Perspectives on the crisis of the university.

Hinkson, John

Why Academics Don't Resist

The folklore of the academy as an institution of independent values that, where challenged, can generate significant political resistance is no doubt overstated. In key respects it is also misleading. Yet it is true that in times of crisis the academy has stood symbolically and practically against certain powerful forces of the social structure. While hardly the whole story, the institution has often enough had to cope with political pressure and significant physical threats. These periods of crisis have become an important element of how the institution understands itself. Whether it was a matter of political corruption, wholesale civil strife or revolt of the generations, the university somehow stood outside the flow of mundane everyday life and the social structure. As such it became the organizing focus of forces seeking to confront and renew social life.

Yet for a decade and a half since the mid-1980s there has been a systematic onslaught by political and social forces against the conditions of staff and students of universities as well as the institution as such. This has almost exclusively been met by, at best, personalized hostility. By and large the response has been one of passive resentment by both staff and students, apart, that is, from that considerable minority who saw the changes as an opportunity for personal advancement.

While it is true that there have been attempts to organize against the restructuring processes within the academy, it is also clear that so far they have failed miserably. More to the point such attempts have gained no centre or momentum. What is it about this new situation that has such immobilizing effects on both staff and students?

It is worth keeping in mind that restructuring processes a generation ago were met with a rebellious fury that shook the world. The so-called Berkeley Student Movement of the 1960s responded to many of the developments that face the university today. Corporatization and the emergence of the technosciences, both of which changed the character of the academy, were of special significance. Here is an excerpt from a comment of Mario Savio, who first came into prominence by virtue of a defiant speech made on the steps of Berkeley against the 'take-over' of the university:

 One conception of the university, suggested by a classical Christian
 formulation, is that it be in the world but not of the world. The
 conception of Clark Kerr (1) by contrast is that the university is
 part and parcel of this particular stage in the history of American
 society; it stands to serve the need of American industry; it is a
 factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or
 government. Because speech does often have consequences that
 might alter this perversion of higher education, the university must
 put itself in a position of censorship. (2)

The movement organized against this development in a variety of ways that challenged both the directions of the academy and the wider society. This was not merely a localized rebellion. In the first place this was ensured by a climate of moral unease and repulsion towards the policies and practices in poverty-stricken Vietnam by the US government. But also the Berkeley Free Speech movement was a triggering event closely associated with May 1968 events in Paris, where for some weeks students and workers took over the streets and President DeGaulle was forced to free the capital. The ramifications were riveting in many parts of the world. The emergence of the counter-culture on a world scale may seem of no great significance today, given its subsequent incorporation into society, but initially this too was a challenge of considerable force. At the most general level it was a challenge to the technologization of society and the academy. It was a response to an early expression of the information revolution. A ferment of ideas and actions accompanied the emergence of the multi-versity of the 1960s.

This educated defiance of forty years ago could have no stronger contrast than the mute and demoralized acceptance of the reality of university re-structuring today. No doubt this is partly related to the lack of social and political contestation generally today, a stirring of ideas and ideals often being triggered by crises in the world of social and political institutions. This demoralization may, of course, be suddenly reversed. That there are signs currently of a re-emergence of social ferment around the processes of globalization is significant. Given time these might percolate across to the restructuring processes of the university. But the fact remains that for fifteen years those processes have transformed the university with hardly a whimper of protest. What is it about the situation in this period that has so undermined the ability to organize on the basis of an educated defiance, compared to a generation ago?

To take hold of this question we need to develop an understanding of what Mario Savio is referring to when he makes a distinction between the university being 'in the world but not of the world'. If Savio was able to see forty years ago that this distinction was breaking down, today it is hard to find any defence of such a notion. The university is now, increasingly, on a scale far beyond that imagined by Clark Kerr, of the world. To be in the world and not of the world requires a form of separation or distancing that increasingly seems unavailable to people and institutions. What has produced this state of affairs?

The institution of the university that was in the world but not of it preceded the emergence of what was called the multi-versity of the 1960s. By that time, the university that is of the world had already emerged in significant respects. This is why so much could be made by protestors of corporate links with the university.

But the demonstration of practical associations between economic corporations and the university does not give much insight into the novelty of the process that was first evident in the 1960s. By and large the Berkeley Free Speech Movement accepted these associations empirically and neglected the question of causation. By implication, causes related simply to political choice rather than to deep structural change. Ironically, this short-term political emphasis became a clear limit on the cultural possibilities of the movements of the 1960s.

One can go further than these attempts to understand the emerging situation and show how these empirical links were possible culturally. This is a major task that requires much more than pointing out empirical contingencies. Amongst other things there is a need for an inquiry into how an institution that for an epoch has been associated with unworldliness--and disinterestedness--towards technical and economic practicality, has moved to the centre of processes of renovation of both society and economy. The institution that was predominantly interpretive is now predominantly instrumental. Indeed any rationale for interpretive intellectual practice is now almost an embarrassment within the institution--not unlike the reception today of the idea of the university being in the world but not of it.

It is my thesis that the immobilization of staff, students and the university as an institution when faced with the re-structuring process, is intertwined with this shift in emphasis from interpretative to instrumental work in the nature of intellectual practice itself. Immobilization arises out of practical confusions. The capacity to form strategies and to act is overwhelmed by the transformation of an institution in the world but not of the world into one which is very much of the world. But, contrary to Mario Savio, it is not merely a matter of being of the world. For the university is now located within the contemporary social structure in a completely novel way, one that, I will argue, transforms the social structure broadly on the terms of the university.

Certainly an institution preoccupied with its emergent role within the everyday world cannot easily draw on its historic cultural resources to critique that world, let alone make sense of its own unique role in that world. The institution itself is in contradiction and it has no discourse that can adequately inform action. Most probably the institution today should not be called a university. Nor is the changing nature of the social structure easily understood or acted upon. Immobilization arises out of both sources: on the one hand the unfamiliar and unprecedented role of the university, and on the other the unfamiliar and unprecedented character of the emergent society.

There is more than one way to approach the task of investigating the changed relation of the university to society and its attendant ramifications. One could, for example, apply phenomenological method comparatively over time to inquire into the day-by-day practices of intellectual workers. This could, if done imaginatively, evoke the relevant contrasts and at least some of their implications. Or one could analyse the changed nature of the institution as institution, as is done by Michael Peters on the knowledge economy or Simon Marginson on the enterprise university in this collection.

This article will make use of such comparisons but at a step removed, via the concept of the social. Given the history of attempting to grasp the nature of the university through a concept of the social has largely failed, because of crude reductionism, this may not seem a promising place to start. Ideas, knowledge, the creative process more generally: these have always eluded a convincing association with a social relational perspective, as indeed have the practices of religion. Yet if we are to be able to speak informatively, with a view to both perspective and policy, of what it means to have a knowledge economy--or more generally, an information society--it is crucial that a social account be developed.

A crude social perspective on the university is certainly implied in many of the restructuring processes of the last fifteen years. The 'sector' is brought back to earth, so it might be said, by being forced into social reality, the 'reality' of the global economy. The 'elitist', 'middle-class' university, relatively relaxed and distanced from the economy, is contrasted with an institution focused on those who have to make a life through practical endeavour in the 'real world'.

But an account is needed that can make sense socially of the concept of information, or can show how globalization is social, in a way that goes far beyond a notion of expanded linkages across the globe. Information, for example, has a commonsense meaning that is predominantly cognitive and certainly not social. Information allows us to know about matters of interest to us. If, however, there is reason to speak of an information society, how is this to be understood in unambiguously social terms? Is it a society that is, somehow, typified by the exchange of information, or does it have a particular social composition? It will be argued that the latter is crucial; that there is a need for the development of concepts to give this new form of the social proper expression. This is an unavoidable matter given that the academy today is utterly interwoven with such a development in society. Any such conceptual development must expand our insights into how the institution today relates to and contrasts with its forebear, which gained its strength and rationale by being 'not of the world'.

The Changed Relation of University to Society

There have been a number of attempts to interpret the dilemma and general situation of the academy in recent times. I will categorize them in three ways. Firstly, those who take for granted a process called 'the university tradition' and interrogate the new reforms accordingly. Secondly, those who take the new situation of the academy for granted and seek to better reveal it and ask questions of it. This second category breaks up into two broad types of approach: those which hold that the changes to the university are basic yet are able to be studied by drawing upon relatively conventional critiques of labour, market and capitalist economy; and those which place and interpret the academy within a renovated set of concepts influenced by poststructuralist method. Arguably each throws light on significant aspects of the academy today, partly in terms of what is being lost and partly what is new. My interest in each of these will give special emphasis to a social understanding of the institution.

I. The university tradition as context

The conception of the university referred to by Mario Savio as 'in the world but not of the world' is one that has a rich history. In it the intellect, supported by traditions of thought, stands differentiated from the world of everyday events. Set aside from the everyday the university has a logic of its own, standing in relation to the everyday not unlike that of the monastic tradition of Christianity. Those who emphasize this tradition, and its corruption by forces of the social structure, defend a process of knowing and research that values 'interpretive' thinking, above all a delving into the basis of things.

Perhaps it is the phrase 'the idea of a University' that best captures its special character. For this places the university squarely in the realm of ideas. Its existence is defended in terms of ideas rather than in terms of it being a material institution that satisfies more mundane needs. Rather than everyday needs, the university stands for what Humboldt calls an ideal form of life. (3) This is not to speak of any particular way of life, but 'thanks to its intimate connection with science, scholarship, and truth--to something universal, something prior to the plurality of social life forms', (4)

In traditions of thought that emphasize a material or a social understanding of how the world is ordered, this approach, that speaks of universals prior to the particularity of this or that social formation, is unconvincing. It is exactly this relation of universal and particular that Marx sought to turn on its head in his critique of Hegel and the German Idealist tradition. This reversal of universal and particular in Hegel is the only way in which the materialist tradition, at least before the American Pragmatists, (5) believed it could place thought and intellect in the world. Yet there is a tension here that still has no satisfactory resolution. For the materialist tradition has nothing of any deep significance to say about the university when it is re-structured by processes directly related to industry. Its only critique relates to class division. If by its introduction into the social structure it produces or supports inequality, there is a clear point of criticism of the new university. But apart from this, very little can be said.

The university tradition has many thoughtful and passionate supporters. They place the core of the institution in the field of universal ethics and interpretation, seeking to protect a unique space where such matters can be thought and argued, rather than being coloured by the demands of industry or the everyday. They know its significance deeply and intuitively and often hold in contempt any pressure to give a materialist or social account of the institution. It is my working assumption that something of this approach to the university must be taken seriously. The long history of writers and thinkers of stature who insist on its crucial importance should be sufficient to makes us wary of those who simply dismiss it as an elitist or merely conservative institution. Without denying the reality of such qualities in many university settings, there is something more than this in the institution that requires interpretation.

A recent book of readings on the reform of Australian universities contains articles by those who defend this view of the university. (6) Two articles stand out, one by Tony Coady (7) and the other, a significant article, by Raimond Gaita. (8) Both writers are philosophers who are drawing on and defending an embattled discipline in the midst of reforms that give ever-decreasing space to 'non-practical' traditions of thought.

What makes up the core concerns of a true university is the preoccupation of both these authors. Coady turns to Newman (9) to develop his concept of the university and to contrast it with what is common in the institution today. It is not an unchanging institution he wishes to elaborate so much as a certain kind of process. The tradition is not a fixed set of concerns, practices and interests. It is rather an approach to the world and the self, the pursuit of 'a certain type of learning'.

 [Newman's] picture of universities is one of communities of
 learning devoted to the pursuit of significant truth, as an end in
 itself, and, as such, fulfilling a central cultural and ethical role
 for society at large. (10)

The emphasis is upon truth rather than the market value of ideas, depth rather than superficial and momentary insights, integrated knowledge rather than bytes of 'information'. Intellectual virtues such as honesty are crucial, but nothing outweighs the significance of the pursuit of truth in characterizing this tradition.

For Coady the contrast is with a form of managerialism that has moved to the centre of practices within the university. People infected by this way of viewing the world,

 see universities and other crucial social institutions, such as
 hospitals, as no more than corporate operations aimed at
 generating products ... The task of 'tertiary training' is to grind
 out 'graduates' at a certain rate for the consumption by society ...
 Fixated on bottom lines, the [managerialists] have a natural
 tendency to flatten the variety and multiform values of human life
 and its social institutions into the one dimension. For individuals,
 it is a peculiarly narrow version of self-interest, for institutions
 a peculiarly narrow version of efficiency. (11)

This latter process has transformed the contemporary institution utterly. Coady does not address how this has been possible, but the contrast gives us a starting point in articulating the nature of the tradition that has been lost.

Gaita makes similar contrasts, but with more insight and passion:

 The conceptual loss we have suffered through the degradation of
 serious conceptions of the university is partly a consequence of a
 conceptual loss in characterising its treasures. The managerial
 Newspeak that now pervades universities is both a cause and an
 expression of the fact that the language that might reveal that
 value has gone dead on us. (12)

Gaita does not, however, locate this conceptual loss solely in recent developments in the university. 'Managerial Newspeak' is only the latest phase in a development that he locates in modernity more generally: 'at least since John Stuart Mill resorted to the notion of a higher pleasure to explain why the life of Socrates dissatisfied was preferable to the life of a pig satisfied' (13) Increasingly, the value of academic life can only be spoken of in terms of the value of certain externalities, such as a contribution to the social structure generally or industry in particular. Notions such as a vocation, as opposed to taking up a profession, have also become anachronisms. These developments in language have contributed in turn to an incapacity to articulate what is important about the university.

A serious concept of the university entails an internal practice that is a search for truth about deep meanings rather than appearances. This requires a certain inner life of the mind grounded in reflection.

 A university community of scholars exists when its members
 acknowledge their obligation to reflect on the nature and value of
 the life of the mind, as that has been revealed in the great
 examples of the past and in their own experience. When it is most
 true to itself, the academic community is constituted by the ways
 its members respond to the ideal of an individuality realised
 through critical, truthful, historically aware reflection on what it
 humanly means to live an academic life. Then the relevant language
 of value is most alive, nourished by examples, fertile in historical
 resonance, often allusive but always rigorous. (14)

It is this community of scholars who give substance and meaning to the notion of collegiality and the necessity for a form of collegial administration to help sustain the unique processes that constitute the university. As Gaita is quick to acknowledge, this is a world that no longer means anything to most members of universities today.

When it comes to outlining the reasons for the profound shift in language, one that can barely accommodate the concept of truth, Gaita has very little to say. He restricts himself to suggestions. The change relates to changes in 'the way we live'. We should look to the 'market and commodity fetishism' (15)--potentially powerful lines of insight, but utterly undeveloped in this chapter. But whatever else is said, Gaita gives us a passionate defence of a practical institution that was significantly marked off from the everyday world and the social structure as well. And, he would add, it was an institution that was critical to the life of the larger society by virtue of not being a simple reflection of that society, by pursuing practices not able to be reduced to the interests and influences of that society.

Robert Nisbet, in a book written thirty years ago, gave a defence of this notion of the university that overlaps Gaita's, but Nisbet did attempt to place it socially. (16) For Nisbet there are many ways in which societies can solve the problem of transmission of knowledge between generations. The university is one quite unique solution that may well be on the road to extinction. It has only existed for about eight centuries, and one of its distinguishing characteristics is its commitment to a peculiar dogma: knowledge is good. By and large this knowledge has not been practical knowledge but scholarly work.

 What is the dogma that the university is built on? Knowledge is
 important. Just that. Not 'relevant' knowledge; not 'practical'
 knowledge; not the kind of knowledge that enables one to wield
 power, achieve success, or influence others. Knowledge!
 Not the principle of utility or rationality, but dogma alone has
 made it possible, during the past century or two, for the Homeric
 or Chaucerian or Miltonian scholar to walk as tall on the campus as
 either the physician or the lawyer or the engineer. (17)

Scholarly work is not the work of genius or the work of revelatory insight. It is rather an aspect of knowledge that Nisbet has in mind as representing the academic tradition, that aspect that relies on a certain kind of collective effort:

 [C]umulative knowledge, corporate knowledge; the kind of
 knowledge that is gained by men working in terms of the works of
 others; the kind of knowledge that declares the indispensability of
 sources, of the ... indispensability of profound learning regarding
 what others have said about these texts, sources, and words. (18)

Creative or sterile, sometimes the latter, this knowledge is the knowledge of academic dogma. Nor is it being suggested that this process of generating knowledge had no relation to a wider society. It is Nisbet's claim merely that any such relationship--what could be termed a higher utility--was never direct, always indirect.

 Only a few decades ago did there begin to take serious hold in the
 American university the view that its service to society, to
 government, and to professions and industry must be direct. Before
 that, going back to its very beginnings, the service rendered by the
 university lay not so much in what it did, but in what it was ...
 Leaving aside the university's direct commitment to the scholarly
 disciplines, it provided a unique environment for young minds
 through their disciplined exposure to scholarship, manifest in the
 curriculum. (19)

In other words a relative autonomy of the university in relation to a larger society existed and within this autonomy the necessary social space was created such that the academic dogma could be sustained. But this knowledge nevertheless also developed students:

 And yet for all the dominance of the academic dogma, for all the
 ascendancy of conviction that it is good for students to read
 Chaucer, Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot, good to study history,
 philosophy, sociology, and physics, good to accumulate knowledge
 in the learned disciplines, each of these good in and for itself,
 no one can doubt that a very real social and moral development took
 place in the student. (20)

This concept of the university defines it as an exceptional institution, one that stands outside of the normative frameworks that govern other social institutions and everyday life. It is significantly marked off from the constraints of government and society, although this marking off must have its limits. The turning point that sees a radical moving away from this concept of being in the world but not of the world comes with strategies that create what Nisbet calls a 'higher capitalism' or an 'academic capitalism'. These strategies seek to achieve the 'last reformation', an institution that has discarded all of the elements of not only medieval institutions, but also the ideal of 'dispassionate reason, of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, of objective study of nature, society, and man'. (21) The university was the last institution to support these ideals and it has been discarded for a more direct utility. This was pursued in ways that broke up the collaborative ideals of the university, targeting this individual, that centre, 'company-like groups of faculty members' and so forth.

 For the most part, traditional agencies in the university were
 bypassed, or given but token recognition, by government, industry,
 and foundation, with the new bullion going instead to academic
 entrepreneurs for companies known as centers, bureaus, and
 institutes ... the academic scene was bestridden by that modern
 incarnation of Caesar, the academic capitalist, the professorial
 entrepreneur, the new man of power! (22)

Nisbet does see a place for research institutes financed by and oriented to industry and the social structure generally. But in his view they should be in a different institution. They do not represent the ideal of the university and to the extent they enter into and make their mark upon it, the university will fragment and be unable to make its historic contribution to knowledge and individual formation.

What then constitutes the social make-up of the scholar and the university? For Nisbet, their social make-up relate to the distinctive practices that make the university a unique institution. As has already been suggested, the university was constituted historically, emerging about eight centuries ago. First constituted as a mediaeval institution, it now faces the last reformation. It also relates to certain ideals of dispassionate knowledge that have a longer history, that have not always been grounded in a social institution. The university is an institution particularly concerned with the constitution of the social order--of social and personal formation--not unlike religion vis-a-vis the social structure prior to modernity. But the special qualities of the kind of sociality able to delve into the social formation of other institutions are left unexplored.

There is an overlapping interest here between Nisbet and Gaita, the latter also trying to find a social grounding for intellectual work by placing it in a distinct social institutional setting. While there is some validity in acknowledging the importance of the university as a social institution, one that changes as a result of conflict with other social institutions, this does not help us sufficiently to understand the unique situation of both university and society today. There are important lessons in this view of the university but a social interpretation needs to achieve at least three things.

Firstly, it must identify the reasons why the university has been overwhelmed so rapidly. Secondly, it must flesh out the implications of what this means for both society and the individual. And thirdly, it needs to help identify major structural conflicts or contradictions that are inherent in the transformation of social relations. While Nisbet would have things to say about such matters--especially points one and two--they would not amount to much more than a view of how capitalism has overwhelmed the last mediaeval institution. Gaita would put it differently, but I think not strikingly so.

II. Information capitalism and the contemporary academy

Two recent studies of the contemporary university make no reference to Nisbet's work yet draw strongly on his notion of "academic capitalism'. One, by Slaughter and Leslie, actually adopts this term as the title of their book (23) while the other, by Marginson and Considine broadly works within the terms of Slaughter and Leslie's arguments. Both place the contemporary university firmly within the ambit of a knowledge economy and study the implications of this context for the university.

The broad-ranging and ambitious study by Slaughter and Leslie emphasizes three issues that bear directly upon the character of the contemporary university: the rise of the global market; the emergence of the techno-sciences as major suppliers to the global market; and the rise of the academic entrepreneur. Nisbet did not write of the global market in his study, writing before that form of the market had emerged. But in other respects he would find much to agree with in Academic Capitalism. He would, however, have little sympathy for the lack of comparative contrast with earlier forms of the university, and he would have little in common with Slaughter and Leslie's attempt to view the academic as engaging in academic labour along the lines of Marx's analysis of the labour process.

Putting these matters aside for the moment, Slaughter and Leslie study the relations of the university with the economy. Their framework of analysis is a modified political economy, a political economy influenced by arguments about a post-industrial or post-Fordist development related to technology change. It is the needs of corporations for new products and the needs of universities and academics for new forms of funding that come together to facilitate a qualitative break in the character of the university as an institution and of the academic as a scholar. Particular disciplines have responded in an exemplary manner:

 The biological sciences exemplify the growing involvement of
 science and technology (or perhaps science as technology) ... in the
 marketplace. Before the 1980s, biology was a basic science whose
 faculty were concerned primarily with performing research for the
 National Science Foundation and authoring papers for scholarly
 conferences and journals. As corporations became more aggressive
 in their search for products for highly competitive global markets,
 they began to invest in molecular biology, the key to
 biotechnology. By the mid 1980s, most full professors of molecular
 biology held equity positions in spinoff companies ... (24)

The authors are well aware that this is no classic capitalist situation. Academics do not own the factors of production. But the term academic capitalism is meant to signify a situation 'in which allocation decisions are driven by market forces'. And the new academic acts from within the public sector as a capitalist, as a state-subsidized entrepreneur.

In their model, various mechanisms were employed by governments and by institutions of higher education to achieve a shift towards the academic capitalist model. Firstly there has been a progressive reduction in government grants, placing the university under financial stress. As far as research is concerned there has been a very deliberate shift in the nature of grants. They have moved away from the block grant to specific grants, shaped to achieve national objectives, especially economic objectives. Entrepreneurial research is favoured over more 'basic' research while the decline of the block grant takes the initiative out of the hands of the institution, especially the institution as an academic body. Entrepreneurial relations with outside corporations become the valued norm. Student fees have become significant, including the selling of education to overseas full-fee students. And the balance has shifted from student grants to loans.

The general forces driving the changes in higher education are broadly termed post-industrial by the authors. They have in mind especially the undeniable fact that the post-industrial or postmodern context is dependent upon high technology, technology that emanates from the universities.

 In an increasing number of cases universities are the sites where
 new technologies and products are developed, often in
 partnerships with business, through funding provided in part by
 the state. (25)

And this technology in turn signifies a crucial change in the nature of knowledge, where knowledge loses its capacity to stand apart from its applications.

 Whether scholars write about 'high technology' (Reich 1991), the
 'information economy' (Castells 1993), or 'technoscience'
 (Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994), they see as central to global
 competition national strength in computers, telecommunications,
 electronics, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, and
 biotechnology, whether as the basis for whole new industries or as
 a means for streamlining old industries. Technoscience makes
 impossible the separation of science and technology, basic and
 applied research, discovery and innovation (Touraine 1974;
 Lyotard 1984; Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994). Techno-science is at
 once science and product. It collapses the distinction between
 knowledge and commodity; knowledge becomes commodity.
 Telecommunications and biotechnology exemplify technoscience. (26)

And it is this profound shift in the nature of knowledge that sets the scene for the rise of the academic entrepreneur. Two generations ago, they reflect, Robert Merton could speak about and theorize the norms of science in terms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism. (27) The conditions that have subsequently emerged such as globalization and the associated turbulence within institutions require a concept that recognizes a 're-norming' process within science and technology in particular and the rise of the academic entrepreneur.

 Tertiary education policies in all [four] countries [of the study]
 moved toward science and technology policies that emphasized
 academic capitalism at the expense of basic or fundamental
 research, toward curricula policy that concentrated moneys in
 science and technology and fields close to the market (business and
 intellectual property law, for example), toward increased access at
 lower government cost per student, and toward organizational
 policies that undercut the autonomy of academic institutions and
 of faculty. (28)

The success of these policies is reflected in the rise of the academic entrepreneur across all faculties, even though the greatest concentration is in science and technology and their emergence is uneven elsewhere. Nevertheless the general effect is to end any meaningful concept of the community of scholars.

The second study, by Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, (29) outlines the basic elements of an emergent institution they term the Enterprise University. The study is, as the authors explicitly state, an empirical study of the changing forms of governance in contemporary universities in Australia, although they also make some observations about the generality of these changes for universities beyond Australia. Here they especially rely on the work of Slaughter and Leslie, but do not explicitly frame their work in the terms of Academic Capitalism. As with many empirical studies, the authors do not attempt to outline a concept of the university against which they measure change. They have an implicit concept of course, but it lacks clear definition.

For example, it is stated in the introduction that the authors are not 'surprised to find that an entrepreneurial spirit is now sweeping the cloisters'. (30) This is accepted as the reality of the university rather than something to study. Thus they simultaneously rely on the study of the entrepreneurial academic of Slaughter and Leslie while taking for granted what is a momentous shift. Rather than select this as a major focus--'the money changers have long since mortgaged the temple'--they focus elsewhere. In particular they turn to the management structures within the university, what they call the study of governance. The changes in these structures, rather than shifts in the nature of academic activity, are Marginson and Considine's focus.

All studies entail selection so this is not in itself surprising. But their study is unwieldy and often contradicts its own selected focus. They wish to comment on the general changes in the university and its context--the rise of the knowledge economy for example--while purporting to study only changes in governance. Probably it is the general change that is of most interest to readers, and it would seem the authors as well. Yet they are limited by their empirical method and their stated brief. For example, they announce with insufficient argument and empirical evidence 'a new phase in the history of the university'. Good arguments can be mounted along these lines but, given their method and focus, the only way they could argue it is anecdotally. Had they framed their arguments more explicitly within those made by Slaughter and Leslie they would have had a better basis for such a proposition. But then changes in governance would have to be studied as an aspect of the larger framework. How managerial strategies have influenced the profound shift in culture within the tertiary sector--making their own distinctive contribution towards the formation of, amongst other things, the 'academic entrepreneur'--would still make a valuable contribution towards an understanding of the entrepreneurial university.

Nevertheless, Marginson and Considine emphasize that they have identified the emergence of a new institution in their study, one that can be identified in terms of modes of governance. This institution may have broader points of reference, such as the knowledge economy on the one hand or a particular form of 'academic labour', termed the academic entrepreneur on the other, but it can also be defined in terms of governance and power. In short, according to Marginson and Considine, the university is becoming an 'academic enterprise'.

There are many elements that make up the mix that points to this new institution. Strong executive control, performance targets typically found in the corporate world, the supplementing and supplanting of older structures such as the senate and academic board with corporate structures, the supplementing of departments with research centres, and market-oriented approaches to students--especially overseas students on full fees: all of these represent a break in the nature of the institution. While most of these elements find a place in Slaughter and Leslie, they are given a more sustained discussion in The Enterprise University, with greater emphasis upon the institution per se.

Perhaps the strongest element of Marginson and Considine's argument relates to the shifts in the governance of the university's research culture, a culture of research oriented towards corporate culture. Here one finds a discussion, without much elaboration, of one of the few examples of the break in research cultures, from collaborative and collegial processes to entrepreneurial processes.

 [Research scholars] perform for their peers. Their discipline-based
 traditions are sanctioned by worldwide scholarly networks rather
 than government policies or managers. These traditions are
 characterised by loosely defined work programs, relations of
 power and status that are conservative and often opaque, and the
 free exchange of published research findings. (31)

This is contrasted with various strategies like the rise of the research centre and various shifts in the culture of research:

 In reinventing research as a system of money, measures, targets
 and comparisons, amid a competitive economy and an enterprise
 culture, research management sets out to change the way that
 researchers think about research, and how they see themselves as
 researchers ... In an era of self-regulating systems, deceptively
 consistent with the old collegial principle of academic freedom,
 researchers must themselves reconcile the differing imperatives of
 knowledge creation and wealth creation. (32)

The authors are not, by any means, seeking a return to the collegial management of research. They accept the 'reality' of the enterprise culture but do look for a re-invigoration of academic cultures as a support for research. For them success for the enterprise university comes when it can combine an entrepreneurial capacity, properly focused, with strong academic cultures. (33)

In other words they emphasize that the emergence of the enterprise university has, at least initially, undermined the base that it needs most. A university without the means of renewing its research base will hardly achieve its goals in a world structured around the knowledge economy.

This study of governance in the new university does identify key elements of the process of re-structuring. However the lack of any discussion of the historical university as in the world but not of it leaves both this study, as it does Slaughter and Leslie's, seriously lacking in terms of perspective and ethical argument. In the case of Marginson and Considine the tendency to take up the practice of collegiality only from the standpoint of governance is reductive. This almost completely misses the point of the collegial idea and collegial practice. Collegiality is primarily a matter of the relations of co-operation required to produce knowledge. Collegial administration is, in this respect, secondary in relation to a larger process. This does not mean it is unimportant. But its contribution is as a necessary support to the work of academics rather than something to be studied apart from that work. The predictable decline in the nature of academic work that follows from the replacement of collegial administration with performance management is ignored where collegiality is given such a poverty-stricken meaning.

Slaughter and Leslie are even more reductive when it comes to collegiality. They frame their arguments by drawing on one version of Marxian concepts. They rely on the concept of labour--in this case academic labour--to describe the work of academics. Collegiality hardly gets a mention as a distinctive mode of work. There is an exception where they refer to Merton's reference to communalism and co-operation inherent in the work of the scholar. But Slaughter and Leslie mentioned this only to point out its unreality given the process of 're-norming' associated with the entrepreneurial academic. Superficially, they are empirically correct. Yet there is a world of meaning in this transformation they have left unexplored. No doubt wishing to avoid the charge of nostalgia they throw the baby out with the bath-water. There will be no insight into what the transformation of the institution means if the concept of the social applied to the university is reduced to that of social labour in general.

The treatment of collegiality in the university is by no means the only example of a reductive framework in their work. To simply study the role of intellectual property in terms of the relations of the entrepreneurial university to the corporate world is of the same order as the study of empirical institutional relations found in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. That is, an empirical relationship is uncovered but it is the underlying patterns and meanings that illuminate the emergence of intellectual property as a significant social focus. Slaughter and Leslie obviously believe that the range of Marxian concepts they draw on make the difference here such as when they place the entrepreneurial academic within the category of labour. But those concepts actually throw no more light on the meanings of intellectual property than is achieved by placing academic knowledge in the market. It is there. It now circulates and has value. But why it is able to make this transition from its very particular form of value within the University tradition has no illumination. In this context Marxian concepts reduce the knowledge economy to the market rather than reveal how the market and other institutions change in order to sustain a knowledge economy.

III. Poststructuralist perspectives on the contemporary academy

The well-known grounding of poststructuralist method in contemporary linguistics tends to deflect attention away from a significant preoccuption of many poststructuralists with changes in the character of intellectuality and its institutions. This preoccupation should not be surprising if we keep in mind the importance of communications theory for structuralism and poststructuralism and the intersection of communications theory with the historic communications revolution that has remade social structures so profoundly over the past two decades. A method that, in contrast to marxist approaches, is more directly concerned to elaborate the character of intellectual practice may provide alternative insights into what the transformation of the academy means. I will give two brief illustrations of this interest from two leading poststructuralists--Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard--before turning to a work by Bill Readings that is directly preoccupied with the academy as an institution.

In a very well-known article on the intellectual, Foucault makes some crucial distinctions in relation to intellectual practice that bear strongly, if indirectly, upon the changes in the academy. (34) In 'Truth and Power' (35) he outlines a shift from the 'universal' intellectual to what he calls the 'specific intellectual'. The universal intellectual roughly corresponds to the period of modernity, the era, as poststructuralists like Lyotard tell us, that was typified by grand, or universalist narratives. In this period the intellectual spoke for us all and was the conscience of the culture. Specific intellectuals are more oriented to definite contexts. They work 'within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family, and sexual relations)'. (36) This distinction is, for Foucault, situated historically. The changing character of the university, moving from being in the world but not of the world to simply being in the world, is thus reflected in his work. Foucault goes on:

 It seems to me that this figure of the 'specific' intellectual has
 emerged since the Second World War. Perhaps it was the atomic
 scientist (in a word, or rather a name: Oppenheimer) who acted as
 the point of transition between the universal and the specific
 intellectual. It's because he had a direct and localized relation to
 scientific knowledge and institutions that the atomic scientist
 could make his intervention; but since the nuclear threat affected
 the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could
 at the same time be the discourse of the universal ... The
 'universal' intellectual derives from the jurist or notable, and
 finds his fullest manifestation in the writer, the bearer of values
 and significations in which all can recognize themselves. The
 'specific' intellectual derives from quite another figure, not the
 jurist or notable, but the savant or expert. (37)

In this argument Foucault is making a distinction between his work on the nineteenth-century specific intellectual--the psychologist, the psychoanalyst--and those who emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. A process has emerged in the interim that generates a profusion of specific intellectuals. As this most likely bears upon the closer attachment of the university institution to the social structure, one would hope for some insight into the reasons for this rise of practical intellect. However Foucault never goes beyond description in this account, offering no concepts or perspectives needed to deepen our insight.

Lyotard takes these observations further without directly addressing Foucault's argument. His central focus is the information revolution, the revolution of high technology that gains expression in the whole range of techno-sciences. This revolution is not merely associated with specific intellectuality. It generates specific intellectuals with a powerful technique that allows them to take apart and reconstitute the natural world in ways science has never been able to do before.

Lyotard also takes up cultural questions that go beyond the themes developed by Foucault. While Lyotard's emphasis on the 'demise of grand narrative' resonates with Foucault's emphasis on specific sites, Lyotard also spells out changes to self and other that he sees as related to the information revolution. For example the data bank, in the age of computerization, stands in for grand narrative. If in prior times grand narratives were internalized by the self, now the data bank stands outside of the self. Indeed the self is no longer related to the other with any particular continuity. Relations come to take the form of the "temporary contract'. In other words, while Lyotard has not particularly fleshed out his argument, he sees a relation between the information revolution, the demise of grand narratives that would otherwise centre the individual self, and a re-shaping of how people live with Others generally.

In this respect he speaks of the knowledge economy but goes beyond this term's narrow reference. It is a different kind of society he has in mind, although he would not use that word with its connotations of social integration and unity. It is also a new form of diversity he has in mind, one that links the information revolution to processes that, among other things, can unravel both the self and nature. With the information revolution we have a technology that leaves the humanism of modernity in ruins. It can de-materialize the body, colonize space, and ultimately it will defeat death. (38)

This is a different social order to that of modernity, one no longer centred around the human subject, a projection beyond what has been assumed to be the human world. Information, unlike knowledge, does not require subjects. This order is what Geoff Sharp has called a 'post-human' future. Treating such developments as elements of a postmodern future, it is clear that for Lyotard the entrepreneurial academy with its diverse links into a renovated social structure is part of a larger picture, one that needs to be assessed in terms that are not restricted to academia. He might disagree with any attempt to do so because it would require that we stand back from any particular site. But his work suggests a system of relations that can hardly be ignored.

In The University in Ruins (39) Bill Readings takes up a particular view of the Lyotardian project. His intention is to come to terms with the concept of the university in the midst of globalization processes that, through the techno-sciences, link the university to the corporate world. He is highly conscious of the modern/post-modern contrasts as they apply to the university. Given this, he gives more substance to that contrast than was encountered in the previous section on informational capitalism. Indeed it is in the contrast between the modern university and the postmodern, or more precisely the post-historical, university that he locates the core processes that have brought the university to what he regards as a ruin.

In these matters he follows Lyotard. The modern university is the university at the peak of its power. No doubt he knows that the university has had a longer history, so important in Nisbet's writing, but it accrues new functions in modernity. These especially relate to the rise of the nation-state. For Readings the nation-state and the university are complementary institutions. The core of the university lies in its cultural role in the formation of the nation-state. Here he gives special emphasis to the role of philosophy and the humanities in the inculcation of a narrative of liberal individualism as a support to the state. And it is this historical university, closely related to the German concept of the university, that he believes is now exhausted.

Globalization stands at the centre of these processes that remove the historical functions from the university.

 The process of economic globalization brings with it the relative
 decline of the nation-state as the prime instance of the
 reproduction of capital around the world. (40)

And with the decline of the nation-state there is a withering of its cultural functions.

 [I]t is no longer the case, that is, that we can conceive the
 University within the historical horizon of its self-realization.
 The University, I will claim, no longer participates in the
 historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the
 Enlightenment: the historical project of culture. (41)

The university that remains in the memory of some is, for Readings, a survivor from another era. Not the survivor from the mediaeval period as argued by Nisbet, but a survivor nevertheless, and more to the point, one that 'has outlived itself'. In its place emerges the new institution, the bureaucratic organization oriented to consumption and aspiring to a contentless 'excellence'.

 [T]he University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic
 corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government
 such as the European Union or functioning independently, by
 analogy with a transnational corporation ... the administrator
 rather than the professor [is] the central figure of [this]
 University. (42)

While Readings notes developments such as the rise of managerialism and the administrator as a figure of more significance than the professor, he emphasizes how the notion of culture changes in the move away from the modern project. He finds a general tendency towards what he calls 'dereferentialization'. This lack of reference is a direct consequence of the decline of the specificity of the nation-state (as well as place more generally) under the influence of globalization. It so happens that cultural studies takes up this challenge and reflects the new lack of 'situation'.

 [L]ike 'excellence' itself, 'culture no longer has a specific
 content ... Cultural Studies does not propose culture as a
 regulatory ideal for research and teaching ... [it] presents
 a vision of culture that is appropriate for the age of
 excellence. (43)

But there is no doubt about the relation of excellence to the rise of the techno-sciences, as one would expect of a follower of Lyotard.

 In this context, excellence responds very well to the needs of
 technological capitalism in the production and processing of
 information, in that it allows for the increasing integration of
 all activities into a generalized market, while permitting a
 large degree of flexibility and innovation at the local level.
 Excellence is thus the integrating principle that allows
 'diversity' (the other watchword of the University prospectus)
 to be tolerated without threatening the unity of the
 system. (44)

And just as one finds a contentlessness in cultural studies, one also finds it American and global culture generally. This contentlessness is nothing more, for Readings, than the emptiness of the cash nexus.

What, then, can be argued to be the contribution of this poststructuralist influenced account of the university and the surrounding social context, in contrast to the informational capitalist accounts of Marginson and Considine and Slaughter and Leslie? This is not as easy to answer as might be expected. Certainly many marxist-influenced categories are discarded--for example the academic as labourer. The economy remains an important factor, especially in Readings; class structures are not discussed, but nor were they by Slaughter and Leslie. There is a stronger determination to identify the new principles at work--especially globalization--and to discard perspectives that predate globalization.

The clearest form of difference is probably in the field of culture, if that is a satisfactory term. With Readings we find an emphasis on how culture is emptying out, losing content or perhaps more to the point, freely disposing of contents, and how this suits the global market. The university responds to, even helps form, this growing emptiness by relinquishing its historical role in relation to the nation-state and transforming into a bureaucratic organization committed broadly to consumption.

While Readings captures some of the important elements of the globalizing process in his observations, especially as it relates to culture, it is Lyotard who remains the radical. For he takes on board the logic of the information and techno-scientific revolution as it carries through into the culture of the everyday with a frankness that is to be valued. It is not for him to draw back in horror at where this is carrying us. For him 'emptiness' is not quite the right word, for the information revolution carries us into a world that no longer pays homage to humanity or humanitarian principles. This is the world of the 'temporary contract', of the dematerialized body that has conquered death. Even that place known as Earth has a larger context, of colonized space.

If Readings still seems nostalgic about the university that has been lost, this is not the case with Lyotard. For Lyotard the university belongs to modernity and liberal individualism; both have passed their use-by date. Information is now freely circulating without the requirement of such an institution. And that is that! We are launched into another process altogether, one no longer concerned to form and integrate selves.

How is this development to be spoken of in social terms? Lyotard ties any concept of the social back to the linguistic method of poststructuralism. The social bond is conceived as a language game and social interchange as language 'moves':

 Each language partner, when a 'move' pertaining to him is made,
 undergoes a 'displacement', an alteration of some kind that not
 only affects him in his capacity as addressee and referent,
 but also as sender. These 'moves' necessarily provoke
 'countermoves'--and everyone knows that a countermove
 that is merely reactional is not a 'good' move. (45)

In conceiving of the social bond in this way Lyotard achieves two complementary things. Firstly, he can conceptualize social relations as 'loose', free-ranging and in constant process, in line with the 'temporary contract' typical of postmodern settings. Secondly, the social bond so conceived is no different than the system of signs adopted by poststructuralist method. The system of signs is a template for the informational social order. And the dissolution of the modern university fits this pattern. Apart from this form of the social as free and constant movement we only have the bureaucratic organization described by Readings. The university is at once the source of this expression of the social because of its role in the techno-sciences and its own organization resorts to a form of bureaucracy.

But if it is true that the techno-sciences carry these powerful effects and that the university in its changed role takes on functions that are inseparable from the positive promotion of these effects, it remains to be asked to what degree such changes are without contradiction. And if there are contradictions then the whole question of what possible functions a university can perform returns in a new guise. How these could be taken up within an institution so besotted by the creation of high-tech value is a pressing question.

Intellectuality and the Social

To this point various approaches have been drawn upon to help illuminate the distinction between the university that is in but not of the world and the university that is substantially drawn into the social structure. A range of basic changes to the university sector have been spelt out and some progress has been made on the question of what is being lost in this process of change. Yet the differences between the various studies and approaches have not been resolved. This will not be possible without a convincing account of how intellectual practice can be understood in social terms and how this structures the nature of the university as an institution as well as the transformations of the broader social structure that accompany globalization. At best only limited steps towards such an account have been made. And without such a concept of the social there will be no unified approach that could illuminate the meanings of the university tradition for the contemporary context.

The strength of the so-called 'traditional' approach lies in its account of a distinctive practice within the university that is differentiated from the broad social structure. It is, on the other hand, unconvincing when it comes to putting this in social terms. At best it is content to describe the institution as a special type of social institution. In this usage the concept of the social lacks any specificity. How a particular form of the social could be said to give a distinctive quality to the university is left unexplored.

The information capitalism theorists, on the other hand, describe changes in university practices and the processes of the global economy but their reliance on Marxian concepts is also unconvincing. The specificity of Marxian argument is necessarily lost in applying it to the university, an institution that never convincingly fitted class analysis. Marx was not helpful on questions of intellectual practice, the academic being simply categorized as petit-bourgeois. He had other more active social forces on his mind. But for a petit-bourgeois practice to become so central to the productive work of society, as well as its basic social constitution, surely suggests that the conceptual framework being drawn upon is now somewhat lacking.

Certainly in the work of Slaughter and Leslie the academic capitalist or entrepreneur is never developed as a concept that could be contrasted with the scholar of the traditional university. They merely describe empirically new practices. The academic capitalist simply exists, in the economy. Lacking a concept of the social that could engage with intellectual practices in the era of the 'university tradition', they reduce contemporary intellectual practices to the social structure of the global phase of society. While they attempt to theorize the contemporary situation, a lack of theoretical imagination ensures they cannot do justice to the task.

The poststructuralists, especially Lyotard, do have a convincing grasp of the radical nature of the contemporary social structure and of everyday life, one that many people prefer to regard as fanciful or exotic. But of course, Lyotard's account lacks a concept of contradiction and he employs a concept of the social that is completely malleable and fleeting. The fleeting quality is quite realistic, as evidenced in the form of fleeting relationships inherent in the global Internet, but his analysis is ultimately one-dimensional. It allows no other postmodern reality or possibility. As a consequence he cannot define a role for the university that is more ethically engaged than one that effects a simple reproduction of the information revolution. In his universe such ethical needs are forms of human frailty.

Each of these approaches to the crisis of the university offers genuine insights that should not be ignored. They capture crucial elements of a complex institution with a rich history. But how to unify such differing insights with a view to interpreting and acting upon the dilemmas of the contemporary university remains an open question. The argument I now wish to develop is that this will only be possible if a more complex concept of the social can be developed, one that illuminates the form intellectual practice as such takes, and which at the same time enhances understanding of the social transformations that have ushered in the information society and globalization. In other words, this conception of the social will allow us to grasp how intellectual practice now sits at the centre of the emerging social structure, and how it can be differentiated from those intellectual practices that composed the 'university tradition'.

I. Intellectuality is distinctively social

The difficulty with attributing social relations to intellectuals lies in the fact that the main way in which they are social is not visible. Structurally speaking, intellectuals rely on technological media for social interchange. Historically these media have been the printed word--the book, the journal--although in more recent times the forms of technological media have expanded. But the main point is that the interconnections of intellectuals are extended rather than predominantly face-to-face; they are not social relations as conventionally understood. They are facilitated by the 'magic' of technological mediation. The 'others' with whom intellectuals connect as intellectuals may be anywhere, or in other words are not tied to place. In this sense their social exchange is relatively abstract. Abstraction is the appropriate description in the sense that the presence of the other is not required, even if some abstract reader is assumed.

I take the characteristics of intellectual practices from the work of Geoff Sharp. (46) In his view these practices reflect a distinctive expression of social activity, one that is marked off from those typical of the general community. (47) This quality of abstractness, this standing back by virtue of technological mediation, gives special powers to intellectual techniques. Such powers are distinctive in that they arise out of the universality of forms of social interchange that are distanced from all particulars. This form of sociality is what makes possible dispassionate reason and the objective study of things and meanings as noted by Nisbet in his account of the university.

It is now clear, given the history of the university, that such abstract practices can be organized in more than one way. The cooperativeness and communalism of collegiality is one such way. The combination of such values with honesty and the free sharing of ideas is a contingent expression of the intellectual traditions identified by Gaita and Nisbet and partially theorized by Robert Merton. (48) They are historically contingent. They are also essential for what has been known as the institution of the university in the Western tradition. Indeed the practical expression of such values is a condition for the development of intellectual practices devoted to public service. This is why the rather flippant reference by Slaughter and Leslie to what they call a 're-norming' process in intellectual practice must be rejected for its ethical poverty. Their comment describes new empirical realities, but it also illustrates the limits of empiricism.

Collegiality, however, is not primarily a face-to-face communalism. It is a necessary form of interconnection for abstract interchange to be sustained. The community of scholars only occasionally takes the form of immediate association and the latter must always be secondary to the free sharing of ideas that has characterised academic interchange. This is actually a condition for the autonomous production that is a feature of academic work.

Collegial relations flourish in the interpretive, as opposed to the instrumental, function of intellectuality. This is the main way in which human societies have experienced intellectual practices historically. In other words the intellectual has stood back from the way in which objects are interpreted in the commonsense, everyday. Usually such meanings have not had direct instrumental outcomes, especially in terms of economy and production. In this regard intellectuals, since the rise of 'civilizations', have been central to the articulation and unity of narratives (or ideology) as well as its critique. By and large any utility associated with such activity is, as Nisbet has argued, largely indirect, and this was the case for the sciences as well as the humanities. The interpretation of the meanings of natural phenomena has been as crucial for the being of humanity as the meanings of social phenomena.

The system that supports the academic entrepreneur still relies on extended relations and a process of standing back from the everyday social structure. The profound change in the present period is the close relation of the university to the social structure (one expression of such being the corporation) that develops in the entrepreneurial university in spite of its necessary technique of standing back. Given the reward structure associated with this relation, the level of co-operation between intellectuals--the communal free-sharing of ideas--is radically curtailed, with unavoidable consequences for knowledge production. Nor is an emphasis on intellectual property an innocent addition to intellectual practice. It displaces the free exchange of ideas as an ethic oriented to a public and institutes the defence of value for entrepreneurial purposes. There is an ongoing tension between the co-operative sharing that lies at the heart of the production of academic knowledge and individual and corporate competition. The once internal ethic of intellectual work--the sharing of ideas, the proper acknowledgement of sources--is corrupted. This tension reflects one of the main contradictions of the postmodern entrepreneurial university. Any attempt to renew that fragile yet productive culture of the free-sharing of ideas is constantly threatened by the new reward structure.

It is also clear that the entrepreneurial university changes the balance between interpretative and instrumental concerns in the practice of intellectuals. Intellectual work can be directly concerned with practical matters. Yet it is important to make distinctions here if the significance of this kind of practice is to be properly recognized. It is not practical, for example, in the way Foucault would have it. His contrast between the universal intellectual and the specific intellectual is a false one because the power of the specific intellectual arises out of universal powers that inform intellectual techniques. These universal powers are derived from the socially abstract nature of intellectual exchange. They are indirectly practical and all the more powerful for their more general social underpinning. (49) While this practical expression is more available to the natural sciences--the new techno-sciences that can take nature apart and re-assemble it with definite purposes in mind--it is an attitude also available to the humanities. The advertising industry, drawing upon knowledge of human behaviour, is one such example.

II. The information revolution is a radical expression of instrumental intellectuality

During the nineteenth century the instrumental possibilities of the natural sciences gained significance and a stronger presence in the academy. Among other things this was an important stimulus in the emergence of the school of American Pragmatism. But the role of the sciences in practical endeavour entered an entirely new phase when it was demonstrated, half-way through the twentieth century, that the most abstract of ideas--and the most abstract of social exchanges that support such ideas--can have a radical practical expression. The most powerful example of this breakthrough came with nuclear power and nuclear weapons, both practical expressions of Einstein's physics; of intellectual universality. Einstein had no such practical expectation and believed that his work had no practical implications economically or socially. He believed he was simply engaged in cosmology, or interpretation.

The information revolution unifies the worlds of communication and production. The break through in knowledge of the practical laws of light has facilitated extended communication, while nature is reconceived as structured information codes, for example genetic codes. These are then available for manipulation. The practical power of the information revolution is an expression of the reversal of the relation of the interpretative and the instrumental functions in the balance of intellectual practice. It takes its effect across all of the disciplines of the university, but, as emphasized by Slaughter and Leslie, bio-technology is its preeminent expression.

Given this, the high-tech entrepreneurial university is drawn directly, notwithstanding its abstract technique, into the economy of postmodern society. The postmodern economy is a transformation of the modern economy by virtue of this relationship with high technology, one that interlaces culture and economy in new ways. This is the reason why, for well over fifteen years, report after report has called for a contribution of the university to the economy. It is also the reason why government has drawn back substantially from the funding of the university sector. There has been much financial suffering as a consequence. But these funding difficulties should not deflect us from recognizing the more profound shift that directly and indirectly is transforming the university into an institution that produces market values. This is, of course, what is often called the knowledge economy.

The difficulties, the massive redundancies, the stresses and strong emotions experienced within the university, easily lead to the view that the university is being transformed by outside forces--by politics and under the influence of the social structure. This is certainly the view of Robert Nisbet and other classical conservatives, but it seems to be held across the spectrum of thinkers. Yet this view misses the fundamental point entirely. While the traditional university is certainly embattled and the entrepreneurial university suffers difficulties in a period of transition, the main point is that the whole society and economy is undergoing a transformation and at its core, objectively, this is on the terms of the university. That is to say, the university that is of the world achieves this status by virtue of the capacity of intellectual practice to instrumentally re-make the world in its own terms; the terms of a distinctive form of the social.

That there is a parallel between Lyotard's discovery of the fleeting relationship of everyday life in the information society and poststructuralist method itself, grounded as it is in the play of signifiers, is not simply contingent. Both are artifacts of life reconstructed in the fashion of abstract-extended inter-connection, the mode of the social of intellectual practice. The information revolution progressively re-makes the social world in the image of the social exchange typical of intellectual practice. Arguably, this transformation is more encompassing than the relations of markets, capital and labour. Cutting across these capitalist relations is the new contribution of intellectual practice embodied in high-tech. The work of the intellect takes apart the work of the hand in economic production, the body in reproduction, and bodily presence in social relations.

As far as the economy proper is concerned, it is now broadly framed by the techno-sciences. This is well illustrated in the printing industry in which developments in scientific imaging, made possible by the computer, tend to bypass the forms of labour of the traditional, industrial workforce. Increasingly, in the more advanced sectors, printing staff do technical training and work in ways that make them increasingly indistinguishable from lab technicians. And they dress accordingly. Intellectual training that equips the new worker with the necessary abstract technique--what are called generic skills--to constantly adapt over a lifetime to changed needs becomes the main preparation for the workplace. In a general sense the intellectually trained worker, emerging from institutes and universities, progressively displaces the industrial workforce. This is the postmodern social logic that entices the leaders of high-tech industry to anticipate the 80/20 society--where only twenty per cent of the potential working population will actually be required to work.

Another major mechanism of this transformation is the postmodern market. The market has always worked through abstract relations but the information revolution propels the market into a new phase. This is not the market of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. It has radically enhanced powers and an expanded reach, both a consequence of the information revolution. The practical availability of image-oriented technologies allows the market to enter processes of self-formation on a scale unimagined two generations ago. This progressively makes over the relations of everyday life into social exchanges that are technologically mediated (television, video, the Internet). As such, these exchanges do not require the physical presence of others. Rather than standing largely outside of the everyday world of socially constituted commonsense, as did the market of Adam Smith, in certain crucial ways this market encompasses and constitutes it.

For this reason the most profound expression of the instrumental-rational information revolution is not in the economy, as stunning as this may be. It is rather in the transformation of ways of life that were relatively autonomous of the economy. The postmodern market in this sense is not really a market; it is a way of life that employs strategies that work like markets. It would be more accurate to say that the way of life of the information revolution reaches out to and breaks down the barriers between it, the economy and everyday life.

Taking in the whole process of transformation, it is everyday life which is embattled rather than the entrepreneurial university.

III. The information revolution embodies cultural contradictions

There has never been a society composed entirely of abstract interchange. Past societies have had a different balance from today's, where any level of abstract interchange has been strongly offset by less abstractly formed communities or social relations that require embodied presence (families, the generations, local community). Bodily presence with others has been an irreducible component of all societies. (50) As far as intellectual practice is concerned the ethic of service by intellectuals was a crucial expression of their relation to the broader society that was always their ground. Other socially abstract institutions, such as markets, have also always been strongly offset by communities of presence.

That is, of course, before the rise of the postmodern market. (51)

The information society makes over relatively concrete associations of presence into forms of abstract interchange that support a hyper-individualism oriented to consumption. It is from this abstract interchange that the contentlessness and emptiness remarked upon by Readings emerges. Form overwhelms content. As a result content does not disappear but it is always fleeting.

Structured relations of presence with continuity over time are not mere empirical facts of human history. They are crucial for the growth of core human characteristics: empathy towards the other, emotional depth, a sense of self and place, a reflexive approach to others and the world. A structure that cannot offer such relations can only target a post-human future, a world of hybrid species, of transsexuality and fleeting exchanges with others--all facilitated by high-tech means. Such a structure transcends processes that rely on cultural meaning. This is the point of contradiction in the transformation wrought by the information revolution.

It seems appropriate to term these contradictions cultural. This is not to refer to class cultures. Unlike the social contradictions identified by Marx that address conflicts within the social structure, these emerge at a social level that is shared by all the social classes. They are conflicts that emerge as a consequence of the fusion of high technology and the market, or more to the point, intellectual practice and the commodity.

These cultural contradictions are accompanied by other seemingly more familiar ones such as what has been termed, by the IT entrepreneurs, the 80/20 society. But what may seem to be no more than a familiar reference to unemployment is actually a much more radical development--that of social redundancy. In such a society, due to the reduced need for co-operative presence in productive process--the so-called 'productivity' of high-technology--most people will live on the margins of society.

Such contradictions will actively shape the realities and political responses of the twenty-first century. Academics now find themselves members of an institution that has a rather different relation to the social world than the traditional university. This university is now directly implicated in processes that carry such contradictions. If the traditional university allowed the possibility of reflection upon the social structure, today's university is in the forefront of developing contradictions in the social structure. If intellectual institutions historically had a certain relation to power, they are now a power in their own right. They are the institutional source of practices that project society into a post-human future.

If this imbrication of intellectual practice in the instrumental mode is to be reformed in some way, the development of a cultural reflexivity that can engage the relation of instrumental intellect, the commodity and a post-human future is essential. But intellectuals will not contribute to this cultural reflexivity unless they first gain insight into the structure of their own social make-up as well as the circumstances under which it can turn against humanity. While the university tradition of Raimond Gaita and Robert Nisbet offers crucial values, it too is quite empty when faced with the question of why social intellect has come to this crossroad.

Conclusion

There is always a variety of ways of interpreting social phenomena. My argument has been that one important way of understanding the entrepreneurial university is to view it as one of the core institutions of high-tech society. Any evaluation of the entrepreneurial university must now involve its relations to other institutions such as the mass media, the economy proper and the postmodern market, as well as the contradictions these relations produce. It seems appropriate to conclude that the shift in the nature of knowledge and intellectual practice is so basic that it is a form of nostalgia to seek to turn the entrepreneurial university back towards the traditional university. Yet the profound nature of the cultural contradictions carried by these institutions can hardly be ignored. It would also be reckless simply to turn our backs on the older interpretive traditions of the academy. There is a great deal at stake here and there is more than one aspect to it.

While we might agree that it is nostalgic to seek a return of the --traditional university because of the objective role played by the entrepreneurial university, it is quite another to give in to it as simply being 'reality'. In any case this is not an option because of the internal contradiction discussed earlier: that certain fundamental processes of knowledge formation do not sit well with the entrepreneurial ethos or the competitive academic. This contradiction will continue to encourage those staff and students who subscribe to values of inquiry drawn from the academic tradition. There is a limit as to how far the new academy can go in discouraging these values and practices without being self-destructive. This conflict with the entrepreneurial attitude will surely shape the struggles of the institution over the coming decades.

Nor should it be forgotten that the high-tech society is not a fait accompli. The more success the entrepreneurial university has in helping to establish a society of this type, the more raw contradiction will bubble to the surface in a range of contexts that can only partly be predicted. Further, high-tech themes and possibilities are still controversial within both the academy and society. There is a growing ferment around what is at stake in these processes and what other social possibilities might be available. This certainly pertains to the process of globalization.

That the historical university has been transformed into a unique institution of the information society, helping to form a social world that gives a place to intellectual workers and their technique like no society ever before, is of course ironic. Just as this social world emerges, the means to study and reflect upon its meanings and contradictions begin to disappear. Instrumental intellectual practice has access to worldly powers as never before and is in the foreground of developments that carry cultural contradictions. In achieving this it seems intent upon squashing the interpretative powers needed to interrogate those same developments.

This is not to ignore the fact that individual scholars engage in critical study of these processes. But the entrepreneurial university, objectively speaking, cannot give them structural support. The odd aberration may occur, but that is no basis for the future. So, quite apart from the claim that this university has internal contradictions, there is also an undeniable need for the creation of a new generation of free scholarly activity. By and large this will need to develop outside the entrepreneurial university. It is to be hoped that such efforts will engage the full range of questions addressed in the traditional university. But there will also be new ones, for the role of the intellect today is historic in its implications. The question that must now also be addressed by thinkers committed to the free exchange of ideas is: what does it mean to have society, quite like intellectual activity itself, increasingly composed of abstract relations of social interchange? And while acknowledging the objective reality of the high-tech revolution, how could other social pathways be built?

In the few months since the terror of 11 September made its imprint on the memory of the whole world, Western societies have taken a giant leap away from their heritage of liberal rights and freedoms towards a society of surveillance--in the name of freedom. A society of surveillance is an information society, one reliant on abstract interchange and technique. It must rely on surveillance because, in its purest form, it can no longer rely on the integration of subjects or the internalization of culture. The database rather than the thoughtful subject lies at its centre. In a context where the surveillance society is embattled it is predictable that there will be no easy renewal of the co-operative generosity typical of the intellectual tradition. Nor will the state support a return to liberal interpretive institutions pursuing open scholarly practices similar to the tradition of the university. Any attempt to create an interpretative practice of this kind will now be especially difficult.

There are no formulae for the promotion of such a development. And scholars inclined in this direction can hardly expect the levels of remuneration now offered by the entrepreneurial university. A new modesty, a new determination to avoid the multiple seductions of the celebrity-oriented consumption society, will surely be one condition of success. Substantial efforts to generate the levels of material support essential for small-scale institutions of inquiry will be necessary, for it is unlikely to come from government.

These are not either-or matters. The retention and partial renewal of scholarly values within the entrepreneurial university will depend on the support of those who renew the tradition outside that institution. But now the values of honesty, integrity, the free circulation of ideas, the pursuit of truth need to be joined with a new realization: that intellect has its limits. Without some sense of limit, intellect in the instrumental mode will put us all, as thinkers and researchers, to shame.

(1.) Then President, University of California.

(2.) Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin (eds), The Berkeley. Student Revolt:Facts and Interpretations, Anchor Books, 1965, p. 218.

(3.) See J. Habermas, "The Idea of the University', in J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate, edited and translated by Shierry Weber, Cambridge, Polity, 1989, p. 101.

(4.) Habermas, p. 101.

(5.) George Herbert Mead's seminal work stepped outside of this version of materialism.

(6.) Tony Coady (ed.), Why Universities Matter: A Conversation About Values, Means and Direction, St Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 2000.

(7.) 'Universities and the Ideals of Inquiry', in Coady, pp. 3-25.

(8.) 'Truth and the University', in Coady, pp. 26-48.

(9.) J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

(10.) T. Coady, in Coady, p. 6.

(11.) T. Coady, in Coady, p. 10.

(12.) R. Gaita, 'Truth and the University', in Coady, p. 29.

(13.) Gaita, in Coady, p. 29.

(14.) Gaita, in Coady, p. 41.

(15.) Gaita, in Coady, p. 46.

(16.) R. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America 1945-1970, New York, Basic Books, 1971.

(17.) Nisbet, pp. 24, 25.

(18.) Nisbet, p. 32.

(19.) Nisbet, p. 34.

(20.) Nisbet, p. 36.

(21.) Nisbet, p xiv.

(22.) Nisbet, pp. 74-5.

(23.) S. Slaughter and L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

(24.) Slaughter and Leslie, p. 6.

(25.) Slaughter and Leslie, p. 27.

(26.) Slaughter and Leslie, p. 38.

(27.) R.K. Merton, 'Science and Technology in a Democratic Order', Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, no. I, 1942, pp. 115-26.

(28.) Slaughter and Leslie, p. 55.

(29.) The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, Oakleigh, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

(30.) Marginson and Considine, p. 2.

(31.) Marginson and Considine, p. 167.

(32.) Marginson and Considine, p. 164.

(33.) Marginson and Considine, p. 238.

(34.) These comments on Foucault and Lyotard have a more substantial discussion in Hinkson, 'Post-Lyotard: A Critique of the Information Society', Arena, no. 80, 1987, pp. 123-55; 'Governmentality: The Specific Intellectual and the Postmodern State', Arena Journal, no. 5, 1995, pp. 153-84; and 'Lyotard, Postmodemity, and Education', in M. Peters (ed.), Education and the Postmodern Condition, Bergin and Garvey, London, 1996, pp. 121-46.

(35.) In P. Rabinow (ed.), Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984.

(36.) Rabinow, p. 68.

(37.) Rabinow, pp. 69-70.

(38.) See Hinkson, 'Post-Lyotard', esp. p. 144.

(39.) B. Readings, The University in Ruins, London, Harvard University Press, 1996.

(40.) Readings, p. 3.

(41.) Readings, p. 5.

(42.) Readings, p. 3.

(43.) Readings, p. 17.

(44.) Readings, p. 32.

(45.) J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1984, p. 16.

(46.) See especially "Extended Forms of the Social', Arena Journal, no. 1, 1993, pp. 221-37 and 'The Intellectual and After', in this book.

(47.) Excepting those community relations of the global era that, as we shall see, tend to take on the same abstract qualities.

(48.) See footnote 27.

(49.) Foucault's example of Oppenheimer (see footnote 37) is a case in point for he sees the universality of Oppenheimer's technique in the production of the atomic bomb as a hangover from the era of the universal intellectual, while viewing Oppenheimer as a pioneer of the specific intellectual. But Oppenheimer's power arises out of the universal powers available to him, a power that was generalized with the information revolution.

(50.) It is not the family that is crucial here as the classical conservatives would have it. It is rather institutions that offer structured presence over time. On the other hand the family is by far the clearest example of this type of institution so far in the history of human society.

(51.) Even that great advocate of the market F. A. Hayek, acknowledges the need for the market to be balanced by the 'face-to-face troop' if social order is not to break down entirely because of an over-commitment to the social extension of the market. It is hard to avoid the feeling, nevertheless, that he regards this as a weakness, one to be overcome. Perhaps Lyotard is his successor here. See The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 17.