When we talk about universities
First published: November 11, 2024. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
Nearly 30 years ago, when I left law practice and started my career as a law professor, a person who was to become a great friend gave me advice that I have never forgotten: “Only one crazy idea per paper.” I have never forgotten it largely because I have almost never followed it. I have lots of ideas, or at least I think that I do, and more than a few of them strike people – colleagues, as others – as crazy.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? Of having universities and colleges and their faculties? To try out crazy ideas?
Hmmm. Maybe.
These last several weeks at “Everything in Between” have focused on what amounts to a case study in crazy ideas. The crazy idea that is the US law school (why is the law school trying to be so many things to so many people?; why is the law school part of the university system?). The crazy idea that law schools are Potemkin villages, financially speaking. The crazy idea that “we” might imagine training lawyers and legal experts, and coming up with better ideas about law and governance, without law schools, at least without law schools in their current forms.
And the crazy idea that talking about law schools is really talking about something else entirely: universities and colleges.
It turns out (actually, I figured out a while back) that the many things that ail US law schools are not simply organic to legal education. The financial fragility, the multiplicity of often inconsistent social purposes, and deep epistemological anxieties that characterize law schools are symptoms and reflections of bigger concerns.
Partly those concerns arise from legal systems generally, lawyers at large, and the societies that have come to depend on both. What is the right relationship between “input” (lawyers in training) and “output” (“law,” full stop)? Way back in the day, I made a few contributions to collaborative projects in thinking through answers to that question, once in 2008 and again in 2018. Crazy ideas, to be sure.
Partly, also, concerns about legal education turn on financial fragility, the multiplicity of often inconsistent social purposes, and deep epistemological anxieties that characterize the entire sector of US higher education.
That’s where “Everything in Between” is headed: raising some crazy ideas about crazy ideas. (Perhaps some of them will turn out to be not so crazy after all.) What is the future of the university, as an institutional form?
In case anyone wonders why I’m interested in the question, and where that interest comes from, glance at this paper, from 2009: “The University as Constructed Cultural Commons.” We used “the university” as a canonical illustration of what we meant then by “cultural commons” and what we mean now by “knowledge commons.” Across the centuries of the history of universities, their changing institutional ebbs and flows can be helpfully understood as the changing patterns of community-based and collectivized knowledge production, storage, and dissemination.
Most of that paper involved a historical case study, which followed other researchers in identifying US universities as (largely) reflecting a late 19th century marriage between the research tradition associated with German universities and the collegiate, training tradition associated with British universities. The marriage has been mostly stable and often fraught, as marriages often are.
And … that marriage appears, today, to be coming apart at the seams.
Diagnoses are easier than remedies – or rebuilding – but one has to know what the problems are before imagining a different outcome, meaning problems in the world, not just problems on campus.
What are the problems? I’ll never get to all of them, but given that today’s newsletter is largely throat-clearing, I’ll close with some previews of specifics.
One: It is relatively easy to frame the question simply in terms of technology, as if Generative AI and EdTech are what ail an otherwise mostly stable, healthy system for humane teaching. The news on the EdTech front is often dire, but all is not darkness. Nevertheless, at last the long-awaited “AI and the University as a Service” has been published, from Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley. Read it; I will come back to some details. And I follow Audrey Watters, known for Hack Education, not because I agree with everything she writes but because I respect her knowledge and her passion, and because she gets me thinking.
Two: Maybe the university has strayed too far from its core commitment to knowledge? Agnes Callard, in “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead,” makes a version of that claim. Callard is a well-known philosopher, which means that I, not a philosopher, struggle to make sense of her premise: “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” Is it? I will come back to that, too.
Three: During the 20th century, American universities were attached to the idea of social mobility. Hollins Robbins, another humanist, has this recent, thoughtful Substack essay about how we might collectively re-think the connection, going forward. Her argument synched in my mind with this old essay of mine, about law schools and their integration with the higher education “economy of prestige.”
Here especially, as well as throughout the conversations to come, it is important to remember that “the university” is more circus train of skills and performers of different sorts than single integrated “thing.” Lee Fennell, a great law professor at the University of Chicago, was a public commentator on a version of the “University as a Constructed Commons” way back when, and the gist of her response was that the various forms of “the university” were too differentiated to justify an analysis that lumped them all together. I (obviously) think that she was wrong then and would be wrong now, but on my list of “papers to write” is a case study of the old Ringling Bros. “Clown College” and the Hamburger University that McDonald’s operates. Knowledge commons is knowledge commons. The question is not merely “what makes Harvard special?” It is also “why Clown College?”
Last for now, have a look at this recent book by Emily Levine, “Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University.” The book is a terrific deep dive into the “marriage” of German and other traditions that I referred to above, with an emphasis on American exports as well as on German imports.
It is noteworthy, somehow, that Levine is at Stanford, a hybrid institution if ever there was one in the history of US universities. Today, and for good reasons, a lot of people think of Stanford simply as another elite private university, the Harvard of the West. But Stanford was certainly not founded in Harvard’s image, and for better and for worse Stanford has long cultivated an identity in the university community as a place that is more pragmatic than ethereal in both its research and its teaching. Pragmatism has been a powerful motor in Palo Alto. But Stanford is not “the” answer, whatever the question, and in many ways Stanford is either an emblem of the problem, or the problem in itself.
See you next week.