Abstract
Keywords
David Frank and John Meyer have provided one of the most systematic attempts to make sense of the university as a social institution and analyze the cognitive, normative, and regulatory functions it fulfills in today’s global world. The text is probably among the most successful results of the influential authors’ decade-long research in the framework of neo-institutional theory.
Their work could be summed up in three main ideas:
(a) Contrary to many who see the university institution on the verge of death because of its steady corporatization – from Readings (1996) to Fleming (2021) – it has never been as healthy and thriving as now in the neoliberal society of the post–Cold War hyper-modernity. Frank and Meyer describe a worldwide trend towards an ever-increasing expansion of universities, graduates, and professional domains ruled by higher education standards and credentials. Universities not only increase but also appear to be developing everywhere according to a convergent and isomorphic cultural template.
(b) The university currently provides a cultural and global frame capable of translating all the local knowledge into higher and more uniform intelligibility. Hence, in the absence of a supranational State, the university would be the only global institution capable of ensuring ‘that many aspects of reality occur under conditions or terms that are the same everywhere and always’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 3). This permits the worldwide commensurability of expert knowledge, scientific performance, curricular contents, educational attainments, and professional skills. Frank and Meyer define the university as a new kind of ‘sacred canopy’ conferring a shared and rationalized meaning to the whole world. In this sense, the university would be a ‘quasi-religious’ institution rather than a quasi-market one, contrary to the claims put forward by the criticism toward the neoliberal university. As a ‘locus of faith in universalistic and unified understanding’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 6), the university produces a universally valuable and accredited knowledge, totally severed from any specific context.
(c) The universal knowledge produced, accredited, and delivered by the university creates ideal conditions for promoting individuals’ general ‘actorhood’ because of the standardization of their global playing field. In doing so, it transforms national citizens everywhere into global ‘strategic actors’ empowered with a ‘godlike creative essence’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 60), whose university degrees improve their own subjective choices and opportunities to achieve their own goals (of moneymaking, making history, making art, making knowledge, making personhood) in the current rationalized environment of the society of knowledge. Of course, this does not mean that structural problems, such as inequality, will decline, but rather that old inequalities concerning sex, ethnicity, and family background are now being replaced by new ones focused on ‘merit as defined in terms of academic knowledge and reasoning’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 63).
In sum, today, the university plays a major role in the symbolic integration of society, so much so that the issues ‘formerly left to the fates are now packed off to the university’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 105). With its so-called third mission, academic expertise is required to carry out an advisory function concerning any issue about social life. It is evident that the ‘university-izaton’ of the world (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 29) raises the vexed question of the borders between research and business, truth and interests. In this regard, Frank and Meyer welcome the process of ‘institutional interpenetration’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 106) between the university and the society. They argue that, on one hand, it leads to the secularization of the university while, on the other, involves, in a certain sense, the ‘sacralization of society’, that is, its enforcement under the aegis of academic authority.
In our opinion, Frank and Meyer’s interpretation lends itself to some critical remarks. First of all, they underestimate that the worldwide universalization of the academic curriculum is not the rationalized result of an impolitic and uncontroversial conceptual convergence. As a matter of fact, it historically arises from a relationship of domination dating back to the expansion of European colonial power. From then, an unequal global division of the research tasks developed between the European imperial science and its overseas possessions, ‘separating data collection, the encounter with materials, from theory and interpretation, the work of patterning’ (Connell, 2019: 75–76). The European higher education reforms implemented in the wake of the New Public Management after the Bologna Process in 1999 have transformed the university into an organizational actor tailored for the neoliberal society in order to strengthen the human capital necessary for it. As a consequence, we can say that the success of the university as an ‘anchor of universalization’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 44) actually reflects a partial standpoint that has gradually colonized the world by imposing its standards (the top journals, the bibliometrics, the English language, the logic of ranking) and, generally, its conceptual framework. In other words, the still prevailing hegemony of the Northern and Western academic pattern is not at all due to its universal epistemic rationality but to a path dependency deeply rooted in a long-term history of power imbalance.
Our second critical remark deals with their central idea, that is, the university is a ‘quasi-religious’ institution. Is such an institution really functional to the rational knowledge needed in research and education? Our idea is that we are faced with one of those ‘irrationalities of rationality’ of contemporary life (Ritzer, 1993) that undermine the reliability of the knowledge society. For example, one may look at the ‘tyranny of metrics’ (Muller, 2018) and the standardized ‘rituals of verification’ (Power, 1997) as an organizing principle of scientific research and educational performances. Frank and Meyer admit that ‘direct measures of abstract knowledge – assessed, for example, with test scores – often count a good deal in obtaining positions and getting promotions, even when they are poor predictors of actual abilities to perform required tasks’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 135). Nevertheless, they add that complaining about the inefficiency of these evaluation practices is a vain and naive exercise, since values are what really would matter in society, especially those ‘linked to the core (often religious) values’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020). Therefore,
degrees indicate the proper linkage, perhaps more than effectiveness in action. [. . .] the therapist with a doctorate gets more than the one with a master’s degree. The doctorate places the holder closer to an assumed transcendent reality – what might once have been called God. (Frank and Meyer, 2020)
However, our suspicion is that the evaluation systems ranking the universities actually do have the purpose, above all, to stratify their graduates socio-economically rather than ascertain their real skills.
Moreover, we would also like to raise an epistemological objection. The authors outline that the consolidation of university knowledge paves the way to the increasing ‘scientization of society’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 8) caused by curricular expansion of the ‘socio sciences’ covering fields where we need ‘concrete solutions to concrete social problems’ (Frank and Meyer, 2020: 124). Yet as Aristotle stated in Nicomachean Ethics, when he criticized the all-encompassing vision of Plato’s epistéme, ‘that practical wisdom is not scientific knowledge is evident’. In contrast to the scientific understanding concerning immutable and universal things, practical wisdom is not ‘concerned with universals only – it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars’ (EN VI, 7). Accordingly, an epistemic paradigm that purports to survey all lives rationally from a viewpoint outside of any particular life fails to know exactly the worldly experience of which it would aim to become the leading socio science. Social wisdom is never universally valuable in every environment and condition of life, instead it is always contingent and context-relative. A universal socio science would be a contradiction in terms, if only because ‘in removing itself from all worldly experience it appears to remove itself at the same time from the bases for discourse about the world’ (Nussbaum, 1986: 291).
Finally, we would like to advance a strictly sociological concern. It has to do with the stigma of populism that the authors nonchalantly use to label the protests against the expert knowledge and meritocratic values of individual actorhood that, supposedly, the university would make possible by improving the merit system. More than a drift toward irrationality, this ‘populist backlash’ (Sandel, 2020) likely expresses people’s disappointment about a supposed rational society that fails to combine the success of some empowered individuals with the common good and collective emancipation of all.