The digitisation of the book has brought a new balance of power in the trade, with established publishers locked in struggle with the new digital distributors for control of production. Pascal Fouché, author of an encyclopaedia of the book, discusses whether publishers are prepared for the challenge posed by the dematerialisation of the printed word.
Lithuania’s capital is close to the heart of many different groups and nationalities who have at one time or another called it “home”. Better that they unite in their love of the city than fight for isolated fragments of its magical, multi-layered past, writes Tomas Venclova.
During the twentieth anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbolic wall consisting of dominoes was toppled. The dominoes were painted on both sides, something that could only have been done with a great deal of forgetting, writes Jacob Kimvall. In reality, there was graffiti only on the western side of the Wall, and that was put there illegally; but during the anniversary, unity seems to be more important than historical accuracy.
The much anticipated US finance regulatory bill, passed at the end of last month, is a compromise between government regulators and Wall Street, writes George Blecher. As for solving the even more pressing problems of the US economy, the bill offers no new solutions.
Between 1941 and 1989, Hungary’s hand-tied politicians were at the mercy of the Great Powers and their struggle for hegemony in Europe. A study of US diplomatic documents shows the extent to which realpolitik determined US policy on Hungarian national independence.
It’s ironic, says a Latvian art critic, that the current saturation of the visual world by infinitely reproducible images via the Internet has driven artists back to older forms of representation.
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.
In Germany, scientific and professional bodies acting on behalf of the state have traditionally mediated between the academic and professional sectors in order to keep academia and the commercial sector separate. Now, independent accreditation agencies certify BA and MA courses according to market-based criteria. The result of the exposure of German universities to purely economic demands will, like elsewhere, be an increasing hierarchization of educational institutions.
Today, a new struggle for control of Russia’s universities is underway between a “black”, private model and a centralized and seemingly more transparent state model. Yet the two are but different expressions of the same thing, writes Alexander Bikbov: spontaneous capitalist neoconservatism. What’s more, governments elsewhere in Europe are seeking to emulate the successful example of the Russian state in extracting profit from the public university.
What began as a row over the French government plans for “masterization” and the revision of the status of teacher-researchers escalated in March 2009 into a prolonged and explosive dispute over Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to overhaul France’s poorly-funded public universities, writes Françoise Benhamou. Though joined in some measure by students, who brought new demands to a conflict that was already very complex, the teacher strikes had the paradoxical effect of hitting the financially worse-off students.
The understanding of the role of higher education that characterized the Soviet era has been reborn in post-Soviet Lithuania as a blind drive towards utility, writes Almantas Samalavicius. The hard sciences have won the struggle over state funding at the expense of the humanities, while falling standards have caused an ongoing brain-drain to the West. The most recent reforms indicate that the only remedy on offer is based on the logic of the market, as Lithuanian universities steadily go the way of the rest of “common property” after independence.
Barbara Holub’s drawings prompt recognition without us having experienced the situations they represent, writes Ines Gebetsroither. They create an opportunity to reassess habitual ways of seeing, and tell us: there are no innocent images; the images are already in us.
Critique of Bologna in Romania is a pretext for academic complacency and professional self-preservation, writes Corneliu Balan. The problem is not the Bologna system as such but the subordination of education to political interests and the privatization of the universities.