European-American University™

Editorial

Welcome to the second online newsletter of European-American University, a new online university that will launch to the public later this year.

In the 1970s, Ivan Illich wrote in "Deschooling Society" that "...learning is unhampered participation in a meaningful setting." This vision presupposes freedom not merely to learn but freedom to teach. Such freedom is becoming rarer today. Why so?

Professor Frank Furedi of the University of Kent in the UK has written extensively on why our societies are becoming increasingly obsessed with risk and why this obsession is accompanied by an inability to assess and understand risk's meaning. This is a damaging process, because it means that our universities, and wider society, are subject to a "dumbing down" that robs them of the capacity to innovate in the most essential of matters - teaching and learning. In the modern mainstream university, this process leads to a loss of academic freedom. He writes,


Risk has become commodified as part of a politicized process and taken up with alacrity by consumer advocacy organizations. The concerns that are frequently presented as a result are the outcome of a society undergoing a crisis of moral confidence, in which there is seen to be a vacuum in which the qualities of given things cannot be reliably established without an "expert overclass" to tell the populace what to do and what to think, and to impose bureaucratic procedures that support the overclass values. This is, of course, a revolt against the free market and liberty in general.

Yet this approach presupposes a fundamental lack of faith in the integrity and abilities of individuals. Just because individuals can and do make bad choices, and take risks that result in failure, there is no validity in removing those choices in the first place. Firstly, this results in a comprehensive lack of freedom totally alien to the Enlightenment traditions of Western society (and a fundamental violation of human rights), and secondly it presents a false solution to the problem. The expert class does not have the capacity to prevent the individual from making bad choices; it does not have any universal right to determine what is good or bad other than by its own assertions and assumptions, and it does not have the means or the will to solve the problems that the individual brings upon him or herself. Indeed, such a comprehensive control over the lives of individuals has not been possible even within the most totalitarian of regimes.

No, what is happening instead is a process with an explicitly political agenda. In 1989, the authoritarian communism of the Soviet variety was seen to have failed abjectly as a political system. The former USSR and the states of Eastern Europe rushed to embrace the values of Western freedom, capitalism and democracy. This left large numbers of authoritarian activists, notably on campuses in the United States, with the problem that their ideology had been fundamentally discredited and that the Soviet Union could no longer be held up as some kind of utopia (particularly since its malign nature was by now abundantly clear to most). The solution was to focus their attention away from politics per se and instead towards cultural control. By entering upon cultural struggle and using that struggle to destabilize the predominance of individual freedom and Enlightenment thought, they would bring about a cultural revolution, not a political one. The agenda was determinedly anti-capitalist, statist and built on the traditional weapons of Soviet control - the artificial creation of a "problem" ex nihilo and then the promotion of a politically correct "solution" to assuage the fear and disquiet.

This is the process that has led to an overwhelming dominance of authoritarian ideology on today's campuses. Faculty are chosen not merely for their considerable abilities, but also for that elusive quality "collegiality", which essentially means the extent to which they subscribe to an authoritarian cultural agenda. They become the "expert overclass" whose role is to remodel society on authoritarian lines. In such institutions, the Ph.D. (particularly in non-scientific areas) has been reduced to a servile apprenticeship scheme in which the focus is not on academic achievement, but on fitting in to "the system" and competing with peers on that basis.

It is time to take our academic system back from those who have assumed it without right or mandate. EAU does not prescribe that its adjunct faculty take any particular ideological viewpoint - such a stance would compromise academic freedom. But we are particularly proud to be associated with those whose outlooks challenge the mainstream academic establishment and ensure that as an institution we are truly diverse and progressive in those things that matter most - teaching and learning.

John Kersey
President, European-American University

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External articles
"A conceptual framework for understanding self-direction in adult learning"

In this chapter from Self-Direction in Adult Learning (1991), Ralph G. Brockett and Roger Hiemstra argue that self-direction in learning refers to two distinct but related dimensions: as an instructional process where a learner assumes primary responsibility for the learning process; and as a personality characteristic centering on a learner's desire or preference for assuming responsibility for learning. 

Read more at the Encyclopedia of Informal Education here.

Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D., "Marketplace of Ideas would free Universities from Liberal Tyranny" (The Heritage Foundation)