In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with David A. Westbrook about his article “From the Ivory Tower to the Football Stadium: A Rueful Response to Michael Hüther,” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Michael Hüther’s claim that the decline of truth at the university is due to moralization and economization; the traditional conception of the university that forms the background for Hüther’s critique and the function it played in society; how the role and function of the university today is different from that earlier conception and the reasons for this shift; how has university research moved from being a form of science to a form of investment; the political function of the university today; whether the ideals of merit and inclusion contradict each other; and how the university compares to a church. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
From the Ivory Tower to the Football Stadium: A Rueful Response to Michael Hüther
David A. Westbrook
In “Tired of Science?! Notes on the Relationship between University and Society,” Michael Hüther insightfully updates a preoccupation of German intellectuals running back at least to Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, the relationship between science and society, and so between “truth” and “politics,” and the extent to which an enlightened politics is even possible—but let us not get too far ahead of ourselves.
It has become commonplace, in both Germany and the United States, to criticize universities as both mercenary and moralistic. The pursuit of truth often seems beside the point. Hüther draws on the philosopher Hans Blumenberg to argue that economization and moralization are symptoms of, or responses to, fundamental epistemological problems. Science has inescapable limitations. The authority of science, therefore, is not unlimited. Realizing this, the broader society has become “bored” with science. “These dilemmas—the dilemma of the inaccessible absolute truth, the dilemma of scientific indeterminacy, and the dilemma of inevitable normativity—give rise to a weariness with science.” Evidently, the Enlightenment dream has been disappointed. Perhaps we need, as Blumenberg suggested, an “academy for processing disappointments of reason.” At present, however, “[m]oralization and economization endanger the university, which is shaped and supported in its activities by the freedom of science.”[1]
Hüther’s conceptualization of the university is familiar, in general terms at least. Society affords, the state even pays for, a special institution, the university. In part, the state does so in order to license the professions (traditionally, theology, law, and medicine), as Kant notes. Such inquiries are carried on under the aegis of authoritative texts. But for Kant, Hüther, and incidentally me, the essence of the university, its telos one might say, is the free pursuit of truth (research) and its dissemination (teaching).
What kind of truth is at issue? Hüther says “Wissenschaft,” here inevitably translated as “science,” but in the broad German sense of all sorts of knowledge. The truth at issue here, at least at the first cut, is something worth pursuing for its own sake, unlike the truths of the professions, where knowledge is in the service of some practice. The soul, the truth at the heart of the university, in contrast, is literally impractical, not in the service of something else. More positively stated, the pursuit of this sort of truth is free, unhindered, independent, by definition, hence “freedom of science.” And not just the pursuit: the object of the pursuit, truth itself, is understood to be free. This sort of talk about “academic freedom” tends to shade into an epistemological preoccupation (how are we to know, really) that rests upon an ontological assertion (the Truth simply is, out there, independent of human interest).
In thinking about Wissenschaft, it may be helpful to shift the focus from “wissen” to know (a fact or other thing that can be known “objectively”) to the suffix “-schaft,” which acts to abstract, to change the meaning from the doing of something to the practice of doing that thing, much like adding the suffix “-ing” can create a gerund, for example, “to swim” becomes “swimming,” the sport.[2] With the addition of the suffix, herren (to command or lord) becomes Herrschaft, lordship. Examples abound: Wirtschaft (economy), Betriebswirtschaft (business administration), Landwirtschaft (agriculture), Gesellschaft (society), Aktiengesellschaft (corporation), and even Gemeinschaft (community, the group that owns/holds in common) are all words that name a practice of individuals coming together to do something. Thus, Wissenschaft is not science only as a body of knowledge but also implies a sociology, even an ethos: a group of people who believe in the collective pursuit of truth for its own sake. Consider Weber’s famous Wissenschaft als Beruf (science as vocation or calling), with its deep Christian resonance.
The free pursuit of the truth is often threatened by the state or by other societal forces with ends of their own, and so in tension with the unrestricted freedom of inquiry. Hüther discusses the threats to academic freedom at the present juncture in Germany under the rubrics of “moralization” and “economization.” More generally, one may say that the university is the institution wherein the truth is to be pursued free of political constraint, using “politics” in a broad sense. From this, one might think that the relationship between the “university” (where “science” is done) and “society” (often represented by the state) is in principle one of subtle opposition, even antagonism.[3] Hüther repeatedly points out that the pursuit of truth cannot be conducted in such a way as to violate the constitution. Insisting on the constitutional character of basic research sounds strange, at least to an American law professor, but the rather abstract scheme of the argument, with “the doing of science” and “the demands of society” at sword point, raises the issue.
Matters get stranger still, since in Germany, as in most of the world, the university is largely supported by the state, using tax money. Why should the state do such a thing? The answer, for Kant (Hüther is less explicit), lies in the other half of the university’s mission, the dissemination of truth, education, Bildung. If elites are taught that the truth is free, to be known by the methods of science, broadly, reason, then society itself will ultimately become rational, reasonable. Enlightened. That is, while science, the pursuit of truth within the university, is not in the service of specific ends (such as health or justice, the ends of medicine and law), a society of people who appreciate the truth, who recognize and use rules of reason, will constitute themselves differently from a society with less enlightened citizens.
The political project of the university so imagined, then, is to provide the cultural ground in which the (educated, even enlightened) citizen can be cultivated.[4] To do so, however, the university has to answer the question “What is it to be educated?”—a question that cannot have a straightforward answer. Instead, the answer is embodied by the figure of the professor, who does research (freely and autonomously), and who also teaches, fosters order. We hear echoes of the contestation of this question, for example, in endless discussions of whether calculus is necessary, and for whom. Or any number of debates over the specifics of this or that “core curriculum.” More generally, the question “What is required to be an educated gentle(man)?” presumes a degree of cultural consensus on what is to be valued and therefore studied. Since Kant’s time, answers have been sought in philosophy, the faculty of arts and sciences, the liberal arts, and even national culture, most purely represented in the study of literature. For present purposes, it suffices to note that any answer is elitist.
I hope to be fair; I am deeply sympathetic. In important ways, I still believe that something like this is what the university, in some essential sense (and this sort of argument is very much from essentials, principles, abstractions), is. Moreover, “Tired of Science” is also preoccupied with the position of the professor, and more generally the preconditions for intellectual life. I too am concerned with how to make the world safe for people like me, and Hüther’s diagnosis points up real dangers for the life of the mind. Hardly the only dangers: this tradition of argument risks seeming tragically naive—the putatively enlightened society, or elite, is not bound to comport itself reasonably, as history in Germany and elsewhere has demonstrated. But what else is a professor to believe?
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1. Michael Hüther, “Tired of Science?! Notes on the Relationship between University and Society,” appearing in this issue of Telos.
2. From the department of false etymology: It would have been really cool if –shaft was from schaffen, to achieve or manage. Schaffen is to take chaotic parts and make a whole, as in Ordnungschaffen, or as in Merkel’s response to the chaotic influx of refugees, “Wir schaffen das,” loosely, “We will manage.” The “wir” is important: schaffen implies a collective.
3. It is a bit afield, but I am put in mind of the “Two Swords” through which authority was symbolized in the medieval struggles between Papacy and Empire.
4. See generally Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996). Readings argues that Kant’s conception, in which the institution is framed simply by “Truth,” gave way to more national, cultural, understandings of education and citizenship in the course of the nineteenth century. The German, French, English, and ultimately American universities had different, national, characters—hence the centrality of literature, where national identities are delineated. For present purposes, and I think for Hüther’s critique, such considerations may be postponed.
