Advanced study and research are essential attributes of a university and some of that research will have vital social and industrial applications. But that is not its primary purpose, which is to enhance our knowledge and understanding, whether of the physical world or of human nature and all forms of human activity in the present and the past. For centuries, universities have existed to transmit and reinterpret the cultural and intellectual inheritance, and to provide a space where speculative thought can be freely pursued without regard to its financial value. In a free and democratic society it is essential that that space is preserved.
Yes, the model of the university has been a residuum of the middle ages, a feudal formation changed by its recontextualization in later capitalism. But now it is even later for capitalism. While I share the intent to resist the commodification of the university, I suspect we have to develop something new, rather than simply try to preserve the old frame for cultural transmission, transformation, and creation.
Then there's Brian Holmes on the financialization of the university, arguing that "most of US universities have become systemically corrupt --that is, captured by interest groups - in the course of the neoliberal period, essentially since the passage of the Bayh-Dohl act in 1980 which reengineered the conditions under which knowledge is patented and sold by the intellectual property departments"; and raising "questions about the "public" nature of education where undergraduate tuition pays for the administrative execs, real-estate deals, six-figure professors and corporate labs." Although
"in an era where the critique of public institutions is carried on by the corporate class, the point is not to destroy those institutions .... However, what has actually happened in the UC system and in many other cases . . . is not so much the destruction as the appropriation and remodeling of those formerly public institutions. The ground has already changed beneath our feet. So to worry about whether we are losing the Enlightenment, at this point when the universities massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology, is . . . to be exactly the kind of humanist that the Frankfurt School thinkers would have excoriated for being unable to see that - how did Adorno put it? - "the whole is the untrue." "To defend the university as it is, means defending a highly advanced state of corruption."
