisis has begun to emerge both within disciplines (‘the crisis of the humanities’,1 ‘the crisis of academic economics’,2 etc.) and across disciplines (‘the crisis of siloed knowledge and the need for interdisciplinarity’3). In short, though with a more muted emotional pitch than we saw in the early twentieth-century German crisis, the organizing ethos of Wissenschaft has once again fallen into a troubled state. The view represented by the post-2008 student activists plunges this crisis of knowledge production and epistemic authority even deeper, subsuming the purity of Wissenschaft under the grubby profit motive. Business and financerelated programmes are by far the most popular majors for undergraduates in the United States. One wonders what kind of new knowledge the university (or humanity, for that matter) gains with the foundation of programmes and departments such as (and these are all drawn from the sprawling School of Business at my own university) Entertainment Marketing, Family Business and Entrepreneurship, and Human Resources and People Management. Jeffery J. Williams is correct in noting that it now seems normal and 57

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unproblematic that ‘the classics department might have its office down the hall from the business department’4 but does this normalization come at too high a cost? As Johann Neem recently wrote in a provocative op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, A good college education offers access to the knowledge requisite to be a thoughtful interpreter of the world, fosters the academic skills necessary to develop meaningful interpretations on one’s own, and cultivates intellectual virtues. In other words, college is defined by its content – by the kinds of things that one ought to think about.5

Quite simply, according to Neem, the career-motivated, utilitarian streak of business programs has nothing significant to add to the impressive edifice of human knowledge universities have helped construct and might be wrapped up in its further descent into a full-blown legitimation crisis. But things can get even worse if we want to push further the undermining of the foundational role of knowledge production in the university. The economist Joan Robinson once claimed that ‘The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all’,6 and for many it is this charge of irrelevance, or that the fruits of their research are not taken seriously, that cuts deepest and foretells the likely decline of universities. A familiar refrain from politicians (predominately of a reactionary stripe) is that the highly technical, specialized language of some fields has tipped over into obscurantism. This applies especially to the humanities, which have, so the charge goes, since the postmodern and deconstructive turn stopped contributing ‘knowledge requisite to be a thoughtful interpreter of the world’ and become an elaborate, Lewis Carrol-like language game played in order to secure some cultural prestige.7 Such at least is the charge of those like Alan Sokal, the NYU physicist who published in 1996 a hoax article in the cultural studies journal Social Text to demonstrate the untethered nature of this discourse.8 What Sokal might not have anticipated is that this suspicion of the humanities would spread to the empirical sciences as well. Like the student protesters, large portions of the public no longer believe that the norms which prevail in university research generate reliable knowledge and feel they often just reflect some sort of underlying agenda – even if it is as narrow as securing and retaining a job with good security and benefits. To paraphrase Robinson, to no longer have the ear of any meaningful constituency outside a narrow group of specialists in your field renders your knowledge functionally irrelevant to any sort of larger social, political or economic project. While this may be most apparent in the United States, we will see how such conditions have informed national policies that increasingly turn on calls for relevance, or ‘impact’, as the precondition of enduring governmental support.

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This chapter takes up yet another fault line in the ‘crisis of the university’ discussion, this time focussing on questions of knowledge, authority and the potential for unity amongst the university’s increasingly diverse landscape of research and teaching. As with the previous two chapters, we can ground today’s assumed organizational structure and horizon of expectations concerning knowledge in a longer history, routed significantly through Berlin and the ‘modern university’ it helped inaugurate. And again, we can think about significant shifts in the university in a wider context that incorporates important changes in the state, economy and culture, seeing where and why the relationships between these give rise to talk of a crisis. However, we can also begin to push the argument towards the more present-based concerns explored in the following chapters. In the post-war period, the university emerged as a central institution in the building and steering of a technologically sophisticated and increasingly complex knowledge economy. As such, the university is also centrally involved in legitimation crises that have come to attend such an economy, as we can see in the view expressed by striking students or the broader loss of faith in the culture of scholarship and research to address genuine human needs and not just the self-interest of a narrow group of professors and students. The dimensions of this legitimation crisis will be broadened by looking at two more recent phenomena – the de-legitimization of whole bodies of knowledge in the culture wars and the attempted quantification of all research to gauge its value. In both cases and others, looking further into border disputes between different disciplines, or between the university and some other purported source of epistemic authority, will help us clarify the particular challenges facing the university today and the crises generated by its knowledge function. The chapter will conclude with an example of how this Anglo-American phenomenon is gaining ground globally.

BACKGROUND: THE JOURNEY FROM UNITY TO COMPLEXITY In the medieval university, there was not much space for conflict between the disciplines, as there were no such things as modern disciplines and their specialized subfields of knowledge. As we have seen, there were instead faculties, the lower of which (Philosophy) comprised the liberal arts of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Geometry, Music, Arithmetic, Astronomy), and these sat in harmonious relationship with one another because they tracked a Natural Law conception of reality and human comprehension. The higher faculties (Medicine, Law, Theology) also had little occasion for generating problems themselves, as they were in many

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ways heteronomous, finding authority in the church, legal codes or medical authorities. (Though they could of course become ensnared in all manner of conflicts if these external sources of authority were themselves challenged.) Since there was no expectation of novel research, there was no comparable concern for contemporary questions of method, for properly delineating the object of study, or whatever else characterizes our modern understanding of disciplines. It was only with the Enlightenment and Kant’s proposed inversion of higher and lower that conflict between the faculties became a pressing concern (more on this in chapter 7). However, prior to the Enlightenment, there were significant changes, both within and outside the university, that started to chip away at this harmony. Following the incorporation of Renaissance Humanism, there were not only additions to the liberal arts curriculum (literature, poetry, Greek, Hebrew) but also shifting expectations about the purpose of such study, namely to inspire new cultural development (which was to become most pronounced in the development of Philology in nineteenth-century Germany). Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) announced a different account of the unity of knowledge, not the received forms of logical justification in Scholasticism, but one based on method and the potential to radically increase the powers of mankind (to put nature on the rack to reveal her secrets, as Bacon is often paraphrased).9 The further development of science would continue to shake the foundations of the university, with institutions such as the Royal Society in the UK existing in vital connection with, but not being exclusively a part of, universities.10 The dynamic between state-sponsored research institutions (where ‘scientists’ could do their work without students) and universities (where ‘professors’ conducted research in their discipline while also attending to the education and formation of students) would become a key factor in how university systems would develop in France,11 Germany,12 and Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century. Finally, the rise of mass literacy and print culture meant that knowledge could disseminate independently of the university, and those who would have made their living teaching could now attempt to do so (or could supplement their teaching income) through writing. In short, one could conjure up a republic of letters without necessarily thinking first and foremost about what was going on in universities. The Enlightenment, to invoke Kant, brought these developments to a state of maturity and posed several new problems for the university. How could the organic, relatively unproblematic organization of the faculties contain the explosion of knowledge emerging from within and outside the university? Would the self-confidence of Kant’s call to ‘dare to know’ unleash destabilizing forces in a relatively well-organized university? As the pace of secularization picked up, would changes in the structure

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of authority in society more broadly lead to new border disputes within the university? Kant felt such border disputes very acutely even in his relatively staid daily existence in far-flung Königsberg. His publication of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1792) drew the ire of the Prussian minister of justice Johann Christoph von Woellner. Woellner accused Kant of ‘[misusing] your philosophy to distort and disparage many of the cardinal and most basic teachings of the Holy Scriptures and Christianity’, thereby undermining the state’s ‘paternal purpose’ which the Theological faculty assiduously pursued in the training of pastors.13 Kant defended himself by asserting that ‘[he] always censured and warned against the mistake of straying beyond the limits of the science at hand or mixing one science with another’.14 As a philosopher, he claimed, his treatment of religion was of a different kind than that of a theologian or, more pointedly, a professor of Theology who is educating a generation of religious leaders. Moreover, he claimed that his work on religion ‘is not suitable for the public . . . [and was] only a debate amongst scholars of the faculty, of which people take no notice’.15 We will make much more of Kant’s handling of this and other conflicts in the final chapter, but here we can note that his defence became increasingly hard to sustain as universities developed in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, as scholars pushed further into their own ‘science at hand’, buffeted by the winds of Wissenschaft, they naturally started to approach similar questions and topics with different methodological commitments than those of other sciences. This could lead to mutual misunderstanding, as Kant had claimed occurred when theologians applied their standards to philosophical problems, and vice-versa. On the other hand, the authorities and the public at large became increasingly interested in the thought of scholars through the growing availability of published work. As Chad Wellmon has argued, Kant worried that the fruits of scholarship absent the rigour of scholarly inquiry would lead to ‘erudition’ over wisdom, which paralleled his worry over dogmatism and the need for a critical philosophy.16 Thus the character and increased presence of such attention became an issue that scholars found it harder to ignore as they bound themselves to some normative epistemological standards within the university. The founders of the University of Berlin looked to a new model of the university which could handle these challenges and in fact reconcile emergent conflicts, such as that between scholarly inquiry and the interests of the state. As Habermas writes, those involved in developing this new model believed that ‘if only scientific work were turned over to the dynamics of research processes, the universities would serve as focal points for moral culture, and indeed for the spiritual life of the nation’.17 We can bracket the question of a ‘national’ character of these educational ideas for the moment and focus

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rather on the belief, seen in different forms in Kant, Fichte, Humboldt and amongst various Hegelians that philosophy would provide the foundational principle for this scientific work. For Fichte, if you become a ‘philosophical artist’, then no matter which domain of specialized scholarly inquiry you engaged in (i.e. genuine Wissenschaft), you would not lose sight of its connection with other domains of knowledge and would be participating in a grand scientific (and indeed moral) project. Wissenschaft, in the summation of Bill Readings, referred to these early thinkers’ belief that universities could cultivate the ‘the speculative search for the unity of knowledge that marks a cultured people’.18 This background shows a shift downwards and outwards, into the lower faculty of philosophy which then fans out into several domains of specialized scholarly inquiry, from the natural sciences to historical and literary studies and eventually to the burgeoning social sciences. The higher faculties are also transformed by this process, incorporating the expectation of knowledge production. The consequence of this shift, laudable as it was for admirers of this new ‘Prussian Model’, could not however sustain the massive explosion in specialized knowledge while still retaining this focus on unity. Expectations of research and concomitant claims to expertise began to diverge. We have already seen the claims to moral authority that Fritz Ringer saw driving some mandarins in the academy in the first decades of the twentieth century, where the purity of their scientific efforts was to give them some sort of privileged claim on envisioning the overall direction of society. On the other side, as Weber notes in ‘Science as a Vocation’, the trend towards ‘the American Model’, in which ‘huge research centers in the field of medicine and of the natural sciences are enterprises of state capitalism [and] cannot be managed without the input of important resources’ sketches out a different justification for the scientific enterprise – namely that it produces all kinds of useful things and can materially change our reality.19 Nationalism, which was a preoccupation of these early nineteenth-century thinkers, could plausibly provide the unifying link between these fragmentary pursuits, but in twentieth-century Germany, we have seen what a distorted and destructive form that could take. Thus, in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the university was forced to revisit the possibility, as well as the desirability, of a renewed sense of unity in its research mission. Could a university continue with a more heterogeneous and complex set of allegiances and practices? If not, would its status decline in the face of other institutions more suited to the pace of modern life? Would the overwhelming success of the scientific enterprise ultimately crowd out other claims to useful knowledge?

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THE TWO CULTURES: THE SPECTRE OF FRAGMENTATION Research became a requirement for many professors in the twentieth century, especially in the expanding American system (recall the University of Michigan president Henry Tappen’s lament about a lack of competent American faculty in chapter 1). With the Prussian Model, ‘Teaching staff came increasingly to be recruited from scholars and scientists who had researched, discovered and made public new interpretations and were expected to continue to do so as a part of their official duties’.20 With this, professors started to develop a sense of what was good and proper research practice within their disciplines. This involved the growth of scholarly societies, to which a professor might feel more collegial and professionally responsible than their own university. There was also more formal attention given to train PhDs in a specific way so that progress could be made in their disciplines, which was part of a general push to professionalize fields of knowledge and house them in the university. Moreover, as Weber noted with his allusion to the ‘American Model’, departments were sometimes given large amounts of money and resources to set up research centres (Area Studies, Scientific Laboratories, Medical Research Facilities in Hospitals, etc.), further wedding professors to disciplinary research. Thus, by the end of this post–World War II process the university had become an extremely complex institution, which, referring to the American case, Clark Kerr famously called the ‘multiversity’. ‘It is more a mechanism’, he wrote, ‘a series of processes producing a series of results – a mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money’.21 Yet it was also a very successful institution, with disciplines maturing within universities and making their influence felt in industry and culture, from the natural sciences to literary and artistic fields. It was this success that attracted the attention, in the UK, of C. P. Snow, who in his 1959 Rede Lecture asked whether this complex model would ultimately give birth to a new kind of institution that left behind those prior iterations that prioritized unity or signal some prevailing ‘idea of the university’. In Snow’s crude categorization, disciplinary success birthed, as the book form of his lectures put it, ‘two cultures’.22 The ‘Intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into two polar groups’, he wrote. ‘At one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other the scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension’.23 Universities were not solely responsible for this split, but as the post-war university touched more people and more aspects of society it would be impossible not to reflect on its role in these competing

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processes of acculturation that attended the growth in specialized knowledge. And as the Sokal hoax would show, mutual incomprehension was something that those working in universities would themselves increasingly sense. Snow’s distinction was undoubtedly crude; the political orientation of the two camps have largely flipped; and his ideas were dismissed by many of his peers. (The literary critic F. R. Leavis wrote a very nasty response, writing that ‘there are the two uncommunicating and mutually indifferent cultures, there is the need to bring them together, and there is C. P. Snow, whose place in history is that he has them both, so that we have in him the paradigm of the desired and necessary union’.24) Nonetheless, there were and are many who would be broadly sympathetic to this distinction. If culture is a set of shared beliefs and attitudes, or a shared language and set of norms, then the development of Wissenschaft in the scientific and cultural fields had the possibility of fracturing what was once imagined as a common culture.25 In essence, the ‘need to bring [these cultures] together’, which Leavis mocked, was seen by many as a reasonable – if not pressing – concern.26 Something like this was in fact intended by Hannah Arendt. Writing just a year earlier in the United States, she fixated on the symbolic importance of the 1957 Sputnik launch, not simply as a wake-up call to one side of the Cold War to ramp up their programme of science education. Rather, Arendt saw the satellite as marking that point of scientific development where limits for human beings or their supposedly natural domain of the Earth were no longer firm, leading her to say that ‘what I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing’.27 On Arendt’s side there was a worry that the big science that was being carried out in universities with massive government outlays lacked the kind of moral constraints that only literary intellectuals could impose. Conversely, a failure of these literary intellectuals to deal with staggering advances in the basic fund of knowledge and technological capacity could lead to extreme political irresponsibility, as Snow himself observed in Britain.28 The question thus arises: When does this culture clash become a crisis? Why can’t universities be comfortable with a pluralistic conception of knowledge, or at least embrace the kind of anti-foundationalism found in pragmatists such as Richard Rorty? For those like Kerr, the lack of a single unifying idea was actually a strength that allowed the post-war university to pursue a range of ends: scientific, civic, pedagogical and economic. Even Snow did not frame the gulf between the two cultures as a crisis, but rather as a call for a renewed commitment to education in the sciences so that leaders could make use of the best tools available to themselves. So long as there are coherent cultures within the disciplines and they are free of any obvious sources of corruption (deceit, censorship and other forms of political meddling), can the

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university still be the engine of new knowledge for relevant publics, even if those within it might have trouble understanding one another? To appreciate the nature of crises in the domain of knowledge production and research we have to widen our aperture. To once again quote Janet Roitman, ‘the point is to observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways in which it regulates narrative constructions, the ways in which it allows certain questions to be asked while others are foreclosed’.29 Two recent examples will help foreground narrative constructions that elucidate broader changes in the state, culture and economy, as well as the university’s role in such changes, and especially in its knowledge function. The first picks up on Snow’s theme of irreconcilable cultures, this time examining an attempt to characterize the culture of academic research itself as a suspect when compared with supposedly more common-sense interpretations of the world. The second looks within the university at novel attempts to provide a unifying ideal intended to bridge diverse research cultures. In both cases, the crisis label suggests that some sort of resolution is needed to address conflicts that emerge from the knowledge function of universities. The difficulty is that they all too easily populate our blind spots with normative ideals that are eminently contestable.

REVISITING THE CULTURE WARS: A CASE STUDY IN THE DELEGITIMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE30 Until the student protests of the 1960s, there were few who claimed that the American university was in crisis, especially in California, where, following the implementation of the California Master Plan (CMP) in 1960, higher education went through a period of unprecedented expansion. The CMP guaranteed admission to graduating California high schoolers with a minimum Grade Point Average, created two new universities (San Diego and Santa Cruz) to absorb the influx of students and instituted a funding model that would commit the state to sustained expansion.31 Other state systems took up aspects of the California model, with the result that this period of general expansion is often referred to as ‘The Golden Age of American Higher Education’, or, as Jeffrey J. Williams puts it, ‘The Welfare State University’.32 Flush with money, students and administrative support, this was a boom time for disciplinary research.33 Despite the student protests that would materialize towards the end of the decade, universities garnered broad public support, and over a considerable period of time. As Christopher Newfield writes in Unmaking the Public University, ‘The public university was the institution where blue- and

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white-collar workers and managers, citizens of every racial background were being invited into a unified majority’.34 This university pushed the values of ‘full social inclusion, general development, cultural equality and majoritarian economics’, and their partial accomplishment of these even served as the impetus for many student protesters – for example minority students pushing for ethnic studies departments in the name of a more inclusive curriculum.35 In Newfield’s telling, the success of these decades led to a sustained counter-movement from conservative elites, who morphed into ‘culture warriors’ in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Crucially, however, these elites did not challenge the broadly popular goods produced by these public universities head-on. Rather, they attempted to provoke a legitimation crisis by claiming that the expansionist policies of the post-war period were ‘incompatible with market forces, democracy, political order, affirmative action, and economic efficiency’.36 The 1970s were a propitious time to begin such a campaign, as the nation underwent a significant economic downturn and fell into a deep ‘crisis of confidence’, as Jimmy Carter famously announced in a 1979 national address. Again, there was a felt desire for unity in the face of the fragmenting forces of modern life, and the university became a point of fixation for such discussions. A key aspect of this anti-university campaign was cultural and directly attacked the knowledge function of universities. Even if ‘qualitative knowledge about culture and human relations’ could circulate freely within universities, there was a sustained attempt by those outside the university to replace this with productive, quantitative knowledge. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ problem was now seen in a new guise. ‘The humanities’, Newfield claims, ‘were often cast as the source of nonknowledge or even a kind of antiknowledge, one that led to social divisions at economic costs’.37 Whether the target was postmodern philosophical discourse, ethnic studies or literary criticism, culture warriors made the case that academics were propagating a form of obscurantism whose use was not readily apparent to wide swaths of society, and thus could not justify the broad public outlays of investment of the postwar period. On the other side of this was the language of the market, which spoke in unambiguous, plain terms of success or failure insofar as it met a human desire. ‘Culture warriors’ were able substantially to reframe the terms in which universities were to be understood during a period in which the relationship between state and economy was undergoing a drastic transformation, with market calculations significantly replacing the logic of broad public investment. This had very concrete material effects, as public funding for higher education plummeted from the 1970s onwards. But it also had effects on the culture of disciplinary research and the knowledge produced thereby.

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The lack of a unifying ideal that Kerr praised became a problem for those hoping to challenge culture warriors, especially for scholars in the humanities who were not accustomed to meeting charges of inadequate utility. As we will see in the following example, attempts to reimpose such a unifying ideal have not provided durable resolutions to this legitimation crisis.

IMPACT FACTORS AND THE CHALLENGE OF DISENCHANTMENT The post-war experience of public higher education in the United States falling into a legitimation crisis is, as Newfield shows, understandable in political and economic terms that are exogenous to the university. But there is also a cultural factor to these changes which goes further back: in Max Weber’s evocative phrasing, the process of ‘disenchantment’. Weber himself saw this process, wherein magical interpretations of the world are supplanted by rational, scientific ones, as provoking its own set of crises while attempting to solve others. But Weber was also aware that the incremental progress made in scientific research, or the development of new interpretive schemas in the humanities and social sciences, may not be powerful enough to elicit commitment, especially as they bumped up against their own limits in addressing questions of values and politics. In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber tried to make the case that these rational and scientific practices should elicit our respect, especially in the modern university, but the decades following his speech showed the challenges to such an appeal. The question of whether such a standard for knowledge and understanding could be found persisted throughout the twentieth century and remains today – not only in the United States but in fact globally. Jean-François Lyotard, in his ‘report on knowledge’ commissioned by higher education authorities in Quebec, asked us to abandon totalizing ‘grand narratives’ and settle for more pluralistic and localized forms of knowledge.38 But others have not been satisfied with this deflationary approach and attempted to breathe new life into Weber’s conception of value-free, disciplinary research that extended the sphere of human understanding through a commitment to scientifically grounded scholarship. The most impactful form of this anti-postmodern reaction is the many evaluative schemas that have been applied to university research. Those in the UK will be familiar with the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is but the most notorious example of a drive to quantify, make comparisons and optimize the knowledge function of universities. As David Preston notes, these evaluative schemes are attempts to address the postEnlightenment legitimation crisis discussed earlier in the chapter, and to do

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so, as Weber demanded, in a supposedly value-neutral manner.39 It is hard directly to compare genuine disciplinary advances in physics, archaeology, linguistics and Russian literature, but one can establish some sort of proxy. The REF, ‘Impact Factor’, and other prominent examples of these proxies (e.g. the European Educational Research Quality Indicators, the Australian Index) increasingly turn on some consideration of ‘relevance’ and, as Bill Readings says, ‘excellence’.40 Such proxies are of course untethered to any specific disciplinary commitments, as they are meant to provide a neutral mechanism for commensurability and comparison, and thus look to metrics like citations within and across disciplines or how much grant funding and prizes are attached to research programmes.41 As a unifying ideal for research and the extension of human knowledge, this is clearly very distant from the moral and cultural valence of Wissenschaft in early nineteenth-century Germany. In many ways, this should not be surprising, as conditions are quite different. For Bill Readings, both the research university and the nation-state emerged as quintessential institutions of modernity, and ‘the emergence of the concept of culture should be understood as a particular way of dealing with the tensions between [them]’.42 If strong cultural norms related to research were in place, or if the nation-state were still the dominant locus of culture, then one would not need to invent these proxies. But when research cultures start to split along the lines of values, as Snow argued, or if research becomes ‘dereferentialized’ from any meaningful cultural context (e.g. that of ‘national culture’ or the culture of science), then talk of a crisis readily picks up.43 These evaluative schemes can then be seen, as David Preston argues, as more in line with the operations of capitalist management, which purports to be the best value-neutral response to the breakdown of older forms of authority – whether they be ‘magical’ or simply that mixture of Romanticism and Enlightenment self-confidence that we saw in nineteenth-century Germany. It is the ‘performativity’,44 or as Michael Power would call them ‘rituals of verification’,45 that Lyotard predicted would emerge as the unsatisfactory but widespread attempt to fulfil this residual desire for unity and answer the question of why knowledge remained a good around which the modern university must still organize itself. This gap between expectation and production has proven an auspicious ground for declaring that the university is in crisis.

KNOWLEDGE (STILL) MATTERS Even during times of crisis and confusion of mission, it is important to remind ourselves of the solidity of the university. As we saw earlier in Clark Kerr’s memorable phrasing, it is one of the few institutions that still, in large measure,

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has been doing roughly the same thing (often in the same place) for centuries and in some cases approaching a millennium. This is especially so regarding the research university. Thus the sociologist Craig Calhoun contends that, despite protestations to the contrary, ‘knowledge is the business of the modern research university: creating knowledge through research, preserving and renewing knowledge through scholarship, transmitting knowledge through teaching and learning, and distributing and applying knowledge in public service’.46 Even during the culture wars of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, or the normalization of competition and assessment schemes in the 2010s and 2020s, many academics have understood themselves in Calhoun’s terms and even excelled by the relevant measures. The mechanism for doing this has been the disciplinary structures and practices of rational inquiry that the research university has brought to maturity. But it is important also to note how much the understanding of the knowledge function of the university can change, and how that reverberates through this disciplinary structure. In the early years of the research university, Wissenschaft could fuse quite seamlessly with other forces of modernity – first and foremost the cultural force of nationalism, which provided a convenient frame for the unity of knowledge. In the post-war United States, there was also a natural alignment between knowledge production in universities and national and economic priorities, to the point where Vannevar Bush could argue for massive increases in federal funding of universities without many preconditions because ‘they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom’.47 Some well-funded and institutionally secure universities can still claim aspects of this hands-off approach, but for the vast majority it is no longer sufficient to appeal to some assumed norms about free inquiry, scholarly self-governance and the transparent worth of certain kinds of knowledge. Whether the result of the diversification of fields and research cultures within, or pressures emerging from without, few have been able to provide a satisfactory answer on what counts as a valuable contribution to knowledge through scholarly research. Most troublingly, as we will see in chapters 5, 6 and 7, a group of managers and administrators, backed by their role in government ministries or empowered within reconfigured chains of authority within the university, have taken it upon themselves to resolve this issue in ways that appear to be driving a great deal of current crisis talk. I end this chapter with a brief ethnographic sketch of what this state of confusion looks like in practice, and why the knowledge function is likely to remain a site of crisis until and unless broader political and economic changes occur. It is also an example of how trends emerging in the United States and the UK spread into different national contexts around the globe. In 2019–2020 I taught in what might be called an academic start-up, a new

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‘school of advanced studies’ that offered a liberal arts education in English within the structure of a state university in Russia. One reason this innovative model was supported was that the school helped the university advance in Russia’s ‘5 top 100’ initiative, the goal of which was to get five Russian universities into the top 100 of global university rankings.48 In pursuit of this, faculty were placed in interdisciplinary teams and tasked with developing research programmes that would place scholarship in ‘impactful’ journals, thus raising the university’s status, improving its ranking and becoming known as a global hub for innovative interdisciplinary research (a highly desired intellectual commodity these days). Each team’s progress would be evaluated at the end of each year, and faculty contracts would be adjusted (or cancelled) depending on the success of their endeavours. At the end of the year, exactly zero research programmes were judged as successful, for a host of reasons: the short time frame in which the research was produced, the inability to balance research with the significant demands of teaching a liberal arts curriculum, the lack of ‘impactful’ journals that would publish interdisciplinary work and a lack of buy-in from faculty who remained quite committed to the disciplines in which they had trained and heretofore practised. In essence, ‘interdisciplinarity’ or ‘excellence’ as defined by these ranking schemes could not provide a compelling frame within which to organize the scholarly energies of the faculty in their desire to produce new knowledge. However, merely by participating in the ‘5 top 100’ programme and in setting these ambitious research targets the university did secure increased government funding. There is nothing unique in Russia’s approach in deciding how to disperse resources across the university system: we can find similar competition-based programs, from China to Western Europe (e.g. in Germany’s identification of ‘excellence clusters’ within universities).49 However, one point I have been pursuing throughout this chapter is that certain cultural assumptions about knowledge production are particularly amenable to certain state and economic forms. Thus, it is important not to concede the point, contra culture warriors such as Alan Sokal, that the knowledge function of universities is in crisis as a result solely of academics’ own doings. Rather it is important to note how much universities, and thus their staff, have been made to do in response to broader crises. For example, Columbia professor Mark Taylor wrote a provocative op-ed in 2009 in the New York Times asking readers to ‘end the university as we know it’, comparing graduate education to ‘the Detroit of higher learning’. Graduate programmes, he argued, ‘produce a product for which there is no market’ (e.g. in non-contingent faculty positions) and the department structure ‘develops skills for which there is a diminishing demand’ (e.g. in hyper-specialized subfields of research that are found in largely unready,

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prohibitively expensive academic journals.).50 As in my institution in Russia, he felt that this required an abandonment of a rigid disciplinary structure, in his case for interdisciplinary ‘zones of inquiry’ organized around topics like ‘Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, and Water’. Such zones were to be revisited every seven years to make sure they were still relevant, but the more important part was to not be caught, like US manufacturing, in too late an acceptance of economic and social transformation because of some dogged commitment to one’s disciplinary traditions and canonical texts. We are a long way here from any organic assumption about the university’s distinctive culture of knowledge production and dissemination that guided Fichte, Kant or even the scientifically minded Vannevar Bush. On the one hand, Snow’s worry seems to have come to fruition, namely that graduate students and faculty are being disciplined not to internalize the rules of a common culture but rather are being disciplined into different kinds of culture. Scientism is for many the norm across disciplines (e.g. cognitive neuroscience over psychoanalysis) or within disciplines (e.g. viewing history as a science and not an art). For others, the interpretive culture of the humanities still remains central, and it won’t be conceded that science doesn’t also have substantial values and a worldview, thus inevitably involving judgement. To quote Nietzsche, ‘It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it. Science is totally dependent upon philosophical opinions for all of its goals and methods, though it easily forgets this’.51

NOTES 1. For a helpful history of this in UK universities, see Joe Moran, “The Humanities and the University: a Brief History of the Present Crisis,” Critical Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2022): 5–28. 2. In the wake of the 2009 global financial crisis, a group of American and European academic economists met in Kiel, Germany, and issued a withering critique of their field’s inability to anticipate the crisis. See David Colander et al., “The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics,” Kiel Working Papers 1489, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (2009), available online at https://www​.files​ .ethz​.ch​/isn​/98185​/Kap​_1489​.pdf, accessed May 6, 2023. 3. Sarah Bay, Clifford Siskin, William Warner, “Is it Time to Dezone Knowledge?” Inside Higher Ed, November 3, 2019. https://www​ .insidehighered​ .com​ /views​/2019​/11​/04​/halt​-crisis​-humanities​-higher​-ed​-should​-rethink​-its​-classification​ -knowledge, accessed May 6, 2023. 4. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” 64.

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5. Johann Neem, “Abolish the Business Major!”, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2019, https://www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/abolish​-the​-business​-major, accessed May 6, 2023. 6. Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1962), 45. 7. To this end, the educational divide, whether in the Brexit vote or in US presidential elections, has been marshalled as evidence in the Culture War that knowledge produced in universities cannot be disinterested and driven by scientific norms of objectivity but can be understood only in terms of cultural capital accrued to achieve political ends: Moran, “The Humanities and the University: a Brief History of the Present Crisis,” 5. 8. Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–252. 9. Carolyn Merchant, “‘The Violence of Impediments’: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99, no. 4 (2008): 732. 10. See Christopher Hill, “The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society. London or Oxford?” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 23, no. 2 (1968): 144–156. 11. Despite having a higher education system that is heavily overseen by the state, much advanced research is not carried out in universities, but rather in the government-funded Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Compare also the differences between Universities and Academies of Science across Central and Eastern Europe, where this arrangement is similar. 12. Again, in Germany the Max Planck Society – not a university – consists of a government-sponsored set of institutions that is a leading site of advanced scientific research. 13. The exchange is relayed in the introduction to Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary Gregory (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 11. 14. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties 13. 15. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 15. 16. Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 123–150. 17. Habermas, “The Idea of the University – Learning Processes,” 9. 18. Readings, The University in Ruins, 165. 19. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 131. 20. McClelland, “The Emergence of Modern Higher Education: The German University and its Influence,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, 275. 21. Kerr, Uses of the University, 20. 22. Snow’s analysis is very much centred on Great Britain and found a receptive audience in other parts of the Anglophone world. In countries driven by a Marxist ideology the relationship between science and the humanities would be more complex. However, on either side of the Cultural Revolution 20th century Chinese university reformers expressed the humanities and sciences in exclusive tones similar to that laid out by Snow. See Wang Hui, “The Humanities in China: History and Challenges,” History of Humanities 5, no. 2 (2020): 309–331, particularly 317–320.

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23. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 24. Cited in Roger Kimball, “The Two Cultures Today,” New Criterion, February, 1994, https://newcriterion​.com​/issues​/1994​/2​/aoethe​-two​-culturesa​-today, accessed May 6, 2023. 25. See Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1989) for an anthropological interpretation that plays up the cultural dimension of different knowledge and research traditions in universities. 26. See for example the Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 27. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 28. ‘I remember being cross-examined by a scientist of distinction. “Why do most writers take on social opinions which would have been thought distinctly démodé at the time of the Plantaganets? Wasn’t that true of most of the famous 20th century writers? Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, nine out of ten of those who have dominated literary sensibility in our time – weren’t they not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?”’: Snow, The Two Cultures, 7. 29. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 93. 30. While this case is specific to the United States, we have seen above that Culture War driven attacks on the university, and the knowledge produced within them have become increasingly common in the UK. 31. See Simon Marginson, The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 3–27 for the general outlines of the CMP. 32. Jeffrey J. Williams, ‘The Post-Welfare State University’, American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 194‐5. 33. See Jonathan Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 191–342 for an exhaustive discussion of the fruits of this investment. 34. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 4. 35. The longest student strike in United States history occurred in 1968 at San Francisco State University and centred around establishing an Ethnic Studies Department. 36. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 12. 37. Newfield, Unmaking the Public University, 25. 38. Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 39. David Preston, “Managerialism and the Post-Enlightenment Crisis of the British University,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 33, no. 2 (2001): 344–363. 40. Readings, The University in Ruins, 21.

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41. See Nicholas Burbules and Paul Smeyers, “How to Improve your Impact Factor: Questioning the Quantification of Academic Quality,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 45, no. 1 (2011): 1–17 for the use of these metrics in European countries such as Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. For a more global perspective see The Quality of Educational Research in Higher Education. International Perspectives, Ed. Tina Besley (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2009). 42. Readings, The University in Ruins, 6. 43. For Readings, the keyword for dereferentialization is ‘excellence’, which no longer attaches itself to a specific set of practices or goals attributable to projects like building a national culture (e.g. in discussions of cannon-formation in national literatures). It rather floats freely without reference to any specific set of goals or practices. 44. Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition, 48. 45. Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 46. Craig Calhoun, “The Public Mission of the Research University,” in Knowledge Matters, eds. Craig Calhoun and Diane Rhoten (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 28. 47. Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier, p. 19. 48. These rankings were the Academic Ranking of World Universities (run by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (run by the journal of the same name) and Quacquarelli Symonds World University Ranking (run by the company of the same name). 49. For further examples see Christine Musselin, “New Forms of Competition in Higher Education,” Socio-Economic Review 16, no. 3 (2018): 657–683. 50. Mark Taylor, “End the University as We Know It,” New York Times, April 26, 2009, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/04​/27​/opinion​/27taylor​.html, accessed May 6, 2023. 51. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, tr. Daniel Breazeale (London: Humanities Press, 1990), 8.

Chapter 4

The Global vs. the Local

At this midway point, it may be helpful to summarize the argument thus far. The previous three chapters have taken three structural oppositions that characterize the university – the past vs. the future, the student vs. the society and discipline vs. discipline – as a way to offer a history of the institution that centres conflict and embeds the university in a wider web of relations with the state, economy and cultural forces. The purpose of this approach is twofold. First, it is a means of resisting both a crude idealism and a rushed presentism that one often finds in discussions of the university, where normative ideals, to quote Roitman, ‘[regulate] narrative constructions, the ways in which [they] allow certain questions to be asked while others are foreclosed’.1 These ideals can either centre on an imputed timeless essence (call this the Platonic conception of the university) or on a narrative of progress and canny adjustment to changing practical needs (call this the pragmatic conception of the university). In either case, there is a drive to resolve conflict, instead of embracing it as constitutive of the university. Second, revisiting the history in this way helps us appreciate the dynamics of the ‘university in crisis’, – when, where and why such claims tend to emerge. We can see periods of time when there is a lag between the self-understanding of those in the university community and the conditions in which they now exist, or others where powerful external pressures deform or put into question normative ideas about the university (call these moments the Hegelian conception of the university). In such periods talk of crisis tends to proliferate, and there are urgent calls to resolve the constitutive tensions that define the university. We are clearly living through such a period today, partly for the reasons outlined in the preceding chapters. But as we build towards the concluding chapter of this book, we can now focus on three particularly salient drivers of our contemporary crisis talk, all of which touch on broader crises: the 75

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global vs. the local, which intersects with issues of sovereignty and the free and easy circulation of people, ideas and – most importantly – capital across national borders; the professor vs. the administration, which intersects with issues of management culture as an increasingly popular response to certain legitimation crises in universities and elsewhere; and the educational vs. the economic, which intersects with the growing influence of economic rationales to the exclusion of all other organizing principles. In each case, we will again have recourse to the university’s history. This will lead us to the position vis-à-vis the crisis of the universities today, which will be taken up in the concluding chapter. This chapter, however, goes back and begins with yet another brief gloss of history of the university, noting the transit of ideas and models across the Atlantic and eventually across the globe and how such circuits of influence were challenged and modified in different local settings. The ‘ideas of the university’ described in chapter 1, while outlining general normative principles of higher education, can also be associated with specific locales: the University for Civic Training at the University of Virginia; the University as Centre for Disciplinary Research emerging in the wake of the University of Berlin’s founding and supercharged in the post–World War II United States; the University as Humanistic Enclave, recalling Oxford, Cambridge or the contemporary American liberal arts college in small midwestern towns like Oberlin, Ohio, or Grinnell, Iowa. Yet as we saw with Minerva University, or as we will see in this chapter with the increasing number of ‘global campuses’, there is a push to de-territorialize the idea of the university and embrace the global over the local, in essence proffering a new ‘idea of the university’ – the global university. The second half of the chapter examines not only this trajectory but also the rise of ‘global studies’ and ‘world citizenship’ as challenges to existing higher education models. Such developments suggest not only a reorganization of scholarly work (e.g. from traditional ‘area studies’ to ‘global studies’) but also a change in the political economy of universities, namely in the direction of, as the anthropologist Tom Looser has put it, the neoliberal ideal of ‘pure self-relation’.2 I will argue that it is less plausible that, despite its most enthusiastic proponents, this new entrant in the ‘idea of the university’ tradition will endure and should solicit our support as a plausible model to resolve the various crises we face.

FROM UNIVERSITAS MAGISTRORUM ET SCHOLARIUM TO NATIONAL DIFFERENTIATION The University of Bologna, organized as a Universitas Magistrorum et Scholarium (Community of Scholars and Teachers), initiated a complicated

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dialectic of local and global, or place-based and universal, that has continued throughout the history of the university. As we saw earlier, students gathered in Bologna from both the locality and abroad, organizing themselves into ‘nations’, reflecting linguistic and loose geographical groupings (cismontane and ultramontane, relative to their being on this side or that of the Alps). In some ways, this made the location of Bologna incidental, as scholars and students could organize themselves into guild-like communities of common interest or identity anywhere. The medieval university was in many instances a highly mobile institution, with quarrelling professors or students simply decamping to another city, sometimes to start a new university (e.g. Cambridge from Oxford, Padua from Bologna) sometimes to let hostile local conditions cool down (e.g. as discussed earlier, the thirteenth-century ‘strike’ at the University of Paris when many students and professors temporarily relocated to Angers). In this regard the medieval university’s description also as a Studium Generale, a universal place of study, is apt. But in other ways, the location of universities was very significant, whether it be a matter of proximity to earlier educational institutions such as a cathedral school, or in the case of Bologna, a locality where the practical need to mediate different orders of law (Roman and Canon) led to the development of specific kinds of expertise. As European universities spread throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they also became sites of prestige for rulers, such as Charles University in Prague (Charles IV) or the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Kasimir III). One can find a similar logic today in East Asia, where the foundation or development of universities is a marker of economic or cultural might on the regional and global levels – for example, the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology or the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, three of the top five ranked institutions in the Times Higher Education Young University Rankings (institutions founded in the past fifty years) in 2022.3 Thus, from the beginning there have been forces pushing in opposite directions, instantiating at the same time both a sense of indifference towards one’s immediate setting and one of attachment and responsibility to where one taught, learned and (later on) conducted research. Often these forces were buffeted by sweeping changes around the university: the Protestant Reformation, technological advances (e.g. the printing press leading to the Republic of Letters, or – perhaps of even greater relevance – advances in transportation4); or, of particular significance in this chapter, the rise of the nation-state. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the spread of European universities from Krakow to Salamanca was still characterized by a high degree of conformity to the classic trivium/quadrivium, higher/lower faculty organization; nor did other features vary much from place to place.

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But through the course of the nineteenth century, divergent models became increasingly associated with newly formed nation-states: the research university in Germany, the Oxbridge model of humanistic enclave in England, the more practical approach to research and teaching (especially in medicine) in Scotland and the centralized approach in France. This involved greater curricular differentiation, but also different expectations coming to be placed upon the university. The development of higher education in the United States showed the effect of these competing models in a country rich in resources and not particularly attached to any dominant tradition. As James Axtell writes, early American colleges and universities ‘borrowed several bits and pieces from English and Scottish universities .  .  . but they failed to replicate a whole university in its essence and character’.5 In these early years, colleges were associated with a religious denomination (Harvard – Congregationalist and Unitarian; Yale – Anglican; Princeton – Presbyterian) and the capstone class of ‘Moral Philosophy’, taught by the president, showed an attachment to the ‘gentlemanly’ focus of British higher education. As Axtell writes, however, Americans did not mimic their European counterparts wholesale but were open to incorporating and recombining different aspects as they developed in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, leading to the variegated landscape of higher education that we see there today. Take Johns Hopkins University as a case in point. Often cited as the purest importation of the German model and America’s first ‘research university’, its founding president Daniel Coit Gilman nevertheless made a point in his inaugural address cautioning against wholesale adoption of any single model, lest local exigencies and constituencies be overlooked. Gilman warned that ‘In following, as we are prone to do in educational matters, the example of Germany, we must beware lest we accept what is their cast off; lest we introduce faults as well as virtues, defects with excellence’.6 Some of these defects were of a technical, organizational nature, such as whether polytechnics should be combined with traditional universities, or whether the Gymnasium or Realschule were the best means of preparing students for ‘higher culture’. But more important for Gilman was what he took to be a point of general agreement about university education that was often forgotten, especially in countries strongly attached to their traditions: ‘Universities easily fall into ruts. Almost every epoch requires a fresh start’. Perhaps the most important feature of the epoch of Johns Hopkins’ founding was the dynamic of competition coming to supplant earlier models of centralized planning and the more organicist organizational approaches to the development of universities that obtained in Germany. As the historian Emily Levine notes,

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by the 1870s, American university reformers perceived themselves to be competing with each other rather than with German universities. If Germany was a symbol of excellence, then the knowledge race among domestic institutions amounted to creating the best version of the German university in America.7

Gilman had pioneered this spirit during his pre-Hopkins tenure at Yale, where he had emphasized the necessity of developing domestic graduate education to compete with and supplant the current dependence on German universities (e.g. granting more domestic PhDs so as to build a growing professoriate, as University of Michigan president Henry Tappen had advocated). That Johns Hopkins developed its graduate programme before Harvard gave it a competitive advantage in the domestic arena, and in the hands of an enterprising leader like Gilman the formidable resources behind a university like Johns Hopkins could raise the status of Baltimore, a bustling port city more associated with commerce than with ideals of character formation.8 Moreover, the dynamic of competitive differentiation would inevitably lead to the German model’s being superseded and to the introduction of something new: the flourishing in the mid-twentieth century of a multiversity that both supercharged the research function of universities and pushed towards mass education. Here ‘German’ functioned much as ‘American’ did for Max Weber. In his ‘Science as a Vocation’ lecture, he lamented the ‘Americanization’ of universities and ‘German life in general’:9 foremost on his mind were enterprising administrators like Gilman. More familiar to Weber was a figure like Frederic Althoff, who, through the Prussian Ministry of Education, had a significant shaping effect on universities across the nation and who should, Weber thought, have been contained by the academic traditions native to Germany. As Weber saw it, Althoff was at risk of also falling prey to, or being swept up in, this process of Americanization, wherein, as he put it in a 1911 essay, leaders were ‘in danger of producing a new academic generation which no longer adhered to the old traditions of the German University’ but rather would now become ‘an approximation to the American type – not to the type of an American academic, but rather to the type of American who is active in the stock exchange’.10 With the vast resources of donors (or the intervention of Boards of Trustees representing various sectors and constituencies)11 the university would inevitably drift towards fragmentation or creative differentiation, depending on their leaders’ disposition towards an ‘idea’ of the university and its coherence within a national context. This did not mean that there wasn’t a concomitant swing back towards the local, as this dialectic worked itself out in America’s resource-rich and tradition-poor higher education system. To take the most striking example,

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a decade before the foundation of Johns Hopkins the government passed the Morrill Act, which founded a number of colleges and universities by selling federal land to raise funds to build a campus (hence the designation of ‘landgrant’ institutions). In the language of this act, the purpose of a university is, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.12

Rural populists made sure that these newly founded universities respected the reference to ‘agricultural and mechanical arts’ and didn’t get swept up in foreign ideas about research and knowledge production.13 We can see similar dynamics working themselves out in other contexts, such as the UK. Stefan Collini highlights the establishment of new universities in great industrial cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham in the 1870s and 1880s. These were ‘the result of local initiatives and aimed at meeting local needs: they were not afraid to teach practical subjects such as “commerce” alongside the traditional curriculum’, and as a result put forward a distinctive model for the university – ‘the “civic” model (“redbrick” was a later 20th-century coinage): local, practical, aspirational’.14 But, he notes, there was subsequently a pull towards ‘being a national rather than a local institution; towards offering a full spectrum of subjects; towards offering postgraduate as well as undergraduate degrees’.15 In chapter 1 we saw the tensions that arose after the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, wherein the ‘polytechnicization’ of UK higher education brought these local, practical subjects into direct contact with other extant models of the university – ‘the Oxbridge model: residential, tutorial, character-forming’, and the ‘Scottish/ London model: metropolitan, professorial, meritocratic’.16 In what respects is this simply a matter of different influences and models working themselves out, with the inevitable variation and differentiation that follows? Must it be a ‘crisis’? In fact, returning to the American case, couldn’t the influence of money, baleful in the eyes of Weber and many of his German compatriots, be viewed as tying universities more to local concerns (through Boards of Trustees’ responsibility to local industries or interest in the well-being of towns in which universities are located) instead of a commitment to an abstract idea which may have little to do with the current needs of diverse localities? Or, more broadly, if there is money to open new institutions of higher education where one did not exist before, is that not a positive development in the additive logic of educational goods? Returning to Gilman’s inaugural address at Johns Hopkins, there is a positive gloss that can be given to moments when there is a great deal of

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attention, experimentation and investment in higher education. Speaking in 1876, Gilman noted that ‘at the present moment Americans are engaged in promoting the institutions of higher education in Tokyo, Peking and Beirut, in Egypt and the Hawaiian Isles. The oldest and the remotest nations are looking here for light’.17 ‘What is the significance of all this activity?’ he asked. The answer is unremittingly positive: It is a reaching out for a better state of society than now exists; it is a dim but an indelible impression of the value of learning; it is a craving for intellectual and moral growth; it is a longing to interpret the laws of creation; it means a wish for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business, less folly in politics.

Given this positive gloss on the globalization of higher education, or at least the potential that ‘Americanization’ could represent a significant step that helps universities navigate local and global interests, why do some still insist this is a significant crisis point for the university? One answer will be glaringly obvious to critics of globalization/Americanization, especially from the global South.18 But there is (also) something else here, namely an attempt to resolve this tension definitively in one direction. To see this let us turn to the rise of ‘global campuses’ and ‘global studies’, both of which enfold the university in a broader crisis of sovereignty as the power of the nation-state wanes and new models rush to serve as viable replacements.

THE GLOBAL UNIVERSITY, AREA STUDIES AND THE WORLD CITIZEN The largest media event in the world, the 2022 FIFA World Cup, offers an introduction to the dynamics at play in these global campuses. The tournament itself included several odd features, for example, that it was held in Qatar, a country with no football tradition and temperatures so high that the tournament had to be held in December (in air-conditioned stadiums at that) as opposed to its normal summer schedule. Several matches were also held at the oddly named Education City Stadium. The stadium sits within a conglomeration of campuses affiliated with several American universities (e.g. Georgetown, Carnegie Melon, Cornell Medical School), a leading French Business School, and at one point University College London, which operated a branch campus from 2010 to 2020. At the conclusion of the World Cup, the stadium would be turned over for use by these campuses, further

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elaborating the package of research, cultural, learning and extracurricular activities on offer to students and faculty from across the globe. It was not just that Education City somewhat incongruously linked several universities to the World Cup, but rather that a confluence of cultural, economic and ethical issues arose from the world’s largest media event. At the forefront of discussions was the compatibility of local norms with the expectations of hosting a global event. Issues ranged from the relatively non-consequential – the host nation reversed their pledge to serve alcohol in stadiums at the last minute, triggering Ecuadorian fans to chant ‘queremos cerveza’ in the opening match against Qatar – to the deadly serious – for example, the deaths of ‘guest’ workers who built the stadiums (400–600 according to Qatari officialdom; close to 6,000 according to others).19 As elsewhere, however, for academics and students at branch campuses in the region, these discussions have been ongoing for decades.20 The proliferation of extension campuses and ‘global studies’ programmes enfolds these questions of sovereignty, pathways of influence and the potential clashes between cultural, economic and educational imperatives. In the first decades of the 2000s, many prominent western institutions – such as Yale, NYU, Sciences Po, University College London – intensified their presence overseas, either in partnerships with existing universities or through the construction of new campuses. As former NYU president John Sexton has put it, the twenty-first century will be a ‘knowledge century’ and its leaders will not be national university systems, as imagined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather ‘idea capitals’. ‘Globalization’, he writes, ‘is not levelling the playing field, it is redrawing it. The future will reside in the idea capitals, those places that attract a disproportionate percentage of the world’s intellectual capacity’.21 This global archipelago of campuses attached to prominent universities in the West would help anchor this new geographical imaginary. Moreover, the mark of excellence for elite universities would now include this global footprint, much as ‘Germanness’ had done in the United States in the 1870s. Sexton was not alone in imagining a new standard by which university success could be measured. In policy circles, the term WCU (World-class Universities) started to emerge in the early twenty-first century, for example, in a 2009 World Bank report, The Challenge of Establishing World-class Universities. The report’s author, Jamil Salmi, highlights three factors that go into establishing a WCU: (a) a high concentration of talent (faculty and students), (b) abundant resources to offer a rich learning environment and to conduct advanced research, and (c) favorable governance features that encourage strategic vision, innovation, and flexibility and that enable institutions to make decisions and to manage resources without being encumbered by bureaucracy.22

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The empty business-speak in factor (c) should remind us of Bill Readings’ discussion of ‘excellence’ as the new watchword for university success or the attempts to quantify and measure research. But its untethered nature also helps us to understand discussions around deference to local norms and customs, for example around alcohol consumption at the World Cup. On the one hand, there is a legitimate and long-standing critique of the West’s reflexive attitude that it has some sort of exclusive claim on establishing the prerogatives of global culture and benefitting from the economic spoils that follow. The idea that Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore or China have no right or capacity to participate in and help shape the coming ‘knowledge century’, or the denial that such regions have their own long histories of higher education that might inform the creative recombination of traditions and models that was seen as such a virtue in late nineteenth century and twentieth century United States, should put this reflexive attitude on pause. But it is nevertheless notable, to say the least, that this explosion of global campuses – attempts to resolve this global vs. local dialectic at the heart of universities – is taking place within governance structures of a particular kind. To get a better sense of this let us turn to the work of cultural anthropologist Tom Looser, who ties these developments to the proliferation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs): There are many variants of SEZs (tax-free zones, free-trade zones, free ports, etc.), but the general idea is that these are exceptional areas allowing for less regulation of capital, often without taxation, and at times allowing for some suspension of local laws.23

For Looser, the new global campus, engineered to produce ‘world citizens’ (who are, naturally, ‘world-class’), is the perfect foil for a more pervasive neoliberal project, one that has ideologically and materially diminished the power of states or the idea of a ‘national community’ to which universities may in some way be accountable or responsible. Instead, it gives succour to the claim that it is the exigencies of global capital that matter. As he puts it, in its most basic and generic form, neoliberalism implies freedom from responsibility; especially, it implies freedom from responsibility to any kind of alterity, in favor of responsibility only to one’s self. Logically, carried out as a principle, the result would be a kind of pure self-identity, free of relation to others.24

What is entailed by this new attitude towards responsibility and national, or local, contexts? As Reinhold Martin notes, ‘the formidable literature on

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the history of universities tends to stress one of two things: epistemological changes, or changes in the political economy of knowledge’.25 The phenomenon of the rise of global campuses is no exception to this trend. Materially, most of these campuses are, like the World Cup stadiums, new constructions, thus initiating a process of building that is ‘of indifferent relation to any specific history (other than their own, newly formed)’.26 This novelty then gets translated into a novel legal and economic infrastructure, and in this the sites of many of these global campuses are far from accidental: polities such as Abu Dhabi and Singapore, for example, have a governing structure that is able to grant universities exemptions from local tax laws or legal restrictions. In the eyes of the World Bank, this is a necessary component for building a WCU. For example, though the construction of Saadiyat Island, home to NYU Abu Dhabi, was highly dependent on the exploitation of migrant labour (which government authorities were finally forced to redress after significant pressure from faculty back in New York), NYU was adamant that the academic conditions of the campus would remain consistent with policies of academic freedom set by the AAUP; respect the equal treatment of genders; and provide services (including shopping and entertainment) equivalent to what a student might access on the home campus in New York City. Such differentiation in legal treatment and cultural norms for different populations is of course characteristic of SEZs. But, as Martin writes, there is also a subtler epistemological shift involved, namely the way in which globalization reconfigures how knowledge is related to specific geographic and cultural contexts. Thus John Sexton refers to Saadiyat Island as a ‘permanent festival of culture and art’,27 including branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim to bolster the study of subjects like ‘world history’ and ‘world literature’. One way to understand the consequences of this shift to ‘world culture’ is to contrast it with the rise of ‘area studies’ during the Cold War. In the 1950s and early 1960s the US government, along with public/private entities such as the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, funded programmes of study of ‘geopolitically significant’ areas of the world. These programmes were multi-disciplinary, involving language study, history, political science, anthropology, literary studies and so on. The Department of Defense had – through a piece of legislation (Title VI of the 1958 National Defense Act) – rapidly increased funding for these endeavours from $500,000 in 1960 to $13 million in 1963. As a consequence of all of this investment, there arose new, permanent departments in non-Western studies at Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Princeton, Indiana University, Stanford, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin by the mid-1960s. These departments bore many marks of their origins in the logic of military defence (and thus were a target for many of the student

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protests of the 1960s), but they also gave rise to flourishing cultures of study in a host of national histories and literatures that may not have otherwise become such a norm within universities.28 The influx of money and the Cold War economy, or current investments in national culture institutes like those listed in footnote 28, certainly speaks to the political economy of knowledge, but epistemically area studies produced a fixed imagination of the world and brought it into the university.29 As Looser notes, Within the new [global] campuses themselves, it is one of the ironies that despite all the rhetoric of the global, area studies is not part of the curriculum .  .  . these campuses are not being built to provide access to understanding a region.30

The ‘Global University’ and its area of non-specific focus rather goes out into the world and tries to reshape the imagination that had been propagated by the university in significant ways. To borrow Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between negative and positive liberty,31 these new global universities are freed from certain things – local laws and taxes, a traditional ‘public’ to which they would feel bound to justify their work or a sense of responsibility to stay where they are. Looser characterizes this as a negative form of freedom, a posture of ‘indifference’.32 But it is also one that frees these new global universities to do certain things: to create new curricula, decide the composition of their student and faculty bodies and define the boundaries of their institution as well as the ‘publics’ to which they feel accountable. As we will see in the next chapter, this positive sense of liberty puts a whole new set of tools at the disposal of enterprising administrators. In turning to these global campuses, we can get a clearer picture of how things like the emphasis on ‘knowledge production’ and our new ‘globalized context’ can have significant effects on our understanding of the nature of the university. For example, Looser writes that in these programs ‘there is a gap, or indifference, between the subject (of citizenship, or culture) and its predicate (the framework of the state, or more generally the area, to which we belong)’.33 As the goal of preparing or producing a certain type of republican subject (the focus of Wilhelm von Humboldt), ‘gentleman’ (the focus of John Henry Newman) or graduate an educated citizenry to meet the complexities of a more diverse society and assume new leadership roles (the focus of postwar policy in the United States) becomes less and less comprehensible, so producing a pliant, open-ended, ‘world citizen’ who can remain responsive to the movements of global capital becomes more attractive. As Looser has it, the social and political ‘modes of belonging’ implied by citizenship (taxes

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paid in support of public goods, voting, etc.) are not operative in this new mode of citizenship. Rather, ‘what clearly provides something like citizenship status is the ability to contribute to value creation’,34 no matter where that might occur and no matter how untethered ‘value’ becomes in a culture that pursues ‘excellence’. EXCELLENCE AND THE EVACUATION OF RESPONSIBILITY I’ve quoted Looser extensively, not to suggest a resurgence in nationalism as the key to resolve this crisis, or that there is no workable vision for ‘globalized’ higher education outside the national frameworks which gave rise to powerful ideals and traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather, my point is to remind us that universities are not operating in a statefree zone, but rather in relation to a particular kind of state – one that supports the thinking of leaders like Sexton. This is quite clear in the World Bank’s report on WCUs. As Looser writes, in ‘these terms, indifference is not only the defining condition of a neoliberal sociality but also a real, historical condition of uncertainty and potentiality – both an opening into new possible social forms, and an ideal site for social debate and critique’.35 Recalling that ‘crisis’ has an etymological link to a point of decision, there are serious reasons to be sceptical about the viability of the ‘global university’ as a durable ideal akin to those discussed earlier, or whether, in Gilman’s words, ‘every epoch requires a fresh start’.36 As I’ve suggested above, there is an enduring tension being named here, one that goes back to the earliest origins of the university and is unlikely to be definitively resolved. Certainly it is true that there are certain realities about the ‘global’ context of higher education today that stretch far beyond these global campuses and require thoughtful engagement. For millions of European students, the Erasmus Programme has accustomed younger generations to a high degree of mobility, which makes them look upon movements like Brexit with unease. The internationalization of the student body in the United States, where roughly one in every twenty students are foreign-born,37 in the UK (15 per cent of undergraduates, 39 per cent of postgraduates38) and in Australia (15 per cent of undergraduates, 50 per cent of Masters’, 33 per cent of PhDs39) also make universities sites of intense political and economic concern. As we have already seen in the Introduction, the funding model in the UK has made many universities reliant on these foreign students and their tuition dollars, leading to a ‘black hole of hundreds of millions of pounds’ as Covid locked students in their home countries.40

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However, the pandemic also showed how the local setting matters, and why one might not want to embrace globalized higher education in all its dimensions. As Oxford professor of Higher Education Simon Marginson wrote in a widely circulated blog post in the summer of 2020, universities in the United Kingdom and the United States were ‘forced to put their bottom lines ahead of public health and student welfare’ because ‘true to the dynamics of the market, [the government refused] to provide guarantees of funding and institutional survival’. In the UK in particular, he observed that ‘Despite the unique character of the pandemic and the government responsibility to ensure the long-term sustainability of social infrastructure, the economic position of higher education institutions is treated by government and the media as their own responsibility’.41 The collapsing of responsibility into the market model, which is evident in many aspects of the push towards ‘global campuses’, dismisses questions of the university’s constituency in ways that can’t adequately meet challenges like the Covid pandemic. Moreover, there is a growing sense that the local deployment of an ‘SEZ-style logic’ furthers the noxious forms of resentment towards ‘globalization’ that flourish today.42 In this regard, Weber was right to compare the influence of American university leadership to the goings on of the stock exchange. In fact, as Marginson notes in a recent book, today remains delineated by Americanization: ‘Universities outside the United States face a dilemma about how much to Americanize and whether to displace national traditions, language, and objectives’, he writes. ‘In contrast’, as we have seen in this chapter tracking the logic of ‘global campuses’ like those found in Qatar or Abu Dhabi, ‘American universities are under no pressure to conform to foreign standards, languages, or models, and as yet they are under little pressure to acquire deep knowledge abroad’.43 However one resolves today’s global vs. local tension, it is clear that it will involve a more compelling account of responsibility than that on offer from global campuses, world studies, and the template set by this current phase of Americanization. Put more broadly, the logic of competitive differentiation floating free of meaningful contexts outside its own logic cannot ground such a notion of responsibility. Like Looser, who sees universities as ‘an ideal site for social debate and critique’44 in an age of waning national sovereignty, Bill Readings embraces Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘dissensus’, where universities open up the space to ‘think the notion of community otherwise’.45 These may not be satisfactory suggestions for those looking for a clearer path forward, but the ambiguity is hard to displace. We have already seen it as the announced goal of the confused and dispirited 2009 University of California – Santa Cruz student protesters in their ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future’, and we will see it once more in chapter 7 amongst a group of discontented faculty, students, and staff at the University of Aberdeen.

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In Notes on Exile, Edward Said characterized ‘the American university [as] generally being for its academic staff and some of its students the last remaining utopia’.46 For all of the baleful features of Americanization, universities like Said’s Columbia still retain so many attractive features that make it and other American universities a site of considerable longing and attachment.47 In this regard crisis talk that turns on this global vs. local dynamic often takes the form of a declension narrative, whereby campus utopias dissolve into heterotopias – where several registers of meaning and attachment contest for primacy – and then dystopias, where universities are directly linked to the deaths of migrant workers constructing campus amenities. Like the ‘nation-state’, or the notion of America as a ‘global hegemon’, such linear notions of decline don’t capture the whole picture. One task for those still attached to the university is to imagine new pathways of influence, imitation and creative reconstruction. There are those who imagine a return to a more mobile institution, whether out of political necessity – for example the Central European University decamping from Budapest to Vienna to escape government interference by Victor Orban’s regime48 – or as an aspirational ideal. In this aspirational mode, the nation-state is a ‘protectionist barrier’ that must be broken down to open up a new kind of university which, in the words of Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, ‘is not a domestic gathering around private issues, needs and facts, but a public gathering that is called into being through specific practices, producing an event around specific things and through the operation of a specific ethos’.49 This ethos would be characterized by a shift from ‘making things known (as “matters of fact”) to making them present (as “matters of concern”)’.50 As we will see in the following chapters, this may have the effect of shifting the agenda-setting function of universities from the administrative ranks back to those students and teachers whose community formation marked the origins of this institution.

NOTES 1. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 93. 2. Tom Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2012): 99. 3. https://www ​.tim​e shi​gher​education​.com​/world​ - university​ - rankings​ /2022​ / young​-university​-rankings, accessed May 6, 2023. 4. The increased physical mobility of professors and students as a result of technological change will be discussed later in the chapter, but here we can recall a remark form the German-American political scientist Francis Lieber, from 1872: ‘Under [Hadrian], professors were appointed to lecture in different places [. . .] and

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the traveling professor had a free passage on the emperor’s ships, or on the vessels laden with grain. In our days of steamboats and railroads the traveling professor should be reinstated. Why could not the same person teach in New York and Strasburg?’ Cited in Emily Levine, “Baltimore Teaches, Göttingen Learns: Cooperation, Competition, and the Research University,” American Historical Review 121, no. 3 (2016): 780–823. 5. Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop, 146. 6. Daniel Coit Gilman, “Inaugural Address,” February 22, 1867. Full text at https://www​.jhu​.edu​/about​/history​/gilman​-address/, accessed May 6, 2023. 7. Levine, “Baltimore Teaches, Göttingen Learns: Cooperation, Competition, and the Research University,” 794. It did not take long for Harvard and other universities to follow suit, for example in Harvard’s Elective System of 1885 that echoed the German ideals of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit. 8. The namesake of the university, who, like Leland Stanford made his fortune in railroads, provided the university with an initial gift of $7 million with few direct instructions on how the money was to be spent. Johns Hopkins continues to benefit from such philanthropy, receiving in 2018 a gift of $75 million specifically to its Philosophy Department from investor Bill Miller. 9. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 131. 10. Max Weber, “American and German Universities,” in Max Weber on Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany, ed. and trans. Edward Shils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 27. 11. The influence of Boards of Trustees and local business concerns on the development of American universities is expertly outlined by Clyde Barrow in Universities in the Capitalist State. For a comprehensive list of funding sources, broken down by profession, company and regional difference, see 30–61. 12. https://www​.archives​.gov​/milestone​-documents​/morrill​-act, accessed May 6, 2023. 13. See Scott Gelber, The University and the People, 101–126. 14. Stefan Collini, “HiEdBiz,” The London Review of Books 25, no. 21 (November, 2003), lrb​.c​​o​.uk/​​the​-p​​aper/​​v25​/n​​21​/st​​efan-​​colli​​​ni​/hi​​edbiz​, accessed May 8, 2023. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Daniel Coit Gilman, “Inaugural Address.” All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from the same speech. 18. See The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, eds. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Premesh Lalu, “What Is the University For?” Critical Times 2, no. 1 (2019): 39–58. 19. Gary Dagorn and Iris Derœux, “World Cup 2022: The Difficulty with Estimating the Number of Deaths on Qatar Construction Sites,” Le Monde, Nov. 15, 2022, https://www​.lemonde​.fr​/en​/les​-decodeurs​/article​/2022​/11​/15​/world​-cup​-2022​ -the​-difficulty​-with​-estimating​-the​-number​-of​-deaths​-on​-qatar​-construction​-sites, accessed May 8, 2023.

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20. In 2015 NYU professor Andrew Ross was barred from travelling to NYU’s campus in the UAE, where he had previously travelled to report on these labour issues. Jessica Roy, “An Interview With the NYU Professor Banned From the United Arab Emirates,” New York Magazine, March 18, 2015, https://nymag​.com​/intelligencer​/2015​/03​/interviewing​-the​-nyu​-prof​-banned​-from​-the​-uae​.html, accessed May 8, 2023. 21. Cited in Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 102. For a further examination of Sexton’s ambitions, see Issac A. Kamola, Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 168–188. 22. Cited in Marginson, The Dream Is Over, 74. 23. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 100. 24. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 99. While capturing something about the changed attitudes towards ‘responsibility’, this does overstate the case somewhat. Education City was conceived and is supported by the Qatar Foundation, run by the wife of the Emir. In all these global campuses, there are entities with which one must cultivate a relationship with to secure support in various forms. But more generally there is a kind of alterity involved here, and that is the geography of other thought capitals against which one is trying to secure the best talent. 25. Reinhold Martin, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 7. 26. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 107. 27. John Sexton, “Global Network University Reflection,” Communications of the Office of the President, December 21, 2010. https://www​.nyu​.edu​/about​/leadership​ -university​-administration​/office​-of​-the​-president​-emeritus​/communications​/global​ -network​-university​-reflection​.html, accessed May 8, 2023. 28. One can see an extension of this in the presence of government-funded cultural organizations that are often housed on directly on university grounds – the Goethe Institute for Germany, the Confucius Institute for China, La Maison Française for France. 29. If we track this history back a little further a similar story could be told with the foundations of institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies, which served the imperial prerogatives of the British Empire. See Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850-1939 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013), 17–36. 30. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 103. 31. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172. 32. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 107.

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33. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 114. 34. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 111. 35. Ibid. 36. Gilman, “Inaugural Address.” 37. https://opendoorsdata​.org​/data​/international​ - students​ /enrollment​ - trends/, accessed May 8, 2023. 38. https://www​.universitiesuk​.ac​.uk​/universities​-uk​-international​/insights​-and​ -publications​/uuki​-publications​/international​-facts​-and​-figures​-2022#:~​:text​=15​.7​ %25​%20of​%20all​%20undergraduates​%20and​,Institute​%20for​%20Statistics​%2C​ %202021). Accessed May 8, 2023. 39. https://www​.studying​-in​-australia​.org​/international​-students​-in​-australia​-statistics/​#International​_Students​_in​_Australia​_by​_Level​_of​_Study. Accessed May 8, 2023. 40. Richard Adams and Rachel Hall, “UK Universities Face Cash Black Hole Amid Coronavirus Crisis,” The Guardian, March 6, 2020, https://www​.theguardian​ .com​/education​/2020​/mar​/06​/uk​-universities​-face​-cash​-black​-hole​-coronavirus​-crisis, accessed May 8, 2023. For a useful summary of the outlook in other countries, see Futao Huang, Daniela Crăciun, Hans de Wit, “Internationalization of Higher Education in a Post-pandemic World: Challenges and Responses”, Higher Education Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2022): 203–212. 41. Simon Marginson, “Covid-19 and the market model of higher education: Something has to give, and it won’t be the pandemic,” Council for the Defence of British Universities Blog, July 17, 2020, http://cdbu​.org​.uk​/covid​-19​-and​-the​-market​ -model​-of​-higher​-education​-something​-has​-to​-give​-and​-it​-wont​-be​-the​-pandemic/, accessed May 8, 2023. 42. The University of Pennsylvania, which sits a few miles from where I write, has long benefited from tax abatements in the impoverished city of Philadelphia. There has been a campaign by faculty and staff to push for Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTS) to be held in an Educational Equity Fund for the Philadelphia School District. This follows similar campaigns at other universities facing similar imbalances between university wealth and community poverty. The rationale behind this, as articulated by the authors of the PILOTS petitions, is that through payments Penn ‘recogniz[es] its financial obligation to the community of which it is a part . . . not a matter of charity but of justice’, which is to say it enacts a sense of responsibility towards a stable and recognizable public. See https://www​.pennforpilots​.org​/petition, accessed May 8, 2023. 43. Marginson, The Dream is Over, 91. 44. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 114. 45. Readings, The University in Ruins 18. 46. Cited in Martin, Knowledge Worlds, 8. 47. Incidentally, it is also seen as a uniquely propitious system for growing WCUs by the World Bank for “the competitive spirit that encompasses every aspect of it,”

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which we’ve seen may stretch back to the nineteenth century. See Marginson, The Dream is Over, 74–75. 48. Shaun Walker, “Classes move to Vienna as Hungary Makes Rare Decision to Oust University,” The Guardian, November 16, 2019, https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /world​/2019​/nov​/16​/ceu​-classes​-move​-to​-vienna​-orban​-hungary​-ousts​-university, accessed May 8, 2023. 49. Jan Masschelein & Maarten Simons, “From Active Citizenship to World Citizenship: A Proposal for a World University,” European Educational Research Journal 8, no. 2 (2009): 246. 50. Masschelein & Simons, “From Active Citizenship to World Citizenship: A Proposal for a World University,” 237.

Chapter 5

The Professor vs. the Administration

One of the more striking transformations in the contemporary university is of course in its managerial culture. There have always been charismatic and enterprising university leaders with pretentions to shape higher education beyond their host institution. We met one such leader earlier, John Sexton, who embodies the current heroic self-conception of the administrator in our globalized age. As Tom Looser writes, [the emphases are mine] while these new [global] campuses are of course educational institutions, their origin lies with university administrators, rather than faculty; there is no a priori academic project driving them .  .  . These are therefore educational projects driven neither by a prior intellectual desire, nor any clear tie of an intellectual aim with a particular area, and without a clear constituency1

—unless of course we add other university leaders competing for influence or the favour of localities like Qatar which have the resources to support these projects. However, the creative agency embodied in a figure like Sexton has, in most cases, been supplanted by ‘management’. This chapter will explore the consequences of this shift. First, however, some terminological groundwork needs to be laid. What I explore here is in some regards comparable across different national contexts, in particular, the ‘undermining of academic professionalism, academic freedom and increased job insecurity’2 amongst academics in the face of accountability regimes and those charged with enforcing them: that is to say, ‘managerialism’. But national differences also make generalization difficult, particularly in two respects: the extent to which universities are state institutions (i.e. overseen and regulated by government officials and bureaucracies and subject to the changing political priorities of the state) and 93

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the particular conditions of employment of academics as it pertains to the freedom and authority they can reasonably expect to claim. We can begin in the United States, which does not experience any strong, direct influence from the government (i.e. there is no minister of higher education) and where there is a powerful tradition of freedom and self-governance, represented – for faculty – most directly in the institution of tenure and bodies like the faculty senate. We have already seen the endowment figures of top private universities, and in the hands of someone like John Sexton these resources can be mobilized for considerable initiatives, such as the founding of the NYU Abu Dhabi campus. However, below Sexton there is a band of what in the United States would be called ‘administration’, which involves positions such as deans, provosts, vice provosts, vice presidents and other staff tasked with overseeing the operations of the university. Thus, when Looser says that ‘the origin [of global campuses] lies with university administrators, rather than faculty’, he is citing a clash wherein decisions are initiated above and imposed on those below, violating expectations of faculty governance. In the UK, Europe and much of the rest of the world, higher education is far more closely integrated into the functioning of the state – government higher education posts abound; for example, the Minister of State for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education in the UK; the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation in France. How this normally falls out is that, as a matter of state policy, more formal and entrenched bureaucratic networks are established that carry out policy initiatives (examples of which we will explore below).3 Here it is more common to speak of ‘management’, as opposed to ‘administration’, and as we will see in chapter 7, the object of frustration for faculty and academic staff are segments of this managerial bureaucracy – ‘line management’ and ‘performance management’, not ‘the administration’. And while norms of academic freedom for faculty may still prevail in this context, the more extensive expectation of faculty self-governance that we see in the United States does not. Thus, the difference between ‘administration’ and ‘management’ is in large part a matter of to whom academic staff feel most pressure to justify their activities, what pressures can be brought to bear on them and in what language their critiques are most likely to be expressed. However, underlying this difference, I contend, is a shared cultural phenomenon,4 which Stefan Collini nicely describes as ‘the alienation from oneself that is experienced by those who are constantly forced to describe their activities in misleading terms’.5 As opposed to the guild-like structure of the faculty which claimed a prerogative to set, preserve and enforce standards of their craft, ‘scholars now spend a considerable, and increasing part of their day accounting for their activities in the managers’ [or, in the U.S., administrators’] terms’.6 Just

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as leaders like Sexton take it upon themselves to set the agenda for universities in the coming ‘knowledge century’, so managers and administrators have seized the prerogative to reshape the university in the current conjuncture. This chapter thus expands upon themes opened up earlier to explore, with yet another gloss on the history of the university, the topic of university governance and the question of who determines the conditions of academic work or the role of the university in the overall functioning of the state. After establishing some historical grounds for faculty self-governance, the chapter takes up those sources of alienation that Collini rightly identifies as the driver of much crisis talk today. The first is New Public Management (NPM), the ideological form in which managers, reflecting a political project and backed by a particular kind of state formation, have remade the university in their own image. NPM, it will be argued, provides a stark illustration of the dialectical relationship between the university and the state, wherein the replacement of welfare state by neoliberal priorities radically shifts the terrain on which governance disputes are waged. This elaborates the line of argument opened in the previous chapter in order further to establish the challenge to self-governance as the most pressing site on which universities connect with a broader legitimation crisis. The second phenomenon is more material in nature, focussing on the changing composition of labour in American universities. Here we can witness, independently of a project carried out as a matter of formal state policy, a radical shift from the strong expectation of faculty self-governance towards the reductio ad absurdum that Benjamin Ginsburg evocatively characterizes as ‘the all-administrative university’.7 A BRIEF AND SELECTIVE TAXONOMY OF ACADEMIC GOVERNANCE In the traditional telling, Bologna and Paris represented two models of university governance – a Student’s University and a Master’s University, respectively. As its website proudly proclaims, the University of Bologna ‘was not established at the behest of a sovereign or an organised group of teachers, but was the outcome of the spontaneous and informal initiative of a few students’8 (emphasis in the original). Students retained all kinds of privileges, including electing rectors from within their own ranks and fining professors if they did not finish their lectures on time. In Paris, on the other hand, Masters set the agenda. James Axtell cites ‘orders in 1215 from the papal legate made it clear that “no one shall be a scholar at Paris who has no definite master” and “each master shall have jurisdiction over his scholar”’.9 In both cases, as we saw earlier in chapter 2 and the resolution of difficulties

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at Oxford and Paris, independence was an explicit value, and the boundaries of external meddling were established by working through a set of crises. One consequence of independence was of course the responsibility for establishing some definite form of self-organization. Or, to follow up on the Derridean question that opened this book, to try and establish who speaks for the university. In medieval universities, students and faculty would elect the rector, who was the titular head of the university. This position was temporary (sometimes three months) and could be a student or a faculty member. The rector did not have a tremendous amount of power, but it was useful to have someone represent the university when interacting with outsiders. As universities became more deeply embedded in society, rectors (or their equivalent, ‘vice-chancellor’ in the UK and many Commonwealth countries) often took it upon themselves to articulate normative visions about the university and its centrality in these dynamic economic and social formations. Fichte’s speech upon being elected the first rector of the University of Berlin again gives us a good indication of how far these articulations would eventually go. The university, he held, was the most important institution, and the most sacred thing possessed by humankind . . . Since the communication that takes place there maintains and transmits . . . everything divine that has ever occurred in humanity, within [the university] lives humanity’s true being, its uninterrupted life, sundered from all decay, and the university is the visible presentation of our species’ immortality, the visible presentation of the unity of the world, as a divine manifestation, as God Himself.10

In the United States, it was the president who served this role as mouthpiece and titular head. Like Fichte they could also reach quite elevated tones, for example, linking the work of universities to democracy or to civilization in general. We have already met the University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper, boldly asserting in an 1899 speech that ‘the university is the Messiah of the democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer’.11 In the early years of colleges and universities in the United States, these religious framings were expected, as in most cases presidents were not professors, but rather religious leaders acting in loco parentis with the more modest goal (at least compared to German Idealist philosophers or later presidents) of ensuring the moral behaviour of students at residential colleges. The modern role of the presidency looks quite different, with fundraising occupying the bulk of a president’s time and the opportunities for broad proclamations becoming less easy to distinguish from rebranding exercises to attract donors. One key in facilitating this shift was the introduction of a new layer of leadership, namely the provost and the dean. Provosts are ‘the Chief Academic Officer’ of the university, overseeing everything from teaching,

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learning, the coordination of research and budgeting. Given this sprawling package of responsibilities, it is often hard to pin down exactly what a provost does, leading many universities to devote a page explaining this role.12 What makes this picture even more confusing is the role of the dean, who in theory is more connected with the business of the faculty (often limited to some specific section of the university, like the dean of Arts and Sciences, the dean of Engineering, etc.) as opposed to the overall administrative running of the university. However, the division of labour is not particularly clear. Michael Bugeja, for example, coded the job advertisements for fifty dean positions and found the following qualifications and expectations to be the most frequent: ‘advocate for the college, communicate well, collaborate, have vision, know budgeting, raise funds, promote diversity, share governance, support research, and meet promotion and tenure requirements for full professor’.13 We will come back to the growth of this phenomenon in the United States. But turning towards higher education systems in countries where universities are more directly state institutions, we can see a different structure of standing and responsibility. Here one is more likely to find extensive regulatory frameworks that grow out of decisions taken by national parliaments or ministerial positions such as those in the UK and France. When a great deal of funding depends on conforming with this regulatory framework, then a robust university bureaucracy of ‘line managers’ and ‘performance managers’ is likely to blossom. But as we will see below in the context of the UK and Australia, it is not just the implementation of state regulations that explains an expansion in the managerial ranks, but the particular shape of policy and regulation that has emerged in the past thirty years – namely the opening up of universities to market forces. As universities become increasingly reliant on tuition dollars,14 obtain funds through competition-based programmes or make decisions about resource allocation amid dwindling public financial support, positions not directly related to the academic programme have sharply risen. As Stefan Collini writes, ‘the overriding aim [of these policies] is to change the character of universities and make them more closely conform to market ideology’.15 The effect of this is that ‘the true use-value of scholarly labour can seem to have been somehow squeezed out; only the exchange-value of the commodities produced, as measure by the metrics, remains’.16 Moreover, it becomes the full-time job of managers to compile and compare these metrics. The argument proffered by these swelling managerial ranks, or government officials whose policies underwrite their expansion, is that the sheer complexity of higher education as a mass, as opposed to élite, institution requires better and deeper organizational oversight. In the United States this, as Max Weber noted a long time ago, often has a monetary underpinning. For

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example, Purdue University president Timothy Sands defended this explosion in administrative positions (to stick with the American nomenclature) in terms of competent management: ‘This is a $2.2 billion operation – you’ve got to have some people involved in administering it, managing it, running it, leading it. We’re about as lean as we can afford to be’.17 Sands perhaps hides behind this gawdy budgetary figure to obscure the broader fact that universities have become comfortable taking upon themselves the very things requiring ever-expanding managerial operations – managing complex budgetary processes, overseeing research operations at large and small scales or expanding what Stefan Muthesius has called ‘student personnel services’.18 English professor David Bromwich notes of his own institution, Yale, like many other universities, clearly now wants to be known not only as a place for teaching, learning, and research, but also as a home, a community, an innovative corporate entity. The swollen self-image requires expanded oversight, and administrators are the overseers.19

Though the UK is operating in a very different financial and regulatory context, it is clear that, especially in the felt need to demonstrate both satisfactory ‘student experiences’ and ‘impact’ in their research activities, such an image of universities and the constituencies they are intended to satisfy has also burgeoned. On the other side of these complexities lies another claimant to university governance, and moreover one that pushes a line of relative purity and simplicity. This is the professoriate, who draws both upon their medieval connections to the guild system (who as masters of a craft claim a certain amount of autonomy, but also responsibility for ensuring that the future of their craft is secure) and the modern ideal of Lehrfreiheit (freedom of teaching) initiated in the seminar rooms of Berlin. Unlike the ‘swollen self-image’ that Bromwich points to, faculty self-governance in the organization of teaching and research is meant to establish and secure the atmosphere that, as we saw earlier in the estimation of Vannevar Bush, ‘is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity. At their best [universities] provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom’.20 Again, the expectation of faculty autonomy will vary depending on the national context. In the United States, as higher education scholar Robert Birnbaum puts it, the institution of tenure and traditions of shared governance ground faculty claims to a high degree of ‘organizational control and influence’: ‘One system, based on legal authority, is the basis for the role of trustees and administration; the other system, based on professional authority, justifies the role of the faculty’.21 While other systems may not have such

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strong protections for faculty autonomy, the violation of the latter claim to ‘control and influence’, namely ‘professional authority’ remains the locus of many claims that managerialism signals a significant crisis for the university. As we will see below, what flows from this claim to professional authority within one’s scholarly role clashes quite sharply with claims that draw upon either a legal authority or the kind of managerial expertise we saw above in the dean’s job listing or the pro-vice-chancellors’ expanding remit. It also points to something that will be taken up in the concluding chapter with reference to Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties – namely that the eclipse of professional authority claimed by the faculty has consequences far beyond the complaints of aggrieved scholars. When judgement is evacuated for the operations of efficient management, the university loses its ability to articulate and reshape ends that would allow it to productively engage with the shifting conditions in which they operate.

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE RADICAL-CREATIVE IMAGINATION There are changes in management culture that stretch back to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the birth of ‘scientific management’, for example, foregrounding efficiency over other potential organizing logics of the workplace.22 In order to evaluate efficiency, one needs to measure and compare, which in turn means attaching some sort of quantity or value to a whole range of activities: Taylor and his infamous stopwatch measuring segments of productive activity. In the neoliberal turn, such changes intensified and swept across a number of sectors, particularly in those categorized as ‘public’. In the British and Australasian contexts, such changes go under the name NPM, though other national contexts share similar features.23 Simon Marginson describes NPM as a governing ideology in which ‘higher education is conceived of as a managed economy in which competitive markets and market simulacra are nested in a framework of external supervision by governments or, depending on the sphere of operation, institutional managers’.24 Implied in such an ideology is the view that competitive markets ensure efficiency, whereas neither publicly managed institutions nor those dependent on the autonomous exercise of judgements by workers themselves can do so. Such market simulacra and frameworks for external supervision have blossomed in universities in recent decades. Earlier on we came across the UK Research Excellence Framework, or its forerunner the Research Assessment Exercise, upon which levels of funding and public support are tied to research outputs of departments and universities. A significant part of this and related

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frameworks and exercises is to establish this temporality of planning targets to be met by some date and time, which also entails periods of review, or what Michael Power calls ‘rituals of verification’.25 As shown in chapter 3, these reviews rely on a myriad of instruments to measure the ‘impact’ of research through Key Performance Indicators, many of which turn on weighted citation indices of scholarly journals. All such instruments depend in large measure on ‘the reduction of matter and even social behavior to measurable units’,26 the ability to make objective comparisons instead of relying on subjective interpretations, which, so the argument goes, is susceptible to forms of corruption or is simply inefficient and wasteful. The downstream effects of these broader changes in managerial culture have helped to sharpen the conflict between faculty and management, blossoming for many into a full-blown crisis, as this conflict is deemed irreconcilable. For example, David Preston claims that the efflorescence of ‘objective’ evaluative schema evidences a post-enlightenment legitimation crisis, wherein models derived from the operations of capitalist management provide a supposedly amoral response to the breakdown of older forms of authority that may have derived justifications from culture and tradition instead of efficiency.27 Thus for philosophers of education Grahame Lock and Chris Lorenz, such a shift hastens the eclipse of ‘universal – educational and scientific – goals’, in universities with ‘ordinary “private” market or commercial logic’.28 Or as we saw Stefan Collini puts it earlier in this chapter, the shift is from ‘the true use-value of scholarly labour . . . [to] the exchangevalue of the commodities produced, as measure by the metrics’. For the faculty, this emerges as a significant crisis because it violates an important ideal of the university discussed in chapter 1 – The University as Centre for Disciplinary Research. In the wake of Berlin and the birth of the modern research university, the PhD came to signify that no matter what else one did (setting up an institute to meet a practical need, becoming a good teacher and mentoring students), one was expected to make a contribution to one’s discipline. To carry out good research, professors and graduate students needed to be free in deciding which questions they felt were most important. And as experts in their field, they were in a better position to judge this than outsiders. There is a temporality to this knowledge function of the modern university. A classic description of this derives from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, deemed by some metrics to be the most influential book in the Social Sciences.29 Kuhn characterizes scientific research as being paradigm-dependent: ‘By focusing attention upon a small range of relatively esoteric problems, the paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable.’30 A good paradigm, furthermore, will have two characteristics: first, it will be

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persuasive enough to attract a group of followers; and, second, it will leave a host of problems for these followers to resolve. In the context of a university committed to Wissenschaft as a core ideal, this makes the character of research relatively self-evident to scholars in their fields, or at least provides some meaningful parameters within which disagreements can unfold. Most of the research conducted in universities is what Kuhn calls ‘Normal Science’, which involves, basically: determining the class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things; matching facts to pre-existing theory; and mopping up, or ‘theory articulation’, wherein questions of application and subtle refinement of terms prevail.31 In Kuhn’s model, this research can lead to ‘anomalies’ that cannot be explained by the paradigm, and these can build up to a crisis point that initiates the phase of ‘extraordinary science’. During such periods symptoms will arise such as ‘the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals’.32 Once a new theory emerges with enough support, it can form a new paradigm, and researchers can go back to what is now normal science. This is of course a simplified account of Kuhn’s theory of research and ‘scientific revolutions’, but it suffices as a plausible and recognizable description of how scholars are able to organize and regulate their labours without much external supervision and management. It is congenial to what Simon Marginson calls ‘the radical-creative imagination’, a potentiality for ‘intellectual “breaks”, apparently sudden disjunctures or leaps in the relevant field of knowledge that cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of path dependency’.33 In brief, Kuhn’s view stands in stark contrast to the temporality and culture emanating from managers. Most faculty would at the end of the day admit that their activities in research and teaching fall under ‘normal science’, or other such modest aspirations. However, they would also hold that effective research and teaching entail some degree of creativity that is radically curtailed by current managerial imperatives. Simon Marginson highlights four essential pre-conditions to such creativity: self-direction (one sort of academic freedom), time and isolation (as creativity runs hot and cold), an absence of external pressures that harm the imagination and a good sense of the current scholarship.34 It must be stressed that the particulars of the list are less important than their incommensurability with the ‘technologies of audit’ and accountability of NPM and related ideologies. Knowledge production and transmission might be seen as a good to which universities are necessarily committed, but how that translates into everyday practice is settled quite differently in the hands of managers and teachers/scholars. As we saw in the previous chapter, when knowledge is rendered a commodity with which enterprising managers can secure funding

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and attract talent in a global competition to found WCUs it loses much of what has historically given it prominence in setting institutional priorities. The final chapter will return to this issue and explore how this particular conflict is indicative of a much wider challenge to the university, namely abandoning durable mechanisms of institutional reproduction in the service of ‘removing’ the ‘inefficiencies’ posed by conflictual elements within. But first, we need to note that the divergence of faculty and management is not simply a matter of diverging ideologies – say that of guild mentality versus that of scientific management. It rather represents a striking material de- and re-composition of the university workforce. To take the example of the UK once more, before the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, pro-vicechancellors were ‘appointed on a fixed-term, internal secondment basis from amongst the professoriate [and had] historically been career academics’.35 Subsequently, these positions have increasingly been filled by external competition and attracted those seeking full-time management positions, not the hybrid academic managers that preceded them. It is to this shift that we now turn.

THE MATERIAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE ALL-ADMINISTRATIVE UNIVERSITY36 Here we can return to the United States, where the effects of this shift are acute, especially when viewed against one of the strongest traditions of faculty autonomy and self-governance. There are many reasons why annual university budgets have ballooned in American universities. But in the early decades of the twenty-first century many faculty began to observe a growth in the administrative ranks that were not directly tied to managing an inflated budget. Take for example a 2012 article ‘The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio’, which begins with J. Paul Robinson, chair of the Purdue faculty senate, pointing to a row of administrative offices. ‘I have no idea what these people do’, he tells the reporter, who proceeds to specify exactly what Robinson is complaining about – one provost, six vice and associate vice provosts, sixteen deans and eleven vice presidents.37 At Purdue, the increase of professional and managerial staff was 54 per cent in the decade leading up to this article, which was slightly below the national average of 60 per cent that the US Department of Education reported from 1993 to 2007. In some places, the growth was even more extreme. For example, in the University of California system, between 1998 and 2009, while student enrollments increased 33 percent and ladder-rank faculty increased 25 percent, the ranks of senior managers rose by

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125 percent. By the end of the period, [the University of California System] had 1 senior administrator per 1.1 faculty members.38

If the early 2010s was when many sounded the alarms about this trend their concern hasn’t translated into a shift in course. In 2021, a group of Yale University faculty noted that the administrative ranks had grown 45 per cent since 2003, three times the rate of students.39 That this also tracked a marked increase in operating costs ($1.5 to $4.6 billion) was no accident, as these new administrative positions are well remunerated and involve the hiring of subsidiary staff. If the tasks of university governance were once delegated to motivated and well-meaning amateurs from within the faculty ranks, what we are now observing is something like a class coming into itself, claiming not only institutional prerogatives to protect their interests, but an epistemic rationale to do so in framing the management of a complex, resource-rich institution as requiring an expertise faculty lack. Such a divergence means that management may be drawn from backgrounds outside of academia, heightening the clash of cultures between these two camps. As we saw above, this has increasingly become the norm in the UK in the past three decades. This focus on what is often called ‘administrative bloat’ is however incomplete in capturing the major contours of current debates over university governance. Just as stunning as the radical expansion of management is, to point to the other side of Benjamin Ginsberg’s title, the decomposition of the faculty as a coherent body that could effectively resist these changes. In the ‘three-legged stool’40 of academic freedom, shared governance and tenure, it is often the first and third that are assumed to have the tightest relationship. Tenure, however, also points to an essential precondition of shared governance, namely the professional stability to formulate and carry out long-term plans. In the United States, roughly 75 per cent of classes are taught by non-tenure track faculty, which incorporates lecturers, graduate students and adjunct faculty. The authors of The Gig University: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University characterize this as ‘a cheap and deprofessionalized workforce .  .  . employed on a part-time, temporary, or contingent basis’.41 Under such conditions values once strongly associated with faculty – such as collegiality or responsibility towards department or disciplinary culture – cannot take root such that they could serve as effective logics of resistance to the values of competition and efficiency coming from above. The causes of this de-composition of the faculty are complex and involve broader trends in the conditions of labour, from the decline in unionization to the outsourcing of core functions to external vendors operating with very different kinds of flexible work contracts (the ‘uberfication’ of the workforce). In this regard, Marc Bousquet may be exaggerating in claiming that ‘late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university, the university makes late

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capitalism happen’ – but only somewhat, at least in terms of perception.42 For from within the university one can see features of this economic form everywhere. To take a mundane example, nearly all American universities will contract with a large food service provider like Aramark or Sodexo instead of hiring staff and administering cafeterias and catering services themselves. In so doing the university cedes control over the conditions of such work, from wage and benefit packages to disciplinary procedures, to these vendors. Similar arrangements can be found in campus security, cleaning, IT, human resources and so on. On the surface, these practices may not raise many eyebrows: aside from a few experimental colleges like Deep Springs,43 which puts manual labour in the hands of students as part of their educational philosophy, there is little in the university’s history that sees food provision as central to the institution.44 However, the import of contracting in this manner is that universities, in their hiring practices, set up a dual structure in which lower-paying jobs that concern the day-to-day maintenance and reproduction of the university are not seen as core functions worthy of the controls, investment and protections of the growing band of jobs in the administrative ranks. For those jobs, some of which involve managing and overseeing these contracts with external vendors, the university is happy to invest with benefits, protections and direct oversight. Thus, when Bousquet and others remark upon the re-composition of the faculty away from the model of tenured faculty and towards the flexible employment structures of an external vendor, they are noting a significant shift.

CONCLUSION There are thus philosophical as well as material dimensions to the question of who governs the university, or who can claim to speak in demarcating its most essential values. As a ‘paradigmatic institution of modernity’,45 to quote Gerard Delanty, it is unsurprising to see universities suffering this particular sort of malaise. If managerialism is reflective of a typical postenlightenment legitimation crisis, then we should not be surprised to see the technocratic, amoral operations of capitalist management follow the breakdown of outmoded forms of authority and cultural cohesion. In universities, these might be widely accepted goods internal to the guild-like structures of professors or faith in the extended and unpredictable temporality of research and long-term investments. Such a technocratic turn has been the concern of communitarian philosophers like Alasdair MacIntrye and Charles Taylor and can of course be seen in other paradigmatic institutions of modernity such as the nation-state. It is, in Taylor’s terminology, an unsatisfactory and ultimately unproductive solution to our contemporary ‘malaise’.46

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But the confusion of who governs and who speaks for the university also has a more immediate, material dimension. The ‘swollen self-image’ that David Bromwich refers to is underwriting a massive expansion of what many universities take to be their rightful mission. Even if leaders will occasionally reach the heights of Fichte or William Rainey Harper and enfold tasks like saving democracy or protecting the accumulated wisdom of civilization into their mission,47 this expansion usually cashes out in more complex budgets and an expanded portfolio of activities. David Lea points to studies which ‘confirm that a majority of faculty respondents believe that decision-making has become more bureaucratic, top down, centralized, autocratic and managerial’ in this shift.48 This perception blossoms into a crisis when faculty believe that ‘transferring authority for these decisions to executive Deans and other members of the upper administration that lack the requisite expertise is to invite ill-formed policies and uninformed decision making’.49 In the culture of NPM the drive for efficiency, and/or the accumulation of ever more functions and responsibilities, threatens the loss of whatever reserves of wisdom and organizational capacity that might emerge from the professoriate itself. In their recent book on ‘the humanities in a disenchanted age’, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon remind us that ‘identifying a situation as a crisis can foreclose the possibility that it came about not because of an unexpected, sudden event but because of chronic, even structural conditions’.50 Many such structural conditions that underwrite the faculty/management split have been building for some time: it is not a phenomenon merely of the past few decades. As Reitter and Wellmon note, the shift from a Universitas (a guild of scholars and teachers) to a modern research university brings with it a shift in mission, from protecting one’s craft to being centrally placed in the diagnosis of social problems and the project of finding solutions. This educationalization of social problems radically incentivizes over-promising and under-delivering, and the enterprising manager is almost perfectly designed to exploit the legitimation crisis this initiates. What one does in the face of these structural challenges is a vexing issue and will be the concern of the concluding chapter. But what should by now be clear is that the managerial makeover of the university makes it more recognizable to external institutions captured by a similar ideology and less recognizable to those within who still operate in the shadow of its formidable history. NOTES 1. Looser, “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the World,” 105.

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2. Michelle Jayman, Jonathn Glazzard, and Anthea Rose, “Tipping Point: The Staff Wellbeing Crisis in Higher Education,” Frontiers in Education 7 (2022): 1. 3. To give but one example, at the Russian university discussed at the end of chapter 3 (which, incidentally, uses the nomenclature of ‘administration’), we faced all the challenges of fitting a loose, open-ended structure, such as one might expect in a liberal arts setting, within a highly bureaucratic state system. Thus the English language syllabi used in the class, which usually ran to eight pages or so, would then be reproduced by an administrator in the form of a forty-plus page Russian version to satisfy all of university requirements (set by state regulations), including absurdly specific, but by no means unique to Russia, session by session class descriptions of learning outcomes and metrics by which they were to be judged. 4. Because this is a shared phenomenon, you will often see people juggling between ‘management’ and ‘administration’, especially in the United States, while intending roughly the same thing – the diminution of faculty autonomy. For an example of this slippage see fn 38 below. 5. Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 152. 6. Ibid. 7. Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. 8. https://www​.unibo​.it​/en​/university​/who​-we​-are​/our​-history​/nine​-centuries​-of​ -history​/nine​-centuries​-of​-history, accessed May 8, 2023. 9. Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop, 13. 10. Cited in Jeffrey Reid, Real Worlds: Language and System in Hegel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 76. 11. Harper, “The University and Democracy,” 215. 12. In describing her own position Northern Michigan University provost wrote, ‘If you don’t know what a provost is, you shouldn’t feel bad. With the exception of people who work for a university, the term provost may be a bit of a mystery. If you check the origins of the word “provost”, you’ll find that the original definition was “keeper of a prison” – certainly not what a university provost is today!’ See Michael Bugeja, “What Do Provosts and Deans Actually Do?,” Inside Higher Ed, February 14, 2018, https://www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2018​/02​/14​/poorly​-defined​-roles​ -provosts​-and​-deans​-can​-lead​-problems​-major​-universities, accessed May 8, 2023. 13. Ibid. This expansion of role is not limited to the American university. Sue Shepherd, in her research on the expanding number of Deputy and Pro-Vice Chancellors (DVC and PVC) at UK universities, finds that ‘the scope of the collective DVC and PVC remit has broadened considerably in the pre-1992 universities beyond the traditional teaching and research area . . . to include internationalisation and other policy areas more usually associated with professional services managers, including planning/resources/operations, external relations, marketing and fundraising’. Sue Shepherd, “Strengthening the University Executive: The Expanding Roles and Remit of Deputy and Pro-Vice-Chancellors,” Higher Education Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2018): 46. 14. One example of this, already introduced in chapter 3, is the emergence of various university ranking tables, which universities will be motivated to perform highly within in order to attract students.

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15. Collini, Speaking of Universities, 152. 16. Ibid. 17. John Hechinger, “The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 21, 2012, https://www​.bloomberg​.com​/news​/articles​/2012​-11​-21​/the​ -troubling​-dean​-to​-professor​-ratio, accessed May 8, 2023. 18. See Stefan Muthesius, The Post-War University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 20–24. Muthesius points to architectural developments in the post-war period that shift the self-understanding of universities away simply from academic training to a broader mission of social adjustment. 19. Philip Mousavizadeh, “A ‘Proliferation of Administrators’: Faculty Reflect on Two Decades of Rapid Expansion,” Yale Daily News, November 10, 2021, https:// yaledailynews​.com​/blog​/2021​/11​/10​/reluctance​-on​-the​-part​-of​-its​-leadership​-to​-lead​ -yales​-administration​-increases​-by​-nearly​-50​-percent/, accessed May 8, 2023. 20. Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, 19. 21. Cited in Cary Nelson, No University Is an Island (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 31. 22. A similar concern is already present at the origins of a capitalist division of labour. Adam Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations that ‘man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another’, further complaining that ‘the habit of sauntering and of indolent careless application, which is naturally, or rather necessarily acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life; renders him almost always slothful and lazy, and incapable of any vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions’. https://www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/archive​/smith​-adam​/works​/wealth​-of​-nations​/ book01​/ch01​.htm, accessed May 8, 2023. 23. See Harry de Boer, Jürgen Enders, Uwe Schimank, “On the Way towards New Public Management? The Governance of University Systems in England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany,” in New Forms of Governance in Research Organizations. Disciplinary Approaches, Interfaces and Integration, ed. D. Jansen (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 137–152. For the post-Soviet sphere see Liudvika Leisyte and Danguole Kizniene, “New Public Management in Lithuania’s Higher Education,” Higher Education Policy 19, no. 3 (2006): 377–396. 24. Simon Marginson, “Academic Creativity Under New Public Management,” Educational Theory 58, no. 3 (2008): 270. 25. Power, The Audit Society, 1–4. 26. David Lea, “The Managerial University and the Decline of Modern Thought,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 43, no. 8 (2011): 833. 27. David Preston, “Managerialism and the Post-Enlightenment Crisis of the British University,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 33, no. 2 (2001): 344–363. 28. Graham Lock and Chris Lorenz, “Revisiting the University Front,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 26, no. 5 (2007): 409. 29. Justin Weinberg, “The Most Cited Philosophy Books in the Social Sciences,” Daily Nous, May 19, 2016, https://dailynous​.com​/2016​/05​/19​/most​-cited​-philosophy​ -books​-in​-the​-social​-sciences, accessed May 8, 2023.

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30. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 24. 31. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 23–51. 32. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 91. 33. Marginson, “Academic Creativity Under New Public Management,” 269. 34. Marginson, “Academic Creativity Under New Public Management,” 272. 35. Sue Shepherd, “No Room at the Top? The Glass Wall for Professional Services Managers in pre-1992 English Universities,” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 21, no. 4 (2017): 129. 36. As mentioned in fn 4, Americans tend to be less concerned with terminological consistency when it comes to ‘management’ and ‘administration’, which you will see demonstrated below. However, the meaning should be clear, given the context, especially when expressed by faculty who feel their autonomy is being undermined. 37. Hechinger, “The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio.” 38. Coleen Lye, Christopher Newfield, and James Vernon, “Humanists and the Public University,” Representations 116 (2011): 5. 39. Mousavizadeh, “A ‘Proliferation of Administrators’: Faculty Reflect on Two Decades of Rapid Expansion.” 40. Cited in Nelson, No University is an Island, 31. 41. Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott, The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 6. This phenomenon is by no means unique to the United States. We saw in the Introduction the prevelance of ‘zero-hours contracts’ in the UK. For a discussion of similar, though by no means as extreme versions of casualization in Europe, see Olivia Mason and Nick Megoran, “Precarity and Dehumanization in Higher Education,” Learning and Teaching 14, no. 1 (2021): 35–59. 42. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low Wage Nation (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 55. 43. https://www​.deepsprings​.edu​/labor/​#farm​-ranch​-facilities, accessed May 8, 2023. 44. In other countries eyebrows may be more raised. For example the University of Sussex, as part of a broader climate initiative, has taken to sourcing their food locally. https://www​.sussex​.ac​.uk​/about​/campus​/food​/values, accessed May 8, 2023. 45. Gerard Delanty, “The Sociology of the University and Higher Education: The Consequences of Globalization,” in The Sage Handbook of Sociology, eds. Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 530. 46. The term ‘malaise’ comes from Charles Taylor’s 1991 Massey Lectures on the ‘malaises of modernity’, which were republished in a slightly modified form as The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 47. A good example comes in a recent book by the president of Johns Hopkins University, Roland J. Daniels, What Universities Owe Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). 48. David Lea, “The Managerial University and the Decline of Modern Thought,” 826. 49. Ibid. 50. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 20.

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The Educational vs. the Economic

It would be naïve at this point to insist that, in deference to the humanistic tradition bequeathed by John Henry Newman, the cultural trappings of Bildung in Germany, or the religious origins of American residential colleges, universities should remain largely isolated from economic considerations. William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago and someone who, as we’ve seen, was not shy about framing the university in elevated terms, insisted that ‘The great university cannot be conducted except upon a business basis with large funds for expenditure’.1 Harper had a genius for fundraising, and in the first ten years of his presidency (beginning in 1891) added to the Theological Seminary by founding a Business School and a Law School on the prodigious resource base he had gathered. To harken back to Derrida, it is nearly impossible, today no less than in the late nineteenth century, not to speak of the university without referencing its vital ties to economic life, from the real estate it owns, the people it employs, the products that emerge from its research profile or the future workers who are being shaped by its educational programmes. However, there is a big difference between an energetic leader gathering funds to build a serious university and the kind of business considerations that guide university leaders today. To get a sense of this, we can contrast two twentieth-century presidents who followed Harper in Chicago. Robert Maynard Hutchins, who assumed the presidency in 1929, swung very firmly back in an anti-utilitarian direction, laying most of the university’s ailments at the feet of decisions led by financial as opposed to educational considerations. ‘Most of the things that degrade [universities]’, he wrote in The Higher Learning in America, ‘are done to maintain or increase . . . income [from students]’.2 The ideal university, on the other hand, rests on the assumption that ‘there should be somewhere in the state an organization the purpose of which 109

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is to think most profoundly about the most important intellectual issues’,3 not to get conflated with concerns for revenue generation.4 For Hutchins, the university should not be led by the needs of society as given at the moment but should be like an avant-garde that would help create a better society through rigorous immersion in the liberal arts. Contrast this with Hugo Sonnenschein, an economist by training, whose leadership in the 1990s saw, in the estimation of University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, ‘the most dramatic moves toward academic capitalism’ in the history of that institution.5 One of Sonnenschein’s first acts was to commission detailed studies on the profitability of each part of the university. Sahlins reports that the findings presented to the faculty showed that Chicago had the greatest number of liberal arts faculty, the fewest undergraduates, the most graduate students, hence the highest faculty-to-student and graduate-to-undergraduate ratios, and so on. All of these are advantages in terms of research and learning, of course, but scholarly virtues were precisely what was wrong with us.6

Sonnenschein’s response was to cut PhDs and expand fee-paying MA programmes to bring Chicago ‘in line’ with peer institutions. This had two principal effects. The first, Sahlins bitterly notes, was a transvaluation of academic values, where ‘the problem was the continued existence of the very intellectual qualities that had given Chicago an enviable distinction among American universities but that, when reduced to monetary terms, simply made it look like we were out of line’.7 The second was that Chicago’s endowment grew from $1 to over $3 billion in five years, an influx of funding put forward as evidence of good governance.8 As we have seen in the previous two chapters, Sonnenschein’s policy is very much in line with the imperious re-description of every area of university life in neoliberal and managerial language. In the last chapter, we saw this seeping into the formation of state policy, as with the NPM-inspired marketization of higher education in the UK. As Stefan Collini notes, ‘universities, though possessing certain forms of legal autonomy, have in effect been public institutions for at least two or three generations’.9 But in the past three decades, the consequences of being a public institution have changed dramatically. According to Roger Brown, ‘in Britain . . . the main threat to academic control of research has come from a series of state initiatives since the early 1990s to promote what successive governments of all parties have deemed to be in the national economic interests’.10 The unleashing of this marketization and economization of universities has led, in the eyes of many British academics, to a suffocating bureaucracy that Mark Fisher evocatively characterized as ‘market Stalinism’.11

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However, we should note that the imperatives of the university and the economy have not always been as discordant as they are today. In fact, the language of business and the ‘business of learning’ have at times been quite closely aligned, even if not able to co-exist without generating bitter denunciations from the university community. The first part of this chapter will eschew, then, another gloss on the history of the university and focus instead on a few important ways in which universities have found themselves, in Christopher Newfield’s phrasing, playing a ‘double role’ in ‘sustaining and evading’ the development of dominant economic institutions like the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American corporation.12 The second half will turn towards the contemporary shape of the conflict between educational and economic ends, focussing on two paradigmatic cases where this ‘double role’ has ceased to function. The first, following Sahlins’ condemnation of his own institution, concerns an explicit attempt to rewrite the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin along lines friendly to the economistic understanding of a Sonnenschein, but deeply uncongenial to faculty and students. This is a particularly interesting example because it reflects one of the most prominent shifts in the economy, wherein an existing understanding of the university’s relationship with capitalism routed through a conception of the public good was replaced by a new understanding whereby educational goods would eschew such references to the public – initiating thereby a legitimation crisis.13 The second directly picks up a thread from the previous chapter to explore the contested conditions of academic labour, which has dramatically reentered the landscape of higher education, with graduate student unionization pushes in the United States and industrial action in the UK. In both cases, crises centre on the university’s ability clearly to draw boundaries between its own prerogatives and the powerful economic forces attempting to reshape its relationship to the state and the private sector. If, as Clyde Barrow writes in his masterful Universities in the Capitalist State, ‘the contradictory imperatives that emerged from attempts to reconcile the rise of corporate capitalism with the claims of political democracy’14 have defined much of the university’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these two examples help clarify significant changes to both sides of this dialectic in the twenty-first century. What we will see here is how the pattern of centring crisis allows us to glance beyond the university’s walls and examine how it is likely to orient itself to the strain produced as prior settlements between economic and political exigencies break down, as well as how this tension often spills out into the cultural realm. As we will see, there are mechanisms that have allowed the university to weather such changes in the past that seem particularly well-suited to our present moment, especially if we foreground the question of institutional

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reproduction over time against the pretentions of management leaning into the thoroughly economized global model explored in this and the previous two chapters. With that perspective in place, we will examine, in the next chapter, with the aid of both Immanuel Kant and some discontented academics at the University of Aberdeen, how the university might best be served during periods that are characterized by proliferating claims of ‘crisis’ – whether by traditions internal to the university or by key critical insights on changes occurring outwith the institution.

CORPORATE PERSONHOOD OR THE UNINTENTIONAL ECONOMIZATION OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY The historian Laurence Brokliss writes that ‘Paris, like other late-medieval universities, was a self-governing, financially autonomous corporate institution, whose members enjoyed a variety of fiscal and judicial privileges’.15 The word Universitas is one of three Latin terms in Roman law – along with corpus and collegium – etymologically linked to corporation or guild; and in fact one of the more remarkable features of universities today is their resilience in retaining trappings of guild-style organization in an economic landscape that is deeply inimical to such arrangements. The erosion of this organizational legacy constituted the conflict highlighted between faculty and management in the previous chapter. As both the nation-state and the modern capitalist economy developed, it became harder to sustain the fiscal and judicial autonomy that Brockliss saw as characteristic of the medieval university. In what follows I want to focus on the American case, as it illustrates a particularly significant instance of universities becoming intertwined at once with a developing nation-state and a capitalist economy. Two things emerge. The first, which comes in the earliest years of the nation, concerns the university’s role in defining the legal status of corporations, which would go on to have such a profound shaping influence not only on the American economy but more widely across the globe. The second is more recent and concerns the ways in which universities became central agents in the rent-seeking phase of capitalism that became widespread after the neoliberal turn in the 1970s. Universities and corporations may both profess their public mission, but most would assume that universities are more sincere in this claim by virtue of the contrast between the educational values of truth, intellectual humility and self-development, and the more straightforward profit motive or shareholder responsibility. Legally speaking, however, this has not been seen as relevant: it is rather a question of ownership that defines in law one’s public

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status. This important understanding of one’s public status, in contrast to one’s private status, which has underwritten a great deal of corporate power in the United States by ‘freeing’ corporations from regulations and democratic oversight, owes its origins in large part to the university. In 1769, Dartmouth College was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles III ‘for the education and instruction of the youth of the Indian tribes of the land .  .  . and also English youth and any others. And the trustees of said college may and shall be one body corporate in deed, action, and name’.16 Twelve such trustees were appointed to oversee this mission (which, as Reinhold Martin notes, quickly jettisoned the focus on Indigenous students and educated mainly wealthy Protestant boys), with Eleazar Wheelock assuming leadership of the board. In 1816 there was a conflict between Wheelock’s son and successor, John, and the Board of Trustees, which the New Hampshire legislature tried to resolve by amending the charter. This conflict led all the way to the US Supreme Court, where in the 1819 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward case the legislature’s actions were ruled unconstitutional under the ‘Corporate Clause’ of the US Constitution, which reads that ‘no state shall, without the consent of Congress, . . . pass any . . . law impairing the obligation of contracts’.17 The ruling had two consequences. First, in interpreting charters as contracts, the court laid the ground for protecting corporations with the privileges, rights and obligations of private individuals engaging in ordinary market behaviour. A string of further court decisions solidified this view18 and had the effect of profoundly extending the powers of corporations to act, for example in claiming free speech protections to use their resources in political elections. Second, a firm distinction was drawn between public and private corporations: ‘That a corporation is established for purposes of general charity, or for education generally does not, per se, make it a public corporation, liable to the control of the legislature’.19 The only thing that would make it a public corporation was, in Justice Joseph Story’s estimation, full public ownership: indirect features, such as serving a public function – however vital it may be – were irrelevant. And given the American penchant for public/private partnerships, this high bar allowed Dartmouth – as an ‘eleemosynary corporation’ (what we would today call a non-profit, charitable organization) – to serve as a precedent for ‘internal improvement’ corporations,20 and eventually for-profit corporations who sought protection from state regulation. Even if, as Dartmouth held, ‘the objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote’,21 this did not grant governments, or the public more broadly, any right to regulate their activities. None of this is to commit the genetic fallacy: it is not to say that contemporary corporate culture, and in particular its pernicious effect on public

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goods, is necessarily linked with anything essential to the university. It is, however, to point to the environment in which the American university unfolded, which involved a political and legal architecture that gave private entities great power in the face of the state. This meant that the development of the modern corporation would overlap significantly with the development of universities, whether in establishing the semantic context for granting corporations personhood or for coordinating pools of capital, knowledge and labour. As Reinhold Martin points out, there is a coherent line from Dartmouth to the corporate ‘campuses’ of IBM or Bell Labs in the post-war military-industrial complex, institutions that are incomprehensible without the ‘topologies of knowledge’22 stemming from Stanford and MIT. In this regard, the American university can often be an exemplary institution of different phases of capitalist development – the expansionist era after the American Civil War (e.g. railroad barons teaming up with enterprising college leaders to found the new intuitions of Stanford and Johns Hopkins); the complex institution of the post–World War II period (e.g. in the militaryindustrial-educational complex of big scientific research in laboratories such as Livermore Lab at the University of California); and since at least the 1980s the drive towards privatization and financialization.23 A key marker in this new phase was the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act (1980), which allowed universities and individual scientists to obtain patents for research that was underwritten by federal funding. As Jonathan Cole writes, universities almost immediately ‘set up technology transfer offices designed to identify research that could be patented, to facilitate the patenting of discoveries, and to oversee the licencing of those patents to companies interested in them’.24 As we saw in the previous chapter, the administrative ranks were expanded to oversee this new development in the research arm of universities. Much like the rapid transformation of British universities in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of opening them up to market forces, the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act were quickly felt. Stanford University was already earning $100 million a year on such patents by the early 1990s, and while there were mechanisms for reinvesting this money broadly across academic programmes, it naturally had the effect of eroding the norm of ‘disinterestness’ that had guided basic research in universities.25 Moreover, it underwrote a broader shift from public investment in higher education, as these new revenue streams from the private sector allowed public support to pull back without immediate disastrous budgetary consequences, at least for private, prestigious research universities such as Stanford. Public universities also benefitted from technology transfer (e.g. the University of California system collected nearly $200 million in annual licencing fees by the mid-2000s), but this was not enough to compensate for the retrenchment in public support and plunged universities into crisis, as we saw in chapter 2.

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This is the era of ‘academic capitalism’ that Sahlins saw so enthusiastically embraced at his own University of Chicago. In addition to the profitability of research, universities have, as was the case in Chicago, used their tax-exempt status to grow their endowment funds, which are then used to engage in normal, private-sector profit-seeking behaviour.26 Universities also engage in more immediate rent-seeking behaviour as holders of large real-estate profiles (e.g. Columbia University and New York University are amongst the ten largest property owners in New York City). In chapter 4 we explored how these outsized resources have allowed American universities to expand across the globe, giving credence to Weber’s observation that the type of Americans we are likely to find in positions of university leadership is not ‘academic types’ but rather ‘the type of American who is active in the stock exchange’. The modern version of this sardonic claim is that American universities more and more resemble hospitals or hedge funds (depending on where profitability is most actively sought) with little colleges attached.27 With this context in mind, we can turn to two recent examples that bring this relationship between educational and economic ends into an acute stage of ‘crisis’ for many. I will continue to stick with the American context, in the hope that it will illustrate other contexts. However, the general phenomenon of yoking universities to this current stage of capitalism applies across the board, raising as it does the broader question of whether durable mechanisms of mediating this long-standing tension between educational and economic ends are being proposed.

THE WISCONSIN IDEA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In chapter 1 we noted one normative idea of the university that placed economic concerns at the centre, namely the university as centre for vocational training. In Germany this became instantiated in the Technische Hochschule, and in the United States it informed the radical expansion of the university system under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which called on universities to ‘teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts’, in addition to its traditional focus on ‘scientific and classical studies’.28 One consequence of this expansion was that the university started to reach more people, and moreover people of different classes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this coincided with a powerful populist economic critique coming primarily from farmers in the vicinity of recently established state universities. For example, in Wisconsin a local chapter of the Grange, a federal agency representing agricultural interests, pointed out that the University of Wisconsin-Madison had not graduated

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a single student from its agricultural programme by 1880. In the view of these rural farmers, the university was still laden with elitist prejudices from Europe which, they argued, made it aloof from the needs of local constituencies. More pointedly, they averred that the elitism of the current university was easily captured by industrial capitalists through their role in Boards of Trustees and other power brokers in these newly founded institutions. The challenge by these rural populists set up a decades-long legitimation crisis that broadly turned on the question of responsibility – to whom and to which ideas are these public universities responsible? The long-term pursuit of truth embodied in Wissenschaft or the immediate practical need to improve the lives of local populations? One powerful solution to this was the ‘Wisconsin Idea’, proposed by University of Wisconsin president Charles van Hise in 1904 and popularized in a 1912 book under the same title by Charles McCarthy (with an introduction by Theodor Roosevelt).29 Van Hise claimed that he ‘shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state’,30 and the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ encouraged universities to form more direct partnerships with local and state governments in the formation of policy. While the rural populists were pushing Wisconsin towards this vision from without, there were also many champions from within, who saw it as advancing ideals in line with scholarly work. This was especially true in the emerging social sciences who appreciated the German commitment to knowledge production and the disinterested search for truth but also picked up the critical potential of this mode of scholarship. At Wisconsin, Richard T. Ely embodied this spirit, writing textbooks challenging reigning British laissez-faire economic dogma and turning novel empirical methods picked up in Germany (and developed in an earlier tenure at Johns Hopkins) to issues directly relevant to the economic realities faced by these rural progressives.31 For Ely and a generation of progressive economists and social scientists, the responsible exercise of their academic office meant using one’s knowledge, research methods and authority to confront the realities of industrial capitalism. In this sense, it is an idea born out of crisis, in particular an understanding of that term that linked criticism to social planning. Supporters of the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ could very quickly point to results, for example when Wisconsin developed the first worker’s compensation programme in the United States in 1911 based on economic data provided by university researchers.32 Moreover, the university set up extension schools and summer programmes to address the charge from populists that the university had no interest in admitting rural and working youths. Even as the Progressive Era waned, this engaged vision of scholarship remained. Professors, in conducting novel research instead of adhering to accepted dogma, would generate knowledge and specific facts (especially in

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economics, law and the burgeoning social sciences), policy would be based on these facts, and a laboratory for social policy experimentation would be born. Moreover, acknowledging the economic realities of the time and bowing to pressures from these farmers helped universities secure a greater degree of democratic legitimacy without seeming to sacrifice much in their own sense of purpose. As we’ve seen in the past two chapters, there has been a decisive movement away from these progressive commitments to the university serving the public good, especially for a well-defined public like the state of Wisconsin. In fact, with the rise of NPM, we have seen that the very definition of ‘public’ has been a site of serious ideological and political contestation, and to this end it is not surprising that the Wisconsin Idea has become a target of those trying to redefine the university around market principles. In 2015 the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, tried to formalize such a change in orientation by amending the University of Wisconsin Mission Statement. At issue were one addition – redefining the mission of the system to ‘meet the state’s workforce needs’ – and several phrases that were to be struck from the statement: ‘to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of campuses’, to recognize ‘public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition’, and, most troublingly to many, the statement that ‘Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth’.33 After a swift public outcry, the proposed changes were withdrawn and explained away as a ‘drafting error’ (despite the fact that emails showed the changes were quite intentional).34 However, the incident was quickly followed by the announcement that 400 positions would be terminated at the flagship Madison campus, the majority in the College of Letters and Sciences. The explanation given by Chancellor Rebecca Blank followed a typical austerity logic. ‘I recognize that this process will impact good people and limit our ability to serve students and the state’, she said, but given budget cuts from the state legislature these difficult decisions had to be made in order to ‘mitigate and ideally avoid [more] layoffs’.35 The confluence of these two events points to one of the most troubling sites of conflict today between the educational and the economic. My interest is not in the specific merits of the Wisconsin Idea, laudable as they may be in squaring scholarly, economic and democratic ends, but rather in how ploys such as Walker’s function in tandem with the logic of austerity. By stipulating that the university should be aligned with meeting the ‘state’s workforce needs’, Walker is prefiguring both the shape and the resolution of the conflict. We should recall here Roger Brown’s description of changes in UK higher education, where ‘the main threat to academic control of research has come from a series of state initiatives since the early 1990s to promote

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what successive governments of all parties have deemed to be in the national economic interests’.36 The logic of austerity cedes in large measure the constitution of the workforce or markers of ‘the national economic interest’ to the vagaries of private sector, thus depriving both the university and publicly accountable government officials of defining the ends towards which their activities should strive. Once this is coupled with budgetary pressures that initiate crises by calling for decisions on how to manage dwindling resources, universities are on a path towards evacuating whatever resources and traditions might guide decisions on their own terms. But there is also a more radical implication of the shift from the Wisconsin Idea to ‘meeting the state’s workforce needs’. Charles van Hise and Richard Ely also wanted to meet the workforce needs of the state, and judged the university’s success accordingly: but, importantly, they wanted workers to have some power in shaping how those workplaces might operate (hence the focus on trusts, labour organizing and applying modern social science to the stale laissez-faire theories that allowed monopolies to develop in the first place). Elizabeth Anderson’s recently celebrated Private Government shows the dire consequences that follow from the abandonment of any discussions of workplace democracy.37 The Wisconsin Idea held out the possibility that the university could have a productive relationship to these stipulated ends because, in partnership with the government and various constituencies across the state, it could subject them to goods internal to scholarly inquiry and the ‘search for truth’ including rational justification and the discovery of relevant facts. ‘Crises’ that centre on supposed economic irrelevance or budgetary emergencies orient discussions in a radically different direction. The university cannot avoid reckoning with forces external to it, whether economic or political. What recent events in Wisconsin (and the historical conditions out of which they emerge) demonstrate is that many still believe that there are ways in which this can be done productively, which is to say there is some sort of normative position from which to deal with proposals like Walker’s. For some, this simply entails reasserting a past idea of the university, as then president of the University of Wisconsin system Ray Cross did when he asserted that ‘the Wisconsin Idea is embedded in our DNA’.38 I gave reasons to be sceptical of such approaches in chapter 1, and in the next chapter I suggest what I take to be the far stronger normative ideal derived from Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties. Framing a conflict in such a way that it can be resolved only by factors external to the university (e.g. shifts in labour markets) is far more destabilizing than debates over whether some past ideal should be viewed as ‘embedded in [its] DNA’ or not, but Kant provides a far more fruitful embrace of conflict.

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There is one more dimension of this clash between economic and educational values that must be mentioned here – namely a renegotiation of the status of labour at the heart of universities. To put it crudely, the Wisconsin example sets up one side of the dialectic wherein universities are asked to cede too much to economic understandings of their purpose. These labour struggles, stressing the other side, point to ways in which universities must embrace such economic understandings if they want to retain educational ideals attached to governance and the slow and unpredictable temporality of research and teaching.

FROM APPRENTICES TO ‘GRADUATE STUDENT WORKERS’ In the previous chapter, I introduced considerations relating to the material re-composition of academic labour in the American university, emphasizing the staggering growth at two ends of the spectrum – highly paid administrators on the one hand, poorly paid temporary faculty and graduate students on the other – and an ever-shrinking band of tenured and tenure-track professors in between. The concern of that chapter was to describe the challenges this brought to university governance. In closing this chapter, I want to shift the focus onto that bottom rung of academic labour itself to show how, like pinning universities to the ‘workforce needs of the state’, ceding certain economic rationales is unlikely satisfactorily to resolve a growing legitimation crisis – and in fact may better explain what is driving such a crisis. In its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession for the 2021–2022 year, the American Association of University Professors, the largest professional association of university professors with branches on over 500 campuses, found that over 60 per cent of the teaching staff were on temporary contracts, with remuneration ranging from $2,979 to $5,557, depending on the size and status of the university.39 Moreover, given the United States’ lack of welfare provision, where health care, retirement contributions and other benefits are tied to full-time employment, these teachers save the university many additional costs. It is characteristic of this phase of capitalism to look to labour as the place to recoup losses from the declining rate of profit or, in the case of universities, constrained budgets with declining levels of public funding. Such is certainly the case in the United Kingdom, where the prevalence of ‘zero-hours contracts’ for university teachers is on the rise.40 There are structural reasons why academic labour has become a site of such contestation in an era of deliberately constrained budgets. As former Princeton president William Bowen has noted,

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in labor intensive industries such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor . . . As a result, unit labor costs must be expected to rise faster in the performing arts and education than in the economy overall.41

As Bowen goes on to argue, productivity gains in other parts of the university, for example in integrating new technologies in various aspects of university administration, ‘could be used to pay the rising relative costs of activities in labor-intensive sectors such as education, if we were to choose to spend them in this way’.42 But if the task of the managerial strata in universities is to become more productive and cost-efficient in all areas of operation, then these labour trends in the ‘gig economy’ are hard to resist. However, an uptick in unionization campaigns amongst adjunct faculty43 and graduate students in the United States points to a potential site of resistance.44 In this regard, the cultural turn of the New Left may be leading back in the direction of a preoccupation with labour, indicated for example in how many of these unionization campaigns are run by the few remaining remnants of that era, like the United Auto Workers running such a campaign across the University of California system. But a more striking aspect of this moment is a conceptual struggle, in this case over the status of graduate students in American universities. At issue is whether graduate students, who like adjuncts have taken on a growing share of teaching duties with compensation far lower than that of their tenured and tenure-track peers, are still to be understood as part of the university’s residual attachment to the guild system, and thus apprentices, or are a source of labour (‘graduate student workers’ in the parlance of these campaigns) and thus entitled to rights like collective bargaining. Hopefully I have not already over-taxed the non-American reader in this chapter, but an excurses into American labour law will help illustrate this general point about academic labour. This power struggle has taken on both a legal dimension and constituting one element in the broader legitimation crises these chapters have been tracking. In the United States, there has been an oscillation in how the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has viewed graduate students. In the 1970s, it assumed jurisdictional control over private university graduate students, opening up a series of unionization campaigns. These were modeled on public university campaigns, such as the Teaching Assistants Association formed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966. However, private university campaigns did not yield much success until 2000, when the NLRB formally granted graduate students collective bargaining rights after a challenge by an NYU unionization campaign. Campaigns flourished for the next four years until 2004, when Brown University gave the NLRB

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an occasion to reverse the NYU decision and exclude graduate students from traditional labour protections, defining them primarily as students and therefore not covered under the National Labor Relations Act. This was reversed once more in a 2016 decision after a challenge from Columbia University graduate students, in which the NLRB held that graduate students could have multiple relationships with the institution and are both students and employees. In the wake of this, unionization campaigns proliferated, until Donald Trump appointed new members to the NLRB hostile to such campaigns and graduate students temporally halted efforts so as not to provide an opportunity to overturn the Columbia decision.45 Thus, on the one hand, these campaigns are dependent upon a legal context that is in turn dependent on a shifting political context in the generally labour-hostile environment of the United States. But on the other hand, there are good faith debates within the university about what would happen to the relationship between graduate students and their supervisors if such unionization campaigns were to succeed. As two MIT professors put it, ‘unionization would represent a fundamental change in the academic partnerships between faculty and graduate students and could put at risk the critically important relationship between graduate student mentee and faculty mentor’.46 By framing the relationship as one of mentor-mentee, the professors characterize graduate work in non-economic terms (e.g. ‘graduate students choose to come to MIT because of the departmental and faculty advisors who will work with them individually, as caring mentors, to develop foundational knowledge and to identify topics at the forefront of their field for a thesis’47). This stands in contrast to the adversarial and legally mediated relationship between employee and employer. Even if faculty would like their students to have better living and working conditions, they don’t want to lose sight of traditions of collegiality and commitment to the knowledge function of universities – in which the PhD is a crucial component and which flourishes in settings sheltered from economic concerns – and the guild-like sense of caring responsibility towards future members of the profession. Even though the organization of graduate study is quite different in higher education systems outside North America, the loss of collegiality in the face of an intensified focus on the conditions of academic labour is a consequence of this conflict between educational and economic ends. On the other hand, there are American graduate students, adjuncts or zero-hours contract teachers who experience this as rank conservatism in the face of a clear crisis of labour power and workplace democracy. It is akin to invocations of nature in Brecht’s ‘To Posterity’, where we must note ‘what an age it is/When to speak of trees is almost a crime/For it is a kind of silence about injustice!’.48

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CONCLUSION The invocation of care in the mentor-mentee relationship brings this trajectory full circle, as issues of care and affection are also central to the historical entanglement between the university and the corporation. Reinhold Martin centres this affective dimension in his account of the Dartmouth decision, in particular focussing on Daniel Webster’s arguments before the court in defence of his alma mater in the face of state interference. ‘It is a small college’, Webster said, reportedly with great emotion, ‘and yet there are those who love it’.49 Webster’s testimony nicely dovetails with the legal fiction of corporate personhood it would help enshrine, namely that ‘the college had already become a body capable of eliciting human emotion’.50 The proximity of such emotions shows why the conflict between economic and educational rationales is often the most acute site of the contemporary crisis. Universities hold out the promise of a different type of organization and sociality than that provided by the market, and the loss of this can generate the strongest feelings of loss, disappointment and disaffection. In the pithy phrasing of Stefan Collini, future historians will look with great bemusement at a set of UK government policies that ‘took decisive steps in helping turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies’.51 But such sentiments will not in themselves ward off many of these economic forces and may in fact obscure the university’s central role in bringing about such economic conditions. What is required is an interrogation of how this axis of conflict establishes those ‘protectionist barriers’52 that Derrida warns us of, and how we might be able to work past them. To begin to outline a model of how this can be done, let us turn to one of Derrida’s guiding lights in debates about universities, Immanuel Kant and his Conflict of the Faculties. NOTES 1. William Rainey Harper, The Trend in Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1905), 161. 2. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), 5. 3. Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 2. 4. The mechanism for this was the development of the ‘Great Books’ programme, for which Chicago and its ‘core curriculum’ is still known today. Along with philosopher Mortimer Adler, Hutchins founded a company to help select and publish a 54-volume set of 443 ‘great works’ from the western philosophical, artistic, literary and scientific tradition which would populate the core curriculum of undergraduates.

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5. Marshall Sahlins, “The Conflicts of the Faculty,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 997–1017. 6. Sahlins, “The Conflicts of the Faculty,” 1004. 7. Ibid. 8. Or, as Sahlins puts it, ‘all things taken together, instead of using the endowment to expand the university, the university was being abused to enlarge the endowment’. 9. Collini, Speaking of Universities, 137. 10. Cited in Collini, Speaking of Universities, 138. 11. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 42. 12. Christopher Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. 13. As we saw above, a similar story could be told about the UK since the early 1990s. See Collini, Speaking of Universities, 119–154 for an excellent account of this transformation. 14. Barrow, Universities in the Capitalist State, 7. 15. Laurence Brockliss, “Corporatism, Church and State: The University of Paris, c. 1200-1968,” Oxford Review of Education 23, no. 2 (1997): 217. 16. Cited in Martin, Knowledge Worlds, 30. 17. https://constitution​.congress​.gov​/browse​/article​-1​/section​-10/, accessed May 8, 2023. 18. Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Co (1886) and Southern Railway Co. vs. Greene (1910) established the equal protection of corporations under the 14th Amendment, which originally was ratified during Reconstruction to protect freed slaves. More recently Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010) extended free speech protections to corporations in the form of eliminating limits on campaign donations. 19. https://supreme​.justia​.com​/cases​/federal​/us​/17​/518/, accessed May 8, 2023. 20. These were corporations in infrastructural sectors such as railroads, canals and bridges (what we would today call ‘public works’) and involved a mixture of government and privately raised funds. 21. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819). https:// supreme​.justia​.com​/cases​/federal​/us​/17​/518/​#tab​-opinion​-1918147, accessed May 8, 2023. 22. Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 182–212. Martin is referring not just to material entanglements between Silicon Valley and Stanford, or the ‘Route 128 Technology Corridor’ and MIT, but also in the spread of Norbert Weiner’s theory of cybernetics through these institutions and then out into corporate spaces. 23. Again, there is no attempt to universalize the particular dynamics that one sees in the United States, as it is beyond the scope of this book to account for the variety of national contexts and histories that bind the university to the economic order. Nonetheless, seeing the convergence between marketization in the UK and the ‘academic capitalism’ one finds in the United States suggests this is a fruitful theme for comparative research.

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24. Cole, The Great American University, 163. 25. Cole, The Great American University, 170. 26. See Charlie Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). University endowments have consistently been a source of campus strife, going back to calls to divest from companies tied to the Apartheid South African regime to current calls to divest from the fossil fuel industry. 27. This is not exclusively an American phenomenon. For an account of this gradual financialization of higher education in a country where universities are more directly tied to government administration see McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. 28. https://www​.archives​.gov​/milestone​-documents​/morrill​-act, accessed May 8, 2023. 29. A full version can be found at https://digicoll​.library​.wisc​.edu​/WIReader​/Contents​/Idea​.html, accessed May 8, 2023. 30. https://www​.wisc​.edu​/wisconsin​-idea/, accessed May 8, 2023. 31. His book titles include The Labor Movement in America (1886), Monopolies and Trusts (1900), Property and Contract in Relation to the Distribution of Wealth (1914), and Land Economics (1940). 32. This programme, which guaranteed compensation for workers injured on the job instead of forcing them to take their employers to court, served as a model for other states and reflected the progressive politics underwriting the Wisconsin Idea. 33. Shawn Johnson, “Walker Budget Would Revise UW’s Mission, Ending The ‘Wisconsin Idea,’” Wisconsin Public Radio, February 4, 2015. https://www​ .wpr​ .org​/walker​-budget​-would​-revise​-uws​-mission​-ending​-wisconsin​-idea, accessed May 8, 2023. 34. Tom Kertscher, “Despite Deliberate Actions, Scott Walker Calls Change to University Mission a ‘drafting error,’” Politifact, February 6, 2015, https://www​ .politifact​.com​/factchecks​/2015​/feb​/06​/scott​-walker​/despite​-deliberate​-actions​-scott​ -walker​-calls​-chan/, accessed May 8, 2023. 35. Karen Herzog and Patrick Marley, “UW-Madison to Cut 400 Positions, Close and Merge Programs,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 17, 2015, https:// archive​.jsonline​.com​/news​/education​/uw​-madison​-to​-cut​-400​-jobs​-close​-and​-merge​ -programs, accessed May 8, 2023. 36. Cited in Collini, Speaking of Universities, 138. 37. Here we can look to the United States as a potential canary in the coal mine if other countries adopt their practices. Anderson herself points to the German policy of ‘co-determination’, wherein worker and union representation is guaranteed on managing boards in large corporations as an example of how workplace democracy can be increased without sacrificing economic viability. See Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 142. 38. https://www ​. wisconsin ​ . edu ​ / news ​/ archive ​ / uw​ - system​- president​ - ray​ - cross​ -issues​-statement​-on​-wisconsin​-idea/, accessed May 8, 2023.

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39. American Association of University Professors, Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession (20220), https://www​.aaup​.org​/file​/AAUP​_ARES​ _2021​%E2​%80​%932022​.pdf, accessed May 8, 2023. 40. At their high point in 2017–2018 such contracts constituted 3.1 per cent of the teaching force, though they are down to 1.9 per cent in 2021–2022. The University and College Union (UCU), the largest union of academics, have made countering these kinds of contracts a priority. See Patrick Jack, “Number of UK academics employed on zero-hours contracts rises,” Times Higher Education, February 3, 2023, https://www​.tim​eshi​gher​education​.com​/news​/number​-uk​-academics​-employed​-zero​ -hours​-contracts, accessed May 8, 2023. 41. William Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 3–4. 42. Bowen, Higher Education in the Digital Age, 25. 43. Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America, ed. Kim Tolley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). 44. Again, I am remaining within the American context in this chapter, but the strike activity initiated by the UCU in the UK, or teach-ins on this topic organized by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) in Australia, shows how resisting these labour trends has become an increasingly important issue for faculty of all ranks. 45. See The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace, eds. Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, and Michael Palm (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “The University Is a Battleground,” Jacobin, May, 2019, https://jacobin​.com​/2019​/05​/graduate​-worker​ -unions​-nlrb​-history, accessed May 8 2023. 46. Philip A. Sharp and Alan D. Grossman, “An Open Letter on the Considerations to be Made about MIT Graduate Student Unionization,” The Tech, March 3, 2017, https://thetech​.com​/2022​/03​/17​/grad​-union​-considerations​-letter, accessed May 8, 2023. 47. Ibid. 48. Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity,” trans. H.R. Hays, All Poetry, https://allpoetry​ .com​/To​-Posterity, accessed May 8, 2023. 49. Cited in Martin, Knowledge Worlds, 31. 50. Ibid. 51. Collini, Speaking of Universities, 154. 52. Derrida, Eyes of the University, 129.

Chapter 7

Kant vs. the Managers Managerialism, Self-Governance and the Burden of Institutional Reproduction

The preceding chapters, in addition to giving a selective but generalizable account of the university’s development from Bologna to the crisis-ridden institution we find today, offer a range of ways not to speak about the university: a-historically; isolated from its dialectical relationship with the state, economy and culture; or beholden to time frames that speed up conditions of work or the felt need simply to resolve conflicts. What remains is the question of whether a language can be found in which to push a more positive agenda. To put matters more provocatively, if the university has been, whether intentionally or unintentionally, an accelerant of the problems surrounding neoliberal globalization, managerialism and the economization of everyday life, then why should we think it is worth defending other than for the sentimental reasons which closed the previous chapter? Could we not pursue the various educational, scientific, cultural and civic goals once attached to the university elsewhere? While there are some who believe the university is irredeemably compromised,1 and that the proliferating talk of crisis is a clear indication of this, I want to develop a defence of the university that centres this theme of crisis. I will proceed in three steps. First, in order to ground the discussion, I will introduce what I take to be both a representative characterization of our current crisis and the attendant call for action that it implies. This will be a stand-in for the genre of books on the crisis of the university that generally follow the string of questions: What is it? Why does it matter? and How can we fix it? In 2016 a group of staff, students and faculty at the University of Aberdeen published a manifesto entitled Reclaiming Our University, which targeted many of the points of crisis I have raised, but particularly the ways managerial changes have eroded trust between faculty and management 127

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and in so doing have put in question the purpose of the university. The example of Aberdeen helps to establish a priority claim, namely that these managerial changes and their resultant threats to self-governance are the most important site of the alleged crisis, as they involve the overlapping structural oppositions covered in the preceding chapters. If conflict is a constitutive element of the university, as the historical argument advanced in the first half of the book claims, then the reconstructions and negotiations such conflicts initiate help the university clarify its sense of mission and identity at different points in time and at different localities. As the Aberdeen manifesto argues, managerialism poses a unique threat to this productive aspect of conflict by re-describing it as yet one more obstacle to be removed in the pursuit of greater efficiency, which strips the university of one of its greatest assets. The question that this naturally suggests, but which is rarely pursued, is: ‘Efficiency towards what end?’ The second part of this chapter turns to a reading of Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) as a way of rehabilitating a conception of the university that embraces conflict (a close associate of crisis) as a constitutive feature and an indispensable component of productively engaging with these questions of ends. What a Kantian framing provides is an expansive field of vision insofar as it is simultaneously concerned with the university’s inward and outward orientations and thus provides resources for breaking down those protectionist barriers that produce many of our crises. This a broader frame yokes normative discussions of the university to normative discussions of the state, the public sphere and the economic realm, embedding such discussions in a properly historical, dialectical framework instead of retreating to a consoling idealism. Thus, a Kantian framing emerges as a powerful challenge to the managerial discourse of efficiency, which, under critical scrutiny, cannot yield a normative account of either the university or its political, economic and cultural entanglements at all. The third and final part of the chapter draws together various threads to reassert the claim that the ‘crisis of the university’ extends far beyond universities and has to reckon with significant changes in the nature of the economy, state and culture, as well as the complex relationships between them. In this wider frame conflict is inevitable, and thus not something that should be seen as aberrant to a purer idea of the university. Furthermore, resisting managerialism and its works in the university confronts this legitimacy crisis head-on and can not only enable us to point to a future where the university is less consumed with addressing ‘the crisis’ and gains as a result more confidence in its ability to reproduce as an institution over time but can also prove instructive for a more general project of social and political reconstruction.

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RECLAIMING THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN The University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495 and is thus one of the oldest English-speaking universities in the world with its own venerable history and traditions to draw upon. But as we have seen, even these august institutions have not been immune to the material and cultural changes in which they operate. In October of 2015, the divide between the management, which ‘trumpets its success, in its newly minted and glossily illustrated Strategic Plan’, and the faculty and students, who characterized academic life as never feeling ‘less secure, less supported, less collegial and less conducive to scholarly endeavours in research and teaching’ had blossomed into a state of crisis.2 Faculty, staff and students initiated a series of discussions and seminars in Dunbar Hall to ‘reclaim our university’, and over the subsequent months met to articulate ‘pillars’ of their campaign. As a result of these seminars and other mechanisms for community input, a manifesto was produced in June 2016, one which was immediately championed in the media by the social anthropologist Tim Ingold and subsequently translated into Danish, as similar conditions were being addressed in Denmark.3 The manifesto, Reclaiming Our University, is helpful on two fronts: as a diagnosis of the contemporary university in crisis that will resonate with many readers and as a statement of principles upon which to organize in response to that crisis. The diagnosis, like the etymological roots of ‘crisis’, places us at a critical point of decision: We stand at a pivotal moment in the long history of our university, a fork in the path that offers two ways forward. One is to follow the business model of higher education to its logical conclusion, in a scramble for students, research funding and ratings that values innovation and change, above all else, as the keys to competitive advantage. The other is to rediscover the civic purpose of the university as a necessary component of the constitution of a democratic society, with the responsibility for educating its citizens and furnishing them with the wisdom and understanding that will enable them to fashion a world fit for future generations to live in.4

The drafters of the manifesto unambiguously state that ‘under its current management, this university has committed itself to the business route’.5 As we saw in chapters 5 and 6, this route is not just a matter of the pursuit of profit, but rather, as the manifesto notes, the imposition of a specific kind of managerial culture. This involves both ‘line management’, in which ‘the responsibility and loyalty of every member of staff from the community of colleagues who share a love of their subject and work together in teaching it, [is redirected] to an organisational superior who neither knows the subject nor is accountable to the community’, and ‘performance management’, in which

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‘scholars are [presumed] not [to be] motivated by a desire to advance knowledge in their fields but are responsive only to threats and incentives issued by managers’.6 Both forms of management erode trust, collegiality and other non-market values and instead install mechanisms of control and surveillance – such that one member of the university was led to state that ‘We live in a culture of fear and alienation at Aberdeen’.7 The implication of the ‘reclaiming’ in the manifesto’s title is made explicit in the document itself, where the call is to ‘restore the governance of the university, and control over its affairs, to the community of staff, students and alumni to which it rightfully belongs’.8 We have seen historical reasons for this claim, whether in the origins of the medieval university in Bologna and Paris, the self-organization of the ideals of Wissenschaft and Bildung informing the birth of the modern university in Berlin, or Daniel Webster’s protestations before the court in defence of his beloved alma mater. Indeed, much of the positive agenda of the manifesto is inwardly oriented around the theme of self-governance: ‘Our university will need leaders, and it will need administrators. It will not need managers’. And these administrators, presumably returning to the tradition of dedicated amateurs arising from the ranks of faculty or the occasional alumnus will be guided by the pillars of Freedom, Trust, Education and Community.9 I take Aberdeen to be typical of the contemporary ‘university in crisis’, both in respect of the grievances stated and the belief that things can’t go on like this without causing irreparable harm to the institution.10 As the manifesto concludes, on a time scale that should sound familiar at this point, ‘We have the opportunity to rebuild our university. We must seize it now’. I also take this movement to be typical in proffering a set of humanistic and civic ideas in the face of this managerial regime and trusting, perhaps with some justification, that they will be galvanizing enough to resolve this clash of value regimes. But in the face of such challenges, how far can the reassertion of such ideals advance the cause of self-governance stated in the Aberdeen manifesto? In the call ‘to rediscover the civic purpose of the university as a necessary component of the constitution of a democratic society’, the manifesto clearly has aspirations beyond internal governance. Is there a way they could link their movement to a broader political order that also finds itself ensnared in this discourse of crisis? Let me then propose a slightly different approach, one drawn from Immanuel Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, that centres these questions of internal governance and the external bearing of the university, whether on civic life, the economy or other connections we have explored. In Kant’s framing, the rightful authority of students and faculty to govern is buttressed by a positive account of conflict, which can serve as a useful point of leverage for movements like the one at Aberdeen to counteract trends in academic governance

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initiated by these managerial regimes. Moreover, it can do so without a reflexive recourse to ideals that, as we saw in chapter 1, may underestimate, or even ignore, the broader forces underpinning the growth of managerialism in universities.

LEGAL AND ILLEGAL CONFLICTS Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties stands at an interesting point in history insofar as it was one of the last works published in his lifetime, and thus the culmination of his critical project in philosophy, while also being at the beginning of significant changes that would reshape higher education in the German-speaking lands and serve as a model for universities around the world. Moreover, as Chad Wellmon notes, it also deals with some of the emerging consequences of the Enlightenment: on the one hand, the proliferation outside the university of texts like the Encyclopédie, which privileged, in Kant’s estimation, erudition over thought;11 and on the other, in initiating challenges to reigning authorities. The Conflict of the Faculties thus emerges as Kant’s advocacy of a certain conception of scholarly work in those unsettled times (hence the legalistic framing he adopts) as part of an attempt to ground a more comprehensive vision of how universities should relate to this emergent social form and how their component parts should interact internally. The book consists of three essays prefaced by a plea from Kant to the Prussian minister of justice Johann Christoph von Woellner who, as we saw in chapter 3, banned Kant’s writings on religion, in particular Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, from university classrooms. In the preface, Kant makes a similar argument to that made in ‘What is Enlightenment?’, where he drew a distinction between one’s free use of public reason as a scholar and one’s more constrained use of private reason in one’s role as a civil servant. Thus, when Woellner begged Kant to ‘realize how irresponsibly you have acted against your duty as a teacher of youth and against our [i.e. the state’s] paternal purpose’,12 Kant responded by saying that his treatment of religion is not as a theologian, and thus a teacher in the narrow sense implied by Woellner, but as a philosopher and scholar. Importantly, Kant does not seek to dissolve this conflict by saying that philosophy should always take precedence in these kinds of conflict. That is to say, he is not committed to the enclave model which isolates scholarly work from its practical bearing on other institutions in society. Rather, one of Kant’s central aims is to articulate a principle of enlightened governance that takes upon itself the role of managing or organizing sources of perpetual, and legitimate, conflict. For him, the university was to emerge as a central

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institution in the project for formalizing the relationships between different sources of authority. He began by canvassing the rightful authority and ‘paternal purpose’ to be found in the Higher Faculties of Theology, Law and Medicine. Theologians derived the content of their teaching from the Bible, the legal faculty from the law of the land and the medical faculty from medical ordinances. Recognizing the importance of preserving the integrity of these heteronomous sources of authority, Kant writes, the higher faculties must, therefore, take great care not to enter into a misalliance with the lower faculty, but must keep it at a respectful distance, so that the dignity of their statutes will not be damaged by the free play of reason.13

Where, then, would the lower faculty of Philosophy draw its authority? Might it too correspond with certain interests and responsibilities of the state? As the above injunction intimates, for Kant the work of the philosophy faculty is authorized by nothing beyond the ‘free play of reason’.14 Even though this marks a clear difference as against the higher faculties, Kant nevertheless gives it a central role in a scheme of wise governance, an inversion that marks his innovative approach to the university: ‘Each particular inquiry, each discipline, develops itself by interrogating its own foundations with the aid of the faculty of philosophy. Thus, inquiry passes from mere empirical practice to theoretical self-knowledge by means of self-criticism’.15 To put it another way and link it back to Kant’s interchange with Woellner and our earlier discussion of the ends of the university raised by the Aberdeen manifesto, the philosophy faculty is indispensable because it is grounded in free inquiry (‘the essential and first condition of learning in general’,16 as Kant puts it), whereas the higher faculties are driven primarily by contingent notions of utility (as set by the prince or king or social conventions at any given time) or by deference to an uncritical acceptance of tradition. Kant goes so far as to say that the government cannot limit this activity of the philosophy faculty ‘without acting against its own proper and essential purpose’, no matter how irksome the challenging of heretofore accepted suppositions may be.17 The kind of conflict engendered in critically interrogating various claims of authority is entirely legitimate for Kant and should be seen to be so by governments, because it is essentially a matter for scholars who enjoy a form of equality in their commitment to the free play of reason that others with direct political, economic or social responsibilities do not. What Kant does is thus to centre our focus on conflicts between the higher and lower faculties and between state duties and scholarly work. The ‘legal’ conflicts described above are guided by procedure, as opposed to any predetermined desired outcome, and in this respect stand in stark contrast to

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the imposition of pre-set ends by managerial regimes. Conflicts become illegitimate when, instead of submitting to the tribunal of reason and relevant normative conceptions of how the university relates to the state, they either are not appropriate for public scrutiny or are resolved by force, deception or dogmatism. The former Kant deems ‘illegal by reason of matter’, the latter by ‘reason of form’.18 If, for example, the medical faculty is only willing to accept rationales that are drawn from existing standards and regulations, then they are attempting illegitimately to settle the conflict by establishing the criteria for participation in the conflict’s resolution from one side alone. Something analogous is going on when evaluations of quality in both teaching and research (and the downstream decisions of funding and hiring) are set by accountability regimes and overseen by the line and performance managers named in the Aberdeen manifesto. Notice that in either case, the aim is removal of the conflict by imposing some sort of one-sided standard – whereas in legitimate conflicts the outcome is guided by norms widely accepted amongst the university community. Much of this should sound familiar to readers of Kant, with the background distinction between heteronomy and autonomy guiding his division of academic labour between higher and lower faculties as well as his commitment to public reason. Illegitimate conflicts can be seen as akin to the ‘supposed right to lie’ in his moral philosophy insofar as prosecuting these conflicts exclusively on the heteronomous forms of authority guiding the higher faculties will lead to anarchy and undercut the very conditions for establishing law or a governable public culture. The significant addition here is that Kant imagines a new kind of governmental configuration that depends in some significant sense on the work of the philosophy faculty and the conflicts it initiates through the free play of reason, thus linking these internal divisions in the working of the university to broader questions of legitimacy. ‘It could well happen’, he writes, ‘that the last would be the first’, and the lower faculty would assume a pre-eminent role ‘not, indeed, in authority, but in counselling the authority (the government)’.19 As David Evans has noted, Kant’s anatomy of the University has both empirical and normative dimensions. It sets out schematically the main divisions of academic work and it also explains why there is a deep basis in human social nature to require that matters have to be ordered this way.20

Towards the end of the preface, Kant lays out his rationale for this ordering: The choice of a wise government has fallen upon an enlightened statesman who has, not a one-sided predilection for a special branch of science (theology), but the vocation, the talent, and the will to promote broad interests of the entire

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scholastic profession and who will, accordingly, secure progress of culture in the field of the sciences against any new invasions of obscurantism.21

The philosophy faculty will never have the heteronomous authority or content that the higher faculties have, but its unique work helps rethink the ‘paternalistic purpose’ of the state by aiding the progressive unfolding of autonomous, rational behaviour in more spheres of life and warding off the drift into sclerotic, dogmatic thought and policy. It also sets the cultural agenda within the university, inviting criticism in such a way that the various sources of conflict do not become destabilizing but rather are generative for furthering the scholarly enterprise in all its various branches. There is much else to say about Kant’s book, but I have spent some time focussing on the conflict aspect of The Conflict of the Faculties because I believe it has special relevance to the Aberdeen manifesto and movements animated by similar concerns. Kant offers a set of conceptual resources for thinking about whence authority for different kinds of work in the university derives, and then how this work relates to broader political, economic and cultural concerns. This gives it a critical purchase in mediating the fault lines explored earlier, and during times of ‘crisis’ can help bring blind spots into focus, whether for movements like that at Aberdeen that might be tempted to retreat to the university’s civic/humanist mission or for managers pressed by the dictates of efficiency and productivity. Moreover, Kant shifts our attention away from definitional struggles about the true nature and purpose of universities and has us examine the conditions under which crises and conflicts are produced. Many of the crises explored in the preceding chapters are overdetermined insofar as they present an either/ or, whether this consists in dedicating oneself to a single normative idea about the university or in asserting priority claims to allocate resources. What is gained by focussing on the crisis claim itself is an opportunity to unfold the conditions that produce the crisis and avoid being diverted by the disjunctive logic of many current debates. CRISIS, CRITIQUE AND THE NECESSITY OF CONFLICT It would go against the spirit of this book to proffer Kant’s vision of the university as the ideal from which we’ve deviated and towards which we must return if we are to resolve our current crisis. He is, albeit in important ways, just one voice in the associative palette I have been presenting throughout these chapters and which I hope may be constructive in helping people work through whatever philosophical or practical concerns they bring to the university. Moreover, his conception of the state and his faith in reason is quite remote from our contemporary reality. However, at specific times and for

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specific reasons some voices are likely to have more resonance than others. Derrida, for example, turned to Kant in the 1970s and 1980s to address frontal attacks on the teaching of philosophy by then French minister of education René Haby.22 It was not just Kant’s elevation of philosophy’s role in both the university and the state that inspired Derrida and his companions in Greph (Le Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement Philosophique),23 but also what he takes to be the heart The Conflict of the Faculties, namely the interrogative and iterative return to first principles and foundational questions. This pushes us beyond the immediate framing of ‘the crisis’ and initiates fundamental questions about the enabling conditions that give rise to such a designation – and for which its embrace of conflict is a springboard. Liberal democratic societies are a long way from the ‘royal censorship’ that Kant faced in the form of Woellner and the Prussian authorities. Rather, for Derrida the problem arises when the unacceptability of a discourse, the noncertificaiton of a research project, the illegitimacy of a course offering are declared by evaluative actions: studying such evaluations is, it seems to me, one of the tasks most indispensable to the exercise of academic responsibility, most urgent for the maintenance of its dignity.24

Being able to identify and stage a proper (i.e. legal) discourse about these evaluations is here explicitly named as a central task of the university. And as we can see in the Aberdeen manifesto as well as in other many voices we’ve encountered, from Weber to protesting students, the potential loss of one’s dignity is a powerful motivator to take up this responsibility that Derrida sees as emerging from Kant’s vision for the university. The central question I have been pursuing is this: What form is most amenable to fulfilling this responsibility in times of proliferating ‘crises’? The argument marshalled by the managers pitched against Aberdeen faculty and students is that prior forms of academic organization were no longer up to the task, and in times where the state is no longer flooding universities with financial and human capital at high levels, but nevertheless is still looking to universities to fulfil a set of civic and economic goals, then more efficient and enlightened organizational and management principles are needed. To recall Jeffrey J. Williams, we are looking at the consequences of a new kind of state formation, in which ‘the state has been reconfigured from a welfare state to a neoliberal state that offers few social services’.25 When this particular state formation is accepted it issues the depoliticization of points of conflict in the name of efficiency, or – in the hope of recouping dwindling sources of public support – pursuing ‘excellence’ both at home and sometimes abroad in global campuses or international ranking tables.

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One central contention of this book is that defences of the university cannot elide these broader conditions, and in this sense the ‘crisis’ claim is not something to run away from. It is, as both Derrida and Kant infer, an opportunity to retrieve its earlier cognate of critique. At the same time, it is also a useful way of staging very large questions of priorities (e.g. how universities should or should not be integrally related to emergent models of the economy and the state). It is on this point that movements such as that at Aberdeen may generatively reconstruct Kant’s work by insisting on the essential relationship between legitimate decision-making authority within the university and reason’s bearing on the proper functioning of the state. As things are today, managerial ideologies have shifted the terms of debate towards the kind of heteronomous ends that Kant thought could function effectively only if subjected to the autonomous work of reason conducted in the philosophy faculty. Moreover, these heteronomous ends are now intimately tied to a state form (the neoliberal state, the austerity state, the managerial state) which finds itself enmeshed in its own set of legitimation crises. This exercise will obviously yield different results from Kant’s. However, I believe his approach remains centrally relevant for three important reasons. The first takes its departure from the distinction between a legal and an illegal conflict. As Chad Wellmon nicely puts it, Kant imagined an ideal university whose unity was grounded not in the medieval guild of the universitas magistrorum et scholarium or in the political ends of the state but in the constant feud among the university’s faculties, which a critical philosophy would ensure never ended. With its constant and rigorous questioning of the grounds of knowledge, the philosophy faculty would guarantee the university its legitimacy and authority.26

As opposed to managerialism, which sees conflict as something to be managed and a threat to measuring up to Key Performance Indicators, Kant sees conflict as an essential component to the progressive unfolding of a conception of reason that has not deteriorated into purely instrumental reason.27 The second reason is that this particular charge of an illegal conflict can illuminate a powerful critique of managerialism as well as other ideologies driving current crises in the university. There are clearly many reasons to detest the intrusion of external actors in university life that bring their noxious ideological commitment in tow,28 but a very important one is that managers cannot even be said to serve the legitimate ‘paternalistic’ interests of the state as the higher faculties could once claim. When the higher faculties resolved conflicts ‘illegally’ by virtue of matter, they thereby installed their sources of legitimacy (the Bible, the legal code or medical regulations) as the sole

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arbiters of a dispute, thus delimiting acceptable vocabulary and methods to their own domain. When resolving conflicts ‘illegally’ by virtue of form, they might still have been making an implicit claim that the legitimate ends of the state that they serve trump the free play of reason and therefore can be excused, as often happens when some sort of emergency is proclaimed. Kant provides resources to criticize both of these, namely through disinterested reason. When line and performance managers threaten to withdraw monetary support from faculty and departments if they do not conform to performance standards, they are arguably resolving a conflict of their own making ‘illegally’ by virtue of form – that is to say, through reverting to force. By reducing ‘social behaviors to measurable units’29 as David Lea nicely put it, managerialism advocates are also ‘illegally’ resolving conflicts by virtue of matter – that is to say, through determining what framings of issues are permissible in public debate. We saw an example in Hugo Sonnenschein’s tenure at the University of Chicago. In both cases, however, there is no robust interest of the state or a broader public to which one is accountable and responsible undergirding these conflicts; and no statutory text which would reflect such an interest and provide a heteronomous source of authority. Thus, by adopting a broadly Kantian framing, one that brings with it a particular conception of academic freedom, movements like Aberdeen’s can at a minimum shift the onus of justification onto advocates of managerial culture to articulate their own conception of state interest and the university’s role therein. I think this is a more specific and potentially effective form of ‘rediscover[ing] the civic purpose of the university as a necessary component of the constitution of a democratic society’, as the manifesto calls for. This is because it conceives of the state not as something static but rather as dependent on the perpetuation of conflict and the nurturing of institutional and communicative standards for their legitimate resolution. In Kantian fashion the discussion would serve both a clarifying and a critical service to the current debate over the relationship between universities and the public interest, one involving a whole range of matters, from those more traditionally attached to teaching and learning to economic questions about just pay and workplace democracy. The third – and perhaps most important – reason why movements such as that at Aberdeen might find it helpful to adopt a Kantian framework turns on the various inversions at play in The Conflict of the Faculties. At the heart of Kant’s inversion of the lower and higher faculties is a concern for institutional reproduction maintaining a functional role for ‘an enlightened government, which is releasing the human spirit from its chains and deserves all the more willing obedience because of the freedom it allows’.30 The progressive unfolding of reason, institutionally protected by a university guided by the

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autonomous work of the philosophy faculty, benefitted the state by producing critical – but obedient – republican subjects capable of exercising their civic function and ensuring that wise consul was being provided by those in charge of training scientists, researchers, doctors, the clergy or legal professionals. This is not to overload universities with a function that clearly outstrips their capacity: no institution can claim to be the sole protector of both reason and the enlightened state without entering dangerous political territory. It is rather to provide a template for university work that has institutional reproduction at its core instead of hanging such work on shifting heteronomous ends, increasingly defined by some measure of economic efficiency or justifiable returns on investment. What is arguably most disturbing for movements like that at Aberdeen is the abandonment of this concern for institutional reproduction. Managerialism envisions more efficient allocation of resources within and between universities, or a smoother transition between the classroom and the workforce for students. Regarding the former ambition, it suffices to note that resource allocation is in large measure dependent on a prior discussion of values and purposes, for which Kant’s inversion of the faculties provides the conditions under which a legitimating account could be articulated – whereas managerialism simply suppresses such discussion. As for the latter ambition, as Stefan Collini sardonically notes, efficiently shuttling students into careers that are meant to be fulfilling ‘will only work as long as we can prevent students from coming into contact with any half-way probing ideas about the nature of human desire’.31 Again, a discussion of values and purposes is suppressed. The critical spirit animating the Kantian university might, however, provide the occasion for different values, purposes and perspectives to clash without seeking ultimate closure. In the rhetoric of the Aberdeen movement, we can see a call for a fullthroated discussion of the responsibility of the university that incorporates these questions of legal conflict and of institutional reproduction. I have suggested that a reading of Kant can help initiate some important reflections on the freedom that universities require in order to fulfil their public responsibilities and maintain their dignity. This is particularly important in addressing the cumulative conflicts discussed in chapters 4, 5 and 6. In other words, while Kant cannot address every source of conflict in the university, his work can help the Aberdeen and related movements make a priority claim and foreground issues of governance over more specific issues such as the adequate preparation of students for work, or the utility of research. By buttressing their claims with a well-articulated account of university organization in relation to the state, instead of ceding conceptual ground to current state forms, these movements might prove to have downstream effects that better address the conditions driving the current talk of crisis.

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HOW TO SPEAK OF THE UNIVERSITY TODAY There is something of a millenarian temporality to crisis, which perhaps harbours the early passages in the Septuagint about the Last Judgement. When it comes to the university, there is a sense that crises mark a point of no return, an end to some particular project that can no longer sustain itself. Such is the idea behind Bill Readings reaching for an architectural type, the ruin, to argue that the modern university has outlived the purpose that gave rise to its material and organizational form. If we grant this characterization, then the ruin asks us to imagine a different kind of academic community, ‘a community of dissensus that presupposes nothing in common, would not be dedicated either to the project of a full self-understanding (autonomy) or to a communicational consensus as to the nature of its unity’.32 The goal is rather ‘to make [the community’s] heteronomy, its differences, more complex’.33 This book began with considerations of the ways in which the Covid pandemic has brought to the surface a set of acute crises that many see as permanently endangering the university if not resolved as quickly as possible. Indeed, the university seems inextricably bound up with what the economic historian Adam Tooze has called ‘polycrisis’, in which ‘the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts’.34 There are two typical responses to this millenarian temporality or to the bewilderment that comes with a polycrisis. The first is to reassert some normative ‘idea of the university’, usually drawn from the past, as a mechanism to either reorient discussions and activities out of a truer sense of mission or to at least clarify what will be lost if the crisis is not adequately resolved. The second is to accept the crisis and take it as an opportunity radically to shift our understanding of the university, perhaps in the service of bringing it into line with current realities (e.g. the digital university, the university in the Anthropocene, the global university, etc.). This might at least help us all regain a sense of agency. Both of these impulses will be disappointed with dissensus or, as we saw in chapter 2, calls for discussion emanating from what was supposedly the radical edge of the student movement occupying the managerial heart of the university. Crisis, going back to its origins in medical and political discourse, is the point where discussion is meant to end and a decisive assertion of agency is required. In most cases, this will involve the resolution of definitional questions about what is essential for the well-being of any given institution, rather than discursively oriented calls that focus on process and the resistance of closure. But it does not seem incidental that the first impulse of frustrated students, faculty and staff at Aberdeen was to get together and discuss their situation, and, especially, around the four pillars that spoke to so many of their deepest

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attachments to the university.35 Indeed, one of the most frustrating aspects of university life today is the routinization of language, from the legalistic nature of a class syllabus, the formulaic and flattening descriptions of research required by managerial overseers, or even nostalgic defences of the humanistic and civic tradition. There is something of Arendt’s admonition to ‘think what we are doing’36 in these calls for discussion, holding out the possibility that discourse could either enliven suppressed ethical considerations or give rise to genuinely novel ways to imagine communities anew. My contention throughout this book is that lingering on the theme of crisis instead of leaping towards its resolution is a propitious terrain for such discussions. We can return to where we began with Derrida’s odd question: ‘How not to speak, today, of the university?’ Trying to dodge or evacuate the complexity of issues like managerialism or others we have discussed is not a rewarding way to speak about the university in this time of crisis. But if we turn the question around we can point to some important general themes. Following the discussion of Kant and Aberdeen, universities should feel it within their purview to have something to say about the political, cultural and economic conditions in which they operate, and to say it in the critical mode that Kant puts forward. As discussed earlier in the chapter, universities have mechanisms to address epistemic anxieties by institutionalizing processes for handling legitimate conflicts, whether in Kant’s exemplary Philosophy faculty or Weber’s plain intellectual integrity. Moreover, as universities become bound up in various forms of state capture, whether in becoming centres of credentialization or in warehousing larger portions of the nation’s youth (as in the post-war period in the United States and the present in the UK), they become exemplary sites for clarification, critique and – potentially – the reconstruction of models of sovereignty. Again, there are productive ways this can occur, requiring careful discussion of historical, economic and political conditions. The suggestion is thus not nostalgically to yearn for a return to particular conceptions of the state or broader social formations but to participate meaningfully in whatever is going to emerge in a time of ‘crisis’. My hope is that in retrieving a history that turns on deep conflicts and cleavages, those still committed to the university can press the case for its enduring centrality. Moreover, to hold that the university is uniquely positioned in having to justify its centrality when its failures are so inextricably bound with dynamics external to it should temper much of today’s talk of ‘crisis’. As this chapter suggests, partisans of the university should feel emboldened to ask for legitimating accounts from the institutional and ideological drivers of such crises, and should such accounts prove unsatisfactory to take this as an opportunity to engage in the kinds of creative reconstruction and critical evaluation that has served the university so well throughout its crisis-ridden history.

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NOTES 1. See Abbie Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” Viewpoint Magazine, January 19, 2022, https://viewpointmag​.com​/2022​/01​/19​/abolitionist​-university​-studies​-an​ -invitation/, accessed May 8, 2023; Sara C. Motta, Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning (London: Routledge, 2018), 25–42. 2. Reclaiming Our University, “Launching the Campaign,” https://rec​laim​ ingo​urun​iversity​.wordpress​.com​/2016​/03​/16​/launching​-the​-campaign/, accessed May 8, 2023. 3. The full manifesto can be found here: https://rec​ laim​ ingo​ urun​ iversity​ .files​ .wordpress​.com​/2016​/10​/reclaiming​-manifestofinal​.pdf, accessed May 8, 2023. See Tim Ingold, “How Scholars at one UK Institution are Reclaiming Their University,” Times Higher Education, March 21, 2017, https://www​.tim​eshi​gher​education​.com​/ blog​/how​-scholars​-one​-uk​-institution​-are​-reclaiming​-their​-university, accessed May 8, 2023. For the Danish context see Asger Sørensen, “Conflicting Ideas of the University: A Case of Neo-liberalism and New Public Management in Northern Europe,” Paideutika 11, no. 21 (2015): 129–139. 4. Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §2. 5. Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §3. 6. Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §15. 7. Reclaiming our University, “Launching the Campaign.” 8. Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §4. 9. Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §34. 10. For an example of a similar movement in the Netherlands, see William Halffman and Hans Radder, “The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University,” Minerva 53 (2015): 168–187. Christopher Newfield, a leading figure in ‘Critical University Studies’ in the United States, has run the website ‘Remaking the University’, which has served as a clearinghouse of articulating and proposing actions to counter the ‘crisis of the university’ in California, which as we saw in chapter 3 has a prized place in American higher education. See http://utotherescue​ .blogspot​.com/, accessed May 8, 2023. 11. Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 123–150. 12. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 11. 13. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 35. 14. Ibid. 15. Readings, University in Ruins, 57. 16. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. 45. 17. Ibid. 18. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. 47. 19. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 59. 20. David Evans, “The Conflict of the Faculties and the Knowledge Industry: Kant’s Diagnosis, in His Time and Ours,” Philosophy 83 (2008): 487. 21. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 21.

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22. The so-called ‘Report Haby’ introduced concrete measures such as a reduction in the amount of philosophy teaching positions nationally and marked what Greph saw as a ‘de facto destruction of the teaching of philosophy’ in favor of the sciences and vocational training. See Jan Plug, “Translator’s Foreword,” in Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University, ed., trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), x. 23. ‘Founded in 1974, Greph conducted research on philosophy and its teaching and became engaged in concerted struggles to restrict the teaching of philosophy in French schools’. Jan Plug, “Translator’s Note,” in Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?, ed., trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), ix. 24. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason,” Eyes of the University, ed., trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 144–145. 25. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” 71. 26. Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 151. 27. Moreover, it is hard, at least at the moment, to find alternative institutions that might plausibly fill this role, particularly as the constitution of publics is captured and colonized by the deforming influences of private interest, whether as a consequence of media consolidation or even something as material as the shrinking of public space in many cities. See Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriate of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (London: Verso, 2019) for an account that traces this drive to privatization in from Thatcherism to the present. For a classic account of this see David Harvey’s “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 57/8 (2008): 23–40. 28. See Collini, Speaking of Universities, 36–60. 29. David Lea, “The Managerial University and the Decline of Modern Thought,” 833. 30. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 9. 31. Collini, Speaking of Universities, 107. 32. Readings, The University in Ruins, 190. 33. Ibid. 34. Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis,” The Financial Times, October 28, 2022, https://www​.ft​.com​/content​/498398e7​-11b1​-494b​-9cd3​ -6d669dc3de33, accessed May 8, 2023. 35. As a reminder, these four pillars were: Freedom, Trust, Education and Community. 36. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 5.

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Index

Note: Page locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. academic capitalism. See capitalism academic freedom, 94 academic governance, 95–99. See also administration; managerialism/ management culture academic labour, 119–21 academic start-up, 69–70 administration, 93–105; growth, 102–3; Kantian framing, 134–39; management vs., 94–95; positions, 94, 103; taxonomy, 96–99. See also managerialism/management culture administrative bloat, 103 Adorno, Theodor, 39–40, 52n4 Akademia, 19 Althoff, Frederic, 79 American Association of University Professors, 119 Americanization, 79, 81, 87–88 American Model, 49, 62, 63 Anderson, Elizabeth, 118, 124n37 area studies, 84–85 Arendt, Hannah, 27, 39–40, 45, 64, 140 Aristotle, 21, 24 Arnold, Matthew, 5 Authentica Habita, 20

authority, 59, 60; external sources, 60; heteronomous, 133–34; structure, 60–61 Axtell, James, 78, 95 Bacon, Francis, 60 Barrow, Clyde, 111 Bayh-Dole Act, 114 Berlin, Isaiah, 85 Bildung, 18, 24–26, 29, 31, 36n30, 39, 40, 43, 109, 130 Bousquet, Marc, 103–4 Bowen, William, 119–20 Brexit, 86 British universities: zero-hours contracts, 14n8 Bromwich, David, 98, 105 Brown, Roger, 117–18 Brown University, 120–21 Bush, Vannevar, 25, 69, 71, 98 Calhoun, Craig, 69 California Master Plan (CMP), 46, 49, 65 capitalism, 103–4, 115; rent-seeking, 112; structural problems, 49 Carnegie Corporation, 84 153

154

Index

Carter, Jimmy, 66 Central European University, 88 The Challenge of Establishing Worldclass Universities (World Bank), 82 Charles University in Prague, 77 Chronicle of Higher Education, 4, 58 citizenship. See world citizenship civic model, 80 civic training, 22–24 Cold War, 45, 46, 64, 84, 85 Cole, Jonathan, 114 Collini, Stefan, 80, 94, 95, 97, 100, 110, 122, 138 ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future,’ 48, 51, 54n41, 87 Conant, James Bryant, 23 Conflict of the Faculties (Kant), 6, 12, 118, 122, 128, 131–34 conflicts: legal and illegal, 131–34; necessity, 134–39 corporations, 112–15; culture, 113– 14; eleemosynary, 113; internal improvement, 113; protecting, 113; public vs. private, 113 COVID-19 pandemic, 1–3, 33, 86–87, 139 crisis, 6–8; contextual meanings of, 7; legitimation. See legitimation; as leverage point, 8–9; understanding of, 7–8 crisis, university in, 1–2; Derrida’s question, 4–5; history, 9–13; Kant’s vision, 134–39; legitimation. See legitimation crisis; managerialism. See managerialism; overview, 9–13; protectionist barrier, 4, 5, 33, 51, 88, 122, 128; revolutionary, 17–18 culture: corporations, 113–14; nationstates, 68; students, 43–44; two, 63–65 culture warriors, 66–67, 70

Deep Springs, 104 Delanty, Gerard, 104 Delbanco, Andrew, 2, 4 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 33, 51, 109, 122, 135, 136, 140 digital learning technologies, 2–3 disciplinary research, 24–25, 57, 65 disciplines, crisis within, 57–71; American Model, 62, 63; competition-based programs, 70; Fichte on, 62; Habermas on, 61; impact factors, 67–68; Kant on, 60–61; knowledge function, 68–71; Prussian Model, 62, 63; scientism, 71; Snow on, 63–65, 66, 68, 71, 72n22; Sokal on, 58; two cultures, 63–65; Weber on, 62, 63, 67–68 disenchantment, 67 dissensus, 87 division of labour, 97

Dartmouth College, 113 deans, 97, 105 decomposition of faculty, 103–4

faculty, 3, 59–60; autonomy, 98–99; decomposition, 103–4; division between, 57; Kantian framing,

economic and educational rationales, 109–22 education: Arendt on, 39. See also higher education Education City Stadium, 81–82, 90n24 The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, 17 eleemosynary corporation, 113 Eliot, Charles, 26, 27 Ely, Richard T., 116, 118 endowments, 2, 94, 110, 115, 123n8, 124n26 Enlightenment, 7, 23, 24, 43, 46, 60, 67–68, 131. See also legitimation crisis Erasmus Programme, 86 European universities: disciplinary research, 24–25; of Middle Ages, 20–21; spread, 77–78 evaluative schemes, 67–68

Index

131–39; philosophy, 131–34; professional authority, 99; scholarly societies, 63; unionization campaigns, 120–21. See also disciplines, crisis within Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 25, 29, 43, 44, 62, 71, 96, 105 Fisher, Mark, 110 Ford Foundation, 84 free speech, 3 Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, 80, 102 General Education in a Free Society, 23 German Mandarins, 29–32 Germany/German universities, 4, 79; crisis of, 29–32; Lehrfreiheit, 98; Technische Hochschule, 26, 27, 115 The Gig University, 103 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 78–81, 86 Ginsberg, Benjamin, 95, 103 global campuses, 76, 81–86 globalization, 81, 82, 84, 87 Global South student politics, 52n7 global vs. local, 75–88 graduate student workers, 119–21 Great Books, 122n4 great debate, 30 The Great University Gamble (McGettigan), 2 Greph (Le Groupe de Recherche sur l’Enseignement Philosophique), 135, 142n22–23 guild system, 98 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 61 Haby, René, 135 Harper, William Rainey, 23, 28, 96, 105, 109 Haskins, Charles Homer, 24, 52n8 heteronomous authority, 133–34 higher education: COVID-19 and, 1–3; globalization, 81, 82, 84, 87; inequality in, 2; public disinvestment, 2, 3

155

The Higher Learning in America (Hutchins), 109–10 Hobbes, Thomas, 7 House of Wisdom, 19 humanistic enclave, 19–22 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 24, 29, 40, 51, 57, 62, 85 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 109–10, 122n4 The Idea of a University (Newman), 21–22 ideas of university, 18–27, 75, 76; civic training, 22–24; crisis, 27–29; disciplinary research, 24–25; humanistic enclave, 19–22; vocational training, 26–27 illegal and legal conflicts, 131–34 Indira Gandhi National Open University, 16n44 inequality in higher education, 2 Jagiellonian University in Krakow, 77 Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 35n20, 39, 43–44 Johns Hopkins University, 78–81; graduate programme, 79 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 12, 25, 57, 60–61, 112, 118, 122, 130–40; on religion, 131; Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 61, 131 Kerr, Clark, 9, 11, 28, 45–47, 63, 64, 67–69 Key Performance Indicators, 100 knowledge (function, production, and dissemination), 25, 57–71, 85, 101– 2; delegitimization, 65–67; pluralistic conception, 64; political economy, 84–85. See also disciplines, crisis within knowledge century, 82, 83, 95 knowledge economy, 59 Koselleck, Reinhart, 6–8, 10 Kuhn, Thomas, 100–101

156

Index

land-grant institutions, 80 Leavis, F. R., 64 legal and illegal conflicts, 131–34 legal authority, 98, 99 legitimation crisis, 8, 41, 49, 58, 59, 66–68, 76, 95, 100, 104, 105, 111, 116, 119, 120, 136 Lehrfreiheit, 98 line management, 94 literary intellectuals, 63–64 London Review of Books, 3 Looser, Tom, 76, 83, 85–87, 93, 94 Lyotard, Jean-François, 67, 68 MacIntrye, Alasdair, 104 Madrasas, 19–20 managerialism/management culture, 5–6, 10, 93, 99, 127–40; allocation of resources, 138; downstream effects, 100; efficiency-obsessed discourse, 11; Kant’s vision, 134–39; New Public Management (NPM), 95, 99–102, 105, 117. See also administration managerial ranks, 97–98 Mandarins. See German Mandarins Marcuse, Herbert, 52n4 Marginson, Simon, 87, 99, 101 marketization, 110, 114 marketization of higher education, 110 Martin, Reinhold, 83–84, 113, 114 Marx, Karl, 17, 18, 53n23 Masschelein, Jan, 88 McCarthy, Charles, 116 McClelland, Charles, 25, 43 McGettigan, Andrew, 2, 13–14n5, 16n41 medieval university, 59, 77 Meister, Bob, 54n41 Middle Ages, 20–21 millenarian temporality to crisis, 139 Minerva University, 17–18, 22, 24, 26, 27, 33, 34n2, 76 Morrill Act(s), 80, 115 multiversity, 63 Muthesius, Stefan, 98, 107n18

nationalism, 62, 69, 86 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 120–21 National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), 125n44 nation-states, 43, 77–78; culture, 68; as protectionist barrier, 88 Newfield, Christopher, 50, 65–67, 111 New Left, 47, 50, 53n23, 120 Newman, John Henry, 18, 21–22, 24, 26, 39, 85, 109 New Public Management (NPM), 95, 99–102, 105, 117 normal science, 101 Novum Organum (Bacon), 60 Obama, Barack, 7 online teaching, 2–3 Oracle Bones, 19 Orban, Victor, 88 Oxbridge model, 21, 22, 27, 49, 78, 80 performance management, 94 PhDs, 63, 79, 100, 110, 121 philanthropy, 16n45 philosophy faculty, 131–34 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 21 polycrisis, 139 polytechnicization, 27, 80 polytechnics, 27 Port Huron Statement, 46–48, 50–51, 53n23 Power, Michael, 68, 100 president/presidency, 96 Preston, David, 67–68, 100 ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils’ (Derrida), 4 Private Government (Anderson), 118 private reason, 131 professional authority, 98–99 professoriate, 98 protectionist barrier, 4, 5, 33, 51, 88, 122, 128 protests, students, 45–50

Index

provosts, 96–97 Prussian Model, 62, 63 public disinvestment in higher education, 2, 3 public reason, 131 Qatar, 81–83, 87, 93 quadrivium, 21, 59 racial inequalities, 3 radical-creative imagination, 101 Rancière, Jacques, 87 Readings, Bill, 62, 68, 74n43, 83, 87, 139 rectors, 96 religious denomination, 78 Renaissance Humanism, 18, 21, 23, 60 Report Haby, 142n22 Research Assessment Exercise, 99 Research Excellence Framework (REF), 67–68 research university, 49, 57, 58, 68–69, 78, 100, 105 responsibility, 86–87; market model and, 87 Ringer, Fritz, 29–32, 36n30, 62 Robbins Report, 24, 35n27 Roitman, Janet, 8, 9, 65, 75 Roosevelt, Theodor, 116 Rorty, Richard, 64 Ross, Andrew, 90n20 Ross, Kristin, 54n30, 54n34 Royal Society, 60 Ruge, Arnold, 7–8 Sahlins, Marshall, 110, 111, 115, 123n8 Said, Edward, 88 Schaar, Johnathan, 46–47 scholarly societies, 63 Science, The Endless Frontier (Bush), 25 ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Weber), 67 science/scientific enterprise, 60–65, 67, 71; research, 100–101 scientific management, 99

157

scientism, 71 scientists, 63–64 Sexton, John, 82, 84, 86, 93–95 sexual assault, 52n7 Smith, Adam, 107n22 Snow, C. P., 63–66, 68, 71, 72n22 Sokal, Alan, 58 Sonnenschein, Hugo, 110, 111, 137 Special Economic Zones (SEZ), 83 Stanford, Leland, 89n8 Stanford University, 114 state institutions, 93 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 100–101 student debt crisis, 3 student movements, 4, 11–12 student personnel services, 98 students, 39–51; culture, 43–44; Global South politics, 52n7; political conflict, 41; protests, 45–50; strikes and riots, 42; tensions, 41–45; unionization campaigns, 120–21; workers, 119–21 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 53n23 Tappen, Henry, 29, 79 tax-exempt status, 115 Taylor, Charles, 104 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 99 Taylor, Mark, 70–71 Teaching Assistants Association, 120 Technische Hochschule, 26, 27, 115 technology transfer, 114 temporary contracts, 119 Times Higher Education, 4, 77 Title IX, 52n7 Tooze, Adam, 139 ‘town and gown,’ 42 Trivium, 20, 59 Trump, Donald, 121 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 113 tuition fees, 2 two cultures, 63–65

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Index

UK Research Excellence Framework, 99–100 unionization campaigns, 120–21 United Kingdom (UK), 11, 86; COVID19, 86, 87; funding model, 2, 86; governments, 2; marketization, 110, 114; Polytechnics, 27; red brick and plate glass, 24 universities: COVID-19, 1–3, 33, 86–87, 139; endowment. See endowments; expenditure-perstudent, 2; rent-seeking behaviour, 115; tax-exempt status, 115 Universities in the Capitalist State (Barrow), 111 University and College Union (UCU), 125n40 University of Aberdeen, 12, 87, 112, 129–31; Reclaiming Our University, 127–31; Strategic Plan, 129 University of Berlin, 24–25, 29, 43, 57, 61, 76, 96 University of Bologna, 20, 76–77, 95 University of California, 48–49, 87, 102–3, 114, 120 University of Paris, 20, 41, 77 University of Pennsylvania, 91n42 University of South Carolina, 44 University of Virginia, 23; Academical Village, 44; system of electives, 43–44 University of Wisconsin, 111 Unmaking the Public University (Newfield), 65–66 US Department of Defense, 84 US Department of Education, 102 Uses of the University (Kerr), 45

US Supreme Court, 113; Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 113 van Hise, Charles, 116, 118 vocational training, 26–27 Walker, Scott, 117, 118 Warner, Marina, 3 WCU (World-class Universities), 82, 84 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 107n22 Weber, Max, 29–31, 33, 43, 62, 63, 67– 68, 79, 80, 87, 97–98, 115, 135, 140 Weber, Samuel, 36n30 Webster, Daniel, 122, 130 welfare provision, 119 Wellmon, Chad, 61, 105, 131, 136 Wheelock, Eleazar, 113 Williams, Jeffrey J., 19, 21–23, 27–28, 49–50, 57–58, 65, 135 ‘Wisconsin Idea,’ 115–19 Wissenschaft, 24, 25, 29–32, 36n30, 43, 57, 61–62, 64, 68, 69, 101, 116, 130 ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (Weber), 30 Woellner, Johann Christoph von, 61, 131, 132, 135 workforce needs, 117–19 workplace democracy, 118, 121, 124n37, 137 World Bank, 16n45, 82, 84, 86, 91n47 world citizenship, 76, 83, 85–86 World Cup (FIFA), 81–82 World War II, 23, 30, 63, 76, 114 Yale University, 103 zero-hours contracts, 14n8, 119, 121

About the Author

Michael Schapira works at the intersection of philosophy and education, with a particular focus on the theoretical and historical foundations of the modern university. He has taught in universities in the United States, Canada and Russia, but also has a keen interest in teaching philosophy at the precollege level.

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