What is college for?

Knowledge.

What is college for?

If you ask four different people, you’re likely to get four different answers. Universities teach students how to think. They produce groundbreaking research. They create citizens. They prepare students for jobs. They archive the wisdom of the past. And so on.

Even the experts seem to agree that universities have no single purpose. For example, in A Time to Build, Yuval Levin sorts a wide variety of university purposes into three broad categories: professional development, moral activism, and liberal education. The first is about producing employees. Universities prepare students to enter the workforce. Polling data confirms that this is the primary reason students and parents cite for going to college.

The second is about moral development; recall that most universities in the United States were formed with a distinctly religious mission. Historically, as Steven Poskanzer puts it, “college existed to inculcate and eventually spread particular religious views.” Schools were Baptist, Presbyterian, or Catholic. They saw themselves as cultivating virtues, defending doctrine, and producing the next generation of clergy.

The third is about producing self-governing citizens. A liberal education is one that acquaints students with the foundational ideas of civilization, refines their aesthetic tastes, and develops their ability to reason and choose for themselves. College graduates are autonomous in a way that their uneducated counterparts are not.

Looking through mission statements of contemporary universities confirms this diversity of purpose. For example, Emory University’s mission is “to create, preserve, teach, and apply knowledge in the service of humanity.” Tufts educates “future leaders through the creation and application of knowledge.” BYU wants to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.” Franciscan University “educates, evangelizes, and sends forth joyful disciples empowered by the holy spirit.”

However, beneath the veneer of diversity, all university goals ultimately come down to the same thing. At their core, universities are epistemic institutions, committed to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.

To see this, it’s helpful to draw distinctions across different kinds of knowledge as they are understood in academic philosophy. The most generic is propositional knowledge, knowing that a particular thing is true. I know that Albany is the capital of New York and that humans are prone to anchor bias. Propositional knowledge is about knowing the facts.

Compare this with know-how. Knowing how to do something is very different from knowing the facts. I might know that a golf club is a driver without knowing how to use one. I might know the difference between a credit and a debit and yet not be able to audit a company. And in the reverse case, I might know how to do something without knowing very many facts about the overall scenario (think of a worker on a production line). Know-how is a distinct form of knowledge. It’s about skill rather than facts.

Finally, philosophers think about knowledge by acquaintance. You can know who Barack Obama is without knowing Barack Obama. There is something special about being acquainted with someone or something rather than learning about it third-hand. Resolving the data in your experiment, walking through an art gallery, and reading a poem are often illuminating experiences even if you don’t learn any new facts. That’s because experiences like these bring their own phenomenology–we learn what it’s like to do or feel or complete something. That kind of knowledge is central to the human experience.

Understanding knowledge broadly in this way shows that virtually everything we do in a university is tied up with one of those three forms of knowledge. Archivists, librarians, and museum curators preserve the knowledge of the past. Researchers and scholars uncover the facts. Creatives produce art, music, and performances that give students the chance to be acquainted with the sublime. And virtually every discipline offers know-how: we teach students how to run a marketing campaign, how to produce a note on a saxophone, and how to reconstruct an argument from a primary source.

University mission statements appear divergent only when we understand knowledge in a very narrow scope. But understood more broadly, it’s easy to see how virtually every imaginable component of a university mission is about knowledge. Research universities want their faculty to discover the facts and new systems or tools for discovering those facts. That’s propositional knowledge and know-how. Liberal arts colleges expose their students to great ideas and art and teach them the skills to live autonomously — knowledge by acquaintance and know-how. Religious institutions defend doctrine, build opportunities for religious experiences, and produce clergy and disciples — all three types of knowledge.

This is why, at root, the university is an epistemic institution. Knowledge undergirds all other purposes of a university. Universities are not political action committees or social engineering experiments. Everything we do had better ground out in knowledge.

I once interviewed for a job where the dean flatly rejected this view. The university, she said, was here to make the world a better place. We need to uplift the downtrodden, protect the environment, and build citizens who would respect the rights of others. She said that if a student graduated from her institution voting the same way as his parents, she was a failure.

I understand her point of view. And I don’t deny that universities have a role to play in making the world a better place. There’s a strong correlation between places with strong university culture and peace, prosperity, and liberty.

But universities contribute to these larger goals in distinctly epistemic ways. A thought experiment illustrates the point. Suppose a dean receives a gift of $50 million from a donor. If the university’s direct, immediate goal were something like social justice, the dean should donate the full amount to the production of mosquito nets, the building of wells, and the inoculation of children in undeveloped countries. Those interventions would do far more social good than most things we can do on campus.

But it would be wholly inappropriate to spend the money that way. Instead, the university should use the money to provide scholarships for students, endow professorships, purchase research equipment, or build a new theater. All of these expenditures are appropriate because they improve the production of knowledge in its various forms.

Even though mosquito nets would be a more direct route to a social good, it bypasses the epistemic purpose of a university. Universities don’t exist to directly make the world a better place. Universities exist to preserve, create, and transmit the knowledge we need to make the world a better place. It’s a difference of telos: universities directly produce knowledge we need to recognize and solve political and social problems. In that sense, universities indirectly make the world a better place.

If you want to save lives, protect the environment, and build peace, prosperity, and the like, you need to know what the world is really like, what counts as truly making it better, and how to do that efficiently and effectively. The university is poised to answer those questions. Without answers, we are fumbling in the dark.

It should be obvious that social progress requires good information, and universities are one of the best places to get it. What’s less obvious is that recognizing that order of operations is important. If we let our social or political aspirations compromise the knowledge-making process, we will be left with ignorance, distrust, or both. And that’s a recipe for social stagnation rather than progress.

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