UK: Demanding ruling mantras of higher education

There is a special kind of British humor that is very good at finding the absurd in everyday life. It draws our attention to much of what we take for granted only by the tone or raising an eyebrow. One of these may be enough to effectively place afraid quotes around a cliche be; or draw our attention to something critical, and we laugh at the absurdity of a sudden that once seemed authoritative.

Professor Robin Briggs of All Souls College, Oxford University, is a master of this very British combination of comedy and criticism.

In South Africa, the TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture at the University of Cape Town, it was with shining eyes, he intoned the ruling mantras past usually for sanity in the global higher education policy.

He began his lecture by repeating the words of the former British Minister of Education David Blanket: ". Higher education generates the research, knowledge and skills to support innovation and change in the economy and the wider community"

This statement suggested Briggs was "blameless enough" unless - and here he paused with the timing necessary to all comedy - "unless you're allergic to truisms is".

From there, he went on the importance of some of the "unstated logical consequence" of the central idea of ​​a 'knowledge economy' Blanket’s stressed, and particularly narrow perspective attend higher education that it sets.

From this perspective - that Briggs carefully qualified as neo-liberal, all suggesting that neo-liberal doctrine amounted to little more than a "work very rhetorical tricks and buzzwords" - the "essential mission of higher education is to generate economic growth, ignores the complex reality of the broader social functions of systems of higher education.

In the end, in Blanket et all’s fixed idea, rather than serving the public good, higher education is aimed to benefit the private pocket.

This narrowing of traditionally broad and diverse social functions of the university, it is yet another industry "with a direct economic impact." Broad educational mission of the university is construed as a purely professional, with a "job training for specific occupations" as its central aim.

Meanwhile touch the core of the university production, research, effectively limited to knowledge "potential industrial and commercial outcomes", with a significant downsizing of "blue skies research and almost anything in the humanities."

Argument with the appeal to evidence characteristic of the historian, Briggs suggested a more complex reality is accepted as neo-liberal vision.

The actual evidence, he argued, have suggested that over "large parts of the labor market employers continue to have a preference for basic literacy, numeracy and analytical skills, with recruits trained on the job rather than to express during their formal training."

Similarly, the historical record shows that "research and development have a very clear relationship to wealth generation" and Briggs roundly criticized recent attempts in Britain to the measure of an impact 'as a measure of research value lies.