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.
Nils, great post. It brings together many topics I've been musing in a troubled way, so first of all, thanks. I needed some inspiration this morning.
Some background (if I may). 58 years ago I was a sort of affirmative action freshman at Columbia, a product of its wish to have a "national student body", which is to say, of a residual sort of antisemitism, since (as my classmates pointed out) there were a helluva lot of Bronx High of Science graduates who were not admitted but who were a lot smarter than I was. So what was a methodist kid from small town Ohio who felt, at least in some, like the dumbest person in the room to do? I did two thing. I hid, squirreling myself away in a (Jewish, of course) fraternity. And I learned, which was easy to do, since the required "Contemporary Civilization" (i.e. Western Tradition) and Humanities courses were revelatory. Nearly sixty years on, I'm still repairing to those books, still exploring the tradition and its current implications, and still (I must admit) trying to prove I deserved the chance I was given.
The point of all this is that I agree with all three core missions that you propose for the modern research university. But you really nail the "preservation and transmission" piece: both what it needs to be and why it's important. In some ways I think of my 1967-68 freshman year as the inflection point in the humanities' turn towards post-modernism and to the privileging -- I want to step carefully here because I think I recall that you were Martin Jay's student -- of a rather slack and uncritical use of the word "critical". So you will have a fight on your hands around this third point and I want to say, as someone who hasn't thrown away his Adorno, that I will help in any way I can.
When I arrived at Cal 35 years ago, the four semester sequence of Contemporary Civilization that you refer to was in the process of being phased out — my freshman year of 1989-90 was in fact its last year. This course sequence was a casualty of the first round of woke-ism, then known as "political correctness," which deemed such courses both Eurocentric and redolent of a "hierarchical" view of culture (two critiques that were often conflated).
Now, these course were undoubtedly Eurocentric — though that bug would have been easy to fix. What would have been nearly impossible to fix was these courses hierarchical view of culture, because this was a feature, not a bug. Which is why the mavens of political correctness insisted that they be abolished, not merely reformed.
The fact that these courses were phased out was to me not only a kind of cultural tragedy, but also a significant milestone in the journey through which the Humanities lost their way. Their hierarchical view of cultural achievement was the correct one.
Thanks for the response. It's interesting that when I hit Columbia in '67 the method of addressing cultural hierarchy issue was to have a parallel Oriental Humanities sequence that wasn't required, but was widely taken. The vulnerability here was that Edward Said was rearing his head just at this point and so the "Orientalism" charge had begun to be leveled. I didn't digest any of this until Said's book came out 10 years later. I think I bought it the day after the NYT reviewed it. It was an amazing book - and justly influential - but certainly not the last word on anything. I can still remember my sense of disappointment when, in the later volumes of his 'Modern World System', my teacher Manny Wallerstein bought so unreservedly into Said's critique.
Um, what about teaching? Bizarre to list three missions but exclude the one that in fact students and families pay for, and the one that our democracy and society in fact relies on.
Your list may appeal to the well-heeled, but not to most voters and taxpayers. They have a right to expect more from universities - what you call “social justice” could also be called public engagement and service.
I agree this is a time for re-imagination, but this vision is sadly lacking.
Teaching is there implicitly. It's the method for (a) "creating highly well-trained experts" and (b) "preserving and transmitting knowledge." It's true that I am mainly referring in this post to the unique function of *research* universities. But I don't think this is particularly an appeal to the "well-heeled" — what taxpayers, voters, and parents are paying for when they fund these places is to create well-trained workers and well-informed citizens, and the way that happens is via teaching.
Is one of the reasons why academics find the "promotion of social justice" and "remediation of historic wrongs" so attractive is that they don't believe that teaching and research in their chosen areas of expertise to be all that important? In actuality, teaching and research in some academic disciplines and sub disciplines may not important to the advancement of technology, the arts or the liberal arts, which include mathematics, the natural sciences, humanities, etc.
1. I’d condense the mission statement even more tightly: “The overriding goal of a research university is the creation and dissemination of intellectual capital to all elements of society.”
2. It’s indeed time to trim back on the recreational offerings, which have grown totally out of control.
3. But consider also the overhead elements of the university’s staffing. In a private sector for profit enterprise, overhead costs range from 4% to 25%, the latter in cases which are high on advertising or R&D. In the case of my own three alma maters (all Ivies or equivalents) the percentages rise to 70%, for stuff like grant writing, DEI, student services, buildings and grounds, etc. Full professorships consume less than 2% of total spending. Think what could be done if overhead were brought more in line with the private sector.
3. Looking at the problem from another angle: start with the net tuition charges to an undergrad for a semester, and subtract 20% for overhead. Divide that number by the total hours spent in class by a student taking 15 credit hours for that semester.
You will probably come up with a number in excess of $800 per class hour.
Now, if instead of writing (or borrowing) your entire semester’s tuition and paying it up front, let’s post a member from the bursar’s or treasurer’s office at the door of each classroom or lecture hall to sell “admission tickets” to each class.
How many classes would you pay that sum attend?
(At the risk of annoying my “woke” readers who’ve gotten this far with my rant, the line for the “admissions guy at the door are, in the words of the late Hollywood actor, Charlie Chan, “No tickee, no washee.”)
Lesson implied: most basic classes in the first two years could be handled by AI or videos by world class scholars, with upper class seminars handled by resident faculty.
The growth of staff is undoubtedly a problem, but in a sense it's a bit like the growing tooth-to-tail ratio in the military — a sign of specialization. To take one of your specific examples: the growth of grant writing might seem like "bloat" but in fact has been about relieving faculty members of duties so they can focus on doing the actual research. To put it schematically: rather than hire two (expensive) faculty members, each of whom has to spend half her time writing grant proposals, it makes more sense to hire one (expensive) faculty member, and one (cheaper) grant writer to support that faculty member.
Same thing goes for many student services -- it used to be that faculty were expected to perform almost all the functions now done by staff. Now they're expected to do almost none, and instead you have (much cheaper) student advising specialists. I don't think buildings & grounds maintenance has escalated much in per-unit costs, though the sheer number of buildings and grounds often has.
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.
Nils, great post. It brings together many topics I've been musing in a troubled way, so first of all, thanks. I needed some inspiration this morning.
Some background (if I may). 58 years ago I was a sort of affirmative action freshman at Columbia, a product of its wish to have a "national student body", which is to say, of a residual sort of antisemitism, since (as my classmates pointed out) there were a helluva lot of Bronx High of Science graduates who were not admitted but who were a lot smarter than I was. So what was a methodist kid from small town Ohio who felt, at least in some, like the dumbest person in the room to do? I did two thing. I hid, squirreling myself away in a (Jewish, of course) fraternity. And I learned, which was easy to do, since the required "Contemporary Civilization" (i.e. Western Tradition) and Humanities courses were revelatory. Nearly sixty years on, I'm still repairing to those books, still exploring the tradition and its current implications, and still (I must admit) trying to prove I deserved the chance I was given.
The point of all this is that I agree with all three core missions that you propose for the modern research university. But you really nail the "preservation and transmission" piece: both what it needs to be and why it's important. In some ways I think of my 1967-68 freshman year as the inflection point in the humanities' turn towards post-modernism and to the privileging -- I want to step carefully here because I think I recall that you were Martin Jay's student -- of a rather slack and uncritical use of the word "critical". So you will have a fight on your hands around this third point and I want to say, as someone who hasn't thrown away his Adorno, that I will help in any way I can.
When I arrived at Cal 35 years ago, the four semester sequence of Contemporary Civilization that you refer to was in the process of being phased out — my freshman year of 1989-90 was in fact its last year. This course sequence was a casualty of the first round of woke-ism, then known as "political correctness," which deemed such courses both Eurocentric and redolent of a "hierarchical" view of culture (two critiques that were often conflated).
Now, these course were undoubtedly Eurocentric — though that bug would have been easy to fix. What would have been nearly impossible to fix was these courses hierarchical view of culture, because this was a feature, not a bug. Which is why the mavens of political correctness insisted that they be abolished, not merely reformed.
The fact that these courses were phased out was to me not only a kind of cultural tragedy, but also a significant milestone in the journey through which the Humanities lost their way. Their hierarchical view of cultural achievement was the correct one.
Thanks for the response. It's interesting that when I hit Columbia in '67 the method of addressing cultural hierarchy issue was to have a parallel Oriental Humanities sequence that wasn't required, but was widely taken. The vulnerability here was that Edward Said was rearing his head just at this point and so the "Orientalism" charge had begun to be leveled. I didn't digest any of this until Said's book came out 10 years later. I think I bought it the day after the NYT reviewed it. It was an amazing book - and justly influential - but certainly not the last word on anything. I can still remember my sense of disappointment when, in the later volumes of his 'Modern World System', my teacher Manny Wallerstein bought so unreservedly into Said's critique.
Um, what about teaching? Bizarre to list three missions but exclude the one that in fact students and families pay for, and the one that our democracy and society in fact relies on.
Your list may appeal to the well-heeled, but not to most voters and taxpayers. They have a right to expect more from universities - what you call “social justice” could also be called public engagement and service.
I agree this is a time for re-imagination, but this vision is sadly lacking.
Teaching is there implicitly. It's the method for (a) "creating highly well-trained experts" and (b) "preserving and transmitting knowledge." It's true that I am mainly referring in this post to the unique function of *research* universities. But I don't think this is particularly an appeal to the "well-heeled" — what taxpayers, voters, and parents are paying for when they fund these places is to create well-trained workers and well-informed citizens, and the way that happens is via teaching.
Is one of the reasons why academics find the "promotion of social justice" and "remediation of historic wrongs" so attractive is that they don't believe that teaching and research in their chosen areas of expertise to be all that important? In actuality, teaching and research in some academic disciplines and sub disciplines may not important to the advancement of technology, the arts or the liberal arts, which include mathematics, the natural sciences, humanities, etc.
1. I’d condense the mission statement even more tightly: “The overriding goal of a research university is the creation and dissemination of intellectual capital to all elements of society.”
2. It’s indeed time to trim back on the recreational offerings, which have grown totally out of control.
3. But consider also the overhead elements of the university’s staffing. In a private sector for profit enterprise, overhead costs range from 4% to 25%, the latter in cases which are high on advertising or R&D. In the case of my own three alma maters (all Ivies or equivalents) the percentages rise to 70%, for stuff like grant writing, DEI, student services, buildings and grounds, etc. Full professorships consume less than 2% of total spending. Think what could be done if overhead were brought more in line with the private sector.
3. Looking at the problem from another angle: start with the net tuition charges to an undergrad for a semester, and subtract 20% for overhead. Divide that number by the total hours spent in class by a student taking 15 credit hours for that semester.
You will probably come up with a number in excess of $800 per class hour.
Now, if instead of writing (or borrowing) your entire semester’s tuition and paying it up front, let’s post a member from the bursar’s or treasurer’s office at the door of each classroom or lecture hall to sell “admission tickets” to each class.
How many classes would you pay that sum attend?
(At the risk of annoying my “woke” readers who’ve gotten this far with my rant, the line for the “admissions guy at the door are, in the words of the late Hollywood actor, Charlie Chan, “No tickee, no washee.”)
Lesson implied: most basic classes in the first two years could be handled by AI or videos by world class scholars, with upper class seminars handled by resident faculty.
The growth of staff is undoubtedly a problem, but in a sense it's a bit like the growing tooth-to-tail ratio in the military — a sign of specialization. To take one of your specific examples: the growth of grant writing might seem like "bloat" but in fact has been about relieving faculty members of duties so they can focus on doing the actual research. To put it schematically: rather than hire two (expensive) faculty members, each of whom has to spend half her time writing grant proposals, it makes more sense to hire one (expensive) faculty member, and one (cheaper) grant writer to support that faculty member.
Same thing goes for many student services -- it used to be that faculty were expected to perform almost all the functions now done by staff. Now they're expected to do almost none, and instead you have (much cheaper) student advising specialists. I don't think buildings & grounds maintenance has escalated much in per-unit costs, though the sheer number of buildings and grounds often has.