But it’s not only about the ongoing border dispute over Brexit this time, important though this is. It is about the future of universities, and the impact of marketisation.
Headlined- Irish president: ‘market-driven’ universities face ‘ruination’.
Michael Higgins warned last week that universities ‘have suffered attrition of range and depth, loss of interdisciplinary exchange, leading in too many cases to a degradation of the very scholarship and teaching for which they were established”.
The president of the Republic of Ireland has issued a stark warning that the “ruination” of the university tradition is “at hand”, with scholarship and teaching threatened by both authoritarian politicians and a subservience to the “utilitarian reductionism” of market ideology.
Speaking at a conference on “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Dissent” on 8 June, Higgins warned that it was a “perilous juncture in the long history of the academy”.
“Universities as sites, sources and experiences of learning, have for several decades now been under continuous attack”. He argued that free inquiry has been under pressure for decades from a drive to turn universities into “market-driven” organisations.
“Such adjustments have usually been rationalised as an inevitable search for relevance, often in the name of market forces and the inexorable drive towards a utilitarian reductionism that is now so pervasive”.
An ideology of “unrestrained market dominance” has taken hold, he said, and significantly diminished the space in universities to ask any questions “beyond ones of a narrow utility”.
The teaching of economics, for example, had degraded from questions of “moral economy”, through “political economy”, to now merely being a “technical training in measurement”.
He took aim at university presidents and rectors who “often describe and introduce themselves as CEOs of multimillion-euro enterprises rather than as academics first and foremost”.
Whilst universities had for centuries spearheaded new movements of thought, new paradigms of human existence – this raison d’être was now being undermined and under threat.
Higgins also made an important suggestion which in my view all universities should adopt:
“Teach a module on the nature and role of the university, including the cornerstone of academic freedom, to every incoming university student, raising awareness of the importance of such freedom.”
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