A couple of days ago I received the following message from a valued friend who has been teaching for some time abroad:
“Yesterday late afternoon I went to a meeting of humanities teaching staff convened by our head, who is as good for us as can be. The problem is in the ‘can be’, the full truth of which came through in brutal clarity. What’s brutal about it (in the etymological sense) is not the reflection of the hard economic times. That wouldn’t have depressed me at all, simply been a rephrasing of what comes in the news every night.
The brutishness of our head’s message was in its exclusive focus on quotas that have to be met in order to show ‘profitability’ and in the cheerleader’s false upbeat tone he struggled to maintain. He spoke not a word about why it is that we become academics, why it is that we should care about these targets other than to maintain our jobs. I sat there thinking, inter alia, why would anyone want to study at a place like this? In this country we have lost the plot.”
The specter of what is happening to higher education abroad, as well as in other places in the world, surely is discouraging for those of us who continue to believe in the centrality of liberal higher education to the maintenance of a democratic citizenry. The sort of “brutal” (the right word, I think) metrics being imposed upon university performance reflect a blunt utilitarian statist approach that threatens what is essentially humane in our higher education undertaking.
But of course we are not without our own “brutalism.” I would like to think that the idealism my friend found at our conference is the dominant theme on this side of the Atlantic. But of course it is not. We, too, are caught between the reality of student/parental preferences (the flight from the arts and sciences) and the legitimately utilitarian needs of the state. Historically, it has been the role of the great universities, public and private, to mediate such challenges to traditional academic values by articulating the broader and bigger goals of education. But economic hard times (shortly to become much more intense) always make that task difficult. And so I think that one of the most daunting tasks that will confront us over the next few perilous years is that of articulating our educational idealism in a manner that does not deny our public educational duties. It will take strong and articulate helmsmen (and women) to carry us past these rapids.
