Chapter 4: Knowledge production and autonomy: the challenge from
5. Implications for the university
5.1 The role of the university
The implications with respect to the role of higher education are clear:
If we accept the notion that there is an established body of knowledge, the question of its transmission, from a pragmatic point of view, can be subdivided into a series of questions: Who transmits learning? What is transmitted? To whom?
Through what medium? In what form? With what effect? A university policy is formed by a coherent set of answers to these questions. If the performativity of the supposed social system is taken as the criterion of relevance … higher education becomes a subsystem of the social system, and the same performativity criterion is applied to each of these problems. The desired goal becomes the optimal contribution of higher education to the best performativity of the social system.374
The change in the status of knowledge thus has a direct implication in changing the role of the university as an autonomous institution that furthers the pursuit of truth to a much more functional institution concerned with increasing its performativity.
373 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p.46.
374 Ibid. p.48.
The function of higher education in Lyotard‟s view thus becomes to create the skills indispensable to the furtherance and maintenance of the economic and social systems.
On the one hand, it is necessary to develop skills designed to tackle world competition, which implies a growth in the management sciences and in the number of high level technologists. On the other hand, skills are needed to fulfil society‟s own need for internal cohesion, since the role of the university is no longer to educate an elite capable of leading a nation towards its emancipation, but to develop doctors, teachers, engineers and other professionals to meet pragmatic ends. In this view, the university becomes a functional body, serving the performativity needs of postindustrial and postmodern societies.
This is very different from the role of universities as traditionally understood. In unpacking the narratives of legitimation of knowledge which are undermined in this critique, Lyotard distinguishes two versions. In the first, humanity is the hero of liberty. All peoples have a right to science. The nation as a whole is supposed to win its freedom through the spread of domains of knowledge to the population. The state uses the narrative of freedom to assume direct control over the training of the nation for the sake of progress. In the second, there is a different relationship between science, the nation and the state. This version Lyotard sees arising in 1807 – 1810, with the founding of the University of Berlin, which has been extremely influential in the way higher education has since been organised. The Prussian ministry considered two proposals for the university, one by Fichte and the other by Schleiermacher. Wilhelm von Humboldt opted for the more liberal version of Schleiermacher. In Schleiermacher‟s proposal for the creation of the university, the emphasis is on an argument for the independence of science or „science for its own sake‟. Humboldt argues that the scientific institution “lives and continually renews itself on its own, with no constraint or determined goal whatsoever”. However, in his view, the university should also orient science to “the spiritual and moral training of the nation” – the so-called Bildung-effect.375 Lyotard argues that two sets of discourse are involved here, which Humboldt synthesises into one – that is, the disinterested pursuit of learning and the moral development of the nation.
375 Wilhelm Von Humboldt, “Über die innere und äussere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin”,1810, in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Frankfurt, 1957, p.126, quoted in Lyotard, J.F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p.32.
Humboldt‟s vision is for the legitimated subject to make sure that the scientific search for truth coincides with the pursuit of just ends in moral and political life.
While Lyotard‟s discussion is based on the founding of the university of Berlin, he sees this model as the basis for the development of higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Usher and Edwards write:
The impact on education of this metanarrative is to emphasise the importance of the university as an educational institution in which academics are provided with the freedom from outside influences to pursue knowledge as they see fit, guided by the movement towards speculative unity, the totality and totalisation of knowledge. They can provide critical comment on the state and society from their position of privilege but are disbarred from an active political role.376
Lyotard sees the legitimation requirements of modern knowledge as not only shaping the university and its division into departments and disciplines, but as also providing academics with a self-conception, a sense of common project and a common language.
But the narrative of legitimation faces a challenge posed by another language game, that is, technology, whose ascendancy is legitimated by the performativity principle. The outcome for the university of both the rise of techno-science and the mercantilisation of knowledge is the subordination of educational relations and practices to the demands of performativity.377 The effect is to make theoretical knowledge redundant. Knowledge becomes no longer an end in itself and its transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students. “Lyotard concludes that the ascendancy of the performativity principle has resulted in the accommodation of the university to the needs of industry and governments, thus making the concept of university autonomy obsolete.”378
With the displacement of the legitimating narrative of reason to one of performativity, the traditional autonomy and privilege of the academic institution becomes undermined.
The principle of performativity, that of optimising performance through technological innovation, has arisen, as alluded to above, through the collapse of the legitimating
376 Robin Usher and Richard Edwards, Postmodernism and Education, London, Routledge, 1994, p.162.
377John Davies, “Postmodernism and the sociological study of the university”, The Review of Higher Education, 22 (3) 1999, p.318.
378 Ibid. p.318.
metanarrative of reason, as well as the rise of techno-science. The rapid development of technology has meant greater scrutiny from governments and the facilitation of the rise of instrumentalist views of knowledge. Lyotard explains why this should be so as follows:
“Given the limitations of human senses and the increasing complexity of empirical demonstration and proof, the principle of experimental replication has become increasingly dependent on sophisticated and expensive technology”.379 This enforces a game of efficiency. The production of scientific proof costs money and therefore a maximum output (proof), minimum input (funding) model becomes increasingly more applicable. Knowledge becomes the organisation of data for immediate problem-solving, with the ultimate goal being an increase in the overall efficiency of the social system.
“Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful etc., but to efficiency: a technical „move‟ is „good‟ when it does better and/or expends less energy than another.”380 In this analysis, Lyotard foreshadows also the rapid advance of globalisation, explored later in this thesis, which has brought about an increase in functionalist views of higher education institutions.