The theater of the absurd has moved from the stage to the quad. Must it stay?
What does higher education need now? Many are asking this question with considerable urgency, including us. This past week we began a forum guided by this question with features on Monday and Tuesday. The forum will continue through Thursday of this week.
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We count on our most important institutions to carry out the purposes for which they were built. So what do we do when we inherit institutions that do not?
This is the question facing so many of our institutions today. Once the bedrock of everything from psyche to soul, institutions now falter, unable to muster the confidence or clarity to perform basic functions needed to sustain them—and us. The institutions of higher education—not all, by any means, but enough to raise alarm—join those, such as family and neighborhood, that have largely lost their moorings in the wake of the twentieth-century sea change of rising individualism and the sales model of personal and public life. Where universities once carried religious, humanistic, and civic imperatives, they now live and die by the cash nexus, which Marx famously defined as the reduction of human relations to monetary exchange.
The idea of the university has hardly been universal across time and place. Different models prevailed, from Plato’s Academy to monastic institutions devoted to producing scholastic interpretations of the Bible to those inspired by medieval and Renaissance humanism to nineteenth-century German research universities structured around scientific research (the model for the modern American research university). Not only subject matter but the modus operandi of university affairs differed. The studium generale established in the thirteenth century was either more student-run like the University of Bologna (still extant) or more faculty-run like the University of Paris (later the Sorbonne). But whatever the variations, the university centered on the relationship between student and teacher, embodying at its very core the ideal of teaching and learning.
Today’s administrator-controlled institutions of higher education have all but lost sight of this mission. The very mission responsible for sustaining the university over such a large swath of time, the genius of an institution that has changed lives and made history, gets only lip service—where memory of its former life persists at all. The word university has its origin in the Latin phrase universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars, derived from the Latin word universus, whole or entire. The university was a kind of universe within the universe, connecting students and teachers in a commitment to transcendent ends. Today’s university, on the other hand, tries to be the universe.
In the absence of a sense of the higher purposes of higher education, fools do rush in. True to the truism that nature abhors a vacuum, we are left not with rubble so much as the theater of the absurd. As hard as it is to believe, human actors and not some AI robot gone rogue sign off on (among others): $80,000 plus yearly tuitions, mushrooming administrative positions, declining full-time faculty positions, pressures towards intellectual conformity, and restrictions on free speech, for just a start. And in the absence of a dividing line between the university and outside politics, things only get worse. Today’s political extremists—“clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” is all too apt—seek, in place of a healthy balance of differing views, the making of political drama out of anything available. In this free-for-all, each side—with the unquestioning zeal of the convert—tries to cancel the other, while those deviating even slightly from one or the other newly minted orthodoxies are thrown on their own (usually meager) resources.
What might prevent such incidents from crossing the line between light comedy and the more treacherous forms of the absurd is something the university should be for, not against: free and open discussion, debate, intellectual diversity, and interpretations rooted in evidence, logic, and principle. Instead, unscrupulous voices call for enforcing what they wish or believe to be true—actually, what they, as true emotivists, feel to be true—rather than allowing open-ended exploration of the question of what is or might be true.
The altered power structure of the modern university— the triumph of “administration” over higher education—makes this urge for ideological enforcement possible in ways prohibited by earlier traditions of community, decentralization, and faculty-and-student governance. It is too recent a development to be checked effectively by countervailing forces; the soft takeover came too fast even for its own self-adjustment. Administrators take jobs with job descriptions that entail carving out their own job descriptions. Meanwhile, the university imports management trends from business. In the era of the Googleplex, the culture of a company is an actual thing, associated with grandiose new visions for the bottom line. Administrative bloat finds its justification in the model of the university as consumer corporation, with its layer upon layer of management. In some institutions today the number of administrators has bypassed the number of faculty members.
Those administrators who see their role as managers can add lines on their résumés according to what mission they implemented in behalf of a profitable company culture. Universities become arenas for this careerist type of administrator to try out one mission statement after another, with the success of any particular “mission” neither measured nor required for career advancement. In this way the creative destruction of contemporary capitalism has come to the university. The proliferation of “mission statements” since the 1970s illustrates the confusion, as does the ease with which universities discard the existing mission for one yet more anodyne—as needed for the omnipresent strategic plan. For which war, we might ask.
So the mise-en-scène of our absurdist drama is a context in which universities seem to require pseudo-mission after pseudo-mission to function. As politics within and beyond the university become ever more emotivist, each trial balloon rises high into the stratosphere, unloosed from traditional standards of logic and evidence. In the absence of genuine dissent and courageous leadership, these pseudo-missions threaten to replace the university’s inherited—and vindicated—mission of teaching and learning.
Universities once had something important in common with the private intimacy between two human beings, and with the family, the press, the church, nature, and more: They all hewed to different values and intents from those of the marketplace. Defenders of so-called free spaces studiously worked to keep these arenas separate from the monetary compromise of principle, the logic of profit, human commodification, the pursuit of self-interest, the striking of the deal. They stood for the arts over against the deal. To invoke this separation is not to ignore all the ways it may have been breached in the past but rather to remind ourselves of our ever-renewable capacity to do something better in the present.
But it is not so easy to mount a purely economic critique of the university’s current problems. While administrators and trustees can behave like the capitalist-managerial class, treating teachers and staff as laborers, students and parents as customers, and donors as investors, there are the rare exceptions. And many faculty members feed the problem as well, serving university managers’ interests while benefiting from their nepotism, acceding when mediocrity inexplicably rises to the top, or, in their own pursuits, fueling the corrosion of traditions of dissent, intellectual courage, free expression, and intellectual diversity necessary for meaningful teaching and real learning. It is simply not accurate, as many do, to pit administrators (qua capitalists) against everyone else—the supposed laborers in the class war of domination, exploitation, and oppression. It is not always the administrators who are benefiting the most, and not all administrators have lost a sense of the real mission of the universities. What is needed is a resistance from those who think differently in all of these groups and beyond.
The problems we face are not only financial but cultural. A U. S. News and World Report article makes clear the connection between the rising costs of attending universities and the expansion of university administrations, but suggests the ways in which the students can unwittingly play into the administrators’ imperatives, or perhaps more aptly, pay into the administrators’ pockets because of the expanding range of services some of them want: “The steady growth in administrative and nonteaching staff positions is largely due to broader student support, often referred to as ‘wraparound services,’ in areas such as mental health, entertainment, intramural sports, academic support, workforce preparedness and initiatives focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.” While some of the loudest voices, whether those of the students themselves or their parents, want certain of these services, it is unclear whether they would favor them at the expense of being taught by full-time faculty members in a situation with teacher-student ratios proven most effective for education.
Let’s say that they—or, more honestly, we—are given the choice and we still choose the universe within walls, the gated community, the all-services model. Since when did we start thinking that simply wanting something makes it good? To have that discussion, and figure out what is and is not the proper preserve of higher education, we would need a tradition of free and open inquiry into what is good, true, and beautiful. Which is to say, we would need the university.
It seems almost unfair to criticize the university today because it is just too easy. But this is not simply because of the university’s real problems. It is also because it is too easy for us to criticize anything.
True, everything does seem to be falling apart. (I prefer Bob Dylan’s formulation “Everything Is Broken,” as it places our own woes in more timeless perspective of what we face as human beings.) But the ease with which we can fall into the mode of criticizing everything reveals a certain habit of mind, or at least a certain habit of talk, that has become all-pervasive: a tendency to complain, to find fault, to look at all the offerings of a typical day-in-the-life through the haze of entitlement. Our demands of what a day, or a life, should bring alter not just how we see but what we see, bringing out our very worst traits and creating yet more. It’s a kind of translation app that transposes each passing thought into a statement of complaint.
This habit takes any institution, whether IRL or URL, and transforms it into a customer-service counter, a magnet for customer complaints. So when looking at the university it is vital to separate what is plaguing it from what is plaguing the rest of our world. But to do so requires finding some kind of dividing line between what the university is and what it is not, which becomes increasingly difficult in a culture that equates the world with what the individual wants the world to be.
Exploring what the university should or should not be means bringing back into the discussion of universities not just the intellectual dimension—laughably missing in an institution devoted to intellectual life—but the moral dimension, without which intellectual life is meaningless.
What is the university not, in this moral sense? It is not the marketplace, and it is not politics, just for starters. Once we regain clarity about what it is not, then we must return to the central question: What is it? It is a center for teaching and learning. A universe of a certain kind, but not the universe.
To regain clarity about the real mission of the university requires replacing the complaint mode with one that helps us see anew the beauty and brilliance of the idea that inspired it in the first place: the possibility of a thriving center of teaching and learning. Buying and selling need not be our highest end.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn is Professor of History at Syracuse University and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. She is the author of numerous essays and books including, most recently, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living (Giles Family Fund Recipient, Notre Dame, 2020), a study of ancient philosophy and modern culture.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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