Universities today: technocracy and truth

Bason on a lecture given at the Katholische Hochschule ITI in May 2023 -- it is all still relevant

“From the beginning, the humanitarian ideal of a systematic education for all was combined with a mechanical pedagogy that invalidated it.”

Lewis Mumford (The Condition of Man (1944), p. 258)

Around the time I received the kind invitation to give this lecture, I received another invitation to give lectures at another central European university, the WSB University in Dabrowa Gornicza, Poland. The coincidence was food for thought.

On one side, the two institutions have some significant similarities. Geographically, they are fairly close by contemporary standards—a mere 330 kilometres apart. They were founded at roughly the same time, both in large part in response to the changes in Europe after the fall of Communism. Both are ambitious and both have idealist agendas. However, in their vision of what education consists of, of what a university should provide its students and the broader community, they could hardly be more different.

That difference is the starting point of what I will be talking about today. Basically, the two universities provide radically different interpretations of the German concept of Bildung, the theme of this conference. I should warn you that just as that word has accumulated many meanings over time, the meanings of two of the English words that I will be using, vocation and profession, remain disputed. I will try to be very clear about what I have in mind.

That comes later. First I want to compare and contrast the ITI and WSB.

The ITI is very small, with not even 100 students. Its administrators would like to enrol more students, but not many more—a maximum of 120. The university’s range of expertise has widened over the years, but remains narrow. Everything that is taught would be recognised as worthy by Thomas Aquinas – especially the central studies of philosophy and theology. The techniques of teaching are designed to help students think deeply and clearly. They are encouraged to develop of a sense of wonder, that awe that Aristotle says is the beginning and principle of philosophy.

WSB, in contrast, is fairly large, around 10,000 students. It offers as many degrees as it can, in an ever-widening range of technical topics: from human resources management and logistics to medical technology and IT security. The teaching is fact-based and pragmatic. The prime pedagogic goal is for students to collect knowledge and master skills that will help them in their careers. Deep thinking is rarely, if ever, relevant for that.

The University of Oxford, which is my academic home, stands somewhere between the ITI and WSB. I suspect that some senior administrators at Oxford would be appalled even to be compared to a mere “trade school” such as WSB. I also suspect that other senior administrators would be more distressed by the comparison with the ITI. After all, while Oxford is building a giant new centre for the humanities, it is publicly committed to de-Christianising its theology offering.

I see Oxford’s changed approach to theology as a sign of a fundamental indifference to what I would call the deeper mission of the ITI: faith’s pursuit of understanding through the development of critical thinking. I mean critical in the best sense, wise rather than nihilistic.

Now, none of the top people at Oxford would ever say that they are indifferent to deep understanding or to the open enquiry which is needed to search for it. However, an unstinting commitment to wisdom or to the “liberal arts” will not produce the roughly three billion pounds the university spends every year. And where your treasure is, there is your heart. What produces that highly treasured money is excellence in the sort of conventional thinking that pleases various elites: political, economic, scientific, and cultural.

Each of the three institutions—ITI, Oxford, and WSB—is an exemplar of one of the three visions of the university that I am about to talk about: the vocational, which I associate with ITI, the professional, which Oxford embodies, and the technocratic, found in its purest form at WSB.

Before beginning, I should point out that no universities deserve to be idealised. Over the centuries, they have rarely demonstrated deep commitments to truth, wisdom, and critical debate. On the contrary, they frequently engaged in more intellectual censorship than in promotion of “the life of the mind”. As early as 1277, the University of Paris was forced to deal with the episcopal condemnation of 219 “manifest and damned” errors being propagated there. As late as well into the 19th century, Oxford was more of party-school than a serious intellectual institution. Between those dates, remarkably few of the great European thinkers worked primarily out of universities.

Even after adjusting for reality, though, I would argue that almost all traditional universities, even Oxford, always retained at least some presence of what I call a vocational vision. I am using the word in the sense close to its etymology, from the Latin “vocare”, to call. The call in question, the call of a vocational education, is from God to come as close as possible to him, through the study of God and his creation.

What happens at a vocational university? Pope Francis gave an answer during his during his recent visit to Hungary. He said the university is “a place where thought emerges and develops in a way both open and symphonic, and never monotonous. It is a ‘temple’ where knowledge is set free from the constraints of ‘accumulating and possessing’ and can thus become culture, that is, the ‘cultivation’ of our humanity and its foundational relationships: with the transcendent, with society, with history and with creation.”

Another answer to that question comes from Saint John Henry Newman, who said that the faculty in a good university “created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes…”. The inhaling student “apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little…A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom…a philosophical habit.”

Newman was thinking of an idealised version of the Oxford college of his day, in which a small group of young men lived amidst a small group of teachers of various ages with various specialities, styles, and accomplishments. The Oxford teachers, who were not allowed to marry until the 1870s, could be as dedicated to the formation of both the thinking and character of their students as to their own more advanced scholarly interests.

Oxford, along with its sister-rival Cambridge, developed a particularly effective pedagogical technique for calling up and passing on knowledge and wisdom, as well as a less attractive cleverness. What Oxford calls the tutorial system combine one-on-one dialogue with exacting reading and the rapid writing of essays. When the system works well, it really does call—vocat—students, and teachers, to think critically and deeply.

For solid economic reasons which I do not have time to explain, such a vocational commitment has become much more expensive since Newman’s days. However, for equally solid economic reasons which I also do not have time to explain, today’s rich nations have a much greater capability to pay for such a vocational commitment than they did in Newman’s days. Putting these two economic facts together, it is clear that developed economies could easily afford to offer a labour-intensive vocational university education all the students who would most benefit from one—the most qualified and eager one or even five percent of each year’s university intake. It is equally clear that the societies in which these developed economies are set do not choose to do that.

This social decision that vocational education is not a prime responsibility of elite universities is well reflected is Oxford’s priorities. The university’s senior administrators are anxious, indeed desperate, for more money, but they show little interest in improving, or even maintaining, the depth and quality of the undergraduate education, especially in the liberal arts.

I am not saying that the University would reject donations for that cause, although they might, especially if the offer came with the taint of a politically unacceptable intellectual agenda. However, the university has higher priorities than building up undergraduate instruction in the liberal arts, for example increasing tuition subsidies for poorer students, adding research positions, and hiring name-brand professors who are unlikely ever to give tutorials to any undergraduates. And where their money goes, there is their heart.

The limited interest in vocational education (in the sense that I am using the word) is neither exclusive to Oxford nor new to it. Since their creation, universities have always been at least as much professional, that is giving out licenses to practice particular professions, as vocational. The original professional faculties of law and medicine continue, but the number of university-certified professions and professionals has increased substantially over the last 150 years.

By now, various sorts of business studies dominate many, perhaps most, non-elite universities, including WSB. Even subjects that once might have seemed largely theoretical, informative, and scholarly—good material for a vocational education—are now largely presented as training for professional careers. For example, economists do still learn a great deal of pure theory (which is, I might add, deeply unrealistic), but they also learn how to use statistics so that they can get economically useful jobs in government and industry. Or consider politics and sociology. The former is largely treated as a study for professional political operators, while the latter is for future domestic planners and policymakers.

I am not exactly criticising these developments. The university years are often the appropriate ones for inculcating the remarkably wide range of professional skills needed to operate the modern economy. And universities are often the most appropriate institutions for such professional inculcation. They are experts in arranging curriculums in an organised way, in pushing information into students, and in testing the results.

Also, universities are good places for another sort of professional activity: research that will not lead quickly to profits. At Oxford, more is spent on such research than on all undergraduate education, let alone on what I am calling vocational education.

The increasing “professionalisation” of universities meshes easily with the traditional status-value degrees from universities, especially from elite ones. A graduate with an Oxford degree in law or engineering is doubly blessed. She emerges with both an Oxford aura and certified professional competence.

However, this “professionalisation” meshes very badly with any residual interest in a vocational education. Wonder, deep questioning, and divine concerns are alien, superfluous, or even possibly damaging to the concerns of professionals in business, data science, and all scientific ventures. Media studies has more vocational potential, but the technocratic paradigm, which I will discuss soon, ensure that the potential is very rarely activated.

The weight of numbers matters here. It is no longer possible for Oxford or any other elite university to be concerned primarily with helping undergraduates find their calling, because the majority of students at Oxford are now post-graduates, including many people getting mid-career degrees and certificates. Also, the university’s employees are mostly researchers and administrators, not educators. In many ways, today’s Oxford has more in common with today’s corporation or government agency than with the University of Oxford of a century ago.

Again, I am not exactly criticising these developments. Or, at least, I am not criticising universities for following the social choices of the societies in which they exist and strive to thrive. I might have preferred Oxford to be more loyal to its traditions of vocation, formation, and scholarship than to its traditions of social leadership and conformity to the conventional pieties of the current age, but such a preference would always have been an idle dream. A university like Oxford could never have avoided participating in what Pope Francis has called the technocratic paradigm.

What is this technocratic paradigm? It is first of all an intellectual paradigm of the sort described by Thomas Kuhn, a 20th century American historian of science. His paradigm is a dominant framework of thinking that determines what questions can be asked, what methods can be used to think about those questions, and what responses to those questions can be considered sensible or even acceptable.

The technocratic paradigm imposes these limits, but on cultural as well as on intellectual matters. Inside the technocratic paradigm, everything is thought about in terms of human power over nature, individual and immediate pleasures, quantities (rather than qualities), bureaucratic organisations, and technical professional expertise. Inside the paradigm, there is no room for the beauty of truth, the truth of beauty, or for everything else that a vocational education calls out in its students.

As the technocratic paradigm comes to dominate ever more thoroughly old universities such as Oxford, wonder, wisdom, and vocation make ever less sense to administrators, researchers, and, sadly, students. Conversely, the social prevalence of this paradigm provides fertile ground for new universities that are not encumbered with such old commitments. The founders of WSB recognised that the government and residents of a modernising—that is an increasingly technocratic—Poland would pay a good price for entirely functional and highly specialised professional education.

I do not have time today, nor is this conference the place, to consider the full implications of technocratic paradigm. I will merely rush through ten observations about the paradigm that are relevant to the contemporary university.

First, technocratic thinking craves data. It collects and collates pure facts, especially countable or measurable ones that can be understood and interpreted with as little non-numerical theory as possible. Universities are expected to find and curate all sorts of data, from ancient manuscripts that can be digitalised to experiments on the responses of commercially bred fish to different feeding regimes to the intergenerational effects of deworming in Kenya, to pick three topics that I have run across in the last few weeks.

Second, technocratic thinking does not have space for problems that cannot eventually be solved. This thinking does not, cannot, pose the great questions that inspired theology and that frame a vocational education: the questions about being, justice, God, evil, the good life, and so forth. At best, technocratic research can gather data about how people ask and answer such questions. At worst, even the questions are rejected as inappropriate to a contemporary university. “We’re here to study business, chemistry, or history. Nothing about the human relationship to God is our affair.”

Third, technocratic thinking is inherently bureaucratic. Just as machines work better, from a technical perspective, when the parts are interchangeable and the functioning is carefully controlled, human systems work better, from a technocratic perspective, when they rely on offices, rules, and record-keeping, rather than on friendships, shared commitments, subjective judgements, and the imperfectly controlled jostling of virtues and vices. Technocratic universities are human systems with a high potential to lose the technocratic plot, perhaps by becoming more vocational. (Students do get tempted by truth and beauty, not to mention sex and drinking.) Vast bureaucracies have been established to ensure that processes and procedures are followed correctly.

Fourth, the technocratic paradigm fits poorly with the reality of humanity. “Homo technocraticus” is fine with problem-solving, rule-setting, career-planning, and controlled quantities of pleasure-seeking, but he or she has no grandeur, no misery, no confusion of passions and enthusiasms, no moral and spiritual struggles. A well-run technocratic university will have limited tolerance for passions that are disruptive, illogical, or not socially approved.

Fifth, technocratic thinking is constitutionally unaware of beauty. I have a friend who collects data on what scientists says about beauty in their work, but he had to do interviews to find out. The love of beauty was for most of them something of a secret vice. It just does not fit into their published work, or, for the most part, with their teaching. Beauty as a conduit of the divine may ultimately be more powerful than technocracy—I hope and believe that it is—but it has no place in a technocratic education.

Sixth, technocratic thinking rejects wonder and wisdom. Intellectual work is fine as long as it solves problems, but any sentiment of wonder must quickly be translated into questions that can be answered in objectively verifiable ways. Any sort of non-verbal wisdom should be articulated as much as possible, and then transferred into a readily available database of best practices.

Seventh, technocratic thinking is often ideological and extreme. The denial of beauty, wisdom, and, as I will discuss soon, truth, does not lead only to vast quantities of data and narrow technical knowledge, although it certainly produces those. The anthropological gap, the non-recognition of what theologians sometimes call the natural human craving for the supernatural, leaves technocrats vulnerable to simplifying and totalising ways of thinking. History and politics are reduced to power, justice to politics, economics to greed, and love to sex.

Eighth, technocratic thinking aims at the production of knowledge, not at the reproduction of culture. The goal of collecting data is to analyse it into bits of knowledge which can be put to practical use. The goal of technocratic education is to produce professionals who collect, have and use knowledge that is relevant to their speciality. There is neither time for nor comprehension of the non-technocratic care needed for the continuation of traditions and wisdom. Indeed, there is little respect for what was once considered the responsibility of most young adults at university: to prepare for the continuation of the species. Raising children gets in the way of data accumulation and knowledge-production.

Ninth, almost all universities have enthusiastically endorsed technocratic thinking. It might be tempting to think that the residual vocational elements of old universities such as Oxford would make these institutions bastions of resistance to the still fairly new paradigm. In reality, though, the role of universities as markers of social status and the role of academics as social and cultural leaders ensure that these institutions, like government agencies, corporations, secondary schools, and most religious groups, move in lockstep with the technocratic times. The declining portion of students in arts subjects and the concomitant increase in science students has accelerated the technocratic takeover. It is hard to avoid some critical thinking when studying philosophy or history. It is hard to include any critical thinking when studying undergraduate biology or engineering.

Finally, and more optimistically, the victory of the technocratic university over vocational education is never total. As I found as WSB, even an institution with no vocational tradition and an exclusively technocratic mission cannot escape some vague sense that real universities should offer courses that develop character, hearts, souls, and minds—as well as courses that impart certifiable skills. In all universities, there are some students who want vocational formation, and some teachers and administrators who would like to provide it.

I turn now from technocracy to the other half of this talk’s title: truth. The pursuit of truth, or at least of something that might be called truth, is central to all three of my types of education: vocational, professional, and technocratic.

The vocation to some transcendental or divine truth is central to any vocational thinking. Insofar as Western universities were vocational, they presented the truth of the Christian revelation in theology, and presented the truth of God found in his creation in philosophy and the various sciences.

Since the contents of these truths have always been contested, Christian universities were often divided by intense theological and philosophic controversies. However, looking backwards from our secular age, the disagreements seem far more superficial than the universal agreement: that there is a Truth which, or who, calls all people to and through knowledge. The belief was taken for granted by almost everyone concerned with both the most vocational and more academically and vocationally careless pre-20th century universities. Even now, to the very limited extent that universities promote a vocational vision, the search for truth remains central. Truth and vocation are inextricably linked.

In contemporary professional education, truth plays a role, but the truth in question is more pragmatic than inspirational. Certification generally requires some promise of personal integrity, but the integrity is rarely defined in terms of a broad understanding of practicing the good and searching for the true. Rather, there are specific ethical standards to be respected, and specific practices to be followed or avoided. The rules can be traced back to some more elevated standard of truth, but the connection is often quite distant.

For technocracy, truth as a human and universal goal or good is not really relevant. I do not mean to say that technocracy promotes falsehood. All I am suggesting is that technocracy’s pragmatic and rules-based thinking is almost indifferent to the vocational understanding of truth. What counts as true is simply what works for the modest goals that technocracy endorses. Problem-avoidance techniques and even convenient lies are likely to be preferred to inconvenient truths.

Indeed, inside the technocratic paradigm, the “noble lies” that so trouble philosophers present no real problem. There may be worries that lies cannot be sustained forever, but the concerns are pragmatic, not ethical or ontological. If people can be persuaded that banks are sound, that governments are competent and well-intentioned, or that they themselves are or should be happy, angry, or frightened, then any recognition of a different reality is a threat to the technocratic understanding of the true common good.

Universities almost always promote the dominant social imaginary of their time and place. It is, then, inevitable, that today’s universities mostly promote the technocratic paradigm, including technical competence and an indifference to any sort of truth that would get in the way of getting a good job.

At Oxford, this aiming-low is not really necessary. An Oxford BA degree provides enough status to guarantee reasonable professional success. Undergraduates could easily spend some of their time searching for truth. And some undergraduates do go down that path. However, many more of them want more than reasonable success. They want first class honours, they want to be hired by the best firms, they want to be on the road to fame, fortune, or both.

More important, their thinking is so technocratic that they can only consider their studies as tools for professional success, with perhaps a secondary concern for actual professional excellence. For these technocratic students, the search for higher truth is not even a tertiary concern. Such worrying and wondering is incomprehensible.

For anyone here connected to the ITI, my description of the contemporary university should be both discouraging and encouraging. It is discouraging, because the goals of this institution—to offer a vocational education and to promote truth, Christian truth—receive so little social respect. As a result, over time the ITI is likely to struggle with some of its regulators. Also, any graduates who do want to move into the dominant culture will often be told that their education was useless. And normal donors to higher education will stay away.

On the other side, the picture I have drawn should also be encouraging. If I am right to think that young people, at least some of them to some degree, are still open to, indeed sometimes actually crave, a vocational education, then there is space for a vocational university like the ITI, even in a society dominated by the technocratic paradigm. That thinking is so dominant that such vocational institutions are unlikely to be large or numerous, but there is a virtue in this necessity. It is easier to build up strong communities in a small institution than in a large one.

Purity is another necessity-generated virtue for the ITI. In the pre-technocratic age, universities almost never clearly favoured vocational formation over the provision of official professional certification and unofficial certification of social status. Such a mixed agenda has become almost impossible, if only because a technocratic approach to often quite technocratic topics undermines all efforts vocational instruction. The ITI’s narrow academic focus allows for a coherent education in, with, and towards the fulness of truth.

With these small comforts, I thank you for your interest.