The Future of the University
Brian: Chris Witter and I began this project with a series of walks around the Lancaster University campus. This was born out of a shared interest in the history of the institution and in the fabric of the campus itself. Though built of brick (and apparently emulating the profile of an Italian hilltop village), we were interested in how the space and fabric of the university physically concretised the principles of Modernism and mass education that informed the development of the ‘new’ universities of the 1960s, many of which are celebrating their own 50 th anniversaries this year. I had been reading Simon Reynolds’ Retromania and his blog ReynoldsRetro, in which he proposed a ‘nostalgia for the future’ identified with a group of musical projects and sound artists, such as those associated with the Ghost Box label, artists who drew upon musique concrete, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and other early electronic music pioneers to attempt to recapture a certain structure of feeling associated with the early- to mid-1960s. Reynolds and Mark Fisher, author of the K-Punk blog and later Capitalist Realism (2009) took Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’ to attempt to characterise the uncanny nature of much of this music. In a K-Punk post from 2006, Fisher suggests: the period since 1979 in Britain has seen the gradual but remorseless destruction of the very concept of the public. Public space has been consumed and replaced b[y] something like the 'third place' exemplified by franchise coffee bars. Here, you are transported into the queasily inviting quasi-domesticated interior of one of SF Capital's space-ships: deterritorialization (you could be anywhere) and reterritorialization (you are in surroundings whose every nuance is shinily familar). These spaces are uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness (their voracious
dominance of the high street is as visually striking a sign as you could wish for of the lie that capitalism engenders competition and diversity), and the monotony of the Starbucks environment is both reassuring and oddly disorientating; inside the pod, it's possible to literally forget what city you are in. What I have called nomadalgia is the sense of unease that these anonymous environments […] provoke; the travel sickness produced by moving through spaces that could be anywhere. […] In Ghost Box and Mordant Music, the lost concept of the public has a very palpable presence-in-absence, via samples of public service announcements. (KPunk, ‘Nostalgic Modernism’, 26 October 2006: http://kpunk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008552.html) As we walked, identifying not only the (disappearing) fabric of the old university and the ways in which people are managed, in terms of pedestrian flows and the organization of buildings along the ‘Spine’ (in relation to the exterior ring of green spaces), Chris and I discussed the relation of the university of 2013/14 with that founded in 1964. The privatization that Fisher identifies, in terms of both public space and the discourse of ‘the public’, we found writ very large across the ‘renewed’ surfaces of the Lancaster campus.
Chris had, in 2011, organized a popular series of talks under the title ‘The University in Crisis?’, and our shared attraction to the Utopian imaginative potentialities of a relation between the university as a public institution and the wider social fabric of Britain (where it was purposed, at least, towards a progressive project and the ‘social good’), drew us towards the point of our particular university’s founding. The difference between the ethos of mass education stood in stark contrast to the private, managerial and marketized structures of the contemporary university. We were keen not to fall prey to nostalgia, however. In our discussions, which have over time focused on the key question ‘WHAT IS THE UNIVERSITY FOR?’, we have come to identify 1964 not as
a ‘lost’ moment of utopian possibility to radically change the relation between the university and the public sphere, but as a point, particularly in the United States, where the core issues and problems that we are still living with came into visibility. One key seemed to be the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, whose ‘leader’ Mario Savio, gave an extraordinary speech in December 1964 which rings down the decades: (show).
Chris: Berkley: public space In a very literal way, the FSM contested the space of the university and its relation to the public sphere. In 1963 and ‘64, Berkley students were recruited for a civil rights struggle in the Bay Area, against the discriminatory employment practices of local businesses, as well as a protest against the Republican convention. When it was revealed that students involved were organizing on campus, the local press and conservative politicians pressured the university to discipline the students. Although the administration refused to do this (Glazer, 80), they moved to stop political organisations – particularly Friends of SNCC and CORE – from fund raising and recruiting on campus. Rules established in the 1930s stated that certain political activities must be kept off campus, but a compromise had been reached whereby student political groups could operate in a small area at the main entrance on Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue. Administrators reneged on this compromise, reviving the ban on political activities on university property.
This led a broad coalition of student groups, headed by Friends of SNCC and
CORE, to protest the ban, setting up tables both at the Bancroft/Telegraph plaza and outside Administration buildings throughout September ‘64. In response, the university attempted to discipline students, threatening a number with suspension. The protests continued throughout the Fall term. Eschewing established bureaucratic grievance processes, students employed direct action tactics learnt during the civil rights struggle of the previous year, and in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, as well as encouraging a strike by newly unionised graduate teaching assistants. In response to this, on December 3 rd, Governor Edmund G. Brown dispatched over 600 policemen to the campus, where they arrested around 800 students occupying the Sproul Hall Administration Building. The arrests reportedly went on for about twelve hours, during which time Faculty were barred from the building.
These details draw attention to the ways in which the struggle between protesters, the university administration, reactionary politicians and the police problematized the university as a space, its relation to society, and its proper membership, functions and processes. As the 1960s progressed, campuses became increasingly politicised spaces. Meanwhile, critics of the student movement constructed themselves as defenders of academic freedom and autonomy. Nathan Glazer, who taught at Berkley, helped develop this line of criticism, in a series of essays written throughout the 1960s and collected in the 1970 volume, Remembering the Answers: Essays on the Student Revolt. He argued that ‘the university must preserve some distance from society, some freedom and independence’ (Glazer, 11) and criticised what he claimed to be students’ ‘passion for immediate action, for confrontation, for the humiliation of others, for
the destruction of authority, […] and finally, for the destruction of what was most distinctive and most valuable in universities – their ability to distance themselves from immediate crises, their concern for the heritage of culture and science, their encouragement of individuality and even eccentricity’ (Glazer, 13). In the midst of debates over the role of the modern university – or multiversity – within the ‘military-industrial complex’, Glazer continued to valorise the traditional ‘autonomy’ of the liberal university. Thus, in the context of Cold War anticommunism, and a liberal narrative whereby postwar US society was held to be, somehow, ‘beyond ideology’, Glazer complained: ‘The objective of the student revolt quite early became not that of transforming the universities and colleges from the point of view of their proper ends – that is, as teaching and research institutions – but one of transforming them so that they realized quite other, and directly political, ends’ (Glazer, 16).
Yet, events clearly revealed the permeability of the boundary between society and the semi-autonomous modern university. Whilst the university responded to reactionary political pressure, in defence of a racist status quo, the University President Clark Kerr claimed, in a press interview, that the demonstrations were being manipulated by non-student ‘subversives’, followers of Castro and Mao – a line later taken up by Ronald Regan.1 Whilst students were criticized for taking direct action, outside of institutional processes, administrators called for and tolerated the invasion of this supposedly autonomous university by a ‘small army’ of policemen, sent in to beat and arrest students (Glazer, 93). Whilst Clark Kerr had become a spokesman for the modern university, which supposedly 1 (Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue, 2003, pp.275-276; Ronald Regan, 'Reagan Rips Faculty Apathy to Majority', Milwaukee Sentinel, 8 Aug., 1969, p.21).
worked in the service of the ‘Great Society’, students were forbidden from using the campus as a base from which to try to enact their vision of a revitalized, interracial and egalitarian democratic society. The contradictions of this new space were clear.
Interestingly, Clark Kerr made a direct connection between this new bureaucratized, professionalized and socially ‘integrated’ university space and increased managerialism, writing in 1963: 'Further integration into society spells further disintegration within the campus. External societal pressures sharpen the challenge for academic leaders to maintain their own sense of direction and their own sense of values. The more the university is seen as a collection of instruments to help this or that interest in society, the harder presidents and faculty leaders will have to work to set their own priorities, to assert the university's independence, to determine how they may best serve the general welfare, and to decide how best to govern themselves and not be totally influenced by others. As the institutional borders of higher education become more permeable, the control of traffic back and forth demands more scrutiny by administrative and academic leaders. Control of this flow is central to control of the nature of the university’. (The Uses of the Modern University, 222) One thing the students brought into question, was the administrators’ right to control these flows and to set the boundaries of this modern university.
Brian: Contestations of temporality: narratives of modernity and progress. In the famous speech at Sproul Hall we showed a few minutes ago, Mario Savio
uses the metaphor of the machine to characterize the university/ multiversity. This machine is both industrial/ productive – ‘the schools […] have become factories to produce technicians rather than places to live student lives’ and involve ‘subject[ion] to standard production techniques of speedup and regimentation’ (Savio, ‘The Berkeley Student rebellion of 1964’, 86-7) – and bureaucratic/managerial – ‘we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation – depersonalized unresponsive bureaucracy’ (Savio, ‘An End to History’, Draper 1965: 179). ‘In place of the “great University”’, another FSM document, ‘We Want a University’, explains, ‘we have said “impersonal bureaucracy”, “machine”, or “knowledge factory”. […] It is as though we have become raw material in the strictly inorganic sense. But the Free Speech Movement has given us an extraordinary taste of what it means to be part of something organic” (Draper 1965: 191). The deployment of the language of the machine and the factory is diagnostic, as is that of the organic and inorganic; the FSM place themselves directly in a tradition of (post-)Romantic anti-industrial thought and writing, in which the ‘student-cog’ not only lacks agency and is subject to the alienating machinery of the educational institution, but yearns to be part of an ‘organic’ community, one that is promised by the FSM.
In an essay on the FSM, Sol Stern, a graduate student involved in the movement, cites University of California’s President of the Board of Regents, Clark Kerr’s description of the modern university as ‘respond[ing] to the expanding claims of national service; [merging] its activity with industry as never before’ (Teodori, 153). He comments that Kerr ‘cheerfully accepts the trend as the inexorable path of development and draws the appropriate conclusions. For if the ‘multiversity’ is
to become more and more attuned to the needs of industry and national defense, then the requirements of tough-minded bureaucracy and management must have first claims on those who lead the “multiversity”. The “Managerial Revolution” has come to campus; now the most important stratum of the university is not the faculty, nor the students, nor any single educational Idea, but rather the manager and administrator. The “multiversity” is a “mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money”’ (Teodori, 153). The phrase ‘the managerial revolution’ is derived from a book of the same name by James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution (1941)), whose vision that ‘the world political system will coalesce into three primary super-states’ had a large impact upon George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia (Burnham 1941: 176). Burnham’s prediction of the ‘managerial society’ was characterized by ‘governmental (state) ownership and control of the major instruments of production’ (Burnham 1941: 118). No longer owned by a bourgeoisie, production becomes controlled by state managers, domination enabled and maintained by technology, particularly in communications and transportation. Hal Draper, in ‘the Mind of Clark Kerr’, makes this connection explicit: ‘Behind Kerr’s vision of the university-factory is a broad-gauged worldview, a view of a Brave New World (his term) or Orwellian 1984 toward which all this is headed’ (Draper 1965: 207). In Draper’s view, the ‘Wave of the Future’ is a managerial (and explicitly dystopian) one.
If both Kerr and Glazer are concerned with the meaning of this new, modern university, its function in modern society, and with a defence of the traditional autonomy of the university, it is not only the space of the university that the FSM
brought into question, a space of presumed ‘autonomy’ and objectivity but one in which the boundary between university and public sphere (and state apparatuses) was all-too porous, but also the time of the university. Mario Savio took up this theme of temporality and ‘inexorable development’ in a speech given in December 1964, which was published under the title ‘An End to History’. He begins by citing his experiences in Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer, before launching a critique of the bureaucratic university, focused on the ‘ahistorical’ world view of the administrator: The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in fact come to an end. No new events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can change American society substantially. We proceed by standard procedures as we are. […] Most people who will be put out of jobs by machines will not accept an end to events, this historical plateau, as the point beyond which no change occurs. Negroes will not accept an end to history here. All of us must refuse to accept history’s final judgement that in America there is no place in society for people whose skins are dark. On campus students are not about to accept it as fact that the university has ceased evolving and is in its final state of perfection. […] Here is the real contradiction: the bureaucrats hold history as ended. As a result significant parts of the population both on campus and off are dispossessed, and these dispossessed are not about to accept this ahistorical point of view. It is out of this that the conflict occurred with the university bureaucracy and will continue to occur until that bureaucracy becomes responsive or until it is clear the university cannot function. (Teodori, 159-160) The shadow of Nineteen Eighty-Four is long. This is a vision of the university which deliberately places itself outside of the historical process, in the name of a liberal ‘autonomy’ and ‘objectivity’; the spatial boundaries of the Berkeley campus, denoting where ‘free speech’ is allowed and where it is not, are repeated as temporal boundaries, where the university is not subject to the processes of historical change and contestation that are crucial to the fabric of United States society in 1964. Savio’s presentation of the university as an a-historical
institution anticipates Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis, post-Cold War; the present state (1964/1990/2014?) is taken to be one in which historical and ideological struggle and contestation is at an end; all that remains is managerialism. It is here, perhaps, we can see the most urgent analogies between the condition of the university in 1964 and in 2014, where resistance to or discourses counter to the private, managerial and marketized structures of the contemporary university/ multiversity remain marginalized.
Chris: Conclusion Going back, once again, to Mario Savio exhorting us to ‘put [our] bodies upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, until you make it stop,’ his words remind me of two images. The first is of those civil rights activists he’d worked with during the Mississippi Freedom Summer, who, in putting their bodies on the line, dramatized the reactionary violence of US society, even as it seemed poised to establish the ‘American century’. The second is from a passage in Susan BuckMorss’s Dialectics of Seeing, an extended meditation on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Morss writes: Where Marx had identified revolutions as the “locomotives of world history,” Benjamin countered: “Perhaps it is totally different. Perhaps revolutions are the reaching of humanity traveling in this train for the emergency brake.” (Dialectics, 92) Central to the FSM was the question: what does it mean to modernize the university? Implicated in this was the deeper question, what does it mean to modernize society?
Peter Scott argued, in The Crisis of the University, that the liberal university of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had three main roles: the custodianship of an intellectual tradition ‘derived more from the culture of a social elite than the codification of scientific principles by a corps of academic experts’; the reproduction of traditional professions; and the transmission of cultural capital (3). By contrast, the postwar modern university ‘became less and less a community of academics with similar values which they could share, and more simply a shared bureaucratic environment’ (6). If we accept this suggestive thesis, which clearly echoes Clark Kerr’s description of the multiversity as a mere ‘collection of instruments’, then we might describe the modern university as an institution fundamentally lacking a common project.
To some extent, this space was filled by the project of contributing to economic growth and, in modest ways, to social justice – through progressive contributions to policy and civil society, and as one mechanism of social mobility. But, at Berkley, the FSM activists brought onto campus a far more radical vision than that of the technocratic gradualism of the Democratic Party: the vision of creating an interracial American democracy. Unfortunately, as recent events in Ferguson have shown, this vision continues to remain, as yet, a dream deferred.
Up until recently, our sense is that in the UK, universities retained a vague and shifting project, which can be described as a ‘service’ or public sector ethos – a complex ideologeme, which could be configured in many guises, so that the university might appear as enclave of liberal humanist values, as instrument of
industry, or, however equivocally, as contributing to a latent social democratic project that seems hauntingly encoded in the fabric of the mass institutions established in the postwar period. However, with the project of austerity, the public is being privatised, portioned and sold off; gradualism has been banished in favour of neoliberal social engineering; and the mass is been broken down into individuated modulations. In short, the new crisis of the university is the old crisis of the modern university: what is it for?