Will the University Survive the Current Crisis?
Why a Kantian embrace of conflict might serve as a helpful re-framing for much ‘university in crisis’ discourse today.
Michael Schapira
9. May. 2024
Clark Kerr
1964
Clark Kerr, who steered the University of California system through the tumultuous 1960s, was fond of reminding anxious audiences that despite the seeming chaos they were witnessing on campus, universities were built on remarkably solid foundations. Of the seventy-five institutions founded before 1520 "which are [still] doing much the same things in much the same places, in much the same ways and under the same names," nearly sixty were universities.[i] Kerr is but one voice in a long history of incredibly reflective, eloquent, and hopeful apologists who were assured in the university’s essential and enduring mission – think John Henry Newman on liberal learning, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fusion of Bildung and Wissenschaft, or Thomas Jefferson’s civic aspirations at the University of Virginia.
It is hard to find such voices today, where universities find themselves under ever-intensifying pressure from all corners. There is a decisive quality to much ‘university in crisis’ discourse these days, harkening back to the ancient Greek sense of krisis as a critical point of decision, whether in reference to the Last Judgment in the Septuagint or in medicine, where crisis referred, as Reinhart Kossellek wrote, “both to the observable condition and to the judgment about the course of the illness. At such a time, it will be determined whether the patient will live or die.”[ii] To be in danger of losing your soul or to enter the terminal stages of a malady– such is the desperate warning surrounding the university today.
If the university is indeed in crisis today, it is probably best described as a ‘poly-crisis,’ to adopt the phrasing of Adam Tooze.[iii] Whereas Clark Kerr once imagined the ‘multi-versity’ advancing the goods of multiple constituencies (‘big science’ benefitting industry, defense, research, and teaching; expansion benefitting both elite and mass education), today’s university seems unable to satisfy conflicting imperatives (economic vs. educational; global vs. local; research vs. teaching; respect for tradition vs. the imperative to innovate, etc.). It is for this reason that universities have narrowed their focus to concentrate on things like efficiency, financial stability, and retaining or expanding their market share for students, faculty, and most importantly, durable sources of funding. Such was the charge made by a group at the University of Aberdeen attempting to ‘Reclaim our University.’ A 2016 manifesto under the same name outlined, in the spirit of the aforementioned etymology of crisis, a critical point of decision for their university:
We stand at a pivotal moment in the long history of our university, a fork in the path that offers two ways forward. One is to follow the business model of higher education to its logical conclusion, in a scramble for students, research funding and ratings that values innovation and change, above all else, as the keys to competitive advantage. The other is to rediscover the civic purpose of the university as a necessary component of the constitution of a democratic society, with the responsibility for educating its citizens and furnishing them with the wisdom and understanding that will enable them to fashion a world fit for future generations to live in. [iv]
The ‘Reclaim’ movement at Aberdeen was indeed successful in reigning in the worst managerial excesses of the business model on offer in 2016, but this success has proved fleeting as a raft of program and staff cuts (e.g. in Modern Languages) have been introduced once more as a consequence of, university leaders claim, cold, budgetary necessity.[v] In the pithy phrasing of Stefan Collini, it seems as if these future generations that the Reclaim manifesto imagines will look with great bemusement at a set of UK government policies that “took decisive steps in helping turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies.”[vi]
With such a complex of issues swirling around the contemporary university it is tempting to find ballast in some normative ideal a la Newman, Jefferson, or Humboldt. However, as the American scholar of higher education Jeffrey J. Williams has noted, simply asserting such ideals can often lapse into a weak idealism that fails to contend with changing material and political realities surrounding the university.[vii] Against the forces roiling universities today – bad faith politicians and an increasingly aggressive donor class in the United States; bad faith politicians and an increasingly aggressive and myopic managerial strata in the United Kingdom – such ideals as free speech, the inculcation of civic virtues, or the inherent worth of humanistic study prove ever weaker.
Kant and the University of Conflict
Let me thus propose a slightly different approach, one drawn from Immanuel Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties (1798), that centres questions of internal governance and the external bearing of the university, whether on civic life, the economy, or other connections that have become flashpoints in contemporary discourse. In Kant’s framing the institutional solidity that Clark Kerr praised is a result of a positive account of conflict, which stands in stark contrast to the overtly negative framing of conflict that one sees today, whether in media accounts, political discourse, or most importantly from university leaders themselves under the thrall of a managerial ethos of ruthless efficiency.
Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties stands at an interesting point in history insofar as it was one of the last works published in his lifetime, and thus the culmination of his critical project in philosophy, while also being at the beginning of significant changes that would reshape higher education in the German-speaking lands and serve as a model for universities around the world. Moreover, as Chad Wellmon notes, it was a paradigmatic attempt to deal with practical issues stemming from the Enlightenment: on the one hand, the proliferation outside the university of texts like the Encyclopédie, which privileged, in Kant’s estimation, erudition over thought [viii]; and on the other, in initiating challenges to all manner of reigning authorities. The Conflict of the Faculties thus emerges as Kant’s advocacy of a certain conception of scholarly work in those unsettled times as part of an attempt to ground a more comprehensive vision of how universities should relate to this emergent social form and how their component parts should interact internally.
The book consists of three essays prefaced by a plea from Kant to the Prussian Minister of Justice Johann Christoph von Woellner, who banned Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone from university classrooms. In the preface Kant makes a similar argument to that made in “What is Enlightenment?”, where he drew a distinction between one’s free use of public reason as a scholar and one’s more constrained use of private reason in one’s role as a civil servant. Thus, when Woellner begged Kant to “realize how irresponsibly you have acted against your duty as a teacher of youth and against our [i.e. the state’s] paternal purpose,”[ix] Kant responded by saying that his treatment of religion is not as a theologian, and thus a teacher in the narrow sense implied by Woellner, but as a philosopher and scholar.
Importantly, Kant does not seek to brush aside the issue by saying that philosophy should always take precedence in these kinds of conflict. That is to say, he is not committed to models like John Henry Newman’s which isolate humanistic scholarly work from its practical bearing on other institutions in society. Rather, one of Kant’s central aims is to articulate a principle of enlightened governance that takes upon itself the role of managing or organizing sources of perpetual and legitimate conflict. For him, the university was to become a central institution in the project for formalizing the relationships between different sources of authority in a social formation characterized by sweeping changes. This, to draw upon a word prominent in the Kantian lexicon, should remain a hope that we retain today.
Kant began by canvassing the rightful authority and “paternal purpose” to be found in the Higher Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine. Theologians derived the content of their teaching from the Bible, the legal faculty from the law of the land, and the medical faculty from medical ordinances. Recognizing the importance of preserving the integrity of these heteronomous sources of authority, he writes, “the higher faculties must, therefore, take great care not to enter into a misalliance with the lower faculty, but must keep it at a respectful distance, so that the dignity of their statutes will not be damaged by the free play of reason.”[x]
Where, then, would the lower faculty of Philosophy draw its authority? Might it too correspond with certain interests and responsibilities of the state? As the above injunction intimates, for Kant the work of the Philosophy faculty is authorized by nothing beyond the “free play of reason.”[xi] Even though this marks a clear difference as against the higher faculties, Kant nevertheless gives it a central role in a scheme of wise governance, an inversion that marks his innovative approach to the university. As Bill Readings renders it, “Each particular inquiry, each discipline, develops itself by interrogating its own foundations with the aid of the faculty of philosophy. Thus, inquiry passes from mere empirical practice to theoretical self-knowledge by means of self-criticism.”[xii] To put this another way and link it back to Kant’s interchange with Woellner or issues raised by the Aberdeen manifesto, the philosophy faculty is indispensable because it is grounded in free inquiry (“the essential and first condition of learning in general,”[xiii] as Kant puts it), whereas the higher faculties are driven primarily by contingent notions of utility (as set by the prince or king or social conventions at any given time), by deference to an uncritical acceptance of tradition, or today by the ethos of managerialism.
Kant goes so far as to say that the government cannot limit this activity of the Philosophy faculty “without acting against its own proper and essential purpose,” no matter how irksome the challenging of heretofore accepted suppositions may be.[xiv] The kind of conflict engendered in critically interrogating various claims of authority is entirely legitimate for Kant, and should be seen to be so by governments, because it is essentially a matter for scholars who enjoy a form of equality in their commitment to the free play of reason that others with direct political, economic, or social responsibilities do not.
What Kant does is thus to center our focus on conflicts between the higher and lower faculties and between state duties and scholarly work. The “legal” conflicts described above are guided by procedure, as opposed to any pre-determined desired outcome, and in this respect stand in stark contrast to the imposition of pre-set ends by managerial regimes, boards of trustees, bad faith politicians, or imperious donors. Conflicts become illegitimate when, instead of submitting to the tribunal of reason and relevant normative conceptions of how the university relates to the state, they either are not appropriate for public scrutiny, or are resolved by force, deception, or dogmatism. The former Kant deems “illegal by reason of matter;” the latter by “reason of form.”[xv] When evaluations of quality in both teaching and research (and the downstream decisions of funding and hiring) are set by the business model named in the Aberdeen manifesto, then the criteria for participation in a conflict’s resolution are being drawn from one side alone and thus ‘illegal’ in Kant’s eyes. In the illegal resolution of the conflict by imposing some sort of one-sided standard we can see the cultural and practical changes that stem from a negative orientation towards conflict. The decision to invite police onto U.S. college campuses to disperse protest movements portends an even darker form of illegal conflict resolution. This is contrasted with legitimate conflicts where the outcome is guided by norms widely accepted amongst the university community, but with no particular end in mind.
Much of this should sound familiar to readers of Kant, with the background distinction between heteronomy and autonomy guiding his division of academic labor between higher and lower faculties as well as his commitment to public reason. Illegal conflicts can be seen as akin to the “supposed right to lie” in his moral philosophy insofar as prosecuting these conflicts exclusively on the heteronomous forms of authority guiding the higher faculties will lead to anarchy and undercut the very conditions for establishing law or a governable public culture. The significant addition here is that Kant imagines a new kind of governmental configuration that depends in some significant sense on the work of the philosophy faculty and the conflicts it initiates through the free play of reason, thus linking these internal divisions in the working of the university to broader questions of legitimacy. “It could well happen,” he writes, “that the last would be the first,” and the lower faculty would assume a pre-eminent role “not, indeed, in authority, but in counselling the authority (the government).”[xvi]
Finding Our Way Through the Crisis
For many – from protesting students to precarious academics to budget conscious managers – a classic ideal culled from the Enlightenment is bound to arouse suspicion. However, it is important to understand why a Kantian embrace of conflict might serve as a helpful re-framing for much ‘university in crisis’ discourse today.
Towards the end of the preface Kant lays out his rationale for his particular ordering of the faculties:
The choice of a wise government has fallen upon an enlightened statesman who has, not a one-sided predilection for a special branch of science (theology), but the vocation, the talent, and the will to promote broad interests of the entire scholastic profession and who will, accordingly, secure progress of culture in the field of the sciences against any new invasions of obscurantism.[xvii]
The Philosophy faculty will never have the heteronomous authority or content that the higher faculties have, but its unique work helps rethink the ‘paternalistic purpose’ of the state by aiding the progressive unfolding of autonomous, rational behaviour in more spheres of life and warding off the drift into sclerotic, dogmatic thought and policy. It also sets the cultural agenda within the university, inviting criticism in such a way that the various sources of conflict do not become destabilizing, but rather are generative for furthering the scholarly enterprise in all its various branches.
There are many other features of Kant’s book worthy of discussion, but I have spent some time focusing on the conflict aspect of The Conflict of the Faculties because I believe it has special relevance to the Aberdeen manifesto and myriad movements today animated by similar concerns. Kant offers a set of conceptual resources for thinking about whence authority for different kinds of work in the university derives, and then how this work relates to broader political, economic, and cultural concerns. This gives it a critical purchase in mediating the fault lines that people point to when they render the university as in ‘crisis’ and can help bring blind spots into focus, whether for movements like that at Aberdeen that might be tempted to retreat to the university’s civic/humanist mission, for managers pressed by the dictates of efficiency and productivity, or for faculty struggling in the face of governance by administrative fiat.
Moreover, Kant shifts our attention away from definitional struggles about the true nature and purpose of universities and has us examine the conditions under which crises and conflicts are produced. Many of the crises that swirl around the university today are overdetermined insofar as they present an either/or, whether this consists in dedicating oneself to a single normative idea about the university or in asserting priority claims to allocate resources or, in the current moral panic surrounding campus protests, prioritize order and safety over the expression of moral critique. What is gained by embracing and centering conflict is an opportunity to unfold the conditions that produce the crisis and avoid being diverted by the disjunctive logic of many current debates.
Michael Schapira is the author of of University in Crisis: From the Middle Ages to the University of Excellence and an editor of the forthcoming collection Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs.
[i] Clark Kerr, "The Internal and External Threats to the University of the Twenty-First Century (Comments)," Minerva 30, no. 2 (1992): 150.
[ii] Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” trans. Michaela Richter, Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 360.
[iii] Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis,” The Financial Times, October 28, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33, accessed May 4, 2024.
[iv] Reclaiming our University, Manifesto, §2, https://reclaimingouruniversity.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/reclaiming-manifestofinal.pdf, accessed May 4, 2024.
[v] Tom Williams, “Backlash Grows Against Aberdeen Language Cuts,” Times Higher Education, December 12, 2023, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/backlash-grows-against-aberdeen-language-cuts. Accessed May 4, 2024.
[vi] Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (New York: Verso, 2017), 154.
[vii] Jeffrey J. Williams, “History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University,” JAC 25, no. 1 (2005): 55-74.
[viii] Chad Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 123–150.
[ix] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. and trans. M.J. Gregor (New York, Abaris Books), 11.
[x] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 35.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Bill Readings, University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 57.
[xiii] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. 45.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties. 47.
[xvi] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 59.
[xvii] Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, 21.
