America’s Medieval Universities

University graduations are quaint pageants. Mine took place in the same venue as the ceremonies of most large American universities, typically the largest one on campus: the football stadium. In the center of a vast colosseum of concrete and plastic seats, the university president, dressed in elaborate red robes made of polyester, shuffled onto a stage assembled above the fifty-yard line. He was flanked by men carry­ing banners with heraldic crests pertaining to the various schools within the university. The engineering school’s crest had a microscope on the escutcheon. In a tremulous voice, the president declared that we had received the “rights, privileges, and responsibilities” of a degree, and then we threw our cardboard caps.

It all felt a little bit like a renaissance fair. But despite its medieval pageantry, the university is the indispensable institution for the organi­zation of knowledge in every part of the modern world—not less in China or in the United States than in its birthplace in Europe. Its influence is not just in intellectual production; it is generalized across economic and political domains.

Expanding at breakneck speed after the Second World War, the American university has transformed from an institution accessible only to a small elite to the site of personal, professional, and political for­mation for vast swaths of the middle classes. Bachelor’s degree recipients made up just 5 percent of the U.S. adult population in 1940.¹ This figure doubled by 1970, doubled again to 20 percent by 1990, and has risen to 40 percent as of 2019 to make up practically all those involved in mana­gerial work outside the domain of the family business.

The American university now serves as hedge fund operator, real estate developer, start-up incubator, and the largest employer in two-thirds of the country’s largest one hundred cities. It also plays a highly conspicuous role in political, social, and cultural life. The revolution in American higher education has been emulated across the world—for example in Britain, where a much more top-down system was built out from the 1940s without prejudice to the special privileges of the elite-forming ancient universities; or in China, where 1,200 universities have been founded over the past two decades.²

What explains the shocking modern success of this medieval rem­nant? Surprisingly few accounts deal in a serious way with the history of the university in the longue durée or offer a serious analysis of its nature and influence in modern society. Books bemoaning the decline of virtue or scholarly excellence in the university—whether due to “wokeness” or budget cuts—have been plentiful for more than a century, yet largely devoid of interest in material or institutional conditions.³ On the other hand, a specialized literature on the economics of higher education deals with such issues as the value of a university degree as an investment or the effect of university admissions on social mobility, seldom taking a systematic sociological or historical view.

Oddly, given the American university’s ubiquitous influence and its frequent appearance in high-profile political debates, a serious and wide-ranging survey of its role in society has not been conducted in half a century.⁴ Perhaps the nature and influence of the university is precisely the reason for this surprising lack of attention. We have entrusted the study of the university to the university. But its preference for specialized treatments—and, perhaps, a protective scholarly esprit de corps, exacerbated by an understandable sense that the university’s values are under attack—has discouraged many scholars in the American univer­sity from producing warts-and-all studies of their own domain.

Recent debate over the political culture of the university and its spillover into American political discourse at large has made understanding the nature of the American university still more important. The university has played a major role in shaping national discourse around topics such as sexual harassment or the treatment of racial minorities before these topics boiled over as respective national “reckonings” in 2017 and 2020—just as campus protests in the 1960s resolved into broader cultural change during the ’70s.

It now seems clear the student protests of the ’60s were only the first sign of a correspondingly larger place in American politics and society for the university. The last thirty years have seen the advance of a novel elite political culture combining progressive stances on issues of race and gender with an increasingly censorious rhetorical attitude. Amid cease­less disputes between observers over the nature and merits of “political correctness,” “wokeness,” or “cancel culture,” it is generally agreed that the ideology these terms refer to is one that was born in the American university, even if now observable in elements of the national political, business, and media superstructure.

Commentators on the left often find this emphasis on race and gender salutary, though many are unconvinced it will produce the change they desire in American society. Some downplay the censoriousness of the new political culture, arguing that formal protections to free expression remain and whatever social consequences students face for expressing their views are immaterial.⁵ Commentators on the opposing side, conservatives and centrist liberals, are more critical of the current rhetorical climate in the university but are unable fully to describe its cause or present an alternative beyond empty enjoinders to the values of toleration.

What is the nature of this new ideology? “Wokeness” lacks a prophet on the order of a Marx, and there is no political leader whose personal cult has become synonymous with this ideology. Eric Kaufmann has plausibly traced this dispensation to the “minoritarian liberalism” of the nineteenth century.⁶ But his account fails to explain the one thing on which all commentators agree: that the contemporary form of this ideology emerged in the American university.

It is therefore worth considering whether the origins of this new political culture can convincingly be attributed to a wrong or sinister step in the dialectical development of modern liberalism—or simply ascribed to the moral failings of contemporary university students or their professors—or whether they lie in the institutional culture of the university itself.

That institutional culture is deeply marked at every level by a funda­mental historical contradiction. The university originated in medieval Europe and many of its formal structures, from the division into faculties to the lecture, date from the thirteenth century. Some of the principles that influence its organization—particularity, insularity, hier­archy—are recognizably medieval. Yet it plays an outsize role in a modern, democratic, capitalist economy and society.

Kaufmann is right to diagnose the university ideology as an offshoot of liberalism. We can add that it is the result of a specifically American liberalism accommodating itself to what remains in important ways a preliberal institutional environment, despite efforts at modernization by Germans and Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The university mindset—which is far broader than the political ideology that is most prominent inside its walls—generates characteristic anxieties in the young men and women who are formed in it. These anxieties only become more pronounced as graduates must live their adult lives outside the university’s walls in a society decidedly capitalist in its organization and liberal in its principles. This phenomenon deserves consideration as an important cause of the present deformations in our political and moral culture.

Students are taught in the university to expect things that American society is not set up to give them. This involves not just college students’ familiar insistence on certain moral assumptions about political issues, but also material things: a walkable living environment, for example, or work that follows no set hours. The resulting deformations have become more pronounced as more Americans go to college. As a critical mass of university graduates now populates the highest echelons of corporate and political life, pressures grow to introduce reforms to make society at large more closely resemble the university.

Moreover, the university’s nonrepresentative internal political organ­ization has combined with the social conscience of American liberalism—and lingering traces of the university’s monastic origins—to form a political culture where politics is conducted through ethical criticism of one’s peers or superiors rather than through the traditional American model of civil society organizing and standing for public office. The process by which American society is falling progressively under the influence of the political culture of the university is that of a revolution in mores—a fact which makes it difficult to track in material terms and which permits interested parties to deny its existence or downplay its scope.

Yet conservative critics, who often smirk that university students will be hard pressed to find “safe spaces” once they graduate, miss the point entirely. Graduates not only retain the morals of the contemporary university but are intent on reshaping their professional, personal, and physical environments in the university’s image, and have already made great strides in this effort.

The central problem of the university in American society is not, as the protests of many academics would have it, that it has become too profit-driven and capitalistic—but rather that it is still not capitalistic enough to play a conspicuous role without introducing distortions. The tensions introduced by the prominence of a still partially medieval institution in modern society can only be resolved in two possible ways: the creation of institutions of education and knowledge production on a more modern model, of which history and international comparison provide several examples; or a partial neo-feudalization of the modalities, if not the class structure, of modern society, a process already underway.⁷

Medieval Origins

Understanding the precise nature of the American university and its influence on society requires charting the historical development of the university from its birth in the Middle Ages, past its eighteenth-century crisis, and through nineteenth-century German reforms that led to the adoption and democratization of the university model in twentieth-century America.

During the European Middle Ages, the university took shape grad­ually as a corporation of scholars based on the model of the cathedral school and the monastery, with special privileges granted by secular or ecclesi­astical authority. In its institutional character, the university is purely medieval, not descended from ancient or Byzantine institutions of learning.⁸

By the thirteenth century, many of the university’s most prominent features were already set. To this day, the university’s basic model of funding, its financial relationship with its students, its internal intellec­tual organization, and its primary educational method remain unaltered in essence. Medieval university students paid fees to matriculate or re­ceived assistance from public or private sources. Study was divided into faculties (classically four: arts, theology, medicine, and law), with teach­ing staff assigned to each. The lecture was the primary means for the transmission of knowledge from master to student.

Tensions between university students and townspeople arose almost immediately. After brawls between students and Parisians resulted in several deaths, Pope Gregory IX was prevailed upon in 1231 to make students at the university at Paris answerable to the local bishop and not to secular authorities for their bad conduct. This was the first step to­ward a tradition of internal disciplinary procedure that is still active today—effective juridical autonomy for the university to exercise on its students.⁹

Ritual mistreatment of new students is documented from the four­teenth century. Medieval universities also acquired an association with Gothic architecture that they still maintain,¹⁰ and soon connections to the upper classes came too, as the university began to serve as a waystation for children of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie.¹¹ At Paris, students were divided into “nations”—international student organizations avant la lettre—and medieval university students in gen­eral were willing to travel far and wide to hear a famed scholar like Abelard. The ius ubique docendi, secured by papal bull by the end of the thirteenth century, guaranteed the rights of scholars to teach at other institutions, establishing the independence of the university and also its international quality. Networks of scholars spanned political boundaries, aided by a common language, yet universities were deeply dependent on local and national patronage—the goodwill of a bishop or king—for their survival. The modern university still faces both directions, looking to the world but depending on local sources of support. This double predicament encourages its peculiar combination of cosmopolitanism and provincialism.

By the fifteenth century, the university had settled into its enduring historical role as a conservative intellectual force against which novel currents react and into which they are eventually subsumed. Though he studied for a time at Bologna, Petrarch found the university to be intellectually barren, filled with scholars who mistook a narrow, uncriti­cal erudition for reason. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century humanists struck a pose as “outsiders resisting the dominant knowledge institution of the day,” write Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon in their survey of recurring crises in the academic humanities.¹²

Humanism achieved the establishment of a few novel, non-university institutions like the Collège de France, still operating today after its founding in 1530 by François I. But by the sixteenth century many humanists had obtained university positions themselves, which they used to try to lend a sense of greater importance or prestige to the studia humanitatis in the lower faculties (university culture being dominated even after the Reformation by theology faculties until the nineteenth century).

Today, even austerity-minded politicians eager to slash university funding tend to see engineering and natural science disciplines as essen­tial to the production and dissemination of basic scientific research. But the university was not always a central institution in this regard. By the seventeenth century the university, regarded as a scholastic-dominat­ed relic, was marginal to the advance of natural philosophy. Nimbler were the academies that had spread through Italy from the fifteenth century. From the second half of the seventeenth century, the Royal Society and the Académie royale des sciences in Paris provided an alternative, more centralized model for a modern institution of knowledge.

During the eighteenth century, it was the more improvised, ad hoc Italian academy model that saw the greatest success. Science moved into civil society as the university’s position acutely deteriorated, its future existence increasingly called into question. The study of Latin declined, striking at the linguistic mainstay of medieval university culture.

The Enlightenment was broadly opposed to the university as it then existed. The great mission of the century in the minds of its intellectuals was to disseminate knowledge more widely and actively through socie­ty. The century’s leading figures sought to promote utility, systematicity, and rationality instead of particularity and supposedly irrational and useless tradition. They saw themselves and their age as a decisive break with an ignorant medieval past—in Kant’s famous phrase in What Is Enlightenment?, in question was man’s “emergence from his self-im­posed nonage.”

The university appeared to the philosophes as the incarnation of everything they opposed: it was closed, particular, and possessed of no sense of its own efficient action on behalf of some public good. It was considered part of the accumulation of useless encumbrances that had to be sloughed off to pave the way for a future of ever widening horizons of knowledge. The task of Enlightenment, for Turgot, was to “topple these sterile monuments and stir up the ashes of the dead to nourish the living.”¹³ Condorcet saw no future for the university and hesitated to even use the word, confident that the age then dawning required an entirely different institutional model in order to build upon the scientific advances that had taken place outside the university over the past two centuries.¹⁴

The great Enlightenment philosophes themselves were seldom uni­versity men. Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant are the only truly major names with university positions. And even granting Edinburgh’s excep­tional status among eighteenth-century universities, Smith wrote his work under the influence of the French physiocrats, not university men. Kant is a late, transitional figure—an exception who, because of his close association with the German attempt to modernize the university, proves the rule.

Around this time, there were attempts to construct institutions of learning that would suit the modern age better than the university. The National Convention created the first école normale (teacher-training school) in France in a 1794 law, influenced by the ideas of Mirabeau and Condorcet (the latter by then dead). The institution opened its doors the next year, counting the mathematician Laplace among a distinguished teaching staff—only to close for good a few months later.¹⁵ Napoleon resurrected it in 1808 and established the Scuola Normale in Pisa two years later.

As both began producing more scholars than teachers, their modern foundation and utilitarian social mission generated an institutional cul­ture distinct from that of the traditional university. In France, the École normale supérieure, as it became known, formed the model for the country’s non-university system of higher education. The grandes écoles, as they are called, are composed of specialized institutions in economics, technology, administration, and engineering, among other subjects. They train a relatively small corps of students who pass rigor­ous centralized examinations. The grandes écoles now occupy a promi­nent place—not without scandal—in the country’s political life, in a way broadly analogous to the Ivy League in the United States.

But the grande école system did not catch on outside France—and even there, it continues to share space with the university. This is largely because the failing fortunes of the university were revived in Germany.

The German Adaptation

At the start of the nineteenth century, the wholesale collapse of the university seemed imminent. The National Convention had suppressed France’s universities in 1793. Enrollments at German universities were down 50 percent by 1800.¹⁶ Theology, the most prestigious university faculty and the one that lent the institution its character, was increasingly despised and ignored.

Within a decade, however, a generation of post-Kantian German intellectuals had latched onto the university as the essential institution in the realization of their vision of a community of intellectuals oriented toward science (Wissenschaft) as a way of life—a change from the uni­versity’s traditional orientation toward God. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new German-originated philosophy of the university, paired with a rationalized, bureaucratized organization, spread from the German lands to America. There, Johns Hopkins and Harvard led a movement to reorganize archaic American colleges as modern research universities. This set a pattern adopted wholesale during the mass expan­sion of the latter half of the twentieth century.

That, at least, is the general view of the German role in constructing the modern university—a matter that forms the subject of Organizing Enlightenment, a 2015 book by Chad Wellmon, professor at the Uni­versity of Virginia. In a highly original analysis as attuned to contemporary media theory as to currents in German idealism, he considers the university as the “last technology of the Enlightenment”—i.e., a techno­logical solution to an informational crisis that had unfolded across the eighteenth century.

The problem was too many books. Drawing parallels to the contemporary sense of internet-prompted “information overload,” Wellmon describes how a massive increase in the volume of scholarly material printed during the eighteenth century marked the exhaustion of a certain simple, utilitarian vision of Enlightenment that equated more books with more learning. A surfeit of unassimilable erudition now obstructed rather than advanced the cause of Enlightenment. Contemporaries spoke of a “plague of books.” Eighteenth-century intellectuals had the impres­sion that the sharp increase in the objective conditions of knowledge (i.e., facts as represented in printed matter) were overwhelming the subjective capacity of the human intellect to assimilate them into a rational order.

Wellmon traces the influence of Kant, Romanticism, and the begin­nings of German idealism on the rise of the research university. In contrast to William Clark, whose Academic Charisma and the Origin of the Research University (2006) conceives of the German university revival in Weberian terms as a transition from a traditional model to a rational-bureaucratic model enlivened by touches of charisma, Wellmon argues that the rise of the research university was as much Romantic and political as rational and bureaucratic.¹⁷

The sense of a crisis of Enlightenment grew more intense as German writers including Herder, Novalis, and Goethe joined the pile-on against erudition and Latin learning. Scientists appeared as figures who might rescue Enlightenment from this danger, but how should they be thought of? Schelling insisted that modern science needed scientists and admitted they were an aristocracy; Fichte insisted that scholars were a social class to themselves and found the scholar’s vocation to be crucial to the future of the university.¹⁸

Finally, Wilhelm von Humboldt, a member of the Prussian political elite charged with reforming the school system, encapsulated the pre­ceding years of debate in an 1809 memorandum containing a “highly portable argument for the purpose of the university in a modern media ecology.”¹⁹ Humboldt held that existing technologies of knowledge neglected the formation of thinking subjects. The modern university could fill this gap by transforming science into a way of life. The founding of the University of Berlin in 1810 gave form to this notion, and soon German universities began remodeling themselves in its image. The text itself remained undiscovered until 1896, after which it became a touchstone for the German university philosophy, by then already adopted as a model across America.

Wellmon seems eager to deemphasize the conservative and nationalistic motivations of the German university reform. It bears remembering that Humboldt and Schleiermacher’s reforms were intended as a direct response to Napoleon.²⁰ The goal was to fortify the university to compete in scholarship with French institutions. Because it had a dual function—scholars taught and studied—it had sometimes been considered, for example by Humboldt, as a lower forum compared to the academy.²¹ Furthermore, the university had not been historically asso­ciated primarily with the German lands, but as the French put their energies behind other institutional models, and with the eighteenth-century success of the reformed University of Göttingen in mind, the university began to appear as a potentially German domain for intellectual activity. Kant himself had defended the university—or at least its lower philosophy faculty, which he thought should be subordinated to the interests of the state—in a 1798 tract, the Conflict of the Faculties.

The fortification of the university in nineteenth-century Germany was of a piece with the massive Prussian state funding for classical scholarship and the museum-building campaign in Berlin from the 1820s. This was all part of a cultural offensive intended as a balm for the amour propre of the German bourgeois after the wounds inflicted by the Napoleonic defeats and, later, as German political and economic power waxed.

Wellmon remarks at one point that German efforts to revitalize the university represented “not simply the conservative defense of a particu­lar institution.”²² Not simply, indeed—but a successful conservative defense of a particular institution is precisely what took place in early nineteenth-century Germany. The result of the successful German reform of the university was that French-led efforts to establish new institutions of knowledge production along modern lines did not suc­ceed on the scale they might have otherwise.

By giving new justifications to an old institutional form, in a manner suitable, as it turned out, for export and later for democratization, Germans of the early nineteenth century ensured that for the organization of knowledge, for the intellectual formation of the young, and for the conduct of scientific research, the modern world would depend to a great extent on institutions whose nature was, and remains, that of an unwieldy amalgam of traditional and modern tendencies.

As for the lofty post-Kantian ideas behind the rise of the research university, Wellmon has reconstructed them minutely and is right to take them seriously—but they should not be taken entirely at face value. Did they really amount to an essential change in the institutional ethos of the university, compared to its medieval origins? An administrative reorganization of the university’s units of teaching and learning from one based on faculties to one based on departments (most modern American universities, indicatively, employ both divisions) and a shift in the tutelary figurehead of the university from God to science may fall short of this threshold. As Weber says about bureaucracies, merely changing their heads does not alter their nature.

Even the seminar—cast as a central institution in the university’s transformation into the locus of the construction of a modern “discipli­nary self”—turns out to have emerged from theological seminaries in Halle.²³ More significant than the shift in guiding ideology is perhaps the definitive handoff from church to state in the role of guaranteeing the university, providing it with funds, special juridical status, and bureaucratic administration from without. Yet even in this regard the continuities are striking. The University of Göttingen was the eighteenth-century model for a university dependent on the state rather than the church, yet “like medieval universities,” Wellmon notes, “Göttingen’s faculty and students were exempt from civil jurisdiction.”²⁴

Further, we must consider how the ideal of the university as the locus for the formation of thinking selves has fared. Wellmon is careful not to suggest that the university has reliably realized this ideal since its inception, only that it remains the guiding ideal (and we can add that he seems to possess sympathy for it). By the end of Wellmon’s narrative, as prominent a champion of the new university as August Böckh, director of the philosophy seminar at the University of Berlin from its founding and father of the Berliner Schule, found himself admitting as early as 1820 that specialization in philology had rendered it a bureaucratic system in which no one individual possessed a “concept of the internal relationship of the different parts.”²⁵ Of course, the French university fared even worse in this regard: by centralizing vertical control in the disciplines when he revived the universities, Napoleon “negated the idea of the university as a place in which the different types of knowledge came together.”²⁶ But the university was no longer the indispensable institution of higher learning in France.

It is clear, as Wellmon recognizes, that the nineteenth-century German university ideal, in its eagerness for state supervision, embrace of a separate status for scholars, and fervor for scientific production, represented a triumph for the specializing instincts of Enlightenment, and a defeat for its egalitarian instinct. The version of Enlightenment that was to be embedded in the form of the modern university was to be a conservative German formulation. The university had found a means to do to Enlightenment what before it had done to humanism—domesticate and incorporate it.

The specializing tendency in the new German universities was at odds with the Romantic, post-Kantian vision of the university as a site for the creation of thinking subjects. In envisaging the university as an organism of knowledge in which no individual might have the complete picture, but in which scholars together created and maintained far more knowledge than they could be capable of separately, the German reformers forgot the critiques of the university that had been leveled during the eighteenth century. Especially crucial among those critiques was the argument that in the university, individuals found their capacity for reason narrowed or subsumed into the ethos of an institution which tended to favor its own interests and was unable to achieve a disinterested view of its own role in society.

The American Adaptation

Before the second half of the nineteenth century, American higher education was dominated by colleges. The term, still used interchange­ably with “university” in common American parlance, indicates a closer adherence to the English university model, notions of a liberal arts curriculum derived from the medieval trivium and quadrivium, and a purpose to “inculcate a traditional set of Protestant virtues” in students.²⁷ In early America, education beyond the graduate level did not exist in its modern form and admission to law or medical school often did not require a bachelor’s degree.

In progress by the end of the nineteenth century was a typically American endeavor to raise vocational subjects—at the time, chiefly farming—to the level of the liberal arts.²⁸ This took the form of land grants (significantly the 1862 Morrill Act) to future state universities, many of which functioned more as vocational schools than universities during their first decades.

Daniel Coit Gilman, an influential figure in the rise of the American research university, spent a short time as the first president of the University of California, at a time when it was debating whether to promote classical education or focus on the perfection of agricultural techniques, before accepting an offer to become the first president of Johns Hopkins. “Universities are conservative,” Gilman admitted in an 1885 speech, reminding his audience they were also “successors of the ancient monasteries.”²⁹ Gilman fashioned Hopkins into the first center of graduate education in the United States in emulation of German models, and in turn a widely copied example for an institution of American higher learning. A generation of scholars formed at Hopkins, among them Woodrow Wilson, helped to establish the model elsewhere.

Other new universities also looked to Germany for inspiration. Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, praised “the German nation” for developing “a system, which, for half a century, has won the admiration of the world by its intellectual triumphs.”³⁰ Meanwhile, Charles William Eliot’s reforms at Harvard brought the university revolution to America’s most storied college, confirming the triumph of the German model.

The replacement of the American college model with the German-derived university model, in a wave of new universities and reforms to existing ones in the latter half of the nineteenth century, did signify a bureaucratization of higher learning in America. What is less recognized is that it also entailed the importation into the American education system of conservative European continental tendencies for the first time, such as the rise of a sense of separate status for scholars and the clear definition of internal hierarchies. U.S. higher education changed from a system bearing the stamp of early modern Protestantism and the echoes of medieval liberal arts curricula to a system, like the German one that was its model, more fundamentally torn between modernizing and medieval characteristics. The influence of the German model helps explain why it is fair to say that even American universities founded well into the modern era, in a country with no history of feudalism, can be described as bearing neo-medieval characteristics.

The Mores of the Modern University

A complete analysis of the culture of the modern American university must take as its starting point the establishment of the German model as the American norm decades before the university’s rapid postwar expansion. This process of expansion, and its connection with broader Cold War trends, deserves close consideration for which there is little space here. Its most important result, for our purposes, is that 40 percent of the American population is formed in an institutional culture marked by contradictions between medieval holdovers (and neo-medieval im­portations) on the one hand, and modern, distinctively American im­pulses on the other.

How do these contradictions manifest in the culture of the contemporary university? One obvious fact about the university is that its internal structure remains profoundly closed, hierarchical, and non-representative or undemocratic. Among the faculty, each department is ordered in ascending distinctions of rank: graduate students, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, and so on, with other distinctions such as chaired professorships providing additional grada­tions.

Much is made of the progression from the hierarchically ordered faculties of the Middle Ages (theology first, philosophy last) to scientifically distinguished disciplines ordered into departments in no particular order. But there remains an unofficial hierarchy of departments in terms of the financial, recognition-seeking, and therefore political priorities of the university. This varies by university but the most common model now, likely to become more universal in the coming decades, has the natural sciences and the engineering disciplines first, followed by nonengineering vocational disciplines, such as business and the social sciences, with the humanities once again last.

And if specialization is highly advanced in terms of the scope of individual scholars’ academic work, it is notably not a defining characteristic in other areas. The roles of teacher and researcher (and often administrator) are combined in the person of the professor. This can cause tensions: Students complain professors prioritize their research over their teaching, while professors complain of distractions from re­search. Excellence in scholarship is sometimes prized above pedagogical skill in choosing between candidates, but appointments must be made to satisfy the teaching needs of the department, sometimes impinging on the desire to hire a scholar doing original work. Many college-age men would gladly take military history classes, but the field of academic history for decades has been less interested in military history than in other subfields.

Decisions on whether to award tenure are made in secret and with strict rules against dissemination of the content of the discussions, in a procedure more reminiscent of a papal conclave than a performance review in a typical corporation. The name itself has medieval connotations, but tenure is a modern American institution, distinct from the German system. It was codified in the American Association of Uni­versity Professors’ 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” and subsequently written into countless faculty contracts and bargaining agreements.

In a typical synthesis, tenure in its contemporary form combines a medieval-style privilege, granting separate status and special protections to an individual, with a modern American ideological justification: the protection of free speech, and the potential for future usefulness that may lie in ideas currently rejected by conventional wisdom or the academic establishment. As the postwar enrollment boom dries up and market pressures mount for cuts to faculty, tenure now serves as a selective barrier providing at least some protection against sweeping rollbacks of academic labor protections.

Mounting calls from left-liberals demand the formation of committees to distinguish “low-value” from “high-value” speech by professors and to strip labor protections from individuals who make “disqualify­ing” statements.³¹ But such demands are merely the discursive side of a pincer whose other, neoliberal political-economic arm is adjunctification, mounting precarity, and wage cuts for teaching labor.³²

Meanwhile, demands for professors to police the expressed political opinions of their colleagues would merely formalize a process already embedded in the social and professional codes of the university. Colle­giality is king in the disciplinary regime of the academy. It is tempting to wonder whether one reason tenure has endured this long is that its protections of controversial inquiry and speech are often awarded to individuals who can demonstrate over the space of a decade of close collaboration with fellow scholars that they will not use them.

In the humanities disciplines, pressure to conform grows more intense as the number of available faculty posts shrinks faster than the number of graduate students vying for them. Even after tenure, when one’s post is secure, the fear of losing status often persists. After dedicating a large portion of their lives to gaining respect from colleagues, many scholars generally continue in that effort, refraining from expressing whatever potentially controversial ideas they may have. “The important lesson . . . is not that the politics of the professoriate is lib­eral,” writes Louis Menand. “The important lesson is that the politics of the professoriate is homogeneous.”³³

It is even more important to consider how the university rules the group of people that forms its largest body of members, its third estate: students. The doctrine of in loco parentis ended in 1961 with Dixon v. Alabama, in which a federal court found that Alabama State College had violated black students’ constitutional rights by expelling them for attending a civil rights demonstration. But universities still maintain a great degree of control over their students in a complicated landscape of imbricated liberty and discipline.

After the sexual revolution and the end of in loco parentis, for example, administrators became increasingly aware that the coeducational university was a landscape of very real danger, especially for female students. But a Foucauldian analysis of the university’s response to this danger practically writes itself: behind the apparent sexual liberation of college students now lies a regime of discourse centered on specific notions of intimacy and consent that teaches them to think about and act out their desires in corresponding ways. The resulting habits have met with criticism. Allan Bloom thought the highly trans­actional aspect of college “relationships”—he used the term with derision—instilled in students a “crippled eros” and made remote the possibility of real love and longing.³⁴

What about students’ political life? During the critical years when they form their political subjectivities, college students, unlike most American adults, do not, practically speaking, govern themselves through their representatives. The university is a body in which those who govern (faculty, professional administrators) are not drawn from among the governed.

Business corporations are, of course, also structured hierarchically—though they often preserve a prospect of long-term advancement, at least within their white-collar workforces.⁵ But more importantly, corporations—at least since the age of the company town ended—are not meant to dominate all aspects of employees’ lives around the clock. They do not generally dictate the precise conditions of their employees’ leisure time, maintain a separate police force for their employees, or house them.

This point is worth dwelling on: unlike the workplace, the church, or the school,³⁶ the university is a totalizing community, especially for students. On the factory floor or in the classical nine-to-five model, workers clock in and out, clearly demarcating the boundaries between work and leisure. But the university predates this modern boundary and does not recognize it. “Most students make love and study in the same room,” writes William Clark.³⁷ The role of student or professor (the case is less clear for administrators) is not a professional role like that of accountant or software engineer or salesman—rather, as Weber indi­cated, it is a vocation.

Professors less than accountants are able to “clock out” and return to a home where they cease to act in their professional capacity. This is true not only in regard to a few obvious details—academics reply to emails on the weekend or into the evening more often than do most journalists, and are known to spend long or unusual hours writing or reading—but also in a more abstract sense. To be a professor is an all-encompassing activity, perhaps even more than medicine or law (two professions that also have their origin in the medieval university). Few would claim to “work as a professor”—one simply is a professor.

This is even more the case for students, who do not have homes to go back to except on vacations. In America, unlike Europe, students generally live on a self-contained campus or in adjacent student neigh­borhoods that function as informal extensions of the campus. Save for the few hours a week when they are in lectures or seminars, students flit moment to moment between work and leisure. When they are studying, they wonder if they could be relaxing instead; when they are relaxing, they wonder if they should be studying instead. Students spend most of their time giving their full attention to neither. The monotony and uncertainty of this condition give rise to a characteristic anxiety and narrowness.

But if students are uniquely trapped in a single institutional environment, they have uniquely little control over it. Students do not vote for professors, administrators, board members, or the president; nor do they have a say in selecting campus police officers, members of Title IX panels, or directors of the endowment. Student government is understood by faculty, administrators, and students alike to be more or less powerless and for show only. Students’ inability to formally express their will regarding the political, juridical, and economic structures that affect them every day is usually justified by pointing to the temporariness of their membership in the university or to the fact that they are supposed to be busy studying.

This might be harmless, except that students—understandably—still want to make their voices heard. Their only recourse is petition and protest. Because of the limits on formal expression of their preferences, political activity for university students becomes synonymous with the list of demands and the noisy disruption of an event.

A people feels some responsibility for the actions of its elected representatives, but there is no mechanism of responsibility for student activist groups if a college president does or does not accede to their demands, and no final, formal means of ascertaining exactly how much of the student body agrees with activist demands.³⁸ (Since the 1970s, student bodies as a whole have tended to be politically passive.)

Under such circumstances, the incentive is always to demand the maximum. Rousseau says somewhere that a petulant child learns to demand more than it can reasonably receive, as a means of keeping its parent perpetually chastened and dreading another outburst. In this sense, the hostile politics of university students are the result of their unfortunate status of extended adolescence. Though the passive majority of college students may not participate in the leveling of demands to the administration, they witness it and, like their active peers, learn to equate this type of gesture with political activity.

There are repercussions beyond the college years. The result of this extended political adolescence during the period of young adulthood, when students’ political and moral sensibilities are set, is what can fairly be called a miseducation for citizenship. Students’ qualities are more or less what one would expect given their situation, embedded in the institutional culture of the university but subject to the demands of the American social conscience. Yet the instincts described above endure past graduation and become a blueprint for behavior in the corporate, bureaucratic, or political realm.

But the “woke” moral-political climate of the university derives not just from institutional culture but from institutional history. In the early nineteenth century, Humboldt and his idealist antecedents had seen science as an organizing life principle for scholars. But specialization eroded the notion of science as an integrated whole, and despite the efforts of the positivists, science failed to develop ethical content.

Weber formulated in the early twentieth century a more pessimistic and limited concept of the role of science as an organizing principle in the university. The austere duty of the scholar was to preserve objectivity by distinguishing between facts and values and by refusing to make, in his capacity as a scholar, judgments about values. Weber’s definition of the role of the scholar suggested that dedication to science itself was just another “value” that could not be judged and therefore could not be defended in a properly rational way, something critics have since argued amounted to a kind of nihilism.

The ethical thinness of Weber’s concept of science as a central principle of the modern university made it vulnerable to the encroachment of politically oriented moral principles into the space left open by the departure of the Christian deity. John Henry Newman’s protestations were a forewarning.³⁹ In this limited sense there is a glimmer of truth to the observation made in many quarters comparing “wokeness” to a religion. Allan Bloom’s analysis went along similar lines: the abdica­tion of commitment to philosophical inquiry by the university had left the door open for politics to insert itself as the master force approving or rejecting scholarly projects. This was his analysis of “the guns at Cornell,” the takeover of Willard Straight Hall in 1969 by gun-toting student radicals, which ended with the university’s agreement to far-reaching changes to its administration.⁴⁰

As always, it is important to note the limits of political radicalism in the university—as Clark Kerr noted, “The faculty member who gets arrested as a ‘freedom rider’ in the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior faculty consent to any change whatsoever on his campus in the North.”⁴¹ This holds equally for students and graduates, whose political-moral demands typically concern the internal makeup of elite institutions more than these institutions’ relation to the society they direct.

The authors of the recent book The End of the End of History describe this phenomenon as “hyperpolitics”: following the decline of the mass politics of the twentieth century, political inclinations remain but are manifested not in organized demands for structural change through parties or labor unions but in ethical demands in personal life or in one’s immediate institutional or social surroundings. We have wit­nessed the rise of “the personal is political” not as an extension of mass politics into personal domains but as the atomization of the former and its misplacement into the domain of the ethical, in the process neutralizing its potential to achieve social change.⁴²

But the political-ethical demands of “social justice” also prove an inadequate guide to many aspects of life—for example, close personal relationships. A culture of greater sexual equality has brought great benefits to intimate relationships when it can also tolerate sexual differ­ence, something critics of the movement’s excesses can lose sight of.⁴³ But close observers (or readers of millennial literature, like Sally Rooney’s novels) will have noticed deformities in the emotional lives of the college educated that result from the political culture they absorb in the university. College-educated men and women sometimes feel obliged to perform opposition to “traditional” displays of masculinity or femininity. But this can be alienating: many feel they are not supposed to appear to want things that they do want, and that the other party also wants to give them.

The University Apart

The pandemic provided a clear indication that universities possess a political culture distinct from much of American society, resulting in a different policy response to external shocks. The American university’s nonrepresentative form and institutional culture permitted it to develop more draconian and intrusive internal regimes in response to the pandemic than could states, local governments, companies, or primary and secondary schools.

Students at Yale were forbidden from visiting local businesses and encouraged to report each other to a central committee for violations of public health guidelines.⁴⁴ Princeton told its students in December 2021 that they could not leave Mercer County.⁴⁵ Cornell, Columbia, and countless other universities that presumably still maintain some number of Foucauldians on their faculty rosters enrolled students and faculty alike in mandatory Covid checks unhesitatingly dubbed “surveillance testing” once or more per week, in most cases preserved in force after multiple rounds of vaccination had also been made mandatory. During much of 2020 and 2021, many students could leave their dorm rooms only to receive a nose swab or pick up prepackaged bags of food to be consumed back in the empty room between joining classes on Zoom—an ascetic routine that recalls the monastic origins of the university.

Restrictions on gatherings in private residences were frequently decreed in blue states—but universities, unlike local and state governments, were in a place to enforce these requirements on students, since they also administered their residences and found themselves under pressure by highly Covid-cautious students and faculty to dispense harsh consequences against violators of public health guidelines. It seems fair to say that during the most intense period of the pandemic, university students living on campus came closer than any other large group of adult Americans, in red or blue states, to experiencing an Australian-style hard lockdown.

This is not just because many university students agreed with the restrictions. (As of January 2022, university enrollment is down 5 percent since the start of the pandemic, but perhaps less from principled opposition than from exhaustion with virtual learning.⁴⁶) It is also be­cause university students in general are already used to following rules handed down to them by university administrations.

Primary and secondary schools often ran up against opposition from parents on issues like closures or mask and vaccine requirements. Parents of schoolchildren have close and regular contact with their children and exercise political power on school boards through elections and financial influence through taxes or, in the case of private or parochial schools, tuition. Parents, unlike university students, bear the influence of the baseline middle-American opposition to intrusion on personal freedom—what Ross Douthat calls “folk libertarianism.”⁴⁷ In the case of the university, parents may pay tuition but are a much more distant force who feel also that their technically grown-up children can make their own decisions.

Or consider the university’s physical footprint. The pseudo-medieval fortifications of Yale and the University of Chicago were erected in emulation of the genuinely premodern walled-off quadrangles of Ox­ford and Cambridge—a holdover from an era when such structures were needed to protect them from attack: Oxford came under siege during the English Civil War. But if constructed for show, these bastions now serve an uncomfortably neo-medieval purpose in insulating students from the decayed landscape of the American city.

As it becomes automatic for students to scan their cards to escape the city into the citadel, they acquire a cast of mind in which they and their domain are set apart from the residents of the city at large. They retain this instinctive exclusiveness. It serves as the constant condition upon the morally universalizing and socially “aware” nature of their rhetoric and mental habits. It is only natural that calls for diversity should be concentrated upon making a statistic or two describing the elect few who dwell intra muros parallel more closely the numbers measuring the world outside (a kind of virtual representation redivivus) and never in favor of tearing down the walls that separate the two groups.

Other urban universities have likewise become fortresses. The University of Southern California is one example: “Every occupied territory must have an army, and the area around USC is no exception; the university possesses one of the largest private police forces in the United States,” a recent article in the Drift notes. “After an on-campus shooting in 2012, USC effectively became a gated community, erecting fences around the campus’s perimeter, requiring guests to register with the university in advance of visits, and forcing students to scan their fingerprints in order to get into their dorms.”⁴⁸

The sharp discontinuity between the university and its American surroundings is no less extreme outside the city. It takes little imagination to observe the similarity between rural colleges and the monasteries that are their institutional ancestors. Suburban campuses like the Uni­versity of Colorado or Stanford University have little need for aggressive security regimes but remain distinct in their dense, centralizing, self-contained structure—registering a stark contrast with the vast, typically Western American expanse of single-family homes that surrounds both. From an airplane window thirty thousand feet over Palo Alto or Boulder, it is easy to ascertain at a glance the precise boundaries of each campus. It could hardly be easier to observe that the university is a uniquely incongruous presence in the American landscape.

We All Live on Campus Now

As a critical mass of Americans have become university graduates, especially in the upper-middle classes, the habits of the university have become generalized through society. One highly significant realm in which this transformation is playing out is in professional life. Attention is paid to the “woke” politics that college graduates are now seen bringing to office life, allegedly disrupting its collegial yet pragmatic culture with an infusion of moral fervor and political stridency.⁴⁹ But there are other significant changes underway.

White-collar workers enter the workforce accustomed to the uni­versity’s lack of division between work and leisure. Increasingly, college graduates accept or even demand a similar breakdown of the division between work and leisure in their professional roles. Technological changes (email, the smartphone, Zoom) and force majeure (the pandemic) have facilitated this breakdown between work and leisure for white-collar workers. But the adoption, and in some cases the origin, of these technologies is impelled originally by the desire to work in the ways that their adoption permits.

The technology industry, responsible for the means of remote work and a pioneer of its adoption itself, is home to an unusually high propor­tion of college graduates and holders of postgraduate degrees, indicating an even greater influence of university culture on the individual.⁵⁰ Implicit in the high-profile stories of tech CEOs dropping out of college to found companies is the fact that such companies emerged directly from the social network—so to speak—of the university, and therefore bear the stamp of its cast of mind.

Having grown comfortable as students with the “flexibility” that a lack of division between work and leisure entails, and with the arrival of the option of permanently remote work, many young professionals will now never experience the rigors of a traditional office lifestyle. Many greet this development as a liberation, and in some respects it certainly can be—from the hassle of a commute, for instance—but they may discover too late that the physical and temporal segregation between the domain of labor and the domain of leisure had psychological and politi­cal advantages that the new regime will deny them.

With the arrival of remote work, a taboo against the intrusion of professional labor into intimate and family life has been broken, and it is naïve to think the intrusion will stop with the end of the high phase of the pandemic or with the glances presented to one’s coworkers of a spouse, a girlfriend, or a child crossing in the background of a Zoom call. Without mistaking the office for an intrinsically democratic or moral institution, we can acknowledge that for all its irritations it served as an only partially permeable container for professional obligations and allowed for a heterogeneity that left room for quotidian but not unim­portant forms of liberty. What one does at home is not the business of one’s coworkers, and what one does at the office is not the business of those one lives with. The boundaries separating the two allowed for a modicum of freedom insofar as neither sphere held predominant power over the individual during all times and in all spaces. Diversity is life, said Constant: uniformity, death.

Now roommates and relatives have become coworkers after a fashion, overhearing meetings and witnessing the day’s tribulations, while coworkers gain a window into home life and a justification for inquiring into it. This is not to mention the massive increase in required medical procedures (vaccination and testing) for employees during the pandemic. In a country where healthcare is already provided largely by employers, one’s health has now become everyone’s business. Meanwhile, lunch breaks become fuzzier or disappear, along with the precise start and end of the day’s work.

As white-collar workers start to live like students, work and leisure begin to blend into a single unified regime that provides less diversity and likely less liberty. Professionals take on the student’s characteristic anxiety, worrying whether they should be working when they are not and worrying whether they should be relaxing when they are working. This may be one reason that the last few years have seen a rise in the use of anti-anxiety medications.⁵¹ Yet jobs still list “flexible work hours” as a perk and ads tout smartphones’ power to transform all domains of life, from the brewery to the boudoir, into the realm of economic productivity. To the college graduate, having spent four years poised between work and leisure, all this is desirable.

There are, of course, limits to the impact that education, in the university or otherwise, can have on American society: the limits that restrict the ability of the superstructure to affect the base. But as the university has become a site of social reproduction for ever-wider swaths of the dominant class in American life, its institutional culture becomes constantly more influential.

In this regard, it is worth noting the tendency to insert ever more professions into the university. The transformation of vocational col­leges into universities has begun to attract criticism from the center and right over the past several years. College or even graduate-level courses have emerged to teach skills for professions such as journalism that were previously understood to require only skills it was possible to learn on the job. But as attending college has become an appealing lifestyle choice for middle- to upper-class families, a stepping-stone that offers parents something to brag about and children a locus of liberation from parental authority, the university and its attendant debt regimes seem to have a stranglehold on a wide swath of American society.⁵²

The rise of business schools—often cited by professors as the final nail drilled into the coffin of the American university’s dedication to philosophical inquiry rather than professional advancement—may also have had the opposite effect, diffusing a perhaps attenuated university influence further into the upper realms of the corporate landscape. Another trend is the academicization of literary fiction and poetry. Complaints about CIA funding for MFA programs miss the point: the introduction of peer review for poems or short stories (the “workshop”) enforces academic-style collegiality, discipline, and homogeneity on forms whose historical appeal has lain precisely in the opposite of each of these qualities. The dogma of literature as “craft,” which has clear roots in the American university’s attempt to include the vocational disciplines in academe, twinned with the more recent encroachment of literature as political-moral dogma, threatens to foreclose the possibilities of literature as aesthetic gesture. It is hard to ignore the influence of the cloistered Weltanschauung of the university on literary production since the midcentury.

Nor is the phenomenon restricted to literature. Louis Menand describes how the university supplanted the world of letters as the hub of American intellectual production: “In some areas, the university supplemented or replaced ‘Bohemia’—communities like Greenwich Vil­lage, Provincetown, and North Beach—as a space for independent art and thought.” This entailed changes in the tenor of the material pro­duced, with the sense of urgency and the social orientation of the “little magazines” replaced by a more detached approach. “Everything that got taken up into the academy ended up adopting a single discourse: the discourse of disinterestedness.”⁵³

Another realm in which the culture of the university has spread into society at large is in social geography. “Yimby” or “urbanist” proponents of reforms to American cities to make them denser and more walkable often like to say that upper-middle-class Americans love their college years so much because it is the only period in their lives during which they live in such a dense environment, before they are banished to the car-dominated suburbs to work, raise a family, and retire.

But could the causation go the other way around? Americans may increasingly favor city life and its densification because more of them have been to college. The formation of urban enclaves of gentrification by young people of similar middle-to-upper-middle-class origins, the repurposing of warehouses into loft apartments in Brooklyn or north­west Portland, and the rise of a rejuvenated bike culture in cities all are explicable as attempts to recreate the college experience in an urban terrain depredated by suburbanization, urban renewal, and deindustrialization. The birth of “yuppie” culture in the late 1980s and 1990s came just as the country’s percentage of college graduates crossed the 20 percent threshold. As that percentage doubled again over the succeeding three decades, the predilections of “hipsters” (as they were rechristened in the 2000s) for single-origin coffee and craft beer went from being mocked in American mass media to adopted tout court by the college educated.

The End of the Age of the University?

My interest here is in drawing attention to the historical nature of the university, the effects of its institutional culture, and the influence of its habits upon American society, much more than proposing policy alter­natives to the current higher education regime. But a few brief remarks can be hazarded.

Unlike the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, the American university is not in acute crisis. It is firmly entrenched, and there is no reason to think it should not continue to play a prominent role in American intellectual life. The mission of universities, especially public universities, to serve as bastions of learning for its own sake in a country often over-dedicated to economic efficiency and productivity is a badly needed one. Reitter and Wellmon cite Tony Judt on the state university as essentially American:

You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears . . . a li­brary! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.⁵⁴

But perhaps the university, now long accustomed to its dominance, should begin to share more space with a wider range of different institutions of higher learning and research. The editors of the Point, a magazine adjacent to academe that is the source of a good deal of thoughtful consideration of the role of the university,⁵⁵ have written that the cause of humanistic inquiry “should never rest solely on the survival” of the university. But their suggestions of possible alternatives—corporate book seminars, for example—seem not fully equal to the task, in some cases too vulnerable to the pull of American mid-browism and in general restricted (as the authors make clear) to the humanities.⁵⁶

Sam Goldman, writing recently in the Week, defended the historical role of patronage in supporting intellectual endeavors and argued that billionaire-funded “magic mountain” projects such as the University of Austin (officially UATX until it receives accreditation) “deserve credit for trying.”⁵⁷ But in the complex landscape of modern mass society, an alternative to the contemporary university must take the form of an integrated system—or at least an ecosystem—of institutions in order to make a difference.

A more robust system of public and private research institutes—universities without students—could be constructed to provide a complementary alternative to the university model. For public institutes, the academy model first developed in the seventeenth century is worth reconsideration. Another model is the Collège de France, a non-degree-granting research institution where chairs are nonpermanent and chosen without reference to academic qualifications. While hyper-elite in char­acter, this setup allows the institution to maintain a certain agility in its culture that traditional universities can lack. Institutes along similar lines could be set up at the state level in parallel to state universities, allowing for a diverse set of material and political interests to be poised against researchers’ own inclinations.

Perhaps more important still is to conceive of institutions to educate young people that are not universities. The French grande école system should be studied as a model for a parallel network of higher learning. It bears remembering that a network of American normal schools, often serving mainly to train schoolteachers, existed well into the nineteenth century before most were converted into universities. These could be revived, with some equipped with specific vocational purposes and others, like the École normale supérieure, more intellectual heft.

The university, like any institution, has advantages and limitations that derive from its institutional setup, and should be complemented by other institutions with different advantages and limitations. These reforms would provide the means to separate teaching and research in some contexts and allow for alternative forms of institutional organization and culture in higher learning and knowledge production. The major challenge is to provide students with alternatives to the traditional “college experience” that will deliver the things they look for in the university in a different manner—intellectual adventure, professional advancement, and an appealing lifestyle. Efforts should focus on how to deliver the latter in the context of a more democratic or at least less totalizing environment.

The American university and American society are different, but they must live together. If the dominance of the university on the formation of young people is not attenuated, it seems inevitable that the movement to make American society more closely resemble the uni­versity will continue—but university education seems to have been expanded as far as society will tolerate and enrollments have begun to drop.

This divides Americans into two opposed groups. It is not clear that the non-college-educated want a society that more closely resembles an institution that they have not been exposed to. In politics and morals, in the geographical layout of cities and suburbs, in expectations about work and intimate life, university attendance determines American desires in ways that have already contributed to political polarization and can be expected to continue to do so in the years to come, unless the task of educating the children of America’s middle and upper classes can be shared by a wider range of institutions with different cultures.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 2 (Summer 2022): 142–68.

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Notes