Reform in academia often sweeps the intellectually mediocre to the top. You can be anti-intellectual and fêted in our universities today, writes Andreas Hess
Democracies depend on popular support and to a degree on equal treatment of citizens. This means, at least in theory, striving for universal access to university education. However, we also know from experience that democracy is not necessarily about the better argument; and, to complicate the picture, more often than not intellectual attempts to provide and defend a reasonable cause can appear to be rather elitist and even anti-democratic. In the past this constellation has led to problematic and sometimes disastrous outcomes - the case of Socrates versus the citizens of Athens being the classic example.
Since Socrates defended the better argument against the majority will (and was even prepared to die for it), we seem to have come a long way. Today it is acknowledged that universities belong to those institutions in modern society that contribute to making democracy work but which themselves do not necessarily operate in a fully democratic manner.
An understanding in terms of boundary maintenance has emerged over time: in Europe and to a large extent also in the US, the state or the government contributes to financing institutions of higher learning but at the same time also withdraws from immediate and direct control and interference. This delicate balance has helped to bring about what we today call liberal education, represented by the great books and the discussions surrounding the major achievements of mainly western philosophy, literature and science. Exposure to their challenging ideas has often changed young people's minds and careers, often against the projective trajectory plans of parents and against the wishful thinking of state planners.
However, the model described above has come under threat - particularly so in Ireland where liberal education never had a great history and universities were never fully free of politics, State and church intervention. Any closer look at how the two biggest institutions, TCD and UCD, were run will confirm that.
Higher education also costs money, and modern mass education demands even more money. Short of sufficient state funds, university administrators and educationalists are now more than ever under pressure to find the money somewhere else. "Somewhere else" usually means a package deal. It involves streamlining the institution in order to prepare for the onslaught of reform, finding outside research funding bodies that guarantee a reliable source of income and having students pay fees. Of this three-part package the last step is the most unpopular.
Practically, it would mean to argue with the voter and the long-established "Keynesianism of the middle classes" - something no popular Irish government would like to introduce.
Outside research funding therefore becomes increasingly popular; it just means that administrations have to rally the academic troops and call them to order, usually by finding incentives so that scholars can be turned into researchers. This can easily be done, for example by changing promotion procedures from output-oriented to input models (those who bring in money get promoted). It is a measure that is also easily introduced because only a minority - the academics - get the stick.
The government is content too because it doesn't have to top up its contributions, and the voters and taxpayers are happy because this involves no action on their side. Finally, streamlining the institution is always favoured because adapting to change sounds reasonable - and who would argue with the proposition that any larger institution or bureaucracy needs an overhaul from time to time?
However, in a small country like Ireland, this becomes problematic, mainly because the professional base is very small. There is no recognised profession of academic administrator in Ireland, and in terms of people with educational vision, the base is even smaller. As the major overhaul relies on what is there, it often sweeps the intellectually mediocre and opportunists to the top.
The situation is further complicated when entire bureaucracies have little international experience of university reform (by international I mean beyond the UK or US experiences).
In terms of thinking about or implementing reform, there seems to be a remarkable intellectual void and very little sociological imagination at the top level of university administrators and educationalists. Fads and foibles are the result.
On one side we find good-hearted but often meaningless "improvements": as if students get a better education by replacing "talk and chalk" with power-point presentations. (As we know, too often the lecturer hides behind the projector, often killing the spontaneity of discussion while students get even more used to visual information overloads.)
On the other side we find bureaucratic top-down policies that usually leave little creative room for individual initiatives or that care for intellectual coherence. Even worse are those mindlessly repeated mantras that tell academics that the scholar is now dead or that books and monographs are obsolete, but that natural science-style peer-reviewed articles in journals and team research are in. These are expressions of a naive belief in scientific progress and the equally simple-minded idea that if one just injects plenty of money into the system something decent will come out of it. It is means-ends thinking, an instrumental rationality that does not stand up to some of the crucial insights that the sociology of science has produced over the years.
It seems that our new captains of learning are simply not aware of such things as unintended consequences or serendipity patterns.
In the case of Irish higher education, an additional political problem can be detected. The stakeholders in higher education usually shy away from or are simply afraid of discussing the democratic dilemmas openly and honestly. This is probably because of a deep-seated fear of being denounced as elitist, undemocratic and anti-republican (or all three) - the worst accusation one can make in a country that promised to "cherish the children equally". An obligation is felt to provide equality of opportunity and to aim for the ideal of universal access to higher education.
However, you can be anti-intellectual and fêted. Ireland has one of the lowest budget allocations for higher education in the EU, and indeed in the western world. Ever since entry levels to university here reached the 50 per cent benchmark - whereby half of a given annual cohort with leaving certificates enters higher education - the problem has been this: Is it possible for the currently under-financed university sector to initiate and socialise all these newcomers so they can recognise and digest an intellectual argument? Or must the institutions dumb down and give in to the dead weight of numbers by lowering intellectual standards and turning lecturing into a branch of the entertainment industry?
It will take a long time for liberal higher education to succeed. In Ireland we are also talking about a future that probably never was. While we hope and strive for the long-term goal of liberal education, short-term measures can be taken.
I suggest first that we acknowledge the societal problem that intelligence levels and comprehensive approaches to dealing with the way knowledge is produced have not kept up with the development of the Celtic Tiger, particularly not in the university sector whose task it is to provide such intelligence.
Sure, there has to be renewal and reform, yet these should be determined not in simple input-output measures, but in terms of quality.
Second, communication needs to be improved. We should get rid of the fads and foibles that surround the agenda of renewal. Currently the gap between rhetoric and reality is so largethat one is often reminded of the house of cards that was late bureaucratic communism, and we all know how that ended up.
Finally, let's be realistic. Let's stop talking about Irish universities becoming like privately funded Princeton. If our top universities could only become half as good as the public University of Zurich they would have achieved an enormous amount.
To pretend that genuine advances in intellectual and scientific inquiries can be easily combined with democracy's demand for undergraduate mass intake and teaching is a complete illusion.
However, I fear that, once more, populist, democratic agendas from the right and the left - usually both illiberal and anti-intellectual - will again prevail over that delicate achievement which liberal education has always been, particularly in Ireland.
Andreas Hess is senior lecturer in sociology at University College Dublin