What for the US has been a tradition of collaborating with a prosperous private business world, for the Europeans risks turning into an acceptance of the dictates of the economy. Romanian academic Ioana Bot on the “entrepreneurial university” and other myths of Bologna.
The decentralization of French Universities has forced individual faculties to cede control to the university management, and has met with opposition from teaching staff, says Yves Lichtenberger. The new culture of assessment has been particularly resisted by humanities departments, which object to being judged on the criteria of the physical sciences. Yet critics have suggested that this sense of having to defend a broad cultural education against business is somewhat exaggerated and unrealistic. Is it not the case that while centralized but remote state control favoured opaque compromises, local control challenges long laid-down university habits?
Jacques Rancière’s “utopian rationalism” invokes the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. Ultimately, however, it may be that the modern university is antithetical to any possibility of establishing true equality among its players, writes Nina Power.
The student and staff walk out at UCLA in September 2009 in response to announcements of fee hikes, cuts and layoffs sparked a wave of protests at universities across California that lasted months. In an article written in the spring of 2010, Evan Calder Williams considers connections between the financialisation of the university and communisation – “a practice of secession from capital that doesn’t wait for a communist revolution”.
In the UK, pressure from government to transform university programmes outside elite institutions into vocational training programmes creates a situation where “employability” becomes the sole goal of higher education, writes Jeremy Gilbert in an article first published in January 2010. What is offered under the guise of “university education” will soon be no more than a form of tertiary training for the service, retail and media industries.
Caught on a bus in rush-hour Tokyo, Anthony Head wonders whether Schopenhauer was right that immunity to noise is proof of idiocy. Could the impassive facades of his fellow travellers be concealing something more spiritual?
Using culture to reshape and renew our declining cities is a nice idea – or is it? Dragan Klaic looks at the successes and failures of urban projects, assesses the value of “regeneration through culture” and challenges some of the more conventional assumptions with a revolutionary recipe for cultural development.
The hopes for African footballing success raised by Cameroon’s performance in the 1990 World Cup have yet to be fulfilled. However African football has long since stepped out of the shadow of its colonial origins, writes Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling. All that remains is for an African nation to capture football’s most coveted trophy.
Modernity in eastern Europe tends to be seen either as the partial opening up of a region characterized by traditional forms of societal self-understanding, or as a disfigured and radicalized adaptation of western modernity that prioritizes closure. Paul Blokker, in an article focusing on Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland and Hungary, argues that both views need to be combined.
Some common notions about analytic philosophy – that it is uniformly anti-metaphysical or indifferent to the history of philosophy – are clearly misconceived. However the impression that analytic philosophers are essentially linguistic philosophers is not entirely false and hence less easy to refute, writes Pierre Wagner.
Asked to compare the Hungarian city of Pécs to his own birthplace, author Peteris Puritis is at a loss: he was only there once. Instead, he gives an unofficial guided tour of the many Soviet-era monuments in the Latvian town of his childhood, recalling some of the cheeky uses he and his friends found for them…
Viktor Horváth’s novel “Török tükör” [Turkish Mirror] portrays everyday life in sixteenth century Hungary, when it was a suzerainty of the Sultan Suleyman. The narrator, an old Muslim man, addresses the reader throughout as “my heir to the true faith”, assuming that by the time his words are read, the Hungarians will have assimilated with their conquerors – an ingenious reversal that runs throughout the book and gives it its special charm. The excerpt translated here describes the market town of Pécs.
Tough materialism and existential frankness, an awareness of one’s mortality balanced by the refusal to talk bullshit: George Blecher selects three works of fiction that sum up the New York attitude.
The “open society” to which Soviet existence is often claimed to have been opposed resembles the old idea of “the free world”. A non-moralistic approach to group relations in the Soviet Union moves beyond the simplistic link between modernisation and openness, writes Catriona Kelly.