Is the University a Public Sphere? — Further Thoughts on Publicly Posting Grades and Publicly Critiquing Assignments

It’s once again time for grading in the history of science survey course. This course has always had the tradition of publishing grades, and this time should be no exception. Of course, I seem to be getting softer and softer lately; the harsh roasting of bad assignments may more likely be shifted into private messages rather than being publicly posted under real names. But the excellent students still absolutely deserve public praise.

Last year I explained: Why post the grades? Now that I’ve recently finished reading Arendt, it may be worth giving that earlier account a further interpretation.

It is said that American universities place enormous emphasis on “privacy”; information such as one’s grades must never be leaked, and a teaching assistant like me would probably have to face hundreds of lawsuits.

Of course, the whole American social environment places great emphasis on “privacy.” The “right to privacy” embodies American-style individualism. Indeed, safeguarding the private realm is a precondition for guaranteeing a free society, just as Arendt says: the “walls” of the private realm (private property, the family) both preserve the private realm and protect the “public realm” beyond the walls. But the question is, how large is the boundary of this “privacy” domain? In ancient Greece, the realm of privacy was your family life; what about modernity? The boundary of privacy seems to have expanded without limit, so much so that universities too are filled with walls of privacy.

Of course, the university environment in the United States is much better than today’s universities in China, but I have never idolized the American model. The American university model may well be a paradigm of modernity.

The modern university does not continue the tradition of the ancient Greek academy; it originated in the medieval “guild.” A guild is a kind of “association,” and this “association” is precisely what Arendt means by “society”: a gathering of equals. A guild is composed of a group of people with the same identity and the same standpoint, and as a whole it defends its own interests vis-à-vis the outside.

A guild is not a bad thing. I once said that the core of democracy is “association”. But of course it is not only about association. The significance of association is that it provides a person with an “identity” and a “standpoint.” Modern society is far more complex than the ancient Greek polis; an individual’s identity cannot be established merely by his “property” (in Arendt’s sense, or rather his “household property,” the wall of his family). Through association, through joining one after another of diverse “walls,” modern people can construct their own “identity.” Once they have this identity, once they have a definite “status” that belongs to them, only then can they enter the public realm in their own name and participate in “political life” in Arendt’s sense. In other words, “guilds” are important, but activity within a guild is not the public realm itself. The formation of a guild has two meanings: first, it marks the difference between these people and others; second, it ensures sameness within this group. Following the line of my so-called “maintaining the same while seeking difference,” “sameness” is the precondition for a guild to exist, but what ultimately needs to be pursued is “difference.” If one only pays attention to preserving commonality and forgets the pursuit of excellence, then one has moved away from the public realm.

And modern society is full of places that preserve sameness, so where is the stage on which difference can be displayed? We know that Americans especially like self-display. Wherever Chinese people go, they like to be modest and exchange courtesies, but wherever Americans go, they like to put themselves on display. On the one hand, this flood of self-display means that they still long for honor (even if in many cases honor has turned into vanity), but on the other hand, this unrestrained urge to perform also suggests that they actually lack an appropriate public realm in which to pour out that urge. In the end, the “American Dream” measures a person’s achievement by his “wealth,” and that “wealth,” however, belongs to the logic of laboring people and is still a homogeneous thing. A “story” whose theme is animals-like achievement of wealth through hard work in a market economy governed by the law of the jungle is, after all, pale and thin. Of course, the “American Dream” is still a culture worthy of admiration; it enables laborers, too, to realize an immortal story in modern society. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Jobs, who realized the meaning of his life—“changing the world.” The “world” in the sense of Jobs is the “world” in Arendt’s sense; Jobs, as a “worker” or craftsman, also achieved his immortality.

So where is the stage for the “actor”? Arendt says that in the end the actor is the scientist. If we broaden that a bit, it is the “academic world,” which still retains a certain public realm: in this realm people uphold their distinct identities, jointly maintain the rules of self-presentation and the conferral of honor, and achieve immortality through “speech.”

“Universities,” on the one hand, are the final stage for scholars, or rather speakers and actors; on the other hand, they are also the direct descendants of the “guild.” So which kind of logic should they carry forward? The logic of the guild treats the university as a place for transmitting techniques; the relationship between teacher and student is established through a commercial contract, a kind of private relationship. The teacher privately passes on the craft only to those who have signed the contract, and does not pass it on to others; the student must pay to learn the craft, while the teacher receives remuneration by teaching the craft. Under this logic, a student’s “grades” are entirely his own business, because the purpose of entering the university is to improve one’s personal skills, not to compete with others for the lead. But according to the logic of scholarship, the university is first and foremost a place for academic activity, that is, for mutual criticism and debate. Under this logic, a student’s “achievement” is not originally about how well he has mastered some privately transmitted skill; scholarship was never meant to be “privately transmitted” in the first place. Most scholarly works strive for the greatest possible degree of “public publication,” and most scholars do not possess any study secrets they would never consent to make public… So why do people still try every possible means to get into universities? Precisely because the university has never been merely an institution for learning techniques, but rather an arena in which scholars are protected so that they can freely speak and exchange, display themselves, attack others, compete with one another, and ultimately gain respect and glory.

Thus, university “grades” are less like a lab report on one’s physical condition than like the scoreboard at an Olympic venue. They ought to belong to the public realm, not to the private affairs of family or body.

Of course, the problem is that universities today are becoming increasingly specialized. The real problem with the modern tendency to divide knowledge into disciplines and majors is not that it has broken up the realm of “philosophy” or “knowledge” that in the old days was fused into one, but that it increasingly turns the activity of study into learning a “trade.” This causes the logic of the actor to give way to the logic of the craftsman. And in modernity, the craftsman’s pursuit is no longer the pursuit of immortal works, but has devolved into doing work in order to make money (to make a living), thereby siding with the logic of the laboring animal. So it is not hard to imagine that the conception of privacy belonging to the laboring animal (the notion of the private, in its original form, was itself connected with the animal functions of human beings: private parts of the body, private bedroom matters, the bedroom and the toilet, and so on) has been able to expand within universities.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.