This essay was delivered as the First Things 2026 Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida.
The contemporary university is widely acknowledged to be in crisis. Loss of public confidence, relentless tuition increases, and intensifying debates over speech and academic freedom have called into question its purpose and institutional legitimacy. Yet these seemingly discrete crises and external pressures are best understood as symptoms of a deeper contradiction—one that reaches to the very heart of the university’s self-understanding and, at a still deeper level, to its conception of the human being it exists to serve.
More and more, the university treats education not as an intrinsic good but as a mere instrument—a means to economic security, social prestige, and self-invention. The university is reimagined as a service provider, the student as a consumer. For many, a four-year degree program represents not a period of intellectual formation but a season of self-exploration, a final interval of freedom before the obligations of adult life set in.
When education is subordinated to self-invention rather than ordered to the pursuit of truth, the notion that students ought to submit their minds to an inherited body of knowledge and pedagogical tradition becomes untenable. Traditional curricula, disciplinary standards, and intellectual authorities are increasingly viewed with suspicion as remnants of a repressive past or impediments to personal freedom. In many institutions, this suspicion is not merely tolerated but fostered. Students are habituated to approach texts, arguments, and traditions not with a view to their intrinsic merit or the truth they may disclose, but rather by questioning whose interests they serve, whom they marginalize, and what structures of domination they reinforce. Thus, the intellectual life is transformed from a common search for truth into a contest of competing identities and narratives.