The following is the first installment of my work in progress, Universitas: Sapiential Leadership in an Era of Civilizational Crisis. I am sharing it in this format in order to catalyze debate –and, hopefully, sharpen my argument—before offering it for general publication. I invite your response, either through the comments section below or by email at mansueto@seekingwisdom.com, and look forward to a vigorous discussion.
There can be little doubt that the university as an institution is in crisis. On the one hand, universities are a bigger “business” than ever. Once institutions which existed only in major civilizational centers, and then only precariously and with great difficulty, one can now find something claiming to be a university in virtually every neighborhood and suburb of every major city and in every market town of any significance in the United States, a pattern which is gradually extending itself globally. We invest more resources than ever in what has come to be called “higher education” and it plays an increasingly central role in the global grand strategy of civilizational actors at every level. On the other hand, universities have never been a more central focus of criticism across a broad political and ideological spectrum for failing to meet the diverse demands placed on them.
If we are to understand the nature of this crisis and how to respond to, we must begin by understanding the nature and origins of the university as an institution. This means situating it in the civilizational contexts in which it first emerged and the one to which it has since migrated. It is only in these contexts that we can define its mission –or the range of its possible missions— and then outline just how the university might actually fulfill that mission or those missions in the present period. This will, in turn, require addressing questions of sponsorship, governance and internal organization, financial support, and the programs of scholarship and research, teaching, and civic engagement which universities undertake.
This work is an attempt to address these questions from a very specific and well defined perspective. While this perspective has been laid out in some detail in earlier works (Mansueto 2005, 2010) we will devote significant attention to explaining and justifying it as we make our more specific argument regarding the university, since the latter will make little sense apart from that perspective. Specifically, at the sociological level, we will argue that the crisis of the university is part of a broader civilizational crisis, a crisis of the ideals to which human civilization has been ordered since sometime between 1500 and 1800 of the Common Era. Universities, we will argue, are carriers and instruments of definite civilizational ideals, and if we do not know what we are doing as a civilization we are unlikely to know what we want our universities to do. Second, at the philosophical and theological level, I will argue for the enduring value of the ideals in service to which universities first emerged:
- the classical humanistic ideal of a political life engaged in deliberation regarding the nature of the common good and the ways in which it is best pursued and
- the spiritual ideals associated with axial and post axial traditions the pursuit of which, at least at the most advanced levels, has historically depended on (even if it has also gone beyond) the kind liberal education which also served the classical humanistic ideal.
These latter ideals, as they have come into increasing dialogue and competition with each other and with various secularisms, require such a liberal education if they are to be freely chosen and not simply embraced as a result of historical or biographical accident. Finally, I will argue on both sociological and normative, natural law grounds that it is the principal mission of the university to advance this complex of distinct, often competing, but interrelated civilizational ideals. While this does not exclude (and in fact organically includes) the cultivation of what we might call the “arts of civilization” (techne of various kinds) it is pursued first and foremost through what I call the exercise of sapiential leadership –leading deliberation among partisans of various post-axial ways of being human—and liberal education: the preparation of free human beings and citizens who can participate in this deliberation.
Closely related to this positive argument regarding what universities are for is a negative argument regarding what they cannot and should not try to do. While universities can be mobilized in the support of other civilizational ideals –whether religious fundamentalisms of various kinds or the positivistic secular ideal of transcending finitude by means of scientific and technological progress, they are in fact poorly adapted to these ends and such mobilization undercuts their ability to carry out their fundamental missions. And the currently prevailing understanding of universities as engines of economic growth is even more fundamentally flawed. This is true both at the economic level and at the substantive, normative level of what it means to be human. While universities certainly can carry out research which leads to economic growth, they are by no means the only or even the best locus for such research. And while they can train skilled intellectual labor, doing so does not by any means guarantee the entry of those so trained into some real or imagined middle class. On the contrary, as technological progress driven by research carried out by universities and other entities eliminates the need for unskilled labor and as universities train more and more skilled intellectual workers, the latter lose the monopoly rent on skill which they formally enjoyed and are increasingly proletarianized. At present only the most capable graduates of the most elite universities retain such monopoly rents, and then only if they actually produce a continuous stream of new innovations. And the privileges of this sector, as well, are threatened by the sheer numerical superiority of India and China, which can produce more high order innovators with much less per capita investment than the United States, Europe, or Japan. And while the aspiration of ordinary people to earn a living wage must never be disparaged (earning such a wage is the precondition for any broader participation in spiritual and civilizational development), merely aspiring to ever levels of consumption, apart from some higher spiritual and civilizational ideal is not worthy of our calling as human beings.
All of this, in turn, implies a variety of conclusions regarding the funding, sponsorship, governance, and internal organization of universities (including such issues as academic freedom and responsibility), the nature of the professoriate and its place in society, and the program of scholarship and research, teaching, and civic engagement in which universities should be engaged.
The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the question of what a university is, considered in relationship to the civilizational contexts in which it emerged and to which it has migrated and will conclude with a statement of the mission of universities in the present period. Chapter Two will discuss the relationship between the university and an institution with which it historically had a very close relationship –the religious order or institute of perfection and its secular successor and counterpart, the political party. This relationship is central to our understanding of the university as once foundationally pluralistic and a place in which competing ways engage each other and as a community of those seeking to actually follow a way, led by professors who are real exemplars of a that way. Chapter Three will explore the relationship between the university as a community of scholars, the institute of perfection as a community of practitioners of a way, and the other institutions of human civilization: religious, political, economic, etc. We will devote particular attention to the difficult question of who has the authority to found and sponsor a university and authorize the granting of degrees and to the delicate problem of preserving the autonomy of the university as an institution capable of criticizing and leading while at the same time ensuring that it serves the common good. Chapter Four will look at the question of the various members of the university: the professoriate and others who enjoy a ius ubique docendi, those who have been admitted to lower degrees, and students and ex-students. We will look at the question of academic freedom and responsibility and how it relates to broader human and civil principles of free expression and civic responsibility. Among other things we will address the difficult –and I think politically pressing problem— of partial literacy and of a growing population which has been partially but not fully initiated into the ways taught in universities, a group which provides much of the broad social base for challenges to its historic rights and authority. Chapter Five will outline a range of strategies for ensuring that the mission of the university is carried out, regardless of the precise unfolding of the current civilizational crisis. Specifically, we will look at ways to reform existing universities (and institutes of perfection), ways of creating new ones, and ways of conserving their traditions under conditions which may make institutional continuity difficult.
But first we need to consider the question of what a university is, an issue we will take up in the next post.
