The following essay is based on remarks I made at the first Symposium on Public Research Universities Futures sponsored by the Center for Higher and Adult Education at Michigan State University on March 12, 2025. The question to which I was asked to respond was:
How can the public research university fulfill its public good mission by being a platform for inquiry?
This question, posed in March 2025, arises at a moment when the very possibility of the public research university as a platform for inquiry has come under intense political threat in the United States. In reflecting on the importance of the practice of free inquiry for public life in a democracy, I was called back to Plato’s Apology, that compelling account of the trial of Socrates in which the citizens of Athens find him guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth…and sentence him to death. There is a moment in that dialogue that responds in a poignant way to the present question and to the context in which it is posed. It comes just after the Athenians have found Socrates guilty and his accusers have proposed death as the proper penalty. When Socrates is given the opportunity to propose a counter-penalty, he subversively suggests that the most fitting punishment for the life he has led, attempting to orient each citizen and the city itself toward what is true and just and beautiful, would be for the citizens to provide him with free meals in the Prytaneum, the most honored place in the city.1 This is Socrates at his most audacious, for the Prytaneum was the site of the hearth of Hestia, a powerful place of social integration where the practices of Socratic education would be woven into the fabric of the community.2 Of all the things Socrates says in his defense, this was perhaps the most provocative, and it likely cost him his life.
We might, however, trace the idea of the public research university to this very provocation; for it invites us to imagine what it might mean to situate the search for truth and the love of wisdom at the very heart of civic life so that the city and its citizens might cultivate the habits of dialogue and discovery that enrich our relationships with one another and deepen our understanding of the world we share.
In the late 18th and throughout the 19th century in the United States, citizens recognized the value of setting up public research universities to serve the public good in the twofold way Socrates served the city of Athens, through research and education, by exploring and generating new ideas and by teaching future citizens to discern how to live meaningful lives. In 1894, the vital importance of research was affirmed by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin when they insisted that the university “should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”3 And in 1862, during the Civil War, an enduring commitment to public higher education found its voice in the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act with its promise “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”4 Research and education have long animated and enriched the civic life of our democracy, for as the 1965 legislation that created the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities so succinctly puts it: “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.”5
A Sacred Space of Research and Learning
To make good on this demand of democracy itself, we must support, sustain, and defend the public research university as a sacred space of inquiry and learning.
To call the university a “sacred” space is not to infuse it with a holiness founded upon religious dogma, but to recall the connotations of the Latin sacrare, which means “to set apart” and “to dedicate.”6 The university is set apart as a space dedicated to the search for truth and the cultivation of the habits of dialogue and thinking that awaken us to the world and deepen our relationships with one another.
The university is a sacred space for thinking in its most active voice. The activity of thinking is rooted in what Hannah Arendt calls the human condition of natality, the capacity to bring something new into the world.7 Thinking thus acts in unpredictable ways. This is one reason idealogues and demagogues find universities so dangerous and seek to control them. The university, however, can only be a catalyst for new and unexpected ideas if it is protected and sustained as a sphere of free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue.
If the activity of thinking shapes the research life of the university, the spiritual practice of learning shapes its educational life. Here, I use the term “spiritual” in the sense in which Parker Palmer speaks of “authentic spirituality” in his book To Know as We Are Known when he writes:
Authentic spirituality wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.8
Fear of uncertainty, ambiguity, and difference destroys the space of learning and inquiry. Diversity of perspective, identity, and lived experience is a condition for the possibility of research and teaching excellence. Authentic spirituality is thus rooted in the courage to create and hold spaces of plurality, paradox, and ambiguity that are animated by a shared commitment to seek truth wherever it leads. To seek truth is not to presume to possess it. Truth is subverted whenever it is made into an instrument of power, for the power of truth lies in its capacity to draw us together in a common endeavor of searching and researching.
Danger from Two Directions
In her book, Nihilistic Times, Wendy Brown recognizes the importance of protecting the university as a sacred space of thinking:
Preserving the scholarly realm for the relative autonomy and integrity of thought, indeed, for thinking itself, means resisting both hyper-politicization of knowledge and its structuration by relations of political economic dependence—state, economic, or philanthropic.9
Brown points here to dangers from two directions. First, the hyper-politicization of knowledge threatens to undermine the research and educational mission of the university. Partisan ideology has come to saturate every facet of civil society, but when it seeps into the classroom, the laboratory, or the studio, the creative play of thinking is hampered, the horizons of discovery constrained. To resist the politicization of knowledge against which Brown warns us, a different kind of space must be prepared and maintained—a space set apart and dedicated to thinking in its most active voice, to the fearless search for truth wherever it may lead. This requires curation, rooted in care, and a lived commitment to free inquiry and responsible dialogue. The university is not a place of neutrality but of restraint informed by intellectual humility.
A second danger to the public mission of the university announces itself here; for the university cannot be maintained as a sacred space of thinking and authentic spirituality if it is economically dependent upon a politics that imposes direction on its inquiry, limits the scope of its purview, or circumscribes its sphere of discovery. This returns us to that provocative suggestion Socrates makes in the Apology that puts education at the center of civic life. The well-being of the city depends upon its willingness to create, sustain, and support a space of free inquiry and responsible dialogue. But the idea that such places dedicated to the practices of research and education should be maintained in perpetuity by the city for the sake of civic life remains as unwelcome today as it was in ancient Athens. Then as now, the idea is unwelcome because the citizenry does not, as James Baldwin reminds us, “trust the independence of mind, which alone makes a genuine education possible.”10 Now as then, however, the idea is essential because the civic life of democracy itself depends upon independence of thought and integrity of judgment.
Between the unwelcome and the essential lies the difficult but possible—this is just the site the public research university must inhabit if it is to fulfill its public good mission by being a platform for inquiry, a place of fearless sifting and winnowing that cultivates in citizens the wisdom and vision democracy demands. If the space the university thus inhabits is political, it is political in the sense in which Socrates was political, serving the public good by cultivating habits of dialogue, by provoking citizens to think.11 In this sense, however, the public research university is no more divorced from partisan politics than was Socrates; like Socrates, the public research university is situated within and vulnerable to the factional fighting that seeks wealth, power, and control. Indeed, in the degree to which the university depends on such partisan politics, it too must be engaged with them. But the aim and extent of this engagement must be to protect and defend the university as a sacred place dedicated to inquiry and learning, for this is the ground upon which our politics will either enliven and enrich civic life or deaden and impoverish it.
Values-Enacted Leadership
The ultimate direction taken in this regard depends on the culture of leadership we develop within and between our public research universities. To cultivate and maintain the university as a sacred space of research and authentic spirituality requires a values-enacted approach to leadership that intentionally aligns the values for which we say we care most deeply with the lived experiences of our students, staff, faculty, and community partners. Values-enacted leadership is as difficult as it is powerful.12 The difficulty lies in remaining always attentive to the deeper purpose of the university, to its core values of free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue even, and especially, when the dissonant noise of partisan politics seeks to deplete our energy and divert our attention. The values-enacted approach to leadership is powerful because it recognizes that values must be navigated anew each time they are invoked. Relationships deepen as values are identified as shared and put into intentional practice each day, in every decision we make and in every interaction we have. Trust takes root as we work together to weave these shared values into the intellectual life of the university. Ultimately, the power of values-enacted leadership in higher education lies in its capacity to sustain and nurture the habits of thinking and dialogue, rooted in trust, that cultivate the wisdom and vision democracy demands.
If, in these reflections, we are called back to the trial of Socrates, it is because his life has long stood as an enduring reminder that free inquiry, intellectual humility, and responsible dialogue have always been the greatest threat to demagoguery and the best hope for democracy.
- Plato, Plato’s Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube and John M. Cooper, 2nd ed. (New York: Hackett, 2002), 36d-37a.
- For a discussion the hearth of Hestia as the place of Socratic political practice, see Christopher P. Long, Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy: Practicing a Politics of Reading (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120–27.
- Theodore Herfurth, “Sifting and Winnowing,” Wisconsin Electronic Reader, 1949, https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/WIReader/Contents/Sifting.html.
- “Morrill Act (1862),” National Archives, August 16, 2021, sec. 4, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/morrill-act.
- “National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act,” Pub. L. No. 89–209, 951 20 U.S.C. 845 (1965), sec. 3, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-79/pdf/STATUTE-79-Pg845.pdf.
- “Sacred | Etymology of Sacred by Etymonline,” accessed March 25, 2025, https://www.etymonline.com/word/sacred.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 178–79.
- Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey, Reprint edition (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993), xi.
- Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2023), 98.
- James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985, Reprint edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), 192.
- For a detailed discussion of the nature of Socratic politics, see Long, Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy.
- For a discussion of values-enacted scholarship in general, see Nicky Agate et al., “The Transformative Power of Values-Enacted Scholarship,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, no. 1 (December 7, 2020): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z.
