CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

The University Now (And Its Related Institutions of Interpretation)

Organiser: Richard C. Cante

Michael, John (The University of Rochester, USA) ACADEMIC AUTHORITY AND POPULAR PREJUDICE: MISUNDERSTANDING THE WAR ON TERROR AS A CLASH OF CULTURES
In the aftermath of September 11th's horrendous attacks, media pundits on the right and the left have attempted to represent the motives and goals of the U.S.'s attackers as stemming from a global war of cultures especially between Islam or Islamic fundamentalists and the West. Seductively clear and unambiguous, this construction of current events pits religious tyranny against secular democracy, the enlightened West--especially the U. S.--against mullah-ridden Moslems. Those who would advance this distorted view of recent history and of contemporary tragedies frequently support their arguments by uncritical references to work by academic intellectual, especially such controversial figures as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. In mediatizing these figures, however, those who cite them neglect--through ignorance or design--to consider the critical reception of their work within the academy itself. The result is that questionable academic opinions circulate beyond the university as established fact, a dangerous deployment of academic prestige and authority in the public sphere. In my remarks I would like to analyze this phenomenon and discuss its troubling implications for academic intellectuals, public policy, and the status of expertise in the public sphere.

Smith, Paul (University of Sussex, United Kingdom) THE UNIVERSITY, NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND 'SYMBOLIC WORKERS
In the 1990s the US university, as well as universities in Europe, found itself positioned as the potential training ground for a new breed of 'symbolic workers'--essentially, people who would be the labour pool for the much-vaunted 'information society.' This new interpellation of the university made exceptionally explicit the university's chronic role in forming the appropriate labour power for capitalism's latest crisis. Most interesting, though, about this moment was the way it called on the university's existing character and practice by wanting to draw on the university's 'expertise' in 'symbolic' work. At the same time, this new moment also demanded huge investment in new technologies and new media on the part of the university. With some comparative emphasis (USA--UK), this paper will look at how that double demand has been responded to in the last ten years, asking what general cultural effects those responses have entailed, and asking what changes to the everyday practice of academic life might have ensued.

Orchard, Vivienne (University of Southhampton) THE CONFLICT OF THE FACULTIES REVISITED, OR THE STAKES OF
'Interdisciplinarity' has become a managerial mantra for the future functioning of the modern 'multiversity'.  Once the
radical demand of student groups in Paris in 68 attacking the stagnation and technocratic imperatives of university education, it is increasingly evoked to designate all 'forward-looking' innovatory strategies.  Where previously it was the watchword of disciplinary radicals, it now risks becoming a vacuous exhortation on the part of the bureaucratic superstructure of the university, the alibi of rationalisation and downsizing for the humanities. This paper will return to the celebrated theoretical interventions of Derrida and Lyotard of twenty years ago, and the more recent work of Bill Readings on the 'posthistorical' university, to repose the question of disciplinarity as institution of interpretation, and to question the radical potential of interdisciplinarity.  The emergence of the genre of  self-conscious disciplinary history, as different disciplinary areas within the humanities and social sciences have staged their own reception and accommodation of academic postmodernism, will be interrogatedi in order to question the simultaneous immobility of disciplinary structures within the university and their effects on knowledge, and the invocation of interdisciplinarity as the category of the future, by both radicals and conservatives.  What are the politics of interdisciplinarity today, and what is its real possibility as an intellectual and institutional strategy?