The death of universities

Terry Eagleton
Academia has become a servant of the status quo. Its malaise runs so much deeper
than tuition fees

Friday 17 December 2010 22.00 GMT

Last modified on Tuesday 3 June 201415.40 BST
Are the humanities about to disappear from our universities? The question
is absurd. It would be like asking whether alcohol is about to disappear from
pubs, or egoism from Hollywood. Just as there cannot be a pub without
alcohol, so there cannot be a university without the humanities. If history,
philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their
wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But
it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be
deceptive to call it one.
Neither, however, can there be a university in the full sense of the word
when the humanities exist in isolation from other disciplines. The quickest
way of devaluing these subjects short of disposing of them altogether is
to reduce them to an agreeable bonus. Real men study law and engineering,
while ideas and values are for sissies. The humanities should constitute the
core of any university worth the name. The study of history and philosophy,
accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for
lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties. If the
humanities are not under such dire threat in the United States, it is, among
other things, because they are seen as being an integral part of higher
education as such.
When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th
century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to
foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had
precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were
more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under
siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set
somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that
humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the
humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.
From time to time, as in the late 1960s and in these last few weeks in
Britain, that critique would take to the streets, confronting how we actually
live with how we might live.

What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as

centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been
to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition,
imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions
of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of
the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by
insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be
central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of
Rembrandt or Rimbaud.
In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how
indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the
whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some
poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.
How can this be achieved in practice? Financially speaking, it can't be.
Governments are intent on shrinking the humanities, not expanding them.
Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our
economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry,
which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally
incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the
question of student fees.
IZVOR: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/deathuniversities-malaise-tuition-fees