The impact of strategic rationality and limited autonomy on the decline of the university

Abstract

In recent decades, we have been observing a prolonged process of the decline of the university – not merely as an educational institution, but, more importantly, as a fundamental social institution. The university has traditionally functioned as a critical locus of influence in the formation of public opinion and, as such, is indispensable to the proper functioning of the state. As a social institution, it is imperative that the university maintain the primacy of communicative rationality; for it is the ascendancy of strategic rationality that undermines the very idea of the university and ultimately precipitates its deterioration–a phenomenon clearly observable today. In this sense, the university has also become a casualty of the expansion of instrumental rationality, which, as Jürgen Habermas has argued, engenders various forms of social pathology. The idea of the university – as developed by famous influential philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and John H. Newman – was based in the principle of full institutional autonomy. Such autonomy was intended to guarantee an open and unrestricted discourse within the university, a discourse that could subsequently exert meaningful influence on the socio-political life of the state. Today, however, the modern university is being divested of precisely this autonomy. It finds itself either subordinated to the state, which imposes its own regulatory frameworks, or subject to the dictates of the market. In either case, communicative rationality is supplanted by strategic rationality, rendering genuine free discourse impossible. Universities are increasingly reduced to state-run or commercial entities, while knowledge is commodified. The result, as Theodor Adorno foresaw, is the proliferation of half-education. For this reason, it is essential to undertake a thorough examination of the modern crisis of the university and to outline potential pathways toward its resolution.