Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society, The

Journal of College Student Development, Nov/Dec 1998 by Bloland, Harland G

The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society

Anthony Smith and Frank Webster (Editors)

Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1997, 125 pages, $34.98 (softcover)

This is a volume of nine papers from a colloquium held in Great Britain in July, 1996. The purpose of the meeting was to reflect upon the momentous changes taking place in British universities. The participants were sociologists from the United Kingdom and the United States with a sprinkling of non-academics and nonsociologists.

The authors are in agreement on their common experience in a world of rapid, uncontrolled economic, political, cultural, and social change that is having profound effects on the nature, structure, legitimacy, purposes, and work of the university. They do not agree on the meaning of these changes or what to do in the face of them. The nature of jobs, the authors suggest, including those in academe, is changing, resulting in a significant decline in careers in bureaucracies and reduced job security in the new "flexible" organizational structures of this era. The information technology revolution has created a myriad of alternative means and places for educating postsecondary students which promise easy delivery of widespread, diverse, and accessible educational products and processes.

These are accompanied by increases in the number of students in higher education and growing student poverty. Ultra specialization fragments knowledge, and makes it exceedingly difficult for communication to take place not only between disciplines but within them. The result is the dissolution of integrative principles or unity of purpose for the university. The changes are viewed as endangering the place of the university as the major locus for research, threatening traditional teacher-student relations, and diminishing the need for residential college experiences. The authors see a serious diminution of funding for higher education, combined with strictures upon the universities to increase their productivity and to attune their activities to the market. The legitimacy of the university and its academics is attenuated, combined with a reduction in the value of the university degree. British universities in this picture are under considerable stress, have indeterminate futures, and are hard pressed to justify their current mode of operation. They need to determine what they might do to adapt to the new world, transform themselves into something new, or find means to resist changing those things which are of the most importance to them and to society.

Much of the authors' discussion of change is associated with the term postmodern either as a philosophical position or as an historical era different from the modern. The change taking place is on such a grand scale and so qualitatively different that the authors need terms and perspectives that reach beyond the language and assumptions of modernism. Thus, whether the changes are believed to be associated with modernism, late modernism, or postmodernism, the authors are driven to use a postmodern vocabulary because they have no other terms to describe what is happening.

Just what is postmodernism and how is it different from modernism and what difference does it make to universities? Philosophically, the major split between modernism and postmodernism in this set of essays puts modernism in the camp of rationalism and disinterested discourse, belief in universals and the possibility of common goals for the university. Postmodernism is identified with intense differentiation, contested knowledge, diversity, disagreement, fragmentation, and problems of communication. Given the impact of the environment described in the book, the authors seek means by which the university can adapt while maintaining its integrity.

In part one, two of the authors find the changes taking place in British higher education are cause for celebration. Sigmund Bauman, around whose views much of the book revolves, flatly asserts that the unity of the university is gone and with it the function of the university as a supplier of legitimating principles and integrating norms for the modern society. The new norms connect with the market, but conflict with those of universities. Nevertheless, Bauman optimistically frames the ultra-specialized, fragmented, postmodern academic community as a site for opportunity. In the variety of types of institutions and the plurality of voices that characterize higher education, he finds a basis for successfully surmounting the present crisis. Because no one can predict what talents, knowledge, and skills will be needed in the fragmented, uncoordinated world of the future, many voices and varied interpretations need to be asserted and tested, and universities do this best.

Krishan Kumar accepts most of Bauman's description of the postmodern character of our age and of universities, but makes the modernist argument that the primary justification for the university is its role as a physical setting for people to gather and explore ideas, to create a culture of engagement. Since universities no longer have a monopoly on knowledge production and dissemination, and cannot compete with business organizations, they should be defended on the basis of what they do best and that is provide the site for unique cross-fertilization of ideas and life experiences.