Chapter 5: Universities, internal restructuring and mergers – academic freedom
2. Internal structures, academic freedom and the disciplines
In terms of Quadrant One, Two and Three understandings, academic freedom is inherently associated with the freedom to study whatever academics deem fit to study, and, what is studied has, since the late nineteenth century, been organised into disciplines. While the disciplines emerged as areas of study over time from what was a much more holistic organisation of knowledge, there has been sufficient continuity within them for them to have become regarded almost as absolutes in the modern university.
But, as Menand writes: “Disciplines depended on a kind of formalism, and formalism is no longer in high philosophical repute. The discipline of English, for example, is neither natural nor inevitable, and it is easy to see all the ways in which, by essentialising the object of its study and by marginalising non-literary approaches, it limits and even distorts the understanding of literature”.423 He outlines the link between academic freedom and disciplines thus:
Academic freedom, as it is now structured, depends crucially on the autonomy and integrity of the disciplines. For it is the departments and the disciplines to which they belong, that constitute the spaces in which rival scholarly and pedagogical practices are negotiated. Academic freedom not only protects sociology professors from the interference of trustees and public officials in the exercise of their jobs as teachers and scholars; it protects them from physics professors as well. It mandates that decisions about what counts as good work in sociology shall be made by sociologists. And, practically speaking, “sociologists” means the department of sociology. That is the self-governing professional community.424
423 Louis Menand, “The limits of academic freedom”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.18.
424 Ibid. p.17.
Disciplines are primarily concerned with a theoretical knowledge of reality and are the prescribed structures for intellectual activity. Mourad explains the primacy of theory as follows:
Intellect is a thing that seeks to know some aspect of reality, and reality is a thing that exists before and independent of the inquiry. A key element of this foundation is theory. Theory is considered to be the bridge between intellect and reality. For this reason, theoretical knowledge of reality is considered to be the most fundamental knowledge. A good theory is, among other things, a human recreation of reality in the form of an explanation of the way something is independent of the knower. In this way, a good theory is transparent; it „mirrors‟ reality. The pursuit of theoretical knowledge of reality is given a special status relative to other practices in higher education. Theoretical knowledge is the foundation for practical knowledge.425
What lends the disciplines their rationale is an underlying concept of the rational pursuit of knowledge. As Readings writes, “The university becomes modern when all its activities are organised in view of a single regulatory idea, which Kant claims must be the concept of reason. Reason … provides the ratio for all the disciplines; it is their organising principle.”426 Blake points out that both the epistemological primacy of the idea of the disciplines and a commitment to disciplinary autonomy have endured over time. He outlines three interrelated concepts, disciplinarity, autonomy and authority, which underlie the current dominant internal university structures. Disciplines are seen as epistemologically autonomous from each other, each following their own domains of interest, methods and methodologies, concepts and theories.427
There are two implications arising from this assumption. Firstly, the presumption of autonomy legitimises an assumption of authority on the part of an academic, understood as the right to resist critique from outside the discipline. It is as a result of following specialist areas in particular ways that academics become experts in specific fields and, assuming authority in a particular discourse, prioritise critiques that arise from within that discourse. Secondly, an implication of mutual disciplinary autonomy is that the full realm of knowledge can grow simultaneously in different areas as cognate activities in one unified enterprise. These assumptions underlie the organisation of universities into discipline-based structures, usually departments, which, although independent of each
425 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, 20 (2) 1997, p.127.
426 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1997, p.15.
427 Nigel Blake, “Truth, identity and the community in the university”, Curriculum Studies, 3 (3) 1995, p.264.
other, are all contributing to the overall project of the advancement of knowledge as a whole.428 The core value of academic freedom implies in part that the pursuit of knowledge is potentially limitless.429
Becher argues that “the ways in which particular groups of academics organise their professional lives are intimately related to the intellectual tasks on which they are engaged”.430 In his study of the cultures of disciplines, he separates out the social aspects of knowledge communities and the epistemological properties of knowledge forms. He finds that although the “attitudes, activities and cognitive styles of groups of academics representing disciplines are closely bound up with the characteristics of the knowledge domains with which such groups are professionally concerned”,431 the disciplines do have cultural characteristics as well. Both the professional language and literature of a disciplinary group play a key role in establishing its identity. “The tribes of academe, one might argue, define their own identities and defend their own patches of intellectual ground by employing a variety of devices geared to the exclusion of illegal immigrants”.432
The analogy of tribes has also been used by Clark, writing about campus cultures in a 1960s context, whom Becher quotes as follows: “It is around the disciplines that the faculty subcultures increasingly form. As the work and the points of view grow more specialised, men (sic) in different disciplines have fewer things in common, in their background and in their daily problems. They have less impulse to interact with one another and less ability to do so … Men of the sociological tribe rarely visit the land of the physicists and have little idea of what they do over there.”433 Yet disciplinary cultures
428 Nigel Blake, “Truth, identity and the community in the university”, Curriculum Studies, 3 (3) 1995, p.264–
265.
429 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, 20 (2) 1997, p.131.
430 Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, Milton Keynes, SRHE and Open University Press, 1989, p.1.
431 Ibid. p.20.
432 Ibid. p.24.
433 B.R. Clark, “Faculty Culture”, in Lunsford, T.F. (ed), The Study of Campus Cultures, Boulder, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 1963, quoted in Becher, T., Academic Tribes and
differ in their level of cohesion, how restricted their areas of study are, and in the permeability of their discipline boundaries.
In terms of epistemological differences between disciplines, a variety of taxonomies of knowledge have been employed to locate them in relation to each other. Habermas has argued that the disciplines themselves fall naturally into three epistemic realms correlated with the three-way distinction between subjects, objects and social relations.
This distinction roughly corresponds to normative, affective and cognitive realms.
Enquiry concerning objects of consciousness constitutes the cognitive realm of the sciences. Inquiry into the realm of subjectivity, particularly in relation to expressive activity and aesthetic experience, correlates to the affective realm. The study of social and moral relations of subjects relates to the normative realm of ethics and law.434 Becher, however, in his empirical study of the disciplines, found that the twelve disciplines he studied were best understood in terms of a combination of dimensions identified by Biglan435 and Kolb436. While he does not actually sketch these dimensions, they would look something like the following:
Territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, Milton Keynes, SRHE and Open University Press, 1989, p.23.
434 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol.1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Oxford, Polity, 1981, pp.48-53, referred to in Nigel Blake, “Truth, identity and the community in the university”, Curriculum Studies, 3 (3) 1995, p.266.
435 A. Biglan, “Relationships between subject matter characteristics and the structure and output of university departments”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 57 (3) 1973, pp.204-213.
436 D.A. Kolb, “Learning styles and disciplinary differences”, in Chickering, A. (ed), The Modern American College, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1981.
The importance for Becher of disciplinary differences is that disciplines cannot all be treated alike. His view is that in the present concern for quality or performance enhancement, it does disciplines a disservice to apply the same measures to them all.
He writes that it is:
Unjust and inappropriate to lump together for administrative purposes different institutions, different subject departments and different individuals, taking little or no account of the variety of characteristics which they may between them quite reasonably display. Bureaucratically inspired measures of performance, which may be seen as one by-product of a demand for efficiency and accountability in higher education, offer a striking instance of this tendency. They are typically designed for imposition with equally blind impartiality across a whole range of academic endeavour. But however carefully chosen the individual criteria which make up the composite instruments may be, it is not difficult to demonstrate the unevenness of their application and their varying relevance to different subject fields.437
437 Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, Milton Keynes, SRHE and Open University Press, 1989, p.165.
2.1 Changes in disciplinary practice
While the empirical evidence reported in Becher‟s study appears to substantiate a view of disciplines embodying fairly constant characteristics over time, he does point out that they are mutable. Indeed, the long-standing division of the study of knowledge into disciplines is being challenged on at least three fronts. Firstly, changes in practice are affecting the disciplines in a variety of ways. The disciplines are expanding, in some cases becoming increasingly incoherent, and the discipline boundaries are becoming more blurred. New areas of knowledge are being included in curricula and sub- disciplines are splintering off into whole new disciplines. For instance, arguments abound between computer scientists, information systems academics, and information technologists about where the boundaries of their „disciplines‟ lie and in what hierarchy they should be viewed.438 There are two implications of this phenomenon. Mourad argues that the continued existence of traditional disciplines constitutes an unjustified constraint on theoretical practice. “Although the pursuit of knowledge within the disciplines is dynamic, the reality that is already there, in the form of theories, methods, and schools of thought, largely determines what reality can mean and how it can be pursued.”439 The rigid application of disciplinary rules as to what counts as legitimate knowledge in a situation in which knowledge is expanding and changing can be regarded as stifling and exclusive.
A second effect of a change in what counts as knowledge in the expansion of disciplines is the emergence of a new kind of pluralism in academic life. Disciplines are very much related to academic senses of identity. In the last few decades, challenges from minorities of various sorts who have felt excluded from the traditional disciplines, e.g. women, gays and lesbians and people of different ethnic origins, have helped to expand what is included in university curricula to cover a variety of areas of study –
438 Denyse Webbstock, “A report on an academic review of computer science and information systems in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Information Technology”, University of Natal, 2001.
Unpublished document.
439 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, 20 (2) 1997, p.131.
„gender studies‟, „African-American studies‟, „cultural studies‟ and the like.440 A new identity-based pluralism has emerged, most obviously in the application of „political correctness‟, which, from some points of view, threatens a disintegration of university communities, a fragmentation of knowledge and an undermining of the autonomy of disciplinarity.
Blake asserts that “identity-based pluralism threatens much that the university has stood for. Its separatist implications undermine any guarantee of the growth of knowledge. Without commitment to some conception of that growth that transcends their own concerns, subject areas may cease to be fully critical enterprises which guarantee progress. They may cease, in effect, to be disciplines. Academic authority may edge closer to the authoritarianism of dogma. And it ceases to be clear why differing intellectual projects should locate themselves within the same institution. Disputes over intellectual territory and pedagogic propriety may begin to take a largely political form;
whilst segments of the university may find their allegiances drawn rather to external groups than to mutual academic support.”441 Indeed, arguments abound about the apparent politicisation of the university and the claims to knowledge staked on the basis of political interest versus a view of the university as embodying the study of universal knowledge. Certainly in the United States, arguments defending academic freedom have become linked to the preservation of disciplinarity and are part of the conservative mindset, whereas in the past (in the McCarthy era, for instance) arguments for academic freedom were primarily advanced by liberals and radicals.442
440 Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social theory in the postmodern era, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, p.234, writes of the effect that new social movements, such as the black liberation movement in America and the rise of identity politics in which members of the same oppressed group share a common identity (feminism, gays and lesbians, ethnic type political communities) have had in contesting the Enlightenment framework of the social scientific disciplines, and in foregrounding the formerly
„subjugated knowledges‟.
441 Nigel Blake, “Truth, identity and the community in the university”, Curriculum Studies, 3 (3) 1995, p.275.
442 Ronald Dworkin, “We need a new interpretation of academic freedom”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp.187–190.
2.2 Epistemological challenges to disciplines
A second challenge to established disciplines has arisen from challenges to knowledge from postmodern theory, which argues against disciplinarity. Scott argues that the whole issue of disciplinarity has been thrown open to question by epistemological challenges and debates about knowledge since at least the 1960s.443 As noted above, new areas of study, from what could be referred to as “subjugated knowledges”, have been included in university curricula. Postmodernism prompted doubts about the status of knowledge – if knowledge is in question then so too must be the institutions which formulate, preserve and transmit it. How do postmodern positions on knowledge affect the practice and organisation of the pursuit of knowledge in higher education? Mourad argues that:
If one believes that a belief in an absolute foundation pervades modern knowledge claims and that it is problematic, it would seem that this belief is also present and problematic in the structure and practice of pursuing knowledge in universities and colleges. I identify this absolute foundation, claim that it is manifested in the form of the disciplines, and argue why this characterisation of the disciplines is a problem for scholars. Drawing from the concept of cross-disciplinarity, I propose an alternative, postmodern foundation that responds to this problem by providing a philosophical basis for pursuing ideas that would be unconventional in the disciplines.444
For Mourad, thus, postmodern challenges tend towards alternatives that stress a change in current disciplinary arrangements towards interdisciplinary or „cross- disciplinary‟ options.
Mourad‟s views are underlined by those of Best and Kellner, who explain that:
The assault on all academic disciplines, the attack on disciplinarity itself, began in the 1960s and has continued to the present, helping to generate the postmodern turn. In the 1960s there was contestation of every discipline from philosophy to economics to psychology. The dominant methodologies of these fields were under siege, and their exclusions, silences, limitations and the ossification of critical inquiry was challenged. The new theories circulated in the 1960s contributed to the vitalization of many disciplines, which were forced to assimilate or otherwise deal with the challenges of Marxism, feminism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and the myriad of new discourses that would nourish the postmodern turn. The questioning of disciplinary boundaries led to calls for multi- and transdisciplinary work of the sort
443 Joan W. Scott, “Academic freedom as an ethical practice”, in Menand, L. (ed), The Future of Academic Freedom, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.170.
444 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, 20 (2) 1997, p.117.
found in the postmodern theories, and this heritage of the 1960s has continued and has directly contributed to the postmodern turn in the university.445
2.3 The market and managerialism
The third major change affecting disciplines is the effect of market forces on what is studied within universities. The market is determining to a much greater extent what activities universities engage in, with a concomitant emphasis on applied research and on saleable teaching packages, which is in line with Lyotard‟s performativity thesis. The increasing expense of research and the growth of funding bodies with conditions attached to the granting of funds, and their determining of research areas have ensured that the purely theoretical content of the traditional disciplines has altered in favour of the immediately useful or applicable in specific collaborative projects. The result has been, according to Becher, that “freedom of research is in general limited by the need to persuade others that the necessary resources should be provided.”446
Not only has the market changed the nature of the content of the disciplines, and arguably altered their hierarchical status, but a further consequence of market expansion has been
the development of interdisciplinary programs, which often appear as the point around which radicals and conservatives can make common cause in University reform. This is partly because interdisciplinarity has no inherent political orientation
… It is also because the increased flexibility they offer is often attractive to administrators as a way of overcoming entrenched practices of demarcation, ancient privileges, and fiefdoms in the structure of universities … At present interdisciplinary programs tend to supplement existing disciplines; the time is not far off when they will be installed in order to replace clusters of disciplines.447
Indeed, this is the major driving force behind the reorganisation of disciplines into inter- or multidisciplinary schools at the former University of Natal and the subsequent reorganisation around a “common curriculum” at the later merged University of KwaZulu- Natal, the subject of the case study in this chapter.
445 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, New York, The Guilford Press, 1997, p.9.
446 Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines, Milton Keynes, SRHE and Open University Press, 1989, p.142.
447 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1997, p.39.
3. A case study of restructuring at the former University of Natal and