Time for quiet v-cs to voice HE’s moral mission

We are often told that we live in a post-truth era. An important wing of politics and the media now believes that truth is something to be created, not discovered: a question of personal choice. Social media is awash with misinformation and attempts to correct it are dismissed as partisan distortions.

In this context, universities should be coming into their own as bastions of truth. They are paid large sums of public and private money to create and share knowledge, and most academic disciplines believe themselves to be searchers after truth. This is as true of more practical disciplines, such as law, accountancy and medicine, as it is of the analytic ones like physics or economics.

In others, however, truth has come to be seen as inherently fractured, relative and unknowable. Indeed, one popular view of the past century sees it as having brought a retreat from any shared truths, with fiction, art and philosophy in the vanguard. And, for many, this has marked a great advance – enabling us to grapple with multiple perspectives and escape from orthodoxies.

Yet, during the same period, our societies have greatly strengthened their institutions for discovering truth and identifying lies. The courts, for instance, have far more sophisticated tools to gather and assess evidence. The financial world has much stricter laws to prevent deception. In parts of the media, journalists are committed to more rigorous methods to interpret, triangulate and confirm. And in science itself, there are more techniques than ever to spot and eject false claims.

I, and many others, have argued that rather than giving up on truth, we need to build on these successes, institutionalising much stronger rights to truth and stronger laws to enforce it, whether in the media or in the economy.

It is true that there is an increasing push for free speech rights to be bolstered in universities – a push that is likely to survive the parking of legislation to that effect by the new government amid fears that it might be too “burdensome”. But in the debates and legislation, free speech is presented as an absolute good, rather than as a means to reach closer to truths. The former is a legitimate political view, but the latter position should be held by anyone involved in academic work.

We should be reminding people that facts are not optional; that although the world is complex, there is a difference between truth and lies; and that through the right processes and institutions, societies can come closer to useful truths.

Part of the problem is university leaders’ low profiles. If you ask a random sample of the UK public – or even of the political and media class – very few will be able to name any. Moreover, when vice-chancellors do speak up, it is usually about money: university funding, the graduate premium and the legitimacy of their own high salaries. As a result, the instrumental, primarily economic justifications for universities have become far more visible than any others.

University leaders seem to find it more comfortable to try to be quietly useful to governments than to take risks in the name of truth or academic excellence, calling out ministers when they bend or break the truth.

There are some good reasons for this strategic silence beyond the pursuit of revenues and even honours – which, in some cases, cynics see as the only coherent explanations for vice-chancellors’ choices. Visibility can be fatal. Some university leaders have clearly struggled with culture wars and the glaring, and probably widening, divide between mainstream culture and the woke cultures of so many universities. And the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia all lost their jobs and their credibility after struggling to defend their institutions’ approach to free speech.

But why were they such easy targets? There are many answers, but one is that they didn’t have a sufficient moral foundation on which to stand. They often appeared vague, confused, legalistic and managerial and they had nothing to say about their relationship to the society they are in.

This matters because every vocation and profession relies on a moral contract with wider society, consisting of a central mission and a set of ethics. Each one has opportunities to serve itself instead of the public because of profound asymmetries of power, so some abuses are inevitable. But what matters is how they are handled.

Typically, when professions are rocked by such scandals, they rid themselves of their abusers and reconvene around a simpler underlying social purpose: the fair working of the law; truthful accounting; serving patients to the best of one’s ability.

Universities are not ridden by abusers, but their public standing is undeniably falling. Yet their role as discoverers and sharers of truths is as important as ever. It should be at the heart of their contract with the wider society.

Crumbling respect for truth is not just a topic for polite debate around the seminar table: it is an existential threat to our world. Opting out of the public debate might be thought tactically wise, but in the long run it serves no one.

Sir Geoff Mulgan is professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at UCL.