These days the rich are very rich indeed. Increasingly, they also seem to be more or less in charge. They negotiate directly with our elected officials about government policies; they own the media companies that set the agenda for our national political conversations; they cultivate private relationships with political candidates dependent on their financial support; they fund ‘grass-roots’ political movements; they even run as political candidates themselves. They are hailed not only as the ‘job-creators’ of our economy, but also, in their guise as philanthropists, as our saviours: of our public services, such as education (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg); our politics (the Michael Bloombergs and Silvio Berlusconis); the discipline of economics (George Soros); and so on. George Clooney even has his own spy satellite pointed at Sudan (the Satellite Sentinel Project). The rich have become public figures with the status of celebrities and ‘thought leaders’ whose lavish lifestyles, minor life-events and superficial opinions on the matters of the day are considered of great public significance.

I think there is something very wrong with this situation. In fact I think it may be a crisis, in the technical sense of a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events is determined, for better or for worse. My concern is well summarised by a famous quotation from the US supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, whose career spanned a previous gilded age.

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. (Dilliard 1941, 42)[1].

This essay tries to clarify the nature of the crisis and how it may be addressed by examining the character of the rich and the character of democracy. The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. Those two features make being rich very pleasant indeed. But they are also what make the rich bad for democracy, and indeed even for capitalism. Democracies are extended moral communities whose flourishing, and also mere survival, depend on the general interdependence and approximate equality of their members. The rich do not only have no place in this kind of community, their very presence undermines it.

This essay is not about social justice. Perhaps it is morally wrong that some people are rich and others are poor, and perhaps it would be morally right to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and even from wealthy countries to poorer countries, but from this perspective that debate is a distraction. What I’m concerned with here is the sinking ship – the threat the rich pose to democracy itself – not the proper (re)arrangement of deck chairs between first and third-class passengers. Hence my modest proposal: if we believe our democracy is worth preserving, we should offer the rich a choice: give up your money or give up your citizenship.

A Political Not a Moral Problem

The normative definition of the rich is always those who have ‘too much’. Yet there are various ways of defining this in the contemporary literature on social justice. Some, egalitarians such as John Rawls (Rawls 1999), take the equal distribution of wealth as the starting point for thinking about social justice: inequality is illegitimate unless specifically morally justified. Others criticise the legitimacy of the processes by which the present concentrations of wealth in our society arose (including even libertarians, when they take Robert Nozick’s historical account of entitlement seriously[2]). Yet others focus on the inefficiency of great inequality. The utilitarian Peter Singer (2009), for example, argues that ordinary middle-class people in the west have much more than enough (anyone with annual income over $35,000 is in the global 1%) while a great many (around 2 billion) live in appalling absolute poverty. The richer you are, the less benefit you will derive from having one more dollar to spend because all your most important needs and wants have already been satisfied; for the same reason, the poorer you are the more good that same dollar could do for you. So the relatively rich should give away our money to the poorest people we can find, where it will do the most good. And we should keep giving up to the point that we have to sacrifice something of comparable moral significance (which seems pretty far).

These various approaches to thinking about justice problematise wealth in different ways (unfairness, illegitimacy, inefficiency). Although I won’t be making direct use of any of them, it is worth noting what they all have in common: identifying the problem of the rich as ‘absolutely relative’. In other words, the rich pose an objective problem of justice not because of how wealthy they are in absolute terms (how much they can buy) but because of the problematic relation in which they stand to others. I employ the same foundational idea – just as seawater is good for fish but poisonous to humans, so extreme wealth is wonderful for individuals but poisonous to democracy. However, my approach is different from that of the justice theorists because I focus on the political problem of wealth and not its moral problems. So I am not directly concerned with identifying injustices in the distribution of wealth, nor with making its distribution more just, for example by making the rich give their money (back) to the poor. My reasons for focusing on the political dimension rather than the moral are two-fold.

First, it seems to me that a threat to democracy has a more existential character and thus possesses an urgency that issues of social injustice lack. In particular, while the relationship between social injustice and concentrations of wealth seems relatively linear (on most accounts), the relationship between democracy and individual wealth may include a threshold above which a dramatic failure of democracy becomes very likely. If our society makes mistakes about justice, we can hope to remedy them later. If we make mistakes with our democracy, we may not get a second chance.

Second, there is a strategic advantage to politicising wealth-holding rather than moralising its distribution. People with very different moral views can appreciate the importance of democracy, and of saving democracy, precisely because of the scope for pluralism and public reasoning about justice that democracy permits. It seems to me that many people who disagree about exactly how wealth should be distributed in society—including those with egalitarian, libertarian, or utilitarian moral intuitions—can nevertheless come together to condemn extremes of wealth that threaten a polity’s capacity to debate justice at all.

The Bourgeois Character of Democracy

Democracy as we know it is the invention of the American republic, and, as Alexis de Tocqueville analysed, is fundamentally government by and for the middle-classes, the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the flourishing democratic societies of the world are all politically dominated by a middle class; as the political scientist Barrington Moore famously put it, “No bourgeoisie, no democracy”. This may not be a feature of many philosophical accounts of democracy, but it is a fact about modern liberal democracies, the only ones that seem to work. For example, the mere possession of formal democratic institutions like parliaments and elections is demonstrably insufficient for the successful practice of democracy, as poor countries such as India demonstrate.[3] 

Successful democracies are bourgeois because middle-class circumstances are particularly amenable to the spirit of democracy. The bourgeoisie live in circumstances of moderate abundance: neither so poor as to be utterly dominated by circumstances or powerful persons, nor so well-off as to be free from inter-dependence on the goodwill of other people for success. This is the sweet-spot of sufficient independence to think for oneself, and sufficient inter-dependence to be sensitive to the interests and concerns of other people; the conditions for the thriving of the civic habits and dispsitions on which a democratic polity depends.

A democratic society is organic, not a construct of high theory. Its heart is equality of political status, or what some would call ‘dignity’ – the freedom of all from domination, whether by government or other people. A real democracy must pass what the political philosopher Philip Pettit calls the ‘eyeball test’: is every person free to look any other in the eye, without fear and trembling?

The brain of a democracy is its ability to make legitimate collective choices in a way that everyone finds acceptable even when they disagree with the conclusions. That sounds like an abstract adding machine – and the terminology of social-choice theorists doesn’t help. But actually it’s about community and common sense. Democratic procedures for social choice work so long as everyone recognizes that we are all in this together, and that we have a shared interest in and commitment to making things better for everyone even though we may disagree about how to do so. The members of a bourgeois society have an orientation toward co-operation, even with those we disagree with, because we are fixed in relations of interdependence with each other and have no choice but to try to make this society work.

So what’s the problem with the rich? Their circumstances of life are distinctly different from the bourgeoisie. At the extreme, the combined assets of Walmart’s Walton family have been calculated to be equal to that of the bottom 150 million Americans combined. Great wealth changes people and their relationship to society as a whole. As Michael Sandel puts it, “Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.” (Sandel 2012, 205).

The rich are independent of the rest of us. Obviously they are materially independent so long as their property rights remain recognized. They can achieve what they want by themselves, that is by buying it from others or paying someone else to do it for them. But this power of command also generates a social distance from society that allows them to become ‘ethically independent’. Since they don’t depend on the goodwill of others to succeed – for example, few of them have recognisable jobs – they may become less concerned in general about whether they deserve goodwill. They are thereby freed from the disciplinary power of bourgeois social norms and standards, and, it often seems, even from the laws that apply to ordinary people. I’m sure that sense of liberty must be quite exhilarating. But it also means that the rich aren’t really like the rest of us.

There is some worrying social psychology research about what the rich are like, suggesting that society’s nobility are not actually very noble (e.g., Piff et al. 2012). The rich appear to have a more positive attitude to greed than the rest of us, and this is expressed, for example, in feeling entitled to opt out of ethical standards – to lie and cheat when it suits them – and a lack of compassion toward others. Though recent events should teach us not to build castles on the findings of social psychology, such research chimes with what all of us see and hear every day of the self-centredness and self-servingness of the rich, from Donald Trump’s use of the US presidential election to promote his business brand, to Warren Buffet’s exploitation of his political connections to lobby for public subsidies of his investments in Goldman Sachs and railroads.[4] The ‘ethical independence’ of the rich from the rest of society thus has political implications, since, to put it mildly, it does not suggest that the rule of the rich is to the benefit of all.

For the rich the spirit of cooperation on which democracy depends is only an option, not a necessity. When the rich engage in politics they are not under the same constraints as the rest of us to find a mutually agreeable solution, since their fortunes are not fixed to the success of this society as ours are. They can always buy their way around the absence of public goods, or leave for somewhere nicer.

That means that the rich don’t have the same political interests as the rest of us (Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013). They aren’t worried about crime (their gated communities come with private security) or the quality of public education (their kids go to the fanciest schools money can buy) or affordable accessible health care, pensions, job security, public parks, gas prices, environmental quality, or most of the other issues that the rest of us have no choice but to care about, and to care about politically since they are outside of our individual powers to fix. The political concerns of the rich do not lie in the provision of public goods, but in furthering their private interests, whether their personal wealth and power or their political whimsies.[5] That is why Adam Smith, the father of economics, warned us so vehemently in The Wealth of Nations to be suspicious of their self-serving rhetoric.[6]

It is an unfortunately widespread fallacy that democracy is a means to achieve one’s interests, rather than a space in which the public interest can be deliberated. Thus some people seem to believe that elections work in the same way as the rest of our modern consumer society: one orders what one wants at the election and then two weeks later it should arrive. Then, if it doesn’t arrive, they think democracy must be broken.

However, for the rich, politics actually does work somewhat like this, because they have the power to intervene non-democratically in our politics. They can and do use their wealth to command outsize political influence, in the ways I outlined above: bargaining and schmoozing privately with our politicians (Kalla and Broockman 2015); buying a media megaphone to transmit their opinions to voters and drown out counter-speech, and so on. The rich act this way because they believe that their opinion deserves to be heard because it is theirs, and their wealth means that it does indeed receive more attention. This is the logic of the market, of course, and it converts politics from a democratic forum into a market for influence.

First, it introduces a principle of political inequality. The rich achieve extraordinary influence over the character and direction of our society, and thus over how our individual lives will go, yet they have no qualification for that political role except their wealth. Like a feudal aristocracy, their special political status derives from a prior asymmetry of power combined with a personal sense of entitlement, rather than democratic selection.

Second, it undermines the democratic legitimacy of our political institutions, the perception that even if we don’t personally agree with their outcomes they genuinely reflect the will of the people and we should go along with them. Every ideological faction wants to get their own way. Liberal democracy deals with the threat of factionalism not by suppression but by transforming it into a vibrant pluralism that is maintained by a transparently fair social-choice process. Everyone still thinks their own views are right and true and seeks to persuade others of them, but in a democracy everyone agrees that practical legitimacy derives from popular consent. Those ideas that win a democratic mandate have a prima facie legitimacy to govern, subject to the checks and balances that protect opposing (minority) views. The rich are a particularly dangerous faction because of their ability to upset this principled modus vivendi by translating economic command into political influence greatly out of proportion to their numbers (cf Gilens and Page 2014).[7]

Moreover, while as individuals they may have differing views about what society’s political priorities should be, ranging from converting the public education system to independent charter schools to defending Israel, they also have what may reasonably be called a class interest in the institutional arrangements that maintain their personal wealth, such as tax codes that favour income from capital over earned income. A democracy converts to a plutocracy gradually, as more and more of the business of politics is turned over to the rich: their interests, their values, their opinions, their policy proposals. Even though popular elections continue to be held, the link between political success and a democratic mandate to govern will crumble away. Political outcomes will no longer be understood as a reflection of the will of the people, but rather of the machinations of the rich or squabbles between them, as in modern plutocracies such as Ukraine and Moldova. As people come to realise that the system is rigged the legitimacy of the political regime will no longer rest on democratic grounds, but on some other grounds, such as economic prosperity or fear of even worse.  

Why the Economy Doesn’t Need the Rich Either

At this point I would like to address a common counter-argument to the claims I have been making. This is that there is a trade-off between democracy and material prosperity: it is claimed that even if great concentrations of wealth undermine democratic ideals, this is a price that most people think is worth paying and thus has a certain democratic legitimacy in its own right. As I will show in a moment, this underestimates the threat the rich pose to capitalism as well as democracy. For now, let me focus on the specific assumption that capitalism requires the rich because they have more wealth than they need for their own consumption and so it is their investment of capital that makes the economy spin around and create jobs. That ‘job creator’ thesis is out of date and back to front. 

First, while in Adam Smith’s time it might have been true that economic development required capitalists to reinvest their profits, this was because everyone else was too poor. But these days the economies of democratic societies are characterized – for now – by a broad middle-class whose savings are quite sufficient for funding business expansion and technological innovation, such as through the share-ownership of our pension funds or the bank loans backed by our deposits. 

Second, the greater the wealth inequality, the worse we may expect the economy to perform. A flourishing economy requires customers as well as investors. If the gains of economic productivity are overwhelmingly transferred to some small group (as profits) it means that they don’t go to ordinary people (as wages) – (for example, since 1979 all the productivity gains of America’s economy have gone to the richest 1%, median wages have been stagnant). The implications are, firstly, that the more unequally distributed economic growth is the less it increases national prosperity, because it does not increase the economic command of ordinary people to satisfy our wants (which was how Smith defined the wealth of nations). And, secondly, economic growth itself will be less than it would have been because high inequality limits the extent of the market (fewer customers) and thus the scope for innovation.

But the biggest problem is the threat the capitalists themselves pose to a free and competitive market economy. As Thomas Piketty notes: “The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier … capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.” (Piketty 2014, 571). This not only involves the production of economic inequalities that undermine democracy and the substitution of inheritance entitlements for meritocracy, but also, as another economist, Joseph Stiglitz (2012) has argued with particular force and clarity, the outright corruption of democratic politics and capitalism itself. The winners of one round of market competition can readily translate their economic wealth into political influence and thereby change the rules to convert their income from a contingent market outcome into a guaranteed entitlement, for example by converting their businesses into quasi-monopolies that effectively levy a redistributive tax on society as a whole. The interest of the plutocratic elite is to widen the market but limit the competition; to do what Bill Gates did to Netscape and Carlos Slim did to Mexico’s telecoms industry. Consider the re-construction of America’s financial services industry over the last 30 years. As the number of firms went down, favourable laws went up, converting the industry into a rentier system in which the costs of financial services to the economy as a whole rose, profits rose, and risks were socialized.

This rentier capitalism doesn’t have the same virtues as the free market kind proposed by Smith and endorsed by most contemporary economists. It undermines the policing required to maintain real – free, fair and rivalrous – competition. It misallocates the country’s wealth and talent, by funnelling it away from productive enterprises and into rent-seeking enterprises that harvest the productivity of others. It politicises the economy in a way that undermines the conditions for liberal democracy rather than providing the shared prosperity that supports it. 

What To Do About the Rich

I have argued that the rich are a burden and a danger to our democratic society as a whole. But that fact doesn’t tell us what to do about them. Some, such as Piketty, argue that we should tax the rich back into the middle-class with progressive taxes on both their wealth and income. Such tax policies face great difficulty because imposing and then maintaining them would require an overwhelming and sustained political consensus to overcome the resistance of an extraordinarily powerful political constituency, exacerbated by opportunities for international tax competition and evasion. Piketty admits that his proposal for an international wealth tax of 5-10% on the greatest fortunes to unwind the inequality ratchet is “utopian”. My own proposal is more radical still, and yet may nevertheless be more effective than Piketty’s because it directly challenges the political domination of the class interests of the rich that would thwart his plan.

Recall that I am not concerned here with fairness and social justice, but with the somewhat simpler but more urgent existential threat that the presence of the rich poses to a democratic society. I’m against the rich, but I don’t care about their money. And that allows me to advance a different kind of proposal than one normally sees in this debate: the simple rule that no-one can be both a member of our democratic society and rich.

A good way of thinking about what a democratic society is and should be, and how its members relate to it, is through the idea of the social contract. A social contract is a hypothetical agreement to form a political association for the mutual advantage, security, and justice of all its members. The significance of this idea is that it allows us to scrutinize whether our current social arrangements resemble what we would have deliberately chosen to create if we had had the chance, or whether we would have chosen something better – for instance, John Rawls’ project in A Theory of Justice. In Rawls’ hands the social contract is a device for generating a unique agreement on the basic institutional arrangements of a just society by making explicit our intuitions about what a fair democratic society requires. 

But one can also use the social contract device more crudely, to draw our attention to the preconditions for, and legitimate authority of, a democratic society. Though we may not follow Rawls’ controversial argument about what an ideally just democratic society would look like (as even Rawls himself accepted in his later work), we may all readily agree that some arrangements are incompatible with the persistence of any democratic society in which such questions of justice might be debated. Plutocracy seems one of those, since it is incompatible with freedom from domination between citizens and political equality in social choice.

The idea of the social contract also directs us to think of our democratic society as a kind of private club for the mutual benefit of its members. (Indeed, this is how we often explicitly describe it when thinking about immigration). Such a club has the legitimate authority to enforce its constitutional commitment to democracy and to take preventative action against members whose activities undermine it.

Hence my modest proposal. We should first identify with some precision the category of what it seems reasonable to call ‘the rich’, i.e. those people whose capabilities for independence from and command over the rest of us crosses the threshold between enviable affluence and aristocratic privilege. Then, when anyone in our society falls into the category of the problematic rich they would be offered a choice: give it away – hold a potlatch, give it to Oxfam, their favourite art museum foundation, it doesn’t matter what – or else cash out their winnings and depart the country, leaving their citizenship at the door on their way out. Since the rich are, well, rich, they will have all the means they need to make a new life for themselves elsewhere, and perhaps even inveigle their way into citizenship in a country that is less picky than we are. I’m sure they’ll do just fine.[8]

How much wealth makes someone problematically rich? That seems a political question for society to deliberate about, informed by empirical research from social scientists about the character and effects of large wealth inequalities. It is certainly not something for philosophers to decide! But, for the sake of this discussion let me outline one approach, to show how such deliberation could move from broad and abstract principles to concrete proposals. 

The general principle is adapted from Rousseau’s proposal in The Social Contract that “in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself” ([1762] 2008, II.11). That suggests that the form of the definition of the rich should be ‘absolutely relative’ rather than merely relative (i.e. we shouldn’t just target the richest 1%, because there will always be a richest 1%, and this proposal is not founded on envy of the better off). One way to go would be to use some multiple of the wealth of the median citizen (the person who is poorer than 50% of the population and richer than 50%) as a proxy for the distance from, and power over, ordinary citizens that defines problematic wealth. Let me suggest a very generous multiple of 500 to be going on with (surely everyone can agree that someone with more than 500 times the wealth of the middling citizen is in a different class than the merely enviably affluent). What would that mean for a country like America?

According to the Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report (2015) the median adult American’s personal wealth is around $50,000, which suggests a cut off of $25 million.[9] For context, America’s mean average wealth is $350,000 (if the gulf between mean and median figures seems surprising, it reflects the fact that wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality).[10] For further context, median wealth in the UK is more than twice as high as America, suggesting a cut-off of $63 million. The UK-US comparison shows that this simple definition has a powerful inbuilt ratchet. The greater the concentration of wealth in a society, the greater, I have argued, the threat to democracy, and the lower the boundary line for the problematic rich that this definition will produce. 

There are obviously many technical difficulties remaining in this definition (from settling on appropriate accounting standards, to allowing for market volatility in asset values, to distinguishing individual from household wealth). But if it could be made to work, what would happen? Presumably there would be an outpouring of wealth as assets are liquidated and moved abroad. But the immediate consequences of this should not be exaggerated. The mansions and penthouse apartments would still be here, just owned by someone else. The already globalised financial portfolios (most of the assets of the rich) would merely be registered at a foreign address and denominated in a different currency. A relatively small number of the rich own large stakes in national enterprises such as department-store chains (those Waltons again), or TV stations, that might be difficult to unwind or internationalise.

Aside from some short-term disruption the loss of the wealth of the rich would not make our society poorer. As I noted earlier, developed economies do not lack for capital; what the rich contribute to the economy is not investment but domination. An economy’s wealth – as opposed to an individual’s – relates to its efficiency in allocating its resources between competing projects so as to satisfy as many of the wants of its people as is technically possible. In the long term our economy’s productivity would be higher without the distorting influence of the rich, and, not coincidentally, the gains from that productivity would be more equally shared than they are now.

But I don’t think everyone would leave. After all, while tax avoidance is extremely popular among the rich, true tax exiles are somewhat rare. Democratic societies really are great places to live; plutocracies and autocracies really aren’t. (Even Russia’s oligarchs want to live in New York and London, and send their children to school there). I think that many rich people understand this, and would appreciate the benefits of democratic society even more if they were forced to make an explicit choice between continuing to live there or holding on to their money.

Another possible consequence is a decline in innovation and entrepreneurship—vital to the future growth of the economy. If the rewards for winning ‘the economic game’ became truncated at a few million dollars, would people stop trying so hard? Will there be no future economic revolutionaries like Bill Gates or Peter Thiel?

This argument seems to rest on the assumption that innovators are only motivated by the possibility of vast financial rewards. On the one hand, this seems false because innovation is just what free people do in the face of interesting or important problems, whether that be in literature, computer science, or logistics. On the other hand, it is true that many of those, like Bill Gates, who package up the technological breakthroughs of others into economically significant contributions are motivated by the hope of economic windfalls. And yet, how big does the reward have to be to motivate entrepreneurial innovation? Does it really have to be in the billions? Would no one write books anymore if they saw the wealth of (the British) JK Rowling capped at $63 million? Perhaps. Though I am sympathetic to Adam Smith’s argument that what people are really seeking is the “respect and admiration of mankind” and that a swimming pool full of money is merely one way – a vulgar, inferior way – of achieving that.[11]

Conclusion

My proposal, though quite serious, is obviously politically unfeasible in the face of the opposition of the rich. It is utopian. But utopian principles can nevertheless perform political service by introducing new normative benchmarks into political debate. (Consider the role that Nozickian libertarianism performs in the politics of taxation). Like the idea of the social contract, the idea of exiling the rich is expected to do its work hypothetically, via persuading people to imagine ‘What if….?’. It politicises the issue of personal wealth in a new way – in terms of democratic citizenship – which may appeal to a different and perhaps larger and more ideologically mixed coalition of voters than alternative social-justice accounts such as egalitarianism and libertarianism do. It thereby places a new onus upon the rich to justify their place amongst us, to overcome our suspicions by proving their loyalty to the democratic values of our society, for example by acceding to less radical proposals such as Piketty’s progressive tax on wealth, or at least much greater restrictions on the mechanisms, such as political donations, that translate private wealth into public influence.  

In this political perspective the very advantages of the rich are turned against them. The rich have been used to thinking of themselves as more equal than others in our society. Yet that power of command over others is exactly what puts the legitimacy of their place in our politics in question. They have been used to enjoying their independence from the rest of us, hardly mixing with ordinary people and hardly noticing the national borders they cross. Yet this very feature would legitimate and justify our ostracising them in turn. To the extent that the rich believe all their accomplishments came through their own efforts and they don’t need us for anything except property rights, we wouldn’t be doing them any harm by exiling them from our politics, or even literally exiling them to another country. By achieving such independence, the rich have brought upon themselves the burden of justifying why they should be allowed to remain amongst us. If you don’t need us, we can ask, why do we need you?

There is an alternative

We are witnessing an ‘assault’ on universities (Bailey and Freedman 2011) and the future of higher education and its institutions is being ‘gambled’ (McGettigan 2013). For years now, we have been warned that our universities are in ‘ruins’ (Readings 1997). We campaign for the ‘public university’ (Holmwood 2011) but in the knowledge that we work for private corporations where the means of knowledge production is being consolidated under the control of an executive. We want the cops off our campus but lack a form of institutional governance that gives academics and students a democratic and constitutional right to the university  (Bhandar 2013).

In 2010, following a policy review into higher education in England (Browne 2010), the newly elected Coalition government increased tuition fees three-fold and removed all public funding from the arts, humanities and the social sciences. This was an intensification of neo-liberal government policies which have been ongoing since the 1980s (Shattock 2012). The policy sparked a wave of protests and student occupations against the increase in fees and the introduction of other austerity measures (Palmieri and Solomon 2011). An important debate at the time among the protestors was that there should be democratic alternatives proposed to capitalist and corporate higher education, rather than simply an attempt to defend the public university: getting beyond the public and private models of higher education as currently constituted (Neary 2012). Current approaches to understanding the changes in UK higher education remain tied to deeply-rooted conceptions of public and private (Neary 2012). Ours is not an argument for or against the privatisation of public higher education but an attempt to go beyond these categories through praxis. This praxis means not only free from financial imperatives but real academic freedom (Wintour 2015).

We suggest there is an alternative: co-operative higher education. The framework for a co-operative model of higher education proposed here offers a challenging perspective to the wide-ranging debates about the future of democratic public higher education that ‘kicked off’ in England in 2010 and around the world (Mason 2011). These debates have re-emerged with renewed intensity during the recent spate of University occupations in the Netherlands and at a number of London University Colleges. We recognise the importance of fighting to maintain free public higher education as well as defending democratic academic values within the current university system, and we want to celebrate the achievements of Rethink UoA and the ‘New University Movement’ as well as the Free Education campaign in England. At the same time we are aware of the continuing dangers of co-option, recuperation and exhaustion as negotiations for institutional reform progress through the complex labyrinth of university committee structures; as well as the ever-present threat of police violence that hangs over any academic and student protest. In this context it is important to continue with experiments in democratic decision-making in ways that constitute a genuine transfer of power from the current university leadership and management to students, academics and other forms of university labour, including cleaners, porters and catering staff.

We argue that while trade unions are a vital element in this process of democratic worker participation, we should be aware of the international co-operative movement as another aspect of working class history and culture from which much can be learned about collective decision-making, along with the institutional and organisational forms within which decision-making as well as other participatory and collective activities take place. Already, outside the university, there are institutional examples of co-operative association that attempt to address issues of ownership and control over the means of production through a radical form of democracy among those involved. Co-operatives are constituted on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, autonomy, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In many cases the assets of the co-operative are held under ‘common ownership’, a social form of property that goes beyond the distinction between private and public.

The possibility of this alternative is bringing together scholars, students, and expert members of the co-operative movement to design a viable model for co-operative higher education. Using our experience of running the Social Science Centre, a co-operative for higher education in the city of Lincoln since 2011, we are interrogating our existing constitution and pedagogic practices to develop a theoretically and practically grounded model of a ‘co-operative university’ that activists, educators and the International Co-operative Alliance could take forward.

The Social Science Centre

The Social Science Centre (SSC) (http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk) organises co-operative higher education in Lincoln, UK and is run by its members. It was conceived in response to the 2010-2015 Coalition government’s changes to higher education funding in the UK; a time when students were occupying their universities in protest against these changes and the model of public higher education in the UK was undergoing rapid marketisation and financialisation that was undemocratic (McGettigan 2013) and imposing a ‘pedagogy of debt’ (Williams 2009).

The SSC was not the only attempt to create a ‘free university’ (Bonnett, 2013), but it is the most sustained and lasting of these efforts. One of the reasons for this is because it was given constitutional form as a democratic member-run organisation that is constitutionally the common property of its current 53 members. Recently, the idea of a ‘co-operative university’ has gained traction among educators and scholars in part drawing inspiration from the SSC, the conversion of state schools to co-operatives (Facer et al., 2012; Woodin 2012) and long-term efforts to teach co-operativism within higher education (Winn 2013).

The SSC can be understood through a conceptual framework of ‘in, against and beyond’ the institutional forms in which it was constituted (Holloway 2002). It was conceived by academics who have been developing a progressive pedagogical framework and model of curriculum development called Student as Producer within the constraints of the capitalist university (http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk). Through this work, we seek to question and reconceive the idea of the university as a social form and work against what it has become (Neary and Winn 2009). We aim to go beyond the conventional paradigms of public and private and constitute in practice a form of higher education grounded in the work of theorists such as Walter Benjamin (1934) and Lev Vygotsky (1997), the social history, values and principles of the international co-operative movement (Yeo 1988), and emerging practices of reciprocity which are constituting a new form of academic commons (Neary and Winn 2012).

Everyday Life at the SSC

Since it was established in 2011, the SSC has run courses in the Social Sciences, broadly conceived, and taught at the level of higher education (Social Science Centre 2013). These courses have been on The Social Science Imagination; The History of the Co-operative Movement; and Know How: Do It Ourselves Higher Education. We offer awards that are equivalent to university degrees, based on our own peer-assessments with no external accreditation. These courses take place in the evening once a week for two hours in premises marked for public use, e.g., community centres, museums, voluntary organisations, cafes and even the pub. The curriculum is decided by the group, with the teaching duties shared by all members, teachers and students, recognising that we all have much to learn from each other. All members of the co-operative are referred to as ‘scholars’ so there is no formal distinction between teachers and students, demonstrating our commitment to the principles of equality and democracy. We have a workshop session each year to decide the taught programmes, which are regularly reviewed and refreshed.

The SSC has arranged sessions on social photography and poetry. We have organised a lecture series on matters to do with ‘The Secret State’, ‘Community Football’ as well as an international conference on Co-operative Learning. This year we had an event where a range of speakers from the co-operative movement spoke about worker co-operatives, how to set up your own local co-operative, and the history of co-operative education in our city.

As well as the educational sessions we have regular planning meetings to deal with the everyday organisation of the co-operative. The students and teachers tend to be members of the SSC so we all have an equal say in the running of the Centre. We pay a lot of attention to making our events accessible to all, including children.  The SSC is a local community project but we would like to find ways of connecting more directly with some of the main issues of local concern and to be able to offer ourselves as a community resource, not only for teaching and learning but also for research.  We worry about the extent to which we are a genuine alternative to mainstream higher education, or a space to imagine what that alternative might look like. Sometimes it feels like we are simply replicating the very model of a university outside of the formal structures of higher education. This is something we talk about a great deal, so it never feels as if the project is ‘finished’ or has realised its full potential. Members of the Centre are committed to the theoretical underpinnings for such a project, but we are also deeply committed to the mundane reality of keeping the SSC alive. The SSC remains experimental in form and an appropriate laboratory for the creation of a co-operative university model.

Student as Producer: Pedagogy and institutional form

Our overall approach assumes that a new social and institutional form of higher education must be based on a pedagogic framework that offers an adequate critique of the capitalist university. Through several years of praxis, we have identified sufficient confluences between our pedagogic approach and the theory and practice of worker and social solidarity co-operatives (Conaty 2014; Winn 2015) to believe that a model of co-operative higher education can be developed that is adequate to meeting the current crises.

Our approach is theoretically grounded in the concept of the Student as Producer (Neary and Winn 2009; Neary 2010). The theoretical basis for Student as Producer is Marx’s labour theory of value (Marx 1976). Student as Producer recognises that both academics and students are involved as academic workers in the production of critical-practical knowledge (Moten and Harney 2004). Student as Producer was conceived inside the University of Lincoln (UK), eventually becoming the teaching and learning strategy for the whole institution. While Student as Producer revealed some of the negative consequences of higher education policy and developed some radical alternatives to ‘academic capitalism’, it is becoming recuperated by the capitalist university and subsumed with the consumerist principles of ‘student engagement’ and ‘student as partners’ (Neary et al. 2015).

Yet Student as Producer was always based on a radical, negative critique of the capitalist university as constituted on the basis of worker exploitation. Originally conceived to operate inside and against the capitalist university, it is now being re-functioned as a pedagogical framework outside of the capitalist university. This re-functioning is based on the values of sharing and commoning, already core academic values, against the exploitative money-based values which characterise the capitalist business. This is achieved not through theoretical novelty, but by connecting theory to an actually existing organisational form: the co-operative university. Student as Producer, as the pedagogical framework of a co-operative university, seeks to reconstitute the ownership of the means of production so that academic workers, including students, own the means of production of the enterprises in which they are working.

Through the specific historical innovations of worker co-operatives and ‘common ownership’, a co-operative model of higher education seems most appropriate to align with a pedagogical framework that recognises academic labour and the academic commons as the organising principle for the production of knowledge. In this way Student as Producer is central to our consideration of a new social form of higher education, having far-reaching social, political and epistemological implications.

The Research Project

The Social Science Centre has recently been funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) to develop a model for co-operative higher education. We have designed an integrated series of workshops inviting academics and students from the social sciences, co-operative business and management, and humanities to work with us. We are also involving historians of the co-operative movement, legal specialists, worker-members of co-operatives, and individuals who have been involved in the free university movement in the UK and elsewhere. We are supplementing these activities with a range of qualitative research methods, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and surveys so as to understand how the different models of co-operative organisation might be applied to higher education and the production of knowledge.

Run as a critical participatory action research project (Kemmis 2008) within the SSC, we aim to ensure that all participants feel able to contribute to the design and outcomes of the research. Based on ‘collective deliberation aimed at collective self-understanding’ (ibid 135) of our own co-operative, participants will seek to contribute, through praxis, to the development of a common model for a ‘co-operative university’. As with our pedagogical approach, our overall methodological perspective is informed by a critique of the contradictory relationship between labour and capital and the emancipatory potential inherent in the capital relation. From this viewpoint, labour is understood dialectically as both socially constituted and mediating (Postone 1993) and the methods of our research are understood to be constituted by our immanent social conditions but also prefigurative of the emancipatory potential of our collective work.

The research is taking place over 12 months (May 2015 to April 2016) consisting of a timetable of actions (workshops, focus groups, etc.). The underlying process of action research is co-designed by the research group i.e. members of the Social Science Centre, and co-ordinated through a regular timetable of information meetings, study seminars and research design workshops. The sessions are aimed at creating a ‘safe space’ that builds solidarity within the immediate group and with visiting guests. The researchers produce frequent blog posts on activities and matters as they arise which are published on the SSC website for public comment.

By the end of the research period, we intend to produce a coherent model for a co-operative university, including a proposed pedagogical framework, business plan, model constitutional rules for the co-operative and a proposed model for federation among co-operative universities. Long-term, we envisage that this work will contribute to the growing literature on co-operative higher education (Winn 2013) as well as inform discussions about its development within the co-operative movement and among alternative and free universities worldwide. We believe that it will stimulate discussion and action within Co-operatives UK and within the International Co-operative Alliance.

In 2016, the Social Science Centre will have been running for five years and it is likely that the outcomes of this research will be formally adopted by its members. The reconstitution of the SSC will mark a second stage in its short history, providing a relatively mature example of an alternative form of higher education for educators and students to draw inspiration from and to continue to develop in, against and beyond the ‘pedagogy of debt’ and the ‘ruins’ of the capitalist university.

 

We invite you to contact us if you wish to contribute to this work.

 

As we struggle over the future of academia, merely exposing the truth – that all that is public is melting into air – is not enough. We will have to develop new ways of demonstrating academic worth. Simply showing to the public that universities are being destroyed is not enough. As everyone and anything is fitted into regimes of indebtedness and thereby subject to programs of austerity, calls to protect ‘our university’ appear hopelessly particularistic. If public expenditures must be cut – as they must within the political economy of what Wolfgang Streeck calls the consolidation state (Streeck 2015) – highly privileged sectors of the educational industry can hardly be exempted. It is, I think, a mistake to assume that publics under such a regime will be persuaded by accounts of the destruction of academia that focus on the problems academics are faced with. Most people are not academics, and have no interest in becoming academics. They have meagre means of realising why they ought to care about them. It is however equally mistaken to conclude that academic worth must therefore be conceived and articulated from the position of the non-academic outsiders – as if to imagine oneself in the position of a consuming audience and thus sense what the others might desire from us. Just as outsiders have little sense of why they should care about the destruction of academia, they have also little sense of what would, alternatively, be worthwhile about academic work. Instead of presuming to know what the public wants and catering to such – often very regressive – aims, I propose to think about alternative modes of academic worth from the inside out. I will propose the concept of demonstration as a name for this kind of public value. While the question of demonstration opens a field of issues about ways in which publics can be engaged, I want to pitch my questioning at the level of method and inquiry. If we – academics – ourselves cannot support alternative demonstrations of academic worth at the scale of our own inquiries, we have no business persuading others – taxpayers, students and other publics – of this worth. That is, if we choose not to cynically deceive our clients. So how do we envision academic worth and what alternative might we have?

 

Between a rock and a hard place

More often than not academic worth is envisioned in two different ways. First, there is the vision of a knowledge economy. Under this rubric, the entire world of academic practice is thought to ‘add value’ to something that is often called ‘the economy’ or, in a more generous sense, ‘society’. However, the vision of a knowledge economy is far more radical than the mere commodification of academic labour. It is not that universities are being transformed into factories that ought to bring its products to market, although that is sometimes part of it. The university, particularly its late 19^th and 20^th century instantiations, was always located at the cross roads of specific supplies and demands. The factory-market metaphor is too shallow. Universities can be coupled to many fields other than ‘the market’ or ‘the economy’ and nonetheless be turned into ‘knowledge economies’.

What the vision of the knowledge economy proposes is the invention of value metrics that can be attached to anything that moves – workers, papers, patents, departments, schools – and thereby allows players to coordinate their strategies. The neoliberalisation of academia is not the introduction of market discipline from the outside but the proliferation of capitalist controls within academic labouring. Even if academic workers are not forced to ‘increase production’ or ‘valorise’ their work in terms of ‘economic’ output or ‘industrial’ yields, they may nonetheless begin to control themselves, others and their work in relation to generalised metrics of value: citations, awards, recognitions, career opportunities, patents, grants, titles, publications, attention, compliments, notoriety. In Marxist terms, we control ourselves and others through a fetishisation of value.

Now, we may take on a cynical outlook and say that, objectively, fields of knowledge production differentiate and are differentiated through one value and one value alone: the academic capital called ‘Reputation’ (Bourdieu 1988). If such a cynical outlook represents ‘objectivism’, the vision of the knowledge economy is precisely its opposite: subjectivism. We are not asked to recognise the objectivity of academic production, in which case it would still make sense to demonstrate the falsity of such an analysis. Rather, we are asked to perceive academic work as a field of opportunities for acquiring academic esteem. Or, as Richard Rorty aptly put it: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” (1979: 176). The invention of quantified performance indicators are but one deliberate tool in such a pedagogy of entrepreneurialism. The more radical idea behind them is that we approach our practices as so many opportunities to profit from our competitors’ informational lags. We are living in Gary Becker’s wet dreams. Thus, any method of outwitting one’s colleagues is granted as long as one scores points in the fetishized metrics of value, however vaguely defined, and all the better if one doesn’t actually believe in them.[i]

Like all forms of capitalism (Boltanksi and Chiapello 2005), the knowledge economy lacks practical criteria of its own and can only be sustained through the exploitation of that which still resists it. Only as long as my colleagues pretend to actually believe in metrics of value can I get away with outwitting them in whatever it is “added value” demands of us without the illusion of “academic expertise” being unmasked as the mere manipulation of other people’s anticipations. Whether those other people are industry executives, policy-makers, citizens, journalists, victims, venture capitalists, academic managers, stock brokers or my very own colleagues is not all that relevant. Even if the metrics of value refer to measures of value assumed to be internal to science – truth, validity, reliability, replicability, etc. – we are already compelled and compel others to keep up appearances.

Demonstrating worth in the knowledge economy basically means impressing as many people as possible of the idea that what I am doing is impressive or, better yet, will be immensely impressive in the future. The knowledge economy is prone to alternate between booms and busts, between academic celebrity and scandals of foul play. But who cares as long as the wheels keep rolling? The knowledge economy is not capable of demonstrating worth other than through Public Relations.

The second vision of academic worth comes in the form of a representist democracy. Here, academia exists in service of the citizenry. This vision conceives of the university as yet another domain of privilege and authority that is opened up to public accountability and legitimation. It envisions a past of ivory towers and professorial dogmatism in order to project a future of public deliberation and fairness. While it may be highly suspect of the truth-claims made by science, biased as it is towards the concerns of insiders, it also glorifies the academic capacity to settle disputes. It envisions the university as the place where true tests of veracity can be made and scepticism reigns unobstructed. The problem is not authoritative truth claims as such, but academic isolation and scholasticism that distort settlements of disputes. The vision of a representist democracy proposes to redirect the consensus-procedures of academic communities to public disputes. Academics are thus asked to take on some of the work that parliament does in representative democracies: figuring out what can be done about public problems. This means that academics should stop resolving their collegial quarrels – scholastic, theoretical, detached, indulgent – and get to work on public dilemmas. Academics ought to translate ideological cleavages into competing truth-claims and test their truthfulness with the best research available. In this view, academia provides a curious kind of discourse, composed of facts and nothing but facts, which enables citizens to speak truth to power. The entire academic community becomes the citizenry’s army in its on-going battle against false consciousness.

The pinnacle of this assault on idolatry and received wisdom is given by the idea of ‘evidence-based policy’. It is not just that ‘fact free politics’ ought to be combated and that the efficacy of public policy ought to be ascertained. The vision of representist democracy seeks to interlink civic representation to the representativity of causal claims. What is tested in the randomised controlled trials of evidence-based policy evaluation is not merely the causal efficacy of policy measures – if they really work – but the question of whether those measures and their effects can be generalised to the civic population – if they work for all in equal measure. Evidence for causal efficacy is generated precisely by testing whether or not a measure is effective for the citizenry-as-a-whole. In other words, each citizen is given an equal right to governmental efficacy. Facts become more factual insofar as they are, or can become, equally effective for all citizens. Even the most impractical research pursuits are to be justified in view of this civic-popular receptivity. Research is about facts and facts are precisely those truths that can be generalised and applied to all citizens.

The vision of a representist democracy is presentist in a double sense. First, it envisions the citizenry to be a homogenous and well-delineated entity: the population. The citizenry is always already present and identical. Of course, effects appear to contradict each other, they are not the same for everyone as they only take effect in the particular circumstances of each unique person. By inventing stable dimensions of difference – demographics – that count for everyone in equal measure, research may nonetheless represent the undivided citizenry to itself. Non-generalizable differences do not count. Such research designs enables democracy to reach behind the veil of ignorance and represent effects in relation to a citizenry-without-differences, but only by assuming that the citizenry is a finite set with well-defined characteristics. Thus: What is fair is factual and what is factual is fair.

Second, the facts revealed in this way are considered causal mechanisms out there in reality. Contradicting them is useless as they are present nonetheless. This way of speaking the truth depends on a curious bifurcation. On the one hand, there is the order of ‘free opinion’ in which anything can be uttered for whatever reason. Here, contradiction reigns supreme. On the other hand, there is the order of ‘unfree facts’ in which contradiction is futile. Now, of course, in a democracy one cannot be forced to speak the truth. It is entirely up to us to exercise our freedom of speech. In this vision: Either we speak the truth, by submitting our opinions to the laws of nature, or our speech is merely expressive and, thus, nothing more than the fact of being uttered. Either disputes are about factual efficacies, resolvable through validated evidence, or they are themselves facts and their resolution becomes a matter of causally effecting them in the right way. Democratic politics is either the scientific resolution of competing efficacy claims – managerialism – or the effective manipulation of non-truthful discord – managerialism.

Demonstrating worth is a matter of civic servicing. Research is done in the name of the citizenry, at its behest and pleasure. It is a service to the public as each citizen is granted the right to equally effective government. It is also a servicing of the public as each civic utterance is judged to be either a statement of fact or the fact of statement. Research is not so much a public good as it is in the public’s good. This good is mainly sanitary. The house of democracy is cleansed of wasteful contradictions by academic clean-up. The vision is of a representist democracy capable of sanitising the public sphere in which academics appear as little more than experts in effective house-keeping, aids to the managers of the manor.

Neither of the two visions available today – the knowledge economy or the representist democracy – can accommodate an adequate discussion about what it means to demonstrate academic worth. The knowledge economy effectively destroys the bonds that keep academic practitioners together and proposes that we exploit our residual fidelity to metrics of value, whatever they may be for the moment, as a way of keeping the show on the road. The representist democracy provides a rational basis for democratic politics – facts – only by reducing this politics itself to a series of facts called ‘causes’ and ‘opinions’. These visions are, in crucial ways, opposed to each other. While the first decouples science from anything other than what, currently, counts as value, the second fixes science into the role of service provider. What the latter fixes, the former seeks to break free from. What the former exploits, the latter seeks to redistribute. It is not uncommon, however, to encounter both visions in some kind of anxious embrace. It can be proposed, for instance, that it is in the public’s good to construct a knowledge economy, a market-place of ideas, a global competition for the best and the brightest. In short: to strive for the one thing everyone must believe in…Innovation. Conversely, it can be proposed that specifically civic metrics of value are what ought to occupy the strategic agendas of academic entrepreneurs – that public expenditures in academia can only be sustained if ‘social value’ can be demonstrated. Moreover, these two proposals are easily connected into an evocative loop: it is in the public’s good to construct a knowledge economy and this knowledge economy is best expressed in metrics of civic interest. The addition of value is to be evidence-based and well-based evidence is that which adds value. In this way, a presentist belief in the facts-as-they-are, and an entrepreneurial unbelief in value-as-it-is-counted, can be tightly coupled together to compose a new spirit of academic capitalism. What Niels Bohr said of superstition – that it works even if you don’t believe in it – is now true of academic practice itself.

 

The monstrosity of experimental activism

There are always alternatives. One such alternative is envisioned by what I’d call a monstrous alliance of experimental activism. This is a monstrous alliance because experimentalists and activists are, in many ways, at odds with each other. I have in mind here two tendencies in counter-hegemonic practices that seek to contest the new spirit of academic capitalism in two different ways. These two tendencies – experimentalism and activism – can be defined by explicating their mutual discordances.

To the frustration of activists, the experimentalists maintain that there is always hope, always new ways of doing things, always possibilities for tinkering with the existing order. Experimentalists think the solution is change, the making of new relations. To the fatigue of experimentalists, the activists hold that there is no time to waste, actions needs to be taken sooner not later, and an unreserved partiality to the dominated, the outsiders, the subaltern, the downtrodden and stigmatised is to be promoted and sustained. Activists think change is the solution, the dissolution of old structures. While experimentalists believe in action, they do not believe in any priority of ‘the cause’. And while activists believe in creativity, they do not believe in moderation. Activists tend to renounce experimentalism as ‘liberal’. Experimentalists tend to placate activism as ‘unproductive’. Yet, there is also an alliance in the making.

What brings both tendencies together, I want to argue, is a vision of academia in which research – instead of any truth-procedure as such – is life. Both already accept what ethnomethodology proclaims: that we ought to do methodical research into methods. Research is taken to be a specific folding back of life’s methods onto its procession. Life acts methodically and it is this aspect of living – how things are done – that academics seek to attend to and, in a sense, demonstrate. Both activists and experimentalists share a reflexive vision of method as they take it to be inextricably entangled with, what Stengers calls, an ecology of practices (2010). Thus, their common enemy is a positivist/presentist position that seeks to uncouple inquiry from its ecology by way of methodological terror – ‘The’ scientific method – or epistemological common sense – black boxes of all kinds. Experimentalists and activists advocate entanglement to be the very reason for doing academic work and cannot help but take inquiry itself to be a reason to be alive. Science is a calling, a biography more than a career. What would it mean to demonstrate worth if it entails the methodical inquiry into the methods of being alive?

My argument hinges on the term ‘demonstration’. It carries into the discussion a useful bundle of associations: acting, protesting, performing, proving, teaching, showing, testing, even impressing and, above all, wondering. Demonstration seems to be a practice that can move between all these registers. We may demonstrate worth in all of these senses and, crucially, none of them can be principally rejected. All of them count in experimental activism. What matters then is doing research and thereby demonstrating ways of living. This is where both the knowledge economy and the representist democracy falter. Both seek to marry the demonstrative efforts of academic practice to concerns that annul life into value-for-the-time-being or facts-without-responsibility. In contrast, demonstration is not the publication of the impressive or the presentation of the indisputable. Experimental activism is the always partial interruption of what is already the case by which the enduring actuality of non-necessity is demonstrated:

To demonstrate how acids do when we work with them this way; to demonstrate how political grievances do when you work with them that way; to demonstrate how archives do when we work with them another way; to constantly propose linkages and translations between the lab and the clinic, the argumentation and the debate, the test and the implement, academic imagination and public truth. In short, to demonstrate that common worlds can unfold from the merely apparent solipsism and very real loneliness of creative expertise and inquisitive dedication.

In an ecology of practices, academia and the work that goes on there become sites of hesitation, unfolding, recombination and monstrosities. Where the knowledge economy asks us, although not politely, to govern our inquisitive enterprises and the representist democracy offers us the role of service-providers, I want to imagine the university as a place where matters-at-hand acquire – always partial – non-necessity. If academic capitalism is the anxious necessity of lock-step relations in the ecology of practices, steered through values-anticipated or legitimated by causalities-proven, then academic worth revolves around the subversion of such idle necessity by methodically demonstrating how life does when we are doing it.

The university that not only harbours but would actually give experimental activists a home is a transgressive place, a utopia, as the very reason to do research is to constantly transgress the boundary between “academic” and “non-academic” practices, to break out of the home. The question of what this new university looks like can thus not be answered from the outside by way of a governance model, as if “democratisation” can be supplanted onto academia. Sure, we might choose to tolerate one or another of such “democratic” models when it is offered to us. The hard work of negotiating over such models is certainly not irrelevant. Yet, we should also work from the inside out and take seriously the responses this provokes from the people that are paid to rule us and allow us to work. To pretend to build – once and for all – the transgressive university that we think we want, is – I think – non-sense. The matter-at-hand is demonstration. We should demonstrate, from the inside out, how a methodological research into methods adds to our capacities to live in a greater variety of ways. We thereby always already remain at a distance from the value-metrics and self-evidences in any of the governance models that are offered to us.

Introduction

In academia and in the public media, a discussion is raging about the aims, the style of management and the ideological background of the university. This debate has spread to several countries, notably countries in which neoliberal models of governance are enforced in systems of higher education[1].  As a result, several student protests have been initiated, as for example the protests in Amsterdam during which university buildings were occupied. Generally, these protests are initiated at classical universities, while engineering students at technical universities don’t seem too eager to go protesting. As an oft-mentioned illustration of the assumed disconnected attitude of engineering students, it is recalled that students of Caltech protested during the student protests of 1968 that revolved around military service and the Vietnam War; but for quite a different reason: the cancellation of the TV series Star Trek. The dealings of the engineering sciences are said to be a long way off from political and societal concerns and engineers seem to occasionally embrace this idea.

However, there are good reasons to believe that even the Star Trek protests of ‘68 arose out of an ideological context (Keyser 2015). Even more pressing reasons can be found for arguing that the current debate that revolves around the ‘marketization’ of the universities and the consequences of this trend for academic education is relevant for technical universities. It would be foolish to think that students of engineering sciences cannot or should not be involved in such political matters that concern the way their education is organised. As a contribution to the debate, I will focus on the specific status of marketization in the engineering sciences at technical universities, taking the Dutch technical universities as illustrative examples. In the argument, I will aim at countering the marketization paradigm at technical universities by juxtaposing the ‘tuned’ engineer with the idea of bildung of the virtuous engineer.

The marketization of technical universities

What is meant by the marketization of the technical university? To answer this question, I firstly need to address the origins of the engineering sciences, which are very different from the origins of sciences at the classical universities. Initially, the education of engineers emerged from two background conditions in the 18^th and 19^th centuries: a development from ‘the shop to the school’ (Lintsen 1993: 12) and developments in state building (Lintsen 1993: 23). The education of engineers moved from professional training (apprenticeship) in artisan shops to formal education that laid down the requirements for being an engineer. Moreover, the first instances of formal education for engineers were directly organized by the state, which trained engineers to be specialized in building military fortifications. Hence, engineering sciences have developed out of a context of professionalization and state interest, which culminated in the so-called ‘polytechnic schools’ (Reynolds 1992: 462).

Nonetheless, the engineering sciences have been transformed and put on an equal footing with the natural sciences and humanities. In the Netherlands, the academic status of the engineering sciences was fully recognized in 1986 when the three institutes for the engineering sciences in Delft, Eindhoven and Enschede were officially titled ‘technical universities’, and therefore elevated from the level of polytechnic school to university. Still, the technical universities are tightly connected to the professional sector. In the Netherlands, they are far ahead of the classical universities in terms of ‘market valorisation’, indicating their success in deploying commercial activities out of their research (Leeuwen & Marc 2013). While acknowledging the differences in background conditions between technical universities and classical universities, I want to assess what has been the alleged impact of neoliberal governance and ‘marketization’ for the technical universities.

Henceforth, I will discuss the general problematization of marketization in universities. I distinguish three distinct aspects of the process of marketization, most of which originated from the rise of neoliberal ideas of governance initiated in the 1980s: the emergence of the knowledge economy, the rise of new public management, and the transformation of curricula. The first aspect, the emergence of the knowledge economy, refers to an increased interaction between businesses and universities in knowledge production at the backdrop of ideas about ‘knowledge capitalism’ (Peters 2013: 13). Knowledge is increasingly seen as a commodity that can be subjected to market forces in order to be made profitable. As such, the idea of the knowledge economy has led to the idea of economic knowledge, both in terms of academic results and of global competition (Levidow 2002: 2-3). Academic results are expected to be quantifiable and capable of being subjected to performance indicators. Global competition between universities, fuelled by the increasing importance of university and scholar rankings, revolves around attracting the most competent and productive students and researchers.

The second aspect of the process of marketization of universities is the rise of ‘new public management’. This type of management indicates an application of business management models on government or semi-government institutions. For the academic world, this involves a shift of the justification of the function of a university, moving from a ‘culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate’ to one with ‘an institutional stress on performativity’ (strategic planning, performance indicators, academic audits) (Olssen & Peters 2005: 313). As a consequence, a class of academic managers became part of the university organization, consisting of people responsible for the management, measurement and audit of academic output.

The third aspect of the marketization process entails a transformation of academic education, both structurally and content-wise. Structurally, education became organized in such a way that its outcomes can be better monetized, measured and audited. Although separate segments of a university’s organization remain responsible for the organization and financing of the curricula, the norms for their performance are strictly regulated by means of output-related criteria. Content-wise, individuals are increasingly assessed on their ‘skills’, which implies that curricula are deemed valuable only insofar as they deliver measurable skills that are explicitly separated from knowledge and understanding (Curren 2003: 564). Skills relate to pragmatic goals that are context-dependent as juxtaposed to the universality that is implied in the knowledge and understanding aimed at by universities. The impacts that these structural and content-wise changes have are best captured by the concept of ‘tuning’, with the aim of ‘producing graduates with relevant skills and dispositions to meet the demands of industry’ (Chan 2014: 15).

Opposing the ‘tuned’ engineer

Now that I have identified the three main aspects of the marketization of universities in general, I will assess to what extent these aspects can be called problematic for technical universities. First of all, strong traces of the above-mentioned aspects of marketization can be observed in the strategic plans of the three Dutch technical universities. Amongst the principal long-term objectives we find: the attraction of leading academic talents, creating business locations (TU Delft 2010), strengthening disciplinary excellence, securing fixed investment goals (TU/e 2011), taking societal and economic impacts as criteria for performance-indication and promoting valorisation activities (Universiteit Twente 2014). Hence, I tentatively argue that the marketization trends influencing the management of universities in general impact the management of technical universities as well; perhaps even more vividly.

As I discussed before, technical universities share a history and a societal embeddedness that differ from those of classical universities. The academic tradition on which classical universities are grounded, which can be traced to the scholastic age, revolves around a universalist idea of knowledge; as knowledge for truth’s sake (Brody 2009: 8). Moreover, the classical concept of the university as it developed during the enlightenment was based according to Humboldt on the ‘unity of research and teaching’, without any necessary connection to the realm of praxis (Scharmer & Kaufer 2000). Though these original values of classical universities have certainly been put under pressure, they nonetheless are part of their history and position in society. Technical universities, on the contrary, are originally grounded in the interests of states and professions. As such, one could argue that a focus on interaction with businesses and state interests is more closely related to the idea of a technical university. Perhaps for this reason, technical universities in the Netherlands have generally spearheaded initiatives focused on valorisation of their knowledge: with as a striking example the focus of the University of Twente on creating an ‘entrepreneurial university’ as early as in 1987 (Kan 2011), when the first contours of neoliberal university management appeared.

Still, we need to critically assess the impact of marketization trends at technical universities. For the aspect of the emergence of the knowledge economy and economic knowledge, this seems to be a question of finding a right balance. Technical universities are originally involved in the application of the knowledge they produce, both in terms of human capital and academic output. However, a danger persists in excessively vesting economic interest in universities through a principle that Max Weber coined technical reason (Peters 2013: 12). Technical reason refers to the emergence of a paradigm in thinking as a result of the economization of knowledge. Because knowledge is increasingly translated into practice, applied to the human life world, a form of what Morozov designates as solutionism (Morozov 2013) arises. This translates into an ideology of seeing technological knowledge and its application as a form of domination over both nature and men (Hamilton 1991: 135). A dominance of such a way of thinking at universities can abstract from the human aspect of technologies: from the societal embeddedness of applications of technical knowledge. The second aspect of marketization of universities, the application of new management practices, strongly relates to the first. A certain set of managerial criteria that map the impact of the work of technical universities can be very beneficial, but an excessive use of such criteria can lead to what scholars of the Frankfurt School designated as the danger of administrative reason (Peters 2013: 12): an over-monitoring of processes leading to the loss of academic freedom and the imposition of substantial bureaucratic burdens.

I argue that the third aspect of the marketization of universities, the transformation of engineering education, is the most problematic aspect at technical universities. The focus on ‘tuning’ of the ‘skills’ of an engineer implies an application of the principles of technical and administrative reason on the person that is educated in the engineering sciences. That is, universities increasingly treat their students as an output-variable that needs to be adjusted, ‘tuned’, to the needs of administrative criteria and the paradigm of the knowledge economy. This leads to several problematic tendencies. First of all, a sole focus on skills empties curricula of their substance: it makes them fully dependent on pragmatic end-points that are themselves not part of the knowledge and understanding of the engineering sciences (Curren 2003: 565). Secondly, the ‘tuning’ of engineers directly impacts the societal, educational and personal expectations that are connected to the curricula. Engineers are expected to excel in their discipline in a way that makes them meet the demands of domain-specific professions. For example, a good mechanical engineer is deemed a good engineer inasmuch as his skills make him fit for serving the needs of the industry demanding mechanical engineers. This has moved the focus of educating a ‘whole’ engineer, expressing a holistic idea of an engineer who actively needs to embed his knowledge in society (Ruprecht 1999), to an engineer who is economized and made into a fragment of a designated process in the knowledge economy. Put bluntly, an engineer is not expected to oversee the impacts of his work in a broader societal setting, but rather to comply with administrative and technical rules by correctly ticking the boxes of the ethical requirements he is confronted with. Furthermore, neglecting the holistic idea of what it means to be an engineer in an educational setting causes failure in living up to the explicit goal of marketization at universities: namely, to produce, as the specific jargon frames it, proper engineers. Next to fragmented skills of problem solving, the skills required to identify challenges and societal contexts from which these problems arise are just as important.

Taken together, I argue that the marketization at technical universities has led to a focus on the ‘tuned’ engineer, which has led to the failure of considering the holistic idea of an engineer as someone who not only solves problems but also identifies and justifies them out of a sense of societal embeddedness. In order to address this challenge, we need to try to answer the question: what does it mean to be a good engineer? In order to do so, I will invoke the idea of ‘Bildung’, framed in opposition to the marketization of engineers.

‘Bildung’ of the virtuous engineer

I argue that in order to counter the problematic tendencies of marketization at technical universities, ideas of what it means to be a good, or rather ‘virtuous’ engineer need to be brought to the table. As such, it is not the skills of a person (end-points that fit within the marketization paradigm) but the person herself – her character – that ought to be the aim of education at technical universities. The idea of a cultivation of ‘character’ is not to be confused with cultivating a psychological disposition of an individual, but refers instead to cultivating a character as in a narrative, as someone endowed with ethical qualities operating in a cultural setting[2]. A vested idea that is grounded on the cultivation of the individual is captured by the originally German idea of ‘bildung’. Bildung strongly connotes with the German word bauen (to construct) (Voskuhl 2014) and as such can be interpreted as the construction of the self, the cultivation of a person. At the same time, it originates from the word bild (image), denoting the designing of a holistic image of the self (Schneider 2012: 303). I argue that since especially engineers are involved with the art of construction and design, the construction and design of our artificial world, the idea of bildung is a relevant starting-point for reflection.

Bildung plays a prominent role in the ideas about education of the German philosopher and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt who had a strong influence on the formation of the German education system. He framed bildung as the ability to be able to understand one’s own fragmented field of action, one’s own narrow worldview shaped by a discipline (mathematics, physics, philosophy) in the context of a ‘higher perspective’, a general humanist overview and understanding (Humboldt 1986: 1). This amplifies the need for reflection upon one’s own standpoint in order to be able to transcend it and to see one’s work in a broader historical, cultural and societal setting. Originally, bildung referred to the autonomous construction of the self, but in the course of the 18^th century it gained the meaning of forming another person’s self (through education) (Schneider 2012: 304). Schneider explains that the educational process of bildung as a moral development occurs in the course of a person’s life. From the impulsive self of one’s childhood, a person constructs herself according to stages in which she organises her thinking, devotes her thoughts to the goals of a community, identifies these goals with an ideology and finally distances herself from this ideology (Schneider 2012: 306). In the context of our earlier discussion, this could entail a formative process in which engineers identify the goals of their thinking with a solutionist ideology, enabling them to reflect upon this ideology by distancing themselves from it.

Unfortunately, bildung is a widely diverse concept with manifold meanings attached to it (Horlacher 2004: 424). In order to make better sense of the concept of bildung, I interpret it in line with the recently revived tradition of virtue ethics (a tradition that has largely been based on Aristotelian ethics). Virtue ethics diverges from the ethical systems that originate from the enlightenment, utilitarian and deontological ethics, by grounding ethics in the moral agent rather than in the application of certain universal principles (Silva 2011: 142). Virtue ethics revolves around the reliability of a moral agent: the reliability of an agent to act according to certain conditions of a virtue in a given situation. In other words, virtue ethics deals with how to act instead of what to do. One of the strong criticisms of virtue ethics is aimed at its communitarian character: the liberal critique of the idea that the meaning of virtues is constituted by society. The concept of bildung, as a free and autonomous process of reflection that belongs to the individual serves to overcome this critique (Silva 2011: 154). According to the idea of bildung in a context of virtue ethics, education should be aimed at promoting individual self-reflection in the context of a historical, cultural and societal understanding. In order for an engineer to distance herself from the ideology that grounds the goals of her work, her education should enable reflection upon these goals and embed this reflection in the context of the idea of how she can be a virtuous engineer. For example, when a computer scientist is working on a specific problem in her discipline, say cyber security, she will first be confronted with the historical and normative grounding of this problem (why is it a problem, due to which circumstances, in order to attain which goal, and why?). Consequently, she will contextualize this holistic view (this ‘bild’) in accordance with what it means for her to be a virtuous computer scientist. For instance, she can develop an idea of herself as an engineer who works on the development of cyber security while respecting the privacy of the users of the technology and contributing to a friendly and just interaction between people in cyberspace. Through the process of bildung, she can juxtapose her idea of a virtuous engineer with the goals set out in her specific field of study. Though this educational outlook can be fruitful for both classical and technical universities, it is particularly relevant for technical universities because engineering students focus on very specific, designated problems and because they regularly work with actual applications of their work that can have direct historical, ethical and political consequences.

How does the education of a virtuous engineer differ from the education of a tuned engineer? This difference can be established by considering the differences with the goals of the ‘skills’ that are central to the tuned engineer. Current management strategies of technical universities mention ‘packages of skills’ that make engineers ‘suitable for employment’ (TU Delft 2010), offering ‘management’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘team-work’ and ‘communication’ skills (TU/e 2011). These skills all relate to certain end-points that arguably can be very beneficial for the ways engineers operate, but barely relate to any aspect of bildung. None of these skills involves an aspect of reflection, of relating to one’s discipline from a more general perspective. Rather, they refer to proper functioning within a fragmented domain (even, paradoxically, skills like ‘team-work’ that focus on working with peers rather than reflecting on this work). Conversely, the virtuous engineer engages with a model of education that is embedded in a culture of reflection. This does not imply the reflection that is often required in study programs in the sense of ‘reflecting on one’s work’, but rather in the sense of reflecting on one’s discipline from a holistic perspective. Next to training in problem solving, engineers ought to be trained in the identification of problems (why is this engineering problem a problem at all from a societal perspective?). The ‘whole’ engineer should not just be expected to be excellently ‘tuned’ towards her future position (this includes team-building and communication skills) but rather to be capable of critically situating her position in society as a whole. This is also a point where an interaction between the engineering sciences, natural sciences and the humanities can occur (Ben-Haim 2000), for each has a stake in the ‘bildung’ of the virtuous scientist – be it an engineer or a philosopher. Such an interaction does not entail engineers having to engage in a form of liberal arts education, but rather that moments of reflection are built into the fabric of the educational program. For example, an engineering student in the discipline of mechanical engineering would be challenged to reflect upon her work by being confronted with the historical development of her discipline and the ethical and political consequences of the technologies she develops. Already, courses of ethics are included in educational programs of technical universities in the Netherlands. However, these courses are still separated from the field-specific courses in the discipline. A more suitable educational design would be one in which the ethical, historical and political aspects of technologies are integral parts of the domain-specific courses. In line with this idea, students could be expected to include these reflections in their work (e.g. as part of their bachelor or master theses).

Conclusion & Discussion

In this paper, I argue that marketization trends affecting universities in general are strongly present in the management and education of technical universities. Partly, this is due to the historical background of the technical university as such, but marketization can nonetheless negatively affect the purpose of technical universities, which I argue should be to educate virtuous engineers. Marketization trends tend to promote technical and administrative reason and culminate in the idea of an engineer that is ‘tuned’ to her future position. As an alternative to the tuned engineer, I discuss the idea of ‘bildung’ of the virtuous engineer, whose education includes a strong reflexive component. Thiscomponent, I argue, should enable engineers to distance themselves from their disciplines and reflect on their discipline-specific goals by juxtaposing them with their perception of what it means to be a virtuous engineer (how one envisions one’s role as engineer in society). Instead of exclusively focusing on sets of skills that are preferred due to societal and business constraints, universities should also encourage students to reflect on their discipline as a whole; not only from a technical, but also from a historical, ethical and political perspective.

However, a merely educational reform at technical universities would be insufficient to achieve this change, for the marketization pressures are present in the research and management structures as well. The purpose of a reform of these structures would be, in line with the bildung principle of educating the virtuous engineer, to enable the university as an institution to engage in critical reflection with regard to its own goals and to contextualise this reflection in terms of what it means to be, so-to-say, a virtuous technical university. I argue that this can be done according to three main reforms. First, the management of universities should be de-fragmentised. Currently, the technical universities especially have faculties and departments that enjoy strict financial and managerial autonomy. Such a separation supports the ‘tuning’ of goals for departments to be most competitive in a societal setting conditioned by marketization trends (to gain the most funding, to ‘tune’ research according to the need of businesses) and to pursue their goals separately. Breaking down the barriers between departments enables more solidarity within the university’s organisation, results in a softening of marketization goals, and makes it easier for researchers from different fields to be embedded in disciplines foreign to their own (e.g. a historian or ethicist working in a computer science department). Secondly, technical universities should adapt more democratic structures to allow for critical self-reflection. When the entire organisation is involved in setting the goals of the university, the opportunities for reflection are enhanced and managerial decisions can be adjusted to the agreed-upon perception of a virtuous technical university. Thirdly, at the societal level, limits to the involvement of business and government interests in setting the goals of technical universities should be deliberated and implemented. In line with our earlier discussion, I argue that we need to balance the gains from marketization against the over-excessive presence of processes of technical and administrative reason that obstruct the possibility for free reflection implied in the idea of bildung.

Acknowledgement

The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology is funded under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106) and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund. 

 

Introduction

The protests at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) that began in November 2014 as a reaction to severe cuts^[1] in the department of humanities have sparked a broad debate nationally and even internationally about the future of the university and the values and ideals that should define it. It turned out that dissatisfaction was much more widespread in different parts of the university than some had previously thought, and many turned out to share the concerns first put forward in the humanities department, to extend beyond the borders of the university and the country. Increasing focus on getting as many students as possible to graduate promptly has shifted the attention ever more towards quantitative indicators for the evaluation of education rather than qualitative ones, leading to raising the question of whether the quality of education has suffered from these priorities. The executive board of the UvA initially tried to ignore the criticisms and demands put forward by the protesters, but eventually recognized that this strategy was untenable and came forward with a substantial response to the protests: the board presented ‘ten points’ that would guide its discussion of the future direction of the university. Although in general everyone was happy with these points as they contained suggestions in response to important demands of the protesters such as the demand for increased democratisation, a broadly-shared criticism of the ten points was that they were very vague and imprecise and required specification if they were to be implemented. We would like to take the occasion of this special issue of Krisis on the future of the university to take up two of these ten points and discuss in this essay how they could be further elaborated and implemented in student education in the new university, explaining why this is not yet the case.

The two points on which we would like to focus are closely related and connected. Point 6 reads: ‘Priority to creativity and innovation in education and research’ and Point 7: ‘Link education with, and value it as highly as, research’.^[2] Here we have one point emphasizing creativity and innovation in education and research, and one point that stresses the connection between the two. A first reaction might be: isn’t that just what the university should be about anyway? In what sense is this a new direction? Is it new at all or does it merely indicate that the traditional values of the university have been pushed too much to the background? We would like to suggest that all these responses are partly true at least. The fact that these two points are part of a plan to direct the future indicates that these points may have suffered under choices made in university governance in the past couple of years. We would like to stress, though, that the current situation is also a good occasion to reconsider the values of higher (academic) education and explore possibilities to implement these in the new university. We will do this by briefly considering the history of the university as an institute that aims to combine – more or less effectively – research and education, subsequently mentioning some more recent challenges for the university, and we will finish our essay with a brief description of a ‘circulation model of education’ that we consider to be a fruitful source for answering some of the challenges we identified from the current discussions.

A brief history of different educational models: from oral disputations via writing exercises to standardized education

The university is often said to be the internationally most successful European social invention: other than many other inventions and institutions, the university has been adopted by most countries as an institution that combines research and education (cf. Lindberg 1992). Where previous interactions between scholars – ‘masters’ – and pupils were mostly organized at a relatively small scale in monasteries, cathedral schools or at private courts, from the 11th century a rapid change occurred.  Increasing wealth, population growth and urbanization provided some of the material conditions for this, while the Renaissance and other cultural changes prepared the intellectual ground. Initially the ‘universitas’ referred to an independent association or guild of teachers and their students, without reference to a particular location or building. When these associations grew, the need for an organization and buildings increased as well. In 1088 freedom of teaching was granted to Bologna’s school, which is considered by many to be the birth-date of the university.^[3] Papal involvement with the early universities and the recognition by the popes from the 13th century onwards of the universal validity of university degrees facilitated the further institutionalization of universities and the increasingly important status of university degrees as indicators of scholarly and professional qualification (Rüegg 2003b). When this new institution spread more and more through Europe, increasing numbers of individuals who participated in university training entered the ranks of the clergy, merchants, civil servants, medical doctors, lawyers, and so on.^[4] With this development, the direct and indirect impact of the university on the larger society grew as well, affected as it was by the students and their skills and expertise as these returned to societal positions after their stay at the university. Of particular interest to us in the present context is the changes that obtained regarding the educational models to be found in these institutions. These educational models affect the interactions between teachers and students and the role and nature of research with regard to education. Moreover, as we will argue, each model is associated with a specific perspective on students as independent learners and researchers.

Medieval and early-modern university training consisted largely of oral exchanges, with the oral disputation being the most important form of assessment. This prominence of the oral nature of academic education and exchange was partly due to the limited distribution of written and printed materials and, consequently, their limited relevance. With the wider availability and distribution of printed publication of scientific results and the emergence of scientific journals, reading and writing largely came to replace the oral disputation – a process that began around 1750 at German universities and from there gradually spreading to other countries. Specific regulations were given as to how seminar writing exercises should be handled, because they were considered to be important as demonstrations of students’ capacity to master original sources and to use these for their own independent research. Indeed, this rise in the prominence of writing reflected the university’s recent emphasis on a student’s individual development for becoming a creative and independent researcher (Kruse 2006). Motivating, supervising, commenting and assessing writing was considered to be the best way in guiding the student along this difficult path, initiating her in the practice and discourse of a particular discipline. This form of ‘student socialization’ (Kruse 2006) has been in place for nearly two centuries until a further development made it nearly impossible to maintain it.

The development at stake is of course the more recent massification of higher education. After the Second World War, and particularly since the 1970s, the number of students has increased exponentially in many countries. In the last decade alone, a rise of 45% of tertiary educated young adults in the OECD and G20 countries has been observed (OECD 2015). This development took place during an economically challenging period, which has motivated European educational policies – more so than in the US – to emphasize higher education as preparation of students for the job market, rather than as preparation to become fully developed citizens (Keestra 2007; Wildemeersch 2013). These socio-economic changes went along with an ideological – neo-liberal – turn regarding higher education, together impacting the conditions of the latter in a negative way: ‘[i]n short, massification, the economic crisis, and a widespread acceptance of the private-good argument have led to a worldwide deterioration in conditions as exemplified by deteriorating student/ teacher ratios, problems for the academic profession, and the general impoverishment of academe’ (Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley 2010: 36).^[5]

These developments have had a big impact on the education universities offer to their students and in particular on the amount of attention and supervision that each individual student can receive from professors. This is ironic, since for several decades so-called constructivist theories of learning have become more widely recognized, implying that students should not be treated as passive learners but instead must be actively engaged with teaching materials: teachers were facing demands to reconsider their role accordingly – ‘from sage on the stage to guide on the side’ (King 1993).^[6] Although this has contributed to the development of valuable pedagogical innovations, their implementation is constrained by the other trends mentioned here. This situation has resulted in a largely unchanged – if not increasing – focus on lectures as the main vehicle for transmission of teachers’ insights and expertise to students, given that they can accommodate as many students as required without, in principle, any limits. In this context, programs and teachers have sought refuge in standardised methods of examination – instead of placing the earlier emphasis on creativity in disputation and writing – with standard questions for all students and often with standard answers for them to choose from (multiple-choice exams).^[7]

Two current challenges of university education

From this brief discussion of the history of university education we surmise that there have been at least three different media of teaching students at the university: a first phase in which verbal disputations occupied a central spot; a second phase in which reading and writing exercises were the main elements of training used at the university; and a third and current phase which seems to be focussed further still on elements such as listening, reading, making exercises and standardized exams, notwithstanding pedagogical and other reasons that point in a contrary direction.

In this model of teaching the role of the teacher is not so much to facilitate the development of students as independent and creative scientists by engaging with their independent thinking through verbal interactions, and by guiding and providing feedback on their writing. Instead, university education in this model consists largely of making students reach certain standardized learning objectives according to predefined pedagogical and scientific methods and processes, preordained by experts whose knowledge and skills students should learn to emulate. In his much debated book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), French philosopher Jacques Rancière has argued that there are a number of negative consequences to this approach to education. First of all it makes explanation the primary mode of engagement of teachers with their students and makes understanding its central goal. As a result, students are put in a relatively passive position. The presumption is that students are not yet capable of understanding a certain piece of information deemed important by the teacher, and that the relatively straightforward goal towards achieving comprehension is by way of the teacher explaining it to them. As Rancière points out, this undermines the confidence of students in their own intelligence and capacity and in fact creates a situation of continued ‘enforced stultification’ in which a separation continues to exist between the superior ‘intelligence’ of the teacher and the inferior intelligence of the students (Rancière 1991: 7 ff.). He contends that even sophisticated pedagogies can still not avoid this separation and that ‘all the perfecting of the ways of making understood, that great preoccupation of men of methods and progressives, is progress toward stultification’ (Rancière 1991: 8, italics in original).^[8]

It should be rather obvious that such ‘enforced stultification’ is the opposite of what education should in fact achieve. There is however another, more subtle, effect of this predetermined and standardized model of education – for which the traditional lecture is exemplary but not unique – that should also be considered, because it is at least as important. Besides creating a distinction between the intelligence and understanding of the student and the teacher, it also creates a distinction between what the student does as against what the teacher does. Whereas the teacher himself, as a researcher, gets to engage directly with his subject matter in his research, the student is deemed unfit for this task. Indeed, Rancière emphasizes that education usually forces students to attend to subjects and contents that have been chosen by their teachers.^[9] As the understanding of the student is only mediated by the necessary explanation by the teacher, the latter is directing and constraining the student’s attention. Accordingly, the creativity of the individual student is not called into action, either for understanding the material presented to her or for any research or direct engagement with primary material. Thus, the traditional model (and many other models) of education not only undermines the confidence of students in their own intelligence, it also discourages the use of their own creativity. Indeed, creativity in research is considered to be the privilege of the teacher, which the student may reach only at a late phase – perhaps the master’s phase – of her studies, if at all.

It might be surprising to apply this – admittedly somewhat provocative – analysis to the current situation of university education, given that most universities, including the UvA, still contend that their programs and courses are built upon a connection between research and education. However, this connection can be variously implemented and correspondingly offers students more or less exposure to a genuine research experience. Realizing this connection, any program or course must position itself along the following three dimensions:

– the emphasis is on research content or research processes;
– the students are treated as the audience or participants;

– the teaching is teacher-focused or student-focused. (Healey 2005: 187)

It is not surprising that, with increasing numbers of students, universities construe most of their programmes and courses in such a way that students are given only limited experience with a research process as participants with their teachers focusing on such student work.

This is not only hampering student development, it is the more worrying as scientific research and education has undergone another development in the last century, particularly in the last decades. We are referring to the growing importance and prominence of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching and research, already recognized nearly half a century ago by an international symposium at the OECD headquarters, presenting a crucial challenge to the modern university’s structure and activities (Apostel, Berger, Briggs, & Machaud 1972). Several drivers have been recognized behind this development, ranging from the inherent complexity of society and nature to new problems emerging from particular technologies – such as the computer or MRI-scanner (National Academies of Sciences 2004). By their very nature, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research try not to abstract from, but rather focus on, the local, historical and contextual conditions that have an impact on a particular problem. As a result, the applicability of the general or nomothetic knowledge developed in separate disciplines is highly constrained in such cases in which causal and theoretical pluralism reigns in often unprecedented ways (Krohn 2010). This means that to engage in inter- and transdisciplinary research students need to be able to creatively combine different frameworks, methods and sources in order to address the questions and problems at hand. Given the increasing importance and relevance of such research, both inside and outside academia, it is all the more worrying that the education model that has become more and more dominant is not delivering students the expertise and skills necessary to become proficient in it and to perform adequately in future jobs both inside and outside academia.

We thus identify two challenges for education at the new university: on the one hand the increasing numbers of students that universities have to accommodate with decreasing budgets, and at the same time an increasing need for universities to develop the creative skills of their students in order to engage in the modern forms of – oftentimes interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary – research that have become important for academia and society. Whereas universities have responded to the first challenge by relying on predetermined and standardized programs as their educational model, the second challenge cannot be met adequately by such a model. In fact, this model has a lot of undesirable consequences for the students, some even contrary to what education should in fact achieve.^[10] Therefore we would like to take this opportunity to investigate what might be an alternative model of education which would be more adequate and that incorporates the two points regarding creativity and innovation, and regarding the connection between research and education mentioned above.

The circulation model of education

As we have seen from our brief history and our brief discussion of Rancière’s analysis of the predetermined and standardized model, the students’ confidence in their own intelligence and creativity is not strengthened and a separation between education and research has occurred, increasingly barring students from engaging in research. The current discussion about what education at the new university should look like therefore seems to ask for acknowledgment of the limited value of this model and an emphasis on another more recent model of education in which research and education are connected creatively. This type of education does exist, yet unfortunately due to economic conditions mostly in a very limited sense at smaller programs or colleges and for a selected group of students. We would like to sketch a few of the aspects of a Weberian ideal type of what we call a ‘circulation model’ of education, because within it circulation rather than unidirectional traffic occurs between different elements: circulation between research and education, between insights of teachers and of students, between disciplines, between general and contextualized knowledge, between disciplinary and experiential knowledge, between doing research and (meta-)reflection upon research, and so on. Let us explain.

In a course that complies with the relevant features of the circulation model of education, students are – preferably in a team project – allowed to determine themselves a complex, real-world research problem, for which they need to articulate and analyze relevant conditions. As these conditions probably transcend their own disciplinary backgrounds – and probably the expertise of their teacher(s), too – their teacher should assist them in this difficult process. Assistance here can imply that she has to guide them in acquiring the necessary insights for determining their problem or re-defining it in such a way that they can handle it. Such an acquisition will in many cases imply that the students need to talk to other experts or stakeholders and then to consider how the insights that result from this can be combined with their preliminary insights. The teacher might need to help students to target and collect these different kinds of insights and then to circulate these with the already existing knowledge-base in a constructive way. Moreover, as it is unlikely that all insights, experts and stakeholder views can easily be put together, it will be necessary to reflect on how the different concepts, methods, assumptions and normative statements that have been assembled can be related to each other. Importantly, this can only be done by a teacher who is not only an expert in her field but also has the necessary meta-theoretical and philosophical insights and skills. This is likely to be challenging for her as well, as this process and the resulting problem definition will be at least partially new, preempting her completely relying on pre-existing knowledge. On the contrary, it will likely force her to participate actively in this research process, which allows students also to witness closely how she approaches this demanding situation which will in itself offer important insights to them. In such a situation, teacher and students are equally engaged in entering unknown territory, which emancipates the students in a way that other educational models hardly do.

Similar forms of circulation will obtain in the next phases of such a research process, as when the now determined problem is subsequently investigated and the eventual research results are implemented in one way or another. Clearly, this process will look differently depending upon the problem at stake and the students involved. As a consequence, the modes of circulation will differ from case to case as well. An analysis of alternative interpretations of a Homeric simile which draws upon different theoretical frameworks and linguistic insights will yield a completely different process, including different types of circulation, than the development of policy advice in response to demographic and economic changes in a particular urban area, or the explanation of the role of maternal stress via a specific epigenetic factor in the development of a particular type of cancer. Depending upon the stage of the students’ education – whether at the undergraduate or graduate level – they can perform a certain amount of original or empirical research themselves while relying for other insights upon already available resources, which the teacher must help to assess adequately.

Referring to the three dimensions of research-based education mentioned above, this circulation model is very different from a process in which the teacher possesses and provides all necessary expertise and knowledge which is then transmitted to the student – perhaps in the form of predetermined problem cases.^[11] Instead, in our model the research problem itself needs to be determined as must the necessary composition of the research team – including different disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives – even before the research itself can begin. Moreover, insights derived from new perspectives might force a revisitation of the initial problem definition, critiquing it for leaving out relevant features of the problem (Keestra 2012; Repko 2008). In our description of the ideal-type of such a research process, students are granted freedom in the choice of the problem they will be trying to solve and the teacher – or teachers – facilitating their research process will herself almost need to take up a role of a co-creating researcher. In such a circulation model of education the borders and distinctions between the intelligence and activity of the teacher and of the students are erased, and students and teachers are encouraged to benefit mutually from each others’ activities.

After this brief description of students’ research projects that concurs with our idea of a circulation model, motivated by the aims of 1) connecting research and teaching and 2) stimulating creativity and innovation, while keeping an eye on the increasing demand for inter- and transdisciplinary research, what should the implication of this be for current academic programs? Moreover, what does the other development mentioned above, the still growing number of university students, imply for teaching such research projects?

One of the consequences of our preceding analysis and description is that universities should offer students more opportunities for engaging in such team-research projects across the boundaries of their programs and disciplines than is now usually the case. Obviously, these should be offered in addition to and not as a substitution for courses that introduce students to particular contents and methods: we are not denying the merit of such predetermined and standardized courses as part of an academic program nor do we deny the importance of sound disciplinary training. However, only if students will have the opportunity to engage in such research projects can they truly be prepared for the work that most academics inside and outside of academia are performing. Such work will scarcely be conducted by an individual academic without interaction with individuals from other disciplines or other walks of life, on the contrary. Whether it is in the form of clients or customers, policy-makers or citizens, patients or other stakeholders, academics will need to be able to interact, communicate and collaborate adequately during such research projects.

Another consequence is that it should be recognized that enabling students to participate in such research projects might require extra efforts and resources. Whereas it sometimes happens, for example at the UvA, that interdisciplinary or liberal arts programs are being proposed in parallel to budget-cuts measures (see footnote 1), these practices are questionable and often fail to reach such a goal (see Augsburg, Henry, Newell, & Szostak 2009). The non-standard teacher-student interaction upon which our circulation model relies is such that it requires even a senior teacher with extensive teaching and research experience extra time and efforts to prepare if she is to adequately facilitate and guide her students through the research process focused on the particular real-world problem that they have settled upon.^[12] Indeed, the new group of teachers that the Secretary of Education has recently promised to appoint could be put to optimal use in such projects.^[13]

Though these observations may appear disheartening, we want to close with a final and more optimistic consequence that can be drawn. When teachers and students move away from the increasingly prominent predetermined and standardized model of education and engage with each other in the way captured by our circulation model, they will contribute to fulfilling the demands that were captured by the two points upon which the board, faculty and students of the UvA agreed and which were mentioned above: (6) to give priority to creativity and innovation in education and research and (7) link education with, and value it as highly as, research. Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, they will revitalize and update the early modern ‘universitas’ or association between researchers, teachers and students from which the current universities stem. Through such projects, the circulation will be fostered between research and teaching, between teachers and students, between meta-reflection and research, between disciplines, between disciplinary and experiential knowledge, between doing research and (meta-)reflection upon research, contributing to the essential role that academia has to play in our current knowledge society. We hope that in future discussions about the new university the importance of this interaction between students and teachers will be recognized and will be given the role it should have, to the benefit of all actors involved and of the society at large.

1. Introduction

Of all the people stung by Socrates’ critical questions, none was more dramatically affected than the handsome, intelligent youth Alcibiades. In the dialogues Alcibiades I and Symposium, Plato describes how Alcibiades’ encounter with Socrates instigates a painfully critical reevaluation of the young man’s ambitions and disposition. What values should he uphold? Which goals should he pursue? How should he live? Alcibiades is used to evaluate his behavior in terms of the appreciation he receives for his actions. Socrates, however, confronts him with a radically different option: the philosopher does what he considers to be desirable, regardless of the public opinion.

Whereas Alcibiades behaves like an eromenôs or ‘beloved’, Socrates is an erastès or ‘lover’. In this essay, the contrast between these two characters will be used to reflect on the condition of Dutch universities and the protest of their students. The first paragraph opens with a description of the disproportionately high number of expectations students are faced with and goes on to outline two common reactions to these criteria: feverish ambition and detached indifference. Both the ‘excellent’ and the ‘indifferent’ student seem to take Alcibiades’ erômenos-attitude which, I will argue, is problematic. In the second paragraph, Socrates’ disposition is presented as an alternative to Alcibiades’ popularity-centered actions. His erastès-minded behavior is used to interpret the recent student protests. Finally, ‘De Bildung Academie’, a student initiative I am happy to be part of, is introduced as an example of what erastès-based education might look like.

Naturally, the interpretation presented here is only one of the many possible perspectives on the current developments in the academic community. But by connecting the contemporary university with the ancient struggle between Socrates and Alcibiades and with its possible future in De Bildung Academie, I hope to place the debate on academic cultivation in a perspective wider than the now evicted rooms of the Maagdenhuis.

 2. Academic excellence and being beloved

Fortunately, one needs neither to enter into a monastery nor to be the son of a gentleman to gain academic knowledge in our present-day society. Some measure of intelligence, a great deal of perseverance, and the willingness to take out quite a high loan suffice to acquire an academic degree. Whether one’s graduation is considered a success, however, is an entirely different matter. Judging from a number of fairly intimidating lists, the ruling principles of the market of success are many and diverse. An ‘excellent’ paper displays not only in-depth understanding of its topic: it presents an original approach, displays an exemplary execution, and gives evidence of initiative, personal responsibility and intellectual rigor too (University of Brighton 2008). An ‘excellent’ PhD candidate has much more to show than a relevant degree and a letter of recommendation: his portfolio includes certificates from a prestigious foreign institute and an honors program, several publications in top ranked journals, and a résumé mentioning volunteer work and experience as teacher and researcher (Espanta 2013). Meanwhile, students seeking to succeed outside the walls of the university face as much of a challenge as their academically-inclined peers. They are expected to not only acquire a degree, but to give evidence of leadership and innovative thinking as well – either by starting their own company, by being a professional athlete or by holding impressive positions in student societies (Van der Klis 2014). On top of that, excellent students of all kinds must have both the social skills and the energy to build an extensive network, so as to maximise their high potential. These intelligent, inventive, experienced and strategic students bear the characteristics of the professors and CEOs of tomorrow. These are the high-quality products universities strive to manufacture (Kouwenberg & Dekkers 2013: 3-4).

Thus, the modern-day student is confronted with alarmingly high expectations, to which he can respond in several ways. Some of us do everything we can to live up to the criteria of excellence. The sad truth is that many of us fall short of the norms we attempt to uphold; they are simply too demanding to meet. The almost inevitable lack of success that results from the grand ambitions of the excellence-hungering students may explain the common occurrence of nervousness and burn-outs in young people (Lijst Calimero 2014). A completely different reaction to the intimidating excellence-criteria is to give up trying to be excellent, so as to avoid disappointment. The indifferent student lives from exam to exam to certificate without even trying for a grade higher than a pass, and without even thinking about a job more interesting than dishwashing (sorry to insult you, dishwashers!). The indifferent student does not think highly enough of himself to try for more. At the end of his uneventful academic career, he receives the piece of paper that’s required to satisfy his parents and to get him a job and so he, too, sets out to live up to expectations others have of him – though in a much less risky way than the excellent student does.

To the extent in which they take the expectations of others as the ultimate norm for their own choices, both the excellent and the indifferent student ascribe mere instrumental value to their academic development. If it weren’t for the certificate that awaits him when he has passed all his exams, the disinterested student would not bother to read his course literature. If he didn’t care about the judgment of his potential employer, the excellent student might drop his course on applied statistical methods and quit his position in the Model United Nations altogether. The study-related decisions made by these self-conscious students are not motivated by their studies, but by the admiration, paychecks or status they hope to receive as a consequence of their activities. They act out of a desire to become beloved by others, and thus take what Plato scholar Rudi te Velde calls an ‘eromenôs-attitude’, an attitude incorporated by the character Alcibiades (Te Velde 2006: 40, 175).

For, as it turns out, the burdensome demand to excel that haunts contemporary students is about as old as philosophy itself. Like the excellent student, Alcibiades decides to take on the challenge of success: he ambitiously strives to attain fame and power not only in Athens, but in the whole of Greece – indeed, in the entire world (Alcibiades I, 105a-c). He wants others to acknowledge his great beauty and intelligence; his acts are motivated by a feverish desire to be loved. Thus, he does not bother to decide what he finds worthy of his attention – Alcibiades’ main question is what others judge as valuable. He simply does whatever the majority of the people would admire him for; the value of his acts is assessed with regard to the popularity they buy him. Like the student motivated to complete a course for the sake of the ECTS credits he will obtain by doing so, Alcibiades acts admirably for the sake of the applause it will bring him (Alcibiades I, 104a-c; Symposium, 216b; Te Velde 2006: 79, 170). To the eromenôs, academic development is a means to an end set by popular or authoritative opinion. 

The eromenôs-attitude is problematic for several reasons. For one thing, neither the excellent student nor the indifferent one gains much gratification from their academic efforts. In order to attain perfection in everything he does, the excellent student needs to work around the clock. He thus strains himself to the point of a mental breakdown, but still feels he does not accomplish enough. Meanwhile, the indifferent student dispassionately carries out his ‘duties’; he writes papers and sits exams without feeling any enthusiasm for the education he receives. The excellent student is plagued by obsession, while his indifferent peer is haunted by boredom; both of them suffer from unhappiness. Feverish engagement with academic success causes an atmosphere of nervous fixation, whereas cold detachment from the university creates an unconcerned culture of mediocrity; neither attitude serves the academic community well.

Yet unhappiness isn’t even the worst consequence of the eromenôs-disposition, as Socrates points out to Alcibiades. Since he founds his actions on criteria set by his audience, Alcibiades has effectually made himself a slave to Athens’ crowds; he carries out whatever actions they will give him credit for. By delegating his decisions to others, he degrades himself; he surrenders his authority as if he were an object with no judgment of his own (Alcibiades I, 135c-d; Kal 1997/98). Similarly, the excelling or complying student answers to norms others set for him and is thus enslaved by his professors, parents, peers, employers or whoever else has expectations of him. He has become an object to himself, evaluating his own actions in terms of the eyes of his beholders. The beloved eromenôs is completely dependent on others to sustain his identity.

Ominously, Alcibiades’ eromenôs-attitude not only harms his own subjectivity, but also endangers the polis in which he operates; he is completely corruptible. He is not concerned with what is right, but with what will be most appreciated by the crowds; he lacks a sustainable moral compass (Alcibiades I, 135c-d; Te Velde 2006: 170). Let us, for now, skip the confronting question about the status of the conscience of the eromenôs-centered student and close with the conclusion that academics motivated by a desire to become beloved are slaves to other people’s judgments.

 3. De Bildung Academie and love for knowledge

The barefooted philosopher Socrates does not come across as a very likeable person. Owing to his very annoying habit of asking stinging questions, he has been compared to unpalatable creatures such as gadflies and vipers (Apologie I, 30e; Symposium, 218a). Socrates cannot be called a beloved person. But he is, perhaps more than anyone else, an erastès; he is a lover of the absolute goodness, beauty and truth that have become known as ‘platonic ideas’ (Goldschmidt 1949: 2-4; Te Velde 2006: 40). These ideas can be understood as the intrinsically valuable idealities that constitute the ultimate ends of our desires. They represent absolute perfection and therefore transcend this ever imperfect world – and incite our desire at the same time (Goldschmidt 1949: 16, 21, 32-33; Wedgwood 2009). Absolutely perfect peace – more commonly known as world peace – is an example of an intrinsically valuable ideality that may serve as the ultimate end of the UN’s General Assembly, but is at the same time inherently unattainable; even in the unlikely event of the complete absence of war, the next door neighbors might still be quarreling about the hedgerow. Our efforts are motivated by our love for idealities we can never fully actualize, precisely because they constitute perfection (Kal 1997/98; Wedgwood 2009). Pure beauty is the end of the artist’s efforts; absolute truth is the final aim of journalism; unconditional goodness is the goal of anyone seeking to act justly.

Socrates’ actions, too, are motivated by his love for ideal possibilities. By ceaselessly asking exasperating questions, he seeks to advance the correspondence between the knowledge people actually hold and the pure truth he is in love with. By carefully assessing what constitutes a just act, he attempts to incorporate a fragment of absolute goodness into the actual world (Kal 1997/98). Socrates tries to turn reality into a mirror of the ideas he so dearly loves for their intrinsic value. Thus, his attitude radically differs from Alcibiades’ disposition. Whereas Alcibiades passively awaits acclaim from others, Socrates actively pursues what he himself finds worthy of aspiration. While Alcibiades’ actions merely serve as instruments to gain fame and power, Socrates is intrinsically motivated to act. The erastès is motivated by a genuine desire to do as he does, not by a desire to be admired for his actions (Alcibiades I, 133c-134d; Symposium 210e-212c; Te Velde 2006: 79, 83, 150).

Fortunately, a significant part of the academic community is similarly inspired by a love for what they do. There are people studying mathematics because they genuinely want to understand why there is an infinite amount of odd numbers. There are people studying Russian literature because they deem knowledge about Dostoyevski intrinsically valuable. These knowledge-lovers may be excellent students, but if they are, it is because they study around the clock out of a sincere interest in their courses – not out of an instrumentally-motivated desire to excel. They may also be students that only just manage to pass their exams – not because they cannot be bothered to study hard, but because their desire to learn motivates them to participate in courses they find intellectually challenging. If the erastès happens to participate in an honors program, he does so because he is interested in the program, not for the honor. He studies because he considers academic development intrinsically valuable. These knowledge-loving students respond to the excellence-mania with neither frantic ambition nor defeatist indifference; they simply do not define themselves by the love other persons have for them, but by the love they cherish for other things – such as their studies.

The students participating in or supporting the current protests – not a ‘small group’ – look at their university from an erastès perspective and conclude that ‘top down, efficiency-orientated management damages the very thing a university should revolve around: research and education’ (De Nieuwe Universiteit 2015). Despite the troublesome upshot of the eromenôs approach, the university seems to encourage students, teachers and study programs alike to become as ‘beloved’ as possible. Students are both supposed to excel and to finish within nominal time; teachers are asked to both organize attractive courses and to publish groundbreaking research results. Studies, too, are assessed with reference to their instrumental value: what financial profit do they bring? How many students do they attract? What jobs do they result in? The value of academic education is discussed in terms coined by business schemes, political parties, managers and taxpayers. The university strives to please her beholders and refers to instrumental utility to evaluate her purposes; she has become an eromenôs. Just as Socrates reprimands Alcibiades in an attempt to turn him into a lover of intrinsic values, so the protesting students are trying to reopen the existing academic reality for a reevaluation of its values. The protesting students emphasize the intrinsic value of academic development and scientific research; that is the benchmark according to which the university should fashion her policies. They try to reshape the eromenôs-minded academic reality by confronting it with the ideals the university ought to cherish and pursue, which are worthwhile ideals in their own right.

But no matter how noble their efforts, it may prove very hard to make the university change her attitude. The fact that answering to expectations from others has higher priority to the university than the advancement of academic development is not altogether the fault of its management. It so happens that the university cannot ignore criteria set by politicians or society, because it effectually depends on the money it is granted by these external parties. The university truly is, to some extent, enslaved by the judgment of others; the reality in which the protesters seek to incorporate their ideal university is dictated by the laws of the eromenôs.

Fortunately, however, there are other ways to actualize academic ideals. A group of devoted students and teachers is trying to be the change they want to see in the university. The initiators of ‘De Bildung Academie’ do not wait for managers to reevaluate the university’s aims, but are quite well on their way to effectuating an utterly new academic institute that seems to mirror the ideals that charm both Socrates and erastès-minded students. The development of De Bildung Academie was initiated by political science student Michiel Tolman and professor Eugène Sutorius last November and has greatly advanced since: the organization was joined by five teachers and 31 students, one of which is myself. Of course, De Bildung Academie still has a lot to prove; we have only just welcomed our first generation of students and although more than thirty of our teachers have agreed to give their Bildung lectures for free in the upcoming term, we will need to find funding if we want to continue and expand our mission. But however things may turn out, I believe the educational ideal of De Bildung Academie can play a stimulating and inspiring part in the debate on higher education. De Bildung Academie aims to offer her students the opportunity to develop themselves, both as academics and as persons, because such development is intrinsically valuable – a thought which is, in fact, framed in Dutch law: Article 1 of the Law on Higher Education states that ‘the university should pay conscious attention to the personal development of the student’ (Wet op Hoger Onderwijs, 1.3.5). Although the Bildungsideal our new educational platform relates to is from Humboldtian rather than Platonic descent – the academy’s interpretation of it would, I think, quite please Socrates.

The full time program we hope to offer each term focuses on four core competences. The first is the critical-analytic competence Socrates is so very enthused about. The ability to criticize and doubt what is usually taken for granted is essential to all those who share Socrates’ love for truth. Secondly, De Bildung Academie seeks to promote the moral competence of her students. Moral issues regarding our interaction with the people we meet and the planet we live on ask for careful reflection on what is right and how we should act. Thus, the student is presented with the opportunity to relate himself to the goodness pivotal to Platonic thought. The third competence we strive to advance in our students is their expressive proficiency. Our students are encouraged to interact with beauty, by implementing their findings in an appealing speech, work of art or project. Finally, De Bildung Academie aims to stimulate the development of the student’s empathic competence, providing him with a chance to put himself in someone else’s shoes so as to understand what motivates people that differ from him. For although individual development is taken as an intrinsic value, such formation is essentially linked to the social reality in which it takes place. According to Plato, too, it is the polis that benefits first and foremost from the individual’s attempt to mirror the ideals (Graefe 1989: 14, 91; Kal 1997/98). The erastès who orientates himself on idealities acts as justly, truthfully and beautifully as he can and thus brings goodness, truth and beauty about in the world. The Bildung student can investigate and develop these competences in courses of which both the content and shape are designed by the students who have founded De Bildung Academie and which are to remain open for input by the students participating in them. Hence, these courses are centered around themes in which students take a direct interest – themes ranging from art and identity to money and digitalization (De Bildung Academie 2015).

So De Bildung Academie tries to be a platform that keeps in close touch with the wishes of her students and that founds her educational choices on their intrinsically valuable development. Here, the erastès-minded student may practice his love for knowledge and academic formation without being hindered by instrumental norms. Here, the excelling eromenôs may come to advance his career prospects and find that his love for knowledge is greater than his love to be loved for his knowledge. Here, too, the indifferent eromenôs may come to escape from the responsibilities others ascribe to him and discover he wants to be responsible for his own goals. Our new platform might not have set out to incorporate Platonic ideas, but if Socrates were on the lookout for an Agora in 21^st-century Amsterdam, I think he would do well to drop by De Bildung Academie.

Let us hope that the established universities will allow themselves to be inspired by the intrinsic values their discontented students uphold. Let us hope that, this time, Alcibiades will pay heed to Socrates’ plea for intrinsic motivation. Until then, De Bildung Academie may provide the idealistic room where students can come together to love knowledge.