Document Type : Original Article
Author
Professor of Philosophy, Institute for Social and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran.
Abstract
In recent decades, detailed philosophical and social literature on the social responsibility of universities has been produced in the world and in Iran. According to some of the same data, Iran's state-oriented university, especially in recent decades, has been accused of being a state-owned institution for issuing degrees rather than an academy in a true sense, and as a result, it has not rendered direct service to its local and national community and has not been responsible for them. What has not been asked is whether such a university had the necessary freedom and independence in adopting its policy towards society or not. The fact is that our non-independent university has seen and sometimes supported society through the government. The government's solutions in this regard have been presented and implemented mainly under centralism and through the government bureaucracy. This article, with a social-philosophical approach, tries to define and explain an intermediary called "higher education charities" between the university, the state, and society, and show how one of the pillars of the university's independence from the state and society, and the establishment of the academy on the independent logic of its scientific activism, can be used to understand the existential capacity of these charities to achieve the two fundamental pillars of the university, namely its independence and its social responsibility towards the society and, in turn, the responsibility of the society towards the university. This solution proposes a model of knowledge management and the university according to which the government can be free from many of its previous obligations to the university. At the end of this paper, some solutions are proposed in order to implement this idea in Iran.
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