United Kingdom: Challenging established mantra in elevated education

There is a special kind of British humor is very good at locating the absurd in everyday life. It draws attention to much of what we take for granted only by voice or lifting an eyebrow. Any of them can be effectively enough to put quotation marks around a cliché; or call our critical attention to something, and make us laugh before the sudden before seemed absurd authoritarian.

Professor Robin Briggs, All Souls College, Oxford University, is a master of this combination very British comedy and criticism.

In South Africa the conference to provide TB Davie academic freedom at the University of Cape Town, was with eyes bright sang mantras ruling usually happens by common sense politics of global higher education.

He began his speech by repeating the words of former British Education David Blankets: "Higher education generates research, knowledge and skills that sustain innovation and change in the economy and society in general ".

This statement suggested Briggs was "unobjectionable enough" unless - and here stopped the essential sense of opportunity for all the comedy - "unless you are allergic to platitudes."

From there he went on to emphasize the importance of some of the 'undeclared corollaries "Blankets Idea of ​​a" knowledge economy "and to challenge particularly narrow perspective in higher education proposed.

From this perspective - that Briggs cautiously described as "neo-liberal" even suggesting that the neoliberal doctrine amounted to little more than "a lot of work and rhetorical tricks buzzwords" - the "core mission" higher education is to generate economic growth, ignoring the complex reality of the broader social functions of higher education systems.

In the end, a fixed idea Blankets et al, instead of serving the public good, higher education is intended to benefit the private pocket.

This narrowing of the social functions that traditionally broad and varied the university sector becomes just one more "direct economic impacts." Extensive educational mission of the university shall be interpreted in purely professional with "job training for specific professions" as its central objective.

Meanwhile, the core of the production of university research, knowledge is effectively confined to "potential industrial and commercial results", with a significant degradation of the "blue skies research and almost nothing in the humanities."

Discuss with the appeal to evidence characteristic of the historian, Briggs suggests a more complex reality that assumes neoliberal vision.

Current evidence, argued, suggested through "large areas of the employers in the labor market continue to express a preference for basic literacy, arithmetic and analytical skills, with recruits trained at work and during their education formal. "

Similarly, the historical record showed that "research and development have a very clear wealth generation" and Briggs roundly criticized recent attempts in Britain to impose the criterion of "impact" as a measure of value to the investigation.