Decolonising the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice by Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Author:Boaventura de Sousa Santos [Santos, Boaventura de Sousa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2020-12-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

The University at a Turning-Point

Introduction

When we consider the university worldwide, the present is a moment in which it is as important to look back as to look forward. In the case of Europe, this is a period of evaluation of the Bologna Process, named after the Bologna Declaration organised by the European Union education ministers in 1999, aimed at reforming higher education in Europe and creating the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).

[159] It is a period prone to intense fluctuations between positive and negative evaluations, between a sense that it is either too late or too early to achieve the intended results. In my view, such intense fluctuations in analysis and evaluation are a sign that everything remains open, that failure and success loom equally on the horizon, and that is up to us to make one or the other happen. The great philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that by each hope there is always a coffin: Heil and Unheil. In this chapter, I focus mainly on the European University but the challenges facing the European University today are to be found in all continents, however different the reasons, the arguments, or the proposed solutions may be.

In general, we can assert that the university is undergoing, as much as the rest of contemporary societies, a period of paradigmatic transition. This transition can be characterised in the following way: we face modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. To put it very succinctly, the modern problems are the fulfilment of the ideals of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. In the past 200 years, we have not been able to fulfil such objectives in Europe, let alone elsewhere. The solutions designed to fulfil them – I mean: scientific and technological progress; formal and instrumental rationality; the modern bureaucratic state; the recognition of class, race and gender divisions within the strict limits of liberal values and the resilience of capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal forms of sociability; the institutionalisation of social conflict raised by social inequalities and discriminations through liberal democratic processes, development of national cultures and national identities, secularism and laicism; and so on and so forth – have not been able to deliver the objectives struggled for. The modern university, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards, has been a key component of such solutions. It was actually in light of them that institutional autonomy, academic freedom and social responsibility were originally designed. The generalised crisis of modern solutions has thereby brought with it the crisis of the university. After the Second World War, the early 1970s was a period of intense reformist impulses worldwide. In most cases, the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the motive behind them. In the past 40 years, however, for different but convergent reasons, in various parts of the world the university has become, rather than a solution for societal problems, an additional problem.

As far as the university is concerned, the problem may be formulated in this way: the university

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