Every so often, an article appears in the national press announcing the death of the university. A recent example in The Telegraph linked the possible demise of universities to the disruptive effects of AI on assessment and coursework. More broadly, the causes usually cited vary: financial instability, student debt, dependence on international recruitment, loss of academic autonomy, managerial expansion, technological change, and disputes about free speech. Yet these anxieties perhaps point to a deeper question: not whether the university is ending, but what its end is.
What is the point or purpose of a university? The question naturally invites an Aristotelian line of enquiry: what good does the university seek? Aristotle’s opening argument in the Nicomachean Ethics offers a useful starting point.
Aristotle begins with the line: ‘Every craft and every discipline, and likewise action and decision, seems to seek some good’. Human activity, in other words, is teleological or goal-directed: it aims at some end (telos) or good.
As there are many activities, there are many ends. Yet these can be ordered because ‘some of these pursuits are subordinate to some one capacity’. That is, some goods are pursued for the sake of further and higher goods: making bridles, for example, is subordinate to horsemanship. This creates a hierarchy of ends in which lower goods, while genuine goods themselves, serve more comprehensive ones. Hence Aristotle writes that ‘the ends of the ruling sciences are more choiceworthy than all the ends subordinate to them, since the lower ends are also pursued for the sake of the higher’.
For Aristotle, politics is the ruling practical science because it orders the conditions within which other activities are pursued. Since its end includes and coordinates the ends of the other sciences, it is concerned with the most comprehensive common good: the flourishing of the political community within which other goods are sought.
This invites reflection on the modern university. In a more limited way, the university resembles the polis in Aristotle’s account: it brings together a complex association of practices within one institution. It houses a multitude of academic disciplines, each of which seeks particular goods of its own: truth in its field, understanding of its subject matter, the advancement of knowledge, or the formation of relevant forms of judgement and skill.
But this analogy also raises a difficulty. While disciplines can be administratively grouped, it is less clear whether they are ordered by any higher common purpose. What is the governing end of the university that justifies and directs these subordinate pursuits?
Contemporary answers vary. Some treat the university’s good as the advancement of knowledge. That is essential, but not enough by itself: knowledge can accumulate without integrating understanding or judgement, and not every extension of knowledge is equally worthwhile or equally conducive to human goods. Others emphasise the production of skilled professionals. That matters too, but it risks reducing the university to an instrument of the labour market. A richer answer would be that universities exist to form educated persons and to contribute to the conditions of human flourishing.
On this view, the proper good of the university is the formation of educated persons through the disciplined pursuit of truth, the acquisition of worthwhile knowledge, and the cultivation of virtues of thought. These include ‘virtues of thought’ (intellectual virtues) such as wisdom, understanding, and prudence, alongside ‘virtues of character’ (moral virtues) such as justice, generosity, and temperance. Ultimately, the university ought to orient its educational and intellectual work toward contributing to human flourishing (eudaimonia).
Education, in this picture, has an architectonic role. It orders specialised disciplines toward a shared human end. Each discipline retains its own proper standards and goods, while also contributing to the wider common purpose of the institution. Governance and curriculum would therefore need to reflect some coherent account of what the university is for.
Aristotle observes that if we know the highest good, we are more likely, like archers with a target, to hit the mark. Something similar applies here. A university that lacks a clear sense of its end risks becoming merely a collection of disconnected specialisms shaped by consumer demand, bureaucratic incentives, or market pressures. A university that understands its purpose can judge more intelligently which disciplines to sustain, how they relate to one another, and how they contribute to the common good.
On an Aristotelian view, then, the university must know what it is for. Its governing purpose should be to contribute to human flourishing through education, truth-seeking, and the cultivation of intellectual and civic virtue. It should judge each discipline not by profitability or popularity alone, but by how far it serves that shared end. A university that forgets its purpose risks being directed by whatever external forces happen to prevail.
References
Aristotle (2019) Nicomachean Ethics. Third edition. Translated by Terence Irwin. Cambridge, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
(Justus van Gent: Aristotle (1476))
