The University As We Know It Is Finished - by Nils Gilman

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The University As We Know It Is Finished<br>That’s a good thing.

Nils Gilman<br>Jun 17, 2026

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Clark Kerr (center), president of the University of California, at Occidental graduation, 1958. (Photo by Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis.)<br>When University of California President Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, published shortly thereafter as The Uses of the University, he was doing something unusual for an academic administrator: he was offering a sophisticated social theory, and doing so with wit. In these lectures, Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe what the postwar American research university had become. In Kerr’s account, the modern university was no longer to be understood as a community of scholars united by a shared ideal of learning, but rather as a sprawling institutional conglomerate serving at once as a research engine, a job-training facility, a credentialing mechanism, a coming-of-age experience, and an incubator of the national technical elite. The University of California, which Kerr had just finished steering through a near-decade of explosive growth, was his exemplar.<br>Kerr was a droll man. He once observed that the three great problems facing any university president were “parking for the faculty, athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” He described the university faculty (and I can confirm from personal experience that this remains accurate) as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” And when Ronald Reagan made good on his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to fire him for being too lenient with the Free Speech Movement protesters, Kerr offered one of the great farewell lines in American academic history: “I leave the University of California as I arrived: fired with enthusiasm!”<br>Despite the jokes, Kerr was a serious man. The argument underneath The Uses of the University was that the multiversity, precisely because of its sprawl and apparent incoherence, was the institutional master key of mid-century American civilization. It was the nexus at which basic scientific knowledge was produced, technical and professional talent was credentialed, democratic citizenship was cultivated, and the national project of technological supremacy was advanced. The multiversity didn’t need to be coherent in order to be functionally useful as a platform for what Kerr called “administering the present.” He wrote with the high modernist confidence of someone who believed that hierarchical technocratic institutions, if competently managed, could keep these various volatile elements in balance.

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Kerr’s dismissal by Reagan in 1967 was, in a sense, the first indicator and warning of the crisis of the high modernist technocratic model that he championed and sought to institutionalize through the multiversity.<br>It is time to acknowledge that Kerr’s model of higher education is finished: long on its last legs, the arrival of AI announces its death-knell. What comes next is disaggregation: the multiversity as we know it being disassembled into its component parts. This need not, however, be a catastrophe for higher education. Actually, in many ways, it represents an opportunity to return to roots, in a classical model of education and in attentive pedagogical instruction. But higher education can only weather this period of disruption if it is clear-eyed about what is happening and moves confidently toward a new model.<br>The Crisis of the University Is Not New

The present crisis of the American university began building already sixty years ago as the postwar bargain that Kerr’s vision embodied started to fray. What followed was a slow-motion privatization of university finances, producing a slow-motion tuition hyperinflation that has burdened a generation of students with debt while hollowing out the public mission of the university. The shift from grants to loans, from tenured faculty to mass adjunctification, and from a broad education in the liberal arts to vocational credentialism all occurred under the banner of making universities more “responsive to market demands.” In practice, this has meant transferring cost from the public to the individual “student consumer,” while defunding the parts of the institution that didn’t produce monetizable outputs. The net result has been the ever-upward-spiraling costs of undergraduate education, without a corresponding increase in the value of educational training or credentialling, and a loss of political support for the mission of universities. These financial and political travails have heightened the...