Education

We seem to have lost sight of a simple truth of late.  Not all things we do should or ought to be money-making enterprises.  Yet we should do them anyway, because, to put it simply, without them we lose everything that makes making money worth the bother.

A string of university decisions in the last few years—most recently the forced resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and now the announced cutting of the University of Missouri Press— underscore how far we have drifted from this truth.  None of these decisions have been about bad decision-making or scandal or anything that might impair the work of education.  They have all been about bottomlines and making money.

Basically, the president of the University of Virginia, Teresa Sullivan, was fired over a disagreement with the direction of the university with the board of directors, who wish to see more business courses and fewer liberal arts courses.  But we don’t really know because no cause was ever given.  Inadvertently, a billionaire, Peter Kiernan, admitted to orchestrating her firing behind the scenes, but still never fully explained why.  He has since resigned from the board of directors.

The elimination of the UM Press is even less explicable other than as a bottomline measure—yet the university recently received thirty million to expand its sports infrastructure.

Actually, anyone paying attention knows what is going on.  Boards of directors everywhere are trying to turn universities into money machines and anything that doesn’t turn a tidy profit is set to be axed.

If these were businesses like any other, this is perfectly understandable, even laudable if it means saving the business.  But a university is not a business like any other.  We have forgotten that.

You do not have a university press to make money.  You have it to make available the materials for learning.  You do not have a university to make money.  You have it to teach.

And you should not teach the making of money to the exclusion of all else.  Universities should teach in service to truth and knowledge and discovery and the investment of character and soul in people so that they have an idea what to do with money when they make it.  Universities should not have to be held accountable the way a bank or a factory is.  That’s ridiculous.

Some things should exist because they are beautiful, elegant, meaningful, true, inspirational.  If all of that had to rely on the ability to turn a profit, we would have a civilization of fast-food franchises, malls, comic books movies, bad music, and superficial fashion.

Oh, wait.  We do have that civilization.

Teresa Sullivan has been reinstated at the University of Virginia because of an enormous groundswell of student and alumni support.  Someone even suggested that maybe there should be fewer political appointees to university boards.  Hmm.

I have no such hopes for the survival of the UM Press.  It hasn’t been in the black for years.  In my opinion, that shouldn’t matter.  Important books often do not earn a profit, yet they remain important books.  They should exist, as should presses like UM’s, because they contribute an absolutely vital yet unquantifiable essence to our culture.  They should simply Be.

We need to get over this nonsense before we lose too much of ourselves.  We’ve been fed a line that capitalism is the essence of America.  That’s as far from true as can be.  The essence of America are the ideas that formed us.  Ideas that came out of scholarship and philosophy and education.  Ideas that have become an inconvenience to certain people who have found a good way to use our own commitment to free enterprise against us to destroy the very things that make us who we are.

It’s not the money.  It should not be about the money.  It’s about the mind and what’s in it.