The University in a Democracy 

The western university has a difficult relationship with modern liberal democracy and its concomitant, civil society. The essence of the concept of academic freedom developed in Western Europe and the United States is that the spirit of enquiry should not be inhibited by pressures from the church, the government, the rich, or the public. The theoretical justification for academic freedom is that intellectuals have a non-negotiable commitment to truth, and play a unique role in challenging the mindset and prejudices of their age. But the conditions for academic freedom - that those who provide the resources for the university do not constrain its activities, that the piper does not call the tune - is hard to reconcile with demands for democratic accountability.

We can explore the possible relationships between the university and democracy through three models of the university: the traditional, the rationalist and the utilitarian. These models are tools for analysis, not descriptions of actual universities. Each model implies a different relationship with civil society and has different implications for democracy. Each model assumes that the host society is constitutional.

The Traditional Model

In the traditional model, the university's raison d'etre  is to preserve, refine, enhance and transmit the culture of which it is part; it does so through teaching rather than research. In the influential nineteenth century conception of John Henry Newman, the university teaches all branches of knowledge, including theology, and provides liberal, rather than commercial or professional, education.

The non-utilitarian character of the traditional university is, however, superficial. The cultivated graduate of the traditional university is preparing himself for a role in government. And, in theory, the leadership of the governing elite is social and moral, as well as political. Consequently, the educated few moulded by the university experience work for the benefit of the many outside it.

What does the traditional model of the university, designed to meet the needs of hierarchical societies, have to offer to modern democracies? This university, with its elitism and distinctive social ethos, can be seen as not only non-democratic but anti-democratic. Yet some of its core qualities are essential in a democracy. The traditional university focuses on what is shared - shared values, shared attitudes, shared beliefs. It shapes the ethos, the norms, the attitudes and above all the style of its members. It nurtures the appreciation of a common cultural heritage. The traditional university fosters what Vickers called a shared appreciative system, defined as 'common assumptions about the world in which we live, and common standards by which we judge our own and each others' actions in that world'. Without a strong measure of shared assumptions and shared values, democracy cannot work.

The idea that the qualities which the traditional university develops in the national elite work to the benefit of society as a whole has been largely rejected in the twentieth century. As mass higher education has expanded largely outside the traditional university the values and expectations held by the latter's members have been questioned.

The philosophy of the traditional university itself has been criticized from within and without, particularly in the United States, where the idea of the Liberal Arts, deriving from the European universities, had taken particularly strong root. The idea of a corpus of traditional knowledge contained in the 'Great Books', indeed the very concept of a shared culture, has come under attack as concepts of culture and civilization have become highly politicized. American multiculturalists have attacked the idea of a shared civilizational identity, and postmodernists have argued that traditional knowledge serves to perpetuate the political dominance of traditional elites. If, some postmodernists argue, the university is, instead, to serve the political purposes of democracy, then scholarship and teaching should explicitly be designed to redress the disparagement or neglect of subordinate groups, such as ethnic minorities and women.

But whether the stability of democracy is served by the inflammation of differences, rather than the cultivation of what is shared, is very much in doubt.

The traditional model of the university is of particular value to contemporary democratic societies for other reasons, too. Academics - conscious as they are of longer timespans - are not subject to the tyranny of the present, whether that takes the form of oppressive public opinion or dictatorial government. The scholar resists that urgent imperative to meet the felt needs of the passing moment which, it is suggested, is endemic in democratic forms of government with their constitutionally short time spans. The 'escape from present-mindedness' is inherent in many of the core subjects of the traditional university, such as history and the natural sciences.

The traditional university can be a unique counterpoise to the crude materialism of popular culture. At its worst, however, it may legitimize and inflame popular passions. Intellectuals, as Benedict Anderson and others have argued, were key players in the creation of nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is always the possibility that the traditional university will see its role not as the guardian of a broadly-based civilization, but as that of an intolerant and exclusive national culture.

The Rationalist Model

The rationalist model of the university derives from the Enlightenment belief in the power of unalloyed reason. Where the traditional model is a teaching university, the rationalist model is a research institute. The role of this university is to subject all received knowledge and ideas to rigorous scrutiny, to 'test to destruction' in the light of unfettered reason, to formulate new hypotheses and thus to advance knowledge. The human output is not the cultivated member of the governing elite, but the specialized expert, the 'trained mind'. The premises of the rationalist view - open, like those of the traditionalist model, to the postmodernist challenge - is that intellectual enquiry is a neutral and disinterested activity, unconstrained by personal ambition, political pressures, or social conditioning. Truth is unequivocal and 'out there': all that is needed to reach it is finely tuned reason.

This model, at its best, provides a strong justification for academic freedom: because the university community represents the soundest possible corpus of knowledge available, academics alone must be the judges of what they teach; their knowledge, tested in the fierce fire of peer group criticism, may not be the ultimate truth, but it is the closest approximation to it.

The temper of the western rationalist model has made an essential contribution to undermining the legitimacy of pre-democratic forms of government. The model serves continuously to undermine the influence of tradition - save only the rationalist tradition itself - and thus chimes with the spirit of democratic systems, in which tradition is little valued.

At its best, the rationalist model is well fortified against the endless temptation to bend academic institutions to political ends, personal or collective. The academic's commitment only to rationalism should be, in theory, the best safeguard against the temptation to succumb to the attractions of extravagant political ideologies.

But it is not always accepted that it works out like this in practice. Oakeshott, in his critique of the impact of rationalism on politics, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays , defines the rationalist as one who stands for independence of mind on all occasions, who acknowledges no authority except the authority of reason itself. In pedagogic terms, the rationalist emphasizes the primacy, if not the exclusivity, of training in the development of the reasoning faculty, that is, a training in technique.

In political terms, the rationalist believes that unhindered human reason is an infallible guide to political activity; the consequence, Oakeshott argues, is that the partnership between past and present is lost, and tradition, which is flexible, is replaced by ideology, which is not. Politics is assimilated to engineering; the political process is defined as an endless series of problem solving exercises, and all political action is based on the 'recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need'.

This objection cannot be taken lightly. Rationality alone fails to provide adequately for the ethical dimension of politics. Neglect of, if not contempt for, the past inhibits that awareness of the dimension of time needed if there is to be a sustainable future.

If the rationalist model may, at its worst, propagate the inappropriate extension of scientific and technological methodologies into politics, it follows that the ethos and principles of the rationalist university may serve not to counteract, but to exacerbate, the characteristic weaknesses of universities, as defined by de Tocqueville, that is, the tyranny of passing public opinion. The temper of the rationalist university may inadvertently surrender to present mindedness.

However, the best hope of rethinking the impact of epistemologies derived from science and technology on our understanding of politics, and hence of developing an approach to politics which is sustainable over time, lies within the rationalist university. Can the rationalist university, which encourages questioning everything except rationalism, confront the problems for political behaviour of enlightenment-derived rationality itself?

The Utilitarian Model

The traditional and the rationalist models of the university include elements of only indirect and long-term utility; neither acknowledges practical relevance to the here and now. The current prominence of an explicitly utilitarian model derives from two linked developments: the extension of university education to larger proportions of the population of developed countries than before; and the comparatively recent identification of education as a key element in national economic success.

The utilitarian model rejects the notion, assumed in the other two, that the university is exempt from the norm that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Universities are directly accountable to those - taxpayers, students or employers - who pay for them, and are themselves part of the market economy, responsive to market forces within and the pressures of global competition without.

To apply market thinking to the university is to reverse the 'academic freedom' argument of the traditional and rationalist models. It is students and employers directly, and governments and taxpayers indirectly, not academics with their special scholarly status or 'finely-tested sound knowledge', who are the arbiters of what is taught and learnt. The student at the utilitarian university is a customer; its human product is not a 'cultivated person' or a 'trained mind' but a 'skilled worker'.

The market capitalist model claims to reinforce the democratic spirit. It could be said, that, by subjecting schools and universities to the same disciplines as everyone else, it eliminates one last vestige of privilege. The universities must also work for the national competitive advantage, and be responsive to the needs of the taxpayer, as articulated through the government of the day. This model has implications for the constitution of universities - 'Chief Executives', responsible to lay councils representing employers and communities, characteristically replace Principals, Heads of House or Vice-Chancellors elected by the academic body - and for funding. The utilitarian university typically derives a substantial part of its income from contract work with external customers.

But the identification of the university as an engine of national competitive advantage in an increasingly cut-throat global context creates serious obstacles to the unhampered international exchange of knowledge. It enshrines the tyranny of the 'immediate felt need'. The assumption, inherent in the utilitarian model, that what the university teaches and researches should be a response to external market demand, rather than informing that demand, is of doubtful benefit to host societies in anything other than the short term.

Future dilemma

All modern universities do, and should, contain elements of all three theoretical models. Each model helps transmit, refine, and enhance the culture of the past, in submitting received ideas, principles and practices to the scrutiny of objective reason, and in contributing a skilled workforce to the national economy.

The biggest dilemma facing the university in developed, constitutional states is how to reconcile with its traditional and rationalist roles the demands that it should serve the immediate economic imperatives of the state. The critical evaluation of current assumptions and priorities, including rationalist assumptions of the nature of politics, is essential for the well being of society in the long term. The pressures to make universities demand-led are growing all the time. The demand that universities be responsive to immediate needs is particularly strong in democracies. But universities have to maintain a distinctive long-term perspective. They stand for intellectual rather than popular culture. The intellectual community of which they are part is international, not national. All these require a measure of academic freedom which is difficult to reconcile with the pressures which come from identifying the university as a key agent of national competitive advantage. This dilemma will become more acute in the future.

Professor Margaret Blunden is a staff member of CSD and Provost of Regent Campus at the University of Westminster. This is an edited version of a talk she gave at a joint CSD/University of Belgrade conference in Budva, Montenegro, in April 1997.