What is a university?
Anton van Niekerk
Imagine the following situation: An overseas colleague visits my university. We discuss all kinds of interesting things, I invite her to lunch and afterwards she asks me to “please show her the university”. What do I do if someone asks me a question like that?1
One answer could be: Put her in your car and drive past the university buildings. But has my visitor seen “the university” if she has just seen a series of buildings from the outside, or even the inside? There surely is more to a university than simply buildings. Maybe, we could wonder, the university isn’t essentially the buildings, but all the knowledge found in the space known as the university? If so, can that be shown to anybody? How do you perceive knowledge? One possible answer could be that the knowledge which exists at the university is collected in the library and all the texts which lecturers, researchers and students have produced. Nowadays knowledge doesn’t only have to exist in printed form, but can also be stored electronically. Is the university the total collection of knowledge in printed and electronic media in all the buildings of the university and on the computers in the lecturers’, researchers’ and students’ studies? Most of us, I am sure, will feel a bit uncomfortable with such an answer.
A more promising line of argument is to claim that a university is not only or essentially buildings or knowledge. It is, essentially, a collection of people, united into a group by something or other. Which people? Only the teaching and administrative staff? If so, the university is, compared to all the people we normally see on campus, a very small group of persons. Or is the university also, and maybe even essentially, its students – the large majority of people we encounter on any campus?
A university consists of students
The idea that a university actually and essentially consists of students is, to my mind, the most reliable – in fact, the correct - view.. The reason for this is not the fact that the students form the majority of people associated with the university. The reason much rather has to do with what students are and what they do or, at least, are supposed to do when they act as proper university students. If you understand the latter, you will understand better why “university” and “being a student” essentially mean the same thing..
In the history of the university where I work, Stellenbosch, the idea that the university is in essence the students was strongly propagated for the first time by a well-known professor, SJ Shand. In 1916 when a law passed in the then Union Parliament which changed the name of the Victoria College to the “University of Stellenbosch”, Shand delivered a lecture entitled: “The making of a university”.2 In this famous lecture Shand made the following statement: “The real university is neither a collection of books, nor a collection of buildings, nor a collection of lecturers; it is a collection of students who possess the will to knowledge – the will to possess it and still more the will to advance it. A university is constituted by its students and by them alone”.3 With this Prof. Shand didn’t mean that lecturers aren’t part of the university. According to him, what turns a university into a university is a “frame of mind” which refers to the “the will to knowledge”.
Being a student has nothing to do with how old a person is or how many degrees you have. Being a student is also not synonymous with messing up, drinking a lot, searching for a husband or wife, doing sport, bunking class or participating in serenades. According to Shand being a student is a frame of mind: the mindset with which we search to understand our world better. All persons who try to understand our world better are therefore students. Students are people who differ from each other in several aspects, but who are united (thus a universitas, a unit society) by the search for more and better knowledge.
But this raises another question: what is “knowledge”? There are several types of knowledge. Getting to know a girl is acquiring a certain type of knowledge. Learning a language entails the acquisition of a certain type of knowledge. Believing the earth is round, merely on the grounds of the fact that most people believe it, is a type of knowledge. Hearing voices in the forest like the French Middle Age heroine Jeanne d’Arc, believing them and, going against every accepted social convention of the time, inspiring and leading the French to big military victories against formidable enemies, is a type of knowledge.
Are all these types of knowledge the point of issue in the frame of mind which we call a university student’s search for knowledge? Not exactly. The mindset of a student is an aspiration towards a certain type of knowledge. We call that knowledge “scientific knowledge”. A university is an institution where students search for scientific knowledge. Practising science means acquiring a certain type of knowledge, but also sharing it. The acquisition of knowledge is called research. The sharing of knowledge is called teaching. Students at a university are busy with the research and teaching of scientific knowledge.
At a university we practice science
What then is “scientific” knowledge? A definition by HW Rossouw simplifies the matter. He alleges namely that science is the result of the “endeavour of the human intellect to attain in a disciplined way a whole of coherent, rationally justifiable, and universally valid insights with regard to the reality in its different facets”.4 One should look at each of these qualifications in a little more detail.
Scientific knowledge has a specific method
The strictness of its method distinguishes science from other types of knowledge. There are many philosophers of science, of which Karl Popper is the best-known, who allege that science is characterised by its method. Different subject fields have specific methods which are adapted to the type of questions that are asked and the type of phenomena which are examined. Microscopic observations for example have no place in sociology (the study of human behaviour within the social context), while questionnaires for opinion polls, which are often used in sociology have no place in microbiology, where the smallest living organisms are studied. Something like experimenting plays an important role in most of the scientific methods, especially in the natural and applied sciences.
Methods are of great importance in science because it can be used and applied by anybody who has the necessary background knowledge. The thing that distinguishes science from many other types of knowledge acquisition is the fact the scientific knowledge claims and methods can be confirmed and applied by a range of research workers. In short, scientific knowledge is never “private” or privileged. It is public and can be tested and controlled. Two factors determine whether or not knowledge is scientific. The first is that the knowledge should be based on observations accessible to all, and the second is that it should be based on logical argumentation.
Scientific knowledge is rational
Rossouw further states that scientific knowledge is rationally justifiable knowledge. That simply means that for all knowledge claims that pass as science, a person should be able to give good reasons. In scientific practice a person doesn’t suck knowledge claims out of their thumb, and you don’t just defend theories because you have a feeling that they are the best or your common sense tells you that you must accept something. Some of the most famous breakthroughs in the history of sciences, like Einstein’s development of his relativity theory, has sprung from a genius’ questioning and rejection of several views that we see as “obvious”, for example that space cannot be “curved”. In the practice of science your gut feeling is not important; what is important are those claims that you can give good reasons for, even if those claims conflict with established knowledge and wisdom.
Scientific knowledge is systematic
Scientific knowledge is also systematic. This means that scientific knowledge connects different ideas with one another in such a way that they make sense to us. We can illustrate this by means of a simple example: The claims “iron expands when heated up” and “lead shrinks when cooled” are both surely true, but on their own they’re not yet “science” in the true sense of the word. It makes more sense when you place that which these two statements claim in relation to a wider theory that claims “metals expand when heated up and shrink when cooled”, and that then be brought in relation to a theoretical law that explains the behaviour of certain elements in nature on a molecular and even atomic level. To quote Rossouw on this: “That’s why scientific practice, in capability as well as in result, still tries to make connections and integrate knowledge items through comparison, classification, subsumation and generalisation”5.
What then is a university? A university, I would answer, is a societal institution where students (in a way that admits that every lecturer and researcher is actually also a student) obtain and share scientific knowledge as has just been described. It is the frame of mind that truly gives the phenomenon of the university its content.
Of course other things also happen at universities. People practise sport at a university. Friendship and collegial relationships that play a big role in people’s lives, also outside of the professional context, are forged. An alarming number of meetings are held. Community service is done on a wide front, often also by students. Parties are held, money is collected, series of activities are organised by societies, politics is practised, late-night conversations about serious issues as well as total banalities are held around tea-urns and in bars – and I could go on. But all the last mentioned activities are secondary to the main business of the university, namely practising science by devoted students. Where science is practised in a context where experienced students (lecturers if you want) lead less experienced students into the wonderous world of science, in order to equip them to become science practitioners themselves and give recognition (in the form of degrees and diplomas) for the progress made with the process – there we see the heart of the university.
The university is a societal institution
In the paragraph above I called the university a societal institution. But what is an institution? We could say that institutions are the ways in which people in a society act, not just as individuals but also as groups. These collective actions are usually inspired by some or other common goal. The state (government) is an example of such an institution: The government is the collective action of people to create order in our coexistence and to subject that coexistence to acts and the moral demand of justice. Marriage is also a societal institution, a form of collective action. Marriage (in all societies) is a wide-accepted way in which intergender relationships are organised and the practise of sexuality is directed and cultivated, and normally serves as the social space wherein children are begotten and brought up. The aims promoted by institutions are often deep-seated ideas that have obtained a very high level of acceptance and authority in a society. Take the idea that, when people’s rights become infringed, the way to settle the problem is by due process of law. This is universally accepted in all democratic societies. An independent judiciary exists and embodies a the social institution that gives expression to the force and authority of this deep-seated idea or conviction.
The university is also such a societal institution. That means that the university is a kind of social or collective action by means of which people embody and promote a certain idea. This is the idea that scientific knowledge is the best type of obtainable knowledge and that young people are best prepared for life when they get familiar with the scientific knowledge that the university offer us.
The latter, as I said, is an idea. Like all ideas, you can ask critical questions about it: Is it really a valid idea? What we, however, cannot deny is that this idea is so widely accepted in nearly all current societies that it has developed into more than just an idea. It has developed into the present-day institution of the university. The university, to state it differently, is therefore nothing more than an institutionalised idea. Let’s investigate how this idea has developed throughout the centuries.
How the university developed
In the antique civilisations like that of the Greeks and early Islam groupings (like the one in Timbuktu) we find schools where adults acquired all types of knowledge. In ancient Athens the philosopher Plato for example had a school with the Greek name akademeia – the word from which our “academy” is derived. But it is rare to find any references to these schools where they are called “universities”. The idea of the university is to a great extent a product of the Middle Ages, particularly the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During that time Bologna in Italy, Paris in France, and Oxford and Cambridge in England came into being as the first institutions known as universities. These first universities were products of the medieval church, organised by the monastic orders. Central to this practice was a teacher who gathered a group of students around him6 to whom he read aloud his written doctrines word for word during (literal) “lectures”. These doctrines were mostly interpretations of or commentaries on religious dogma. Initially the aim was not to stimulate critical discussions; it was rather to initiate the students into the master’s way of thinking, and so to enter his “school”.
The university as we know it today is however an institution that differs significantly from its medieval predecessors. The modern university is rather a product of the Enlightenment than of the Middle Ages. “Enlightenment” refers to the period in Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the Enlightenment the idea came to being “that knowledge [acquired at a university] is more likely to be advanced through free inquiry than through collective endorsement or rejection. More specifically, hypotheses can only be validated as knowledge – as opposed to dogma or official party policy – by being subjected to the tests of free inquiry”.7 The latter idea usually represents a totally different world from that of the medieval university where the process of acquiring, systematising and transferring knowledge is totally in the service of the understanding and defending of the authoritative church dogma.
One of the important shifts that the idea of the university has undergone since the start of the Enlightenment is the insight that scientific practice pertaining to the university takes place internationally, and that the game rules for scientific practice are therefore determined internationally.8 A present-day university that thinks that they can just do their own thing within a certain, local environment, is no longer taken seriously. The game rules of universities require that all work done at universities must be able to be checked and scrutinised by peers, in other words colleagues on the same level of expertise connected to universities elsewhere in the world. This holds all kinds of implications for universities, especially with regard to the languages used for teaching and research. If the university’s primary medium of education is not a language accessible to peers, proper peer review of that university’s work cannot be done and that leads to a questioning of the quality of the university’s work. That is one of the reasons why we increasingly find that English is becoming the international language of university scientific practice.9
The university and the community
Today there are numerous voices that allege that a university, besides the two core functions of research and teaching, also has a third core function, namely community service, or, as it is increasingly called “community interaction”. This notion acknowledges the fact that a university doesn’t exist in an intellectual, social or political vacuum. A university grows from within a community and should also serve this community.
This point of view became increasingly popular during the past century when it started becoming clearer that universities are of decisive importance with regard to economic growth. While universities in previous centuries were mostly left alone to their own devices, with sporadic recognition of the fact that they sometimes produce people that can play special roles in society (Oxford and Cambridge, for example, have produced a number of British politicians, especially prime ministers), the current opinion that universities are extremely important and decisive resources in modern societies has grown. The modern world (that is the historical period that started at the beginning of the seventeenth century) has been dominated by a growing realisation that knowledge is power, and that scientific knowledge is not only important to satisfy people’s curiosity, but that the science and techniques that flow from it are capable of getting the world under our control in an incomparable way.
Several examples can be given. Isaac Newton’s (the famous seventeenth century mathematician and physicist from Trinity College, Cambridge) formulation of the laws of mechanics (for example the law of gravity) was so accurate that space travel in the twentieth century became possible thanks to the application of a number of his insights. Albert Einstein’s (who only in his later life became a university professor) general and special theories of relativity gave us a whole new understanding of the universe, but also brought insight into the massive energy locked up in the nucleus of an atom, with all the repercussions it has had since then. Watson and Crick’s decoding of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule – the basic building block of all forms of human life – caused a revolution in biology during the second half of the previous century and has recently led to the description of the entire human genome and to technologies (for example cloning and stem cell transplants) that place formerly inconceivable powers in the hands of medicine – possibilities like the curing of diabetes and the repair of damaged nerve tissue of paraplegics and quadriplegics.
The growing realisation is that universities are necessary national assets that can make decisive contributions to an economy, which is increasingly driven by access to new knowledge and technology (the so-called knowledge economy). It all causes the relationship between university and community in our time to become a more and more complex matter. The government and others that fund the university want to see fast results; they insist that the university must do “applied” research – that is research where the applications are clear and preferably multiple. Many academics, however, are still convinced that the growth of science itself can be kept in check by the demands for applications. They prefer to practise science purely in response to the stimuli of the discovering mind of the researcher; they prefer to investigate problems that are gripping because of the intellectual insights that it will yield, and not necessarily because it is always clear what the “applications” of such knowledge will be. The relationship between university and community is therefore increasingly characterised by a tension between the autonomy of science itself and the demand for relevance or applicability from the community. This tension will not disappear, which is probably a good thing, because it forces the university as well as society to try and find a balance between the different forces that influence the work that the university does.
The university has a responsibility towards the community
How then must we understand the relationship between university and community? I would like to allege that the university does have a clear responsibility toward its community. In the first place it is a responsibility of service without implying servitude. There is nothing wrong with the fact that a university plays into the needs of its surrounding environment in its research and teaching programmes, as long as its freedom to come to conclusions that exclusively rest on scientifically considered and evaluated evidence does not come under fire. The university owes no-one excuses for the fact that the truth, which is its only norm for investigation, sometimes hurts.
The university’s second responsibility toward society is investigation without implying prescriptiveness. Its academic freedom and autonomy not only enables the university, but also gives it the responsibility to work searchingly and experimentally with regard to unsolved problems in society. If – to use an image from the early days of pioneer settlement in South Africa - society is seen as the ox wagon10 that moves slowly and cannot easily be turned, then the university can be seen as the leader of the oxen. The leader of the oxen is not the boss who cracks the whip, sits on the wagon-box and decides where they’re going. But the leader of the oxen has to decide whether the route is passable; he must be on the lookout for thorns and dongas, and must sometimes contrive routes to the boss’ destination. The leader of the oxen explores, because he sees the road before his boss and the oxen see it. That is what the relationship is like between university and society: The university does not decide what society’s destination will be; the university doesn’t rule the country. But the university must explore whether the old way is passable for society and if they will be able to reach the destination without injuring the oxen or getting stuck in the mud.
The third and last of the university’s community responsibilities , is value mediation without indoctrination. Probably the most important service that a university can provide to a society is when it can extend its academic values to the cultural life of the community that it associates with. The university is very aware of how preliminary and tentative, pending further evidence, its research results often are. To present them as the final truth will come down to indoctrination, the forcing of “facts” and “information” that couldn’t stand the test of critical purification. The university serves the community much better if it rather sees its task of teaching as an opportunity to contribute to the establishment of what I, for lack of a better word, call a scientific mentality in the tackling and handling of problematic issues.
In the same way that science must acknowledge several “non-academic” influences on its practice, society can also benefit a lot from an academic-scientific way of doing. The university has the task of putting its research, teaching and community service programmes into action to provide to the community, not so much people who have encyclopaedic facts and techniques at their disposal, but people who internalise the values that form the basis of scientific practice and thought in such a way that they can approach society’s problems.
To study at a university is therefore one of the biggest privileges one can have. It provides the key to a proper, well-rounded education, and therefore provides the best opportunity to a decent career, if of course you use your opportunities correctly. A university degree is not an automatic guarantee to a prosperous and successful life; there also are other forms of education and training that provide attractive possibilities, while people with university degrees often fail in life. Nevertheless, people still strive towards a university education because the idea that a university can best train and prepare us for life, as I have alleged above, is still widely accepted.
My thanks to Willie van der Merwe who read this article at my request and gave some valuable commentary.↩︎
Although the act was accepted by parliament in 1916, it only came into operation on 2 April 1918. Since that date the existence of the “University of Stellenbosch” became official.↩︎
Shand, SJ. 1995. The making of a university. Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University. p. 3.↩︎
Rossouw, HW. 1993. Universiteit, wetenskap en kultuur. Cape Town: Tafelberg. p. 95.↩︎
Ibid., p. 96.↩︎
Unfortunately at that time women didn’t take part in these events.↩︎
Moulder, J. 1977. University neutrality: some puzzling reflections in a South African mirror, in HW van der Merwe & D Welsh (eds.). The future of the university in South Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. p. 251.↩︎
You can probably argue that universities in the Middle Ages also operated “internationally” in the sense that they were located far from one another and often received lecturers from other places. The term “internationalising” however presupposes the phenomenon of different nations, and the latter weren’t found in the Middle Ages; nations are products of the modern world. The language of written communication in the Middle Ages was mostly Latin – a predecessor of what nowadays we see more and more in the university world, namely that effective international scientific practice gives more and more rise to the need for and use of a so-called science language or lingua franca.↩︎
It is not my intention to claim that, since the start of the Enlightenment, English has suddenly everywhere become the international academic language. The latter phenomenon has actually only really started occurring since the eighties of the twentieth century. At the start of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century the tendency was rather to only use local languages because these languages were so closely connected to the nations that have only originated at the end of the Enlightenment. The need for, and growing domination of English is especially a symptom of “globalisation” which is still taking place across the whole world.↩︎
With acknowledgement to Marlene van Niekerk from whom, I think, I first heard this image several decades ago.↩︎