Academia as Intellectual, Imaginative and Consolidating Power in Democracy-Building: Lithuanian Academia’s Contribution to the Democratic Transformation in the 1990s Lithuania

• In Event: Politics of Plurality in Lithuanian Higher Education

Abstract

The paper explores and conceptualizes academia as an intellectual, imaginative, and socially consolidating power in democracy-building by tracing Lithuanian academia's contributions to Lithuania's democratic transformation in the 1990s. The transformative period in Lithuania opened the space for collaborative and experimental policy-making processes and for academia to manifest its powers at full capacity. While universities became dynamic sites for nurturing democratic values and the culture of public debate, individual public intellectuals, often with university affiliations, stepped into political roles, experimenting with progressive reform ideas. The democratic transformation ascribed particular significance to educational reform, which resulted in intellectuals' active involvement in educational policy and reform formation. There was a need to reimagine the old education system in a way that decentralized educational administration and reflected the country's democratic aspirations. Professor Meilė Lukšienė, who, collaborating with academic colleagues, shaped strategic educational documents, is a pivotal example of an intellectual's public and political engagement. Her team's collective efforts were instrumental in conceptualizing education as integral to the larger democratic project. Lithuanian academia's contributions to democracy in the 1990s testify to the unique transformative role academia can play in society, showing how academia can be both a center of knowledge and a powerful agent of change. Moreover, Lithuanian academia's active public engagement during the transition to democracy elucidates the importance of everyday, inclusive participation in democratic processes. It offers valuable universal lessons for the contemporary Western world on academia's substantial democratizing impact on society.

Short Bio

Rūta Petkutė is a social researcher at Kaunas University of Technology, the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (Lithuania). She works at the intersection of the sociology of higher education, higher education change, the philosophy of higher education, and the history of universities. Petkutė gained a social sciences doctoral degree from Tallinn University (Estonia). This year, her doctoral dissertation was awarded in Lithuania as the best dissertation of 2022 at the Competition for the Best Dissertations, the category "The best doctoral dissertation of Lithuanian citizens defended in foreign research and study institutions in social sciences, humanities, and arts.” In 2022-2023, Petkutė had the position of a post-doctoral research associate at Yale University (USA), where she was working on the ongoing book project "Exchanging Tyrannies: Paradoxes of Neoliberalism in a Post-Communist Society", co-authored with a British educational sociologist Ivor Goodson. Rūta Petkutė's current thematic interest is the link between the public university and civil democracy.

Author

• Rūta Petkutė, Kaunas University of Technology