Students usually come to our institutions with one of three aims in mind: to get a job, to change the world, or to “grow as a person,” as they like to put it. Unsurprisingly, these three aims correspond to the three aims that define contemporary higher ed: to train workers for the economy, to drive social progress, and to educate “whole persons” via the liberal arts. We know our customers.
Higher education has for many decades been organized around the obvious tensions between these three aims, and defined by fights between the factions that prioritize one over the others, or condemn the others as incompatible with the very idea of a university. That the three aims and their champions can come into conflict is easy to see. If a program places its graduates in good jobs, it achieves the first aim, but if the work the graduate does is bad for the world and bad for the graduate, then the program has not only failed to achieve the second and third aims, but actively opposed them. Think of a business major who lands a high-paying but soul-sucking desk job at a tobacco company.
The usual response to this conflict is to sweep it under the rug and pretend that there is no tension between the three aims, or to bypass it by giving each faction its own turf, and maybe even its own separate institutions. The professional programs can help students get jobs, the social justice programs can help them change the world, and the liberal arts programs can help them “grow.” Students can vote with their feet. If there’s a conflict at the heart of the university, the market will resolve it.
But if it is easy to see how the three aims can conflict, it’s also easy to see that they could be reconciled. Unless you have a very peculiar economic theory that openly intends the destruction of the planet, or a very severe theory of social justice that condemns remunerative labor as such, or a very austere philosophy of life that requires you to live alone in the woods, then you should be able to imagine the possibility of work that earns you a living, makes the world better or leaves it no worse, and enriches your soul, all at the same time.
While I am certainly not neutral in the factional struggle, I think it is better to focus on the possibility of reconciliation than to reduce university life to just one of the three aims. There are purists in each faction who argue that an institution with multiple purposes is incoherent. In one sense, this is true, and I myself, as a partisan of the liberal arts, have often thought this way. But in another sense, healthy institutions must have multiple purposes. One purpose of a for-profit corporation, for example, is to make a profit. But it is also to make a product, and if it makes a profit without making a product, something is up. Likewise, if it makes a product without making a profit, it will go bankrupt (and if it does not, something is up). These are two different purposes that might be separately pursued and can come into conflict, but a healthy corporation pursues both. At the same time, one (production) is arguably primary while the other (profit) is secondary. It is the same with a healthy university. I believe that a university’s primary aim is that of the liberal arts tradition. But if we graduate liberally educated people who cannot make a living (especially when they have gone into massive debt), or who make a living that makes the world worse, well then – something is up.
When they are reconciled, the three aims of a healthy university are also the three aims of a healthy-minded person – to provide for oneself and one’s dependents, to shape one’s social world, and to expand one’s own range of thought and feeling. That most students start college with one of these more firmly in mind does not mean that they have no inkling of concern for the others. Thinking about what it would look like to combine the three aims in our institutions more coherently means considering how our institutions need to be organized if they are to bring these aims together in our students, so that they might become more whole.
To say that this is the point of reconciling the three aims – to help our students become more whole – is already to say that the liberal arts must come first if the other aims are to make sense. It is not just a matter of declaring that the three factions can just get along. These aims can only be reconciled by putting them in proper order. One of them must frame the others, and I feel no compunction about insisting that this is the role of the liberal arts. An institution devoted primarily to training workers, or to improving society, might be very useful and worthy of respect. But it would not be an institution of higher education. At the same time, a contemporary institution of higher education can and should pursue these other two aims, if it is itself to be “whole.” Our responsibility is to graduate students who can make a living that makes the world better, not because they have been trained in certain professional skills, or persuaded by certain theories of social justice, but because they have grown into the kind of persons capable of thinking for themselves and with others, carefully and creatively, about the perennial question: how to do good work in the world in which we find ourselves.
Part II will unpack the nature of this good work tomorrow.
