Professorit poliitikkoina : pelikentät ja retoriikan lajit

Kirjoittajat

• Kari Palonen

Abstrakti

Max Weber regards citizens as occasional politicians. The rhetorical genres provide us styles of political action. From these perspectives I judge the political actions of professors. The first part deals with the decline of once extraordinary presence of professors in Finnish government and parliament. This tendency corresponds to the professionalisation of democratic politics towards full-time politicians. An increasing gap between scholarly and political judgments has alienated professors from parliamentary politics. Nonetheless, professors’ activities are thoroughly political in Weber’s sense of striving for power shares and their redistribution. This political aspect is omnipresent in a professor’s relationship to students, colleagues and university institutions. The politics of evaluation and justification is daily professorial activity. The academic polity is subject to power struggles, for example regarding academic freedom versus dependence from arbitrary powers. The epideictic rhetoric ex cathedra has declined, the rhetoric of interest negotiations dominates university politics. The article argues for strengthening the parliamentary style of deliberative rhetoric in academic politics. A main ground for it is that research itself is part of the rhetorical practice debating pro et contra. For a fair dealing of scholarly controversies the parliamentary procedure offers the best historical approximation.