Proceso de la evaluación de la calidad docente en la facultad de educación de la

At first glance, Gibson’s desire to make science useful to corporations strikes more radical geographers as a poor political choice. We might say, why not put geography to some better use? This has been the progressive social science response for much of this century. In the past thirty years, radical geography and feminist geography have reframed the questions

“useful knowledge for whom?” and “towards what social ends?” Together with critical theory, this has led geography to begin to question not only how geo-graphical knowledge is used but on what bases it is made. Along these lines, we might ask Gibson what assumptions underlie his regional science method-ologies—exposing them to be just as ideologically driven as the use to which he wants them put—and could then continue to question his motives. However, we wouldn’t normally think twice about his desire to produce useful knowledge. That, after all, is the point of doing research and the point of having research universities.

Such an attitude would strike the group of German Idealists led by Wilhelm von Humboldt, with whom we credit the idea of the modern research university and its dual mission of research and teaching, as a near-total failure of the institution with which their names are associated. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, when the University of Berlin—

recognized as the first modern research university

—was founded, Humboldt and his companions were engaged in a lengthy intellectual struggle to define the proper mode of inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.

However, by the time geographer Daniel Coit Oilman established the first research university in the US in 1876 at Johns Hopkins, which set the standards for such American institutions, the primary impetus for such an institution was its possible usefulness to a rapidly expanding American industry and empire. In this section of the paper, I trace this crucial shift to show how instrumentalism came to dominate the university system between Humboldt’s time and Gilman’s.²My

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point is not to argue that universities have been exclusively concerned with producing instrumental knowledge. Rather, it is to show that the conception of knowledge as “useful” is historically contingent and has been continually contested. Because universities are products of such a history they are pluralistic places, full of competing, often contradictory, processes and practices that persist into the present despite pressures towards capitalist homogenization. The goal for radical geography is to create greater, not less, space in the future for those practices that challenge the current hegemony.

Kant’s last book, The Conflict of the Faculties (originally published in 1798), described universities as divided between “true” and “useful” knowledge (Kant, 1979). The former resided in the Faculty of Philosophy, encompassing the disciplines that we would now call Arts and Sciences; and the latter was to be found in the Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Religion, where civil servants were trained. Emphasizing speculation as the superior mode of inquiry, Kant hoped a philosophical science could function as an opposition party in the parliament of knowledge, keeping the training of the young on the road to “truth.” At the same time, others who followed Bacon, Locke, and Newton promoted the utility of certain scientific knowledges derived from empirical observation and experiment. The conflict between speculative and empirical modes of inquiry quickly came to be aligned with Kant’s division between “true” and “useful” knowledge, and by the time Humboldt presided over the founding of the University of Berlin science and philosophy had begun to be seen by some as fundamentally different.

Along with his brother Alexander and other thinkers of the day, Humboldt held a more holistic vision of science than that inherent in this growing dualism. As he explained in a 1797–8 essay on Goethe, “There are those who appeal to actual observation, others who appeal to philosophical analysis . . . Insofar as an individual accords more emphasis to one or the other of these two basic activities of the mind, he departs from the course of true experience, either in a too empirical or a too speculative manner” (Humboldt, 1963: 107–8). He argued that joining research and teaching would aid in bridging the growing breach between truth and use: “a mind which has been trained in this way will spontaneously aspire to science and scholarship [Wissenschaft]” (Humboldt, 1970: 247; 1903:

256).³Wissenschaft is what we would today call critical thinking, with this crucial difference: that it was not

solely the business of the humanities or departments of philosophy, because “science” as we now conceive of it had not yet precipitated out from the general field of knowledge and shed its claims to philosophical truth.⁴ Humboldt’s concept of knowledge failed to take hold, however, and the natural sciences became increasingly differentiated from the human sciences during the nineteenth century, partly as a result of the pressures of state demands in the imperialist era and partly due to the related growth of capitalist emphasis on instrumental knowledge. There developed what social science historian Wolf Lepenies calls “a functional division of labor between production of knowledge and achievement of orientation” (1989:

57)—that is, between practical knowledge and questions of value. In Germany, as the disciplines became redefined, questions of value retreated from other fields until they were left primarily to the discipline of philosophy, so that the university came to expound “an unwavering faith in the power of science and philosophy to generate knowledge and culture”

(Lepenies, 1988: 59), that is, for science to generate useful knowledge and for philosophy to generate culture.⁵By the time Daniel Coit Gilman transferred the model of the research university to the US in 1876, Humboldt’s Wissenschaft had come to designate natural science rather than “the principles of the cosmos”

(McClelland, 1980: 133).

The German university quickly developed into an institution that we would recognize today: one that relied heavily on the state as well as on industry for its funding, pursued specialized research for utility rather than pure Wissenschaft, and produced technical specialists and excellently efficient administrators to run the increasingly industrialized and highly bureaucratized German society.⁶The process only accelerated after 1870 with the founding of the German Empire and the Reich, and the university became a crucial instrument in the rise of Germany indus-trially and as a world power on the imperial stage.

The “integration of the universities with the admini-strative and economic structures of imperial Germany”

was in large part responsible for its power and pres-tige within Germany and with Anglo-American educators, many of whom were trained in this system (McClelland, 1980: 314). Mitchell Ash maintains that

“it was precisely the mixture of state and private industry funding that made the German universities and basic research so productive under the German Empire” (1997: xvi).

The modern American research university followed its German elder by integrating its structure with that of industry and the nation-state. As historian Burton Bledstein argues, “Not only has higher education brought coherence and uniformity to the training of individuals for careers, it has structured and formalized the instrumental techniques Americans employ in thinking about every level of existence” (1978: 289–90).

While the humanities concerned themselves with the study and stewardship of “culture,” Bledstein main-tains, “[i]t was the primary function of American universities to render universal scientific standards credible to the public” (1978: 326). Just as it had in the industrializing and imperially aspiring Germany, the university became a powerful social institution in the US precisely because it could successfully contain value questions in the “cultural” disciplines and open up science to the pursuit of instrumental reason. By the turn of the century, the new American universities and the newly restructured colleges met the bureau-cratic and governmental needs of an expanding empire in the same way that they were used by Bismarck in the Germany of the 1870s: they not only produced bureaucratic subjects to administer an empire, but also produced the technological know-how to win such an empire industrially and militarily. And Daniel Coit Gilman played a crucial role in shaping and cementing that relationship.⁷

When Gilman traveled to Germany in 1875 to study German universities as possible models for Johns Hopkins, he found a system of research and education fundamentally tied to the imperial aspirations of the German Reich. At this time his own discipline, geog-raphy, was experiencing an “explosive institutional-ization” in Germany due to its “practical relevance”

to the imperial project (Sander and Rossler, 1994:

115–19). In fact, it was in Germany in 1874 that

“[g]eography as a field of advanced study taught by professionally qualified individuals first appeared”

(Martin and James, 1993: 133).

When Gilman began to establish the hegemony of the research university in the US, he used the relationship between geography and the German Reich as his model. He found theoretical justification for his version of knowledge production in geographical thought: he based his idea of the social role of the university on the instrumentalist theories of his teacher and mentor Arnold Guyot, who argued in his book The Earth and Man (1850) that geography provided

“scientific” justification for the Euro-American

domination of the world. Guyot concludes this book by looking forward to

the elaboration of the material wealth of the tropical regions, for the benefit of the whole world. The nations of the lower races, associated like brothers with the civilized man of the ancient Christian societies, and directed by his intelligent activity, will be the chief instruments. The whole world, so turned to use by man, will fulfil its destiny.

The three northern continents, however, seem made to be the leaders; the three southern, the aids.

The people of the temperate continents will always be the men of intelligence, of activity, the brain of humanity, if I may venture to say so; the people of the tropical continents will always be the hands, the workmen, the sons of toil.

(Guyot, 1850: 331) Instead of a geographical inquiry (and all forms of Wissenschaft) with the goal of producing critical thinkers, Guyot’s geography bolstered a strictly instrumentalist approach in which man⁸stood apart from nature: nature existed so that (European) man could conquer it, and science would prove to be a central tool in that project.

In a speech entitled “Books and Politics” in which he invoked Guyot’s geography, delivered at Princeton at the conclusion of the Spanish–American War, Gilman explained the central importance of a research university to the new imperial project that the US had undertaken. He believed that the “highest service” that universities could “render to the community in which they are placed” would be to produce “the man behind the gun” of American imperialism, a man “disciplined in accuracy, coolness, memory, ingenuity, judgement, and intellectual strength” (Gilman, 1906: 198–9). It was the “intellectual strength” of the modern research university that allowed Gilman to make it an institution indispensable to the project of American industrial imperialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, this intellectual strength did not so much replace physical or military might in Germany and the US as it became a crucial component in those nations’ development of industrial nationalism in the late imperial era. Through the work of Gilman and others, the university became a crucial site for the production of that might and for the entrance of Germany and the US onto the global imperial stage at the end of the nineteenth century, a position it has retained and strengthened since the

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beginning of World War II, particularly since the explosion of government-funded research during the Cold War.⁹

That Gilman’s instrumentalism beat out Humboldt’s during the nineteenth century to emerge as the hege-monic model for knowledge production in the American university does not mean that the university is “in ruins,” nor does it mean that the university should be abandoned by critical thinkers. Indeed, political scientist Clyde Barrow argues that “[w]hat radical scholars must therefore rediscover is not merely that intellectuals play a significant role in the reproduction of capitalism and the capitalist state, but that education has been and remains every bit as much a contested terrain as the shop floor, the party caucus, and the halls of legislative assemblies” (1990: 9). The contested history of the university means that these institu-tions remain crucial sites for political engagement. Just as geographers and geography have been central to historical conceptions of the modern research university—through, for example, Humboldt’s theory of the “cosmos” or Guyot’s racist imperial dreams

—so too can radical geography play a vital role in reimagining a progressive role in the contested university today.