“Emergent Orders in Higher Education: Reconsidering the Idea of a University” is the title of a conference held from March 14–17, 2013 at the Conrad Indianapolis Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana. It grew out of a conference entitled: Emergent Orders in Higher Education: Resistance, Restoration or Restructuring? which was held in early 2012.
Sponsoring both conferences was the Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders (FSSO). Founded by the late Richard Cornuelle to conduct academic programs and award prizes, FSSO encourages scholarly work on the nature and history of spontaneous orders and their influence on and intersection with social institutions and organizations.
Overview: The concept of spontaneous orders was first articulated in the Middle Ages. The Nobel laureate Friedrich A. von Hayek has since described them as “the result of human action … not … created by men deliberately arranging the elements in a preconceived pattern.” Widely appreciated as one such order, enabling men to adjust their actions to one another, is the market; arguably more fundamental are such other spontaneous orders as language, morals, common law, and culture itself.
In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek cited favorably the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. As his way of characterizing culture, Tocqueville coined the phrase: “habits of the heart.” Taking this phrase as its title is an influential book from the 1980s examining the culture of the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century. Relentlessly shaping our cultural habits, Hayek proposed, are the human activities of education and research. Driven by the widespread desire of humankind both to transmit culture to successive generations and to pursue knowledge for its own sake, education takes place, in his view, over many stages of life—at many levels of sophistication—in the context of many human institutions: family, community, church, school. At the apex of such institutions, are those engaged in higher education and research.
Objective: The question this conference addressed is whether such institutions are adrift, untethered from their fundamental role in human life and unsure of the general rules that best give shape to the organizations that form the pinnacle of the educational experience in American culture.
While skeptical of prescriptive attempts to articulate the purpose of human activities, Hayek deeply respected the intellectual endeavor of those who, rooted in practical domains of human experience, turn their experience toward understanding the ways in which such domains operate and evolve. As prime examples, he cited British Common Law and derived from it a statement he much admired, The Declaration of Independence of the United States. It can be seen as reflecting the fundamental assumptions—first principles, indeed “habits of the heart”—of the culture of the political entity then emerging in North America.
Warranting as much, if not more, consideration are equivalent statements on behalf of the human institutions organized to educate the rising generations of a society—in both the “independent” and “government” sectors. While the “undirected, uncontrived, informal, person-to-person relationships are the basis of a workable society,” Richard Cornuelle has observed, “there are limits to the reach of spontaneous action. … Complex societies such as ours must go far beyond them. … There is … a need for more consciously contrived common efforts, for the more deliberately formed institutions of the independent sector.”
Readings: Inspired to renew such institutions—drawing on important historical and contemporary discourses on this subject—this conference proposed to reconsider and conceivably articulate anew the “first principles” of higher education, as notably attempted in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, and since, in such works as Jacques Barzun’s The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going. Can our colleges and universities benefit from a moment of constitutional reflection on, as others have put it, “the idea of the university?” Can such reflection help limn the constitutive principles that might guide the particular purposes and governance of distinct institutions engaged in higher education and advanced research?
Audience: The participants of this conference are invited to use this site, where they can readily access readings and logistical information and engage with one another.