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

whether by scholarship or science. This accords with definitions in the historical literature, though these are much fuller: ‘A university sits atop an educational hierarchy, awards degrees and trains its own members and evaluates itself by peer review’ (Frijhoff 1996a, 69–70).

Still, these definitions provide only a thin conceptual outline of what the university is and what is its purpose. Consequently, it will be argued that the university embodies what is loosely termed the academy and that the primary task of this entity is higher learning. The reason is that in functional terms, the university is located at the generative core of a constellation of agencies, learned societies, associations, and centres that have either spun out of the university or rely heavily upon it for training and peer review.³ It is within this larger amorphous body that the ‘omnipresent memory’ of the university (Neave and van Vught 1991, x) is nourished. Without it, higher learning would be nearly impossible.

The institution of higher learning, then, as a common human attribute stretches beyond physical institutional settings; it is part of a living and shared memory. This would exist even if every university building and campus disappeared without a trace in the same way that early literate Chinese and Islamic civilisations passed knowledge down through generations, in ways that were less reliant upon physical institutions (Grant 1996, 33–34). It is not possible, therefore, to neatly separate the institution of the academy from the larger ‘invisible university’ that has expanded over hundreds of years because networks of students and scholars form links ‘bridging institutional knowledge with civil society’ (Charle 2004, 75).

In this regard, notions of higher learning in both Eastern and Western cultures converge. Both are defined as the process of systematically acquiring and accumulating advanced knowledge in ways that are ‘transformative’ (Fehl 1962, 1–14). In the Western tradition, this process is encapsulated and symbolised in the academy. Since the Middle Ages, this has become the global model, with the exception of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo (Altbach 2003, 3), which provides a singular reminder of the fact that some of the roots of Western tradition are derived from Islam; this phenomenon will be discussed later.