Has University to Become an Enterprise

Preliminary Communication UDC 130.2:[378.1:316.323.64] Received August 23rd, 2012 Lev Kreft University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, SI–1000 Ljubljana [email protected] Has University to Become an Enterprise? Abstract The aim of this paper is to explain that it is not useful to grasp all transformations at the University during last decades under terms of the struggle between evil politics and innocent academy, because universities were involved in formation and promotion of re­ forming guidelines, and went through inside ideological split and political fight during this process. Also, it is not appropriate to find neoliberalism an enemy which has to be defied and defeated with resources of the critique of ideology, because this leads into the conflict between ideology (presumably, but not really coming from the outside world) and science (presumably belonging to universities themselves). Here too, universities were involved in the process, be it in foundations of neoliberalism, be it in de(con)struction of scientific to­ tality and autonomy. The parallelism between art and science as two autonomous domains of modernity, and their postmodern turn which left them without solid ground of inherited autonomy, will be exposed to support this thesis. Finally, University used to be the special and autonomous workshop with its own laws of procedure, secluded from market economy, to become educational factory, and now, finally, the enterprise. There is no way back. But is there a way out? Contemporary critique of political economy is where we should look at least for a start, and united appearance of students and teachers could give some power to bring academy back into hands of those to whom it originally belongs. Key words university, enterprise, neoliberalism, Bologna reform, autonomy, totality, critique of political economy Introduction In these post-Yugoslavia and post-war times, it happens often that after many years of no-see one meets an old colleague from university. “It has been a long time. What’s new at your place?” So one starts with a long list: independent state with new agenda and strategies, including enormous flow of new legislation concerning national high education systems; transition from authoritarian to democratic state, which, however, gives less chance to selfgovernment on micro-level, especially for students; from one Party rule to rule of partitocracy, with important ideological and practical influence of governing coalitions at the universities; transition to European Union and its rules for university development and financing, together with access to EU funds, which mean transition from work-as-usual to project-oriented fundraising orientation; inclusion into the international system of evaluation, where comparability means competition, together with all instruments which put forward quantity over quality of academic results and achievements; from the search for truth as the highest academic principle to the search for funds and to the production of surplus-value oriented applicability; appearance of private faculties and universities as new competition of traditional national and public SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 46 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? high education, usually not really private but strongly financed and politically supported from public resources and by governments; pressures to introduce higher and higher scholarships and the revolt against such pressures which, however, are believed to gain momentum anyway; power over making decisions about educational processes and other academic issues taken from old professors into the hands of management and administration which function under guidance of state governments; and, of course, one label which covers more or less all of these: Bologna. This incomplete enumeration of drastic change leads two colleagues to conclusion that enormous difference divides old from new times, and that there is not such a big difference between contemporary situation at the universities in different new countries. Or old countries, where, especially in European Union’s western part, these radical and fundamental reforms started much earlier. We live in sovereign and independent states, but our lives and destinies at the academy, in general, do not differ very much. If Bologna is differentia specifica of a change which happened at the universities, neoliberalism, especially after the start of another deep longitudinal crisis of capitalism, is the name of ideology and power which shaped the territory before the outburst of financial and economic crisis, and are (a paradox but not a contradiction) now in charge of the crisis management as well. What kind of tonality and mood markings should we choose to discuss critically what happened with the university? Predominant approach is that of radical criticism of neoliberalism embraced by governments throughout Europe as their guiding ideology. Predominant tonality is that of dissonance and invective against powers from the outside which occupied university and enforced reforms and changes against best interests of the academia. Predominant mood markings are that of passion and sadness, together with pessimistic rhetoric question: will universities’ long tradition survive the 21st century? During his dialogue with Leonidas Donskis,1 Zygmunt Bauman was confronted with similar approach and the same question. He answered: “You said that ‘the great transformation of the universities begun by Margaret Thatcher, who in effect dismantled the old British academic system.’ I would rather replace ‘by’ with ‘under’, signalling a time coincidence rather than a causal relationship and a resolute as well as peremptory apportionment of authorship and victimhood. I remember Stuart Hall, one of the most perceptive and insightful sages I have come across, reminding us many years ago that, unlike in the case of the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher did not send expeditionary forces with marine battalions and aircraft carriers to do this dismantling job; that the dismantling was accomplished with our own hands, the hands of academies, in a flurry of enthusiasm and with all the zeal, acumen and ingenuity we could muster. We lived up and vied to join the demolition squads. We are all accomplices in that accomplishment: even those few among us who felt like protesting and never gathered the courage and determination to stop the rot.” (Bauman & Donskis, 2013, 139–140) It is hard not to agree with that. And if demolition of universities during last decades was done by the university itself, not exclusively, of course, but with enough determination on its side, than this binary criticism which now attacks political and financial pressures foreign to the academic world is here just to provide an alibi, and leave all responsibility in hands of outsiders. I do not care much about responsibility, because it does not change the fact that university has changed beyond return, but it is not proper to start with misguided analysis of the past events and developments, if we want some future-oriented criticism which can produce auxiliary measures to sustain some basic academic values and aims,. What happened with the universities was their own doing too. Even neoliberalism, now so unfavourably attacked from all sides which were before silent, is not a concoction of political discourse but noble SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 47 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? result of academic science, recognised (at least up to now) as fundamental scientific support not only for Reagan’s and Thatcher’s politics and ideology but also for the “economic miracle” of the Western world after the Second World War.2 Criticism of university’s transfiguration, transformation and metamorphosis has to start with university itself. This is the only way to start searching for some perspective in the situation we have reached through all these reforms and changes; and it may be a way to propose how to establish certain equilibrium after long period of disturbances, and how to begin with what we have arrived at, because after successful demolition there is nothing else to start with but the state of university as it is now. But one cannot burden universities and its scholars with all dimensions of change and its results. Similar, if not identical kind of transformation was and still is going on in previously largely autonomous (or, if not autonomous, managed by the specialists in the field) domains of health-care, art, social care and social transfers, and elsewhere, where previous regimes of management were exchanged in favour of general model of enterprise management. This process represents major part of universal and global shift which was described under terms of transition to late capitalism, to liquid modernity, to postmodern culture, to risk society and second modernity, to post-Fordism, and to neoliberalism, which were general labels invented during last few decades to emphasise that change of last decades is epochal rather than just periodic. And epochal change means that one has to live with it, because things will never be the same again. At a point of no return, one has to choose between three possibilities: to adapt, to re-establish stability under new conditions, or to open new critical or even utopian dimension which may destroy unfavourable order and its regimes in a long run. The aim of this article cannot be to touch all the facets of change, or to find better description (may be even definition) of novelty together with unifying label for it, or to put down well founded strategies of adaptation, stability and criticism. What will be followed here are three starting points of prerequisites for critical thought about university as it emerged after implementation of multiple transformations: 1. It is not plausible as well as it is not useful to grasp these transformations in terms of struggle between evil governments and good universities, or, between false interests of politics and economy, and well-founded interests of science and academy. For one, universities were involved, and their scholars and students were split over the formation of policies and 1 Leonidas Donskis has PhD in philosophy and is a member of European Parliament for Lithuania. 2 Wherever we start, be it with pre-war Hayek and his disciples defence of liberalism against its totalitarian enemies, or with Milton Friedman and Chicago School, or with German post-war ordoliberalism, we will arrive not only at the university, but also to the same shift: from the liberal state as a watchdog over market economy to the market economy as watchdog over liberal state (see Gane, 2012, 611–634; and Taylor, 2012, 685–692). Nicholas Gane formulates the fundamental question of (neo)liberalism: “…what is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things?” (Gane, 2012, 617), and answers that neoliberalism is not a new doctrine of laissez­faire; quite the contrary, it gives new mission to the state: to become a transmissional mechanism of the market’s leadership. Matthew Taylor, after he names main historical protagonists from neo-classical economy to neoliberal school proper, concludes that neoliberalism at first existed as a body of scholarship: “The vaunted ‘crisis of democracy’ provided a set of complex questions to which this body of scholarship offered a beguiling simple answer: markets.” (Taylor, 2012, 685) SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 48 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? their scientific foundations, and for two, assumption that all was well at the universities before bad wolf of Bologna started to knock on good old doors does not take into account the point of the story of three little pigs. It is more acceptable to think of these transformations, especially about Bologna reform, as direction produced by university discourse as well, and from intrinsic university conflicts over regeneration of academic institutions under new conditions at the end of the 20th and the beginnings of the 21st century. 2. It is not appropriate to find neoliberalism as an enemy which has to be defied and defeated with resources of the critique of ideology. Such approach of criticism leads into the conflict between ideology (presumably coming from the outside of academic world) and science (which belongs to universities themselves). Academy itself is producing ideologies all over the time. On the other side, it is hard to distinguish what is ideological and what is scientific in neoliberalism, as in all similar general doctrines of “social physics”. What was knocking at the doors, and occupied the universities, were universal and global transformations with all their consequences. These consequences were not felt just under ideological terms (for instance, new theories of everything ‘post’ which were produced to find out what is destroying good old ways of high education). They were understood as inescapable empirical facts (for instance, massive influx of new cohorts and generations of students, and the need for international recognition and competition of universities and its scholars, developed as consequence of globalisation). What has to be done is to describe and analyse broader social and cultural context of general change in all domains of public services and social autonomies. This can explain how neoliberal tendencies, which were developed at the university itself as well, went hand in hand with the deconstruction of scientific totality and inauguration of postmodern relativity of truth. 3. If university initially used to be the special and autonomous workshop (‘atelier’ in French) with its own laws of procedure, with its independent mission secluded from market economy, and separated from all the other educational institutions as a free community of students and teachers joined in search for the truth; it has then developed into the educational factory, to start finally to transform itself into the enterprise. Troubles with the Whole: Badiou, Hegel and Althusser Through decades from 1968 on, when similar front was already entrenched (called “autonomous university vs. technocracy”), there was a lot of opposition and revolt at the university against guidelines provided by neoliberalism (or, ordoliberalism, as it was called in Germany after the Second World War) and managerial discourse which believed that university’s mission is just to produce ready-to-use specialists and not publicly engaged intellectuals. Students fought for the university which should be open to all strata of society as the promotional tool of emancipation, and for the university without pressure from outside powers. Many teachers supported them, at least because the only real oppositional power at the university were and are students, while teachers usually don’t have enough unity to fight for their own collective interests, and for the university as a whole. But there was a flaw in student movements’ criticism of academic traditions, and a flaw in their emancipatory potential,3 because at the same time erosion of traditional status of science had already started. It started at the universities as much as in all other intellectual and cul- SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? 49 tural circles. By many radical groups and movements university was understood as fortress of conservatism and intellectual elitism which has to disappear with introduction of educational populism. “Cultural turn” of the 1960s entered all autonomous intellectual activities, dismantled scientific worldview and certainty which were inherited from enlightenment and positivism, and achieve similar result within the artworld too.4 University’s flaw is quite similar to that of the art. During the 1960s “cultural turn” and later, scientific validity was recognised as a construction, which does not reside on natural and/or factual reality but on culturally produced models, ideas and assumptions. At approximately the same period of time, institutionalised autonomy of high art (built on presupposition that art has different and autonomous logic of creation than all other domains of human abilities, and that it produces a kind of value, usually called “the aesthetic”, which no other domain can produce, and which is as imperative for human progress as truth is) had to admit that “anything goes”, that anything can become an artwork, and that everybody can be(come) an artist.5 This postmodern relativisation harmed art’s (and science’s) ability to oppose neoliberal demand to subjugate both of them under general law of the market and surplus-value production. At first, art (a concept which modernity defined for its own use as late as 17476) was 3 What is represented by 1968, or 1960s, has been interpreted in many different ways already. The existence of a flaw and potential failure is one of more often mentioned characteristics. This is no surprise. To speak in Marxian terms, but against his anticipation, even those revolutions of the 20th century which were decorated with red flag proved to be more bourgeois than proletarian, at least with Katzenjammer as their consequence (Marx, 2010, 6–7). Some interpretations go well beyond the usual historical criticism, to find a direct connection between the victory of neoliberalism and the ideas of 1968. Mario Perniola has recently surprised Italian intellectual public, especially those who still continue to cherish 68’ legacy like Franco Berardi – Bifo, with a thesis that Berlusconi as a figure was born from this legacy, and that even neoliberalism has some of its roots in the same pool of ideas. Beside analysis of his own, Perniola quotes Jean-Pierre Le Goff (Le Goff, 1998, 496), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiappello (Boltanski & Chiappello, 1999, 848) to support him (Perniola, 2012, 112). In his previous book on miracles and traumas of communication, Perniola has put ‘68 as traumatic event in a longer historical sequence of post-WW2 development, with critical evaluation of revolutionary dreams and utopias (Perniola, 2009, 39–67), and with comparative study of politics, economy, communications and arts of the period in the West and in Italy. 4 The term ‘artworld’ itself is from the 1960s, to denominate the turn from the artwork as something objective and discernible at sensual level by at least some visible specific characteristics, to the artworld in which art and non- art objects or performances do not perceptually differ any more: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” (Danto, 1964, 580) In a similar was, science was understood not as something which can be taken for granted as objective truth but as something which belongs to the atmosphere of academy and is product of its inherent ideology. 5 Joseph Beuyss was heard to repeat again and again: “Everyone is an artist”. His slogan did not support the democratisation of culture, which was a political movement planned to offer high art to masses (Jack Lang’s project as French Minister of Culture serves as paradigmatic case, but so could cultural politics of socialist Yugoslavia). Beuyss promoted creative exchange among all people without special status of high art, or sublime position of artist as the Creator. 6 This was done by Abbé Batteaux in his treatise The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Batteux, 1997, 102–104). Paul Oskar Kristeller argued “that this system of the five major arts, which underlies all modern aesthetics and is so familiar to us all, is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth century, although it has many ingredients which go back to classical, medieval and Renaissance thought,” (Kristeller, 1997, 91), and added: “The decisive step toward a system of the fine arts was taken by the Abbé Batteux in his famous and influential treatise Les beaux arts réduits á un même principe (1746).” (Kristeller, 1997, 96) SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 50 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? grasped as a multitude of beautiful objects pleasurable to our senses. Then, this objective quality of objects was denied, so that beauty, or more broadly, all sentiments of sensual attraction or repulsion were recognised as subjective, at first in English and Scottish empirical, sensual and moral philosophy, to get final modern formulation in Kant’s third Critique.7 Kant’s consequent subjectivism of the aesthetic judgment (Kant, 1914, 45–46; &1) opened way to modern myth of art with genius as its only creator (Kant, 1914, 188–190; &46). Also, art got its special place within golden cage of the institution of art because it was something very different from all other usefully oriented activities, and deserved this special place, but also the autonomy. Heightened into the domain of authentic uselessness it was not without its own mission in historical progress of humanity: quite the contrary, its mission was the most important one, because only art could achieve what religion can no more: united and liberated humanity, and representation of the universe in its totality. Dethroning of artwork and its creator, a process which started at the end of the nineteenth century within first avant-garde movements, deconstructed all these premises and institutional provisions, because they were recognised as constructions without permanent validity, and as institutions created for the sake of alienation of art from life, and for ideological use of art as a powerless consolation far away from the real life with its real fights and struggles. As already mentioned, the result of this process was that anything can become art, that anybody can become, or perhaps everybody already is an artist. That sounds very democratic in comparison with previous ideologies of high art, as does criticism of university conservatism and scientific triumphalism in comparison with positivist ideologies of scientism. It means also that autonomy of art has no solid foundation, being just another of the fictions of modernity. Left without its lofty status created by modernism, the whole legal and institutional system which produced art as special and autonomous domain can be endangered and dismantled. Even on legal level: it is not rationally sound to protect art from non-art, especially from political power, if the difference between art and non-art is something the eye cannot descry, and there is definitely no reason for protection of special minority and particular kind of creative production if this minority does nothing special and there is nothing particular about art anyway. As for authorship, both in art and in science it has been given into the hands of contemporary merchants and peddlers, with the exception of the so-called moral authorship which is still recognised as something which cannot get alienated from the person of the author. On both sides, in art and in science, postmodern relativisation and neoliberal marketisation and commodification jointly destroyed traditional walls which safeguarded autonomous regions of modernity. In fact, the whole story with postmodernism started not with art but within science. “Anything goes!” was initially not a slogan to push forward all styles and approaches in art without distinction or hierarchy of value, it started as Paul Feyerabend’s expression covering choices of scientific paradigm and method: the right one does not exist, it is just a matter of choice: “Anything goes!” During its pre-postmodern appearances, postmodernism was Arnold Toynbee’s name for historical epoch of Western decline, and part of its remoulding of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Spengler, 1991) into respectable scientific form. And Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition (Lyotard, 1984) is a report on the state of science, not on the state of art. Scientific view of the world which was criticised by Edmund Husserl (Husserl, 2009) in favour of everyday life experience has radically changed, from its presupposed universality and potential totality to the status of construction which may be true, SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 51 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? but it is not all the truth. To exemplify radical turn in scientific culture, it is possible to give many examples. As philosopher, I will take Alain Badiou’s dialogue with Hegel on the Whole from Logique des Mondes (Badiou, 2008). He starts from opposition between Hegel whose philosophy is constructed on a premise that “There is nothing but the Whole.”, and his own philosophical credo that “There is no Whole.” Hegel’s position is to insert totality into any movement of thought, which guarantees unity of scientific truth, and identity of being and thought: one World, one Truth. Badiou’s position is that of multiple worlds which cannot be unified into totality, arriving at a state where these worlds are “disjoined, or to the assertion that the only truth is a local one.” (Badiou, 2008, 227) Hegel’s approach opens way to the system of science. This system is more than just a taxonomic order; it is “a fulfilled being” (das erfülte Sein) and “the concept comprehending itself” (Badiou, 2008, 229). The difference between taxonomy and system is that in system the Whole is a norm. In Badiou’s multiple worlds, there is no norm which would allow for configuration of Science as a system. One could discover a trace of Adorno’s passionate argument against the Whole as a lie from Negative Dialectics here, but there is no power of negativity in Badiou: “Of course, we share with Hegel a conviction about the identity of being and thought. But for us this identity is a local occurrence, and not a totalised result. We also share with Hegel the conviction of a universality of the True. But for us this universality is guaranteed by the singularity of truth-events, and not by the fact that the Whole is the history of its immanent reflection.” (Badiou 2008, 220) This destruction of totality does not open possibility for negativity which would disarm total embrace of the Whole, it just posits multiple disjoined Wholes; and it does not open horizon of future through potential conflict between being and thought, because it preserves the identity of being and thought, or, the identity of identity and non-identity. Local events, multiple worlds, absence of untamed negativity, and contemporaneity without a horizon: that is where critique of Badiou’s philosophy of “intotality” could start. But that is not my choice. My choice is to begin with Althusser’s invisible. There are two surprisingly invisible points in Badiou’s treatment of Hegel and the Whole, and the first one of them is the absence of Althusser, Badiou, otherwise critical but attached to Althusser, is discussing a topic of the Whole so crucial for Althusser’s reading of Marx without even mentioning that Althusser compared Marx’s and Hegel’s ideas on totality and the whole, and that Althusser’s solution to unity and multiplicity is different from that of Badiou, who, in this text, is not distancing himself just from Hegel but also from Althusser and his understanding of Marx. This discussion on the Total and the Whole is involved with University because it is exactly the university which possesses and maintains a kind of universality and wholeness in its name and its discourse, step back to Althusser is not useful just for special science of logic and its different structure in-between Hegel and Marx, and in-between Althusser and Badiou, but also as an opening for questioning the situation of University as an object of scientific examination. In Reading Capital (Althusser, 1970) Althusser and other partners asked themselves what is the object of Marx’s Capital, having in mind a difference between progressive continuation of the same disciplinary discourse (be it 7 The history of this shift from objective to subjective understanding of beauty is well ex- posed in Tatarkiewicz’s study (Tatarkiewicz, 1980). SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 52 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? political economy, history, philosophy…), or producing a break (rupture) in inherited discourse which is in construction of new, another object. Scientific discourse of modernity expects continuation without a break. Its position is exemplified with reading and writing The Book of the World (le Livre du Monde), which was initially, at the beginnings of science and university, the Bible. Later, in modernity, the Book of Nature was installed as the Bible of Science and University. Following Althusser and others from Lire le Capital (Althusser, 2005), we find out that Marx’s approach was the third step and another rupture which produces new paradigm, because the critique of political economy is not a continuation of (classical) political economy, or of Hegel’s philosophy, or of progressive history. Modern science is constructed on belief that Nature is an open and transparent book: one embraces approach and methods of empirical rationalism which can be described as well as Badiou’s or Hegel’s epistemological unity of being and thought. This is also position of young Marx who discovers the essence of humanity in transparency of its alienation. But in Capital there is a rupture with this kind of the Whole. World is not an open book any more, and science is not just reading the book of truth, be it Bible or Nature. Transparency lost is not something invented in postmodernity; it is position of distance constructed by Marx’s critique of political economy because another way than that of established academic science is needed to get to the structure of the real. Althusser speaks about young Marx’s reading of the whole, and Marx of the Capital reading, where young Marx is still keeping positions of transparency of truth, while Marx of the Capital examines that which remains invisible in transparent reading. Invisible is not what scientific knowledge of political economy, of Hegel, or of history can miss but what it cannot do without – without it being invisible, namely: not to see is a form of vision, says Althusser. Totality of modern science is a structure into which we have to look for its invisible, and therefore deny its claim on totality, while Marx insists on thought’s appropriation of the world in form of the whole (Gedankenganze, quotes Althusser from 1857 Manuscripts). In For Marx, in chapter “On the Materialist Dialectics”, differentiation between Hegel and Marx is even more developed. Complexity of structured unity, as he calls it, is where “one contradiction dominates the others” (Althusser 2005, 210). With addition which sounds as critique of Badiou avant­la­lettre: “So to claim that this unity is not and cannot be the unity of a simple, original and universal essence is not, as those who dream of that ideological concept foreign to Marxism, ‘monism’, think, to sacrifice unity on the altar of ‘pluralism’ – it is to claim to something quite different…” (Althusser 2005, 201–202). What is quite different is the complex whole which “has the unity of a structure articulated in dominance.” (Althusser 2005, 202) Traditional kind of unity of the world and its book(s), with its identity of being and thought, is totality, developed by Hegel to its final consequences. Althusser’s reading of Marx is not deconstruction of Hegel’s Totality but introduction of what this Totality can live without as its invisible, so that the complex Whole is a unity of multiple contradictions, but still a whole because its invisible is precisely the product of dominant contradiction which articulates the unity of complex structure. Badiou’s unity, opposed to Hegel as well, denies rights of postmodern relativity, but embraces multiple pluralities of local worlds without any dominant contradiction which would lead to discovery of what is otherwise invisible. This is the world we, universities and sciences as well as all the others, inhabit today: plurality without dominant contradiction. We can still make a choice between radical relativism of SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 53 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? postmodernism and relative relativism of Badiou, and we know (this became one of universally taught university skills) that unity of totality is a lie. But can we, among many proposals for a post-Hegelian Whole, keep in mind that there is no contingency in distribution of different contradictions in complex whole? Within approach to contemporary situation of university, problems with totality, unity and wholeness are of major importance, because its autonomy depends on persuasive ability to represent universality which is its name’s origin, and the identity of real object and its representation in science. Modern university, as founded in Berlin (1810) after the disastrous defeat of German nation and Prussian state by Napoleon, should be an enterprise pursuing the totality of knowledge understood as a system, or, the most elaborated and institutionalized enterprise of the German enlightenment. Change in scientific approach to the whole which went from totality to complex unity, and from complex unity to membra disiecta of multiple worlds, damaged university in its claim to represent scientific view of the world at least as much as ready-made represents a rupture in art after which artistic autonomy is just a convention without permanent validity. If one can agree that monumental effort to construct totality, exemplified by Hegel’s philosophical system/method, has failed, it does not follow that we have to embrace open relativisation. There may not be any totality or universality science and universities can produce, but there is an universal contradiction at work in every region and all domains. This contradiction is demanding that all different worlds function as market oriented enterprise would, i.e., that they have to follow market laws, produce surplus value, install management kind of organisation, strengthen competition for funds and rewards, and generally behave like capitalist enterprise. Just a moment before the outbreak of the French revolution, on May 26, 1789, and before Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schiller expressed a view that university is a community of students and teachers searching for the truth about humanity and its universal destiny. They should all be(come) philosophers, not bread-andbutter scholars (Schiller, 1972). This is university as an academic and scientific enterprise of the Whole. University as a market enterprise is, quite contrary, a bread-and-butter institution and therefore an enterprise in search for its success at markets, where teachers and students compete in search for money. University has become an enterprise. This means that we cannot think about it, and study its existence with inherited approach, albeit it is always possible to cry over spilt milk. What is needed are not lamentations coming from traditional academic glory but foundations of such science which is able to criticise university as market enterprise. Critique of political economy is such science. Study and research into dominant contradiction of the market oriented enterprise can start with David Tyfield’s proposal for “A Cultural Political Economy of Research and Innovation in an Age of Crisis” (Tyfield, 2012) where he notices seismic shifts in science and technology policies, but it could include university education policies as well. We need to start with political economy because it opens complete framework of policies we feel. His proposal speaks of cultural political economy because it takes Gramscian idea about ties between cultural field of conflicts, and political economy, and because he believes that Foucauldian concept of power has to be introduced into analysis of paradoxical policies science (and universities) are confronted with in contemporaneity. SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 54 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? Universality of the University, and the Students University deserved its name because it was a self-sufficient community of scholars devoted to the Book and to the Book only. Consequently, it received autonomy directly from the King, and the right to be represented as independent corporation in the Parliament (as is exemplified, for instance, by Oxford University and Cambridge University right to send representatives into the House of Commons from 1604 to 1948). Here is how its foundations, history and position on the Whole and the Truth was described and criticised by Thomas Hobbes at the threshold of modernity: “Within the same time, that is, between the time of the Emperor Charles the Great and of King Edward the Third of England, began their second polity; which is, to bring religion into an art, and thereby to maintain all the decrees of the Roman Church, by disputation, not only from the Scriptures, but also from the philosophy of Aristotle, both moral and natural. And to that end the Pope exhorted the said Emperor by letter, to erect schools of all kinds of literature; and from thence began the institution of universities; for not long after, the universities began in Paris and in Oxford. It is true, that there were schools in England before that time, in several places, for the instruction of children in the Latin tongue, that is to say, in the tongue of the Church. But for an university of learning, there was none erected till that time; though it be not unlikely there might be then some that taught philosophy, logic, and other arts, in divers monasteries, the monks having little else to do but to study. After some colleges were built to that purpose, it was not long time before many more were added to them, by the devotion of princes and bishops, and other wealthy men; and the discipline therein was confirmed by the Popes that then were; and an abundance of scholars sent thither by their friends to study, as to a place from whence the way was open and easy to preferment both in Church and Commonwealth. The profit that the Church of Rome expected from them, and in effect received, was the maintenance of the Pope’s doctrine, and of his authority over kings and their subjects, by school-divines; who, striving to make good many points of faith incomprehensible, and calling in the philosophy of Aristotle to their assistance, wrote great books of school-divinity, which no man else, nor they themselves, are able to understand; as any man may perceive that shall consider the writings of Peter Lombard, or Scotus that wrote commentaries upon him, or of Suarez, or any other school-divine of later times.” (Hobbes, 1990, 16–17) This may be a biased representation because of Hobbes’ views on Aristotle, reading the Bible, revolution, and their causal connection. But it contains information on twofold community: a community of scholars, and a community of knowledge. Scholars are equal, which includes students as well, because they are all keen to uncover the Truth, and they are put into hierarchical order where each person has its own place and duties. This is not an awkward rule; it just resembles that of the monastery from where it developed. And it is also a community of knowledge which collects, preserves, develops and diffuses knowledge and truth. It is a special kind of truth if compared to that of the Church, because it is presented as rationally transparent. If we put Hobbes prejudice against Aristotle and contemporary political divisions aside, he criticised universities at a time when the Book (being the Bible) and Aristotle had to be abandoned as sources of truth, to install another book, that of Nature, and another authority, that of rationalist empiricism (la conception empiriste de la connaissance – Althusser, 1971, 38) Enlightenment (Humboldtian university was one of its product) went one step further, and added another end to all this activity: to enlighten human world for its ultimate end which is in reaching a stage of perfection, freedom, and happiness, i.e. to support progress understood as writing the Book’s last chapters. This project which has university at its centre cannot survive deconstruction of the Whole in all of its appearances, and cannot function in multiple disjoined worlds of local events. University as corporation and community, together with its unity, universality and autonomy which had their foundations in the project, SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 55 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? cannot maintain its autonomy and devotion to truth, only truth, and nothing but the truth, or its own universality, if it does not believe any more in such unity and in such Truth. To give only two recent examples which demonstrate contradictory situation of science and its presumed validity, we can name USA Supreme Court’s rule in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that Intelligent Design cannot be taught in school because it presupposes supernatural power of religious kind (December 2005), or, that any theory which includes the Creator among its explanations is not scientific but religious, and therefore cannot be taught in schools. It was the first case of creationism or intelligent design conflict which entered jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and it confirmed secular power of science over religion. This sounds as repetition of Pierre Simon Laplace who, asked by Napoleon where God is in his model of solar system (Mécanique céleste of 1796), answered (of course, apocryphal) that he had no need of that hypothesis. On the other side is a case of the newest and greatest and most important discovery which may open doors for scientific explanation for making of the universe, whatever that could mean (for philosopher, it means that physics would like to give an ultimate answer to the question “Why is there something and not nothing?”). This Higgs boson, however, was called by media “the God particle” in the 1960s already, and this was the global characterisation all media used when discovery confirmed Higgs predictions and hypothesis from 50 years ago. On one side, there is legally confirmed belief in science as major secular power which has to be taught by the rules of science itself in public institutions – because it is the best kind of truth we can get at; on the other side is a fact that it is impossible to speak about one of major contributions and results of contemporary science in public without calling intelligent design and creationism to support its authority, or, to demonstrate their authority cannot be diminished by science. Can serious scientist be religious? With all respect to Dawson and Eagleton, that is not a problem at all. Can scientists still trust their science – that is more of a problem! Is there a way back? With the local truth, no. But do we have a choice? Hegelian totality seems completely out of reach. Should we then take university for one of Badiou’s “local worlds”, which perhaps have their own truth, without a way open to any kind of universality? No decent academic would defend universality, totality, or absolute nowadays, if for no other reason because it is indecent to even use these concepts: they are so repugnant to all kinds of oppressed and all kinds of minorities that just to utter them causes audience to look for holy water of postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, poststructuralism and so on. Totality and universality are ideological concepts used for oppression, they all say, and with good arguments. I could live with that. There is just a tiny problem. We can get rid of universality, totality and absolute by erasing them from our heads and language, no tears shed. But we cannot erase tendency of the capital to universalise its impact upon all local worlds of these global world, to introduce total control of all events, and to behave as an absolute wherever and whenever there is no resistance. Speaking in Althusser’s language, in the world of local worlds and no universal truths, there is at least one contradiction which dominates the others, and thus determines structure as such. All being relative, one of relative components gets to a position of dominant contradiction, i.e., dominant, because it functions as if universal, total and absolute; and contradiction, not just because it is in reality not universal, total and absolute, but because it is conflicting as such. Critique SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 56 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? of scientific religion professed by university in modernity is a prerequisite for any other criticism, but as there is no way back to universality and totality and absolute, there is no possibility to avoid or to outplay dominant contradiction of contemporaneity which is not just a local world event. To demand that university has to become a profitable enterprise means to put university under the principle of capitalist production, i.e. under the principle of production for profit. Obviously, this principle is not universal or total or absolute, but it is dominant in contemporary global structure, and dominant enough to express its will to become universal, total and absolute guidance for future development of the university. This demand is the invisible of the debate between Hegel and Badiou: there is nothing local about it. What it represents in the domain of university, and in all other domains, is the dominant contradiction of contemporaneity. In this context, it is John Rogers Searle who explains how the construction of social reality functions can be of help, because he considers social phenomena and artefacts (both university and capital are such phenomena and artefacts) as the imposition of functions on physical objects, which leaves us with social “objects” – institutions constructed in a way which puts some objects in position to count as something else (Searle, 2010). This status function, as Searle calls it, requires collective intentionality for its construction. If we proceed from Searle, we could add that such “to count as” construction which is so similar to political concept of representation cannot proceed by wish or will, as if guided by “anything goes” principle. There are limits to collective intentionality or regularities as Searle calls them, to stress their difference from laws of physics. What is of interest here is how and why the change from one construction to the other happens and proceeds, and what is at stake during this process; for instance, the process to turn university into an enterprise structured by the model of profit-producing enterprise. One tendency is that of the dominant contradiction which pressures to become universal, total and absolute, and in case of contemporary local worlds, of which university is just one, this dominant contradiction is profit-oriented production. This tendency puts in motion all kinds of change on different levels and pressures coming from different angles to bring university from an institution which counts as the highest educational institution and highest point of scientific effort into an institution which counts as auxiliary pillar of profit-oriented production. There are two ways to oppose this universalising demand. One is to insist on university’s difference and autonomy, which opens dangerous question: why should university be an exception when states and their European union are managed as profit-oriented enterprise, as well as their respective general subsystems as health, pensions, social care, prisons, and military and so on. To insist on exception would mean, finally, to look for help in arguments coming from insistence on Totality, Universality and Truth of Science. Bit how could university insist on something it already deconstructed and abandoned itself? Another is, in typically academic manner, to question dominant contradiction itself, and its general demand, and not just its attack on university. Only through such approach the need to construct university so that it can “count as” an enterprise may be exposed and its logic understood in terms of dominant contradiction of all contemporary local worlds. To explain this second approach, the case of students’ situation in these contradictions is enlightening, and also of crucial importance. Political power of university lies with students, as already said. That is not a consequence of their youth or of their numbers, but result of their inherited status at the university and in the society: when teachers criticise, or go on strike, nobody SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 57 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? cares, and it is relatively easy to find those teachers who support the other side; when students rise, high politics gets worried, and in serious cases, it is not that simple to find and organise strike breakers, as it usually cause even deeper conflicts. In confrontation with pressures to reform the university according to management discourse formula, students proved that they are ready to fight at least on some of the issues, and to include in their fight a change of university, but in quite different direction as that proposed by state apparatus and profit management principles. The first feature of students’ actual position could make old revolutionaries from 1968 happy: study is organised and controlled as work, divided into working-units, evaluated with points, motivating for longer hours and total devotion. Students’ study is organised and structured in the same manner as work of their teachers, by ranking efforts, counting points and create hierarchy of achievements. Why? Not for the sake of better education and not even for the sake of shorter studies (because they will finalise their studies quickly only when jobs will be waiting for them and not them waiting for jobs)). All processes were shaped to become controllable by another, third person, someone beside and outside teacher and student, someone who starts to control both of them on the basis of turning persons into numbers. Everybody has to become comparable, because everybody is and will be always compared to all the others, at the same time fighting to gather enough points to save his or her status, because status is all that counts. To call our biggest education halls amphitheatres now sound to the point. But the main reforming moves attack social status of students. In older sociology, students were described as a group “in-between” their dependency on parents, and their involvement with serious life of employment, family care and competition for survival – a conditional freedom. With massive influx of new generations into university education as means for social promotion, and, quite to the contrary, precarious future as their reality, students’ formal status became something worth fighting for, and to prolong it as much as possible. On the other side, such numerous inscriptions were seen as an opportunity to get much more highly skilled labour for much lower salaries, ready to work under extremely precarious conditions. Here are some of proposals which were introduced with more or less success, but which stay on the agenda even after somewhere some of them were dismissed because of conflicts with students: to eliminate special position of students work which helped them to finance their studies, to make them independent, and to support students activities and associations; to rearrange scholarships so that they will not go to the students any more but to their parents; to introduce, instead of free public university education (which is already quite costly in reality anyway), university fees together with promise that social problems will be solved with greater public support through scholarships (which never came). The last proposal to introduce university fees at public universities, met with strongest opposition, and is still an open front especially in former socialist countries where free access to university education for those who passed other admittance selection regimes is still understood as human right. But if public universities have no fees, private universities struggling for concession status with state support will be less competitive, because they usually are incomparable in terms of educational quality and more than competitive in production of “ready-made” “fast-food” labour. In all these fights and struggles, students were defending their social and human independence against proposals which are turning them into minors and dependent youth again. They represented that kind of negation which is directly opposed to unified structure articulated in dominance, or, to use Adornian category, they repre- SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 58 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? sent, in confrontation with oppressive synthesis into total unity, a negation which does not want to disappear in identity. The struggle is not about this or that privilege and its substitute, it is about independence. If students lose their temporary independence from labour markets and precarious labour regimes, university will lose its autonomy. There is another reason which explains why teachers should support free public university education, and it lies in character of teacher–student relationship at the university. I remember when we started in grammar school, after finishing elementary, and our teachers addressed us formally, to make us understand that, in spite of still being minors, at least when being at school, we are independent and responsible subjects. We were proud, of course. Then, at the university, our professors told us to use familiar address with them, because students were not pupils but partners there. We were proud again. Students are concrete negation of dominant contradiction, they are negation which does not allow be subsumed and lost in synthesis under dominant contradiction. What may be even more important than such potentially romantic view of students status which Adorno himself would no doubt strongly attack, it is important to note that when we speak about university as an enterprise, we have to put forward fundamental productive process which is going on at the university: the relationship between teachers and students which is not equal to relationship between teachers and pupils because it is supposed to be collaboration in pursuing knowledge and scientific truth, and is not equal to exchange between labour and capital because students do not sell their working force to the university. When we hear about university as an enterprise, we have to become suspicious, because university already is an enterprise of highest education and scientific excellence, and an non-profit one at that: this call does not support the enterprise university already is, it demands that university is reformed and changed into enterprise of the usual market orientation which includes change of relationship between university and its workers into relationship between capital and labour. Such arrangement presupposes that means of production have to become inaccessible to teachers and students alike but with their agreement to accept command of the third, managing party which controls university means of production. This is nothing new for teachers who were already at the university under socialist rule and ideological self-management control8, but it is new as concerns students, and the relation between teachers and students. What is new is total quantification of evaluation which leaves no place for discussion on quality. Understandable: when power is not in hands of academics, but in hands of management and administration, their ability is to count, not to evaluate qualitatively. This shift from evaluation of quality, which can be done by teachers and students only, to quantified evaluation is the most important change which every member of the university feels directly, and is confronted with its consequences. On public university with free access (no scholarships), relationship between teachers and students is founded on advancement and progress in knowledge and scientific abilities, which can only be measured and in hands of both teacher and student. Because of free access, students are free also as it concerns their own involvement and investment in studies, and when social situation of being student is more attractive than that of entering workforce market, students may tend to prolong their student status as much as possible. State, as prevailing, if not the only source of financial support for public universities, can decide what is better: to allow student status to become, at least partly, a social support institution, or, to pressure students to enter labour SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 59 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? market as soon as possible. If the main rationality is stable social situation, the usual outcome is a kind of state and public universities opportunism which while introducing some measures for shorter studies, is not really committed to this task. If the main rationality is that of lowering labour costs of surplus value production, there will be strong pressure to eliminate social importance of student status, to make student status otherwise more dependent, and to introduce student fees to strengthen this pressure. And when teacher and student are both independent, which includes their social independence, their relationship concerns only study, and circumstances which enable or disable it. When student has paid university fee, teacher seems to be his or her employee, but that is only on the surface, because both have to allow for lower standards and quicker results, and at the end of it the whole process is controlled by management machinery which has already occupied education and research processes. Student, in spite of university fee which shows him or her as a customer, has become working force because of systematic control of status and systematic measurement of activities and results: we get at a situation of unpaid labour which, to get employed, even has to pay for it. So, the independent social position of student is a clue for relatively autonomous public university, and not only for student’s independence. With university fees, teacher and student both are no longer in charge of education process, and another fundamental relationship of public university tradition is breaking down. Teachers who understood that a bouquet of all the reforms and changes taken together is endangering their position and course towards good education and research, decided to leave mass graduate education process, and to emigrate from there to doctoral postgraduate studies and research projects. They did not succeed in that, or not all of them who wanted to do so, but overall attitude to lower level of studies has changed, and mass studies are treated more or less as less important and less demanding educationally, which is partly understandable because conditions for serious work (more teachers per student, technical equipment, libraries with rich informational sources…) are usually absent. Mass university education which is now and will remain a fact in future, and with mass education comes normal distribution of abilities and ambitions which in previous decades would not pass the selection: prevailing number of students just want to get their hands on formal proof of their university education. High numbers of students, and high number of students per teacher are something new, but this distribution of ambitions is not. When Friedrich Schiller started his lectures at Jena on May 26, 1789, before touching world history as his and new subject, he said a few words on two kinds of students, because he wanted to reach agreement with those who wanted to attend his course. First kind of students were bread-oriented, second kind of students were of philosophical mind. 8 During socialist times, after introduction of universal self-management in the 1970s, universities’ and faculties’ senates and other decisive bodies consisted of three parts: teachers, students, and public interest. Representation of public interest was there to provide a link of public support for universities’ development plans, but also to intervene when universities were believed to get on the wrong side of public interest. To reach any decision in such body, all three parts had to support the proposal, which introduced a lot of bargaining. For instance, when teachers’ salaries had to be approved, students introduced their proposals conditioning their support for teachers’ higher salaries with adoption of the interest of their own. In a similar way, external pressure, ideological or political or any other, was in principle accepted with opposition which softened if and when some other goods were delivered. SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 60 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? “The course of studies which the scholar who feeds on bread alone sets himself is very different from that of the philosophical mind. The former, who, for all his diligence, is interested merely in fulfilling the conditions under which he can perform a vocation and enjoy its advantages, who activates the powers of his mind only thereby to improve his material conditions and to satisfy a narrow-minded thirst for fame, such a person has no concern upon entering his academic career, more important than distinguishing most carefully those sciences which he calls ‘studies for bread’ from all the rest, which delight the mind for their own sake. Such scholar believes that all the time he devoted to these latter, he would have to divert from his future vocation and this thievery he could never forgive himself…” (Schiller, 1789) What Schiller put in front of his students (who, by the way, had to pay for his lectures because with Goethe’s help he could get only position of Privatdoz­ ent) was not the idea that he will thoroughly try to divide their ranks among bread-seekers and philosophical minds, but that he will have the same attitude towards them all, treating them as philosophical minds, i.e. as students who want to invest all their abilities and efforts into search for truth. We have still to follow his example, whatever difference there is between his and our circumstances, and whatever demands we get from anybody else at or out of university. By the way, academics of the enlightenment period would be extremely happy if they could get their hands on much greater number of students, because that would mean that there is a chance to fulfil their mission. We may not believe in that mission any more, or have other missions that those of enlightenment, but – and that is another of my proposals – we have to treat this massive body of students we get nowadays as great number of persons with philosophical mind, i.e. with highest expectations and ambitions, and try to give them much more than just skills necessary for their vocation: we have to offer them a mission for their abilities, and it is their right to decide to take it or not. But they deserve a chance and a challenge. University is an enterprise of education and research for which we can do something regardless of the dominant contradiction of contemporaneity: 1. We can support independent status of students, which will, during the process, strengthen independence of the university as well. 2. We can do our best in terms of approach to graduate studies in spite of massive influx of students because visible effort on one side causes reaction on the other. Some of us still remember slogan from another times: they cannot pay us so bad that we would not do our work by best standards of our own. 3. Successful at first two, we can start to fight for our own power at the University, so that it becomes obvious that if University is an enterprise of education and research, teachers and nobody else are its managers. 4. It is absolutely necessary to analyse paradoxes of contemporary public policies in education and research taking broader view of political economy and critique of political economy. There is no need of nostalgia for long lost times of Totality as an end of science, and of Science as a myth. There is no Whole – that much is sure. But there is also no local hole where we could hide from the dominant contradiction of contemporaneity: that of capitalist mode of production. Not even at the university. SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 61 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? References Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar (1971), Lire le Capital I., Paris: Maspero. Louis Althusser (2005), For Marx, London and New York: Verso. Alain Badiou (2008), “Hegel and the Whole”, in: Theoretical Writings, London & New York: Continuum, 227–238. Charles Batteux (Abbé Batteux; 1997), “The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle”, in: Aesthetics (ed. Susan L. Feagin & Patrick Maynard), Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 102–104. Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis (2013), Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. London: Polity Press. Luc Boltanski & Ève Chiapello (1999), Le nouvel esprit du capitalism, Paris: Gallimard. Arthur Danot (1964), “The Artworld”, The Journal of Philosophy, 61, 19, 571–584. Paul Feyerabend (1978), Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge, London: Verso. Nicholas Gane (2012), “The Governmentalities of Neoliberalism: Panopticum, Post-Panopticum and Beyond”, The Sociological Review, 60, 4 (November 2012), 611–634. Thomas Hobbes (1990), Behemoth: or, the Long Parliament, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences (1938), available at: http://archive. org/details/HusserlscrisisOfTheEuropeanSciences , accessed 5 August 2013. Immanuel Kant (1914), The Critique of Judgement, London: Macmillan, available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticfile=show.php%Ftitle=1217 , accessed 5 August 2013. Paul Oskar Kristeller (1997). “The Modern System of the Arts”, in: Aesthetics (ed. Susan L. Feagin & Patrick Maynard), Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 90–102. Jacques Le Goff (1998), Mai 68: l’héritage impossible, Paris: La Découverte. François Lyotard (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karl Marx (1999), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, available at: http://www. marxist.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire , accessed 5 August 2013. Mario Perniola (2009), Miracoli e trauma della comunicazione, Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore. Mario Perniola (2012), Da Berlusconi a Monti: Dissaccordi imperfetti, Milano & Udine: Mimesis edizioni. Friedrich Schiller (1789), “What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History”, http://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/Schiller_essays/universal_history.html , accessed 5 August 2013. John Roger Searle (2010), Making the Human World: The Structure of Human Civiliza­ tion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oswald Spengler (1991), The Decline of the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matthew Taylor (2012), “Changing the Subject: The Core for Social Politics”, The Politi­ cal Quarterly, 83, 4 (November 2012), 685–692. Brian A. Thomasson (2011), “Arguing from the Evidence: The Correct Approach to Intelligent Design’s Challenge in the U.S. Courts”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 41, 4 (December 2011), 495–534. Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1980), Istorija šest pojmova, Beograd: Nolit. Arnold Toynbee (1935), Study of History 1–3, London: Royal Society of International Affairs. David Tyfield (2012), “A Cultural Political Economy of Research and Innovation in an Age of Crisis”, Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 50, 2 (2012), 149–167. SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 62 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? Lev Kreft Treba li sveučilište postati poduzeće? Sažetak Cilj je ovog rada objasniti da nije svrsishodno shvaćati sve transformacije na sveučilištu posljed­ njih desetljeća u pogledu borbe između zle politike i nevine akademije, jer su sveučilišta bila uključena u oblikovanje i promoviranje smjernica reforme, te su prošla unutarnje ideološku podjelu i političku borbu tijekom ovog procesa. Također, nije prikladno smatrati neoliberalizam neprijateljem od kojeg se treba obraniti i poraziti ga resursima kritike ideologije, budući da to vodi u sukob ideologije (koja naizgled, no ne i u stvarnosti, dolazi iz vanjskog svijeta) i znanosti (koja po pretpostavci pripada samim sveučilištima). Usto su sveučilišta bila uključena u taj pro­ ces, bilo u utemeljenju neoliberalizma, bilo u de(kon)strukciji znanstvene cjelokupnosti i auto­ nomije. Paralelizam između umjetnosti i znanosti kao dvije autonomne domene moderne, kao i postmoderni okret koji im je izmaknuo čvrsti temelj naslijeđene autonomije, bit će razmatran kako bi podupro ovu tezu. U konačnici, sveučilište je nekada bilo posebna i autonomna radioni­ ca s vlastitim zakonima procedure, odvojena od tržišne ekonomije, da bi prvo postalo obrazovna tvornica, a danas konačno i poduzeće. Povratka nema. No postoji li izlaz? Suvremena kritika političke ekonomije je mjesto koje bi barem za početak trebali razmotriti, a ujedinjen nastup studenata i nastavnika bi mogao dati neku moć za povratak akademije u ruke onih kojima je izvorno pripadala. Ključne riječi sveučilište, poduzeće, neoliberalizam, bolonjska reforma, autonomija, cjelokupnost, kritika političke ekonomije Lev Kreft Soll die Universität ein Unternehmen werden? Zusammenfassung Das Bestreben dieses Papers ist die Erläuterung, dass es nicht segensreich ist, sämtliche Trans­ formationen an der Universität in den vergangenen Dezennien unter Bezug auf die Zwiespäl­ tigkeit zwischen der bösartigen Politik und der schuldlosen Akademie auszulegen, denn die Universitäten waren an der Gestaltung bzw. Förderung der reformerischen Leitlinien beteiligt und durchliefen eine innere ideologische Spaltung wie auch ein politisches Gefecht im Laufe dieses Prozesses. Darüber hinaus ist es deplatziert, den Neoliberalismus als Feind auszuwei­ sen, gegen den man vermöge der Ideologiekritik aufzubegehren und welchen man zu bezwin­ gen hat, da dies zum Zerwürfnis zwischen Ideologie (die scheinbar, allerdings nicht tatsächlich von der Außenwelt stammt) und Wissenschaft (vermutlich den Universitäten selbst angehörend) führt. Auch diesbezüglich waren die Universitäten in diesen Fortgang involviert, sei es in der Gründung des Neoliberalismus, sei es in der De(kon)struktion der wissenschaftlichen Totalität und Autonomie. Um der angesprochenen These Rückhalt zu verschaffen, wird die Parallelität zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft als zwei autonomen Domänen der Modernität als auch de­ ren postmoderne Kehrtwende erörtert, die ihnen festen Boden der ererbten Autonomie entzog. Schließlich fungierte die Universität ehedem als spezielle und autonome Werkstatt mit eigenen Verfahrensvorschriften, abgesondert von der Marktwirtschaft, um zuerst zu einer Bildungs­ fabrik und derweil letztendlich zum Unternehmen auszuarten. Es gibt keinen Weg zurück. Ist jedoch ein Ausweg in Sicht? Die zeitgenössische Kritik der politischen Ökonomie muss der erste ultimative Gegenstand unseres Augenmerks werden, und der vereinigte Auftritt der Studenten und Lehrer könnte einigen Schwung zur Rückkehr der Akademie in die Hände jener bringen, denen sie ursprünglich zugehörte. Schlüsselwörter Universität, Unternehmen, Neoliberalismus, Bologna-Prozess, Autonomie, Totalität, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 55–56 (1–2/2013) pp. (45–63) 63 L. Kreft, Has University to Become an Enterprise? Lev Kreft L’université doit-elle devenir une entreprise ? Résumé L’objectif de cet article est d’expliquer qu’il n’est pas opportun de penser à toutes les transfor­ mations survenues à l’Université depuis les dernières décennies en termes de confrontation en­ tre une politique malveillante et une université innocente, car les universités ont été impliquées dans la formation et la promotion des lignes directrices de réforme et ont connu une division idéologique et une lutte politique interne au cours de ce processus. En outre, il ne convient pas de considérer le néolibéralisme comme ennemi qu’il faut défier et battre avec les ressources de la critique de l’idéologie, car cela mène au conflit entre l’idéologie (qui semble venir, mais ne vient pas vraiment du monde extérieur) et la science (censée appartenir aux universités elles­ mêmes). Là aussi, les universités ont été impliquées dans le processus, que ce soit dans le fon­ dement du néolibéralisme ou la dé(con)struction de la totalité et de l’autonomie scientifiques. Pour soutenir cette thèse, on exposera le parallèle entre l’art et la science en tant que deux do­ maines autonomes de la modernité, ainsi que leur tournant post­moderne qui les a laissés sans le fondement solide d’une autonomie héritée. Enfin, l’université fut autrefois un atelier singulier et autonome avec ses propres règles de procédure, séparé de l’économie de marché, avant de devenir d’abord une usine d’enseignement, puis finalement aujourd’hui une entreprise. Il n’y a pas de retour. Mais y a­t­il une porte de sortie ? L’endroit où nous devrions regarder, du moins pour commencer, est la critique contemporaine de l’économie politique, tandis qu’un bloc uni d’étudiants et d’enseignants pourrait dispenser un certain pouvoir pour ramener l’académie dans le giron de ceux à qui elle appartenait initialement. Mots-clés université, entreprise, néolibéralisme, réforme de Bologne, autonomie, totalité, critique de l’économie politique