Commentary No. 27, November 1, 1999
"The Future of the University System"
We tend to talk of the university as an institution whose origins are in medieval Europe. This is a nice myth. However, in reality, the medieval university ceased flourishing circa 1500 and petered out in the three centuries following that. What we have today was created virtually ab novo in the nineteenth century in western Europe and North America and diffused as an institution to the rest of the world, slowly for a century and spectacularly after 1945.
The modern university had several features which are distinctive. The faculty consists of full-time paid professionals, who are drawing the bulk of their income from their work in the university. The students are for the most part full-time and are pursuing specific degrees. The university is divided into faculties that are in turn divided into departments. Faculty and students tend to be assigned to particular departments, and departments are supposed to incarnate "disciplines," that is, circumscribed subject matter that is specialized and intellectually coherent. Universities are not only the major instrument of the reproduction of knowledge but also of the main locus of its production.
This description of an ideal type needs to be historicized. As of 1750, what constitute today the "arts and sciences" were all taught within a single Faculty of Philosophy, in which professors held "chairs" - each of which had a specific title which was not necessarily that which would be held by a successor. It was about this time that there crystallized a deep split in the world of knowledge, to which we refer today as the "divorce" between science and philosophy, or as the "two cultures." It is important to understand how extraordinary this was. Nothing like it had previously existed in the Western world or indeed in any other part of the world. It was now being proclaimed that there were two entirely different modes of knowing. On the one hand, there was designated a so-called scientific mode in which one learned via empirical examination of reality and stated the results of one's examinations in generalizations as wide as the evidence permitted. And on the other hand there was designated a so-called humanistic mode in which one learned through hermeneutic empathy and in which generalizations were frowned upon.
What resulted was a two-century-long epistemological feud, in which each side at the minimum scorned the other and at the maximum deprecated it as bearers of useless or irrelevant knowledge. Furthermore, whereas previously the search for the true and the search for the good and the beautiful were inseparable duties of the scholar, the two epistemologies divided up these tasks. Science assumed sole responsibility for the search for the true and the humanities were accorded sole rights over the good and the beautiful. The social sciences emerged as the domain of the study of social reality, a domain contested by the two epistemologies. The social sciences were torn apart by this so-called Methodenstreit between nomothetic and idiographic approaches to knowledge.
Each side began to construct its citadels within the university system, creating appropriate faculties, within which were erected multiple departments representing supposed disciplines. Faculty and students were virtually imprisoned within these disciplinary boundaries, and a whole set of corollary institutions emerged to reinforce these boundaries: cursus of studies, degrees labeled by disciplines, journals bearing the names of the disciplines in which faculty from that discipline were expected to publish and only there, national and international congresses and associations of the disciplines, and even library classifications.
The whole structure was in place as of 1945. By this time, science had won its prestige battle with the humanities, and was recognized as the superior form of knowledge, receiving social rewards not only in the form of honors but in the form of money. Science laid claim to being socially useful, indeed indispensable, in producing technology that fostered economic growth and permitted a better quality of life. However, as soon as this structure was finally in place, it began to suffer from overload.
The separateness of the multiple disciplines began to be challenged as intellectually incorrect, as heuristically creating impediments to knowledge, and as socially harmful. Furthermore, the incredible expansion of the world university system in the period 1945-1970 created an enormous pressure for scholars to find niches in which to distinguish themselves. There began a process of massive "poaching" on neighboring "disciplines" in the search for such niches, and soon what had been clear separations between the "disciplines" as of 1945 became muddied arenas of overlap and confusion.
In the meantime, the concept of two cultures began to be undermined from both ends of the epistemological divide. Within the natural sciences emerged the advocates of the sciences of complexity, who challenged Newtonian dynamics and all its corollaries: linearity, time-reversibility, determinism, equilibria. They began to argue for a science based on the opposite premises and talked of the "arrow of time" and of the "end of certainties." Within the humanities emerged the multiple advocates of cultural studies who challenged the traditional stance of the humanities with its emphasis on the importance of universal canons that were to be elaborated and transmitted. They insisted on the social context of all cultural production and reception, and therefore of its variability over time and space. What was happening is that both these knowledge movements were transforming the magnetic field of knowledge from one that was centrifugal to one that was centripetal. Their work has been pushing the world of knowledge towards overcoming the two cultures.
At the same time, the world university system has been coming into a long-run financial squeeze. The global cost of tertiary education has become a major element of social allocation of wealth, and since 1970 the states and other donors of funds have been looking for ways to reduce the ever-expanding costs of tertiary education. One principal mechanism being proposed everywhere is what may be called the "high-school-ization" of the university system: fewer teachers for more students, simplification, standardization, and increased control of curricula, along with de-emphasis on research. This trend will probably not slow down over the next half century.
This has begun to push leading scholars outside the university system - to institutes of advanced study, academies of science, private research structures, and work for large corporations. This tendency will probably accelerate in the next 25 years, stripping the university systems of some of their best scholars. More importantly, it may signal the end of the role of the university as the locus of the production of knowledge.
This is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad. But it does mean that, at a moment of fundamental epistemological reconstruction of the world of knowledge, the university may no longer be where the action is at. We will then need to wonder whether scholars will be sheltered in the new institutional settings from too great pressure to produce short-term advantage for their funders, whether the states or the private economic interests. The century ahead may be as great a reconstruction of the world of knowledge as was the period 1750-1850.
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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