Why Do Universities Have Students? MacIntyrean Reflections on the Aims of Higher Education

In After Virtue Alasdair MacIntyre develops an account of practices, a type of socially established and cooperative activity in which participants pursue unique goods, guided by standards of excellence that develop over time. This account provides valuable insights into the nature of scientific and scholarly inquiry and the kind of apprenticeship required to contribute to such inquiries. MacIntyre’s treatment of the relationship between practices and institutions can sharpen our understanding of the reasons why the bureaucratic structures of the modern university often fail to serve the goals of academic inquiry. However, insofar as the educational mission of the university is understood to include not only the training of scholars and scientists but the production of a broadly educated public that mission is threatened not only by institutional features of the modern university, but by the culture of modernity itself.