In Person Event: Veblen on the function and dysfunction of the universities

(Please note this is an in person event: An online one is posted here.) One of the more interesting spots where philosophy intersects with the preoccupations of citizens in modern Western democracies can be found in questions concerning the function and dysfunction of universities and colleges.
As institutions, these places have a long history and have served and continue to serve a dazzling variety of functions. In the 20th century, they have become gigantic institutions, sometimes with endowments the size of the GDP of small nations. And because of this size and because of the variety of functions they have served, often involving a number of sometimes apparently contradicting interests, and because they are also incubators of intellectual culture, the question what a university should be Is a matter of interest to both any engaged citizen and to the philosophical particularly, whose job lies intimately close to the interpretation of the conflicted ideals of a culture and it's institutions.
To clarify our thinking about these matters, it is helpful to consider a critical evaluation of the university system that should come from a coherent and markedly distinct point of view and that should illuminate the historical processes that the university is subject to. With these objectives in mind, we might do well to consider Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America, a remarkable critique of the University system at a time when it was just starting to take on its modern features.
An institutional economist famous for work on conspicuous consumption and waste, Veblen’s largely pessimistic view of these modern developments stems from a peculiar and idiosyncratic conception of the function of universities. For Veblen, a university is first and foremost an institution dedicated to research and study, a scientific institution. As such, it is not primarily a place for education, vocational training, or cultural refinement. Rather, it is as he says, a seminary of higher learning dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Therefore, Veblen’s critique of the University will not be related to whether it provides a well-rounded education, whether it provides practical skills, makes good citizens, or good people. It will be whether it exists in a way that supports the needs of scholarly communities.
Veblen proceeds to make an argument that at the beginning of the 20th century, in the pursuit of public notoriety, large cash flows and traffic, and prestige, the needs of scholarly communities were largely pushed to the side in the pursuit of power, prestige, and money.
The structural explanation for this lies in the fact that the board of directors of universities increasingly consists not of scholars autonomously governing a community of scholars, but rather of businessmen running universities according to their own instincts of what makes a good business. As Veblen puts it, we see in this the old Platonic folly in reverse: instead of the philosopher governing men of affairs and directing practical affairs, the men of practical affairs are governing the philosophers and directing them in their work.
The results of these business instincts is that almost everything gets the attention of University administration except the needs of actual scholarship and impartial pursuit of truth. The primary focus of the University becomes attracting students as customers, and attracting donors as sources of cash, and so an increasing amount of the university's time is spent on amenities, architecture, and marketing. Because a large student body cannot be expected to actually be invested in scholarship, the university has to invent a systematized, coercive, and rigidly standardized and planned out course of instruction, so as to get as many people through the system as possible who do not have an interest in the pursuit of knowledge.
In this way, Veblen's profoundly narrow scholarly focus provides an interesting window on more general human problems at a time when the fate of the universities was very much a live question. In this Meetup, we went to discuss from a philosophical perspective, Veblen's interpretation of the failures of the emerging university system, and its hierarchical organization, size, sprawling diversity of functions, and standardized system of instruction.
readings are linked here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12J1G2ue5YTecUuQiY1ep1jVNeZhyILJZ/view?usp=sharing