On social grounding of the University

Abstract

University as an institution has been always co-created by expectations and needs of social surrounding. The crisis of the contemporary university and the decay of academic culture is due, on one hand, to the changes of the basic institutions of late modernity, such as state, economic firms and mass media, and on the other, to changes of the very science that facilitate the transformation of scientists from scholars to experts. An answer to all those changes is the emergence of audit culture that replaces the traditional forms of social control in academic milieu but also give rise to some pathological behaviors. The longing for the past academic culture may hamper an effort to built a new one, based on adequate diagnosis and moral responsibility for the society.