The Idea of the University

Jaspers published The Idea of the University in 1946, in the wreckage of post-war Germany. The book is one of the most serious twentieth-century attempts to ask what a university is finally for. The article works through the diagnosis Jaspers makes of what the modern university had become, and his proposal for what it could be instead.

A book written in the wreckage

The Idea of the University appeared in 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War. The context is essential to the book. Jaspers was writing in the wreckage of a German higher-education system that had, in his judgement, failed badly in the Nazi years. Universities that should have served as the intellectual conscience of the era had instead, in many cases, gone along with the regime, lent their authority to its programmes, and produced graduates who served it well.

The book is therefore not just a treatise on the abstract idea of a university. It is a statement made in the aftermath of the war, when the question of what universities were for had become acute. The values the university was supposed to represent (free inquiry, the honest pursuit of knowledge, the formation of complete human beings, the intellectual conscience of the era) had been visibly threatened. The book is partly a defence of those values and partly an account of how the university could be reconstructed to defend them in the future.

The reconstruction Jaspers had in mind was practical as well as philosophical. Post-war Germany needed to rebuild its universities. The question of how to rebuild them was a real one. A simple return to the pre-war model was not acceptable; that model had failed. A complete abandonment of the German university tradition was not acceptable either; the tradition contained much that was worth keeping. The book tries to extract what was worth keeping from the tradition while diagnosing what had failed.

Flashcard

What is the context of Jaspers's 1946 book *The Idea of the University*?

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Answer

Written in the wreckage of post-war Germany, after universities had failed to prevent or even enabled the Nazi years

The book is a statement of what a university should be in the aftermath of a war that had threatened the values the university represented. German universities had, in Jaspers’s judgement, failed to serve as the intellectual conscience of the era and had often gone along with the regime. The book is partly a defence of the values and partly a practical account of how the university could be reconstructed to defend them.

The diagnosis

Jaspers’s diagnosis of what had gone wrong is direct. The university, through fragmentation of knowledge and emphasis on useful knowledge, had underwritten nationalism and the new technological age.

Two failures are named.

Fragmentation of knowledge. The modern German university had become a collection of specialised departments, each pursuing its own narrow research with little contact with the others. The fragmentation had advantages for productivity within each specialty; it produced highly skilled specialists. The cost was that no one in the university was responsible for the whole. No discipline saw the broad consequences of what the disciplines together were producing. The university could not, in its fragmented state, function as the intellectual conscience of its era because it had no comprehensive view from which to perform the function.

Emphasis on useful knowledge. The modern university had increasingly oriented its work toward what was practically useful: technology that could be applied, professional skills that could be sold, research that produced economically valuable results. The orientation was rewarded by the institutions that funded the university and was therefore self-reinforcing. The cost was that knowledge pursued for its own sake (knowledge of the good, the true, the beautiful, in the older philosophical formulation) was marginalised. A university that had abandoned this kind of knowledge had abandoned much of what had made it a university in the first place.

The two failures together had a political consequence. The fragmented, usefulness-focused university had underwritten nationalism and the new technological age. The technological work the university produced was a major contributor to the rise of the modern nation-state and to the increasing technological power of warfare. The university had not chosen to underwrite these developments deliberately; it had done so by default, through the work its specialists pursued without comprehensive reflection. A more unified, less use-focused university would have been better placed to resist the developments or at least to articulate clearly what they were doing.

Jaspers’s positive proposal follows from the diagnosis. He saw the possibility of the university playing a role in the reconstruction of a more human society, based on a more unitary and purposeful conception of knowledge. The unification is the response to fragmentation: the university should treat knowledge as a connected whole rather than as a collection of separate specialties. The purposefulness is the response to the focus on usefulness: knowledge should be pursued for ends that the university itself articulates, not just for whatever ends the surrounding society currently happens to be paying for.

The book also reflects what Jaspers calls the tension felt within Germany between the state (and nationalism) and the university. The university is, in his account, partly an institution of the state and partly a counterweight to the state. The two roles do not always sit easily together. A university whose relationship to the state is only the first (institution of the state) cannot perform the second (counterweight). A healthy democracy needs universities that perform both, and the tension between them is part of what makes the university a serious institution.

Flashcard

What two failures of the modern university does Jaspers identify in his diagnosis?

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Answer

Fragmentation of knowledge into specialised departments, and emphasis on useful knowledge at the expense of knowledge pursued for its own sake

The fragmentation produces skilled specialists but no one responsible for the whole; the university cannot function as the intellectual conscience of the era when it has no comprehensive view. The emphasis on useful knowledge marginalises knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Together, the two failures had a political consequence: the university underwrote nationalism and the new technological age by default.

Discontent with the modern functions

Jaspers’s discontent with the modern university was specific. He listed the four functions to which the modern university had limited itself:

Research. The discovery of new knowledge through specialised inquiry. This is real work and Jaspers does not dismiss it. The criticism is that the university had been reduced to this function in a way that lost the larger context.

Training. The development of practical skills in students who would use them in their careers. Again, real work; again, partial. A university limited to training is doing the work of a trade school with a higher entry requirement.

Professional education. The preparation of students for the major professions: medicine, law, engineering, administration. This is the most prestigious of the four functions and the one that pays the institution’s bills. A university doing this work alone is producing professionals but not educated human beings in the full sense.

Transmission of a particular kind of culture. The communication of inherited cultural materials (canon, history, tradition) to students who will carry them forward. This is closer to what the older idea of a university was about, but limited to the transmission of a particular culture, it produces graduates fitted to that culture without the capacity to engage critically with it.

The four functions together describe what the modern university actually does. None of them is wrong in itself. The complaint is that the four together are not enough. A university that does only these four is missing the comprehensive intellectual life that Jaspers’s account of the university requires. The missing piece is the seeking of knowledge and truth in a sense that goes beyond all four. Seeking knowledge and truth, Jaspers writes, means something more than just maintaining a community of scholars and students. It means being the institution in which the comprehensive intellectual life happens, in which the four functions are integrated and held accountable to a larger purpose.

A modern reader can recognise the diagnosis. Many modern universities (especially in research-intensive systems) limit themselves to the four functions Jaspers listed and have lost the comprehensive intellectual life he wanted. The result is high-quality specialised work without the conscience-of-the-era function the older idea of the university included.

Flashcard

What four functions does Jaspers list as the functions to which the modern university has been limited?

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Answer

Research, training, professional education, and transmission of a particular kind of culture

The four functions describe what the modern university actually does. None is wrong in itself; the complaint is that the four together are not enough. A university doing only these four is missing the comprehensive intellectual life that Jaspers’s idea of the university requires. The missing piece is the seeking of knowledge and truth in a sense that goes beyond all four, the intellectual conscience of the era.