A couple of days ago, I went to a meeting in Stockholm, as I
do a couple of times a year. The train ride takes about three and a half hours,
and I know the town well. I quite enjoy those trips, although I would never
like to live there. When the meeting was done and I had a couple of hours to
kill before returning, I decided to go back to the central station to get
something to eat – there are a couple of places serving at least decent
vegetarian meals there – and to read a good book (right now Frank Zappa’s
hilarious autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book). As I strolled around the ever expanding
waiting hall, I noticed that something had changed. Practically all the benches
where people used to sit, rest, read, talk to each other or observe were gone.
The huge waiting hall was… empty. If I now wanted to sit and do those nice
things, I had to go in to one of the many coffee shops that had been
established along the sides of the hall. Or simply wander around in any of the
many new shops selling stuff I don’t need. There had obviously been a change
in the way that people were treated in this old, open building. They are no
longer travellers or citizens. They are consumers. To sit and read, observe or talk
do not render money, so away with the benches and put the people where they
have to pay to sit. Then they can do whatever they are doing while waiting for
trains. It is a striking picture of social development (or degradation). Social
space has turned in to economic space. Thank you, Ronald Reagan (who started it
all) and the subsequent non-thinkers of present Swedish politics.
As I got on the train it struck me that I had not only seen
a wrecked social space, I had seen a picture of Swedish universities – not
least my own. Departments are seen as production units, students as consumers
moulded to a marketplace of (un)employment and even the thought of ”free”
research is opressed in the race for ”external funding”. A place where we once
could read, observe, talk to each other, and see each other as human beings has
been replaced by a system where intellectual space has turned into economic
space. No benches are left to sit on.
My own university is extremely senitive to this development.
Not only has it recently been re-organized so that it is now run more or less
like a private corporation – all in the name of New Public Management. It has
also been subjected to a large donation of research funds which is well on the
way of killing every inch of free critical research in any of its faculties –
not least in the arts and humanities faculty to which I belong. Suddenly the
whole university is running like crazy for an, although ridiculously large, amount
of money tied to ”research themes” dictated by ignorant corporate
representatives without the slightest clue of how research is being
done. Of course, critical (or ”free”) research is not what is sought for. Highly qualified researchers are used as marionettes in the pursue of further economic growth.
Is that what we really need? It would have been a lot better if the absurd
amount of money in this fund would be taken in by the tax system and then
distributed to the Swedish universities to take care of without the muddling of
corporate ignorance. This, of course, will not happen. It is too late. Instead
I see good and capable colleagues nervously discussing how to "adjust" their research
interests to fit requirements set by people who know very little, but
have a hell of a lot of money. Somehow, the will of these people have been mixed up with the needs of society – there is of course no similarity there. It is just so sad.
Someday this system will crumble and break under its own
weight. But not yet. As we wait for that to happen, is it possible to oppose,
to stand beside all this? Of course. By not applying for their money. By
focussing on ones own research, without letting others dictate the problems
studied. By not running in the same direction as everybody else, just because
management tells you to. By not believing the myth saying that ”this is the way
it must be – the way it is”. Disobedience in these matters might bring some personal
disadvantages, it might even lead some symbolic punishment. It is a hard system
we have had imposed upon us. However, it would, above all, be a manifestation
of integrity, and of belief in the value of free thought and critical research -
in contemplation, talking, reading, observing. In order to do that we need somewhere
free to sit. So, let us begin by carrying back the benches.
