"So,
what kind of shape is the University in these days?"
It was only after I had answered my neighbour’s
kindly question in the manner dictated by the circumstances
of its asking – the annual pot-luck supper of
our mutual community association – that I recognized
and began to ponder the spatial implications of what
he had asked. What kind of shape are Canadian
universities in these days? Or, to put it differently,
is there a university structure that can be envisaged
and, if so, what are its characteristics, its origins,
and its likely future?
A
glance at almost any eighteenth or nineteenth century
engraving of a university in England, Germany or the
United States (the three countries in which the Canadian
idea of the university has its deepest roots) will reveal
the shape of the university as it was and residually
remains: the college with one of Matthew Arnold’s
"dreaming spires"and, as likely as not, a
grassy quadrangle surrounded by the "rooms"
of faculty and students. Whether mediaeval, Tudor, neoclassical,
or gothic in style, the architecture of such a college
reflected its identity as a religious foundation and
an intellectual community whose residents attended at
least as much to one another as to the realm outside
their jealously guarded quadrangle. Consisting of the
three professional faculties of Theology, Medicine,
and Law, and a fourth faculty, Philosophy, composed
of the Arts and Sciences, the early modern university
was funded primarily through endowments rather than
grants or fees, a situation that allowed – indeed,
encouraged – colleges to remain small and self-contained,
to function with a minimal administrative hierarchy,
and to exercise great autonomy with respect to the subjects
that they taught and the students that they admitted.
According to Immanuel Kant’s well-known analysis
in The Conflict of Faculties (Der Streit
der Fakultäten), the animating and most socially
valuable feature of the early modern university was
the freedom of the Faculty of Philosophy to pursue truth
"independent of the government’ s command"
and, thus, in a manner that would ultimately benefit
the government and society at large (27, 29). In practice,
of course, the relative independence of early modern
colleges and universities led to the languidness and
indifference among faculty and students that elicited
expressions of dismay from Edward Gibbon (see 29-31),
Robert Southey (see 3: 85), and others, and prompted
Adam Smith to call for the reform of Oxford and Cambridge
through the introduction of a scheme whereby professors
would be paid by the students who attended their lectures
(see 2: 284).
Reforms
of the sort envisaged in An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations were in place
at the University of London and elsewhere in the early
nineteenth century, but they were only a small part
of the process that led very gradually to the emergence
later in the century of the high modern university.
When William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones attended
Oxford in the eighteen fifties, universities were still,
in the latter’s words, primarily "instrument[s]"
for the education of "professional m[e]n"
(Burne-Jones 1: 71-84). Only in degree would this change
for several decades, and, of course, its footprint is
still evident on any campus that has a law school, a
medical school, or a theology programme aimed at producing
ministers for a particular religious denomination. Because
universities are in their very nature conservative as
well as progressive, the history of post-secondary education
is a story, not of abandonment or expulsion, but of
incorporation, expansion, and reconfiguration: law,
medicine, and theology would not be cast out of the
quadrangle but, rather, joined by a proliferation of
disciplines and fields from within the Faculty of Philosophy.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw vigorous
conflicts between traditionalists such as Arnold and
John Henry Newman, who argued for the foundational nature
of Christian-humanist values in shaping the character
of the university curriculum (and, ergo, its
products), and progressivists such as T.H. Huxley and
Herbert Spencer, who argued that the physical sciences
were at least as important a component of a modern education
as the classics, but the result was neither a full victory
for the forces of progress nor a complete defeat for
the forces of tradition; rather, it was a tense truce
between the two cultures, a grudging acceptance of competing
aims that would eventually lead to the icy insularity
chronicled by C.P. Snow in his 1959 Rede lecture "The
Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" and,
in the meantime, necessitated a re-thinking not only
of what and how subjects would be taught at the post
secondary level, but also of the function and form of
the modern university.
If
there is one statement that succinctly captures the
nature of what emerged from that rethinking, it is surely
Adolf von Harnack’s endorsement in 1929 of the
concept of the "research university" that,
as Jaroslav Pelikan observes, was over a century earlier
with establishment in 1810 of the University of Berlin
under the leadership of Wilhelm von Humbolt and the
rectorship of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (84). "Never
must our German universities and institutions of higher
learning change their character of being devoted both
to instruction and research," declares von
Harnack as he propounds the "mutually fructify[ing]"
relationship between "research and instruction"
as the defining characteristic of "German institutions
of higher learning": "[in some countries,]
the chief emphasis lies in introducing students to the
results of scholarship. But in [German] universities
we want to introduce them to scholarship, and to teach
them how one arrives at the reality and truth of things
and how one can advance the progress of scholarship"
(qtd. in Pelikan 84-85). Because the "defining
characteristic" of the Humboltian German university
was also the defining characteristic of the high Modern
university in Europe and North America, its characteristic
architectural structure – the classroom block
with research facilities and faculty offices –
became ubiquitous on both continents as well as elsewhere.
Only a few Canadian campuses today (and these are usually
religious and or liberal arts schools modelled on the
early modern pattern) are without their purpose-built
Physics Building, Arts Tower, or Natural Sciences Building.
One
consequence of the existence of these "silos"
(for once, the cliché seems more apt than banal)
was and is a severe curtailment of the sorts of liberating
discussions between Philosophy (the Arts or Humanities)
and the other faculties envisaged by Kant – in
other words, the gradual emergence and intensification
of the wintry isolation identified by Snow. But the
compartmentalized high modern university did not take
shape solely because of the conception of research-teaching
that it embodied. Less isolated from the surrounding
society than its originary and still very vital early
modern component, it gained its less visible shape –
the pyramidal administrative structure that it still
exhibits today – by absorbing a combination of
the collective and laissez-faire tendencies
that, as numerous cultural historians have recognized,
constituted the warp and woof of the intellectual world
in which its foundational principles gained their superstructure.
What happened, in brief, is that, even as nineteenth-century
collectivism led to the emergence in universities of
a strong social mission, corporate identity, and central
administrative bureaucracy, the Romantic individualism
and libertarianism of the period caused scholars, departments,
faculties, universities, and, ultimately, university
systems to insist on their freedom to pursue their own
research and teaching agendas. In this way, academic
freedom was secured, but within a centralized and fairly
rigid administrative system.
Perhaps
best visualized as a vertical version of research-teaching-office
building with the chair’s, dean’s, president’s
"power office" in the corner, the high modern
university is a pyramid characterized by a high degree
of self-similarity across the system – that is,
the top-down and bottom-up relationship of the central
or senior administration to the university as a whole
is replicated as the faculty and department levels.
Visualizing the university as a series of smaller and
smaller pyramids within a large pyramid is not an idle
exercise because it helps to clarify the way in which
the central or senior administration in its capacity
as the university’s principal point of contact
with the surrounding society and, above all, with the
government came to function as a normative agent of
transmission, negotiating and, at least as often, just
accepting government financial formulas and dispersing
monies downwards through the system according to similar
formulas based on such things as Basic Income Units,
Weighted Teaching Units, and Enrolment Targets. Closely
related to this development and process was and is the
centralization (or pyramidization, if there were such
a word) of procedures and standards governing entrance
requirements, academic programmes, tenure and promotion,
and the emergence almost inevitably of at least the
appearance of a top-down management model and its corollary,
the "them" and "us" mentality that
is so amenable to translation into the employer versus
employee dynamic of trades unionism.1
At
the present time, the collegial-cum-managerial pattern
that developed in the course of the last century through
a combination of early and high modern elements continues
to serve most Canadian universities quite well. About
a decade ago, however, there were signs of shifts both
outside and inside the universities that have led to
additional modifications in the shape of the institution
and new problems to be confronted and solved. One of
these shifts was heralded in Ontario by the 1991 Stuart
Smith Report, a document that struck at the foundations
of the high modern university by proposing to enhance
the quality of teaching in Canadian universities by,
among other things, severing its connection with research.
A staunch resistance to the Report was mounted on many
fronts and it gradually wilted into oblivion, but by
the middle of the decade other sundering forces were
coming to bear on the research-teaching symbiosis in
the form of (1) severe cut-backs in government funding
to universities; (2) strategically targeted federal
and provincial research monies; and (3) increasing pressure
on the universities to match such targeted monies with
donations from the private sector. In many universities,
the effect of these factors has been a reduction in
the number of tenured research-teachers and an increase
in the number of untenured instructors whose duties
do not include research and administration. In larger
universities especially, the second and third factors
– i.e., the targeting and matching of funds for
research – has led to the creation of research
centres and institutes whose faculty members are largely
or entirely relieved of teaching, an exemption also
built into the federal government’s Canada Research
Chairs programme. When added to the already existing
tendency in nearly all universities to privilege research
over teaching in tenure and promotion decisions, these
and similar developments have effectively institutionalized
a distinction between, on the one hand, undergraduate
teaching in the so-called "core" teaching
faculties (Arts, Sciences, Social Sciences) and, on
the other, graduate teaching and research. In short,
the interdependence of "research and instruction"
that was the pride of the high modern university is
now honoured more and more in the breach than in the
observance. The up-to-date version of the classroom-laboratory-office
building is as likely as not to contain at least one
high-tech superclassroom in which a 3M Fellow ministers
to several hundred students while his or her colleagues
do the "real" work of research and supervision
in much more intimate settings.
Increasingly,
too, those intimate settings are to be found in structures
designed and built to house a particular research project
or sub-unit of the university. Whether free-standing
or annexed to an existing building, such structures
are almost invariably emblazoned with the name of the
corporate or individual donor whose generosity they
reflect. For a variety of reasons, not least the fact
that a pre-condition for their existence is usually
a contribution from the university to match that of
the external donor, edifices with names like the Lagado
Centre for Energy Research arouse resentment and even
anger in some quarters of the university. (A few years
ago, when a British businessman offered Oxford University
a large donation for a business school to bear his name
some faculty members suggested that the university give
him an equivalent amount to start his own business school
outside the university.) There seems to be little doubt,
however, that dedicated and privately/publicly funded
extensions to (or implants in) the university are here
to stay and, moreover, that their presence on Canadian
campuses is re-shaping the landscape of post-secondary
education as surely as did the emergence of the high
modern university in the preceding centuries. Perhaps
more than any other architectural structure, the late
modern university resembles a superblock or megastructure:
a massive, centrally managed unit of urban real estate
that reflects and embodies a complex combination of
public, private, and public/private institutions and
entities, and, as a result, has the capacity within
certain spatial limits to accommodate an enormous diversity
of interests and amenities (see Banham).
An
indication that this is so can be seen in the fact that
much of the tension on Canadian university campuses
today can be felt in the vicinity of their new buildings
and extensions. The negative responses of traditionalists
and leftists to the monied interlopers are one source
of such tension, but there are others that are as important,
though perhaps less visible because more often than
not they manifest themselves in senate planning meetings
and in meetings between members of senior/central administrations
and the directors of new privately/publicly funded research
centres. Most frequently at stake, of course, are matters
directly or indirectly linked to funding: differential
fees (the most public of the issues in contention),
fund-raising activities, intellectual property rights,
and the commercialization of research. Should the Lagado
Centre be able to set its own fees and solicit donations
independently? Who owns an idea and who should benefit
from its development? These and questions like them
arose in the high modern university, but in the later
modern university they have been exacerbated not only
by the presence of competing but overlapping centres
within the university, but also by the pervasive presence
in the surrounding culture of the entrepreneurial ethos
and its concomitant emphasis on research, innovation,
and development as the keys to prosperity and social
well-being. "‘We are not necessarily incompatible’,"
said Larry Tapp, the departing dean of the Ivey School
of Business, in May 2003 of his institution’s
relationship with the University of Western Ontario:
"‘[Ivey] need[s] flexibility to adapt and
change and move quickly as the market changes, and that
is not something the universities traditionally do ...
[We have] a healthy tension and that’s not necessarily
bad’" ("Departing Ivey Dean" B6).
One
hypothetical example in the area of intellectual property
rights will illustrate the complexities of the situation.
According to the Lockean principle to which current
property law is ultimately traceable, rights in "[w]hatsoever"
accrue to a person when he or she "mix[es] ...
Labour with [it]" and, by so doing, "removes
[it] out of the State that Nature hath provided, and
left it in" (134). Or, as David Hume put it half
a century later: "[w]here a man bestows labor and
industry upon any object which before belonged to nobody
... the alteration which he produces causes a relation
between him and the object, and naturally engages us
to annex it to him by the new relationship of property"
(125-26n). Under many circumstances (including those
of a settler colony) rights in property thus conceived
can be contentious, and this is certainly the case in
a university setting, where the "[w]hatsoever"
or "object" with which a researcher’s
labour is mixed does not occur merely in "the State
that Nature hath provided" but in a state wholly
or partly provided by the university and, more likely
than not, investigated with the assistance of funds
from the university and/or a government granting agency
and/or the private sector. Suppose for a moment that
Professor Blimber, who has been seconded from the university
proper to the Lagado Centre and holds grants from the
National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and
the Acme Foundation, discovers a method whereby sunbeams
can be extracted from cucumbers, stored in hermetically
sealed vials, and released to warm the air and lift
the spirits during inclement weather. Suppose also that
Professor Blimber lands a contract of $1,000,000 to
develop a workable system of Cucumber Energy Storage
(CES) for a consortium consisting of two Anglo-American
private sector companies and the government of Newfoundland
and Labrador. To whom do the rights in and earnings
from Professor Blimber’s discovery and invention
accrue? To Professor Blimber? To the University that
employs him? To the Lagado Centre that houses his lab
and purchases his cucumbers? To NSERC and the Acme Foundation?
To a proportional combination of some or all of these
interested parties? If so, which parties and in what
proportions? Such are the issues that face faculty members
and administrators in parts of the late modern university.
That
several of the issues to which Canadian universities
are now responding are dismaying to some faculty members
and exciting to others is only to be expected, but extreme
reactions to the changes that are occurring can perhaps
be avoided by their contextualization in a history of
change that at every stage provoked a similar spectrum
of reactions. No university, let alone "the university,"
was ever a stone keep capable or even entirely desirous
of resisting the incursions of the new; on the contrary,
they were and are structures whose combination of conservatism
and progressivism has shown itself to be remarkably
capable of adapting to new pressures from without as
well as from within by the process of absorption and
persistence that made the early modern university part
of the high modern one and will make both part of the
university that has already begun to take shape. Whether
in the realm of differential fees or intellectual property,
fund-raising or the commercialization of research, universities
are by their very natures capacious enough to accommodate
all "thought styles" (Douglas xii) and all
"political cultures" (Schwarz and Thompson
61), be they hierarchical, individualist, communitarian,
or fatalistic. And being so, they can and must recognize
that their various components function according to
differing cultural models whose underlying assumptions
about everything from hiring procedures, merit allocation,
and administrative decision-making to governance structures
and educational, economic, and social practices, contexts,
and goals are always in tension and frequently in conflict.
If today’s universities are not able to recognize
and accommodate their own manifest intellectual and
cultural diversity, then they will fail present and
future generations as surely as the early modern university
failed Gibbon, Smith, Southey, Morris, and Burne-Jones,
and the structures that facilitate ideation, discovery,
creativity, and innovation will be built elsewhere,
or not at all. |
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