It’s becoming a habit of mine to record a YouTube video with some minimal notes and then to expand on some thoughts here on Substack. Today I’m going to expand on thoughts from two videos I’ve made on leaving academia, but especially my latest video, which I’ll link here for your convenience.
In that video, I make a brief argument for why I wouldn’t return to academia, even if I were to be offered a tenure-track job. Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t go back. That sounds a bit odd, since I’m very open about the fact that the life of a professor is the life I wanted to live. It’s a life of reading, writing, researching, and teaching — all things that I love.
I stand by what I said in the video, even though I know some people thought my comments were petty. The reason I wouldn’t want to go back to a university is pretty simple: I think we’ve lost sight of what a university is for. So let’s talk about that a bit.
Right now, universities are primarily credentialing institutions. The vast majority of students go to universities because they have been told that getting a degree will get them a better job, where a better job is defined as a job that will make you more money. And to some extent this is true. If you’re just talking about earnings, graduates of a four-year university do earn more money.
This is a flawed way of justifying the existence of universities, for at least two reasons.
First, it is an exclusively instrumental way of thinking about knowledge. On this line of thought, the knowledge you get from your university education is only worthwhile because it is going to let you do things, and what this really means is that it is going to let you do certain jobs. There’s no consideration of the intrinsic value of the knowledge, the way that engaging with the world – through books, through discussions, through experiments – forms you as a person. There’s no consideration of becoming a fuller human being, a human who can exercise more of her capacities. It is a deficient way of thinking about education.
Second, the logic only works in a particular cultural context, and there’s no reason to think we need that context to persist. That’s a bit abstract, so let me try and make it clearer. For many jobs, the reason you need a degree is simply because we expect you to have a degree. It isn’t because you need the skills or knowledge you picked up while attending a university. If we admitted to ourselves that people don’t need a bachelor’s degree to get a job as, say, a product manager or even a software engineer, the justification for the university system falls apart. So if we think universities are valuable (they are) and that these cultural institutions should be preserved and improved (they should be), we need to make the case in non-economic terms.
The argument for universities is straightforward, but I’ve found that it isn’t that compelling to a fairly large group of people, especially in the United States. Universities are for the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge and culture, and they are for the intellectual and moral formation of the students. Since it is better for our world to have more knowledge and more culture, and since students need to be intellectually and morally formed, then it is good to have universities.
That raises a different question: do universities live up to this mission? I think the answer right now is decidedly mixed. Some students come away feeling quite glad that they went to a university, that they really pursued the life of the mind. But many walk away thinking that they might have just wasted four or more years of their lives, and they come to resent their experience in large part because of the debt they’ve taken on.
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