The University

Robert M. Hutchins

[Chapter 8 from the book, The Learning Society, 1968]

IN THE 1960's, all over the world, the ideal of a university, cherished for almost 1,000 years, appeared to be fading, to be replaced by the notion of the university as a nationalized industry. Instead of being thought of as an autonomous community of masters and scholars pursuing the truth, the university was coming to be regarded as the nerve center of the knowledge industry, dedicated to national power, prosperity, and prestige. The president of the largest American university said, "The basic reality for the university is the widespread recognition that new knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth."

Is the university to be the servant or the critic of society? Is it to be dependent or independent, a mirror or a beacon? Is it to attempt to meet the nation's immediate and practical needs, or is its primary duty that of meeting the need for the transmission and extension of high culture? Is an intellectual community possible in an age of specialization? Can a nationalized industry pretend to a world outlook? Or can all these apparently contradictory aims be successfully combined in one institution?

Such questions had been asked from time to time since the rise of the nation-state and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Somebody was always trying to use the universities for something. Napoleon, for example, wanted to make them a kind of intellectual gendarmerie. He said:

If my hopes are realized, I shall find in this corps a guaranty against pernicious theories subversive of the social order. . . .These bodies, being the first defenders of the cause of morality and the principles of the state, will give the first alarm, and will always be ready to resist the dangerous theories of time who are trying to single themselves out, and who, from time to time, renew those vain discussions which, among all peoples, have so frequently tormented public opinion.[1]

The Soviet Union and mainland China have had much the same idea and have added to it the requirement common among industrializing nations, that the university should help supply the programs and personnel necessary to speed the process of industrialization. By the Morrill Act of 1862, the United States, perhaps despairing of obtaining such assistance from established universities, created a whole new set of a new kind that had no other object.

The discovery during World War II that universities could be "useful," particularly in promoting technological advance, swelled the cry that they must change with the times. The universal recognition that technology rested on progress in science and that such progress required a high degree of specialization was forcing the proliferation and fragmentation of instruction and research. The argument was hottest in the developing countries, especially in those that had recently achieved nationhood, because their universities were mostly new and had to fight their way to some conception of their purpose.

The monster, which by definition is an exception to the rule, was becoming the rule. Universities of 50,000 students appeared in many parts of the world, and the University of California was looking forward to 300,000. Though mere growth on this scale and at this rate was disconcerting, it did not necessarily force a fundamental change in purpose and method; for universities could be multiplied and the Oxford and Cambridge principle of small colleges within a large framework was before those who cared to imitate it. The quality of the students, or rather the quality of their preparation, was perhaps more important than their numbers: the rapid expansion of secondary education, and the ad hoc character that it had assumed, created a demand that the university adjust itself to a kind of student it had never had before and alter its character, if necessary, to accommodate him.

In many places the university seemed on its way to thorough absorption in the ad hoc. It was sometimes said that games were now the only university activity pursued in a liberal spirit, that is, for their own sake. But in some countries, even this was doubtful; for the publicity and the gate receipts often seemed more important than the sport. Certainly the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, though still referred to, appeared to be a less and less accurate description of anything actually going on in the universities. As Georges Gusdorf has remarked, Napoleon pas mort.[2]

The most advanced industrial country, the United States, was pouring money into research through governmental agencies that had a mission and wanted the universities to help them carry it out. The university, if it accepted the money, accepted the mission, which was not the mission of the university, but of the agency. These grants required a kind and degree of specialization hitherto unknown, drew off professors from teaching, and made the agency, rather than the university, the nourishing mother, the Alma Mater, of the professor.

The material base, even the physical location, of the professor was changing. He drew his sustenance now from outside the university and could take it with him whenever he thought he would feel more comfortable elsewhere. In many fields, he could develop into an executive presiding over a large staff who carried on his work while he traveled from meeting to meeting, consulting and negotiating. For him the university could be a place to hang his hat, one to which he owed no obligation and in which he felt no interest. The professor might belong to an intellectual community, but it was not one having a local habitation and a name: it was not a university community as that term had been understood since the Middle Ages.

The conception of a worldwide intellectual community, of the wandering professor, free to go where his work can be done best, of a university without walls, composed of men who meet anywhere that is convenient, whose interest is in their subjects rather than their institutions, is not without appeal. Affluence and technology have introduced a new flexibility and ease into the communication of scholars. A specialist in any subject can assemble material and colleagues from anywhere: the resources of the whole world are open to him. No idea of a university, and no organization of it in practice, can fail to include these new advantages in its scope. The question is whether they can be assimilated to the ancient university ideal.

The Purpose of the University

All formulations of that ideal have involved one proposition in common, and that is that the object of the university is to see knowledge, life, the world, or truth whole. The aim of the university is to tame the pretensions and excesses of experts and specialists by drawing them into the academic circle and subjecting them to the criticism of other disciplines. Everything in the university is to be seen in the light of everything else. This is not merely for the sake of society or to preserve the unity of the university. It is also for the sake of the specialists and experts, who, without the light shed by others, may find their own studies going down blind alleys.

The physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond pointed this out long ago. Following notes sounded by Bacon and Locke, he said:

The exclusive study of natural science, like any other exclusive occupation, restricts the circle of ideas. The natural sciences limit the view to what is under our eyes, to what can be carried in our hand, to what gives immediate sense experience with a certitude that appears absolute. …In a certain sense, we may regard this characteristic as a most precious advantage, but, when natural science is an exclusive master, we cannot deny that the spirit easily becomes poor in ideas, the imagination loses its colors, the soul its sensibility, and the consequence is a way of seeing that is narrow, dry, and hard.[3]

The university has been a symbol of human integrity, a trustee for civilization, an intellectual community. Those who like to think of a university as an intellectual community do not do so because the words have a pleasant, friendly ring. The community has a purpose, which is to think together so that everybody may think better than he would alone and so that his own vagaries, which are likely to include an overweening confidence that his subject is the most important in the world, may not carry him away.

The gratifying spectacle of the scholar in Lagos in touch with his fellow specialists in Tokyo, Cairo, Rome, and New York and attending a half dozen international conferences a year is no substitute for the historic role of the university as a center of thought. The members of such a center may take off from time to time to confer with their fellow experts without impairing the vitality of the university; but they must have some continuous attachment to it and dependence on it if it is to remain a center.

Such a center, then, does not exclude specialization or professional study. It does, however, prescribe the kind of professional study it will include and the limits of the specialization it will tolerate. If the sole object in view is to train reasonably successful lawyers, doctors, administrators, engineers, or technicians of any kind, there is no reason for burdening the university with the task. History has repeatedly shown that this can be done on the job or in separate training schools. When Karl Jaspers proposed something new for Europe, a technological faculty in the university, he did not do so because he felt the need for more or more efficient practitioners. On the contrary, he wanted to bring technology within the circle of humane studies. His summary statement was: "The university must face the great problem of modern man: how out of technology there can arise that metaphysical foundation of a new way of life which technology has made possible." Although the British decision to turn the colleges of advanced technology into universities was probably grounded on far more mundane considerations, it may conceivably have the effect Jaspers was seeking. Obviously this effect is not to be expected from a nationalized industry, even the knowledge industry.

The Basis of Autonomy

Nor can a nationalized industry, even the knowledge industry, easily sustain a claim to autonomy. If the university, as we frequently hear, is to reflect the national culture, or if it is to promote national power and prosperity, then there is every reason why the university should be made to follow the orthodox interpretation of the national culture and official prescription for achieving power and prosperity. The university that accepts money from a governmental agency with a mission must try to complete the mission. A university that is an intellectual community cannot accept such grants: it can take no money on conditions that limit its freedom of inquiry or instruction.

So the university has to be clear as to what it is about. Many large American universities appear to be devoted to three unrelated activities: vocational certification, child care, and scientific research. Only the last of these could be the basis of an assertion of academic freedom; and the last, if overpowered by the demand for prespecified results, could add nothing to the argument.

Clark Kerr sardonically said, "A university anywhere can aim no higher than to be ... as confused as possible for the sake of the preservation of the whole uneasy balance." But this involves great risks, especially the risk that those who attend and support the university may ask someday what it is trying to do, and, on receiving an incomprehensible answer, turn their backs on it.

The Students

All over the world, in the 1960's, students were restless. In large part, their complaints resulted from the confusion ironically recommended by Kerr. They did not know why they had come to the university, what they were supposed to do there, or what the university was.

Most of them were under the impression that the university led on to social status and a good job. But how could social distinction attach to something that everybody seemed destined to have? And perhaps there would not be any jobs, or any of the kind they had been led to expect. They found themselves taught by assistants while the professors roamed the world. They found themselves numbered and computerized. The confused university added to their own confusion.

The ancient ideal of a university obviated these complaints, in principle, if not in practice. According to that ideal, research and teaching were identical; and the students were junior partners in the intellectual enterprise. The ideal could be realized or approximated if the students were capable of independent intellectual work and if the professor joined them with him in his inquiries. The problem of teaching versus research, which plagues all universities today, the problem of the "impersonality" of the university, which is as vexing in Paris as it is in Abidjan, the problem of the role of the student in the university, can never be solved amid the current confusion.

These problems become relatively simple if the university is limited to those capable of independent work and interested in doing it. There is no reason why it should not be limited in this way. Liberal education is for everybody, because everybody has a right to have his mind set free. But not everybody wants to lead the life of the mind. If the university were limited to those professors who wanted to lead the life of the mind and who had the capacity for it, and to those students who were able to associate themselves with the enterprise, the size of the modern universities would be greatly reduced.

The University Versus Training Schools and Research Institutes

What would happen to those who were not admitted? By hypothesis, they would have had a liberal education and would be prepared to lead human lives. If they wanted to become technicians of any kind, if they wanted to go into business, if they wanted to solve practical problems, if they wanted to enter upon any of the multifarious occupations of life, they could learn to do so on the job or in training schools set up for these purposes. Those training schools might be located in the vicinity of the university. The teachers and students might avail themselves of its resources. But, since their object would be different from that of the university, they could not be regarded as members of it and could have no part in its management. An intellectual community cannot be built out of people who are not pursuing intellectual interests.

Those scientists or other workers in the knowledge industry who are interested merely in piling up data or in carrying out the missions of government departments or in gratifying the needs of industry might be established in a similar manner in institutes near the university but not a part of it. There is no reason why governments and industries should be forbidden to conduct such investigations as will, in their opinion, meet their needs. There is no reason why investigators who are collecting information should be thwarted in their attempts to do so. There is some reason why specialists should not insist on conducting esoteric researches in isolation - the reason is that they are unlikely to be successful - but, if they are accommodated in institutes of their own, outside the university, they will not confuse that institution. If the university can be an intellectual community, it can fulfill its historic function.

Tendencies in England

The outcome of the struggle going on in England in the 1960's will be instructive. There the government has announced a "binary" or "bilateral" plan for higher education and research. It is reminiscent of the division that must have been in the minds of the framers of the Morrill Act in the United States, a division repeated more recently in Nigeria. According to the British scheme, the universities, which now include the Colleges of Advanced Technology, will continue to be autonomous; but parallel with them will be what is called the "public sector," meeting the demand for "vocational, professional, and industrially-based courses in higher education." Anthony Crosland, Minister of Education and Science, said of these institutions, in 1965: "Why should we not aim at ... a vocationally oriented non-university sector which is degree-giving and with an appropriate amount of post-graduate work with opportunities for learning comparable with those of the universities, and giving a first class professional training?" Crosland refers to this sector as "under social control, directly responsible to social needs."

The institutions in the public sector will not confer their own degrees: they will recommend their candidates to a Council for National Academic Awards that will formulate the standards. Apparently the institutions in the public sector will not be expected - certainly they will not be required - to engage in much research. Their duty will be to turn out technicians.

The autonomy of the English universities has continued in spite of their financial dependence on the state. The "public sector" is directly controlled by local authorities, who are in turn subject to guidance, or at least to pressure, from the central government. The theory of the binary plan appears clear enough: the universities are to be centers of independent thought and criticism; the institutions in the public sector will be responsive to current needs. If the theory can be carried out, the demand that the universities meet current needs will be assuaged.

The question is whether the theory can be carried out. The division between the universities and the land-grant colleges in the United States has almost entirely disappeared. They are all universities now. Whatever other institutions have asked for, these institutions have obtained. On the other hand, the existence of the land-grant colleges did not assuage the demand that the universities meet current needs. Yale, Harvard, and Prince-ton do not teach agriculture, but this is almost the only difference the list of their courses discloses between them and those land-grant colleges that are now called universities. What the University of Michigan is doing and what Michigan State University, founded as a land-grant college, purports to do are about the same.

It seems unlikely that the graduates of the institutions in the public sector in England will long be content with "second-class" degrees, that their faculties can or should tolerate being deprived of the chance to carry on research, or that they and their constituencies will acquiesce in a status that will be regarded as less honorable than that of the universities. On the other hand, the pressure to get the universities into the business of meeting current needs is likely to continue, since Britain, like every other country, is convinced that knowledge is power.

If, in spite of these difficulties, the binary plan can be maintained, it will be a tribute to the strength of the university tradition in England and to the public understanding of it. It may, perhaps, be an example to the world.[4]

The Free and Responsible University

How can an autonomous intellectual community be held to its duty? History suggests, that all bodies of privileged persons tend to deteriorate, and the Oxford of Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith shows that ancient universities are not an exception to the rule. They do not seem to be able to find within themselves the means of regeneration. The danger in the modern university is greater than ever, because specialization tends to remove the professor from the realm of. discussion within the university and makes his field his private property. As Jasper says: "The conduct of faculty members has been compared wit that of the monkeys on the palm trees of the holy grove Benares: on every palm tree sits a monkey, all seem to be very peaceful and minding their own business. But the moment one monkey tries to climb up the palm tree of another he runs in to a heavy barrage of coconuts." Professors must be selected by professors; but departments and selection committees and individual professors seem often moved by fear of competition on the one hand and by affection for their disciples on the other. A university atmosphere, moreover, is not propitious to genius: the academic body is likely to be favorable to accepted doctrine and routine performance. It does not care for fireworks.

Adam Smith proposed to remedy academic indolence and inertia by depriving the universities of their endowments and basing the professors' incomes on student fees. This was at one time the rule in Germany. It put a premium on fireworks, and not necessarily those of genius, but of the television star or vaudeville performer. The remedy actually applied in England was the intervention of the state through royal commissions. Since politics is architectonic, all states have the power to intervene in the affairs of universities. The question is when and how it shall be exercised.

The issue turns on what the state thinks the university is for. A state that regards the university as a means to national power, prosperity, and prestige will - and quite properly, if its premise is accepted - direct the affairs of the university to this end. A state that thinks the primary duty of the university is to look after children will be alert to see to it that no forbidden paths run through the groves of academe. A state that wants a university to be an intellectual community pursuing the truth for its own sake will hold its powers in reserve unless the university, like Oxford in the eighteenth century, flagrantly fails to make the attempt. This has been the general practice of Europe except in such periods as that of Hitler in Germany. Although the vast bulk of all university support in England comes from the public purse, the parliamentary committees that investigate all other public accounts have not been able to get their hands on those of the universities. But the initiative of European ministers of education, like that of governments in England, has on several occasions recalled the universities to their duty.

In those countries in which there are, between the state and the university, intermediate bodies set up to hold the university's property and manage its business affairs, the degree to which they have interfered with academic operations has varied with the tradition of the country. The boards of laymen who nominally control the red-brick universities of England would not think of vetoing a professorial appointment, of deciding on a curriculum, or of determining the scientific value of a research project. They limit themselves to business. Similar boards in the United States, because higher education has traditionally been ad hoc in that country, have not shown similar restraint. Where an American state sets up a board of regents to operate its university, the legislature and the board often vie with each other to see which can interfere more in education and research. The boards of trustees of private, endowed universities in the United States, which are the legal owners of its property, have shown a tendency to behave like the directors of an American corporation, regarding the professors as employees and the students as a product to be turned out in accordance with the specifications of the directors. This tendency is both a cause and an effect of the American tradition, which holds that a university is a mirror, and not a beacon.

The vitality of an intellectual community requires that it be free from such interference. But the continued vitality of the community requires that it be subject to criticism. Boards of trustees and regents can be the primary source of such criticism, I and, apart from the management of business affairs, it would appear to be their primary duty to supply it.

Administration

Red tape, administrative machinery, and all that goes by the name of bureaucracy are the inevitable accompaniments of large-scale organization. They tend to assume such importance as to give the impression that the organization exists for their sake, rather than the other way around. The tendency is toward dehumanization.

The method of a university is maieutic through and through. A university aiming at the ancient ideal depends on human contact. A university and a factory have nothing in common. Although it cannot escape bureaucracy, a university, if it wishes to remain one, has to minimize it in every possible way. One way is to turn the university into a federation of small colleges, an arrangement that minimizes housekeeping and maximizes human contact while preserving the advantages of the larger community to all its members. This way has the additional advantage of minimizing the administrative functions of those members of the community who have to carry them out.

In that conception of a university which analogizes it to a business corporation, the president or rector and the deans are the bosses or foremen of the labor force and are responsible as well for the inspection and certification of the product, the maintenance of good public relations, and securing adequate financing. They are not chosen because of their commitment to the intellectual life or their ability to lead it. If they had the commitment and the ability, they would not be in a position to lead it, because they have no time. Yet their place in the academic apparatus is such that both inside and outside the university they speak for the corporation.

No man committed to the life of the mind can easily reconcile himself to being an administrator for his whole time or for very long. The system that used to prevail in the Netherlands, where every professor was prepared to sacrifice two years of his life, one as secretary of the faculties and another as rector, or that in Oxford and Cambridge, where the college is so small as not to require much administrative attention, and the vice-chancellorship rotates on a three-year cycle, prevents the development of a panoply of academic bureaucrats who dominate but do not belong to the intellectual community.

The president or rector, if he is to be the embodiment and representative of the intellectual community, has to be chosen by it. The "magnificence" that attaches to his name in many parts of Europe is that of the intellectual community, or of the university ideal.

The Prospects

The theme of this essay has been that in the twenty-first century education may at last come into its own. This chapter can offer little evidence that the university may do so. The tendencies all over the world suggest rather that the university will cease to be an autonomous intellectual community, a center of independent thought and criticism, and will become a nationalized industry. Vast sums of money, hordes of people, and almost all governments are dedicated to the realization of this prospect.

If the prospect is realized, the loss to humanity will be severe. It is like the loss of wisdom, of light. Totalitarian countries, primarily concerned with the perpetuation of an official dogma, may be content with this result. In the 1960's, there were some slight indications that democratic countries would not be. Centers of independent thought and criticism were springing up outside the university or in very tenuous connection with it. This solution is better than none, but it seems less than satisfactory. It will take generations for these new organizations to acquire the prestige the name of the university carries with it everywhere.

This essay has taken the position that education may come into its own in the, twenty-first century because of the practical inutility of continuing the inhuman, antihuman, nonhuman programs of the past. The conscientious critic cannot say the same of the university as a nationalized industry. It can be done, and the results desired can be achieved. The results may be unworthy, even suicidal, but in the closing decades of the twentieth century the desire to achieve them looked unalterable.

This field has produced a lush crop of doubletalk. A contemporary scholar has no difficulty in saying that a university must be a service station for its community and at the same time an international organization; an institution focused on the immediate needs of its immediate environment and at the same time engaged in the study of "universally applicable principles or the development of universally valid scholarship."[5] Nobody wants to come into the open and say that the university ideal is outmoded; its hold on the minds and sentiments of men is too strong for that. Almost every statement about the modern university begins or ends with obeisance to the glories of the autonomous intellectual community. A book on education in Nigeria will talk of the importance of intellectual activity for its own sake and emphasize the necessity of a world view; but when it gets serious it will say of the universities that they are "the people's universities and that their development must be upon lines which decisive public sentiment lays down"; it will leave no doubt that decisive public sentiment demands industrial growth and a parochial Nigerian emphasis. Even Shakespeare's sonnets are to be taught with a view to "the light they shed on contemporary African life and contemporary African dilemmas," a challenge to the teacher if there ever was one.[6]

Clark Kerr, when he has described the university as the central manufacturing plant of the nationalized knowledge industry, asks for the improvement of undergraduate instruction, the unification of the intellectual world, the humanization of administration, and a chance for students who have genuine interest and capacity. He summarizes by saying, "The university may now again need to find out whether it has a brain as well as a body." There are no reasons why an efficient nationalized industry should make any concessions to these aspirations, and (there are many reasons why it should not. What Kerr aspires to san be achieved only in an autonomous intellectual community, and this would mean that the university would cease to be a nationalized industry.

It does not seem possible to have it both ways, to preserve the university ideal in a knowledge factory. Unity and clarity of purpose are fundamental. Purpose is a principle of limitation and allocation. It determines what will not be done and how effort and resources will be distributed among those things which are to be done. An institution cannot long pursue cross-purposes; presumably this is what is meant by saying that the university may now again need to find out whether it has a brain. The purpose of the brain is to give meaning, coherence, and unity to the organism and its activities.

NOTES

1. Georges Gusdorf, L'Universite en question (Paris: Payot, 1964), p. 72.
2. Ibid., p.74.
3. Ibid., p.166.
4. For discussion of a somewhat similar notion in West Germany, see Ernst Anrich, Die der deutschen Universitat und die Reform der deutschen Universitaten (2d ed.; Darnutadt: Wiisenichaftliche Buchgesell-schaft, 1962), p. 89.
5. See Harold R. W. Benjamin, Higher Education in the American Republics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 207.
6. O. Ikejiani, ed. Education in Nigeria (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), passim.