Audits
Recent thought and reading has led me to a deep questioning of the system in which I learn. University courses must justify themselves to external auditors and their bureaucratic requirements, and this means defining University courses in terms of 'aims' 'objectives' and 'leaning outcomes'. Reading my general philosophy programme guide this afternoon I discovered that my lecturers had declined offering intellectual and knowledge criteria with the excuse that these things are implied in all of the other targets. This is only, however, denying one ridiculous thing within its own context, and the fact is that no matter how freely my lecturers define what they do in terms of these business sound bites, they are nevertheless allowing their subject to be valued and judged by those sound bites and the political discourses behind them that are positively against cultural self-valuation and are also therefore anti-philosophy. This is all pretty old news in academia, auditing is one of the mainstays of debate; Yet why on Earth hasn't such encroachment been rejected yet? Tomorrow I will endevour to find out what my faculty is doing, or is prepared to do, to preserve the task of knowledge for its own sake.
posted by Anonymous at 6:27 PM
1 Comments:
You forget one crucial aspect of any form of worldly endeavour - funds.
Either find a wealthy independent donor to sponsor knowledge for its own sake, or kowtow to the government in unpleasant ways.
The only decent example of this sort of thing happening that I can come up with is the Guardian newspaper group, which is as politically independent as it is due to its own funds, beqeathed in death by Robert Scott, who owned the Guardian and absolutely bummed independent journalism. Find a rich person who bums knowledge and learning, or become rich yourself!
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