Can I begin by congratulating Coventry UCU for coming up with the idea of a Teach Out and on adopting the theme of ‘(Re)Humanising the University: An Alternative Coventry’ Programme. 

When I thought about offering to run a workshop, my mind immediately led me to think, before we can talk about (Re)humanizing, we need to understand what we mean by human and the processes of dehumanization.

And so in the next 20 minutes or so I want to explore the notion of dehumanisation and consider how education has, both historically, but in the present period of the shift towards a utilitarian model designed essentially to serve the needs of Industry and capital, the university, a Henry Giorux has noted, is his book, University in Chains, the modern university is increasingly becoming subservient to the ‘military and pharmaceutical industrial complex’, where education is increasingly being displaced by training as the primary focus.  To end I will briefly outline what an alternative ‘pedagogy’ for humanizing the university might look like.

At the outset, let me make it clear that I am not against what is termed the ‘skills’ agenda, but that for me, just emphasizing this aspect, especially in a world where, because of the growth of automation and artificial intelligence, the shelf life of a wide range of employment skills and for that matter knowledge, simply is short.

The trend of closing down philosophy departments (e.g. Hull and Middlsex) over the past few years and recent news that The University of Sunderland is to withdraw degree courses in History, politics, modern languages and public health illustrates the point I am seeking to make. Following a review Sunderland has decided to make ‘curriculum changes to make the institution “career-focussed” and “professions facing”, Chair of the board of governors, John Mowbray, said:

Some may argue that in the competitive world we live in today, institutions are required today are compelled to make necessity into a virtue, but, many of these decisions tend to be based on short term expediency – Student numbers- rather than thinking through the wider consequences, both for students and society as a whole. But, as Julian Baggini (2018) How the world thinks: a global history of philosophy, commenting of the closure of the philosophy department at Hull University, ‘The crude pursuit of what is “practical’, “efficient” or “useful” is threatening everything of value that isn’t evidently profitable’.

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. For almost 20 years a national commemoration day in the United Kingdom dedicated to the remembrance of those who suffered in The Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, as well as subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. The 27th Febwas chosen because of the association with the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Russians in 1945. Much has been said and written about the Nazi Holocaust, but perhaps one of the key central messages is, as Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish Holocaust survivor and writer famously noted.

Across the world, from Bolsorano in Brazil to Modi in India we are witnessing the rise of right wing authoritarianism. Incidentally, guess who was the chief guest of honour at the Indian Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi on Sunday? No other than Jair Bolsorano. Let me give you a flavor of his political views which he as openly expressed:

He wants criminals to be summarily shot rather than face trial. 

He presents indigenous people as “parasites” and also advocates for discriminatory, eugenically devised forms of birth control.

He has warned about the danger posed by refugees from Haiti, Africa, and the Middle East, calling them “the scum of humanity” and even argued that the army should take care of them.
He accused Afro-Brazilians of being obese and lazy and defended physically punishing children to try to prevent them from being gay.

He has equated homosexuality with pedophilia and told a representative in the Brazilian National Congress, “I wouldn’t rape you because you do not deserve it.”

(Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/05/bolsonaros-model-its-goebbels-fascism-nazism-brazil-latin-america-populism-argentina-venezuela/ )

You may be thinking, what has this to do with humanizing education? To help answer this point, I would like to briefly introduce to you the work of Jewish philosopher Hanna Arendt, who was herself a Jew that had to flee Germany during Hitlers rise to power. Though she was a prolific write focusing on totalitarianism, perhaps her most celebrated work is a book published in 1964, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’. She was a reporter on the trial of Adolf Eichmann’s for The New Yorker. In this book, Arendt asks the simple question, what enabled educated human beings like Eichmaan, who may well have lacked “intentions” participate in such a heinous crime against humanity, insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing, justify his actions. For Arendt, it want that Eichmann did not think he acted without conscious activity, but that the term “thinking” had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality. In other words, there was a kind of unreflexively instrumentality, almost devoid of any moral dimension, in the way that Eichmaan sought to justify his actions. His defence was that he was a good worker, following orders efficiently and effectively and that he had no other option and follow -orders. Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide in order to understand such a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. And key to her analysis was the failure to think that so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was not only an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. It was in and of itself a profound act of dehumanisation of the self. 

So, for Ardent and many other scholars dehumanization represents the stripping out of those essential characteristics that we possess as humans that distinguishes us from all other species, that is to have the potential to step beyond an instrumental/mechanical relationship with ourselves and each other, and nature. It is not only to have a functioning brain, which is particularly unique, but to develop a theory of mind and common sense.

In a follow-up book The Life of the Mind entitled “Science and Common Sense, Arendt sought to argue that the practice of science is quite distinct from thinking as a philosophical activity.

“Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it can only be a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific. “

What distinguished us from robots is that robots think logically, but are incapable of making moral judgements. And what makes human being human beings is that, unlike robots and all other species, our capacity to develop a theory of mind. In other words, for Arendt, science cannot justify itself on scientific grounds, but rather must somehow depend on something outside of and beyond itself. Perhaps more to the point, science, especially as associated with empiricism, cannot be divorced from concrete reality, and it is the concrete reality that makes all the difference. E.g. Development of sophisticated weapons, or the burning of fossil fuels, etc.

Arendt goes on to argue that instrumental scientific speculation lacks “the safeguards inherent in sheer thinking, namely thinking’s critical capacity.” This includes the capacity for moral judgment, which became horrifically evident by the ways in which Nazi Germany used science to justify its genocidal policies and actions. Auschwitz did not represent a retrieval of tribal violence, but one of the ultimate expressions of the scientific enterprise in action. Arendt, in the book Life of the Mind, is interested in the absence of ‘critical thoughtfulness’, which she terms as ‘non thinking.’ This is a kind of dogmatic approach to life, where one simply replaces one set of common sense ideas with another without really engaging in critical thought. For Arendt the horrors of the 20th Century are not so much a failure of Enlightenment, as Zygmund Bauman would have us think, but a failure of critical thoughtfulness. An education system that teaches students to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society results in them getting used, less to the content of the rules, which on ‘close examination would always lead them to perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars. (Arendt, Life of the mind, p177). In other words, the emasculation of critical faculties for Arendt leads to thinking and judgment becoming a matter of sentiment and sophistry and persuasion rules. If you like, a kind of virtual thinking, or what Steve Cowden and I have referred to as kind of ‘sat-nav thinking’ (Cowden and Singh).

And so Arendt doesn’t dismiss Enlightenment but is at pains to argue that in its desire for objectivity, at best it is limited and at worst, as we have seen over the past 300 years, can lead to the point where we are on the verge of destroying the planet. So for instance, she argues, Judgment for the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant is only a faculty of the mind, but for Arendt judgement is dependent on actual interaction with others. In other words, there is a social dimension to reason since speech and action need to be received by someone in a public realm.  Furthermore, following Wittgenstein, because any idea has no meaning until it is described to others through language, i.e. it is social in nature, enlightenment for Arendt cannot simply be about the establishment of ideas, but the social impact of these and that is essentially how that needs to be understood. For example, the true impact of French revolution is not in the event itself but the different public responses to it. This could be applied to most historical events. There cannot be a separation of event from the impact it has. 

Arendt argues, first, a person perceives through imagination, a specific faculty that moves from a physical to a mental instance. Second, in reflection, one achieves a distance from the original representation that further distances oneself from it. Indeed, here Arendt speaks of the “proper distance, the remoteness or involvedness or disinterestedness, that is requisite for approbation and disapprobation, for evaluating something at its proper worth” (Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 1992: 67). Judgment proper occurs in this second step, where one takes a stand on one’s first impression in terms of a value assertion.

In the current climate it is not an exaggeration to assert that the defense of genuinely critical educational spaces is in and of itself an act of (re)humanisation. The demise of humanities teaching and research within UK universities in all but the so called ‘elite institutions’ on the one hand, or the annexation of the creative arts by neoliberal consumerism on the other is a disaster for students and society as a whole. The disastrous effects of the £9000 plus student fee, along with the tyrannical research assessment exercise and the total obsession with utterly flawed student satisfaction surveys is turning University Managers into Zombies.

And so in the short term, our job must be to maintain a commitment to an engaged pedagogy and positions students, not as consumers, but co-creators/producers of learning that is meaningful to them in their chosen course trajectory, but is also capable for taking them outside of their contort zone, is able to nature the kinds of critical reflexivity that is going to serve them well beyond their course of study. Above all a pedagogy that is truly humanizing will be built on a profound belief in the inherent ability of all students irrespective of their background to achieve and succeed, but unless we can help students to dream, then horizons no doubt will be constricted by political economy of higher education. And so, there can be no doubt that perhaps the single most important step we can take to humanizing education is to see it, like health, as a human right that should be free at the point of delivery.