How Universities Can Save Themselves
The crisis of the universities is worse than they realize. They must rediscover their core mission.
The American university system is in deep political trouble—deeper than most people realize, especially people inside academia. MAGA has for over a year been planning a frontal assault against research universities, and there is every reason to think that the adverse consequences of that project, as currently undertaken by Trump, will last decades, if not forever.
From the perspective of saving the university, the timing could not be worse. MAGA’s assault comes against a weakened foe with few allies in today’s political field. Universities are in a uniquely vulnerable position, critiqued today from points left, right, and libertarian. The left believes that the debt burdens that universities impose on their graduates, as well as the partnerships with corporations, make them engines of neoliberal reproduction. The right thinks the universities are woke indoctrination factories that have poisoned the cultural bloodstream with DEI and other “communist” ideas. And the libertarians claim that the hierarchical structure and subject matter make them antiquated institutions, which are just a waste of time and money to attend. Where a generation or three ago, investing in universities was a great bipartisan national project, that consensus has collapsed.
The question that leaders of research universities must grapple with is this: How can we preserve and enhance what is uniquely valuable about the research university? To do that, we must begin by defining what is “uniquely valuable”—that is, what research universities do better than any other existing institution, and without which society would suffer badly. I take those uniquely valuable attributes to be: (a) the creation of highly well-trained experts; (b) path-breaking knowledge creation; and, crucially, though often ignored or even denigrated, (c) knowledge preservation and transmission.
You will note that I do not list “remediation of historic wrongs” or “promotion of social justice” as among the unique value-adds of research universities. This is not because I do not regard these goals as worthwhile but rather because I do not regard those objectives as ones that research universities are “uniquely” suited to pursue. Those projects, I would argue, are much better implemented either through an explicit political process or through civil society actors with explicit moral missions such as churches, charities, and so on. To those who regard everything, including all teaching and research, as part of the social justice agenda, I would simply say that such a moralizing conception of the mission of the university is a drain if not a stain on the legitimate intellectual focus on research. The Germans have a useful and untranslatable term for this project: “Wissenschaft,” i.e. the pursuit and preservation of systematic truth.
To return to the left, right, and libertarian critiques of the university, it must be admitted that each—whatever its exaggerations—also contains undoubted elements of truth that universities need urgently to address. To address the left critique, the cost of education (or at least the ever-escalating cost curve) absolutely needs to be brought down. No one likes to say this, but part of how this has to happen is that the services offered to students must be dramatically reduced, with universities no longer acting as the all-in-one entertainment complexes that they currently are but rather re-focusing on their core missions. To address the libertarian critique, very different standards need to be used to evaluate teaching and research—and these long-twinned elements may need to be more formally separated. (There’s no reason other than prestige for a Nobel winner to be teaching Intro Econ or Bio or Physics or whatever.) And to address the right-wing critique, universities need both to enforce free speech principles more rigorously and take a much less forbearing attitude toward “activist scholarship”—a concept which has almost nothing to do with the pursuit of Wissenschaft. This latter point in turn connects with the desperate need for the humanities to reconceive themselves not as a site for remediating bad things about the past but rather as a site for preserving and transmitting what is worthy about the past.
This last point may be controversial, but it’s arguably the most important, because this is also the only way that the humanities are possibly going to survive and add intellectual value to the university (or society, for that matter). Few need convincing that breakthroughs in physics, biology, or chemistry are socially valuable activities. But what exactly is the social value of the humanities, and why does it need to take place inside a research university? That’s a real question and my answer is that making sure that the next (and every) generation of students is systematically exposed to and given an appreciation for what was greatest and best about the intellectual and cultural life of the past is an essential part of any research university’s mission—and indeed is crucial to the project of long-term civilizational stability. Conversely, a loss of commitment to knowing and, where appropriate, venerating past cultural touchstones (across many cultures) is tantamount to an embrace of barbarism.
In this call for a re-envisioning—arguably a restoration—of the mission of the academic humanities, I want to be very clear about what I am not saying. This is not a mindless directive to steer attention away from the failures, inadequacies, and exclusions of past modes and products of cultural production. History (and other historically-minded fields) should not be a site for the uncritical celebration of the past. Its many failings must be open to examination. But what must end is the view that the entirety of the present is best or even adequately represented as the fruit of the poisonous trees of past iniquities. Such cultural pessimism, which in some variations can verge on nihilism, is at odds with the research mission of the humanities, whose primary pedagogic focus must be providing students with knowledge and models from the past that can help them understand the present in more complete and nuanced ways. A due attention to the highest achievements of the past—I use the hierarchical metaphor deliberately— is the right and proper focus for a renewed humanities.
This injunction then speaks to what is ultimately most important about the research university, and what is most worthy of defense and extension. No other institution ever invented has been anywhere near as good at educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency, nor at creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world, nor at maintaining the knowledge already created. To speak the language of business schools: these are the “core competencies” of the research university. A ruthless focus on eliminating anything and everything that stands in the way of these three attributes is the only hope I believe we have for generating a renewed appreciation for the social value of these indispensable institutions, and thus withstanding the onslaught of the barbarians.
Nils Gilman is Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President at the Berggruen Institute and a former Associate Chancellor of UC Berkeley.
A version of this essay originally appeared in Small Precautions.
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It can perhaps be hard to remember that the original ‘university’ was set up free of change by a famously ugly ex-sculptor in the Athenian agora just over 2500 years ago. Then, too, the city had been ravaged by plague, it’s attempt at democracy subverted by political hubris, an overabundance of demagogic populism, military adventurism, and a hot if sporadic war with an autocratic state bent on its destruction. And yet, in one extraordinary span, it had made unmatched advances in philosophy, medicine, the arts, architecture, political theory, historiography, naval shipbuilding, had twice defeated forces of the world’s strongest empire, and had birthed the Western Tradition.
The outcome, that first ‘professor' was judicially murdered for being the gadfly who asked too many uncomfortable questions, which ought to be one of any unversity’s core missions.
I’m just 80. My intellectual journey was begun in what most would certainly call an elite independent school followed by a mixed college odyssey of eight years that included an Ivy, a catholic college, a land grant university, and a stint in the US army during one of the most divisive periods in our recent history. Looking back now I wouldn’t have forgone any of it, albeit that at times, I was far less convinced of its value than I should have been.
Universities must save themselves. At their best, they lie at the heart of our democracy. Let them return to some form of the original in which a man asked and with the help of his students attempted to answer the essential question - how and according to which principles should men live. We’ve accumulated one hell of a lot of data toward that answer, and as Americans we are both the inheritors of and the participants in the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex experiment in human society and government ever attempted, based entirely on that data.
We cannot afford to fail. To do so would prove to an increasingly skeptical world stalked by autocrats that we are not and never were "the last best hope of earth”.
These are great strategies, but the biggest problem is Aristotelian in nature: What are the 4 causes of higher education? To begin what is the Final Cause, the ultimate function of education. This is what has been lost primarily. Once post-modernism eliminated truth and post-colonialism eliminated morality, education has been adrift; at that point academics and political activism merged into a very expensive pablum of confusion. The Final Cause of education was once to learn about the ways the world and the people in the world actually work. Why is this important? Physics is only possible after we know why we want to know about physics. Only then do your strategies come into play: The Formal Cause of education is how we teach. What is the best way to deliver this valuable information? If the intersection of politics and science is in fact the best strategy then we do that. However as you clearly point out... it is not! Third we think about the Material Cause of education. This has changed more dramatically than anything else. We no longer need classrooms or books or pens or even groups of desks. Education can occur on the screen of a computer at home -- but is this the best way to achieve your strategies which in turn serve the ultimate function of education? Likely not. People, to really learn effectively, need to see each other and smell one another's pheromones it seems. Which brings us to the fourth cause, the Efficient Cause: Who does it? What is the animating cause of education? Do we now look to Grok and Gemini to do the teaching now? Are teachers even necessary? Do students need to talk and disagree and confront one another energetically? Yes, simply yes.
Still the biggest challenge THE FIRST challenge remains the Final Cause. Final Cause first, and then we know why we have colleges and universities at all. Perhaps it is not for learning about the world anymore. Perhaps now the exorbitant price of some schools relative to others is to create an environment for a new kind of mating sorting ritual. At the Ivies and sub-Ivies preppies mate with preppies, with some poor angry diverse people and professors sprinkled in to add entertaining flavor to the mating rituals of the wealthy. At the state schools the middle class mingle with less required DEI flavoring added since more diversity is already indigenous there, and then at the bottom rung and the community colleges no DEI is added at all, because it is already a native component of the college mating rituals of the working class colleges. Is that the Final Cause of education: to create mating rituals that maintain our silent class structures? It certainly seems that way. DEI is no more than a little spice sprinkled in here and there, so the smug can go about in the ways of Mrs Jellyby, as ever -- and as ever, virtue is merely signaled but never done.
This is why Trump appeals to the working class. Why we love seeing the Ivies losing billions of dollars of federal funding. We take genuine glee in this! The working class saw the elite perfectly represented by Biden who we all saw, with our own eyes, was incompetent while the Harvard and Princeton and Cornell elite told us he was sharp as a tack and fit as a fiddle. But here at the Community College of Allegheny County we saw the truth.