What For?
Is it even possible to build a better university?
“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.
Occasionally a single published sentence crystallizes something really important in a public debate, perhaps intentionally. Perhaps not. I am back with a post to note just such a sentence.
From the July 19th 2025 print edition of The Economist, in a piece about the struggles of British universities titled "Leaner Learning” in print and “Britain’s bankrupt universities are hunting for cheaper models” online (paywalled, alas):
Higher education in Britain is too homogenous, inclined to wastefulness and obsessed with being “world class” rather than efficient. Resetting muddled incentives could improve things for students, and help universities get by with less.
Strip out “in Britain,” and consider the extent to which that sentence distills an attitude about education at all levels that is shared across regions and countries and across political, economic, and social groups - including policymakers as well as would-be free-market-leaning opinion shapers that include The Economist.
Reflect on the conflation of “efficiency” in administration, teaching, and research. Pause to consider whether all of the purposes and functions of colleges and universities, and all fields, disciplines, and degrees are or ought to be wrapped up and assessed via a single “efficiency” metric. Ponder the implicit premise that the purpose of a university, and of a university system, is to optimize output at minimum cost.
I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the arguments summed up in that sentence are wrong, in their totality. (Maybe, someday, I’ll manage the energy to make that argument!) But they are powerful, descriptively, in their reductiveness. The simple seems true, whether or not it is in fact true.
It may be possible to imagine a better future university against that backdrop, and it is - for some academics, at least - energizing to participate in that enterprise. But it is realistic, or practical, even over a longer time horizon?
I’ve mused here about “fixing” the university and wondered about how institutions end … implicitly motivating questions about how institutions might be renewed, or might renew themselves, especially if one focuses on future needs and opportunities rather than the romance of history. Those posts have nodded indirectly to the fact that I feel the breath of historical materialism metaphorically on my neck.
(I link there to Helen Beetham, who makes a mostly different point about materialism, but whose reference to Stafford Beer brightened my day. Beer on cybernetics (systems for decision-making) is a valuable source of resistance to Shannon-ism (entropy reduction in information processing). More on that distinction in a future post).
In contests for institutional utility, integrity, sustainability, and normativity, how do ideas matter? Not only in the skies of the imagination, and not only in manufacturing “optics” and political rhetoric, but on the ground, and in practice. What does it take to activate and execute on ambitions to build a better university? Or, to be even more specific in my own context, to build a better law school?
In future posts, I’ll wrestle with my own answers to that question.