Introduction.

Cooper, Simon

After the events of 11 September the American Council of Trustees and Alumni--a US-based conservative think-tank--commissioned a report into the influence of American academics on the cultural life of the nation. Entitled 'Defending Civilization: Why Our Universities are Failing America', the report tabled various critical assessments of US policy made by academics in lectures, student newspapers and the like. While this kind of political surveillance is pernicious in its own right, from another perspective the report seems anachronistic in its willingness to believe that universities have been able to maintain a role in the cultural interpretation of their societies. While such interpretation no doubt continues, the capacity of universities to undertake this traditional role has been greatly reduced in recent decades.

The university remains influential but today exercises its influence in very new ways. Ideas have fused with market values, helping to reconstitute rather than interpret society, while the techno-sciences and vocational disciplines have flourished at the expense of the sciences and humanities. In short, the university as a place for the discussion of ideas, and transmission of tradition; a cultural institution which can sustain the cultural framework for social interpretation, is less under threat by intervention from the conservative Right than it is undermined by an embracing structural change: the fusion of intellectual practices and market forces.

While the nature and ultimate significance of this change remains a subject of debate, as the varied contributions to this volume reveal, such questions have largely been ignored in the public arena. Typically, the university has been understood merely in terms of the more general celebration of the coming 'knowledge society'. In Australia the enthusiasm for a new hybrid of the university and the market began almost two decades ago with the 'Dawkins reforms'--a local variant of a transformation occurring across the Western world. These reforms saw no contradiction, and indeed opportunity, in the new fusion between the academy and the market. The chapters in Part I of this collection are responses to the Dawkins reforms, written at the time the reforms first swept through Australian universities. They reveal the comprehensive nature of the forces which have led to the present crisis of the universities.

At first it seems ironic that the further we progress towards a 'knowledge society' the harder it is for universities to sustain themselves. Almost universally, universities have been subject to cuts in government funding which, together with the massification of the tertiary education system, has overstretched their diminishing resources. Applied and vocational disciplines are flourishing at the expense of traditional knowledge. The semiautonomous status of the university is collapsing as the institution increasingly merges or competes with private capital for education and research funding. Culturally, it has become very difficult to defend the traditional university. Calls for the university to return to its traditions, to turn away from the market--whether it be the student market or the research market--fall on deaf ears or mesh with an anti-intellectualism which brands any such suggestion of a return 'elitist'.

It is no coincidence, however, that the crisis facing universities corresponds with the expansion and increasing importance to governments and economies of 'knowledge'. Contrary to claims which suggest that the key to the renewal of the university lies in the embrace of knowledge society, it is possible to argue that the university has 'made over' the rest of society in its own image--through the reconstruction of work and life via intellectual technique--and that it is this that has led to the present crisis. The undermining of the university stems not so much from the marginalization of intellectual work, but from the privileging of a certain type of intellectual practice: the instrumental, over the cultural-interpretative.

That universities are undergoing a significant transformation is generally accepted. What is less agreed upon is the nature of the transformation. The broad range of perspectives in this collection suggest that the transformation has been both profound and wide-ranging. This diversity also suggests the difficulty, to use Frederic Jameson's term, of 'cognitively mapping' the changes within universities. Just what has happened and why is almost as difficult to come to grips with as the question of what to do about it. Certainly calls by sections of the Left and of the Right for greater access to universities, whether through greater public funding, privatized fee-paying, or the extension of virtual learning, miss the point. These calls fail to recognize the changing nature of the university (what one actually has access to), as well as the conditions which have led to the need in Western societies for more 'knowledge'.

The chapters by Bernd Huppauf and Kevin Hart help us to see that we ought not make a clear distinction between the expansion of the tertiary system in the 1980s and the cutbacks by conservative governments in more recent times. Indeed the expansion of the university sector ultimately meant that it had to account for itself differently. It increasingly had to generate income from applied research and more vocational training, as successive governments refused to fully fund the expanded tertiary sector. This has led to a crisis for the more traditional sections of the university, as they struggle to maintain their identity in a framework in which knowledge is regarded as valuable only to the extent that it can generate income. Stuart Macintyre's chapter in Part II of this collection describes the largely negative impact of these changes on the humanities.

While defences of the university based on a tradition of disinterested scholarly inquiry have been marginalized by the aggressive, dominant discourses of economic accountability and social practicality, the defence of the university from the standpoint of tradition is essential. It forms part of a principle from which the university might be sustained. Also in Part II of this collection, Raimond Gaita powerfully articulates such a perspective: the university, if that concept is to retain its time-honoured meaning and ethical core, is an institution governed by a commitment to truth outside of the demands of worldliness and utilitarianism.

This perspective levels its criticisms at a variety of targets: corporate managerialism, the massification of the higher education system, the institutionalization of relativist thought at the expense of an Enlightenment commitment to truth. The importance of defending the university as a distinct institution, semi-autonomous from the society is that it identifies some essential elements of the university's critical and cultural role. Whether this position, based on the ideals of scholarship and collegiality, is fully able to come to grips with the causes and forces driving the transformation of the university is, however, open to debate.

In a certain sense the postmodern university, envisaged by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins, (1) and to some extent endorsed by Michael Peters also in Part II of this volume, can be seen as the 'flip-side' of the traditionalist response. Readings argues that the university must retain a space for autonomous thought, although of a very different kind from that envisaged by Gaita. Readings also critiques the hollowness of much managerial thinking (the empty signifier of 'excellence', for instance). Nevertheless, he shares with the traditional defences of the university a tendency to downplay the special social power of the intellectual practices and how they themselves have contributed to the managerial imperative currently driving universities.

A different perspective takes on board the transformation of the university and attempts to rectify the resulting problems from within. Here, reconstituting the structures of university governance is regarded as a means to ensure that the best of the traditional university is maintained while the new university meets contemporary challenges posed by the information economy. Simon Marginson and Geoff Sharrock articulate different versions of this position. While Marginson is more critical than Sharrock of developments which have undermined the specificity of university culture, both writers are prepared to entertain the idea of a more pluralist university, one able to marry the best of tradition with the demands of the new economy. It remains to be seen whether these attempts to 'civilize' educational capital can come to grips with the structural factors which have driven the fusion of knowledge and the market. It may be that these attempts to steer the university away from becoming a wholly instrumental institution will be more effective than the more broadranging and more abstract theoretical attempts to engage with the crisis of the university.

All of the perspectives in this volume cast light on the situation in which universities currently find themselves. They all make a claim for the significance of the university as an educational and cultural institution, whether it be a significance that has a long historical pedigree, or a more contemporary significance as the university redefines itself in an age of information. Given the multi-faceted character of the crisis universities face, it is clear that none of these alone can provide a comprehensive solution. From the perspective of the Arena editors, whose work is to be found in Part III of this book, a more thorough interrogation of the social relations and social significance of intellectual practice needs to take place before the crisis of the university can be responded to adequately. Kevin Hart's earlier call to consider the conditions of possibility for thinking and interpretation goes some way towards such an analysis, even if his conceptual framework and conclusions diverge considerably from those of the writers in Part III of this collection.

For over two decades the group of writers associated with Arena have concerned themselves with theorizing the significance of intellectual practice. Broadly speaking, they argue that intellectual practice constitutes a specific mode of sociality as well as a distinctive way of taking hold of the world. Both of these are constitutively abstract in their mode of engagement, which is to say that via media such as writing and the Internet, social relations manifest themselves in the absence of the tangible 'other'. Further, intellectual practice renders abstract its object of inquiry: cultures become systems of information, natural objects are taken apart and reconstituted, the human body becomes a genetic map, and so on. Traditionally, the intellectual practices intersected with more concrete ways of life and provided a source of critical and cultural interpretation for the culture which supported them. The shaman, the priest, the philosopher, the political theorist and the humanistic scientist have all stood in such a relation.

Today, however, the more abstract ways of knowing and engaging with the world enabled by intellectual practice have become dominant. Intellectual practices have to an unprecedented degree displaced more traditional ways of knowing and being in the world. Rather than intersecting and helping to orient less abstract modes of engaging with the world, we find that the scope and constitutive power of intellectual practice has been radically enhanced via the techno-sciences and the collapse of cultural/ moral frameworks which might have set limits on intellectual activity. Intellectual practices have moved to the centre of daily life. More and more aspects of our lives are constituted through some kind of intellectual practice: either through the generation of our cultural identities via the consumption of media and information; or the techno-scientific replacement of natural environments with artificially customized zones of habitation.

If our taken-for-granted ethical points of reference, based in mutuality and presence, are superseded by more abstract relations, it becomes vital to understand the nature and limits of a way of life based on the intellectual practices. Alongside the expanded constitutive power of intellectual practice there has been a decline in the critical and culturally interpretive role of intellectual practice in society. The reduction of the scope and range of critical activity can be seen in the near general endorsement of Foucault's idea of the specific, rather than the universal intellectual, and of Lyotard's claim that intellectuals have become knowledge 'handlers', perhaps best exemplified by the rise of the expert and the consultant. Such modes of intellectual practice tend to govern over a narrow field of inquiry, one consequence being that they generally fail to consider the wider social implications of their activity. The chapters by Paul James and Douglas McQueen-Thompson, and by Simon Cooper in this last section of the collection examine such changes in the status and social meanings of knowledge.

Also in Part III, Geoff Sharp and John Hinkson argue that no adequate defence of the university can be mounted without an account of intellectual practice. They suggest that just when the university ought to be playing a key role in such an inquiry--asking questions about the degree to which knowledge as a means of constituting the social can sustain a mode of life--it is blinded by its involvement in the market. Any attempt to reconstitute the university as a site of knowledge generation and training, while generating money in the short-term, is seen to be misplaced.

Indeed, the very identity and role of the university as a semiautonomous institution capable of sustaining critical and cultural interpretation will be subsumed as the university becomes merely another source of commodifiable knowledge, destined to perish as it tries to compete with private capital. At present attempts by many scholars to redefine themselves as entrepreneurs--to market their own capacity for synthesis in order to save the university--can only hasten the demise of the institution. To make a fetish of innovation, whether in the sciences or the humanities, is to create conditions which militate against any defence of the university. The values to which one might have appealed have themselves been overturned, and at best are considered optional.

The Arena perspective which informs these final chapters regards the crisis of the university as a symptom of a vast structural shift, namely the expansion of the intellectual practices as they merge with capital and high technology. This change has marked effects on society as well as the university. The consequences of a form of life governed by knowledge in its instrumental, market-derived mode involve the stripping away of established reference points in time, space, nature and tradition. While all of these have always-already been relative to culture in certain respects, they have stood back from the fully extended reach of abstraction now present in the fusion of the market and intellectual practice. Those reference points have informed frameworks of inquiry and interpretation that enabled ethical and co-operative ways of life.

It is doubtful that such a way of life can be contemplated in a world defined by constant mobility, the conditions of which are established by the commodity. The need for an institution which can provide critical and reflexive insight into this transformation is vital. Whether the university, the traditional place for such critical activity is able to meet this challenge, remains an open question. It is our hope that these contributions will encourage a wider ranging discussion of these issues than is presently the case.

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this collection, as a double issue of Arena Journal and as a book, has been the work of many people. By co-ordinating and also carrying through the greater part of the copy-editing, Alison Caddick has played an indispensable part in bringing the whole project to finality. Michele Lonsdale, who for many years has volunteered her editorial skills to support Arena Journal, worked with Alison.

Jan Allan, Betty Rouch, Eamon Evans, Tim Petterson, David Condylis and Cleo Macmillan assisted with copy editing and proof reading. Prior to their generous efforts, Cleo Macmillan and John D. Howard ensured that rough copy mutated into clear typescript. Sonya Reichstein and Carol Christensen completed the lay-out.

As the product of a voluntary association, Scholars and Entrepreneurs is an expression of co-operation among a wide circle of people. We wish to record the mutual satisfaction that everyone involved has felt in working together towards a common end. We trust that the public reception of Scholars and Entrepreneurs will bring its own reward.

(1.) B. Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996.