A willingness to ask about the purpose of a university — as Stefan Collini, a literary critic at the University of Cambridge, does in his recent book “What Are Universities For?” — in itself points to a certain approach to learning. The question presumes that matters of purpose are important. It also presumes that universities are something we should care about. By framing the question in terms of purpose rather than utility, Collini stacks the deck on the side of learning for learning’s sake before the conversation even begins.
So it should come as no surprise that Collini, who spoke Tuesday in Minor Hall about the relationship between universities and their publics, endorses liberal-arts education. His investigation of why universities matter stands as an example of the kind of spirited quest for meaning academics like Collini are fighting to make sure the higher-education world does not abandon — or, in an era of rising trustee governance, summarily dismiss.
If you were to camp out by Minor Hall, a few times a semester you would see professors and students file in for lectures on liberal arts and the future of the university. Each time the group would look much the same: literary critics and classicists, historians and philosophers, eager students in square-rimmed glasses. Would they gather so frequently to discuss the state of higher education if there weren’t a danger that their world could collapse? Like a well-dressed support group for universities and the people who love them, they cheerfully discuss the supposedly imminent demise of their own disciplines. Such matters are of grave importance in today’s academic climate. The humanities and social sciences find themselves caught in a crisis of credibility as publics demand that universities, especially those receiving public funds, demonstrate direct, quantifiable contributions to short-term economic growth.
But most who attend events like Collini’s talk are already sold on the university’s value as a means for deepening human understanding. They are professors who depend on the humanities for purpose (and a paycheck, though in the absence of proper faculty compensation at the University the former might outweigh the latter). Or maybe they are students who know already they can’t live without books.
The limited pool of those willing to engage with the question of what universities are for is regrettable. We all have a stake in how society ascribes value to its higher-education institutions. And Collini would offer hope to many students wondering why we should care about college. In his talk he pointed to shortcomings contained in the view that higher education should derive legitimacy from economic or utility-based outcomes. Strategic dynamism (“as your local dialect puts it,” Collini said) or treating universities like any other business leads to an incomplete way of measuring higher education’s value.
But Collini also expressed skepticism about the view, espoused by thinkers like Martha Nussbaum — who spoke in Minor Hall a few months before Collini flew in from Cambridge — that a liberal-arts education is necessary for the development of moral imagination or expanded sympathy. Collini’s defense of the life of the mind was, more than anything else, Jeffersonian: a university’s purpose, he said, is to extend human understanding wherever it may lead. So it’s too bad that he was, so to speak, preaching to the choir: because while those in attendance, nodding and laughing, likely had heard similar arguments before, the students who remain outside such conversations would benefit more from an inspiring reflection on why they are at the University. The project of defending the liberal arts cannot be left only to those who practice them.
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