








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expo. 3.2 (2009) 143–148] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.143 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Needed: Some (Any!) Philosophy of Higher Education

DENNIS O’BRIEN

President Emeritus, Bucknell University and University of Rochester

Mark Taylor calls for “an end to the university as we know it.” Before search-
ing for a new model—Taylor’s or anyone else’s vision of tomorrow’s higher 
learning—it is worth looking at “the beginning of the university as we know 
it.” The “university as we know it” is actually a rather recent invention—in 
America about 150 years old. Historians are likely to date the current Ameri-
can university model from the founding of the Cornell University in 1868, 
Charles Eliot’s reforms at Harvard in the latter half of the nineteenth century, 
or the opening of the John Hopkins University in 1876. Whoever takes pride 
of invention—and there are other claimants—the emergent and reigning 
model is the research university. It is that model that Taylor seeks to jettison.

The research university’s prime “product” is the Ph.D. degree, an attainment 
not granted in the United States until 1861 at Yale. As a research degree, the 
Ph.D. was not just a more advanced form of the Bachelor’s degrees awarded 
up until then by American colleges, but rather expressed a fundamentally 
different view of what was higher in higher education. Taylor characterizes 
the Ph.D. mentality accurately: specialization and sub-specialization, which 
leads to advance in knowledge in the chosen area. It would be bizarre to  
argue against the gains which the research model has brought to education 
and society. Because of research and research universities, we enjoy extraordi-
nary advances in science, medicine, technology, the understanding of history, 
society, and even literary texts. The problem with the research model accord-
ing to Taylor is, to begin with, that it produces more Ph.D.s than the market 
can absorb. Bad enough that the market isn’t buying the product, Taylor 
claims further that Ph.D. research has become so refined and arcane that 
it may not be worth selling at all. If a sub-sub-specialist does gain a faculty 
berth, he or she will probably continue on a narrow path producing minimal 
good for society and maybe no good at all for hapless freshmen. For financial 
and philosophic reasons, then, the research university model needs to be “rig-
orously regulated and radically restructured.”

(The weakest part of Taylor’s argument, by the way, is that he largely ignores 
the natural sciences and allied fields like engineering and medicine. In those 
areas, specialization into seeming arcana continues to produce spectacular 



144 Overheard in the Academy 

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results in basic understanding and practical application, and Ph.D.s still find 
jobs in academia, industry, and government.)

Given this sketch of the modern university, I want to examine what the 
research revolution rejected. The standard American college and university  
before the rise of the modern university was a Christian denominational col-
lege committed to the “classical curriculum.” The typical course of study con-
sisted of a heavy dose of Greek and Latin, Paley’s View of the Evidences of 
Christianity, lectures to the seniors by the president on ethics, and maybe 
some natural history if one had a collection of stuffed birds. A modern com-
mentator notes the utter inadequacy but paradox of the classical curriculum:

The first college curriculum introduced into British America was al-
ready obsolescent, yet it became the standard one for 250 years.... In 
almost all official aspects the system was a failure, yet it produced a 
high proportion of the intellectual and political leaders of the nation.

(Earnest 1953, 1)
For a restless people forging across a continent, Cicero and Demosthenes 

seemed inappropriate guides. The Morrill Act of 1862, promoting the agri-
cultural and mechanical arts, was seized upon by Ezra Cornell and Andrew 
Dickson White to found “ a university where any person can find instruction 
in any subject.” The practical arts and sciences entered higher education and 
soon eclipsed the classical curriculum and the educational philosophy of the 
older colleges.

To the modern academic, the classical curriculum seems “dry as dust,” 
taught badly, with a premium put on memorization and oral recitation. No 
wonder the history of student life in the nineteenth century is marked by  
riots and destruction. The students were bored. It bears emphasizing, how-
ever, that the critic who notes the “failure” of the classical curriculum points 
out that these obsolete colleges “produced a high proportion of the intel-
lectual and political leaders of the nation.” Why? The classical curriculum 
incorporated, albeit in a particularly tedious form, the dominant philosophy 
of higher education for some 2000 years: the liberal arts. (Professional schools 
like medicine and law, which began before the rise of the universities in the 
thirteenth century, are another story.)

In his brilliant book Four Cultures of the West, John W. O’Malley, S.J., dis-
tinguishes two cultures that have vied for dominance in higher education:  
a philosophical culture and a humanistic culture. Both cultures originate in 
Greece, the philosophers represented by Plato and Aristotle, the humanis-
tic culture by, for example, Isocrates, who in 390 BCE opened a school for 



Needed: Some (Any!) Philosophy of Higher Education 145

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

rhetoric. O’Malley characterizes the philosophic culture as “logical, rigor-
ous, argumentative,” which is the precursor of the university’s scholarly style. 
But the longer history of higher education was in the humanistic rhetorical 
culture. That culture, based as it was in persuasion, supported the art of the 
statesman, not the scholar. That the classical curriculum produced the politi-
cal leaders of the American Revolution was, then, no mere accident.

Humanistic education was, as O’Malley suggests, “classical” in two senses: 
it depended on a classic literature which provided models of both conduct 
and persuasive speech, and it was “classical” in a sense that is still with us: 
characterized by “balance, harmony, proportion, moderation, and rational-
ity” (O’Malley 2004, 131). Plutarch’s lives and Ciceronian rhetoric with its 
balanced cadences and moral passion fit the educational goals. The aim was 
the formation of character, a “classical” character with the traits of the lit-
erature in the curriculum: “balance, harmony, proportion, moderation, and  
rationality.” The “rationality” alluded to is not, it should be noted, the insist-
ent, probing “rationality” of the philosopher, but the rationality of the states-
man who knows the arts of balance and harmony in his person and in politi-
cal life. When Emerson in his famous Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 
1837 stated that “character” was the proper aim of higher education, he was 
asserting the essential claim of the classical curriculum.

The older classical colleges and the modern research universities differ 
about the ultimate purpose of higher education: formation of character ver-
sus advancement of knowledge. (A more precise description might be that 
character formation is a “recessive” gene in the modern university’s DNA. 
It gets expressed in the president’s speeches and all those slogans: “For God, 
for Country, and for Yale,” “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” etc. Whether 
these rhetorical outbursts are more than nostalgia for former days, I leave 
to the reader.) Mark Taylor’s restructuring is toward neither character nor 
knowledge as such. He suggests, instead, studying notions that cross current 
disciplinary silos (Mind, Body) and practical problems (Water). There are, 
of course, problems with both suggestions. Cross disciplinary studies are not 
that easy because the key term is often so broad that one can’t be certain that 
the various scholars are even talking about the same thing. Take Taylor’s own 
principal field, religion. One of the first issues that comes up in the cross 
disciplinary study of religion is what constitutes a “religion.” Is Confucianism 
a religion? Communism? As for the practical subjects, who will decide the 
ranking of practical issues? Which leads back to Taylor’s claim that universi-
ties need to be “rigorously regulated.” Maybe—but by whom?

We can gain some sense of what regulation and restructuring might look 



146 Overheard in the Academy 

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

like by considering regulation and structure in earlier colleges. Rigorous regu-
lation was exercised by the religious concerns of the sponsoring denomina-
tion. The universal acceptance of certain classic texts solidified the curricu-
lum. Emulation of ancient republican heroes and religious saints served the 
ultimate aim of forming character. After the American Revolution, the clas-
sical curriculum, aimed at forming the classical virtues of moderation and 
balance, was regarded as a necessary support for the American experiment in 
democracy. Moral restraint would prevent factionalism and the enthusiasm 
of the mob, both of which could destroy the new republic.

The classical curriculum directed at moral instruction was expressed in 
structural assumptions for administration and faculty that are radically differ-
ent from those in the present university. In administration, the minister col-
lege president was plenipotentiary. He hired and fired faculty and defended 
the curriculum. Faculty were “hired hands” and, by contemporary stand-
ards, amateurs in their special fields. Like the president himself, faculty were  
almost exclusively ordained ministers. If the aim of classical education was 
training in character, the dominance of religion and its teachers fit this aim. 
It was hard to imagine in those days that Christian ethics colored by classical 
restraint was not the perfection of moral tutelage. Then, of course, a large 
majority of the students were training for ministerial careers—one of the 
few “learned” professions of the day. There was a commonality of vocation 
between the faculty and the life that they expected their students would lead 
personally and professionally.

Regulation and structure changed radically with the advent of the research 
university. The principle change that affected almost everything was the rise 
of the faculty. In the nineteenth century, the administration in the figure of 
the authoritative ministerial president governed all. When the aim of educa-
tion became not character but the advancement of knowledge, the faculty 
specialist became dominant. Tenure, a twentieth century invention, only sub-
stantiated the authority of the faculty in the research university. In the clas-
sical college, faculty were employees of the college; in the modern university 
faculty substantially manage the institution, though to be sure in tension with 
administrative “business” concerns like budgets and raising money. In brief, if 
the nineteenth century was the century of “management” by the authoritative 
president, the twentieth century became the century of faculty.

A final important change involves the relation of faculty and students. We 
can no longer speak of ministers training ministers; no commonality of voca-
tion can be assumed between faculty and students. Taylor suggests, however, 
that in one sense current assumptions are more like the older model than one 



Needed: Some (Any!) Philosophy of Higher Education 147

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might think. No longer do we have ministers training ministers, but special-
ists cloning themselves. Unhappily, most undergraduates follow careers only 
tangentially related to their departmental majors, and the few who go on for 
Ph.D.s in some specialty often won’t find academic positions commensurate 
with their training.

If there is to be “rigorous regulation” and “radical restructuring” ahead, we 
are obviously not going to return to the aims, regulation, and structures of 
the denominational college and the classical curriculum The old style college 
was, however, clear about who regulated, for what end, and how that affected 
faculty and curriculum. The most important lesson of the classical college for 
the present day is its clear sense of an educational mission that goes beyond 
the excellences of the specific subjects taught. You taught Greek not to perfect 
the pluperfect but to offer moral guidance. If the research model based on 
the advancement of knowledge is to be sharply altered, what will be the non-
specialist educational goal that regulates and restructures? Taylor’s proposal 
to create “problem-centered programs” presents a non-specialist goal for the 
university enterprise, and it may suffice. But a critical problem is whether 
the research university, given its current managerial and faculty assumptions, 
can formulate any overall educational goal beyond specialization. Lacking an 
educational goal, the university will inevitably be regulated and restructured 
by economics.

The small classical college with its lofty but limited aim and its “amateur” 
faculty who could slip from pulpit to professorship and back again was rela-
tively inexpensive. The modern “multiversity” with its collection of specialties 
and specialists needing sophisticated and costly equipment and staff support 
is inherently expansive and expensive. Great discoveries may lie ahead, but 
funding sources may well not be forthcoming to match such hopes and ambi-
tions. The current recession only underlines the long-term reality. If econom-
ics dominates, the twenty-first century will be like the nineteenth: a century 
of management—but monetary, not ministerial.

In a recent set of short commentaries in The Chronicle of Higher Education 
(July 19, 2009), various faculty members were asked to predict what the 
university would be like in twenty years. The headline caught the spirit of 
the comments: “The Future of the Faculty: Leaner, Meaner, More Innova-
tive, Less Secure.” With varying degrees of dismay, the faculty commentators  
bewailed the increasing power of administration at the price of faculty pre-
rogative. Faculty griping about administration is old hat, but faculty need to 
do more than gripe. If economics is not to conquer education, modern facul-
ties, separated as they are in terms of interests and needs, will have to agree 



148 Overheard in the Academy 

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009

on some overall educational vision for the university that goes beyond disci-
plinary specialization. If they do not create such a unitary vision, money will 
manage. Taylor’s “rigorous regulation” and “radical restructuring” will occur, 
but it will not be “innovative,” and instead only “leaner and meaner.”

References
Earnest, Ernest

1953. The Academic Procession. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

O’Malley, S.J., John W.
2004. Four Cultures of the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


