Abstract
The well-documented academic shift toward productivity-related and managerial priorities has created new ethical stakes and exacerbated older ethical deficits in the university world. At this juncture, the re-thinking of higher education commendably emphasizes a stretch of the intellect and of the imaginative reach of feasible transformation. Justifiably, this amounts to a critique that unleashes utopian energies and hidden possibilities. But, in a broadly anti-utopian global climate, the association of higher education with utopian imagination requires some qualifications. After elaborating on such qualifications, this chapter examines the possibility of re-thinking the notion of utopian imagination through the lens of a desirable, ethical image of higher education.
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Notes
- 1.
The terms ‘higher education’, ‘academia’ and ‘university’ will be used in this chapter at times interchangeably. This does not obscure the differences of the terms and does not favour a conflation of them. But it aims solely to avoid needless intricacy and also to stress the points on which all of them face similar realities and challenges.
- 2.
In the early modern Christian world, the effort to find a pedagogic mediation between religion and science which ‘would flourish in an educative utopia’ was the sole concern that united utopian authors/thinkers such as Bacon, Andreae and Comenius (Shklar 1981, p. 282). The significance of all this for the universities of the times is easy to infer.
- 3.
Here is Lacan’s famous retort to the student revolutionaries: ‘As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!’ According to Žižek, this passage ‘can also be conceived in more general terms, as the passage from the prerevolutionary ancien regime to the postrevolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is one, but proposes himself as a mere “servant” of the People’ (Žižek, ibid).
- 4.
For a fuller discussion of such issues, see Papastephanou (2013).
- 5.
It is remarkable that the earliest refutation of anti-utopian liberal arguments can be found in the earliest liberal use of utopia alongside with dystopia. John Stuart Mill used the term dystopian in a public speech in the House of Commons along with the term ‘cacotopian’ taken from Bentham (Sargent 2006, p. 15).
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Papastephanou, M. (2014). Higher Education and Ethical Imagination. In: Gibbs, P., Barnett, R. (eds) Thinking about Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03254-2_3
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