Machiel Keestra

With the positively ending Elektra, Sophocles wanted to show the audience how political and moral independence, judgment and the courage to act are necessary - to a sometimes extreme extent - for the good of the family and the state. Even in the old democracy, virtue - which for Hegel was a principle of democracy - was not enough on its own. The downfall of democracy was probably due to a lack of individuality rather than the emergence of that individuality. We find the negative result of Hegel's general assessment of the contribution of an individual to democracy not only in relation to ancient democracy. In a similar sense he expresses himself about contemporary conditions. In the Reform Bill article he describes how a French voter makes up a ninety-millionth part of the legislative power and will therefore pay little attention to his contribution to the general public. Although the Athenian democracy was smaller and different from the French one, its citizens probably needed proof of the need for individual participation in it too. Sophocles' Electra served this purpose. How Elektra and Orestes re-paved the way for an essential institution of democracy, the court of justice, will not have escaped the onlookers' attention. In this play it was shown that individuality could have negative as well as positive consequences. After all, it was only through the appearance of Electra and Orestes that justice could be saved and become a public matter again.

The protests at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) that began in November 2014 as a reaction to severe cuts in the department of humanities have sparked a broad debate nationally and even internationally about the future of the university and the values and ideals that should define it. It turned out that dissatisfaction was much more widespread in different parts of the university than some had previously thought, and many turned out to share the concerns first put forward in the humanities department, to extend beyond the borders of the university and the country. Increasing focus on getting as many students as possible to graduate promptly has shifted the attention ever more towards quantitative indicators for the evaluation of education rather than qualitative ones, leading to raising the question of whether the quality of education has suffered from these priorities. How did this come about and what could be done to improve this quality? In this essay we briefly consider the history of the university as an institute that aims to combine research and education, subsequently mentioning some more recent challenges for the university, finishing it with a brief description of a ‘circulation model of education’ that we consider to be a fruitful source for answering some of the challenges we identified from the current discussions. In this model circulation rather than unidirectional traffic occurs between different elements: circulation between research and education, between insights of teachers and of students, between disciplines, between general and contextualized knowledge, between disciplinary and experi- ential knowledge, between doing research and (meta-)reflection upon research, and so on.