When the pursuit of knowledge is eclipsed by money and power, what remains of higher learning? What is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University, Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Goettingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands. Across centuries, the goods of disciplined study-the joy of reading, the virtues of intellectual rigor, and the possibility of self-formation-have been overshadowed by the pursuit of external rewards such as money, prestige, and power. Part institutional history and part philosophical reflection, After the University examines how today's institutions defend themselves not in the name of learning but in the language of productivity, innovation, and economic utility. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and witness to crises such as white supremacist marches and the COVID-19 pandemic, Wellmon illustrates how universities justify themselves through the outputs of graduates, research discoveries, and workforce training while leaving unmentioned the very practices that once defined them. Despite this transformation, Wellmon argues that the university's current state of turmoil exposes a new, enticing possibility: recognizing the practices of disciplined study as goods worth valuing in and of themselves rather than simply as means to other ends. With insight and urgency, After the University asks whether our institutions can still nurture intellectual desire-or whether we must find new homes for the life of the mind.
Chad Wellmon is a professor of German at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University and Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age.
Table of Contents Introduction: An Autobiography of Higher Learning Section I: From Universitas to "the University" 1. Knowledge Institutions: Guild, Factory, Social System 2. From Corporation to Social System 3. The University Factory 4. The Student, Striving, and External Goods Interlude I: The University, Technology, and the Magic of Credentials Section II: Going Professional: The Modern University 5. Democracy, Progress, and the University 6. Efficiency, Social Reform, and the Higher Learning 7. An Alternative Vision: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ends of Knowledge Interlude II: General Education, Curriculum Reform, and the Dream of Unity, or, What Is Missing? Section III: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Human Capital Theory 8. Access to What? The Belief in Higher Education and Human Capital 9. Human Capital and the University 10. The California Master Plan: Human Capital Theory Made Manifest 11. The New Left, the Liberal Counterrevolution, and Meritocracy 12. The Higher Faith and Student Credit 13. The Educational Revolution and an African University Interlude III: August 11, 2017, Moral Clarity, and the Other University Conclusion: The University is Not Enough Notes Index
When the pursuit of knowledge is eclipsed by money and power, what remains of higher learning?
