What’s the point of universities? In one sense the answer is straightforwardly uninteresting.
The point of universities is to produce and disseminate knowledge. But this answer should leave us rather unsatisfied for it is not clear what the point of the knowledge is that universities produce and disseminate.
What we need in order to account more robustly for the purpose of universities is an account of why knowledge is valuable. To ask about the point of universities is then centrally to ask about the value of knowledge. And to ask this is to ask why knowledge in general should matter to us. Some may think that the question about the value of knowledge is not worth asking because the answer is plain.
A large subsection of those who believe this will argue that economic progress demands highly refined knowledge-related skills that are acquired at universities and that is why knowledge ought to be produced and disseminated. But those who believe this are putting the cart before the horse.
As Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen argues, the point of economic systems is to create the conditions for humans to actualise their capabilities. And some of the key capabilities that economic systems ought to be promoting are those that make us able proudly to think of ourselves as rational animals.
Universities are one of the primary spaces where the actualisation of these capabilities is promoted, so economic systems ought to be at the service of universities (although obviously not solely universities). Of course one cannot deny that many of the skills that people acquire at universities do play key economic functions, but this is very different from thinking that the point of universities is to serve the economy.
More plausibly, but also infelicitously, some think that the knowledge produced and disseminated at universities is only of value if it aims at furthering some narrowly defined developmental aims. In this conception, the aim of the university is socially transformative.
I agree in some sense that this should be one of the aims, but I would strongly oppose this conception if it meant that departments of literature and mathematics should close down. And I would be opposed to this because what is centrally of value in human life, including those aspects of what is valuable that are refined in universities, is not rendered valuable purely in relation to the work they do in bringing about narrowly defined developmental aims.
I do think, however, that the value of knowledge is partly parasitical on the benefits that it brings about. But the standard measures of value one most often hears about in the public sphere are far too coarse-grained to measure the value of knowledge properly.
Another subsection of those who believe that the story about the point of knowledge can be told straightforwardly holds that the purpose of universities is to give people knowledge-based skills to get by in life; that is, either to perpetuate or achieve social status measured primarily in terms of levels of wealth.
University life certainly does tend to advantage graduates in this way, but this is not the point of universities. If it were, then all public universities should be closed down or fees should go up markedly, because it would be unjust for the taxpayer to pay for the selfish advancement of others.
If graduates leave universities believing that the point of studying is in the first instance to further their economic prospects, then universities have failed them and hence have largely failed as universities.
Much of the knowledge produced in universities has no positive economic impact and probably never will — and I should add that much of it has no practical impact of any sort, at least under the standard interpretation of “practical”.
But I would be very unhappy to live in a world where academic departments were systematically shut down because the research coming out of them had no practical impact. It seems that the value of knowledge typically transcends these narrowly conceived practical effects.
But there is another sense in which knowledge that is worth pursuing is practical and I will now show in what sense I think the aims of knowledge, and consequently of those institutions responsible for producing and disseminating it, ought indeed to be practical.
The sense of “practical” that I have in mind is the one used to describe things that enhance human existence. Under this interpretation, the mad pursuit of wealth by many students and many of those in charge of designing educational policy is positively impractical, for such pursuits are largely damaging to human existence.
Of those who think the question about the value of knowledge is not so trivial, some will think that the point of universities is ultimately to produce knowledge for its own sake — that knowledge is intrinsically valuable. But I do not understand what people mean by “knowledge for its own sake”.
If knowledge were valuable for its own sake then it would be valuable independently of there being someone who values it. But all knowledge, it seems, is valuable because it is valuable to us in some way. Knowledge, if valuable, ought to matter to us insofar as having it will make us — rational animals — better.
So what we need in the first instance to understand why knowledge is valuable is an account of what it is to be human and in what way catering for the intellectual part of our lives makes us better. The relevant “us” here is not merely those who are privileged enough to go to university but humanity as a whole.
Humanity has benefited from great intellectuals and scientists, independently of whether a large percentage of people are unable to benefit directly or even indirectly from the product of great minds. Having a fuller account of why this is the case will give us the resources we need to understand the point of universities properly.
Pedro Alexis Tabensky is a professor of philosophy at Rhodes University