In a recent article, NAS reported that Yale University’s self-study on higher education found numerous flaws (“Correcting the Course?,” Minding the Campus, April 24, 2026). The article praised Yale’s premise “that while higher education maintains a certain distance from society to produce the best research and teaching for public benefit, it must also
serve the needs of faculty, administrators, and students, but also those of the public at large. The nation’s colleges and universities cannot succeed without a widely shared belief in the value of the education they provide.
Both the article and Yale’s original presentation seem precisely backward. Higher education—if it is education at all—has as its first aim teaching, and the further presumption that it is for public benefit is slavish. The quote within the quote (from the Yale report itself) is worse. The purpose of an institution of higher education—or any education at all for that matter—cannot be to serve the needs of the faculty, or absolutely and by definition of the word, not the administrators, but primarily—if not only—the students.
Perhaps the NAS article and Yale’s self-report only indicated interim results, as the presently available mission statement for Yale University and College reads quite differently: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” The College’s mission is
to educate [the students], through mental discipline and social experience, to develop their intellectual, moral, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest. The aim of this education is the cultivation of citizens with a rich awareness of our heritage to lead and serve in every sphere of human activity.
The rift between these two sets of sentences is as deep as the divide between the North and South rims of the Grand Canyon. The failure to even mention administrators, much less concern itself with their “needs” is, like the punch line to the old riddle about 10,000 lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea: “a good start.” Riddles and jokes aside, it is perhaps worthwhile to set out the classical underpinnings of Yale’s ostensible conversion.
Long before education became “higher” Aristotle set out its plausible aims based on the “born ignorant and incapable” nature of the human being which can be aided (or even more easily thwarted) in its efforts to actualize a variety of excellences. These excellences he divided into two large categories—moral and intellectual—and the latter into to the further categories of the technical/practical and the scientific. The divisions were not arbitrary, but based on the differing nature of the things education can aim at.
For Aristotle saw that among the things that we can know there are some that change and some that do not. The clearest example of the latter is in mathematics—arithmetic, geometry, solid geometry, and music, which was a mathematical science among the Greeks. But we should also consider that physics doesn’t change, nor chemistry; because they don’t, we can learn from the physical world itself what it is made of and how it works. We can do experiments, and the results will be replicable under the same conditions. How we measure those results may improve, and how we explain those measured results may differ, but Einstein, Newton, Aristotle, and Archimedes are trying to explain the same world, the same happenings in that world—and those happenings haven’t changed. They won’t have changed a whit, though our ‘eyesight’ might have become technically better, when someone explains quantum gravitation either. The world doesn’t have to be eternal (as Aristotle thought) for all that to be true. We should, perhaps, also make clear in these misbegotten days that the world’s unchanging responses are not racist, ageist, ableist, religiously, or politically differentiated. Everyone else will get the same response dead white males have received since antiquity.
Excellence at that theoretical kind of thinking can (and for almost all people does) begin with teaching and thinking under the direction of someone with considerable experience in what Aristotle called epistemê, nous, and sophia, usually translated science, intelligence, and (theoretical) wisdom. Aristotle’s own school was set up to encourage just such virtues, and—as a result—a large research program began to be organized, by students who wished to continue in lines of thought they first began at school. All men desire to know, and once they cultivate those virtues, they do not cease from inquiry; for the greatest human happiness arises from activities in accordance with those virtues—so Aristotle argues. Yale College’s mission statement is perfectly in line with this, even to Aristotle’s ordering of the virtues a higher education aims at: intellectual first, for Aristotle considered that education and training through mimesis in the moral virtues began in childhood.
We should note that research both follows from and builds on the first purpose of education: these two ends are mutually supporting—-and mutually demanding. We should note also that education’s purpose is not first of all “the betterment of society” or advances in the technologies of mousetrapping, waste disposal, or building a better soldier. The first end of the research is the end which drives the process of all education from the beginning: I want to know. This drive is infinite and (according to Aristotle) leads the mind to God, whom every mind wishes to imitate. When Einstein said he wished to think God’s thoughts, he, like Yale, was cribbing from Aristotle—whether he knew it or not.
But talents and natural virtues are not equally distributed among human beings, and the activities of those other excellences (moral and technical/practical) are also ways to achieve happiness—at which every human being aims. Those other excellences also begin in teaching, imitation, and instruction—learning how to be practically wise and technically proficient in matters that change and demand an intelligence flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances, different necessities, and different means at one’s disposal in order to find the best course of action, whether making a pair of shoes, designing a wastewater treatment plant, or training a soldier. I mention the last in deference to a certain Harvard professor who, while receiving Department of Defense research funding, was also accepting money and conducting research at Wuhan University of Technology, unbeknownst to the DoD and—ostensibly—to Harvard University itself.1
Now these moral and technical virtues do have quite obvious engagement with societal improvement or “public benefit.” With significant education into practical wisdom and moral virtue a society can spend less money on prisons and lawyers. With technical education and developing expertise we can have better waste treatment, or—as we see in Ukraine—better drones and techniques for warfare under quite straitened circumstance. What China’s new techniques will bring forth has yet to be seen. In any case, these latter improvements have been the case since Archimedes. But of course it was not Archimedes’ first principle to get better math and develop better tools in order to make better weapons of war. His city needed them to defend its peace, and Archimedes needed peace in order to think. Thus, we are taught that the practical and technical ends at which education can aim are secondary to the first.
For Aristotle, the technical virtues did not constitute a third path to happiness alongside the lives of intellectual and moral virtue. Perhaps this was partly because much technical labor in his day was performed by slaves. More likely, however, it was because Aristotle regarded the natural slave as incapable of recognizing and rightly ordering ends. The technically proficient but free person therefore finds fulfillment not in technique alone, but in the technical excellences that serve moral virtue, contribute to the good of the community, or enable a finer understanding of the universe he seeks to know. Technical excellence untethered from moral virtue would be not a path to happiness, but something dangerous—more hazardous than a child loose in a virology lab, and not a route to embracing happiness.
But should a state spend money educating people just to know—astrophysics, for example? What good will come from knowing how long ago more exactly the big bang occurred? Or what happens in the depths of a black hole? If we suppose that all of education must have a social pay-off—either moral or technical—we are presuming that the good of a human life is to redound to the good of the state. But what if the state exists for the good of the individual? Then mustn’t the state support to some extent those impractical researches that stretch into the two infinities of before and after, just because “all men, by nature, desire to know”?
And to withhold such knowledge—to refuse to introduce those with the aptitude and inclination for it—would this not itself betray a deficiency in the moral virtues: in generosity, magnanimity, high-mindedness, perhaps even in courage?
Meanwhile, praise, honors, and funding for building a better soldier, is praise, honors, and funding for better techniques at making fellow citizens into better tools—i.e., slaves, which are, according to Aristotle, living tools. And the person practicing such a technê upon other citizens does so only by first dedicating himself to slavery—slavery to the ends set by the state (which rarely, if ever in history, has been cognizant of the true end of human beings).
Cheers to Yale for rediscovering the truth of things.
Gene Fendt is Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy (emeritus), University of Nebraska, Kearney; fendtg@unk.edu. Fendt last appeared in AQ with “On Excising Plato from the Academy” (Spring, 2026)
1 See, for instance, “Former Harvard Scientist Rebuilds Brain Computer Lab in China,” Reuters, April 30, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/convicted-former-harvard-scientist-rebuilds-brain-computer-lab-china-2026-04-30/.
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