On the Predicament of the Richly Endowed University and Liberal Society

Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)

The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’

I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).

Second, liberal democracies have been half-hearted friends of the modern research university. This may be obscured by the enormous resources that have been showered on the modern research university by liberal democracy. But these funds have also caused a narrowing of academic freedom by substituting the sponsor’s interests in certain outcomes for the researcher’s judgment on what is worthy of interest. In addition, the universities have been nudged away from their Humboldtian origins, and have become instruments for other socially desirable results: employability, social mobility, an incubator for tackling social problems, sports glory, a place for public debate, etc.

Yes, as Max Weber (and his followers in STS) notes the modern state and the modern academy mutually support each other. But this mutual support, when drawn too close, also involves more than a mutual taint.

Having said that, as Michael Polanyi notes, the modern university (and the wider academy) is one of the social, partially self-governing organizations (within science, art, law, journalism, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) that are collectively constitutive of the possibility for an enduring liberal society. Obviously, the absence of trade-unions intimates Polanyi’s (as the Marxists would note) bourgeois slant that we need not emulate. What’s crucial for Polanyi is that he diagnoses how the independence of these self-governing organizations and liberal society more generally are at risk of sudden collapse after a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that indirectly help partially stabilize liberal society.

Columbia’s unsigned letter followed the concessions of the managing partners of Paul, Weiss. During their fateful cost-benefit analysis acquiescing to the American President’s demands, they may well have reflected on the rule of law. Perhaps, someone with a historical sense suggested that there have been profitable law practices long before there were equal rights or Habeas Corpus was codified.

Be that as it may, that corporate lawyers feel politically friendless — despite a massive over-representation in America’s legislatures — in times of dire need is no surprise. Lawyers are not especially popular. But that Universities feel friendless and socially isolated more so. Support for medical research has been the one political constant in my adult life. Regular readers know I have been seeing a catastrophe coming for a decade now, but I was truly surprised that NIH funding was the instrument of choice to put the squeeze on the research universities and expose their political vulnerability.

That Columbia University was politically isolated became clear during an interview with Senator Schumer (the minority leader) in the New York Times a week ago. Schumer is also from New York City. He basically said that the University had it coming and should not expect help from him; he only objected to the manner President Trump acted “indiscriminately, without looking at its effect.”

In my view this collapse in social support that made even the rich, private modern research university vulnerable is the effect of quite a few self-incurred wounds I have noted (recall here) and won’t repeat, and, non-trivially and more importantly, the effect of a clever long-term campaign that by appealing to and emphasizing purportedly liberal commitments (freedom of speech, toleration, and anti-discrimination) cleaved the natural coalition supporting universities (as is evident from the Schumer interview). The enemies of liberal society managed to confuse university leadership themselves who have been, by and large, unable to think and speak clearly about the nature of academic freedom and its relationship to a wider political society and who have been inept at political speech. This is no surprise since they have been elevated for their fundraising and managerial skills. The cleavage strategy paid off after October 7.

So, one important lesson of the last year and a half is that when the chips are down an oversized endowment need not equal intellectual or social authority. Rather, it means you are a juicy target for various shakedowns in the way, in extremis, the Catholic monasteries were in the age of Henry VIII.

However, that one side has all the police and legal power and the other side not, does not mean that absent guns one is automatically powerless. A moment’s reflection on the long duration and influence of both the Catholic Church and, yes, the medieval university teaches otherwise. They drew on what I like to call ‘spiritual authority.’

The university’s distinctive spiritual authority is rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults. Both tasks are serious and dedication to them commands respect in most societies. There is, however, no universal template for how to engage in this mission such that spiritual authority is the effect. On my view this is something to figure out and decide upon by each university, conceived as a corporate (in the medieval sense) entity, and to be articulated in its mission and the practices that are structured by it. A private university should have more space for autonomy in these matters than public ones.

But we know what does not work: the transactional ethos and process driven decision-making now prevalent in the modern research university is orthogonal to spiritual authority. My suspicion is that these features, while necessary in moderation, generate contempt from all involved. Even the meaning of buying one’s way onto the Board of Trustees is not understood as a ‘giving back’ or an ‘act of service,’ but rather a good investment for networking and, as it turns out, exerting political influence.

The new purported salve, ‘neutral institutional speech’ unless vital interests are threatened is just as corrosive to the mission of the university. For, it turns out that in practice it is a recipe for cowed silence rather than leadership in orienting a large community to a common end. Henceforth, Columbia promises “commitment to greater institutional neutrality.” Before long we will have institutions promising the greatest maximum amount of institutional neutrality!

In a different context, a while ago, our very own Henry Farrell wrote that ““Neutrality” is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and context-free acceptance like “transparency.”” During the last year (recall here; here; and here; I explained my reasons for doubting the desirability and practicability of institutional neutrality; see also Agnes Callard here).

But at bottom on my view institutional neutrality does not show respect for the special and distinctive mission(s) of the university. In particular, and this is my political point, spiritual authority is not gained from instrumental agency (‘vital interests’); it is only possible if there is underlying fidelity toward and an intellectual courage rooted in trusting the nobility of one’s task—one can’t be neutral on witnessing truth and in the education of the young.**

This sounds pompous and fodder for comedy. Perhaps an example will help. Johan Huizinga was one of the great intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. His scholarship (e.g., Homo Ludens; The Waning of the Middle Ages) is still read and influential a century later. His work was greatly admired among the leading scholars of Germany. For most of the time since, he would be understood as politically conservative. During the 1930s he was rector of the Leiden University. In a once famous incident (recall this post), he threw a German Nazi propagandist who tried to pass his prejudices off as scholarship off campus as incompatible with the mission of the university. Huizinga was only radical in his defense of the mission of the university as a place of disciplined speech in the service of genuine intellectual discovery. This act and later his continued outspoken rejection of Nazism cost him dearly, especially when the Germans occupied the Netherlands.

It’s a truism that modern institutions ought not demand physical courage and heroisms from us. And my example is not meant to recommend acts that exhibit lack of prudence. Each age has its own challenges and its own ways of expressing resistance. But rather that if universities are not to be instruments of raw power, we must find sources of authority that elude power. And this can’t begin without undoing some of the practices that have led us to this fateful moment.

Alas, the task of the modern university can’t be to save liberal democracy. But its self-inflicted incapacity and inability to stand up for itself — even when richly endowed and private — is a sign of the more general corruption of society. This is a failure of self-confidence and identity. So, while our own John Quiggin has already written off US universities, let me close with a suggestion.

University life and universities can inspire respect and begin to create the conditions for spiritual authority if we are willing to reclaim academic freedom by rethinking, for example, the role of sponsored research in university life.+ I used to think the negative dependency could be managed if one has different kinds of donors (the state, industry, alumni, philanthropists, etc.). But that’s not so. The University has lost its capacity for autonomy and independence relative to powerful donors and the state. There is no road to spiritual authority as long as this state of affairs continues. I don’t say this lightly because I recognize that the implication is ultimately a much smaller research university than we have grown used to. But the university can’t stand for truth when everyone assumes it can be bought or bullied.

• An earlier version of this post (before Columbia had responded to the President) appeared at DigressionsNImpressions (here).

*What’s true of the modern research university is also true of the academy in the wider sense. But this would require a different schema.

+Obviously, the pervasiveness of the transactional ethos in modern universities suggests that no single change is sufficient to return to the path of spiritual authority.