Truth, Democracy and the Mission of the University

Modern liberal democracies invest great hopes and resources under the heading of “higher education”: along with their role as motors of national economic growth, employability and technical innovation, universities are expected to inculcate and promote equality, tolerance, social and environmental awareness and democratic values. “Higher education” is to lay the foundations for a shared sense of civic responsibility, democratic ideals and active citizenship. Mill’s” On Liberty” opens with an epigraph from Humboldt’s Sphere and Duties of Government: “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” In this essay, the relationship between higher education and liberalism as a political philosophy is examined in terms of this “essential importance of human development”. With that aim, I consider the role of the university as what Arendt called “an institution of truth” as necessary for the perpetuation of a liberal (democratic) form of life, and connect it to what Ortega y Gasset described as “the mission of the university”. The viability of the institutions in and through which we negotiate, establish and communicate “truth” is today an acute political question.