In his new book, “After the University,” Chad Wellmon answers a question many in higher education are currently asking: How did we get here? This autobiography of American higher education takes us from the European guilds and knowledge factories that inspired our current system to the modern research university that now defines it. In doing so, Wellmon reminds us that the university has always shaped and reshaped itself to serve political, social, and economic interests. His underlying concern is — at what cost to the goods of disciplined study? 

Wellmon, who is the Commonwealth Professor of English and German at the University of Virginia, writes that the recent intensity of these external pressures has made the sector almost unrecognizable to itself. Over the years, we have created what Wellmon calls “the other university,” known not by its intellectual vigor but by outputs such as earnings, workers, and research. 

Wellmon's own reverence for, and frustration with, higher education is woven throughout the book in his personal stories: the utility of education as a means of escaping his past, his questioning of its purpose in the 2010s, and his eventual understanding that the love of knowledge itself — not necessarily the institution — is what we should hold dear. In July, Wellmon spoke with LearningWell about the book’s main messages, as well as his motivation and experience in writing it. 

LW: Let’s start with your own experience in academia, particularly at U.Va. where you’ve been witness to a lot of upheaval and changes in higher education. What were some of the things that motivated you to write “After the University”?

CW: This book turned out to be an exercise in trying to make sense of the world in which I had found myself. I grew up in a family and in a place in which the university was not a real presence, with parents and siblings who didn't go to college. In many ways, I am a poster child for the American system of higher education. It was my way out — socioeconomically, intellectually, spiritually, materially, and geographically. That’s how I thought about the university. 

Through undergrad, graduate school, and the tenure process at U.Va., the university was just the world in which I thrived. I understood myself through it. And then in 2012, when [then-President] Teresa Sullivan was forced to resign by the Board of Visitors, I started to question that. I was standing there on the lawn that summer with my two kids. We had posters and were chanting, protesting for academic freedom, against poor governance, and for the university. And then, all of a sudden, I just stopped and thought, "Wait, what are we defending exactly?” It wasn't a revelation. It was just befuddlement. What is this thing that I'm out here on a sultry southern afternoon protesting for? It has to be something much bigger than this person whom I don't really know. 

That was over a decade ago, and ever since then, I've been thinking and writing about the university, trying to make sense of this institution. Another key experience was in August 2017. My family had just moved onto campus, when far-right neo-Nazis marched behind our house and up the U.Va. Lawn and Rotunda with tiki torches. This was also the period when I was helping to lead an effort to reform U.Va.’s undergraduate general education curriculum. It was a seven-year process. These experiences reconstituted my relationship, everybody's relationship, with the university. 

My family and I had moved onto campus, because I had been appointed principal of Brown College, one of U.Va.’s three residential colleges, where about 300 students live together over four years in a group of dorms on the center of campus. We ate in the dining hall. Students spent a lot of time in our house, eating and hanging out. As I got to know students outside of the classroom and office hours, I encountered a completely different institution. 

All this was happening at the same time as the curriculum reform project. I quickly realized how naive I had been in assuming that if U.Va. just had a good curriculum, we [faculty] could make it the center of students' lives again — we could reorient the institution to what we thought it was supposed to be about. But the more time I spent with these students, the more I realized that the curriculum was almost tangential to their lives at U.Va. Their lives were lived outside of the curriculum. They were lived in their dorms and managed by student affairs people and an entire institutional apparatus about which I had been totally ignorant. They led their lives outside the classroom as I had imagined it. So there was this second moment after 2012 of being disabused of how ignorant I was of the very institution to which I thought I understood.

LW: In the book, you write about the yawning gap between what we claim universities are for and what they actually do. So this gap you talk about, you saw this manifest in the students themselves?

CW: Oh, absolutely. In the book, I call it the “other university,” this completely other half — now I would say other three quarters — in which students actually led their lives and that formed them in profound ways, both good and bad. I know student affairs people who literally saved the lives of several of my students with mental health services, people who are unfailingly dedicated to the wellbeing of students but dedicated in a way that's almost wholly separated from what the faculty and the curriculum do.

LW: This value you call “disciplined study” — which you describe as intrinsic learning, the joy of learning, the joy of reading — how has the university removed itself from that?

CW: That's the question I tried to set out to understand. Why is it that this institution that is so obviously about education, so obviously about the life of the mind, so obviously about what I call discipline study — why is it also about none of those things and more clearly about moving up the social ladder and earning more than your parents? Why is it so obviously about the connection with labor markets? Why is it so obviously about the production of patentable knowledge and technologies? All the things that universities do or claim to do I had largely taken for granted. Of course that's what universities do. But so many of these things pull the institution in different directions. In some instances, they’re contradictory. And so that's what I wanted to understand. I wanted to know how this happened. I tend to think historically, so most of the book is an attempt to understand the development of this tension. 

The book goes back to the beginning of the 19th century and the rise of the German research university. My point here is that this is not the first time that universities are being called to serve other entities and competing ends. When you think of 13th-century University of Paris and its intimate but conflicted relationship with the church or 18th-century University of Göttingen in Germany and the pressure it was put under to provide revenues for a sovereign by trying to get more young English aristocrats to come from abroad to pay higher fees –– these types of conflicts are central to the history of the university. There have always been tensions between what the university has understood itself to be sustaining, which is something like the scholarly communities and scholarly inquiry, and the demands and expectations of the external entities that tend to fund these institutions. And the thing about institutions is that on the one hand, they're sustaining these communities, these practices. But on the other hand, they do that by seeking financial support, by sustaining the material conditions that make it possible for these scholars to do the kinds of things they do. Over the past 150 to 200 years, however, these historical tensions have intensified.

"Why is it that this institution that is so obviously about education, so obviously about the life of the mind, so obviously about what I call discipline study — why is it also about none of those things?"

Some of these tensions have produced a lot of good. As the university has understood itself to be in service to the public, it has democratized knowledge and made itself more accessible. But this has also changed the institutional conditions of disciplined study and put all kinds of new pressures on the university as an institution. For example, when 19th-century Prussians directly linked the university to a job market — that job market being Prussian bureaucrats or the administrative state — everybody who was going to work in the higher ranks of the Prussian bureaucracy was required to have very high levels of education. And it was meritocratic in a way. It was, in many ways, a good thing. But what it also did is that it made the university this mechanism that was coupled with a competitive job market. 

My book traces various instances in which universities became more tightly connected to institutions or demands to which they had previously been more loosely related. Again, many of which were wonderful and good. Who is against democratizing the university? Who wants to argue that the post-World War II American system of higher education and higher education itself should be shrunk? These are some of the contradictions that just didn't make sense to me and I tried to explore in the book. 

LW: In terms of the rise of the modern American research university, of which U.Va. is one, is this another example of the sector being tethered to something that is important but detached from its original goal? 

CW: First, I would say that I don't know if there was an original goal. I think the modern university was some kind of settlement where the institution becomes this mediating force with scholars and knowledge on one side and the state and all these other interests on the other. And the university positioned itself as this go-between, this mediating institution. The 19th-century American research university adapted some elements of the German research university model, but with at least one very important distinction. From the beginning, the American research university cloaked itself in “democracy.” Around 1900, the first president of University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, gives a speech in California describing the American research university as the prophet of democracy. It is not just going to work on behalf of democracy, it will embody and point the way to democracy.

In the American context, there are several things that followed. One is that the reluctance among 19th-century Germans to talk so explicitly about instrumental or useful knowledge was not a problem for the American university. University knowledge was useful knowledge. University knowledge should help to improve agriculture, help to expand the rail system, help strengthen the military. To be a democratic university was not simply to open up the doors to people who had never been allowed in the hallowed halls of Oxbridge or Berlin or Paris, but to open it to all kinds of knowledge. No knowledge was too instrumental or too useful to be kept out. 

Again, incredible goods come from these radical changes, but so, too, do new tensions, as well as an accumulation of external expectations about what universities ought to do and the ends they ought to serve. Now it's no longer simply to be a finishing school for the sons of the aristocracy. It's no longer just the production of elite bureaucrats. The expectation or promise universities themselves make is to sustain democracy and, eventually, to produce the knowledge required by a modern industrializing world. 

We need to recognize the expectations that have been put on universities. We expect universities to solve questions of social injustice and equity. We expect them to deliver high earning salaries to their students. We expect them to cure our grandparents and our neighbors and ourselves in hospitals. We expect them to entertain us and manage professional sports teams. 

"We need to recognize the expectations that have been put on universities."

LW: What have we lost in all this?

CW: I don't know if we've lost something in particular. Had I been born a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have had access to the kind of higher learning that I have been blessed with. It’s crucial that we acknowledge that, because “After the University,” for me at least, is not a recovery project. We don’t need to recover something that never actually existed. The university never existed in a world in which the goods of intellectual study were freely given to for everyone.

LW: Maybe the better question might be: What aren't we doing?

CW: I will start by talking about what I wasn’t doing. Even though I didn’t want to think of myself as writing a “what we lost” story — and I was operating on that for a while because the university continued to be this precious world for me — I couldn't see the places and the people in which discipline study and the love of learning was alive and well. I was blind to that, which is ironic. That's why I begin the book with my dad, who throughout his life diligently prepared for his church Bible studies. For too long, I assumed that he stood for everything that I was trying to get away from, which meant everything from non-college-educated, low-income America to his own kind of radical Christian piety.

That was what I didn't want to be. And I never would've recognized him as a model reader. I saw his Bible study as just one of the many crazy things that he did. I couldn't recognize that he actually taught me how to read. He modeled discipline study for me in a way that none of the professors I've ever had, none of my colleagues that I've ever had, have done. He wasn't getting paid to fill his yellow legal pad with notes, to sit with five different concordances. He did it because he had to. He did it because he wanted to. He was so excited about it and loved it so much that he just wanted to share it. I couldn't see that. I think we build and structure our lives and institutions in ways that mitigate against those kinds of possibilities — that these kinds of intellectual necessities are add-ons; they are superfluous, leisure-time activities instead of the core of who we are. And I’ve come to see that I was wrong. 

LW: One of the big questions in the book is, Can the goods of disciplined study be recognized on their own terms? Where do you come out on that? 

CW: I think so much about the structure of higher education mitigates against this. There’s dismissiveness among some university faculty — I think it's less so now — about students who are worried about careers or worried about getting a job. Damn right they're worried about getting a job, because we have created this system over the past 70 years in which the system of higher education is the only mechanism to a good life, or that’s what we’ve come to believe collectively — that the B.A. is the only path to a good life. But this system didn't deliver on the equity promises that were trotted out in the early of 1960s. I think what has happened is that the expectation has become even more intense as the competition for fewer high-paying jobs has grown more intense. The tensions that were already in the university have become that much more immediate. 

Every year, when I meet a new class of undergraduate students for the first time, I know that they're going to have these anxieties about what's going to happen four years from now and that everything in between will be related to that anxiety. The B.A. has been made into this single pathway to the upper middle class, which in some ways is true but in a lot of ways isn't. But maybe even more importantly, we haven't really asked about how that affects what we claim to be doing in universities, which is educating people. We just talk about outcomes and outputs. But what about the flourishing of students and the ways in which these institutions are shaping them?

LW: If the goal is to encourage and motivate discipline study, what is it we need to do to the university? Are we trying to save the sector? Are we trying to change the sector? Are we not looking at this correctly?

CW: These were some of the many questions that I realized I was asking and had to figure out. I think in the midst of what I had done with the curriculum, being a professor, being a principal of a college, I kept thinking, “We have to fight for the university. It's lost its core.” But as I said earlier, I don't know if it ever had a core. But more than that, I've come to relate to it almost as an ethical question because each chapter I wrote, I just kept getting sadder and sadder. But then by the end, the only way I can describe it is, I felt liberated.

Being liberated through this broader understanding of realizing, Oh wait, I’m not actually fighting for the university. The university is just the most recent institutional form that the goods of higher learning and the goods of discipline study have taken. Libraries, museums, churches, monastic communities, craft shops, workshops — there are so many institutions which have nurtured and sustained the kinds of practices that I think we ought to be fighting for. For me it's not about defending or saving “the sector” of higher education. It's not about defending the university per se. It's about recognizing and then fighting for the practices that I think so many of us already hold dear. The university, for the time being, is still one of the primary places that affords a certain material environment for these things, but it's not at all, historically speaking or even now, the only place. I think for too long the university has monopolized these things. 

LW: Given that, how would you move forward within the university? 

CW: It’s not, for me at least, an excuse to detach myself from or just give up on the university. But it does motivate me and others, I hope, to try to build good and beautiful places for disciplines alongside and apart from universities — healthy institutions that shape meaningful lives. That's a rather abstract response, but that’s where I am now. It frees me to relate to the institution in a different sort of way, because I don’t expect everything from it. 

And it helps me see what’s worth fighting for — not for particular institutional structures and interests but for the practices that give those institutions value in the first place. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.