Steve Fuller - The Academic Caesar: University Leadership is Hard

I always try to be ahead of the curve: I like to know our current position and then think how we should proceed to reach a desirable future. This assumes a general direction to history, which nevertheless remains open to the future and hence pliable to any of a number of ends and susceptible to any number of outcomes. It also means that my projections change as the data points defining the curve change. Consider it a 21st century update of John Maynard Keynes offhand remark that when the facts change, so does his mind. At the very least, this book should make it clear that the university as an idea will need to be reinvented if the assorted people, buildings and car parks that constitute universities are likely to continue to perform their current functions in the coming years. We do not live in a time especially friendly to the idea of the university, and so it will require a champion, the Academic Caesar. But before this figure can be unveiled, the stage needs to be set. It is the neo-liberal moment. What follows is my thinking through this moment, which I do more sympathetically than those who normally claim to defend the university these days.

Let me start with a general point about criticism. The capacity to realize an idea such as the university in a hostile environment is quite different from blaming the world when it fails to live up to its promises. Unfortunately the latter is too often what passes for critique these days, something which Freud dismissed as an infantile neurosis before he had heard of the Frankfurt School but had already heard of socialism. Critique can turn into a cure worse than its disease when pursued as an end in itself, which is to say, without any clear commitment to a feasible positive end. In that case, it fails to be the second moment of a purposeful dialectic, which is what critique was meant to be. It is worth recalling that in the Enlightenment, critics were irksome, first in art and then in politics, precisely because they suggested how an idea could have been better realized. They were the backseat drivers and Monday morning quarterbacks of their day. They dared to replay history to demonstrate an improved result. They did not dwell on factors beyond the artists control that would point to inevitable failure, no matter what he or she had done. Equally, they did not mourn missed political opportunities that will never return. Unfortunately, todays self-appointed critics strike just these more fatalistic poses, not least with regard to the future of the university.

I have been casting a critical eye on the future of academia ever since I started the interdisciplinary field of social epistemology thirty years ago, mainly because the university is the only institution expressly dedicated to producing knowledge as a public good. I shall regularly return to this point. However, as the political economy of higher education has changed, so too has my perspective. Until the early years of the post-Cold War era (say, up to 1995), I was focused on the tendency for disciplinary structures in universities to impede intellectual innovation and obscure public access to knowledge. As I used to put it: Disciplines are necessary evils the more necessary, the more evil. Thus, I have consistently been a champion of interdisciplinarity who has tried to lead by example (e.g. Fuller 1988, Fuller and Collier 2004). It helps to explain my efforts to overcome the legacy of Thomas Kuhn, whose standing as the most influential theorist of science of the second half of the 20th century based on Kuhn (1970) rested on a celebration of paradigms, his name for discipline-based inquiry (e.g. Fuller 2000b, Fuller 2003). As we shall see in , this vision remains alive and well in peer review, about which I also have serious reservations. My opposition to this general Kuhnification of academic life also helps to explain my rather positive disposition towards intellectuals, understood as inquirers who do not see academic inquiry as an end in itself but a means to greater public Enlightenment (Fuller 2005, Fuller 2009).