Higher education has become increasingly important. More people seek it. More kinds of employment require it. More progress depends on it. Universities have become steadily more important as engines of growth and as strategic necessities in international competition and cooperation. They are centers of the struggle to make governments more democratic, stable, and responsive. Leading universities are essential to national leadership. There is a reason for all of this, and it is not that higher education is simply an obstacle course and that a degree certifies oneâs ability to get through it. It is that what universities teach really is useful.
âHigher educationâ is not just any kind of post-secondary schooling. The phrase is especially associated with education in the main scholarly disciplines of the arts and sciences, now usually grouped as the humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and physical sciences. Certain types of professional education with ancient roots are also included. These are most notably law, medicine, engineering, and business.
Faculty in institutions of higher education are scholars. What they teach is scholarship. It is not âjob skills.â Scholars are custodians and creators of knowledge. Their task is to identify and preserve the best that we have inherited from the past and to add to it for the future. So it should not be surprising that those who have obtained such education turn out to be more useful in many occupations of daily life than those without it. So on average, they earn more. But this is a by-product. It is not the main product.
The main product is truth that is established by proof. This includes truths about truth itself, the difficulties of creating it, and exactly what it can and cannot be used for.
The Stakes
In the last two centuries, expanded university scholarship has produced a vastly expanded understanding of our world. This in turn has produced unprecedented material benefits. It has allowed people everywhere to live better and longer. It has supported improved worldwide communication and cooperation, with rising expectations of social development and self-development. But the benefits have also produced new problems. In 1900, the worldwide population was about 900 million. Now it is about 7.8 billion. If birth and death rates remain as they are, it will increase to about 10 billion before it levels off.
More people can mean increased productivity, but they can also mean global disaster. People require places to live. The world population is now majority urban, and cities are proving unable to cope. They are developing large populations of homeless, unemployed, and unengaged. People require food and energy, but the present methods of food production and energy technologies are not sustainable. They will be even less sustainable as population increases further.
The greatest danger we now face is us: our inability to act collectively in a way that is fair to each and sustainable for all. Poverty and political instability in the less wealthy nations cannot be ignored by the wealthy nations. Nor can they be cured by migration or isolated by preventing migration.
There is an overwhelming scientific consensus on what is needed and solid public support for the science. It was stated in the Millennium Development Goals of 2000 and reiterated in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016, which President Trump repudiated in 2017. To get there, most of the world needs better government at all levels. We all need more effective social service organizations, health care, and education. And we all need manufacturing and mining regulations that require producers to internalize the costs of environmental protection as part of the cost of production, and thus ultimately as part of the cost of what is produced. This will have cascading constructive effects just as the present economic incentives to externalize costs in the form of environmental damage have cascading destructive defects. We also need new technologies of many kinds and more energy-efficient and sustainable agriculture. And all of this must be done in the framework of ending and if possible reversing global warming. In academic terms, this translates into needs for conceptual advances across all of the physical and social sciences as well as the disciplines in the humanities that enable us to understand one another through an ever more complex awareness of our historic and cultural interrelationships.
Academic Freedom and Academic Democracy
The recognized precondition of creative and productive scholarship and education is academic freedom. This means two distinct things: the freedom of an institution to regulate itself and the freedom of scholars and students to pursue the truth wherever evidence and reason may lead. Freedom for the institution does not automatically result in freedom of thought for the individual scholar. Whether it does so depends on whether the governance of the institution is an academic democracy and not some kind of system of authority and repression. As a political democracy is a governmental system in which individual citizens can participate in such a way as to protect their necessary rights and freedoms as citizens, so an academic democracy is a system of academic governance bodies in which the members of the academic community participate so as to assure that the institution protects their freedom of enquiry and communication.
Academic democracy works by producing good policies. Good academic policies do not strike those they apply to as elaborate or arbitrary prohibitions or prescriptions. Good academic policies combine freedom with responsibility. They produce coordinated action by conveying a common vision and intellectual outlook that those in the academic community consider at least compelling and possibly inspiring. They enable people to take pride in what they do because it is of genuine value, they see it to be so, and they have a reasonable expectation that others will as well.
Good policies have to be based on good knowledgeâaccurate, factual, knowledge that holds up to accurate, factual, criticism. The great strength of an academic democracy is that it can produce such knowledge, and such knowledge in turn allows those in the democracy to sustain it.
The academic policies that an academic democracy must generate spring from the nature of scholarship and teaching. Just as a craftsman recognizes impediments encountered in trying to do the best work possible and can imagine working conditions without them, scholars recognize impediments to scholarship and can imagine an institution without them. As long as scholarship lives, there will be scholars who seek such an institution and students who seek such scholars.
Seeking new knowledge involves risk. Many well-known problems have defied solution for centuries. In other cases, several scholars working on a problem independently have arrived at solutions almost simultaneously. Many problems turn out to be illusory. University rules and practices have evolved to allow capable individuals to take intellectual risks while minimizing exposure to financial and physical dangers. One of these practices is tenure. Another is bringing many risk-takers together in one institution, so while the odds of success for each individual remain low, the likelihood for the institution will be high. It is also done by combining research with teaching. These broad features produce subtle tensions. Balancing them effectively in each institution requires carefully written policies that take into account the institutionâs needs, resources, and constituencies. Academic life is intensely disciplined, but it cannot be the discipline of the assembly line. It provides great personal freedom, but it cannot be the freedom to ignore the requirements of scholarship and service. It has to attract creative people and allow those who fail to get up again and try something else. But it also has to provide as much guarantee as possible that attempts are grounded in reality.
The distinctive problem for American higher education is that the forms of academic democracy that evolved in Europe depend on a legal and political framework unlike that in the United States. Individual American institutions have worked out appropriate adjustments, but as a nation we have not.
Organizations and Culture
This is about governance organizations: what they are, how to create them, maintain them, and defend them. It is a strikingly neglected topic. If we go by the titles of works, the greatest body of books and articles on higher education with the word âgovernanceâ in the title has been generated by faculty in schools of education. But they do not describe governance organizations. They describe what they call âorganizational culture.â The emphasis in the associated theory is on culture. âOrganizationalâ only connects what is said about it to a specific group.
By contrast, if we go by what articles actually describe, the largest literature on governance organizations is probably in anthropology, although their titles rarely include either âgovernanceâ or âorganization.â They, too, most prominently talk about âculture.â And, in fact, both these lines of discussion have a common theoretical starting point.
The idea that an academic institution has a distinctive organizational culture was introduced in the education literature by Burton Clark in The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed, and Swarthmore (1970). This construes organizational culture as a system of values and attitudes that somehow takes shape in an organization and thereafter perpetuates itself by shaping the behavior of the individuals within it. In Clarkâs view, each of these outstanding colleges had one. It was distinctive. And it explained their success.
Clark was a sociologist in the UCLA School of Education. He adapted the imagery from Clifford Geertz and a few other anthropologists in a line of positivist, deterministic, anthropological, and sociological theory descended through E. B. Tylor, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Before Geertz, other widely recognized American anthropologists who argued for the same idea included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ralph Linton, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert Lowie. Their European counterparts proposed similarly deterministic conceptions of âsocial structureâ as a self-perpetuating whole. Prominent British exemplars included A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Edmund Leach. On the continent, by the 1970s, the most prominent version was âstructuralismâ associated with Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss, who was joined by Leach.
The theory was supported by a metatheory. A basic assumption in positivistic metatheory is that there is no such thing as just plain facts. Before one can make any observations, it is necessary to impose oneâs own analytic scheme, meaning oneâs own system of arbitrarily defined categories into which observations must be classified.
In the hundred years from Tylor to Geertz, every proponent of deterministic cultural and social or social theory offered a different explanation of what culture or social structure was. There was a reason for this. It was that for every version anyone offered, there were observations that appeared to disprove it. Efforts to dismiss or incorporate such observations led to such theories becoming ever more complex and usually also narrower. In the 1960s, this culminated in two major controversies. Both were focused on kinship organization. One concerned âcomponential analysis.â The other was the alliance-descent controversy focused on LĂ©vi-Straussâs âstructuralism.â
Then, in a series of critiques, David Schneider showed that all the arguments in both controversies were essentially circular (Schneider 1965, 1968, 1987, 1994). For componential analysis, he argued that âIf the input is restricted to kin types, and only some of them, it is inevitable that the output is a series of dimensions implicit in those kintypesâ (Schneider 1969: 3). Schneider characterizes this as, âYou are what you eat.â In computer terms: garbage in, garbage out.
For the alliance-descent controversy, Schneider showed that neither type of theory had a decisive case that could be interpreted only in its terms and not the opposed terms. Each involved what he called âtotal system models,â and such models were vacuous in principle. They covered too much, too many disparate kinds of phenomena. Instead, he argued, what was needed was âa model of defined parts.â But given this, he also concluded that âalliance theory, as a theory, is capable of dealing with the symbol system as a symbol apart from, yet related to, the network of social relationsâŠ. Where Radcliffe Brown rejected culture in favor of what he was pleased to call structure, ⊠alliance theorists have brought culture and social structure into an ordered relationshipâ (1965: 487).
Schneiderâs next substantive work tried to build on this. It was American Kinship (1968). He construed this as a system of âcultural symbolsâ ârefracted out ofâ the âcentral symbolâ of incest. Unhappily, however, since Schneider accepted the same positivist metatheory as most of those he criticized, he eventually recognized that his criticism applied to this as well. The result was a theoretical apocalypse. His next work was the Critique of the Study of Kinship (1987). It concluded that a âquartetâ of phenomena that social scientists had been focused on for over a centuryââkinship, economics, politics, and religionâ (p. 181)âwere nothing more than âmetacultural categories imbedded in European culture which have been incorporated into the analytic schemes of European social scientistsâ (Schneider 1987: 184). They had no validity as universal or objective categories. Many of the anthropologists who shared Schneiderâs positivistic assumptions also agreed with his conclusions. What else could explain the previous decades of frustration? Many also saw Geertz as providing the way out: give up on science and consider anthropology part of the humanities.
Tylor had defined culture as âthat complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of societyâ (1889: 1). The âcomplex wholeâ was âobjective.â This meant it was to be determined by Tylor himself through comparative study. It was not something that the members recognized for themselves.
Although Geertz explicitly claimed that his purpose was to correct Tylorâs definition, the correction was only enough to preserve the idea of a deterministic whole in the face of the failure to demonstrate ...