Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    A Culture of Cybersecurity
    Opportunities in the Hard Sciences
    Career Preparation
Sign In
First Person

Reading the University Classics, Part 2

By Kai Hammermeister October 7, 2010
Careers Library/Books Illustration
Brian Taylor

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.

From the distance of more than half a century, Karl Jaspers’s 1946 treatise, The Idea of the University, reads both like a farewell to the 19th-century German university and a lucid anticipation of several of today’s academic problems.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.

From the distance of more than half a century, Karl Jaspers’s 1946 treatise, The Idea of the University, reads both like a farewell to the 19th-century German university and a lucid anticipation of several of today’s academic problems.

Jaspers wrote his book at the end of World War II. The Nazis had suspended him from his position as professor of philosophy. One of his reasons for writing this treatise was to lay the groundwork for a thoroughly democratic restructuring of higher education in Germany. However, Jaspers also insists that the university is a genuinely transnational institution and that his elaborations concern higher education everywhere.

There is a good bit of dusty German philosophy in Jaspers, who positions himself in the venerable line of thinkers that includes Kant, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher. True to their spirit he declares that the university is the place where “a given epoch may cultivate the clearest possible self-awareness,” precisely because it is a community “engaged in the task of seeking truth.” It follows that research is the foremost concern in Jaspers’ vision of the university; teaching is relegated to second place. But because the idealists define truth as communal, it must be shared with other scholars and also transmitted to the next generation. Thus teaching is an indispensable, if secondary, aspect to research.

While the university cannot and should not get out of the business of teaching, for Jaspers, it is well advised to organize teaching according to “aristocratic principles.” In other words, university teaching should focus on only a select few among its students.

Jaspers identifies three types of university students: True geniuses, the mediocre ones who make up the largest proportion of the student population, and a small group of talented youngsters. The geniuses require no instruction because in the university setting, they will take care of their own education. Teaching the large majority, however, is a waste of time, Jaspers says. All attention should, thus, focus on those few who are gifted but can develop their potential only when instructed by experienced professors.

Such guidance, though, will have to be gentle. The talented student develops best when inspiration replaces rigid formation. “Artificial guides such as the syllabi, curricular and other technical devices which convert the university into a high school, are in conflict with the ideal of the university,” Jaspers writes. “They have resulted from adapting the university to the needs of the average student.”

In our age, a university without syllabi would not only fail the next round of accreditation reviews, it would also violate the basic principle of contractual openness. One partner in the educational transaction (the student) cannot be left in the dark about what to expect from the other partner (the instructor).

Equally quaint, and fundamentally out of touch with today’s social reality, are Jaspers’ aristocratic sentiments that dare to ignore not only large portions of society but also the majority of enrolled university students. His notions were rather outdated in the mid-20th century already. We are, irrevocably, in an era of mass education, and one of the more important goals of our national politics is to significantly increase the percentile of the population’s college graduates. Jaspers’s call to resist “concessions to outside pressures for mass education” therefore appears bizarre, at best, and dangerously misguided, at worst.

Were the book to consist exclusively of those curmudgeonly, falsely elitist, and thoroughly impractical musings, no reason would exist for us to continue reading it. Yet Jaspers courageously turns toward two structural problems of the university that remain unsolved and, therefore, become ever more pressing. The first problem is the division of the university into departments. The second is that of tenure.

ADVERTISEMENT

Coming from an idealist philosophical background, Jaspers postulates the unity of all knowledge. Every branch of inquiry should refer back to a common principle. Held up against this Hegelian foil, the division of higher learning into separate fields of study administered by individual departments seems artificial, and results in an “intellectual department store.”

The departmental structure also creates practical problems. First, strong and creative scholars often do not fit into existing departmental structures, thus preference in hiring will be given to moderately talented ones who can readily be cast into existing slots. Second, academic specialization undermines the common good of a shared knowledge base to which all research activities must relate. For Jaspers, only inquiries that connect specialized knowledge areas back to a communal intellectual interest merit full support. But “mutual respect in university circles tends to a state of affairs where everyone may indulge his every inclination or caprice, with the result that the university no longer centers on matters of common concern. ... It is a tragic paradox that academic freedom tends to obliterate this ultimate freedom of true communication.”

Academic freedom is also responsible for the problems surrounding the institution of tenure, Jaspers suggests. In Germany, professors are directly employed by the state and hold lifetime appointments. He does not challenge the principle of state employment that extends far beyond the university into all areas of public service. Yet he draws a distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech. “Faculty members cannot invoke their constitutional freedom of speech except as private citizens,” he writes.

As the argument goes today, tenure is a necessity so that neither state nor sponsors nor administrators can interfere with the freedom of research and instruction. Tenure protects especially those, it is posited, who care to voice politically inopportune opinions. Jaspers, who was trained in jurisprudence as well as medicine, considers that position an illegitimate appropriation of the principle of academic freedom, which, he writes, must never be understood to “mean the right to say what one pleases. ... Practical objectives, educational bias, or political propaganda have no right to invoke academic freedom.” For him, academic freedom simply meant that the state cannot interfere with the contents of research and student examinations.

Jaspers’s aim was to safeguard the universities against radical takeovers like that by the Nazis. But maybe that line of defense for tenure is outdated today. I would argue that, in our society, serious political threats to the freedom of publishing and teaching have been absent for a long time. Evoking the principle of academic freedom to defend the institution of tenure might have become as antiquated as Jaspers’s syllabus-free seminar.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Harvard University
'Deeply Unsettling'
Harvard’s Battle With Trump Escalates as Research Money Is Suddenly Canceled
Photo-based illustration of a hand and a magnifying glass focusing on a scene from Western Carolina Universiy
Equal Opportunity
The Trump Administration Widens Its Scrutiny of Colleges, With Help From the Internet
Santa J. Ono, president of the University of Michigan, watches a basketball game on the campus in November 2022.
'He Is a Chameleon'
At U. of Michigan, Frustrations Grew Over a President Who Couldn’t Be Pinned Down
Photo-based illustration of University of Michigan's president Jeremy Santa Ono emerging from a red shape of Florida
Leadership
A Major College-President Transition Is Defined by an About-Face on DEI

From The Review

Photo illustration of Elon Musk and the Dome of the U.S. Capitol
The Review | Opinion
On Student Aid, It’s Congressional Republicans vs. DOGE
By Robert Gordon, Jordan Matsudaira
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a blue-toned eye with a small hand either pushing or pulling a red piece of film over the top
The Review | Essay
We Don’t Need More Administrators Inspecting Our Ideas
By Nicolas Langlitz
Solomon-0512 B.jpg
The Review | Essay
The Conscience of a Campus Conservative
By Daniel J. Solomon

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin