[-empyre-] Engineering the University- Week Two

[Chad Wellmon]

Thanks so much for the great observations and questions, Ned. You raise two key concepts: newness and crisis.

Claims of media surplus––too many books! too much data! too much to know!––have historically been tied to claims that this moment in history is radically unique, unprecedented, or new. Late eighteenth-century intellectuals and writers increasingly lamented a surplus of print and repeatedly argued that their particular experience was historically unprecedented and, therefore, required immediate and fundamental change. 

Claims about media surplus are rarely neutral; they are fundamentally normative. Observations of excess or proliferation, whatever the medium, are almost always tied to proposed solutions about how to fix the perceived problem. Too many books? . . . become better bibliographers, write more and better encyclopedias, become better readers, organize better libraries, create a new kind of university. Too much data?  . . . unplug, read this and not that, buy an iWatch. Oftentimes, when a critic, intellectual, or political leader claims radical “newness,” unprecedented conditions, or “crisis,” they are attempting to frame a particular moment and set of conditions as one without history and, thus, without the constraints that historical knowledge can often afford. As Nietzsche never tired of warning us, history and memory can be heavy burdens––and this in both productive and negative ways. A crisis is a turning point, so the declaration of “crisis” can function similarly––it can declare a moment unhinged from a past and, thus, radically open to future possibilities. 

These rhetorical and ethical moves can be liberating but they can also be stifling. If a moment is so radically new or unprecedented, then, so goes the argument, radical and unprecedented measures are required. Claims to newness are used to legitimate a whole range of actions as necessary in an exceptional moment, a moment when the norms governing institutional, political, or ethical relationships or actions no longer hold. 

With respect to the rise of the modern research university, “newness” and claims about media surplus served similar functions. The proliferation of print over the course of the 18th century led a group of Prussian intellectuals and writers to argue in 1795 that the university as traditionally conceived had become irrelevant. Easy access to print had rendered the university surperfluous. Universities, argued the most radical critics, should be abolished and replaced with more practically-minded trade schools. The unparalleled situation of print required immediate and drastic action. 

An analogous situation happened in the summer of 2012 at UVa. We faced a “crisis of technological disruption,” claimed our board of trustees, and the only way forward was for radical and immediate change. Similar to previous invocations of crisis and newness, these claims about our media moment didn’t just describe, they prescribed. The university (UVa was just a stand in) had to change and now. The claims to radical disruption legitimated, for some, the firing of a university president by a committee of four. Suddenly, we existed in a moment outside of history and outside of time––there was no historical time to think through nor was enough time to reflect, to consider the relevant claims and reasons. There was only time to act, i.e. fire a president and implement MOOCs. (Here <http://chadwellmon.com/2015/03/03/136/> is my description of that moment in 2012.)


Chad Wellmon
Associate Professor of German Studies
University of Virginia
chadwellmon.com <http://chadwellmon.com/>

Author, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University <https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/organizing-enlightenment>




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