What Is a University?

What is a university?


A university is a free association of scholars. Freedom is their attribute, freedom to choose their objects of scrutiny, freedom to imagine, freedom to write, freedom to teach, to travel, to think, to speak and to be silent.

Nowadays a university needs a manager, a development office, and a press. It needs a corporation in all the good and evil ways. So Tulane has Scott Cowen, who, judging by his Friday talks, loves Tulane with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his mind. And there is nothing bad in Tulane. Scott is the bearer of the gospel, the good news, good news only.

This is the prototype of university presidents today. It wasn’t that way in the recent past. University presidents were members of the association of scholars, like President Eliot of Harvard (way back), or President Pusey. When the students mutinied and staged sit-ins in the sixties, president Pusey asked himself, what would Thucydides do? When Senator Joseph McCarthy threatened civil liberties in the fifties, President Pusey knew what to do; he condemned him.

Those were the days of heroes in academia. Today, the scholars are trapped in the tight nets of institutional and bureaucratic controls. It is the parents and the students whose suasion counts for most these days, and so we have degrees in hotel and casino management in the School of Continuing Studies. Scholars rue the loss of the disciplines of logic, geometry, rhetoric, language, history. We have to put up with all this to get anything at all worth while done.

Now it’s the case that the bureaucracy can force nothing on the university that the faculty does not want to shape, control and govern, the faculty itself. If the bureaucracy gets too intolerable, the faculty will leave. If the bureaucracy tries to run something itself, the university suffers.

A small case in point which I will not discuss at great length is SACS, the association of Southern schools and colleges which accredits our university. To achieve and maintain accreditation we have to assess our programs and our faculties, and we must do it ourselves. All well and good. Is there anything wrong in this? Not at all.

But the mechanisms of assessment are given from above, or from without, far without, to the faculty, effectively vitiating their creative will to do this assessment. As a result SACS has a terrible reputation and the work of self-assessment is regarded, far and wide, with ridicule and repugnance. Naturally no scholar wants to ‘do’ this, or ‘be responsible for’ the work in her program or department. So the work goes to new contingent, non-research faculty, such as professors of the practice, or others who agree to ‘do’ it in return release from other duties. I was given the job for German and Russian, as I am retiring this year. All scholars want to focus on their research, and I’ll have plenty of time for that in short order. Do you think this bodes well for SACS?

Well, I do this of my own free will. I enjoy writing, and this is a remarkable challenge. My ‘boss’ is an intelligent person with a very sharp eye and nose. It’s not too bad; I’ve done worse. I won’t describe all this to you except to say it could be worse. My boss could be a fool. Or worse. It could be, well, a contemporary university president.

There aren’t any Puseys left, or many of them. (Actually I like the present prexy, Drew Faust.)

Now, a certain big bureaucrat at Tulane has been criticizing departments for “cobbling together” data instead of really and truly assessing and really and truly planning necessary changes in curriculum. Doesn’t this sound like corporation-speak? That’s what you get when faculty don’t want to do something and are told how to do it. Well, we are going to have to put up with a lot of things to have the privilege of a great, or at least a good, university.

Dear students, don’t let anyone know about this blog. Especially not your parents. Я имею право иметь свои секреты.
gmc