Sharon Rider

Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market

Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market : The Breakdown of Scientific Thought

Higher Heteronomy: Thinking through Modern University Education

This chapter addresses certain presuppositions which, the author argues, undergird the Bologna process. These epistemological assumptions are considered in light of the theoretical and practical arguments concerning the legitimate aims and appropriate means to achieve them that were made in conjunction with the founding and expansion of the modern research university. In particular, this chapter focuses on the Enlightenment idea that the aim of higher education is primarily to cultivate the capacity for autonomous judgment. This ideal is then compared to the tools implemented in accordance with the Bologna Process, which explicitly aim at standardization, measurability, and predictability of both process and product (“outcomes”). In particular, the term “expected outcomes” and related notions are examined, and it is demonstrated that these indicate a shift of focus from training in a discipline as necessary for the capacity for judgment, to the form, where subject matter is conceived as extraneous to the achievement of desired outcomes (“skills” and “competencies”). This chapter argues that the Bologna model undermines the goals of liberal education by training students not to exercise independent judgment but to follow blindly formal protocols.

Truth, Democracy and the Mission of the University

Modern liberal democracies invest great hopes and resources under the heading of “higher education”: along with their role as motors of national economic growth, employability and technical innovation, universities are expected to inculcate and promote equality, tolerance, social and environmental awareness and democratic values. “Higher education” is to lay the foundations for a shared sense of civic responsibility, democratic ideals and active citizenship. Mill’s” On Liberty” opens with an epigraph from Humboldt’s Sphere and Duties of Government: “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” In this essay, the relationship between higher education and liberalism as a political philosophy is examined in terms of this “essential importance of human development”. With that aim, I consider the role of the university as what Arendt called “an institution of truth” as necessary for the perpetuation of a liberal (democratic) form of life, and connect it to what Ortega y Gasset described as “the mission of the university”. The viability of the institutions in and through which we negotiate, establish and communicate “truth” is today an acute political question.

Language and Mathematical Formation

Inspired by a certain reading of Wittgenstein , especially his notion of rule-following , this paper sketches an outline of an idea of elementary mathematics (arithmetic and basic geometry) as an intrinsic part of intellectual formation, or Bildung . In particular, I argue that we need to distinguish between mathematics as an activity and mathematics as a body of knowledge, where it is the first mentioned that is primary for the character of thinking. My claim is threefold: (i) The development of the capacity to think mathematically, together with the ability to read, write and speak one’s native tongue with clarity and precision, ought to be the primary aims of primary and secondary schooling; (ii) At this basic level, the capacity to think mathematically is inseparable from the capacity to reason in general and should be seen as an essential part of the latter; (iii) These two claims, if correct, have profound consequences for how we ought to think about the form and content of teaching .

Critical Theory as Metatheory of Education

Critical theory of education can be understood as essentially a specific kind of philosophical project, in which the question of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge is taken as at once conceptual and social. Whereas pedagogy or educational theory focuses on the actual acquisition of knowledge and inculcation of certain desired or desirable dispositions (i.e., the conditions for teaching and learning), a philosophical or “critical” project is to examine the conditions of possibility for such a systematic knowledge as that which educational theories claim for themselves. In other words, the aim is to examine the very premises upon which educational theory and practice are based. While educational theories, however abstract, belong broadly to the empirical sciences and, more specifically, the social sciences, the critical project is “metatheoretical,” to the extent that it addresses the very principles that constitute any theory of education as a science or program of systematic study. Critical theory of education goes beyond the practical disciplines concerned with methods for achieving particular aims (such as psychological theories, for instance) and seeks theoretical grounding in a thorough critique of the tacit assumptions, aims, and methods of all educational ideals and practices. This tradition of ideology critique, stemming from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, addresses the function of teaching and learning as consequent upon the social nature of the ostensible knowledge, understanding, and/or dispositions that are to be attained. All the data assembled and interpreted in empirical social science must be critically theorized. The strict methodologies and regulated experiments of empirical study of social phenomena can never replace critical reflection, for the simple reason that all observation already assumes a theoretical framework, itself the result of certain historical conditions, which can and ought to be made explicit, critiqued, and normatively assessed, that is, evaluated from the perspective of human agency and emancipation. In this respect, “critical theory” is always already “metatheoretical” in the sense that it is theorizing about theory as much as of practice. Behaviorist theoretical frameworks for the study of education, for instance, and the models issuing from them, which have long exercised a powerful influence on the curriculum field, were in part adapted from Taylorism (the scientific management movement of the 1920s). The task of critical theory here then would be to subject behaviorism as both theory and a practice to critical reflective analysis.

Conclusion: On the Verge of Breakdown

The unifying theme of the contributions to this volume is a perceived transfiguration in higher education and research, which the authors and editors of this volume believe is related to markets and marketisation. The transformation of the global economy into an amorphous network transgressing national borders is the prime mover in the present reorganisation of ‘knowledge production’, which has the effect of undermining the legitimacy of the university as an essential component in the project of modernity. Whether or not the modern research university ever actually lived up to the aim of the disinterested and universal quest for knowledge for the common good without regard to partisan interests or political ambitions, this role was part and parcel of its self-understanding and its mission and as such was a cornerstone of its activities. On the one hand, the loss of that self-understanding can be seen as a loss of innocence, which we are better off without. The realisation that the university is no more unfettered than the rest of society can thus be regarded as a new realism and thus as inevitable if not beneficial. On the other hand, if the ideal of value-free (or at least value-neutral) science is disavowed in favour of the norm of science on demand, what will the consequences be? The choice seems to stand between research and teaching faculty actively arguing and fighting for the right to be non-partisan and universalist, in practice enacting the ideal of the democratic university, or we have to hope and trust that some contingent of individual scientists and teachers will continue to exercise scientific judgement and that these will constitute a large enough community to make a difference.

On Knowing How to Tell the Truth

This essay concerns the connection between our use of the language of truth and falsity, and the political and social conditions in which such terms have or make sense. I argue that the problem is that a picture has gotten hold of us in which social, ethnic, economic and other divisions encourage the thought that commonality in our way of life is a pernicious delusion, rather than a sine qua non for the choice to live and to continue living together. Important for this context is the division between what is often termed “educated elites” and “uneducated masses”, which suggests somehow a straightforward divide between intelligent, open and informed opinion and dogmatic, narrow-minded prejudice. Were the matter so simple, then the answer to the question, “how are we to reconstitute and sustain the polity for the future good of man and the world?” would be relatively straightforward. I suggest that it is not.

Post-truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity and Higher Education

This edited collection brings together international authors to discuss the meaning and purpose of higher education in a “post-truth” world. The editors and authors argue that notions such as “fact ...

Coercion by Necessity or Comprehensive Responsibility? Hannah Arendt on Vulnerability, Freedom and Education

Hannah Arendt is sometimes read as reserving the prerequisites and perquisites of genuine action to an elite. This is largely a misunderstanding. I propose a reading of Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays, Between Past and Future, as a coherent argument that might be characterized as a kind of phenomenological description of Bildung, understood not as private selfrealization but in the public and shared sense, as the vocation of being human, or rather, of achieving humanity. Arendt invites us to see formal education as an “institution of truth”. To bring this aspect to light, the paper first rehearses the salient points in Arendt’s argument in Between Past and Future, together with relevant forays into the Kantian context of practical philosophy which she takes as her starting point on certain fundamental points. In the second part, a number of changes in ideas about thinking, learning and judging which have both contributed to and been exacerbated by the massification, marketization, mediatization and juridification of culture and learning, are analyzed in light of Arendt’s understanding of what it means to be human.