The Idea of a University: Here and Now

12:15 p.m., Wednesday, 21 Feb. 2001
University Hall 131

Opening Jeremiad. "While the public has been napping, the American university has been busily reinventing itself. In barely a generation, the familiar ethic of scholarship--baldly put, that the central mission of universities is to advance and transmit knowledge--has been largely ousted by the just-in-time, immediate-gratification values of the marketplace. . . . Gone . . . is any commitment to maintaining a community of scholars, an intellectual city on a hill free to engage critically with the conventional wisdom of the day."
(David Kirp, "The New U," The Nation, 17 April 2000)

A Stoic's View (2000-year flashback).   "I respect no study, I count no study good, that results in money. Such arts are money-making occupations, useful only if they prepare one's natural ability, but do not detain it. One should rest in them only as long as the mind can do nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our work. You see why liberal studies [liberales studia] are so called because they are worthy of a free man. But there is only one truly liberal [liberale] study, that which makes one free [liberum]. It is the study of wisdom--lofty, courageous, magnanimous. All other studies are petty and puerile; or do you believe there is something good in any of the subjects whose teachers, as you see, are the most disgraceful and shameful of all? We should not be learning such things; we should be done with learning them."
(Seneca, Epistulae morales [Moral Letters], Letter to Lucilius, 88.1-2, 20-23)

A few terms (and the magic number seven). Based on the types of studies pursued in the classical world, the Seven Liberal Arts became codified in medieval times as a canonical way of depicting the realms of higher learning. They were divided into the Trivium (the "three roads" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (the "four roads" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Philosophy was often envisioned as a metastudy uniting all branches of knowledge. The Latin term universitas, both in Roman and medieval times, designated simply an aggregate of persons. Medieval universities were corporations, either of masters or of students. Only gradually, with the modern notion of a unity of knowledge, did the university become associated with the notion of a comprehensive, all-embracing knowledge, that is, with the requirement of teaching a complete array of subjects. Today, the liberal arts are generally defined broadly as Academic disciplines (such as languages, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science) that provide information of general cultural concern" (American Heritage Dictionary, 4e).

Educational traditions. The liberal arts constitute the oldest educational tradition we inherit, but not the only one. America's most venerable universities grew out of liberal arts colleges designed to educate young men (usually young white men) for the ministry and then the professions of law and medicine. Another tradition began with the establishment of land-grant colleges and universities in the 1860s with the explicit intention of giving men and women the work skills they needed to find employment in an industrializing society. The German research tradition, which began in the U.S. with the founding in 1876 of The Johns Hopkins University, has as its goal the discovery of new knowledge, especially through the scientific method. Our colleges and universities today are characterized by tensions among these three traditions. Some believe the liberal arts tradition should guide and direct the other two because it offers a deeper and fuller understanding of the nature and purpose of human life. If you agree, what beliefs and practices inherent in this tradition might guide our lives and our universities today?

The Idea of a University. "This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called liberal education. . . .[The purpose of a liberal education is to] open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, [and] eloquent expression. . . ."
(John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 1852)

Only connect?   "More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here--listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people's eyes, leading, working in a community--is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect."  (William Cronon, "Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education," The American Scholar, Autumn 1998)

Metaphors be with you: Is "the core" a "foundation" or a "gateway" or a "gate-keeper"? "I think I am not alone in fearing that the traditional aims of liberal education, reduced to the ideal of general education or core curriculum, have lost their punch. They are too frequently viewed by students as add-ons, nuisances in the road to specialized learning. They are perceived as mechanical contrivances, intended to correct the tendency of learning to move in the direction of specialization, epicycles in a system which has spun badly out of balance."
(Stanley N. Katz, Address to Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, 30 Oct. 1997).

An albatross or a white rhinoceros? "[L]iberal education at the undergraduate level is an endangered species and likely to face extinction in another generation or so, at all but the wealthiest and most protective institutions. If recent trends continue, the liberal arts will be replaced by some form of vocationalism, in disguise perhaps, or migrate into other environments, such as Master of Arts in Liberal Studies programs, for adults who recognize what they missed in their undergraduate education. . . .."
(W. R. Connor,  "Liberal Arts Education in the 21^st Century," 25 May 1998)

The Learning Factory. "With changes in age-old relationships in and outside the university and deep financial pressures, internal governance and trust are so disordered in many institutions that higher education is in danger of becoming just another modern machine grinding at the human soul."
(Claire Gaudiani, "The Soul in the Machine or the Machine in the Soul?" Profession 1996)

"What of the consequences for academics of a mass market in [higher education] as a middle-class
consumer product? No one is in any doubt of the relative market positions of UK universities once deregulation is allowed; and the U.S.A. provides a clear indication of where we are headed."
(Roger Harris,  "Dearing Boring: The Massification of Higher Education," Radical Philosophy 1998)

"The British university system is in a mess. To combine successfully mass higher education with elite
excellence, it must follow the decentralised U.S. model. It must introduce differentiated tuition fees, allow a mixture of public and private funding, and give up the pretence of uniform standards"
(Alan Ryan, "The American Way," Prospect 1999)

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