No one can agree on the purpose of university education. Two divergent understandings hold the field. First is the ascendant “practical-political” view, which generally aims at one of two goods: social justice or career preparation. Second, and much less common, is the “disinterested” university, where contemporary political and social problems are set aside for an interval in favor of learning as its own end. The insistence of personal interest subsides as students submit to traditions that have long preceded them.
These two competing visions do not coexist happily. The practical-political university is intensely concerned with future outcomes; the disinterested university is focused on the process of learning in and for itself, right now. The problem at the moment is that one finds few defenders of disinterest; the practical-political view is almost wholly ascendant. As the political philosopher Ken Minogue commented, “The most alarming feature of our times is that the very concept of ‘disinterestedness’ has almost disappeared from the language. Our world wants a bang from every buck.”
As Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, a carpenter and a geometrician “both want to find a right angle, but they do not want to find it in the same sense: the former wants to find it to the extent to which it is useful for his work, the latter, wanting to see truth, tries to ascertain what it is and what sort of thing it is.” For the 20th-century British Idealists, similarly, there were several discrete “modes” of apprehending the world: the scientific, historical, practical, and aesthetic. In the mode of practice, a vase is something that holds flowers. In the historical mode, it is the modern version of the form perfected by the Ming dynasty. In the aesthetic mode, a vase is a thing of beauty and wonder.
But these modes do not stand on an equal footing, and the practical mode tends to dominate. Practice encompasses moral and political life: love and marriage, politics and war, child rearing and work. We pursue our interests in this mode, though these need not be selfish interests — works of charity and compassion take place here, too. We attempt to prevent pain and suffering, to promote justice and other political goods, to save money for retirement, and in general to go on living.
The aesthetic mode haunts us with its promise of something more permanent and fulfilling than the endless, temporary satisfactions of life’s great to-do list.
When university governing boards and state politicians inquire about the aims and practices of higher education, they are asking the most natural of all human questions: Of what use is this to us? A dean at an American university gives a familiar answer: “From sex trafficking to pure-water initiatives, we want to make sure our students are prepared to impact every situation with a hurt or need around the globe.”
But the aesthetic mode can sometimes seem as natural as the practical one. We feel the reality of this mode most acutely when we are startled by something beautiful, or when we delight in another person, or in a particularly arresting turn of phrase, or in a child’s use of language. It also appears when we engage in intellectual inquiry without worrying about its consequences: translating a passage of Latin, writing a geometric proof, reading a novel for pleasure. This mode haunts us with its promise of something more permanent and fulfilling than the endless, temporary satisfactions of life’s great to-do list.
The aesthetic mode is rooted in the old idea of “disinterest,” a concept with roots in the 18th century or even before. Disinterest names the attentive, engaged interest in something that is not essentially related to the self and that may point far beyond the self. Disinterest makes an appearance whenever we act “for the sake of” a given activity, thinking neither of our particular aims nor of the activity’s consequences.
I might, for instance, have a “disinterested interest” in the folk art of Kenya or the origins of the common law, but these things do not bear on me directly, nor I on them. The disinterested person, like Adam Smith’s famous impartial spectator, aims at seeing his interests alongside those of others. He attempts to overcome or temper the natural self-regard that comes with being human. In the process, he may inadvertently acquire restraint and self-control. And because he has been freed to enter into the complex moral worlds of other people, he may also cultivate the characteristics of sympathy, humility, and charity.
Despite the protestations of some theorists on the left, disinterest is not merely veiled power or a tool of the privileged classes. It is a moral and intellectual virtue whose cultivation would have salutary effects not just on universities but on civil society as a whole. Disinterest demands a quieting of the self in order to enter into the worlds of other people who may be quite unlike us in terms of geography, history, and outlook. Cultivating disinterest requires a facility in understanding the world and in seeing that the most profound freedom may consist in letting go of our own particular attachments. This is something that the various identity studies, by definition, can never achieve.
The practical and the disinterested university can exist together, but only if individuals are able to enter into modes of experience that may not feel natural or intuitive. In learning the basics of calculus or physics, for example, a student must put aside the question of practical usefulness. But preparation for the LSAT, also an intellectual exercise, is the pursuit of an easily understood, practical goal. These activities are categorically different. Both have a place in the university.
The real-world problem arises when one mode — usually practice — tries to dominate the others. Practical-political universities make this move in familiar ways: They promote some particular form of social justice, or they tout the high employment rate of their graduates, or they claim that every single student will graduate with exceptional leadership skills. They enthusiastically advertise “real world” outcomes that cater to the interests of students and parents. They may also pressure faculty into pursuing these aims, by tailoring grants and evaluations toward ends that are directly at odds with the traditional goods of disinterested study.
Yet disinterest, despite its many virtues, does not provide a simple contrary vision that, if adopted, would solve the problem of excessive practical “interest.” If we assume that all study is or ought to be disinterested — i.e., if personal questions about meaning and identity are banished from the scene — an alternative vision of the intellectual life may appear that is so extreme as to be nearly impossible to achieve. It is the mirror image of the activist academy, or what might be called the “New Criterion vision” of the depoliticized academy.
Despite the protestations of some theorists on the left, disinterest is not merely veiled power or a tool of the privileged classes.
When academic subjects are taught as wholly separate from politics and lived experience, they do not satisfy students’ desire to figure out how best to live. The success of the practical-political university results at least in part from its willingness to address the questions about identity and meaning that naturally arise among students: Who am I? Does it matter that I’m a woman, or a man, or that I’m black, or wealthy, or poor? Should I live like my parents? What constitutes valuable work? How should I approach the social problems I see around me? The practical-political university answers these questions, ushering students into their new roles as workers, activists, or both. Ignoring or downplaying such concerns, as those of us who favor disinterest sometimes do, may drive students directly into the more extreme forms of identity politics.
Imagine, for example, an aspiring classicist who enrolls in courses that are exclusively concerned with philology, in which he is discouraged from asking questions about the moral life that arise in Homer or Plato. Or an art-history student who learns only about brush strokes, patterns, and techniques, with an occasional nod to context. Such emphases might not answer the most pressing question posed by students: Why should I care about this stuff? While the goods of such study may be self-evident to professors, they are not always clear to beginners.
Against this background, imagine how startled a young female student would be if a dynamic professor marched into the classroom and provided a convincing theory that made sense of why she had always felt slightly inferior to the boys in her classes, or, if she was black or Hispanic, why it seemed that career prospects were always better for her white friends than for her. The professor might provide a “structural” explanation for the racist attitudes that she had sometimes observed, and the student might even be brought to see that she herself was complicit in racism in ways she had not seen before. The professor could explain different kinds of knowledge — “normalizing knowledge” versus “oppositional knowledge,” for instance — and insist that she and her peers had an obligation to change the status quo.
The explanatory power of such teaching would be illuminating, but even more exciting would be the sense of purpose it provided. “There is oppression in the world,” the student might think, “so why am I not doing something about it?” She cannot believe that she has been blind all these years to what was always right in front of her. She has found purpose and meaning. But there is a risk. Academic study might come to seem meaningful only if it issues in real-world, practical outcomes. Everything else might seem pointless by comparison.
A second problem with disinterestedness is that, while certain subjects are quite resistant to politics (the material covered in engineering and computer-science courses has little inherent connection to race or gender), other fields, like sociology, political science, and law, are political by their very nature. How exactly can one teach American constitutional law, for instance, without recognizing the thoroughly political character of nearly every landmark decision made by the Supreme Court?
Race, gender, and sexuality are essential for understanding contemporary life, and we do our students a disservice if we do not work through these issues with them.
Leaving politics wholly out of higher education is therefore both impossible and undesirable. We must make subtler distinctions, and see that political education is a vital part of the college experience, though it is certainly not the only part. This is not political education as indoctrination. Instead, students should come to see the complexity of the political world and the real competing goods pursued by the left and right. Just as important, they must be educated in the historical and philosophical origins of the political ideas that we now take for granted, such as liberalism, equality, and freedom.
Conversely, in other areas of scholarship and thought, politics is either not relevant, or relevant only in a tangential way. The poetry of Catullus or Horace may evoke reflection about Roman politics or about the relations between men and women. But these poets are not primarily tools for engaging in contemporary critiques of our own institutions. If the gender roles in Catullus (or in Aristotle or Plato or Homer) are not what we would personally desire, let us bracket these feelings and understand the authors on their own terms before we denounce them as sexist or racist. Or maybe we shouldn’t denounce them at all. We constrict experience if we view the intellectual world wholly through the lenses we have acquired in our own contemporary experience.
The point is that different kinds of study call for different attitudes toward hot-button political topics like race, gender, power, and oppression. Addressing modern political questions is appropriate in certain forms of study, and in others it is not — or it is at least inappropriate to use such questions as the primary framework for understanding the subject in question. In many fields, and even in the study of politics, what may be most necessary is that old idea of disinterest.
Disinterest and practice each deserve a place in the university, but at present the former has been almost entirely eclipsed by the latter. Disinterest is not an easy solution to the problem of the ever-increasing politicization of the university, yet it must not be abandoned. Universities might be seen as institutions that prepare students for moral and political life and as places of refuge — even of monastic retreat — from that life. Ideally, the same university should strive to make both ends available to those who teach and learn there.
How can we amplify the tradition of disinterest without engaging in a zero-sum game against the imperatives of the practical? Perhaps the most important step professors can take is to cultivate the tradition of disinterested learning by modeling it. Disinterested study appears any time a historian pores over old newspaper articles to find out what happened and what was said about it at the time without regard for contemporary relevance. When a music historian presents Bach cantatas to a class that has never heard them, delighting in the performance, or in the harmony, or in the pure emotion that such works evoke, this too is disinterest. It is what takes place in courses that cover Sanskrit literature or Dante or Confucianism. Disinterest has not left our universities altogether; it is just not valued very much in a world that finds contemplation rather puzzling and that has little time for “useless knowledge,” that lovely old idea.
Another practical step is to appreciate and live with the real diversity of colleagues. This is not merely the diversity of the progressive academy, which is marked by categories like race, gender, and sexuality. It is diversity of ultimate ends and of self-understanding — of competing visions of the good. In my own academic program, for example, there are committed pacifists and a just-war theorist. I see myself as an inheritor of the conservatism of Burke and Oakeshott; a colleague teaches Paulo Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy. We have cobbled together a mostly successful assemblage of interest and disinterest, of different approaches to learning.
Disinterested study is a foundational good precisely because it allows teachers and students to pursue the truth and to set aside calculations of utility and advantage. If this sounds old-fashioned, that’s because it is. But consider the distortions that creep in when we are too personally invested: We massage data to support our conclusions; we imagine that “telling our own story” stands as unqualified truth; we ask research questions that we know will issue in favorable political outcomes. We can never escape ourselves. And scholarship without disinterest also cuts off the very highest modes of inquiry. Must we always use geometry to build a bridge or carpet a room, or is there still a place for wondering about the nature of the triangle and the circle as such, and even about what universals lie beyond the triangle and the circle? As one of my most perceptive students put it, “I want to be able to think about things that aren’t only related to me.”
In the pluralist university I imagine, neither side would win unconditionally. Perhaps it is too late for many current professors and administrators to embrace this vision of the university, where history, science, practice, and aesthetic disinterestedness can coexist. They, like all of us, tend to become hardened by habit into certain familiar patterns of thought. But it is not too late for our students to see the beauty of a truly liberating education, just as John Henry Newman described it long ago: “A cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.”
Elizabeth Corey is an associate professor of political science in the Honors College at Baylor University. An earlier version of this essay appeared in National Affairs.
