Sometimes, economic conditions and political change compel us to ask critical questions about our social institutions.
This is what has happened to universities as they confront globalisation, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid, the emergence of China and now the West’s financial crisis.
What should we expect from them? Who should pay for them? How is their obligation to society to be squared with academic freedom from political control?
These questions are made more pressing by an increased emphasis on university league tables, the rankings of which have become a matter of national pride. Yet few are clear about what a university is or what it should be. In addressing these questions we must keep historical reality in mind. It would be foolish for philosophical theorists or ministries of education to start reinventing the wheel.
The history of universities goes back to medieval times and their development over succeeding centuries follows a common trajectory. To focus on essentials, we need to find the “inner pulse” of this trajectory.
There are at least three distinguishable ideals of what a university should be. The oldest is the “university as college”. Education as the pursuit of learning lies at its heart and its members are “colleagues” — not just teachers and students, but ‘bachelors, masters and doctors”, a hierarchy in which the “doctor” is engaged in learning no less than the “bachelo”.
College education was not simply knowledge for its own sake. From earliest times university colleges were professional schools as well as centres of scholarship, a key feature that endured into the modern period and received new life in colonial America.
Many fledgling institutions were modelled on Scottish university colleges and several subsequently became famous universities — Princeton in New Jersey and Columbia in New York, for example. Nevertheless, the college ideal of combining advanced scholarship and undergraduate education struggled to survive in the second half of the 19th century as two competing ideals arose: knowledge for its own sake versus practically useful knowledge.
Berlin University was established in 1810, devoted entirely to scientific and scholarly research. Sixty years later a private benefactor founded Johns Hopkins University in the United States in the belief that universities served society best by sticking to the production and transmission of knowledge. Both constitute a model that has won great prestige in the modern world.
Nowadays, a “first-class university” generally means “a leading research institution”. And yet the model too easily fits the negative image of “the ivory tower”, an institutional luxury that has little connection with “real” life.
Why should taxpayers pay scholars in ivory towers? More practically minded people have always tended to look elsewhere. In the year Johns Hopkins was founded the University of Texas A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical) opened its doors. As with technical institutes in general, Texas A&M was proudly focused on training personnel for local needs. The severely practical emphasis, however, proved short-lived.
Today Texas A&M describes itself as a “research-intensive flagship university” and across the globe institutes of technology have made the same move in their search for the special status that “university” signifies. The most prestigious modern universities, it seems, are committed to elements drawn from all three originally competing ideals: good undergraduate education, pure research and practically beneficial knowledge.
In reality, however, these three goals reflect importantly different values. How might we adjudicate between them? As an account of the inner pulse of a university, the ideal of a research-intensive institution is problematic.
First, “pure” research does not need publicly funded universities. There are pharmaceutical laboratories, defence contractors, art museums and so on ready to undertake it.
Second, some of the greatest scientific advances in history — the theories of Darwin and Einstein, for example — clearly have no practical application.
But third, and most importantly perhaps, the elevation of research runs the risk of marginalising undergraduate education. On this score the model of the “technical” university seems preferable since it aims to provide useful education for all.
Its problem, however, is finding a place for free academic inquiry, scholarly and scientific research that pays no attention to practical relevance or social benefit. To relinquish such freedom would be to abandon the autonomy that universities have always claimed.
If practical knowledge is the ultimate goal of the university, then many, perhaps most, great intellectual discoveries count for nothing. In a research university undergraduate education becomes the first step in an academic career that only a tiny minority of students will ever pursue. In a technical university science and scholarship matter only to the extent that they serve a social need.
Can the college model do any better? The tension between academic specialisation and general education is not easily resolved, but one element in the college model offers a potential solution to the integration of research, teaching and practical relevance.
From the first, university colleges offered professional education. Professional education is practical, but not technical, since it must go beyond technical expertise. Trivial computer games and life-saving operations need just the same technical expertise, but professional education needs non-technical values also.
The purpose of law is the administration of justice; mere legal expertise can be used to subvert it. This shows that the problem with “bent” lawyers is not technical incompetence but disregard for a non-technical value — justice. Professional education is “values education”.
Legal education, for example, must go beyond education cases and statutes, looking to jurisprudence, legal history and criminology. This is precisely the combination of education and training to which the ideal of the college aspired.
Moreover, it took civic education to be a key part of its role: the production of informed and responsible citizens who would be able to resist tyranny and the blandishment of populist politicians.
Free inquiry has a crucial role too. Its purpose is to ensure that intelligent citizenship does not degenerate into conventional opinion or political dogma. Here, then, is a model of the university in which science, education and social benefit unite.
Professor Gordon Graham teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States