The recent Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education says:

Focus on the mission. In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university. We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” This statement serves as the basis for the recommendations that follow in this report.

When I led a discussion of this report with a large group of Tufts undergraduates through CEVIHE last week, some students expressed skepticism or cynicism about official mission statements. I agree. I usually view such texts as mere advertising copy–including the Tufts’ mission statement, which looks to me like outreach to prospective undergraduates.

That said, I think the Yale faculty committee was right that any recommendations for an institution should flow from an authentic idea of that institution’s mission (whether it is stated on its website or not). Therefore, choosing a mission statement for a university is a worthy task.

Yale’s current mission is very different from the one proposed by a faculty committee of the same university in 1828. They asked “What then is the appropriate object of a college?” Their answer: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind: expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.”

In those days, Yale made no pretense of creating knowledge. It did not hire faculty to conduct research and scholarship. The teachers’ job was to transfer the knowledge that they had already acquired when they were students–particularly their knowledge of the ancient languages–to “furnish” young men’s minds.

The mission that the recent Yale report endorses derives from Johns Hopkins’ founding goal, “to advance the arts and sciences.” In fact, the Yale report echoes the 1872 inaugural address of Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, who said that universities may have many functions, but what makes them universities in the promotion of knowledge. His ideal, in turn, reflected Prussian influences.

I think that knowledge is good, but it is certainly not all that Yale actually does. Consider that 30% of Yale’s revenues come from medical services, or that it budgets about $89 million for athletics, or that it allocates a portfolio of about $441 billion. Descriptively, one could say that Yale’s mission is to operate a hospital and an investment fund.

But a mission statement should be aspirational, and Yale could strive to make all of its other functions serve its knowledge mission. That would be a choice, different from an ideal such as public service or developing students’ character.

To choose a mission for any given university, it might be helpful to select a guiding analogy or model. What should the institution be like?

1. A laboratory: This is a place where knowledge is created, preserved, and shared. People who work in a lab may disagree, and their disagreements can be valuable, but the goal is always to resolve disputes with evidence. Laboratory workers may learn and develop ethically, but scientific methods and instruments are supposed to be people-proof, so that they can generate knowledge irrespective of the scientists’ characteristics. The main outcome is the findings contained in publications.
2. A debating society (or an op-ed page, or a high-quality talk show): This is a place where people exchange opinions. To be interesting and valuable, it must welcome–and even curate–diverse opinions. Whenever everyone seems to agree, it is time to invite someone who has a different “take.” The main outcome is the education of participants and listeners.
3. An advanced prep school: a university like Yale (which, for full disclosure, I attended) could be analogized to a boarding school. It is a place where young people live together, develop skills and networks, and prepare for the next level. The main outcomes are the successes and contributions of the graduates.
4. A not-for-profit, multi-purpose corporation. Yale could be seen as an entity that operates a major hospital, owns many of the prominent buildings of a mid-sized US city, serves food, attracts more tourists than any other site in Connecticut, runs a significant regional repertory theater, discovers medical advances, fields a football team, and does anything else that its trustees choose as long as the surplus revenue goes to endowment. The outcomes are diverse.
5. A city: Cities do not have mission statements–nor should they, because their residents must be free to pursue their own goals. But the mission of a city government can be to serve its residents. In the same way, a university can offer a range of services to its members, who should be able to pursue various goals. The immediate outcomes are the well-being of students and other members of the community. (This suggestion came from a student during the CEVIHE discussion.)

I worry that it is in bad faith to claim that a university’s mission is knowledge. If the pursuit of knowledge is supposed to determine everything a university does, then many of its actual functions should be spun off. And to interpret a $441 billion endowment as simply a means to the end of promoting knowledge is a convenient way to ignore its other outcomes. With more than $20 billion invested in private equity, Yale is the 31st largest private equity institutional investor in the world. That money has many other affects besides generating returns that can pay for laboratories and seminar rooms.

Here is a different way of thinking about such issues. In a provocatively entitled article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972), Cohen, March and Olsen posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated.”

The phrase “garbage can” sounds pejorative and isn’t really necessary. The core idea is that complex organizations develop so that they have multiple functions. If that describes a modern university, then debates about its mission statement are worthwhile but will never resolve the question. Universities are opportunities for people to pursue various agendas, and they will make competing claims about “the” mission. Perhaps the best universities are those in which this ongoing debate is handled relatively wisely.

See also: the university between a club good and the commons; universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies