I am not wearing rose tinted spectacles here, particularly at a time when the UK higher education sector is witnessing its resource base shrink by 25% over the next three years. Even though these changes are only just beginning I¹ve already witnessed brutal management tactics, at a number of institutions, being implemented in order to save costs. That means people losing their jobs and, ultimately, many of them losing their homes and the means to care for themselves and their families. They can also lose their sense of value.
The main problem in academia is not the academics. It is management culture. A few institutions have sustained governance structures that are founded on collegiality and transparency amongst academics. Most others have brought in or created professional managerial layers in their organisations. This has also happened at the critical interface between government and education, the funding councils and policy institutes. The result of this is an instrumentalisation of knowledge and creativity, which is arguably what is at the core of Michael¹s critique. Knowledge or art for its own sake? No! We are now required to evidence the social and economic value of everything we do. How does an artist articulate this, or an astronomer or philosopher? In many cases it cannot be... This has also happened in the art world. Want money from the Arts Council? You will be required to justify the social and economic value of your proposed activities. Want to make it without state support you will need to satisfy the demands of the commercial market. There are those who think these are good things, whether they be patrician socialists or free-marketers. Whatever, instrumentalisation is not constrained to education it is a cultural trope. Academics are teachers and researchers. They have to be both if they are to contribute to knowledge and be able to transfer it as it is developed. These are highly creative activities, arguably as creative as the activities of many artists (I know academics who are more creative and innovative that a some artists I know). My experience of HE has been marred by management and also by certain conservative forces that remain within the academy, who do not want to see the role or value of knowledge change, who want to manage access to knowledge and the means to creating knowledge as an arbiter of power. I have observed this within the now largely defunct art school system and within the university system that has consumed those art schools. However, I have also experienced an intellectual fervour and openness to other ways of seeing that is heartening in how it challenges the dogmatic and blinkered thinking that underpins instrumental approaches to creativity and the making (and destroying) of knowledge. Education is a good thing. It has been observed many times, in places of conflict and suffering, that it is education that can make the long term difference; not food aid, drugs or weapons. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [email protected] www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ [email protected] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]> Reply-To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 02:46:06 -0800 (PST) To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Call for Submissions: Multichannel VariableEconomies Screening Programme Deadline 28th January (Helen Sloan) * and by academia let me say what I mean -I don't mean "teaching" in whatever context -like Renee I'm utterly in favour. Nor do I mean the art school tradition at least up to the 70s. I'm referring particularly to developments over the last 30 years or so. I'm amazed that people can be so sanguine about the university research culture ( which has swallowed the art schools) when it is being constantly more colonised by the market & market values - again there are surely deep issues here in the way this affects what constitutes "research" and indeed "art" as defined within the academy, which doesn't of course float Zeppelin-like above the rest of society ( and I'm very grateful to Rob for the Art and Language quotes which I previously knew nothing about and which both made me laugh and struck me as enormously pertinent). And I'm *not* trying to make some easy or pat argument - I'm saying there are *unanswered and legitimate questions* and there is *room for discussion*... Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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