Some very kind person helped me access Terry Eagleton’s article title “The Slow Death of the University.” Thank you, kind person!
As you must have gleaned from the title, the subject Eagleton is addressing in the piece is the tragic transformation of the function that universities have had since the very dawn of their existence (thank God for blogging where I can indulge my occasional urge to use cliches):
From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to São Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique.
I really believe that this process is a lot more momentous than the pointless and idiotic Cuban Revolution, but it’s great that Eagleton is choosing to discuss the issue.
Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism.
This is precisely what I have always valued so much about the work I do. For a few hours every week, my students and I get to remove ourselves from the cycle of selling, buying, and discarding as we gather to talk about literature. There are two pursuits that radically distance human beings from other species: the capacity to create art and the capacity to create knowledge. In my classroom, we engage in creating knowledge about art, which is the most exalted activity of the human mind that I can imagine.
The bastardized language of failed entrepreneurship is seeping into college campuses, however:
Instead of government by academics there is rule by hierarchy, a good deal of Byzantine bureaucracy, junior professors who are little but dogsbodies, and vice chancellors who behave as though they are running General Motors. Senior professors are now senior managers, and the air is thick with talk of auditing and accountancy. Books — those troglodytic, drearily pretechnological phenomena — are increasingly frowned upon. At least one British university has restricted the number of bookshelves professors may have in their offices in order to discourage “personal libraries.” Wastepaper baskets are becoming as rare as Tea Party intellectuals, since paper is now passé.
Colleges increasingly employ people who failed miserably at both scholarship and learning to run campuses, and here are some of the sad results:
Philistine administrators plaster the campus with mindless logos and issue their edicts in barbarous, semiliterate prose. One Northern Irish vice chancellor commandeered the only public room left on campus, a common room shared by staff and students alike, for a private dining room in which he could entertain local bigwigs and entrepreneurs. When the students occupied the room in protest, he ordered his security guards to smash the only restroom near to hand. British vice chancellors have been destroying their own universities for years, but rarely as literally as that. On the same campus, security staff move students on if they are found hanging around. The ideal would be a university without these disheveled, unpredictable creatures.
This is as true in the US as it is in Britain. The deputy director of the Illinois Board of Higher Ed laid out his vision for a university without either professors or students. In the mind of this intensely bizarre creature (and so many nincompoops just like him), the ideal university is a source of endless stream of revenue for his greedy ass. It should exist as an abstract concept and not as an actual place where actual people come together to learn, discuss, and enrich themselves intellectually.
Of course, there are areas in which the UK system has always been better than its US counterpart:
Every few years, the British state carries out a thorough inspection of every university in the land, measuring the research output of each department in painstaking detail. It is on this basis that government grants are awarded.
If only this were the case in the US, I am sure that we would be able to prevent many of the problems that plague our higher ed system today. In the UK, the efforts to promote research lead to the idiocy that Eagleton describes because of the abysmally poor standards to which scholars in the Humanities are held. I believe I already shared the story of the British prof, the star of UK’s Hispanism, who barely spoke any Spanish at all. In the US such cases are extremely rare. Our problem resides in a very low number of professors who actually have a vibrant and active research agenda. Half of the problems our academia faces today could be removed if we had a system in place that at least tries to reward and promote research in the Humanities on campus. I have nothing but envy for the system in which
Points are awarded by the state inspectors for articles with a bristling thicket of footnotes.
It is sad that the British scholars haven’t been able to make use of such a great system while we, the American scholars, could only sigh with jealousy when we here about it.
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