Universities

In a previous post, I pointed out that charging students US$22,000 for a semester at sea might not be in the best interests of society. But what are universities for?

Universities are a very different thing from the universitas magistrorum et scholarium (community of scholars and teachers) that arose in Europe during the Middle Ages. Then, students (the scholars) paid the teachers, which gave them an important say in the universities. In the nineteenth century, universities underwent a dramatic change, becoming centers of scientific research rather than religious teaching. They acquired laboratories, and began their transformation into research institutions. But they also began to be mass institutions, often with a practical or applied focus.

In 1862, in the United States, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act, “Donating public lands to the several States and territories which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts.” In the aftermath of the Second World War, governments decided that tertiary education ought to be opened up still wider. In the U.S., this resulted in the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — the G.I. Bill, which sought to (partially) compensate war veterans by giving them help to “readjust”; this included tuition benefits. Almost overnight, the number of people (well, mostly men) who could afford to go to college skyrocketed. Other states managed to expand the pool of people going to tertiary education in similar ways.

So, by mid-century, the constituencies for universities included teachers; governments (which sought to increase the wealth and productivity of their economies by investing in “productive” research; and lots and lots of people who had never before had the opportunity to become “scholars,” people for whom a university or college education was (potentially) a ticket to a better life.
Mass education worked. People got better educations; economies became richer; workforces became more productive.

But lurking inside the institution we call the university is a big problem. The many constituencies that make up the modern university don’t all have the same goals. Educating students is not always easy to harmozie with primary research — despite the repeated assertions that research and teaching are inextricably linked. Students who assume that the university exists to educate them are in for a rude shock–because the institution that the university has become does not place high priority on a population that is, after all, transient and not particularly remunerative.

State interests do not always coincide with academic freedom, freedom that one of the university’s constituencies, the teachers, ought to value and defend more vigorously than they do.

Universities have also grown, and as their budgets have become bigger (not because of government largess, but largely because scientific research is damnably expensive), the people who used to run them, academics themselves, have been shunted aside by people who have academic credentials but are more at home with the language of the corporation than with the language of teaching.

This is a big deal in an era where state financing of tertiary education is going down. Asked to balance between the university’s constituents, the managerial class that runs universities rarely plunks for the scholar (understood as the student) or the teacher. Instead, universities have sought “partnerships” with business, or have sought to make themselves as directly useful to the states that fund them as possible. Business and states, or rather the people who run those states, tend to have very instrumental views of universities. And that is not particularly good for the original constituency of the university: the scholars and teachers, whose goal is (or ought to be) the free pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.