UnHerd ✒ A university without a library is like a home without a roof.
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| Tom Crew 15-June-2020 |
And so, despite the insistence of many universities that their libraries remain “open online”, higher education has all but come to an end in the UK. A sector that remained open during the Second World War and provided a home to dissidents and the otherwise persecuted — from Theodor W. Adorno to Sir Ludwig Guttmann — has closed itself as quickly and as meekly as the church.
The University of Cambridge, where I am a doctoral student and which, in 1933, helped form the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), seems to be leading the retreat: declaring an end to group lectures for the whole of the next academic year and generally falling over itself in eager deference to government “advice”.
Speaking at the Albert Hall at an event organized by CARA in 1933, Albert Einstein urged the audience to “resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom”. As contentious as references to the 1930s might be, when in our entire history has “intellectual and individual freedom” been as besieged as it is today?
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The managerialist culture imposed on universities by the exigencies of bean-counting mechanisms such as the Research Assessment Execercise and the requirements of PhD researchers to prove to Research Councils how "useful" is and to whom their useful when applying for studentships has much to do also with the decline of universities as bastions of academic freedom and original inquiry.
ReplyDeleteI should know; I experienced annual rejections from the Economic and Social Council in the 1990s because I could not prove the "usefulness" of my PhD research on Post-Eighth Amendment Irish Abortion Politics to UK PLC.
The denigration of humanities and social science research by the STEM warriors also has serious consequences for the quality of democratic debate and intellectual standards in society outside academe. After all, to whom was Osama Bin Laden expertise in mechanical engioneering useful to ...?