Download here - University of Kent

Michael Young: Paper presented to the 1st International Conference: Knowledge,
technology and education: university policies and practices on Feb 6th at the University
of Santiago de Compostela – also the basis for presentation to the Philosophy of
Education Society of Great Britain South-East Branch & University of Kent Centre for
the Study of Higher Education Seminar, 28th January 2013
- comments welcome (if you do not delay too long!) to him: [email protected]
Challenges to the disciplines and the future of the university (Draft)
Introduction
The Universities face unprecedented pressures to change which I will argue, unless
resisted, will undermine their purpose as the key site of :



the production of new of knowledge
society’s conversation with itself about its future and what it should be like- or,
in Bernstein’s terms , ‘thinking the un-thinkable and the ‘not yet thought’
progressively extending ‘epistemic access to an ever wider section of each
cohort.
These pressures are for:
 the instrumentalisation of knowledge - the university are being asked to
become society’s HR agency for high level ‘skills’ and its R and D agency for
developing applicable knowledge for industry and commerce,

a market-led approach to access to higher education extended by opening
opportunities for ‘for profit’ institutions like BPP
They are compounded by :
 the current policy of shifting more of HE costs onto student fees
 the decision not to fund undergraduate degrees in the humanities
 the cuts in the funding of research Councils which has led to the ESRC no
longer funding taught Masters degrees
 The REF’s new impact criteria
The long term consequences are likely to be that universities will lose their capability to
fulfil their role as a major innovation resource for the future knowledge economy that is
assumed to be the outcome of the reforms. Lacking the tradition of rich alumni funding
that has supported the ‘ivy league’ universities in the USA their role as the primary sites
for the society’s ‘conversation about itself’ will be limited to a few elite universities .
What has gone wrong?
1. the limits of the neo-liberal critique.
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2. Universities need reform as they address the implications of the ‘massification’ of HE.
However if the are going to improve as resource for a future ‘knowledge society’, this
has to be based on an adequate theory of knowledge and how it is produced and
transmitted. At best we have an approach to the reform of universities that (a) is
designed to increase access but neglects ‘epistemic access’ , (b) is designed to make
universities more likely to produce knowledge that is a source of innovation but neglects
the conditions for producing this knowledge.
In other words a theory to inform the reform of universities must be a theory of
knowledge. This takes me to the ideas of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim who
died nearly a century ago, and how his ideas were developed by the English sociologist
Basil Bernstein who died in 2001.
Durkheim’s Theory of Knowledge
Durkheim had an insight about the production of knowledge which has not been widely
recognised, even by sociologists. It took me 40 years from when I first read Durkheimas an undergraduate student in the 1960’s. Then we were taught that Durkheim was a
functionalist, a positivist and a conservative. There were no greater sins in sociology at
that time, so we only studied him as a Founding Father to learn how he was wrong and
why ,in effect we should forget about him. I learned later that each of those claims were
false –
He was only a ‘positivist’ in the sense that (a) he saw sociology as a science and this
meant that sociologists should be as rigorous and objective as possible and always
search for empirical evidence to support their explanations.
Politically he was a Progressive and Republican, and only conservative in recognising
the role of tradition and social consensus in shaping social progress
He was only a functionalist in the sense that he saw society as a set of inter-relationspart-part and part whole that are not reducible to the acts of individuals - in other words
his sociology of education was about the role of education in society, not education in
isolation.
My view is that the critiques of Durkheim said more about the climate of sociology at the
time than about his work.
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Durkheim’s insight was that all societies distinguish two types of meaning- or we might
say , two types of knowledge- what he referred to as the ‘sacred and the ‘profane’. This
distinction arose from his research on the simplest forms of society known at the timethe aboriginal tribes in Australia. And led to his book The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life. For Durkheim, ‘Sacred’ knowledge is that knowledge that is not tied to
specific contexts; it is knowledge that takes one beyond experience- sometimes
described as ‘esoteric’ but more mundanely as ‘theoretical’ knowledge. In contrast,
Profane knowledge is that knowledge concerned with the material survival of societies –
initially food, shelter and security; it is knowledge that is tied to specific contexts;
valuable in those contexts but of little value outside them.
In the earliest societies that Durkheim studies ‘sacred’ knowledge took the form of
religion- or ideas about the ‘after life’. However, he argued that the distinctive featureand for him the sociological importance of religion as an expression of the sacred was
not its content ( in other words specific beliefs about God such as those criticised by
Richard Dawkins) but its structure, its independence from particular contexts and the
internal consistency of its concepts. His argument was that the structure of the sacred
not only provided the basis for ideas about the after life-as it does in the case of
theology, but, as it became secularised, a basis for generalising about the world and
our experience. For Durkheim, secularisation did not just mean the progressive loss of
credibility of religion and the growth of science, but the transformation of the sacred as
it appropriated more and more of the profane and domains such as nature and the
universe that had previously been part of religion. Religion was forced by the success of
science to renounce its claims to truth outside the narrow domain of the after life . In
other words social progress became gradually dominated by secularised ‘sacred’
knowledge less and less impeded by religion- the original form of the ‘sacred’.
This new secular ‘sacred’ initially took the form of the curriculum of the medieval
universities inherited from the Church. With some autonomy, they became the sites the
early division between the trivium and the quadrivium, or the Word and the world, and
though this the search for God and salvation in the after life. By the 17th and 18th
centuries much of the former ‘sacred’ became secularised into the modern science
and humanities disciplines, leaving only theology as the remaining form of ‘sacred
knowledge’ in its original sense. The ‘search for God’ was gradually replaced by the
‘search for truth’. By the 19th century these secular forms of the sacred became further
differentiated as the social sciences following the model of the natural sciences became
distinguished from the humanities.
For Durkheim ‘sacred’ knowledge consisted of what he called the ‘collective
representations’ that allow a society to develop knowledge that is beyond individual
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experience . Thus theology became the paradigm for all future specialised forms of
knowledge because it involved , in Durkheim’s words ‘connecting things to one
another…and classifying them’ .
Because, these connections were internal to the sacred and not tied to specific
contexts, they became a source of disciplines of different types- the natural sciences
where knowledge was testable, the social sciences, which offer weaker forms of testing
and therefore more conflict within their specialist communities, and the humanities in
which different forms of human experience such as such as literature, music and art
became conceptualised and the subject of debate among specialists . It was their
separation from profane activities and their internal coherence that led Durkheim to
describe the earliest totemic religions of the aborigines as ‘proto sciences’.
So we have the basis of a social theory of knowledge that locates the historical roots
of the growth of knowledge in the early religions- a theory quite different to though I
would say not in opposition to that of Marx- the other great sociologist of knowledge.
The questions for us today are (i) what constitutes today’s secularised sacred? (ii) do
such secularised forms of ‘sacred’ knowledge’ still have the significance that Durkheim
gave them , and (iii) if not, what is the alternative social base for the development of
knowledge that is not tied to the particular? I now turn to Basil Bernstein’s development
of Durkheim’s ideas.
Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge
Bernstein developed Durkheim’s ideas in two ways.
First he made explicit that Durkheim’s idea of collective representations- the social
basis of university disciplines- had both a cognitive or intellectual as well as a normative
character. They were the means by which a society conducts conversations about itself
– its future and what it should be like- and thus they were a society’s source of ethics
and values. But as Bernstein pointed out they were also ‘ the site of the unthinkable’,
and the ‘not yet thought’- precisely because they were not tied to the everyday-like the
profane.
Most sociologists who have discussed Durkheim have emphasised him as a theorist of
moral education, rather than the curriculum and knowledge. This is understandable
because the moral basis of society was uppermost in Durkheim’s thinking as a
response to the instability of French society at the time. I think that is the wrong lesson
to take from Durkheim. What I understand him as saying is that truth- and therefore
knowledge has an inescapable moral and therefore social basis . In other words the
social or collective representions are as important to how we understand ‘better action’ethics- as they are to how we understand ‘better explanations’- epistemology.
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To recap- the ‘power’ of the secularised ‘ sacred is to ’think the un-thinkable’ or the ‘not
yet thought’ in systematic ways, un-constrained by practical demands. This is why
access to such ‘knowledge’ is always controlled and distributed by those in positions of
‘power’; it is this ‘power’ that sociologists like Bourdieu and philosophers like Foucault
have focussed on.
Both the truth and the fallibility of the ‘secularised sacred’- in other words ‘theory’, and
the possibility it provides for ‘thinking the unthinkable’ and envisioning alternatives has
historically only been known and available to the few but underpins the idea I referred to
earlier of ‘epistemic access’.
Disciplines, as an expression of Durkheim’s collective representations, have been
preserved and developed by specialist communities and have defined the parameters
of thinking and what is true and false in different fields, at any particular time. Euclid’s
geometry as an example of the secular ‘sacred’ was treated as ‘true’ for 2000 years, but
it was not until the mid 19th century that mathematicians made explicit Euclid’s
‘fallibility’ and developed non-Euclidean geometries, which have led to space travel, and
Geographical positioning systems and mobile phones. Non-Euclidean geometry is a
good example of a discipline as a set of “Collective representations’ being a source of
‘thinking the un-thinkable’. For those of us who work in education, it is this that links
Durkheim’s theory of knowledge to the idea of social justice- why should anyone be
excluded, as they have been and still are, from participating in such thoughts and such
conversations?
Bernstein’s three knowledge relations
Bernstein developed Durkheim’s ideas in another way which extends his theory of
knowledge. From the distinction between the sacred and the profane, he distinguished
a what he called three knowledge relations- singulars, regions, and generic( fields of
practice-in everyday terms). We could say that whereas singulars represent the ‘sacred’
and regions a tension between the sacred and the profane, fields of practice are
sometimes codified forms of the profane with little if any relationship to singulars . I want
to say a bit about the first two and their relations to each other. Later in the paper I will
refer to Bernstein’s generic mode.
Singulars
Singulars are the purest general form of disciplines. In Bernstein’s words, they:
“ appropriate a space to give themselves a unique name(and) a specialised
discrete discourse with its own intellectual field of texts, practices, rules of entry,
examinations and licences to practice”
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Their key characteristics are:

The clear boundaries between different singulars and between them and the
everyday world
 they provide for the ‘purity’ of identity (of members of singulars or disciplinary
communities- physicists know they are not chemists) in contrast to the uncertain
and blurred identities such as citizen associated with the everyday world.
 They exhibit strong inner commitments (of their members) centred on their
perceived intrinsic value of their specific domains.
Historically, of course the three categories are best seen as what Max Weber called
ideal types- referring to tendencies rather than empirical prescriptions. In the case of
some disciplines- my own for example, sociology- the boundaries are anything but
clear, identities are often ambiguous at best and inner disciplinary commitments are
frequently weakened by political and other affiliations. Despite their empirical diversity,
the concept of ’singulars’ remains useful in analysing the strengths and weaknesses) of
specific disciplines.
Until the 19th century, singulars dominated the university curriculum in the form of
disciplines which had roots in the medieval distinction between the trivium and the
quadrivium that I referred to earlier. The strong boundaries separating the ‘word and the
world explains why up to then, most scientific and all technological developments took
place outside the university and most pre 19th century technology developed
independently from science.
Regions
In the 19th century under economic and population pressures and the problems
associated with urbanisation, a new knowledge relation emerged which Bernstein refers
to as ‘regions’. Regions arose from attempts to relate singulars to different aspects of
everyday life or ‘fields of practice.’ – in other word a weakening of boundaries. A
number of features distinguished the emerging ‘regions’ from singulars.
 They involved more than one singular- for example engineering involved
mathematics and physics and the new medicine involved anatomy, physiology
and chemistry


Unlike singulars they are only partially ‘inward looking’ as they had to take
account of the specifics of every day practice- construction engineering ,
manufacture and illnesses and wider health problems.
The success of the early regions and the growth of the professions associated
with them led to similar attempts to apply the social sciences. Groups of the new
singulars such as economics, psychology and sociology were brought together
to form regions such as social work, administration, business etc. What set these
new regions apart was (a) they were dealing with the social not physical or
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material world, and (b) the social sciences were far less reliable as sources of

explanations than the earlier regions which were based on the physical sciences.
Some regions gradually came to convert themselves into singulars- reasserting
the boundaries between them and their respective fields of practice- obvious
examples are engineering and medicine, but it was an increasingly common
process.
20th Century changes
As universities became increasingly dependent on government funding, government
started to demand greater control and reduction of the ‘inward’ focus of singulars. As a
consequence, universities came under pressure to take more account of fields of
practice- in particular employers and (as more university funds came directly from
students or their parents), from the students themselves. This raises two kinds of
questions for universities about the internal boundaries between disciplines and the
external boundaries between disciplines and the wider fields of practice.



Are the current threats to disciplines from government and market forces
undermining the conditions that make possible the development and
transmission of new knowledge? Or
Are disciplines as a modern form of the ‘sacred’ increasingly redundant in the
new conditions, and if so
What is replacing the secularised ‘sacred’ as sources of new knowledge?
Challenges to the disciplines as forms of the ‘sacred’?
I want to briefly refer briefly to three;
 the weakening of internal and external disciplinary boundaries as expressed in
the Mode 1/Mode 2 debate ( Gibbons et al)
 the consequences of internationalisation and the standardisation of university
curricula
 the emergence of what Bernstein referred to as a generic knowledge relation
The common strand through all these developments is what might be called a challenge
to the ‘disciplinary leadership’ of the universities. This 'discipline-based' model of
university leadership has been challenged not only by governments but by some
academics.
Mode1/ Mode 2
The most widely recognized internal 'academic' challenge to the ‘disciplinary leadership’
of universities came with the publication of the book The new production of
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knowledge by Michael Gibbons and his colleagues. They made both a descriptive and
a prescriptive argument. Descriptively, they argued that the disciplinary based mode of
knowledge production(referred to it as Mode 1), was becoming superceded by transand cross- disciplinary modes(referred to as Mode 2). Mode 2 involves combinations
of discipline-based and practical knowledge, with employers and other 'users' not just
testing and applying knowledge but influencing how the knowledge was formulated in
the first place. In Bernstein’s terms used earlier, the balance in regions between
singulars and ‘fields of practice were shifting in favour of the latter. Their prescriptions
claimed that Mode 2 was more efficient in producing the kind of knowledge that a
modern 'knowledge-based' economy needed. The Mode 2 model attracted
considerable interest from governments, especially in developing countries as it
appeared to be a way of bringing together academic rigour and the practical needs of
emerging economies. However it is hard to find evidence for the claims made for Mode
2 as a new approach to innovation through university/business collaboration; the most
successful examples such as the Knowledge Parks and Silicon Valley appeared to
have been discpline-led(although invariably with government support1). Some
innovation studies suggest a more complex pattern of stages where stage 1( Mode 1discipline –led) is followed by Stage 2, when the lead is taken over by the particular field
of practice. What Gibbons and his colleagues did not take account of was that
weakening the epistemic rules of the disciplines (as in the move from Mode 1 to Mode 2
move) might weaken the features that made Mode 1 a unique source of innovation. A
rather different set of questions is raised about Mode 2 in relation to pedagogy and
curriculum. For example, can students develop their identities as learners in a context in
which the boundaries for intellectual development are ambiguous?
Standardization and the challenge of outcomes
The drive to make universities more efficient and satisfy external demands is most
manifest in the policies and influence of the major international organizations(OECD,
the EU, the World Bank) and their initiatives designed to standardize, and therefore
control universities. All emphasise performance outcomes or skills at the expense of
disciplinary inputs. For example :

the introduction of outcomes-based National qualification frameworks at all
levels up to doctorates (there were 138 at the last count)

The Bologna Accord on Higher Education to develop common outcomes for
all degree qualifications across 50+ countries

extension of outcomes -based curricula to higher education. An example is
Tomorrow’s Doctors(GMC 2009), the curriculum framework newly
approved by the General Medical Council for the professional education of
doctors in England.
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What these standardising developments have in common is (i) the aim of with
the aim of promoting mobility and transferability between and within national
systems and (ii) the priority they give to the outcomes of learning at university
over the content and structure of the programmes that lead to the outcomes.
This inevitably reduces the role of the specialist communities associated with
disciplines.
Generic skills
A theme that runs through nearly all the current HE reforms is a shift
‘disciplinary content’ to ‘generic (non discipline specific) skills’. With only
some exaggeration, this shift could be described as the ‘emptying of content’
of university curricula.
The shift gives a high priority to generic skills that could apply to any field of
study or occupation; examples are problem solving, thinking skills, learning to
learn and communication skills. This shift. I argue, is based on a number of
mis-conceptions.
(1) the difference between knowledge content and knowledge
structure
The case for generic skills is that with the speed with which new knowledge
is being created increasing, new knowledge quickly becomes out of date
and so it is better to develop ‘knowledge handling skills' that are not tied to
specific knowledge contents at all. Hence the proposals for 'problem solving'
and 'thinking skills'. What such proposals do not recognise is that although
'contents' change fast and become out of date, concepts which are the core
of disciplines have far greater stability. It is not 'less content' and more 'skills'
that students need but a better theoretical concepts to deal with the complex
changes in the modern world that they will face. A good example iare the frst
and second laws of thermodynamics, first suggested by Carnot in the 1820s
which are fundamental to the leading edge research on protein gradients and
our understanding of photosynthesis. This of course takes the biological
science curriculum back to its conceptual base in the discipline of physics and
not away from them towards 'skills' that it is claimed are ‘generic’.
(2) the difference between generic (or common) skills and the
capacity to generalise
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New curricula policies frequently emphasise the similarities between
processes in traditionally distinct fields of study and and professions. This is a
development partly produced by the spread of digital technologies to all
sectors and occupations. The idea that such changes point to common or
generic skills becoming part of courses leading to distinct qualifications raises
two questions. (i) even though skills or knowledge may be common to
different occupations, the contexts will be different the ‘generic skills will need
to be ‘recontextualised’ in relation to the different discplinary domains. (ii) To
understand why apparently similar skills need to be recontextualised requires
requires not not just a set of generic skills but the ‘capacity to generalise’ that
is a product of theory located in particular domains- in other words back to
disciplines.
(3) the domain –specificity of ‘generic’ skills
Much emphasis is currently placed on problem solving and thinking skills
as ways of making university(and other) curricula more relevant and
making graduates more employable. However this assumes not only
that 'thinking' is a skill- something that one can do and be observed
doing- but that such 'skills' can be identified and taught
independently of the specific domain of their use. Such assumptions
go against much educational research which shows that people learn
to think in ways that take them beyond everyday thinking by engaging
with the concepts of specific disciplines. Thinking skills can be a
curriculum goal but as a curriculum they must be embedded in specific
disciplinary domains- the generalizing capacity of the thinking will
depend on the generalising power of the disciplinary concepts. This
suggests that insofar as students do develop generic skills such as
problem solving it is through tackling problems raised by particular
disciplines.
CONCLUSIONS
Underlying what I have said in this paper is an argument that again I draw
from Durkheim. Social progress, the creation of new knowledge and
innovation all depend primarily on the differentiation and specialization of
secular forms of the sacred/profane distinction. Developments such as the
shifts from Mode1 to Mode 2, from discipline specific to generic skills and
knowledge, efforts to tie university curricula to preparing job-ready students,
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and reducing the funding for research that is not tied to immediate economic
needs not only go against Durkheim’s theory of knowledge but
will in the longer run be counter-productive to the goals of such reforms. The
alternative does not mean returning to the old elitist and static forms of
discipline-based faculty structures; that would be equally against Durkheim’s
theory of the progress of knowledge and of society. It does mean that
university reform must start from a theory of knowledge- what I call ‘powerful
knowledge’ as the basis for university curricula and research, regardless of
whether they are based on 'pure' disciplines such as literature and chemistry,
or 'applied' disciplines such as engineering or nursing, and whether they draw
on the natural or the social sciences or on the humanities. The criteria of
powerful knowledge, that I have already referred to are:


differentiation from everyday experience.
degree of specialisation
Access to specialised, un-common sense knowledge in any field
defines the purpose of universities and is what university students are
entitled to, whether it is ‘pure’ or ‘applied’. Skills are involved in acquiring any
knowledge; work-related skills can be acquired at work. This is not an antiskills, anti-applied knowledge, anti-professional or anti-vocational approach to
the curriculum. It is an approach which identifies both what future a modern
democratic society needs and the role the university is best suited to provide.
Universities like all institutions are specialised in what they do and what they
do best. Their purposes begin with specialisation and the ‘sacredness’ of
discipline-based knowledge. This does not mean that universities will remain
static in what they do. Like specialisation and differentiation sacredness will
continue to be expressed in changing ways as they have for past centuries.
What universities cannot do is to imagine that they can continue fulfill their
three purposes- as sources of new knowledge, as sources of epistemic
access and as sites of debate about society and where it is going, if they
renounce the principle of ‘sacredness’ and its implications. Sacredness
sounds like an old fashioned and out of date word better suited to the past. As
I said at the beginning Durkheim was a progressive, a Republican and a non
believing Jew. That hat did not stop him seeing the importance of the sacred
in its original form as religion and its now largely secularized forms.
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