Confidence in Purpose: The Challenge of Defending the University Today

     

Elizabeth Corey’s powerful and beautifully rendered essay seeks to clarify the nature of the (modern) university and the community it occasions. The primary aim of her effort, as I understand it, is to develop a more effective defense of liberal education against managerial approaches to its operations; in our present moment, Corey shows, we are confronted with various and undesirable manifestations of the dominant view of the university as a business enterprise or training ground for “changing the world (the latter raison d'être often articulated and advertised in the service of the first, i.e. to attract and appease consumers and patrons, students and donors). The essay is thus concerned with understanding in the service of persuasion: how, Corey asks, might we clarify the nature of liberal learning to persuade those not yet or never to be intimately acquainted with liberal learning of its value, and the need to preserve or restore its autonomy?

Corey’s understanding and experience of the liberal arts is Oakeshottean: liberal learning is conversational and affords liberation from the here and now. The university is the place that occasions this great and untimely conversation, one that occurs between students, teachers, and their predecessors and through which we gain understanding of ourselves and our world to lead more intelligent and meaningful lives. Because liberal learning is a distinctive practice and mode of association (and experience), Corey invites us to utilize Oakeshott’s distinction between civil vs. enterprise association from his On Human Conduct to further illuminate and defend liberal education and the university in which it takes place.

I am compelled by Corey’s account of liberal education and agree with her that the dominant contemporary tendency to stress the practical, financial, vocational and political benefits of liberal learning (within and at the heart of the university) distorts its true character and encourages governance that jeopardizes its value. I note also that Corey’s recommendation to describe the university as “civil association” is, in certain respects, modest: she admits that “partisans of Oakeshott’s vision of liberal learning” may find this representation “inadequate” insofar as it belies liberal education’s promise to offer “the best good” rather than one good among many. Likewise, Corey does not pretend that the transposition of Oakeshott’s civil vs. enterprise association typology from the sphere of the modern political state to higher education is seamless. What “civil association” as a framework does promise, Corey argues, is a way of generating a “confident pluralism” within and towards the university that recognizes liberal education “as at least equally valuable among all the goods that a university pursues” (6). “Civil association” encourages pluralism because in this kind of association, in Oakeshott’s formulation, each member regards others as equal and respects their self-chosen purposes; the rules or laws ordering relations between members in civil association are not instrumental to achieving a particular purpose but rather create conditions of “civility” or prescribe norms of conduct that enable each to pursue their own purpose.

There are several aspects of Oakeshott’s original articulation of civil vs. enterprise association that do not map on easily to the realm of education, but I take Corey to be doing something other than arguing for a perfect analytical framework or scholarly equation. I do not therefore offer a systematic or comprehensive review of Oakeshott’s ideal typology in what follows. Rather, I focus on the absence, in Oakeshott’s “civil association,” of a common purpose: this is an essential element of his ideal type, and it plays a crucial role in Corey’s argument; it is also the source of my doubts about the suitability of “civil association” for illuminating and defending the university today.

While I share Corey’s desire to carve out and protect the freedom of teachers and students within the university to pursue their own self-chosen purposes, I am not persuaded that we can describe or defend the university without centering, articulating and confidently defending its essential purpose, which is to say the common purpose that binds together its members and which everyone entering the university freely chooses to adopt as their own. We will (and should) argue about what that purpose is, and we must find illuminating and persuasive ways of distinguishing between the university’s essential purpose and other (more practical, vocational, urgent, diverse) purposes nested within but not essential to the university, which direct some but not all its members. An implication of my insistence on common purpose is that the university’s rules or laws must be evaluated in terms of whether they advance or detract from the shared purpose of its members. Heated debates about whether a university’s rules, required training programs, or governance serve the institution’s purpose will invariably ensue. I do not think we can or should avoid these debates. To make them intelligent and productive, however, we must confront head-on rather than side-step the question of our common purpose.

Oakeshott developed his civil vs. enterprise association ideal-typology to illuminate the modern state and the distinctive relationship between citizens within it. Unlike in “enterprise association,” where members voluntarily band together to achieve a common purpose and govern their association with rules geared towards achieving that purpose (OHC 112), in “civil association” citizens finds themselves in relationships of political equality governed by lex, i.e. non-instrumental laws or rules that maintain formal relationships between persons (civitas) without determining each person’s purposes or actions within that civic order or association. Members in enterprise association express their freedom by determining their own purposes and joining (and retaining the freedom to exit) an association organized to advance their chosen purpose; the mode of governance in enterprise associations is “managerial” and rules are created to respond to contingent circumstances pursuant to the association’s purpose (OHC 117). By contrast, civitas or members of civil association enjoy civil freedom because they are related to each other “solely in terms of their common recognition of the rules which constitute a practice of civility” (OHC 128), with “civility” referring to norms of conduct that enable each to carry out their own self-chosen purpose(s) while respecting each whose “loves are as various as themselves” (OHC 129).

For Corey, “civil association” promises to illuminate two essential features of liberal education: its non-practical orientation and the freedom required for and produced through liberal learning. Members of a university, however, express their freedom also and crucially in a way that resembles enterprise association: the university is an association that members voluntarily choose to enter and from which they may freely exit. Specifically, the university is a community of teachers, scholars and students who freely choose to enter a partnership with each other for the shared purpose of learning and teaching. In the only mention of the university (of which I am aware) in Oakeshott’s discussion of different kinds of partnership in On Human Conduct, he classifies the university as “universitas” (199) which in the Middle Ages designated “a many joined in the pursuit of a common substantive satisfaction” as distinguished from “societas,” denoting a “multitude of men” formally associated through “moral” (i.e. not prudential) rules or laws (217). Oakeshott traces his civil vs. enterprise distinction to these historical designations, and while the modern university may contain a mix of different kinds of partnership, the “pursuit of a common substantive satisfaction” may still be the essential glue that binds us together and according to which we must organize our relational activity. I would suggest that it is, and that we must find the confidence to identify and defend it.

In our current moment, there is increasing (and often top-down or bureaucratic) pressure to make a case for why what we are teaching or learning is useful, with usefulness understood narrowly in economic, political or social terms. As Tyler Austin Harper has recently argued, administrators “concerned with public-facing diversity data” attempting to persuade “debt saddled student customers” alongside departments competing for scarce resources encourage these utilitarian appraisals and defenses of the university’s purpose. For Harper, the humanities have accelerated their own existential crisis by attempting to defend their purpose in these narrow utilitarian terms. Because the humanities “have a hard time mounting a credible case that their disciplines catapult graduates into six-figure salaries,” what they “can offer their young charges—who grow more progressive by the year—is the promise that their majors can help them understand power and fight for equality.”

In her essay, Corey has considered the benefits of describing the university according to an Oakeshottean ideal type that disavows a common purpose. What I see animating both Corey and Harper’s interventions, however, is a commitment to what today will appear to many as a paradox: a “useless” purpose. The shared purpose that binds together members of a university is difficult to define because, as Corey has explained, those pursuing degrees in engineering have different purposes than those pursuing a philosophy degree, and some disciplines are more obviously “useful” or practical than others. If a narrowly-defined utilitarian purpose is not and cannot be what defines the university (and this is certainly part of Corey’s argument), we may still – and I believe we must— identify and defend the purpose that does bind together otherwise diverse members within the university, understood as a distinctive place and enterprise.

We must, in other words, distinguish between different kinds of purpose and confidently defend the purpose that all members of the university do in fact share. Oakeshott is helpful on this point: in any enterprise, he explains, the common purpose animating the association “may be simple or complex, clearly identified or vaguely imagined; its achievement may be a near or a distant prospect, or no prospect at all, but an interminable engagement in the continuous promotion or protection of an enduring interest. The response sought may be that of others not thus associated (as a productive enterprise seeks buyers or consumers), or it may be an enjoyment of the associates themselves” (OHC 114, emphasis mine).

Even the engineering student, who may enter the university with an eye to a practical or vocational future benefit, is also there to gain understanding and to enjoy four years of freedom to devote to learning, ideally without the distractions and responsibilities of the practical world to which she must return. The university provides a place for this distinctive and secluded occupation, and the rules that govern it must facilitate both the engineering student’s and the philosophy student’s singular opportunity to dive deep into their subject. The university provides a place where every student may forget, if only briefly, the urgent pressures that will otherwise drive them. My sense is that the promise of a reprieve from the demands of the here and now for the sake of knowledge and understanding, and the invitation to live a more meaningful and intelligent life, are more attractive sales pitches than we’ve been encouraged to assume. They also have the benefit of being true. Whether the material and political conditions exist (or can be created) to allow students and scholars to heed their call is a different question, but I do not think we can defend the university, and certainly not the liberal arts, without sustaining and advertising this ideal, without standing by and for our common purpose.