Reinventing the University

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.