Serie mensual de artículos del Chronicle of Higher Education sobre la universidad en la literatura. Primer artículo dedicado a Ortega y Gasset y su Misión de la Universidad.
Rereading the University Classics
By Kai Hammermeister, The Chronicle oh Higher Education, September 9, 2010
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.
The American university is often considered to be an unlikely and precarious, if highly productive, conjoining of the British residential college and the German 19th-century research university. In his short treatise, Mission of the University, José Ortega y Gasset rejects both models and wants to replace them with an Italo-Spanish emphasis on student participation that was decisive for the founding of the medieval European university but quickly receded into the background.
Ortega’s 1930 essay is still one of the most daring, albeit ultimately misguided, attempts of the past century to re-emphasize the student as the central organizational principle of higher education.
Ortega (1883-1955) studied in Spain and Germany and was active as a publisher, a politician, and a professor of philosophy. He is best known for his book The Revolt of the Masses, yet the radical democratic tendencies of Mission of the University seem to belie the elitism of the earlier treatise.
Very few reformist thinkers in higher education have been willing to shift as much responsibility toward students as Ortega. As a whole, however, his essay on the university lacks rigor of argumentation as well as coherence.
When law students grouped together in Bologna in the 11th century to organize their instruction and to hire their professors, their bottom-to-top initiative led to the establishment of the medieval European university. That student-driven model was strongest in Italy and Spain; Paris, for one, soon shifted the power to the professoriate.
Clark Kerr mentions that remarkable feature in his seminal volume The Uses of the University: “The students had all the power once; that was in Bologna. Their guilds ran the university and dominated the masters. … The Bologna pattern had an impact on Salamanca and Spain generally and then in Latin America, where students to this day are usually found in the top governing councils.”
Thomas Jefferson attempted a student-driven model for his University of Virginia but quickly abandoned it. And, of course, Italy and Spain themselves have long since replaced student governance with state control. Yet it is Ortega’s intention to again place the student at the center of the university and thus to renew this Italo-Spanish contribution to the discourse and practice of higher education.
Ortega derives his student-centered model from the economic principle of scarcity that defines a good. Only because the lifetimes of students are limited is it necessary to make decisions about the content and periodization of education. The starting point for all educational decisions must, therefore, be the capacity of the student to learn, he argues, not the available knowledge at large nor the research specialities of the professoriate.
In fact, the students themselves should once more take charge of the curriculum and all other aspects of university life except for the research. Professors are relegated to a supporting role. “Put the students in charge of the house,” he wrote, “and let the student body constitute the body of the institution, complemented by the faculties of professors.”
We can infer that, for Ortega, it is the economic principle that leads students to the wisest choice regarding the curriculum. With limited time to learn available, students will choose to prepare themselves for their future professions while picking up enough culture to communicate smoothly with the previous generations.
Needless to say, such a self-organized curriculum could only emerge from long trial-and-error periods and extended discussions. A model for efficient employment of the resource of time it is not.
Ortega operates with two structuring triads for the university. Each is organized as a clear hierarchy rather than as a balanced triangle.
* The first is that of students, professors, and knowledge in which the learner takes precedence over the teacher and over the content of education.
* The second triad harks back to the central principle of scarcity. Because of the brevity of the educational experience and the natural limits of most students, universities must focus mostly on the transmission of general cultural knowledge rather than attempt to produce scientists. “To pretend that the normal student is a scientist is a ridiculous pretension.”
A secondary consideration is the preparation of the students for their future professional lives. “It is necessary to make the ordinary man a good professional,” Ortega writes. “Besides his apprenticeship to culture, the university will teach him, by the most economical, direct and efficacious procedures intellect can devise, to be a good doctor, a good judge, a good teacher of mathematics or of history.”
General education first, vocational training second, and no research being necessary—that is the hierarchy of a student-driven curriculum for Ortega. “University, in the strict sense, is to mean that institution which teaches the ordinary student to be a cultured person and a good member of a profession,” he wrote, adding: “It will consequently avoid causing the ordinary student to waste part of his time in pretending that he is going to be a scientist. To this end, scientific investigation proper is to be eliminated from the core or minimum of the university.”
While research has its place in the university setting, Ortega does not consider it a genuine element of its structure. Yet today few university administrators, faculty members, or students would regard research as a sideshow of academe. Nor would we want to dissuade students from acquiring proficiency in research methods.
Furthermore, all trends of the present age, and the foreseeable future, point toward a larger share of vocational training and a reduced general-education curriculum. We cherish Ortega’s commitment to student participation, but we regard student input less as a separate principle and more as an outgrowth of participatory democracy (with maybe a sprinkling of customer-satisfaction rationale).
But precisely because we value our students’ educational experience and their time, we prefer to design their curriculum for them.
Kai Hammermeister is an associate professor of German at Ohio State University.