Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [19]
In contrast to the practical orientation of the higher faculties, the lower faculty extends the tradition of otherworldliness characteristic of medieval monasteries and universities to modern educational institutions. The arts and sciences in the philosophical faculty are not bound by utilitarian principles, but are designed to be “autonomous.” Never yielding to personal, religious, political or economic interests, members of the philosophical faculty are supposed to be guided solely by the principles of pure or universal reason, which is purportedly untainted by practical concerns. This claim points to a puzzling ambiguity in Kant’s view of the university. Although he insists that theology, law and medicine are the higher faculties, he defines the primary responsibility of the lower philosophical faculty as sitting in judgment over them. The autonomy of the arts and sciences faculty enables it to fulfill its critical function within the university. For Kant, the purity of reason is a prerequisite for philosophy, and the dedication to it is necessary for the lower faculty to play its role in judging the higher faculties. Within this scheme, the raison d’être of the arts and sciences is criticism. For critics devoted to purportedly disinterested inquiry, nothing compromises the purity of the faculty more quickly than government interference and the crass calculations of “businessmen and technicians of learning.”
The autonomy of the lower faculty is, however, fragile and is always in danger of falling prey to outside interests. And to repeat, in order to protect the autonomy necessary for critical judgment, Kant insists that the arts and sciences faculty, unlike the so-called higher faculties, must be granted academic freedom as well as protection from government intervention. This is a very important point whose far-reaching implications did not become apparent until 1915, when the American Association of University Professors instituted the practice of tenure, supposedly to protect academic freedom.
The independence from practical affairs, as I said, is intended to enable faculty members to make disinterested or objective judgments. There is, however, a further consequence of Kant’s principle of autonomy that is not immediately obvious. In explaining the implementation of the division of labor, he writes, “for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee, and all of these together would form a kind of community called a university.” And then, as noted earlier, he adds almost in passing, “The university would have a certain autonomy (since only scholars can pass judgment on scholars as such).” The multiple aspects of the principle of autonomy or self-determination not only create a gulf between the university and the real world but also erect barriers between and among different divisions and departments within the university.
While most faculty members today decry the deregulation of modern financial markets, they vehemently defend the two-hundred-year-old tradition of self-regulation according to which no one can tell them how to conduct their business. As a result of the principles Kant defined, the work done by faculty members can be judged only by other “experts” in the same field or subfield, thereby isolating departments from one another. There is not even an obligation to communicate the importance of one’s work or the results of one’s research to people in other departments and disciplines, to say nothing of the wider public. To the contrary, efforts to work across fields and to communicate beyond the confines of the university are regarded as unprofessional and thus discouraged.
This limited view of the responsibility of faculty members is also the basis of the practice of peer review, which eventually leads to the culture of expertise that creates overspecialization among faculty members who are more interested