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The Mission of a University

Let me begin with a basic but potentially controversial proposition: the modern university is one of the great achievements of American civilization. We do not often, at least anymore, speak of an “American civilization.” Perhaps that is appropriate in a commercial republic such as our own. As a nation, we have always celebrated the practical and the popular. We elevate as heroes inventors and businessmen like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, social activists like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. and statesmen like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The art forms we most celebrate are those produced for a mass audience—television, film, pop music. The “ivory tower” is a pejorative, dismissing those who are not sufficiently rooted in the practical strivings of the day-to-day. The historian Richard Hofstadter once called our attention to the anti-intellectual tradition in American life and the frequency with which public figures have had recourse to the denigration of expertise and specialized knowledge, preferring a more populist “horse sense” to the opinions of elite “eggheads.”1

But there is an American civilization nonetheless, and universities occupy an important place within it. Commentators have sometimes struggled to capture an “American mind” that is both uniquely American and also elevated. The Victorian English writer Samuel Butler observed that “America will have her geniuses … but I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius,” a view that was shared by many of his American contemporaries.2 Boston’s Henry Adams looked across the Mason-Dixon line and concluded that “the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament.”³ The essayist Paul Elmer More returned the favor, dismissing the “half-civilization” that New England had pilfered from old England.⁴ The conservative literary scholar Richard Weaver bemoaned returning in the fall of 1939 to the campus of Texas A&M University and its “rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life.”⁵ Such conservative critics of the American scene as Adams and More could be too pessimistic, even as that scene appeared in the early twentieth century. But over the course of the twentieth century, cultural institutions have flourished in America, creating new homes for the exploration of ideas and values, and universities have been among the most important and successful of those institutions.

This is not to suggest that the modern university does not have problems or confront challenges. Universities are expensive. Although the economic value of a degree remains substantial, the traditional educational model is costly to maintain, and universities have taken on many more expenses in an effort to serve their various constituencies and to entice students to enroll. Those difficulties are exacerbated by public disinvestment from many institutions of higher education. Both the value and the cost of education give rise to worries about student access. Making the benefits of universities available to an ever-increasing number of students raises not only questions of cost, however, but also difficult issues of adequate student preparation for what universities have to offer. The traditional role of faculty in guiding university decisions has been threatened by the rise of professional administrators and contingent instructional staff, and universities are tempted to sacrifice their core mission by enticing distractions ranging from semiprofessional sports to economic investments. Students, employers, policymakers, and competitors question whether ivy-covered universities remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Perhaps most disturbing is an apparent crisis of confidence among members of the general public in the value of universities in American society. In recent years, Americans who identify with the Republican Party in particular have developed sharply negative views on the contribution of institutions of higher education to the United States.6

Despite such causes for doubt, American universities remain the envy of the world. Students from across the globe flock to American universities to pursue educational opportunities unrivaled by anything available in their home countries. The faculties of American universities have dominated the ranks of Nobel Prize winners because they provide a welcoming home to scholars from across the world and the resources and freedom to allow those scholars to push the boundaries of human knowledge. The system of higher education in the United States offers an unmatched diversity of institutions and educational models. A historically high proportion of the population of the United States have earned college degrees, and those numbers continue to grow. The economic value of a college degree continues to rise as well.⁷

These achievements are surprisingly recent, however. It is easy to be lulled into complacency by the long history of many of our most prestigious colleges. Institutions like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale can boast of foundings that predate the formation of the United States itself. But the fact of the matter is that those colleges were for much of their history quite different from what they are today. The colleges of the early republic were more finishing schools than research universities, and they emphasized rote memorization more than critical thinking skills. The modern American university as we know it today was the product of the late nineteenth century. The established institutions of New England that were founded to train ministers were forced to remake themselves into very different institutions, and they were joined by a proliferation of new schools, from the land-grant universities of the Midwest to the new private universities endowed by the Gilded Age elite to the smaller technological, religious, and progressive institutions that carved out unique niches in the collegiate landscape. These modern universities became crucial drivers of economic growth and cultural enrichment over the course of the twentieth century. The modern American university has been with us for only a little over a century. Universities have proven adaptable to social and economic challenges in the past, but there is no guarantee that they will continue to serve the same important functions in American life into the future.

In order to consider how free speech is central to the mission of a university, we must first understand what the mission of a university is. This requires abstracting a bit from the specific situation of any given university. The mission statement of a university tries to identify the core commitments and central goals of that particular institution. Such a statement needs to be abstract enough to encompass the complexity of the institution and allow for changes over time, but it also needs to be specific enough to help an institution set priorities and guide its day-to-day operations. Part of the wonder of higher education in America is its diversity, and there are important differences between Caltech and Sarah Lawrence, between Swarthmore College and Liberty University, between Princeton University and the University of Texas, between Spelman College and the University of West Florida. Such differences will drive individual institutions to make their own peculiar decisions that will shape their community and practices, distinguish them from their peers, and provide a unique experience to their students.

Despite this diversity, modern American universities share some fundamental features in common. From those commonalities, we can see the core mission of the university in general. While identifying a common mission at that level of generality might not help any given institution decide what academic majors to offer, what faculty to hire, or what residence halls to build, it does help identify what an institution must be committed to in order to fit within the framework of a modern university.

At heart, the mission of a university is to produce and disseminate knowledge. Not every university can or should want to do that in the same way. No university seeks to produce knowledge simply, or disseminate it indiscriminately. Choices must be made about how to advance that general mission, but all universities are recognizably engaged in that common enterprise of advancing and disseminating knowledge.

Each part of that formulation is important, and they are inextricably linked in a university environment. The production of knowledge is as integral to the purpose of a university as the dissemination of it. The production of knowledge is, of course, at the heart of the scholarly profession. The scholar embarks on a lifelong journey of learning. That scholarly work might, in the first instance, revolve around the accumulation and synthesis of the existing stock of knowledge. Throughout human history, a critical task has simply been to realize and preserve what is already known. The scholar must pick up the pieces of the scattered bits of knowledge that have been gained in the past, consider the connections between them so that they can be fitted together, and think through their implications for the present age. The first step in the production of knowledge is remembering what has come before.

Learning what there is to be learned can, in the best of cases, generate new insights, new discoveries, and new knowledge. The quest of scholarship, frequently frustrated, is to advance the frontiers of what is known, to learn not only what is already known but also what is not yet known. Pushing the boundaries of what we can know and understand about the natural world, the social world, and the human condition is at the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Universities certainly are not alone in seeking to produce knowledge, but they have been a critically important site for research across a wide range of human endeavors. Moreover, at their best universities are dedicated to the task of gathering, preserving, and advancing human knowledge not for the sake of achieving some other goal, but for its own sake. The struggle to cure a disease, or manufacture a product, or turn a profit can and does lead individuals and organizations to advance the frontiers of knowledge, but such research is ultimately a secondary by-product of those activities and only an instrumental good. Universities are committed to the advancement of human understanding for its own sake. They rest on the proposition that rewards will come from that work, but they encourage the exploration of the unknown without any prior expectation of what those rewards might be. No doubt, there are many intellectual dead ends along this path of progress, but there are also many unexpected gateways to new frontiers. The academic community is dedicated to unbounded exploration, recognizing that there will be many failures, but hoping that there will also be many breakthroughs that could not have been anticipated when the journey began.

Universities are equally committed to the dissemination of knowledge. The scholarly work of producing knowledge is inescapably bound up with the effort to communicate what has been learned. The goal of research is not to hide the light under a bushel, but rather to let it shine forth. The fruits of research are to be shared, with other scholars, with students, and with the general public. Although the scholarly life is often imagined to be isolated, even hermetic, the scholarly enterprise is fundamentally communal. It is a community of scholars that preserves the inherited store of knowledge, and a community that seeks to add to that store. New puzzles and their solutions are advanced, assessed, and recognized by individuals working in a constant dialogue with their peers. Scholarship is a conversation, a conversation that extends across generations and across the globe, and to shut oneself off from that conversation is to shut oneself off from the scholarly enterprise itself.

As a consequence, universities are dedicated to the task of accumulating and sharing our collective knowledge of the world and fostering an environment of constant learning. To do so, universities organize a wide variety of activities to spread the fruits of research. From sponsoring scholarly journals and academic presses to organizing conferences and lectures to maintaining archives and libraries, universities seek to promote the sharing of what has been learned with both a local and a global community of scholars who will in turn make use of and contribute to the common store of knowledge. It is a community that grows rich through the free exchange of ideas.

This community of learning is not limited to those who have dedicated their lives to scholarship. What is gained through research is to be shared not only with other researchers, but also with students and beyond them with the public. Research and teaching are sometimes portrayed as competing goals, but that is true only in a narrow sense. An individual’s time is pressured by the competing demands of teaching and scholarship, and undoubtedly some individual scholars have a comparative advantage in one or the other. But most professors know that teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. The best teaching is informed by the latest research, and the challenge of teaching at the college level is determining how to synthesize the mass of research on a given topic and make it accessible for a nonspecialist audience. Academic research should eventually make its way from the pages of a scholarly journal read by relatively few to the classroom where it can be heard by many. Likewise, research is often spurred on by experiences in the classroom. As teacher and student together work through scholarly puzzles and what is known about them, the teacher often leaves those conversations with new insights and a new appreciation of the material, and new thoughts on how those questions might be pressed further. The classroom too is a place of discovery, and not just for the student.

Everything else that universities do flows from this twin mission of generating and disseminating knowledge. Universities are great engines of economic growth. But those benefits are natural products of universities pursuing their core mission of producing and disseminating knowledge. Universities are ill-suited to working as economic agents. Nonetheless, by performing their core function, universities have played an important role in technological innovation and economic growth in the United States and elsewhere over the past century and more. Universities do not and should not focus on maximizing quarterly earnings or bringing new products to market, but they lay the foundations for economic gains. They help build the capital that entrepreneurs leverage to enhance the welfare of society. They perform the basic science that becomes the building blocks of new technologies that reshape the world.

As parents and students are increasingly aware, universities are the training ground for the high-skilled workers needed in the modern knowledge economy. Across their working lives, those who graduate from universities earn a substantial income premium over those who do not, and as a consequence universities have played an important role in lifting generations of Americans out of the economic circumstances in which they were born, and setting them on a new economic path. But much would be lost if universities were reduced to credentialing services for the professional classes. A university degree is worth something because of the intellectual, emotional, and social experiences that universities impart. If those experiences were devalued or debased, then the degree would be worth very little no matter how attractive the campus or elegant the framed diploma.

Universities are incubators of ideas that help shape American society, but their primary purpose is not to mobilize social movements. Universities give free play to new ideas about the wide range of human endeavors, from the sciences to the arts. They shelter dissidents and innovators, idealists and critics. Within universities, scholars question what we think we know about how the world works, about the foundations of society, about the qualities of a well-lived life. Such scholars are not always right, of course. But they expect their ideas to be vigorously debated, to be investigated with both skepticism and care. They push their colleagues and students to reexamine their own assumptions and commitments, and sometimes their unorthodox ideas migrate beyond the ivied walls of the college campus and help remake the daily lives of people far removed from the university.

Universities are critical molders of democratic citizens, but creating better citizens is a by-product of universities performing their primary mission of educating students. Democratic government puts extraordinary demands on the average citizen. Democracies ask individuals not only to earn their living, care for their families, and obey the law, but also to help form public values, set the direction of public policy, and choose the officials who manage public affairs. Universities help produce not only the economic, social, and political leaders who will guide American life, but also the mass of voters who wield decisive power within a republic. Universities help prepare young adults to be thoughtful and responsible contributors to civic life.

Admittedly, our secular research universities might come closest to fitting the model of higher education that I have just described, but I believe the entire array of colleges and universities in the United States and elsewhere can find common ground in the basic commitment to produce and disseminate knowledge. Teaching institutions necessarily prioritize the effort to educate students over the effort to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. The military academies have a foremost responsibility to prepare their students to enter military service rather than civilian life. Religious institutions may well place boundaries on the quest for truth, having a prior commitment to certain revealed truths that are not to be questioned. Perhaps some secular institutions might commit themselves to a similar but political mission, insisting that the members of their communities endorse an implicit statement of faith in order to remain members in good standing. Such qualifications shape particular institutions and give them their distinctive character, but to the extent that they qualify the central mission of a university to engage in skeptical inquiry in pursuit of the truth, there might well be ramifications for the scope of free speech on such campuses.

In order to realize this core mission of the university of producing and disseminating knowledge, and the many subsidiary benefits that come from universities fulfilling that mission, a robust commitment to free speech on campus is essential. Universities seek to constitute communities dedicated to experimentation, discussion, and learning. The university should welcome anyone who is willing to join such a community. The university embraces those who enter its campus, saying, “Come now, let us reason together.” It must close its gates only to those who are unwilling to accept that simple invitation. Those who wish to maintain a closed mind and a stubborn orthodoxy will find nothing of interest on the college campus. Those who wish to keep an open mind and have their ideas and commitments tested and strengthened will find joy on the college campus.

This conception of the university is relatively modern. The first universities established on American shores had a rather different mission. Their goal was to inculcate orthodoxy. They were not imbued with a spirit of discovery. Their founders and leaders were convinced that the storehouse of knowledge was already full, the final truth was already known. The mission of the university in such circumstances was to pass on to a new generation the inherited wisdom of past generations. This is still an important mission. Those scholars saw their task as dispelling ignorance by the instillation of the truth, and much could be and was accomplished through the fulfillment of such a task.

A university committed to conveying orthodoxy does not require free speech, and the early decades of American universities did not place much emphasis on free speech. The faculty was expected to adhere to approved doctrine, and the students were expected to imbibe it. These colleges were expected to be producers of doctrinally reliable preachers and finishing schools for the sons of the wealthy (and those who aspired to join their class). At their best, professors in these schools served as stern disciplinarians who put students through the paces of a “system of mental gymnastics” (usually in the form of exercises in Latin and Greek grammar and geometric proofs) that were intended to strengthen the minds of future lawyers and doctors.8 The classical advocates of colleges in America had no doubt of the value of schooling, but their understanding of education was cramped. They were certain that it was learning that separated the ignorant and dangerous savage from the enlightened and industrious citizen, but they understood the critical feature of higher education to be the stomping out of “wrong ideas and impulses.”⁹ Strict adherence to orthodoxy was the ideal. Intellectual freedom was achieved through the devoted acceptance of received wisdom.

It is no surprise that the new breed of Gilded Age industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, who was largely self-educated and had spent his teenage years earning a living, had little use for the colleges that dotted postbellum America. From his perspective, college students were wasting their time wrestling with dead languages instead of learning in the “school of experience” as he had done. A college education was “fatal” to those who wanted to be a success in business.10

A new generation of education reformers responded by creating the modern American university. Old colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were radically reformed. New colleges, both private and public, from Carnegie and Cornell in the East to Wisconsin and Stanford in the West, grew up in the new model. Over the course of a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, such varied figures as Harvard’s Charles Eliot, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson, and Johns Hopkins’s Daniel Coit Gilman took a lesson from the more academically vigorous German universities to shake up the sleepy American colleges and make them simultaneously hospitable to the life of the mind and relevant to a new age of American enterprise.

The core value of the modern American university would be free inquiry, not indoctrination. It was in this environment that the idea of academic freedom emerged, for it was in this environment that academic freedom would have a purpose. In the reformed university, liberalism, democracy, and meritocracy would ideally go hand in hand. Colleges should fling open their gates and seek to “help all who are worthy to get in,” as the president of the University of Illinois declared.¹¹ The worthy were to be defined not by their wealth, breeding, and willingness to engage in mental gymnastics and adhere to established truths, but by their eagerness and ability to challenge inherited verities, to improve the studies of their fellow scholars, and to place our collective wisdom on firmer foundations. The University of Michigan’s long-serving president James B. Angell tentatively reached toward the new ideal when proclaiming that “no man worthy to hold a chair here will work in fetters,” and the university should “never insist on their pronouncing the shibboleths of sect or party.” The “intellectual freedom of the teachers” was an essential condition for instilling “catholic, candid, truth-loving habits of mind and tempers of heart” in the students.12 The path to reform was often a rocky one. The First Amendment scholar Alexander Meiklejohn was forced out of the presidency of Amherst College early in the twentieth century because his desire to shake up the “country club college” and instill a sense of American life lived “beautifully, courageously and honestly” did not always sit well with the more conservative alumni and faculty. Meiklejohn favored a new breed of faculty with the “tendency to substitute discussion for pure lecturing, the disposition to lead the students into original inquiry and speculation rather than to preach dogma to them,” whose classes could be described as “ordeal by battle.”¹³ The unsettling educational goals and methods of reformers like Meiklejohn were not always welcome, but in time they made American colleges vital centers of intellectual activity and more relevant to the progress of the nation.

Some would question whether modern universities are truly dedicated to the unbiased pursuit of truth, and as a result they question both the reality and the wisdom of intellectual freedom where indoctrination rather than free inquiry prevails. When Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos complained that university faculty “tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think,” she expressed long-standing conservative concerns that the modern universities had abandoned their stated mission of rigorously seeking after knowledge.¹⁴ If the faculty were preaching rather than teaching, then it was the intellectual freedom of the students that was being put at risk, and the faculty would have destroyed the necessary preconditions for their own claims to academic freedom. The newly graduated William F. Buckley, the founder of the conservative magazine National Review, came to national prominence at the opening of the 1950s with his book-length indictment of his alma mater, Yale University, and the “superstitions of ‘academic freedom.’” Buckley thought it evident that the faculty and administrators of Yale in the early days of the Cold War did not in fact maintain “an atmosphere of detached impartiality with respect to the great value-alternatives of the day.” The theory of impartiality “has never been practiced” in the classrooms and corridors of Yale, and consequently cries of “academic freedom” were just a fig leaf to cover faculty proselytizing of left-wing values.15 Now, ultimately Buckley doubted whether an attitude of academic detachment was either possible or desirable when it came to such basic matters as whether atheism or Christianity, collectivism or individualism, coercion or freedom were correct, and thus he preferred that Yale shift its “bias” so as to conform with rather than contradict the commitments and values of its alumni and trustees and of the citizenry of the United States. But it is notable that the first step in his argument was to try to show that Yale had failed to live up to its own core values. If the university were to be an instrument of propaganda, it could at least have the grace to pick the right side.

The response of some academics to such charges is to embrace them, and to argue that the universities must act as a countercultural force of resistance to mainstream political and cultural values. This idea is not a new one. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, the favored philosopher of the New Left, laid out the case for rejecting what he called “pure tolerance,” or the tolerance for all sides on contested issues of science, art, and politics. Such tolerance might be reasonable, he thought, if the people were capable of rationally evaluating the arguments that they heard. But in the context of a liberal capitalist society, he thought that was never the case. The people were too “indoctrinated” to recognize the truth when they heard it; they could not be expected to tell the difference between “sense and nonsense.”16 Tolerance is valuable only to the extent that it leads to “liberation,” which means that true tolerance “must always be partisan—intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.”¹⁷ Establishing a real “freedom of thought” necessitated “new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior.”¹⁸ In short, progressives should practice intolerance “toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right,” and recognize that “the majority is no longer justified in claiming the democratic title of the best guardian of the common interest.”¹⁹ Since this philosophy of liberation “presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve,” there was no reason to hear from those who would question that goal or the means to achieve it. Freedom would be achieved only by “radical minorities … minorities intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior which tolerate destruction and suppression.”²⁰ As the legal philosopher Brian Leiter recently pointed out, however, even Marcuse thought universities were an appropriate arena for tolerating diverse perspectives, and there are good reasons for thinking that Marcuse did not appreciate the depths of the reasons why that should be the case.²¹

There is room in the world for institutions that explicitly embrace intolerance. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Such advocates of intolerance might struggle to convince legislators or wealthy alumni that they should patronize their mission of radical political indoctrination or persuade parents and students that a limited intellectual horizon was the best preparation for life in the modern world, but there is room for them in the marketplace of ideas. It must be recognized, however, that owning the label of “tenured radical” undercuts not only the justification for free speech on campus but also the very mission of the modern university to produce and disseminate knowledge.22 It presupposes not only that everything worth knowing is already known, but also that education should be dedicated to the achievement of a preordained political goal. The office of minister of information is useful if truth is expendable when politically inconvenient, but it has no place in an institution dedicated to genuine learning.

Some would argue that the mission of the modern university has simply changed, or at least is not strictly focused on the production and dissemination of knowledge as I have posited. The notion of an “engaged university” sometimes points in that direction. In 1999, a group of university presidents signed on to a “declaration on the civic responsibility of higher education,” which called on colleges to “renew our role as agents of our democracy.”²³ Such ideas are hardly new. The postwar president of the University of Chicago famously challenged Americans to become better educated, for “the death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.”²⁴ Various individual institutions include in their mission statements a commitment to molding democratic citizens, shaping the character of students, or engaging with their communities. The implications of such commitments can be various, from “service learning” programs to civic education. Often they have been tied to social justice concerns, such as Occidental College’s self-described mission of offering a curriculum with a “multicultural focus” and a “deeply rooted commitment to the public good.”²⁵ Such initiatives inspired Stanley Fish, an outspoken literary scholar and former college dean, to grumble that members of the faculty should “save the world on your own time.”26

In the abstract, the idea of an engaged university committed to “educating citizens” can draw interest from both the political right and the political left. It would be relatively uncontroversial for universities to try to foster such civic virtues as honesty, integrity, empathy, curiosity, individual responsibility, and critical thinking. Some on the left might be more leery of a university likewise trying to foster the “nationalistic chauvinism” of patriotism, just as some on the right might object to a faculty dedicated to teaching “an emancipatory form of citizenship” aimed at “eliminating oppressive social practices” and “constructing nonalienating social relations.”²⁷ For some, the very purpose of a university is to “change” the world, “to create, maintain, and continually develop the Good Society.”²⁸ Few would object when newsman Walter Cronkite intones in promotional videos for the University of Texas, “We serve a place as big as it is diverse. Maybe that’s why we’re so single-minded in our purpose: to help transform individuals into the thinkers, dreamers and leaders of tomorrow. What starts here changes the world.”²⁹ Things become more controversial, however, when what some would call the “pedagogy of freedom” or the “pedagogy of solidarity” turns out to be what others would call teaching “students how to organize protests, occupy buildings, and stage demonstrations.”³⁰ There is little doubt that some on American college campuses are, in fact, committed to a view of the university mission and of their own role within it that creeps toward the latter description.

While recognizing that quite genuine point of disagreement, however, we should not lose sight of the inescapability of “ethical advocacy” in at least some parts of the university curriculum. Some worry that this can tip into mere “preaching about values,” and argue that faculty should be skeptical of providing students “with the truth about the important issues we study.” From the perspective of the university as a whole, however, we can recognize that none of us are likely to have a firm grasp of “the truth,” while expecting faculty to urge students toward what they take to be correct, if contested, answers to some hard questions. Urging students to be “independent thinkers” can be compatible with faculty passionately advancing their own views of the matters at hand.31 The difficulty comes when faculty or students seek to stamp out critical engagement with those ideas and censor out competing perspectives.

I do not believe most academics embrace the role ascribed to them by DeVos and Buckley, or urged upon them by Marcuse and his heirs. Most understand their work to be guided by the principles laid down by university reformers over a century ago. Within the domain of their particular professional ambit, most faculty seek to pursue the truth as best as they can, in a spirit of open inquiry and disciplinary rigor, and to introduce students to that enterprise of discovery and to the fruits of the labor of the many researchers who have likewise embarked on that journey. It is because they embrace those ideals that free speech is crucial to what they do, and the tradition of free speech on campus is a worthy tradition to preserve. Much would be lost if the minority of faculty, students, and administrators who reject those ideals are allowed to reshape the universities, and if others remain on the sidelines as mere spectators as the prized universities that were built over generations are gradually dismantled.