Note: From Mission Driven Colleges (B&H, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The fact is that too many young people attend college or university, and their parents encourage them, without any gripping sense of what college is all about beyond tentative vocational goals or questionable social aspirations. [Arthur Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, p. 3]
Universities are among the most important institutions in modern cultures. They form our youth, preserve and impart human learning from previous generations, open pathways of service, develop transformational technologies, equip leaders of our society and push forward the frontiers of human knowledge. But despite the unquestionable importance of universities, or perhaps because of it, stating their purpose is surprisingly difficult:
- Does a university exist to disseminate knowledge or to create it?
- Is a university intended to shape a person’s soul or get a person a job?
- Does a university serve the interests of the prevailing culture, or does it challenge and disrupt those interests?
- Is a university intended for the masses or the best and brightest?
These questions are not merely philosophical. Universities have limited resources and therefore need a well-defined mission and clear priorities to guide daily decisions on hiring, curriculum, recruitment of faculty and students, and raising funds. Moreover, the purpose of the university can be clearly seen in the questions asked when prospective students contemplate their higher education:
- Will my education get me a high-paying job?
- Will my education help me change the world?
- Will this college give me the best education and open doors for graduate school?
- Will my education help me find my purpose in life? my spouse? myself?
- Will my education help make me a better person and make my life more meaningful?
And, of course, parents, donors and governments who fund education have their own versions of these questions. Asking, “What is a university for?” may sound philosophical, but it is among the most profound and practical questions facing higher education.
The University in Contemporary Culture
If one were to look carefully at the list of questions above, one would discover five basic conceptions of the telos of higher education hidden within them. These conceptions could be stated as follows:
- Higher education for the sake of jobs
- Higher education for the sake of justice
- Higher education for the sake of knowledge (or truth)
- Higher education for the sake of self-actualization
- Higher education for the sake of human flourishing
Though we will consider each of these models shortly, it should be noted that these are not just fleeting notions that come to the minds of prospective college students in the early twenty-first century. These conceptions of a university have a long history. The academies of ancient Greece sought after truth and knowledge. At the same time, or perhaps at a deeper level, they thought the underlying purpose of an education was to make a certain kind of person – namely one who had the tools and character needed to govern themselves and their city well. One might see their conception of higher education as a hybrid of a truth and a human flourishing model. Medieval Christian universities shared a concern for truth and knowledge but also prepared students to serve in the learned vocations of medicine, law and theology. Similarly, in 1635, Harvard was founded for a vocational purpose – assuring the new colonies would have educated ministers – but in the same period one finds the motto on the Harvard shield that bears the single word Veritas – Latin for “truth.” A recent review article on European and American models of education identifies three nineteenth-century European models of education that match directly with the three models above: a German university model that seeks to advance knowledge, a French university model that is vocationally centered, and an Anglo-Saxon university model that focuses on human flourishing. [Paul Ashwin, “The Educational Purposes of Higher Education”] The article adds a fourth model associated with John Dewey in early twentieth-century America. This model is a hybrid of the other three models and adds a distinctively democratic and social element to education.
For some time, both insiders and those outside the university setting have raised questions about the telos (the intended end) of universities. As far back as the 1960s, University of California (UC) chancellor Clark Kerr began referring to the UC system as a “multiversity” instead of a university, emphasizing the lack of a singular focus for university education. This is the point made in the early 1990s by the late social critic Neil Postman:
Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn’t teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “skills.” [Technolopy, p. 185-186]
Universities once existed not only to prepare people for their occupations, but they also took the moral formation of their students seriously. The goal was not only to produce productive graduates who would be good citizens, but also to produce morally good people. However, under the impact of moral relativism, there is no longer any unified concept of what constitutes a good person. Former Harvard president Derek Bok observes the following, “Relativism and individualism has rewritten the rules of the game; they have extinguished the motive for education.” [cited in Stephen Garber, The Fabric of Faithfulness, p. 73]
Some years ago, then Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission John Shad gave Harvard Business School $30 million to establish a program in ethics. His good friend the late Chuck Colson pointedly told him that he was wasting his money because Harvard could not teach ethics. Shad challenged Colson to publicly tell that to the faculty and students at Harvard Business School – a challenge that Colson took up and repeated at most other Ivy League schools. Colson later commented on how little critique he got from the students, which reinforced his point to Shad and reflects the relativism about which Bok spoke.
It appears, then, that we all agree that universities are extremely important, but, ironically, we have little or no consensus about what they are actually supposed to do. The university is an institution without a telos. Yuval Levin’s book A Time to Build helps make sense of this swirling set of conceptions of a university. As he surveys the controversies surrounding the university in the past two hundred years, he identifies three “cultures” within the modern university: professional training (vocation), activism and social change (justice), and liberal arts (human flourishing). Levin’s specific insight is that these cultures are usually all present within a single university. Each of the three cultures believes it reflects the university’s core ethic (what we have called telos), and each views the others as inadequate if not illegitimate. Champions of professional (pre-professional) development often implicitly regard both liberal education and moral activism as distractions from the practical aims of higher education. Champions of liberal education speak of both professional development and moral activism as profane intrusions into what should be an almost sacred realm reserved for the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness. Champions of moral activism treat both professional development and liberal education as callous and selfish – different forms of individual enrichment that would ignore the call of social justice. Levin describes the university that emerges from this contest of cultures as
an institution largely directed at professional training, moved by an impulse for liberation from injustice, but always challenged by a small, persistent band of earnest and tradition-minded humanist gadflies….We expect the university to take on a vast array of tasks, and we often find it embroiled in heated struggles to do so. But these struggles are easier to understand when we see that they involve internal cultures at war over the soul of the institution, and when we see that they all have legitimate, longstanding claims. [A Time to Build, p. 98, emphasis added]
Note: Used with permission of the author and publisher, B&H Academic.
Richard Langer, professor of biblical and theological studies, Talbot School of Theology; and Scott Rae, professor of philosophy and Christian ethics, Talbot School of Theology
