The Historical Falsehood of Apolitical Universities

The Idea That Universities Should Be Politically Neutral is a Modern Invention

Photo by Grigorii Shcheglov on Unsplash

Many pundits and politicians today argue that universities are “too political” and should return to “value-neutral” education. That premise has become a slogan in political campaigning. Hyper-partisan legislatures use it to justify censorship of university curricula in dozens of states.

Nonetheless, the idea of an apolitical university education is a very recent and politically cynical invention. It’s deeply inconsistent with the historical role of universities in Western culture.

Universities did not exist in classical Greek and Roman times, but advanced education did. In classical Greek literature, the question of how students should be educated for political leadership is ever-present. The dialogues of Plato, the plays of Aeschylus, the philosophy of Aristotle, and more, intermittently explore this question. The prospect of educating students for political leadership is always intertwined with the emergence of democracy in such texts.

Such leading Roman thinkers as Cicero and Quintilian identified lifelong advanced learning as a critical benefit to republican politics. Sapientia et eloquentia: wisdom and eloquence. Leaders skilled in the republican art of eloquence should rule the public realm, and eloquence, according to Roman thinkers, required continual infusions of wisdom from the contemplative life of intensive study.

These Greco-Roman equations of advanced learning with public leadership and power-holding influenced the first Western universities in the medieval period. They arose as institutions that helped define both civil and canon (ecclesiastical) law.

The first universities, then, were founded to train leaders in both secular and church governance at a time when church and state competed for political power throughout Europe. Scholars were agents, not passive subjects, in the establishment of imperial and ecclesiastical authority.

Later, leaders of the Protestant Reformation—most famously, Martin Luther—were trained in university theology programs. The growth of education and the course of the reformation were deeply intertwined. Communities of scientists in early modern universities aided the scientific revolution. Both developments are considered revolutionary eras of modern Western history that led to dramatic expansions in individual rights and political liberty.

No concept was more important to Enlightenment thinkers than education. Education, especially among university-educated classes, signified intellectual liberation from dogma in pursuit of individual rights—an explicitly political struggle.

That Enlightenment vision profoundly shaped the worldviews of early American leaders. The eighteenth-century founders of our republic understood the revolution of 1776 as an ongoing project in social and political egalitarianism. They considered greater opportunities for education among the people at large an important part of that revolution.

In his first annual address to Congress (1790), President George Washington encouraged Congress to establish institutions of knowledge—perhaps a “national university”—that would educate the public in their newfound political rights.

Thomas Jefferson advocated public university education on a historically expansive scale. He repeatedly said that universities should educate people in their political liberties “without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.”

John Adams and other leaders of the revolution also held this view. The ideals of popular governance and political self-determination were fundamentally connected to the prospects of a revolutionary new system of education at this time.

Land grant universities were established in the late nineteenth century as an expression of those prior ideals. The legal architecture of twentieth-century desegregation in universities rested on principles of equality dating to the fight for independence.

Equal access to universities and fair treatment within has been a political flashpoint in American history ever since. The question has never been whether universities play an important political role in society, but how or to what purpose.

Pundits and politicians today who argue that institutions of higher education should be apolitical do so to allegedly defend classical traditions and American patriotic ideals. Yet that argument is profoundly antithetical to the very traditions and ideals they claim to defend.