A second Ivy League university has just published a major report that calls on higher ed to reflect on its shortcomings and think about major reform. The report from Cornell University’s Committee on the Future of the American University will hopefully turn the page on the argument about whether higher ed should “resist” criticism or engage with it. The more interesting question is about where today’s universities have gone astray and how to correct course.
The answer to that question depends on how you understand what the American university is. Both the Cornell report and the earlier report from Yale University’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education make this point. But the two institutions articulate the university’s purpose differently.
Yale simplified its mission statement this spring to define the university’s core work as “to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge.” The Cornell report, by contrast, argues that the university exists to cultivate “sound judgment.” While fostering judgment may seem less straightforward than producing knowledge, we think that other universities seeking to restore public trust should follow Cornell’s lead. Here is why.
First, good judgment is what the country most needs from university graduates. In politics, business, technology and every other major area of American life, we suffer when leaders fail to exercise sound judgment: when politicians of both parties make bad decisions about war and peace; when businesspeople lead our economy into bubbles; when AI entrepreneurs work feverishly to develop a technology they believe could prove disastrous.
Such people do not lack cleverness, drive or technical skill. They lack judgment. Someone who possesses mental power but lacks good judgment is, as Aristotle put it, like a “big man walking blind,” whose very strength makes him a special menace. A university that makes the cultivation of sound judgment its aim can address a serious need in a time in which our power often outdistances our wisdom.
Second, judgment is “human-centered.” Only people can exercise judgment. Books, museums, archives and websites can preserve and disseminate knowledge; AI seems to be able to create new knowledge. A university focused on cultivating sound judgment makes the development of human capacities themselves—not the products of those capacities—its highest priority. The Cornell report recognizes this when it recommends reclaiming “technology use and non-use as an institutional decision” (emphasis added).
Third, a focus on the cultivation of judgment can help faculty themselves do their work better. Faculty don’t just teach and research; they also play a major role in the governance of their institutions, weighing in on everything from curricular changes to tenure decisions. Their judgments about whom to hire—and therefore which fields, topics and questions will be taught and studied for the next several decades—do much to determine the future of the university. What kinds of knowledge future faculty will be funded to pursue and teach depends on the judgment of the current professoriate.
To help cultivate faculty judgment about such questions, the Cornell report makes the innovative recommendation to develop an “academic civics.” It recognizes that in institutions as large, complex, specialized and professionalized as modern universities, faculty and others often exercise governance roles without deep knowledge of or attachment to the institutions they serve. Cornell therefore recommends cultivating the kind of understanding that would allow faculty and others to “situate their own responsibilities within a broader institutional context and engage institutional questions with broader perspective.” Academic civics would cultivate the specific form of sound judgment necessary to steward a university well.
One way to develop such an academic civics is to offer an opportunity for faculty, staff, administrators and graduate students to study the history and structure of the university together. At the American Enterprise Institute, we’ve been working with the Cornell committee over the last year to develop such a course of study, and together have convened a set of faculty from Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Vanderbilt and Yale Universities, along with the Universities of Florida and North Carolina, to work out a model syllabus together.
Cultivating judgment within the university community could also help it deal with its changing relationship to the outside world. The political situation of the university is complex and shaped by resentments over mindboggling costs, opaque admissions standards and the perception of ideological one-sidedness. Navigating such relations requires more than intoning about the “autonomy” of the university and the dangers of declining respect for academic expertise.
To acknowledge the university’s deep material and intellectual entanglements with the country and the culture that supports it while maintaining itself as a distinctive institution requires political self-awareness and intellectual responsiveness. Those qualities come from the exercise of judgment, not the minding of categorical rules. Although the Cornell committee does at times slip into the language of the “autonomy of the university,” committee members implicitly recognized these entanglements by engaging with many people off campus, including with federal, state and local leaders, conducting hundreds of conversations that fed into the report.
For all these reasons, Cornell’s recommendation to put the cultivation of judgment at the center of the university’s mission is a wise step other university leaders should heed. If universities “serve only as knowledge factories,” as Cornell’s provost, Kavita Bala, has put it, then there is no reason to resist its takeover by machines which produce research faster and more accurately than frail, mortal, human scholars. But if the aim of the university is the cultivation of human judgment, we may need it more than ever.
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