On a noticeboard in a staff room recently I spotted a cartoon which I won’t reproduce here, because the draughtsmanship is puerile and the narrative stands alone. It goes something like this: publically-funded researchers conduct publically-funded research in publically-funded institutions and submit their work to journals which the university library has to pay to access.
As I recall, research materials were free at Moscow University in the 1950s. We’ll get there yet.
Every now and then in this country, someone mentions the Left’s domination of university faculties of arts and social sciences. It’s usually a right-wing commentator, and after a flurry of denials, the great Australian public gives a great collective shrug. Knowledge-production flows on, its surface barely ruffled by the rocks of profit.
In the US this year, Stanley Fish has published Save the World on Your Own Time. The title, in this context, is self-explanatory. Sketches for the book have been appearing on Fish’s blog at the New York Times, and the discussions there have been long, serious and worthy. I expect here the book will be seized on by raving Rightists like Andrew Bolt and ridiculed by the orthodox. But Fish’s argument, rightly understood, gives no comfort to left or right. Fish argues that academics as such, when they are plying their trade, have no responsibility either to change the world or to affirm it. Their responsibility is to their discipline.
Since the 1970s, Marx’s shallow remark about philosophy (“the point, however, is to change it”) has become the unseen epigraph on hundreds of Australian university courses. Whole disciplines have been set up to promote a social agenda. Sitting on committees to approve new subjects I became familiar with the argument – presented as an academic argument – that a proposed subject would change the world for the better. (At one point the seal of approval was the word ‘liberatory’.) This culture, of which the cartoon is a symptom, has not had to deal with intellectual challenge for a long time.
The system, of course, has changed – academics are now required to think of students as ‘customers’ and so on – but the product has remained the same. And because staff turnover is so low, it’s likely to stay that way for much too long.