Page 11 - Professorial Lecture - Professor P van Rooyen

The ideal for a university is governance of the self – providing individuals
and collectives with a vocabulary and various techniques via which they can
relate to and control themselves (Dean, 1999). Foucault presented the
perspective of “govern-mentality” (Foucault, 1978). Here freedom and
steering not only co-exist, but shape each other. Govern-mentality is the
government of the self, a mentality to self-government. In this way it
constructs individuals who are capable of choice and action, shapes them as
active subjects, and seeks to align their choices with set objectives. If this
freedom and capacity for choice is abolished, there can be no steering – only
coercion. Govern-mentality thus assumes that steering (government) takes
place through the freedom to decide, and indeed targets the freedom of the
governed by attempting to align the goals of the governed with the goal of
governing.

These changes mean an increasing focus on professionalization. The reform
implied an entirely new way of ‘thinking university’, namely a more
instrumental view, where the state-university relationship is contractual
and change reflects a continuous calculation of relative performance and
costs, and the University, or some of its parts, will be disposed of if there are
more efficient ways to achieve shifting objectives (Olsen, 2005).

Since taking over from the state of nature the modern State apparatus is
notorious for restricting the liberties of the individual. This can be more or
less restrictive, up to the point of structural violence. According to Galtung,
structural violence can be significantly reduced only in a context of more
individual freedom and autonomy (See Dilts, 2012). The democratic
imperative is clear: the State should not try to engage and confine the social
and private spaces within which individuals and communities live and
function.

I propose the vision of the ideal university as a competitive university. It is
a university that is designed – with national interests in mind – to act
dynamically and strategically on a new global market characterized by a
knowledge economy agenda. The competitive university must service its
customers by providing the services (education, research, candidates, etc.)

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