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Hi Scholar,

Recently, The Tatler took to social media to announce his decision to pursue an independent PhD by publication: 

“The goal I set myself this year is to earn my PhD by January 2032. 

I won’t be enrolling in a formal program. I won’t be affiliated with a university. I’m going to do it independently. Being independent means being outside traditional funding, outside traditional institutions and doing a different kind of scholarship than what is common in academia. 

I’ll be working towards my PhD by publication. Instead of a monograph/thesis, I will spend the next 6 years working to publish between 3-5 peer reviewed journal articles. When taken together, these publications will form a coherent, original body of work that is equivalent to the contributor of a standard PhD thesis. My topic is broadly in intellectual history/history of science. I’m interested in how shifts in scholarly practices, institutions, and norms in the 20th century have shaped contemporary academia today.

If you believe that a research grant and a lab are needed for you to be a scholar, then traditional academia is where you can find them. But that support comes at a cost. You can’t have it all. It takes some imagination to pursue this kind of independent scholarship. It will take time. And there’s no one size fits all way to do it.” 

The announcement elicited a stream of questions but one of them struck particularly hard: 

Are you anti-university? Why else would you purposefully do your work outside one?

The question was invited into one of our many conversations and it left us – if we’re being honest with you, dear Scholar – a little bit ... .muted. We found ourselves unable to jump to quick binary answers involving ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Instead, our answers followed with ‘well….’. 

We found ourselves appreciative of the question because it provoked us and demanded our attention. 

We also began to think of how this was in fact not the first time one of us were asked a question of these sorts relating to our thoughts on the university. A week or so before this question was directed toward The Tatler, both of us were asked the following question during the recording of a podcast episode: 

“So, the thing that I've really come across as a challenge in my own scholarship and academic journey is that despite their flaws, universities seem to remain the dominant institutions of learning and knowledge production. Do you see that dominance as something that can be meaningfully challenged or do scholars need to learn how to work alongside and outside of it?”

This was definitely neither a binary nor as pointed a question as the one that The Tatler was individually asked. However, we couldn’t help but now see the overlapping contours between the two questions aimed to unearth how we thought of, saw, related ourselves to the university. 

That we were being asked such questions was perhaps not only understandable but also to be expected. We regularly and publicly write about research, knowledge, and scholarship which is often contextualised in the university. Oftentimes, our writings about the modern university may even be said to be acerbic. We don’t hold our tongues when it comes to stating what we find most unsettling and unbecoming of our higher education institutions. 

No wonder, those in our scholarly circles want to know what we really think of the university.

— Written by The Critic (with contributions from The Tatler)

In 1949, when James Killian was inaugurated as the 10th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he delivered a most interesting speech on the ideals and obligations a private Institution of Technology – like MIT – would be striving to uphold in the second half of the 20th century. 

In this speech, Killian defines a private institution of technology as  “a special type of educational institution which can be defined as a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts. We might call it a university limited in its objectives but unlimited in the breadth and the thoroughness with which it pursues these objectives. It includes an undergraduate school and a graduate school as coequal parts of a homogenous faculty... a school of engineering and applied science working in close association with a school of basic science.... enriched by the social and esthetic values of architecture and the humanities...”

Speaking of the primary obligation of such institutes, he set forth that “the education of men and the conduct of research to keep [science’s] frontier endless” would continue to lie at the very core. Further reminding his audience that “one of America’s greatest sources of strength” was “its unequalled industrial capacity”, he stressed the “major responsibility” schools of science and engineering bore toward “educating men for the refinement and management of this productive machine.” 

While he recognised the “close relationship to government and industry” that such institutes of technology maintained, he was also of the view that they “have an obligation to keep themselves strong and independent... [as] to curtail freedom in our institutes of technology would be to run counter to the spirit of science, which thrives best in an atmosphere of freedom practiced with responsibility – the responsibility of a company of scholars governing themselves."

For Killian, science and technology were not only “essential to health, prosperity, and security” but also forces that “give you and me more freedom to be socially responsible citizens, to be good neighbors, to pursue the good life, to seek ways of making it unnecessary ever again to divert science away from its normal peaceful objectives…”. In this sense, he held that “a special responsibility lies upon our institutes of technology not to neglect basic science”. This responsibility, as he described it, was “the need to cultivate science for its own special values, its disinterested search for truth, its creativeness, its readiness to acknowledge error and accept new ideas…” 

Carrying this line of more romantic – rather than utilitarian – thinking further, he also opined that “education is to be found not only in the classroom or the laboratory, but in the experience of living with one's fellows in an environment stimulating to intellectual activity…”. In this manner, the goal was “to carry further the development of an environment at MIT which performs in the broadest sense an educational function itself” whereby “students need not only meet rigorous requirements” but have “the opportunities to reflect, to develop the intellectual maturity that comes only from self-education.”

A few reflections come to mind when considering these objectives and obligations of private institutions of technology as set forth by Killian in his inaugural speech. 

The objectives Killian laid out some 75 years ago for private institutions of technology sound, to us, uncannily similar to the missions most contemporary universities today espouse. While we have not quoted any of Killian’s references to the Atomic Bomb and Cold War above, if we looked past these historically specific moments in his speech, there is little that would seem out of place had it been delivered at a graduation ceremony six months ago. To us, it almost seems like contemporary universities have adopted these objectives that were once considered ‘unique’ to private institutes of technology. 

However, when reading the speech against the immediate historical context in which Killian delivered it, we can be sure that there were no motivations at the time for other forms of educational institutions – that is, not private institutions of technology – to take up these ideals and objectives. If anything, while public universities and liberal arts colleges may have shared overlapping roles, Killian ultimately saw them as serving distinct functions within the American education system of the period. 

For example, when addressing the expected growth in demand for university education in the coming decades, Killian was resolute in his belief that private institutions should prioritise "quality over quantity" and limit the number of students they admitted. Much of the burden of expanding access to education, in his view, would need to be carried by public institutions in receipt of government funding – something which MIT itself would not receive for another 20 years. 

Additionally, when speaking of the relationship that such institutes of technology should have with the government, Killian was of the view that it is to maintain independence, particularly through ties with business and industry. Whether this arrangement truly made these private institutions more independent is up for debate. But the point is that such ties were not characteristic of public universities at the time. 

Further differences between an institute of technology and other forms of educational institutions can be identified in the way that Killian points to the benefits liberal arts colleges and institutes of technology had enjoyed by adopting features of one another's curricula. The former had become somewhat more specialised, the latter became somewhat more general, and both, he argued, were better for it. 

While much of Killian’s speech feels familiar to us – akin to what we might hear from our Vice Chancellors at graduation ceremonies – at the time when it was delivered, diversity among different kinds of higher education institutions was still very much present. 

Since Killian's address, however, the distinctions between these institutions appear to have grown increasingly fuzzy. 

Private universities now receive government funding, public universities prize industry partnerships, and liberal arts colleges emphasise the development of graduates capable of contributing to a nation's economic prosperity and security. 

This growing homogeneity is not confined to the USA. In 1992, for instance, the UK Government converted the country’s 35 polytechnic colleges (or institutes of technology) into universities. More generally, at least in the USA and the UK, what we can see is that the university system has become more and more homogenous. 

In working through these reflections, we cannot help but think of the extent of influence a historically prestigious institute of technology – such as MIT – which has since formally itself become a university, has had on the becoming of our contemporary public universities. There is almost a sense that there has been a significant level of imitation in the way that all universities today see themselves in their relationships with and responsibilities to government, business, and industry. 

This is not to suggest that a single speech by Killian caused universities across the world to adopt this model. Rather, we ask the reader to consider this for themselves: does the vision he articulates not sound eerily similar to what we experience and encounter in the modern university today? And if so, does it not appear to be the case that the objectives which were articulated in Killian’s speech now form part of the foundation upon which many of the tensions experienced in present-day universities now rest? 

Graduates are expected to emerge as professionals with specialist knowledge that prepares them for economically productive careers, while also having received a general education that renders them well-rounded citizens and neighbours. Universities are expected to maintain their financial independence from government through generation of funds by fee-paying students, yet simultaneously to cultivate close financial ties with government and industry in the service of industrial capacity and societal wellbeing. In this sense, the contradictions of the private institution of technology appear to have been well and truly transferred into the ecosystem of higher education more broadly, and are no longer specific to private institutions alone.

From these reflections, we may infer two things.

First, higher education has become more and more homogenous as the diversity of institutions are flattened through the emergence of a universal model of the university. Second, and relatedly, the university itself has undergone a process of singularisation involving the widespread adoption of the objectives and ideals once distinctive to the private institution of technology. 

This homogenisation of higher education and singularisation towards a universal model of the university demands us to raise two questions about our contemporary university, and more broadly, about our current system of higher education: 

In singularising ourselves around the aspirations of the private institution of technology, what has become of the distinctive model of the public university?

And more fundamentally, what has happened to a system of higher education in which the historical model of the private institution of technology was not hegemonic, and in which a diversity of institutions – universities, colleges of education, institutions of technology, and colleges of further education – were properly supported and allowed to flourish?

 Allow us, Scholar, to address these questions, for in doing so it will become clear to you the posture we have towards the university. 

In A Manifesto for the Public University, the public university is not defined simply by its association with public funding: taxpayer money, government grants, and the like. Instead, the authors define the public university in terms of its public purpose, and more specifically, in terms of how it functions for the public (or publics). In this regard, what distinguishes the public university is not primarily how it is funded but how it serves public life. 

Here, we would like to highlight that this understanding of the public does not reduce it to an aggregate of taxpayers whose interests are represented by the state alone. As John Holmwood suggests, by drawing on John Dewey’s understanding of the public, the public is something that forms through shared problems, consequences, and collective concerns. Most importantly, the public must be able to represent itself rather than merely be represented. The role of the university, in this sense, is not simply to receive public funds or serve public policy objectives, but to facilitate the conditions under which publics can emerge, deliberate, and make sense of the issues that affect them.

Accordingly, John Holmwood argues that if the improvement of debate, discussion, and persuasion is a central problem of democratic life, then the university is necessarily part of the answer. However, it can only play this role if it is genuinely at the service of the public. A university at the service of the public, in Dewey’s sense, is one that should properly be regarded as a public university. This may not be the university’s only function, but it is a necessary one – one that places the social mission at its heart. Anything less, Holmwood argues, risks turning the university into just another private corporation, embedded in what has become a corporate society, and oriented primarily toward whoever is able to pay.

Understood in this way, and to put it more directly, the key offering that a public university provides is education as a public good in its own terms – valuable both for the student and for wider society. Its defining characteristic lies in its purpose which is the cultivation of the mind, in the development and transmission of knowledge and culture, and in the strengthening of democratic citizenship through improved debate and enhanced civic capacities. And so, what is unique and distinctive about the public university is its fundamental role in culture and public life as an instrument of collective intelligence. 

This is exactly the kind of public university which we feel has gone entirely missing in our modern day landscape of universities. While historically, only institutes of technology pursued a dual objective: close alignment with business and industry, alongside the education of individuals as professionals and citizens, now all contemporary universities have come to inherit this same combination of objectives. In this large-scale process of institutional imitation, whereby “all institutions strive to emulate Harvard, and in so doing look the same”, we have lost what was the most distinctive of the public university: 

its commitment to developing a public which is able to represent itself. 

You see where our problem with the contemporary university lies now. We take issue with the extent to which universities have come to forget their responsibilities to the public through education, research, and scholarship. And so, you may call us anti-university but only to the extent that we are in disagreement with the way the university has come to serve both public and private corporate interests at once, and in doing so has weakened its commitment to the public mission that could – and should – remain its defining characteristic, its raison d’être.

Now that we have laid bare our irks with the contemporary university, let us turn our attention specifically to the homogenisation of higher education more broadly. It is striking that, even when we recognise that a diversity of higher education institutions exists, it can still feel almost unimaginable to think of higher education as something other than “the university.” Higher education has become synonymous with university – indeed, with a very particular model of the university, as we have already discussed.

And yet other forms have long existed: institutes of technology, liberal arts colleges, colleges of education, community colleges, and more. It is simply that the landscape has become so homogenised that this distinctiveness is now difficult to perceive. What we can recognise instead is only the contemporary university – often a poor imitation of the private institution of technology, carrying its mixed obligations without its historical specificity. There is just no other university which is possible in our minds.  

Do not mistake our bemoaning of this dominance of the contemporary university as a push for the public university to instead become the only model in the higher education system. We are not saying that the features of the public university we have just discussed need to replace the features of all forms of higher education. This is because we are not opposed to private institutes of technology – or, for that matter, private universities – pursuing twofold objectives: the cultivation of citizens alongside a close relationship with business and industry. Such institutions can exist – indeed, they should exist – but, and this is important, alongside institutes for whom business links are not a primary objective, or those that prize creativity over ‘impact’. 

To put it directly, what we are most alarmed by is this: 

the erosion of distinctiveness across the whole system of higher education.

That is, the steady smoothing-out of institutional differences in pursuits, aims, and purposes, until every institution is expected to look and sound like the same kind of university.

When we look back to the past, it is not impossible to find periods when difference and experimentation were not only imaginable but actively pursued. Experimental institutions such as Deep Springs College, Bennington College, and Black Mountain College proliferated in the early twentieth century. Mid-century community colleges represented another innovation: an institutional response to access and affordability. As Joy Rosenzweig Kliewer writes: 

What she describes is a landscape of heterogeneity, one in which new institutional forms could be imagined and attempted. Such heterogeneity, however, is now a rarer sight. The sector increasingly churns out look-alikes – institutions drawn toward a single dominant model and evaluated by the same narrow measures. 

What we take to be most important in the idea of higher education is transformation: the formation of a different person from the one who began the journey. While this idea of transformation is typically used to describe what should take place in the university, we think it makes more sense to extend this idea to higher education more generally. Different environments and institutional forms can produce distinct kinds of transformation. Yet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see such variation in a smoothed landscape where one dominant university model prevails and where only one form of transformation is prized: the conversion of the student into a productive worker, servicing and maintaining the status quo of capital.

In this sense, we think that higher education should be delivered across a variety of settings within a heterogeneous system. Importantly, while transformation should lie at the core of all higher education, transformation itself should not be singular; it should produce different kinds of persons, different capacities, different orientations toward public life. Such differences require variation in institutional forms. 

The university is one kind of higher education institution but it should not be the only one, nor the template for all the rest. 

This is not, then, a call for the abolition of the university – an idea which we admit is thrilling, and also absurd. It is a call to recover plurality in how and where higher education happens. Here, we should note that even the pursuit of independent scholarship can be understood as a form of difference: an innovation in how education and scholarly formation might occur, outside the script of the contemporary university. Our advocacy for and adoption of independent scholarship is, therefore, not an opposition to university education but an argument for its place within a broader ecology of higher education – alongside universities, and alongside other institutional forms that ought, once again, to be supported and allowed to flourish.

So, as you can see, Scholar, no, we are not anti-university.
What we are is perhaps post-university.

By post-university, we do not mean that the university has nothing left to offer, nor that it should be abandoned or dismantled. We mean that we refuse to treat the contemporary university – with its inherited twofold objective of business alignment and the cultivation of mind – as the sole institutional horizon through which scholarship, education, and intellectual formation must pass. To be post-university, therefore, is to take seriously the idea of the public university while also recognising how far the dominant university form has drifted from that ideal.

We are post-university, first, because we insist on recovering the public mission of higher education: a commitment to education, research, and scholarship as public goods, and to the creation of conditions under which publics can form, deliberate, and represent themselves. And we are post-university, second, because we reject the narrowing of higher education into a single institutional form. We call instead for heterogeneity: a landscape of varied settings, environments, and institutions through which different kinds of transformation can occur.

Seen in this light, you will also understand then that the decision to pursue independent scholarship is not a posture of withdrawal from, resentment toward, or opposition to the university. If anything, it is an experiment – one attempt among many to imagine how higher education might be practiced otherwise. If, as has been observed, “all systems of higher education across the world are moving inexorably in the direction of the marketised university,” then the task before scholars is not only to criticise this trajectory but to do something about expanding the space of possibility beyond it.

We do not deny that some forms of higher education will continue to value the transformation of students into productive workers, nor do we deny the legitimacy of those aims in certain contexts. What we reject is the idea that this should be the only transformation worth valuing or that the university should be the only site in which such transformation can take place. We believe that higher education can be richer, more inventive, and more meaningful when it allows for difference – of purpose, form, and outcome.

So we hope that rather than seeing our work through an anti-university lens, you will see it in the light of a post-university understanding: a position which is to do with a broader, more imaginative understanding of what higher education can be, where it can happen, and who it can help us become.

If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, we want to hear it. Even if it’s something negative, it’s okay. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that knowledge and scholarship begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email, Scholar, we want to hear what you have to say and share.