The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs), by Gordon Graham (Charlottesville, VA and Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 295 pages, $29.

With something of J. Alfred Prufrock’s bewilderment and exhaustion, we have “known them all, already, known them all”—the stories, that is, of academic horrors and tyrannical, radical ideologies hijacking higher education. Certainly, leftist politics are thoroughly “in possession” of campuses throughout Europe and America, and notions that thoughtful scholars would lately have considered affronts to intelligence and civility now have entire departments dedicated to their “study.” Nevertheless, the exhaustion with these stories is real and may point to something more than our being surfeited with them. It may imply an underlying recognition that something deeper or more perilous (if such can be imagined) has gone wrong. Higher education suffers, at its center, from a teleological vacuum. We have lost any coherent idea of its purpose. Even so political a wrangle as recent disputes between the U.S. Department of Education and the regional accrediting agencies amply illustrates that we lack anything like a general understanding of what higher education is supposed to do, how to evaluate or recognize its successes or failures, what means of funding are appropriate to it, or even whether it is worth the expense and time it requires. Of course conflicting opinions about all these things exist in cacophonous abundance, but the problem is not simply a lack of consensus. It is deeper yet. Western culture has taken a peculiar turn in the last century-and-a-half, resulting in proclivities of thought and imagination that render us largely incapable of comprehending one of our own, most venerable institutions: the university.

Those habits of thought and the turn they bespeak—commercial, utilitarian, and scientific or quantifying—have so shaped the imagination that other categories of thought or value seem now quaint or self-refuting. If, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, then to the modern imagination every institution looks like a business, and every human relationship corresponds to the logic of contracts. One sees this instantly in the language used in common discourse. Virtually anything from lawn care to international relations is discussed in terms of outcomes, deliverables, productivity, value added, maintenance, cost-benefit, maximized returns, and interest. So, too, even the language of romance: people “invest” in their relationships, have “productive conversations,” spend “quality time” (i.e., low investment, high-yield), are “on the market,” and have relationships that “go bust.” When we bring this language and thought to higher education, the result seems at once ordinary yet distorted: students become customers; courses have content; content is packaged and delivered; institutions are accountable; institutions generate outcomes; and outcomes require quality control. No wonder, then, that for us higher education is not just a problem; it is a mystery.

Gordon Graham’s The Institution of Intellectual Values, the fifth volume of General Editor John Haldane’s St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs is an antidote to despair as it effectively—and patiently—reasons around the limits of contemporary thought, restoring to modern view those goods of higher education that tend to escape notice in a commercial age. Graham (Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen) fills the teleological vacuum with ends or purposes for higher education that are rooted in the realities of man’s intellectual being without ignoring the particular historical conditions in which that being now operates. The volume’s subtitle, “Realism and Idealism in Higher Education” alludes to Graham’s intent to avoid the dichotomies characterizing most discussions of the subject. On the one hand, there are modernizers who consider themselves realists or pragmatic progressives. These modernizers tend to embrace business models and reforms like outcomes assessment in the name of (often governmental) accountability. On the other hand are traditionalists who consider themselves the guardians of an ancient educational ideal, an ideal uncorrupted by crass commercialism or utilitarianism and free of state or bureaucratic interference. Graham eschews both of these houses. From the outset, he argues, the state has had much to do with higher education; there never was a time when universities were free of such interference. From the outset, again, universities consciously prepared students for professional lives and activity; there never was a time when John Henry Newman’s “knowledge for its own sake” was the sole end of either teaching or research. Likewise, regarding the tendency to organize, manage, and evaluate universities along lines originating in modern business, Graham concedes that “Important social and economic changes have brought it about that much of the style of the modern [ . . . ] university, both of management and presentation, is appropriately modeled on commerce and industry.” Thus Graham declines to shrug off everything advanced in the name of realism. Nevertheless, he insists as well that the so-called “realists” are themselves dangerously and unwittingly unreal. They stumble fatally when they “think that the spirit of commerce and industry should, or could, enter into the conception of [the university’s] principle purpose as well, that, so to speak, the heart of the university must itself be adapted to the corporate image.” There is something, then, essential to the university that realists and corporate educational models fail to grasp.