As the culture wars rage in North America and elsewhere, hardly a week goes by in which a survey of one sort or another does not confirm that public trust in venerable institutions like universities is on the wane. Although student demand for admission in jurisdictions like Canada remains very high鈥攔ather surprisingly in this context鈥攖he broader perception of universities has been coloured by populist sentiment, in particular by hostility to elites and impatience with 鈥渆xpertise.鈥 Questions are asked whether university study brings appropriate benefit to those who pursue it, and whether the research conducted in such places, mostly with public money, justifies the investment made in them.
University leaders have responded with dismay and no small amount of disbelief, lamenting that somehow the nature and purpose of their institutions is being misunderstood and that if only their story were better told, public trust would be restored. At the same time, that story鈥攏o matter how expertly it is crafted and recrafted鈥攕eems peculiarly unable to get purchase on public opinion. Why should that be the case? Why should a narrative that has proved compelling for decades now seem to have lost force?
One answer to that question is obvious and straightforward: the positive university narrative, if I might call it that, will command attention only if it is embedded in a larger cultural story that supports it. So, in the period of accelerated technological innovation that followed the Second World War, with its generally optimistic assumptions about open-ended human and societal development, the value of higher learning and research was rarely a matter for debate. The unlikely result of the human catastrophe at Hiroshima was something like a six decade-long reprise of the Enlightenment, although of course it was never really that. To know that reason and science could find their apotheosis in destruction on an unimaginable scale had a profoundly chastening effect on the march of science.
In that sense we are unfortunately no longer in chaste times. Nor do reason and discovery enjoy the same strong alliance that they once had with human personal, social and political aspirations. And that is why the university story struggles for credibility at present, except perhaps to the extent that it can be made congruent with a narrative of personal, corporate, or national aggrandizement. The higher mission of universities has been eclipsed by instrumentalist thinking, and the trust society might have in them has come to seem irrelevant by comparison with the use society might make of them.
Universities have had a hand in their own devaluation, in part at least because they have allowed their story to be co-opted by a discourse in which trust has no part, or at least a very minor role. In a remarkable book from 2012, The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World [1], Douglas Allen distinguishes between pre-modern institutions based on trust and modern ones justified almost entirely by their productivity, measurement providing the ultimate or only evidence of success or value. Over the last two decades the global academy has undergone a process of modernization in this sense, the indicators of its pre-modern origins鈥攍ike the liberal arts curriculum with its focus on apparently less directly 鈥減ractical鈥 subjects that have comparatively few obviously utilitarian applications鈥攂ecoming increasingly marginalized.
As university leaders have allowed a preoccupation with metrics, data and quantifiable outcomes to dominate their institutions, the university story has certainly become businesslike and in that sense more modern, but it has also become decidedly mundane. Even the argument that universities are sources of innovation and therefore of economic benefit, though definitely credible, has evidently proven insufficient to convince society that these institutions are worthy of its trust and concerted support.
The paradox is that what society now needs is what for decades it has increasingly undervalued, and what universities, in their pursuit of public favour and funding have also progressively pushed to the margins: education, research and leadership that can lift society beyond the transactional and businesslike. There is no doubt that these institutions must be sustainable and properly managed, but it is a mistake to think that is all that humanity will expect of them. Nearly two centuries after the 鈥渋nstitutional revolution鈥 first began to equate human relations with industrial ones, the public hunger for trust in a higher order has returned, and the question that faces universities is whether or not they still have the capacity to show what makes a just, equitable and prosperous society, as well as what probably unquantifiable human attributes and virtues are needed to make that a reality.
Originally published in