What is a university for?

Last month the board of trustees at my alma mater, Auburn University, dissolved the faculty senate and “gave itself complete control over [the university’s] course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials.” That news came in a report published at Inside Higher Ed. The decision comes in the wake of the passage of Alabama House Bill 580, which is set to take effect in October and will apply to other public institutions in the state. As a land-grant institution, Auburn University is not under the direct purview of the bill, but Auburn’s board is taking action to align the university with the bill’s intent.

The decision has been praised as a model of university accountability to its constituents and criticized as a threat to shared governance and academic freedom. But the move raises questions that are even more fundamental: Who is ultimately responsible for a university’s curriculum and what is a university for?

A university’s curriculum always belongs to someone. The question has never been whether someone will govern the educational outcomes of a university, but who should govern them and toward what ends. These latter questions are especially pressing for a public institution that is funded by taxpayer dollars. A similar question can be raised at private institutions as well, who have their own donors and constituents and their own missions and goals. As a professor at a private Christian university, I believe in the principles of academic freedom and shared governance within their proper limits, but those limits are rightly established in the university’s mission.

The concern about board oversight is not without merit. Universities require expertise, but that expertise is distributed. A board of trustees is not equipped to determine whether a chemistry department needs a new laboratory course or whether a historical interpretation represents the best available scholarship. Faculty governance exists because disciplinary expertise matters. But I am also convinced that Yale alumnus William F. Buckley, Jr., was right in his first book, God and Man at Yale: Donors and alumni have freedom in the academic enterprise as well. If university faculty are leveraging their academic freedom to take the institution in a direction that runs counter of the purposes of the university, there should be some legitimate means of a course correction.

In my own denominational context, the Southern Baptist Convention, this tension between academic freedom and academic responsibility has produced some of the most hotly contested debates in our denomination’s history. The story of the SBC’s “Conservative Resurgence” (or “Fundamentalist Takeover,” depending on your theological convictions) is well known. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, professors in the SBC’s six seminaries had shifted in a decisively liberal direction theologically. Through a long process of presidential elections and board appointments, the base of the SBC was enabled to move the seminaries back into alignment with the theological convictions of the denomination. A lesser told story is how similar changes were enacted at the state level, as state Baptist colleges and universities have witnessed their own, often quieter conservative resurgences.

The educational perspective of the SBC was expressed in the 1963 and 2000 revisions to our statement of faith, The Baptist Faith and Message. This statement still represents a significant expression of the desired calibrations:

In Christian education there should be a proper balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility. Freedom in any orderly relationship of human life is always limited and never absolute. The freedom of a teacher in a Christian school, college, or seminary is limited by the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ, by the authoritative nature of the Scriptures, and by the distinct purpose for which the school exists.

While this statement is unique to the religious purposes of SBC education, the same underlying principle applies to any institution of higher education, whether public or private: Academic freedom is limited by the distinct purpose for which the school exists. While faculty expertise should be valued in curriculum and degree requirements, this prerogative should never be allowed to run roughshod over the purposes of the institution.

In a public university, ultimate accountability rests with the public institutions and governing bodies entrusted with stewarding that university. Accountability does not mean political control over every scholarly judgment, but it does mean that academic freedom exists within a broader framework of institutional responsibility, intellectual rigor, and fidelity to the mission of the university. Likewise, in a private university, the curriculum ultimately belongs to the affiliated institutions who fund and oversee the university’s work. A university’s constituents have every right to ensure accountability and ideological balance or alignment from its professors. Trustees are elected to ensure that trust.

All of this leads to the most important question: What is a university for? Ultimately any university should have as its aim not only the production of groundbreaking research and excellent instruction. More fundamentally, its aim should be the production of virtuous students. The goal is not just vocational readiness. Far less is it ideological indoctrination. The goal is to produce graduates who know how to think and what to do to serve the public with their education. The ancient university tradition was never merely about job preparation. It was about formation. It was about ordering the human soul to the ultimate good.

The modern university’s crisis is not simply who controls curriculum. It’s that we no longer agree about what education is for.