This Submission addresses one single question in relation to Theme 1 as identified in the information document supplied by the Secretariat of the Inquiry. Theme 1 concerns the role of higher education in Australian Society and Economy. In this Submission I want to challenge one pervasive assumption that exists in literature discussing Higher Education in Australia and else where in the Western world. That assumption is that Universities should be measured by the direct results that they produce and which contribute to the society usually considered in terms of a contribution to the commercial, industrial, material activity of that society.
Sometimes this is discussed in University literature as the "vocational role" of Universities. That role has always been present in Universities from the foundation of the University of Sydney in 1851, to the foundation of the most recent Universities in the Post Dawkin's era. The University of Sydney was established to provide useful knowledge and its early courses were clearly vocationally directed. The Murray Report sought to develop the tertiary sector in a similar direction in the Post-War technological context. However, that role has never been the whole story for the University of Sydney or for Australian Universities generally. That is, until recent years when a quantum change took place, reflected by, and encouraged by, the Dawkin's reforms. That quantum change has had the effect of so unbalancing the higher education system in this country, that it has become almost entirely vocationally directed. Thus, what justifies the Higher Education Sector now has become almost exclusively the degree to which it contributes to the economic and material welfare of Australian society. We have almost reached the point where it is not just the main reason why Universities are justified in our society, but almost the only reason why they are justified. The whole process of the corporatisation of the University Sector has aided this means of justifying the Universities in our society. Even the suggested areas identified in Theme 1 of the literature given to those wishing to make submissions to this inquiry move in that direction. While it is true the word "social" does remain in the questions there, the direction and overwhelming emphasis to which the Universities role is directed, is on the economic and technological functions and developments shaping Australian society.
I believe that the Committee should seriously consider how far this tendency is eroding something quite fundamental in our society which the institution of the University has stood for. Universities are the institutions conceived in Western civilisation for the purposes of giving expression to something about the quality of our human condition, a quality of inquisitiveness and of relationships in the process of learning. This quality which brought the Universities into existence in Western civilisation explains the continuing survival of the University of an institution. It has survived in such varied circumstances and in such varied forms that positional or pragmatic explanations do not seem to be adequate. There is something about the human condition which this institution has touched.
In other words the University as an institution in our civilisation serves the humanity of our society. That is something more fundamental to its vocation than its service to the economy or to the market. It is for that reason that the University as an institution has survived.
I believe the Committee of Inquiry ought to reflect upon the fact that since the inception of modern Universities in Western civilisation, there has come into institutional expression in the form of the University a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, namely, a desire to know and understand who we are and the way the world is. The University embodies something about what it is to be human and it embodies that within the context of particular societies. Universities, therefore, of course have always existed to serve the societies in which they were located, but the service which they render is something more profound and more enduring than simply providing apparatchiks for the current demands of the economy, the market place or industry.
When the University is given over to these other kind of purposes as is dramatically happening in our society as well as in other countries, then the University comes to share in the short-term authoritarian demands created by the economy. It is a kind of fundamentalist demand. The University however stands for something broader, something less monochrome, something more plural, something more interactive, something more dynamic, something fundamentally humane. It stands for a determined and inexhaustible inquiry as to who we are and the way the world is. It will of course properly demonstrate by its own internal life of inquiry and courteous argument, its commitment to that vocation. It is in this way that the University truly serves the society in which it is located.
If this supra-mundane vocation of the University for our civilisation and in our society is not given some significant support in the recommendations of this Committee, then not only is the long tradition of this element in the history of the University as an institution in Western civilisation endangered in our society, our society itself loses one of its most important institutional servants in maintaining a humane and civilised society.
In its deliberations on finance, I submit to the Committee, that it must take into account this part of the vocation and idea of the University seriously and fundamentally and give it place and priority in the recommendations which it makes about the future of our Universities. What is at stake is more than nuts and bolts, goods and services, what is at stake here is one of the most important institutions in our civilisation for the sustaining of humane values and ideals in our society.
Note: by way of support for this Submission I have included a copy of an article which I have written on this topic which develops a little more fully the point for which I am arguing.
Proceedings from a Symposium on the values underlying the transformation of the contemporary university.
Edited by
Jennifer Nevile
There is a good deal of talk these days about the obligation of universities to be of some direct service to society. The Dawkin's White paper speaks of national needs as defined, of course, by the government of the day. No doubt there are things which can be described as national needs, and no doubt we all ought to be contributing to the satisfaction of those needs. However the discourse about such national needs must surely be conducted at a better level that simply, that of the demands of the economy. I want to argue in this paper that the university serves a much more fundamental and enduring human and social need, and it does so by properly pursuing its vocation of inquisitiveness and understanding.[1] Furthermore 1 want to argue that the benefit that the university gives to society does not consist solely, or even principally, in the external goods which it produces, for example in the form of graduates or research results, but rather in the maintenance and promotion of a life of individual and social enquiry within the university itself.
I want to begin by referring to the broad cultural and philosophical analysis of the present situation of the university offered recently by Alasdair Maclntyre. In the final chapter of his Gifford Lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, MacIntyre attempts to re-conceive the institution of the university . He draws attention to the cultural changes in the last 100 years which have had an impact upon the university. He suggests that three great changes can be observed. First, "inquiry had become fragmented into independent, specialised and professional activities whose results could, so it seemed, find no place as parts in any whole."[2] Secondly, the public, who were the recipients and beneficiaries of such an education were increasingly disintegrated as an educated body of people. There was no cohering set of values and assumptions which held the educated public together. Thirdly, and increasingly, "moral and theological truth ceased to be recognised as objects of substantive inquiry and instead were relegated to the realm of privatised beliefs." [3]
Despite this disintegration within and without the university, the generalist unity of the old liberal tradition, was still felt in its very absence. In support of what MacIntyre here suggests one can notice the iconistic status that Newman has in much modern literature. MacIntyre suggests that the university, by its own practices, in the way in which it conducts its discourse has developed the capacity to dissolve antagonisms and, by that very process, to make itself culturally irrelevant. Universities are able to accommodate disagreement because the common ground, which is necessary for argument or conflict, has been diminished out of sight. Within the university system, debate is emasculated of any real conflict because there is no agreed value base to sustain serious an argument.
It is in that context, says Maclntyre, that recent attacks upon the university by external forces have found the universities so incapable of defending themselves effectively against those forces. Maclntyre argues that in the twentieth century liberalism, in the sense of radical individualism, has only served to accelerate these processes within the university. His proposal is that we re-conceive the university, ,,as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict." [4]
This analysis focuses the question on a very broad philosophical basis and serves to confirm the impact of the professionalisation of knowledge and the scientific culture within the university. However, I wish to suggest that while there is a very great deal to be said for MacIntyre's proposal about the re-conception of the university, we need to stand back from our own particular circumstances and ask why it is that the university has been such a hugely successful human institution. There may be a crisis this decade. There have been crises on many occasions before. But the university as a human institution has maintained an extraordinary record of adaptability and success. Why is that so? I suggest that it is because the university touches, in its activity and its vocation, something which is fundamental to our humanity.
The university has shown a capacity to respond to social, political and economic circumstances and to adapt itself so that it is able to survive, but the persistent theme in its survival has been the congregating of intelligent people for the purposes of learning and inquiry. Universities have, in general, attracted to their membership intelligent people. Because their very activities, as well as the results of their activities, have been seen to have a social benefit, they have regularly been allowed to congregate in universities by patrons as diverse as autocratic monarchs or elected governments. Some universities have come to hold strongly established positions and substantial assets of various kinds, which have given them some security. But the dynamism and endurance of the university as a social institution has persisted through times when none of these favourable circumstances have applied.
Indeed the university has survived in such varied circumstances and in such varied forms that positional or pragmatic explanations do not seem to be adequate. There is something about the human condition which this institution has touched. I suggest that the university has touched upon our character as an inquisitive species, with a desire to understand who we are and the way the world is.
Who we are, however, is both an individual and a social matter. Who we are socially is the link between the university as an institution and the society in which it is located. It is because we are social individuals that the university is a social event. It is because we are social individuals that the institution of the university is necessarily connected with the society within which it is located. The university, therefore, in my judgement as a social institution of inquiry and learning, serves its society by maintaining a vital aspect of our humanity. Furthermore, because the University serves a vital aspect of our humanity we can be confident that it will endure in human society in one form or another. Certainly it has changed in its particulars at various times, and at the present it reflects the current fashion for commercial corporatism. But the enduring character of the university as a social institution is that it arises from our inquisitiveness about who we are and the way the world is.
Not only is the university a social institution which touches our human condition and therefore is of enduring significance and importance, but it is also, and for the same reason, a community of values. The kinds of things that are undertaken in universities require for their successful completion, indeed even for their initial undertaking, certain important values of an ethical kind. There is the value given to inquisitiveness in the first place and the notion that we are actually seeking after some truth and understanding. In this collaborative exercise, high value is placed within the university on honesty, creativity, imagination, insight, articulation, respect for others, respect for their inquiry, respect for them as discussants and conversationalists. These are values of an ethical and moral kind upon which the very activity of the university depends.
The social values which operate in Academe are essential presuppositions for the activity of the university. Respect for others and for other groups of people, the civilised character of the argument which is conducted within the university, a pattern of interacting which is in the service of the inquiry after the truth are as necessary to the university's successful operation as a balanced budget. Indeed, the balanced set of accounts is only the facilitating prelude to the real work of the university.
The notion that as an academic I have a vocation of understanding and of learning which vocation 1 serve along with my colleagues in the university, has been an enduring theme these past 500 years in the institution of the university. It is undoubtedly the case that particular universities from time to time throughout history and in different places have failed to live up to the ideal of the tradition of which the particular university is a part. That does not invalidate the tradition. It simply stands as a warning to any academic and to any society that these institutions do not automatically succeed in fulfilling their vocations.
At the present time in western societies we are going through a huge transformation in relation to our institutions. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked many things, but amongst them it marked the final loss of the competition between the communist experiment in eastern Europe and the capitalist experiment in the west. Yet the future in a post cold-war world is fraught with uncertainty, and many commentators speak of it now as also a post capitalist world. [5]
Peter Drucker has recently claimed that a post capitalist society will be a society based on knowledge thought of as skill. This marks a shift from general knowledge to particular knowledge. Drucker says, "The shift from knowledge to knowledges has given knowledge the power to create a new society. But this society has to be structured on the basis of knowledge as something specialised, and of knowledge people as specialists." [6] Such a knowledge in a post capitalist knowledge society, he goes on to argue will be a society of organisations. An organisation, according to Drucker's analysis, is always specialised. It is defined by its task. "Society in all developed counties has become a society of organisations in which most, if not all, social tasks are being done in and by an organisation: the business enterprise and the labour union; the armed services and the hospital; schools and universities; a host of community services - some of them government agencies many more non profit institutions of the social sector."[7] Such a society, according to Drucker, is profoundly pluralistic. Such organisations exist only to produce results external to the organisation. It is when someone buys a product that a result is achieved.
I cannot rest as content with this prospect as Peter Drucker does. It is fundamentally important for the sake of our own humanity that there continue to exist in society institutions which, by their internal activities, serve and foster basic human qualities. Charities do this, so does the family and a host of other institutions, including the university. Universities do not just produce measurable products, such as graduands with skills of immediate use in the market place. The university is also an institution, a tradition, embodying the inquiring values of the human condition.
A similar misunderstanding appears in the Dawkin's White Paper in the contrast made between the traditions of the University and the economic reasons for change in the Higher Education system. The traditions are those of; "Freedom of inquiry and expression, intellectual rigour, a broad spectrum of teaching and research, and the preservation and development of a national culture and identity..."[8] The White Paper then went on to say that there were pressures to change. These had been described earlier in the document, mainly in economic terms. The contrast is therefore posed in the White Paper between traditions, which are regarded as inhibitions to change, and external forces, which demand change.
I want to suggest that change is only possible from within institutions which are tradition orientated.[9] The White Paper seems to envisage tradition as some past weight, a burden which is static and fixed. But the traditions to which the White Paper refers within the universities are not static, not a dead weight from the past. The traditions to which the White Paper refers as obstacles to change - Freedom of enquiry and expression, intellectual rigour and a broad spectrum of teaching and research - are in fact the heart and soul of the institution in its changing role within the host society.
Tradition ought to be thought of in more dynamic and creative terms. Tradition is a process of receiving from the past, values which are embodied in institutional arrangements. These values enable us to grapple with the present and change those institutions in terms of their fundamental vocation and values.
It is in this context that 1 want to say again that universities are institutions with a vocation to embody the fundamental human characteristic of inquisitiveness, of the drive to understand who we are and the way the world is. That inquisitiveness is inevitably a social activity and must necessarily involve dissent and disagreement. The university therefore is an institution of inquiry and courteous argument and it exists in this role for the service of society. By courteous argument I do not mean simply argument which is cast in gently polite phrases and body language. Rather I mean argument which is shaped by, and serves to promote, by its content and its form, the essentially ethical character of the vocation of the university. The University serves society by training people in this way, by demonstrating these qualities of inquiry and courteous argument in its life. By this very activity the university contributes, as part of society, to the human experience.
Let me try and summarise the argument so far. I suggested that from the inception of modern universities in western civilisation there has come into institutional expression in the form of the university a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, namely, a desire to know and to understand who we are and the way the world is. The university embodies something about what it is to be human and it embodies that within the context of particular societies. Universities therefore have always existed to serve the societies in which they were located.
The pressures facing Australian universities are not greatly different from those which faces universities in other countries in the western world. These pressures present a challenge which has to do with the nature of the university and its identity, its vocation and its values as an institution of western civilisation.
The most important task facing Australian universities is not the rebutting of the commercialisation of the universities. A more sensible commercial instinct would almost certainly be of service to the university. Rather, the most important challenge facing universities today is the rediscovery of the vitality of the university's essential identity and vocation, and the values which flow from that.
That re-discovery will necessarily involve interaction between the differing constituent parts within the university as well as between the university and the host society. Our identity will be shaped, forged, and given its particular profile by the dialogue which we have as universities with the society in which we are located. It is in this sense that universities should always be disputing, both in their own internal life, and in their relationship to the society in which they are located.
Structures to promote such a dialogue would be a very worthy claim on the resources of both the university and the society. Within Academe, the time has come to cease simple disagreement. Often such disagreement is kept behind the borders of our own particular discipline and as a consequence we are silent in the university and silent in the wider society. We should engage in argument and sustain that argument with courtesy and civility. In doing so we will bring out into the open the ethical basis of our life as a university. Structures which will provide opportunities for such argument should be a necessary part of every university's community life.
Since I am a university theologian , may I conclude with a reference to one of my famous predecessors in that role. At the end of the sixteenth century England was threatened with a great social upheaval. Puritans attacked the English church-state establishment with a theology and a polity which was revolutionary in character. In the end, this Puritanism enjoyed a triumph, but inevitably only a temporary one. Late in the sixteenth century a philosopher theologian, Richard Hooker, invited the Puritans to dispute. Hooker understood very clearly that public divisions of this kind ought properly to be disputed in the universities. "If the thing ye crave be no more than only leave to dispute openly about those matters that are in question, the schools and universities (for any thing I know) are open unto you. . ." ". . and the favour of proposing there in convenient sort whatsoever ye can object, (which thing myself have known then to grant of scholastical courtesy unto strangers) neither hath (as 1 think) nor ever will (1 presume) be denied you." (Hooker, Preface 5. 1) Hooker invited the Puritans to dispute fundamental issues of politics in the universities because the universities were public centres of courteous argument.
We have, of course, Puritans in our own day. Fundamentalists in the church, in the university and in politics. The university stands for something broader, something less monochrome, something more plural, something more inter-active, something more dynamic, something more fundamentally humane. It stands for a determined and inexhaustible inquiry as to who we are and the way the world is. It will demonstrate by its own internal life of inquiry and courteous argument, its commitment to that vocation. It is in this way that the university truly serves the society in which it is located.
Like the church, the university has not only a universal, but also, one might even say, a supra-mundane vocation. It is in pursuing that vocation that the university fulfils its responsibilities to society.
Revd Dr Bruce Kaye is at present Master of New College at the University of New South Wales, but from July 1994 he will take up a position as General Secretary of the Anglican Church in Australia.
[1] This could be construed in terms of what the corporate plan of the University of New South Wales calls, "its essential role , the conservation, transmission and extension of knowledge. The University of New South Wales, Corporate Plon, 1994, p. 7.
[2] A. MacIntyre; Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Notre Dame University Press, 1990, p. 216. For his earlier analysis of modern society see also, After Virtue, London, Duckworth, 1985 (2nd Ed).
[3]MacIntyre; Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, op. cit., p. 217.
[4]Ibid., p. 231.
[5] There are, of course, other formulations of the present situation of western culture, such as the very rigorous Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990 or the more speculative John Luckas, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modem Age, Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1993 (a century of nationalism), or the blandly optimistic Francis Fukuyam, The End of History, London, Penguin Book, 1993 (liberal democracy has won).
[6]P F. Drucker; Post-Capitalist Society, New York, Harper Collins, 1993, pp. 46ff.
[7]Ibid, p. 49.
[8] J. S. Dawidns, Higher Education. A Pblicy Statement, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988, p. 6.
[9] See H. C. Coombs, The Fragile Pattern, ABC, Sydney 1970, and also E. Shils, Tradition, Chicago University Press, 1981.