José Cabranes: The Present Danger at our Leading Universities: What is to be Don [7:48-12:50]

Now how do we get here? How do this new alliance of student activists and allied functionaries supplant the faculty? The answer reflects a far-reaching intellectual confusion. Today too many are either unwilling or unable to maintain a distinction that lies at the core of the liberal democratic project and at the core of the intellectual traditions of the West. I refer to the distinction between inquiry and action, between speech and conduct. Our first amendment of course is built on that very distinction. Long before our Constitution, Socrates stood before the people of Athens and swore that he would never cease from the practice in teaching of philosophy, but he also disclaimed any involvement in politics and in the struggle for power. At one time, not so long ago, it was obvious that universities were the embodiment of Socrates' distinction, that they would dedicated to reflection, not political action. We understood or thought we understood that their purpose was to teach students in methods and habits of free inquiry, in deliberation, assessment of evidence, and the expansion of knowledge. It was also clear, we thought, what universities were not. Universities did not exist to implement the conclusions of our social cultural moral or economic debates. Maintaining that distinction between inquiry and action has always been crucial to academic freedom. It is difficult, after all, to obtain the truth while you're being bludgeoned into submission. In our time, it is the totalitarian who rejects this distinction, who insists that a society may regulate opinion as it regulates action, that society may control minds as it controls bodies. And today, the idea that some speeches violence, the very conflation of inquiry and action, is no longer merely an obscure and obscurantist academic slogan. Today, that idea threatens the entire project of higher education. Consider, for instance, the rather remarkable recent change in Yale University's so-called mission statement. Before 1916, the statement asserted, and I think it's an important, simple quotation, Yale has a tripartite mission to create, to preserve, and to disseminate knowledge. The statement is arguably banal, but is just about right. But in 2016, the current president of Yale announced a new longer statement, and here are two representative statements from the Yale University mission statement as it exists today. Yale is committed to improving the world. Yale educates aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society. These two new sentences reveal new priorities. The focus on knowledge is gone, replaced by leadership, practice, and world improvement. We are witnessing an evolution in the self-understanding of universities, a shift from institutions of inquiry and deliberation to institutions of assertiveness and action. This shift is at once both a cause and an effect of the astonishing rise of the non-academic bureaucracy. To be sure, universities always retained a small number of professional staff, of which I was pleased to be one, but this staff understood its role as a supporting role. Someone must ensure that the campus is secure, that the papers are in order, and that laws and university rules are obeyed, so that the university can perform its function as a place of inquiry. Indeed, when I served as the university professional, as the legal advisor to three great university presidents, Kingman Brewster, Hannah Holborn Gray, and A. Bartlett-Jermati, I was pleased to think that my job was to protect our faculty from undue risks and assault. But now the ambitions of our university staff are greater. The achievement of diversity, inclusion, and equity. And so it is that the non-faculty professionals who unlike the faculty are dedicated to doing rather than deliberating, so it is that they have taken the lead.