The University’s Cutting Edge—Source of Its Flatness, Or: Reclaiming the University’s Third Dimension

The American Association of Universities (AAU), the exclusive club of the nation’s leading research universities, characterizes a research university in the association’s “White Paper” thus:¹

The raison d’être of the American research university is to ask questions and solve problems. Together, the nation’s research universities constitute an exceptional national resource, with unique capabilities:

• • America’s research universities are the forefront of innovation; they perform about half of the nation’s basic research.

• • The expert knowledge that is generated in our research universities is renowned worldwide; this expertise is being applied to real-world problems every day.

• • By combining cutting-edge research with graduate and undergraduate education, America’s research universities are also training new generations of leaders in all fields.

Let me give up front the central claim of my article²: What is increasingly missing from the late-modern research university and the kind of training it offers is what I shall call the university’s third dimension. For the AAU this third dimension seems to have disappeared from the university. The first two dimensions of the late-modern research university constitute its “sharpness” as a problem-solving institution: to ask intricate questions and to solve complex problems. The late-modern research university accomplishes this task by way of ever more specialized research and by way of a concomitant training of undergraduate and graduate students in the kind of expert knowledge that makes them competent problem-solvers. The university’s third dimension—constitutive of the classical university—comprises, first, scholē (in English “leisure”), that is, the structured practice of genuine intellectual contemplation and reflection, and, second, paideia, that is, the integral formation of the intellectual virtues in conjunction with the development of the moral virtues. A university that lacks this third dimension might well be able to develop remarkable research, but, I think, will eventually suffer from a suffocating intellectual and spiritual flatness that in the long run will prove detrimental to the university as such. In order to make good on this claim I will proceed in three steps. In the first step, I will offer a snapshot of the late-modern research university and highlight three of its noteworthy features: first, the remarkable ambivalence in contemporary academic thought pertaining to reason’s reliability and range, and, ultimately, to reason’s capacity for truth; second, the late-modern university’s pervasive embrace of the means of quantification or metrics for purposes of assessment and management (into which university administration seems to have largely morphed); and third, its embrace of the allegedly neutral framework of “secular reason” for its internal and external communication. These features belong essentially to what I regard as the university’s first and second dimension that together constitute the cutting edge, the utilitarian character of a highly complex problem-solving machine. The university’s third dimension, its depth dimension, refers to what has been at one time essential to the university qua university, that is, the pursuit of larger, comprehensive and integrating questions of truth and meaning—questions, I dare say, of metaphysics and morals. What is to be observed at the present moment regarding this third dimension are signs of a newly emerging disenchantment with secular reason as the university’s governing principle, a disenchantment discernible as it seems first and foremost among some of the postmodern avant-gardes of the late-modern research university.

In a second step, I shall consider a brief philosophical observation and an equally brief theological reminder about the university’s third dimension.

In a concluding third step I will suggest that leisure and paideia are the two practices that keep the soul of the university alive and, that will assure that the university qua university will continue to matter even under the specter of a comprehensive functionalization of the late-modern university—especially after the disenchantment of secular reason.

Like all thought, the normative perspectives that inform my critique of the late-modern research university and the concomitant university education come from somewhere...