In Search of the Big Picture at UCSD : Academics: Universities are forgetting their purpose as the scramble for individual achievement accelerates, Roger Revelle once wrote.

A score of years ago, a new publicly supported college was born in La Jolla, conceived in academic idealism, and dedicated to excellence. Now we are meeting, even though many of us hesitate to say so, to discuss whether such a public college, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

When this college was born, we who were involved with it first thought of what a college education should be--remember those were optimistic times, times of rapid change and unlimited horizon.

Our conclusion was--it may seem strange today to many students and parents who are forced to think in economic terms--that the object of a college education was not to acquire a body of knowledge, but to learn how to learn. We felt that in the rapidly changing world of our times, few of the so-called facts one learns in college were likely to be useful, or even true, 10 years later. But what would be permanently useful were the language and the logic of a science or a humanistic field, the demonstration that it is possible to learn something new that is not already known--in other words, to make discoveries--and that it is an exciting and satisfying thing to do so.

We thought of universities as the cathedrals of the modern world. In the middle ages, the cathedral was the center and symbol of the city. In the modern world, its place could be taken by the university.

There were many analogies:

1. A university, like a cathedral, is ever building, yet never finished. At each stage of its building it is full of beauty and wonder, but the vision in the minds of its builders of what it should be and could be is even more wonderful.

2. A university, like a cathedral, should be at the center of the highest ideals and aspirations of the people.

3. A university, like a cathedral, is built by unknown craftsmen, working not for their own glory, but for a cause far greater than themselves.

4. A university, like a cathedral, should belong to everyone. Everyone can participate in its building, everyone can gain inspiration and meaning from it.

5. A medieval cathedral was a complex structure, with many chapels dedicated to different purposes. So should a modern university be complex, with many different objectives and activities.

6. A cathedral soared above the city, above the meanness and dirt of cramped lives. So should a university reach beyond life’s necessities toward what human lives can be.

7. A cathedral was a symbol of faith in the unseen. A modern university should be a symbol of confidence that what is unknown can be known.

It was a unique time to begin a new university; a time of confidence in science and in the idea of progress through the growth of knowledge. Federal support for basic research was rapidly expanding; the population of California was rapidly growing. In short, we were lucky. This university is an example of the overriding role luck plays in human affairs.

One way to judge universities is in terms of the fundamental ethical criteria of freedom, justice and loyalty. How far, and in what ways, does the university further human freedom, the integrity of the individual; distributive justice as Socrates said, giving every man his due (and nowadays, of course, also every woman); and loyalty, devotion to a cause that is larger than the individual?

American universities, reflecting our American society, have given the greatest stress to freedom.

They are concerned, more or less, with distributive justice.

But over the years, the value of loyalty has been eroded and distorted among their faculties. As a result, our universities, as cohesive institutions, are often not much more than a central heating plant, places which provide facilities and salaries for isolated individuals.

One of the consequences is that American universities face profound difficulties in dealing with three kinds of problems: the problems of society, of professionalism and of fragmentation.

Consider the problems of society, such problems as world population growth and human food supplies, arms control and disarmament, energy supplies and conservation, development of natural resources, technology assessment, environmental protection and assistance to less developed countries. (Here in San Diego we are faced with one of the most difficult of these problems: the impact on California of the poverty, unemployment and low educational levels of our fellow human beings in Mexico, and yet our university is involved with this problem in only the most peripheral way.)

The problems of society are almost, by definition, interdisciplinary; they require genuine cooperation and mutual understanding among members of different disciplines.

How can they be effectively attacked in a university where each faculty member’s loyalty is concentrated so largely on the advancement of his or her discipline, rather than on the missions and the potential of the university as an integral institution, and where promotions and recognition depend so largely on individual discoveries, rather than on thinking and working together?

The problems of professionalism in our time are equally related to questions of loyalty--in medicine and law, for example, the tendency to serve private interest rather than public good, to emphasize technical skill rather than understanding of the whole human being.

The problems of fragmentation are likewise related to the nature of loyalty. The members of each discipline are loyal to their own field, to its deep but narrow methodology, to the enlargement of its body of painfully won knowledge, to their colleagues in their field.

This is right and proper, but an equal share of loyalty needs to be devoted to the university, to the living institution that gives life and meaning to discovery and to methodology.

Loyalty to the university should be given not as a duty, but in joy and pride. Only if this is so can the university become what it can be: the center of the highest and best.