In his study of the great medieval universities Hastings Rashdall (1895, 4-5) observes that ‘the University is an institution which owes not merely its primitive form and traditions, but in a sense, its very existence to a combination of accidental circumstances . . . but [its] subsequent development was determined by, and reveals to us, the whole bent and character of the age to whose life it became organic.’ This opens before us the question about what is said about the being (existence) of “the” university, in the being (bent and character of the age) of the world in which it finds itself’ – the place of the university in history and society today.
An increasing number of articles have recently been published which point towards what has been identified by many commentators as a “crisis”, a crisis not only in the humanities – now somewhat a cliché – but in the universities themselves as they face ‘declining numbers, declining funding, declining societal value, declining autonomy and declining expectations’ (Butterfield 2024) – a decades long decline. The growing assault on our universities has meant they have become mired in a morass of the worst kind of commercialism where students are now regarded as consumers and education is a commodity that delivers ‘a marketable degree and an “enriching experience” — that is, an experience which flatters their existing sense of self’ (Skidelsky 2024). They have been overtaken by managerialism, falling standards and have become the fertile breeding ground for ideological activism, transforming them into ‘a proponent body for social engineering and change which now drives the curriculum and much university research and practice’ (Hemming 2025). This matters even more, as Prof. Alice Sullivan (2025) has recently noted, because ‘[i]n a climate where wider public discussion has been constrained, it is particularly important that universities provide a space where critical analysis, dialogue and the pursuit of knowledge can occur without fear. This matters for science and scholarship, for education, for public trust in universities, and for democracy. Academia must tolerate and encourage diverse viewpoints. But the university cannot fulfil its proper function if it permits behaviours which threaten the norms which are essential to the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge as a public good’. This is as Dr Iain McGilchrist (2025) has also noted ‘something that has been advancing across a couple of generations: the drifting away from, a neglect – even an abandonment – of, the pursuit of truth, the pursuit that is ultimately the only justification of a university’. We are therefore left asking with McGilchrist ‘what can we make of the future… of the university as an institution of learning today?’ What is the fate of the university?
The Foundation does not seek to address the issue of “finding solutions” to the question of why the universities are adrift, but much more fundamentally to talk about why universities and academic research is so important as a preserver and guarantor of what underpins scientific and intellectual truth. We have no wish to contribute directly to the formation of public policy or critique, although we readily note that much of what happens in the way universities are now governed and run falls under the terms of the discussion of managerialism and technocracy in which we are already engaged. Our fundamental concern is to understand the scope and character of the question suggested by Rashdall’s opening of his 1895 study: how does the university reveal to us the whole bent and character of the age of which it is an organic part?’
More details to follow.