In this paper, I present three competing conceptions of academic practice and the ethos governing university institutions. These are, in the words of one university president, the functional conception, which considers the university to be an institution whose main purpose is "economic growth" achieved through "technical" service in the creation of scientific-technological knowledge and in training experts to apply this knowledge for beneficial social purposes; the ideal conception, which takes the main purpose of the university to consist in the service of "knowledge and discovery" as "higher values", while striving for the realization of a timeless ideal; the critical (or civic) conception, which sanctifies the "soaring" of thought beyond "the signals of the economy and the dictates of authoritarian governments" and sees the university as a site of freedom, of telling truth to power, and of opposing any tyranny, governmental or otherwise (including, at times, what is perceived as the tyranny of the elitist "ivory tower", and even that of the "striving for truth" itself).
There is room for an integrative view. Each of these conceptions is an appropriate, though partial, expression of a multidimensional practice that lies at the basis of modern universities. Academic conflicts arise when each of these conceptions is presented as exclusive, or on a unilateral basis. Thus, the subordination of academic autonomy, and with it, of the search for truth, to the service of useful economic purposes brings along with it the conception of the university as a kind of factory, or a center of industrial-commercial entrepreneurship, and marginalizes the academic community as a community established on intellectual values. Similarly, ignoring the public manifestations of the truth being studied in academic institutions can serve to exclude the critical public role of the academy and lead to its rejection in the name of a crippling moral neutrality. Similarly, too, a public-critical appeal against the academy's own activities, especially if this appeal is argued for in radically skeptical terms that negate the concepts of truth and rationality themselves, constitutes a reductio to absurdity of the academy's intellectual values and exacerbates trends of academic fragmentation. These are all ways of intensifying internal tensions through one-dimensional conceptions of academic practice and its objectives.
In the present lecture, I shall focus on this last example by way of presenting arguments by Jacques Derrida, in some well-known lectures (1980,1983), that are directed against the modern university based on critical moves rooted in that tradition itself. Derrida's critique is too narrow and one sided in the way the modern university is presented, though it does reflect an important aspect of the academic ethos. Speaking truth to power, including the institutionalized power of science, technology, and the university itself, is one of the major roles of the modern academy, alongside its more practical functions in teaching and research, and it is rooted in the connection highlighted by Kant (1979) between bringing truth to light and the public existence of a free "faculty," that is, in the institutionalized connection between the freedom of thought and expression and the advancement of truth. As we shall see, Derrida applies this critical principle of speaking truth to power to the critique of power mechanisms that appear to underlie the pursuit of truth itself. By this move he brings this critical approach to its highest expression but undermines it in practice.