Babies and bathwater: Revaluing the role of the academy in knowledge

Abstract

Higher education is being changed in two ways. First, it is becoming more utilitarian and specifically vocational as a consequence of the dominance of economic values in contemporary society and policy which subordinates higher education and its institutions as instruments of micro-economic policy. Second, the rhetoric of 'the knowledge society' seems to undermine the distinctiveness of 'higher' education and its institutions. Both processes contribute to undermining the academic disciplines and their location within institutions of higher education. The irony is that prosperous, socially inclusive, knowledge rich societies rely on the store of knowledge developed, codified, curated and transmitted by higher education institutions. More fundamentally, they rely on an understanding of the nature of knowledge and of the means of its generation-research-which are undermined by utilitarianism and by the genericism posited by the knowledge society.