“My thesis is that stories emerge out of places
and they then make sure that they are
told”
(Wenders, 2004,
293)
Instead
of an Introduction – The University in search of a story-teller
The more I think
about this quotation, the more convinced I am that the University choose me to
tell its story. Following Bion’s groundbreaking idea that thoughts are looking
for a thinker (Bion, 1997, 27), then it also seems possible that places and the
stories connected to them are searching for a story teller. Following Wenders,
I assume that the
The question for
me was how I could become such a story-teller who transcends the story and
tells it so that it comes to consciousness. On the one hand, I have much
experience as a member of this organisation in different roles (e.g. as a
student, student assistant or scientific assistant). On the other hand, I have
been working with students for more than 5 years in my role as scientific
assistant together with Burkard Sievers. The experiences we create with
students are special, because of our application of socio
The following
story of the University Wuppertal is an attempt to look at the “crisis of
universities” (Stölting & Schimank, 2001) – not an entirely new phenomenon.
The focus is on illustrating the psychodynamic tendencies of the contemporary
culture of the Department of Economics in order to gain an understanding of the
dramatic and overwhelming changes characteristic of the university landscape.
The following comments refer primarily to the Department of Economics being
part of the
University culture
and its discontents
The title of this paper is based
upon Freud’s important work (Freud, 1930/1968) on
the individual’s discontent – according to him, it results from a suppression
of base instincts imposed upon human beings by each culture – I, however,
assume that discontent is socially induced. Following this idea the discontents
of the university’s culture do not primarily result from the individual’s necessary
suppression of base instincts, but from special structures and conditions as
well as from unconscious processes and behaviour caused by these conditions.
When one goes further into the
question of the University’s traditional views, it becomes clear that they are
inseparable from the picture of the “alma mater”. Literally translated, alma
mater means “nurturing mother”. Originally the expression stood for the nurturing
and blessing mother of god in ancient
Considering these
issues from the psychological perspective of the ideal self, the university
takes over the function of a mother or a maternal imago, which is an image of
the ideal mother. It becomes clear that the ‘maternal’ university does not
differentiate between its children according to achieved success but loves them
all as they are. Recognition in this mother’s eyes means unconditional love,
but not respect. (Schwartz, 1993, 202)
Even if today this
characterisation seems exaggerated, one must, however, ask the question: how
much love does this university have for its children? From the students’
perspective, there is no feeling of love and security, professors are
transformed into unknown beings and the cafeteria’s food is not exactly
comparable to mother’s cooking. Nowadays, Universities are at best “stepmothers
or uncaring mothers” of the academic ‘offspring’ as well as for the teaching
staff (Goebel, 2003). There is no trace left of the original maternal love that
seems to have been used up.
It would be too
short-sighted to reduce the university to its ‘motherliness’. As Schwartz
points out, referring to the psychology of the super-ego, the university can also assume paternal functions. From
this perspective, the university resembles an arena of competition in which
respect based on performance can be achieved. In this case, the university
takes over the function of the father in preparing students to achieve
something in a world that is based on the rewards of good and bad work
(Schwartz, 1993, 202).
Both functions
influence each other, interrelate and ideally form an equilibrium. The previous
descriptions suggest that such an equilibrium is an ideal view that does not
exist in reality. Aspects of care, protection and support that can be connected
to the image of the mother are not in existence any more. This loss is even
more serious, as the containment, which is implied in the image of the mother
and her care for her children, has a special meaning for the learning and the
development of the children (in this case the students). French (1997) makes
this impressively clear in his description of the teacher (or the professor) as
a container for the anxieties of the pupils (and students). This containing
function enables pupils to get rid of their anxieties and be open for new experiences
that provide for learning and development. If contemporary universities are, at
best, stepmothers, then this indicates that the university has lost one of its
characteristic ideals.
Like almost all
contemporary organizations, the university is confronted by fundamental
societal changes. While in the early 90’s one thought that globalisation would
affect primarily companies, now it is clear that globalisation, accompanied by
‘economisation’ also affects universities. Finally, the influence of
globalisation in an increasingly complex world also affects the relationship
between universities and society. Whereas 18th and 19th century universities
and their famous thinkers always commented on actual societal problems, the
voices of contemporary universities and thinkers have fallen silent.
There are hints
that further ideals, such as „free thinking“ or the liberty of teaching and
learning, got lost and became unimportant. Sometimes I cannot help but think
that they not only became unimportant but were sacrificed to diametrically
opposed ideals.
Delving further in
this direction, the university is on its way to abandoning its entire original
constituent and distinguishing ideals and values and is turning into an
organisation with no original ideals. In a globalized world, which is
characterised by competition and in which a positive external presentation is
important, it is very important to show a positive image, despite the loss of the organisational ideals.
Since such an
image is difficult to realise or is non-existent, due to the missing organisational
ideal, it has to be created via a narcissistic self-perception. Totalitarian
organisational structures and behaviours serve as a good medium to create such
a self-perception. They result in passive organisational members with adapted
ways of thinking and behaviour, who do not advance their own opinions and who
do not form their own judgements. Thus, organisational members, without
realizing it, slowly become dependent on the organisation, which determines
what is right and what is wrong and finally determines what they should think. (Schwartz,
1987)
I would like to
show the existing totalitarian tendencies at the university via some pictures.
On the one hand the pictures originate from social photo-matrices, a new method
offering an access to unconscious processes and dynamics with the help of
photos. In both cases over 150 pictures were taken of the university as a whole
and respectively of the department of economics as a preparation for the
matrices. The social photo-matrices included an association part and a
reflection part. At first the group associated to a part of the pictures chosen
at random. In the following reflection session the associations were connected
to each other and to the issue (for a detailed description see Sievers 2006a,
2006b.) The basic intention of the matrix is to develop relationships and
connections via the associations in order to understand (in the subsequent
reflection meetings) the organisation and to enable new thinking about the
organisation.
On the other hand, the pictures drawn by students reflect the internal picture of the university or the department. The fact that the drawn and the photographed pictures link similar themes and associations respectively is a sign for me that unconscious parts of a culture affecting the university as a whole can be found in them.
The following
pictures raise the question of whether the university is actually much like the
reality of a modern prison. The bars that can be found very often and the
fences as well as the long and partly dark hallways that one has to walk
through clearly suggest a prison atmosphere (Fig. 1 and 2).
Fig. 1: picture of social photo-matrix Fig. 2: Student picture with the
topic “Organisational shadow”
The associations
show this clearly:
- "Where shall one take refuge? Always along the wall? With the
head through the wall."
- "What does the next prison cell look like?"
- "Everything is barred and fenced in."
- "Like a view out of a prison cell."
- "The bars were painted again and again so that one can bear it."
- "A castle prison."
- "The dungeon in an ivory tower."
The pictures and
the associations clarify a further characteristic that is closely linked to
totalitarian organisations; their lovelessness. The following two pictures
(Fig. 3 and 4) express this.
Fig. 3: picture of social photo-matrix shadow Fig. 4: student
picture with the topic “organisational
This
characteristic turned up in a further association describing the university as
„buildings made with precast concrete slabs”. A grey, ugly, run-down and dirty
building was presented which had a repulsive effect and does not look
welcoming. Another association to an occupied
house whose cladding is dropping off and no one cares about it is
similar.
Nearly all of the
photos as well as the painted pictures of the university and its buildings seem
miserable and lifeless. The respective associations enhance this impression.
Even if the reality that the pictures show is difficult to bear and one finds
oneself thinking “this can’t be a university”, it seems somehow understandable
as it represents a central part of the university’s history. They (the pictures) reflect a long lasting
struggle against misjudgement and for recognition and make clear it’s
culturally internalised basic assumptions. The university apparently seems
unable to give love, recognition, or affection beyond structurally-functional
requirements, because it has never experienced it.
Beyond this, the
pictures and associations seem to confirm to a certain degree the hypothesis
that the missing ideals are compensated for by the narcissistic self-image
based on totalitarian structures and behaviours. Although the associations to
totalitarianism are related to the buildings, they can also be understood
differently. If one works with the presented hypothesis, the associations to
totalitarianism can also be understood as a projection of one’s own
totalitarian tendencies that should not become conscious.
Therefore test who
wants to bind himself forever…
My
first working hypothesis assumes that contemporary universities are
characterised by a loss of opportunities for. Referring to my own experiences
and observations, this lack of identification can be found on different levels.
Neither the students are able to identify with their role as students nor are they
able to experience solidarity with other fellow students. Moreover, there is no
relationship or connection with their professors as well as to their own
department or the university as a whole. The immediate consequences of this ‘missing
connection’ and disintegration are fragmentation and disorganisation. They can
be found on the level of course offerings and the content of study as well as
on the level of roles, creating further anxieties and uncertainties.
Societal
developments that shape the students’ world as well as changes in the
university landscape have, without doubt, an influence on this development. The
“normal student” of twenty years ago who was single, did not live with his
parents and was in the first degree
widespread ?, is nowadays more and more an obsolete model (Brendel,
Metz-Göckel, 2002). Many students disagree with the idea that the university is
not only a university, but beyond this the ‘real world’. Their reality is
characterised by two or more different areas of interest (study, family,
relationship, job, etc.). All this needs to be taken into account. The
requirements that need to be fulfilled turn life into a balancing act in which
they have to decide according to the situation and set again and again new
priorities.
Moreover
the identification with the student’s role and the studies respectively is
undermined by the rapidly increasing importance of the labour market,
especially in the subject of economics. Extremely deteriorating? professional
perspectives result in a challenge to the studies themselves. As a consequence,
from the beginning, the students are trying to be close to the labour market to
find early access and to improve their professional chances. The students
mainly (if not entirely) organise the structure of their studies according to
the demands of the labour market and the potential use of their professional
chances.
Today’s reality and the importance of the labour market are revealed in
the following two comments of students:
“The studies are mainly characterised
by disinterest; you study not because of the subject but because of the
career.”
“At the beginning of the studies,
you already plan according to the wishes of the employer; at the moment
controlling seems very promising on the labour market.”
Students are more
often confronted by sustained impressions of fragmentation and feelings of
being torn apart, so that beyond fragmentation and disintegration one can speak
about an erosion of the student’s role.
This fragmentation creates the
view that the best way to cope with their studies is on their own. „University
studying with the aim to receive a degree is exclusively understood as an
individual matter, as if the students would say: It is my reward and I achieved
it at a place I would barely dare to call “my university”. (Sievers, 2006b, 20).
It
is no surprise that the student – professor relationship is affected by the
consequences of this missing identification. Therefore, it becomes increasingly
less important where and what one studies, but also under which professor. Not
long ago it was important to study under certain experts and often it was a
reason to change one’s university but currently it is not
important under whom one studies. The important thing is to get a good degree.
The idea that students need a teacher to admire or to look up to is antiquated
and behind the times. The current mentality seems to change radically as formal
criteria gain considerably more importance than the contents or people. The
professors rarely counteract this avoidance, as teaching has always played an
inferior role to research. Thus, lectures – as the name might assume – are read
out, but without bringing the dry letters to life. Instead of this, students
are put in a passive role as it becomes evident that neither discussion and
criticism is demanded nor individual interests desired. Based on this
demonstration, the relationship between students and professors could be
characterised as “purpose-related indifference”.
The university as a whole is also
affected by the consequences of the non-existent identification. During a
reflection session following a social photo-matrix, it became clear that it is
nothing special to study in the lecture halls or seminar rooms of the
university. Students would rather stand out because of their old fashioned look
and deficits than to convey any kind of charm or flair. The indifference
mentioned before and often hidden behind structural requirements is not only
manifested in relationships but also characterises the university and its environs.
I would like to end my thoughts
with some comments concerning the significance of my own history and what it
might represent for the department and for the university as a whole. At many
sites I noticed that there is not any consciousness of history, only some
traditions exist and there is not any feeling for or idea of nostalgia. If I
could not reconstruct stories and events that concern the department or the
university by my own experience, I couldn’t obtain them. There were barely any
sources about the university’s history and an extensive search led to only two
results. On the university’s (web)side, there is a clinical fact-orientated
chronicle of the university’s history. In addition, there is an entry about the
It is certainly true that the
university was founded until the beginning of the 70’s and therefore does not
have a long history and linked traditions. The fact that generations studied at
this university is rather an exception. Nevertheless I have asked myself again
and again what makes it so difficult to recognize a more than thirty year long
history and to be proud of it. If I consider my own experiences it becomes
clear that knowledge about the university’s history – if it produces interest –
is developed with the entry into the university and gets inevitably lost with a
successful ending of the studies. It seems as if there was nothing existing
before the entry. If one follows this thought then the university represents a
place without memories. The acceptance of memory, a consciousness for history
and tradition seems to threaten the present so strongly that it cannot be
admitted. As a defence mechanism to this threat, the past is not valued
I am experiencing
this treatment of things that belong to
the scrap heap - its increasing devaluation and insignificance - at the
moment of a chair’s upcoming retirement. Devaluation does not refer to personal
deficits or bad task fulfilment but results in a couple of questions: Maybe the
past is not valued and its history is not told because the remembrance of old
virtues is not wanted? Is the history not valued because one would like to
delete it so as not to be reminded of its black spots? Is the history not
valued because it is not worth being valued?
Of course it is
difficult to be proud of a history that was characterised especially in its
founding years by a battle for recognition. Based on the background of the
working hypothesis this would mean that the university was not (and still is
not) able to give identification because it has been fighting for it since its
foundation. Thus a further perspective concerning the lifelessness and
indifference opens up. The lovelessness with which the university was founded
and the lack of recognition are projected onto the students and become a part
of them. The lovelessness that the mother experienced is projected onto her
children and makes the missing identification a bit more understandable.
About the students’
loneliness at the university
With my second
working hypothesis I follow the previous explications and try to clarify them.
Not least because of the missing identification possibilities I assume that
wide areas of the university culture are characterised by non-relationship and
anonymity. Above all, on the students’ side (but not only there) the reciprocal
effect of missing identification, non-relationship and anonymity leads to
feelings of loneliness, helplessness and deficiency. These feelings do not have
a space in the university and they are not shown because nobody deals with
them. Finally, they lead to a passive and lethargic attitude leading to further
anxieties.
This hypothesis
has its origin in the second social photo-matrix. As with probably most of the
participants, I remember well being surprised to see that there were not any
people in most of the pictures. We did not expect this as the university is
“people-orientated” to a considerable extent. Again and again reflection
sessions started with comments like “it
is astonishing that there are not any people in the pictures” or “we haven’t seen any people pictures today”.
Whereas the mainly people-free pictures, make a sad and unlively impression,
releasing at first a certain degree of fear or even giving us the creeps they
were, nevertheless, quickly taken for granted. The initial perturbation and
astonishment quickly changed to a feeling of “apparently that’s normal” which
was accepted.
In the course of
time the idea came up that recurring deserted pictures could indicate a sort of
internalised basic assumption. If you follow the pictures, that often showed
funny and creative details, then objects are the most important. People were
not shown very often which could indicate that subjects have an inferior
importance. The more pictures we saw, the clearer it was that there was another
basic assumption behind the pictures. It is expressed in the idea that a
businesslike rational objectivity is the focused aim which can only be achieved
when subjectivity is ignored and suppressed as far as possible. A student
expressed this with the words: “The University
is made for the sciences not for the people”.
Another access to
the meaning of the deserted pictures became clear in a reflection session. In
the course of the reflection setting it became clear that it was important to
the photographers to stay incognito while taking photos of people. There were a
couple of photos in the lecture halls for example that were taken from the back
showing only the students’ backs. Another participant explained the origin of a
photo with a person as follows: “I took a photo out of an open door of a lift,
suddenly someone ran through the picture”. It became clear that pictures with
people were only taken coincidently or had to be taken secretly. This enabled
us to see the recurring deserted pictures as an expression of an immense inhibition
about getting in contact with other organisational members. The prevailing
shame about taking photos of working and studying people as well as the timidity
to take photos of fellow students or professors caused a feeling of the
importance of the prevailing non-relationship. Even photos showing people
support this non-relationship. Photos with people made clear (for example in
front of the library or the cafeteria) that there was not any contact or
relationship between them. If there are contacts in the university context then
they are formalised and impersonally goal-orientated to a large extent.
Both the
structural unification and the prevailing individualization, understood as a
withdrawal into one’s own self, lead to the fact that studying is not
experienced as something one has in common with others. The adoption of new
knowledge is individualized in the first place. Research is done via the
computer or transferred from reference books and accumulated. The following
picture (Fig. 5) shows how far this individualization has progressed and that
it has already become a sort of institutionalised idea.
Fig.5: photo of social photo-matrix
It shows (study)
cubicles in the library in which the individual student can learn separately
and undisturbed by other students. Since there are few possibilities to pause
and to exchange ideas – neither in the library nor in the entire university –
it is thus made clear that the way of learning supported by the university is: “You learn alone”. As a consequence the certainty
is gained that each student can only manage his/her studies alone and that he
or she should not rely on others. This leads to the creation of „lonely
strangers“ or in other words "lonely students“, who manage their studies
on their own. It contributes to the fact that students become
"self-made-men" (and women) negating others and thus are well
prepared for the labour marked and future careers as managers. From another
perspective, which is even more alarming, the focus on individual performances and
rewards and the perception of studies as an exclusively individual matter
expresses a denial of the dimension and importance of the collective. The
adoption of new knowledge as a common search and accumulation process is not
thinkable or imaginable.
The
non-relationship and the loneliness due to having to fend for oneself,
especially against the background of big crowds leads to manifold anxieties on
the students’ side. While trying to understand new theories, ideas or models,
students often experience their own shortcomings and reach their limits. On the
one hand, anxieties arise not to gain the often idealized professor’s or
lecturer’s recognition and appreciation. On the other hand, these experiences
and anxieties lead to failure in exams and confront the students with the
question of whether they are good enough for the aspired goal. Set backs and
backwardness behind the demanded norms creates the omnipresent fear of not
being able to get a job. Fears of not being able to manage it in real life if
it does not even work at the university are the consequence. But the worst fear
is to get lost in the crowd of students and to be deleted wordlessly out of the
book of university-life without anyone noticing.
If one believes the associations, then survival on
a collective level is only possible by a common and collective feeling of
sadness in this culture. It seems that the university culture generates a sort
of uneasiness and discontent due to the uncontained anxieties and feelings. How
little is received from the
University
incorporated
Within my third
and last working hypothesis I am proceeding from the fact that the different
anxieties described above have not only a personal effect but show as well
social affectivity. Finally these social anxieties will become an impetus for
academic reform and changing processes.
Even though
universities have always been dependent on their environment – social,
political, and economic circumstances have an enormous influence on the university
– the dependency seems to have reached a new quality within recent years.
Uncertainties, imponderability, and chaos are no longer the exception, but the
rule. So, for example, examination and study regulations and even the structure
of faculties are changing with a frequency never known before. Besides all the social
changes it is most of all the ever-increasing growth of capitalism – mainly in its
destructive form – that is responsible for this. There are several public
organisations whose thinking is dominated by the capitalist paradigm:
hospitals, prisons, and nowadays even universities. No matter whether it is a
car factory or a university in both cases the same aims are disseminated and
exactly the same success criteria are applied. They are named ‘profit
maximization’ with ‘reduction of expenses’ at the same time. This likely
perpetual preceding of capitalism leads – referring to the universities and
their departments – to the fact that students, professors, deans, and
presidents are confronted at a considerable degree with the finiteness and
transience of their organization. Consolidations, restructurings, dissolutions,
and reducing of financial resources - actually anxieties belonging to other
contexts (most of all entrepreneurial) - will show them again and again this
finiteness and will increase the demands that are put on them.
Reactions to these
changing environmental conditions are based on the belief that these existing
problems can easily be solved if only universities were structured and m
The application of
economic rationalism might make sense if the problem were primarily an economic
one. However what if the primary problem is a social one? With these words I do
not want to deny that the financing of universities as well as of education as
a whole has to be sustainable. This can, however, be a problem if the
narcissistic potential of the pure numbers and thereupon financial resp.
economical questions will – without being scrutinized – become a superior
subject of activity, to whom everything is subordinated. Taking into account
this growing economic thinking into the dimensions of activity, the
glorification of economic thinking and m
So the university
is alienating itself more and more from its initial aim and is becoming a
functioning organization that shall create certain products. A female student
is emphasizing this development: "If
I am looking out of the window, I see a grey front, dirty and ugly, that looks
like a laboratory where students are grown up as prototypes that are searched
and needed by the early market economy. If one follows this perspective, then
universities are becoming suppliers for business enterprises that shall provide
utilizable human capital and thereupon create career." One can only agree
with Höpfl who is intimating that universities (in the near future Business
Schools) are no longer places of learning and also do not declare this. They
are enterprises that are working according to the tayloristic principles of
standardization, measurability, and control (Höpfl 2005, 66).
A future scenario
that is not to far away could then be read as follows: In universities that are
similar to learning factories, students who have become customers are demanding
the product "knowledge".
It can be seen
that in the "customer's aspect" of the student's role, that until now
has only been noticed marginally, is expanding to an emphasis of the role that
is overlapping all other parts and is making them increasingly meaningless.
Students, who don't have to learn how to learn any more, because knowledge has
become a demandable and saleable product, will notice that this knowledge will
become antiquated very soon. Fundamental reasons for this antiquated knowledge
can be seen in the fact that they are notable to relate their knowledge to
their work environment and that they don't have the necessary experience to
learn in a special work environment (Long 2000, 14 f.) Finally students within
a culture that appreciates final results more than developing and learning
processes will become a (mass) product themselves. In fear of potential
unemployment students submit themselves to the rules of the labour market,
following the belief that they can better place themselves on the labour market
if they themselves become a product in demand.
The university – a
non-place?
Concerning this
matter I would like to put the focus – in respect of the reflections mentioned
above – on the university as a place. My thoughts are based on the following
working hypothesis: In view of my latest comments, it can be asked: Whereas the
university can be characterized as potential space by means of its initial
ideas, as they are expressed in the image of the "alma mater", a
certain development has been started, at the end of which universities will be
similar to the non-places resp. the non-places that have been described by
Augé.
As in many
If you regard the
roots of this concept, the relationship between mother and child, then it is
not astonishing that a potential space is only possible in connection with a
feeling of confidence (Winnicott 1971, 100, 103). If one is holding in mind oneself,
in this respect, the pattern of the university as "alma mater" that
has been subscribed before, then it is quite clear that the students' former
relation to the university had been characterized by dependence. The students
trusted in the good, nourishing mother university who took care of them in the
literal as well as in the metaphorical sense. They could not imagine that their
mother could abandon them or not be at their side. The actual culture of the
university, described above, presents itself as a culture without dependability.
Anonymity and unrelatedness are preventing a development of confidence and the
missing identification leads to the question, what can be relied upon here? If
any confidence exists, then it exists due to separation and individualization
into the person himself (the self-made man) or as a kind of trust in God, that
anyone is there who helps to understand the situation.
If one summarizes
these comments, then the university is increasingly characterized by situations
of non-relationship and non-experience. Relations will no longer be
established, experiences will be avoided, and significance that could result
from both of them will not be created. You may have the impression that present
universities do not provide any possibilities but, on the contrary, exclude
more and more possibilities. If one takes the previous comments concerning the
university culture seriously, and ascribes importance to this view of reality,
then it has illustrated an evolution in the university from ‘potential space’
to ‘the room of impossibilities’. The following comments as to
"non-places" can be understood as metaphor in order to build an
access to the room of impossibilities.
The French
philosopher Augé considers the appearance and the distribution of non-places as
a phenomenon of super-modernism. According to his opinion, the abundance of
time, space and individuality produces these non-places. For Augé a non-place
represents the opposite of an anthropological place. Whereas such an
anthropological place is characterized by history, identity, and relation, a
non-place has no identity and can be signified neither as relational nor as
historical. If one accepts these assumptions, then the university seems to have
developed as a paradigm of a non-place. A lack of identity opportunites and
changing ideals causes identity questions and are emerging as a current
identity vacuum. Relations and correlations are also diminishing or are only
available as a formal alternative. Whereas relations inside the university - which
for a long time have been an essential characteristic for the university - are increasingly
losing their meaning, outside university relations are undergoing a radical
change. If only 30 years ago the society has been the reference system of the
university, so today it is definitely the economy. Even the last condition that
signifies a non-place can still be seen as fulfilled for the
Augé´s description
of the non-place applies so well to the situation of the university. For him,
places of transit or at least with transitive character like e.g. airport,
railway station, or car are representing the prototypes of a non-place.
Following this idea, attributing to the university the criteria of a non-place
could indicate their increasingly transitive character. This could be an
indicator of how terrifyingly far the economization or the take-over of the
university by economy has spread. It seems to be the intention to guide the
students as through fast as possible and to produce more and more standardized
economists as requested by the enterprises.
While on the one
hand it is not amazing that you can find the dimension of non-places that Augé suggests
in relation to the university, it is, however, disenchanting and frightening on
the other hand. It is the inhumanity that changes the essential place into the non-place
and that stresses its typical character. Augé assumes that non-places lead to
human beings acting against their nature, that they are living in a kind of
inhuman situation. This inhumanity finds its expression in de-personalization,
non-staying, disobliging, and mechanical-impersonal communication. Such inhumanity
can also be found at the university. As the preceding comments have made clear,
anonymity and solitude are essential characteristics of the present university
culture.
Altogether,
non-places – the imagination of university as a non-place as well – make clear
complex mechanisms of effectiveness and function. In this sense non-places
sensitize for the process of abstraction, the relation that people have to their
environment. Furthermore, non-places are confronting to one's own, distressing
normal habits and demonstrate how much we are engaged by these often
unconscious habits. Finally, behind this non-place, the question is hidden, how
the sense of an individual life is grown from the global accesses(?) that
signify everybody's life. In case any answer is searched after the question,
this search takes place in the university context at an individual level. The
university and people learning and working in it seem to answer to this
question clearly. Individually, as well as collectively, they see no other
possibility but to submit themselves to the mostly global-economical
necessities.
"If I ever could turn the clocks backwards,
because how much of the things that I
know today,
I wish I had never seen them"
(from the song” Kein Zurück” of the band Wolfsheim)
"Indeed I
know a lot, but I want to know everything!"
(Goethe 1986, xx)
Hope against all
hopes
After all these
thoughts noted above, at the end of this paper I have difficulty not to decline
into the extremes of destructive hopelessness. This ambivalence, together with
the preceding discussion, could be made clear by the two citations above. If
one accepts at least part of the description of the university culture as real,
then this reality raises the unpleasant question to whom can studying actually
be recommended under these determining conditions? If once the eyes have been
opened to the reality for some of them, you cannot simply close them afterwards.
It is not possible to act as if nothing had happened before. So sometimes I
found myself thinking that I would have been better not to have experienced
some of these facets of university-cultural.
But even if
university life is no longer as good as our everyday perceptions are leading us
to believe, a reaction to these abuses cannot be in non-studying or closing
universities. In this context the second citation is dominant and pertains – if
one excludes the implied omnipotent fantasies – the meaning of discussion,
curiosity, and the demand of being understood. While the former comments have
only shown some facets of a university culture and the ensuing developments,
analysis, consciousness, and reflection upon these are absolutely necessary. If
the developments I have indicated continue unrestrained and unreflected, it
will certainly cause one of the most total changes of the university culture
ever. At the end of such developments, universities will no longer be recognisable.
For example, the
"area-wide" invention of business-oriented, short-time study
programmes such as the Bachelor model will change the role of the university
more sustainably than all reforms ever (Liessmann, 2006, 106). Thus, the
meaning of the university will be extinguished and will lead to the fact that
the reality of scientific education, measured by its own original demands, will
create the opposite. Thus universities do not only distance themselves from
their ideals concerning education, but are contributing to an essential degree to
the characterization of ‘non-education’ according to the philosopher Liessmann
(Liessmann 2006).
In this context
neither the absence of knowledge, nor certain forms of non-sophistication, are
the essential problem. The core of the problem is, rather, that in spite of an
intensive interaction with knowledge and its increasing importance, every
normative idea of education is missing. If the economization of the
universities is proceeding further and further, what can be seen by a growing
competition, financial restrictions, and (in consequence) the profit-maximizing
education of students, will thus lead to a loss of fundamental ideals.
Education is reduced to a simple learning and knowledge is reduced to a
characteristic of human capital. In a frightening manner this future scenario
makes clear that there will grow a sneaking economization of mind, which is not
only affecting in the university context, but all areas of life.
Even if the
present situation and the emerging development do not give cause for much hope,
for me there remains nothing else but to hope against all hopes. A part of this
hope is resulting from the experiences that I have had during the social photo
matrices. They have indeed shown to me the dark and deterrent sites of the
university culture, but furthermore they have shown the meaning and the
importance of common thinking and comprehension, and hence let grow the hope
that this is still possible in a few places. I can still remember very well an
association where the social photo matrix had been compared with the movie, "The
dead poets’ society". There, the underlying feeling was similar to the
pupils in the film; within the matrix it was possible to think beyond a given
frame. Maybe it is possible that the preoccupation with the university, enabled
by a social photo matrix, will become a germ cell, out of which something like
"the thinking students’ society" is originating. Such an association
could again make it possible to look at the world from different perspectives,
to appreciate non-conformity as a value and thus finally to adopt thinking.
Thinking would thus be liveable and relievable again and hence released a bit
from the clasp of scientific methods.
In light of the
former comments, even if this fantasy seems to be a naïve daydream, it also
points to the fact that not every kind of hope is dying. At least in fantasy,
another reality is still conceivable and possible. Nevertheless, there is no
other possibility than to confront oneself and to become aware of the shady
sides shown in this paper. Based on the feelings of frustration, desperation
and resignation that this realization is creating, by and by new perspectives
and new hopes can be developed. This is the only way it seems to be possible
that in the near future the university is changing into a place that gives
sense and identity.