ABSTRACT
Democracy is always already in crisis because democratic politics is always a matter of ongoing deliberation that is never settled once and for all. The democratic will necessarily balances on the blade of the knife. And yet, in the real world democratic politics are populist, they are corrupted, they are technocratic and this has been an echoing refrain through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Even though political crisis is inevitable, there is surely merit in the claim that control over democratic politics has drifted away from ordinary citizens. The idea of the university also seems to be in constant crisis. There are ongoing concerns about levels of tuition fees for students, modes of funding, managerialism and bureaucracy supplanting an academic ethic, issues surrounding freedom of speech and academic freedom, grade inflation and over-expansion, the role of higher education in social mobility, the value of pure theoretical research; the list goes on and on. I think the crises in democracy and in universities overlap considerably. The seeds of the plant that might resolve the democratic crisis are most likely to be found in our public institutions, but decision-making in universities has also drifted away from the people who study within them. The language of democracy is all too often used to cloak tyrannical regimes in the robes of legitimacy. Think of how Vaclav Havel takes apart the idea of the Prague greengrocer who puts a ‘Workers of the world unite’ sign in his window. Similarly, the language of the university, of higher learning, of research and scholarship can cloak academic institutions which have little interest in their public capacities yet proclaim programmes of civic engagement.
