Response to Jaspers and "The Idea of Education."

The University as the Co-Research of Culture

In his book The Idea of the University, Karl Jaspers outlines 3 essential components to the concept of the university: “professional training, education of the whole man, [and] research” (Jaspers, 79). This idea is notable to the development of the university as Jaspers motivates us to consider the university as a unique institution that fosters a site for learning with this indivisible trinity—Jaspers considers research to be a type of “work” in a threefold sense: work as craftsmanship and discipline, as meaningfully moved by ideas, and as guided by intellectual conscious. He explains that “only hard work can lay the indispensable foundations, can fashion our tools” (Jaspers, 80); this is to say that research work is more than just following a procedure well, but rather it further requires a “sheer discipline and endurance of persistent effort” (ibid.). Jaspers writes on the second conception of work that “the man who does intellectual research belongs to that group of men who must ‘forever think about their subject,’ who are thoroughly permeated by their work” (ibid.). This is similar to the last point in that it communicates a type of dedication to the work, though perhaps this is moreso a type of attunement to the work, where one can’t help but think about it forever. As a researcher is obligated to forever think only about their subject, the “worth” of studying that subject is based not on the mere utility or relevance of the research, but the intrinsic and inexhaustible meaningfulness that emanates from the field of study that you can access only upon having entered that field; this is to say that the more someone studies their subject, the wider, deeper and more encompassing their studies become. Finally, research work as guided by intellectual conscious; this element of research is perhaps what separates it the most from industry—Jaspers explains that “because [the researcher] strives for the ultimate implications of his ideas and wishes to bring these out in his work, he is little concerned with what is merely fashionable or current… He is able to seclude himself. He knows that no one on the outside can judge whether or not he is proceeding correctly. His intellectual conscience decides for him” (Jaspers, 80). One must be okay with their research being controversial: research ought to not bend to the opinion of the hoi polloi, as what ought to be researched is not necessarily what is popular, or vice versa.

In this sense, the university, as a site for research, should promote (in the sense of the latin pro-movere, to move onward)  this threefold sense of research as work to its students. Perhaps one problem especially endemic to the contemporary understanding of the university is the motivation of “C’s get degrees,” or more simply, the mentality of our late-modern age is one of mere efficiency, as opposed to meaningfulness, and this has spread to the “cultural epistemology” of the university-institution. Unless one is planning to use their undergraduate grades, for example, to pursue a masters degree (where during the application process, someone will consider their academic performance explicitly), it is indubitably a “waste of energy” to work extra hard for an A. This is because the value of the degree in the job market generally is aesthetic, in the sense that if one can put their degree on their resume (in which seldom you see grades mentioned) then it is productive; in other words, contemporary education at a university is an “investment.” If instead we hear Jaspers’s conception of the university as the unity of teaching and research, we can begin to think about the university beyond value and terms of efficiency. This is evermore true when Jaspers writes “teaching vitally needs the substance which only research can give it” (Jaspers, 82); we are dooming our education system if the “substance” that is taught at university has a “value” denominator, as if, for example, the engineering department ultimately exists to ensure the economy makes X amount of money in the following economic quarter, then we are essentially capping the potential depth of that research, and hence what can even be taught or learned. Jaspers then makes a point to stress how the real teaching of the university is the cultivation of the ability to search or “discover.” Jaspers writes “ideally the best research worker is also the best and only teacher. The research worker may be pedagogically inept… in transmitting bare facts. Yet he alone can bring the student into contact with the real process of discovery” (Ibid.). What most importantly is learned by a student of the university is not merely the “bare facts” of the topic, but the facts in tandem with the method of acquiring or “discovering” those facts.

Jaspers goes on to explain that “by its very name the university is a ‘universe…’ The university deteriorates if it becomes an aggregate of specialized schools… Scholarship depends on a relation to the whole” (Jaspers, 83). There must be some sort of unified directivity within the teaching and the learning that precisely “verses” it toward the uni-versity; if this is not the case, the math, philosophy, engineering and history departments are merely unified by name and their buildings’ proximity to each other. In his book Mission of the University, Jose Ortega y Gassett explores precisely what is the unity of the university in regards to its activity or “mission.” This teleological approach, looking for the “mission” of the university, can be informative to understanding what the university ought to do for its students and teachers; we can combine this with Jaspers’s concept of the idea of the university as the site for research work, education of the whole man, and professional training, especially as Ortega y Gassett argues that it is “necessary to consider any institution with reference to the man of ordinary endowment. For him it is made, and he must be its unit of measure” (Ortega y Gassett, 552). This is to say that the university’s activity, (that is, the research, education, and training, according to Jaspers) necessarily concerns the “ordinary man.” The university is not a “club” that one must “get into;” there is a worrying oligarchical aura surrounding contemporary universities, such as with the cultural obsession with attending Ivy league schools, for example (and how some schools are seen as ‘more academic’ whereas others are ‘party schools’—whether or not either school effectively educates is irrelevant). 

Interestingly, Jaspers takes a somewhat contrary path here, arguing that certain people are more “fit” for the university as having a natural drive to research and remain committed to learning, writing “it is to this minority [people naturally attuned to university life] that the university must direct itself” (Jaspers, 92). While this seemingly takes an opposing path to Ortega y Gassett, it is within Jaspers’s own writing that he admits the university cultivates this ability to research among students and teachers, both methodologically (as in, how to research) and substantially (as in, what to research); thus, Ortega y Gassett is correct when writing that “the teaching of the culture, the system of vital ideas … is the basic function of the university. This is what the university must be, above all else” (Ortega y Gassett, 549). We will find the university wherever we find teachers and learners participating reciprocally in the culture of research: the university, and our closeness to it, is not merely the buildings where we attend classes (thought certainly that is part of our “being-in-the-university,” in a Heideggerian sense). We might also say that the “ordinary man” ought to also be the teacher, notably when thinking of Eva Brann’s essay “Eight Theses on Liberal Education.” In the essay, she explains that students should not “specialize” in one thing, as a student can’t enter education with what they will be educated on already in mind. She writes “That is why students are better taught by non-specialists than by authorities in their field… They should be taught by people who have achieved mastery in some field but are venturesome enough to try a new inquiry which will throw them back to the beginnings, the elements” (Brann, 3). Essentially, this means that teachers are cultivating themselves while they cultivate their learners; thus the cultivation of culture, as Ortega y Gassett has in mind, comes from the productive co-research (what Brann describes as “co-learning”) within the community. Ortega y Gassett describes “culture” as “what saves human life from being a mere disaster; it is what enables man to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace” (Ortega y Gassett, 548). In the university, everyone can research and discover alongside one another, thinking as themselves (without fear of judgement) for the sake of widening and following the research authentically.