Our Brave New University: a Call for Papers

By Agnes Horvath & Arpad Szakolczai

The university is one of the core and unique institutions of European culture, or Western civilisation, being in a way corporate (in the classical and not in the modern organisational sense): based on personal connections and recognition of merits, and self-governing. Yet, over the past half a century or so, and accelerating in the new millennium, it has been altered all but beyond recognition. Instead of its basic values, academic freedom and collegial recognition of intellectual excellence, it has become subservient of economic and media-driven political and ideological aims, while being guided by meaningless formal criteria, which themselves changed frequently: article publications over research monographs, formal – and short-term – citation impact over intellectual qualities, the procuring of research funds. This logic of bureaucratic proffessionalization has inevitable lead everywhere to the same result: the most ideologically conformist, opportunistically oriented, servile, cowardly, and spineless people receive the best ratings.

 

Such changes, on the one hand, were promoted by the general political climate which everywhere advocates bureaucratic managerialism over classical values. This is often called neo-liberalism. Yet, critics of neo-liberalism ignore that these changes are also pushed from the opposite political side, by various movements who similarly aim at the obliteration of classical culture, and of the university which is at its forefront, while altering every communal integrity and individual autonomy into a unified mass of slavish behaviour. As a result, now we are overwhelmed by a growing system of brutalisation, euphemistically called managerial, which is harsh, blunt, senseless and offensive, and which forces on the academy a brave new world of ugly impersonalisation.

IPA invites original contributions such as research articles, reflexive essays, and autoethnographic pieces, in between 4-8000 words, with a mid-January deadline, that explore the reasons and modalities of these changes, possibly suggesting ways out. Possible themes could include:

- The origins and the driving forces of the rise to power of HR departments in universities

- The role of research funding bodies in influencing university politics and altering intellectual priorities

- The role of student movements, inspired by 1968, in undermining basic university values

- The reasons and modalities of undermining the public funding of universities and of prioritising instead “private” (meaning: large multinationals marked in stock markets, thus really being public: technically, “a public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange”) economic organisations

- The manifold techniques by which the power of academic governing bodies dominated by full professors (like Academic Councils) were undermined (diluting membership by inviting purportedly “democratic” representatives; nominating subgroups furnished with executive power; creating external bodies with non-academic members overseeing academic bodies)

- The complicity between allegedly opposed political agendas (managers taking away power from academics as they presumably are from the opposite political side, while explicitly supporting the most extreme versions of avantgarde politics)

- The prioritisation of ”impact” as an overriding aim, in the specifically economic and journalistic sense (as soon as possible), though it is common knowledge that genuinely new ideas, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, take a lot of time to become accepted

- The crisis of the university as institution of education: formal science, over-specialization, intellectual divertissement, ideological clientelism, student-oriented marketisation, democratic massification and the death of educating young generations in meaningful human knowledge

- Exploring the links between the crisis of the university and the contemporary political-civilizational crisis of the Western world

- The future of university education: impact and meanings of the AI interference

- Looking into the future: what is/should be the real purpose of the university in the Western world and how do we get there.