Alan Gilbert challenges some heretical ideas about universities
[ UniNews Vol. 12, No. 19
20 October - 3 November 2003 ]
Delivering the recent 2003 Robert Menzies Oration on Higher Education Some Heretical Ideas About Universities University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Gilbert, warned that the values traditionally placed on knowledge for its own sake may be abandoned, along with the idea of universities as civilising institutions. Professor Gilbert said that these previously non-negotiable elements are now being called into question by a series of heretical ideas about universities. These include the single mission heresy that all universities should undertake a significant level of research and the idea that the only proper way to fund universities is through public funding. If left unchallenged, these heresies could make higher education more expensive and more narrowly focused, and could leave universities increasingly unsustainable financially without making them any more inequitable socially. But Professor Gilbert made his major attack on the heretical idea of the exclusively instrumental university which threatens to rob humankind of the subtle and formative civilising influences through which, historically, universities have sustained and enriched fragile civil societies. That, he stressed, would be an incalculable evil. In the following excerpts from the Oration, Professor Gilbert outlines some of his concerns about these heretical ideas about universities.
The single mission university
The heresy of the single mission, by pressing all universities to be research universities, and by implying that institutions not undertaking a defined minimum of research activity cannot be regarded as proper universities, creates a number of serious problems.
Firstly, pursued in a dogmatic fashion, the single mission model will undoubtedly stultify pedagogic and institutional innovation in higher education. Inexorable pressures to develop a research profile oblige otherwise good teaching universities to divert scarce resources into a costly and often forlorn pursuit of research credentials. Insistence on a research criterion also rules out the development of new kinds of teaching only universities that may be needed urgently. Taken to its logical conclusion, the MCEETYA* approach would prevent the emergence in Australia of the kinds of high quality on-line providers that modern societies seem certain to need, but that for very good reasons will almost certainly need to concentrate on teaching rather than research. The successful Phoenix University in the United States, for example, could not be recognised in an Australian higher education system shaped by MCEETYA. Nor could the burgeoning of corporate universities in America and elsewhere. More than 2000 such universities have emerged over the past few decades to meet an evident need for highly-focused executive education, training and skills upgrading for people already in the workforce. Australia might not wish to adopt the model exactly, but under the MCEETYA Guidelines a comparable institutional flexibility could not even be contemplated.
Secondly, a single mission approach is uniquely expensive. Around the world, much higher participation rates and increasingly diverse educational and training needs are creating wide-spectrum higher education systems incorporating a range of multiple mission universities. In deciding that the idea of a research university, dating back only to the 19th century, should be mandatory, Australian policy makers are opting for the most expensive of solutions at a time when funding levels in Australian universities fall well short of those in most leading industrial countries.
Public funding = pristine
The notion that the pristine idea of a university is realised only in universities totally dependent on public funding is a dangerous policy premise. The assumption is that public funding alone is free from corrupting influences associated with the power of the purse. The argument is that he (or she) who pays the piper calls the tune except, curiously, when Government is the paymaster. Sponsorship, benign in its public form, undermines the very legitimacy of the idea of a university in the case of funding by private, and especially commercial sponsors.
None of us should be surprised that those providing higher education funding wish from time to time to call the tune. But having been a vice-chancellor for 13 years, it occurs to me that only the most astonishing innocence could allow anyone to believe that government funding flows to universities without either strings attached or far-reaching policy interventions. The truth is that all funding entails a danger of undue influence. The immense importance that universities have placed historically on high levels of institutional autonomy is a measure of their determination to ensure that no patron, whether a medieval prince, a modern state or a profit-driven corporation sponsoring research, is ever able to compromise the integrity of academia or the independence of research.
The irony is that government paymasters are usually the most demanding of all sponsors when it comes to trying to call the tune in the academy. Indeed, as public funding declines in proportion to total funding, governments have in recent decades tried to increase, not relax, their control over universities, often in ways that would be comic were they not so potentially serious. The establishment of highly prescriptive quality assurance procedures and agencies has, for example, accompanied the steady decline in real funding levels in many jurisdictions. A government no longer able to fund quality at competitive levels, often succumbs to the Quixotic alternative of mandating quality outcomes usually, and perversely, with a threat to reduce funding levels further in the event of poor outcomes.
Public universities are also liable to be pressured by governments to comply with public policy objectives that have no specifically educational relevance. Thus in the contemporary Australian higher education debate, universities have been warned that to be eligible for a share of $404 million a significant tranche of funding foreshadowed under the proposed Nelson reforms they will have to give all new staff the option of individual contracts that would override any current Enterprise Agreement negotiated with the National Tertiary Education Union, or other unions. In addition, they must not encourage union membership, whether by distributing membership forms to new staff, paying the salaries of full-time union staff or providing unions with rent-free premises. These may or may not be worthy objectives, depending on an individuals view of industrial relations, but they certainly represent a blunt use of the Commonwealths funding powers to micro-manage Australian universities.
At a more political level, too, governments sometimes expect to call the tune. As a vice-chancellor in Australia, I have had to resist threatened government interference in academic appointments or calls by ministers to discipline academics for making inconvenient public critiques of government policy. In Australia, fortunately, a vice-chancellor backed by a resolute University Council, readily holds the line in such cases. But far more sinister and systematic political interference characterised the sad history of 20th century universities in totalitarian and dictatorial regimes. Historical and contemporary experience indicates that governments, far from being unimpeachable, are actually more likely than any other paymaster to want to call the tune. The principles of institutional autonomy and academic freedom have enduring validity in relation to all paymasters, whether students, corporations, private donors or governments.
The instrumental university
Is there a danger of the idea of a 21st century university being pared down to a narrower, instrumental core of no-nonsense professional education, increasingly targeted research, efficient research training and well-articulated technology transfer functions? There are certainly some straws in the winds of change that suggest so. The instrumental focus on wealth creation is what excites politicians about higher education. The public policy settings that governments favour all value universities essentially for their contributions to applied science and technology, for their role as producers of human capital, and for their value as sources of the basic intellectual property required for innovation and commercialisation in a knowledge economy. Policy references to education as a humane, liberal, civilising process are, by comparison, perfunctory.
Broadly speaking, two profound changes may be identified that threaten to turn modern universities into narrow, instrumental, utilitarian institutions. The first is the major economic transformation sometimes referred to as the rise of the knowledge economy. Robert Reich, Bill Clintons Secretary for Labor, has predicted in his seminal publication, The Work of Nations, that a knowledge economy will be dominated by symbolic analysts or (more colloquially) knowledge workers, who will make up around 40 per cent of the workforce in a mature knowledge economy. The capacity to train, retain and add value to knowledge workers, Reich emphasised, will be the single most important determinant of competitiveness and profitability for companies and nations in the 21st century.
Assuming he is right, the most fundamental infrastructure of a knowledge economy will be the communications infrastructure through which information is stored, disseminated, analysed and utilised, and the knowledge institutions that produce the scientists, technologists, economists, researchers and thinkers who create new knowledge and that educate and train sophisticated knowledge workers. Road networks, railways, airports and power stations will remain important, but the hallmarks of economic competitiveness will be the quality of the institutions through which societies ensure continuing access to knowledge and world class knowledge workers. The empires of the future, in Winston Churchills haunting words, will be empires of the mind.
In such empires, why should we entertain even the slightest doubt about the future of universities: knowledge institutions par excellence? Despite any number of short-term crises, the current prognosis is promising, to say the least. Demand for higher education is stronger, and more broadly based, than ever before, with participation rates at a historic high, and rising. Universities are increasingly valued as research institutions, especially in areas where commercial applications seem likely. In such circumstances, the idea of a university is surely reaching a sublime apotheosis.
Enduring characteristics
But while they will be cutting-edge research institutions providing sophisticated professional education and advanced training for knowledge workers, will the universities of the knowledge age actually be universities in the richest meaning of the idea? What of the other two enduring characteristics identified earlier in this analysis: the valuing of knowledge and inquiry for their own sake, and the civilising mission of sustaining well-founded civil societies? Will the idea of instrumental utility, by subverting those traditional elements, have reduced the idea of a university to a rudimentary utilitarian parody of its historic richness?
If so, the fault may lie partly within the academy itself. In the century that began, metaphorically, with the terrifying collapse of Manhattans twin towers on 11 September 2001, the world desperately needs powerful institutional leadership working for tolerance, understanding, social justice, human dignity and human rights. Yet universities seem to be losing the capacity, and even the will, to serve this great purpose.
This internal tendency towards a narrowing of the academic mind, at least in the Western academic tradition, had been explored by many great thinkers, from Ortega Y Gasset to the liberal-minded Bernard Shapiro, who in this Oration last year explored with regret what he called an abandonment by academics of
our obligation
to deal with our students explicitly and continuously about the ethical dimensions of knowledge. The concern is that, largely over the course of the 20th century, the intellectual and cultural verities at the heart of Western institutions, including universities, have been weakened by modern philosophical uncertainty and ideological dissonance. Universities in the Western tradition have become wonderfully adept at pushing back the scientific and technological boundaries of human knowledge and skill, but less willing, less confident and less able to offer students any coherent legitimation of the cultural, moral and philosophical underpinnings of Western civilisation.
These two trends technical and scientific virtuosity and philosophical uncertainty are obverse sides of the same cultural coin. In the century-and-a-half since John Henry Newman wrote about it, the idea of a university has been expurgated, for all practical purposes, by a loss of confidence in its once-dominant moral dimensions. There survives a nervous disposition in academic language towards the shifting norms of political correctness, but that is a pale shadow of the towering cultural confidence and responsibility of Jowett at Balliol or Eliot at Harvard. The ascendancy of epistemological and philosophical pluralism has left academic teachers uncertain about their capacity and unsure of their authority to go beyond questions of truth to the advocacy of values, or to try to inculcate civic virtues as well as useful knowledge. More recently, the vogue of post-modernism has only exacerbated this sense of intellectual anomie within the academy.
There are of course exceptions to such trends. I am proud to say that the University of Melbourne is taking seriously its moral and civic obligations to serve wider communities, in and beyond Australia, through a range of cultural, financial and educational programs and partner institutions. The truth nevertheless remains that the Western intellectual community, including those members of it who teach undergraduates in good universities, sit loose to the idea that they have a responsibility for training citizens. More comfortable with value-free definitions of their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and researchers, when they do range beyond these narrow professional boundaries into social commentary, they speak more often as iconoclasts, critics and prophets of despair than as confident advocates of particular moral or philosophical positions.
At a philosophical level, the essence of the heresy of instrumental utility is materialistic. It is predicated on the assumption that tackling material needs, solving economic problems, securing economic growth, will solve problems of cultural alienation by ameliorating economic deprivation. But will material improvement alone create stable, just, humane civil societies? Will globalisation, driven by the explosion of knowledge in First World economies, become an antidote to chronic poverty in the rest of the world? These truths are not self-evident. Material well-being may reduce the incidence of gratuitous violence in a society, and it certainly makes people materialistic, but is it demonstrably effective in creating generosity of spirit, global vision, empathy with the less privileged, tolerance of diversity or a genuine commitment to human rights? At a national level, the wealthiest societies often seem complacent rather than humanitarian; defensive of their privileged inheritance rather than aware of the moral and practical case for the eradication of world poverty.
So let me cut to the chase. Only the most debilitating heresy, I believe, could encourage universities to give less priority to the ethical dimension of higher education than at any other time over the last 900 years. How effectively does a modern university education encourage students to think about the values, assumptions and expectations that will shape the personal moral universes in which they live as 21st century citizens? Or have universities settled for producing wonderfully competent, narrow, instrumental knowledge workers?
As always, there is an alternative view. Marx may have been right. Perhaps the beliefs, expectations, symbols, norms, values, knowledge, pseudo-knowledge and rhetoric through which humankind shapes and expresses understanding of the world, are themselves merely reflections of fundamentally deeper realities dictated by economic systems and material culture. Perhaps all that really matters in the end is who owns and controls and has access to material goods and satisfactions and the health, security and material comfort that accompanies them.
But is it valid? Humankind would be taking a stupendous risk to count on so facile a social theory. Civilised norms, humane values and respect for human rights are undermined, I suspect, by cultural alienation as well as by economic deprivation. It is not either the cultural or the material dimension of human life that is profoundly formative; both are. If that is so, then the key challenge for the 21st century university will be to bring to those deprived of them not only the manifold economic benefits of sophisticated modern technologies and innovations, but also the civilising power of broad, liberal, humane values, and the intellectual excitement of truth for its own sake.
What a costly irony it will be if universities, inheritors of a great civilising mission to promote critical inquiry, encourage original critiques of conventional wisdom and embrace moral seriousness, end up producing the great idiot savants of history, sophisticated barbarians possessing terrifying power and knowledge, yet bereft of the guiding values and wisdom to use their stewardship prudently, wisely and justly.
The full 2003 Robert Menzies Oration on Higher Education by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Gilbert, is available at: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/speeches
*Ministerial Council of Employment, Edu-cation, Training and Youth Affairs
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