The Spectre of a Private University
Isn’t a private university a contradiction in terms? Knowledge and education must be public goods, “universal” even, as the name suggests; And the idea that education should be an end in itself, and not for profit, is at least as old as Socrates — who was (unlike Marx) adamantly opposed to charging fees for teaching. European Universities have made Socrates their patron from early on, and their inception predates the rise of bourgeois capital and a globalised economy by at least two centuries. Universities have been venerable institutions, taking pride in their long memory, their monumental buildings and ideals. In the 19th century, their members were allowed to carry special weapons, rights and insignia. Universities were largely self-gouverned bubbles, with their own jurisdiction and students and professors alike walked the earth, sure of their status and privilege.
Now they have to scramble for money, like everyone else.
With old protections falling, state universities have long felt economic forces encroaching on them. New rules and requirements slowly seemed to undermine the dignity of the pure strife for knowledge. Universities do not sell a product! Students are not customers! Intellectual achievement is not a quantifiable resource! Such was the tone that I grew up in, when I studied the humanities in the 1990s. The German education system had fallen behind, austerity measures were taking their toll, and capitalist forces had proven stronger than the emancipatory dreams of the 70s. Still, universities were always among the last to change. On the old corridors the tides of current economic pressures were felt somewhat less strongly — just strong enough to fear and hate them, but not so strong as to having to actually interact with them. There was enough space for ample criticism. But such a mixture of fear and distance creates a self-righteousness and very uncreative psychology. Resistance can be a very conservative affair. Digging your heels in, even for the best of reasons, doesn’t make you better at walking.
And this is the most amazing thing about working at CODE. We are not sitting motionless, waiting for change to happen elsewhere until it finally reaches us. We make it ourselves. Being at CODE is a creative endeavour, because curiosity and change are its foundations; and because even the best of academic traditions have their holy cows. It feels like for a long time I have sat in the last carriage of a train, now I can sit by the engine. A small engine maybe, but an engine after all. It needs fuel, true, and operating it can be a messy business. But it is self-determined and independent (and German University Law helps quite a little bit with that, and so does having a founding team that has more ideals than financial interests). So here we go. There is still time for being disillusioned later.
The immense (and undeserved) gift of being at CODE is this: While others rightly mourn the suffocation of free thinking, we can think about how to reconceive of an institution that provides for it. This privilege has been handed to us, yes, by private money. And yes, that means we have to be close with those very forces, that we used to judge, conveniently and comprehensively, as evil. The privilege of making this simplistic judgement is gone. We cannot treat “capitalists” as a faceless mass anymore. Of course we still have the responsibility to call out evil. But we also have the chance to talk, and to be surprised. And having to play that game on a daily basis, I am not even sure that this is always only a compromise. It’s not the case that I am only ever learning about and never from those who are now, if you want it or not, the most influential architects of our future: corporate liberals with a strong bias for initiative, creative optimism, and the fact that you never know (also a Socratic virtue, by the way, that few Marxists share). There are a thousand ways to become complicit, mediocre and docile. But apparently, not even being a state university can save you from that. And at least our private university is good for having ideas. So while others mourn, debate and watch, we can do what private does best: do something. And learn from mistakes other universities do not have the privilege (or the courage) to make.
Intellectual Postscript
Maybe there is a certain, if you allow me to put it in such terms, dialectics of the dialectics of enlightenment. Yes, it’s true that enlightenment’s pursuit of freedom has led to the coercion of capitalism, and worse. But the conceptualisation of this fact leads to a false negative totalitarianism that renders those who conceive of it needlessly inert. At the very least there is a little irony in the fact that right in the midst of those forces which were so destructive to the old status quo, a form of freedom is reborn (and this is subtly related to the fact that many influential Marxists were from well-off backgrounds). Of course none of this justifies any injustices that have lead to this situation. Maybe a private university is still a contradiction in terms. But if Marx taught us anything, then that contradictions are the driving force of change.
