I think there are three or four versions of the university and these can be distinguished in terms of their ultimate goals and purposes. So, the university has at various times aimed to promote pure research (from the late 19th c. onward); it has been animated by the deeply humanistic impulse to foster cultural understanding and individual awareness (sometimes this has been about the appearance of culture, as in the production of the gentleman who is supposed to administer the empire or his-and it is usually men we're talking about here-personal assets); it has been about civic engagement, making better citizens. There is the older, religiously-inspired goal of hooking up academic scholarship with religious functions (the training of the clergy). The disinterested pursuit of truth may have resulted in religion and thought eventually going their own ways (K. Minogue).
In recent times there's been another transformation and it is determined by the imperatives of the 'knowledge economy'. The neo-liberal university is useful to the extent that it can help people get better jobs, promote economically useful research and boost economic growth. Attending this development has been the growth of a business mentality, accounting and management practices, a pathetic show of accountability and a transfer of power to administrators and bureaucrats. As the last bastion of resistance to capitalism, it was obvious the university had to be worked over. And the teachers were not just passive witnesses to this change but in some sense active participants in it. Gamesmanship and one-upmanship, pettiness and political maneuvering taken to the next level.
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Science as the only mode of knowledge and experience. Other, older forms of experience must be denigrated as either useless or untrue. The practical experience of doctors, judges, nurses, teachers doesn't really count. An individual's own personal experience cannot be a source of knowledge, a way of knowing(far too crude and unsystematic). The whole body of inherited and transmitted knowledge that is the arts: poetry, music, paining cannot be allowed to count (mere aesthetics and therefore irrational, unverifiable). Tradition and religion, too, are mere remnants of faulty ways of approaching reality. No, it's scientific analysis or it's nothing.
In recent times there's been another transformation and it is determined by the imperatives of the 'knowledge economy'. The neo-liberal university is useful to the extent that it can help people get better jobs, promote economically useful research and boost economic growth. Attending this development has been the growth of a business mentality, accounting and management practices, a pathetic show of accountability and a transfer of power to administrators and bureaucrats. As the last bastion of resistance to capitalism, it was obvious the university had to be worked over. And the teachers were not just passive witnesses to this change but in some sense active participants in it. Gamesmanship and one-upmanship, pettiness and political maneuvering taken to the next level.
~~
Science as the only mode of knowledge and experience. Other, older forms of experience must be denigrated as either useless or untrue. The practical experience of doctors, judges, nurses, teachers doesn't really count. An individual's own personal experience cannot be a source of knowledge, a way of knowing(far too crude and unsystematic). The whole body of inherited and transmitted knowledge that is the arts: poetry, music, paining cannot be allowed to count (mere aesthetics and therefore irrational, unverifiable). Tradition and religion, too, are mere remnants of faulty ways of approaching reality. No, it's scientific analysis or it's nothing.
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