Ethics “in” and “for” Higher Education

Professor Peter Scott

Kingston University, United Kingdom

Universities are value-laden institutions - perhaps the most value-laden institutions in modern society following the decline of organised religion, which has been most obvious in the ‘West’ (with the intriguing exception of the United States) although the rise of secularism is a global phenomenon. Universities not only express intellectual and scientific values directly through their teaching and research; they also embody powerful organisational values (notably in terms of collegial governance, institutional autonomy and academic freedom) and equally influential instrumental values (because of the increasingly potent role they play within the ‘knowledge society’); finally universities contribute crucially to the formation of wider social and cultural values.

Yet universities, it seems, are more and more reluctant to acknowledge these essential value structures - or, rather, they seek to contain values within carefully policed zones. So more circumscribed ‘scientific’ values are emphasised at the expense of more open-ended ‘intellectual’ values; instrumental values, through which universities can demonstrate their utility, are fore-grounded at the expense of more critical values which are open to the (often spurious) charge of being too ‘political’; and the traditional organisational culture of universities is increasingly contaminated by the growing power and influence of ‘business’ culture. The effect, whether intentional or not, is to encourage universities to shy away from open acknowledgement of the significance of values. If not a conspiracy of silence, at any rate a culture of disinterest has become established. Instead of presenting themselves as value-laden institutions, universities now seem to wish to be regarded as technically contrived ‘service’ organisations that willingly accept whatever values their key stake-holders (notably Government and Industry) seek to impose.

The sad result is that ethical issues are in danger of becoming second-order issues in the modern university - or, to be more accurate, ethical issues have tended to be redefined as essentially procedural issues rather than as fundamental issues directly connected to the core mission of the university. This shift can be readily observed in the context of research. Research ‘ethics’ are no longer debated in terms of the morality of military or commercial sponsorship of research programmes; ‘blue skies’ research and ‘dis-interested’ scholarship are no longer so fiercely defended. Instead research ‘ethics’ concentrate on much narrower, often technical, issues such as exposing research malpractice and upholding the rigor of research methodologies (including the need to avoid exploitation of, or unnecessary intrusion into the lives of, research subjects) (Scott 2003). A similar shift can be observed in the context of teaching. Critical inquiry has been reduced to problem-solving. Instead of encouraging ‘big debates’ about the desirable development of the curriculum universities now focus on policies and procedures designed to avoid, or punish, plagiarism by students.

There are two possible interpretations of the significance of this apparent conspiracy of silence and/or culture of disinterest with regard to ethical issues in higher education. The first treats it as an almost entirely negative phenomenon - the subordination of university values to external political and market forces (combined with an internal collapse of morale and confidence or, still worse, a raisin des clerks). The second interpretation, which will be elaborated in this paper, is more nuanced and less judgmental; the apparent erosion of the autonomy of the university and growing ‘fuzziness’ of traditional academic values are seen as evidence not of decline-and-fall but of higher education’s ‘success’ within the expanding territory of the ‘knowledge society’.

This paper is divided into three main sections:

1. First, a brief historical sketch of the development of university values, both intellectual and organizational (which is rather less straightforward and more problematic than university leaders are prepared to acknowledge);

2. Second, a discussion of the impact of changing relationships between the university and society (and, in particular, the development of mass higher education systems) on these values. Is it right to see this impact exclusively in terms of decline-and-fall?

3. Third, a similar discussion of the impact of new modes of knowledge production, management and transmission, on traditional (elite?) academic values. Are familiar dichotomies between academic and vocational education, and ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research, still valid?

The university first developed as a distinctive institution in Southern and Western Europe in the high Middle Ages. The qualifier ‘distinctive’ is important in two senses. First, there had been ‘academic’ institutions in Europe before the emergence of the university (or stadium general) - in 7^th century North Umbria (Bead) or at the court of Charlemagne (Albumin). But they had been monastic or court schools, organizational elements within much larger configurations. Second, ‘academic’ institutions also flourished in the Byzantine east, where institutions close to universities did emerge, and in the Islamic world, where the unity of religion and state made it more difficult for distinctive institutions to emerge. So, although the structural differentiation of the medieval university was decisive in terms of future evolution, its significance can be exaggerated in intellectual and normative terms. The university did provide a separate organizational basis for the emergence of a distinctive value system, scholasticism. But the degree to which scholasticism could really be distinguished from the wider culture of medieval Catholicism and feudal society was limited.

Only with the coming of the Renaissance - and especially the Reformation - did the organizational (semi) independence of the universities become significant. Once the unity of medieval Europe had been shattered, universities played a crucial role in state-building. They educated new (and more secular) bureaucratic elites, bridged or brokered between mercantile and court cultures, and promoted new intellectual values by providing ideological justifications for the new politico-religious order and proto-scientific culture. Many universities, of course, were founded between 1500 and 1700. One indicator of the importance of universities during this period is their social penetration. In England the so-called ‘Long Parliament’, which was first elected in 1641 and went on to wage war against King Charles I, contained more graduates than any English (by then United Kingdom) Parliament before 1945.

Yet in some respects this second flourishing of the European university was a false dawn. From the mid 17th to the late 18th centuries universities stagnated both in terms of student numbers and of intellectual engagement (- this statement remains broadly valid despite recent studies that suggest universities were not as stagnant during this period as was once supposed) (Porter 1996). In fact the new Academies of Science, ‘practical’ engineers, Enlightenment illuminati, the first stirrings of the dominant media and publishing industries, radical thought and revolutionary politics - these were the channels through which intellectual and scientific innovation flowed for more than a century. While the university played some part in the scientific revolution, its role in the Enlightenment was tangential, even accidental and value systems evolved independently. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 1800 the university had become a threatened species, at risk of being superseded by other more ‘modern’ academic institutions (de Ridder-Symeons 1996).

Only in the 19th century did the university revive. This was a Europe-wide (and, by now, world-wide) phenomenon, which is why the foundation of the University of Berlin, in reality a local episode in the reconstruction of Prussia after its defeat by Napoleon, has achieved such totemic historical significance. This third flourishing of the university was driven by many forces - political change, especially with regard to the increasing elaboration of the nation state; intellectual and cultural change, as religious belief declined; scientific change, as the connections between speculative science and effective technology became much tighter; and socio-economic change, as mass, urban and increasingly democratic societies emerged. Universities played a key role in the refinement and transmission of this new culture but they were arguably followers rather than leaders. The fundamental impulses still continued to come from outside the university.

In the 20th century the social engagement of universities intensified. The crucial role played by scientific knowledge in maintaining and extending industrial and military capacity was universally accepted, and the role of universities in producing this scientific knowledge strengthened through the century. The democratisation of society led to the emergence of mass higher education systems within which, to some extent, traditional university values were submerged (Scott 1995). By the end of the century universities were not only decisive in shaping the division of labour; through research, by contributing to the emergence of new technologies; and through teaching, by training technical (and other) experts. Universities were also decisive in transmitting cultural and social capital, as older class and gender-based social classifications fell into disuse.

But how decisive has the modern university been in shaping values? This is more difficult to answer. In one sense it may have been more influential than the 19th-century university in this respect. First, the growth of the ‘public sector’ and ‘welfare state’, within which modern higher education systems were embedded, promoted the organisational independence of the university; it was no longer so dependent on industrial subsidy and student payments. Second, the university’s association with radical thought, always implicit because of the inherent novelty of science, the critical culture of scholarship and the liberating and deracinating influences of the student experience, became explicit at times during the past century. This was evident in the 1960s, when intellectual excitement and political radicalism melded together in ways not seen since the late-18th/early-19th century (or even the Reformation).

In another sense however, the modern university has been thoroughly subordinated to the instrumental values of the so-called ‘knowledge society’. First, the university is now only one of an array of ‘knowledge’ institutions and has absorbed many of their values and practices. To that extent both its organisational independence and its ability to generate its own values have been compromised. Second, the modern university’s primary driver is now to service the knowledge needs of an increasingly ‘expert’ society - whether in terms of training highly-skilled workers or in terms of producing sophisticated technical knowledge. Other more traditional purposes of higher education, which emphasise personal development or encourage critical thinking, have been - apparently - downgraded. As it is through these other, now perhaps secondary purposes that academic values were most clearly expressed, it seems reasonable to conclude that the normative power of the university has been reduced.

The common view is that the elite university was able to maintain a critical ‘distance’ from society - for a number of reasons. First, it could be trusted not to deviate too far from dominant norms or to defy the dominant intellectual culture because the social and university leaders were members of a common elite. Second, the elite university, unlike the mass higher education systems that have succeeded it, was comparatively small-scale and, consequently, did not represent a major burden in terms of public expenditure (and was less visible in political terms?). Third, the articulation between the elite universities on the one hand and industrial society and the bureaucratic state on the other was less direct and less intense than that between mass higher education systems and the ‘knowledge society’ and the market state. In the ‘critical distance’ established by these means the elite university was able to develop its own value systems - closely aligned with but distinct from those of society - and then to propagate these value systems, partly through its research and scholarship but mainly through its key role in elite formation.

Mass higher education systems, it is argued, lack this ability to maintain a similarly ‘critical distance’ from society. They are fully embedded in society - also for a number of different reasons. First, these systems contain other institutions apart from ‘classical’ universities - typically polytechnics, Fachhochschulen and higher professional schools which are vocational rather than scientific in their orientation and are guided by instrumental rather than liberal (or academic) values. In some contemporary higher education systems, such institutions now comprise the majority sector. Second, even ‘classical’ universities have taken on new roles which are very different from their traditional roles - for example, by establishing business schools, developing work-based learning programmes or creating technology-transfer units.

Third, the development of a ‘knowledge society’ has led to an erosion of the boundaries between once discrete domains such as politics and the market, science and culture. As one of the most dynamic institutions within the ‘knowledge society’ the university is among the most affected by this erosion - and, as a result, its ‘success’ in solving scientific and social ‘problems’ has tended inevitably to lessen its ‘autonomy’. Finally, mass higher education systems are no longer so intimately related to the reproduction of elites. Elites themselves, to the extent that this label is still appropriate in contemporary society with its much more fluid power structures, have proliferated and become more volatile. As a result, the collusive trust that bound together the elite university and what was called in Britain the ‘Establishment’ has been undermined. For all these reasons mass higher education lacks the critical independence once possessed by the elite university - and therefore, the capacity to generate its own distinctive value systems.

That at any rate is the standard account - in essence a story of ‘decline and fall’. As the acceleration and instability characteristic of contemporary society have fuelled a compensatory discourse of regret and nostalgia, such accounts are readily accepted. The ‘dumbing down’ of universities, the collapse of traditional ‘standards’, the inability of universities to act as independent and effective critics of society, the collapse of their ethical base - these are common complaints. But is such an account or discourse an accurate description of the situation?

It is certainly possible to offer an alternative account, to argue that elite university systems were also closed systems in both social and intellectual terms. So their capacity to be critical of prevailing social norms and structures (and, therefore, to develop a genuinely independent ethical base) was self-limiting. The degree of collusion between social and political elites on the one hand and intellectual and scientific elites on the other was always high - and especially high in terms of war. Both World Wars not only provided key stimuli to the growth of higher education, arguably promoting the democratisation of the university, they also highlighted the incestuous links between political, military and scientific power. Before the age of the mass university critical intellectuals tended to congregate in other institutions, often grouped round journals or newspapers - or in no institutions at all, ‘out in the wind’ in George Steiner’s evocative term (Steiner 1965); the elite university did not provide them with a supportive or congenial environment. However it did provide a formative environment for future leaders of the state bureaucracy and elite professions, if less so for business and industry.

Mass higher education systems, in contrast, are much more open - not only because they enroll mass student populations that are no longer drawn predominantly from privileged social groups; but also because they have been obliged to incorporate non-elite, even alternative, knowledge traditions. This is partly due to the need to accommodate these new students, but also as a result of the splintering and proliferation of knowledge. Superficially, there is a tighter ‘fit’ between student choices and subject provision on the one hand and the labour market on the other in mass than elite higher education systems. In that sense, mass systems are more ‘vocational’ and less ‘scientific’. But this may create a misleading impression: the need to make these links between higher education and the economy explicit may also demonstrate the decline in the implicit connections and understandings characteristic of collusive self-interest. Mass systems must be planned and regulated in order to police their emancipatory potential, their willful unboundedness. They cannot be trusted to the same degree as elite systems. More open (and democratic?) higher education systems may have a capacity to develop an alternative ethic, distinct from the dominant ethic in society.

The significance of the interwoven, even incestuous, relationship between mass higher education systems and the so-called ‘knowledge society’ can also be misinterpreted. The simple reading is that higher education has been incorporated into the productive base - and, consequently, has forfeited whatever discretion it may once have had to act as an independent base for the development of a distinctive ethical system. Because knowledge itself is both a primary resource (in terms of inputs - for example, advanced technologies) and a primary commodity (in terms of ideas and images), it can no longer be clearly distinguished from other resource inputs and commodity outputs (Bell 1973). Just as knowledge now suffuses society, so society suffuses knowledge.

But according to a second more subtle reading, the relationship between higher education and the ‘knowledge society’ is more complex and ambiguous. First, modern higher education systems are made up of a range of increasingly heterogeneous institutions. Not only are the traditional roles of the elite university transcended, and extended, within these more sprawling and open higher education systems, the institutions comprising them also intersect with the ‘knowledge society’ at many different levels - from the production of world-class research and advanced technologies through the training of technical and professional elites to the formation of mass graduate populations. While some may lead to the more thorough incorporation of higher education within the ‘knowledge society’, others may actually enhance its independence - or, if not the independence of higher education, the dependence of other social and economic institutions on higher education (Scott 1999).

Modern higher education systems also tolerate (and even celebrate) a much greater variety of knowledge traditions. These extend far beyond traditional scientific, or academic, and elite professional cultures (which themselves, of course, are being radically transformed) to embrace vocational and even popular cultures. Again these different cultures intersect with the ‘knowledge society’ in different modes and at many levels. Some indeed can be described in terms of the incorporation of higher education within the productive base; other linkages, however, contribute to increasing cultural turbulence (and, therefore, may contribute, directly, to the evolution of value systems). So, from the perspective of higher education, it is misleading to conclude that its engagement with the ‘knowledge society’ has necessarily eroded its capacity to sustain, and develop, its own distinctive ethical base.

Indeed it can be argued that the sheer variety of academic disciplines and professional training within modern higher education systems makes it more, not less important, to emphasise this ethical base - for two main reasons. The first is that ethics have at least the potential to act as ‘glue’ that helps to hold together what would otherwise be very disparate knowledge traditions. Even if the extent to which ethics can really play this role in practice is open to doubt, nevertheless the attempt is still worthwhile because it is a concrete assertion of the ideal of the unity of higher education. The second reason is that ethical considerations obtrude more and more into what were traditionally regarded as purely expert, or even technical, domains. The impact of so-called ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production will be discussed later in this paper. But an examination of the curriculum in many professional disciplines demonstrates how important ethical considerations are. For example, engineers are now taught much more about the impact of legal and environmental issues on the practice of their profession.

There is a second way in which, according to this more subtle reading, the relationship between modern higher education systems and ‘knowledge society’ is more complex and ambiguous. Just as universities intersect with the ‘knowledge’ society’ at many different levels and in many different ways, so the ‘knowledge society’ itself is a heterogeneous (and contested?) formation (Stehr 1994). Too often only one dimension is emphasised - the remorseless rise and irresistible impact of information and communication technologies. Closely linked, of course, are the modifications in social behaviour and economic structures associated with the idea of a ‘knowledge society’ - for example, the creation of a global ‘language’ through the spread of powerful images and brands, or through round-the-clock/round-the-globe financial and other markets.

But the ‘knowledge society’ can not be regarded as simply short-hand for the triumph of free-market capitalism, liberal democracy and secularism. For a start it is difficult to separate from the phenomenon of globalization; key to both is the effective ‘abolition’ of time and space. It is now possible to manipulate both (almost) at will. This manipulation of time and space enables novel, and global, configurations of production and consumption to be developed; more crucially, it is also at the root of the almost infinitely pliable social and personal identities that characterise the modern (or post-modern?) world (Nowotny 1994). The socio-cultural aspects of the ‘knowledge society’ are at least as important as its economic and technological ones.

Within the ‘knowledge society’ (and globalisation) it is possible to identify a small number of key trends (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001). The first is acceleration - and, closely linked, complexity. Acceleration and change are conventionally regarded as, first, essentially technological and economic phenomena (the impact of ICT and the triumph of the ‘market’); and, secondly, as linear and predictable. But acceleration is also a scientific, intellectual and cultural phenomenon - and often it is, in a real sense, directionless. Everything is in flux. The second trend is uncertainty - or risk, because alongside the ‘knowledge society’ is its other, the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). This uncertainty has two aspects. The first is typically described in negative terms, namely the downside of economic growth and social change in terms of environmental pollution and family breakdown. But the second, and more positive, aspect is that successful science is (and always has been) a generator of uncertainty; one problem is solved only for another to appear. For a time this uncertainty was confined within the comparatively safe intellectual sphere. Now it has flooded out into society at large. So uncertainty is intimately linked to potential, which in turn is a key element in producing innovation.

The third trend is that the Knowledge Society is contested terrain - in two different senses. First, as has already been said, its impact is not confined to the economy. Its impact is as much social and cultural. The daily lives of individuals are textured by brands which are themselves often ‘localised’; life-chances, once raw data for the economic calculus of ‘market’ right and ‘socialist’ left alike, have been superseded by life-styles, even life-brands. In a very real sense the ‘knowledge society’ goes ‘beyond the market’. Secondly, the ‘knowledge society’ - and, in particular, globalisation - are highly ideological. The triumphalism associated with the idea of the ‘End of History’ (to quote the - naïve - title of Francis Fukuyama’s book of a decade ago) is misplaced (Fukuyama 1992); the idea that the nation- or welfare-state is being superseded by the ‘market’ state in some great historical shift (as another American author, Philip Bobbitt, has suggested) is misleading (Bobbitt, 2002).

But globalisation embraces not simply the advance of democratic capitalism - more often today animated (sadly) by neo-liberal values than by social democratic ones - but also global resistances to free-market globalization: Greenpeace is just as much a global brand as Coca-Cola. To a significant extent, attitudes to free-market globalisation have substituted for the traditional left-right divisions of politics in developed countries. Some movements that are directly opposed to so-called ‘Western’ values and however unpalatable it may be, al-Qaida is also a creature of globalisation in terms of the techniques and technologies it employs. The old question about the contrast between modernity and modernization re-emerges: once it was assumed impossible to modernise successfully without at the same time becoming fully ‘modern’. One of the consequences of globalisation has been to re-open that question.

The ‘knowledge society’, far from being an essential technological (or technocratic) phenomenon, is brimful with values. Modern higher education systems, themselves wide-open and increasingly heterogeneous, must engage with this new form of society, which is fast-moving, complex, multi-layered, ambiguous and volatile. Value systems in both higher education and society-at-large are in flux, and the scope for ethical engagement between the two is correspondingly enhanced. It could be said that under contemporary conditions, all questions are - to some degree - ethical questions. There are no longer questions that are solely technical, or even economic. This may represent a reversal of the 20th-century trend towards an ever-tighter fit between higher education and an expert and professional society: both have become more diffuse and more complex. As a result the correspondences between the two have become more ambiguous, as they can no longer be reduced to comparatively unproblematic expert, technical and scientific exchanges.

Just as it has been argued - wrongly - that mass higher education systems are less able than elite university systems to assert and maintain a necessary ‘critical distance’ from society, so it has been argued that two other trends have also eroded the modern university’s independent ethos. The first is the apparent drift from academic, or scientific, education to vocational education (often described pejoratively as ‘training’); the second is the parallel drift from ‘pure’ to ‘applied’ research which has been described in terms of shift from ‘Mode 1’ research to ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production. As teaching and research are the core purposes of the university, key elements in what Martin Trow has called the ‘private life’ of higher education (Trow 1973), any changes in their constitution and orientation are likely to have a profound impact on the university’s ethos - more profound perhaps than changes in the socio-economic and politico-cultural positioning of higher education, which arguably are aspects of its ‘public’ life.

The dramatic changes that have taken place in higher education in recent years appear to be unprecedented. First, entirely new subject domains have been introduced. A good example is nursing and non-medical healthcare subjects, which now occupy a central role in modern higher education systems including in some elite universities. A generation ago they were often regarded as entirely vocational subjects fit only to be taught in non-university institutions such as HBO schools in the Netherlands or Fachhochschule in Germany. In Britain until a decade ago these subjects were provided within hospital-based training schools outside the formal higher (and further) education system. Yet the incorporation of new subject domains into higher education is not quite as unprecedented as it appears at first sight. For example, it was not until the 1960s that management became a fully-fledged subject domain; previously its presence in higher education had been more precarious and depended on the contribution (and legitimacy) of more specialised disciplines such as economics and industrial relations. More crucially it was only after the mid-20th century that business schools took over from more academically oriented departments as the dominant organisational form for management education.

Second, new subjects have been introduced into the university curriculum, and the majority of these have vocational labels. Of course, these labels can be misleading. ‘Media studies’ as a label can be used to describe both highly theoretical studies - for example, in sociology or cultural studies - and highly practical studies - for example, journalism or film and television production. In modern higher education systems subject labels are chosen more perhaps for their marketing appeal than as accurate descriptions of their academic content. Once again the emergence of new subjects is not new. The social sciences as currently conceived are a post-1945, even a post-1960s, formation. Political science emerged somewhat earlier as a development of political economy. Literary studies (as opposed to language and philology) first came to the prominence not much more than a century ago. Even the core natural sciences, in their experimental form, only emerged during the second half of the 19th century. So the university has always been in flux. Nor is the (apparent) emphasis on vocationalism a new phenomenon. All three examples of new subjects had a strong vocational element - the natural sciences such as a chemistry because of their links with industry; literary studies (and the humanities more generally) because of their links with school teaching; and the social sciences because of their engagement with the post-war welfare state.

There are, of course, other changes for which there are fewer precedents.

A similar analysis can be made of the parallel drift from ‘pure’ to ‘applied’ science - which, of course, is also far too simple a characterisation of what is in reality a highly complex set of trends in research and scholarship. These trends have been described in terms of a shift from ‘Mode 1’, university-based research and scholarship, to ‘Mode 2’ knowledge production which is much more heterogeneous, applications-oriented, socially distributed and reflexive (Gibbons et al 1995). Again it is too simple to align ‘Mode 1’ research with the preservation of a scientific and critical culture, and ‘Mode 2’ knowledge with the subordination of science and scholarship to political and/or market agendas. Two points need to be emphasised:

The argument presented in this paper is, to some extent, counter-intuitive. According to the conventional account the modern (or mass) university is a much more instrumental, and a much less normative, institution than the traditional (or elite) university. It has become incorporated within a ‘knowledge society’ and, as a result, has lost its capacity to act as an independent critic of society; and crucially, to generate its own distinctive values including a robust scientific culture. Instead the university must respond to other agendas - economic, social, political and cultural - to which it powerfully contributes, but on which it does not have the ‘last word’.

The alternative account which has been offered in this paper presents two counter-arguments. First, the conventional account is bad history. It is based on idealized myths of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, which ignore the collusive relationships between political, social, economic and cultural elites on the one hand and intellectual, academic and scientific elites on the other. This account also ignores the crucial role that states, cities and communities played in the establishment and development of higher education systems. Second, the multiple engagements between mass higher education systems and society, economy and culture cannot be reduced simply to a series of expert and technical exchanges, whether in terms of the production of a highly-skilled workforce or of science and technology. These multiple engagements also - inescapably - include a series of profoundly ethical exchanges which continue to shape both the normative constitution of universities - ethics ‘in’ higher education, in the title of this paper - and also the wider normative landscape: ethics ‘for’ higher education, in the same title.

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