THE CONTEMPORARY UNIVERSITY: SOME ONTOLOGICAL AND EMPIRICAL ASPECTS.

• Author: Pomeda, Jesus Rodriguez

1. Introduction: the context that delimitates the debate on the meaning of the university today

   The context of this essay is the university at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. During its millennial history, the university institution has had a variable relationship with the society (and its dominant powers) of each moment. However, it was in the Europe of the Middle Ages when universities were configured based on certain characteristics that, totally or partially, can be observed in the currently existing universities (Palfreyman and Temple 2017). As Ruegg (1992: xxix) points out.

   as a community of teachers and taught, accorded certain rights, such as administrative autonomy and the determination and realization of curricula (courses of study) and the objectives of research as well as the award of publicly recognized degrees, it is a creation of medieval Europe, which was the Europe of papal Christianity. In any case, the university has adopted a subordinate position to the current social powers (Kavannagh 2009, 2012) in search of its legitimacy in each historical setting.

   There are different assessments of the current situation of the university. Such evaluations range from the positive (with the verification of their flourishing--increase in the number of universities, students, etc., worldwide, Frank and Meier 2007) to the negative (due to the loss of their essences, the neoliberal emergence on campuses or the impoverishment of their ethos; Giroux 2020, Readings 1996, Vicars 2019, Zuidhof 2015). If we are able to dispense with value judgments, we will see that both perspectives seem to be supported by what we observe in the contemporary university: the success of the institution, proof of validated legitimacy, runs parallel to the departure from what it was in the past (from medieval mists to the brilliance of enlightened reason). Does it make sense to try to fix its immanent traits when we must accept that if it persists, it is because it has been able to transform itself in a profound way?

   Our proposal is oriented towards the idea of university from the confluence between recent developments in social ontology, empirical analysis of the contemporary university and organization studies, which implies, of course, incorporating the historical (recent) and sociological approaches to the university institution. The justification for this multidisciplinary approach is found both in the fact that the most fruitful analyses of the contemporary university have come from these intellectual territories and in the inability of each one of them separately to offer a complete and useful vision of such a complex and polymorphic institution. Our starting point in this exploration is the recent historical evolution of the university.

   Since the end of the 1970s, neoliberal ideology has driven substantial economic, political and cultural transformations throughout the world. In this historical context, the Great Recession of 2008 has exacerbated the transformative pressures on most of the institutions of Western capitalist society. One such institution is the university. This transformation has taken place on different levels, more or less visible to the public. In the debate that appears in the media, self-serving simplifications are observed that, by shaping the dominant opinion, facilitate the implementation of modifications (for example, in the university's governance or its financing) derived from the neoliberal program. The characteristics of the university affect this transformation process. Thus, its complexity, antiquity and diversity--by making it impossible to show even approximately through the communicative formats in vogue--facilitate the trivialization of the debate that opens about it from an ideologically born perspective of neoliberalism. For Peters and Jandric (2018: 554).

   the shift from the Public University circa 1960-80 to the Neoliberal University has been comprehensive and has transformed the university irrevocably and perhaps irreversibly into a consumer-driven system where freedom is defined in terms of consumer sovereignty. The liberal public university is no more--if it ever was. As Bill Readings intimates in his influential book The University in Ruins (1996), there is no going back except in nostalgic terms. To understand and act with respect to this transformative hurricane that the university is suffering, it is necessary to adopt a perspective that combines the reformulation of its ontological essence with the analysis of its emerging aspects, as pointed out by Al-Amoudi and O'Mahoney (2016: 23-24),

   [W]hile it can be argued that ontology is vacuous in the absence of substantive enquiry, it is equally the case that substantive enquiry is blind in the absence of ontological reflection. Moreover, while ontology is conventionally presented as logically and chronologically anterior to substantive enquiry, the relationship between both practices is iterative rather than linear. ... There is, instead, an ongoing iteration between ontological reflexion based on the finding of previous substantive enquiries and refined substantive enquiries informed by renewed ontological reflection [emphasis added]. Our goal in this essay is to gather a non-exhaustive series of elements typical of ontological reflection and empirical research on the contemporary university to facilitate the understanding of its ongoing modifications. That is, the interaction between ideas coming from ontology with others derived from empirical research is our selected way to study some of the crucial aspects of today's university. We will complete that framework by adding elements from organization studies (such as the idea of organizational identity), history and sociology.

   The joint presentation of these elements will lead us to a proposal for ethical action (both from the collective and individual point of view within the university) that renews the social responsibility of the university institution.

2. Materials and methods: recent developments of ontology in the social field and its relations with university ontology

   University and ontology each have a millenary history. However, it is necessary to advance in the effort to better establish the ontology of society and, specifically, that of the university. As Little (2016: xvi) states, 'ontology matters in the social sciences.' Although metaphysics has a millenary tradition with respect to ontological problems, it is surprising that--with regard to the social sphere--the 'ancient philosophers'did not approach them in a systematic way, and it was not until the 17th century that this began to happen with Hobbes, Pufendorf, Filmer and Locke (Epstein 2018: 3). However, from that time until now, we have gained a huge and enlightening body of work carried out by a significant number of authors, both from the philosophical field (to name only some of the contemporaries, Searle, Epstein, Guala and Little) and from the very social sciences (Barnett being an outstanding example in what specifically refers to the social ontology of the university).

   Perhaps the most relevant result of such efforts has been the convergence between the views of social ontology from philosophy and from different social sciences (such as economics and higher-education studies). Among the possible avenues of advancement in the social ontology of the university is the consideration of university studies within the framework, not of social ontology in the broad sense but in that of ontology as a specific social object (that is, what could be called the socio-scientific ontology of the university). Among such studies on the university, those carried out by Barnett in which he proposes three planes of analysis to register the specific characteristics of the contemporary university may be very useful for this purpose.

   According to Lawson (2019), socio-scientific ontology refers to the particular results or social objects (he explicitly cites money, markets, cities, companies, technology, gender and universities) that are formed according to the most general principles analysed by socio-philosophical ontology. Among such generic principles, he points out that the aspects and phenomena of the social sphere have a procedural and relational nature. In his opinion, social reality is procedural because it exists only by being reproduced or transformed 'through the sum total of our individual practices'. A similar distinction is used by Al-Amoudi and O'Mahoney (2016: 16) when speaking of committed versus uncommitted ontology (or philosophical versus scientific ontology).

   It can be said that Barnett (2016) is part of this socio-scientific current of ontology by walking the path that leads from previous substantive research (relative to both the context and the present situation of universities in the world) to a new level of ontological reflection referring to these institutions. Thus, he proposes to understand universities as diverse realities that occupy different places in a space that he defines from three planes of analysis (Barnett 2016: 43 ffi).

   The first is delimited by two opposite extremes: the university as an institution and the university as an idea. In the background, we find each specific university located between two poles: the university as it is in a specific time and space and the university in its possibilities. In Barnett's third plane, each university is placed according to two limits: the university in its particularities and the university in the universals with which it is linked.

   When imagining the universities along the three planes, one becomes aware of their enormous complexity since contradictory behaviours can appear at different points in the planes. In Barnett's words (2016: 71),

   universities are extraordinary places. Soft and hard are their surfaces, open and closed are their spaces, quiet and noisy are their sounds, quick and slow are their rhythms...