Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

814). The importance of truth is in the process of seeking it and the human consequences of this process. The material substance of truth is the elaborate living artefact of human endeavour.

A new pragmatism is evident in the current thinking about ‘modes of knowledge production’ (Gibbons 2003, 190), which is the tacit knowledge gained by interaction between researchers and end users, as discussed in some detail in chapter 2. These theoretical debates may impact upon the basic conceptions of the university and its civil mission. For instance, one of the great extravagances of postmodernism was the enthusiasm with which globalism was embraced. This opened many of the doorways that allowed other questionable ideas to rush through, such as ‘new public management’ (NPM), which became fundamental to the rise of market liberalism and central to the reorganisation of higher learning. However, this has since gone out of fashion within government, albeit very quietly (see case study 3). The warm embrace of NPM might have been random coincidence; yet there is a close correlation between this and the wider embrace of theories borrowed directly from science, related to notions of relativity and chaos. As more pragmatic notions of knowledge emerge, there may also need to be a wholesale revision of the organisational principles that have informed the direction of higher learning over recent decades.

Aims and Methods

As mentioned briefly, the aim here is to offer a revised theoretical conception of the purpose of the university, the key to which, it will be argued, is unravelling the intrinsic nature of the relationship between the academy and the state. The argument is advanced in three stages: a substantive history, an analytical history, and a set of contemporary case studies. Each component brings together three lines of inquiry: (1) to develop a theoretical position based on historical evidence; (2) to test and validate this against more recent evidence and current theories of knowledge and power; and (3) to test key propositions using a set of tightly structured case studies.