| Contrary to expectations, the word university does not refer to universalism but derives from the medieval Latin universitas, which referred to “a society, company, corporation, or community regarded collectively.” David Westbrook brings us back to this idea of the university as a community in his response to Michael Hüther’s “Tired of Science,” in which Westbrook challenges us to wonder what kind of community a university represents today. In our podcast discussion, Westbrook and I discuss Hüther’s complaints about the economization and moralization of the university. Hüther presents a vision of the university as a community of scholars devoted to truth, setting itself against a broader society that is dominated by economic and political goals. By contrast, Westbrook notes that this ivory tower model of the university has become obsolete precisely because of its success in expanding its reach to cover the educational needs of a majority of the population. Rather than being a society of scholars, for Westbrook the university community is now defined by the kind of mass participation exemplified by tailgate parties at the football stadium. While Hüther worries about the extent to which freedom of inquiry and expression are being suppressed by political or economic considerations, Westbrook sees this development as an alignment of the university community with the rest of society.
Yet it is also not clear whether this infiltration of the university by the broader society is as successful as Westbrook intimates. In one key measure, political party preference, the alienation of the university from the outside world seems to be more extreme than ever before, with the ratio of Democratic to Republican faculty increasing to 8 to 1.[1] University academics might interpret this development as the justified predominance of scientifically based truth over the prejudices of the broader society. Looked at from the outside, however, the impression might be that the university community has become isolated within a left-liberal echo chamber that has become increasingly closed to alternative perspectives. If this is the sense in which the university community now remains separate from the surrounding society, the consequent skewing of debate around variations of left-liberal perspectives could be undermining the university as a privileged place of debate that aims toward truth.
Notes
1. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American College and University Professors,” in Professors and Their Politics, ed. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 24–26; John M. Ellis, The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done (New York: Encounter, 2020), pp. 28–32. While Gross and Simmons find that professors self-identified as 44% liberal, 46% moderate, and 9% conservative, Ellis shows from their own data that those who self-identified as moderate were actually liberal, based on their answers to questions that rated them on a scale used by a Pew Values survey of political orientation.
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