Truth And Relevancy
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday December 28, 1987
YACHT clubs are the product of people who like boats. Imagine that the government of the day found yacht clubs were good recruiting grounds for the navy. In times of economic growth, government decided to promote yacht clubs by offering funding too large to be refused. It seemed a good way to recruit sailors.
As it was so heavily subsidised, more and more people took up yachting. Then a marine crisis occurred and soon enough the government turned to yacht clubs to produce more volunteer sailors. Government pressure increased.
Yacht club official were perplexed. They had known for some time that the government had viewed the clubs as naval auxiliaries, but had not pondered the implications. To tell the truth, officials had played on this government perception to secure even greater funding before the crisis. But now the side-effects of yacht clubs have become their raison d'etre. To change yacht clubs into efficient naval training institutions would distort them completely. Real yachties would loose interest and strike out on their own.
If no yacht club has had to deal with the mixed blessing of government funding, universities have. To judge by the media reporting, universities are now in crisis.
In response to public pressure, one professor has declared that "a university is a place where scholars seek truth, pursue and transmit knowledge for knowledge's sake - irrespective of the consequences, implications and the utility of endeavour".
It's a provocative definition, but it is not adequate because it consciously excludes teaching and learning. I would prefer to say that at a university a select minority are instructed in special branches of knowledge that can be acquired only by concentrated and prolonged effort.
Teaching, together with learning and research, are the two great mandates of a university.
The ideal since a German named von Humboldt revitalised German universities in the 19th century has been to combine them into one institution. The assumption is that the very best teaching comes from those engaged in the work of research. Researchers as teachers offer an authenticity, a depth of understanding, and a discrimination of perception born of the need to produce new discoveries and interpretations that will withstand informed criticism.
Research that will withstand the scrutiny of the international community of scholars required above all else time to concentrate. Meeting that standard is one of the best guarantees of quality there is in intellectual life. Well publicised allegations of scientific fraud remind us of how difficult it is to maintain quality. Spreading scarce resources ever thinner undermines even the best efforts to uphold the integrity of research.
Though the average person might not spontaneously mention research in connection with universities, it does figure in government perceptions of universities. Like the yacht clubs of the opening, university officials have encouraged successive governments to think of universities as producing socially useful research. The natural and medical science have long profited from this perception. More recently, the social sciences of economics and political science have followed this golden path.
But if university authorities argue for funding on the grounds of such useful research, it is difficult to argue against the pressure to do more of such research at the expense of less useful research. Basic research is hard to justify. The justification must be long-term and indirect. Over time basic research generates useful as well as useless knowledge. In physics, in oncology, and in mechanics this sounds plausible.
But is it much harder to justify in humanities. The standard defence of the role of humanities in university education has become cliched. It usually consists of quoting the economist John Maynard Keynes's observation that the most opinionated practical person all too often spouts a garbled version of some earlier theoretician's ideas. An educated person will realise this, or realise that it might be the case and so take things with a grain of salt.
George Santayana, the philosopher, is also called upon when he is quoted as saying that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
TRUE as the observations of Keynes and Santayana are, both emphasise useful knowledge, albeit different in kind from those offered by scientists. The deeper question is: "Can useless knowledge be justified?"
Apparently useless knowledge requires a profound justification. Part of it lies in the fact that if the great names from science like Galileo, Kepler or Newton are still preserved in universities, it is in humanities. If these great scientists were alive today, they might be found in humanities departments where they could pursue the large questions that they did, and not the highly specialised science departments that characterise the contemporary university.
The humanities are the home of the classics of our culture in art, music, literature, and ideas. But it is not enough that the classics like Aristotle's Ethics are still read, if they are read only as a duty to the past. They must be read because they might be true. Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is a part of ourselves and we are a part of him.
If similarity is one reason to read the classics, difference is another. Aristotle lived in a different world and, more importantly, saw the world in a different way. Far from rendering him irrelevant, these differences make it all the more important to understand Aristotle in order to measure the distance between his world and ours, and to understand that our world is not superior to his.
The casual reader will not understand Aristotle's foreign quality unaided. Commercial translators and publishers have long laboured to moderate or expunge the alien aspects of classic works to make them reader-friendly. Yet this alien quality provides an essential perspective on our own time and place. It is a perspective that a university both in its research and teaching roles is uniquely suited to develop.
Since the end of the 17th Century when universities began systematically to teach as they do now, the cry to reform them to make them more socially relevant has been perennial. This was the demand of Hitler in the 1930s, of the student militants of the 1970s, and of John Dawkins today. Relevance means relevant to the problems of the moment as perceived by a few transitory individuals.
It is antithetical to the detached perspective that universities provide. Today the problem is the economy. Who knows what it will be tomorrow. All of this goes on despite the fact that J. R. Hough, for example, has shown in Education and the National Economy that there is no direct connection between education and economy.
Universities should be all the more valued for being detached from the pressures of public life. Only then can research put things into perspective. Only then can students be educated, as distinct from trained.
The education of students is a capital investment for them and for the society as a whole. A student who takes advantage of the opportunities of an undergraduate education lays up a store of capital to draw against later in life when divorce, adversity or illness rattle the foundations.
A graduate who has befriended Aristotle or Anna Karenina will weather the storms of life better than a narrowly trained technician. If the crush of information has caused university education to stress lectures and examinations as in a technical subject, it shows how difficult it is to meet the idea of a university.
The irony is that it was the support of the university-educated middle-class uninhibited by fears of northern yellow hordes or reds under beds, who made the ALP an acceptable government in 1972. Now the ALP seems determined to disinherit the goose that laid the golden egg.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
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