Chapter
1 – Introduction to The University in Transformation: Global
Perspectives on the Futures of the University (Westport, Ct. Bergin
and Garvey, 2000).
__________________________________________________________
Forces
Shaping University Futures
Sohail
Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley
While it often appears to
academics that the university is stable, looking back in history and
forward to the future, the university is far more malleable.
Just as in Western history, where there were a range of
possibilities, the Bologna student model versus the Paris university
of masters model or in recent colonial Indian history between
indigenous traditions and modernist British models, the university
stands at the gateway of a range of futures.
Creating these futures are a number of trends and emergent
issues, among others, globalism, multiculturalism (including
indigenization), virtualization and politicization.
These promise to dramatically change the face of the
university, in some ways taking it back to more ancient indigenous
models, in other ways transforming it in ways that will make the
future university all but unrecognizable to those of us in the 20th
century.
This book is divided into
four sections: Futures of Higher Education in the West (which given
the dominating positions of Western universities has direct and
structural implications for the rest of the World); futures of the
university in the Non-West (these are not as representative as they
ideally could be, still, modernist; scholar/activist; dissenting and
multicultural approaches are presented); Alternative Universities
(these contest the foundations of the modern university and seek to
offer disjunctive alternatives); and, Transformations in the
University, our concluding chapters, where we both summarize what
has gone before and offer alternative futures ahead.
Authors range from varied
disciplines: social and political science, political economy,
futures studies, cultural studies, education, consciousness studies
and women's studies. All work, or have worked, as academics in the
modern university to some extent, and all take a critical view of
the current transformations that universities are undergoing. This
book is not an apologisis of globalization. Even if the scholars
here are critical of current universities, they are more so of the
commodification process universities are undergoing. None are
luddites but are cautiously optimistic about the role of the
internet, believing that while it may lead to increased interaction,
it may also continue to distance teacher from student, knowledge
from ethics. Some are
more concerned about the content (‘does it dissent from current
understandings’?) and others more about the process of education,
and still others about the political economy of knowledge, (‘who
gains and loses when structures of education change’?). All
writers have a preferred future of the university, while assessing
the trends creating the future, they have not shied away from
explicitly stating the future they want, and in some cases, the
future they fear.
Our hope for this book is
that it impacts the policy debate on the futures of the university,
particularly by contesting current assumptions of the future, and
offering alternative future possibilities. We understand that the
forces changing the university are often more than any particular
university or nation can address, and yet, there are spaces for
agency - whether it be ensuring that content is more multicultural,
or finding ways for faculty to show solidarity, or better meet the
changing needs of students or creating alternative universities, or
... more significantly, the future undetected is a future given to
us, and thus taken away from us. A future contoured, alternative
futures mapped, means that the possibility of influence can
increase, at the very least, it means that there is a possibility
that the futures being shaped are done more thoughtfully, more
creatively, and with more urgency.
A
FORWARD GLIMPSE
Gaps
and Imbalances
As
with all such books, while the intention is comprehensiveness,
complete representation is often not achieved.
Gaps have remained. From
a conceptual perspective, although in many of the chapters, mention
is made of the current corporatization of universities, in our
seeking to access an author from within that framework, our contact
with colleagues in one of the largest international corporate
business degree providers, was unfruitful.
It became evident that they were too busy creating the future
to write a reflective chapter.
The
cultural and gender imbalance is particularly evident in the first
section where we were seeking a range of critical views of shaping
trends from the broad perspective of the western situation.
The perspective of students has only been addressed second
hand by academics and this is indeed an oversight. The
geographic/cultural diversity we sought became somewhat more limited
when some of our prospective authors, from Nigeria, Hungary, Tibet
in exile (Dharamsala, India), were unable to make the required
commitment, largely due to connectivity problems, as this book was
edited largely through a continuous passing back and forth of
emails, and partly because academics in these areas are already
overly taxed with teaching and community/national responsibilities
and financial hardship. In
addition, there were other alternative universities which could have
participated, some of which are mentioned and there may be many
which are unknown to us. Perhaps
this book will inspire other authors to develop a Global
Transformations Mark 2, as undoubtedly the gaps we have left could
fill another book.
We
now summarize the main arguments made by the contributing authors in
the context of the book’s four sections.
Following this, the drivers creating the future are explored.
Western
Perspectives
A broad context is provided
for this section by the first three chapters.
Phillip Spies presents an historical overview of the
development of the traditional western model of the university.
Speaking of the university as both the product and
co-producer of each age in which it exists, he looks back at broad
historical stages as the Renaissance/Enlightenment age, the
Industrial age and the present ‘Nomocratic’ age.
However, he places the deep roots of the university in much
earlier classical Greek times.
Spies’ focus is the great liberal/classical tradition
reminding us of the
criteria for an education
that develops the whole person, through a search for welfare and
freedom as well as goodness, beauty and truth.
Decrying the current emphasis on quantity rather than quality
in education, he calls for a new kind of intellectualism, which
includes the five-fold breadth of the classics, as a means of
acquiring context and systems knowledge capable of addressing the global
problematique.
Peter Manicas extends the
historical context into more recent developments in England, Europe
and the United States. Along
with Deane Neubauer, he tracks the major forces of change today in
terms of globalization, unaffordability and computer mediated
technology. Manicas
also describes who the survivor institutions might be, but places
responsibility for survival and quality firmly back in the hands of
faculty. Deane Neubauer
focuses strongly on the impact
of economic rationalism, as well as numerous other
macro-forces, on the university sector.
He further develops the survivor proposal with an examination
of three types of new ‘convenience’ institutions.
Neubauer discusses the major institutional challenges,
particularly for university managers, in the wake of these
macro-changes. He also
poses some dramatic future scenarios with far-reaching implications
for universities. These
are the 20/80 scenario where 80% have no work; and the 185,000,000
student scenario world-wide.
The virtualization of the
university is taken as a given by Michael Skolnik and Jim Dator.
Skolnik explores the major implications of this in terms of
its impact on students and particularly faculty.
He discusses the mixed responses of faculty, from organized
rejection on the one hand to passionate ‘conversion’ on the
other. Skolnik also
fears the inevitable loss of jobs for faculty as in other mechanized
industries. Dator’s
emphasis is more on the changes to the structure of university
institutions once the bricks and mortar fall. He also bemoans the
likely loss of academic freedom, and develops a brief charter for
what needs to be learned in the universities of the 21st
Century if we want humans to exist in the 22nd.
Tom Abeles argues that it
is time for the Academy to face its demise (and rebirth).
In the massive competition of the market place for the
production of what he calls short half-life knowledge (with a short
use-by date), Abeles believes universities have lost the battle
because of the infrastructure costs compared to costs of virtual
space. He believes
faculty need to asks the deep questions such as ‘what is their
purpose?’. His own
position is that there needs to be a return to the core business of
providing long half-life knowledge, ability to synthesize or wisdom.
David Rooney and Greg
Hearn, and also Paul Wildman, to an extent summarize some of the
forces of change acting on universities, yet each from different
perspectives. Rooney
and Hearn discuss the commodification of higher education in terms
of how inappropriate it is to attempt to use a linear industrial
economic model to support a process that deals with educating the
complex, non-linear human mind.
They present three scenarios for the future of university
education: the do nothing scenario; the commodified university; and
their favored one: the online learning community, incorporating
their comprehensive typology of four types of knowledge, going
beyond simply information gathering.
Wildman looks at how emerging issues for future universities
might look from the periphery.
He discusses how fragmented futures might be for young people
and how the idea of a ‘subversity’ might appeal to the children
of the alternative generation who seek an ‘alternative to the
alternative’ and yet can’t fit back into the mainstream.
He looks towards a ‘futures active learning system’ that
listens to the voices coming from the margins of society.
Non-Western
Perspectives
The five chapters in this
section can give only a taste of the richness and diversity of views
that exist beyond the paradigm of the traditional, western
university model and even beyond its critique of itself.
Ashis Nandy’s opening chapter sets the context for the
others in the sense that he analyses the politics of the
‘knowledge’ that is taught in universities, regardless of
whether they be western or their hybrid transplants into other
cultures. He examines
how the imported western university system has worked at taming
traditional knowledge systems and looks to how knowledge may truly
be pluralized through the recovery and affirmation of indigenous
knowledge systems.
Tariq Rahman and Shahrzad
Mojab present completely different positions on the struggles within
colonized or post-colonial cultures to develop quality, autonomous
university education. Rahman
tracks the colonial history of universities in India and Pakistan,
leading to the present situation of government control, poverty and
lack of quality. He
looks to three options for the future and given the limitations he
sees with both privatization and Islamization, he would prefer to
see a modernization of the public universities as a necessary step
towards Pakistan’s transition to modernity, which he believes lags
far behind its East Asian counterparts.
Mojab discusses the difficulties in parts of the Middle East
in creating genuine tertiary education in the context of education
being seen by the political dictators as creating sites of dissent.
She describes the various attempts to found an autonomous
university in Iran, and of the elimination of the Kurdistan
university by Khomeini on the eve of its inauguration.
For Mojab, the idea of an autonomous university is
inextricably linked to the idea of a civil society.
She highlights the ongoing challenges for university futures
in the Middle East and presents a fairly grim outlook for the
likelihood of autonomous universities, let alone academic freedom.
Not surprisingly,
university futures in the Caribbean, are somewhat less disturbing,
in the view of Anne Hickling-Hudson.
Hudson looks to the ‘soul of the university’, rooted in
the Caribbean soil, as a source of vital scholar-activism.
She points out that this tradition and flavor of university
life has been flagging, and needs to be rebooted, in order to put
‘scholarship at the service’ of the Caribbean people and the
sustainable development of its culture.
She presents some rich and colorful scenarios as to how this
‘scholar-activism’ might be reawakened and used as a lever of
change in the coming decades.
Patricia Kelly takes
another tack again viewing globalization and the current
‘internationalization’ of many western universities to be about
more than just an increase in numbers of international students.
From her perspective and experience in academic staff
development, she discusses the politics of language and teaching and
the need for institutional support for cultural awareness among
academics.
Alternative
Universities
This section includes the
two very different alternative university visions of Ivana Milojevic
and Patricia Nicholson, and also two case studies of existing
universities which radically depart from the traditional western
secular model. Milojevic
discusses the two commonly occurring likely scenarios of the
corporate university and the global electronic university in terms
of their implications for women. Since, in Milojevic’s view, women
do not fare well in these scenarios, she then goes on to develop her
own utopian vision of how a women’s university would look, where
for example, education and child care would be central rather than
peripheral concerns. Nicholson,
on the other hand, after briefly discussing the present context,
develops two rather contrasting scenarios as to how the survivor
institutions might look in 30 years.
Her mega-corporatized university would be called an
‘advanced learning network’, while her ‘experience camps’
would be smaller, more community responsive and related to service
needs.
The chapter by Bussey is
both a case study and a preferred vision of the future.
Having discussed and critiqued the modern western university,
he argues for the need to recontextualize learning from a spiritual
framework. He discusses
the seminal ideas of Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar and the traditional
idealism of his approach to Tantra.
He cites the example of Sarkar’s Gurukula university in
India, and develops some broader implications and visions for the
extension of this model.
Finally, James Grant
presents a case study of the Maharishi University of Management,
based on the philosophy and efforts of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He
describes in some detail the scientific evidence for the existence
of pure consciousness, the accessing of which being one of the core
functions of this university. Grant
also develops the implications of the existence of pure
consciousness on educational goals and practices, the primary goal
being to transform society.
In our concluding section,
Inayatullah offers three alternative futures of the university:
Mileage Plus-Air Points, where universities are managed by competing
mega-structures; Virtual Touch, a scenario in which electronic
classrooms are joined with face-to-face pedagogy; and Bliss for all,
an ideal scenario wherein multiple ways of knowing and
transformative knowledge are at the heart of what the university is
about. Gidley
summarizes the book, in the light of the dehumanizing effect of the
current changes, and offers some clues to a rehumanized future for
universities. She
examines three roles for faculty: the Broker, the Mentor and the
Meaning-Maker.
DRIVERS
AND TRANSFORMATIONS
We now turn to the crucial
drivers which are shaping the futures of the university. While there
are many, we assert that four are crucial: globalization,
multiculturalism, virtualization and politicization.
·
globalism
- the freeing of capital and the taming of labor and nation-states,
particularly those in the South;
·
multiculturalism
- an understanding that while reality is socially constructed and we
create gender and culture through practice; cultures, civilizations,
and women and men know the world differently, and that a good
society must authentically reflect this diversity;
·
the
internet - in all its meanings from
the site, the form, the delivery system to the content of the new
universities, particularly in the possibility of the creation of the
virtual university and decentralized publishing; and
·
politicization
- in the South this refers to increasing attempts to use the
university for repressive measures as well as the university as a
site of dissent, and in the North it relates to the university being
part of the economic rationalization of society, of the
post-industrial problematique.
These general drivers
operate at different levels. Globalism and politicization are long
term historical trends and now fully developed, while
multiculturalism and the internet are more emergent. These drivers
which will impact the dimensions of the University, also include: 1
·
The university as a corporation (which globalism enhances);
·
The university as a site of academic leadership (the model of
knowledge as philosophy);
·
The university as the ideological arm of the nation-state
(politicization);
·
polyversities, multiversities and diversities - the creation
of a range of alternative universities, all based on the idea of
difference, of finding knowledge niches (multiculturalism);
·
the emerging global electronic university, which will
overcome the "tyranny of disciplines, replace hierarchy, and
through reduced costs and flexible access reach enormous numbers of
people," 2 (internet) and
·
the community-based university, whose main function is public
service, using the university to help the community thrive, seeing
the student as an active participant instead of consumer or rote
learner and seeing professors as active and reflective practitioners
instead of experts. This
last dimension of the university is about the role of the
intellectual in society: as beholden to state and capital or serving
community/global planetary interests (the expanded public).
Globalism
Certainly if we take the
present as a point of departure for understanding the future, there
can be no driving force more important than globalism. Academics all
over the world have felt the painful pinch of globalism as defined
by decreased funding for research, decreased state subsidies, and
the calls by deans for academics to be more competitive in not only
their own discipline but in the larger national or global economy.
This process is structural. Whether one is Marxist, feminist
or postcolonial, the bureaucratic structure forces one into a
position wherein the university and the self becomes corporatized.
Among others, Manicas and
Neubauer make the case that the irrevocable forces of capitalism
have created a two/tiered university system, and as long as access
and convenience are enhanced by the new electronic technologies,
issues of quality will continue to fade away. Moreover, faculty have
focused on maintaining their jobs, and not on the larger debate.
More and more the
university is being explicitly tied to the global capitalist system.
For instance, California State University is in the process of
entering into a long term partnership with Microsoft, GTE, Fujitsu
and Hughes Electronics. This plan gives the university technology
which the state is unable to fund. As Robert Corrigan, the President
of San Francisco State says: "If I had my druthers, I think
it's something the state should pay for, but as a president who
can't get the money either from the students or from the state, I'm
driven into working with the corporate sector." 3
But, asks Lawrence Wiseman, once the university becomes just another
business, will it lose it "special character, some of its
societal privilege," 4 its moral authority and force
- its link with civil society, as a repository of truth and
knowledge? Can a university be both a business and fulfil "its
potential as an institution of noble and transforming purpose?"
5 Will the university be the axial institution of the
postindustrial professional society or as Dator argues, not needed
at all - just a theme park? 6
Tom Abeles points out that
the real transformation that is occurring is the shift from
state-centric universities to corporatized/globalized universities -
from Oxford to IBM or Macdonalds. Abeles sees two levels: grand
megaglobal universities and localized highly diversified
universities. The mega universities will soon provide core courses
through virtual networks while smaller institutions will meet
specific local needs. This
loosening of the Ivy League Western model with its Greek heritage
will certainly lead to enhanced diversity, with alternatives not
just coming from corporatist ventures but from civilizational
perspectives. Witness the spread of Islamic universities 7
or new age meditative type universities (from transpersonal
psychology universities to the Maharishi University of Management).
There is also conventional
resistance to the globalization of the University. In 1998, students
in Germany recently protested en masse to changes in funding to the
university, disputing why they undergo budget cuts since more and
more the university is subsidizing corporations, serving as the
training ground for industrialism. 8
Irrespective of protests,
the long term trend does appear to be the university as
customer-consumer led, where the relationship of the student to the
university is not as a member of a community but as a site of
transactions - gaining some information and then moving on to the
next vendor.
Multiculturalism
and Deep Inclusiveness
While market pressures are
one force changing the future of the university, another challenge
comes from multiculturalism. 9 Indeed, as Anne Hickling-Hudson
argues, multiculturalism directly confronts the ideology of
globalism. At heart, argues Nandy, multiculturalism is about
dissent, about contesting the categories of knowledge that modernity
has given us. And, even with multiculturalism often criticized and
coopted by "political correctness" (given the strength of
the right, an understandable process), and used strategically to
ensure representation, still the future is more and more about an
ethics of inclusion instead of a politics of exclusion. Of course,
the struggle will be long and hard, and more often than not, instead
of new curriculum, there will be just more special departments of
the Other. This is a
real fear as it narrows the role of the Asian or African or Pacific
intellectuals to that of "becoming otherness machines." 10
Or as Kwame Anthony Appiah writes: "Our only distinction in the
world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it
to our fellows" 11 (and then regurgitate it back to
the West as the view from the Other).
While Western intellectuals produce general universal
knowledge, non-Westerners merely write on what it means to not be
part of that enterprise, becoming the official Other.
As "globalism"
continues in its varied oppositional forms: as critique of uneven
capital accumulation; as authentic encounters with the Other; and,
even as cultural chic, the multicultural challenge to the future of
the university has become more pervasive (moving beyond the
catchphrase of "equal opportunity employer”) and will not go
away.
While the initial trend is
multiculturalism in terms of representation and better curriculum,
the long term agenda is a fundamental transformation of the
male-Western bias of current universities -
what Galtung has called the "mama" syndrome
(middle-aged male academics). Positively put, this is the vision of
the alternative university, whether a women’s university, a
spiritual university, an indigenous university or an experiential
learning camp.
Multiculturalism, too,
however, can become part of official dissent, seen as essentialist
instead of an evolutionary practice.
Writing from Australia, Patricia Kelly interrogates
multiculturalism in the day-to-day practices of universities. She
challenges us to go beyond inclusion and to move toward
responsiveness - to investigate the points of universalism in
relativity, to respond to the changing needs of students, academic
and administrative staff and university management.
In the South, these issues
- framed as ethnic minority political representation - are equally
relevant, and focused less on epistemological and structural
violence and more on direct violence. Pakistani and Indian textbooks
write the other as violent and themselves as more natural, essential
to the future of culture. Textbooks become vehicles for state policy
and not for a more neutral transference of ideas of a possible
history or future. 12
Genocide throughout the
world shows that unless one incorporates the other - nation, tribe,
ethnicity or religion (as in the cases of South Asia, Rwanda, the
former USSR and the former Yugoslavia) as part of a plurality of
selves, of historical cultures that have had episodes of
cooperation, of living in community as well as episodes of violence,
the result will be obvious. Less of all.
Virtualization
and the Internet
A third dramatic force, and
perhaps the most obvious one, is the impact of the idea of the
internet, which has captured the global imagination. Wildman, for
example, believes that it will fundamentally change who is student
and who is teacher. It will virtualize the walls of the university,
creating "elsewhere" learning. It will allow for new
levels of interactivity. It
will eliminate the temporal rigidity of office hours or class
meeting times. Those who do not jump on the post-industrial
knowledge bandwagon will, as Dator warns, become theme parks -
places to visit emeritus professors.
While the theme in the last decade has been: globalize or
die, the theme for the future of the universities will be:
virtualize or disappear. Everyone has joined in, from California
Virtual University 13 to the World Bank's African Virtual
University. 14 The virtualization of the university will
not just be about the delivery of knowledge but also about the
skills needed in the future. Multi-skilling
and other ways of learning will be far more important than the
ability to concentrate on one task (of course, anyone having done a
PhD while working knows about that as well, or any mother who must
take care of children, run the home economy and endless other
responsibilities). Abeles
also believes that the web will allow "bridges between
generations where the wisdom from the past can be used to link the
future with the present, youth with adults."
However, there are limits
to virtuality. Among other revolts, the Belgrade student revolt of
1997 taught us that the university can be a genuine site of dissent.
Virtual links can help spread information, telling others of
injustice but it is the physical site that has mythic resonance. It
is the marching of fifty to a hundred thousand individuals calling
for the resignation of a vice-chancellor or the prime minister that
is transformative. Thus it is not only curriculum that should be
seen as dissenting but the actual physical site of the university
that can create an alternative future. Without physicality,
virtuality will not be about dissent but about information-numbed
minds. However, while
virtuality calls out for responses, and universities attempt to
transform, they do so in fetish ways. One university's idea of
becoming more interactive through the net is to require professors
to put their lecture notes on the web. The result: lectures become
even more rigid and boring. Instead
of using the net for passing information so that professors can
concentrate on the more human needs in pedagogy, that is,
encouragement, nurturing and ideas generation, as in the mentoring
role proposed by Gidley in her concluding chapter, universities
transform professors into information automatons. Instead of
"sage-on-stage" one gets information-retrieval system on
stage. In
Inayatullah’s concluding chapter, he argues that once the
distinction between content designer and professor is made, in the
long run, it will be the content designers who will write the
software for the new universities, ending domination by academy and
capital/state.
Still, the university in
the web/net vision of the world will dramatically and fundamentally
change us. One
historical analogy is that of the impact of the Enlightenment on the
university. "The
rational cosmology - the Enlightenment - undermined the universities
as homes of outmoded theoretical knowledge, still based largely on
Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen and increasingly out of touch
with observed reality." 15 Why go to a university,
it was argued, to learn old doctrine of little use outside a career
in the church? The university in France of the ancien
regime was seen
with scorn as supporting a dead worldview and state. Certainly the
above quote could be applied to the universities of the late 20th
century, argue the creators of the Net.
If we go further back to 12-14th century Bologna, the
university was student-run - fines were levied on lecturers if they
started or finished their lectures late, "not keeping up with
the syllabus, leaving the city without permission." 16_
Politicization:
Enter The Violent State
Of course, leaving the city
is not the problem, finding time away from quickening of information
- of the gaze of the computer screen - is.
Thus while virtuality has its own dangers, particularly
technology fetishism (not to mention loss of face to face
interaction; loss of the wisdom imparted by a truly exceptional
teacher; the gaze of others), another trend (a foundational one) is
the continued politicization of universities.
At one level this is about loss of political freedom at the
national level and the resultant loss of academic freedom, 17
at another level it is, as in Pakistan, taking guns to class and
using them as threats for grades but also to ward off the advances
of the youth wings of other political parties. 18_
The university is not only
a site for finding a future job, for learning philosophy or for
finding a future partner, but also a site of violent state politics
- of deciding who will run the nation. In the North, this is often
done through admissions and graduations. In the South, it is done
through using the administrative apparatus of the state for
political benefit, for striking fear in academics
- letting them know they must not dissent.
Decreasing funds going towards education continue the spiral
of the decline of knowledge and the university. At the same time,
with the formal university in the South under sustained criticism
(seen as the carrier of national culture, as official culture) a
host of business universities have begun to open up. Globalization
has created new possibilities - for computer training and for
business training, as well as for the endless courses one can take
in order to enter an American university.
The challenge in the South
is about entering modernity. At one level this is about decolonizing
the mind, reforming the colonial heritage that universities grew up
in - as Rahman writes how in India universities grew so as to create
lower level bureaucrats for the British to order around, so the
British could save on colonial administrative expenses. Part of the
decolonization process is about creating universities that are
critical of not only the colonial state but the modern independent
nation - i.e. critical of the postcolonial state and its
authoritative power. Universities must become modern - that is
academically independent of the state with fair processes of entry
for students - but not necessarily using the modern model of the
West. Other models of the modern university are required. These must
challenge power in all forms and honor traditional ways of knowing.
The futures of the
university are thus not only about revisiting its pasts, discovering
what its roots are and deciding which histories to privilege, it is
about recovering the many civilizational approaches to knowledge.
Indeed, the future of the university is essentially about rescuing
the plurality of knowledge, specifically the plurality of dissent,
argues Nandy. 19 The
larger problem, as Nandy points out in this volume, in understanding
the future of the university and creating authentic alternatives, is
conceptual colonization.
Central to understanding
the current predicament of non-Western universities is they have not
evolved naturally from their historical roots - rather the
traditional system has gone underground or become exoticized, seen
as the alternative to the official rational university. "As an
Indian academic put it in 1917: "The University of Calcutta is
a foreign plant imported into this country, belonging to a type that
flourished in foreign soil ... the new system was introduced in
entire ignorance and almost in complete defiance of the existing
social order regulating the everyday life of an ancient
people." 20 This is the cultural violence.
And yet the colonial
university has become universal. However, while the lineage of
non-Western universities is assumed to be non-existent, Western
scholars forget that the modern Western university too must be seen
as intimately related to the state and the episteme. Changes in
knowledge as with the Enlightenment forced dramatic changes to
European universities. Nationalism forced universities to reify
myths of war and the Other as enemy. History was rewritten to
glorify the state and its functionaries.
While many focus on changes
in knowledge, multicultural discourse is also about acknowledging
the importance of changes in consciousness. Grant, for example,
imagines an age of Enlightenment (not the European nomination but
the more classical Vedic concept) that comes about through the use
of new technologies developed in the context of meditational
practices. These
individual practices lead to a cooperative coordinated collective
consciousness.
However, alternative
visions of the university in themselves just because they dissent
from conventional visions are not enough to be considered futures
that can create a transformative pedagogy. Secularists such as
Rahman warn that Islamic universities do not present a local
alternative to state-supported universities.
Islamic universities disseminate a particular view of Islam
and repress other interpretations of what it means to be Muslim.
Exclusion instead of tolerance towards others and their ways of
knowing is taught. On
the other hand, private universities only teach courses that can
lead to immediate wealth. They
are not concerned with profound questions of the nature of the good
society. Most importantly they are reserved for the wealthy.
Thus, for Rahman, it is crucial to modernize Third World
universities in accordance with liberal Enlightenment values and not
to be overly charmed by indigenous models or pressures from
globalism.
Mojab extends this and
writes that modernist nominations of the university must be in the
context of civic society, of taming the power of state and capital,
of autonomous universities that are not physically and
epistemologically threatened by the state, whether in its Iranian
Islamic guise or its Western secular guise.
The state must be civilized. Modernist nominations of the
state in the Middle-Eastern context merely expand the state monopoly
on education. Attempts to dissent, to create oppositional social
movements with different visions of education are brutally
repressed.
It is exactly this vision
of the autonomous student-led responsive university that the wise
application of the new technologies allow us to create.
Unfortunately, the planning and use of these new technologies
occur in a context that is currently dominated by economic
rationalism, wherein information transfer comes to mean knowledge
creation, where the counting of number of emails globally is equated
with a global conversation of civilizations. In this context, it is
difficult to remain optimistic about the institutional ability of
current universities to innovate (and why Manicas writes that the
great promise of pessimistic futurism is that history is full of
surprises). This is why the indigenization of knowledge project, the
creation of alternative modernities - Milojevic's ideal of the
women's university, Grant's vision of a meditative campus, Bussey's
vision of a community of spiritually-oriented activist thinkers,
writers and artists carry some transformative potential.
DRAMATIC
CHANGES
The traditional university
is under challenge/threat from various forces - worldwide.
Globalization and politicization are the current factors but the
emerging issues of multiculturalism and virtualization will continue
the dismantling of the university as it has been imagined and
constructed by humanists in the last thousand years - as knowledge
for the sake of knowledge.
In the South, the failure
has come from within, with low pay and local violence as well as
imitative rote knowledge making the academic university a place to
avoid. However, for the upper middle class, who cannot afford to
send their children to America or to send them to private colleges,
all that is left is the state-run university. Gaining entrance is a
life and death issue - the Third World university will remain the
same for decades to come, irrespective of what happens in the West.
Modem saturation and regular electricity are still a distant dream
not an everyday normality.
Thus, while the university
has deep roots - in its modern form in the Christian 12th century in
the West, and in its many different forms (as the formal passing of
knowledge) perhaps one to two thousand years earlier in India and
China - this does not mean that the university will remain stable.
What the future of the
university will be, as with all questions about the future, is
unknown. Our intent is both to contour the unknowable as well as
provide insights into the alternative futures of the university -
to take the various histories, drivers, themes, trends and
emerging issues and weave them together to arrive at alternative
futures of the university. While
historical forces will dramatically change the current university,
there are still choices to be made as to the shape of future
universities.
NOTES
1.
Ivana Milojevic, "Women's higher education in the 21st
century," Futures,
30, 7 (1998): 699.
2.
Ibid: 699.
3.
Pamela Burdman, and Julia Angwin,
"Cal State forging partnerships with 4 High-Tech Firms
link upsets some in academia," San
Francisco Chronicle (1
December 1997): A1. Taking
a critical note is James Wood. In his essay, "In California, A
Dangerous Deal with Technology Companies," The
Chronicle of Higher Education Opinion
(February 20, 1998) (received on the listserve
HRCFS-L@hawaii.edu on February 24, 1998), B6. Wood writes that:
"the proposed partnership would commercialize higher education,
allowing profit motives, rather than pedagogical ones, to drive
university policies regarding curriculum and employment.
4.
Lawrence Wiseman, "The University President: Academic
Leadership in An Era of Fund Raising and Legislative Affairs,"
in Ronald Sims and Serbrenia Sims, eds, Managing
Institutions of Higher Education into the 21st Century.
(New York: Greenwood, 1991): 5.
5.
Ibid.
6.
Jim Dator, “The Futures of Universities.
Ivied Halls, Virtual Malls or Theme Parks?”, Futures,
30, 7 (1998).
7.
For more on this, see Zia Sardar, "What Makes a
University Islamic?" in Zia Sardar, ed., How
We Know: Ilm and the Revival of Knowledge.
(London:Grey Seal, 1991): 69-85. Series editor, Merryl Wyn
Davies.
8.
See Andreas Hippen, , "100,000 fight back the neoliberal
attack on education in Germany," HRCFS-L@hawaii.edu. December
16, 1997. Email of author: sg885hi@unidui.uni-duisburg.de. For more
information see: http://fsrinfo.uni-duisbert.de/streik/
9.
For an American perspective on this, see, Haro, Roberto,
"Developing a Campus Climate for Diversity in the 21st
Century," in Sims and Sims, Op cit: 49-64.
He writes, "Along the Atlantic Seaboard colleges and
universities, especially the older, private ones, celebrate these
English and European traditions. African-Americans, Asian-Americans,
Hispanics, and Native Americans were, for the most part, never
involved in the development of these institutions and are,
therefore, like `strangers from different shores.'" 51. See
Takaki, R, Strangers from
Different Shores. (Boston:
Little Brown, 1989). Haro provides some excellent suggestions for
creating a better climate including, establishing a nonthreatening
social environment, changing the curriculum, diversifying the
faculty, reaching out to off-campus minority groups, strengthening
ties with feeder institutions which have greater minority
representation, employing minority leaders in management, and
creating a minority commission that meets directly with the
university president. However,
his suggestions do not touch on the epistemology - the ways of
knowing - that constitute knowledge and the university that, too,
must be changed before others can feel that they are in the same
ocean and are not strangers.
10.
Taken from Sara Suleri, Meatless
Days. (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1989): 105.
11.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, In
My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): 157.
12.
S.P. Udayakumar, `Presenting'
the past: The Politics of `Hindu' History Writing in India.
Doctoral Dissertation. (University of Hawaii, Department of
Political Science, 1995). Email: spkumar@tc.umn.edu
13.
Wall Street Journal
(January 7, 1998). The executive director of the
virtual-university design team says: "This has got to be one of
the largest, if not the largest, investments in online education in
this country." see:HRCFS-L@hawaii.edu.
Organized by University of Hawaii futurist, Jim Dator, this
listserve focused on emerging technologies and alternative futures.
14.
Through satellite-based distance education, the African
Virtual University intends to provide Sub-Saharan African countries
with "university education in science and engineering,
noncredit continuing education programs, and remedial instruction.
Http:www.worldbank.org.html/extdr/rmc/guide/africa.htm#2africa. For
more information contact: Avu@worldbank.org
15.
Harold Perkin, "History of Universities," in Philip
Altbach, International Higher
Education: An Encyclopedia.
(Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1991): 182.
16.
Ibid: 174.
17.
Khan, Shahrukh, "Pakistan" in Altbach, (1991), Op
cit: 533.
18.
Ibid: 535.
19.
Nandy, Ashis, "The Future of Dissent," Seminar
, 460, (December, 1997): 42-45.
20.
Perkin, (1991), Op cit: 194.
