Session 7: The Contexts of Education

Session 7: The Contexts of Education
Chair: Roger Serneels

Why be Melancholic? European Intellectuals and Academia Nowadays
Raluca Fratiloiu
Department of Communication, Concordia University, Canada

In 1966, Ortega y Gasset was writing that Europe was facing a crisis in terms of its cultural conscience. If the 17 th century marked the moment when the European peoples started to feel as distinctive nations and national cultures were therefore effervescent and stimulating forces, at the time he wrote, nationality had already become static and passive. The organic intellectual was always at the core of the development of a national conscience in Europe . The context which Ortega y Gasset was just pointing to in the late 60’s becomes more evident in Europe nowadays as one speaks more about integration and less about organic intellectuals and national belonging. The status of the intellectual in Europe should be thus reassessed.
It is clear that a new model of intellectualism is evolving that includes the marketing of intellectual production. Western/North American academic models are not only fashionable but are also the centers where new meanings are associated with intelligentsia and new roles of intellectuals in society are emerging.
If the usual thesis would be that Europe needs to find its particular tone and its own ways of framing the role of intellectual participation in society, and implicitly the role of academia in the process, in this paper I will argue that in fact the longing for a lost meaning of intellectualism in Europe makes total sense nowadays because as Zizek (2001) says “anyone who is not a melancholic […] can today be suspected of ‘totalitarianism’” (p. 141).
Zizek (2001) argues: “… the mistake of depreciating melancholy can have dire consequences – papers are rejected, applicants do not get jobs because of their ‘incorrect’ attitudes towards melancholy. […] Melancholy is thus an exquisitely postmodern stance, the stance that allows us to survive in a global society by maintaining the appearance of fidelity to our lost ‘roots’” (p. 142, author’s emphasis).
Thus, melancholy for a lost meaning of the organic intellectual is part of the European academic act.

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Greece followed, inevitably, the centralized model of development: almost everything was concentrated in Athens . So, until 1964 the country had only two Universities (in Athens and Thessaloniki ). In 1972 a few small technological institutes were founded in experimental form, which, after Ovidian transformations approximated Universities (in terms of equivalence). After 1981, and mainly after 1999, the reverse tendency began: a multitude of Universities and Technological Institutes across the country. In most of the areas tertiary education institutions are now the “heavy industry”.
The proposed paper is co-financed by the E.U. and the Greek state. The research focused on the west axis of Greece , but its results have more general validity, as there is no divergence from the rest of the Greek regions. Initially, some charts of inflows-outflows were compiled – something that was not available from the Statistics Department. This extremely laborious approach was carried out for the years 1988, 1994, 1998, while for 2004 it was based on temporary data. Likewise, the economic changes that occurred in the area as a result of the function of similar institutions of tertiary education were assessed.
Furthermore, various qualitative parameters are examined. More specifically, through primary research, 2.500 questionnaires were collected from six different cities, which helped to determine social differentiations. Based on the above outcomes, not only the social but also the demographic and cultural changes that came about after the creation of faculties of tertiary education were described. Then research was conducted in the archives of the cities in order to evaluate the changes in the morphology of the area (city plan, look of the city, land uses etc.).
At the same time, the development rate of the local economy was correlated, after taking into account all the multiplying outcomes (improvement of infrastructures, construction of medical care units, cultural expenses, etc.). This long research contributed to the estimation not only of the benefit and the cost (the deducible cost of the non-function of this model was also estimated), but also of the limits of this policy.

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This paper is a case study of Iranian higher education as a Third World higher education system in terms of its economic function for individuals on the one hand and the society on the other hand. By considering the way a university education affects those individuals who graduate as well as the society in general, it is possible to find a contradiction in its usefulness.
Iranian national universities, as highest level of universities in the country, attract the smartest students from all across the country via an intense examination system, and the universities provide all necessities for study and life of those who succeed in these exams. It is great opportunities for students to change their economic and social life for better, but it is also a major financial expense for the government that has been struggling with challenging economic problems in the past few decades.
Iran has had the highest rate of “brain drain” in the world in the past decades. A recent IMF survey says that every year more than 150,000 educated Iranians leave their home country in the hope of finding a better life abroad. The costs of this brain drain in a free higher education system are heavier than usual, and some local sources put the economic loss as high as $50 billion a year or more.
This numbers are considerable enough to oblige the Iranian government for a change in its financial policies related to education. However, every new policy that asks students to pay for their studies faces serious protests from various political and non political student associations active in the universities. Such protests are reasonable; because every honest observer will admit that free higher education is just in the way it offers equal opportunities to everyone to change their futures and lives. But at the end, it seems that the individuals win and the society lose.
This paper will explore the tension between public and private interests in the reform of higher education policies.