Universities must transmit technically exploitable knowledge. They must meet an industrial society’s need for qualified new generations and at the same time be concerned with the expanded reproduction of education itself. In addition, universities must also produce new knowledge capable of use … Through instruction and research, the university is immediately connected with functions of the economic process …

Three Responsibilities

First, the university has the responsibility of ensuring that its graduates are equipped, no matter how indirectly, with a minimum of qualifications in the area of extrafunctional abilities. This refers to all those attributes and attitudes relevant to the pursuit of a professional career not contained per se in professional knowledge and skills … The university certainly does not produce the virtues of these unwritten professional standards, but the pattern of its socialization processes must at least be in harmony with them. Third, the university has always fulfilled a task that is not easy to define today. We would say that it forms the political consciousness of its students.
The academic stratum, shaped by a uniform mentality, has dissolved in connection with long-term structural changes in society. Does this mean that today’s universities no longer meet the task of providing political education, or, insofar as they take care of this function in another way, no longer need to meet it? Should the university today restrict itself to what appears to be the only socially necessary function and at best institutionalize what remains of the traditional cultivation of personality as a separate educational subject divorced from the enterprise of knowledge?

Two Answers

1) In every conceivable case, the enterprise of knowledge at the university level influences the action-orienting self-understanding of students and the public. It cannot define itself with regard to society exclusively in relation to technology … It influences comnunication action. 2) If the university were exclusively adapted to the needs of industrial society and had eradicated the remains of beneficent but archaic freedoms, then behind the back of its efficient efforts, it could be just as ideologically effective.

Some Final Conclusions

The link between our post-war democracy and the traditional university is coming to an end. Either increase productivity as the sole basis of a reform that smoothly integrates the depoliticized university into the system of social labor and inconspicuously cuts its ties to the political, public realm (In otherwords, autonomy, isolation), or the university asserts itself within (and through) the democratic system.
I should like to substantiate my vote for this second possibility. We must expect masked states of emergency that are not interpreted and recognized by the authorities as violations of legality. Often in such cases the only thing that works is the mechanism of self-defense, based on solidarity, undertaken by the whole institution under attack … If the constitutional norm that guarantees freedom of instruction and research should ever be violated again, the first resistance should corrie from the universities themselves, or the professor’s ax.

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