Are Universities Broken?
COLA Dean Ann Stevens and UATX President Pano Kanelos in Civil Discord
Last month, the College of Liberal Arts co-hosted the Civil Discord symposium, which we’ve mentioned before. Now video recordings from almost all the event’s panels are available to watch, so if you didn’t make it to Austin for the event you can still catch up on the debate.
To celebrate, we’re sharing a (slightly condensed and lightly edited) transcript of the panel on “Is the Traditional University Broken Beyond Repair?,” featuring COLA Dean Ann Stevens in conversation with Pano Kanelos, president of the University of Austin. Their discussion was moderated by Jeremi Suri, UT’s Mac Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, and covers topics including: What’s the point of a university, anyway? How should we talk about education’s return on investment? What’s the university’s role in our age of social media run amok? Is intellectual diversity or intellectual complexity the better goal?
If you’d like to watch the entire conversation, we’ve included the video below. If you’d like to skip straight to the transcript, keep reading. And if you have any thoughts to share, our comments (and our inbox) are always open.
Suri: We have two incredibly well informed, experienced, distinguished people to talk about our question today: “Is the traditional university broken beyond repair.” I thought I’d start with: What is a university supposed to do? Why do we have universities? Before we talk about if they're broken or not, we should have a sense of what the mission is.
Kanelos: I think that's exactly where we should start. As you might imagine, somebody who's involved with a project to start a new university thinks a lot about the purpose of universities, the telos of universities, why we have these strange institutions. I would start with a simple formulation, and that is that universities exist for the discovery of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge. That's the core mission of a university.
Universities are the places where society does its thinking. And we set them aside in a very special way. We mostly wall them off from the community at large, and we populate them with these strange creatures called professors and then we give these professors a privilege, which is that they get to spend their days reading and thinking and talking and teaching. Then we pass through these institutions these other beings called students, most of whom will just spend a bit of their life on campuses. Some come back to teach, like we all did, with the idea that what's happening at the university, the pursuit of knowledge, is itself a good, but that also by exposing young people during a formative time in their life to the pursuit of knowledge, that that is a good, maybe even a greater good.
Universities have always been dedicated to preparing graduates for the knowledge economy. And that sounds like a very modern term, but even if you go back to the medieval roots of universities in Europe, there were essentially just very limited courses of study in fields whose work was primarily intellectual in nature. You could either be a lawyer, a doctor, or a theologian, and that was it. That's what the knowledge economy entailed. And as the knowledge economy expanded over time, the role of universities expanded and changed. And I think that's something that we're grappling with today. What is the role of universities in the culture that we live in?
Suri: Ann, your thoughts?
Stevens: The first thing that came to mind when I looked at the title of this panel, and even as you were introducing it, is that I'm not sure we should talk about the traditional university. One of my observations with a lot of the heat and discussion of universities in America is there are a lot of different things we mean when we talk about higher education. There are elite privates, there are elite publics, flagships such as UT, there are small liberal arts colleges, there are less selective small colleges, and then there are vast numbers of community and junior colleges. These institutions have slightly different purposes.
I've lived my professional life mainly in large public research universities and I think I agree that the mission is to discover, transmit, and preserve knowledge. I've always felt that as a public institution, it's particularly important — because we are using public dollars, we have to protect and defend the public trust — that we have to integrate those missions. So it's not just three things we can check off and have in separate spheres, but as a research institution, we need to engage students and have them understand not just the knowledge that comes out of our great faculty but the process of getting to that knowledge. That's where the magic is. That's where we think about the life of the mind. One of the advantages to a research institution or a place where faculty are actively engaged in research is that students don't just learn the facts, but they can see the process. They can see hard problems and how they're solved. Sometimes that's not always friendly, in the sense that our faculty, with their own disciplines within their departments, go through enormous academic arguments and fights and scrutiny. I think we don't talk about that enough. We're trying to expose students to it, but we don't expose the general public to that. So, I think a lot about how to integrate those missions. And I think that the more you can do that, I would argue the more effective you are at making all three of them happen.
Suri: From your comments, universities are about knowledge. They're about engaging students. They're about the process of learning, learning to learn. And they're about integrating these elements and engaging the public as well as our students. Ann, how are you doing? How are you as a leader at the university doing in achieving those missions?
Stevens: It's hard to grade oneself. At UT and our college, are we perfect? No. But I think we are headed in the right direction. Why do I say that? Because in my spare time, I'm a labor economist. We talked a little about the life of the mind and preparing for some vocations, but I think — and again, I find this very tied to the public nature of this institution — it is important that we engage students in the life of the mind but also that we prepare them for the world out there. I am all for being lofty and having big goals, but students also have to be able to support themselves and their families, and they have to get a return on the tuition dollars they've spent. When I say I think many parts of higher ed are actually doing quite well, it is because, if you look at the numbers, the value proposition for strong universities that work hard to keep graduation rates high, which is critical, the return on that investment is extraordinary. So I think, in that way, we're doing well. Could we do better? Absolutely.
I tend not to see a lot of space between exposing students to the life of the mind, engaging them in the discovery of knowledge, and having them do well in the labor market, because I think of what we do as a little bit like athletic cross training. When we have students do close reading in the humanities, it's so they can appreciate art and literature, but it's also so that 20 years down the road when they're in some corporate setting and they're trying to decipher what the competition is doing through these badly written documents, they have some muscle memory. They're like, “Oh, I've read obscure texts before, and I'm going to be able to do that.” That's just one silly example, but on that, I'd say we're doing well.
Suri: What it comes down to for you, as one of your main propositions, Ann, is the return on investment. That what the tuition dollar cost is exceeded by the value that the students take away when they leave. Pano, why do you have a different point of view? Why do you think that value proposition and general argument is wrong?
Kanelos: I don't think it's wrong. Maybe I want to add some nuance to it, maybe say something that might be a little provocative. Why not?
Ann mentioned earlier, and I completely agree, that there are different types of universities serving different types of students towards different ends, so to talk about the university or the traditional universities to elide some significant differences. I want to lay out what I consider three types of university with three different ends, and then think about the ROI relative to each.
When we're talking about elite universities, maybe hyper elite universities — top 20, 30, 40, wherever you draw that line — the ROI is not income, it's power. The function of hyper elite universities is to provide pathways to power for students. It's elite formation. When you go to an Ivy, the primary concern isn't “how much money am I going to make”, but “which Supreme Court justice am I going to clerk for,” right? Because you realize the end game is something more than just financial ROI, even though that's folded into it.
I would say in the next band of universities, and maybe it's the next hundred, two hundred, the end goal is not power but prosperity. That's where the financial ROI plays out, that you have an opportunity to go to a school and become distinguished in a particular field. And it becomes very important what you do there. It doesn't really matter what you major in at an Ivy League school, but it matters in most of the schools what you major in because it's putting you on a particular pathway. It matters that you get an internship because you're building a portfolio of your future so you can be prosperous to some degree or another.
And I would say the vast majority of schools, of the 4,000 plus that are in the U S., are oriented towards upward mobility. Just a step up the ladder from where you came from, towards prosperity. So thinking about the ROI in different contexts is important. It's not just a simple calculation.
Suri: When we talk about the purpose of a university, is it appropriate to focus on ROI? Or is it more appropriate to focus on perhaps a broader metric, which would include sometimes ROI, which would be the quality of one's life?
I am a product of elite institutions, and yes, I was going there as a child of immigrants for the purposes of prosperity, but what actually I got is a love of learning, a different quality of life, a life of contemplation, a life of the mind. And I'm quite certain that's what we're offering at UT. What leads you to think that the University of Austin can do this better?
Kanelos: Rather than better, I'll just say why I think we'll do it well or strive for a kind of excellence. I think that the purpose of education is not professional success in the end. It's human flourishing. Human flourishing includes professional success to some extent, but it isn't defined by it. So the real ROI measure should be something like a human flourishing index. And I think if we had something like that, we'd get a sense of the true value of what an education is.
Why do I think we'll do that well at University of Austin? Because we care about that front and center. The reason we call it higher education is that through these distinctive institutions, we allow human beings to soar to the highest possible intellectual heights, or at least give them the potential to do so. And so when you assess your success as an institution, if you put human flourishing as the assessment tool, it creates a particular kind of institution.
Stevens: I didn't mean to imply that the narrow ROI was the main purpose of what we do here. I think this life of the mind and flourishing is especially important at large public institutions, because if we don't embrace that and if we're not conscious of that, it's such an incredible missed opportunity because of the scale and the potential we have to think about and affect social mobility. It can't just be social mobility into this number of technical occupations. It has to also be a form of social mobility that equalizes the knowledge and the appreciation of beauty and life and complexity. That is what the humanities and social sciences teach, and so I think I would probably draw a less stark line between one set of institutions promoting power and connections and maybe a really complex life of the mind and the next tier, because I think here at a place like UT, we have not just the ability but an obligation to do both. And I think we do both.
Suri: One of the criticisms that's often voiced that we have all heard, and maybe one of the many reasons why the University of Austin has come into existence, is that some people argue sincerely that some students are not flourishing in our universities. They claim that there is a bias against particular points of view, maybe also a bias against those who are more religiously inclined. It's a very serious and a very sincere argument. What is your response to those criticisms?
Stevens: I do think there is a crisis in people being able to express views, controversial or less controversial, and argue with one another in a constructive way. That is a crisis, I would argue, of society at large. When we start to look and say, is it a particular problem at universities? I'm not sure I'm on board with that.
In the College of Liberal Arts, we've got 700 faculty, about 12,000 students, and the mathematicians in the group can figure out the number of possible combinations of human interactions that that involves on any given day. We hear anecdotes and documented cases where things didn't go right, and some viewpoint was not warmly received or was shut down. And we should all be fighting against that. But if you think of a university as this globe, there's a lot going on in that interior that no one hears about.
We track our reputation for free expression, how well are we doing. In a typical semester, I'll get course evaluations at the end. The last one I looked at was for 61,000 student course interactions, where one of the questions they're asked is “did the professor in your classroom allow and facilitate free expression and exchange of ideas?” Out of these 61,000 reports, I think it's 87 percent agree or strongly agree that that happened in the classroom, about 4 percent say it didn't and then the rest are neutral. Now we don't have to take student reports of this as saying, “Oh, we're fine. We don't have a problem.” But I think it’s important to know that we are monitoring this and even if we have some failures, that doesn't mean we're not trying and succeeding most of the time.
Now, there's still an issue, and we've had forums on this with students where we say, “how can we help you be more comfortable disagreeing and expressing difficult ideas?” The thing they say is, “we're not sure what you can do. We're worried about what other students are hearing and reporting. And so sometimes I'm careful what I say because I don't want a classmate to report it.” And there I actually think the University of Austin has some interesting ideas on how to build a culture to address that concern that's student to student.
Suri: So, Pano, building on that, I want to turn to you. I've heard many of your eloquent and thoughtful statements about what the University of Austin is about, and this is an issue where I think you and I agree. I think we are both absolutists on free speech. I think Ann is too. And you've made the eloquent case that universities are not fine in the way different points of view are handled. You're careful as to where to place responsibility, and I'm not sure what you think about that, but it does seem to me that you believe that the situation is more dire than Ann just described it. Can you explain your position on that to us?
Kanelos: I'll try to. I think what I'm going to say is probably something that most of us find to be intuitively right.
You know, the myth of the devious Marxist professor like rubbing his hands together waiting to corrupt the minds of youths, it's a myth. I don't think that's true. That’s not the primary problem. I think Ann touched upon the larger problem, and that is that universities exist in a world where expressing one's opinion comes with risk, primarily because everything is available to everybody all the time on the internet and it never goes away.
We were talking earlier over lunch, and I said, you know, in my mind, if you think about what social media is, I use a Freudian analogy. Social media is the culture's id, and there's nothing to put it back in the box. People can say things, make comments, do things on social media without any sense that they will ever be held accountable or even acknowledged. We live in this world now where we are constantly absorbing the unfiltered reptilian part of our fellow human beings, and young people are affected by this much more than we are because this has always been their world. Now they enter classrooms and everybody they see, they have a dual understanding of this person. “There's the person who sits across the table from me, who seems nice and humane, maybe even cute, and I like them. But there's that version of them that exists in the ether, social media, that may take something I said and cause me harm.” It’s a very difficult environment in which to have free and open conversations. Universities have a particular responsibility to push back this the influence of the greater culture and that miasma of social media influence and create spaces where conversation can flourish, and we're not doing a good enough job of that.
One of the things you can do when you're creating a new university is build the culture from the ground up and put in place ways of being together that will allow conversation to flourish as best you can. I'll give one example: We intend at University of Austin to abide by the Chatham House rule, which essentially just says “whatever is said within the confines of a conversation around the table in a particular setting, anybody can say whatever they want. Nobody can repeat with attribution what's said outside of that setting. And if you do, there are consequences.” So at the university, we say, look, we'll get together, we'll sit around the table, you can share your ideas, you can say things sometimes that are stupid, you can make mistakes, maybe we offend one another, we'll also teach students how to be gracious to one another and forgiving, but you are honor bound not to cause any one of your peers or the professor harm by repeating what they say in the classroom outside the classroom, unless you get their permission. And if you do that, then there are consequences. Things like that can help push back, but we have to be very purposeful about creating an environment in which students and professors can be intellectually risky.
Suri: You have a lot of faith in people following that honor code. I have spent years going to conferences where people invoke the Chatham House rule and then all talk about what everyone has said thereafter. But the follow-up question I wanted to ask you is about selection bias. It strikes me that one of the challenges we face in creating real, vibrant conversations with people from different points of view is people select into the conversations they want to be in. One of the other effects of social media is it allows us to find the ten people in the world who think exactly like we think and just communicate with them and get news just from them. How is the University of Austin going to prevent itself from recreating that problem? How are you going to bring together different points of view?
Kanelos: First of all, you have to be purposeful in the way you construct your institution. If one of the problems in higher education is that most universities tilt too far to one end of the political spectrum, that creates a lack of intellectual complexity. The solution isn't to create an institution at the other end of the political spectrum. The solution is to do away with the spectrum altogether. So the idea that you're trying to achieve some balance between conservative students and liberal students and conservative faculty, I just reject that whole framework. The difference isn't between red and blue. It's not between Republican and Democrat. It's not between conservative and liberal. It's between liberal and illiberal. The students and faculty we want to attract are liberal in the root sense of the term. That is, they're interested in liberal education, which is an education that insists upon intellectual pluralism. That insists that you ask questions that make you uncomfortable. That insists that you hear every opinion out and also ask for evidence. So the bias that we're building the institution for is towards people who are seeking a liberal education. And I will tell you right now, there's no political group that has a monopoly on that kind of liberalism.
Suri: Ann, do you agree with the implication of what Pano just said, which is that there's a problem of illiberalism at UT?
Stevens: I don't think it's specific to UT, or even to universities. I do think we have an obligation and what I really agree with is that you have to be purposeful. You have to think about this. I tried an experiment a year or so ago where we just gave faculty some incentives to change their course on a whole range of difficult topics so that students will actively disagree and be forced to take positions they don't necessarily come to naturally. We heard about a course on U.S.-Asia relations and international political economy where students were debating a China-versus-U.S. trade negotiation, and one of the students playing the U.S. side said, “Oh, you know what, we'll get them to make concessions by not worrying about the Taiwan thing, because it's not a big deal.” Well, on the China side, they’re like, “wait, hold on here.” And the professor had a great description of how they worked through that, and she said, “We have to do more of that.”
I was talking about our great scale and all the potential, and the flip side of that is, I've done this experiment now in seven courses. That leaves me about 12,000 or so. But I think I agree. It’s a time in society where we have to teach students how to write their papers and edit them on word processors. That's not the mission of a university, but we're not still having students turn in papers on typewriters. It's no different with these major social challenges. We can still teach the knowledge, all the things we do, but I think we also have an obligation to say that there's some big challenges about how we discuss with each other, how we get along, how we participate. I think we can do more, and I hope we'll continue to do that.
Kanelos: I want to say something that's going to raise eyebrows from people: I'm against intellectual diversity. Let me explain that. Oftentimes people characterize and contrast the idea that the universities are politically monochromatic and you need this thing called intellectual diversity and that's the cure.
When I hear intellectual diversity, what I hear is, “instead of having 10 people who all look at things the same way, if we had 10 people who all look at things a different way, that would be great.” What we really need to be doing is not looking for the things we have not yet seen. In other words, we shouldn't come to universities as fully-baked people with positions that we hold on to tightly. We have to come with convictions that are loosely held, but still are convictions. We have to create a culture where the end isn't just a bunch of people who think about things differently, intellectual diversity, but is about intellectual complexity. I think that's the end goal.
Suri: I think you’re both making a fantastic point here, that learning is about questioning what you already believed, not reinforcing what you already believed.
I want to ask a question about illiberalism. Oftentimes illiberalism is seen in the debates about universities as coming from the left. It's often seen as coming from the right in our general discourse. We've talked about that a little bit, but I want to ask a very specific question. Are the attacks on — and I don't mean intellectual diversity in the way you talked about it, but the attacks on, in your words, Pano, people who see things differently and come from different backgrounds and the emphasis on bringing people from different backgrounds — are the attacks on that kind of diversity, that are quite explicit, illiberal?
Kanelos: I think so. If the purpose of universities is the discovery of knowledge, that is facilitated by the exchange of competing ideas. Anything that would foreclose a maximalist version of that, especially if it's doing so intentionally and with an agenda, is illiberal.
Suri: So the University of Austin is for racial diversity?
Kanelos: We're for intellectual pluralism in all its forms. That seems axiomatic.
Suri: Ann, how do you see this issue? You deal with this on a day-to-day basis. How do you navigate this space?
Stevens: In Texas we've been through some changes as a result of some prohibitions on certain technologies of how we were working to diversify the faculty and the student population. Personally, do I agree with every aspect of that law? No. Have I complied and worked to preserve our values and what we think are important and still comply with state law? Yes.
Maybe this is not where you were going, but the thing that worries me more even than what we've been through legislatively is another phase of restrictions that have to do with the ideas we can teach and discuss. The good aspect of the state law that was passed is that there were very clear, powerful carve-outs for academic research scholarship and for academic study discussion in the classroom. That is our core. This goes back to the first question. What worries me about an illiberal approach is if we move into curricular content. Because the thing about an idea is that ideas don't have clear boundaries. You can start out banning some idea and it's going to have implications you cannot imagine. If you don't like, for example, critical race theory and you say we can't talk about that, there's a lot of work that looks at that. I think all the time about a famous economics paper done by a Nobel Prize winner and another outstanding economist where they were trying to understand how investments in school affect earnings of adults decades later. They looked at the history of segregated schools in the South and saw that Black men of a certain generation who had attended schools that were much weaker resourced, 10, 20, 30 years later, were doing much worse in the labor market and you could tell by the state-to-state patterns. Look, David Card is not a critical race theorist. I don't think anyone would accuse him of being liberal. But when I think about some of the attacks on one idea, I don't know how we can say “you can't talk about that” but then allow people to think creatively about how to learn from the world and do research. I think that's where things get even more concerning, and that's what keeps me up at night.
Suri: So, in your opinion, not speaking for the institution, but speaking for Dr. Ann Stevens, the attacks on critical race theory and the prohibitions on teaching it are illiberal.
Stevens: I think attacks on ideas and prohibitions of teaching ideas would be illiberal.
Kanelos: But criticism of ideas is not illiberal. Right?
Stevens: No, absolutely.
Kanelos: I think critical race theory is very important in our society today for people to think about and grapple with without necessarily accepting its implications. I certainly don't think critical race theory or any theory should be the operating system of a university. But I do think it's something that should be studied and discussed and argued about because it's an important phenomenon in the culture today.
Suri: So the University of Austin would hire a critical race theorist as a faculty member?
Kanelos: We're generally against theoretical approaches like that at-large for complex reasons. But I'm certainly willing to hire somebody who wants to bring texts from critical race theory into the classroom and take them seriously. I don't think there's any idea that we should be afraid of, and I don't think there's any idea that should be off the table. That's being intellectually honest to say that, we need to confront the things that are most prevalent in our society today and figure them out, figure out what we believe in, what we don't believe in, and why in each case.
