The Meaning of a University

THE Americans have never quite understood the theory of a university. The first source of ambiguity is that since the seventeenth century we have seldom or never used the word “university" in any consistent sense. Thus Harvard College, oldest of all American academic institutions, was through the Colonial period and into the nineteenth century referred to as Harvard College or as the university in Cambridge. Ambitious makers of state constitutions in new commonwealths or of new pieces of legislation designed to bring a state swiftly into cultural maturity bestowed the word “university" upon a paper organization or upon actual institutions that were often no more than indifferent high schools or academies. The term is still so loosely employed that I have heard of a university of cosmetology.

One might think that with the maturing of the nation, the creation of the Johns Hopkins University in 1876 and the University of Chicago in 1893, the word would have been clearly understood. Not at all. The semantic confusion is now worse than ever. A common verbal syndrome follows this pattern: a normal school sheds that name and becomes a teachers college; the teachers college sheds that name and becomes a state college; the state college sheds that name and becomes a state university without making any perceptible attempt to discover what the proper function and necessary equipment of a university should be. A parallel case is the present tendency to turn honest agricultural schools or some agricultural and mechanical colleges, titles that indicate honorable functions, into state universities. Thus there are both the University of Kansas and Kansas State University, both the University of Colorado and Colorado State University. Or a complex of colleges, as in the state of New York, is transformed without any clear central purpose into a “university" supported by the state, and the four city colleges in New York City sprout an indeterminate something called the University of the City of New York. Confusion is increased by the existence of New York University, a privately endowed institution, and the Regents of the University of the State of New York, which is simply the state board of education. Transformation in most cases has been dictated by a desire for status to impress the legislature, the alumni, donors, and the community. The great schools of technology are among the few institutions that have resisted this facile renaming.

A second source of confusion is historical. American universities, however defined, differ from Old World universities in being the creation of the state, not of the church or of a guild of learned men. This has been true since the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted a charter creating Harvard College. Creation may be by charter or by organic law. The charter, without which no college or university can grant degrees, is (or was) a grant of power by the sovereignty of the colony, the state, or the federal government. Charters were necessary for private institutions. State colleges or universities were created by the state constitution or by public law. In any case, the legislature also created a small body of men charged with the duty of bringing a university into being.

In the first case, this body is commonly called the board of trustees; in the second, the board of regents; in almost every case it is either self-perpetuating or appointed by the governor or constituted of members ex officiis, together with appointed or (more rarely) elected members. In Europe, universities often preceded the state, at least in modern terms; in America, the state precedes the university. In point of law, therefore, the trustees or the regents are the university. Seldom chosen for learning, these boards usually begin by securing real estate. Then they hire as their agent a president, whose duty it is to devise a curriculum and find a faculty to teach it.

In other cultures universities are self-governing bodies with a minimum of state supervision except in fascist or Communist countries. If by a university one means primarily a group of scholarly experts, no American university is self-governing. The faculty are employees. Few boards of trustees or regents admit a representative or representatives of the faculty regularly as members of the board, and many do not admit a representative of the faculty to be present at their meetings except in unusual circumstances. Few include the president as a member. The president is usually the agent of the board as well as the only agent of lawful communication between the body of scholars and the nonacademic board. The situation is further complicated by the fact that nowadays the American university president is usually chosen either for his name value or his presumed managerial potentiality. If he has been a scholar, he gives up that profession.

No American university faculty is empowered either to choose a president or to depose him; and though faculty members may be formally or informally consulted by members of the board when a new president is to be chosen, the board is under no obligation to accept the recommendation of the faculty or a committee thereof, these recommendations being in fact often ignored or overruled. Most of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth has been spent in working out a proper modus vivendi between a nonprofessional board, members of which incline to look upon the university as an odd sort of baffling business enterprise, and the body of professional scholars, who, unlike their European counterparts, have little or no responsibility for the financing of the university.

In older American institutions, public or private, a long record of trial and error has resulted in rough definitions and limitations of responsibility. In such universities the board is now commonly content to leave the courses, the modes of teaching, the direction to be taken by research, and the granting of degrees to the president, his academic aides (the deans of the several faculties or colleges making up the university), and the faculty. The vexed question of university finance, which necessarily determines academic policies, lies in a sort of undistributed middle that involves investments, appropriations, salaries, government contracts, fees, fellowships, promotions, and so on. Obviously the financial situation profoundly affects the nature of any university. Obviously the faculty has, at best, only an indirect, sometimes only a remote, relation to financial policy. A board may be so negligent as to permit a university president to bankrupt his institution; or it may be so fussily intrusive as to enforce standards and values that have more relation to popular trends than to the pursuit of truth and excellence.

Since all legal authority rests in the board, its members may abolish or alter parts of a university or invent new ones with or without the knowledge or consent of the faculty. With or without the advice of the faculty the board may also promulgate rules governing the lives of students and of faculty members that may or may not be consonant with the real purpose of the institution. Of course, with experience, boards tend to leave this sort of thing more and more to the “administration,”but the recent turmoil at Berkeley illustrates the confusion that results when the distribution of responsibility among the board, the administration, the faculty, and the students is not clear.

THE American university is further distinguished from its Old World counterpart by a confusion of aims and responsibility between undergraduate (and vocational) and graduate (and professional) education. The American college of arts and sciences is unique in the world. American graduate schools developed out of existing colleges of arts and sciences in this country late in our educational history. The graduate school of arts and sciences therefore did not, like a law school or a medical school, come into being for a unitary purpose. Indeed, in one sense there is no graduate school of arts and sciences but only departments that offer graduate work. The common denominator that makes the concept of a graduate school of arts and sciences possible is a mild uniformity in entrance requirements for graduate work (the entrant must have a bachelor’s degree) and an equally mild uniformity about the mode of granting advanced degrees — the M.A. and the Ph.D. A dean of a law school heads a professional body devoted to teaching law; a dean of a graduate school of arts and sciences heads ten, twenty, thirty, forty separate professional units, part of whose time is devoted to teaching students not in the graduate school and part of whose time is devoted to teaching graduate courses. Without a graduate school there can be no university, but the graduate school of arts and sciences rests upon the unstable foundation of shifting departmental interests as the school of medicine does not.

In creating Cornell University, the founder said he wanted to establish an institution in which anybody could study anything. This dictum has been widely accepted as a sound definition of university work. Consequently, television programs sending out news broadcasts, information, and domestic science courses for future housewives, the teaching of advertising layouts and the training of future football coaches, “short course” instruction in agriculture, and adult education classes for retired businessmen are offered by the “university" along with advanced research in atomic physics, abstruse work in higher mathematics, chemical studies of the sun’s corona, metaphysical speculation about the nature of metaphysical speculation, and a seminar in the economic background of the First Crusade. This need not obscure, but in most cases it certainly straitens, the pure idea of a university as a house of intellect. Goodwill is one of the obscuring forces in academic life.

The American university is also expected to assume responsibility for the housing, feeding, medical and psychiatric care, amusement, and in some cases religious instruction of youngsters just out of the secondary school, and has permitted itself to be surrounded by an amiable jungle of fraternity and sorority houses, religious institutions especially directed to keeping student faith alive, student journalism, intercollegiate athletics, intercollegiate debating, student dramatics, ROTC units, musical enterprises ranging from jazz to Beethoven, cooperative housing, bookstores, alumni offices and organizations, responsibility for extension courses, responsibility for nonacademic conferences on business, social, sociological, political, or international problems, alumni reunions at commencement, and so on, until the original aim of the university has disappeared.

One of the latest, most praised, and in some ways most disastrous new functions assumed by the university is the encouragement of “creativity.” Creativity is not scholarship and not science, but a surrogate for them. Creativity is not research, which is an act of the controlled intellect, but as practiced on most American campuses, an emotional outlet. Courses in creative writing, creative dancing, creative painting, creative music, creative play-making, and creative folk singing abound. In the nature of the case, these activities cannot be judged by the severe intellectual standards basic to research, nor can they be judged by the harsh, if differing, standards of professional excellence. They lie in a kind of no-man’s-land more distinguished for sentiment than for severity, and the existence of this no-man’s-land is one of the principal reasons for our current confusion between the “creative” arts and humane learning. If these activities are proper to college instruction, they should remain collegiate. If the intent is to be professional, they should be referred to such professional institutions as a conservatory of music. As universities are lauded for supporting a quartet in residence, a tame painter, a writers’ conference, a school of the theater, or a studio for dancing or painting or sculpture, the original concept of the university becomes more and more blurred, and the public comes more and more to believe that a university fails of its true purpose (the frayed phrase about an “ivory tower” commonly appears at this point) if it does not nourish the arts.

WHAT,then, is a university? In the Continental sense it is a collection of professional faculties — the faculty of the humanities, the faculty of science, the faculty of law, the faculty of medicine, the faculty of theology, for examples — empowered to offer mature instruction in their several professions and to grant “advanced” degrees when the student has demonstrated his ability to go it alone. In the British sense a traditional university is a collection of colleges that, taken separately, house and teach students, and taken collectively, offer general advanced instruction (the lectures) and grant degrees. In the American sense, at least as defined by the Office of Education, a university is an institution of higher learning comprising a college of arts and sciences or its equivalent, a graduate school of arts and sciences, and one or more professional schools — for example, law, medicine, or theology. A college of liberal arts and sciences may grant a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. Only a university can grant a Ph.D. degree, though in certain cases (again the confusion of American nomenclature!) established colleges grant the doctor’s degree and so-called universities do not, the reason being that they do not have either the proper faculty or the proper facilities for advanced professional work.

I trust I shall not be considered mystical if I put the matter another way. A college is, or should be, concerned with the elements of knowledge, a university with bringing these elements into professional fruition. In this sense, therefore, a university is more especially an act or product of intellect. It is an institution created for the critical examination by professional minds of tenets, principles, laws, dogmas, and ideas that make up the ever varying body of truth. It preserves truth by perpetually subjecting conventional assumptions to critical analysis, discarding fallacies, and retaining as valid only the information or the general statements that pass severe, impersonal, and professional testing; and it extends truth by pushing forward, into the unknown, task forces of professionally trained persons who are skilled in distinguishing fact from assumption. The university climate of opinion is therefore critical. When a given group of professionally competent scholars approve of something they have thoroughly examined, be it a biblical text or a new discovery about the chemistry of meteorites, their findings circulate freely among other professional men all over the world.

The faculty of a university, however organized into schools or colleges, is a group of men and women dedicated to the assumption that there is an intellectual order in life, that they participate, however imperfectly, in that order, and that they can make this intellectual order clear, whether it be in literary history or non-Euclidean geometry, to younger scholars who can carry on learning and research in a particular field. The faculty of a university is the only body competent to determine what general knowledge and what specialized education are necessary for a continuation of professional knowledge and professional skill.

The university may develop other functions, many of them laudable in themselves, and in America they have done so, but if these other functions are not kept subordinate to the central idea of university education and university work, they can overwhelm the university idea by their very multitudinousness. The university then disappears in a smog of sentimentality, “school spirit,”vocationalism, pseudo-parental responsibility, experiments in living, and fallacious political activity.

THREE observations seem to me pertinent. The first is that the present amiable tendency to confuse college with university, “creativity” with scholarship, vocational training with professional education, and extension courses for high school teachers with a mature philosophy of education must somehow be subdued or clarified. We need universities as universities. The necessity for a clear definition of university work is evident in the fact that whereas fifty years ago a Ph.D. was the mark of professional education, those in charge of research in many fields are now, in despair, talking about the need of postdoctoral education to accomplish what the university was originally established to do. There is nothing shameful about being an excellent teachers college or a good agricultural school, but the highest needs of the nation are in a sense betrayed when the teachers college or the agricultural school becomes a pseudo-university granting a third-rate Ph.D,

The second is our need for a stern insistence upon the truth that university education is a privilege for the competent, not a right to be claimed by the many. American parents seem to feel that some “university" somewhere somehow should be required to accept their children upon demand. Legislatures sometimes pass laws requiring a state university to admit virtually any high school graduate. The result is general confusion, waste of funds, futile teaching, and the creation of special undergraduate “colleges" for the mentally indigent. Why do mediocre high school graduates have to go to universities? Our need, as John Gardner has said, is for excellence, not for mediocrity. If universities are overcrowded, this is only in part a result of population pressures. A more disturbing reason is the incapacity of boards and presidents to insist that a university is, precisely, not an institution in which anybody can study anything, but an institution for mature professional education.

Finally, the student being admitted to the high privilege of a university must be taught, if he does not know them (commonly he does not), his rights, duties, and responsibilities as a member of the great traditional republic of learning. Much has been talked about the indifference of one student generation to political issues and about the rebellion of another student generation against university regulations. No one questions the idealism of young men and women who go to Selma or Bogalusa or join the Peace Corps. No one wants to deny the student the right to express his political opinion. But the student, by becoming a student, has lost something and gained something. He has lost the opportunity of embracing anarchy, and he has gained the more durable possibility of becoming a mature citizen in both the political republic and the republic of learning. If more and more students spend more and more time in public demonstrations against this and that, they inevitably spend less and less time in scholarly pursuits, their avowed purpose in asking to be admitted to the university. In other countries the university function of an institution of higher learning was destroyed when the campus became an arena for political action as the principal manifestation of intellectual life. The American problem has not yet been thought carefully through.