Experience

Another Way To Think About Universities

ANOTHER WAY TO THINK ABOUT UNIVERSITIES

At the moment the overwhelming majority of our collective tsouris - even though there is a great deal of tsouris to go around - is directed at the universities. The sense is that something has gone terribly wrong. How you analyze that says a great deal about who you are and what political presuppositions you bring to the table - but a few of the favorite culprits are: the rise of tuition costs together with student debt and the shackling of an entire class of white-collar workers to debt payments; the general cowardice of the academics who have been unwilling to advocate strenuously enough for free speech on campus; the much-coddled Generation Z, going to the mat with the insistence that they be coddled even more; the ‘excellent sheep’ paradigm by which students forego actual education and independent inquiry in order to perform in the job market, as bland manifestations of a managerial class. 

All those critiques are - as far as I can tell - really accurate. But at the same time they bring too much opprobrium to bear on the poor university, which can’t possibly do all the things expected of it - although, to be fair, the university system has invited that with a widely inflated and idealistic sense of itself. 

Essentially, the university system has made an effort to corner the entirety of intellectual life. It has made itself the custodian of a startling range of knowledge across a really disparate set of disciplines, has made itself the job market for credentialed intellectuals with its system of credentialing holding sway well beyond the university system itself, has made itself a powerhouse of ideas and a critical arbiter of what constitutes acceptable civic discourse for the society-at-large - and, to a remarkable extent, does all that entirely by leaning on revenues from 18 to 22 year olds and with a reciprocal promise that those 18 to 22 year olds are getting the education that they need both to be fully-fledged intellectuals and to embark on a viable white-collar career. And the problem with the whole marvelous system - and it really is marvelous, and really has been startlingly successful in so many ways - is that it’s basically wasted on the 18 to 22 year olds who are its bedrock. 

This isn’t so surprising. People are developing later than they used to. Life is longer and there is a corresponding tendency, at the sort of sub-conscious collective layer, to postpone the more difficult aspects of it as late as possible - adolescence seems to last longer, people enter the job market later, and so on. The much-mocked Yale student in the Christakis video yelled that the point of school “is not about creating an intellectual space! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home!” That line might have shocked the original trustees of Yale University, as it would the German research scientists or medieval seminarians who put together the outlines of the modern university, but it is not inaccurate to the life trajectory of a contemporary 18 or 20 year old. The campus is presented - and Gen Z in particular seems to be adamant about this - as an extension of the home, a padded room, in which young people are, above all, safe, as they go through a formative period of their development. And in that padded playroom, the professor creates an odd figure - and modem professors tend to be very conscious of how out-of-place they are. As per the reigning paradigm of the university, they are supposed to be on a different level from the students, to not really have all that much to do with them, but to invite the students into the chapel of their own expertise, which is supposed to have such an awe-inspiring effect on the students that they, with very little direct encouragement, are stimulated to pursue a path much like the professors’. And, dealing with students who are less-than-impressed with them and seem to be consumed with the niceties of civil discourse, the professors roles don’t actually change that much - they find themselves with heightened awareness of their students’ touchiness and they sort of keep a wide berth, and that’s all to the good for them since, really, they’d prefer to be focused on publishing their own papers and not on the intellectual nurture of teenagers. 

And so the vast machine keeps on spinning but through a series of sneaky little social compromises and without particular benefit to anyone. The students can’t possibly take in everything that the university system has to offer; and the university puts up its paywalls so that nobody other than the paying students can access what the university has to offer; and the students not only can’t take advantage of what the university has to offer but, increasingly, choose to ignore the university’s core mission, focus instead on nurture and to some extent on career credentialing; and the professors increasingly ignore the students and focus instead on their own fraught job market. 

The public - the screeching op-ed writers and to some extent the check-cutting parents - are aware of the crisis, but that doesn’t even come close to compelling the universities to rethink their mission or to do anything other than business-as-usual. (Even the fact of the pandemic - of campuses closed, of nobody getting an actual education, did nothing to dissuade universities from charging their exorbitant tuition like in any other year - and, in a sense they were right, they were awarding the same degrees regardless of any correspondence to actual education and the degrees had the same value on the marketplace.) But the public can start to rethink what education is. That’s a slow-moving process and is unlikely to happen immediately - but the Internet creates an almost endless array of opportunities. There’s adult education, the possibility of recalibrating aspects of the university system for adults who choose to be there as opposed to 18 to 22 year olds who are sort of peer pressured into it; there’s the great archipelago of malcontented academics who are rightly pissed off about the adjunctification of the universities, the lack of any viable career path for the vast majority of Ph.Ds, but who have abundant knowledge and have nothing really to stop them from hosting paid seminars online; there’s the ability to use Zoom to cut the costs of campuses, of buildings, of tuitions, and to simply offer quality content to the like-minded. A great deal of the whole Jordan Peterson phenomenon was simply this - a professor delivering academic knowledge in a public setting and not just to recalcitrant undergraduates. And there is no reason, actually, that Peterson’s model can’t be followed by other academics - except that so many of the academics have learned to speak in jargon and their work doesn’t hold up particularly well for skeptical adults.

That’s the way out - whether we get organized to do it or not - of our current conundrum about the university system. The deep roots of the university are in exactly this sort of open exchange - the medieval Goliards who traveled from town to town lecturing, the model of the cathedral schools and early Sorbonne with speakers engaged in public debate (the modern lecture is actually a timid derivative of these medieval debates). That spirit has been tamed and domesticated since then by the university but there’s no reason not to move back towards the original model of academic life - loose, heterodox, archipelagoized, anchored in both the learning and the charisma of individual scholars, open to anyone, and thriving on the spirit of free exchange and of debate.