[Bukharin] said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for his own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan.
Professionals will continue to react with cynicism, hypocrisy, and dissidence, as was the case under state Communism. This means, ironically enough, that state Communism as a bureaucratic and economic nightmare still has a historical lesson to teach us, long after the political dream of state Communism has evaporated: to see through the neoliberal New Public Management dream as representing the privatized versions of economic and bureaucratic totalitarianism.
In a book devoted largely to the question of political theory after totalitarianism, Jeffrey Isaac (Reference Isaac1998) resorted frequently to a simile from Camus’ The Plague. Though the plague apparently disappeared, it only lies dormant in the woodwork and fabric of everyday life, everywhere, awaiting another chance to reemerge. This is an appropriate simile for totalitarianism in Europe, East and West. This and the next chapter concern the hidden “diseased” legacies of totalitarianism in the woodwork of European democracy.
Totalitarianism imploded in the Communist world, but some of its constituent parts, institutions, like the limbs of a decapitated lizard, continued to move without connection to a central nervous system. Institutional legacies could and often did outlast totalitarianism. Institutions pass on cultures, norms, and hierarchies from generation to generation. Following the end of totalitarianism, institutions that were molded and staffed by the late-totalitarian state came under external and internal political, civil, and economic pressures to reform, change, rationalize, and become accountable and transparent. Post-totalitarian institutions, their leaders, and privileged employees attempted to preserve their status, institutional hierarchies, and norms, and to reproduce themselves for another generation. The mechanisms for self-preservation of institutional legacies were political: Lobbying the state to isolate institutions from external economic pressures through subsidies and protectionism. If successful, the institutions and their leaderships could resist political pressures from society and the lower echelons of the institutions themselves to reform. Institutional autonomy is in the interest of institutional oligarchies, facing pressures from below and above to give up power or institute reforms that would undermine their power, their security, and established institutional norms, including corruption, of course.
The extent of post-Communist privatization varied from country to country. But if we draw an imaginary continuum between poles of “always privatized” to “never privatized,” at one pole there are small firms, shops, and other businesses with limited capital and cash flow and few employees while at the other pole are the public services, health, education, and security that are state-owned in Western Europe, too. The greatest possibilities for institutional continuities have been in public institutions. By contrast, the radical scope of discontinuity in small businesses like restaurants is illustrated by the appearance of “Ostalgie” theme restaurants that attempt to recreate or more likely construct seventies-like dining experiences. These private restaurants sell an ersatz late-Communist everyday experience because no genuine late-totalitarian food establishment has survived (and university cafeterias do not cater to tourists).Footnote 1
The post-totalitarian public services crisis appeared in the context of a crisis of public services in Europe, without sharing path dependency, as governments attempted to get more services for less money and the citizens received fewer services for higher taxes. The cultures and traditions of public services in the post-totalitarian and what may be called, perhaps precociously, post-social-democratic halves of Europe have been very different. But from the perspectives of elected politicians and appointed civil servants who have been looking for parallel problems and solutions, there were sufficient similarities to consider transplanting policies from West to East. Some of the policies that post-totalitarian states have introduced or are in the process of introducing to attempt to overcome the totalitarian legacies of their public institutions were tried before in Western European countries in response to their crisis of public services. I argue that some of these Western European policies resurrect totalitarian central planning and constitute a return to late totalitarianism for institutions that have not quite overcome yet the legacies of their previous totalitarian stage.
Post-totalitarian states were large and weak. They inherited from their totalitarian predecessors customary provisions of privileges to their citizens, public services that citizens learned to expect though they had no rights to them in the totalitarian system. Post-totalitarian states were too weak to control the institutions that provided those public services. The obvious immediate post-totalitarian policy that united the feasible with the desirable in the realm of the inevitable was to decentralize, to grant institutions officially the autonomy they possessed in any way. The state could concentrate then its limited resources on the most urgent tasks, democratization, stabilization of the economy, and privatization, while the public services operated autonomously. Post-totalitarian voters were used to appeal to the state for their public services and to receiving low levels of service marred or made manageable, depending on one’s perspective, by corruption. Initially, voters were unaware of, or at least did not expect, better levels of medical service, education, and so on.
Pressure to reform the legacies of the post-totalitarian autonomous public services emerged only after most of the urgent reforms were completed and the expectations of voters rose. When the still-weak state came under pressure to improve public services, the cheapest option was to withdraw protection of monopolies in health, education, pension, and so on rather than attempt to directly force state institutions to reform and improve the quality of the service, or privatize and incur the ire of citizens fearing the loss of free benefits they had grown accustomed to under the terms of the late Communist social contract. Privatization of such services would have also appeared anomalous in the context of the European Union. After the abolition of the legal protection of state monopolies, private companies, mutual benefit societies, or nonprofits could enter the market for education, health, or pensions, but still had to compete with heavily subsidized state institutions and had to find the capital to start nongovernmental health and education trusts. Continued state subsidies of public services have made it impossible for private services to compete over prices. They have had to try to be competitive over quality or capacity, either offer better services than the state or provide them immediately in the case of health or to students who were rejected by state schools in the case of education. The very rich could purchase superior services abroad, mostly in the United States, so private services had to charge less than foreign competitors.
Still, since even after ending monopoly protection the post-totalitarian state continued to provide most public services to most citizens, their reform continued to be a political issue. Another option was to abolish the institutional autonomy of public services and return the institutions to the direct control of the state. Totalitarianism could be brought back from the dead along with some of its nastiest aspects with the reintroduction of central planning of public services. The universality of the threat of totalitarian relapse in Europe is manifested by the origins of the blueprints for some of the neo-totalitarian institutional structures that I discuss later in this chapter in the western half of Europe.
Totalitarian Higher Education
One of the hallmarks of the neutral liberal state is the independence of higher education, just like the separation and independence of the judiciary and the Central Bank from the executive and the separation of church from state. The rule of law, liberty, and democracy require some institutions to be independent of the executive arm of government whether or not they are financed from the public purse. The oldest such institution is the judiciary. Religion, higher education, the mass media, and the Central Bank were added gradually through a trial-and-error process that proved that they could not perform their functions properly or at all if they were not independent of the state. If the state is not separated from an independent judiciary, there can be no rule of law. The judiciary would follow orders from the powers that be, irrespective of the law. If there is no separation of the state from the universities, they become instruments for state control of social stratification and mobility and a tool for socially engineering society and its culture and ideology, stifling spontaneous and independent thinking. If the church is not separate from state, a vital moral critical voice would be silenced and the state could use institutional divine sanction to legitimize its actions. If the state controls the mass media, democracy is impossible because there could be no public criticism of the government and only an informed citizenry is able to make informed political choices. In liberal states, even when the state finances the television and the radio, they are independent of its control. The independence of the central bank and its decisions about monetary policies are necessary to protect the economy from the temptation of politicians to adopt short-term populist measures that damage the economy in the long term. One of the hallmarks of totalitarian states is that none of these institutions, the judiciary, organized religion, the mass media, higher education, and the central bank, can be independent. It is no coincidence that Putin’s first act as president of Russia was to take over the independent television stations and then the central bank. Conversely, democratic post-totalitarian countries separated the mass media, the central bank, organized religion, and higher education from the state.
Higher education governance, control, regulation, allocation of resources, and relations with the state have been neglected by political science in general, though these are political issues par exellence (Jakobi et al. Reference Jakobi, Martens and Wolf2010). Since higher education affects the composition and character of elites in the modern world, social revolutions are reflected by, affect, and are affected by higher education policies. Totalitarianism was founded on the elimination of all alternative elites to the ruling one and the attempt to radically social engineer the class structure of society to maintain the monopoly of single elite, give it total control over upper mobility, and prevent the emergence of alternative elites. As I argued, continuities after totalitarianism resulted from the absence of alternative elites to challenge and replace the late-totalitarian elite. The absence of trained and competent lawyers, economists, social scientists, and even psychotherapists in sufficient numbers has made the transformation of post-totalitarian societies more difficult. At the same time, post-Communist societies suffered from an oversupply of engineers and blue collar workers overspecialized in obsolete technologies, the result of the attempt to socially engineer the class structure according to the needs of nineteenth-century advanced industrial economies.
Elites do not grow on trees. Professional elites are seeded, nurtured, and harvested when ripe in universities. Totalitarian regimes centrally planned and controlled who was admitted to study what, how many students studied in each field, and the content and forms of instruction. By controlling admission, they made sure that political opponents and their family members could not receive the education that would qualify them to join any professional elite. Obviously, admission to study pedagogy to become a kindergarten teacher was not as strictly controlled as admission to study foreign languages or journalism. By controlling the number of students in each field, they attempted to socially engineer the structure of society. The total ratio of students to population was smaller than in comparable democratic countries to keep the number of potential members of the professional and educated middle classes down to the necessary minimum. The content and form of education fitted totalitarian culture where instructions trickled down from the top to the bottom; students were expected to memorize lectures rather than discuss or criticize them. Subjects taught were overspecialized, so that graduates would be skilled to occupy only a prescribed social role, and would lack the independence to move from one position to another, let alone exit in emigration.
The worst-affected academic fields were those that enable students to operate in and develop civil society, occupy the space between the family and the state. Departments of politics and environmental studies and business schools did not exist. Economics departments and law schools were very small in comparison with universities in liberal countries and taught ideologically truncated and mutated versions of their disciplines. Economics was Marxist theory with some management and marketing courses adapted to command economies; supply and demand were unheard of. The humanities were doctrinal ideology at worst or the histories of their disciplines at best. For example, the best philosophy departments could teach the history of Western philosophy up to Marx because he was usefully influenced by all the philosophers who preceded him, and logic, because it was not political. The number of students admitted to study law, the humanities, the social sciences, and foreign languages was severely limited, because such professionals would have destabilized the Communist order. In Communist Czechoslovakia only 1.2 percent of university students studied the humanities; in East Germany the number was only 2.1 percent, and in Poland 8.8 percent. To take a culturally commensurable comparison, 12.7 percent of West German students studied then the humanities. 15.9 percent of Czechoslovak students studied the social sciences and law in comparison with 16.3 percent in East Germany, 21.6 percent in Poland, and 28 percent in West Germany (Quandt Reference Quandt2002). The Communist emphasis on the military industrial complex and heavy industry led to overproduction of engineers and technicians trained to work in mining and heavy industry, many of whom had to find other professions after totalitarianism in modern postindustrial economies.
Totalitarian “divide and rule” bureaucratic control separated research in academies of science from universities where teachers were not expected to conduct research, and universities from overspecialized vocational agricultural, medical, engineering, and mining schools. Vocational training institutions devoted exclusively to transportation, horticulture, or the food industry were controlled by different ministries. In Poland, for example, there were no fewer than 300 different academic specializations. Narrow specialists could not innovate by combining fields (Quandt Reference Quandt2002, 22). The legacy of overspecialization in higher education is unemployment when narrow training becomes obsolete following technological and economic changes. The artificial separation between research and teaching was introduced by Napoleon. He considered research important but potentially dangerous and so subordinated it to the state.
Libraries in totalitarian countries stopped purchasing books that were printed abroad almost completely following the totalitarian revolution, with the exception of technical topics relating to weapons production. They also severely and strictly limited access to some books that had been acquired prior to the totalitarian revolution and were considered to have subversive potential in questioning or contradicting ideological dogmas or in just offering an alternative to totalitarian reality and ideology, whether they were of domestic or foreign provenance. Quandt analyzed the basic problems of East European librarianship: Under Communism, libraries were repositories of knowledge rather than providers of information. Materials were not catalogued and staff was untrained and poorly paid. Cataloguing systems were inefficient and “user unfriendly.” Libraries had no open shelves and manual systems of retrieval were inefficient. Books were spread over many specialist libraries without central management or cataloguing. The Communist method of “divide and rule” discouraged cooperation between libraries. Quandt considered the difficulties in forcing libraries to cooperate “a salutary lesson … in Byzantine politics … [that] taught me that philanthropy and technology transfer may well get wrapped up in the nefarious Machiavellian schemes of people looking out for their own interests” (202).
The initial Soviet project was to achieve the goals of class warfare by preventing the scions of the bourgeoisie from gaining higher education, and indoctrinating the faculty by selecting it on the basis of political loyalty, though as Connelly (Reference Connelly2000) discovered, even during the Stalinist years, success was not total; some Czech middle-class students slipped through and some non-Communist Polish professors kept their positions. It was difficult to be admitted into higher education; the ratio of students to population was much lower than in Western democracies and political or family connections or the payment of bribes were often required. But it was easy to graduate with little or no performance assessment.
Post-Totalitarian Higher Education
In countries where late totalitarianism persisted after 1989–1991, direct state control of higher education persisted. In Belarus and Russia, governments closed down independent institutions of higher education on trumped up regulatory violations and violated academic freedom in state institutions. For example, the independent Belarusian European University was forced to move across the border to Vilnius and its academic staff was prevented from returning to jobs in Belarus. During the nineties, Vladimir Mečiar’s populist government in Slovakia created new public universities staffed by political loyalists, ignoring the 1990 higher education law that guaranteed the autonomy of universities. Mečiar’s Education Ministry attempted to use pseudoaudits to take over independent institutions such as the Slovak Academia Istropolitana Nova. The Slovak ministry of education claimed that the institution broke the law because it conducted research, as well as educated (sic!). The Slovak government appointed an uneducated political client who knew no foreign languages as its director. Western donors were forced to react by providing funds to privatize it and guarantee its independence from the state (Quandt Reference Quandt2002, 139).
In post-totalitarian societies such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states, the end of totalitarianism resulted in academic autonomy and internal democracy. Self-regulation harked back to the pre-totalitarian period in Central Europe, when universities maintained medieval collegial traditions or were constructed after Humboldt’s model of self-governing research university. In post-totalitarian systems of higher education, local democracy was of faculty selected largely by the totalitarian regime. Universities were financed but not governed by the state. Since education was free or very cheap, there was no market discipline. Local academic democracy resulted in an elected university governing administration that represented the interests of late-totalitarian academics, resisting change, protecting the hierarchy, and rent-seeking. As Holmes (Reference Holmes and Dworkin2004) noted in reference to judicial systems, institutions that are isolated both from the state and from the discipline of the market protect sclerotic and arcane practices. Self-governance resulted in an academic hierarchy controlled by senior faculty members who established and maintained control of university functions: Hiring mostly their own students; promoting their loyalists; granting diplomas for their students sometimes for bribes or other favors; rigging elections to university representative bodies and elected offices, for example by informing only loyalists of the dates and locations of ballots; embezzling funds (especially kickbacks from construction and foreign grants); and selling entrance exams and admissions.
As in all state institutions, the replacement of totalitarian control with autonomy and self-regulation allowed increased levels of corruption, especially in admissions and in selling degrees and grades. I mentioned in Chapter 2 that an advance copy of the entrance exams to Prague’s Charles University Law Faculty cost the equivalent of $1,500 and the answers cost an extra $1,500 in 1999. In Ukraine corruption was more widespread but the price of a passing grade was a bargain at just $20. In 2007 in Romania, passing grades in medicine cost 1,500 euros and in law 300 euros. In Russia, admission to a prestigious institute cost 15,000 euros, and end-of-term exam 2,000 euros. In Serbia, an exam cost 600 euros and the whole (public “free”) degree 6,000 euros. Even worse, corrupt teachers forced even smart and diligent students to purchase the exams by writing incomprehensible questions that would be impossible to answer unless the students purchased the answers. Forty percent of students in six post-Communist countries reported purchasing their admissions (Land Reference Land2007). The market cap on such bribes is the cost of comparable degrees for out-of-state students in European or American public (or private) universities; that is, it is still cheaper to study in corrupt post-totalitarian universities than in comparable U.S. institutions.
An education system where senior professors received subsidies from the state irrespective of what they did and could select new employees had no corrective institutional mechanism, such as economic competition, to weed out failing academic units or institutions. Inbreeding, the employment of graduates by their teachers, allowed departments to close themselves from the world. New faculty members were particularly obedient students chosen before the job advertisement was published and since this fact was often known, only a single person applied for each academic position and that person was selected as “the best” applicant. When more than one applied, it was easy to add some procedural requirement that was not advertised, such as the filling in of a particular form, and claim that only a single candidate fulfilled the formal requirements for applying for the position, and so only this candidate could be considered. Similar silly tricks are played on a much larger scale in election in countries such as Russia.
Late-totalitarian academics who wished to preserve and advance their status in post-totalitarian academia faced internal challenges: competent educators; talented younger academics; foreigners; returning exiles; and books, ambassadors delivering knowledge from faraway lands, rude reminders of incompetence for those unfamiliar with them. The mission of the post-totalitarian academic functionary was to keep these “enemies” away. They claimed that there were no funds for new academics and that the institution was already teaching everything so new educators, even those paid by outside sources such as Fulbright, were unnecessary as they would have merely duplicated what was already being taught. When it was difficult to rid universities of competent academics immediately, they were assigned to teach courses in different fields than their own and their courses were not accredited toward fulfilling requirements to reduce student enrollment. After totalitarianism, self-conscious backwardness fueled academic xenophobia and fear of new ideas to protect jobs, but also to preserve the respect of students and even self-respect (Ripková Reference Ripková1997).
Post-totalitarian librarians claimed, sometimes honestly and sometimes not, that libraries had limited space and could not display new books, that donated books were outdated and did not fit course requirements, and that nobody knew the foreign languages necessary to read them.
[W]here are the books? In one case, books donated long before were sitting in another room still in boxes …. Judging from anecdotal evidence, it would appear that most books can be found in the possession of lecturers or university administrators …. As one visiting Western lecturer in Romania commented, “Deans, department heads and professors seem to always have some brand new donated books proudly displayed in their homes, even if their knowledge is limited.” The inability of some end-recipients even to read the donated materials underscores the importance of placing books in libraries. All too often, books become trophies rather than sources of learning.… As with book donations, there were instances of journals found in faculty members’ and librarians’ offices. In one case, only when a librarian was confronted with a list of donations were the journals “found.” In other cases, journals were kept in faculty libraries and their use by students was restricted.
Under totalitarianism, in a closed system, monopolizing knowledge was a source of power. It was not important just to obtain books and journals, it was more important to prevent others from having access to them.Footnote 2
A symptom of the totalitarian legacy of undervaluation of research libraries and books was the 2009 major public debate in the Czech Republic about the building of a new National Library. The futuristic design by the renowned architect Jan Kaplicky was controversial and some journalists accused allegedly corrupt officials in the Prague municipality of trying to block the project so they could sell the centrally located land on which the library would have been built to private developers. The one issue that nobody debated was that apart from its function as the copyrights library of the Czech Republic, the National Library did not have the foreign published books and journals necessary for it to function as a research library. The debate was about a monument to a library, not about a library.
A 1993 report on Hungarian higher education by volunteers of the Citizens Democracy Corps summarized what would be the state of affairs in self-governing newly autonomous post-totalitarian universities during much of the nineties in countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland: Universities were excessively decentralized. The faculties had greater power than the central university administration and the rector. There were no external boards of trustees to oversee university policy and administration. Universities had no development offices, nor were they looking for alternative sources of income to the state. In comparison with American state universities, the teacher–student ratio was very low. Universities were isolated from each other and students could not transfer credits from one university to another. Attempts to subsidize students rather than academic institutions to allow competition failed following political lobbying from the public education sector. The general quality of university education was low and outdated, based on learning by rote (Quandt Reference Quandt2002, 114–116). Since separate budgets were allocated by the state to investment, salaries, and operation, it was impossible to move money saved on one budget to another and unspent funds had to be returned to the government. Income generated by academic units had to be given to the state or the general university budget, thus eliminating incentives to innovation and efficiency. Low academic salaries led to brain drain to the private sector.
Valters Nollendorfs of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the executive director of the American Association for Baltic Studies, summarized the typically post-totalitarian main problems in Latvia (Quandt Reference Quandt2002, 255): Academic programs were compartmentalized and overspecialized. Consequently, knowledge was fragmented and higher education lacked coherence. Universities lacked a sense of social responsibility and were isolated from global developments. Academics and students often did not know Western languages. Libraries carried no international books and periodicals in the humanities and social sciences. Science and technology had been emphasized at the expense of the humanities. Prevailing pedagogical methods did not develop analytical, critical, and comparative skills. Nollendorfs described the Latvian academic system as bogged down in bureaucratic inertia, losing its best teachers to the private sector. Academics who remained in the universities did so for lack of external employment opportunities and held on to their jobs beyond retirement to avoid low pensions, and in the meanwhile resisted changes.
After the granting of autonomy and self-regulation in the immediate aftermath of totalitarianism, the first reforms to the system of higher education increased its capacity. Governments reacted both to the needs of their growing, increasingly service-oriented economies and to the demands of citizens to provide them and their offspring with higher education, just like Western European governments did a generation earlier. Increasing the ratio of students to teachers was the cheapest and therefore easiest option. States also founded new universities, sometimes by changing the names of vocational colleges to those of universities. In the decade following 1989, the overall number of students tripled in Poland, doubled in Hungary, and increased by 50 percent in the Czech Republic and Russia. The number of teachers increased slightly in all systems.
An even cheaper method for post-totalitarian states to increase the size of the higher education sector was through legalizing and accrediting private higher education, which is still illegal in most of post-social-democratic continental Europe. New private universities have had to compete with heavily subsidized public universities with existing infrastructures. Consequently, private universities have been teaching mostly subjects that needed smaller investments: The humanities, social sciences, and law. Private universities, with a few exceptions such as the richly endowed by George Soros graduate Central European University, have failed to offer a higher quality of education than state institutions, mostly because there has been no demand for superior elite education; the concept of elite education has remained foreign to most people, and those who know it and can pay send their children to elite American or British institutions. Instead, private higher education has offered education mostly to students who were not admitted to study in state universities, at least not in the city of their choice.
State accreditation has occupied a pivotal role in preserving academic power hierarchies. Where accreditation remained controlled directly by the state, as in Mečiar’s Slovakia or in contemporary Belarus and Russia, accreditation was used to ensure political control of higher education. Elsewhere, the old universities controlled the accreditation committees and could disaccredit institutions or programs that threatened the academic status quo, whether because they were very good or very bad. Procedures varied. The 1993 Hungarian higher education law established twenty-four professional committees of accreditation. In Poland in 1998 the universities established a University Accreditation Commission independent of the state. Polish accreditation was voluntary, for a period of time, and by field rather than institution. In the Czech Republic a single accreditation committee was in charge of accrediting all fields. Generally, self-regulation, peer accreditation, in small autonomous academic systems where institutions can retaliate against each other tended to create a system of quid pro quo, where academics accredited each other’s programs in expectation of reciprocity. But new institutions, private or public, could not retaliate against accreditation committees stuffed with faculty from the older universities. The old universities’ senior professors could use their accrediting power to force new universities to appoint their post-retirement colleagues by evaluating them on the basis of the ratio of full professors in their faculties when only the old universities could confer this title. They could also pressure them to hire their young graduates. In this way they also ensured that the quality of new institution would not exceed that of the older institutions and in many cases be worse because the retired full professors were products of the Communist system and the young graduates were inexperienced.
Some of the problems I identified in post-totalitarian higher education were shared by Western European universities: Academic libraries in many European countries were not better than those in post-Communist universities, though some British, German, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Swiss libraries could support world-class research. Authoritarian teaching, learning by rote, and the discouraging of critical analysis, creativity, and intellectual autonomy plagued many other European universities. Inbreeding, faculty recruitment from among the graduates of the departments that hired them, together with its accompanying xenophobia (where a foreigner is anybody who is not a graduate of the academic unit), intellectual backwardness, and provincialism were rampant in many European departments. These similarities led civil servants and politicians in the new member states of the European Union to consider imitating the kinds of higher education reforms that were implemented in post-social-democratic European states. These reforms eliminated Humboldtian self-governance and autonomy of universities and introduced instead Brezhnevian central planning and direct state control of higher education. Implementing such reforms in societies still reeling from the destructive legacies of state control and central planning in higher education has been sadly ironic. The new cure for the legacies of Communism was more Communism, this time imitating a Western rather than Eastern model. This trend illustrates the argument I make in this and the next chapter: It is a mistake to presume that totalitarianism is over and done with in Europe just because Nazism and Communism collapsed and have been radically discredited. Totalitarianism has not died; it just broke apart. Elements of the totalitarian project can do more than persist as institutional legacies; they can be advocated, introduced, and imposed in areas of public life where they had not been dominant before and may not be recognized as totalitarian in popular consciousness. Europeans, and especially state central planners, are as cured of totalitarianism as former alcoholics are cured of vodka. Following a crisis, their kneejerk reaction may be to turn back to the totalitarian bottle. European higher education is a case in point.
The New Totalitarianism
European bureaucrats and politicians blamed academic autonomous self-governance for a culture of stagnation and backwardness, resistance to innovation and change, lack of a research culture, and resistance to adapting to new global economic circumstances and job markets and rising student demand. Self-governance seemed to encourage the vicious triangle of incompetence, dependency on state subsidies, and xenophobia. “Instead of Humboldt’s ideas of unfettered scholarly inquiry, academic self-governing models have frequently become synonymous with the deterioration of teaching, mass bureaucratization, and distrust between the state, universities, and society” (Dobbins Reference Dobbins2011, 40).
The situation in Western European academic systems could not be as bad as in post-totalitarian universities because open borders allowed ideas and people to flow in, especially from the United States. Without totalitarian control of personnel there was greater diversity of academics, some of whom were better than others, even if they were not rewarded for it. The absence of state ideological guidance and interferences prevented the development of perverted curricula in academic fields such as law, the social sciences, and the humanities. Though the state kept determining to a large extent the number of students in each discipline, those numbers were intended to fit the needs of modern democracies with the rule of law and free markets. Especially in the sixties, Western European public higher education grew in size, rather than stagnated as in Communist Europe. The totalitarian attempt to socially engineer class structure by nipping in the bud the professional middle classes and eliminating the politically useful and critical humanities and social sciences was reversed. Western European democratically elected politicians had the opposite goal to that of the Communists; they wanted to socially engineer higher education to expand the middle classes by increasing the ratio of university graduates in society to increase the competitiveness of their workforce (Dobbins Reference Dobbins2011). If there were more people “with degrees” (their content was a different matter), more people would have better paying jobs. They and their parents would vote for the politicians who gave them the education, and the result would be planned prosperity from above. Better-paid citizens would pay more in taxes and the state would be richer and stronger. Politicians and civil servants felt that the universities were getting in the way of achieving these lofty goals.
It is difficult if not impossible to force reforms on autonomous, self-governing, and therefore conservative institutions. Therefore, the trend in many European countries beginning in the eighties has been for central planners in the ministries of education to centralize a vertical of power that goes down from the ministry of education to appointed, not elected, academic managers, not scholars or pedagogues (Dobbins Reference Dobbins2011). The new model of managed university was the model of late Soviet industry during the Brezhnev era: The Soviet state set production targets and quotas. The managers had considerable local powers and autonomy and were assessed according to their satisfaction of these production targets without micromanagement of the means they used to achieve them. As in the Soviet Union, when there was no paying customer to satisfy, the easiest way to meet production targets was by falsifying data and compromising on quality.
Local officials controlled what information reached their supervisors. Just as artificial “Potemkin villages” hid the squalid countryside from travelling tsars, plan fulfillment reports obscured the true state of Soviet economic and social relation from Moscow planners …. In particular, the pervasive system of concrete performance targets offered local and branch managers extensive latitude in running their daily affairs, provided they were able to meet, on paper at least, their regular performance targets. Equally important, local bureaucrats generated the reports on which their own performances were monitored and evaluated by superiors.
To consolidate this vertical of power, the new “Brezhnevian” managerial academic model had to abolish academic self-governance, the autonomy of universities and units within them such as faculties, schools, and departments; tenure; and academic freedom (Grafton Reference Grafton2010; Pears Reference Pears2010; Head Reference Head2011). Some European countries such as Germany and Italy still retain some of the aspects their traditionally Humboldtian higher education. But the general trend in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, encouraged by the European Union’s Bologna Process and the massification of higher education, has been to turn universities into state-managed corporations dedicated to vocational training (Wolf Reference Wolf, Jakobi, Martens and Wolf2010). In the Bologna agreement all members of the EU agreed to create “A system of easily readable and comparable degrees to promote European citizens’ employability and international competitiveness” (Dobbins Reference Dobbins2011, 25). To impose this new order and fulfill production targets the appointed managers were not accountable to the faculty so they could impose policies and decisions against its will and discipline those who dared to defy their commands. As the Soviet experience showed, central planning may succeed in a few projects by concentrating all available resources on, for example, sputniks and sport. But command economies cannot sustain the effort across the board to match supply with demand. Academic central planners may be able to construct a few centers of excellence by concentrating resources and finding some effective managers. But on a systemic level, their chances of competing with the decentralized and partly private American academic system are as good as those of Soviet industry.
The Soviet and European central planners had diametrically opposed goals for their social engineering. The Communists attempted to limit the size of the professional, educated, middle class. The European planners attempted to increase the size of the middle class. It is ironic but inevitable that both types of central planners chose to achieve these diametrically opposed goals by the same means: assaulting high culture, contracting the humanities and languages, expanding and encouraging engineering, radically dumbing down the level of education, limiting or eliminating altogether basic research, basing education on learning by rote with little or no space for creativity, and imposing state-appointed managers to force these measures through and achieve quantitative targets.
The central planners could only measure the satisfaction of quantifiable quotas they assigned to the managers, and even that largely on the basis of data provided by the managers themselves. Actual control was in the hands of the unaccountable managerial new class and the bloated and expensive bureaucracy they created to centrally plan, manage, and control: “a constant increase in [university] management staff is preprogrammed …. Controlitis – or evaluitis – is not therefore an unfortunate disease … but is part of its very nature (just as the power and growth of the secret police was not an accidental but an intrinsic feature of state Communism)” (Lorenz Reference Lorenz2012, 616). The academic managerial new class possessed none of Weber’s three sources of authority: they had no democratic legitimacy because they were appointed, as radical reformists they acted against tradition, and, with typically meager intellectual achievements, they had no personal charisma. In a market, unelected successful and effective managers can establish legitimacy by their success. But when “success” meant meeting government-set targets by dumbing down the quality of education and forging grades and degrees, it was not the kind of success that commanded respect:
Because they lack professional authority, managers are inclined to treat any lack of cooperation on the shop floor as a threat to their position and as subversion. Those who dare to cast doubt on their decisions can therefore count on pressure, blackmail, divide-and-conquer tactics, and open humiliation. Because the discipline of the market does not play a role in the New Public Management, there are scarcely objective constraints on managers’ freedom toward their employees. After all, where profit does not exist as an objective criterion for the performance of the organization, the managers themselves decide what performance is …. [They] tolerate a staggering range of irrational management practices under the wide, protective, ideological umbrella of efficiency. In these two respects (the lack of objective reality checks and the resultant unconstrained power of management) organizations in the quasi-market sector under New Public Management and party organizations under state Communism again show striking similarities. In both types of organization the scope for irrational management practices is virtually unlimited.
From the perspective of the central planners, college dropouts (e.g., Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Kerouac, Woody Allen, etc.) who did not complete their degrees were lost investments; not because students who drop out of college do not benefit from the time they spent there, but because the bureaucrats did not know how to measure that benefit. Confusing skills with formal degrees was an easy option for central planners who could not assess the long-term effects of substantial rather than formal education.
The way Dutch educationalists defined quality of education in the 1980s provides a typical example of the self-referential nature of Quality Assurance. The quality of education was simply defined in terms of the percentage of students who had passed each course. At the end of the first year 90 percent of students were deemed to have graduated within the set length of time in which they are supposed to complete their studies. This success rate (also known as output or educational performance) was then defined as the standard for education quality. Since then education quality has been used during audits of educational institutions to compare the performance of schools and universities, departments, and faculty.
The standard method to substantially improve retention rates was the radical dumbing down of the level of education and requirements for graduation. Managers claimed that expecting students to critically read anything and discuss it in class was beyond their cognitive level. Managers demanded of professors to publish on the university intranet “bullet points,” for each lecture, a few sentences that students could memorize for the exam and pass, so students who did not attend lectures or read textbooks could pass by learning by rote the teachers’ own highly simplified and dumbed-down lecture notes. Another method for ensuring that all students passed exams was through pressuring the teachers to dictate the answers to the exam question to their students either by repeating them in class every class, or by publishing them on the intranet along with the bullet points. Managers coerced the faculty to pass everybody and hyperinflate grades by measuring their performance according to the grades they gave to their students. Teachers who failed to ensure that all their students graduated were dismissed or punished by being forced to attend afternoon and evening courses on pedagogy that concentrated on learning by rote and were denied sabbaticals and funding for their research, attending conferences, and so on. Facing such pressures, it was easier and less painful for many faculty members to either post the answers to exams on the intranet or repeat them in every class and, finally, to hyperinflate the grades. If students failed despite all the efforts, a manager with the Orwellian title of “Director of Education” could multiply the true grades according to an algorithm that ensured that all the students passed, even if the best students received 180 out of 100 possible points (Ainley Reference Ainley2008; Gil Reference Gil2008; Tucker Reference Tucker2012).
The biggest victims of the dumbing down of education, the learning by rote, the bullet points, and the repetitions of the exam questions and answers were the students. Since the level of education was forced to adjust to the students at the bottom of the class, the rest of the students became bored, did not receive the challenging level of education that they would have benefited from, and were presented with a perverted, dumbed-down version of the disciplines they studied. It was one thing to overproduce low-quality consumer goods such as cars in the Soviet bloc, but it has been a much more harmful practice to do the same to young Europeans. The dumbing down of higher education to meet production targets caused waste of public and private resources. The central planners could easily cheat students and parents about the value of the low-quality diplomas they were producing, but employers could not be easily cheated. Employers adapted to the decreasing value of university degrees by demanding advanced graduate degrees to enter the workforce. A rise in the degree “price” for work followed grade inflation. Advanced degrees cost more for the state and for the students. Employers also became selective about the university degrees they recognized, rejecting applicants from some universities irrespective of their grades, especially the institutions that should have helped lower-class students achieve upper mobility.
The central planners demanded the homogenization of education. As production managers in McDonald’s should make sure that all hamburgers are the same, all university courses had to be “the same,”
usually in the form of standardized units called courses or modules. A module is defined in terms of a fixed quantity of time investment by both its producers and its consumers. Moreover, it is characteristically independent of its producers (professional teachers) because it has a standardized (online) form and content …. Online modules typically are no longer owned by their direct producers – the faculty – but by management … the basic idea and drive behind the Bologna Process is to standardize all of higher education in Europe in terms of interchangeable modules … with the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) point functioning as the educational equivalent of the euro.
This led everywhere to incredible overregulation of academic work, instituted by an incredible number of time-consuming administrative chores, regulating and being regulated, all in chase of an impossible phantom of homogenization of education that is neither possible nor desirable. Some topics are naturally more difficult and time consuming than others. Intellectual heterogeneity and competition between universities requires them to be different, to offer different kinds of education to allow choice.
In Humboldtian universities, autonomous, self-governing academic departments competed over university resources with other departments and guarded jealously their disciplinary boundaries and methods. Academics who attempted to cross boundaries and combine and integrate disciplines could meet serious resistance. Departments asked if researchers were “one of us” rather than whether they did valuable work. The central planners set to ameliorate this situation. However, instead of increasing the rights of individual academics or introducing institutional mechanisms for hiring and evaluation that were not discipline-specific, they abolished academic freedom and individual departments; they cured a sick patient by killing him. “Schools” that amalgamated several previous departments replaced departments. Central planners could not create a space for freedom and let spontaneous unpredictable natural growth take place. Instead they attempted to control the system from the top down. The results have been unintended even if predictable. “Territoriality” reappeared on the school level. Since school heads, unlike deans in Humboldtian universities, micromanaged contents as well as budgets, they were tasked with planning the study of fields they often knew nothing about and, even worse, dictated research programs to the experts.
As in tyrannies in general, totalitarian and authoritarian, constant reorganization, moving people around, prevents the creation of local alternative power bases and potential threats to the tyrants …. The unrelenting organizing of reorganizations – and splitting up professional jobs into processes that can be managed, measured, and controlled – have therefore become the quintessential specialization of management … reorganization also is the easiest means of disconnecting employees from former faculty rights – like shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom.
Managers were evaluated and promoted according to their success in satisfying required quotas. After a few years of such selection, the result was late totalitarianism: The people who rose up the hierarchy, the heads of school who were promoted, not elected, to be deans, lacked moral fiber, were able and ready to cheat, and were good at forcing other academics to do the same; some of them were even psychopaths whose amorality and preference for intimidation over other methods of persuasion fitted the institutional design. Conversely, the idealists, the best researchers and teachers, who believed in the importance of what they researched, wrote about, and taught, and so refused to dumb down and cheat, found themselves marginalized, denied promotions, or harassed, ejected, and dismissed (Lorenz Reference Lorenz2012; Tucker Reference Tucker2012).
The managerial model, the creation of a powerful managerial new class, and the abolition of academic self-governance were intended to combat the power of lazy, unproductive, resistant to change, sometimes even corrupt, yet powerful and protected senior faculty. For this reason, managerialism was initially popular among some junior members of the academic profession, who were competent and creative but poorly paid and lacked power to affect policies that were destructive of research, innovation, and creativity, dictated by their intellectually inferior bureaucratic superiors. They hoped that the managers would shift the balance of power in their favor. But as with dictators in general, whether of the industrial proletariat or the academic adjuncts, once they received the power deemed necessary for solving the problems of the downtrodden, they were under no constraint to use this power as others wishfully expected. The managers received and developed sets of powers to break established hierarchies at universities, fire members of faculty, discipline them into submission, and harass them into resignation or early retirement. First, they used these methods against the incompetents. Then, they used them against the disobedient who dared to challenge their authority. Then, they sought to use their institutional power to eliminate any alternative center of power within their academic units. Since much of the power of the managers was based on terror, it was in their interest to victimize occasionally the apparently most secure members of faculty, deservedly senior professors with laudable research record and international reputations. If a few of “the intellectuals” were made redundant or harassed into resignation or early retirement, it became obvious to everybody who had the power and that nobody was safe from it, however impressive were their achievements and global reputations. Finally, once everybody else was out of the way, managers went after everybody who was different for some reason. The bottom of the xenophobic cesspool could then float to the surface with nativism, racism, anti-Semitism, and all the other crown jewels of European history. The similarity with the revolutionary establishment of totalitarian regimes is striking: first they had to eliminate their real political enemies, then their “objective” enemies, then anybody who was respected but not part of the party–state hierarchy, and finally anybody who was different.
[M]anagerialism … is reminiscent of state Communism. Like Communism, [it] is totalitarian because it leaves no institutionalized room for criticism, which it always sees as subversion …. [M]anagement … just like the party in state Communism, is outside all control and accountability …. The question of whether managers really do spend taxpayers’ money more efficiently and whether they are more reliable than faculty cannot be asked …. Nor may one ask whether the cost of the management controls are less than the money saved on inefficient academic personnel …. There is not a shred of evidence for these two crucial assumptions …. [J]ust as the Party by definition represents the interests of those who are led by the Party …, New Public Management management models allow no place for representative bodies, which are only seen as a hindrance to administrative efficiency …. Neither the New Public Management nor the state Communist discourse will accept any criticism of their core practices and key personnel as legitimate because criticism is identified with lack of loyalty to the organization and so is seen as fundamentally subversive.
The methods that some academic managers employed to maintain power bear bizarre similarities to some of the “Gestapo methods” that totalitarian regimes and their secret police used. The managers enacted long and vague lists of declarative regulations that they could use selectively as a cover to start disciplinary proceeding against anybody arbitrarily because there was no independent judicial branch of university governance. As in Kafka’s Trial, everybody was always guilty, but they could be granted reprieves;
all behavior is classed as irresponsible (and therefore unacceptable) if it is not controlled by management. The management discourse of accountability and management control practices are therefore interdependent. The net effect of both is that academic personnel are effectively robbed of their professional autonomy to determine their own behavioral norms, and these are replaced by norms determined by management, which are formulated in quantitative terms. Professional autonomy then appears – mirabile dictu – as irresponsible and as elitist, while the subordination of professionals in top-down managerial control systems is presented as increased accountability and as democratic.
Managers started disciplinary proceedings against scholars for “inattention to detail,” writing typos in an email; “lack of responsiveness to student concerns,” dismissing a student request for rescheduling a class; “inattention to student progression,” assigning a take-home essay to freshmen; “lack of collegiality,” refusing to become an informer on another professor for the managers; and “having inappropriate attitude,” making jokes. Managers used disaffected failing students as agent provocateurs to undermine members of faculty. Since managers had access to their universities’ digital databases, they could find out which students were about to fail. They also had access to medical records to know which students were suffering from mental illness or had an otherwise professionally recorded troubled emotional background. When they targeted a member of faculty, they could connect with one or more of such troubled and easily manipulable students and suggest that if they wished to lodge complaints against a professor, the managers would have grounds to revise upward their grades (Tucker Reference Tucker2012).
As under Communism, control required bureaucratic divide and rule. Like in other large corporations, managers had access to the work email accounts of employees. When members of faculty did not realize it, they become the victims of spying and provocation. Managers could learn of frictions between co-workers and exacerbate them to turn academics who worked reasonably well together into sworn enemies with the manager acting as their arbitrator. The goal of the manager was the atomization of the faculty, breaking any possible alliances and alternative centers of power. In totalitarian societies, the ultimate way of achieving that was by turning citizens into informers on each other. There is anecdotal evidence that even this lowest level of debasement was reached when managers sought to blackmail academic colleagues into becoming informers on each other (Tucker Reference Tucker2012). Domination and tyranny had the predictable results on the character of academics: “There is a worrying similarity between management under state Communism and under New Public Management. Because both discourses leave no place for legitimate criticism, the response[s] … are mixtures of cynicism, hypocrisy, self-exploitation, inner immigration, and dissidence” (Lorenz Reference Lorenz2012, 620).
The primary priority of European universities, according to the all-European Bologna agreement, was vocational. The managerial interpretation of it was vocational, narrowly specialized, programs at the expense of theoretical liberal education. The assumption was that programs in football management would be more professionally useful than philosophy or history. Subjects that had lower graduation success rates because they were more difficult were eliminated, most notably foreign languages and quantitative or formal training. Languages were then hit twice, because they appeared nonvocational to provincial managers and because they were challenging for monolingual students. The result was graduate degrees in musicology for students who could not read musical notes (Koldau Reference Koldau2013), degrees in history for students who did not know foreign languages, and the evisceration of quantitative methods from the humanities and social sciences.
This result was central planning in its self-contradictory essence, plans were incoherent and their effects unintended, as they undermined each other: One hand of the state wished to turn universities into vocational schools by teaching students skills, while the other planning hand wished to increase the number and rates of graduating students by dumbing down education, especially the most transferable and vocationally useful linguistic and quantitative skills. European central planners worried that their countries were losing their competitiveness because their universities were worse than the great American research universities, so they curtailed research and dumbed down the level of mass education. Vocational overspecialization, typical of the Soviet model of higher education, created workers who could do one and only one thing. When technology advanced or production moved elsewhere, they could not find jobs in other fields. For example, post-totalitarian Europe is full of people with engineering degrees who cannot use their obsolete overspecialized training commercially. European central planners wished to adjust the curriculum to the needs of the largest employers. Corporations would welcome offers of welfare to have the state pay for their training expenses. However, the interests of the big corporations are not identical to those of students and workers or even the long-term interests of the state. Corporations have an economic interest in highly specialized workers who cannot change jobs easily and cost nothing to train. Workers who are overspecialized cannot find alternative jobs easily and therefore are in a weak negotiation position over compensations and must strive to keep their job at all cost. If the company collapses or downsizes, they have a limited set of skills to offer other employers. The employers can replace them with fresh graduates who possess new specific sets of skills. Eventually and inevitably any specific set of skills becomes obsolete.
Some people who oppose the academic managerial central planning model and were not familiar with Soviet history were misled by the use of jargon about production targets, corporate identity, line-managers, and so on, and thus considered this model “neo-liberal” (Lorenz Reference Lorenz2012) or “conservative” (Wolf Reference Wolf, Jakobi, Martens and Wolf2010; Head Reference Head2011). The European Commission
puts forward a clear market-oriented vision for European universities. This includes … a diversification of funding sources, an intensification of ties between universities and industries and a closer match between the supply of qualifications and labour-market demands. In other words, universities have a duty to their “stakeholders” (students, public authorities, labour market, and society at large) in order to maximise the social return of the investment.
But Communist central planning was not “market oriented,” it was not conservative but radically revolutionary. Without a market, private universities, a pricing mechanism to fit supply with demand, and above all creative destruction of failing universities, the managerial universities are Brezhnevian. As under Communism, the greatest achievement of the central planner is to confuse language sufficiently by Orwellian identifications between opposites to make criticism of the system linguistically impossible (see the next chapter). It becomes impossible to criticize Communist central planning, if its hapless victims come to believe it is “market oriented” and “neoliberal.”
Totalitarian Soft Power
In command economies, without a pricing mechanism to mediate between supply and demand to transmit information about what is in demand and not produced sufficiently and what is overproduced, managers cannot know what and how much to produce. If public higher education is free or if its price is fixed, regulated, and subsidized, there is no such price mechanism. Central planners and managers need to guess which subjects to teach and how many students to admit. In the absence of information, decisions had to be made on the basis of guesswork that was often strongly biased by the value systems of the planners and managers. When managers who had little exposure to high culture, chose their careers because they were not intellectually gifted or inclined, and were promoted because they had few moral compunctions and convictions were put in charge of planning university education, they eliminated what they did not understand and had antiintellectual aversion against the theoretical sciences, high culture, and anything that resembled ethics, exactly the fields that cost the least to teach because they require only teachers, books, and blackboards and are most necessary for the survival of civilization. This was recognized after the Second World War, when the military governor of the British section of Berlin forced the Technical University of Berlin to start teaching the humanities and ethics. Alas, the lessons of the Second World War were forgotten and the choices the academic managers made reflected values strikingly similar to those of late-totalitarian central planners.
When deciding on where to allocate resources, central planners could try to infer from what had proved successful globally in the immediate past. But all trends come to an end and then they are not trends anymore, just bubbles that have just popped. Soviet central planners noticed that the great success stories of nineteenth century industry were in heavy industry and energy, so they directed their industries toward steel and electricity and their higher education toward generating mining engineers and meteorology technicians. Consequently, they missed twentieth century technology, electronics, information technology, and biotechnology. Whatever the great next things will be, they will be known on a limited local level long before any central planner will be able to spot them, especially without a pricing mechanism that signals what is in demand.
In the absence of market mechanisms that amalgamate multiple individual preferences, central planners pay excessive attention to positions on international charts that evaluate universities. Few people who read these charts consider the highly questionable and sometimes totalitarian values that underlie them. The most famous one is The Best 500 Universities, prepared by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The Shanghai criteria are based on the following inputs: 10 percent reflects whether alumni of the university have won Nobel Prizes. 20 percent reflects whether teachers at the university have won Nobel Prizes. Since the Nobel Prize is awarded only in physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, and economics (Peace and Literature prize winners are rarely academics), the rating is obviously biased in favor of these disciplines. Twenty percent reflects how many articles academics published in the two most prestigious journals in science, Science and Nature. This biases the rating in favor of the natural sciences in general. Twenty percent reflects the quantity of publications in international journals and another twenty percent reflects how well cited are the published articles by other articles. The quantity of institutional publications is a strong indication of achieving an international level of competence, though academics especially in the Far East are already gaming this criterion by founding and publishing in bogus journals that do not evaluate the quality of the articles they publish, but charge for their publication. They then cite each other’s bogus work. Another shortcoming of this criterion is that it does not consider books. This displays again a bias in favor of the natural sciences. Original research in the natural sciences is usually published in the form of articles. Scientific books are usually textbooks or popularizations, not groundbreaking new discoveries. By contrast, in the humanities and social sciences books are often the main vehicle for new substantial and original research and so are valued more highly than and are read more than articles. The citation of articles in other articles should indicate their importance. Presumably, many citations mean that an article was important for other researchers to comment on or base their own research on. This is an imperfect indicator because it does not measure citations in books or of books, which again penalizes the fields where scholars publish books rather than articles. It also does not take into consideration the reasons for citations or their absence; some articles are cited because they are so outrageously provocative that many people write why they are so wrong. Other articles address fashionable but insubstantial topics that disappear for no better reason than they appear. Some important articles require advanced skills from their readers and so would not be cited much. As with other artificially set quotas and targets, they can be gamed by central planners. A recent trend in managerial academia is to pressure academics to co-author articles with other academics of the same institute to increase the total number of citations for the institute since each co-author of the same institute will be counted separately. Finally, ten percent reflects the size of each university. So, put together, there is a clear bias in this rating in favor of the natural sciences and large universities. These highly biased criteria are hardly surprising given they were formulated in a late-totalitarian state that builds centrally planned megauniversities that emphasize the nonpolitical natural sciences and engineering. It is surprising that such a clearly biased ranking that reflects late-totalitarian values is taken seriously into consideration in democracies that should know better. When academic managers attempt to game the ranking of their universities according to these criteria, they are serving in effect the soft cultural power of a late-totalitarian state. Central planners who work to reform their universities so they advance on this chart work in effect to engineer their society not to fit the late-totalitarian Chinese model, but to construct a Communist Chinese Potemkin village that appears to be an excellent university.
Kitsch and Engineering: O tempora o mores
From a historical perspective, the end of academic freedom and autonomy in much of Europe marks the ends of two centuries of patronage of high culture by European states and the ultimate victory of the totalitarian project of ending high culture and the transformation of society into a military-like organization made of drones specializing in subtasks of the five-year plan.
Humboldt, the founder of the university in Berlin, was an aristocrat, a scholar, and the Prussian Minister of Education. He used his position to bankroll the creation of the first research university. Humboldt’s model of the autonomous research university was copied and merged with the nationalist nation-building project. To build, unify, solidify, and justify the nation state, intellectuals had to homogenize and codify a national language for education, commerce, and bureaucracy. Then, they had to construct a national history and folklore, music, legends, and a national literature in the vernacular to justify the existence of a nation unto itself. To protect nations from their enemies, the universities were supposed to produce research relevant for military and economic strength and support national pride. Indeed, military defeats and other humiliations were conducive for the construction and spread of the Humboldtian research university model in Europe and beyond. Most French probably did not read Descartes and Proust, but they were proud that they were French and respected people who conducted research about them. The same was even truer of the newer nations of Central Europe who needed to construct a cultural justification for their separate national existence; they needed national high culture. Many national movements and state founders were intellectuals who naturally respected high culture. The cosmopolitan antinationalists agreed with the nationalists about the importance of high culture. They believed in a universal high culture, in knowing history and many languages, and in the usefulness of the universal truths of philosophy and the classics. Against the rise of the workers’ movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the upper classes used high culture as a status symbol and a moral justification for their privileges. In response the progressive left believed in egalitarianism through education. They believed that teaching high culture to the working classes would abolish class distinctions and offer a higher quality of life for the workers. Totalitarianism abolished these trends. As Göring put it, when he heard the word culture he reached for his gun. Instead of high culture, totalitarianism sponsored kitsch and engineering.
It has been quite a journey for Central European Universities from imposed totalitarian models from the East, through provincial autonomous incompetence, back to totalitarian models, kitsch and engineering, this time imported from the West. Today’s Europe is postideological, postnational, and led increasingly by populist governments. Populists supply bread and entertainment for the masses and dumbed-down, vacuous, and in the long run useless academic diplomas for their children. Like the great totalitarian regimes, they use public funds to pay for grandiose popular spectacles, giant Ferris wheels and domes, sports tournaments and rock concerts, celebrating kitsch and engineering. Voters who are not familiar with higher education or savvy about academia have no views about how universities should be managed and disciplines taught. They care for what they can understand, whether their children study at a university and whether it is free or cheap. That is what they receive when they do not look a welfare gift horse in the mouth. The rest is left for unelected and largely unaccountable civil servants with their own vested interests in centralization, planning, higher tax revenues, and ingratiating themselves to large corporations. The result is typical of totalitarian central planning, a mismatch between supply and demand, misallocation of resources, overregulation, protectionism against competition from the private sector, and the overproduction of shoddy goods for which there is no demand. Parents and students realize that they have been cheated when graduates cannot find a job because they are underqualified and because employers do not recognize the dumbed-down degrees they were awarded; but that takes years to realize, and then it is usually too late and only contributes to further social resentment against the public universities and the faculty members who produce degrees that nobody cares for.
Communism is considered by some to have been a grotesque parody on modernity. The new publicly managed university is a parody of a university, a Potemkin village that has the facade of a university. Instead of teaching, there is cheating; instead of Socratic dialogues, there are bullet points; instead of a community of scholars united by a search for truth, there are atomized individuals suspicious of each other and informers for the managers; instead of intellectual and spiritual life in truth, academic life is devoted to the implementation of absurd, senseless, immoral, and harmful policies that percolate down from an anonymous and unaccountable bureaucratic hierarchy. This is the university Kafka would have had nightmares about, rather than the university Humboldt dreamt of, a nightmare of kitsch and engineering.
