Telos 200 (Fall 2022): The Place of Truth at the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
The place of truth at the university has always been elsewhere. Scientific conclusions are after all hypotheses, subject to continuing examination and critique in a process that forever defers the arrival at a final truth. In addition to this unbridgeable temporal distance from truth, there is a spatial distance to the extent that the university is subject to a larger purposive context that stands outside of scientific activity itself. A researcher can be objective by being non-prejudicial in collecting facts and weighing arguments but can never be neutral in terms of the goals of the research, which must always be established before the research begins and from outside of the research project itself.[1] Research cannot begin until an interest in some question has been expressed, and such an interest has generally not been up to the researcher to decide. Whether the goal of medical research will be to protect humans from a virus or attack humans with a virus will be determined by the sponsor of the research rather than the researcher, who at best may decline to take part in some forms of research. If the determiners of the goals of the university are not the professors themselves but the society that sponsors their work, it is within this external values framework that the truth of the university must be found.
Accordingly, in the first essay of this special 200th issue of Telos, Michael Hüther argues that the university can never attain truth but can only strive for it and then can only do so within a larger context that establishes the values and goals of scientific endeavor. Taken together, these two limitations undermine any claim for science to be a source of truth. Rather, Hüther notes a fundamental change in the Enlightenment-based faith in human self-empowerment. Instead of believing in science as empowerment, the twentieth century brought a realization of our subjection to the “absolutism of reality,” that is, the basic disconnect, which can only be palliated but never resolved, between our short lifetimes and the time of the universe. Science as a way of managing our living environment and myth as a framing of our endeavors within a narrative context both exist as measures for coming to terms with the brevity of our stays in the world. Both science and myth must then be pursued with an insight into the responsibilities that come with self-empowerment as well as a consciousness of its limitations.
If we understand myth in Hans Blumenberg’s sense, as a way to come to terms with such human limitations, then myth provides for Hüther a necessary supplement to scientific endeavor. The problem of the university today arises from the particular mythic frameworks that are shaping science by resorting to economization and moralization as two bankrupt strategies for dealing with the uncertainty of our situation. Economization shifts the question of where to focus our scientific energies to market-based approaches that depend on who is willing to pay rather than on a values-based assessment of what is worthwhile to investigate. Moralization narrows the range of perspectives that can be discussed at the university through demands for adherence to particular political views or other forms of censorship. Hüther by contrast defends the freedom of the university from both economic and activist imperatives. At the same time, he recognizes that society must set general limits to the autonomy of the university to the extent that research and teaching should support the constitution and its liberal values. But this social constraint on the university in fact mandates a support for a diversity of opinion within a liberal public sphere, including minority views and a spirit of skepticism.
Hüther’s framing of the problem presumes a set of liberal values as the context for university endeavor, grounded for him in the German constitution. Yet he also provides an argument for a general theory of myth that justifies his position as one that reflects the existential situation of a humanity that must reconcile eternity with mortality. The necessarily mythic mode for this reconciliation can lead in two directions. Either the overarching myths for our existence are established by religions with no claim to scientific objectivity, or the myths arise as a consequence of our scientific engagement with the world. This latter direction, implied by Blumenberg’s analysis of myth, is premised on the idea that there might be an intellectually advanced mode of myth that could provide the unified framework for the truth that governs university teaching and research. Wayne Hudson develops this approach by imagining a new grounding of the humanities in a metaphysics and ontology that would supersede the current historical approach. As opposed to an orientation around rhetoric and historical contingencies, he argues for a type of humanities that sees humanity as part of nature rather than as part of a separate realm of culture. This new orientation would link the humanities to mathematics and the natural sciences, and the methodology would be grounded in logic and metaphysical necessity as the basis of an explanatory rather than a descriptive or interpretive method. He proposes a humanities pedagogy that is ethically oriented around the idea that variations of human culture and history are limited by general principles and structures. This pedagogy focuses less on interpretation of texts than on discerning probabilities for different outcomes and viewing events and texts in terms of rational ethics and natural law. Rather than looking at historical details, learners would be trained to discover general principles of development from an Enlightenment-oriented perspective.
Yet if such an approach might determine some ways in which human history and culture often follow certain patterns of development, the claim to be developing a universal ethics runs the risk of trying to impose a particular metaphysical perspective in a situation in which, as Immanuel Kant famously argued, there can be no rational judgments with regard to such metaphysical claims. To insist on such a rational ethics would be to turn the university into a kind of church, with professors preaching their values. In his critique of such preaching, Max Weber points out that a value perspective, such as liberalism or Roman Catholicism or German nationalism, cannot be justified scientifically, and there is no way in which a researcher would be able to argue for the legitimacy of such a value system.[2]
Yet at the same time there is no presuppositionless research. It will always occur within the framework of a preexisting value perspective. Just as the medical researcher will have to take sides for or against the virus in structuring a research project, research on Goethe’s Faust would have to occur within the context of some value perspective, such as Roman Catholicism or German nationalism or liberalism, which would determine the goals and framework of questions for the research. The point of the research would not be to argue for that value perspective but rather to consider the meaning and consequences of Faust for the establishment and spread of, for instance, Roman Catholicism or German nationalism or liberalism. Even the decision to take up Goethe’s Faust as an object of study reflects a specific idea of what constitutes a cultural tradition. Research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences will be oriented around a political and cultural tradition that provides a framework of values.
Weber points out, however, that in early twentieth-century Germany the national consensus about values had broken down, with different political parties advocating radically different understandings. He argues that the university should maintain neutrality in terms of values and allow different professors to pursue perhaps conflicting research agendas based on their personal party preferences. Since Weber assumes that there is no rational basis for making a choice between such value positions, he does not think that the university as a whole is in a position to promote any one choice over others, and he extends the idea of academic freedom to include the freedom of the researcher to determine the goals of research.[3] Yet such a policy that allowed Marxists, Nazis, Social Democrats, and Catholics to all conduct their teaching and research based on their value orientations would lead in the Weimar Republic to a dissolution of the consensus that was necessary to maintain both the stability of the political order and the coherence of a university’s role in society. While the Nazi victory was a tragic development for liberalism and in general for human flourishing in Germany and the world, its establishment of a unified values framework was not itself the problem. The replacement of liberal values with Nazi racist values was the problem, and Hüther defends the university not as a place that is open to all value systems but as a place whose truth lies in its support for the liberal values that are grounded in the German constitution. The prior establishment of those values in the structure of the German state is the key, and the university can only follow this lead.
In the end, colleges and universities have always been dependent on their sponsors for determining their purposes. The earliest colleges and universities were founded by religions to train clergy in the European Middle Ages and in early American colleges. Later, states seeking to develop their bureaucracies and technological capacities established public universities. In all these cases, as Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo observe, the spiritual truth that structures university research and teaching has been determined from the outside. The modern university is the latest in a long line of institutions that were created to train bureaucrats for state administration and were thus designed to establish standards of doctrinal conformity. This link between schools and bureaucracy was established as early as the third century in the Roman Empire under the emperor Diocletian, whose persecution of Christians coincided with the development of schools to train administrators for an imperial bureaucracy. Medieval universities had a similar task of enforcing an ideological conformity for the sake of a state bureaucracy, and they combined a hyperrationalist approach to knowledge with a hyperemotionalist fervor in pursuing heresy. The kind of piety that supported moderation and tolerance generally developed outside of the universities within lay communities and heretical sects. The modern university has consequently inherited the linking of hyperrationalism and hyperemotionalism to create the ideological fervor of “cancel culture,” which bans diverging viewpoints out of an exaggerated sense of moral mission. For Melleuish and Rizzo, then, the university has never been a place for seeking truth through the cultivation of diverse opinions but rather is an institution designed by professional scholars to enforce ideological conformity to the needs of a state bureaucracy. Yet this dependence of the university on an externally established value system does not mean that university research would have to lose its objectivity, its ability to judge impartially. Even if it cannot be ethically neutral in the choice of research topics or the purpose of research, university research can and should maintain its objectivity if it is to remain useful.
As the world shifted from church-sponsored to state-sponsored universities, nation-state rather than religious values began to provide the framework for university culture. Consequently, while academic freedom provides scholars with the justification for following the evidence where it leads them, it does not generally extend to allowing them to decide the goals of their research. The type of values that are established by a religious or state sponsor as the guiding truth cannot be questioned within the university as an institution that has always been designed to serve the broader spiritual and ideological goals of its patrons. Today, a similar dynamic is at work to the extent that grant-making bodies, first and foremost the federal government in the United States, provide research funds based on priorities that they set, and students make decisions about the kind of education that they would like to pursue. If there are complaints about the market-oriented nature of the corporate university, they in fact echo a longer history of frustration with the limits that outside authorities set on research and teaching. But such external pressures on the university are themselves not the problem. The core problem is the legitimacy of those values that establish the external truth for university teaching and research. As long as we are in agreement with the values imposed on the university, then this external control is not a problem and is in fact the expectation.
Once liberal democracy as a value is established as the external truth that structures the university not as a universal ethic but as one that must be consciously affirmed against alternative ones, we can begin to analyze universities within liberal democracies in terms of this goal. Here, as Russell Berman lays out, there is cause for worry, as universities have participated in the deterioration of the practices of public sphere debate and discussion in the slide toward a post-critical public sphere in both Germany and the United States. In both countries, the legislature has given up its role as a place of discussion and debate, often ceding decision-making to the executive and the workings of the administrative state. Moreover, governments have often justified decisions based on a deference to scientific authority rather than considering science as a space of debate and criticism that can inform political decisions without determining them. Journalists have colluded with governments by presenting information that buttresses one perspective while suppressing information that would contradict it. At the university, right-wing politicians attempt to censor views they disagree with, while left-wing activists often attempt to silence particular viewpoints through a cancel culture technique of disallowing those viewpoints rather than arguing against them. Moreover, the focus on diversity does not refer to viewpoint diversity but rather defines culture based on racial groups and thereby undermines knowledge of and loyalty to a national tradition while also suppressing academic debate and criticism. Today’s curricula no longer require Western culture or U.S. history courses that would promote the idea of a shared American identity grounded in liberal values of freedom of speech, civil discourse, and critical discussion. Instead, universities are more likely to require multicultural studies courses that focus on ethnic belonging, leading to a fragmentation of national identity. This identity oriented around liberal values is more important than ever in a global context in which China is trying to establish a form of authoritarian capitalism in competition with liberal democracy.
Tim Luke describes the way in which the level of truth at universities is constantly being measured through ranking systems that depend on quantitative metrics of quality. Based on a scientific method that equates truth with technical efficiency in an experimental method that valorizes what works, the consequent equation of truth with efficiency and economic impact contrasts with both the goals of civic education and social justice. He documents the discrepancy between the imperative to rise within the rankings systems and the finding of real solutions to problems of civic education and social justice. The stated goal of increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion contrasts with the wide gulf between the university and poverty-stricken neighborhoods, in which no amount of affirmative action–based inclusion can bridge the divide.
Richard Marcy and Valerie D’Erman discuss the practice of making territorial acknowledgments that the land occupied by an institution once belonged to Indigenous peoples. Rather than arguing for or against making such statements, they argue that the practice has involved a process of sensemaking in which a political narrative acquires a level of truth at the university that excludes alternative narratives. The kind of truth that this practice establishes is, however, not the kind that we typically associate with universities that promote free inquiry. Rather, truth here refers to an ideology that has been established as indisputable and thus not available for discussion or debate. Consequently, the sense in which the territorial acknowledgments constitute truth is not like a scientific truth, which is in fact a hypothesis to be tested and debated, but more like the truth of a myth or a religious cult, an indisputable pledge that serves as a prerequisite for belonging to the community. Yet since no one seriously suggests that the land be given back to Indigenous peoples, the mythic truth here is not the truth of those peoples but that of a particular political position on the status of minority rights within a liberal democracy. The difficulty is that the territorial acknowledgment treats this political position as a mythic truth that is not available for discussion and debate.
If the goal of diversity and the defense of minority rights thereby function as an unquestionable mythic truth for the university, their establishment was indeed supported by the state to the extent that diversity as a goal was justified by the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision on affirmation action in 1978. Yet if we understand the promotion of diversity as a means of arriving at liberal democratic values of freedom and equality, then diversity itself would not have the same status as those ultimate values for university teaching and research. Such values determine goals without specifying means, which must be determined based on analysis and research. The pursuit of diversity is not a value in and of itself, however. As a general idea, a diverse population, such as that of the United States, is not in itself to be preferred over a more homogeneous one, such as that of Sweden. When we consider the issue of racial diversity, it functions as a means of achieving a color-blind society without racism. As a means, however, it cannot be an organizing value, such as the support of liberal democracy, which is not a topic of debate at the university, even if support for authoritarianism, for instance, is also not forbidden. Rather, the promotion of proportional representation by racial group should be debatable as a means of reaching the goal of a color-blind society.
The question here is whether the idea of ameliorating underrepresentation by race might itself be racist, since it implies the reduction of overrepresented minorities and thus discrimination by race. It is certainly difficult to claim that underrepresentation is itself a sign of racism, as that would lead to the strange conclusion that the overrepresentation of Asians at universities would indicate pro-Asian and anti-white racism. Rather, it makes more sense to surmise that economic and cultural factors lead to underrepresentation and overrepresentation by racial background of university students. These cultural factors are more difficult to address but may be key, though the current discourse of diversity fails to properly address them.
If diversity, understood as the pursuit through admissions policies of proportional representation by race, is instead treated as an unquestionable truth, then it may be the case that its defense could end up missing or even undermining its goals. Diversity has attained the level of a mythic truth not by establishing itself as a societal goal, like the promotion of liberal democracy. Rather, as a means, its status as truth serves to suppress legitimate discussion of its efficacy. The inability to discuss the current policy of promotion of proportional representation in university admissions and hiring has established a political position about the means for achieving equality as the mythic truth of the university. It may even be that this establishment of diversity as a mythic truth threatens the support of liberal democracy by setting minority identity as a definer of individual identity, equivalent to a kind of tribalism, above a commitment to liberal values of freedom of speech and equality as the underlying basis for the social and political order.[4]
Such a suppression of the search for truth in favor of the espousal of a political attitude has transformed university discourse. J. E. Elliott argues that in a context in which the university has become an enterprise oriented around quantifiable metrics such as enrollment growth, application numbers, and yield rates, teaching and research have become organized around brands that seek popularity rather than any kind of truth value. As a consequence, the production and dissemination of knowledge can no longer be oriented around truth but rather the need for Brand Business, Brand STEM, and Brand English to differentiate themselves in order to find their own niches within the university mall. Increasing specialization serves this trend by making the goal to be less the search for truth, in which there will be winners and losers, than the establishment of a distinctive brand. In the humanities, this situation has led to the establishment of the culture of dissent as the basis for brand appeal, attracting students interested in social justice within an environment in which protest has been safely integrated into disciplinary structures. Functioning to shore up declining enrollment numbers, the protest ethos is an outgrowth of the corporate character of the university. As opposed to such corporate-bureaucratic values as enrollment growth, the idea of truth brings up on the one hand the evidence that could support a particular truth claim and on the other hand the sense of meaning that one associates with works of art or the wisdom and judgment associated with leadership. In noting that these notions of truth are still part of the animating spirit of the university, Elliott nevertheless also argues that they have become in the corporate university “truth-posits” rather than truth itself because any truth claim must be channeled through both a disciplinary community and the university bureaucracy. While he is unsure of whether to be critical of this situation, the replacement of truth with truth-posits is clearly a concession to the branding aspect of disciplinary differentiation, since the idea of a truth-posit must refer to a proposal for an idea of truth around which a discipline could organize itself.
Mark G. E. Kelly argues that the shift of left-wing priorities from a focus on class-based issues to the defense of minority rights constitutes a merging of a university discourse with capitalist goals. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” as an ideology has itself become commodified. Because university and government bureaucracies as well as corporations can easily embrace the call for diversity and inclusion through symbolic gestures alone, without having to engage in any significant change to their structures, the championing of minority rights deflects attention from economic inequality while buttressing academics in their positions.[5] By creating both a social justice justification to save their own jobs in traditional humanities disciplines and an argument for creating new ones in ethnic studies rather than bringing about any significant social or economic change, this left politics has participated in its own commodification. Moreover, if universities sell woke ideology, they have also shifted their role from being the supporters of an externally imposed ideology or doctrine, as with the relationship between church and university in the Middle Ages, to being the producers of an ideology that they market as a commodity. This process has led to a new orthodoxy of minority rights that constrains what can be said on college campuses, leading to a situation in which a critical attitude no longer involves an in-depth analysis of ideas with an eye for contradictions and gaps in evidence but a rote repetition of the ideas and positions that have been designated as “critical.”
In David Westbrook’s account, the modern university is no longer an elite institution that is separated from the rest of society in its search for truth. Rather, the university has become much more central to society as the standard place for developing a career and as a locus for community engagement, not least in providing entertainment in the form of spectator sports like football. Accordingly, university research is no longer about understanding the world or the past but about an investment of resources that is meant to create a return, similar perhaps to the functioning of a pharmaceutical company. Finally, universities justify the existing social order through their dual function of separating students into categories based on merit through the college admissions process while at same time claiming to dissolve such elitism by promoting equity and inclusion.
Joseph Bendersky laments the decline of grand historical narratives in favor of the social and cultural history that has become the dominant mode of historical research. While he accepts the importance of such “little history,” he opposes the way in which it has expanded in such a way that military and political history have been nearly excluded from university curricula and research projects. The consequence is a growing historical amnesia regarding the broad outlines of political history, wars and revolutions, and the significance of singular individuals in shaping these events. The effect is the further deterioration of the goal of civic education for liberal democracy.
As an example of the approach to the past that he lays out in his essay on the humanities, Wayne Hudson’s “Dialogues” between past historical and literary figures depicts convergences between ideas from different cultures and periods as well as episodes of complete incompatibility.
Joseph Bendersky’s review of George Schwab’s memoir, Odyssey of a Child Survivor: From Latvia through the Camps to the United States, provides an overview of Schwab’s experiences in the Nazi camps as well as his later struggles in U.S. academia. Even though his 1962 dissertation on Carl Schmitt was rejected by Otto Kirchheimer at the dissertation defense, obliging him to write a new dissertation, Schwab’s ideas were eventually published and vindicated by later scholarship that has confirmed the extent to which Schmitt was committed to defending the Weimar Republic. As a lone advocate in the 1960s for the value of Schmitt’s ideas, Schwab’s intellectual courage stands out in a time when scholars struggle to maintain their objectivity in the face of evidence that would upset their political sympathies.
In his review of another recent book by a Telos associate, Johan Wennström examines how Tim Luke’s Screens of Power describes the ways in which more and more spheres of our lives, including love, religion, political views, and family relations, are being commodified.
1. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), pp. 76–77. For an extended discussion of Weber’s views on objectivity and neutrality in research, see David Pan, “The Crisis of the Humanities and the End of the University,” Telos 111 (Spring 1998): 69–106; here, pp. 90–100.
2. Max Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in Shils and Finch, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 3–4.
3. Max Weber, “The Academic Freedom of the Universities,” in Max Weber on Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany, ed. and trans. Edward Shils (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 20–21.
4. On the racist implications and mythic status of woke anti-racism, see John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021). On the undermining of liberal values at the university, see John M. Ellis, The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done (New York: Encounter, 2020).
5. On the conflict between the goal of racial diversity and the amelioration of economic inequality, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
