Slogans as an integral part of educational discourse: Two examples

Abstract

Slogans in education have been the subject of critical analysis – at least in the context of philosophy of education – for more than half a century. Some of these slogans are no longer relevant or frequently used, while their analyses and explanations are still an appropriate theoretical basis for understanding new educational slogans. One of these theoretical findings – given by the French philosopher Reboul – that still holds true is that educational slogans almost always try to conceal themselves in educational discourse, that is, to present themselves not as slogans but as something else: educational principles, evidence, factual or rational obviousness. They are mostly words or expressions with ambiguous meaning. Although they can contain an informative element, their abressence is not to inform or explain but rather to persuade or to make us act in a specific way. Usually, they serve the cause of different educational theories. Yet they do so in a rather specific way, as the hidden goal or function of educational slogans in educational discourse is to legitimise or disqualify a certain educational doctrine or practice. The more effective and persuasive the slogans are in this regard, the greater the danger is that they will increasingly replace thinking. The only way that slogans will not determine our thinking is to think about slogans, to take them as an incentive to think and not as a substitute for it. In this article, after a very brief review of the theoretical explanations of the slogans and a mention of some well-known slogans in education, some elements for an analysis of two less known and interlinked contemporary slogans (‘We are the university’ and ‘The university is not an enterprise, knowledge is not a commodity’) related to the critique of the still influential neoliberal ideology in higher education are given.

Introduction

Slogans are, following the interpretation of French philosopher Olivier Reboul, ¹ an essential part of the language of education and of educational discourses, as he explains them (Scheffler, 1960; Reboul, 1984). ² According to his interpretation, the term ‘discourse’ has three meanings. Firstly, it means a coherent set of sentences on a given topic, which can be either spoken publicly by a person or presented in a written text. Secondly, it means ‘a linguistic unit of the same or higher order as a sentence’ (e.g. a maxim, an article, a circular issued by the school authorities, a book, etc.), while the unity of discourse derives both from the unity of the topic and from the internal organisation of the discourse: syntactic, logical and rhetorical. Thirdly, discourse is meant as a collective name for a set of discourses (in the narrow sense of the word) produced either by one and the same person (for example, Rousseau’s works) or by a social group (say, the educational discourse of modernity) and presenting common linguistic features. In this sense, discourse is something between language and speech. Like speech, discourse retains a certain freedom; for example, it can offer a choice between two synonyms, between two syntactic forms. ³ But this choice, which seems to be free, is, as a matter of fact, more or less determined by the sub-code as a system of constraints of a social group or ideology. ⁴ These are crucial features common to all discourses, but just as important for understanding them are those characteristics that distinguish discourses from each other. Educational discourses (discours pédagogique), for instance, differ from other types of discourses (religious, political, philosophical, legal, etc.) in that they relate to education. Another characteristic of educational discourse, says Reboul, is that it pretends to be true independently of its content. For him, this truth is of a practical order, that is to say, its aim is to justify or condemn this or that activity which is intended to be educational. ⁵ Therefore, educational discourse speaks about education and at the same time pretends to be true in order to justify a certain theory of education or aspect of education while condemning another (Reboul, 1984: 11). However, since there is not only one educational discourse but several, this leads to contradictions between discourses. ⁶ In his book, Reboul analysed five types of educational discourses that played important roles in France at that time: contentious, innovative, functional, humanistic and official (Reboul, 1984: 15–54). Analyses of these educational discourses and their elements (metaphors, hyperboles, slogans, clichés, analogies, false alternatives and so on) are in many ways still relevant and theoretically interesting. This is also true for his, and others’, analysis of famous slogans that belong to educational discourses. But since these slogans are now more a matter of history than of current educational discourses, it does not seem necessary to present them and their analyses extensively or in detail. An additional reason for this is the fact that these analyses are excellent and still quite widely available to anyone interested in the subject. It therefore seems to me that a very brief and incomplete review of the theoretical explanations of slogans as such, and a mention of some well-known slogans in education, might be sufficient at the outset. After that, some elements for an analysis of two less known and interlinked contemporary slogans (‘We are the university’ and ‘The university is not an enterprise, knowledge is not a commodity’) related to the critique of the still influential neoliberal ideology in higher education will be presented. This ideology is globally widespread, but the slogans associated with it are (as terms and notions) – like the vast majority of the slogans analysed in education – specific to Western cultures, languages and educational ideas. This article is no exception in this respect.

Educational slogans and slogans in education

Reboul (1975) defines a slogan as a precise, short and punchy formula with a striking effect, which aims to win the public over to a cause precisely through the surprise effect it produces. It is distinguished from information, instruction or regulation by its rhetorical form. This form makes the formula have a surprise effect in various ways: rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, metaphor, hyperbole, allusion, concise argument, etc., but always such a formula is rhetorical because it seeks to persuade rather than inform or prescribe (Reboul, 1984: 82). When we say that a slogan is a formula, we mean that it is either a sentence (‘education is productive work’, etc.), a phrase (‘democratise education’, ‘learn to learn’, etc.) or a catchword (‘selection’, ‘creativity’, ‘autonomy’, etc.). The catchword is not, of course, a formula in the true sense of the word, but it nevertheless functions as a slogan because it strikes at the level of connotation in order to provoke a commitment to what it is trying to convince the addressee of. Since some words (growth, autonomy, creativity) are perceived as values in current educational discourse while others (coercion, reproduction, selection) are mostly pejoratives, the very mention of these words acts as a value judgement. Another thing to note about the slogan is its similarity to a cliché. The only difference between the two is that a cliché is an established or frequently repeated formula which does not have a striking effect and is imposed in a different way to give the impression of obviousness. But the boundaries are not sharp; all slogans can become clichés and punchy words can work as slogans. ⁷ Together, they represent the hard core of educational discourse.

Educational slogans are an integral part of educational discourses. However, according to Reboul, not all slogans relating to education are educational slogans. The slogan ‘knowledge is riches’, for instance, is indeed a slogan, but it has no educational connotations; it is ‘nothing but “salesmen’s patter”’ (Reboul, 1979: 296). The most typical educational slogans are those that ‘convey an educational doctrine, and even an entire ideology’ (Reboul, 1974: 63). ⁸ Nevertheless, they are subject to the basic characteristics that apply to other types of slogans as well. The first characteristic is that they try ‘to conceal themselves so as to be taken for something else’: educational ‘principles, demonstrations, truisms based on fact or reason’ (Reboul, 1979: 298, 1984: 86). Their second characteristic is that they are anonymous formulas. It is precisely in their anonymity that their rhetorical power lies, because as such they emphasise the impression of obviousness that slogans create: ‘they do not express “what so and so thinks”, but rather “what is true”’ (Reboul, 1984: 86). The third characteristic of educational slogans is their polemical nature. When they ‘assert something, it is always in opposition to another assertion’. ⁹ The fourth characteristic of slogans is that they are abbreviations. It is the abbreviations that give them their power to justify, to persuade, to disqualify, to win over, etc. If they were longer, they would not only be less punchy and harder to repeat and remember, but they would no longer be summaries; in short, they would no longer be slogans (Reboul, 1984: 86). For Reboul, the essence of slogans as self-confirming, short, punchy and polemical formulas lies, above all, in their power to persuade, to instigate, to get people to act against something or for something, and to legitimate or discredit a particular educational practice or theory.

Such an interpretation of slogans is not the only possible one, of course, but it seems to be so important that philosophers of education must either take it into account or give a reasoned explanation of why they do not. Since I find this interpretation mostly acceptable, especially in the light of the purpose of this text, I leave it to others to prove it otherwise. In my view, such an explanation can be a good introduction to understanding slogans as such and as specific elements of educational discourses. However, the essential features of slogans, understood in this way, have only been presented in a very brief and rudimentary way, because this text – as is clear from its title – is neither intended as a critical discussion of Reboul’s understanding of slogans nor as a substitute for other understandings of slogans, but rather it only serves as a suitable conceptual framework within which the two slogans related to the neoliberal idea of the university will be discussed in the following. It follows that the focus of this text is an attempt to analyse and interpret these two slogans, which have been undoubtedly widespread in at least some Western countries and formulated in at least three different languages.

The university is not an enterprise, knowledge is not a commodity

In 2009, a protest and resistance movement of students and professors (against neoliberal university reforms) began in many European universities, manifesting itself also in the occupation of faculties and entire universities (Bruno et al., 2010: 130–134). With the slogan ‘L’Université n’est pas une enterprise, le savoir n’est pas une merchandise’ (‘The university is not an enterprise, knowledge is not a commodity’) and others like it, these resistance movements in France and other European countries ‘target the neoliberal matrix of the European reform which subjects the whole field of knowledge to the logic of profit and competition’ (Bruno et al., 2010: 134).

A telling example of this is the open letter to the president of the University of Strasbourg, who said in an interview ‘Nous sommes une entreprise qui a du mal à être heureuse d’avoir plus de clients’ (‘We are an enterprise company that struggles to be happy to have more customers’) (DNA, 2020). One hundred professors of the same university strongly criticised this statement in their open letter and wrote in response: ‘No, Mr. President, our university is not an “enterprise”, its students are not “customers”’ (Lettre, 2020).

At first glance, it may seem that both this slogan and the slogan ‘The university is not an enterprise, knowledge is not a commodity’, mentioned earlier, are actually a kind of negative definition that tells us what the university, students and knowledge are not, and that for this reason their use is problematic, because the slogans, understood in this way, do not tell us what the university, students and knowledge are at all. But such a literal understanding of these slogans would be wrong and misleading. For to understand them in this way is to overlook their polemical nature, which is essential to them and to most other slogans. These slogans are an expression of opposition to neoliberal notions and policies that treat the university as an enterprise, students as customers and knowledge as a commodity. Therefore, the message of these slogans is not that existing universities are not enterprises, that students are not consumers, and that knowledge is not a commodity, but that they should not be. It follows that what these slogans are really expressing is not a negative definition of existing universities, students and knowledge, but a warning. For example, in the aforementioned letter of protest, the professors warned the president of the University of Strasbourg as follows: ‘We are not an enterprise, we are not ‘operators’ and you are not our boss. … We no longer want to hear this language that accompanies the methodical destruction of our public service. We want to continue to be the university, characterized by the production and transmission of knowledge to all, a university open to the world and accessible to all those in search of knowledge’ (Leys, 2006). The warning to the president of the University is perhaps even more evident in the following passage from the letter: ‘We are not an enterprise: we are the university. Do we need to remind you of the meaning of this word? It speaks of the universality of knowledge that we must make fruitful and transmit for the benefit of all. It says a community of research and teaching united by the construction and transmission of knowledge, at the service of society. It also says: equality in access to knowledge, collegiality and academic freedom, collective search for truth, scientific imagination’ (Leys, 2006).

This once again confirms that the slogan ‘The university is not an enterprise’ is not intended to define the university in a negative way, but to criticise the neoliberal understanding of the university. ¹⁰ Because of its polemical nature, this slogan can perhaps also be understood as what the slogan originally means: a rallying cry; that is, a cry that rallies people against something, ¹¹ in this case uniting professors in their struggle against those who defend a neoliberal understanding of universities and, therefore, also treat them as enterprises. As we have seen, the professors in question have expressed their opposition to this understanding of the university with another striking slogan: ‘We are not an enterprise: we are the university’.

We are the university

The slogan ‘We are the university’ is quite new. It was used by students and university professors (who were protesting against the announced or already implemented changes to their universities in line with neoliberal views) as a label to describe themselves. This slogan is easier to understand if we consider the context in which it was allegedly used for the first time. Several authors have referred to an anecdote mentioned by Simon Leys in his short essay on the idea of the university. The anecdote tells of a bright young minister of education in England who visited a distinguished old university and addressed the assembly of professors who came to hear him with ‘the employees of the university’. Immediately, one of the professors stood up and corrected him: ‘Excuse me, Mr. Minister, we are not the employees of the university, we are the university’ (Leys, 2006). ¹² When professors at various French universities also say ‘Nous sommes l’université’ (‘We are the university’), they want to emphasise that the more and more dominant understanding of the university (according to which it is taken for granted that university professors are employees of the university, and that the university administration is in fact the university that employs them as an employer) is wrong and misleading. University professors, therefore, use this slogan in order to oppose this perverse image of the university that is closely linked to the previously mentioned neoliberal idea of universities as enterprises. Some professors at the University Paris 6 who are members of the ‘We are the university’ association literally declare: ‘Nous ne sommes pas des employés ou des clients des universités: Nous sommes l’université’ (We are not employees or customers of universities: We are the university) (NSU, 2017). In their opinion, it is the university administration that should be at the service of professors (who, as a community of professors, are in fact the university), and not the other way around.

It is clear from what has been said that this slogan – like the slogan discussed above, and many others – is ambiguous and polemical. On the one hand, it is polemical because it is used by professors to express their opposition to being perceived and, consequently, treated as university employees by politicians and university administrators. On the other hand, it is ambiguous because some students also assert that they are the university. For example, those students who occupied rooms at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) in 2011 to protest against the neo-liberalised and commercialised university proclaimed ‘We are the university’ (Nielsen, 2019: 89).

Therefore, if both professors and students claim to be the university, who is really the university, the professors or the students, or perhaps both? At first glance, the two claims ‘We are the university’ seem to be contradictory. But they would only be if professors and students, each for themselves, thought that they and only they were the university. For in that case, only one or the other could be the university. But the slogan in question can also be understood in another way, as if both professors and students were the university. And it seems right to understand it in this way. There are at least two reasons in favour of this understanding. One is that when professors utter ‘We are the university’, they are emphasising that they are not employees of the university, and when students say the same, they are emphasising that they are not consumers of university services. Both, therefore, use this slogan to express their opposition to and condemnation of the neoliberal conception of the university as an enterprise, of professors as employees, and of students as consumers. Consequently, neither professors nor students use this slogan to address each other, and neither of them, therefore, claims that one or the other is not the university.

The second reason that the above-mentioned assumption that the two statements embodied in the slogan in question are not contradictory might be a historical one. For, although the alleged first university, which originated in Bologna in the Middle Ages as a corporation or universitas, was indeed a community of students (universitas scholarium), and the next one, in Paris, was initially a community of professors (universitas magistrorum), later universities were nevertheless mostly defined as a community of professors and students (universitas magistrorum et scholarium). But it is not just that this has been the case in history. The possibility mentioned earlier that the slogan ‘We are the university’ refers to both students and professors is confirmed by the contemporary protest movement, which mainly involves students and professors who, in 2021, occupied some lecture halls of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana declaring ‘We are the university’.

But even if these two reasons are convincing, the slogan in question is still ambiguous, since it can be understood as either a performative or a constative utterance. ¹³ If understood not performatively (as was the case of some students in Auckland who did not belong to the protesters), but within the logic of representation, this slogan not only causes difficulties in understanding it, but also in its criticism, based on the argument that it does not refer to all students but only to a minority of them. ¹⁴ Something similar happened to the protesters at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, as at least some of their colleagues understood their proclamation of ‘We are the university’ as an attempt to unjustly appropriate the university and symbolically exclude from it anyone who does not think like them. This might be one of the reasons why most students and professors acted as if the occupation of part of the Faculty of Arts did not exist (Kodelja, 2017: 31–35).

Both of these examples show that the slogan ‘We are the university’, like many others, is ambiguous because it has ‘quite different meanings according to the speaker or the person spoken to’ (Reboul, 1979: 299). But there is another problem with this slogan as well: when it becomes the name of a protest movement of professors or students, of an association or organisation of which they are members, it somehow ceases to function as a slogan.

Concluding remarks

Slogans, as Reboul interprets them, are short striking phrases which have the ‘power to rally people for or against, to persuade them and to justify’ or denounce a particular practice (1979: 297), doctrine, politics, educational reform, etc. It is precisely because of this power that slogans are used with the aim of making people act in accordance with what the slogans assert. Although slogans do not need to provide proof or convincing arguments to achieve this aim, they can nevertheless be more effective if we see them not as slogans but rather as something else: ‘principles, demonstrations, truisms based on fact or reason’ (Reboul, 1979: 298), and so on. Justifying or disqualifying a specific doctrine or practice is, therefore, an important but usually hidden function not only of educational slogans but slogans as such. The more effective and persuasive slogans are in this respect, the greater the danger is that they will increasingly replace thinking. The only way to prevent slogans from determining our thinking is to think about slogans, to take them as an incentive to reflection and critical thinking, not as a substitute for them.