The Social Dimension and Social Cohesion.
Or,
On Reconciling Adam Smith with Thomas Hobbes.
Guy Neave,
Professor of Comparative Higher Education Policy Studies,
Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies,
Capitool 15,
Universiteit Twente,
7500 AE, Enschede,
Netherlands.
Presentation to the Seminar
‘The Social Dimension of the European Higher Education Area and
world wide competition’,
The Sorbonne,
Paris, January 26 – 28th 2005.
1
Introduction:
Let me start by noting a certain paradox. This paradox resides in the fact that
ensuring social cohesion has long been one of the constant and underlying tasks of
education in general and higher education most specifically so. Indeed, the reform of
the two basic variations of the modern European university – the Humboldtian and
the Napoleonic – had, amongst other purposes this very deliberate end, which is
scarcely surprising given the situation both countries then faced – the collapse of the
social order of the first after the battle of Jena (Nybom, 2003) – and seating a dynasty
on firmer footing in the case of the second. (Verger, 1986) It has, even so taken four
years after the signature of the Bologna Declaration for attention to turn to the Social
Dimension and Social Cohesion. Still, there is doubtless some consolation to be had
from the adage “Better late than never.”
When we broach the issue of social cohesion and we do so within the setting of the
European Higher Education Area it is as well not to forget that the best part of two
hundred years have been spent defining, and refining social cohesion within the
setting of the Nation State. Indeed, of all the world’s universities, it is the European
that has had the Nation State as its basic referential framework the longest.
(Huisman, Maassen & Neave, 2001) That we are being asked to consider a new and
broader definition of social cohesion is therefore no small task.
Operationalising the Concept.
The concept of social cohesion can of course be operationalised around very different
criteria. Indeed, we have heard our Dutch colleagues applying it to describe the
disparities between modes of student financing and the differences in what is known
in that hideous barbarism derived from the Franglais, portability. That there are
differences in modes of student financing and funding and thus, portability, is
scarcely surprising. What is more surprising, however, is that such differences
should be seen as posing obstacles to ‘social cohesion’. (Vossensteyn, 2004) It may
well be that such a diagnostic term is not meant to be understood as it stands.
Rather, it may be viewed as yet another example of Euro-speak which opens the door
to further questions such as the type of ‘coordination’ to ensure cohesion defined
uniquely in terms of student finance and who shall exercise it, not to mention the type
and the range of ‘solutions’ that may be contemplated. Whether they are to be
contemplated in unitary terms – one size fits all - or whether they are to perpetuate
the notion of national diversity, and the glorious obduracy of national practice
perpetuated, is the heart of the matter, of course.
De-coding the felicitous phrase.
In the Russian doll of Euro-politics, inside one issue another always lies waiting.
And in the case of ‘social cohesion’ interpreted in the narrow terms of financing
students when abroad, there lurks the well-exercised conflict over the distribution of
power between Commission and Member States, not to mention by whom and how
student mobility is to be sustained in the near future. And he who speaks of
‘sustaining’ anything in these latter days is but one step away from the question of
resources and the eternally vexed question who is to pay what for whom and how?
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Within this very special decoding of the felicitous term, other questions put
themselves forward. Assuming that ‘social cohesion’ is a stalking horse for ‘coordination’ - perhaps harmonisation or even architecture would smell as sweet – the
first question when applied to the funding of students venturing outside the frontiers
of the Nation, is surely “where are we to set the limits to conceiving difference as
obstacles?” If differences in national practice are an obstacle, and we have spent the
last two centuries seeking in every way possible to mark ourselves off from our
neighbours – above all, our neighbours – by our differences, where is the process of
‘removing obstacles’ to stop? On this criterion, we might as well begin the learning
of Letzenburgisch on the grounds that by learning it we will remove obstacles,
impose an equality of great difficulty upon everyone concerned and, by so doing,
counter the inadmissible domination of the North Atlantic tongue.
A Broader Understanding.
Yet, the issue of social cohesion, read in its meaning en clair rather than encoded, is a
serious issue. It is a serious issue because one tends to evoke social cohesion only
when it seems to be in question and apparently in a condition of fragility. Or, to put
matters slightly differently, social cohesion is only brought into question with the
imminent prospect of social instability or its likelihood. A number of feline phrases
are currently going the rounds that give voice to this anxiety, though it has to be said
that they are not identified with the Bologna Process as such though, by using that
platform to turn our attention to the social dimension, Bologna serves perhaps to
amplify our awareness of them. Within the Nation State, marginalisation, exclusion
fall into the category of those forces in society that weaken the social fabric. Or, as
another possibility, as forces that work in favour of new definitions of collective
identity that do not lend themselves easily to accommodation within existing
institutional or social structures and which notorious poverty or a shared sense of
what Gary Runciman termed ‘Relative Deprivation” may serve to accelerate and
precipitate. (Runciman, 1966)
That the Bologna process has opened up the social dimension serves to underline that
factors of disparity, which determine and accompany differences in the quality of life
within the Nation State, are now shared across them. Such disparities, whether
socially or geographically sited, are not new. Indeed, higher education policy – at
least in Western Europe – has from the mid Sixties onwards been engaged in seeking
to remedy them – either through policies of institutional distribution – or through
various policies to strengthen the influence of regional authorities in the affairs of
academia, beginning in Sweden with the 1977 reforms, and spreading into Spain with
the Organic Law of 1983, in Belgium with the Federalisation of the Kingdom in 1988
and in Britain with the regionalisation of the higher education funding base in 1992.
Others are certainly not backward in this sphere. The ‘fit’ between the location of
institutes of higher education and regions of notorious deprivation is not always
close. Nevertheless, the use of higher education to spur regional development, if not
always regional identity, is an enduring trend these four decades past.
3
Social Cohesion and Higher Education: a brief excursion across History.
Now the issue that the very concept of social cohesion poses is “It is its purpose to
achieve even closer harmony, architecture or common practice? Or is it evoked
simply because the thrust of social and technological change is dissolving the
established mechanisms of social stability?” What evidence have we from the
domain of higher education?
As Moscati has pointed out, competition and meritocracy are the abiding values of
higher education and for that reason are also central to the notion of social cohesion.
But their continuing and vital part in determining who goes to higher education can
be made to serve vastly different social objectives and thus very different
interpretations of social cohesion. The historic and identifying feature of the
European university, though not ostensibly its American counterpart, has been the
close alignment of higher education with public service, whether that public service
is construed in terms of the services of the State – or, in the setting of an ideology
that has now gone the way of all flesh – of the party. The historical origins of this
engagement to the collectivity, not unnaturally, vary from country to country. They
may be traced back to the Josephine reforms at the end of the 18th century in Austria,
were re-affirmed in the Memorandum of Wilhelm von Humboldt on the future of
Berlin University in 1806 and, for France, as I have said, were re-stated in the form
of the Imperial University. (Neave, 2001) The University acting on behalf of the
Nation supplied the talent that in turn fed what the American political scientist Robert
Dahl termed “the value allocating bodies in society” – the church, the law, the
education system sensu lato, national administration and, not least, the tax system.
(Dahl, 1966 The Political System) These ties were made closer by what in some
countries is termed the ‘effectis civilis’, namely that certain university degrees were
held to be valid to compete for a place in public service and for a place in what
economists qualify as ‘the fixed price labour market’. (Kerr, 1986)
Clearly, the first major break in the saga of the elite university took place with the
drive towards massification in Europe from the mid Sixties onward. Its rationale
remained fully within the post war settlement which involved the Nation assuming
new resposibilities and thus taking over new dimensions that underpinned social
cohesion in the form of the welfare state – in health, unemployment and child
benefits, pensions and not least the right first to secondary education and later to
higher education. Key to this was the recognition that education determined life
chances. Higher education took on an active and re-distributive role as indeed the
welfare state itself performed. Education and the university by extension acted as a
public instrument for the re-distribution of wealth through investing in social
mobility and above all, through public investment in the younger generation.
Seen from this perspective, the first stage in Western Europe’s drive towards
massification stood as an unprecedented act of social solidarity and very explicitly so
in its focus on what were then presented as ‘first generation students’. The
fundamental assumption that underpinned this interpretation of social cohesion rested
on the conviction that social mobility and raising the general level of education
amongst the population was an issue of collective responsibility. It extended into
higher education the basic tenets of the welfare state in the broad domain of social
security. In this, three aspects remained constant. First, the principle of merit itself ;
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second that mobilisation of society around technological and social change was
primed by the public sector – a social counterpart of Keynesian theory in economics;
and third, that the pace of economic change was in keeping with the capacity of the
labour force to keep pace on the basis of the intellectual baggage it had once acquired
in youth.
In effect, the factors that undermined this particular model of higher education’s part
in social cohesion are also to be found along these three dimensions and very
especially in the relationship between social cohesion and economic development. Is
social cohesion a condition of economic development ? Or, on the contrary, is
economic development a condition of social cohesion? The fundamental assumption
that lay beneath the ‘welfare state’ model of higher education policy inclined towards
the former, namely that social solidarity was a prior condition to economic
development, a view which received operational definition by placing priority on
equality of opportunity, often expressed in terms of ‘social justice’. If we accept this
interpretation of social cohesion, we have to ask ourselves what were the elements of
disolution?
Erosion of a model of social cohesion: the Welfare State.
The usual explanation given for the demise of the ‘welfare state’ model of social
cohesion in higher education is astounding in its simplicity – namely, that the Nations
of Europe could not afford to fund mass higher education in the same lavish manner
as they had its elite predecessor. None will disagree the part cost played. But it is
not the whole explanation. There is another one. And whilst both are inextricably
linked to the process of massification itself, the second is important on its own
account. Social demand for higher education not only outstripped the ability – or, as
the theory of fiscal stress suggests (Vossensteyn, 2003) - the willingness of
governments and their citizens to pay (an interesting example of de-solidarization). It
also outstripped the capacity of the public sector to absorb the increase in qualified
output from higher education. Precisely when this historic watershed was reached is
not greatly important. There is evidence aplenty to suggest that the latter part of the
70s – with variations between countries – provides a reasonable marker. There are
other pointers as well, not least of them being the refocusing of higher education
policy – and research which tends to follow in its train – away from access to higher
education and instead to concentrate on output, on occupational change and on the
ties – increasingly problematic - of higher education with the labour market.
Such a refocusing went hand in glove with a root and branch revision in re-thinking
the place of the public sector and, more to the point, the economic condition of the
Nation, a revision which, in its more extreme forms set about defining the economy
as the prime lever in social cohesion. This, in essence, is precisely what is meant by
the twin credos of ‘marketisation’and ‘privatisation’. In other words, the relationship
between social cohesion and economic development which, in the welfare state
interpretation of higher education, saw social cohesion as the path that led on to
economic fortune, was thus reversed. Economic development was thus the prior
condition to social stability, if not to social cohesion
5
Effects upon the University.
Placing the emphasis upon the market as the prime condition of social coherance has
had weighty consequences indeed for the European university – as the unprecedented
20 years saga that lies behind us of reform in purpose, administration, governance,
authority, financing and intake capacity all bear witness. This is not to say that the
place of the university is any the less central to society. Indeed, the very idea of a
Knowledge Economy and within it, the strategic place of higher learning, affords it
even greater significance as the prime supplier of trained Human capital and capital
expressed through ideas and innovation. (Kogan, forthcoming) Even so, the
university occupies a very different siting precisely because social cohesion is held to
be conditional upon the economy rather than the other way round.
Our tendency in the area of policy research in higher education has been both to
conceive and to analyse these reforms individually and separately. Each is, after all, a
highly complex affair. There is, however, an excellent case to be made for trying to
weld them into a whole and to re-contextualise them within the framework of the
consequences they have for the notion of social cohesion. The first thing to note is
that inverting the relationship between the economy and social cohesion places the
latter as a sub set of a particular ideology that is variously described as ‘Economic
Liberalism’ or in certain quarters, ‘Ultra-Liberalism’ which has a certain kinship with
supply-side economic theory. It is the guiding Mantra behind the process of
Globalisation. (Marginson, 2004)
Setting Neo Liberalism in context.
The interpretations that may be placed upon this ideology are many. For its adepts,
the market provides the freedom for individual initiative and as such, a necessary
corrective to the restraining influence of the State. Individual freedom and enterprise,
thus liberated, drive the economy forward, create jobs, satisfy consumers and
contribute to the wealth of individuals inside the Nation – or more accurately
described, inside the ‘common wealth’. (Neave, 2003) The central credos of neo
liberalism turn around individual performance, efficiency and above all competition
which, aggregated up, ensure national prosperity. It is, in its essence, a doctrine
derived from the notion of possessive individualism (Macpherson, 1962; Neave, 2002
Placed in an organisational setting, its institutional form of reference is the business
enterprise and the world of corporate – in the American sense of the term – practice.
There are two features well worth the noting that accompany the permeation of this
doctrine into society. This first is that the Nation-State itself assumes the status of the
local context and very particularly so in the case of multi-national firms. But the firm
does not simply exist in the Nation or across Nations. Nor is it simply the prime
operant of globalisation. Neo Liberalism, since it cannot entirely eliminate the value
allocating bodies without putting itself in danger, in effect adds one more to those
that, in an earlier age, operated within the Nation State. It adds The Firm. (for this
see above, pp. ) If one wishes evidence for this statement, one has only to consider
how far reform of higher education turns to ‘business practice’ as the yardtick of its
successful modernisation. And whilst practices are not always the same thing as
‘values’, nevertheless the influence of what is held to be ‘good business practice’
exercises upon universities – whether entrepreneurial (Clark, 1998) or innovating -
6
suggests that institutional centrality of the firm, which characterizes neo liberalism in
its relationship to society, is indeed every bit as comparable in its pervasiveness and
its norm-shaping power to the earlier bodies of value allocation. Indeed, business
efficiency becomes a value in itself
Farewell to a Nineteenth Century Vision of Social Cohesion.
There is, however, a second difference and it, too, has direct bearing upon the notion
of social cohesion just as it does in the relationship of higher education to social
cohesion. The relationship of a firm with other enterprises may carry obligations.
But in essence, it is contractual, formal, written and based on a utilitarian notion of
securing services, advantages or advancing opportunities – most of which are time
specific and conditional – that is, there are objectives to be atttained as part of the
exchange, the attainment of which determines the fulfilment of the contract. And
indeed, it is precisely this type of contractual, targetted and conditional relationship
that now governs the ties between higher education and the public. Higher Education
is no longer perceived in terms of collective identity, as a repository and as hander
down of the national genius or, for that matter as the crowning example of national
unity, all of which are forms of cohesion expressed through notions of continuity and
commonality pursued across generations.
One can, of course, point out that this nineteenth century vision of the university had
already been severely mangled in the heady days of May 1968 and its aftermath that
apread across Western Europe. Very certainly, the advent of participant democracy,
of group interests inside the groves of Academe, (de Groof, Neave & Svec, 1998)
antedated the arrival of Neo-Liberalism and the advent of ‘new public management’.
(Pollitt, 1992) Nor is it out of place to note that even the welfare state model of social
cohesion defined and measured how far the university had met its mission of social
cohesion in terms of groups defined by social background or relative disadvantage. If
anything, the drive into higher education from the mid Eighties through to the mid
Nineties, put a final touch to the fragmentation of the student estate, extending its
range of ambition. Most significant of all, it brought to an end the concept of
students as part of an organic collective order – the Student Estate as opposed to the
Academic Estate. In keeping with the tenets of Neo-Liberalism, student status was
brought within the canons of the new theology and individualised as ‘consumers’.
Towards the Stakeholder Society.
Though few systems have, I would suggest, gone as far down the path as Britain in
shaping higher education as a ‘consumer service’, that the student qua consumer is
today a common-place, is much more than a shift in analogy and symbolism. The
shift from collective ‘Student Estate’ to individual ‘consumer’ is itself a very
sensitive pointer to some of the basic changes taking place in the concept of social
cohesion within higher education. What separates the ‘student qua consumer’ from
the student as member of a one-time privileged order is not just that the notion of
privilege has disappeared and with it the sense of obligation to public service that
implicitly accompanied student funding under the welfare state. It is the shift
towards the individual assuming responsibility for investment in himself. As
enrolment fees are introduced across Europe and repayable loans replace grants or
indirect subsidy, so the cohesion symbolised by inter-generational investment
transmutes into an instrumentality to spur on at one and the same time individual
7
competition and individual accommodation to rapid economic change. And with it
also changes the notion of the State both in its relations with higher education and,
for that matter, vis a vis the individual student. For whilst one may argue that a
certain element of solidarity has not entirely vanished and is visible in the form of
publicly provided loans, they constitute very much a short term conditional solidarity.
Student funding systems become stakeholders in the student, just as students in turn,
for the period of their studies, become stakeholders in the university: the former for
the repayment of the loans, the latter for that training which will furnish him – or her
– with the operational skills to ensure ‘employability’ and thus permit the repayment
of that loan. Seen from this angle, loans are not so much an act of solidarity – though
means-testing permits a nicer rationing of the amount of solidarity to be afforded – so
much as a lien upon the individual and as a spur for the individual to be ‘performing’
if the debt is rapidly to be discharged.
The individualisation of student status, the fragmentation and diversity in ability and
social origin have radical consequences for the university. Whilst the notion of the
‘Stakeholder University’ is more evident in English speaking systems – Australia,
Britain and the United States – certain dimensions of the Stakeholder university are
becoming generic to the university in the post-modern world. The first of these
features is the re-siting of the university as an expression of national culture and
casting it as a service and training institution the purpose of which is predominantly
defined in terms of serving one particular interest within the Nation, namely the Firm
and the development of one over-riding priority – the embedding of entrepreneurial
culture as its central referent.
Resocialising the University.
There are many pointers to this re-alignment, both in the terms some establishments
use to distinguish themselves from the historic university and in terms of the skills
which they claim to engender amongst their students. Evidence of the former
emerges, of course, in such self-descriptions by individual universities as
‘Entrepreneurial’ ‘Responsive’ Innovating or Service. (Neave, 2004). From a
European perspective, such descriptors are as good a pointer to the detachment of the
university from public service as ever one might wish. They also point to an amazing
reduction in its central purpose, which, if more precise and for that reason more
capable of being operationalised, is but the servicing of one interest in society. Such
descriptors thus stand as a fundamental re-alignment in the dialectical relationship
between higher education and society which calls for the university to adapt to
external change – a far cry from its civilising mission within the Nation State that
once it had.
The second feature is rather more subtle. It involves an equally marked shift in what
may be seen as the university’s role in socialisation. This has narrowed from the
broader definition in terms of broad social obligation, professional skills and ethics to
concentrate on the technical and operational skills and attitudes that accompany
performance in the private sector – to wit, the much quoted triology of flexibility,
adaptability and performance. Certainly, few systems have gone so far as the United
Kingdom which, in the mid Nineties, sought to inject an ‘enterprise culture’ into
academe in the shape of the so-called ‘Enterprise Initiative’ project. By the same
token, few establishments of higher education in Europe will deny their engagement
8
to this new and more focused edition of socialisation presented under the guise of
‘professionalisation’.
There remains, however, a third dimension which we have touched upon briefly
earlier. (see above p.5) This is the pace of change itself. That higher education has
entered a phase where, if the growing literature on the matter is to be believed,
change is held to be continuous as new occupations are created – above all in the area
of Information and Computer Technology. This is why such a premium is placed
upon responsiveness in institutions, adaptability amongst their students and flexibility
in both.
Taken together, these three features of the contemporary university, pose a number of
very crucial questions above the viability of the cohesion they appear to endorse. The
first of these is whether the transformation of the university into a university of
interests is not itself a dissolvant of collective solidarity. This is not to say that
conflict of interests is absent from academia and that all is sweetness and light. Even
so, the individualisation of student status, the notion that the purpose of the university
is to optimalise individual choice as a means for the individual to ensure his own
‘employability’ - which is light years away from the notion of ‘employment’ – pose
another highly uncomfortable question. That question is whether the university may
be said to be symbolic of any kind of unity – regional, national or for that matter,
European – let alone of solidarity and cohesion. That the governing ethic of the
contemporary university is one of competition serves merely to underline the issue.
The Ambiguous Nature of Competition.
Competition may indeed secure brilliant students and lavish sources of revenue. But
it cannot, by definition, do so for all. Iindeed, depending on the prosperity – and
perceived self- interest - of the private sector, so those that benefit will be more or
fewer. In all cases, they will be a minority in the national – or regioinal -.provision.
Competition discriminates – in the original meaning of the word. Or, to revert to the
jargon of our trade, it differentiates. Just as the massification of higher education
posed the issue of public service versus private advantage, so the drive towards
universal higher education – which thirty years ago Martin Trow set at a 40 percent
enrolement rate for the appropriate ago group (OECD, 1974) - raises another highly
delicate problem – namely, that of exclusion. And many systems of higher education
in Europe have already gone beyond the threshold of ‘universal’ higher education with France in the lead as it was in passing the tipping point to mass higher education
in the early Seventies.
Exclusion takes two forms, the first best expressed in the jingle penned by the
English Victoran librettist W.S. Gilbert, in Iolanthe a delightfully light operette :
‘When Every one is somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody.’
Universal Higher Education and Marginalisation.
Certainly, advantages – and very substantial ones at that – are still to be had by
participating in higher education : lower unemployment rates and, increasingly, the
opportunity to place oneself in the European or global labour market. But, by the
9
same token, as more drive into higher education, so the penalties for those who do
not, increase. Whilst the problem of downward substitution – that is, those better
qualified replace those less qualified in jobs once identified with the latter, an
outcome of the diploma spiral – may not be as great as many feared (Teichler, 1998
check) But the perception that this process stands in the wings is most assuredly
present and with it the very real possibility that, even if the university does not
generate exclusion through its graduates replacing secondary school leavers in the
central labour market, thereby forcing the latter into the peripheral labour market, the
belief that it does, is present, powerful and highly detrimental to the public image of
the university. There is, I would suggest, no greater threat to higher education than
for it to be seen wholly and exclusively as a competitive arena, above all by those
who, for one reason or another, cannot – or will not – come in from the cold. And
whilst it may be argued that compensatory opportunities are present in the form of
life-long education and training, one cannot ignore the fact that for the most part,
those who take up these opportunities are largely those who have already been hearty
consumers of higher education. As the proverb suggests, appetite comes with
eating !
Envoi.
The real question Bologna poses and which constructing the European Higher
Education Area begs is not whether we have a social dimension to either, though it
should perhaps be pointed out that Bologna’s phasing and strategy follow the NeoLiberal model of mobilising for social change, namely by concentrating primarily on
the economic dimension and bringing in the social dimension as a follow up. The
key issue is, on the contrary, how far in advancing both a balance may be struck
between the principles of individual opportunity and those of collective advantage.
From the standpoint of political philosophy, this is a very old dilemma and one
which, when extended beyond Europe, is no less evident in the relationship Europe
seeks to have with the rest of the world. It is also explicit in the narrower terms of
‘social cohesion’ as it applies to the different modes of financing those who study
abroad. As I have argued, this particular instance is one manifestation of a broader
and deeper-seated dilemma.
In truth, the dilemma that confronts both Bologna and the Higher Education Area is
how to reconcile Adam Smith with Thomas Hobbes, the Sage of Malmesbury and the
author in the mid 17th century of Leviathan, that paen in justification of a strong,
regulatory State. Each in his way was concerned with the place of competition in the
social construct. For Smith, competition was the driving force of human society and
individual initiative. For Hobbes, competition was most certainly an innate human
trait. It was not, however, positive. (Oakshott, 1972) On the contrary, competition
was the brutish comportment of man in the state of Nature, prior to the social
contract, when ‘Every man’s hand was turned against his neighbour.’ And where the
lot of Mankind was ‘poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short.’ For Hobbes, in
competition lay the heart of mayhem and civil strife. These two contrary imaginings
extend to the place of the State as a very real restraint upon individual
adventurousness in the case of the father of Economics or as a restraint upon the
bestial excesses of Man’s otherwise natural instincts in the case Hobbes as advocate
for the rule of Leviathan.
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That competition can be subject to so different interpretations is, I would suggest,
quintessential to the currrent quandry in which we find ourselves when constructing
the European Higher Education Area. We are confronted with the same dilemma
about the degree of solidary that forms the base on which social cohesion in its
deepest sense, reposes. Yet very precisely, this dilemma is in-built to the Bologna
Declaration itself. It emerges in the notion that relations between systems of higher
education inside the European Union are to rest on the principle of cooperation and
that competition – in the form of our civilised attractiveness - shall shape our dealings
with the world at large. (van der Wende, 2001) As a statement of intent, it is a fine
and splendid thing. We agree to reserve Adam Smith, like strong medicine, for
‘external use only’. And we hope that Thomas Hobbes will serve us well on the home
front, though even there is every sign that, reviewing the social contract requires a
slight shrinkage in the power of Leviathan the better to harness some of the raw
energies found in the State of Nature. Others believe they are also to be found in The
Boardroom
The European dilemma is how far the gospel according to Adam Smith should be
seen as “the way, the truth and the life”, just as it is how far we see it desirable to
abandon Leviathan and with it it the social cohesion Leviathan regulated and shaped
– in higher education, not least. The problem can be stated conversely, of course.
How far is Europe prepared to accept a possible further weakening of social cohesion
by utterly embracing the unpredictable acts of Mr Smith’s more ardent pupils who in
their organised expression may just as well be presented as an alternative Leviathan
but dressed in corporate clothing ?
These are delicate issues for whilst their resolution lies at the heart of building the
European Higher Education Area, they also re-shape the social and institutional
fabric in general. Yet, if Europe is to generate any citizen cohesion – apart from that
expressed in the domains administrative, legislative and formalistic- it is important
to ensure that interests external to Europe do not confine the European identity to that
construction from which we are just emerging, namely a ‘Common Market’,
populated not by citizens but by consumers. That is the crux of the matter when we
enter globalisation into our calculus. Yet, the translation of consumers to citizens
depends precisely on creating a sense of solidarity. Whether that sense of solidarity
without which social cohesion remains a technocratic code word, is to permeate from
above or grow up from below is very certainly a task that deserves our engagement, if
only to find ways by which Mr Smith and Mr Hobbes may be reconciled.
References :
Clark, Burton R. [1998] The Entrepreneurial University, pathways to organisational
transformation, Oxford, Elsevier Science for IAU Issues in Higher Education.
Dahl, Robert [1966] The Political System, New York, Knopf.
De Groof, Jan, Neave, Guy & Juraj Svec [1998] Governance and Democracy in
Higher Education, vol.2, in the Council of Europe series Legislating for higher
education in Europe, Dordrecht, Kluwer.392 pp
11
Kerr, Clark [1986] ‘The Employment of the university graduates in the United
States : the Acropolis and the Agora,’ in Ladislav Cerych, Alain Bienaymé & Guy
Neave [Eds] La Professionnalisation de l’Enseignement supérieur, Paris/
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