This book is premised upon the assumption that the core purpose of universities is
to create, preserve, transmit, validate, and find new applications for knowledge. It
is written in the perspective of critical university studies, in which university
governance processes should take ideas and discourse about ideas seriously, far
more seriously than they are often taken within many of today's universities, since
doing so is the key to achieving this purpose. Specifically, we assert that the best
way for universities to take ideas seriously, and so to best achieve their purpose, is to consciously recognize and
conserve the entire range of available ideas. Though the current emphasis upon factors such as student
headcounts, increased efficiency and job creation are undoubtedly important, far more is at stake in universities
than only these factors.
From this premise, we deduce insights and arguments about academic freedom, as well as factors such as control
and monitoring of the market place of ideas, the structure of information flows within universities, the role of
language in university governance, and relationships between administrators, faculty members and students. We
identify impediments to achieving the core purpose of universities, including the idea vetting systems of
authoritarianism, corporatism, illiberalism, supernaturalism and political
correctness. We elucidate how these impediments inhibit successful
achievement of the core purpose of the university. In response to these
impediments we prescribe relatively autonomous universities characterized
by openness, transparency, dissent, and the maintenance of balance between
conflicting perspectives, values, and interests.
