Can a Diverse Campus Share One Purpose? Cornell Thinks So.

Cornell’s new report proposes to end the balkanized campus and rebuild around a unifying vision of human-centered learning.

A Cornell faculty committee has released a report about Cornell and, perhaps, the future of the American university. The committee positions itself at the turning of the tide between two eras. The era ending was one of division and fracture, with elite universities abandoning any unified project of character formation. In the era beginning, the university declares a unifying purpose: human-centered learning aimed at “sound judgement.”

But how could a diverse, modern university declare its commitment to any single purpose? It seems an unlikely ambition. But Cornell builds its idea of purpose on the deeper idea of open inquiry. This makes diversity an advantage rather than a threat. And it provides something unexpected in our time of rancour: a future-oriented university.

The earliest American universities pursued a clear but narrow purpose of character formation. They taught ecclesiastical and classical literature to elites. The turn of the 20th Century saw the founding of universities on the Germanic research model. But in America, these took a pragmatic turn toward teaching and service. After World War II, universities were enriched by federal funding and a wave of European refugees. The GI Bill brought millions to campus. The 20th century thus saw the rise of what University of California president Clark Kerr in 1963 dubbed the “multiversity.” An institution, the committee says, that “held together research, teaching, and public impact in an integrated circuit, with each enriching the other.” This integration enabled American universities to “accomplish things no other institution in the world could match.”

But the multiversity unraveled. As the university’s functions multiplied, the committee writes, “they began to pull attention, resources, and aspirations in different directions.” Political goals displaced scholarly ones. Disciplines became too specialized to talk with one another. Careerism crowded out curiosity. Endowments swelled but tuition spiraled. AI entered the scene as a disruptor. Speakers were shouted down, and students self-censored. Every group the Cornell committee consulted reported that fear “is what most often stifles the kinds of encounters universities were built to host.”

At Cornell and other Ivies, generous funding papered the cracks. But public trust collapsed, and universities came under unprecedented governmental attack. The committee writes: “the seams that fragmentation left exposed can no longer hold.”

Cornell’s 238-page report proposes a way forward. Here’s the key line: “At its best, the university is an integrated ecosystem for learning whose goal, in its broadest sense, is the cultivation of sound judgment.”

It is an unusual formulation, but its strangeness shows how far outside the culture war the committee is working. Rather than proposing a patchwork of fixes — a constructive dialogue program here, an intellectual diversity hire there — the report would reorganize Cornell around “whole-person education.”

Character formation must be considered “across different university units and functions, from the classroom to the field site, from studios to residential life, from the research lab to local communities.” Architecture and common spaces should support it. Cornell should create “institution-hosted technologies, such as AI models or social networks, that better align with the human-centered university’s mission than those currently commercially available.” Instead of a civics center focused on American ideals and institutions, the Committee imagines a center devoted to Cornell’s character-shaping project: academic civics. Rather than “achievement in the abstract,” admissions should look for the capacities that human-centered education aims to build: “curiosity and constructive, nuanced thinking; the capacity for connection and pluralism; resiliency, flexibility, and the willingness to be changed by ideas.”

But how to unify a modern university around one purpose? Sound judgment is a substantive value, and a campus-wide pursuit of it could take an authoritarian turn. We saw something like this in the DEI era.

Here is the report’s deep power. Cornell’s idea of sound reason is grounded in principles of open inquiry: intellectual pluralism, freedom of expression, and scholarly humility. Cornell, the committee writes, must be “a place in which differences of opinion, perspectives, and ideology are not only tolerated but embraced as the key ingredients of genuine learning and growth.”

The result would be a diverse university integrated toward a common purpose. No one university can turn the tide of woes now besetting our universities. And the committee has already been criticized for underplaying the university’s own role in creating its problems. Still, Cornell’s report offers hope that change is coming.

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