hi karl

I think we are tracking the issues similarly. In many ways you esposue the idealistic form of the Germanic university where the government basically drops money over the academic draw bridge and lets the university decide what it will study and what will be learned in a scholarly community. The problem as epitomized by US institutions, today is that both the university as admin and faculty and the university as a body of students are strongly influenced by the "king's shilling". Students don't come to play in an intellectual sandbox but seem willing to work through the maze to reach the prize, a college diploma and the faculty are caught in the equivalent of a roman colleseum where the powers which hold life and death of the academic have mandated that the faculty create a series of competition to decide who will survive and who will be kicked out into the cold- the pub/perish criteria for tenure. Neither students nor faculty are masters of their fate. The latter driven more by trying to find the path to a sinecure and the former a certificate to enter the next game. Both are paradigmatic examples of homo economicus and not homo intellectualicus.

I am not certain that, except for those who had their own wealth and could play scientist or philosopher, or those who were able to pirate a bit of resource for their passion, most were, like many of the teachers of the wealthy, trying to survive. Few willing to risk having to swallow hemlock or who were in the position to challenge those whoe gold defined what was wisdom. And so it is today in the academy.

I think the search for wisdom is probably worth the struggle. But the academy is not my place to beigin with the lamp of Diogenes

thoughts?

tom

tom abeles

From:  Karl Rogers <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To:  Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom <[log in to unmask]>
To:  [log in to unmask]
Subject:  Re: Conference, Journal & Virtual University
Date:  Sun, 29 Oct 2006 21:15:16 +0000

Tom,



Thanks. I am very sympathetic to the radical ideas and visions of the university movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But, I appreciate that fact, as Roger has pointed out, that certification is central to how universities have been set up in modern societies, as geared towards the job-market and careerism, and I imagine that the opposition to certification was a major contributing factor to the loss of interest in the idea of a free university based on learning for its own sake. However, I also think that there were political and economic interests that worked to undermine the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s because they were "bad for business" and the creation of the high level of conformity needed to produce a workforce. It is for this reason that I have been noting that the revolution in academia would entail a revolution in the political economy.



You said


"In recent times, faculty have chosen the equivalent of economic security in exchange for real decision making powers within the institution. In the US at grades K-12, the charter school movement gives parents and faculty control over a quasi public institution -but one bound by measures external to the school."



This is important. It is the imposition of these "measures external to the school" that actually prevent education being developed democratically through the participation of those who are directly involved in it. While I think that it is essential that parents and faculty democratically control the development of the school cirriculum, children should participate in the decisons regarding the development of their own education, as a guided part of their education. How can we expect to develop democratic citizenship when children are prevented from participating in any public decision making process until they reach the magic age
of 18 years old? Of course, at the university level, students, faculty, and the local community assembly should be "owners" of the institution and have the exclusive right to deciding the development of their university. It is essential for the revolution in academia and the development of a rational society that both the government and the market are decoupled from the development of education. Educational policy should be decentralised.



"Some faculty would see universities as quasi, cloistered, platonic republics, governed by academic wisdom when, in fact, the hand of the State, like a being of creation, hangs over these institution and real decisions rest in the hands of the accountants."



Indeed. And this treats universities as if they were a commercial service industry, geared towards the market, rather than institutions for internally directed towards the development of civic society and
wisdom.



"Universities certainly are not the places to find wisdom beyond, perhaps, that of a few gurus sitting at the top of some intellectual mountain within the walls."



Agreed. This is why I think that universities should create a space for wisdom to emerge and flourish, through free-association and speech, rather than by directly teaching what wisdom is. Thus the universities should be "internally directed" through direct participation by students and teachers, rather than external directed in accordance with the needs of the market or politico-economic ideology.



"I am afraid that the hopes of the intellectual neo-marxists on academic campuses are just that, hopes or dreams, ones which have the potential to follow the failed grand experiments as exemplified by the FSU or, more importantly, as Fukyama has admitted, the failed hopes of Democratic Capitalism."


I am not at all impressed with Fukyama's end of history thesis. Also I am also more sympathetic to anarcho-syndicalism (and other "grass-roots" approaches) than neo-marxism (which, in my view, still reproduces the top-down approach), but they do have commonality on many points. But, putting that aside, I agree with you up to a point. However, the failure of past efforts do not indicate that alternatives would also fail. It is not all that clear that the current market-model for universities (which is itself an ideology) is proving to be all that successful either. It seems to me that the market-privatisation movement of the 1980s and 1990s have been just as much a failure in education as were the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but for different reasons. This is why, after all the Thacher-Blair reforms, standards have been lowered in order to claim "improvements in standards", and we seem to be perpetually at the "back to basics"
level. When is it going to be "forward to advanced studies"?



I once wrote a seminar paper for a business school called "Failure is not optional!" in which I argued that experimentalism and innovation implicity involved failure, through trial and error processes of discovery and accommodation to emergent boundaries, resistances, and possibilities, and therefore it was essential not to suppress or penalise it.



All organisation enterprises, including institutionalised education, are inherently experimental, given that we do not know all their parameters and consequences, in an open-ended, complex, and changing world, and we are simply not in a position to be able to certain that any alternative experiments would fail, just as we cannot be sure that the current status quo is being successful.



Hence, critical enagement with education is central alongside the "internal"
freedom for students, faculty, and parents to decide how education should be developed. Thus, all education facilities should be the public property of the municipality or city within which they are situated and government should be constitutionally prevented from intervening beyond making sure that access to good education is universal, but the decision about what qualifies as "good education" should be a democratic decision by those who are directly participating in its development at a local level.



Karl.

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