C. John Sommerville, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida, has written an engaging book entitled Religious Ideas for Secular Universities. As he looked back on fifty years of university life as both a student and a professor, he wondered at how much the mission and role of the university had changed in that time period.
“I thought I was finally able to see our universities the way American society does, as a good way of preparing us for our jobs, but not where we look to answers for our important questions.” [Page 3]
Sommerville amplifies this view on page 7.
“It seems that some time in the 1980’s accountancy became the queen of sciences. Universities are about money in a whole new way. They are now measured in terms of money – the size of their endowments, how much they can charge for tuition, and the return on that investment in the starting salaries of new graduates.”
Sommerville’s views lead to three questions:
- Are universities becoming corporations?
- If they are, is this a good or a bad thing?
- If it is a bad thing, what can be done to reverse this trend?
Are Universities Becoming Corporations?
I have spent a good deal of my life in the university sector and in the corporate world and I hear many of the very same questions discussed in both spheres: How can we raise more money? How can we cut costs? What do we need to do to satisfy our customers? I agree with Sommerville that many of the distinctions between the two have disappeared and that universities more and more are beginning to look like government or private corporations.
Is “Universities Becoming Corporations” a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?
Corporations bring us many valuable things. They build our cars, develop medicines, and they pay salaries and taxes. Corporations are all about delivering a product or service. But what keeps these entities from providing goods and services that are contrary to the public good? We look to our laws to define what corporations can and cannot do and we also look to the ethics and integrity of corporate decision makers to make judgments and decisions in favor of the public good even if laws don’t cover a particular loophole. That is to say, in a secular society we look to politics and ethics to guide our choices and ethics are personal. But where do our citizens develop values for the common good? Should universities not have a role in that? Can they have a role if they become corporations? As Sommerville points out (Page 6):
“You can see that money has moved all the way up to the top of our scale of values. It trumps all other values so it doesn’t have to justify itself. We can never have enough of it, because it is mistaken for an end in itself rather than a means to an end.”
Universities through their excellent training can show us how to make money, but as things stand they cannot teach with any conviction how we should spend that money.
As Sommerville puts it (Page 6):
“Surely we should reserve ultimate allegiance to something that takes the personal dimension into account, as money does not. Any absolute or final goal or concept should personalize our concepts as religions do.”
What Can Be Done to Reverse This Trend?
I believe universities need to realize that materialism and the rationalism it engenders is ultimately destructive of values in any real and non-subjective sense. If universities want to be more than corporations that deliver trained students that can earn a high salary then they need to re-engage with religious ideas. As Sommerville put it on page 14:
“So my big point is that the university needs to consider religious voices, not just for their historical interest, but for the help we might gain from them. You may wonder if this is directly against the constitution of the secular university. Was the founder’s point in secularizing universities to open them to non-religious viewpoints, or to impose a non-religious viewpoint and single vision?”
In writing The Halcyon Dislocation, as part of other themes, I explore one possible outcome of imposing a secular point of view on students. It is interesting to me that a very real debate of this nature is going on. I think John Sommerville has made some very strong points about how we are losing our ability to explore values because anything religious in a secular university has become an anathema. Perhaps it is time to re-open the dialogue.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
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