The University in the knowledge economy.

Peters, Michael

We live in a social universe in which the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge presents a fundamental problem. If the accumulation of capital has been an essential feature of our society, the accumulation of knowledge has not been any less so. Now, the exercise, production, and accumulation of this knowledge cannot be dissociated from the mechanisms of power; complex relations exist which must be analysed. (1)

Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx.

Introduction

The 'structural adjustment' policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, international 'free trade' agreements, the development of new communications and information technologies, and so-called 'growth theory', have helped precipitate a restructuring of higher education systems by Western governments. (2) This restructuring, carried out to enhance national competitiveness in the global economy, is not limited to the advanced economies. There has been a shift in national economic policies to focus on the relations between higher education, human capital and knowledge production, as the favoured nexus for encouraging greater growth and productivity, and thus a stronger basis for participating in the global 'knowledge economy'. It could be argued that under these new conditions the founding discourses of the modern university have been ruptured by the emergent discourse of 'excellence' which reflects this logic of performativity (to use Lyotard's phrase).

Bill Readings argues that the idea of the modern university owes much to the Kantian idea of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and the techno-bureaucratic idea of excellence. (3) It is identified with a set of founding discourses--initiated by Kant, the Humboldt brothers, John Newman and others. Yet, while the University of Excellence is still modern--in the sense that it is both regulated and unified through the force of a single idea--it breaks significantly with the set of founding historical discourses of the university.

I differ from Readings in that I think the founding discourses of the modern university have been ruptured by the discourse of excellence. The combined pressures of globalization, managerialism and marketization have stripped the university of its historical reference points and threaten to change its mission permanently. The academic freedoms and institutional autonomy characteristic of the traditional modern liberal university are also in danger of being jettisoned. This historical break is perhaps even more evident in relation to the emergent discourse of the knowledge economy. In this article I will first trace Readings' argument concerning the three dominant ideas or grand narratives of the university, then examine the notion of the knowledge economy and the role of the university within it. I will then conclude with a brief consideration of two neo-liberal or corporate forms of what Readings calls the 'post-historical' university. These forms have been defined recently in reviews of higher education in the United Kingdom (the Dearing Report) and Australia (the West Report).

The Modern ('Historical') University

Timothy Bahti discusses the historiography of the modern university in terms which not only emphasize its historical break with the mediaeval university but also echo the theme of the 'post-historical':

 Standard histories of the university distinguish the 'older' and
 modern versions according to a chronology that is familiar from
 other such histories as the history of literature, the history of
 industrialization and modernization (urbanization, rationalization,
 etc.), and the history of warfare. Somewhere between the
 eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, the model at hand
 changes: whether the opposition is (neo-)classical/romantic, early
 capitalist/high capitalist, or manual/mechanized, the switch is
 made, the revolution occurs, and we are all henceforth
 'post-'--post-romantic, post-revolutionary, post-feudal--which is
 to say modern. With respect to the university, the opposition is
 medieval/modern, the place is Germany and the time is the end of the
 eighteenth century. (4)

Bahti indicates that whereas the seventeenth century had been a heyday for the European academies of sciences, the eighteenth was the low-point for German universities, with student rioting and drunkenness, dropping enrolments, and little relationship between subjects taught and vocations. In the last decade of the eighteenth century there was talk of abolishing the university altogether, allowing the academies of sciences and the new practical vocational schools to take its place, but in 1810 the University of Berlin was founded. In the intervening years, following the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon, the reorganization of the Prussian bureaucracy was carried out and, as Bahti points out, the discourse of German idealism became established with 'the philosophical writings on and for the university, from Kant and Schelling and then from Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt'. (5)

For Kant it was the idea of reason that provided an organizing principle for the disciplines. Reason is the founding principle of the Kantian university. It confers universality upon the institution and, thereby, ushers in modernity. As the immanent unifying principle of the Kantian university, reason displaces the Aristotelian (6) order of disciplines of the mediaeval university based on the seven liberal arts, and substitutes a quasi-industrial arrangement of the faculties. In The Conflict of the Faculties Kant writes:

 It was not a bad idea, whoever first conceived and proposed a
 public means for treating the sum of knowledge (and properly the
 heads who devote themselves to it), in a quasi-industrial manner,
 with a division of labour where, for so many fields as there may be
 of knowledge, so many public teachers would be allotted,
 professors being trustees, forming together a kind of common
 scientific inquiry, called a university (or high school) and having
 autonomy (for only scholars can pass judgement on scholars as
 such); and, thanks to its faculties (various small societies where
 university teachers are ranged, in keeping with the variety of the
 main branches of knowledge), the university would be authorized
 to admit, on the one hand, student-apprentices from the lower
 schools aspiring to its level, and to grant, on the other
 hand--after prior examination, and on its own authority--to teachers
 who are 'free' (not drawn from members themselves) called
 'Doctors', a universally recognized rank (conferring upon them a
 degree)--in short creating them. (7)

The free exercise of a self-critical and self-legislating reason controls the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine, establishing autonomy for the university as a whole.

Readings argues that there is a problem or paradox in Kantian thought that haunts the constitution of the modern university: the question of how to institutionalize reason's autonomy, or how to unify reason and the state, institution and autonomy. (8) Kant attempts to reconcile this conflict through the republican subject, the universal subject of humanity, who incarnates this conflict. Thus, while it is one of the functions of the university to produce technicians or men of affairs for the state, the state must protect the university to ensure the rule of reason in public life. Philosophy, as the tribunal or home of reason, must protect the university from the state's abuse of power and must act to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate conflict, that is, the arbitrary exercise of authority.

Humboldt's project for the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 is decisive for the modern university up until the present day. Once the idea of reason is replaced by the idea of a national culture, the university becomes pressed into the service of the state. For the German idealists, the unity of knowledge and culture has been lost and needs to be reintegrated into a unified cultural science (Bildung). The university is assigned the task of producing and inculcating national self-knowledge and as such becomes the institution charged with watching over the spiritual life of the people.

Under the influence of John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold, the British substituted literature for philosophy as the central discipline of the university, and thus of national culture. The possibility of a unified national culture was defined explicitly in terms of the study of a tradition of national literature (or 'canon' in the United States). Literature and the function of criticism are entrusted with a social mission in the Anglo-American university. In England, the idea of culture gets its purchase in opposition to science and technology, partly as a result of the threat posed by industrialization and mass civilization. Newman gives us a 'liberal education' as the proper function of the university, which educates its charges to be gentlemen through the study of literature rather than philosophy. Readings argues that:

 For Arnold, as for Eliot and Leavis after him, Shakespeare occupies
 the position that the German Idealists ascribed to the Greeks: that
 of immediately representing an organic community to itself in a
 living language. (9)

In 'The Idea of a University', as Readings points out, F. R. Leavis proposes that all study should be grounded in the study of literature, centred in the seventeenth century, and based on Shakespeare as the natural origin of culture. (10) Leavis believes that the University of Culture can provide the lost centre and heal the split between organic culture and mass civilization.

In 'Literature: A Lecture in the School of Philosophy and Letters' delivered in 1858, (11) Newman 'explicitly positions as the site of the development both an idea of the nation and the study of literature as the means of training national subjects'. (12) Newman suggests that '[a] literature, when it is formed, is a national and historical fact; it is a matter of the past and present, and can be as little ignored as the present, as little undone as the past'. (13) National language and literature define the character of 'every great people'. When Newman speaks of the classics of a national literature, he means 'those authors who have had the foremost place in exemplifying the powers and conducting the development of its language'. (14)

In the wake of globalization, the grand narrative of the university, centred as it was on the cultural production of a liberal, reasoning, citizen subject, is no longer credible. As Readings argues, '[t]he University ... no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture', (15) Excellence has become the last unifying principle of the modern university, yet the discourse of excellence brackets out the question of value in favour of measurement, and substitutes accounting solutions for questions of accountability. As an integrating principle excellence is entirely meaningless; it has no real referent. Under corporatization universities have become sites for the development of 'human resources'. As Readings remarks:

 University mission statements, like their publicity brochures, share
 two distinctive features nowadays. On the one hand, they all claim
 that theirs is a unique educational institution. On the other hand,
 they all go on to describe this uniqueness in exactly the same way.
 (16)

He goes on to tell the true story about how Cornell University parking services received an award recently for 'excellence in parking'. The discourse of excellence is contentless; it does not enable us to make judgements of value or purpose and it does not help us to answer questions of what, how or why we should teach or research.

The 'Post-Historical' University

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Readings' thesis as I have presented it must recognize the influence of Jean-Francois Lyotard. (17) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, originally published in Paris in 1979, became an instant cause celebre because Lyotard analysed the status of knowledge, science and the university in a way that many critics believed signalled an epochal break, not only with the so-called 'modern era' but also with various traditionally 'modem' ways of viewing the world. It was written, Lyotard asserts, 'at this very Postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end'. (18)

In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard was concerned with grand narratives which had grown out of the Enlightenment and had come to mark modernity. In The Postmodern Explained to Children Lyotard mentions:

 ... the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the
 progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labour ... the
 enrichment of all through the progress of capitalist techno-science,
 and even ... the salvation of creatures through the conversion of
 souls to the Christian narrative of martyred love. (19)

Grand narratives are the stories that cultures tell about their own practices and beliefs in order to legitimate them. They function as a unified single story that purports to found a set of practices, a cultural self-image, discourse or institution.

Lyotard writes in a now famous formulation:

 I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates
 itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making explicit appeal
 to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the
 hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or
 working subject, or the creation of wealth. (20)

By contrast, he defines postmodern simply as 'incredulity toward metanarratives'. (21) Lyotard holds that capitalist renewal after the 1930s and the post-war upsurge of technology led to a 'crisis' of scientific knowledge and to the internal erosion of the very prospect of legitimation. He locates the seeds of such 'delegitimation' in the decline of the legitimating power of the nineteenth-century grand narratives. The speculative narrative of the unity of all knowledge held that knowledge is worthy of its name only if it can generate a second-order discourse that functions to legitimate it, otherwise such 'knowledge' would amount to mere ideology. Lyotard claims that the process of delegitimation has revealed not only that science plays its own language game (and consequently is both on a par with and incapable of legitimating other language games), but that it is also incapable of legitimating itself as speculation assumed it could. In particular, the process of European cultural disintegration is symbolized most clearly by the end of philosophy as the universal meta-language able to underwrite all claims to knowledge and, thereby, to unifying the rest of culture. The European cultural disintegration to which Lyotard refers can be seen in the collapse of the European monarchies, the two World Wars, and (what Nietzsche calls) the question of European nihilism. (22)

Since the late 1970s neo-liberalism has become the dominant global narrative. (The publication of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition coincided with the election to power of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in Britain.) The discourse of neo-liberalism revitalized the master discourse of economic liberalism and advanced it as a basis for a global reconstruction of society. A form of economic reason encapsulated in the notion of homo economicus, with its abstract and universalistic assumptions of individuality, rationality and self-interest, has captured the policy agendas of Western countries. Part of its innovation has been the way in which the neo-liberal global narrative has successfully extended the principle of self-interest to a paradigm for understanding politics itself, and, purportedly, all behaviour and human action. In the realm of higher education policy the market has been substituted for the state at every opportunity. Students are now 'customers' and teachers are 'providers'. The notion of vouchers is suggested as a universal panacea to problems of funding and quality. The teaching/learning relation has been reduced to an implicit contract between buyer and seller. As Lyotard argued prophetically in The Postmodern Condition, '[k]nowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange'. (23)

In his writings on the university Readings has been strongly influenced by Lyotard. Readings translated Lyotard's Political Writings (24) and wrote an introduction to his thought. (25) The seminar program, 'The University Institution: The Crisis of Identity', run by Readings at the University of Montreal, was designed to work systematically through the modern discourses on the university, leading up to the problem of legitimation of knowledge and education that Lyotard so defiantly poses.

Definition and Characteristics of the Knowledge Economy

Let me turn directly to the received definition of the 'knowledge economy' before moving on to examine the role of the university in this new constellation. I emphasize that I am simply representing the claims made for or about the knowledge economy by others. The United Kingdom's White Paper Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, for example, defines a knowledge-based economy in the following terms:

 A knowledge driven economy is one in which the generation and
 the exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant
 part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back
 the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use
 and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of
 activity. (26)

The report suggests that knowledge is more than simply information, and it goes on to distinguish between 'codified' knowledge, which can be written down and transferred easily to others, and 'tacit' knowledge which is 'often slow to acquire and much more difficult to transfer'.

New Zealand's Ministry of Research, Science and Technology has recently completed a comprehensive review of the priorities for public good science and technology under the umbrella of the so-called Foresight Project. In its report knowledge economies are defined in the following terms:

 Knowledge economies are those which are directly based on the
 production, distribution and use of knowledge and information.
 This is reflected in the trend towards growth in high-technology
 investments, high-technology industries, more highly-skilled
 labour and associated productivity gains. Knowledge, as embodied
 in people (as 'human capital') and in technology, has always been
 central to economic development. But it is only over the last few
 years that its relative importance has been recognised, just as that
 importance is growing. (27)

This description is accompanied by a description of the 'knowledge revolution', sprinkled with references to Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, Tapscott (Digital Economy), Negroponte (Being Digital), Charles Handy, Kevin Kelly, Hazel Henderson, and Paul Hawken. (28)

The knowledge economy allegedly differs from the traditional industrial economy because of its emphasis on what I have called the 'economics of abundance', the 'annihilation of distance', the 'de-territorialization of the state', the 'importance of local knowledge', and 'investment in human capital'. I will briefly expand on each of these characteristics.

The knowledge economy is said to be different from the traditional economy because it is an economics of abundance rather than of scarcity. Unlike most resources that become depleted when used, information and knowledge can be shared, and actually grow through application. The 'annihilation of distance' is meant to register the fact that the new information and communications technologies diminish the effect of location. Virtual marketplaces and organizations offer round-the-clock operation and global reach. The 'de-territoralization of the state' indicates that laws, barriers and taxes are difficult to apply solely on a national basis. Knowledge and information 'leak' to where demand is highest and barriers are lowest. Finally, investment in human capital (that is, competencies) is touted as the key component of value in a knowledge-based economy. Knowledge-based companies seek knowledge locked into systems or processes rather than in workers because these have a higher inherent value and cannot 'walk out the door'.

In terms of this kind of representation of the knowledge economy, the traditional liberal university is considered to have both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, universities as knowledge institutions have always had an international mission and have been oriented towards the international community. On the other, modern research-based universities that grew up during the nineteenth century under the state's influence are perceived by reformers and decision makers as being too academic and insufficiently oriented to the world of business and industry. On the one hand, many reformers believe that universities are well positioned to take on new forms as genuinely globally economic institutions; on the other hand, universities are often seen as too big and cumbersome to operate efficiently or quickly enough to take advantage of changes in the international marketplace.

Policies in the United Kingdom, for instance, have begun to address systematically the university-industry interface, encouraging greater interpenetration, mixed public/private ownership and 'partnerships'. There has also been a greater emphasis on vocational and professional education, workplace learning and the funding of nationally prioritized targets in science and technology 'sunrise' industries. The corporate or entrepreneurial university has turned itself into a knowledge corporation, often developing overseas satellite campuses and privatized (research) corporate forms within the older bureaucratic public forms. Patterns of ownership and governance have changed. The logic of formula-like public funding, operating on the basis of a full-time student equivalent, has driven cost accounting all the way down the line to individual departments and courses, and introduced an internal market within the university. In addition, traditional forms of governance have declined in their importance relative to the influence of new advisory groups, the growth of executive power, and greater reliance on private sector management styles, especially in respect of 'human resources'.

The new round of mergers, alliances, special relationships and new international constellations have emerged as universities have jostled to take up the best market position and take advantage of the global knowledge economy. International groupings of universities like Universitas 21 can enter into special relationships with multinational media conglomerates to develop online course delivery and to position themselves for the expected revolution in distance education via the new information technologies. The result is that universities have now reinvented themselves either as corporations, sometimes multinational, in their own right or as part of a larger corporate formation. In short, there is a globalization of the university, a process that is deliberately engineered, in part by national policy makers and in part by administrators of individual institutions seeking to take advantage of perceived new economic trends.

The University in the Knowledge Economy

Fundamental to understanding the new global economy has been a rediscovery of the economic importance of higher education and structural shifts in the production of knowledge. The OECD and the World Bank have stressed the significance of education and training for the development of human resources, for 'upskilling' and increasing the competencies of workers, and for the production of research and scientific knowledge, as keys to participation in the new global economy. Both Peter Drucker and Michael Porter emphasize the importance of knowledge--its economics and productivity--as the basis for national competitive advantage within the international marketplace. (29) Lester Thurow suggests that 'a technological shift to an era dominated by manmade brainpower industries' is one of five economic tectonic plates which constitute a new game with new rules: 'Today knowledge and skills now stand alone as the only sources of comparative advantage. They have become the key ingredient in the late twentieth century's location of economic activity'. (30)

Equipped with this central understanding and guided by neo-liberal theories of human capital, public choice, and new public management, Western governments have begun the process of restructuring universities, obliterating the distinction between education and training in the development of a massified system of higher education designed for the twenty-first century. Recently, the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand convened reviews of higher education to determine the shape and imperatives of the sector for the twenty-first century. I shall briefly describe two examples of the 'post-historical university' as articulated in two of these reports: the Dearing Report (United Kingdom) and the West Report (Australia).

The Dearing Report: The Corporate University in the Service of Global Capital and National Culture

The Dearing Report recognizes globalization as the major influence upon the UK economy and the labour market, with strong implications for higher education. (31) In analysing the Dearing Report it is possible to talk of the globalization of tertiary or higher education according to three interrelated functions: knowledge, labour and the institutional function.

The production and transmission/acquisition of knowledge is still a primary function, as it was with the idea of the modern university, but now its value is legitimated increasingly in terms of its ability to attract global capital and its potential for serving transnational corporations. Knowledge is valued for its strict utility rather than as an end in itself or for its emancipatory effects.

The developments described here under the banner of globalization that accentuate the primacy of knowledge are further underwritten by recent advances in so-called 'growth theory'. Neoclassical economics does not specify how knowledge accumulation occurs. As a result, there is no mention of human capital and there is no direct role for education. Further, in the neo-classical model there is no income 'left over' (all output is paid to either capital or labour) to act as a reward or incentive for knowledge accumulation. Accordingly, there are no externalities to knowledge accumulation. By contrast, new growth theory has highlighted the role of education in the creation of human capital and the production of new knowledge. On this basis it has explored the possibilities of education-related externalities. There appears to be an emerging consensus that education is important for successful research activities (for example, by producing scientists and engineers) which are, in turn, important for productivity growth. Education creates human capital, which directly affects knowledge accumulation and therefore productivity growth. (32)

The globalization of the labour function is formulated in terms of both the production of technically skilled people to meet the needs of transnational corporations and the ideology of lifelong learning, where individuals 're-equip themselves for a succession of jobs over a working lifetime'.

The institutional function is summed up in the phrase: 'higher education will become a global international service and tradeable commodity'. The competitive survival of institutions is tied to the globalization of its organizational form (emulating private sector enterprises) and the globalization of its 'services'. This view has already led to a stronger and closer alliance between global corporations and universities, especially in terms of the funding of research and development. In some cases, universities have become global corporations with international sites for teaching and research. The latter trend is likely to continue, with the world convergence of media, telecommunications and publishing industries. It is important to note that the Dearing Report still acknowledges the British university as a site for the development, preservation and transmission of national culture, albeit in its commodified, tradeable and exportable forms. A-commissioned paper for the West Report, by contrast, is even more unremitting.

The West Report: The Hollowed-Out University

The West Committee's 1997 discussion paper 'Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy' begins with a preface by its chairman Roderick West, who asserts that 'the twenty-first century will mark the era of tertiary education and lifelong education for everybody'; and that there are 'extraordinary possibilities in the provision of education through ever expanding technological advance'. (33) These two 'certaintites' dictate the approach to financing and policy evident in the report.

The paper articulates a 'learning for life' vision, a seamless postsecondary education environment with commitments to building a culture of learning, civic values, scholarship, preparing graduates, advancing knowledge and skills, 'developing the industry', and equity. It lists the principles on which the future should be built, including a commitment to universal access, a consumer-driven system emphasizing student choice, outcome-based assessment of quality, cost-effectiveness and greater levels of competition from the private sector.

The vision of a corporate form of the post-historical university is provided in a commissioned paper entitled 'Australian Higher Education in the Era of Mass Customisation' by Global Alliance Limited, a Tokyo-based investment bank established in 1995. The bank specializes in providing corporate advisory services to Japanese and Taiwanese companies, especially in relation to the information technology sector. It has investments on its own account in Internet service providers and related companies.

The report proclaims both the end of 'the era of homogeneity' under state planning and the beginning of another era that will be consumer-oriented, more diversified and exposed to international competition. The remnants of an era of state planning show that while costs of production are world competitive, productivity incentives are poor and capital management requires reform. The existing providers, protected in the Australian domestic market, will be opened up to the forces of international competition as a result of global economic change.

The report identifies the following forces for change: a reduced government fee structure, an associated shift of power to the consumer, increasing international competitive exposure, and changes in the technology of production and consumption. Computers will lower marketing costs and the provision of customer services while also promoting greater access to and a better quality of learning. Back-end systems will be automated and learning systems will be increasingly Web-based. The effects of these forces will lead to 'the hollowing out of the university'. The report is worth quoting at some length:

 The vertically integrated university is a product of brand image,
 government policy, history and historical economies of scale in
 support services. If government policy is no longer biased in favour
 of this form, and technology liberates providers from one location,
 then we would expect to see new forms arising such as multiple
 outlet vertically integrated specialist schools and web based
 universities ... Specialist service providers, such as testing
 companies and courseware developers will arise, as will superstar
 teachers who are not tied to any one university. Many universities
 will become marketing and production coordinators or systems
 integrators. They will no longer all be vertically integrated
 education versions of the 1929 Ford assembly plant in Detroit. (34)

These combined forces will lead to greater market segmentation, course specialization and customization, and specialization of providers. The new university business system will take the form of one of a number of possible business models: the low-cost producer university; the Asia middle-class Web university; the Harvard-in-Australia university; the world specialist school university.

In both neo-liberal forms of the corporate 'post-historical' university, the notion of culture, if it figures at all, is secondary to the notion of 'economy'. Culture is not really seen as a unifying idea at all in the model presented by Global Alliance Ltd. While it is mentioned in the Dearing Report this is mainly in relation to its heritage functions. The bottom line in this report is an abstract neo-liberal notion of the globalized knowledge economy.

Readings asks the question: 'How are we to reimagine the university, once its guiding idea of culture has ceased to have an essential function?' (35) He suggests that the university is in ruins and asks us to ponder the question of what it means to dwell in the ruins without falling back on romance or nostalgia. 'Nostalgia' in this context means to question modernity's preoccupation and search for 'the primordial unity and immediacy of a lost origin'. (36) I acknowledge the critical force of Readings' question but suggest that the guiding idea of culture now has been replaced by the neo-liberal idea of economy given precisely in the notion of the knowledge economy.

(1.) M. Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito, New York, Semiotext(e), 1991, p. 165.

(2.) This paper draws on my presentation in the University of Auckland's Winter Lecture 1998 series, "The University in the 21st Century'.

(3.) Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1996; I. Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. M. Gregor, New York, Abaris Books, 1979 [orig. 1798]; W. von Humboldt, 'On the Spirit and the Organisational framework of Intellectual Institutions in Berlin', Minerva, vol. 8, no. 2, 1970, pp. 242-50; J. H. Newman, The Idea of the University, Introduction and notes by M. Svaglic, New York, Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1968.

(4.) T. Bahti, 'Histories of the University: Kant and Humboldt', MLN, vol. 102, no. 3, 1987, p. 438.

(5.) Bahti, p. 439.

(6.) The Aristotelian order of the disciplines was divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and knowledge) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).

(7.) Kant, p. 23.

(8.) Readings, p. 59.

(9.) Readings, p. 78.

(10.) Readings, p. 79.

(11.) Newman, pp. 201-21.

(12.) Readings, p. 76.

(13.) Newman, p. 230.

(14.) Newman, p. 240.

(15.) Readings, p. 5.

(16.) Readings, The University in Ruins, p 12.

(17.) J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Foreword by F. Jameson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984; Lyotard, 'Universal History and Cultural Differences', in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989; and Lyotard, 'Foreword: Spaceship', in M. Peters (ed.) Education and the Postmodern Condition, Westport, Conn., and London, Bergin & Garvey, 1995, pp. xi-xx. See also J. Derrida, 'The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils', diacritics, Fall, 1983, pp. 3-20; J. Habermas, 'The Idea of the University-Learning Processes', New German Critique, vol. 41, Spring-Summer, 1987, pp. 3-22; T. Clark, and N. Royle (eds), The University in Ruins: Essays on the Crisis in the Concept of the Modern University, special issue, Oxford Literary Review, 1995, p. 15; M. A. Peters, "Cybernetics, Cyberspace and the University: Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game and the Dream of a Universal Language', in Poststructuralism, Politics and Education, Westport, Conn., and London, Bergin & Garvey, 1996; A. Smith and F. Webster, The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, Buckingham, England, SRHE and Open University Press, 1997; B. Crittenden, 'Minding Their Business: The Proper Role of Universities and Some Suggested Reforms', Canberra, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Occasional Paper Series, no. 2, 1996.

(18.) Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxv.

(19.) Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans, and edited by J. Pefanis and M. Thomas, Sydney, Power Publications, 1992, p. 29.

(20.) Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxii.

(21.) Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv.

(22.) See G. Shapiro, 'Nietzsche and the Future of the University', Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 1, 1991, pp. 15-28.

(23.) Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 4.

(24.) Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. B. Readings and K. Geiman, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

(25.) Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, London, Routledge, 1991.

(26.) See http://www.dti.gov.uk/comp/competitive/main.htm

(27.) See http://www.morst.govt.nz/foresight/font.html.

(28.) For a critical discussion of the Foresight Project, see Peters and Roberts, University Futures and the Politics of Reform in New Zealand, Palmerston North, Dunmore Press, 1999, pp. 66-73.

(29.) P. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, New York, Harper, 1993; and M. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, New York, Free Press, 1990.

(30.) L. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Will Shape Tomorrow's Future, New York, Morrow, 1996, p. 68; See also G. Papadopoulos, Education 1960-1990: The OECD Perspective, Paris, the Organisation, 1994; and G. Delanty, 'The Idea of the University in the Global Era: From Knowledge as an End to the End of Knowledge', Social Epistemology, vol. 12, no. 1, 1998, pp. 3-26.

(31.) The Dearing Report, Higher Education in the Learning Society, National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, London, HMSO, 1997.

(32.) See the Dearing Report, Report 8, 'Externalities in Higher Education'.

(33.) The West Committee, Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy, discussion paper, Canberra, Australia, 1997

(34.) Global Alliance Limited, 'Australian Higher Education in an Era of Mass Customisation', the West Committee, p. 12.

(35.) Readings, The University in Ruins, p 119.

(36.) Readings, The University in Ruins, p. 169.