What is a University for?

We could ask a lot of questions about what’s going on at Columbia and universities across the country at the moment. But first it’s worth asking this, more fundamental question: why are these tensions erupting so fiercely at universities, specifically? Why aren’t these demonstrations happening at places more directly involved in crafting public policy, for instance? And, why do we care so much about these universities? Media concern has gone beyond the risk these protests are posing to different groups and individuals. There’s an institutional concern, too, a worry about the harm being done to our notion of “the university.” Why?

One place to start is several decades ago, when universities began marketing themselves as providing highly impressive technical and professional training. It’s good to note that this wasn’t an obvious move for universities; such institutions have always been fundamentally formative places – it’s in their genes, the spur of founding mottoes like Oxford’s “Dominus illuminatio mea” (“The Lord is my light”) or Harvard’s early “In Christi gloriam” (“For the glory of Christ”). Those missions arose out of an understanding that the institutional task at hand was to form in students an entire vision of reality, as well as a spiritual and moral way of being that accorded with the deepest truths of who they are and what they’re made for.

Modern universities tend to cringe at such language. But that doesn’t mean they’ve wholly lost their formative impulse. Long genetic inertia, and the nature of the project of education itself, mean that they’ll inevitably form students in a vision for who they are and what they’re made for, however they may market themselves. At present, that vision just happens to be governed by the religion of the day – a progressive, utopian project that thinks it can bring about a better world through social revolution. The young, energetic, high-hearted 18-year-olds who show up at a university’s door, though, are still primed to be deeply formed into that project, entering an institutional space that’s always promised that kind of deep, religious formation.

The current explosion of protests, fear, and lurching efforts to wrangle the situation are fault lines suggestive of the seriously inferior nature of this religion, and perhaps also of this inconsistent understanding of a modern university. A Northwestern University professor addressed a group of demonstrators by commending them this way: “You’re building solidarity with one another… Learning how to build relationships, real relationships. And you are learning how to bring a whole new damn world into being.” Press a modern university for a clear vision of that new world or the meaning of solidarity, though, and one often finds them flat-footed, hiding behind unoffending and generic dreams of freedom and equality that come up short when faced with, for example, the massively complex issues currently at hand, with assertions of oppression and injustice happening on too many sides for generic dreams to parse through.

The trouble is that university students are becoming fodder for this bad religion, rather than those their institutions have taken responsibility for in a promise to give them the best of a deep, time-tested wisdom that gives rise to rich, meaning-filled lives. In any reasonably healthy society, elite institutions or persons of extraordinary ability have always put their advantages and resources at the service of the larger culture: we ourselves could never do what artists like Michelangelo and Bernini have for a place like St. Peter’s Basilica, but we do encounter its beauty, and are strengthened by it. Work like that – or, say, the work of good statesmanship – has always been meant to hold up the true flourishing of the common, rather than to start a movement or inspire an uprising. Today’s elite, though, are interested in a movement, and they’re using their place to court the young into a project that, at least in recent days, is self destructing. Rightly, we sense something’s wrong.

So for all people of good will, it’s a good time to be clear about what an institution like the university is for: service to the real good of our communities, and not revolution. “Our work is not about objectivity,” the Northwestern professor stated, “Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work and opening your compassionate hearts.” Universities mean far too much to us to be guided by a mission as perplexing as that. As those belonging to institutions of whatever kind, let’s own our task better: to know the objective, real good of those we serve, and to do our best to help them to it.

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