Austin Sarat
On July 6, the New York Times published an editorial entitled “A Great University Undermines Its Mission.” I turned to it eagerly, expecting to see a stirring defense of what I call the civic and purposes of higher education.
Instead, the editorial highlighted the uproar among faculty at the University of California over the consequences of the university’s 2020 decision to end the use of SATs in its admissions process throughout the University of California system. It discussed letters from hundreds of faculty members in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities calling on the university’s Board of Regents to reverse its 2020 decision and reinstate standardized testing.
Their letters first highlighted the pedagogical challenges they face in classrooms. The letter from STEM faculty described “preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields….Furthermore,” it said, “the widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work”
But what caught my eye was not these pedagogical issues. Instead, I was struck by the focus on the university’s larger purpose.
As the letters noted, the University of California system is supposed to serve as “a powerful engine of social mobility for the people of California.” Moreover, STEM faculty emphasized the university’s mission “to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California’s scientific, technological, and economic future.”
This is a refreshing and much-needed reminder that America’s colleges and universities, both private and public, should serve society and the world beyond their gates and that thinking about that mission should not be an afterthought on college campuses. There, decisions about what to teach, research to do, and how resources are allocated should be made with that mission in mind.
All too often, questions about how pedagogy, curriculum, and scholarship serve society and the world beyond their gates are not being asked in higher education. They are displaced by inward-facing concerns such as disciplinary coverage, enrollment management, administrative convenience, and institutional maintenance.
I have never heard a colleague who wants to teach a new course or an administrator who wants to make a policy change talk about how either will advance the mission of the college or university where they work or serve the public good.
It is no wonder that, as Yale University’s Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education explained, “Just a decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction.”
“Trust,” that report contended, “is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.”
Good so far.
But when it came to talking about what those fundamental commitments are or should be, the Yale Report got a little fuzzy. “Universities,” it said, “play a distinct role in a modern democratic society. They exist not only to educate students and preserve cultural heritage, but also to push the frontiers of knowledge.”
As the Yale Report put it, “The guiding idea is that the public will benefit, in the end, from the sum total of knowledge produced.” “In the end” sounds a bit like an educational version of trickle-down economics.
Following up on that report, Yale revised its mission statement in May. As an article in Forbes noted, “In place of the statement’s former language, which emphasized the lofty ideals of ‘improving the world today,’ educating ‘aspiring leaders worldwide,’ and fostering ‘an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community,’” the mission statement now says: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
More trickle down?
It wasn’t always this way.
As Harvard University’s Kate Abramowitz, Wendy Fischman, and Howard Earl Gardner explain, “In the United States, the missions of the earliest institutions of higher education were rooted, at least in part, in Christian (Protestant) values….Over time, however, the religious mission of American universities began to fade… (H)igher education increasingly centered on preparing citizens for work and contributing to society, notably in science and technology. In these ways, the sector broadened its mission to meet new needs.”
They worry about what they call “mission sprawl—the promotion of multiple missions on a single campus. Rather than a set of focused goals, we find that institutions that invoke the liberal arts attempt to pursue a myriad of goals for too many disparate groups of people, thus obscuring their own primary reason(s) for existing.”
Others agree and want higher education “to re-examine its public purposes and its commitments to the democratic ideal. We also challenge higher education to become engaged, through actions and teaching, with its communities. We have a fundamental task to renew our role as agents of our democracy.”
Mission sprawl seems to me to be a serious problem. And re-examining “public purposes” seems a useful response.
But my primary worry is that, whatever their mission and however they articulate it, colleges and universities have lost their mission focus. So they drift. They add courses or cut programs driven by budget considerations or willy-nilly.
They drop the SATs or alter admissions requirements without asking whether and how those changes serve their mission. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not consider this a management problem. Colleges and universities don’t need more top-down direction, assessment tools, or performance metrics, and they don’t need a focus on short-term, instant gratification returns.
What I am talking about is a culture problem, one that can only be cured by a shared commitment among faculty and administrators to consider how what we do helps the civic and social purposes of their colleges and universities. That commitment can and should play out when academic departments meet to discuss their work, when administrators develop plans, and when finance officers think about resource needs.
Here, I think that the way the University of California faculty addressed the SAT issue offers a useful example of the kind of mission-attentive thinking that would serve higher education well at this moment in its history. We need more thinking about “the larger impact the school is trying to create in the world or in a given community,” done in more places on college and university campuses throughout this country.
Austin Sarat ScheerPost
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others
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