I like David Labaree’s book A Perfect Mess better than some of my colleagues and friends who have read it. Labaree argues that the contemporary American university is essentially the alchemical product of a whole bunch of institutional histories that were not in and of themselves aiming for the university as it emerged post-1945 but that summed up accidentally to the range of practices, norms and missions that have come to characterize the institution as it stands.
That interpretation stands against many critiques of the university that attribute its present character, especially after the neoliberal turn, to highly interested and intentional plans to use the university to some end—to reproduce ideology, to create a distraction from the failings of the labor market, as a part of a schools-to-prison pipeline intended to absorb the energies of young people entering into an unresponsive and hostile political economy, as a porous target for or initial foundation of financialization, and much more besides. There are ways to reconcile those interpretations with Labaree (they’re more or less the way that any left critique of political economy has to find space for contingency or for how intentionality in capitalist society doesn’t necessarily require the conscious agency of identifiable individuals or groups).
My issue might be more with the fact that Labaree argues that no effort to reform the university is advisable because all reforms threaten that “perfect mess”, partly by misunderstanding how we got to this point. That seems like a peculiar contradiction of his basic thesis that the university has been shaped by all sorts of impulses, reform plans, and idiosyncratic projects. Why is only now that reform aspirations and so on are going bring the whole house of cards crashing down? What makes the mess of the moment such a fragile equilibrium. It’s a sort of Goldilocks “and now everything is just right” assessment, a way of thinking I always mistrust when it’s characterizing an outcome that I know is accidental or unintended. (Say when a colleague says that their department must have precisely the number of faculty lines it has now, as if that was always the size they aimed to be.)
And yet it’s kind of true that it’s really hard to think of how a university could be other than it is. Ed-tech and for-profit planners take the university as it is and think about it subtractively only to get rid of its most expensive workers—they don’t rethink its mission, they don’t rethink its promises to students, and they don’t really rethink how much it costs students or society, it’s just that they want that money flowing into the pockets of the owners of the tech or the service rather than into the continuous maintenance and stewardship of the institution.
I’ve indulged in thinking about alternative institutional designs before, and I’m kind of heartbroken every time an interesting alternative fails or stumbles badly (like Quest University or Hampshire College). As I’ve written recently, I don’t have much enthusiasm left for serious proposals about radical institutional projects, if for no other reason that I kind of fall in love with ideas that I originally just think up for shits and giggles and then I’m unreasonably sad when an idea that wasn’t envisioned with real people’s aspirations in mind doesn’t grab anyone but me. (Or worse, when the wrong person who totally does not grok what I’m envisioning tries to implement the idea. I wrote up a beautiful idea for the perfect “liberal arts” course many years ago on my old blog and then came across someone’s attempt to actually teach my design and it was ugly.)
But it might be worth thinking about what building up from scratch might look like simply as a clarifying response to Labaree’s history. He essentially describes American higher education as a folly in the architectural sense, a structure with baroque elaborations all over it that are not necessary to its purpose but which are now part of its charm as well as necessary to its structural integrity. If so, it’s a big and sprawling folly, more Gormenghast than a simple garden decoration. What’s the unornamented basics of the thing?
Most faculty will answer, “The faculty”. I know that contemporary academic leadership, for both sincere and cynical reasons, will do almost anything to avoid confirming this proposition, but if we’re stripping the whole thing down to essentials, it’s hard to contest it. What’s a university without faculty? A residential transition into adulthood, equipped with starter-kit versions of conventional services? (Medical treatment, mental health treatment, mediation services, centralized dining, etc.) Build that if you like, but I’d wager you’d have zero takers even if that’s a function of a residential college or university. No faculty, no nothing.
On the other hand, what’s the faculty, if we’re stripping it down? You can imagine a community of researchers and intellectuals who don’t have students, but that’s not a university. It’s Bell Labs or an artists’ colony. So to be a university, you have to have faculty and you have to have students. There can be structured forms of teaching in a society without the university, and the teaching that universities offer can vary a great deal, but there have to be faculty and there have to be students. The activity of teaching defines the ground floor of the university as an institution in all its forms, for all of its history.
There has to be “higher”, meaning, university has to follow from other institutionalized forms of teaching. The university can’t be the first place where learning happens. That builds doors and windows in the big room of the ground floor: the university looks to something that has already happened, and therefore also has to look to how it continues or completes what has already happened. That implies something about the students—they need skills, credentials, knowledge before arriving—and it implies something about faculty, which is that they need to have prior training, knowledge or credentials equal to what they are teaching. It also implies a curriculum, a course of study which precedes the faculty and the students, that shapes the planning and activity of other teachers earlier on.
Who designs that curriculum? Here faculty also tend to answer “faculty” but that’s by no means an inevitable, stripped-down necessity of an answer. The curriculum could be a widely-shared and invariant standard, as it substantially was in 18th and 19th Century higher education in the U.S., prior to the advent of the elective as a standard form of a course. The curriculum might not require any institutional design or system as well—a university could consist simply of highly individualistic apprenticeships with masterful tutors, with each day’s instruction going as the master deigns.
Does a university have to be a physical place set aside from other places? No, in the age of Zoom, not necessarily, though keep in mind we’re not talking about efficacy yet at all. But it could be taught out of a series of homes in person as well. But to be more than just individual acts of teaching and learning, a university needs a sense of particular coherence, of being all one thing. Socrates wandering around Athens with his pupils is not by himself a university, nor is Athens a university if there happens to be ten such philosophers wandering around thusly.
So faculty, students, a plan of study that culminates or continues earlier education or training, and some form of connected systematicity. Does that take money? Probably to pay the faculty. Are we talking staff yet? Arguably the students could just hand the money to the faculty and the faculty decide if it’s enough to keep teaching. That is pretty much how it worked until the later 19th Century. But if not, if there’s a standard fee paid on a regular basis, you’ll likely need a staff accountant. If you’re attesting that students have continued their training or education successfully and measuring whether they have the qualifications to enroll, you’ll need some staff to maintain those records.
If there are offices, classrooms, or buildings, you need someone to maintain them and clean them, whether that’s a third-party service or a direct institutional employee. There are many kinds of teaching in modern knowledge systems that require dedicated, expensive facilities. I suppose you can sit students down on a log and explain dark matter to them with a stick and your hands but not if you want them to be able to actually study it on their own. And thus we are now likely well past the point where students could just pool some money and pay their tutors and have done with it.
Do you need a leader or coordinator who represents the institution and guides its institution? Probably but by no means necessarily: there have been universities that have functioned, sometimes quite well, without formal leadership hierarchies. In any event, we are now well past the ground floor sitting on its basic foundation. From here on, everything involves adding some additional function, adding some new kind of complexity, or building out necessary interfaces to the complexity that surrounds the university. Owning and operating residences is a major addition of structural complexity and responsibility that immediately implies other kinds of facilities with attendant services, in particular.
But the implication that you can just subtract all of those additions to get back to the core tends to expose that the supposed unadorned core is rather insufficient in any contemporary context. Universities have been a place that where young people convene physically—and often get up to trouble that annoys the communities within which they convene—since their beginnings, and it’s plain that the teaching and learning only really function well when that kind of convening is basic to what a university is. So even though faculty sometimes fantasize that stripping the folly of its complexity would once again enthrone them at the heart of the whole enterprise, even undoing the mess (perfect or otherwise) doesn’t really get us there. A wholly unadorned university may be little more than faculty and students engaged in teaching, but that’s not much on its own.
More to the point, I dislike the thinking that pulses underneath the exercise. It’s true that institutions do need to think about the basics of their mission and purpose with some clarity—a monastery that becomes more about brewing beer than maintaining a community of worship has lost something irreplaceable. A university that doesn’t understand that teaching by faculty is the starting foundational condition of its purpose and mission is lost, and at least some of them are teetering on the edge of that confusion. But the problem is that contemporary organizational cultures tend to confuse clarification of this kind with austerity, with the removal of activities, expenditures and workers, often without any effort to understand how the fundamental mission might have threaded outward into additional projects, skills and locations. You could decide a runner doesn’t need arms and you’d be wrong, that they don’t need shoes or a track and be misguided, that they don’t need a stopwatch or lanes and miss the point of competitive track and field, that they don’t need audiences or rules and undercut the great pleasure of spectatorship and the necessary constraints required for sustained competition. Clarifying missions shouldn’t become horror-film amputation fests.
Which takes me back to Labaree. He may be wrong that efforts to improve, reorganize and clarify higher education will destroy the mess that he deems just right, but he’s not wrong that some calls for change will end, have ended, badly because the determination to change things regardless of outcome precedes the appreciation of what we already have. If the mess has been something useful and likeable in many respects, it’s because no one concerned with it has ever had the unilateral power to reorder it entirely to their liking. That, perhaps, is (unfortunately) at an end.
Tim, you make me think again about an argument I associate with Lonsdale and Berman in their attempt to theorize “the colonial state”...as a pile of contradictions more than one coherent thing. I guess it is applicable to all institutions developing through time.