Gray - Searching for Utopia : universities and their histories

The essays that follow are not intended to offer anything approaching a comprehensive view of the state of higher education today but to reflect on some perennial questions and debates that have accompanied the history of American research universities and that continue to be addressed today. They were presented as the Clark Kerr Lectures on Higher Education at the Berkeley and Davis campuses of the University of California in fall 2009. I had known and admired Clark Kerr as perhaps the most thoughtful and incisive commentator on American higher education in the late twentieth century, and rereading his The Uses of the University, first published in 1963, confirmed that earlier judgment. So in these lectures named for him, I undertook to consider to what extent his analysis of the research university, as he then described it, might still be descriptive of that institution and its essential features in our time.

I was struck by the sense in which Kerr's depiction oered a decidedly mixed review of the character, achievement, andprospects of the postwar university. In coining the term, and in laying out the nature, of the multiversity, Kerr was not so much defending as trying dispassionately to picture the anatomy of the research university as it had come to dominance in the academic universe, to explain the confluence of causes that had created its character and strengths, and to assess the losses and potential weaknesses as well as the gains represented in its current state.

I was struck also by Kerr's several references to another major figure of twentieth-century higher education, Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago. It seemed clear that the two were far apart in their views and in their experience, but Kerr spoke of himself and Hutchins as the principal critics and reformers of their time. To compare them is to contrast two ways of thinking about universities that can be roughly identified with the ideas of the collegiate university and the multiversity. They remain still the two broad and opposing models that one finds cited in contemporary discussions of the university. and with the conviction that the fate of this mandated search was only partially in the power of the universities themselves to determine.

The contrast between Hutchins and Kerr, then, seemed to reveal the two most familiar forms in which the American research university has been conceived. At the same time, their discussions of higher education display some equally visiblecommonalities, not only in their searching for utopia, but also in many of the concerns to which their critiques were directed. Increasingly, it appeared, from a historical perspective, that the issues to which they pointed had already been those animating the essential questions associated with liberal learning from centuries long past together with others that spoke to the key controversies over the purposes and conditions of universities from the time of their emergence in late-nineteenth-century America. Hence it seemed worthwhile to ask how the collegiate idea of a university founded in a tradition of the liberal arts came into being, how it was affected by new intellectual movements and assumptions (including a redefinition of the content of liberal learning itself), how it was seen to be challenged by a new commitment to research and scholarship and graduate training and by the growth of professionalism and specialization that marked the development of the universities, even while claiming to reconcile these sometimes conflicting directions in an integral idea of a single university culture.