Arts & Sciences

What do universities do in modern America? What happens here, high above Cayuga's waters? The Eddy Street Gate, the entrance to campus from College-town, reads:

My mention of the Eddy Street Gate reminds me that colleges and universities are usually set apart by gates and that they are traditionally organized around quadrangles which face inward-away from the world. We talk of colleges and universities as ivory towers. The second verse of the Cornell alma mater tells us that during the years you are here you will be "far above the busy humming of the bustling town"; that Cornell "reared against the arch of heaven looks she proudly down." How colleges and universities educate you, then, is in isolation from the temptations and diversions of the world and family. College is idealized as a four-year moratorium, a time of reflection and study.

But colleges and universities do much more than educate you in splendid isolation.

What they do today has evolved in part from their past in which, at different times, different sets of purposes and functions emerged.

So let me take you on a very rapid, rather sketchy look at the history of the college and the university to see how and when the many things they do emerged.

The college and the university as we know it are European inventions which developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as alternatives to the form of schooling which then dominated education the Christian monastery. The medieval university started, then, as a secular and usually urban, bourgeois alternative to the more rural, more aristocratic, and more doctrinaire church schools. The university was a freer environment where alongside theology and common law one could also study arts, civilian law, and medicine. Science, as we know it, was not done in the original university and, indeed, until deep into the nineteenth century, the major advances of science took place in private or state laboratories or in aristocratic and royal academies set up outside the universities.

Though set up as a freer and secular alternative to the church school, the college and university throughout the Middle Ages and well into the eighteenth century still came under Church authority and control. When we turn to the United States, we find similarly that by the Civil War, while there were over 300 colleges in America (not yet any real university), virtually all of them had been created out of Christian inspiration, often primarily to train ministers and usually still associated with particular religious denominations. Only secondarily were colleges intended to educate the social and political elites.

Moral training, character development, and cultivating mental discipline remain things that colleges and universities still do to this day though in most settings less in terms of piety and orthodoxy. But many critics of the university in the last few years resent the decline of the university's concerns with piety and would have it put back, front and center, in any list of what colleges and universities ought to do.

Post Civil War America saw a dramatic new development in higher education, The emergence of the American university and with this the development of graduate education brought several new things for the university to do that are still with us.

With Cornell University in fact leading the way colleges and universities set out to make their students useful as well as learned, thoughtful, and moral. Scientific and applied subjects were added to the curriculum to teach students skills appropriate for their actual work lives in an industrial society. Cornell even required all students to do manual work on campus in order to learn mechanical skills. (We did, by the way, abandon this requirement some time ago.)

Applied science and engineering's entry into university offerings indicated the university's commitment to provide leaders for a new commercial, scientific, industrial society. No longer were colleges and universities supposed to just prepare the children of the elite for their predestined places as leaders of church, state, and professions. No surprise, then, that the new, more democratic universities like Cornell and the great state universities like Michigan and Wisconsin and Illinois took the lead in introducing useful, practical,training, character development, applied courses into the curriculum. But even older schools like Harvard began to see producing useful graduates as one of their purposes. The president of Harvard in the late nineteenth century Charles W Elliot, for example, championed the creation of a business school at Harvard.

And so it also developed that one of the things universities were supposed to do was to train civic leadership-to train people to serve others by doing useful, practical work in the real world outside the university's gates. The Eddy Street Gate's entire inscription reads:

Now if Cornell University's creation in 1865, when Ezra Cornell said, "I would found an institution where any person could find instruction in any study," was the symbol of the American university's new commitment to produce useful as well as thoughtful students, then the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 introduced another new and enduring purpose and function of the university-the pursuit of pure research.

Johns Hopkins was built on the Germanic ideal of the university. This ideal, since the early part of the nineteenth century, had little to do with the cultivation of morality in students or with training students for useful service to mankind. It was an ideal of a community of scholars who, with a small number of graduate student disciples, were engaged in the pure and abstract quest for truth. The university was its faculty; and its faculty were not teachers or moral mentors, they were independent researchers engaged in the quest for scientific and scholarly knowledge.

One more important thing that colleges and universities do today also emerged in the late nineteenth century, and in many ways it was in reaction to the new commitment to teach students useful and practical subjects and the opposite tendency of the faculty to do their own research. Colleges and universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came to see it as their responsi-bility also to teach their students the cultural traditions of the West. Universi-ties came to see as one of their objectives producing a civilized and cultured leadership for industrial and commercial America. The university became the custodian and transmitter of elite culture. The study of literature, art, music, and philosophy entered the curriculum. Students were to be taught to pursue truth and beauty, and to cultivate good taste.

The professor, then, was once again given the role of mentor and teacher, not of distant researcher; the faculty were supposed to be guides to the good life and to the development of character , but not as in the past in the service only of piety and religion. Now the faculty were seen as free and often charismatic guides to truth, beauty, and wisdom, whatever its source, secular or sacred.

This ideal, this function of the university as moral mentor and arbiter of culture and taste, came to America via conventional wisdom, it is in our day England and American Anglophilic faculty, just as the university as a place to do research came from Germany. Only the university's goal of producing useful students is an ideal native to America and very much a product of these hills in upstate New York.

If we look at the American university today as we near the end of the twentieth century, we see that what it does is still very much a product of what it came to do in post-Civil War America:

• The university develops wisdom.
• The university develops character.
• The university develops skills for the economic marketplace and professional world.
• The university trains civic leaders who will serve others.
• The university employs professors who, in their pursuit of research and scholarship, seek truth.
• The university is custodian of high culture and good taste, which it passes on to each new barbaric, television-dazed freshman class.

Now there are clearly some tensions and even contradictions among these many different things the university does:

• A faculty too preoccupied with their own research often doesn't have time for teaching skills or for developing students' moral character.
• Serving the bustling town and the American economy by providing useful professional students with practical skills often can conflict with the university's disinterested and bias-free pursuit of truth and wisdom.
• Being the custodian and transmitter of elite culture presents problems for a democratic age and democratic student body that questions the class, racial, or gender dimensions of that culture.

Not only are there tensions among the various things the nineteenth century gave the present-day university to do, there are also problems created by additional functions that have emerged in more recent times. Not only is the university today involved in teaching our culture's received truth and about the only institution in our public life that is self-consciously skeptical, that questions, doubts, or challenges the prevailing consensus on what is right, true, or good. The university does these two contradictory things, then. It transmits the prevailing moral and political values, the prevailing view of truth and also challenges and questions those prevailing views.

The college and university has also become in America a vital agency of social mobility. No longer the privileged preserve of future Christian clerics or of white male social and economic elites, American college and university education has become the ladder to economic and social success. It all began with schools like Cornell and the great state universities in the latter half of the nineteenth century that opened up higher education to rural Protestant America. Then women's colleges and black colleges in the late nineteenth century provided higher education for the first time to those groups excluded from most American colleges. Cornell played its important role here, too, for its first president, A. D. White, committed Cornell to gender and racial equality. And then after World War II, the GI Bill, through which the federal government paid college costs for veterans, opened the university and higher economic status to many urban working-class Catholics and Jews. And since the 1960s, most universities have begun to provide entry into successful middle-class life for more and more African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.

American colleges and universities are often the reluctant arenas for dealing with America's social and political problems. Whether it be the society's commitment to affirmative action, the debate over the moral righteousness of war, defining the nature of free speech, the reconciliation of a racially and ethnically divided population, realizing sexual identity, or competing in the global economy-Americans tend to see their colleges and universities as having the responsibility to do some-thing, to solve America's problems.

Well, the time has come for me to bring all this to a close. As you see the innocent question I began with-what do universities do?-was deceptively simple. They do lots of things, lots of things that make sense for an educational institution to be doing, even though some are in conflict with one another, and lots that don't seem to have been intended for them to do, but that they do as part of their role in American society What is surprising is that many of the things universities do they do pretty well.

Isaac Kramnick is the Richard .1. Schwartz Professor and chair of the Department of Government. He has taught at Cornell since 1972. His most recent book is The Godless Constitution (written with R. Laurence Moore, Cornell Department of History). This is a shortened version of a talk he has given to entering College of Arts and Sciences freshmen over the years.