Culture and the University

Education, Ecology, Design

Ronald Barnett, Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Rikke Toft Nørgård

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350193031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Not long ago, it was understood that universities and culture were intimately related. However, to a large extent, that understanding has faded. Culture and the University confronts this situation. Written by three leading scholars of higher education and the philosophy of higher education, the book opens the debate about the cultural purpose of universities and higher education. The authors argue that the university should be and can be an institution of culture, of great cultural significance in the digital age, and exercise cultural leadership in society. This wide-ranging and polemic text addresses a range of subjects including environmentalism, citizenship, post-truth, the ethical implications of technology and feminist philosophy. The authors build on the work of key philosophers of the university from Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger to Donna Haraway, Terry Eagleton and Martha C. Nussbaum to conceive of an entirely modern vision of the university. This is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the future of higher education and the university.

Part I

Warring Cultures and a Universal Culture

Ronald Barnett

1
The Cultural Crisis of the University

Introduction

In a recent edition of the Times Higher Education magazine, it is suggested that ‘The university provides a standardised cultural base through which . . . disease is recognized and addressed. It binds together events, separated by oceans and time zones, in Wuhan, Milan and the Bronx. It unites persons suffering [in isolation]. It provides the vocabulary, analyses and anticipated resolutions’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020; RB’s emphasis). The authors go on to claim that this role of the university – in extending ‘a global cultural canopy’ – is now at risk. Populism, a growing fear of strangers, a retreat to one’s nation and locality and a mistrust of experts and science cast a pall over such global pretensions. The ‘standardised cultural base’, which (for these writers) seemed, until quite recently, to be pervasive, and spreading ever widely across the globe – and in which the university has played a key part – is now in jeopardy; indeed, it may be lost irrevocably.

We have here a nice, if rather disquieting, entrée to our present explorations. At one time, perhaps until the mid-twentieth century, a connection between the university and the culture of the wider society was taken for granted. It was not so much to help the world to be more rational, for two world wars had shown where rationality might lead to. The trains would run on time but (literally) to which end? And with what value framework? More than reason as its watchword, many felt that it was a central role of the university to help the world to become more sensitive to life, and to have a care for life, and in all its forms.

Advocates of this viewpoint in the mid-twentieth century – such as Karl Jaspers (1946/60) in Germany, Ortega y Gasset (1946) in Spain and Walter Moberly (1949) in England – pitched their analyses and proposals often against a near-despairing sense of the world, already subject to technological threats. Culture in general was in jeopardy but they felt that university reform was possible and that an explicitly cultural role could be derived for higher education. As late as the 1960s, a major national report (in the UK) – the ‘Robbins Report’ – could argue, without embarrassment, that ‘the transmission of a common culture’ formed one of four aims of higher education (Robbins, 1963: 7). There was a common culture still dimly present, and it was a task of higher education to sustain it and even to further it.

Pleas for a tight connection between higher education and culture have long vanished. Even in the 1960s, voices were drawing attention to ‘the disenchantment of . . . culture with culture itself’ (Trilling, 1967). And, over past decades, we have been left on the one hand with dismal analyses of the situation in which the university is depicted, forlornly, as a value-free zone, and on the other hand with sociological analyses, which observe ways in which universities are replete with culture. Here, in this latter perspective, the accounts run in different directions. The university is depicted as tacitly embodying an elite or a closed – and perhaps even a colonialist – culture, largely inaccessible to the wider society and, paradoxically, is celebrated in being a site of many cultures – a multicultural site indeed. And now the university is warily observed to be a site even of antagonistic cultures, as culture wars play themselves out on campus.

Both as a matter of fact and as a matter of value, then, a strong association between the university and culture is problematic, if not completely outré. After all, culture has long been depicted as having been swept up into a culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944/89), and now turned into a ‘cultural political economy’ (Sum and Jessop, 2013). Culture as a resource for meaning in the world has been inverted by its acquiring an economic form. In turn, ‘cultural pessimism’ (Bennett, 2001), with us for over a century, has lapsed into cultural neglect, a lack of interest in culture as such. Against this background, is it possible for the university to help in advancing culture in the wider world? Could the juxtaposition – of ‘university’ and ‘culture’ – possess any substance in the twenty-first century? These are the questions before us in these first four chapters in this book.

The University as a Culture-Free Zone

In his influential book (1997), The University in Ruins, one of Bill Readings’ arguments was that culture has been evacuated (not his word) from the university: on his argument, the university had become a culture-free zone. Readings observed that the idea of culture was in difficulty, it having been associated with a dual unity – as a process of personal development and as a unity of knowledges (64) – both of which parts had foundered. That dissolution of the dual idea of culture lay in the further weakening of the link between higher education and the nation state, such that cultivation was defined ‘in primarily ethnic terms’ (69). The opera house did not need to put ‘no admission’ notices outside for its audiences were self-selecting.

At the same time as culture had become problematic, so the university had undergone a double shift. In the first place, a technological and bureaucratic society had seeped into the university. Universities had become corporations subject to nostrums of efficiency and had developed massive bureaucratic systems to monitor and to evaluate their own activities and even their own people. This shift was accompanied by national and even cross-national systems of audit and evaluation, the emergence of the empty tropes of ‘excellence’ – a particular target in Readings’ forlorn analysis – and then ‘world-class universities’ (Rider et al., 2020). In this techno-bureaucratic world, the very mention of culture became difficult for universities, not least as they became international and home to students of many cultures. Universities responded both by establishing programmes of cultural studies – at least, ‘culture’ could be analysed – and by celebrating themselves for their multicultural leanings. This was distinctly a small ‘c’ set of meanings of culture, cultures rather than Culture.

The upshot of all of this is that whereas, even fifty years ago, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘university’ were comfortably and often put together, now they no longer keep each other company in any strong sense. To draw on a concept of Rowan Williams (2003), universities could be said to be in a state of ‘cultural bereavement’.

A Culture-Free World?

That universities have, at best, an ambiguous relationship with culture is hardly surprising for this tension is to be seen in the wider world. The very expression ‘culture wars’ – which we shall come onto in the next chapter – is indicative of contemporary schisms evident in many societies, which can be traced to competing sets of cultural values. And these sets of cultural values – over abortion, gay rights, women’s rights, gender identity, national identity markers – are associated with heated arguments and even inflamed passions. Culture seems to be a matter of non-reason better reserved to the private sphere and not to be addressed in the public sphere. Far better to keep one’s cultural preferences to oneself, it seems.

We see here a playing out of Ernest Gellner’s analysis of culture. In his (1992) book, Reason and Culture, Gellner argued that reason and culture fell into opposed spheres of life. Descartes’s nostrum ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am’) secreted a distancing of the thinker from culture. It was the individual’s own thought processes that furnished a bedrock on which she or he could move through the world with confidence. Everything could reasonably be doubted – there seemed to be little firm ground on which to build a life – but the sheer fact that one could think and reason provided a measure of indubitability.

This amounted to an assault on culture in more than one sense. Culture brought nothing to the party, for modern man or woman could get along very well without it. Even more, modernity and civilization lay in reason, and culture was to be shunned as not amenable to reason. Culture invited only a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude. It was a matter of unarguable taste, not of reason. Moral philosophy in the twentieth century (at least in the analytic tradition) came to a similar conclusion. Cultural utterances were no more than emotional spasms and did not warrant serious attention as if they said anything about the world as such. To utter anything of any substance, one had to produce either analytical or verifiable statements, and, manifestly (Ayer, 1962), culture could generate neither. At best, the cultural sphere was a domain of mere collective opinion. It was a place in which humanity – in the traditions, practices and beliefs of its communities and their separate lifeworlds – wrapped itself up in itself, into a set of non-comprehending imaginaries (cf. Taylor, 2007). Culture held no lessons for humankind in general and could safely be given a wide berth.

Gellner, therefore, could have adopted a much more aggressive title for his book. It could have justly been entitled ‘Reason versus Culture’, for the two realms were embattled with each other. For some, culture provided just a hierarchy-sustaining gloss, conferred by social class, and reflecting questionable good manners and taste; for others, it offered a way of supplying purpose to life through society-wide traditions and lifeworlds. Either way, culture was not to be reasoned but was to be lived and felt. At best, it was an empty signifier, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’; at worst, a kind of cultural violence was not far away, in dogmatism, ideology and imposition.

Culture and the University, and Life Itself

The juxtaposition of ‘university’ and ‘culture’ has been hit, then, by a double tsunami. On the one hand, the idea of culture is in trouble in itself and, on the other hand, that discomfort is multiplied in the university through its own criticality – and its suspicions of a category such as ‘culture’ – and in virtue of its being host to an increasing array of cultures, in multiplying disciplinary cultures and in its public engagements. In the university, culture, it seems, can find a place only as an object of analysis and not of advocacy.

As intimated, there had been a thin line of thinkers who had bravely advocated an explicit role for the university not merely in sustaining culture but actually in advancing it. Perhaps the stand-out representative of that genre was that of Ortega y Gasset. Writing during the Second World War, Ortega – in his (1946/60) ‘Mission of the University’ – saw a world suffering from a crisis that was essentially a crisis of culture. ‘Culture’ was a key concept at the heart of Ortega’s philosophy: ‘Culture is what saves human life from being a mere disaster; it is what enables man [sic] to live a life’ (44). And, for Ortega, ‘Culture is the vital system of ideas of a period’ (44). That emphasis – the italicization of ‘vital’ – is Ortega’s, and its ambiguity is probably deliberate. The ideas in question were those that lay at the heart of a full life; and they were always in motion, having to be kept alive to both serve and lead ‘a period’.

And the university? For Ortega, ‘the contemporary university’ had greatly expanded ‘professional instruction’ and ‘the function of research’, but, in the process, ‘it ha[d] abandoned almost entirely the teaching or transmission of culture’. It is evident, he added, ‘that the change has been pernicious’ (Ortega y Gasset, 1946). And so, for Ortega, ‘it is imperative to set up once more, in the university, the teaching of culture, the system of vital ideas, which the age has attained’. By the system of vital ideas, Ortega had in mind ‘the great cultural disciplines’ in physics, biology, history, sociology and philosophy.

Ortega distinguished between an essential ‘synthesis’ of a discipline and its corresponding science. It was the former on which Ortega was keen, and he even looked to a ‘Faculty of Culture’ to bring these cultural disciplines together to form ‘the nucleus of the university and of the whole higher learning’. The synthesis was to be derived and a curriculum was to be forged on the basis of ‘a principle of economy’. In this way, knowledge was to be vitalized. The ‘mission of the university’ was nothing short of the formation of ‘a cultured person’ (73).

Thinking of this kind is now passé. Few read Ortega now, and those who do stand out (e.g. Giannakakis, 2020). That whole way of thinking, both of speaking of culture with a capital C as it were and of advocating the university as a major institution in sustaining it, is seldom to be seen. This is an extraordinary shift over the last half century or so. It is not so much that that mode of thinking has been explicitly debunked; rather, it has gradually fallen in desuetude. Subsequent to Ortega, there were one or two rear-guard actions of that ilk – for example, by F. R. Leavis (1969) in England and Bloom (1987) in the United States – but even then, in the 1960s–1980s, the cause was lost. It smacked not so much of elitism but of apartness, specialness and a questionable self-elevation. (F. R. Leavis fought for English to be at the centre of the university; but then he was a scholar of English.)

Pumping up the cultural powers of the university in this way exhibited an unacceptable haughtiness and self-grandeur. This sceptical stance received sociological backing, especially from Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990), in whose hands ‘cultural capital’ came to be seen as a powerful resource by which social classes could maintain their elevated position; and universities were seen as pivotal in this hierarchical process.

But the close association of the university and culture was not entirely over. Attention turned inward, the key idea being that the disciplines of academia secreted their own separate cultures (plural). The innovator here was Tony Becher with his (1989) book ‘Academic Tribes and Territories’, which, on the basis of interviews with academics, showed that disciplines could be staked out in virtue of their location on two axes (hard-soft; pure-applied). For a while, that line of research led to more discrete studies into the cultures (plural) of disciplines (Becher and Trowler, 2001; Kreber, 2009), but it rather fell away. After all, it rather ducked key questions. It should have raised the matter of differential power among the disciplines. In particular, the place being assumed by the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines was becoming evident, even if the acronym was not then in use. The cultures of some disciplines could have been exposed as exerting more epistemic power than others (a forensic analysis of which we still await).

This situation poses challenges for teaching and for the university more widely. In relation to teaching, culture becomes an especially fraught category, no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Whatever Happened to the University for Culture?
• Part I Warring Cultures and a Universal Culture
• Part II Designing for Cultural Places
• Part III Within and beyond Culture
• Part IV Dialogical Imaginings
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• Copyright