Universities under Conditions of Duress: Question and Answer Session

Shlomo Avineri, Richard Bernstein, Jonathan R. Cole, Hans-Peter Kruger, and Alan Ryan Universities under Conditions of Duress: Question and Answer Session RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Iunderstand Socrates and Kant. Couldyou explainwhy the Protestant God is the thirdpresiding deity ofthe liberal arts college? A L A N R Y A N : Because the Protestant God is the one that said every man was to be his own priest, was to read the Bible for himself, and was to make his own way to salvation. Out of that comes the whole Lockean story about toleration, and the idea that unless you question your own favorite ideas and inclinations, you are not being entirely serious. Self-criticism. The failure to really understand this is, if I may say so, the one drawback of what is otherwise the immense pleasure to be had from teaching in the United States. All the kids are taught at the age of about seven to distinguish between facts and opinions. So they write essays in which they painfully copy out whatever it is they are copying out, and you say, “Where is the criticism of what you’ve read?” “Oh, you want my opinion.” You don’t want their opin­ social research Vol 76 : No 3 : Fall 200 9 959 ion. What you want is their best critical judgment. That is what the Calvinist God demands of believers. JONATHAN COLE: Alan, you asked about what the ideal university would be, and what the mission ofthe universities are. In the very, very top 120 universities in the United States out of the 4,000 colleges and universities in a highly strati­ fied, highly varied system of higher learning in the United States, the ideal is not purely utilitarian. Rather, it is a mixture of the utilitarian and that other aspect that is the intrinsicvalue ofuniversities. Myownpaper began with thefundamen­ tal principle that universities are institutions designed to be unsettling in exactly the Socrates way, so that at the very best of the universities there is an attempt to improve analytic thinking, to confront biases and presuppositions, to think of education there as an intrinsicgood, as well asproducingproducts and commodi­ ties and the like. Nonetheless, I think the defense ofthe university can be made on both ofthose levels and, infact, at their best they contain both ofthose levels. A L A N r y a n : This is not said out of hostility to the enterprise at all. But of course it does mean that the big research university has to be a multiversity, and it is very difficult to stop one part of a multiversity from trying to eat up the other parts. That’s what I think is genuinely an organizational issue, and interesting and important one. But I thank you for reminding me to say that Iwas teasing. QUESTIONER: Myname isRobertKostrzewa. I am an associate dean at theNew Schoolfor Social Research, which makes me a member of the growing academic bureaucracy. My question is about the relationship between supreme university governance and the markets. I sympathize with ShlomoAvineri’s sentiment that it is not healthy when markets influence academic decisions or academic structures or learning or how we are learning it. However, the story is more complicated, as others have indicated, when education becomesfantastically complicated as an institution in the delivery ofproper product—you see, I am even using those words—andfantastically expensive. The New School’sfounders were very suspi­ cious of money, and they did not want to build an endowment in the early days, which in this particular moment is a blessing in disguise. But with the current state ofthe institution, is thefacultyprepared to take responsibilityfor the bottom 960 social research line?Are the trustees, the bankers, and lawyersprepared to have theirhands dirty with Socrates and the Protestant God? QUESTIONER: I’m Ernestine Bradley and I’m sort of associated with the New School. I have two questions to ask of Professor Krüger. First, you spoke about the continuityfrom the GDR bureaucratic university system into the current system, and I wondered whether you could expand on what you meant by that. The second thing I wanted to mention, because in all our discussions it hasn...