Claiming HE only has one humanistic mission won’t reclaim public trust

US higher education is facing a difficult future.

Its unwillingness to address its drift into a progressive intellectual monoculture – about which conservative professors have been sounding the alarm for almost a decade – is raising ever louder political hackles, particularly in the wake of the controversies over how protests about the Israel-Hamas war should be handled.

At the same time, the era of enrolment expansion is about to go into reverse as the number of 18-year-olds heads into steep decline, even as student debt has become such a hot-button issue that pushing the cost of tuition even higher is not an option if we want to attract those 18-year-olds who remain.

Amid all this turbulence, many figures in the sector have begun to reflect on what the core purpose, or telos, of higher education is and should be – with a view to clinging to that purpose even as other pursuits potentially fall away.

Some argue that, in line with Harvard University’s “veritas” motto, truth is the single ultimate pursuit of the university – from which other ends, such as justice, can flow. According to Jonathan Haidt, for instance, any telos in addition to the pursuit of truth would require a “massive restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth”.

However, examining this idea two years ago, Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder found that “truth” is not a priority in the mission statements of the top-ranked institutions for open enquiry. Instead, the primary themes in these schools were “critical thinking, diversity, preparation for citizenship, public service, the production and dissemination of knowledge, and active and engaged learning in the liberal-arts mold”.

Nor do Khalid and Snyder endorse John Tomasi’s suggestion of curiosity – “a necessary precursor to the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and social justice” – as higher education’s “central guiding concept”. While curiosity should be present in all learning environments, they argue that a university’s telos should be “critical inquiry” because “university life should equip us with the skills to be able to navigate a world in which spin and misinformation are the order of the day”.

These positions all have merit, but their common flaw is their insistence on admitting just one telos. And the common reason for that is a failure to acknowledge that not all institutions of higher education are unequivocally focused on humanistic enquiry.

In reality, many students do not pursue higher education to become better thinkers and scholars of history and the human condition: they are there to earn a degree that helps them with their careers and develop and refine particular skills. Data from the Higher Education Research Institute makes that quite clear: 84 per cent of American first-year students report that being able to “get a better job” was a very important reason why they selected their school, while 79 per cent selected their school for a specific career.

Many schools, in addition, have mandates to serve the public good and its needs. The State University of New York (SUNY), for instance, was created to “meet the changing needs of New York’s students, communities, and workforce”.

So while there is real value in learning how to think, question and debate, countless students that I regularly encounter, from pre-med to those looking to go into finance, are not enrolled in courses that teach them to probe the text of Mill or Nietzsche or to connect with French or Russian revolutions.

At Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach, there is a strong position that college life should not be explicitly and narrowly preparatory for careers. Rather, Sarah Lawrence sees itself as a place that teaches liberal arts and approaches to critical thinking and analysis in order to promote true personal and intellectual growth. Skills- or profession-based courses are rarely offered. Yet even Sarah Lawrence nods towards a secondary telos, making the claim that its ivory tower approach “inculcates the entrepreneurial habits of exploration, risk-taking, and invention”.

And that is probably just as well. Today, under 5 per cent of incoming students report that they intend to pursue truly liberal arts and science majors (history, languages and literatures, philosophy, religion, other humanities, English) compared with 13 per cent who intend to study business, 12 per cent (excluding pre-med) health professions, and 10 per cent engineering.

Despite this, liberal arts programmes, particularly at elite institutions, continue to dominate the cultural perception of higher education. That may be one under-discussed reason Americans are losing trust in higher education. In the effort to rebuild that trust, higher education must clarify this breadth of purpose, not pretend that it can all be boiled down to something that sounds irrelevant to many students and large numbers of Americans as well.

In the real world, a diversity of institutions has arisen as a result of higher education’s evolution to be practical and serve the public well beyond theoretical and purely academic or ivory tower interests. US colleges and universities have embraced the marketplace of what students and states want from them.

Each school needs students to exist, and its telos should reflect that reality. Academics who are interested in maintaining broad public support for their sector would be wise to embrace its diversity of purposes, not try to theorise them all away.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.