This is the first in a four-part series on the Death and Evolution of Education, which seeks to explain why we cannot rely upon the university to provide the intellectual formation necessary for the common good, but must “evolve” a new approach to learning. One part will be published each week for the next four weeks. Part II: The Hostile Environment is here.
“The university is dead.” To the chagrin of many of my friends and colleagues, I have been saying this for months. I have been implying it for years.
Immediately, it seems a claim either absurd or pure hyperbole: there are still over 3,000 accredited institutions of higher education in the United States alone, after all, and universities are lightning-rods of attention and controversy. Rare are the days where Harvard, Columbia, Yale, the University of Chicago, Stanford, or some other prestigious and historic school does not make headlines. We fight about their curricula, evaluate their faculty; argue about how they should be structured, what they could be “if only…”; we hear of countless dollars spent in efforts to control their future, and so on. Were the institution truly dead, it would be not only strange but morbid for so many people to be up in arms over how the corpse ought to live.
At the very least, thus, it seems to claim that the university is “dead” constitutes mere hyperbole.
Well—there is no doubt that it is hyperbolic. But let us strike away the “mere”; for exaggeration sometimes becomes necessary. It has oft been stated, over the past seventy years, that education is “in crisis”.[1] The word English “crisis” comes from the Greek κρίσις—specifically, the meaning given it in medicine: the turning point in a disease at which the patient will either improve or turn terminally ill.[2] Diagnoses may differ as to causes of the ailment, but it has long been acknowledged that our educational systems are not healthy. How long, we must ask, can an entity be “in crisis”? At some point, the point of crisis is passed—for better or worse. Do we believe that the university, today, is better off than it was even just a few decades ago?
But it is true: the university is not dead. Not yet—it may hang on for some time. But I do not believe it will last much longer in any but a truly decrepit and unnatural form, a form unfitting to its actual purpose. Nevertheless, it occurs to me that I should explain more clearly and more precisely what I mean. In previous efforts to explain the death of the university, I have used the metaphor of a living individual substance: saying that, much like any living body, the university possesses a natural lifespan. But upon further reflection—brought on by an astute line of questioning from a conversation had at a Lyceum Institute Philosophical Happy Hour—it occurs to me that this metaphor stumbles; for, although individual universities may come and go, departments may grow or shrink, and the signs point to a general decay, the idea of the university not only persists, but continues animating those who seek its perpetuation—and so the image does not convey the point as well as I would like. This or that particular institution, continuing to exercise the vital operations of higher education, seems like a counterfactual instance to my claim.
Thus, perhaps the better metaphor—understanding that the point of any metaphor is not to explain the object it signifies, but to help us see its presence more clearly—could be found not in the death of the individual but rather in the evolutionary decline of a species. That is: when the external conditions of the environment shift, extant species’ previously suitable adaptations—by which adaptations they attained dominance within that environment—may become not only insufficient for their continued thriving but prove even to be inhibitions to their survival. A maladapted species may persist for a time, with diminishing dominance; or perhaps even continue indefinitely, as an evolutionary relict.[3] This decline towards the status of a relict, I believe, well-describes the university—for the environment has irrevocably changed, and while the needs of the human mind remain fundamentally the same, the means employed by the university are no longer adequate. In other words, it is not only the case that the majority of universities are failing to bring their “matter” (faculty, curricula, etc.) to the standards of their purpose (the education of students and the advancement of science and understanding), but that their “form” (the structure of the university itself) is not capable of sustaining that purpose.
Of course, unlike living species, here we are discussing a socially-constituted reality. The university does not have an internal form making it to be what it is. Rather, its form is what we make it to be through our own minds. In other words, we create and re-create the university insofar as we keep talking about it. This ability to create and re-create, however, is not a matter of mere arbitrary stipulation. The objects of social constitution, that they evolve into custom and thereby gain a kind of “legislative force” for our practice, require a fittingness to the mind-independent realities of the world. The more we insist upon social institutions that are maladapted to these realities not constituted by our thinking, the sicker they become.
So let us ask—and reflect deeply upon this question—what is the environment we today inhabit, and why is the university maladapted for it?
[1] Walter Moberly published a text in 1949 titled The Crisis in the University; Hannah Arendt penned an essay in 1954 titled “Crisis in Education”. Both bemoaned the movement away from the mores of traditional conveyance—of the fostering habits of liberal mind apart. Moberly undertook an explicitly Christian perspective, however, while Arendt suggested a kind of “value neutral” approach to early childhood education.
[2] More generally, the term identifies “a separating, power of distinguishing; choice, selection; decision or judgment”—from the verb κρίνω.
[3] Such as the Snowdon lily, the Tasmanian tiger, various species of shrew, Ginkgo biloba, and many others—including, it has been hypothesized, the Neanderthal.
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