Stephen Knight
This essay was written
for the Melbourne-based leftist magazine Arena: this has been running since the
1970s and has consistently offered a radical take on social, economic and
governmental issues with a recurrent interest in cultural matters. I used to
write for it when at the University of Melbourne around 1990 and having returned post-retirement to Melbourne have
met up with the editors and am producing an intermittent series of essays,
including in 2012-13 a sequence on The Politics of Myth, which is also a course
in the Melbourne Free University programme.
This piece comes out
of my retrospective consideration of the
university as it is now, immersed in the economy, and so unsurprisingly
experiencing commercialisation of outcomes, labour specialisation,
fetishisation of work, alienation of the producer. The underlying method is to
suggest that a decent knowledge of history, read in social terms, can explain
our situation and also indicate that while the university as we know it appears finished as a medium of intellectual
inquiry, that process will emerge elsewhere, probably surprisingly.
In Australia the universities are now in market competition for
internal as well as external students. In Britain all students will pay full-cost
costs. The tertiary sector has been immersed in the economy. My recent British colleagues
are having to dream up advertising slogans. Cardiff, from which I have just retired,
is considering `Friendly but Challenging’. Have we hit bottom ? .
Back here in Melbourne, self-funded research ($1.70 a week
for the Wednesday Australian) reveals
almost all the university job adverts are in business, engineering or health,
managing not thinking (though one Koori lectureship raised the tone last week).
Most brain-employing academics hold the situation is dire, and darkening.
Yes indeed. But not for the first time. High-quality
knowledge has always been fugitive, both needed by and distrusted by the
authorities. They must control those on whom they rely. As a result, as I see
it, in nine hundred years of universities there have only been four high
periods, all quite short. Studying the first three was part of my work as a
cultural historian; for the fourth, I saw it come and go.
The first surprise may be that `university’ actually means
`union’, as in `trade union’. In the twelfth century, as Europe settled to
comparative peace (the Normans had seized enough, even for them) and remarkably
good weather, harvests, trade, surpluses and cathedrals all grew upwards. For
religious purposes and to generate administrators for expanding systems, the cathedral
schools expanded in major centres, to be called
studium generale where
outsiders flooded in, like Bologna, a centre for Roman-style civil law, and Paris,
another major crossroads where the church's hold was stronger and theology was top
dog. Language was no problem –Latin was the original lingua franca (hence the Latin quarter) -- but management was. The Bologna students formed their own universitates to demand better
provision; in Paris organisation was led by the working masters: to be an MA
meant you were out of your apprenticeship and could teach, and they organised.
The university/union personnel responded to authority
pressure with industrial seriousness. From 1217-20 the students simply left
Bologna until they had acceptable terms; in 1229 the Paris masters dispersed the
university to unheard-of places like Cambridge, until their demands were met.
How we dreamed in the late 1960s of dispersing Sydney University, but were tied
down by families, mortgages, and other modern enfeeblements.
Medieval socio-economic innovations meshed with new content
– that’s what makes a high phase in universities. The long-forgotten Aristotelian
method, founded on rational analysis, was available again, especially through
Islamic commentators like Averroes and Avicenna (hence Arabic numerals) and cut
deep into Christian traditionality. This material permitted the major
development of medieval dialectic pioneered a century before by Abelard (not merely
Heloise’s lover heading for castration) as Paris started university operations.
This tradition of truth-seeking debate (now only surviving among high-paid
barristers) drew on Abelard’s Sic et Non,
`Yes and No’ (c.1121). You argued logically to validate your position, and also
that of the church. Neither Abelard nor his great successor St Thomas Aquinas
ever doubted faith as the prime force: Thomas’s hugely influential Summa Theologica (1265-74) is a set of questions trying to rationalise
apparent biblical contradiction, and clear our believing heads. These were
heady times: students filled the lecture rooms and would shout from the windows
to the their friends just what the masters were saying: some scholars have called
it the twelfth-century renaissance.
Though the embattled Paris Chancellor tried to ban the
teaching of Aristotle, faced with the Zeitgeist embodied in the massed and
unionised masters, by the mid thirteenth century he was a central curriculum
figure. Logic-driven learning in the Greek tradition expanded, with Europe-wide
figures like the widely-travelled Duns
Scotus (Scot still meant Irishman) and at Oxford science and optics were
outstanding under the famous Roger Bacon (remembered as a dark wizard) and the well-named
Robert Grosseteste (French for big-head).
Crucially, the intellectual dynamism of the period embodied both
teaching that was vocational training – for brain-work in church and state –
and research writing at the highest level. There was no separation of what Weber would later call charismatic
leadership from collegial activity. It is when those two modes of higher
education are separated that universities weaken as social and intellectual
drivers
Genius is succeeded by repetiteurs:
the exciting scholarship turned into Scholasticism and before long Duns was remembered
as a Dunce. Yet change brings change. If Greek-Arab input fired the twelfth century,
it was in the second high phase Latin, though not church Latin, that was the dynamo.
The rich secular literature of Rome was a natural source of old values for the
new world of humanism – the phrase for
it was translatio studii, translatio imperii
`transfer of culture, transfer of
power’. Italian universities were largely locked down into local functional
control looking for old-style lawyers and administrators, and Catholic
tradition had a grip on France, so creative writers forced the charismatic pace,
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio in Italy, Machaut, de Pisan in France – and
Anglo-European Geoffrey Chaucer. The new humanist force had university bases
where the forces of Protestantism, supported by secular power, resisted Catholic
dominance. Martin Luther was professor of theology at Wittenberg, not some
wild-eyed radical; protestantism avows a personal contract with God highly
compatible with both humanism and emergent bourgeois individualism.
In England King Henry’s wife-swapping entailed a change of
religion, but more dynamically growing prosperity (some stolen from the
monasteries, some in booming trade) located young men at Oxbridge simply eager
for polish to match and validate daddy’s money. Erasmus, from Holland, reached
Cambridge just as the exquisitely medieval King’s College Chapel was being finished:
his influence led the last charge by which the `Greeks’, armed with the new humanist
classics, defeated the old-style Scholastics whom, having read their Homer,
they wittily called `The Trojans’.
Civic activity was involved – as in those social handbooks Elyot’s The Governour (1531) and Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570) -- but English humanism went further. Those Cambridge
`university wits’ like Greene, Nash, Peele and especially Marlowe who took their
college learning onto the London stage established through Shakespeare’s inspirational
borrowing a mode of art that, combining grand events with personal feeling,
would shape western culture through many media to the present – War and Peace and Citizen Kane for two examples. Out of that new secular context came
the insistence on scientific learning typified by Bacon (another one), and also
the intellectual formation of Milton, staggeringly
learned in books and languages, who became both the most important poet of protestantism and also a major ideologue for
Cromwell’s revolutionary government.
That second high period also had limits, notably in England.
Protestantism became either Puritan or slackly Anglican, the royal Restoration
of 1660 and the bourgeois revolution of 1688 between them did for intellectual
vigour: for nearly two centuries: science grew in specialist Societies while
Oxford and Cambridge mostly went to dinner: Thomas Warton, the late eighteenth-century
resurrector of Spenser and medievalism, also edited a food-oriented poetry
anthology, The Oxford Sausage (1775).
The Oxford Movement of the 1830s, which jerked affective religious worship into
a nearly dormant Anglican church, was a one-off. The dons dozed on.
New energy came from Germany, which already had a remarkably
high proportion of universities, notably from the sixteenth century. Most were
central to a city or small state, and in the early nineteenth century under the
guidance of the long-lived Alexander von Humboldt, they generated scientific
and social research to guide their regions forward. Research professors led,
and their trainees were doctoral students.
The medieval university only had doctorates in really serious stuff, Theology,
but now the PhD covered many areas of study, including practical fields like agriculture,
education, linguistics, at places like Göttingen, the newly linked Halle-Wittenberg
and Marx’s own Berlin. In the post-1815 long peace and a newly thrusting economy
(dynamic universities need both those conditions) energetic students flourished:
they played a noticeable role in the 1848 Euro-risings, and were constrained
afterwards, but the Germans did not give up the essentially charismatic system
that was delivering real Wissenschaft,
which implies `knowledge- business’.
This was too narrow a stream to be a truly high university
phase, but the Americans had noticed. There the Oxbridge collegiate system had
been followed in small teaching-oriented institutions, providing first training
for the upper professional stratum of the citizenry. But after the Civil War
(peace again a factor) and in the giant growth of American trade and industry
(the economy chipping in), conscious moves attached the German research-focused
model to the older collegiate pattern. Johns Hopkins was founded in Baltimore in
1876 as a professor-heavy institution; older Harvard and Yale added that level,
and big cities across the county followed with public funding – Chicago and Wisconsin
were notable instances. Those local links and local service inspired the
massive donations American universities still enjoy. Across the country high-level
charismatic research operating beside collegial institutions, often on the same
campus, and a big PhD programme trained both future researchers and college
staff. In 1876 the US awarded 44 doctorate, by 1918 as many as 500. Oxbridge continued to
think they were vulgar, right into the 1950s.
There were other positive features. Where the Germans had
narrow research-subject focussed structures, the Americans had a town-meeting
style of broad-range departments in a coherent faculty, and, most impressive of
all, in response the academics saw themselves as high-level generalists. Charles Eliot Norton was professor of art
history at Harvard, translated Dante, and was friend and supporter, including
financially, to Ruskin, Carlyle and Longfellow. My own hero Francis James Child,
star mathematician and linguist as a student, studied in Göttingen, assembled
his great collection of the British ballads with correspondence in many languages,
and (starting at 26) worked right across the literary field from Chaucer on as
professor of Rhetoric and then English at Harvard.
Britain never matched American breadth or professionalism (and
probably as a result never got the donations). Secular education at least was
guaranteed at University College London in 1826, but its catchment was still the
haute bourgeoisie. There were a few
moves towards external studies – 1867 saw James Stuart, a Cambridge scientist,
start public lectures in the north; the Cooperative movement soon weighed in,
sponsoring massive lecture audiences, but it was not till after 1900 that Oxbridge
admitted some elite workers and established, parallel to the new WEA, the
external tutorial classes system – to be in 1946 Raymond Williams’ first
employer. These outreach activities thrived across Britain—especially in Wales,
Scotland and the English north: you could see it as an early OU, or a web of its day – but very little certification
followed study and this was not in effect a collegiate system. Though actual
enrolment numbers increased in Britain from 1850 to 1950 not a lot had changed:
Perry Anderson argued in his essay `Components
of the National Culture’ that the professional middle classes were in fact
acculturated via cultural capital to the aristocratic/religious power structure
of the past.
Dating the end of the north American boom (Canada was involved
as well) is elusive: I feel the third high phase had become routinised by the
early twentieth century, when subject specialism and the fetishisation of
research into patents began to dominate as they have to the present in that
part of the world. But we have seen a fourth high phase. It was not, as if by magic, until after
another war and in a new period of boom that universities across the Anglophone
world, very noticeably in Australia, began
to change structurally and intellectually. The present had arrived. Or what s
now the past.
After the second world war north American universities had
the facilities and structures to increase student numbers without serious restructuring.
In Australia the one uni per state model was soon bulging under pressure of
returned service personnel and increasing demand from the young for educational
mobility, notably women. By the mid sixties most capitals had more than one
campus, with Sydney and Melbourne up to three. Britain was slower both to expand and change: its first wave of
innovation was in the art colleges, but new universities like Warwick, Sussex and York
were operating well by 1970.
Expansion didn’t mean anything in itself for this last (so
far, and perhaps for ever) high phase of university activities. Key elements
were the type of students and staff that expansion attracted, their new facilities,
and aspirations. I saw this from the inside. I went to Oxford as a working-class
grammar-school boy in 1959. It was like
Time Team. My college tutor was an expert in fifteenth-century English
pronunciation. He discouraged us from lecture attendance as distracting (what
from?). In second year he was made a professor and instantly stopped teaching
(charismatic doesn’t seem the right word).His replacement gave us a sheet of
paper, with names and titles on it. We had never seen a reading list. By sheer luck,
I had for two terms a brilliant and later famous American PhD student, Del
Kolve, as tutor: no doubt why most of my work is medieval still. We all need
help.
I saw the new world when I became a lecturer in Sydney, in 1963.
They were hiring anyone. There was real teaching -- lectures and tutorials -- and truly collegial
colleagues, libertarians like fondly-remembered Bill Maidment (never published
an article, influenced us all) and already multi-talented Michael Wilding; and seriously generous scholars like Bernie
Martin, folklorist, rhetorician, Celtic scholar, and George Russell, mighty
medievalist: he shared his teaching with me, including a course in medieval
universities, useful to the present.
It was a rowdy, dynamic department, with fifty lecturers at
its peak (with a cricket team and a snooker team: the latter did better). Most
of the young staff were uncomfortable
disseminating platitudes about what we had just learned to call cultural
capital. With the Sydney radical philosophers on hand, the place hummed with left
theorisation, Althusser and Macherey everywhere: we thought Derrida and
Foucault were pretty middle-of-the-road. We found avatars on other campuses in what
we called the New Humanities and increasingly across Britain – Methuen
handbooks by the likes of Terry Eagleton, Kate Belsey, Terry Hawkes and (soon working
in Australia, as now again) Tony Bennett made cutting-edge teaching much easier.
The historians and the political scientists were as energetic and active – they
led the democratisation of the campus and for some it didn’t go far enough. A
free university was one active ideal: Terry Irving and his friends set one up
in Redfern. It was widely thought the People’s University of Balmain would have
a winning acronym.
History remembers the 1960s and 70s on the streets. Vietnam
and the authoritarian structures of Berkeley and the Sorbonne were certainly
detonators for resistance, but deeper educational
change was in the teaching and learning. There were some material bases (there
have to be). I recall when the first photocopier arrived. It smelled terrible,
but now you could expect students to
read serious articles and chapters; when academic paperbacks started flooding
into the increasingly well-funded libraries lectures no longer needed to
dictate facts, as when there was only one book on each topic for a class of six
hundred, but could launch critical discourses. Among the students the
confidence and new world cheek of a full-employment economy, they were ready to
have a go at anything out of interest, without fear of losing a place in the job
queue. There was a sense in those Whitlamesque days that it was just worth going
to uni to find things out you didn’t yet know. In recent years I have often
told my nervous British colleagues about the mid 1960s year when New South Wales
added a year to study – and there were no undergraduates. What should the
university do ? Close first year ? Very grandly, it did nothing, stayed open,
and took anyone who fancied it. As I recall it, the entire Sydney Anarchist club,
led by Bulgarian taxi-driver Jack Grancharoff, attended in an unprecedented expression
of single purpose, as did many members of the semi-employed thinking classes --
some of the Sydney Push showed up, even in the morning.
Not only critical energy, social variety and political
energy hit the newly expanded campuses. There was a sense of ownership among
students and staff. Women, leftists, non-whites, and gays, pretty much in that
order as I recall it, claimed a say in what they were going to study. That was
international, and the Americans led in many areas, with the Australians close
behind. Many British campuses lagged, but in some, notably Sussex, Cardiff,
Warwick, York, influential new work was done. The story of those innovative
years is not yet written (why not ?), and my account is inevitably restricted, but innovation was right across the campus. Australian
historians made major strides in re-shaping national consciousness after Britain
lurched towards Europe; British scholars developed Cultural Studies to account for
the interests held, and the pressures felt, by those outside the elites.
Sociology, largely driven by American models, but gaining a critical edge in Britain
and Australia, delivered stinging critiques of the status quo, as in more muted
tones did Educational studies.
Dialectics always works. From the start of this fourth high
phase there was opposition, notably in Australia. B. A. Santamaria’s National Review, report E. R. Trevaud
and John McLaren in Equal but Cheaper,
on the 1970s colleges, attacked `the creation of a class of idle youth fed with slogans they
are incapable of evaluating and lacking skills that might be turned to useful
purposes’. The right had young cadres
too; I recall the blustering at Sydney
of their chosen vessel the pugilistic Tony Abbott. In America the right spoke through
people like Alan Bloom, who denounced
the new educational thrust as The Closing
of the American Mind (1987). Bloom and his kind fingered any affirmative
action as a breach of personal freedom for those who already had plenty of affirmation.
The bottom line in repression was, of course, economic. After
the oil price hike of 1974 increasingly right-wing Western governments (quite a
few of them Labour or Labor) steadily sought to control public expenditure and
impose financial values. The crunch in Australia was the mid 1980s Dawkins
initiative to dictate policy through the purse, and impose the shades of the mercantile prison-house on
free thought. Research funding was not to be collegially distributed through
departments, but in government-approved grants; overseas students became the
golden calf. Research productivity was numerically assessed, and so goodbye to collegiate
teaching as an ideal. The survivors moan about management, but in fact it is
all meta-management, only concerned with processes, having no interest in,
indeed hostility towards, the content that drives top-class teaching and learning.
It needn’t be so. America has kept the collegial system going
underneath a charismatic superstructure: the German campuses I have visited
seem to have held onto many of their best traditions. Australia has very noticeably
thrown out the infant learners with the collegial bath-water (and the
Barthes-water as well). In Britain this anti-pedagogical downturn has been
largely restricted to the high-end research departments like Chemistry and Engineering,
because you couldn’t get big research funding in the humanities anyway. But
Cameron has fixed that version of culture-lag with all-round cuts and a radical
instrumentalisation of learning.
The fourth-phase university boom lasted about a generation. They all seem to. The Americans
still have real quality on some campuses, though they say they feel very
pinched. Elsewhere I think it’s clear that knowledge has packed its tents and moved
on -- into electronic modes, into informal encounters, into the intellectual
hills. But while I am sad to see what people I knew created so well fading
away, and I recognise that the young lecturers who saw it for a while are more angry
than sad (a proper response), the sort of narrative I have recounted here tells
us that knowledge, of the
non-fetishised, socially and intellectually vigorous sort, doesn’t die,
and will re-emerge.
There is a myth about undying knowledge. My recent book Merlin: Knowledge and Power (2009)
explores how he is always a figure of pure knowledge, and he is eventually
harassed by the powers he generates and supports. Inattentive scholars say he
disguises himself. But there is no single Merlin identity. He is knowledge,
that’s it. He never appears in the form of a figure of power, a king or a lord or
even a lady. His usual trick is a boy or a peasant or an old crone, sometimes
an animal. But none of them is ever really Merlin; he, being knowledge, is only
a polymorphous force that takes many forms, all of them as much a challenge to
power as knowledge is absolutely necessary for the survival of power. And Merlin
always speaks from the grave.
So having reflected on the various formations of university knowledge,
sometimes at its best and most critically functional, we can only predict, hopefully, and
confidently, for its new formations, its re-formations …electronic, neomorphous,
unexpected --but elusive, challenging, and crucial as ever.
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