A Critique of Universities by Skúlason Páll;

Author:Skúlason, Páll;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Iceland Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

University Education and the Status and Aims of Research

We now need to look at the status of research as it has evolved in the universities in recent decades, because we commented earlier that according to a common understanding, at least in Europe, universities are concerned with teaching, research and service to society. There has been a strong tendency to increase the emphasis on research in universities, and various systems of incentives have been invented in order to ensure that academics engage more and more in research.

But what is research? The classical understanding is clear: research is one aspect of the preoccupation with knowledge or what was called studium in Latin. The other two aspects of that preoccupation, as it developed in universities, are the transmission and preservation of knowledge, whereas research strives to obtain new knowledge through theoretical and experimental inquiry. Of course, research has also been practiced outside universities, both by individual scholars and within special centers or institutes; but it has remained a central aspect of the activity of academics working in universities since the Middle ages, an aspect closely related to the other two aspects of studium. The founding father of the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw the connection between teaching and research, professors and students, as the basic principle of the university. And his ideas have had an enormous influence on the way in which academics themselves think about the university. For Humboldt, research was the inspirational source for the transmission and preservation of knowledge. And this implies that research is not only the search for new knowledge but also a constant reflection on how to preserve and transmit it, the ultimate goal being the Bildung of young people, and through them, of human society as such.

But now the massification and the ensuing vocationalisation of the universities has clouded the traditional association of research with teaching. The special relevance of research applies to theoretical education: that is, in effect, teaching students how to conduct original research, because that is the way learning is advanced. Students with vocational aims are not overly interested in learning the craft of independent research; and when teachers are therefore supposed to relate research to their teaching, the very concept of research – that is, of academic research in its traditional sense – is obscured.

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