The Great (Campus) Divorce

Over the past year, a number of common tactics have emerged from the opposition to what is widely referred to as the Trump administration’s “defunding” of education. One of these is to decry the ostensibly catastrophic harm that will result from Trump’s moves, particularly in the areas of public health and scientific research. “American science and innovation should not be subject to the political winds of the day,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) intoned in a piece published over the summer. According to the authors, a would-be despotic, right-wing administration is “targeting” higher education for “political retribution.” “Higher education, research and development, and science at large are under attack,” they declare—and “no institution is safe.”

The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions. There’s a point to be made here, but it’s almost certainly not the one that CAP thinks.

Certainly, many college- and university-affiliated research projects have been negatively impacted by Trump administration policies. But if there is a problem here, it has far less to do with the so-called defunding of higher education than with the fact that our universities are such powerful players in the science and innovation arenas in the first place. This is especially true given the poor track record of many of these institutions when it comes to providing students with a sound education and safeguarding their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights.

The arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy. The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge. The issue isn’t merely that the present arrangement allows ideologues and recalcitrant administrators to use research projects as human shields, howling miserably when failures to comply with federal regulations and their underlying values result in the withholding of federal funds. It is that the current arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy.

An issue brief published this past summer by the Manhattan Institute describes “the frustrating reality that,” as authors Frederick Hess and Richard Keck write, “at far too many of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a secondary concern.” Per Hess and Keck, “University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman notes that faculty tend to characterize ‘research as their “work” and teaching as their “load,”’ a habit that, as Zimmerman dryly observes, says ‘volumes about academic priorities.’” What it says, of course, is that college and university administrators are far more concerned with maintaining a stable of widely published, grant-winning faculty celebrated for their research and writing than they are with the quality of teaching on campus. And this can come only at the expense of student learning and real education.

Every hour devoted to specialized research and writing for the purpose of publication is an hour not spent on preparation for the classroom—including researching those aspects of one’s field that are unrelated to one’s particular interest but may be of use to students. It is an hour not spent revisiting and revising old lesson plans. It is an hour not spent finding new readings—or new interpretations of old readings. It is an hour not spent developing new lesson plans; reviewing, evaluating, and critiquing student work; providing in-depth, specific, detailed, and personalized feedback; forming relationships with students; or doing any number of other worthwhile activities that would benefit undergrads and lead to stronger, more lasting, more broadly beneficial learning outcomes.

Not only that, but when the primary job of faculty is to research, write, and publish, the university will attract faculty who are interested primarily—even, perhaps, solely—in researching, writing, and publishing rather than teaching. Regarding teaching as a “load” rather than one’s actual work reflects professional realities. “Even within teaching-oriented institutions,” Kimberly French and others have noted, “faculty are increasingly research productive, in an effort to generate funds and emulate the professional status awarded to their colleagues in research universities.” “Teaching universities” are, it seems, poised to become “research universities.”

But, as suggested earlier, it is not merely teaching and learning that are negatively impacted in the marriage between the university and the academy. The increased pressure on college and university professors to pursue often esoteric or niche concerns; the privileging of fresh discoveries, original interpretations, and new “knowledge”; the proliferation of academic (in every sense of the word) papers, conferences, and journals with highly specialized and in many cases infinitesimal audiences: All of these things have resulted in what amounts to a large-scale, multi-billion-dollar cottage industry of “$33,000 Academic Journal Articles That Almost No One Reads.”

The real raison d’être of a substantial amount of academic research is to provide the author with lines on a CV or fodder for a tenure application. “Some 70% of the arts and humanities studies published in Web of Science, an index of scholarly journals, in 1990 were not cited within 25 years of publication,” Hess and Keck note. “An analysis of Scopus, a database of peer-reviewed literature, found that roughly 36% of arts and humanities papers, books, and chapters published during 1995-2015 had never been cited.” The real raison d’être of a substantial amount of academic research is to provide the author with lines on a CV or fodder for a tenure application.

In some ways, the situation with regard to scientific research—which is most often implicated in debates about “defunding”—is even worse. As Hess and Keck observe,

This incentive to churn out ever more publications has led to the publication of fragile studies whose conclusions cannot be replicated. The result? It has proved disturbingly difficult to replicate findings in psychology, medical science, biology, economics, and the social sciences. A survey in Nature found that more than 70% of researchers, primarily in the sciences, reported trying and failing to reproduce another scientist’s experiment. Data from the Center for Scientific Integrity show a steep increase in the number of retracted articles over two decades’ time: approximately 10,000 papers published in 2022 were retracted; only 1,400 were retracted in 2012 and a mere 300 in 2002.

To all of this, the authors provide a remarkably simple and profoundly sensible answer: “It’s time for college professors to teach.” They outline a proposal for how colleges and universities can and should return to their fundamental mission of educating students, suggesting clearer delineations between “good educational institutions” where the emphasis is on teaching and learning and “research institutions for which teaching is a peripheral concern.”

But perhaps such a move could be a transitional phase within something more: a more or less complete separation of the academy from the university, so that all colleges and universities are “good educational institutions”—and research institutions are just that.

John Henry Newman implied such an arrangement more than 150 years ago:

The nature of the case and the history of philosophy combine to recommend to us this division of intellectual labour between Academies and Universities. To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new.

In keeping with this—and in light of the significant issues and problems described above—perhaps it’s time to divorce the academy from the university altogether. Under such an arrangement, college professors could truly dedicate themselves to the real mission of the university: to transmit knowledge and to form students by providing them with the benefits of the intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped us as members of society and as human beings. Academics, conversely, could devote themselves fully to discovering and producing genuinely valuable new knowledge and interrogating, critiquing, and revising the body of knowledge that has been established to date. Finally, neither would be beholden to the other—though both would benefit from each other. Educated academics would benefit from the body of knowledge that college professors teach, while college professors would themselves continue to learn from the genuinely valuable work of researchers.

Such a project would be a massive undertaking—one that would have to proceed slowly, incrementally, and cautiously if at all. How feasible such a shift currently is, how exactly it might occur, what exactly the final arrangement might look like in practice: These are large, significant questions. It’s far from clear what the answers might be. But perhaps the time to ask those questions and begin the work of answering them has come.

David C. Phillips is an English teacher who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.