Behind the current crises in universities, of issues of funding, trust, and relevance, is a deeper issue, a long-term process of secularisation in Western society in the form of this year’s New College, UNSW, lectures, held this week.
The presenter, Peter Harrison, is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, and a former Australian Laureate Fellow.
The rise of secularisation, Harrison contended, led to the erosion of a shared societal conception of “the good,” which in turn shifted the university’s purpose from cultivating intrinsic value, such as character and wisdom, to pursuing instrumental and utilitarian outcomes.
Harrison described his lecture series as “a work in progress, experimentally combining some of the conceptions in [his recent book “Some New World”] that were essentially about the processes of the secularisation of western society, the loss of religion, the loss of meaning from our culture and what that means for our forms of knowledge.”
“If you type the words ‘universities in crisis’ into a search engine, you’ll get more than 150 million results. … Now I haven’t read all of those results, but as any undergrad will tell you, that’s what ChatGPT is for. And Chat GPT tells me this: universities worldwide are undergoing a crisis of funding, enrollment, governance, trust and relevance. I think that pretty well sums it up. We might take the deliverances of Chat GPT with a grain of salt, but I think anyone who’s been paying attention would agree that our universities are in trouble. There’s the crisis of humanity. But increasingly we also have scepticism about science and more recently some quite explicit worrying attacks on scientific institutions and scientific credibility.”
He described the Australian scene: “If we move from outside perspectives to inside perspectives, there’s growing disenchantment among academic staff with one recent measure suggesting that 50% of academic staff in Australia and diversity are so alienated from their institutions that they’re considering leaving the profession. Some of ’em in fact had no choice, and as we’ve seen, again, you can read the newspapers, there have been mass layoffs of academic staff.
“Even more concerning, I think, is that something of an epidemic of mental health issues in the student body… A report on student mental health conducted in Victoria says that a survey at Australian students about 28% reported high psychological distress and 30% low psychological wellbeing. It’s not surprising, given this, that the dropout rate of undergraduates currently is about one in four.”
Referencing four recent books on Australian Universities “Another problem they highlight is top-down corporate management and the way universities go with a concentration of decision-making in the operational at the university, exacerbated by the proliferation of PVCs, DVCs, portfolios and various clients.”
“I’ll just step back on that kind of analysis of the more immediate causes of the present crisis of the universities. I want to look at the broader question about how this crisis might be in relation to longer-term social changes. And as I’ve already indicated, especially those linked with secularisation, with the decline of the influence of religion in our culture and what I’m hoping is not so much an alternative account but rather added a deeper explanatory layer to the layer in these books.”
He pointed to the University of Sydney’s fundraising campaign, titled “For Good”.
“References to ‘the good,’ ‘for good,’ highlight the fact that ultimately, questions about the function and purpose of our university come back to questions of the things we value as a society, which is to say, what is our conception of the good? But there have been major historical shifts in what we imagine the good to be.. I think there is now unprecedented disagreement about what counts as good, and we follow that from that is that if we’re mounting it hard about what universities ought to be based on a conception of the good, it’s going to be very difficult to get traction because we no longer have a shared conception of what things are good.”
Universities don’t face that sort of crisis alone.
“According to secularisation theory, Christianity suffered the crisis of legitimacy. That’s similar in some respects to what universities underwent, and in fact, to some extent, that’s in reverse order; however, it is the same set of problems. So it’s possible that there be structural similarities between what’s happening in these two venerable institutions in western society. More importantly, though, to return to the question of what we ultimately value, the questioning of ‘the good’ Western Christianity once provides a model of what an appeal to intrinsic ‘good’ looks like, as also did a degree of a philosophical tradition that feeds into the Christian tradition.”
This led Professor Harrison to begin tracing the rise of secularisation and utilitarianism in the modern university. He began with a detailed discussion of Aristotle (384–322 BC) – explaining that the Greek philosopher’s thinking dominated university thinking into the 17th century. He described Aristotle’s three-level treatment of knowledge, with theoretical knowledge placed above other categories of practical knowledge (for example, ethics) and productive knowledge (how we make things).
The encounter of Aristotelian thought and Christianity was a fascinating topic for this observer. “Now it is worth saying there’s a difference between Aristotle’s God and the Christian God. Whereas Aristotle’s God does nothing else but contemplate. The Christian God created things, God makes stuff, so the principle you might agree with is to become godlike, but it also depends on what your conception of God is, what being godlike consists of.
Aristotle’s placement of theology in the upper contemplative level of “science” (meaning knowledge) did not fit easily with Christianity.
“Aristotle had an understanding of theology placed at the top of the tree. But when Christian thinkers came to think about whether theology was a science at all, there were questions about that because Christian theology didn’t meet the strict criteria that Aristotle set for a true scientific form of knowledge, which … involved logically demonstrated conclusions from premises that were secure. [Christian] theology didn’t have those premises; it came from scripture. ..
“What I think was more interesting was whether theology would be regarded as a theoretical science or a practical science. And the argument with something like this is that if Christian theology is about knowing God, then it would be a theoretical science. But if it was about loving God, it was an active part of science, and it would be a practical science. And there was a division in the Middle Ages between essentially two of the [monastic] orders: the Dominican order that suggested that it was theoretical. The Franciscan order suggested that it is a practical size, the goal of which was to know to love God rather than to know God.”
In his opening remarks, the master of New College, Dr William (Bill) Peirson, had recounted that he had found a course on science and religion helpful as an engineering undergraduate at UNSW. But that course had disappeared long ago. During question time, the question of whether Christian theology, or praxis, fits within the University was further explored. Professor Harrison pointed out the irony that at UNSW, where the New College and the lecture series are located, the largest student group ‘by a country mile’ is the Campus Bible Study. But it is ignored by the university.
The compatibility or otherwise of the modern university’s role in forming morally formed human beings and or competent human professionals for their productive role in society dominated a question time. One difficulty for the modern university is scale, which requires bureaucracy. Possibly reflecting his time working at Oxford, Professor Harrison suggested that the federated collegial structure of Oxbridge, a remnant of medieval universities, was the best model for individual formation in communities.
Which is also why he approved of residential colleges like New College.
H arrison responded to a question about the ancient academic discipline of “rhetoric,” which he described as the ability to persuade. Was it its modern equivalent, critical theory, he mused.
The new college lectures continue this week and can be livestreamed.
https://newcollege.unsw.edu.au/academic-program/new-college-lectures
Thx John, great topic, well reported.