How to run the ivory tower?

Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself. And if there is one institution that needs – and should be able to provide – self-reflection, it is universities. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to comment on a new addition to this genre, Long Live the Ivory Tower, by historian Klaas van Berkel (currently only available in Dutch). It made me think, once more, about a question that I’ve long been chewing on: how to preserve the right balance between functional differentiation and coupling of institutions in modern societies?

A bit of context: Dutch universities are publicly funded, and while finances are currently tight, the situation is far less disastrous than what it seems like in some other places, e.g. in the UK. But there is a lot of political pressure to move in directions that are “useful for society,” for example to generate more graduates for fields that have employee shortages (as if universities could so easily convince young people which field to enter…), and to focus on technological and medical innovation. Many funding streams are tied to societal problems (defined politically), and there is also a growing expectation that universities should collaborate more with the military in the future, to meet NATO goals. At the same time, there are lots of expectation on scholars to also do outreach, collaborate with businesses, and somehow make “impact”. And there is a general sense, undergirded by employee surveys, that work pressure is too high, because academics are asked to do everything at once.

Van Berkel’s book is a rallying cry to not forget, in all this busy-ness, what a university is about. He discusses three core values: Respect for knowledge and learning, academic freedom, and the interconnectedness of teaching and research. Very Humboldtian, you might think, and he indeed owns this label. He is not against impact per se, but wants universities to remember what their core is, and to institutionally separate this core from other functions.* Hence the provocative title about the ivory tower.

Now, I have lots of sympathies for these values – who wouldn’t! I want universities to stand up and confidently defend their intrinsic value, also by pointing out that curiosity-driven research without an impact agenda has, time and again, proven extremely useful to society (as captured in the notion of “serendipity”). And yet, I don’t feel quite comfortable with the three cheers for the ivory tower. In places where I’ve studied or worked that could make a claim to being very ivory-towery (no names shall be named here), I’ve met wonderful teachers, inspiring colleagues, individuals coming pretty close to the ideal academic. But I’ve also encountered sexism, old-boy networks, and types of scholarship that seemed closer to a battle of egos, than to a contest of ideas committed to the collective search for truth. Lack of accountability, and a complete disinterest in the world outside of the tower, does not always bring out the best in individuals.

Now, Van Berkel wants the ivory tower to have windows and doors and to remain connected to society. But this leads to a challenge: how to find the right balance between the preservation of an institution’s core values and the loops with other institutions and the outside world? This is a challenge not only for universities, but for any institution that is meant to serve a specific function, but where this function cannot be defined independently from what is going on in the wider society. At the book launch, one audience member pointed out that the developments in Dutch universities mirror those in many other sectors, e.g. in medical and care work: neoliberalism, new public management, etc.  – without academics resisting them a lot. But the vision of academia not at all reacting to societal developments is not attractive either, and you can only tell in retrospect which trends expressed genuine progress and which ones were misguided.

I’m so obsessed about how to find solutions to this problem because functional differentiation, and institutions that are held to account for fulfilling specific functions in society, are for me a key building block of an economic model that stops relying on economic growth and market value as the only orientations for the economy. Neoliberalism was, at its core, the idea that a certain kind of Hayekian market logic should be applied to all spheres of society. This doesn’t work, for so many reasons, and arguably even markets that would otherwise be functionally justifiable lose their positive features if they are absolutized in this way.** So, to come to an alternative, we need to return to a model in which different social functions are governed according to their own logics: health should be the guiding value in the medical sector, knowledge and learning in academia, etc.

But earlier versions of self-governance of these sectors, before the era of market dominance and quantitative accountability, were often socially exclusive, and centered very much on the interests of insiders. Instead of being nostalgic about previous model, we need to ask how to find a better balance in the here and now: how to preserve the core values an institution needs to be oriented towards to fulfil its societal function, while also remaining sufficiently linked to outside developments to stay relevant with this function.

I don’t have a full answer, but I have some elements that I think need to be part of it: some form of self-government by employees and their representatives, but also the inclusion of other stakeholders in the governance. A willingness to be accountable to the outside, but a refusal to let one’s contribution be captured in indicators that are meaningless for what is at stake. A disposition to experiment, and to try out new things, but also to reverse to previous practices if the new ones actually don’t work. And a culture of trust in which there is a strong ethos of collaboration and a joint commitment to the core values.

The last one is the hardest part. In some places where I’ve studied or worked, such an ethos was simply there, and new people coming in would easily adapt to it. Despite lively debates about concrete issues, there was a consensus on core values, and it felt like a matter of fact that this is the way things had to be – we’re academics, after all, right? In other places, there was infighting, status seeking, and distrust, and it felt like the mere shell of a university, with something rather different, and quite rotten, going on inside. How to get from such a bad equilibrium to the happier, and more functional state in which there is a core consensus about the point of what one is doing, is a question I keep mulling over. If we could figure out how to do this for universities, the answers might be relevant beyond them.

* Part of the discussion here is about student numbers: how large should universities be? That discussion is rather specific to the Dutch context, however (ultimately having a lot to do with details of the funding structure, which create perverse incentives to grow student numbers endlessly) so I omit it here.

** Lots of people have argued that; my own take on the issues, in full detail, can be found in chapter 7 of Citizen Knowledge.