Abstract
In this section of Human Arenas, we continue the critical and constructive analysis of the contemporary state of affairs of universities as arenas for both the highest level of education and for the creation of new knowledge that was started 5 years ago (Valsiner et al. in Sustainable futures for higher education: The making of knowledge makers (pp. vii-x) Cham, 2018a) and continued recently (Gebert & Woller in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 56, 4, 2023). Admittedly, the Humboldtian ideal of freedom for knowledge creation united with education has eroded in the social-administrative assumption of control over universities. As a result, today we can observe institutions of higher education gloriously producing graduates with various certificates as a reward for successfully passing through the socially approved curricula under the general pressures of neoliberal ideologies that emphasize social and fiscal conformity to expectations. The result in the side of contents of the education is intensive replication of existing knowledge with limited emphasis on innovations that go beyond the approved curriculae. This is successfully camouflaged by introducing different criteria of success of the institutions—value ranking of universities, bibliometric indices in scholarly evaluations, creating mandatory courses, and expecting academics to bring in funds into the universities under the conditions of the high rate of rejections of grant applications. The contributions to this section bring forth concrete suggestions for new ways of restoration of knowledge construction focus to university frameworks: new forms of courses with non-fixed learning tasks, close unity of internship experiences with post-graduation activities, and substitution of mandatory elements of higher education by necessary ones with openness to future construction of knowledge.
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There are many published accounts about how our contemporary higher education systems are suffering from pressures of financial and organizational kinds (Kern, 2010). Among those, there are elaborations of how the crises in universities have recurred since the early 1800s (Nybom, 2003; Savvina, 2016). The elimination of basic science and mathematics has had deleterious impacts on the opportunities for education (Paycha, 2018) as the basic science gives way to the immediately applicable parts of it.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) outlined his credo for higher education in 1809 for the opening of the University of Berlin, with a focus on the unity of knowledge from various sources and the general focus on the multi-sided enlightened development of human beings of higher learning (Bildung) who are the knowledge makers in any society. This general focus fitted the domain of higher learning in the first half of the nineteenth century before the expanding industrial revolution and artificial segregation of science from art brought it into first crisis (Nybom, 2003). The century that followed as marked by further crises.
German original Qualitätssicherung im Hochschulbereich und ihre Kritik.
Muller (1985) reminds us how US graduate schools were based on Humboldtian ideas.
See Keller, et al. (2018) for an example of an extended system of the administrative kind. Note that in medicine in Basel the ph.d. system is mostly inhabited by epidemiologists.
It needs to be added that for none of the doctoral aspirerers the present publication can serve as part of their cumulative dissertations. So the publication of these articles in this section is already an act that does not fit with the expected excellence standards of “graduate schools,” but constitute the qualitative “surplus” beyond their contracts.
The banishment of the focus on poetic science of Goethe as well as of Naturphilosophie in German academia at the second half of the nineteenth century demonstrates the emergence of ideological borders—in the form of intellectual no-(wo)man’s-land—in the differentiation of natural sciences. In psychology, this can be observed in the fate of the notion of soul (Seele) that has become replaced by the (seemingly) more precise term of psyche or mind.
For example—a national evaluation system of psychology accepts as productive only publications by the academics in a list of journals labelled “psychology journals” (especially “peer reviewed journals” and does not give credit for the same author’s publication in an “art journal.” Such concrete evaluation practice renders all public statements of the value of “interdisciplinary” nature of psychological study mute.
Human capacities to read existing scientific literature cannot grow in parallel to the number of publications. That difference leads to new forms of scientific reading where the first decision by a reader is that of elimination—decision not to read some of “the literature.” Thus, the readers themselves operate with an intuitive evaluation scheme, selecting non-zero novelty for their use of always limited reading capacities.
In the recent past, it was the journals’ citability (the so called “Impact factor”) that became administratively used as if defining the value of the scholar’s work that happens to be published in that journal. This amounts to the valuation of a foyeur in public on the basis of her or his Armani clothes versus the rugs of an unemployed person (in academia, the latter is indicated as “independent scholar). This value transfer from journal to scholars that was a result of purely administrative set-up is now substituted by the H-index. The latter now depends on the accessibility under the “open access” system—another border set up to distinguish the rich class of authors who publish (due to administrative funds to pay for it) and the wide international public that can reference the openly available articles.
The well known “Zeigarnik Effect” emerged from Lewin’s research group having a meal in Schwedisches Café near the Berlin Institute in the 1920s, with subsequent carry-over of the phenomenon into a laboratory context. The idea-germinating role of the “Kitchen Seminar”—from 1997 to 2012 at Clark University, then in Aalborg, and currently in Salerno—carries a similar function: all participants are equal in discussing new ideas, excluding politics from the discussions.
A framework where the degree aspirant manages to publish or get into publication review process a prescribed number (3 or 4) articles within the PhD studies period. An Introduction and a General Conclusion are then added to the collected articles and defended publicly for the Ph.D certificate.
For example, the experiment at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia—https://www.ralston.ac/. After one quarter of immersion in Greek society, the masters students send three quarters in deep discussions of the humanities. By careful take-in of highly motivated students and giving them an in-depth opportunity for freedom of thinking through unlimited readings and discussions, the masters degree after 1 year is a major developmental milestone.
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The preparation of this article was funded by Torgny Segerstedts forelesningsfond slått sammen med Fondet til samarbeid mellom Nordens universiteter year 2022 project number 102499072.
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Valsiner, J. Beyond Certificate Factory: Intellectual Innovation in Systems of Education. Hu Arenas (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00316-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00316-4