According to the Wall Street Journal, AI giant Anthropic has recently tasked one philosopher with teaching morality to its chatbot, Claude. Oxford-educated Amanda Askell aims to endow Claude with emotional intelligence, a personality, a conscience, and a soul.
This revelation from Anthropic makes me think that some of the AI industry’s challenges are analogous to some of the pressures that universities are under. Both are viewed with a mixture of optimism and distrust (if not downright opposition), and challenged to define or redefine, respectively, their purpose and values.
The president of the United States has exploited declining trust in universities to attack their student admissions, campus life, and research missions. As the leader of a research-oriented center at Cornell University, one of the universities targeted, I’ve had a front row seat.
Many of the Trump administration’s broadsides are grossly exaggerated but based on kernels of truth. I am, therefore, heartened to see many universities, including my own, turning this crisis into an opportunity to reassess purpose, values, and ways of operating (while defending academic freedom, which is essential to the contest of ideas and the pursuit of truth). Here I want to address two related trends that bear closer examination and reform:
- In a positive feedback loop of self-selection, university faculties have become more left-leaning than the general public; and
- To the public, activism is more visible than civil argument on campus.
It’s not surprising that when campus culture seems foreign to many, and the annual increases in net costs of college attendance seemingly have put a college degree out of reach, those outside universities have redefined the purpose for universities: the college wage premium, i.e., lifetime income for those with a college degree vs. those with only a high school diploma. Many political leaders encourage students and their parents to use this metric to choose among universities and degree paths.
Winning back the public’s trust and increasing the already substantial contributions of universities to society require a different statement of purpose for higher education. History can help us understand the current situation and, perhaps, help navigate the future.
When I entered college 51 years ago, some version of two long-standing goals of university education still had some traction for many parents, students, and higher education leaders. As chronicled by Julie Reuben in her 1996 book, “The Making of the Modern University,” these goals were:
- Individual moral formation and character development (usually in the mold of Protestant Christianity).
- Cultivation of the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. As Ronald J. Daniels argues in his 2021 book, “What Universities Owe Democracy,” universities remain indispensable to liberal democracy, but only if they are intentional about this in curriculum, research, and other activities.
These two goals were inextricable from the 17th century through much of the 19th century, given that almost all U.S. universities were founded as sectarian (e.g., Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopalian) or nonsectarian (but understood to be broadly Protestant Christian) institutions.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, especially after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” Reuben describes that science replaced Protestant Christianity as the center around which curriculum revolved. Although Christian moral formation and education for citizenry were still regarded as very important, they increasingly were relegated to extracurricular organizations and gradually faded into the background or disappeared entirely, even after it was widely recognized that science could not be the foundation of moral formation.
During and after World War II, the goal of producing a responsible citizenry morphed into a much more specific and instrumental aspect of university service to society: executing basic and applied research that the federal government would organize and pay for. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “Science: The Endless Frontier” report to President Harry Truman began the institutionalization of a partnership between the federal government and universities that operated for 80 years. This fueled the explosive growth in universities of research-based infrastructure and personnel, including graduate students.
According to a 2024 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, it has also accounted for about 25% of all business sector productivity growth since World War II. While vital to the dynamism of the U.S. economy, this may not mean much to individual students and parents paying college tuition.
Furthermore, this form of university service to society created increasingly divergent categories of four-year higher education institutions. On one end of the spectrum are liberal arts colleges, where faculty focus entirely on undergraduate education. These colleges can maintain an intellectual climate engaging all disciplines in cross talk around common topics, including moral formation and civic responsibility – an updated, pluralistic version of colleges of old.
At the other end of the spectrum is the modern research university, where graduate education in the context of research is prioritized. The intellectual landscape here is fractured among specialized research-focused disciplines, each with their own culture, norms, and methods around research. This has enabled ideological uniformity within disciplines and, to a lesser extent, across disciplines, which has undermined public trust. In the humanities especially, which have benefited far less from government largesse, cultural critique has increasingly turned into progressive activism, further alienating the public.
Research universities are thus no longer organized around any intellectual public square. Instead, each discipline’s purpose became defined by its own research agenda, increasingly disconnected from other disciplines. The college wage premium has filled the public square vacuum.
However, leaning on financial return will not restore the soul of universities any more than leaning on one philosopher is going to give Claude a soul.
Instead, university leaders must publicly reject the college wage premium as their primary purpose and, instead, create an intellectual public square in which undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty can participate in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, the disputation of ideas across the political spectrum, and the search for truth, as well as contribute to their own and the nation’s economic well-being.
My next blog post will offer more specific reforms to begin to restore public trust in universities, including a focus on fostering research agendas that more often address questions of high interest to others in society.
David M. Lodge is the Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability