As I continue to plug together the pieces of my thesis, I am searching sometimes for the right approach to what is sometimes called analysis and for a voice of sorts that will sit comfortably both on my desk and within this discipline of design. I also continue to notice an ill wind blowing through the corridors of knowledge that have now become the corridors of power. This wind rustles up all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of the institutions which are its traditional custodians.<\/p>\n
Two recent readings come to mind, like a door at each end of the corridor.\u00a0The History Man\u00a0was\u00a0Malcolm Bradbury’s morality play on the radical sociologies of late sixties and early seventies university education. In the latest issue of the LRB\u00a0Marina Warner has followed up to her previous\u00a0article on why she left\u00a0her post as a Professor at Essex University.<\/p>\n
In the one hand a wry comment on the foibles of the post-war liberal education establishment. In the other an account of the neo-liberal response to what is\u00a0seen as the\u00a0moral turpitude of the post-war settlement.\u00a0And I get on campus and overhear talk of voluntary redundancies, of libraries\u00a0without books,\u00a0of falling student numbers and rising\u00a0executive salaries and see that the faeries have taken over the House of Lords.<\/p>\n
Bradbury poked\u00a0fun at the utopian ideals expressed through the Scandinavian modernist architectural structures\u00a0of his nineteen sixties humanities buildings. It\u00a0seems that now the managerialist infrastructures of the whole institution of higher education is poking holes\u00a0not only in the humanities but also in\u00a0humanity. And, like Howard Kirk’s over managed but\u00a0unloved partygoers, not many people seem to be having much fun.<\/p>\n
It\u00a0occurred\u00a0to me that in these\u00a0seats of learning, where such rare and valuable collections of incisive thinkers, lucid writers and socially responsible researchers still, for now, gather together, we\u00a0must surely between us\u00a0be able to come up with something to counter\u00a0this perverted\u00a0mistral of\u00a0“managerial philistinism” that ultimately threatens to disfigure or destroy voices of all sorts.<\/p>\n
Further reading: Warner\u00a0on the disfiguring of higher education:
\nWikipedia on the History Man:
\nhttp:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_History_Man<\/a><\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v37\/n06\/marina-warner\/learning-my-lesson<\/a><\/p>\n