This volume addresses the central question facing the future of higher education around the world, whether and why universities need to exist at all. This book accepts the question’s premise: It is not clear that the university is any longer needed as an institution -- that is, unless its defenders recover what had made the university the revolutionary institution that over the past two centuries has not only defined the shape of modern systematic inquiry but also the distinctiveness of the societies that have housed them. In short, what is required is a reanimation of the spirit of Wilhelm von Humboldt for our times; hence the book's title and subtitle. Humboldt was responsible for relaunching the university as the vanguard institution of 'Enlightenment' to which we continue to pay lip service – and sometimes not much more than that. Admittedly, the task of relaunching Humboldt today is made difficult because many of the concrete achievements associated with the Humboldtian university – not least academic disciplines and nation-states – are increasingly seen as problematic if not obsolete. However, the global reach of the Humboldtian vision in its 19th century and 20th century heyday offers hope that it may be recovered in the 21st century. The book focuses on the performative character of the academic vocation, what Humboldt memorably characterized as the 'unity of research and teaching' in the same person, a role model for students and society at large. The book's seven chapters develop this theme in a historically and philosophically nuanced way in terms of the Humboldtian vision of knowledge, sense of free expression and critical judgement, and commitment to translation and publicity.
Author(s): Steve Fuller
Series: Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 173
City: Coventry
Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Relaunching the Humboldtian University
Chapter 2: Deviant Interdisciplinarity as Philosophy Humboldt-Style
2.1 Normal and Deviant Interdisciplinarity as Alternative Ways of Organizing Inquiry
2.2 How Expertise Appears to the Deviant Interdisciplinarian
2.3 Normal and Deviant Interdisciplinarity as Alternative Ways of Organizing the University
2.4 Deviant Interdisciplinarity after Philosophy: From Naturphilosophie to Biological Science
2.5 The Fate of the Deviant Interdisciplinarian: The Case of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
2.6 Epilogue: The Fate of Philosophy in a Multi-Disciplinary World
Chapter 3: Judgement as the Signature Expression of Academic Freedom
3.1 Academic Freedom as a Form of Positive Liberty
3.2 The Fate of Judgement in the Hands of Bureaucracy from Germany to America
3.3 The Genealogy of Judgement from Germany Back to Greece
3.4 The Logic of Judgement: Of Truth and Other Values
3.5 The Religious Sources of Academic Freedom: The Decision to Dissent
Chapter 4: Hearing the Call of Science: Back from Max Weber to Francis Bacon
4.1 The Religious Roots of Max Weber’s Secular Calling: Luther Versus Calvin
4.2 The Purposiveness of the Academic Calling: Weber Pivoting Between Kant and Popper
4.3 The Call of a Voice that Few Hear: The Problem of Minorities in Organized Inquiry
4.4 What Would Francis Bacon Have Said?
4.5 Bacon Redux: The University as a Revolutionary Constitution
Chapter 5: The University as the Site of Utopian Knowledge Capitalism
5.1 Marxism as a Casualty in the Fight to Reclaim Progressivism from Neoliberalism
5.2 Utopian Socialism as Post-Rentier Capitalism: Saint-Simon as Social Epistemologist
5.3 Saint-Simon Deconstructed and the Promise of Proudhon
5.4 Towards a Truly Open Science and the Prospect of Academic Georgism
5.5 Utopian Knowledge Capitalism as Philosophy of Science: Revisiting the Popperians
Chapter 6: Prolegomena to a Political Economy of Knowledge beyond Rentiership
6.1 The Cognitive Economy of Gestalt Shifts: Plato and Aristotle Redux
6.2 Modal Power and the Defeat of Knowledge as a Public Good
6.3 Learning from Plagiarism: Knowledge as an Artworld
6.4 Academic Rentiership as a Tale of Swings and Roundabouts
6.5 The American Hegemony and its Protscience Digital Afterlife
6.6 Postscript: Are Neoliberals Right to Want to Reduce Knowledge to Information?
Chapter 7: Appendix: Towards a Theory of Academic Performance
7.1 To Speak or to Write? That Is the Question
7.2 Improvisation as the Wellspring of Human Creativity
7.3 The Three ‘Rs’ of Academic Performance: Roam, Record and Rehearse
7.4 Ave Atque Vale! My Own Back to the University’s Future
References
Index
