UNIVERSITIES AS COMMUNITIES OF DIFFERENCE

Abstract

If universities are communities, then the communities they comprise must be inclusive of difference. This inclusivity, I argue, is central to the pedagogic practice of reasoning together that is the raison d’être of the secular humanist university. The predominance of the elite research-led universities —the prestige value of which is sustained and promoted through institutional «league tables» and world-wide «ranking exercises» —should not blind us to the importance of the university as a place of teaching and learning. It is this idea of the university as a community unconditionally committed to the dialogical exploration of difference that provides the university with its ethical authority —its «ethos of critical responsiveness», which, as William E. Connolly argues, radically disturbs the «traditional virtues of the community» based on assumptions regarding «the normal individual». In a world of cosmopolitan difference that defies «any fixed code of morality», the capacity for ethical deliberation is all important. Our prime responsibility as teachers and intellectuals is to provide the resources necessary for interpreting this new world in a way that recognises its newness and its potential for natality and new beginnings. We must seek to develop a pedagogy that enables us to reason together —not to reason against one another, but with one another in the disinterested pursuit of the common good. The university, I argue, is a place primarily concerned with realising and activating that capacity through the practice of pedagogy. (See Nixon, 2012a; 2012c; 2008).