Social responsibility vs. academic capitalism: The challenges confronting media studies and higher education Professor Frank Sligo, Massey University, New Zealand MLeague Forum: Future Image, Future Leadership, Shanghai 19 May 2011
Being the critic and conscience of society Each New Zealand university was established by an Act of Parliament, and each is mandated in its Act to “serve as the critic and conscience of society”. That is, each university’s Act of Parliament specifically requires it to undertake work as a moral guardian for its society.
Speaking truth to power In media studies this is sometimes known as “speaking truth to power”. This however is difficult for any individual to do, and requires a high level of courage (which each of us may or may not possess!). However what is difficult for an individual is much more challenging for an institution such as a university, which is also charged with being an instrument of social and economic development. Increasingly universities are competing with one another with the aim of supplementing what is often diminishing funding from government sources.
Being creative and connected Massey University has identified two important characteristics by which it wants to be known: being creative and connected. Being connected means in particular seeking liaison with industry, with the goal of increasing the funding we obtain from this source. However, leaders in industry will naturally have their own sensitivities about what they may perceive as criticism. This may serve to inhibit critical comment from university personnel.
Being a critic and conscience ... Is sometimes also described as “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” ... This is much easier to achieve when one stands aloof from the people or group being criticised than when you are trying to become more closely connected to them. Yet one benefit of stronger connections with industry is that university staff by this means do learn the language and assumptions used in industry and build more mutual trust. In this way they obtain insights into how best to sell a message to industry people that may be difficult for them to accept in the first instance.
What does critic and conscience mean? To the best of my knowledge, no New Zealand university has an agreed-upon statement about how this is to be implemented, though there are various traditions around it. About two months ago the full professors in my College at Massey organised a half-day forum on this question, what does it mean in our current environment to serve as the critic and conscience of society? There is an old saying, you can take all the economists in the world and lay them end to end, but they will never reach a conclusion. The same might be said for professors who are debating the issue of critic and conscience.
Responsibilities in balance The point was made at the meeting that our role as critic and conscience needs to be seen in the context of our other responsibilities. These include service to our stakeholders (students, their families, students’ employers, the wider national society which funds the universities, and the global community which our graduates are entering).
We did come to the conclusion that an important element in our responsibilities as critic and conscience had to be a better understanding of what our key stakeholders understood by those responsibilities. Hence it is planned to research what stakeholders think about our role as critic and conscience (if they do in fact think about the university in this way).
The risk of seeming irrelevant The risk for any individuals who may focus only on uttering criticisms of public current issues is that they are likely to be dismissed as irrelevant to society. It is important for scholars in communication and media studies not to be written off as irrelevant to the real world and actual needs of the societies that they inhabit. If they are, this represents a great waste of resources. Well-trained minds with a valuable point of view should not be extraneous to the urgent currents of social and economic development.
The Law of Requisite Variety Our deliberations on this subject may be assisted via use of the LRV (Ashby, 1956). This holds that internal complexity is needed if a system (or person) is to cope adequately with the external complexity which it encounters. That is, a system (or entity, or person) which is flexible enough to employ many options can better cope with change, ambiguity and uncertainty in its environment than a system which is so rigid that it has few ways of responding to the change it encounters.
What the LRV proposes The LRV proposes that a system which is oriented only to a single, well-understood set of conditions, at first glance looks to be very efficient. But it tends to fail at the point when its environmental conditions change. Too much specialisation, thus narrowness, in social roles, undermines the ideal of the fully engaged citizen.
An example from education For example, if a student at university is trained only quite narrowly in a particular discipline, essentially they are being prepared for the past, not for the future. A given discipline in which they are being trained may represent a “how to do it” form of thinking from the past. If so, graduates are likely to flounder once they find that environmental conditions have changed. Hence university education needs to incorporate breadth and diversity in what it provides in order to equip its students with usefully disparate ways of seeing.
Who is responsible? The LRV implies that each of us is personally responsible for the intellectual complexity and subtlety of our own learning and the quality of how well we teach our students. However, the LRV also implies that we cannot serve in any role of critic and conscience until we are first effective critics of ourselves. Or put another way, our service as critic and conscience can only be as good as our capability to be responsibly self-critical.
What should media studies in the university do? Media studies in the university has a special role in producing well-educated citizens who know how to think critically about all aspects of their society and about the media in particular. In the globalising economy of the 21 st century, with the relentless spread of the Internet, these citizens will have access, if they choose, to the opinions of intellectuals in media studies and every other topic.
The allure of the shopping channel – is this a problem? Increasingly people around the world can make free choices in terms of what they access online. When this is the case, each individual can study the views of scholars in media studies, or else can watch online such as the sports channels, travel channel, shopping channel, or the fashion channel. And if the well-educated citizen would rather watch sports or the shopping channel than read the writings of you or me, then that is their choice.
The task of media studies educators, researchers and commentators in the university is therefore to compete in the online free market of ideas, and try to make our messages as relevant, interesting, and as thoughtful as we can.
Society benefits from its critics Ultimately, if a society is to flourish, it needs its critics. The New York film critic Pauline Kael once said, “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising” (Wikiquote Pauline Kael, n.d.) . We as communication and media studies educators and scholars should play our part in being brave enough to be critics in the public sphere. But we need to balance that freedom against our responsibilities to the societies that we serve and to the needs of our institutions.
We should explore whether there are traps into which we might be falling in our professional practice. Does our scholarship really enhance the moral evolution, autonomy, and development of humankind?
Guidelines from the LRV In this way the LRV offers guidelines as to how to go about being a critic and conscience of society. If media educators ensure that they have carefully scrutinised their own consciences, then they are in a much stronger position to be a critic both of their institution and what lies beyond. In the same way, if a university follows due process in ensuring that its internal ethics and processes are in good shape, then it should be much better equipped to play its part in being critic and conscience for its society.
References Ashby, R.W. (1956) An introduction to cybernetics . London: Methuen Wikiquote Pauline Kael (n.d.) Downloaded May 12, 2011, from: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Communication University of China and to the sponsors of this Forum for the invitation to be present.
Recommend
More recommend
