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

ideas to replace them in the wake of postmodern critiques. Perhaps these traditions need to be reconsidered and their assumptions revised, given what higher learning has achieved and may yet achieve.

In this regard, this inquiry examines the function of higher learning within a pragmatic perspective, with the aim of developing a revised theoretical conception of the role of the university, as set out in the this study's ‘Aims and Methods’. The aim is to articulate a reconsidered, coherent explanation of the role of higher learning and to follow the suggestions of Amaral and Magalhaes to make an entirely ‘new case’ for the university, rather than offer a ‘restatement of the former’ (2003, 252). The argument here is that building a new case requires nothing less than amending society's attitude towards, and comprehension of, science and scholarship.

Previous Research

The nature of the university's relationship to the state falls within a rapidly expanding body of higher education policy literature. However, it also relates to conceptions of the state and notions of state power. The analytical problems in these two distinct areas are informed by trends in thinking that relate to ideas of human knowledge and political power. Although it is useful to consider the dominant ideas and key trends in this third area, it is clearly not possible within the scope of this work to delve deeply into all aspects of these wide-ranging debates. The aim, therefore, is to consider the dominant trends and examine how they are relevant to higher education policy and political theory.

The focus of most current policy research relates to how the traditions of the academy are endangered by ‘academic capitalism’, particularly in liberal economies (including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), where allocation decisions within higher education are now driven by the market, transforming academics into ‘state-subsidized entrepreneurs’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997, 9). In no other country has the shift from collegialism towards a market-based model of regulation been as dramatic as in Australia, with perhaps the United Kingdom following