Values for the times
Some of the fundamental values associated with postsecondary institutions have been transformed.
by Christine Overall
Half a century ago, Canadian society lived by very different values. Over the last 50 years, our attitudes toward the roles of women and men, racial differences, sexuality, immigration, international relations and the media have changed – often radically. It’s not surprising, then, that some of the fundamental values associated with postsecondary institutions have also been transformed.
Four changes are, I think, particularly significant. In the last half-century the university has moved from:
1) understanding education as a good that’s both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable to justifying education mainly in terms of its purported utilitarian value;
2) being hierarchical and exclusive to becoming more
egalitarian and inclusive;
3) being a place where scholars’ intellectual authority was accepted almost without question to a place where the very idea of intellectual authority is challenged;
4) being a place built on a notion of objective truth to a place where relativism in values and epistemic claims is common.
Are these changes good or bad? Are Canadian universities better or worse places than they were half a century ago? It’s a little of both, because these four changes are complex and interconnected.
The first two changes reflect the way that postsecondary education is valued. These days, to keep government funds flowing, academics and administrators make the argument that a university-educated populace contributes more to the nation’s economy than do citizens without postsecondary education. They point out that graduates earn more money than those with high school diplomas and suggest that even the humanities are worth studying for the sake of the skills students acquire.
In these value-for-money days, what many university advocates no longer stress is the intrinsic value of learning: the joy of challenging one’s own and others’ beliefs, of understanding more of the world and the people in it and of stretching one’s mind beyond the familiar and comfortable. The idea that learning and discovery are among the fundamental intrinsic goods of humankind is seldom pitched to politicians or to potential students and their parents. That’s a serious omission. And when an academic discipline is thought to be unrelated to jobs or not economically viable, it becomes expendable and vulnerable to budget cuts.
Now, more and more students are drawn to our campuses, convinced of the utilitarian value of postsecondary education and attracted by the prospect of a better life. Of course, the egalitarian wave has yet to wash up as high as the full professor or high-ranking administrator. And, as education becomes more expensive, poor and working-class kids are unlikely to flock to university. Nonetheless, over the last 50 years the participation of women in universities – as students and faculty – has significantly increased, and the numbers of aboriginal students and students of colour are also growing. On many Canadian campuses there’s an atmosphere of greater cosmopolitanism, and that’s all to the good.
Yet, the more people who earn a postsecondary education, the less that education seems to be valued. Admission to university, formerly a coveted privilege, is now a taken-for-granted right. The normalization of university education may be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, or perhaps merely indifference.
That brings us to the third and fourth changes in values at universities over the last 50 years. Professors once carried considerable authority, and their students regarded them with respect if not awe. Today, professors appear as specialists on television, radio, blogs and films. The popularization of professorial expertise makes it easier to treat a scholar as just one more pontificator seeking his (or sometimes her) 15 minutes of fame. As a result, some students think they themselves are better judges of the quality of their own work than their instructors are. Some administrators and trustees are noticeably unimpressed by faculty expertise.
Partly this is because ethical and epistemic relativism dominates Western society, and it shows up in academia. In a culture where everyone with an Internet connection can post his ideas, where a trite “you have your opinion and I have mine” dominates what passes for public debate, and where postmodern theories call into question the objectivity of belief systems, there can be no real experts. Or maybe now everyone is an expert: we’re all experts about our personal convictions, and personal convictions are, many think, all we have.
Like other institutions and practices in Canadian society, universities have changed over the last half century. Indeed, the contemporary public discourse about universities is all about change: the increasing need for fundraising, the growth of “cutting-edge” research, the development of innovative graduate programs, the construction of new facilities and the unique characteristics of the millennial generation.
But we should also be discussing the deeper changes, the transformation of the fundamental values that underpin academia.
Christine Overall teaches in the department of philosophy at Queen’s University and is our regular columnist on philosophical issues in the academy.
