In Either/Or Søren Kierkegaard marks ” the distinction between an essentially hedonistic, aesthetic mode of life and the ethical life, which is predicated upon commitment.” Today we have, Either “to allow for universities which are teaching only“ Or universities must “… must conduct ‘world-standard’ research in at least half of the broad fields of education they teach.”
In the current idiotic debates of Australian higher education, the cognitive distinction is lost. If you have teaching-only universities, why not research-only universities? That would be technically higher degree teaching.
It is a reasonable solution to have teaching-specialised universities and research-specialised universities. One could argued that we did have such a system since the Colleges of Advanced Education were folded into mainly the regional and technology universities, as teaching-specialised universities, with the sandstone universities providing the research-specialised universities.
In such a system, however, research and teaching has operated, but operated insufficiently since these areas of work have been made to compete against each other, eroding the resources and production outputs of both areas. In particular, universities have not employed sufficient numbers of expert researchers. The institutions and the public have short-term memories, but I am here to challenge the historical forgetfulness: in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Australia’s very top researchers were going overseas in droves. Whatever the story now, the damage has been done, and the problem has not been resolved: we have lost critical-thinking fields of knowledge in courses and subjects of what has been missing since the 1980s, and it is not a story that these are outdated frameworks (the falsehoods of certain politicians and Vice-Chancellors).
To go back to Kierkegaard, philosophical compatibility fails in both course and research design, because higher education is forced to make teaching-learning and research entertaining. The modern entertainment is essentially hedonistic, aesthetic mode of life. Traditionally, and on philosophical principle, the higher education of universities is (or was) the ethical life, which is predicated upon [existential] commitment.
Source: John Ross, “Don’t ditch research quality benchmarks, universities say”, THE, March 11, 2024.
Featured Image: Boceto inacabado de Søren Kierkegaard c. 1840 por su primo Niels Christian Kierkegaard. Wikipedia.
Fotografi efter blyantstegning udført ca. 1840 af N. C. Kierkegaard
Neville Buch
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