Seven Principles of Higher Education: A Primer.(Brief Article)

Seven is a lucky number (and thankfully less than Luther's ninety-five). I hope that by distinguishing the interrelated principles below, it will be easier for critics to bring out specific rather than global objections to my arguments.

1. The central mission of the academic community is epistemological--the search for truth.

Because I take a realist view of epistemology (i.e., that there can be an increase in knowledge of the world, but that--contrary to naive realism--knowledge is always fallible), I have formulated the central mission as one where the academic community (comprising both faculty and students) is engaged not in establishing the truth, but rather in the search for truth. Although this search tends to be more straightforward in the hard sciences than in the humanities, there is the possibility of error in all disciplines, and disagreements are therefore expected even in the "hardest" of sciences. (This sort of hard-science dispute is exemplified, for instance, by Einstein's disagreement with such younger colleagues as Heisenberg and Bohr, colleagues who argued for indeterminacy in quantum physics.)

To argue that the search for truth is the university's central mission is not to say that it is the only mission. Nor is it to suggest that members of the academic community are motivated only by this central mission, and are not influenced by other factors such as greed, envy, fear, selfishness, and altruism.

2. Academic freedom should belong equally to all members of the academic community.

Although there is a variety of conceptualizations of academic freedom, I suggest that its essence is the right of all members of the academic community to be evaluated in terms of academic performance, rather than on the basis of conformity with some ideology, or on the basis of membership in some designated group (however deserving of support on other grounds that group may be). To say this does not imply that the judgments of academic performance will always be sound. Far from it.

3. Academic power should vary with expertise in the relevant discipline or disciplines, and so cannot be egalitarian.