- The creation of cadres of people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.
- The teaching and research of basic scientific knowledge and skills in such arenas as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.
- It received students from everywhere and not just its own local region.
- It engaged in higher learning, going beyond "the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages" to include the re-discovered teachings and writings of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle as well as Arabic learning.
- "A significant part of the teaching was done by Masters (teachers with a higher degree)." (Peters, cited above; Healey, cited above.)
- It was a self-governing, autonomous institution (a corporation run like the craft guilds) with a high degree of control over its budget and expenditures, and complete academic freedom over what degrees were awarded, and to whom. Indeed, those universities which depended entirely on student tuition had complete control over their own budgets and expenditures. (Axtell, cited above.) This self-governance was usually exercised entirely by the university faculty, that is, the collection of masters who taught university courses. However, sometimes, this self-governance was exercised by students, who could choose which masters to hire or fire in addition to their other administrative powers. (See the University of Bologna, for instance.) Note that there were no early cases of universities being run by "administrators" who were not directly involved in teaching or learning. This point will become important later.
- Its main function was to produce the European equivalent of mandarins and other "professionals to maintain and lead the established social order, secular as well as religious." (Axtell, cited above.) Research was not a major function of the medieval university, although the influence of Aristotelian thought on the university curriculum did produce a spirit of inquiry.
- The individual universities eventually became part of a European university system in which a degree issued by any one university was recognized as valid by any other university and anyone who achieved the degree of master was to be recognized as such by any university and to be allowed to teach at any university without having to undergo further examination.
Although the medieval university system did not deliberately focus on research, the fact is that a large number of scholars who were products (either graduates or professors) of medieval universities went on to do the work that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. These included such figures as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It can be argued that the contributions of such intellectuals were greatly amplified and expanded by the transformation of the German university system, even though the stated motivations for that transformation were not initially the pursuit of practical scientific knowledge. According to Lindsay and Neumann (cited above), the reforms of German universities triggered in the 18th and 19th centuries were "based on an acceptance of the view that the purpose of higher education was to advance as well as to preserve and transmit knowledge." However, another significant motivation for these reforms was the fact that Prussia had been badly humiliated by France during the wars of the early 19th century, and so the German university system was reformed in order to catch up with and pass up the French.
"Universities should view knowledge as incomplete and so subject to discovery, although full or final knowledge could never be attained. Further, knowledge was pure and was tobe found deep within the self. It could not be gained merely by the extensive collection of facts. Only knowledge that came from, and could be developed within, the self formed one's character; and it was character and the manner of behaving that was important for the state and for humanity, not merely knowledge and eloquence ..."
"Over the last decade, university research has gradually changed its character under the influence of cost pressures, ambivalent public attitudes, and increasingly narrow notions of "utility." The natural sciences have received higher priority, and research has been increasingly concentrated in large teams and centers. The proportion of applied research has increased and closer links with industry developed. These trends have contributed to a weakening of the teaching-research nexus. Relationships with government have been marked by increasing bureaucratization and control. The business community and the government both stress the contribution of university research to national economic and social renewal, but the pattern of postwar development in higher education has brought utility into conflict with excellence, the traditional criterion for funding research. The challenge is to incorporate utility into research policy and funding without compromising the pursuit of excellence."
"... corporations of learning [which] set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of theuniversities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers thatdevolve on them."
In other words, even as far back as 1918, American universities were viewed by their administrators as businesses. (For a look at this process in an Australian context, see "How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations", James Guthrie and Adam Lucas, 2022.) (BTW, lemme break one thing down for ya: when Veblen uses the term "captain of erudition," what he means is "business executive as college administrator.")
What's more, even as far back as 1918, the function of governing these universities was being moved away from faculty and students, and was being transferred to administrators who had no direct role in either teaching or learning. Veblen was ruthless in his evaluation of these administrators: "They are needless..." (That's "needless" as in, "useless"!) Yet the ranks of college administrators have grown steadily over the decades, at first slowly, then meteorically during the period from the 1970's onward. I don't have time to write the statistics here (it's late in the day - gotta clean the bathroom and kitchen, and water the vegetables!), but I will leave a list of articles that interested readers can check out themselves if they are curious. Suffice it to say that the administrative function of modern universities has begun to displace all other functions, hogging resources like a cancerous tumor even as faculty tenure is eliminated, faculty input into university policy is marginalized, faculty pay stagnates or declines, the percentage of adjunct faculty relative to full-time faculty increases, and student tuition (along with student debt) skyrockets.
It may well be that the growth of the administrative and non-teaching professional sector of university staff has begun to threaten the long-term economic viability of American universities, both public and private. This would explain two phenomena which I have noticed over the last decade or so and which I identify as possible coping mechanisms: the increasing promotion of university athletic programs (particularly football) in universities which never used to care much about athletics, and the expansion of a bewildering offering of professional graduate degrees and certificates. I suggest that these professional graduate certificates and degrees are producing a glut of mandarins of the Global North at a time in which the job market for these mandarins is becoming saturated.
What is to be done about these new mandarins and their dwindling job prospects? One suggestion comes from Peter Turchin, a corpulent Russian academic who has proposed that elites should limit access to higher education lest their less fortunate yet educated underlings become a source of the kind of upheaval and social transformation that destroys the power of these elites. I can't say that I agree with his moral viewpoint. I argue that education should be made as widely available as possible precisely because of the power of educated people to transform situations of inequality dominated by entrenched elites. But for this to occur, ordinary people must regain a sense of the purpose of education in order that they might produce and revive grassroots expressions of that purpose. More on that in another post.
- "Globalization, Neoliberalism, and International Student Enrolments in Higher Education: Expanding Global Interconnectedness and Academic Commodification", pages 32-42
- "Degrees of Change: How New Kinds of Professional Doctorates are Changing Higher Education Institutions"
- Article by Michael Delucchi, Richard Dadzie, Eric Dean, and Xuan Pham in Review of Social Economy, June 2021 (Language warning!)
- "A Bad Bargain: Administrative Bloat and Low Faculty Pay at UDC"
- "How Much is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs Through Effective Oversight"
- "Report: IU Athletics generated 13th most revenue nationally in 2022"
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