This post was originally published in Kronika: Filozofski magazin as “Što sa znanjem koje više ne zna čemu služi?” It has been translated by the author and reproduced here with the permission of Kronika.
“Where is the life we lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we lost in information?”
T. S. Eliot (The Rock, 1934)
If we are to judge by the notorious “policy frameworks” housing various research, education, and innovation “strategies,” “implementation plans,” “guidelines,” and “statements” issued by different national and international “bodies”—all those indispensable, buzzword-laden panaceas of modern administration—science and higher education appear to have merged into a miraculous creature. This creature is at once flexible and stable, competitive and inclusive, excellent and sustainable, socially relevant and market-adaptable. It measures, evaluates, optimizes, and improves, and in doing so shows not the slightest trace of fatigue. However, if knowledge really functioned as described in the tables and indicators of these documents, we would have known everything there is to know long ago. The problem, of course, is that science and higher education have never been like that. When they are forced to become so, we get something completely different: formally, a merely embellished managerial simulation of meaning, but in reality, a chimera, a wondrous mythological creature that the “spirit of the times” is trying so hard to bring to life.
But as in the original myth, this modern chimera of science and higher education carries within itself a lesson that is persistently ignored, namely that absolute power, no matter how impressive it may seem from the outside, carries within itself the seeds of its own downfall. The lion in front may seemingly demonstrate strength, the goat in the middle stubbornness, and the snake-like behind determination, but together they form something that cannot survive without constant internal tension. A system composed of flexibility and stability, evaluations and competitions, excellence and market adaptability can only function until it is confronted with reality, historical experience, the logic of cognition, or simply common sense. When confronted, it, like the ancient Greek Chimera whose mythical power, stubbornness, and determination turn into a self-consuming force of greed and manipulation, shows all its weaknesses. It reveals that it is too complex, too contradictory, and too self-sufficient to last without bursting at the seams. Marvelous creatures, however impressively conceived, always fail in their attempts at self-realization, often causing considerable harm to themselves and to others. Therein lies the paradox of the modern chimera of science and higher education. It is marvelous, ambitious, and grandiose in its strategies, but fragile at its very foundation.
Every mythical story has its heroes, of course. No one could oppose the mythical ancient Greek Chimera until Bellerophon appeared on the winged Pegasus. Is there such a hero in the story of the modern chimera of science and higher education? In fact, there is, although he is no longer among the living, and his ideas live on—Alexander von Humboldt, who had already performed a heroic feat, although this is somehow hushed up today or, at best, forgotten. His model was not a failed utopia but a successful institutional undertaking. Moreover, German, and later European, science and universities of the nineteenth century became a global reference precisely because the model gave them time, autonomy, and trust, producing an explosion of truly excellent theoretical and empirical knowledge in both the natural sciences and humanities and the social sciences, never seen before. And all this was achieved not despite the “inefficiency” that the model advocated, but precisely because of it. The model that we so easily accuse today of being “uncompetitive” and even “useless” was one of the most productive we know. What has changed is not its inherent value but our willingness to tolerate slowness, risk, and knowledge that does not come with a pre-filled performance template.
However, when the “Humboldtian model” is invoked in discussions about science and higher education today, there is unease. Isn’t this a return to a romantic era of professors in long coats, scarves, hats, and their indispensable pipes, free from concern and responsibility for society and its needs? Wasn’t that model also historically “impure,” socially limited, politically conditioned, and ultimately elitist, as is often claimed? Of course, like any model, it is not without its weaknesses. The problem arises only when Humboldt becomes nostalgia or myth, just as the market model, which wants to live only on “excellent,” “competitive,” and “market-oriented” science, becomes dogma. If, however, it is read as a corrective, not as a prescription, then things come to life. The Humboldtian model emphasized the unity of research and teaching, the autonomy of the scientific question free from market and political imperatives, and knowledge as development rather than as a training or production facility. It was not intended as an escape from reality but as a defense of an academic space in which knowledge did not yet know in advance what it was for. This is precisely what is most intolerable to today’s system: the idea of doing something without a clear outcome, without a measurable effect, and without a guarantee of success. The market cannot stand it, management tries to control it, and today’s science, without all this, supposedly does not exist.
Where, then, is the solution to a system that has already noticeably begun to show signs of fatigue? It is clear that both the market and the Humboldtian models fail when absolutized, the former ending in complete heteronomy, the latter in the myth of an autonomous elite outside society. The solution is therefore not in a new grand model, another grandiose reform with an acronym, a prescribed logo, and a PowerPoint presentation in corporate colors. The solution is neither in some kind of synthesis that would end in “excellence with a human face,” but rather in the recognition that science is always partially dysfunctional, slow, and unpredictable, and that this is precisely its value, historically demonstrated and epistemically justified. In practice, this would mean persistently and courageously criticizing management chimeras rather than offering better management. The solution is actually in abandoning the idea of an “entrepreneurial” solution. Instead, we need a social and institutional decision to (re)build into the very foundations of science and higher education a tension that does not need to be “resolved” but maintained. Anyone who knows the history of science at all will recognize in this the only clear and reasonable form that we need to “fill in.”
On this historically and epistemically proven successful path, there are not many steps that should be taken. Autonomy is certainly the first of them, but not just declarative autonomy, written into statutes and strategic visions, but the boring, expensive, and politically unattractive kind, brought to life through stable core financing, reduced dependence on project-based survival, and trust in judgment, as opposed to a system that does not trust people but trusts numbers, even when they actually show nothing but themselves. Admittedly, qualitative evaluation is slow, conflictual, and imperfect, but it has the advantage of being able to recognize meaning where “indicators” do not see it. Knowledge is not to be assessed like a credit rating but as a dialogue that lasts for years, sometimes decades. We also need differentiation within the system, because the false universality of excellence produces a system in which everyone must be, at once, everything—internationally competitive, interdisciplinary, innovative, and socially relevant. In this way, not only does the acquisition of knowledge actually become a more or less irrelevant hyperproduction along the “line of least resistance,” but it also erases the differences between disciplines, institutions, and rhythms of work. The solution is therefore not in “lowering the criteria,” which modern administrations are so terrified of, but in admitting that not all criteria are the same, that some places simply are and must remain slow, theoretical, and “unprofitable,” because without them the rest of the system becomes impoverished in the long term.
But ultimately, and perhaps most importantly, trend-blasphemous as it may sound, science and the universities must once again become places of legitimate loss, places where research can fail, where questions can remain unanswered, and where education does not have to immediately find a market niche. A society that can no longer afford this has already decided that it is interested in knowledge only as long as it is “useful” and “profitable.” This is, of course, not a technical question but a political one, and not in the narrowly partisan sense but in a deeply historical and human sense: how much we as a society are prepared to tolerate uncertainty, slowness, “uselessness,” and the “unprofitability” of thought. And whether we have the courage to admit that it is precisely in these “flaws” that its greatest value lies. A return to Humboldt would not mean a return to a romantic past but a recognition of the boundaries and limitations of the present, and it would not mean an escape from the world or an abdication of responsibility but a conscious acknowledgment that science and higher education, among the most important institutions of the modern world, cannot function exclusively according to the logic of the market and management. Not because they are evil, but because they cannot recognize what cannot be readily measured. And that is where, for better or worse, most of what gives science and higher education their meaning still resides.
Boris Kožnjak
Boris Kožnjak is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia. Holding a degree in physics and a PhD in philosophy, he primarily focuses on the history and philosophy of science, while also maintaining a keen interest in the sociology and psychology of scientific and philosophical knowledge.
