Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy

George Fallis’ examination of the plight of the large, Anglo-American, research-intensive universities has recently been reprinted in paperback making it more accessible to many of us who should be reading it. As Fallis notes, most of us in the academic community are “remarkably poorly read” about what is driving the world of the multiversity and what lies in store for us. In Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy, he sets out what he takes to be the most salient ideas that have shaped universities over time and then posits five characteristics of our age that are transforming the multiversity. His cri de coeur is that the emerging idea of the multiversity as an explicit service to the economy will so radically change the function of the multiversity that its critical function as an institution of democracy will wither. As members of the academy, whether as presidents, provosts, deans, or faculty members, we share the responsibility for ensuring that doesn’t happen. Five years after it was first published, the book is still essential reading, though not all of us will find all parts of it of equal interest. Fallis’s history of various ideas of universities that have been at play over the years, though, is helpful in understanding the tension between the teaching (particularly undergraduate teaching) and research functions that causes so much stress for us both individually and institutionally today. It also helps us understand why we should all care about the plight of the social sciences and humanities, whether we are in arts, science, or professional faculties. However, our interest in his discussions of the five characteristics of our age that he is most worried about—the constrained welfare state, information technology, postmodernism, globalization, and commercialization of research—will vary, depending on how much we already know about these issues. In skimming through these sections, it is important not to miss his real point: to expose the impact those forces have been having on our universities. What makes his analysis compelling reading, though, is his conclusion that we need to make serving democracy an explicit part of the multiversity’s mission and his subsequent discussion of the implications for us as academics if that were to happen. While Fallis is disinclined to present the alternative as a “doom and gloom” scenario, he is gravely concerned that something fundamental is threatening to transform the multiuniversity and its role in society, that it is suffering a drift in mission toward becoming an instrument of the economy, putting our inheritance at risk.