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G O D AT T H E E N D OE H I G H E R E D U C A T I O N : R A I S I N G

T H E T E L O S OF T H E U N I V E R S I T Y H I G H E R

John c. McDowell
University ofD ivinity Melbourne

One of the most significant sets of concerns for public life in the
contemporary West is the nature oftheological education, made more intense
by the controversies sparked over practices of spiritual formation in pub-
lie primary schooling in Australia. The underlying performances of power
necessitate deep soul-searching over matters regarding the authority of the
teacher, the relation o ^scripture teachers and publically educated teachers,
the transfiguration of reason, and the embrace of an expansive religious edu-
cation. However, what is at present largely slipping from the political agenda
and public consciousness is the larger question of what is educating about
our public education. More precisely, what is our education for? Even more
specifically for this article, what is the end or telos of higher education? And
that leads me into considering some recent work on higher education.
In t r o d u c t i o n

Sheldon Rothblatts massive study The Modern University and Its


Discontents opens with an admission that [f]or two centuries a particular
kind of debate has gone on, revived in every generation, concerning the
role and purpose of a university and the education it provides. The debate
has been inconclusive.1 ^ e re fo re , he continues, and this is the thesis un-
dergirding his historical tracing, even if there are recognizable elements of
overlap, [a] single idea of a university has never truly existed, although in
some periods fewer alternatives were available. W hat that does to studies
that attempt to return the university from its conditioning as a multiversity
to its idea, especially one given voice by John H enry Newman, is provide

1 Sheldon Rothblatt, The M odern University a n d Its D iscontents: The Fate o f N ew m an s


Legacies in Britain an d A m erica (Cambridge: Cam bridge U niversity ?ress, 1997), 1.
2 Rothblatt, The M odern University and Its D iscontents , 1. Rothblatt w rites further:
Universities today arrive packaged in every conceivable shape and style. ... In its long
and im pressive history as a distinct institution w ithin western civilisation, the university
has never assum ed a single form or follow ed a single pattern, nor, despite undeniable
similarities in organisation and curriculum , has one university been a carbon copy o f
another. N ational differences o f organisation, m ission and curriculum have been plentifal;
and w ithin nations them selves num erous forms have coexisted (229).

John c. M cDowell, G od a t the End ofH igher Education: 221


R aising the Telos o fth e University Higher
a significant complication to the critical story that can be told.3 The idea,
in the type of account, takes shape in a nostalgic m ood as m uch as in good
educational interrogation.
However, in a consideration of God in Higher Education it is
provocative to open with an attention grabbing headline that is becom-
ing frequently heard among the educational theorists: Higher education
has been in a crisis mode for so long now.^ So claims Carl Raschke. The
problem that Raschkes study identifies has to do pre-eminently with foe
revolutionary shifts in teaching and learning technologies, and his book is
an attempt to counter the fierce resistance to change by indicating foe lib-
erating effects of the digital and com puter-mediated learning technolo-
gies and foe necessary advent of the ^ e ru n iv e rs rty .3 While his thesis on
educational cybersystems im portantly analyzes the reconstrual of the new
spatio-temporal conditions for considering educational theory, policy and
practice, and for foe learning that is involved, he fails to consider foe way in
which shifts in technological usage are not merely expressive ofhum an en-
deavour, but in fact contributors to reconstituting it. W ithout succumbing
to Luddite rhetoric, a concerned Heil Postman contests just such a techno-
docetic approach more insightfully and makes three relevant claims.^ First-
ly, in critical conversation with Diane Ravitch, he writes: though new tech-
nologies may be a solution to foe learning of subjects, they work against
foe learning of what are called social values, including an understanding
of democratic processes.^ Secondly, there is foe question of who foe tech-
nology serves, and who become its victims, since every new technology
benefits some and harm s others.The victims, among others, are those too
impoverished to gain access to it. Thirdly, Postmans Amusing Ourselves
Death is an extended m editation on foe way in which technologies change
perceptions, reform character and social processes, and thereby transform
knowledge and value. In other words, he declares: Every technology has a

3 O n the term multiversity, see Clark Kerr, Godkin Lectures, 5th ed (Cambridge, M A
Harvard U niversity ?ress, 2001), 14
4 Carl A Raschke, The D igital R evolution a n d the C om ing o f the Postm odern University
(L ondon Routledge, 2002), vu
5 Raschke, The D igital R evolution, vil, V1U He claim s that [d] 1g 1tal learning IS the true
b u lw a rk o f a global dem ocracy (x)
6 The reader w ill, o f course, recognize the analogical nature o f the allusion to docetism in
this regard
7 N eil Postm an, The E nd o fE d u ca tio n Redefining the Value o f School (N ew York Vintage
Books, 1995), 46
8 Postm an, The E nd ofE ducation, 192

222 Colloquium 4 7 /2 2 0 1 5
philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people
use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies
the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and
intellectual tendencies it disregards.
Postman is equally concerned with the nature and practice of
schooling, but his analysis offers a markedly different set of problems for
consideration and they suggest that the egregious difficulties he at the level
of the generative and not merely the expressive. The first, and pre-eminent,
thing this article will do is consider the kind of crisis higher education is,
arguably, in. The article will identify a set of operating assumptions and
policies which entail that it becomes difficult to give an account of what
is educative about higher learning institutions. As cultural and educa-
tional theorist H enry Giroux argues, in the corporatized university, increas-
ingly the norm under the late m odern economy, educational leadership is
stripped of its ethical and political obligations and is redefined primarily as
a matter of management, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.10
A second layer of analysis would have to address the implications of this
for consideration of Christian accounts of the agency of God, although this
article will largely leave this dimension to the briefest set of suggestions. It
would be all too easy to address this in an intellectually impoverished way
by appealing to higher education providers to introduce courses on theol-
ogy, that is, to contest Fichte with Kant and to end up with Humboldts Ber-
lin model.11 While this could secure the discipline of Theologys place in the
m odern university, it would leave untouched the ideological difficulties of
which we need to be aware. It is already to assume and work from within the
crisis rather than contest it, and to distract from substantial issues of what is
occurring in the moral devisioning of higher education. Certainly it is im-
portant not to go as far as John Milbank and proclaim that the university
is only educative insofar as it is Christian, but only because Milbanks the-
ological voice requires a good deal of the honesty of the post-Christendom

9 Postm an, The End o f E ducation, 9 2 .


10 H enry Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture o f Cynicism (N ew York:
Rowm an and Littlefield, 2002), 7 -8 .
11 Por an explanation o f what that m odel involves see David H. Kelsey, To U nderstand G od
Truly: W hat is Theological about a Theological School (Louisville: W estm inster John Knox
Press, 1992). Cf. John c . M cD ow ell, G e o lo g y and the Puture o f T heological Pducation,
in Theology and the Future: Evangelical A ssertions and Explorations, ed. Trevor Cairney
and David Starling (London: Bloom sbury, 2014), 115-35.

John c. M cDowell, G od a t the End o f Higher Education: 223


R aising the Telos o fth e University Higher
sensibility of a M aefonnonesque kenotic exposure to fragility.^ That
reparative move, then, is what might well render theological support for
what David Ford calls the non-neutral plurality of voices of a plural reli-
gious and secular university.^ In other words, the claim IS not being made
that the current performance of theological education can, without it-
self being substantially theologically repaired, save higher education. This
IS, to put it another way, not a matter of apologetically announcing foe
soteriological value of an appeal to only Christianity
The U niversity at t h e E n d o f H i s t o r y

Almost three decades ago, Fostman appealed to Cicero to articulate his


understanding of education: foe purpose of education is to free foe student
from foe tyranny of the present.^ Rashkes work suggests, however, that
with foe new non-sequential learning all that is available is foe present .
W ith this relocation of educational tem porality and spatiality foe present
is intensihed, near realized, and it is so in a way that reflects foe global
economy.16 It is not presented in tyrannical fashion, however. The feel is
very much that of foe adventus of Fukuyamas promised land constructed
on free economic exchange at foe end of history, of the global market as
disciplining desire by organizing self, time and space themselves.
Increasingly in recent years, Duncan Forrester claims, market forces
and market values have invaded one area after another, replacing existing
values and procedures with m arket values and market procedures.^ In
some cases, Forrester continues, this been extremely harmful, because

12 See Dnald M acK innon, Philosophy an d the Burden o f Theological H onesty, ed John c
M cD ow ell (L ondon ^ T C i a r k , 2 0 I I ) , 1 -9 Joh lba w r te s ,u ess other d1$c111nes
are explicitly ordered to th eo lo g y (assum ing that this m eans participation in G od s self-
know ledge, as m the A ugustinian tradition) th ey are objectively and dem onstrably null
and void, altogether lacking in truth, w hich to have any m eaning m ust involve som e
sort o f adequatio (for m ere coherence can only concern the coherence o f conventions
or appearances) John M ilbank, The Future o fL o ve Essays in Political Theology (Eugene
Cascade, 2009), 306
13 D avid F Ford, Christian W isdom D esiring G od a n d Learning in Love (Cam bridge
Cam bridge U niversity Fress, 2007), 345
14 N eil Postm an, Conscientious O bjections Stirring u p Trouble abou t Language, Technology,
an d E d u ca tio n (N ew York. V intage book s, 1992), 22
15 Raschke, The D igital Revolution, 4
16 Raschke, The D igital R evolution, X
17 D uncan B Forrester, Christian Justice a n d Public Policy (Cambridge Cam bridge
University Press, 1997), 160 Charles M athew es speaks o f the fluidity and increasing
m arketization o f our occupations, our relationships, and even our id en tities Charles
M athewes, A Theology ofP ublic Life (Cam bridge Cam bridge U niversity Press, 2007), 2

224 Colloquium 47 /2 2015


market forces can be destructive if dom inant in spheres of life in which
they do not properly belong.^ It is with regard to the all-determining mar-
ket and the consequent detrim ental encroachm ent of economics on edu-
cational values that critiques of the direction universities have taken over
recent decades can be m ost felt in books such as bill Readings University
in Ruins and Gary Rolfes The University in Dissent.19 The latter, for instance,
argues that the university has merely replaced the Enlightenment narra-
tives of grand narratives of truth and emancipation with an unquestion-
ing acceptance of the liberal capitalist grand narrative of the market.
claim is a suggestive one. O n foe one hand, the point is that the university
has simply replaced one grand narrative with another, what William Ca-
vanaugh calls the myths of the free market and of consumerism.^ As myths,
the stories are the product of decisions by agents, and therefore are not part
of an inevitable and unch^lengeable processive system. On the other hand,
as assuming a grand narrative, however, while universities may offer
Newspeak assertions that they are liberal, secular and value-free, their
choice of what is worth knowing makes a distinctive claim about what is
valuable, and therefore foey enact an ontological assumption about the
way things are and should be. In particular, foe global market involves
substantial intensification of foe subjectivity of the Eichtean Ich, foe

8 Forrester, Christian Justice an d Public Policy, 160.


19 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Rress, 1996);
Gary Rolfe, The University in D issent (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Cf. more generally,
M ichael Apple, Can Education Change Society? (N ew York: Routledge, 2013); Richard H.
Roberts, Religion, Theology an d the H um an Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity
Fress, 2002); David Robertson, Students as Consumers: The Individualization o f
C om petitive Advantage, in Higher Education Re-Formed, ed. Peter Scott (London: Falmer
Press, 2000), 78-94; H enry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back H igherEducation:
Race, Youth, an d the Crisis ofD em o cra cy In the Post-C ivil Rights Era (N ew York: Palgrave
M acm illan, 2004); Stanley A ronow itz and H enry Giroux, Education Under Siege: The
Conservative, Liberal, an d R adical D ebate O ver Schooling (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1986); Stanley Hauerwas, The State o f the University: A cadem ic Knowledges an d the
K nowledge o fG o d (Malden: Blackwell, 2007); John c . M cD ow ell, W hat Athens Has to D o
w ith Jerusalem: The W isdom o f Reason, the Publics o fT h eo logy, Pacifica 22 (2009): 125-
47. According to the M urdoch University Strategic Plan 2 0 1 2 -2 0 1 7 ([M urdoch: M urdoch
University, 2012], 11), changes in the shape, character and operations o f the m odern
university are the product o f trends in the global econ om y and in particular the centrality
o f new knowledge in econ om ic productivity. Accordingly, it claims that governm ents will
continue to be attentive to the know ledge-producing capacity o f higher education as a key
indicator o f a nations ability to participate in the global economy. This now places higher
education in the crucial position o f contributing to a productive econ om y
20 Rolfe, The University In D issent, 8.
21 W illiam T Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Im agination (London: T&T Clark, 2002).

John c. M cDowell, G od a t the End ofH igher Education: 225


R aising the Telos o fth e University Higher
individuated subject or unencum bered self devoid of the tempoml
expansiveness of m em ory or the linearity of hope in the intensive m om ent
of desire. The atomised subject is secured in its Cartesian dematerialization
by t ^ h u m a n i z i n g h)^er-technologies. Yet a significant question remains
whether the habituated virtues of the market, choice and freedom, are suf-
ficiently substantive to enable politically responsible action. Charles Taylor,
for one, thinks not and he declares that the political order is suffering from a
considerable m oral impoverishment. W ithout some socially endorsed con-
ceptionofthegood, hem aintains, dem ocraticregimes simply cannot survive
the fragmenting consequences of unrestrained liberal freedom.^ After all,
Forrester explains,
there has been an increasing tendency to treat all issues in the public
realm as technical rather than m oral concerns, so that it is assumed
that political problems are amenable to a quick fix on the part of a
technician, an expert, rather than requiring a wrestling with the com-
plexities and ramifications of the problem on the part of the wide
range of people who are involved and bringing into the common
discussion their varied insights and perspectives.^
Furthermore, Rolfe is suggesting that the Enlightenment concern with
truth is not one that directs the m arket-driven university. Drawing on
the work of M artin Heidegger as well as Readings, he speaks of the ruins
caused by the abandonm ent of the cultivation of erudition for foe produc-
tion of information.^ R e a so n has been reduced to technocratic reason
education to a deeducational inform ing that Faolo Freire describes as foe
transference or banking model,^ foe educated subject to foe recipient of
inform ation in foe so-called knowledge culture, leaning-form ation to
training, and academics to being mere factors of production.^
22 Charles Taylor, C ross-Purposes The L ^eral-C om m unrtanan Debate, in Liberalism and
the M oral Life, ed N ancy L R osenblum (Cam bridge Harvard U niversity Press, 1989),
15 9 -8 2 (a tt7 2 )
23 Porrester, Christian Justice a n d Public Policy, 23
24 Rolfe, The University in D issent, 1
25 Paolo Preire, Pedagogy ofF reedom Ethics, D em ocracy and Civic Courage, trans Patrick
Clarke (Lanham R ow m an and Littlefield, 1998), 32
26 Roberts, Religion, Theology a n d the H um an Sciences, 90 Australian public universities
require academ ics em ployed at Level E (professorial level) to achieve an annual research
output w orth four points (where peer review ed journal articles and b o o k chapters are
w orth one pom t each and five points are attributed to a research book /m onograph )
O n m odernitys instrum entalizing [of] reason, reason w hose epistem ological drive IS
utilization and dom ination, see, for exam ple, Jurgen M oltm ann, G o d fo r a Secular Society

226 Colloquium 4:712 2015


One implication of this has to do with the commodification of degree
programmes and the shift ofthe student into consumptive m ode.^ The Con-
sumer Subject acquires knowledge (by which is m eant information) rather
than learning to enquire into the complexity of things and become less ill-
inform ed;^ is treated and used as a customer to be supplied rather than
engaged with on the task of intellectual inquiry; can accordingly slip into
the stupefied state of simple receiver rather than responsible co-contributor;
and treats his or her courses and teaching with the capricious demands ap-
propriate for an increasingly self-defining, self-promoting, self-interested
narcissistic subjective agent. To adapt F e o d o r Adornos critical analysis
of the massifying forces of the culture industry, the Consumer Subject is
not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but
its object.^ She is not the measure but the ideology of the culture indus-
try. For Rolfe, many students no longer come to university in order to be
educated, nor even to acquire new knowledge,* although couching this as
a lament seems a little nostalgic given the ^e-tiventieth-century tradition
of universities as glorified finishing schools for gentlemen and ladies, or as
ways of enjoying campus life for three to four years before the serious busi-
ness of adult work, or for professional training in medicine, law and divin-
ity. Nonetheless, the point Rolfe goes on to make is revealing and pointed:
instead, many stu d e n ts... come to university ... obtain a degree certificate
that can then be cashed in for a good salary in order to repay their student
loans and debts. In other words, the role of the corporate university is not

ThePublic Relevance ofTheology, trans. Margaret Kohl (M inneapolis: Fortress Fress, 1999),
7. Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John W ilkinson (N ew York: Vintage
Books, 1964); F e o d o r w A dorno and M ax Horkheim er, D ialectic o f E nlightenm ent,
trans. John C um m ing (London: Verso, 1997). A ccording to Faolo Freire, [njeoliberal
doctrine seeks to lim it education to technological practice. Currently, education is no
longer understood as formative, but sim ply as training. Faolo Freire, D aring to D ream:
Toward a Pedagogy o fth e Unfinished, trans. Alexandre K. Oliveira (Boulder: Paradigm
Fublishers, 2007), 4.
27 See, for instance, Terry Eagletons dam ning critique o fh ig h e r education, The Slow Death
o f the University, The Chronicle o f Higher Education (6 April 2015), http://m .chronicle.
c o m /a r tic le /^ e -^ o w -D e a th of-the/228991 (accessed April 2 4 ,2 0 1 5 ).
28 Fostm an speaks o f teachers as error detectors w ho hope to extend the intelligence o f
students by helping them reduce the m istakes in their know ledge and skills. Postm an, The
End o f Education, 120; cf. Postm an, C onscientious Objections, 87.
29 See F e o d o r A dorno, The Culture Industry, trans. j. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge,
1991), 99.
30 Rolfe, The University in Dissent, 55.

John c. M cDowell, G od at the End ofH igher Education: 227


R aising the Telos o fth e University Higher
to educate b u t ... to produce graduates.^ In this context, the development
of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may well not be a threat to the
existence of the corporate institution, but rather may provide its opportu-
nity to scale back on educational teaching expenses while receiving a fee
for signing off the piece of paper required for the consum ers employability.
According to Rolfe, the university is no longer necessary or even required
for the learning of facts in order to pass examinations. ... If the corporate
university has less and less influence in student learning, then at least it still
has a m onopoly on the awarding of degrees in what is fast becoming an
assembly-line production of graduates, or what Lord Conrad Russell once
described as battery higher education.^ In this regard, post-Fordist uni-
versities are becoming educationally less interesting places than technical
colleges that are involved in vocational skills training, colleges that in 1992
in the UK gained university status. W hile Australian TAFEs continue to
teach, universities will be able to contract out teaching while maintaining
the business-enterprise connections of their research culture.
If the Enlightenment project was one of emancipation and contributing
contexts to the realization of democratic freedom of thought and social
justice, the neo-liberal conditioning of university self-understanding has
redirected its interests and energies.^ In fact, the connection between the
universities and social wellbeing is being loosened to the point of disap-
pearing into a de-m or^lzed educational ecology. The managed Quality
in the new University of Excellence institutionalizes that gap so that the
public arena is increasingly populated by all m anner of pseudo-intellectuals

31 O n April 20, 2015, Les Field, the D eputy V ice-C hancellor Research, addressed the
o p e n ^ g o fth e D eans and D nectors n f Graduate Research conference held on the cam pus
o f at the U niversity o f N ew South W ales He spoke o fth e current A ustralian governm ent
mantra being one o f higher educations serving industry, the nations job creation and
technological innovation It IS this that has increasingly shaped the allocation o f research
funding A little later he spoke o fth e grow ing gap in the ratio o f students to staff, arguing
that there IS a financial need for increasing bum s on seats, albeit he did recognize that
fo is requires the sector to ask w hat universities are for ?oint 2 5 o f the U niversity o f
N ew castle, N S W s N ew D irections Strategic Plan 2 0 1 3 -2 0 1 5 explains the im portance to
fois university o ft h e need to [A m plem ent a strategic business planning m od el that uses
market, industry and com m u nity analysis to inform institutional decision-m ak ing on foe
retention, abolition introduction o f undergraduate and postgraduate program s N ew
D irections Strategic Plan 2 0 1 3 -2 0 1 5 (Callaghan, N SW U niversity N ew castle, 2012), 4
32 Rolfe, The University in D issent, 101, Russell cited in Roberts, Religion, Theology a n d the
H um an Sciences, 88
33 See M ary W arnock, Universities K now ing O ur M inds W h at the G overnm ent Should do
A b o u t Higher Education (L ondon Chatto and W indus, 1989), 43

228 Colloquium 47/2 2015


peddling their wares,34 while ERA cnntrnlled peer-to-peer researchers fid-
die as Rome blazes around them in the bourgeois acadmie amusement of
themselves to death.33 Referring to Jean-Franois Lyotards analysis, Rolfe
declares that the grand narratives of truth and emancipation have been
replaced by the m onolith of liberal capitalism; culture has been separated by
economics as the driving force of the universities.^ Moreover, the mana-
gerial imposition of an audit based on unaccountable tudent-evaluation
rewards lecturing entertainers as much as skilled facilitators of the learn-
ing process. As Douglas Hague once claimed, [w]e are approaching a new
Hollywood era. Some UK academics are television mini-stars already ...
[K]nowledge is now being packaged. This really is show-bizand uni-
versifies are hopeless at that!37 Yet, for a subject requiring entertainment,
serious public conversation becomes a form of [undemanding] baby talk.3
In 1783 C.F. Lamoignon, a m em ber of the Paris Parlement, argued that
[e]ducation should be under the inspection of the public power, because
it should be wholly directed toward public utility and the good o fth e State,
and should not suffer from the variable views of private administration.39
However, universities that have their contexts as Enlightened humanistic
enterprises in the m odern nation-state have lost their raison detre with
the demise of the nation-state as the fram er of the citizen-subject under
the conditions of a transnational economy. Lord Conrad Russell claims.

34 A lasdair M acIntyre argues that nnly from the university can the w ider society learn
h o w to condu ct its ow n debates, practical or theoretical, in a rationally defensible
way. A lasdair M acIntyre, Three R ival Versions / M oral Enquiry: E ncyclopaedia,
Genealogy, a n d Tradition (London: D uckw orth, 1990), 222. Yet, [i]t is ^ e c is e ly because
universities have n ot been such places [where intellectu al argum ent, debate and rational
disagreem ent can take place in a c o m m u n ity o f contested discourses] and have in fact
organized enqu iry through institution s and genres w ell d esigned to prevent th em and
protect th em from being such places that the official responses o f both the appointed
leaders and the w orking m em bers o fu n iv e rsity com m u n ities to their recent critics have
been so lam en tab le
35 In M cD ow ell, W hat A thens has to do w ith Jerusalem, I refer to a Times Higher
E ducation article that had b een entitled w ith the question: W hy D o A cadem ics Fiddle
as the W orld Burns?
36 Rolfe, The University in D issent, 8.
37 D ouglas H ague, B eyond Universities: A N ew R epublic / the Intellect (London: Institute
o f E con om ic Affairs, 1989), 59, cited in R oberts, Religion, Theology a n d the H um an
Sciences, 9 8 -9 9 .
38 T im othy L Gorringe, Capital a n d the Kingdom: Theological Ethics an d Economic O rder
(Maryknoll: Orbis Rooks, 1994), 71.
39 C. F. Lamoignon, cited in Elie Kedourie, Perestroika in the Universities (London: Institute o f
E conom ic Affairs, 1989), 17, and Roberts, Religion, Theology and the H um an Sciences, 93.

John c.M cDowell, G od a t the End o f Higher Education: 229


Raising the T e lo so fth e University Higher
therefore, that [t]he first question facing academics is whether battery
higher education serves some useful purpose.^ The graduate as citizen
subject is reconstructed by the market and its utilitarian demands. Ac-
cording to Readings, culture (by which he means cultural knowledge and
understanding) is ceasing to be essential to an increasingly transnational
economy.** The value of the university to the global market precludes the
kind of humanistic pursuits that characterize the imagining of Wissenschaft
of Berlin and beyond as informed by Bildung, and that underm ine the dem-
ocratic co-operation in the pursuit of knowledge in favour of cut-throat
competition for research funding, students and professionally securing
recognition. The crisis, then, is particularly one of legitimation, of identity,
of teleology, with the requisite question of who and what are universities
for not even being entertained by many government and higher education
policy makers, or if it is, the considerations leave persons behind.^ So Post-
man declares, there is no surer way to bring an end to schooling than for it
to have no end.43
According to Postman, many of our most vexing and painful social
problems could be ameliorated if we knew how to school our young.**
The problem is that even imagining options for, and possibilities of, resist-
ance are distinctly curtailed in this educational commodification given
that, Rolfe laments, [i]t is impossible to adopt an authentically radical
stance in the corporate University of Excellence because radicalism can be

40 Russell cited in Ruberts, Religion, Theology an d the H um an Sciences, 92.


41 Readings, cited in Rolfe, The University in Dissent, 7. In the Foreword to a 2008 report
by Parliam ent o f the C om m onw ealth o f Australia, Marta Vam vakinou claims that
[r]esearch is o f value to society as a w hole, be it in academ ia, governm ent, sm all
and large businesses. Building A ustralias Research C apacity (Canberra: C om m onw ealth
o f Australia, 2008), v i-v ii (at vii). However, and this is hardly surprising given that the
report focuses largely on the com petitive econ om ic conditions o f innovation for future
growth, what she articulates as valuable research is packaged in term s o f enhancing
em ploym ent opportunities. Accordingly, w hile she speaks o f history as one o f the
foundational studies alongside subjects like m aths, s c ie n c e s,... and languages, the sense
o fth e value o f the H um anities is m issing from the fram ing o f her critical and aspirational
reflections on the challenge facing research located in Australia.
42 This was a poin t strongly made at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences
and H um anities (CRASSH, UK) and British A cadem y conference C hanging Societies,
C hanging K now ledge in 2003 (see Ford, Christian W isdom , 9 5 -9 6 ). See also the recent
critique o fth e universities by Terry Eagleton.
43 Postm an, The End ofE ducation, 4.
44 Postm an, The End ofE ducation, ix.

2 0 Colloquium 47/2 2015


packaged and sold as a comm odity just as readily as intellectualism or
sporting prowess.* Options to imagine alternatives, to re-imagine the edu-
cational subject against the m odern myth are swallowed up in structures
g a r e d towards securing the subject-aswill, to use ontological language, and
in which co-operative responsibility (whether by governments, universities,
or academics themselves) has been dislocated and fractured into managed
conditioning of educational providers. E k u y am as end ofhistory may well
be perceived to be ideological, but the ideological rabbit hole is endless, and
the pull to choose and consume remains undisturbed by the intellectually
ironic work conducted with a knowing wink.46 Dissent itself has been com-
modified, privatized. In fact, num erous c m m e n ta to rsReadings, Giroux,
Rolfe and Roberts among them argue that the very possibility of thought,
debate, co-operative argument, and critical vision are becoming less
valuable to the m odern university.*^ In such an educational economy the

45 Rolfe, The University in D issent, 21. Cf. Zygm unt Bauman, Intim ations o f P ostm odernity
(London: Routledge, 1992), 183.
46 Claims to being radical theologies are ironic given the discursive reduction to power
involved in practices o f discussion that give up on sober analysis, conversational hospitality,
and that resort instead to anti-virtuous name calling, simplistic sloganeering, m ud-slinging
sound hites, and the argumentative bluff o f the quick and trivializing dismissal. A violent
politics o f speech is the order o f the day that revels in reviling others, and that enacts a self-
confident rejection o f others through its exhibition o f a narcissistic glorification o f its ow n
voice (even if it hedges its ow n articulation with self-ironization). A ccordingly it becom es
itself reducible to a discursive solipsism ironically, and unwittingly, and is thereby unable
to encounter otherness. It casts an Archim edean eye over all things. The difficulty lies not
even in w hat it says, but in the shape o f its saying. This self-proclaim ed ^ t-m e ta p h y s ic a l
approach becom es a form o f m onocracy and an excuse for self-assertive self-securing
dressed up as a form o f deconstruction as it patrols the self-defined gateways o fth e culturally
speakable. As David Bentley Hart observes, [cjritique is never merely doubt, but always
a vantage (and advantage); it is always already principled, already dependent upon firm
metaphysical assum ptions, already a transcendental surveillance that has determ ined in
advance the lim its o f every storys credibility. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty ofth e Infinite:
The Aesthetics ofC hristian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 7.
47 See Rolfe, The University in Dissent, 24. Roberts writes that the free-ranging intellectual
apostolate o f such a great but not flawless figure as D onald M acK innon has becom e a
functional im possibility in contem porary British [and, we w ould add, Australian] higher
education. Roberts, Religion, Theology an d the H um an Sciences, 87. Intensive courses
take little tim e, and the offering o f com pressed degree program m es only reduce the tim e
available for thought. As A dorno and H orkheim er declare o fth e tem porally com pressed
products o fth e culture industry, sustained thought is out o fth e question if the spectator
is not to m iss the relentless rush o f facts. Even though the effort required for his response
is sem i-autom atic, no scope is left for the im agination. A dorno and Horkheim er, The
D ialectic o f Enlightenment, 127.

John c. M cDowell, G od a t the End ofH igher Education: 231


Raising the Telos o fth e University Higher
pressure on the Humanities in partieular, therefore, is particularly intense,
and research, where it remains im portant in a heavily bureaucratic audit
culture, is taking more and more of a methodologically mechanical and
banally conservative scholastic direction.*
G od at th e End oe th e U niversity

Given the shifts in foe role of education in neo-liberal societies, ft will be


apparent that foe dom inant narrative voice has been an interrogative one.49
has m eant that foe focus has been an attempt to identify and criti-
cise certain dom inant patterns of policy and performance in contemporary
Western higher education. The analysis here has not been a theological one,
and that should alert the theologically m inded of us to possibilities for shar-
ing in the range of concerned cries being uttered around foe world. The edu-
cational investigation conducted by cultural and educational commentator,
H enry Giroux, for instance, is packaged within a burgeoning dfttress over
the shape of contem porary N orth American culture in which substantial
political, economic and ocio -cu ltu ral pressure is putting democratic prac-
tice itself at risk. A culture of self-assertive individualism is generating con-
ditions in which patient reasoned argument and non-competitive conversa-
tion are increasingly disregarded. Accordingly, Giroux argues, educational
leadership is stripped of its ethical and political obligations and is redefined
primarily as a m atter of management, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.50
Erom a theological angle, Nicholas Lash wonders whether at a time of in-
tensifying local nationalistic fervour, fluid relationahty, familial insecurity,
and a rapacious ideology of consumer choice, ft is even possible to entertain
foe possibility of a global conversation to resist foe competitive cacophony.**
However, foe self-articulation ofthe secular cannot continue to exclude
the theological without unmasking its own ideological determinations,

48 Ellen T. Charry writes: Theolnglans find them selves talking am ong them selves, with
both the w ider academ y and the churches having turned off their hearing aids. Ellen T.
Charry, To W hat End Knowedge? The A cadem ic C aptivity o f Theology, in Theology in
the Service o fth e Church: Essays in H onor o f Thomas w. Gillespie, ed. W illiam M. A lston
(Crand Rapids: Eerdm ans, 2000), 7 3 -8 7 (at 73).
49 This voice m ust be distinguished sharply from a sim ple p essim istic one. M y articles
analysis offers critical observations on the ontological ground on w hich judgm ents about
w hat the m od ern university is for take shape.
50 C iroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives, 7 -8 .
51 N icholas Lash, Holiness, speech an d Silence: Reflections on the Question o fG o d (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004), 5 1 -7 3 .

232 Colloquium 47/2 2015


whatever the im p le x historte reasons for that excluston might have been.
As Stephen Carter argues, secularly, even when it does not systematically
exclude appeals to religious reason, always by default privileges secular-
ism, or a practical atheism.52 Universities and public schools frequently are
shaped by such an ideology of providing a neutral ground, and as David
Ford recognizes:
do not on foe whole educate people to engage intelligently
in this m ulti-faith and secular world, nor do they foster the high-
quality religion-related study and debate across disciplines neces-
sary to make thoughtful critical and constructive contributions to
the public sphere or its various dim ensions (political, economic,
cultural, technological, religious).53
Under these conditions foe question of the relation of God and higher edu-
cation would need to take a quite distinctive form. The question could be re-
duced to that of where can God be found in higher education?, m aintain-
ing a supplemental and with God being supplemental to the educational
process. At worst, foe strange O ther is se u l^ istic a lly excluded altogether
from study, being shunted off into theological college providers who tend
to operate from a threefold difficulty circumscribing the range and capacity
of theologically ordered reason: by being on foe margins of the intellec-
tual life they effectively have no ability to converse wifo foe best currents of
thought across the universitys disciplines; they substantially lose the abil-
ity to contest and redirect the public discourses; and they are less resist-
ant to further tribalistic fragmentation into denom inational or theological
ethos arrangements. According to Duncan Forrester, [c]ontent, more or
less, in its domestic captivity, religion passively legitimates the social and
economic order to which it has capitulated.5* Increasingly, he argues from
Stephen Carter, it is assumed by people who should know better that
religion is like building m odal airplanes, just another hobby: something
quiet, something private, something trivialand not really a fit activity for
intelligent, public-spirited adults.55
At best, foe strange O ther is welcomed in, and given a role and a po-
sition in foe introduction of theological courses in the universities in a

52 Stephen L. Carter, The Culture o f Disbelief: H ow A m erican L aw an d Politics Trivialize


Religious D evotion (N ew York: D oubleday, 1993).
53 Ford, Christian W isdom , 279.
54 Forrester, Christian Justice an d Public Policy, 21.
55 Forrester, Christian Justice a n d Public Policy, 29, citing Carter, The Culture ofD isbelief, 22.

John c. M cDowell, G od a t the End o f Higher Education: 233


Raising the T elo so fth e University H igher
dmesticating m om ent of what Denys Turner calls theistlc complacency
on the part of theologians and what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a Godless
secular curriculum on the part of the university more broadly. *The echoes
here are oflm m anuel Kants Conflict ofthe Faculties with the Kantian sub-
ject prescribing duties for the discipline of G eo lo g y to perform in reflection
ofthe work done by the contingent processes ofreligious particularities. This
it does through a form of epistemic and moral subjectivity unsustained by
the necessary gaps required for God, imm ortality and freedom as operative
assumptions by practical reason. God becomes historicized as with phe-
nomenological study of religions, or siphoned off into the spiritual part in
private self-satisfactory spirituality courses. The theological is hereby equal-
ly privatized as that which deals with the positum of other peoples beliefs (as
in toe phenom enology ofthat odd m odern beast Religious Studies),^ or as
the object among other objects of philosophical testing and contesting, or as
the shape of personal A ctiv ity , or as that objectified but departicularized
entity in the post-death-of-God type pluralist and interfaith theologies.So
where John Henry Newman once declared that a University should teach
universal knowledge, to toe secular university this is precisely the reason
to reduce toe study of the theological to toe historical or sociological.59
On saying that, it does at least raise an irtellectual justification for courses of
study that refuse to succumb to the contemporary climate in which, Roberts
observes, course topics follow market fluctuations.^
M odern theology, then, has not been in a position in toe academy, either
practically or intellectually, to challenge the pedagogic reductionisms that
follow the gods of higher education and provide service to social wellbe-
ing and pedagogies of humanization. The difficulty is not toe secular self-
understanding o fth e institutions as such, as if a religious addition will make

56 D enys Turner, D oin g T heology in the University, in Fields ofFaith: Theology and Religious
Studies fo r the Twenty-First Century, ed. D avid F. Ford, Ben Q uash and Janet SoslUee
(Cambridge: Cam bridge U niversity Fress, 2005), 2 5 -3 8 (at 35); Alasdair M aelntyre,
God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective H istory o f th e Catholic Philosophical Tradition
(Lanham: R ow m an and Littlefield, 2009), 17. M aelntyre claims that the m ost prestigious
C atholic universities often m im ic the structures and goals o fth e m ost prestigious secular
universities and do so w ith little sense o f som ethin g having gone seriously am iss (179).
57 See T im othy Fitzgerald, The Ideology / Religious Studies (Cxford: Oxford U niversity
Fress, 2000).
58 1 plan at som e juncture to provide a critical analysis o fth e brief and trouhled history o fth e
study o f G e o lo g y and Religious Studies at the University o f Newcastle, N SW as a case study.
59 John H enry N ew m an, The Idea o fa University (N ew York: Chelsea H ouse, 1983), 19.
60 Roberts, Religion, Theology and the H um an Sciences, 92.

Colloquium 47/2 2015


234
appropriate repair rather than assume it. Instead, it has to do with the kind of
seeular enelosure in eonsumptive objectivity that shapes university identity
Numerous studies such as those of Giroux suggest that the increasingly
corporatized universities can only be imagined to be places formative for
healthy critical reason and evaluation, conversational co-operation, care
for deep learning, and substantive public debate, in the most nave way.^
To return to Lashs question above, if his answer to the question of a com-
m on conversation, and thus of concern for foe flourishing of the public,
lies in an appeal to the theological, it is so in a distinctly hesitant way. On
the one hand, Christian traditions witness to the cosmic expansiveness
of Gods making all things well in an eschatological salve for foe fracture
and pain of creatures suffering self-dissolution in distorted desire. On foe
other hand, the outstretched arms of the One betrayed by his own most in-
timate friends cast a shadow over the troubled way of the churches as well.
As Cyril of Jerusalem writes, God stretched out His hands on foe Cross,
that He might embrace the ends of the world; for this Golgotha is the very
center of the earth.^ But it is here that there is hope. The strange image
of the Hum an was presented to the gaze of the crowd and was drawn with
words dripping with irony: Ecce Homol Behold foe man! It is difficult to
see where contem porary educational policy and technocratic performance
can even attempt to make sense of this for our lives, but it is incumbent
on the churches to rem ind all agents of their responsibility to the healing
humanization of Gods ways with the world, and thereby to refuse to make
education a m atter that can operate without even considering its end: foe
eschatological flourishing of all life in friendship with God.
The reparative reflections at this point in the paper can only be sugges-
tive and all too brief gestures towards foe need to refuse foe domestication
of the discursive range of the theological, and of exercising responsibility to
reconstrue the idea of formal education. In humble ascetic mood, theology
can purgatively engage in a dem)rthofogizing practice of de-education, of un-
learning in brutally reflexive honesty all that is acquired under foe dominant
systems of control and misdirected desire that mis-shape our engagement in

6 See, for exam ple, Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives, xi. In this regard, D avid Robertsons
perspective appears distinctly naive in its optim ism : H igher education w ill becom e the
principal m eans o f achieving personal prosperity, but it w ill also be the m eans by w hich
m ore people w orld-w ide gain access to social justice. D avid Robertson, Students as
Consum ers: The Individualization o f C om petitive Advantage, in H igher Education Re-
Form ed, ed. Peter Scott (London: Falmer Press, 2000), 7 8 -9 4 (at 93).
62 Cited in Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, a n d the Cross: Reappropriating the A ton em en t
Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 25.

John c.M cDowell, G od a t the End o fH igh er Education: 235


Raising the T e lo so fth e University Higher
public life today and that figures the de-moralized ecology of the
universities.^ Yet, in the celebratory mood of witnessing to the illumination
of all things in their higher order through Gods Self-giving eschatological
salus, then well-ordered theology can fimction in a number of ways. It can,
crucially, enact a witness to the sociality of commitment and responsibility
beyond the subjection of the subject to an egological subjectivity that privi-
leges judgments determined by the bare will to choose. Further, it can wit-
ness to the healing of the symbiotic relationships between things in the world
that moves beyond the fractures of a non-integrative curriculum and the self-
interest o ^ s tru m e n ta liz in g reason. Finally, it can encourage a commitment
to responsibility that labours to keep the question of the justice of common
hum an flourishing on the agenda. Educative activity would then ultimately be
directed to those virtues that assist us in our ultimate endfriendship with
God enacted in hospitable action to the stranger. In this case, then, our pri-
mary theological question would become not that of where is God in higher
education, but rather of what it is that constitutes higher education in, with,
and under God in Jesus Christ for the renewal of not only specific local con-
texts but indeed all things. Retrieving a sense of theological witness to the
irreducibility of the unpossessable Otherness of God in Gods Self-
presencing redirects educational reflection to recover questions of teleology,
and telic hominization. If this is the case, then maybe some sense can be made
of the question asked by Mike Higton, of what the church and the academy
can do for each other to help each other regain their right minds.^

63 M athewes, A Theology / Public Life, 2. E schatological p r o v isio n a lly and doctrinal


developm ent provide a m odel (albeit an am biguous one) a politics o f contestable
discourses that need to continue to resist their flattening into the m on olith o f progressive
know ledge generation.
64 M ike H igton, Can the U niversity and the Church Save Each Other?, Crosscurrents
(Summer: 2005): 17 2 -8 3 (at 172).

2 6 Colloquium 47/2 2015


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