The university of the 21st century: Facing complexity

It is imperative to problematise the idea of a university relentlessly and insistently at the beginning of the 21st century, and for a number of reasons.

The first is that, regardless of a widespread belief in the ‘neutrality’ of universities, they have not been unaffected by political partisanship. Perhaps this is unavoidable, given the fact that they are human institutions. After all, in every institution one inescapably encounters power struggles and contestations of some kind, and these do not only bear on internal ‘university’ politics. They are intertwined with struggles outside the university, as suggested by the recollection of the Afrikaner Broederbond’s involvement in a number of universities before the fall of apartheid (and I would not be surprised if this organisation still existed and continued to influence policy decisions at some universities).

A former doctoral student of mine, who wrote a ‘Foucaultian’ thesis (straddling English literature and philosophy) on the teaching of English in an institution in transition, focused to a certain degree on such involvement of the Broederbond in the life of the university in question. Today it is no different. Universities are arenas, among other things, for political battles, where partisans of ruling parties cross proverbial swords with adversaries who have different political affiliations, and even within disciplines, turf-wars rage which are not restricted to tussles over theoretical positions and counter-positions.

Over and above the need to debunk the supposed neutrality of universities — a myth hardly worth elaborating on further; at best it amounts to a confirmation of the political status quo — a question which requires serious attention at present, is the changed meaning of the ‘universality’ implied by the name ‘university’. As institutions of ‘higher learning’, universities are (and have always been) expected to represent the universe in all its variety and (paradoxically) its unity in the disciplines and sciences taught there.

In the heyday of modernity (more or less between 1750 to 1950) it was not difficult to conceive of universities as representing nature and culture in terms of what thinkers like the French ‘philosophes’ regarded as diversity of culture and unity of nature — that is, even human nature was regarded as being the same everywhere, but as expressing itself in an endless cultural variety. By the end of the 19th century in so-called Fin de Siecle thought, however, the idea that change or differences, rather than permanence was predominant, was already gaining the upper hand, and if any doubt remained, it was swept away by the tumultuous events leading up to and following the First and Second World Wars. The intellectual atmosphere emanating from social thought, literature and art (including existentialism, positivism and surrealism) in response to these world-shattering wars, left no doubt that all bastions of permanence had been obliterated, leaving the world adrift in what Franklin Baumer called a sea of ‘becoming’.

Understandably, under such circumstances universities faced the difficult task of adequately representing the particulars of this ostensibly ever-changing universe in the disciplines. As if this was not challenging enough, the unavoidable insertedness of universities in the political fabric of society asserted itself with a vengeance when a convergence of crises worldwide in the course of the 1960s impacted explosively on the way that universities operated.

Apart from the civil rights and women’s movements, there was the university revolts around 1968, which was symptomatic of more than simply a deep dissatisfaction with the outdatedness of university curricula. Fundamentally, it reflected a schism between the older and the younger generations — one that manifested itself in what an American judge called the ‘greening of America’, otherwise known as the hippie movement with its slogan, ‘Make love, not war’.

This attempted return to a mode of living closer to earth-values was partly born of disillusionment with a materialistic older generation, partly of disgust with the senselessness of war, but it also registered a deep crisis in the history of capitalism. In fact, just as one may regard the 1968 student revolutions as a political symptom of the birth of postmodernity, so too the emergence of ‘flexible accumulation’, as the adjustment of capital to its environment in crisis, marks its truly postmodern manifestation.

One may wonder what this has to do with the challenges facing the university today. The short answer is: everything. With the fading of the altruistic ideals of the 1960s and 70s, came the emergence of yuppiedom, so strikingly depicted in Brett Easton Ellis’s novel, ‘American Psycho’, and the return of a collective materialistic disposition that put that of the 1960s to shame.

Admittedly, it had to happen, given the switch to the neoliberal model of economics after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, according to which the ‘market’ was enshrined as the sole regulatory or organising force in society. In fact, the emphasis on economic growth since about 1970 has been such that all talk of ‘limiting growth’ — urged by the Club of Rome around that time — has almost completely disappeared. And with economic growth came an increase in power for the nations that were becoming increasingly wealthy.

What stimulated this dual growth immensely was the development of information technology which, by the end of the 1970s, prompted Jean-Francois Lyotard to point out that the very structure of knowledge had altered in contemporary societies, and he reminded people urgently not to forget the fundamental structural distinction between different kinds of knowledge, such as technical and scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and narrative knowledge, with its important function of securing social bonds, on the other. He also pointed out that we had entered the era where superior possession of information would ensure economic and political superiority.

An awareness of this partly explains the downscaling of humanities and social sciences during the Reagan and Thatcher years, which ended with the renewed awareness, on the part of especially educational authorities in the Northern hemisphere, that such downscaling would be fatal in the long run. After all, even medical doctors, engineers and technical experts of all stripes still had to be able to communicate with one another and with their clients. And communication requires language.

Hence it is no accident that, today, the humanities and social sciences at the leading universities in the Northern hemisphere are no less emphasised than the natural and information sciences. In fact, at the university which prides itself on being the most ‘wired’ in the USA, Villanova University in Philadelphia, the flagship programme is the PhD programme in Philosophy.

One may wonder why this is the case. The reason is not hard to find if one remembers that, from cybernetics and computer science through polymer science, biochemistry, astrophysics and zoology to sociology, history, comparative literature and philosophy, the most pervasive underlying model of reality, today, is one of ‘complexity’. Hence the principle on which chaos theory is founded: chaos is but another, very complex form of order (so complex, in fact, that it used to be blithely opposed to order as its antithesis).

Add to this the relatively recent realisation (if not discovery), that human cultures may indeed all be approximations of some notion of rationality, but that this elusive rationality is inevitably refracted through and by the languages which are the repositories of cultural values, and the formidable communicational task facing contemporary universities becomes somewhat more apparent.

Universities — especially in the age of globalization, which also means internationalisation of tertiary education the world over — not only face the difficulty of finding sufficient numbers of academic staff members who are able to introduce students effectively to the complex nature of the world in both the physical and the social sciences, they also have to take up the challenge of providing the linguistic, cultural and theoretical means to mediate between and among students from a wide spectrum of global cultures. In short, universities today have to be more like ‘multiversities’ — the ‘universe’ has proved to be a ‘multiverse’.

Add to this what is probably one of the most complicating factors of all, namely that these students come from countries that differ widely as far as economic wealth and power are concerned, and consequently do not have access to the same standards of teaching and learning in their own countries, then the utter complexity of the situation in which universities find themselves begins to dawn on one. Admittedly, when such students get into international academic exchange programmes, they usually gain access to funding that enables them to study at universities somewhat higher on the educational ladder than others, but they still face a tremendous disadvantage compared to students who had these benefits all along. Such inequality is a harsh reminder that the critique, and possibly the transformation (in the sense of humanisation) of capitalism is still one of the most intractable problems facing humankind (not to mention the urgent need to address this in relation to the damage inflicted on nature in the name of ‘development’), because universities are inseparable from the pervasive, dominant economic system known as neoliberal capitalism — a system not exactly committed to what is known as ‘distributive justice’.

And yet, despite the situation briefly sketched above, there are still some (so-called) academic staff members at universities who believe, rather obtusely, that all it takes for a university to be run effectively, is a set of bureaucratic rules and guidelines underpinned by (or perhaps underpinning?) the ‘strategic plan’ of universities, regardless of the fact that such rules and regulations often serve to inhibit and suffocate the very innovative thinking, research and teaching so urgently needed at universities that are truly ‘postmodern’ in the sense of belonging to this age beyond the modern (which saw its zenith and its demise in the first half of the 20th century).

Unless these pseudo-academics were to be unmasked for what they are — little people who find security and comfort in the safety-net of mindless bureaucracy because they cannot, or will not, think as autonomous individuals with a capacity to share the fruits of their work with others — universities may yet prove incapable of rising to the challenge of negotiating the complex global terrain in which humanity finds itself today.