Thin knowing rules university management

The latest issue (no. 106) of World University News, of December 20, 2009, has a report by Anthea Garman on "Marketisation, globalisation and universities", from a conference earlier in December at the South Africa-Nordic Centre (Sanord) on Inclusion and Exclusion in Higher Education.
Here, Professor Saleem Badat, Vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, said that to steer the university into the future "we need other principles, other co-ordinates and logics from those dominating the previous three decades". - "Universities hold the promise of contribution to justice, democracy and citizenship, but dealing with exclusion goes beyond access, it goes into institutional and academic cultures, into learning and teaching, into ideas, into the conceptions and the purposes of universities."

Here's a longer quote from the report:

Anthropologist Vigdis Broch Due from Bergen, who heads a poverty politics research group, approached the issue from a different point of view. Titling her keynote lecture "In praise of complexity" she called for an ethics of standing against the "seductions of simple-mindedness" in which a "dense reality is organised into an easily graspable reality by bureaucrats and policy-makers."
"Ideas shape the world," she reminded the intellectuals present, "and the world is simply, stubbornly complex. How can we understand the world without betraying complexity?" she asked.
She argued that what universities and scholars do best is to use "thick descriptions" (Clifford Geertz' words) to help societies understand the world they live in. "This should be at the core of our production and dissemination of knowledge and it runs counter to the current domination of the thin descriptions of current policies."
The drive to thin descriptions is because it is "easier and manageable", but the challenge for academics is to "insert the thick into the thin" because "thin knowing has a host of unintended consequences which is the bitter fruit of policy implemented through the last decade" in higher education institutions, she said.
"There is something reassuring about simple binaries such as 'men exploit, women are exploited'; a powerful need to distil social complexities into moral simplicities. But scholars and analysts should resist the overriding concern with categorisation," Broch-Due said.
"We cannot dislodge simplistic stories by arguing they are wrong, we must provide a better story, a more compelling story. This is also a question of pragmatics: how do we tell a better story?" she asked and then elaborated: the community of scholars must use the techniques of communication, talking to publics and across disciplines, writing and publishing in "many different genres".
The key to understand the world is in higher education, she concluded, "only higher education gives the key to complex thinking. It is impossible to divorce knowledge from the community of knowledge-making."
The key to understand the world is in higher education, she concluded, "only higher education gives the key to complex thinking. It is impossible to divorce knowledge from the community of knowledge-making."

Find Anthea Garman's report here.