Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? London: Penguin.
The author is a professor of English and History at Cambridge University, and the book is primarily from a British, secular and research institution perspective. But it is interesting to compare the issues he discusses with those in US Catholic higher education. Of particular note, Collini discusses Newman’s “ideal university” in a contemporary light. It is a highly readable and provocative book.
Collini identifies the key issue in his introduction: the view that “universities need to justify getting more money, and the way to do this is to show that they help to make more money” (x). He counters that the true purpose (and value) of universities is “not chiefly, and certainly not exclusively, economic [but] intellectual, educational, scientific and cultural. In addition, it must be emphasized that higher education is a public good. “(p. x, my italics).
Collini acknowledges the great diversity of universities (“multiversities”) including research, vocational and technical institutions, but rather than lamenting the “dilution or distortion” of a “pure” or “ideal” university of the past, he asks what is (or should be) distinctive about what universities do. He suggests four “minimum characteristics” of modern universities (p.7), summarized as
- Post-secondary education that “signals more than professional training”
- Scholarship or research that is not “wholly dictated by the need to solve practical problems”
- These activities are pursued in more than one or discipline or a “tight cluster” of disciplines
- Universities have “intellectual autonomy”
Underlying all four is the concept of intellectual freedom. In addition, universities “select and shape their own future staff” (p.8) – meaning that faculty were previously students, so how they “shape” students is heavily influenced by how they were “shaped” (a subtle but important point).
Collini notes that university education involves both achieving “mastery of a discipline” and “the capacity to challenge or extend received understanding”; university teaching involves a “paradox” of “telling someone to be autonomous” (p.9). [This seems to parallel Crowe’s integration of “the way of heritage and the way of achievement]. Universities are about “enlarging the understanding” (p.12).
Noting various changes to higher education during the past 50 years, an addition to a familiar list (including commercialization, technology, increased cost and decreased funding) is “increased mobility of students”, which not only leads to (welcome) diversity but also to accelerating competition between universities to attract students, grants etc., and an unhealthy preoccupation with getting into “the top 50 or top 100” (p. 18).
“Universities in Britain: a brief history” (chapter 2) is interesting in its own right and as a companion to various histories of American universities. A common problem with historical interpretation is “suggesting that everything would be alright if we could just go back to universities as we think they were c. 1959” (p.20). [An example of the “classicism” that Lonergan deplores]. He concludes that the major changes in universities in the past few decades have not been in “scholarship or science” but “changes in the ways universities are administered, financed and overseen by their host societies” (p. 38).
Discussing Newman (chapter 3), Collini critiques the disjoint between Newman’s “ideal” and “practice”, the lack of actual “content” in his (overblown) rhetoric, class and gender snobbery and, since this is a secular critique, Newman’s assertion on the primacy of revealed truth and Catholic theology. But, in addition to admiring Newman’s prose and passion, he stresses that Newman’s “ideals” passionately support pursuing knowledge beyond the boundaries of “utility”. He observes that even disciplines initially devoted to “utility” eventually lead to open-ended (philosophical) question, and attempts to restrict academic enquiry to “utility” are ultimately bound to fail, because:
“Intellectual enquiry is in itself ungovernable; there is no predicting where thought and analysis may lead …. It is not the subject matter itself that determines whether something is, at a particular moment, classed as “useful” or “useless”. Rather, it is a question of whether enquiry into that subject is being undertaken under the sign of limitlessness … where the open-ended quest for understanding has primacy over any application or immediate outcome” (p.55)
Although Collini frequently expresses wonder at the persistence (and misunderstanding) of Newman’s work, he notes that “The twenty-first century university needs a comparable power to articulate in the idiom of our time the ideal of the untrammeled quest for understanding” (p.60). This is a challenge indeed!
Discussing the often-cited need to “defend the humanities”, he notes that the humanities are “in many ways not so different from work in the natural and social sciences. The effort to understand and explain is at the heart of all scholarly activity” and separating groups of disciplines leads to “lazy notions of their being two cultures” (p.62). Attempting to deepen our understanding of “what it means to be human … is an end in itself” and “The kinds of understanding and judgment exercised in the humanities are of a pieces with the kinds of understanding and judgment involved in living a life” (p.85).
On “defending universities”, Collini argues that there is “still a popular conception, almost a longing, that the university is a protected space” for the pursuit of ideas, with “ideals and aspirations that go beyond any form of economic return (p. 87). Adopting a “defensive posture” in the face of criticism (e.g. but universities do actually contribute to economic growth) overlooks this and can be self-defeating. He notes “how little public discourse about universities in contemporary society appeal to this widespread appreciation on the part of ordinary intelligent citizens that there should be a place where these sort of enquiries are being pursued at their highest level”; part of the problem is that universities are not good at “explaining what they are doing when they do this” (p. 89). The section on communicating this “value” to public funders and politicians may be more applicable to Britain than the US, but the underlying message is that universities represent a “public good” that goes beyond mere economics.
In the second section of the book, Collini gives a scathing discussion of the culture of assessment and “counting publications” as an indication of a university’s “productivity”, noting that “we don’t measure it, we judge it” (p. 122). Simple “bibliometric data” is misleadingly “objective”, but frequently used to “make decisions, primarily about funding, by those not qualified to judge” (p.126). He has a deliciously satirical piece on citation analysis (p. 126-7) and the American “no book no tenure” system (p. 128) that should be circulated among our administrators and rank and tenure committees.
The subsequent chapters are primarily devoted to policies and practices in Britain (bearing in mind that higher education there is – or was – almost entirely government funded) but they deserve reading and pondering similarities with the US, most notably “measuring performance” and “the market model”. A few notable observations include:
“It is a mistake to think that if you make people more accountable for what they do, you will necessarily make them more efficient in doing it” (p. 135).
“The most important goals of a university … can’t be measured … they need to be judged” (p. 138).
“University education [is] a social good” over and above “economic prosperity”, and “some kinds of intellectual inquiry are goods in themselves” (p. 167)
The system “rewards research disproportionately more than it does teaching” (p.179)
On the significance and value of universities “conserving, understanding, extending, and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific and artistic heritage of mankind”. “We are merely custodians for … a complex intellectual inheritance which did not create – and which is not ours to destroy (P. 198-199).
Questions
- Is the observation that even subjects originally studied for “utility” end up asking philosophical questions correct, and if so, how might we “speed the process”? (Consider, for example, Pieper’s insistence that all disciplines should be approached in a “philosophical way”).
- Economic determinism, consumerism and “productivity as assessment” are also prevalent in the US. Can we find a “voice” like Newman’s to advocate for universities as having value without resorting to economic arguments, especially in regard to the Humanities?
- Collini’s emphasis on free and open-ended questioning and the notion of “the good” seem close to a Catholic philosophy of education, but without Catholic theology. How might we address the question “does a university education need God or theology?” (This seems critical for non-Catholic faculty and students)
- Collini’s closing remarks are a clear appeal to Crowe’s “Way of Heritage”. How do we interpret his choosing to end on this note?