University and Globalization. The three Transformations of the modern University and the Abandonment of Enlightenment

FRANCISCO NAISHTAT, CATHERINE MALABOU, YUJI NISHIYAMA, YASUO KOBAYASHI, STÉPHANE NADAUD, GERT BIESTA

París

Simposio; Forum Philosophie et education; 2006

Collège International de Philosophie, University of Tokyo, Universidad de Buenos Aires

ABSTRACT We can assign three typical transformations of the modern university from 1800 to the present day: the university of the Bildung, the university of the scientific specialisations and what we shall here call the university of the hybridisation. When we here speak of university in the singular form, we do not intent to reduce the fundamental diversity inherent of the different universities, both in their traditions and in respective models as in their level of scientific and academic development. Instead, we try to outline some typical features of the general university evolution in the last two hundred years, seen from a global perspective. Only in a second part will we specifically refer to Latin American universities and to the Argentine university in particular. Now then, our point of view here is that we are able to capture the evolution that encompasses the last two transformations of the modern university as a gradual abandonment of specific enlightened parameters, a fact which reaches a determining point in today’s university. Therefore, the passage from the Bildung to the ethos of the scientific specialisation maintains the enlightened idea of the autonomy of knowledge and the unity of teaching and research under a criterion of truth, but abandons the programmatic idea of integrative formation in the knowledge and of enlightened self, understood as an emancipating mission of university education. The ethos of specialisation therefore abandons the intrinsic solidarity, dear to the programme of Enlightenment, between science and culture, between the ideal of the Kultur and the ideal of the Aufklärung. This unity was intended by the Bildung university through its projective dimension in history, as part of a movement or a process that the human liberty was to carry out in the knowledge and in the culture.