Prof Tom Garvin is a respected historian and Professor Emeritus at UCD. In the Irish Times today, he writes:
[t]he people who are “running” Irish universities claim, falsely, to be businessmen running enterprises which will bring greater economic growth. These people are truant academics, running universities while having no idea what universities are for. Anti-intellectualism automatically leads to the glorification of ignorance, and this country is well on the way from the former to the latter.
Garvin's position is worth discussing, because the issue he highlights in his piece is very important (to me as an academic, obviously), but also, I think, to the wider community.
I agree, Garvin makes a very valid point for a couple of reasons, not just because of the harm that may occur to our society but also to the universities themselves, they are going down a very narrow path and there is a risk that as they increase their charges and narrow their focus they actually become irrelevant. (For example see: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/the-coming-meltdown-in-higher-education-as-seen-by-a-marketer.html)
Garvin's piece should also be read together with Garret Fitzgerald's in the same edition, they both point to an anti-intellectual bias that seems to be built into our society.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0501/1224269476058.html
Hi Fred, thanks for the comment--there are clearly issues with the way Garvin constructs his argument-bitter reflections on UCD, for example-but the core of his point seems really worth exploring: to what extent can research be 'managed', and to what extent such management helps or hinders those in universities who have to do their jobs anyway.
The 'bitter reflections on UCD' are, trust me, quite restrained compared to what one might say.
Garvin is right on target. My only quibble is that he's far too kind to certain economists who are, if anything, complicit in the dismantling of our universities.
Hi Ernie,
I'm sure after a lifetime in academia, books could be written about the kinds of things that go on. I'm only in the door myself, and I've seen a fair amount of odd things in the 4 universities I've studied or worked at! The problem for Prof Garvin is to what extent his argument is damaged by the inclusion of the bitter asides-I think they serve to devalue his argument, which I think is worth discussing.
My own thinking on this issue comes from two angles.
First, those who would do the ground breaking research and collaborate and publish, etc, will do that anyway, because that's how one gets promoted in good universities. Those who don't, won't, and I think that would be an alright system of sorts, but it would stop those in the middle of the distribution from pulling 'up', as it were. The move to collaborative, team-led research is on the whole a good one, because you'll have more experienced scholars publishing with less experienced scholars, the system itself will gain experience of what a research culture looks like, and away you go. The obvious potential downside, of course, is that research becomes narrowly focused or siloed, funds get allocated in perhaps a suboptimal way, and the 'blue sky' research just doesn't get done.
Second, it's unclear to what degree the 'hollowing out' has actually taken place in most Irish universities. Yes, we all have management structures, and yes, they want us to publish in good journals. But so what? We *should* be publishing in good journals! We *should* be working with younger colleagues, and trying to attract funding--that's our job! For me the danger comes in the marginal call. Say I've got an idea for a ground-breaking book, or I could write two papers that stand a good chance of getting published in 4* ISI rated journals. If I'm sensitive to the incentive structure of the system, I'm going to go for option #2, because of the citations I'll get, etc, and that will result in the ground breaking book not being written. It's there I think the danger lies, but honestly, that's much more of a hypothetical than I make it sound, because if you're going to write ground breaking work, you're going to do that anyway, regardless of whether there are gold stars attached to one activity over another. And maybe you'll write the ground breaking work as a paper, etc, etc.
It's a very complicated argument, I don't fully understand all of the facets of it myself to be honest--I'd welcome any ideas you had on fully describing the problem, as I see it, of effective management of a class of creative and less than creative people by means of numerical assessment of some kind.
Stephen,
I've posted a response to you in the comments of Ferdindand von Prondzynski's blog. I reproduce them here:
What I should have added is that there is a whole class of scholars who are like Piero Sraffa and have much of interest to say but not yet. As you point out, our whole system--with its emphasis on publishing at a frenetic rhythm--does not allow these people to exist.
Cheers Ernie, I'm throwing my comments up there, too: http://universitydiary.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/assessing-the-state-of-the-academy/
This is a very interesting and contentious subject.
In the 1950's The Encyclopaedia Britannica(Mortimar J Adler et al) made survey of all human knowledge and came up with ~3000 topics subdivided further into ~95 different categories.
In my opinion subjects like epistemology and logic are neglected in our university educations and at least the rudiments of these diciplines should be part of all university courses.
Irish universty educations used to be mostly for people who generally then worked abroad. The abilities of Irish people to mix well everywhere was/is very useful in this context..
Arguably most poeple who go to university would be just as well off simply getting technical trainings as unless one develops an ongoing love of knowledge it is a waste of everybody concerned's time, money and effort going to university at all. Again in my opinion of course.
Carry on the very good work at UCD and of course at TCD where I studied Natural Science(geology) happily and very productively in the 1950.s.
The Idea of a University: an Essay in Support of Professor Tom Garvin’s Thesis of Grey Philistines Taking Over Our Universities
Jim McKernan
Professor,
Social and Cultural Foundations of Education,
Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
College of Education
East Carolina University,
Greenville, North Carolina, USA
Email mckernanj@ecu.edu
Introduction
Professor Tom Garvin’s eloquent and critical essay “Grey philistines taking over our universities” is cogent, timely, and also necessary reading at this critical juncture in Irish higher education. His remarks, which invite widespread discussion and debate, are not only applicable to education at University College Dublin, but for education in the round. I also write as a former lecturer in the Faculty of Arts who watched how the university began to ape the same processes which drove the Irish Celtic Tiger and adopted much of that education-for-profit strategy as a prolegomenon for the current situation. I have chosen as the title of my essay that of John Henry Cardinal Newman in his famous work The Idea of a University based on lectures he gave in setting up the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854; now University College Dublin. It is instructive to note that Professor Garvin’s thesis is in accord with the sentiments of Cardinal Newman. It is of further notable interest that plans are afoot to canonize Cardinal Newman in September of this year. This should be a big event for University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland. I feel sure Cardinal Newman would roll over in his grave were he to see how “education” is conducted at the university he established. It is my thesis that we are in danger of losing our concept of education in favour of lower notions of instruction and training . Let me explain. By ‘training” I mean a process which suggests the acquisition of skills and the enhancing of performance capacities. By ‘instruction’ I mean learning facts and new information-the results of retention. But by ‘education’ one understands induction into the forms and fields of knowledge: those thought processes and intellectual activities that allow one to know the epistemologies of the culture so that we can think rationally, by using it. Too often nowadays, even folks in universities confuse training and instruction with pure ‘education’. We lose sight of this concept of education at our peril.
Professor Garvin is right to lament that intellectual activity for its own sake is being hi-jacked in favour of a penchant managerialism and the intrusions of technical rationality so characteristic of the business-industrial complex today. Traditional (basic) research what Garvin calls “blue sky” inquiry in the human and social sciences is being viewed as inappropriate in favour of applied scientific “evidence-based” research methodologies where grant money is being currently channeled. This strategy is acknowledged as the legitimate way forward in official policy statements from the OECD and US Federal Government on the future of research in higher education. Those who have sought to find the truth through historical and other qualitative research methods are being ignored by funding agents across the Western World.
Professor Garvin’s thesis is sustainable. Personally, this author witnessed the same rampant technical rationality when I accepted the first Deanship of Education at Limerick University. I resigned and resumed my professorial duties in America apart from that environment. I admit I expected some of this managerialism at Limerick, which had emerged from a technological base, but not the out-of-control intrusions of technical rationality resulting in a now discredited “Total Quality Management” strategy (which has been abandoned in most American universities) for the entire university and its emphasis on “entrepreneurship”. I see this managerialism evident in every facet of education today in both the USA and Ireland. Yesterday I heard the Governor of North Carolina, a former teacher, Beverley Perdue; state that the first word a six year old should learn should be “entrepreneurship”. She was delighted to learn that our local Pitt Community College had received 21 million dollars of the President’s Stimulus Package to set up IT programs to educate hospital administrators digitalize medical recordkeeping.
What is the aim of a university education? Let us recount what Cardinal Newman argued:
“I am asked what is the end of University Education, and of the Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge which I conceive it to impart: I answer, that what I have already {103} said has been sufficient to show that it has a very tangible, real, and sufficient end, though the end cannot be divided from that knowledge itself. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.”
Further on in the work Newman expands his ideas:
“Now, when I say that Knowledge is, not merely a means to something beyond it, or the preliminary of certain arts into which it naturally resolves, but an end sufficient to rest in and to pursue for its own sake, surely I am uttering no paradox, for I am stating what is both intelligible in itself, and has ever been the common judgment of philosophers and the ordinary feeling of mankind. I am saying what at least the public opinion of this day ought to be slow to deny, considering how much we have heard of late years, in opposition to Religion, of entertaining, curious, and various knowledge. I am but saying what whole volumes have been written to illustrate, viz., by a selection from the records of Philosophy, Literature, and Art, in all ages and countries, of a body of examples, to show how the most unpropitious circumstances have been unable to conquer an ardent {104} desire for the acquisition of knowledge. That further advantages accrue to us and redound to others by its possession, over and above what it is in itself, I am very far indeed from denying; but, independent of these, we are satisfying a direct need of our nature in its very acquisition; and, whereas our nature, unlike that of the inferior creation, does not at once reach its perfection, but depends, in order to it, on a number of external aids and appliances, Knowledge, as one of the principal of these, is valuable for what its very presence in us does for us after the manner of a habit, even though it be turned to no further account, nor subserve any direct end.”
Newman argues consistently that knowledge for its own sake is a significant purpose of a scholar in a university-moreover, this is the very essence of conduct within a liberal education:
“This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called Liberal Education; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard of excellence; {153} and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of a University.
The Techologisation of Education
It should be pointed out that this notion of technical means-ends rationality in education began with the Americans. In particular Franklin Bobbitt, a former engineer who became Dean of the School of Education at Stanford University. In 1918 Bobbitt argued for a form of efficiency-accountability that schools should be like factories where students are viewed as products and that the physical plant should be utilized on a shift basis throughout the school year. He became so enthralled with this that he produced a book outlining some 800 behaviours all responsible citizens should be able to perform. He operationlised the use of behavioural performance objectives and the American and European systems of educational planning have never been the same since. This “Science in Education” movement led to Educational Psychologists embracing Behaviourism as an appropriate theory for curriculum design. That is, that teachers should state specific outcomes in students in terms of behavioural performances in order to be accountable that students had mastered subject knowledge. I liked Professor Garvin’s comment relating to a remark made by Picasso that predicting outcomes makes a nonsense of any activity and in essence in education it would deny the use of imagination. My mentor Professor Lawrence Stenhouse once remarked
“Education as induction into knowledge is successful to the extent
that it makes the behavioural outcomes of the students unpredictable”
Professor Garvin also grasps an important nettle in commenting about the loss of imagination in educational culture. Mary Warnock, the English philosopher wrote that “imagination is the faculty by means of which one is able to envisage things as they are not”. The trend nowadays in education is to plan all the outcomes as behaviours in advance of instruction, and test student by means of objective type multiple choice tests to see if they have mastered this ‘rhetoric of conclusions’. On this model students never exercise their own creative imagination or critical discourse-they select random options already printed on the test page. This is not education but mere training and instruction-teaching to the test.
Conclusions
I believe that there are very real possibilities that education can be reclaimed from these ‘grey philistines and merchants of managerialism’. The idea of a university is that it is a community of scholars having a discourse, using a variety of research methods appropriate to their discipline to advance knowledge, to contribute to searching for truth through inquiry, to conduct teaching of this knowledge and these methods, so that students can get into perspective the knowledge which they do not yet possess and to offer service to the university and the community. The main thing is to permit academic freedom in the pursuit of these inquiries. Academic freedom means that lecturers and professors have an unfettered right to select materials and methods appropriate to their discipline and the right to conduct research that matches their curiosity and interests. The health of Irish education and society is indeed tied to this notion of academic freedom-which is being eroded at present by arguments to abolish tenure with fixed term appointments and by not appointing Professors to disciplinary chairs such as the languages (German, Spanish, French) at UCD, which Professor Caldicott, pointed out in his response to Professor Garvin’s piece. The UCD administration seems only interested in the “bottom line” here-saving funds through cost cutting vital disciplinary appointments and operations that have been hugely successful like the Language Laboratory. The reorganization of University College Dublin into Schools that are integrated and interdisciplinary does not speak to the definite epistemology of the disciplines of knowledge as historically understood. This reorganization, albeit in the name of efficiency, seems utterly incoherent to this observer. I have watched in my lifetime whole departments of Logic, Philosophy, (subjects at the core of a liberal education from medieval times) and indeed Colleges of Teacher Education, disappear due to the ‘bottom line’ mentality. The control by universities and other agencies of higher education over teaching, research and learning and their inalienable right to academic freedom must not be relinquished to external agencies and government. Dublin City University President Ferdinand Von Prondzynski’s accountability arguments are not sound. The logic of his argument makes academic freedom a joke. He says that universities should not be a place of leisurely intellectual pursuits. This is what has characterized the greatest universities throughout history. As scholars we are accountable to the standards immanent in our respective disciplines first. Of course it is right that any government or foundation grant money for research demands accountability-but the idea that these agents would run the university is a sacrilege. Further the idea that the Arts disciplines would not be funded is indicative of a Philistinian philosophy of education. As Professor Garvin suggested, one of the better ideas of mankind was to establish universities where truth and knowledge could be pursued for their own sake. I would argue that it was the setting up of universities in the 11th century in Europe (first in Italy by the Pope at Salerno and Bologna) that saved world culture and literacy from extinction during the ‘Dark Ages’. Ireland, to give her fair dues, played an essential role in establishing Monastic Schools keeping learning alive in a desperate time during the early Middle Ages. Hence the phrase “land of saints and scholars”. In this respect we owe a great debt also to our Arab friends who had perhaps the greatest institutes of higher education by the 9th and 10th centuries and who had transcribed many of the lost works of the Greeks and Roman scholars. My favourite scholar was, however, Peter Abelard, (1079-1142) the Scholastic philosopher and logician, who criticized state and church and was perhaps the greatest scholar of Paris in his day and precursor to the establishment of the secular University of Paris in or around 1160 A.D. Abelard taught us that the critical thought of an independent and free scholar would be a valuable aspect of higher education. We need to respect the various methods by which scholarship is engaged and invite our students into this search. It is a search that does not discriminate between the arts and sciences. That, I believe, is the idea of a university.
May 23rd, 2010