Scholars give idea of 'The Idea of the University' serious thought

Cornell Associate Professor N'Dri Assie-Lumumba addresses President Hunter Rawlings, one of the speakers Oct. 18, during the weekend's "The Idea of the University" conference in Clark Hall. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Franklin Crawford

Scholars accustomed to the rarified atmospheres of events with heady titles such as "The Idea of a University" might well have prepared themselves for a nose bleed on the ascent. But instead, Cornell's Society for the Humanities (SHC) conference on campus, Oct. 18 and 19, on the "The Idea of the University," provided an intellectual oxygen blast, particularly when Neil Rudenstine, Harvard president emeritus, took to the podium Oct. 18 to discuss "The Idea of a University: Newman to Now: Altered But Persistent Principles."

All of Friday's speakers, including Rudenstine, sensibly resisted scholarly jargon in their presentations. While there were no easy answers, if any, to the questions posed, speakers skillfully guided the 80-plus attendees, mostly faculty scholars and graduate students, through an otherwise dense conceptual thicket. True, a grasp of context helped enormously.

That context was provided by SHC director Dominick LaCapra in his greetings to the attendees and was elaborated upon by Friday's introductory speakers -- Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and Peter Hohendahl, academic director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell -- both of whom preceded Rudenstine.

"There has been extensive empirical research on the university from the historical and sociological perspectives," said LaCapra. "But there is little sustained and informed analytical and critical work on the contemporary university, its genealogy, its problems and its prospects."

These issues, among others, were addressed by some of the foremost thinkers in academic humanities today during the two-day conference on campus. The impetus for the conference arose, LaCapra explained, from the rise of the university system as a corporate or business enterprise, for reasons largely economic and societal. Many academic units have benefited from the change -- the hard sciences especially -- but this shift has marginalized the humanities and social sciences, he said.

"Another closely related issue is the nature of a liberal arts education, given the structure of the contemporary university and its relation to the larger social, economic and political world," LaCapra added.

Rudenstine's address was dispatched with the focused alacrity of a master executive, sans PowerPoint. His breakneck pace and style lent an urgency to his presentation, and some listeners leaned forward as if flying into a headwind.

"If we think of the thousands of assemblages that are called universities across many dozen of societies, we know how vastly different they can be from one another in fundamental purpose, scale, curricula, research activity, quality, pedagogy, resources, living and working conditions and the students they serve or what workers they serve -- there is no single model that we can extract from this variety of institutions. If that's the case, how can we derive an idea of the university that might be at all plausible, leave alone persuasive? In fact, why do we need such an idea at all?"

Neil Rudenstine, former president of Harvard University, also addresses conference participants, Oct. 18.

Rudenstine explored the question by reaching back to 19th-century English scholar John Henry Newman, who composed the first protracted and systematic discourse on the subject in 1854, called "The Idea of a University." Rudenstine paired Newman with political economist Thorstein Veblen, whose 1918 work, "The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Businessmen in the University," remains a seminal contribution to the study. The university ideal, according to Veblen, should be the pursuit of "idle curiosity," and, he said, any treatment of knowledge as a "merchantable commodity" is a desecration of an exalted calling.

Rawlings addressed, among other issues, chronic criticisms of the modern university.

"The corporate university has come to occupy a highly visible and influential place in American life -- and that is a mixed blessing," said Rawlings. "There are many constituencies, both on and off the campus, that are exceedingly difficult to balance, and we risk losing our fundamental sense of the identity in the effort."

Rawlings then wondered aloud if the idea or identity of a university was at all "discoverable" under current conditions. Is there consensus on the essential nature of our enterprise, he asked.

As he has in other presentations on the subject, Rawlings re-emphasized that the fundamental identity of the university depends "upon answers to the twin questions: What should students know, and what should the faculty teach? These questions are curricular and pedagogical by nature ... and, when neglected, as they are today, they cause us far more trouble, I think, then the other mostly external problems afflicting us.

"This is the heart of the issue to me," Rawlings said. "Given the huge increment in knowledge created in the past 20 years and, more importantly, the changing nature of disciplines that structure knowledge, we are in serious need of sustained faculty consideration of our curriculum, undergraduate and graduate, departmental and collegewide."

Saturday's speakers included: Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of English and criminal justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago; Catharine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and University Professor at New York University; and Daniel Fallon, chair of the Carnegie Corp.'s education division. Joining the concluding panel discussion were Cornell Provost Biddy Martin and President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes.