Left: Professor Jonathan Haidt. Right: Artistotle. Credit: Institute for Humane Studies, and Adobe Stock
For centuries, universities have advanced humanity toward truth. Professor Jonathan Haidt speaks to why college campuses are suddenly heading in the opposite direction.
In a lecture at UCCS, NYU professor Jonathan Haidt considers the 'telos' or purpose of universities: To discover truth.
Universities that prioritize the emotional comfort of students over the pursuit of truth fail to deliver on that purpose, at a great societal cost.
To make that point, Haidt quotes CNN contributor Van Jones: "I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong—that's different."
Imagine someone had a knife and told you, "This is a great knife. The only problem is it can't cut anything."
You'd think, Then it's not a great knife.
"Telos is the Greek word that Aristotle and others use to define the end or purpose of something," Jonathan Haidt, professor at New York University Stern School of Business and bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, says in a recorded lecture at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. The telos of a knife is to cut. What, Haidt asks, is the telos of a university?
Truth—that's the purpose of higher education, Haidt says. The academy aims to be an arena where truth is sought, discovered, and explored. When the university is functioning at its best, students learn to present arguments and receive counter-arguments in pursuit of truth.
The question is then: Are today's universities achieving their purpose?
In his lecture, Haidt suggests that changes in campus culture over the past decade have rerouted university resources away from the pursuit of truth and towards creating an emotionally and intellectually comfortable environment for students.
"From out of nowhere, students in 2014 began asking for trigger warnings," Haidt says. A growing contingent among student bodies and administrators seemed to believe students were fragile and needed to be aggressively protected from "bad" ideas, offensive imagery, and provocative arguments. Students began reporting faculty, protesting speakers, and publicly shaming peers whose words made them uncomfortable.
CNN contributor Van Jones speaks onstage at the EMA IMPACT Summit in 2018. Credit: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Environmental Media Association
There are many places and institutions whose purpose, or telos, is comfort. But a university is not one of those places. To make that point, Haidt quotes CNN contributor Van Jones:
I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong—that's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
By prioritizing comfort over the pursuit of truth, universities are ignoring their purpose. Higher education should be an arena of open inquiry and free expression, where ideas are exchanged, tested, and scrutinized. A liberal education should be "an invitation to be concerned not with the employment of what is familiar but with understanding what is not yet understood," according to philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
What are the social repercussions if universities fail to achieve their purpose? New generations could lose more than academic muscle; they could lose the ability and inclination to pursue and prioritize truth. They could become so dependent on emotional comfort that they refuse to contemplate "what is not yet understood" in good faith, instead catastrophizing everything that doesn't fit into comfortable frameworks.
This is already happening, Haidt points out in his lecture. "We isolate young people from the adult skills that they will one day have to master," he says. This manifests in growing anxiety, depression, and other disorders among college students.
With college enrollment on the decline, and the global economy under tremendous strain, universities need to realize their telos—or they'll risk losing their essential role in society.
Ipsos surveyed adults in 29 countries on how they see higher education being delivered in five years' time.
The majority think the split between online and in-person learning that's come about during the COVID-19 pandemic is here to stay.
Respondents in China and Japan were most likely to see higher education being delivered mainly in person.
Just over half of the adults surveyed believe in-person learning is worth its cost.
In 2025, higher education will be a hybrid of in-person and online learning, according to a new Ipsos survey for the World Economic Forum.
As a second wave of COVID-19 saw cases resurging across the globe in October, more than 27,500 adults in 29 countries were asked how they saw higher education being conducted in their country, five years from now.
Almost three-quarters (72%) of respondents said higher education in their country would be conducted online at least as much as in person, if not more.
The pandemic saw as many as 1.3 billion learners affected this year, as schools and universities were forced to close, and adopt 'blended' learning strategies, which mixes online with face-to-face teaching.
Moving online
Higher education could change a lot in the next few years. Image source: Ipsos/WEF.
One in four adults surveyed (23%) believe higher education will move mostly online, while around half (49%) think it will be split between in-person and online. Only 29% think it will be delivered only or mostly in-person.
Nearly half of respondents in China (48%) and Japan (47%), which have had relatively low numbers of COVID-19 cases, think traditional in-person teaching will still be in place.
But only a third of adults in India (31%), where cases have been the second highest in the world, and less than a fifth of adults in Brazil (18%), third highest for cases, agree higher education will be face-to-face.
Counting the cost
Is in-person higher education value for money? Image source: Ipsos/WEF.
The survey also found divergent views about the cost of in-person higher education.
On average, across the 29 countries, just over half (53%) agree that in-person higher education is worth its cost, compared to just over a third (36%) who disagree.
China (81%), Sweden (78%), Saudi Arabia (69%), India (68%), the Netherlands (64%), Malaysia (63%), Singapore (62%), and Germany (61%) were most in agreement.
While in Chile (59%), Italy (57%), Russia (51%), Brazil (51%), and South Korea (51%), more than half of adults surveyed think in-person higher education is not worth its cost.
Globally, men, adults aged 50-74 (55%) and, most of all, those with a university degree (59%) are especially likely to agree that in-person higher education in their country is worth the cost.
I’m reading Thomas Carlyle’s poetic classic, The French Revolution, published in 1837. It occurred to me that the historical narrative of Australian universities and their relationship to government is like that revolution, but in reverse.
Carlyle summarised the goal of the French Revolution with the refrain “victorious analysis”. This was the foundation of Australia’s modern, rational system of government, achieved with universities. It was a triumph that turned out to be deeply flawed, as we will see.
Reversing the revolutionary process, in recent years universities have descended into the kind of aristocratic excess Carlyle described in pre-revolutionary France. This leaves a large scholarly workforce facing (this is Carlyle again) “an indubitable scarcity of bread”.
It is an admittedly dubious historical parallel, but it helps us understand something of the relationship of higher education to Australian politics, and the mess we now face.
The foundation of the Australian university
W.C.Wentworth.State Library of NSW
In the mid-19th century, when Australians decided they wanted to govern themselves, political leaders knew they needed a university. Politician and university founder W.C. Wentworth went so far as to argue that self-government in New South Wales – the kind of modern, rational government increasingly in vogue since the French Revolution – would be “useless” without higher education.
In Carlyle’s more flowery language (citingPlato’s Republic): Australia had no aristocracy to overthrow and the founders of our first governments sought a basis for rule that did not rest on inherited position. University graduates, Wentworth believed, were needed to “enlighten the mind, to refine the understanding, to elevate the soul of our fellow men”. They were also needed to train men – and, shortly, women – to fill “the high offices of state”.
Kings can become philosophers; or else philosophers Kings. Let but Society be once rightly constituted, by victorious Analysis.
This merit-based elite – which some of Wentworth’s contemporaries ridiculed as a “bunyip aristocracy” – constituted the emerging professional class. Their work as medical practitioners, lawyers, clergy, teachers, charity workers, engineers and politicians was to guide this “rightly constituted” society.
Such modern, rational governments relied on the kinds of knowledge that a university pursued. “Victorious analysis” guided Australian governments through rabbit plagues and conquered parasites and diseases that threatened food supply and human health.
But it also steered the conquest of Aboriginal lands with knowledge of geology, geography, anthropology and agriculture. And it equipped generations of teachers and clergy with the wealth that was Western history, literature and philosophy – embedded in a racialised, moral superiority.
It was not perfect. Indeed, in many ways this “victorious analysis” was downright harmful.
The kind of knowledge the university produced helped build the nation, but it did so by also developing and reinforcing ideas that expropriated Indigenous land and oppressed people of colour. It built and encouraged ideas that determined a human’s worth on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. Universities and the governments they supported structured a so-called “rational” world that extracted value from some people and concentrated it among themselves.
Exposing the flaw in ‘victorious analysis’
By the second world war, some of these problems were becoming evident worldwide. In that war, the same “victorious analysis” combined with political regimes that sought to use “rational” knowledge to commit atrocities, even genocide, and demolish cities full of civilians.
It was at work when Nazi doctor Josef Mengele compared the effects of cruel experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Through those unspeakable experiments on 1,500 sets of twins, only 200 survived.
The dangers of aligning scholarly knowledge with political regimes was further exposed when, in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin dismissed, imprisoned or executed thousands of biologists. The reality that their knowledge may have helped prevent a tragic famine was not more important to Stalin than that their understanding of genetics contradicted government doctrine.
Democratic regimes were not immune. “Victorious analysis” led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When news of those horrors filtered through, Western democracies saw the problem engendered by the relationship between modern, rational government and scholarly research.
Protecting the independence of scholarship
This did not mean governments sought to dismantle or undermine universities. On the contrary, Australian governments, like most others, invested in them further. However, care was taken, in Australia as elsewhere, to increasingly protect universities from political interference.
At this moment, Nobel-prize-winning author Herman Hesse had his character Joseph Knecht express the significance of scholarly independence in his novel The Glass Bead Game, published in 1943. Describing an age where rulers “determined the sum of two and two” and scholars capitulated (and lost their self-respect), protested (and died) or learned the art of silence (merely going hungry), Hesse’s character concluded that scholarship and politics must not mix:
The scholar who knowingly speaks, writes or teaches falsehood, who knowingly supports lies and deceptions, not only violates organic principles. He also, no matter how things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice. He corrupts its air and soil, its food and drink; he poisons its thinking and its laws, and he gives comfort and aid to all the hostile, evil forces that threaten the nation with annihilation. The Castalian [scholar], therefore, should not become a politician.
These sentiments were not confined to fiction. As the Commonwealth government sought to support the expansion of higher education – a tricky task, since education was and is the responsibility of Australia’s states – they were conscious of the contradictions required of them.
Robert Menzies, here receiving an honorary degree from Winston Churchill in 1941, invested heavily in universities.National Museum of Australia
The 1957 Murray Report, arguably the founding document for the modern university in Australia, pointed to exactly this.
Here is one of the most valuable services which a university, as an independent community of scholars and inquirers, can perform for its country and for the world. The public, and even statesmen, are human enough to be restive or angry from time to time, when perhaps at inconvenient moments the scientist or scholar uses the licence which the academic freedom of universities allows him, and brings us all back to a consideration of the true evidence and what it may be taken to prove …
… No nation in its senses wishes to make itself prone to self-delusion, or to deceit by other nations; and a good university is the best guarantee that mankind can have that somebody, whatever the circumstances, will continue to seek the truth and to make it known. Any free country welcomes this and expects this service of its universities.
On the basis of this report, Prime Minister Robert Menzies instigated what is likely the most generous funding Australian universities have ever seen.
He was building on work that Labor did during the war, establishing the Universities Commission and implementing a funding scheme that helped universities build new infrastructure.
The clashes produced by the dual need for scholarly independence and democratic accountability emerged early. “What I am asking,” argued the vice-chancellor at Sydney University in 1943, “is that you give us the money and be done with it.”
It is a large sum of money and when the Government says ‘We gave this subsidy, did the universities find it all right?’, we must be able to say something more than just ‘Trust the Universities’.
Paul Miller/AAP
Solutions and compromises were negotiated, though the original problems of “victorious analysis” remained.
Contesting the moral foundation of the university
By the 1970s, students and academics began to point out that this rational, supposedly objective system of knowledge veiled ideologies. This was not avoidable, they argued, and so the solution was to seek knowledge systems that were inclusive and decolonising, rather than those that supported established systems of inequality.
Under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s policy of free public education, the university sector expanded, seeking innovative and inclusive methods of learning and teaching.
In retrospect, this disruption in the universities marked a shift in the moral focus of the professional class. Where university graduates were originally central to the colonial project and capitalist expansion, they now turned their moral efforts towards moderating both.
This put them at odds with the political and managerial classes with whom the professional class, in the mid-20th century, had managed the entire world, through institutions like the World Health Organisation.
Rise of the managerial elite
But now the professional class split from the managerial class. Using radical student critiques of old moral codes as a springboard, in the 1980s the managerial class sought freedom from traditional moral constraints, which they believed also constrained capitalist growth.
This was more than a culture war: it was conflict over the moral foundation – and thus the control – of the economy. It was a kind of class struggle between a changing professional class and a newly separate, managerial class.
National Library of Australia
New values infused government and university leadership alike, forging what became known as neoliberalism. By the mid-1980s, “victorious analysis” was no longer the basis of government. Yet, ironically, government and economy alike relied on universities more than ever. Innovation was often key to profitability, and the changing global economy required ever more white-collar workers: university graduates.
In 1987, Labor Education and Training Minister John Dawkins led a review of higher education that sought to shift the entire university and college sector from “victorious analysis” to economic asset. Rather than considering the university as a moral institution, it would now be an economic one. An international student “export” market was a key component of 1980s reforms. So too, was massive expansion in the enrolment of Australian students.
But that professional class – which included academics, journalists and teachers, in influential roles – could clearly not be trusted to prioritise capitalist expansion over moral reform.
Transformations in higher education, then, wrested institutions from academic control. Over the following two decades, management of universities became a professional pathway almost entirely distinct from the pursuit of scholarship.
We must not romanticise universities run by academics under the old conditions of “victorious analysis”. As we have seen, this did a great deal of harm. But the fact that the system needed to change need not imply a managerialist solution.
Steered by government policy, an expensive managerialist epidemic infected the universities. Every year, millions of dollars in salaries alone propped up a this new “aristocracy”, a managerial elite.
Leaders assured us this was the best way to manage these growing and complex institutions. But, instead, managers encouraged one another to game the government’s funding system to achieve their KPIs (and earn spectacular bonuses). The cost has been a failure to invest in good universities that are sustainable in the long term.
Failure to build a good university sector
Looking at the state of the university sector now, we surely cannot consider the managerial salary bill to be money well spent. The present crisis was exacerbated by COVID-19 but was not unexpected.
University leaders were repeatedly warned of financial risks, of threats to the university’s legitimacy (and thus community and political support). They have also been reminded continually of their moral responsibility as public institutions. And yet, like Carlyle’s King Louis XV, they have pilfered resources that were “sufficient not to conquer Flanders, but the patience of the world”.
Like that French aristocracy, the university sector in Australia has been teetering on the edge of ruin for decades. In some ways it is astonishing it has taken so long to tip over. Carlyle, on pre-revolutionary France, noted that:
[…] it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.
Australian universities have long teetered – or, worse, arrogantly swaggered – on a precarious foundation. Their precarity goes beyond their over-reliance on international student fees and management’s tiresome reprises of what Geoff Sharrock calls “yesterday’s logic”.
Julian Smith/AAP
All of this – the education of young people, the medical research we’ve all been sitting at home waiting to be done, our entire stock of knowledge of history, mathematics, robotics, climate science – sits atop a 93,000-strong workforce of casual academics on starvation wages. It is these academics who will probably be out of work within the month.
They will likely be followed by thousands of their better-paid, but still overworked, teaching and researching colleagues, then thousands of the indispensable workers who throughout the pandemic have kept the technology running, the exams timetabled, library resources accessible, the payroll delivered, and who have cared for troubled or confused students.
A good university sector would look at 100,000 very clever, highly qualified and extremely hard-working scholars and see a valuable resource.
A good government would work with them.
The job of building a good university out of the system we have inherited from history is a more revolutionary task. It is one we all need to share.
This essay is based on an episode of the UTS podcast series “The New Social Contract” that examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through this global pandemic.
Universities are confronting the possibility of profound sector-wide transformation due to the continuing effects of COVID-19. It is prompting much needed debate about what such transformation should look like and what kind of system is in the public interest.
This is now an urgent conversation. If universities want a say in what the future of higher education will look like, they will need to generate ideas quickly and in a way that attracts wide public support.
This will involve articulating their unique role as embedded, future-regarding, ethical generators of crucial knowledge and skills, well-equipped to handle coming contingencies and helping others do the same.
And this means higher education changes are entangled with another major force for transformation – climate change.
How can universities credibly claim to be preparing young people for their futures, or to be working with employers, if they do not take into account the kind of world they are helping to bring about?
It is rapidly exacerbating environmental and social stress across the globe, as well as directly and indirectly impacting all institutions and areas of life. And worse still, global greenhouse gas concentrations are moving in exactly the opposite direction to what we need, with carbon emissions growing by 2.0% in 2019, the fastest growth for seven years.
Much-needed transitions towards low carbon and well-adapted systems are emerging. But they are too piecemeal and slow relative to what is needed to avoid large scale cascading and compounding impacts to our planet.
Universities, along with all other parts of our society, will feel the effects of climate change. The cost of the devastation at the Australian National University due to the summer’s fires and hailstorm, for instance, is estimated to be A$75 million dollars.
Whether due to climate impacts (such as the effects of sea level rise on coastal laboratories) or policy and market shifts away from carbon-intensive activities (such as coal powered energy), research investments face the risk of becoming stranded assets. Not only could expensive infrastructure and equipment be rendered redundant, but certain skills, capabilities and projects could too.
Universities are key to enabling Australian society to transition to a safer and lower emissions pathway. They are needed to provide the knowledge, skills and technologies for this positive transition. And they are also needed to foster the social dialogue and build the broad public mandateto get there.
This means old ideas of universities as isolated and values-free zones, and newer notions of them as cheap consultants to the private sector, fundamentally fail to fulfil the role universities now need to play.
They must become public good, mission-driven organisations devoted to rapidly progressing human understanding and action on the largest threat there has ever been, to what they are taken to represent and advance – human civilisation.
Inaction will erode the trust on which universities rely, especially among the key constituencies universities are meant to serve – young people and the private, community and public sectors.
Who universities invest in, fund, partner with and teach, and how, will increasingly be judged through a climate change lens. All actors in the fossil fuel value chain – including insurance brokers and researchers – are coming under pressure to stop facilitating a form of production that enriches a few while endangering all.
mobilising more resources for action-oriented climate change research and skills creation
committing to going carbon neutral by 2030 or 2050 at the very latest
increasing the delivery of environmental and sustainability education across curriculum, campus and community outreach programs.
Some universities are already starting to build aspects of climate change into their operations. Most prominent have been efforts to divest university finances from direct support of fossil fuels. While some institutions are still dragging their feet, the University of California has announced it will fully divest its US$126 billion endowment from fossil fuels.
Pressure is similarly growing for Unisuper to stop investing Australian university staff superannuation into corporations that endanger the very future staff are saving for.
It is essential universities do not quarantine climate change as some kind of specialist topic. A recent analysis of management studies found a profound lack of engagement across the discipline with the implications of climate change.
This means recognising the strong overlap between work that has instrumental value for climate change action and work that celebrates the intrinsic value of human understanding. The intellectual and social challenges presented by climate change are perhaps the greatest justification yet for why we need open-minded, open-ended exploration and dialogue of the sort universities can provide.
Universities produce the knowledge galvanising others to act. It is time for them to act too. It is time for all of us who work in or with universities to reappraise our institutions in light of the changes needed, the changes coming, and the changes already here.
This is the public mission of universities in the 21st century. And it is the most pressing mission there is.
The next article linked to the podcast will look at universities and the nation’s workforce.
Universities and climate was made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology, Sydney - an audio production house combining academic research and audio storytelling.
