12 Higher Education Reading Group
Our discussion focused on three interrelated dimensions of Ortega’s The Mission of the University: context, depth, and content.
First, context. We situated Ortega’s writing in 1930s Spain, as a post-imperial, post-Spanish Flu society, deeply uncertain about its civilizational identity and sharply divided between modernist/progressive forces and conservative commitments to religion and tradition. Crucially, this is Spain on the eve of civil war. What follows historically, is captured in works like Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ramón J. Sender’s Requiem for a Spanish Peasant. This historic context reve the stakes of Ortega’s questions and reflections of the mission of the university. One charitable reading is that Ortega is engaged in a form of European soul-searching after World War I, attempting to locate what made Europe “special,” and identifying the university as a unifying cultural institution meant to resolve conflict through rational, dialectical means rather than violence. Yet history also exposes a degree of naïveté in this vision, as (German) universities later became complicit in Nazism, shattering claims of European exceptionalism and revealing the dangers inherent in a unitary conception of “culture.” To be fair, he warns of this danger, as what he identifies as form of educated barbarism.
Second, depth and abstraction. We noted how both enchanting and frustrating Ortega’s level of abstraction can be illustrated by his use of parables such as the frog who has only known a puddle and cannot imagine the ocean. Yet our own discussion paradoxically affirmed one of his core claims: that meaningful dialogue across time, language, and culture is possible. The fact that readers today across continents and contexts can still engage Ortega’s arguments suggests that universities can indeed function as sites of cross-cultural communication, dialogue, and civilized exchange. Albeit he is rather opaque in his prose, and it is admittedly a difficult text to read. So yes, it does need patience and engagement to be able to read him in a charitable manner and not see him purely as a form of reactionary mindset.
Third, content and critique. At the heart of Ortega’s project is a conception of the university as a civilization-forming institution. He draws a civilizational boundary, identifying “barbarians within” as those who instrumentalize culture for purely political or personal ends. However, understanding and justifying this argument requires an extensive grounding across theology, philosophy, history, and the social sciences. Ortega’s notion of “science” aligns more closely with a Kantian hierarchy of knowledge than with a modern Anglo-American STEM-centered understanding. At the same time, he offers little concrete definition of the cultural content he elevates, positioning himself as above politics while nevertheless making strong political claims. While the vision of the university as a unified cultural project is compelling, we ultimately questioned whether it is overly monolithic and historically naïve, very much a product of its time.
In conclusion, despite all of his warnings and clarification, his project does reveal a sort of optimism about the perfectibility of man. Meanwhile, given our contemporary post-second world war context, we could make the argument about a much more tragic reading of human nature. Much more akin to Isaiah Berlin’s borrowed quotation of Kant about the crooked timber of humanity. Interestingly, apparently Berlin was not a fan of Ortega’s elitist tendencies.
