The importance of universities

It seems to me that it is important to reflect regularly on the function of universities in today’s rapidly changing, postmodern society, in the face of circumstances and forces that endanger the continued existence of this centuries-old institution.

What I am talking about is what seems to me to be the drift towards a narrowing down of the “function” of a university in the traditional, constantly self-renewing sense, towards an institution which merely serves the needs of the community as determined by current economic and social needs, by focusing mainly on the training of “professionals”. The fact that, since the merger of the PE Technikon, Vista PE and the University of Port Elizabeth, the institution (and others like it) has been known as a “comprehensive institution”, instead of a university, plain and simple (despite the fact that it bears the name of a university). The question that this raises is: Does the training of professionals at such a tertiary institution preclude the maintenance of the character of a university as an institution that encourages and cultivates critical thinking, or does it presuppose this character?

On the one hand it has to be admitted that, if by “training of professionals” is meant the imparting of specific skills required for the practice of professions such as nursing, accounting or teaching, it may seem, at first sight, that mere technical training might suffice. After all, nurses have to be intimately acquainted with medical and nursing procedures which have the character of various kinds of technical skills, such as bandaging, administering injections and so forth.

These skills are usually, but not necessarily, taught in hospital environments, while their descriptive underpinnings can be taught in lecture rooms. The question that remains is: What kind of lecture room will this be, or what kind of lectures will be given there? If the lectures and the material on which they are based comprise the verbal or textual counterpart to the technical training given in work environments such as hospitals or schools — that is, if these lectures are the descriptive (or prescriptive) correlates of technical training — they can be given in a technikon-type of environment. But, and this is an important but, if these lectures and their corresponding materials or texts are theoretical (or literary, or historical) in a broad humanistic sense, the educational environment where they belong is that of a university.

Why is that the case? Several considerations converge here. On the one hand the institution known as a university (which, one should remember, has shown remarkable resilience since its inception in the late European Middle Ages, periodically adapting itself to changing social circumstances) is, and has always been, one where the branches of advanced learning, or the various scientific, economic, literary, artistic and philosophical disciplines are offered for instruction. As such, it represents the cultural repository of learning regarding the world in all its variegatedness, but with the important implication, that the variety is considered in its “oneness” and its wholeness. In fact, the word university derives from the Latin universitas, which means “the whole” (world), and is related to the Latin universus, for “combined into one, whole”.

While an institution which offers instruction in technical training has no such pretensions, a university therefore offers, or promises to prospective students, instruction in those disciplines which, together, cover or include all extant knowledge of the universe as understood by humankind. And this means that, although technical instruction or “applied” knowledge is not necessarily excluded from curricula offered at a university, their legitimacy would depend on whether they dovetail with those theoretical disciplines on the basis of which they are justified and practised.

On the other hand, the specifically academic character of a university derives from its overtly and unapologetically theoretical character. Unapologetic, because human understanding of the universe in all its multitudinousness (to use a term coined by Matthew Arnold in the 19th century) has, at least since the ancient Greeks, assumed the form of theory. What preceded a theoretical approach to the world, was a dependence on myth. (Which is not to say that myth, in the guise of ideology, is absent from contemporary cultural understanding. As Roland Barthes has shown, “mythical” constructions of various kinds are still pervasive in culture.) It is noteworthy that (as I have argued in an earlier posting on theory and practice) “theory” derives from the ancient Greek word, theoria, which, as Gadamer points out, harbours the idea of a “sacral communion”, a participation in a festival through watching or being present in a self-forgetful manner at a drama or festival. A theoros was a spectator at a drama, that is, someone who beholds and thus shares in the enactment of dramatic events which are ultimately of ontological significance.

In other words, these events tell us something about the nature of reality, and of the place of humans in it. (Think of Sophocles’s Antigone, or of Shaffer’s Equus as pertinent examples of this.) By analogy, scientific theories are ways of “looking at” or being spectators in the “drama” of reality, or the world, in this way sharing in the drama by giving oneself over to it — something accurately captured by Stephen Toulmin when he remarked that science is a new way of looking at familiar phenomena. The value of such a novel way of looking (theories) is that it casts new light on something in its interconnectedness with other things, with the result that these things are grasped systematically, by means of causal, logical or associative links between them.

So, for example, Durkheim’s social-theoretical principle of anomie, which pertains to the disintegration of traditional social bonds in the course of urbanization, resulting in interpersonal alienation and lack of social cohesion, enables one to understand the differences in incidence of suicide between Protestants and Catholics, respectively, where such incidence is an index of the social cohesion that go hand in hand with the respective religious practices in each case. The theoretical moment, here, is indispensable for grasping the social phenomena in question in a manner which enables social intervention with a view to overcoming sources of social alienation and disintegration. In comparison a naïve, intuitive, everyday approach, however sympathetic or intelligent, is ineluctably burdened by the kind of prejudice which would prevent one from grasping the interconnectedness of different phenomena.

Theory of this kind belongs and is taught at universities, often in conjunction with training in modes of application or technical implementation. The point is that in the latter case the technical training is embedded in and underpinned by the theoretical “practice” of grasping the reasons for specific modes of technical intervention in preference to others. In other words, someone who has access to both — the theory or rational framework of justification, as well as the technical training that is underpinned by it — has a crucial advantage over someone who has access to only the technical training, and lacks the insight into the complex field of reasons within which such training is situated. One could argue, and I think correctly, that someone who has been trained in techniques of various kinds — medical, financial, computational — may well excel at the practice of such techniques, and could therefore hardly be said to require familiarity with the encompassing theoretical and historical field presupposed by the implementation of these technical operations in order to do his or her job better. That may well be the case, but someone who is also, in addition, knowledgeable about these rational structures or fields at a theoretical level, has the edge over the technician, so to speak.

A specific case, which illustrates this difference well, concerns a Master’s student whose work I supervised some years ago. She was a lecturer in accounting, and, not content with merely teaching the techniques of accounting practice, was eager to assess the discipline she teaches in terms of criteria derived from the philosophy of science. She proceeded to write an excellent dissertation in which she reconstructed various models of science encountered in the work of philosophers of science ranging from Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos to Paul Feyerabend, and demonstrated that accounting may be regarded as an “applied social science”. Importantly, the upshot of her research (what she had learned from the philosophy of science) was that accounting usually ignores its embeddedness in the fabric of an ever-changing society at its peril, and can fulfil its own task adequately only by situating itself within the social sciences on an ongoing basis.

She continued her studies at doctoral level, and received her doctor’s degree in accounting for a thesis on the relationship between accounting and ecological concerns, concentrating on the increasing number of companies (in countries like Canada, for example), which make it their business to include ‘ecological accounting’ in their annual reports. In this way she showed herself once again as someone who, in true scientific fashion, went beyond the nuts and bolts concerns of mere accounting techniques, and researched the relationship between accounting and its social as well as natural environment. Needless to say, if all accountants had been of a similar mindset, the Enron scandal would never have occurred, because the scoundrels responsible for the “creative accounting” that led to that specific financial disaster would have considered the embeddedness of the company in a broader society, the good of which is the final consideration.

The danger of accountants thinking of themselves, hubristically, as demi-gods who create order out of chaos should be apparent here — unless such professionals have access to the broad field of humanistic thought, and gain an understanding of the inseparability of their profession and the way in which societies are structured and evolve, they may well fall into the Enron trap. My friend and erstwhile colleague is the exception to this rule — perhaps that is why she is a professor of accounting at a prestigious Californian university today, and an active researcher who concentrates at an advanced theoretical level on socio-economic and cultural issues that bear on the practice of accounting. Given the excessive, and misguided emphasis on technical education in certain circles in South Africa today, her continued presence here would have been of great benefit for the enlightenment of this country (but also of other countries, where similar tendencies are visible).