Liberal Learning and the Crisis of the University

by Patrick Keeney (June 2026)

This essay is a revised version of a talk I delivered at Swedenborg House on April 18 this year.

Let me begin with a claim that may seem, at first, overstated, but which I think is increasingly difficult to avoid.

The crisis of the modern university is not, in the first instance, institutional. It is civilizational. And at its deepest level, it is anthropological. We have lost clarity not only about what education is for, but about what the human being is, and therefore about what sort of education his nature requires.

The familiar signs of disorder within the university are, by now, well-rehearsed. We point to the expansion of administrative structures, the proliferation of credentials and their conflation with genuine education, the narrowing of permissible discourse, and the uneasy atmosphere surrounding open inquiry and the espousal of unorthodox ideas. These developments are real and not trivial. But they are not the root of the problem. They are the visible expressions of something more fundamental: a loss of confidence in the very idea that education is ordered towards the formation of a certain kind of human being.

What has been forgotten is not a policy framework, nor a curricular model, but an understanding of the person.

The tradition of liberal learning rests on a demanding, and now increasingly contested, premise. It holds that human beings are rational and moral agents, capable of seeking truth, exercising judgment, and, in some measure, governing themselves in light of what they come to understand. Education, on this view, is not primarily concerned with the delivery of information or the acquisition of marketable skills. It concerns the formation of the individual.  It seeks to cultivate habits of attention, clarity, honesty, and intellectual courage. It initiates the student into what Michael Oakeshott once described as a civilizational conversation, an ongoing dialogue in which the most enduring questions of human life are posed, contested, and reconsidered across generations.

This is not a modest ambition. It assumes that some forms of understanding are superior to others, that some questions are more worth asking, and that a life oriented towards truth and understanding is, in a meaningful sense, superior to one that is not.

It is precisely here that the tension with our present moment becomes most apparent.

Modern liberal societies have come to understand themselves increasingly in procedural terms. They emphasize rights, neutrality, and the protection of individual choice. These are genuine achievements. They have secured forms of freedom that ought not to be lightly dismissed. But they also carry with them a characteristic hesitation: a reluctance to speak substantively about the good, about human flourishing, about what it means to live well.

A liberal education cannot sustain that hesitation without ceasing to be itself.

To educate is always to make judgments: about what is worth knowing, what is worth preserving, and what kind of person one ought to become. Where such judgments are no longer articulated, they do not disappear. They are displaced.

The result is the peculiar condition of the contemporary university: an institution that continues to function, often with impressive efficiency, yet lacks a clear account of its own ends. It speaks fluently about outcomes and innovation, but hesitates to speak about wisdom. It promises employability, yet grows increasingly silent about seeking the truth.

Where purpose becomes obscure, substitution follows. In the absence of a coherent account of the human person, a series of thinner anthropologies takes hold, each carrying its own implicit educational logic.

If the human being is understood primarily as a consumer, education becomes a service to be delivered. Its success is measured by satisfaction and utility.

If the human being is understood as an identity to be recognized and affirmed, education becomes therapeutic. Its task is not to challenge but to validate.

If the human being is understood as an economic unit, education becomes vocational training.  Its purpose is to produce measurable outputs aligned with labour market demands.

None of these accounts is wholly false. Each captures something real. But each is radically incomplete. And when any one of them becomes dominant, something essential is lost.

What disappears is the idea that the self is not merely expressed, but formed. That judgment must be cultivated. That freedom is not simply the multiplication of options, but the capacity to choose well.  These are not ancillary considerations. They are the core of liberal education.

Once they recede, the rest follows with a certain inevitability. Managerial rationalism expands under such conditions not merely because administrators seek power, but because measurement rushes in to occupy the space left by the absence of purpose. Where an institution can no longer give a clear account of its ends, it turns, almost by necessity, to what can be counted. Metrics acquire an authority they were never meant to bear. Outputs, efficiencies, and performance indicators become proxies for goods that are no longer clearly named. Administration, in this sense, does not simply overreach; it compensates. It provides a kind of procedural clarity in the absence of substantive direction. But the clarity it offers is of a limited kind. It can organize activity, but it cannot justify it.

Credentialism follows a similar logic. When education is no longer understood as the formation of judgment and character, its achievements become difficult to recognize except through external markers. Degrees and certifications multiply, not because learning has deepened, but because they stand in for what cannot easily be seen. They function as tokens of attainment within a system that has lost confidence in its ability to articulate what true attainment is. The result is a steady inflation of credentials, accompanied by a corresponding uncertainty about what they actually signify. Certification, in effect, substitutes for formation, and in doing so, gradually obscures it.

Ideological conformity intensifies in the same vacuum. Where the pursuit of truth no longer serves as a shared end that can orient disagreement, the conditions for genuine intellectual pluralism weaken. In the absence of a common standard, moral certainty seeks anchorage elsewhere. It attaches itself to identity, to affiliation, to the security of belonging within a recognized moral community.

Disagreement, under these circumstances, is no longer experienced as an invitation to inquiry, but as a challenge to legitimacy. The result is a climate in which the range of acceptable thought narrows, not always through overt coercion it should be said, but more invidiously, through the quieter pressures of alignment and recognition.

Taken together, these developments are not accidental distortions of an otherwise stable system. They are responses to a deeper loss. Where purpose recedes, procedure expands; where truth loses its orienting force, conformity supplies its substitute.

As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, practices that lose sight of their telos do not merely decline. They become incoherent. They persist, often with increasing technical sophistication, but they can no longer account for what they are for.

This is our present condition. The university has not ceased to operate. It has ceased to understand itself.

And the consequences of this loss extend far beyond the institution itself.  A liberal democracy depends, at its best, on a particular kind of citizen: one capable of deliberation, of weighing arguments, of distinguishing between persuasion and manipulation, and of recognizing the possibility of error in one’s own judgments. It needs to be stressed that these are not natural endowments. They are cultivated achievements. They depend upon habits of mind that must be formed over time: patience, attentiveness, intellectual humility, and a willingness to engage seriously with interlocutors who advance positions one does not share.

When universities cease to cultivate these habits, they do not simply fail in their internal mission. They weaken the civic culture upon which democratic life depends.

The signs of this weakening are already visible. Public discourse increasingly exhibits certainty without understanding; we are encouraged to rush to judgment without the requisite reflection and to moral dogma unaccompanied by intellectual discipline. Disagreement is no longer treated as a condition of inquiry, but as a threat to be managed, eliminated, or reported to the authorities.

In such an environment, the virtues that sustain liberal education begin to appear not merely unfashionable but suspect.

It is at this point that the anthropological dimension of the crisis comes fully into view.

For what is at stake is not simply the structure of institutions, but the kind of human beings those institutions seek to produce.

If we no longer believe that individuals are capable of disciplined attention, sustained reasoning, and self-correction in the light of truth, then the educational project oriented towards such capacities will inevitably appear misplaced. It will be replaced by something radically more modest, more manageable, and ultimately more reductive.

Conversely, if we recover even a partial confidence in those capacities, the case for a more demanding form of education re-emerges.

This is why the language of formation cannot be dispensed with. It names something real about the human condition. It recognizes that our capacities are not fixed, that they require cultivation, and that such cultivation is both an intellectual and a moral undertaking.

To speak in these terms is not to deny the importance of skills, or the legitimacy of economic concerns, or the reality of identity. It is to situate them within a broader and more adequate account of the person.

It is to insist that the human being is not exhausted by any single dimension.

The recovery of such an account will not be achieved through policy adjustments alone. Administrative reform, however necessary, cannot supply what has been lost. The difficulty is not primarily structural. It is conceptual.

We require a renewed willingness to speak, without embarrassment, about ends. This will involve the recovery of a language that has, in many contexts, become attenuated or suspect: a language of truth, of judgment, of intellectual virtue, and of the good.

It will also require the reassertion of certain intellectual virtues that have always been central to serious inquiry, but which now require deliberate defense. Among these, two stand out. The first is humility. Not the performative humility that signals compliance, nor the scepticism that refuses commitment, but the disciplined recognition of the limits of one’s knowledge. Without it, inquiry collapses into assertion. As Pascal observed, “We know too much to be sceptics, but not enough to be dogmatists.”

The second is courage. The willingness to ask difficult questions, to entertain unwelcome answers, and to defend the conditions of inquiry even when they are under pressure.

At its best, the university is the place where humility tempers certainty, and courage sustains the search for truth.  If that productive tension can be recovered, even in part, something essential can be restored.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that such a recovery requires a wholesale return to some idealized past. The tradition of liberal learning has never been static. It has developed through contestation and renewal. What is required is not restoration, but rearticulation.

The questions remain. What has changed is our willingness to pose them clearly. What is the human being for? What does it mean to live well? What is worth knowing, and why?

These are not peripheral questions. They are the conditions under which liberal education becomes intelligible. Without them, or when such questions are neglected, the university drifts.

What has been obscured can, in principle, be brought again into view. The practices of serious inquiry persist: in classrooms where genuine conversation still occurs, in texts that resist easy consumption, in teachers who continue to demand more of their students than the mere completion of tasks.

These habits of mind are not relics. They are resources. The task, then, is not to invent a new purpose for the university, but to recover the clarity to name the one it has long possessed. It is for the pursuit of truth. It is for the formation of judgment. It is for the cultivation of those habits of mind and character upon which a free and serious culture depends.

These are large claims. They rest upon an equally large assumption: that human beings are capable of becoming the kind of persons such an education presupposes.

If that assumption is abandoned, the rest will follow. If it is retained, even tentatively, the possibility of renewal remains.

And that, finally, is why the crisis of the university cannot be understood in isolation. It reflects a deeper civilizational uncertainty about the nature of the human person itself. Until that question is confronted directly, the symptoms will persist and the proposed remedies will remain largely superficial.

Yet if the question is faced honestly, the path forward, though demanding, is not obscure. It begins with the recovery of an older and more adequate understanding of the human person: not as a bundle of appetites or a construct of social forces, but as a moral and rational being, capable of truth, responsibility, and transcendence. From that recovery, everything else follows.

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Patrick Keeney is the author of the forthcoming book Liberal Learning and the Modern University: Reclaiming the Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Higher Education, to be published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism series.

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