Mercantilization of knowledge
The present-day academic community is confronted with a number of challenges coming from outside the university. Higher education has almost no influence at all on most demands, let alone a satisfactory answer. The expansion of corporate forms of research and a sudden boost of commercialized knowledge have speeded up the process of structural transformation of the university. An ever stronger impetus of technological metamorphosis of knowledge has raised the issue of the institutionalized status of a new subject of knowledge. An (un)predictable process of the relocation of knowledge – put into circulation in the same fashion as money – has brought about the problem of formational rather than epistemological legitimization of knowledge. The traditionally elitist image of academic intellectuals (cultural heroes), typical of the modern European university, has been disturbed by a cruel demand of the market and severe criticism by the media. In the background of these new changes – "knowledge has become the principle force of production"-a debate about the status of contemporary university and the consequences of the changes in question to the academic profession has been revived. Under the altered circumstances, the following question has been re-addressed: "Does the university, today, have what is called a raison d'être . . . but also the cause, purpose, direction, necessity, justification, meaning and mission of the University; in a word, its destination?" Voices suggesting that the contemporary university, in contrast with the modern European university, cannot be considered within the limits of a state paradigm are multiplying: "A major debate is under way today on the subject of the politics of research and teaching, and on the role that the university may play in this arena. . . Such a problematics cannot always – cannot any longer – be reduced to a problematics centered on the nation-state; it is now centered instead on multinational military-industrial complexes or techno-economic networks that are apparently multi- or transnational in form". A similar suggestion is found in Jean-Francois Lyotard's report on the state of today's knowledge: "For the mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning". A pragmatic policy of finalized research has been imposed upon the university of today. It is getting increasingly difficult to defend the cognitive superiority of fundamental research which we until recently believed pertained to the exclusive order of truth and knowledge: "Once upon a time it was possible to believe that pure mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy (and, within philosophy, especially metaphysics and ontology) were basic disciplines shielded from power, inaccessible to programming by the pressures of the State or, under cover of the State, by civil society or capital interests. The sole concern of such basic research would be knowledge, truth, the disinterested exercise of reason, under the sole authority of the principle of reason." In a discrete call for a new responsibility and attention for the University, Jacques Derrida drew attention to a mutual intertwining of fundamental and finalizing research, blending of scientific and technical practices: "One can no longer distinguish between technology on the one hand and theory, science and rationality on the other. The term techno-science has to be accepted, and its acceptance confirms the fact that an essential affinity ties together objective knowledge, the principle of reason, and a certain metaphysical determination of the relation to truth. We can no longer – and this is finally what Heidegger recalls and calls on us to think through – we can no longer dissociate the principle of reason from the very idea of technology in the realm of their modernity." The profitable mixing together of technology and knowledge within the university is taking place to the expense of an ever more jeopardized position of academic education as such. In one of the most comprehensive works in the field of sociology of higher education , Talcott Parsons proves that educational revolution had a strong influence on the external development of the university only. The university lost its real or fictitious right to research-related and educational self-definition and "it is at this precise moment that science becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital". The rise of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge (Lyotard), and prevalence of the spirit of general technological performance are linked to the expansion of market and profits, rather than the expansion of truth and knowledge. The university found itself caught in the grip of the (inter)national market and its regulatory law of offer and demand. "The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself – the realization of the Idea or the emancipation of men – its transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students. The notion of 'university franchise' now belongs to a bygone era. The 'autonomy' granted to the universities after the crisis of the late 1960s has very little meaning given the fact that practically nowhere do teachers' groups have the power to decide what the budget of their institution will be." This is to say that financial operations and the university's policy are decided by either the committees (The University Grants Committee in the case of Great Britain) or, as in the case of the United States, the almighty Boards of Trustees. The budgeting procedure for research and educational programs, as well as the distribution of allocated funds, is no longer under the jurisdiction of the state. The state authority and its administrative apparatus have lost the real grounds on which to get involved in the matters of the university. The ban on research, censorship over public debates and, in general, mechanisms of pressure on the academic community are now operational within the framework of financial and market arrangements. All it takes is to limit or do away with the financial support for unwelcome research or unprofitable education. And, as Derrida notes, "the machinery for this new 'censorship' in the broad sense is much more complex and omnipresent than in Kant's day, for example, when the entire problematics and the entire topology of the university were organized around the exercise of royal censorship. The prohibiting limitations function through multiple channels that are decentralized, difficult to bring together into a system." To investigate the various forms of pressure and analyze the fluid control that is spreading invisibly throughout the contemporary university is the primary task which, despite the unfavorable circumstances for saving the threatened academic dignity, must be dealt with responsibly.
The invasion of higher capitalism of the university cannot, as Robert Nisbet believes, be clamped down on with a naïve appeal to humanistic principles and threatened academic tradition. The New University, one sobering conclusion suggests, cannot be defended by appealing to the idea of the university: "Allegiance to Humboldt is the life-lie of our universities. They have no ideas. From this perspective, all the university reformers who, like Jaspers, have appealed, and with ever weaker voices still appeal, to the idea of the university belong to the defensive minds whose cultural criticism is rooted in hostility to modernization." In compliance with the demands of the market competition, the very nature of the university production and distribution of knowledge (Lyotard is suggesting the term transmission of knowledge) is significantly modified. Teaching at the university now carries the obligation to form skills necessary to the system, not to the profession. "The desired goal becomes the optimal contribution of higher education to the best performativity of the social system. In the context of delegitimation, universities and the institutions of higher learning are called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals." The expansion of formal training, devoid of any ideology of education whatsoever, is a general trend at present-day universities, Anglo-American in particular. The biased followers of theoretic elitism (humanistic intelligence!) feel threatened and increasingly unable to deal with the operative performances of technical knowledge. On the other hand, seduced by the market's conjuncture, the technical intelligence often goes too far in its arrogant underestimating of the enlightening and emancipating role of academic education. However, the traditional intertwining of different functions under the roof of just one institution – the university (collecting and passing on scientific knowledge, preparation for academic professions, general, vocational and technical education, the process of cultural self-understanding, and enlightening the public political sphere) does not necessarily have to result in a conflict of competence and interest. The problem arises and intensifies during the decisive periods only, when the internal process of the differentiation of scientific knowledge – always the only guarantor of the stable foundation of the idea of the university – gets exposed to external influences and, more and more often, pressures.
Today, the university has been pounded by a wave of mercantilism and higher learning has become an integral part of the industrial complex and commercial business. More than ever before, social prosperity is depending upon the ways in which the countries educate and provide advanced training for their citizens. An assumption has it that the present-day university's orientation towards market is a result of a shift in governmental priorities and national interest: "The higher learning has become less important than prisons, medical aid or roads. Moreover, it is high-schools rather than colleges, children rather than adults, that now come first in the field of education." A widespread skepticism toward the university's commercial concept and, along with it, marketing-like stylization of education – boutique-ing of higher education – was felt particularly strongly at the European universities. The dominant European attitude was that the university cannot get transformed into a company that manufactures knowledge, an economic subject selling teaching and scientific services on a free market. Such an attitude is based on the unrealistic presumption that the present-day university is sui generis an educational and not, say, industrial plant, and that it is ruled by the principle of knowledge and not of profit. The university has became a high-profit sector of mass education and personal investment. The spreading of higher learning was the price that the university had to pay to the growing democratization and inevitable popularization of knowledge. The ethics of the market changed the pricing of higher education and the standard form of university financing. The state guarantees no higher education to anyone and it becomes a matter of family budgeting and individual investment. Universities are no longer granted financial aid in the form of gifts, but rather in the form of loans. Most universities are transformed into specialized "boutiques" offering well-packaged curricula and courses. Communication, marketing and advertising take up the function of new operative skills; priority programs and courses are aimed at raising the level of techno-managerial productivity. The professional training and relentless competence require perfect knowledge of the sophisticated technology. "Secondary literacy" means proficient computer and communicational network knowledge; elegant handling of info-stations, terminals and databases, which have become our new Encyclopedia. It is safe to conclude that without informational and telematic education (Virtual University) it is not possible to become a part of the international market of operational and functional skills. Those who do not speak the language of modern technology cannot participate in an ever more severe competition on the world market of performative knowledge, whose perspectives are wide open. Moreover, the performative skills are not reduced, as many are prone to believe, to purely theoretic, i.e. professorial skills. Gedel's mathematical theorems or, say, Mandelbrot's fractals are a true paradigm of the "changed nature of a (de)stabilized, mobile, local knowledge". The pragmatic (re)valorization of theoretical procedures and results (the discovery of new cases, counter examples and paradoxes) points to science which, under the pressure of a general mercantilization, has opened up to the "new rules of the game". The kind of operative knowledge suitable for the performative stabilization of a referential system is in privileged circulation, i.e. the knowledge which is compatible with the nature of the entire system and which, in principle, serves as the system regulator. In the background of the commercial shift in the orientation of higher education, the normative requirement for academic freedom and, by the same token, the autonomy of the university, can no longer count on the pleasant 'game of knowledge', but will rather have to pay its debt to the pitiless 'law of the market'. The idea of the university can only be revived from the outside!
It seems that the "golden age" (!) of the modern European university definitely belongs to the past. The break-up of the academic idea/ideal of self-determination of the university as an autonomous instance of knowledge can partly be blamed on and ascribed to academic (ir)responsibility. Despite the structural shock that the "commercial university" suffered, the continental intellectuals are still clinging to the substantial "idea of the university". A mandarin-like demand for a normative re-birth of the idea of the university – which, as a rule, results in halfway, unsuccessful reforms – proceeds from the implicit ideology of institutionalized idealism. "Institutions are forms of objective spirit. An institution remains capable of functioning only as long as it embodies in a living form the idea inherent in it. As soon as the spirit leaves it, an institution rigidifies into something purely mechanical, as an organism without a soul decomposes into dead matter." Naturally, there remains the question of whether or not the university, which differentiated itself at a growing speed, had to toss away, "like an empty shell", what by its own self-understanding it called the idea of the university! In other words, once the normative model has been rejected, can some unifying function, a certain sense of community, a certain solidarity, a certain residue of corporate conscience continue to exist without being linked with politics or market?
Etatisation of knowledge
The university is a historical creation, a specifically European phenomenon which, since its beginnings in the Middle Ages, cherished the ambition to enhance all cultural achievement and preserve it for the generations to come. And even if all national universities were established under the paternalism of the state, the academic community showed a clear ambition to get emancipated from the tutorship of its very founders. Such an academic pretension was exposed in an enlightenment demand according to which the free professors had the obligation "to publicly instruct public rights". According to Kant's insights, it is this permanently postponed and never fully realized demand for publicity that made the Prussian regime "denounce the free professors – made infamous under the name of the Enlighteners (Aufkläker) – as individuals dangerous to the state". Because of the constant pressure on the university and uncannily frequent onsets against the academic community, the accomplishment of the enlightenment ideals had been continually put off: "The enlightened age is still postponed. And in that postponement, the modern, scientific university comes to share a responsibility for having delayed its promise for so long. Yet, even as we indict the university for its failure, we reiterate the demand that the promise be renewed, that long-overdue letter of public instruction be finally delivered." Despite the pragmatic reason which is invading more and more the space of legitimized knowledge, the modern university managed to salvage and pass on the emancipating request for free use of public mind. In that respect, it can be said that the modern university was not only the guarantor of the "continuity and differentiation of knowledge, but also a part of the overall socio-cultural progress". Irrespective of national or regional determination, not necessarily equal to provincialism and parochialism, the modern European university functioned as a permanent corrective for cultural and political universalism. In that respect, it can be said that the modern European university was the institutionalized consciousness of the western society.
As an educational institution of particular (inter)national importance, the European university emerged in the field of conflicting political and legal forces which for ages formed the antagonistic framework for modern educational systems. Even with principled references to freedom, autonomy and self-definition, the modern European university had commonly been obliged, and often tempted, to pledge allegiance to its founder – the State. This external demand penetrated the educational apparatus, its scientific and theoretical motor, precisely as the state took on the obligation to form the nation.
High normativistic rhetoric accompanying the drawn-out process of extravagant establishment of state control over knowledge, whose roots can be traced back to the beginnings of "Napoleon's university" is well known: "Accordingly, the measures adopted by Napoleon regarding higher education are generally considered to have been motivated by the desire to produce the administrative and professional skills necessary for the stability of the State." The academic demand for setting up an autonomous domain of knowledge (the university) and, at the same time, the government's cautious demand that higher education became a nursery of state cadres and, only in passing, of other actors of the civil society, were mystically reconciled in the concept of the nation. "The State resorts to the narrative of freedom every time it assumes direct control over the training of the 'people', under the name of the 'nation', in order to point them down the path of progress". A disguised program of the polito-legal, i.e. state legitimization of the German university found its ultimate patron in Humboldt. According to the blueprint of the so-called idealistic university, the academic community is represented by the "authorized subjects of knowledge". The professorial class was given a double role, they held the monopoly over the free quest for truth and, at the same time, the mandate over the exclusive education of the nation! It is safe to say that it was only the "German idealism" that fully developed the idea of speculative university, which became a privileged place, the center of a totalizing metanarrative. As a symbol of enlightenment, self-consciousness and self-confidence, the "Prussian university's" task was to prepare the subject for a unique and comprehensive amalgamation of knowledge, truth and nation. The spirit needs Absolute Freedom, which, in the speculative system of the number one state philosopher, Hegel, is actualized as academic and, at the same time, state truth! Generally speaking, the old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is inseparable from the training (Bildung) of minds, individuals, or even of whole nation, can be tracked down all the way to Heidegger's inaugural speech. In the symbolic and, equally so, political sense, the Heidegger Case represents the final stage of the long process of Nazification and, at the same time, establishing state control over the German university. Max Weber commented on the unfavorable situation at the "Weimar University" prior to the Nazi siege of the German universities as follows: "Academic atmosphere became so extremely reactionary and, what's more, radically anti-Semitic".
The following short reexamination of the "Heidegger and Nazism" case is aimed at pointing to the complexly controversial abuse of academic institutions. It is well known that research of the reconstruction of the relation between Heidegger's philosophical and political thought (and work!) has been completed. The reason for reopening the Heidegger case is not the incorrect idea that Heidegger's entire philosophy should be placed within the framework of his Nazi past. It is about Heidegger's readiness – in his capacity of the top member of the university class, i.e. the rector – to "hopelessly compromise" the academic profession. In a speech given at his rectorial inauguration at the University of Freiburg, on May 27, 1933, Heidegger put the entire German metascience, expressed this time in the seducing radiance of the "ontological jargon" in the service of the "education of the leader and guardian of the German nation's fate" and that "to the last breath". The belligerent public appearances of the "rector-leader" – Führerrektor ("No one will stop us from doing it", Heidegger) – represent without any doubt a sad attempt of philosophical and political legitimization of the university knowledge understood as the knowledge of the people! Because, if the "being is the fate of the German people", then the historical mission of the state university is to recognize that fate, proclaim it and, of course, heroically apply it. The mystical character of Heidegger's rectorial promotion – "self-affirmation of the German University" – was compelling enough to find disastrous echoes in the realm of politics. The Nazi nationalization of university knowledge and academic life in general had its big and influential follower in Heidegger. "In a speech in front of the Tübingen students, on November 30, 1933, Heidegger said that 'it is no longer possible to talk about a relationship with the state because the university itself became the state' Annihilation of academic knowledge – by the state and, worse, by party politics – was under way: "All that so far we designated by the words 'knowledge' and 'science' has acquired a different meaning The knowledge of the true science is in essence no different from the knowledge of a peasant, lumberjack, digger and miner, a craftsman Knowledge and the possession of knowledge, the way National Socialism understands these words, do not divide into classes but join the comrades-compatriots and the classes in one big will of the state". Heidegger's stage appearances, after which, as Karl Löwith remarked, the listener would not know whether to "read Diels' Presocratics or sign up for an assault unit" were calculated at bringing about a decisive mobilization of the national university. An influential rector, Heidegger practically elaborated and applied through the authorized ministries the already propelled mechanism of tuning up all university standards to the norms of the ideology of National Socialism. Heidegger really found himself in politics having worked at and, above all, against the university. Fascinated with the great mission within the new order, Heidegger the rector was much more than just the "extended hand of the well-planned Nazi operation of taking over the University of Freiburg". He became a fervent advocate of the Nazi coup and, before long, a keen agent in the general Nazification of German universities. Finally, the question of whether the Nazi occupation of the German universities was merely a conservative revolution which took place in the heart of the university of enlightenment still remains open. In other words, was the occupation of the German university just a tiny unwelcome incident in the otherwise exemplary tradition of the modern European university? Had Nazism in a brutal manner annulled the usurping pretension of the German university to snatch from the state the proposed right to production and distribution of knowledge?
Even today, in the period of erosion of post-totalitarian systems of higher learning, most former East European regimes have not let the university get fully emancipated and separated from its founder – the State. Bureaucratic delegitimation of university institutions and their academic knowledge still remains under the control of state education ministries. European higher education regulative – incorporated in the statute of Serbia's first university – should be more carefully analyzed. Archived materials and documentation at hand point to a double – political-legal and cultural-educational – function of the educational apparatus. The first University Law (passed on Feb. 27, 1905), and "by God's mercy and the people's will" proclaimed by His Majesty Petar I, King of Serbia, underscores the university's autonomy (it is a "self-governing body") and, at the same time, states that it is an institution under the authority of the state (under the supreme control of the ministry of education and church affairs"). This means that the university in Serbia came out of the same or similar normative framework that defined the long process of structural reorganization and, more important still, state consolidation of European universities. In the era of Socialist universities, state administration of higher education was broadened, centralized and stabilized. The regime bureaucracy gained solid and all-embracing control over academic life. The entire school system, including the so-called people's universities, became the official ideology's exercising ground. For almost half a century, the regime's version of Marxism functioned as an mandatory "view of the world". The authoritarian traits of a narrowed Marxism completely distorted the standard form of the academic discourse. The philosophical teaching of the "classics of Marxism", taught as a regular subject, was elevated to the rank of a supreme state, political and party ideal. The university became a party school for the education of the Socialist masses which were to be freed from the curses of tradition, demons of the past. The utopian project of the future was reduced to a naked and overly passionate formula: "Technology To the People". It therefore does not surprise that in the former Socialist countries the locomotive was a mass symbol of a popular concept of modernization. The specifically local universities in Yugoslavia, as one seemingly unusual statement has it, were modeled after their sister "educational institutions", such as army barracks, penitentiaries, hospitals. "We tried to describe the Lepoglava penitentiary as the institution in which the Communists received highest education prior to coming to power. Lepoglava may be considered a parauniversity because it is a place where modern technology, as a blend of punitive and corrective measures, had been introduced, as a strategy of re-education rather than just punishment". Communism abandoned and revoked the autonomy of the academic forms of knowledge basing them upon the mechanisms of power instead. Compact and strong mechanisms of administrative control penetrated all levels of educational apparatus. The regime enslaved the Socialist university along with the network of educational institutions and the discourse around it. The elaborate practices of repressive disciplining dispelled all liberal hope for academic freedom; for many years, the Communist university functioned as a devalued center of heteronomous, state-party forces. The monopolistic neutralization of the Socialist universities was threatened only occasionally, in the moments of excessive outpours of leftist radicalism. This condensed and rather simplified diagnosis should not lead to a wrong conclusion that the state dynamics of taking over the university is reducible to a specifically Communist model. The long history of institutional organization and stabilization of the state monopoly over the universities may be tracked down to Napoleon's times.
"Napoleon's university" represents the first modern European system which came out of an explicit demand typical of the age of enlightenment for the homogenization of vocational knowledge and monopolization of scientific knowledge. The first and foremost function of the modern European university, regardless of whether its role was central or merely marginal, referred to the selection of (institutionally controlled) knowledge rather than the selection of cadres! The university took up the obligation to – from a sea of chaotic, polymorphous and spread-out knowledge that in the early 20th century was spreading uncontrollably – extract only the knowledge affiliated to "science", i.e. the one containing the explicit and privileged prerequisite for "truth". The enlightened rhetoric of freedom and self-determination of the institutions of higher education is greatly underscored in the idealistic vision of the university, which, according to Kant, should be based on the pure "idea of mind". Accordingly, the appearance of modern academic discourse, "the great and monotonous apparatus of knowledge" that came forth in the struggle against ignorance, the struggle of truth against lie, experience against chimera, reason against un-reason and, finally, in the struggle between mind and mindlessness, has been celebrated as the progress of enlightenment to this day. Humboldt's model of European university – "the community of a luxurious quest for truth", "the free and autonomous organization of teaching, learning and science" – marks the pinnacle of the enlightened glorification of Europe's educational system. The one-way emphasizing of the European university's emancipating potentials made the (self)critical re-examination of the modern academic institutions' conformist function more difficult. Many analysts of pluralistic systems of education suggested that all consideration about contemporary university should be freed from the one-sided paradigm of the enlightenment. The impressive development of the academic discourse did not result from the fierce struggle between knowledge and ignorance, but rather by virtue of a complex confrontation of various kinds of knowledge placed one opposite the other. This accelerated and uncontrolled process of the development of knowledge, this mechanism of confrontation and circulation of a plethora of different kinds of knowledge, is backed down by state interventionism, the very same bureaucratic and administrative measures that the European universities have applied by mutual consent. In its capacity of state appointee and often interpreter as well, the modern academic community took to itself the obligation to introduce irrevocable order in the realm of knowledge. The university science is placed in one field of knowledge in order to be separated from other, competitive forms of knowledge, in order to institute a scholastic system and establish undeniable authority. The modern university completed the process of standardization, establishing hierarchy and centralization of the spread-out and uncontrolled forms of knowledge. It was the modern university that was given the role of the supreme arbiter in the long process of disciplining knowledge. Whoever remembers the tiny, useless, peripheral, irreducible, "wild" forms of an almost defunct knowledge that the ruling rationality, the "disciplinary knowledge police" as Foucault put it, rigidly eliminated and firmly removed from the public scene! Alongside the public history of "university knowledge", another hidden, secret history of non-academic knowledge should be written, i.e. one of unscientific, anti-theoretical, undisciplined, rejected and ostracized knowledge.
Alongside the strategy of closing down and eliminating, the reproductive machines of academic education often opened up to new, still unrecognized, dubious forms of knowledge. The aim of this expansive step outside the university walls was to verify, professionally discipline and institutionally adopt the anti-academic and (un)scientific "discoveries". Freud's scholastic offers an illuminating example: despite Freud and against Freud, it seeks to institute the rule of pathos of the academic, scientific, exact knowledge everywhere (at the universities, institutes, hospitals and mental institutions). It is exactly this (un)controlled mystification of permanent opening and closing of the academic community that leads to a conclusion that the "University, as a pretension to universal knowledge, is always an already aborted pretension Or, conversely, this pretension will not fail only under the condition that it is aware of its already being already, i.e. only providing it knows that it is organized around its own deficit of knowledge and truth, that it is organized as a motion in which knowledge or truth remain constantly, inevitably, by definition, elusive". The modern university earned its indisputable reputation and great glory precisely on the basis of the academic pretension to usurp the entire knowledge. The mandarins persistently spread the illusion that a nation's entire spiritual life was concentrated within the institutions of higher education, at the university!
Napoleon's university has been respected and praised as the first to impose a new process of institutionalized re-organization of knowledge, disciplinary standardization of knowledge, of including knowledge among scientific disciplines. Thus the modern European university became a privileged place of academic education which is explicitly linked only to the "internal organization of disciplined knowledge", the knowledge understood as a vocation and discipline. It is in this context that the enlightenment's heroic document – The Encyclopaedia – should be examined. "We often tend to see The Encyclopaedia only in light of its political and ideological opposition to the monarchy and a certain form of Catholicism. Its technological importance should not be attributed to any philosophical system, but rather to the political as well as economic operation of rendering the technological knowledge homogenous". From the perspective of academic mechanisms of internal disciplining of knowledge, the mechanisms which never hindered the renewal of old and the gathering of new supplies of scientific knowledge, the question about the meaning of modern European and contemporary world university, its origins, its potentials, purpose and limits should be raised. The disciplinary "booming of knowledge", liberated from the ambition to create a kind of "interdisciplinary super-theory" (a philosophical surrogate), is unfolding in the sign of a new compulsion, which is not the compulsion of absolute truth, but rather the compulsion of a differentiated science, a rigid and precise encoding of individual knowledge. The idea of an inter-disciplinary approach is specific to the age of delegitimation and its hurried empiricism. The disciplined academic discourse and the surrounding educational institutions were losing the ability to produce and foster critical, subversive, anti-state knowledge. On the contrary, the dominant discourse imposed itself as the true institutionalized bastion against an eventual outburst of the new forms of unscientific, undisciplined, non-standardized, i.e. "wild knowledge". It is not my intention here to deal with the complex story about how the modern European university partly came to be a first-rate and ultimate institution of state knowledge. I merely wish to highlight the way in which the academic disciplining machines influenced a new order in the relations between truth and knowledge and between power/might and knowledge. The modern university managed to change and partly liberalize the political economy of power, to modify its brutal apparatus of power by humanizing the external mechanisms of state coercion in a mystified form! The academic rigidity, scientific and theoretical severity lies in the foundation of numerous practices of "humanistic disciplining of the society". The domain of the modern European university has been usurped by an external power, state power, which will remain immune to the repeated demands for autonomy of the academic institutions and self-regulation of its educational apparatus.
Relocation of knowledge
The traditional notion of the self-definition of the university, born in the heroic age of early bourgeoisie, is no longer popular. The academic community betrayed its normative ideal – the autonomy of the university and with it the self-regulation of the system of higher education. In a tactical retreat before the aggressive demands of its founder – the State – the university, in an elitist manner, withdrew in the virtual space of academic freedoms. With the growing democratization of the university, the academic freedom is consensually accepted as a secure and lasting "bastion of the western civilization" (R. Dworkin). Even the conservative detractors of free university ("the bastion of liberalism") accepted the legal implications of academic freedoms. A visible calendar of pragmatic revalorization/re-adaptation of the convenient notion of academic freedom. As Rorty remarked, the concept of academic freedom today has been freed from the imposed demand for a philosophical foundation and metatheoretical justification: "The philosophical propositions said to be presuppositional turn out to be rhetorical ornaments of practice, rather than foundations of practice. This is because we have much more confidence in the practice in question that in any of its possible philosophical justifications."
Indeed, the present-day demand for academic freedoms sounds more moderate; it is stripped of the rhetoric of the enlightenment which celebrated the university as a privileged space of an emancipated society of the future. This reasonable step back may be interpreted as a confession that the modern European university failed to institutionally embody the (announced) exemplary form of public life. Because "what since Humboldt has been called 'the ideal of the university' is the project of embodying an ideal form of life" and can no longer be defended. Perhaps the idea of the unity of knowledge and education, as Habermas argues with caution, was elitist by virtue of burdening the autonomy of the academic discourse with the expectation that the university should, inside its walls, be able to anticipate a society of free and equal citizens. Thanks to its intimate union with knowledge, science and truth, the modern European university appropriated the extravagant right to an elitist and even esoteric status. The emancipating ambitions of the modern university failed because the academic community – often in fear from the state – closed out the entire and undivided public. The autonomy of the university has been interpreted in the spirit of the liberal "freedom in solitude", the freedom which presupposes isolation from the civil society and the public political sphere. However, it has been unclear from the outset, and in this I fully agree with Habermas, "how this mission of enlightenment and emancipation was to accompany the abstention from politics that was the price the university had to pay for state authorization of its freedom".
And finally, the present-day apologetic discussions about academic freedom as the most suitable means for attaining truth echo the well-known defense of the freedom of speech by John Stewart Mill and, later on, John Dewey. "Mill argued that truth emerges best from a marketplace of ideas from which no opinion is excluded." Engaged in a debate with his fundamentalist opponents, Dewey also insisted upon the cognitive dimension of higher education: "The university's function is the truth-function and the one thing that is inherent and essential to the idea of the university is the idea of truth."
This time I would rather avoid taking part in the polarized debate about the priorities of academic community which, as it happens, is becoming increasingly liberal and cosmopolitan. The pluralistic conception of the university includes, among other things, the educational practice inside which the academic community will not unilaterally opt for either truth or freedom. Democratic university should not teach us in a self-satisfied manner that we are the legitimate heirs to the academic tradition which in good measure achieved the mental unity of truth and freedom. Finally, the consensual reference to academic freedoms is acceptable only under the condition that the academic market of ideas be freed from state control, on the one hand, and the domination of the market, on the other! We should distance ourselves from the inappropriate veneration of the university, which drew its great reputation and even greater fame from the heteronomous, state and financial forces. Unless the internal processes of self-differentiation of academic knowledge and self-attainment of academic freedom are demystified, the entire story about the autonomy of the university will look like some guide to internal education intended for external barbarity. For we should not neglect the fact that the visible progress of science, the blooming of disciplines and the deepening of knowledge, go hand in hand with the increasing deformations of the modern world.
1 Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Scheifer (Eds.), Contemporary Literary Criticism – Literary and Cultural Studies, Longman, New York, London, 1994, p. 321
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987, p.5
3 Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," p. 330
4 Ibid, op. cit.
5 Talcott Parsons and Gerald Platt, The American University, Cambridge University Press, MA., 1973. On the influence of the society upon the formation of the university institutions see in Lawrence Stone, ed., The University in Society, 2 vols., Princeton University Press, N.J., 1974. The connection between the city and the university is analyzed in Thomas Bender, ed., The University and the City, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991
6 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987, p. 50
7 Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," p. 332
8 R. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945-1970, Heinemann, New York, 1971. See also Page Smith, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, Viking Books, New York, 1990. In Russell Jacoby's polemic book, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academie, Basic Books, New York, 1987, the American universities are accused of the "sterilization" of cultural life in the United States. The author is romantically in favor only of the extremely engaged, critical, radical, elitist intellectuals who traditionally shaped the "spiritual aura of the American culture". The disappearance of the "last intellectual heroes" from the American public scene is a symptom of accelerated decline of the vitality of a culture whose spiritual landscape has turned barren! Despite the demands of the educated and enlightened public, the academic intellectuals, Jacoby argues, withdrew to a self-loving isolation of university campuses. Under the pressure of the university and academic community, the American public life has been dominated by the spirit of specialization, and the intellectuals are acting more and more in keeping with their profession and, of course, the requirements of their vocation. Even though some descriptions of an ever-louder apology for the institutions of higher education are over-emphasized, we agree with Jacoby's main diagnosis of the disappearance of radical culture in America. This book may be read as a sentimental self-defense of leftist radicalism. See also: Obrad Savic: "Sumrak amerikih mandarina", NIN br. 2060/1990, p. 43
9 Jürgen Habermas, "The Idea of the University: Learning Processes", The New Conservatism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, p. 102
10 Will Marshall, Mandate for Change, Progressive Policy Institute, Berkley, 1993. "Professionalism itself may not necessarily be an 'Anglo-American disease', but it is hard not to be struck by the degree to which academics in continental Western Europe fail, unlike their British and American counterparts, to perceive themselves as being part of the grand corps d'Etat, of an academic estate closely related to, or intimately a part of the state." (Francis Oakley, "The Elusive Academic Profession: Complexity and Change," in: DAEDALUS, Fall, 1997, p. 43)
11 Arthur Levine, "How the Academic Profession is Changing", DAEDALUS, No. 4/1997, p. 1
12 The debate about the influence of technology on academic discourse and the analysis of the origins of "Knowledge Engineering" can be found in: George Johnson, Machinery of the Mind, Times Book, New York, 1996
13 Jürgen Habermas, "The Idea of the University: Learning Processes," The New Conservatism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, p. 101
14 The first universities appeared in Europe in the 12th century. By 1600, there were 108 institutions for higher education in Europe. In most European countries, it was mainly the noblemen's sons who attended the universities. For the majority of students, the university was a confirmation of status rather than a way to climb the social ladder. Stanley Rothman, "Univerzitet na prekretnici", Pregled, No. 261/1993
15 Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature or the University in Deconstruction, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1997, p. 138
16 Branko Despot, (ed.), Ideja univerziteta: Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche, Globus, Zagreb, 1991
17 Erwin Hufnaget, "Ideja sveu_ili_ta i funkcija filozofije", Filozofska istra_ivanja, br. 3/1996, p. 727. See also: Avner Cohen & Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy, Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Illinois, 1991; John Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, Doubleday and Camp., New York, 1962
18 James Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1999
19 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 31
20 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, p. 32
21 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Vintage Books, New York, p. 83. See: Uwe Loalm, "Volkisch Origins of Early Nazism-Anti-Semitism in Culture and Politics," in: Strauss, Hostages of Modernization. Also: John Milfull, ed., Why Germany? National Socialist Anti-Semitism and the European Context, Berg Publisher, Providence, 1993. A renowned analyst of the German cultural situation between the two world wars argued that the German mandarins "hated Nazism and, at the same time, they disliked the republic." (Peter Gay, "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider" in: Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, (eds.), The Intellectual Migration, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, p. 29
22 Martin Heidegger, "Samopotvrcivanje nemackog univerziteta", NOVA SPRSKA POLITICKA MISAO, br. 1/1998, p. 254-261
23 Rajner Ali, »Hajdegerov rektorski govor u kontekstu«, OVDJE, br. 259-260/1990, p. 9
24 Martin Heidegger: "Nacionalsocijalizam i znanje", in: Slobodan Dunjic, (ed.), Martin Hajdeger i nacionalsocijalizam, Knjicevna zajednica, Novi Sad, 1992, p. 117
25Despite the sympathy for "Heidegger's cause", his rectorial contribution to the Nazi revolution at the German university cannot be minimized. He meticulously carried out all the state orders referring to the "racial standards" and directly participated in the legal application of Gleichsstaltung at the German universities. The official imposition of anti-academic curricula at the University of Freiburg (mass sport, working camps, military exercises, etc.), as well as the practical application of anti-democratic, führer principle at the university, are a clear proof of his involvement in the deadly politics of Nazi destruction of the German university. The Nazis destroyed the German academic community; in the course of 1933, 7,500 students were suspended, and around 1,200 professors were left jobless. See: Klaus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile, The University of Massachusetts Press, Mass., 193, p. 11-12. See also: Edward Y. Hartshorne, The German Universities and National Socialism, London, 1937
26 Heidegger's contemporary Curtius commented on the Nazi nationalization of the German university in the following words: "We have, so to speak, established state monopoly over education and instruction: a measure every liberal citizen should deeply regret." Ernst Robert Curtius, "Kriza univerziteta", REC, br. 5/1998, p. 107
27 Dragoljub Baralic, Zbornik zakona o univerzitetu, Nau_na knjiga, Beograd, 1967, p. 177
28 Ugo Vlaisavljevic, "Antropotehnologija", DIJALOG, br. 5-6-1998, p. 49
29 Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Apatija u teoriji" in: Obrad Savic, Filozofsko Citanje Frojda, IICSSO, Beograd, 1998, p. 486-499
30 Branka Arsi_, "Soba s pogledom", in: Peggy Kamuf, Univerzitet u dekonstrukciji ili podela knjiCevnosti, Beogradski krug, Beograd, 1999, p. 400
31 Michel Foucault, Treba braniti dructvo, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1998, p. 220
32 Richard Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions," in: Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 23. Also see Rorty's article "Obrazovanje bez dogme", PREGLED, br. 251/1990
33 Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1993, p. 1. In any known civilization there will be found something in the way of institutional esoteric knowledge.
34 Ronald Dworkin, "We need a New Interpretation of Academic Freedom," in: Louis Menand, The Future of Academic Freedom, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 185
35 Richard Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?", in: Louis Menand, ed., The Future of Academic Freedom, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 35