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.
Clarissa's Blog 
The problem with the system here (the Research Excellence Framework) is that no one knows the standards by which research is rated, particularly in the humanities were things like impact and international import can be harder to measure. Instead, we are given vague descriptors like ‘nationally recognised’, ‘internationally recognised’ and ‘internationally leading’. In addition, there is no clarity about the importance of place of publication and form (for instance, whether it matters where a particular piece if placed or whether it is the piece on its own merits). What ends up happening is that departments panic and put in place arbitrary goals in an effort to game the system, rendering the whole exercise utterly worthless. If you have access to the Times Higher Ed, you can see this in play through the disparity between the raw REF rankings and rankings corrected for intensity. The other problem is that the 6-year cycle doesn’t account for scholarship that is longer term in nature or that takes longer to become significant for whatever reason.
I myself am not against the REF in theory – I think it is good to be held accountable in various ways – but I think that the system is too opaque. I am lucky to have a few friends and colleagues who have sat on the assessment panels, including one who chaired his subject’s panel, and they express the same frustrations.
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I’ll also add that the next REF cycle, slated for 2020, is also being tied to open access (that is, from April 2016 publications must be open access in order to be eligible for the REF), which is obviously a huge problem.
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“from April 2016 publications must be open access in order to be eligible for the REF”
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“Oh God. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
Yes. Yes, it is. Luckily, this only pertains to journal articles and conference proceedings (for now), though it is only a matter of time before this lunacy is applied to monographs.
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And if you are in a journal-dominated field like me it is ridiculous and frustrating NOW!
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Exactly! Just how hard it is to copy a person’s last name, you know?
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Yes, yes, and yes! I do agree that many institutions of higher education are falling behind from empowering the present and coming generations with practical knowledge in the sense that they place more emphasis on disciplines that contribute to the bureaucratic nature of society as opposed to the spaces that the world needs these growing, thinking, beautiful minds most. While it is extremely wonderful that entrepreneurship and the mechanics of business and corporate diplomacy seem to be the ever-present focus (and it is necessary to pay attention to these things to an extent), adhering to these soulless waves rob our generations of a workforce of those who will maintain our infrastructure on many elements as it is and will also have more devastating moral consequences, I believe. Not to say that all universities and colleges do this, of course, there are many that instill in their students the importance of the basics of life, as I’d like to see them, but life is not to be lived catering to the invisible and explainable (if that makes sense – to technology and practices that contribute to the man-made phenomenon of money (as opposed to the man-perceived invisible phenomenon of sciences such as biology, physics, agriculture, etc. or even the unexplained supernatural to take it a step further) and with the ongoing moral degradation of society from a media and public consumption aspect, it is depressing that any so-called higher institution at all would forgo the importance of reinforcing the basic elements and building blocks of a rich society instead preaching the art of bullshitting (not to say that using mathematical and critical thinking is bad, but the purpose for which it’s used for means more) for the purposes of acquiring currency that would rob society of even the minds that created the earliest “higher education” facilities in the first place (that’s an assumption, I don’t know why the first higher education facilities were established nor do I feel like researching it right now, but one could assume it wasn’t for business or entrepreneurs or to contribute to the monetary system or money-gaining system in any way). Thank you so much for giving more insight in this article since it can’t be accessed without subscription!
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I suppose what’s left will lead to a time known as “The Re-Emergence of the Cultural Foundation”.
Of course, this will be about how during the decay of the university, some madmen (and madwomen, naturally) will shift the preservation of culture and knowledge out of universities and into the hands of those who could be trusted to maintain them, hoping for a day when universities may be re-imagined as something new …
At this point, the answer to the critique that universities will have become organisations for educating buffet intellectuals (if not Buffett intellectuals) will be, “So where’s the problem, pops?”
In the meantime, some future Voltaire imagines the day in which he can admit to having a vast personal library, in his own office no less, and not be looked upon as some kind of inhumane “great waster of paper” …
One last bit: during the run-up to elections, the Beeb has been running various bits about what the parties promise (other than the State of the Status Quo, which always wins, and the subsequent State of the Organisational Name Changes, which makes it appear that substantive change has arrived despite the existence of the former permanent State). What caught my eye was a bit about the rise of MOOCs, and yet with a two-fold increase in offering them over the past year (according to the news blurb), 93% of students fail to complete them.
This is seen as a grand achievement, since after all, it’s all about access rather than about achieving meaningful goals …
I’m reminded of something that Yogi Berra probably said that momentarily escapes me, most likely about “making good time” toward a destination. 🙂
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