The President of the Republic of Ireland has issued a warning that the "ruin" of the university tradition is "at hand", with scholarship and teaching threatened by authoritarian politicians and subordination to "utilitarian reductionism" From the market. Ideology.
Michael Higgins, a poet and former Irish labor politician who had a brief career as a professor of sociology, suggested that all incoming students should be taught in a module on the role of universities.
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"Universities such as sites, sources and learning experiences have been under a continuous attack "He warned the delegates to the conference, which was organized by academics at risk and all European academies.
While Higgins addressed the most recent assault on the Academic Freedom of Ascending Authorities, he argued that free research has been under pressure for decades from an impulse to convert universities into organizations "driven by the market".
Universities "have suffered a range of rank and depth, loss of interdisciplinary exchange, which leads to too many cases to a degradation of the scholarship and the teaching by which they were established," he said.
such the adjustments have generally been rationalized as an inevitable search of relevance, often on behalf of the market forces and the inexorable impulse towards a utilitarian reductionism that is now so widespread, "he continued.
An ideology of "non-restrictions domain" has taken HO LD, he said, and squeezed space at universities to ask any questions "beyond those of a close utility." googleg.cmd.push (function () googleg.display ("dfp-ad-article_in_article");) Do you want to announce? Click here
The teaching of the economy, for example, had degraded with the questions of the "moral economy" through "political economy" to now simply be a "technical training in the measurement".
A point to presidents and university rectors who "often describe and present themselves as CEO of multi-million dollar companies, instead of academics, first of all". "
For centuries, the universities had headed" new movements of thought, new paradigms of existence. "But with this reason to be threatened, Higgins speculated if the universities could become" the tourist attractions of the future ".
" It is not an exaggeration, I think, to make the argument that the ruin of the University tradition, for a process of wear, surrenders to the calm hegemony of what is really inexplicable, is at hand, "he said.
He defended tenure as" essential "to academic freedom and He lamented the "precarity of so many scholars".
Higgins also made a concrete suggestion: "Teach a module on the nature and role of the university, including the cornerstone of academic freedom, to all students incoming university students, raising awareness of the importance of such freedom. "
The philosopher, political critic and linguist Noam Chomsky, who warned that the degradation of academic freedom and independent thinking in universities has always been a Concern. - The critics COS lamented the fact that many intellect. Ubles had aligned to encourage their respective governments in the First World War, or the Vietnam War in the sixties and seventies.
But still, academic freedom had been cut by a switch in the 1980s away from the state.
