“You burn money!”
I once had a casual conversation with a colleague at Malmö University in Sweden. Or, in fact, not so casual. She was a Danish lady, elegant and intellectual, and loved by the students. Calmly, she told me she´d been called in for a private meeting with her Head of Dept. Before my colleague barely had closed the door, she´d been attacked: “You burn money”! Confused at first, she realized what it was about. She had failed some poor students and at a Swedish university – where they are paid by the state only once each and every student exit through the front gates – degree in hand – a “Fail” meant Malmö University would not get the money. Not now, at least, and perhaps never. Ah, the cynicism!
“But what was I supposed to do?” my colleague asked me, shaking her head. I said something along the lines of: “Well, you could give them all a “Pass”. The students would have wasted their time and money and once they were hired, our organizations would stumble and bureaucracy crumble. But at least your Head of Dept. would walk about with her nose in the air.” “Yes”, my colleague said, “I know.” “Well, I was only joking. You can´t do that, can you?” “No”, she continued. “You can´t let your students and your country down.”
Niccolò Machiavelli – Portrait by Santi di Tito, c. 1550–1600
An ideological eczema is spreading across our institutions of higher learning, and as a result of it, the role of the university is no longer to ensure that our students will learn a whole lot, be as intellectually independent as they possibly can, drawing any conclusion they want based on the knowledge they are taught. Instead, other, murky objectives have taken over, such as – for instance – the cynical greed among Deans, Heads, Vice-Chancellors, and, I fear, certain Professors also. No matter if we teach them nothing, they seem to say, as long as we can get our hands on the cash. Pondering about suitable parallels, my thoughts wandered aimlessly towards Bertrand Russell´s acid review of Machiavelli´s The Prince: “A morality for bandits”. Not a morality for Lux Mundi, though. Here, our goal is classic: the intellectual growth of our students.
Göran Adamson