Two pictures of the university

Look at the pictures on your boss’s wall - they tell you a lot about him. Are they scenes of distant landscapes, all aspiration and vision; or pictures of battles, conflict and subjugation? Most likely, they are abstract - the art of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is the common feature of big organisations. Created to build things, teach people or provide public safety, they now exist to maintain themselves. Big organisations outlast the puny individuals who staff them or think they ‘manage’ them. This is why we often refer to organisations as buildings, such as ‘The White House’ or ‘Scotland Yard’. Inside buildings are structures, and all big organisations have structure plans, in which the human components are heaped up in hierarchies of power.

The best picture of this vision of an organisation was painted by Pieter Bruegel in 1563, and is shown below.




Bruegel’s Tower of Babel is still under construction but is shaped like an organisational hierarchy. The ruler, who is shown in the bottom left of the picture, surely intends to occupy the highest level of the completed building. There, he will be only one floor below God and the angels from whom he no doubt believes he derives his right to rule. Other individuals in the picture are insignificant and trivial compared with the vast structure they are constructing. Some are abasing themselves in front of the ruler, but not talking to him or each other. Communication of a different sort would of course have taken place had the Tower been completed. There would have been a cascade of orders, strategies and targets descending from the ruler and his advisors down the multiple levels of the structure. These would, however, have become increasingly incomprehensible to its occupants. This is because the large physical barriers made evident in the painting prevent the groups of people in the different departments and hierarchical levels of the building speaking with each other. As a result, each department develops its own language and culture, and becomes unable to co-operate in the shared task of completing the Tower. Unable to understand the cause of their failure, the former inhabitants of the Tower adopt a blame culture, which in this case means blaming God.

Despite this historical and biblical example, new Towers of Babel are being built all over the land. In fact, this has become the dominant way of organising our society. Whole areas of public life that used to be run by people with primary competence such as engineers, doctors and teachers are now run by managers sitting at the top of their Towers of Babel, issuing streams of commands, guidelines and targets. This even applies to universities, which began as self-governing communities committed to the enhancement of competence in teaching and research. No longer. My own university has recently re-organised its self into a small number of ‘colleges’, each subdivided into a few large ‘schools’. The job of academic staff has become that of responding to centrally-set targets in an atmosphere of near-secrecy. Indeed, it is easier to discern information about the Chinese secret service than the school in which I work. Attempts to facilitate staff from different departments to group into multi-disciplinary research centres, as in the Tower of Babel, are impeded by structural barriers. This kind of structure can result in staff becoming isolated and resentful: some will leave; other perform without enthusiasm.

However, there is another picture of the University, shown below.



This is by Raphael in 1511, and is usually called the ‘School of Athens’, although many of the philosophers in the picture are not Greek. This picture is an extreme contrast with the Tower of Babel. There is still a splendid building, but the emphasis here is on the space rather than the structure. Within the space, there is intense discussion within different groups of philosophers, apart from one isolated figure (thought to represent Diogenes) at the front. Several of the groups are moving and are about to exchange ideas with other nearby groups. There is no hierarchy of power evident (although in an academic community we would expect a hierarchy of esteem) and no physical impediment to communication.

This picture of the university as an extended conversation matches the traditional model of university organisation as seen in Oxford and Cambridge. Academics and students from different disciplines are mixed together in colleges. These have rituals which help bring staff together for meals and meetings. There are departments which bring together staff in the same discipline from different colleges, and research centres which combine staff from different disciplines who are working on common problems. This complex organisation presents major problems for those seeking to assert personal power (‘manage’) these universities, but their desire for a simpler structure has fortunately been defeated on several occasions. Few other universities have similar patterns of organisation, but those which are near the top and rising in most rankings of research and teaching usually also have complex (deemed ‘chaotic’) mixtures of schools, departments, research and teaching centres.

Can Towers of Babel be transformed into Schools of Athens? My university now has a new Vice Chancellor in charge. We shall see whether he takes the road of glorifying in power by peering down at us from the top of his Tower, or helping us meet and discuss how to research and teach better.