Programska knjižica - Hrvatsko filozofsko društvo

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of its disciplines. However, during modern history of university important
and perhaps fundamental changes on both sides of this source were
introduced. Progressive optimism which promoted science as myth of
modernity has been diminished and deconstructed lately. Does this deconstruction
produce a bricolage, or a change of totalitarian unity into
wholeness?
2. How does university manage its intertwined mission (to produce highly
educated workers who enter labor market with their useful abilities
and to produce scholars who pursue the ideal of universal knowledge
for its own sake) at the same time? This is not just recent idea really,
as Schiller’s inaugural lecture in Jena (May 1789) exemplifies. At the
same time, university is expected to produce knowledge as its highest
good and useful solutions for trivial applications needed in profit-making
processes, and for domination and hegemony necessary for social
management. Famous Humboldt university reform (1810) was shaped
as much by enlightened philosophical principles as by need to recreate
Prussia into strong and stable state with the mission to unite all Germany,
with a touch but not too much of modernization. Can both these
double missions continue to live hand in hand?
3. Neoliberal approach to the reform of university which became especially
stressed and stressful part of so-called Bologna process is contradictory:
fundamental tenet of neoliberalism is that state and economy
have to stay apart, and that politics should not try to direct business and
market processes; in case of university and other public services, however,
it is expected that state power and not university as autonomous
enterprise has to pressure university into more business-like behavior,
with the aim to produce “fast-food” labor force with directly applicable
skills and knowledge, profit-ready solutions for productive processes,
and practical ideas of how to maintain social stability. If university is or
can become an enterprise, it should, according to neoliberal principles,
be left alone, because state pressure cannot have positive managerial
effects on entrepreneurship; but, on the other side, neoliberal mantra
insists that state is to pressure all public services to become market oriented,
and to sell them on the market finally, to privatize them – from
prison to university. At another level of contradiction, university is expected
to embrace managerial leadership over its pedagogical and research
activities, while this kind of management applies exactly those
methods and motives which were exposed by university itself as destructive
to science, and dangerous for society as a whole. This is more
than simple contradiction, because it reveals that neoliberal vision is to