Thoughts from the Dean (part 1): Worldly Politics in LUC The Hague
One of the biggest problems faced by universities is how to keep pace with the shifting contours of reality. It’s frighteningly easy for academics to become, well, academic to the societies that feed them.
The ambiguity in the English word is a warning sign in itself. Look how easy it is to slip between the meanings:
‘Hello. What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m an academic.’
‘Oh, that’s fascinating, what do you study?’
‘Hello. What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m academic.’
‘Oh, don’t say that! Everyone is good for something.’
(It’s nice to see how a well-placed indefinite article can make all the difference in the world.)
Whilst it is tempting to claim that this problem is particular to the present (as we witness such massive and rapid social and technological changes, and as we face unprecedented levels of globalization in incredibly diverse sectors of society), I think that this problem resides at the core of universities (and perhaps in the heart of all large institutions) at all times. I would defy anyone to give an example of a period in history when change was not taking place; if such a period had existed, we would still be stuck in it. Things change.
One of the problems with universities in this respect is their tendency to ossify categories of knowledge that seemed to make good sense at the time they were created. For many of the Social Sciences, for instance, this meant nineteenth century Europe and the USA. The study of Political Philosophy, for example, became enwrapped in an institutional box bounded by the kinds of ideas and concerns that shaped industrialization in the West. Studying political ideas meant studying a line of thinkers from Aristotle, through Machiavelli and Hobbes, and perhaps ending with Adam Smith (or even Marx). And, of course, at that time and in those places, this made some sense. However, given that this line of thinkers remains basically unbroken in university curricula in most places today, despite the massive and wholesale transformation of Western societies (not to mention so-called ‘non-Western’ societies), we have to ask ourselves whether studying political ideas today should still mean that. Is it possible that universities have become so wrapped up in their own academic concerns that they have made themselves academic?
Of course, I would not want to claim that we should abandon Machiavelli, whose importance as a political thinker is beyond dispute. However, I do think that we should look at the shape of the world around us and at the forces that shape that world when we ask the question of what it means to think about politics today. When we do this, it becomes immediately and powerfully obvious that the ideas of these dead, white men are only part of the picture (and perhaps a rather small part). There are large parts of the world (indeed, the vast majority of the planet) were Machiavelli has been historically completely irrelevant, even if his ideas might now be useful for our understanding of those areas. Likewise, there is a whole world of political thought outside of the European tradition that offers sophisticated insight into political and ethical processes, which has been completely ignored in Western universities.
In other words, there is often a gap between what societies need from their universities and what universities actually do, in this case. A gap between the knowledge that people need and the knowledge that universities generate. Whilst the world has changed, in general the university has not. Most importantly for me today, the boundaries of the societies in which universities find themselves have changed profoundly: a university is no longer merely in a city, or a nation, or even in a region – universities are now in the world, whether their structures cater for this or not. This is not only about the international movement of scholars, but it is also about the movement of the boundaries around fields of knowledge.
One of the wonderful things about beginning a new university college is that we are able to change some of these things. We have the chance to bring our university college into the present. Given LUC’s emphasis on internationalism and global citizenship, it is imperative that our programme is self-conscious about its place in the world today. Hence, for instance, studying Political Philosophy in LUC The Hague will be unlike studying it almost anywhere else. We are re-imaging the meaning of political thinking from the ground up, taking advantage of research funded by Leiden Universiteit Fonds and the NWO, and in collaboration with leading professors from around the world, we are developing a new curriculum that goes beyond the traditional Euro-centricity of the field to include political ideas from other places and times. Not only that, but through an ongoing process of dialogue and collaboration with international partners, we seek to ensure that our programmes remain dynamically responsive to conditions in the real world. It is a complicated and exciting process that is attracting widespread attention; we are proud to be able to give our students the chance to be educated in today’s world, and to ensure that their experience of academia is not merely academic.
Chris Goto-Jones
Dean, Leiden University College The Hague