expected deliverer.
William Rainey Harper, The University and Democracy (1899)
What constitutes a good American university and how should it function? To answer
these questions most convincingly, I think it necessary to first respond to a fundamental
question: What are American universities good for?
In a 2003 essay on “The Idea of a University,” the president of Columbia University,
Lee Bollinger, answered that question in the following way:
There are many reasons why [Americans] universities have endured the
test of time, but a few are fundamental. Foremost is the purpose they serve.
Universities remain meaningful because they respond to the deepest of
human needs, to the desire to understand and to explain that understanding
to others. A spirited curiosity, coupled with a caring about others (the
essence of what we call humanism) is a simple and unquenchable human
drive, certainly as profound an element of human nature as the more often
cited interests in property and power, around which we organize the economic
and political systems.
I respectfully disagree with President Bollinger’s essentially idealist theory of the
function of universities. Rather than primarily satisfying “a spirited curiosity,” I argue for the
real world problem-solving, action-oriented, proposition Karl Marx asserted in his 11
th
thesis
on Feuerbach (quoted above in our second epigraph). In effect, for Marx the most profound,
unquenchable “human drive” is not curiosity about the world but the innate materialist need—
and therefore drive—to change it for the better; to create, maintain, and continually develop
the Good Society that would enable human beings to lead long, healthy, active, peaceful,
virtuous, happy lives.
Although this paper focuses on research universities—and particularly
on my experience at the University of Pennsylvania—I contend that liberal arts institutions,
state colleges, and community colleges in the United States alike share this noble purpose—as
do higher educational institutions throughout the world. To accept my version of Marx’s
2
Convention