Thinking and Rethinking the University

The selected works of Ronald Barnett

Ronald Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317665250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international scholars compile career-long selections of what they judge to be among their finest pieces so the world has access to them in a single manageable volume. Readers are able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field.

Over more than three decades, Professor Ronald Barnett has acquired a distinctive position as a leading philosopher of the university and higher education, and this volume brings together 15 of his key writings, particularly papers from leading journals. This volume also includes, as his introductory chapter, an intellectual autobiography, in which Professor Barnett recounts the history of his scholarship and writing, traces its development across five stages, and identifies the themes and sources of inspiration that lie within his corpus of work.

Ronald Barnett has described his corpus of work as a social philosophy of the university that is at once conceptual, critical, practical and imaginative. His concepts of criticality, critical interdisciplinarity, supercomplexity and the ecological university have been taken up in the literature across the world. Through telling examples, and with an incisive clarity of writing, Ronald Barnett's scholarship has helped to illuminate in fresh ways and reorient practices in the university and in higher education. The chapters in this volume reveal all of these qualities so making this volume a compelling overview of a passionate and yet constructive critic of the university.

Part I The university

Chapter 1 Supercomplexity and the university

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768045-2

(from Social Epistemology, 1998, 12 (1) 43–50)

Outline

We are in the presence both of the knowledge society and of the end of knowledge; the university has become the home of the expert and yet, in the knowledge society, knowledge is distributed throughout society; postmodernism forbids us from claiming access to universal values but the university still has a role to play in upholding cognitive standards. In short, there are grave contradictions facing any attempt to legitimise the university. Can these contradictions be overcome or dissolved? If not, can a stance towards them be found that will offer some stability?

Introduction

Four questions arise from the apparent contradictions in this chapter’s outline. First, are these apparent contradictions real? Second, should we be concerned about them or should we just live with them? Third, if concern is an appropriate response, can these contradictions be dissolved? Fourth, are these contradictions connected and, if so, is there a single general strategy or stance that we might take up so as seriously to address them in toto? I shall take these four questions in turn.

Real or apparent contradictions?

The contradictions identified in the outline above are real if we take them to be real. They arise from a disjunction between the ideals that have been successively invested in the Western university and the conditions in which the university finds itself today.

The ideals, have—in different eras since the medieval foundation of the university—invoked notions of service, trust, knowledge, understandings, expertise, enlightenment, personal development and citizenship. Not far from this forward value background have been other concepts such as democracy, community, enquiry, freedom and autonomy. Some concepts have tended to recede as others have become dominant; some have clearly overlapped with others; and, with the arrival of mass higher education, some concepts have been more fully taken up by some institutions than others. Nevertheless, this total value background—which we might crudely depict as one of enlightenment—has been undermined by the shifts accompanying the current positioning of the university.

The shifts are not of a piece and pull against each other. The mass university is faced both by the exigencies of modernity and postmodernity all at once. On the one hand, it is being called upon by the state to accede to the demands of technical reason both as an organization and in its internal educational and research processes. Performance indicators, managerial disciplines, skills, knowledge products, market penetration and economic regeneration: these are just a few of the characteristics that the university has acquired. What has largely been an example of the guild in operation has suddenly been required to take on the character of modernity (cf. Halsey, 1992). On the other hand, the university is not just exhibiting but may be one of the exemplars of postmodernity. Compression of time and space, globalization, detraditionalization, the switch from production to consumption, the arrival of post-Fordism and performativity: all these have their imprint on the contemporary university in different ways in all of its main activities (Scott, 1995).

The result of these structural changes—separate and even conflicting as they are—are that the value background of the Western university has been undermined (Barnett, 1990; Brecher et al., 1996). Research is judged by its use value: understanding among students gives way to performance; personal development yields to skill acquisition; the university as a community becomes the university as an organization; and truth recedes in favour of impact. The university is, rightly, felt to have been de-legitimized.

It is this de-legitimization of the Western university that gives rise to the contradictions apparent in its contemporary situation. The contradictions are only real if we wish to hang onto something of its historical value background. We are only concerned about the proliferation of sites of knowledge production if we believe that the university should be the key site of knowledge production. We are only concerned about the university becoming a site of the production of expertise if we believe that it should be a site of the development of general culture or Bildung or emancipation. We are only concerned about the value background of the university falling away in an age of ‘postmodernism’ if we believe that it should rest on an explicit value basis.

The angsts, therefore, that are arising over the Western university are an expression of a felt disjunction not just between what it has stood for and its contemporary situation. They are a symptom of a further disjunction between what it has now become and what it might yet or should yet still contain or offer. The ‘is’ and the ‘might’ or ‘ought’ of the contemporary Western university sit uneasily together. The difficulties arise because, despite the changes that have befallen the Western university, our hopes for it still to continue to offer something of its earlier value background of enlightenment, understanding and even of emancipation will not be extinguished easily. We continue to invest our hopes in the university even though our analyses shed a shadow over the retention of such ‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard, 1984).

Justifiable angst?

Gerard Delanty (2001) shows how difficult it is to free oneself of the value background of the Western university. How do we read this difficulty? Is it a logical failure, a failure scrupulously to carry through the analysis and to accept that the Western university is now delegitimized; and that’s an end to it? Or is this retention of the value background, the wish still to make sense of the new in the traditions of the old, an indication that the analysis has to be more subtle so as to allow both for the new and for the old; paradoxically for continuing values amidst the very loss of values?

I suggest that it is the second of these situations that faces us. However, to say that in turn raises further difficulties. How is it possible to hold both the old and the new together, without self-contradiction? How can it be plausibly maintained that there is nothing special about the university in the modern era (or, rather, postmodern era) and that there remains something special about it after all? However, that is the rescue operation that faces us.

The angst present in the paper has to be justified argumentatively if we are not to succumb to the counter-argument that the angst can be dissolved simply by demonstrating its outworn and outdated retention of a value framework that is past its sell-by-date. We have to come forward with an analysis of our contemporary times in which it is plausible to hold what may seem to be incommensurable readings of our situation. However, the angst also has to be justified persuasively. In the end, hanging onto a value framework can only be justified by a persuasive argument for those values.

That, then, is the dual challenge facing those who wish—as I do—to hold the apparently contradictory position both that the traditional value background of the Western university has been undermined and that it makes sense to hang onto it. The making sense has to have two components. It has to contain a sociology; it has to offer a reading of the situation in which the contemporary university finds itself and which can contain this apparently contradictory set of analyses. Also, it has to contain a philosophical viewpoint—as we might call it—which argues cogently for the value background. In turn, that argument will have to show both that the value background is worth retaining and that it is plausible to retain it in the present circumstances.

Dissolving contradictions

Two tempting courses of action for dissolving the contradictions inherent in any legitimation of the modern university have to be repudiated. The first is that of declaring in favour of a particular large story of the university while ruling others offside. Five large stories of the modern university present themselves, each of which is built around a separate constellation of dominant concepts.¹

First, the Western university has taken to itself a story built around the concepts of knowledge, truth and understanding. This is a relatively modern story but it is in trouble. The definitions of knowledge which the academy has developed are challenged from outside the academy: put alongside propositional knowledge are knowledge-in-use, tacit knowledge, action learning, experiential learning, process knowledge, ‘transferable skills’ and so forth. There are many knowledges² (‘McCarthy, 1996), and the academy is no longer in control of them. More, knowledge is being redefined such that high marks are now being given to the multitude of forms of knowing-how (Gokulsing and DaCosta, 1997).

However, in an age of performativity (Lyotard, 1984), knowledge as giving a secure insight into our world is being downvalued in favour of relationships with the world that take us forward pragmatically. In this situation, knowledge, truth and even understanding become outworn concepts. This is a constellation of concepts that spring from a relatively disengaged relationship of knower with the world. Now, knowing is active, engaged and pragmatic in character. Concerns over relativism, and the end of truth and knowledge are symptoms of the repositioning of our social epistemologies.

A second constellation of concepts that is also in trouble as an underpinning of the university are those of freedom, autonomy, liberation and emancipation. Admittedly, postmodernity may seem to endorse such concepts. If the only universal is that there are no universals, it would seem as if constraints, boundaries, and grounds for large responsibilities must be removed. However, whatever the theoretical possibilities that postmodernity seems to open out, this cluster of concepts is in trouble pragmatically.

States across the world are seeking to divest themselves of some of the responsibilities that they have taken unto themselves in relation to higher education. Both in terms of income generation and in terms of quality assurance, self-regulation is the name of the current game (Kells, 1992). Nevertheless, higher education remains a state apparatus (Althusser, 1971), the effects of which are felt on the autonomy of universities.

Some influences are direct. For example, while devolving responsibilities for quality assurance to institutions, such devolution takes place within ever-tighter national frameworks of quality assurance. Second, the financial envelope within which institutions operate is drawn ever-tighter, with student numbers in particular fields being determined. Third, governments—both individually and collectively (across Europe)—are seeking to develop a national or pan-national system of credit accumulation. Fourth, some governments are looking to influence teaching outcomes, encouraging work-based learning and even moves to inject competence-based teaching approaches.

Other curtailments of academic autonomy and freedom are more indirect. The most significant is the rise of the new managerialism (which comes in harder and softer forms (Trow, 1994)), which is an outcome of the complex and demanding external environment within which universities find themselves. Another indirect influence is found in the development of the student market. Intended partly as a direct curtailment of the power of the academics over the curriculum, it has also had the unintended consequence of limiting the students’ own curriculum space as they work within the limited horizon of their consumers’ expectations.

Quite apart, therefore, from the charge of a lurking grand narrative that can be levelled at the emancipatory conception of the university, it is in serious trouble pragmatically.

Yet other clusters of concepts have been called up in support of the modern university. One is the constellation of democracy, as we might term it, founded on such concepts as democracy, citizenship, equity, access and justice.³ The difficulty here is that this cluster is about means, not ends. It tells us that the university should not be in the business of exclusion. It does not tell us what business it should be in.

A fourth cluster of concepts underpinning the modern university is the constellation of production, as we might term it, which includes work, skill, the vocational and the economy. However, this won’t do either. Work cannot constitute the full ends of an educational process. In any event, work itself is changing: there is no activity that we can pin down under the heading of work.

A final cluster of concepts that is on offer to legitimate the modern university is the constellation of self, as it might be called. Personal development, personal fulfilment, and personal realization: in the Western tradition of the university (especially in England), these concepts continue to have a resonance. Indeed, we might say that a genuine higher learning calls for the injection of self into its epistemologies. Through their utterances, students are expected to give of themselves, to become themselves, to constitute themselves. However in a postmodern age, in which the self has been deconstructed, such a cluster of concepts has to be problematic.

The modern university, then, has been de-legitimized. None of its conceptual underpinnings offer it any serious support. Nor, it follows, can any of these past underpinnings be accorded priority over the others. We cannot declare ourselves in favour of any of them. Accordingly, we shall not overcome the contradictions before us by giving our allegiance to one while repudiating the others. All are in the dock together.

A second beguiling strategy for dissolving the contradictions has also been repudiated. It is that of attempting to hold all the conceptual clusters together in a coherent and coordinated formation. The difficulty here is quite simple: the conceptual constellations, both internally within themselves and collectively, contain competing if not incommensurable agendas. Within them reside agendas of technical reason and of dialogic reason, of production and of consumption, of critique and of reproduction, and of individualism and community. Such a multitude of competing agendas cannot be held coherently together with a straight face.

In short, the answer to the third question with which we started is that the contradictions before the university cannot be dissolved in any straightforward way. The university has to live with the contradictions within it and before it. Can we provide a new legitimation of the university which renders coherent such an apparently incoherent position?

The challenge of supercomplexity⁴

Recall the problem that we identified at the outset. It was that of the apparent paradox of the delegitimization of the modern university coexisting with a reluctance to disinvest of the key planks of the traditional value background. The Western university has ended but we still wish it to live on in ways that bear traces of its heritage.

To that analysis we have now added the further observations that the value background of the Western university is itself fractured. Even hanging onto the value background is itself fraught as a coherent project since the different elements within it pull against each other. The modern university turns out to be both paradoxical and incoherent at the same time.

The question we posed earlier still remains in its essentials. Should we can, can we, disinvest ourselves of the value background of the university—especially those elements oriented around the grand narratives of knowledge, emancipation and justice or should we simply accept that these grand narratives are symbols of a previous age? Instead, so the argument might run, we should surrender the university to agendas of performativity, of production and of consumption. In short, let the motto of the modern university be: seize the main chance.

Such a course of action—both as theory and as practice—should be eschewed. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of sources and permissions
• Introduction
• PART I The university
• PART II Higher education
• PART III Students and learning
• Appendix: key publications
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index