My last post talked about the need to improve universities. Improving universities implies that there is something wrong with them, so the first task is to describe just what is wrong with them. To do that, one needs to know what the purpose of universities is in the first place. One way to answer this question is to consider what universities do. The answer to this is complicated since universities do many things. At the same time, I think it's safe to say most people would agree that universities educate students in highly specialized domains of knowledge. Another thing that universities "do" is research. What qualifies as research is admittedly potentially broad, but again, I think it's safe to say that most people would broadly agree that research is what is done to extend the boundaries of human knowledge. That these two things are done in the same "place" by the same people (professors) implies that there is a link between the two. That is, people extending the boundaries of human knowledge are also the people educating students. The connection implies that universities are places that aim to educate students with the most up-to-date knowledge about the world.
Another clue about the purpose of universities is related to professors themselves. The "university professor" is characterized by three things. First, they are well remunerated. In fact, in the US, the average university professor earns roughly $110,000 per year.[1] This places them in the 87th percentile of income.[2] That means that 87% of workers in the US make less than university professors. Second, university professors have very good job security in the form of tenure. This makes them difficult to fire. Third, an important aspect of job security is academic freedom. Academic freedom ultimately means that professors are free to study what they believe is worthy of study, teach what they think is appropriate to students, and publicize what they understand to be true.
Academic freedom is an important concept and in itself also points to important clues about the nature of universities and professors. Academic freedom is justified for two reasons. The first is simply so that professors could say things that people might disagree with, particularly universities themselves (Ludlum 1950). The second reason relates to the Enlightenment innovation of the liberal approach to the advancement of knowledge, most famously articulated by John Stuart Mill (Mill 1859). This boils down to the idea that individually, we (humans) are plagued by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning making our ability to understand the nature of reality by ourselves difficult. The miracle discovery of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, however, was how to overcome individual biases and motivated reasoning collectively through knowledge-uncovering mechanisms and institutions. At the base of these mechanisms was the idea that the best way to uncover the truth is by publicly presenting what we believe to be true, justifying these beliefs with evidence, describing how we arrived at them, and having the ideas confronted by others through argument and evidence (see e.g. Rauch 2013).
We can now consider the enigma of why professors are well-remunerated, with job security and academic freedom. The answer to the enigma needs to be independence and neutrality. High salaries prevent professors from needing to compromise their independence and neutrality by accepting money from other sources that may want them to compromise their mission of knowledge expansion. Job security allows professors to present their (potentially unusual or threatening) ideas without fear of losing their jobs, and this job security is undergirded by academic freedom. Why else would society accord these privileges to academics for advancing the bounds of human knowledge and teaching this to future generations?
The outlines of the purpose of universities are now becoming clear. What universities do, and the privileges accorded to academics point to a social contract between the public (who supports both private and public universities), and universities and professors themselves. The social contract is that professors neutrally and independently pursue the advance of knowledge and instruct future generations (facilitated by universities) about the state of that knowledge. In return, universities are funded and academics receive excellent remuneration and job security.
Now, academics adopting a Critical Social Justice perspective (or Woke academics - see Pincourt & Lindsay 2021, Chapter 1.1) would likely deny that independence and neutrality are the only answer to why professors are paid well, have job security and academic freedom. They would likely begin a refutation of this answer by saying that it is impossible to be independent and neutral - that everyone is "situated" and therefore independence and neutrality are impossible. Worse, they would claim that not only is neutrality impossible, but that anyone (including academics) making any claims about what is true, knowingly or unknowingly make such claims in order to perpetuate existing structures of oppression (see Pincourt & Lindsay 2021, Chapter 1.2). Finally, they would likely claim it is therefore the responsibility of universities and academics to recognize this and work towards opposing oppression, and teaching students to oppose oppression as well (see Pincourt & Lindsay, Chapter 1.3).
Ultimately, the Woke perspective amounts to saying (using Hume's language) that the role of universities is not to understand what is but rather what ought to be. This worldview has its roots in Karl Marx's famous maxim from his 11 Theses on Feuerbach "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." The putative social contract between the public and universities from a Woke perspective is thereby quite different than what I concluded above. From this perspective, the contract involves the public funding universities, and providing academics with high salaries and job security to tell them, and teach their children, how the world ought to be, and how they ought to behave.
There are two main problems with this (Woke) perspective. First, the worldview itself (all knowledge is socially constructed and serves to perpetuate existing structures of oppression) is fallacious and based almost entirely on theoretical assertion (this essay summarizes the key arguments about this). Second, even if it were true, institutions already exist for these purposes. Religious institutions, for example, specialize in (among other things) describing the way society ought to operate and how individuals should behave. In addition, there are many Non Governmental Organizations whose role is explicitly to interpret evidence to advocate for how they believe the world ought to be and how people should behave. (Incidentally religious institutions and NGOs pay less well than universities, so they do this at a comparative bargain as well.) As a result, and given the implicit social contract between the public and universities, this is clearly not the role of universities. On the contrary, the role of universities is to uncover what is and not to advocate for what ought to be.
[1] This is derived from Table 1 and Table 7 of the American Association of University Professors' Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2020–21.
[2] See the DQYDJ income percentile calculator.
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