Beyond the ‘Postmodern University’

Abstract

As an institution, the “postmodern university” is central to the canon of today's research on higher education policy. Yet in this essay I argue that the postmodern university is a fiction that frames and inhibits our thinking about the future university. To understand why the postmodern university is a fiction, I first turn to grand theory and ask whether we can make sense of the notion of “post”-postmodernity. Second, I turn to the UK higher education sector and show that the postmodern university is a chimera, a modern artefact of competing instrumentalist, gothic, and postmodernist discourses. Third, I discuss competing visions of the future university and find that the progressive (yet modernist) agendas that re-imagine the public value of knowledge production, transmission, and contestation, are those that can move us beyond the palliative and panacea of the postmodern university.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and to Wolfson College, Cambridge University, for granting me a Visiting Fellowship in Michaelmas Term 2009. My work in progress was presented at the British Sociological Association Theory Group Conference, “Have We Ever Been ‘Post’? Critiques of Sociological Knowledge,” University of Warwick (September 2009); at seminars at CRASSH (October 2009), RAND Europe, Cambridge (December 2009), the Sociology Group, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University (May 2010); and at workshop on “The Political Economy of University Governance,” PolSiS, University of Birmingham (June 2010). I want to thank my colleagues for their helpful comments on my work and Evy Varsamopoulou for her infinite patience.

Notes

1. Support for this generalisation, though it is not rigorous or scientific, is that via Google Scholar the terms “postmodern university” and “post-modern university” return 1212 hits, while via Google Search, “post-modern university” and “postmodern university” generate 58,100 (accessed 19 May 2011).

2. I am not hostile to postmodernism or postmodern theory per se; rather, I wish to challenge the idea that we live in a truly postmodern age, however we may define this. My claim is that postmodern or interpretive sociological theory is essential to move “beyond” postmodernity.

3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

4. Anne Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack: Consumption, Diversity and the Need for Values,” in The End of Knowledge in Higher Education, ed. Ronald Barnett and Anne Griffin (London: Cassell, 1997), 6.

5. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 6.

6. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 6.

7. Indeed, it would not be very postmodern to have just one standard definition.

8. For an explanation of language games and family resemblances, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), §65–71.For an explanation of hermeneutics and the possibility of “fusion of horizons,” see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 306–7, 374–75.

9. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 6.

10. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992); and for a critique of this thesis, Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

11. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. The owl of Minerva represents wisdom and vigilance, and in contrast to the “grey in grey” of philosophy, the ability to see clearly in the twilight.

12. For Hegel, there is no end point in the logic of history.

13. For the alternative case that we may be on the cusp of post-postmodernity, see Malcolm Bradbury, “What Was Post-Modernism? The Arts in and after the Cold War,” International Affairs 71 (October 1995): 763–74; although Bradbury also complements the Hegelian view as he feels that he cannot clearly decipher current times: “For the time being, we seem culturally caught at the moment of uncertainty, seeing forms and historical conditions transforming quickly around us, but finding it difficult to give form, style, meaning to the shape of those things that will indeed come, whether or not we predict or shape them” (774).

14. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1985).

15. For more on each of these terms, see respectively, Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Modern Late Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Gilles Lipovetsky and Sébastien Charles, Hypermodern Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2000); Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1997).

16. See also John C. Scott, “The Mission of the University: Medieval to Postmodern Transformations,” The Journal of Higher Education 77.1 (2006): 1–39. As Scott puts it: “What causes these transformations in the university mission across the centuries? The answer is found in the drive of Western and world civilization” (5). University history, over 850 years, reflects those seismic events that periodically rock humanity.

17. What is presented here is a reasonable composite of narratives of historical development as found in the literature (or what we may call “ideal types” of university by era). What is still debated is when precisely the pre-modern, modern, late modern and “postmodern” university came into being; whether the selected key features truly characterize just one (or any) of the incarnations of the university; and it can be maintained that all these forms of the university overlap and continue to exist today in either narrative or institutional form.

18. John Skorupski. “Mill, Liberalism and the Idea of a University,” unpublished paper presented at Social and Political Theory Seminar, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, 20 July 2009.

19. Scott, “The Mission of the University,” 2.

20. Scott, “The Mission of the University,” 5.

21. Skorupski, “Mill, Liberalism and the Idea of a University,” 7.

22. Scott, “The Mission of the University,” 3.

23. Krishan Kumar, “The Need for Place,” in The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, ed. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1997), 33.

24. Scott, “The Mission of the University,” 11, 14.

25. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” in Smith and Webster, The Postmodern University?, 109.

26. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 33.

27. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 110; see also Claire Donovan, “Consuming Social Science,” in Governance, Consumers and Citizens: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics, ed. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 69–94.

28. Scott, “The Mission of the University,” 3.

29. See Claire Donovan, “The Chequered Career of a Cryptic Concept,” in The Rise and Rise of Meritocracy, ed. Geoff Dench (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 61–72.

30. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 104.

31. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 5.

32. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 11.

33. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 3.

34. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 9.

35. See, for example, Paul Filmer, “Disinterestedness and the Modern University,” in Smith and Webster, The Postmodern University?, where he defines the function of the modern universities as “institutions of cultural reproduction,” research and training (52–53). It should be noted that while there are some contrary views, the shared narrative tends to discuss the Humboldt reforms and their consequences in the context of the late-modern university and not the modern university.

36. Skorupski, “Mill, Liberalism and the Idea of a University,” 2, 11.

37. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 1.

38. Peter Scott, “The Postmodern University?” in Smith and Webster, The Postmodern University?, 48.

39. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 14.

40. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 3. See also Burton R. Clark, The Higher Education System: Academic Organisation in Cross-National Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 18.

41. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 5.

42. Zygmunt Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” in Smith and Webster, The Postmodern University?, 17.

43. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 33.

44. Filmer, “Disinterestedness and the Modern University,” 48.

45. F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 59–60.

46. Filmer, “Disinterestedness and the Modern University,” 49. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1948).

47. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

48. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 30.

49. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 30.

50. See Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different.”

51. Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 20.

52. On the instrumental narrative, see Ronald Barnett, “Supercomplexity and the University,” Social Epistemology 12.1 (1998): 44; Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 20; Filmer, “Disinterestedness and the Modern University,” 51; Scott, “The Postmodern University?” 36; Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 2; “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 100. The term gothic was first used by Peter Larmour to denote overly pessimistic accounts of change; see also Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 17; Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 5; “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 100, 104. On the postmodernist narrative, see Barnett, “Supercomplexity and the University,” 49; Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 24; Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 3; Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 3, 9; “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 104.

53. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 5; and “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 100.

54. Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 24.

55. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 104.

56. See Michael Moran, The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

57. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 99.

58. Anthony Smith and Frank Webster, “Preface,” in Smith and Webster, The Postmodern University?, xi.

59. Smith and Webster, “Changing Ideas of the University,” 3; Smith and Webster, “Preface,” xi; Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 3.

60. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 104.

61. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 30–31.

62. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 3.

63. Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 20–21.

64. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 33.

65. Max Weber, “The ‘Rationalization’ of Education and Training” in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills ed. and trans, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949).

66. Burton, R. Clark, B. The Higher Education System: Academic Organisation in Cross-National Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).

67. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 108.

68. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 105–6.

69. Smith and Webster, “Conclusion: An Affirming Flame,” 105–6.

70. Bauman, “Universities: Old, New and Different,” 25.

71. Barnett, “Supercomplexity and the University,” 49.

72. Griffin, “Knowledge under Attack,” 3.

73. Victor Rothschild, “An Enquiry into the Social Science Research Council,” Cmnd. 8554, (London: HMSO, 1982).

74. Mark Matthews, “Giving Preparedness a Central Role in Science and Innovation Policy,” Federation of Australian Scientific and technological Societies (FASTS) Policy Discussion Paper, Canberra, 2009; <http://www.fasts.org/images/news2009/preparedness nov 09.pdf> (accessed 19 May 2011)

75. Smith and Webster, “Preface,” xx.

76. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 31–32.

77. Kumar, “The Need for Place,” 34.

78. Barnett, “Supercomplexity and the University,” 47.

79. Barnett, “Supercomplexity and the University,” 45, 44.