Idea of University

The sector of education, when addressed carefully and wisely by the government, can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction by which any country can move millions of steps forward leaving behind it countries, which have not taken advantage of this weapon, lagged behind. Whilst primary and secondary education represent the pillars of the country’s socio-economic development, Higher Education as one component of the educational system, constitutes the cornerstone of this development as it broadens its people’s opportunities to ‘know’ and use ‘the knowledge’ they have learned to open various horizons to the ambitions of the country to be achieved. Besides coping with some terminological issues related to the domain of higher education and providing a brief history of higher education in Morocco, and with respect to the Moroccan context, the present report will attempt to let light go through the most typical and hypersensitive issues that govern any higher education system, viz. reforms, methodology, cost sharing, policies, division of sectors; public and private, and the phenomenon of Brain drain; its factors and potential solutions.

The contemporary academy is suffering from a crisis in meaning. Its humanistic core has given way to disciplinary specialization. Scholars pursue their agendas within local specializations, often unware of outside scholarship that has deep implications for their work. Disciplines prepare career-minded students for individual professions or further localized study. There is arguably no core ideas that structure the scholarly and teaching missions of the academy. While academic fragmentation has many sources, one involves the longstanding science-humanities antinomy. From within this schism, the sciences produce reliable, useful and objective knowledge, while the humanities produce speculative, inconsistent and subjective belief. This divide, however, is based on a false premise, namely the objective-subjective dichotomy itself. Drawing upon Husserl’s concept of intersubjectivity within a shared lifeworld, I argue that the sciences and humanities share a common intersubjective basis. Neither alone can address the crisis of meaning that infects academy and society alike. Given their common foundation, the sciences and humanities can be understood to function with reference to a shared academic purpose: the cultivation of knowledge for the good of humanity. This “idea” acknowledges the complementarity of disciplines in advancing a common objective – one that incorporates descriptive and axiological dimensions of scholarly and social life.

Three years ago, the academic freedom saga, which interrupted university operations from
February to October, 2011, presented a big challenge in the life of the university and of scholarship in Malawi. It involved a clash of values between the state, personified in the figures of former President Bingu wa Mutharika and former Police Inspector General Peter Mukhito, and university academics. The grand narrative interprets the conflict in terms of binary struggles of academic license versus censorship, freedom versus authority, rationality versus irrationality etc. The university academics represented and championed academic freedom, vouching for unrestrained rationality while the state was the voice of authority drenched by power to irrational levels. This paper offers an alternative interpretation which removes that binary structure to show that the academics were as much drenched by the desire to assert power. They ignored other intellectual virtues and in the process left the classroom, the library, and the publishing house to become unionists on the streets. Their mode of acting displayed trade-unionist tendencies characteristic of a period of crisis under which irrational forces dominate the rational (critical dialogue). Ultimately, this paper ventures the hypothesis that the unfolding of the saga was symptomatic of the levels of immaturity in virtues (values) of the intellectual life – which give the university its integrity and of which academic freedom is one – and consequently symptomatic of the overall crisis the university is in on the account of the state, but no less on the account of its role holders.

Das große Thema " Vernunft und Glaube " , das sich durch die abendländische Geschichte zieht, kristallisiert sich in besonderer Weise institutionell in der Universität. Welche Implikationen die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Verhältnis von philosophischer Vernunft und Glaube im Hinblick auf das Wesen und die prakti-sche Gestaltung der akademischen Bildung hat, läßt sich trefflich am Beispiel zweier Autoren aufzeigen, die sich intensiv mit diesem Problem befaßt haben: dem englischen Theologen John Henry Kardinal Newman und dem deutschen Philosophen Josef Pieper. Beide setzten sich eingehend mit der Frage auseinander, was die Universität ihrem Wesen nach – also ihrer Idee nach – auszeichnet (eben deshalb geht es Newman um The Idea of a University!), und was es also heißt, wenn man das Wort " akade-misch " in den Mund nimmt. Was ist das Eigene des Akademi-schen im Gegensatz zu allem anderen, das Bildungs-und Aus-bildungsinstitutionen auch noch leisten und auch leisten sollen? Worin besteht der Kern dessen, was in vollem Umfang als aka-demische Bildung zu bezeichnen ist? Es kann keinem Zweifel unterliegen, daß die von Newman wie Pieper vorgebrachten Überlegungen denkbar weit von den gegenwärtigen Trends im Bereich der Hochschulpolitik und-bildung mit ihren völlig unübersichtlich gewordenen Reformen entfernt liegen – gerade deshalb aber mögen ihre Gedanken, so " idealistisch " und " unrealistisch " sie erscheinen mögen, drin-gend nötiges kritisches Potential entfalten. Jedenfalls dort, wo die Idee der Bildung noch nicht endgültig ad acta gelegt wurde. Es ist mir unvergeßlich, wie sehr mir dieser Kontrast bereits ins Auge fiel, als ich in den neunziger Jahren wohl einen der letzten Vorträge Piepers in der Berliner Guardini-Stiftung hörte, der sich dem Problem des Akademischen widmete und, wie ich später bei der nachbereitenden Lektüre feststellte, fast wortwört-lich identisch war mit jenem Text Piepers, der zuerst in den

Obie pozycje z jednej strony demaskują procesy i zachowania niszczące ideał uniwersytetu od środka, z drugiej zaś – podają pewne recepty na uzdrowienie czy utrzymywanie „organizmu” w dobrym zdrowiu. Upraszczając, można powiedzieć, że dwie rady – pod którymi Jaspers i Śliwerski zapewne podpisaliby się obiema rękami – są ponadczasowe: „zachowuj się etycznie” i „dbaj o jak najwyższą jakość swoich badań”. Jeśli chcielibyśmy podać jedno hasło, czy lepiej – zawołanie, które streszczałoby postulat, jaki znajdujemy w Idei uniwersytetu i Turystyce habilitacyjnej, moglibyśmy powiedzieć, odwołując się do klasycznych, bo Platońskich i potem przejętych przez chrześcijaństwo, teorii metafizycznych: „służyć prawdzie”. Służba bowiem oznacza wierność, ale i wytrwałość, prawda zaś nierozerwalnie wiąże się z dobrem.

In this article I critically discuss Professor Oladele Abiodun Balogun's reflections on the proper final ends of doing philosophy and related sorts of abstract, speculative, or theoretical inquiry. Professor Balogun appears to argue that one should undertake philosophical studies only insofar as they are likely to make a practical difference to people's lives, particularly by contributing to politico-economic development, or, in other words, that one should eschew seeking knowledge for its own sake. However, there is one line of thought from Professor Balogun, about philosophy being able to make life meaningful, that I argue ultimately-perhaps contrary to his intentions-entails that it can be appropriate to some degree to pursue philosophy that is unlikely to ameliorate poverty and similar social ills. My central aims in this article are to identify Professor Balogun's strongest argument against pursuing any knowledge for its own sake and to argue that an appeal to meaningfulness constitutes a strong, competing reason to seek out some of it.

L'intervento approfondisce il ruolo centrale del dialogo nella conoscenza inter- e trans-disciplinare proposta da papa Francesco nella Veritatis Gaudium. Senza idealizzazioni, la dinamica profonda del dialogo indica una strada di trasformazione ascetica e mistica dei partecipanti... che richiede ambienti fisici, temporali e relazionali adatti. 

1. Frammenti di storia e attualità
2. Il poliedro della conoscenza di papa Francesco
  2.1. Kerygma come il centro
  2.2. Dialogo come irradiazione
  2.3. Transdisciplinarità attraverso la creazione di reti
3. La fatica ascetica e mistica del dialogo
4. Archetipi per il cammino
  4.1. L’albero dell’amore di S. Francesco di Sales
  4.2. L’ospedale di campo come luogo della saggezza pastorale
  4.3. Cortile dell’oratorio – luogo del dialogo vitale

In the text, the author has attempted to discuss, in connection with globalization processes in
Western cultures, changes in the organization and functioning of higher education systems. Imple-mented reforms aim to replace the concept of the university of idea with the so-called university of excellence. The author points not only to the changes being made, but also on their impact on the education of students, as well as the formation of a new academic culture. Not sharing the enthusiasm of advocates of reforms, he sees them as a threat to modern man and his culture. These threats primarily affect the level of education and academic culture, as well as they mean impoverishment of the substantive and axiological personality of the human of the future and are an attempt to bring it to a one-dimensional specialist, i.e. a technical man. Homo electronicus, or homo technicus as well as homo excellence is to replace homo sapiens. The author sees the reforms not as a process of improving education, but as an implementation of an ideology aimed at a global liberal empire.
Автор в тексте попытался обсудить, в связи с процессами глобализации в западных культурах, изменения в организации и функционировании систем высшего образования. Реализованные реформы направлены на отказ от университета идеи и ее замену так называемым университетом совершенствования. Автор указывает не только на происходящие изменения, но и на их влияние на образование студентов, а также на формирование новой академической культуры. Не разделяя энтузиазма сторонников реформ, он считает их угрозой современному человеку и его культуре. Эти угрозы касаются прежде всего уровня образования студентов и академической культуры, а также национальных культур. Они означают содержательное и аксиологическое обнищание личности  человека будущего, и это попытка довести его до одно-мерного специалиста, то есть технического человека. Homo electronicus, или homo technicus как homo excellence, должен заменить homo sapiens. Автор воспринимает реформы не как процесс улучшения образования, а как реализацию идеологии, целью которой является формирование глобальной либеральной империи.

The paper deals with some aspects which occur in contemporary discussions concerning the idea and crisis of the university from the phenomenological perspective. The author holds that this crisis originates in the alienating interpretation of the university, which leads to inappropriate discourse on the function or purpose of the university and, in the end, disrupts its original meaning. In the first part of the article, taking Hannah Arendt’s concept of labour as a basis of reflection, the latent background of the dominant alienating interpretation is discussed. Human activities in this context appear meaningful insofar as they are turned into labour or are evaluated and justified according to the norms prescribed by labour’s structure of meaning. The second part of the paper is devoted to the need to differentiate between mere function (purpose), the end of which is already given, and the idea that embodies the experience of non-givenness. The need to turn attention away from the purpose and towards the idea of the university consists in the fact that in education the experience of personal transformation, of opening towards the non-given, is inherent. Next, the encounter with the world, i.e. the experience of wonder (θαῦμα) as the grounding experience of personal transformation and education, which becomes institutionalized especially in the interpersonal relations of the university, is discussed.