Imagine someone had a knife and told you, "This is a great knife. The only problem is that it can't cut anything." You'd think it's not a great knife.
"Telos is the Greek word that Aristotle and others use to define the end or purpose of something," Jonathan Haidt, professor at New York University Stern School of Business, says in a recorded lecture at the University of Colorado Springs. The telos of a knife is to cut. What, Haidt asks, is the telos of a university?
Truth — that's the purpose of higher education, Haidt says. The academy aims to be a stage where truth is sought, discovered, and explored. When the university is functioning at its best, students learn to present arguments and receive debate in following truth.
Are today's universities achieving their purpose?
In his lecture, Haidt suggests that changes in campus culture over the past decade have rerouted university resources away from the pursuit of truth and towards creating an emotionally and intellectually comfortable environment for students.
"From out of nowhere, students in 2014 began asking for trigger warnings," Haidt says. A growing group among student bodies and administrators seemed to believe students were fragile and needed to be aggressively protected from "bad" ideas, offensive imagery, and annoying arguments. Students began protesting speakers, and publicly shaming peers whose words made them uncomfortable.
There are many places and institutions whose purpose, or telos, is comfort. But a university is not one of those places. To make that point, Haidt quotes CNN contributor Van Jones: I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong — that's different. I'm not going to settle the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
Putting comfort over the pursuit of truth, universities are ignoring their purpose. Higher education should be a stage of open exploration and free expression, where ideas are exchanged, tested, and inspected. A common education should be "an invitation to be concerned not with the employment of what is familiar but with understanding what is not yet understood," according to philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
What is the social influence if universities fail to achieve their purpose? New generations could lose more than academic power; they could lose the ability and interest to pursue and prioritize truth first. They could become so dependent on emotional comfort that they refuse to observe deep in thought "what is not yet understood". Anyhow, this is happening in reality. It's time for universities to realize their telos, or they'll risk losing their essential role in society.
