Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [5]
This entire system is now unraveling. Nation-states are still powerful, but the era of their domination is rapidly coming to an end. Unyielding forces of globalization are creating new types of social, political and economic organization that require the formation of new institutions in every sector and at every level of society. As nation-states become increasingly entangled in a growing number of transnational networks of exchange, boundaries that have long seemed secure become permeable, and walls that have appeared to be solid begin to crumble. Just as the modern university was created at the moment of transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, so what might be called the postmodern university must be created to negotiate the shift from industrial and consumer capitalism to financial capitalism and a network-driven world. Our most immediate concerns might be local, statewide or even national, but the most pressing long-term problems we face are international and global. Parochial interests must be set aside to create global educational networks that will facilitate the production of new knowledge and encourage the free flow of intellectual and cultural capital. While the shape of these new institutions is far from clear, their general contours are beginning to emerge.
We can trace the history of our current crisis first to the turmoil of the 1960s and then deeper to developments in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. All too often debates about the critical issues of our time are conducted in a historical vacuum. During the 1960s, developments within and beyond ivied walls created unprecedented unrest on campuses. The end of the postwar expansion of colleges and universities and the changing demographics of the student population collided with national and international events to create a volatile environment in which students demanded sweeping changes that faculty members and administrators were unable or unwilling to make. These conflicts, which often turned violent, created a crisis of authority and legitimization from which the academy has never recovered. The turmoil of the sixties led to the culture wars of later decades that still shape our social and political landscape. The seeds of conflicts surrounding what was later dubbed “political correctness” were sown during the 1960s and 1970s. Though many of these controversies began on college and university campuses, they had a considerably broader social and political impact. It is important to recall that as far back as the administration of Richard Nixon, higher education has been a favorite target of conservative politicians and pundits.
Tensions within colleges and universities did not immediately lead to changes. One of the primary reasons faculty members and administrators could not or would not respond to the demands for change was their abiding commitment to a model of the university that was first defined by Immanuel Kant, a lonely eighteenth-century philosopher who never left his hometown in what was then Prussia and is today Russia. While medieval universities were intended to serve the needs of the church, Kant’s plan for the modern university, which he published in 1798, was designed to serve the needs of emerging nation-states.