Democratising Academia

Academia has been the subject of significant criticism in recent times. In the UK the Browne Report calls on universities to follow a market model, with student "consumers" deciding on which courses will and will not be taught. This is based on the ludicrous idea that only that which 18 year olds find appealing should be taught. This is a recipe for hugely undermining universities' ability to produce graduates who are culturally literate with the intellectual depth to apply analytical and intellectual skills in a range of situations. 


My own experience of studying law has been that there were a number of course such as tort and contract that I found boring and would not have chosen to study. However, the background knowledge of the overall nature of the legal system that these courses gave me has proved indispensable in allowing me to properly analyse the subjects, such as constitutional law and EU law, that I would have chosen to study anyway.


As was shown by the exodus of British students from foreign language learning that followed the removal of the requirement to study languages beyond the age of 14, young people, if given the chance, will avoid courses that require initial effort to build up basic skills in favour of those that offer more immediate gratification. A market-based approach is a surefire way to further undermine the idea of a shared public culture and is a further move to promote the individualistic, consumerist ethic that has done so much damage in recent decades.


More defensible have been critiques that argue that academics have become excessively narrow and jargon-focused in their writing http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/30/nick-cohen-higher-education-cuts. I tend to agree that this has happened and that academics should definitely minimise the jargon. I think the resort to jargon (particularly in literature and social sciences) is probably a status anxiety based reaction to the loss of social status that academics have undergone in the context of the glorification of money making that has occurred over the past few decades. 


That doesn’t make it justifiable (actually I think it is self-defeating and makes this status loss more acute). However, it is also important to resist the notion that academic writing should aspire above all at being "accessible" and should aim to secure the widest possible audience.

To break new ground academic authors often need to take as read, a large amount of material that most people don’t have the inclination or time to have read or thought about. They should make their work as open as possible to as large a number as possible, but producing new knowledge and critiques will often require focusing on limited audiences if nuance is not to be lost or if new material is not to drown amidst hundreds of pages of explanation of context.

There needs to be room in culture for that which most people find boring and inaccessible. Public policy and culture are already saturated with market ideas based on giving consumers what they want and the ability to withstand the pressure to appeal to narrower audiences is one of the more useful capabilities still possessed by universities (indeed, outside academia I would probably prefer public broadcasters like the BBC to be less democratic and to focus more on high culture even at the cost of lower ratings).


That said, specialisation in academia, caused partly by the huge increase in available knowledge brought about, inter alia,  by the internet, has made many academics unduly narrow in their focus. Juergen Habermas argued last year that to make a useful contribution to public intellectual life, commentators need to be willing to speak about subjects in which they do not specialise http://www.dublin.diplo.de/Vertretung/dublin/de/06/GI/Habermas__Veranstaltung.html. This brings the risk of making errors but that is one that must be accepted. 


I have met a heartbreaking number of academics who have no interest in broader issues or public life and who are only ever willing, even in private conversations, to venture views on their extremely narrow area. This seriously undermines the social value of academia. It is not a profession of technical experts like medical doctors or engineers, but a group who are meant to provide a broader intellectual approach that enriches public life and public culture. However, if undergraduate students are to learn only that that is immediately appealing to 18 year olds, the academics of the future are likely to be even more narrowly focused than their contemporary equivalents.