A Crisis of Purpose

THE PURPOSES OF HIGHER EDUCATION — the very reasons for under-taking activities — are literal and symbolic. Official mission statements express an institution's moral values, claims about its accomplishments, and aspirations. Mission proclamations may thus be read as philosophical documents: transcripts subject to myriad interpretations and tacit understandings reached through consensus and conflict. They may also be used as rhetorical strategies, public relations devices, and tools for recruitment and fund-raising. To grasp their intended and unintended consequences, one must look at and beyond public pronouncements in which higher education institutions tout themselves. It is important to search for subtexts and their contexts. Normative values and deep philosophical ideas are educational policy issues. The challenge is to come to grips with the workings of multipurpose universities and how they are evolving.

The language used in their public statements is emblematic of changes in the purposes of higher education institutions. They have become preoccupied with strategic planning, benchmarking, branding, visibility, rankings, productivity indices, quality assurance systems, students as customers, and measurable outcomes. Before the 1980s, members of the higher education community rarely expressed themselves in these terms. Just as this parlance is commonplace in the business world, it is customary in the academy.

Yet the purposes of the university have long distinguished it from those of other endeavors. By purposes, I mean the premises and values on which the university rests. Understood as steering mechanisms, purposes provide a basis for making decisions, galvanizing stakeholders, and legitimating policy. They can be used to transform thinking and action.

Universities, however, are not solely mission-driven; they are mission- and market-driven, with varying degrees of state intervention in their development.

Transformation

Scrutinizing the business of the university in 1852, John Henry Newman, a Roman Catholic priest and later a cardinal, presented a series of lectures on "the idea of a university." He laid the groundwork for enduring debates about reforms in higher education. Schooled at Trinity College, Oxford, Newman emphasized the teaching mission of the university and contemplated the "real worth in the market of the article called 'a Liberal Education.'" Newman held that "to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be the business of the University." In this respect, the university is for cultivating the intellect. Newman deemed this pursuit as a sufficient good.

Newman compares his belief in the transmission of knowledge as the university's principal objective to the familiar view that the end of higher education is professional knowledge. While granting that practical courses in law or medicine, for example, should be taught, he responds to the contention that an education must be useful to university graduates — in today's terminology, "relevant." After all, "a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number." In other words, Newman's riposte to the claim that higher education ought to be useful is that the business of a university is to stimulate minds and build character.

For the sake of brevity, I want to fast-forward to the first half of the next century when Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Princeton-based Institute for Advanced Study, extended Newman's position. Flexner argued that utility means that universities are supposed to do useless things. In an essay titled "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge," he maintained that researchers should strive for knowledge without an anticipated outcome. He claimed that useless knowledge is the source of unmatched utility. Citing Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless radio, Flexner submitted that this innovation resulted from technical detail added to a lot of useless work by major theorists in the field of magnetism and electricity. In this case and others, the scientists who offered useless ideas had no practical payoff in mind. What then motivated them? The driver was their intellectual curiosity, which eventually provided immensely useful rewards for humankind. Crucially, training students in the scientific spirit in seemingly useless but vital investigative areas can yield unforeseeable ways to address concrete problems. According to Flexner, enabling free inquiry untrammeled by demands for usefulness promises illumination.

To wit, the famous British scholar G. H. Hardy took pleasure in pure mathematics and expressed disdain for applied research, leaving it to other minds. In his cogent formulation: "they [branches of applied mathematics] are indeed repulsively ugly and intolerably dull." He made a landmark contribution to what became known as the Hardy-Weinberg law, a theorem that addresses controversies over what proportions of dominant and recessive traits spread in a sizable mixed population. Several years after his formulation first appeared, Hardy's work had tangible spinoffs in genetics that he had not intended and would not have imagined. This experience suggests that the ivory-tower stereotype of universities misses the point: the programs of scholars with their own agendas for basic research can have relevance to the "real world." Seen from this angle, the knowers and the doers may be one and the same.

These modes of reasoning about the value of useless and useful knowledge resonate in times like our own when the value of higher education is widely debated. By all means, some present-day educational leaders share Newman and Flexner's vision of the role of the university. In the words of Daniel Zajfman, president of Israel's Weizmann Institute:

When we look at the values of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, we realise 100 years later what we can do with this. If you look at the history of science, you will find that most of the discoveries were never made by trying to solve a problem, rather by trying to understand how nature works, so our focus is on understanding.

But today's public skepticism about this thinking, when used to defend the performance of universities, is palpable. A concern is that given their high costs, universities are providing insufficient returns, variously understood in light of the informational needs of...