Constructing Universities for Democracy

Abstract

Universities can sharpen their commitment to democracy through institutional change. This might be resisted by a traditional understanding of universities. The question arises whether universities have defining purposes that demarcate possible university policy, strategic planning, and priority setting. These are significant questions because while universities are among our most stable long-term institutions, there is little consensus on what they are, what they are for, and what makes them valuable. This paper argues that universities can in fact be organized around a wide variety of purposes without thereby becoming any less real as universities. Normative discourse around universities should therefore be unafraid to consider novel ideas that test the limits of our current university concept and our entrenched practices. The argument applies fresh insights from feminist philosophy. Haslanger’s (Haslanger, S. 2000. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs 34(1), 31-55, Haslanger, S. 2005. What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds. Hypatia 20(4): 10-26, Haslanger, S. 2012. Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford University Press.) ameliorative account of gender and race provides a model for how to frame novel and critical ideas about universities. Ásta’s (Ásta. 2018. Categories we live by: The construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. New York: Oxford University Press.) conferralist framework explains how universities are socially constructed and where our university concept, social behavior, and normative discourse fits into that construction. Stakeholders have the power to create the social fact of whether an institution is a university and what being a university means in each context. However, stakeholders are a heterogenous group and contemporary universities are fragmented institutions in desperate need for an ameliorative account that would guide their construction toward democratic value. That account can build on a distinction between valuing universities as expressions of democracy, its symbols, components, and causal agents.