Towards a Political Theory of the University

Public reason, democracy and higher education

Morgan White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138610262
• eBook ISBN: 9781317359050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Towards a Political Theory of the University argues that state and market forces threaten to diminish the legitimacy, authority and fundamental purposes of higher education systems. The political role of higher education has been insufficiently addressed by academics in recent decades. By applying Habermas' theory of communicative action, this book seeks to reconnect educational and political theory and provide an analysis of the university which complements the recent focus on the intersections between political philosophy and legal theory.

In this book, White argues that there is considerable overlap between crises in democracy and in universities. Yet while crises in democracy are often attributed to the inability of political institutions to adapt to the pace of social and cultural change, this diagnosis wilfully ignores the effects of privatisation on public institutions. Under present political conditions, the university is regarded in instrumental and economic terms, which not only diminishes its functions of developing and sustaining culture but also removes its democratic capabilities. This book explores these issues in depth and presents some of the practical problems associated with turning an independent higher education system into a state-dominated and then, subsequently, marketised system.

This book bridges political and educational theory in an original and comprehensive way and makes an important contribution to the debate over the role of the university in a democracy. As such, it will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of the philosophy of education, higher education, and political and educational theory. With its implications for policy and practice, it will also be of interest to policy makers.

Chapter 1
The university and the public sphere

Democracy is always already in crisis because democratic politics is always a matter of ongoing deliberation that is never settled once and for all. The democratic will necessarily balances on the blade of the knife. And yet, in the real world democratic politics are populist, they are corrupted, they are technocratic and this has been an echoing refrain through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Even though political crisis is inevitable, there is surely merit in the claim that control over democratic politics has drifted away from ordinary citizens. The idea of the university also seems to be in constant crisis. There are ongoing concerns about levels of tuition fees for students, modes of funding, managerialism and bureaucracy supplanting an academic ethic, issues surrounding freedom of speech and academic freedom, grade inflation and over-expansion, the role of higher education in social mobility, the value of pure theoretical research; the list goes on and on. I think the crises in democracy and in universities overlap considerably. The seeds of the plant that might resolve the democratic crisis are most likely to be found in our public institutions, but decision-making in universities has also drifted away from the people who study within them. The language of democracy is all too often used to cloak tyrannical regimes in the robes of legitimacy. Think of how Vaclav Havel takes apart the idea of the Prague greengrocer who puts a ‘Workers of the world unite’ sign in his window. Similarly, the language of the university, of higher learning, of research and scholarship can cloak academic institutions which have little interest in their public capacities yet proclaim programmes of civic engagement.

Problems with contemporary democracy

Writers like Arendt, Lijphart and Touraine have all argued that, fundamentally, democracy allows us to live together, and this seems increasingly difficult as society becomes ever more complex and differentiated. The public approves the idea of democracy but despises the reality of politics, just as academics might appeal to a love of the idea of the university while feeling their hopes dashed on the rocks of the realities of some aspects of the job.

Perhaps a central problem with democracy is that we have lost our political imagination and that ability to maintain an optimism of the will in the face of intellectual pessimism. How, Habermas has asked, do we cultivate a collective political imagination in the face of the exhaustion of utopian energies? There seems endless disagreement about what constitutes the limit of free speech, but in an era when so many voices can speak through social media we ought to draw attention to a public medium for talking. What use, Arendt says, is free speech if nobody will listen? It seems that if our political culture is a cacophony of different interests screaming into a virtual void of comments, likes, tweets and blogs then what we need to reassert is the equivalent cultural environment of the intellectual salon, where such ill-mannered discourse could not be countenanced. We need to foster the art of listening and resurrect institutions that impose conditions which enable rational discourse. Crises in democracy are often attributed to the idea that political institutions cannot adapt to the pace of social and cultural change. This diagnosis, however, seems to willfully ignore the ways in which our public institutions are being transformed into private institutions which have lost their democratic capacities.

Democracy is often said to depend on understanding and accepting the compromise between participating and being a subject. Now, however, the public is no longer deferential in the way it once was and wants to participate as skeptical, critical citizens. Skepticism, of course, is healthy but cynicism is corrosive. Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, for instance, stresses how strong social anchors and institutions have changed, like church, jobs for life and universities. In their place now we have the precariate, photoshopped images and brand management. The result is a cultural anomie that feeds a sense of legitimation crisis that affects some groups more than others. Inequality is disrupting a sense of political belonging. The young and the poor are less likely to vote compared with the old and wealthy, and this points towards a need for political education for the sake of democracy. Instead of an attempt to resolve this situation, however, public services are being moved towards those who do engage with voting. Ontological insecurity feeds narcissism and we are left with a political system that puts off anyone concerned about their own self-image. The vacuum is filled by anti-political demagogues who promise simple populist answers to intractable problems.

The democratic process is messy and ongoing, but populism wants simple quick fixes which tend to generate antipathy towards some minority that can be readily blamed. Populism is an expression of public frustration at a lack of perceived required change, and the more public institutions seem resistant to offer this change, the more likely politicians are to tap in to populist sentiment. The charge is often that democratic institutions have not kept pace with social change, but this obscures the role of the imposition of market frameworks on public institutions. Markets tend towards providing goods that consumers demand, what they want rather than what they need.

Mainstream parties have offered the market mechanism as a panacea for all problems. But the market needs the counterweight of democratic politics. Trust itself has become commodified, e.g. through customer loyalty cards where consumer data is purchased in exchange for ‘points’. Market values have become imbued within ourselves in an atomised civic culture, and democratic elections have become exercises in selling policy bundles to the electorate. However, political participation is not consumption of a package of policies and the public is not a market. Indeed, economic behaviour often tends towards irrationality. David Marquand, describing Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the leisure class, explains that:

In modern societies ‘good repute’ depended on ‘pecuniary strength’; and ‘pecuniary strength’ could be demonstrated only by ‘leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods’. Economic behaviour was not rational, as conventional economic theory assumed, and still assumes. It was governed by bizarre rituals of emulation reminiscent… of the mating displays of peacocks.… Like their American predecessors a century ago, today’s ‘celebs’ are Mammon’s most glittering acolytes and Mammon worship’s most successful missionaries.

(Marquand, 2015, p. 5)

In the face of growing inequality and celebrity culture, the public demands more from politicians, but democracy has hived off many of its institutions in an attempt to depoliticise democracy. This is an abdication of responsibility for the world because people will struggle to re-engage with democracy when politics itself has become enfeebled. The capacity to act politically has been diminished. Action is increasingly supplanted by reputation management. Cribb and Gewirtz describe the ‘hollowed-out’ university as one where academic substance has been transformed into organisational surface:

It is not just that some academics choose to present their work and careers in ultra-packaged passages of hype and are, on occasions, seemingly comfortable to sell themselves as ‘assets’ and drive hard bargains in the careers marketplace. But it is also, and much more routinely, that the merits of academics are increasingly spoken of, not only by managers but by themselves, in terms which derive directly from the reputational drivers of the university.

(Cribb and Gewirtz, 2013, p. 344)

To the extent that academics identify themselves as 4* researchers, or engage in the ‘miniaturisation’ of knowledge (May, 2001) in order that research issues become small and manageable in order to ensure publication, they turn away from what Alessandro Ferrara calls the ‘democratic horizon’ (Ferrara, 2014). This issue is also raised in relation to academic freedom, where Jon Elster has argued that freedom to think has become undermined by tendencies towards obscurantism in academic work (Elster, 2015, p. 82). Elster’s argument is that academic conservatism leads to a lack of freedom if scholarship is pushed towards existing conventions and there exists a timidity about making an attempt to engage in original thought because of risks to career progression. If the quality of academic work is gauged on some metric such as numbers of citations, then voice is not free but tuned to prevailing orthodoxy.

This might be mistaken for an over supply of democracy: too much voice, free speech, openness, transparency, but the wrong sort of self-seeking rather than public spirited action. There are many ways of engaging politically, but the cacophony of information and resulting complexity makes analysis and action all but impossible, or at least, overwhelming. Noise replaces thoughtfulness. The noisiest tend to be those with the greatest interests and resources, rather than the better argument. The result is legitimation crisis for academics and citizens. The presence of more opinions should not be mistaken for democracy and such cacophony does not generate the calm conditions for rationality.

In this frenzy of opinions there is a lost capacity for listening. Listening is a public virtue for deliberative democrats. Hannah Arendt refers to the public sphere as a realm of appearances:

Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life – the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses – lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.

(Arendt, 1998, p. 50)

Deliberative democracy requires deliberative manners. We need a calm conversation rather than a shouting match. Adversarial politics sees listening as weak, flip-flopping, etc. We need space for contemplation but we also require an ethos that allows us to see and to listen, rather than one that encourages us to package ourselves as high-grade assets that add institutional value. A conversation is catatelic, but technocratic, professional politics are about pushing through agendas to generate decisions and effective policies. Nicholas Mirzoeff points out that in our visual culture ontology is increasingly presented as a matter of performance symbolised by voguing (the dance) where the goal is to present realness and avoid being ‘read’ as fake, despite using exaggerated movements: ‘You wanted to simply appear to be what you appeared to be. In short, for your performance to succeed so well that it becomes invisible as a performance’ (Mirzoeff, 2015, p. 58). If the space of appearances comprises individuals struggling to be seen and heard but not to look and listen, then the potential for rationality contained in the space collapses. Think, for example, of the scientists encouraged to focus on publishing groundbreaking research findings and neglecting attempts to test and falsify their colleagues’ work. Fetishizing the new undermines a fundamentally important aspect of the scientific community by encouraging individualist incentives (Moriarty, 2011, p. 71).

Democracy requires political literacy among engaged citizens, rather than different literacies which talk past each other. Normative learning is a lost possibility in such complex conditions. Political education, in the limited, empirical sense of understanding how the system works, ends up leading to disengagement. We need, instead, to encourage democratic literacy and critical skepticism to rebuild a civic culture whereby engaged citizens no longer feel overwhelmed in conditions of complexity.

This may well involve a need to increase the quality of politicians and improved quality in public service broadcasting. Above all, however, a re-enchantment of democracy requires publicly oriented education. Publicly oriented higher education feeds into all these. Think, for instance, how media figures like journalists but also celebrities, politicians and civil servants are increasingly brought in to universities, sometimes as occasional lecturers but also as heads of colleges.

But we need to alter the culture of universities and go beyond, for instance, universities sponsoring a few academy schools or recruiting well-known names to the staff. Who will vote for radical policies required to address pressing problems that will require self-sacrifice? This concern cannot be addressed through marketing campaigns to attract funds and students. The overarching issue is about making the public responsible for itself.

The public sphere seems still to be undergoing structural transformation, though in a deeply concerning direction. New forms of technology created new social media, newspapers are read online, television viewed on demand and on computer screens and tablets, lectures are read on mobile phones. It is tempting to regard the switch from print media, to TV broadcasting, to the internet as a structural transformation of the public sphere, and we can be sure that one is involved, but we should be careful to distinguish the locus of publics from transformations in the public sphere.

The public sphere involves relations between persons. In other words, it is a political rather than a social relation involved between actors within it, and the difference is attitudinal rather than substantive (Benhabib, 2003, p. 148). Something is public when it is open to all, but, like a public building, this need not mean the doors are thrown open to everybody. Rather, a public building might house an institution that belongs to the public realm (Habermas, 1989, p. 2), like the offices of town planners. For Arendt, the public sphere is relational: the spaces between people constitute our common world – our ‘inter-est’, which binds us together (Arendt, 1998, p. 182).

Now, the concept of the public sphere is unhelpfully porous. Too often the concept of the public sphere – that site where speaker and hearer meet under a principle of rational-critical publicity – is confused with civil society more broadly or particular fractions of the public. When Habermas first published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere he was keen to point out that there existed a moment in history, pre-revolutionary French bourgeois society, when the public sphere contained emancipatory potential. The salons of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment briefly provided a moment within which unconstrained communicative rationality held sway and discourse was guided through the force of the better argument. Bourgeois intellectual society held latent within it a moment with emancipatory potential.

Some of Habermas’ earliest critics were quick to point out that this portrayal of the public sphere overlooked the role of ‘subaltern publics’. There are, for writers like Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, and Nancy Fraser, less visible groups contributing towards social change through their struggles for recognition. Candidate groups include workers’ movements, the women’s movement or the black civil rights movement.

The force of the criticism was that Habermas’ focus on intellectualism served to privilege a particular form of (masculine or bourgeois) rationalism in argumentation. Proletarian counterpublics, Negt and Kluge argued, involved much more learning from experience rather than bourgeois reason. Fraser argued that subordinated social groups found it advantageous to establish alternative publics.

Craig Calhoun points out that the idea of counterpublics can be misleading. Analysts, keen to tell the story of subaltern groups, over-emphasise the extent to which they formed parallel publics to a dominant bourgeois public sphere as part of some deliberate political strategy. More likely it was a second-best alternative to participating in the ‘primary public sphere’. Radical intellectuals of the eighteenth century often found themselves outside of the public sphere and setting up counterpublics because they had been deliberately expelled by elites (Calhoun, 2012, p. 159).

The structural transformation of the public sphere

Habermas’ influential study of the structural transformation of the public sphere forms the bedrock for understanding his sociological and philosophical theories of communicative action and discourse ethics. At the heart of his immanent critique of the public sphere is the idea that moments containing emancipatory potential occasionally spring forth. This early book (written in 1962 but not translated into English until 1989) traces the category of the public through a theoretically heavy historical analysis:

We are dealing here with categories of Greek origin transmitted to us bearing a Roman stamp. In the fully developed Greek city-state the sphere of the polis, which was common (koine) to the free citizens, was strictly separated from the sphere of the oikos; in the sphere of the oikos, each individual is in his own realm (idia). The public life, bios politikos, went on in the market place (agora), but of course this did not mean that it occurred necessarily only in this specific locale. The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis), be it the waging of war or competition in athletic games.

(Habermas, 1989, p. 3)

The private sphere of the oikos was obscure but status over the private sphere determined membership of the polis. Citizens with property and slaves could therefore enter the realm of freedom and permanence where issues took sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The university and the public sphere
• 2 Higher education and economies of worth
• 3 The role of the university in a democracy
• 4 Academic authority, trust and reliance
• 5 Higher education and citizenship
• 6 The ivory tower and public life
• 7 The corruption of democracy and education
• 8 Implications for policy and practice
• 9 Towards a modern democratic society
• 10 Concluding remarks: Communicative rationality and the cultural impoverishment of the university
• Bibliography
• Index