The Changing Nature of the University
How modern research universities fundamentally changed the structure of an ancient institution
Universities have been in the news a bit as of late. The Supreme Court decided two consequential cases this term dealing with higher education. In one, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Court struck down race-based affirmative action as unconstitutional. In the other, Biden v. Nebraska, the justices held President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy to be illegal. After the affirmative action case was announced, many colleges released statements bemoaning the decision and rushed to end their legacy admission policies, whereby the children of alums and wealthy donors are given a leg up in the admissions process. Additionally, civil rights groups sued colleges over their legacy admissions policies, claiming they disproportionately benefit white applicants at the expense of underrepresented minorities (since the majority of legacy admits are white).
These are all interesting developments, each of which deserves its own post. But instead of jumping on the bandwagon to write about these decisions or weigh in on the legality and morality of race-based affirmative action or legacy admissions, I decided I’d take a step back and ask a set of very different questions: What is a university? How should we view the role of the university in our society? And how should universities actually function? Amid all the consternation over the news, it’s important to consider these deeper questions about the purpose of the university in today’s society.
To answer these questions, we have to explore a bit of the history of the university. The earliest western universities arose in Italy, France, and England in the cities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, respectively, between the late-11th and 12th centuries. For several hundred years, the goal of the university was simple: Educate young men in the ways of the world so that they could become theologians, lawyers, or doctors. To that end, “most Western universities offered a core curriculum based on the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.” After taking grueling exams and graduating, “students then proceeded to study under one of the professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology.”
In the early universities, there was little commitment—indeed, a near-complete rejection—of academic freedom. Students and professors were mostly pigeonholed into studying topics that reinforced the teachings of the Catholic Church. One would suspect, then, that the Protestant Reformation ushered in a new period of academic freedom. In fact, just the opposite occurred: Because both Protestant and Catholic sects were utterly convinced of their religious beliefs, universities operating under the auspices of each church became increasingly wary of new knowledge that threatened established theological wisdom.
This lasted up until the later 18th and 19th centuries, when the modern German research university was born. Wilhelm von Humboldt was the head of the new department of education created in Prussia in the early 19th century, and his modernizing impulse created lasting change within the structure of the university. “In an 1809 report to the king,” reports Jan C. Bongaerts, “Humboldt . . . said that anyone with a general, enlightened education in humanity and citizenship, be they a craftsman, salesperson, soldier, or businessman, could easily acquire the skills needed for their job while maintaining the freedom to move from one profession to another as life called for.” In other words, “a general education provides the foundation for learning professional qualifications and skills (and not the other way around).”
Humboldt, then, revolutionized the way we think about higher education. Instead of a place where aspiring preachers, doctors, and lawyers went to learn established truths, the Humboldtian model envisions universities as breeding grounds for developing well-rounded students with transferable skills. This profound shift changed the way the university was structured, too: Whereas the old liberal arts-based institutions emphasized the mastery of the professor over his field, Humboldt believed that students “should participate as junior partners in their teacher’s research activities.”
“As a result,” continues Bongaerts, “the so-called seminar became the key academic education forum in which teachers gather with small groups of students to discuss research topics. This novelty meant that teachers themselves conducted research—in Humboldt’s days by no means an established academic reality.” That new structure also led to other key advances in higher education, modeled after Humboldt’s own University of Berlin (est. 1809). In these new universities, according to Britannica, “laboratory experimentation replaced conjecture; theological, philosophical, and other traditional doctrines were examined with a new rigour and objectivity; and modern standards of academic freedom were pioneered.”
Like Bratwurst, sauerkraut, and BMWs would in later centuries, the Humboldtian model of higher education took the United States by storm. As Americans moved westward, new universities were founded on the German model, including land-grant universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cornell University, and state universities in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. These universities grew out of investments under the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided states with money to start agricultural and mechanical colleges across the U.S. With modernization came new subjects for universities to teach, including physics, chemistry, and engineering; later, social sciences like economics, political science, and sociology would be added to the curriculum. Where previously the focus of many universities had been the liberal arts and humanities—such subjects as history, literature, and philosophy—these new, larger institutions shifted the aim of universities towards building skills and producing innovations. So-called technical education flourished in the U.S. after World War II under the influence of Vannevar Bush, dean of the School of Engineering at MIT. “As dean,” writes Korak Roy for National Affairs, “Bush envisioned a new technical curriculum oriented around basic science that could capture large amounts of public funding for research and development (R&D) and create prototypes for next-generation technologies.” In other words, “modern technical education is in the business of applied science,” rather than merely theoretical science.
Since then, there has been an explosion in growth of the U.S. higher education field. There are almost 6,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., nearly 4,000 of which are degree-granting post secondary institutions. Many of them, if not directly modeled after Humboldt’s vision, are at least inspired by the idea and take their cues from Humboldt’s view. This means that most of our universities—especially our most well-attended (large state schools) and prestigious (the eight Ivy League universities in the Northeast, coupled with Stanford, the University of Chicago, and others)—view as their mission the pursuit of rigorous research and technological innovation.
The structure of the university, then, has changed remarkably over the past nine centuries. That is to be expected; after all, the world outside of universities is very unlike that of the 12th century. Large-scale social change, spurred on by the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, affected universities just as much as they did the rest of the world. Technological innovation was so rapid throughout the 19th and 20th centuries that it would have been foolhardy for the university not to adapt. The secularization of society meant that students were no longer as interested in theology. And expanded economic and political equality opened up the field of possible admits into universities beyond the cloistered, aristocratic world in which only the (male) children of wealthy (white) families could attend college.
But has this change been all positive? Or was there something inherent in the liberal arts education of yesteryear that students aren’t getting anymore? As with any large-scale transformation of society, trade offs are inevitable.
Let’s start with the idea of liberal education in general. As Roy writes, “liberal education seeks to form the student through exposure to excellence and habitation in rational thought . . . . Professors who practice this tradition apply tools of careful reasoning and group discussion to deduce truths by engaging with the written word.” When you read good literature or philosophy, you grapple with profound ideas about the human condition, the nature of good and evil, the character traits that shape a person’s actions, the inevitability of death, and the constant search for meaning. Indeed, part of engaging in the liberal arts is to find meaning, particularly in an increasingly secular world in which most students don’t find their meaning from religious texts. Wrestling with these ideas, particularly with the guidance of a good professor, makes for a more interesting and engaging educational experience. Arguably, it also makes for better people.
Technical education is a whole different beast. Roy continues: “in contrast to the lofty conversations one might encounter in a philosophy seminar . . . the physical environment of machines, labs, equipment, and tools imbue technical education with the trappings of a factory or production plant.” This is not to suggest that technical education is necessarily inferior, “but it plainly conflicts with the norms of the liberal arts.”
But if higher education were a democracy, the students would vote overwhelmingly in favor of the new Humboldtian model. Because science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degree holders go on to earn a $76,000 median salary after graduation while liberal arts graduates only make $51,000, the market pushes students towards STEM degrees regardless of the educational or moral benefits of studying the humanities. While those poetic positives of studying English may sound good, it’s simply not enough to dissuade students from “opting for degrees they view as most likely to result in gainful employment.”
So students don’t seem to be embracing the liberal arts. But what about professors? In a liberal arts-dominated world, it would be unlikely for universities to expect professors to do as much research as they do now. After all, if you’re a professor teaching Aristotle’s political philosophy to undergraduates, there’s not much you can add to the conversation. Moreover, that wouldn’t be the point of your engaging with such ideas. Texts like those written by Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, and Rousseau have been around for thousands of years, in some cases. Professors teaching these ideas are not supposed to be adding new research to the conversation; instead, they are tasked with transmitting that knowledge to the next generation. In a liberal arts world, you would expect most of the professor’s time to be spent teaching, grading, and preparing lessons for his or her students.
In our research-based universities, the expectation is flipped. Most research universities in the U.S. have a 40-40-20 workload. Professors are expected to spend about 40 percent of their time teaching, 40 percent of their time doing research, and 20 percent of their time doing “service” (peer reviews, organization leadership, community service as an expert in one’s field, internal university service, etc.). Not all professors are created equal, however. “For example,” as the University of Arizona points out, “career-track faculty who primarily teach often have a much higher teaching workload and very low workload for research/scholarship/creative activity or for service. Research professors or continuing status track faculty often have very low teaching workload expectations if at all.” To put a finer point on it, there are some professors who have no teaching requirements at all.
There is also a prestige problem in the U.S. higher education field. While it’s obvious that institutions like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Notre Dame are more desirable to teach at, it is also the case that professors feel pressured to work at research universities rather than liberal arts colleges, where the research expectations are not as high.
For these reasons and others, one university professor and vice-chancellor in Australia, Brian Schmidt, has begun questioning the Humboldtian model of higher education. “Once you start having a cycle where you’re not being taught by the people at the bleeding edge” of scientific research, he argues, “you just dumb the whole system down.” Schmidt also “questioned the ‘return on investment to the nation’ when people generated 100-plus page applications for grants they had less than a one-in-five chance of securing.” In other words, the incentives for producing original research, while certainly necessary to attain key advancements in scientific knowledge, may be crowding out the time professors spend with their students. In an earlier era, that would have been alien to the university experience.
One of my colleagues, a University of Chicago graduate, told me that several of his classes consisted of writing just one paper and receiving no feedback on it other than a letter grade. The worst part about that story is that he was a philosophy major. That type of laissez-faire teaching may be more understandable in a STEM field, where at least the research that takes up much of the professor’s time is socially beneficial. But, as I detailed earlier, what can a philosophy professor in the 21st century add to the conversation?
Perhaps this is an indication of perverse incentives that are inherent to the ethos of a research university. Even in the humanities, professors are being asked to devote considerable time to producing original research, rather than teaching or reading outside of their own field to obtain a greater understanding of the world. This is why lots of professors spend their days writing ever-more-niche papers that fewer people will read and understand. In order to obtain more prestigious appointments, professors narrow the scope of their inquiry to the point where—especially in the humanities—the question of whether the product has any social value is up in the air.
What, then, is the purpose of universities? Is it to further scientific inquiry? Or is the purpose to expand the intellectual horizons of their students? It’s important to note that both of these conceptions involve the pursuit of truth. Studying the liberal arts allows students to develop a deeper understanding of the past and the human experience in the hopes that this will illuminate the true nature of the world. Technical education is also geared toward finding the truth, but it’s grounded in the exploration of the physical world, rather than the metaphysical.
It’s clear to me that there is value in both pursuits. Technical innovation has been profoundly impactful on society and has led to human flourishing beyond belief. Indeed, because it has had such a large impact on the world, state and federal governments disproportionately fund incentives for students to obtain STEM degrees (rather than humanities degrees) in their higher education career. But, I would argue, there is just as much value in studying the humanities. Grappling with complex philosophical ideas and reading timeless literature opens a window into the human soul that sophisticated gadgets just can’t contend with.
I fear that by reducing higher education to STEM degree production, we are worsening our ability to understand the human experience. We’re taking time away from professors to teach in order to push them into doing research that merely adds to their résumés. While I’m not advocating a return to the liberal arts-only education of the past, it’s important to remember the original purpose of universities. Shaping undergraduate students into more thoughtful, well-informed members of society is just as crucial as building the next advanced telescope. We neglect the liberal arts at our peril.
We probably have too many universities/colleges. I’m always surprised at the number and sometimes when I drive through a small town and it has a university that I may not have heard of, I always wonder how it stays in business? Just the real estate costs and operation and maintenance alone are extraordinary not to mention salaries, benefits, etc of the faculty and staff. I thought COVID might separate the wheat from the chaff when on line learning exposed some of the cost weakness of a brick and mortar university/college but I don’t think it did. I suspect government lending might have something to do with so many able to sustain themselves and perhaps a shift to a more normal equilibrium is under foot. I do to agree there is a lack of liberal, thought based education and we are surely seeing the fruits of that. Just open your eyes.