Rolfe (2013) Thinking As A Subversive Activity

Thinking as a subversive activity: doing philosophy in the
corporate universitynup_551 28..37

Gary Rolfe PhD
Professor of Nursing, College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
Abstract The academy is in a mess. The cultural theorist Bill Readings claimed
that it is in ruins, while the political scientist Michael Oakeshott sug-
gested that it has all but ceased to exist. At the very least, we might argue
that the current nancial squeeze has distorted the University into a
shape that would be all but unrecognizable to Oakeshott and others
writing in the 1950s and 1960s. I will begin this paper by tracing the
development of the modern Enlightenment University over the past 200
years from its roots in late 18th century Berlin to its current predica-
ment. I will then turn my attention to the introduction during the 1990s
of nursing education into the University, and examine the particular
difculties and tensions encountered at the interface between a profes-
sional practice and an academic discipline. Finally, I will propose phi-
losophy as a way of dwelling in the ruins of the Enlightenment
University and of reconciling the corporate demands of the University
with the obligations of the nursing profession.
Keywords: education programme, nursing philosophy.
The University in ruins
It is generally agreed that the origins of the modern
Enlightenment University can be found in the writ-
ings of the German thinkers Wilhelm von Humboldt
and Immanuel Kant, whose ideas led to the founding
of the University of Berlin in 1810. Kant (1798)
argued that the University should ostensibly be
accountable to the state, but ultimately to the prin-
ciples of truth and reason, while von Humboldt (1810)
emphasized the role of the University in developing
the moral culture of the nation and of the individual.
This model of the pursuit of knowledge for primarily
moral and cultural ends spread rapidly across Western
Europe and, by the middle of the 19th century, John
Henry Newman (1858) was describing the ideal of the
gentleman scholar who, with his broad classical edu-
cation, was morally and practically equipped for any
profession or walk of life. The idea of the Enlighten-
ment University as a community of scholars in pursuit
of a unied and universally applicable body of
Correspondence: Professor Gary Rolfe, Professor of Nursing,
College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea University,
Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. Tel.: +44 (0)1792 295809;
fax: +44 (0)1792 295487; e-mail: [email protected]
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28 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Nursing Philosophy (2013), 14, pp. 2837
knowledge for its own sake persisted well into the
20th century, where it nally came under pressure
from what was by now a fully industrialized state to
produce engineers, technicians, and scientists with
specic skill-sets, and for whom the classics had little
relevance or meaning. As a result of the pressure
exerted by governments for universities to make a
more substantive and practical contribution to the
workforce, many degrees in pure subjects such as
philosophy began to disappear, to be replaced by
qualications in applied or professional subjects such
as teaching and nursing.
The University of Culture and the crisis
of legitimation
In his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings
(1996) argued that the original moral and cultural
function of the Enlightenment University was closely
linked to the development and specic identity of
individual emerging nation states, and what he
referred to as the University of Culture therefore
played a vital unifying role by articulating and dis-
seminating the cultural norms and values distinct to
each of the nations of Western Europe and North
America. In return, the government funded the uni-
versity sector and was prepared to allow it a certain
degree of academic freedom, provided of course that
the University continued to uphold and promote the
values and cultural norms of the state.
However, Readings identied two developments
during the second half of the 20th century which
fatally fractured this symbiotic relationship between
University and State. Firstly, our ideas of culture
began to fragment. The culture wars of the 1950s and
1960s highlighted the growing divide between the arts
and the sciences, for example in the public and acri-
monious falling-out between F.R. Leavis and C.P.
Snow. This was compounded in the 1960s by the
breaking down of the barriers between so-called high
and low (or popular) culture, to the extent that the
term culture became more or less meaningless. Sec-
ondly, the growth of internationalism and the global
village blurred national identities and cultural stereo-
types, leading Readings to observe that:
the nation state and the modern notion of culture arose
together, and they are I argue, ceasing to be essential to
an increasingly transnational global economy. (Readings,
1996, p. 12)
The very raison detre of Readingss University of
Culture was therefore under threat, resulting in
what he referred to as a crisis of legitimation for the
University.
One of the effects of this calling into question of the
purpose of the University has been a re-evaluation of
how and why it is funded. The original moral and
cultural missions of the University had clear benets
to the state, which was prepared to pay for what was a
largely non-productive institution. However, as the
mission of the University shifted during the latter part
of the 20th century from providing a broad education
to awarding work-based qualications, and as the
opportunity to gain those qualications was extended
to a greater and greater proportion of the population,
it was increasingly expected that the beneciaries of
the qualications rather than the state would foot the
bill, an expectation that has intensied as a result of
the current climate of austerity. In addition, as the
University began to make inroads into the profes-
sional education and training market, it needed to
distinguish itself from other more established provid-
ers such as technical colleges.
Readings suggested that the University has
responded to these challenges in two ways. Firstly,
it has wholeheartedly embraced the ethos of the
market economy. As he rst pointed out in the early
1990s, the University is not just like a corporation;
it is a corporation. Students . . . are not like custom-
ers, they are customers (Readings, 1996, p. 22).
Whereas the cultural mission of the University was
largely cooperative and collaborative, the market
economy in which universities now nd themselves
pits one against the other and all against the alter-
native providers of vocational qualications such as
colleges of further education and technical colleges.
Of course, the major advantage of universities
over other providers is the very fact that they are
universities, with all the cachet that the title pro-
vides. Secondly then, as Readings observed, excel-
lence was promoted as the new selling point,
Thinking as a Subversive Activity 29
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
distinguishing feature and legitimating idea of the
University as an institution. However, he further
suggested that the term excellence was being used
to refer not only to the quality of the product being
sold by universities, but to the product itself. In other
words, universities were in the business of selling
excellence.
The University of Excellence
At some point during the second half of the 20th
century, the University of Culture was replaced by
the University of Excellence. We can see this appeal
to excellence in the mission statements, public pro-
nouncements, and aspirations of many universities,
including my own, and Readingss book The Univer-
sity in Ruins can be read as an extended critique of
the corporate University of Excellence. On the one
hand, the idea of the University of Excellence is
almost tautological: of course universities should
aspire to excellence; that is what they are for. On the
other hand, however, Readings points out that the
idea of excellence is empty, that it is quite literally
meaningless, a signier without a signied. In order
to illustrate his point, he offered the example of the
estates department at Cornell University in the
USA, which was given an award for excellence in
parking. It turned out that the award was actually
given for the success of the department in preventing
staff and students from parking on the campus: for
restricting parking rather than for facilitating it. As
Readings pointed out, the award could just as readily
have been given for attempts either to increase or
decrease the number of parking spaces on campus, so
that excellence can function equally well as an
evaluative criterion on either side of the issue of
what constitutes excellence in parking (Readings,
1996, p. 24). For a university to describe itself as
excellent therefore tells us nothing about it beyond
an aspiration to do well or to be better in some
unspecied way than its competitors, all of which are
making exactly the same claim.
For example, my own university, along with many
others, aspires to excellence in research (Swansea
University, 2009). As a nurse, I might consider excel-
lent research to be work that improves the lives of
patients. As a philosopher, I might consider excellent
research to be work that helps us to think differently
and more productively about particular problems, or
to problematize ideas that were previously taken for
granted. This is not, however, what the senior aca-
demics and administrators in my university mean by
excellent research. For them, excellent research is
research which is published in journals with a high
citation index, which is cited by other researchers,
and which is funded by prestigious grant-awarding
bodies; that is, research that is likely to make a con-
tribution to the universitys score in what used to be
called the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK,
but which has recently (and perhaps not coinciden-
tally) been rebranded as the Research Excellence
Framework.
However, closer inspection will reveal that the term
excellence does not apply to the research at all. The
criteria for excellence are concerned with what
happens before and after the research takes place,
with writing and submitting the grant proposal and
with writing up and publishing the ndings. As far as
my university managers are concerned, the aim,
objectives, and conduct of the study and its applica-
tion to the real world are largely irrelevant as mea-
sures of excellence. What makes for excellent nursing
research is not whether it improves peoples lives, but
whether it is funded by a prestigious grant-awarding
body and written-up in a top academic journal. Fur-
thermore, I have noticed recently that excellent
research is no longer being dened by my university
simply in terms of the size of the grant, but by the
overheads that the awarding body is prepared to pay;
that is, by the prot that the university will make.
Excellent research is, more and more, research that
brings in money to the university. The point that
Readings was making is that the term excellent is
available to universities to promote whatever
happens to be expedient at the time. As the Univer-
sity as an institution becomes ever more corporate
and money is in ever shorter supply, excellence is
being dened more and more in economic terms; as
the recession continues to bite, Peter Druckers
concept of the knowledge economy is increasingly
being interpreted simply as the economic value of
knowledge.
Gary Rolfe 30
The industrialization of the University
The University, then, is in the knowledge business:
the business of manufacturing and selling knowledge,
information, and qualications on an increasingly
industrial scale. As research grants get bigger,
research is being carried out by multidisciplinary
teams of specialists in narrower and narrower elds of
expertise. Projects are passed along what resembles a
factory assembly line from methodologist to litera-
ture reviewer to economist to ethicist to statistician to
eldworker to data analyst and so on, until a com-
pleted project report with a dozen or so names on it
emerges from the end of the conveyor belt. Similarly,
class sizes are getting bigger and more geographically
dispersed, sometimes across several continents, and
teaching is becoming more technological and less per-
sonal. This, incidentally, is often promoted as some-
thing positive rather than as a nancial expediency.
The concept of education, which includes moral and
social components, no longer gures in the mission
statement of my university, and has been replaced by
learning and teaching and the student experience.
Even this is a misnomer, since there is a growing
number of courses and modules which include very
little teaching in any recognizable form.
In order to manage the industrialization of
research and teaching, Readings suggested that the
academic is being replaced by the administrator,
that thought is being replaced by efciency and
protability, that quality is being replaced by quan-
tity, and that academic accountability is being
replaced by nancial accountancy. Thus, the role of
the course leader is becoming increasingly manage-
rial, the role of the principal investigator of a
research project is now largely administrative, and
both are being called to account for their successes
and failures on nancial rather than academic or
scholarly grounds. And, of course, the student is
being replaced by the customer who in many cases
wishes to purchase a qualication that can be
cashed-in in some future workplace rather than an
education whose worth is largely intrinsic. We should
hardly be surprised by these developments. Writing
over 60 years ago, Michael Oakeshott issued the fol-
lowing warning:
A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has
degenerated into what is now called research, when its
teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the
whole of an undergraduates time, and when those who
come to be taught . . . desire only a qualication for earning
a living or a certicate to let them in on the exploitation of
the world. (Oakeshott, 1950, p. 117)
In retrospect, we might argue that some faculties
and departments in the University have already met
the fate that Oakeshott described, and that nursing is
perhaps one of them.
The place of nursing in
the University
Oakeshotts apocalyptic vision of the end of the Uni-
versity only really became apparent in the UK in the
1980s with the imposition of the Thatcherite eco-
nomic policy of the internal market. As the University
became more and more corporate and was increas-
ingly governed by consumer-driven market forces, it
began to shift its focus and tailor its products away
from pure subjects which have traditionally been
studied at least in part out of scholarly interest, and
towards applied subjects which are taken primarily
in order to obtain a qualication that has currency in
the workplace. Initially, students gravitated towards
the well-established and academically respectable
technological disciplines such as engineering, but the
1990s saw the arrival of many new subjects and
departments in the University with an overt voca-
tional focus, including (among many others) cultural
studies, leisure studies, sports studies, business studies,
tourism studies, and retail studies. As we can see, this
new category of university departments can usually
be identied by the word studies in the title, which is
appended in order to signify that a pastime, interest,
or occupation is now the subject of academic study.
These new departments often directly address the
requirements of the service industries, and generally
consist of a patchwork of modules, topics, and other
elements taken from a variety of existing academic
subjects, often from the humanities and social
sciences.
Nursing in the academy
When nurse training courses rst moved en masse into
the UK higher education sector in the 1990s, they
tended to adopt many of the characteristics of these
so-called studies subjects. The Project 2000 curricu-
lum at the time emphasized the importance of knowl-
edge from the social sciences and encouraged
patchwork courses that consisted of sociology, psy-
chology, social research, life sciences and, in some
cases, philosophy modules, often taught by non-
nursing lecturers from other departments. As the aca-
demic discipline of nursing matured, it embeddeditself
into the University sector and started to develop its
own academic staff, theoretical perspectives, research
methodologies, and epistemological and ontological
positions. It subsequently attemptedtodissociate itself
from the overtly practical and usually vocational
approach of the studies subjects and assert itself as a
fully-edged academic discipline in its own right.
However, the development of nursing as an aca-
demic subject created a professional, epistemological
and often a geographical schism between those who
taught nursing and those who practised it. This in turn
triggered a number of controversies and disagree-
ments about what nurses should be doing and how
they should be prepared for their role. The disputes
currently being played out in the academic, profes-
sional, and popular press include, among others,
whether nurse education is too theoretical or too prac-
tical; whether it has been dumbed down or over-
intellectualized; whether nurses are over-qualied to
perform basic nursing care or not bright enough to
take onextended(usually medical) roles; whether they
should be educated in a university lecture theatre or
trained in a hospital ward; whether nursing practice
should involve conceptual problem-solving or the
technical application of research-based procedures
and directives; and whether the relationship of nurses
to doctors should be that of handmaiden, assistant,
partner, or replacement. That these issues continue to
resist our attempts at resolution should alert us to the
possibility that there is something amiss, on the one
hand in the relationship between academic nursing
and the nursing profession, and on the other between
academic nursing and the rest of the University.
There have been numerous diagnoses of the
problem, but they can, on the whole, be boiled down
to the simple fact that nurse academics, unlike most of
their university colleagues, are being pulled in two
often conicting directions. On the one hand, the
demands of the corporate University are steering us
ever more towards nancially driven goals and out-
comes, while on the other hand we also have to take
into account a variety of professional demands, for
example in the UK, the nursing code of conduct to
which all registered nurses, including myself, have
signed up (Nursing and Midwifery Council, 2008). As
we have seen, the corporate research agenda exerts
pressure on us to listen and respond to the needs of
research councils and other grant providers rather
than to the needs of practitioners and service provid-
ers; to choose research projects based on the size and
source of the grant rather than on professional crite-
ria such as the contribution that the study will make
to nursing practice and theory; to conduct large mul-
ticentre experimental research projects rather than to
engage with practitioners and service users in small-
scale local studies that will have a direct impact on
professional practice and patient care; and to publish
our ndings in journals with high impact factors which
are read and cited only by other researchers rather
than journals which are read and acted upon by
practitioners.
Likewise, the corporate learning and teaching
agenda emphasizes student throughput, retention
and demonstrable outcomes on the one hand, and
student experience and customer satisfaction on
the other. In some extreme cases, this has resulted in
students who are patently unsafe and incompetent
being pushed through their courses in the name of
economic expediency and being awarded diplomas
and degrees that entitle them to practise as qualied
nurses. In contrast to this corporate customer-
focused strategy, education for professional practice
entails far more than the simple and straightforward
transmission of generalizable propositional knowl-
edge and does not t with the competencies-based,
outcome-driven corporate teaching agenda, nor
with the high-tech, high-volume, high-throughput
distance-learning approach. Neither does it sit com-
fortably with the technical rational epistemology of
Gary Rolfe 32
practice and the simplistic procedural and pathways-
driven approach of the evidence-based nursing
movement.
In a nutshell, I have suggested that pre-registration
nursing education entered the academy at the point
when it was turning into a market-driven corporation,
and that the values and aims of the nursing profession
are becoming ever more at odds with those of the
University. As a further complication, the academic
discipline of nursing is not readily accommodated in
the current university structure: it is not a technology
in which research ndings are applied simply and
unproblematically to practice; it is not one of the
dwindling number of pure subjects; and neither does
it t with the growing number of studies, most of
which are theoretically underdeveloped and whose
coherence and identity is achieved through a patch-
work of applied bits and pieces from other disciplines.
Furthermore, the University (or, at least, my univer-
sity) has no real interest in nursing as an academic
discipline beyond its utility as an undergraduate cash
cow, and has shown little inclination to listen or
respond to its particular needs.
The demise of Thought
The academic discipline of nursing is faced with a
dilemma, perhaps with an aporia. There is no going
back, no return to some golden age of the Enlighten-
ment University and, at least at the moment, no pros-
pect of an exit from the university sector. We must
therefore make the best of what we have and of
where we nd ourselves, albeit in the face of a general
disinterest and often a lack of respect from the
wider academic community. Some colleagues have
responded by playing down or even abandoning their
commitments to the nursing profession, to practitio-
ners, and to patients, and have fully and wholeheart-
edly embraced the corporate mission of grant capture
and student throughput. It might even be argued that
this is our only option if we wish to thrive or even to
survive in the University. As Lyotard (1979, p. xxiv)
remarked, the ethos of the times is be operational or
disappear.
The challenge for those of us who wish to resist the
corporate University from within is therefore to full
the basic demand to be operational lest we disappear,
while at the same time exploring new and creative
ways of making a scholarly contribution to nursing
practice and theory. We must, in Bill Readingss
words, nd ways of dwelling in the ruins of the Uni-
versity without recourse either to romantic nostalgia,
cynicism, or despair. There is clearly no single simple
recipe for this, and Readings was suitably vague when
it came to the practicalities. He was quite clear,
however, that the demise of the academy went hand
in hand with the rejection of Thought (his capitaliza-
tion) as its primary activity and purpose. For Read-
ings, then, the University is in ruins primarily because
Thought, as an activity of intrinsic worth rather than
as a means to some corporate nancial end, is no
longer valued or encouraged in either students or
academic staff. As Readings pointed out, Thought is
non-productive labor, and hence does not show up on
balance sheets except as waste (Readings, 1996, p.
175). Thought as an activity of intrinsic worth has lost
its pre-eminence in the University, and as we might
expect, the devaluation of Thought is inextricably
linked to the demise of philosophy as a distinct and
unique academic discipline. Thought would appear to
offer little to the modern student in search of a voca-
tional qualication, and as Readings observed:
nothing in the nature of the institution will enshrine
Thought or protect it from economic imperatives
(Readings, 1996). But if the devaluation of Thought is
linked to the demise of the academic discipline of
philosophy, then arguably the reinstatement of phi-
losophy to the academy will bring with it a renewed
commitment to critique and the practice of thinking.
Philosophy and the lower faculty
The faculty of philosophy originally occupied a
special and privileged place within the Enlightenment
University, to the extent that the idea of a University
without a philosophy department was until recently
considered unthinkable. Writing in the late 18th
century, Kant categorized the University into three
higher faculties and a lower faculty. The purpose of
the higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine was
to attend, as he put it, to the eternal, civil, and physical
well-being of the people, and this task fell largely
under the remit and control of the state. However, in
addition to these three state-controlled faculties, Kant
argued that:
It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the
university also contain a faculty that is independent of the
governments command with regard to its teachings; one
that, having no commands to give, is free to evaluate every-
thing, and concerns itself with the interests of the sciences
[Wissenschaft], that is, with truth; one in which reason is
authorized to speak out publicly. (Kant, 1798, pp. 2729)
Kant identied philosophy as the faculty charged
with this critical (in both senses of the word) role. He
continued:
The reason why this faculty, despite its great prerogative
(freedom), is called the lower faculty lies in human nature;
for a man who can give commands, even though he is
someone elses humble servant, is considered more distin-
guished than a free man who has no one under his command.
(p. 29)
From the very outset then, philosophy occupied a
unique position in the modern University. Philoso-
phers were largely free to think outside of the con-
straints of government control and accountability, and
performed the essential duty of evaluating and regu-
lating the higher faculties. Philosophy acted both as a
mediator between the disparate agendas of the facul-
ties of divinity, law, and medicine, and also as the
critical function that called them to account. It was
able to do this because, for Kant (1787, p. 657), phi-
losophy is unique among the faculties insofar as it has
no content of its own but is rather the science of the
relation of all knowledge to the essential ends of
human reason.
The demise of philosophy
The triple role of philosophy as the dening feature of
the University, as the mediator between the other
faculties, and as the independent and neutral faculty
of critique charged with the pursuit of truth, gradually
eroded during the early years of the 20th century. On
the one hand, the discipline of philosophy began to
turn its gaze inward and to call into question its own
relationship with truth. And on the other hand, it
renounced its neutral position with regard to the
other faculties and was perceived to turn away from
the arts towards mathematics and science. In the view
of Jurgen Habermas (1968, p. 4), philosophy moved
from providing a reective and transcendent theory
of universal knowledge to what he called the pseudo-
normative regulation of established research. This
scientic turn, under the guise of logical positivism
and later of analytical and linguistic philosophy,
resulted in a schism within the university and a back-
lash in the form rstly of German phenomenology
and latterly of French post-structural philosophy and
literary criticism.
By the second half of the 20th century, philosophy
had become detached from everyday affairs and
largely inaccessible to the educated lay person. More
worryingly, however, philosophy in the 20th century
had become too technical and specialized even for
academics from other faculties in the University, so
that its function since the time of Kant as the gate-
keeper of truth and reason was called into question.
Suddenly, the idea of a University without a faculty of
philosophy was no longer quite so unthinkable. As
philosophy departments in the UK began to close,
there was a rapid diaspora of philosophers across the
whole university as they found new homes in depart-
ments as diverse as medicine, geography, cultural
studies, and English literature. A number of writers
have expressed concern over this apparent resur-
gence of philosophy across the University. Alain
Badiou, writing in 2009, complained that:
if philosophys existence was declared minimal twenty years
ago, one could today maintain that it nds itself no less under
threat but for the diametrically opposed reason that it is now
endowed with an excessive, articial existence. Particularly
in France, philosophy is everywhere. It serves as a trade-
mark for various media pundits. It livens up cafs and health
clubs. It has its magazines and its gurus. It is universally
called upon, by everything from banks to major state com-
missions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. (Badiou,
2009, pp. 6768)
Elsewhere, Badiou (2005) made the distinction
between the TV philosopher who is wheeled out to
give an opinion on the issues of the day, and the
Gary Rolfe 34
genuine philosopher who constructs her/his own
problems rather than merely resolving the problems
of others.
If we apply Badious distinction to the academy, we
can see that there is a danger that the applied phi-
losophers who are found in departments across the
University, including nursing, are becoming little
more than the TV variety who pronounce on the
ethics of this or the epistemology of that, and whose
role is to answer questions rather than to pose them.
This fundamental shift in what the academy now
demands of philosophy and philosophers might be
seen as a response to the growing ethos of manageri-
alism in the corporate University. As one manager in
my own department was recently overheard to say to
an academic: Dont bring me problems, bring me
solutions. As corny and clichd as that remark might
sound, it ts perfectly with the growing corporate
culture of measurable outcomes, key performance
indicators, and tangible (preferably monetary) results.
The role of the philosopher (and, indeed, of all aca-
demics) is no longer to problematize but to provide
simplied answers to simplistic questions. The Univer-
sity has, to use Michael Oakeshotts phrase, ceased to
function as a manner of human activity and has
become a machine for achieving a particular purpose
or producing a particular result. Thus, while many
so-called multidisciplinary teams and departments
now employ a philosopher, there is an expectation
that everyone pulls together in order to reach a con-
sensus and produce a result, and that the role of the
philosopher is to solve her/his particular aspect of the
problem at hand as it rolls along the conveyor belt.
The return of philosophy
This expectation that the philosopher will t seam-
lessly into the team, will bring a philosophical point
of view to the table, and will resolve problems
through reasoned discussion and the application of
logic is based on what is arguably a naive misconcep-
tion about philosophy and philosophers. Slavoj iek
(2005) suggests how a true philosopher might be
recognized:
Youre sitting in a caf and someone challenges you: Come
on, lets discuss that in depth. The philosopher will immedi-
ately say Im sorry, I must leave, and will make sure he
disappears as quickly as possible. (p. 49)
Philosophers, then, tend not to be team players and
are not concerned with simple or simplistic solutions.
iek (echoing Wittgenstein) continued:
Philosophy is not a dialogue. Name me a single example of a
successful philosophical dialogue that wasnt a dreadful mis-
understanding. This is true also for most prominent cases:
Aristotle didnt understand Plato correctly; Hegel . . . of
course didnt understand Kant. And Heidegger fundamen-
tally didnt understand anyone at all. So, no dialogue. (p. 50)
For iek, true philosophers generally do not
enter into debates about the issues of the day; they do
not take sides or give opinions or provide answers.
The rst gesture of the philosopher is usually to
point out that the alternatives being put forward are
almost always false alternatives or what Deleuze &
Guattari (1994) termed a disjunctive synthesis. As
iek (2005, p. 51) pointed out, we must change
the concepts of the debate, that is, we must
re-problematize it, which on the whole is not a
popular move with fellow academics, managers, and
administrators who wish to solve the current problem
rather than create a new one.
In his book The Differend, Jean Franois Lyotard
made a similar distinction between what he called the
intellectual and the philosopher. Whereas the intellec-
tual smoothes over difference and generally supports
the status quo for the sake of political hegemony
(Lyotard, 1983, p. 142), the job of the philosopher is to
problematize disputes and discussions by pointing out
incommensurabilities and by attempting to keep
debates open rather than resolve them through the
imposition of hegemonic power. Lyotards statement
at the very beginning of his book that The time has
come to philosophize (p. xiii) should therefore be
read as a call to all academics to resist the production-
line mentality of the corporate University of Excel-
lence and to open up a new space for Thought that
refuses to close down debate and discussion for the
sake of an articially coherent, unied, and market-
able product. Readings, who was a Lyotard scholar,
referred to this attitude of encouraging parallel lines
of thought as dissensus. He claimed that it should
form the foundation for a new way of dwelling in the
ruins of the corporate University and suggested the
need to build a community of Thought, that is, a
community committed to dissensus. This is not a com-
munity of dissent; not a community of opposition; not
a community that likes to say no. Rather, it is a
community that, to borrow Deleuze and Guattaris
term, says . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .; one that
encourages a plurality of conicting opinion with no
pressure to achieve a consensus in the name of truth,
beauty, or a marketable product (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 25). A community of dissensus is concerned
not with an end product but with reinstating Thought
as a process and as a problematic which, as Readings
said, does not function as an answer but as a question
(Readings, 1996, p. 160).
Readingss invitation to dwell among the ruins in
communities of Thought can therefore be interpreted
as a return to philosophy in its traditional Kantian
sense of the lower faculty of the University. This
lower faculty would stand apart from the manufac-
ture and sale of knowledge, information, and quali-
cations that has become the main business of the
University and which is now more or less self-
perpetuating and immune to internal critique. For
Kant, the faculty of philosophy was lower because it
renounced political power and authority in return for
academic freedom. Transposed to the 21st century,
this would rst and foremost entail replacing nancial
accountancy with academic accountability.
Dwelling in the ruins
The time has come to philosophize, that is to say, to
challenge and call into question the basic assumptions
on which the corporate University rests. This can only
be achieved by members of the University itself, and
they have to do it while at the same time sustaining
the very institution that they are calling to account.
Philosophy in the 21st century is no longer something
we can do instead of, say, sociology, mathematics, or
even nursing. Philosophy in the corporate University
must be done alongside our academic specialism,
from within our home department or faculty. To do
philosophy in this sense is to critique the ethos of the
corporate University as it applies to our particular
academic discipline, to call into question the unspo-
ken assumptions on which that ethos rests, and to
challenge and subvert the corporate mission as and
when it comes into conict with the professional
ethics and values of nursing. To paraphrase the
manager cited earlier, our duty as philosophers is to
bring problems, not solutions. For nurse academics,
this critique might (or perhaps should) include a deep
and fundamental questioning of the relationship
between research, theory, and practice; of the
meaning of education in relation to practice; of why,
for whom, and by whom nursing research should be
undertaken; and perhaps even of whether the Univer-
sity is the best and most appropriate home for nursing
education and research.
The University is in ruins and there are a number of
ways that we, as academics and students, can respond.
We can pine nostalgically for the return of the
Enlightenment University; we can actively rebel
against the corporate machine that has taken its
place; or we can sink into an attitude of passive
despair. Readings insisted that none of these options
were acceptable and argued instead that we should
dwell in the ruins without alibis, that is to say, as
authentically and productively as we are able, given
that we all need at least supercially to satisfy the
demands of a corporate mission that we neither
agreed nor signed up to. This is arguably more press-
ing for nurse academics than for geographers, math-
ematicians, and historians. Firstly, as we have seen,
there are tangible points of conict and contradiction
between the corporate demands of the University and
the professional demands of nursing practice. And
secondly, the requirement by the nursing profession
for competent graduates and effective research is in
some cases quite literally a matter of life and death. To
paraphrase Heidegger, philosophy must be our way of
dwelling in the ruined University.
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Rolfe (2013) Thinking As A Subversive Activity

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