The Current Dispute on the Status of the University: The Anthropological and Axiological Aspects of the Problem
The Current Dispute on the Status of the University: The Anthropological and Axiological Aspects of the Problem

Summary/Abstract: The author claims that the ongoing controversy over the functioning of the university is essentially of an axiological and anthropological nature. The paradox, described by Tadeusz Kotarbiński, of the academic freedom which characterized clandestine education organized during the Nazi occupation in Poland, provides the background against which the author presents threats posed by reductionist technocratic anthropology and utilitarian axiology inherent in the currently promoted model of the university as a provider of educational services. According to the author, the progressing objectification of research and teaching results in an atrophy of selflessness, a quality indispensable in this type of activity, while perceiving university as a product to be marketed undermines the world of academic values. Due to bureaucratic overregulation, researchers and teachers are coerced into attempts at quantification of their, essentially unquantifiable, intellectual effort. The author expresses also his anxiety about the demand for university professors to take responsibility for the ‘upbringing’ of their students, i.e., about the expectation that students should be involved in activities which are oversimplistic in the case of individuals capable of selfeducation. According to the author, such ‘belated’ attempts at psychological training tend to prove counterproductive and actually encourage immaturity on the part of the students. The author also argues that the system of a militarylike discipline imposed on the university contributes to the destruction of its autonomy and that the teaching methods recommended in the official guidelines would be damaging to the intellectual and spiritual culture and to the ethos of the university. In the author’s opinion, education divorced from the selfless pursuit of truth is bound to produce ‘closed minds,’ incapable of a pursuit of truth.

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