Reinventing the University

The universities are under siege. No one seems happy. Faculties complain that students cannot write English. Students complain that fees are too high. The taxpayers demand their money’s worth. The line between TAFE (or Polytechs in New Zealand) and universities becomes more blurred by the day.

High schools have to deal with 17 and 18 year-old adults within an institution designed to deal with children. It’s time for some fresh thinking.

Our universities have a problem. They are victims of success - full of students, while thousands more desperately seek entry to their hallowed halls. Critics see simultaneous failures, saying that standards are falling, and graduates will not have the skills demanded by a knowledge-based society.

The technical institutes escape much of this criticism. Certainly their political environment is much less turbulent. Even so it is not unreasonable to argue that our TAFEs seem determined to become second rate universities while our universities are determined, or destined, to become second rate TAFEs. Every TAFE wants to offer qualifications, which take as long to acquire, which cost as much to finance, and which carry the same letters as university degrees, but without the core of research and scholarship we associate with university life.

Universities, on the other hand, offer degrees which seem to be increasingly more like the trades certificates of the traditional TAFEs but in a context of much larger classes with less qualified and more distracted teachers.

Both institutions are losing their focus, and both are at risk of betraying their students, their faculties and finally the taxpayers, who meet most of the bill.

The university was traditionally a centre of knowledge, research and scholarship in which both faculty and students were committed to developing knowledge. If their students thought about careers at all, they were the careers of civilised men and women, serving their nation, their community or civilisation itself. From there it was a short step to training for the four traditional professions whose members were deemed to put their service before self - teaching, theology, medicine and the law - which was when the rot set in.

Visit any major university today and you find little sign of a community of scholars, advancing knowledge for its own sake, and searching for a greater understanding of the human condition. Instead you will find crowded lecture halls (of course that was ever so) full of students sitting weekly “quizzes” designed to enforce attendance and to ensure that they are absorbing enough material to gain some qualification - any qualification - which might enhance their chances of employment in an uncertain world.

Most of them have no real interest in university life as such. They are just seeking to enhance their chances of economic survival. This alone should sound a warning. The last time we experienced universities chock full of students seeking something other than advanced education, was during the 60s when advanced education immunised young Americans against service in Vietnam.

While attending Berkeley in the 60s I heard Eldridge Cleaver perceptively define the universities as, “The minimum security wing of the American Penitentiary system”. The “students” had little interest in scholarship, so they made “non-negotiable demands” for reforms to suit their special needs. They wanted “relevant education”; they wanted the universities to become agents of social change, or even of revolution; to be bust-free drug bazaars: indeed to be anything other than Cardinal Newman’s “place of teaching of universal knowledge”.

Once the draft ended, the traditional and peaceful order of the “universal community of scholars” was restored - at least for a while. Then young people around the world found themselves confronting another frightening prospect: The prospect of unemployment, or low incomes. So, once again, they flooded into universities seeking immunity from being drafted into the emerging underclass. Once again, the university became an agent of social change outlawing discrimination, even on the basis of talent, so that everyone should be equal before his or her potential employer.

Only a few decades ago, I experienced one of the delights of entering the great university at Berkeley California: At last I could leave behind any suffocating demands of family, nation, religion or tribe - this was the international community of scholarship - and the air was truly free. Today, however, the university wraps its young in the swaddling clothes of political correctness and proper behaviour. The international community of scholars has been transformed into Balkanised tribes of timid conformity.

This may be a caricature but it embodies some useful truths. We are fortunate that Australian and New Zealand universities have never totally succumbed to the political correctness plague. Most students seek intellectual adventure as well as a chance to get the skills and knowledge they need to land a rewarding job after graduation.

But we cannot will away the confusion between the roles of the technical institutes and the universities. We should not be surprised that they seem to have no clear plans or strategies designed to keep their missions separate and identifiable. After all the confusion is inherent even within their names.

Cardinal Newman reminds us that the university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge”: And that its objects are to focus on “intellectual pursuits, not moral reform” (or social engineering) and on “the diffusion and extension of knowledge not technical advancements”. He adds that the name of the university is “inconsistent with restrictions of any kind.”

Similarly, Dr Johnson, in his dictionary, defined the university as, “A school where all arts and faculties are taught”. While the historian Mosheim said that the school of Paris, “Which exceeded all others in various respects, as well as in the number of teachers and students, was the first to embrace all the arts and sciences, and therefore first became a university”. In those times the university could make a solid claim to being a unique institution, which offered to teach all things to all men.

But the name of the TAFE carries the same message. Surely a technical institute is a place, which teaches “many skills”. And so we find that every field of knowledge taught in the university is taught in the TAFE. If a TAFE takes up a new field, such as Hotel Management, then the university follows, with Tourism Economics. If a TAFE teaches Real Estate then a university offers courses in Urban Economics.

The lines are blurred. The university faculty will cry, “But we are research centered. Our lecturers are not so much teachers,” (as many an undergrad will happily certify) “as scholars prepared to share their knowledge”.

Students and taxpayers used to go along with these claims but are no longer sure. They see the high fees as being the direct result of “all this useless research”. They ask, “Why should students subsidise the work of some scholar lost in the intricacies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or in telling us that children around the King Country suffered “Post Eruption Trauma Syndrome” after Ruapehu’s last eruption.

The lines blur further.

Newman reminds us that the idea of teaching all subjects was to ensure that the university would be open to all students “for, if certain branches of knowledge were excluded, those students of course would be excluded also, who desired to pursue them”. Later he says:

This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning ... an assembly of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect to consult to aid each other ... Hence it is that this education is called “Liberal”.

Such a model demands that the university be small. Our modern universities contain departments so large that students are unlikely to step foot outside their doors. They are unlikely to meet others who will “unsettle the boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to destroy the harmony which binds them together”. Indeed we now enclose them within departments of uniform ideology, ethnicity, and gender to further reduce such “unsettling” thoughts.

A true university should be small.

So let’s do it. Let’s draw a clear distinction between university and TAFE. Let us declare that the university should be for the dissemination and development of knowledge and that it should leave job-skilling to the TAFEs.

The true university should research and teach the history of jurisprudence, but not the practice of law. It should research and teach the history of art and architecture, but not the skills of the artist or the architect. It should research and teach mathematics, but not the practice of engineering; the science of physics but not industrial chemistry; economics, but not accounting; and history but not social work; biology, but not medicine; botany but not forestry.

Such a university would be an elitist institution whose doors would be wide open to only the most brilliant minds. We have elitist academies of sport - why not of education? Such students would win scholarships or would pay their way as mature artists who wished to study art history, or lawyers who wished to study the history of constitutional law, or as engineers who wished to study some science of new materials.

The maximum roll would be 10,000 students, with a useful mix of undergraduate and postgraduate studies. There would be no quizzes or terms. Just solid review every year or two. The final distinction might be to abandon the degree, which will have been fully commandeered by the TAFEs and junior colleges by then. Suitable letters and “honours” might mean much more.

The TAFEs would have a clear role - they would provide the tertiary training dedicated to enhancing employment and earning capacity. They could tailor courses to fit the needs of all those seeking to better equip themselves in the work force. They would not carry the research overheads of universities and would remain free of political turbulence. Students would pay their fees, win scholarships or take out loans. They could take long degree courses, short diplomas or pressure cooker certificates. Part time and full time students would be properly catered for.

The final ingredient of this reform is to make sure that these TAFE students have some form of liberal education too. The answer is to stop high school at the fifth form and open up Junior Colleges, which take students for two to four year college degrees in the liberal arts and sciences. School uniforms would end at high school and schoolteachers would not have to deal with ten-year-old children and moustached young adults within the same institution. Sixth and seventh formers would be “grown ups” in their Junior Colleges, continuing their compulsory state funded education.

Once in the TAFEs or Universities they would seek their own funding - scholarships, loans or saving. And everyone would know where they were, and why they were there, and why they decided where to go.

Of course this goes against the current fad for a huge percentage of the population to have a university qualification - 30 per cent is a frequent target. We are told that if we fall short of some international statistic then we are doomed to exclusion from the knowledge economy.

In the meantime Switzerland seems to do quite well. Only about 12 per cent of young Swiss are at universities - the rest are in vocational training. It must save the Swiss taxpayers one hell of a lot of money.