Universities Were New, Once
Could they be new again?
“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.
Historians of the university center narratives of the modern university on developments in the United States in the decades immediately following the Civil War. The German research university model married the English collegiate system, whose American version was represented by Harvard and Yale, and their product was Johns Hopkins University. The land grant university system took root around the same time, underwritten primarily by the federal Morrill Acts.
Far from every American college and university became a “research university” in the style of JHU, but the birth of JHU offered a model, or template, that with numerous variations is represented today in everything from community colleges to HBCUs to SLACs to R1s. A host of denominational colleges, many of which were founded before the Civil War, were assimilated to the model. Some emphasize teaching, possibly to the exclusion of research; some blend research and teaching in various combinations; some are known primarily for their research programs even while they accommodate students. In the US at least, the pure technical institute, think tank, or R&D organization sits adjacent to but outside the “higher education” ecosystem.
I am, in short, continuing my weekly series of newsletters “about” the university as an institution.
Call the late 19th century the last great “institutional” moment of the university world. “Knowledge” in all of its glories was domesticated, channeled into the departments and schools (“faculties” or “colleges,” sometimes) of “the university” very much like the financial and factory engines of the late Industrial Revolution domesticated and organized urban labor, educated management, and capital and married them to the institution known as “the corporation.”
What followed, in higher education, was the siloing of interest and practice that generations of professors and administrators have tried to break through with “interdisciplinary” research and “centers” and “institutes.” But siloing will silo, and documented norms of “academic freedom” and tenure have made the silos resistant to substantial change, if not impervious.
That is a potted history, to be sure, but it leads me simply to wonder aloud whether we are, now, at a similar but different (potentially great) “institutional” moment. For reasons having to do with society and culture, with economics and finance, with small “p” politics, and with changing understandings and beliefs about knowledge itself, is the foundational template of “the university” due for deep, basic re-thinking?
There are good reasons to think so, which I’ll get to in later posts. There are also good reasons to be deeply skeptical. And there are reasons to wonder whether or how we might even know. It is relatively easy to look back at the 1870s and marvel and more difficult to assume that the educational community of that era was broadly aware of what was happening. There are reasons to wonder whether acting on a big re-think is even possible. Can institutional trajectories be changed substantially by purposeful collective action? And there are reasons to believe that even if the moment is right in many respects, the possible harms and costs of re-institutionalizing “the university” may outweigh the possible benefits.
In short, I have a lot of detail to spell out in future posts, and a lot to unpack.