We are in the midst of a knowledge revolution, one that affects all the ways we acquire, evaluate, store, and communicate almost everything we know. By means of this revolution’s technology we travel outward to the moon or Mars and inward to the secrets of the brain, the DNA, the genome. We have not only a flood of new knowledge, but of new knowledge about how we know what we know or think we know. Although the brain and computer are not the same thing, the one is a valuable means of exploring the other, and in conjunction they have intensified one of the most signal features of modernity, the scale and pace of change, the rapidity with which things are invented, used and replaced, the blur of events speeding past us, making the neck snap as it turns to watch them go almost as soon as they have come. There is something in human nature that resists so much change crowding in upon us.
The scope of this knowledge revolution is hard to overstate. It has been compared to the Industrial Revolution, to the Renaissance, to the invention of the printing press. It will probably outrun them all in long-term consequence. It promises to make obsolete the traditional book, the traditional library and traditional research techniques. Could it make obsolete even the home of such traditional things, the university?
After all, a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did not need university training to launch their companies, any more than Henry Ford needed it to make a car or Thomas Edison to make a light bulb–or for that matter, Johann Gutenberg to print his books. In fact, science did not come out of universities in the past–chemistry, for instance, arose from the dye shops of fabric merchants and glass blowers, from the arsenals of military establishments or from prizes offered from bodies like the Royal Society in England. It was possible then for the university to dismiss science as the art of doing things while it specialized in knowing things.
But knowing is precisely what the knowledge revolution is all about, so this challenge tests the universities’ resilience more intimately than any previous one.
The governor of Washington state, Gary Locke, has proposed that his legislature cut state education costs by replacing professors and expensive physical plants with Internet classes and CD-ROMs. Already 75 percent of colleges offer some form of online instruction, and 90 percent will be doing so by next year. This development alone raises serious questions about previous agreements on professional status, rights, duties, tenure and intellectual property, and it promises to alter even more drastically the logistics of student life.
It is useful to look at five of the outmoded ideals proposed by the university: the lockbox theory of university education, the beach-blanket theory, the lace-collecting theory, the arboretum theory and the Jeeves-the-Butler theory.
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Al Gore should like the first concept, the lockbox theory. According to this, the university has a treasure chest of eternal truths that it opens for students, who then carry off replicas of them stored in little lockboxes in their own heads. This is the view of the university voiced in 1872 by professor Charles Hodge of the Princeton Theological seminary, who proudly boasted that “a new idea never originated in the seminary.”
This attitude was not confined to the 19th Century. In 1936, Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, wrote: “Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education should be everywhere the same.”
Few people connected with universities would try to defend the “one truth” rationale for the university. More are likely to lean toward a second idea, what might be called the beach-blanket theory. I take this from a former president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, who said that the university’s role is to arrange for “the survival of the fittest among ideas tossed in the blanket of debate, dispute and disagreement.” This free market of ideas concept assumes that all ideas start out even and then prove their worth under test. This allows escape from the one-truth approach and makes the university simply preside over a process guaranteeing that ideas shall prevail by their own vigor, not by official endorsement.
But present-day creationists are good at puncturing this pose of neutrality. They complain that their ideas don’t get an equal shake in the blanket with evolution–they don’t even get into the blanket for tossing. Of course, they are by and large right. Neither do flat-Earth theories or Ptolemaic astronomy get onto the blanket. Ideas simply do not start out equal in the academy and never have. There is a presumption against certain notions–for example the notion that Ayn Rand is America’s greatest novelist. And by the way, if the blanket toss ever did achieve the survival of the fittest ideas, those ideas would become the one truth that intellectual free-marketers are trying to avoid.
The third theory is the lace-collecting one, after Samuel Johnson, who said that “Greek, sir, is like lace: Every man gets as much of it as he can.” He was speaking sarcastically, but John Henry Newman was not when he gave us his idea of a university: “It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. These are the [innate] qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University.”
This theory, you notice, does not look to the permanent or provisional state of the knowledge being imparted but to the effect on those to whom it is imparted. The university rounds them off, breaks them out of specialization and narrow expertise. It fits a person to be interesting in the larger social spheres of life. It is a process that, Newman admits, takes leisure and at least partial release from useful tasks.
The fourth obsolete view might be called the arboretum theory: It is that the university should be a time spent in the groves of academe, sheltered from the harsher winds that blow in the outside world, preparing for entry into that world. The university is a hothouse antechamber to real life, in which young shoots of intellect would be tended, given knowledge and ideals, to help them when they at last emerge from this cocoon.
If this view ever made sense in the past, it is clearly nonsense now. The world cannot be sealed out. It streams in through television, rock music, movies and the Internet. Nor do students come to the university innocent of worldly cares. They have been involved and active in various cultural and intellectual and political concerns well before they reach the campus.
I recall a Mike Mansfield symposium I served on with ex-President [Jimmy] Carter in Wyoming. His daughter, Amy, a student at the time, had recently been arrested for protests outside the South African Embassy. This was back in the days of official apartheid. A student asked Carter, once sworn to uphold the law, how he felt when his daughter broke the law and went to jail. He said, “I cannot tell you how proud I am of what she did, and if you students are not going to express your conscience now, when you are not weighed down with family and job concerns, when will you do it?”
This turns upside down the old view that the university should give an exemption from real life. President Carter says it should send people out into those activities–and it certainly has in our time. My own son spent part of his undergraduate days campaigning for Jesse Jackson. In the early 1970’s, after President [Richard] Nixon’s Cambodian incursion and the outbreak of campus unrest, universities even offered credits for those who would campaign for peace candidates. I first met at that time a young faculty member at Princeton who was training students for this program, and I wrote a newspaper column about him saying that this Henry Bienan was really no dope.
The fifth theory is the stickiest of them all. It keeps dying and coming back. This is the Jeeves-the-Butler theory. Jeeves is the omniscient man whose reserves of knowledge continually bail out his employer, the worldly but dithery Bertie Wooster. Even when other views of the university are held, it is said that it should serve the society that supports them.
In America, a utilitarian view of the university has been revived over and over. Our earliest colleges were meant to train Congregationalist and Presbyterian preachers, and prominent men in the pews to understand their sermons. Thomas Jefferson promoted the idea of educating a democratic electorate, able to make intelligent choices. The study of Western civilization, which Hilton Kramer and others claim was the basis of the university curriculum down through the ages, was actually introduced, as Lawrence Leaven has demonstrated, in the First World War, in response to governmental pleas for solidarity with our European allies.
There are good and bad ways for the university to serve society, but some ways will always be demanded. Which raises the question: What service can the university perform for the knowledge revolution? Much of the talk so far is just about keeping up with it, adjusting to it, weathering it. Has the university no present higher mission than survival?
To answer that question, it is worth looking back at the obsolete views of the university. As different as universities have been, age by age, ideal after disappearing ideal, there must be something constant that makes us call the various forms by single name “university.”
It is often said that apprenticeship on a real newspaper or television station is the best and quickest way to become a practicing journalist. Then why do we have a journalism school in the university? To ask questions about newspapers that newspapers do not have the time, inclination or resources to ask themselves. What is their role in society, their ties to the economy and power structure, their place not only in the history of journalism but of the country? Students engaged in these questions need to call on other disciplines that are ready to their hand in a university–disciplines of history or sociology or political science or psychology or literature.
Newman said that a gentleman’s taste is formed by enjoying cultural knowledge for its own sake. That can be done almost effortlessly outside the university these days. Access to music, drama, art is easy and is buttressed by interactive programs of all sorts. A moderately interested person can now see, in a decade, more Shakespeare performances–live, on screen, on television, on the Internet, in DVDs–than the most dedicated Shakespeare scholar of the early 20th Century would be able to see in a lifetime. But the modern experience of a devoted Shakespeare buff haunting performances is not, of itself, a university experience.
What sets the latter apart?
Suppose a teacher is going to teach one of his or her favorite books for the first time. All who teach know what this entails. First, by way of preparation, one has to read the book in a brand new way, not just plumbing it for ones own purpose or perception or enjoyment, but asking different questions about it: How will it be perceived by those of far different experiences than my own, by students either not exposed to it or its like, or exposed to them in sketchy ways that may have distorted perception. What obstacles can be foreseen and removed or minimized? What ancillary material can be deployed to deepen understanding of it? And that is just the beginning of these preliminary tasks.
St. Augustine said that when he taught others certain principals, he came to a new understanding of them himself. “When listeners are moved as we speak, we enter into each others’ reactions. As the hearers speak, we learn from them what we were teaching.” The questioning of the book becomes a self-inquest, a testing of one’s own and others’ reactions to it. That is the university experience. It is not mere dispensing of information. It is the process of going through one’s own and others’ ways of knowing, something that is not secondhand, or delegated, or mechanically replicated.
This process or something very like it went on in all the different kinds of university that have existed in the past. And that is the experience that will occur in the university of the future, if there is such a thing.
But the problem is not one, simply, of updating in order to stay in existence. The job of the university is to challenge and measure and assess what occurs, not simply to accompany it, to ask questions about the process from outside the process. The more dizzying and disorientating the changes taking place, the more needed in some arena for understanding what is happening. In the past the university could provide landmarks to steer by.
Now, in the swirl of things, it must provide a gyroscope to keep us from tumbling head over heels in uncharted space. The university will not be made obsolete because we can not allow it to be. It was never more needed.
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In America, a utilitarian view of the university has been revived over and over.