L.S.E. FOUNDERS’ DAY LECTURE by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON, L.S.E., 27TH OCTOBER, 1995
L.S.E. FOUNDERS' DAY LECTURE by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON, L.S.E., 27TH OCTOBER, 1995
THE ACADEMIC SPACE: NEW FRONTIER OR BLACK HOLE?
I am honoured to have been invited to deliver the Founders' Day Lecture in your centenary year. This great institution is no stranger to Ireland, having provided an academic home for a steady stream of Irish students from the earliest days right up to the present.
In coming here they joined students from more than 100 countries, and benefited from the opportunity to study, to learn, to carry out research and, above all, to be stimulated intellectually by the environment and ethos of L.S.E.
However that ethos may be defined, or, indeed, may have altered over the years, it has always seemed to me to have had a radical perspective. In a broad sense, there has been a commitment not just to the values of education, but education linked to and underpinning the civil society.
Perhaps my real tribute to L.S.E. is the simple one of admitting that I was prompted to respond to your invitation by thinking about education in the context of civil society today. I do this not as an expert on education, but as an observer of the small details of one society, the modern Ireland, adapting to change.
I have chosen the concept of the 'academic space' as a theme because I believe that it encompasses, in a usefully imprecise way, a number of separate but related areas which are very properly the concern of many of you, and of your contemporaries in higher education, throughout the world today.
The title was chosen - even Presidents are pressed on such matters - before I was aware of a fine book of essays by the former President of Yale University, Bartlett Giamatti, entitled 'A free and Ordered Space: The real World of the University', let alone that it would begin with these words:
"Being president of a university is no way for an adult to make a living".
The theory and practice of higher education is not static. While aspiring to model itself on eternal verities, it very often responds, like Biblical exegesis, to very contemporary concerns. It evolved in Europe, in many respects as we know, as a response to the manpower and ideological needs of the institutional churches; today it is as frequently pressed into service as the disciple of that most modern of religions, industrial development.
And yet, and yet . . . . in all the ebb and flow of thinking about higher education across the centuries, there has emerged this concept of the academic space - a concept which is based on the human spirit's hunger for exploration and knowledge, and on the need for a context within which that hunger can be satisfied.
It is, or ought to be, just what its name implies, a space - a space in which to learn, to carry out research, to teach, to think. Like all spaces, it is subject to encroachment, to enclosure, to limitations of every kind. It is frequently regarded as a black hole by conscientious administrators and policy-makers because it appears to be an area into which scarce resources vanish without leaving a trace behind. But it is defensible because it is at the core of an idea of higher education which offers us our best chance of producing a world that is not only more prosperous but also more civilised, more equitable and more humane.
The case is cogently made by Bartlett Giamatti:
"A college or university is an institution where financial incentives to excellence are absent, where the product line is not a unit or an object but rather a value-laden and life-long process; where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or market share but intellectual excellence; not profit or proprietary rights but the free good of knowledge; not efficiency of operation but equity of treatment; not increased productivity in economic terms but increased intensity of thinking about who we are and how we live and about the world around us. In such an institution, leadership is much more a rhetorical than a fiscal or "strategic" act. While never denigrating the day-to-day, never scorning the legitimate and difficult chores of management, never pretending that efficiency is useless or productivity irrelevant, leadership in such an institution must define institutional shape, that is, define its standards and purposes - define the coherent, sustainable, daring, shared effort of learning that will increase a given community's freedom, intellectual excellence, human dignity."
Universities have fought for centuries to establish this space, and defend its freedoms, even though these freedoms have occasionally been abused. It is the price and the value of freedom, after all, that it can be occasionally misused, without its essential character being thereby compromised.
In recent times, indeed, I believe there have been signs that many university institutions, in defending this space against the demands of those who have insisted that higher education must be increasingly 'relevant' and ever more narrowly focused, have been wiser than their critics. In their insistence on the importance - not of 'how to do' or of 'what to think' but of how to think - they have paradoxically rendered a service even to that area of society which was previously believed to need ever more closely focused educational support - the area of technology.
The paradox is that because technology is changing so rapidly, many of the voices which were calling a decade ago for higher education to be more and more applied, more and more relevant, are today looking for graduates whose education is more broadly-based and even non-specific. The wheel has not yet gone full circle, to the point where a double first in classics is regarded as the only essential prerequisite for running an empire, and I hope it never will! But there is, at the very least, I think, a growing realisation that many of the pressures to which higher education has been subjected over recent years were applied too hastily, or without adequate consideration of the probable consequences.
This is, in turn, bound up with changes in the nature of work and employment. Much work today is increasingly specialised and technology-driven. It is characterised by the high level of skills required, by short-term contracts, and by ever more sharply focused areas of specialisation. This has helped to create, within higher education generally, an ever-widening pool of applied courses, buttressed by applied research. And this development has brought tangible benefits. Let me turn briefly to the Irish context, where it lead to the establishment a quarter century ago of a network of regional technical colleges and other institutes of higher education. They not only broadened access to third level education but they met the developing needs of the wider society. This was brought home to me when I travelled to Dundalk recently to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Regional College there. That town lived in the shadow of violence across the border in Northern Ireland for most of those 25 years, and the college served - and continues to serve - as a vital community resource, a beacon of hope for the regeneration of the local economy.
What I believe is being reasserted in our modern societies, and this is by no means confined to our universities, is an insistence on the continuing importance of a form of education which teaches people to have open, critical and creative minds, which encourages them to take initiatives, favour action, and communicate effectively. It recognises that the sharpening and honing of the mind is the best way to equip the individual for his or her future. It is aimed at strengthening the spirit of citizenship in a democratic and caring society. It accepts - not only accepts, but rejoices in - a belief in the complementarity of technological and humanistic studies. And it rejects a narrow, blinkered approach heavily dependent on technical language and analytical methods, opting instead for the necessary move towards synthesis and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Allied to this is the growth of a realisation that technology itself is not value-free, as is sometimes supposed. Some forms of technology have the potential for making the world a better place to live in, with shorter working hours and a better quality of life. Others have an equally enormous potential for intensifying the many forms of exploitation - both of our fellow human beings and of the environment we all share - which so disfigure our fragile planet. And behind all the decisions that are taken about technology - decisions that frequently involve the allocation of substantial resources - lie human aspirations and human fears, a view of the world and its potential, which are crucially shaped by our third level education system and the values it professes.
Bartlett Giamatti puts it well:
"Surely, all of us can recall certain voices, the voices of teachers who changed the way we live our lives."
These values are, or ought to be, cultural in the broadest sense. I think the reasons for this can be fairly simply stated. It is another paradox that as our means of communication become ever more rapid, and ever more streamlined, society itself is becoming more complex and atomised, and marked by cultural, social and economic tensions and divisions. The old idea of universality, so important a component of humanism and the European cultural heritage, risks being swamped in a sea of competing localisms, emotional reactions, and the cult of the individual.
Are our universities to remain aloof from all of this? In the era of competitiveness which now characterises third level education as much as it characterises the global economy where multinational corporations do battle, is it enough for universities simply to hitch themselves to rising corporate stars?
There is, of course, an inevitable tension between nurturing institutional autonomy and having appropriate public accountability. It is, however, a tension which need not endanger the core values of higher education, given the underlying commitment of the institutions to the democratic values of society, and the commitment of democratic societies to respect necessary institutional autonomy.
And it is against this background I welcome the reassertion of the concept of defensible and socially relevant academic space. It is taking place at a time when the context of higher education itself is changing dramatically. Not only is the context changing, it is subject to increasing differentiation across the globe.
In the developed world, an increasingly ageing population is producing unforeseen competition among higher education institutions in some countries as they attempt the difficult double act of maintaining academic standards and fishing in an increasingly depleted pool of applicants.
What are seen as problems, could in fact be opportunities. The easing of the pressure of numbers could be the lever for widening access to third level for many hitherto excluded or marginalised groups. Despite the fact that significant progress has been made in equalising the gender balance, participation remains unevenly distributed among the social classes, with severe under-representation persisting among young people in the lower income groupings.
Nor has the chance been seized to equalise opportunity throughout working life. Though there has been some growth in recent years in the numbers of mature and non-traditional students, the systems and policies underpinning higher education remain strongly directed to the needs of the school-leaving population.
And in the developing world, the hunger for higher education grows ever more intense, at the same time as the resources needed to satisfy it are eroded by our embarrassing inability to deal with the problems of debt, disease and destitution. How much thought do we give to those who struggle so courageously in areas of conflict to attain some academic space? The students in Sarajevo who have spent academic terms without electricity, dodging sniper fire, instruct us in a very powerful way in the values we take for granted.
Earlier this month I visited the National University of Rwanda at Butare, the second city of that country. The Rector gave me what he called "a short summary" of the effect of the genocidal killing of up to 1 million people between April and July, 1994, on the University itself. Fifty professors were killed and about 150 members of the administrative and technical staff. Six hundred students were massacred on the campus and about 1,000 students were killed off campus. There was demolition, plundering and looting of libraries, laboratories, computers, office materials and even records. The Rector then referred to the recent return to Rwanda of refugees who had fled during an earlier conflict in 1959, as posing another problem:
"After the repatriation of refugees, our University received many students from anglophone countries, and this forced the government to adopt a bilingual system of French and English, which caused serious problems as all our professors are francophones, and our libraries don't have enough manuals in English".
Just as we defend the academic space in our own countries, so, too, we must support and extend it in others.
In the developing world, there is not only a shortage of resources, but a pressure of numbers on a scale never experienced in the more fortunate quarters of the globe. The opportunities for creating new forms of partnership between the information-rich and the information-poor seem to be lost sight of, as each sector becomes preoccupied with its own struggle. If higher education therefore, both as a concept and as a reality, is not to end up divided and conquered by short-term considerations, is it not time for those who believe most passionately in its essential values and principles to voice and defend them in committed and accessible language and actions?
An enormous change is coming to all of us, which must revolutionise our ideas of both education and exchange. Even as I speak today about distance between developed and developing world, there is another distance which is adding to itself every hour in a mysterious way. Our name for it at the moment is cyberspace. But it may not be the right name. Indeed we have not found a name for a huge and mythic expanse which opened up slowly and yet suddenly, where packets of information are switched and retrieved, retrieved and passed on, are returned and added to. Where vast amounts of information and expertise, and reference and knowledge, are seething in a darkness we need to define and control. We also need to harness it in a way which equalises opportunities.
Is it not time to develop further the concept of the academic space as an area in which, relatively free from more mundane or short-term preoccupations, the quality of human existence becomes the paramount consideration? To do otherwise may carry with it the risk of creating a society driven by economics but devoid of values - not that values are anywhere universally agreed or subscribed to, but that there is a vital need to attempt to define them, to argue about them, and to establish an authentically human set of national and international priorities.
I believe this could well be of some considerable significance to the relationships that can, or should exist, between institutions of higher education in the developed and the developing worlds. It is certainly the case, for example, that declining numbers in the traditional university institutions offer more opportunities than ever before for students from the developing world.
I am aware that there is a legitimate argument between those who believe that this is the best way forward, and those who believe that academic and educational outreach is more properly situated in the developing world itself, rather than simply as an adjunct to existing institutions. It is an argument which may take different forms within different disciplines, or within different sets of international relationships. It is an argument which is often heavily overlain by politics, by the still discernible outlines of a colonial past, or by the complicated international questions of intellectual property rights and technology transfer.
No matter what side of that particular argument is taken, however, there can be agreement that the concept of academic space, remarkably unencumbered by cultural and ideological baggage, could be one of the most valuable and enduring forms of academic exchange between our two worlds. And in the process of exporting it, as it were, to institutions and generations where its implantation is accompanied by difficulties we have not experienced for generations, we may rediscover its significance for ourselves.
Academic freedom - a term which I have consciously avoided up to now, because it has come to carry so many questionable connotations - is an essential attribute of this academic space. It is not, as some of its detractors would have it, the freedom for academics to write their own cheques (a view which I believe is held in some quarters!) but essentially a freedom which exists as the servant of other, ultimately more important freedoms: freedom from want, freedom from tyranny, freedom from fear, freedom to build a future.
This is the yardstick by which the academic spaces you are continually creating and hope to defend will ultimately be judged. You will be judged by generations not yet born, and in the light of criteria which are perhaps not yet more than faintly visible. This in a sense is why you cannot justify, in narrow cost-benefit terms, all that you do, all that you seek, all that you attempt. But that is also why it is so essential that you should continue in the search to define, to defend, and to develop that essential territory in your institutions where human aspirations and human capabilities can meet and grow together.
As the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh put it, with an economy I cannot hope to emulate:
To be dead is to stop believing in
The masterpiece we will create tomorrow.