The present Jubilee Year of the Jagiellonian University is marked by numerous international conferences and meetings featuring members of academic communities from both Poland and abroad. This series of events started with the Congress of Academic Culture, which took place from March 20 to 22, 2014 and was aimed to start a discussion on the most important problems, dilemmas and challenges faced by the university as an institution in the second decade of the 21st century. It sent a strong message on the role that the European academic tradition should play in our times. The issues discussed at the Congress were later adressed at the Polish-American debate debata "Challenges and Dilemmas of Polish and American Universities in the XXI Century", which took palce on May 12.

Here is an interview with Professor Björn Wittrock, one of key participants of the Conrgess of Academic Culture and the author of its opening lecture "Modern University in Historical Context: Rethinking Three Transformations"

We would be lost if we were just fashionable

In your lecture "Modern University in Historical Context: Rethinking Three Transformations", you referred to three major transformations in the idea and role of the university that happened during the last three centuries. Do you think that we are now on a threshold of another major change?

That is possible, definitely. I think we should realise that we have to reflect upon the situation of the university with the same seriousness as it happened at some other crucial moments. And we have a paradoxical situation in which, on the one hand, there are a number of developments that many academics find problematic. It is clear that we have to be more responsive to demands for auditing and assessment, and that is reasonable. But there is a clear increase in the number of tasks that are assigned to universities, and what sometimes is summarised by the rubric of ‘new public management' has affected the universities more deeply than many previous instances where governments have tried to direct universities. So universities are exposed to a host of demands and they are trying to respond to that, but in doing so they might actually be asked for too much. They may lose sight of their core tasks. So, on the one hand, you have this situation and on the other hand, I think most leading academics and university rectors are critical of this. They are aware of the situation. And yet many people perceive that drift as an irreversible process that cannot really be stopped. I think that is an error. We have to come up with the rationale for universities that makes their role as sites of free research and curiosity driven research, catering for students, credible.

Do you think that a compromise between the pragmatic principles of the modern world on the one hand, and the preservation of high academic standards in education and research fueled by curiosity on the other, is possible today?

Yes, I think so. I think it is absolutely possible, but too few academics believe it is possible. And that has to some extent to do with the fact that academics are used to invoking ideas from previous ages and I still believe that what Humboldt, Clark Kerr and Flexner said is to a large extent reasonable, but it is not enough that we invoke their rhetoric – we have to actually come up with the rationale that is credible in the present situation. And I think there are many features in the present situation that actually make the kind of compromise which you have mentioned quite possible, quite feasible and indeed necessary.

What could be in your opinion the role of the present Congress in such a change? What could be its contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of academic institutions in Europe?

I think the Congress, as far as I have been able to understand, is a very important occasion. It poses key questions concerning the role of university and it does so in a very open and very honest fashion. I can gather that the debate is on a very high level. People are quite aware of the relevant literature and relevant practices and the debate is conducted in a friendly but also sharp and open-minded way, and that is exactly the right way to proceed. So I think this is a very powerful manifestation of how a number of leading universities in Europe articulate their mission. And it is not just a faint hope, because if you look historically, a hundred years ago Europe accounted for something like between a quarter and a third of global population. That is more that has ever been before and after. The overwhelming economic power in the world was in Europe. If you had made a list a hundred years ago of the 25 or 30 leading universities in the world, I think all of them would have been European. Not even Harvard would have qualified for such a list. If you look at the present situation, the population of Europe will be below 10 percent of the world population within the foreseeable future. It is more in terms of economic power, but still the rise of new economies and the continuous strength of the United States make it impossible for Europeans to be complacent. And when you look at all these rankings, you can criticise them, but you can see that there is a global competition for preeminence in research, and unless European universities are able to maintain high standards, we are in deep trouble.

Doesn't this necessity to compete on many different levels pose a threat to the academic culture?

Yes, but we should not put too much blame on global competition, because, I think, we should maintain the idea that science in its heart, in its core, is an international undertaking. So we have local communities within individual universities, but scientific disciplines and scientific endeavours must be universal in their spirit. Otherwise we are lost. But when I said that I think there are good possibilities for this, I pointed in my lecture to some such developments. And one such development is that leading scientists, both in the social and in the natural sciences, are open to collaboration across this divide. So then we talk about C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures, I think he was right to a large extent, but you can see many more leading academics who are able to bridge that gap today and have to do it for the sake of the curiosity-driven research itself. And I also pointed out that it is very important that here, in Poland, you have strong collegiate organisations. In many other parts of the world you can see a drift towards strong university rectors and presidents, whereas the collegial dimension is being weakened in many countries. And in many parts of the world, including many parts of Europe, academics, and also policy makers, seem to believe that strong university presidents who behave like big business leaders are the way of the future, but I think that all the lessons of the leading American research universities point out that it is good when there are strong university presidents, but they can only be strong if they are also supported by and linked to the organisations that express the collegial nature of the university. And here, I think, Poland has many lessons to teach the rest of Europe.

In this perspective, could you say something about the main differences between the contemporary Poland and Sweden (or, more generally, Scandinavia) in the context of the problems faced by the world of academia?

There are increasing tendencies for scholars at the very edge, at the very forefront of different disciplines, to be open to collaboration across disciplines, which is something that is universal, and you can see it in Scandinavia, you can see it in the United States, you can also see it in Poland. And, incidentally, one reason which is the cause for optimism is the fact that for Humboldt the unity of science was expressed in terms of a philosophical system, and philosophy would be the form in which this unity was expressed. And throughout the 19th century, the different scientific endeavours became more and more separated into different subspecialties. But today we truly witness efforts to supersede these divides. Another reason for optimism is the fact that if you look at young scholars who are now entering their careers, they are better trained than before. And there is a risk of course that they are so well-trained, and so specialised, and they publish so much that they lose interest in anything but publishing papers within their subspecialties. But you can also see that in many countries some young academics, and I think the Swedish young academics are actually quite a good example, have been able to have very interesting intellectual discussions that link people from the arts, the social sciences, and the natural sciences in a very effective way. And in many cases these young academics have also been able to step up and defend curiosity-driven research. And ministers are sometimes more willing to listen to these young people than to older professors.

Does that mean that interdisciplinarity is the future of science?

Well, we should not give up disciplines, of course, and interdisciplinarity should not mean superficial adaptation to some trend. We would be lost if we were just fashionable. So this kind of ‘transgression' must emerge from disciplines, out of the solid grounding in disciplines. Otherwise it is just superficial. But if I should say one thing about Poland and Scandinavia, I think what has impressed me here in Poland is both the way in which universities seem to be decisive in maintaining high standards in education, and the degree to which they still are self-governing entities. Swedish universities used to be like that, but today about half of the members of the consistoria - the governing boards of universities - are actually appointed by the national cabinet. So you still have representatives of academics and even of students, but you have actually a little more than half who are external representatives. And they are normally very nice people and they listen. But you can see in some instances that it has effects. I think that if you have external representatives, it would be very reasonable that some of them were representatives of leading academies and thus ensured the highest quality of scholarship. That is, unfortunately, not always the case. I think you should not oppose it. I think academics must realise that we are supported by public means and it is our responsibility to do something that is useful and we have to keep high standards. But I do not think that it is very healthy if universities are entirely governed by external forces. There must be the element of autonomous self-government. And this is something, it seems to me, that Polish universities are really very good at.

Interview by: Kamil Jodłowiec, JU Department of Communications and Marketing

Professor Björn Wittrock is University Professor at Uppsala University and Principal of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.

He is a member of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of Academia Europaea,
He has held visiting positions at many universities and scholarly institutions, including Berkeley, Berlin, Budapest, Los Angeles (UCLA), NIAS (Wassenaar), NHC (Research Triangle Park), Stanford (CASBS) and Vienna (IHS).

He has contributed to the work many academic institutions, including Max-Planck-Society (MPG); European Research Council (ERC), where he now serves as deputy chairman of the SH2 panel for Consolidating Grants); Nobel Foundation; Rockefeller Foundation; Institute for Advanced Study Princeton (IAS), contributing to the most recent decadal review of IAS; and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (WIKO). He has been President of the International Institute of Sociology (founded in Paris in 1893).

He has published nineteen books in the fields of intellectual history university history, historical social science and social theory, and has been member of the boards of 22 scholarly journals.

He has been awarded Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany and "H.M. the King's Medal (8th class) in the ribbon of the Order of the Seraphim" by the King of Sweden.

Source: http://kongresakademicki.pl